a pile of stuff

> create a (small) black hole that orbits the earth

>send a batch of cheese to go orbit mars or something

>bring the cheese back after a while

Longtime Nautilus contributor and the "Indiana Jones of marine biology," Peter Ward has spent decades studying the ancient cephalopod that gave our magazine its name. On an expedition to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Ward and his colleagues sampled two nautiluses long regarded as separate species. Despite striking differences in their shells and anatomy, DNA analysis revealed no genetic difference between them. The discovery became the starting point for Ward's exploration of epigenetics—the study of how environmental influences can alter the way genes are expressed without changing the underlying DNA sequence. In this essay, Ward argues that epigenetics may help explain why some organisms that appear to be distinct species are actually one and the same—and why Earth may contain fewer species than scientists have traditionally believed.

These people noticed the same-species phenomenon with the nautiluses because they thought they were comparing two different species, but realistically, it's less likely people are going to want to do DNA sequencing on some bug #45,890 on enough individuals to catch it, when they could be spending their time and money doing first-time sequencing on a bunch of obviously different species of bugs.

I read the same three or four pages of the new network analysis paper probably six times yesterday, and at some point I had the math notation page on Wikipedia open for reference, and I don't have a subject matter expert's understanding but I do get more of it than I did when I started. And the next time I read it I'll understand it more.