Sketchbook and Inspiration

Chalcedony on Chrysocolla stalactites
Inspiration Mine, Inspiration, Globe-Miami District, Gila Co., Arizona, USA.

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myedol:

The Tissue Series are a collection of anatomical cross sections using quilled paper, created by Lisa Nilsson

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mothernaturenetwork:

Do you know what this is? It’s the skin of an immature cucumber, magnified 800 times. The spiny structures are called “trichomes” and protect the vegetable from hungry herbivores.

Check out more awesome images and see how science becomes art.

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neuroimages:

Quadruple fluorescence image of the mouse retina, showing optic nerve axons and glia stained red and green, respectively, actin in endothelial cells of the blood vessel walls stained blue and nucleic acids stained orange. By Thomas Deerinck/ NCMIR/ Cell.

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ikenbot:

Inside the Eagle Nebula

Credit: Far-infrared: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/Hill, Motte, HOBYS Key Programme Consortium;

X-ray: ESA/XMM-Newton/EPIC/XMM-Newton-SOC/Boulanger

In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula.

This remarkable false-color composite image revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes.

Herschel’s far infrared detectors record the emission from the region’s cold dust directly, including the famous pillars and other structures near the center of the scene. Toward the other extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, XMM-Newton’s X-ray vision reveals the massive, hot stars of the nebula’s embedded star cluster.

Hidden from Hubble’s view at optical wavelengths, the massive stars have a profound effect, sculpting and transforming the natal gas and dust structures with their energetic winds and radiation.

In fact, the massive stars are short lived and astronomers have found evidence in the image data pointing to the remnant of a supernova explosion with an apparent age of 6,000 years. If true, the expanding shock waves would have destroyed the visible structures, including the famous pillars. But because the Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, their destruction won’t be witnessed for hundreds of years.

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thenewenlightenmentage:

Scientists Chart High-Precision Map of Milky Way’s Magnetic Fields

The sky map of the Faraday effect caused by the magnetic fields of the Milky Way. Red and blue colors indicate regions of the sky where the magnetic field points toward and away from the observer, respectively. The band of the Milky Way (the plane of the Galactic disk) extends horizontally in this panoramic view. The center of the Milky Way lies in the middle of the image. The North celestial pole is at the top left and the South Pole is at the bottom right. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

(PhysOrg.com) — Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) are part of an international team that has pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy.

The team, led by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), used the database they created and were able to apply information theory techniques to produce the map, explains NRL’s Dr. Tracy Clarke, a member of the research team. “The key to applying these new techniques is that this project brings together over 30 researchers with 26 different projects and more than 41,000 measurements across the sky. The resulting database is equivalent to peppering the entire sky with sources separated by an angular distance of two full moons.” This incredible volume of data results in a new, unique all-sky map that gives scientists the ability to measure the magnetic field structure of the Milky Way in unparalleled detail.

Read More

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(by Captain Tenneal)

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alchymista:

Ferrofluid

Ferrofluids are made up of tiny magnetic fragments of iron suspended in oil (often kerosene) with a surfactant to prevent clumping (usually oleic acid). 

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scipsy:

Mars Express reveals wind-blown deposits on Mars

Syrtis Major, discovered in 1659 by Christaan Huygens, is a volcanic province on Mars.

Newly released images of a part of Syrtis Major seen from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter show lava flows that flooded the older highland material, leaving behind buttes – isolated hills with steep sides that were too high to be affected.

They can be identified by their lighter colours and their eroded state, and some even show ancient valleys on their flanks.

Individual lava flows, filled craters and partly-filled craters can be made out in the images. The prevailing wind direction can be seen from the dispersal of the lighter-toned dust and darker-toned sand in and around the craters and buttes. The smaller craters illustrate this clearly.

The largest crater in the pictures has a small central peak and contains a small dune field of darker-toned dunes to the east of its floor.

The number and size of craters can be used to date surfaces in the Solar System because craters slowly accumulate as impacts occur over time. This information can be used to date the volcanic province and suggests an age of over 3 billion years. (ESA)

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