The Most Interesting Science News Articles of the Week

Each week we uncover the most interesting and informative articles from around the world, here are 10 of the coolest stories in science this week.

Ice and Fire

This illustration shows where water rests and flows under the Antarctic ice, with blue dots indicating lakes and lines indicating rivers.
This illustration shows where water rests and flows under the Antarctic ice, with blue dots indicating lakes and lines indicating rivers.
Credit: NSF/Zina Deretsky
Imagine drifting over Antarctica's icy expanse. A white continent extends below you, and it's smothered in enough frozen water to drown every coastline in the world in a 216-foot (66 meters) wave if it were to melt. But scientists now believe that, deep beneath almost 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) of ice and a relatively thin slice of rocky crust, one region of the frozen continent hides a column of red-hot magma, straining toward the surface, according to a new study. [Read more about the universe.]

Alien Technology Imagined

An artist's illustration of Boyajian's star, which experiences unexplained changes in brightness. One hypothesis is that a planet has broken up around the star, and the debris is block the star's light.
An artist's illustration of Boyajian's star, which experiences unexplained changes in brightness. One hypothesis is that a planet has broken up around the star, and the debris is block the star's light.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A bizarre flicker of light from space led to the discovery of a still-mysterious star called KIC 8462852, otherwise known as "Tabby's Star," "Boyajian's Star" or the star surrounded by an "alien megastructure." [Read more about the megastructure.]

A Tiny, Unseen Subject

You can't see the grasshopper in this image of Vincent van Gogh's "Olive Trees," but it's there.
You can't see the grasshopper in this image of Vincent van Gogh's "Olive Trees," but it's there.
Credit: Courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
There's a secret hidden in a Vincent van Gogh painting.

Conservators like Schafer can be like detectives, uncovering clues in their careful studies of works of art hat reveal new details about their origins and contexts. Many of history's artists worked outdoors, Schaefer said, especially in the 19th century. [Read more about the secret.]

An Elusive Piece

An abstract artist's illustration shows a high-energy hadron collision.
An abstract artist's illustration shows a high-energy hadron collision.
Credit: Giroscience/Shutterstock
Flit, zip, jitter, boom. Quarks, the tiny particles that make up everything tangible in the universe, remain deeply mysterious to physicists even 53 years after scientists first began to suspect these particles exist. They bop around at the edge of scientific instruments' sensitivities, are squirreled away inside larger particles, and decay from their higher forms into their simplest in half the time it takes a beam of light to cross a grain of salt. The little buggers don't give up their secrets easily. [Read more about the particle.]

An Asteroid at Any Other Place

What if the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs hit another spot on Earth?
What if the space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs hit another spot on Earth?
Credit: Esteban De Armas/Shutterstock
The age of dinosaurs met an unlikely end — because had the cosmic impact that doomed it hit just about anywhere else on the planet, the "terrible lizards" might still roam the Earth, a new study finds.

To explain why the Chicxulub impact winter proved so catastrophic, Japanese scientists previously suggested the superhot debris from the meteor strike not only caused wildfires across the planet, but also ignited rocks loaded with hydrocarbon molecules such as oil. They calculated that such oily rocks would have generated vast amounts of soot. [Read more about the asteroid.]

Rodent-Cousins

The earliest ancestors of eutherian mammals were small rat-like creatures (depicted in this illustration) that lived 145 million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs.
The earliest ancestors of eutherian mammals were small rat-like creatures (depicted in this illustration) that lived 145 million years ago in the shadow of the dinosaurs.
Credit: Mark Witton/University of Portsmouth
The earliest known ancestors of the mammal lineage that includes everything from humans, to blue whales, to pygmy shrews may have been nocturnal, rodent-like creatures that evolved much earlier than previously thought.

The researchers discovered these fossils at the cliffs of Dorset on the southern coast of England. This process often involved toting buckets of rocks up rugged trails, "with slabs of limestone falling all the time off the pretty dangerously eroded cliffs," Sweetman said. "You have to be pretty careful collecting samples there." [Read more about the creature.]

A Case of Mistaken Identity?

Lilias Adie, accused of witchcraft in 1704, died in prison before she could be burnt alive for consorting with the devil.
Lilias Adie, accused of witchcraft in 1704, died in prison before she could be burnt alive for consorting with the devil.
Credit: Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, University of Dundee
Forensic experts have reconstructed the face of a Scottish woman imprisoned on suspicion of witchcraft more than 300 years ago.

The end result was "quite a kind face," according to forensic artist and CAHID lecturer Christopher Rynn, who performed the reconstruction of the long-deceased "witch." [Read more about the "witch."]

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Interstellar Travellers

A tardigrade in space?
A tardigrade in space?
Credit: Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock
People are gearing up to spread life from our solar system out into the cosmos. But the first life-forms to make that journey won't be human beings, or even critters most folks would recognize. Instead, scientists plan to send tiny, chubby, pinch-faced tardigrades on the first living journey out past the Oort cloud (the ring of icy debris around our solar system) and into interstellar space. [Read more about the critter.]

Ozone Layer Holes

The ozone hole over Antarctica shrunk to its smallest maximum-extent in September 2017. Here, in this false-color view of the monthly-averaged total ozone the blue and purple indicate areas with the least ozone, while yellows and reds mean the most ozone.
The ozone hole over Antarctica shrunk to its smallest maximum-extent in September 2017. Here, in this false-color view of the monthly-averaged total ozone the blue and purple indicate areas with the least ozone, while yellows and reds mean the most ozone.
Credit: NASA
Higher temperatures over Antarctica this year shrank the hole in the ozone layer to the smallest it's been since 1988.

In 1985, scientists first detected the hole in the ozone layer and realized it was being caused by man-made chlorine and bromine, often found in chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), compounds used as refrigerants. [Read more about the hole.]

Original Social-Networking

A depiction of a man rubbed into a Mona Island cave wall at least 500 years ago.
A depiction of a man rubbed into a Mona Island cave wall at least 500 years ago.
Credit: Unversity of Leicester / Alice Samson
Imagine a social-networking site that predates not only the internet but even a European presence in the Americas. That's how researchers from the University of Leicester are describing the discoveries they've made after three years of excursions deep into the narrow caves of an abandoned Caribbean island.

To analyze the cave drawings, thee archaeologists took X-rays and used carbon dating. They were surprised to find that all of the artwork discovered in about 70 winding caves predated Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas. [Read more about the island.]