Video
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Life
Saharan silver ants are the world’s fastest despite relatively short legs
Saharan silver ants can hit speeds of 108 times their body length per second.
- Space
The solar system may have a new smallest dwarf planet: Hygiea
New images reveal Hygiea is round, a final criterion for promoting the wee world from asteroid to dwarf planet status.
- Animals
Humpback whales use their flippers and bubble ‘nets’ to catch fish
A study reveals new details of how humpback whales hunt using their flippers and a whirl of bubbles to capture fish.
- Space
A supermassive black hole shredded a star and was caught in the act
Astronomers have gotten the earliest glimpse yet of a black hole ripping up a star, a process known as a tidal disruption event.
- Climate
Malin Pinsky seeks to explain how climate change alters ocean life
As global temperatures rise, Malin Pinsky’s research attempts to understand how marine ecosystems are changing and why.
- Life
We’ve lost 3 billion birds since 1970 in North America
Scientists estimated the change in total number of individual birds since 1970. They found profound losses spread among rare and common birds alike.
- Humans
A 3.8-million-year-old skull reveals the face of Lucy’s possible ancestors
A fossilized hominid skull found in an Ethiopian desert illuminates the earliest-known Australopithecus species.
- Anthropology
A tiny skull fossil suggests primate brain areas evolved separately
Digital reconstruction of a fossilized primate skull reveals that odor and vision areas developed independently starting 20 million years ago or more.
- Life
How these tiny insect larvae leap without legs
High-speed filming reveals how a blob of an insect can leap more efficiently than it crawls.
- Astronomy
A 3-D map of stars reveals the Milky Way’s warped shape
Our galaxy flaunts its curves in a chart of thousands of stars called Cepheids.
- Animals
There’s more to pufferfish than that goofy spiked balloon
Three odd things about pufferfishes: how they mate, how they bite and what’s up with no fish scales?
- Astronomy
In a first, physicists re-created the sun’s spiraling solar wind in a lab
Some of the sun’s fundamental physics have been re-created with plasma inside a vacuum chamber
