Apart from Modern Meadow, a company that grows leather in the lab, another start-up is giving leather makers a run for their money. MycoWorks is using fungi to produce leather substitutes, through a process that's cheaper and faster.

MycoWorks' chief technical officer Phil Ross has been collecting and growing mushrooms since the 1980s. He discovered the vast possibilities resulting from manipulating the growing conditions of the mushroom mycelium-the spiderweb-like fibers that extend through soil or decaying matter to gather nutrients. "Fungi are very sensitive; they will change their growth in relationship to how they're being poked and things like that," Ross says. "You put it in a cup, it would take the shape of a cup."

The world's first human head transplant has been carried out on a corpse in China, according to a controversial Italian doctor who said Friday that he and his team are now ready to perform the surgery on a living person.

Dr. Sergio Canavero, chief of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, said the operation was carried out by a team led by Dr. Xiaoping Ren, who last year successfully grafted a head onto a monkey's body.

"The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done. A full head swap between brain-dead organ donors is the next stage," Canavero said at a press conference in Vienna, the Telegraph of the UK reported.

"And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent," said Canavero, who gained a mix of fame and notoriety in 2015 for his Frankenstein-like plans to achieve his feat within two years.

When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor.

More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa.

A key to this idea is that cave art is often located in acoustic "hot spots," where sound echoes strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those drawings are located in deeper, harder-to-access parts of caves, indicating that acoustics was a principal reason for the placement of drawings within caves. The drawings, in turn, may represent the sounds that early humans generated in those spots.

In the new paper, this convergence of sound and drawing is what the authors call a "cross-modality information transfer," a convergence of auditory information and visual art that, the authors write, "allowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking." The combination of sounds and images is one of the things that characterizes human language today, along with its symbolic aspect and its ability to generate infinite new sentences.

"Cave art was part of the package deal in terms of how homo sapiens came to have this very high-level cognitive processing," says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "You have this very concrete cognitive process that converts an acoustic signal into some mental representation and externalizes it as a visual."

Cave artists were thus not just early-day Monets, drawing impressions of the outdoors at their leisure. Rather, they may have been engaged in a process of communication.

"I think it's very clear that these artists were talking to one another," Miyagawa says. "It's a communal effort."

The paper, "Cross-modality information transfer: A hypothesis about the relationship among prehistoric cave paintings, symbolic thinking, and the emergence of language," is being published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The authors are Miyagawa; Cora Lesure, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Linguistics; and Vitor A. Nobrega, a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil.

Science, the journal, is beginning to go the way of the magazine Scientific American, in that it is beginning to become an oxymoron all by itself, as SciAm did in the Forrest Mims scandal. Science Magazine has turned itself into Politics-uber-Science.

In today's email of Science News, comes this article "Fighting back against 'alternative facts': Experts share their secrets" by Dan Ferber. The article starts out with a clichéd attack on the sitting President of the United States and the repeated-ad-nauseam liberal-progressive assertion that all "alternative facts" are necessarily intentional falsehoods ("lies") for the simple reason that they do not support their favored "experts":

"...Chuck Todd, host of NBC's Meet the Press, confronted her about an overinflated White House estimate of the crowd size at the president's inauguration. "Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck," she shot back. "You're saying it's a falsehood. [But] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts."

Amazon's Jeff Bezos just revealed video of a massive 10,000-year clock that's being built inside a West Texas mountain.

The clock is 500 feet tall and powered by the Earth's thermal cycles, Bezos said in a tweet Tuesday.

"It's a special Clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking," a blog post signed by Bezos says.

The clock has been in the works for nearly three decades, according to the post, and is designed to tick once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.

Fossilized footprints from an iguana-like reptile provide what could be the earliest evidence of a lizard running on two legs.

The 29 exceptionally well-preserved lizard tracks, found in a slab of rock from an abandoned quarry in Hadong County, South Korea, include back feet with curved digits and front feet with a slightly longer third digit. The back footprints outnumber the front ones, and digit impressions are more pronounced than those of the balls of the feet. The lizard's stride length also increases across the slab.

That's what you'd expect to see in a transition from moseying along on four legs to scampering on two, says Yuong-Nam Lee, a paleontologist at Seoul National University who first came across the slab back in 2004. A closer examination two years ago revealed the telltale tracks.

Lee and his colleagues attribute the tracks to a previously unknown lizard ichnospecies, that is a species defined solely by trace evidence of its existence, rather than bones or tissue. Lee and his colleagues have dubbed the possible perpetrator Sauripes hadongensis and linked it to an order that includes today's iguanas and chameleons in the Feb. 15 Scientific Reports.

It seemed like an easy question.

The query came from a Twitter poll I spotted on my news feed last week, from user @cgpgrey. "Please help resolve a marital dispute," @cgpgrey wrote. "You would describe the color of a tennis ball as:" green, yellow, or other.

Yellow, obviously, I thought, and voted. When the results appeared, my jaw dropped with cartoonish effect. Of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it's yellow, and 6 percent went with "other."

I was stunned. I'd gone from being so sure of myself to second-guessing my sanity in a matter of seconds. More than that, I could never have imagined the question of the color of a tennis ball - surely something we could all agree on, even in these times - would be so divisive.

I dropped the tweet into my team's Slack channel, which includes The Atlantic's science, technology, and health reporters and editors. The long conversation that followed can only be described as a bloodbath.

The seemingly trivial question tore apart our usually congenial group. Lines were quickly and fiercely drawn, team green against team yellow, as my colleagues debated the very definition of color itself. Swords were brandished in the form of links to HTML color codes or the paint selection at Sherwin-Williams. Attempts to broker a cease-fire, to consider that maybe tennis balls are actually yellow-green - or green-yellow, or chartreuse - were brushed aside. At one point, I lashed out at a colleague who then reminded me we were on the same side.

A complicated reproductive system makes pollination a tough job

It's a wonder we have chocolate at all. Talk about persnickety, difficult flowers.

Arguably some of the most important seeds on the planet - they give us candy bars and hot cocoa, after all - come from pods created by dime-sized flowers on cacao trees. Yet those flowers make pollination just barely possible.

Growers of commercial fruit crops expect 50 to 60 percent of flowers to make a fruit, or pod, says Emily Kearney of the University of California, Berkeley. In some places, cacao crops manage to be that prolific. But worldwide norms run closer to 15 to 30 percent. In the traditional Ecuadorian plantings that Kearney studies, cacao achieves a mere 3 to 5 percent pollination.

A new exhibit explores the science of ancient funeral paintings

Everybody's a critic. Even back in second century Egypt.

While digging in Tebtunis in northern Egypt in the winter of 1899-1900, British archaeologists stumbled upon portraits of affluent Greco-Egyptians placed over the faces of mummies. One grave contained an ink and chalk sketch, a bit larger than a standard sheet of printer paper, of a woman from around the years A.D. 140 to 160. The sketch includes directions from an unidentified source to the artist to paint the "eyes softer."

That ancient critique is now the name of a temporary exhibit at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Ill. "Paint the Eyes Softer: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt" features the sketch, along with six more intact or nearly intact Egyptian funeral portraits, one still attached to its mummy. All were discovered more than a century ago but recently examined using modern scientific tools.

Humanity's ability to map the universe around us has just expanded significantly, as astronomers have been able to detect an enormous supernova that is farther away than any we've seen before.

The bright celestial event, named DES16C2nm, exists over ten billion light years away from planet Earth, making its discovery something of an achievement for the scientists who spotted it. It's worth pointing out that the universe itself is only around thirteen billion years old, so if the light from this supernova took ten billion years to get to us, it means that the event occurred fairly early in the lifespan of the universe.

Supernovae are among the brightest lights in the universe, caused by large, heavy stars that are bursting with so much raw volatile energy and matter that they can't help but explode in a beautiful light show. As we study stars that are further and further away from home, these big explosions are among the easiest sights to get a good look at, thanks to the sheer amount of light and energy that they give off.

This isn't to say that successfully detecting DES16C2nm was by any means easy - in order to reach further out into the stars than ever before, a team from the University of Southampton in England had to rely on specialist sky-survey equipment in Chile, before double checking with other telescopes, including the Magellan Clay Telescope, the Keck II telescope, and the Very Large Telescope, in order to make sure that this definitely was a distant supernova event.