Lago Erepecu and Rio Trombetas, Brazil (NASA) The shapes of fractals appear in nature all the time, but when I saw this Earth Observatory image from the International Space Station, I thought I was looking at a zoomed-in portion of the famous Mandelbrot set graphic. This picture wasn’t formed by...

The solar corona is a strange place. For the last few decades solar physicists have been trying to understand why it is so hot. Yes, it’s the Sun, and yes, it’s hot, but the corona is too hot. There are many possible solutions to the “coronal heating phenomenon”, but physicists...