- Scientists in Australia have discovered that hugging trees helps koalas keep cool. They used thermal cameras to reveal that in hotter weather, the animals moved to the lower, cooler parts of the trees. The scientists also found that the koalas pressed their bodies even closer to the trunks. So by hugging them more tightly on hotter days, koalas are able to lose heat without panting or losing water.
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- Researchers have found evidence that another world crashed into the Earth billions of years ago to form the Moon. Researcher’s analysed lunar rock brought back by Apollo astronauts and found traces of another planet. The researchers claim that their discovery confirms the theory that the Moon was created by a huge collision. Since the 1980s it’s been thought that the Moon was created when the Earth and another planet called Theia collided 4.5billion years ago. But earlier experiments showed Moon rock was made entirely from the Earth. If the collision had happened, the Moon should have been made of material from Theia too. Dr Daniel Herwartz, from the University of Goettingen, said this was the first time anybody had found definitive evidence for the collision theory.
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- Seals and sea lions in Japan have been preparing for the football World Cup. Chanto the six-month-old seal has managed to advance her penalty taking in just a few weeks. Sea Lions have also been practicing how to balance a football on their heads. Unfortunately the sea creatures are not eligible to be entered into the World Cup.
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- An American man has been jailed for three months for smuggling dinosaur fossils, including a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar from Mongolia. Erik Prokopi was called a “one-man black market in prehistoric fossils”, meaning he was selling them illegally. The Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton was returned to Mongolia, near China in East Asia, in May 2013. He had sold it at auction in May 2012 for more than $1m (£600,000) but the US government confiscated it. Prokopi was accused of lying about what was inside packing cases of dino fossils that he was sending to America from Mongolia. He’d told officials that the fossils were worth much less than their real value.
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- A new study has revealed that sleep after learning strengthens connections between brain cells and enhances memory. Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have shown for the first time that sleep after learning encourages the growth of dendritic spines, the tiny protrusions from brain cells that connect to other brain cells and facilitate the passage of information across. Moreover, the activity of brain cells during deep sleep, or slow-wave sleep, after learning is critical for such growth.