<p>Just in time for the holidays, the Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a spectacular view of a star-forming region in our Milky Way galaxy that looks like a snow angel in deep space. This region, called Sharples 2-106 (or S106 for short) is located nearly 2,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan). [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17517-celestial-snow-angel-photo-hubble-telescope.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p>Physicists announced this week they are closer than ever to hunting down the elusive Higgs boson particle (sometimes called "God particle"), the missing piece of the governing theory of the universe's tiniest building blocks. </p><p> Shown in this image, an example of simulated data modelled for the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The Higgs boson is produced in the collision of two protons at 14 TeV and quickly decays into four muons, a type of heavy electron that is not absorbed by the detector. The tracks of the muons are shown in yellow. [<a href="URL">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p> The newfound Comet Lovejoy defied long odds Thursday (Dec. 15), surviving a suicidal dive through the sun's hellishly hot atmosphere, according to NASA scientists.</p><p> The image above, taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows Comet Lovejoy diving through the sun's atmosphere on Dec. 15, 2011. Lovejoy's tail is visible as a faint diagonal smudge to the left of the sun, toward the bottom of the image. The tail points from lower left to upper right. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17518-doomed-comet-lovejoy-sun-encounter-wrap.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p>One hundred years ago this week, on a fine summer afternoon, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four travel-weary companions plunged a bright flag atop a spindly pole into the Antarctic ice, marking their claim as the first humans to set foot at the bottom of the world. The South Pole was theirs. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17477-antarctica-biggest-mysteries.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p>Since Amundsen's feat, an explosion of technological progress has transformed the scope of human knowledge of Antarctica. Even still, many mysteries, including why some animals thrive in the bone-cold desert, still remain. </p><p> Shown here, an Antarctic icefish that makes its own antifreeze. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/29740-creatures-of-the-frozen-deep-antarcticas-sea-life.html">See more images of Antarctica's Weird Sea Life</a>]</p>
<p>The giant killer claws of dinosaurs such as Velociraptor might have been employed much as birds of prey use similar talons — as hooks to keep victims from escaping, researchers say. </p><p> Shown here, an illustration of a small dromaeosaur in side view. The forelimbs are wrapped around the prey, preventing escape as the dinosaur dispatches its victim with its teeth. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17485-velociraptors-killer-claws.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p>Scientists may have found the smallest black hole yet by listening to its X-ray "heartbeat." The black hole, if it truly exists, would weigh less than three times the mass of the sun, putting it near the theoretical minimum mass required for a black hole to be stable. The black hole resides in the binary star system IGR J17091-3624. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17521-smallest-black-hole-ray-heartbeat.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p>Air-breathing fish that can hop and walk across the floor on their fins hint that walking may have evolved underwater before such animals began migrating on to land, scientists find. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17426-bounding-lungfish-origin-walking.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
<p>With the buzz of the holidays ringing near, we put together a gallery of stunning winter scapes all wrapped in snow this week. This otherworldly shot shows snow-covered trees in front of the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17531-snow-landscapes-gallery.html">See more snowy photos</a>]</p>
<p>Satellite tags have tracked a southern elephant seal nicknamed Jackson traveling for a whopping 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers), the equivalent of going from New York to Sydney and back again. The Wildlife Conservation Society tracked the male seal from December 2010 until last month after conservationists with the group fitted Jackson with a small satellite transmitter on the beach of Admiralty Sound in Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile. [<a href="http://www.livescience.com/17443-elephant-seal-travels-18000-miles.html">Read full story</a>]</p>
