A male cockroach (left) releases scent for the female checking him out.
Credit: Allen Moore

Researchers have reprogrammed immature fat cells into cartilage cells, shown here.
Credit: Guilak

The youngest, smoothest terrain in Ganymede's Sippar Sulcus area lies at the lowest elevations. In color bar, 0 connotes average elevation.
Credit: Schenk et al./Nature

A healthy striped bass, hauled out of the Chesapeake Bay (above), and a sick one (below) with nodules, which appear as round, grayish spots on internal organs.
Credit: Anthony Overton

Panoramic view of the sky as seen by the Digital Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. A proposed National Virtual Observatory would integrate this and a multitude of images and spectra from other surveys into one huge database, enabling astronomers--and the public--to explore the universe from their own computers.
Credit: S.G. Djorgovski, Digital Media Center/Caltech

A small portion of the sky, toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies, seen in visible-light, far-infrared, and radio wavelengths. Each image comes from a different sky survey. Users of the virtual observatory could explore such combinations of sky surveys to attain a panchromatic view of the universe.
Credit: Djorgovski and Digital Media Center/Caltech

Ask and ye shall receive: Diagram shows the information flow in the proposed National Virtual Observatory, from a detailed question asked by an astronomer to the answer (at right). Computers close to the archived data, rather than the astronomer's computer, perform the processing.
Credit: Hanisch/Space Telescope Science Institute

The way gunshot sounds change over snow reveals snow's traits.
Credit: Albert

The Io torus seen by Cassini.
Credit: JPL/NASA

~~After the Fires~~ In the wake of one of the worst fire seasons in the past 50 years, scientists seek to minimize the risk to fire-prone areas by developing better techniques for predicting fires and modeling how they spread across the landscape. (Photo © Karen Wattenmaker Photography/Boise National Forest)

Credit: Bureau of Land Management

As subdivisions such as this one in Idaho encroach on areas prone to wildfires, uncleared vegetation near the homes increases the risk from intermix fires.
Credit: Bureau of Land Management

Large amounts of smoke (blue haze) from boreal fires (red) blanket eastern Siberia and northern Sakhalin Island in this Sept. 24, 1998, satellite image.
Credit: NOAA