The embryo of a guppy fish at 40-times magnification.
Image by Shmuel Silberman.
THIS WEEK’S QUESTION!
Every Sunday, a question will be asked about one of the images from this past week. Be the first to answer correctly, and your blog will be promoted on Monday’s image post and Biocanvas’s main site!
Some flowering plants have evolved ways to inhibit self-fertilization in order to increase the genetic variability of the population.
What is one specific mechanism employed by plants to prevent a flower from using its own pollen to fertilize itself?
Despite being so far apart in evolutionary terms, dolphins and crickets may both use a sound-transmitting lipid to hear things.
You thought Charizard was scary, wait until you meet MRSA…
If you find yourself some place really cold this holiday season, may I suggest stepping outside and having some fun freezing soap bubbles? The crystal growth is quite lovely, as seen in this photograph. If you live in warmer climes, fear not, you can always experiment in your freezer. It would be particularly fun, I think, to see how a half-bubble sitting on a cold plate freezes in comparison to a droplet like this one. (Video credit: Mount Washington Observatory)
For the right flow speeds and incidence angles, a jet of Newtonian fluid can bounce off the surface of a bath of the same fluid. This is shown in the photo above with a laser incorporated in the jet to show its integrity throughout the bounce. The walls of the jet direct the laser much the way an optical fiber does. The jet stays separated from the bath by a thin layer of air, which is constantly replenished by the air being entrained by the flowing jet. The rebound is a result of the surface tension of the bath providing force for the bounce. (Photo credit: T. Lockhart et al.)
Read em and weep anti-space-funding promoters.
Nothing quite compares to the beauty of fluid dynamics on astronomical scales. What you see here are raw photographs of recent storms at Saturn’s north pole. The recent change in Saturnian seasons has afforded Cassini a sunlit view of the northern pole, which had previously lain in darkness. A roiling vortex filled with clouds being twisted and sheared was revealed near the center of its famed polar hexagon. (Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute; submitted by J. Shoer)
A 2-year-old girl named Lilly sits on a Victoria water lily inside a tropical greenhouse at the Braunschweig University of Technology’s botanic garden.
The Victoria water lily, named for Queen Victoria of the England, is native to the Amazon river basin and can hold up to 70 pounds of weight.
Does the Universe Have a Purpose? feat. Neil deGrasse Tyson
Amazing new photos from NASA’s Cassini probe orbiting Saturn reveal a dizzying glimpse into a monster storm raging on the ringed planet’s north pole.
Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI
Cassini took the spectacular Saturn storm photos Tuesday and relayed it back to Earth the same day, mission scientists said in a statement. The pictures reveal a swirling storm reminiscent of the recent Hurricane Sandy that recently plagued our own planet.
Saturn’s mysterious northern vortex, a vast hexagon-shaped storm, dominates this photo taken Tuesday by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
The tempest is located in a strange hexagonal cloud vortex at Saturn’s north pole that was first discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s, and sighted more closely by Cassini since then. The strange six-sided feature is thought to be formed by the path of a jet stream flowing through the planet’s atmosphere.
“Cassini’s recent excursion into inclined orbits has given mission scientists a vertigo-inducing view of Saturn ‘s polar regions, and what to our wondering eyes has just appeared: roiling storm clouds and a swirling vortex at the center of Saturn’s famed northern polar hexagon,” Cassini scientists wrote in an online update.
Atlantis as seen from the ISS, 19 July 2011. Backing away from the station for the final time, the Shuttle is hidden in Earth’s Shadow.