Large scale modern agriculture has a fair number of detractors, but the ones that ultimately matter most are the consumers. And consumers almost uniformly hate what’s happened to the tomato. Over the past few decades, a fruit that once exploded with taste and aroma has become synonymous with bland, textureless mediocrity.

But some researchers haven’t given up on the tomato. Taking a mix of flavorful heirloom strains and modern agricultural varieties, they’ve deployed everything from chemical chromatography to consumer taste tests to identify the key genes behind the loss of flavor. And with the new information, we’re in a much better place to rescue the tomato.

This isn’t new work, and some of the people involved were already talking about the outlines of it at science conferences back in 2013. But today’s issue of Science features a major progress report from a large international team of scientists. As they describe the issue, a large team of scientists, along with the equipment they bring in tow, is really what you need to understand the tomato.

If you don’t go far enough in chemistry, it’s easy to get the impression that metallicity is an innate property of certain elements. But “metallic” is simply defined as substances with electrons that can move around easily. These electrons give metals properties like good conductivity and an opaque, shiny appearance. But these traits are not exclusive to specific elements; carbon nanotubes can be metallic, and elements like sulfur become metallic under sufficient pressure.

In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, “was way off.” It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms—at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal.

All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up.

Syfy

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for The Magicians S1 and early S2.

The Magicians will sneak up on you. At first it might seem like a cheesy CW show about angst and magic at an exclusive east coast college. But suddenly, it gets seriously twisted and frightening. Seemingly adolescent rivalries bleed into murder and erupt into cross-dimensional authoritarian regimes. There’s a nasty, dark sense of humor nipping at the edges of the story. Perhaps most importantly, the characters are multi-layered and their magic has real-world consequences. The Magicians‘ second season premiered last night on Syfy, but you’ve got plenty of time to catch up with the most interesting fantasy series on TV right now.

A book of lies

Based on Lev Grossman’s bestselling series of novels, The Magicians sometimes gets compared to Harry Potter. It’s about young people learning magic in school, and it centers on an unlikely group of friends/frenemies. But that’s pretty much where the comparison should end. The series is creepy and messed up in ways that Harry Potter never is, and it also deals a lot more with the non-magical world. Main character Quentin (Jason Ralph) has been in and out of mental hospitals for depression, and he’s spent far too much time obsessing over a series of Narnia-like fantasy novels about a magical land called Fillory. When he finds out that magic is real and that he’s been accepted to a magical Ivy League school called Breakbills, Quentin basically soils the bed with glee.