Inside Insides blog has a collection of fruit and veg porn: MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) photos of fresh produce, animated in sequence to reveal a kaleidoscopic beauty.

Above is a cucumber from top to bottom. More at Inside Insides (via kottke).

Astronomy (vulcanology?) Photo of the Day :

Why did the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland create so much ash? Although the large ash plume was not unparalleled in its abundance, its location was particularly noticeable because it drifted across such well populated areas. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland began erupting on March 20, with a second eruption starting under the center of small glacier on April 14. Neither eruption was unusually powerful. The second eruption, however, melted a large amount of glacial ice which then cooled and fragmented lava into gritty glass particles that were carried up with the rising volcanic plume. Pictured above two days ago, lightning bolts illuminate ash pouring out of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

(via APOD)

Slate has a nice selection of photographs — by various photographers — of Irish life between the 50s and 80s. I like the less typical images like the one above. See here.

From Petapixel photography blog:

Caleb Charland is a Maine-based photographer who combines a love of scientific experiments and photographs into wonderful and amazing photographs.

Fun stuff. More here.

China: The Dong family of Beijing

Food expenditure for one week: 1,233.76 Yuan or $155.06
Favorite foods: fried shredded pork with sweet and sour sauce

Seeing the weekly diet of families all around the world gives an insight into how much we and our diet are affected by economic, social, and political factors. Reasonpad blog:

Come see What The World Eats. A few years ago photographer Peter Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio started to photograph what family’s around the globe eat and wrote down what their weekly expenditure is. In 2005 they published an award winning book called Hungry Planet: What The World Eats.

This project turned out to be so educational that he’s currently still giving lectures at universities about this very subject. A current exhibition is held until May 9, 2010 is hosted by the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.

As you look at the photographs and see what they spend per week, you can draw a lot of different conclusions about their dietm their surroundings, their personal/economic circumstance and how globalization has influenced what people eat.

Reasonpad have put all the images from this Time article on one page, and provided the info for how much was spent, where the families are from, etc.

Photo: Luca Galuzzi (click for original size)

Abandoned former quarters of the Dalai Lama at the Potala. The empty vestment placed on the throne symbolises his absence

Wiki.

Photographer unknown. (9GAG via kottke)

The BBC website has a beautiful audiovisual slideshow with fantastically detailed photos of plankton, and a commentary to go with it.

Photo by David Fisher

Photo by Sebastian Lewis

(photos via light boner)

Just a small section of another great Shorpy image that caught my attention. See the full image.

Martine Franck (born 1938) is a Belgian photographer, and a member of the Magnum Photos agency. She was the second wife of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson after his divorce with Ratna Mohini, and is president and co-founder of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, which administrates his estate. (from wiki)

(via 3qd)

In this mindboggling video, photostock magnate Yuri Arcurs gives a tour of his vast studio in Denmark. There he knocks out stock images on an industrial scale, selling pictures for as little as 20c each — devastating the competition.

The video offers a fascinating insight into his whiter than white, faker than fake world! (via growabrain)