Science News

The patterns that can be produced by a fluid like oil or water on a nonstick surface will depend upon the amount of liquid and how much the liquid is repelled from the surface.

Imagine a layered cake, a parfait, or any layered dessert. A similar type of layering occurs in thin films of block copolymers, only the layers are tens of nanometers thick (a hundred thousand times thinner than a sheet of paper)!

Prosthetic limbs are wonderful for restoring mobility to folks who've lost a leg, but form can sometimes get lost in the prosthetic function.

The man on the picture, William McElligott, spent 28 years of his life driving a delivery truck in Chicago. Only the left side of his face was exposed to the sun, with the result that it now looks much older than the right side.

New project captures images of every ant known to science...

An explanation of the image, as taken from Heller Gallery: The Transport series renders electron flow paths in a "two dimensional electron gas" (2DEG), inspired by the experiments of Mark Topinka, Brian Leroy and professor Robert Westervelt of Harvard University.

A simulation showing ground wave action as shock waves travel under the ocean, passing Catalina Island (in blue, upper right). View from underground level, looking south.

The May 20 annular eclipse may have been an awesome sight for skywatchers across many parts of the Earth, but it was also being viewed by a robotic explorer around the Moon!

The photo-snapping rover Curiosity returned another postcard from Mars on Thursday — the first 360-degree color panorama of Gale Crater.

There's no way to take a direct picture of something as small and fleeting as a Higgs boson. But physicists can photograph its relatives, directly imaging atomic structures and improving our understanding of atomic physics. Now comes this picture: The first-ever snapshot of a single atom's shadow.

No Photoshop: The uncommon Mwanza Flat-headed Agama was spotted and photographed in Kenya.

These photographs from the Wellcome Image Awards 2012, record a beauty usually hidden to the human eye...

These images render electron flow paths in a "two dimensional electron gas." The research leading to the "Transport" series (of which Dendrite is a part) was inspired by the experiments of Mark Topinka, Brian Leroy, and professor Robert Westervelt at Harvard, which actually measured the paths taken by the electrons.

A 40-year-old Chinese mother-of-two has been left horribly disfigured by seven tumors that have been steadily growing on her face for the last ten years.

Excuse the blemishes, but Mars has been beaten and battered by comets, asteroids, and other cosmic buckshot for billions of years. Now, using data gathered by probes orbiting the Red Planet, including those that have delivered landers and rovers, researchers have tallied the impacts—at least those that gouged holes 500 meters wide or larger—for a grand total of nearly 635,000 craters (each a red dot on the image).

To photograph the very infancy of the Universe—back when it was mere seconds years old—you need an extremely complex camera. In an operation that seems not unlike the building of a backyard tree fort, the EBEX team at Columbia University, led by physicist Amber Miller, has spent seven years building a complex balloon-borne telescope. When it takes flight later this year, over the icy dunes of Antarctica, the hope is that scientists will be able to glimpse a little further into the past than ever before.