Update: Thanks to cowens and others who informed us that this is actually an absolutely massive piece of land art called desert breath. Click through for some images and a way better description than I gave it!

What on earth is the purpose of this massive spiral in the Egyptian desert?

It appears to be made from near-perfect circles scooped from the sand, which decrease in size toward the centre of the spiral – where there is a much larger circular trench.

Whatever the spiral’s purpose actually is, it must have taken a serious amount of effort to put here.

Thanks to BZoltan

Here in Rotorua, New Zealand, we find the birthplace of possibly the most ridiculous pastime ever – Zorbing. Invented here in 1967, Zorbing involves nothing more than climbing into a giant PVC sphere and being chucked down a hill.

Yes, that’s it. Sounds cool huh?

In our thumbnail you can see several zorbuses (or should that be zorbii?) gathered at the top of the hill, and there also seems to one being hoisted back to the top using the, er… zorb-lift, just like in this image.

More on Zorbing and links to where you can try it at Wikipedia

Thanks to Mike P.

Synchrotrons are just a fancy type of particle accelerator.

I’m not the world’s greatest physicist but, as far as I understand it, they are circular accelerators that use an electricity field to speed up sub atomic particles to something near the speed of light and a synchronous magnetic field to rotate the beam (hence the name).

The resulting synchrotron radiation is a million times brighter than normal sunlight and a billion times stronger than your everyday X-ray – making it great for looking inside stuff.

One of the first dedicated synchrotrons was built underground in Daresbury, UK, but will close next year.

However, until then you can get a live status display of the beam. I don’t understand it either but it looks cool to leave it on the screen at work.

Lightsources lists 69 different synchrotrons around the globe, so we’re only going to look at a few of the most attractive.

ESRF, Grenoble, France:

NSRRC, Hsinchu, Taiwan

BESSY, Germany:

And finally, Diamond is the UK’s new synchrotron near Didcot, Oxfordshire.

Although on Google Earth construction has just started, the Diamond “light source” (radiation sounded too dangerous) was first used earlier this year.

Coincidently, we last looked at particle accelerators around this time last year. I hereby name this particle accelerator week!

Google Earth Community member ChrisJHall also put together an excellent collection of Synchrotrons.

More info: Back to basics, Synchrotron (device), Synchrotron radiation & Diamond Light Source.

Many thanks to ChrisJHall

Regular visitors to Google Sightseeing may notice that we’ve made a few tweaks to the layout, so you may have to shift-refresh your browser to get the updated styles.

We’re planning a few more exciting new features, which will hopefully be forthcoming in the next few weeks, but Alex was proud of the updated logo and was tired of waiting for me to implement all the features I was promising.

In fact, you may find that my posts for this week are a little sparse as I will be packing up home and relocating down south to Oxford (which I’ve written about on our other blog, Rotacoo).

Stick with us though, and we’ll be back up to speed soon.

Congregating by this water outlet in West Palm Beach is a whole herd of Florida Manatees, a highly intelligent species of aquatic mammals, also known as Sea Cows.

The water outlet is actually from an adjacent power plant, and Manatees commonly gather in places like this, as the water is artificially heated. This has meant that the Manatess no longer migrate to warmer waters, and have actually become reliant on the heat from the power plants.

You’d think hanging around power plants might not be the safest practice, but actually these manatees are much more threatened by potential collisions with boats – and you can see why, given these ones proximity to the passing traffic.

Thanks: Jim Schomberg.