Science doesn't disappoint. We have super-cool stories from sharks with lightsabers to just how similar men and women are. Check these out.
10. Unparticle may lurk in Earth's mantle
It's a good time to be a particle physicist. The long-sought Higgs boson particle seems finally to have been found at an accelerator in Geneva, and scientists are now hot on the trail of another tiny piece of the universe, this one tied to a new fundamental force of nature.
An experiment using the Earth itself as a source of electrons has narrowed down the search for a new force-bearing particle, placing tighter limits on how big the force it carries can be.
9. Lightsaber shark
Austin Powers' Dr. Evil had one simple request: "sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads."
Velvet belly lantern sharks may not satisfy that demand, but perhaps they're even better: They come ready-made with glowing spines that look like lightsabers, research shows.
8. Smallest alien planet found
The discovery of a strange new world about the size of Earth's moon has shattered the record for the smallest known alien planet, scientists say.
The newfound alien planet Kepler-37b is the first exoplanet discovered to be smaller than Mercury. It whips around its parent star every 13 days and has a roasting surface temperature of about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 Celsius), researchers said. It not a promising contender for life, they added.
7. 3D-printed ears
With 3D printing, it seems the things you can make are limited only by your imagination. The latest innovation: a 3D-printed artificial ear.
The ear, which looks and functions like a normal human ear, was created by squirting living cells into an injection mould. Over the course of three months, each ear grew cartilage in the shape of its mould. These ersatz ears could replace the ears of children with congenital deformities, researchers report online today (Feb. 20) in the journal PLOS ONE.
6. Listen to meteor blast
A new recording lets human ears listen in on the largest infrasound blasts ever recorded, created by the meteor that exploded over Russia last week.
Infrasonic waves from the Russian meteor fireball were picked up by 17 infrasound stations around the world, part of a network for detecting nuclear weapon explosions. Stations as far away as Antarctica tracked the blast's low-frequency waves as they travelled through Earth's atmosphere.
5. Alligator's always-erect penis
Unlike many other reptiles and mammals, alligators sport permanently erect penises that hide inside their bodies, new research reveals.
The reptiles sport fully erect penises made of tough, fibrous tissue that shoot out of their bodies and get pulled back in just as quickly, according to the study, which is detailed in the March issue of the journal Anatomical Record.
4. Warrior's grave found
Hidden in a necropolis situated high in the mountains of the Caucasus in Russia, researchers have discovered the grave of a male warrior laid to rest with gold jewellery, iron chain mail and numerous weapons, including a 36-inch (91 centimetres) iron sword set between his legs.
That is just one amazing find among a wealth of ancient treasures dating back more than 2,000 years that scientists have uncovered there.
3. 19 clicks connect any 2 websites
Credit: Shutterstock / Toria
It's a small Web after all. As the six-degrees of separation notion says that any two people are only six introductions away from one another, researchers claim that any two webpages are no more than 19 clicks apart.
The Royal Society, a scientific organization established in 1660, this week published a paper that has found a similar model works for the Web as well as it does for people. Despite the billions of pages on the Web , you can get from one page to any other in about 19 clicks, according to Albert-László Barabási, a networking theorist in the U.K. and member of the Society.
2. Men and women both from Earth
Credit: wavebreakmedia ltd, Shutterstock
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Think again. New research suggests that black-and-white thinking about what makes a man and what makes a woman is off-base.
In fact, while real gender differences (whether biologically based or cultural) do exist, men and women overlap psychologically more than they differ, according to a new study published in February in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In other words, cute book titles aside, both genders are from Earth.
1. Higgs may spell universe's doom
A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say.
The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva - is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.
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