Floating Maze Optical Illusion
The image is static, your vision processing is not.
If anyone attempts to actually do this, grab a barf bag.
The Milky Way by Nasa’s great observatories: Spitzer - Infrared, Hubble - Visible/Near-Infrared, Chandra - X-Ray. (via JPL)
Via Scipsy
Cosmic Bling: Astronomers Find Planet Made of Diamond
“The planet is relatively small at around 60,000 km in diameter (still, it’s five times the size of Earth). But despite its diminutive stature, this crystal space rock has more mass than the solar system’s gas giant Jupiter.
Radio telescope data shows that it orbits its star at a distance of 600,000 km, making years on planet diamond just two hours long. Any closer and it would be ripped to shreds by the star’s gravitational tug.”
(via Wired Science)
Data as Art: Textured Brain
The brain is a monotone mass of neurons that is often difficult to pick apart, even on a dissection table. Yet through a technique called diffusion MRI, which measures the spread of water molecules through neural tissue, researchers can add revealing color to the maze of connections.
Ultra-strong magnetic fields on the order of 7 teslas (about 1,400 times stronger than a refrigerator magnet) manipulate the water molecules along tracks of white matter neurons, breaking the movement into three basic directions.
Left–right tracks of neural tissue are represented by red, front–back tracks by green and top–bottom tracks by blue. Each track winds around in a specific way, lending it a unique color. Functional clusters of white matter emerge as colored regions. “It’s a smart way to transform something so complex into something simple and immediately comprehensible,” Margulies says of the diffusion MRI technique.
I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At…
(Source: jcs.biologists.org)
Experiment Confirms Hints of Dark Matter
An experiment in Minnesota is the first to bolster a long-contested claim that detectors a continent away have found evidence of particles called WIMPs.
WIMPs are theorized particles considered to be leading candidates for dark matter, invisible material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. In the Minnesota experiment, called COGENT, a hockey puck–sized chunk of germanium deep in a former iron mine attempts to record rare collisions with WIMPS.
In 15 months’ worth of data, COGENT researchers detected a seasonal variation in the collision rate — higher in summer and lower in winter — similar to that seen for 13 years by a larger experiment, using different detectors, in Italy. Researchers with that experiment, DAMA/LIBRA, have attributed the results to the Earth’s motion through a cloud of WIMPs (for weakly interacting massive particles) (SN: 5/10/08, p. 12). But many physicists have doubted that interpretation because, until now, no other experiment had found similar results.
