[The Nothing Corporation on Flickr]

Neutrinos
Univers
067post
Atomic Happiness
Fisherman's Friend
Worm Power

Balog was just written up in the Wall Street Journal for his Extreme Ice Survey, which involves a mix of mountaineering and nature photography to capture the effects of global warming. Balog explains:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for "Extreme Ice Survey"?

A: The New Yorker asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying. That idea gestated in my mind for a year and eventually turned into the "Extreme Ice Survey" in 2006.

Q: How do images of glaciers collapsing bring the idea of climate change home?

A: There were a lot of repeat photos that showed glaciers retreating over a hundred years. That's pretty abstract. I wanted to show a shorter term time lapse that would make people think, "My god, little Emily was in first grade in April and she's in second grade in October. I remember this. It's happening in my life."

The EIS photos are arresting and heartbreaking — they show the icebergs breaking off from the glaciers and going out to sea, and in one case you can actually see an iceberg on a beach where surf and sand meet the deaths of the icecaps. There are some utterly lovely pictures of "meltwater" floating on top of the ice, as well as some disgusting images showing the silt-befouled water encroaching on the ice, over the past few years.

But meanwhile, Balog's site also has a section called "Techno Sapiens" which celebrates the cyborgs in our midst, including gorgeous looking artificial limbs and wearable computers. Back in 1996, Balog talked to Fortune Magazine about it:

On the following pages, photographer James Balog documents what he calls Techno sapiens: fusions of humans and machines that can be found today in American research labs and hospitals, and even on the streets. Add up the images, says Balog, and it's not hard to envision a race of flesh-and-technology beings with electric hands, legs of steel that run a two-minute mile, and perceptual powers unknown in nature. "Imagine you are a traveler from another galaxy," Balog says. "You land in North America today and look around carefully, with fresh eyes. This is what you might see."

It's an interesting contrast, but maybe not a contradiction: He worries what we're doing to the planet, but he's also celebrated the way we're transforming ourselves.

There are tons more photos at the links. [Extreme Ice Survey and James Balog Photography]

Icebergs 200 feet tall, formerly part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, float into the North Atlantic Ocean, raising sea levels as they melt.

Jökulsárlón, Iceland. Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajökull.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Columbia Glacier calves icebergs into Columbia Bay west of Valdez, Alaska. The ice shown in the bergs was deposited in snowstorms 300 to 500 years ago.

Columbia Glacier, Alaska. Contrasts between clean glacial melt water and water laden with eroded silt color these lakes on the surface of the East Fork of Columbia Glacier. Black stripes are erosional debris called "moraines."

Svínafellsjökull Glacier, Iceland. An EIS team member provides scale in a massive landscape of crevasses on the Svínafellsjökull Glacier in Iceland.

Greenland Ice Sheet, Greenland. On the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet east of Kangerlussuaq, a meltwater stream known by the French word "moulin" (in English it means "mill," as in windmill).

Icebergs calved from Whiteout Glacier, Alaska.

River water and seawater polish the surface of a berg in Iceland.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Decaying ice and icebergs on the surface of the Jökulsárlón in southeast Iceland. The ice drains off the great icecap called the Vatnajokull.

Meltwater on surface of Columbia Glacier, Columbia Bay, Alaska.

Kenny's Arm

Breathing Observation Bubble

Wearable computer

Every year, the Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Contest invites imaging experts and amateurs to submit their best examples of microscopy - in still and video form. The results, as you can see, are incredible.

The top prize is $5,000 worth of Olympus imaging equipment. In addition, twenty-two of the 2009 winning and Honorable Mention images will also be displayed in a winners' tour that will travel to San Diego, California, New York City; suburban Washington DC; Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities. Additional exhibits of BioScapes images will simultaneously be touring cities across the U.S. and Canada throughout 2009-10.

You can see more winners and honorable mentions on the BioScapes page.

Sexual Attraction in Spyrogyra. This classic microscopic subject illustrates sex in lower organisms and shows the power of sexual attraction even in simple algae. One cell becomes quite amoeboid as it squeezes through the narrow fertilization tube that the partner cells have just built between them. The movie was shot in time-lapse over 2 hours. By Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, University of Melbourne, Australia. Third Prize.
Water flea Daphnia atkinsoni. This specimen has a "crown of thorns," a defensive trait induced in offspring only when the parents sense chemical cues released by one of their main predators, the tadpole shrimp Triops cancriformis. The water flea's exoskeleton (exterior structure, green) and subcellular details within the organism (nuclei - tiny blue dots) are both visible. By Dr. Jan Michels, Department of Functional Morphology and Biomechanics, Institute of Zoology, Christian Albrecht
University of Kiel, Germany. First Prize.
Nucleus of a plant cell showing synaptonemal complex, a ladder-like protein structure that forms between pairing chromosomes during meiosis (the cell division required for reproduction). This may be the first-ever high-resolution 3D image of this complex ever captured with light microscopy. The two parallel axes of this complex, which run the length of each chromosome, are seen as two threads spaced 100-200 nm apart and twisting around each other in a helix. By Chung-Ju Rachel Wang, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, USA. 2nd Prize.
Fresh water algae Haematococcus pluvialis, 100x. Phase contrast microscopy. By Charles Krebs, Issaquah, WA, USA. Fourth Prize.
Unicellular alga Penium, treated with the microtubule poison oryzalin. By David Domozych, Department of Biology, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA. Fifth Prize.
Single-cell smackdown! Amoeba trying to engulf a yeast cell by Margaret Clarke, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma City, OK, USA. Honorable Mention.
CAR fish fibroblast. By Maria Nemethova, Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria. Honorable Mention.
Adipose tissue in living animals. Cellular dynamics and structures including erythorycytes, platelets, leukocytes, and endothelial cells are visualized through in vivo imaging. Satoshi Nishimura, Tokyo, Japan. Honorable Mention.
Desmid (green alga) dividing. Desmids are symmetrical cells composed of two identical halves or "semi-cells" that have a complex, highly ornamented and species-specific shape. Every time the cell divides, it is bisected between the two semi-cells. The two daughter cells now have to generate a new, complementary semi-cell to restore the cell's normal symmetry. This morphogenesis takes about 2 hrs. By Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, University of Melbourne, Australia. Honorable Mention.
Mouse cortical neurons (nerve cells in the brain). Each second in the movie replays one hour in real time; total time is 5 days. Scientists are looking at the trajectories of the elongating axons. Despite the disorganized culture environment, note the straight trajectory of axon growth cones. This type of experiment is extremely difficult; researchers spent two years optimizing the biology and imaging conditions to make this long-term imaging possible. By Neville Sanjana, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA. Honorable Mention.
Epidermal layer cells of Lotus japonicus dry seed. By Mayumi Wakazaki and Kiminori Toyooka, RIKEN Plant Science Center, Yokohama, Japan. Honorable Mention.
Drosophila (fruitfly) ovarioles. Fluorescence imaging. By Maria Paula Zappia, IIB-INTECH UNSAM-CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Honorable Mention.
Apicoplast. Confocal imaging. By Bernd Zobiak, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany. Honorable Mention.
Genetically-identified retinal ganglion cells. This study shows that it is possible to target genetically-identified neurons, a non- random approach to studying cell types. By Tim Viney, Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland. Honorable Mention.
Fungia feeding. Fungia are large individual corals that don't form colonies or reefs. Their large and very expandable mouths allow them to eat large pieces of food compared to most corals. The movie was captured with epifluorescence, using the Fungia's own natural auto-fluorescence stimulated by UV, blue and green excitation light. James Nicholson, Coral Culture & Collaborative Research Facility, NOAA NOS NCCOS Center for Coastal Environmental Health & Biomolecular Research, Fort Johnson Marine Lab, Charleston, SC, USA. Honorable Mention.

According to an article in the New York Times, Moholy-Nagy was one of the least well-regarded members of Germany's Bauhaus school during his life, but The New Vision, his posthumous book on the future of art, design education, and the new media of photography and film, helped change that. And now he's being hailed as an important forefather to today's digital artists.

So what does the Light-Space Modulator do? It allows you to study the motion of light. Moholy-Nagy explains:

This piece of lighting equipment is a device used for demonstrating both plays of light and manifestations of movement. The model consists of a cube-like body or box, 120 x 120 cm in size, with a circular opening (stage opening) at its front side. On the back of the panel, mounted around the opening are a number of yellow, green, blue, rot, and white-toned electric bulbs (approximately 70 illuminating bulbs of 15 watts each, and 5 headlamps of 100 watts). Located inside the body, parallel to its front side, is a second panel; this panel too, bears a circular opening about which are mounted electric lightbulbs of different colors. In accordance with a predetermined plan, individual bulbs glow at different points. They illuminate a continually moving mechanism built of partly translucent, partly transparent, and partly fretted materials, in order to cause the best possible play of shadow formations on the back wall of the closed box. (When the demonstration occurs in a darkened space, the back wall of the box can be removed and the color and shadow projection shown on a screen of any chosen size behind the box.) The mechanism is supported by a circular platform on which a three-part mechanism is built. The dividing walls are made of transparent cellophane, and a metal wall made of vertical rods. Each of the three sectors of the framework accommodate a different, playful movement study, which individually goes into effect when it appears on the main disc revolving before the stage opening.

Image by HC Gilje on Flickr. [New York Times]

The above image, by Spike Walker, was one of the winners of the 2009 Wellcome Image Awards, announced yesterday in England. Last year's winners blew us away, but if anything, this years' are even more spectacular. Many of them play to our weakness for beautiful microscopy images. Here are our absolute favorites — more images at the link. [Wellcome Image Awards]

Microparticle drug delivery by Annie Cavaugh and Dave McCarthy: A synthetic drug coated with co-polymers. Scanning electron micrograph.

Villi in the small intestine. Multiphoton fluorescent micrograph by Paul Appleton.

Capillary network. Light micrograph by Spike Walker.

Mouse liver. Scanning electron micrograph by Jackie Lewin.

Lung cancer cell. Scanning electron micrograph by Anne Weston, London Research Institute, Cancer Research, UK.

Summer plankton. Light micrograph by Spike Walker.

The winners for the 2009 competition will be announced this Thursday, October 8th. In the meantime, you can play a few rounds of Identify the Image with more finalist photos on the competition website.

Small Wonders: Finalists From the Nikon Small World Competition [PDN Photo of the Day via Metafilter]

Shamuel Silberman, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Embryo of guppy fish (40X)
Viktor Sykora, Institute of Pathophysiology, First Medical Faculty, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Hoya carnosa (wax plant) flower (10x)
Massimo Brizzi, Microcosmo Italia, Empoli, Firenze, Italy
Snail eggs (200x)
Daniel Vega, Madrid, Spain
Gall (plant tissue growth) formed by Trigonaspis mendesi (4X)
Karie Holtermann, Rancho Cucamonga, California, United States
Raindrop on butterfly wing (20X)
Norm Barker, Department of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Dinosaur bone, Jurassic period (15X)
Gerd A. Guenther, Düsseldorf, Germany
Sonchus asper (spiny sowthistle) flower stem section (150X)
Fabrice Parais, DIREN Basse-Normandie, Hérouville-Saint-Clair, France
Atherix ibis (fly) aquatic larva (25x)
Yanping Wang, Beijing Planetarium, Beijing, China
Snowflake (40X)
Frederique Ruf-Zamojski, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States
Zebrafish embryo, 22 hours post-fertilization, living specimen (40X)

A group of researchers with University of Washington's graphics and imaging laboratory (GRAIL) wanted to see if they could build a piece of software that would search the web for images of a particular place and recreate that place in 3D in under a day. They succeeded. Rome was their first target, since it is such a well-photographed city. Their software harvested images from photo-sharing site Flickr, and recreated landmarks from around the city by determining the angles at which each photograph had been shot and arranging the images accordingly.

But my favorite subject was the city of Dubrovnik, because they managed to get the entire old city - apparently, it's such a well-photographed region that they were able to get all the buildings and streets, instead of just prominent landmarks.

The researchers write:

At the time of our experiments, there were only 58,000 images of Dubrovnik on Flickr. For this city we were able to experiment with the entire collection. Matching took only 5 hours on 352 compute cores. The largest and most interesting component corresonds to the old city. It is interesting that the reconstruction time for Dubrovnik is so much more than that for Rome. The reason lies in how the data sets are structured. The Rome data set is essentially a collection of landmarks which at large scale have a simple geometry and visibility structure. The largest connected component in Dubrovnik on the other hand captures the entire old city. With its narrow alley ways, complex visibility and widely varying view points, it is a much more complicated reconstruction problem, and this is reflected in the time it took to solve it.

Also worth noting is the fact that the reconstruction is not restricted to the city itself, as can be seen in the video below, it also contains the hills surrounding the city and part of Lokrum island which is south east of the city.

There is something poetic about the results of this research. What we are seeing here, in blurred and softened detail, is a concatenation of what thousands of people saw through their camera lenses in Dubrovnik. It's like the GRAIL researchers have given us a way to rebuild cities out of our own memories - at least, if you consider that tourist photographs are one way we remember where we've been.

See a lot more atUniversity of Washington's GRAIL Lab (via New Scientist)

The ghost orchid, of course, is the haunting beauty featured in the book The Orchid Thief and the bizarre movie version, Adaptation. Nobody knows why it's suddenly reappearing so regularly in the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary after a dozen years of absence, nor what strange qualiities it might have if you actually ingested it. Image by Mick Fournier [AP]

There are many types of slime mold, and they come in a variety of lurid colors. You can see several examples, photographed by Russian researchers, in this gallery. You can see the two forms of slime mold in these pictures - the gooey collective form (the yellow grid/blob) and the more commonly-seen individuated form that looks like a stalk with a small sphere or lozenge on top.

via English Russia (Thanks, Ekaterina Sedia!)

Stuelke, a former radiology medical student turned art professor, decided to start running everyday objects through the scanner to discover their hidden structures, he telsl the London Free Press:

Donated time on the scanner lets Stuelke produce hundreds of image slices of an object — cutting deeper and deeper into its guts — with a computer program that allows him to create 3-D-like depth effects using different colours...

His first CT scan — because it works better than an MRI — was of a TV dinner.

Stuelke wants people to think about the complex construction of items we may casually handle each day.

[London Free Press]

R.R. Lunt's microscope image of organic solar cells is probably my favorite of this year's Art Of Science competition contenders, because it's so vivid, and because it holds out the promise of cheap, renewable solar power thanks to the use of organic materials in the future. But for now, there are still some flaws to work out, and luckily for us, those flaws look gorgeous.

Other images in the contest include a mouse retinal ganglion that looks like an alien creature, collisions of clouds of plasma in space, embryonic fruitfly neurons, and an artificially induced vortex that looks like a superhero emblem. Here are more of our favorites.

See, and admire, the rest at the link. [Art Of Science 2009 via Nanowerk]

We've raved about Ernesto Neto's bizarre-looking, alien artworks before, but this is probably my favorite. Called "anthropodino," it's the first attempt at turning New York's neglected Park Avenue Armory into a public art destination along the lines of London's Tate Modern.

Says the New York Times, the Armory was designed to be "a Gilded Age boys' club for its wealthy regiment, an imposing palace of oak paneling, ironwork and ornamental armor under the majestic gaze of many a stuffed moose head," but now it's been filled with carpenters and craftspeople in their stocking feet, laboring to create this sweeping diaphanous installation that covers the whole space. The Times explains:

Made of hundreds of yards of stretched Lycra tulle, it looks something like a superfine spider web, laden with egg sacks, that has drifted down onto the skeleton of a forgotten species of dinosaur shaped like a cephalopod.

On Thursday it will open to visitors, who are invited for the next month to look at it, walk through it, touch it, lie down in it, even smell it.

Smell it? Oh yes, there are tons of ground spices, including cumin, cloves and turmeric, in the mix. This alien queen likes to smell fragrant. Or maybe like curry.

Schmoranzer's microscopy images of "wounded monolayers," "starved fibroblasts" and a "nuclear face" come from the 2008-2009 NanoArt competition organized by NanoArt21.org.

Schmoranzer is a group leader and head of the BioImaging facility at the Molecular Cancer Research Center of Charite Berlin. He says:

Seeing the beauty of cellular structures, like microtubules, after many hours of tiring and repetitive lab-work often gives me the kick to go on. I am glad that scientist like me receive public attention for display of scientific imagery and I am excited to expand on projects like ‘Cell Portraits' by exploring different cellular structures and cell types. I believe that visualizing science – the process of research as well as its end products – will gain importance in the future, not only to draw attention to a particular scientific subject, but also for science education itself.

You can see the rest of the gorgeous nano-art here. [via AzoNano]

Over at Morbid Anatomy, Joanna Ebenstein says she uncovered this striking image on the Christie's auction website - it was sold a couple of years ago. The text that goes with the auction gives you some background on the odd life of its crafter:

Although his artistic career was extremely short-lived, Gaetano Zumbo was arguably one of the finest wax modellers active in the second half of the 17th century. Born to noble parents in Syracuse, Sicily, he took up art after a long period of self-criticism and self-tuition. He made his debut as an artist in Bologna in 1691 and was soon after taken into the service of Cosimo III, Grand Duke of Tuscany. By 1695 Zumbo left Florence for Bologna, and then went on to Genoa where he entered into partnership with Guillaume Desnoues, a French surgeon, for whom he made exact models in coloured wax of the human anatomy to assist medical studies. His collaboration with Desnoues was, again, short-lived and by 1700 he had moved to Paris and obtained a royal privilege for the manufacture of anatomical preparations in coloured wax. He died in Paris in 1701.

Apparently one of Zumbo's biggest fans was the Marquis de Sade. Which makes sense when you consider that Zumbo loved to sculpt hot naked people, as well as the sick and decomposing.

via Morbid Anatomy

The Medical Museion in Copenhagen just put Rennie's amazing and bizarre work on display, and it was so heavy they worried that it would actually crash through the floor. So they assembled it in the basement of the museum. Says Thomas Söderqvist, who is the museum's principle investigator:

We have placed it in the basement area to the left of the main entrance - we didn't dare put it on the ground floor because we were afraid the 18th century wooden floor construction would collapse under the 900 kilograms of assembled glass plates. It's lit by a single spotlight which gives the small and dark room a crypt-like ambience, and increases the presence of the sculpture. An object of secular awe.

Below Colin is polishing one of the 30 glass plates measuring 1×1 meter. You can see how the structure of the sculpture is made out of nothing, i.e., holes in the glass plates made by a water jet stream cutter.

Learn more about the exhibit via Biomedicine on Display

Below is a scientific drawing of ATP-synthase.

These posters were all created by North Carolina's The Merch, a group of designers who usually create party invites, band posters, and awesome t-shirts. Above you can see four of UNC's recent events, advertised on posters that look like they should be plastered on the wall outside a venue where The Decemberists or Death Cab for Cutie are playing. I especially love the one about early mouse development - that mouse embryo really looks post-grunge in its stark freakiness. And how about "Human Pheromones and Olfaction"? That is totally Le Tigre's new album, if only Le Tigre were still making albums.

No word on whether these are all-ages shows, or if you have to be 21 to get into one of UNC's ultra-cool science concerts. Erm, I mean lectures. Collect all the posters.

Biology Posters via BoingBoing

A few years ago, Wisconsin Zoological Museum worker Paula Holahan opened some cabinets that hadn't been touched for decades. Inside, she found several boxes of delicate glass replicas of ocean life, including this Argonauta argo. Some were crumbling, and all needed to be cleaned. Fascinated by the artistry involved in their creation, Holahan embarked on a quest to find out who had made them and what they were for.


It turned out these pieces, like this model of an Actineria Hemprichi, sold in the late 19th century by Ward's Natural Science Establishment, a company still operating today. Stamps in the wooden bases of some of the glass creatures revealed them as the work of German glassmakers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, a father and son who started out making glass eyes and graduated to scientific models of sea creatures in the 1880s. Holahan combed through the museum's records and discovered that a zoology professor ordered the collection in the mid-1880s as a teaching aid for biology students at the University of Wisconsin.

Here's another of their creations, a model of Spongodes Celosia. According to University of Wisconsin-Madison News:

The Blaschkas were commissioned by museums to create glass models that would capture the exotic species' fanciful shapes and vivid colors. Other models were sold for exhibit or instruction at universities or even as elegant knickknacks for private homes.

"These were highly in demand. The living animals were often so minuscule and delicate, [models were] an ideal way to demonstrate what they looked like," says Holahan.

Working from illustrations or live or preserved specimens, the Blaschka craftsmen meticulously reproduced the spikes, polyps, and suckers of their aquatic subjects. They preserved an impressive degree of scientific accuracy, even modeling the tiniest creatures at 600- to 1,000-times actual size to show fine detail, Holahan says.

The Blaschkas pioneered many of their techniques and developed original formulas for their glasses, glues, and colored enamels. They experimented with methods, sometimes using internal wires for support and other times painstakingly gluing on individual spines and tentacles.

These delicate, now-restored glass creatures are a clear example of how art, science, and craft can merge beautifully.

SOURCES:

Design Museum (with many more images)

University of Wisconsin-Madison News

Thanks to DaveinVA, Doctor Who?, Turlough and a few other commenters who suggested some especially great spacey looking buildings. I've included some of them (with thanks to the suggester) in this gallery.

Note: Some of the pics I downloaded from AP last week turned out not to have captions embedded, and I'm honestly no longer sure what buildings they're pictures of. Any suggestions? Also, one picture of St. Paul's Cathedral made its way in there by mistake, even though I thought I'd already removed it. Although, with the other buildings around it, it does sort of look like a battle cruiser. Sort of.

The Duke Light Microscopy Core Facility has allowed us to look at everything from liver cells to scallop eyes up close, showing how alien they can appear up close. Here are a few more of our favorites:

More pics, including a Quicktime movie of that fruitfly's dorsal closure, at the link. [Duke University LMCF Gallery]