Cassini鈥檚 final five
NASA鈥檚 Cassini spacecraft has started the first of its final five orbits around Saturn before it crashes into the planet on 15 September. On 14 August, the spacecraft dipped lower into the atmosphere than ever before, forcing the thrusters to fire to maintain stability and allowing researchers to figure out the density of the top of Saturn鈥檚 haze.
Cardiac weight risk
You can鈥檛 be 鈥渇at but fit鈥�. An analysis of more than half a million people in Europe found that even when overweight people have healthy blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, they are still 26 per cent more likely to develop coronary heart disease (European Heart Journal, ).
Game on
Artificial intelligence beat professional video gamers at the Dota 2 championships in Seattle last Friday. Elon Musk鈥檚 OpenAI developed the bot, and although it can only at present play a restricted version of Dota 2, the game is still considerably more complex than others AI has mastered.
Advertisement
Care home demand
The average woman now requires three years of substantial care in old age and the average man 2.4 years, according to an analysis of 15,000 adults in England. The study predicts that by 2025, the nation will need an extra 71,000 care home places (The Lancet, .
Dino mystery
A strange dinosaur may be the 鈥渕issing link鈥� between two great dinosaur groups. Chilesaurus resembles a Velociraptor-like meat eater, but a new analysis suggests it is an Ornithischian, the group that includes Stegosaurus and Triceratops (Biology Letters, ). It may reveal how the two groups diverged.