Fractal Lab.

(Io non aggiungerei nessun commento)

L’ottima fonte stukhtra, sta pubblicando giornalmente un particolare calendario dell’avvento.

Queste sono solo due delle immagini, e relative informazioni, che mi sono piaciute di più finora.

In the upper right of this image is part of NGC 4921, an unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma Galaxy Cluster some 320 million light-years from Earth. […] All around, and even through the galaxy itself, thousands of much more remote galaxies of all shapes, sizes and colours are visible. Many have the spotty and ragged appearance of galaxies at a time before the familiar division into spirals and ellipticals had become established. This image was created from 50 separate exposures. Fonte originale

While hunting for volcanic plumes on Io, the Hubble telescope captured these images of the volatile moon sweeping across the giant face of Jupiter in 1999. Io appears to be skimming Jupiter’s cloud tops, but it’s actually 500,000 km away. The conspicuous black spot on Jupiter is Io’s shadow and is about the size of the moon itself (3,640 km). This shadow sails across the face of Jupiter at 17 km per second.

“You got 17 out of 20” ;-)

Mi hanno fregato il primo, il quarto e il quartultimo…

Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling.

Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain.

Fake smiles can be performed at will, because the brain signals that create them come from the conscious part of the brain and prompt the zygomaticus major muscles in the cheeks to contract. These are the muscles that pull the corners of the mouth outwards.

Genuine smiles, on the other hand, are generated by the unconscious brain, so are automatic. When people feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of the brain that processes emotion. As well as making the mouth muscles move, the muscles that raise the cheeks – the orbicularis oculi and the pars orbitalis – also contract, making the eyes crease up, and the eyebrows dip slightly.

Lines around the eyes do sometimes appear in intense fake smiles, and the cheeks may bunch up, making it look as if the eyes are contracting and the smile is genuine. But there are a few key signs that distinguish these smiles from real ones. For example, when a smile is genuine, the eye cover fold - the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid - moves downwards and the end of the eyebrows dip slightly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/

Ho pubblicato nella mia galleria pubblica di Dropbox un po’ di foto che ho fatto qui in Australia e che ho scelto come possibili sfondi del desktop.

Il formato è 16:9, le foto sono tutte ad alta risoluzione per accontentare anche i desktop più esigenti e ovviamente sono tutte disponibili per il download.

Qualche prova di foto in HDR con la Panasonic DMC-FZ38 e Photoshop.