From microscopic coral to massive planets, the natural world is full of beauty on a scale that can only be seen with the aid of a microscopic or a telescope. Announced today, the winners of the 11th annual International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge—sponsored by the journal Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation—zoom into microscopic scales and zoom out onto planetary scales.
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This monochrome image of living tissue has some extremely unwelcome visitors lurking within it. Taken from some of the first ever 3D images of HIV at work, those little blue circles show the virus infecting the surrounding cells.
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There are, however, electric fish: eight-foot long, 600 volt, mouth breathing, alligator-killing fish.
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I was blown away when I first heard about a project that tried to tap into the electromagnetic communication potential of mushrooms. Using wires, radio waves, and circuits—not psychedelics—the project’s off-kilter quest to find (and listen to) "electromagnetic fungi" was nonetheless more art than science. But who says mushrooms have the right to remain silent?
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When you think of cyborgs becoming a reality, you probably picture Arnold Schwarzenegger’s glowing red eye from Terminator or the steely, tight-lipped stare of Robocop. But the future where man and machine converge won’t just be built with nuts and bolts. It will be built with biology.
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This is a game changer, folks. Whereas mining stem cells has been either an ethical quandary or a months-long affair, scientist can now turn any old blood cells into stem cells in just 30 minutes—by dipping them in acid.
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You’re looking at Ozobranchus jantseanus, a little leech found in East Asia. It doesn’t look much, but it has a very special skill indeed: it can survive for up to 24 hours immersed in liquid nitrogen.
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Like a silent bionic army, the era of the cyborg has crept upon us. Or so a group of reviewers said recently when they evaluated where the science of cyborgs has led.
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According to a 2013 survey, over eighty three percent of Americans drink coffee in the morning and the average citizen drinks multiple cups per day. Between the dark brew, the flavored lattes, the frozen caffeinated treats, and the whirling gadgets, coffee is now a thirty billion dollar industry. Coffee is big business and companies like Starbucks, Peets, and Folgers have spent gobs of money to get people to drink more of it. Despite all of that, the most expensive coffee probably can’t be found in your downtown coffee shop. No, the most expensive coffee in the world lives alongside feces in the intestinal gut of an Asian palm civet.
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The first ever full genome sequence of a European hunter-gatherer has revealed that hunter-gatherers had far better immune systems that we thought—and evolved blue eyes way earlier than predicted, too.
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