No, This is not that weird flying creature from classic Trek that infected Spock and killed Kirk’s brother.. This is an incredible construct called a bio-hybrid machine or bio-bot. It consists of silicon gel, some gold, and genetically engineered rat heart cells. It’s designed to move towards light and undulate just like a real sting-ray.
It’s hard to beat this picture for sheer jovian awesomeness.
This is a recent image taken by the Hubble Space telescope of an aurora over one of Jupiter’s poles. Actually, it’s only kinda recent. It’s really a composite image. The Jupiter part of the picture is from an optical image taken in 2014 and the aurora itself was imaged earlier this year by Hubble’s ultraviolet sensors.
What you’re looking at is a Stanford Torus. It’s one of the many types of designs that have been proposed for future space habitats.
This specific picture is one of the most iconic images of this bit of scientific/engineering speculation. If you have a story about future living in space, chances are this one will be high on the list of images to use. Case in point, I just read a recent NASA news-item discussing their new program to develop future space habitation and propulsion technologies. Of course, they used this image at the top of the article.
This looks like some particularly nasty room in a torture chamber, doesn’t it? The only thing this stuff tortures though is sound and radio waves perhaps. What you’re looking at is called anechoic foam. It is designed to minimize reflections of incident sound and electromagnetic frequencies. The specific foam in the image above is from
J. Craig Venter is in the news again. He and his team at Synthetic Genomics have created a synthetic organism with a viable genome smaller than anything that evolved the old-fashioned way.
This is not a ukelele in UV light. What you’re seeing is a beautiful species of Foraminifera in polarized light.
Astronomers are claiming to have found the biggest known structure in the known Universe.
The structure is called the BOSS Great Wall. No, the scientists are not necessarily fans of Bruce Springsteen, BOSS stands for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey which is part of the more well known Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
What you see here is a thermal (or mid) infrared image that was recently announced as a finalist in Wellcome Images of the year awards. The two hands on display here would seem perfectly similar and normal if they weren’t photographed in this way. Each hand was held in cold water for two minutes before
We are currently witnessing one of the big milestones in Artificial General Intelligence. An AI has beaten the best human GO player in the world.
As of this writing, 10-year world champion, Lee Sedol has lost the first two games of a best-of-five match against Google’s Deep Mind AI program, called AlphaGo. The match is taking place in Seoul, South Korea from March 9 -15, 2016.
A new biological simulation solves a long-standing mystery why mitochondria still have DNA.
Mitochondria are my favorite organelles. Organelles are the specialized nanomachines floating within eukaryotic cells and carrying out the critical tasks of cellular life. Examples include the Golgi apparatus, lysosomes, the endoplasmic reticulum etc.