Science in Images

January 1, 20242min readA newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope provides a detailed view of a star’s infancyBy Lori Youmshajekian Credit: ESA/Webb/NASA, CSA/Tom Ray (Dublin)Shrouded in a turbulent knot of dust and gas, a fledgling star expels supersonic jets of material that stretch thousands of times the distance from Earth to the sun. This is the dramatic adolescence of HH 211, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera and described in a study recently published in…

Images of the human body’s most complex and intriguing organ often never make it out of a laboratory. The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience’s annual Art of Neuroscience competition began as a way to peer into this unseen world. Year after year, submissions have depicted the minutiae of the brain’s tangle of blood vessels and neurons, revealing the beauty at the intersection of the artistic and scientific realms. Now in its twelfth year, the competition has elicited a deeper response, with many artists challenging how…

Oyster mushrooms feature in cuisines around the world, but they should be off the menu for hungry worms—which these delicious fungi kill and devour with abandon. Now researchers finally know how they do it. A study published in Science Advances details how oyster mushrooms use a particular toxin to paralyze and knock off fungus-eating roundworms called nematodes. The fungi, which grow on nutrient-poor rotting wood, then consume the nitrogen-rich worms. “Nematodes happen to be the most abundant animals these fungi…

Breaking more than seven months of calm, the peninsula of Reykjanes in western Iceland has once again burst into volcanic flames. After a swarm of earthquakes in late July and early August rocked the area, lava burst forth from the Fagradalsfjall volcano into the valley of Meradalir—not far from the barely cooled lava from the same volcano’s 2021 eruption—treating tourists and researchers to the vibrant red-orange glow of fresh molten rock just 20 miles from Iceland’s capital of Reykjavk. Such striking volcanic displays…

Imagine the perfect ocean wave: a wall of water swells and curls in on itself before breaking dramatically near the shore. Catching such a wave would be any surfer's dream—and the physics underneath its churning surface is just as mind-blowing as the ride. As an ocean wave coils, it creates a hollow tube made of spinning water. If you could peek under the surface, you would see numerous small, thin twisters known as rib vortices looping around this primary vortex. Scientists have only recently begun to investigate why…

ANGEL, MONSTER When sea angels hunt, they transform into monsters. The free-swimming slugs, less than an inch long, store six jellylike “arms” known as buccal cones inside their heads (left). When they sense prey—for example, a nearby sea butterfly—muscles in their core contract, causing the arms to shoot out (right) and grab the target, in milliseconds. They can also tear a victim’s body out of its shell for easier consumption. Credit: Alexander SemenovSea angels, telescope fish and blanket octopuses can be real…

Every night at sundown, a great mass of mostly small sea creatures rises up from the depths into the topmost layers of the planet’s oceans. This daily vertical migration is the largest on Earth—an estimated 11 billion tons of animal biomass travels miles upward each night and then, before the sun rises, returns back to the dimly lit “twilight zone” below. The animals make this journey to feed on the organic material closer to the water’s surface and do so at night to avoid being eaten by the larger predators swimming…

During their nightly energy-conserving cooldowns, hummingbirds may strategically adjust just how low their body temperatures go. These tiny powerhouses cool off by up to 37 degrees Celsius while roosting, entering a hibernationlike state called deep torpor. This state can save 60 to 90 percent of an individual’s energy per hour, says Anusha Shankar, a Cornell University ecologist and lead author of a new study about the phenomenon. Though crucial for the fleet fliers’ way of life, deep torpor comes with trade-offs. For…