The active dust devil displays a delicate arc produced by a westerly breeze partway up its height. The dust plume is about 30 yards or meters in diameter.
The image was taken during the time of Martian year when that planet is farthest from the sun. Just as on Earth, winds on Mars are powered by solar heating. Exposure to the sun’s rays declines during this season, yet even now, dust devils act relentlessly to clean the surface of freshly deposited dust, a little at a time.
Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars. They are spinning columns of air, made visible by the dust they pull off the ground. Unlike a tornado, a dust devil typically forms on a clear day when the ground is heated by the sun, warming the air just above the ground. As heated air near the surface rises quickly through a small pocket of cooler air above it, the air may begin to rotate, if conditions are just right.
“The Scale of the Universe 2″ is an interactive visualization that shows the relative size of different things, from quantum foam (very small) to the observable universe (very large).
Interactive (flash) version here
Like a 3-D take on Jackson Pollock, the latest work by the artist Martin Klimas begins with splatters of paint in fuchsia, teal and lime green, positioned on a scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker. Then the volume is turned up. For each image, Klimas selects music — typically something dynamic and percussive, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis or Kraftwerk — and the vibration of the speaker sends the paint aloft in patterns that reveal themselves through the lens of his Hasselblad. Klimas rose to prominence in the art world four years ago for a series of photos that captured porcelain figurines just as they shattered. For this series, Klimas spent six months and about 1,000 shots to produce the final images from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition to the obvious debt owed to abstract expressionism, Klimas says his major influence was Hans Jenny, the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena. The resulting images are Klimas’s attempt to answer the question “What does music look like?”
(Source: The New York Times)
