Month: August 2021

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  MJ (Zendaya) and Peter Parker (Tom Holland) try to enjoy a peaceful moment on a rooftop [credit: YouTube/Sony Pictures ]

Sony Pictures was scrambling over the weekend to quash a leaked teaser trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home. But now the studio has released the official version, announced during CinemaCon in Las Vegas by chairman Tim Rothman. And it's a doozy: a full three minutes laying out the plot, with shots confirming some of the rumors that have been swirling since the project was announced—including the involvement of Doctor Strange and the return of several classic villains from prior Spider-Man films. Alas, it looks like we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if the rumored appearances by past Spider-Man stars (from the films directed by Sam Raimi and Marc Webb) are true.

(Some spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home and other MCU and DCEU films below.)

In 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter Parker is grieving the loss of his mentor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), who perished in the final battle against Thanos in Avengers: Endgame. What better than a summer field trip to Europe to help him process his grief? Then Nick Fury shows up and enlists Spider-Man's help in battling a series of Elementals. Peter thinks he's found a new mentor in Quentin Beck, aka Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal). But Beck has his own agenda and betrays Peter. The two battle it out, and Beck is killed. But he gets his revenge, sending doctored footage of the climactic battle framing Spider-Man for his death to Jonah Jameson at The Daily Bugle. The footage also reveals Peter's secret identity as Spider-Man to the world.

Enlarge / Two ants tunneling in green gel. A new Caltech study found that ants search for and remove loose grains of soil when digging their tunnels, much like humans remove loose blocks while playing Jenga. (credit: Kimberly Hosey/Getty Images)

Ants are prodigious diggers, constructing elaborate nests with multiple layers connected by an intricate network of tunnels, sometimes reaching depths of 25 feet. Now, a team of scientists from Caltech has used X-ray imaging to capture the process of how ants construct their tunnels. The scientists found that the ants have evolved to intuitively sense which grain particles they can remove while maintaining the stability of the structure, much like removing individual blocks in a game of Jenga. The team described their work in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists interested in collective behavior have been studying ants for decades. That's because, as a group, ants behave like a form of granular media. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour fire ants from a teapot, for instance, or the ants can link together to build towers or floating rafts. Ants may be tiny critters with tiny brains, but these social insects are capable of collectively organizing themselves into a highly efficient community to ensure that the colony survives.

Several years ago, behavioral biologist Guy Theraulaz of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France, and several colleagues combined laboratory experiments with Argentine ants and computer modeling to identify three simple rules governing the ants' tunneling behavior. To wit: (1) the ants picked up grains at a constant rate (about 2 grains every minute); (2) the ants preferentially dropped their grains near other grains to form pillars; and (3) ants typically chose grains marked with a chemical pheromone after being handled by other ants. Theraulaz et al. built a computer simulation based on those three rules and found that, after a week, their virtual ants built a structure that closely resembled real ant nests. They concluded that those rules emerge from local interactions between individual ants, with no need for central coordination.

Enlarge (credit: GM)

GM has announced that it is recalling every Chevrolet Bolt made to date, including the new EUV models, over concerns that a manufacturing defect in its LG-made batteries could cause a fire.

The Bolt was first recalled in November after five cars that hadn’t been in crashes caught fire. After investigating the problem further, Chevy recalled a second batch in July. The problem was traced to two manufacturing defects which could occur simultaneously. The defects—a torn anode tab and folded separator—created conditions that could lead to a short in affected cells. So far, the company has identified 10 fires that involve faulty batteries, according to an AP report. 

This third and latest recall includes 73,000 Bolts made from 2019–2022, the current model year. This brings the total recall to nearly 142,000 cars, with over 100,000 having been sold in the US. GM estimates that the initial recalls will cost $800 million, and it expects the new one to add $1 billion to the total. GM said it will be seeking reimbursement from LG.

Enlarge / Wales' forward Gareth Bale misses a penalty kick during the UEFA EURO 2020. (credit: VALENTYN OGIRENKO / Getty Images)

The world of sports is full of people who choke under pressure in very visible and humiliating ways. But as it turns out, humans aren't the only species capable of underperforming when the stakes are high, new research shows.

A team of scientists recently published a paper suggesting that at least three rhesus monkeys will, in fact, choke under pressure. The authors told Ars that this lapse in performance is almost certainly true of all rhesus monkeys—and quite possibly other primates as well.

There are several reasons you might expect a person—or a monkey—would fold under pressure. The researchers list social incluence, fear of losses, and over-excitement as some examples. So they decided to check if the size of a reward, which would increase the pressure, impacted a monkey's performance. When the reward was particularly large, the monkeys performed the task less well compared to more reasonably sized prizes.