Photographs from the series Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert, 1996–98, by John Divola, whose work was on view in May as part of the exhibition Hard Copy, at WSA, in New York City. The exhibition was curated by Aaron Stern © The artist
Archaeologists uncovered evidence of repeated human habitation of the Umm Jirsan lava tube, unearthed the missing upper half of the statue of Ramesses II at Hermopolis Magna, and unveiled a porcelain gallbladder belonging to a woman buried at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. A bionic eye deciphered a scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that reveals the burial place of Plato, who was found to have complained about the musical abilities of the enslaved Thracian girl who played the flute for him as he lay dying. During a crisis of the late seventh century, Anglo-Saxon pennies were minted from the melted-down Byzantine silver of elites, whereas during the Carolingian dynasty, pennies were made from Melle silver. The global GDP loss due to childhood verbal abuse was estimated to be $300 billion, and the damage to global GDP caused by climate change was estimated to be six times the cost of the investment needed for mitigation.
Land-use change contributed to a biodiversity decline of up to 11 percent during the twentieth century, though climate change may become its lead driver by the mid-twenty-first century. Climate change is causing various ant species of Colorado’s Gregory Canyon to alter their traditional ranges, the shells of East Coast mussels to grow more porous, herring to arrive earlier in the Wadden Sea, and Australian scientists to urge the breeding of less flatulent cows. The melting of the poles is making Earth’s days longer. The White House directed NASA to create a time zone for the moon, and a deep-learning model accurately diagnosed the moon blindness of horses. The authors of a study titled “Appropriate Incongruity Driven Human-AI Collaborative Tool to Assist Novices in Humorous Content Generation” found that humans are less funny when they lack AI assistance in writing entries for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. A large language model was better than humans at prompting chatbots to produce toxic responses, including from chatbots previously deemed safe.
The hatching season of a male spear squid (Heterololigo bleekeri) determines whether he will pursue bold or sneaky mating tactics. Semen from twenty-one stallions that was extended in a skimmed-milk diluent, processed through SpermFilter® or centrifugation to achieve pellet form, and resuspended in an egg-yolk extender, exhibited superior sperm motility. Sandworms decapitated above the first parapodium and then left to regenerate were found not to be negatively affected by the introduction of virgin PVC nurdles to their seawater solution. In upstate New York, scientists who raised larval wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) on rabbit chow and killed them by introducing table salt to their water found that the larvae of wood frogs whose habitats are contaminated by the salt from nearby parking lots and roads had, over the past quarter century, developed improved resistance to road salt. Spruce-cone seeds mitigate the early-life trauma and lengthen the lives of Yukon red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris), but peanut butter does not. Anosmic mice who, as embryos, had been chimerically injected with pluripotent stem cells extracted from rats were able to locate hidden cookies. Scientists defibrillated genetically modified mouse hearts with pulses of blue light.
