Hello, friends!

It feels so good to be back, and thanks for joining me again after such a long break. It means a lot 🥲

Here’s a teaser: All but one of these events happened in the same year. Which is the odd one out?

Answer in just a moment, but first…

1. Australian beer companies changed the design of their bottles so that beetles would stop humping them. The bottles’ size, colour, and array of little bumps had fooled the amorous male beetles, which mistook them for females. This serious case of mistaken identity was having such an impact on the beetle’s population that the beer companies removed the little bumps from their bottles.

+ The beetles’ behaviour illustrates the power of “supernormal stimulus”, an exaggerated version of an existing physical feature that animals respond to.

+ A just-about SFW video of the beetles on the job, in what looks like an early-’90s era nature programme from the BBC archive.

2. It’s possible to calculate pi using Minecraft. Mathematicians Molly Lynch of Hollin University and Michael Weselcouch of Roanoke College combined the random movements of the game’s slimes and zoglins with a “throwing darts” technique (also known as the Monte Carlo method) to calculate an approximation of the delicious constant.

+ Reddit user Psychological_Meat_6 simulated 100,000 games of Wordle using the Monte Carlo method to find the best possible opening word. They found the winner to be SLATE, followed by SPANE, SALET, STARE, and, erm, SOARE (an obsolete word meaning a young hawk, apparently).

3. In 1797, one of Stonehenge’s stones fell over. What happened next means we know what they’re made of. In 1958, a restoration team drilled through one of the stones to install metal rods, and one of the resulting cores had – after a journey across the Atlantic and back – been returned to English Heritage. A team examined the core using many different techniques, finding it was almost entirely made of quartz. “It has to be the most analysed piece of rock on Earth,” said archaeologist Mike Pitts.

+ Other fun examples of nominative determinism in science: Ion Ion, author of an article published in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, astronomer Stella Law, and incontinence paper authors J. W. Splatt and D. Weedon.

+ New Yorkers: It’s Manhattanhenge time.

4. Cooped up together over Antarctica’s dark winter, researchers on the coldest continent reported… loneliness. A study following 12 “hivernauts” found that social interaction isn’t always a good thing, as they reported heightened loneliness and paranoia. Study author Jan Schmutz suggested a lack of privacy may be the problem. “We humans are deeply social creatures, but also there are boundaries,” Schmutz said.

+ We’re going to need to get a handle on this before sending anyone on deep space missions. When Mars-500’s crew emerged from the pretend spaceship they’d lived in together for 520 days, one had fallen into a 25-hour routine, taking them out of sync with the others, one had suffered chronic sleep deprivation, and another developed mild depression.

+ NASA’s 378-day Simulated Mars Mission is live, and recently passed the halfway mark. That crew of four is due to “return to Earth” on 31 October.

5. This dog has been trained to sniff out pests and diseases that could destroy UK woodlands. Zinc, a three-year-old cocker spaniel, paid a visit to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show last week. Zinc’s handler noted that sniffer dogs can get “nasal fatigue”, so they’re only put to work for three to four hours a day, and get lots of breaks.

+ A look at the training college in Pennsylvania where dogs earn their search and rescue stripes.

Science talks and lectures from Monday 1 June to Sunday 7 June. Many are free!

(All times are BST.)

Beyond Net Zero: Can we repair the climate? with Dr Luke Haworth, University of Cambridge, Monday 1 June, 19.30, free #climate

Pluto isn’t a planet, with Professor Chris Lintott, Gresham College, Wednesday 3 June, 19.00, free #astronomy

Thinking like Hutton: Shaping the next 300 years, with Professor Iain Stewart, Luisa Hendry, Christopher Jackson, and Dr Katie Strang, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Wednesday 3 June, 18.00, free #geoscience

Forensics: How to solve a crime, with Dame Lorna Dawson, Katherine Brown, Iain Macauley, Georgios Zouganelis, and Nicholas Dawnay, Royal Institution, Saturday 6 June, 19.30, pay what you can #biology #chemistry #technology

“We know less than 1 percent of what happened 500 years ago, and two-thirds of what we know is wrong.” – Meghan Herbst in Wired, speaking to sci-fi writer and history professor Ada Palmer.

Now for the answer to that teaser: Pluto was discovered, neoprene was invented, and Buzz Aldrin was born in 1930. The airlock was patented 100 years earlier, in 1830.

Thanks for coming, and see you next week! x

PS: Harry Hill doing Morrissey on Stars in Their Eyes is the clip I didn’t know I needed.