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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper by Richard Avedon, 1981.
To get the bees to land on Fischer, photographer Richard Avedon enlisted the help of UC Davis entomologist (and professional bee wrangler) Dr. Norman Gary, who smeared the beekeeper with queen bee pheromone and a dash of plant extract similar to peppermint — a method he devised himself.
Norman Gary, a professor emeritus, also has quite the impressive imdb page — with bee wrangling credits ranging from My Girl to The X-Files.
ucresearch
ikenbot
Rare photos of Albert Einstein
Charming.
Back in the days of our Cosmotron accelerator, control rooms were full of analog knobs and buttons, and the scientists wore pants up at their actual waists. In 1952, the hard-core researchers above were inventing new technologies to replicate energetic cosmic rays.
Nowadays, our Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider carries that torch, but it’s operated in a lean, flat-screened control room. There may not be oscilloscope panels or a 1950s microphone, but groundbreaking data and high-precision measurements play out across each of those screens as RHIC smashes particles. Our NASA Space Radiation Laboratory uses that same control room to prepare particle beams that simulate the impacts of deep space travel on biology and materials.
Brilliant Noise Semiconductor
Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy bringing together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments.
(via ikenbot)
Art Show in Space Could Last Billions of Years
A piece of artwork headed into space this week may be on display for the next few billion years.
A collection of images called “The Last Pictures” is hitching a ride on a communications satellite today (Nov. 20) that may well orbit the Earth until our planet’s predicted fiery death 5 billion years or so from now, according to the the project’s creator.
“‘The Last Pictures’ tells a kind of story to the distant future about where these spacecraft came from and what happened to the people that made them,” artist Trevor Paglen, who spent almost five years assembling the collection.
The satellite will launch atop a Russian Proton rocket at 1:31 p.m. EST (1831 GMT) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the local time will be early Wednesday.
Delivery
Delivering a dinosaur to the Boston Museum of Science. Source : Arthur Pollock
expose-the-light
The psychologist Harry Harlow (c. 1958), with one of his experimental rhesus monkeys, used for his studies on maternal love.
In his most famous experiment, he separated infant monkeys from their mothers at birth, and placed them with a pair of surrogate mothers: one wire frame mother, and one cloth mother with a face. In one condition, the wire mother had a milk bottle built into her chest, while in the second condition, the the cloth mother had the milk bottle. In both conditions, the monkey would feed from the milk-possessing mother, but regardless of the food source, the infant spent the majority of its time clutching to the warmer, more life-like cloth mother. Harlow (1958) concluded:
Certainly, man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed, and we may be sure that there is nothing to be gained by giving lip service to love
H. F. Harlow (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13, 673–685.
Pluto, Planets Series by Colin Nichols
Black Sun and Inverted Starfield
Does this strange dark ball look somehow familiar? If so, that might be because it is our Sun. In the above image, a detailed solar view was captured originally in a very specific color of red light, then rendered in black and white, and then color inverted.
Once complete, the resulting image was added to a starfield, then also color inverted. Visible in the above image of the Sun are long light filaments, dark active regions, prominences peaking around the edge, and a moving carpet of hot gas.
The surface of our Sun has become a particularly busy place over the past two years because it is now nearing Solar Maximum, the time when its surface magnetic field is wound up the most. Besides an active Sun being so picturesque, the plasma expelled can also become picturesque when it impacts the Earth’s magnetosphere and creates auroras.
Angling Saturn
The Cassini spacecraft takes an angled view toward Saturn, showing the southern reaches of the planet with the rings on a dramatic diagonal.
North on Saturn is up and rotated 16 degrees to the left. This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 14 degrees below the ringplane. The rings cast wide shadows on the planet’s southern hemisphere.
The moon Enceladus (313 miles, or 504 kilometers across) appears as a small, bright speck in the lower left of the image.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on June 15, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 72 degrees. Image scale is 11 miles (17 kilometers) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
