Video
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Planetary Science
How NASA has kept Apollo moon rocks safe from contamination for 50 years
NASA wouldn’t let our reporter touch the Apollo moon rocks. Here’s why that’s a good thing.
- Neuroscience
Both fish and humans have REM-like sleep
Sleeping zebrafish have brain and body activity similar to snoozing mammals, suggesting that sleep evolved at least 450 million years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Vision cells can pull double duty in the brain, detecting both color and shape
Neurons in a brain area that handles vision fire in response to more than one aspect of an object, countering earlier ideas, a study in monkeys finds.
- Planetary Science
With Dragonfly, NASA is heading back to Saturn’s moon Titan
NASA’s next robotic mission to explore the solar system is headed to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
- Life
‘Sneezing’ plants may spread pathogens to their neighbors
A “surface tension catapult” can fling dewdrops carrying fungal spores from water-repellent leaves.
- Health & Medicine
Extra fingers, often seen as useless, can offer major dexterity advantages
Two people born with six fingers on each hand can control the extra digit, using it to do tasks better than five-fingered hands, a study finds.
- Life
Some fungi trade phosphorus with plants like savvy stockbrokers
New views show how fungi shift their stores of phosphorus toward more favorable markets where the nutrient is scarce.
- Anthropology
Hominids may have been cutting-edge tool makers 2.6 million years ago
Contested finds point to a sharp shift in toolmaking by early members of the Homo genus.
- Life
How bacteria nearly killed by antibiotics can recover — and gain resistance
A pump protein can keep bacteria alive long enough for the microbes to develop antibiotic resistance.
- Artificial Intelligence
AI can learn real-world skills from playing StarCraft and Minecraft
By playing StarCraft and Minecraft, artificial intelligence is learning how to collaborate and adapt.
- Earth
Dry sand can bubble and swirl like a fluid
Put two types of sand grains together in a chamber, and they can flow like fluids under the right conditions.
- Animals
How aphids sacrifice themselves to fix their homes with fatty goo
Young aphids swollen with fatty substances save their colony by self-sacrifice, using that goo to patch breaches in the wall of their tree home.
