Welcome to our Wallpaper of the Week bit. The idea is pretty self-explanatory. Open an image, right-click it, save it and wallpaper your life with science!
We’re interested in all types of science-related images, so if you’ve got a great picture, hit ‘contact/submit’ above and send it our way.
Also, we’re eventually aiming to write some software that can update your desktop automagically. If you’re a coding guru and you’re keen to help, drop us a line.
I’ve been a very bad nerd, not having posted a new wallpaper in over 2 months! I blame it on the impending doom that is my PhD thesis. Well, I snapped this pic of some moss on a water irrigation tube whilst on a stroll to clear the head. Mosses are small, relatively simple plants with no flowers, cones or fruit. They are also ‘non-vascular’ ie have no xylem or phloem and so need to get their moisture from the [read on...]
While we’re on the job of self snapped shots, I took this little pic of mushies a couple of months back in Cardiff. Being a foreigner to these strange isles, I have no idea what sort these actually are. Needless to say I didn’t bother munching any. Mushrooms are the spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus. Fungi are a fantastically diverse bunch; they can taste yummy, make antibiotics, be hugely poisonous or even elicit some trippy psychedelia. One particular type [read on...]
This week’s pic is one I snapped on a highland holiday – she’s a native resident of Lochcarron, although you can find plenty of her fellow garden spiders in, you guessed it, gardens all over Europe and North America. She’s also known as a cross orbweaver, diadem spider or – to you and me - Araneus diadematus. Common they may be, but these ladies (the gents are smaller and don’t spin webs) are pretty impressive engineers. The first, anchoring thread [read on...]
The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of distorted colliding galaxies about 70 million light years away in the constellation of the Crow. This picture combines observations made by the Hubble telescope in the visible spectrum (blue) with preliminary observations collected at submillimetre wavelengths (red and yellow) by only 12 of what will eventually be 66 of ALMA’s antennaes. Although the resolution of ALMA can’t yet compare to that offered by Hubble, it can do something Hubble can’t – detect the [read on...]
This beautiful photo by José Francisco Salgado shows four antennas of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) gazing up at the star-filled night sky. The Moon is visible to the right whilst the Milky Way can be seen stretching across the upper left. ALMA, consisting of 66 antennas, is being built at an altitude of 5000m way up on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama desert is one of the driest spots on earth. This combined [read on...]
This awesome image, by Chris Kotsiopoulos, was taken during an eclipse of the moon on the Greek island of Ikaria at Pezi. The area is know as the planet of the goats for its strange shaped rocks and rough terrain. Big rocks, an eclipse and lightning storm make for some trippy subject material. by joseph
This is the Cave of Swallows, an enormous pit cave in Mexico. With a 370m drop from the cave entrance to the floor it has the largest cave shaft in the world. It could pretty much swallow up a whole skyscraper with ease. Like most pit caves and sink holes it was formed by centuries of carbonic acid in rain water chomping through the calcium carbonate that makes up limestone. It’s the same process that formed our favourite blue hole in Belize. It’s [read on...]
This orange crusty stuff growing on a rock is lichen. Lichen isn’t actually a single organism but rather a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and algae. The fungus surrounds and protects the algal cells and makes both more resistant to water deprivation. The algae in turn provide the nosh via photosynthesis. This happy arrangement can survive in all sorts of bad-ass places from deserts and mountain peaks to the frigid vacuum of space. According to the illustrious British Lichen Society, the [read on...]
One of nerd-alert’s very first wallpapers was of an aurora. Because they’re just so awesomely beautiful I’ve decided to post another. Put on some groovy audio (how about Pink Floyd – The Division Bell?) load up the image, make it fullscreen, sit back and be overwhelemed by the magic of this meteorological phenomenon. by joseph
This monstrously huge crop circle was ‘discovered’ on Milk Hill in Wiltshire, UK, on the 13th of August 2001. Over 450 m in diameter with 400 circles in a pretty dang complex mathematical pattern this circle has been described by a top circle researcher as “the pinnacle, the very epitome of perfection, the paragon of all circles”. Not bad for a bunch of tipsy aliens far from home. Needless to say I imagine they left the local farmer feeling rather [read on...]
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