The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, on a beach in Hiroshima…
The 1945 blast melted buildings, sand and seawater together and flung the result onto local beaches as tiny glass beads. Examining them, researchers found grains containing a metal alloy that has never been catalogued anywhere else, natural or synthetic. The bomb, in effect, invented a material.
Meanwhile, near the far side of the Moon…
Rounding the Moon in April, the Artemis 2 crew watched the lunar disk slide across the Sun from a vantage point no human had used before. Victor Glover described the blacked-out Moon against the corona as looking like a hole in the universe. The crew's images also carry real value for solar physicists studying the corona's structure.
Meanwhile, on an Arctic island peak…
A British expedition in 1948 found a huge fossil on an Arctic peak, photographed it, chipped off a few bones and left the rest to the weather. Rediscovered decades later, it turns out to be the first known specimen of its species and the largest marine hunter of its kind from the Triassic.
Meanwhile, off Point Lowly in South Australia…
Every winter more than 100,000 giant Australian cuttlefish crowd onto one stretch of rocky coast to mate, flashing and shape-shifting in the only mass cuttlefish gathering known anywhere on Earth. This year the animals simply did not show up.
In 1950s Japan, engineers built working computers with neither vacuum tubes nor transistors, using resonant circuits called parametrons that stored bits as the phase of an oscillation. The machines were reliable and cheap to make, and then the transistor swept the field and the whole lineage vanished from the story we tell about computing.
Meanwhile, in a freshwater pond…
Fever is the textbook animal response to infection, but tadpoles carrying a virus went looking for colder water instead. Deliberately chilling themselves slowed the pathogen more than heating up would have, an inversion of the fever strategy in an animal that regulates temperature by choosing where to sit.
Meanwhile, across the night sky…
A 5.6-trillion-pixel colour map containing nearly 4 billion stars and galaxies has been released, the largest two-dimensional view of the universe assembled. Anyone can pan and zoom through it in a browser for free.
Meanwhile, inside an MRI scanner…
Dogs lay in an MRI scanner looking at photographs of human faces, and their brains responded differently to anger, sadness and fear. Smiles lit up a region of their own. It is the first evidence that dogs don't just detect that something is wrong with you, but sort out which wrong thing it is.
A Pieter de Hooch interior showed 17th-century soldiers at a drinking game until a later hand painted one player out, wrecking the sense of the scene. Conservators have now removed the overpaint and returned the missing drinker to the table.
Meanwhile, in western Colombia…
A magnitude 7.4 quake struck western Colombia, collapsing buildings across the region and killing at least 111 people, with rescuers still working through rubble. It was felt as far away as Bogotá.