In this week's science news, we reported on the world's oldest mummy, the bizarre cloning behavior of the Iberian harvester ant, the sun's activity ramping up, and scientists using mysterious fast radio bursts to map the cosmos.
(Image credit: Yousuke Kaifu and Hirofumi Matsumura/ Jonathan Romiguier, Yannick Juvé and Laurent Soldati)
This week's science news is stuffed with a menagerie of weird and wonderful animal discoveries. Topping the list are Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus), which mate with the male ants of a distantly related species (Messor structor) to procreate.
That's odd enough on its own, but now scientists have discovered that the harvester ants don't even need nearby M. structor colonies to achieve this — in a bizarre first, they simply clone the males when they need them.
It's a "science fiction" feat that has led to the naming of an entirely new reproductive method. With this system, called "xenoparity," the ants blur the lines between species in a completely unprecedented way.
Scientists thought the sun was set to quiten down. But it's doing the exact opposite.
(Image credit: NASA Goddard)
If the above stories didn't rock your world, this one will certainly set off geomagnetic storms in the sky above it: This week, NASA scientists announced that the sun's activity is set to rise in the coming decades, likely sending more dangerous space weather our way.
That comes as a big surprise, as sunwatchers mostly expected our star to cycle through a period of low activity in the years ahead. But observations of an unusually hyperactive sunspot cycle have upended those predictions. The upshot is that more powerful X-class solar flares and coronal mass ejections will be hurled at Earth. That could prove problematic, given our increasing reliance on satellites and the growing "second space race" to colonize the skies, the moon and even Mars.
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Chatbots are infamous energy guzzlers, with their rapid rollout and adoption in the past few years leading them to suck up increasingly large shares of electricity from power grids. With their energy consumption expected to skyrocket even higher, we looked into why the greedy bots require so much power and what can be done about it.
The oldest mummies discovered thus far were smoke-dried, a burial practice that likely had spiritual significance.
(Image credit: Yousuke Kaifu and Hirofumi Matsumura)
When you think of mummies, your mind will likely travel to Egypt and the roughly 4,500-year-old preserved bodies sealed inside its elaborate tombs. But the discovery of some 10,000-year-old dried human remains deposited in dozens of ancient graves in Southeast Asia and China shows that the world's oldest known mummies were from a different part of the world.
The remains were smoke-dried over a fire before burial. The ancient practice, which is still performed today, went beyond mere preservation and was likely freighted with spiritual and cultural significance. The scientists who found the mummies also believe they could support a "two-layer model" of migration across Southeast Asia, since the funeral ritual of ancient hunter-gatherers who arrived in the region 65,000 years ago was distinct from the burial rites of Neolithic farmers who arrived 4,000 years ago.
Mysterious flashes of light from deep space could help scientists to map the cosmos.
(Image credit: Wei-An Jin)
They arrive as brief flashes in the cosmic dark, powerful jolts of energy that discharge more energy in a few milliseconds than the sun does over an entire year. Yet as much as scientists have puzzled over what processes could be causing these fast radio bursts (FRBs), they still do not fully know what the pulses are.
What is apparent is that FRBs are produced through completely unexpected processes, and far more often than expected. And that makes them very useful to astronomers. In this week's Science Spotlight, we investigated how scientists are using FRBs to create the ultimate map of our universe.
Something for the weekend
If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best interviews, polls and science histories published this week.
Soaring like a rocky mountain against a starry blue sky, the image spotlights Pismis 24, a stellar nursery at the core of the Lobster Nebula. The craggy spires of gas and dust in the foreground span multiple light-years in height, and are being actively sculpted by the radiation of nearby baby stars. It's a breathtakingly gorgeous scene, and contains two of the brightest stars in our entire Milky Way, measuring 74 and 66 times the size of our sun.
Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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