Hillman, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, spearheaded the microscope’s creation and partnered with pediatric cardiologist Kimara Targoff, also at Columbia, to image this tiny beating heart. The microscope boasts other advantages as well: it has a wide field of view, can focus on immobile or freely moving subjects and is small enough to fit in your car trunk-or at least in Elizabeth Hillman’s, who often carries the instrument with her to give hands-on demonstrations. Previous microscopes couldn’t take these 3-D images fast enough to capture the continuous pumping of such a small organ. It can even be watched from different axes, though this GIF shows just one angle. Thanks to a newly improved microscope, SCAPE 2.0, you can follow the journey of individual blood cells through the heart of a zebra fish embryo. The Beat of LifeĬredit: Venkatakaushik Voleti, Kimara Targoff, Hillman Lab and Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University The study’s authors hope the machine learning approach can be used like a virtual astronaut, capable of making fixes in the vacuum of space.- J.D. Doing so helps us predict when solar storms might affect us here on Earth by doing nasty things such as knocking out radio communications. The observatory’s mission is to keep eyes on the sun at all times. The top row of suns in the GIF above shows the actual instrument measurements the team used to generate the virtual measurements in the bottom two rows. (It malfunctioned in 2014.) The team used machine learning to compare how the instrument’s past readings lined up with measurements from the observatory’s other sensors and then estimated what it would record, were it still running. That’s the goal of a new study, which details how researchers simulated a busted sensor back into existence onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. When a space instrument fails, a machine learning process can perhaps replace it virtually. The new work, by a group of researchers in Europe, uses a technique called hyperspectral imaging to collect information in the shortwave infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and see through a mounted scroll to the back, or “verso.” An added benefit: the method also helps enhance images of the recto side of the scroll, potentially bringing even more volumes that had been kept in the same crisped library back to life.- J.D Machine Learning Goes Cosmic Much of the scientific work over the years has been focused on piecing together the material on the front, or “recto,” of unrolled scrolls. The GIF shows a reconstruction of one of those scrolls if you could fly through it from end to end without it being unrolled. Papyri kept in a library in the ancient city of Herculaneum in what is now southern Italy were buried when the volcano erupted in 79 A.D., only to be unearthed in 1756, after which some were unrolled and stuck to paperboard toward the end of that century. The work is a continuation of a centuries-long effort to recover words that persisted through the stinging ash and smothering gas from Mount Vesuvius. The ancient Greeks apparently engaged in double-sided printing, and new research is uncovering what they wrote on the backs of their scrolls. Photons will encircle the hole once or even multiple times before being flung out toward us, the viewers. This gravitational light bending gets so strong near the black hole that it ensnares some particles of light in a central “photon ring” ( bright central circle). That is why, from a side-on view of the simulation, you can see light from the back side of the whirling accretion disk of material arching above and below the cosmic object. Like all black holes, this behemoth warps spacetime so much that it drastically bends the path of light around it. It exists 54 million light-years from Earth, at the very heart of the galaxy Messier 87, and has a mass of 6.5 billion suns. This particular celestial body may seem familiar, because it’s the only black hole ever photographed. Well, thank goodness for Jeremy Schnittman, the theoretical astrophysicist who created NASA’s latest and greatest black hole visualization. It’s hard to imagine how a black hole works, let alone what one looks like. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Jeremy Schnittman
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