November 2011 Archives

The first giant pandas to live in the UK for 17 years will arrive at their new home within days.

Tian Tian and Yang Guang will arrive in Edinburgh from the Ya'an reserve in Chengdu, China, on Sunday.

The breeding pair will fly into Edinburgh Airport to begin their ten-year stay in Scotland.
The date was confirmed ahead of the Scottish First Minister's visit to China.

Alex Salmond said the pandas could expect "the warmest of Scottish receptions".

He said: "I will be in China myself on the day they arrive, signing a cultural exchange agreement with the Chinese, and I am sure all Scotland will be delighted to welcome Tian Tian and Yang Guang with the warmest of Scottish receptions awaiting them."

This montage of New Horizons images shows Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, and were taken during the spacecraft's Jupiter flyby in early 2007.

If you look closely can get just make out a huge volcanic explosion on the surface of the little moon.

Click on the image to embiggen.

Here's an amazing 'sideways' view of the closest planet to the Sun.

The image was created by merging together nine oblique views from the Messenger spacecraft of Mercury's limb, looking towards the horizon.

Click on the image to embiggen.

A distant world is being hit by solar storms so ferocious, the entire planet is probably enveloped in auroras.

Motivated by the nature, this jumping robot is designed and fabricated to imitate animals.

A university has asked for pictures of tattoos and body piercings - to help identify bodies and trace missing people.

The University of Dundee wants to build up an international database of images that will help find out how common certain designs are, and whether there are any particular trends in certain areas.

The research, at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID), is part of a wider Interpol project - the Fast and efficient international disaster victim Identification (FASTID) project.

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Staying on the topic, this shows some of the weirder realms of probability.

Click on the graphic to embiggen.

The limb of the Earth is a work of awesome beauty and a gift to science

When observed from space, the palette of gaseous layers of atmosphere reminds us of the fragility and tenuousness of the cocoon that shelters life from cold, harsh space.

That same view also allows scientists to detect the gases and particles that make up our the different layers of our atmosphere.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured a bit of both in this digital photograph from July 31. They threw in the Moon as an extra gift.