What’s What: Worlds Apart

Mesmerizing travel photos from National Geographic's latest contest, how big the solar system really is, the reality of the job search, and more in our What's What of cool stuff on the web.

I think it's a well known fact that our solar system is pretty huge. But do you have the concept of how huge it really is?  This webstastic journey to the outer edges of our solar system might give you a clue.

In 1982, 5 teenage guys sat down to take a picture while on vacation in 1982.  (From L-R, John Wardlaw, Mark Rumer, Dallas Burney, John Molony, John Dickson.)  30 years later, they're in the same spot and same pose, just as they've done every 5 years since that first photo, but with slightly less hair and a little more around the middle.  "Watch us lose hair and gain forehead, Gain and lose and gain and lose weight." Dickson posted on his website, copcolake.com.  "There are reasons we all decided it was better to take the photo with our shirts on."

One of 12,398 entries entered into the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest happened in a planned, yet spontaneous moment when a portion of the world was at nature's mercy.  "My husband and I, along with a tour guide and a group of friends, hiked up to what was formerly the Royal Gardens subdivision above Kalapana, Hawaii, where the last standing house was just recently taken over by the active lava flow." Dallas Nagata White wrote about her photo.  "While waiting for the rain to pass, we started taking back-lit portraits of each other in front of the lava flow after I set up my camera on the tripod. For the last photo, my husband spontaneously dipped me in a kiss. It was a truly once-in-a-lifetime moment!"  See more of her photography HERE.

Korean artist Ran Hwang created murals of beautiful images using the most run-of-the-mill materials.  Utilizing her art as a form of symbolic meditation, she focuses all her energy into hammering thousands of tiny pins in the canvas, holding the button (representing something as common and ordinary as human beings) and thread (connecting the free-moving buttons, suggesting a network where all humans are somehow connected), creating something beautiful and awe-inspiring out of items that, on their own, don't seem to hold much significance.  Sends a powerful message, doesn't it?

This generation of college grads don't have it easy. There are far less jobs than there are degrees.  According to the International Labor Organization, the number of people ages 15 to 24 without a job is at almost 75 million worldwide.  Reuters recently captured the images and stories of workers around the world who worked hard to get to the career they hoped to be at, and the jobs they ended up at instead.