Paperclippe in the City

A rich deposit of gas and dust in the NGC 3324 region fuelled a burst of starbirth there several millions of years ago and led to the creation of several hefty and very hot stars that are prominent in the new picture. Stellar winds and intense radiation from these young stars have blown open a hollow in the surrounding gas and dust. This is most in evidence as the wall of material seen to the centre right of this image. The ultraviolet radiation from the hot young stars knocks electrons out of hydrogen atoms, which are then recaptured, leading to a characteristic crimson-coloured glow as the electrons cascade through the energy levels, showing the extent of the local diffuse gas. Other colours come from other elements, with the characteristic glow from doubly ionised oxygen making the central parts appear greenish-yellow. (via Who do you see in this massive silhouette in space?)

amgamble:

Margaret Hamilton, “The Wizard of Oz”, 1939
Photographer: Virgil Apger 

via maliciousglamour

hellanne:

Transition Ⅲ (by y2-hiro)

andirememberme:

An Early Morning view of Downtown Pittsburgh(Explored) by Z!@ on Flickr.

(Source: ovrdoz)

Lightning, Utah-Arizona Border

(Source: vi-rosenrot)

(Multicolored Auroras at National Geographic)

(Source: National Geographic)

This is gallery of photographs by and all featuring Natsumi Hayashi, a Tokyo teenager who takes hundreds of pictures of herself jumping until she captures just the right one where, instead of jumping, it looks like she’s levitating. (via Eye Candy: Levitating Girl Natsumi Hayashi - Geekologie

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scinerd:

The Unreasonable Beauty of Mathematics

If you shut yourself in a room and devise some abstract mathematics for the sake of sheer intellectual fascination, you might not expect your scribblings to have any relevance to the real world. Your parents would probably bug you about what you were doing with your life. And yet time and again, scientists find that the creations of pure thought match what they discover in nature. Does it mean the world at its deepest levels is somehow mathematical? Does it simply mean that scientists are good at cherry-picking the conceptual tools they need? Mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and others debate that question, as astrophysicist Mario Livio describes in the August issue of Scientific American. Whatever the answer may be, we can still marvel at the beauty of mathematical structures.

Image: Heavenly Spirals:

Spiral patterns occur throughout nature, perhaps most dramatically in spiral galaxies. This pair of galaxies has particularly unusual spiral patterns that are presumably the result of the gravitational tidal forces between them. The inner spiral arms of the upper galaxy (UGC 1810) are not planar, and the outer arm may have been pulled into a ring by a direct collision with the lower one (UGC 1813).

More examples after the link