Watch Amazon River Dolphins Pee Straight Up Into The Air, What Do Ancient Mummies Smell Like, And Much More This Week

This week, we take an inside look at how humanity is dealing with the threat of asteroid 2024 YR4, humpback whale song seems to follow a fundamental law of human language, and we investigate whether red light therapy is a skin superhero or a beauty bust. Finally, we discuss a powerful human emotion everyone has experienced, but that few have heard of: kama muta.

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Watch Amazon River Dolphins Pee Straight Up Into The Air: They May Be Sending Messages To Their Mates

It’s not unusual for species to have a few tricks up their sleeves that we never knew about. Blue whales can sing low enough to remain undetected by killer whales, tarantulas can run just as fast with six legs as they do with eight, and now research has revealed that Amazon river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) are peeing straight up into the air, possibly for a curious reason. Read the full story here

An Inside Look At How Humanity Is Dealing With The Threat Of Asteroid 2024 YR4

Over the last few weeks, Asteroid 2024 YR4 has become a staple in science news columns. This space rock has a fluctuating but small chance to hit our planet around 12 pm UTC on December 22, 2032. This chance will likely drop to zero in the coming weeks, but the possible size and current risk of the asteroid have crossed a few thresholds that kick into motion the gears of the global planetary defense system. We take a peek behind the curtains at how that response is shaping up. Read the full story here

What Do Ancient Mummies Smell Like? Pretty Good By The Sounds Of It

After thousands of years in the afterlife you might expect to stink like a moldy old scrotum, but as it turns out, ancient Egyptian mummies are still surprisingly easy on the nose. A credit to their embalmers, the shriveled bodies retain many of the pleasant odors emanating from the aromatic oils and waxes with which they were originally treated, and have been described as “hedonically pleasant” by a team of trained sniffers. Read the full story here

Humpback Whale Song Follows Zipf’s Law, A Fundamental Law Of Human Language

Whale song is something we humans listen to when relaxing – but new research has shown that, as a form of communication, it ain’t messing around. A new study has found that certain whale species’ vocalizations adhere to two linguistic laws of efficiency seen in human language: Menzerath’s law and Zipf’s law (Zipf’s law being something almost all human languages seem to follow). Read the full story here

Red Light Therapy: Skincare Superhero Or Beauty Bust?

If you’ve ever seen a beauty influencer don one of those mildly creepy red light masks, you might have wondered if they actually do anything for your skin. Is red light therapy really the answer to all of our skin woes, or does it just make us look a little bit silly (and/or like a serial killer)? Read the full story here

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Feature of the week:

Kama Muta: The Powerful Emotion Everyone Has But No One Has Heard Of

Maybe your most recent experience with kama muta came at a sports game, cheering your team on with 10,000 fellow fans. Perhaps you felt it watching a rom-com or sharing a meal with a friend. It’s a feeling shared by, presumably, all of humanity – or at least, in every society the kama muta researchers have looked at so far. Yet, for most of us, kama muta is probably not a very familiar turn of phrase. But the concept is “nothing new,” Thomas Schubert tells IFLScience – it’s just a new name for something that is, as it turns out, pretty fundamental to humanity itself. Read the full story here