Posts tagged "science"
The most important photograph ever taken?
This is Photo 51, taken in 1952 by Rosalind Franklin. The photograph is an X-Ray diffraction image of hydrated DNA, the result of a 60-hour exposure, and was the key to the development of the double-helix model of DNA. The discovery led to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962.
The image one of about a million resources related to genetics being put online by the Wellcome Trust.
Formalhaut. A Class A star approximately 25 light-years away from Earth. Scientists think there may be evidence of two exoplanets in orbit around it.
Wind Map is an animated visualization of current surface wind flowing over the U.S. using hourly forecast data from NOAA.
Perpetual Ocean is a data visualization project from NASA which depicts the flow of surface currents from June 2005 until December 2007. The visualization was produced using NASA’s ECCO2 computational model.
For more information, other animations, and high-resolution stills, see NASA’s Perpetual Ocean page.
Periodic bedrock ridges on Mars; a geologic feature found on Mars, but not on Earth.
These ridges are etched into the bedrock of the planet, and run perpendicular to the direction of the prevailing wind.
This is an ultradeep image recently released by the ESO. It was taken by the ESO’s VISTA telescope; it is a 55-hour exposure of a patch of sky in the southern hemisphere.
The interesting thing about this image is that although it might initially appear to be a patch of sky filled with stars, in fact most of the objects in this image are galaxies, much like in the famous Hubble deep field image. There are over 200,000 galaxies in this image. If you click to zoom the picture, even the tiny red pixels scattered all over the background are not stars, but in fact entire galaxies whose light has been red-shifted.
Click the image for a larger version. If you want a really large version of this image, you can download a 250-MB version from the ESO. The large version is 17,000 x 11,000 pixels.
Some 16th Century illustrations from a book of anatomical tables commissioned by English surgeon John Banister.
The frontispiece depicts Banister delivering a lecture at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall in London, ca. 1580. The other images depict the nervous system and the skeleton.
Until the recent Mars rovers, Lunokhod 1 held the robotic rover endurance record: it landed on the Moon at Mare Imbrium in November of 1970 and lasted 400 days, until September of 1971.
The LRO images above show the rover sitting in Mare Imbrium, as well as the tracks it made around the Russian Luna 17 lander.
Using a process called “two-photon lithography”, researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have devised a 3D printer that creates microscopic objects at much faster speeds than was previously possible.
The car pictured above is 285 µm long; the span between the towers of the London Bridge model is 90 µm.
A video demonstrating the printing process is available as well.
Researchers have pieced together the first comprehensive map, taken using sonar, of the entire 3-by-5 mile debris field surrounding the RMS Titanic.
Super 8 footage taken by Jeffrey Ault on January 28, 1986, showing the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
This footage was shot from a vantage point less than ten miles from the launch itself. Ault himself had not viewed the film over the past 26 years.
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