American robotics company Boston Dynamics released a new robot dance video after it announced it had been acquired by Hyundai - and, like its previous effort, this one had many people terrified.

Though it announced the completion of the acquisition last week in a press release, Boston Dynamics decided to mark the occasion in style on Tuesday.

The video shows five of its dog-like 'Spot' robots dancing to the song 'IONIQ: I'm On It' by South Korean boy band BTS, and demonstrates the precision and complexity of its machines, which feature long arm-like appendages with claws.

A new class of illusion, developed by a visual artist and a psychology researcher, underscores the highly constructive nature of visual perception.

The illusion, which the creators label "Scintillating Starburst," evokes illusory rays that seem to shimmer or scintillate — like a starburst. Composed of several concentric star polygons, the images prompt viewers to see bright fleeting rays emanating from the center that are not actually there.

"The research illustrates how the brain 'connects the dots' to create a subjective reality in what we see, highlighting the constructive nature of perception," explains Pascal Wallisch, a clinical associate professor in New York University's Department of Psychology and Center for Data Science and senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal i-Perception.

"Studying illusions can be helpful in understanding visual processing because they allow us to distinguish the mere sensation of physical object properties from the perceptual experience," adds first author Michael Karlovich, founder and CEO of Recursia Studios, a multidisciplinary art and fashion production company.

A joint research team led by Prof. FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences sequenced the ancient genomes of 31 individuals from southern East Asia, thus unveiling a missing piece of human prehistory.

Prof. FU's team used DNA capture techniques to retrieve ancient DNA from Guangxi and Fujian, two provincial-level regions in southern China. They sequenced genome-wide DNA from 31 individuals dating back 11,747 to 194 years ago. Of these, two date back to more than 10,000 years ago, making them the oldest genomes sampled from southern East Asia and Southeast Asia to date.

Previous ancient DNA studies showed that ~8,000-4,000-year-old Southeast Asian Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers possessed deeply divergent Asian ancestry, whereas the first Southeast Asian farmers beginning ~4,000 years ago show a mixture of ancestry associated with Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers and present-day southern Chinese populations. In coastal southern China, ~9,000-4,000-year-old individuals from Fujian province show ancestry not as deeply divergent as the Hoabinhian.

In 2021 June 19, the circular MPEC 2021-M53 of Minor Planet Center announced the discovery of an asteroidal object by astronomers P. Bernardinelli & G. Bernstein (University of Pennsylvania) that they found in CCD exposures obtained with the 4.0-m reflector at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in the course of the "Dark Energy Survey", and which they reported as a previously unknown member of the Oort Cloud. The reported astrometry was spanning from 2014 Oct. 20 to 2018 Nov. 8. The new object was designated 2014 UN271. It was hidden among data collected by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile and was announced only now because, in the words of one of the discoverers, "finding TNOs with DES is a massive computational problem (my PhD was solving this problem). The search itself took 15~20 million CPU-hours, and the catalog production from our 80,000 exposures probably took more than that!"

According to the orbit calculated using data from 2014 to 2018, this object is likely to be a comet from the outer edge of the Oort Cloud. But 2014 UN271, despite its typically cometary orbit, appeared completely stellar in these archival images when it moved from 29 to 23 AU (for comparison, Pluto is 39 au from the Sun, on average). Below a simulation (made by T. Dunn) of the orbit of comet C/2014 UN271 showing it path in the Solar System from 1985 to 2049.


A few days after the discovery announcement, 2014 UN271 has been found to show cometary appearance in new CCD images obtained by observers at station codes L81 & K93.Basically this object, that was first seen as an asteroid of magnitude ~22 by DES in 2014 at a distance of 29 AU, approaching the Sun was growing his coma and tails. As of June 2021, it was 20 AU from the Sun shining at a magnitude ~20.After the discovery of the cometary coma, the new comet has been designated C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein). This comet will reach perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, in January 2031 at about ~11 AU away from the Sun.

Astronomers may have finally discovered convincing evidence of an elusive kind of supernova, one that could explain a bright explosion that lit up the night sky on Earth nearly 1,000 years ago and birthed the beautiful Crab Nebula, a new study finds.

Supernovas are giant explosions that can occur when stars die. These outbursts can briefly outshine all of the other suns in these stars' galaxies, making them visible from halfway across the universe.

The big idea

Much of the brittle, upper crust of Venus is broken into fragments that jostle and move - and the slow churning of Venus' mantle beneath the surface might be responsible. My colleagues and I arrived at this finding using decades-old radar data to explore how the surface of Venus interacts with the interior of the planet. We describe it in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 21, 2021.

Planetary scientists like me have long known that Venus has a plethora of tectonic landforms. Some of these formations are long, thin belts where the crust has been pushed together to form ridges or pulled apart to form troughs and grooves. In many of these belts there's evidence that pieces of the crust have moved side to side, too.

Logic, science, and mathematics are all part of the design inference. But sometimes you don't need a rigorous logical, scientific, or mathematical demonstration to reveal evidence of design in nature. Consider this 2008 TED talk which we were recently sent. It's by David Gallo of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution showing the stunning abilities of cephalopods to change their colors and essentially perfectly blend into their surroundings:

Over the past few hundreds of thousands of years Sicily was home to two different miniature elephants.

Now for the first-time researchers have been able to extract and delve into the DNA of one of these extinct elephants, helping to show how the largest land mammal ever to exist shrank by at least 8,000kg to become one of the smallest elephants known.

The tiny elephants that were once found on Sicily were some of the smallest elephants ever to have existed, but quite extraordinarily they are descended from one of the biggest land mammals ever to have lived: the straight-tusked elephant.

These animals were genuine giants, with some individuals reaching up to 4.5 metres tall and tipping the scales at 14 tons. An adult straight-tusked elephant could very easily have rested its chin on the back of a bull African savannah elephant.

In a study of Drosophila fruit flies, NIH scientists found that only about 30% of the genes that are hallmarks for aging may set an animal's internal clock. The rest may reflect the body's response to bacteria.

To better understand the role of bacteria in health and disease, National Institutes of Health researchers fed fruit flies antibiotics and monitored the lifetime activity of hundreds of genes that scientists have traditionally thought control aging. To their surprise, the antibiotics not only extended the lives of the flies but also dramatically changed the activity of many of these genes. Their results suggested that only about 30% of the genes traditionally associated with aging set an animal's internal clock while the rest reflect the body's response to bacteria.

"For decades scientists have been developing a hit list of common aging genes. These genes are thought to control the aging process throughout the animal kingdom, from worms to mice to humans," said Edward Giniger, Ph.D., senior investigator, at the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the senior author of the study published in iScience. "We were shocked to find that only about 30% of these genes may be directly involved in the aging process. We hope that these results will help medical researchers better understand the forces that underlie several age-related disorders."

A giant arc of galaxies appears to stretch across more than 3 billion light-years in the distant universe. If the arc turns out to be real, it would challenge a bedrock assumption of cosmology: that on large scales, matter in the universe is evenly distributed no matter where you look.

"It would overturn cosmology as we know it," said cosmologist Alexia Lopez at a June 7 news conference at the virtual American Astronomical Society meeting. "Our standard model, not to put it too heavily, kind of falls through."

Lopez, of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England, and colleagues discovered the purported structure, which they call simply the Giant Arc, by studying the light of about 40,000 quasars captured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are the luminous cores of giant galaxies so distant that they appear as points of light. While en route to Earth, some of that light gets absorbed by atoms in and around foreground galaxies, leaving specific signatures in the light that eventually reaches astronomers' telescopes (SN: 7/12/18).