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Perched between Brazil and Suriname lies French Guiana, Europe’s gateway to the galaxy. It might boast a majestic rainforest, but as a French territory it is still part of the European Union and even uses the euro as its currency.

The tiny aluminum device—only 40 microns long and 100 nanometers thick—in which Caltech researchers observed the quantum noise from microwaves.

Jupiter's trademark Great Red Spot — a swirling storm feature larger than Earth — is shrinking. This downsizing, which is changing the shape of the spot from an oval into a circle, has been known about since the 1930s, but now these striking new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture the spot at a smaller size than ever before.

Comet develops a coma

Rabe crater perspective view

The Mars Hand Lens Imager on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover provided this nighttime view of a hole produced by the rover's drill and, inside the hole, a line of scars produced by the rover's rock-zapping laser. The camera used its own white-light LEDs to illuminate the scene on May 13, 2014.

Lithium purple-bronze (LiPB) is a thermoelectric material comprised of aligned conducting, zig-zag chains of molybdenum and oxygen (left image, pink and white circles with green bonds). When an electric current was applied in a direction slightly misaligned with the chains (depicted as gray lines, right image), heat flowed perpendicular to the current, a phenomenon known as the transverse Peltier effect. The efficiency of this effect in LiPB was among the largest known for a single compound.

Magnetars are the bizarre super-dense remnants of supernova explosions. They are the strongest magnets known in the Universe — millions of times more powerful than the strongest magnets on Earth. A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) now believe they’ve found the partner star of a magnetar for the first time. This discovery helps to explain how magnetars form — a conundrum dating back 35 years — and why this particular star didn’t collapse into a black hole as astronomers would expect.

Thwaites Glacier.