What did the plant say to the other plant?

The year 2023 saw the “enshittification” of platforms from Facebook to Google Search. A new exit strategy means platforms will have to play nicely with your data, even if you leave for a rival.

Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed a cache of treasures—including more than 50 wooden sarcophagi, a funerary temple dedicated to an Old Kingdom queen and a 13-foot-long Book of the Dead scroll—at the Saqqara necropolis, a vast burial ground south of Cairo, according to a statement from the…

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The team also discovered dozens of sarcophagi, wooden masks and ancient board games.

Topological photonics could impact the scalability of integrated photonics, but it has shown limited reconfigurability to date. Here, the authors demonstrate reprogrammable integrated photonics as a nearly universal platform for topological models.

Archaeologists measured the magnetic fields found in clay bricks to determine the construction date of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate.

Kim, SW., Wang, K., Chen, S. et al. On the dynamical stability of copper-doped lead apatite. npj Comput Mater 10, 16 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-024-01206-9

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In defense of scientism.

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The spectra of C₁ molecules are confounding in that each of the fundamental vibrational modes transform as the same irreducible representation (A) and hence each band consists of a seemingly random distribution of a-, b-, and c-type transitions. This is in contrast to higher symmetry molecules for which band types are readily deduced by simple symmetry rules. Herein, we present a method to simulate the convoluted rotational contours in the gas-phase spectra of C₁ molecules by combining existing ab initio calculations with Colin Western’s pgopher rotational contour program. Specifically, ab initio calculations in the NWC hem suite of programs were employed to predict the components of the dipole moment derivatives along the principal axes of the moments of inertia. This information was then input into pgopher to model the fundamental band contours as a sum of a-, b-, and c-type transitions. This method was applied to simulate the rotational contour spectra of a series of representative C₁ molecules which were then compared against both ab initio stick spectra and experimentally measured broadband IR spectra from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory infrared gas-phase database. In addition to providing further insight beyond what is revealed in a typical stick spectrum, the simulated contours showed good agreement with the measured spectra.

It’s pretty hard to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes, especially different animals. But a new study using lab-grown human retinas reveals that even between different humans, our vision is extremely diverse.

And it might be to do with how the red and green cones form in our retinas. Cones are light-sensing cells in vertebrates’ eyes; their combined responses to different wavelengths enable color vision.

Humans and some closely related primates are some of the only mammals known that can see the color red, as well as green and blue.