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Sunday 1 July 2012

THE MOST AMAZING SCIENCE IMAGES OF THE WEEK VI


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The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, June 25-29, 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

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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

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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

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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.

Read more here.

4. Well, No

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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.

Read more here.

5. Croc Baby

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Hey buddy! You are already kind of scary. Scary-cute. This photo was taken at a crocodile farm in the Philippines.

Check out more amazing photojournalism like this over at American Photo.

6. Skydiving Goggles

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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.

See the video here.

7. Manicured Turtles

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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.

Read more here.

8. A Groan Thing

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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.

Watch it here.

9. A Worker-Powered Desk

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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.

It's not enough to power a laptop, says Mark Wilson over at FastCoDesign, but it does power a lamp.

10. "Salt Sprinkled on Black Velvet"

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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.

Read more here.

Top image: Quokka (left) and Manicured Turtles (right)

[Source: Popular Science. Edited. Top image and some links added.]


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