1,350 light-years: the distance to a "fiery ribbon" stretching across the Orion Nebula, captured recently by a submillimeter-wavelength camera inside Chile's Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope. The ribbon is actually a glow given off by cold interstellar dust at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see.

4: the number of toes you need on each foot

8 weeks: the time it took a team of nerds to create real-life Mario Kart, complete with bananas, shells, and mushrooms

2016: the launch year of a NASA spacecraft that will land on the asteroid Bennu, scoop up two ounces of its soil, and then fly the sample back to Earth. Scientists hope the soil will offer clues to the birth of the solar system and life on Earth.

11:18 a.m. ET: the time on May 14, 2013, at which the X-47B autonomous warplane became the first unmanned aircraft to ever complete a catapult launch from the deck of an aircraft carrier (video below)

2.64 billion years: the length of time that water discovered in a Canadian mine may have been untouched by Earth's atmosphere. The stream may be the oldest free-flowing source of isolated water ever known.

500 miles: the distance a robot plane flew over Europe carrying human passengers

2013: the year scientists created the first cloned human embryo

1,500 watts: the power of the metal-halide vapor lamps in the U.S. Army's brutal weather simulator, the only lab of its kind to use human test subjects (the lamps are so bright, it's impossible to look directly at them)

$10.7 million: the amount Google has just invested in a drone intelligence company

3,600 degrees Fahrenheit: the temperature on the surface of a distant, massive gas planet, which scientists recently discovered using Einstein's theory of relativity

40 million miles: the distance from Earth to NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, discoverer of distant worlds large and small. The beloved telescope suffered a critical failure this week, though there might still be a way to save it.

$300: the price of an animatronic robot kit designed to teach anyone robotics, one of the coolest inventions of the year

4,000: the number of teeth an American alligator can regenerate during its life. Dentists are studying the giant reptiles to figure out a way for humans to regrow teeth.

$50,000: the price of a sleek, comfortable space suit for space tourists

13,000: the number of customers the space tourism industry is expected to have by 2021. Scientists are warning that commercial spaceflights could fill the stratosphere with sunlight-absorbing black carbon.

2.2 millionths of a second: the lifespan of a muon, a negatively charged subatomic particle (scientists need a 600-ton, 50-foot-diameter magnet to measure them)

0.05 percent: the blood-alcohol content to which all states should lower their threshold for DUI, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (all states currently have a blood-alcohol limit of 0.08 percent for driving)

5 hours: the time it takes to build your own gene machine, a pipe that copies DNA using the heat of a lightbulb

Plus the most beautiful image of Earth, New York City on Venus, and the world's largest (deflated) rubber duck.

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By studying the way leaves shrink when they fossilize, a team of more than 100 high school students could build more accurate models of climate change.

A team of high school students have co-authored a scientific journal paper with their University of Arizona grad student instructor that could have a serious impact on the reliability of climate models. Their work details the impact of shrinkage on dried, fossilized leaves--shrinkage that is often unaccounted for in climate models. By better accounting for this change in leaf size, the students found that researchers could significantly improve the accuracy of their climate models.

Climate models are usually a mash-up of all kinds of data collected from various sources, much of which is stored up in the fossil record. And one of those sources is fossilized leaves, which researchers look at to determine what kind of climate reigned in a geographical region at a given point in time. Generally speaking, larger leaves are indicative of warmer, more favorable climates.

But when fossilized leaves are measured they aren't perfect representations of the living leaves they once were. They shrink as they dry out and fossilize, as one might expect them to. And yet, though this is readily known, most climate models don't account for this shrinkage. Many studies and scientists have long considered such shrinkage during fossilization to be negligible. But more than 100 high school students in Arizona would beg to differ.

In a paper published in the American Journal of Botany--40 of the students completed enough of scientific requirements to qualify them as co-authors on the paper--the students carried out various experiments in leaf shrinkage, accelerating the fossilization process by drying leaves at about 140 degrees. They found that leaves tend to shrink when they dry out much more than previously thought--in some cases by up to 80 percent, a value that is certainly not negligible. Some species of ragwort lost more than 40 percent of their size when dried out, and on average leaves lost anywhere from 10 to 30 percent.

In other words, to treat the measurement of fossilized leaf size as roughly the same as living leaf size introduces errors into the computer models used to generate pictures of Earth's climate history. Depending on the species of leaf, those errors can be quite large--large enough to lead to conclusions that are flawed.

To flesh out their work, the students did additional experiments, hydrating leaves after drying them, placing dried leaves in damp environments, and leaving them in mud throughout the drying process. Doing so helped them to qualify the impact of various variables on drying leaves and how those variables impact shrinkage. The results were good enough to get the students published--and perhaps to sharpen the resolution of historical climate models going forward.

[Nature]