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

The French theorist Roland Barthes has this dictum that ugliness can be described, but beauty cannot, because beauty just repeats itself.

A seminar paper on the strange creation scene in Frankenstein drew a simple objection: its author was a teenager. Years later, a reader excited above all by novels that fail to work began to ask why. The answer pointed to bad writing as a concept criticism lacks.

Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel

Plants are intelligent beings that sense, remember, and communicate.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Understory

The most sophisticated robots are often the ones that do more with less.

The idea began not with an equation but at a sailing centre, watching windsurfers. Years of work on maple-seed robots met a sail seen every day since childhood, and a sensor that could drop in by air and then sail off took shape.

ALBATROSS: A Bioinspired, Aerially Deployable, Autonomous Sailing Sensor Platform