Seven days, lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of some of the week’s most notable and quotable items: The Philae lander woke up on a comet and reestablished contact with Earth after a nice seven-month nap. To see better at night, the hawkmoth slows down its own brain. MIT physicists created the coldest chemically stable molecules ever by cooling sodium potassium gas down to 500 nanokelvins, more than a million times colder than the void of space. Korean researchers used graphene to create the world’s thinnest light bulb. Methane was discovered on meteorites from Mars, lending credence to the idea of life on the Red Planet.

In the United States, when we think of the first woman in space, the name Sally Ride probably leaps to mind. But—no disrespect to Ride—the Soviets beat America to gender parity in space by 20 years. The first woman to slip the surly bonds of Earth was cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who blasted off in the spherical, 7.5-foot-wide cabin of the Vostok 6 spacecraft in June 1963. Tereshkova spent about three days in space, during which she orbited the Earth 48 times. She was also in close radio contact with another cosmonaut, Valery Bykovsky, in Vostok 5, which had launched two days previously. (Originally Vostok 5 was also supposed to be piloted by a female cosmonaut, but that changed due to budgetary concerns, according to Space.com).

Seven days, lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of some of the week’s most notable and quotable items: Saturn’s Phoebe ring, discovered in 2009, is much larger than originally thought—270 times the size of the planet itself. Wild chimpanzees in Guinea regularly get drunk on fermented palm tree sap. (Wonder if it helps with their anxiety issues?) Chimpanzees around the world, whose population has declined from around a million at the beginning of the 20th century to an estimated 172,000-300,000 today, are now protected as “endangered” species, regardless of whether they live in the wild or are held in captivity. For the first time, a baby was born using transplanted ovary tissue frozen back when the mother was a child.

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

When actor Alan Alda was 11, he wondered what a flame was. He asked his teacher who told him a flame was “oxidation.” Not exactly helpful, Alda said. “That’s like calling it by another name,” said Alda. “‘A flame, that’s Fred.’” That frustrating moment decades ago resulted in something great—the Flame Challenge, in which scientists compete to accurately and succinctly explain a simple question like “what is a flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old can understand.