Photographer Marc Simon Frei took some shocking photos of the high-voltage electric storms created by a Tesla coil. Marc Simon Frei/ Google+
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Google’s Street View isn’t just taking it to the streets anymore. Google partnered with rock climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell to put up cameras on the rock face of Yosemite’s “El Capitan.” The 3000-foot vertical rock formation is one of the most popular sites amongst rock climbers and base jumpers. Users can now enjoy a bout of vertigo from the comfort of their own home by going to Google Maps and checking out the view from the side of the massive rock.

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Researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment have created a model of the world’s air transport. The team analyzed flight schedules of more than 1000 airlines from 1990 to 2012 and around 1.2 million ticketed flight itineraries. They found that one-stop flights as well as the emergence of more airports around the world and increased cooperation between these airlines, global connectivity has increased by 140 percent. The German Research Foundation and MIT’s Airline Industry Consortium funded part of the research.

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Researchers developed a new imaging technique that uses laser light to take detailed images of a mouse’s brain. This technique overcomes a huge hurdle with laser light in that photons scatter when they hit biological tissue and do not penetrate. However, the team at Washington University found that when this scattering occurs it produces a rapid rise in temperature and generates sounds. Imaging reconstruction software can use these sound waves to generate high-resolutions at a depth of almost three inches.

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Daily Overview is the project of Benjamin Grant, a brand strategy consultant. Grant uses satellite photos available on DigitalGlobe that focus on areas where there is great human impact. The mission of the project is to build people’s appreciation of the earth through what is called the “Overview Effect.” The effect was coined by author Frank White in 1987, and describes the sensation of awe that astronauts feel when looking at the planet from space. The image above is of The City of Arts and Sciences, an architectural complex in Valencia, Spain.

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Nasa Astronaut Scott Kelly shared a picture on twitter of what an aurora looks like from space. The International Space Station resident tweeted, “#Aurora I don’t think I will ever see another quite like you again. #YearInSpace.” He also shared a video of the rare event, which shows the vibrant red, greens and purples pulsating on top of our world. The rare geomagnetic storm was caused by a mid-level solar flare that happened earlier in the week.

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Saturn has 53 moons that have been named and another nine that are being studied. Cassini-Huygens, an unmanned spacecraft captured an image of three of those many moons using its narrow-angle camera. Titan is the largest moon in the image and appears fuzzy due to its cloud layers. Rhea is on the upper left, and the one on the bottom is Mimas.

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Bruce Banner isn’t the only one interested in gamma-rays. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope released its latest gamma-ray maps, which combine over seven years of data. The station, which sits low in the earth’s orbit, takes maps of the whole sky every three hours in search for gamma-ray activity such as energetic explosions like gamma-ray bursts. The Milky Way is at the center of the maps and the brighter colors show more gamma-ray sources.

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I recently went to see my optometrist and he used a special machine to take a “fundus photograph” of my eyes. The fundus camera takes a picture of the back of the eye to test for retinal detachment or eye diseases such as glaucoma. The dark area is my macula, the part of the eye that gives the most visual sharpness, and the bright light is shinning on my optic disk. Don’t worry, my eyes are fine.

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The Daily Show’s John Stewart used an image of the cover of a faux Popular Science magazine to discuss the Pope’s new environmentalist stance on climate change. Stewart poked fun at the Vatican’s use of Galileo as a source to show the church’s openness to science. Galileo, of course, was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church in 1633 for his theory that the earth revolves around the sun, and that the earth was not in fact the center of the universe.
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