Just a couple of hippies showing an old man how to play the guitar. *
Street Art by Sam3
Street Art Utopia just posted an enormous collection of work by street artist Sam3spanning the last few years but includes a number of pieces I’d never seen before. If you like what you see, also check out his blog and maybe pickup some stuff in his shop. (via street art utopia)
Advertisments for scanning electron microscopes take you into the world of nano-monsters
Biological flying machine? Terrifying monster of the deep? Nope - this is just a scanning electron microscopy image of a Lamnacarus ornatus, or common mite.
Industrial microscopy company FEI sells a variety of imaging rigs, including the one that produced this image. To show what their SEM machines can do, FEI created an incredible image gallery of shots taken with their equipment. Here is just a tiny subset of what you can see if you visit their site.
Click to embiggen! See more at the FEI image site, which is organized both by subject matter and by type of imaging device.
In the image:
1. A worm found in hydrothermal vents - its mouth can turn inside-out.
2. Here is the same worm with its mouth tucked back inside. Very Alien-esque.
3. Gah! What is that? Oh, only hibiscus pollen
4. Here are the mouthparts of a caterpillar, showing the sensory organs.
5. FEI says this is an “image of sperm tails tangled up in a seminiferous tubule.” The sperm mature inside this tubule before thrusting into the world.
6. This is a coccolithophorid, or tiny marine organism. Yes, it looks completely amazing.
Transit of Phobos from Mars, as seen by Mars Rover Opportunity
Transit of Phobos from Mars, as seen by Mars Rover Opportunity On Mars, only partial solar eclipses (transits) are possible, because neither of its moons is large enough, at their respective orbital radii, to cover the Sun’s disc as seen from the surface of the planet. Eclipses of the moons by Mars are not only possible, but commonplace, with hundreds occurring each Earth year. There are also rare occasions when Deimos is eclipsed by Phobos. Martian eclipses have been photographed from both the surface of Mars and from orbit.
The Civil War, Part 3: The Stereographs
The Farmington coal mine disaster kills 78. West Virginia, US, 1968.
Mitosis
Prophase: The two round objects above the nucleus are the centrosomes. The chromatin is condensing into chromosomes.
Prometaphase: The nuclear membrane disintegrates, and microtubules have invaded the nuclear space. These microtubules can attach to kinetochores or they can interact with opposing microtubules.
Metaphase: The chromosomes align at the metaphase plate.
Anaphase: The chromosomes split and the kinetochore microtubules shorten.
Telophase: The decondensing chromosomes are surrounded by nuclear membranes. Cytokinesis has already begun; the pinched area is known as the cleavage furrow.
Famous in Black and White
Part of the crew of the television series Star Trek attend the first showing of America’s first Space Shuttle, named Enterprise, in Palmdale, California, on September 17, 1976. From left are Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, DeForest Kelly and James Doohan.(AP Photo) #
Sept. 15, 1916: All Disquiet on the Western Front
1916: The tank makes its debut as a battlefield weapon, attacking the Germans as part of a British assault near Bois d’Elville, or Delville Wood, on the Western Front.
The crude, 14-ton monster that breasted the German trenches that day was the culmination of an idea 145 years in the making.
The Brick Moon
One of the Strange Forgotten Space Station Concepts That Never Flew
The earliest concept for a space station is from an article called “The Brick Moon” by Edward Everett Hale. Published in 1868 in the Atlantic Monthly, Hale’s article described the construction of a 200-foot-diameter sphere made of bricks that is accidentally launched into space with people aboard.
Hale envisioned the brick moon as a possible navigational aide. It could have served as a fixed reference point above the prime meridian to help travelers calculate longitude, analogous to the North Star’s use in determining latitude.
While certainly impervious to being blown down by big bad space wolves, the brick moon was mostly fantasy. But Hale’s funny concept did foresee one major aspect of space station design: the astronomical price. In the story, the narrator calculates that the brick moon would require 12 million bricks and cost $250,000 (a tidy sum in those days).
