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TDK tape head cleaner cassette "HCL-11" made of clear hard plastic. The plastic is birefringent and demonstrates internal stress as coloured patterns (photoelasticity) when photographed using cross-polarisation. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was released on this date in August 1963.

Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can't look into the past and see Earth's formation directly, telescopes let us watch similar processes unfolding around distant stars. At the center of this frame lies a young Sun-like star, hidden behind a coronagraph that blocks its bright glare. Surrounding the star is a bright, dusty protoplanetary disk -- the raw material of planets. Gaps and concentric rings mark where a newborn world is gathering gas and dust under its gravity, clearing the way as it orbits the star. Although astronomers have imaged disk-embedded planets before, this is the first-ever observation of an exoplanet actively carving a gap within a disk -- the earliest direct glimpse of planetary sculpting in action.

Children play with bicycle tires among large conical piles of rice at a processing mill in Brahmanbaria, Bangladesh.

Original: Azimronnie Derivative work: Radomianin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

View of the old town of Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, seen from the islet Unterwöhrd in the river Kocher.

Roman Eisele, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes even the sky surprises you. To see more stars and faint nebulosity in the Pleiades star cluster (M45), long exposures are made. Many times, less interesting items appear on the exposures that were not intended -- but later edited out. These include stuck pixels, cosmic ray hits, frames with bright clouds or Earth's Moon, airplane trails, lens flares, faint satellite trails, and even insect trails. Sometimes, though, something really interesting is caught by chance. That was just the case a few weeks ago in al-Ula, Saudi Arabia when a bright meteor streaked across during an hour-long exposure of the Pleiades. Along with the famous bright blue stars, less famous and less bright blue stars, and blue-reflecting dust surrounding the star cluster, the fast rock fragment created a distinctive green glow, likely due to vaporized metals. Jigsaw Universe: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photo by Yousif Alqasimi & Essa Al Jasmi

Wildlife photographer in a ghillie suit. Some wild animals are very difficult to approach without disturbing them, which sometimes leads some wildlife photographers to wear a ghillie suit when they go in search of them. By remaining undetected, wildlife photographers can observe animal behaviour that would otherwise not be observable if the animal would have had knowledge of human presence.).

Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906 – 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, literary translator and poet. Beckett was a resident of Paris for most of his adult life and he wrote in both French and English. Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH during WWII and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In 1961 he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. More

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula's core. About twelve light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, cavities and swirling filaments near the Crab Nebula's center. The featured picture combines visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope in purple, X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue, and infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red. Like a cosmic dynamo, the Crab pulsar powers the emission from the nebula, driving a shock wave through surrounding material and accelerating the spiraling electrons. With more mass than the Sun and the density of an atomic nucleus,the spinning pulsar is the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded. The outer parts of the Crab Nebula are the expanding remnants of the star's component gases. The supernova explosion was witnessed on planet Earth in the year 1054. Sky Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your birthday? (after 1995)