The month’s best science images: A Mars helicopter and a spectacular flowery frame for the Milky Way

Hello Nature readers,
Today we enjoy the month’s best science images, consider whether AI will drag astrophysics down to Earth and hear that a smartphone’s selfie camera can monitor your heart rate.

The month’s best science images

Photographer Alvin Wu used a fisheye perspective to capture this surreal snap of a field of flowers framing the Milky Way over Twizel, New Zealand. The shot was one of 25 selected images in the ninth Milky Way Photographer of the Year competition.

See more of the month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.

Bees can problem-solve on the fly

Bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) can suss out how to use a tool to complete a set task without explicit training. Bees were shown a ceiling-mounted artificial flower, which contained a tasty sucrose treat, and then separately, a styrofoam ball. Then, the insects were put into an environment with both. The bees worked out that they could roll the ball under the flower for a leg-up to their reward. The insects were never explicitly shown that they could use the ball for this purpose, which suggests they have the cognitive capacity to problem-solve.

Will AI be the death of astrophysics?

“Anyone working in astrophysics is someone who wants to do astrophysics, not someone who wants to learn the answers,” argued David Hogg in a recent preprint. “When we measure the age of the Universe, no-one on the team actually cares what the specific value is, even though each of them might have spent many hard years of their life figuring [it] out.” Hogg was exploring an issue that has been increasingly debated behind closed doors: if AI tools can do much of the data science and mathematics that make up the bread-and-butter of astrophysical discovery, where does that leave one of science’s most fundamental and philosophical fields?

Futures: Book of Cron Job

A noble machine learns the weight of its power in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.

Podcast: face-reading phone for heart health

Researchers have developed a system that passively measures your resting heart rate during everyday use of your smartphone, avoiding the need for a visit to a clinic, or an expensive wearable monitor. “Every time your heart beats, it generates this pulse wave that propagates through the blood vessels… including the vessels that are underneath the skin of your face,” study co-author Ming-Zher Poh tells the Nature Podcast. “These are the subtle colour changes that the front-facing smartphone camera is analyzing.”