The OmegaCAM imager on ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope has captured this glittering view of the stellar nursery called Sharpless 29. Many astronomical phenomena can be seen in this giant image, including cosmic dust and gas clouds that reflect, absorb, and re-emit the light of hot young stars within the nebula. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The OmegaCAM camera on ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope has captured this glittering view of the stellar nursery called Sharpless 29. Many astronomical phenomena can be seen in this giant image, including cosmic dust and gas clouds that reflect, absorb, and re-emit the light of hot young stars within the nebula. The region of sky pictured is listed in the Sharpless catalogue of HII regions: interstellar clouds of ionised gas, rife with star formation...

The bright areas of Occator Crater — Cerealia Facula in the center and Vinalia Faculae to the side — are examples of bright material found on crater floors on Ceres. This is a simulated perspective view. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI

If you could fly aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, the surface of dwarf planet Ceres would generally look quite dark, but with notable exceptions. These exceptions are the hundreds of bright areas that stand out in images Dawn has returned. Now, scientists have a better sense of how these reflective areas formed and changed over time – processes indicative of an active, evolving world...

Electricity, eel-style. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Michigan

Inspired by the electric eel, a flexible, transparent electrical device could lead to body-friendly power sources for implanted health monitors and medication dispensers, augmented-reality contact lenses and countless other applications. The soft cells are made of hydrogel and salt, and they form the first potentially biocompatible artificial electric organ that generates more than 100 volts. It produces a steady buzz of electricity at high voltage but low current, a bit like an extremely low-volume but high-pressure jet of water. It’s perhaps enough to power a small medical device like a pacemaker.

While the technology is preliminary, Michael Mayer, a professor of biophysics at the Adolphe Merkle Institute of the Uni...

This Hubble Space Telescope image of globular cluster M79 is a combination of observations taken in 1995 and 1997 by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The red, green, and blue colors used to compose the image represent a natural view of the cluster. Credit: NASA and ESA; Acknowledgment: S. Djorgovski (Caltech) and F. Ferraro (University of Bologna)

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling snowstorm in a snow globe. The stars are residents of the globular star cluster Messier 79, or M79, 41,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Lepus. The cluster is also known as NGC 1904. Globular clusters are gravitationally bound groupings of as many as 1 million stars...