THE MOST AMAZING SCIENCE IMAGES OF THE WEEK XXVII

A City Made From Chewing Gum And Other Amazing Images From This Week
By Colin Lecher, Popular Science, 26 April 2013.

Plus churches that look like tanks, paintings made from masking tape, and more.

1. Impossible Bike Loads

Credit: Alain Delorme via Kotaku

For the photo series "Totems," Alain Delorme captures the insane loads carried by migrant workers in China, then photoshops them to increase the proportions even more. Seems like it could almost be real, though, if you just tweak physics a tiny bit. [More at Kotaku and Fast Co.Exist]

2. Ant Trackers

Credit: Alessandro Crespi via Ars Technica

To learn more about ant society, a team of scientists glued movement-tracking barcodes to hundreds of ants. Twice a second, the position of the ants was calculated, and researchers eventually determined how ant society divides labour based on age: younger ants nurse the young, for example, while older ants become foragers. But in the 9 million ant-to-ant interactions that happened during the experiment, all of the ants were too polite to say anything about the barcodes on their friends' backs. [More at Ars Technica]

3. Fox In A Forest

Credit: Klaus Echle/GDT via The Guardian

The Nature Photographer of the Year 2013 competition is over, and some stunning winners came through this year. This fox in a forest is particularly memorable; it took runner-up in the "mammals" category, while another fox photo won it all. Both look like something out of a fairy tale. [More at The Guardian]

4. Gum City

Credit: Jeremy Laffon via Co.Design

French artist Jeremy Laffon stacked thousands of pieces of gum together to make what you'd imagine Robert Moses made when he was a 9-year-old: a city composed entirely of (unused!) chewing gum. After building the city, Laffon turned on a light to warp the buildings with heat. Because you don't get to have a city without having an urban heat island. [More at Co.Design]

5. Church-Tank

Credit: Kris Kuksi via BuzzFeed

Is it a church-tank, or a tank-church? No idea! But artist Kris Kuksi made a set of sculptures like this, and the world is a slightly stranger place for it. [More at BuzzFeed]

6. Shake It

Credit: Carli Davidson via Slate

Oh God! What a horrible malformed monster! Ha-ha. Just kidding. It is a dog. Photographer Carli Davidson photographs them mid-shake for her appropriately titled series "Shake." Check out more over at Slate.

7. Eye To The Sky

Credit: Romain Jacquet-Lagreze via LikeCool

Romain Jacquet-Lagreze frequently photographs Hong Kong from the ground up for the series "Vertical Horizons," a look at the city's buildings. Makes you feel like you're falling up. [More at LikeCool and Daily Mail]

8. Balloonasaurus

Credit: Airigami via designboom

Airigami specializes in making crazy balloon sculptures, but they might've outdone themselves by making this 20-foot-long reproduction of the acrocanthosaurus, which was put alongside real dinosaur skeletons at the Virgina Museum of Natural History. [More at designboom]

9. Masking Tape Art

Credit: Sun K. Kwak via CollabCubed

Artist Sun K. Kwak makes incredible 3-D painting-sculptures out of black masking tape, spontaneously tearing apart roll after roll to create wavy, smoke-like shapes on walls. [More at CollabCubed]

10. Painted Skies

Credit: Matt Molloy via Colossal

Matt Molloy takes time-lapse photos to capture multiple shots of moving clouds or the changing colours of a sunset, then digitally adds in stokes from the different times to create a paint-like, layered effect. Here's evening by a barn. Even better than the real thing? [More at Colossal]

11. A Volcano From Space

Cmdr. Chris Hadfield, tweeting this photo from the International Space Station, wrote this: "The beautiful and violent ugliness inside a naked volcano. Chad, Africa." That about sums it up.

[Source: Popular Science. Edited. Some links added.]