Week in pictures: Atomic movies to galactic storms (slideshow)
From planetary, super-size hurricanes and next-generation space flight to bathing with Google Glass and the world's smallest movie, here are the best tech pictures of the week.
James Martin
James Martin is the Managing Editor of Photography at CNET.
His photos capture technology's impact on society - from the widening wealth gap in San Francisco, to the European refugee crisis and Rwanda's efforts to improve health care.
From the technology pioneers of Google and Facebook, photographing Apple's Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Sundar Pichai, to the most groundbreaking launches at Apple and NASA, his is a dream job for any documentary photography and journalist with a love for technology.
Exhibited widely, syndicated and reprinted thousands of times over the years, James follows the people and places behind the technology changing our world, bringing their stories and ideas to life.
SpaceShipTwo fires rocket engine in supersonic flight
CNET brings you the Pictures of the Week -- the images from this week's tech stories that stood out, defining the future and all that the world might become.
From outer space to the inner ear, biology to bionics, here are a few of this week's greatest hits.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, billed as the world's first commercial space plane, notched an important milestone by firing its rocket engine during flight for the first time during a test flight this week at Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
During the flight, the space-ready passenger space plane detached from its dual-hull mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, at an altitude of 47,000 feet while being piloted by Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury of builder Scaled Composites.
2 of 7 IBM
Every atom matters in tiny film
Called "A Boy and His Atom," this animated film features a small boy having a good old time as he bounces around, plays catch, and dances. The twist? The film, produced by IBM, was shot at the atomic level and features 130 atoms that were painstakingly placed, atom by atom, as the researchers shot 250 individual frames.
In a stunning image released this week, NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped this spectacular picture of an enormous hurricane on Saturn this past November. The storm is such an extreme size that the image of the gigantic hurricane has a scale of about 1 mile per pixel.
5 of 7 Archie Whitehead
Iron Man costume from scratch
The materials for Archie Whitehead's Iron Man suit cost around $500, with some portions of the costume made from foam rubber, automotive spray paint gives it the glossy, just-built-by-a-billionaire look. Battle scars across the helmet hint at some epic conflict. It took several months to put the costume together.
6 of 7 Queen's University
The flexible phone
The MorePhone is made with a flexible display and shape memory alloy wires. When a call comes in, it activates the wires and causes the whole phone to curl up. It's an unmistakeable visual cue that you've got someone on the line.
7 of 7 Robert Scoble/Google+
Can Google Glass ever be fashionable?
When real, normal people get a hold of Google Glass, they may be fascinated, or you might see uber-dork Robert Scoble in the shower, and just get really freaked out, like we did.
The heads-up display augmented reality is so awkward, many just laugh when first confronted with someone wearing Glass. It might just be strange enough to make nerds nerdy again.
