Atomic Stopmotion

Fertilization

Honourable mention in the 2012 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge:



Tons more great animaions from Nucleus Medical Media can be found at their youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/nucleusanimation?feature=watch or here: http://catalog.nucleusmedicalmedia.com/nucleusindex.php?

via: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/science-visualization-winners/?pid=6148&viewall=true

Also check out the Cell in HD: http://blog.geoffchristou.com/2012/10/the-cell-hd1.html

Ant

Photos by Gier Drange, from the Nikon Small World Photomicrography website:





Subject Matter: 
Two ants of different genus meeting on a twig


Technique:
Reflected Light, Image Stacking

Subject Matter:
Myrmica sp. (ant) carrying its larva
Technique:
Reflected Light,  Image Stacking
 (5x) (2.5x)

More from the Nikon Small World website: 


Anna Franz
University of Oxford

Subject Matter:
Ink injection into yolk sac artery of 72 hour-old chick embryo to visualize the beating heart and the vasculature

Technique:
Reflected Light


Dominik Paquet
German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases Munich & The Rockefeller University New York


Subject Matter:
Time lapse movie of transport of mitochondria in nerve cells of transgeniczebrafish with nerve cell membranes labeled in green and mitochondria labeled in blue.

Technique:
Widefield fluorescence microscopy


via http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/people/bio/geir-drange

The Cell: HD!1

Thanks to Azzo for the link.

g

Ant Colony Castings

Pretty  Cool:



Thanks to my brother for the link.

Geoff

*Update: Here are some more....





Reminds me of the Catacombs of Domitilla (see old post: http://blog.geoffchristou.com/2012/06/m1-8-catacombs-of-domitilla.html)

-g

Space Timelapse

via Singularity Hub

Concectome Project

 "Human Connectome Project" maps in very high resolution connections within the human brain.

http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/

via http://singularityhub.com/2012/08/16/scan-reveals-brains-structure-to-be-much-simpler-than-we-thought/

-g

Zygote Body, previously "Google Body"

It's back up!!  Fun times.

http://www.zygotebody.com/

G

Mini-World

be fun to film a full-length film in there... claymation?



via Genomicon!
http://www.genomicon.com/

Milky Way's Center

Via Wired:

A space telescope peering into the Milky Way galaxy’s dusty core has spied a colossal twisted ribbon of supercooled material.

Until now astronomers had only seen bits and pieces of the ribbon’s 600-light-year-wide superstructure, which resembles the symbol for infinity: ∞.

“We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy,” said astronomer Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in a press release. Molinari and others describe the strange ribbon in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal Letters study available on arXiv.org.

Astronomers previously studied gas-piercing infrared images of the Milky Way’s cloudy barred core, but they didn’t have photos with resolution high enough to discern the ribbon’s entire structure. Molinari and others found the ring by aiming the European Space Agency’s infrared Herschel Space Observatorytoward galactic center.

The telescope’s images suggest the ring is a chilly 15 degrees Kelvin — warmer regions are blue while cooler regions are red — and has two segments that poke out of the galaxy’s pancake-like plain. Ground-based radio telescope data also hints that the ring is spinning around the core as one cohesive unit.

Although astronomers aren’t certain why the two lobes of the ring twist upwards, they suspect the gravitational tug of nearby galaxies — perhaps Andromeda some 2.5 million light-years away — is responsible.

via http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/milky-way-ribbon/

Analemma

An Analemma the figure traced in the sky when the position of the Sun is plotted at the same time each day over a calendar year from a particular location on Earth

Human Migration 200-5 Ka

Made this map of the Migration of Homo Sapiens over the last 200,000 years (200 Ka) on a dymaxion projection:  

I hope to eventually add the data from the last 5000 years, showing major migrations within that time period (Spanish Empire, British Empire, Hun's pushing West, etc)... but need to find a clear way of representing that.

Earth Drags Space Time

From a CBC article:

"Imagine the Earth as if it were immersed in honey. As the planet rotates, the honey around it would swirl, and it's the same with space and time," Francis Everitt, the Stanford University physicist who led the mission, said in a statement.

Gravity Probe B was designed to test the predictions by taking measurements from four ultra-precise gyroscopes. Those instruments contain rotors that NASA bills as the "most perfect spheres ever made by humans," allowing them to spin indefinitely without drifting from the alignment of their rotation.

The gyroscopes were aboard a spacecraft circling the Earth in a polar orbit — that is, it travelled perpendicular to the Earth's rotation, passing over both poles during each orbit.

The experiment was set up so the gyroscopes' axes of rotation should always point in the same direction — toward the "guide" star IM Pegasi — provided the Earth's gravity did not affect space and time.

However, the researchers detected tiny, measurable changes in the direction of the gyroscopes' spins, confirming that the Earth's gravity does:

• Warp space and time around it, which is called the geodetic effect.
• Pull space and time with it as it rotates, an effect called frame dragging.

NASA began planning the mission in 1963, making it one of the longest-running projects in the U.S. space agency's history. The satellite was decommissioned in December 2010, after the final parcels of data were collected.

via http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/05/05/science-gravity-probe-b-relativity.html

Kuwait Dust Storm

Things from my Pocket

Ocean Current

One important implication of this finding concerns the possible energy sources needed to maintain the ocean's large-scale “conveyor-belt” circulation and to mix upper ocean heat into the abyssal depths. It is thought that 2 terawatts are required for this process. The winds supply about 1 terawatt, and there has been speculation that the tides, by pumping energy into vertical water motions, supply the remainder. However, all current general circulation models of the oceans ignore the tides. “It is possible that properly accounting for tidally induced ocean mixing may have important implications for long-term climate modeling”, Egbert said.

In the past, most geophysical theories held that the only significant tidal energy sink was bottom friction in shallow seas. Egbert and Ray find that this sink is indeed dominant, but it is not the whole story. There had always been suggestive evidence that tidal energy is also dissipated in the open ocean to create internal waves,

http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=205

Marcus Aurelius

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
-Meditations

via 

Petri Fractal

Excerpt from The Science Behind the Art:

"These images are part of a series of remarkable patterns that bacteria form when grown in a petri dish. While the colors and shading are artistic additions, the image templates are actual colonies of tens of billions of these microorganisms.  The colony structures form as adaptive responses to laboratory-imposed stresses that mimic hostile environments faced in nature. They illustrate the coping strategies that bacteria have learned to employ, strategies that involve cooperation through communication."

from Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of the Tel-Aviv University

via Shrankmonster

Ganges_hires

via 

Fast Animal - Slow Motion

"Flashes of light.  Moments before impact a pressure wave in front of the claw causes the water to boil.  The steam immediately implodes generating light and heat"

How a dog drinks water with a spoon: