It means measure.

It's just terminology. We call something that can be measured an "observable" in quantum mechanics. Chill dude

It's called a scientific observation. Don't worry, you'll learn about the scientific method eventually. Until then, enjoy 3rd grade.

measure as in...?

Probably speed, position, charge, etc. All the things we can measure.

Forget the idea of 'observing', replace it with 'measuring' instead. It's bad terminology that just confuses people.
In a quantum system, before a measurement takes place, things just sorta act like a probability - 'you've got a 30% chance of finding this particle here, only a 5% chance over here' etc. Once we try to measure the system, the universe essentially rolls a dice and the particle appears in one of it's possible locations.

This isn't quite accurate, but should suffice for getting the general concept idea.

Imagine you have a 6-sided die floating in front of you, spinning so rapidly that you can't really tell which side is facing you at any moment. You can give probabilities (in this case, a 1/6 chance for each side if it's spinning randomly, if it is oriented flat and only spinning horizontally then only 4 sides will ever face you, and so on).

If, at any point, you wanted to check which side was facing you, you would have to stop the die from spinning. If you stopped it and the 5 was facing you, you'd now know the side, but the probability would be changed to 100% for the 5 and 0% for the other sides. By observing it (as in finding a way to measure the information you wanted), you have changed the properties of the die, locking it in place, and when you release it it will start spinning again and become semi-random.

Just replace the die with quantum particles, the only way to measure certain properties is to interact with the particles in such a way that they can't change until you stop measuring.

We just confirmed the fact that it happens

There isn't anyone in the world who could explain why it happens to you (right now)

It just defies all logic, to me at least.

Discovering something like this redefines the way we percieve logic, before the discovery of gravity the idea of an object pulling on you by simply being near you probably sounded pretty silly, one hundred years from now this phenomenon will just be another law of physics

I guess so

In quantum mechanics 'observing' just mean measuring. So, in most cases, physicists hit things with photons to determine their position and momentum. As it turns out, if you shoot enough photons at your particles of interest, they are more likely to obey the laws of classical mechanics. Rates of Quantum tunnelling dramatically reduced, but the articles don't actually state that the atoms stop moving or anything.

that's the question, wtf is up with consciousness and is it defined by its ability to observe?
either that, or it's using instruments to measure the atoms that interferes with them, eg: light hits the electrons in metals making them bounce around, which means that all we see is bouncing around electrons but the electrons are naturally not bouncing, it's the act of shining a light on it to observe it that changes its results... or something

i dunno man i read like one tiny book on quantum theory in 8th grade, **** , where's sciencexplain

tho i do think that guy, Bohr, he tried to figure out wtf is up with conscious observers being the trigger for that quantum **** we keep talking about... but i dont think people really cared much back then tho