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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
A face mask may turn up a male wrinkle-faced bat’s sex appeal
The first-ever scientific observations of a wrinkle-faced bat’s courtship shows that, when flirting, the males raise their white furry face coverings.
- Life
Monarch caterpillars head-butt each other to fight for scarce food
Video experiments show that monarch caterpillars turn aggressive when there’s not enough milkweed to go around.
- Physics
Giant lasers help re-create supernovas’ explosive, mysterious physics
For the first time, scientists have re-created a type of shock wave that occurs in supernovas.
- Life
Ogre-faced spiders catch insects out of the air using sound instead of sight
A new study finds that ogre-faced spiders can hear a surprisingly wide range of sounds.
- Plants
How Venus flytraps store short-term ‘memories’ of prey
Glowing Venus flytraps reveal how calcium buildup in the cells of leaves acts as a short-term “memory” that helps the plants identify prey.
- Space
How do you clean up clingy space dust? Zap it with an electron beam
An electron beam is the newest addition to a suite of technologies for cleaning sticky and damaging lunar dust off surfaces.
- Environment
This moth may outsmart smog by learning to like pollution-altered aromas
In the lab, scientists taught tobacco hawkmoths that a scent changed by ozone is from a favorite flower.
- Animals
Sea butterflies’ shells determine how the snails swim
New aquarium videos show that sea butterflies of various shapes and sizes flutter through water differently.
- Space
A weirdly warped planet-forming disk circles a distant trio of stars
The bizarre geometry of a disk of gas and dust around three stars in the constellation Orion could be formed by “disk tearing” or a newborn planet.
- Physics
Toy boats float upside down underneath a layer of levitated liquid
The upward force of buoyancy keeps objects afloat even in unusual conditions.
- Archaeology
X-rays reveal what ancient animal mummies keep under wraps
A new method of 3-D scanning mummified animals reveals life and death details for a snake, a bird and a cat.
- Tech
Methanol fuel gives this tiny beetle bot the freedom to roam
A new robot insect uses energy-dense methanol as fuel, not batteries. It could be a blueprint for future search-and-rescue bots with long run times.
