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Sunday 19 May 2013

BEST SCIENCE PHOTOS OF THE WEEK XLVIII


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Best Science Photos of the Week
By
Live Science, 18 May 2013.

1. Quirky frogs

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Neon green, vivid orange, striped and spotted - the frogs are back! An exhibit featuring live frogs from around the world is returning to the American Museum of Natural History here in New York.

The exhibition, entitled "Frogs: A Chorus of Colours," features more than 150 live frogs from approximately 25 species, from the brilliantly coloured poison dart frog to the giant African bullfrog. The exhibit opens Saturday (May 18) and runs through Jan. 5, 2014.


2. Melting glaciers

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The world's glaciers lost 260 gigatons of water each year between 2003 and 2009, making these rivers of ice responsible for almost a third of sea-level rise in that time, new research finds.

The study, to appear tomorrow (May 17) in the journal Science, used multiple methods to pin down estimates of how much ice is lost from glaciers. The results suggest that on-the-ground measurements yield estimates that are too extreme, but some satellite methods don't go far enough.


3. Weirdest Earth maars

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In Alaska, where the winter runs colder, the sun shines longer and the mountains rise taller than any other state, the Land of the Midnight Sun can claim another superlative: The biggest and strangest maars ever found on Earth.

Maars are craters left behind after violent volcanic steam explosions, sparked when rising magma runs into groundwater, which then blows up like a bomb.


4. A busy sunspot

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An overachieving sunspot on the surface of the sun unleashed its fourth major solar flare in two days late Tuesday (May 14), a solar storm that may deal Earth a glancing blow, space weather experts say.

The active sunspot AR1748 roared to life Tuesday night releasing an X-class solar flare - the strongest type the sun can experience - that peaked at 9:48 p.m. EDT (0148 May 15 GMT), according to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Centre in Boulder, Colo. The flare came after a relative lull in activity from sunspot AR1748, which fired off three monster X-class solar flares within a 24-hour period between Sunday and Monday.


5. Talking about volcanoes

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An amazing variety of rocks appear in Hawaii from a single type of molten rock called basalt. Here's a guide to some of the weird and wonderful stones that result from the active lava flows in Hawaii, as well as a description of different types of volcanic rocks.


6. The SOAR telescope

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A powerful new ultraviolet laser that fires into the night sky is helping scientists take their most detailed look yet at a distant star cluster.

A team of astronomers at the Southern Observatory for Astrophysical Research (SOAR) and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Cerro Pachon in Chile used an instrument called SOAR Adaptive Module, or simply SAM, to peer deep inside the crowded NGC 6496 cluster to understand how its stars evolved.


7. Sparkling blue mineral

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Collectors prize the copper mineral linarite for its intense blue colour, but specimens with crystals large enough to truly show off this hue are rare.

Linarite, which also contains lead, typically shows up in the form of microcrystals, "little sparkling blue things that coat other stuff," said Jim Walker, a director of the nature and science department at the auction house Heritage Auctions. "You don't really get any idea what the crystal form is, because their sizes are fractions of a millimetre."


8. A Society Island

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Charles Darwin sparked more than one controversy over the natural progression of life. One such case involved the evolution of coral atolls, the ring-shaped coral reefs that surround submerged tropical islands.

Coral reefs are actually huge colonies of tiny animals that need sunlight to grow. After seeing a reef encircling Moorea, near Tahiti, Darwin came up with his theory that coral atolls grow as reefs stretch toward sunlight while ocean islands slowly sink beneath the sea surface. (Cooling ocean crust, combined with the weight of massive islands, causes the islands to sink.)


9. Beautiful plankton

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As weather warms up off the coast of France, blooms of plankton have once again begun to form, creating a beautiful, multi-coloured swirl visible from space.

NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites acquired these images of the colourful blooms on April 20 and May 4, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. On the later date, a noticeably larger bloom occurred, fuelled by nutrient runoff from French rivers and warmer temperatures in the Bay of Biscay.


10. Greenland glacier crack-up

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A deafening rumble alerted two scientists to an amazing sight: the collapse of one of Greenland's biggest and fastest-moving glaciers.

And because the scientists were already in place with a time-lapse camera, they were able to capture the calving event - one of the biggest of these glacier collapses ever recorded on film.


[Source: Live Science. Edited.]


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