Researchers at MIT, Harvard and partner institutions have built Lumina, a very large computer simulation of the early universe. It starts about 45 million years after the Big Bang, during the cosmic dark ages when neutral hydrogen filled space and blocked light, and runs for roughly 2 billion years. The model covers a patch about 500 megaparsecs, or roughly 1.6 billion light-years, across and contains around half a trillion simulated particles and gas cells. It was run on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Lumina captures two key events, hydrogen and helium re-ionization, which occurred when early stars and galaxies, and then supermassive black holes, emitted enough ultraviolet light to strip electrons from atoms and let light travel freely. The team is sharing the simulation so astronomers can compare it with observations from current and future telescopes.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.