Science

 

And while was designed to study the sun’s atmosphere, its construction also happens to allow it to detect this unanticipated window of light. The photographs show a planet so hot that it glows, much like red-hot iron, said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist at the U.S. “It’s fortuitous that they happened to have an instrument that could see through the clouds,”  says. The new photographs, Wood said, “may help in the interpretation.

The images come as NASA prepares to launch two missions to Venus This pattern correlates well with topographic maps previously produced from radar and infrared surveys. It was during two such flybys in July 2020 and February 2021 that the probe’s telescopes captured the new images. Naval and a coauthor of the paper, during the social media event.

“The pattern of bright and dark that you see is basically a temperature map,” he said — brighter regions are hotter and darker regions are cooler. While found Venus’ day side too bright to image, it was able to discern large-scale surface features, such as the vast highland region called Aphrodite Terra, through the clouds on the night side.

Clouds tend to scatter and absorb light. But some wavelengths of light get through, depending on the clouds’ chemical makeup, says Paul a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study.

Though scientists knew such spectral windows exist in Venus’ thick clouds of sulfuric acid, the researchers didn’t expect light visible to human eyes would break through so intensely.The ice melted into smooth, downward-pointing spikes if placed in water lower than about 5° C. Simulations showed “a strange thing — that the cold liquid water near the ice is actually buoyant” due to being less dense than the rest of the water in the tank, says. 

The opposite occurred above about 7° C; the ice formed an upward-pointing spike. That’s because colder water near the ice is denser than the surrounding water and sinks, pulling in warmer water at the top of the ice and causing it to melt faster than the bottom, simulations showed. This matches “what your intuition would expect,” says. 

Between about 5° to 7° C, the ice melted into scalloped columns. “Basically, the water is confused,”  says, so it forms different layers, some of which tend to rise and others which tend to sink, depending on their density. Ultimately, the water organizes into “swirls or of fluid that carve the weird ripples into the ice.”

More work is needed to understand the complex interplay of factors that may generate these and other shapes on ice melting in nature But the diamond like lattice alone doesn’t fully explain how the ossicles stay strong.

Within that lattice, the atoms that make up the calcite have their own pattern, which resembles a series of stacked hexagons. That pattern affects the strength of the calcite too. In general, a mineral’s strength isn’t uniform in all directions. So pushing on calcite in some directions is more likely to break it than force from other directions. In the ossicles, the atomic pattern and the diamond like lattice align in a way that compensates.

It’s a mystery how the animals make the diamond like lattice. Li’s team is studying live knobby starfish, surveying the chemistry of how ossicles form. Understanding how the starfish build their ossicles may provide insights for creating stronger porous materials, including some ceramics.

We can learn a lot from a creature like a starfish that we may think is primitive, Li says.Li and colleagues used an electron microscope to zoom in on ossicles from several dozen dead knobby starfish. At a scale of 50 micrometers, about half the width of a human hair, the seemingly featureless body of each gives way to a pattern that mirrors how carbon atoms are arranged in a diamond.

If you’re a male northern elephant seal, your car-sized bulk is crucial to your genetic legacy, since only a fraction of the very largest males will have access to mates. Now, scientists have found that male elephant seals are so driven to eat and grow that they take on great personal risk and are much more likely than females to die while foraging for food. 

Male and female northern elephant seals look quite different from each other. Females can weigh hundreds of kilograms, but males are truly humongous, three to seven times as large as females. Despite these physical differences between the sexes, much of the scientific research has targeted just females, says Sarah at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. 

The team found that the two sexes hunt for food in very different places. Females spent most of their foraging time in the open ocean, diving deep for prey, while males stuck to shallower, nearshore habitats, feeding continuously on prey on the continental shelf. This helped males accumulate six times as much mass, on average, as females, gobbling up calories more than four times as fast.