The brightest take on this week’s science

Today, the Amazon rainforest is revered as one of Earth's most immaculate wildernesses.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, it looked very different.

Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape.

Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined.

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Somewhere in the Universe, an alien culture may have developed the technology to build giant megastructures around stars, harnessing their energy on an unimaginable scale.

First proposed in 1960 by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, the Dyson sphere has become one of the most enduring symbols of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Such structures should change starlight in ways we can detect from Earth – telltale technosignatures that could finally reveal an advanced alien civilization.

Now, astronomers have used the JWST's golden infrared eye to put two of the strongest Dyson sphere candidates to the test.

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A) Coral
B) Mite eye
C) Dried super glue
D) Fern sporangium

Answer at the bottom.

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Making a turducken – stuffing a chicken inside a duck, then stuffing that inside a turkey – seems like a recent Thanksgiving tradition.

But paleontologists in Australia may have found the dinosaur-era equivalent.

In this case, the 'chicken' is a hapless flying reptile that swooped too close to the ocean and was eaten by a marine predator.

That meal may have been the marine creature’s last, though, because it was soon gobbled up by an even bigger sea monster.

This incredible moment in time has been frozen in the fossil record for over 100 million years, providing a rare glimpse of the ancient food web in action, and marking the first evidence that pterosaurs were on the menu for this kind of marine reptile.

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There are more than 400 subglacial lakes hidden beneath Antarctica’s snow and ice.

One is large enough to have its own currents and tides. In the pitch-black cold, some life forms can even persist…

Time to curl up!

Microscope answer: Mite eye

This gorgeous specimen is the compound eye of a mite. Many mites are actually blind, but if they do have eyes, they are usually located above the legs in the ‘shoulder’ region.