megapixels

Bundles of microelectrode wires fan out over a small area of a human brain. These electrodes were placed by neurosurgeons at the University of Utah to see if they could detect precise brain activity associated with motor movements. To their surprise, the hair’s-width microelectrodes, originally designed to study epilepsy, picked up the firings of small groups of neurons despite being merely set on the surface of the brain.

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A trio of turkeys peacefully gobbles cornmeal on a cattle ranch in northern Mexico. But a fence may cut off the chuckwagon. Last February, Roy Toft, a fellow at the International League of Conservation Photographers, photographed these turkeys for an ILCP project documenting wildlife around the first few hundred miles of the 18-foot metal wall that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is building along the border.

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A horse trots along a dirt road in Turkey, encased by the Kurtsystems Car equine training system. What may look like a complex horse-drawn carriage is actually a high-tech way to automate the delicate process of training racehorses.

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The first computer-generated model of an entire sunspot—a magnetic anomaly on the surface of the sun—tracks the magnetic fields in the area, helping researchers figure out how the sun releases energy around the spots. At the dark center, or umbra, the field is so strong—about 1,000 times the solar average—that it blocks the solar gases that typically bubble to the surface.

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What’s more disgusting than cockroaches? Mites that feed off cockroaches. Here, mites munch moist debris from around the breathing holes of a Madagascar hissing cockroach, an insect sometimes kept as a pet that, unfortunately, can trigger allergies.

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This is a pig heart, procured from a slaughterhouse, beating on a heart-pumping machine called the Heart Cart. Because pig hearts share many anatomical similarities with humans', scientists often use them to test new medical devices and surgical procedures. Instead of operating on the entire, living hog, which costs about $2,500 for each experiment, the Heart Cart lets researchers work on just the hearts, dropping that cost to $25, by pumping them with a saline solution to make the heart valves move realistically.

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Have you ever been taking pictures of an entire country from space and thought, "you know what, this is ok, but I want to photograph the entire hemisphere at once,"? Well, with Raytheon's new 16-megapixel infrared sensor, you can.

Or, more precisely, the government can. Designed to work as part of a satellite, the sensor uses 4,096 pixel rows and columns to produce what the company calls, "an 'unblinking eye' over an entire hemisphere."

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The wind may be restless, but the fastest air-powered ground vehicle is surprisingly steady as it sails over the dusty ground. Called Greenbird, it was developed by English engineer Richard Jenkins and the U.K.'s largest private green electricity supplier, Ecotricity.

On March 26 in a dry lakebed in California, the craft broke the world land-speed record for wind-powered vehicles by more than 10 miles an hour, setting the new record at 126.2 mph.

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Lemur IIa is a robot designed to autonomously inspect and maintain in-orbit space equipment such as the Orion crew exploration vehicle. Shown below on a model space telescope, the Lemur IIa was envisioned as an orbital Swiss Army knife. Each limb has four degrees of freedom and a "quick connect” feature, allowing astronauts to swap in different repair tools as needed.

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