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Science news this week: China turns a desert into a carbon sink, a Viking Age grave holds a giant who had brain surgery, real-life inception, and a last-minute Valentine's gift idea from nature
Feb. 14 2026: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
China turns a desert into a carbon sink, a Viking Age grave holds a giant who had brain surgery, scientists perform dream inception, and a last-minute Valentine's gift idea from the natural world
(Image credit: John Bavaro Fine Art / Science Photo Library | NASA/ISS program)
This week's science news was filled with astonishing stories about ecological transformations. Topping the list was the finding that China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert that it has turned one of the world's largest and driest places into a carbon sink that sucks up more carbon dioxide than it emits.
The effort is part of China's "Great Green Wall" aimed at holding back the expansion of the Gobi Desert. So far, China has planted roughly 88 million acres (36 million hectares) of forest and 66 billion trees, showing that human-led interventions can transform natural landscapes for the better. That was also evident in China's ban of fishing in the Yangtze River, which has caused fish populations to rebound.
Some even more consequential climate news came from China this week, with an early analysis indicating that carbon dioxide emissions from the country have flatlined or fallen for 21 months. This could mean the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter may have reached a turning point sooner than expected.
A Viking Age mass grave filled with the dismembered remains of 10 people in England also contained the skeleton of an extremely tall man who'd had brain surgery, we reported this week.
Archaeologists unearthed four complete skeletons, along with a scattering of heads and limbs, during an excavation of Wandlebury Country Park, south of Cambridge, in summer 2025. Evidence strongly suggests that the pit's occupants had met violent ends. This most likely ties these buried bones to ninth-century conflicts between the Saxons and the Vikings, during which Cambridge was a frontier zone.
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As for the giant, scientists speculated that he may have experienced pituitary gigantism, a condition that causes the body to overproduce growth hormones. This also may have caused swelling in his skull that may have necessitated a form of brain surgery called trepanation, which involves drilling a hole into the cranium.
Ghost lineages sound very spooky, but you won't need Tyler Henry to contact them, just a good geneticist. These extinct populations left behind no fossils, but their traces are being unearthed in humans and other animals.
The role of dreams and the unconscious in our waking cognition has long been a pervading mystery. Take the 19th-century German chemist August Kekulé, who famously claimed to have discovered the ring-like structure of the benzene molecule after dreaming of a snake swallowing its own tail.
This week, we reported on an intriguing study that seemed to demonstrate that dreams can help people solve a conundrum. But this time, the solution was one deliberately inserted into participants' sleeping minds using a musical cue — not far off the dream manipulation performed in the Christopher Nolan blockbuster "Inception."
And yes, it actually improved the volunteers' ability to solve previously encountered puzzles.
By 37,000 years ago, the gruesome deed was already done. Across El Salt, in southeastern Spain, the final vestiges of the Neanderthals lived their days never knowing they would be their species' last members. But what drove our evolutionary cousins to extinction? In this long read, Live Science searched for the answers to human prehistory's most enigmatic whodunit: Who killed the Neanderthals? Reader, was it us?
Something for the weekend
If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best analyses, science histories and crosswords published this week.
Forgot to get that special someone a romantic gift this Valentine's Day? We've got you covered: Give them some table salt, and say it came from this lake.
Taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station as it drifted overhead, Salinas Las Barrancas is an Argentine lake that gets its pink hue from microorganisms that thrive on the salt deposited within. Humans use the salt too; 330,000 tons (300,000 metric tons) of it are mined from the flats each year. The salt is then replenished by the next major rainfall, with mining expected to remain possible for the next 5,000 years.
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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