This Week in Science: Too Much Ocean Trash, Male Hotties Selfish, Tootsie Pop Query Licked

Seven days, lots of science in the news. Here’s this week’s roundup.

A new study finds that teenage girls vaccinated against HPV are no more likely to engage in risky sex than unvaccinated teens.

Attractive men, according to a new study out of Brunel University in London, tend to be less egalitarian, more selfish than their homelier peers.

They can’t read a book, but apparently dogs can read you. New research finds that our beloved canines can tell if you’re happy or angry just by looking at (part of) your face.

Here’s one to make you happy: a space smile caught by the Hubble telescope.

There’s probably dark matter in the core of the Milky Way.

Around half the world in 100 minutes: European Space Agency plane the size of a car flies 250 miles above Earth in test flight.

Federal health officials are renaming chronic fatigue syndrome to “systemic exertion intolerance disease” as well as simplifying the diagnostic criteria for the condition—changes that are stirring up a bit of controversy.

A series of storms appears to have helped reduce California’s extreme drought conditions from covering 77 percent of the state to just um 67 percent.

Researchers pinpointed a gene behind the rapid evolution of different beaks in Darwin finches of the Galapagos islands.

Australia has lost 10 percent of its native mammal species over the last 200 years, mostly thanks to invasive cats and foxes.

There’s so much trash in the ocean that a research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara estimates it’s equivalent to “an area 34 times the size of Manhattan ankle-deep in plastic waste.” And that’s the middle range of their estimate.

Finally there’s an answer: scientists figured out how many licks of the tongue it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

Illustration by: Sarah Peavey