Flowers of Sulfur

[mymodernmet]

Miniature Watercolor Paintings of Space by Lorraine Loots

[bbsrc]

Scientists visualise the scars left by heart attacks

These images show (A) a healthy heart and (B) a heart damaged due to a lack of oxygen during a heart attack.

As you can see, the microstructure of a heart changes after a heart attack (B). The scar (outlined area), is formed because of the tissue death caused by a local lack of oxygen, and the consistency of muscle cell arrangement compared to the healthy heart (A) is lost. This will affect how much blood the heart can pump into the body within one heartbeat.

The images taken by BBSRC-funded researchers at the British Heart Foundation Experimental Magnetic Resonance Unit (BMRU), University of Oxford, were generated by a special type of imaging technique that measures the motion and movement of water molecules in the heart tissue.

This new technology, that Dr Jurgen Schneider and his team have developed, could eventually allow doctors to be able to look at a 3D+T representation of the patient’s heart, zoom-in on any relevant detail (a coronary vessel blockage or a damaged part of tissue), assess treatment options, and predict outcomes for the specific individual before the patient even enters the operating theatre. Much of this vision is still far ahead. Nonetheless, this research is vital to its development.

Image credit: BHF Experimental MR Unit, Radcliffe Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Oxford.

Read more: http://www.rdm.ox.ac.uk/principal-investigators/researcher/jurgen-schneider

Read more on how BBSRC-funded scientists are trying to mend broken hearts: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/health/2014/140214-n-helping-mend-broken-hearts.aspx

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"Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" And the whole room, including me, was like, "Yeah." And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "disabled" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. Somebody that might even be super-abled. Interesting.

A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment.

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"All I know is that I know nothing" –Socrates

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This is the cocoon of the Metallic Mechanitis Butterfly Chrysalis from Costa Rica. Mechanitis is a genus of tigerwing (ithomiine) butterflies, named by Fabricius in 1807. They are in the brush-footed butterfly family, Nymphalidae.

[kny111]

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A Day In The Life of A Living Mars

[itsokaytobesmart]

Lenticular and wave clouds are cool, but they don’t hold a candle to the undulatus asperatus clouds. Not new, but new to science, its Latin name means “undulating wave”. it’s like staring up from under the sea, or from beneath an undulating ice formation, except we are seeing a cloud rather than a solid or liquid.

They look ominous, but are rarely stormy. Why they form and what their pattern means? I haven’t been able to find anything. Can you?

(via APOD)

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This is a cat with two faces, Frank and Louie. In 2011, at the age of 12, he entered the Guinness World Records as the longest surviving cat with Diprosopus (craniofacial duplication).

Although classically considered conjoined twinning (which it resembles), this anomaly is not normally due to the fusion or incomplete separation of two embryos. It is the result of a protein called sonic hedgehog homolog ( inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog). The SHH protein and its corresponding gene have been found to play an important role in signaling craniofacial patterning during embryonic development. Among other things, the SHH protein governs the width of facial features. In excess it leads to widening of facial features and to duplication of facial structures.The greater the widening, the more of the structures are duplicated, often in a mirror image form.

Photograph by Steven Senne

[flowersofsulfur]

Frost Flowers

They aren't flowers, of course. They are more like ice sculptures that grow on the border between the sea and air. On Sept. 2, 2009, the day Jeff's colleague Matthias Wietz took these pictures, the air was extremely cold and extremely dry, colder than the ocean surface. When the air gets that different from the sea, the dryness pulls moisture off little bumps in the ice, bits of ice vaporize, the air gets humid — but only for a while. The cold makes water vapor heavy. The air wants to release that excess weight, so crystal by crystal, air turns back into ice, creating delicate, feathery tendrils that reach sometimes two, three inches high, like giant snowflakes. The sea, literally, blossoms.

Source: NPR

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Evolution of Type series by Andreas Scheiger 

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The black dragonfish (Idiacanthus atlanticus), like many deep sea fish, can produce its own light. 

It is covered with photophores along lower and upper surfaces, and has photophores under its eyes and at the end of its long barbel. When disturbed it lights up all over, even down the lengths of its fins. 

However, unlike almost all the other bioluminescent organisms in the ocean, it can glow and perceive a red as well as blue-green light.  The light of the black dragonfish can be such long wavelengths that it is almost infrared and barely visible to the human eye. The ability to produce this type of light gives the black dragonfish an enormous advantage over its prey as it can find its way to unsuspecting prey through the deep dark depths of the ocean.

Source:wwf

[thekhooll-deactivated20210705]

400,000 Balls

In 2007, the Department of Water Protection in Los Angeles detected high levels of bromate, a carcinogen that forms when bromide and chlorine react with sunlight, in Los Angeles’s Ivanhoe Reservoir. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix. When the Department of Water Protection realized the problem, they began construction of a new underground reservoir in Griffith Park, but while the new facility was being built they had to determine a way to keep the sunlight out of the water.

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Sparkling Enope squid (also known as the flirefly squid)  They are about 15.24 cm (roughly 6 inches) and die after only one year of life. Found in the Western Pacific ocean, they live at depths of 183-366 meters and only comes up to the surface at night to show off their brilliant bioluminescence. The photophores, the organs that produce the light, are located at the end of each tentacle. They are the only species of cephalopod that have evolved to be able to see color in three visual pigments. Scientists think that this is to help them distinguish between ambient light and their own bioluminescence. The firefly squid lights up for two reasons: the lights on the tentacle can flash to attract fish that the squid feed on and the squid can light up its entire body to attract a mate during the months of March to June.

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Evolution of Type series by Andreas Scheiger 

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Powering the Cell: Mitochondria

The animation highlights the creation of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) -- mobile molecules which store chemical energy derived from the breakdown of carbon-based food. ATP molecules act as a kind of currency, imparting chemical energy to power all the functional components of cellular activity.

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The Periodic Table of Elements

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Evolution of Type series by Andreas Scheiger