In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

Uranus smells like rotten eggs

TAKE A WHIFF Uranus is a lovely robin’s egg blue in this image taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew past in 1986. New measurements of the planet’s chemistry suggests it may smell like eggs, too — that is, really rotten eggs.

JPL/NASA

Uranus’ upper clouds are made of hydrogen sulfide — the same molecule that gives rotten eggs their noxious odor.

“At the risk of schoolboy sniggers, if you were there, flying through the clouds of Uranus, yes, you’d get this pungent, rather disastrous smell,” says planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester in England.