Friday, 25 May, 2012

The Skogafoss is one of the biggest waterfalls in Iceland, and is especially beautiful in this stunning image under the aurora borealis. The Northern Lights are shining against a great sea of stars, including the constellation Ursa major, or Great Bear, home to the asterism — a recognizable cluster of stars — the Big Dipper. [...]

Eyes aren’t the only human organ that can “see” light. It turns out that skin cells called melanocytes have a light-receptor molecule called rhodopsin that fluoresces as soon as it detects ultra-violet A light (UVA), the deeper penetrating, long-wavelength UV light, as shown here. Until now, researchers have only found rhodopsin in the eye, where [...]

This view, taken by the QuickBird satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, shows the Breidamerkurjökull Glacier in Iceland. The Quickbird is a sub-meter resolution satellite, which means that each pixel of the image represents less than a one square meter area. Breidamerkurjökull is the main glacier of Vatnajökull, the largest ice cap in Europe, which covers 8 [...]

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 [...]