A squid, a shipwreck, and a spreadsheet

The animal had been shelved in Barcelona among the Marine Biological Reference Collections, logged as a common deep-sea squid it merely resembled.[2] When Sam Arnold, then finishing a master's thesis, sat down with the cephalopod biologist Fernando Ángel Fernández-Álvarez to examine it, the anatomy refused to fit any family of squid then known.[2][4] They named it Mobydickia poseidonii and, in a single description, raised a new species, a new genus, and a new family, the first new family of open-ocean squid in twenty-seven years.[1][2][3]

The squid is nearly colorless, missing the pigment sacs that let most cephalopods blush, flash, and vanish against the dark.[1][2] Its arms carry hooks tipped with small lateral points, which struck the describers as trident-like.[2] The names followed from those two features. Mobydickia salutes Melville's white whale, for the pale body and for the belly that preserved the specimen; poseidonii belongs to the sea god, for the three-pointed spear the hooks recall.[2] A family of its own now surrounds it in the catalogues, the Mobydickidae.[3]

The specimen owes its survival to Malcolm Clarke, a British scientist who sailed with the factory ship Southern Harvester in 1955 and 1956 to record what sperm whales were eating.[1] Sperm whales are thorough collectors of the deep, and their stomachs have long yielded soft, fragile creatures that trawl nets shred or miss entirely.[1] A stomach, however, keeps no logbook. No one recorded where the whale had fed, or how deep, so the squid arrives in the present with its home waters a blank.[4]

Arnold and Fernández-Álvarez cast the find as collection-based discovery, the unglamorous work of reexamining specimens already sitting on shelves.[2][4] Most new species are still described from fresh expeditions, yet here an entire family had been waiting, mislabeled and in plain sight, in a collection open to any visiting researcher.[2] The World Register of Marine Species listed Mobydickia poseidonii among the ten most remarkable marine species of 2025, a distinction that usually rewards animals pulled from the sea last season rather than seventy years ago.[3]

His name is Espen Saastad, and he designs watches in the small Norwegian town of Porsgrunn while running a modest underwater survey company on the side. He came across the wreck in the autumn of 2025 and did the quiet, correct thing, reporting it to the authorities rather than to salvagers.[3] The site lies about 600 metres down, well beyond the reach of scuba divers, so the Norwegian Maritime Museum went to it with a remotely operated vehicle, a tethered robot lowered on a cable a kilometre long and fitted with cameras, a gripping arm, and soft suction cups.[2]

What the robot's lights found was a hold laid out almost as it had been packed. Whole plates were lying in stacks on the seabed, one of the museum's archaeologists said.[4] The museum records two kinds of Chinese export porcelain, the ware named for Batavia, the Dutch trading hub on Java through which so much of it passed, and the milk-white type that European dealers called blanc de chine.[2] Around the china sat chandeliers, stemmed drinking glasses, barrels of grain, and crates that still appear to hold tea and herbs.[1] Roughly forty objects have been lifted so far, and thousands may still be down there.[4]

Almost everything else about the ship is unknown. She was a galiot, a stout two-masted trader some 22 metres long, and she went down around 1750, but her name, her home port, and her intended destination are all lost, as is the reason she sank.[1] The head of Norway's heritage directorate called the condition of the wreck almost beyond belief.[3]

Cargoes like this are usually broken, scattered, or stripped long before scholars reach them, which is why the wreck has been called a time capsule[2] and the best-preserved cargo of its kind yet found in northern Europe.[1] The porcelain was most likely bought not in China but at a European trading hub, or entrepot, such as Gothenburg, Copenhagen, or Amsterdam, and gathered in a single sealed hold it gives a rare dated snapshot of the eighteenth-century trade that carried Asian luxuries into ordinary northern homes.[4]

On a neon-lit stage, under a towering video wall, a competitor folded a sheet of virtual origami using nothing but a spreadsheet.[5][7] The room was an esports arena of the kind that usually stages Fortnite, and a live crowd of several hundred had come to watch formulas resolve in real time.[6] This was the Microsoft Excel World Championship, whose finals ran in early December at the HyperX Arena inside the Luxor in Las Vegas.[2][7]

The new champion is Diarmuid Early, an Irish consultant with a doctorate in computer science who runs a small data firm in New York.[4] He first opened Excel for a living in 2008, as a young analyst in London, and has spent years near the top of the game without the marquee title.[4] He has been dubbed the "LeBron James of Excel," a nod to long excellence finally rewarded.[5] When the result was read out, the cameras caught him near tears.[5]

To take the belt, Early had to get past Andrew Ngai, an actuary from Australia known at ringside as The Annihilator and a three-time world champion.[6][5] The two were not balancing books.[8] Players are handed invented "cases" and perhaps forty minutes each, tracking the vital signs of twenty World of Warcraft avatars in one round and modelling the physics of a pinball table in the next.[6][7] Artificial intelligence is banned at the keyboard, and only the plain machinery of Excel is allowed.[7]

The whole enterprise is barely five years old.[6] A sudoku champion from Latvia, Andrew Grigolyunovich, founded the Financial Modeling World Cup in 2020, then coaxed spreadsheeting toward genuine spectacle, with entrance tunnels, sponsor jerseys and a run of broadcasts on ESPN.[6][1] Around seventeen thousand people watched the previous final on television.[7] The reward stays modest by esports standards, five thousand dollars and a wrestling belt.[3][5]

There is a quiet stake beneath the showmanship.[7] As generative artificial intelligence takes on more of the world's spreadsheet drudgery, the championship keeps faith with the unaided human hand, and measures its champion in the craft itself.[7] Early is no sceptic about the new tools, calling them a good direction of travel.[4] He offers one caution, drawn from seventeen years among cells and formulas.[4] The software, he says, "can often be confidently wrong, so you still need to check your results."[4]