Science Illustrated Issue 96

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None of these beautiful images of nature is real. We created them all using an artificial intelligence ‘art engine’ called Stable Diffusion. In a matter of seconds, the art engine turns any text prompt into an image created from characteristics it has absorbed from millions of tagged sample images. While the process is clever and the results often astoundingly beautiful, art by AI could also be used to deceive, and creates one more layer of unreality in a world where it’s increasingly hard to determine facts from fakery. ALL IMAGES: STABLE DIFFUSION VIA PLAYGROUNDAI.COM BY JEZ FORD…

Henichesk is one of Ukraine’s ‘pink lakes’. The higher the temperature, the more water evaporates from the lakes and the richer their colour becomes. Then as the waters recede, tons of white salt ‘sand’ is left on the shore, where it can be harvested by locals. This lake region is to the west of the Sea of Azov, north of Crimea, in territory still held (as we write) by Russia. The image comes from ‘The Beauty of Ukraine’ a new book pubished by teNeues, which was begun before the conflict. To complete it, the book’s team worked through bombings, forced emigration, and in some cases military missions.…

STARS It is a glowing cloud of dust and gas with a diameter greater than 24 light years, and it is the home of hundreds of newborn stars. Located only 1350 light years from Earth, the Orion Nebula is the closest major nebula we have found. That makes the region an important area for improving our understanding of how new stars form. We have known about the nebula’s existence since it was first recorded in 1610, but it still keeps countless secrets. Now the most powerful space telescope ever created, the James Webb, has captured the heart of the star factory in an image that is the sharpest so far achieved, say astronomers. The image has been produced using the James Webb telescope’s infrared cameras and a combination of filters to peer…

CLIMATE CHANGE From fertile green to charred brown: the extreme heat of the European summer left its mark on major parts of the continent, influencing drinking water, agriculture, and energy generation. New satellite images of what may be the continent’s worst drought since the Middle Ages reveal the changes seen from space, hundreds of kilometres away. The European observation programme Copernicus released a short video on Twitter showing the difference a year can make, comparing images captured by the Sentinel 2 satellite between 1 July and 31 August 2021 with the same period of 2022. The images reveal how vegetation suffered major damage across the continent, from the east of England, through northern France into central Europe. The satellite shows that only northern Scandinavia and some far eastern parts of Europe escaped…

MEDICINE 10 minutes, 23 minutes, 100 minutes: a new study from Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University has found remarkable differences in the speed at which pills are absorbed depending on whether we lean to the left, right, or back. The study was made using ‘StomachSim’, a virtual version of the human stomach that simulates its shape and structure. The best result, where pills dissolved in 10 minutes on average, was achieved when the pills were consumed with the torso leaning 45 degrees towards the right (or was lying on the right side). According to the study, this improved significantly on either standing up straight or leaning 45 degrees backwards – in those positions, the pill took 23 minutes to dissolve in the simulated stomach. But when leaning 45 degrees to the left (or…