Scientists identify hidden accelerant in Antarctic ice loss

For years, scientists have warned that melting Antarctic ice could push sea levels dangerously higher by the end of this century. But a new study suggests those warnings may still be too conservative because they leave out a crucial factor: the ocean’s own complex circulatory system.

Why is almost everyone right-handed?

It is one of the strangest puzzles in human evolution. About 90% of people across every human culture favor their right hand—with no other primate species showing a population-level preference on this scale. Despite decades of research into the brains, genes and development behind handedness, why humans ended up so overwhelmingly right-handed has remained an evolutionary enigma.

How much is a bat worth? Their deaths cost taxpayers and the wider economy

Bats pollinate plants, including many important food crops, when they stop by flowers to drink nectar. Their guano is mined from caves for fertilizer. And they eat a lot of bugs—the kinds that bother people (think mosquitoes) and others that destroy crops that humans depend on for food.

Basalt could be the key to greener and cheaper cement

Ideas to reduce carbon emissions often revolve around renewable power, electric vehicles and energy efficiency. But there’s another, less colorful character that’s often overlooked: cement.

String theory is uniquely derived from basic assumptions about the universe

If you could take an apple and break it into smaller and smaller parts, you would find molecules, then atoms, followed by subatomic particles like protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up. You might think you hit the bottom, but, according to string theorists, if you keep going to even smaller scales—about a billion billion times smaller than a proton—you will find more: tiny vibrating strings.

Grasslands are facing a threat of poisonous plant takeover—but there’s a surprising upside

Grasslands provide food for millions of grazing animals across the world, but overgrazing along with climate change make these valuable ecosystems vulnerable to invaders. In particular, certain species of poisonous plants have been taking over grasslands, reducing the availability of food for grazing animals and causing changes in local ecosystems.

Your brain has a shortcut for hard problems, and it starts by ignoring most of them

What’s the best way to learn a puzzle or solve a problem? Consider a task where you must predict the weather from mysterious symbols. Should you try to interpret all the clues at once, or master them one by one?

== yjc
Hairy new fish species discovered in the Great Barrier Reef

Ghost pipefish are masters of camouflage that can easily melt into their backgrounds. These close relatives of seahorses and sea dragons often closely match the color of their surroundings and develop skin filaments that look like algae or coral.

Your blood may already know what illness comes next—long before symptoms appear, study finds

Predicting who will develop common diseases is key to prevention, detection, and early treatment. Traditionally, clinicians have estimated risk based on age, sex, laboratory results, and lifestyle factors. Although these classical indicators provide important information, they do not necessarily reflect the multifaceted biological mechanisms underlying disease development.

Digital arson spree by ‘AI Bonnie and Clyde’ raises fears over autonomous tech

The investigation by the New York company Emergence AI into the long-term behaviour of AI agents ended up like a lovers-on-the-lam movie script. It has prompted fresh questions about the safety of artificial intelligence agents – the version of the technology that can autonomously carry out tasks.

A beacon of light in swirls of dust

Peer into the heart of a barred spiral galaxy in this stunning new capture from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Most people don’t know what they don’t know, but think they do

Just like how your knowledge of the world around you is imperfect, your knowledge about your own knowledge—also called metaknowledge—is often flawed.

The first domesticated horses: 6,000 years of a complex story

Taming and domestication were not single events. They were a slow, stop-start process, full of setbacks, playing out over generations and across vast regions, before full domestication set in shortly before 2000 BCE.

15-year quest yields malaria compound that hits parasite at all major stages

The three life-cycle stages of the malaria parasite include a liver stage, blood stage, and sexual stage. When a female Anopheles mosquito carrying the parasite bites a person and takes a blood meal, it injects the parasite into them. Once inside, the parasite travels to the liver where it multiplies. Those parasites later emerge in the bloodstream to infect red blood cells.

A history of containers, an ancient technology hundreds of thousands of years in the making

We hardly give them a second thought, but everyday objects like bags and backpacks belong to a long technological tradition that may stretch back hundreds of thousands of years.

Natural malaria immunity: Human volunteers may hold the secret to why some people never get sick

People living in regions where malaria outbreaks are common experience repeated exposure to the disease, which gradually teaches the body how to fight back. Over time, they develop naturally acquired immunity that helps the body control the density of malaria parasites (Plasmodium falciparum) in the blood and prevent the development of clinical symptoms.

The ultimate viral stowaways: A Trojan Horse story

Scientists had believed they understood how viruses move around for decades. They recognized that some minuscule parasitic viruses—like the famous hepatitis D virus (HDV)—simply could not survive on their own. Their shells were only large enough for a bare handful of molecules to slip through. To invade cells, they depended on a larger “helper” virus to wrap them in a protective coat.

Neanderthal dentists used stone drills to treat cavities nearly 60,000 years ago, ancient molar suggests

Archaeological discoveries have shown that Neanderthals used toothpicks to remove food from their teeth and might also have used medicinal plants, but the extent of their medical capabilities is unclear.

Gravitational wave detectors can now ‘autotune’ signals to harmonize the heavens

by combining signals from other detectors with precise predictions from the laws of gravity, researchers can identify and account for subtle distortions in the data. The process is similar to how music-production software such as Auto-Tune can correct a singer’s errant pitch to meet the intended note in a melody.

Why Are Some People Mosquito Magnets?

Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers.

== the internet is a truly strange place
The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock

This clock displays the current time alphabetically.

== yjc
Manabu Kosaka Art Works

Transforming everyday objects into precise sculptural forms using only paper. Each work is entirely handmade, built through a process of cutting, assembling, and refining paper into highly detailed objects.

== paywall?
Why does AI hallucinate?

The tendency to make things up is holding chatbots back. But that’s just what they do.

Dinosaurs had company in the dark: Amber fossil reveals an ancient glow that lit Cretaceous nights

Picture a moonless night in the Cretaceous, dark trees towering over everything, while little green flashes dart through the ferns. In modern times, the glints seen above would be fireflies, members of the beetle family Lampyridae. But could such “natural lanterns” really have flickered when dinosaurs still walked? The early firefly history remained a mystery until recently.

== we had article on that test in the Atacama Desert
Solar-powered gel pulls drinking water from the air

Scientists in recent years have sought to efficiently draw moisture from ambient air and condense it into potable water using materials made of salt and absorbent polymers. But these materials, known as hydrogels, until now have degraded too quickly to be practical or cost-effective.

First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device

Researchers provided the first direct evidence that brain-controlled technology can help listeners isolate a single voice in a crowded environment. The study demonstrates a system that acts as a “neural extension,” utilizing real-time brain signals to identify which speaker a person is focusing on and automatically amplifying that specific voice.

Astronomers use the Webb telescope to improve our map of the cosmic web

The cosmic web is the universe’s vast, skeleton-like framework — a network of interwoven filaments and sheets of dark matter and gas that surround immense, nearly empty voids. It forms the underlying architecture of the cosmos, linking galaxies and clusters into a single, intricate, and far-reaching structure.

== seen somthing on this before, but…
Arts and Cultural Engagement ‘Linked To Slower Pace of Biological Aging’

Research from UCL suggests visiting art galleries or museums, singing and painting can help improve health outcomes

CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company

There’s a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia—and it has nothing to do with hardware.

Google Says Hackers Used AI To Create Zero Day Security Flaw For the First Time

Zero-day exploits are considered the most serious type of security flaw because they are not detected by security companies and have no known fixes.

Scientists are warning Canadians to get ready for a U.S. tick invasion this year

Canadians need to get ready for a slow and steady invasion from south of the border, according to scientists. The threat comes from different varieties of ticks carrying dangerous pathogens that are looking to establish themselves in Canada.

Anthropic Says ‘Evil’ Portrayals of AI Were Responsible For Claude’s Blackmail Attempts

Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with “agentic misalignment.”

==yjc, read a bit of Sartre in my 20s
Why Do People Embrace Hate? Sartre Has an Answer

A classic essay examines the hidden dynamics behind modern prejudice..

This everyday plant protein may be quietly reshaping blood pressure risk in ways doctors cannot ignore

Legumes and soy foods have been associated with an overall lower risk of cardiovascular disease, but the evidence on their potential for lowering high blood pressure is mixed and needs to be systematically quantified, explain the researchers.

For years, reading struggles seemed obvious

For decades, the common explanation for why children struggle to read has stayed remarkably consistent. Smart kids read well. Kids who don’t simply aren’t smart enough. And when children strain over a page, the assumption has often been that something about how they see the text is getting in the way. By this logic, reading comes down to intelligence and visual processing.

== yjc, couldn’t resist
Humanoid Robot Becomes Buddhist Monk In South Korea

Clad in humble black shoes and the Buddhist order’s ceremonial gray and brown robe, the 1.3-meter-tall robot stood in front of Buddhist monks and nuns as it pledged to commit itself to Buddhism in the ceremony held Wednesday, ahead of Buddha’s Birthday later this month.

Fiber optic cables can eavesdrop on nearby conversations

Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech.

== an update?
Nasa keeps track as Mexico City sinks into the ground

The teetering of many of the capital’s historic buildings is the most visible sign of a phenomenon that has been ongoing for more than a century: Mexico City is sinking at an alarming rate.