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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Neuroscience
‘Silent’ cells play a surprising role in how brains work
New studies show that astrocytes, long thought to be support cells in the brain, are crucial intermediaries for relaying messages to neurons.
- Psychology
Chess players rely on familiar moves even when the game changes
In chess as in life, people use memory as a shortcut for decision-making. That strategy can backfire when the present doesn’t resemblance the past.
- Tech
A hopping robot shows off its squirrel-like skills
Salto the jumping robot can take a flying leap and land on a narrow pipe — just like a squirrel soaring from branch to branch.
- Animals
How a mushroom coral goes for a walk without legs
Time-lapse video shows how a mushroom coral polyp pulses and inflates, flinging its soft body into micro-hops to slowly move itself to a new location.
- Physics
A cosmic neutrino of unknown origins smashes energy records
A deep-sea detector glimpsed a particle with 220 million billion electron volts of energy — around 20 times as energetic as any neutrino seen before.
- Space
Space missions spanned the solar system in 2024
Humankind accomplished new feats in space this year, including scooping up some of the moon’s farside and launching a probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
- Life
Here’s how long it would take 100 worms to eat the plastic in one face mask
An experiment reveals that a bio-solution to humans’ microplastics mess is likely to fall short, but could inspire other ways to attack the problem.
- Planetary Science
Uranus may have looked weird when NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by
A solar wind event days before the NASA probe flyby in 1986 may have compressed the planet’s magnetosphere, making it look odder than it usually is.
- Climate
Meet Chonkus, the mutant cyanobacteria that could help sink climate change
The mutant of the lab-studied Synechococcus elongatus has traits good for ocean carbon storage.
- Chemistry
Work on protein structure and design wins the 2024 chemistry Nobel
David Baker figured out how to build entirely new proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper developed an AI tool to predict protein structures.
- Neuroscience
Semaglutide saps mice’s motivation to run
Mice given semaglutide, the key ingredient in drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, lost weight, but they also voluntarily ran less on a wheel.
- Animals
These sea creatures can fuse their bodies
A species of comb jelly can fuse its body with another jelly after injury. Some of the pair’s body functions then synchronize.
