Expressive tail wags, a hot new planet, and some new species highlight this week's discoveries:
1. How dogs'
tails speak volumes: Wagging tails are little more complicated than you might
think. A new study finds that dogs are able to pick up on friend or foe
depending on whether a tail is wagging to the left or right. But Fido
apparently isn't intentionally communicating.
2. Earth-like planet
discovered, but it's hotter than ...:
Astronomers have discovered a planet where a certain red guy with horns could
make himself right at home. It's a planet much like our own Earth—about the
same size, with the same mixture of rock and iron, and it orbits a star like
our sun—except that Kepler 78b is an infernal ball of fire. Think temperatures
up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt rock.
3. 'Lost'
rainforest yields bizarre species: Meet the blotched boulder
frog, the shade skink, and the leaf-tailed gecko, three new species discovered
when researchers finally got to explore a rainforest nearly impossible to reach
in Australia
4. Dark matter
experiment finds best nothing yet: The team running the biggest,
most sensitive dark matter detector yet
announced its first round of results this week—specifically, the lack thereof.
Scientists cooled a vat full of liquid xenon to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit,
watched it for three months, and caught nary a glimpse of the particle clouds
that should have theoretically shown up. Turns out, this is a good thing,
scientifically speaking.
5. Yellowstone's
magma reservoir bigger than thought: That Yellowstone has a big
blob of molten rock lurking beneath it isn't news to scientists. A new
analysis, however, shows that this blob is more than twice as big as they
originally thought. Figure about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide, though
researchers aren't much worried about an eruption.
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