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

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 19

ROBOTIC STRING HAND

This robotic hand is actually operated with extremely strong polymer strings, attached to actuators. Given how much our own muscles are like strings, it's surprising that we haven't seen anything quite like this before. Read more here.

Markus Breig

THE QUIETEST ROOM ON EARTH

This room, the "anechoic chamber" at Orfield Laboratories, is 99.99 percent sound absorbent, and holds the Guinness World Record for quietest room on the planet. Apparently it's so quiet it drives you insane--the only sounds you hear emanate from your own body, fluids gurgling and heart pumping and joints cracking--and nobody has ever been able to stand it for more than 45 minutes. Read more here.

Steve Orfield

TECHNOSENSUAL

Technosensual is an exhibit at quartier21, in Vienna--a chance for designers to show off high-tech fashions, equipped with LED lights, smoke machines, transforming fabrics, and more. Read more here.

quartier21

SPEEDY NANOPRINTING

Why is Vienna so cool all of a sudden? Here's another from the Big V (that is not a nickname): a new world record for the fastest 3-D printed nano-objects has been set by the Vienna University of Technology. Researchers there printed a 0.285mm model of a Formula 1 racing car in just over four minutes. Read more here.

Vienna University of Technology

CONCEPT BIKE

Frog, a company that designed not only the original Frog FZ Rana, which was so influential it's currently shown in the SFMOMA, but also the cases for Macintosh computers in the early '80s, has a new motorcycle concept. We'll admit to not understanding quite how it would, like, work--not sure what the benefit is to the big hole in the middle of the body, nor are we sure where the actual power to turn the wheels comes from. But it sure looks pretty! Read more at FastCoDesign.

Frog

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 17

DEWDROP INSECT

Ondrej Pakan's gorgeous macro shots of insects bedecked with dewdrops are just about the prettiest shots of what are basically just wet bugs we've ever seen. See more here.

Ondrej Pakan

ROBOT, MEET HUMAN

Robonaut 2 has been around for a few years now, but we never get tired of its exploits. And this picture shows the R2 reaching out to touch a human. NASA notes that it and GM are working on new robotic gloves to assist astronauts and other workers.

NASA

SPIDER GUITAR

This intricate arachnophilic guitar body looks...cool, I guess, if you're into stuff like that. But what's more impressive to us is that the whole body was made with a 3-D printer. Read more here.

Olaf Diegel

BALL OF BEES

Japanese honeybees have an insane defensive ploy: they swarm around the predator (like, say, a hornet) so aggressively that the heat from their bodies actually cooks the predator. Read more here.

Wikimedia Commons

THE TITANIC, 100 YEARS LATER

The April 2012 issue of National Geographic has a cover story with incredible photos of the sunken Titanic, a hundred years after the wreck. Only the newest imaging technology has made these pictures possible. See them over at Nat Geo.

Walden Media

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 16

DO YOU SEE A BIRD?

This image of the Seagull Nebula's 100-light-year wingspan was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday.

Harel Boren

MERCEDES WITH CLOAKING DEVICE

In the latest Mercedes commercial, one side of this F-Cell car has a camera recording the scenery it passes, while the other side displays that scenery on a field of LEDs, effectively letting you see through the car. Engadget has the video.

Mercedes

A DUST DEVIL ON MARS

Pictured: a Martian dust devil twisting across the Martian Amazonis Planitia region. The 100-foot-wide column of swirling air was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter last month as it passed over the northern hemisphere of Mars.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

BRICKLAYING WOMAN

Channi Anand captured this image of a female bricklayer at a plant on the outskirts of Jammu, Indian, on International Women's Day. Anand is an AP photographer based in and around India. From American Photo.

AP Photo/Channi Anand

FIRESTORM BIRTH

This image, from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, shows the chaos of star birth, dust, and collision out in the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. Read more here.

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

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 - 13

Star-Vapor

The Milky Way is a particularly dramatic galaxy, with its spiral arms. Most look more like this, the DDO 82 dwarf galaxy, which is about 13 million light-years away--like an amorphous cloud of "vapor," which are actually stars. Read more here.

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Croc Baby

Hey buddy! You are already kind of scary. Scary-cute. This photo was taken at a crocodile farm in the Philippines. Check out more amazing photojournalism like this over at American Photo.

Reuters/Romeo Ranoco

Manicured Turtles

It's important to track the endangered loggerhead turtle, but not particularly easy to keep the trackers on the turtles' backs. A novel solution: take advice from a manicurist. One of the Florida team called her manicurist, who recommended an acrylic base coat--a far better method that actually increased the life of the trackers by two to three months. Read more here.

Kate Mansfield

A Worker-Powered Desk

It's not a pedal-powered desk or anything, luckily. Instead, the Unplugged desk, from designer Eddi Törnberg, uses a variety of technologies to generate electricity, from piezoelectric fabric woven into the chair to some tricks to leverage the human body's heat output. It's not enough to power a laptop, says Mark Wilson over at FastCoDesign, but it does power a lamp.

Eddi Törnberg

"Salt Sprinkled on Black Velvet"

Captured by Hubble, this here is the dwarf galaxy UGC 5497, which has a bright blue appearance which lasts for a few million years--a short lifespan, comparatively--before exploding as supernovae. Read more here.

ESA/NASA

Aurora over Crater Lake

Photographer Brad Goldpaint took this shot of the Aurora Borealis over Oregon's Crater Lake a few weeks ago. It's a gorgeous one. Check out his site for more.

Brad Goldpaint

World's Largest Croc

This crocodile, found in the Philippines, is officially the world's largest, at more than 20 feet long. It's suspected of killing two people, which is partly why these people seem so excited to strap it onto a wagon.

Reuters

FAVORITE IMAGES OF THE WEEK - 12

Glowing Jellies

Part of the American Natural History Museum's "Creatures of Light" exhibit, the crystal jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, flashes green when it's touched. Read more here.

AMNH

Whales Doing It

This is the first time two humpback whales have ever been seen during mating. It is majestic and has led to several very good jokes. Read more here.

Jason Edwards

Algae Lake

China's Chaohu Lake has been suffering from a blue algae outbreak so thick it covers the entire body of water. Officials think it might be due to rising temperatures.

AFP/Getty Images

It's What We're Livin' In

Canon, makers of fine cameras and other photography wares, showed off a new "Mixed Reality" headset. It sounds bonkers. Read more about it here.

Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

Stellar Nursery

The ESO's Very Large Telescope snapped this image (well, "snapped" isn't quite right, but you get the idea) of NGC 6357, a stellar nursery about 8,000 light-years away. Read more here.

ESO

Bike Routes

This simulation, created with GPS trails, shows the routes taken by cycling pizza delivery drivers on one night in Manhattan. It's a tough job! Not least because riding a bike in Manhattan is pretty much exactly like driving a taxi in Crazy Taxi. Read more here.

America Revealed

Quokka

This little guy is a quokka, a small marsupial related to kangaroos and wallabies. Zookeepers at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney are attempting to map footprints of all of the zoo's creatures.

Reuters/Daniel Munoz