Weekly Science Picks

It’s Sunday! Maybe some of you are not that happy for that, because it’s the end of the weekend, but for us it’s our time to provide you with a new editor’s selection for this week. The task was very interesting and exciting. We got an opportunity to present at once amazing stories from biology, space industry, neuroscience and much more. So, let’s review this week’s choice.

The solar explorer built with dead animal bones

When I meet him in his office at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, a non-descript industrial town some an hour’s drive north of London, Chris Draper is sitting at his desk idly flicking a long narrow strip of what looks like cooking foil. Smooth burnished metal on one side, ridged matt black on the other, the thin material makes a crinkly noise as he twists it back and forth.

Prehistoric ‘groundhog’ identified by scientists

US lead scientist Dr David Krause, from Stony Brook University in New York, said: “We know next to nothing about early mammalian evolution on the southern continents. This discovery, from a time and an area of the world that are very poorly sampled, underscores how very little we know. No paleontologist could have come close to predicting the odd mix of anatomical features that this cranium exhibits.