This week on Break It Down: We’ve just seen our third-ever interstellar object whizzing though the Solar System, eating cheese really might give you nightmares (but so might dessert), cavers are rewarded with a treasure trove of blind, mummified invertebrates including the only known cave-adapted wasp, the Neanderthal fat factory is just a delicious as it sounds, orcas caught kissing out in the wild, and if the Moon gets slapped by an asteroid as NASA predicts there’s a 4.1 percent chance it might, it would be a 1-in-5,000-years spectacle for Earth to enjoy (from a safe distance).

So, sit back, relax, and let’s Break It Down…

Links:

Interstellar object

Cheesy nightmares

Cave of mummified insects

Neanderthal fat factory

Collagen

Smooching orcas

Asteroid about to slap the Moon

Project Hail Memory

We Have Questions

CURIOUS magazine

The Big Questions

This week on Break It Down: feast your eyes on the stunning first images from the world’s largest digital camera, capturing millions of galaxies and thousands of new asteroids. Why killer whales are rubbing each other luxuriously with seaweed, the world’s oldest rocks aren’t that much younger than the planet, mice born from two dads prove they’re fertile, a French woman becomes the only known person in the world with a new kind of blood type, and we celebrate 50 years of the European Space Agency with a special interview with astronaut Luca Parmitano.

So, sit back, relax, and let’s Break It Down…

Links:

World’s largest digital camera

Vera C Rubin images of space

Be the first to spot a galaxy

Orcas allokelping

World’s oldest rocks

Mice with two dads

Brand new blood type

Can we make blood?

50 years of ESA

Brain uploads

Bonus episode of We Have Questions

Dolphins help a lost whale

This week on Break It Down: Two spacecraft just created the first ever artificial solar eclipse, thanks to some impressive drone photos we know now dancing dinosaurs might have been leaping around to impress females in Colorado, a child from the world's oldest burial site appears to be a Neanderthal-Homo sapiens hybrid, for the first time we know what a Denisovan face looks like, a medical breakthrough means we could have a vaccine against HIV (if only anyone could buy it), and 50 years after JAWS was released, we take a look at the lasting impact on shark conservation the blockbuster movie made.

So, sit back, relax, and let’s Break It Down…

Links:

Artificial solar eclipse

Dancing dinos

Hybrid child

Denisovan skull

HIV vaccine

JAWS 50 Years On

Papahānaumokuākea marine conservation

Ghost Elephant

The Big Questions is back!