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Saturday 28 September 2013

BEST SCIENCE PHOTOS OF THE WEEK LVII


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Wow! The Most Amazing Images in Science This Week
By
Live Science, 28 September 2013.

The sinking of Venice, the oldest fish face and blooms on the Bering land bridge are just a few of the great images we found for you this week.

1. Venice sinking!

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Venice, the "floating city" of romance and gondolas, is slowly sinking into its watery foundations.

A new study using modern satellite data has shown the amount that Venice is sinking with an unprecedented level of resolution, allowing scientists to tease apart the influence of natural causes of the sinking, due to compaction of the sediments on which the city is built, versus man-made ones, such as building restoration.


2. 1st fish face

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A newly discovered fish fossil is the earliest known creature with what might be recognized as a face.

Entelognathus primordialis was an ancient fish that lived about 419 million years ago in the Late Silurian seas of China. The finding, detailed today (Sept. 25) in the journal Nature, provides a link between two groups of fishes previously thought to be unrelated, challenging long-held notions of how vertebrate faces evolved.


3. Stormy Sunset

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Credit: Mike Kvackay

This spectacular image of a lightning strike at sunset was submitted by Live Science reader Mike Kvackay. The photo was taken in Bozeman, Montana, while Kvackay was shooting a series of time-lapse images on a small pond.

"I heard some thunder in the distance and was about to stop shooting when I saw that lightning bolt," Kvackay told Live Science. "I didn't think much of it, but wanted to get my slider and two tripods back in my car before it started to storm. I checked my camera in the car and found that I caught that shot."

Kvackay caught a lucky break, he said, as he had stopped the time-lapse only a few seconds after the lightning bolt struck.

Kvackay used a Canon 7D to capture the phenomenal shot, with a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 lens with a 2-second shutter speed, and a slide-tracked 6-foot motorized dolly. [Related: Electric Earth – Stunning Images of Lightning]

4. A bat toad?

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Credit: Yufani Olaya via Rainforest Expeditions

What's the matter, bat got your tongue?

A park ranger in northwest Peru got a surprise when he encountered a toad with something in its mouth. This something happened to be a bat.


5. Amazing cat's paw nebula

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A new camera on a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere has captured a stunning view of the Cat's Paw Nebula, offering a colourful and detailed view of a star-forming region of the Milky Way.

Released by the European Southern Observatory, the new photo of the Cat's Paw Nebula located about 5,500 light-years from Earth is one of the first shots taken by ArTeMiS - a submillimetre-wavelength camera added to APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment in Chile. ESO officials also produced a video fly-through of the incredible Cat's Paw Nebula view using the new camera observations.


6. Hawaiian pancakes anyone?

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The biggest active volcano in the world is a towering stack of lava layers laid down over a million years, a new study finds.

The research could help solve a long-standing debate over how Hawaii's volcanic islands formed.


7. Strange spinning star

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A perplexing fast-spinning star just might be the "missing link" in a long-standing pulsar mystery, scientists say.

The so-called neutron star - a city-sized stellar remnant born from the explosive death of a larger star - is located about 18,000 light-years from Earth has the never-before-observed ability to change from one kind of pulsar to another and back again. You can watch a video animation of the pulsar here set to the music of rock band Atom Strange.


8. Gokyo lakes

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As the huge effort to compile the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report comes to a close this week, many researchers expect new certainty to emerge in such areas as sea level rise and global temperature increases.

Climate scientists are generally pleased with the evolution of and output of the group, though some would like to see stronger messages from it. Some scientists also want to cut down the timescale of the massive operation, which takes several years and is done on a volunteer basis by scientists.


9. Ancient Earth or Jupiter's Moon

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Anybody wondering what Earth was like 4 billion years ago should cast an eye toward Jupiter's hypervolcanic moon Io, a new study suggests.

Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, dissipating its massive stores of internal heat via intense eruptions that cover the entire moon with about 0.4 inches (1 centimetre) of lava every year. Earth probably went through a similar phase in its youth, back before the planet cooled enough for plate tectonics to start up, researchers report today (Sept. 25) in the journal Nature.


10. Bering land bridge blooms

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The transition from summer to fall has barely begun across most of the United States, but in Alaska fall has arrived with a colourful flourish.

In Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, gone are the shockingly bright pinks, yellows and purples of summer. They've been replaced by deeper and darker reds, yellows, greens and the beginnings of brown. The days are a crisp 34 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). With daylight slowly diminishing, visitors to this Alaskan wilderness must enjoy the colour while they can, because soon a blanket of white will fall upon the landscape.

The Bering Land Bridge National Preserve is one of the most remote U.S. national parks. It is a wilderness dotted with hot springs, ancient lava flows and the largest maar lakes (caused by a kind of volcanic eruption) in the world.

This national preserve protects a remnant of the Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia with North America more than 13,000 years ago. The Bering Land Bridge was a pathway for plants, animals and people to cross from old world to new.

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11. Amphibian 'death scene' fossil

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In rare cases, one of life's important childhood lessons - always chew your food properly - becomes fossilized. And now, anyone can own one of these reminders in rock. A specimen containing the remains of a large, predatory amphibian choking on another creature is up for auction in October.

Nearly 300 million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era, this predator attempted to eat another, smaller amphibian. The larger creature died mid-meal with the smaller one's body half-consumed. This type of fossil, in which a predator chokes on its prey, is known as an aspiration.


12. Animal with 'tide body clock'

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Most animals have a circadian clock that helps them distinguish night and day, but now researchers have found coastal animals seem to be equipped with a separate clock to track time via the tides.

The evidence comes from the discovery of internal clock genes that help some marine animals track the ebb and flow of the tides, according to two studies detailed today (Sept. 26) in the journals Current Biology and Cell Reports.


[Source: Live Science. Edited.]


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