Image: CarbonNYC

While blind people can’t enjoy photographs the same way sighted people do, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to take them. Or at least that’s the premise of this new app that helps blind people position their cameras better through sound cues.

Researchers recently asked blind and partially sighted people what the hardest part of getting a photo right was. Armed with the knowledge of exactly what their sampling of blind people wanted help with, the researchers made an app, which solves a few key problems that blind photographers have.

The first is locating the shutter button. In the app, there’s no button—an upward swiping motion on the screen takes a picture. The app also detects the number of faces it sees and speaks that number out loud. It also uses audio to help the photographer move the camera and get the subjects in focus.

To help photographers recognize the shots, the app records sound, too. New Scientist explains:

This is to help with photo organising and sharing – and is used as an aide-memoire as to who is in shot. The user can choose to save this sound file along with the time and date, and GPS data that is translated into audio giving the name of the neighbourhood, district or city the shot was taken in.

While sighted people might not understand why a blind person would want to take photographs, the results can be quite incredible. Take this gallery of photos taken by a blind woman. Sonia Sobertas, a blind woman who paints with light in her photographs, is part of the Seeing With Photography group of people who want to create images despite being blind. The New York Times explained Sobertas’s reason for taking photographs:

For seeing individuals, it may seem bizarre that Ms. Soberats dedicates so much time to an art she cannot fully appreciate. Why not a more tactile pursuit, like sculpting? But Ms. Soberats said she savored her work through the eyes of others.

“The more difficult the photo, the more interesting and the more rewarding when you complete it and it’s good,” she said. “To be able to realize and obtain something that at the end everybody praises, it’s very satisfactory.”

The researchers developing the app want to give their users that same experience and provide one more way for them to enjoy the same activities as everybody else.

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Blind Photographer Paints With Light, Creating Stunning Images

Over the past few decades Lake Urmia in Iran has steadily dried up. Photo: Google / Landsat 

Since 1972, the U.S. has flown a series of satellites known as the Landsat program, a fleet of Earth-observing satellites that were tasked with taking pictures from space. Landsat’s gorgeous photos have been a favorite of the Earth-as-art crowd, and the satellites’ observations have provided an absolutely critical long-term record of how our planet is changing.

The development of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Photo: Landsat / Google

Today, Google put out the Earth Engine, a fascinating tool that showcases a scrollable, zoomable time-lapse of the entire planet as seen by Landsat over the decades. The Landsat photos only go back to 1984, but they show the dramatic ways in which the planet has changed in such a brief period of time. To help you get started, Google pulled out some highlights to look at, such as the drying of the Aral Sea or the deforestation of the Amazon. But the tool does show the whole planet (just the land, not the oceans), and there are many more cool things to be seen.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a more detailed look at this, the development of the oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Landsat / Google

But don’t bother looking for Antarctica, because it’s not included. (Sad.)

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In February 2013 Cassandra Brooks, a marine scientist with Stanford University, landed at McMurdo Station, a U.S. research station on the shores of Antarctica’s Ross Sea. For two months she worked on a ship, the icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer, cruising through the Antarctic sea. Brooks documented her life on the ship for National Geographic, and now she’s compiled two months of travels into a gorgeous time-lapse video. It gives a rare look at the onset of the fall season in one of the most remote places on Earth.

Don’t miss the end, where Brooks’ camera caught the ebb and flow of penguins going out to fish—a odd scene to watch in time-lapse.

Brooks’ cruise was intended to track what happens to all the phytoplankton that grow in the Ross Sea during the summer as the sun sets for the long polar winter.

This isn’t the only time-lapse that Brooks has put together, either. Here she shows what its like to do science from the ship as they cruise the Ross Sea.

H/T Deep Sea News via BoingBoing

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The eye of a dragonfly is made of tens of thousands of individual segments Photo: Rudi Gunawan

The first working compound-eye-style camera can’t quite see like a dragonfly. Dragonfly eyes are made of tens of thousands of individual light sensors, says biologist Robert Olberg to the blogger GrrlScientist:

“Dragonflies can see in all directions at the same time. That’s one of many advantages of a compound eye; you can wrap it around your head..The spherical field of vision means that dragonflies are still watching you after they have flown by….If you swing at them while they are approaching they’ll usually see the net coming and easily avoid it. They are awfully good at what they do.”

With 180 facets, not 30,000, the first camera designed to mimic insects’ compound eyes isn’t quite that perceptive. But the camera, created by optical engineers led by Young Min Song at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, does offer a 160-degree view of the world, say the researchers. ”It contains 180 artificial ommatidia, about the same number as in the eyes of a fire ant (Solenopsis fugax) or a bark beetle (Hylastes nigrinus) — insects that don’t see very well,” says Nature.

Photo: University of Illinois

The compound eye camera’s expansive field of view isn’t what makes it so special. Fisheye lenses are a favorite of photographers, and they already give you a 180-degree view of the world. The difference between the compound eye camera and a fisheye lens, says PetaPixel, is that having all those different individually-operating sensors means that the camera has “a nearly infinite depth of field. In other words, they can see almost all the way around them and everything, both near and far, is always in focus at the same time.”

A fisheye lens photo of the Jefferson Memorial. Photo: Don DeBold

And, fisheye lenses cause a distinct distortion at the edges of the photos (the reason some photographers love the lenses). The compound eye camera doesn’t do that, says Popular Science.

With only 180 imaging sensor–lens pairs, the camera takes photos that contain 180 pixels. (An iPhone 4, by comparison, takes photos with 5 million pixels.) To work up to the full dragonfly-eye experience, the team will need to add more lenses and more sensors, something which they say “will require some miniaturization of the components.”

“The current prototype can only produce black-and-white, 180 pixel images,” says PetaPixel, “but future iterations could be game changing in the tiny camera game, with applications ranging from spy cams to endoscopes.”

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A video stitched together from sequential photos of Saturn’s hexagon. Photo: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Saturn changes seasons ever so slowly, and in 2009, after seven years of winter, the planet’s orbit tipped, bringing sunlight once more to Saturn’s north pole. The changing season offered astronomers the first good look at the region since the Sun began to wane in the mid-1990s, says Wired.  And the break of first light provided a stunning view of a marvel that has baffled scientists since they first saw it in images captured by the Voyager spacecraft back in the 1980s, during Saturn’s most recent summer.

At the tip of Saturn’s north pole, there’s an oddly geometric hexagon: a wall of clouds with six distinct sides. Here’s what Voyager was able to document three decades ago:

Saturn’s hexagon as seen in the 1980s. Photo: NASA, seen through Universe Today

Wired, in 2009, explained what was so interesting about that figure:

“The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini project researcher at the California Institute of Technology, in a NASA release. “It’s a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter.”

The hexagon circles Saturn at 77 degrees north and is wider than two Earths. Nearly everything about the weather pattern is baffling. First, it’s unclear what causes the hexagon. Second, it’s bizarre that the jet stream would make such sharp turns. Earth’s atmospheric movements rarely display such geometric rigor.

But now, says NASA, improvements in satellite sensors and a bit better timing gave scientists working with the Cassini satellite a view into the very heart of the storm. There, they discovered something surprising: a gigantic hurricane.

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

Wired:

Though 20 times larger than an average Terran twister, the hurricane is very similar to the ones we see on Earth. Both have central eyes with low-hanging clouds surrounded by a wall of higher clouds spiraling around. Saturn’s hurricane winds are four times stronger than those on Earth, whipping by at 530 kmph (330 mph). Cyclones on our planet also tend to move around but Saturn’s polar storm has nowhere to go, remaining stuck in place for years.

As Saturn edges ever more into summer, an opportunity for scientific study of the storm—and hopefully more gorgeous photos—should emerge.

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Saturn’s Polar Hexagon

The aurora as seen through the “Little Planet” projection. Photo: Göran Strand

The dazzling display of the northern lights is one of the most valuable perks of living in the world’s colder regions. Outflows of hot plasma, streaming from the Sun, bombard the Earth’s magnetic field. Magnetic field lines snap. Atmospheric gases are are stripped of their electrons. The air is set aglow with ghostly greens and reds.

The northern lights are a favorite subject for photographers and even astronauts, but Swedish photographer Göran Strand has what may be the best chance for aurora-watching from outside the Arctic circle.

Drawing from timelapse images captured with a fish eye camera, Strand put together an interactive timelapse of the northern lights,  from more than 2,000 photos, says PetaPixel. The interactive even lets you change your perspective, switching from the normal “fisheye view,” which makes you feel like you’re there, to the more abstract “little planet view,” which lets you watch the entire display at once.

For a better idea of how the aurora are made, Space has a fairly detailed explanation:

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Lighting Up the Arctic Sky With Artificial Aurorae
The Northern Lights—From Scientific Phenomenon to Artists’ Muse

Hyperlapse photography is super hard to do, but the results are just incredible. Combining the sequential shooting of time lapse photography with carefully controlled camera movements—often over huge distances—hyperlapse photography transports you through stunning vistas at an unreal speed. Watching one gives you the sense of cruising along atop a speedy motorcycle, blowing through the landscape at top gear. Careful pans of the camera let you focus on a point of interest. Pointing dead ahead gives you that rush of speed.

But where hyperlapse videos are gorgeous, they’re also hard to pull off. The folks at Teehan+Lax Labs, says The Verge, released a free web tool to let you build hyperlapse videos using the images captured by Google’s street view cameras.

Google’s photos aren’t as stunning as you’ll get from a custom hyperlapse, but as the video above shows, the results can be quite spectacular.

We decided to speed not along a dusty open road, but through downtown Washington, D.C., a hyperlapse trip around the Smithsonian castle.

A hyperlapse of the Smithsonian castle, showing the free tool made by Teehan+Lax Labs

To make the app free and open to all without destroying Google’s servers with tons of requests for images, says PetaPixel, the tool has to make some concessions—you only get sixty photos for your video. But, if you know how to code, they’ve made the entire system freely available for you to tinker to your heart’s content.

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Amazing Shots Captured by Google Street View
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“Walking with a bucket in mouth; light-gray horse, Eagle” ca. 1884-1887 by Eadweard J. Muybridge Photo: George Eastman House / Google Art Project

Opened in 1949 in the mansion once owned by the man who in 1888 founded the Eastman Kodak Company, the George Eastman House is “the world’s oldest museum dedicated to photography,” says PetaPixel. And last week the Google Art Project added high-resolution scans of many of the wonderful photos housed in George Eastman House to its growing collection.

Much as Project Gutenberg is trying to digitize the world’s books, the Google Art Project is seeking to digitize the world’s art. This is the first photography museum to join Google’s project, says Mashable.

The collection spans a range of photography styles and techniques, from early collotype prints and daguerrotypes to more modern photos of historical significance. George Eastman House:

The initial group of 50 Eastman House photographs on Google Art Project spans the 1840s through the late 20th century and a wide variety of photographic processes from the 174 years of the medium’s existence are represented. The variety of subjects featured include Frida Kahlo, Martin Luther King Jr., the first train wreck ever photographed, the Lincoln conspirators, the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx in the 1850s, and a portrait of photo pioneer Daguerre.

This isn’t the only new digital archive of significant photos. PetaPixel also points us to the newly revamped PhotosNormandie collection, an archive of thousands of photos from the late stages of World War II.

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“Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It” by James Wallace Black. Photo: James Wallace Black / The Met

The first flight of an untethered hot air balloon—humanity’s first really successful attempt at flight—took place in 1783 when “Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes” flew over Paris. The first real photograph was taken in 1826 when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took a picture out of his window. It took more than 30 years for someone to put these two inventions together to bring us the world’s first photo from the air. That photo, an 1858 aerial image of Paris, France, captured by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon is no longer with us. But the next best thing, says PetaPixel, is in the caring hands of the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: an 1860 photograph of Boston captured from 2,000 feet. The Met:

Best known for his photographs of Boston after the devasting fire of 1872, Black launched his solo career in 1860 with the production of a series of aerial photographs taken from Samuel King’s hot-air balloon the “Queen of the Air.”

… Black’s photographs caught the attention of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a poet and professor of medicine at Harvard, who gave this photograph its title. In July 1863, Holmes wrote in the “Atlantic Monthly”: “Boston, as the eagle and wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South [Church] and Trinity Church [left center and lower right] are two landmarks not to be mistaken. Washington Street [bottom] slants across the picture as a narrow cleft. Milk Street [left center] winds as if the old cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its commercial palaces. Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in numbers…. As a first attempt [at aerial photography] it is on the whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.”

For what it’s worth, Boston-proper (a city renamed from the Algonquin territory of Shawmut) was at this time already 230 years old.

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The Long History of 3D Photography [video]
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It may look little, but this beautiful panorama of Mars’ Mount Sharp, at 15,000 pixels across, is huge. Click for maximum Mars beauty. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This is it, folks. This is what it’s all about. Since the Curiosity rover first set down on Mars in August, the one-ton mobile laboratory has been slowly inching its way towards Mount Sharp, a 3.4 mile high mountain nestled within a crater on the face of the red planet.

In this gorgeous mosaic NASA shows how the surface of Mount Sharp would look if the light on the dusty planet were the same as on Earth. In reality the Martian atmosphere makes the vistas appear a bit more drab, but editing the photo to look more Earthlike “helps scientists recognize rock materials based on their experience looking at rocks on Earth.”

The slow crawl toward Mount Sharp began months ago, and photos taken over time show the feature slowly inching into view.

One of Curiosity’s first photos shows Mount Sharp in the distance. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA:

Mount Sharp, also called Aeolis Mons, is a layered mound in the center of Mars’ Gale Crater, rising more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the crater floor, where Curiosity has been working since the rover’s landing in August 2012. Lower slopes of Mount Sharp are the major destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called “Yellowknife Bay,” where it has found evidence of a past environment favorable for microbial life.

Another huge photo of Mars’ surface. Captured in August, this black and right panorama shows the crest of Mount Sharp off in the distance. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mount Sharp, a peak rising in the midst of Gale Crater, was selected for the rover’s research because scientists thought they could find water and other signs that the region was once hospitable for life—dreams that have so far come true.

A computer image of Mount Sharp, resting in Gale Crater. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS

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Click Around This High Definition 360° Panorama of Mars

High in orbit above the Earth, the Solar Dynamics Observatory watches the Sun year-round, providing stunning stellar views that go unbroken except during a few special times each year. Because the SDO stays relatively fixed over one part of the planet in a geosynchronous orbit, the satellite goes through two annual “eclipse seasons.” For a few weeks twice each year, part of SDO’s view each day will be blocked by the Earth. And, three times a year, the Moon will get in the way.

Though a bit of a pain for the scientists trying to study the Sun, these orbital quirks provide some beautiful unintended consequences: gorgeous photos of an eclipse from space. Yesterday, NASA released photos and video of that day’s double whammy, a single day that saw both a terrestrial and lunar eclipse.

Earth passes in front of the Sun, from the perspective of the SDO satellite. Photo: NASA/SDO

One beautiful feature to notice is the apparent fuzziness of the Earthly eclipse. According to NASA, this is because of Earth’s atmosphere. The Moon, for the same reason, appears as a sharp disk.

When Earth blocks the sun, the boundaries of Earth’s shadow appear fuzzy, since SDO can see some light from the sun coming through Earth’s atmosphere. The line of Earth appears almost straight, since Earth — from SDO’s point of view — is so large compared to the sun.

The eclipse caused by the moon looks far different. Since the moon has no atmosphere, its curved shape can be seen clearly, and the line of its shadow is crisp and clean.

The Moon’s silhouette, by contrast, is much crisper. Photo: NASA/SDO

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A Solar Eclipse, As Seen From the Surface of Mars

Drawing rain runoff and snow melt from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River is a dominant source of water for the American southwest, providing fresh water for drinking and farming and hydroelectric power to millions.

In 2011, Will Stauffer-Norris and Zak Podmore spent nearly four months kayaking and portaging and hiking the length of the Colorado River, from the Green River in Wyoming, which feeds into the Colorado, to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. That 113 day journey was crushed into one beautiful three-and-a-half minute time lapse, showcasing the varied landscapes of the southwest, from the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead, the reservoir that feeds the Hoover Dam, to a narrow series of irrigation channels.

The pair used their journey to try to draw attention to the modern state of the Colorado River, which Smithsonian‘s Sarah Zielinski detailed in 2010:

The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the nation’s seventh-longest river, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but there are ominous new twists. The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.

Indeed, in the video, you can see the powerful river’s flows dwindle as water is siphoned off for irrigation or power production as it makes its way downstream.

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The Colorado River Runs Dry

Working from his own photographs of far-off nebulae, astrophotographer J-P Metsävainio came up with a way to artificially add in the third dimension. From there, he’s produced gorgeous animations of voluminous nebulae. (The files are quite big, so you might have to give it a second.)

An experimental 3D representation of the nebula IC 1396. Photo: J-P Metsävainio

The images, says Phil Plait, on his blog Bad Astronomy, are “not actually showing you the 3D structure of the nebula. It’s an approximation, a guess based on various assumptions on how nebulae are shaped. J-P broke the image up into layers, made a surface model of it, then remapped it all into different frames seen from different angles. He then put those together to make the animated GIF you see here.”

A 3D rendition of Melotte 15. Photo: J-P Metsävainio

Wired‘s Nadia Drake lays out how it works:

First, Metsavainio collects information about how far away an object is, and carefully studies the stars and structures in and around it. Then, he creates a volumetric model of his subject — usually a nebula, although he’s rendered at least one globular star cluster. Finally, he animates the 3-D rendering, providing viewers with a tantalizing taste of what it might be like to fly a starship through these enormous astronomical ornaments.

“How accurate the final model is, depends how much I have known and guessed right,” Metsavainio said. Many of his renderings carry the statement: “NOTE: This is a personal vision about shapes and volumes, based on some scientific data and an artistic impression.”

A rotating version of IC 410. Photo: J-P Metsävainio

Along with the stunning animated images, Metsävainio has a whole range of photos and animations in his portfolio, including more attempts at rendering the celestial features in three dimensions.

A 3D rendering of the Lagoon Nebula. Photo: J-P Metsävainio

More recently, Metsävainio told Smart News, he has been publishing his animations as videos on YouTube, rather than animated gifs, since videos tend to be easier to share than the slow-loading gifs.

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X-Ray Telescope Puts Glorious Nebulae in New Light
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Everybody knows about Pavlov’s dogs—the pooches who taught us about conditioning by being trained to salivate at the sound of the bell. But what kind of dog did he use? Easily trainable German Shepherds? Small, easy-to-handle Chihuahuas? Venerable Dalmations?  Turns out, Pavlov wasn’t picky about the kinds of dogs he used. He didn’t go for a specific breed, but instead seems to have used all sorts of dogs, many of them mutts. Here’s what Pavlov’s dogs looked like:

You might be wondering why making a bunch of dogs drool is so special. The Nobel Prize website explains:

Pavlov’s description on how animals (and humans) can be trained to respond in a certain way to a particular stimulus drew tremendous interest from the time he first presented his results. His work paved the way for a new, more objective method of studying behavior.

So-called Pavlovian training has been used in many fields, with anti-phobia treatment as but one example. An important principle in conditioned learning is that an established conditioned response (salivating in the case of the dogs) decreases in intensity if the conditioned stimulus (bell) is repeatedly presented without the unconditioned stimulus (food). This process is called extinction.

But while you might think of dogs when you think of Pavlov, his Nobel Prize was actually for something completely different. Here’s the prize website again:

In 1904 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering studies of how the digestive system works.

Until Pavlov started to scrutinize this field, our knowledge of how food was digested in the stomach, and what mechanisms were responsible for regulating this, were quite foggy.

In order to understand the process, Pavlov developed a new way of monitoring what was happening. He surgically made fistulas in animals’ stomachs, which enabled him to study the organs and take samples of body fluids from them while they continued to function normally.

But it’s his dogs that we remember. In fact, one of them is preserved at the Pavlov Museum, in Russia. Here’s the little guy:

Image: Rklawton

So while the pooches didn’t win him a prize, Pavlov’s legacy certainly lies in these dogs. What has your dog done for science lately?

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Five Nobel Laureates Who Made Food History
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Photo: Kevin Dooley

When Andy Warhol famously said that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” he couldn’t have been talking about himself. Two and a half decades after his death, he shows no sign of leaving the spotlight. In the past few months, he’s been popping up everywhere, alongside the discoveries of some of his lesser-known art.

For instance, the Luckman Gallery in Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a series of Warhol’s Polaroid photographs that have never before been on display. LA Weekly describes the particularly Warholian appeal of the show:

Set in glass cases, the tiny photos showcase Warhol’s knack for capturing not only the physical features of his subjects — mostly visitors to the Factory, the studio where Warhol worked — but also their personalities. Their small size forces viewers to slow down and look more closely, and there are multiple photos of some of the people. In a digital camera, the less ideal ones would probably get deleted with the push of a button but here the many shots become little clues to each subject’s personality.

In March, California will also be home to another exciting West coast Warhol debut—his 1968 film “San Diego Surf” will be playing at The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The surf movie, shot with 16mm cameras near where it will play, was never finished in Warhol’s lifetime. It remained locked up for decades until it was unearthed for the first time for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011. The San Diego showing will also feature never-before-seen footage of the making of “San Diego Surf,” so Warhol fans that want to catch a glimpse of the man behind the camera won’t be disappointed.

This week, Planet Money also reported that Warhol’s (very rough) sketch on paper of the U.S. unemployment rate from 1928 to 1987 was going up for auction at Christie’s soon. Estimated sale price? $20,000 to $30,000. Not bad for what looks like something scribbled on one of those big notepads in a corporate conference room.

Not only is Warhol’s art still being discussed, dissected, and sold, his influence continues to reverberate in very contemporary culture.

In the cover story of this week’s TIME, for instance, Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow reveals what (or who) inspired her to first switch from painting to film when she was a young artist. As Vulture quotes Bigelow’s profile:

“I think I had a conversation with Andy Warhol somewhere in all this, and Andy was saying that there’s something way more populist about film than art — that art’s very elitist, so you’re excluding a large audience. ” Yep, she got into making movies because of a conversation with Andy Warhol. (“In the future, everyone will have a world-famous fifteen-minute torture scene.”)

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Warhol’s influence is apparent everywhere, considering how he changed the way we see something as banal as a can of tomato soup.

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Warhol’s Pop Politics