Andromeda
is headed our way at around 120km/second and is predicted to collide
with the Milky Way galaxy in three or four billion years. The result, if
anybody is around to see it, will be beautiful. As there's so much
empty space and such large distances between stars, the two galaxies
will pass through each other first and it's very unlikely any stars will
collide, but dust and clouds will, meaning the rate of star creation
will be greatly boosted and supernovae will become more common.
This
is the first footage ever captured of a deep-sea squid battling an
owlfish - and it's mind blowing. Collected by the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Research Institute, the video shows a black-eyed squid snaring an
owlfish with its two hook-tipped tentacles and using its sharp beak to
gnaw away at the owlfish's spinal cord, rotating it like a cob of corn
until it severs the cord, rendering the owlfish helpless and ready to be
eaten.
Would you like to become a diamond? A Swiss
company is making diamonds out of cremated human remains. The process
reduces ash to carbon and then applies intense heat and pressure for
weeks to create diamond crystals. Once these have cooled off, they’re
cut to shape and engraved. ‘Human diamonds’ tend to have a blue
colouration due to the amount of boron present in the human body.
Astronomers have confirmed that the dwarf
planet Ceres - the largest body in the asteroid belt that sits between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - is generating plumes of water vapour.
Thought to be caused by cryovolcanoes, which spew water instead of
molten rocks, these plumes could explain how so much water made it to
the early Earth.
Astronomers
have observed one of the most powerful black holes in the known
Universe. Located in a galaxy cluster around 3.9 billion lights years
from Earth, the black hole has created two enormous cavities (shown as
two dark spaces in the bright purple X-ray glow) in the hot gas
surrounding it and stopped trillions of stars from forming.
For
the first time, researchers have explained the mechanism behind the
eruptions of supervolcanoes like the one in Yellowstone, Wyoming that
ejected more than 2,000km3 of material some two million years ago. Turns
out these giant volcanic time bombs can erupt simply due to changes in
their huge magma chambers as they slowly cool.
Reading
someone’s mind is easier than you thought – you just need to look at
their pupils. A person who is about to answer ‘yes’ to a question will
have more enlarged pupils than those who will say ‘no’. If the person is
hesitant, the pupils will grow even larger. This is due to signaling
chemicals produced by the brain.
For
the past decade, 350 seals equipped with special headgear have been
collecting crucial information about the Southern Ocean's temperature
flucations and salinity. Scientists are now sorting through the data to
better understand and monitor climate change events in the future.
This
is what an embryonic leopard cub looks like in the womb. It's not a
photograph, but a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans,
tiny cameras and computer graphics used to create realistic
representations of animal fetuses for a National Geographic documentary.
The
DNA of a rare, sexually transmissible cancer has been decoded. It arose
in a single, husky-like dog 11,000 years ago and has survived through
millions of genetic changes. The only other known transmissible cancer
is the facial cancer currently devastating our Tasmanian devils.
This
is fluorite, a widely occurring mineral found in parts of China,
Europe, and North America. Dubbed "the most colourful mineral in the
world", it's commonly found in shades of purple, blue, green, yellow,
and more rarely in pink, red, white, brown, and black.
This
amazing shot by German photographer Martin Rietze captures the moment
when a bolt of lightning flashed in an erupting volcano in Japan last
year. The volcano, named Sakurajima, has been erupting almost constantly
since 1955.
