The corvid family--a widespread group of birds made up most prominently of crows, ravens, and magpies--are no ordinary birds, with a brain-to-body-weight ratio and cognitive abilities equal to apes and dolphins. This excerpt, from the great new book Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell, details an experiment in which students and faculty at the University of Washington tried to discover if crows can recognize individual humans--and what they'd do with that information.

A couple of days before Valentine's Day 2006, students and professor donned grotesque masks - bold, heavily browed, reddish-orange cavemen - and captured seven crows on the University of Washington's campus. They tagged the ensnared crows with standard plastic and metal bracelets like those we had fit onto Light Blue, Dark Blue's legs and released them after only a few minutes.

On Valentine's Day John slipped into his Dick Cheney face and strolled across campus looking for crows to record their reactions. He found nine birds, and while one seemed a bit anxious and flew off calling, the others basically ignored him. The students were more reactive, as being Dick Cheney on a liberal college campus wasn't easy, but from the crows' perspectives Dick was just an average Joe.

Two days later, John left the Cheney mask in the lab and morphed once again into the caveman. He stepped outside his office building at 11:07, eager to learn whether the crows would remember the face of the man who had captured them earlier in the week. At 11:15, he found a crow near the student union building and began to approach. Immediately the bird flew into a tree and gave a series of harsh calls, flicked its tail, and stared directly down at him.

This scolding behavior, identical to how these rowdy birds typically address their natural predators, quickly attracted a second bird. The pair now cautiously eyed John and issued a real tongue lashing. The first scolding bird was unbanded - John had never even handled this aggressive beast. But the second bird wore bands, signaling that it had personally met the caveman a few days earlier. This bird had good reason to scold - the caveman was a proven threat. But the first bird could have known only secondhand about the dangerous caveman. Perhaps she had seen us catch and band her colleague. John continued his walk and in total encountered thirty-one crows, three of whom scolded him.

A glowing cloud blossomed into a rainbow over southern China on 5 June, appearing at dusk over Wanning City in southern China in Hainan Province. The glowing 'rainbow' was spotted first by a child on a fishing boat, and captured by a local photographer.

The rare effect is created by light refracting off ice crystals in clouds, rather than water particles close to Earth, creating a 'flying' rainbow.

So-called "coregasms" are more common than anyone had imagined.

The Gist

• Orgasms tended to occur after multiple sets of crunches or some other abdominal exercise rather than after just a couple repetitions.
• Exercise-induced orgasms may be one way for scientists, and women themselves, to learn about the process of orgasm.

Women may not need a guy, a vibrator, or any other direct sexual stimulation to have an orgasm, finds a new study on exercise-induced orgasms and sexual pleasure.

The findings add qualitative and quantitative data to a field that has been largely unstudied, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, co-director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. For instance, Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues first reported the phenomenon in 1953, saying that about 5 percent of women they had interviewed mentioned orgasm linked to physical exercise. However, they couldn't know the actual prevalence because most of these women volunteered the information without being directly asked.

Graphene has caused a lot of excitement among scientists since the extremely strong and thin carbon honeycomb-shaped material, just one atom thick, was discovered in 2004. In 2011, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted the signature of flat carbon flakes, called graphene, in space --the first-ever cosmic detection of the material -- which is arranged like chicken wire in flat sheets that are one atom thick.
The team of astronomers using Spitzer identified signs of the graphene in two small galaxies outside of our own, called the Magellanic Clouds, specifically in the material shed by dying stars, called planetary nebulae. The N 70 nebula shown above is a "Super Bubble" in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC image below), a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way system, located in the southern sky at a distance of about 160,000 light-years.

The infrared-sensing telescope also spotted a related molecule, called C70, in the same region - marking the first detection of this chemical outside our galaxy. According to the astronomers, the graphene and C70 might be forming when shock waves generated by dying stars break apart hydrogen-containing carbon grains.

DARPA hopes to create real-life "Avatars" in the near future.

Science fiction fans and robot fanatics are familiar with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Government (more familiarly known as DARPA). They are also familiar with James Cameron's largely successful movie, Avatar. When the two come together, the line between what is fiction and what is real gets blurred beyond all recognition.

Straight out of the movie, the agency has set aside a $7 million of its $2.8 billion budget to essentially create "autonomous bi-pedal machines" that a handling soldier is able to manipulate on the battlefield. This removes the soldier from the heat of battle, reducing real life casualties and adding a greater degree of safety when performing menial but essential tasks.

Some of these tasks include clearing buildings of enemy hostiles, handling the wounded on the field, and controlling other sentries in the area. DARPA robotics has certainly entertained the concept before, so creating unmanned ground troops may not be as impossible as it seems. While we certainly aren't expecting to see any Jake Sully-controlled giant blue aliens anytime soon, it'll definitely be interesting to see what DARPA comes up with in the following years.

Future microprocessors could extend the idea of 3D transistors to entire 3D cores.

Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) said they have developed a chip that can integrate three or more processors that are stacked on top of each other. Today's processing cores are aligned horizontally.

According to Yusuf Leblebici, director of the Microelectronics Systems Laboratory (LSM) at EPFL, the processors are vertically connected through "several hundreds" of "very thin copper microtubes", commonly referred to as Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs). "It's the logical next step in electronics development, because it allows a large increase in terms of efficiency," Leblebici said. He noted that more than 900 TSVs are "functioning simultaneously".

"This superposition reduces the distance between circuits, and thus considerably improves the speed of data exchange," added Yuksel Temiz, a researcher at LSM.

While presented at the 2012 Interconnection Network Architectures Workshop in Paris, Leblebici did not reveal further features of the technology, but noted that it is not ready for mass-production. At this time, he wants to make his research available to "a number of academic research teams for further development, before being commercialized."

Here's the entire 7-hour transit of Venus across the face of the Sun - shown in several views - in just 39 seconds, as seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory on June 5, 2012. This view is in the 171 Angstrom wavelenth, so note also the the bright active region in the northern solar hemisphere as Venus passes over, with beautiful coronal loops visible. The transit produced a silhouette of Venus n the Sun that no one alive today will likely see again. With its specialized instruments SDO's high-definition view from space provides a solar spectacular!

Dinosaurs were often hefty, but not as plump as previously thought.

A new study describes a new technique used to measure the weight and size of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. It could forever change museum exhibits, book illustrations, and other recreations of these now-extinct species. The study appears in the latest issue of Biology Letters.

"This is a huge help for any sort of reconstruction," lead author William Sellers told Discovery News. "We now have a number that suggests how much flesh to add to the bones and that should help people produce animals that are the right balance of too fat or too thin."

"This technique can also allow you to calculate the numbers you need for more sophisticated locomotor reconstructions, such as the running simulations we have produced in the past," added Sellers, who is based at the University of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences.

He and his team used lasers to measure the minimum amount of skin required to wrap around the skeletons of large modern animals that included reindeer, polar bears, giraffes and elephants. Doing this, the researchers noticed that the animals had almost exactly 21 percent more body mass than the minimum skeletal "skin and bone" wrap volume.

The formula was then applied to a giant Brachiosaur skeleton housed at Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde. Previous estimates of this dinosaur's weight have been as high as 176,370 pounds. This latest study, however, reduces the figure to just 50,706 pounds -- impressively weighty, but not nearly as heavy.

A user has found a 'huge asteroid' while scanning the virtual heavens using Googly Sky.

Youtube user planetkrejci, who has investigated other anomalies on NASA pictures, claims the object - found using the Google website which transports the heavens to desktop computers and smartphones - is an asteroid which is heading towards Earth.

He says the asteroid - which, if real, has not been spotted by other scientists or astronomers - has only appeared recently on Google Sky, which receives updated images every few months.

Scientists have gathered with other experts to create a strategy for potentially hazardous Near earth Objects (NEOs).

Nearly 40 scientists, reporters, risk communications specialists, and Secure World Foundation staff participated in a meeting in November last year to come up with a strategy for dealing with hazardous NEOs.

The report created by the team will be presented at the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) and its Action Team-14 on NEOs during the 55th session of the UN COPUOS being held in Vienna, Austria.

During the meeting, the group explored in detail the views of risk communication experts and experienced science journalists on the development of a successful communications strategy.

"A lot of attention is focused on the catastrophic damage a large asteroid could do if it collided with Earth," Dr. Michael Simpson, Executive Director of Secure World Foundation, said in a press release. "This report focuses on how to prevent the even greater damage we could cause ourselves by mis-communicating or failing to work together on a common response to the threat."