[NakedScientist (OP)]

In view of the success of Question of The Week (QOTW), I thought we should have a scientific image of the week.

Please keep these scientifically relevant. Each image should be accompanied by a few lines of description, and a reference / acknowledgement of the source if it is not yourself.

Please do not converse about the photos in this forum, it's intended as an image library. Instead start a separate thread to discuss them.

I reserve the right to remove inappropriate images or comments.

TNS

[NakedScientist (OP)]

"Residents of Tainan learned a lesson in whale biology after the decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours."

Source : MSNBC


exploding_whale.jpg (32.68 kB . 463x273 - viewed 63982 times)

Links : Naked Scientists Radio Show coverage of this story 1st February 2004 http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/news/news/523/

[neilep]

  Dying Star Sculpts Rungs of Gas and Dust




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Astronomers may not have observed the fabled "Stairway to Heaven," but
 they have photographed something almost as intriguing: ladder-like
structures surrounding a dying star. A new image, taken with NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope, reveals startling new details of one of the
most unusual nebulae known in our Milky Way. Cataloged as HD 44179,
this nebula is more commonly called the "Red Rectangle" because of its
 unique shape and color as seen with ground-based telescopes.

I acknowldege that I 'borrowed' this info from the hubble website and
that I did not take this picture myself....my ladder is just not long
enough !!

[neilep]

Screen Shot 2017-04-17 at 12.14.07.png (126.65 kB . 263x382 - viewed 36170 times)
The particles were seen in arteries with calcified aneurysms
(Image: American Physiological Society)

Doctors claim to have uncovered new evidence that the tiny particles
known as "nannobacteria" are indeed alive and may cause a range of
human illnesses.

The existence of nannobacteria is one of the most controversial of
scientific questions - some experts claim they are simply too small to
 be life forms.

But US scientists report they have now isolated these cell-like
structures in tissue from diseased human arteries.

<u>Source: BBCi News</u>

Link for more info:

http://www.msstate.edu/dept/geosciences/4site/nannobacteria.htm

<font color="blue">'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'</font id="blue">

[neilep]

Imaging Study Shows Brain Maturing

The brain's center of reasoning and problem solving is among the last
to mature, a new study graphically reveals. The decade-long magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) study of normal brain development, from ages 4
 to 21, by researchers at NIH's National Institute of Mental Health
 (NIMH) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that
such "higher-order" brain centers, such as the prefrontal cortex,
don't fully develop until young adulthood.



Time-Lapse Imaging Tracks Brain Maturation from ages 5 to 20

-- Constructed from MRI scans of healthy children and teens, the
time-lapse "movie", from which the above images were extracted,
compresses 15 years of brain development (ages 5 - 20) into just a few
 seconds. Red indicates more gray matter, blue less gray matter. Gray
 matter wanes in a back-to-front wave as the brain matures and neural
 connections are pruned. Areas performing more basic functions mature
 earlier; areas for higher order functions mature later. The
prefrontal cortex, which handles reasoning and other "executive"
functions, emerged late in evolution and is among the last to mature.
 Studies in twins are showing that development of such late-maturing
areas is less influenced by heredity than areas that mature earlier.
(Source: Paul Thompson, Ph.D., UCLA Laboratory of Neuroimaging

Source:   NIH/National Institute Of Mental Health
 


'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'  

[neilep]

NASA has announced new findings from the Spitzer Space Telescope, including the discovery of significant amounts of icy organic materials sprinkled throughout several "planetary construction zones," or dusty planet-forming discs, which circle infant stars.
These materials, icy dust particles coated with water, methanol and carbon dioxide, may help explain the origin of icy planetoids like comets. Scientists believe these comets may have endowed Earth with some of its water and many of its biogenic, life-enabling materials.

Out of the dust, a planet is born as depicted in this artist's illustration. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech)


SOURCE NASA

'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'  

[NakedScientist (OP)]

electron micrographs6.jpg (6.86 kB . 150x182 - viewed 38166 times)

corona virus.gif (87 kB . 510x451 - viewed 38204 times)

Sources : Genome News Network (top), CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) (below).

Electron micrographs showing particles of the 100 nm diameter SARS coronavirus, so named because the particles carry a corona (crown) of glycoproteins around their envelope

The virus is a relative of the common cold and first appeared in China in late 2002.

[neilep]

SATURN'S STORM ALLEY


Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

This image shows several dark storms confined to a region below 30
degrees south latitude in Saturn's atmosphere. This turbulent region
has produced quite a few storms during Cassini's approach to Saturn,
 including some that have merged. A number of other interesting
smaller-scale atmospheric features are also becoming visible.


The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on
 May 11, 2004, from a distance of 26.4 million kilometers (16.4
million miles) from Saturn through a filter centered at 750
nanometers. The image scale is 157 kilometers (98 miles) per pixel.
Contrast in the image was enhanced to aid visibility.


SOURCE  SPACEFLIGHTNOW.COM



'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'  

[neilep]

Record-Breaking Ice Core May Hold Key to Climate Variation


Image: BAS

Scientists have successfully drilled through an Antarctic ice sheet to extract the longest ice core ever recovered, according to a report published today in the journal Nature. The cylinder of ice dates back nearly three quarters of a million years and will help researchers better understand our planet’s history of cyclical climate variation. "This has the potential to separate the human-caused impacts from the natural and place it in a much clearer context," explains James White of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was not involved in the research but penned a commentary on the find for this week’s issue of the journal Science.

Source: Scientific American

'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'  

[neilep]

Saturn's moon reveals violent past

Phoebe may be a captured comet CLICK (Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Images of Saturn's battered, icy moon Phoebe have been captured by the Cassini spacecraft

The mysterious moon is an outsider, lying further out than any of Saturn's other major moons, and being the only major moon to orbit backwards. Because of these quirks it has been suggested that Phoebe was either an asteroid or comet captured by the giant planet's gravitational field.

The new pictures show that most of the moon is dark, but impacts have blasted holes in the surface to reveal much brighter material underneath, which is probably a mixture of ices. So Phoebe looks like a dirty snowball - the term coined to describe comets.

SOURCE:NewScientist.com news service



'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'  

[neilep]

Insect enjoys warmer UK climate

Experts say its arrival in the UK is a clear sign of climate change




An insect that normally inhabits warm countries has been found living and breeding in the UK, entomologists say.
The green "shield" bug, which attacks a broad range of crops, is usually seen in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Australia, North America and Africa.

Its arrival in Britain is a clear sign of climate change, claim experts from the Natural History Museum, London.

"I'm always reluctant to invoke global warming but it's the only explanation," said curator of beetles, Max Barclay.

Stink bugs

The green vegetable bug (Nezara viridula) is similar to the UK's native green shield bug (Palomena prasina), but is paler in colour and has a longer, narrower shape. Also, unlike its British cousin, the green vegetable bug has no brown markings.

The insects - sometimes known as "stink" bugs, because of the foul odour they emit when threatened - are regular stowaways to the UK.

They often get shipped in with imported vegetables but, until recently, they have not been able to stand Britain's cold climate.

Now three healthy colonies have been found in London - two in the Queen's Park area and one in Kings Cross.


SOURCE BBC NEWS

I've seen these little critters the last couple of years...I just figured they were an insect I hadn't seen before......well...in a way I was right. I've never smelt the pong but that's probably because I'm an angel, and I've never threatened one !![}:)]

'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'  

[neilep]

Countdown to private space trip

SpaceShipOne, the first private manned spacecraft, is undergoing final preparations before its historic flight to the edge of space on Monday.
The craft, built by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, will be launched into the sky by its carrier, White Knight, then rocket upwards to 100km (62 miles).

No private craft has ever been so high. In May, it reached 64km (40 miles) in a test flight, doubling its last best.

"It's all been done privately on essentially a shoestring budget compared to what the governments spend," former Nasa astronaut Rick Searfoss told the BBC. "It's a whole different model and we should all be excited about the prospects it can lead to."

The attempt over California's Mojave Desert is due to launch at 1330 GMT.



Leading the way
On Monday, SpaceShipOne will attempt to become the first private vehicle to take an individual above the Earth’s atmosphere.

The rocket plane, developed in just a few years by the Californian company Scaled Composites, has room for a pilot and two passengers.

The passenger seats will be empty for the first space flight.


Two steps up
SpaceShipOne is carried to more than 14km (47,000ft), slung beneath the White Knight craft.

SpaceShipOne is then released and glides for a few seconds before the pilot lights the rocket and points the vehicle straight up.

Its speed will exceed Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound).


Out of this world
SpaceShipOne will just break the Earth’s atmosphere.

The pilot will experience three minutes in a near-weightless environment.

At the top of its flight, the vehicle must adjust its wings into a high-drag configuration so that when it falls back to Earth its speed is controlled and heating of the airframe is minimised.

SOURCE BBC NEWS

'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'

[neilep]

SpaceShipOne rockets into history

Melvill climbs from SpaceShipOne after landing as Allen approaches. Credit: William Harwood

MOJAVE, Calif. - A privately-built rocket plane soared into space today, boosting a 63-year-old test pilot on a thrilling, at times scary ride out of Earth's discernible atmosphere and into history as the first non government-sponsored astronaut.
The successful voyage sets the stage for a possible attempt later this summer to win the coveted Ansari X-Prize, a $10 million award that will go to the first team that can launch a privately developed, manned craft on sub-orbital flights to space twice in two weeks.
But SpaceShipOne, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and built by legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan, will not fly again until Rutan's team of pilots and engineers figures out what triggered the failure of a critical flight control system during the climb to space.
"There is no way we would fly again without knowing the cause and without assuring we have totally fixed it because it's a very critical system," Rutan told reporters later. He called it "the most serious flight safety systems problem that we have had in entire program."
Based on a preliminary analysis of flight data, engineers believe a component called a trim actuator failed, causing the sleek rocket plane to suddenly roll as it streaked through the extreme upper atmosphere.
Pilot Mike Melvill quickly activated a backup system that "saved the day," but by the time the roll problem was corrected, SpaceShipOne was off course. It re-entered the atmosphere 22 miles from its planned 5-by-5 mile re-entry zone.

SOURCE: SPACEFLIGHTNOW.COM
'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'

[neilep]

INCREDIBLE DISCOVERY OF NEW SEA HORSE FOUND



new_sea_horse.jpg (47.36 kB . 432x576 - viewed 36164 times)


'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'

[neilep]

Hubble IMAX film gives ride through space and time

Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)

This unforgettable cosmic journey is presented in the award-winning IMAX short film, "Hubble: Galaxies Across Space and Time," which transforms images and data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope into a voyage that sweeps viewers across the cosmos. Using the 650-megapixel-mosaic image created by the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS), more than 11,000 galaxy images were extracted and assembled into an accurate 3-D model for the three-minute movie. The large-format film was created by a team of Hubble image and visualization experts in the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. The film was directed by Frank Summers, an astrophysicist and science visualization specialist.

Galaxies are vast assemblages of stars, gas, and dust. And viewers experience these majestic cities of stars on a movie screen as tall as a five-story building. The film opens with looming images of two mature galaxies that are relatively nearby Earth, and then pans through the vibrant and diverse panorama of thousands of galaxies in the GOODS mosaic.

The ensuing 3-D journey through these galaxies provides more than just a new perspective in space, it also takes the audience back in time. Because light takes time to cross space, the galaxies farther away from Earth are seen further back in cosmic history. The virtual voyage reveals galaxies as they appeared billions of years ago, when they were still in the process of forming.

SOURCE...SPACEFLIGHTNOW.COM


'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'

[neilep]

Rings of success

Close encounter: The Cassini spacecraft has captured this image of Saturn.

AUSTRALIA will be the ears of the world when a tiny spacecraft named Cassini completes a seven-year journey to Saturn on Thursday.
Cassini will fly through Saturn's outer rings to establish itself in the planet's orbit early on Thursday afternoon.
The Canberra deep space communication complex at Tidbinbilla will tune its three main antennas to pick up the faint success signal.
Cassini will spend four years orbiting the planet taking pictures and analysing the composition of its rings, moons, how the planet was formed and why it has rings.

SOURCE: HERALDSUN.NEWS.COM
'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'

[neilep]

Cassini mission hinges on Wednesday's engine firing
 
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Cassini fires its engine to enter orbit around Saturn as illustrated in this artist's concept.

After a seven-year voyage from Earth, NASA's $3.3 billion Cassini probe is racing toward a make-or-break rocket firing Wednesday, a 96-minute maneuver designed to put the craft in orbit around the ringed planet Saturn for a four-year scientific odyssey.

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., sent final commands to Cassini over the weekend, setting the stage for main engine ignition at 10:35:42 p.m. Wednesday.

Operating more than 930 million miles from Earth - so far it takes radio signals an hour and 23 minutes to make a one-way trip - Cassini's on-board computer system must carry out the all-important rocket firing on its own.
To achieve orbit around Saturn, the 12,600-pound Cassini must reduce its velocity by about 1,400 mph using a rocket engine that only produces 100 pounds of push. As a result, the engine must fire for 96.4 minutes to put Cassini into the desired orbit.

If the engine shuts down early, the computer will switch to a spare. But the end result must be roughly the same - 96 minutes of braking - or Cassini might not be able to achieve its long-awaited mission.


SOURCE...SPACEFILGHTNOW.COM

UPDATE 1st July 2004
Cassini successfully arrives at Saturn
NASA's $3.3 billion Cassini probe completed a seven-year, 2.2-billion mile voyage tonight, firing its main engine for a nerve-wracking 96 minutes to successfully brake into orbit around the ringed planet Saturn.
Throughout the all-or-nothing rocket firing, flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., could only sit and wait, monitoring events that had already taken place 934 million miles away.

At that distance, radio signals, moving at 186,000 miles per second, needed an hour and 24 minutes to complete a one-way trip between Saturn and Earth. As a result, Cassini's on-board computer was responsible for carrying out the most critical maneuver since launch Oct. 15, 1997, a maneuver that simply had to work or the mission would end in failure.

To everyone's relief, Cassini's main engine fired up on time at 10:36 p.m. EDT and shut down at 12:12 a.m., putting the craft in its planned initial orbit around Saturn.



Men are the same as women...just inside out !

[neilep]

First pictures from Saturn orbit show rich ring detail

The first batch of photographs snapped by the Cassini Saturn orbiter earlier today reached the Jet Propulsion Laboratory around 8:30 a.m., zoomed-in shots of the planet's myriad rings showing a ghostly tapestry of icy, back-lit particles arrayed in sharply defined bands.

One of the images taken by Cassini from orbit of Saturn shows a close-up view of the planet's rings. Credit: NASA/JPL

Much brighter shots showing the rings from the sunlit side were expected to reach Earth later this morning, but scientists were elated at the initial results.

"Look at that structure, it's so regular!" marveled imaging team leader Carolyn Porco as a picture came in showing well-defined bands of brightness and darkness. "I'm wondering if we're looking at a density wave. This looks like it might be a density wave, but I'm not quite sure."

Density waves, caused by gravitational interactions with nearby moons, are thought to be "kissing cousins" of the waves that produce the spiral structure seen in galaxies like Earth's Milky Way.

SOURCE SPACEFLIGHTNOW.COM

'Men are the same as women...just inside out !'

[neilep]

African Skull Fills Gap, Fuels Debate


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Remains of the hominids that lived in Africa between a million and half a million years ago are frustratingly rare in the fossil record. Bones from this time period have been recovered in Europe and Asia, but the paucity of finds from Africa has prevented a full understanding of just what members of the species Homo erectus looked like. Indeed, some paleontologists posit that hominids from this time period should be divided into multiple lineages, whereas others suggest that there was simply wide variation within H. erectus. A discovery described today in the journal Science is helping to fill the fossil gap.
Richard Potts of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues found 11 fragments of a single hominid skull during excavations at an archaeological site in Olorgesailie, Kenya. Together these finds mark the first discovery of ancient human bone at the site since exploration began in 1942. Based on radiometric dating and sedimentary evidence, the team estimates that the fossil is between 900,000 and 970,000 years old. The skull is from an adult or near-adult and shares some features with H. erectus. If it is a member of this species, it is a very petite representative. The researchers note that it is the smallest individual yet known from the time interval spanning 1.7 million and half a million years ago. Because many of the tools recovered from the same site are large and would have required significant strength and size to handle, Potts and his collaborators conclude that there was wide physical variation in the population to which this hominid belonged, with both large and small individuals present.
Other researchers interpret the new find differently, however. “[The skull] doesn't look like anything else we know so far,” contends Jeffrey H. Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh, who penned an accompanying commentary in Science. He argues that a number of the fossils categorized as H. erectus show too much variation from the original, or type, H. erectus skull discovered in the late 19th century in Java to be considered members of the same species.

SOURCE SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.COM

Men are the same as women...just inside out !

[neilep]

Sticky bees combat insect pests

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The mites have killed off many colonies
A powder that exploits the natural stickiness of honey bees could help control a devastating insect pest.

The Varroa mite is endemic in British hives and in large numbers can sap a bee colony's strength.

The powder has proved useful in helping spread chemical anti-mite agents much more widely around a hive than other mite-controlling substances.

The powder could help suppress the mite to low levels and ensure the usefulness of other controls is not exhausted

varroa_mite04.jpg (55.81 kB . 500x390 - viewed 36026 times)

Varroa destructor: Mites make bees susceptible to disease

A Varroa species of mite was first discovered in Britain in 1992 but was thought to be present in hives long before then.

The first outbreak devastated honey bee numbers, with many keepers losing up to 75% of their colonies.
Chemical controls known as pyrethroids have proved effective in controlling Varroa but lax use has produced mites resistant to them.

Beekeepers fear this means mite numbers are set to boom again leading to more lost colonies.
But now Southampton-based Exosect has developed a novel way of distributing another Varroa-controlling chemical around hives.

The Exomite system uses a powder that can be made to stick to the bee by exploiting its natural electrostatic charge.

The wax powder being used as a carrier medium is a harmless food grade substance.

The charged powder can be dosed with oils, such as thymol, used in other anti-mite products.

SOURCE: BBC NEWS