Our favourite pictures of 2010
Dec 22, 2010 10 comments
These are 15 of our favourite images from 2010 presented in no particular order. Some are funny, some instructive and others are just plain beautiful. We hope you enjoy looking at them
Disc and pillar switch light
No, that's not a Frisbee balancing on a stalagmite – it's an electron microscope image of the
first all-optical transistor on a silicon chip. (Courtesy: EPFL.)
Topological defects
It could be a Hermes scarf, but it's a photograph of topological defects created when a particle
is placed in a liquid crystal. (Courtesy: Oleg Lavrentovich, Israel Lazo and Oleg Pishnyak.)
The far side of the Moon
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has been sweeping around the Moon for over a year and has delivered many spectacular pictures – including this one of the far side of the
Moon. (Courtesy: NASA.)
A four-legged motor trots along
This one made us laugh. On the left is an artist's impression of a four-legged molecular motor,
which walks much like a horse (right). (Courtesy: Ludwig Bartels.)
Up close and personal with Leonardo's famous muse
Why does Leonardo's famous portrait of Mona Lisa have such natural grace? The answer
could come from this X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy study at the Louvre. (Courtesy: Walter
Philippe.)
A clearer vision of the past
This is our best view yet of "the face of God", taken by ESA's Planck space mission. What will this all-sky survey of the cosmic microwave background reveal about the origin of the universe? (Courtesy: ESA.)
Nano Matterhorn
Making a model of the Matterhorn just 25 nm tall must rank among the oddest of follies. But that's just what Armin Knoll and colleagues at IBM in Switzerland and the US did using their new scanning probe lithography technique. (Courtesy: IBM Research, Zurich.)
A filament at a wavelength of 304 angstroms
Fantastic flares and eerie light from streams of electrons are just some of the stunning scenes
of the Sun captured in high resolution by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in February. (Courtesy: NASA.)
Swishing iron in the Earth's liquid-iron outer core
Magnetohydrodynamics may be a mouthful, but it does create stunning computer visualizations. These were made by Akira Kageyama and colleagues at the Earth Simulator supercomputer in Japan and show how molten iron could flow deep within our planet's interior
to generate the Earth's magnetic field.
Fractal patterns enter the quantum world
This scanning tunnelling microscope image is the first ever fractal pattern spotted in a quantum
system. It was taken by Ali Yazdani and team at Princeton University in the US, who say that the fractal emerges when the doped gallium arsenide sample makes the transition from metal to insulator. (Courtesy: Yazdani Group, Princeton University.)
Simple ingenuity
This year's Nobel Prize for Physics went to Andre Geim (left) and Kostya Novoselov of the
University of Manchester. We loved this serene shot of the two graphene gurus sitting outside on a lovely autumn day – the calm before the storm of fame struck. (Courtesy: University of Manchester.)
Giant hole opens in Guatemala
Oops! There goes the neighbourhood. This amazing 60 m "sinkhole" suddenly appeared this year in Guatemala City. Geophysicists say that such collapses can occur when liquids flow into
an underground cavity causing it to corrode into a network of chambers that can no longer support the overlying rock and soil. (Courtesy: Guatemalan Government.)
Do these concentric circles offer a glimpse of before the Big Bang?
Do these concentric circles offer a glimpse of before the Big Bang? Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyn came to this conclusion after studying images of the cosmic microwave background radiation. However, other physicists are not convinced. (Courtesy: Penrose and Gurzadyn.)
Flow field around a swimming Volvox carteri
The oceans are full of tiny organisms like this alga. Their constant swimming plays an important, yet poorly understood, role in the transport of heat and nutrients. The colours and
contours show how water flows past the moving alga. (Courtesy: K Drescher and colleagues, University of Cambridge.)
A refreshable, holographic image of an F-4 Phantom Jet
Remember that scene in Star Wars when a hologram of Princess Leia pops out of R2D2? Now, Nasser Peyghambarian and colleagues at the University of Arizona and Nitto Denko Technical Corporation have taken an important step towards creating such an animation. This is their
version of an F-4 Phantom Jet. (Courtesy: gargaszphotos.com/University of Arizona.)
10 comments
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reader01 Dec 22, 2010 12:09 PM
fractal patterns in quantum world
This fractal pattern of atomic structure have inside spin fractal patterns of electrons or
nucleis. So it can be count down why these patterns arise and on these results suggest
other atomic fractals. Also there are orbital fractals that is something new in the world
of orbitals and chemical binds.
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reader01 Dec 23, 2010 2:44 PM
all optical transitor
That disc could measure and change spin of electrons in the atoms on the tip. Rotation
of the disc with spin orientated atoms at this disc and it?s velocity controlled by light can
cause the change of orbitals too as they depends on spin of electrons at the tip.
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Turtle137 Dec 23, 2010 11:05 PM
Sinkhole
Will this hole have any practical uses, like using for mining or experiments?
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reader01 Dec 24, 2010 11:18 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by reader01
That disc could measure and change spin of electrons in the atoms on the tip. Rotation
of the disc with spin orientated atoms at this disc and it?s velocity controlled by light can
cause the change of orbitals too as they depends on spin of electrons at the tip.
Also phonons vibrating on the tip can change rotation of the disc.
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reader01 Dec 24, 2010 11:36 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by reader01
This fractal pattern of atomic structure have inside spin fractal patterns of electrons or
nucleis. So it can be count down why these patterns arise and on these results suggest
other atomic fractals. Also there are orbital fractals that is something new in the world
of orbitals and chemical binds.
Is it possible to measure fractal spin? Assume that we put to all tips ( in fractal patterns
points ) discs that will be rotating. ( one fractal pattern, the basic picture of pattern will
give one common spin of the picture ).
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reader01 Dec 25, 2010 9:35 AM
all optical transistor
The disc of this optical transistor can be very small spintronic memory.
Or we can make the disk from gallium arsenide material so we received fractal
nanopatterns on the disc. Then the light beams can rotate the fractal pattern. These
rotating fractal can show us new possible fractal that arise from rotating fractal and
rotating speed in which such new fractal arise.
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reader01 Dec 27, 2010 9:53 AM
fractal patterns from gallium arsenide
Can be such fractal patterns used in construction of fractal nanoantennas? Maybe
smaller patterns can receive signals from bigger pattern and thus is signal lead to area.
But exist also space fractals?
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