Science!

December 4, 2009 7:37 PM

The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images
posted by Artw (18 comments total)

Goes well with The Most Amazing Medical Images of 2009.
posted by Artw at 7:37 PM on December 4, 2009

This one of the water repellent surface is fantastic.
posted by dhruva at 8:08 PM on December 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

I am SO making a wall-size poster of the Grand Prismatic Spring. The lung cancer cell, not so much.

PS: 'Summer Plankton' would be a great name for a fictional movie star. Or a new Spongebob character, whatev.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 8:12 PM on December 4, 2009

zomg death star fully operational
posted by gnutron at 8:31 PM on December 4, 2009

I spent a very happy half hour looking through those images. My favourite was the world's largest ferris wheel against a backdrop of fireworks. Second favourite was the desert rift in Ethiopia.
posted by annathea at 8:34 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Wow, that brain implant one is truly creepy. Welcome to the future, we're just getting started
posted by crayz at 8:39 PM on December 4, 2009

Summer Plankton, had me a blast
Summer Plankton, happened so fast
Met a krill, crazy for me
Met a whale, cute as can be
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:41 PM on December 4, 2009 [4 favorites]

Henh? I'll believe it when I see it on the Cracked site.
posted by telstar at 9:34 PM on December 4, 2009

Ok, monopoles and, uh, anti-monopoles? Sounds non-mono-polar.
posted by GuyZero at 10:19 PM on December 4, 2009

The ear hairs and microvilli are breathtaking. Also the volcano/lightening.
posted by bebrave! at 11:59 PM on December 4, 2009

In photo 14 of the medical images, the neonate has a tiny teddy bear.
posted by Cranberry at 12:09 AM on December 5, 2009

I appreciate that scientists do some fucking brilliant stuff but half of these are just nature doing what nature has always done and will always continue to do long after we are dust. Nature rules. Flagged.
posted by turgid dahlia at 2:23 AM on December 5, 2009

A lot of them are also more correctly classified as 'engineering' rather than science. Nothing wrong with that.
posted by Catfry at 6:05 AM on December 5, 2009

These were incredible. The ferris wheel looked like a painting, a work of art. The reanimated mouse heart was an incredible story. Others were fascinating as well. This is one of the reasons I love Metafilter - wake up on a Saturday morning and just be immersed in something visually fantastic and learn a little bit. Thanks for posting.
posted by bunnycup at 8:18 AM on December 5, 2009

Someone found a mammoth bone in Vero Beach, Florida (article) with a carving of a Mammoth on the bone! This is unusual for the Western Hemisphere, much less Florida.

The now exclusive area once hosted giant beasts and nomadic bands of Ice Age hunters... Discoverer and local fossil hunter James Kennedy only recently noticed the image after dusting off the bone, which had sat under his sink for a few years... "This is the first glimpse of real art in the Western Hemisphere, and I think that's our starting point for something that might be found in the future if we start looking closely at these old bones."

posted by stbalbach at 8:25 AM on December 5, 2009

I was gonna moan 'where's the teddynaughts!?!'... but a bit of googling tells me that was last year (just)... how time flies.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:58 AM on December 5, 2009

someone honked as I was reading the title of this post & I read it as The Year's Most Annoying Scientific Images

I'm not sure what an annoying scientific image *is*, but I'll report back when I find some...
posted by morganw at 4:02 PM on December 5, 2009

Observation of natural phenomena is science, too. Science is just figuring out how stuff works.

I loved these, especially the ferrofluid.
posted by rubah at 10:59 AM on December 6, 2009