helping to quiet down the voices in my head . . .
Inner ear hair cells. Colored scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of sensory hair cells from the organ of corti, in the cochlea of the inner ear. These cells are surrounded by a fluid called the endolymph. As sound enters the ear it causes waves to form in the endolymph, which in turn cause these hairs to move. The movement is converted into an electrical signal, which is passed to the brain. The V-shaped arrangement of hairs lies on the top of a single cell. Magnification: x21,000 when printed 10cm wide.
This striking image actually shows part of an ox's eye, and the capillaries in it. Capillaries are small blood vessels, which act as the connective network between arteries and veins. The capillaries have been made visible by injection of an insoluble dye into the artery that supplied them.
Nature unleashes a torrent of energy as ash fills the air: After lying dormant for more than 9,000 years, the Chaitén volcano belched forth a 40,000-foot-tall ash plume in early May, touching off lightning and a monthlong eruption. The volcano, situated 700 miles south of Santiago, Chile, forced the evacuation of 8,000 people from the nearby village of Chaitén. It was roughly comparable in size to the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption that released hundreds of millions of tons of debris in an explosion 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.
Swimming around in their tank, these autonomous robotic jellyfish move alone or in a swarm and communicate with their brethren to avoid underwater collisions. Developed by German industrial-automation company Festo as an attention-grabbing experiment in cooperative robotics, each AquaJelly uses eight bendable "tentacles" to propel itself forward. But the AquaJelly does more than swim around and look pretty. Each is coated with conductive metal paint that draws the robot to a nearby charging station. It also has LED illumination, integrated pressure, light and radio sensors, and 11 infrared light-emitting diodes used for jelly-to-jelly communication.
Ferrofluids are made up of tiny magnetic fragments of iron suspended in oil (often kerosene) with a surfactant to prevent clumping (usually oleic acid). The fluid is relatively easy to make at home yet extremely expensive to buy on-line. How does $165 a liter sound? Pretty bad, right? Click here to learn how to make ferrofluids on the cheap.
In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. The photographer made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.
The newly-refurbished Hubble Space Telescope sent back its first breathtaking images after being repaired in September. Here, Nebula NGC 6302 with its butterfly wings of 36,000-degree gas.
A dead heart beats again, thanks to the efforts of scientists at the University of Minnesota. To rebuild and reanimate the organ, which was harvested from a rat, scientists first stripped the old heart cells away with a detergent typically found in shampoos. That left behind a collagen matrixthe protein fibers that hold groups of cells together and help give organs their overall shapewhich they then reseeded with heart cells from a newborn rat. They attached the organ to electrodes and waited. Then it happened: The heart started to beat regularly. "We were all running around like crazy, scared that it would [just stop and] never beat again," says team member Harald Ott, a surgical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The reanimation technique is now being tested on pig hearts, which are much closer in structure to human hearts than are rat hearts. Organs from built-to-order collagen matrices could help treat the five million Americans who suffer from heart failure and the some 2,600 patients currently waiting for transplant donors.
The Grand Prismatic hot spring is a deep thermal spring, richly colored by growths of exotic heat-loving micro-organisms. Some believe they offer a glimpse of what the first life on earth would have looked like.
Image from BBC Earth's Yellowstone: Battle for Life.
the Cassini spacecraft conducted a flyby of Saturn's sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, snapping some rather breathtaking photos along the way. The flyby, whose purpose was to gather the highest-resolution photos ever of the moon's southern polar region and to thermally map the "tiger stripe" terrain there, gathered some stunning images including some of the geyser-like plumes Cassini discovered on the moon's surface during previous flybys.
The photos themselves -- provided by Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) -- are raw and unprocessed, but along with the thermal data they should help researchers piece together a detailed map of Enceladus's geologically active southern pole.
Check out the full gallery here.
This cross-section of an anglerfish's ovary is reminiscent of another sea creaturethe nautilus. Its otherwise-dull spirally composition caught James Hayden's eye, so he used fluorescent hematoxylin and Eosin stains to illuminate the different details of the image. "I was trying to create an image that sharply defined the boundaries of the different parts of the specimen, so that the image could actually be used to demonstrate the morphology of the ovary and eggs," he says.
This fireworks display is actually a microscope image of a zebrafish retina that's been immunolabeled for ultraviolet cones (magenta) and rods (green). The image shows the regular pattern of the cones and the scattered pattern of the rods typical of a normal fish. The labeling was performed by Karen Alvarez-Delfin, doctoral candidate at Florida State University.
This 35-mile long, 20-foot-wide rift in the Ethiopian desert opened in 2005. Though some geologists at the time suggested that it would one day become a new ocean, that position was considered controversial until recent research confirmed it. This research showed that the geological processes that are creating the rift are nearly identical to those that occur at the bottom of oceans.
This satellite image provided by GeoEye and taken Monday March 30, 2009 shows Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano as it emits a steady ash plume.
A moment's inattention creates a dramatic nano-landscape: Sure, these look like mushroom clouds of nuclear doom, but they're really just evidence that nanoscale construction is tricky business. Engineering physicist Fanny Béron of the Polytechnic School of Montreal accidentally left the power on for too long when making 175-nanometer-wide wires. When the wires overflowed from their mold, creating the lumpy structures [here colored orange], she turned the error into art by etching away the molds and imaging the remaining malformed nanowires using a scanning electron microscope. Digitally added color completed the Armageddon effect. The image won first place at the Materials Research Society's fall 2007 "Science As Art" competition.
When objects like circuits are going to be chemically etched, they are often first covered with photoresist. Photographer Dr. Pedro-Barrios Perez inspects the photomechanical substance to make sure it will work when it goes to production. So why did he submit this picture? "It looks like the sun warming up the earth with its mighty energy waves," he says. Interesting, because photoresist sometimes wrinkles when exposed to heat.
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