Lawmakers Say Facebook Struck Deals Over Personal Data

(Bloomberg) — Internal emails at Facebook Inc., including those involving Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, were published online by a committee of U.K. lawmakers investigating social media’s role in the spread of fake news.

The documents, which had been sealed by a California court, led lawmakers to conclude that Facebook undertook deals with third party apps that continued to allow access to personal data.

Damian Collins, head of the committee, added that Facebook shut off access to data required by competing apps, conducted global surveys of the usage of mobile apps by customers possibly without their knowledge, and that a change to Facebook’s Android app policy that resulted in call and message data being recorded was deliberately made difficult for users to know about.

In one email, dated Jan. 23 2013, a Facebook engineer contacted Zuckerberg to say that rival Twitter Inc. had launched its Vine video-sharing tool, which users could connect to Facebook to find their friends there. The engineer suggested shutting down Vine’s access to the friends feature, to which Zuckerberg replied, “Yup, go for it.”

“We don’t feel we have had straight answers from Facebook on these important issues, which is why we are releasing the documents,” said Collins in a Twitter post accompanying the published emails.

The senior lawmaker said last week that he would release the emails and that he was free under U.K. law to do so. He’d obtained the documents after compelling the founder of U.S. software company Six4Three to hand them over during a business trip to London.

A spokesman for Facebook was unable to immediately comment.

Six4Three’s founder, Ted Kramer, had obtained them as part of a legal discovery process in a U.S. lawsuit against Facebook that his company has brought against the social network in California.

Facebook touted itself as championing privacy four years ago when it decided to restrict outsider developers’ access to data about its users’ friends.

In one email, dated Feb. 4, 2015, a Facebook engineer said a feature of the Android Facebook app that would “continually upload” a user’s call and SMS history would be a “high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective.” A subsequent email suggests users wouldn’t need to be prompted to give permission for this feature to be activated.

Kramer was ordered by a judge on Friday to surrender his laptop to a forensic expert after admitting he turned over the documents to the British lawmakers, in violation of a U.S. court order.

“What has happened here is unconscionable,” California Superior Court Judge V. Raymond Swope said to Kramer and his attorneys during the hearing.

Facebook wants the laptop to be evaluated to determine what happened in the U.K., to what extent the court order was breached, and how much of its confidential information has been divulged to the committee.

Elon Musk Has Revealed the First Firing of a New Starship Rocket Engine

Elon Musk released footage Sunday revealing the first firing of a new SpaceX flight engine.

The founder of Tesla tweeted photos and video of the new Raptor rocket engine, which is supposed to power a prototype Starship that will take people around the world. One day Musk envisions the rocket will take people to Mars.

A prototype version of the Starship, called the Starship Hopper, is being built at a separate SpaceX branch in south Texas, Geekwire reports. Testing for the starship could begin within the next month or two.

A Solar Storm Could Bring Spectacular Northern Lights Tonight. Here’s How You Can See Them

A solar storm this week will heighten the Earth’s auroras, making the stunning northern lights visible to the northern-most parts of the United States.

Lasting from Wednesday through Thursday, the geomagnetic storm will also impact the Earth’s magnetosphere — or magnetic field, which is impacted by changing solar winds. That means the storm could cause minor “power grid fluctuations” and have small impacts on orbiting satellites, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It appears this upcoming event will allow residents in U.S. to catch a rare glimpse of the northern lights. The center says residents in the northern tier of the U.S., including Michigan and Maine, may be able to see the auroras.

According to a graph from the space center, it also appears states like North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin could also see the lights as a result of the storm. In addition, the northern-most part of Ireland, Norway, and parts of Sweden and Finland can see the lights.

The minor storm is classified as G1, which is the lowest on the scale of intensity from the Space Weather Prediction Center. These kinds of storms occur about 2,000 times over 11 years, the center says, which amounts to more than 180 times per year. The highest level of this kind of storm is a G5, which would involve a “high frequency radio blackout” on the sunlit side of the world for several hours, according to the center. Those come once every 11 years. The largest of these storms come as a result of the release of plasma from the Sun’s corona, called coronal mass ejections, that arrive at Earth and disturb its magnetic fields.

The Real Scientific History Behind the Jurassic Park Dinosaurs

The Jurassic Park franchise — including Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in theaters Friday, almost exactly 25 years after the first movie came out in 1993 — is obviously entirely fictional, so you don’t have to worry that the dinos are coming to get you. But that doesn’t mean there’s not something real at its heart: the story was in fact inspired by important changes in the scientific world.

And, over the course of the franchise, though they might not get everything right, the filmmakers have incorporated some expert advice on how to make the dinosaurs in the movie the most realistic depictions possible.

Here’s a look at how the real evolution of dinosaurs influenced the dinosaurs onscreen:

How Scientific Discoveries Inspired the Franchise

When Michael Crichton wrote the 1990 sci-fi novel that inspired the first Jurassic Park movie in 1993, he was inspired by paleontologist Jack Horner’s 1988 book Digging Dinosaurs, on dinosaur behavior and discoveries made in the prior decades. “He bases the character of Alan Grant on a guy digging up baby dinosaurs in Montana at a place called Egg Hill and [my site] was called Egg Mountain,” Horner tells TIME.

A “dinosaur renaissance” had kicked off in the ’60s and ’70s, according to paleontologists. That didn’t mean there wasn’t interest in dinosaurs before the 1960s. In fact, as Daniel Barta, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, explains, there was a great deal of interest in paleontology in the Victoria era and the decades that followed, especially after scientists first recognized dinosaurs as a specific group. But interest in dinosaurs dried up during World War II, as did funding to study them, while the world focused on the war and scientists were drafted. When they returned their studies in the post-war years, they ended up breaking new ground — literally.

“Back in the ’60s, there were still large parts of the West where nobody thought to look for dinosaurs or that they hadn’t explored in a long time,” says Barta. “There were excavations in Wyoming and Montana, where people were uncovering these huge dinosaurs and that was the beginning of the public’s love affair with dinosaurs.”

Paleontologist John Ostrom’s discovery of Deinonychus, a close relative of the better-known Velociraptor, in August of 1964, sparked particular interest. He argued dinosaurs didn’t drag their tails on the ground like people thought they did, and also popularized the idea that dinosaurs were more like warm-blooded birds than cold-blooded reptiles. There was still limited evidence for his argument, but Horner’s research in the late ’70s helped validate Ostrom’s findings when his team uncovered the remains of baby dinosaur nesting grounds in Montana. They found evidence that suggested that dinosaur parents were bringing food for the babies, and that dinosaurs traveled in herds. Horner wrote about these findings and others in Digging Dinosaurs.

Before these discoveries, “dinosaurs were seen as evolutionary failures, sluggish and corpulent reptiles — and also as a group that no self-respecting scientist wanted to spend much time studying,” Matthew T. Carrano, Curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian, told TIME in an email. “But largely thanks to the careful research and discoveries of scientists like John Ostrom, two things became clear. First, dinosaurs were in fact lively, active animals that were more like birds and mammals than lizards or snakes. Second, birds were the direct living descendants of dinosaurs. These twin realizations utterly changed our perception of dinosaurs both scientifically and culturally — and I think Jurassic Park is a tangible reflection of that.”

What Jurassic Park Gets Right About Dinosaurs

Carrano gave Jurassic Park high marks for the basics of the dinosaurs that show up in the franchise. “The franchise gets one very important thing right: dinosaurs were once active, living things that were as successful on land as any animals before or since,” he added.

Proof that the franchise has earned the respect of paleontologists is the fact that the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology has recognized Steven Spielberg — who directed the first two films and has been executive producer on the others — for his contributions to the field. After all, he helped dinosaurs become perhaps more popular than they’ve ever been.

Carrano noted that as a kid who grew up wanting to be a paleontologist in the ’70s, he struggled to find new books to read. “Now, it’s impossible to keep up with the books published each year. Scientifically, dinosaurs went from being a weekday-night show at an off-off-Broadway theater, to a sold-out long-running juggernaut with a movie deal. It’s night and day… Errors are mostly forgivable, because the movie succeeds at making dinosaurs exciting, interesting, and something to root for.”

“[The year the first Jurassic Park came out] is the first time we actually see dinosaurs depicted as smarter, more agile, and faster than people had thought previously,” echoes Horner. “People had thought of dinosaurs as big stupid lizards wandering around looking for a place to go extinct.”

How dinosaur tails appear in the films best illustrates this milestone, as a visible example of the change in perception of dinosaurs. Before the milestone scientific discoveries in the ’60s, skeletons of dinosaurs depicted their tails dragging on the ground because that’s what lizards’ tails are like. Jurassic Park depicted dinosaurs with their tails sticking straight out. “It goes back to the late 1800s when the first dinosaur skeleton was put together, because the teeth looked like those of an iguana. They decided the tail of a dinosaur should be on the ground, [believing that] dinosaurs were ordinary lizards — just big,” says Horner.

The movie also depicted them as traveling in herds, as birds would travel in flocks, and Barta gives a thumbs up to Jurassic Park III‘s depiction of a paleontology camp.

What Jurassic Park Gets Wrong About Dinosaurs

But, while the franchise has helped spread the word on some truths about dinos, it has also introduced new misconceptions. In particular, one question that paleontologists didn’t often have to field before Jurassic Park is whether dinosaur DNA exists and if dinosaurs can be cloned. “We all know now to anticipate that question,” says Barta. “The oldest DNA that has been recovered from fossil record is well under a million years old, and these non-bird dinosaurs all died out 65 million years ago. Because [DNA] is a fragile molecule, it’s not thought to have survived as far back as the Jurassic period.” (Horner explains that, in 1993, when the first movie was made, scientists didn’t yet know that they wouldn’t be able to find dinosaur DNA, adding that he and a grad student tried.)

The films tend to be off on the sizes of some dinosaurs, and filmmakers have invented new functions for some of their physical attributes.

The Velociraptor is one of the dinosaurs that the movie depicts as larger than it would have been in real life. (Carrano says it should be just about three feet tall.). Ankylosaurus is depicted with a club on its tail for self-defense, but that was probably for wooing the ladies, says Horner, and the Mosasaurus in Jurassic World (2015) is depicted as about the size of a whale when it would have been half that length, according to Barta. The opposite is the case with Dilophosaurus.“The Dilophosaurus would have been larger than it was portrayed in the movie, and overall, is the most inaccurate dinosaur in the movies,” says Barta. “We wouldn’t be able to have fossilized evidence of a poison gland or a bony structure near the throat for the support of anything like a frill. We have no evidence for either of those things in actual fossils.”

Those who find the Tyrannosaurus terrifying will be relieved to hear that it wouldn’t have able to run because it didn’t have large enough muscles, and that the dinosaurs probably sounded less scary too — scientists believe they grunted and hissed but probably didn’t really roar.

In terms of the physical environment, some people might walk away from the movies or other pop depictions of dinosaurs and think that dinosaurs only lived in swamps and jungles, when in fact, the world’s climate when they were really around “still would have been quite seasonal and temperate,” says Barta.

Appearance-wise, the biggest inaccuracy in Jurassic Park‘s dinosaurs is the lack of feathers and colorful plumage, some knowledge about which has been gained in the years since the franchise debuted. Horner says the dinosaurs were as accurate as possible when they were made, but because filmmakers need to preserve continuity, later discoveries wouldn’t have been incorporated in sequels. In later films, he says, “we knew Velociraptor should have feathers and be more colorful, but we couldn’t really change that look because everything goes back to the first movie.”

New Dinosaurs in Fallen Kingdom

But, the new film does feature species of dinosaurs that haven’t been in previous films, in an effort to incorporate dinosaurs from new places — like Carnotaurus, a meat-eating dinosaur that roamed South America, and the Baryonyx from England. “We don’t know much about [Carnotaurus],” says Horner. “It’s got tiny little arms even smaller than T-rex, and weird little teeth, so we don’t know what it evolved to eat.”

But the most scientifically mysterious dinosaur in the franchise may still be one of the best-known ones in popular culture: the Brachiosaurus, the first dinosaur that Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt encounter in awe when they reach Isla Nublar in the new movie.

“We don’t know much about them, but once we really understand a Brachiosaurus or any of the long-necked dinosaurs, we’ll probably know most of the things we need to know about dinosaurs,” says Horner. “They’re probably a key to them all, but they’re just horribly big and horrible to dig up. Every part of them is so gigantic so it takes a long time.”

Instagram’s Founders Are Unexpectedly Leaving ‘To Explore Our Curiosity’

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are leaving the company, they said in a surprise announcement late Monday.

“We’re planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again,” Systrom, Instagram’s CEO, said in a statement. “We remain excited for the future of Instagram and Facebook in the coming years as we transition from leaders to two users in a billion.”

Systrom, 34, and Krieger, 32, have not given a reason for the timing of their departures. But Bloomberg reported that they were leaving after “growing tensions” over Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s increasing involvement in the day-to-day running of Instagram.

Instagram had previously been seen as largely autonomous from Facebook’s influence. The app recently introduced features aimed to compete with rival Snapchat, a rising threat to both Instagram and Facebook that has since been quieted.

Facebook bought the photo-sharing app for $1 billion in 2012. Back then, it was used by around 30 million people. Under Facebook’s umbrella, it has grown to reach over a billion people, making it one of the social media giant’s most successful acquisitions. Analysts say Instagram is one of Facebook’s most important businesses, and one which generates the least controversy.

Instagram is the third Facebook-owned business whose founders have left recently. Jan Koum, who helped start WhatsApp in 2009, resigned in April over disagreements about privacy and encryption. Virtual reality firm Oculus VR lost founder Palmer Luckey in March 2017 amid a series of scandals and lawsuits.

Facebook has faced numerous stumbling blocks in the last two years, including scandals over its privacy practices and failure to prevent the spread of false information during the 2016 election, as well as slowing growth.

Facebook shares were down 2% in pre-market trading on Tuesday.

Elizabeth Warren Proposes Breaking Up Tech Companies like Amazon and Google

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is proposing to break up the largest technology companies, including Amazon.com, Alphabet’s Google and Facebook, calling them anti-competitive behemoths that are crowding out competition.

The Massachusetts senator is calling for legislation that would designate the companies as “platform utilities” and the appointment of regulators who would unwind technology mergers that undermine competition and harm innovation and small businesses.

“Twenty-five years ago, Facebook, Google, and Amazon didn’t exist,” Warren wrote in a post on Medium Friday. “Now they are among the most valuable and well-known companies in the world. It’s a great story — but also one that highlights why the government must break up monopolies and promote competitive markets.”

Facebook declined to comment. Representatives of Google and Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for a reaction. Shares of Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook all extended losses on the news, sliding as much as 1.5 percent. The stocks were already lower after disappointing payrolls data.

“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Warren said. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.”

Warren said “weak antitrust enforcement” has resulted in a reduction of competition and innovation in the tech sector and lax venture capitalist investment in new startups to compete with big tech companies “because it’s so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business.”

Warren’s economic populism, paired with fierce attacks on corporations and wealthy Americans who she says are rigging the system for self-interest, is at the heart of her campaign in a crowded field of contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

Are Dogs Smarter Than Cats? Science Finally Has a Clue

A new study has some ammunition for dog people everywhere.

The research, published in the journal Frontiers of Neuroanatomy, says dogs may be brainier than cats. That is, dogs have cerebral cortexes with twice as many neurons — the brain cells responsible for thought, planning and behavior – compared to cats. Scientists have associated neuron density with overall cognitive ability – i.e. intelligence.

For the study, a group of researchers led by Suzana Herculano-Houzel, an associate professor of psychology and biological sciences at Vanderbilt University, examined the neuronal density and brain sizes of various carnivorans, a class of mammals that includes many predators – along with some omnivores and and a few herbivores. These animals are of particular interest, according to the paper, because many must outsmart prey to survive, potentially pointing to a higher number of neurons, and thus higher intelligence.

To learn more, the researchers examined the brains of eight mammals: cats, dogs, bears, lions, hyenas, ferrets, mongoose and raccoons. They found that the animals with larger brains also tended to have more neurons, just like non-carnivorans — a similarity that suggest carnivorans aren’t so different from the rest of the animal kingdom, after all.

The results were marked. In addition to dogs’ cortical neurons outnumbering cats’ — to the tune of 530 million to 250 million — they discovered that brown bears had only as many neurons as cats, despite the obvious size difference. Raccoons, on the other hand, had far more neurons than their small brain size would suggest.

A golden retriever that was studied had the most cortical neurons of all, with 627 million.

However, even the researchers admit that their findings shouldn’t resolve the old dogs-versus-cats debate over intelligence.

“While our finding of larger numbers of cortical neurons in dogs than in cats may
 confirm anecdotal perceptions of dog owners and animal trainers as well as unpublished reports that dogs are easier to train and therefore ‘more intelligent,’ cat owners would probably protest, and rightly so,” they write.

“Any argument about their cognitive capabilities at this point will be largely a matter of opinion until direct, systematic comparisons of cognitive capacity are performed across these and other species.”

This article originally appeared on People.com

What Happens When Amazon Takes on Health Care

What happens when a company defined by utterly ruthless efficiency sets its sights on the flabbiest part of the U.S. economy? We shall see, now that Amazon has announced that it–along with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the banking behemoth JPMorgan Chase–will be entering the dominion of health care.

“The three of our companies have extraordinary resources, and our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans,” said JPMorgan chairman Jamie Dimon on Jan. 30, treading lightly (“potentially”) on the enormous implications (“all Americans”) that were apparent. As it takes shape, the as-yet-unnamed joint enterprise will nominally serve, without seeking profit, only the 1.2 million people who work for the three companies.

But the clear and worthy goal is to confront the Gorgon that has stymied politicians for decades.

The triumvirate combines the savvy integrity of the Oracle of Omaha, as America’s most admired investor is known; the leadership status and financial muscle of the country’s largest bank; and, crucially, Amazon. The retail and tech giant has flourished by innovating relentlessly and expanding omnivorously. Word that Amazon was entering health care immediately depressed the value of old-school health-insurance companies. Anyone who has been a customer of either knows why.

The U.S. health care system is the antithesis of Silicon Valley. Grossly inefficient and user-unfriendly, it may be the least transparent enterprise outside the Kremlin–and just as awash in money. The $3.3 trillion that Americans spent on health care in 2016 was close to Germany’s entire GDP that year. It accounted for an astounding 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product–twice the share other developed countries typically spend on health–and produced a return on investment that would get any CEO fired. Life expectancy in the U.S. is actually going down.

“The ballooning costs of health care act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy” is how Buffett put it in the six-paragraph news release that offered no blueprint but what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called “talented experts, a beginner’s mind and a long-term orientation.”

You can see where this is going. Shop for a piece of furniture online and the seller explains why it can offer a quality sofa at a reasonable price by listing the half-dozen middlemen it’s cutting out: retail warehouse, retail store, wholesaler warehouse, wholesaler showroom, export agent. It may not be possible to list the intermediaries milling about between a patient and a healer, but David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard, made the striking calculation that administration accounts for about a quarter of the cost of health care in the U.S.–perhaps double the rate in the next-most-benighted system. He once pointed out that Duke University Hospital had 900 beds and 1,300 billing clerks.

None of this qualifies as news. What does is the prospect of a new sensibility addressing the mess. Bezos became the richest man in the world in no small part by exploiting and inventing technology, like “one click.” His approach is to undercut the competition at every turn–cutting prices so low that customers were reliably pleased, and vendors had no choice but to stock his shelves. Many of the company’s half-million employees work among those shelves, at the “fulfillment centers” all across the U.S. where boxes are packed and shipped. A warehouse worker might make $15 an hour, better than retail but not enough to make anyone rich, especially after taxes and health-insurance premiums, which have been rising faster than wages.

If the triad of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase can find a way to bring sense to health care, the savings will accrue first for those three companies, which are not acting out of altruism. But sometimes business interests align with human ones. Every dollar matters to an hourly worker, and when the savings from a better health care system reach the worker–and when the worker reaches a doctor without having to run a gauntlet–the vaunted, disruptive efficiency of tech will have produced a common good.

For more on these stories, visit time.com/ideas

This appears in the February 12, 2018 issue of TIME.

What to Know About the Original A Star Is Born—and the Other Versions, Too

Critics and moviegoers alike are excited, to say the least, about Friday’s theatrical release of A Star Is Born — but this is not the first time the story will play on the big-screen. The latest version, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper (who also directed), is the fourth in almost a century.

Each of the film’s three previous iterations starred a female icon of its moment — not to put pressure on Lady Gaga, whose limited film acting credits include 2013’s Machete Kills and 2014’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. She plays a waitress whose life is changed by fame after a country-music star spots her singing in a bar.

A Star is Born is already set to be a huge hit after garnering critical acclaim after its August premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. And, if the movie’s previous versions are any indication, Oscars may be coming: Each of the three A Star Is Born movies was nominated for (and two of the three films won) Academy Awards.

However, not every iteration of the film had the same style, plot or music. In fact, the original was not even a musical. Here’s what made each of the film’s adaptations special — and what contemporaneous TIME critics had to say about them.

1937: The original, a romantic drama

A poster for the original “A Star Is Born,” 1937.
United Artists/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

The Plot: The plot of the first film differs the most from the following renditions, as the lead character’s passion is for acting rather than singing. Janet Gaynor (1906-1984) plays Esther, who grew up on a farm in North Dakota. After Esther moves to Los Angeles to pursue acting, she meets Norman Maine (Fredric March), an alcoholic actor Esther looks up to.

What the Critics Said: A May 3, 1937, TIME review critiqued Gaynor, not only for her acting in A Star Is Born, but for her talent in general. March stole the show and lent the movie its “effectiveness”:

TIME’s critic also praised the film for containing “a magnificent shot which is possibly the best individual justification of Technicolor yet seen on the screen.”

The Music: The scoring of the movie, which was not a musical, was not nominated for an Oscar, despite its well-known composers. The music was written by Dorothy Dick and Max Steiner (of Gone With the Wind), with the full soundtrack sung by Buddy Clark.

The Awards: The original A Star Is Born, directed by William A. Wellman, was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Gaynor, having already starred in 1927’s Sunrise and 1928’s Street Angel, was certainly Hollywood’s it-girl of the late 1920s and 1930s. Both films won her the respective year’s Best Actress in a Leading Role award at the Academy Awards. (Her 1927 win for Sunrise was monumental, as it took place at the first Academy Awards ceremony in history, making Gaynor the first-ever Best Actress award recipient.) However, though she was nominated, Gaynor lost the Best Actress in a Leading Role award. March, who played Norman Maine, was nominated for but ultimately lost the Best Actor in a Leading Role Academy award, too.

1954: The musical adaptation

James Mason and Judy Garland in “A Star Is Born,” 1954.
Warner Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

The Plot: 1954’s A Star Is Born, directed by George Cukor, took inspiration from the original and showed Esther again as an aspiring Hollywood star. This time, the it-girl of the 1950s was Judy Garland (1922-1969), whose career had taken off with her role Dorothy in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Garland’s leading man was played by James Mason, a British actor known for his role in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959).

What the Critics Said: TIME’s October 25, 1954 issue applauded her performance for her musicality and acting, highlighting the improvement in her skills:

The Music: The movie’s Oscar nominations included Best Original Song for the TIME-acclaimed “The Man That Got Away” and Best Scoring of a Motion Picture by Ray Heindorf. Heindorf later won the same award for his scoring of 1962’s The Music Man.

The Awards: Like her predecessor, Gaynor, Garland also lost the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar. She lost to Grace Kelly for her role in The Country Girl. According to Telegram!, a book of Hollywood history by Linda Rosenkrantz, Garland, who missed the Academy Awards because she was still in the hospital after giving birth to her son, was the favorite for that year’s coveted award. Disappointed with Kelly’s win, Groucho Marx sent Garland a letter, calling her loss “the biggest robbery since Brink’s.”

1976: The musical remake

A promotional image of Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson in “A Star Is Born,” 1976.
Warner Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

The Plot: The 1976 adaptation of A Star Is Born — perhaps better known as the Barbra Streisand version — took the previous two films’ backdrop of Hollywood and turned its star into an aspiring singer rather than an actress. Directed by Frank Pierson, who co-wrote the movie with Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, the film opens with Streisand’s Esther is discovered by John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson), a rock star, as she performs in a bar. This plot line is the most similar to 2018’s rendition.

What the Critics Said: TIME didn’t love Streisand’s performance nearly as much as the magazine had appreciated her predecessors’ takes on the role. In a review headlined “Barbra, a One-Woman Hippodrome,” film critic Jay Cocks wrote that Streisand’s rock ‘n’ roll interpretation was questionable.

The Music: Despite Cocks’ concern, the music was perhaps more successful than the film. “Evergreen” also won a Grammy award as the Song of the Year, and the score, composed by Williams and Kenny Ascher, also won a Grammy. Streisand and Kristofferson both sang on the soundtrack, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart in February of 1977.

The Awards: Despite some less-than-stellar reviews, the film grossed $80,000,000 in the United States box office and was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning one for Best Original Song. The winning song, “Evergreen,” was co-written by Streisand and Paul Williams.

The first two versions of A Star Is Born depicted Esther winning an Oscar award, but in this one, the character won a Grammy. Because the first two lead actresses lost those awards in real life, Barbra Streisand is the only lead to win the same kind of award for the film as her character does in her respective version.

Among the Many Talents of the Humble Honey Bee: Arithmetic

Honey bees are capable of understanding complex arithmetic, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Scientists discovered that bees can “learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for addition or subtraction,” according to the report published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

While many animals demonstrate an understanding of basic numbers for tasks such as foraging, shoaling, and resource management, more complex math can be done only by a limited number of nonhuman vertebrates.

The findings are significant because honey bees and humans are separated by more than 400 million years of evolution, meaning that “advanced numerical cognition may be more accessible to nonhuman animals than previously suspected,” the study found.

Scientists created an experiment using mazes to test whether 14 bees could use yellow and blue to add and subtract. The study found that the bees got the right answer 63% to 72% of the time.

While the testing pool was small, the findings are significant given that brains of bees are 20,000 times smaller than those of humans. According to Science magazine, this could lead to new approaches to artificial intelligence and machine learning.