News in Brief
- Space
Search for E.T. gets financial boost
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets a $100 million donation from a Russian entrepreneur.
- Planetary Science
Latest dispatch from Pluto reveals frozen plains, icy hills and more
Polygon plains, windswept hydrocarbons, and more moons were tantalizing details revealed about Pluto in the latest data from New Horizons.
- Neuroscience
How screams shatter the brain
The acoustical properties of screams make them hard to ignore, a new study suggests.
- Animals
Polar bears’ ‘walking hibernation’ not much of an energy saver
Summer’s “walking hibernation” doesn’t shut down polar bears as much as winter does.
- Life
Cutting calories lets yeast live longer
A new study confirms yeast live longer on fewer calories.
- Cosmology
Brightest supernova breaks record
A recent supernova shines with the light of 600 billion suns.
- Astronomy
Massive black hole lurks in lightweight galaxy
A heavyweight black hole grew to weigh as much as 7 billion suns within the first 2 billion years after the Big Bang.
- Tech
3-D–printed body helps jumping robot land on its feet
To launch itself into the air, a jumping robot relies on a 3-D–printed body made of a gradient of soft and stiff plastics.
- Astronomy
Beta Pictoris planet makes waves
Spiral waves whip through the belt of debris around a young star — and it’s all a giant planet’s fault.
- Genetics
Why mammoths loved the cold
An altered temperature sensor helped mammoths adapt to the cold.
- Health & Medicine
Genetic tweak turned plague bacterium deadly
Two genetic changes allowed plague bacteria to cause deadly lung infections and pandemic disease.
- Astronomy
X-ray rings reveal neutron star’s distance
Concentric X-ray rings around a neutron star help astronomers triangulate the star’s distance.
