This amazing video (click image to play) shows the motions of the stars at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. As you can see, there is no visual object at the center that they appear to be orbiting around. In fact, they are orbiting around a supermassive black hole. We can deduce the properties of this black hole from the speed and shape of their orbits. Only something very, very massive could account for the highly elliptical orbits you see at the center here.

The movie begins in 1893 and plays through to the present, zooming out from the galactic center along our line-of-sight. The field of view at the start spans a distance of approximately 1.5 light years and expands to show orbits out to 20 light years across. The colors of the stars represent stellar ages: green are young, orange are old, and magenta ones are unknown. The length of the tail behind a given star shows how far it travels in a 15-20 year time span.

This animation was created by Professor Andrea Ghez and her research team at UCLA and are from data sets obtained with the W. M. Keck Telescopes and in collaboration with the University of Illinois NCSA Advanced Visualization Library.

And now for some more revelatory geek:

• Space flight is awesome and all, but it wreaks havoc on your body.
• Sci-fi geeks: interactive graphic pitting the most famous space ships against each other in an interstellar race across the Universe.
• Think gardening is hard work, try growing one on nano scales. These structures are all less than the width of a human hair.
• Number geeks: this fantastic browser extension converts extremely large numbers on the Internet into more graspable concepts.
• If you've ever wondered what it might be like to be ea, wonder no more. Bonus footage of grizzlies on the prowl. [VIDEO]
• Linguistics geeks: where does the New York City accent come from? We may never fully know. [VIDEO]
• An unmanned passenger plane flew from England to Scotland last month. Your next pilot may be a robot.

Have a great and geeky week. @Summer_Ash

If you are on Twitter, or even if you aren't, you are probably aware of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. Commander Hadfield has been tweeting and social media-ing up a storm from the International Space Station ever since he arrived on December 21, 2012, as a member of Expedition 35. From zero-g grooming and cooking tips to science experiments, Hadfield has reignited for many the lost thrill of our manned space flight program. If this is all news to you, or you just want to relive Hadfield's greatest hits, the Guardian has you covered. And if you think he spent all his time playing around, check out this list of experiments he's been actively conducting aboard the ISS.

Commander Hadfield is scheduled to return to Earth today. His parting gift to us is probably the most applicable cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" ever to be recorded. It's hard to watch it and not get a little misty eyed. While I will miss his stunning pictures from orbit, I have no doubt that Hadfield will continue to spark our imaginations back on Earth's surface. I highly recommend we all stay tuned.

UPDATE 12:35pm: A short read on the making of the video. 

This Mother's Day, Week in Geek celebrates the mother of all mothers: Mother Nature. One her craziest projects is the 17-year cicada life cycle about to kick-off anew on the East Coast any day now. Watch the video for an excellent summary of these insects by one of nature's favorite narrators, Sir David Attenborough. My favorite part is when he teases a male cicada in search of a mate by imitating the female cicada response (around min 3:09). I'm not sure how obvious the cicada invasion will be where I livem in New York City, but I vividly remember when they took over my neighborhood as a child. It was gruesome and fascinating at the same time. A conservative estimate has 30 billion cicadas emerging from the ground over the next few weeks. That's 600 cicadas for every human! For more on this insanity check out Carl Zimmer's recent post over at The New York Times.

Your weekly geek smorgasbord:

• Kick-ass teen girl wins hackathon with code for blocking television show spoilers on Twitter.
• Glow-in-the-dark plants on the International Space Station are helping us learn how planets adapt to new situations. [VIDEO]
• Greater wax moth has "super sonic" hearing up to 300 kilohertz, higher than scientists believe any other insect or animal emits.
• You'll never think of tongues the same way after watching this bat drink nectar. [VIDEO]
• Language geeks: some modern words may have been around since the last Ice Age.
• The only known photograph of Einstein in action deriving E = mc².
• Top 10 reasons why bone-eating worms beat out giant squid for scariest monster of the deep.
• How did dinosaurs know if other dinosaurs were of the opposite sex? Scientists are still working on that one.
• DARPA's new PETMAN robot will scare the crap out of you. [VIDEO]
• Get to know a few of the thousands of people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars as part of the Mars One Mission.
• Early Earth smelled like rotten eggs. Yummy.

Happy Mother's Day! @Summer_Ash

As part of their effort to improve data storage technology, scientists at IBM made this stop-motion animation entitled "A Boy and His Atom". The video is made entirely of carbon atoms. Each frame was made using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to manipulate the individual atoms. STMs work by passing an electrically charged needle over a metal surface with tiny raised features. As the needle passes over these features, electrons tunnel or "jump" from the needle to the metal. The video is essentially 242 still frames of this transition happening over various features in the metal surface. You can watch a video on how the movie was made here and some additional atomic shorts here.

Now for some science on the macro scale:

• How does the most powerful space rocket since the Saturn V work? Like this.
• Weather forecasts might need to be amended in the future to "cloudy with a chance of space debris."
• Extreme star-forming galaxy is so fuel efficient it would make a hybrid car blush.
• We may not know who wrote the book of love, but these birds-of-paradise most definitely wrote the book on sexual selection. [VIDEO]
• Digital cameras based on insects eyes can see sharply with a 180 degree field of view. Being a fly on the wall just got more real. .
• What happens when physicists go to a Six Flags amusement park? SCIENCE.
• Astronomers discover new dwarf galaxy hanging out in interstellar space between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
• Need more responsibility in your life? Now you can adopt a planet.
• Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo breaks the sound barrier in first rocket-powered test flight. Buy your tickets for space now!

Revel in the geek. @Summer_Ash

I would be a failure as a geek if I didn't include this video which has been flying across the internet this week. It answers the burning question you didn't even know you wanted to ask: what happens when you wring out a washcloth in space? Astronaut extraordinaire Chris Hadfield took it upon himself to demonstrate after the question/experiment was submitted to the Canadian Space Agency by two Nova Scotia high school students. Watch and learn - you won't quite believe your eyes.

In related ISS geek, Nathan Bergey combed though every image ever taken from the space station (all 1,129,177 of them) and plotted their coordinates to visualize the photos taken from space for each ISS mission. The results are strangely beautiful and very illuminating, showing which missions astronauts took the most picture on and of what.

Nathan Bergey

And some for some geek below low Earth orbit:

• This week in awesome: little girls are better at designing superheroes than you.
• Stonehenge is hiring. Must love rocks.
• Scientists find microorganisms in the troposphere changing the way we understand how life can travel around the planet.
• Letters Niels Bohr wrote during his time in Cambridge reveal clashes with English physicists over atomic theory.
• Crawling robot inspired by baby sea turtles. [WITH VIDEO]
• Pulsating corals open and close every few seconds for nutritional purposes. [WITH VIDEO]
• Pluto's "gate to hell" discovered by archeologists in Turkey by tracing the route of a thermal spring.
• Last week we covered the science of standing in the elevator. Now it's time for the science of sitting on the subway.
• Study uses obituaries in the New York Times to investigate the relationship between vocation and longevity. Turns out fame is an occupational hazard.

Geek long and prosper. @Summer_Ash

NASA created this video to remind us that even though the Space Shuttle program is no more, our drive to explore lives on and the agency is continually working on new endeavors to go further and faster. The video itself is essentially an ad for NASA, but as a government organization, they are prevented from directly buying ad time. So instead they are crowdsourcing the funding to get the video into movie theaters as a "trailer" before screenings of the new "Star Trek into Darkness" film coming out next month. To date, they have succeeded in raising enough money to get the trailer into 50+ theaters, but their new goal is to get it into 750, including one in every state. Oh, and if the narrator sounds familiar…it's Optimus Prime.

More geek from exploring the world around us:

• The oldest star in the Universe is older than the Universe. Wait…what? [VIDEO]
• Pitch drop experiment has been running since 1927 and only 9 drops have formed since then. [WITH VIDEO]
• This turtle species was thought to be extinct, but upon closer inspection it never existed in the first place.
• You think you have a long commute? Check out this selection of world's longest bird migrations.
• Fascinating interview with Ken Goldberg, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Berkeley, on how he makes art out of Earthquakes.
• Speaking of art…there is such as thing as the Roomba Art Flickr Pool, pictures made from Roombas with LEDs.
• Last week was the anniversary of the Apollo 13 oxygen tank explosion. These five NASA employees saw it happen through their telescope.
• Lip-smacking monkeys in Ethiopia may be part of the key to the development of human language.
• The science of standing in an elevator: who stands where and why.
• Immerse yourself in springtime with NestWatch, a website that compiles data on the nesting habits of bird species. Seriously cool.

Now go explore the geek around you.