100 Best Science Photos Published in 2018

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, Dec. 31 (SEE) - A recent album published by Livescience.com revealed the most beautiful but also strange photos of scientific nature for 2018.

In this below piece, SEE selects the best ones of them.

Slurpee waves

The cold that gripped the U.S. East Coast this past winter created a gorgeous phenomenon along the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts — slurpee waves. As if frozen mid-break, these waves were surfable, according to photographer and surfer Jonathan Nimerfroh, who captured the surreal photos.

Spiral bee hive

The Australian stingless bees in this image, captured by entomologist Tim Heard and posted to Reddit in January, worked together to build this spiral nest that looks delectable enough to eat (or maybe not). The spiral-shaped towers are called brood combs, and they link together hundreds of egg chambers, forming a staircase of developing young. "A fully developed nest consists of 10-20 layers. Each layer is one circle of a continuous spiral," Heard, of The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia said.

Nervous system

In 1925, two medical students in Kirksville, Missouri -- M.A. Schalck and L.P. Ramsdell -- took on the challenge of dissecting the body's nervous system in one piece. Their work is still on display at the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University in Missouri, and a photo of it went viral on Reddit this year.

BEIJING, CHINA

Super blue blood moon

A Super Blue Blood Moon lunar eclipse graced the heavens and dazzled Earth-bound humans during the early morning hours of Jan. 31, an event that hadn't happened in 152 years. A supermoon, which is a full moon at a time when the orb is near perigee, or at its closest point in its orbit to Earth, occurred at the same time that the moon passed through the Earth's shadow (a lunar eclipse). This was also the second full moon in January, meaning it's called a blue moon. Rather than appearing a blue hue, though, the moon shone a reddish color due to how the sun's reflected light gets filtered by our atmosphere.

Sea stack on Reddit

Standing starkly amidst of a sea of waves is Dún Briste, a sea stack found off the western coast of Ireland. A photo of the jagged rock tower rose to viral-status on Reddit earlier this year, with a caption claiming the sea stack took "millions" of years to form. That's more than a wee bit off, though: Maria McNamara, a paleobiologist at the University College Cork, in Ireland, told Live Science that, "rather, [it likely formed in] tens to hundreds of thousands of years." That doesn't make it any less impressive, however. The rock formed during the Carboniferous, a 60-million-year-long period lasting from about 359 million to 299 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Penguin supercolony

Lots and lots of penguins were discovered nesting on Antarctica's Danger islands, scientists reported this year. They estimate, based partially on poop stains (yes, poop) seen in aerial snapshots, that about 1.5 million Adélie penguins are living and breeding on the islands. The supercolony had gone unnoticed for nearly 3,000 years, researchers said.

Glacier blankets

One could only hope to look so glorious beneath a cozy blanket. But these aren't just any blankets that were draped over Rhône Glacier in the Swiss Alps this year: The white cloths are meant to reflect the sun's light before it could wreak its warming havoc on the glacial ice. As is the case for many glaciers, as the globe warms, this one has retreated, by a lot — as much as 4,600 feet (1,400 meters) since 1856. Though the luxurious covering may slow this decline, it can't stop it completely, glaciologists said.

Dreamy minke whale

In what looks like a stereotypical hallucination of a whale floating beneath puffy clouds, rare footage released in March reveals a very real minke whale swimming with sinuous grace beneath a blanket of floating ice chunks. This might be the first underwater video of a minke whale in sea ice in the Ross Sea, said Regina Eisert, a marine mammal expert at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, who captured the footage while trying out a prototype of an underwater camera

Supersize whale

This image of a per swimming beneath a sperm whale captures scale like no other: Humans are but tiny "gnats" compared with the sperm whale, which can reach 40 feet (12 meters) long and weigh up to a whopping 130,000 pounds (59,000 kilograms). This year, scientists figured out why these marine beasts haven't gotten any bigger, say, supersize sperm whales. It turns out, it would be just about impossible for an ocean-bound creature to eat enough food to support a body larger than today's whales.

Lava dome fountain

This bizarre, fiery blob is a "lava-dome fountain." Normally, volcanoes erupt lava in powerful jets that look like fountains gone wild. But in this photo — captured Oct. 11, 1969, in Hawaii — the lava spurted out symmetrically, forming an aesthetically pleasing lava-dome fountain. The amazing photo resurfaced this March, when the U.S. Geological Survey tweeted out the photo with the hashtag TBT, for Throwback Thursday.

Whale's rainbow sneeze

Wildlife photographer Domenic Biagini was in the right place at the right time to capture footage of what looks to be a rainbow spraying from the whale's blowhole; Biagini then shared the image on Reddit in April. Being an oxygen-breathing mammal, a whale exhales a mixture of warm air, some water vapor and plenty of whale snot. In this whale's case, the water vapor caught the sunlight just perfectly — in the same way raindrops do when they refract light into its constituent colors, creating rainbows.

Exploding ants

Treetop-dwelling ants from Southeast Asia take down their foes by blowing themselves up, rupturing their cell walls and spattering toxic body fluids all over prey. And this year, scientists found such "exploding ants" (which sacrifice their own lives with the goo-spattering weapon) encompass not one, but 15, separate species, including one previously unknown species in Borneo, which they described in a new study released in April.

Giant iceberg

In July, residents of a small town in Greenland got a big visitor in the form of a massive iceberg, which parked itself just off the shores of the village. The iceberg, photographed on July 13 next to the village of Innaarsuit, measured a staggering 656 feet (200 meters) wide and rose about 328 feet (100 m) above sea level, according to satellite data, and was thought to weigh more than 12 million tons (11 million metric tons), according to The New York Times. Thirty-three of the village's 169 residents had to be evacuated because, if the iceberg had disintegrated, massive chunks of ice falling into the bay could've sent powerful waves washing into the town.

Penguin leap

Scientists revealed a depressing statistic this year: Just 13.2 percent of the world's oceans (which cover 70 percent of the planet's surface) remain truly wild. That's about 20.8 million square miles (54 million square kilometers) that are unadulterated by human activity. And most of these wilderness patches are in the Arctic, Antarctic or around remote, Pacific Island nations, the researchers said. So, at least for now, this penguin may have a spot to bask free of human mucking.

Ducklings!

That’s a duckload of baby ducks! In June, nature photographer Brent Cizek snapped this shot of a mama duck followed by what looks like a small army of ducklings at Lake Bemidji in northeastern Minnesota. Cizek counted at least 50 ducklings in his original photo, but when he returned to the lake for later visits, he spotted as many as 76 tiny beaks to feed. The photographed dubbed the duck Mama Merganser, nodding to her species, the common merganser (Mergus merganser). (The ducklings are also common mergansers.) Experts say that it’s unlikely all the ducklings are Mama’s offspring, and more likely, she’s helping out other duck moms on the lake.

Steve aurora

This mysterious and majestic ribbon of purple light slashing across the Canadian sky has a fittingly mysterious and majestic name: STEVE. The shimmering band of light was given this name by skywatchers back in 2016. At the time, they thought Steve was just another part of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. However, scientists have since learned that Steve is something completely different — and something "completely unknown" to science. That's because Steve doesn't contain the telltale traces of charged particles blasting through the Earth's atmosphere that auroras do. So for now, we just have to call it STEVE: "Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement."

Hurricane Florence eye

This beautifully still and quiet storm eye belies the havoc Hurricane Florence wreaked across the southeastern U.S. in September. And while the storm was still raging, packing Category-1 wind speeds, scientists calculated how much climate change nudged this storm into the monster it became. Because of climate change, they found, Hurricane Florence would grow about 50 miles (80 kilometers) larger and dump 50 percent more rain over a period from Sept. 11 to Sept. 16 than it would have in a world before climate change.

Alien jellyfish

A family on New Zealand's North Island came upon what appeared to be a creature disguising itself as a Jell-O mold. But, alas, this blob with its gelatinous grape-colored center, was not for eating. Rather, the family had spotted an enormous lion's mane jellyfish (Cyanea capillata). The lion's mane is the largest jellyfish species, with a bell that can grow up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) across and a thick mop of hair-like tentacles that reach nearly 120 feet (36.6 meters) long, according to the nonprofit Oceana.

Pufferfish art

This fish may be the greatest and hardest-working fish on Earth. When it's time to find a mate, male Japanese pufferfish in the Torquigener genus spend seven days, 24 hours each day, sculpting a complex but ultimately fleeting work of art into the sandy seafloor. And they do it al by wiggling their fins to create intricate ridges and valleys. In the end, if the male is chosen by the female, she will lay her eggs at the center of this sandy design.