As interest about the missing Titan submersible grew this week, one horror-themed submarine videogame has seen an increase in sales, according to its developer. Iron Lung game developer, David Szymanski, tweeted a screenshot of a text file showing an increase in the amount of units sold between Monday and Tuesday, with an apparent sharp incline in sales Tuesday. The post was captioned with "This feels so wrong." The source of Szymanski's information was not immediately clear, nor was there any comparison to prior days. "I definitely see the dark humor in this whole Titanic sub thing, it's just... like, I made Iron Lung the most nightmarish thing I could think of, and knowing real people are in that situation right now is pretty horrific, even if it was their own bad decisions … Like all the jokes I've been seeing are hilarious but also good lord nobody should have to die like that,," he tweeted 25 minutes later.

A predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, demonstrates that when an outside threat – like war or a pandemic – fails to unite the group, the divide may be irreversible through democratic means. Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as part of a Dynamics of Political Polarization Special Feature, the model identifies such atypical behavior among the political elite as a powerful symptom of dangerously high levels of polarization. "We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue," said network scientist Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center (NeST) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society." The model – essentially a game that simulates the views of 100 theoretical legislators over time – allowed researchers to dial up party identity, intolerance for disagreement, and extremism to levels such that almost no degree of shock could unite the legislative group. In some situations, the simulation revealed that even the strongest shock fails to reverse the self-reinforcing dynamics of political polarization.

Billions of birds die annually from collisions with windows, communication towers, wind turbines, and other human-made objects. One reason is that birds see a reflection of the sky in the object and think they're flying into an unobstructed path. This is even a problem for solar panel facilities, which see up to 138,000 bird deaths per year in the US from collisions with equipment. Though damage to the solar panels is minimal, officials worry about the impact these structures have on local wildlife. To combat the problem, the Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Argonne National Laboratory $1.3 million to develop a system that can automatically monitor bird activity.

Of all the world's birds, ravens are believed to be one of the smartest. Video taken in Haines, Alaska, shows one clever raven unlocking a weighted trash bin. The bird can be seen fastening its beak under clasps to unlock the lid, knocking it to the ground. The trash-pillaging raven was caught on camera by Randa Szymanski and her husband, who initially assumed their garbage bin was getting knocked over by bears. Despite the garbage lid clasps and a heavy rock on the lid, ravens are regularly able to dig through their trash.