Jurassic Park sticks with me for plenty of reasons. The dinosaurs, of course, were the major draw when I picked up the novel in advance of the screen adaptation's summer 1993 release. It was also the first "grown up book" I was allowed to read. And then there was the scene where the Tyrannosaurus wraps its prehensile tongue around Tim's head, a narcotic sleep being the only thing that saves the kid. As much as I adored dinosaurs, I didn't relish the image of being drawn, helpless, towards the jaws of one of my Mesozoic favorites.

A new paper on the anatomy of dinosaur tongues reminded me of that creepy scene. Chalk up another difference between the world of Jurassic Park and actual dinosaurs - T. rex actually had a very different tongue.

No one, as yet, has found a preserved non-avian dinosaur tongue or tongue impression. But that doesn't mean that the anatomical trail has run cold. There are bony correlates to tongue size and anatomy that paleontologists can look at for soft tissue clues. As part of a study on dinosaur tongues, paleontologists Zhiheng Li, Zhonghe Zhou, and Julia Clarke looked at one of these - the hyoid bone.

Two solar physicists, Robert Leamon from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Scott McIntosh from the High Altitude Observatory at Boulder, CO, have made an interesting observation that links changes in solar activity with changes in the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

As they reported at the AGU 2017 Fall Meeting, the termination of the solar magnetic activity bands at the solar equator that mark the end of the Hale cycle coincides since the 1960's with a shift from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific.

Predicting the La Niña of 2020-21: Termination of Solar Cycles and Correlated Variance in Solar and Atmospheric Variability

"We look at the particulate and radiative implications of these termination points, their temporal recurrence and signature, from the Sun to the Earth, and show the correlated signature of solar cycle termination events and major oceanic oscillations that extend back many decades. A combined one-two punch of reduced particulate forcing and increased radiative forcing that result from the termination of one solar cycle and rapid blossoming of another correlates strongly with a shift from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean."

The first mission designed to hunt a meteorite that crashed into the ocean has now discovered what may be tiny fragments of the meteorite's crust, researchers say.

On March 7, three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather stations detected the fall of a meteorite about 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) off the coast of Washington state. "The fall was widely seen around local areas and widely heard around local areas - it came with some loud sonic booms," Marc Fries, the cosmic dust curator for NASA, told Live Science.

Fries estimated this fall might yield about 4,400 lbs. (2,000 kilograms) of meteorites. He also calculated the largest meteorite might weigh about 9.7 lbs. (4.4 kg) and have a diameter of about 5 inches (12 centimeters).

"This is the largest meteorite fall I've seen in 20-plus years of radar data," Fries said.

You might be aware of one of Uranus' complexities: It spins on its side, and its moons orbit on that same rotated plane. New evidence strengthens the case that Uranus was smashed in a giant collision, resulting in its sideways orientation to its orbital plane and perhaps explaining some of the planet's other mysteries.

A new paper performs a series of simulations on Uranus early in its history, taking note of what an early impact may have done to its rotation rate, atmosphere and internal structure. The impact could have left a clear signature still visible inside the planet we see today.

Uranus really is strange. Not only does it rotate on an axis that sits at a 98-degree angle to its orbital plane, but, unlike the other giant planets, it doesn't appear to release more heat than it receives from the Sun. Its magnetic field, too, appears warped compared to the Earth's.

An impact could perhaps help explain some of these strange traits.

Scientists have been simulating giant impacts into Uranus since the early 1990s, according to the new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

A comet that could become visible to the naked eye in August has just exploded in brightness. Amateur astronomer Michael Jäger‎ of Austria reports that Comet PANSTARRS (C/2017 S3) brightened 16-fold during the late hours of July 2nd, abruptly increasing in magnitude from +12 to +9. He took this picture of the comet's expanding green atmosphere shortly after the outburst: "The gas cloud around the comet's nucleus is about 4 arc minutes wide," says Jäger‎. That means the comet's atmosphere is 260,000 km in diameter, almost twice as wide as the planet Jupiter. These dimensions make it a relatively easy target for backyard telescopes.

Comet PanSTARRS is falling toward the sun from the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of fresh comets in the distant outer solar system. It has never visited the inner planets before, and, as a result, no one can say what will happen when its fragile ices are exposed to solar heat as it approaches the sun in August. Previous estimates of the comet's brightness max out at magnitude +4--that is, barely visible to the unaided eye from dark-sky sites. Additional outbursts could boost its visibility even more.

Equine tooth extractions evolved to make way for a riding bit, making mounted warfare possible

Mongolian pastoralists were trying to remove troublesome teeth from horses' mouths almost 3,200 years ago, making those mobile herders the earliest known practitioners of horse dentistry, a new study finds.

Those initial, incomplete tooth removals led to procedures for extracting forward-positioned cheek teeth known as first premolars from young horses, say archaeologist William Taylor and his colleagues. That dental practice, which dates to as early as about 2,800 years ago, coincided with the appearance in Mongolia of metal bits that made it easier for riders to control horses, the researchers report the week of July 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Long-distance travel and mounted warfare with sedentary civilizations across Asia soon followed.

A star system containing two gigantic suns is blasting cosmic rays into space and NASA scientists have found that the radiation is making its way towards Earth on intergalactic winds.

High-energy observations in the sprawling southern constellation of Carina had puzzled scientists for some time. But now a NASA orbital telescope has helped pin the energy source on Eta Carinae, a double-star system around 7,500 light years away from Earth.

It is already known that rays with energies greater than 1 billion electron volts are sprayed into our solar system. However, the erratic movement of the energy and sheer size of the great expanse previously made it difficult to locate some of the sources. Colliding stellar winds within Eta Carinae, which is surrounded by an hourglass dust nebula, have now been confirmed as a reason for the energy patterns in the region.

Like a July 4 fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars resembles an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust - the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603.

Appearing colorful and serene, this environment is anything but. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster. Most of the stars in the cluster were born around the same time but differ in size, mass, temperature and color. The course of a star's life is determined by its mass, so a cluster of a given age will contain stars in various stages of their lives, giving an opportunity for detailed analyses of stellar life cycles. NGC 3603 also contains some of the most massive stars known. These huge stars live fast and die young, burning through their hydrogen fuel quickly and ultimately ending their lives in supernova explosions.

Google allows third-party app developers to read its customers' Gmail emails, a new report reveals, throwing a damper on its claims that it protects its users' privacy.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the tech giant continues to let hundreds of developers read people's emails. Any of Gmail's 1.3 billion users who have connected their email addresses to apps may have unknowingly given those apps permission to read their communications.

The Wall Street Journal spoke to a number of companies that said they had read people's emails. Those included Edison Software, eDataSource Inc and Return Path.

Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.

As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.

I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.

With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar - and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.