FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK

Anna Redmond/Facebook

Exposed Seawall

This bizarre mass of rocks and seaweed is the result of a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit New Zealand last week, thrusting the seawall up and out from the water. The movement of the planet's plates isn't uncommon at all. It's what formed Mount Everest and why South America and Africa fit so nicely together. But while tectonic plates usually move from side to side, the earthquake pushed them up and down instead, exposing this rather alien-looking seawall.

Photograph by Brian Klutch

Buy Your Own Paper Microscope

When Stanford physicist Manu Prakash invented his pocket-sized foldable microscope, called Foldscope, a few years back, his main goal was to make them widely available for any child (or adult) who wanted one. Now he's launched a kickstarter campaign where anyone can reserve a Foldscope of their own for $15. While the cost to create the device is only around 57 to 97 cents, the extra dollars will go toward donating millions of Foldscopes to schools and communities around the world.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Calzetti

Oh Hey Spiral Galaxy NGC 3274

NASA's Hubble telescope snapped this image of a spiral galaxy more than 20 million light years away from Earth. The image is a combination of five different filters, incorporating ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light into one shot. If you look closely you can see another galaxy—PGC 213714—in the upper right corner.

NASA

Silver Linings

Astronauts above the Philippine Sea took this shot from aboard the International Space Station. They actually aimed their camera toward the sun, which emphasizes the clouds' shadows and produces a dramatic 3D effect.

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

The Most Luxurious Private Jet

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is designed to carry 280 people across oceans and between continents. But one special model has been converted to a private plane, complete with a master bedroom and five bathrooms. It's slightly smaller than the average U.S. home, but nearly 100 times the price.

Top 10 Biggest Airplane in the World

The Airbus A380 is a double-deck, wide-body, four-engine jet airplane manufactured by Airbus. It is the world's largest passenger airplane, and the airports at which it operates have upgraded facilities to accommodate it.
The A380's upper deck extends along the entire length of the fuselage, with a width equivalent to a wide-body aircraft. This gives the A380-800's cabin 478 square metres (5,145.1 sq ft) of usable floor space, 40% more than the next largest airliner, the Boeing 747-8,[4] and provides seating for 525 people in a typical three-class configuration or up to 853 people in an all-economy class configuration

How Germy Are Airplanes?

By Susanne Rust

Plane: My Good Images/Shutterstock. Bacteria from left: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; CDC/Janice Haney Carr; CDC/Melissa Brower

Viruses and bacteria can persist on airplane surfaces for days, researchers find.

Missed connections and lost bags might not be your biggest worry when traveling. Researchers have found that nasty, contagious bacteria can last for days on airplane surfaces.

James Barbaree, a pathologist at Alabama’s Auburn University, and colleague Kiril Vaglenov were curious about how long bacteria could last under typical air travel conditions. They applied smears of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus(MRSA) and the virulent E. coli strain O157:H7 to six airplane surface types — armrests, plastic tray tables, metal toilet buttons, window shades, seat pocket cloths and leather — which were supplied by an unnamed major airline.

What they found was disturbing. MRSA lasted for 168 hours, or seven days, on seat pockets (where travelers reach for magazines and store their iPads), while E. coli samples thrived for up to four days on armrests. Barbaree and Vaglenov rubbed pig skin on the tainted surfaces to mimic contact with human flesh. They found that the less porous the surface, the more transmissible the bug.

Bacteria survived longer, however, on more porous surfaces, such as seat pockets, though they were much less transmissible than those on, say, a tray table.

The researchers are now performing the same tests on Streptococcus pyogenes, which causes strep throat. They also are testing cleaning agents that might help prevent bacterial stowaways.

For now, Barbaree says regular hand-washing is probably the best way to prevent the spread of disease. He says he and his wife now take alcohol wipes with them on flights.

And the next time you’re waiting to get on a plane, ponder this: There are no federal cabin-cleaning regulations.