GEOTHEMATIX

The Dutch Windwheel is not only a silent wind turbine – it’s also an incredible circular apartment building

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 20:29:49 +0200

The Dutch Windwheel is not only a silent wind turbine – it’s also an incredible circular apartment...

50bestphotos: Made In Iceland by kristinnr...

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 10:30:39 +0100

50bestphotos:

Made In Iceland by kristinnr http://ift.tt/1IW5xhu

nevver: Melt down, Camille Seaman

Fri, 19 Dec 2014 19:56:38 +0100

nevver:

Melt down, Camille Seaman

gravitationalbeauty: Mammatus Clouds Over Saskatchewan

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 21:22:56 +0100

gravitationalbeauty:

Mammatus Clouds Over Saskatchewan

Photo

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 20:47:01 +0100

“Ice circles,” a rare natural phenomenon that...

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 20:44:52 +0100

“Ice circles,” a rare natural phenomenon that occurs in slow moving water in cold climates. They are thin and circular slabs of ice that rotate slowly in the water.

Gary Lane

unexplained-events: Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia is such an...

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 06:25:05 +0200

unexplained-events:

Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia is such an amazing place. It is the world’s largest salt flat, and when its covered in water it becomes a mirror. Everytime someone walks across it, they appear to be walking on clouds.

awkwardsituationist: kīlauea, one of hawaii’s youngest and most...

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 12:14:25 +0200

awkwardsituationist:

kīlauea, one of hawaii’s youngest and most active volcanoes, has been spewing lava continuously for over thirty years, making it the longest rift zone eruption of the last two hundred years.

despite a melted tripod and shoes, toxic gases (which can become lethal should the winds change direction), and scolding ocean steam, miles morgan captured these shots of the volcano’s crater and of the lava which spews from it for a six mile, four hour journey to the sea. (also captured by chance was a meteor seen in the first photo)

said miles, “when you are within about two hundred yards of the ocean’s edge, you are standing on nothing but cooled lava of questionable thickness, called the bench, which is massively unstable. if you happen to be on the bench when it collapses [which happens often, in chunks measured in acres], there is no chance for survival.”

mymodernmet: Has Venice’s famous Grand Canal completely frozen...

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:13:16 +0200

mymodernmet:

Has Venice’s famous Grand Canal completely frozen over? Not quite. Though it may appear so in these photos, they’re actually the clever work of art director Robert Jahns (@nois7 on Instagram). He’s taken photos shot by others, like Venice’s Piazza San Marco by Luis Manuel Osorio Fernando, and Russia’s Lake Bakail taken by Daniel Kordan, and spliced them together to create a surreal composite that looks almost believable. Though Venice’s famous canals have frozen in the past, as they did most recently in 2012, they’ve never turned completely solid like this.

chezpicker-uk: A Maldives beach awash in bioluminescent...

Wed, 19 Mar 2014 20:37:28 +0100

chezpicker-uk:

A Maldives beach awash in bioluminescent Phytoplankton looks like an ocean of stars

Italian designers envision amazing Solar Wind bridge

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 08:06:09 +0100

Solar Wind Bridge Bridges and wind turbines seem to be a match made in heaven; most bridges are...

Photo

Sat, 21 May 2011 14:48:56 +0200

weandthecolor: Inside Glacier Caves Photography by Eric...

Sat, 21 May 2011 14:48:20 +0200

weandthecolor:

Inside Glacier Caves

Photography by Eric Guth.

More photography inspiration.

__
posted by weandthecolor//facebook//twitter

take-nothing-but-photos: Geckos…the ultimate free...

Sat, 21 May 2011 14:47:10 +0200

take-nothing-but-photos:

Geckos…the ultimate free climbers!

Well we know about Van der Waals forces right? :) So for any of you who have forgotten it involves very weak attractive and repulsive bonds.

So what does that mean? That means geckos can walk UPSIDE DOWN ON GLASS! That is bad ass!

Here’s the Wikipedia bit:

The toes of the gecko have a special adaptation that allows them to adhere to most surfaces without the use of liquids or surface tension. The spatula tippedsetae on gecko footpads demonstrate that the attractive forces that hold geckos to surfaces are van der Waals interactions between the finely divided setae and the surfaces themselves, although a more recent study suggests that water molecules of roughly monolayer thickness (present on virtually all natural surfaces) also play a role.

These van der Waals interactions involve no fluids; in theory, a boot made of synthetic setae would adhere as easily to the surface of the International Space Station as it would to a living room wall, although adhesion varies with humidity and is dramatically reduced under water, suggesting a contribution from capillarity.The setae on the feet of geckos are also self cleaning and will usually remove any clogging dirt within a few steps.Teflon, which has very low van der Waals forces, is the only known surface to which a gecko cannot stick.

Geckos’ toes seem to be “double jointed”, but this is a misnomer. Their toes actually bend in the opposite direction from our fingers and toes. This allows them to overcome the van der Waals force by peeling their toes off surfaces from the tips inward. In essence, this peeling action alters the angle of incidence between millions of individual setae and the surface, reducing the Van der Waals force. Geckos’ toes operate well below their full attractive capabilities for most of the time. This is because there is a great margin for error depending upon the roughness of the surface, and therefore the number of setae in contact with that surface.

Use of small van der Waals attraction force requires very large surface areas: every square millimeter of a gecko’s footpad contains about 14,000 hair-like setae. Each seta has a diameter of 5 micrometers. Human hair varies from 18 to 180 micrometers, so a human hair could hold between 3 and 36 setae. Each seta is in turn tipped with between 100 and 1,000 spatulae. Each spatula is 0.2 micrometer long (one five-millionth of a meter), or just below the wavelength of visible light.

(via portais, baubauhaus)

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 02:12:33 +0100

(via portais, baubauhaus)

ianbrooks: The 10-meter South Pole Telescope and the BICEP...

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:39:38 +0100

ianbrooks:

The 10-meter South Pole Telescope and the BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) Telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, against the night sky with the Milky Way. The red lights are used to minimize light pollution, but still enable people to see while walking to and from the facility during the six months of darkness. Both of these telescopes collect data on cosmic microwave background radiation and black matter.

stocassticity: Contact lenses will project images directly...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:00:52 +0100

stocassticity:

Contact lenses will project images directly onto your eyeballs

Researchers at the University of Washington have been working on extremely tiny and semi-transparent LEDs designed to be integrated into contact lenses. So far, they’ve managed to create red pixels and blue pixels, and when they can figure out green ones, they’ll be able to make full color displays.

Despite being millimeters from your retinas, the images created by the lenses will be in perfect focus, and when the display is turned off, everything will be transparent. Since the lenses are inside your eyelids, though, you can’t un-see anything that they decide to project, which is something that you’ll have to consider when you’re watching something especially scary or gross on them. Power will come from a beltpack that transmits electricity wirelessly to a resonating antenna in the lens itself, and data will be transmitted the same way so that you don’t have to plug HDMI cables into your eye sockets.

(more at NewScientist.)

flavorpill: At Flavorwire: David Shindler’s photos of...

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 23:59:18 +0100

flavorpill:

At Flavorwire: David Shindler’s photos of Chernobyl, 25 years later.

Photo

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:46:06 +0100

jerzee55sst: Photo and Caption by Zachary Caron Placid Awe

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 11:14:25 +0100

jerzee55sst:

Photo and Caption by Zachary Caron Placid Awe