Wednesday, 23 May, 2012

In an experiment that could only have come out of California, UC Berkeley researchers decided to see what would happen if they chucked a gecko into a wind tunnel. Who says science can’t be fun? Looking for inspiration for building more maneuverable robots, the researchers pointed a powerful fan straight up to simulate freefall conditions [...]

You’ve seen photos of lunar and solar eclipses, or maybe you’ve even been present for one yourself, but have you ever seen an eclipse of the Earth? Astronaut Bill McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarey snapped this photo from aboard the International Space Station on March 29, 2006 during a total eclipse of the sun. [...]

If you were to draw lines representing your social connections to all your friends, your friends’ friends, and your friends’ friends’ friends, what would it look like? For Jeffrey Heer of the University of California, Berkeley, it looks like a big blue ball of glittery fuzz. In this image, Heer is represented at the center [...]

Yes, this is a real picture. More accurately, it’s 165 pictures pasted together from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft’s flyby of Saturn as the planet between the probe and the sun. From this unique vantage point, the contrast of light and shadow enabled astronomers to discern new bands of ice and dust — perhaps the remnants of [...]

Buried 1000 meters under the city of Hida, Japan, and packed with 11,146 photomultiplier tubes, the Super Kamiokande detector is set up to capture the presence of what may be the universe’s most bashful particle. The ghost-like neutrino has no electrical charge and a near zero mass. That means it doesn’t like to play with [...]

No, that’s not a cover of a 70s-era psychedelic rock album. But if you were thinking “Dark Side of the Mushroom,” you’re closer than you think. This is a dark photo of a bioluminescent bunch of Mycena lucentipes mushrooms. They’re an especially radiant species of the 65 different mushroom varieties known to glow. Why does [...]

This CSI is a scanning electron micrograph of the snout of a butterfly. Conveniently coiled when not in use, the long proboscises of butterflies are used to drink and obtain nectar and other nutrients from flowers. This pretty picture was obtained with the aid of a scanning electron microscope, a microscope that scans a specimen [...]

The progenitor of canine parvovirus, shown here in glorious molecular detail, once afflicted only cats and their relatives. But in the 1970s, the cat virus reconfigured just two or three surface amino acids and unleashed a plague upon dogs everywhere. All viruses, whether they infect plants, animals or bacteria, are utterly dependent on living host [...]

Tissue, please… In honor of the sneezin’ season, this CSI is common ragweed pollen as seen under a microscope. Ragweed pollen is the principal cause of hay fever and can also trigger asthma. But for all the itchy throats and watery eyes, this tough little plant is just trying to survive. The common ragweed is [...]

This CSI is Salvinia molesta, or Giant Salvinia, a fast-growing, free-floating aquatic fern that is native to Brazil. Instead of roots, the Salvinia uses a three-leaf or frond approach: two water resistant fronds float atop the surface while the third frond is divided into sections and submersed in the water, serving as a “root.” This [...]