Astronomers detect signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus

A team of astronomers believe they have found signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus, The New York Times reports. In two papers published today, the astronomers explain that they’ve detected the chemical phosphine in Venus’s thick atmosphere. They...

The uHandy Duet lets your smartphone’s fancy camera click microscopic shots too

Telephoto, wide, and now ultra-wide… your phone has all these incredible lenses that let you shoot farther, or fit more into a frame, but uHandy lets your phone manage the opposite, and remarkably so! The uHandy Duet isn’t a macro lens… it’s a literal mobile-mounted microscope. You can zoom in on bugs, microorganism, even cells, to experience life on a scale that’s too small for the eye to see. Duet’s microscopes (there are two of them) attach to your phone, and use small sample-gathering stickers to collect everything you can find, be it hair, pollen, dust, or anything else you want to dive deep into.

A lower-intensity Lo-Mag lens allows you to observe small details like textures, or a butterfly’s wings, while the more powerful Hi-Mag lens lets you zoom in as much as 30x~200x to be able to view things or microorganisms as small as 1 micrometer (imagine being able to look at a small cluster of the transistors on the new iPhone’s chip!) The Hi-Mag lens uses its own light-source, and is roughly the size of a hockey-puck, giving you the ability to view literally an entire new world with your smartphone! The uHandy seems like a perfect toy to get kids curious about the micro-world around them, but truth be told, I’m probably just as eager to own one of these!

Designer: uHandy

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Creating electricity from a bog in a bomb crater

They might not deliver as much electricity as solar panels and windmills, but geobacter have an extra talent. The microorganisms can purify water by consuming waste, then excrete electrons we can harvest as energy. To show that in action, Artist Tere...

Microorganisms Play in a Pac-Man Maze: Protozoan-Man

Scientists at the University of Southeast Norway apparently have nothing better to do, so they released microorganisms into a Pac-Man-style maze made out of fluid to observe how the single-celled euglena (Pac-Men) avoid their predators, the multi-celled rotifers (Ghosts). I love how scientists will use any excuse to get their geek on.

pac_man_science_1zoom in


These “micromazes” make it easier to view and study microorganisms, which can normally be found bunched together in a Petri dish. Now they are spread out and you can see what’s going on better.

So why the tiny Pac-Man imitation? Well, that is maybe the most brilliant part of all of this. It is a good way for the researchers to better communicate their findings to the public. It certainly got our attention. Next I want to see Dig-Dug.

[Motherboard via Gizmodo]