Welcome to Sci-Friday! Every week, we’ll help you head into the weekend by collecting some links from the best real-life science news that happened throughout the week, so you can mix a little reality into your fantasy.
Multiple Studies Confirm There is Water on the Moon
Well, this is certainly where reality meets a long-time science fiction premise in a head-on collision! The scientific journal Nature Astronomy has published not one but two different studies that found evidence of water molecules and likely water ice on the shadowed side of the Moon. (from The Washington Post)
A Mind-Bogglingly Tiny 3D-Printed USS Voyager That Moves Under its Own Power
Okay, this is just downright geeky cool – a team at Leiden University in The Netherlands have 3D-printed the smallest microscopic self-propelled objects ever, and one of the objects they created was the USS Voyager (well, an unmarked Intrepid-class starship, anyhow). With the ability to move provided by chemical reaction, the starship measures in at 15 micrometers, so small that it could remain comfortably balanced on a single piece of human hair. (from PCGamer)
Escaped Cloned Female Mutant Crayfish Take Over Belgian Cemetery
I couldn’t write that headline any better than it was originally written, so that’s a direct quote from the New Zealand Herald, who reported well on this crazy-sounding story. The self-replicating crustaceans (who are always female) dig deep into the ground to live their lives under the surface, which makes them exponentially more difficult to find and remove. A group of them – which are technically banned in the European Union – have escaped a scientific breeding program and holed themselves up in the Schoonselhof Cemetery in Antwerp. (from the New Zealand Herald)
Have a cool science story that we should feature in next week’s column? E-mail it to us and we’ll give it a good look!
