What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
For nearly two decades, researchers have been demonstrating in mice that the blood of a young animal, when surgically shared with an old one, can reverse signs of aging across nearly every tissue — heart, brain, muscle, liver, kidney — and the search for the specific factors in young blood that cause this effect has now become one of the most heavily funded races in modern biotech
In 2003, an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom published an argument that we are statistically more likely to be inside a computer simulation than in original reality — provided any sufficiently advanced civilization runs simulations of its own ancestors, a conditional that has reshaped serious debate about the nature of existence
Smell has a direct neural pathway to the brain's memory centres — and researchers used that to produce a 226% performance gap on a memory test, without drugs or training
Glass frogs can turn much of their body see-through while they sleep by pulling almost all of their red blood cells out of circulation and storing them in their liver, then releasing them again when they wake and need to move.
Veterinary researchers found that between 64% and 92% of cats over the age of 10 have arthritis — and because cats are built to conceal pain, most owners have no idea
The human body gives off a faint glow of visible light, produced by ordinary chemical reactions inside living cells. It is real light, but it is far too weak to see: roughly a thousand times below the sensitivity of the naked eye, so to us the body appears completely dark.
Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood that carries oxygen using a copper-based protein rather than iron, and because the heart that supplies the body stops beating whenever they swim, many bottom-dwelling octopuses tend to crawl along the seafloor instead of swimming for long stretches.
In 1977, a radio telescope in Ohio called Big Ear picked up a 72-second signal so strong and so cleanly from the direction of Sagittarius that the astronomer on duty circled it in red ink and wrote 'Wow!' in the margin, and nearly fifty years later nobody has ever heard it again.
The sun accounts for about 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system, which means every planet, moon, asteroid and comet combined is little more than a rounding error.
Naked mole-rats age so slowly, resist cancer so well and survive oxygen loss so strangely that researchers now study them as one of nature’s best clues to human ageing.
