A professor of physical geography has put together the most detailed map yet of the sunken medieval town of Dunwich using underwater acoustic imagining.

The port town, often referred to as "the British Atlantis," was a hub of activity up until its collapse in the 1400s. This was brought about after a series of epic storms battered the coastline in the 1200s and 1300s, causing repeated flooding, submerging parts of the town, and flooding the harbor and river with silt. Today it stands as a small village, but up until its demise it was around the same size as medieval London. Despite still existing at depths of just three to 10 meters (or, 9.8 ft to 32.8 ft) below sea level, the murky conditions have made investigating what lies beneath particularly tricky.

Since 2010, however, Southampton's David Sear—along with the GeoData Institute, the National Oceanography Center, Wessex Archaeology, and local divers from North Sea Recovery and Learn Scuba—has been exploring the muddy depths using dual-frequency identification sonar (DIDSON) acoustic imaging.

Humanity has often looked to the insect world for its technological metaphors, and now for digital inspiration

Swarms. Hive minds. The web*.

It can be hard to avoid talking about our digital culture without using insect metaphors.

IBM has made a stop-motion film—A Boy and His Atom—using individual molecules as pixels, in what Guinness has acknowledged is the world's smallest movie.

The movie's plot line depicts a character called Atom who befriends a single atom and goes on a "playful journey." This journey involves dancing, jumping on a trampoline, and playing catch. It's unlikely to win any Oscars, but that's not really the point; it's designed to get people inspired about science.

IBM moved the molecules using two of its own scanning tunnelling microscopes. It's a huge machine that weighs two tons, operates at minus 268 degrees Celsius and magnifies atoms—placed on a copper surface—by 100 million times. The machine moved around 5,000 carbon monoxide molecules to create the movie. Each time the molecules were arranged in the right way, the IBM team rendered a still image to create each of the 242 frames. In those frames, you can only see one atom or pixel because you look at it from above. It took roughly 10 days of 18-hour shifts to get each frame right.

The United States Geological Society (USGS) has launched an online database and map that keeps track of more than 100 million different species and where they live within the United States,

Biodiversity Serving Our Nation, or BISON (a backronym if ever there was one), contains location-specific records of where living species are within the US. Its data comes from hundreds of different organisations and thousands of scientists, making it the most comprehensive map of American biodiversity ever made.

Anyone can search by scientific or common name of any living species (plant or animal), and can look to see what lives within any specific geographic area they want by drawing a perimeter—so, for example, searching to see exactly which forests in Virginia have been infected with a tree fungus.

Researchers have managed to turn indigestible cellulose into starch, a process that could render billions of tons of agricultural waste into food and fuel.

Plants grow more than 160 billion tons of cellulose—the material that makes up the walls of plant cells—every year, but only a tiny fraction of that is useful to humans in the crops we grow. This is frustrating, as cellulose is made up of glucose chains that are almost, but not quite, the same as those which make up the starch that constitutes 20 to 40 percent of most peoples' daily calorie intake.

With the world's population forecast to reach nine billion by 2050, working out how to alter cellulose glucose into something more practical could be vital for preventing starvation. There's also an extra benefit in that some could be used for biofuels.

In the 28 years since Super Mario Bros. was released, and it's obviously been comprehensively beaten, thoroughly, many thousands of times in that time by players around the world. But have you ever made the game beat itself?

That's what computer scientist Tom Murphy has done. At SigBovik 2013, he presented a program that "solves" how to play Super Mario Bros., or any other NES game, like it's just another kind of mathematical problem. And for those who know that SigBovik is an annual computer science conference dedicated to spoof research, hosted on April 1 every year, Murphy stresses that this is "100 percent real."

He outlines his method in a paper, "The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel... after that it gets a little tricky," but he also presented the results in the video you can see with this story.