Sight on Science

A curated look at the most interesting visual manifestations of STEM subjects created by artists, journalists and researchers.

[bobbycaputo]

TED Talk: Photographing the Whole Earth Every Day With an Army of Tiny Satellites

[climateadaptation-deactivated20]

Satellites collect climate change data by monitoring and measuring solar activity, sea level rise, the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans, the state of the ozone layer, air pollution, and changes in sea ice and land ice. This guy is proposing to do this cheaper and smarter.

[sightonscience]

Watch a mesmerizing visualization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

[chesbayprogram]

Fish biologist Vicki Blazer first discovered intersex fish a little over ten years ago while studying the cause of fish kills in the Potomac and Shenandoah River watersheds. Recently her team from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) revisited the Shenandoah River in Front Royal, Va, to collect and study specimens of smallmouth bass, a species in which intersex characteristics have been caused by exposure to chemical contaminants in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Intersex conditions occur when exposure to chemicals disrupts the hormonal systems of an animal, leading to the presence of both male and female characteristics in an animal that should exhibit the characteristics of just one sex in its lifetime. In the case of smallmouth bass, male intersex fish are found with immature eggs in their testes, which indicates exposure to estrogenic and anti-androgenic chemicals.

[sightonscience]

Amazingly detailed story of how Earthrise, one of the most influential photographs of the 20th century, was taken.

[sightonscience]

"Knowing that there is so much around us we can see, forever changes our understanding of the world. And by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe. And this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards."

Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg nails the magic of speeding up and slowing down time. Now I think I'll go see his 3D film, Mysteries of the Unseen World, even though the title seems like it should be a Victorian carnival show.

[skunkbear]

Life In A Beer - a video celebrating the evolutionary history that made one pint possible.

(Also, a bad David Attenborough impression)

Cheers! (reposting this for the late crowd)

[sightonscience]

Signs for Lonesome George's enclosure at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in Galapagos are now marked with the initials R.I.P., and seeing them firsthand makes this video especially poignant. It is strange to see a venerable creature taxidermied. An tortoise is more than a skin and a shell, so what happened to the rest of Lonesome George?

[willparson]

Triggered by air bubbles, a giant salamander (Cryptobranchus) executes its suction feeding mechanism at 1/100 slow-motion. The two largest species of giant salamander live in Asia, but the third-largest is North America’s own Eastern Hellbender, which is highly susceptible to poor water quality.

[sightonscience]

So many snakes.

Luckily the snakes of Narcisse Snake Dens enjoy protection at Narcisse Wildlife Management Area in Manitoba, Canada. But it makes me wonder about the habitat bottlenecks that a species has to endure just because of the quirks of its life history, that could make them vulnerable if a relatively small but crucial habitat were threatened.

[sightonscience]

Major Malfunction: Revisiting Challenger

From NY Times comes a look at Space Shuttle Challenger's legacy.

[sightonscience]

Point to point, a zebra herd in Botswana and Namibia travels farther than any other African mammals, researchers say. Luckily, the entire migration falls within a proposed conservation area.

[sightonscience]

Video: Caring for Cuttlefish

From Science Friday comes mesmerizing footage of cuttlefish and their incubating eggs at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

[montereybayaquarium]

Where do you find inspiration? First as a volunteer and now as an assistant aquarist, Michelle Stamme loves working with our eight-armed animals—and painting them! Share your love of #MBATentacles and you could win!

[fastcompany]

See, And Vote On, The Jaw-Dropping Contenders For The Year’s Best Wildlife Photograph

[kqedscience]

Frozen Icelandic cave illuminated by Northern Lights

“This stunning image of the aurora borealis illuminating the weird underground world of a vast cave in Iceland is vying for an award.

Photographer Ingólfur Bjargmundsson lay in wait in the frozen 1360-metre-long lava cave to capture this image of the aurora borealis at its peak through one of the cave’s natural skylights.”

Learn more from newscientist.

[skunkbear]

Daniel Stoupin's latest video deserves to be watched in a movie theater - these gifs don’t do it justice.

His painstaking time lapse photography reveals an incredible alien world — the world of the coral reef. As he explains on his blog:

Life has a very broad spectrum of speeds. While we associate plants and even faster creatures such as corals with something still and immobile, particular lifeforms would be hard to even perceive as living objects at all. Kilometers underground, under ocean floor, in ice, and in permafrost metabolic rates of organisms are dramatically slower than on the surface. To our perception such life is literally indistinguishable from rock.

…

Difficulties in understanding “slow” marine life and interpreting its behaviour, unfortunately, are aggravated by its decline caused by human impact. Marine systems are extremely delicate and react to the tiniest perturbations of the environment. Although such alterations in the environmental parameters appear small to us, they are catastrophic to corals, sponges, and numerous other representatives of marine life that create entire ecosystems in the ocean. Through long chains of connections coral reef deterioration is catastrophic to us as well, for we are ultimately as sensitive to our habitat as the colorful creatures appearing in my time lapses.

Beautiful images. Important story.

[sightonscience]

Animator Xiangjun Shi hunts for circles in her lovely meditation, "Why Do I Study Physics?"

Robert Krulwich wrote about her, too.