Video
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- 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
- Materials Science
Permanent liquid magnets have now been created in the lab
Magnets that generate persistent magnetic fields are usually solid. But new little bar magnets have the mechanical properties of liquids.
