Hello, friends!

The World Wide Web was invented at CERN. In recognition of this, who appears on the research facility’s 404 page?

Answer in a moment, but first…

💃🏽 It’s my party: Two articles I wrote went live on Ingenia this past week 😅

The first is about data and tech at the World Cup, and how it’s changing football. It also gets into machine learning, what makes AI explainable, and why you might need Arsène Wenger if you want to build a footie chatbot.

The second was a real labour of love: I spoke to rocket scientists, a sci-fi author and actual astronaut (!) to find out how near-future technologies will let us travel interstellar distances, i.e. Ryan Gosling our way out of the Solar System.

…and now on with the show.

1. Fruit flies’ sperm are 20 times longer than their bodies. (And 1,000 times the length of human sperm.) So how is it that they don’t tangle up with themselves? A team at Flatiron Institute in New York put the sperm under a microscope, finding that the super-long swimmers were neatly stacked, “like spaghetti strands that stay together as they swirl in a pot of water”, writes Monique Brouillette in the New York Times.

+ And this week in insect drop news: the California Department of Food and Agriculture plans to release millions of sterile Mexican fruit flies in the state to control its population.

2. In 1960, a psychology professor tried to show that memories are edible. James McConnell conditioned flatworms to scrunch up their bodies under a bright light, before cutting them up and feeding them to other flatworms. Did it work? The cannibal worms did show the scrunching response to light, as though they had remembered, rather than learned, what to do, explains Claire L. Evans in Quanta, but efforts to replicate McConnell’s results failed.

+ Evans looks at the continuation of this “edible memory” work, which in some cases, appears to have been more successful. One 2018 experiment showed that a sea slug’s response to a shock could be transferred to another sea slug by injecting the latter with the former’s genetic material.

3. There’s no such thing as a seagull.

+ Does richer birdlife correlate with World Cup success? (Or, do gulls = goals?) A serious investigation by Jacob Whitehead.

4. In 2022, researchers grew plants in genuine moon dust for the first time. The astrobotanist team, from the University of Florida, grew thale cress in regolith samples from three of the Apollo missions. “[The cress] was stressed out, but it was amazing to show that plants can grow in real regolith,” botanist Jessica Atkin told Robin George Andrews at New Scientist.

+ Can you terraform Mars? Play this game by Nature to find out.

5. A certain tomato plant secretes a chemical that stops caterpillars eating their leaves… and drives them to cannibalism. “At the end of the day, somebody gets eaten,” said study author Professor John Orrock. (There’s a video as well. Warning: it’s horrifying.)

+ Olivier Giroud enjoying his first Colin the Caterpillar. (Ed: This isn’t science.) (Also Ed: I know, but boys enjoying their food is one of my favourite things to look at.)

Science talks and lectures from Monday 29 June to Sunday 5 July. Many are free!

(All times are BST.)

The thyroid-miscarriage connection: new research and hope for the future, with Dr Rima Dhillon-Smith, University of Birmingham, Tuesday 30 June, 18.00, free #gynaecology

Zoology Live! the livestream (about ladybirds), with Professor Helen Roy, Museum of Zoology, Thursday 2 July, 19.00, free #entomology #interactive

“Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul.” – Alexander von Humboldt, naturalist and explorer

The answer to the teaser is Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the www. And here’s a link to CERN’s 404 page.

Thanks for coming, and see you next week! x

PS: The brown bears of Alaska are starting to bulk up – watch Chunk et al. snatching salmon on these live streams from Katmai National Park.