News in Brief
- Animals
Desert ants look to the sky, rely on memory to navigate backward
Desert ants appear to use a combination of visual memory and celestial cues to make it back to the nest walking butt-first, researchers find.
- Climate
Earth’s last major warm period was as hot as today
Sea surface temperatures today are comparable to those around 125,000 years ago, a time when sea levels were 6 to 9 meters higher, new research suggests.
- Climate
Monsoon deluges turned ancient Sahara green
The ancient Sahara Desert sprouted trees and lakes for thousands of years thanks to intense rainfall.
- Tech
Heart-hugging robot does the twist (and squeeze)
A robotic sleeve that slips around the heart mimics the heart’s natural movement, squeezing and twisting to pump blood in pigs. If it works in humans, it could buy time for heart failure patients awaiting a transplant.
- Life
Here’s how earwax might clean ears
Science seeks inspiration in earwax for dreams of self-cleaning machinery.
- Materials Science
New ‘smart’ fibers curb fires in lithium-ion batteries
To stifle battery fires, scientists create component with heat-release flame retardant.
- Planetary Science
The moon is still old
New analysis of moon rocks points to our satellite forming about 4.51 billion years ago, roughly 60 million years after the start of the solar system.
- Computing
Retracted result on network equivalence reinstated
Graph isomorphism result still stands, despite error.
- Astronomy
Milky Way’s black hole may hurl galactic spitballs our way
Gas blobs formed in the wake of stars shredded by the black hole in the center of the galaxy could pass within several hundred light-years of Earth on their way to intergalactic space.
- Particle Physics
Dark matter still missing
The XENON100 experiment found no evidence of an annually varying dark matter signal.
- Astronomy
Earliest galaxies got the green light
Galaxies in the early universe might have emitted lots of green light, powered by large populations of stars much hotter than most found today.
- Earth
Antarctic ice shelf heading toward collapse
A fast-growing crack in Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf could soon break off a 5,000-square-kilometer hunk of ice into the ocean.
