WE’VE been watching with interest since the new Biomedical Picture of the Day website went live (in beta testing, strictly speaking) a couple of months ago. Known as BPoD, the site is managed by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and says it “aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biomedicine”.
Here at LabHomepage,we’re big fans of the use of images to engage people in science, and hope this new experiment proves fruitful. There certainly should be no shortage of raw material.
Selection of BPoD daily images from Feb 2012 - fluorescence is a common theme (click to be taken to the BPoD site)
One concern we have, though, is that a lot of these biomedical images can look rather similar to each other – an almost uniformly abstract arrangements of green, blues, and magentas. We’re pleased to see that, in the last few weeks, the people behind BPoD have been harvesting a broad range of image types, although the predictable flourescence microscope shots still make up the majority of those on the site.
Still, it is an interesting initiative and deserves some success. It follows in the footsteps of Nasa’s excellent Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD) site, which we also recommended recently. To be fair, we think that images taken by telescope are as likely to be repetitive as those taken by microscope, and in both cases there is the occasional show-stopper that makes the whole exercise worthwhile.
Visit the BPod site here: http://www.bpod.mrc.ac.uk/