A complex structure with multiple electrons is within reach of today’s hardware. Last week, IBM trumpeted its contributions to a rather unusual paper: the production of a molecule with a half-Möbius topology, assisted by an algorithm run in part on a quantum computer. There was, to put it mildly,…
Marc Abraham: “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country.” Every year, we have a blast covering a fresh crop of winners of the Ig Nobel prizes. After 35 years in Boston, the annual prize ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland,…
Shang Dynasty oracle bones and modern weather models feature in the same study. Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean may have brought devastating floods to the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, according to a recent study in which its authors link three wildly different lines of evidence to tell…
Falling cats in the study also seemed to show a marked preference for turning to the right. Why do falling cats always seem to land on their feet? Scientists have been arguing about the precise mechanism for a very long time—since at least 1700, in fact—conducting all manner of…
Small size seems to have come before a change in diet for a tiny dinosaur lineage. Alvarezsaurids were mostly small-bodied theropods that paleontologists originally misinterpreted as early flightless birds, only to later recognize them as an ant-eating lineage of non-avian dinosaurs. For years, we suspected that Alvarezsaurids underwent a…
Werner Herzog directed this evocative NatGeo documentary of an ornithologist’s quest to find a new species. Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is…
A unique head spike and fish-eating jaws help make sense of these dinosaurs. The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable of taking down a T. rex in Jurassic Park 3. Then they changed their mind and made it a fully…
The binary asteroid’s orbit around the Sun was affected by the impact. On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into a binary asteroid system. By intentionally ramming a probe into the 160-meter-wide moonlet named Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, humanity demonstrated that…
Burr Oak Cemetery is the final resting place of Emmett Till and blues singer Willie Dixon, among others. Back in 2009, residents were scandalized when employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip were accused of exhuming old graves in order to resell the burial plots,…
A new hypothesis proposes that our ancestors lost their eyes, then rebuilt them. After losing its original eyes, one of our distant ancestors may have done what evolution does best: tinkered with what was available, reshaping a single central visual organ into two new eyes. That’s the idea behind…
