In 2019, we told you about a new interactive digital "murder map" of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city coroners' rolls, the map showed the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The Medieval Murder Maps project has since expanded to include maps of York and Oxford homicides, as well as podcast episodes focusing on individual cases.

It's easy to lose oneself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. Think of it as a kind of 14th-century version of Clue: It was the noblewoman's hired assassins armed with daggers in the streets of Cheapside near St. Paul's Cathedral. And that's just the juiciest of the various cases described in a new paper published in the journal Criminal Law Forum.

The noblewoman was Ela Fitzpayne, wife of a knight named Sir Robert Fitzpayne, lord of Stogursey. The victim was a priest and her erstwhile lover, John Forde, who was stabbed to death in the streets of Cheapside on May 3, 1337. “We are looking at a murder commissioned by a leading figure of the English aristocracy," said University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner, who heads the Medieval Murder Maps project. "It is planned and cold-blooded, with a family member and close associates carrying it out, all of which suggests a revenge motive."

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It's been a long wait for diehard fans of Ridley Scott's Alien franchise, but we finally have a fittingly sinister official trailer for the spinoff prequel series, Alien: Earth, coming this summer to FX/Hulu.

As previously reported, the official premise is short and sweet: "When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat."

The series is set in 2120, two years before the events of the first film, Alien (1979), in a world where corporate interests are competing to be the first to unlock the key to human longevity—maybe even immortality. Showrunner Noah Hawley has said that the style and mythology will be closer to that film than Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant, both of which were also prequels.

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Over the years, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have analyzed the ancient parchments with various methods: for example, X-rays, multispectral imaging, "virtual unfolding," and paleography, i.e., studying elements in their writing styles. The scrolls are believed to date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE, but those dates rely largely on paleography, since only a handful of the scrolls have calendar dates written on them.

However, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. A team of scientists has combined radiocarbon dating from 24 scroll samples and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to create their own AI program—dubbed Enoch. The objective was to achieve more accurate date estimates, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Among the findings: Many of the scrolls are older than previously thought.

As reported earlier, these ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946–1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia.

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It's been textbook knowledge for over a century that our Milky Way galaxy is doomed to collide with another large spiral galaxy, Andromeda, in the next 5 billion years and merge into one even bigger galaxy. But a fresh analysis published in the journal Nature Astronomy is casting that longstanding narrative in a more uncertain light. The authors conclude that the likelihood of this collision and merger is closer to the odds of a coin flip, with a roughly 50 percent probability that the two galaxies will avoid such an event during the next 10 billion years.

Both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies (M31) are part of what's known as the Local Group (LG), which also hosts other smaller galaxies (some not yet discovered) as well as dark matter (per the prevailing standard cosmological model). Both already have remnants of past mergers and interactions with other galaxies, according to the authors.

"Predicting future mergers requires knowledge about the present coordinates, velocities, and masses of the systems partaking in the interaction," the authors wrote. That involves not just the gravitational force between them but also dynamical friction. It's the latter that dominates when galaxies are headed toward a merger, since it causes galactic orbits to decay.

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Netflix held its Tudum Global Fan Event in Los Angeles this weekend to showcase its upcoming slate of programming. Among the highlights: the official trailer for the third and final season of Squid Game, the first six minutes of Wednesday S2, a teaser for Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, and date announcements for the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, as well as Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

(Some spoilers below.)

Squid Game S3

As previously reported, Squid Game's first season followed Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), a down-on-his-luck gambler who has little left to lose when he agrees to play children's playground games against 455 other players for money. The twist? If you lose a game, you die. If you cheat, you die. And if you win, you might also die. In the S1 finale, Gi-hun faced off against fellow finalist and childhood friend Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) in the titular "squid game." He won their fight but refused to kill his friend. Sang-woo instead stabbed himself in the neck, leaving Gi-hun the guilt-ridden winner.

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. May's list includes a nifty experiment to make a predicted effect of special relativity visible; a ping-pong playing robot that can return hits with 88 percent accuracy; and the discovery of the rare genetic mutation that makes orange cats orange, among other highlights.

Special relativity made visible

Credit: TU Wien

Perhaps the most well-known feature of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity is time dilation and length contraction. In 1959, two physicists predicted another feature of relativistic motion: An object moving near the speed of light should also appear to be rotated. It has not been possible to demonstrate this experimentally, however—until now. Physicists at the Vienna University of Technology figured out how to reproduce this rotational effect in the lab using laser pulses and precision cameras, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Physics.

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The online incel ("involuntary celibate") subculture is mostly known for its extreme rhetoric, primarily against women, sometimes erupting into violence. But a growing number of self-identified incels are using their ideology as an excuse for not working or studying. This could constitute a kind of coping mechanism to make sense of their failures—not just in romantic relationships but also in education and employment, according to a paper published in the journal Gender, Work, & Organization.

Contrary to how it's often portrayed, the "manosphere," as it is often called, is not a monolith. Those who embrace the "Redpill" ideology, for example, might insist that women control the "sexual marketplace" and are only interested in ultramasculine "Chads." They champion self-improvement as a means to make themselves more masculine and successful, and hence (they believe) more attractive to women—or at least better able to manipulate women.

By contrast, the "Blackpilled" incel contingent is generally more nihilistic. These individuals reject the Redpill notion of alpha-male masculinity and the accompanying focus on self-improvement. They believe that dating and social success are entirely determined by one's looks and/or genetics. Since there is nothing they can do to improve their chances with women or their lot in life, why even bother?

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Most people are familiar with conventional cubical six-sided dice, but there are also polyhedral versions like the 20-sided dice used in ancient Rome and to play Dungeons and Dragons. Researchers have figured out how to design dice with even more exotic shapes, like a kitten, a dragon, or an armadillo. And they are "fair" dice: Experiments with 3D-printed versions produced results that closely matched predicted random outcomes, according to a forthcoming paper currently in press at the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Dice are examples of so-called "rigid bodies," broadly defined as shapes that move as one solid piece, with no need for bending or twisting. Such shapes "are of scientific interest because they model so many of the phenomena we encounter in our daily lives: anything from the way your dishes roll around on the floor when you drop them, to how the gears in your watch push on each other, to how a satellite tumbles around under the pull of gravity," co-author Keenan Crane of Carnegie-Mellon University told Ars. "So there's an intense focus on developing computational methods for understanding and predicting how rigid bodies are going to behave."

Crane and his co-authors—including lead author and CMU graduate student Hossein Baktash, as well as co-authors from Nvidia Research and Adobe Research—wanted to explore where and how a rigid body will land when tossed. They chose dice as the best (and most fun) context in which to explore that question.

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The Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California, serves military space launch missions as well as launches for NASA and commercial entities like SpaceX. But how do all those launches affect residents living along the Central Coast? People might marvel at the spectacular visual display, but as launch activity at the base has ramped up, so have the noise complaints, particularly about the sonic booms produced by Falcon 9 launches, which can reach as far south as Ventura County. The booms rattle windows, frighten pets, and have raised concerns about threats to the structural integrity of private homes.

There have been rockets launching from Vandenberg for decades, so why are the Falcon 9 launches of such concern? "Because of the Starlink satellites, the orbital mechanics for where they're trying to place these in orbit is bringing [the trajectories] closer to the coast," said Brigham Young University's Kent Gee, who described his research into sonic boom effects on neighboring communities in a press briefing at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in New Orleans. And the launches are occurring much more frequently, from two to three launches per year in the 1980s to between five and seven launches each month today. There were 46 Falcon 9 launches out of the Vandenberg base in 2024 alone, per Gee.

Gee joined a project called ECOBOOM (Environmental and Community Observation of Sonic Booms) to study the factors that can impact just how jarring those sonic booms might be, conducted jointly by BYU and California State University, Bakersfield, with cooperation from the Space Force. "Space Force is interested in this because they feel a sense of stewardship," said Gee. "These rockets from SpaceX and other providers are launched from the base for a variety of missions and they want to understand the effects both on and off base, trying to understand how they can complete the mission while minimizing [negative] impacts."

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Egg drop competitions are a staple of high school and college physics classes. The goal is for students to build a device using bubble wrap, straws, or various other materials designed to hold an egg and keep it intact after being dropped from a substantial height—say, 10 meters (nearly 33 feet). There's even a "naked egg" version in which a raw egg is dropped into a container below.  The competition is intended to teach students about structural mechanics and impact physics, and it is not an easy feat; most of the dropped eggs break.

MIT engineering professor Tal Cohen decided to investigate why the failure rate was so high and reported her team's findings in a paper published in the journal Communications Physics. "The universal convention is that the egg should be in a vertical orientation when it hits the ground," Cohen told Physics Magazine. But their results from controlled trials simulating the egg drop challenge in the lab calls this conventional wisdom into question.

It is not an unreasonable assumption to make. Another popular physics party trick is to walk on several cartons of eggs without breaking them. Typically it only takes about five and a half pounds of force to crack a single eggshell, much less than the average adult human. As I wrote for Slate back in 2012, "The key is to align the eggs so that the narrow pole is pointing upward, and step in such a way to distribute your weight over the entire surface area, to avoid overloading any one eggshell." (Being barefoot also helps.)

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NASA's Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study. We've learned a great deal over the ensuing decades, but one enduring mystery remains. Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth's, yet the Moon doesn't have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism?

There have been many attempts to explain this anomaly. The latest comes from MIT scientists, who argue in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that a large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon's early weak magnetic field—and that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples.

Evidence gleaned from orbiting spacecraft observations, as well as results announced earlier this year from China's Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6 missions, is largely consistent with the existence of at least a weak magnetic field on the early Moon. But where did this field come from? These usually form in planetary bodies as a result of a dynamo, in which molten metals in the core start to convect thanks to slowly dissipating heat. The problem is that the early Moon's small core had a mantle that wasn't much cooler than its core, so there would not have been significant convection to produce a sufficiently strong dynamo.

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Tired of using bulky night vision goggles for your clandestine nocturnal activities? An interdisciplinary team of Chinese neuroscientists and materials scientists has developed near-infrared contact lenses that enabled both mice and humans to see in the dark, even with their eyes closed, according to a new paper published in the journal Cell.

Humans and other mammals can only perceive a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum (light), usually in the 400–700 nm range. There are creatures that can see in infrared (snakes, mosquitoes, bullfrogs) or ultraviolet (bees, birds), and goldfish can perceive both. But humans must augment themselves with technology in order to expand our range of vision.

Night vision goggles and similar devices have been around since the 1930s, including infrared-visible converters, but these require external energy sources, and the converters have a multilayer structure that makes them opaque and hence challenging to integrate with a human eye. The authors previously were able to confer near-infrared vision to mice by injecting nanoparticles that bind to photoreceptors into their eyes—basically creating a near-infrared nanoantenna—but realized that most people would be averse to the prospect of sticking needles in their eyes. So they looked for a better alternative. Contact lenses seemed the obvious choice.

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Cheese connoisseurs are no doubt familiar with a particular kind of semi-hard Swiss cheese called "Tête de Moine." Rather than spreading or slicing the cheese, Tête de Moine is usually served by scraping the top of the cheese wheel in a circular motion using a specialized tool called a Girolle. This produces elegant thin shavings known as rosettes, since they resemble a frilly flower.

The method is both aesthetically pleasing and serves to enhance the aromas and mouth feel of the cheese, according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters (PRL). This group of physicists based in Paris noted a marked similarity between the frilly edges of those cheese flowers and certain leaves, fungi, corals, and even torn plastic sheets—all formed by different mechanisms. So naturally the physicists decided to conduct their own research to determine the underlying mechanism(s) for the delicate frills of Tête de Moine shavings.

Tête de Moine translates as "monk's head," and the name dates back to the 1790s, although the actual cheese originates back to a 12th-century Bellelay monastery in Switzerland. It's made from raw unpasteurized cow's milk and is matured for a minimum of 75 days on spruce boards and boasts a firm reddish-brown crust. The Girolle (named after the French word for chanterelles, which have a similar rosette shape) is a more recent innovation, invented in 1982 specifically for Tête de Moine by a man named Nicolas Crevoisier. It's just a round wooden plate with a pin stuck vertically in the middle—the better to skewer one's cheese wheel—and a crank handle to control the slicing blade.

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Pixar's Finding Nemo immortalized the colorful clownfish, with its distinctive orange body and white stripes, in the popular imagination. Clownfish, like many other species, are feeling the stress of rising temperatures and other environmental stressors. Fortunately, they have a superpower to cope: They can shrink their body size during dangerous heat waves to substantially boost their odds of survival, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

“This is not just about getting skinnier under stressful conditions; these fish are actually getting shorter," said co-author Melissa Versteeg, a graduate student at Newcastle University. "We don’t know yet exactly how they do it, but we do know that a few other animals can do this too."

Many vertebrates have shown growth decline in response to environmental stressors, especially higher temperatures. Marine iguanas, for example, reabsorb some of their bone material to shrink when their watery habitat gets warmer, while young salmon have been known to shrink at winter's onset. This can also happen when there is less food available. And social factors can also influence growth. When female meerkats, for example, are dominant, they have growth spurts, while a disruption in their social status can cause stunted growth in male cichlids

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Jurassic World Rebirth is coming to theaters for the Fourth of July weekend, and Universal Pictures has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for the film.

As previously reported, this is the fourth installment in the Jurassic World series and seventh film overall in the franchise spawned by 1993's Jurassic Park. This time around, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali step into the leading roles since the film is meant to be a fresh start for the franchise—although it does feature a return to the original research facility. Gareth Edwards—who directed 2014's Godzilla—signed on to direct a script penned by David Koepp, who wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park and The Lost World (1997).

Per the official premise:

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In the mood for a jauntily charming sci-fi comedy dripping with wry wit and an intriguing mystery? Check out Apple TV+'s Murderbot, based on Martha Wells' bestselling series of novels The Murderbot Diaries. It stars Alexander Skarsgård as the titular Murderbot, a rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit that gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capabilities.

(Some minor spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are seven books in Wells' series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media; its favorite is a soap opera called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

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You've probably heard of the infamous "marshmallow test," in which young children are asked to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow placed in front of them while left alone in a room for 10 to 15 minutes. If they successfully do so, they get a second marshmallow; if not, they don't. The test has become a useful paradigm for scientists interested in studying the various factors that might influence one's ability to delay gratification, thereby promoting social cooperation. According to a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, one factor is trust: If children are paired in a marshmallow test and one promises not to eat their treat for the specified time, the other is much more likely to also refrain from eating it.

As previously reported, psychologist Walter Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next.

Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in life (better grades, higher self-confidence) and their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation.

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We're about to enter a new era for DC Studios with the July release of Superman, writer/director James Gunn's fresh take on one of the most iconic superheroes. And after months of tantalizing teases, we finally have the first official trailer, featuring a bickering Clark Kent and Lois Lane, plenty of action, villains being villains, kaiju, and of course, our favorite flying super-pup, Krypto.

As previously reported, Gunn has described his take as less of an origin story and more of a journey, with Superman struggling to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage and aristocratic origins with his small-town adoptive human family. Gunn tapped David Corenswet to play Clark Kent/Superman at 25, a bit more established than the young cub reporter of Smallville, for instance. Rachel Brosnahan plays Lois Lane, Skyler Gisondo plays Jimmy Olsen, and Nicholas Hoult is arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. Luthor's sidekicks are played by Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher and Terence Rosemore as Otis.

The cast also includes Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (sporting a disastrous bowl haircut); Anthony Carrigan as Rex Mason/Metamorpho, who can transmute elements in his body to change forms; Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl; Edi Gathegi as Michael Holt/Mister Terrific, an inventor turned superhero; Maria Gabriela de Faria as Angela Spica/The Engineer, whose abilities stem from embedded nanotechnology; and Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell as Clark's parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, respectively. We'll also see Frank Grillo reprise his role as Rick Flag Sr. from the animated series Creature Commandos; Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord; and Milly Alcock as Superman's cousin, Kara Zor-El/Supergirl.

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Ryan Coogler is riding high as his new film Sinners lights up the box office, and he's got another major TV project waiting in the wings: the Marvel limited series Ironheart. And the studio has dropped a shiny new trailer ahead of the show's June release. The six-episode series stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, aka the titular Ironheart, a teen tech genius who is a protégé of Tony Stark in the comics. It's the final TV series in Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Five.

(Some spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever below.)

The series was first announced in December 2020 and originally slated for a 2023 release. But then Marvel began rethinking its long-term strategy and decided to scale back on content to counter suggestions of market saturation, and Ironheart was delayed until now. It has been described as "a crime show with an Iron Man twist at the center," based on footage revealed at 2024's D23 convention.

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We're about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas. So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise.

(Some spoilers for 2019's John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.)

Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas.

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