Landslide and Avalanche Debris Litter Hubbard Glacier - NASA Science (.gov)

Resembling a brightly coloured artwork, a virtual environment software replicates the real-life setup shown right behind the screen – a group of robotic platforms hovering over an extremely flat floor. While the real setup includes only three objects, the screen displays three more virtual ones alongside them. The minds behind this experiment are part of Star-bots, a student team from the University of Bologna, Italy. They are one of the teams selected for this year’s edition of the ESA Academy Experiments Programme, which gives students access to testing facilities and technical guidance. The Star-bots team’s project tackles the issue of space debris. The number of non-functional objects in space is growing – some are satellites that have reached the end of their lifetime, ran out of fuel, or have collided with others and broke up into smaller pieces. The team’s experiment addresses this by testing how a swarm of autonomous robots could help with active debris removal, a process of cleaning up non-functional objects from space by grabbing onto them and changing their orbit to reenter the atmosphere and burn up.

With 302 neurons, 200 of them in their heads, hermaphrodite female roundworms reveal surprising sex-specific differences in the nervous system and how these differences influence behavior, reproduction, and aging. Researchers at Northeastern University compared brain activity in male and hermaphroditic Caenorhabditis elegans, a microscopic worm widely used in biological research to understand how sex wires males and female nervous systems differently.

Artist’s concept of the new dinosaur species Invictibellatrix amberina, along with the fossil from which it was identified. The fossil had been sitting in a drawer for 100 years, until researchers pulled it out and became curious. Image via Sergey Krasovskiy and Pedro Salas/ Natural History Museum London. You deserve a daily dose of good news. For the latest in science and the night sky, subscribe to EarthSky’s free daily newsletter.