This Week in Science: Dark Side of the Moon, Mystifying Monarchs, and a Very Energetic Neutrino

(The Week of August 3, 2015)

Seven days, lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of some of the week’s most notable and quotable items.

NASA’s DSCOVR satellite got a shot of the dark side of the moon crossing the face of the Earth.

Manipulating the results of online search engines can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by a significant amount.

Baby bonobos seem to employ a similar kind of “babytalk” comparable to that which human infants use.

Good news in the search for an Ebola vaccine: A single dose of one experimental formulation protected monkeys within three to seven days.

How you perceive the color yellow can change with the seasons.

Researchers made a new kind of material that’s almost like a cousin of graphene: stanene, a mesh of tin that’s just one atom thick.

The first-ever venomous frogs (equipped with head spikes to deliver poison into a victim) were discovered in Brazil.

Berkeley physicists made supercool gas—chilled down to a billionth of a degree of absolute zero—to help eliminate “noise” and study quantum effects inside the substance.

No one really knows what’s going on with monarch butterflies.

Now we know how to program the size and number of holes in Swiss cheese (or, if you’re a pedantic turophile, Emmental cheese).

Physicists have spotted the highest-energy neutrino ever seen, with an energy of over 2,000 trillion electronvolts.

Researchers found a genetic factor that keeps the moles on your skin (which are actually benign tumors) from turning into cancerous melanoma.

City sparrows are more aggressive than country sparrows.

Image: NASA