Amazing! Kottke writes,

Using Lego bricks, a Raspberry Pi mini-computer, an Arduino microcontroller, some off-the-shelf components like lenses, and 3D-printed components, IBM scientist Yuksel Temiz built a fully functional microscope to help him with his work. The materials cost around $300 and the microscope performs as well as scopes many times more expensive.

Check it out:

Insanely magical.

The real footage in this video was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover’s entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft’s descent stage (a kind of rocket-powered jet pack that helps fly the rover to its landing site), a camera on the rover looking up at the descent stage, a camera on the top of the aeroshell (a capsule protecting the rover) looking up at that parachute, and a camera on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface.

If that’s up your alley, check out this 4K video showing images of the red planet (captured earlier):

Per Laughing Squid,

Elderfox Studios took photographic footage taken by various Mars space rovers and compiled them into an absolutely astonishing 4K rendered video that reveals the surface of Mars. The original photos used in this short but stunning documentary were from NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU.

A few years ago, John Penn was invited to attend the Internet Crimes Against Children Conference and share his knowledge as a Photoshop engineer. The experience changed his life. Now he’s a Senior Solutions Architect helping law enforcement agencies around the world use Photoshop to combat the exploitation of children.

WTF, IBM, GTFO…
I remember in the early 80’s “drawing” on an IBM PCjr, fastidiously pecking out pixel after pixel. Now the company behind that artistic juggernaut has taken that approach to an insane extreme:

You’re about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.

The making-of is fascinating:

Presumably, notes Adobe video PM Al Mooney, it was edited in Premiere Proton. 😉

Interesting: I didn’t know that the Apollo 11 mission patch deliberately omitted the crew members’ names.

[Via]

The crazy nerds at Backyard Brains have created “the world’s first cephalo-iPod,” pumping Cypress Hill through the body of an unsuspecting squid:

An iPod plays music by converting digital music to a small current that it sends to tiny magnets in the earbuds. The magnets are connected to cones that vibrate and produce sound.
Since this is the same electrical current that neurons use to communicate, we cut off the ear buds and instead placed the wire into the fin nerve. When the iPod sends bass frequencies (<100Hz) the axons in the nerves have enough charge to fire an action potential. This will in turn cause the muscles in the chromatophores to contract.

[Via]

I don’t know who’s finding this NASA animation more fascinating—me or the @Micronaxx:

Fantastic:

I couldn’t stick around for the Challenger incident, though. [Via]

Photoshop plug-in (featuring the world’s most invasive USB dongle) next, maybe? 🙂 Via Kottke:

This is incredible…researchers at Berkeley have developed a system that reads people’s minds while they watch a video and then roughly reconstructs what they were watching from thousands of hours of YouTube videos. This short demo shows how it works:

Just like it says on the tin. And lovely.

[Via Jim Goldstein]

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Three minutes of fascinating advances, narrated by Adobe’s Adam Finkelstein:

[Via]

Extremely high frame rates capture “Water Droplet Bouncing on a Superhydrophobic Carbon Nanotube Array”–which, for my money, would make a solid Pink Floyd song title.

Here’s more info on the project. I really want to see the water on the half pipe bust a McTwist. [Via]

Clearly I will never tire of this stuff. Onboard cameras capture the journey of shuttle Atlantis into space, plus the return of the solid rocket boosters:

[Previously: Camera strapped to Space Shuttle boosters] [Via Rick Spitzer]

Today, as you’re probably reading elsewhere, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, humanity’s first landing on the moon. Follow along with the mission on the beautiful We Choose The Moon. Related links of interest:

• As is their M.O., The Big Picture presents a gloriously high-res gallery showing images from the mission & its lead-up–very few of which I’d ever seen. The gallery includes text from Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts. (See photo 35 for an interesting bit.)
• Elsewhere, a crew is using Photoshop to help restore & analyze data from the unmanned lunar probes that preceded the Apollo landings.
• Mentioned previously, but worth a revisit: Here’s a map of the area covered by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their Apollo 11 moon walks, superimposed on a soccer field and on a baseball diamond. (I suppose if I were carrying a 400lb suit, I wouldn’t get too far, either.) [Via]

[For many more space-/imaging-related links, see this blog’s scientific & technical imaging category.]

• Spheres, large & small:
  • Jason Tozer creates lovely bubble photography.
  • The Hubble recently captured a very cool quadruple lunar transit of Saturn. [Via]
• Four Spanish teenagers sent a camera to the edge of space. Kinda beats listening to Jane’s A & driving a minivan, or whatever I was doing at that age. [Via]
• Aiming to digitize & preserve historic photos, NASA has unveiled a lunar image recovery project.
• Historic bits from Bibliodyssey:
  • The beautifully illustrated Book of Eclipses dates from the 16th century.
  • Echinodermata rounds up some lovely 19th-century scientific illustrations of fossilized creatures.

And finally, a space-related quote o’ the day: “Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.” — Fred Hoyle

It’s been a while since I last shared science-related bits. Without further ado:

• No Photoshop required: The “barreleye” fish (or what my wife refers to as “eww, that weird eyeball fish!”) has tubular eyes and a translucent head. Scroll down for the video. [Via Jerry Harris]
• I’m not sure it’s scientific, but the Periodic Table of Awesomeness is fun. (And “Almost intolerably awesome.”) [Via]
• The math-rock kids get crazy exploring logo designs with Mathematica.
• Space:
  • The Big Picture hosts a “Round trip with Endeavour,” showing the various stages of a shuttle flight. This shot especially is outta sight.
  • NatGeo features a zoomable map of the moon from 1969 , and cartographer Richard Furno tells the story of how the map came to be. [Via]
  • HIRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, has put a bunch of stereoscopic pictures of the surface of Mars online, requiring 3-D glasses to view.
  • The Onion staff offer their take on NASA.