1. Monster Saturn storm
Spectacular new images from a NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn have captured the most detailed views ever of an enormous hurricane churning around the ringed planet's north pole.
The stunning new images and video of the Saturn hurricane, which were taken by NASA's Cassini probe, show that the storm's eye is 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometres) wide - about 20 times bigger than typical hurricane eyes on Earth. And the Saturn maelstrom is more powerful than its Earth counterparts, with winds at its outer edge whipping around at 330 mph (530 km/h).
2. Snowpack from space
Every winter, water managers in the West plunge metal tubes into high mountain snow, tracking its depth in order to predict how much water thirsty residents, farmers and power companies will get after the spring thaw.
The sampling system leaves large room for error, scientists admit. So, this year, in California and Colorado, the snowpack tests went high-tech. NASA gauged the snowpack with a plane-mounted device, called the Airborne Snow Observatory, which created detailed maps of snow depth and predicted melt.
3. Cute capybara
Richard Muller, a physicist at Berkeley and a founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, used to be a sceptic on climate change. His analysis of climate data changed his mind; today he, like the overwhelming majority of scientists, believes that climate change is real and caused by people. But, also like most scientists, Muller's evidence comes primarily from the statistical analysis of large numbers of temperature observations over many years, not from direct observations of nature.
Ntôni Kisêdjê, leader of the Kisêdjê people in the Xingu river basin in Mato Grosso, Brazil, has a different perspective. Ntôni is a traditional healer and a highly skilled forest farmer, and like most of his peers across the Amazon he pays very careful attention to what the myriad plants and animals of the forest are doing at different times of the year, and to the weather.
4. Solar plane takes off
A solar-powered airplane that can fly day and night without using a single drop of fuel embarked on an unprecedented flight across the United States today (May 3).
The solar-powered aircraft, named Solar Impulse, took off from Moffett Airfield near San Francisco, California, shortly after 9:00 a.m. EDT (6:00 a.m. PDT). The plane will now head south on the first 19-hour leg of its journey, and is expected to touch down at Phoenix's Sky Harbour International Airport on Saturday (May 4) at 4:00 a.m. EDT (1:00 a.m. PDT).
5. The amazing brain
For the first time, a brain region has been found that may control aging throughout the whole body, a new study reports.
A signalling pathway in the brain region known as the hypothalamus could speed up or slow down aging in mice. If it applies in humans, the discovery could open up possibilities for slowing age-related diseases and increasing life span.
6. Lonely clouded leopard
The Formosan clouded leopard, a clouded-leopard subspecies native to Taiwan, is now extinct, according to a team of zoologists.
"There is little chance that the clouded leopard still exists in Taiwan," zoologist Chiang Po-jen told Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA). "There may be a few of them, but we do not think they exist in any significant numbers."
7. Star-spawning space cloud
An amazing new photo from a telescope in Chile reveals a cloud of star-producing gas and dust glowing brightly 5,000 light-years from Earth.
The new image, unveiled today (May 2) by the European Southern Observatory, shows the cosmic wonder NGC 6559, gaseous nebula in the constellation Sagittarius. Hot, young stars are forming from the gas and dust inside the interstellar cloud.
8. Bug's eye camera
A new digital camera developed by researchers mimics insects’ multifaceted vision. So far, the results seem pretty buzz-worthy, producing images that likely rival what many bugs see.
The insect-inspired camera consists of a hemispherical surface studded with a dense array of lenses and photo detectors. The device could be used in applications ranging from surveillance to the scoping of the human body.
9. World's smallest movie
An ensemble cast of carbon atoms stars in the world's smallest stop-motion movie created by researchers at IBM.
The video "A Boy and His Atom" features thousands of atoms that have been carefully arranged into nearly 250 frames with a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), a Nobel Prize-winning tool invented by scientists at IBM three decades ago. The tool first allowed scientists to visualize single atoms.
10. City constellations
A new set of city maps reveals a constellation of human motion in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.
The research, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal but submitted to the paper pre-print website arXiv.org on April 4, uses colourful dots to show how people move on a daily basis over the course of a year. Each dot represents a frequent Twitter user who has enabled geotagging so the location of their Tweets is easily pinpointed. The lighter the colour of the dot, the farther that person travelled in 2011, according to his or her Twitter feed.
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