Best of Last Week—Galactic matter found, happy monkeys play Pong, and Pfizer vaccine 90 percent effective after 1 shot

It was a good week for space science as a team from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery and CSIRO, spotted bizarre, never-before-seen activity from one of the strongest magnets in the universe—a rare kind of neutron star. Also, doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, Yuanming Wang, found missing galactic matter—the other half of the baryonic matter that is believed to make up approximately 5% of the Milky Way. And Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argued that an alien vessel paid us a visit back in 2017—the 'Oumuamua object, he suggests, might have been like a buoy resting in the expanses of the universe, sent by intelligent life forms.

In technology news, Elon Musk announced that his Neuralink team had created "happy monkeys" who played Pong with their minds, using implanted wireless chips that helped them play the old video game. Also, a team at Xi'an Jiaotong University introduced a new bio-inspired joint model that could help with developing more stable and robust exoskeletons for robots. And Boston Dynamics introduced its newest iteration of Spot, the doglike robot—it now has a usable arm and is able to charge itself when needed. Also, a team from Baidu Security and Pennsylvania State University created a machine-learning algorithm that may be the key to timely, inexpensive cyber-defense.

In other news, a team at the University of Texas at Austin found that the use of pronouns may show signs of an impending breakup—they found that language use by those in a relationship changed up to three months prior to a breakup and lasted for six months after. Also, a team at the University of Copenhagen created an AI-based computer model to determine whether someone will die from COVID-19.

And finally, if you are in the unique position of being able to choose which type of vaccine you are given to ward off COVID-19, you might want to check out the latest test of the version by Pfizer by a team at the University of East Anglia—they found it to be 90% effective 21 days after a single dose.

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