Once the two patterns have been compared, you get a kind of black-and-white silhouette of the object you want to photograph. Scientists call this a "ghost photograph." University of Maryland physicist Yanhua Shih has been working on this "ghost photography" for a while, and has been talking to the military about using it in UAVs for photographing bomb damage through smoke.

According to the Air Force Times:

Albert Einstein explored the basic research behind ghost imaging — quantum entanglement — which he called "spooky action at a distance" in 1935. Shih discovered ghost imaging in 1995, but the theory has yet to leave the laboratory.

Air Force satellites could use ghost imaging by pointing a light sensor toward the Earth's surface and another toward the sun. The technique could allow the service to penetrate clouds or the smoke that follows airstrikes . . . Defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin has shown interest in quantum entanglement, acquiring a U.S. patent in May to develop quantum radar that could defeat stealth aircraft and find camouflaged improvised explosive devices and mines, according to the patent.

Discovery May Make Ghost Imaging a Reality [Air Force Times]

Down in Rio, Brazil, the flying saucers look a little inverted but are still sleek and lovely.

Piatus snapped this shot.

In Spain, meanwhile, this glorious building looks just like a landed UFO, according to photographer Dags1974.

And of course people in Florida, United States, have their own special take on the UFO. Just crash it into a building.

Tony the Misfit took this one. Some things aren't entirely universal.

Here you can see cacti dotting the edges of the salt flats. If you were going to try to introduce plants to Mars gradually, a succulent like cactus would be a good bet. Of course, that assumes that you've already introduced sufficient nitrogen to the environment, or have bioengineered cacti that could thrive in the Martian atmosphere — and in temperatures much colder than anything in Bolvia.

These are the mud pots of Sol de Mañana, which release steam and sulfur as well as hot mud. The strange blue cast to the mud comes from the scalding water reflecting the sky at dawn. This might be from the surface of ultra-volcanic moon Io, rather than anywhere on Mars.

If you want to see many more of the amazing photographs Steinmetz took, check out the National Geographic gallery. Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Bolivia's Brink and Bolivia's New Order Gallery [via National Geographic]

According to National Geographic:

Nudibranchs crawl through life as slick and naked as a newborn. Snail kin whose ancestors shrugged off the shell millions of years ago, they are just skin, muscle, and organs sliding on trails of slime across ocean floors and coral heads the world over.

Found from sandy shallows and reefs to the murky seabed nearly a mile down, nudibranchs thrive in waters both warm and cold and even around billowing deep-sea vents . . . So why, in habitats swirling with voracious eaters, aren't nudibranchs picked off like shrimp at a barbecue? The 3,000-plus known nudibranch species, it turns out, are well equipped to defend themselves. Not only can they be toughskinned, bumpy, and abrasive, but they've also traded the family shell for less burdensome weaponry: toxic secretions and stinging cells. A few make their own poisons, but most pilfer from the foods they eat. Species that dine on toxic sponges, for example, alter and store the irritating compounds in their bodies and secrete them from skin cells or glands when disturbed. Other nudibranchs hoard capsules of tightly coiled stingers, called nematocysts, ingested from fire corals, anemones, and hydroids. Immune to the sting, the slugs deploy the stolen artillery along their own extremities.

But sometimes even the vicious Nudibranchs must find time for love. That's what you're seeing right here, with two Nudibranchs getting busy.

Find out more about these dangerous but recycling-conscious snails, and see over a dozen more pictures in the full gallery at National Geographic.

Living Color: Toxic Nudibranchs [National Geographic] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Photographs by David Doubilet for National Geographic.

Why are the little doll's panties around her ankles?

Maleonn's art will be on display at the Kasia Art Projects Gallery in Chicago next month. Images by Maleonn

Maleonn main page

Says Kadrey:

Science fiction and the human body are inextricably linked through velocity. Both forms (the flesh and the word) are hurtling toward a future that is probably a hundred times weirder and more unexpected than anything we're yammering about today. I embrace with the future by throwing words at it. I obsess about speeding bodies by documenting and modifying them, trying to guess the forms they'll take as they hurtle off the cliff of the future. I wonder what we'll be like and look like when we hit the bottom and start rolling to the edge of the next cliff.

Belger's cameras serve a greater function than just taking photographs; in fact, they are always part of the bigger picture. Each of his cameras has a destiny. For example, this one is destined to document a geographic comparison of people with HIV. We think he's onto something—photography of the future may very well warrant a deeper connection with its subjects.

Keep reading for a couple more examples.

This one's called the 9/11 Camera, designed to capture images of religious figures. It's another 4x5 camera, made of T6 aircraft aluminum, plus pages from the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah. The piece of metal with the pinhole that you see in the front is part of a support beam that was holding up the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

The Third Eye Camera is made with a 150 year old skull of a 13 year old girl, and intended to photograph the beauty of decay. He drilled a hole in her third eye for two reasons: as a medium for film exposure, and as a symbolic way of letting light and time into her head. Morbid? Maybe, but to pay his respects, he embedded pieces of silver with gemstones into her forehead. Images by Wayne Martin Belger

Boy of Blue Industries via Notcot

This is a recreation of a famous 1968 photo by Eddie Adams of a soldier with his gun to a Vietnamese man's head. The Lego version is much less intense, but the irony of the gun and the smiley faces is creepy. Images by Mike Stimpson

Classics in Lego via Notcot

Hello to my new desktop wallpaper. Annie Cavanaugh took this with a scanning electron micrograph. "Red blood cells clearly showing their biconcave disc shape," is how she describes it. I just want to dive in! They look so puffy and soft.

Yirui Sun took this outer-space-looking picture of stem cells implanted into a mouse brain with a confocal micrograph. He says these are "Mouse neural stem cells, labelled with green fluorescent protein [that] have been transplanted into the brain of a newborn mouse and are developing into oligodendrocytes and astrocytes." In other words, those stem cells are acclimating and turning into brain cells.

Check out the Wellcome site for more images.

Wellcome Image Awards [via Bioephemera]

Once our world is annihilated, the planet will be occupied by giant mushrooms. Not hard to guess what foodstuff he used to make this one. And could this image, below, be a broccoli paradise?

Images by Carl Warner

Carl Warner main page via Playmedesign

- Set up your camera to take 100 photographs of the same exact scene @ 1 photo per minute.
- Lay out all the pics in order of time from left to right.
- OK, that's way too long for the human eye to take in. Let's take a pair of scissors or a paper cutter and slice a narrow strip from each pic. Make sure you get a strip from the same part of each photo, on every photo.
- Put them all together, in time sequence, from left to right.
- Because clouds move, suns set, and waves crash, you get a pretty cool (and always different) effect.
- Don't have the patience for 100 photographs? Try it with 50. Images by Alan Grinberg

Alan Grinberg main page via NotCot

Flickr macrophotographer P/\UL took this on a Texas beach, where tiny sand crabs tunneling under the sand kick up these dwellings as they disappear. Here is another shot he took, of the cracking surface of mud in Galveston. To me it looks like a wound in the hide of some impossibly huge sea monster from an alien world.

Images by P/\UL.

This one comes from photographer John Nassr in Baguio, Philippines.

Here are some of my favorites. This looks like an abandoned factory that's become a dimensional portal to another world. And this one looks like a robot train (actually, one of the new superfast trains in Paris) that might take you deep into the heart of a planet where slaves wait for Riddick to rescue them. And what is this? An abandoned hyperdrive engine?

All images from L.A. Gallery. [Jakarta Post]

To get good images of the sun, you have to "take the law into your own hands," Alvarez writes. His site includes instructions on how to build a build a white light filter system out of cardboard and filter material, or a slightly fancier version made of plywood, glue and velcro. He also teaches how to convert your Coronado 60mm, 70mm or 90mm MaxScope telescope into a focuser for solar images. I love his workbench with the Rubik's cube next to his hacked telescope and camera equipment.

Flower Mound Observatory [Photographer's Website]

No matter what, I like any trend that leads us closer to a day when people flirt online by exchanging MRIs of their brains.

The strawberry was there, along with a photograph of the "jungle canopy" in a flower pot.

You can take the full tour, including tiny flowers, trees, and insects via Hails' miniature forest gallery.

Here he is blending the berries in liquid nitrogen. Pretty fancy way to eat Pixie Stix. Image by Dumbledad.

Now there's scientific proof that a doctored photo can change history. Researcher Elizabeth Loftus altered a photo of the Rome protest, adding a person in a mask, and discovered that people took this tiny change as a sign that the protest had been combative. Apparently:

Participants who viewed the doctored photos said they were less inclined to participate in future protests.

Memory can be manipulated by photos [UC Irvine]