Habitat navigation is a skill that helps animals reach food or safety. To test how navigation works in fish, Shachar Givon and colleagues taught goldfish to drive a vehicle—a motorized fish tank with wheels—on land. The vehicle was programmed to move in the same direction that the fish swam within the tank. In the experiment, the fish were tasked with driving their tank to a pink board. They received a treat when they succeeded, and they often did. Because the fish could move their tank to the board, Givon concludes that their navigational skills aren’t specific to an aquatic environment.

Women like Dorothy T. Blum made important early contributions to the history of US cryptology, a field concerned with secure data communication and storage. Blum provided cryptological services for the US Army in the 1940s and then joined the National Security Agency (NSA). She was a pioneer in transitioning the NSA to using computers for cryptoanalysis. In this way, Blum and others like her helped make it possible for more women—such as Maureen Baginski, who currently works in intelligence and supports the FBI—to enter the field of cryptology.

Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth’s research into the debt defaults of Philip II (who ruled an empire including Spain and much of Belgium from 1556 to 1598) relates to other work on European early modern state finance, including Hoffman and Norberg’s research on the relationship between state finance and political development. But Drelichman and Voth’s unique contribution to the field is their reconstruction of the earliest extant set of annual fiscal records for any sovereign state, demonstrating in turn that Philip’s defaults were caused by short-term cash shortages, not long-term unsustainable debts.

The following text is from Yung Wing’s 1909 memoir My Life in China and America.

We landed in New York on the 12th of April, 1847, after a passage of ninety-eight days of unprecedented fair weather. The New York of 1847 was altogether a different city from the New York of 1909. It was a city of only 250,000 or 300,000 inhabitants; now it is a metropolis rivaling London in population, wealth and commerce. The whole of Manhattan Island is turned into a city of skyscrapers, churches and palatial residences.

Although notorious for its strict formal requirements, the sonnet is nevertheless represented by such wide-ranging examples as Claude McKay’s “America” and Natalie Diaz’s “My American Crown”—poems that differ remarkably in subject, rhythm, and structure. It may seem counterintuitive that the sonnet—ostensibly rigid and timeworn—could accommodate such variety, but poet Carl Phillips contends that the form invites experimentation: when a genre’s conventions are as recognizable as those of the sonnet, the opportunity to subvert them is especially irresistible.