You knew this was coming, right? The blockbuster film of the weekend wasn’t going to sneak by without a little bit of geeky inspection. Not only is it a science-fiction film, the film itself was created using lots of cool artistic technologies and techniques that were themselves science fiction only a couple of years ago. From MSNBC and Space.com:

A member of the Na'vi humanoid race in 'Avatar'

The science fiction blockbuster “Avatar” is set on a mysterious alien moon with out-of-this-world technologies. Its star director, James Cameron, has not only directed other science fiction epics like “Aliens, The Abyss” and the first two “Terminator” films, but was apparently the president of his high school science club, a physics major in college and has an engineer brother who has designed underwater robots.

So how much science is there in “Avatar”?

CAUTION: Possible spoilers ahead.

Pandora
The movie is set on the fictional Pandora, one of the many moons of a fictional Saturn-sized gas giant, Polyphemus, which is located in the real Alpha Centauri system, which at nearly 4.4 light-years away is the closest star system to Earth.

While astronomers have yet to discover moons beyond our solar system, they expect to. And the Alpha Centauri system could be a place worth looking. The larger of the two real, sunlike stars that make up this alien system, Alpha Centauri A, is the fictional Pandora’s sun. In reality, scientists might soon be able to detect habitable moons with the James Webb Space Telescope and also study their atmospheres for key life-related gases such as oxygen, and water vapor.

Tropical rainforests cover most of Pandora’s continents, which suggests its mother planet must be fairly close to its sun to take advantage of its light. A few years ago, this might have seemed implausible, but most of the alien planets scientists have discovered so far are in fact gas giants that are exceedingly close to their stars.

However, life on a gas giant’s moon might present a host of challenges. Jupiter’s moons exist within an intense radiation belt of electrons and ions trapped in the planet’s magnetic field, and Saturn’s gravitational pull leads to extraordinary tidal effects that may have once ripped apart nascent moons to produce its rings, and today can drive winds and volcanic eruptions on its moon Titan.

The draw that Pandora has for humans is a naturally occurring ore dubbed “unobtanium,” an old in-joke in science fiction for materials with physically impossible qualities. (Technically, since it’s a mineral, it might better be called “unobtainite,” but that’s a pretty nerdy quibble.) Unobtanium is the best superconductor known, and apparently works at room temperature. Just as real-world superconductors can float in the presence of a magnetic field, mountains on Pandora apparently loaded with unobtanium can float in the powerful magnetic pockets that dot the moon’s surface. The films show these magnetic fields can interfere with technology, just as they would in real life — although, apparently, not whatever wireless links which allow the main characters to link with their “avatars.”

High technology

Continue reading…

I have FINALLY gotten around to posting the top ten astronomy photos as voted by blog Bad Astronomy:

#9: "A Computer’s Spot in the Sun" Credit: Matthias Rempel, NCAR

Every year, this gets harder.Not that deciding what pictures to use in 2006, 2007, or 2008 was all that easy! But astronomy is such a beautiful science. Of course it has scientific appeal: the biggest questions fall squarely into its lap. Where did this all begin? How will it end? How did we get here? People used to look to the stars asking those questions, and coincidentally, for the most part, that’s where the answers lie. And we’ll be asking them for a long time to come.

But astronomy is so visually appealing as well! Colorful stars, wispy, ethereal nebulae, galactic vistas sprawling out across our telescopes… it’s art no matter how you look at it. And our techniques for viewing the heavens gets better every year; our telescopes get bigger, our cameras more sensitive, and our robotic probes visit distant realms, getting close-up shots that remind us that these are not just planets and moons; they’re worlds.

So every year the flood of imagery takes longer to sort through, and far longer to choose from. And the choices were really tough! This year leans a bit more toward planetary images than usual, but that’s not surprising given how many spacecraft we have out there these days.

I don’t pick all these images for their sheer beauty; I consider what they mean, what we’ve learned from them, and their impact as well. But have no doubts that they are all magnificent examples of the intersection of art and science. At the bottom of each post is a link to the original source and to my original post on the topic, if there is one. If you disagree with my picks, or think I’ve missed something, put a link in the comments! All the pictures have descriptions, and are clickable to bring you to (in most cases) much higher resolution version. So embiggen away!

And welcome to my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures post. Enjoy.

ENTER THE TOP TEN GALLERY

More scientific art.

I’m a sucker for pretty pictures and photographs of bizarre animals. Compiled by Scientific American:

More than 340 scientists from around the world have been working over the past nine years to complete the Census of Marine Life, a project that has sent out dozens of expeditions to document ocean life at all levels of the sea. Final results from the survey will be announced next October, but preliminary results about the deep-sea findings are being released early.

With some 17,650 creatures found living below 200 meters, where photosynthesis stops, (and another 5,722 living below 1,000 meters), the researchers compare the surprising amount of marine diversity with that found in tropical rainforests. Of course, in a rainforest, “it’s visually overwhelming,” says Robert Carney of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and co-leader of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s Census project, Continental Margin Ecosystems (COMARGE). Even a mere scoop of mud from the ocean floor can contain a wealth of animals that are just millimeters long.

View the Slideshow

Don't you just looove that this guy's real, actual, common name is the Dumbo Octopus?

That’s write, art and science lovers. I will be out patrolling the west coast next week, and doubt I’ll have time to post much. Plus, I have my second annual SPIE ART SHOW happening today, so I am swamped!

But as a consolation prize, some mini art of microbes for you:

Check out the whole slideshow.

As the head of the Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimetre, van Egmond has created the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, an online gallery of all creatures tiny and tinier. To gather his collection, van Egmond sampled organisms from anywhere he could find water, scooping up critters from urban puddles and country ditches as well as the ocean. From desmids to diatoms, he captured all the stunning features of these normally invisible creatures using a standard light microscope.

Deadly tentacle of a Portuguese man-of-war stands out as a delicate pink ribbon containing toxin-filled beads. Alvaro Migotto

I thought I’d posted on this already, but there are SO MANY small photo competitions these days…sheesh! Small is big, or something:

10 Scientific American Magazine Bioscapes Photo Contest Winners Revealed: A gallery of images captured by light microscopy reveals the high art of the natural world

We are approaching the millennial anniversary of the first meaningful written description of how lenses and light could be used to magnify objects. It was in 1011 that Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) began writing the Book of Optics, which described the properties of a magnifying glass, principles that later led to the invention of the microscope. The entrants in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition provide fitting tribute to nearly 1,000 years of making the invisible visible.

Optical microscopy, energized by generation after generation of technological advance, continues to furnish dazzling proof that beyond the resolution of the human eye resides a sweepingly large world of small things, both around and within us. The artistic beauty of the microcosm can be witnessed in these photographs of the beadlike band of toxin-carrying compartments on the tentacle of the Portuguese man-of-war, the gemlike quality of row on row of single-celled algae and the red-and-yellow patterning of a Triceratops bone, reminiscent of a loud necktie. A selection of winning and honorable mention images that particularly appealed to us at Scientific American follows.

View Top Ten Winners Slideshow

Technology and art bringing the geeks together…

Featured on Wired Science.

Image: The Orion Nebula. / Elias Jordan

We have been amazed by the astrophotos our readers and followers have been sharing with us. So to facilitate our ongoing amazement, and in keeping with our belief that there can never be too many space photos, we have created a new Flickr group for you to upload your favorite shots. We’ll run the best of the bunch on Wired Science periodically so that your work can be properly gawked at by your fellow Wired.com readers.

So join our DIY Astronomy Flickr group, and start wowing us with your nebulas, clusters and galaxies! Our first submission, the Orion Nebula by Elias Jordan, is pictured above. We’ll also be tweeting @wiredscience about your astrophotography, so follow us there.

From the November 2009 issue of Discover Magazine, originally published online October 21, 2009:

Image by: Prof. Paul Woodward, Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota

Stellar turbulence!

This computer-rendered image depicts a Rayleigh-Taylor instability: a turbulent, gravity-driven mixing of fluids that occurs in stars (and in boiling water) when a heavy substance sits atop a lighter one.

Astrophysicists at the University of Minnesota conducted a supercomputer simulation of sun-like stars to model this turbulence, which violently but effectively circulates heat in the region just below the stellar surface.

Check out this gallery of lovely, sometimes whimsical microbe colonies, from Discover Magazine:

Whoa. Wow. Etc.

Since 2006, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings – very cold, dry and distant, yet real.

(35 photos total)

 By building thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates, researchers have made electronics that almost completely dissolve inside the body. So far the research group has demonstrated arrays of transistors made on thin films of silk. While electronics must usually be encased to protect them from the body, these electronics don’t need protection, and the silk means the electronics conform to biological tissue. The silk melts away over time and the thin silicon circuits left behind don’t cause irritation because they are just nanometers thick.

“Current medical devices are very limited by the fact that the active electronics have to be ‘canned,’ or isolated from the body, and are on rigid silicon,” says Brian Litt, associate professor of neurology and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Litt, who is working with the silk-silicon group to develop medical applications for the new devices, says they could interact with tissues in new ways. The group is developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system.

Last year, John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, developed flexible, stretchable silicon circuits whose performance matches that of their rigid counterparts. To make these devices biocompatible, Rogers’s lab collaborated with Fiorenzo Omenetto and David Kaplan, professors of bioengineering at Tufts University in Medford, MA, who last year reported making nanopatterned optical devices from silkworm-cocoon proteins.

To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface. In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that these devices can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.