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We are in the early 1900s, and a French chemist (also an artist and decorator), Edouard Benedictus, has a banal accident in the laboratory: He drops a flask. Only this time, it doesn't shatter. The pieces of glass remain stuck together, like a mosaic. Intrigued, Benedictus delves deeper and realizes there was a solution of collodion inside the flask, which, once evaporated, had deposited on the surface of the glass like a film and was holding the pieces of glass together. He had unknowingly invented shatterproof glass.

It may take less than 1,000 years for an advanced alien civilization to destroy its own planet with climate change, even if it relies solely on renewable energy, a new model suggests. When astrophysicists simulated the rise and fall of alien civilizations, they found that, if a civilization were to experience exponential technological growth and energy consumption, it would have less than 1,000 years before the alien planet got too hot to be habitable.

In computerized simulations of packaging and assembly lines where humans and robots work together, the algorithm developed to account for human carelessness improved safety by about a maximum of 80% and efficiency by about a maximum of 38% compared to existing methods.