Content about Images

Image of the week - The Antarctic as seen from space

Image courtesy 

In this image, the Wilkins Ice Shelf can be seen in the process of slowly breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula as the ice bridge that connects it to nearby islands looks set to collapse. New rifts forming along its center axis resulted in a large block of ice breaking away.The 40-kilometer-long (25-mile-long) ribbon of sea ice that secured the Jamaica-size ice shelf to Antarctica had been "hanging by a thread" since August 2008.
But now, at least, scientists can keep an eye on the phenomenon nearly in real-time, using images downloaded from the European Space Agency’s Webcam from Space, which have been processed by the Earth Observation Grid Processing On Demand operated at ESA/ESRIN using grid computing.
This is one several third-party applications and services integrated and supported by the European Space Agency Grid using Terradue's gridify application integration environment. The gri

Image of the week - Here comes the sun

The sun, as seen by the orbiting space platform known as SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory). False colors were added by Baltic Grid’s and LitGrid’s spectra monitoring progam to give astronomers a better visualization of its temperature and its chemical makeup. Image courtesy of SOHO, Baltic Grid, and LitGrid 

At Lithuania’s Vilnius University, researchers were able to take images of the sun from SOHO and get highly detailed images of its spectra, using a synthetic modeling program known as SYNTSPEC. Run on  Baltic Grid and Lit Grid,the software allows astronomers to use atmospheric plasma diagnostics to determine the temperature of surface layers, the sun's chemical composition, and the relative abundance fo the various elements. Using this information, astronomers can study the sun's “chemical evolution.”
That program will be presented to the European Commission as a model project demonst

Image of the week: XKCD - romance, sarcasm, math and language

Image courtesy XKCD 

Our Image of the Week is XKCD, a cartoon strip which a recent New York Times article said was the hottest thing among the technorati. Written by Randall Munroe — a grad student with a degree in physics and experience in working with robots for NASA — it’s been described as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.”
The strip comes with its own disclaimer, below
“Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).”
But we all find it funny!

Image of the week -  Dilbert looks at departmental strategy

Copyrighted image, courtesy of Dilbert.com. Used with permission.

Image of the week - A star is born - thanks to supersonic turbulence

A Star is Born - Thanks to Supersonic TurbulenceUsing the largest simulation of supersonic turbulence to date, UC San Diego researchers have shown how fundamental laws of turbulent geophysical flows can also be extended to supersonic turbulence in the interstellar medium of galaxies. This image, stored and analyzed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, shows the density field from one snapshot of the simulation, run on 4,096 processors for two weeks and resulting in 25 terabytes of data. The brightest regions in the image represent gas at the highest density, compressed by the action of a complex system of shocks in the turbulent flow. Dense filaments and cores, created in such a way by supersonic turbulent flows, are subject to massive gravitational collapse – and that leads to the birth of stars.Credit: Alexei Kritsuk, Michael Norman, Paolo Padoan, and Rick Wagner, UC San DiegoSource: San Diego Superco

Image of the week - Emergency management at your fingertips   Image courtesy of RENCILed by Jessica Proud, a project team from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) has partnered with the North Carolina State Climate Office and the National Weather Service to develop and deploy NC-FIRST. NC-FIRST is a program designed to help first responders and county emergency managers decipher weather data, understand weather threats and choose actions that minimize the threats to lives and property caused by extreme weather. This customizable Web portal environment aggregates information — radar imagery, watches and warnings and surface observations — from a wide range of weather Web sites, satellites and radars into a format that is easy-to-use — and easy to carry.

Feature - For the love of movies: recommendations from the grid Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” Image courtesy of MGM Alfred Hitchcock once said, “A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.” Tired of wasting your time sifting through DVDs at the rental store only to end up with a mediocre film? Help is on the horizon for all interested in movie recommendations. In a one-man project, Leandro Neumann Ciuffo, offers grid-powered film recommendations through a simple algorithm, his Web portal and EELA-2, the E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America. “This is a very simple application,” he said. “It’s not going to cure cancer, but it does show that average people can use the grid.” Marilyn Monroe gets fitted for a scene with the help of Hollywood costume designer William Travilla, who custom-made Monroe’s outfits for eight of her films. Image courtesy of  The Travilla Tour Custom-tailored suggestio

  Image of the week - Dilbert and performance reviews Copyrighted image, courtesy of Dilbert.com. Used with permission. Women are still perceived as 'technically incompetent' and must work harder to prove themselves, says a recent report: Women in ICT, 2008. See also GridBriefing, page 2, bottom of section entitled "The leaky pipeline; the glass ceiling."  

  Image of the week - An up-Lift-ing conference Image courtesy of Lift09 Geneva, Switzerland's, upcoming "Lift09 Conference" sounds like Woodstock but with a 21st century twist: Three days of "change, solidarity, love . . . and intense networking . . ."Running from 25 to 27 February, and featuring entrepreneurs, artists, managers, researchers, investors, CEOs, designers and ethnologists (and speakers such as iSGTW contributor Francois Grey and CERN's James Gillies), the conference's goal is to explore the social consequences of new technologies — such as the grid. This year's theme is 'Where did the future go?" The organizers ask: "We were told the future would be about mechanization, computerization, 1984-like nightmares or robots. What did and did not happen? What can we learn from the predictions that never materialized to better look at the future?" Among other items, the agenda features sessions on the relationship between science fiction

  Image of the week - ThIS cancer therapy  ThIS is an acronym for Therapeutic Irradiation Simulator for cancer therapy, which simulates the irradiation of a patient with carbon ion beams in order to allow clinicians to compute the 3D dose distributions inside the patient for a computer-aided tomography (CT) scan.Such simulations are very computing intensive, requiring thousands of hours on a single CPU. But by putting ThIS on the EGEE Grid, one simulation can be split into independent sub-simulations executed concurrently on different CPUs, speeding up the job.The project is now being integrated into the OpenGATE project. The developers — Sorina Camarasu, Tristan Glatard, Laurent Guigues, Thibault Frisson and David Sarrut, of CNRS in Lyon, France — say “The results are promising and we are confident that this advanced submission method will help the simulator to reach a larger research and medical community. Moreover, since most users need a higher-level graphical user in

  Image of the week - GlobAerosol Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the air, and they are a fundamental component of the Earth's atmospheric chemistry. Knowing their distribution and density is vital to improving the accuracy of air quality forecasting and predicting. But tracking where aerosols come from, where they tend to collect, and where they tend to “sink” on a planetary scale is a tricky busines. (Due to wind and weather patterns, sometimes the most pristine, remote areas accumulate the most aerosols.) However, by coordinating European Space Agency satellite data through BeinGrid, researchersat GMV are able to make maps such as the one above as part of the GlobAerosol project. (Black represents no aerosols, purple is some aerosols, and red is the most aerosols.)  Image courtesy of GlobAerosol