King Richard III the end of dinosaurs and the world of above average people all made our top stories in Science this week.
Click on the see them all.
Scientists have discovered neurons in mice that fire in response to gentle stroking touch.
The neurons described in the Jan. 31 issue of the journal Nature may explain why animals from rats to cats to humans enjoy grooming each other and being stroked.
[Full Story: That's the Spot: Massage Neurons Found]
Pablo Picasso famous for pushing the boundaries of art with cubism also broke with convention when it came to paint new research shows. X-ray analysis of some of the painter's masterworks solves a long-standing mystery about the type of paint the artist used on his canvases revealing it to be basic house paint.
Art scholars had long suspected Picasso was one of the first master artists to employ house paint rather than traditional artists' paint to achieve a glossy style that hid brush marks. There was no absolute confirmation of this however until now.
[Full Story: Picasso's Genius Revealed: He Used Common House Paint]
In a chilling case report doctors in Turkey have described what they claim to be a real-life vampire with multiple personalities and an addiction to drinking blood.
The 23-year-old married man apparently started out slicing his own arms chest and belly with razor blades letting the blood drip into a cup so he could drink it. But when he experienced compulsions to drink blood as urgent as breathing he started turning to other sources the doctors said.
[Full Story: Real-Life 'Vampire' Addicted to Blood Doctors Claim]
The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support researchers say.
The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event often known as K-T. The only survivors among the dinosaurs are the birds.
[Full Story: Asteroid Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs: New Evidence]
The largest prime number yet has been discovered and it's 17425170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008 which was a paltry 12978189 digits long.
The number 2 raised to the 57885161 power minus 1 was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers devoted to finding primes similar to projects like SETI@Home which downloads and analyzes radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The network called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) harnesses about 360000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second. This is the third prime number discovered by Cooper.
[Full Story: Largest Prime Number Discovered]
The body of the lost and vilified English king Richard III has finally been found.
Archaeologists announced today (Feb. 4) that bones excavated from underneath a parking lot in Leicester beyond reasonable doubt belong to the medieval king. Archaeologists announced the discovery of the skeleton in September. They suspected then they might have Richard III on their hands because the skeleton showed signs of the spinal disorder scoliosis which Richard III likely had and because battle wounds on the bones matched accounts of Richard III's death in the War of the Roses.
[Full Story: Confirmed! Bones of King Richard III Found]
On a scale of one to 10 you probably think you're a seven. And you wouldn't be alone.
While it's impossible for most people to be above the median for a specific quality people think they are better than most people in many arenas from charitable behavior to work performance.
[Full Story: Why We're All Above Average]
Beware of robots driven by small insects. A group of researchers has put a silkmoth in the driver's seat of a small two-wheeled robot to study how the insect tracks down smells.
Understanding the scent-tracking behavior of a silkmoth (Bombyx mori) could help scientists develop robots that are able to sense environmental spills and leaks by smell according to the new study.
[Full Story: Insect Drives Tiny Robot Toward Seductive Smells]
Imagine if you could take living cells load them into a printer and squirt out a 3D tissue that could develop into a kidney or a heart. Scientists are one step closer to that reality now that they have developed the first printer for embryonic human stem cells.
In a new study researchers from the University of Edinburgh have created a cell printer that spits out living embryonic stem cells. The printer was capable of printing uniform-size droplets of cells gently enough to keep the cells alive and maintain their ability to develop into different cell types. The new printing method could be used to make 3D human tissues for testing new drugs grow organs or ultimately print cells directly inside the body.
[Full Story: 3D-Printed Human Embryonic Stem Cells Created for First Time]
The oldest known wild bird in the United States has hatched a chick for the sixth year in a row.
The Laysan albatross named Wisdom thought to be at least 62 years old hatched a healthy-looking chick on Sunday (Feb. 3) according to a statement from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Wisdom and her young chick inhabit Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) which is famous for its Laysan albatross population.
[Full Story: Oldest Known Wild Bird Hatches Healthy Chick]