One of the coolest things I've ever seen.

A Google research team has been working on eliminating the face-stretching distortion you get from wide angle lenses, without the ugly bending of perspective lines you get by applying regular distortion filters. At SIGGRAPH 2019, the team has presented an algorithm that does just that.

Acrylics on Canvas - 100 * 70 cm

by @SylviaDuckworth on Instagram.

What creates the colors in Jupiter's clouds? No one is sure. The thick atmosphere of Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, elements which are colorless at the low temperatures of the Jovian cloud tops. Which trace elements provide the colors remains a topic of research, although small amounts of ammonium hydrosulfide are one leading candidate. What is clear from the featured color-enhanced image -- and many similar images -- is that lighter clouds are typically higher up than darker ones. Pictured, light clouds swirl around reddish regions toward the lower right, while they appear to cover over some darker domains on the upper right.

Building anything or getting anywhere isn’t always going to be easy. Keep moving. Stay positive.

See the breathtaking 2018 National Geographic Photo Contest winners.

A natural limestone monolith located at the village of Katskhi in the western Georgian region of Imereti.

Connecticut got hit by quite a bit of snow and ice over the weekend; after the storm had passed, it left behind a lot of beautiful things.

These mesmerising photos of nearly frozen waves look like they’ve been pulled straight out of the new Frozen 2 trailer. However, they were taken by photographer Jonathan Nimerfroh in Nantucket, Massachusetts. So, unless Elsa has recently moved to New England, this sub-zero phenomenon is entirely the work of Mother Nature. Nimerfroh first encountered the slushy waves back in February 2015, during his daily surf check.

HOW DID J.R.R. Tolkien create The Lord of the Rings? The simple answer is that he wrote it. He sat down in a chair in 1937 and spent more than a dozen years working on what remains a masterwork of fantasy literature and a genius stroke of immersive worldbuilding. The more complicated answer is that in addition to writing the story, he drew it. The many maps and sketches he made while drafting The Lord of the Rings informed his storytelling, allowing him to test narrative ideas and illustrate scenes he needed to capture in words. For Tolkien, the art of writing and the art of drawing were inextricably intertwined.

Acrylics on canvas - 30*40 cm - Ghent (Belgium), 2019

50 years apart

Images from the 1950s and ’60s have a better resolution than Google Earth

Acrylics on canvas - 30 * 40 cm

A Tim Cook Earth Day tweet has shown off four ‘Shot on iPhone’ nature photos. These show two penguins against a mountain backdrop, a tiny frog sitting in a flower (above), a close-up of a snake and a giraffe beneath a tree on an open plain with rain in the background … Apple earlier issued an Earth Day press release, updating us on its mangrove restoration project, chosen because mangroves absorb ten times as much carbon as land-based trees.

A fish had managed to wedge itself between the bell and the tentacles of a jellyfish, and the two were moving along together. This strange combination turned towards Scott Gutsy Tuason after he had taken 20 photos, and he was able to get this fantastic shot.