Yesterday, NASA's latest Mars Rover Perseverance safely touched down on the Red Planet and sent back its first images of the surface. The view is from one of the rover's hazard avoidance cameras and is partially obscured by a dust cover.
The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) has announced the winners of its 2020 Science Photographer of the Year competition, which exists to celebrate the stories behind scientific exploration and application. TPS says this year's selections throw light on the climate emergency.
If you want to learn the science and technical details of how cameras and lenses work, there's a fantastic new resource on the Web for you. Developer Bartosz Ciechanowski has published an interactive 5,700-word article that explains things in great depth.
One of the best ways to broaden your horizons and inject a little inspiration into your photography is to explore subjects outside the world of photography. To study painting or take a course in graphic design, for example. But I recently discovered a fount of photographic inspiration in an unusual place: a neuroscience lab.
In an effort to research how the center of the Milky Way Galaxy formed what is known as a "galactic bulge," Scientists used a Dark Energy Camera to survey a portion of the sky and capture a photo of billions of stars.
Dr. Adrian Smith—a scientist who is perhaps best known for his educational videos on YouTube—has released another fascinating super slow motion video highlighting a tiny little insect you've probably never heard of. They're commonly called jumping plant lice, and they're "the fastest front-flipping insect" on the planet.
According to Fujitsu, Canon Inc. has just placed an order for one of its ultra-powerful PRIMEHPC FX1000 supercomputers with the goal of turning their product development cycle into a "no-prototype" affair where things like impact, functionality, and airflow tests can be run on CAD designs instead of real products.
A team of engineers at MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell have created something that, on the surface, seems impossible: they've designed a 180° fisheye lens from a single, 1mm-thin piece of calcium fluoride glass that is completely flat.
Even the most mundane, unremarkable, or sometimes disgusting phenomena take on a totally new life when viewed at a supermacro scale. Case in point, a new timelapse film dubbed "The Rise of Molds" captures the mesmerizing growth of a subject we've all at one time or another cut out of a slice of bread or scrubbed off our bathroom walls: mold.
Earlier this year, researchers from two universities and Google published a new AI-powered technique they developed called "Depth-Aware Video Frame Interpolation" or DAIN, and it's simply mind-blowing. The tech can interpolate a 30fps video all the way to 120fps or even 480fps with almost no visible artifacts.
NC State Assistant Professor Dr. Adrian Smith recently set out to capture some never-before-seen super slow motion footage for his YouTube channel Ant Lab. The results sit right at the border between "genuinely educational" and "downright stunning."
A team of researchers at Google have come up with a technique that can combine thousands of tourist photos into detailed 3D renderings that take you inside a scene... even if the original photos used vary wildly in terms of lighting or include other problematic elements like people or cars.
Unsplash has just released "the most complete high-quality open image dataset ever": an open-source collection of over 2 million images captured by over 200,000 photographers, now available to download in bulk for free.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have put a specialized camera to use in a cool new experiment, capturing super-slow motion video of a light beam moving through a carefully-arranged set of mirrors.
The folks over at Envisioning Chemistry have created yet another spellbinding time-lapse that will appeal to photography nerds and science nerds alike. Using a polarized light microscope, they captured the kaleidoscope of colors as various substances crystalized in front of their lens.
A team of researchers at the University of Washington have created something they're calling "a GoPro for beetles." In reality, it's a tiny, smartphone controlled camera backpack that can ride aboard an insect, giving us a beetle's-eye view of the world.
In 2019, researchers made international headlines by releasing the world's first photo of a black hole. Here's a 1-minute video that zooms from the night sky into that black hole image to show how impressive the achievement was.
Did you know that your body is bioluminescent? That's right -- the human body actually emits visible light and can be photographed by an ultra-sensitive camera in complete darkness.
A team of scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed an artificial eye that could someday help cure blindness or even enhance human vision. For now, their creation boasts just 100-pixel resolution, but the groundwork has been laid.
Engineer and YouTuber Ben Krasnow over at Applied Science has put together a fascinating little optical demonstration that explains the physics behind 'hypercentric' optics and how they allow you to see around and behind objects. He even shows you how to build your own.
How do you go about capturing images of a coronavirus, which is too small to see with a standard light microscope? Here's a 5-minute video in which Vox explains how two electron microscopy techniques give us views of what the SARS-CoV-2 virus looks like.
Researchers have released the highest-ever resolution photos of the Sun's atmosphere. The images reveal "magnetic threads" in the star's outer layer for the very first time.
Advanced imaging company LaVision has released a new video that shows just how effective a face mask can be at preventing the spread of infections like COVID-19. The video lends visual support to the CDC's recent recommendation that everyone wear a mask in any situation where it is difficult to maintain social distance.
The world's first photo of black hole was published back in April 2019, and scientists have been laboring to find ways to capture sharper images of the mysterious regions of spacetime. Scientists are now saying that focusing on a black hole's "photon ring" may lead to a huge increase in sharpness.
Photographer Chris Lee of pal2tech has created a much-requested follow-up to his technical breakdown of how ISO works when you take a picture. The followup uses Fuji cameras as an example to explain how the Extended Low, or "L", ISO setting on your camera functions.
A group of aurora enthusiasts in Finland have discovered a new kind of aurora that scientists had never noticed or classified before. It's called "the dunes," and it's being hailed as a boon to scientific research about a mysterious layer of Earth’s atmosphere.
Late last week, controversial free stock photography website Unsplash announced that the Library of Congress, CDC, the New York Public Library and 10 other major institutions would be adding hundreds of scientific and historic images from their collection to the site's archive.
The National Solar Observatory has just released the highest resolution images and video ever taken of the sun's surface. The images, captured with the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, capture the sun in unprecedented detail, revealing features as small as 18 miles (30km) in size for the first time ever.
Johns Hopkins University and the Rochester Institute of Technology recently announced Images from Science 3 (IFS3), a collection and international touring exhibit of the best and most thought-provoking images curated from the fields of astronomy, medical photography and illustration, material sciences photography, and related industries. Scientific images, unlike most other genres of images, rarely find their way into art.
We crossed the 1 trillion frames-per-second barrier a while back, but a group of Caltech scientists just made another leap. Their new camera doesn't just shoot up to 1 trillion fps, it can do it while capturing transparent objects like neurons and invisible phenomena like shockwaves.