FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 20

UFO GALAXY?

So here's the thing about this galaxy, which is otherwise known as NGC 2683. It's a regular spiral galaxy, about 35 million light-years from Earth. But given our (read: Hubble's) vantage point, we see it from the side, so it has a sort of a flying saucer shape. But that's the only reason we call it the UFO galaxy! If we were elsewhere it'd be a regular spiral galaxy. [via Livescience]

ESA/Hubble & NASA

SNAIL MASSAGE

The snail massage, available in Siberian Russia, is believed to help eliminate wrinkles and make skin appear more youthful. We can't speak to that, though this picture did gross out a few of our less slime-tolerant writers.

Ilya Naymushin/Reuters

PINK PANTHER, SORT OF

Couple things wrong with calling this a naturally pink panther: First, it's not a panther/cougar/puma/mountain lion--it's a leopard. Second, it's claimed to be pink, but I'm not so sure about it from this photo. It definitely looks a little blushed, but...what do you guys think? Read more here.

Courtesy of Deon De Villiers of SafaGraphics

PASTELS IN ORION

The watery pastels of this false-color photo of the Orion Nebula come from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. All those little dots are baby stars--Orion is a nursery of sorts. Read more here.

NASA

TINY ANCIENT MAMMOTH

This is the world's best-preserved baby mammoth carcass (that we know of). It's about 42,000 years old, and currently on display in Hong Kong. For more photos like this, check out American Photo.

Aaron Tam/AFP/Getty

SPACE MARGARITA

Not sure why this satellite is shaped like a margarita glass, but NASA's funding an exploration into its ability to harvest sunlight and beam the energy back down to Earth via microwaves. Read more here.

John Mankins via PhysOrg

MAPPING WIKIPEDIA

Mapping Wikipedia is a project to map out where (and in what language) Wikipedia's writers are writing from. It's fascinating, actually--why are people writing Arabic articles in New York, Boston, and DC, but hardly at all in Philadelphia? Why are Italians writing so many more English-language articles than Spaniards? Play with it here.

Mapping Wikipedia

Астрономы обнаружили самую горячую экзопланету

Температура поверхности планеты выше, чем у большинства звезд.

Астрономы открыли похожую на Юпитер экзопланету, которая фактически "испаряется" своей звездой, сообщает NASA. 

Как отмечают исследователи, температура поверхности планеты KELT-9b составляет 4600 Кельвин, то есть она горячее, чем большинство звезд. Вместе с тем, звезда KELT-9, вокруг которой вращается планета, еще горячее. По мнению исследователей, она заставляет испаряться вещество планеты. 

Ученые отмечают, что KELT-9b – самая горячая газовая экзопланета из всех, которые были обнаружены на данный момент. Она в 2,8 раза массивнее Юпитера, но ее плотность составляет только половину плотности газового гиганта Солнечной системы. 

Планета приливно связана со своей звездой, так же, как Луна с Землей. Это означает, что одна сторона экзопланеты всегда повернута к звезде, а вторая  - всегда находится в тени. Это приводит к тому, что молекулы воды, диоксида углерода и метана не могут образовываться на "дневной" стороне, поскольку она подвергается слишком сильной бомбардировке радиацией. На "ночной" же стороне они, скорее всего, могут быть образованы, но только временно. Возраст звезды KELT-9 составляет около 300 миллионов лет, то есть, это очень молодая звезда, в два раза больше и в два раза горячее, чем Солнце. 

По мнению исследователей, за планетой может тянуться хвост испаренного "бомбардировками" звезды материала, который делает ее похожей на комету.   Ранее сообщалось о том, что ученые открыли экзопланету с противоречащей теоретическим моделям орбитой. Вращаясь вокруг довольно небольшой звезды, она отклонена от плоскости вращения звезды на 76%. Планета обладает массой, близкой к массе Юпитера, но располагается на гораздо более близком расстоянии к звезде.

Больше читайте здесь: https://zn.ua/TECHNOLOGIES/astronomy-obnaruzhili-samuyu-goryachuyu-ekzoplanetu-250543_.html

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 15

Living and breathing

Hannah Cohen / MIT

1 of 5

Most of us sweat a lot when we work out. And while many workout clothes today have been specifically designed to help sweat evaporate more easily, none of them had done so using bacteria. Until now. A group of researchers at MIT developed a prototype that uses B. subtilis—when it comes in contact with sweat, it absorbs the moisture and relaxes, allowing the clothing to relax, too. The researchers say this new tech is just a stepping stone on the way to developing a shirt that can also make your sweat smell good.

No dye needed

Joshua Stevens/NASA

2 of 5

This lake isn't great for swimming. Located in Northern Tanzania, Lake Natron is one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Because its located just beneath a volcano, the lake receives a steady supply of molten lava, the contents of which turns the lake its fiery red color. While most living creatures wouldn't survive one second in that water, some salt-loving extremist bacteria bask in the briny depths. The image here of the lake was taken this past March via the The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8.

Lift off

Rocket Lab

3 of 5

New Zealand's first commercial rocket took to the skies this week, following three scrubbed attempts. The Electron Rocket, which belongs to New Zealand's Rocket Lab company, stands only at 55 feet tall. It could become an inexpensive way to place small satellite systems into space.

Jupiter up close

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles

4 of 5

New images from NASA's Juno mission, which launched in 2011 and went into orbit around Jupiter in August of last year, show the gassy planet's turbulent atmosphere. This one, which NASA just released this past week, shows that both of Jupiter's poles contain swirling storms the size of Earth.

Shape shifters

Michael Indresano Production

5 of 5

Can't decide on what shape of pasta you want? Perhaps one day you might not have to. A group of researchers from MIT used the adaptive absorption of gelatin to develop a pasta sits flat in its packaging, but then forms into 3D shapes when it comes into contact with water. With some more research, they think consumers could even design their own shapes at home. Here's a cool video of the process in action.

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 14

THE PRAWN

Astrophotographer Dieter Willasch created this great shot of the Prawn Nebula, in the tail of Scorpius. It's about 6,000 light-years away. Read more here.

Dieter Willasch

NOT FROM OUTER SPACE

This image may look like it's capturing a faraway star or some other celestial body, but it's not--it's actually the first-ever snapshot of an individual atom's shadow. Read more here.

Kielpinski Group, Griffith University

FOURTH/MOON

Another great fireworks shot, this was taken in Kansas City, Kansas, where the fireworks and the moon both lit up the sky. For more great photojournalism like this, check out American Photo.

AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

SIFTING STARLIGHT

New tech offers a better view of exoplanets by using advanced optics to remove the starlight from a photograph. Here's a look at HD 157728, a nearby star 1.5 times larger than the sun. Be sure to check out the whole story here.

Project 1640/NASA-JPL

DARK GALAXIES

For the first time, astronomers have been able to get a better look at starless "dark galaxies," theorized to exist but never directly seen. Even now, it takes some annotation in this image. The quasar lighting them up is circled in red; the dark galaxies are circled in blue. Read the whole story here.

Royal Astronomical Society

MARS PANORAMA

It took 817 images to create a composite panoramic view from NASA's Mars rover, but the results are worth the effort, offering a rare glimpse of the red planet. For more on the image, check out PopPhoto.

NASA

STUNNED FISH

Scientists are using an electric current, shown here, to stun fish in Mississippi and Illinois rivers so they can be studied. It's thought the local fish populations might be hurt by the arrival of Asian Carp, and researchers are scooping up the stunned fish for a closer look.

AP Photo/Robert Ray

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 10

Kevin Hand (JPL/Caltech), Jack Cook (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Howard Perlman (USGS)

Europa's Water

Here's what Earth (right) and Jupiter's moon Europa (left) would look like if all the water was removed and shaped into a lovely blue sphere. Europa's ocean is two to three times larger than our own. Read more here.

Libero Rutilo

The Green Wheel

This hydroponic wheel was actually, according to FastCoDesign, thought up by NASA back in the 1980s as a way to grow plants in space. It was never actually made, for some reason, but designer Libero Rutilo brought it back in this mockup. Seems like it's work well in apartments as well!

RayFish Footwear

Stingray Leather

We're pretty sure this isn't possible for a few reasons--like, we haven't sequenced the stingray's genome, and it seems unlikely that we'd have this level of control anyway--but a company called RayFish is attempting to offer a customized shoe made of genetically modified stingray leather. You pick what you want the stingray to look like, RayFish creates said stingray, then kills it, skins it, and makes shoes out of it. Just for you! It's weird. Read more here.

EPFL/Grégoire Courtine via Reuters

Run Rat Run

This rat may be running a little oddly, but remember what happened to it--this rat was previously paralyzed, and a combination of drugs actually enabled it to walk again. Read more about it here, and don't forget to check out American Photo Mag for more amazing photojournalism like this.

X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; IR & UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

Pinwheel Galaxy

The Pinwheel Galaxy, located in Ursa Major, is about 21 million light-years from Earth--but we can still enjoy its cheerfulness. Read more here.

Jennifer R.S. Gordon and Joaquin C. Brieva

Half Aged

This guy is a truck driver, 69 years old, who's been exposed to 25 years of direct sunlight thanks to his job--but only on the left side of his face. So we get a first-hand view at how much more aged human skin looks when bombarded with sunlight over the years. Crazy. [via Gizmodo]

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 8

NASA/CampoAlto/V. Robles

Mars On Earth

Chile's Atacama Desert contains Earth's closest Mars-like conditions: It's extremely dry with high UV radiation from the sun. So naturally, NASA has made the area it's go-to practice facility for tests and experiments that they may one day perform on the red planet. Recently, scientists from NASA’s Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies completed their second season of tests. The tested KREX-2 rover was able to rove, drill, and detect life signs all at the same time. Such multi-tasking robotic rovers could ultimately help scientists to figure out if there was (or still is) microbial life forms under Mars' surface.

Image courtesy of UW–Madison

A Simulated Tornado

Believe it or not, it’s springtime. And with it comes Tornado season—and tornado simulations. By modeling real data with a supercomputer, a team led by Leigh Orf at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has re-created this tornado-producing supercell that spawned several strong tornadoes in May 2011, including the EF-5 that touched down near El Reno, Oklahoma and caused a 63-mile path of destruction. These simulators can help us better understand the formation and structure of this extreme weather form.

NASA/Chris Gunn

NASA's Ghosts

It takes some artistic tricks to see ghosts around a space telescope. A NASA photographer recently captured this amazing and freaky picture during a lights-out inspection on the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Because the special flashlights used for testing worked better in the dark, the engineers kept the lights off. To combat the dim (or nonexistent) light, the photographer used a longer than normal exposure, making the moving technicians look like blurred ghosts.

X-ray: NASA/CXC/University of Alberta/A.Bahramian et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

A Black Hole Meets A White Dwarf Star

In a new study out this week in the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers found a white dwarf star orbiting around a black hole. It's a pretty rare find. Only a handful of binary systems like this one have been found in such dense globular star clusters. The researchers hope to learn more about this star-and-black-hole pair in future, and space-based gravitational wave observatories could be the key to its secrets.

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS

A FICTIVE FLIGHT ABOVE REAL MARS from Jan Fröjdman on Vimeo.

The anaglyph images of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera holds information about the topography of Mars surface. There are hundreds of high-resolution images of this type. This gives the opportunity to create different studies in 3D. In this film I have chosen some locations and processed the images into panning video clips. There is a feeling that you are flying above Mars looking down watching interesting locations on the planet. And there are really great places on Mars! I would love to see images taken by a landscape photographer on Mars, especially from the polar regions. But I'm afraid I won't see that kind of images during my lifetime.

It has really been time-consuming making these panning clips. In my 3D-process I have manually hand-picked reference points on the anaglyph image pairs. For this film I have chosen more than 33.000 reference points! It took me 3 months of calendar time working with the project every now and then.

The colors in this film are false because the anaglyph images are based on grayscale images. I have therefore color graded the clips. But I have tried to be moderate doing this. The light regions in the clips are yellowish and the dark regions bluish. The clips from the polar regions (the last clips in the film) have a white-blue tone.There are a lot of opinions and studies of what the natural colors on Mars might be. But the dark regions of dust often seems to have a bluish tone. Please study this issue on e.g sites by NASA.

This film is not scientific. As a space enthusiast I have just tried to visualize the planet my way.
The video begins with a nearby approach to Mars moon Phobos.
Some of the anaglyphs used can be seen on my blog, please visit:
av-creo.com/fictive-flight-real-mars

Please watch the film in 2K if possible for greater details.

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 6

NASA

Beauty In The World

NASA's GOES-16 satellite, which launched in November of last year, sent back its first images to Earth this week—and they are gorgeous. The satellite captures images in 16 different wavelengths of light, allowing scientists to better study atmospheric conditions. In the process, it makes some really nice looking images of our lovely planet. Don't believe me? Take a closer look here.

Smithsonian/National Zoo

Cuteness Needed

Zoos and aquariums across the country decided we needed an infusion of cuteness after this long week of political news. So they started a #cuteanimaltweetoff on Twitter, with each facility posting the cutest animal photo they have. If you need a bright spot in your day, this is sure to cheer you up. Here's a newborn female gray seal pup, born on Saturday at the National Zoo and posted on the Smithsonian's twitter account.

H/T The New York Times

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Death Star Moon

This is not a screenshot from Star Wars. It's a moon in our solar system that looks eerily similar to the Death Star. Orbiting Saturn, Tethys boasts a huge, suspiciously cinematic crater.

Jose C. E. Mendoza

Harry The Crab

Meet the newest Harry Potter character—except this one doesn't do magic. Instead, you can find him crawling around near the coast of Guam. A group of researchers announced this week that the newest species of crab discovered would be named Harryplax severus, a combination of the main character in the popular children's book series and the misunderstood Severus Snape.

YouTube

Firefighting Jetpack

Yes, that's a man in a jetpack, and yes, he's putting out a fire. First responders in Dubai tested out the new Dolphin jetpack this week. The system seems to lift the rider into the air via a tube, allowing him a better angle for putting out the fire. Read our take on how it works here.

Boeing

Sky High Fashion

The first astronauts traveling to space with private companies are going to fly in style. Boeing just released its new spacesuit, which is meant to be more comfortable and less bulky than NASA's current offerings. Hopefully it will be just as functional, too.

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 5

NASA/Joshua Stevens

The West Coast has been hit bad this week with torrential rain and snowfall. This .gif shows the precipitation, which is measured every 30 minutes, from Jan. 7 through Jan. 10. It's intense; California’s Mammoth Mountain received some 133 inches.

Rebecca Saxe, Atsushi Takahashi and Ben Deen / Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT / Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT

A new study out this week found that infants as young as four months old understand and process faces like adults do. The authors say that this suggests that the visual cortex in our brain is already highly structured and formed by the time we are born.

Apple

This week 10 years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the very first iPhone—a device that forever changed how we use and design mobile phones. Here’s what Twitter users thought about the device when the concept was brand new.

NASA

Obama On Mars

Though President Obama’s time as leader of the U.S. is coming to an end, his efforts can still be recognized in places as distant as Mars. This image, of the Curiosity rover’s deck (taken by one of its own cameras on its 44th Martian day on the red planet) contains the signatures of the outgoing president and his VP, Joe Biden.

USGS

Red Listed

The rusty-patched bumblebee just became the first bee species in the continental United States to join the endangered species list. According to the Fish and Wildlife service, the population has decreased by 87 percent since the 1990s. This decline is likely due to a combination of factors, including habitat loss, climate change, and pesticide use.

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 2

NASA

Hurricane Tracker

A NASA mission called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which includes eight small satellites, launched this week. Its goal is to better understand how hurricanes form in order to more accurately predict how and when they will occur. One advantage of this system is that it will focus only on areas around the tropics, where most hurricanes form.

XPRIZE

Patient, Diagnose Thyself

In many ways, the tricorder in Star Trek is the ultimate piece of medical technology: A handheld device that can diagnose any disease in the body. In 2012, tech company Qualcomm created an XPRIZE competition to challenge engineers and doctors to create a device similar to the fictional tool. We took a first look at the two finalists' prototypes, which show us that our future doctor might simply be a tiny, high-tech medical box.

Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory

Snow Light

The weather these past two weeks has been rough for communities around the Great Lakes. Last week, the region was smothered with several feet of snow, and this week, an arctic air mass piled a few more feet on top. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite, which can detect even extremely dim light sources, took this image above. The white areas show where the full moon is reflecting off of large piles of snow.

Department of Transportation

Talking Cars

Behind the wheel, humans make mistakes and cause accidents. That's mostly because we have bad communication skills (among other reasons). To make roads safer, the U.S. Department of Transportation wants cars to "talk" to each other. New technology that forces cars to broadcast their surroundings to other vehicles might prevent many accidents in the future.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Dry Ice Bubbles

These crazy land formations, which look more like human intestines, can only be found on the south pole of Mars. They form when dry ice (carbon dioxide), which makes up the pole, is punctuated with holes. Over time, air slowly leaks in and puffs up the surface.

T.H. Prettyman and N. Yamashita, Planetary Science Institute

Ceres On Ice

Scientists are pretty sure that Ceres, the dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter, holds water. But a new paper out this week suggests that it might contain more than liquid H2O: A portion of its surface, particularly near the poles, could be coated in a thin layer of ice. Studying how it built up there will help researchers understand how ice forms all over our solar system.