Science

Fins, fossils, and the awkward little fish that changed your face forever

Someone had to be first, and science may have found out who.

Picture this. It is the first day of school, about 400 million years ago. Everyone is comparing fins, gossiping about trilobites, and waiting for class to start. Then in swims one shy little fish sporting something no one has ever seen before. A jaw. Functional. Hinged. Ready to make chewing an actual thing. Oh, how they laughed.

As Erik Barnes reports in this story, that pioneer might have been Romundina gagnieri, a small armored fish whose Arctic fossil is suddenly spilling secrets. Synchrotron scans revealed tooth-bearing plates on the roof of its mouth, complete with layered odontodes. Translation: this little creature was messing around with bite long before evolution made it mainstream.

The discovery challenges the long-held idea that teeth began far back in prehistoric mouths and slowly migrated forward. If these scans hold up, chewing may have begun earlier, weirder, and in a much more socially awkward setting than anyone expected.

To that poor, haphazardly anthropomorphized pioneer, I just want to say: they're not laughing now!

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And what did we learn, Olympic Edition.

Yesterday I asked if you’re watching the Olympics and the overwhelming answer was… a bit.

• Are the Olympics happening? Oh! (21.4%)

• I'll wait for the Summer games, thanks. (3.6%)

• I'm pinned to the TV! I love them so much. (22.6%)

• I'm watching the highlights when I remember. (40.5%)

• Something else (share your answers). (11.9%)

Readers wrote in with opinions (Pro hockey players shouldn’t be allowed to take time off to compete!), favorite sports (Figure skating is big!), and annoyance (None of my shows are on!).

Culture

The cure for runaway polarization might be found on your own block

Local governments can give hope in a fractured political world.

Politics can be a lot like fire. When it grows too big, it rages out of control, burns everything in its path, and scares the life out of us. But shrink it to the size of a candle and suddenly it is useful. It lights the room. It warms your hands.

In this story by Lauren Hall, we learn that some parts of American politics still run at a candlelight size. Local officials in towns under 50,000 residents report far less partisan heat than what scorches the national stage. Their fights are about potholes, zoning quirks, school logistics. Problems that actually need solving. Problems you cannot hashtag your way out of.

Hall argues that national drama can spill into city halls, but the quieter successes of local governance hint at something important. If small communities can keep the flame steady, maybe the rest of the country can learn from the way they hold the match.

History

The digital detective work reconnecting ancient faces with their forgotten pasts

How do you solve a puzzle without a box when you only have 20% of the pieces, and they’re scattered around the globe?

Museums around the world are filled with beautiful Egyptian artifacts that, thanks to outdated and dodgy record-keeping practices, have lost their origin stories long ago. As Carlo Rindi Nuzzolo explains in this piece, the result is a global puzzle with most of the pieces separated by oceans and time.

Enter 3D scanning. A quick digital sweep turns fragile fragments into precise data that can be compared across institutions. Suddenly, a shard pulled from the dirt in 2024 can be aligned with a museum mask in Copenhagen to see if their shapes match, right down to the millimeter.

These digital fingerprints help archaeologists rebuild relationships once thought permanently lost, letting forgotten objects reclaim their histories and reconnect with the stories that made them.

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us…“

On Valentine's Day, 1990, humanity took a selfie from 3.7 billion miles away. As the venerable Voyager 1 probe shot out of the solar system, scientists had it point its camera back home for one last set of photos before shutting it down to save energy. The image it captured was majestic and humbling, depicting Earth as nothing more than a speck suspended in light. The “beams” are lens artifacts that give the picture an ethereal feeling.

Carl Sagan, who was largely responsible for getting the team to agree to take the picture, was inspired by the image to pen his famous Pale Blue Dot passage in which he paints the epic struggles and mighty triumphs of our species as both ephemeral and grand in equal measure. “Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

Today, Voyager is nearing 50 years old and resides deep in interstellar space, traveling about 38,000 miles further from home every hour. It continues to function at reduced capacity to this day, but the Pale Blue Dot image may be its greatest contribution to humanity's self-image.

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