Two overlapping spiral galaxies are pictured in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The two galaxies, which have the uninspiring names SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, lie more than a billion light-years from Earth. Despite appearing to collide in this image, the alignment of the two galaxies is likely just by chance — the two are not actually interacting. While these two galaxies might simply be ships that pass in the night, Hubble has captured a dazzling array of interacting galaxies in the past.

This image is one of many Hubble observations delving into highlights of the Galaxy Zoo project. Originally established in 2007, the Galaxy Zoo project and its successors are massive citizen science projects which crowdsource galaxy classifications from a pool of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. These volunteers classify galaxies imaged by robotic telescopes and are often the first to ever set eyes on an astronomical object.

Over the course of the original Galaxy Zoo project, volunteers discovered a menagerie of weird and wonderful galaxies such as unusual 3-armed spiral galaxies and colliding ring galaxies. The astronomers coordinating the project applied for Hubble time to observe the most unusual inhabitants of the Galaxy Zoo — but true to the project’s crowdsourced roots, the list of targets was chosen by a public vote.

Credit:
ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel

an incredible glimpse at mosquito larvae hatching shot underwater

2022 Nikon Small World in Motion Competition - Honorable Mention

A new study proposes that Saturn got its rings and tilt from a long-lost moon

Saturn’s most striking feature is its rings, made mostly of small chunks of ice. It was long thought that these rings were leftover material from the formation of Saturn itself some 4.5 billion years ago, but recent studies suggest they’re much younger – between 10 and 100 million years old. If that’s the case, they could have formed from an icy comet or moon that wandered too close.

The planet also rotates tilted at a 27-degree angle, relative to the plane it follows as it orbits the Sun. This was long believed to be caused by the gravitational influence of the nearby Neptune, but closer inspection has revealed that Saturn is no longer in-step with its neighbor.

The astronomers on the new study have now proposed a story that explains both mysteries: Saturn used to have another moon.

The End of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch | The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup has a huge task on its hands in ridding the seas of plastic waste, but a sleek new video offers a compelling look at its latest plan of attack. The animation shows massive trash-collection barriers sweeping through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with great efficiency, with the company envisioning 10 of these systems would be enough to put a serious dent in the problem.

After first introducing the idea back in 2013, The Ocean Cleanup team has developed and tested various iterations of its giant trash-collecting barriers. Its plans involve deploying these in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to gather up plastic debris, and last year proved the viability of this approach with a massive haul.

Meet the bronze deep-sea DRAGON! Scientists spot a rare torpedo-like dragonfish lurking in the twilight zone of Monterey Bay – marking only the fourth time it's been seen

During almost all of Juno's past perijove flybys, JunoCam took images that allowed us to derive cloud velocity field data from cloud feature displacements.
During more recent Jupiter flybys, JunoCam observed distinct cloud top features with very different emission angles within less than ten minutes. These images also show relative cloud feature displacements. These newly observed displacements fields, however, appear to be parallel to vector fields that would be expected from parallaxes induced by long-baseline observations of the cloud top topography rather than primarily from cloud motion.
Based on this assumption, we show stereo images to make these observations intuitive. For this purpose, we project a pair of JunoCam images to the same trajectory position.
The pair of trajectory positions the JunoCam images have actually been taken from can be used to derive a quantitative displacement field in terms of pixels per km altitude offset. Stereo correspondence ís simplified to a one-dimensional search. Observed relative displacements can then be divided by the previously derived scaling in order to retrieve a digital elevation map of relative heights of the cloud tops.
Digital elevation maps can further be rendered in 3D.

Ferrofluid robot can split into tiny droplets and reform into a blob

A soft robot made from droplets of a magnetic fluid can break itself up and reconstitute itself later when it encounters obstacles or thin passages. Researchers say it could be used for targeted drug delivery in the future.

Xinjian Fan at Soochow University in Taiwan and his colleagues used droplets of a ferrofluid, in this case magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles suspended in oil, to make a soft robot about a centimetre in size. A set of controllable magnets can direct the robot to make itself bigger or smaller, as needed.

what ‘representation’ does and should do for neuroscientists in terms of three key aspects of representation. (i) Correlation: a neural representation correlates to its represented content; (ii) causal role: the representation has a characteristic effect on behavior; and (iii) teleology: a goal or purpose served by the behavior and thus the representation. We draw broadly on literature in both neuroscience and philosophy to show how these three aspects are rooted in common approaches to understanding the brain and mind. 

Ben Baker, Benjamin Lansdell, Konrad P. Kording. Three aspects of representation in neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26 September 2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.08.014

Based on its market share, the world's most notorious cryptocurrency Bitcoin results in more climate damage than the production of beef and nearly as much damage as crude oil, researchers in the United States have calculated.m