1. Suicidal comets
Scientists can use daredevil comets to probe regions of the sun's complex, hellishly hot atmosphere that are off-limits to spacecraft, a new study reports.
The sun's magnetic field caused the tail of Comet Lovejoy to wiggle in strange ways during the icy wanderer's suicidal plunge through the solar atmosphere in December 2011, researchers have found, suggesting that the close approaches of such "sungrazer comets" can help astronomers better understand Earth's star.
2. Groovy birds
Humans aren't the only animals that dance to a beat: Deep in the forest of Southeastern Australia, male lyrebirds groove to their own music, a new study reports.
The study researchers found that during mating displays, male superb lyrebirds (Menura novaehollandiae) - medium-size birds with peacock-like tail feathers - sing songs and perform coordinated dance movements. And just as humans waltz to waltz music and salsa to salsa music, male lyrebirds have different dance moves for different kinds of music. One lyrebird move even resembles "the grapevine."
3. Naked Antarctica
The hidden face of Antarctica, concealed for more than 30 million years beneath thick ice, is revealed in a new map and video of the continent's rocky surface, released today by NASA.
The project, called BedMap2, is part of an international collaboration led by the British Antarctic Survey to calculate the total extent of ice in Antarctica - an essential step in predicting potential future sea level rise. To do so, researchers needed to know the details of the continent's underlying topography, from broad valleys to buried mountain ranges.
4. Reappearing frog
The Hula painted frog was declared extinct in 1996, the first time any amphibian had been declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a conservation group.
The decision was guided by the best available scientific data at the time: Nobody had seen any sign of the creature since its sole known habitat, the Hula Valley wetlands in northern Israel, had been drained in 1955. Then, in October 2011, a routine patrol turned up an adult male of the species. Further searching uncovered another 10 Hula painted frogs.
5. 'Mars rat' discovered?
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will apparently perform no follow-up studies of a Red Planet rock that resembles a rodent, dealing a blow to the nascent field of Martian mammalogy.
The so-called "Mars rat" has generated a lot of Internet interest lately, with some UFO buffs claiming that it may be an indigenous Red Planet life form or an Earth rodent Curiosity carried to Mars as part of a secret experiment.
6. Moore tornado scar
The numerous photos and videos taken on the ground after a massive EF5 tornado tore through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore on May 20 showed the individual scale of the destruction. A new satellite image shows the full scale of the disaster, with the trail of damage the tornado left visible as a scar across the landscape.
The twister touched down at 2:56 p.m. CDT, some 4.4 miles (7.1 kilometres) west of the town of Newcastle, and was on the ground for about 40 minutes, barrelling through Moore and finally dissipating 4.8 miles (7.7 km) east of the city at 3:35 p.m. CDT, according to National Weather Service surveyors. The total path of the tornado was 17 miles (27 km) long and 1.3 miles (2.1 km) across at its widest. The tornado started and ended its life as an EF0, the lowest rating on the Enhanced Fujita scale, but at its peak, it was a terrible EF5, the highest ranking on the scale.
7. Atoms' quantum spin
Physicists have revealed a new way to control the spins of atoms, an achievement that could open the way for new kinds of sensors while also shedding light on fundamental physics.
While scientists have been able to nudge the spins of atoms in the past, this new achievement, detailed in the June 6 issue of the journal Nature, is the first time they've done it in a strange chilled gas called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
8. Ghostly seal
An ethereal seal emerges from a forest of kelp in the winning photograph from the 2013 Annual Underwater Photography Contest held by the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science.
The haunting image was taken in California by amateur photographer Kyle McBurnie. Other 2013 honourees include colourful shrimp, crabs and fish, including a male jawfish incubating a clutch of eggs in his mouth near Riviera Beach, Florida.
9. Real-life lizard king
A lizard the size of a German shepherd once roamed Myanmar, a new fossil analysis reveals.
The lizard, one of the largest ever known, has been dubbed Barbaturex morrisoni in honour of The Doors' singer Jim Morrison, who once wrote a song that included the lyrics, "I am the lizard king/I can do anything."
10. Cat's paw
A nebula that shines about 5,500 light-years from Earth could be going through a "baby boom," according to a new study.
NGC 6334 (the Cat's Paw Nebula) might be one of the most productive star-forming regions in the Milky Way. The nebula is home to tens of thousands of newly formed stars and plays host to about 200,000 suns' worth of star-creating material.
11. Awww! Baby monkey
A baby kipunji, one of the rarest species of African monkey, sticks close to its mother in a new photo that was released today (June 5) by wildlife conservationists.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), headquartered in New York City, circulated the photo of the baby kipunji (Rungwecebus kipunji) this morning on Twitter.
12. Cool octocoral
Two new species of coral have been found on the West Coast of the United States and Canada. One of the species was discovered in a tide pool on the outskirts of San Diego, while the other was found by divers near the coast of British Columbia.
Both are types of octocorals, so named because each mouth of these corals has eight tentacles around it, said Gary Williams, a researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, who described the species in the journal ZooKeys.
13. Swirly Milky Way
Our home in the Milky Way could be much larger than ever thought before, according to a new study.
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) found that the area of the galaxy that holds Earth and the rest of the solar system is a prominent feature of the spiral galaxy.
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