Adam Phillips on resistance.
The Paris of Agnès Varda. Sadly I missed the exhibition. Some of her films have been digitally restored and are back in (art house) cinemas.
Alien planet glimpsed in star’s “habitable zone”.
The Gentleman of Verona. The majesty, serenity, and opulence of Paolo Veronese’s paintings bolstered the myth of Venice’s vibrancy at a time of social, political, and religious decline.
Dry mouth, hot throat, feeling of malaise. The familiar experience of thirst is a motivational state constructed by your brain to induce a behavior: drink water.
Lithium deficiency and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. One of the most talked about papers of the year so far.
Illusions of AI consciousness.
New method reveals perhaps the most massive black hole yet spotted. It’s 5 billion light-years from Earth and 36 billion times as massive as the Sun.
Why chocolate tastes so good: microbes that fine-tune its flavour. Manipulating the microbial communities involved in cocoa bean fermentation could make chocolate even more delicious.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos.
Protests are infectious: mapping rural unrest in Revolutionary France. Researchers have used epidemiological models to determine whether the wave of riots in 1789 known as the Great Fear spread through irrational panic or rational protest.
Review of David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema by Mike Miley.
Ant queens produce sons of two distinct species. The discovery of an unusual reproductive system for one ant species solves a long-standing puzzle about a missing population of another ant species. I had to read the title twice and of course clicked to read the article.
In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules.
Review of the collected essays of David Graeber.
Paris braces for a future of possibly paralyzing heat. The article considers a scenario with temperatures as high as 50 Celsius, but already some museums partially close because of the summer heat.
The life and death of the suburban novel. Why isn’t there a twenty-first-century Cheever?
Damaged bridges flex and twist to prevent collapse. Bridges made from connected steel frameworks can sometimes survive unexpected damage by activating hidden structural responses.
Scientific theories about the origin of the universe often involve a vigorous give-and-take between speculation and discovery.
Gone with the wind: deciphering how dandelions drive seed dispersal. Analysis of seed attachment and the forces needed for detachment reveal how dandelion plants have evolved to spread in the same direction that the wind blows.