955. Adam Caruso & Peter St John /// Studio House /// Highbury, London, UK /// 1993-94

At the very centre of the image above is something incredible - a single, positively-charged strontium atom, suspended in motion by electric fields.

Not only is this an incredibly rare sight, it’s also difficult to wrap your head around the fact that this tiny point of blue light is a building block of matter.

The image was captured by physicist David Nadlinger from the University of Oxford, and it’s been awarded the overall prize in the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council photo competition.

To give you a little perspective on the size of this set-up, the atom is being held in place by electric fields emanating from those two metal needles on either side of it.

The distance between them is about 2 millimetres (0.08 inch).

The atom is being illuminated by a blue-violet laser. The energy from the laser causes the atom to emit photons which Nadlinger could capture on camera using a long exposure.

The whole thing is housed inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber and dramatically cooled to keep the atom still. Nadlinger took this photo through the window of the vacuum chamber.

To learn more, click here.

Nahi mila hain koi tujhsa aaj tak mujko,

Aur phir ye sitam alag hain ki mila tu bhi nahi

I laughed way too hard at this

While most folks were sitting down for supper, NASA tried to move a space mountain.

Beyond sight for backyard stargazers, a spacecraft the size of a vending machine self-destructed by ramming into a harmless asteroid shortly after 7 p.m. ET Monday, September 26th. The high-speed crash was part of the U.S. space agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART.

The moment of impact marked the first time in history humans have attempted to alter the path of an asteroid, a flying chunk of rubble left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of the time, these ancient rocks pose no danger to Earth, including Dimorphos, the one NASA just used for target practice. But at least three have caused mass extinctions, the most infamous of which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Stegosaurus didn't have NASA.

"We are changing the motion of a natural celestial body in space. Humanity has never done that before," said Tom Statler, program scientist. "This was the substance of fiction books and really corny episodes of Star Trek from when I was a kid, and now it's real."

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“The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught.”

—

Richard Feynman

Keith Haring windsurfing with friends on a beach in Knokke-Heist, 1989.

Photos by Tseng Kwong Chi

Agnès Varda - Jane B. par Agnès V. (1987)

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021)

The first simulated image of a black hole was calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978.

تم مجھے روزقیامت ملنا،

تم سے میرا حساب باکی ہے۔

Tum mujhe roz-e-qayamat milna,

Tum se mera hisab baaki hai.

~Lines