Rarely do we get the opportunity to hum a classic David Bowie song while thumbing through the latest science news, but this week we saw the return of spiders on Mars. No, they’re not real arachnids scurrying across the Red Planet’s surface — instead they’re part of a geological feature known as araneiform terrain. These dark, crack-like structures form when carbon dioxide seasonally erupts from the planet’s surface and resemble spiders scurrying across the terrain when viewed from a great height. And now, for the first time they have been recreated on Earth.

But these “spiders” are not the only thing we’ve had to keep an eye on from space: There is the new ‘mini-moon’ taking a short spin around our planet; the discovery that Earth may have once worn a Saturn-like ring; and the prospect of space trash leading us to intelligent aliens. Archaeologists in Egypt recently unearthed the 3,200-year-old remains of a military barracks containing a sword with hieroglyphs depicting the name of Ramesses II. Remains of pottery containing fish bones were also found on the site, alongside multiple cow burials.

The bronze sword was found in a small room in the barracks, near a less-protected area where an enemy could infiltrate. This is an indication that this sword was intended for fighting and not just for show, Ahmed El Kharadly, an archaeologist with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities who led excavations at the site, told Live Science in an email. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you went in there, or been about to speak but suddenly realized you had no idea what you were going to say? The human brain normally balances countless inputs, thoughts and actions, but sometimes, it seems to short-circuit. So what really happens when we forget what we were just thinking about?

A giant mosasaur’s fossilized jaw fragments still hold the animal’s blunt, mushroom-shaped teeth. The two fossil fragments, discovered in Texas, give us an insight into the lifestyle of Globidens alabamaensis, which may have reached lengths of up to 20 feet. The teeth show the brute force mosasaurs brought to bear on their prey.

“These structures … are great for impact attacks — for shell crushing. If something is getting away and you shatter it, that’s kind of it,” Bethany Burke Franklin, a marine paleontologist and educator at Texas Through Time fossil museum in Hillsboro who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.