Enlarge / Math for English Majors talks about numbers as nouns, verbs as calculations, and algebra as grammar. (credit: Ben Orlin)

Galileo once famously described the universe as a great book "written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures." Unfortunately, it's a language that many people outside of math and science simply do not speak, largely because they are flummoxed and/or intimidated by the sheer density of all that strange symbolic notation.

Math teacher extraordinaire Ben Orlin is here to help with his latest book: Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. And just like Orlin's previous outings, it's filled with the author's trademark bad drawings. Bonus: Orlin created a fun personality quiz, which you can take here to find out your mathematical style.

Orlin's first book, Math with Bad Drawings, after his blog of the same name, was published in 2018. It included such highlights as placing a discussion of the correlation coefficient and "Anscombe's Quartet" into the world of Harry Potter and arguing that building the Death Star in the shape of a sphere may not have been the Galactic Empire's wisest move. We declared it "a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike, because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems—or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds."

It has been five long years since director Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite topped Ars' list for best films of the year, whose prior work on Snowpiercer and Okja are also staff favorites. We're finally getting a new film from this gifted director: the sci-fi comedy Mickey 17, based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. Judging by the trailer that recently dropped, it feels a bit like a darkly comic version of Duncan Jones' 2009 film Moon, with a bit of the surreal absurdity of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) thrown in for good measure. And the visuals are terrific.

Ashton's inspiration for the novel was the teletransportation paradox—a thought experiment pondering the philosophy of identity that challenges certain notions of the self and consciousness. It started as a short story about what Ashton called "a crappy immortality" and expanded from there into a full-length novel.

Ashton told Nerdist last year that Bong's adaptation would "change a lot of the book," but he considered the director a "genius" and wasn't concerned about those changes. The basic premise remains the same. Robert Pattinson plays the space colonist named Mickey Barnes, who is so eager to escape Earth that he signs up to be an "expendable" without reading the fine print.

Enlarge / Many have seen a reflection of Vincent van Gogh's inner turmoil in the swirling vortices of The Starry Night. (credit: Public doman)

Vincent van Gogh's most famous painting is The Starry Night (1889), created (along with several other masterpieces) during the artist's stay at an asylum in Arles following his breakdown in December 1888. Where some have seen the swirling vortices of the night sky depicted in Starry Night as a reflection of van Gogh's own inner turmoil, physicists often see a masterful depiction of atmospheric turbulence. According to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids, the illusion of movement in van Gogh's blue sky is also due to the scale of the paint strokes—a second kind of "hidden turbulence" at the microscale that diffuses throughout the entire canvas.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” said co-author Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University in China. “Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

Physicists have long been fascinated by van Gogh's innate feel for turbulence. As previously reported, in a 2014 TED-Ed talk, Natalya St. Clair, a research associate at the Concord Consortium and coauthor of The Art of Mental Calculation, used Starry Night to illuminate the concept of turbulence in a flowing fluid. In particular, she talked about how van Gogh's technique allowed him (and other Impressionist painters) to represent the movement of light across water or in the twinkling of stars. We see this as a kind of shimmering effect, because the eye is more sensitive to changes in the intensity of light (a property called luminance) than to changes in color.

Enlarge / The Fifty-Eight holes board from Çapmalı. (credit: W. Crist et al., 2024)

An ancient board game known as Hounds and Jackals has long been believed to have originated in Egypt. However, according to a paper published in the European Journal of Archaeology, a version of the game board found in present-day Azerbaijan might date back even earlier, suggesting that the game originated in Asia.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

Last year, archaeologists discovered a 500-year-old game board in the ruins of Ćmielów Castle in Poland. It was a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.

Tom Hardy is back for one last hurrah as investigative journalist Eddie Brock, host of an alien symbiote that imparts superhuman powers to its host, in the final trailer for Venom: The Last Dance. The trailer has all the wise-cracking "buddy cop" vibes and fast-paced action we've come to expect from the franchise, including a trip to Vegas where Venom discovers the addictive allure of slot machines. But there are also hints of an inevitable bittersweet farewell—because this time they'll face off against Knull, god-creator of the symbiotes.

(Spoilers for Venom and Venom: There Will Be Carnage below.)

As previously reported, the first film in the franchise served as an origin story for our antihero. A bioengineering firm called the Life Foundation discovered a comet covered with symbiotic lifeforms and brought four samples back to Earth. Brock's then-fiancée, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), showed him classified documents revealing that the foundation was conducting human/symbiote experiments. The symbiotes needed oxygen-breathing hosts to survive, but they invariably ended up killing those hosts.

Enlarge / The Ig Nobel Prizes honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Curiosity is the driving force behind all science, which may explain why so many scientists sometimes find themselves going in some decidedly eccentric research directions. Did you hear about the WWII plan to train pigeons as missile guidance systems? How about experiments on the swimming ability of a dead rainbow trout or that time biologists tried to startle cows by popping paper bags by their heads? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2024 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit.

Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a "non-opera" featuring various songs about water, in keeping with the evening's theme. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Enlarge / A woman wearing a sweatshirt for the QAnon conspiracy theory on October 11, 2020 in Ronkonkoma, New York. (credit: Stephanie Keith | Getty Images)

Belief in conspiracy theories is rampant, particularly in the US, where some estimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the population believes in at least one outlandish claim. And those beliefs are notoriously difficult to debunk. Challenge a committed conspiracy theorist with facts and evidence, and they'll usually just double down—a phenomenon psychologists usually attribute to motivated reasoning, i.e., a biased way of processing information.

A new paper published in the journal Science is challenging that conventional wisdom, however. Experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory showed that the interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs, even two months later. The secret to its success: the chatbot, with its access to vast amounts of information across an enormous range of topics, could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual.

"These are some of the most fascinating results I've ever seen," co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University, said during a media briefing. "The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies, that they're the result of various psychological motives and needs. [Participants] were remarkably responsive to evidence. There's been a lot of ink spilled about being in a post-truth world. It's really validating to know that evidence does matter. We can act in a more adaptive way using this new technology to get good evidence in front of people that is specifically relevant to what they think, so it's a much more powerful approach."