Science

Sonselasuchus cedrus, discovered in fossils from Arizona, was a crocodile relative from the Triassic period that grew into an ostrich-like adult

Engineers have discovered an unexpected link between two very different realms of physics: the behavior of electrons in graphene and magnetic waves in specially engineered materials. By designing a thin magnetic film with a hexagonal pattern of holes—similar to graphene’s structure—the researchers showed that magnetic “spin waves” can follow the same mathematical rules as graphene’s famously unusual electrons. The surprising overlap reveals a deeper connection between electronic and magnetic systems and gives scientists a powerful new way to study complex magnetic materials.

Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset—the largest ALMA image to date—will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its center.

I am not usually fond of restaurants that serve many small “nouvelle” courses that are lovely and exquisitely curated, as they don’t usually get me full—my prime requirement for a good restaurant. But last night we went to one of these multicourse places and had one of the best meals of my life—and it left me sated. This is the story of that meal.

AT 5:30 I met up with my friend, the engineer and origami master Robert Lang, visiting Chicago to teach a two-day class in origami at a meeting.  And, as I mentioned yesterday, he invited me to a well-known Chicago restaurant for a slap-up dinner, which lasted a full three hours.  It turns out that his niece manages the place, and so we were able to obtain hard-to-get reservations. From Robert:

As I may have mentioned before, my niece Kate is the general manager at Next Restaurant, and she’ll get us in. (You may recall I tried this with you several years ago during a Chicago trip, but the airlines conspired to ruin my arrival. This time, I’m flying in the day before, so there’s more buffer.) Next is in the family of restaurants owned by the famous chef Grant Achatz, the most famous of which is Alinea. Here’s a Wikipedia photo of Achatz at Alinea, preparing a dish tableside: star5112, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s a University of Chicago connection with Achatz, and I well remember his diagnosis of, ironically, mouth cancer. I did not expect him to survive, but he did:

On July 23, 2007, Achatz announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth, which spread to his lymph nodes. Initially, Achatz was told that radical surgery was necessary, which would remove part of his mandibular anatomy, including part of his tongue and large swaths of neck tissue. Later, University of Chicago physicians prescribed an alternative course of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. This led to full remission, albeit with some side effects including a transitory loss of his sense of taste, which eventually returned. On December 18, 2007, Achatz announced that he was cancer-free. He credited the aggressive protocol of chemotherapy and radiation administered at the University of Chicago Medical Center for driving his cancer into full remission. The treatment regimen, administered under the direction of Drs. Everett E. Vokes, Blair and Haraf at University of Chicago, did not require radical invasive surgery on Achatz’s tongue.

Yay! It’s been nearly twenty years now and he remains cancer-free. Achatz cooks at Alinea, but owns some of Next and, I presume, visits and gives feedback.

Every four months or so, the appropriately named Next changes its themes—themes that are quite eclectic. You can see the history of the changing themes since 2011 at its Wikipedia page, as well as reading about the difficulty of getting reservations. We were lucky to get in, but Robert began the request several months ago, and of course has a genetic connection to the restaurant.

The theme until the end of April is Japan.

From Next’s website:

Robert sent me this photo the menu, so I knew we were in for a treat:  There’s a more complete menu below. as we got a few extra dishes:

Below is Achatz from a FB video. To prepare for the meal, as he says, much of the Next team went to Japan and spent their time eating at a variety of humble and fancy restaurants. They then, said his niece, came back and spent a few months developing a menu that was inspired by what they tasted.  I think the slurring of Achatz’s speech is due to his treatments for mouth cancer.

There is only one menu, and you can get it with or without a wine pairing (this one includes sake) or with non-alcoholic beverages. We got it with booze, of course, and the wines and sakes chosen matched the dishes remarkably well. They were fancy, tasty, and pricey wines. This place is a class act with some good palates working behind the scenes.

This is our menu; we were comped a few dishes because of Robert’s relationship to his niece, and so we wound up with eleven dishes, six wines, and two sakes (I love sake, and these were good ones, not obtainable, I was told, in local stores):

The food menu (this is what we were actually served including the gratis dishes; they apparently made up a custom menu post facto for us as a souvenir):

The wine-and-sake menu (while waiting for me, Robert was given a glass of champagne):

And now for the dishes (all photos by me except Robert’s, which are labeled “RJL”).

First, a glass of bottle-fermented sparkling sake, a real treat. It was served poured to overflowing in a glass inside a cedar box.  After you take a few sips from the glass, you pour the rest of the glass into the cedar box and drink it from there, a traditional practice that gives the liquid a slight woody flavor:

The sake, one of several made by Masumi. It looks to cost about $60 a bottle retail: they did not stint on the wines but that was not near the most expensive libation we were served:

Me, excited before dinner; photo by RJL:

First course: chawanmushi (a savory egg custard), made with sweet corn, umeshu (a Japanese plum liqueur), and black truffle.  Like nearly all the dishes, I had never tasted anything like it before. It was fantastic. Note the dried cornhusk garnishing the plate.  It’s eaten with the wooden spoon:

The next dish arrived at the table as a gift: osetra caviar (the second best in the world after beluga) served with bluefin tuna, wasabi, and crème fraîche. It came with four sheets of seaweed (to the right next to the wasabi), and two already-formed seaweed rolls (left) with unidentifiable goodies inside. You are supposed to roll the caviar, crème, wasabi, and salmon into a sheet of seaweed and eat it as if it were a luxurious Japanese burrito.

The only caviar I’d ever had before was pressed caviar made from irregular eggs, and sevruga caviar (the third rarest).  It was hard for me to resist leaving the caviar out of the burrito and just eating it plain with the mother of pearl spoon (the traditional utensil), so I did eat some plain (fantastic) and also put some into two “burritos” (also fantastic).  The two rolls to the left were eaten separately. Note the two “fruits”, actually pickled vegetables) at the top and bottom of the plate. I believe they are a pickled radish and a pickled cucumber, both decorated with nasturtium blossoms.  Those, too, were amazing, full of complex flavors. The “pickle” was like the most delicious pickle you could imagine, and of course you can’t buy them as they’re made in house.

Photo by RJL. Note the lovely setting with chopsticks (and fancy chopstick rests) and spoons:

The wine: Vermintino, an Italian white wine made by Laura Ascero, light, crisp, slightly saline, and dry, a perfect accompaniment to the creamy burritos with caviar. These people know their wines:

Two cute little “ramen eggs” in a spoon with ginger and togarashi (the red spice on top), made to resemble the flavor of Japanese ramen (there’s no ramen in there, and I can’t remember what is). Two cute and savory bites.

A fancy dish: gyoza (a dumpling filled with shrimp and sweet potato), accompanied by a froth made from carrot ponzu. You can see the dumpling at 10 o’clock next to a savory crunchy thing. AI describes “ponzu” as “a tangy, citrus-based Japanese sauce made from soy sauce, vinegar, and citrus juice (like yuzu or sudachi), often with added mirin, dashi, and bonito flakes for a complex salty, sour, and umami flavor.”  Again, it was like nothing I’d ever tasted.

The wine: a Grüner Veltliner (Austrian white), the “Ried Rosenberg” blend made from the Weingut Ott.  A dry version of the wine, it again was great with the dish:

We continued with a fancy dish comprising three items: king crab to the left, a fancy rice in the middle, and a broth (I can’t remember what kind) to the right, with the broth poured from the traditional Japanese metal teapot. Above on the tray is also a pot with sprigs of fresh rosemary, with coals below them to create a herb-scented smoke while you had this dish. You could eat a bit of the incredibly sweet king crab with some rice, and then wash it down with the broth.

With that dish we move to Burgundy for the white wine, A Premier Cru Chablis, the “Fourchaume” blend by De Oliveira Lecestre, a crisp and fruity but dry wine. Another good pairing.

The seventh dish was kare pan (Japanese curry bread), filled with grilled cabbage and heritage pork belly.  This was very complex, and look at the decorations! I didn’t photograph the inside but yes, it was excellent.  There was no dish in the whole meal that I found less than inventive and tasty.

And with the kare pan we moved to the red wines, this one a 2021 Grenache from Cemetery Vineyard from Newfoundland Winery in Mendocino, California.  It was a light red wine to go with the pork, and very tasty (photo by RJL).

I couldn’t remember why they called it “Cemetery Vineyard” (they told us), but AI had the answer:

The “Cemetery Vineyard” (specifically the noted Rockpile Ridge site) is named for a distinct outcropping of rocks at the base of the vineyard that looks like giant, old-fashioned headstones. This specific block has been referred to by this name for over 140 years, long before the wine was commercialized

And then some fish: a luscious piece of grilled cod with a brown butter and miso sauce, accompanied by seaweed and golden mustard seed.  I’m not much of a fish-eater but I loved this:

And for that dish of course we needed sake, and were poured a whiskey tumbler (with ice) of 2024 Tamagawa “Ice Breaker” sake. We were told it was unfiltered, and it was a stronger, slightly sweet, and luscious rice wine. And there was a penguin on the label! The website says this:

Tamagawa’s Ice Breaker is a cask-strength, fresh-pressed junmai ginjo that is undiluted, unpasteurized and unfiltered. This is a seasonal release always listed with the brewery year (BY).

Pairing Notes: The Ice Breaker sake is designed to be drunk over ice as a refresher in the humid Japanese rainy season. Try it with edamame, mackerel, skipjack tuna and eggplant with zesty grated daikon.

I believe the white stuff with the cod above is grated daikon (white radish), but I’m not sure.

When the cod was served, they also put a mysterious bowl of seaweed containing very hot rocks atop a seaweed packet. We asked what it was, and were told was part of the next course being steamed by the rocks while we ate the fish. See below. (Photo by RJL).

Where’s the beef? It was next in a “wagyu au poivre”, and yes, it was real wagyu beef from Japan, the first I’ve had. It was of course rare, and then the seaweed packet was opened to reveal the cooked accompaniments: pear and trumpet mushrooms, along with kombu (edible kelp). Photo by RJL:

Yummers! The beef was so tender and tasty that although the slice was not large, I ate it in very small bites so I could prolong the flavor. It was great with the meaty trumpet mushroom and the fruitiness of the pear:

Of course with that you need a gutsier red wine, which came as a Cabernet Franc (often found in Bordeaux) from Podere Forte, an Italian winemaker. The designation was “Guardiavigna Orienello” with some age: 8 years. It’s a biodynamic wine, tasting much like a Bordeaux; the website describes it this way:

Guardiavigna is a version of perfectly and slowly ripened Cabernet Franc. An intense, deep and vast bouquet. Full bodied, with a very refined tannic structure. A very elegant and endless wine.

It goes for $150-$180 per bottle.

Photo by RJL:

With two courses left, we had dined for about 2½ hours, eating leisurely and catching up.  Robert’s house is nearly rebuilt after the Altadena fire and should be done by June. His studio will take a bit longer.

We were then treated to “Tokyo toast”, with sake lees (I guess the rice at the bottom of the fermenting tank), sakura (cherry blossom), and kumquat. You see that the dishes are inspired by the flavors the team encountered in Japan, but the dish itself is sui generis. It was a very elegant version of a Rice Krispy treat:

And the eleventh and last course: musk melon with saffron, pine nuts, and spaghetti squash. An inspired combination; you have to have a good palate to even think of putting these things together. They melded well. Again, the presentation was carefully thought out, with matching fancy plates, trays, and appropriate cutlery:

Sauternes, my favorite sweet wine, goes with very few things. I eat it either on its own or with a ripe peach or mango. It does not go with chocolate (Thomas Keller hasn’t learned that lesson.) But it did go with the musk melon, which is not too sweet, and the spaghetti squash, barely sweet. And so we were served a 2019 Château Fontebride 2019.  That wine also counted as dessert.  If you haven’t tried a Sauternes, which gets better and more golden as it ages, you might spring for one. (I brought Robert a half bottle of another Sauternes as a gift; it wasn’t clear whether it would make it back to California since Robert is staying with his brother in Chicago.)

And so we wound up at 8:30, having started at 5:30. I was replete, filled with great food and fancy wine, amazed at what we had eaten, impressed by the thought and care that went into the food and service, and, of course, slightly buzzed.  Next is an amazing restaurant and I’d gladly go again—if I was willing to spring for the meal (I have no idea what it cost) and could get a reservation (the website says there are 10,000 people on the Next waiting list!).

When you have a long, sumptuous, and fancy meal like this, you leave the restaurant with a bracing sense of well being. (A Parisian chef once told me that you know a meal is good if the birds sing more sweetly when you leave.) I had that feeling, and of course it was helped along by the slight buzz from wine and sake.

Many thanks to Robert for inviting me, to his niece Kate, the manager, for greeting us and stopping by to chat during the meal (and of course running things), and the staff who organized, cooked and served.

Oh, two dark pictures of the place, the first of the kitchen by Robert and the second of the main room by me. It’s not a large restaurant. Note the Japanese lanterns.

I know that I’m going to get criticized for putting this up, excoriated for eating fancy food and “privilege.” To those who would say that, take a hike. This was a rare treat, and all I can say is that there have been Japanese emperors who haven’t eaten this well.

Physicists have discovered a surprising new “Island of Inversion” in a place no one expected: among nuclei where the number of protons equals the number of neutrons. For decades, these strange regions—where atomic nuclei abandon their usual orderly structure and become strongly deformed—were thought to exist only in highly neutron-rich isotopes far from stability. But experiments on molybdenum isotopes revealed that molybdenum-84 behaves dramatically differently from its close neighbor molybdenum-86, even though they differ by just two neutrons.

Asteroids with tiny moons may be quietly trading material across space. Images from NASA’s DART mission revealed faint streaks on the moon Dimorphos—evidence of slow “cosmic snowballs” drifting from its parent asteroid, Didymos. The discovery provides the first direct visual proof that sunlight can spin asteroids fast enough to shed debris that lands on nearby companions. It also shows that near-Earth asteroids are much more active and constantly reshaped than scientists once believed.

If humankind is to explore deep space, one small passenger should not be left behind: microbes. In fact, it would be impossible to leave them behind, since they live on and in our bodies, surfaces and food. Learning how they react to space conditions is critical, but they could also be invaluable fellows in our endeavor to explore space.

Solid-state batteries could be safer and more energy-dense than today’s lithium-ion technology, but finding materials that allow ions to move quickly through solid electrolytes has been difficult. Researchers developed a machine learning pipeline that predicts Raman spectra and identifies a distinctive low-frequency signal linked to liquid-like ion motion inside crystals. This signal appears when rapid ion movement temporarily disrupts a crystal’s symmetry. The approach could dramatically speed up the discovery of superionic materials for advanced batteries.

Bill Maher’s latest news-and-comedy shtick on “Real Time” deals once again with the flak he got for having dinner with President Trump. Remember? Despite Maher constantly criticizing the President’s policies durin gthe dinner, he also reported that he found Trump affable and friendly.

That was enough for liberals to come down on Maher like a ton of bricks, despite the fact that he simply gave his reaction. Trump’s policies were reprehensible, Maher averred, but he was a good host.  In today’s world that will do you in. Larry David, for instance, wrote a satire of Maher’s reaction in a NYT op-ed called “Larry David imagines a private dinner with Hitler” (archived here), and I imagine that pissed off Maher.

Apparently Trump posted about his dinner with Maher on Truth Social (on Valentine’s Day), and Trump’s post was full of lies (surprise!). Here Maher corrects the record, and gets a few shots back at Trump for lying, while calling out people with true “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”  (“Get a life: stop making him your whole personality”.) But he adds that Trump bears some responsibility for promoting TDS because his racism, misogyny, anti-democratic acts, and corruption “make people crazy.”  Maher further also ticks off a few good things that Trump did, including asserting that “penises don’t belong in women’s prisons,” which will simply anger “progressives” more.  Maher argues that he may be “the last person from the Lunatic Left that is still an honest broker when it comes to Trump.”

Maher winds up addressing Trump directly, calling him out for his many detestable acts—after he’s given the President plaudits for some things.  Yes, Maher seems defensive here, but he’s honest and I still like the guy.  I don’t have much truck with people who say that Trump never did anything good, and, in fact, it’s impossible for that to happen.

Bill’s guests were Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), journalist Don Lemon, and author Annabelle Gurwitch/

As I mentioned yesterday, Robert Lang invited me to dinner last night at a famous Chicago restaurant called Next, whose metier is mulitcourse menus with a theme. And they completely change the theme every four months, so they’re always working on and testing the dishes to come (see the history of the themes at the Wikipedia link given in the first sentence).  The theme of our meal was “Japan,” inspired by the restaurant chef, manager, and some staff having taken a trip to Japan to absorb the food and culture. They they returned to the U.S. and worked for a few months to develop dishes that were not explicitly Japanese, but inspired by the food they tried in Japan.

While preparing the account of our meal for a post, I realized that it is going to take some time, what with 12 dishes and 8 wines (including 2 sakes), as well photos of the menu and the restaurant. I will say now that it was one of the best meals I’ve had in America—even better than the vaunted French Laundry in California, where years ago I paid a lot for a disappointing meal.

We managed to get into this restaurant, which has a huge waiting list, because Robert’s niece is the general manager; and because of that we got a few gratis dishes.

The meal was terrific, with a largesse of small, lovely, and wonderful dishes and thoughtful and appropriate pairings with wines and sakes. The meal did not fail where many of small-dish places do: making you leave when you haven’t had enough to eat. This was not the case at Next: I left dazzled, sated, and a bit buzzed.

I will ask your indulgence because it will take me a few hours to crop the photos, insert them in a post in the proper order, and try to describe the dishes from a memory clouded by sake.  The post will be up tomorrow morning.

To wet your whistle, here’s a photo taken by Robert, showing the introductory tipple, a glass of sake poured to overflowing inside a cedar box. This is traditional: you sip the full glass until it can be poured into the box, and then drink the rest from the box, which lightly flavors the sake with cedar. This was also a rare form of sake for me: a sparkling one.

All will be revealed tomorrow. Right now I am recovering.

We have three cat items and lagniappe today.

This first video was made by Meowtopia, the same people who made the informative video on cat psychology that I posted recently.  Here we have 18 minutes of advice about what not to do to your cats: nine human behaviors that adversely affect cats based on their evolved natures.

The list: failure to greet the cats when you come home; using a laser pointer or other toy that a cat cannot catch (this is a no-no as it violates the predatory sequence that ends with a kill), petting in the wrong places, invasion of a cat’s territory, punishment of trangressing cats by squirting, yelling, or striking them (this conditions them to fear you; the solution is to prioritize a better option), afflicting them with loud noises (their hearing is absurdly sensitive), failure to understand their communications and to respond to it (feral cats don’t meow), picking them up and thrusting them into the hands of a stranger), and, finally, assailing their sensitive vomerine scent-detection system with strange smells like heavy perfumes or air freshener and, worst of all, scented cat litter.

This is a very good and educational effort, not simply a cute cat video. Even if you have a cat, do watch it.

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Winston Churchill was a huge fan of cats, as you can see from this National Trust post below about the lineage of orange (“marmalade”) cats that still roam the grounds of Churchill’s old home, now given to the country. As Wikipedia says in its article about Winston Churchill’s pets (my bolding):

Churchill had many cats in his life, both at Chartwell and in government service. At Chartwell, these included a tabby, Mickey, and a “marmalade colored” cat named Tango. Tango was there in the 1930s and 1940s and appears in anecdotes about those years. But Churchill’s most famous wartime cat was Nelson who was initially a mouser at the Admiralty when Churchill was First Lord. Churchill named him Nelson after the great admiral after seeing the cat chase a large dog away. He then took the cat with him to 10 Downing Street when he became prime minister, where it also chased Chamberlain‘s cat, the Munich Mouser.

In later life, he was given a cat by Jock Colville for his 88th birthday. This was a ginger cat with white markings that he called Jock too. This cat became a favourite in his final years. When he died and Chartwell was donated to the National Trust, the family asked that a marmalade cat with white bib and socks called Jock should always be maintained there. This tradition has continued and Jock VII became the current holder of this position in 2020.

Chartwell was Churchill’s country home in Kent to which he retreated again and again, even when he moved 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.  Click to read about the two living Jocks:

. . . Generations of ginger cats have lived at Chartwell over the years. Since the National Trust opened the house to the public in 1966, the family of Sir Winston Churchill requested that there always be ‘a marmalade cat named Jock, with a white bib and four white socks, in comfortable residence at Chartwell’.

Here are the last two Jocks that are still alive, though Jock VI retired and, nearly blind, lives with a staff member (see short video below).

Jock VII

In May 2020 Chartwell welcomed Jock VII, a six-month-old rescue kitten, to take up this unique role.

Along with his white bib and white paws, Jock VII has a very mischievous character. His favourite pastimes are investigating what the gardeners are up to and playing down in the long grasses of the orchard. He also likes lots of cuddles on the sofa after an eventful day.

Keep an eye out for him as you tour the property.

Rescued

Jock VII, previously known as Sunshine, was rescued by the RSPCA before being adopted by one of the team at Chartwell.
He was rescued along with 30 other cats from squalid conditions. The kittens were very weak and undernourished but were young enough to be brought back to health quickly. Jock was the most confident of the whole group and was already playful and full of fun.

Jock VI

Jock VII’s predecessor, Jock VI, came to Chartwell in 2014. Sadly, he became almost completely blind and was finding life at Chartwell difficult. After his six years of service, he retired and is now enjoying a much quieter and more peaceful life with a member of staff in a garden of his own.

Here’s Jock VI with his staff; she seems quite loving:

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Finally, from an author called Sean, we have a Medium story about his cat Moon Unit (you may remember that this was the name of  Frank Zappa’s daughter, born in 1967).

Click on the link below to go to the story of a latter-day Moon Unit, a cat who went missing from London and turned up in France, toothless but otherwise okay, 8½ years later!

An excerpt:

A few years passed and we had a new year’s party. The next morning we discovered we had one cat missing. Moon Unit had somehow got out during the party and disappeared. We went out looking, printed out posters, told the local cat rescue places, but no luck. People told us about lots of little black and white cats they’d seen, but none of them had MU’s distinctive white nose or big whiskers. So no luck. And we were very sad.

But about a month ago, out of the blue, I got an email from the Kennel Club saying that a cat with a matching microchip had been found. IN PARIS. Now if that isn’t boggling enough, that party was EIGHT AND A HALF YEARS AGO. We exchanged photos with the French rescue place, and it was definitely Moon Unit. Distinctive nose and whiskers as I said. And she has that fur that is dark on top but white underneath.

She had been found wandering around outside a train station in a French suburb, and taken to a cat rescue place, who checked her chip and got in touch. Well, the chip contact details were a bit out of date (did I mention EIGHT YEARS missing?), but the French people were very stubborn and eventually the KC used newfangled email to get in touch with me.

So this weekend we went over to Paris. In the past few weeks, Moon Unit had been checked at the vet, and given rabies shots and worming tablets, and a Pet Passport organised for her. Two lovely ladies came over to our hotel with her on Saturday (we gave them some chocolates and flowers), and we took her to Calais by train (telling her story to the people around us), and our friends met us at the station and drove us onto the car ferry, and back to London. (There aren’t many foot passenger services that take pets).

.. . .Back in London we closed all the doors and let Moon Unit out into the hallway. She had a look around, and seemed perfectly fine. I spent the rest of the evening in the hallway with her, and she’s been following me around all day. She’s not been doing that “OMG new place I must HIDE” thing that cats often do — in fact she’s curled up next to me on the sofa as I write this. (Remember she only got back yesterday).

So there we have it. A tale of European cooperation and perseverance and international mystery. How did Moon Unit get to PARIS? How has she survived for over EIGHT YEARS? How did she lose all her teeth? Has no vet checked her chip in all that time? Answers we will never get, until she writes her mewmoirs.

. . . And the moral of the story — always get your pets microchipped and keep the contact details up to date, even if they are indoor pets. Moon Unit was an indoor cat while she was with us. Hope you enjoyed reading this.

Here’s a photo labeled “Moon Unit back in the day,” presumably taken by Sean.

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Lagniappe:  Here’s a two-minute cat version of Indiana Jones: “Indiana Jonesy” in “Raiders of the lost treat.” You will remember some of the scenes. No cats were injured in the making of this film.

h/t: Matthew Cobb,

Chris Maddison was just an intern when he started working on the Go-playing AI that would eventually become AlphaGo. A decade later, he talks about that match against Lee Sedol and what came next

It's been 10 years since Go champion Lee Sedol lost to DeepMind's AlphaGo. Has the technology lived up to its potential?

Gravity may seem constant, but it actually varies across the planet—and one of the strangest places is Antarctica, where gravity is slightly weaker than expected. Scientists have traced this “gravity hole” to slow, deep movements of rock inside Earth that unfolded over tens of millions of years. Using earthquake data to essentially create a CT scan of the planet’s interior, researchers reconstructed how the anomaly evolved and discovered that it strengthened between about 50 and 30 million years ago.

A team of physicists has experimentally confirmed a long-predicted sequence of exotic magnetic phases in an atomically thin material. When cooled, the material forms tiny magnetic vortices before transitioning into a second ordered magnetic state—exactly as predicted by a famous theoretical model from the 1970s. Observing both phases together for the first time validates key ideas about how magnetism behaves in two dimensions. The findings could help inspire ultracompact technologies built on nanoscale magnetic control.

Today’s Picture of the Week, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), seems to have captured a cosmic hawk as it spans its wings.

NASA’s DART mission slammed into the small asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, and the impact slowed its orbit around the larger Didymos – and also the pair’s path around the sun

Looking for molecular evidence of life on other worlds is tricky, but a test based on the reactivity of carbon compounds could be a useful indicator

Persistent inflammation in the gut, lungs and skin might lead to Alzheimer's disease, but lifestyle choices - from getting vaccinated to eating well - can keep inflammation under control

I need a life—even if that is a life outside of writing for this website. That’s by way of informing you that posting here may be a bit light for about a week. I have a writing assignment, which is to answer Michael Shermer’s response to my own post on this site taking issue with his claim (also in his new book Truth) that we have a form of free will.  (My response will appear at Skeptic.) I can do no other than answer a form of compatibilism that gives us free will simply by redefining the folk notion of free will in an un-refutable way so that that we do have free will even if all our behaviors and thoughts derive from and are compatible with the laws of physics. But I digress.

My second task is to go shopping for much-needed Chinese groceries (I ran out of everything during the cold spell), but, most important, to meet my friend origami master and engineer Robert Lang, who’s invited me for splendid dinner at Next. Next is a sister restaurant of Alinea—surely one of America’s most famous restaurants. Next is equally highly rated. Both Next and Alinea are run by the same chef, Grant Achatz (see a Facebook interview with him here). Robert’s in town for an origami convention, and the trip to Next is prompted by his rare appearance in Chicago and the felicitous fact that Robert’s niece happens to be the general manager of Next.  I think that’s how we got reservations given that the site says, “On any given night, there can be 10,000+ guests on our waitlist.”

Next is so named because it changes menus to a new theme every few months.  This most recent theme is Japan, and I have the menu, which has nine courses that look fabulous (Earlier, Robert provided some origami for the menu.)  I’ll save the food experience for a post (with photos) tomorrow or Sunday. There will also be a wine pairing with the many courses, and I’m sure that a great and bibulous time will be had by all.

Stay tuned. As always, I’ll do my best, both at table and at this site. Oh, and don’t forget to set your clocks forward on Saturday night.