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The news this week was dominated by the search for the OceanGate Titan submersible, which went missing during its descent to the wreckage of the Titanic. Tragically, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that debris found near the sunken ocean liner was part of the lost sub, and that it suffered a "catastrophic implosion," killing the five men inside.
Elsewhere, there was plenty of science to exercise your brain cells this week. There was the exciting discovery of an exotic new state of matter made of particles called excitons; extraordinary research looking at the cosmological constant problem, which suggests the expansion of the universe could be an illusion; and the discovery that your brain itself is filled with mysterious spiral signals that could be key to our cognition.
Far more tangibly, we learnt of the tallest tree in Asia, which stands at an astonishing 335 feet (102 meters) tall, and an anatomically accurate, 42,00-year-old penis pendant — the world's earliest known depiction of human genitalia.
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Picture of the week
A time-lapse image of lightning bolts from a thunderstorm near Mudanya in Turkey on June 16.
(Image credit: Uğur İkizler)
This striking time-lapse photo of more than 100 individual lightning bolts was taken during a fierce thunderstorm in Turkey. At least three different types of lightning are visible — cloud-to-cloud, where the bolt begins and ends in the clouds; cloud-to-ground, where the bolt hits the ground; and cloud-to-water, where the bolts strike the water.
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Astrophotographer Uğur İkizler created the electrifying image by combining individual shots collected over a 50-minute period, with a lightning strike happening every 30 seconds on average.
"Each and every one of them is beautiful, but when I combined all the lightning bolts into a single frame, it was a frightening sight," İkizler told Live Science in an email. The thunderstorm was a "magnificent visual feast," he added.
A close-up image of the sun with a halo of plasma spinning around the star's north pole
(Image credit: NASA/ Solar Dynamics Observatory)
From here on Earth, the sun may seem calm and steady, but our home star is in a perpetual state of flux, transforming over time from a uniform sea of fire to a chaotic jumble of warped plasma and back in a recurring 11-year cycle.
During this cycle, the sun's magnetic field gets tangled up like a ball of tightly wound rubber bands until it eventually snaps, turning the star's north pole into the south pole in the process. The lead-up to this gargantuan reversal is a period known as the solar maximum and is filled with rising sunspot numbers, bizarre plasma structures and enormous solar storms. It is a potentially perilous time for Earth, which gets bombarded by solar storms that can disrupt communications systems, damage power infrastructure and send satellites plummeting toward the planet.
Alexander McNamara is the Editor-in-Chief at Live Science, and has more than 15 years’ experience in publishing at digital titles. In 2024 he was shortlisted for Editor of the Year at the Association of British Science Writers awards for his work at Live Science. He has previously worked at New Scientist and BBC Science Focus.
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