This Week in Science: Shipwrecks, Narlugas, and Southern Accents

It’s time for “Nerd News,” covering the most important news for your brain you may have missed.  Here’s a quick rundown of this week in science . . .

1.  Explorer Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship The Endurance was finally found 107 years after it sank.  He and his crew were trying to become the first to cross Antarctica on foot in 1915, but never made it after their ship got caught in ice.  They had to camp out on an ice floe for months, and didn’t make it home for two years.  But everyone survived.

2.  Being around someone with a different accent can make YOU take on their accent.  And a new study found it starts before you even hear them talk.  Just expecting to hear a southern accent can make you start talking that way.

3.  In animal news:  Octopus ancestors were around even before dinosaurs.  Ants can learn to sniff out cancer.  And a group of beluga whales that adopted a narwhal are getting old enough to mate . . . so they could have “narluga” babies soon, which is rare.

4.  A study in China found our sense of smell is getting weaker.  Human ancestors probably had much stronger noses than we do.

5.  And in space news:  NASA is in the process of opening a container of Moon rocks that were vacuum-sealed and brought back to Earth in 1972.  They didn’t open it for 50 years, because they were waiting for better technology to analyze the rocks.