As no doubt everyone reading this blog will know, the past month has seen an absolute bonanza of space-related science news. Lots of cool and exciting stuff there but we’ll start with the non-space stuff first.

• Given my recent post on the Dog Emotion and Cognition course, this first bit is especially relevant. This BBC article covers a Japanese experiment which shows that dogs are able to observe strangers interacting with their owners and calibrate their own behavior accordingly. Specifically when offered food by a stranger, dogs will decline the offer if the stranger has previously been observed as acting in a “mean” manner to its owner.

• Staying on the subject of animals, this New York Times article talks about joining together the brains of mice and monkeys to form a simple neural network. The combined brains were then set to perform tasks such as controlling a robotic arm in three-dimensional space. It’s very speculative and somewhat icky stuff but apparently in many cases the networked animals were able to perform better than single ones.
• Moving on to the space news, obviously the biggest news is the Pluto flyby performed by the New Horizons spacecraft, a mission that has been nine years in the making. Perhaps the most surprising so far is that contrary to all expectations Pluto, despite its extreme distance from the Sun or any other planetary bodies of significant size, is actually geologically active, as this Bloomberg article explains. For me, this makes for a good reminder that all of our models about the formation of planets, star systems and perhaps even stars, should be subject to much skepticism because we still have so little data to work with.
• A good example of this would be the fuss over NASA’s discovery of what is supposedly the most Earth-like exoplanet yet. I wouldn’t have included this one in my usual round-up if not for the huge media buzz over it, because really it was found with a telescope and we know very little about it. As this Vox article points out, what we know must be couched in so much uncertainty that it’s almost saying nothing at all since it could yet turn out to be just a gas planet.
• The next bit of space news and potentially the most explosive of everything here is that something weird seems to be going on with the so-called impossible EmDrive device. It’s a drive that works by having microwaves resonate within a specially shaped cavity and produces thrust without needing any propellant, seemingly violating the law of conservation of momentum. This is cranky stuff but lots of people have been looking to poke holes into this claim and have so far found none, as this Wired article explains. If it does work, it would revolutionize space travel and overturn large parts of what we think we know about physics. Apparently a spacecraft equipped with this would reach Pluto in a mere 18 months instead of 9 years.
• Finally we end with an interesting finding about sexism among gamers, especially since Gamergate refuses to die. This paper claims that male players, as tested in an online multiplayer shooter, who have poorer skills tend to be more hostile towards female players. By contrast, they behave submissively towards other male players with superior skills to themselves. Male players with higher skills had more positive attitudes towards female players. The authors posit that this is caused by jockeying for position within a social hierarchy.