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Written by Mike McRae Your pets might like a good scratch, but new research suggests your beloved pot plants might not be so fond of having their fronds fondled.

As long as a thumb and with a six-centimetre wingspan, you’d think it would be hard to miss Wallace’s giant bee.

Imagine bacteria, clinging to a rock, floating deep in space. The rock was once blasted off its planet by a cataclysmic explosion. Hundreds of years in the future, the rock encounters a new planet, bringing these lonely bacteria with it. The question is, could the bacteria survive?

Way back in 2006, an unusual anime began airing on Japanese television. Although the series was about aliens, time travel and other supernatural events, no one could have predicted the strange effects that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumia would have on the world of mathematics.

If you want to fly, you’ve got to move, right? Birds flap, propellers whirr, and if you’ve ever watched the spiral painted on the middle of a jet engine, you’ll know they spin too. But recently, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States created a plane with no moving parts at all.

A walk in the Australian bush can occasionally reveal piles of strange, cube-shaped poo, carefully balanced on top of rocks. Although it might seem like a prank, they’re perfectly natural. Chances are, this cube poo has been ejected from a wombat’s rear end.

The Great Barrier Reef has had a rough time. Rising temperatures , storms and attacks from crown of thorn starfish are among the problems damaging the reef. This year, scientists are aiming to supercharge its recovery with a new robotic helper.

You might not think about it much, but there’s an amazing planet under your feet. Dig down about 50 kilometres and the rocky crust begins to give way to the hot, soft mantle. Deeper down, the rocks get hotter and runnier, reaching temperatures of thousands of degrees.

If you’ve ever seen the iconic movie The Dish, you’ll probably remember when two engineers turned the most famous telescope in Australia into a cricket pitch. Kids from across New South Wales got a chance to do the same, along with some of Australia’s biggest cricket stars.

Astronauts have nerves of steel. They ride controlled explosions, strapped to giant tanks of rocket fuel. And every now and then, things go wrong. Last Thursday, two space explorers didn’t quite make it to space – but they lived to tell the tale!