0 A Hummingbird Nest

Imgur

Detail: A Hummingbird Nest

0 Microscopic Flowers

Microscopic flowers by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) post-doctoral fellow Wim L. Noorduin.
About the project:

To create the flower structures Noorduin and his colleagues dissolve barium chloride (a salt) and sodium silicate (also known as waterglass) into a beaker of water. Carbon dioxide from air naturally dissolves in the water, setting off a reaction which precipitates barium carbonate crystals. As a byproduct, it also lowers the pH of the solution immediately surrounding the crystals, which then triggers a reaction with the dissolved waterglass. This second reaction adds a layer of silica to the growing structures, uses up the acid from the solution, and allows the formation of barium carbonate crystals to continue.  Stacey Thinx

Detail: Microscopic Flowers

0 Researchers Take First-Ever Photographs of Molecules Forming Chemical Bonds

Science nerds and photographers can join hands today and stare in awe at what a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory managed to do. Entirely by accident, these scientists have managed to take the first ever high-res images of carbon atoms in the process of forming chemical bonds.
The team, led by Felix Fischer, were actually trying to create tiny nanostructures made of graphene — basically a one molecule thick layer of the substance graphite that has the potential to revolutionize everything from circuits to touch screens. But creating the right graphene nanostructures is a tough process, so Fischer asked to borrow Berkeley physicist Michael Crommie’s atomic force microscope, which could capture atom-level images of the molecules falling into place.
 
Although the initial experiment was a bust, the pictures the group got (seen above) are nothing short of astounding. It turns out the people who came up with the drawings in your Chemistry book were right on the money.
The technique they used to capture these stunning images is called Non-Contact Atomic Force Microscopy. The microscope has a single Oxygen atom at the tip of a tiny “needle.” This needle is then run over a sample, moving ever so slightly every time it passes over a molecule or bond. A laser beam is used to determine how much the needle moved, and a picture is formed based on that info.
 
Just like the needle in a record player interprets different sized ‘bumps’ in the grooves of a record as sound, the different sized ‘bumps’ detected by the microscope are then turned into pictures.
Until now, all of the drawings of molecules we’ve ever seen (or been forced to look at) were educated guesses based on the scientific information at hand. Now, due to photography at the most infinitesimal level, scientists no longer have to guess. It won’t make O-Chem any more interesting, but at least now you’ll be studying something that you’ve seen IRL. PetaPixel

Detail: Researchers Take First-Ever Photographs of Molecules Forming Chemical Bonds

0 What Happened To The Iceberg That Sank The Titanic?

Image: United States Coast Guard

  Exactly one hundred years ago Sunday, an ocean liner struck a block of ice and sank in the North Atlantic. The story of the ocean liner has been told hundreds of times. This story is about the block of ice.
The photos you see up top and down on the left are quite possibly the only known photographic evidence of the actual iceberg that struck the Titanic. Understandably, nobody had bothered to snap any photographs while the ship was actually sinking, so it’s impossible to make an absolutely confirmed positive identification. But both photographs feature the telltale sign of a collision with a ship, and likely a recent one at that: a streak of red paint.


The photo up top was taken by the chief steward of the German ocean liner SS Prinz Adalbert, which on Apr. 15 was sailing through the North Atlantic mere miles away from where the Titanic had sunk the night before. At the time, the chief steward hadn’t yet learned of the Titanic‘s fate, so he wasn’t even on the lookout for icebergs. He simply spotted a streak of red paint along the iceberg’s base, which most likely meant a ship had collided with it in the last 12 hours.
This next photo was taken by a Captain De Carteret of the Minia, one of a few cable ships — vessels ordinarily used to lay deep sea cables, such as those for telecommunications — sent to the site of the shipwreck to recover corpses and debris. The captain claimed this was the only iceberg in the area, and the red paint was again a clear sign that a ship had recently struck it. There’s some disagreement over whether this was the only iceberg in the area, but it certainly seems likely that something had hit it, and the odds are good that that something was the Titanic.

Image: United States Coast Guard

 If you were to trace the story of the Titanic to its earliest human origins, you couldn’t really go much further back than 1907, when the White Star Lines first drew up plans to build the three largest ocean liners the world had even seen: Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic, which was later renamed Britannic and sank in the Mediterranean during World War I. From conception to sinking, the Titanic really only lasted about five years, although obviously its memory has endured far longer.
But by comparison, the iceberg began its slow journey to the North Atlantic over three thousand years ago. Again, we can only guess at the exact details, but the story likely began with snowfall on the western coast of Greenland somewhere around 1,000 BCE. After a few months, this snow has been turned into a more compacted form called firn, which then over subsequent decades is compressed into dense ice by the weight of newer snow on top of it.
The frozen water in these glaciers is slowly forced further westward toward the sea. When they finally reach the coast of the Arctic Ocean, the lapping tides break off chunks of the ice, and icebergs are calved from the glacier, some 30 centuries after their source water was first deposited. The iceberg that sank the Titanic began its journey as a rough contemporary of King Tutankhamun, entire civilizations rising and falling while it made its slow march to infamy.

Image: Russell Huff and Konrad Steffen/CIRES/University of Colorado/NASA

But once all that’s done, the iceberg’s life was a short one. We know that because the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, rather than the Arctic, which means the currents must have taken it far south of where it was calved. Starting on the Greenland coast, it would have moved from Baffin Bay to the Davis Strait and then onto the Labrador Sea and, at last, the Atlantic.
The Titanic iceberg was one of the lucky ones, so to speak, as the vast, vast majority of icebergs melt long before they reach that far south. Of the 15,000 to 30,000 icebergs calved each years by the Greenland glaciers, probably only about 1 percent of them ever make it all the way to the Atlantic. On Apr. 15, 1912, the iceberg was some 5,000 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
The water temperature on the night of the Titanic sinking was thought to be about 28 degrees Fahrenheit, just below freezing. Such a temperature was of course lethally cold for all those passengers who had been forced to take to the open water to escape the sinking ship.
But such temperatures are far too warm to sustain icebergs for very long. The average life expectancy of an iceberg in the North Atlantic is only about two to three years from calving to melting. That means it likely broke off from Greenland in 1910 or 1911, and was gone forever by the end of 1912 or sometime in 1913. In all likelihood, the iceberg that sank the Titanic didn’t even endure to the outbreak of World War I, a lost splash of freshwater mixed in imperceptibly with the rest of the North Atlantic. WIRED

Detail: What Happened To The Iceberg That Sank The Titanic?

0 The Most Unique Eclipse Image You’ll Ever See

This is an image of a unique eclipse as viewed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, with a model of the moon from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter replacing the lunar shadow. Credit: NASA/SDO/LRO/GSFC

You’ve probably never before seen an image like the one above. That’s because it is the first time something like this has ever been created, and it is only possible thanks to two fairly recent NASA missions, the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. We’ve shared previously how two or three times a year, SDO goes through “eclipse season” where it observes the Moon traveling across the Sun, blocking its view.
Now, Scott Wiessinger and Ernie Wright from Goddard Space Flight Center’s Scientific Visualization Studio used SDO and LRO data to create a model of the Moon that exactly matches SDO’s perspective of a lunar transit from October 7, 2010. They had to precisely match up data from the correct time and viewpoint for the two separate spacecraft, and the end result is this breathtaking image of the Sun and the Moon.
“The results look pretty neat,” Wiessinger said via email, “and it’s a great example of everything working: SDO image header data, which contains the spacecraft’s position; our information about lunar libration, elevation maps of the lunar surface, etc. It all lines up very nicely.”
‘Nicely’ is an understatement. How about “freaking awesome!”

And of course, they didn’t just stop there.

his is an up close shot of two NASA images: An image rendered from a model of the moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter overlaid onto an image of the sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, during a lunar transit as seen by SDO on Oct. 7, 2010. The various features of the moon’s horizon are labeled. Credit: NASA/SDO/LRO/GSFC

 Since the data from both spacecraft are at such high resolution, if you zoom in to the LRO image, features of the Moon’s topography are visible, such as mountains and craters. This annotated image shows what all is visible on the Moon. And then there’s the wonderful and completely unique view in the background of SDO’s data of the Sun.

So while the imagery is awesome, this exercise also means that both missions are able to accurately provide images of what’s happening at any given moment in time.
Beautiful. See more imagery and info at this SVS page

The image on the left is a view of the sun captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on Oct. 7, 2010, while partially obscured by the moon. Looking closely at the crisp horizon of the moon against the sun shows the outline of lunar mountains. A model of the moon from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been inserted into a picture on the right, showing how perfectly the moon’s true topography fits into the shadow observed by SDO. Credit: NASA/SDO/LRO/GSFC

Universe Today

Detail: The Most Unique Eclipse Image You’ll Ever See

0 Good Morning!

Detail: Good Morning!

0 Butterfly On Purple Flowers

Francis Gray

Detail: Butterfly On Purple Flowers