Volunteers spotted scores of ghostly planes while hunting through satellite images for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Many of these false positives stood out because they showed up as three separate brightly colored airplanes, an interesting artifact of the …
The splendor of this not often highlighted galaxy was increased with every processing step I took. This is a wonderful example of a galaxy with multiple arc-like plumes and a dust lane that *wraps* around the disk. I think the …
Tiny tropical snails with beautiful, jewel-like shells are going extinct almost as fast as scientists can discover them.
The most dangerous thing on Mars today isn’t a 1-ton laser-wielding robot: It’s dust. Researchers have now built a vacuum chamber that can help test how future probes and, one day, human explorers might fare against the mighty Martian dust.
Coal supplies over 40 percent of global electricity needs, and that percentage is going up. The only real question is how to minimize the damage. Dan Winters Proof that good things don’t always come in nice packages can be …
The Sun’s light provides a powerful tool for understanding the composition of materials in the Solar System. Today’s image features two views of Mercury provided by the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) instrument. As the Sun’s light hits …
Sticky bacterial mats called biofilms are already pretty impressive. But scientists have one-upped nature and figured out how to make biofilms bionic.
The images collected here are the winners of the 2014 Wellcome Image Awards, which celebrate striking science and medical images.
In celebration of the 24th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (on April 24, 1990) astronomers have taken an infrared-light portrait of a roiling region of starbirth located 6,400 light-years away.
The Hubble mosaic unveils a collection of …
This composite image contains data from Chandra (purple) that provides evidence for the survival of a companion star from the blast of a supernova explosion. Chandra’s X-rays reveal a point-like source in the supernova remnant at the location of a …
This full-disk image from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite was captured at 11:45 UTC (7:45 a.m. EDT) and shows the Americas on March 20, 2014. This date marks the start of astronomical spring in the northern hemisphere.
In 1910, Boston was the fifth biggest city in the United States, with a population just over 670,000. It was the second busiest port of entry for foreigners at the time, and 240,000 of its citizens were foreign born. A …
In the microscopic world beneath our feet there lives what is perhaps the toughest creature on Earth: the tardigrade. Also known as the water bear, this is an exceedingly tiny critter with an incredible resistance to just about everything: Go …
What’s neither black nor white but is radiating in a donut-shaped region of space around the Earth? The Van Allen belts, of course. And this week, scientists have discovered a new structure within these radiation belts, which they are calling …
This new Hubble image is centred on NGC 5793, a spiral galaxy over 150 million light-years away in the constellation of Libra. This galaxy has two particularly striking features: a beautiful dust lane and an intensely bright centre — much …
You can tell when someone’s faking a smile or pretending to be in pain, right? Sure you can. But computer scientists think they can build systems that do it even better. There’s already a Google Glass app in beta testing …
Great surprises in science don’t just happen – they’re engineered. This is the story of how a team of researchers kept one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in recent years under lock and key for many years, before casually dropping …
A new gully has appeared on a sloped crater wall on Mars. The channel, which was absent from images in Nov. 2010 but showed up in a May 2013 pic, does not appear to have been formed by water. Exactly …
The enormous cloud of gas and dust in the constellation Taurus contains many complex molecules. It is a hotbed of star formation.
Normally, human ears are incredibly good at focusing on sounds of specific frequencies and simultaneously filtering out the rest of the noise — say, your drinking buddy’s voice in a bar. Now, scientists have figured out how ears do this. …
Physicists have searched for a theory of quantum gravity for 80 years. But every proposed theory of how gravity particles might behave faces the same problem: upon close inspection, it doesn’t make mathematical sense. But as theoretical particle physicist Zvi …
A large new study of ovenbird lineages questions whether competing species push each other to evolve.
On 18 June 2009, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to map the surface of the Moon and collect measurements of potential future landing sites as well as key science targets. After two and a half years in a …
For centuries, the purpose of a narwhal’s tusk has eluded explanation. Now, researchers suggest that these small whales use their tusks as sensory organs and speculate that sensing changes in seawater salinity might help male narwhals stay safe, and locate …
The physics world was on fire yesterday after an announcement that astronomers had detected a signal from the beginning of time. This is exactly as cool as it sounds. Maybe even cooler. And it might lead to us learning further …
Published in 1844, the Atlas de Zoologie: ou collection de 100 planches contains illustrations of a number of creatures, some of which no longer walk this planet. Among those are thylacines — striped, carnivorous marsupials that went extinct when the …
One of agricultural biotechnology’s great success stories may become a cautionary tale of how short-sighted mismanagement squandered the benefits of genetic modification. After years of predicting that it would happen, scientists have documented the rapid evolution of corn rootworms resistant …
Saturn, which appears as only a thin, lit crescent, broken only by the shadows of its rings, poses gracefully for the Cassini spacecraft cameras.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 42 degrees below the ringplane. …
Scientists have an awesome word for things that look like they’re dead but aren’t really dead: cryptobiosis. Crypto for hidden, and biosis for life. Lots of organisms can do this. Scientists have previously revived microbes stuck in permafrost for tens …
A team of scientists may have detected a twist in light from the early universe known as primordial B-mode polarization that could help explain how the universe began. Such a finding has been compared in significance to the detection of …
