Friday beautiful science

This is the inside of the National Ignition Facility, a wicked cool new fusion research facility dedicated today. They've got FRICKEN' LAZER BEAMS! 192 of 'em.

Friday beautiful science

In honor of the Hubble servicing mission:

Friday beautiful science

I was alerted about this image from Bad Astronomy.  Check this out:  

It shows a ribbon of gas, compressed and glowing due to a shock wave that slammed into it. The shock came from Supernova 1006, a star that detonated 7000 light years away from us. This was not a massive star that exploded, but a low-mass white dwarf, the dense core left over when a star like the Sun runs out of fuel. Still, the forces are roughly the same, with a titanic explosion ripping the star apart and creating eerie, unearthly beauty even in death.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from The Vector Site. They have a nice primer for young students on how evolution by natural selection works. One of the photos they show is of the leafy sea dragon. They look like kelp, but they're sea dragons. Look again?

I've seen these in tanks at an aquarium before, and they are truly stunning to behold. As much as I hate to admit it, Wikipedia has a pretty good description of them here.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science shows the construction of a Buckeyball in action.  From the News Release:  

heating bends single-atomic-layer carbon sheets into nano bowls, and then adds more carbon atoms to the edge of the bowls until the formation of giant fullerenes — larger, less stable versions of the C-60 molecule. Continued application of heat reduces these fullerenes — “shrink-wrapping” is the favored term — to the size of stable C-60 molecules, the buckyball: the smallest stable arrangement of carbon atoms in that shape.

In further heating, the buckyball vanishes, providing more proof that the buckyball stage had been reached.

Buckyball codiscoverer (1985) and Nobel laureate (1996) Richard Smalley had hypothesized that buckyballs are formed in this fashion, but at his death in 2005 no experimental confirmation was yet available and other methods have been proposed.

Way cool. Follow the link to check out a live-action movie. Neat!

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes a bit late.  It's a picture of the Phoenix lander, landing on Mars.  Check it out:  

This amazing image was captured as Phoenix came in for its Mars landing on May 25, 2008. The HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pointed at Phoenix, which is seen here against the background of a 10-kilometer-diameter crater called Heimdall. The dramatic view makes it appear that Phoenix is falling into the crater, but in fact Phoenix was 20 kilometers closer to HiRISE than Heimdall, and it landed nowhere near the crater. The photo was taken 20 seconds after Phoenix' parachute opened.

Posts should become more frequent again. I'm preparing to move to California, but some of the most brutal parts are behind me (I hope) and I should be able to at least keep a regular Friday beautiful science coming.

Friday beautiful science

Sorry I've been quiet for a while. Various personal issues have kept me fairly occupied (including flying out to California for a job interview at a biotech company).

Today's Friday beautiful science is something I've lusted after ever since I first saw it. It's a 3-dimensional map of our best data about the Milky Way galaxy, mapped out in painstaking detail inside of a cube of glass. It's simply beautiful.

Behold: a galaxy suspended in a glass cube.

A laser was used to etch around 80,000 of the stars in the Milky Way, using three-dimensional data from the Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory.

Production of the cube was motivated by the urge to see a galaxy in three dimensions. In encyclopedias and such, galaxies can only be viewed in two: we wanted to do so from all directions. Even the Magellan Cloud, comparatively close to us, is outside this cube. Space can be sparsely filled, one could say…or rather, there are great extremes in density.

I've made prints of many of my other Friday beautiful science photos. Perhaps some day I'll save enough Japanese yen to be able to purchase this little beauty...

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from a shot taken of a Saudi Arabian lava field from the International Space Station:

Harrat Khaybar, Saudi Arabia is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 16 crewmember on the International Space Station. The western half of the Arabian peninsula contains not only large expanses of sand and gravel, but extensive lava fields known as haraat (harrat for a named field). One such field is the 14,000-square kilometer Harrat Khaybar, located approximately 137 kilometers to the northeast of the city of Al Madinah (Medina). According to scientists, the volcanic field was formed by eruptions along a 100-kilometer long north-south linear vent system over the past 5 million years; the most recent recorded eruption took place between 600 - 700 A.D. Harrat Khaybar contains a wide range of volcanic rock types and spectacular landforms, several of which are represented in this view. Jabal al Quidr is built from several generations of dark, fluid basalt lava flows; the flows surround the 322--meter high stratovolcano (Jabal is translated as "mountain" in Arabic). Jabal Abyad, in the center of the image, was formed from a more viscous, silica-rich lava classified as a rhyolite.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science was inspired by the obituary of Edward Lorenz:

In discovering “deterministic chaos,” Dr. Lorenz established a principle that “profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said a committee that awarded him the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences.

Dr. Lorenz is best known for the notion of the “butterfly effect,” the idea that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can induce enormous consequences.

As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.

The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.

At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.

The photo above is a demonstration of chaos theory. It's a Mandelbrot set, that is seen to contain the same patterns at large and small magnification. You can zoom and explore a Mandelbrot set here. For more on Chaos Theory (written for non-mathematicians), see:

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science is a shot of bacteria spreading across a petri plate, with false color added to make them more beautiful. This looks like a Bacillus mycoides type of growth, but I couldn't find the identity on the original website.

Go on over to Eshel Ben-Jacob's website, where there are all kinds of beautifully rendered shots of bacterial growth.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday Beautiful Science is a photo of the moon Phobos. Phobos orbits Mars, and is orders of magnitude smaller than Earth's moon (compare Earth's moon at 3400 km in diameter to Phobos at 19-21 km in diameter). As you can clearly see in the photo, Phobos is not regularly shaped. From the Planetary Science blog:

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter approached to within 6,800 kilometers (4,200 miles) of Phobos to capture this enhanced-color view of the Martian moon on March 23, 2008. The color is from infrared, red, and blue-green channels on the camera, so it represents light shifted slightly longer in wavelength than human eues can see, which emphasizes subtle colorations on the moon. The color view shows that the material surrounding the giant crater Stickney (on the left side of the moon) appears gray while the rest of the moon appears reddish. The grayer material is likely fresher material.

Click on the photo to get a large majestic view of Phobos.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday Beautiful Science comes from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. They're genetically engineering mosquitoes, with the hopes of making a malaria resistant mosquito. See more pictures here.

Friday beautiful science

Okay, I've been doing a lot of astronomy photos for my Friday's, but it's only because those damn astronomers have been pumping out all kinds of great photos. This photo comes from the Cassini probe. From the Jet Propulsion Lab:

Cassini's March 2008 flyby of Enceladus was designed to directly investigate the ongoing plume activity at the moon's south pole, but the path of the spacecraft allowed investigation of older evidence for internal activity near the north pole.

Compared to much of the moon's southern hemisphere—the south polar region in particular—the north polar region is much older and covered with craters. These craters are captured at different stages of disruption and alteration by tectonic activity and probably past heating from below. Many of the craters seen here are sliced by small parallel cracks that seem to be ubiquitous throughout the old cratered terrains on Enceladus. The mosaic also shows a variety of impact crater shapes, some with bowed-up floors and smaller craters within, very likely indicating that the icy crust in this area was at some time warmer than at present. While this conclusion was previously reached from NASA Voyager spacecraft images, these new data provide a much more detailed look at the fractures that modify the surface. This data will give a significantly improved comparison of the geologic history at the satellite's north pole with that at the south pole.

Hat tip to Emily.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from an 5200-year old Assyrian bowl, with the oldest known moving animation:

The artefact bears five images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree, which the members of the team at that time had not recognised the relationship between the pictures.

Several years later,Iranian archaeologist Dr Mansur Sadjadi, who became later appointed as the new director of the archaeological team working at the Burnt City discovered that the pictures formed a related series.

I wasn't able to upload the movie (darn blogger) I was able to convert the movie to an mpg, Blogger still hates this movie, but you can watch it in it's original form at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub or the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies. Very cool!

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science is us. Here's a shot of our tiny little planet, as seen from Mars. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HIRISE) is orbiting Mars:

Launched in August 2005, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) is flying onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission. HiRISE will investigate deposits and landforms resulting from geologic and climatic processes and assist in the evaluation of candidate landing sites.

But in this particular image, they've pointed their cameras at earth to get a shot of the earth and the moon.

As an aside, I wanted to put this shot down as the Friday beautiful science this week, but Mrs. Factician thinks it's too difficult to look at. I'll let you be the judge.


This is another shot taken by the HIRISE. It's catching an avalanche in real time. The top of the mountain is on the left side of the photo, sloping downwards to the right. Those clouds to the right are dust thrown up by the avalanche. Absolutely beautiful. This photo is false colored.

Material, likely including fine-grained ice and dust and possibly including large blocks, has detached from a towering cliff and cascaded to the gentler slopes below. The occurrence of the avalanches is spectacularly revealed by the accompanying clouds of fine material that continue to settle out of the air. The largest cloud (upper images) traces the path of the debris as it fell down the slope, hit the lower slope, and continues downhill, forming a billowing cloud front. This cloud is about 180 meters (590 feet) across and extends about 190 m (625 ft) from the base of the steep cliff. Shadows to the lower left of each cloud illustrate further that these are three dimensional features hanging in the air in front of the cliff face, and not markings on the ground (sun is from the upper right).

Wow.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science is a shot of a fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) larva trapped in a water droplet. From the Nature website:

This image of a live Drosophila larva in a water droplet has won the photographic competition that forms part of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Winner Robert Markus, of the Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged, received the award at a ceremony on 25 February in Amsterdam.

...

Markus took his photograph to show how blood cells affect the fruitfly's immune system. "By identifying blood-cell-specific genes, we can generate transgenic Drosophila strains in which the blood cells express green fluorescent protein, so that they are visualized in vivo, making in vivo research possible on the immune system," he explained.

If you know Dutch, head on over to the prize website, and check out more info.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science is another shot of Mercury from the Mercury Messenger. The Planetary Society has an awesome blog where they describe this shot:

MESSENGER took this photo of Mercury as it departed from its first flyby at 19:59:41 on January 14, 2008 UTC. The image contains two craters with dark halos, which may indicate that Mercury's surface is layered, with different compositions at different depths. Alternatively, the dark halos could represent deposits of material that was melted during the impact; such materials are often darker in color than unmelted rock.

Very cool. I'm really looking forward to when Messenger parks itself in orbit around Mercury on March 18, 2011.

Friday Beautiful Science

Horrible mutant lovecraftian lemon
Originally uploaded by stevelewalready

Check out this cool lemon:

infected by [Eriophyes] sheldoni, the citrus bud mite.

The photographer called it a

Horrible mutant lovecraftian lemon.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the horrible part. Well, the mutant part is wrong, too (they're developmentally messed up, not genetically messed up). For more cool Lovecraftian lemons, click here.

Happy Friday.

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from the Mercury Messenger mission:

One week ago, the MESSENGER spacecraft transmitted to Earth the first high-resolution image of Mercury by a spacecraft in over 30 years, since the three Mercury flybys of Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975. MESSENGER's Wide Angle Camera (WAC), part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters, in contrast to the two visible-light filters and one ultraviolet filter that were on Mariner 10's vidicon camera. By combining images taken through different filters in the visible and infrared, the MESSENGER data allow Mercury to be seen in a variety of high-resolution color views not previously possible. MESSENGER’s eyes can see far beyond the color range of the human eye, and the colors seen in the accompanying image are somewhat different from what a human would see.

Wow!

Friday beautiful science

Today's Friday beautiful science comes from the TaMaRa lab (the lab of Francois Taddei, Ivan Matic and Miro Radman). They've worked on a lot of different projects, but these photos are intended to demonstrate that bacterial colonies are not made up of homogeneous cells. The first photo is of:

Cells expressing RFP undert rpoH and YFP under rpoS-dependent promoters.

That is, they have RFP (red fluorescent protein) and YFP (yellow fluorescent protein) expressed under two different stress-dependent promoters. The colour of the cell will indicate which stresses that particular cell is being exposed to, protein folding stress, or starvation stress. As you can see, this group of 'homogeneous' cells is far from - and different cells are experiencing different stresses, depending on their position within the microcolony.

This second photo is of a

microcolony formed from a single cell (as above) with sublethal mytomycin concenration. Brightest cells (center) stopped growing after 3rd division and were engulfed by dividing cells.

It is merely intended to show that different cells are responding to a sublethal dose of a DNA-damaging agent in different ways. This lab does all kinds of exciting work. I'll try to post on them more in the future.


P.S. I apologize for my absence. I had a massive hard drive meltdown a couple weeks ago, and I'm still recovering from it. I'm currently working on an ancient iMac while I wait for my machine to be fully repaired. Posting should pick up again shortly.