Hello, friends!

Which of these is a genuine headline from 14 March, 1930?

Answer in a moment, but first…

1. Cacao* is pollinated by midges. Despite about 5 million tonnes of cocoa beans being produced each year, no one’s quite sure how the plants are pollinated. A new paper suggests that a group of blood-sucking midges are doing the job. (*Cacao is the unprocessed version of cocoa.)

+ Making chocolate is like mixing concrete. In a process called conching, where the chocolate is worked into its deliciously smooth consistency, researchers observed something similar to what happens in a cement mixer:

“The dry paste formed from the powder and the fluid made shaggy clumps. Then, at a certain point, it morphed into a more liquid-like state and started to flow. Adding the oil near the end just encouraged the process, resulting in a shining creamy liquid straight out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate waterfall.”

2. The parachute silk that delivers spacecraft safely back to Earth is made in a Devon factory. Heathcoat Fabrics in Tiverton, which has been making parachute fabric since before the Second World War, supplies its materials to Blue Origin and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The latter used the fabric in a parachute that landed the Perseverance rover on Mars.

+ Perseverance just finished its first marathon on Mars, passing the 26.2 mile mark yesterday. Terran marathoner Chelsea Gohd explores might happen if you ran a marathon on Mars with human legs and other human paraphernalia.

3. Rabies was virtually eradicated from an area in Switzerland after scientists dropped 4,000 vaccine-laced chicken heads along the shore of Lake Geneva. Vaccinating wild animals can protect humans from disease, not to mention spare the animals from pain and suffering, argues Michelle Ma in this piece for Works in Progress.

+ In 1885, after four boys in New Jersey had been bitten by a mad dog, the public clubbed together to pay for their passage by steamer to Paris, where they would receive Louis Pasteur’s brand new rabies vaccine. “Golly! Is that all we’ve come so far for?” said one of the boys after his jab. The entire event helped ingrain the idea that medical research could benefit the public, writes history professor Burt Hansen.

4. Having feelings for chatbots goes back to the 1960s. In the mid-’60s, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, one of the first ever chatbots, to simulate a conversation between a patient and a psychotherapist. What he didn’t expect was users to become so taken with it, they would share intimate details about their lives with the machine. David Robson notes this love for the machine in an article for New Scientist.

+ This tendency to attribute human qualities, such as empathy, to computer programmes is called the ELIZA effect. Corydon Ireland writes in the Harvard Gazette: “Weizenbaum was dismayed when his secretary asked to be left alone with ELIZA so she could have a real conversation. ‘No one understands,’ said a frustrated Weizenbaum later. ‘No one is there.’ By the 1970s, he was a critic of the limitations of artificial intelligence.”

5. In 1976, a team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst cobbled together a wind turbine… and it worked really well. The team wanted to prove that wind energy could keep rural homes warm in the winter months. And could it ever: “We had to open up the doors in the dead of winter. It was just too damn hot,” says Michael Edds, the project’s first resident engineer.

+ Today, about 10% of electricity in the US is generated by wind. In Great Britain, that figure is just shy of 30%.

Science talks and lectures from Monday 22 June to Sunday 28 June. Many are free!

(All times are BST.)

Rhinos in the rainforest: what links the world’s rarest rhinos and the climate crisis?, with Dr Jo Shaw, Tom Owen Edmunds, Dr Barney Long, and Nicole Egna, Royal Geological Society, Monday 22 June, 14.00, free #conservation #pachyderms

The science of DMT and ayahuasca, with Dr David Luke, Seed Talks, Monday 22 June, 19.00, from £13.50 #psychedelics #psychology

From self-regulated to hybrid regulated learning: a framework, with Dr Hayo Reinders, University of St Andrews, Tuesday 23 June, 16.30, free #education #learning #ai

Exploring ancient Mars with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, with Dr Keyron Hickman-Lewis, the Geological Society, Tuesday 23 June, 18.00, free #geology #mars

On the nature of time according to modern physics, with Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Gresham College, Tuesday 23 June, 19.00, free #physics

More than words: the science behind speech, communication and human connection, with Yvonne Wren, University of Bristol, Thursday 25 June, 18.00, free #language #speech

The speed of life, with Anjali Goswami, Royal Institution, Friday 26 June, 19.20, pay what you can (minimum £5) #evolution #biology #ecology

“You are one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There’s only one of you. So to give your voice to a machine, to say, speak for me, I’m going to be silent, is such a crime against yourself.” – writer Dave Eggers on Wild Card with Rachel Martin

The answer to the teaser is “Scientists spy planet hunted for 25 years”, and that (then) planet was Pluto. “Astronomers believe it’s big and cold,” the article goes on.

(“Heredity…” – about DNA – is from 1947, “US approves pill…” is from 1960, and “Dr Albert Einstein…” is from 1955.)

Thanks for coming, and see you next week! x

PS: Meet Brötchen (“bread roll”), Berlin Zoo’s new baby pygmy hippo.