What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Yawning may be the brain's way of cooling itself: in one experiment, people watching others yawn were far less likely to yawn when a cold pack was pressed to their forehead, but not when the pack was warm
In 1676 a Danish astronomer noticed the eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io kept arriving late as Earth pulled away, and used the delay to conclude that light does not travel instantly
Cuttlefish passed a version of the marshmallow test, waiting up to two minutes for a better meal, and the ones that held out longest also learned fastest
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were preparing to leave the Moon in July 1969, a Soviet robot called Luna 15 was descending toward another lunar sea in a final attempt to bring soil home first; it crashed after 52 orbits, ending a race that continued above the Moon even after Apollo 11 had landed
A bar-tailed godwit flew 7,250 miles nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, going more than eight days without landing, eating or drinking
In February 1985, the Soviet space station Salyut 7 went silent and began tumbling with dead batteries, frozen instruments and frost covering its windows; four months later, two cosmonauts docked with the powerless 20-tonne station by hand, entered wearing gas masks and brought it back to life with flashlights and improvised wiring
Neptune has the strongest winds in the solar system, gusting past 1,200 miles an hour on a planet that gets barely a fraction of the sunlight Earth does
Astronomers have found the first stellar-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, locked with a star in a 94-year orbit — the longest-period black hole binary yet found
In December 1972, before he climbed the ladder of the Apollo 17 lunar module for the last time, Gene Cernan knelt in the grey dust of the Taurus-Littrow valley and traced his daughter Tracy's initials, TDC, into a surface with no wind or weather to erase them for millions of years
Have physicists caught the faint whisper of neutrinos from every supernova that ever exploded — a first hint, not yet a discovery?
