In case you missed them, here’s another chance to catch 10 of our most popular recent stories. A midnight ISS flyover of London; a view over an alien world; a night at the Malware Museum; digital data storage capable of surviving for billions of years; unimaginably large and small numbers in recent experiments; the unearthly beauty of the Red Rectangle; deep learning revitalizing neural networks; 10 inspiring works that showcase the aesthetic side of math; and a surprising mathematical law tested on Project Gutenberg texts are all among the top stories.

Surprising Mathematical Law tested on Project Gutenberg Texts
Zipf’s law in its simplest form, as formulated in the thirties by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, states surprisingly that the most frequently occurring word in a text appears twice as often as the next most frequent word, three times more than the third most frequent one, four times more than the fourth most frequent one, and so on. The law can be applied to many other fields, not only literature.

When Art and Math Entwine: 10 Inspiring Works Showcase the Aesthetic Side of Math
The connection between mathematics and art goes back thousands of years. Today, with the help of computers, mathematicians and artists are entwining their skills to take things to a whole new level. There is much symmetry, geometry and measurement involved in creating beautiful art. As well, many artists take advantage of mathematical findings, such as the golden ratio to make their artwork realistic and beautiful.

Deep Learning Revitalizes Neural Networks to Match or Beat Humans on Complex Tasks
Deep learning has created a resurgence of interest in neural networks and application to everything from Internet search to self-driving cars. Results show better-than-human accuracy on real-world tasks that include speech and facial recognition. Fueled by modern massively parallel computing technology, it is now possible to train very complex multi-layer neural network architectures on large data sets to an acceptable degree of accuracy.

Unearthly Beauty of the Red Rectangle
Straight lines do not often crop up in space. Whenever they do, they seem somehow incongruous and draw our attention. The Red Rectangle is one such mystery object. It first caught astronomers’ attention in 1973. The star HD 44179 had been known since 1915 to be double, but it was only when a rocket flight carrying an infrared detector was turned its way that the red rectangle revealed itself.

Extreme Numbers: The Unimaginably Large and Small Pop Up in Recent Experiments
The physics world erupted in celebration this month with the confirmed discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) group. Predicted by Einstein a century ago, the discovery verifies his description of the universe in which space and time can warp and bend. And what is the evidence gathered by LIGO?

Eternal 5D Data Storage Could Record History of Humankind
Scientists have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years. Using nanostructured glass, scientists have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity.

A Night at the Malware Museum
Offering a glimpse of an important part of computer history, the new Malware Museum is an online collection featuring emulated versions of MS-DOS viruses from a simpler time. Assembled by Mikko Hermanni Hyppönen, the chief resource officer at Finnish security firm F-secure, the new collection of emulated malware programs launched just few days ago and has already attracted more than 100,000 visitors.

Microsoft Research Project Puts Cloud in Ocean for First Time
In 2015, starfish, octopus, crabs and other Pacific Ocean life stumbled upon a temporary addition to the seafloor, more than half a mile from the shoreline: a 38,000-pound container. But in the ocean, 10 feet by seven feet is quite small. The shrimp exploring the seafloor made more noise than the datacenter inside the container, which consumed computing power equivalent to 300 desktop PCs.

View Over an Alien World
At first glance, this scene may look like a reptilian eye or a textured splash of orange paint, but it is actually a fish-eye view of Saturn’s moon Titan. It was acquired at a height of about five kilometers as ESA’s Huygens probe, part of the international Cassini-Huygens mission, descended through Titan’s atmosphere before landing.

London Nightlife
ESA astronaut Tim Peake took this image of London, UK, from the International Space Station 400 kilometers above Earth. At the time, it was midnight in the capital city and, because the Space Station runs on Greenwich Mean Time, it was also the same time for Tim Peake. Tim took this photo from the Space Station’s European-built Cupola observatory. Such a clear image is rare.