One of the features of science is that there is always a tension going on. We have standard paradigms that most scientists work within but on occasion a new result will turn up that seems to be violate the boundaries of that paradigm. What does one do then? Reject the paradigm and its associated underlying theory? Seasoned scientists know not to do that because throwing out a paradigm is not something to be undertaken lightly since good theories are hard to come by. What they do is treat the discrepant event as an anomaly meriting further study.
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The design of the standard passenger airplane seems to be pretty fixed where there is a central fuselage that houses passengers and cargo and the wings that provide the lift. But via David Pescovitz I learn that KLM is funding a new design where the central fuselage is eliminated and passengers and cargo are seated in the wings, as shown below.

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On May 20th, the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures instituted a new standard for the kilogram mass. A metal block kept in a hermetically sealed vault in Paris had been the mass standard for 130 years. New standards were also introduced for the unit of current (Ampere), temperature (Kelvin), and the mole.

It used to be the case that standards for the basic units used in science had been defined in terms of macroscopic objects like this and thus could be easily understood. But the need for increasingly precise and unvarying standards meant that these were no longer suitable and standards have increasingly shifted to using the fundamental constants of nature and getting from those to the familiar quantities involves quite a long chain of reasoning. The kilogram is the last remaining physical object to be so displaced.
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That is a blatantly clickbait-and-switch post title. Anyone expecting to read about the origins of romantic outings involving two people will have to look elsewhere. What this post is about is how the idea of assigning consecutive numbers to the years originated.

We now routinely assign a numbered year to events in recorded history, so that I can write that Bishop Ussher’s year of the creation of the Earth was 4004 BCE or that the American revolution was in 1776 CE. This sequential numbering of the years enables us to immediately fix an event in relation to other events. The system seems so natural that one feels that it must have always been in place and did not have to be invented at all, let alone have a definite beginning. But classicist Paul J. Kosmin says that there was a time when this system of numbered years did not exist and that events were placed in a historical sequence using various circumlocutions that had only local validity.
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We have all seen migrating birds traveling in a V-formation. It has long been speculated that this pattern is chosen because it reduces the energy required for flight in the birds that are at the back. But so much fine-tuning of positions was required to save energy by this method that some researchers doubted that this could be the reason and suggested alternatives, such as that the better navigators were in the front for others to follow or that this formation reduced the risk from predators.

But scientists were able to attach devices to a flock of birds and noticed that the birds were not just locating themselves precisely with respect to the lead birds as predicted by the aerodynamics of fixed wing aircraft, but that they were even synchronizing the flapping of their wings to achieve maximum energy savings.
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