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3D map of Easter Island takes you places visitors aren’t allowed
Nestled in the South Pacific Ocean, some 6,000 people live on the most isolated, inhabited island in the world: Rapa Nui. Known to many as Easter Island, a name Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen coined after landing on the island on Easter Sunday 1722, Rapa Nui is roughly double the size of Disney World, or 63.2 square miles. And every year, some 100,000 people visit the remote island to see the famed 13-foot-tall moai statues or Easter Island heads.
As you might expect, visiting the remote island isn’t easy. To combat overtourism to the small island, only a limited number of flights travel to Rapa Nui each week. That means flights can book up quickly, especially during the busy season between December and March. But now, thanks to the work of an intrepid team of geographers and researchers, you can view the impressive moai statues from the comfort of home.
The team, which included faculty from Binghamton University and the State University of New York, just launched the first-ever high-resolution 3D model of Rano Raraku, one of the major quarries on Rapa Nui. The model includes nearly 1,000 carefully rendered moai statues. It also lets viewers explore the Rano Raraku quarry, which is located in a steep volcanic crater that visitors to the island can’t explore due to safety concerns.
“You can see things that you couldn’t actually see on the ground. You can see tops and sides and all kinds of areas that [you] just would never be able to walk to,” said team member and Binghamton University anthropologist Carl Lipo in a statement. Lipo is also the lead author of a new paper on the model and statues published in PLOS One in November 2025.
Three-dimensional model of Rano Raraku quarry produced through Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry. This comprehensive digital documentation, derived from 11,686 UAV images, reveals the complex spatial organization of production activities distributed across multiple workshops. areas. Image: Carl LipoIn addition to providing researchers with a detailed 3D replica of Rano Raraku quarry, Lipo also hopes the model will help more people experience the island.
“We’re documenting something that really has needed to be documented, but in a way that’s really comprehensive and shareable.” So go get busy exploring Rano Raraku! As Lipo said, “the quarry is like the archeological Disneyland.” But one you can now visit from the comforts of home.
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Plastic-free soy sauce container biodegrades in 4 weeks
Chances are sushi aficionados have left a restaurant take-out in tow and with a handful of adorable, but environmentally problematic, fish-shaped soy sauce packets. These single-use plastic “shoyu-tai” drip bottles are as iconic as they are convenient, but their small size and disposability mean they often end up sliding down sinks and into drains. Eventually, these plastic faux fish make their way to landfills or, worse, the ocean. Once in the big blue, they slowly break down into microplastics that are then eaten by real fish. Ironically, those microplastic-filled fish may one day end up nestled between rice at a sushi bar.
One Australian state has already passed legislation banning the plastic fish-shaped soy sauce packets, and others are reportedly considering following suit. But designers at Heliograf and Australian design studio Vert Design may have found a way to keep the fish packet alive—albeit in a more sustainable form. Their newly designed fish is called Holy Carp! and is made entirely from biodegradable plant fibers. Allegedly, these fibers will completely break down in just four to six weeks, leaving no microplastics behind. The new product is also noticeably heftier than a typical plastic fish, with a liquid capacity of 12 milliliters—a deliberate choice informed by research showing that diners often use more than one packet per meal.
“The soy fish are cute and convenient, but while they serve their purpose for just a few minutes, they can persist in the environment for hundreds of years,” Heliograf writes in a blog post. The company estimates somewhere between eight to 12 billion plastic fish soy sauce packets may have been discarded since the product’s introduction in the 1950s.
“They’ve become a symbol of a wasteful, linear economy that’s harming both people and the planet,” Heliograf adds.
A traditional plastic fish-shaped soy sauce container (left) with the new biodegradable option (right). Image: Heliograf. A bigger, fresher, fishHeliograf and Vert Design say they gathered feedback from restaurants to arrive at a design that preserves some of the original fish’s emotional nostalgia, while prioritizing sustainability. The new container is made primarily from bagasse pulp, a byproduct of sugarcane production that has already been proven effective in other biodegradable packaging. When diners squeeze the fish’s engorged belly, soy sauce trickles out through a small dropper near its head. The team says the container is made entirely without PFAS, synthetic compounds that can take thousands of years to degrade, often called forever chemicals .
However, there are some drawbacks. Since the fish containers needs to break down quickly, it can only hold sauce for a maximum of 48 hours. This means restaurants will have to fill the containers individually themselves. Heliograf and Vert Design optimistically suggest that this could result in fresher sauce for customers. It also means more work for store employees.
The inventors of Holy Carp! aimed to merge the original plastic fish-shaped design with sustainability. Image: Heliograf. Fish containers warrant’ always made of plasticThe plastic fish were reportedly first invented in Japan in 1954 by Teruo Watanabe, the founder of Japanese houseware company Asahi Sogyo.The earliest versions were made of ceramic and glass, but the push for mass production, and the timely advent of inexpensive industrial-grade plastics, led to the creation of the now-iconic polyethylene container. As in so many other cases, the pursuit of scale prompted manufacturers to adopt single-use plastics.
Like water bottles and plastic grocery bags, these plastic fish are particularly problematic because of how long it takes for them to break down. That’s partly why lawmakers in South Australia passed legislation in 2025 officially banning the fish-shaped containers. Defending the law, government officials noted that the packets were especially troublesome because their petite size caused them to be captured, or missed entirely, by recycling sorting machines.
The new containers are made without dangerous forever chemicals. Image: Heliograf.Relying too broadly on recycling to reduce plastic waste has proven to be a losing bet. Even as recycling has become more common, the vast majority of single-use plastics are not recycled. A 2023 United Nations report found that nearly half (46 percent) of all plastic waste ends up in landfills, while another 22 percent is mismanaged and becomes litter.
Holy Carp! provides an elegant, though admittedly imperfect solution to the problem. The reality is, plastics are popular for a reason and sustainable alternatives will almost always struggle to match their convenience and functionality. But it’s been that and the more microplastic in the ocean, the real fish would certainly prefer the former.
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800 ancient Roman blade sharpeners found in Britain
At the height of its power, the Roman Empire extended as far away as Britain. Rome didn’t view the region as remote or unimportant to its audacious goals, however. Based on a new trove of archaeological artifacts discovered in northeast England, Britain hosted critical sites that supplied the empire’s vast military complex.
Over six months in 2025, researchers from the United Kingdom’s Durham University excavated the new evidence on the banks of the River Wear not far from Newcastle, England. There, experts located over 800 whetstones—traditional tools used to hone blades and weaponry—the largest deposit of its kind in northwest Europe. Archaeologists then utilized Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) to date the items. OSL is particularly helpful for dating quartz and other minerals that amass miniscule amounts of energy from sunlight.
After focusing heat or light on the material in a controlled environment, scientists can determine how long an item has remained buried in sediment. While the soil below the whetstones dated to 42–184 CE, samples taken from the tools trace back to 104–238 CE, when Romans occupied the island.
Additional nearby clues support the theory that the area functioned as a military manufacturing hub. Researchers noted a sandstone formation on the other side of the river—a likely sign Romans selected the location to quarry materials for their whetstones. Apart from the small tools, the team also excavated five stone anchors. These, coupled with another six anchors discovered along a neighboring location in 2022, suggest the waterway hosted vessels that carried sandstone across the river.
Why so many whetstones? The answer likely can be found in their overall condition. All of the artifacts displayed some form of damage, meaning artisans likely tossed them aside because they didn’t meet the Roman army’s required whetstone length requirements. According to Durham University, the military “was particular about the uniformity of its equipment.”
The archaeological discoveries here didn’t only date to ancient Roman occupation. Other finds within the sediment layers included both a stone and wooden jetty, chisels, a Tudor-era leather shoe, and even cannonballs and ammunition from the English Civil Wars of 1642 to 1651.
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Mass death paved the way for the Age of Fishes
About 445 million years ago, our planet completely changed. Massive glaciers formed over the supercontinent Gondwana, sucking up sea water like an icy sponge. Now called the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME), Earth’s first major mass extinction wiped out about 85 percent of all marine species as the ocean chemistry radically changed and Earth’s climate turned bitter cold.
However, with great biological havoc also comes opportunity. During all of this upheaval, one group evolved to dominate all others—jawed vertebrates. This ultimately put life on a forward path that can be traced up to today, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances.
“We have demonstrated that jawed fishes only became dominant because this event happened,” Lauren Sallan, a study co-author and evolutionary biologist at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, said in a statement. “And fundamentally, we have nuanced our understanding of evolution by drawing a line between the fossil record, ecology, and biogeography.”
Earth’s first mass extinctionDuring the Ordovician period (roughly 486 to 443 million years ago) Earth looked very different than it does now. A southern supercontinent called Gondwana, dominated the planet and was surrounded by vast, shallow seas. There was no ice on the North or South Pole and the water was warm due to a greenhouse climate. Small plants and many-legged arthropods began to thrive on the coasts, and the water surrounding them were teeming with lifeforms that looked like something from a science fiction. Large-eyed, lamprey-like conodonts looped around sea sponges. Tiny trilobites scuttled among shelled mollusks. Sea scorpions as big as humans and nautiloids with 16-foot-tall shells scoured the water in search of prey.
In between these creatures were the ancestors of gnathostomes, or jawed vertebrates. Gnathostomes would eventually dominate animal life on Earth.
“While we don’t know the ultimate causes of LOME, we do know that there was a clear before and after the event. The fossil record shows it,” explained Sallan.
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The extinction came in two stages. First, the planet rapidly switched from a warmer greenhouse to a much colder icehouse climate. Most of Gondwana was covered with thick ice, drying out shallow ocean habitats. A few million years later, biodiversity began to recover, but the climate flipped again. The cold-adapted marine life drowned in warm, sulfuric, and oxygen-depleted water as the ice caps melted.
During these waves of mass extinction, most vertebrate survivors were confined to refugia, or isolated biodiversity hotspots separated by large areas of deep ocean. In these zones, surviving jawed vertebrates evidently had an advantage.
In the new study, the team pulled years of paleontological data about the Ordovician and early Silurian paleontology to build a new database of the fossil record during this dramatic period in Earth’s history.
“That helped us reconstruct the ecosystems of the refugia,” added study co-author and Ph.D. student Wahei Hagiwara. “From this, we could quantify the genus-level diversity of the period, showing how LOME led directly to a gradual, but dramatic increase in gnathostome biodiversity. And the trend is clear – the mass extinction pulses led directly to increased speciation after several millions of years.”
Of fish and finchesWith this new database, the team linked the rising jawed vertebrate biodiversity to not only this first mass extinction, but also location. They could trace the movement of species around the world and pinpoint specific refugia that played a role in helping vertebrates diversify.
“For example, in what is now South China, we see the first full-body fossils of jawed fishes that are directly related to modern sharks,” explained Hagiwara. “They were concentrated in these stable refugia for millions of years until they had evolved the ability to cross the open ocean to other ecosystems.”
A Promissum conodont, which range from about 2 to 20 inches (5 to 50 centimeters) in length and named after unusual, cone-like teeth fossils, and which are hypothesized to be the ancestors of modern lampreys and hagfishes. Very few conodont species survived the Late Ordovician Extinction Event. Image: Nobu TamuraMerging the fossil record with biogeography, morphology, and ecology, can help us better understand the course of evolution.
“Did jaws evolve in order to create a new ecological niche, or did our ancestors fill an existing niche first, and then diversify?” asks Sallan. “Our study points to the latter. In being confined to geographically small areas with lots of open slots in the ecosystem left by the dead jawless vertebrates and other animals, gnathostomes could suddenly inhabit a wide range of different niches.”
A similar trend is seen in Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. These birds took advantage of new opportunities to diversify their diet to survive. Over time, their beaks evolved into different shapes to better suit their needs.
The diversity reset cycleWhile jawed fishes were trapped in South China, their jawless relatives continued to evolve in parallel elsewhere. The jawless fish ruled the wider sea for the next 40 million years, diversifying into different types of reef fish. Why jawed fishes—among all other survivors—came to dominate once they spread out from the refugia remains a mystery.
According to the team, instead of wiping Earth’s ecological slate clean, the Late Ordovician mass extinction triggered a reset. Early vertebrate species stepped into the niches left behind by extinct conodonts and arthropods, rebuilding the same ecological structure, just with new animals. This pattern also repeats across the Paleozoic following other extinction events driven by similar environmental conditions. The team calls this a recurring “diversity-reset cycle,” where evolution restores ecosystems by converging on the same designs.
“This work helps explain why jaws evolved, why jawed vertebrates ultimately prevailed, and why modern marine life traces back to these survivors rather than to earlier forms like conodonts and trilobites,” said Sallan. “Revealing these long-term patterns and their underlying processes is one of the exciting aspects of evolutionary biology.”
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Exponential Future Revealed by Elon Musk
Zombie fungus, ‘living stones’ among favorite botany discoveries of 2025
It’s easy to forget how much we still don’t know about our planet’s ecosystems. Every year, researchers identify thousands of plant and fungi species that were previously unknown to science. While it can be tough to highlight the most striking examples, an international team of scientists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) in London, have offered their personal picks for 2025. The selection of spider-infecting zombie parasites, stone-camouflaged plants, and a “fire demon flower” is certainly worth a closer look.
In Brazil, botanists described Purpureocillium atlanticum for the first time. This deadly fungus targets the region’s trapdoor spiders that reside in burrows on the rainforest floor. Once infected, P. atlanticum kills the arachnid after covering almost its entire body in fine threads of white root-like structures called mycelium. The fungus then grows a nearly 0.8 inch fruiting body through the trapdoor burrow entry. This extension eventually releases its own spores into a world of unsuspected spiders.
The entomopathogenic fungus Purpureocillium atlanticum emerges from a spider host in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, its cotton‑white mycelium exposed. Credit: Joao Paulo Machado De AraujoOther year-end selections are much larger than a zombie mushroom. In Peru, researchers described an acanth shrub that reaches upwards of 10-feet-tall. These plants feature fiery red, yellow, and orange flowers that reminded scientists of Calcifer, the fire demon in acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 classic, Howl’s Moving Castle. With that in mind, Aphelandra calciferi is an ode to the character—one with “great potential as a conservatory ornamental plant,” according to Kew.
A detailed view of the fiery flowers of Aphelandra calciferi, a newly described Peruvian shrub species. Credit: Rodolfo VasquezNot all species are recognizably plants or fungus, however. Namibia’s woodland savannahs feature a newly described subspecies of lithop (Lithops gracilidelineata subsp. mopane) also known as a “living stone.” The moniker is well-earned, too. Each succulent looks more like a tiny pebble than a plant, and grows a single pair of leaves that collect sunlight through filter-like screens. Unlike other lithops, the mopane is more grayish-white in coloration than other relatives with more brown-pink or cream hues.
Continuing to scour the world for unknown species is a critical role for today’s botanists, according to Martin Cheek, RBG Kew’s senior research leader for African species.
“It is difficult to protect what we do not know, understand and have a scientific name for,” Cheek said in a statement. “Each identification of a new species to science helps us better understand ecosystems. Without this foundational knowledge, species conservation efforts fail.”
RBG Kew estimates botanists add around 2,500 plants and even more fungi to taxonomic registers every year. Experts believe as many as 100,000 plant species and up to 3 million fungi remain undescribed. It’s a race against time to classify and conserve them—in a 2023 report, RBG Kew calculated as many as 75 percent of all undescribed plants face extinction threats.
“Wherever we look, human activities are eroding nature to the point of extinction, and we simply cannot keep up with the pace of destruction,” said Cheek. “If we fail to invest in taxonomy, conservation and public awareness of the issues now, we risk dismantling the very systems that sustain our life on Earth.”
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Science sleuths think they found Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA
Scientists are one step closer to pinpointing fragments of Leonardo da Vinci’s elusive DNA.
A team of researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project analyzed samples swabbed from a red chalk drawing possibly attributed to the famed polymath, as well as letters written by one of his known cousins. Buried within that jumble of genetic material were human Y-chromosome sequences that belong to the same genetic grouping, sharing a common ancestry in Tuscany, the region where da Vinci was born. Specifically, they belong to the broad E1b1b lineage on the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son.
The findings, presented this week in a preprint paper on the BioRxiv server, suggest that the DNA on the painting may belong to the storied Italian Renaissance man. If so, it would mark the first time scientists have identified his DNA.
Though the researchers caution that they can’t link the DNA to da Vinci with absolute certainty, the investigative process they describe shows how recent advances in modern genetics could reshape the way the art world thinks about authenticating works. A process currently accomplished by painstakingly poring over brushstrokes and making educated guesses could become more precise by looking for biological signatures like fingerprints left behind by an artist. On a more personal level, the findings mean researchers involved in this work are a step closer to finally identifying da Vinci’s DNA—a journey that began nearly a decade ago.
“Together, these data demonstrate the feasibility as well as limitations of combining metagenomics and human DNA marker analysis for cultural heritage science, providing a baseline workflow for future conservation science studies and hypothesis-driven investigations of provenance, authentication and handling history,” the team writes in their paper.
This table depicts “Holy Child,” a letter from da Vinci’s descendants, and two other non-da Vinci art pieces from a similar period that were all swabbed for genetic material. Image: Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project at the J. Craig Venter InstitutePaper lead author and University of Maryland and microbiologist Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe, who has worked with the da Vinci DNA project for years, tells Popular Science that he initially started looking for the presence of microbes in art pieces and cultural artifacts for conservation purposes. Successful findings there led him and his colleagues to hypothesize that human biological signatures might also be embedded in those artifacts.
“Thus, we aimed to present a platform that could be used to study the multi-kingdom DNA present,” Gonzalez-Juarbe says.
Da Vinci’s lost DNADespite being one of the most widely known figures of the European Renaissance, da Vinci’s genetic history is shrouded in mystery. Researchers in Italy claim to have identified 14 living descendants of his direct relatives, but as far as historians can tell, da Vinci didn’t father any children of his own. Analyzing his own remains also isn’t possible because the church he was buried in fell into ruin following the French Revolution. Researchers have also thus far been denied access to his presumed tomb at The Château d’Amboise in Amboise, France.
The supposed tomb of Leonardo da Vinci in Saint-Hubert Chapel in Amboise, France. Image: Claudev8 CC by 3.0.That left science sleuths to search for trace signs of genetic material the painter may have left on his works. In this case, researchers turned to the chalk drawing titled “Holy Child,” which had been in the private collection of the late art dealer Fred Kline for the past 20 years. Gonzalez-Juarbe says he and his colleagues reached out to Kline about studying drawing before he died.
After some initial testing to determine the right extraction protocols, Gonzalez-Juarbe gently swabbed the drawing’s surface in April 2024 using a “minimally invasive” technique meant to collect biological signatures without damaging the work. That small swab, similar to the type so many people stick their nostrils for a COVID-19 test, collected hints of half millennia worth of history
Sorting through genomic historySince paper is porous, it absorbs even faint traces of sweat and skin, both of which can carry whispers of DNA. But paper doesn’t discriminate among DNA sources. That’s why researchers can’t simply look for signs of da Vinci’s genetic material on the “Mona Lisa” or “The Last Supper.” In both cases, countless human hands have made contact with these works over the past 500 years, leaving behind a jumble of genetic signatures.
One of those human hands belonged to Kline. Luckily his wife remembered that he had previously sent a vial of his saliva to the personal genetics company 23andMe. Gonzalez-Juarbe and his colleagues were able to obtain that DNA sequence and effectively eliminate it from the list of possibilities. But that was just a drop in the genetic ocean. In reality, the vast majority of the DNA recovered from “Holy Child” wasn’t of human origin at all: around 99 percent came from bacteria, fungi, and plants.
Some of that nonhuman DNA proved useful. The researchers discovered that one of the sequences belonged to sweet orange trees (Citrus sinensis), which were known to be cultivated in Medici gardens in central Italy during da Vinci’s era. That clue told the geneticists that they were on the right track. The team also found signs of Plasmodium DNA. The single-celled parasite was endemic to the same region of Italy and was responsible for the death of several Medici family members. DNA fragments from plants and animals known to have been used in art shops at the time were also found.
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“There were non-human sequences that mapped to animals, plants and other microbes that match the type of environment of Tuscany at the time of Leonardo,” Gonzalez-Juarbe says. “For example, the presence of plants such as sweet oranges, known to be a symbol of power to the Medici family and present in their palaces and gardens.”
However, to narrow down the remaining human DNA, they needed a point of comparison. That’s where his relatives’ correspondence came into play.
Since researchers knew the corresponding letters had shifted hands between several da Vinci descendants (and was sealed shut with a thumb), they could have confidence that the Y chromosome segments were in his lineages. Y chromosomes are passed down from father to son and remain essentially unchanged through many generations.
da Vinci’s anatomical study of the arm (c. 1510). Image: Public Domain.
In this case, the Y chromosome samples in both the drawing and the letters were traced back to a haplogroup labeled E1b1b, which is traced back to Tuscany. This suggests the DNA sequence found in the drawing and in the letters are from the same family lines.
“The [human] samples had composite profiles that show more than one person handled the piece and having more than one artifact from two different locations showing a similar Y chromosome marker was the interesting observation,” Gonzalez-Juarbe says. “However, this needs to be further validated by additional sampling. We cannot confirm at this stage that the result is the lineage of Leonardo just yet.”
So we might have Leonardo’s DNA. Now what?It is worth noting that all of this is only possible thanks to rapid advances in modern genetics, which allow scientists to read tiny DNA fragments and determine their source. This simply wasn’t feasible until the late 20th century.
Shotgun genome sequencing, the technique used in this study, lets scientists sequence all the genetic material in a sample at once, rather than targeting one gene at a time. Over the past several decades, researchers have also compiled vast genomic databases, enabling them to quickly cross-reference their results.
Presumed self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1510). Royal Library of Oxfordshire. Image: Public Domain.
Sequencing da Vinci’s genome could open up numerous possibilities. Most obviously it could shed light on physical features like the inventor’s eye and hair color, as well as height. But could also poetically help answer one theory surrounding his abilities. Some art historians believe da Vinci may have had an innate ability to “see” more frames per second than the average person. If that’s true, analyzing his genome could provide insight into whether there’s a genetic trait linked to that ability.
And the possibilities don’t stop with da Vinci alone. If geneticists can sequence his genome, researchers could theoretically look for that same biological signature in other works of questionable origin to see if they were truly touched by his hands. There’s no reason the same principle couldn’t be applied to other artists as well. That ability to authenticate artworks could make a real dent in the estimated $4 to 5 billion in art fraud reported each year.
Moving forward, Gonzalez-Juarbe says he’s hopeful this report will increase their odds of getting access to analyzing additional da Vinci drawings and letters. The end goal of all of that, he says, is to piece together a fuller picture of individuals who left an outsized mark on history.
”We would like to learn more about his story, about his lineage and about him as a visionary,” Gonzalez-Juarbe adds.
The post Science sleuths think they found Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA appeared first on Popular Science.
Its Your Job To Keep Your Secrets
In the last month, many who want to kill Polymarket have agreed on a common strategy: claim that Polymarket allows illegal “insider trading”. I’ve received roughly a dozen media inquiries about this in the last few weeks. E.g., some articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
This is the strategy: In 2011, the US CFTC issued Rule 180.1 prohibiting any commodity market trades accompanied by “deceptive” talk. Since then the CFTC has interpreted this rule as prohibiting trades based on info obtained via a breach of a duty of trust or confidentiality. Some recent profitable Polymarket trades have been accused (without evidence) of being based on such “inside info”. But Polymarket is a crypto system, where they cannot usually know who are their traders. QED: Polymarket must be shut down.
I see much misleading talk in my world, so a rule against deceptive talk relevant to trades seems to me to not actually be enforced much. And also quite hard to fairly enforce, and in any case not clearly needed. The US Supreme Court has struck down laws against lying on free speech grounds, unless such lies produce “material gain”. I’m not convinced we should distinguish material vs non-material gains re lies.
In any case, trading on info that you promised to keep secret does not remotely “deceive” markets re your or their trades. Furthermore, I don’t think it makes sense to generally assign to all our social institutions the task of preventing anyone from revealing secrets that they instead promised to keep. If you come to my store to buy a dress for your wife, and reveal to me her dress size, I don’t think it should be my job to check that it was okay with your wife for you to tell me her dress size. The two of you should be in charge of figuring out how to enforce your info promises to each other.
As a closer analogy, both journalism and speculative markets are info institutions, which reach out to collect info from the world, aggregate that info into useful summaries, and then spread those summaries into the world so that people can act on them. Both are private for-profit institutions, depending on voluntary participation.
We should treat all such info institutions the same re any duty to ensure that the info they collect doesn’t break secrecy promises. Are you willing to require that journalists either don’t talk to anyone who might know a promised secret (e.g., any govt officials), or keep records of who they talked to on what, available to law enforcement to check on suspicions that a news article revealed a secret? If not, we shouldn’t requite analogous rules of speculative markets either.
Yes, it can sometimes be hard for people and orgs to keep secrets. People who promise to keep secrets might instead tell them to others. But assigning to everyone the task of making sure that no one reveals promised secret seems way too hard, and also doesn’t give good incentives re how many secrets are worth keeping. Instead let people and orgs figure out how to use their voluntary powers to keep their secrets, via contract, reputation, relationships, or something else. When someone tells you something, it shouldn’t be your job to check if they are thereby revealing a secret.
BOOM! That time Oregon blew up a whale with dynamite.
When a whale dies in the ocean, an ecosystem grows around its sunken carcass. It’s an epic burial at sea, something researchers call a whale fall. The body is a literal smorgasbord on which deep sea creatures and bacteria feast for years at a time before what’s left transforms into a reef festooned with anemones and sponges.
A whale that dies stranded on land is something different, a stinking mass of rotting flesh and draining fluids. While scavenging birds might struggle to bust through the corpse’s leathery skin, insects go to town. Little by little, they break the body down as its nutrients ooze into the sand and nearby vegetation.
It takes about two years for everything but the whale’s skeleton to disappear. But with the unholy stench of a dead, 45-foot-long sperm whale turning stomachs across town after beaching on November 9, 1970, officials in Florence, Oregon couldn’t wait that long. They needed the eight ton carcass gone as soon as possible.
The State Highway Division, which managed Oregon’s coastline in those days, treated the problem as if it were a giant boulder blocking a lane of traffic. They blew it up with dynamite, igniting “a blubber snowstorm,” as one observer described it. A geyser of blood and muscle shot a hundred feet into the air, falling on spectators stationed a quarter mile away. The reek reportedly lingered on their skin and in their hair for days.
The explosionRidding a beach of such a colossal problem with dynamite wouldn’t have seemed so unusual in the mid-20th century. There are many “wonderful new uses for dynamite,” a Popular Science article explained back in 1927—and not just on land, but at sea, where shark-leather operations used it to kill a dozen of the predators at once. The sad shark carcasses would bubble up to the surface for easy collection. Even whalers were, at the time, embedding small explosives in the tips of their “killing lances.”
This whaling station in northwestern Norway captured about 180 whales a year before closing in 1920. The whale carcasses were used to produce cooking oil and fat. Image: Public Domain.jpg){kind=link}
The method did sort of work, says James Heiss, associate professor of environmental, Earth, and atmospheric sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, just “not in the way anyone hoped.”
On a Monday, shifting tides pushed the bloated whale carcass into the mouth of the Siuslaw River and onto the sand dunes on the southwestern side of Florence, a small town on Oregon’s central coast.
By Thursday morning, as workmen spent nearly two hours excavating holes under the body to fit 20 50-pound cases of explosives, its fetid reek had become almost unbearable—though that hadn’t stopped a local opportunist from sawing off the whale’s lower jaw for a souvenir sometime over the preceding days.
Assistant district highway engineer George Thornton’s plan was to strategically place the explosives to blast the whale’s chunks into the river where they’d be gently carried back to the ocean by the tide. Instead, the dynamite’s enormous eruption flung the rotting beast every which way, a three-foot long piece caving in the roof of a car in the beach’s parking lot.
When the foul rain stopped falling, all that was left at the site of the explosion was a large hole and the whale’s severed tail. “It went exactly right,” Thornton told the press, apparently oblivious to the sheen of blood and bits now covering the beach and everyone on it.
The stench was reportedly only slightly less offensive than it had been in the first place. A bulldozer moved in to bury the largest hunks left by the dynamite. Seagulls, Thornton expected, would take care of most of whatever was left.
In 1970, officials exploded a 45-foot-long sperm whale carcass that had washed up along the Oregon Coast in the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. Image: Dougtone / CC BY-SA 2.0 Ditching the dynamite
Today, “leaving a [beached] whale in place is the cheapest, easiest, and safest option,” says Heiss. “It also returns nutrients to the food web by serving as a food source for birds, crustaceans, and microbial decomposers.”
Remote beaches are fewer and farther between than they were 55 years ago. Meanwhile, an increase in whale strandings due to malnutrition, boat collisions, and entanglement in fishing gear sometimes makes it impossible just to leave the carcass be. In those cases, Heiss explains, the standard practice isn’t blowing it up but “bury[ing] it in the beach above the high tide line.”
There’s some controversy to the approach, including concerns over whether decomposing whales attract sharks and whether chemicals leaching from the body negatively impact water quality. While the answer to the shark question remains uncertain, the results of a study published by Heiss in 2020—a first step towards building a more comprehensive model—did show that buried whales leach chemicals that “are transported seaward in the beach by flowing groundwater and discharged to the ocean near the low tide line.” One compound he examined turned out to be 26 times higher in surf zones with a buried whale than without one—though the concentration could be decreased by interring the body closer to the water line where there’s “less opportunity for chemical reactions to occur.”
Still, on beaches near human communities, the choice between dynamiting a dead whale into a million stinking pieces or burying those stinking pieces intact, under the sand, is no contest. Florence, Oregon, at least, has a sense of humor about the incident. In 2019, they renamed the notorious stretch of sand Exploding Whale Memorial Park in the whale’s honor.
In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.
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Why is this infamous iceberg turning blue?
Iceberg A-23A is looking a little blue these days. In late December 2025, NASA and NOAA’s Terra satellite spotted the massive iceberg covered with blue meltwater. A-23A is one of the largest and longest-lived bergs ever tracked by scientists, but is at risk of completely disintegrating as it drifts through warm Southern Atlantic waters.
The satellite image of iceberg A-23A taken on December 26, 2025. Image: NASA.In 1986, the flat-topped iceberg broke away from Antarctica’s Filchner Ice Shelf. Back then, it was over 15,000 square miles—almost twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. Today, the United States National Ice Center estimates the iceberg’s area is around 456 square miles. While that is much smaller than its original size, it still makes it bigger than New York City. In July, August, and September of 2025 iceberg A-23A saw some sizable breakups as it moved into the Southern Hemisphere’s relatively warm summer conditions by December.
The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on the Terra satellite captured this image of what remained on December 26, 2025. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) then captured a photograph showing a closer view of the iceberg one day later, with an even bigger melt pool.
A satellite image of the iceberg taken on December 27, 2025. Image: NASA.The extensive pools of “blue mush” on the iceberg’s surface are likely the result of ongoing disintegration events.
“You have the weight of the water sitting inside cracks in the ice and forcing them open,” he said. “Note also the thin white line around the outer edge of the iceberg seemingly holding in blue meltwater—a ‘rampart-moat’ pattern caused by an upward bending of the iceberg plate as its edges melt at the waterline,” University of Colorado Boulder senior research scientist Ted Scambos explained in a statement.
The blue and white striped patterns are likely due to striations that were put into the ice hundreds of years ago, when the ice was dragged across Antarctic bedrock.
“It’s impressive that these striations still show up after so much time has passed, massive amounts of snow have fallen, and a great deal of melting has occurred from below,” added retired University of Maryland Baltimore County scientist Chris Shuman.
The ailing iceberg may have also sprung a leak. The white area to its left could be the result of what Shuman described as a “blowout.” This occurs when the weight of the water pooling at the top of the iceberg creates enough pressure at the edges to punch through.
These signs indicate that the iceberg could be just days or weeks from disintegrating completely.
“I certainly don’t expect A-23A to last through the austral summer,” said Shuman.
The clearer skies and warmer air and water temperatures during summer in the Southern Hemisphere accelerate the disintegration process in an area known among ice experts as a “graveyard” for icebergs. Climate change is only speeding up this process, as air and water temperatures continue to smash records.
Even as A-23A fades, more enormous icebergs are parked or drifting along the Antarctic shoreline. A-81, B22A, and D15A, are each larger than 500 square miles and could also begin their journey north.
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Super smart dogs learn by eavesdropping
Just like with toddlers, it’s often better to spell out certain words when a dog is nearby. Saying words “park” or “walk” can make the family pet excited the way that the mere mention of a “cookie” will for a young child. By the age of one-and-a-half, toddlers learn new words by listening to other people. And, it turns out, some dogs can also learn by eavesdropping. According to a small study published today in the journal Science, Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs can learn the names for various objects by listening to their owners’ interactions,
Learning wordsGWL is a fairly new distinction by scientists for dogs that are considered uniquely gifted for their ability to learn the names of various objects. Previous studies have found that these smart canines can categorize objects by function and understand how similar types of toys work, even if the toys don’t look alike. Being a GWL dog is not unique to any particular breed, but border collies and border collie mixes retained a decent amount of words in a 2023 study.
Toddlers learn new words in many ways, including passively listening to interactions between adults. To do this, they must follow the speakers’ gaze and attention, spot communicative cues, and pick out the target words from a continuous stream of speech. Until now, it was not known if GWL dogs could also learn new object labels when not directly addressed.
Addressing vs. eavesdroppingTo learn more, a team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary’s Genius Dog Challenge research project tested 10 gifted dogs in two situations.
The first situation was called an addressed condition, where owners introduced two new toys and repeatedly labeled them while interacting directly with the dog.
The second was an overheard condition, where the dogs sat nearby as their owners spoke with another person about the toys and did not address the dogs.
During each condition, the dogs heard the name of the new toys for a total of eight minutes over several short exposure sessions. To see if the dogs had learned the new labels, the toys were then placed in a different room. The owners asked the dogs to retrieve each toy by name. For example, an owner would ask a dog “Can you bring Teddy?” and the dog’s actions were recorded.
In both conditions, seven out of the 10 dogs learned the new labels. The dog’s performance was also very accurate. During the addressed condition, the choices were correct 80 percent of the time. During the overhearing condition (when the dogs were not directly addressed) they were correct 100 percent of the time. Overall, the GWL dogs performed just as well when learning from speech they overheard as when they were directly taught.
“Our findings show that the socio-cognitive processes enabling word learning from overheard speech are not uniquely human,” Dr. Shany Dror, a study co-author and cognitive researcher and animal trainer, said in a statement. “Under the right conditions, some dogs present behaviors strikingly similar to those of young children.”
Matters of timeDuring a second experiment, the team also found that GWL dogs can overcome one of the key challenges in learning labels. In the experiment called a discontinuity condition, dog owners first showed the dogs the toys and then put the objects inside of a bucket. They only named the toys when they were out of the dogs’ sight. For the dogs, this created a time delay between actually seeing the object and then hearing its name. Despite this, most of the dogs successfully learned the new labels.
“These findings suggest that GWL dogs can flexibly use a variety of different mechanisms to learn new object labels,” added study co-author and ethnologist Dr. Claudia Fugazza.
According to the team, these findings suggest a dog’s ability to learn from overheard speech may rely on brain mechanisms shared across species, instead of being tied to human language. However, since GWL dogs are extremely rare, their abilities likely reflect a combination of nature and nurture.
“These dogs provide an exceptional model for exploring some of the cognitive abilities that enabled humans to develop language,” Dror concluded. “But we do not suggest that all dogs learn in this way—far from it.”
If you suspect that your dog knows multiple toy names and could be a GWL dog, researchers from the Genius Dog Challenge research project encourage dog owners to contact them by email (geniusdogchallenge.offcial@gmail.com), Facebook, or Instagram.
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