Gridded Population of the World (GPW), v4 dataset available

Gridded Population of the World (GPWv.4.10)
The first ever global data set on the spatial distribution of population broken down by age group and male versus female is now available. The most recent update to the fourth version of the Gridded Population of the World (GPWv.4.10) data collection contains a unique data set on basic demographic characteristics related to age structure and sex ratios for the world, based on the 2010 round of national censuses. The data were developed by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN.

The free, downloadable data and descriptions, including documentation and maps, are available at: http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/gpw-v4/whatsnewrev10

Hubble Telescope celebrates 25 years with eBook; 1990 - 2015

NASA celebrates 25 years of Hubble Telescope in 2015, since its launch in 1990. I just came across an ebook that was part of the celebration which showcases images and videos from Hubble.
All data generated from Hubble is released without copyright, but subject to some conditions (see link to Guidelines below).



Download the ebook as (1) epub (225Mb) or (2) pdf (189Mb) here. Videos included in the epub version, including Saturn, Jupiter and flying through a nebular are spectacular.

See NASA copyright guidelines here; "NASA still images... generally are not copyrighted".

NASA Plan for Increasing Access to the Results of Scientific Research

NASA Plan for Increasing Access to the   Results of Scientific Research (Digital Scientific Data and Peer‐Reviewed Publications)

Available from :
http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2014/12/05/NASA_Plan_for_increasing_access_to_results_of_federally_funded_research.pdf

Satellites: Make Earth observations open access

Freely available satellite imagery will improve science and environmental-monitoring products, say Michael A. Wulder and Nicholas C. Coops.

NASA

The Landsat 8 satellite launched in February 2013 (artist's impression).

A new era of open-access satellite data has arrived. In 2008, the US Geological Survey (USGS) released for free to the public its Landsat archive, which dates back to the 1970s and is the world's largest collection of Earth imagery². Greater computing power is also enabling scientists to manipulate big data representing larger areas and with greater sophistication, to produce multibillion-pixel composite maps of land cover and change across regions, continents and the globe. Monitoring land-cover change in near-real time is now a reality.

http://www.nature.com/news/satellites-make-earth-observations-open-access-1.15804

NASA opens earth science data, cloud computing to the public as part of new contest

SUMMARY:

NASA is launching a new challenge, hosted on Amazon Web Services, that gives the public access to a trove of earth sciences data and computational resources in the name of discovering new uses for all that information.

NASA launched a new contest Tuesday for imagining and then building new uses for the space agency’s trove of earth sciences data. The challenge — actually two of them, broken down into the imagination and building stages — kicks off on July 1 and runs through Nov. 15, and utilizes the NASA Open Earth Exchange platform. The exchange’s datasets and informational material, as well as the computing resources for the challenge, are hosted on Amazon Web Services.

http://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/nasa-opens-earth-science-data-cloud-computing-to-the-public-as-part-of-new-contest/