High above the Uvas Reservoir in Santa Clara County, it looks like there’s hundreds of colourful balloons floating up into the sky.

The possible balloons are unfortunately on the overlap of two images, but appear to be rising up from the beach on the South-Eastern tip of the island.

Helium balloons can reach anywhere between 2000 and 6000 metres in height¹, but whether or not that would be high enough to make them so visible on a satellite photograph is unclear.

So it’s over to you readers: could this be a large balloon release captured from space?

Thanks: Vaudesir

In the yard of Scheveningen prison, the Hague, the incredibly high resolution aerial photography has captured this prison inmate doing press ups!

As an aside, this is actually the prison where the former communist President of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević was held for 5 years before his death in March 2006, shortly before his trial was due to end.

Thanks to gozoman

If you haven’t yet heard about the Google Maps street view launched yesterday, then make sure to check it out.

Although currently only available in 5 U.S. cities, there’s loads to see on the panorama images and it’s all wrapped up in a very fluid interface.

The first great find is Google employees posing outside their office. Zoom in and you’ll see that many are wielding garden tools and orange flags?

Check out this fantastic capture of a plane towing a banner message past a packed beach in Italy.

Here’s another plane towing a message off the coast of South Carolina (where there’s also a great shot of someone parasailing too).

I don’t know what messages these planes were flying, but at North Perry Airport in Florida someone’s left one of these plane-banners lying out, and you can clearly read the message “CAT I LOVE, YO!“…

Thanks to mlc1us, nicolor and Mark Ralston.

The first pedestrian crossing of London’s Thames river in over one hundred years, the Millennium Bridge was conceived as part of the high-profile Millennium Project. Opened on the 10th of June 2000, it was closed again just three days later when it became apparent that the large numbers of people crossing it were causing the whole structure to sway nauseatingly…

The initially small natural vibrations of the bridge encouraged the pedestrians to walk in sync with the movement – which only served to amplify the effect. These vibrations began to occur when there were comparatively few people on the bridge, so by the time there were around 2,000 people on it at once, the wobbling had become pretty dramatic [Youtube link].

Lateral movement of this type in bridges was well known (most famously having caused the complete collapse [Youtube link] of the Tacoma Narrows bridge) – yet this driven harmonic motion caused by the movement of pedestrians remained unanticipated throughout the pre-construction analysis of the bridge.

The Millennium Bridge was closed from June 2000 until February 2002, and even though the problem has now been resolved, it will forever be known simply as The Wobbly Bridge.

More about the London’s Millennium Bridge, as ever, at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Rory and Tim.