That’s one hell of a science project: four Spanish students, using an inexpensive latex balloon and a Nikon Coolpix camera, managed to record images and meteorological data from an altitude of as high as 30 kilometres before the balloon burst. They managed to recover the sensor package 10 kilometres away. The project page is in Catalan (but can be machine-translated); the photos from the balloon and the launch can be found in this Flickr photoset (whence came the image at right) as well as The Big Picture. Via Boing Boing, Gizmodo and Engadget (among others).