The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, June 25-29, 2012
By Dan Nosowitz, Popular Science, 29 June 2012.
By Dan Nosowitz, Popular Science, 29 June 2012.
A great roundup of images this week, from raging wildfires to nerds sky-diving out of planes while wearing futuristic augmented reality goggles to perhaps the first time the noble quokka has graced Popular Science. Also a baby crocodile.
1. Colorado Fire
This aerial shot shows the destroyed homes of Colorado Springs [USA] due to the Waldo Canyon fire. There are dozens of these shots.
For more on the fire, check out our explainer here.
2. Quokka
This little guy is a quokka, a small marsupial related to kangaroos and wallabies. Zookeepers at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney are attempting to map footprints of all of the zoo's creatures.
3. Star-Vapour
The Milky Way is a particularly dramatic galaxy, with its spiral arms. Most look more like this, the DDO 82 dwarf galaxy, which is about 13 million light-years away - like an amorphous cloud of "vapour," which are actually stars.
4. Well, No
For some people, people who don't follow bagel news as closely as maybe they should, the Supreme Court's ruling on President Obama's health care reforms was a major event. In the race to be the first to report on the ruling, CNN and Fox News both got the results slightly incorrect. Sorry, did I say slightly? I meant completely. 100%. The exact opposite of the truth. Here's a screengrab before CNN managed to fix their mistake.
5. Croc Baby
Hey buddy! You are already kind of scary. Scary-cute. This photo was taken at a crocodile farm in the Philippines.
6. Skydiving Goggles
It's hard to upstage Apple, even if your announcement is just as big - like Google's I/O this week, where they announced a new tablet, a new OS, and a curious spherical streaming media device. One way to make a big impression: have some folks wear your crazy augmented-reality glasses, jump out of a plane, land on the roof of the convention centre during the convention, rappel down the side of the building, and BMX-bike onto the stage.
7. Manicured Turtles
It's important to track the endangered loggerhead turtle, but not particularly easy to keep the trackers on the turtles' backs. A novel solution: take advice from a manicurist. One of the Florida team called her manicurist, who recommended an acrylic base coat - a far better method that actually increased the life of the trackers by two to three months.
8. A Groan Thing
Sure, okay, science can feel like a male-dominated field (though it's worth noting that the split is fairly even here at PopSci). But good god is this ever not the way to go about fixing that. A European commission created this video to convince girls that science "is a girl thing," and it's complete with all the worst trappings of gender marketing: everything is pink, science is somehow represented with lipstick and makeup, all of the girls are smiling models who later awkwardly don protective goggles...it's just awful.
9. A Worker-Powered Desk
It's not a pedal-powered desk or anything, luckily. Instead, the Unplugged desk, from designer Eddi Törnberg, uses a variety of technologies to generate electricity, from piezoelectric fabric woven into the chair to some tricks to leverage the human body's heat output.
10. "Salt Sprinkled on Black Velvet"
Captured by Hubble, this here is the dwarf galaxy UGC 5497, which has a bright blue appearance which lasts for a few million years - a short lifespan, comparatively - before exploding as supernovae.
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