Envisioning Chemistry—the collaboration between the Beauty of Science and the Chinese Chemical Society that seeks to “reveal the beauty of chemistry through special techniques such as macro and micro photography, high-speed photography, time-lapse photography, and infrared thermal imaging"—has released another fascinating entry.
Nikon has revealed the winners of the 45th annual Nikon Small World photomicrography competition. The photo contest features images that "showcase a spectacular blend of science and artistry under the microscope," and as usual, this year's winning images are just plain spectacular.
In a breakthrough that seems more science fiction than science fact, researchers at MIT have developed a model that can recover "lost dimensions" in images. Translation: it can recreate video from a motion-blurred photograph, and may some day be able to create a 3D scan from a 2D image.
A team of researchers from the University of Utah have made a major breakthrough in optics by developing a new kind of flat lens that's only ten microns thick, making it "a thousand times thinner than regular lenses." And apparently, it doesn't sacrifice performance.
The world's first photo of a black hole, revealed this past April, was the result of years of collaboration between 347 astronomers from around the world. Today, those astronomers get to figure out how to split $3,000,000 in prize money for their hard work.
An ant's stinger is thinner than the width of a human hair, and made up of a main stinger and two "lancets" that actively drill into you as they release venom. We know this because of the incredible footage of this process that was recently captured for the very first time in super-slow motion.
Every mind-blowing deep space photograph captured by the Hubble space telescope that you've ever seen started out black-and-white. So how do we get those amazing technicolor images of the Pillars of Creation or the Bubble Nebula? This short video explains how scientists manage this feat.
Scientists have revealed a new futuristic robotic contact lens that's essentially an advanced zoom lens for the human eye. It can be zoomed and controlled by blinking and looking around.
Scientists have unveiled the first photograph ever captured of quantum entanglement, the physical phenomenon in which two or more "entangled" particles are connected via their quantum states, even across vast distances.
A team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have figured out how to capture super slow-motion footage using what's called an "Event Camera." That is: a camera that sees the world in a continuous stream of information, the way humans do.
In honor of The International Year of the Periodic Table, the scientists behind the Beauty of Science project set out to capture the 11 chemical elements that make up 99% of your body in the most artistic way possible.
The night sky offers an unlimited source of markers (e.g. stars, constellations, Milky Way, etc.) that never lie about the time of year and location in the world you shot a night sky picture from. You don’t even need to be a professional astronomer or to double-check RAW files to prove it.
The first-ever picture of a black hole was unveiled yesterday, generating a huge amount of interest and excitement across the world. But how exactly was this picture captured? Well, it definitely wasn't as simple as "pointing and clicking" a giant camera.
While I was visiting San Francisco, Kristy Headley, a dear friend and fellow engineer, showed me her studio. There I was lucky enough to sit for her while she did some vintage tintyping. Tintyping was one of the earliest forms of photography, popular in the 1850s.
NASA has captured the first-ever photos showing the shockwaves of supersonic jets interacting in flight. The beautiful images were captured in an extremely difficult air-to-air photo shoot.
Storm-chasing photographer and filmmaker Martin Lisius wanted to demonstrate the danger of flying debris in a tornado, so he got scientists to fire a camera out of a tornado projectile test cannon at 264mph. As you can see from the 1.5-minute video above, the camera doesn't fare too well.
Portrait photos are often disliked by the subject themselves. From the early formative years of grade school on into the advanced years of adulthood, the feeling of dislike of your own picture is universal. Yet it is not for vanity sake, nor is it to spare the shock of another from seeing self-assumed horrors. Assuming you are neither a narcissist nor a person with flawless perfection, you may simply be like the rest of the human race: there is real science behind the reason why you may not like your own photograph.
Here's a 6-minute video by photographer Kelly Hofer of Theory of Curiosity on Background Oriented Schlieren (BOS), a technique that lets you shoot photos and videos of heat using an ordinary camera and Photoshop.
In the past two decades, most people went from not carrying a camera to always having a smartphone camera with them at all times. With millions upon millions of photos shot (and shared) every single day, how is this explosion in photography affecting us? Here's a 10-minute video by WIRED that explores that question.
Finding new ways to create isn't always easy, so you have to keep your eyes open for inspiration. One day while making my way down the rabbit hole of YouTube, I stumbled across a video. These guys had created 3 colored shadows off this pencil while keeping a perfectly white background. What in the world was this sorcery? Turns out it wasn't sorcery, it was science.
Most mammals rely on scent rather than sight. Look at a dog’s eyes, for example: they’re usually on the sides of its face, not close together and forward-facing like ours. Having eyes on the side is good for creating a broad field of vision, but bad for depth perception and accurately judging distances in front.
Earth is spinning... and fast! It was during my first nights in astrophotography that it became very concrete for me. By taking pictures of the stars, one quickly obtains a change of star physiognomy that confirms the rotation of the earth. In this article, I describe how to use this phenomenon to measure the rotational speed of the earth with a simple camera.
Nikon has announced the winning photos from the 2018 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, the 44th annual contest celebrating "excellence in photography through the light microscope."
Researchers have created a new world's fastest camera. Called T-CUP, the camera can capture a mind-boggling 10 trillion frames per second.
Art is something we all enjoy in one way or another. We assume it is a subjective subject, but there may be an objective angle that we can observe art from. Perhaps art isn’t subjective at all? Neuroaesthetics is a scientific approach to art in the way it is both produced and consumed, and this gives us a basis for figuring out what makes art… art!
This 40-second time-lapse video of a sensory nervous system developing and growing neurons has won the 2018 Nikon Small World in Motion contest.
A week after giving us the first photo from the surface of asteroid 162173 Ryugu, Japan's MINERVA rovers have just sent back new views of the asteroid's surface, including the first video ever from an asteroid's surface.
Japan just made history by landing two small rovers on the surface of an asteroid hurtling through space 174 million miles (280 million km) from Earth, and here's the first published photo from the rovers shot from the surface of 162173 Ryugu.
Scientists have created a new lensless camera that can capture photos using a standard pane of window glass.
Canon DSLRs can trigger Canon Speedlites using the pop-up flash. If you try triggering those same Speedlites with a different camera's flash, it doesn't work, which means that there's actual light-based communication going on between the DSLR and Speedlite. In this 9-minute video, Roger Nieh of Science'n'me explores the technology behind this communication.
There's a new photo recovery technique that may help humanity recover some of the world's oldest photographs that were previously considered to be damaged beyond repair.
Adobe's software has been widely used for many years now as a tool to create fake photos, but now the company is developing software for the other side: it's using AI to spot photo manipulations to aid in the war against fake photos.
NASA's newest planet-hunting satellite has captured its first photograph -- a dazzling one that shows over 200,000 stars.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to “sunbursts” in photos – those points of light with rays streaking out of them – people often have polarizing views. Optical diffraction is the physical property that causes this effect. The appearance of sunbursts is more technically described as “diffraction spikes,” and it’s caused by the bending (sometimes referred to as spreading) of light around an object like the edges of your camera’s aperture.
Shooting a photo every day and then sharing it online improves your well-being. That's what scientists found after studying a group of people who have committed themselves to photo-a-day projects (often referred to as "Project365").
NASA has developed a special camera called the "Fluid Cam" that can see and shoot clearly through ocean waves. The resulting photos can be used by researchers to study the health of reefs.
If you've never learned the technical details of what "middle gray" and "18% gray" are, check out this 6-minute video by Filmmaker IQ. John Hess shares the math and science behind the concepts to demystify them.
NASA is looking for people who are willing to regularly snap and share photos of clouds. The space agency is turning to citizen scientists for a cloud observation project that will help validate the images captured by satellites in space.
How does SpaceX get such clear and detailed imagery and footage of its rocket launches? Here's a 5-minute video from Primal Space that answers that question.
Back on September 20th, 2016, an Argentinian amateur astronomer named Victor Buso was setting up and testing a new camera on his telescope when he captured something that may have never been caught on camera before: the first moments of a supernova.