#wild

Two Science Advances studies with Freie Universität Berlin scientists find the ocean under Enceladus’s ice easier to sample from orbit than assumed, and that some microorganisms tolerate its conditions better than thought.

Researchers led by evolutionary biologist Julia Van Etten turned a motel room in Nags Head, N.C., into a lab and identified two new photosynthetic Paulinella species, published in the Journal of Phycology. Paulinella is the only known organism besides plants and algae to acquire photosynthesis by engulfing a bacterium.

Lex Friedman recounts the 2011 Apple Cards letterpress app, codenamed Speed Racer, including an account from the print partner’s program lead describing it as a pinnacle of mismanagement.

In Works in Progress, Patrick Fitzsimmons examines why the eastern Mediterranean’s great powers—Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaeans and others—collapsed within a few centuries of the Battle of Kadesh.

Quanta reports on how researchers who once sought quantum effects in photosynthesis now find quantum-style mathematics useful for describing classical biology.

Archaeologists found the first two intact burials at Göbeklitepe in Turkey (8,700–8,000 BCE); comparing them with loose bone fragments suggests many came from ordinary burials that later eroded downslope into the monumental buildings.

A Space Weather paper argues that an anonymous 1871 report of a magnetic disturbance disrupting rail travel in Exeter in October 1841—thought to be the earliest space-weather effect on technology—most likely has a typo in its date.