Each week at Live Science we find the most interesting and informative articles we can. Along the way, we uncover some amazing and cool images. Here you'll discover the most incredible photos we found this week, and the remarkable stories behind them.

Wreck of the Reich

(Image credit: Statnett/Isurvey )

The wreck of a German warship torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine in 1940 has been discovered in deep water off the North Sea coast of southern Norway. Norway's electric grid operator Statnett located the shipwreck near its underwater power cables on sonar scans of the seafloor in 2017, according to a Statnett statement .

In August, Statnett sent down an underwater remotely-operated-vehicle, or ROV, to inspect the wreck. The ROV's scans suggested the wreck was that of the German cruiser Karlsruhe – a 570-foot-long (174-meters-long) cruiser equipped with nine 15-inch guns. The wreck now lies upright on the seafloor beneath 1,607 feet (490 m) of seawater, about 13 nautical miles (24 kilometers) from the port city of Kristiansand on Norway's southern coast.

According to the Reuters news agency, Norwegian broadcasters also reported that the underwater images taken by the ROV included a medallion on the warship decorated with a Nazi swastika symbol.

Read more: Wreck of WWII battleship with Nazi symbol discovered off Norway

"Andromeda at arm's length"

(Image credit: Copyright Nicolas Lefaudeux)

The Andromeda galaxy lies 2 million light-years from Earth , but it looks close enough to touch in an image that took home the top prize in the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2020 competition.

French photographer Nicolas Lefaudeux used a technique called tilt-shift — positioning a camera's lens in a way that manipulates the depth of field in an image — to bring our closest neighboring galaxy closer still. His photo blurs the foreground and background while leaving the center sharply in focus, making the galaxy appear startlingly close, almost as though the observer could reach into the photo and grab it.

Contest judges selected Lefaudeux's photo, titled "Andromeda Galaxy at Arm's Length?", from thousands of submissions, naming it the winner in the "Galaxies" category, as well as the competition's overall best photo.

Read more: Mind-blowing Andromeda galaxy and 'Cosmic Inferno' earn space photo contest's top prizes

Recovering Arecibo

(Image credit: University of Central Florida)

On Aug. 10, 2020, the Arecibo Observatory — a massive telescope in Puerto Rico famous for tracking asteroids and advancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence ( SETI ) — was slashed to pieces after a metal cable above the telescope came loose in the dead of night and crashed through the radar dish below.

One month later, facility officials still don't know what caused the mysterious midnight malfunction. But the recovery effort is underway, and officials plan to launch a full "forensic investigation" into the disaster as soon as the facility's safety can be guaranteed, according to a statement from the University of Central Florida (UCF), which helps manage the telescope.

Last month's incident left a 100-foot-long (30 m) hole in the telescope's 1,000-foot-long (305 m) radar dish, immediately suspending operations. Since then, UCF and its partners have begun assessing the damage by building a detailed computer model of the telescope. Engineers will then study the model carefully before sending humans into the site. Initial tests of the telescope's receivers showed no signs of damage to the underlying electronics. However, the team has yet to test the telescope's critical S-band radar, which detects microwave signals from distant stars, galaxies and nebulas.

Read more: Alien-hunting telescope suffered 'no damage to electronics' during mysterious midnight disaster

The blazing coast

(Image credit: CIRA)

Disturbing new satellite imagery shows the vast scope of the wildfires burning in Washington, Oregon and California. Dozens of fires have turned skies orange, rained ash on cities and towns, destroyed several million acres of land and killed at least seven people. The Sept. 8 imagery comes courtesy of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University. The GIF, posted on Twitter by meteorologist Dakota Smith, combines two types of imagery from the GOES-West Satellite: GeoColor, which shows the smoke clouds and the topography below; and Fire Temperature imagery, which uses infrared cameras to pinpoint the fires themselves.

Smoke pours and swirls from the fires. Updated imagery from Wednesday (Sept. 9) shows the blanket of smoke still enveloping the coast from the northern end of Oregon down. This smoke turned skies in the Bay Area and elsewhere along the coast an eerie, apocalyptic orange.

The severe fires this year are a result of heat and dry weather, and are exacerbated by climate change, according to climate researchers .

Read more: Stark new imagery reveals the scary extent of West Coast wildfires

Baby dino on the horn

(Image credit: Martin Kundrat/Evolutionary Biodiversity Research Group, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University)

A rare dinosaur embryo that was nearly lost to science shows an unprecedented view of what a wee, developing sauropod dinosaur looked like before it hatched and grew into a humongous, long-necked plant-eating behemoth. As it turns out, this unknown species of titanosaur had a tiny, rhino-like horn on its snout that it lost by adulthood, a new study finds.

The nearly intact skull is all that's left of the 80 million-year-old embryo, but reveals this wee horn in incredible detail. It's possible the titanosaur used this horn to peck out of its egg, the researchers said, although they also had other ideas about how it broke free from its shell.

Researchers almost missed the opportunity to analyze this one-of-a-kind skull. The fossilized egg had been smuggled out of Argentina, where it was originally found, and sold in 2001 by an Argentine dealer at an auction in Tucson, Arizona to study co-author Terry Manning, a freelance paleontology technician. Manning prepared the egg with his self-developed, acid-etching technique — a chemical method that etched away just 10 micrometers of the rock a day. This revealed the previously hidden skull inside; the first recovered 3D embryonic skull of a sauropod on record.

Read more: Teensy long-necked dinosaur embryo reveals weird snout horn

The science of Candyland

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

The stunning, razor-sharp spires of stone forests can form in deceptively simple conditions, a sugary new experiment finds.

Using sticks of candy, researchers discovered that cylindrical shapes can naturally sharpen into points in still water as they dissolve — no complicated flow required. This phenomenon could explain why sharp stone pinnacles are often found where easily-dissolvable limestone rock predominates. Examples include the Stone Forest, or Shilin, of Kunming, China, the jagged pinnacles of Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park in Madagascar, and the Pinnacles of Gunung Mulu in Malaysia.

The recipe was simple indeed. Ristroph and his team cooked up hard candy — like a lollipop — in the shape of a cylinder with a domed top. They stuck the candy upright in a tank of water and simply let it dissolve. One might imagine that the candy would simply shrink away, staying more or less the same shape. But that's not what happened. Instead, the candy gradually sharpened into a point as it dissolved. These points could become quite sharp, Ristroph told Live Science — at least 10 times thinner than a human hair.

Read more: 'Candyland' stone forests form using deceptively simple physics

Thirteen mummies

(Image credit: Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)

Archaeologists have discovered more than 13 ancient Egyptian coffins piled one on top of the other within a burial well at the desert necropolis of Saqqara, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The 2,500-year-old wooden coffins are so well preserved that the intricate designs on them, painted in blue, gold, white, black and red, are still visible.

The identity of the deceased who were buried within the coffins remains a mystery; archaeologists have yet to look inside the sealed coffins, which haven't been opened since the bodies were interred within, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities reported in a Sept. 6 Facebook post . Archaeologists found the coffins in a well measuring nearly 40 feet (11 meters) deep. It's likely that more of these coffins will be found within the niches located along the sides of the well, the ministry noted.

These newfound coffins are the largest finding at Saqqara since 30 wooden coffins were discovered in a cache at Al-Assasif cemetery within the necropolis in October 2019, the ministry said.

Read more: 13 mummy coffins stacked in a well unearthed in ancient Egyptian necropolis

Straight to the heart

(Image credit: Gladstone Institutes)

The new coronavirus seems to slice heart muscle fibers into small, precisely sized fragments — at least when it infects heart cells in a lab dish, a new study reveals.

When scientists mixed the new coronavirus with heart cells in the lab, the virus appeared to carve heart muscle fibers into small fragments. On the left, an image of healthy heart muscle cells, which have long fibers that allow them to contract. On the right, an image of heart muscle cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 in which the long fibers appeared to be diced into small pieces.

This snipping of muscle fibers, which could permanently damage heart cells, is scary enough in a lab dish; but the researchers found evidence that a similar process could be happening in the hearts of COVID-19 patients as well. However, the new finding, which was published to the preprint database bioRXiv on Aug. 25, has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, or proven to happen in people.

Read more: Coronavirus may dice heart muscle fibers into tiny snippets, remove cells' DNA

The oldest anatomical atlas

(Image credit: The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo)

A series of 2,200-year-old Chinese texts, written on silk and found buried in ancient tombs, contain the oldest surviving anatomical atlas, scientists say.

The texts were discovered in the 1970s within tombs at the site of Mawangdui in south-central China . The tombs belonged to Marquis Dai, his wife Lady Dai and their son. The texts are challenging to understand, and they use the term "meridian" to refer to parts of the human body . In a paper recently published Sept. 1 in the journal The Anatomical Record , researchers argue that these texts "are the oldest surviving anatomical atlas in the world."

Additionally, the texts "both predate and inform the later acupuncture texts, which have been the foundation for acupuncture practice in the subsequent two millennia," the researchers wrote in the study. The find "challenges the widespread belief that there is no scientific foundation for the 'anatomy of acupuncture,' by showing that the earliest physicians writing about acupuncture were in fact writing about the physical body," they added.

Read more: 2,200-year-old Chinese text may be oldest surviving anatomical atlas

A creature in the ice

(Image credit: Esercito Italiano - Comando Truppe Alpine)

A hairless, leathery horror found encrusted in Alpine ice is a chamois that died 400 years ago. The long-dead goat -antelope was discovered in Val Aurina, South Tyrol, Italy by Italian alpinist and champion skier Hermann Oberlechner, who was on a 6-hour hike from civilization when he noticed something strange sticking out of the ice.

"Only half of the animal's body was exposed from the snow," Oberlechner said in a statement. "The skin looked like leather, completely hairless; I had never seen anything like it. I immediately took a photo and sent it to the park ranger, together we then notified the Department of Cultural Heritage."

The discovery is reminiscent of other ice mummies found at high altitudes, including the famous "Iceman" Ötzi, whose 5,300-year-old mummified body was found by hikers in the Italian Alps in 1991. That similarity has scientists excited about the find: They now plan to use the rare chamois mummy to learn how to better preserve ancient DNA for analysis in the lab, hoping to be prepared the next time a human mummy appears out of the ice.

Read more: 400-year-old mummified goat found frozen in Alps by champion skier

Originally published on Live Science.