Stars jostling around the galaxy aren't quite like a cosmic game of pool. But they do have occasional near misses as they speed past each other. Back when spears and stone points were the height of human technology, astronomers say, our solar system had a close encounter of the interstellar kind.

The brief visitor was Scholz's star, and it might have grazed the outer edge of the solar system's distant Oort Cloud about 70,000 years ago - carrying its companion, a likely brown dwarf, along for the ride.

It's unclear whether the near miss was close enough to give objects in the Oort Cloud, our solar system's halo of dormant comets, a gravitational nudge to fall toward the Sun. But the interstellar trespasser highlights a sometimes-forgotten reality: On long time scales, stars seem to fly around like sparks from a campfire, occasionally coming close enough to disturb each other's cometary clouds.

Such close passes could have profound implications for exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars - and how they got where they are. At least some of the time, an interloper could become a thief, stripping a star of one or more planets - or vice versa.

Our solar system, too, might have been shaped and sculpted by stellar flybys.

A 2018 study showed that the orbital motions of some of our solar system's small bodies appear still to bear the imprint of Scholz's gravitational wake. And some planet-like objects in the Kuiper belt, the collection of rocky and icy bodies past the orbit of Neptune, could have been stolen from another star far earlier - in fact, soon after our Sun was born. Scholz's flyby could just be the latest in a series.

The discovery of our star-crossed close encounter was almost as random as the event itself.

Artificial intelligence has been the bogeyman of science fiction since before it even existed for real. But while humanoid robots are still very much a work in progress, AI research keeps making big advances quietly behind the scenes. And it's absolutely starting to get weird.

5. An AI Learned To Half-Ass Its Work, Then Lie About It

It's nice to imagine that we can avoid the sci-fi cliche of a bloody scientist screaming "But ... but I created you! I AM YOUR MASTER!" at a hunk of metal. But even if AI isn't learning to eviscerate us, it's still learning to do things like cut corners in ways that a supervisor won't notice.

This one came up on a project from a Stanford and Google research team. They were using a neural network to convert aerial photos into maps. The AI was very good at its job. Almost ... too good. So the researchers checked the data and found that the AI was cheating. They wanted it to create a new map based on aerial photos, and graded the AI on how close the map's features matched the pics. But instead of actually constructing a new map, the AI quietly copied the data from the photos ... and did it in a way that the humans wouldn't easily notice.

It gets a bit technical here, but it was basically the neural network equivalent of an art student saying they painted a self-portrait when they really just messed with a selfie in Photoshop to make it look like brush strokes. To quote the TechCrunch article linked above:

"The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn't notice, but that the computer can easily detect ... The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting."

In the last few years, electric vehicles have seen a significant rise all over the world. It was such a big hit that the biggest automakers in the market started making plans to go electric. It is also expected that very soon, we can see a 100% switch from diesel cars to EVs. One of the biggest reason to universally choose EVs is the environmentally friendly nature which is a much-needed trait these days. A German automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors, who describe themselves as 'the only relevant top management consulting firm working exclusively for the auto industry' is saying that EV might not be as eco-friendly as the industries think it is.

The electric cars do not release carbon emissions, but the problem lies in the production of their lithium-ion batteries. The energy required to make the cells result in a high carbon footprint. It is so high that the automotive experts have estimated that an electric vehicle in Germany would take more than 10 years to break even with an efficient combustion engine's emissions. Dr. Jan Burgard, managing partner at Berylls said in a statement, "Electric cars appear to be the panacea and reduce emissions by 35 %. After all, electric vehicles do not emit any carbon dioxide while driving - at least that is a widely held opinion."

Here's a mysterious truth that scientists have known since 1983: Protons and neutrons act differently when they're inside an atom, versus floating freely through space. Specifically, the subatomic particles that make up those protons and neutrons, called quarks, slow down massively once they're confined to a nucleus in an atom.

Physicists really didn't like this, because neutrons are neutrons whether they're inside an atom or not. And protons are protons. Both protons and neutrons (which together make up the class of particles called "nucleons") are made up of three smaller particles, called quarks, bound together by the strong force.

"When you put quarks into a nucleus, they start to move slower, and that is very weird," said study co-author Or Hen, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's strange because the powerful interactions between quarks mainly determine their speed, whereas forces that bind the nucleus (and also act on quarks inside the nucleus) are supposed to be very weak, Hen added.

And there's no other known force that should be modifying the behavior of quarks in a nucleus so intensely. Yet, the effect remains: Particle physicists call it the EMC effect, named for the European Muon Collaboration, the group that discovered it. And until recently, scientists weren't sure what caused it.

Two particles in a nucleus are typically pulled together by a force of around 8 million electron volts (8 MeV), a measure of energy in particles. Quarks in a proton or neutron are bound together by about 1,000 MeV. So it doesn't make sense that the comparatively mild interactions of the nucleus are dramatically impacting the powerful interactions inside quarks, Hen told Live Science.

"What is eight next to 1,000?" he said.

But the EMC effect doesn't look like a mild nudge from an outside force. Though it varies from one sort of nucleus to the next, "It's not like half a percent. The effect pops out of the data once you are creative enough to design an experiment to look for it," Hen said.

This is a tale of five documents. To help keep them straight I will introduce the documents here, followed by a shorthand designation for each. The many human actors will remain in the shadows as much as possible so as to avoid introducing personality issues.

1. Mike Behe's new book, Darwin Devolves. (Behe's book)
2. Review article in the journal Science, "A biochemist's crusade to overturn evolution misrepresents theory and ignores evidence," by Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski. (Review)
3. "Real-Time Evolution of New Genes by Innovation, Amplification, and Divergence," by Joakim Näsvall et al., Science 338:384, 2012. (Näsvall et al.)
4. For a brief overview see "New Genes Arise via Innovation, Amplification, Divergence," by Andersson and Näsvall," Microbe 8(4):166-179, 2013. (Overview)
5. "Reductive evolution can prevent populations from taking simple adaptive paths to high fitness" Gauger et al., BIO-Complexity 2010(2):1-9. (Our paper)

The dispute started when the review in Science proposed the 2012 article by Näsvall et al. as evidence against Behe's book.

A short article at Evolution News then criticized Näsvall et al. by quoting an excerpt from the book Heretic. This excerpt argued that Näsvall's carefully controlled experiment didn't supply proof that unguided evolution could produce entirely new functions. As I explain below, I agree with this basic point. However, the excerpt also included a discussion of our paper on reductive evolution, highlighting it as showing the limits of evolutionary processes. That is fine on its own. Nevertheless, in the context of the Evolution News article, this second part of the excerpt might be misleading. Some people might think our article was intended to refute Näsvall et al. As I will explain shortly, it wasn't, because it used different methodology. Then I'd like to add to the argument about why Näsvall et al. does not refute Mike Behe's book.

A research group from RIKEN and Kyushu University has developed a new type of material, based on ethylene, which exhibits a number of useful properties such as self-healing and shape memory. Remarkably, some of the materials can spontaneously self-heal even in water or acidic and alkali solutions. The new material is based on ethylene, a compound that is the source of much of the plastic in use today.
Materials that can self-heal have become a popular area of research during the last decade, and a variety of materials have been developed. However, most of the self-healing materials reported to date have relied on sophisticated designs that incorporate chemical mechanisms into polymer networks, such as irreversible or reversible covalent-bond formation, hydrogen bonding, metal-ligand interactions, or ionic interactions. As a result, they require some external stimulus, such as heat or pressure, to prompt them to heal, and in most cases, they do not function in water, acid or alkaline solutions because the chemical networks cannot survive such conditions. The ideal is to create a material that possesses sufficient toughness and can autonomously self-heal under various conditions.

So says Stephen L. Talbott in The Organism's Story (January 2019) at Nature Institute:

Organisms are purposive ("teleological") beings. Nothing could be more obvious. The fact of the matter is so indisputable that even those who don't believe it really do believe it. Philosopher of biology Robert Arp speaks for biology as a whole when he writes,

"Thinkers cannot seem to get around [evolutionary biologist Robert] Trivers' claim that "even the humblest creature, say, a virus, appears organized to do something; it acts as if it is trying to achieve some purpose", or [political philosopher Larry] Arnhart's observation that . . . "Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young - these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed".¹"

And yet, despite his acknowledgment that we "cannot get around" this truth, Arp again speaks for almost the entire discipline of biology when he tries, with some delicacy, to take it all back: "with respect to organisms, it is useful to think as if these entities have traits and processes that function in goal-directed ways" (his emphasis). This as if is a long-running cliché, designed to warn us that the organism's purposive behavior is somehow deceptive - not quite what it seems. The goal-directedness is, in the conventional terminology, merely apparent or illusory. Certainly it must not be seen as having any relation at all to human purposive activity - an odd insistence given how eager so many biologists are to make sure we never forget that the human being is "just another animal".

When Becky Evans started studying cat-human relationships, she kept hearing, over and over again, about how cats are psychopaths.

On one hand, anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a catloaf knows exactly what that means. But also, exactly what does it mean to apply a human mental diagnosis to felines? We let these clawed creatures into our homes and our beds, but we still have trouble understanding them on anything but our own human terms.

Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths. The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog's bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members. In short, pretty typical cat behavior.

These answers get at the tricky semantics of calling a cat a "psychopath" when it is just ... a cat. There's always an implicit comparison when we talk about cats as aloof little jerks, says Mikel Maria Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher on cat behavior at the University of California at Davis. And that comparison is with dogs, which humans have spent thousands more years domesticating and molding in our image.

We like things that remind us of us," Delgado told me. "We like smiling. We like dogs doing what we tell them. We like that they attend to us very quickly. They make a lot of eye contact.

Cats, she pointed out, simply don't have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can. So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that's just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable-and even nonexistent-until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.

A species of giant tortoise thought to have gone extinct over a century ago was found on the Galapagos island of Fernandina, stunning researchers and bringing hope to conservationists.

According to Ecuador's Ministry of the Environment, the female Fernandina Giant Tortoise found Sunday is likely over 100 years old. While genetic tests are still being conducted, the experts at the Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative (GTRI) say they have made the first confirmed sighting of the species since 1906.

The world's two most innovative companies this year are both from Asia, with Chinese tech platform Meituan Dianping unseating 2018 champion and Silicon Valley giant Apple, according to ratings by US business magazine Fast Company.

While Washington keeps saying that Beijing is stealing its technology and uses this mantra to justify the ongoing trade war, the Chinese "transactional super app" claimed top spot among 50 of the most innovative companies in the world. It is the first time that a non-US company has emerged on top since Fast Company started running the rankings in 2008.

In its "definitive list of who matters in 2019," Fast Company gave the crown to Beijing-based Meituan Dianping, which was making its debut in the ratings. The app-based service expedites the booking and delivery of services such as hotel stays, movie tickets, and food.

The Chinese platform was followed by Singapore-based Grab, which forced American rival Uber out of the region in 2018 and acquired its local operations. The company now not only includes ride-hailing, ride-sharing services, food delivery and travel booking, but also offers its 130 million users financial services and will soon add healthcare services. Grab hit $1 billion in revenue last year and is likely to expand further after it managed to attract more than $3 billion in fresh funding.