Syria’s culture ministry confirmed that six Roman-era statues of Venus were stolen from the National Museum in Damascus, and investigators now believe the theft was carried out by a single individual rather than an organized trafficking network. Staff discovered the loss early on Nov. 10 after finding a door broken from the inside. The missing pieces, small nude figures between 6 and 9 inches tall, are among the museum’s oldest artifacts, though experts note they would be difficult to sell on the black market. Founded in 1919, the museum houses major archaeological treasures, including clay tablets bearing the oldest known complete alphabet. It fully reopened earlier this year after long periods of closure during Syria’s civil war, and authorities are now working to recover the statues amid an ongoing review of the museum’s security.
What happens when your most valuable spy suddenly disappears after a murder?
In Atlanta, a young FBI counterintelligence agent, Frank Figliuzzi Jr., gets an unusual call. Local police have found a woman dead in her apartment, a note pinned to her chest in a foreign language, and an FBI business card nearby. The victim is the wife of a code clerk at a hostile embassy, the quiet specialist who handles encrypted communications and sees every classified message that flows in and out. The clerk is also an FBI asset. Now he is missing.
Frank has to work with seasoned homicide detectives while keeping the most sensitive details classified. As he studies the crime scene and digs into the couple’s secret life, new intelligence suggests the clerk’s own government may have sent a team to the United States to find him. What begins as a domestic murder inquiry turns into a manhunt on two fronts, with the Bureau and a foreign service racing to reach the same man for very different reasons.
Join Frank Figliuzzi Jr. in this week’s podcast selection, 'The Code Clerk', as he tries to track down a vanished spy before an adversary can erase him.
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How does a tiny invader convince an entire colony to betray its own queen?
New research reveals that some parasitic ant queens can pull off a remarkable takeover: they trick a host colony into killing its reigning queen so they can seize the throne themselves. The strategy hinges on chemical deception, a kind of pheromone-based coup.
Ant societies aren’t strangers to queen-killing. Workers sometimes turn on their mother when she stops producing offspring, and invading queens have been known to commit regicide directly, usually by biting or beheading their rivals. But this recent study, published in the journal Current Biology, shows that a newly mated Lasius orientalis queen can take a subtler, far more manipulative approach.
After sneaking into a Lasius flavus nest, the invading queen sprays the resident queen with a liquid from her abdomen, believed to be formic acid. The coating masks the host queen’s scent, the chemical signature that tells workers who belongs and who doesn’t. Stripped of her identity, the queen suddenly smells like an intruder. Her own daughters then swarm her, attacking as if defending the nest. With the colony’s monarch eliminated, the invader steps into her place. The workers, unaware of the deception, dutifully raise offspring until the colony eventually collapses.
Technology
Zoox Versus Waymo
What happens when two self-driving giants hit the streets?
Amazon’s Zoox has opened its robotaxi service to the public in San Francisco, putting the company in direct competition with Alphabet-owned Waymo. The move marks a new phase in the race to dominate commercial self-driving transport.
Zoox, founded in 2014 and purchased by Amazon for about $1.3B in 2020, takes a different approach from its rival. Instead of retrofitting existing cars, Zoox builds its own all-electric, steering-wheel-free shuttles designed specifically for robotaxi service. The company recently announced that a former California bus factory will be converted into a manufacturing hub capable of producing around 10,000 vehicles a year. About 50 Zoox robotaxis now run in San Francisco and Las Vegas. For now, rides are free and restricted to select neighborhoods while regulators review the expansion.
Waymo has been charging fares in San Francisco since 2023 and continues to scale its footprint. The company recently extended its autonomous routes to include highways around San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
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Colombian researchers have recovered their first artifacts from the San José galleon, a Spanish warship that sank off the Caribbean coast more than 300 years ago. The newly retrieved items, a cannon, three coins, and a porcelain cup, offer an early glimpse into a wreck that has long been shrouded in mystery and legal disputes. Officials are keeping the precise coordinates classified, given the ship’s contested treasure, estimated to be worth as much as $20B.
The San José sank to the ocean floor, nearly 2,000 feet below, in 1708 during a battle with an English fleet, taking with it gold, silver, and emeralds. Its legend only grew over time and after Colombia announced it had located the wreck in 2015, a tangle of competing claims quickly emerged from Spain, a US salvage firm, and Bolivia’s Qhara Qhara Indigenous group.
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