Can fish sing? Yes, they can, though I’m not sure about mackerel like the ones above. And they probably don’t sound like anything you’d put on your iPod. But that wasn’t what Alex Tattersall of Charminster, England, was searching for when we went on a dive last September in the Red Sea off Egypt. He was looking for a great photo, and he found one. Tattersall writes:
I saw a large school of these feeding mackerel towards the end of a lovely dive. … I decided then to follow the school and try to isolate some individual fish. As luck would have it, these three subjects moved into this very photogenic position, and seem to be singing just like the three tenors or the barbershop trio.
Tattersall’s photo, Chorus of mackerel, is a finalist in the Natural World category of Smithsonian magazine’s 7th Annual Photo Contest. Vote now for your favorite in the People’s Choice category; you can vote once a day until March 31. Contest winners will be announced in early summer.
Think you’ve got what it takes to win our photo contest? Our 8th Annual Photo Contest is now open. Good luck to all who enter!
And check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week on our Facebook fan page.
This photo, Spider in the light of daybreak, is a finalist in the Natural World category of Smithsonian magazine’s 7th Annual Photo Contest. The image was taken by Csaba Meszaros of Budapest, Hungary. He writes:
Velence is the second largest lake in Hungary and Sukoro is a village closely. I went out early in the morning to shot the mist at the lake that I saw on the previous day, but had no luck because the weather changed to be warmer and much dryer. When walking on the fields around the village, I found the awakening spider in the net. The cross spider (Araneus diadematus) is very common in Europe, but the warm sunlight at low angle made its appearance quite uncommon: the legs and the body of the animal were shining in the darker background and seemed to be almost translucent.
Voting is open in the People’s Choice category; you can vote once a day until March 31. Contest winners will be announced in early summer.
Think you’ve got what it takes to win our photo contest? Our 8th Annual Photo Contest is now open. Good luck to all who enter!
And check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week on our Facebook fan page.
Voting is now open in the People’s Choice category of Smithsonian magazine’s 7th Annual Photo Contest. The picture above, A coconut floats in the shallows, is a finalist in the Natural World category. It was taken by Ethan Daniels of Berkeley, California, in April 2007 in the Republic of Palau. You can vote once daily until March 31. Contest winners will be announced in early summer.
Think you’ve got what it takes to win our photo contest? Our 8th Annual Photo Contest is now open.
After seven competitions, our editors have seen over 140,000 photographs from more than 90 countries around the world. What makes a photograph a Smithsonian winner? Technical quality, clarity and composition are all important, but so too is a flair for the unexpected and the ability to capture a picture-perfect moment.
Good luck to all who enter!
And check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week on our Facebook fan page.
The winners of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge—an annual contest sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science—were announced last week. The image above, “Flower Power” from Russell Taylor, Briana K. Whitaker and Briana L. Carstens of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received an honorable mention in the photography category.
Accidents can sometimes be beautiful. Briana Whitaker and Briana Carstens of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, snapped this photograph as a quality-control step in their experiments to study the forces that cells, such as those that stitch together skin wounds, exert. They visualize these forces by watching how forests of 10-micrometer-tall polymer pillars bend when they place the cells on top of them. Ideally, the pillars should stand straight up, but on this occasion most of the pillars had fallen over. Amazingly, though, they’d all collapsed into a flowerpetal-like pattern.
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An Egyptian fruit bat aims for an apple (image courtesy of Yossi Yovel)
The Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus) pinpoints its meal with its sonar not by aiming in front but by “looking” off from side to side, according to a study in a recent issue of Science.
With sonar, a bat (or whale or submarine) will emit a sound that is reflected off nearby objects. Those sound waves are altered by the objects, and the bat can use those changes to gain information about what the object is and its distance and direction. There are two strategies for sonar detection: A sonar beam that is sent directly forward, which returns more information overall, or a signal that hits objects on an angle, which can give more precise information.
Mathematically, strategy number two is the best strategy, and that is the one that Egyptian fruit bats use. The researchers suggest that such a strategy tradeoff may be involved in other detection methods, such as smelling, vision and hearing.
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