io9: national science foundation

Aurora Australis Warms Up the Antarctic Sky

Lauren Davis — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:40:00 PDT

Photos of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, have become a common enough sight, but a less frequently seen phenomenon is their Southern cousin, the Aurora Australis, which create a spectacular light show over the Antarctic desert.

Like the Aurora Borealis, the Aurora Australis occurs when solar winds carry charged particles from the sun into our atmosphere, where it reacts with the Earth's magnetic field. These particular images come from Antarctica's Amundsen-Scott Station, home of the South Pole Telescope. Keith Vanderlinde of the National Science Foundation took these photos of the Aurora against the unusually clear Antarctic Skies.

[National Science Foundation via Sci-Fi-O-Rama]

2008 Science Visualization Challenge Reveals the Teeth in a Squid's Suckers

Ed Grabianowski — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:00:00 PDT

What you see above are actually the suckers on the arm of a squid, captured with an electron microscope. The color was added for the obvious effect. The National Science Foundation and the journal Science have announced the winners of the 6th annual International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Incredibly talented scientist/artists wielding electron microscopes and more esoteric methods created a bunch of exceptionally cool images, such as this shot of Yog-Sothoth gibbering madly as he tries to force his way into our dimension.

If you head over to the Science website, you can see a slideshow with a bunch of the winning images, plus a podcast about the competition, and more info about the methods used to get the images.

There's an amazing 3D illustration of the human circulatory system and some innovative infographics, but my favorite is probably a cancer cell imaged with an electron microscope surface scan. After each scan, an ion blast shaved 20 nanometers off the cell, then another scan was taken. You can see a reduced scale version of the resulting 3D masterpiece at left, but be sure to check out the full-size version over at Science. Images by: Science/NSF.

Winners of Science Visualization Challenge announced. [Nobel Intent]

A Galaxy Unwinds, 140,000 Light Years From Its Core

Charlie Jane Anders — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:00:00 PDT

Baby stars spring to life at the supposedly desolate fringes of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as M83, in this new image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer. Up to 140,000 light years from the galaxy's center, the outer arms of its "pinwheel" shape seem to flap away from the center like "giant red streamers," and these extended galaxy arms are giving birth to a surprising number of new stars. Want to see another image of the pinwheel galaxy extending itself?

These composite images, including data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, give new insight into how stars can appear in a galaxy's backwoods. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. Images by NASA. [Galex]