amazing science images you must see

This ringtail possum has the camera, so whos going to provide the action? Taken in 1943 somewhere in northern Australia, this photo is part of the Australian War Memorial collection. The possum, someones pet, apparently became interested in a Department of Information movie camera and assumed the directors position. Normally, ringtail possums live a less artistic life in dense, brushy forests. Like the more famous koalas that share their Aussie home, ringtail possums are eucalyptus loving marsupials.

The spread of cancer from one its initial outpost to someplace else in the body, called metastasis, is the most common reason cancer treatments fail. Some cancer cells rely on microscopic feet called invadopodia, which are projections on the cellular membrane that help the cells walk to surrounding tissues. Now researchers are reporting online in the July 26, 2011, issue of the journal Science Signaling that they have identified compounds that inhibit invadopodia formation without causing toxicity. The team also found a number of compounds that increased a cancer cells invadopodia. Here, invadopodia (bright red dots) form on metastatic cancer cells.

Blazing a tiny trail across the face of the Earth, the Space Shuttle Atlantis makes its final descent on July 21, 2011. An astronaut snapped this photo from the International Space Station, showing the ionized plasma plume created by Atlantis descent through the atmosphere. The greenish glow hovering over the planet is airglow, which occurs when molecules in the high atmosphere release energy at night that they absorbed from sunlight during the day.

What are you going to be for Halloween? These two galaxies have joined forces to masquerade as two spooky eyes floating in space. Galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 met and began a slow gravitational merge about 40 million years ago. This false color image of the galaxies shows their cores in blue green and their spiral arms in bright red. Eventually, the two galaxies will become one.

Even though the oceans tend to warm slower than the land, researchers report in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Science that similar movement rates are needed for organisms to stay ahead of climate change on land and in the oceans. After analyzing 50 years of global temperature and climate data, Michael Burrows of the Scottish Marine Institute in Argyll and his colleagues found that the speed and direction of climate change, along with the arrival time of various seasons, is happening just as fast in the oceans as on land. The research team says that this climate change velocity and seasonal shifts can be used to predict shifts in habitat ranges and life cycle changes in a warming world.

The brilliant Northern Lights fill the sky above a radar dish in Svalbard, Norway, on a crisp December night (temperatures dipped to minus 4 degrees F,or minus 20 degrees C) in 2006 when Cyril Simon Wedlund captured this image. Scientists were in the process of taking measurements using the European Incoherent Scatter Svalbard Radar to learn more about the aurora and the ionosphere. This aurora was very dynamic and one of the most beautiful that we watched during this period of waning solar activity,writes Wedlund.

These leopard spotted jellies are appropriately decorated, considering theyre terrifying predators if youre a plankton. This species, Mastigias papua is known as the spotted jelly or the lagoon jelly. They live in coastal waters in the South Pacific and grow about 5.5 inches (14 to 16 centimeters) in diameter. But what makes spotted jellies really cool is that they grow their own gardens. The jellies get their greenish brown tinge from algae that they harbor. The algae is a handy food source for the jellies. Some of the larger individuals will even keep extra hangers on: Little minnows that live inside the jellyfishs bell until theyre large enough to face the wider ocean.

Summer can be seen at the end of winters long tunnel at Glacier National Park in Montana. Love to hike? Glacier is your place for summer backcountry adventures. With over 700 miles (1,127 kilometers) of trails, hikers will find a wilderness of forests, alpine meadows, mountains and beautiful lakes. For those not ready to leave winter behind, theres the solitude of snow caves. Caves such as the one shown in the above image often form when meltwater runs under the ice of a glacier.

Clouds and canyons converge at Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona and Utah. This wilderness area boasts striking sandstone cliffs and narrow canyons beloved to hikers.

Around and around goes Saturns north polar storm as fast as 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second). This striking red photograph of the 1,250 mile wide(2,000 kilometer) storm is a false color image from NASAs Cassini spacecraft taken in November 2012. No one knows how long Saturns north polar storm has been spinning, according to NASA. Saturn periodically sports Great White Spots thousands of kilometers wide. These white cloud storms are sometimes visible by telescope on Earth.