This ultimately makes the material much stronger than wood (though the researchers don’t compare its strength to that of pressure-treated lumber, which is also stronger than untreated wood). As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn’t capture the heat in the same way regular wood does. The researchers estimate that covering an apartment building with the treated wood could save about 35 percent of the energy used for cooling.

If left to freely breed, green anaconda like Anna can have dozens of babies at a time, which is precisely why staffers at this Boston aquarium had taken great care to keep male and female snakes in separate tanks. Young anaconda snakes born by parthenogenesis hang out together in a behind-the-scenes holding area at the New England Aquarium in Boston. (New England Aquarium)
On Thursday, when the aquarium presented Anna’s mystery to the world, staff said they had been holding the two babies “every day of their short lives” to condition them for regular handling by humans.

In recent years, Vebjørn Ekroll, Bilge Sayim, and Johan Wagemans have started to investigate a wide range of magic tricks, and their findings are revealing impenetrable perceptual illusions that are far more powerful than most magicians would expect. In this magic trick, the magician starts with one ball, held between two fingers, and we see that his hand is otherwise empty. Ekroll and his colleagues have suggested that when “viewed from this perspective, the spectators do not merely entertain the intellectual belief that the semi-spherical shell is a solid ball, but rather automatically and immediately perceive it as such because that is what their visual systems tell them to be the case.”

Image: SA/DLR/FU Berlin; NASA MGS MOLA Science Team
Using ground-penetrating radar, scientists detected a massive reservoir of frozen water sandwiched by layers of sand beneath the northern polar ice cap on Mars. The cavi unit rests about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the Martian north pole, and prior to the new study, scientists figured it was primarily composed of sand dunes and contained less than 50 percent water ice by volume. “The only hypothesis that can reconcile our results and all the previous studies is that the cavi unit is made of alternating ice sheets, remnants of former polar caps, and sand layers, which acted as protective blanket and prevented the complete retreat of the old polar ice,” Nerozzi told Gizmodo.

High-speed cameras capture frames on light sensors composed of semiconductors. Such cameras typically save each frame of a sequence on a separate area of the sensor. Feng Chen of Xi’an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi, China, Lidai Wang at the City University of Hong Kong and their colleagues instead expose each frame on separate but overlapping areas of the camera sensor.

Since then, scientists have worked to increase the temperature at which materials turn into superconductors, since these materials could transfer electricity more cheaply and have important uses in the medical and quantum computing fields. The team, led by physicist Mikhail Eremets from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, kicked off the most recent race for a high-temperature superconducting hydride in 2015, when they published a paper announcing the discovery of superconductivity at -70 Celsius (-94 Fahrenheit). And there are other teams around the world working to find materials that turn into superconductors at even higher temperatures or lower pressures, which would make them practical to use in modern technology.

Image: Corentin Loron et al
Scientists have discovered fossils of a fungus that lived roughly one billion years ago—yes, billion—making it over twice as old as any other fungi specimens identified to date. The discovery, announced on Wednesday in Nature, not only pushes the fossil record of fungi back by about 600 million years, it also suggests that other eukaryotic organisms—a group that includes complex multicellular life-forms like animals—may have originated around the same time as O. giraldae, in the mid-Proterozoic age. Scientists have also presented possible fungi fossils predating the Cambrian explosion, a sudden proliferation of complex life that occurred 541 million years ago, but those specimens are not considered to be definitive proof of Precambrian fungi.

• Read “How Computer-Assisted Telepathy Will Help Humans Communicate” at NPR elsewhere, too:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/npr

• Facebook: Instagram: Tumblr: http://npr.tumblr.com/

• Snapchat: NPR

NPR connects to audiences on the air, on demand, online, and in person. More than 26 million radio listeners tune in to NPR stations each week and more than 36 million unique visitors access NPR.org each month making NPR one of the most trusted sources of news and insights on life and the arts. NPR shares compelling stories, audio and photos with millions of social media users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Snapchat; NPR News and NPR One apps, online streaming, podcasts, iTunes radio and connected car dashboards help meet audiences where they are.

“What they’ve done is fantastic, and no doubt they’re going to go flesh this out some more,” says James Hagadorn, who is curator of geology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which hosts other wire gold samples from Colorado’s Ground Hog mine. For wire gold, the researchers also looked for the absorbed neutrons, which revealed another surprise: both samples are actually gold alloys that include up to 30 percent silver. For that work, Rakovan and a different team of researchers grew synthetic wire silver from silver sulfide to tease apart how they form.

That’s because Rocky’s space rock was just one piece of a clay-rich meteorite that crashed to Earth over the town of Aguas Zarcas in Costa Rica. “It formed in an environment free of life, then was preserved in the cold and vacuum of space for 4.56 billion years, and then dropped in Costa Rica last week,” Laurence Garvie, a curator at Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies, . Garvie and his colleagues are now working to do just that, analyzing fragments collected in the five days after the Aguas Zarcas meteorite fell last month.