Star Trek is hardly beginner-friendly. Five television series, 12 movies, and a nerd following that defines nerd followings present a serious obstacle to the casual moviegoer. J.J. Abram's 2009 reboot of the series was an attempt to make Star Trek more accessible, but it's the second movie of the reboot, Into Darkness, where he succeeded. Here's why (spoiler alert for much of what follows):

Academy Awards continue to elude Johnny Depp, but as of today no one can say he hasn't been immortalized. A 505-million-year-old Cambrian fossil of a creature with scissor-like claws has been named Kooteninchela deppi in honor of Depp's role as Edward Scissorhands in the movie of the same name.

Boston Dynamics' Cheetah robot may be the fastest, but MIT's version of the DARPA-backed quadruped robot is proving to be the most efficient. In a newly released video, MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Lab shows off it's new and improved Cheetah, which can move along at a respectable 13.7 miles per hour and carry its own power source. Outside of the lab on the open savannah, that's a critical capability.

Earth-bound scientists are on track to get their hands on asteroid soil, straight from the source, in 2023. An asteroid-sampling mission, planned for launch in 2016, is moving into development, NASA and the University of Arizona announced yesterday.

A team of high school students have co-authored a scientific journal paper with their University of Arizona grad student instructor that could have a serious impact on the reliability of climate models. Their work details the impact of shrinkage on dried, fossilized leaves - shrinkage that is often unaccounted for in climate models. By better accounting for this change in leaf size, the students found that researchers could significantly improve the accuracy of their climate models.

Andrew Clark

A group of engineers from MIT have created analog calculators out of living cells, according to a paper published online in Nature yesterday. By tweaking the genes of bacterial cells, the researchers were able to create circuits that can perform calculations - including division, multiplication, logarithms and square roots - in a much more efficient way than many existing biocomputers.