A New Kind of Fossil (Eos)
by Grace van Deelen
A fossilized feather is a rare discovery. A study of a 30,000-year-old bird fossil has found that this kind of preservation follows a different path than other fossilization—and that could lead to the discovery of many more fascinating specimens in the future.

How to Program a Fruit Fly (Ars Technica)
by John Timmer
As some researchers work to make robots that can mimic living things, others engineer organic lifeforms to act more like robots. That’s how fruit flies managed to spell out “Hello World.”

Mythologizing Rural America (Public Books)
by Jacob Bruggeman
Today, many people look at rural America as representative of an idyllic past. That’s been true since the nation’s founding, but the reality has always been more complicated.

Yes, We Know How the Income Tax Happened (ProPublica)
by Jesse Eisinger
President Trump recently said that the income tax was established “for reasons unknown to mankind.” Historians disagree. But the beginnings of the federal income tax system is actually a pretty weird story.

A Different Kind of Smarts (Quanta Magazine)
by Yasemin Saplakoglu
Over the decades, researchers have become increasingly impressed with how many cognitive tasks birds can do as well as apes. New studies point to different evolutionary origins of the brain structures that allow for this kind of thinking in entirely different parts of our family tree.

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