High-energy neutrinos are highly fascinating subatomic particles produced when very fast charged particles collide with other particles or photons. IceCube, a renowned neutrino detector located at the South Pole, has been detecting extragalactic high-energy neutrinos for almost a decade.

To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can "live" outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe. They designed a mind-bending experiment at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory to try to detect a particle that has been speculated but not spotted. If found, the theorized "mirror neutron"—a dark-matter twin to the neutron—could explain a discrepancy between answers from two types of neutron lifetime experiments and provide the first observation of dark matter.

A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found nearly 1,000 species of bacteria in snow and ice samples collected from Tibetan glaciers. In their paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the group describes collecting and studying the bacteria and their concerns about the spread of disease as the glaciers melt.

A traditional paper crane is a feat of artistry. Every fold in origami leads to the transformation of a single square sheet of paper into a bird, a dragon, or a flower. Origami discourages gluing, marking or cutting the paper, but in the art of kirigami, strategically placed cuts can transform the shape of the paper even further, creating complex structures from simple slits. A well-known example of this is a pop-up book, where depending on how the flat paper is cut, a different set of shapes—a heart, a frog, a set of skyscrapers—will emerge when the book is opened.

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere have observed an ultraluminous X-ray source known as NGC 925 ULX-3 using NASA's Swift and NuSTAR spacecraft, as well as ESA's XMM-Newton satellite. Results of this observational campaign, published June 16 on arXiv.org, deliver important insights into variability behavior of this source.