Saturday, 4 February, 2012

If you saw something like this falling from the sky, you might think that the weather outside was indeed frightful. But this dumbbell shaped object is, in fact, a super-magnified snowflake — yes, a snowflake. Not so frightful after all. This particular snowflake is a capped column, one of many types of snowflakes. The fuzzy [...]

Buckle your tiny seatbelts. Scientists have created a car at the nano scale. Just how small is nano? One nanometer equals one billionth of a meter. To help you wrap your head around that, the average sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick. Measuring in at 4 nanometers by two nanometers, this car is [...]

You don’t have to be a birder or ornithologist (a.k.a. a bird scientist) to think this graphic is fascinating. This map shows where American Pipits, a small, sparrow-like bird, can be found throughout the year (click on it to watch the animation of their migration). The American Pipit likes the open country. During its breeding [...]

Caenorhabditis elegans is a one millimeter-long soil roundworm, as well as an insightful model organism for research in molecular and developmental biology, because it is simple, easy to grow and can be frozen. C. elegans has two sexes: a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite and a male. Hermaphrodites make both sperm and eggs. This picture of a hermaphrodite [...]

Teeny little video cameras called minirhizotrons snapped these photos of wetland plant roots. The cameras will help scientists anticipate how the plants might respond to climate change. Minirhizotrons give scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory a technological boost by allowing them to study living roots, especially the really small ones, without harming the plants. [...]

One hurdle to treating neurodegenerative diseases is the inability of neurons in the central nervous system to regenerate axons after damage. In glaucoma, retinal ganglion cell (RGC) axons, which make up the optic nerve and serve as cables to pass information from our eyes to our brains, are damaged and thus unable to regenerate. Shown [...]

Despite being merely microns thick, these impurity crystals jut like skyscrapers from the surface of NF 616 cast stainless steel, a specialized engineering material. All engineering materials contain small amounts of impurities, which play an important role in the mechanical properties of the material. This image was captured with a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Courtesy [...]

This muscle cell was derived from human embryonic stem cells propagated on a synthetic hydrogel scaffold. The cell’s alpha smooth muscle actin is stained red and the nucleus blue. Hydrogels are networks of hydrophilic, or water soluble, polymer chains that are used for tissue engineering. They are useful for the creation of microenvironments to support [...]

Reminiscent of children’s sand art, the Painted Hills of Eastern Oregon tell the story of climates past. Fifty million years ago the region was lush and tropical. It is now a sublimely rugged landscape in a semi-arid climate. The red and tan layers of the hills reflect the climatic cycling between warm/wet and cool/dry, which [...]

This image shows a very small portion of a cotton flower magnified more than 500 times. The spike-covered orbs are cotton pollen grains stuck to the papillar surface of the stigma, a sticky surface with finger-like projections. The stigma is located at the very top of the pistil, which is the female reproductive structure of [...]