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YouTube user yesterday2221 downloaded raw image data from NASA’s Image Science and Analysis Laboratory and created a time-lapse video that shows a view from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night. The movie, comprising 600 still photos, starts over the Pacific Ocean and flies over cities and stormy weather in North and South America, and ends at daylight near Antarctica.
What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth? Check it out below.
[via Slashdot]
Gizmodo posted a rather trippy optical illusion yesterday where the green and the blue in this spiral are actually the same color. As interesting as that is (the explanation is here), one of the commenters submitted another illusion that caught my eye.
The Benham top, created by nineteenth-century British toymaker Charles Benham, is a disc that contains a black-and-white pattern, which when spun gives the illusion of colour. These colours are visible on different parts of the disk, and not everyone see the same colour.
I see red quite clearly. What about you?
The answer to why different people see different colours on Benham’s top is not a concrete one. Hit the jump to read one of the theories.
Internet search giant Google has opened a new, cool data centre in Hamina, Finland. The site used to be a paper mill, but in 2009, Google purchased the 60-year-old pulp factory with a mind to construct a data centre that would significantly reduce its impact on the environment. Data centre servers are usually kept cool by blasting cold air at them, an inefficient process that requires vast amounts of power. Last year Google is reported to have used 2.26 terawatt hours of electricity, the same amount of electricity that would be used by 200,000 average American homes.
At the Hamina data centre, Google has used a renewable resource at the heart of its cooling system — seawater. There was existing seawater intake tunnel underneath the paper mill, and it was repurposed to provide cooling to massive banks of servers. The new water-to-water exchange system pumps in frigid water from the Gulf of Finland through the intake, and it travels through a myriad of pipes in the data centre to cool the components. That water is then piped to another building, where it is mixed with an incoming stream of sea water, so it is cooled before it is returned to the Gulf of Finland.
This new power-efficient data centre cost €200 million to build. Take a quick look into the inner workings.
[via Wall Street Journal]
You might not believe it, but this is an actual photograph reported to have been taken back in 2006 as the Cassini space probe sheltered in the shadow of Saturn. It was 2.2 million kilometers away from the gas giant when it took the photograph.
Astronomy Photo of the Day explains the image thus:
The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in giant planet’s shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other.
First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn, slightly scattering sunlight, in this exaggerated color image.
Hit the jump to see the full image.
This educational short narrated by NPR’s science correspondent Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky, shows us how the flu virus gets access to our system (it has a key, LOL) and tricks our own cells into becoming the assembly-line factories that churn out more and more copies of the virus itself.
Bolinsky who created the video says that it is essentially in slow motion, the infection process takes a fraction of a second to occur. Also, they added colour to the different protein and DNA material in the video because at their tiny size they are, for all intents and purposes, colourless.
[via Holy Kaw!]
Back in 2007, Flickr user Rob Jones took a photo of the wonderfully intricate mess of veins and capillaries in a porcine heart. With its four chambers and four valves, a pig’s heart is similar to a human one and blood flows through it in a similar way to a human’s.
The image show a porcine heart where the blood was replaced with a plastic substance, and when the tissues surrounding the heart was dissolved, all that remained was the detailed vascular system. Have a look at the full image after the jump.
In an episode of “Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds”, Richard Hammond travels to the English countryside in search of the fastest living thing on the planet. Would it surprise you to know that it lives in piles of horse poop? Be disgusted and/or amazed below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3xXLxIbiXw
If you had some concerns about Hammond’s confusion of speed and acceleration, you may want to read Rhett Allain’s article on Wired, where he uses maths to question Hammond’s claims.
[via The Presurfer]
We’re big fans of how the scanning electron microscope can show the smallest of details. If you liked the last set of in-depth SEM images, you may like the works of Caren Alpert.
As a child, Alpert was fascinated with the back-page quiz of “3-2-1 Contact” Magazine, a quiz that tasked the viewer to identify the items in a selection of close-up images. The photographer (and food lover) has always been interested in the smaller details and has been photographing food for over eight years. After seeing an image taken with an SEM, Alpert was inspired to use the scientific equipment to capture images of the foods that we ingest on a regular basis. The magnification is between 45 and 850 times and the resulting images look like alien landscapes, delicious alien landscapes. Her project is entitled Terra Cibus and can be viewed on her website, which you can find through Google.
[via Laughing Squid]
A photomicrograph (or micrograph) is an image that is taken through a microscope, and we’ve covered a few of those on the blog including Nikon’s “Small World” competition, a traveller’s tale in a strange microscopic world, and an incredibly close-up look at insects. If you missed any of those, click here to see them.
North American scientific instruments company, FEI, is in the business of supplying electron microscopes to a various industries and it is the fantastic images taken by their line of scanning electron microscope (or SEM), that we’ll show you today. According FEI, their SEMs can magnify 20 to 1,000,000 times better a light microscope and can be used in tasks that contain long scientific words such as 3D cellular ultrastructure, macromolecular localization, and 3D tissue imaging. The proof is really in the details. Hit the jump to see some of the FEI’s microscopic images.
Fisherman and artist Iori Tomita turns the process of preserving animals into an art form. Tomita, who studied ichthyology at university, uses a interesting staining method to bring colour to animal carcasses. This is his process as explained by Wired:
Tomita first removes the scales and skin of fish that have been preserved in formaldehyde. Next he soaks the creatures in a stain that dyes the cartilage blue. Tomita uses a digestive enzyme called trypsin, along with a host of other chemicals, to break down the proteins and muscles, halting the process just at the moment they become transparent but before they lose their form. The bones are then stained with red dye, and the brilliant beast is preserved in a jar of glycerin.
The staining process for each creature can take anywhere from five months to a year to be complete. The results are absolutely striking, have a look at some of the see-through creatures in his New World Transparent Specimens series after the jump.