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Explanation: Sporting a surprisingly bright, lovely green coma Comet 252P/Linear poses next to the Large Magellanic Cloud in this southern skyscape. The stack of telephoto exposures was captured on March 16 from Penwortham, South Australia. Recognized as a Jupiter family periodic comet, 252P/Linear will come close to our fair planet on March 21, passing a mere 5.3 million kilometers away. That's about 14 times the Earth-Moon distance. In fact, it is one of two comets that will make remarkably close approaches in the next few days as a much fainter Comet Pan-STARRS (P/2016 BA14) comes within 3.5 million kilometers (9...

Explanation: All of the other aurora watchers had gone home. By 3:30 am in Iceland, on a quiet night last September, much of that night's auroras had died down. Suddenly though, a new burst of particles streamed down from space, lighting up the Earth's atmosphere once again. This time, unexpectedly, pareidoliacally, they created an amazing shape reminiscent of a giant phoenix. With camera equipment at the ready, two quick sky images were taken, followed immediately by a third of the land. The mountain in the background is Helgafell, while the small foreground river is called Kaldá, both located about 30...

Explanation: What would you do if you saw the Sun disappear? Quite possibly: cheer. That's what many exuberant sky watchers did across Indonesia during a total eclipse of the Sun last week. There and then, the land and sky went dark during the day as our Sun disappeared for a few minutes behind our Moon. Many people watching knew they were witnessing a rare event, and their joyous exclamations can be heard on the featured video. What a far cry this reaction is from centuries ago, when more typical eclipse reactions derived from fear and worry. The video shows first...

Explanation: Sometimes even the dark dust of interstellar space has a serene beauty. One such place occurs toward the constellation of Taurus. The filaments featured here can be found on the sky between the Pleiades star cluster and the California Nebula. This dust is not known not for its bright glow but for its absorption and opaqueness. Several bright stars are visible with their blue light seen reflecting off the brown dust. Other stars appear unusually red as their light barely peaks through a column of dark dust, with red the color that remains after the blue is scattered away....

Explanation: If seen in the right light, Saturn glows like a neon sign. Although Saturn has comparatively little of the element neon, a composite image false-colored in three bands of infrared light highlights features of the giant ringed planet like a glowing sign. At the most blue band of the infrared light featured, false-colored blue in the above image, Saturn itself appears dark but Saturn's thin rings brightly reflect light from our Sun. Conversely, Saturn's B ring is so thick that little reflected light makes it through, creating a dark band between Saturn's A and C rings. At the most...

Explanation: In a flash, the visible spectrum of the Sun changed from absorption to emission on March 9 during the total solar eclipse. That fleeting moment, at the beginning the total eclipse phase, is captured by telephoto lens and diffraction grating in this image from clearing skies over Ternate, Indonesia. At left, the overwhelming light from the Sun is just blocked by the lunar disk. The normally dominant absorption spectrum of the solar photosphere is hidden. What remains, spread by the diffraction grating into the spectrum of colors to the right of the eclipsed Sun, are individual eclipse images. The...

Explanation: This snapshot from deep space captures planet Earth on March 9. The shadow of its large moon is falling on the planet's sunlit hemisphere. Tracking toward the east (left to right) across the ocean-covered world the moon shadow moved quickly in the direction of the planet's rotation. Of course, denizens of Earth located close to the shadow track centerline saw this lunar shadow transit as a brief, total eclipse of the Sun. From a spacebased perspective between Earth and Sun, the view of this shadow transit was provided by the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging...

Social scientists generally, and criminologists especially, often lack the ability (usually due to both ethical and practical concerns) to perform randomized controlled trials, the gold standard of research. We might expect, for instance, that having low levels of self-control is a cause of criminal behavior. In fact, some of the most powerful explanations of crime have been built on this idea, and there is much evidence to support it. We might also hypothesize that bad parenting causes children to develop low levels of self-control. Yet we can’t randomly assign people to have different levels of self-control, and we most assuredly...

Explanation: A dark Sun hangs in the clearing sky over a volcanic planet in this morning sea and skycape. It was taken during this week's total solar eclipse, a dramatic snapshot from along the narrow path of totality in the dark shadow of a New Moon. Earth's Indonesian isle of Ternate, North Maluku lies in the foreground. The sky is still bright near the eastern horizon though, beyond the region's flattened volcanic peaks and outside the Moon's umbral shadow. In fact, near the equator the dark lunar umbra is rushing eastward across Earth's surface at about 1,700 kilometers (1,100 miles)...

The next Einstein will come from Africa. At least that is the premise of a global gathering of scientists, government representatives and innovators in Senegal this week. The organizers of the Next Einstein Forum say sub-Saharan Africa currently contributes just one percent of the world's scientific research output. But that, they say, is not for lack of ingenuity, but rather lack of opportunity on the continent.

Explanation: Why is this galaxy so thin? Many disk galaxies are actually just as thin as NGC 5866, pictured above, but are not seen edge-on from our vantage point. One galaxy that is situated edge-on is our own Milky Way Galaxy. Classified as a lenticular galaxy, NGC 5866 has numerous and complex dust lanes appearing dark and red, while many of the bright stars in the disk give it a more blue underlying hue. The blue disk of young stars can be seen extending past the dust in the extremely thin galactic plane, while the bulge in the disk center...

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: R. Sahai and J. Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a final act of celestial beauty before the long fade into cosmic history. Invisibly buried in the centre of this colourful swirl of gas is a dying star, roughly the same mass as the sun. As a star ages, the nuclear reactions that keep it shining begin to falter. This uncertain energy generation causes the stars to pulsate in an irregular way, casting off its outer layers into space. As the star sheds these outer gases, the super-hot core...

The University of Washington used federal grant funding to buy thousands of dollars worth of custom embroidered Snuggies. Taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation grants were used to purchase Snuggies, pottery, and a trip to Hawaii. The agency’s inspector general audited the University of Washington and found millions in unallowable salary costs, and numerous examples of “unreasonable transactions” from funds intended for scientific research. The audit, released last month, identified $8,821 charged to five separate grants on unallowable promotional items and gifts, including personalized Snuggie blankets. The wasteful expenditures included $3,920 on canvas bags, mini optical computer mice, and custom Snuggies, as...

Explanation: The total solar eclipse of March 8/9 will be the only total eclipse in 2016. Crossing the international date line, the New Moon's dark shadow traces a limited, narrow path for viewing the total phase, making landfall in Indonesia and mostly tracking across the Pacific Ocean. A much larger region will be witness to a partially eclipsed Sun though, during morning hours on March 9 for southeast Asia and northeast Australia, and before sunset March 8 for Hawaii and Alaska. Safely viewing the eclipse can actually be very easy. One technique is demonstrated in this shoe group portrait from...

[SNIP]The diminution of the Big Idea isn’t easy to accept,even for those willing to concede that there are major problems in their field.An ego depletion optimist might acknowledge that psychology studies tend to be too small to demonstrate a real effect,or that scientists like to futz around with their statistics until the answers come out right.(None of this implies deliberate fraud;just that sloppy standards prevail.)Still,the optimist would say,it seems unlikely that such mistakes would propagate so thoroughly throughout a single literature,and that so many noisy,spurious results could line up quite so perfectly.If all these successes came about by random chance,then...

Explanation: What is that changing object in a cold hydrocarbon sea of Titan? Radar images from the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn have been recording the surface of the cloud-engulfed moon Titan for years. When imaging the flat -- and hence radar dark -- surface of the methane and ethane lake called Ligeia Mare, an object appeared in 2013 July just was not there in 2007. Subsequent observations in 2014 August found the object remained -- but had changed. In an image released last week, the mystery object seems to have disappeared in 2015 January. The featured false-color image shows...

Explanation: One of the most spectacular solar sights is an erupting prominence. In 2011, NASA's Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressively large prominence erupting from the surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the above time lapse video covering 90 minutes, where a new frame was taken every 24 seconds. The scale of the prominence is huge -- the entire Earth would easily fit under the flowing curtain of hot gas. A solar prominence is channeled and sometimes held above the Sun's surface by the Sun's magnetic field. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a...

Explanation: Looking toward the south from an altitude of 400 kilometers, this stunning snapshot from orbit finds bright lights of Tokyo and cities across central and southern Japan, planet Earth shining upward through broken clouds. The spacefaring perspective was captured last July by astronaut Scott Kelly during his stay on board the International Space Station. Thin stripes of airglow follow the curve of the planet's dark limb, while beyond lie stars of the constellation Centaurus and the southern sky. Their solar panels extended, a docked Soyuz (bottom) and Progress spacecraft are posed in the foreground. Kelly returned to planet Earth...

Explanation: NGC 134 is probably not the best known spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor. Still, the tantalizing island universe is a clearly a telescopic treasure in southern skies. It shares a bright core, clumpy dust lanes, and loosely wrapped spiral arms with spiky foreground stars of the Milky Way and the more diminutive galaxy NGC 131 in this sharp cosmic vista. From a distance of about 60 million light-years, NGC 134 is seen tilted nearly edge-on. It spans some 150,000 light-years, making it even larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. NGC 134's warped disk and faint extensions give...

Explanation: Some of the Solar System's largest moons rose together on February 23. On that night, a twilight pairing of a waning gibbous Moon and Jupiter was captured in this sharp telescopic field of view. The composite of short and long exposures reveals the familiar face of our fair planet's own large natural satellite, along with a line up of the ruling gas giant's four Galilean moons. Left to right, the tiny pinpricks of light are Callisto, Io, Ganymede, [Jupiter], and Europa. Closer and brighter, our own natural satellite appears to loom large. But Callisto, Io, and Ganymede are actually...