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Thanks to new research out of MIT, you might one day be able to subtly manipulate your picture to make it more memorable — meaning that people should be more likely to remember your face. According to the research article: "One ubiquitous fact about people is that we cannot avoid evaluating the faces we see in daily life ... In this flash judgment of a face, an underlying decision is happening in the brain — should I remember this face or not? Even after seeing a picture for only half a second we can often remember it." There are subjective factors affecting how a face sticks in your memory — for example, if you know someone else who looks similar, you might find a new face more familiar. But researchers found that there is also a strong universal component to memorability. Some faces are just consistently more easily remembered.

The movie grew out of a conversation Mr. Jenison had with Penn Jillette in which he casually remarked that he thought he had figured out how the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was able to produce canvases so lifelike that they still mystify painters and art historians alike.

The secret, suggested Mr. Jenison, whose role in inventing the “video toaster” means he is sometimes called “the father of desktop video,” was the canny use of mirror-based optical devices. So he set out to test his hypothesis by painting his own stroke-by-stroke version of Vermeer’s “Music Lesson” in a Texas warehouse, with Teller, the quieter half of the duo, documenting every advance and reverse as Mr. Jenison experimented with the optical equipment he thinks Vermeer used.

“I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on? The question predates Berger’s interest in it by centuries. In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos.

When he was seventeen years old, the artist and illustrator Chris Foss read a glowing newspaper review of “Whaam!,” the diptych painting by the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which was heavily inspired by a panel from a 1962 comic book. “I remember being completely outraged,” Foss said. “The world was going mad over this blown-up comic-book panel, and all I could think about was the original artist, the person who arranged the dots and who was being completely overlooked. Who knew that, thirty years later, the same thing would happen to me?” In October, “Ornamental Despair,” a 1994 painting by the British artist Glenn Brown, sold at auction in London for $5.7 million. The painting is almost an exact replica of a science-fiction illustration that Foss created for a men’s magazine in the nineteen-seventies, for which he was paid about three hundred and fifty pounds.

In the first place, science doesn’t involve merely telling stories about history. If it did, scientific explanations might not have any claim to a higher level of veracity than religious stories. The stories that science does tell have empirical consequences, and make physical predictions that can be tested. In this sense, all science is historical science. We make observations about past events, based on everything from data gathered in the laboratory yesterday to remnants of phenomena, like meteor impacts or stellar explosions, which may have happened billions of years ago. We then use them to make predictions about the future, about experiments or observations that have not yet taken place. To quibble about how long ago the original data was generated is to miss the point

The nearest living relative of the passenger pigeon is a bird called the band-tailed pigeon, which lives in the western United States and in Canada. The theory behind Revive & Restore’s resurrection effort—which, it should be noted, has a staff of one—is that, with some very sophisticated genetic slicing and dicing, a band-tailed pigeon embryo could be converted into a passenger pigeon embryo. This embryo could then be transferred to a band-tailed pigeon egg and raised by band-tailed pigeon parents.

he Washington Post reports that an “obscure textbook bill that elicited threats from Japan and drew busloads of Korean activists to the Capitol was headed Wednesday to Gov. Terry McAuliffe for his signature.” The bill requires all new Virginia textbooks to mention that the Sea of Japan is also known as the “East Sea.” McAuliffe promised to make the change on the campaign trail while attempting to win votes from Northern Virginia’s growing Korean community, who claim that the name was wrongly popularized while Korea was under Japanese occupation. It has predictably irritated Tokyo, with Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. warning that it could harm Japan-Virginia business relations. New York and New Jersey are reportedly considering similar bills.

What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.

Life is a concept, not a reality.