Screenshots taken by Taysir Batniji between April 24, 2015, and June 23, 2017, during WhatsApp video calls with his family in Gaza. From Batniji’s book Disruptions, which was published by Loose Joints © The artist. Courtesy Loose Joints
Scientists used light-activated synthetic droplets to move genes to different sections of chromosomes, animated a circuit in the brains of mice that caused them to seek shelter where none was available, and allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a four-wheel vehicle and a soft five-limbed robot. Veterinarians treating a bearded dragon whose aneurysm had led to an enlarged temporo-orbital artery discovered that a reptile’s pulse can be taken at the back of its head. Sea robins can taste with their legs. Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills. Eiffinger’s tree frog tadpoles preserve the cleanliness of their water supply by refraining from defecation until adulthood. Captive greylag goose couples who exhibit similar levels of boldness have more successful fledglings. A classical psychedelic reduces rodents’ anxiety by activating their ventral hippocampi. High rein tension causes mouth injuries in horses. Scientists determined why some aging gray horses turn white faster than others.
A global 10.88-millihertz monochromatic very-long-period seismic signal in September 2023 was found to have been caused by the melting of a glacier, which led to the collapse of a mountain into a remote Greenlandic fjord, which resulted in a 650-foot-high tsunami that stabilized into a wave that traveled back and forth in the ten-kilometer-long channel every ninety-two seconds for nine days. Ocean waves can grow even steeper after they break. Electricity generated by earthquakes may be what accounts for the formation of gold nuggets in veins of quartz. Microsoft committed to powering data centers with electricity from the resuscitated Three Mile Island reactor. The United Kingdom’s last coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, was shut down. Hundreds of trillions of dollars of carbon-intensive assets may be stranded by the transition to renewable energy. Scientists re-created Mars’s araneiform surface on Earth, which gained and then lost a second moon in the autumn.
An additional 303 Nazca Lines were discovered. The preponderance of female skeletons at the necropolis of Panoría suggests a culture of male exogamy, the sled dogs of northeastern Eurasia were found to have emerged as early as the end of the Pleistocene, and archaeologists argued that evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Proto-Indo-European language was spread by humans on horseback may have overlooked how humans who ride cows, donkeys, and wild asses exhibit the same hip-socket deformations, as previously observed in twentieth-century nuns. The dragon on a shield from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo may actually be a wolf. London’s Crystal Palace is the first building known to have used standard screw threads. The stranger churches of sixteenth-century London extensively spied on their congregants, noting when women accused other women of being “pocked whores.” Chinese talk-show hosts use less personification and simile in their monologues than do their American counterparts, the Post-Apocalyptic and Doomsday Prepping Beliefs Scale was deemed fit for use in Turkey, and medical professionals in American intensive care units were warned against using such phrases as “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
