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Thirty-five dogs watched forty second videos of three human faces, one of them their own owner’s, and blinked at a higher rate when the faces on screen were blinking, an increase that showed up for owners and not detectably for strangers, with no significant blink-for-blink timing between dog and human

Science Blog Editorial Team
43m ago

Two different comparisons sit inside the result, and a third prediction failed. The blink-video effect appeared only when the face on screen was the dog's owner; the direct owner-versus-stranger comparison separated only for female owners; and the prediction that dogs would time their blinks to a human's was not confirmed.

animal-behaviorbiologycognitive-neuroscience

In 1925, 24-year-old graduate student Cecilia Payne calculated that the Sun and other stars were composed overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium—a result so contrary to accepted astronomy that senior astronomer Henry Norris Russell called it “clearly impossible,” leading her to write in her thesis that the enormous abundances she had derived were “almost certainly not real.” Four years later, Russell reached the same conclusion by another method and acknowledged that Payne had got there first.

The Long View
6h ago

Payne's 1925 calculation was right, but the familiar story misses why it looked wrong and how Russell's independent 1929 analysis both confirmed and explicitly credited her earlier result.

astronomyastrophysics

On 16 January 1913, an unknown accounts clerk at the Madras Port Trust mailed Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy pages crammed with dozens of extraordinary theorems and almost no proofs. Hardy initially suspected a crank, then spent an evening examining them with J.E. Littlewood; before midnight, both knew the sender was a genius. His name was Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The Long View
8h ago

Ramanujan's 1913 letter looked implausible because it compressed deep mathematics into unsupported claims. Hardy's response mattered because suspicion led to examination rather than dismissal.

mathematicsnumber-theory

Peter Mark Roget began privately arranging words by meaning in 1805, while still a young physician. After leaving medical practice at 61, he spent twelve years turning that lifelong habit into a classification of the English language; he published it at 73, and Roget’s Thesaurus has never gone out of print in more than 170 years.

The Long View
10h ago

Roget's famous reference work grew from a private catalogue begun in 1805. Its long development, idea-first structure and continuing revisions make the real story richer than a simple retirement tale.

Neanderthals did not disappear simply because the climate turned cold or Homo sapiens defeated them—a 2026 Université de Montréal-led modelling study found that their habitats largely survived the climate swings, but some regional networks were too weakly connected to absorb the demographic and environmental shocks that better-connected Homo sapiens populations endured.

Natural History
12h ago

A Europe-wide habitat model suggests climate shifts moved Neanderthal refuges without erasing them, while weak links among some regions may have made small populations harder to rescue after local shocks.

biologyevolutionpaleontology

One of ageing research’s most counterintuitive findings is that biological-age markers may not move steadily in one direction. They can rise within days under the stress of surgery, pregnancy or severe illness, then fall again during recovery—suggesting that at least part of what we measure as ageing is a fluid physiological state, not simply damage accumulating year after year.

The Long View
14h ago

Age-related molecular scores rose after emergency surgery, across pregnancy and during critical illness, then fell with recovery. The clocks are dynamic biomarkers, not proof that accumulated ageing was erased.

agingmedicine

A five-story school built in Shanghai in 1935 stood in the way of a new office complex, so engineers dug underneath it and fitted 198 mechanical supports; over 18 days they walked the 7,600-ton building 62 meters and rotated it 21 degrees onto its new site.

Science Blog Editorial Team
14h ago

Instead of demolishing Shanghai's 85-year-old school, engineers gave it mechanical legs and walked it 62 meters across town, rotating the 7,600-ton structure like a chess piece into its new position.

civil-engineeringengineering

The left lobe of Pluto’s heart is a nitrogen ice sheet with no impact crater of any size in images down to about eighty metres per pixel, and a new analysis argues the dark lines threading the convection cells along its northern edge are where liquid nitrogen that rose through fractures no New Horizons image could resolve pooled on the surface and refroze

Science Blog Editorial Team
16h ago

The dark features were photographed in 2015; this is the first published attempt the authors know of to read them as liquid flowing in the modern epoch.

astronomyplanetary-science

A total solar eclipse depends on an extraordinary coincidence: the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon but also roughly 400 times farther away, making them appear almost exactly the same size. Other planets experience eclipses, but none in our Solar System is known to offer Earth’s near-perfect match—the Moon hiding the Sun’s bright surface while exposing its corona.

The Long View
17h ago

The 400-to-one coincidence is rounded, changeable and temporary. Its near-match hides the photosphere closely enough to expose the Sun's faint inner corona.

astronomysolar-physics

Night owls have outscored early birds on some cognitive and creativity tests, yet morning types tend to earn better grades and report greater wellbeing—an apparent reversal partly explained by schools and workplaces running on schedules that favour early risers.

Mind & Matter
19h ago

Night owls sometimes score higher on selected tests while morning types do better in classrooms and wellbeing surveys. The difference often lies in timing, sleep and what each measure rewards.

cognitive-psychologypsychology

A 2025 Nature Communications study drew on brain-activity data from 1,473 people across 13 countries and found that expert tango dancers, musicians, visual artists and strategy gamers had brain patterns estimated to be five to seven years younger than those of matched non-experts. In a separate experiment, just 30 hours of StarCraft II training shifted beginners’ estimated brain age by about three years.

Mind & Matter
20h ago

Creative experts had younger-looking functional-connectivity patterns, and a small controlled gaming experiment moved the same modelled measure. Neither result shows that biological ageing was reversed.

cognitive-neuroscienceneuroscience

Scientists who read 16 years of radio tracking from three Mars orbiters say the mantle beneath the planet’s southern highlands runs 200 to 400 degrees Celsius hotter, averaged over the whole depth of the mantle, than the mantle beneath the northern plains, an inference drawn from the way Mars flexes under the Sun across each Martian year

Science Blog Editorial Team
20h ago

The tracking shows Mars deforming in a way a uniform planet should not, and the least strained explanation is a hemisphere of mantle that something is still keeping warm.

astronomyplanetary-science

A 2025 study of 1,200 outdoor swimming visits across 19 countries found that people reported about 9% higher wellbeing after swimming in oceans, lakes or rivers than after using open-air pools. The difference was linked mainly to feelings of freedom and personal mastery—not social connection.

Mind & Matter
22h ago

Natural-water swims were recalled more positively than open-air pool visits, with autonomy and competence accounting for the difference. The cross-sectional survey cannot show that the setting caused the lift.

behavioral-sciencepsychology

Vesper bats—a family of more than 500 species—appear to carry two distinct sets of antibody heavy-chain genes, an immune arrangement never previously found in mammals that could help explain how many bats tolerate dangerous viruses without developing severe disease.

Lab Report
23h ago

Vesper bats possess two complete antibody heavy-chain gene loci on separate chromosomes. Both work, but their possible role in viral tolerance remains a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated cause.

biologyimmunology
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