Would you call yourself curious, creative, adaptable, resourceful, and resilient?

Mars One could be looking for you if you just answered “yes” to the question above.

Dutch space travel company presents an out-of-the-world opportunity to all adventure seekers – make the red planet your home, forever. Mars One officially launched its astronaut selection program today.

The non-profit has embarked on a bold mission to establish a human settlement on the planet Mars in 2023.

The selection process of this mission will involve a total of four rounds. The first round that constitutes of an online application will run until August 31, 2013. While Mars One officials would have the final say on who makes it to the next round, applicants are free to share and promote their applications.

The company is looking for “mature and interesting” folks. Basically what that means is that there are no professional or academic prerequisites, and anyone can apply.

“Gone are the days when bravery and the number of hours flying a supersonic jet were the top criteria,” said Norbert Kraft, Mars One’s chief medical director, and former NASA senior researcher, in a statement on the news. “For this mission of permanent settlement we are more concerned with how well each astronaut lives and works with others and their ability to deal with a lifetime of challenges.”

All the potential settlers will be given the necessary training and skills. The final decision of choosing the first settlers will be decided by an audience vote.

The whole program is projected to cost $6 billion. To subsidize that cost and to weed out any individuals who aren’t serious about the mission, Mars One will require an entry fee of up to $25, depending on your location, along with the one-minute video application. Additional funds from broadcasting deals of a reality show are also on the cards.

“In a 1,000 years, everyone on Earth will still remember who the first humans on Mars were, just like Neil Armstrong has been etched in our memories forever,” said Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One, in a statement.

When asked in an interview whether he plans on going to Mars himself, Lansdorp told VentureBeat, “This has been a dream of mine my whole life. I came up with this idea because I want to go to Mars, but in discussions with our medical director, and because I’m 15 years older and wiser than when I first had the idea, I might not be the perfect candidate.”

“I might try to get this mission going — I’m an entrepreneur, I get things done. But I’m also impatient, not good for a small team of people who need to get along for the rest of their lives. When the first team leaves, I will be extremely jealous,” he added.

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Oh, you thought your trip photos from Cancun were great for Facebook? Sorry, next to Col. Chris Hadfield — who is posting his Facebook photos from space — your pics aren’t that special.

A Canadian astronaut on the International Space Station, Hadfield is one of the most social savvy spacemen ever. He recorded a moving Christmas song on the ISS and posted it to SoundCloud. He’s taking part in a Google+ hangout from the ISS soon. And now he’s hosting his own cooking show from space.

Another part of Hadfield’s experience with communicating to the world below is frequently posting to Facebook and Twitter. On Twitter, he’s amassed more than 418,000 followers, and on Facebook, he’s attracted about 44,000 likes.

His Facebook posts have gotten especially interesting in the past few weeks, with plenty of amazing photography from the International Space Station. The picture above is what Budapest looks like at night — from space.

Check out more awesome photos that Hadfield has posted recently in the gallery below.

Photos via Col. Chris Hadfield/Facebook

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has recorded “Jewel in the Night,” the first Christmas carol ever taped on the International Space Station.

Hadfield arrived on the ISS last week with two other astronauts. He recorded the holiday-themed track on Dec. 23 and posted it on SoundCloud on Dec. 24. The song has accumulated more than 145,000 listens in two days.

“A week ago I was on earth looking at the stars,” Hadfield wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Today I am looking down thinking what a beautiful world we have. Happy holidays to you all.”

Listen to the track below:

For those interested, Hadfield also recorded ambient noise from the ISS:

Photo via Chris Hadfield/Twitter

The company is Hover, and it creates advanced real-life 3-D imagery from just about any images: smartphone snaps, drone airplane photography, satellite images, and yes, home movies. Today it’s announcing new funding — $3.1 million — and a new CEO, Kevin Reilley, the former top exec at Pictometry, which provides “bird’s eye” photography for Microsoft’s Bing maps.

“We started by selling a product for the military,” Ed Lu, the company’s chief technology officer told me. “Our product was used by special forces to understand what they’re getting into.”

Lu is the former astronaut. He spent 206 days in space, most of it in the International Space Station, and went EVA for spacewalks from the Shuttle. After every geek’s dream job, he moved on to Google, where he ran the company’s advanced project group and worked on image systems for Google Street View, Google Maps, and Google Earth.

In other words, Hover has an executive dream team for a startup focused on imaging and 3-D.

“Hover’s building the next-generation 3-D mapping platform,” Reilley told me this morning. “We’re rendering an environment that reflects real-life behavior.”

“One of the things that’s really hard on maps is exploring,” Lu tag-teams. “Street View is not so satisfying … it’s amazing technology but it’s not the way people think. 2-D maps with search is very good when you know what you want … but when you’re trying to figure out what is out there to explore … that’s a tougher thing.”

Typically, creating 3-D imagery is a demanding process that requires significant technology and control of variables. Your software needs to know exactly where each image was taken, what lens was used, the angle the camera was at, and all the details of photography like f-stops that SLR buffs know and the rest of us don’t.

The magic of Hover’s technology is that none of that matters anymore.

“We can generate these 3-D models using arbitrary images,” Lu says. “We do a visual mapping of common features from video, handheld images, overhead images from aircraft or drones … and build a 3-D structured model in real-time.”

The first versions of the software ran on a laptop so U.S special forces could use it in the field: shoot pictures with drones, mix in satellite imagery, and add a few shots on the fly, and then build a 3-D space from that raw visual material in which they could check sight angles, pinpoint likely spots where snipers might be emplaced, and generally get the lay of the land before actually setting foot in the target zone.

With the $3.1 million in funding from Almaz Capital, de Anda Capital, McKenna Management, and a few angels, Hover is taking the technology to the cloud … and your iPhone or Android smartphone.

The goal is not to compete with Google or Apple or Bing. The goal is to sell advanced 3-D mapping capabilities to organizations that already use 2-D photography extensively.

“We’re going to take this technology that’s been deployed for situational awareness for our special forces and provide it for other industries: the Department of Defense, law enforcement agencies, infrastructure companies, utilities, and oil & gas companies,” Reilley told me today.

And the crowdsourced part?

“We won’t hoover up images from Flickr,” Lu said. “But in our app, we will allow users to update the images themselves.”

“What’s the first things consumer do in Google Maps, Google Earth, or any other satellite images?” Reilley asked, now tag-teaming Lu. “They go look at their own houses.”

So Hover plans to capitalize on that by having consumers — as well as corporate clients — add photography in select regions to its overall database. And that photography will then be available for everyone to see in the company’s mobile app — and online in web browser.

Hover is based in Los Altos, Calif.

photo credit: EraPhernalia Vintage . . . (playin’ hook-y ;o) via photopin cc

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What happens when an astronaut plays a game of Angry Birds in real life on a space station? An awesome new video posted by Rovio showing just that.

The video was released to hype up the much-anticipated launch of Angry Birds in Space. NASA astronaut Don Pettit explains on camera at the International Space Station just how physics affect launching both Angry Birds and spaceships.

Pettit launches a red Angry Birds toy from a catapult while in zero gravity to explain trajectory. To add to the effect, he also blows up green balloon to make an evil pig and lets some “stolen” eggs float in the air in front of him. Of course, he makes the admirable pitch for people to learn math and physics so they can “get a neat job, a job sort of like mine.”

“We’ve got to see all of this in a weightless environment, which is what the Angry Birds Space game is going to be like with gravity fields from planetary bodies,” Pettit says in the video.

Angry Birds Space will be available for download on iOS, Android, PC and Mac on March 22. Personally, I cannot wait to play this installment.

Watch the full video below:

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Yesterday, Expedition 25 Commander Douglas H. Wheelock checked in to Foursquare 220 miles above Earth from space (see image). The astronaut checked in from the International Space Station and unlocked the new NASA Explorer Badge, according to Foursquare’s blog. Check-in services allow users to give their location via a smartphone in real-time and share with their social networks.

Similar to Gowalla, Foursquare worked with Jess3, a creative agency, for the project’s visual and social media components. Jess3 explains the project on its website, noting that astronaut Wheelock checked in at 11:09 am EST and that the agency created the visual header for the NASA Foursquare page and did the animation wrap for the NASA TV official coverage (see video below).

When I asked Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley last week about working with government agencies, such as NASA, he told me, “Maybe we’ll do something like that someday.” Who would have thought he meant it was just a week away. Or perhaps we sparked his interest so much that he decided he wanted is own astronaut.