Extreme Heat Is Spreading Into New Months
Phoenix logged zero out-of-season record-heat days in the 1980s and dozens by the 2020s, part of a lopsided worldwide shift pushing heat toward spring in some regions and fall in others.
Ben Sullivan
A Coordinated Tilt Pairs Magnetism and Polarization Near Room Temperature
Researchers revisited a decades-old strontium manganite ceramic and found that a single coordinated tilt of paired oxygen octahedra creates both an electric charge and a faint magnetism, letting both survive far above the usual cryogenic cutoff for such materials.
Social Media Warnings Outdo Platforms’ Own Screen-Time Nudges
A Stanford trial found teens and young adults rated social media health warnings, already mandated in four states, more discouraging than platforms’ own screen-time nudges, though perceived persuasiveness doesn’t guarantee anyone actually logs off.
Slow Pyrolysis Turns Toxic Crop Waste Into Useful Carbon
Contaminated crop residue does not have to be burned or buried. A review of pyrolysis studies finds that heating it slowly, away from oxygen, can trap most heavy metals in place while producing charcoal, oil and gas with real uses.
The American Cheetah Was a Puma, and It Probably Fished
Miracinonyx trumani fossils from the Yukon carry nitrogen isotope signatures higher than any other Pleistocene carnivore in the region, placing these cats a full trophic level above their southern relatives and pointing toward salmon runs rather than grasslands.
Atoms and Photons Could Help AI Remember More in Spin Glass
Ultracold atoms trapped by lasers and light bouncing between mirrors formed a spin glass, a notoriously disordered magnetic state, that stored several times more memories than a standard artificial neural network of the same size.
Chimpanzee Dialect Grows More Distinct With Age
Chimpanzee grunts, laughs and whimpers grow more population specific with age, a new study finds, hinting that experience, not genes alone, shapes primate vocal dialects.
Pet Talk Varies Wildly, and That May Explain the Pet Effect
University of Arizona researchers eavesdropped on 240 people’s phones to catalog exactly how they talk to a pet, from cooing baby talk to lecturing the cat like a roommate, and found barely two habits alike.
Pro-Russian Hackers Turn Web Outages Into Psychological Warfare
A pro-Russian hacker collective has launched more than 1,500 DDoS attacks since 2022, paying volunteers in cryptocurrency while treating each outage as a stage for undermining public trust in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) governments.
One Overlooked Number Could Flip the Vehicle Pollution Rollback
Correcting a single accounting error in how regulators value fuel savings could turn the federal rollback of vehicle pollution rules from a $790 billion win into a net loss, ten economists argue in a new Science paper.
A Smartphone and a $7 LED Case Can Now Spot Hidden Cameras
A South Korean team’s system called SweepLED sweeps LED light across a room and reads how the reflections bend, catching camera lenses that ordinary detectors mistake for glass, chrome or a shiny doorknob roughly nineteen times out of twenty.
A 33-Million-Cell Map Uncovers Hidden Genetic Switches Governing Human Immunity
By systematically disabling nearly 12,000 genes across 33.4 million primary human T cells, researchers revealed how genetic networks drastically alter their behavior between resting and activated immune states.