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The third-largest dwarf planet in our solar system has its own moon, a new study reveals. Astronomers used three different telescopes to detect and characterize a moon orbiting 2007 OR10, which is known informally as “Snow White.” Snow White is a 950-mile-wide (1,530 kilometers) dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of frigid bodies beyond Neptune. The object’s newfound satellite is pretty big, with an estimated diameter of 150 to 250 miles (240 to 400 km), researchers reported in the new study....

Mobile devices have become incredibly popular for their ability to weave modern conveniences such as Internet access and social networking into the fabric of daily life. For people with disabilities, however, these devices have the potential to unlock unprecedented new possibilities for communication, navigation and independence. This emergence of mobile “assistive” technologies, influenced heavily by the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) 25 years ago, marks a major step forward for people with disabilities....

How does the Coast Guard find people lost at sea? Arthur A. Allen, a physical oceanographer with the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue in Washington, D.C., answers (as told to Adam Hadhazy): We begin by interviewing the people who reported the problem. We try to find out where and when the boaters got in trouble, when they left port, where they intended to go, and where else they may have headed—what their plan B was....

Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas By Matt Lewis. Penguin Random House, 2015. Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins By Susan Casey. Penguin Random House, 2015. The Reason For Flowers: Their History, Culture, and Biology, and How They Change our Lives By Stephen Buchmann. Scribner, 2015. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel By Carl Safina....

NOAA has used its air, sea and satellite resources to develop a global picture of the sharp reductions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants created by the behavioral changes caused by the coronavirus. In what the agency hopes will be the first major study on what the United States might expect from a future fleet of cleaner electric vehicles and reduced future emissions from aircraft and industries, NOAA rushed to put together multiple experiments to measure changes caused by the nearly global lockdown in April....

Allie and Bailey knew each other when they both lived in Florida. More than 20 years later, Allie lives near Chicago and Bailey lives in Bermuda, but Allie’s name still rings a bell for Bailey. That would not be breaking news, except that Allie and Bailey are not people: they are dolphins. Bailey’s recollection of Allie’s name — or more precisely, of her ‘signature whistle’, which functions as a name among dolphins — is the most durable social memory ever recorded for a non-human....

Some early humans likely ate their relatives’ remains—not with ferocious contempt like some imagine, but rather with a touch of ceremony. And anthropologist Silvia Bello may have found the arm bone to prove it. The engraved limb could stand as the oldest evidence of humans engaging in ritual cannibalism, as Bello and her fellow Natural History Museum of London researchers reported today in PLOS ONE. The study is the latest in a series of examinations Bello has made of human remains from a cave in southwestern England that, all together, suggest our early ancestors engaged in complex and unusual eating habits....

A new report describes a way of mimicking the event horizon of a black hole—that infamous point of no return, the boundary beyond which light and matter are forever lost—using nothing more than light pulses transmitted along an optical fiber. With luck, researchers will be able to use the system to study faint particles emerging from the artificial horizon that are analogous to Hawking radiation, theorized by physicist Stephen Hawking to stream from real black holes....

Chunks of black manganese oxides have been recovered at Neanderthal sites for many years, and until now it was thought to have been used as a source of body paint, as it is often found alongside other coloured minerals. However, some have pointed out that there would have been more readily available sources of black pigment, including ash and charcoal. Now, a group led by Marie Soressi at Leiden University in the Netherlands has put forward the idea that these compounds were instead used as firelighters....

From Nature magazine Most everyone knows that stress can cause a clenched, gurgling, unhappy stomach. What’s less well known is that the relationship goes both ways. Beneficial gut bacteria, or probiotics, have been shown in the past to alleviate symptoms of stress and anxiety, but it wasn’t clear whether the bugs could have an impact on the brains of healthy animals. Now, John Cryan, a pharmacologist with the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Center at University College Cork, Ireland, and colleagues have found that probiotics have a direct impact on mood neurotransmitters in mice1....

Doris Tsao launched her career deciphering faces—but for a few weeks in September, she struggled to control the expression on her own. Tsao had just won a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award, an honour that comes with more than half a million dollars to use however the recipient wants. But she was sworn to secrecy—even when the foundation sent a film crew to her laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena....

The first taste I had of the power of naming bad things came when in college I mentioned how I’d had German measles when I was young. Bristling, a student from Bremen said “What is this German measles? There is nothing German about it!” “Um, I dunno—that’s just what it was called when I was a kid,” I stammered. In fact, the illness (now known as rubella) was so called because a German scientist named Friedrich Hoffmann was the first to identify it as a distinct disease, in the 1700s....

Men with autism respond differently to human odors — and the social signals that they contain — than do their neurotypical peers, according to a new study. The results suggest that men with autism misread social signals present in human odors — causing them to misinterpret others’ emotions. Human sweat contains chemicals believed to convey social and emotional information. For instance, when women smell sweat collected from men watching scary movies, they are more likely to describe faces with ambiguous expressions as fearful....

Bioengineers have eagerly explored tiny mechanisms that move microscopic or nanoscopic amounts of fluid. Already used in ink-jet printers, microfluidic devices hold out the promise of efficient and rapid medical assays requiring only minuscule sample volumes for results. Potential applications include lab-on-a-chip devices for on-site chemical analyses, engineered vital organs, and in vivo pharmacies that secrete drugs when needed. In terms of implants, one of the main problems is power. Microfluidics typically rely on large external gear and electricity supplies to run actuators that drive fluids through microchannels....

Big earthquakes, such as the ones that devastated Chile in 2010 and Japan in 2011, are more likely to occur during full and new moons—the two times each month when tidal stresses are highest. Earth’s tides, which are caused by a gravitational tug-of-war involving the Moon and the Sun, put extra strain on geological faults. Seismologists have tried for decades to understand whether that stress could trigger quakes. They generally agree that the ocean’s twice-daily high tides can affect tiny, slow-motion tremors in certain places, including California’s San Andreas fault and the Cascadia region of the North American west coast....

Morphine is often a cancer patient’s best and final friend. So it came as a shock when researchers at the University of Minnesota published a study showing that doses of morphine similar to those used to ease pain actually spurred the growth of human breast cancer cells grafted into mice. “These results indicate that clinical use of morphine could potentially be harmful” in some cancer patients, the scientists wrote in 2002 in Cancer Research....

Three of the five Great Lakes—Huron, Superior and Erie—are awash in plastic. But it’s not the work of a Christo-like landscape artist covering the waterfront. Rather, small plastic beads, known as micro plastic, are the offenders, according to survey results to be published this summer in Marine Pollution Bulletin. “The highest counts were in the micro plastic category, less than a millimeter in diameter,” explained chemist Sherri “Sam” Mason of the State University of New York at Fredonia, who led the Great Lakes plastic pollution survey last July....

Key concepts Physics Forces Friction Surface area Introduction Sometimes friction can be annoying. It can make it difficult to push heavy things like furniture and it can even give you a nasty scrape if you fall. But friction is actually very important—without it, you could not move around at all, or even pick things up! Try this project to find out how friction can lead to some surprising effects—such as making it almost impossible to pull two books apart....

From Nature magazine The usually quiet world of mathematics is abuzz with a claim that one of the most important problems in number theory has been solved. Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture, which proposes a relationship between whole numbers — a ‘Diophantine’ problem. The abc conjecture, proposed independently by David Masser and Joseph Oesterle in 1985, might not be as familiar to the wider world as Fermat’s Last Theorem, but in some ways it is more significant....

As far as pop culture is concerned, a vomitorium is a room where ancient Romans went to throw up lavish meals so they could return to the table and feast some more. It’s a striking illustration of gluttony and waste, and one that makes its way into modern texts. Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” series, for example, alludes to vomitoriums when the lavish inhabitants of the Capitol—all with Latin names like Flavia and Octavia—imbibe a drink to make them vomit at parties so they can gorge themselves on more calories than citizens in the surrounding districts would see in months....