The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, in an English field…
A hobbyist engineer built a trebuchet whose projectile crosses Mach 1, powered by nothing but a falling weight and mechanical advantage. Medieval siege physics, pushed until the air itself cracks.
Meanwhile, at Sumatra's Lake Toba…
The Mount Toba supereruption has long been cast as the near-extinction of humanity, squeezing our ancestors down to a few thousand survivors. A fresh look at the climate evidence finds the eruption barely cooled the planet — the bottleneck may need a different villain.
A newly identified Martian meteorite turns out to be 1.27 billion years old and chemically unlike anything else that has fallen here, meaning it came from a region of Mars's interior no rock has ever sampled. A piece of the planet's deep plumbing, delivered free of charge.
Meanwhile, in the Arctic Ocean…
Matt Rutherford is attempting 10,000 nautical miles alone around the Arctic Ocean, threading ice floes and riding out gales, and spoke by radio from his cabin mid-attempt. No one has completed the loop solo.
Meanwhile, off the coast of Sicily…
Divers off Sicily have found a Roman ship still lying with its cargo, which Italy's culture ministry is calling one of the most significant underwater finds in years. The seabed keeps better records than most archives.
Microscopic synthetic particles have been made to push on each other unequally, so that action and reaction no longer cancel — and the pair keeps moving on its own. Newton's third law still holds for the whole system, but not for the particles as they see it.
The long argument over where snakes lost their legs — burrowing, swimming, or slithering on land — now looks like a false choice. Fossil evidence suggests the earliest snakes were doing all three at once.
Meanwhile, in the main asteroid belt…
Astronomers have finally pinned down the shape of (44) Nysa, one of the brightest asteroids in the main belt and a puzzle for more than a century. It appears to be two or possibly three bodies resting against each other rather than one rock.
Meanwhile, in California's interior…
Two beads carved from giant rock scallop shells turned up hundreds of miles inland, and they are thousands of years older than any comparable ornament. Long-distance trade in prestige goods on the Pacific coast started far earlier than the record allowed.
Meanwhile, on a simulated Earth…
A spinnable globe drops today's cities onto Earth's continents as they were and as they will be, so you can watch London and New York drift apart or find your hometown wedged into a future supercontinent. Plate tectonics, made personal.