On Tuesday, the US Senate lodged a rare unanimous vote on a bill that could have drastic technological and transportation implications: a permanent, year-round adherence to daylight saving time (DST).

The one-page "Sunshine Protection Act," as co-sponsored by Sens. Marc Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), is now cleared for a vote in the House of Representatives after passing by unanimous consent in the Senate. This bill, as originally filed in 2018 and reintroduced in 2021, would reverse the Calder Act's introduction of a twice-a-year clock-change process in 1918, along with its eventual reinforcement by the Uniform Time Act of 1966.

The result would permanently leave clocks and timetables in the "spring forward" state of DST beginning in 2023, with the exception of states that had previously established specific time-change rules based on issues like different time zones in the same state. In terms of US politics, it's unclear whether either major American party will mount serious opposition in the House to its eventual vote there—and President Joe Biden has yet to announce his stance on the bill.

Scientists found themselves working from home along with most everyone else when universities shut down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic—including laboratories, posing a unique challenge for experimentalists in particular. That's how physicists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) found themselves casting about for experiments that could be done at home in the kitchen. The physicists ended up investigating the physics of cooking pasta—first conducting home experiments, then repeating those with greater precision in the lab once the university reopened.

Cooking instructions on most packaged dried pastas typically recommend an 8 to 10 minute cooking time, but it's an imprecise method that can result in a great deal of variation in the consistency of the cooked pasta. Among other findings, the UIUC physicists came up with a simple technique, using just a ruler, to determine when one's spaghetti is perfectly al dente, with no need for the time-honored tradition of throwing a cooked strand against the wall—although the latter arguably requires less setup. (And yes, horrified Italians, the tasting method works just fine too. But where's the fun in that?)

A paper on their findings has just been accepted for publication in the journal Physics of Fluids, and two of the authors presented the work at this week's meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago.

There have been a surprisingly large number of scientific papers seeking to understand the various properties of spaghetti, both cooking and eating it—the mechanics of slurping the pasta into one's mouth, for instance, or spitting it out (aka, the "reverse spaghetti problem"). The most well-known is the question of how to get dry spaghetti strands to break neatly in two, rather than three or more scattered pieces.