Video
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Planetary Science
Watch real video of Perseverance’s Mars landing
NASA’s Perseverance rover filmed its own landing on Mars. Here’s that video.
- Tech
A robot arm toting a Venus flytrap can grab delicate objects
By attaching electrodes to the plant’s leaves, researchers found a way to snap its traps shut on command.
- Plants
Rats with poisonous hairdos live surprisingly sociable private lives
Deadly, swaggering rodents purr and snuggle when they’re with mates and young.
- Animals
Brown tree snakes use their tails as lassos to climb wide trees
A never-before-seen climbing technique could inspire the creation of new serpentine robots to navigate difficult terrains.
- Space
How future spacecraft might handle tricky landings on Venus or Europa
Scientists are getting inventive with ways to touch down on these worlds, where landers will face obstacles not seen elsewhere in the solar system.
- Space
Astronomers spotted colliding neutron stars that may have formed a magnetar
Astronomers may have witnessed the formation of a kind of rapidly spinning, extremely magnetized stellar corpse for the first time.
- 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.
