This week’s science news was filled with some astonishing — and creepy — displays of technology’s accelerating progress.
Top of the bill was a stunning demonstration of Chinese company Unitree Robotics’ humanoid robots, which somersaulted, flipped and kicked in a kung fu performance at this year’s Lunar New Year festival. The robots’ eerily fluid movements were a sight to behold on their own. But compare them with the stiff and cumbersome moves by similar robots just a year earlier, and it’s clear how much the tech — has advanced, thanks to better algorithms and cluster control platforms.
Physicists make a Big Bang soup
In the most ambitious instance of experimental home cooking we covered this week, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recreated the primordial state of the early universe and found it was more like soup than first thought.
The discovery comes from the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid, which smashed together two heavy atomic nuclei at near light speed to create an extremely short-lived quark-gluon plasma, believed to be the stuff of our universe in the first microseconds following the Big Bang.
The findings could have enormous implications for how our cosmos, and the stuff it’s made of, first formed.
Discover more space and physics news
—Solar flares may be triggering earthquakes, controversial study claims
—Saturn’s largest moon may actually be 2 moons in 1 — and helped birth the planet’s iconic rings
—Bungled Boeing Starliner mission was the highest order of mishap that put stranded astronauts at risk, report says
Life’s Little Mysteries
Not long after death, a sea change takes hold within the human body — a sequence of natural, cellular-level steps that result in a process called rigor mortis. But what are these steps? And why does rigor mortis happen to nearly all human bodies?
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Teenager buried with her father’s bones
Archaeologists who performed a DNA analysis of skeletons excavated from a Neolithic cemetery in Sweden have uncovered some surprising family burial practices this week, showing that some of Europe’s last hunter-gatherers had detailed knowledge of their family lineages.
The society, called the Pitted Ware culture, was a hunter-gatherer community that lived on the western Swedish island of Gotland 5,500 years ago. Evidence of burials and reburials, with graves shared by up to third-degree relatives, suggests people of this culture paid scrupulous attention to their social connections and honored them long after death.
Discover more archaeology news
—2,500-year-old ‘primitive prosthetic’ found on jaw of mummified Scythian woman who survived complex jaw surgery
—‘Absolute surprise’: Homo erectus skulls found in China are almost 1.8 million years old — the oldest evidence of the ancient human relatives in East Asia
—Research group claims preeclampsia doomed the Neanderthals, but experts say it’s just a ‘thought experiment’
Also in science news this week
—Diagnostic dilemma: 83-year-old man’s unusual form of syphilis had an ‘uncertain’ source
—Our adorable, noodle-like ancestor had 4 eyes, half-a-billion-year-old fossils reveal
—Vanishing lakes in Tibet may have triggered earthquakes by awakening faults in Earth’s crust
—In a ‘race against time,’ archaeologists uncovered Roman-era footprints from a Scottish beach before the tide washed them away
Science long read
At a secret meeting in Berkeley, California, last year, some of the world’s leading mathematicians gathered to discuss the fate of their profession. The agenda was clear: Was artificial intelligence (AI) on the precipice of taking their jobs? And would the best math no longer be produced by humans?
Yet during the discussion, an even more troubling question appeared. In the past, confidence and a good argument were signs a proof was right, as only the best would be convincing to the rest of the field. Now, however, AI is spewing out hundreds of proofs that could be flawed but are too complex to verify. In this long read, Live Science investigated mathematicians’ fight to figure out if the machines are right.
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, opinions and crosswords published this week.
New tech allows parents to ‘score’ IVF embryos for desirable traits — and it’s in desperate need of regulation [Opinion]
Live Science crossword puzzle #30: Brightest star in the night sky — 5 down [Crossword]
Science news in pictures
This photo shows Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, an ice ball three times the length of Manhattan, erupting into a cosmic snail shell as it circles the inner solar system.
29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is an example of a cryovolcanic comet, which explodes after its icy shell soaks up too much solar radiation. This causes the icy gas and dust on its surface to sublimate outward, forming a fuzzy cloud.
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