Wired Science

This new picture from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory shows the remarkable super star cluster Westerlund 1. This exceptionally bright cluster lies about 16 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Ara (The Altar). …

The sounds of marmoset monkeys chattering may hint at the mysterious origins of human language. A new study shows that marmosets exchange calls in a precisely-timed, back-and-forth fashion typical of human conversation, but not found in other primates. The monkeys …

RCW 120 is a bubble blown by a central star (not visible at these infrared wavelengths) that has exerted enough pressure in the bubble ‘walls’ that material can begin collapsing into the next generation of star. The bright knot in …

No one ever talks about what the world looks like if you’re a cat. Luckily, artist Nickolay Lamm has volunteered to act as cat-vision conduit. Here, Lamm presents his idea of what different scenes might look like if you’re a …

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter holds one of the best cameras of any space probe, the HiRISE camera, which can see features on the Red Planet as small as 1 meter across. Here, we take a look at some of the …

Here is the collision of two galaxies that collectively form NGC 520. The “tale” being told here is the small galaxy to the lower left (UGC 957) is also involved in the interaction as is readily seen with the outreaching …

A new system could make space exploration robots faster and more efficient by predicting where they will be in the very near future.

This dramatic image features Hokusai in the foreground, famous for its extensive set of rays, some of which extend for over a thousand kilometers across Mercury’s surface. The extensive, bright rays indicate that Hokusai is one of the youngest large …

Big data is overwhelming nearly every field of science. But in order to handle it, we will also need to make advancements in how we process this data deluge. As computers approach the limits of Moore’s Law, what new algorithms …

Filaments stream from nebula N44C, a region of glowing hydrogen gas around an association of young stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The star responsible for illuminating the nebula is unusually hot. Typically, the most massive stars have maximum temperatures …

This mosaic of Hebes Chasma is composed of eight single images taken with the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, corresponding to orbits 360 (2 May 2004), 2149 (16 September 2005), 3217 (12 July 2006), 5142 (3 January 2008), …

Multicolor image from the Pan-STARRS1 telescope of the free-floating planet PSO J318.5-22, in the constellation of Capricornus. The planet is extremely cold and faint, about 100 billion times fainter in optical light than the planet Venus. Most of its energy …

The next time you gaze up at the night sky, remember that you’re looking at a graveyard. The Milky Way is studded with dead stars, from black holes to neutron stars to dim white dwarfs. Often, these stellar corpses reveal …

As the number of big biology project increases, the amount of data that scientists need to handle will grow at an alarming rate. While nearly all fields are struggling with Big Data, the biological and neurological sciences have their own …

If you’re a young mountain lion, a fresh deer carcass is probably among the better things you could find in a forest. But eating it could mean you end up spending some time in a cage, getting teased by your …

Meet Asia’s giant salamander, a remarkable 6-foot amphibian that has remained unchanged for millions of years, hiding on river bottoms and hoovering up fish into its gaping maw. It sometimes smells like pepper, it’s astonishingly quick, and it makes noises …

Located about 1200 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Carina (The Ship’s Keel), the Toby Jug Nebula, more formally known as IC 2220, is an example of a reflection nebula. It is a cloud of gas and dust …

Tell your film buff friends they’re right: the most creative period in cinema history was probably the 1960s. At least that’s the takeaway from a detailed data analysis of novel and unique elements in movies throughout much of the 20th …

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have figured out how to make structures – like houses or cages – that are small enough to corral bacterial cells.

A new documentary has exposed how the NFL has long tried to hide evidence between the wear and tear its players experience and neurodegenerative diseases. Now that these findings have come to light, we remain with the much bigger question: …