In 2008, a YouTube video featuring an Eleanora cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the beat of the Backstreet Boys went viral. His killer moves stunned scientists, since the ability to synchronize body movements to music was believed to be a uniquely human activity. Nor is Snowball an isolated case. Griffi the Dancing Cockatoo has his own YouTube channel, for example, and a recent TikTok video showed two sister cockatoos engaging in a dance-off to Earth, Wind & Fire's "September." But it's Snowball who holds the Guinness World Record for most dance moves performed by a bird.

Snowball's record might be in jeopardy, however. A new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE investigated dancing behavior in several parrot species and identified 30 distinct dance moves that the birds executed—17 of which had never been observed scientifically before and were performed by just one bird. So dancing in cockatoos and other parrot species seems to be much more complex and varied than previously thought. It's still unclear why parrots in captivity love to dance so much, but encouraging such behavior could help birds like these thrive in an environment they often find challenging.

Researchers at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Australia scoured YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok for video footage of dancing birds, particularly cockatoos. For videos to be selected for inclusion in the study, they had to meet several criteria: They had to show a cockatoo in a domestic setting where music was being played at the same time the bird was dancing (videos where music had been added to the footage were omitted); the bird must demonstrate at least two different dance moves; and the camera angle had to provide a good view of the dancing bird. And each video had to feature a different bird.

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough 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. July's list includes the discovery of the tomb of the first Maya king of Caracol in Belize, the fluid dynamics of tacking a sailboat, how to determine how fast blood was traveling when it stained cotton fabric, and how the structure of elephant ears could lead to more efficient indoor temperature control in future building designs, among other fun stories.

Tomb of first king of Caracol found

Credit: Caracol Archeological Project/University of Houston

Archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase are the foremost experts on the ancient Maya city of Caracol in Belize and are helping to pioneer the use of airborne LiDAR to locate hidden structures in dense jungle, including a web of interconnected roadways and a cremation site in the center of the city's Northeast Acropolis plaza. They have been painstakingly excavating the site since the mid-1980s. Their latest discovery is the tomb of Te K'ab Chaak, Caracol's first ruler, who took the throne in 331 CE and founded a dynasty that lasted more than 460 years.

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Builders in ancient Rome used a special kind of ancient concrete to construct their aqueducts, bridges, and buildings. But is Roman concrete more sustainable than the Portland cement used in today's concrete? The answer is more nuanced than one might think, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. Roman concrete produces as much CO₂ as modern methods, but fewer air pollutants.

As we've reported previously, like today's Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder, with just a touch of added gypsum—the better to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.

Scientists have long been fascinated by the remarkable longevity of Roman concrete; it's a very active field of study. For instance, in 2017, scientists analyzed the concrete from the ruins of sea walls along Italy's Mediterranean coast, which have stood for two millennia despite the harsh marine environment. That analysis revealed that the recipe involved a combination of rare crystals and a porous mineral. So exposure to seawater generated chemical reactions inside the concrete, causing aluminum tobermorite crystals to form out of phillipsite, a common mineral found in volcanic ash. The crystals bound to the rocks, preventing the formation and propagation of cracks that would have otherwise weakened the structures.

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It's undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

"One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics," Abate told Ars. "I've published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz's Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I've been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now."

Her most recent book is 2024's Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. "I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too," Abate said. "It occurred to me one day that there isn't a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I'm sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there's more continuity than there is difference."

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Most people, after suffering consequences for a bad decision, will alter their future behavior to avoid a similar negative outcome. That's just common sense. But many social circles have that one friend who never seems to learn from those consequences, repeatedly self-sabotaging themselves with the same bad decisions. When it comes to especially destructive behaviors, like addictions, the consequences can be severe or downright tragic.

Why do they do this? Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, suggest that the core issue is that such people don't seem able to make a causal connection between their choices/behavior and the bad outcome, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Psychology. Nor are they able to integrate new knowledge into their decision-making process effectively to get better results. The results could lead to the development of new intervention strategies for gambling, drug, and alcohol addictions.

In 2023, UNSW neuroscientist Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel and colleagues designed an experimental video game to explore the issue of why certain people keep making the same bad choices despite suffering some form of punishment as a result. Participants played the interactive online game by clicking on one of two planets to "trade" with them; choosing the correct planet resulted in earning points.

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San Diego Comic-Con is coming up next week, and Disney is getting ready for its big presentation by releasing a new trailer for TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning.

(Spoilers for TRON: Legacy below.)

As previously reported, TRON: Legacy ended with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) from the original film, preventing the digital world from bleeding into the real world, as planned by the Grid's malevolent ruling program, Clu. He brought with him Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a naturally occurring isomorphic algorithm targeted for extinction by Clu.

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Karl Urban takes a break from The Boys to play a washed-up Johnny Cage in the trailer for Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to 2021's Mortal Kombat reboot and the fourth live-action film in the franchise based on the 1990s video game series. It comes one day after Warner Bros. released a (very entertaining) fake trailer for a new in-universe, faux 1990s Johnny Cage movie, Uncaged Fury. (Cage's prior fake film credits apparently include Cool Hand Cage, Hard to Cage, and Rebel Without a Cage.)

The first live-action Mortal Kombat film turns 30 this year. It was a box office success but a critical failure, although it has since evolved into a campy cult classic—and Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa is still considered by many to be the definitive portrayal of sorcerer Shang Tsung.  A 1997 sequel, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, however, bombed both critically and financially. And Midway, the game publisher, filed for bankruptcy soon after.

However, Warner Bros. bought the rights and eventually tapped Simon McQuoid to direct a reboot more than 20 years after the original's release, focusing on MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan). The 2021 film earned mixed reviews, but performed sufficiently well at the box office for Warner Bros. to green-light a sequel, also directed by McQuoid. The 2021 film ended with Cole heading to Los Angeles to look for martial arts movie star Johnny Cage, who is the main protagonist of Mortal Kombat II.

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The premiere of Alien: Earth is just weeks away, and FX/Hulu dropped one last trailer to pique our interest, along with a much more detailed synopsis. It's meditative and existential in tone, with a haunting tune playing over footage of mysterious alien craft, dead bodies, blood-spattered humans fleeing through futuristic corridors, and, of course, a spooky silhouette of a xenomorph in the distance.

As previously reported, the eight-episode 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 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.

Per the official premise:

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It's widely accepted conventional wisdom that when it comes to creative works—TV shows, films, music, books—consumers crave an optimal balance between novelty and familiarity. What we choose to consume and share with others, in turn, drives cultural evolution.

But what if that conventional wisdom is wrong? An analysis based on data from a massive online fan fiction (fanfic) archive contradicts this so-called "balance theory," according to a paper published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The fanfic community seems to overwhelmingly prefer more of the same, consistently choosing familiarity over novelty; however, they reported greater overall enjoyment when they took a chance and read something more novel. In short: "Sameness entices, but novelty enchants."

Strictly speaking, authors have always copied characters and plots from other works (cf. many of William Shakespeare's plays), although the advent of copyright law complicated matters. Modern fan fiction as we currently think of it arguably emerged with the 1967 publication of the first Star Trek fanzine (Spockanalia), which included spinoff fiction based on the series. Star Trek also spawned the subgenre of slash fiction, when writers began creating stories featuring Kirk and Spock (Kirk/Spock, or K/S) in a romantic (often sexual) relationship.

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Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer twice made references to an early work featuring a Germanic mythological character named Wade. Only three lines survive, discovered buried in a sermon by a late 19th century scholar. There has been much debate over how to translate those fragments ever since, and whether the long-lost work was a monster-filled epic or a chivalric romance. Two Cambridge University scholars now say those lines have been "radically misunderstood" for 130 years, supplying their own translation—and argument in favor of a romance—in a new paper published in the Review of English Studies.

We know such a medieval work once existed because it's referenced in other texts, most notably by Chaucer. He alludes to the "tale of Wade" in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde and mentions "Wade's boat [boot]" in The Merchant's Tale—part of his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. A late 16th century editor of Chaucer's works, Thomas Speght, made a passing remark that Wade's boat was named "Guingelot," and that Wade's "strange exploits" were "long and fabulous," but didn't elaborate any further, no doubt assuming the tale was common knowledge and hence not worth retelling. Speght's truncated comment "has often been called the most exasperating note ever written on Chaucer," F.N. Robinson wrote in 1933.

So, the full story has been lost to history, although some remnant details have survived. For instance, there are mentions of Wade in an Old English poem, describing him as the son of a king and a "serpent-legged mermaid." The Poetic Edda mentions Wade's son, Wayland, as well as Wayland's brothers Egil and Slagfin. Wade is also briefly referenced in Malory's Morte D'Arthur and a handful of other texts from around the same period. Fun fact: J.R.R. Tolkien based his Middle-earth character Earendil on Wade; Earendil sails across the sky in a magical ship called Wingelot (or Vingilot).

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Physicists with the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration have detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger between two black holes yet observed, resulting in a new black hole that is 225 times more massive than our Sun. The results were presented at the Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland.

The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration searches the universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

To date, the collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars.  In 2021, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars.

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Earlier this month, Hollywood mourned the passing of Michael Madsen, a gifted actor best known for his critically acclaimed roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, among others. Few obituaries have mentioned one of his lesser-known roles: a black ops mercenary hired to help hunt down an escaped human/alien hybrid in 1995's Species. The sci-fi thriller turns 30 this year and while it garnered decidedly mixed reviews upon release, the film holds up quite well as a not-quite-campy B monster movie that makes for a great guilty pleasure.

(Many spoilers below.)

Screenwriter Dennis Feldman (The Golden Child) was partially inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke article discussing how the odds were slim that an extraterrestrial craft would ever visit Earth, given the great distances that would need to be traversed (assuming that traveling faster than the speed of light would be highly unlikely). Feldman was intrigued by the prospect of making extraterrestrial contact via information: specifically, alien instructions on how to build an instrument that could talk to terrestrial humans.

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I'll be frank: I had mixed feelings, based solely on the trailers, about James Gunn's Superman reboot. Sure, the casting seemed great, Gunn has a winning track record on superhero fare, and Krypto the dog stole the show every time he appeared. The trailers struck a nice balance between action, humor, and heart. Yet the film also seemed overpacked with super-character cameos, and it was hard to get any sense of the actual plot.

I've now seen the film, and those impressions were largely correct. But I'm happy to report that the positives far outweigh any negatives. Superman is a super-fun ride that unabashedly embraces its early comic book roots, naive optimism and all.

(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

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The Netflix series Wednesday, created by Tim Burton, was one of our favorites in 2022, and while it was quickly renewed, it's been a long wait for that second season. That wait is nearly over. The first half of S2 debuts next month, and Netflix has released a full-length trailer to remind us of that fact. Verdict: It looks like we're in for another spooky supernatural mystery that only our favorite pig-tailed goth girl detective can solve, with all the deadpan witticisms and lavish Burton-esque aesthetics one could hope for.

(Some spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, the first season followed Wednesday's (Jenna Ortega) adventures as a new student at Nevermore Academy. Aloof, sardonic, and resolutely independent, she was very much the problem child, even by Addams standards, having been expelled from eight schools in five years. Hence, her enrollment at Nevermore, a haven for so-called "outcasts" and the alma mater of her parents.

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There is increasing consumer demand for low- or non-alcoholic beers, and science is helping improve both the brewing process and the flavor profiles of the final product. One promising approach to better non-alcoholic beer involves substituting barley malt with milled rice, according to two recent papers—one published in the International Journal of Food Properties and the other published in the Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists.

The chemistry of brewing beer is a very active area of research. For instance, earlier this year, we reported on Norwegian scientists who discovered that sour beers made with the sugars found in peas, beans, and lentils had similar flavor profiles to your average Belgian-style sour beer, yet the brewing process was shorter, with simpler steps. The pea-sugar beers had more lactic acid, ethanol, and flavor compounds than those brewed without them, and they were rated as having fruitier flavors and higher acidity. And sensory panelists detected no trace of undesirable "bean-y" flavors that have limited the use of pea-based ingredients in the past.

But replacing barley malt with rice still might strike some beer aficionados as sacrilege. In Germany, "purity laws" dictate that any beverage classified as a beer—including non-alcoholic beers—must only be made from malted barley, hops, water, and yeast. This produces non-alcoholic beers that have more "worty" flavors (due to higher levels of aldehyde) than might ideally be desired. But not every country is as stringent as Germany. The US is much more flexible when it comes to selecting raw materials, including rice, for brewing beers. In fact, Arkansas just passed a bill this spring creating incentives for using rice (grown in Arkansas, of course) in the production of sake and beer.

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This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Oscar-winning film, Apollo 13, director Ron Howard's masterful love letter to NASA's Apollo program in general and the eponymous space mission in particular. So we're taking the opportunity to revisit this riveting homage to American science, ingenuity, and daring.

(Spoilers below.)

Apollo 13 is a fictional retelling of the aborted 1970 lunar mission that became a "successful failure" for NASA because all three astronauts made it back to Earth alive against some pretty steep odds. The film opens with astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) hosting a watch party in July 1969 for Neil Armstrong's historic first walk on the Moon. He is slated to command the Apollo 14 mission, and is ecstatic when he and his crew—Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton)—are bumped to Apollo 13 instead. His wife, Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan) is more superstitious and hence less thrilled: "It had to be 13." To which her pragmatic husband replies, "It comes after 12."

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Back in 2022, we reported on the Australian National Maritime Museum's (ANMM) announcement that its researchers had confirmed that a shipwreck proposed as a likely candidate in 2018 is indeed the remains of the HMS Endeavour. However, the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP)—the museum's research partner in the project—promptly released a statement calling the announcement premature. RIMAP insisted that more evidence was needed.

The final report is now available, and both RIMAP and ANMM say they have confirmed that the wreck is indeed the Endeavour. (You can read the full report here.) “The timbers are British timbers. The size of all the timber scantlings are almost identical to Endeavour, and I’m talking within millimeters—not inches, but millimeters," Kieran Hosty, an ANMM archaeologist who co-wrote the report, told The Independent. “The stem scarf is identical, absolutely identical. This stem scarf is also a very unique feature—we’ve gone through a whole bunch of 18th-century ships' plans, and we can’t find anything else like it.”

As previously reported, Endeavour Captain James Cook's first voyage (1768–1771) was, in part, a mission to observe and record the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun. The observation was part of a combined global effort to determine the distance of the Earth from the Sun. Those observations proved less conclusive than had been hoped, but during the rest of the voyage, Cook was able to map the coastland of New Zealand before sailing west to the southeastern coast of Australia—the first record of Europeans on the continent's Eastern coastline.

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Today marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster horror movie based on the bestselling novel by Peter Benchley. We're marking the occasion with a tribute to this classic film and its enduring impact on the popular perception of sharks, shark conservation efforts, and our culture at large.

(Many spoilers below.)

Jaws tells the story of Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the new police chief for Amity Island, a New England beach town and prime summer tourist attraction. But that thriving industry is threatened by a series of shark attacks, although the local mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), initially dismisses the possibility, ridiculing the findings of visiting marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). The attacks keep escalating and the body count grows, until the town hires a grizzled shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to hunt down and kill the great white shark, with the help of Brody and Hooper.

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The 2009 discovery of footprints (human and animal) left behind in layers of clay and silt at New Mexico’s White Sands National Park sparked a contentious debate about when, exactly, human cultures first developed in North America. Until about a decade ago, it seemed as if the first Americans arrived near the end of the last Ice Age and were part of the Clovis culture, named for the distinctive projectile points they left behind near what’s now Clovis, New Mexico. But various dating methods indicated the White Sands footprints are 10,000 years older. Now there is a fresh independent analysis that agrees with those earlier findings, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

As previously reported, earlier archaeological evidence had suggested the Clovis people made their way southward through a corridor that opened up in the middle of the ice sheets between 13,000 and 16,000 years ago. Subsequent archaeological evidence—such as a 14,500-year-old site in Florida and stone tools dating to 16,000 years ago in western Idaho—suggested that the Clovis people were actually not the first to arrive. It also made it look much more likely that the first Americans had skirted the edge of the ice sheets along the Pacific Coast.

The White Sands footprints further muddled the narrative. In 2019, Bournemouth University archaeologist Matthew Bennett and his colleagues excavated the White Sands area and found a total of 61 human footprints east of an area called Alkali Flat, which was once the bed and shoreline of an ancient lake. Over time, as the lake’s edge expanded and contracted with shifts in climate, it left behind distinct layers of clay, silt, and sand. Seven of those layers, in the area Bennett and his colleagues excavated, held human tracks along with those of long-lost megafauna.

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Arid coastal regions that are also prone to fog are prime locations for fog-harvesting devices as a water source, especially during prolonged droughts. But the standard technology is prone to clogging. Scientists at Virginia Tech have created an improved version of their earlier "fog harp" alternative design to address that issue, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Fog harvesting (or dew catching) is an ancient practice dating as far back as the Incas, who placed buckets under trees to collect condensation. It's also practiced by certain insects, notably Namib desert beetles, which survive on the water that condenses onto their wings. The wings have alternating hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions to enhance the condensation. Today's fog harvesters are usually mesh nets mounted onto frames with a trough or basin underneath. Like the beetle's wings, the mesh filaments are chemically coated to be either hydrophobic or hydrophilic.

The efficiency of these water harvesters depends on decreasing the size of the filaments and the mesh holes. "If the holes were too big, the microscopic droplets would pass through it, and it wouldn't harvest much water," co-author James Kaindu, a student in researcher Jonathan Boreyko's lab at Virginia Tech, told Ars. The trade-off is that smaller filaments and holes are more prone to clogging. "If it was too small, the droplets would coalesce and create a water film on it," said Kaindu. "It would impede the flow and act as a barrier that would dramatically affect its capture efficiency."

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