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Kwesi Bowman was 21 when he posed for a photo wearing a blue Civil War Union army uniform. Bowman didn’t fight in the Civil War. In fact, he was born in the 21st century. But his great-great grandfather, Andrew Jackson Smith, was a war hero who risked his life to carry his regiment’s battle flag through enemy fire during the Battle of Honey Hill in 1864. Bowman’s photo shoot was part of a project in which descendants of Black Civil War soldiers recreate portraits of their ancestors.

The project is the brainchild of British photographer Drew Gardner. Gardner began taking photos of the descendants of famed historical figures many years ago, but he recently turned his attention to people who changed history but may never have been recognized for it. From there, he decided to try to track down descendants of enslaved people, including Black men who fought in the Civil War.

In 2023, Bowman and many other descendants gathered at a studio in New York City, where Gardner took portraits of them using a 19th-century camera. Each descendant reproduced the pose from their ancestor’s portrait and wore a near-copy of his uniform.

Most of these soldiers are not as well known as Andrew Jackson Smith, whose grandson, Andrew Bowman, Sr. (Kwesi’s grandfather), successfully campaigned to get him a Medal of Honor—the U.S. government’s highest military decoration—in 2001, decades after his death. And it wasn’t easy to link most of the soldiers with their descendants. While Americans whose families immigrated to the United States can often trace their family histories, descendants of enslaved people were included in fewer of the historical documents that researchers often rely on. For example, when enslaved people were listed in records, they were often unnamed. So Garner and a team of researchers had a lot of work to do.

In one case, the team set out to research a Civil War soldier named David Miles Moore, Jr., who was only a teenager when he enlisted in the Union army in 1863. Moore served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the unit of Black soldiers later depicted in the 1989 movie Glory. The researchers unearthed a record showing that Moore had filed for a military pension in 1897 and then found his name in the 1900 U.S. Census. From there, they traced Moore’s family to his living descendants, the Flowers family. It was 9-year-old Neikoye Flowers who recreated a portrait of Moore, holding a drum like the one his ancestor held.

Austin Morris recreated a portrait of his ancestor, Lewis Douglass, a Civil War soldier and the son of famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Morris, who is 20, has always known that Frederick Douglass was in his family tree. But dressing up like Lewis made him feel a special connection to the Douglasses.

“I was looking at his picture, thinking: I’m 20. He was in his 20s when the picture was taken. He fought in the war, and he was one of the first Blacks to sign up for it,” Morris told Smithsonian Magazine.

Neikoye Flowers’ mom, Janisse, says this portrait project is giving her son and his twin sister a similar sense of pride.

“They’re going to remember everything about this trip,” Janisse told Smithsonian. “And hopefully it turns that page in history where they can brag about this to their kids and grandkids.”

Ask a driver what’s most challenging about operating a car, and they’re likely to say it’s parallel parking—maneuvering a vehicle into a space between two cars already parked on the side of a street. Parallel parking requires three precise turns of the steering wheel (more turns might be needed for a tight parking spot or with a nervous driver). But what if a car’s wheels could rotate 90 degrees, allowing the car to move sideways, right into that spot? A new technology makes this, and more, possible.

Hyundai Mobis’s new e-corner system allows a vehicle’s wheels to turn so they’re perpendicular to the vehicle. This enables drivers to move the car sideways (Hyundai calls this “crab driving” because crabs move sideways), diagonally, and even in a full, 360-degree spin. The Hyundai Motor Group says this makes it easier not only to parallel park but also to maneuver around parking lots, narrow streets, and obstacles in the road.

When antique collector Sara Rivers Cofield found strings of unrelated words written on two pieces of paper from the 1880s, she had no idea what they meant—and neither did many code experts. Now, the mystery has been solved. It turns out that Rivers Cofield’s mysterious messages were probably old-fashioned weather reports.

Rivers Cofield found the messages in a hidden pocket of an antique dress she’d purchased in 2013. The handwritten words didn’t make much sense together. In fact, they didn’t seem related at all. One line read, “Bismark omit leafage buck bank,” and there were many more like it. Perplexed, Rivers Cofield went online and asked for help. Clearly, this was some kind of code—but what code was it, and how could it be cracked? 

Marvel has a new superhero, and she has the power to change the world.

Kahhori (pronounced KAH-HORI), a young Mohawk woman, was introduced in the animated Marvel TV show What If…?, which explores what would happen if certain events had never taken place. Kahhori is living in what’s now New York state in the 1500s when Europeans arrive in the area and attempt to enslave the Indigenous people. By that time, the Mohawk nation had long been part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of five Indigenous nations.

In real life, Europeans eventually colonized large areas of what’s now the United States and took the land where Indigenous people had been living for thousands of years. In the show, however, Kahhori discovers that she has incredible powers that enable her to help the Haudenosaunee fight back and negotiate a peace agreement. The Europeans leave the area without colonizing it, and the Haudenosaunee remain on their land.

“‘What if?’ That’s what I was thinking of,” Agnes “Sweets” Jacobs told North Country Public Radio, after watching a screening of the episode. Jacobs is a sub-chief of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. “What if we didn’t welcome [the Europeans]?…What if we still lived in peace and harmony and took care of the earth the way we’re supposed to?” 

The episode is notable because Marvel Studios created it in consultation with Mohawk people. Almost all the dialog is in the Mohawk language and voiced by Mohawk actors. Details such as what Kahhori would have worn are accurate.

“[The people at Marvel] were faithful and they were steady and they were completely committed to treating us with the greatest respect,” Doug George-Kanentiio, who is Mohawk and who served as a historical consultant on the show, told North Country Public Radio.

What If…? is available to watch on Disney Plus.

Tetris is one of those video games that’s always been impossible to beat—until now. Thirteen-year-old Willis Gibson recently became the first person to reach what’s basically the end of a game of Tetris.

There’s no actual end to Tetris. The game involves manipulating shapes created from seven different configurations of four blocks so that they complete rows in a grid on screen. Each row disappears when it’s completed. If a player doesn’t complete enough rows, the blocks reach the top of the screen, and the game is over. The blocks fall faster and faster until the player can’t keep up. When developers designed Tetris, they figured it would beat everyone. The game isn’t made to be defeated.

A house in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., planned a famous civil rights march is being relocated and will soon be open to the public. The house will be moved to Dearborn, Michigan, to be part of a history museum called Greenfield Village.

Jawana Jackson, who grew up in the house, sold it to the Henry Ford Foundation so it could be recognized for its part in the civil rights movement. Jackson was 4 years old in 1965, when King and other civil rights leaders arrived at the house to plan marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of voting rights for Black Americans. The march was one of many that King and other leaders organized to protest racist laws and policies. While at the house, King had telephone conversations with U.S. president Lyndon Johnson. He urged President Johnson to support legislation expanding voting rights and protections to Black Americans. That same year, the U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Jackson’s parents offered King, an old friend who lived in Montgomery, the use of their home because they knew his work would be important to Jawana’s future.

“[Jawana] and children in this country and all around the world … deserve a better, a more even, a more just society. Whatever we can do to support you, we’re here,” Sullivan Jackson told King, according to the Pensacola News Journal.

“It became increasingly clearer to me that the house belonged to the world, and quite frankly, The Henry Ford [Foundation] was the place that I always felt in my heart that it needed to be,” Jawana Jackson told the Associated Press.

The foundation runs Greenfield Village, a history museum in Michigan that contains more than 80 historic structures. Soon, the Jackson home will be one of them. Officials are dismantling the home so it can be transported to Dearborn, where it will be rebuilt. Once open to the public, the home will contain some of King’s neckties and pants, as well as furnishings dating back to 1965.

The home is expected to open in the next three years.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have finally solved a problem that vexed them for months: they’ve located two missing tomatoes.

The dwarf tomatoes were grown aboard the space station as part of ongoing research to see how well plants grow in space. But in March, shortly after U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio harvested the fruit, he lost it—which may be understandable, given that anything on the station that’s not tied down will float away.

“I put it in a little bag, and one of my crewmates was doing a [remote] event with some schoolkids, and I thought it’d be kind of cool to show the kids—‘Hey guys, this is [a] tomato harvested in space’,” Rubio said in October. “I was pretty confident that I Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it … and then I came back and it was gone.”

Rubio spent hours searching unsuccessfully for the tiny tomatoes. Meanwhile, other astronauts jokingly accused him of eating them. Then, in September, it was time for him to return to Earth. Because the ISS is a low-humidity environment, Rubio predicted the fruit would quickly shrivel and become unrecognizable.

Then, in December, the good news came. The two tomatoes had turned up.

“Our good friend Frank Rubio, who headed home [already], has been blamed for quite a while for eating the tomato,” NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli said during a December 6 livestreamed event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ISS. “But we can exonerate him. We found the tomato.”

Mystery solved!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has a new math professor with an unusual background: He used to play in the National Football League (NFL). Former Baltimore Ravens guard John Urschel began teaching at MIT in the fall of 2023.

Urschel discovered his love for math as a kid, when he happily tackled the math and puzzle workbooks his mom gave him and, as an 8th grader, took a college math class. By the time he got to college, he was a talented football player but possibly even more gifted in math. After the NFL drafted him, in 2014, he decided to apply to MIT to get a high-level degree called a Ph.D. MIT admits very few applicants, but Urschel got in.

What do you do when you play for the NFL in Maryland and you’re admitted to school in Massachusetts? If you’re John Urschel, you find a way to make it work. For one year, Urschel continued to play pro football full time while taking his MIT classes online. And while he juggled both responsibilities, he was happiest when he was studying math. In 2017, at age 26, Urschel decided to retire from the NFL so that he could devote his time to what he loved the most. He earned his Ph.D. in 2021.

“[MIT] is my favorite place in the world,” Urschel told Sports Illustrated in 2017. “I love being here. I love every day I’m here. The happiest I’ve ever been in my life is when I’m at MIT. Ever in my life. EVER in my life! Happiest ever.”

Now an assistant professor, Urschel says he hopes to inspire young people to study math, science, and engineering. Sometimes he gives talks to kids and teens—and he knows he can serve as an example of what’s possible.

“I know I wouldn’t be where I am today as a mathematician if it wasn’t for a lot of specific people, a lot of different mathematicians deciding that I was worth their time,” Urschel told ESPN in 2020.

A commercial jetliner completed a flight from London, England, to New York City powered only by sustainable jet fuel. Instead of fossil fuels, the Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787 plane ran on a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) consisting mostly of cooking oil, animal fat, and synthetic kerosene made from corn. Other planes have crossed the Atlantic Ocean without fossil fuels, but this was the first time a commercial jet made the journey. 

“The world will always assume something can’t be done, until you do it,” Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, wrote on his Facebook page. Branson was on board the flight, dubbed “Flight100,” along with scientists, engineers, and journalists. There were no paying passengers.

It’s one of the most talked-about issues: Human-made pollution is changing Earth’s atmosphere and leading to rapid climate change. But how did the atmosphere change before humans began producing pollution, and what can that tell us about the future of the atmosphere? Scientists believe the key to finding out may be the study of ancient ice.

The Ice Core Archive in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a massive freezer full of ice that originated mostly in Greenland. The ice, which is compressed snow rather than frozen water, dates back as far as 120,000 years ago. It’s a snapshot of a time when the atmosphere was unaffected by human activity.

Air temperatures in Greenland were actually warmer 120,000 years ago than they are today—not because of human activity but because of natural atmospheric conditions. The ice cores can help scientists figure out what the atmosphere was like at that time and how it affected sea levels. Using this information, they hope to be able to figure out how much sea levels will rise due to today’s human activity, according to University of Copenhagen glaciology professor Jorgen Peder Steffensen, who manages the Ice Core Archive.

“With ice cores, we have mapped out how greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane vary over time,” Steffensen told Agence Presse-France. “And we can also see the impact of the burning of fossil fuels in modern times.”