A very powerful woman's story

A phone hidden in a baby's diaper became a young mother's way of telling her story from detention in Libya. The rescue in the title is hers.

Rescue

The TLE that hit the ER-2 produced very strong UV signals but comparatively weak IR.

The pilot remembered the storm shooting lasers at him. Ultraviolet signals and a purple hue told researchers what the lasers were, and why the next generation of lightning sensors needs to see in the UV.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

In a flash, one of them climbs onto the bike and rides off.

Day one of a new job, up a ladder, pasting Rita Hayworth to a wall half by half. Some men circle between the parked cars; in a flash the bike is gone, an accomplice fakes concern, another points the wrong way down the road. The street sounds give way to a swelling score, the camera cranes back, and within seconds a bicycle has stopped being a bicycle.

Bicycle Thieves

A giant Jurassic dipluran shows that hidden mouthparts evolved more than once.

A 165-million-year-old fossil from Inner Mongolia looks like a textbook dipluran, except its jaws sit outside its head. That single detail suggests hidden mouthparts evolved separately in three groups, overturning the idea that they share one ancestral origin.

A Jurassic giant with its mouthparts showing

Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

A poet left alone in a vocal booth, session after session, produced a catalog of old poems, songs and stories. When six busy musicians could not gather in one room, that catalog and a rule against heavy gear shaped the record.

Sing the Color Blue

During pregnancy, a woman's brain changes enormously.

Pregnancy and the postpartum remodel the brain more, or at least faster, than adolescence does, making them among the most plastic periods of adult life. The evidence takes apart three old stories about motherhood: idealization, minimization, and the famous "mommy brain."

A Mother’s Brain: The New Science of the Neuro-Maternal Revolution

Once the pollinators go, we'll all go with them

A film without a villain, unless the villain is eighty years of farming policy. Why the loss of birds and insects outside our own windows matters more than cute penguins, and what happens if struggling farmers go under.

Derek vs Derek

Nonmeritocratic beliefs rise among Chinese college students; greater increases correlate with steeper rises in depressive symptoms.

Young people are told that effort and education decide success. Following Chinese youth from early adolescence into their twenties, the study finds college students still value effort but increasingly see family wealth, connections and luck at work, and those who notice it most grow more depressed.

Disillusionment With Meritocracy During the Transition to Adulthood: Longitudinal Change in Belief Systems and Depression in China