6 planets will parade across the night sky at the end of February

Six planets are linking up in the sky at the end of February, and most will be visible to the naked eye.

How stepping into nature affects the brain

Spending time in nature, even briefly, triggers changes in the brain that calm stress, restore attention, and quiet mental clutter, a new study has found.

Frequently distracted? Your brain rhythms may be to blame

Turns out our attention is on a cycle, shifting seven to 10 times per second. This rhythmic occurrence may be crucial for survival, as it prevents us from becoming overly focused on one thing in our environment.

Grasslands are vanishing nearly four times faster than forests, global study finds

Along with forests, grasslands and wetlands are also being converted to cropland and pasture at an increasing rate around the world. [But grasslands are far more than just “green spaces”—they are one of our planet’s often overlooked service providers. Around 20 to 35% of the carbon sequestered worldwide is stored in these ecosystems.] Why you can’t tie knots in four dimensions We all know we live in three-dimensional space. But what does it mean when people talk about four dimensions? Is it just a bigger kind of space?

Peanut waste can be turned into high-quality futuristic graphene

Graphene is made up of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, but is hundreds of times stronger than steel, conducts electricity and heat better than copper and is almost completely transparent.

Sea urchin spines inspire self-powered underwater sensors

Nature does it again! The natural world has a knack for giving us the blueprints for some useful technologies, and the humble sea urchin is the latest contributor.

== yjc, interesting perspective
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer

3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer.

== yjc, for what it’s worth
A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation

A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Humanity’s oldest geometries, engraved on ostrich eggs

At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo sapiens who lived in that region.

Smarter shelf strategy can boost retail profits and cut food waste by more than 20%, study finds

The new study takes a close look at perishables with declining quality over time, such as fresh produce, dairy and meat. Using advanced analytical modeling and thousands of simulated retail scenarios, the researchers examined how three factors interact: product display, discount timing and discount depth.

‘Tiny’ dinosaur, big impact: A 90-million-year-old fossil rewrites history

A team has identified a 90-million-year-old fossil that provides the “missing link” for a mysterious group of prehistoric animals.

Why plants may bloom earlier: Tiny dew droplets are triggering early flowering in plants

Plants around the world are flowering earlier in the year, a trend attributed to climate change. But there could be another hitherto hidden trigger.

2D memristors could help solve AI’s energy problem

A memristor is a cutting-edge electrical component whose resistance depends on the amount of current that previously passed through it. Because it “remembers” this history even after charge is no longer flowing, it can store data when the power is switched off.

ALMA reveals Milky Way’s core in largest-ever mosaic, tracing cold gas filaments

The region featured in the new image spans more than 650 light-years. It harbors dense clouds of gas and dust, surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

== yjc, a pretty good explanation of the algoritm/math behind chatGPT and its friends
== paywall, look for line: If you cant read the article further than please click here and click link
Andrej Karpathy Just Built an Entire GPT in 243 Lines of Python

Same algorithm as ChatGPT. The attention mechanism, the training loop, the way it predicts the next token: it’s the same math running inside GPT-4. Just at a micro scale.

Hacker Used Anthropic’s Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data

This attack proves that sophisticated hacking no longer requires years of training—just creative prompting and consumer-grade AI tools.

== yjc, personally don’t recall any such screeching, but…
Scientists Crack the Case of ‘Screeching’ Scotch Tape

Scotch tape has been a household mainstay for nearly a century, but it still holds some scientific surprises. Researchers have discovered the why behind that screeching sound emitted when one rapidly peels Scotch tape—akin to the screech of fingernails on a chalkboard.

Probability underlies much of the modern world

Probability is a branch of mathematics that describes randomness. When scientists describe randomness, they’re describing chance events—like a coin flip—not strange occurrences, like a person dressed as a zebra.

Why our immune system remembers vaccinations for decades

Why can the human immune system often remember a vaccination for a whole lifetime? A new study provides a surprisingly clear answer: The immune cells responsible for immunological memory seem to switch to a type of standby mode at an early stage.

Monitoring plant light use saves indoor farm energy costs

Modern farming faces a myriad of challenges, including pest management and extreme weather, even as food production demands continue to rise with a growing world population. Vertical farms, housed in enclosed facilities with a smaller footprint and controlled irrigation and lighting, sidestep some of these challenges. However, even with high-efficiency LED lighting, the energy costs of vertical farms are a significant obstacle.

Sunlight-powered process turns plastic waste into acetic acid without added emissions

The breakthrough offers a promising new approach to reducing plastic pollution through photocatalysis, while simultaneously creating a useful, value-added chemical product through a process inspired by nature.

Ensuring smartphones have not been tampered with

With increasing cyberattacks and government data breaches, one of the most important devices to keep secure is the one in everyone’s pocket: smartphones. The problem is that it is difficult to check that a smartphone has not been tampered with without the risk of unintentionally damaging the device itself.

A new eco-friendly water battery could theoretically last for centuries

The problem with many types of modern batteries is that they rely on harsh chemicals to work. Not only can these corrosive liquids damage internal parts over time, but they can also leach into soil and water when disposed of, contaminating it.

== yjc
How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes?

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.

Why scientists fear Emperor penguins’ annual moult may be killing them

The penguins’ feathers are “the most complicated and best insulating of any animal”, he says. Over time they are damaged, so the penguins shed them annually. “It’s incredibly energy-intensive and the birds use up to 50% of their body mass.”

Color-changing nanopigment sensor tracks pH one to ten with stable, repeatable readings

From environmental monitoring to medical diagnostics, pH is a vitally important indicator of health, quality, and safety. Currently, the most widely used tools for assessing whether an environment is more acidic (lower pH) or more alkaline (higher pH) are electrochemical sensors, which measure the potential difference between a pair of electrodes when immersed in a solution.

How many bee species exist?

The world has far more bees than anyone realized. Scientists have, for the first time, estimated just how many species of bees are out there on a global scale, offering a clearer look at how these vital pollinators are distributed around the planet.

40,000-year-old Stone Age symbols may have paved the way for writing, long before Mesopotamia

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures.

== if it scales
Breadcrumbs offer fossil fuel–free production of everyday goods

Hydrogenation is a cornerstone of modern chemical manufacturing, but today it depends almost entirely on hydrogen gas made from fossil fuels. Both producing and using this hydrogen is highly energy-intensive, often requiring temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to those found at the deepest parts of the ocean.

A silent signaling network deep in the gut protects against inflammatory intestinal disorders

Despite the potential for invasion, the mammalian gut in general—and the human gut in particular—is less a battlefield than a negotiation table, the study revealed.

== repeat/update?
Cosmologists collaborate to sharpen measurements of the Hubble constant

When researchers infer the Hubble constant from cosmological models that incorporate our best theoretical understanding of the universe’s expansion—based on observations of the early universe—the resulting values differ significantly from those obtained through direct, local astronomical measurements.

== yjc
US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’

Families are navigating the tough choice between unimaginable riches and the identity that comes with land.

== opinion piece, lengthy
The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored

Federal officials have for years tried to wean Silicon Valley from its dependence on Taiwan, an island democracy roughly the size of Maryland that makes 90 percent of the world’s high-end computer chips.

== lengthy
How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?

One of the humblest and most ubiquitous file formats is stumping the world’s most advanced models.

== yjc
Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

Sharks are innocent. Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network of fiber-optic cables.

Rule-Breaking Black Hole Growing At 13x the Cosmic ‘Speed Limit’ Challenges Theories

A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules: It’s not only exceeding the “speed limit” of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist.

If food is medicine, how about a prescription for blueberries?

As Canadians grapple with an affordability crisis, researchers say interest in food prescribing is growing rapidly.

== yjc, always enjoy good/great photography
20 riveting images from the Sony World Photography Awards 2026

An orderly queue of penguins, a waving squirrel, and the fight over a fish dinner.

== lengthy
Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds

Couds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, are still the biggest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. The world’s top supercomputers aren’t nearly super enough to include tiny digital clouds in the gigantic digital Earths they simulate.

== yjc, can’t believe after all the incidents in the last 5-10 years,
== that any company’s security is/was this lax
Man Accidentally Gains Control of 7,000 Robot Vacuums

A software engineer’s earnest effort to steer his new DJI robot vacuum with a video game controller inadvertently granted him a sneak peak into thousands of people’s homes

== fup
Hit Piece-Writing AI Deleted. But Is This a Warning About AI-Generated Harassment?

Last week an AI agent wrote a blog post attacking the maintainer who’d rejected the code it wrote. But that AI agent’s human operator has now come forward, revealing their agent was an OpenClaw instance with its own accounts, switching between multiple models from multiple providers.