The structure of a ketone crystal is revealed with crossed polarizers. The crystal rotates the plane of polarization of the light differently for different colors in different regions. Photo by Manfred Kage, 1968.
Porpita porpita has a small disc like body and floats freely in the water column. Related to the jellyfish, this species measures just one inch in diameter.
Image courtesy of Islands in the Sea 2002, NOAA/OER.
Source: NOAA Ocean Explorer
An image of the Moon showing variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL).
Measurements taken by Ebb and Flow, the two probes that make up GRAIL, resolve blocks on the surface with a spatial resolution of about 12 miles. In this image, red corresponds to high-mass areas and blue corresponds to low-mass areas.
GRAIL project scientist Mark Wieczore says that “with our new crustal bulk density determination, we find that the average thickness of the moon’s crust is between 21 and 27 miles (34 and 43 kilometres), which is about 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometres) thinner than previously thought.”
Source: NASA
How Do Jellyfish Sting?
the science of cnidocytes and nematocysts
jellyfish don’t sting through electricity or by touch. Jellyfish sting through a special type of cell called a Cnidocyte, there are three types of cnidocytes currently known. Spirocysts which entangle their prey, Ptychocysts which build tubes for tube anemones and the most well known Nematocysts. Nematocysts consist of a toxic barb which is coiled on a thread inside the cindocyte, when triggered the barb is ejected almost instantly taking only 700 nanoseconds to fire and firing with a force of five million g’s. A cindoctye can only fire once, and must be replaced when fired a process that could take 2 days.
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was a genius polymath as well as a very difficult person to get along with. Among his many discoveries was the cellular basis of life. Here we see his sketch of cork viewed through his microscope. He likened the structure to the rows of monk’s cells in a monastery, which introduced the word cell into biology. Source: National Library of Mediicine
Where objects are stored in the brain.
Ed Yong: The weird shape results from flattening the convoluted surface of the brain onto two dimensions, just as we distort our globe to fit on a flat map. And the colours? The colours show how different categories—whether people, or animals, or moving objects—are represented across different parts of the brain.
As a very rough guide, green tends to correspond to humans, yellow to other animals, turquoises to communication, dark blue to buildings, pink and purple to vehicles and landscapes, red to movement, and so on. These are maps of information, more detailed and comprehensive than anything that has come before. They show the where of what.”
Research Team Discerns Atomic Bond Types From Image
A team of researchers at IBM has had astounding success at imaging things on the smallest of scales, and once again they have worked their magic and produced something completely out of this world. After producing an image of a molecule shaped like the Olympic Rings earlier this year, they have published this image and a paper in the journal, Science, in which the detail is so high that they are able to discern the types of atomic bonds present.
Using a technique called atomic force microscopy (AFM), the team was able to create this picture. Atomic force microscopy works through using a carbon monoxide molecule which effectively works as a recording needle (read: record player needle), as to pick up the minute vibrations.
In order to get a clear picture instead of a fuzzy mess, the experiment must be isolated from any vibrations in the lab. This means that too much warmth would lead to distortion also, so the experiment is kept at a chilly -268C.
In the image you can see just how long the atomic bonds are, with the bright and dark spots corresponding to higher and lower densities of electrons respectively.
That we can now see different physical properties of different bonds is really freaking awesome and this new ability will no doubt lend itself to future developments in many areas of science. (x)
(Source: throughascientificlens)
Higgs Hunting. An event recorded with the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson to a pair of photons (dashed yellow lines). The green towers indicate how much energy was recorded in the detector, photons do not leave tracks in the detector (like charged particles) their paths are inferred by the energy recorded with the absence of a track. The event could also be due to known standard model background processes. Via CMS
The Case of the Missing Dark Matter
A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery.
Dark matter is an invisible substance that is suspected to exist in large quantity around galaxies, lending mass but emitting no radiation. The only evidence for it comes from its gravitational effect on the material around it… up to now, dark matter itself has not been directly detected. Regardless, it has been estimated to make up 80% of all the mass in the Universe.
A team of astronomers at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has mapped the region around over 400 stars near the Sun, some of which were over 13,000 light-years distant. What they found was a quantity of material that coincided with what was observable: stars, gas, and dust… but no dark matter.
“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” said team leader Christian Moni Bidin of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”
Based on the team’s results, the dark matter halos thought to envelop galaxies would have to have “unusual” shapes — making their actual existence highly improbable.
Still, something is causing matter and radiation in the Universe to behave in a way that belies its visible mass. If it’s not dark matter, then what is it?
“Despite the new results, the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for,” Bidin said. “So, if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found.
“Our results contradict the currently accepted models. The mystery of dark matter has just became even more mysterious.”
Black Hole Lensing
This is a simulation of gravitational lensing caused by a black hole going past an arbitrary galaxy. Gravitational lensing is an effect that occurs when a large cluster of matter occurs between an object and an observer, such as a black hole in between a galaxy and an Earthly observer. As the light travels from the galaxy to the observer, the intense gravity of the black hole bends the light - due to the curvature of spacetime around the object.
A secondary image of the galaxy can be seen within the black hole Einstein ring on the opposite direction of that of the galaxy. As the primary image approaches the black hole, the secondary image grows (but remains within the Einstein ring). The maximum amplification occurs when the background galaxy (or in the present case a bright part of it) is exactly behind the black hole.
