ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

Astronomers have discovered bloated Jupiter-sized worlds that are so precariously close to their parent star they are being roasted at seething temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough to vaporize most metals, including titanium. They have the hottest planetary atmospheres ever seen. Hubble astronomers are reporting on bizarre weather conditions on these sizzling worlds. It's raining vaporized rock on one planet, and another one has its upper atmosphere getting hotter rather than cooler because it is being 'sunburned' by intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from its star.

Social bonding between randomly assigned college roommates is not only a human phenomenon, a new study on vampire bats suggests. Vampire bat pairs that were forced to live together for only one week sustained their friendly relationships for more than two months after they were released into a bigger bat community.

When dieting and exercise aren't enough, weight-loss surgery can be an effective obesity treatment. But people who don't want surgery have other options, including insertion of an appetite-suppressing balloon or other implant in the stomach. Now, researchers report that they have augmented that procedure in laboratory animals by coating an implant with a laser-activated dye that kills cells producing ghrelin, the 'hunger hormone.'

Scientists have built instruments to give humans eyes and a nose on Mars -- and now they are helping add ears as well.

On November 8, 2020, NASA's Juno spacecraft flew through an intense beam of electrons traveling from Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, to its auroral footprint on the gas giant. Scientists used data from Juno's payload to study the particle population traveling along the magnetic field line connecting Ganymede to Jupiter while, at the same time, remotely sensing the associated auroral emissions to unveil the mysterious processes creating the shimmering lights.

Scientists have developed a pollen-based 'paper' that, after being printed on, can be 'erased' and reused multiple times without any damage to the paper.

Honey might be a sweet solution for developing environmentally friendly components for neuromorphic computers, systems designed to mimic the neurons and synapses found in the human brain. Hailed by some as the future of computing, neuromorphic systems are much faster and use much less power than traditional computers. Engineers have demonstrated one way to make them more organic too by using honey to make a memristor, a component similar to a transistor that can not only process but also store data in memory. They created the memristors by processing honey into a solid form and sandwiching it between two metal electrodes, making a structure similar to a human synapse. They then tested the honey memristors' ability to mimic the work of synapses with high switching on and off speeds of 100 and 500 nanoseconds respectively. The memristors also emulated the synapse functions known as spike-timing dependent plasticity and spike-rate dependent plasticity, which are responsible for learning processes in human brains and retaining new information in neurons.

A new study has found that squid will camouflage against coral reef and other substrate as a way of avoiding predation.

Extinct for 66 million years, T. rex still inspires speculation about its anatomy, behavior and fierce physique. One conundrum: its peculiarly short forelimbs, which have relatively limited mobility. While scientists have suggested explanations, a paleontologist puts the proposals to the test and finds them wanting. He hypothesizes that the arms reduced in size to limit damage, possibly fatal, when a pack of T. rexes descended on a carcass with their bone-crunching teeth.