ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

A team of astronomers has developed a method that will allow them to 'see' through the fog of the early Universe and detect light from the first stars and galaxies.

Because it's bigger, Jupiter ought to have larger, more spectacular rings than Saturn has. But new research shows Jupiter's massive moons prevent that vision from lighting up the night sky.

Researchers have developed a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient algorithm for one-shot visual imitation. It can learn directly from human-interaction videos and generalize that information to new tasks, making robots well-suited to learning household chores. People constantly perform various tasks in their homes. With WHIRL, a robot can observe those tasks and gather the video data it needs to eventually determine how to complete the job itself.

Scientists discover off-axis, high-temperature deep-sea hydrothermal vents along a portion of the northern East Pacific Rise that are hotter and cover more area than any other hydrothermal vents studied to date along this section of the mid-ocean ridge. The discovery demonstrates that there are likely more hydrothermal vents in the deep-sea than previously thought, and underscores the need for high-resolution bathymetric mapping to locate them.