If there is any definition of "ironic", it must be a smiley face seen in a cancerous cell:
Australian researchers at the Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research were investigating how the protein beta-catenin invades a cell’s nucleus and causes it to become cancerous, when they spotted the protein apparently mocking them. You can see this a bit more clearly in the video they made:
The circle is the cell’s nucleus as the protein moves in, and the dark spots are where the protein is blocked. The smiley face doesn’t surprise me; we’re hardwired to see faces and familiar shapes everywhere we look (click the tag marked "pareidolia" — the psych term for this — under this post to see lots of examples). Heck, I spotted one in a supernova once…
And I certainly hope this research yields insight into how to fight cancer. I’d love to see that smirk wiped off that nucleus’s face.
[I don't repost very often, but this one from last year still works. -- The BA]
I know some people have Christmas on their mind today, but this is a bit too literal: a brain scan taken at Newcastle University turned up a familiar face nose:
I always pictured him as somewhat bigger.
The part of the brain they were imaging? The hippocampus. Eh, close enough.
Happy holidays to all, and to all a clear night!
Tip o’ the stirring creature to BABloggee Michael Lonergan
In the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud (one of the Milky Way’s many satellite galaxies), there lies a vast complex of gas called 30 Doradus. And inside that sprawling volume of space is the Tarantula Nebula, a star-forming region so huge it dwarfs even our own Orion Nebula. Thousands of stars are churning away in there, going through the process of being born.
And as they do, the hottest and brightest of them carve huge cavities in the nebula, heating the tenuous gas therein to millions of degrees. The result? This:
[Click to embiggen.]
I love this image! It’s a combination of observations from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (in blue, showing the incredibly hot gas) and from Spitzer Space Telescope (in red, showing cooler gas). Those bubbles of hot, X-ray emitting gas are constrained by the cooler gas around them, but it’s likely the hot gas is expanding, driving the overall expansion of the nebula itself. However, it’s also possible the sheer flood of high-energy radiation from the nascent stars is behind the gas’s expansion… or it’s a combination of both. Astronomers are still arguing over this, and observations like this one will help figure out who’s right.
… but you know me. I love pareidolia, and there’s no way you can look at this image and not see a really angry screaming face, shrieking at that blue blob hovering in its way. That’s so cool!
And c’mon, NASA: you release this image two weeks after Halloween? Oh well, I’ll add it to my scary astronomy gallery anyway, which is after the jump below.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/PSU/L.Townsley et al.
I believe without reservation that this may be the greatest instance of pareidolia of all time: an ultrasound of a man experiencing epididymo-orchitis, or pain and swelling of a testicle:
Having suffered through a similar (if less traumatic) version of this, may I add that the expression on the man’s, um, "face" is exquisitely accurate.
Tip o’ the codpiece to my Hive Overmind co-blogger Ed Yong on Google+. Original image: Elsevier, Inc.
I know I’ve posted a lot about the Sun lately, and I knowI just posted a funny picture by astrophotographer Alan Friedman. And maybe I should’ve waited for Caturday to post this. But c’mon. How could I not post this as soon as I saw it?
[Click to concatenate.]
It’s a SOL cat! I love how it looks like it’s rubbing its head on the Sun.
If you want the technical description of what you’re seeing, it’s a solar prominence, a long stream of ionized gas belched out by the Sun, flowing along its magnetic field lines.
Think of it as a 80,000 kilometer-long cosmic hairball the Sun hacked up. I will from now on.
And if you liked that picture by Alan, this one will make your hair stand on end!
[UPDATE: Alan calculated the size of this prominence as 80,000 km, and that looks about right to me. So just for comparison, I added the Earth roughly to scale in the picture here. That's a pretty big cat. It's head is bigger than our whole planet! Imagine the litter box that would take...]
Pareidolia is the trait of seeing recognizable objects in random patterns (usually, but not always, faces). Cryptozoology is the study of fabled creatures like Nessie, or the chupracabra, or… I don’t know, for a totally random example, let’s say Bigfoot.
Still not sure what I mean? Maybe this’ll help:
Ha!
OK, I’ll be a pedantic dork for just a sec, and say that this is actually just a prominence, an eruption of ionized gas off the surface of the Sun, guided by the twisting and churning solar magnetic field. Prominences can take all sorts of shapes — even angels and dragons — as they launch upward and fall back down to the Sun’s surface.
Alan Apeman — urp, sorry, I mean Friedman — takes simply amazing pictures of the Sun which I feature here all the time; see the Related posts section below for many more. And you should keep an eye on his pictures. Who knows what you’ll find in them?
Hey, I haven’t posted a fun pareidolia (patterns that look like faces or figures) news article in a while, and this is a good one: a man in Finland found this interesting image on his wall:
Of course, the article claims it looks like the Virgin Mary.
Now look: I know that the standard depiction of Mary is usually with her head bent, covered in a cowl, with a robe of some sort. That kind of figure lends itself to pareidolia — it’s an easy shape to make, from oil stains to an MRI. But this is a pretty far cry from even that! Unless Mary’s head is a perfect sphere.
It looks very much like this is a simple reflection off a window or other shiny object. The way the light plays on the wall makes that clear. Of course, I cannot rule out a supernatural influence… so if it’s not Mary, who is it?
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
[UPDATE: Alan calculated the size of this prominence as 80,000 km, and that looks about right to me. So just for comparison, I added the Earth roughly to scale in the picture here. That's a pretty big cat. It's head is bigger than our whole planet! Imagine the 
