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The Paralympic Games, a multi-sport event for athletes with disabilities, will open on August 28 in Paris, France, and continue through September 8. Like the Summer Olympics, the Summer Paralympics takes place every four years and features some of the best athletes from around the world. (There’s also a Winter Paralympics.)

Thousands of people will compete at the 2024 Paralympics. Here are a few you might want to check out!

Do people look like their names? Studies have shown that they do. But a new study suggests that people aren’t born looking like their names. Instead, they alter their appearance to match their moniker.

A group of researchers showed a group of children and a group of adults a series of adult faces and asked them to match the faces to the correct names. Both the children and the adults matched the faces to the correct names more often than if they were to guess randomly. This suggests that adults with certain names have a certain appearance. For example, someone named Mark somehow looks like a “Mark” but not like a “James.”

Then the researchers showed the children and adults a series of children’s faces and asked them to match these faces to the correct names. This time, the participants didn’t match the faces to the names accurately. The researchers also put images of human faces into a computer. Like the people in the study, the computer matched the adult faces to their names but could not match the children’s faces to their names. This suggests people don’t look like their names until they’re older.

Researchers concluded that people aren’t given a certain name based on how they look. Instead, a person’s appearance changes over time to match the stereotype of how someone with their name would look.

Electricity is important in every city, but it may be especially crucial in a place like New Orleans, Louisiana. Located on the southeastern coast of the United States, New Orleans gets extremely hot and humid in the summer and early fall. When the electricity shuts off, so does the air conditioning—and that can be dangerous. That’s why an organization called Together Louisiana is setting up “community lighthouses,” places where New Orleans residents can go to cool off and recharge during power outages.

So far, Together Louisiana has opened a handful of community lighthouses at medical centers, community centers, and churches. A total of 86 lighthouses will have solar panels that will collect the Sun’s energy when the skies are clear. Some solar energy will be used all year, and some will be stored in batteries that can provide power when the city’s main power grid isn’t working.

Archaeologists have discovered five musket balls that, amazingly, were used in one of the battles that opened the American Revolution.

The musket balls were discovered at Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord, Massachusetts. They were located near the site of the Old North Bridge, where a famous American Revolution battle took place on April 19, 1775—one of the two that are collectively called the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The fighting began on April 18 at Lexington, Massachusetts, where British soldiers attempting to crush the rebellion faced off against minutemen (members of the American militia), killing eight Americans and wounding 10. The British then went on to Concord, intending to destroy military supplies the Americans had stored there. But the American militia had been tipped off, giving them enough time to hide most of the supplies and prepare to fight back. The two sides met at the Old North Bridge, where a battle broke out that is now considered to be the start of the American Revolution. The newly discovered musket balls are from that battle.

What’s the first word you’d use to describe a snake? If you’re someone who isn’t a fan of the slithery reptiles, scientists hope you’ll reconsider. A group of scientists at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) put a webcam outside a rattlesnake den to learn more about these animals and to convince the public that snakes aren’t the villains many people think they are.

Located in the safety of a rocky hillside in Colorado, the den is home to as many as 2,000 rattlesnakes at certain times of the year. Snakes use dens to protect themselves from cold weather and from predators. During the summer, only pregnant females live in the den. (Unlike most snakes, rattlesnakes give birth to live young rather than laying eggs.) After the young, called pups, are born, they’ll stay with their mothers until the males return to the den in September.

Scientists say the webcam, which they call RattleCam, allows them to observe and learn about rattlesnakes without disturbing their natural habitat. It also gives the public an opportunity to learn—and maybe come to like rattlesnakes, if they didn’t already. The RattleCam website even has a place where viewers can comment and tell scientists what they saw while watching. It could be something the scientists didn’t catch. 

“It truly is a group effort, a community science effort, that we couldn’t do on our own as scientists,” Cal Poly biology professor Emily Taylor, who is leading the project, told the Guardian.

Experts say rattlesnakes are most active in the morning and the early evening. That’s when webcam viewers are most likely to see the snakes drinking rainwater that’s pooled around them or defending themselves from hawks and other predators.

One thing that may surprise viewers is that rattlesnakes are kind of warm and cuddly—to their offspring, at least. They’ll use their bodies to shield their pups from predators. Sometimes they’ll take care of each other’s young.

“Rattlesnakes are actually really good mothers. People don’t know that,” Taylor said.

The webcam will remain active until the winter, when the snakes will be hibernating. It will go back up in the spring of 2025.

Each year, 101 million tons (92 million metric tons) of textiles (fabric) are thrown away, and less than 1 percent of clothing is recycled. That’s partly because it’s not that easy to recycle textiles. But scientists have developed a process that could help keep textiles out of landfills.

Many textiles are made from a mixture of natural materials, like cotton, and materials made with plastic, like nylon and polyester. These materials need to be separated before they can be recycled, just as you might separate paper, glass, and plastic into separate recycling bins. But how can they be separated?

Scientists have experimented with a solvent that, with the help of microwave energy, separates and breaks down the different materials. What’s left could be used to make new fabrics, as well as electronics or tires. Similar processes have been used to break down plastic bottles.

The world’s best athletes will gather in Paris, France, this year to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics. Opening on July 26, the Olympics will include everything from gymnastics to basketball to breakdancing.

More than 10,000 athletes are scheduled to compete during the two-week event. We’re highlighting a few who experts say have a good chance at striking gold.

Humans call each other by name, but do other animals do this? A group of researchers say elephants seem to.

The researchers listened to recordings of a low, rumbling sound that elephants make as part of their communication with one another. The elephants in the recordings were living in Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya. For each recording, the researchers knew which elephant was making the sound and which elephant it was addressed to. 

With the help of machine learning, the researchers worked out whether the rumbles contained distinctive sound information, the way humans often use people’s names when speaking to them. Not every recording did, but humans don’t always address one another by name either. Then scientists tried to determine how often each distinctive sound matched with the elephant that was being addressed. The machine learning showed that the sounds matched the elephants being addressed more than 27 percent of the time, much more often than when the scientists looked at random sounds. 

“There must be something in the calls that’s allowing the [technology] to figure out at least some of the time who that call was addressed to,” Mickey Pardo, a biologist at Cornell University and an author of the study, told National Public Radio (NPR). Researchers also noted that the “names” were often used by adult elephants to address young elephants.

The researchers then worked with some of the elephants they believed were being addressed in the recordings. They played some of the recordings for the elephants to see if they recognized their own “names.” The elephants didn’t seem all that enthusiastic when they heard sounds that weren’t addressed to them. Their reaction was stronger when they heard their own names.

“The elephants responded much more strongly on average to playbacks of calls that were originally addressed to them relative to playbacks of calls from the same caller that were originally addressed to someone else,” Pardo told NPR.