The piano-mover puzzle involves trying to transport an oddly shaped load across a constricted environment with various obstructions. It's one of several variations on classic computational motion-planning problems, a key element in numerous robotics applications. But what would happen if you pitted human beings against ants in a competition to solve the piano-mover puzzle?

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, humans have superior cognitive abilities and, hence, would be expected to outperform the ants. However, depriving people of verbal or nonverbal communication can level the playing field, with ants performing better in some trials. And while ants improved their cognitive performance when acting collectively as a group, the same did not hold true for humans.

Co-author Ofer Feinerman of the Weizmann Institute of Science and colleagues saw an opportunity to use the piano-mover puzzle to shed light on group decision-making, as well as the question of whether it is better to cooperate as a group or maintain individuality. "It allows us to compare problem-solving skills and performances across group sizes and down to a single individual and also enables a comparison of collective problem-solving across species," the authors wrote.

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HBO released a new one-minute teaser for the second season of its post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us during CES last night, along with a release date of April 2025. Based on developer Naughty Dog's hugely popular video game franchise, S2 is set five years after the events of the first season and finds the bond beginning to fray between plucky survivors Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) while introducing several new characters.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The series takes place in the 20-year aftermath of a deadly outbreak of mutant fungus (Cordyceps) that turns humans into monstrous zombie-like creatures (the Infected, or Clickers). The world has become a series of separate totalitarian quarantine zones and independent settlements, with a thriving black market and a rebel militia known as the Fireflies making life complicated for the survivors. Joel is a hardened smuggler tasked with escorting the teenage Ellie across the devastated US, battling hostile forces and hordes of zombies, to a Fireflies unit outside the quarantine zone. Ellie is special: She is immune to the deadly fungus, and the hope is that her immunity holds the key to beating the disease.

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Some version of the Hula-Hoop has been around for millennia, but the popular plastic version was introduced by Wham-O in the 1950s and quickly became a fad. Now, researchers have taken a closer look at the underlying physics of the toy, revealing that certain body types are better at keeping the spinning hoops elevated than others, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were surprised that an activity as popular, fun, and healthy as hula hooping wasn’t understood even at a basic physics level,” said co-author Leif Ristroph of New York University. “As we made progress on the research, we realized that the math and physics involved are very subtle, and the knowledge gained could be useful in inspiring engineering innovations, harvesting energy from vibrations, and improving in robotic positioners and movers used in industrial processing and manufacturing.”

Ristroph's lab frequently addresses these kinds of colorful real-world puzzles. For instance, in 2018, Ristroph and colleagues fine-tuned the recipe for the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films. In 2021, the Ristroph lab looked into the formation processes underlying so-called "stone forests" common in certain regions of China and Madagascar.

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Members of the Elsevier-published Journal of Human Evolution quit, citing AI production processes introducing errors, high author fees, and concerns over editorial independence.

Squid Game's hotly anticipated second season debuted on Netflix the day after Christmas and racked up more than 68 million views in just three days. It had already been renewed for a third and final season—filmed back-to-back with S2—but Netflix ushered in the new year by gracing us with a 15-second teaser on X, introducing a brand new killer doll dubbed Chul-su—similar to the giant "Red Light, Green Light" doll Young-hee.

(Spoilers for S1 below; some spoilers for S2 but no major reveals.)

As previously reported, the first season followed Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae, seen earlier this year in The Acolyte), 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.

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Back in 2019, we told you about an intriguing experiment to test a famous anthropological legend about an elderly Inuit man in the 1950s who fashioned a knife out of his own frozen feces. He used it to kill and skin a dog, using its rib cage as a makeshift sled to venture off into the Arctic. Metin Eren, an archaeologist at Kent State University, fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon.

Sadly for the legend, the blades failed every test, but the study was colorful enough to snag Eren an Ig Nobel Prize the following year. And it's just one of the many fascinating projects routinely undertaken in his Experimental Archaeology Laboratory, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer all manner of ancient technologies, whether they involve stone tools, ceramics, metal, butchery, textiles, and so forth.

Eren's lab is quite prolific, publishing 15 to 20 papers a year. “The only thing we’re limited by is time,” he said. Many have colorful or quirky elements and hence tend to garner media attention, but Eren emphasizes that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. “I think sometimes people look at experimental archaeology and think it’s no different from LARPing,” Eren told Ars. “I have nothing against LARPers, but it’s very different. It’s not playtime. It’s hardcore science. Me making a stone tool is no different than a chemist pouring chemicals into a beaker. But that act alone is not the experiment. It might be the flashiest bit, but that's not the experimental process.”

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There aren't that many movies specifically set on New Year's Eve, but one of the best is The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Joel and Ethan Coen's visually striking, affectionate homage to classic Hollywood screwball comedies. The film turned 30 this year, so it's the perfect opportunity for a rewatch.

(WARNING: Spoilers below.)

The Coen brothers started writing the script for The Hudsucker Proxy when Joel was working as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981). Raimi ended up co-writing the script, as well as making a cameo appearance as a brainstorming marketing executive.  The Coen brothers took their inspiration from the films of Preston Sturgess and Frank Capra, among others, but the intent was never to satirize or parody those films. "It's the case where, having seen those movies, we say 'They're really fun—let's do one!'; as opposed to "They're really fun—let's comment upon them,'" Ethan Coen has said.

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Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement. It's the 20th mass resignation from a science journal since 2023 over various points of contention, per Retraction Watch, many in response to controversial changes in the business models used by the scientific publishing industry.

"This has been an exceptionally painful decision for each of us," the board members wrote in their statement. "The editors who have stewarded the journal over the past 38 years have invested immense time and energy in making JHE the leading journal in paleoanthropological research and have remained loyal and committed to the journal and our authors long after their terms ended. The [associate editors] have been equally loyal and committed. We all care deeply about the journal, our discipline, and our academic community; however, we find we can no longer work with Elsevier in good conscience."

The editorial board cited several changes made over the last ten years that it believes are counter to the journal's longstanding editorial principles. These included eliminating support for a copy editor and a special issues editor, leaving it to the editorial board to handle those duties. When the board expressed the need for a copy editor, Elsevier's response, they said, was "to maintain that the editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting."

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There is rarely time to write about every cool science paper that comes our way; many worthy candidates sadly fall through the cracks over the course of the year. But as 2024 comes to a close, we've gathered ten of our favorite such papers at the intersection of science and culture as a special treat, covering a broad range of topics: from reenacting Bronze Age spear combat and applying network theory to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, to Spider-Man inspired web-slinging tech and a mathematical connection between a turbulent phase transition and your morning cup of coffee. Enjoy!

Reenacting Bronze Age spear combat

An experiment with experienced fighters who spar freely using different styles. Credit: Valerio Gentile/CC BY

The European Bronze Age saw the rise of institutionalized warfare, evidenced by the many spearheads and similar weaponry archaeologists have unearthed. But how might these artifacts be used in actual combat? Dutch researchers decided to find out by constructing replicas of Bronze Age shields and spears and using them in realistic combat scenarios. They described their findings in an October paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

There have been a couple of prior experimental studies on bronze spears, but per Valerio Gentile (now at the University of Gottingen) and coauthors, practical research to date has been quite narrow in scope, focusing on throwing weapons against static shields. Coauthors C.J. van Dijk of the National Military Museum in the Netherlands and independent researcher O. Ter Mors each had more than a decade of experience teaching traditional martial arts, specializing in medieval polearms and one-handed weapons. So they were ideal candidates for testing the replica spears and shields.

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'Tis the season for many holiday traditions, including the Ugly Christmas Sweater—you know, those 1950s-style heavy knits featuring some kind of cartoonish seasonal decoration, like snowflakes, Santa Claus, or—in the case of Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones' Diary (2001)—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. "It’s obnoxious and tacky, but also fuzzy and kind of wholesome—the fashion equivalent of a Hallmark Christmas movie (with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek)," as CNN's Marianna Cerini recently observed.

Fashion (or lack thereof) aside, sweaters and other knitted fabric are also fascinating to physicists and mathematicians. Case in point: a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters examining the complex mechanics behind the many resting shapes a good Jersey knit can form while at rest.

Knitted fabrics are part of a class of intertwined materials—which also includes birds' nests, surgical knots, knotted shoelaces, and even the degradation of paper fibers in ancient manuscripts. Knitted fabrics are technically a type of metamaterial: an engineered material that gets its properties not from the base materials but from their designed structures. The elasticity (aka, stretchiness) of knitted fabrics is an emergent property: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. How those components (strands of yarn) are arranged at an intermediate scale (the structure) determines the macro scale properties of the resulting fabric.

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There are thousands of YouTube videos in which DIY science enthusiasts cut grapes in half—leaving just a thin bit of skin connecting them—and put the grapes in the microwave, just to marvel at the sparks and plume of ionized gas (plasma) that the grapes produce. This quirky property of grapes might help make more efficient quantum sensors, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Applied.

The plasma-inducing grape effect was first observed in 1994, per the authors. As previously reported, the usual explanation for the generation of plasmas is that grapes are so small that the irradiating microwaves become highly concentrated in the grape tissue, ripping some the molecules apart to generate charged ions (adding to the electrolytes already present in the grapes). The electromagnetic field that forms causes ions to flow from one grape half to the other via the connecting skin—at least at first. That's when you get the initial sparks. Eventually, the ions start passing through the surrounding air as well, ionizing it to produce that hot plume of plasma.

But in 2019, Trent University scientists showed that explanation isn't quite right. The skin bridge isn't necessary for the effect to occur. Rather, the plasma is generated by an electromagnetic "hot spot." The grapes have the right refractive index and size to "trap" microwaves, so putting two of them close together leads to the generation of a hot spot between them. The trick also works with gooseberries, large blackberries, and quail eggs, as well as hydrogel beads—plastic beads soaked in water. ("Many microwaves were in fact harmed during the experiments," co-author Hamza Khattak admitted at the time.)

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Everyone has their favorite film that serves as alternative Christmas movie fare, with Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) typically topping the list—at least when all you want for Christmas is buddy-cop banter, car chases, shootouts, and glorious explosions. (Massive gratuitous property damage is a given.) I love me some Lethal Weapon but it's high time to give some holiday love to another great action flick set during the Christmas season: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac school teacher who turns out to have been a government assassin in her former life.

(Spoilers below for this nearly 30-year-old film.)

At the time, Davis was married to director Renny Harlin, coming off a disastrous showing for their previous collaboration, Cutthroat Island (1995), which remains one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. (It is indeed a pretty bad movie.) But Shane Black's smart, savvy script for The Long Kiss Goodnight seemed like the perfect next project for them; it was promising enough that New Line Cinema bought it for what was then a record $4 million.

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Editor's note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y.

This was another good year for television, with established favorites sharing space on our list with some intriguing new shows. Really, 2024 had a little of everything, from wacky crime capers (Bad Monkey) and Satanic Panic (Hysteria) to dystopian video game adaptations (Fallout) and sweeping historical epics (Shōgun), with plenty of genre-mashup delights in between. While streaming platforms continue to dominate, the selection is more evenly distributed across them this year, with only Hulu and Netflix snagging more than two slots (depending on whether or not you lump Hulu together with Disney+ after the merger).

As always, we're opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our "year's best" vote at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite TV shows released in 2024.

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Director Denis Villeneuve's stunning two-part film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune has received many well-deserved accolades—with Dune: Part 2 being crowned Ars Technica's top movie of 2024. The films also spawned a lavish HBO spinoff TV series, Dune: Prophecy, just renewed for a second season right before a momentous season finale.

(Some spoilers below for S1 of Dune: Prophecy, but no major plot reveals.)

Dune: Prophecy is a prequel series inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune, written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, exploring the origins of the Bene Gesserit. It's set 10,000 years before the ascension of Paul Atreides and follows two Harkonnen sisters as they combat forces that threaten the future of humankind, establishing the fabled sect that will become the Bene Gesserit in the process.

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Editor's note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed films that some might consider spoiler-y.

This was the year that Marvel Studios hit the pause button on its deluge of blockbuster superhero movies, after rather saturating the market in recent years. It proved to be a smart move: the only Marvel theatrical release was the R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine, a refreshingly irreverent, very meta take on the genre that delighted audiences and lit up the global box office. Perhaps audiences aren't so much bored with superhero movies as becoming more discriminating in their choices. Give us a fun, fresh take and we'll flock back to theaters.

Fewer superhero franchise entries meant there was more breathing room for other fare. Horror in particular had a stellar year, with numerous noteworthy offerings, touching on body horror (The Substance), Satanic Panic (Late Night with the Devil), psychological horror (Heretic), hauntings (The Oddity), a rom-com/revenge mashup (Your Monster), an inventive reimagining of a classic silent film (Nosferatu), and one very bloodthirsty child vampire with a wicked sense of humor (Abigail). Throw in a smattering of especially strong sequels (Inside Out 2, Dune: Part 2), a solid prequel (Furiosa), and a few hidden gems, and we had one of the better years for film in recent memory.

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The Internet has been buzzing the last few days about James Gunn's Superman reboot slated for release next year. The studio released a "motion poster" earlier this week set to a moody cover of John Williams' "Superman March," as well as a teaser for a teaser for the film. That teaser just dropped.

Clearly, given all the buildup, what director James Gunn wants for Christmas is for everyone to get excited over his Superman movie. And you know what? It kinda worked, especially since Superman's dog Krypto makes an adorably welcome appearance.

Gunn describes 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 Holt is arch-nemesis Lex Luther. (Holt's son shaved his head for the role.) Luther's sidekicks are played by Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher and Terence Rosemore as Otis.

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We think of squirrels as adorably harmless creatures, admiring their bushy tails and twitchy little noses and the way they cram their cheeks with nuts or seeds to bring back to their nests for later. But the rodents turn out to be a bit more bloodthirsty than we thought. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Ethology, California ground squirrels have been caught in the act—many times over—of chasing, killing, and eating voles.

Co-author Jennifer Smith, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, described the behavior as "shocking," given the sheer number of times they watched squirrels do this. “We had never seen this behavior before," she said. "Squirrels are one of the most familiar animals to people. We see them right outside our windows; we interact with them regularly. Yet here’s this never-before-encountered-in-science behavior that sheds light on the fact that there’s so much more to learn about the natural history of the world around us.”

Squirrels mainly consume acorns, seeds, nuts, and fruits, but they have been known to supplement that diet with insects and, occasionally, by stealing eggs or young hatchlings from nests. And back in 1993, biologist J.R Callahan caused a stir by reporting that as many as 30 species of squirrel could be preying on smaller creatures: namely, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and the occasional small mammal.

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Werner Herzog has made more than 60 films over his illustrious career. His documentaries alone span an impressive topical range, from the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) to people who choose to live and work in Antarctica (the Oscar-nominated Encounters at the End of the World) or a haunting exploration of the oldest human paintings in France's Chauvet Cave (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). His latest offering, Theater of Thought, tackles what might be his most ambitious subject yet: the mysterious inner workings of the brain.

Theater of Thought premiered in 2022 at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado and is now getting a theatrical release. Herzog's inspiration grew out of his conversations with Rafael Yuste, a Columbia University neurobiologist who also served as scientific advisor on the film. "How can we read thoughts?" he writes in his director's statement. "Can you implant a chip in your brain and in my brain, and see my new film without a camera? Why is it that some young people immerse themselves in video games and become addicted to completely artificial worlds? Sometimes mice even prefer invented cartoon worlds, so who is the ghost writer of our mind, of our reality?"

The topic might be scientific in nature, but Theater of Thought is not really a science documentary, despite Herzog's use of the classic talking head format. It's more of a personal, almost quixotic quest, with plenty of random branching digressions along the way. "It was like a road movie, one Monument Valley and one Grand Canyon, then one Mount Everest after the other," Herzog told Ars. "You just couldn't stop wondering and enjoying." For the viewer, it's as much a journey through the eccentric workings of Herzog's endlessly curious, nimble mind.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a seminal moment in 20th century history, paving the way for German reunification. Many segments, both large and small, were preserved for posterity—including portions covered in graffiti or murals. A team of Italian scientists used a combination of spectroscopic analysis and machine learning to study paint chips from wall fragments to learn more about the chemistry of the paints and pigments used, according to a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

There has been increased attention in recent years to preserving street art, which is vulnerable both to degradation over time as well as deliberate vandalism. For instance, in 2021, Italian chemists figured out how to use hydrogels to remove added graffiti from vandalized murals in Florence. (Over-painting by vandals is so chemically similar to the original painting underneath that it is difficult to selectively remove just the over-painting without damaging the original.) Unlike most classic masterpieces of the past, created with paints designed to last centuries, street art is more ephemeral in nature, using materials that lack such longevity.

In many cases, like the Berlin Wall, the painters didn't bother to document the specific materials they used, their application techniques, or other useful information that conservators could use to restore or conserve street art. Modern painting materials are also much more complex, and manufacturers typically do not report specific information on the composition of those materials.

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We've got a shiny new trailer for Star Trek: Section 31, the long-awaited spinoff film that brings back Michelle Yeoh's magnificent Phillipa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery. The film will give us the backstory for Georgiou's evil Mirror Universe counterpart, where she was a despotic emperor who murdered millions of her own people.

As previously reported, Yeoh's stylishly acerbic Georgiou was eventually written out of Discovery, but fans took hope from rumors of a spinoff series featuring the character. That turned into a spinoff film, and we'll take it. Miku Martineau plays a young Phillipa Georgiou in the film. Meanwhile, Yeoh's older Georgiou is tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets as part of a black ops group called Section 31, while dealing with all the blood she's spilled in her past.

Any hardcore Star Trek fan will tell you that Section 31 was first introduced as an urban legend of sorts in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Apparently Ira Steven Behr—who came up with the idea of a secret rogue organization within Starfleet doing shady things to protect the Federation—took inspiration from Commander Sisko's comment in one episode about how "It's easy to be a saint in paradise." The name is taken from Starfleet Charter Article 14, Section 31, which allows Starfleet to take extraordinary measures in the face of extreme threats—including sabotage, assassination, and even biological warfare.

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