All stories on OVELUNOR

Faulkner and O'Connor built Southern Gothic on Poe's ground

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:31:25 +0000

Where Southern Gothic came from

Southern Gothic grew from an English novel about a haunted castle, transplanted to the American South and turned on the region’s own history. The gothic half of the name goes back to 1764. That year Horace Walpole, then the Whig member of parliament for King’s Lynn, wrote The Castle of Otranto. Walpole first passed the book off as a translation of a manuscript from 1529, and he only owned up to writing it in the second edition. Imitators followed fast. Clara Reeve published The Old English Baron in 1778, and MG Lewis published The Monk in 1796.

Gothic horror: the novels that taught readers to love fear

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 22:39:12 +0000

Where Gothic horror fiction came from

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Gothic horrorLicence: CC BY 2.0

Gothic horror began with one book and one man’s taste for fake ruins. Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, and the BBC and the British Library both call it the first Gothic novel. Its first page still delivers. A young prince is crushed under a gigantic plumed helmet that seems to drop from nowhere, and his father, Manfred, stares at the helmet rather than at his dead son. A writer for The Paris Review admits the book is not quite “good”, then recommends it anyway for exactly that kind of opening.

J-horror's long-haired ghosts are older than the videotape

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:47:33 +0000

A girl with long black hair climbs out of a television set in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998). Variety credits the film with launching the J-horror trend of the 2000s. This guide follows it from the old ghost stories to the remakes, and ends with eight films to watch this Halloween.

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A temple path in Kyoto.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Where J-horror came from

J-horror’s ghosts are far older than the videotapes they crawl out of. When BBC Culture traced Ring and Ju-on: The Grudge back to their roots, it found Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968) and Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan waiting there. The more traditional films, Ring and Dark Water among them, took their look and their themes from Noh and Kabuki theatre and from Japanese folk mythology.

Dystopian films from Metropolis to Mad Max: where to start

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:18:07 +0000

Dystopian science fiction cinema found its founding image in Berlin in 1927, when Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered with its city of rich masters above and workers below. Nearly a century on, the films that followed still share its shape, a future where the few run everything and the many keep the machine turning. Here is how the genre grew, from Lang and H.G. Wells to Kubrick, George Miller and Alfonso Cuarón, and nine films to start with.

Survival horror has rationed your bullets for 30 years

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:14:55 +0000

Where survival horror came from

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Wondercon 2016 - Silent Hill Cosplay Cosplay at WonderCon 2016.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Survival horror is the genre that makes you weak on purpose. When Capcom released Resident Evil in 1996, the new PlayStation and Saturn were selling the bright arcade rush of Daytona and Tekken, and games were about power. Resident Evil was about vulnerability. Thirty years on, IGN calls survival horror the dominant format for anyone looking to be scared by a game.

Hollywood made film noir before anyone named it

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:13:55 +0000

Nobody on a 1940s Hollywood set thought they were making a “film noir”. Little White Lies points out that no film was produced under that label, which critics pinned on a run of similar pictures after the fact. Edward Dmytryk, one of the directors who made them, once had a student tell him he had invented film noir. He replied that he hadn’t the faintest idea what it was.

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The atrium of the Bradbury Building in Los AngelesLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

This guide covers where the style came from, who built it, the films that fixed its rules, how it travelled and where it stands now. It ends with eight films to watch first.

Victorian Britain reset the dinner table, course by course

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:13:20 +0000

A Victorian dinner party could run to about nine courses and last several hours, with up to eight forks laid at each place. That table sat at the top of a long ladder. In Wiltshire, the Poor Law Commission found the standard fare was bread, butter, potatoes, beer and tea. Between the two stood a growing middle class, and two women wrote its cookbooks. Eliza Acton published Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845. Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management first appeared as a bound book in 1861.

Jungle was hardcore rave remade by London's sound systems

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:12:52 +0000

Where jungle came from

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Aba Shanti I at the Music Cafe in Leicester on 21st June 2013Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

Jungle came out of London in the early 1990s, when the breakbeat hardcore of the rave scene met the bass weight and MC culture of Black British sound systems. DJ Mag lists what went into it. From Jamaica came dub, roots reggae and dancehall. American hip-hop supplied the breaks and the sampling. Some Belgian new beat went in too, along with the UK acid house scene as it hardened into hardcore. Michael West, who made records as Rebel MC and later as Congo Natty, told the Guardian it was breakbeat, reggae, rap and soul “all coming into one”. Reggae records fed it directly. Pitchfork says that once Dawn Penn’s You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No) became a new standard in 1994, jungle producers took it up in droves.

Why horror fell for found footage, and eight films to start

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:12:42 +0000

Found footage horror is the art of making a film look as if nobody made it. It began with a reel from the Amazon in 1980, broke through with three students lost in a Maryland forest in 1999, and now plays out on Zoom calls and in the yellow corridors of the Backrooms.

Image: Ignat Gorazd from Tokyo, Japan more

An early shoulder-mounted camcorder, held by hand.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

This guide tells that story, then gives you eight films to watch this Halloween.

Britain's plot holders dug through two wars and a waiting list

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:12:10 +0000

Where the British allotment began

Image: Anthony O'Neil more

An allotment site beneath terraced houses.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The British allotment began as compensation for land taken away. For centuries, ordinary people grew food on shared ground. Then landowners fenced it off, and the small plots handed back to the poor became the first allotments.

The horror of the body, from The Fly to The Substance

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:11:50 +0000

Body horror asks you to fear the one thing you can never leave, which is your own body. The BFI traces it from gothic literature to Titane, a film that won the Palme d’Or. This Halloween, here is where it came from, the people who made it, and ten films to start with.

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An old anatomical engraving of skulls and neck bones.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Where body horror came from

Body horror is the horror of your own flesh turning against you. The BFI describes a subgenre built on mutation, transformation and losing control of the body, usually served with enough gore to test a strong stomach. The name is younger than the films. It traces back to a 1983 essay by the Australian academic Philip Brophy, though the ideas behind it reach back into gothic literature.

Before Halloween, a British flop wrote the slasher's rules

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:11:16 +0000

Where the slasher came from

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A lit jack-o'-lantern on Halloween night.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The slasher film was born twice in 1960, and only one birth was celebrated. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is widely called the first modern horror film and the one that launched the slasher. The same year, a British film had done much of the same work and been dismissed for it.

Your zip began as a shoe fastener that barely worked

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:10:59 +0000

The zip you pulled this morning started life as a boot fastener that jammed, sold almost nothing, and outlived its inventor without ever earning its name. Whitcomb Judson of Chicago patented his “clasp-locker” in 1893 to spare people the long laces on their boots. The public at that year’s World’s Fair in Chicago largely walked past it. Two decades later a Swedish-American engineer, Gideon Sundback, rebuilt the idea into something reliable, and only then did it start to sell.

The fly agaric's road from Siberia to fairyland

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:10:44 +0000

Where the red cap grows

Ask someone to draw a mushroom and they will probably give you a red cap with white dots. Mia, aged 11, made that point in a Young country diary for The Guardian in November 2025. She had only ever seen the thing in books until a misty morning in Dalby Forest, on the North York Moors, when she found a whole clump on the pine needles.

Eight werewolf films to see first, and how the genre grew up

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:09:47 +0000

Where werewolf films came from

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The entryway to the building housing the Tom Savini Special Make-Up Effects Program in Monessen, Pennsylvania. The program helps to train aspiring practical and visual effects artists.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The werewolf film began as a near miss. Its first screen outing was a 1913 silent short called The Werewolf, directed by Henry MacRae, and no print of it is known to survive. Roger Ebert’s site describes it as feared lost. So the genre’s starting point is a title on a list rather than a film anyone can watch.

Dropped by Atlantic, Chappell Roan returned with a Grammy

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:55:49 +0000

After Atlantic Records let her go, Chappell Roan went home to Willard, Missouri, and took a job at a drive-through coffee kiosk. She spent her shifts scheming about how to get back to Los Angeles. She told the Guardian she felt like “a failure”, while knowing deep down she was not one.

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Chappell Roan performing in Paris on 20 August 2025.Licence: CC BY 4.0

The label had dropped her in 2020, shortly after releasing a song it felt had underperformed. The song was “Pink Pony Club”.

Two students wrote Rogue in 1980. A whole genre followed

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:00:52 +0000

Where the roguelike came from

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<a href=' http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/349 ' rel='nofollow'>www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/349</a>Licence: CC BY 2.0

A roguelike is a game named after one game. In 1980 two students at UC Santa Cruz, Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy, set out to shuffle the maze, the monsters and the treasure of Colossal Cave Adventure so that no two games matched. They also wanted to fold in Dungeons & Dragons and Star Trek, a 1970s mainframe game in which you hunted Klingon warships against the clock. The result was Rogue: a hero descending a dungeon of many floors, hunting treasure and fighting monsters, with no extra lives and a new layout every time.

The first point-and-click adventure was a 1984 Mac game

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:00:18 +0000

The first point-and-click adventure game was Enchanted Scepters, which Silicon Beach Software released for the Apple Macintosh in 1984. Ars Technica gives the real innovation to ICOM Simulations, whose mystery Déjà Vu dropped typing altogether a year later.

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Tim Schafer at GDC 2016Licence: CC BY 2.0

In 1986, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick wrote a proposal for a Lucasfilm game that showed every available command on screen, and their interface became the pattern for the genre. Rock Paper Shotgun still fills the top of its list of the 25 best adventures with LucasArts games, because in its view LucasArts made the best ones.

From Show Boat to Hamilton: how songs began to tell stories

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:54:44 +0000

Where the musical came from

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The Palace Theatre at Cambridge Circus, London.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

No one person made the stage musical, but two men started it. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II gave Broadway a show with real characters and a plot, at a time when revues were the norm. Playbill starts its list of Broadway’s most-revived musicals with Show Boat, which opened on December 27, 1927. Playbill says many credit it with creating modern musical theatre.

Dubstep, from a Croydon record shop to America's arenas

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:45:18 +0000

Where dubstep came from

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(From left to right) Porter Robinson , Zedd , and Skrillex perform at the 2012 South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 16, 2012.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Dubstep began in south London around the turn of the millennium, when a handful of producers took UK garage and stripped it down to bass, drums and dub echo. Its roots lie in Big Apple Records, a shop and label in Croydon, where the people who would build the sound met to try out new, bass-heavy ideas. By 2011 it had travelled from evening radio to arenas across middle America.

Trance grew out of German clubs and became a global genre

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:42:50 +0000

Where trance came from

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A Rave in Seoul, South Korea in 2001Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Trance began in the early 1990s in Germany, in dark clubs where DJs such as Sven Väth played fast techno laced with melody. Red Bull’s history of the genre places its birth in Europe, and in Frankfurt above all. Ferry Corsten, one of its biggest names, remembers it the same way. Trance now has a reputation for lasers and stadium shows, he told Red Bull, but it came out of those dark rooms, and it was always about dancing.

Britain's kitchen sink drama, from Osborne's play to the screen

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:42:42 +0000

Where kitchen sink drama came from

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The Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, in 2025.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The best-known story of kitchen sink drama starts with an unknown actor’s script, read in a riverside house in Hammersmith in 1956. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger put a university graduate who runs a sweet stall, and his cramped attic flat, on the London stage. Within two years of that premiere, Wesker had opened a play in Coventry, and Delaney had put Salford on the stage.

Harrison Ford swept a floor, then landed Han Solo

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:42:16 +0000

How a carpenter got the part of Han Solo

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Harrison Ford speaking at the 2017 San Diego Comic Con International, for 'Blade Runner 2049', at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Harrison Ford was sweeping a floor in Francis Ford Coppola’s office when George Lucas walked in. He was standing there in his carpenter’s work belt. Weeks later, someone asked him to read lines opposite the actors being considered for Star Wars. Nobody told Ford he was in the running.

Shoegaze began as an insult and ended up on TikTok

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:41:54 +0000

Where shoegaze came from

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my bloody valentine live, 19 November Dublin 2005Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Shoegaze began as an insult. British journalists coined the word for bands that seemed to study their effects pedals instead of the audience. A second nickname, “the scene that celebrates itself”, was no kinder. The musicians did not like the term at first, but they have gradually reclaimed it.

Guillermo del Toro, the monster maker who wanted Frankenstein

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:39:38 +0000

A weird boy in Guadalajara

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Guillermo del Toro at 2025 Cannes PhotocallLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director with 13 feature films behind him, Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, and one novel he spent more than 50 years trying to film. The novel is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He finally made it for Netflix in 2025, and he says pieces of it sit inside all 13 of his films.

David Lynch: the Eagle Scout who made his name an adjective

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:38:34 +0000

David Lynch made ten feature films and co-created Twin Peaks, and the work left such a mark that his surname became an adjective. IndieWire put it plainly in its obituary: there is Hitchcockian, and then there is Lynchian. The Guardian called Blue Velvet his masterpiece, and a Guardian critic said the same of Mulholland Drive. Those two films, and the first series of Twin Peaks, are where a newcomer should start.

Universal's first monster wore a face Lon Chaney made himself

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:37:47 +0000

Universal’s monsters gave horror its family tree. Between 1925 and 1954 one Hollywood studio gave cinema its Phantom, its Dracula, its Frankenstein’s Monster and its creature from a lagoon. At their best, the BFI says, the films brim with wit, invention and atmosphere. This is the story of where they came from and the people who made them, with eight films to start on this Halloween.

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Bran Castle in Romania, often linked with Dracula.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

How a silent phantom started Universal horror

Universal’s monster cycle began with a man in a mask, not with a vampire. The BFI traces the studio’s horror back to two silent films starring Lon Chaney: The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1925. Nobody called them horror at the time. The BFI says people thought of them as melodrama, and that “horror” only came into wide use at the start of the 1930s.

Gothic rock: how post-punk learned to love the dark

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:21:46 +0000

Gothic rock is British post-punk that turned towards the dark and found it beautiful, and it starts with a nine-minute song about a dead film star. Pitchfork says “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, which Bauhaus recorded in Northamptonshire in 1979, is widely accepted as goth’s wellspring. Soon afterwards the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and Killing Joke had given the sound its range. A London club called the Batcave gave it a home.

British big beat ruled the late 90s, then crashed

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:17:28 +0000

Big beat ruled the late 1990s because it reached people who never went to clubs. Hip-hop breakbeats, acid house noise and punk attitude turned rock and indie fans into ravers, in Norman Cook’s own phrase. The Prodigy took the sound to No 1 in Britain and America. Then it crashed almost as fast. Cook, who recorded as Fatboy Slim, says a style built to break the rules became a formula that anyone could copy.

The Wicker Man still burns: where folk horror came from

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:17:26 +0000

Folk horror came out of a handful of British films and television plays made around 1970, and it was named decades later. Its heart is three films: Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man. Start there, and then follow the genre out into the woods of New England, the islands of Sweden and the Himalayas.

This is a genre made by people who loved the countryside and feared it in equal measure. It is a good one for Halloween, because its monsters are rarely monsters. They are neighbours, harvest songs, and the soil itself.

Why Italy's giallo thrillers still haunt horror films

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:17:04 +0000

Where giallo came from

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Piazza Navona, Rome, at night.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Giallo is Italy’s gift to the horror film: the murder mystery dressed in black gloves and painted in colours too strong for real life. Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace, a 1964 story of a killer stalking fashion models, helped shape the American slashers of the 1970s, according to the BFI. The Hollywood Reporter describes the genre as Italy’s erotic cross of the whodunnit and the slasher, and puts its heyday in the 1970s.

In Chicago, Larry Heard slowed house down and made it deep

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 06:09:11 +0000

Deep house began in Chicago in the mid-1980s, when Larry Heard slowed the city’s new house music down and filled it with jazz chords. Mixmag credits him with starting the style, through records such as ‘Mystery of Love’ in 1985 and ‘Can You Feel It’ in 1986. The Guardian notes that he is known as the godfather of deep house. He was a drummer, frustrated that he never got to write the music. He recorded some of his first tracks on two cassette decks.

How horror film scores learned to scare, and eight to hear first

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:33 +0000

Horror film music grew from a silent-era pianist’s cue sheet into some of cinema’s most copied sounds. Bernard Herrmann’s string stabs in Psycho, John Carpenter’s piano figure in Halloween, and Goblin’s prog-rock witchcraft in Suspiria still turn up on critics’ lists. Their makers ranged from a radio dramatist to a director who could barely play.

Image: Theresa Arzadon-Labajo more

Can't Look Away, The Lure of Horror Film - The Shining axe (15198227343)Licence: CC BY 2.0

This guide follows the sound from the first quiet monster films to the current horror boom, and ends with a starter guide of scores to hear first.

Luis Enrique won PSG the Champions League after Mbappé left

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:09:04 +0000

Kylian Mbappé sat in a room at Paris Saint-Germain and watched footage of himself not defending. The clips came from a Champions League quarter-final against Barcelona, and the scene later appeared in a documentary about Luis Enrique’s first year as the club’s coach. Luis Enrique opened with basketball. “I read that you like Michael Jordan,” he told the club’s record scorer, and went on to describe how hard Jordan defended.

Slot won Liverpool's 20th English title with Klopp's squad

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:00:48 +0000

A year before Liverpool won the title, their sporting director, Richard Hughes, met a Dutch coach at his home in Zwolle. Data analysis and character references had already made Arne Slot the club’s preferred choice to succeed Jürgen Klopp.

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Anfield, Liverpool's home ground, in May 2024.Licence: CC0

“At that moment I didn’t even think about Arne,” the former Liverpool goalkeeper Sander Westerveld told the BBC. He has been Slot’s friend since they played together at Sparta Rotterdam. In England, Westerveld said, people knew little about him.

UK firms exposed to AI are cutting junior jobs first

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:53:41 +0000

AI is already changing who gets hired in Britain, and the first people to feel it are those at the bottom of the career ladder. A study by Dr Bouke Klein Teeselink of King’s College London found that firms whose work is most exposed to AI cut their junior staff by 5.8 per cent on average.

Image: Dominique Roger more

In the picture, two women and a man are working at the UNESCO Archives. Stacks of books and papers are piled on tables and bookshelves around the room. The man in the front of the picture and one of the women are sittingLicence: CC BY-SA 3.0

Klein Teeselink drew on millions of job postings and LinkedIn profiles dated 2021 to 2025. He found that ChatGPT’s public release in November 2022 marked the turning point.

Three usual causes of a slow computer, and how to spot each

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:43:44 +0000

Microsoft says a Windows computer can slow down for several reasons, among them low storage, too many apps launching at startup, outdated software and hardware that has fallen behind. Apple’s list for the Mac starts with a startup disk short of free space and an app wanting more memory than the machine can spare. wikiHow sorts the causes into three groups: a software problem, a full hard drive or faulty hardware.

The NHS says food poisoning usually clears within a week

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:43:23 +0000

Food poisoning usually gets better within a week, according to the NHS, which calls it rarely serious. The exact length depends on the germ that caused it. A bout can end in a day or drag on for weeks.

Image: Medical History Museum, Gothenburg more

An early twentieth-century hospital kitchen in Gothenburg, Sweden, from the Medical History Museum's collection.Licence: Public domain

What counts as a normal bout

The NHS says most people can treat themselves or their child at home. Cleveland Clinic puts the typical run of symptoms at 12 to 48 hours. Health.com gives the same range and adds that symptoms can last a week or longer in some people.

Cat licking is usually affection, but a sudden rise needs a vet

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:37:15 +0000

The cats.org.uk blog says a cat that licks you is most likely trying to form a close bond with you. PetMD adds a caveat: scientists have not fully worked out why cats lick people, so every explanation is a theory.

Image: tracy from north brookfield,Massachusetts, usa more

Cat washing itself. The cat licks its paw and uses its paw to clean its head (see image Image:Cat washing - by tracy.jpg .Licence: CC BY 2.0

Where does the licking come from?

Grooming fills a large part of a cat’s day. Pamela Perry, a resident in animal behaviour at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, puts it at 30 to 50 percent. National Geographic, reporting a study in the journal PNAS, says cats spend up to a quarter of their waking hours cleaning their fur.

Keith Flint, the gentle man behind the Prodigy snarl

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:44:43 +0000

Keith Flint was the dancer who became the face of the Prodigy, the Essex band that grew out of the rave scene into the biggest dance act of the 1990s. He did not write the hits, but his look and his snarl on Firestarter turned a producer’s project into a band that rock crowds could follow. When The Fat of the Land reached No 1 in America in 1997, no British dance act had done that before.

China's Gang of Four were called to a meeting and arrested

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:55:54 +0000

On the evening of 6 October 1976, four of China’s top leaders were told to come to an emergency meeting of the Politburo. The session was called for the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and every member was expected to attend. Between 7:55 and 8:30 that night the four arrived, and soldiers seized each of them as they stepped through the doors into the lobby. Nobody fired a shot.

The Empire State Building: New York's 13-month race to the sky

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 03:11:35 +0000

The Empire State Building went up in about 13 months, between the spring of 1930 and the spring of 1931, and it opened as the tallest building in the world. Its builders ran the site like a factory line. Parts were made elsewhere to a standard pattern, then brought to the site and put together.

Image: Glenn Beltz more

The Empire State Building from Rockefeller Center at sunset, 2014Licence: CC BY 2.0

The dates show how tight it was. Foundation work started on March 17, 1930, and by September 19 the steel frame had topped out at 1,048 feet, 23 weeks later. President Herbert Hoover opened the finished building on May 1, 1931, by pressing a button in Washington.

The roof that cost Jørn Utzon the Sydney Opera House

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 02:57:46 +0000

Jørn Utzon lost the Sydney Opera House because building started before anyone knew how to build its roof. Solving the shells took years, the budget swelled, and in 1965 a new state government took a hard line on the cost. Its works minister stopped paying him, and Utzon resigned in February 1966 with the interiors unfinished. He left Australia and never came back to see the building complete.

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The Sydney Opera House from under the Harbour Bridge, 2015Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The trouble showed early. In 1958, when Arup’s engineers asked Utzon to define the curves of his roof, he bent a plastic ruler against a table, traced the line and posted the drawings to London. “There was no mathematical basis,” Peter Thompson, a structural engineer at Arup, told the Guardian.

Claude will join Gemini in watermarking text, and users object

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 01:31:32 +0000

Guillaume Meyer needed four hours to beat the invisible watermark Anthropic is adding to Claude. That was the gap, Wired reported, between Anthropic confirming the watermark and Meyer publishing code to strip it out. His code has since drawn more than 100 contributors on GitHub and been bookmarked over 20,000 times on X.

Image: Goldflakes more

Writing in invisible ink shows up only under ultraviolet light.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The watermark he went after is a different thing from the faint logo on a stock photo. It lives in the choice of words. Each time a chatbot picks its next word, it often has several good options, and a random number settles which one it uses. A watermarked model swaps that random number for one derived from a secret key and the words just written, so the text reads the same. It carries a pattern that anyone holding the key can test for. Google’s Gemini already marks its text this way, and Anthropic’s version is built on Google’s method.

Nearly half of the UK's 8.6m people living alone are 65+

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 23:12:44 +0000

About 8.6 million people lived alone in the UK in 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), out of 29.0 million households. Nearly three homes in ten hold one person, and that share has barely moved in a decade.

Image: Bill Boaden more

Terraced houses in WavertreeLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What has changed is who those people are. Nearly half of them (49.6%) are now 65 or over. Men, once a clear minority of people living alone, have closed much of the gap with women.

Saddleworth's villages grew on wool and turnpikes

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 19:11:40 +0000

Saddleworth grew in three steps. Hillside weavers came first, then turnpike roads in the 18th century pulled them down into valley villages, and the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and the railway turned those villages into mill towns. A visitor today walks through all three steps at once, from the moorland routes down to the canal at Uppermill.

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Dovestone Reservoir and the hills above Saddleworth.Licence: CC0

The district is a civil parish of a dozen or so settlements on the western slope of the Pennines. The river Tame and its side streams drain the eastern half, past Denshaw, Delph, Dobcross, Diggle, Uppermill and Greenfield. The river Medlock drains the western half, past Scouthead, Austerlands, Grasscroft, Lydgate, Grotton and Springhead.

A high tunnel can add weeks to the growing year at both ends

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:07:18 +0000

A high tunnel, a type of polytunnel used on US farms, can add weeks to the growing year at both ends. Penn State Extension, writing for growers in Pennsylvania and the north-eastern US, says they can lengthen the season by as much as eight weeks before the field season starts. The same source says the tunnel can also stretch the season for up to six weeks after the first outdoor frost.

Britain's allotments owe their survival to a century of law

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:02:20 +0000

Britain’s allotments exist today because Parliament told councils to provide them. The Small Holdings and Allotments Act 1908 still obliges a council to find plots when six or more people ask for them. The law is old, and the BBC reported that a pastime once tied to flat caps and Thermos flasks still faces pressure from housing.

The rule has a catch. The duty carries no deadline, so a would-be plot holder could wait decades. Demand has made that a live problem. In Camden, north London, the BBC found the waiting list had stretched to ten years.

Victorian spiritualism: the telegraph made seances plausible

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:02:39 +0000

Seances took hold in Victorian Britain in an age when new science made the impossible feel within reach. To some, the telegraph made a message from the dead seem a smaller step.

Two girls and a code of taps

Modern spiritualism began in America. On 31 March 1848, Kate and Margaret Fox, aged 11 and 14, announced that they would contact the spirit world. They used a code of taps, one for yes and two for no, to chat with a ghost in their New York State home.

A Baltimore novelty firm sold Ouija as a Victorian family game

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:02:31 +0000

The Ouija board began as a toy. The Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore introduced it in 1890 as a “wonderful talking board”, and families played it in the parlour.

The board was plain cardboard. It carried the alphabet, some numbers, and three words: “yes”, “no”, and “goodbye”. Players rested their fingers on a triangular pointer, which seemed to move by itself and spell out answers.

Where the idea came from

Talking boards grew out of Modern Spiritualism, which took hold in the 1840s. Smithsonian Magazine dates the American movement to 1848, when the sisters Kate and Maggie Fox said spirits rapped on walls to answer them.

A Serbian village gave Europe the word 'vampire' in 1725

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:02:31 +0000

The vampire entered print through a health inspector’s report from a Serbian village. In July 1725, villagers in Kisiljevo, on the edge of the Habsburg Empire, called in an official named Frombald because they believed a dead man was killing them. His account made sensational newspaper copy and gave Europe the first printed use of the local word “vampyri”.

The dead man in Kisiljevo

The suspect was Petar Blagojević, who had been buried ten weeks earlier. His widow said he had knocked on her door after the funeral, asked for his shoes and then tried to strangle her. Over the next nine nights, nine more villagers said he had lain on them and throttled them, and each died after a brief illness.

A German court ordered every Nosferatu print burnt

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:02:19 +0000

A German court ruled in July 1925 that every print of the silent film Nosferatu must be destroyed. The reason was copyright. Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, had sued the film’s makers for lifting the story of Dracula.

The order failed. Prints survived, and the film is now a classic of German Expressionist cinema.

How a Dracula film got made without Dracula

Director F.W. Murnau founded the company Prana-Film in 1921 to make horror films for the export market. He wanted to adapt Dracula, but Stoker’s estate refused him the rights.

Poe turned gothic clichés into horror of the mind

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:02:01 +0000

Edgar Allan Poe took the stock scenes of a tired genre and moved the terror inside the mind. His settings often read as places in the head rather than places on a map.

Image: Unknown author Unknown author ; Restored by Yann Forget and Adam Cuerden more

Edgar Allan Poe , June 1849. Daguerreotype 'Annie', given to Poe's friend Mrs. Annie L. Richmond; probably taken in June 1849 in Lowell, Massachusetts, photographer unknown.Licence: Public domain

Poe began writing stories in earnest in the early 1830s. The gothic was then the most popular genre in the periodicals of the day, and The Guardian’s survey calls it “distinctly hackneyed” in artistic terms.

Posada gets credit for Mexico's Day of the Dead skeletons

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:01:44 +0000

The printmaker José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) gets much of the credit for the skeletons of Mexico’s Day of the Dead. A 1792 novel holds some of the earliest examples.

Image: Tomascastelazo more

Catrinas are figures in Mexican culture that appear during Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico, inspired in the work of José Guadalupe Posada.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

What Posada drew

Posada used skeletons for satirical commentary on the politics of his day. In the early 1900s, the political cartoonist made a satirical etching of La Calavera Catrina, a female skeleton in a flowery hat.

Ireland's barmbrack hides a ring, a coin and a cloth

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:01:28 +0000

Barmbrack is an Irish fruit bread that doubles as a fortune teller. Small objects hide inside the loaf, and each one is an omen for the person who finds it.

Saveur lists four charms: cloth, a coin, a dried bean and a ring. Parchment wraps each one. The cloth points to lean times and the coin to wealth. The bean means spinsterhood, and the ring means marriage.

What the charms mean

The Guardian’s Felicity Cloake gives a slightly different list. In her account, the ring means marriage within the year and the pea means the opposite. A stick foretells a dispute, and a silver coin brings good fortune. She writes that a piece of cloth is a sign to hide under the duvet.

Bats and Halloween: what the myths get wrong

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:01:13 +0000

Bats are less frightening than Halloween makes them. Only three of the world’s bat species feed on blood, and they live in South and Central America. Other bats forage for insects and fruit.

Image: Paramanu Sarkar more

Specie of bat.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The Natural History Museum says bats earned a ghoulish reputation partly because clawed wings wrap around them like a cape and most species fly only at night. Blood-feeding is not unique to bats either, since birds, insects and fish also do it.

In Edinburgh's Blair Street Vaults, the dark is the attraction

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:00:59 +0000

Mercat Tours, which curates the Blair Street Vaults in Edinburgh’s Old Town, says the city’s violent history hands ghost tours a ready-made story. Underground, its general manager says, the dark does the rest.

The BBC found the vaults candle-lit and gloomy, and silent apart from nervous coughs. On its visit a woman hurried out partway through because the tour had unnerved her.

Why the vaults work, according to the people who run them

Shirley Suliman of Mercat Tours calls the city’s past gory, from grave robbers and torture to murder at Holyrood Palace. Fear does not always need blood, she adds. In the Blair Street Vaults, she says, the lack of light is enough to get hearts racing.

Irish immigrants swapped turnip lanterns for pumpkins in America

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:17 +0000

The pumpkin became America’s Halloween vegetable because Irish immigrants met it and liked the size. They arrived with a habit of carving lanterns from beets or turnips, and the pumpkin did the job better.

Image: Silar more

Halloween PumpkinLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

That is the story Modern Farmer tells. It does not cover how farmers came to grow pumpkins for the holiday, and neither does the second source. What both sources do cover is the lantern.

What China's hukou permit costs a rural migrant

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:48:25 +0000

A rural hukou follows a Chinese migrant into the city and shuts them out of the benefits city-born residents take for granted. The household registration system links health care, pensions and other welfare to a person’s registered status, so a migrant who moves for work does not move their entitlements with them.

Lynette Ong, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, called it “basically apartheid”. Jiang Wenran of the University of Alberta used the same word to the BBC.

Hilbert's fully-booked hotel always finds room for one more

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:48:15 +0000

Imagine a hotel with infinitely many rooms, every one occupied, and a new guest walks in asking for a bed. The manager doesn’t turn them away. Every existing guest shifts along one door, so whoever was in room 2 takes room 3, whoever was in room 3 takes room 4, and the pattern continues down the corridor, freeing room 1 for the newcomer. That is Hilbert’s hotel, a thought experiment the mathematician David Hilbert first told in a lecture in January 1924, though he never published it himself.

One ambassador's speech, and 200 miles of ocean for every coast

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:48:05 +0000

A coastal country’s rights over ocean resources now generally reach 200 nautical miles out, roughly 230 land miles. The process behind the treaty that set that limit began with a 1967 speech at the United Nations. Maltese ambassador Arvid Pardo told the General Assembly that the minerals lying on the deep seabed, beyond any nation’s existing reach, should be the common heritage of mankind.

Why a seabed speech changed how far a coast reaches

Pardo’s speech landed at a moment when the old rules of ocean law were already under strain. In the decade before he spoke, the number of independent states had roughly doubled, and most of the newly independent nations had not ratified the 1958 Geneva Conventions that were then meant to govern the sea. Those states wanted a bigger share of the fish and minerals off their own coasts, and several South American countries had already started claiming exclusive rights far past the traditional territorial sea.

Japan has had five prime ministers in five years

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:47:44 +0000

Japan’s prime minister rarely leaves office by losing a general election. The job belongs to whoever leads the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and the party can pull that support the moment a leader’s poll numbers or a scandal make them a liability. Five people have held the post within five years: Shinzo Abe, Yoshihide Suga, Fumio Kishida, Shigeru Ishiba and Sanae Takaichi.

Two national elections fell in that period, and neither winner completed a term. Each change of leader happened inside the party, between elections, decided by a much smaller electorate than the one the country votes in.

Village girls bobbed for apples to find a future husband

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:27:37 +0000

People bobbed for apples at Halloween because the game was a way to see the future. In the version the Guardian describes, the fruit that landed between your teeth named the person you would marry.

Image: See-ming Lee (SML) more

Tom Grek, Apple Bobbing, HackJamHK Halloween Party 2012 / Hackers / SML.20121103.7D.14381Licence: CC BY 2.0

The game sounds like a soggy party trick now.

A Celtic fire festival and a Church feast made Halloween

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:27:21 +0000

Halloween grew from Samhain, an ancient Celtic festival that marked the end of summer, and from the Christian feasts that later settled on the same dates. The name comes from the Church. Much of the spooky detail comes from older habits that nobody wrote down.

Image: Avia Venefica more

Samhain OfferingsLicence: CC BY 2.0

Halloween is often seen as a modern American invention. The BBC points out that it dates back more than 2,000 years, to Ireland and a Celtic fire festival.

Northern England still keeps Mischief Night alive

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:27:03 +0000

Mischief Night is a night of pranks that survives mainly in northern England. Treacle on door handles and thrown eggs mark it, according to the BBC and the Guardian.

Image: ami harikoshi more

Mischief Night falls around Halloween and Bonfire Night, depending on where you live.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The BBC calls it a centuries-old tradition that is barely known elsewhere in the UK. It falls around Halloween and Bonfire Night, depending on where you live.

Portland's scream park against Chicago's puppet peepholes

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:48 +0000

Two haunted attractions in the US show how far the form can stretch. One is a Portland, Oregon, scream park that aims to frighten people but not too much. The other is a Chicago puppet haunt where visitors watch scenes through slits in a wall.

Image: IDS.photos from Tiverton, UK more

A dark corridor.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

NPR reports that millions of people across the US pay each Halloween for the chance to be terrified in houses, mazes and amusement parks.

Monster Mash hit number one in 1962, then the Top 10 in August

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:33 +0000

Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash” spent the last two weeks of October 1962 at number one on the Billboard chart. It came back in 1973 and reached the Top 10 again, this time in early August.

Image: Shixart1985 more

An old radio, covered in cobwebs.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Two fads in one song

Billboard’s Steve Greenberg says the record was made to cash in on two fads at once. One was the monster-movie craze, and the other was the run of dance records that followed the Twist.

The Celtic origin of Halloween costumes rests on thin evidence

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:32 +0000

Many accounts say Halloween costumes began as Celtic disguises, but the evidence for that is thin. The Guardian notes that animal skins worn around a ritual fire “may have been part of it” at Samhain, then adds that actual evidence is thin to nonexistent.

Image: Petful.com more

two dogs in halloween costumes funnyLicence: CC BY 2.0

That caveat matters because the tale is everywhere. BBC Bitesize tells young readers that the Celts lit huge bonfires and sometimes wore disguises so spirits would not recognise them. Smithsonian Magazine says Celts dressed in costumes to stave off evil spirits.

Audiences who fainted gave The Exorcist its cursed name

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:24 +0000

The Exorcist became known as a cursed film because people really did faint and fall ill after watching it, according to IndieWire. The sources the magazine holds describe that audience reaction. They do not describe a string of misfortunes on set.

Image: Kevin Burkett more

The Exorcist Steps in Georgetown, Washington DC.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What happened in the cinemas

The film reached theatres in 1973. Little White Lies describes moviegoers queuing for hours outside sold-out cinemas in bad weather. It says word of mouth spread the film’s reputation from person to person across the country.

Carpenter made Halloween for $300,000, and slashers followed

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:12 +0000

John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween cost about $300,000 to make and still launched a run of sequels. The BBC says its masked killer, Michael Myers, became a pop culture icon.

Image: Kyle Cassidy more

John CarpenterLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

What the money bought

The BBC puts the budget at just over $300,000 and says the film has since made more than $47m. The Guardian reports a worldwide gross of $60m, a record for an independent film at the time. The Hollywood Reporter goes higher, with more than $70 million for the original and more than $362 million across its nine sequels.

How did Halloween take over Shibuya in Tokyo, Japan?

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:12 +0000

Halloween in Shibuya started underground, as a party for foreigners on a Tokyo train, and grew into a street crowd that the ward now asks people to avoid.

Image: AsPJT more

Crowds in Shibuya on Halloween night, 2015.Licence: CC0

In the late 1980s, the nearest thing Japan had to Halloween was a season of August festivals honouring the dead. Almost nobody marked 31 October except foreigners living in the country. A group of young expats took over part of the Yamanote Line for an hour around Halloween. The event became known as the “Yamanote Halloween Train.”

Dracula in Whitby: what Bram Stoker took from the harbour

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:26:02 +0000

Bram Stoker found three things in Whitby that ended up in Dracula: a shipwreck, a black dog and the count’s name. He spent time in the Yorkshire port in 1890, and the town still shows in the novel’s early chapters.

Image: Glen Bowman more

Dracula - Bram Stoker Experience in Whitby, North YorkshireLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

How Stoker came to Whitby

At the end of July 1890, Stoker was the business manager of the actor Sir Henry Irving. His theatrical company had just finished a difficult tour of Scotland. Irving suggested a month’s holiday, and he named Whitby as a place to try.

Fear of spiders may trace back to scorpions

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:25:58 +0000

People who fear spiders are usually not afraid of a bite. Psychologists have found that the way a spider moves, and its long legs, matter more, and that the fear can pass down through families.

Image: Michael Gäbler more

A spider in its web.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

An estimated 6% of the general population suffers from full-blown arachnophobia. Spiders are also the thing children name most often when researchers ask what they fear. The question is why a small animal, nearly always harmless, gets that reaction.

Ten hanged at Lancaster in 1612 on a child's testimony

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:24:52 +0000

Ten people were hanged after the Pendle witch trials of 1612 because an English court at Lancaster found them guilty of witchcraft, and a nine-year-old girl’s evidence weighed heavily with it. The case began with a request for pins.

Image: Brian Deegan more

Alleged Grave of Alice Nutter (1612), Pendle Witch, Newchurch in PendleLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

How did it start?

Near Colne in Lancashire, Alizon Device met a pedlar named John Law and asked him for some pins. The Guardian’s Blake Morrison writes that she may have been offering to buy them, but more likely, being poor, she was begging.

Egypt's Mamluk rulers began as purchased slaves

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:23:04 +0000

The men who ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 until 1517 began as slaves. Their dynasty, the Mamluks, took its name from an Arabic word meaning “owned”.

Image: Prof. Mortel more

Mosque lamp, Egypt, Mamluk era, 13th cent.; Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, QatarLicence: CC BY 2.0

How a slave became a soldier

Recruiters captured boys of about 13 from lands north of the Persian empire. Traders then sold them to the commanders of Islamic governments. Venice and Genoa played a large part in shipping them, despite papal bans.

Conwy axe mould: why two halves count as treasure

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:22:19 +0000

A metal detectorist in north Wales dug up two stone pieces that fit together, and a coroner has ruled that both count as treasure. They are the halves of a mould for casting axes, made about 3,400 years ago.

Image: Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D. more

Axe Moulds, NE Thailand, 1st Millennium BCLicence: CC0

The ruling turned on one question. Is a two-part mould one object or two?

An ion thruster pushes with the force of a sheet of paper

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:22:13 +0000

An ion thruster pushes a spacecraft with about the force of a sheet of paper resting on your hand. The German space agency DLR makes the same comparison for the engines on the Dawn asteroid probe.

Image: Rocketscience14 more

Busek's BET-3 Ion ThrusterLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

How xenon becomes thrust

Xenon is a gas like helium or neon, only heavier. It flows into the engine, where it picks up an electrical charge, and charged atoms are called ions.

Britain's 1911 Act made workers, employers and state pay

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:56 +0000

The National Insurance Act 1911 made British wage-earners pay into a national fund that covered them when they fell ill. A second scheme covered unemployment in some trades. The Liberal government of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith passed it.

Image: Poster published by the Liberal Party 1911 more

Poster published by the Liberal Party.Licence: Public domain

Before the Act, a free National Health Service did not exist, and poor people usually could not afford medical care.

Volcanic ash stopped all four engines on two airliners

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:51 +0000

On the evening of June 23, 1982, British Airways Flight 009 left London Heathrow for Auckland. Hours later, at 37,000 feet, all four engines of the Boeing 747 stopped, and nobody on board knew why. The jet had flown into an ash cloud from the Galunggung volcano in West Java, 93 miles away.

Image: tarotastic on Flickr more

Volcanic Ash Dunes of Tarvurvur, Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The night four engines failed

The crew first saw what Betty Tootell, an eyewitness, described as millions of sparks. Onlookers took it for St. Elmo’s fire. Then the fourth engine flamed out, and the other three followed in less than a minute. Captain Eric Moody told passengers, “All four engines have stopped.”

Crossword setters keep grids symmetrical by convention

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:49 +0000

Crossword setters build their grids so the pattern of black squares survives a half turn. Rotate the page upside down and the blocks land where they started. No rule of nature demands it. The habit is a convention, and it is more than a century old.

Image: CrosswordMan more

British Cryptic Crossword Grid BlankLicence: CC BY 2.0

Where the habit began

The modern crossword grew from a puzzle by Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool immigrant. It ran in The New York Sunday World on December 21, 1913, under the name Word-Cross. Readers took to it at once, and their suggestions shaped the basic rules. A symmetrical grid became a convention within months.

Scientists logged a 58-foot rogue wave off Vancouver Island

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:28 +0000

On November 17, 2020, a sensor buoy off Ucluelet, British Columbia, measured a wave 58 feet tall. Scientists call it the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Its authors described it in the journal Scientific Reports.

Image: NOAA more

Rogue wave or freak wave — merchant ship (amidships oil tanker) labouring in heavy seas as a huge wave looms ahead. Picture taken in the Bay of Biscay near the 100-fathom curve, off France, ca. 1940. Huge waves are commoLicence: Public domain

The wave stood three times as tall as the waves around it. By contrast, the first rogue wave ever detected, off Norway in 1995, reached 84 feet but was a little over twice as tall as its neighbours.

Nitrate film burns underwater, so its reels get their own vaults

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:17 +0000

IndieWire reports that nitrate film resembles guncotton and burns even underwater.

Image: Hansmuller more

Nitrate film lies decomposing in a rusted film can.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Kodak discontinued nitrate stock in 1952. Many classic prints then spent decades in vaults.

Why a projector is the worst place for it

Showing a nitrate print puts the film in a hard spot. It runs through the projector at 24 frames per second, inches from a red-hot 6,000-watt bulb, and rough handling can lead to disaster.

Underground fungi trade phosphorus for plant sugar

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:10 +0000

A plant pays a fungus in sugars and fats, and the fungus pays back with nutrients, mainly phosphorus. The deal runs in the roots of around 70 percent of land plant species.

The fungi involved are arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. They cannot make their own food, so they depend on carbon from the plant that hosts them. The plant takes in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and feeds it to the fungus.

Is a farm without soil or sun worth its power bill?

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:08 +0000

In Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, the company Mirai turned a former Sony factory into an indoor farm. It harvests about 10,000 heads of lettuce a day under 17,500 LED lights.

Image: ifarm.fi more

Vertical farm Hydroponics, Finland (iFarm.fi)Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The open question is the electricity.

Inside a UK Amazon warehouse, scanners counted down each pick

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:21:07 +0000

When the BBC visited Amazon’s Hemel Hempstead warehouse in 2015, a picker’s handheld scanner told them where to walk and counted down the seconds they had to reach the next item. The company’s general manager first denied the countdown existed. A scanner shown to the reporter then displayed one.

Image: Indy beetle more

Amazon fulfillment center in Garner, North Carolina, site of the former Jones Sausage factoryLicence: CC0

The same visit shows how the software works on the shop floor. It does not show how Amazon sets the target behind the timer.

A fight director turns Shakespeare's "they fight" into a story

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:47 +0000

A stage sword fight is safe because every move is choreographed, even when it looks wild. Fight director Terry King says the aim is a fight that looks disorganised and erratic but is “absolutely choreographed”.

Image: eschipul more

Sword FightLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

That is the craft in one line. The audience should see danger, and the performers should never face it.

Apollo's computer landed on the Moon with 72 kilobytes

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:46 +0000

The computer that guided Apollo 11 to the Moon had 72 kilobytes of memory, and its programmers still had to cut features to make the software fit. The machine was the Apollo Guidance Computer.

Image: csixty4 more

Apollo guidance computer UILicence: CC BY 2.0

What 72 kilobytes meant

The memory held 36,000 words, according to SpaceNews. The Planetary Society puts it at almost a million times less storage than a modest smartphone. The processor ran about 80,000 instructions per second. Ars Technica says the scarce memory shaped the software far more than that speed did.

Dick Fosbury turned his back on the bar and won Olympic gold

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:46 +0000

Dick Fosbury won the high jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City by going over the bar backwards. He cleared 2.24m, an Olympic record, and beat his team-mate Ed Carruthers by 2cm.

Image: Respublika Narodnaya more

A painting of a man doing Fosbury flop .Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

World Athletics says almost every elite jumper now uses the flop. It says older methods, such as the western roll and the straddle, are no longer in use.

Five layers of Kapton shield Webb's instruments from the Sun

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:40 +0000

The James Webb Space Telescope stays cold because its sunshield reflects the Sun’s heat back into space. The shield has five layers of Kapton film, coated with aluminium and silicon. That keeps the telescope at minus 233C, which protects its infrared observations.

Image: IMAGE: STScI more

Webb's sunshield plays a vital role in protecting the telescope from unwanted infrared radiation. The five-layer design insulates the telescope, keeping light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon from overheating the mirror andLicence: Public domain

The shield is huge. It measures about 21 by 14 metres, roughly the area of a tennis court.

Raised ground can defeat a UK home's damp-proof course

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:36 +0000

A damp-proof course is a barrier in a wall’s foundations that repels moisture from the ground below. Damp problems arise when the ground outside sits higher than the course, which lets water step around it.

Image: Nick / from United Kingdom more

A damp-proof course shows as a thin line in a block wall's mortar.Licence: CC BY 2.0

What the barrier stops

Water climbs a wall by capillary action. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) compares it to a sponge sitting in a puddle, slowly drawing water up through tiny holes in the material.

Diplomats in Berlin wrote the rules for seizing Africa

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:33 +0000

European diplomats gathered in Berlin in 1884 to agree how Europe would take Africa, and no African leader was in the room. The conference did not draw the modern map. It wrote the rules that governed the race to claim it.

Image: Karmakolle more

Seals and signatures on the Belgian copy of the General Act of the Berlin Conference, 1885 (photographed in the House of European History)Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

A map with white spaces

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck hosted the talks at his official residence, the Reich Chancellery. A map five metres tall hung on the wall. It showed Africa with a few rivers, lakes and place names, and many blank patches.

On an induction hob, the pan makes the heat, not the glass

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:26 +0000

An induction hob heats the pan itself, with no flame and no hot element beneath the glass. Which?, the UK consumer group, says no heat is produced unless a pan touches the hob surface.

Image: CDAappliances more

Woman cooking on induction hob and using oven.Licence: CC BY 2.0

How it differs from an electric hob

An ordinary electric ceramic hob passes a current through elements under the glass. The surface heats up whether or not a pan sits on it. An induction hob does not work that way.

Rome's Praetorian Guard protected emperors and killed them

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:15 +0000

Rome’s Praetorian Guard was the emperor’s household force, and on at least two occasions it ended an emperor’s reign. Its soldiers stabbed Caligula, and they eliminated Pertinax.

Image: The Armatura Press more

Praetorian Guard: Louvre reliefLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Where the Guard came from

The Guard began as the cohors praetoria, young men of good family who served as a bodyguard for Republican generals in the second century BC. It became a permanent force only after Augustus destroyed Mark Antony at the sea battle of Actium and made himself sole master of the Roman world.

Cas9 follows a guide RNA to one spot and cuts the DNA there

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:20:06 +0000

Cas9 is a protein that cuts DNA, and a short strand of RNA tells it where to cut. Change the RNA and the same protein cuts a different gene.

Image: Elena I Leonova more

Three-dimensional structure of the Cas9 protein, PDB ID 5Y36, prepared with PyMOL.Licence: CC BY 4.0

The RNA supplies the aim.

Past the Sagittarius dust sits a black hole of 4.3 million Suns

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:16:05 +0000

Most astronomers say a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* sits at the centre of the Milky Way. It holds about 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, and astronomers worked that out by watching nearby stars race around it.

Image: patrickkavanagh more

Aurora Australis and Milky Way centreLicence: CC BY 2.0

You can point to the place on a summer night. The galactic centre lies in the constellation Sagittarius, next to the teapot’s spout. You will not see it. Dust along that stretch of the Milky Way blocks the view in visible light.

North Korea ranks people by what their grandparents did

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:15:45 +0000

North Korea grades its citizens by the background of their families, and that grade, called songbun, decides much of what they can do with their lives. A United Nations panel traced the discrimination in the country to the system, which sorts people by state-assigned class and birth. It also weighs their political opinions and religion.

Image: Roman Harak more

North Korea - Kim Il-Sung statueLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Songbun is a Korean word meaning “ingredients”, according to The Diplomat. It says Kim Il Sung, the founder of the state, created it.

US lenders weigh a firm's credit, age and revenue

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:15:06 +0000

A US lender looks at three things before it extends a small business a line of credit. These are the credit behind the firm, its business history and its finances. Each lender sets its own bar, and the bars differ a lot.

Image: homegets.com more

A person works at a laptop on a desk.Licence: CC BY 2.0

What the credit reports show

Fit Small Business says a credit report shows lenders how much debt a business carries and how it handled past loan payments. It also hints at whether the owner will keep paying on time. That data feeds a credit score, a number meant to show overall credit risk.

A diamond cutter engraves a sound wave into a spiral groove

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:13:57 +0000

A vinyl record stores music as a shape rather than as data. One unbroken groove wiggles in step with the sound, and a needle later follows those wiggles to bring the sound back.

Image: Evan-Amos more

An almost-flat view of a 12 in LP vinyl record.Licence: Public domain

The groove is a single spiral. It starts at the outer edge of the disc and winds towards the centre. Know Your Instrument describes it as geometry with no samples and no clock, just a physical map of the waveform.

Glacier ice keeps a year's snow and air in every layer

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:12:09 +0000

Snow traps air as it falls, and the next snowfall buries it. Pressure then turns the pile into ice with the air sealed inside. A glacier is a stack of these years, and a cylinder drilled out of it is a record of the sky.

Image: GlacierNPS more

Grinnell Glacier IceLicence: Public domain

Scientists call that cylinder an ice core. Cores usually run 300 to 500 feet long.

What the Rana Plaza accord changed in Bangladesh's factories

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:18:00 +0000

The accord brought an inspection regime with legal teeth. Within weeks of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people on April 24, 2013, the world’s two biggest fashion retailers backed an accord on fire and building safety. Ten years later, Corporate Knights counted 56,000 independently overseen inspections at more than 2,400 garment factories as the accord’s work to that point.

How the accord came about

Rana Plaza was not the first disaster. A factory fire the previous November had killed 112 people, and CNBC reported that the run of deaths had drawn world attention to safety in Bangladesh’s garment trade, then second only to China’s as a clothing exporter.

Cambodia's 1993 election was the UN's biggest peacekeeping bet

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:17:38 +0000

The United Nations supervised Cambodia’s May 1993 election. It sent a peacekeeping force of 22,000 people at a cost of $2 billion, the largest operation in its history, and staged a vote over six days. The Khmer Rouge boycotted it and attacked the people running it.

The mandate came from a peace deal. In 1990 the UN Security Council endorsed a plan for a UN-supervised interim government and free elections. Cambodia’s factions signed the accord in Paris in October 1991, and the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, known as UNTAC, began work in 1992.

Set designers build the whole stage in miniature first

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:16:39 +0000

A model box shows the whole set, shrunk to scale, before construction begins. The National Theatre describes it as a scaled, three-dimensional version of a theatre set. It is how a designer translates a design for a show into a physical space that others can read.

Who looks inside the box

The model is a shared reference. According to the National Theatre, it lets the director, the producer, the workshop teams and the actors grasp the space and what the show will need on stage.

Russia's Kaliningrad exclave relies on transit through Lithuania

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:15:49 +0000

Russia’s land route to Kaliningrad crosses someone else’s territory. The exclave sits between Lithuania to the north and east and Poland to the south, about 1,300km from Moscow, and much of its supply arrives by rail. That rail traffic crosses Lithuania, an EU member, so EU sanctions apply to it.

How the EU lets goods through

EU law carves out an exception for the exclave. Because of its isolated position, Regulation (EC) No 798/2008 sets special conditions for some consignments travelling to and from Russia through Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Those conditions add extra controls and require the consignments to be sealed.

England's compulsory purchase fight is about hope value

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:14:28 +0000

In England a public body that wants land for a scheme can issue a compulsory purchase order. By 2023 the argument was over hope value, the premium land carries when someone expects it to win planning permission.

What an order looks like in practice

The London Development Agency, the mayor’s business arm, issued one for a 345 hectare site in Stratford, east London, to clear the way for the Olympic Park. The site held some private housing and more than 270 businesses. Many firms around Marshgate Lane told the BBC they were being forced out.

Britain and the US make big firms publish CEO pay ratios

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:13:57 +0000

A company must publish how its chief executive’s pay compares with what its staff earn, but the details depend on the country. In the UK, a company with an average of more than 250 UK employees must set the boss’s total pay against three points on its pay scale. In the US, a public company must give one figure: the CEO’s pay divided by the pay of its median employee.

US Four Corners marker is at most 1,800 feet off, not 2.5 miles

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:32:22 +0000

Surveyors fixed the Four Corners point in 1875, and they put it where the law told them to. Chandler Robbins, working for the US General Land Office, ran the boundary between Arizona and New Mexico north from the Mexican border and set the monument where it met the 37th parallel. The National Geodetic Survey says the marker sits no more than about 1,800 feet from where it was meant to be.

A 1945 magazine feature set off the Skinner baby-box myth

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:32:15 +0000

The false story began with a magazine feature in 1945 and a name people already knew. The Ladies’ Home Journal showed B. F. Skinner’s baby daughter inside a glass-fronted crib he had built. Readers who knew the Skinner box, his chamber for training rats and pigeons, assumed the crib was one too. Over the following years the rumour grew that the girl had been harmed by it. She was not.

Big British employers must publish their gender pay gap

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:32:15 +0000

An employer in England, Scotland or Wales with 250 or more staff on the year’s snapshot date must report its gender pay gap. It files the figures on the government’s gender pay gap service, publishes them on its own website, and keeps them online for at least three years. From 2027 it will also have to publish an action plan.

What the gap measures

The government defines the gender pay gap as how far men’s average pay in an organisation differs from women’s. The CIPD describes it as a comparison of men’s and women’s median hourly pay. That makes it a different thing from equal pay, which the Equality Act 2010 covers and which requires equal pay for work of equal value.

UNESCO stopped updating its atlas of endangered languages

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:35:49 +0000

UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists about 2,500 languages, including 230 counted extinct since 1950. That figure sits close to the roughly 3,000 languages linguists generally reckon are endangered worldwide.

How the atlas grades a language

The atlas sorts living languages into four bands, from vulnerable, where most children still speak it at home, to critically endangered, where only grandparents use it, and only rarely. Extinct makes a fifth band. A language counts as extinct once the atlas has found no speaker since the 1950s, and one judged safe does not appear in the atlas at all.

Africa's free trade area was first tested with batteries and tea

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:35:48 +0000

The African Union launched the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement in March 2018. Counted by member countries, it is the largest free trade area in the world, linking 55 African economies. Signing it was the quick part. The pact did not take effect until January 2021, and its pilot shipments began in 2022.

From signature to launch

The agreement was a framework, not a finished deal. When leaders met in Niamey, Niger’s capital, to launch it formally, World Politics Review noted that members still had to negotiate the actual cuts to tariffs and other barriers. At that point it covered 54 of the African Union’s 55 members.

Norway owns Svalbard, but a 1920 treaty lets others mine it

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:34 +0000

The Svalbard Treaty split ownership from access. Signed in Paris in 1920, it recognises Norway’s sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago. In the same text it guarantees citizens of the other signatory states the right to exploit Svalbard’s natural resources “on a perfectly equal footing”. Euronews counts 46 such states besides Norway, Russia among them.

The result is a territory that, in Foreign Policy’s words, is run by one country, lived in by people from many and defended by no armed forces at all.

NBC asked up to $10m for 30 seconds of the US Super Bowl

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:32 +0000

NBC aired the 2026 Super Bowl and sold its advertising time. How much it charged depends on whom you read. Semafor reported that NBCUniversal sold out at around $7 million per 30-second slot. MediaPost, citing USA Today’s Ad Meter, put NBC’s record price at $8 million to $10 million for the same 30 seconds.

MediaPost’s figures point upward. In 2023, by the same USA Today count, 30 seconds sold for what MediaPost called a relatively low $7 million.

Philae touched comet 67P three times before it stayed put

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:32 +0000

Philae landed on a comet by falling onto it slowly and, in the end, by luck. The lander touched comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014, bounced off, came down again, bounced a second time, and only settled on its third contact. Its anchoring harpoons never fired.

That third touchdown still made Philae the first spacecraft to soft-land on a comet, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.

Why a comet is hard to land on

Gravity is the problem. On 67P it is about a hundred thousand times weaker than on Earth, so a lander has almost no weight to hold it down. Philae came in at roughly 3.2 kilometres per hour, slower than a brisk walk.

Offa's Dyke still shadows the border between England and Wales

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:31 +0000

Offa’s Dyke marked the edge of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, not a modern country. King Offa of Mercia most likely had it built once he held his throne securely, as a lasting line between his lands and the Welsh, according to Herefordshire Council’s archaeology service. The England and Wales border still runs close to it, though walkers on the dyke keep changing countries as the line weaves back and forth across the bank.

A self-taught US engineer built truck refrigeration from scrap

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:29 +0000

Frederick McKinley Jones made refrigerated trucking possible by solving one problem: shaking. Cooling units already worked on ships, but they could not survive the vibration of road travel, so lorries still ran on blocks of ice. Jones, a self-taught mechanical engineer, designed a unit that could take the pounding, and the company built around it became Thermo King.

The BBC’s Tim Harford calls it the last link in the cold chain, the network that keeps perishable goods at a controlled temperature from source to shop.

Who decides what goes on a book cover?

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:23 +0000

Most book covers are decided by the publisher, not the author. The Guardian’s history of the cover found that the marketing and design departments have usually chosen the image, with little reference to the writer. What those teams work from is a brief: whatever the editors and marketers tell the designer about the book.

That brief matters more than most readers would guess, because the designer often has not read the book.

Hundreds of thousands of brass fans fill a small Serbian village

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:22 +0000

Guča is a contest as well as a party. Bands from across Serbia compete for the Golden Trumpet, and the BBC reported that winning usually brings a recording contract and months of wedding bookings. Around that contest, a village of a few thousand people fills with brass for the best part of a week.

The numbers are the first surprise. The festival’s organiser, Adam Tadic, told the BBC he expected about half a million people, in a village normally home to 3,000. The Guardian gave the crowd as more than 300,000 and the population as 2,500.

Bangladesh's Grameen Bank grew from loans made in a famine

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:21 +0000

Grameen Bank began with an economics professor handing small sums of his own money to villagers during the Bangladeshi famine of 1974 and 1975. Muhammad Yunus drew one lesson from it: the poor needed access to capital to become self-sufficient. In 1983 he turned that lesson into a bank and called it Grameen, the Bengali for “of the village”.

The idea that a bank could lend to the poorest people without asking for collateral sounded unrealistic at the start. Yunus told the New York Times in 2013 that people asked him exactly that, and that Grameen had shown it could be done.

What Greenland's 1979 home rule gave it, and what Denmark kept

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:21 +0000

Greenland won home rule in 1979 after a referendum, and it gained its own parliament to decide and run internal matters. Denmark held on to the rest: constitutional affairs, foreign relations and defence, according to the BBC’s timeline of the island. That split still shapes every argument about Greenland’s future.

Three centuries of rule from Copenhagen

Home rule ended a long run of rule from Copenhagen. Danish colonisation began in 1721, with a settlement near present-day Nuuk. Denmark claimed a full monopoly on trade with Greenland from 1776.

A lunchtime joke about flying saucers became the Fermi paradox

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:20 +0000

The Fermi paradox started as a lunchtime aside. In the summer of 1950, at Los Alamos, Enrico Fermi was talking about flying saucers with Edward Teller and Emil Konopinski. Then he suddenly asked, “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” The question outlived the conversation. The SETI Institute says it has held the attention of every SETI researcher since.

It became a paradox later, when other scientists turned a quip into an argument. Fermi asked a question. They supplied the logic that made the silence hard to explain.

How psychologists study the flow state

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:20 +0000

Flow is the state people call being “in the zone”: total absorption in a hard task that somehow feels effortless. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first set out the idea in 1975, and he found it by asking people rather than by measuring them.

He interviewed hundreds of experts across a wide spread of activities and heard the same pattern again and again. A rock climber described moving in harmony with something larger. A dancer talked of floating along. A writer said that sometimes the fingers, not the brain, did the work.

Store the Picasso, defer the tax: how art freeports work

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:20 +0000

A freeport is a warehouse that customs treats as not quite inside the country. Goods can enter it without paying import duties or taxes such as VAT, because the law treats them as still in transit. The tax falls due only when they reach their final destination, and under the Geneva Freeport’s rules a work of art could in theory stay in that untaxed limbo forever.

That is the whole trick. A painting that never formally arrives never triggers the bill.

England's 1974 reform scrapped councils, not its old counties

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:19 +0000

England’s reorganisation of 1 April 1974 did not wipe out its old counties. What the Local Government Act 1972 abolished was a layer of councils and the areas they ran. It then gave the word “county” to the new council areas that replaced them, and that choice of word has confused people ever since.

So when someone says Cumberland or Huntingdonshire vanished, they are half right. Neither name is attached to a county-wide council any more. Both can now appear on boundary signs as traditional counties.

Deutsche Welle: Germany's broadcaster for audiences abroad

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:18 +0000

Deutsche Welle is Germany’s public broadcaster for listeners and viewers outside Germany. Its own spokesman, Berthold Stevens, put it plainly to The Guardian in 2006: “Deutsche Welle is Germany’s international broadcaster.” Because its audience lives abroad, its fortunes turn on how it reaches other countries and whether their governments let it in.

Two episodes show both sides of that.

Reaching more than 100 countries

At the start of 2007, DW handed its worldwide radio transmission to VT Communications, a British firm. VTC believed it was the first time a state broadcaster had outsourced its output to a foreign contractor. The five-year deal covered broadcasts to more than 100 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

A 1977 Black feminist statement coined 'identity politics'

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:17 +0000

The Combahee River Collective Statement shaped Black feminist thought in the US by insisting that oppressions do not arrive one at a time. Written in 1977, it described the overlapping economic and social oppression Black women faced, in the words of its co-author Barbara Smith. Smith says it also coined the term “identity politics”.

She made that claim in The Guardian in 2020. She wrote that the statement pushed the international left and other movements to see inequality as structural, and as something that hits oppressed groups in different ways.

California water budgets: a pinhole disc for the overspenders

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:15 +0000

A household water budget turns a plea to save water into a number a home can break. In the third year of a drought, Californians were asked to keep indoor use to 55 gallons, about 208 litres, per person per day. One utility in the Santa Monica Mountains went further, setting each home an allowance and fitting a flow restrictor when repeat offenders ignored it.

For scale, the BBC noted that filling a bathtub takes about 30 gallons.

The Maya built a year into Mexico's El Castillo pyramid

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:15 +0000

El Castillo has 365 steps because its builders made the pyramid count the days of the year. Each of its four staircases has 91 steps, and the platform at the top adds the last one. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian gives the same sum: 91 on each side, plus the temple at the summit, makes 365.

The pyramid, also called the Temple of Kukulkan, stands at Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. National Geographic calls a 365-day calendar one feat among many in Maya science.

Belgium's loot box ban: strict on paper, unenforced

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:14 +0000

Belgium’s ruling told publishers to take paid loot boxes out of their games or risk prosecution. In April 2018 the country’s Gaming Commission found that the loot boxes in FIFA 18, Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive broke Belgian gambling law. Justice minister Koen Geens demanded their removal. Publishers that refused faced up to five years in prison and fines of up to €800,000, doubled where children were involved, Eurogamer reported.

A Pentagon-funded radar became Puerto Rico's Arecibo telescope

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:57:13 +0000

The Arecibo telescope began as a radar for studying the upper atmosphere, paid for by the Pentagon. Cornell University engineer William Gordon conceived it to probe the ionosphere, and the US military’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded it. ARPA hoped the instrument might help track nuclear missile launches, Astronomy magazine reports.

When it opened in 1963, it was called the Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory. Astronomy came later, almost by accident.

Gaia, parked at L2, still fired thrusters to stay put

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:06:23 +0000

A Lagrange point holds a spacecraft because the gravity of two large bodies balances there. Around the Sun and Earth there are five such points, and a craft placed at one can stay in position while spending very little energy, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) explains.

“Very little” is not “none”. The European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory needed a correcting thruster burn about once a month to keep its place.

Clownfish keep their anemones breathing at night

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:06:16 +0000

A clownfish and its sea anemone trade protection for housekeeping. The anemone’s stinging cells, called nematocysts, keep predators off the fish, and the fish cleans algae from the anemone. That is the textbook version. Research since has added two more services the fish provides, and one of them happens only in the dark.

NOAA’s staff at the Fagatele Bay National Marine Sanctuary describe the pair as living in a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship, with the stinging tentacles no threat to the resident fish.

Red notices: Interpol's nearest thing to a global warrant

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:06:16 +0000

Interpol does not run manhunts of its own. It links police forces in 196 countries, while each national force stays in charge of investigating and enforcing its own law, UN News reports. The best-known form of that request is the red notice, which the Guardian calls the closest thing the world has to an international arrest warrant.

The film version gets this wrong. Encyclopedia Britannica notes that Interpol agents making arrests would trespass on the sovereignty of member countries, so they do not.

A lung drug passed its main test and missed two others

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:06:15 +0000

A clinical trial proves a drug works by beating a precise statement that it does nothing. Researchers write down that “no effect” claim, called the null hypothesis, before the trial starts, and the statistics test whether the results let them reject it. The drug nintedanib, appraised by England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in 2016, shows how that plays out.

On its main measure the drug cleared the bar easily. On two others that patients would care about, it did not.

The gap in Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:06:15 +0000

Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem by not attacking it head on. He proved a piece of a much larger conjecture linking two distant areas of mathematics, and the theorem followed from that. Getting there took him seven years of secret work, and then one more year to repair a flaw a reviewer found.

The claim in the margin

The theorem says that the equation x to the n, plus y to the n, equals z to the n has no positive whole-number solutions once n is bigger than 2. Pierre de Fermat wrote it in 1637 in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica, adding that the margin was too narrow for his marvellous proof.

Costa Rica's forests returned once cattle stopped paying

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:55:45 +0000

Costa Rica got its forests back mainly by ending the subsidies that paid people to clear them. Crops, cattle and new roads cut forest cover from 77 per cent of the country to 41 per cent between 1943 and 1986, according to the World Resources Institute. The United Nations Environment Programme now puts it at more than 53 per cent.

In the 1950s Costa Rica cleared forest faster per head of population than any other country, the BBC World Service reported.

Direct air capture: a fan, a filter and a lot of heat

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:53:54 +0000

A direct air capture plant pulls carbon dioxide out of the sky in two steps. Large fans draw air through a filter holding a material called a sorbent, which grabs the CO₂. Then the plant heats the sorbent, or treats it another way, so it lets the gas go again. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes that as the typical design.

The released carbon can then be buried deep underground or put to industrial use, such as making concrete or synthetic fuels.

A stage costume is built to come off in seconds

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:53:43 +0000

Stage costumes have to come off fast and last a long time. On Broadway, dressers strip performers head to toe in seconds, eight times a week. On the Melbourne club circuit, two performers told the Guardian how they wash, mend and alter their own outfits for years.

The trick in both places is the same. A costume is made to be got out of quickly, and then kept going.

A dresser for every track

On Broadway, dressers do the changing. Each one is assigned one or more cast members to follow through the whole performance, and joins a team for quick changes in the big numbers. Playbill counted 17 dressers on Aladdin and 12 on Mean Girls, against five on Chicago and two on Come From Away.

Carbon capture buries a sliver of the CO2 the world emits

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:42:36 +0000

Carbon capture and storage aims to stop carbon dioxide from a power station or factory chimney reaching the air, then moves it away and locks it deep underground. The catch is scale. The BBC puts the amount captured worldwide at around 45 million tonnes a year, while human emissions passed 40 billion tonnes in 2022.

How the process works

The idea has three steps. Most of the CO2 a plant produces is captured at source, then transported, then stored far below the surface. Britain’s energy regulator, Ofgem, describes the aim in plain terms: keep the gas from industry and power generation out of the atmosphere, where it would add to climate change.

Microplastics in bottled water: more particles, unclear harm

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:41:08 +0000

Bottled water tends to hold more microplastic than tap water, according to a review of 21 studies published in 2022. Whether those particles harm the people who drink them is still an open question, and the World Health Organization lists the missing evidence as a set of gaps to fill.

So the finding is firmer on how much plastic is in the bottle than on what it does once swallowed.

How a botched press briefing opened the Berlin Wall in 1989

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:38:44 +0000

The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, after East Germany’s government fumbled the announcement of a modest change to its travel rules. The BBC notes that it came five days after half a million people had protested in East Berlin.

The press conference that went wrong

East German leaders wanted to calm the protests by making travel a little easier. They never meant to open the border outright. The new rules went to a spokesman, Günter Schabowski, who had no chance to read them before his regular press conference.

What happens underground when a well is fracked

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:36:12 +0000

When a well is fracked, fluid pumped down it at high pressure splits the rock around it, and grains of sand hold the new cracks open. Oil and gas then have far more surface to escape from, and they flow back along the cracks to the well and up to the surface.

The fluid is mostly water and sand. The US Department of Energy describes large volumes of both, with small volumes of chemical additives, injected into rock that lets little through.

The NPT let five countries keep the bomb, on a promise

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:35:57 +0000

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons split the world with a bargain. Five countries that already had the bomb, China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, were recognised as nuclear-weapon states, and they promised to pursue disarmament in good faith. Every other party agreed not to build nuclear weapons, in return for access to peaceful nuclear technology.

The treaty opened for signature on 1 July 1968 and came into force on 5 March 1970. Fifty-nine countries signed on the first day. It now has 190 parties.

One yellow fever jab now covers a traveller for life

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:35:16 +0000

A yellow fever certificate no longer runs out. The World Health Organization ruled that from July 11, 2016, the certificate of vaccination is valid for life. One dose, recorded once, now does the job that used to need a fresh jab every ten years.

That matters because a long list of countries still checks. Proof of yellow fever vaccination is a condition of entry for many countries in South America and Africa, according to the Sheffield GP Dr Marion Sloan, writing in Wanderlust. She adds that the list keeps changing, and points travellers to the NHS Fit for Travel service for the current picture.

Six countries pooled coal and steel, and built the EU's machinery

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:35:04 +0000

The European Union grew out of the coal and steel pact because the pact supplied its working parts. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded on 23 July 1952, had a high authority independent of its member governments, a court, an assembly and a council of ministers. Those four became the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament and the council where EU governments still meet.

Its makers meant it as a start. The BBC’s account is that the community’s planners always saw it as the first step towards ever closer integration.

The world's longest-running whale hunt still feeds the Faroes

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:34:52 +0000

The Faroese justify the grind on two grounds: it is food, and the whales are plentiful. Islanders told a BBC correspondent that with 800,000 pilot whales in the North Atlantic, and rarely more than 2,000 taken a year in the Faroes, the population was not at risk. They also asked whether visitors had ever watched the daily slaughter of farm animals in their own country’s abattoirs.

The hunt is old. Russell Fielding, a geographer at the University of the South in Tennessee who has studied it since 2005, calls the grindadráp the longest continuously practised whaling tradition in the world, and one that has changed relatively little.

Eritrean fighters took Asmara in 1991. The vote came two years on

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:34:15 +0000

Eritrea won its independence on the battlefield in 1991 and confirmed it at the ballot box in 1993. Fighters of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front marched into the capital, Asmara, on 24 May 1991, and the Ethiopian forces they had fought for 30 years fled the city. Two years later the United Nations supervised a referendum on independence, and the front’s leader, Isaias Afwerki, became the first president.

The war had begun with an annexation. Eritrea, a former Italian colony, had been in a loose federation with Ethiopia until Emperor Haile Selassie dissolved its parliament and seized it in 1962. Separatists fought a guerrilla war from then on.

A second fluid lets geothermal plants run on cooler water

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:33:51 +0000

A binary-cycle plant never lets the underground water touch its turbine. It pumps hot water up from the reservoir through a heat exchanger, where the heat passes to a second working fluid with a much lower boiling point than water. That fluid turns to vapour, drives the turbine and generates electricity, and the water goes back underground.

The second fluid is the “binary” in the name, and it is what makes moderate heat useful. The modest heat of the geothermal water is enough to flash the working fluid to vapour.

Ecuador widened the Galápagos reserve to guard a shark highway

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:33:33 +0000

Ecuador pushed out the Galápagos reserve’s boundary to protect the sea route its sharks, whales and turtles swim to Costa Rica. President Guillermo Lasso announced the 60,000 square kilometre addition at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in November 2021. Conservationists hoped it would protect the paths endangered whale sharks travel, and leave the reserve more resilient as the climate warms.

The old reserve was already large. Ecuador set it up in 1998, covering about 130,000 square kilometres of ocean, and UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site the same year.

Architects are building thick walls and deep windows again

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:30:33 +0000

A heavy wall with a small, deep-set window keeps a room cool because in hot weather the main source of heat is usually the window, not the wall. John Palmer of the Passivhaus Trust told the BBC that in hot weather very little heat passes through walls. In temperate climates the main source is usually sunlight coming through glass.

Thick masonry adds a second effect. A deep envelope can cut heat gain, temper the light, and hold the temperature inside steady, as ArchDaily’s Diogo Borges Ferreira puts it. In many climates, he writes, building heavy was a passive way to stay comfortable.

The first treaty every country ratified is mending the ozone

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:29:54 +0000

The Montreal Protocol stopped the world making the chemicals that were thinning the ozone layer, and the layer is now healing. The treaty was adopted on 16 September 1987. A United Nations assessment in 2022 found the ozone layer on course to return to its 1980 state, before the hole appeared, by the middle of this century.

That is the short answer. The longer one is about chlorine, refrigerators, and a second problem the fix created.

How a fish thought extinct turned up on a trawler

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:35 +0000

Science learned the coelacanth still lived because a museum curator looked closely at a fishing catch. In 1938 Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a curator in South Africa, found the fish on a local trawler working the country’s Indian Ocean coast. Scientists had assumed it died out tens of millions of years earlier.

Textbooks of the day said this line of lobe-finned fish vanished with the dinosaurs, some 70 million years ago. Its fossils go back to the Devonian period, about 360 million years ago. Finding one alive, Smithsonian Magazine noted, was about as likely as meeting a velociraptor in your garden.

The largest mangrove forest on Earth is shrinking in Bangladesh

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:34 +0000

The Sundarbans stands between millions of people in Bangladesh and the sea. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says the forest protects them from cyclones, storm surges and other climate hazards. That shield is now under strain.

Rising seas are swallowing parts of the forest, and saltier water is harming its plants and marine life, National Geographic reported.

How big the forest is

No mangrove forest on Earth is bigger, and no river delta is bigger than the one it grows on. The BBC put it at six times the size of Greater London.

A Hawaiian blowhole shows how waves can drive an air turbine

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:21 +0000

An oscillating water column turns waves into power by using the sea as a piston. Waves enter a chamber that is open below the waterline, and the water surface inside rises and falls. That motion forces the trapped air through an opening, where it spins a turbine linked to a generator.

The water surface acts as a piston, and the turbine sits above the water.

A straw standing in the sea

Nicholas Ulm, a PhD student at the University of Hawai’i, describes the core of his team’s device as a straw floating upright in water. The opening at the bottom restricts each wave, so the water surface inside the straw reverberates.

A lawyer wrote the rules budget airlines still fly by

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:21 +0000

Southwest Airlines pioneered low-cost flying by stripping out almost everything a traditional airline thought it needed. It flew one aircraft type, the Boeing 737, cut cabin service, and dropped assigned seats. It flew short hops from point to point instead of feeding passengers through hubs.

The man behind it, Herb Kelleher, had trained as a lawyer. “I knew nothing about airlines,” he told National Public Radio in 2016, and he said that ignorance qualified him to start one.

The Catholic Index banned books for four centuries

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:21 +0000

The Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum banned the Protestant Reformation first and many later classics of European culture after it. The first Index, published in 1559, barred every book by Luther, Calvin and the other reformers. Catholics who owned or read a listed book faced excommunication.

The Vatican offices behind it ran from 1559 until 1966. Hubert Wolf, a priest and historian at Münster University, said no other institution had tried to control books for over 400 years.

A vote on autonomy, and East Timor's road to independence

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:20 +0000

East Timor’s 1999 ballot never put independence to voters. It asked voters about special autonomy inside Indonesia, but everyone understood it as an independence vote. On 30 August 1999 the people of East Timor used it to vote for independence. After three years under a United Nations mission, the country became formally independent in 2002.

Twenty-four years of occupation

Indonesia had occupied the territory since 1975, after Portugal’s colonial rule ended. An estimated 180,000 Timorese died during the occupation, according to the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank.

Europe launches its rockets from South America for the speed

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:20 +0000

French Guiana became Europe’s spaceport because France went looking for a launch site near the equator and found one there. In 1964 the French government chose Kourou from 14 candidate sites. When the European Space Agency (ESA) formed in 1975, France offered to share the base with it.

The site sits at latitude 5°3’, just over 500 kilometres north of the equator. That position is worth money on every launch.

Eleven countries saved the Pacific trade deal the US abandoned

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:19 +0000

The 11 countries left behind by the United States revived the Trans-Pacific Partnership by keeping almost all of it and shelving what Washington had wanted. Two thirds of the new deal’s 30 chapters are identical to the old one, according to Matthew Goodman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Twenty-two provisions were suspended or changed.

They signed the result, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), in Santiago, Chile, on March 8, 2018.

Tom Stafford spoke Russian in orbit as the space race wound down

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:28:14 +0000

The Apollo-Soyuz docking happened because two rivals had stopped racing. By the 1970s the United States and the Soviet Union faced other enemies and tighter space budgets, and both spoke openly of working together. On July 17, 1975, an American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz locked together in orbit.

It was the first time spacecraft from two countries met, docked and parted in space.

From a moon race to a handshake

The rivalry had been sharp. John F. Kennedy started the race to the Moon in 1961 to beat the Soviets at something. Over the following years the two sparred over communism and nuclear arms, but relations slowly improved.

GPS: a timing race between your phone and four satellites

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:26:21 +0000

GPS works by timing. Each satellite broadcasts the moment it sent its signal, and your receiver measures how late that signal arrives. Multiply the delay by the speed of light and you have the distance to that satellite. Do that for four satellites and the receiver can work out where it is.

Nothing goes up to space from your phone. The receiver listens, and the arithmetic happens in your pocket.

Russia's late yes made the Ross Sea the world's largest reserve

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:20:25 +0000

The Ross Sea became the world’s largest marine protected area on 28 October 2016, when every member of the body that manages Antarctic waters finally agreed to it. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, meeting in Hobart, Tasmania, approved a joint proposal from the United States and New Zealand without a vote against. The decision needed consensus, and getting there took years.

The area is about 1.57 million square kilometres, or 600,000 square miles. National Geographic put it at more than twice the size of Texas.

Pluto failed one of three tests, and lost its planet status

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:18:46 +0000

Pluto lost its planet status because astronomers finally wrote down what a planet is, and Pluto failed one line of the definition. On August 24, 2006, the last day of the International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly in Prague, members voted for a planet to meet three tests. It orbits the Sun. Its own gravity pulls it into a round shape. And it has cleared its neighbourhood of other bodies of similar size.

Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace may have helped spread the bomb

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:17:25 +0000

Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech led to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) because he asked for one by name. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on December 8, 1953, he proposed that the main nuclear powers pool uranium and fissile material in “an international atomic energy agency”. The IAEA was set up in 1957 as an autonomous body under the UN.

The speech did something else too. It launched a US programme that handed out reactors, and that part of its legacy is still argued over.

How Cornish came back after nearly dying out

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:15:26 +0000

Cornish came back through scholarship rather than inheritance. Nobody alive learned it from a parent in an unbroken line. Instead, a 20th-century revival rebuilt it from books, and learners now speak it as a second language. That revival is what Britain recognised. The UK has committed under part III of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages to promote Cornish at an official level.

Ethnologue classes Cornish as a dormant language of the United Kingdom. Nobody in the community uses it as a first language, but some younger people use it as a second, and some schools teach it.

Brillo Box: the Warhol that made Arthur Danto end art's story

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:15:15 +0000

Arthur Danto decided art had ended because he could not see the difference between a Warhol and a box from a stockroom. In 1964 he walked into the Stable Gallery in New York and found Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, plywood copies of the cardboard cartons Brillo pads were shipped in. He left dumbstruck, Aeon reports, convinced that something outside the object had to explain why one box was art and the other was not.

Barbados swapped the Queen for its own president in 2021

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:14:45 +0000

Barbados replaced Queen Elizabeth II with a president of its own around midnight at the start of November 30, 2021. The new head of state was Sandra Mason, a 72-year-old judge who had been elected to the post in October. She was already the governor-general, the Queen’s representative on the island, so the person at the top stayed the same while the office changed.

The republic was born 55 years to the day after Barbados became independent.

Las Vegas has run three self-driving vehicle trials since 2017

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:11:48 +0000

Las Vegas has hosted three different self-driving vehicle trials since 2017, and the first one crashed within two hours of its debut.

An autonomous shuttle bus, built by the French company Navya, began carrying free passengers around a 0.6-mile loop in the city’s Innovation District in 2017. Local celebrities turned out to see it off, among them the racing driver Danica Patrick and the magicians Penn and Teller. The oval-shaped shuttle seated up to eight people, had no steering wheel or brake pedals, and used GPS and kerb sensors to find its way at no more than 15mph.

The Michelin Man began as a pile of tyres and a champagne toast

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:09:42 +0000

The Michelin Man is made of tyres because a pile of them once looked like a body. In 1894 the brothers Édouard and André Michelin, from Clermont-Ferrand in France, went to the Lyon Universal Exposition. The story goes that Édouard saw a stack of tyres on the Michelin stand and told André that with arms and legs it would make a man. Four years later, in 1898, the figure was first drawn.

Mont-Saint-Michel could have stopped being an island by 2040

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:09:39 +0000

The causeway built to make Mont-Saint-Michel easier to reach nearly ended its life as an island. Built in 1878, it let silt carried in by the tides pile up in the bay. Some studies warned that without action the rock would be joined to the mainland for good by 2040.

So France knocked the causeway down.

A tide that moves faster than a walker

The bay holds some of Europe’s strongest currents and most powerful tides. National Geographic calls them the strongest in continental Europe. High tide can rise as much as 45 feet and sweep in at about 200 feet a minute, Smithsonian reported.

Germany's allotments began as play space for poor children

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:08:26 +0000

Germany’s Kleingarten were built for children, not pensioners. The plots first appeared during the country’s rapid industrialisation in the 19th century, so that working-class children could stay in touch with nature. Cities leased land where poor children could play away from the cramped barrack housing that had grown up around the factories.

The scale is large. Germany has about a million allotments, and Berlin has by far the most, at about 70,000. The Guardian counted 73,000 Berlin plots in more than 900 colonies, covering about 3,000 hectares.

A London cabbie learns 25,000 streets to earn a green badge

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:07:29 +0000

A London black cab licence goes only to drivers who pass the Knowledge. Candidates learn every street within six miles of Charing Cross, which takes most of them three or four years. Transport for London (TfL) then licenses only a quarter to a third as many drivers each year as apply.

The prize is the green badge, which lets a driver work anywhere in Greater London.

What the Knowledge asks

A trainee, known as a Knowledge Boy or occasionally a Girl, covers around 20,000 miles by moped inside that six-mile circle. They learn around 25,000 streets and thousands of points of interest, from hotels to monuments.

Bulgaria's Varna gold undid the myth of an equal Copper Age

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:06:40 +0000

The gold from a lakeside cemetery near Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, says that some people 6,500 years ago were far richer than their neighbours. Radiocarbon dating puts the objects at that age, only a few centuries after the first farmers arrived in Europe. Yet the treasure turned up in just a handful of graves, which makes it the first evidence of social hierarchy anywhere in the record, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

A pope's letter set Roger Bacon writing the Opus Majus

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:05:13 +0000

Roger Bacon wrote the Opus Majus because a pope asked for something he did not have. In 1266 Pope Clement IV wrote to the friar requesting a copy of his “writings and remedies for current conditions”. Bacon had nothing to send, so he spent the next year writing it.

What he produced was meant as a preamble to a larger masterwork on the state of knowledge. The preamble is the book now known as the Opus Majus.

A Basel looted-antiquities dealer walked free as charges expired

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:01:38 +0000

Police in Rome laid out 5,361 vases, bronze statues and frescoes at a national museum, a haul worth about €50 million and the largest recovery of looted antiquities in history by their own count. Every piece had come from Swiss warehouses belonging to the Basel-based dealer Gianfranco Becchina. Becchina walked away from the raid a free man. The charges against him had already expired.

What the raid found

Investigators traced the hoard to Becchina and his wife, Ursula Juraschek, whom prosecutors accused of running a trafficking network that reached from Italian “tombaroli”, the local term for tomb raiders, through to dealers and buyers worldwide. The warehouses held detailed inventory records, photographs and receipts documenting the trade. Carabinieri general Mariano Mossa called it the biggest such recovery ever made, by quantity and by quality. The works dated from the eighth century BC to the third century, and might be shown to the public before going back to museums in the south of Italy.

Martin Luther King answered his critics in a letter from jail

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:05:27 +0000

Martin Luther King wrote one of the most celebrated texts of the civil rights era on scraps of paper in a jail cell. Few texts frame the tension between law and justice as sharply.

King had been arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on Good Friday 1963, after leading a demonstration in defiance of a court injunction. He spent the following week composing his response on whatever paper he could find. His lawyers carried the notes out for a secretary to type, and drafts went back to King for revision before the letter reached its final form.

Maasbommel's Dutch houses ride floods on concrete boxes

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:05:26 +0000

The amphibious houses at Maasbommel float because each one sits on a hollow concrete box. When the River Maas rises, the box lifts off the riverbed and carries the house up with it. A vertical pile keeps each house anchored in place, and the BBC reported the homes can cope with the water table rising by up to four metres.

What a flood looks like from inside

Most days the houses look like ordinary waterfront homes. They rest on the riverbed, a few centimetres above the water, on a concrete box about two metres high. Power and water reach them through flexible pipes.

Gerald Holtom drew the peace sign for the Aldermaston march

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:55:31 +0000

Gerald Holtom, a designer and wartime conscientious objector, drew the peace symbol for a 1958 march against Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. The Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War had asked him to design banners and placards for a walk from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, and Holtom gave them a symbol to carry as well.

He first considered a cross. Holtom later wrote that he had considered the Christian cross as the march’s central image, then rejected it, arguing that the cross had been co-opted by “crusading tyranny culminating in Belsen and Hiroshima”. He rejected a dove too, on the grounds that Stalin’s government had already used one to put a peaceable face on its own bomb programme.

Every household in Germany pays for ARD and ZDF, TV or not

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:55:16 +0000

Germany funds ARD and ZDF mainly through the Rundfunkbeitrag, a flat monthly charge on every household. It does not matter whether the household owns a television. The Hollywood Reporter put the fee at €18.36 a month in 2024, and said it supplies the bulk of the public broadcasters’ money.

Why owning a set no longer matters

The household charge arrived in 2013. It replaced the old GEZ fee, which Germans paid per device, and which relied on people declaring what they owned. Under that system inspectors could patrol door to door. The new charge is compulsory, so nobody can avoid it. In 2015 the Guardian reported the fee as €17.98 a month.

Gaia's star map: the position and motion of two billion stars

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:55:00 +0000

For each of the roughly two billion stars it tracked, the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite recorded a position on the sky, a distance, and the direction and speed at which the star travels. One of the researchers who turns that stream of readings into a catalogue, Stefan Jordan of the University of Heidelberg, has said each star’s file holds “only five parameters for astrometry”, covering position and motion. Brightness and colour come on top of that, giving an estimate of temperature and composition, and a Doppler-shift reading of speed toward or away from Earth.

India falls to 23rd in the Climate Change Performance Index

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:52:10 +0000

India dropped 13 places in the 2026 Climate Change Performance Index, falling from 10th to 23rd, with a score of 61.31. Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute and Climate Action Network International published the ranking on November 18, 2025, at the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil.

The index scores 63 countries and the European Union, which together produce more than 90% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Three of its four categories run on emissions and energy statistics. Greenhouse gas emissions carries the heaviest weight, at 40%, and renewable energy and energy use carry 20% each. Each is measured against a country’s current level, its five-year trend, and how it compares with the 2°C target.

New York made its cable company give airtime to anyone

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:16:49 +0000

Public access television in Manhattan was a condition, not a gift. A Time Inc. subsidiary laid cable across the borough. A group of academics then pushed for part of the system to be set aside for programmes made by the public, director David Shadrack Smith told Deadline. The Hollywood Reporter described the result as an experiment the city forced on the cable company.

Manhattan Cable Television launched in 1971. Its stated aim was to open up a medium still dominated by three broadcast networks.

What is materials science and engineering?

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:16:49 +0000

Materials science and engineering is the study of why a material behaves the way it does, and how to make it behave better. Michigan Technological University describes the aim as making materials stronger and lighter, among other things. The work runs from understanding why a part failed to inventing a material that did not exist before.

The University of Maryland puts the field where engineering meets physics and chemistry. Its reach runs from semiconductors and nanotechnology up to engineered materials for aircraft and medicine.

The elephant that carries Kandy's casket

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:16:22 +0000

The Kandy Esala Perahera exists because of a tooth. Kandy’s Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic holds what Sri Lankan Buddhists revere as a tooth of the Buddha. No relic in the country matters more to them, and the festival parades a replica of it through the streets.

Accounts differ on exactly what goes on parade. The Guardian described a replica of the relic being carried around the city. Al Jazeera described the lead elephant bearing a golden casket of Buddhist relics. Either way, the honour of carrying it falls to one animal.

IBM rebuilt Deep Blue's chess chip before beating Kasparov

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:16:01 +0000

IBM answered its 1996 defeat by upgrading Deep Blue’s hardware and software. Its team designed a new chess chip that judged pawn positions better and doubled the machine’s speed. It also rewrote the program around a plan a grandmaster had shown it. In May 1997 the rebuilt Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov.

Image: Christina Xu more

In May 1997 the rebuilt Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov.Licence: CC BY 2.0

What the 1996 loss showed

Kasparov won the first match in Philadelphia in February 1996, four games to two. He lost the opening game of that match, though, and no computer had beaten a reigning world champion under classical time controls before.

A donkey with no reason to choose starves where it stands

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:52 +0000

A donkey stands exactly halfway between two piles of hay, equally large and equally tempting. It has no reason to prefer either, so it never chooses, and it starves. That is Buridan’s ass, named after the philosopher John Buridan, who lived from 1300 to 1358. The story asks whether a choice needs a reason, and what happens when there is none.

Image: Cham (Count Amédée-Charles-Henry de Noé) (France, Paris, 1819-1879) more

L'âne de Buridan entre deux opinions, a lithograph by Cham, 1859.Licence: Public domain

The principle the donkey tests

The philosopher Michael Hauskeller, writing in Philosophy Now, starts somewhere more ordinary. You open a menu and find your two favourite dishes, asparagus and spinach tart. You like both equally, yet you pick one.

Britain and the US both moved against Iran's Press TV

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:50 +0000

Press TV is the English-language satellite channel of the Iranian government, and two Western governments have treated it that way. Britain’s regulator, Ofcom, took it off UK screens in 2012 after learning its editorial decisions were made in Tehran. Later, days after Ebrahim Raisi won Iran’s presidency, the US government seized its web addresses as part of a sanctions case.

Each case pulled back a little of the curtain on how the channel is run.

IdentityTheft.gov turns a US theft report into a recovery plan

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:49 +0000

If someone in the US has used your name to open accounts or run up charges, the official place to report it is IdentityTheft.gov. The Federal Trade Commission built it as a single stop where victims report the theft and get a plan to recover. It does more than take a complaint. It produces paperwork you can use with banks and credit bureaus.

What counts as identity theft

USAGov, the federal government’s general information site, defines it as someone using your personal or financial details without your permission. That can mean a credit card number, a Social Security number, or a medical insurance account number.

Philippine lawmakers refused ABS-CBN's franchise, 70 votes to 11

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:35 +0000

ABS-CBN lost its right to broadcast in two steps. In May 2020 its 25-year congressional franchise ran out and the regulator ordered it off air. Then, on 10 July 2020, lawmakers voted 70 to 11 against giving it a new one.

In the Philippines a broadcaster needs a franchise from Congress to operate. ABS-CBN had applied to renew, but the application sat in a Congress controlled by allies of President Rodrigo Duterte, and the coronavirus lockdown delayed hearings further.

Cosmic radiation doubles with every 6,000 feet you climb

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:22 +0000

A single long international flight exposes you to about a week’s worth of the natural background radiation you would get on the ground, according to Air & Space magazine. That is no health concern for a passenger, even a pregnant one. The people who fly enough for it to matter are the crew.

The reason is the air above you. Earth’s atmosphere shields the planet from cosmic radiation, so the higher you go, the larger the dose. The dose doubles with every 6,000 feet of altitude.

How the Black Death spread, and why medieval doctors missed it

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:22 +0000

The Black Death was a pandemic of plague that tore through Europe in the 1340s. BBC Bitesize says it killed up to half the population in 1348 and 1349. National Geographic gives a lower figure, about a third of the continent, or an estimated 25 million people.

The killer was a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, and the carrier was a flea that lived on rats. Nobody at the time knew either fact.

Eighty-one states in Vienna wrote the rules diplomats still keep

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:15:08 +0000

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations lasted because it invented very little. Eighty-one states met in Vienna from 2 March to 14 April 1961, and the treaty was signed on 18 April. Most of what they signed had already been diplomatic practice for more than 200 years, which the UN’s own history of the treaty gives as the first reason it worked.

The second reason is reciprocity. Every state is both a host and a guest, so a country that mistreats foreign envoys can expect the same for its own. The UN account names that as the sanction that keeps states in line.

In the UK's North Sea, 78p of each £1 of profit goes in tax

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:56 +0000

The UK windfall tax on oil and gas is a flat 38% charge on the profits companies make from extracting UK oil and gas. Its formal name is the Energy Profits Levy. It sits on top of the tax North Sea producers already pay, and the stack is steep.

Those firms pay 30% corporation tax on their profits, then a supplementary rate of 10%. Add the levy and the total reaches 78%, a figure Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics puts at roughly what Norwegian producers pay.

Blind viewers once missed the action. Now a voice fills the gaps

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:55 +0000

An audio description track works by waiting for silence. A describer finds the pauses in a programme’s dialogue and fills them with short spoken notes on what is on screen. That is how Ira Miller of the Media Access Group at the Boston broadcaster WGBH described it to WNYC’s The Takeaway. The aim, he said, is to sound like a friend in the next seat, whispering what is happening.

The pauses can be tiny. Some last as little as one second, so writers need a firm command of language and grammar to land a description inside them.

Geneticists extract ancient DNA from a single tooth

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:50 +0000

Teeth survive where bone crumbles, because their enamel is 97% mineral. DNA breaks down in sunlight and water, but long after death it survives in teeth and bones. Geneticists extract it in rooms built to keep modern contamination out.

Why teeth outlast almost everything else

The anthropologist Peter Ungar has written that enamel’s mineral content makes teeth stronger than bone, so they are more likely to survive. At an excavation, archaeologists routinely turn up dozens or hundreds of teeth for every skull or skeleton they find.

In the UK, a dangerous building waits for a council's notice

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:38 +0000

A council can make a dangerous building safe even when the owner does not, but first it has to serve formal notice. Under the Building Act 1984, local authorities must deal with dangerous structures in their area. A building control surveyor who finds one immediately dangerous can act under section 78 of that Act.

Until the notice goes out, the council’s hands are tied. One senior building control officer put it plainly: before he served notice of his plan to remove the danger, he could take no action.

Britain sells its airwaves to the highest bidder, round by round

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:36 +0000

Britain’s 2000 spectrum auction gave each licence to whoever kept bidding longest. Firms raised their offers over many rounds, and the sale ended when there were no new bids on any licence.

The format is called a simultaneous ascending auction. US authorities first used it to sell radio frequencies in 1994, and the UK government copied it in 2000 for 3G mobile licences.

How the 2000 sale ran

Bids in each round were secret. A bidder had to stay active in every round, either holding its bid or raising it by at least a set minimum. The bids were revealed only once each round closed.

The UK is cutting aid to its lowest share of income since 1999

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:36 +0000

In February 2025 the UK government said it would bring aid down to 0.3% of gross national income in 2027, to pay for more defence spending. On that measure, aid will sit at its lowest level since 1999, according to the House of Commons Library. Britain’s foreign aid budget is the money the government spends on official development assistance, and it is shrinking fast.

What counts as aid

Official development assistance follows rules set by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. The money has to go to developing countries or multilateral bodies, with their economic welfare as its main aim, and it has to come as grants or soft loans. The OECD sets which countries qualify and reviews the list every three years.

Two astronomers spent seven years measuring out the metre

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:36 +0000

The metre began as a slice of the Earth. In June 1792 two French astronomers left Paris in opposite directions to measure the meridian arc running from Dunkirk through Paris to Barcelona. From that arc they meant to work out one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, and call it a metre.

Physics World describes the same aim from the other end. The Académie des Sciences devised the new system, and it tied the metre to one forty-millionth of the Paris meridian, a full circle round the planet. The founders wanted a measure “for all times, for all peoples”.

The UK's Climate Change Act binds ministers to net zero by 2050

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:35 +0000

The Climate Change Act 2008 turned a UK climate goal into a legal duty. Section 1 makes the Secretary of State responsible for ensuring the net UK carbon account for 2050 is at least 100% below the 1990 baseline. In plain terms, that is net zero.

Parliament passed the Act in November 2008 with an overwhelming majority across the parties. The Grantham Research Institute at the LSE describes it as the first legally binding climate mitigation target that any country set for itself.

Denmark gave the world co-housing in the 1970s

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:23 +0000

Co-housing asks residents to share more than neighbours usually do. Each household keeps a private, self-contained home. In return, members share a common house and other facilities, and run the community themselves. The model began in Denmark in the mid-1970s and spread quickly through Scandinavia, Germany and the United States.

Jo Gooding, then coordinator of the UK Co-housing Network, described such projects to the Guardian as self-managing communities governed by the people who live in them.

Clay and sandy soil fail a garden in opposite ways

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:19 +0000

Clay and sand fail a garden in opposite ways. Clay holds water and drains slowly, and it can pack down hard. Sand drains freely and holds little water or food. A lawn on compacted clay shows the first problem plainly. One Guardian writer’s front lawn in Bristol sat waterlogged every winter and turned as hard as asphalt every summer.

Telling the two apart

Rub a damp pinch between your fingers. Clay feels sticky and smooth, and it rolls into a ball or even a sausage without cracking, according to the gardener and author Sarah Raven. Sandy soil feels gritty, and its grains will not hold together when you squeeze them.

Chile's building code: crack, tilt, but never fall

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:13 +0000

Chile’s building code sets one hard rule: a new building must not collapse in a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. It may crack. It may tilt. It may even be declared unfit for use afterwards. It must stay standing.

That rule is set to the country’s geology. Chile runs along the boundary between the Nazca and South American plates, which grind past each other by up to 80mm a year. Magnitude 8 quakes come all too often there, and the BBC’s science correspondent Jonathan Amos described the building codes as strict and generally well enforced.

Your PlayStation pad's circle means yes. Teiyu Goto chose it

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:10 +0000

Teiyu Goto designed the original PlayStation controller as a careful copy with a few deliberate breaks. He kept the basic layout of the Super Nintendo pad, added grips and a second pair of shoulder buttons, and replaced lettered buttons with four symbols he invented. Sony shipped it with the first PlayStation in 1994.

Two of them needed persuading. Goto told the Japanese magazine Famitsu that it took work to convince Sony management the grips were a good idea, and that the colours on his symbols met resistance too.

America's first space station began as a spare rocket stage

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:09 +0000

NASA built Skylab out of hardware the Moon programme no longer needed. When the Apollo landings were cut short, surplus Saturn V rockets became available, and that made a heavier, better-equipped station possible. The main living and working space, the Orbital Workshop, was a converted Saturn upper stage. NASA calls the result America’s first space station.

Where the idea came from

NASA centres had floated station ideas for years, but the race to the Moon came first, according to Space.com. As Apollo wound down, NASA set up the Apollo Applications Program to fly unused Moon hardware. Wernher von Braun, the Apollo rocket engineer, proposed building a station from an empty rocket stage, and the design shifted over the years as funding shrank.

Delisted: why licensed games vanish from digital stores

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:09 +0000

A game built on someone else’s property can only be sold while the licence lasts. Once the deal for a car maker, a soundtrack or a film brand expires, the publisher loses the right to sell, and the game comes off digital stores. Eurogamer put it bluntly: a digital-only licensed game is on borrowed time from the day it launches.

Unless the publisher agrees to renegotiate those rights, the game rarely comes back.

The account a UK customer described, against the one they ran

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:09 +0000

A UK bank’s anti-laundering checks come down to one comparison. The bank learns who a customer is and what their business should look like, then watches whether the money in the account fits that picture. The Financial Conduct Authority requires firms to monitor every customer continuously, so that transactions stay consistent with what the firm knows of the customer, their business and their risk.

The clearest example of the pattern comes from a case where a bank saw the warning and did not act on it.

Wales's first Unesco City of Literature is not a city

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:14:09 +0000

Aberystwyth is a town, yet Unesco has named it Wales’s first City of Literature. The title went to the town together with its county, Ceredigion, which Unesco chose for its literary scene, its universities and national literary bodies, and its bilingual culture.

That points to how the system works. A place does not qualify by size or by a city charter. It qualifies by showing that one creative field runs through its civic life, and by convincing Unesco of it in a bid.

Wax against dye: how batik keeps colour off the cloth

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:38 +0000

Wax stops dye by getting there first. Batik is a resist technique: the artisan lays hot wax on the cloth, and wherever the wax sits, the dye cannot reach the fibres. Soak the cloth, and only the bare areas take the colour. Remove the wax, and the protected areas show through in the colour they had before.

UNESCO describes Indonesian batik as hand-dyed cotton and silk on which craftspeople draw designs in dots and lines of hot wax. The wax resists vegetable and other dyes.

Selling a share you don't own starts with borrowing it

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:35 +0000

You cannot sell a share you do not own until somebody lends it to you. A short seller borrows the stock, sells it straight away, and waits for the price to fall. If it does, they buy the share back for less, return it to the lender and keep the gap.

The borrowing is where the trade gets its texture. There is no central exchange for lending shares, so finding stock to borrow can be hard and sometimes impossible, according to a review of the research in the NBER Reporter. The seller has to find an owner willing to lend.

Antarctic bases lean on diesel when the polar sun goes

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:34 +0000

Most Antarctic research stations make their electricity from a mix of sources, and diesel fills the gaps. Nature reported in 2006 that stations typically have some wind and solar power but rely on diesel generators for part of their energy. They lean on them most in winter, when there is little sun.

The interesting cases are the bases that try to do without, or with much less.

The station built to run on wind and sun

Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth station was planned as the first Antarctic base to run on solar and wind power alone. Nature put its cost at €6.4 million when the Belgian government committed to it in 2006.

How Russia's shadow fleet slips past Western oil sanctions

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:34 +0000

Russia’s shadow fleet keeps its oil moving by changing names and flags, and by using waters where coastal states have little power to stop it. The ships move under various identities and switch flags to get round Western sanctions.

The scale is large. The UK Ministry of Defence says the fleet runs to more than 700 vessels and carries 75% of Russia’s sanctioned oil.

A new name and a new flag

Sanctions attach to a named ship. The UK has sanctioned more than 500 vessels, barring them from British ports and banning British firms from insuring, financing or broking their cargoes.

De Gaulle was the hard-liners' hope. He let Algeria go

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:29 +0000

French rule in Algeria ended in Paris as much as in Algeria. The National Liberation Front, or FLN, did not win militarily in Algeria. It won, as the historian L. Carl Brown put it in Foreign Affairs, diplomatically in France, once Charles de Gaulle led the country towards Algerian independence. De Gaulle had first been the hope of French hard-liners, and he ended the occupation by negotiating peace with the insurgents.

The trouble with ice on a wing

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:25 +0000

Ice on a wing changes its shape and texture, and disrupts the air flowing over it. It adds drag, cuts lift, and can stall the aircraft, leading to a total loss of control. Even a little frost, snow, or ice on the wings or tail is dangerous, and a safe departure needs none there at all.

Weight is the second problem. On a plane full of fuel, the extra load of ice on the wings and body can stop it getting airborne. It also throws off the pilots’ performance sums, such as how fast the plane can climb and whether the runway is long enough.

Advaita Vedanta holds that your self and reality are one

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:13:02 +0000

Advaita Vedanta teaches that the individual self is not separate from ultimate reality. Its followers hold that the true self in each person, atman, is the same as brahman, the reality behind everything. “Advaita” means non-dual, and that sameness is the non-duality the name refers to.

The school rests on the Upanishads, and the teacher Adi Shankaracharya later developed it, Punit Kumar and Sanjeev Kumar Varshney write in Philosophy Now.

Flock cameras in the US: what they record and who can search

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:09:02 +0000

In December 2025, the musician and YouTuber Benn Jordan found at least 70 Flock number-plate cameras exposed to the open internet, viewable through an ordinary search engine with no password at all. Some of what he could see were Condor cameras, a model built to follow people rather than cars. Flock Safety, the company behind them, says its network is protected. Jordan’s find is one of several signs that protection has gaps.

Beijing promised Hong Kong 50 years of its own way of life

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:08:52 +0000

On paper, one country, two systems still guarantees Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and an unchanged social and economic system until 2047. In practice, what it guarantees depends on whom you ask. The British government says China has breached the treaty behind it. Beijing says the arrangement is a success and could outlast its deadline.

What the treaty promised

Britain and the People’s Republic of China signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration on 19 December 1984. Britain handed over sovereignty on 1 July 1997, and Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region of China.

Leaning on credit ratings may have deepened the crisis

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:08:52 +0000

A credit rating is an opinion on how creditworthy a borrower is. Five Bank of England economists argue that heavy reliance on that opinion lay beneath many of the problems in the financial crisis.

Their paper, Financial Stability Paper No. 9, puts it plainly. Common, often mechanical reliance on ratings for information, certification and regulation lies beneath many of the crisis’s problems.

From private opinion to part of the plumbing

Rating agencies began as private firms selling investors their considered view of a borrower’s credit quality. They still do that job. Their role has grown, though, and the Bank of England authors say ratings are now wired into financial contracts, investment processes and regulation.

Göbekli Tepe may have put the temple before the farm

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:07:32 +0000

Göbekli Tepe suggests religion came before farming because hunter-gatherers seem to have built it. The carved stone rings on a hilltop in south-eastern Turkey are about 11,000 years old, older than pottery or metal tools. Klaus Schmidt, the German archaeologist who excavated the site, argued that the work of building them pushed people towards farming, rather than farming making the building possible.

That reversed the textbook order. Since Schmidt died in 2014, fresh digging has made the picture messier.

UK MPs shut the door on Black Rod. Speakers say it isn't defiance

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:07:08 +0000

Black Rod knocks because the Commons has just shut its door in his face, and he is let in only after three knocks. The popular explanation is defiance. The door slam is usually read as the Commons showing its independence from the Crown, a gesture traced to the English Civil War.

The official explanation is plainer. Erskine May, the standard guide to parliamentary procedure, records that successive Speakers have ruled the custom lets the Commons establish Black Rod’s identity. It is not, they ruled, the direct assertion of the House’s rights that people often suppose.

Australia's 1975 dismissal and the palace letters

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:07:05 +0000

On 11 November 1975, Governor-General Sir John Kerr removed Gough Whitlam as Australia’s prime minister. He relied on what is known as a reserve power, an authority he argued the constitution implied rather than spelled out. Lawyers have argued about that power ever since, and before the dismissal many Australians had little idea the Queen’s representative held it.

The justification was money. Whitlam had failed to get parliament to approve spending, and he then declined to call an election. Kerr dismissed the Labor government to break the deadlock, and installed the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker prime minister. Voters returned Fraser’s Liberal Party by a wide margin at the election that followed.

Lightning can travel through your plumbing to the shower

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:24:31 +0000

Showering in a thunderstorm is risky: if lightning strikes your house, it can run through the plumbing and reach you at the showerhead or the tap. The US National Weather Service advises people indoors in a storm to keep away from plumbing, including sinks, baths and taps. Cleveland Clinic says to wait at least 30 minutes after the last thunder before you shower.

Image: Gary Ladd/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA more

Lightning over Kitt Peak National Observatory on June 4, 1972.Licence: CC BY 4.0

How lightning gets indoors

A strike on a house looks for the easiest route to the ground. Pipes and electrical wiring offer that route, so the current follows them through the building.

A small error today can spoil next week's forecast

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:22:26 +0000

A forecast for next week can go wrong for one plain reason: the conditions a model started from were slightly off, and that gap grew. The atmosphere behaves as what scientists call a chaotic system, which means a small difference in today’s conditions does not stay small. It compounds, day after day, until it reshapes what a model says will happen a week out.

Researchers who study this describe the result as an insurmountable predictability limit. Sharper models and faster computers narrow the error a forecast starts with, but they cannot remove it, and the limit comes from the physics of the air rather than from any shortfall in computing power.

Two examiners judge a UK PhD in one viva

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:21:41 +0000

A UK PhD candidate’s final hurdle is the viva voce, an oral exam that usually runs two to four hours. Two examiners question the candidate on their thesis and can recommend anything from an outright pass to failure. In many countries the viva is a formality. In the UK it is built to probe the work rather than rubber-stamp it.

The exam is normally held about three months after the candidate submits their thesis. A supervisor proposes suitable examiners first, and the university confirms them. Lauren Roffey, a candidate quoted by Times Higher Education, described her own viva as a 90-minute blur she had dreaded for months despite three mock run-throughs beforehand.

A talent agency now forecasts what a product placement will do

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:21:19 +0000

A brand’s product can reach a screen three ways, and only one of them looks like a normal advertising buy. The first is a paid placement: a contract with a studio or network that can set how visible the logo is and how long it stays on screen. The second is organic placement, where a company hands over free product with no guarantee it will ever appear. The third is the one nobody negotiates. A writer puts a real brand into a scene without asking the company at all, and United Talent Agency’s Jillian Raskin puts that third route at around 90% of everything that reaches the screen.

Madhava's circle value missed by two, and no one knows why

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:20:56 +0000

Madhava of Sangamagrama, who lived from about 1340 to 1425, is remembered as the founder of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics in southern India. Later Kerala scholars quoted him on the circumference of a circle 9×10¹¹ units across. His figure was 2827433388233. Rounded to the nearest whole number, the true answer ends in 231, so Madhava was out by two.

That small miss is now a research puzzle. A paper tested the infinite series for π that tradition credits to Madhava. Except in one unlikely case, none of them reproduces his number, and the paper concludes that how he reached it remains unanswered.

In the US, one exam can buy a pupil college credit

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:19:11 +0000

A US high schooler who passes an Advanced Placement exam can start college with credit for a class they never took there. AP courses have been officially available on high school campuses since 1956.

The College Board, which also runs the SAT, leads the programme. AP courses came about in the 1950s in response to a gap people felt between high school and college. They are college-level courses taught in a high school setting, with an exam in each subject.

South Korea capped its working week at 52 hours

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:18:35 +0000

South Korea’s National Assembly voted in 2018 to cut the legal maximum working week from 68 hours to 52. The cap took effect on July 1, 2018, starting with large employers. It was a campaign promise of President Moon Jae-in, and it passed by a wide margin over business opposition. The same year Moon also secured a 16% rise in the minimum wage.

Image: kallerna more

Crossing between Teheran-ro and Yeongdong-daero in Gangnam, Seoul.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The new week is 40 regular hours plus up to 12 hours of overtime.

Football mocked an Irishman's penalty kick, then adopted it

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:18:28 +0000

A Notts County defender handled the ball on his own goal line during an FA Cup quarter-final against Stoke City in 1891, stopping a certain goal. A similar incident in Scotland added to the pressure. In June 1891, football’s four British associations wrote a new punishment into the game’s laws: a shot from 12 yards, defended by nobody but the goalkeeper. Football has called it the penalty kick ever since.

Humpbacks tune their bubble nets, and may learn them from others

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:18:24 +0000

A humpback whale builds its trap out of breath. It dives below a shoal of krill or fish, swims in circles, and lets bubbles out of its blowhole to form a rising curtain. The prey treat that curtain as a wall and bunch together inside it. Then the whale, or a group of whales, surges up through the middle with its mouth open.

Image: Christin Khan , NOAA / NEFSC more

A humpback whale surges up through the middle of its bubble net.Licence: Public domain

Krill, herring and young salmon are all on the menu, and whales use the method around the world, sometimes alone and sometimes in teams. People have watched it for decades. How it works under the surface took longer to see.

Migrant workers built Brasília, Brazil's capital, in three years

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:18:21 +0000

Brasília replaced Rio de Janeiro because a president promised it on the campaign trail and then had four years to deliver. Juscelino Kubitschek inaugurated the city on April 21, 1960. Most of it went up in three years, built by tens of thousands of migrant workers known as candangos.

At the opening, Kubitschek told the crowd he was proud to count himself one of them.

A promise from 1889

The idea was far older than Kubitschek. When Brazil became a federal republic in 1889, its constitution set aside a future capital in the state of Goiás, with no date attached. The new republic’s leaders felt Rio held too much economic and political power, and some feared it lay open to attack from the sea, according to TheCollector. Survey expeditions went inland in 1892 and 1894, and then the plan stalled for decades.

Newborns hear every speech sound, then tune to one language

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:18:14 +0000

A newborn can tell apart roughly 600 consonants and 200 vowels, the full set used across the world’s languages. By their first birthday, many of those distinctions have faded, narrowed down to the sounds their own family speaks.

Every sound, for a few months only

The shrinking starts around six months old, in a process researchers call perceptual narrowing. Before that point, an infant can hear a contrast between two sounds even when neither exists in the language spoken around them. After it, many of those contrasts disappear from what the baby notices.

Westinghouse underbid GE, and alternating current won

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:18:14 +0000

In 1893, General Electric offered to wire the Chicago World’s Fair with Thomas Edison’s direct current for $554,000. George Westinghouse said he could do it for $399,000, using an alternating current system built on Nikola Tesla’s patents. Westinghouse won the contract.

Why direct current came first

Edison developed direct current, the kind that runs continually in one direction, as in a battery. His 1882 Pearl Street station in New York is credited as the world’s first commercial power station. In 1882 Edison lit J. P. Morgan’s Madison Avenue mansion from generators in a nearby cellar, as a test run for a system to feed the whole city. Direct current had one serious flaw. It is not easily converted to higher or lower voltages. Alternating current can also travel much greater distances.

Banner ads on a Magic card site paid for Blue Prince

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:17:45 +0000

For twelve years, Tonda Ros ran a website called Mythic Spoiler, a page that posted card images for Magic: The Gathering players. For eight of those years, the banner ads on that site were paying for something else: a video game. All of the site’s ad revenue, Ros wrote on the site once the game was out, had gone into “making Blue Prince” for that time.

What that ad revenue funded became one of 2025’s first indie breakouts. Almost 150,000 people had played it, according to the games analyst Rhys Elliott, and its concurrent players on Steam peaked above 15,000. More than a quarter of Steam players had already logged between 20 and 50 hours only eight days after launch. Ros never pitched Blue Prince to publishers before it was fully playable. GamesIndustry.biz introduced him, at launch, as a “first-time developer.”

Five dead as Amazon cargo jet overruns Miami runway

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:15:08 +0000

Five people died when a Boeing 767-300 freighter flying for Amazon overran a runway at Miami International Airport just before 2 p.m. on Sunday, September 6, 2026. Five more were hurt, and Miami-Dade County officials said three of them were in a critical condition.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the jet was arriving from San Juan, Puerto Rico. An Amazon spokesperson said a contractor, 21 Air, operated the flight.

Into the road behind the airport

BBC News reported that the jet left the runway at nearly 130 mph, struck several vehicles on the road behind the airport, and came to rest tipped onto its nose. It caught fire, and crews also had to deal with a fuel leak. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said more than 60 of its units worked the blaze.

France's PACS gives some marriage benefits and ends by letter

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:15:08 +0000

French couples pick the PACS civil partnership because it gives them some of what marriage offers, with far less to undo. A PACS brings some of the tax, legal and welfare benefits of marriage. Yet a couple can end one by sending an official letter to their local court. A French divorce, by contrast, usually took several years and several court appearances when The New York Times reported on the new law in 2000.

Canadian airlines owe delay compensation if the fault is theirs

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 10:14:10 +0000

A Canadian airline owes you compensation for a delay when you reach your final destination 3 hours or more late, for a reason within its control. The Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) sets three more conditions. The delay must not be needed for safety, and the airline told you about it 14 days or less before departure. You must also claim in writing within 1 year.

Image: Snipergirl more

A departures board at Singapore Changi Airport.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The rules come from the Air Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR), in force since 2019. They cover flights from, to, and within Canada.

Why Easter's date follows the moon, not the calendar

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:05:23 +0000

Easter moves because it is pinned to the sky rather than to a calendar date. Wait for the spring equinox, find the next full moon, and Easter is the Sunday that follows it. The full moon lands on a different day each year, so Easter does too.

Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg more

A full moon over the coast of the Andaman Sea.Licence: CC BY 4.0

That rule gives Western churches a window of just over a month. The earliest Easter can fall is 22 March, and the latest is 25 April. The commonest date is 19 April.

Learning London's streets grows a cabbie's hippocampus

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:05:22 +0000

Studying for The Knowledge makes a London taxi driver’s hippocampus swell as they learn the city’s streets. The growth shows up in the back of that region, and only in trainees who go on to pass. Eleanor Maguire and Katherine Woollett of University College London showed this by scanning the same people before and after their training.

Image: Oleg Yunakov more

A London black cab waits at the kerb.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

What a trainee has to learn

Since 1865, would-be cabbies have had to memorise every street within six miles of Charing Cross, about 25,000 of them. They must also know the locations of 20,000 landmarks and 320 routes linking them up. Learning it all takes two to four years.

Galloping Gertie sent bridge engineers into the wind tunnel

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:01:29 +0000

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge broke apart on November 7, 1940, in a wind of 40 to 45 miles an hour. The investigation that followed told engineers they had to test suspension bridge designs on models in a wind tunnel, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). The bridge had been open for four months.

Image: University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections more

Opening day of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Tacoma, Washington, July 1, 1940 Photographer: Unknown Subjects (LCSH): Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Tacoma, Wash. : 1940) Bridges--Washington (State)--Tacoma Narrows Automobiles--WashLicence: Public domain

A bridge that moved from the start

Leon Moisseiff redesigned the crossing so it could be built for $7 million, the budget allotted, against $11 million for Clark Eldridge’s original plan. The deck began to sway while the floor was still going in. After the bridge opened on July 1, 1940, its wave-like bounce in high winds earned it the name “Galloping Gertie”, and people paid the toll to ride it.

Can Japan's Ainu language outlive its last native speakers?

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:21:12 +0000

Ainu nearly vanished because Japan’s government pushed its speakers into Japanese, and only a handful of native speakers remain. Unesco lists it as “Critically Endangered”. Yet more Ainu people are relearning it, helped by laws, free classes, radio, and now speech recognition software.

The fall was fast. In 1870, a year after Ezo, now Hokkaido, became part of Japan, records suggest about 15,000 people spoke varieties of Ainu, most of them no other language. By 1917 the estimate was 350.

Haiti's restavek children work for their keep, not a wage

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:31:06 +0000

The restavek system asks a child to work for a household in return for being housed and fed. Poor families, often rural, send a child to live with relatives or acquaintances in a city, and the child works for its upkeep. Most become domestic servants. The work is unpaid, and many of these children are kept out of school.

The word comes from the French “rester avec”, meaning “stay with”.

One hour outside the ISS costs seven hours in a pool

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:30:10 +0000

An astronaut practises for roughly seven hours in a swimming pool for every hour they might spend outside the International Space Station, according to NASA figures reported by Space.com. The pool is the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and it holds a submerged replica of the station. Astronauts start training there years before their first real spacewalk.

Image: Robert Markowitz more

A crane lowers astronauts in training spacesuits into the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory pool.Licence: Public domain

The water stands in for weightlessness, but it is only half of the preparation. The other half is a plan, written on the ground, that the crew rehearses until the day itself.

UK pets and Brexit: a new certificate for every EU trip

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 22:29:22 +0000

Taking a pet from Great Britain to the EU now costs a vet’s certificate every time you go. The animal health certificate, or AHC, replaced the EU pet passport, and Good Housekeeping put its price at around £100 to £150 a trip. That assumes your pet already has a microchip and an up-to-date rabies jab.

The old passport did not have to be renewed for each journey. The AHC does.

Frederick Taylor's stopwatch built US scientific management

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:11:10 +0000

Frederick Winslow Taylor broke factory work into tasks small enough to time, and then timed them. His stopwatches had dials marked in tenths and hundredths of a minute, and he cared less about a 10-hour shift than about 10 seconds of it. Those measurements became scientific management, the doctrine of a “one best way” to do every job.

Image: Rumely Company more

Frederick Winslow TaylorLicence: Public domain

A rich boy on the shop floor

Taylor lived from 1856 to 1915 and came from a wealthy family near Philadelphia. At 13, touring Europe with his parents, he watched his father pay reluctant local labourers to mend a bridge. George F. Will, reviewing Robert Kanigel’s biography of Taylor in The New York Times, calls the lesson practical. Money can make working men move faster.

New York rewrote factory fire safety after the Triangle fire

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:46:20 +0000

A locked stairwell door trapped workers on the ninth floor of a New York garment factory on March 25, 1911, and 146 of them died in the fire that followed. New York answered with thirty-eight new laws ordering factories to improve their fire safety. The blaze at the Triangle Waist Company was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City’s history. Most of the workers were young women and girls whose families came from Southern and Eastern Europe, many of them Jewish, and they spent long hours sewing the blouses called shirtwaists.

A German school ran 14 years and reshaped modern design

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:45:09 +0000

Walter Gropius opened the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, and the Nazis shut it in 1933. In those 14 years a small German art school settled what most people still picture when they hear the word “modern”: white walls, glass, steel tube and no ornament.

Image: Cethegus more

Licence: Public domain

The Victoria and Albert Museum ranks it among the 20th century’s most influential schools of architecture, art and design. Dezeen goes further and calls it the most influential art and design school in history.

Best AI: a different winner for every task

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:44:34 +0000

There is no single best AI. Ask a reviewer to name one and the answer depends on what they were testing: a note-taking gadget, a chatbot you type questions into, or the raw model underneath both.

Image: Illustration generated for this article more

Which one is best depends on what you ask it to do, and every benchmark measures something different.Licence: Generated, no third-party rightsThis image is an illustration generated for this article, not a photograph.

The best AI notetaker

WIRED’s testers ran several AI notetakers through real meetings, interviews, and calls, then judged each on transcription accuracy, the quality of its summaries, speed, and value. Their pick was the Comulytic Note Pro, a 28-gram device that clips to a phone with a magnetic ring and runs for 45 hours on one charge. It processes recordings through both OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini, and it is one of the few notetakers with a small screen rather than just a blinking light to show it is recording.

One of India's 89 top civil servants was a Dalit in 2019

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:43:36 +0000

In 2019, only one of the 89 most senior civil servants in India’s federal government was a Dalit, from a group once called “untouchable,” according to parliamentary data. That single gap points at something larger. Caste still decides who gets a job in India. It also decides who a family lets a child marry.

Image: Giveaway285 more

The four varnas, with Dalits outside them.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

How a surname decides who gets the job

India’s civil service exam is the country’s toughest competitive test. Roughly a million people sit it each year, chasing about a thousand posts across the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Foreign Service, and the police. Of those, close to 180 succeed, a pass rate near 0.01%.

Nations choose their side of the date line

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:43:03 +0000

No single body draws the International Date Line, and the countries that sit near it choose whichever side keeps their own calendar in one piece. That is why the line only roughly follows the 180th meridian, and bends wherever running it straight would put one country on two dates at once.

Image: KevGuy4101 more

Butaritari, KiribatiLicence: CC BY 2.0

Kiritimati Island sits almost directly south of Hawaii, on the same line of longitude. Yet its calendar runs a full day ahead of Hawaii’s, because Kiritimati belongs to Kiribati, and Kiribati sits on the other side of the line.

City of London approves twin towers to replace Fountain House

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:42:01 +0000

The City of London Corporation has approved two new office towers at 130 Fenchurch Street, clearing the way to demolish the ageing block known as Fountain House. In 2023, a mock-up of the City’s skyline in 2030 already showed 11 extra towers, approved or under construction.

Image: EuroVizion more

25. //104g/1k/1132/3f - Barbican Centre, London 2000Licence: CC BY 2.0

What replaces Fountain House

Fountain House went up between 1954 and 1958, on a former bomb site, and was one of the first tall office blocks the City built after the Blitz. Architects W H Rogers and Sir Howard Robertson designed it with an eye on New York’s Lever House, and it later housed a run of insurance and finance firms. Architects WilkinsonEyre have drawn its replacement: a 31-storey tower and a 34-storey tower, holding 58,000 square metres of office space between them, plus a publicly accessible cultural space and a garden terrace. The existing block was due to come down in 2026, with the new scheme finished by 2030.

Pakistani police shot Dhaka students demanding language rights

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:58 +0000

On 21 February 1952, police in Dhaka shot into a crowd of students who had broken a government ban on public meetings to demand recognition for the Bengali language. Pakistan’s refusal of their demand pushed many Bengalis toward the independence campaign that ended Pakistani rule over the region in 1971.

Image: Mostaque Ahammed more

Shaheed Minar in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The monument in Dhaka established to commemorate those killed during the Bengali Language Movement demonstrations of 1952.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Where the dispute began

East Bengal held 44 million of the 69 million people counted in the new Dominion of Pakistan after the 1947 partition of British India, and Bengali was the language most of them spoke. Despite that, the government named Urdu the country’s sole state language in 1948. Pakistan’s government, civil service and armed forces were staffed mainly by officials from the country’s western wing.

Mark Zuckerberg blocked Facebook's Like button for two years

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:46 +0000

Facebook’s engineers had a Like button ready to launch by November 12, 2007. Mark Zuckerberg would not let it ship. A rival, FriendFeed, launched its own version first. Facebook did not switch its own version on until February 9, 2009, five years after Zuckerberg started the company in a Harvard dorm room.

Image: Nursing Schools Near Me more

Like Button FacebookLicence: CC BY 2.0

Who clicked first

A Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sketched thumbs up and thumbs down icons for restaurant reviews on May 18, 2005. Yelp passed on his idea and went with “useful,” “funny” and “cool” buttons instead. Around the same time, other Silicon Valley founders were chasing the same idea from different directions: Twitter’s Biz Stone, PayPal’s Max Levchin, YouTube’s Steve Chen and the Gmail engineer Paul Buchheit were each testing low-effort ways to reward people for posting content free.

Harry Brearley found stainless steel while testing gun barrels

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:29 +0000

Harry Brearley was not trying to make a steel that would stay bright. In 1913 his job in a Sheffield laboratory was to find a better alloy for gun barrels, one that would resist erosion rather than corrosion. The rust-proof metal he found instead ended up in almost every cutlery drawer.

Image: Neil Theasby more

The Harry Brearley Mural in SheffieldLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

A lab run by a big steelmaker

Brearley was the first manager of the Brown Firth Research Laboratories, BBC News reports, run by one of Sheffield’s biggest steelmakers. He was testing different alloying elements to make steel harder. The British Stainless Steel Association says the request came from a small arms maker whose gun barrels were wearing away too fast. Brearley tried alloys with between 6% and 15% chromium.

Buffon showed that falling needles could estimate pi

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:27 +0000

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, worked out in 1777 that dropping a needle onto a floor of parallel lines could estimate the value of pi, using nothing but the chance of where the needle landed. The technique, now known as Buffon’s needle, links a purely random event to one of mathematics’ most exact constants.

Image: Matt From London more

An exhibit on 18th-century science, the era in which Buffon devised his needle experiment.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Buffon started from a game rather than a laboratory. He had a long-standing interest in probability and wanted to show that some probability problems answer to geometry rather than algebra. He imagined two men throwing stick-shaped loaves of bread backward, so they landed on a floor of parallel wooden planks, betting on whether a loaf would fall across the crack between two of them. Working out the loaf length that made the bet fair, he found that the odds of a crossing were tied to pi.

Bank of England rate rises squeeze debt before they cool prices

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:19 +0000

The Bank of England raises its Bank Rate to make borrowing dearer and saving more rewarding, so that spending cools and price rises slow with it. The rise reaches a mortgage or a loan long before it reaches a supermarket till, and it does not reach every borrower on the same day or by the same amount.

Image: Images George Rex more

Bank of England / Threadneedle St.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Between November 2021 and its most recent rise, the Bank increased its rate fourteen times in succession, taking it to 5.25%, the highest level since 2008. Inflation itself had peaked at 11.1% in October 2022 before falling back to the Bank’s 2% target by May 2024, the first time it had done so in almost three years. Not every household felt that arc on the same day, and some did not feel it as the same size of shock at all.

Why grief refuses to run on a schedule

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:19 +0000

Why grief has no timetable

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Angel of GriefLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Grief follows its own course, not a calendar. There is no way to escape the pain altogether. Trying to suppress or deny it is just as likely to draw the process out as to end it, and doing so takes more emotional effort, not less. Believing that more grief is somehow healthier, or that there is a proper way to do it, only makes things harder.

Joe Russo called it a passion project. Critics called it a dud.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:41:11 +0000

Real robots walked the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere of The Electric State, on loan from a UCLA robotics lab for the occasion. The screening that followed started 45 minutes late.

Image: Gage Skidmore more

Millie Bobby BrownLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Nobody in that room could have priced what came next. The Electric State carries a reported production budget of $320 million, which puts it among the most expensive films ever made. Within three days of its Netflix release, the streamer’s own figures put viewership at 25 million. That was a little over half the 43 million who watched The Gray Man, the Russo brothers’ previous Netflix film, over its opening weekend in 2022. Carry-On, Damsel and Rebel Ridge, three films that cost a fraction of the price, each drew more viewers than The Electric State did in their own first three days. On Rotten Tomatoes, it settled at 16%.

Kiwi skin is edible, and it adds fibre to the fruit

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:53 +0000

Yes, you can eat kiwi skin. Good Food treats it as an ordinary fact rather than a curiosity: the fuzzy brown coat is edible, and it is a growing habit rather than a strange one. The peel adds fibre, vitamin E and folate beyond what the green flesh gives you on its own. Two health cautions decide who should keep a peeler handy anyway.

Image: Luc Viatour more

Whole and halved kiwifruit with the skin still on.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.5

The Guardian’s food-waste column calls the skin one of the biggest challenges its writer faced in learning to eat new foods, worse than any offal or funky ferment. She got there by trying it ten times. Ten kiwis later, she bites into the whole fruit like an apple and throws nothing away.

The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:41 +0000

John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, gave the dish his name in the 18th century. He didn’t invent it. Bread wrapped around food is a habit people around the world had kept for thousands of years before he sat down to a card game.

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Steak Sandwich - The LoungeLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The story behind the name is well worn. One evening in 1762, Montagu refused to leave a game of cards despite being hungry. He asked a servant to bring him meat between two slices of bread. Whether or not the details are exact, something in his order caught on. His fellow players liked the look of it enough to ask for “the same as Sandwich”.

Comparing universities properly takes more than a league table

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:21 +0000

Comparing universities properly takes more than a league table. Discover Uni is the UK government’s course-comparison service, and it shows data for the specific course wherever it can. The University of Queensland’s advice to its own applicants makes the same point from the other direction. Check the entry threshold for the specific course you want, it says, because two courses that sound alike can ask for very different grades.

Image: Alroyfonseca more

Students at the first class of a course at the University of Ottawa, September 2006.Licence: Public domain

The subject narrows the choice before the ranking does

Some subjects are offered almost everywhere. More than 120 UK universities teach business. Veterinary science is offered at only a handful, so that subject narrows an applicant’s shortlist straight away.

Mary Austin opens the trunks that held Freddie Mercury's lyrics

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:21 +0000

Mary Austin kept four silver trunks shut in her Kensington attic for the best part of forty years. Inside were the handwritten lyrics to some of Freddie Mercury’s biggest songs, packed away in the mid-1980s and left shut because they were too painful to face. In the week Mercury would have turned 80, Austin is publishing what the trunks held.

Image: Freddie_Mercury_performing_in_New_Haven,_CT,_November_1978.jpg : * FreddieMercurySinging21978.jpg : Carl Lender derivative work: Lošmi derivative work: Morn ( talk ) more

Freddie Mercury performing in New Haven, Connecticut, in November 1977.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

What was in the trunks

Austin packed the trunks in the mid-1980s and did not lift a lid again until 2022. The first one held handwritten drafts of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “We Are the Champions”, “Killer Queen”, and “Don’t Stop Me Now”, all in Mercury’s own hand. She shut it again. The pages still felt like his, she says, not hers to read. In the end she asked her two grown sons to sort through the rest instead.

Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem after 358 years

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:19 +0000

Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem by working almost entirely alone, in secret, before announcing a proof at a mathematics conference in Cambridge, England, on 23 June 1993. Fermat’s Last Theorem says no positive whole numbers x, y and z satisfy xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ once the exponent n rises above 2. Pierre de Fermat scribbled the claim into a book’s margin in 1637, adding that he had found a “marvellous proof” too large for the space available.

China chose its officials by exam until 1905

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:14 +0000

China chose its officials by essay, not birth, for centuries. From the Tang dynasty onward, a system of written exams replaced a territorial aristocracy with officials selected on how well they had mastered the Confucian classics, and it lasted until the government abolished it in 1905.

Image: そらみみ more

江南貢院の正門Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The scale of it, by the last centuries of empire, is hard to picture from a modern classroom. During the late Ming and Qing periods, roughly 1400 to 1900, men gathered by the millions every two or three years outside walled examination compounds scattered across the country. Only about one in a hundred of them would ever complete the full academic regimen and win a post in the administrative bureaucracy.

Brazil's Pix instant payments undercut card fees

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:40:09 +0000

Brazil’s central bank, the Banco Central do Brasil, launched Pix in November 2020 and made it free for individuals to send money to each other. Businesses pay 0.33% to accept it, against 1.13% for a debit card and 2.34% for a credit card. By 2022, Pix accounted for 29% of the country’s non-cash transfers, more than any other payment method.

Image: Senado Federal more

Edifício sede do Banco Central do BrasilLicence: CC BY 2.0

Why the BCB built its own rail

The central bank set out to cut reliance on cash, widen access to financial services, sharpen competition in a banking sector a few large lenders dominated, and modernise the settlement system underneath everyday transactions. Angelo Duarte heads the BCB’s department of competition and financial market structure. He says moving cash around a country the size of a continent is expensive, and cutting that cost was one aim. Even his own staff were “surprised by the speed of adoption,” he says.

Nepal's Everest permits have no cap, only a price and a test

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:39:46 +0000

Nepal’s government decides who may attempt Everest from the Nepalese side, and it does so one permit at a time. It sets no ceiling on how many it hands out. In 2024 the country’s Supreme Court told the government to issue fewer permits, yet no fixed limit followed. What controls the crowd instead is a fee and a growing list of conditions a climber must meet.

Image: mckaysavage more

Nepal - Sagamartha Trek - 242 - Prayer flag pole with Lhotse and EverestLicence: CC BY 2.0

Who issues the permit

Every climber starting in Nepal needs a government permit and must pay for it. National Geographic reports that the Ministry of Tourism issued a record 408 Everest permits in 2021. Wanderlust puts the record higher, at 454 permits in 2023. The ministry took in $5.2 million from Everest permit fees in 2018, according to National Geographic.

A 1943 report told England to scrap its elite school exam

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:39:27 +0000

England’s A-level traces back to a wartime committee that wanted its predecessor gone. In June 1943, with the Second World War still raging, a committee led by the educationist Sir Cyril Norwood recommended abolishing the Higher School Certificate. The exam that replaced it, the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level, was first sat in 1951 and is still taken today.

Image: Michael Westley more

Lincoln Christ's Hospital School in Lincoln, England.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What the Higher School Certificate was for

The Higher School Certificate, sat by 18-year-olds, had existed since 1918 alongside the School Certificate, which 16-year-olds took. It did three jobs at once. It measured the work a pupil had done in the sixth form, it served as the university entrance test, and it was increasingly used to decide who received a state scholarship to study.

London's driverless taxis still carry a human safety driver

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:39:23 +0000

Waymo has been testing self-driving Jaguar I-Pace cars on London’s streets since the start of 2026, under a government-backed pilot scheme that lets the technology run ahead of full legal approval. Uber said it would join the scheme that spring, running Wayve’s driving software in its own fleet. Both companies still keep a trained safety driver on board, ready to take over if the system falters.

Image: Dllu more

A Waymo robotaxi on the road, its roof-mounted sensor array visible.Licence: CC BY 4.0

Waymo and Wayve hope to lose that safety driver and run fully autonomous cabs in the city later this year, pending sign-off from ministers and Transport for London. Personal ownership of a self-driving car stays illegal in the UK until the second half of 2027 under current law, though the pilot scheme sidesteps that for these ride-hailing trials. Waymo already runs ride-hailing services in ten US cities.

Andy Ruiz Jr loses his comeback fight to Damian Knyba

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:39:20 +0000

Andy Ruiz Jr lost his comeback fight to Poland’s Damian Knyba on a unanimous decision at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. The judges scored it 117-110, 114-113 and 114-113 for Knyba. Ruiz, 36, walked out with a black eye and a request to do it again.

Image: JazzyJoeyD more

Andy Ruiz Jr. speaks at the press conference announcing his rematch with Anthony Joshua for the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The event was held on September 5, 2019, in the home of the original Bowery Bank in LLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

It was his first fight in two years, and only his fourth since he lost the rematch to Anthony Joshua in December 2019. BBC Sport put the long gap down to injuries.

UN votes to retire the Mercator map for Equal Earth

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:39:00 +0000

The United Nations general assembly has voted to phase out the Mercator world map in favour of a projection based on the 2018 Equal Earth design. The resolution passed with 164 votes. The United States cast the only vote against, calling it “superfluous”, and six countries abstained.

Image: Strebe more

The Equal Earth projection shows every continent at its true relative size.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

On a Mercator map, Africa looks about the size of Greenland. The continent is in fact 14 times larger than the Danish territory. Togo led the campaign for the resolution on behalf of the African Union, which endorsed the Correct the Map campaign in August 2025.

Click beetles flip upright with a snap, not their legs

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:38:59 +0000

A click beetle on its back does not push with its legs. It throws itself into the air with a hinge between two segments of its body. The beetle bends the hinge and holds it under strain, then lets it go. The stored energy snaps free with a loud click and launches the insect upward.

Image: Pasha Kirillov more

Click beetle Ampedus balteatusLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The jump can carry a beetle more than 20 body lengths high. No leg touches the ground to do it.

Ofsted in England: why no single lesson decides the grade

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:38:59 +0000

A parent picturing an Ofsted inspection often imagines one tense lesson, one inspector at the back of the room, and a single grade that follows from it. That is not how a grade forms. Under the framework Ofsted published for inspections from September 2025, a school’s evidence builds before the inspector arrives and continues across a visit that touches far more than one classroom.

Image: J Scott more

Ofsted OutstandingLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What happens before anyone sets foot in the school

Preparation starts with a planning call, usually done by video, where the lead inspector asks school leaders about the school’s structure, its priorities and its context. Before that call, inspectors review the school’s previous inspection report, its inspection data summary report, any complaints made to Ofsted, warning notices, and the school or trust website’s governance pages. They also check recent SEND inspection findings, the local authority’s children’s services report, responses to Ofsted’s Parent View survey, and anything reported about the school in the press.

Booked an all-inclusive? It began in tents on a Mallorca beach

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:38:43 +0000

The first all-inclusive resort stood on a Spanish beach. In the summer of 1950 the first Club Med opened on Alcúdia Bay, on Mallorca, at a stretch of sand now called Platja des Franceses, or Frenchman’s Beach. Guests slept in US Army surplus canvas tents by the sea and shared one shower. Every meal and all the wine came with the stay. Anything extra was paid for in beads.

Who thought of it

The man behind it was Gérard Blitz, born in Antwerp. Condé Nast Traveler describes him as a veteran of the French Resistance. From 1947 he worked in France, caring for Belgians who had escaped the concentration camps. He set up a small group of hotels in the Alps near Chamonix for them. There the former prisoners paid nothing for food or amenities, so that they had, in his words, “no material concerns”.

Cyrus Field failed three times before the cable held

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:38:11 +0000

Cyrus Field’s team failed three times to lay a lasting transatlantic telegraph cable before one finally worked for good, in 1866, nine years after the first attempt.

Image: themet more

Cyrus Field Congressional MedalLicence: CC0

Field, an American businessman, led the project with a team that included the physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, the telegraph’s inventor Samuel Morse, and the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The prize was speed: a ship crossing the Atlantic with news took ten days or more, and a cable could do it in hours.

Spain's 1697 cession to France began Hispaniola's split

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:38:01 +0000

Haiti grew from the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain ceded to France in 1697. The Dominican Republic, on the rest of the island, did not break away from Spain at all. It broke away from Haiti, in 1844.

Image: NASA/Expedition 20 crew more

A view of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola from the International Space Station. This island is comprised of Haiti (in the center left of the image) and the Dominican Republic and is part of the Greater Antilles islandLicence: Public domain

Christopher Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492 and gave the island its name. Four years later Spain founded Santo Domingo, the first European settlement anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, on the site that is now the Dominican Republic’s capital.

A Wimbledon broadcast named Emma Navarro's hypothyroidism

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:57 +0000

Emma Navarro arrives at the 2026 US Open with an explanation for a season that swung between big wins and long silences. During ESPN’s broadcast of her Wimbledon match against Marta Kostyuk on 2 July, commentator Chris McKendry said on air that Navarro has hypothyroidism. It was the first on-record confirmation of the condition behind her troubled year.

Image: Hameltion more

Emma Navarro playing in the first round of the 2023 US OpenLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The diagnosis puts a name to a stretch that looked, from outside, like two different careers. Navarro reached a career-high ranking of world No. 8 in September 2024, the year she made her first Grand Slam semifinal, at the US Open. She got there having never won a previous main-draw match at the tournament, one of only six players to do that in 40 years. In the quarterfinal she beat Paula Badosa, winning 24 of the last 28 points.

A Ubisoft employee's side project became Game of the Year

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:55 +0000

Guillaume Broche built the first version of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in the evenings, after his shifts at Ubisoft. He told the Guardian he put in about eight hours a day on top of his job, for years, and barely slept. The project was a technical demo called We Lost. At that point it had no studio behind it and no publisher.

The finished game went on to win Game of the Year at The Game Awards. It had gone into the show with 12 nominations, a record for the event. By then it had sold more than 5 million copies. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called the win a source of “great pride for Montpellier and for France.”

Sabalenka reaches the US Open last 16 after a rocky summer

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:53 +0000

Aryna Sabalenka is into the last 16 of the US Open. The world No 1 beat Kamilla Rakhimova 6-3 6-4 in the third round, and next faces the American Taylor Townsend. She is trying to become the first player since Serena Williams, champion from 2012 to 2014, to win three US Open titles in a row.

Image: Ocoudis more

Aryna Sabalenka waits to return serve during a US Open final.Licence: CC0

That run follows a summer in which her Grand Slam form fell apart twice.

Two tricks bats use to leave a packed cave without crashing

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:45 +0000

A bat leaving a crowded cave does two things. It moves out from the dense middle of the swarm, and it changes the way it calls. Within five seconds of leaving the roost, it switches to shorter, weaker calls at a higher pitch. Those calls tell it most about the one bat directly ahead, and that is the bat it could hit.

Image: USFWS Headquarters more

Indiana batsLicence: CC BY 2.0

The answer comes from field work. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Tel Aviv University published it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Miliband was tipped for chancellor. He got the Foreign Office.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:20 +0000

Ed Miliband spent the early summer of 2026 as one of two frontrunners to become Britain’s next chancellor. When Andy Burnham formed his first cabinet in July, the job went elsewhere, and Miliband became foreign secretary instead, taking over from Yvette Cooper.

Image: skuds more

Ed MilibandLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Speaking outside Downing Street after his appointment, Miliband told the BBC it was “the honour of my life” to take the role. He is not the first Miliband to hold it: his brother David served as foreign secretary under Gordon Brown, from 2007 to 2010.

Estonia sells a digital ID card, not a right to live there

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:16 +0000

An Estonian e-resident gets to start and run a company in Estonia from anywhere in the world. They do not get to live there. Estonia launched the programme in 2014, and it gives no extra right to enter Estonia or the wider EU.

Image: _Yuki_K_ more

e-Residency Card kitLicence: CC BY 2.0

What the holder receives is a smart card carrying a digital certificate, which serves as their identity for Estonian online services. With it comes an official @eesti.ee email address and access to services for registering a company and opening a bank account.

Ottolenghi wants one big dish for weekend breakfast

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:16 +0000

Yotam Ottolenghi wants one thing on the table at weekend breakfast. His fix for a house full of people on a weekend morning is one big dish, set down in the middle of the table, that everyone helps themselves from. He made the case in the Guardian on August 29, 2026, alongside six recipes from his new book, Simple Too.

Image: Keiko Oikawa more

Yotam Ottolenghi.Licence: Public domain

The change traces back to his children. Family life has shaped his home cooking more than almost anything else, he wrote, and the result is a lot of pasta, potato wedges, meatballs, and pancakes. The pancakes were meant to last the week: batch-cooked on Sunday, then reheated in a toaster or dry pan until Friday. Instead, all 22 disappear by Sunday lunch, eaten by his sons, their friends, and whoever else is at the table.

Carl Sagan's committee raced to choose Earth's sounds

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:37:05 +0000

Voyager’s project manager, John Casani, asked astronomer Carl Sagan to lead a committee. Its brief was unusual: decide what humanity should say to whoever might one day find one of the two Voyager spacecraft. Sagan’s group had less than six weeks to choose sounds, images and music that could stand in for an entire planet.

Image: NASA/JPL more

Voyager Golden Record This gold aluminium cover was designed to protect the Voyager 1 and 2 'Sounds of Earth' gold-plated records from micrometeorite bombardment, but also serves a double purpose in providing the finder Licence: Public domain

Why a record, not another plaque

Earlier NASA probes had carried metal plaques, added in case an alien intelligence ever intercepted them. Sagan’s committee went further. The physicist Frank Drake proposed a phonograph record instead of a plaque. Sound cut into a record’s grooves, on the right material, could survive for millions of years. NASA had each record made from gold-plated copper and sealed inside an aluminium cover built to withstand the vacuum of space. Instructions for playing it were etched on the outside, in a mathematical code meant to be legible to an advanced species.

A pumped-hydro plant stores height, not water

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:50 +0000

A pumped-hydro plant stores energy as height. It moves water between two reservoirs set at different elevations, pushing it uphill when power is spare and letting it run back down when power is wanted. The water is only the carrier. What the plant banks is the drop.

Image: John Englart (Takver) more

Dinorwig pumped hydro Power Station at Slate Quarry near LlanberisLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

That trick matters because a grid cannot keep electricity sitting in a wire for later. Duke Energy, which runs two of these plants in the Carolinas, puts it plainly: electricity cannot be stored, but the potential to make it can.

Homebuyers sue UK housebuilders over alleged price collusion

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:50 +0000

Britain’s biggest housebuilders are facing a claim worth up to £4.5bn, brought on behalf of more than 700,000 people who bought a new-build home between 2015 and 2026. The case accuses the firms of swapping pricing and sales information rather than competing for buyers on their own terms.

Image: Hugh Venables more

Northstowe housebuilder signLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The claim names Barratt Redrow, Bellway, Berkeley Group, Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey, Vistry Group and Bloor Homes. Mark McLaren, who used to handle legal affairs for the consumer group Which?, is bringing the case with the law firms Geradin Partners and Hausfeld. The sums involved work out at roughly £3,100 to £6,200 for each household affected.

Cryptic setters build most clues to work two ways at once

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:48 +0000

A cryptic crossword clue usually carries two routes to the same answer. One half is a plain, if hidden, definition. The other half is wordplay: an anagram, a hidden word, a homophone, or some other trick that spells the answer out letter by letter. The two halves never announce which is which, and the solver’s job is to work that out before the clue makes any sense at all.

Image: muffinn more

Cyprus - Kourion Beach - sunshine and cryptic crosswordLicence: CC BY 2.0

Once a solver sees the split, the clue stops looking like a sentence and starts looking like two overlapping instructions aimed at one word.

Europe's broadcasters borrowed Sanremo and built Eurovision

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:43 +0000

The Eurovision Song Contest started as a test of what television could do across borders. The idea took shape in early 1955, at a meeting in Monaco of the newly formed European Broadcasting Union. It drew inspiration from a song competition that already existed, the Sanremo Festival in Italy.

Image: ESC_2011_Winner_Aserbaidschan.JPG: JCS derivative work: César (talk) more

Ell & Nikki - Azerbaijan (Eurovision Song Contest 2011)Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

After a year and a half of planning, the first contest went out live from Switzerland to small audiences watching in black and white. It took place in Lugano on 24 May 1956. The Guardian counts it among the earliest attempts to broadcast a live television event to an international audience.

James Martin cooks every dish on camera unrehearsed

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:41 +0000

Every dish James Martin cooks on his ITV show is one he is making for the first time. “We don’t do any rehearsal or any practice,” he told The Independent, as James Martin’s Saturday Morning reached its ninth year. His latest cookbook, named after the show, gathers recipes he first made in front of the cameras.

Image: CGirlPeaGirl more

James Martin at the Good Food Show, 2014.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The method is loose by television standards. The ingredients sit written out in front of him, and somebody behind the camera writes the steps down as he cooks. He compares it to a grown-up Ready Steady Cook, backed by decades in professional kitchens.

Spotify pays rights holders by their share of a stream pool

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:24 +0000

Spotify sets no price for a single play. Each month it pools what Premium subscriptions and advertising brought in. It keeps close to a third for itself and splits the remainder among rights holders in proportion to each one’s share of that period’s streams. A quoted rate is never fixed in advance. It is worked out afterwards, once the pool and the play counts are both in.

Image: Johan Larsson more

SpotifyLicence: CC BY 2.0

That leaves the real question: if nobody sets a rate, what decides what a stream is worth?

British law entitles staff to every penny of a service charge

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:18 +0000

When a UK bar, restaurant or salon adds a service charge to a bill, the money belongs to the staff who served the table. It does not belong to the business that collected it. A law that took effect on 1 October 2024 bans employers in England, Scotland and Wales from keeping any part of a tip, whether a customer pays in cash or by card.

Image: markhillary more

A restaurant bill showing a service charge added to the total.Licence: CC BY 2.0

More than three million service workers stand to gain, most of them in restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs, hairdressing and taxi driving. Northern Ireland is not yet covered. Its executive is still drafting separate workers’ rights legislation after a public consultation, and the union Unite called the gap “completely unacceptable.”

Desalination boils or filters the salt out of seawater

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:10 +0000

A desalination plant gets the salt out of seawater one of two ways. It boils the water and catches the vapour, or it forces the water through a membrane fine enough to hold the salt back while the water passes through. Either method takes seawater as salty as 45 grams per litre and turns it into water fit to drink, at about half a gram per litre.

Image: JoelCarterRamadge more

Aerial view of Victorian Desalination Plant looking at main plant, Bass Strait, storage pools and green roof from over the ecological reserveLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Which method a plant uses mostly comes down to how salty its water runs, and how cheap its energy is.

A Dublin team's computer search proved Sudoku's 17-clue floor

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:36:04 +0000

A Sudoku grid with a single valid solution cannot start with 16 clues, however those clues are arranged. Gary McGuire’s team at University College Dublin proved it in a paper that went public in 2011, and Nature covered the result on 6 January 2012. Seventeen clues, not sixteen, is the true floor.

Image: Paul Downey more

A sudoku puzzle book, its grids partly filled in by hand.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Getting there meant checking a number too large to search by hand. McGuire’s team, working with Bastian Tugemann and Gilles Civario, searched within that space for any 16-clue puzzle that could stand on its own.

A warehouse robot's job is carrying, not picking

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:40 +0000

A warehouse robot spends its shift carrying things, not choosing what happens to them. It moves a pallet, a tote, or a whole shelving unit from one point on the floor to another, and a routing system well above its own sensors decides where that point should be. Most of the fleet never touches a single item on its own. That part still belongs to a person, or to the rare robot built for exactly that job.

New robot submersibles aim to explore the ocean's hadal zone

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:31 +0000

The hadal zone begins 6,000 metres down and reaches 11,000 metres, inside ocean trenches where the pressure is more than 1,000 times what it is at the surface. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have built a small robot submarine to work there, called Orpheus.

Image: John Williams more

An autonomous underwater vehicle from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is lowered into the water for testing.Licence: Public domain

Orpheus can thread the rocky narrows of a trench and work alone or in a swarm to map a trench and study what lives there. WHOI singles out one ability: the vehicle can rework its own mission mid-dive when something unexpected turns up.

A chameleon rearranges skin crystals to shift colour

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:28 +0000

A chameleon changes colour by rearranging crystals inside its skin, not by mixing pigment. A layer of cells called iridophores holds a lattice of guanine nanocrystals, and tuning the spacing of that lattice changes which wavelengths of light bounce back. At rest, the crystals sit close together and reflect blue and green. When the animal is excited, they spread apart and the reflected light shifts towards yellow, orange or red.

Timing decides what a Las Vegas flight costs

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:24 +0000

A direct return to Las Vegas cost £433 when Which? searched, against an average fare of £709 a year earlier. The saving came from the travel date.

Image: Dietmar Rabich more

The Strip, Las Vegas, in 2012.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Which? found a direct return to Las Vegas with Norse Airlines for £433 in November 2024, flying out on 31 December and back on 7 January. That was against an average Las Vegas fare of £709 the year before. Flying out three days earlier, on 28 December, cost £560 more for the same trip. Which? also flagged 20 December as the date to avoid, since it was both the busiest and the most expensive day to fly outside Europe over the Christmas period.

Two Chinese towers pulled the core out of the middle

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:24 +0000

An office tower’s core holds its lifts and mechanical services. Many towers build it as a thick block of concrete. Architectural Record’s critic argues that it pushes the people who work there out to the edges of each floor. Two towers in China show what happens when architects move it.

What the core holds, and what it costs

The core is the building’s spine for movement and plant. At the Hanking Center in Shenzhen, Dezeen reports, the core carries most of the lifts and the mechanical services. In that tower the core is also the steel structure that holds the building up.

Enem: the exam that decides who gets into university in Brazil

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:09 +0000

One weekend of testing decides where millions of Brazilian school-leavers will spend the next several years. A single score from the Enem is what most public universities in Brazil now use to fill their places. A student sits four sections of 45 multiple-choice questions and writes one essay. That result becomes their application to as many as 115 institutions at once.

Image: Wilfredor more

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Licence: CC0

What the exam replaced

Before the Enem took over, most publicly financed universities ran their own entrance exam, known as the vestibular. Each one set its own dates, fees and format, so a student who wanted to apply to two universities that scheduled their exams on the same day simply could not sit both. Fees added up too. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the Enem cost 35 reais, about $21, against roughly 100 reais for a typical vestibular, and some students sat two or three of the older tests.

Amazon paid $775 million for a warehouse robot maker

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:08 +0000

Amazon bought Kiva Systems in 2012 as it built out its network of warehouses and tried to improve its margins. The retailer agreed on March 19, 2012, to pay about $775 million in cash for the Massachusetts robot maker. Amazon was already one of Kiva’s customers. Only one earlier Amazon purchase was bigger: the $847 million takeover of Zappos.com in 2009.

Image: Michael Rivera more

An Amazon fulfilment centre, the type of warehouse Kiva's robots came to run.Licence: CC0

What Kiva’s robots did

Kiva sold a package of hardware and software for picking, packing and shipping online orders. Hundreds of small mobile robots, run by control software, crossed the warehouse floor and brought items to the workers who packed them. The founder, Mick Mountz, told TechCrunch the system handled two to four times as many orders an hour as the old way. An average system cost about $5 million, and the company had been growing at more than 100% a year.

What a blue plaque costs in England, and who decides

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:35:05 +0000

No single body sets the price of a blue plaque, or the rules for who gets one. England’s best known scheme, run by English Heritage, has put the cost of making and fitting one at just under £1,000. A council running its own scheme instead bills that cost straight to whoever made the nomination.

Image: Lucho Payne more

Emile Zola Blue Plaque, LondonLicence: CC BY 2.0

No national body governs plaques, so the criteria vary widely from place to place. Local councils, charities and history organisations police the plaques in their own areas.

A planarian cut into pieces grows back its head

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:35 +0000

A planarian regrows its head with two tools. The first is a supply of adult stem cells, called neoblasts, that can turn into any tissue in the body. The second is a chemical signal, the Wnt pathway, that tells those cells which end of the fragment should become a head. Switch that signal off at a wound and the worm builds a head there.

Image: berniedup more

Land Planarians (Bipalium sp.) matingLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The scale of the feat is hard to overstate. The species Schmidtea mediterranea can rebuild an entire animal from a fragment as small as 1/279th of the worm. Cut one in half and each half grows into a planarian of its own.

Coral polyps build reefs from the skeletons they leave behind

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:35 +0000

A coral reef is a pile of skeletons. Each coral polyp, a tiny animal, pulls calcium carbonate out of seawater and turns it into a stony cup to live in. When the polyp dies, the cup stays put, and later generations keep adding to the structure.

Image: NOAA's National Ocean Service more

Coral ReefLicence: Public domain

Calcium carbonate is the same mineral found in chalk and in shells, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History points out. Laid down by millions of polyps over millions of years, it becomes the limestone ridges that National Geographic describes as the body of a reef.

A Broadway show earns back its investors, one week at a time

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:24 +0000

A Broadway show pays its investors back only once a week’s earnings clear that week’s running cost, and only the surplus above that line counts toward the debt. The musical “Just in Time” cleared its full $12.5 million budget just over a year after opening.

Image: garryknight more

Udderbelly Box OfficeLicence: CC BY 2.0

That is rare in the trade. Variety called it the first musical of the 2024-2025 season to turn a profit, and named only four other musicals that had recouped on Broadway since the pandemic: “MJ,” “Six,” “& Juliet” and “The Outsiders.”

A hot, dry pan turns a steak's crust into flavour

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:24 +0000

A seared steak browns because dry heat drives its surface past the point where amino acids and natural sugars in the meat start reacting and rebuilding themselves into new molecules. Chefs have a shorthand for the result: colour equals flavour. Chemists call the process the Maillard reaction, and it is what turns a pale, steamed-looking piece of meat into one with a mahogany crust and a smell that fills the kitchen.

No decoding of the Voynich manuscript has survived scrutiny

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:19 +0000

Nobody has translated the Voynich manuscript because nobody who has announced a solution has produced a passage that other specialists can check against the page and confirm. Three people have made that announcement since 2017, and none has produced a translation other experts accept.

Image: Unknown author Unknown author more

A page from the mysterious Voynich manuscript , which is undeciphered to this day.Licence: Public domain

The manuscript itself is why the puzzle holds. It runs through 240 vellum pages of handwriting in a script nobody recognises. Illustrations run alongside it: plants nobody can name, zodiac wheels that match no known calendar, women bathing in green pools, and pages of recipes. Carbon dating carried out in 2009 put the vellum at 1404 to 1438. Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer, bought it in Italy in 1912. It had earlier belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who is said to have paid 600 gold ducats for it believing the medieval English scientist Roger Bacon wrote it. Bookseller H.P. Kraus later bought the manuscript from Voynich’s widow and gave it to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969. It stays there still, in a vault, fully digitised for anyone to study.

A researcher unlocked an encrypted laptop in about five minutes

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:16 +0000

Five minutes and a screwdriver were enough. In 2020, security researcher Björn Ruytenberg of Eindhoven University of Technology showed that he could get into a locked, encrypted Windows or Linux laptop without ever learning its password, by opening the case and rewriting the firmware of its Thunderbolt controller.

Image: Kristoferb at English Wikipedia more

An unattended laptop, the moment an evil maid attack needs.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Ruytenberg called the technique Thunderspy. The steps are removing the laptop’s back panel, clipping a small programmer onto the Thunderbolt chip’s pins, and rewriting its firmware so the chip’s built-in security checks read as switched off. Reprogramming the chip took a little over two minutes in his demonstration video, and Ruytenberg said the whole procedure, screws and all, “can be done in under five minutes.” Ars Technica timed its own look at the demonstration at a little more than five minutes, and noted that an attacker would then need extra time to install lasting malware or copy the drive.

Rachel Carson's book set off the US fight that banned DDT

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:11 +0000

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book did not ban DDT. It set off ten years of research, courtroom fights and public anger that did. Carson, a marine biologist, examined what the synthetic pesticide was doing to birds, fish and the wider food chain. The United States banned DDT from farms in 1972, a decade after Silent Spring appeared, and it took a newly built federal agency to close the case.

Image: USDA Forest Service more

1955. Ford tri-motor spraying DDT. Western spruce budworm control project. Powder River control unit, Oregon.Licence: Public domain

The book concentrated on how DDT built up in the bodies of wild animals. Just fourteen years before Carson wrote it, the chemical’s discoverer, the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, had won a Nobel Prize for identifying its power as an insecticide. Parts of Carson’s account also ran as a series in The New Yorker the same year.

A surgeon still controls the surgical robots used on patients

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:57 +0000

A surgeon decides where the blade goes, even when a robot is holding it. At Scotland’s Golden Jubilee Hospital, consultant thoracic surgeon Alan Kirk removes a patient’s thymus gland from between the lungs. He sits at a console some distance away, moving a pair of hand controls, while three robotic arms carry out each motion beside the operating table. The BBC watched him operate on Stephen O’Reilly, a patient who chose the robotic approach hoping to leave hospital within days rather than a week. The robot never picks a movement on its own. It follows Kirk’s hands from the console.

Afghanistan's instrument bonfires: how the Taliban hushed music

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:57 +0000

The Taliban silenced Afghanistan’s musicians with fire, threats and the airwaves. After taking Kabul in August 2021, they restricted music and in places made it a crime. Their vice and virtue ministry burned seized instruments, and selling an instrument became an offence that could be punished.

The message reached musicians before the fighters did. A singer the Guardian called Farhan said Taliban commanders phoned and messaged him with accusations of “moral corruption” as they neared his city. He buried his instruments in a field and left the country.

James Flynn found IQ scores rising for decades

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:57 +0000

In November 1984, the social scientist James Flynn received a package of IQ test results in the post, comparing two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. The younger group scored far higher than the older one, and when Flynn checked further countries the same pattern kept turning up.

Image: Bryce Edwards more

Prof Jim Flynn at the 40th Anniversary of the Political Studies Dept at the University of OtagoLicence: CC BY 2.0

By the time he had gathered data from almost thirty countries, Flynn found IQ scores climbing everywhere he looked, by roughly 0.3 points a year, or about three points a decade, for as far back as the tests went. Psychologists now call the pattern the Flynn effect, and treat it as settled fact rather than theory.

The EU's GDPR replaced a law from when 1% of Europe was online

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:33 +0000

The General Data Protection Regulation replaced the European Union’s 1995 Data Protection Directive. When that directive was written, only about one European in a hundred used the internet. By 2018 the figure was about 80%.

Image: theglobalpanorama more

European Union FlagLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The new law did not start from nothing. Most of its principles were already in the earlier rules.

Josef Čapek coined the word robot, not his brother Karel

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:27 +0000

Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. gave the world the word “robot,” but Karel did not think of it. His brother Josef, a painter, did, and he offered it between brushstrokes while Karel struggled to name the artificial workers in his new play.

Image: Unknown author Unknown author more

Czech writer Karel Čapek at his desk.Licence: Public domain

Karel had been calling his creations “laborators,” a word he admitted to Josef felt “somewhat stilted.” Josef, absorbed in a canvas and barely looking up, told him to call them “roboti” instead, the Czech word for a serf or forced labourer. Karel adopted it at once.

Seabed 2030 has mapped 28.7% of the world's ocean floor

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:21 +0000

Seabed 2030 has mapped 28.7% of the world’s ocean floor in detail, after adding almost five million square kilometres of new data over the past year. The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO project wants a complete map of the seabed by 2030.

Image: Heinrich Berann, Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp more

The Heezen-Tharp World Ocean Floor map, the first physiographic map to render the entire seabed in relief.Licence: Public domain

A project that started from almost nothing

When Seabed 2030 launched at the United Nations Ocean Conference in June 2017, only 6% of the world’s oceans had been mapped to modern standards. The project brings together the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic body, and GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans. GEBCO holds the only intergovernmental mandate to chart the entire seafloor. GEBCO itself traces back to 1903, when Prince Albert I of Monaco set up its first chart series.

Jonah Lomu: the wing who helped rugby turn professional

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:12 +0000

Jonah Lomu was the New Zealand winger who scored four tries against England in the 1995 World Cup semi-final, running straight over full-back Mike Catt for one of them. New Zealand’s sports minister at the time of his death, Jonathan Coleman, called him rugby’s first global superstar. He said Lomu had inspired Polynesian men, and in later years, through his fight with kidney disease, people with chronic illness too.

He is back in the news because of Lomu, a documentary showing that even the All Blacks management did not know how sick he was. His widow, Nadene, went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the film, and did not take part in it.

Eiffel Tower staff walk out after order to hide women

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:33:06 +0000

Staff at the Eiffel Tower held a one-day strike this month after managers ordered female colleagues to stay out of sight during a weekend visit from a Hindu religious group. The walkout shut the landmark to visitors on the Monday that followed.

Image: Paolo Neo more

Eiffel con genteLicence: CC0

The staff’s own account says some women had to leave their posts, others were swapped for male colleagues, and none could enter parts of the tower while the group was inside. They said the arrangement had nothing to do with the equality they expected from their employer.

Circle puts USDC on Chelsea's shirts for the new season

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:54 +0000

Circle, the company behind the dollar-pegged token USDC, has become Chelsea Football Club’s principal partner and official front-of-shirt sponsor for the 2026/27 season. The brand “USDC by Circle” appears in gold lettering on the men’s, women’s and academy shirts, and it debuted at Chelsea men’s first Premier League home game of the season, against Brighton at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea began the season without a main sponsor, having relied on short-term deals since their long-term agreement with the telecoms firm Three ended in 2023.

Seven in ten adults may feel like a fraud at least once

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:26 +0000

Imposter syndrome is the conviction that you have not earned your success and that someone will soon find you out. Psychology Today describes people who believe they are less able than others think, despite being well regarded. It is common. Around 70% of adults may feel it at least once in their lives, according to research the magazine cites.

It is also not an illness. Psychology Today notes it is not an official psychiatric diagnosis and does not appear in the DSM, so nobody can be diagnosed with it.

Most who fled US slavery began the Underground Railroad alone

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:19 +0000

The Underground Railroad was never one organisation with a timetable. The US National Park Service describes it as the efforts of enslaved African Americans to free themselves, and most of them set out with no help at all. Many finished the whole journey that way. Organised help existed only in some places.

Image: Acroterion more

The visitor center at Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Dorchester County, Maryland, USALicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The first stretch was the loneliest

Escapes usually happened at night, the BBC notes, with the North Star as the only guide. Those who fled depended on their own wits and a good deal of luck, even where a support network existed further on.

The first known state hack began with a 75-cent error

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:19 +0000

A missing 75 cents led Cliff Stoll to a ring of German hackers who were selling their access to the KGB. Wired calls the case the first known instance of state-sponsored hacking.

The BBC notes that Stoll was an astronomer, not a spy. He held a PhD in planetary astronomy. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had moved him, not wholly by choice, into its computing department.

Why 75 cents mattered

The lab rented time on its computers to remote users and billed them by the minute. In 1986 Stoll’s boss asked him to explain a 75-cent gap in those accounts. Stoll, then 36, found that someone was logging in without paying.

Mickey 17 needed $300m to break even. It was never close

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:08 +0000

In June 2024, at the Cinematheque’s Friends Film Festival, Bong Joon Ho was asked about a rumour. The story going round was that Warner Bros. had found his cut of Mickey 17 too hard for audiences, and had pushed the release back to fix it. Bong said he had always held full control of the edit under his contract. The studio, he said, had been reviewing his finished version since November 2023.

Germany's Basic Law lets judges ban a party outright

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:07 +0000

Germany’s Basic Law lets its Federal Constitutional Court ban a political party outright, if the party works against the country’s free democratic order in a “militant and aggressive way.” The power sits in the constitution adopted in 1949, four years after the fall of the Nazi regime. The court has used it only twice, and both bans came in the 1950s.

Image: Johannes Bader more

Bundesverfassungsgericht KarlsruheLicence: CC BY 2.0

Only parliament, the Bundesrat, or the federal government may ask the court to open a ban case. An ordinary citizen or a rival party cannot bring one.

Ryanair is cutting seats to Spain's cheapest city to fly to

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:32:03 +0000

Research by Which? Travel found the cheapest Spanish city to fly to from London was Santiago de Compostela, at an average of £98 return. Since then Ryanair has said it is shutting its base there and cutting its Santiago flights by 38 per cent.

Which? worked from Skyscanner fares for return economy flights booked from London in 2023, across all airlines and 20 Spanish airports. Santiago, the end point of the Camino de Santiago pilgrim route, came in at nearly half the price of Tenerife, the dearest destination on the list.

How does a free-to-play game actually make money?

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:58 +0000

A free-to-play game earns nothing the moment someone installs it. Every dollar comes afterwards, either from something the player buys inside the game or from an advertiser paying for a slice of the player’s attention. Space Ape Games’ mobile racer Fastlane: Road to Revenge shows how large that afterwards can get. The game launched in May 2017 and fell short of its own targets, shrinking to a skeleton crew of two staff. Within a year it had passed 16 million installs and was earning about $80,000 a day between adverts and purchases. It had become Space Ape’s most profitable game.

In a California lab, a wooden block became the mouse

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:52 +0000

The first computer mouse was a hollowed-out wooden block on wheels. Bill English, then chief engineer at Stanford Research Institute in California, built the prototype in 1964 to ideas Douglas Engelbart had been working on since the start of the decade. It had to win a contest first.

Image: vonguard more

Douglas EngelbartLicence: CC BY 2.0

Engelbart began making notes for the device in 1961. He wanted something better than the light pen, a pointer used on radar systems in the Second World War. His team tried the alternatives. Engelbart told the BBC the tracking ball was heavy, “like a cannonball”, and there was also a joystick and a light panel held up beside the screen.

An owl's feathers break up sound at three points

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:20 +0000

Three structures on an owl’s wing break up the sound a flying bird would otherwise make: a serrated leading edge, a velvet-soft upper surface, and a fringed trailing edge. Researchers reviewing the field have named these the same three features since a British pilot pointed them out in 1934.

Image: mybulldog more

Barn Owl FlightLicence: CC BY 2.0

BBC Earth once tested the claim directly, filming a barn owl, a pigeon and a peregrine falcon flying the same studio course past six hypersensitive microphones. The pigeon’s wingbeats registered clearly. The falcon’s registered more heavily still. The owl barely registered at all.

Samsung kept its cross-owned web as Korean rivals moved on

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:05 +0000

A South Korean chaebol family keeps control by owning a company that owns shares in its other companies, rather than by owning everything itself. Samsung is the clearest case. CNBC described Samsung C&T in 2023 as an industrial conglomerate the Lee family controls through several affiliates that own stakes in each other.

Image: Oskar Alexanderson more

The Samsung headquartersLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

How one company holds the rest

Samsung C&T had a stock market value of about $15 billion when CNBC looked at it. Its main assets were an operating business and stakes in five listed Samsung companies. CNBC put the after-tax value of those stakes at $30.9 billion. The biggest were Samsung Electronics at $13.9 billion and Samsung Biologics at $13.4 billion. Smaller holdings in Samsung SDS, Samsung Life and Samsung Engineering made up the rest.

Dolly Parton was a songwriter first

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:03 +0000

Dolly Parton, who has died aged 80, arrived in Nashville to write songs rather than sing them. She left high school in 1964, moved to the city, and began as a songwriter. A year later a label signed her as an artist. Her team said she died at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center after a short illness with cancer.

Image: Movieguide more

Dolly Parton performing with her crew.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The songs came first. From a catalogue of hundreds, she scored a record 25 US country number one singles, according to the Guardian.

Minecraft's best diamond level is Y -59, not Y 11

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:02 +0000

Dig to Y -59 for diamonds in any version of Minecraft since the Caves and Cliffs update landed in 1.18. Deepslate diamond ore is most common at Y -58 and Y -59, the layer just above the bedrock that starts generating at Y -64. A Minecraft creator named xisumavoid worked out that same coordinate through his own research, and IGN India’s guide sends players straight there for the greatest concentration of ore.

The first vaccine began with a cowpox sore

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:31:02 +0000

In May 1796, Edward Jenner drew matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes, then worked it into a cut on the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps. Phipps developed a mild reaction and felt unwell for a few days, then recovered. Two months later, Jenner exposed him to matter from a human smallpox sore, to see whether the boy could still catch the disease. Phipps stayed well, and became the first person ever vaccinated against smallpox.

TV Licensing knocks on 2m UK doors, and fewer answer

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:30:58 +0000

If a UK household goes without a TV licence it needs, the usual consequence is a knock on the door from a TV Licensing Enquiry Officer. If that goes badly, the case can end in prosecution and a criminal conviction. In 2020, 52,376 people were convicted of licence fee evasion.

The system is under strain. In 2024 officers made nearly 2m visits to unlicensed homes, half as many again as the year before, yet prosecutions fell by 17%.

A design student sketched Nike's swoosh for $35

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:30:32 +0000

Carolyn Davidson billed Nike $2 an hour for 17.5 hours of work on its new shoe logo in 1971, which came to $35. Phil Knight, the company’s co-founder, looked at what she handed him and admitted he did not love it, though he thought it would grow on him.

Image: Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine more

NikeLicence: CC0

Davidson was a design student at Portland State University at the time, not a working designer. Knight had overheard her telling a friend at the university that she needed money for an oil painting class, and over the following months she took on graphs and spreadsheets for the young sportswear label before he asked her for a logo.

New York traded taller towers for public plazas

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:16:15 +0000

Many Manhattan towers have a plaza out front because the city paid for it in floor space. New York’s 1961 zoning law created privately owned public spaces, or POPS. The Department of City Planning defines one as an amenity a developer builds and maintains for public use, in exchange for extra floor area.

Image: (vincent desjardins) more

New York City, Lower Manhattan, Zuccotti Park : red steel sculpture : ' Joie de Vivre ' Mark di Suvero /Licence: CC BY 2.0

How much space the deal produced

Jerold Kayden, a Harvard professor of urban planning and author of a book on New York’s POPS, has tracked them for decades. By 2017, Metropolis reported, his research counted almost 540 of them covering more than 80 acres. That is about a tenth of Central Park.

Ne Zha 2 took $2.26bn, almost all of it in China

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:15:23 +0000

Partway through making Ne Zha 2, its director took back the work he had sent abroad. Jiaozi, whose real name is Yang Yu, had outsourced some shots to studios outside China, and they came back wrong. He told the state broadcaster CCTV that a top-tier studio might still put “third-rate staff” on his project. So the shots came home, and the whole film ended up being made in China.

The finished film went on to take $2,259,822,417 worldwide, according to the scholar Ying Zhu, and topped the global box office for 2025. Only about 1% of that came from outside China. That split is the story. Ne Zha 2 was the biggest film of the year and one that most of the world never went to see.

Winning native title in Australia brings a right to negotiate

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:14:32 +0000

To win native title in Australia, an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander group rests its claim on its own traditional laws and customs. Those laws predate British invasion, and the claim depends on them continuing today. The Native Title Act of 1993 governs the process, including compensation when those rights are impaired or taken away.

Image: feral arts more

kowanyama native title determination 001Licence: CC BY 2.0

Winning does not make a group the owner in the ordinary sense. Holders get “a right to negotiate”, said Michael Dockery, a Curtin University associate professor who studied native title deals in Western Australia.

Hand-made pointe shoes can last a busy dancer one day

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:14:13 +0000

A pointe shoe is made by hand, and it does not last long. At New York City Ballet, a woman dancing in both rehearsal and performance can use up one pair each day, according to the company’s ballet shoe supervisor, Angel Betancourt. The company told Playbill in 2007 that it went through thousands of pairs a year, on a shoe budget of $500,000.

What is inside the shoe

The part a dancer stands on is the box. It is built up from layers of fabric stuck together with glue. Under the foot sit three more parts: an outer sole that meets the floor, an inner sole that braces the instep, and a shank between them that acts as a spine.

In Morocco's souks, banter comes before the better price

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:13:54 +0000

In a Moroccan souk, the final price comes out of conversation. BBC Travel, writing with Lonely Planet, says everything in the souks is negotiable except the pleasantries. A shopper who takes time over friendly banter gets a warmer welcome and probably a better price.

Image: Anja Disseldorp more

Marocco Marrakech - SoukLicence: CC BY 2.0

So the talk is part of the deal. It is not a delay before it.

UK and US mortgage rates climb again as war unsettles markets

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:13:17 +0000

US housing researchers hoped 2026 would bring cheaper mortgages. For a few months it did. Then war with Iran unsettled bond markets, and rates in both countries turned back up. In the US, the average 30-year fixed mortgage reached 7.03% on September 24, 2026, according to Freddie Mac. In the UK, Which? put the average two-year fix at 5.63% and the five-year fix at 5.66%.

Image: Gnangarra more

Ardmore Terrace Houses.Licence: CC BY 2.5

How the US rate passed 7%

The 7.03% reading was the first above 7% in 20 months, since January 2025. NPR notes that the round number means nothing in itself beyond its effect on buyers’ nerves. What matters is the climb behind it. US rates had dropped under 6% by the end of February before rising sharply from March.

Why did critics split so sharply on The Whisper Man?

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:12:17 +0000

A pan here, a rave there

Image: Illustration generated for this article more

The book's whispered nursery rhyme made a generation of readers check the window.Licence: Generated, no third-party rightsThis image is an illustration generated for this article, not a photograph.

Netflix released The Whisper Man on August 28, and reviewers could not agree on what they had watched. In a review headlined “Robert De Niro sleepwalks through silly Netflix potboiler”, the Guardian judged the actor “on full checked-out autopilot mode” in a film it called cheap and increasingly uninteresting. Roger Ebert’s site went further, headlining its review “about as bad as Netflix originals get” and calling the film “an absolute waste of time”.

Lane Kiffin's $91m move to LSU divides US college football

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:11:43 +0000

Lane Kiffin begins his first season as LSU’s head coach carrying a seven-year, $91 million contract and a reputation as the most polarising coach in college football. He left Ole Miss for that deal while the Rebels were still bound for the College Football Playoff, and the move drew widespread criticism.

Image: Bobak Ha'Eri more

USC Trojans football Head Coach Lane Kiffin talks to Trojans quaterback Matt Barkley (No. 7) during a game in the 2010 USC Trojans football season .Licence: CC BY 3.0

Why the exit still rankles

Kiffin announced his departure from Ole Miss on November 30, 2025, after six seasons that had built the Rebels into a playoff contender with an 11-1 record. He said he had asked Ole Miss to let him coach the postseason before moving on. “That was excruciating and difficult,” he told reporters at his LSU introduction, describing negotiations that ran through the night before the school refused.

A style guide settles a newsroom's arguments before they start

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:11:12 +0000

A newsroom’s style guide is a long, alphabetical list of rulings, each one closing a question before a writer on deadline has to guess at the answer. The BBC’s guide and the Guardian’s guide both work the same way. Each has one entry per word or name, so every reporter writing “Nasa” or “an hour” makes the same choice as everyone else on the desk.

Image: Nic's events more

2008-01-26 (Editing a paper) - 26Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Why leave nothing to the writer’s ear

Both guides fix “a” against “an” by sound rather than spelling. Use “an” before a silent H, as in “an hour”, “an honest politician” and “an heir”, and “a” before an H that is pronounced, as in “a hero” or “a hotel”. A sub-editor checking a page at midnight does not have to decide whether “historian” sounds aspirated to them personally. The guide already decided.

How a VPN works, and who still gets to watch you

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:10:49 +0000

A VPN encrypts your traffic on your own device, then routes it through a server the VPN company runs. The website answers that server, not you, so it sees the server’s address rather than yours. A VPN company runs hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of servers around the world. That’s why you can choose which country a site believes you’re connecting from.

Image: Syced more

A home router, where most VPN traffic starts.Licence: CC0

Your internet provider doesn’t vanish from the arrangement. It still carries your connection as far as the VPN’s server, and it sees you connecting to that server. What it loses is any view of what happens after that point: which domains you visit, what you send them, and what comes back. The company running the server sees roughly what your provider used to see. A VPN doesn’t remove a watcher. It changes which one gets the job.

Creatine near a workout might help. The evidence is still thin

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:10:24 +0000

Taking creatine near a workout probably matters less than the supplement aisle suggests. A 2022 review by Scott Forbes and colleagues concluded that nobody yet knows whether the timing of creatine changes the gains it brings. The reasons people give for dosing close to a workout are, in the review’s words, currently only hypothetical.

What is not in doubt is the headline effect. The same review notes that creatine taken during a resistance training programme has consistently beaten training alone on muscle mass and strength.

Lebensborn's children are tracing the families the Nazis hid

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:10:06 +0000

Adults born under the Nazi programme Lebensborn now trace their birth parents by digging through old case files, visiting the homes where they were born, and finding each other. Heinrich Himmler set up the scheme in 1935 to raise the German birth rate. Later it took in children the SS judged racially “valuable” for adoption. Many of those children spent decades not knowing why their own families never made sense.

Europe's only banned theatre company still performs, from exile

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:09:51 +0000

Belarus Free Theatre does not stop making theatre because a government banned it. It moved its actors, its director and whatever text it was rehearsing to a country that would have them, and carried on from there.

Image: Tore Sætre more

Belarus Free Theatre at the award ceremony for the 2018 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The company is the only one in Europe prohibited on political grounds, and for sixteen years it staged underground performances in Minsk from whatever space it could find. In October 2021, with reprisals against its members judged too likely, it moved its people out of the country instead.

Recipe sites disagree on air fryer chicken breast times

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:08:53 +0000

Cook times for what looks like the same piece of chicken breast range from six minutes to close to half an hour, depending on which recipe site you follow. An air fryer is, in Serious Eats’ words, “a supercharged mini convection oven,” and air fryer chicken breast is a boneless, skinless breast cooked fast inside one. The cut has a “reputation for drying out,” Delish notes, and the quick, circulating heat of an air fryer is meant to stop that.

India's electric car sales cross the 5% mark

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:08:48 +0000

Electric cars took more than 5% of India’s passenger vehicle sales earlier this year, a share analysts treat as the point where a niche product turns into an ordinary one. The market grew by a quarter in the year to March 2026, and India’s dealers’ association called the shift “no longer directional but substantive.”

Where the growth sits

The strongest demand sits at the top of the market. Among cars priced above one million rupees (about $10,481, or £7,777), one in ten sold is now electric. Smaller vehicles moved first. Electric three-wheelers already take more than 30% of their category, and electric motorbikes more than 15%.

Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 satellite idea took 19 years to fly

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:08:31 +0000

Arthur C. Clarke did not invent the geostationary orbit. What he did, in a 1945 article for Wireless World, was propose putting a set of satellites there to form a communications network spanning the globe. The first satellite reached that orbit in 1964, 19 years after his paper.

Image: Rob Croes for Anefo more

Arthur C. Clarke, laughing, at an awards ceremony.Licence: CC0

What makes the orbit special?

A satellite about 35,786 km above the equator travels at a speed that matches the Earth turning beneath it, so it hangs over the same spot. To someone on the ground it looks fixed. Antennas can then point at it and stay put, with no need to track it across the sky. The BBC notes that each such satellite’s footprint covers 40% of the globe.

Bosnia's presidency chair passes hands every eight months

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:07:42 +0000

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s head of state is not one person but three, and the job of chairing that trio changes hands every eight months. A Serb, a Bosniak and a Croat sit on the Presidency together, and the chair rotates between them in turn.

Image: Diego Delso more

Arslanagić bridge, Trebinje, Bosnia and HerzegovinaLicence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The arrangement dates to the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the 1992-95 war in December 1995. The war killed more than 100,000 people and displaced around two million, and the peace deal split the country into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, joined by a shared federal government. A tripartite presidency sits on top of that structure. AP News describes it as a body designed to heal the country’s ethnic divide.

Giles Gilbert Scott's red phone box, which he wanted silver

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:07:00 +0000

Giles Gilbert Scott won a 1924 competition to design a standard telephone kiosk for Britain, and he wanted it painted silver. The boxes were painted red instead.

Image: Post Box more

K6 telephone kiosk, Front Street, TynemouthLicence: CC BY 2.0

Scott was already known for large public buildings. He designed Battersea Power Station, Liverpool Cathedral and Bankside Power Station, the building that later became Tate Modern. His winning kiosk, known as Kiosk No. 2 or K2, combined a mass-produced structure with a domed, perforated crown that gave the box proper ventilation.

UK National Cinema Day came back in 2026 as a £4 weekend

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:58:13 +0000

The UK’s cut-price cinema day returned in 2026, a year after it was shelved, and it came back twice the length. Under the new name National Cinema Weekend, it ran on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 September. The Film Distributors’ Association put tickets at £4 in the UK and €4 in the Republic of Ireland.

Image: Wolfmann more

4DX seats at Kilden kino in Tønsberg, Norway.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Why there was no cinema day in 2025

Cinema First, the cross-industry body behind the event, paused it for 2025. A spokesperson told Screen that admissions were growing and the release slate for the rest of that year was unusually busy. The same statement said a changed format was under consideration for 2026.

Why a star vanishes at once when the Moon passes in front

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:18:40 +0000

On 18 February 2026, Mercury slipped behind the Moon for skywatchers south of Sallisaw, Oklahoma, and stayed hidden for about three minutes. Astronomers call this a lunar occultation: the Moon passing directly in front of another body and blocking it from view, the way it blocks the Sun during a solar eclipse. A star occulted this way gives no warning. The Moon has a very thin atmosphere and a star’s disc is tiny, so the star disappears at once rather than dimming first.

Office conversions crowd the UK's 2026 reuse awards shortlist

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:18:24 +0000

Buildings converted into offices drew so many entries to this year’s AJ Retrofit & Reuse Awards that the organisers split the category in two. The Architects’ Journal said it divided adaptive reuse into office into projects under £10 million and those at £10 million and over because of the number of entries.

The AJ published the first shortlists in July 2026, covering five adaptive reuse categories out of 18 in the awards. It defines adaptive reuse as retrofit combined with a change of use.

Newsrooms take bystander video apart to test rival accounts

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:49 +0000

An ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good dead on a Minneapolis street, and bystanders filmed the scene from several angles. The clips did not agree. One showed the agent standing beside a vehicle whose wheels pointed away from him. Another, filmed from a balcony and later shared by President Trump, made it look as though the vehicle had struck him. A newsroom cannot settle that kind of dispute by watching a video once. It settles it by pulling the video apart.

The two kinds of hyperhidrosis, and what causes each

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:49 +0000

Most sweating has an ordinary trigger: a hot room, a hard walk, a nervous phone call. What counts as excessive is sweating beyond what the body needs to regulate its temperature. A review of the condition on PubMed Central traces that pattern to the nervous system rather than the sweat glands. The glands themselves work as they should. What is overactive is the signal telling them to fire.

That signal runs through the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that also sets body temperature. The review describes two separate routes out of it: one answers heat, the other answers emotion. The emotional route is why sweaty palms show up before a job interview rather than a jog. The review notes a theory for why: sweat on the palms and soles may have improved grip when an early human needed to run.

A Florence harpsichord maker is credited with the piano

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:42 +0000

Bartolomeo Cristofori, an Italian instrument maker working in Florence, is widely credited with inventing the piano. His change was a single mechanism: where the harpsichord plucked its strings, his instrument struck them with hammers.

Image: matsuyuki more

HarpsichordLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

That swap gave the player control through the fingers. The harder a key went down, the louder the note, and the lighter, the softer.

Wheel of Fortune fires announcer Jim Thornton

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:41 +0000

Sony Pictures Television has fired Jim Thornton, the announcer on Wheel of Fortune. The studio said in a statement that his employment had ended “effective immediately” after what it called a thorough investigation. The firing came days after Sony suspended him and began recasting the role.

What led to the suspension

The trouble traces back to a flight in May. On September 1 a studio spokeswoman told Deadline that Sony had “recently been made aware of allegations” about Thornton, and that it was recasting while it investigated. TMZ first reported the story, saying a passenger had complained to a flight attendant about Thornton.

Amazon MGM has yet to cast a new James Bond

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:21 +0000

No actor has signed to play the next James Bond. Amazon MGM, which now controls the character, confirmed in May that casting was under way, and producer Amy Pascal has said the end of the year is “a good bet” for an announcement. The BBC notes that it has never been clear whether the rumoured names rest on inside information or guesswork.

Only six actors have played Bond in the official series since Dr. No in 1962, fewer than the number of prime ministers Britain has had in the last ten years, and half the number of people who have walked on the Moon. The franchise has not announced a new Bond since 2005.

Why a heat dome set all-time records in Montana and Utah

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:21 +0000

A heat dome pushed daytime readings past 100F (38C) across much of the western United States in mid-July 2026. On one Sunday it set all-time heat records in two states at once. Billings, Montana, hit a sweltering 111F (43.9C), its hottest day on record, and Salt Lake City, Utah, reached an all-time high of 109F the same day.

What a heat dome actually is

A heat dome forms when a large area of high pressure settles over a region and refuses to move on for days or even weeks. Air trying to rise gets pushed back down, compresses, and warms further, while the same high pressure keeps clouds from forming, so unbroken sunshine keeps beating on the ground below. AccuWeather meteorologist Brandon Buckingham describes the effect as a dome that acts “like a lid”. It is not a formal scientific term, but it has become a popular way to describe the pattern in recent years.

Passive house is a measured standard, not a style

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:20 +0000

A passive house is not a look. It is a small set of measured targets, checked with a blower-door fan rather than a planning officer’s eye. Passive House International, one of two bodies that certify the standard, permits no more than 0.6 air changes an hour at 50 pascals of pressure leaking through a building’s seals.

Image: seier+seier more

passive house kindergarten. renovation of gyldenrisparken social housing, copenhagen. vandkunsten/witraz/wissenberg 2005-2012Licence: CC BY 2.0

That number shapes daily life inside the building. In Stephanie Silva’s flat in Brooklyn, profiled by the Guardian, the sealing shows up as quiet: no smell of a neighbour’s cooking, no traffic noise from the street, no clatter from old radiators. It shows up on her utility bill too. Her first month in the 67-unit affordable building came to $57, against roughly $135 split between gas and electricity in her previous flat.

The body shuts down in stages before death

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:08 +0000

Death is not one moment but a sequence. The Cleveland Clinic lists the end points: the last breath, the heart stopping, the brain stopping, the kidneys, the liver and every system they power. Before that comes a slower run of changes that doctors and nurses learn to recognise. What follows the last of them is a question medicine cannot test, so the answers come from religion instead, and they differ.

Montessori classrooms let the child choose the work

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:16:01 +0000

A Montessori classroom removes the parts of school most children take for granted. There’s no blackboard, no teacher’s desk, and no register of instructions from the front of the room. The child, not a timetable, decides what happens first.

Image: Natalie Choi more

A Montessori classroom has no blackboard and no teacher's desk.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

At Walthamstow Montessori School in north-east London, the day starts on that principle. Pupils greet their teachers with a handshake, then pick up whichever piece of equipment they choose. Some read in a corner. Others thread beads or piece together a jigsaw. Nobody tells them what to do first, and nobody stands at the front waiting for quiet.

Air conditioning harms the climate through power and gas

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:50 +0000

Air conditioning harms the climate in two separate ways. Mark Radka, who heads the energy and climate branch of the UN Environment Programme, calls cooling a double burden. Much of today’s equipment runs on refrigerants that are potent greenhouse gases, and it also uses a lot of energy. Neither cost is fixed. Both depend on which gas sits inside the machine and how the grid that powers it is fed.

Fruit flies breed in a week, so traps alone rarely end them

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:49 +0000

To get rid of fruit flies, remove what they breed in first and trap the adults second. Which? says a trap on its own is unlikely to finish the job. It does nothing about the eggs already sitting in the fruit bowl.

Image: Brandon Antonio Segura Torres & Priscilla Vieto Bonilla more

Close-up of the compound eye of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) observed under a scanning electron microscope, digitally colored.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Why a few flies become a swarm

Speed is the problem. A fruit fly can lay up to 500 eggs in one go, and an egg becomes an adult in about a week. Warm weather shortens that cycle further, which is how a couple of flies turn into an infestation.

Heat kills bed bugs. So can cold.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:49 +0000

Bed bugs die at temperatures above 45C, held there for at least 30 minutes. Wash whatever you can at a hot cycle, then tumble dry it on high. Anything that can’t take the heat goes in a sealed bag in the freezer instead, for three or four days.

The rest of this piece is about finding what the wash misses, and knowing when to hand it to a professional.

Image: CDC / Harvard University, Dr Gary Alpert; Dr Harold Harlan; Richard Pollack. Photo: Piotr Naskrecki more

An adult Cimex lectularius feeding, photographed in 2006.Licence: Public domain

What you’re looking for

An adult bed bug is up to 7mm long, oval, and usually brown, darkening towards red once it has fed. Juveniles are only a couple of millimetres across, pale and close to see-through, so they’re easy to miss. They hide in bed frames, mattresses, clothing, furniture, behind pictures, and under loose wallpaper.

One cost of living figure never fits every household

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:43 +0000

A cost of living comparison prices a fixed basket of goods and services in two places, or at two times. The answer depends on whose basket it is. Change the household and the same prices give a different figure.

Investopedia describes the measure as the money a consumer needs for an average lifestyle. That covers food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, fuel and other goods and services.

Image: zeevveez more

Supermarket trolleys, the basis of most price baskets.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The same year, a different rate for each household

The UK’s Office for National Statistics shows how far the basket matters. Its Household Costs Index rose by 2.8% in the year to June 2026. The Consumer Prices Index rose by 2.6% over the same year.

Marcus Aurelius may not have been the Stoic he described

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:42 +0000

Marcus Aurelius may not have been the Stoic he described in his own notebook. He took Rome’s throne in 161 CE, after his adoptive father Antoninus Pius, and held it until he died in 180. The book that made him famous, Meditations, was never written to convince a reader of anything. Marcus wrote it for his own benefit, as a kind of self-instruction, and he did not necessarily expect anyone else to read it. Jon Brooks of The Stoic Handbook argues that its most repeated lines sound like a man still working on a problem, not one who had already solved it.

Kelp forests slow waves and cut coastal erosion

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:28 +0000

A kelp forest protects a coast by getting in the way of the water. NOAA explains that the drag from large kelps slows ocean currents, and that slower water inside the forest means less wave action on the shore behind it. Weaker waves wear away less of the coast, which cuts the cost of defending or replacing property there.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History makes the same point, and adds why it matters more now. Sea levels are rising and storms are arriving more often.

What a duvet's tog rating actually measures

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:27 +0000

A duvet’s tog number measures how well it traps heat, not how thick or heavy it feels in your hands. The rating comes from “thermal overall grade”, and it runs from a bare 1 tog at the light end to beyond 16 tog at the warmest.

Image: Øyvind Holmstad more

two duvets side by sideLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

That distinction matters because two duvets of the same tog can feel completely different to hold. It’s why a slim-looking duvet can rate the same as a bulkier one, and why price and weight are poor guides to how warm a night you’ll actually get.

England caps contingency fees in injury cases at 25%

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:15:22 +0000

A contingency fee lawyer is paid a share of whatever the client wins, and nothing if the case is lost. How big that share gets depends on where the case is heard. In England and Wales, a personal injury lawyer can take no more than 25% of the damages. In the Australian state of Victoria, a court has approved rates of 27.5% and 40% in class actions.

Image: This image was produced by me, David Castor ( user:dcastor ). The pictures I submit to the Wikipedia Project are released to the public domain. This gives you the right to use them in any way you like, without any kind of notification. This said, I would still appreciate to be mentioned as the originator whenever you think it complies well with your use of the picture. A message to me about how it has been used would also be welcome. You are obviously not required to respond to these wishes of mine, just in a friendly manner encouraged to. (All my photos are placed in Category:Images by David Castor or a subcategory thereof.) more

Royal Courts of Justice main gate.Licence: CC0

The percentage is only half of it. The other half is who gets to say no.

Every UK employer must auto-enrol staff earning £10,000

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:56 +0000

If you work in the UK, are aged 22 or over but under state pension age, and earn at least £10,000 a year, your employer must put you into a workplace pension. The only exception is a worker already in a suitable scheme. You do not have to ask. The duty covers businesses of every size, according to Acas.

How the money goes in

In some workplace schemes, a share of your pay goes into the pension each payday, and your employer pays in as well. The law sets a minimum for those contributions. The Pensions Regulator’s guidance notes that the minimum rose by statute in 2018 and again in 2019.

UK installers fill cavity walls through the outer brickwork

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:56 +0000

An installer fills an existing cavity wall from outside. They drill through the outer layer of brick and inject insulation into the gap behind it, between the outer and inner leaves of masonry. The holes get made good once the job is done.

What sits inside the wall

A cavity wall is two masonry walls standing side by side with a space between them. The Energy Saving Trust says the outer one is usually brick, and the inner one is brick or concrete block. Most British homes built after about 1920 have one.

Anthropic's alignment lead puts AI extinction risk above 10%

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:42 +0000

In September 2026, Anthropic’s own head of alignment science, whose job is to stop exactly that, put the odds that AI kills us all at more than 10 per cent. He was agreeing with an AI researcher who had just left Anthropic and wrote that people inside the industry believe the technology could kill us all by the end of the decade. Until recently, answers to how AI will change the world ran from the mundane to the speculative. Fewer repetitive jobs, sharper medical scans, perhaps one day a robot that fetches your reading glasses. This was a starker kind of answer, with a number attached.

A single ruling can bind courts that never heard the case

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:41 +0000

A court follows an earlier ruling on the same question under a doctrine called stare decisis, Latin for “let the decision stand”. The judges who wrote the earlier ruling need not sit on the later court, and the parties need not be the same. The rule binds the court itself.

Image: Jarek Tuszyński more

The US Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The doctrine does two separate jobs, and US courts treat them differently. One binds a court to the decisions of the court above it. The other binds a court to its own past decisions.

Judith Jarvis Thomson named the trolley problem, then doubted it

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:36 +0000

The trolley problem asks whether you may harm one person to save several. The philosopher who gave the puzzle its name spent decades on it, and then reversed her own answer.

A runaway trolley is heading for five people. You can pull a switch and send it down a side track, where it will kill one person instead. Most people say you should pull it. Now put yourself on a footbridge beside a large stranger. Pushing him onto the track would stop the trolley and save the five. Almost nobody says you should push.

No new UK cost of living payment, and where help comes from

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:33 +0000

There is no new cost of living special payment. The Department for Work and Pensions says it is not planning any more Cost of Living Payments, and its guidance covers only those made from 2022 to 2024. Help in England now comes through local councils and a pair of winter payments instead.

Image: Illustration generated for this article more

The Cost of Living Payment scheme has closed, and no further rounds are planned.Licence: Generated, no third-party rightsThis image is an illustration generated for this article, not a photograph.

What the old scheme paid

GOV.UK lists five payments for people on low income benefits or tax credits: £326, £324, £301, £300 and £299. A couple on a joint claim got one payment, not two. People on qualifying disability benefits could also get two payments of £150.

How a Smithsonian curator chooses US campaign objects to keep

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:10 +0000

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, a curator’s judgement decides what joins the campaign collection, not a rulebook. Larry Bird, curator of the campaign collection in its division of political history, told Smithsonian Magazine there was no formal process for choosing what joins it. What he looked for instead was proof that ordinary people cared.

That makes his collection an unusual window on how museums choose what to keep. A campaign button costs a couple of dollars and has almost no value on its own.

The brain that changes itself, and what keeps it steady

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:10 +0000

The brain that changes itself is now mainstream science. Neuroplasticity, the nervous system’s ability to reshape itself over time, was widely dismissed about 30 years ago, according to an essay published by the AAAS. Today it counts as a basic feature of the nervous system and a subject of rigorous study. Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself tells of the pioneers who fought to prove the idea, and of stroke patients who made remarkable recoveries.

A student designed the recycling symbol for $2,500

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:09 +0000

Gary Anderson was 23, studying architecture at the University of Southern California, when he entered a design contest in 1970 and won. His prize was $2,500, and his logo is now recognised around the world: three bent arrows chasing each other around a triangle.

Image: The Bag N Box Man LTD more

Recycling Symbol among Cardboard and Paper PackagingLicence: CC BY 2.0

A Chicago container company ran the contest to mark the first Earth Day, held on 22 April 1970, and asked entrants for a logo for recycled paper products. Anderson’s entry won. The mark he drew in pencil and traced in black ink has stood for five decades since.

Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the revival of spoken Hebrew

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:06 +0000

Hebrew had no native speakers for close to 2,000 years. Jews prayed in it, studied it, and wrote in it, but nobody grew up speaking it at home. Many credit Eliezer Ben Yehuda with changing that, and the clearest sign of how strange the change felt is what it did to his own son.

Image: Jewish National Fund Photographer (Israeli) more

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda with his second wife, Hemda nee JonasLicence: Public domain

Itamar Ben Avi grew up home-schooled and kept away from other children, so that Hebrew would be the only language he ever heard. For a long time his parents feared he would never speak at all. He said his first Hebrew word at three and a half, and became, by most accounts, the language’s first native speaker in almost two millennia.

Certificate authorities check who owns a site before signing

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:14:02 +0000

A certificate authority checks before it signs for a website. It confirms that the web address really belongs to the organisation asking for the certificate. The UK’s security agency adds that an authority should confirm the request is genuine and allowed. Your browser then leans on that work every time it shows a padlock.

Image: Yu. Samoilov more

HTTPS BrowserLicence: CC BY 2.0

That ownership check is where the trust comes from. When you accept a site’s certificate, you are relying on the authority to have checked the organisation’s identity on your behalf, as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) puts it.

Bhutan scores happiness from 148 questions and nine domains

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:13:48 +0000

A Bhutanese bureaucrat asks a farmer 148 questions, feeds the answers into nine weighted categories, and comes out the other end with a single number from 0 to 10. That number is a citizen’s Gross National Happiness score, and it decides which of four bands they fall into: deeply happy, extensively happy, narrowly happy, or unhappy.

Image: Mario Biondi, Italian writer more

A wall sign quotes the fourth king's view that national happiness matters more than GDP.Licence: Public domain

The questions range from the direct to the oblique. One asks a person to rate their overall satisfaction with life on a scale of zero to ten. Others ask how many goats they own, or whether they feel selfish. A young woman whose cow had calved the day before answered ten. A recent widower scored seven, his grief offset by religious contentment.

A UK power of attorney passes your decisions to someone you trust

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:13:34 +0000

A power of attorney is a legal document that hands your decisions to someone else, called an attorney, if illness, injury or absence stops you making them yourself. The person who grants it is the “donor”. The attorney they name can act on their behalf once the document takes effect.

The document only works while you still have the mental capacity to sign it. Once that capacity is gone, the choice is no longer yours to make.

Air fryer jacket potato: 200C for 40 to 50 minutes

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:13:21 +0000

Set the air fryer to 200C, rub the skin with oil and salt, and give a baking potato 40 to 50 minutes, checking it at the 20 minute mark. BBC Food and Good Food land on that same method. Where they part company is the microwave shortcut, and how long the air fryer needs after it.

Image: Andy Li more

A jacket potato with baked beans and mature cheddar.Licence: CC0

Which potato to buy

A floury one. BBC Food suggests anything labelled as a baker, or a variety such as King Edward, Maris Piper, Vivaldi or Estima.

Air fryer corn on the cob: how heat changes the cooking time

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:13:17 +0000

Corn on the cob cooks in an air fryer in anything from 6 to 18 minutes, and the heat you pick decides where in that range you land. Kitchn runs its air fryer at 400F and has the corn out in 6 to 8 minutes. BBC Good Food sets 180C and gives it 15 to 18.

Image: NeoBatfreak more

Foil-wrapped corn steams in its own butter for a juicier result than the bare-basket method.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Both recipes start the same way. The cob is shucked, cut in half if it will not lie flat, and rubbed with oil and salt. What happens next is where they part.

A Tinder romance crypto scam took a UK chef's house deposit

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:12:50 +0000

Alexandr Gutu, a chef who has lived in the UK since 2016, worked two jobs to save a £42,000 deposit for a house. He matched with a woman calling herself Kristine on Tinder, and the two grew close over several weeks of messages about a shared future. Kristine introduced her uncle, a cryptocurrency trader who offered to grow Gutu’s savings, and Gutu put in £850 to start. He kept adding larger sums as his balance appeared to climb, until he had put in £40,000. When he tried to withdraw part of the money, the uncle stopped replying, and Kristine blocked his number and vanished from Tinder.

A rubber hand can start to feel like your own

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:12:37 +0000

The rubber hand illusion works by making sight and touch agree. You watch a rubber hand being stroked while your own hand, hidden from view, is stroked at the same moment and in the same spot. After a few minutes most people start to feel that the rubber hand is theirs.

The brain settles the mismatch in favour of what it sees. Matching signals from two senses outweigh what the person knows to be true.

Kaley Cuoco started producing before Big Bang Theory ended

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:32 +0000

Kaley Cuoco founded her own production company, Yes, Norman Productions, in 2017, two years before The Big Bang Theory ended. She had spent twelve seasons on the CBS sitcom playing Penny, a Cheesecake Factory waitress living across the hall from two physicists, and the show closed out on May 16, 2019, after 279 episodes.

Image: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America more

Kaley Cuoco speaking at the 2017 San Diego Comic Con International, for 'The Big Bang Theory', at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Where she started

Cuoco was born on November 30, 1985, in Camarillo, California, and started modelling and appearing in commercials as a child. Because of her career, she was homeschooled. “I’ve never been to a regular high school,” she has said. She took her first starring role as a teenager, playing Bridget Hennessy on the ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules from 2002 to 2005. She then joined the supernatural drama Charmed as Billie Jenkins for its eighth season.

Sandel's Justice was the first Harvard course put online free

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:17 +0000

Michael Sandel’s Justice was the first Harvard course made freely available online and on television, and tens of millions of people around the world have watched it. The BBC notes that he has been called “the most relevant living philosopher” and a “rock-star moralist”.

Image: Dariusz Jemielniak ('Pundit') more

Harvard Business School's Baker Library.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard, where Justice became one of the university’s best-known courses. Over two decades more than 15,000 students took it on campus, with hundreds of graduate students from philosophy, government and law departments working as teaching assistants.

Webb's bigger mirror catches light too faint for Hubble

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:07 +0000

Webb’s primary mirror spans 6.5 metres, built from 18 gold-plated hexagonal segments fitted together like a honeycomb. Hubble’s is a single 2.4-metre disc. The bigger mirror gathers more than six times as much light, so Webb can record a faint object roughly six times faster than Hubble ever managed.

Image: NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham more

NASA engineer Ernie Wright looks on as the first six flight ready James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror segments are prepped to begin final cryogenic testing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center .Licence: Public domain

Size is only half the story. Webb observes wavelengths from 0.6 to 28.5 micrometres, stretching from the red edge of visible light deep into the mid-infrared. Hubble’s optics cover 0.09 to 2.5 micrometres, mostly ultraviolet and visible light. That difference matters because the oldest galaxies emit visible and ultraviolet light that the universe’s expansion has stretched into the infrared by the time it reaches Earth. Seeing that light at all means observing in the infrared.

What your body does overnight, and what a short night costs

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:03 +0000

Sleep is not the body switching off. It is the body doing work it cannot do while you are awake. The US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) says sleep supports healthy brain function and maintains physical health, and in children and teenagers it also supports growth. Too little of it, over time, raises the risk of long-term health problems.

Image: Shuma Shuam CHENMIEL more

A hotel bedroom in Guzhen, Zhongshan, photographed in May 2023.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The cost shows up in the day as well. The NHLBI says poor sleep can affect how well you think, react, work and learn, and how you get on with other people.

A V&A exhibition shows what accessible design means

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:02 +0000

A ramp gets a wheelchair through the door. It says nothing about the seating inside, whether a label can be read aloud, or whether disabled people helped design what’s on show rather than only receiving it. The Guardian’s review of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition, Design and Disability, argues that the show goes far beyond the assumption that access means a ramp. It shows disability-led design is “so much more than ramps.”

Cracker Barrel dropped its new logo within a week of launch

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:02 +0000

Cracker Barrel unveiled a stripped-down logo on 19 August 2025, dropping the “Old Timer” who had leaned against a barrel on its signage since 1977. Customers, investors and even President Trump objected, and within a week the chain had brought the old mark back. David Johnson, who runs the branding agency Strategic Vision PR Group, called the redesign a “flop” in comments to CBS, the BBC’s American partner network. The company had “gone against their brand story,” he said, rather than against good design.

The most common sleeping position isn't the best for everyone

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:02 +0000

On your side. That is the usual answer, and it holds up on average. In a 15-night trial, 13 volunteers wore a flexible sensor that tracked their posture through the night. The ones who mostly lay on their right side, turning over the least, reported the best sleep quality. Separately, Danish researchers wired volunteers with motion sensors and found people spend just over half the night on their side, about 38% on their back, and 7% on their front.

Your UK pension moves abroad with you, but its rises may not

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:02 +0000

If you leave the UK, your pensions stay yours. MoneyHelper, the guidance service of the Money and Pensions Service, says you can usually still claim all of them, including the State Pension. What changes is how they are taxed, what currency they arrive in, and whether the State Pension keeps rising each year.

Plenty of people face the question. The Office for National Statistics counted about 479,000 people leaving the UK in 2024, and around 79,000 of them were British nationals.

Texas started a US map war that the Supreme Court then widened

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:01 +0000

American politicians favour a party by redrawing the lines of the districts that elect the House of Representatives. Each of the 435 members represents one district in their home state, and state governments set the process that fixes its boundaries. Who holds the pen decides much of whether a district leans Democratic or Republican.

The BBC defines gerrymandering as redrawing electoral boundaries to favour a party. Both main parties do it, and it is legal unless a court finds it racially motivated. Since a 2019 Supreme Court ruling, courts can no longer block political gerrymandering.

A UK network is testing the old recipe for saving a language

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:53 +0000

A four-part formula has long shaped language revival plans. It calls for a stable local community, a family who passes the language on at home, work that rewards knowing it, and a government willing to fund the effort for years. A UK research network, Revitalise, is now testing whether that formula still holds, and the people doing the work on the ground are not waiting for the verdict.

Image: Snow storm in Eastern Asia at English Wikipedia more

I took this picture of a Welsh language road sign near Wrexham Central railway station myself in the year 2009. I hereby release it into the public domain.Licence: Public domain

Why a research network doubts the old recipe

The network, called Revitalise, is funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. It argues that the four-part formula took shape when public life looked different from how it looks now. Societies have grown more individualistic, more mobile and more diverse. Economies have become more interconnected, and governments have taken on more layers and more outside partners.

Researchers keep breaking the memory shuffle that stops exploits

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:53 +0000

An attacker who finds a bug in a program still has to know where in memory the useful code sits. Address space layout randomisation, or ASLR, moves the pieces of a program to random places each time it starts. An exploit written for one layout then points at the wrong address, and the program crashes instead of being taken over.

That is the whole trick. It does not fix the bug. It hides the target.

Home loans become bonds, and the bank picks which ones go in

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:52 +0000

A home loan becomes a tradeable bond when someone pools it with many others and sells claims on the income they produce. The result is a mortgage-backed security, or MBS. Bruegel, the Brussels economic think tank, calls the practice bundling.

Image: Carol M. Highsmith more

Fannie Mae's former headquarters in Washington, DCLicence: Public domain

The bank that made the loan does not have to keep it. It can exchange the loan for the MBS itself.

Nigeria built Abuja to escape the politics of Lagos

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:52 +0000

Nigeria built Abuja because Lagos was the wrong place to govern from. The old capital sat on the coast in the south-west, exposed and short of room, and it lay in the heart of Yoruba country in a nation balancing rival ethnic groups. A new city near the geographic centre was meant to belong to nobody in particular, and so to everybody.

Image: Mark Fischer more

The Abuja National Mosque, also known as the Nigerian National Mosque, in Abuja, Nigeria.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

NASA’s Earth Observatory put the government’s reasoning plainly: Lagos lacked the space and the ethnic mix that Nigeria’s leaders wanted in a modern capital.

Gulf Stream explains less of Europe's mild winters than thought

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:42 +0000

The Gulf Stream explains only part of why Europe is mild. Oceanographers Stephen Riser and Susan Lozier point to climate modelling studies that removed the Gulf Stream altogether. In those studies the temperature gap between western Europe and eastern Canada persisted. Winter in Ireland still runs about 20°C warmer than winter in Newfoundland, at the same latitude, and the current everyone credits for that gap explains less of it than the textbook version claims.

Ethiopia finished its Nile dam, but Egypt still has no deal

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:08 +0000

Ethiopia finished building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in July 2025 and launched it officially on 9 September 2025. Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia still have no binding agreement on how it is filled and run. Egypt says the dam threatens the river it depends on. Ethiopia says it needs the power, and that treaties it never signed cannot stop it.

Image: pmobarbados more

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, with water running down its spillway.Licence: Public domain

What Ethiopia built

The dam stands on the Blue Nile in the northern Ethiopian highlands, about 30km from the Sudanese border. The BBC describes it as more than a mile long and 145m high, with a reservoir whose surface is roughly the size of Greater London. Construction began in April 2011, and the build cost more than US$4 billion, raised mostly from Ethiopians at home and abroad.

Ecuador gave nature legal rights, and its courts enforce them

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:04 +0000

In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court blocked a mining company from digging in the Los Cedros cloud forest, ruling that the mine would damage the forest’s biodiversity and so violate the forest’s own constitutional rights. Nobody had to show that a person was harmed. Since 2008, Ecuador’s constitution has given nature itself the right to exist and to keep its own cycles going. It lets any person or community demand those rights before public bodies.

The ozone hole that took the world two years to answer

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:08:00 +0000

Governments went from a confirmed ozone hole over Antarctica in 1985 to a global treaty in 1987. One debated explanation for the treaty’s success is that one industry caused the damage and substitutes were available. The damage was also dramatically visible in one region.

Image: Alan Light from Charlotte, USA. At Commons: Alan R Light ( talk · contribs ) more

Nacreous clouds over the NASA Radome, McMurdo Station , Antarctica. This radome cover a telecommunication antenna used for space-to-ground communications support to dozens of Expendable Launch Vehicles and polar-orbitingLicence: CC BY 2.0

Who found the hole, and why nobody expected it

Jonathan Shanklin joined the British Antarctic Survey in the late 1970s and spent much of his time in a Cambridge office, working through years of backlogged readings from ground-based instruments called Dobson spectrophotometers. The devices track how much ozone sits above a fixed point, and Shanklin supervised the digitising of the paper records.

The eclipse Thales may have predicted, and what came next

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:55 +0000

On 28 May 585 BC, two armies fighting in Anatolia stopped mid-battle because the sky went dark. The Lydians and the Medes were fighting when the sun vanished. Both sides read it as a sign from the gods and made peace on the spot.

Image: C. B. Campbell more

Miletus 3Licence: CC BY 2.0

The event is remembered as the Eclipse of Thales, because ancient sources credit the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus with predicting it, down to the year. Modern historians doubt he had the astronomical method to do that with any precision, and BBC Bitesize notes that experts now suspect a lucky guess rather than a calculation. But the story stuck, and so did Thales’s reputation as the man who explained the sky through reason rather than divine anger.

How AlphaFold changed protein structure prediction

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:46 +0000

AlphaFold changed protein science by making a protein’s shape something you compute rather than something you wait years to measure. DeepMind’s system predicts the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its sequence alone, and in 2020 it did so well enough to match lab experiments for about two-thirds of the proteins in a blind test. Paul Adams, a structural biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, put the result more sharply: “AlphaFold changed everything and nothing.”

England's regulator says some degree algorithms inflate Firsts

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:42 +0000

A university turns a student’s marks into a single number on a 0-100 scale, weighted by each module’s credit value and year. That final figure decides whether the degree is a First, a 2:1, or lower. At the University of Bristol, every mark from every unit is converted to that 0-100 scale before classification starts. The first year of study is left out of the calculation altogether.

Image: fishbel more

Advent Thankvent 2012-13: Day 10: UniversitiesLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The unit marks themselves do not carry equal weight. A module’s contribution depends on its credit points and which year it falls in. Once the marks are combined and weighted, an exam board reviews the result. It also weighs any exceptional circumstances that may have affected a student’s performance, before confirming the classification.

Fox News parts with Maria Bartiromo and gives no reason

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:38 +0000

Fox News Media has parted company with Maria Bartiromo, and it has not said why. The network announced on Thursday, September 3, 2026, that she was no longer with the company, effective that day. Its statement thanked her for 12 and a half years of work and wished her well in “her next chapter”.

Image: Jacqueline Zaccor, linkedineditors more

Maria Bartiromo in 2015.Licence: CC BY 2.0

That is the whole of the official explanation. Fox gave no reason, and by Thursday afternoon her staff page on the Fox Business site had gone.

BRAC's schools in Bangladesh target different villages

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:13 +0000

A BRAC school is a non-formal primary school with one teacher and one classroom. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, or BRAC, pioneered the model. The government later copied it in a project called Reaching Out-of-School Children, or ROSC. Research on where each type sits finds that they reach different poor places.

Image: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade more

Director of education at BRAC is Dr Shafiqul Islam talks to staff at a BRAC school in Koral slum in Dhaka. Photo: Conor Ashleigh for AusAID. Contact photolibrary@ausaid.gov.au to request a high resolution original.Licence: CC BY 4.0

A 2016 study by the economist M. Niaz Asadullah, in the Australian Economic Review, asked whether these pro-poor schools reach the poor. Its title put the question plainly: “Do pro-poor schools reach out to the poor?” It used school census data to map where BRAC placed its one-room schools against where ROSC placed its own. Both programmes have a statistically significant presence in poor sub-districts. The study compared sub-districts within the same district, so the contrast is local rather than national. Where they diverge is which poor places they pick.

NHS England ranks 999 calls, and category 2 is the crowded one

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:07:04 +0000

Ambulance services in England sort 999 calls into numbered categories. Category 1 holds the most life-threatening cases. Category 2 accounted for most callouts in one year, nearly five million of them.

What goes in category 2

The BBC lists heart attacks and strokes as category 2 emergencies. Burns and severe headaches sit in the same band, though they may not need so quick a response. The target for reaching a category 2 patient is 18 minutes.

Amsterdam's white bicycles, and the idea that outlived them

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:06:57 +0000

The first bike-share was a stunt. On a summer’s day in 1965, members of Provo, a Dutch anarchist group, painted a handful of used bikes white and left them unlocked in central Amsterdam for anyone to ride. They called it the Witte Fietsenplan, the white bicycle plan. The police soon removed the bikes. What turned the gesture into a working idea was one of its authors, who kept pushing it.

Concorde carried its last passengers in 2003. Nothing replaced it

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:58:42 +0000

Concorde stopped flying largely for commercial reasons, and nobody has built a supersonic airliner to take its place. Its last commercial flight came on October 24, 2003. That flight, British Airways’ G-BOAG from New York, landed at Heathrow and ended passenger travel faster than sound. More than two decades on, it remains the only passenger jet ever to break the sound barrier in service.

Image: archer10 (Dennis) more

France-003403B - ConcordeLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Why British Airways gave up

British Airways announced the decision in April 2003. It gave commercial reasons: passenger revenue had fallen steadily while maintenance costs rose. Chief executive Rod Eddington called retiring the seven-aircraft fleet “a prudent business decision”. The airline took an £84 million write-off for the year to March 2003.

Water puts out wood fires but makes oil fires worse

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:58:42 +0000

A fire extinguisher’s rating is not a mark of quality. It is a match to one kind of fuel, and using the wrong one can make a fire worse. Pour water on a pan of burning cooking oil and the two do not mix. The water breaks the oil into smaller droplets, and the fire gets worse.

Image: Bruno Girin more

Fire extinguishersLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What a fire actually needs

Every fire needs fuel, oxygen and heat, together at once. Take away any one of them and it stops burning. That idea, called the fire triangle, is why extinguishers are not interchangeable. Each type attacks a different side of the triangle. The fuel decides which side is worth attacking.

Two scholars needed a year to rebuild one Dead Sea scroll

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:58:41 +0000

Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls did not come out of the caves as scrolls. Searches of 11 caves near Qumran turned up around 900 texts, and most of them were fragments. Rebuilding them is slow. One scroll took two researchers a full year, and telling apart the scribes who wrote another needed a neural network.

Image: Photograph: the Israel Antiquities Authority 1993; photographer not named. more

The Psalms scroll, one of the Dead Sea scrolls . Hebrew transcription included. English translation available here .Licence: Public domain

The find began with a lost goat. In 1946 a Bedouin shepherd boy threw a rock into a cave above the Dead Sea and heard it strike a ceramic jar. Inside was an ancient manuscript, the first of the scrolls. Archaeology Magazine dates the find to 1946 or 1947, and says searches over the following decade produced the rest.

Why a blast furnace makes iron, not steel

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:58:36 +0000

A blast furnace never makes steel on its own. What comes out of its base is pig iron, and pig iron carries so much carbon, 4 to 5% by weight, that it stays hard and brittle rather than useful for building anything. Turning that pig iron into steel takes a second step, one that strips most of that carbon back out.

The chemistry that does the first job has barely changed. A blast furnace strips oxygen from iron ore using carbon monoxide gas, made by burning coke, a fuel baked from coal. The National Institute of Standards and Technology notes that the reactions involved are close to the ones ancient furnaces ran around 1000 BCE.

Lake Chad has lost nine-tenths of its water since the 1960s

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:24:40 +0000

Lake Chad has lost nine-tenths of its surface area since the 1960s, through climate change, population growth and unplanned irrigation. The lake did not fade out slowly, either. Almost all of that loss happened by the 1990s, and then, by one detailed study, it stopped.

Image: NASA Hubble more

A satellite view of Lake Chad, showing how much of its former surface has become vegetated land.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Start with what the lake looked like before the drop. A US reconnaissance satellite photographed it in 1963, and an Apollo 7 astronaut photographed it again in 1968. Both images show a single, unbroken body of water spanning at least 22,000 square kilometres, about the size of New Jersey. The French explorer Jean Tilho had reported parts of the lake dry as early as 1910, so the basin was never a stable pool.

British rule spread left-hand driving to a third of the world

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:24:32 +0000

Some countries drive on the left because Britain kept a horseman’s habit and then exported it through empire. In the pre-industrial era, riders kept their horses to the left so they could draw their swords. Napoleon’s conquests later pushed continental Europe onto the right, and the United States followed France rather than Britain. Britain’s own colonies took the opposite habit with them: India, Pakistan, Australia and the Republic of Ireland all still drive on the left today.

Finland has 3.3 million saunas for 5.6 million people

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:24:32 +0000

Finland has an estimated 3.3 million saunas for a population of 5.6 million. Many sit in ordinary homes, and the habit goes back further than the country itself.

Image: Johnnidian more

Harvia Ventura saunaLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The city of Tampere alone has about 60 public saunas serving roughly 250,000 residents, enough to earn it the title “sauna capital of the world”. One of them, Rajaportti, opened in 1906 and still runs on a seven-hour wood heating routine that starts at 7am. In 2020, UNESCO added Finnish sauna culture to its list of the world’s intangible cultural heritage.

Why packaging is hard to open, and how to get in

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:24:31 +0000

Packaging resists you because someone designed it to. A sealed plastic clamshell deters shoplifters. A tamper-proof seal shows that nobody opened the container before you did. Manufacturers told The New York Times as much when readers complained to the paper in 2010. The same shell that frustrates you at the kitchen table also protects the product, and it cuts down on bulky cardboard boxes.

Image: Plastic Ingenuity more

The image is a stock photograph of a blister pack manufactured by Plastic Ingenuity in their Cross Plains, WI facility.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Every year, around 6,000 people in the US end up in hospital after losing that fight, according to reporting by Seniors Guide’s Terri L. Jones. People arm themselves with scissors, knives and box cutters. The frustration even has a name: wrap rage.

Why humanoid robots still struggle with balance and hands

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:24:26 +0000

A humanoid robot has to solve several of robotics’ hardest problems inside one machine: balancing on two legs, matching a human hand’s grip, and reading a room that refuses to sit still. None of those is a new problem by itself. Stacking all three into one body, then asking it to work all day beside people, is what makes the humanoid version so much harder than any one piece alone.

The Antikythera mechanism's rebuilt front still needs proof

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:39 +0000

In 2021, a team at University College London built the most complete model yet of the missing front of the Antikythera mechanism, the corroded bronze device pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901. The model fits every surviving fragment and matches the inscriptions cut into the mechanism’s own casing. Nobody has yet shown that a Greek workshop of the period could have built it.

The reconstructed front needs nested tubes to carry pointers for the sun, moon and the five planets known at the time. Tony Freeth’s team found room for them all only by fitting the tubes into a space 25 millimetres deep. A modern machinist would turn each tube on a lathe. Whether anyone in the first century BC had a tool that precise is the question the model cannot answer on its own.

A tripped power line can black out a grid in seconds

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:36 +0000

A blackout spreads across an entire grid because of cascading failures, which cause most large-scale power outages. Trip one line, and it is the collective behaviour of the whole network, not that fault alone, that decides whether the disturbance dies out or spreads. In the worst cases, it spreads within seconds.

Image: Nick Page Photos more

Electricity PylonsLicence: CC BY 2.0

The largest blackouts on record all began this way. The 2003 outage across the northeastern United States, the 2006 European blackout, and the 2012 blackout in India each started as a small, local event. Each grew into an outage reaching millions of people, with heavy economic and political costs behind it.

US Senate races barely mention Social Security's 2032 deadline

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:36 +0000

The Social Security trust fund that pays US retirement benefits is due to run dry by the end of 2032, and monthly payments will drop by 22% if Congress does nothing before then. The senators elected this November will still be in office when that deadline arrives, yet the subject barely comes up in this year’s campaigns.

Image: Yoshi Canopus more

Social Security Administration, Hilo, Hawaii (at Prince Kuhio Plaza)Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Why isn’t this an election issue?

Bill Sweeney of AARP says six years sounds like a long runway until you think about how slowly Congress moves. It is “almost a lifetime” for lawmakers, he told NPR, even though it is not long at all for the people who depend on the cheque. Because this year’s Senate winners will hold their seats until 2032, Sweeney calls it a serious failing that the trust fund rarely comes up in a debate or a candidate’s answer.

Much ocean plastic sinks or washes ashore within a month

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:35 +0000

As much as 80% of the plastic in the sea travelled there over land, down a drain or a river, rather than being tipped into the water directly. Once it is in the water, buoyancy decides its fate fast. Much of it sinks or washes up on a beach within a month. What stays afloat for years can end up circling in a slow-turning current for decades, or ground down small enough to reach a fish.

The UK road sign system, barely changed since 1965

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:33 +0000

Britain’s road signs have carried the same design since 1965. That year Britain officially adopted the system Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert had spent most of a decade building. The system has “changed very little since,” and the Guardian calls it “a house style for Britain.” Michael Wolff, chairman of the Sign Design Society, puts what any sign has to do in three words: clarity, consistency, simplicity.

Image: lydia_shiningbrightly more

Warwick Hospital - Road signLicence: CC BY 2.0

What the shape tells you before the words do

A circular sign gives an order. Red-bordered circles rule something out, such as a U-turn. Blue circles give a positive instruction, such as turning left ahead. A triangular sign, almost always outlined in red, warns of a hazard ahead rather than commanding anything. Rectangles inform rather than instruct. Blue ones carry motorway information, green ones direct traffic on primary roads, and white ones give directions on minor roads.

The sky is blue because air scatters blue light, not the sea

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:32 +0000

The sky is blue because air itself sorts sunlight by colour, scattering blue far more than any other colour it carries. It has nothing to do with the sea below it. Sunlight looks white, but it holds every colour of the rainbow, and the atmosphere splits that white light apart long before it reaches an eye.

Two explanations for the colour circulate anyway, and BBC Bitesize names them directly: that the sky reflects the ocean, and that oxygen itself is a blue gas. Water covers most of the planet, so the mirror idea has an obvious pull. Neither holds up.

Sinners is North America's biggest original hit since Inception

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:26 +0000

Ryan Coogler’s uncle James grew up in Mississippi and died in 2015. He had listened to blues records constantly, and after his death Coogler played them to feel close to him. That habit, the director told the Guardian, is what led him to research the music and, in time, to “this movie.” The movie was Sinners, a vampire film set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.

On paper it was a big risk for Warner Bros. It was an original story with a mostly Black cast, a budget of about $90 million, and a deal that handed its director unusual power. The Guardian later recalled that Hollywood insiders had predicted it would never make money. Instead it became the highest-grossing film in North America not based on existing material since Inception in 2010.

The US doesn't use the two-quarter rule to call a recession

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:14 +0000

The test everyone repeats for a recession, output shrinking for two quarters running, is a shorthand. In the United States, it isn’t the rule that gets a downturn officially called one.

Image: 颐园居 more

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE BuildingLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The UK’s Office for National Statistics calls that shorthand a “technical recession,” and treats it with some caution. Darren Morgan, the ONS’s director of economic statistics, points out how thin the trigger is. A swing of a tenth of a percentage point either way is enough to count. He says that kind of move usually leaves the economy “broadly flat, but some people do get excited about it.”

Back pain is commoner in women, and strains are the top cause

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:08 +0000

A pulled or overstretched muscle, tendon, or ligament in the lower back is the most common cause of back pain, the Cleveland Clinic says. Low back pain itself is more common in women than in men, and it is already the single leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The scale of the problem is large and growing. The World Health Organization counted 619 million people living with low back pain in 2020 and expects that figure to reach 843 million by 2050 as the population grows and ages. A review published through PubMed Central goes further for women specifically, citing the 2017 Global Burden of Disease Study to call low back pain the leading cause of disability among women worldwide.

The ship of Theseus: the puzzle philosophers never settled

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:08 +0000

If every plank of a ship is swapped out, is it still the same ship? Philosophers have argued about that since the ancient Greeks, and, as David Papineau wrote in The Philosophers’ Magazine, they have not agreed on an answer.

Image: Alf van Beem more

Licence: CC0

Where the puzzle comes from

Theseus was a legendary king, honoured as one of the founders of Athenian society. Plutarch records that the ship he and his crew sailed across the Aegean had its planks replaced one at a time. In the end the whole ship had been renewed, which left open whether it was still the same vessel.

Two spoken languages leave a mark on the brain's grey matter

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:08 +0000

Learning a second language leaves a physical trace in the brain. Adults who speak two languages carry more grey matter than monolinguals in the frontal and parietal regions that handle executive control. That is the mental work of paying attention, holding back unwanted responses and keeping information in mind.

Image: Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata more

Brain tissue (Silver staining).Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

That finding comes from a 2015 study of Spanish-English bilinguals at Georgetown University Medical Center, led by Olumide Olulade and senior author Guinevere Eden. The team wanted to know what, specifically, was driving the change. Their answer: it is not just having a large vocabulary in two languages. It is managing them at the same time.

A 360 record deal lets a label take more than record sales

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:04 +0000

A modern record contract can claim a share of merchandise sales, touring income, publishing royalties and even book deals, not only the money an artist earns from selling recordings. Labels call this a 360 deal, and it began arriving as music piracy cut into record sales in the 2000s, promising artists more promotional and tour support in exchange for a cut of a wide array of their income.

Image: minimoniotaku more

A vinyl record on a turntable.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The scope of the deal shows up clearest in one contract that became public: the 27-page agreement Universal Music offered contestants on the Dutch-owned television format The Voice. Scandinavian label sources say the format’s owner wanted 50% of contestants’ record sales and 50% of songwriter royalties on any song they recorded. The 360 element gave the label 20% of the gross from every other income source tied to the artist, such as merchandise, biographies and performance fees.

The Atlantic has had no hurricanes so far in 2026

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:04 +0000

The Atlantic hurricane season is deep into its peak weeks, and it has not produced a single hurricane. Only two years on record have gone the whole way without one, 1907 and 1914, and both predate satellites that could confirm whether a smaller storm slipped past unnoticed. If nothing forms before 8 October, this year will break the standing record for the latest first Atlantic hurricane, set in 1905.

Image: Image courtesy of Mike Trenchard, Earth Sciences & Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. more

From his vantage point high above the Earth in the International Space Station, Astronaut Ed Lu captured this broad view of Hurricane Isabel. The image, ISS007-E-14750, was taken with a 50 mm lens on a digital camera.Licence: Public domain

Averaged over the three decades to 2020, the season’s first hurricane typically showed up around 11 August, a second followed by 26 August, and a third had arrived by 7 September. This year’s running total, as September draws to a close, is zero. Forecasters at NOAA expected a quiet year. They opened the season expecting three to six hurricanes against a typical seven, then cut that to two to six in an August update.

Patrick Mahomes returned from ACL surgery unbeaten

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:03 +0000

Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL and LCL with less than two minutes left in a Week 15 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers on December 14, 2025. The injury ended his season and knocked the Kansas City Chiefs out of the play-offs for the first time since 2014. Nine months later, he threw two touchdown passes and ran for another in his first game back. The Chiefs have not lost since.

Ransomware: the four checks before a company pays

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:03 +0000

A company decides whether to pay a ransomware demand by working through four checks: whether it can recover without paying, whether a free route to its files already exists, what outside experts advise, and whether it can later show a regulator how it reached its decision. The National Cyber Security Centre, which wrote its payment guidance jointly with the insurance bodies ABI, BIBA and IUA, is explicit that the final call belongs to the victim, and that the guidance never overrides a law that already applies.

Researchers say QWERTY came from telegraphy, not jams

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:03 +0000

The QWERTY keyboard is usually explained as a jam-prevention fix, but researchers who traced its history point to telegraph operators rather than a broken typewriter.

Image: bennylin0724 more

QWERTYLicence: CC BY 2.0

Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer and inventor working in Milwaukee, patented an early typewriter in 1868 with its keys arranged alphabetically, in a layout closer to a piano than a modern keyboard. In that machine, and in the Sholes & Glidden “Type Writer” that Remington later manufactured, the type bars carrying each letter hung beneath the paper and swung up to strike it. Hit two keys whose bars sat close together in quick succession, and the bars could collide and jam.

The Princess of Wales completes the Three Peaks, a royal first

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:03 +0000

Catherine, Princess of Wales, is the first member of the royal family to complete the National Three Peaks Challenge, climbing the highest points in Scotland, England and Wales inside a single day. She took on the trek to raise money for the Royal Marsden, the hospital in Chelsea that treated her for cancer.

Catherine, 44, climbed Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon within 24 hours, starting on a Saturday evening in June. She walked the route solo, supported en route by Mountain Rescue, and climbed more than 3,000 metres in total, driving 462 miles between the three peaks. At the finish, Prince William and their three children, George, Charlotte and Louis, were waiting, along with Catherine’s parents and her brother James.

Your taste in music may owe something to Pavlov's dogs

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:03 +0000

Pavlov’s dogs revealed classical conditioning by drooling at the wrong moment. They learned to link the dinner bell with the meal, and began to salivate when the bell rang, before any bowl was within reach.

Image: Karl Bulla more

Ivan Pavlov qui présente une de ses expériences.Licence: Public domain

That small, wet signal became the basis of what psychologists now call Pavlovian or classical conditioning: learning that one event predicts another.

Patent trolls make money by threatening suits, not products

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:22:02 +0000

A patent troll makes nothing. It buys the rights to an invention second-hand, finds companies whose products might brush against that patent’s wording, and threatens them with a lawsuit expensive enough that paying up looks cheaper than fighting. One such firm, IP Nav, told the BBC its licensing fees have topped $700m.

Image: Alexandre Dulaunoy more

Patents grant a temporary monopoly on an invention, whether or not the holder ever builds it.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The formal name is a “non-practising entity”, and the description is literal: it holds patents without making or selling anything covered by them. Alan Schoenbaum, general counsel at the cloud firm Rackspace, which has itself been sued this way, put it more bluntly to the BBC: the people running these firms buy up patents and file suits, and they are rarely inventors themselves. “Generally they are not inventors, they’re entrepreneurs or finance people.”

A World Cup red card brings a one-game ban with no appeal

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:54 +0000

A red card ends a player’s match on the spot and costs them at least the next game as well. At the 2026 World Cup, that one-game ban was automatic and could not be appealed. The only thing a team could contest was extra punishment added on top.

Image: Sdo216 more

Referee Alan Wiley sends off Nemanja Vidic at Old Trafford, Manchester United against Liverpool, 2009-03-14.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

What earns a red card

Soccer Blade, a coaching site, lists the usual offences. They are:

Instagram's Restrict cuts someone off without telling them

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:54 +0000

Restricting someone on Instagram cuts them off without telling them. Their new comments on your posts stop being public, their messages land in your requests folder, and they can no longer see when you are online or when you have read what they sent. Unlike a block, it gives them no sign that anything changed.

Why Instagram built it

Instagram rolled Restrict out to every user a few months after testing it with a small group, according to Engadget. The company pitched it as an anti-bullying tool. Its argument was that many people, young users in particular, hesitate to block or report a bully because they fear retaliation. Restrict gives them a way to shut the person out without a visible break.

Your IP address gives away your provider, not your street

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:54 +0000

Your IP address is the number that gets information sent to and from your device rather than someone else’s. Every device connected to the internet carries one, in the form of a long number. That number splits into two parts: one showing which network the device belongs to, and one identifying the device itself on that network. The number a lookup page prints, though, is not the whole picture. A home network runs two kinds of address at once, and only one of them ever reaches the open internet.

A dead whale feeds the seafloor for a century

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:53 +0000

A whale that dies at sea usually sinks whole. Its body can go on feeding the seafloor for more than a hundred years. A whale that dies on a beach has a rougher path ahead, one that can end with the carcass bursting before anyone manages to move it.

Image: National Marine Sanctuaries more

Octopuses and fish feed on a whale carcass on the seafloor in Monterey Bay.Licence: CC BY 2.0

NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has a name for the sunken kind: a whale fall, a sudden and concentrated food source landing in a part of the ocean that is normally short on energy.

Cables, rug edges and corners: why a robot vacuum gets stuck

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:48 +0000

A robot vacuum usually gets stuck because it met something it cannot move, climb or see past. Loose cables, raised rug edges and tight corners are common trouble spots. A robot cannot pick a chair up or push a toy aside the way a person can, because the vast majority have no arms.

Image: ajay_suresh more

Roborock robot vacuum chargingLicence: CC BY 2.0

WIRED’s reviewers put it bluntly. Makers will tell you suction power matters most, but the real test is whether the robot wedges itself under the same corner and dies on every run.

A grandmaster's chess memory relies on patterns, not pieces

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:47 +0000

A grandmaster does not memorise thousands of positions square by square. They store patterns, and a team of researchers writing in Nature put the count at more than 100,000 of these memory chunks, built up over at least ten years of study. When a real game appears on the board, the grandmaster recognises the pieces in groups. When the pieces are placed at random, there is nothing to recognise, and the famous memory mostly disappears.

Cold feet on ice: why a duck lets its toes chill

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:47 +0000

A duck’s foot does not stay warm on ice. It stays cold, and that is the point. The blood vessels in a bird’s leg pass heat from outgoing blood to returning blood, so the foot runs close to the temperature of the ice. A cold foot loses far less heat than a warm one would, and the bird’s core keeps the heat it needs.

Image: GlacierNPS more

Harlequin Duck (Long exposure)Licence: Public domain

The foot never quite freezes, though. Living Bird, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s magazine, describes chickadees whose feet cool to close to 30°F while their bodies stay hot. Birds generally hold a core temperature of about 105°F.

Great Britain and Ireland win Walker Cup in record comeback

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:47 +0000

Great Britain and Ireland completed the biggest comeback in Walker Cup history at Lahinch, beating the United States 13½ points to 12½ to win the trophy for the first time since 2015. GB&I had lost the Sunday-morning foursomes session 4-0, leaving the USA just three and a half points from a sixth straight win before the singles began.

Image: Detroit Golfer more

17 TOC Walker Cup (3)Licence: CC BY 2.0

Stuart Grehan set the tone for the fightback by beating world number one Preston Stout, who had been battling illness before the match, in the day’s opening singles. It was the second time in the week that Grehan, playing at home in Ireland, had beaten Stout. He called the win “unbelievable” and said it was the best feeling he had ever had on a golf course.

UK has 47 working F-35B jets, and the next order is stalled

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:47 +0000

DE&S announced on 27 March that it had accepted the UK’s 48th F-35B, the last of the first batch, AGN reported. One jet was lost in the Mediterranean in November 2021, so the working fleet stands at 47. The next order waits on a Defence Investment Plan with no publication date.

British companies make 15% by value of every F-35, according to Defence Equipment & Support, the Ministry of Defence’s buying arm. That share applies across a global order book of more than 3,000 jets, not only the ones the UK flies. DE&S puts the value to the UK economy of building and sustaining the worldwide fleet at more than £50 billion over its life.

Zach Cregger's horror Weapons opened well ahead of forecasts

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:47 +0000

On a Monday morning in 2023, Zach Cregger and his producer Roy Lee sent a horror script to every major studio in Hollywood at the same instant. They used a locked-down reading app called Embershot, which let a studio read the script only inside the app, and set the same 8 a.m. start time for everyone. By 9:30, Warner Bros co-chief Mike De Luca was on the phone. “I have to make this movie with you,” he told Cregger. The deal was done that afternoon.

The first US commercial deep-sea mining permit is under review

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:46 +0000

A US company has asked Washington for the right to lift metal-rich nodules off the ocean floor beyond any country’s waters, and NOAA is now weighing the request. The Metals Company USA filed a consolidated application for an exploration licence and a commercial recovery permit, and NOAA posted it in the Federal Register on August 19, 2026. Public comments run until October 19, and a virtual hearing is set for October 13.

Russell Howard launches a charity in his son Felix's name

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:45 +0000

Russell Howard and his wife, Cerys Morgan, have set up the Felix Foundation in memory of their baby son, Felix, who died shortly after birth. The charity will help families through miscarriage, premature birth, stillbirth and neonatal death. Its launch is a comedy gala at the O2 in London on 8 February.

Image: Yohannk more

Russell Howard before a gig.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

It is a new kind of project for a comic best known for turning the week’s headlines into stand-up.

UK hiring confidence is at its lowest outside the pandemic

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:41 +0000

UK employers are more cautious about hiring than at any point outside the pandemic, and AI is part of the reason. The CIPD’s quarterly Labour Market Outlook, drawn from a survey of more than 2,000 employers, found that one in six expect AI to shrink their workforce over the next year, against 6% who expect it to grow.

The squeeze falls hardest on early-career and lower-level professional roles. One in four large private-sector firms expect their headcount to fall. Across the private sector as a whole the figure is 17%, and in the public sector 20%, with finance and insurance, IT, and administrative support the hardest hit. The CIPD also cited the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, which says 40% of employers worldwide expect to reduce their workforce by 2030 in favour of AI automation.

Eye twitches: the usual causes, and when to see a doctor

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:38 +0000

Your eye keeps twitching because a muscle in or near it is moving without your say. The Cleveland Clinic calls this a muscle spasm. It says the lid, the eye itself, or the face around it can be involved. Nearly everyone gets one now and then, and it is usually harmless.

The National Eye Institute, part of the US National Institutes of Health, says the same. Eyelid twitching usually fades without any help.

Will AI replace lawyers? Trainees are the first to feel it

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:38 +0000

No, not on the evidence gathered so far, but the newest lawyers already feel it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics still forecasts 4% growth in lawyer jobs from 2024 to 2034: about 31,500 openings each year, at a median wage of $151,160 in May 2024. Those numbers describe a profession that keeps hiring. They say nothing about which rung of it AI is emptying first.

One global law firm has halved its intern class, from 1,000 trainees to 500, according to interviews conducted by Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession. The centre spoke to 50 chief legal officers, law firm partners, legal operations leaders and corporate executives for a report published in July 2026. The cuts it found sit at the bottom of the profession, not the top.

A film tax credit can decide where a film is shot

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:28 +0000

A film tax credit hands a producer cash back for a share of what they spend making the film, commonly about a fifth of the budget. In the UK, a producer who spends £1m gets roughly £200,000 back once they file the costs, before the film has even opened. That refund is large enough to decide where a film gets made, which is why a small state with no incentive of its own can go years without seeing a film crew.

Canada's and Britain's new wealth funds run on debt, not surplus

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:27 +0000

A sovereign wealth fund is supposed to run on money a government already has to spare: oil income, a trade surplus, or the proceeds of selling off a state asset. Australia’s Future Fund started that way, built from the sale of state-owned businesses. Two of the newest sovereign funds do not. Canada launched one this year funded by government borrowing, and Britain is funding its own the same way.

Image: HM Treasury more

Britain's National Wealth Fund will run on government borrowing rather than a surplus.Licence: Open Government Licence

What job does a fund do?

Analysts sort these funds into three kinds, and each choice commits a government to a different sort of institution. A savings fund converts income that will not last, usually oil, into financial wealth that outlives it. Norway’s fund, the one every other one gets measured against, invests its oil and gas revenue almost entirely outside the country for exactly that reason. A stabilisation fund instead flattens a government’s income when that income swings with a single commodity price. Chile runs one this way, holding back copper export revenue so a falling copper price does not tear a hole in the annual budget. A strategic fund does neither. It backs a government’s own economic goals and accepts a lower return in exchange, the way Saudi Arabia’s $925 billion Public Investment Fund exists to support the country’s Vision 2030 industrial plan.

Encryption hides what you say, not who you said it to

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:26 +0000

Open WhatsApp or Signal and the app promises that nobody in between can read what you type. That promise holds. A message is scrambled on your phone and only unscrambled on the recipient’s, so nobody handling it in transit can unpick the words, not even the company that built the app. What the promise leaves out is everything wrapped around those words.

Image: jfrigger more

A WhatsApp message shows its send time and blue read ticks.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

About two in five people worldwide use chat apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, and Messenger. For every one of them, the company still knows a good deal about who is talking, even when it cannot see what was said.

Dollar reserve status is worth the US an estimated $18 trillion

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:23 +0000

Losing reserve-currency status would cost the United States roughly $18 trillion, a National Bureau of Economic Research paper estimates. That figure is what economists put on the “exorbitant privilege” the dollar earns simply by being the currency the rest of the world chooses to hold.

Image: epicharmus more

Federal Reserve Bank of New York Building panoramaLicence: CC BY 2.0

The privilege is not abstract. Foreign central banks, investors, and institutions hold US Treasury bonds and other dollar assets for more than the return: those assets are safe, liquid, and useful as collateral. That demand works like a fee, or seigniorage, that the rest of the world pays for access to dollar liquidity.

Stoicism was a test of control, not a mood

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:23 +0000

Stoicism’s real teaching was a method, not a mood. It set out a test for sorting any situation into what you can act on and what you cannot. Epictetus laid the test out in the Enchiridion, a handbook of his teaching published around 125 CE. Its opening move is blunt: work out which part of a problem is your own doing, your opinions, motivations, desires and aversions, and treat the rest, including your body, your possessions, your reputation and your position, as none of your business.

Eyewitness memory holds up only if tested once, says Wixted

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:22 +0000

A witness’s identification of a suspect can be trusted, according to the psychologist John Wixted, but only the first time it happens. Wixted, who studies memory and recognition at the University of California, San Diego, compares a witness’s memory to other forensic evidence: it can be contaminated. Tested early, carefully and only once, it holds up. Ask the same witness again later, and each further test can rewrite what they remember.

How Louis Braille turned army night writing into a six-dot code

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:22 +0000

At 15, Louis Braille gave blind people a code they could write as well as read. As a pupil at a school for blind youth in Paris, he built a tactile system out of six raised dots. It handled text, numbers and musical notation equally well, and it still carries his name.

Image: François Jouffroy more

House of Louis BRAILLELicence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The boy from Coupvray

Braille was born on January 4, 1809, in Coupvray, on the edge of Paris. An accident in his father’s workshop, and the infection that followed, left him totally blind by the age of five, according to the Library of Congress. BBC Bitesize puts the loss of his sight at three.

ZDNET picks Bitdefender as the best antivirus for 2026

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:22 +0000

ZDNET’s most recently updated guide names Bitdefender Total Security the best antivirus software of 2026, and recommends Norton for anyone protecting only one device. The pick rests on hands-on trials of malware detection and system slowdown, weighed against feedback from security professionals and Trustpilot reviews. ESET Protect is ZDNET’s separate pick for business customers.

PCMag UK and TechRadar test independently and land on the same winner. Tom’s Guide does not. It names Norton 360 Deluxe the best antivirus overall, after weeks of installing, testing, and calling each brand’s support line.

Richard O'Sullivan, star of Man About the House, dies at 82

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:21 +0000

Richard O’Sullivan has died at the age of 82. He played Robin Tripp, first in Man About the House and then in Robin’s Nest. He died with his close family around him at Brinsworth House, the Royal Variety Charity’s care home, where he had lived for 23 years.

Robin Tripp is the part the obituaries led with. Yet O’Sullivan had been working in front of cameras for two decades before he ever stepped into that flat. He made his screen debut at eight.

Rochdale's mill workers wrote the rulebook co-ops copied

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:21 +0000

What set the Rochdale Pioneers apart was not their shop but the rulebook behind it. In 1844 the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers wrote down seven principles, and two of them kept takings inside the society rather than dividing profits among shareholders, the usual practice. Those rules, not the counter on Toad Lane, are what co-operatives around the world went on to adopt.

Image: Reading Tom from Reading, UK more

31 Toad Lane, Rochdale. The Rochdale Pioneers Museum is housed in the building where the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society started trading on 21 December 1844. The museum is regarded as the birthplace of the modern co-Licence: CC BY 2.0

Not the first co-op

The Pioneers were 28 mill workers. They were not the first people to run a co-operative. In 1761, 15 weavers in Fenwick, East Ayrshire, signed a document binding themselves to fair work and fair prices. By 1769 the Fenwick society was buying oatmeal wholesale, selling it on cheaply and dividing the savings among members. The Guardian reported in 2007 that the Co-op’s own historians, and Rochdale council, accept Fenwick as the first proven co-operative.

The geometry lecture that waited 61 years for Einstein

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:21 +0000

On June 10, 1854, a shy young mathematician named Bernhard Riemann stood in front of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. Despite a fear of public speaking, he described a geometry that did not yet have a name for its own ideas. Sixty-one years later, Albert Einstein built general relativity on it.

Image: yuriy.maturin more

Georg Friedrich Bernhard RiemannLicence: Public domain

A lecture set as a formality

Bernhard Riemann gave the talk, called a Habilitationsvortrag, to secure a teaching position at Göttingen. His assigned topic was the foundations of geometry. The lecture generalised the work of his supervisor, Carl Friedrich Gauss, who had studied the properties of curves and surfaces on their own terms. It grew into a theory that could describe any number of dimensions, even infinite ones.

Switzerland's fourth language split into five mountain dialects

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:19 +0000

Switzerland has four national languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Romansh is an official language in only part of the country. In its home canton, Graubünden, isolated mountain valleys split it into five dialects.

Image: Hansueli Krapf more

In Graubünden's isolated valleys, Romansh split into five dialects.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

How the mountains split one language into five

Romansh grew out of Vulgar Latin, carried in by Roman soldiers and colonists who conquered Rhaetia, now the canton of Graubünden, around 15BC. It mixed with Rhaetian, the language already spoken there, and the hybrid became the region’s everyday speech for centuries.

Cambodia refilled its classrooms with anyone who could teach

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:21:05 +0000

Cambodia rebuilt its teaching workforce by lowering the bar for who could stand at the front of a class. The Khmer Rouge had killed or driven out most of the country’s educators. The government that followed put anyone with almost any schooling into a classroom, and gave them a few weeks of training.

Image: Marcin Konsek more

Building C. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum . Phnom Penh , Cambodia.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The scale of the loss explains why. Of Cambodia’s 725 university instructors before 1975, only 50 survived the Khmer Rouge period. The country’s Ministry of Education later put the toll among college students at 96%. By the time a new government took shape in Phnom Penh in 1979, an official at the University of Phnom Penh could find only 30 or 40 Cambodians in the city with a college education.

KPop Demon Hunters became Netflix's most-watched title ever

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:57 +0000

Maggie Kang, who directed KPop Demon Hunters, wanted her co-director to be another Asian woman. The search came up empty, and Sony Pictures Animation’s president, Kristine Belson, told her plainly that it was “gonna be a white man.” That man was Chris Appelhans, whose one previous feature as director was Wish Dragon, a fantasy comedy set in China. Together they made a film steeped in Korean myth and Korean pop, and it became the most-watched title Netflix has ever carried.

Kristen Bell hosts the Actor Awards for a third time

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:57 +0000

Kristen Bell hosted the Actor Awards for a third time on March 1, and opened the show by handing some of the room’s best-known names new stage names. The ceremony renamed itself too. The union that presents it, SAG-AFTRA, dropped “SAG” from the title this year. Bell noted that the statue has always been called The Actor.

What she did with the mic

Bell opened her monologue by singing about the rebrand. From there she turned it into a running joke, telling nominees they could all be doing more with their own stage names. Jacob Elordi became “Jacordy O’Lordy.” Ted Danson became “Teddy Dandaughter.” Teyana Taylor became “TeyTay.” Chase Infiniti, she decided, needed no notes.

What the Large Magellanic Cloud gives astronomers

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:57 +0000

The Large Magellanic Cloud matters to astronomers because it puts a whole galaxy within reach of one telescope. At about 160,000 light-years away, it is the largest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It sits close enough for individual stars, nurseries and supernova wreckage inside it to be picked out one at a time. Together with the Small Magellanic Cloud, it has featured in more than 15,000 research papers.

Image: Harel Boren more

Large Magellanic Cloud in full colorLicence: CC BY 4.0

Seen from the Southern Hemisphere, it needs no telescope at all. It spans about 10 degrees of sky, some 20 times the width of the full moon, glowing across the constellations of Dorado and Mensa.

Kendrick Lamar started GNX long before the Drake feud

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:56 +0000

Mustard was in the gym on a Friday afternoon when he saw Kendrick Lamar post a snippet of a new song on social media. He guessed the record might land the following week, maybe timed to Thanksgiving. Ten minutes later, it was out.

Image: jon_elbaz more

Kendrick Lamar, Bonnaroo 2012Licence: CC BY 2.0

That was November 22, 2024, and the surprise was total. GNX, Lamar’s sixth studio album, arrived with no warning. The only warning was a minute-long teaser video posted to YouTube just before the album dropped. None of the music in that clip made the final tracklist.

Kimi Antonelli wins the Italian Grand Prix from 19th

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:56 +0000

Kimi Antonelli won his home Italian Grand Prix at Monza from 19th on the grid, a drive his team boss, Toto Wolff, compared to a miracle. The Mercedes driver had taken an engine penalty for exceeding his season allocation, which put him at the back.

Image: Liauzh more

Kimi Antonelli at the wheel of his Mercedes.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Wolff said afterwards that he had seen it coming on the Saturday. He expected one of his two drivers to win, either George Russell from the front row or Antonelli from the penultimate one. He had talked to Antonelli’s father the day before, and said the father saw it coming too.

Australia's Stolen Generations survivors still wait on redress

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:55 +0000

Many of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people taken from their families as children are now old, and many are still searching for family. The Healing Foundation says governments have let the work stall since the 2008 national apology.

Image: edna-photos more

A public broadcast of Kevin Rudd 's formal apology to the Stolen Generations at Elder Park , Adelaide .Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Its plan, From Sorry to Action, came out in May 2026, ahead of Sorry Day. It asks federal and state governments for practical help while survivors are still alive to receive it.

Lee Strasberg turned Stanislavski's system into the Method

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:55 +0000

Lee Strasberg took Konstantin Stanislavski’s system for building a character and narrowed it to a single tool: emotional truthfulness. Strasberg, who taught Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and John Garfield, coined the phrase “the Method” for his version of it.

Image: Unknown author Unknown author more

Lee Strasberg in 1976Licence: Public domain

Stanislavski, a Russian actor, director and theorist, had spent his working life refining a much broader system for psychological realism on stage. Born Konstantin Sergeievich Alexeyev, he changed his name to spare his wealthy merchant family the disapproval a career in theatre might have brought them. With Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, he founded the Moscow Art Theatre after a single meeting between the two men that lasted 18 hours. Stanislavski kept refining his ideas about acting until his death in Moscow in 1938, by which point he was, in Callow’s words, “weighted down with international honours”.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day carries Marvel's hopes for a rebound

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:20:36 +0000

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has opened as the test of whether Marvel can end a run of underperforming films. Sony is hoping it matches the scale of Spider-Man: No Way Home after three recent Marvel films disappointed.

Image: Illustration generated for this article more

Certificate listings and cinema chains have quoted different running times.Licence: Generated, no third-party rightsThis image is an illustration generated for this article, not a photograph.

The film picks up after the spell that closed No Way Home, in which Peter Parker erased himself from the memory of everyone who loved him, including his best friend Ned Leeds and MJ. Tom Holland, now 30, plays a lonelier and more introspective Peter than in his first three outings, still fighting crime as Spider-Man while nobody in New York knows his name.

A hydrogen fuel cell sends electrons round a wire to make power

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:57 +0000

A hydrogen fuel cell makes electricity by pulling hydrogen apart and sending its pieces down two different routes. A catalyst splits each hydrogen atom into a proton and an electron. The protons pass through the middle of the cell, while the electrons travel round an outside wire, and that flow is the current. At the far side the two meet oxygen and become water and heat.

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Daiba (human settlement in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan)Licence: CC0

The US Energy Information Administration reckons a fuel cell may beat a petrol engine on efficiency by a factor of two or three. NASA flew fuel cells on the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

Corn on the cob needs five minutes, or no boil at all

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:55 +0000

Boil corn on the cob for about five minutes, counted from the moment the water comes back to the boil. That is the Delish answer for a fresh ear of sweetcorn in a big pot of salted water. Serious Eats tested the question harder and reached a stranger conclusion. After cooking more than 60 samples, its writer decided the best “boiled” corn is never boiled at all.

Both answers work. They suit different cooks, and the difference comes down to how much attention you want to pay to the pot.

US importers pay the tariff, then pass part of it to shoppers

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:51 +0000

A shopper never pays a tariff at the till. The company bringing the goods into the United States pays it to the government, and then decides how much of that bill to push on to its customers. In 2025 the answer turned out to be a good share of it, arriving slowly rather than all at once.

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Containers wait at a terminal in Mannheim, Germany, before trucks and trains carry them onward.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Who writes the cheque

A tariff is a tax on imported goods, usually set as a percentage of what the goods are worth. The BBC gives the arithmetic: put a 10% tariff on a $10 product and the importer owes $1, so the item now costs $11 to land.

A university GPA is a weighted average, not a raw one

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:45 +0000

A grade point average turns a term of separate grades into one number by weighting each grade by the size of the course it came from. At Duke University, as at other schools, a registrar multiplies every grade’s point value by that course’s credit hours, adds those totals together, then divides the sum by the total credits attempted. A five-credit course pulls the average harder than a one-credit one, because the weight is the credit load, not the grade alone.

Pirate radio stations keep coming back after raids

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:45 +0000

A pirate radio station keeps its studio and its transmitter apart, joined by a link box. Raids seize equipment, yet stations raided time and again have come back on air.

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Free-radio activism from the pirate broadcasting scene.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The transmitter is the part a regulator can find. Pirates hide transmitters on city rooftops, or up in the attic of a friend. The studio sits somewhere else, connected to the transmitter by that link.

A heat pump moves heat, which is why it works far below freezing

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:40 +0000

A heat pump does not make heat. It carries heat that already exists from one place to another, where a boiler burns fuel to create it. An air source heat pump takes that heat from the air outside a house and uses it to warm the rooms. Because it only moves heat, it keeps working in weather well below freezing.

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Air ConditionerLicence: Public domain

Cold air is not empty air

That it works in the cold seems odd only because of a mistake about temperature. Fahrenheit and Celsius both put their zero at an arbitrary point, as an article in GreenBuildingAdvisor points out. The Kelvin scale starts at absolute zero, and the heat in air rises in step with it.

UK press regulator IPSO decides where a correction must run

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:40 +0000

A UK newspaper that gets a fact wrong cannot tack an update onto the online article and move on. The Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO, can order exactly where the fix runs, in print and online, and how loudly it says the paper got it wrong.

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British newspapers piled high at BBC Monitoring in CavershamLicence: CC BY 2.0

That power comes from the Editors’ Code of Practice, which IPSO enforces. Clause 1 requires a significant inaccuracy to be corrected “promptly and with due prominence”, with an apology where one is due. In cases involving IPSO, the code says, due prominence is whatever the regulator requires.

Iceland's Althing is called the oldest parliament. It has a gap.

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:39 +0000

Iceland founded the Althing in 930, when Norse chieftains began gathering each year to make laws and settle disputes. Icelanders call it the world’s oldest parliament, and one argument for that claim rests on an unbroken list of presiding officers. The assembly itself was not unbroken. It was formally disbanded in 1800 and re-established by royal decree in 1845, a gap of about 45 years.

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Lögberg, Þingvellir National Park, IcelandLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Iceland had no king to answer to in 930. Many of its Norse settlers had left Norway specifically to get away from one, so its regional chieftains, the goðar, ran the new assembly by consensus rather than royal decree. Early on, a settler named Úlfljótur sailed to Norway, studied its legal system there, and brought home the code the Althing then adopted. Nothing was written down at first, so the Lawspeaker had to recite the whole of it from memory at every meeting.

Panama Canal locks lift ships 85 feet above the sea

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:37 +0000

A ship crossing the Isthmus of Panama does not sail through a slot cut at sea level. It climbs a series of locks, crosses the man-made Gatún Lake, and descends again on the far side. Water alone lifts it 85 feet above the ocean, not any engine of its own. The route runs about 50 miles from Colón, on the Caribbean side, to Panama City on the Pacific.

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A ship enters the Gatun Locks on the Panama Canal.Licence: Public domain

How the locks lift a ship over a mountain

Panama’s own account of the waterway describes the system as a pair of water elevators. Gravity draws fresh water down from Gatún Lake through culverts beneath each set of locks, filling the chambers to float a ship upward, then draining them to lower it again on the other side. Seen from the deck, it feels less like a river than a staircase. A ship climbs three steps up to the level of the lake, crosses it, then descends three steps back to sea level. A single transit draws roughly 200 million litres of fresh water, all of it from the lake rather than the sea.

A tidal lagoon wall makes power as the tide rises and falls

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:36 +0000

A tidal lagoon such as the one proposed for Swansea Bay generates electricity by closing a wall around part of the sea. The tide piles up or drains away outside it, then gates open so the height difference drives water through turbines. It does this twice in a single tide: once as the sea rises, once as it falls.

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Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station, Sihwa Lake, Gyeonggi Province, South KoreaLicence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The lagoon is a man-made enclosure, built with a barrier wall much like a harbour or a marina. Inside, the water is cut off from the sea’s ordinary rise and fall. Outside the wall, the tide keeps moving. That gap between the two levels is what does the work.

A 1958 patent fixed the Lego brick that barely sold

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:35 +0000

Ole Kirk Christiansen bought a small carpentry workshop in Billund, Denmark, in 1916, and it made stepladders, ironing boards and footstools for sixteen years before it made a single toy. Orders for household goods dried up in the Great Depression, so in 1932 Christiansen started carving wooden toys instead, to cheer the children up, as he put it. Two years later a staff competition gave the workshop a new name: Lego, a contraction of the Danish leg godt, “play well.”

Irish Garda vetting has no expiry, but some employers set one

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:35 +0000

Garda vetting in Ireland carries no national expiry date. Citizens Information, the state’s public guidance service, says you do not currently need to be vetted again unless you change jobs, or change roles within a sports or community group. The catch is that the organisation you work for can set its own limit, and some set three years.

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A Garda station, one of the offices where vetting applications are processed.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What the law actually requires

Vetting rests on two National Vetting Bureau Acts, passed in 2012 and 2016, covering children and vulnerable persons. An Garda Síochána describes them as the legal basis for mandatory vetting of anyone who wants to work with, or provide services to, children or vulnerable people. The Oireachtas amended the 2012 Act in January 2016, mainly so that certain old minor convictions would stop appearing in vetting disclosures.

Let's Encrypt made HTTPS certificates free and automatic

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:35 +0000

Let’s Encrypt gives away the certificate a website needs for HTTPS, thanks to sponsors including Cisco, Google and Akamai. It also automated the forms, waiting and server setup that made even a cheap paid certificate costly in time.

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Server racks at the NOIRLab Headquarters Computer Server Room in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011.Licence: CC BY 4.0

Why a $9 certificate still kept small sites off HTTPS

When Let’s Encrypt opened to the public in December 2015, a domain-validated certificate from an established authority could already cost as little as $9 a year. The price was not the biggest barrier. A buyer filled out forms, then waited hours for even the cheapest certificate to arrive. Once it turned up, the certificate and its key had to be downloaded and carried onto the server by hand. Only then could the web server be reconfigured for encryption. A less experienced administrator often copied a working configuration from whatever site claimed to have one. An outdated cipher setting could slip through unnoticed as a result. The whole job needed doing again every one to three years, whenever the certificate expired.

GATT ran world trade for 47 years, then became the WTO

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:34 +0000

The World Trade Organization exists because a permanent trade body planned alongside the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade never got built. In October 1947, 23 countries signed GATT in Geneva to give trade liberalisation an early boost. Talks on a permanent International Trade Organisation began the following month. It took 47 years, and eight rounds of talks, before members finally built that missing institution. The WTO took over from GATT on January 1, 1995.

Apple unveils the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max and first foldable

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:32 +0000

Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max go on sale Friday, September 18, a week after preorders opened on Saturday, September 12. The phones headlined Apple’s “Surprise and Shine” keynote on September 9. It was the first product event run by new chief executive John Ternus, after Tim Cook handed him the role the week before.

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Apple's Pro line has stuck with a triple camera block and Apple logo on the back for several generations.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

As expected, Apple did not announce a standard iPhone 18 at the event, and Ternus said nothing about Vision Pro, iPads or Macs either. His focus was the Pro and Pro Max, Apple’s first folding handset, and updates to the Apple Watch and AirPods.

Triple glazing's second gap cuts heat loss further

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:32 +0000

Triple glazing adds one thing double glazing doesn’t have: a third pane, sealed behind a second gas-filled gap. That second gap gives heat a second barrier to cross. It’s why triple glazing typically reaches a lower U-value than double glazing, on the standard measure of how easily heat passes through a window. A double-glazed unit usually sits around 1.2, though some centre panes now reach just under 1. Triple glazing can fall below 0.5.

A decree on the Rosetta Stone let Champollion read hieroglyphs

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:31 +0000

How three scripts on one stone cracked the code

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Close up of the Rosetta Stone replicaLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The Rosetta Stone, a slab of speckled grey stone carved with one unremarkable tax decree, gave scholars back a writing system that had sat silent for centuries. The decree runs three times down the stone: once in hieroglyphic script, once in the everyday Egyptian script called Demotic, and once in ancient Greek. Because scholars of the day could already read Greek, the stone offered a way in.

Alan Turing swapped 'Can machines think?' for a game

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:31 +0000

In 1950, Alan Turing dismissed the question “Can machines think?” as “too meaningless to deserve discussion” and replaced it with a game that gave a judge something to score. His paper proposed a party game: an interrogator questions a hidden person and a hidden machine by typed message, and the machine passes if the interrogator cannot reliably tell which is which. It became known as the Turing test.

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Estatua de Alan Turing en Manchester: Gay village. Jardines de SackvilleLicence: CC BY 2.0

Turing wrote out his own worked example of a passing exchange. When asked to add 34,957 and 70,764, his imagined machine paused for thirty seconds and answered 105,621. The true sum is 105,721. A machine that never slipped would give itself away as a machine. The error in the transcript reads like one Turing planted on purpose.

How to clear your cache in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:31 +0000

Your browser stores pieces of the pages you have already visited, such as images, so those pages open faster the next time. The BBC’s own fix for a stuck BBC Sounds app is exactly that: sign out of your account, then clear the cache. ZDNET makes the wider case for a whole Mac. Clearing the browser and the app cache, it says, can settle a slow machine and free up storage.

Wittgenstein argued a truly private word can never be corrected

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:31 +0000

Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that a language only one person could ever understand cannot work, because nothing outside that person exists to catch a wrong use of a word. A word needs a check its user does not control. Take that check away, and there is nothing left to get right or wrong.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)Licence: Public domain

What a private word would try to name

Wittgenstein’s target was not a foreign tongue or a secret code. It was a language built to name sensations that only their owner could feel. He asked readers to imagine keeping a diary and writing the sign “S” on every day a certain sensation turns up. A recent essay on the argument in the philosophy journal Think frames the same thought differently. You focus on the sensation and tell yourself, “I shall use ‘S’ to represent this,” then consult your diary later to see which days it recurred.

Carbon dating can age remains up to about 60,000 years old

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:29 +0000

Every living thing absorbs a radioactive atom called carbon-14 throughout its life, and that atom starts disappearing the moment the organism dies. Measure how much of it remains in a bone, a scrap of cloth, or a lump of charcoal, and a laboratory can work out roughly how long ago that tissue stopped exchanging carbon with the world around it. Willard Libby built the technique at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, and it can still date organic remains up to about 60,000 years old.

Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies, or 1.3 million, in a week

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:29 +0000

Rebecca Yarros’s first novel found her an agent, and then nothing. It “died on submission,” an ordinary fate that authors rarely admit to in public. She went back to the keyboard anyway once her husband, a US Army veteran who had already been seriously injured once, deployed to Afghanistan. The military romance she wrote to work through that, Full Measures, became her debut instead of the fantasy manuscript nobody had bought.

In 1961, Cuba sent volunteers to teach a million adults to read

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:27 +0000

Cuba’s government sent an estimated 250,000 volunteer teachers into the countryside in 1961, aiming to teach a million illiterate adults to read and write within a single year. Fidel Castro had announced the target the year before, less than two years after his revolution took power.

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Cuba, where volunteers fanned out into cities and countryside to teach reading in 1961.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

By the end of 1961, the campaign had brought basic literacy to around 75% of the million people it set out to reach, with further adult education programmes continuing afterwards. Cuba’s literacy rate, which a Miami University account puts at around 70% in the 1950s, stands close to 100% today.

Littler and Van Gerwen traded 170 finishes in one Dublin match

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:25 +0000

On March 19, 2026, at the 3Arena in Dublin, Michael van Gerwen and Luke Littler each hit the highest checkout in darts in the same Premier League semi-final. The finish is 170, which a player takes out with two treble 20s and the bullseye.

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BetMGM Premier League Darts 2025, night 9 of the preliminary round in the Uber Arena Berlin: Luke LittlerLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

One leg, two players on 170

The BBC described Littler as renowned for hitting the finish, which players call the Big Fish. Yet he missed his first try at it in that match. In the same leg Van Gerwen also sat on 170, and he hit both treble 20s and the bull to go one leg from victory.

Museums scan mummies to read them without unwrapping

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:25 +0000

A CT scanner takes thousands of X-rays of a wrapped mummy from every angle, then a computer stacks them into a three-dimensional model a researcher can walk through, layer by layer, without touching the linen. The body stays sealed. The picture comes apart instead.

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British Museum: mummiesLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The British Museum has not unwrapped a mummy in 200 years. John Taylor, the museum’s mummy curator, said the museum wants to leave the contents of the bodies undisturbed, since they are fragile remains of people who once lived. Scanning does the job unwrapping once did, without the damage.

A census counts everyone on one day, then checks who it missed

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:24 +0000

A census counts every person in a country against one fixed date, then a second survey goes back to check how many the first count still missed. In the United States, the Census Bureau’s checks put the 2020 national shortfall at about 1.1 million people out of a headcount of 331.5 million. The figure announced on the day is not the final word. It is the number statisticians spend the next two years testing.

A combi boiler heats water only when a tap opens

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:24 +0000

A combi boiler connects directly to the mains cold water supply, and it heats water the moment a tap or shower opens rather than drawing it from a tank. There is no cylinder sitting full and warm in an airing cupboard, waiting to be used. Turn the tap, and the boiler fires and heats the water as it flows through.

Image: Heatable more

Wall hung combi boiler in kitchen (Creative commons by https://heatable.co.uk/)Licence: CC BY 2.0

That single design choice is why a combi boiler is the most common type installed in the UK. It also explains most of what people like about it, and most of what frustrates them.

Ford's moving line cut Model T assembly to about 90 minutes

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:21 +0000

Henry Ford’s moving line did not start with a machine. It started with a car that kept one design. Ford’s team broke its assembly into single steps and trained one worker for each. In 1913 those pieces came together in a moving line.

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A Ford Model T, the car Highland Park's moving line made affordable.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

Why the car had to be simple first

From its launch in 1908, the Model T came in one body, with no factory options and, famously, no choice of colour. Ford and his team took four principles from other industries. Parts had to fit any car without hand adjustment, work had to flow steadily, one worker had one job, and as little motion as possible went to waste. Take interchangeable parts. Once a valve or a steering wheel was cut to the same size every time, a machine operator with little training could fit it. Ford no longer needed the skilled hand-fitters earlier carmakers relied on.

Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary took hold within a few years

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:16 +0000

Sequoyah could not read or write a word of any language, including his own. What he built instead was a character for every syllable a Cherokee speaker says, rather than a letter for every sound the way English does. Because the system matched sounds Cherokee speakers already made, native speakers found it easy to learn. Reported literacy rates climbed quickly once it appeared, and the Cherokee Nation had adopted it as the tribe’s formal writing system within a few years.

Smart thermostats learn your routine from your own adjustments

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:16 +0000

A smart thermostat learns a household’s routine by copying the adjustments people already make, rather than by being taught any explicit rule. If a household turns the heating off at a certain time, a learning model can pick that up. The more capable models also work out when the house is usually occupied, and use that to predict the next day instead of only reacting to it.

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A hand adjusts a smart thermostat mounted on a wall.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Not every smart thermostat does this. Which? has tested 32 models, and only some of them carry a “learning” mode. Others offer program modes, a schedule someone sets by hand.

Adam's Bridge: a sunken shoal chain between India and Sri Lanka

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:15 +0000

Adam’s Bridge is a chain of shoals stretching roughly 29 km between Dhanushkodi, on India’s Rameshwaram Island, and Talaimannar, on Sri Lanka’s Mannar Island. It sits mostly out of sight. Research using NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite found that 99.98 percent of its volume lies submerged in shallow water, leaving only a fraction of sandbanks exposed above the surface.

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Photo taken from a drone, of Adam's Bridge.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

What it is made of

The ICESat-2 study put the total volume of Adam’s Bridge at about 1 cubic kilometre. NASA describes it as a chain of limestone shoals, and nineteenth-century British surveys found sand extending down 7 to 9 metres before reaching a harder base of coral reef or calcareous sandstone. The sandbanks are loose and fine, and none of them carries rock or vegetation.

El Niño strength comes down to Pacific sea temperature

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:15 +0000

An El Niño’s strength is a temperature reading. Scientists measure how far the surface of the central and eastern tropical Pacific has warmed above its long-term average, and that departure is the standard gauge of each event.

Image: Charles Thompson more

Sea surface temperature anomalies on December 26, 1997.Licence: Public domain

The Met Office sets the starting line at 0.5C. Once sea temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific rise that far above normal, an El Niño is declared.

Phonics teaches children to read by blending letter sounds

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:15 +0000

A phonics programme teaches a child to match individual letters, and pairs of letters, to the sounds they make, then blend those sounds together to say the whole word. Shown “c-a-t”, the child sounds out each letter in turn and hears the word “cat” emerge. That single skill, applied over and over, lets a young child sound out a written word they do not recognise.

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Volunteers can work as support staff for the teachers at the Early Child Development CentreLicence: CC BY 2.0

Teachers call this decoding. It works in reverse too: a child who knows that “sh” makes one sound rather than two can use the same knowledge to spell a word, not just read one.

Tree rings date a drought to the exact year

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:14 +0000

In a temperate climate a tree adds one ring for each year of growth. A wet growing season leaves a wide ring and a dry one leaves a narrow ring, so a thin band in the wood marks a dry year. The trick is working out which year. Scientists do that by matching the pattern of wide and narrow rings against other trees from the same region whose dates are already known.

Is Taco Bell safe to eat after the US Cyclospora outbreak?

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:10 +0000

Yes, Taco Bell looks safe on the evidence so far. It has taken the lettuce linked to a US Cyclospora outbreak out of its supply chain, and food safety scientist Tamika D. Sims told Delish there is no science-based reason to avoid the chain or any single item on its menu. The outbreak itself was serious, and it is worth knowing how it unfolded before you order.

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Taco Bell removed the lettuce linked to the outbreak from its restaurants.Licence: CC BY 4.0

How bad was the outbreak?

Delish reported thousands of cases nationwide and two confirmed deaths, putting the outbreak among the worst of its kind the country has recorded. The CDC had counted nearly 1,700 confirmed diagnoses and another 5,100 reports, spread across 34 states.

Africa's crust has thinned to 13km at the Turkana Rift

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:07 +0000

Under the Turkana Rift, where Kenya meets Ethiopia, Earth’s crust has thinned to about 13 kilometres at its narrowest point. The rock around it runs closer to 30 kilometres thick. Geologists at Columbia University measured the same squeeze a different way and got 8 miles of crust at the rift’s centre against more than 22 miles just outside it. They call this stage necking, the point where a continent’s crust stretches almost to breaking before it finally gives way, and nobody has watched it happen this closely before.

How lost-wax casting turns a wax copy into a bronze sculpture

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:07 +0000

A sculpture goes into a foundry as wax and comes out as bronze, and the two forms never touch. The wax copy is buried inside a mould, heated until it melts and drains away, and the molten bronze fills the space it leaves behind. The method takes its name from that one step: the wax is not removed so much as lost.

Image: Kritzolina more

Bronze casting in Kunstgießerei München - pouring the hot liquid bronze into the prepared formsLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

How old is the technique, and where Benin fits in

The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones writes that the method was first used in ancient China, and that Greek and Roman sculptors later relied on it to give their bronze figures lifelike detail. In the West African kingdom of Benin, casters worked in bronze, brass, and sometimes copper from before the 13th century. Its royal court commissioned large-scale bronze work under Oba Ewuare I, who ruled from around 1440. His grandson, Oba Esigie, likely commissioned more than 850 cast reliefs to sheath the columns of the royal audience court, after a civil war and an attempted invasion by the kingdom of Idah. Esigie valued the craft enough to raise the head of the royal casting guild to the rank of privy counsellor.

Sweden raised the Vasa warship after 333 years underwater

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:06 +0000

Sweden raised Vasa after an engineer found the wreck and divers confirmed the hull had survived. Marine engineer Anders Franzén spent years searching old harbour records for the ship’s resting place and located it in 1956. Divers who went down afterwards found the hull still largely intact.

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Vasa warship museum (Stockholm, Sweden 2017)Licence: CC BY 2.0

Why the pride of the Swedish navy rolled over in a gust of wind

On 10 August 1628, Vasa set out from Stockholm on its maiden voyage carrying 64 bronze cannons, ordered by King Gustav II Adolf. The king watched from the shore as his newest warship went down within twenty minutes, nowhere near an enemy. The crowd that gathered to see it off had come to watch what one Archaeology magazine writer called “Europe’s most ambitious warship to date.”

The Dewey system shelves books by subject number, then letters

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:06 +0000

A number for what the book is, not when it arrived

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Books labeled with YKL (yleisten kirjastojen luokitusjärjestelmä), a variant of the Dewey Decimal System for Finnish public libraries.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

A Dewey number files a book by what it is about, not by its size or the day a library received it. The classification splits the whole of human knowledge into ten classes of a hundred numbers each. A decimal point after the three digits then lets a cataloguer narrow the subject as far as the collection needs. Two books on the same exact subject can still land on the same number, and it is the letters after the number that keep them apart on the shelf.

Jai Arrow leads Rabbitohs out for 100th game after MND

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:18:05 +0000

Jai Arrow walked out as captain of the South Sydney Rabbitohs against the Sydney Roosters for his 100th game with the club, months after motor neurone disease forced him to retire. He did not play on. The NRL gave the club special dispensation to list him as an additional man in the final two rounds, which carried him past the century.

More than 40,000 people at Allianz Stadium stood and sang Stand By Me as he came out. Former teammates and club legends had been flown in to line his route to the centre of the field. Arrow can no longer run, and he can no longer speak.

The 1871 act that ended religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:53 +0000

Since 1581, nobody could enrol at Oxford without first swearing an oath to the monarch and the Church of England. That rule survived almost three centuries. Parliament finally struck it down on 16 June 1871, when the Universities Tests Act opened Oxford, Cambridge and Durham to students and staff of any faith, or none.

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Oxford students walking to their examsLicence: CC BY 2.0

What the oath actually required

Under Elizabeth I, matriculating at Oxford meant swearing allegiance to the crown and formal assent to the Church. The same test applied to university jobs. A college fellowship or a professorship required it too, and Oxford’s version of the rule was stricter than the equivalents at Cambridge, or at universities in Ireland and Scotland. St John’s College, one of Oxford’s constituent colleges, describes the pre-1871 rules as the strictest of any university in England, built to protect the institution’s Protestant orthodoxy.

A chaplain's student hostel gave the Sorbonne its name

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:52 +0000

The Sorbonne began as a place for students to sleep. In 1257 Robert de Sorbonne, a chaplain to the French king, founded the first hostel for students of the University of Paris, and his surname stuck to the whole institution. The university it came to name was already a few decades old by then.

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Carte postale photographiqueLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The university came first

The school that became the University of Paris grew up inside the compound of Notre-Dame cathedral. The canons who served the cathedral lived there, and so did a cathedral school that trained the diocese’s priests and drew scholars from across Europe. Writing in The Conversation, a historian of medieval religion counts Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus among those who studied or taught in its early centuries.

The Pantheon's dome has lasted nearly 1,900 years without rebar

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:52 +0000

Rome’s Pantheon dome has stood for nearly 1,900 years, and no rebar or tension cable holds it up. It remains the largest dome ever cast in unreinforced concrete, and nobody built a wider one for the next thirteen centuries. Michelangelo, looking up at it, called the result “angelic and not human design.”

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Pantheon in Rome (Italy) - Front view with the Piazza della Rotonda and the Fontana della Rotonda in front of it.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Concrete that keeps reacting long after it sets

The dome is opus caementicium, the Roman recipe set down by the architect Vitruvius: quicklime, volcanic ash and rubble, mixed with no steel at all. Modern concrete is built the opposite way round. Portland cement is paired with aggregate chosen to be as chemically inert as possible, so nothing reacts once the initial set is done. Marie Jackson, a geologist at the University of Utah, has studied Roman concrete for decades. A modern cement that changes chemically after it sets has usually gone wrong, she says. “Romans wanted their concrete to react.” They picked an aggregate built to stay part of the chemistry for centuries, not just for the initial pour.

Mutinous soldiers failed to oust Niger's military ruler

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:48 +0000

Soldiers tried to remove Niger’s military government on Saturday 29 August 2026, and they failed. It was the latest attempt to unseat General Abdourahamane Tiani, who has run the country since the army seized power in July 2023.

Then came the denials. Nigeria’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Sola Enikanolaiye, issued a statement on Thursday 3 September rejecting social media claims that Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States had backed the attempt. He called those claims baseless and irresponsible, and said Nigeria would never support an unconstitutional change of government, “no matter who is involved or which country it happens in.” Nigeria wants “peace, security, democracy and development” for Niger and the Sahel, he said.

Elizabeth Holmes will move to a halfway house next year

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:45 +0000

Elizabeth Holmes will leave the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan, in Texas, for a halfway house in Del Valle, near Austin, next August. The Federal Bureau of Prisons told her victims about the move, and NBC News and the New York Times have confirmed a report first carried by ABC News. She has been at Bryan since May 2023.

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Elizabeth Holmes meets Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and former Secretary of Defense William Perry at Theranos in April 2013.Licence: Public domain

Why the sentence keeps shrinking

Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years for defrauding investors in her blood-testing start-up, Theranos, and her term has been cut several times since. She is now due for full release in February 2030, according to Bureau of Prisons records the Guardian has seen.

Max Miedinger drew Helvetica in 1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:39 +0000

Max Miedinger drew Helvetica in 1957, working at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, for the foundry’s director, Eduard Hoffmann. Haas published it that year as Neue Haas Grotesk. The name most of the world now uses arrived only in 1961, when Stempel and Linotype introduced the complete typeface and renamed it after Helvetia, the Latin word for Switzerland.

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Network (in glorious Helvetica)Licence: CC BY 2.0

Why Hoffmann wanted a new typeface

Hoffmann decided in 1956 that Haas needed a rival to Akzidenz-Grotesk, a sans serif the German Berthold foundry had released in 1896. The new design was meant to counter that typeface’s international success, and Hoffmann turned to Miedinger, a freelance designer who had worked for Haas before.

Most volunteers gave shocks they believed could kill

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:39 +0000

Stanley Milgram was 27, newly appointed to a professorship at Yale, when he began designing an experiment on obedience in 1960. Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem opened in 1961, while Milgram was running his experiments. Eichmann had organised the mass deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, and in the dock he said he had simply followed orders. Milgram wanted to know whether an ordinary person, told to hurt someone by a figure in authority, would do it too.

Office nap pods spread from Google to the law firms

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:37 +0000

Google’s nap pods were never Google’s alone. The same MetroNaps pods sat in other tech offices, and then spread to firms with no tech culture at all. Fast Company listed Google, Cisco and the Huffington Post among the employers giving staff a pod to nap in. By 2017 the Financial Times found the same pods in a Washington law firm.

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EnergyPod in an officeLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The pods come from one company. Christopher Lindholst and Arshad Chowdhury founded MetroNaps in 2004. It began in retail and later turned to making pods and advising employers on napping. Each pod cost about $13,000.

Gloria Steinem's new memoir, and the life behind it

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:17:23 +0000

Gloria Steinem died on a Wednesday at the start of September 2026, aged 92, in the Manhattan brownstone she had bought part of years before. Her second memoir, An Unexpected Life, was due out on 22 September, and it now does a job nobody planned for it. A New York women’s lunch late that month had her down as a speaker, and October held more dates.

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Gloria Steinem in 2016.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The book follows My Life on the Road, which came out in 2015. Kirkus calls it a mostly grateful and sometimes rueful account of the people and places behind her 92 years. The Guardian’s reviewer, writing the day after her death, found that its opening pages had taken on a new weight.

The African Union depends on outsiders to pay for peacekeeping

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:15:31 +0000

The African Union and its regional partners today run ten peacekeeping and security operations across seventeen countries, with more than seventy thousand personnel between them. Some of these missions win UN backing and support. Beyond that, a senior UN official said in 2009, AU peacekeeping depended on a small pool of donors.

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African Union Conference CentreLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Africa already hosts more peacekeeping than any other continent. The UN has run more than thirty missions there since 1960, and roughly half of its missions worldwide still sit on the continent. The AU and partners such as the Economic Community of West African States have layered their own operations on top of that UN presence. The two biggest are the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia and the Lake Chad Basin Commission’s Multinational Joint Task Force. More than fifty thousand troops serve in UN operations in Africa, and tens of thousands more in regional missions. In 2022, four African-led missions launched or revised their mandates. They cover the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, and Somalia.

France's 35-hour law traded fewer hours for flexible shifts

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:15:14 +0000

France’s working-time law, the loi Aubry, did more than shorten the working week. It made firms with more than 20 employees renegotiate their labour contracts, and most of them traded shorter average hours for the right to schedule staff unevenly across the year.

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Martine Aubry, le 30 juin 2010 à Paris.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The law began in June 1998 and became mandatory for large employers in January 2000. Martine Aubry, the Socialist minister it is named after, pushed it through while her government shared power with a centre-right president. Its stated aims were to cut unemployment and to give companies more flexibility over labour. Unemployment had peaked at 12.4% in 1997.

Ford's moving line cut a Model T from 14 hours to 93 minutes

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:15:08 +0000

The moving line Ford installed at Highland Park, Michigan, in 1913 turned the car from a hand-built object into a timed flow of parts. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Model T that had taken 14 hours to assemble now took 1 hour and 33 minutes.

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Workers on Henry Ford's assembly line in 1913.Licence: Public domain

The trick was to move the car rather than the worker. Each worker stayed at one station and repeated a single task on every vehicle that passed. The line worked only if parts, subassemblies and larger assemblies arrived at the moving main line at exactly the right moment.

A Minecraft Movie out-opened Barbie despite poor reviews

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:15:00 +0000

In April 2025, cinemagoers in Utah brought a live chicken to a screening of A Minecraft Movie. They had not come to watch quietly. Across the United States, teenagers climbed onto their friends’ shoulders, threw popcorn into the air, and filmed themselves cheering before the film had even started. At some screenings, the noise brought the police.

Before release, tracking had put the film’s opening weekend at around $65 million. By Saturday morning, insiders at the studio projected a $135 million domestic weekend, built off a Friday take of $58 million. The real three-day total, once every ticket was counted, was $163 million, including roughly $10 million from Thursday previews. That beat Barbie’s own opening weekend from 2023.

A 1927 IBM gadget solved Nuremberg's language problem

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:43 +0000

Nuremberg’s judges needed four languages heard as one, and translating each sentence in turn, language by language, would have made the trial run four times as long. So on 20 November 1945, everyone in the court put on a headset instead, and heard that day’s 24,000-word indictment live, each in their own language. What carried the sound to them was a system that had seen only limited experiments before.

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Nuremberg Trials courtroomLicence: CC BY 2.0

A trial too urgent for the usual method

Officials had argued for months over what to do with the men the Allies now held. Britain wanted them shot as soon as they were caught and formally identified, while the United States and the Soviet Union pushed for a trial instead. The International Military Tribunal was finally set up on 8 August 1945, once the four powers had agreed which offences to prosecute. The Soviet Union insisted the charges cover only Axis aggression, since its own invasions of Poland and Finland would otherwise have belonged in the same dock.

A 1978 US law put Native American families first in adoption

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:43 +0000

In 1978 the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) changed how US states place Native American children in foster care or adoption. It requires states to notify the tribe and give it a role in the case. It also sets an order of preference: extended family first, then the child’s tribe, then another Native family.

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The Supreme Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act in 2023.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The law arrived after a century of removals. Starting in 1860, the Bureau of Indian Affairs opened the first of more than 350 boarding schools built to assimilate Native children. By the 1920s, nearly 83% of school-age Native children were enrolled in one, where a government report found many malnourished, overworked and harshly punished. Boarding school attendance peaked at 60,000 pupils in 1973. Alongside the schools ran the Indian Adoption Project, which placed 395 Native children from western states with white families in the Midwest and on the East Coast. By the 1970s, between 25% and 35% of Native children nationally had been removed from their families. Most went to white families or to institutions aimed at erasing their culture.

Alonzo Church's lambda calculus: computation without a machine

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:36 +0000

In 1936, the mathematician Alonzo Church published a paper called “An unsolvable problem of number theory”. In it he set out a way to decide which functions of whole numbers could ever be worked out by a fixed, effective procedure. He called a function “λ-definable” if it could be built inside his own notation, a system now known as the lambda calculus. Alan Turing’s work of the same period reached the same result on a related problem.

America's 17-year cicadas wait for warm soil to surface

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:36 +0000

A 17-year cicada brood keeps two clocks. One counts years underground while the nymphs feed on tree roots. The other is a thermometer: in the year the count runs out, the nymphs wait until the soil reaches about 64 degrees Fahrenheit before they climb out. Why the insects keep to such long periods is still unclear.

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A cicada ovipositing in a narrow branch. Female magicicadas cut a narrow slit in a branch with their ovipositor and lay 20-30 eggs in it.Licence: CC BY 4.0

Seventeen years on a diet of sap

A brood spends almost its whole life in the dark. Brood X nymphs, for example, drink xylem fluid drawn from tree roots and dig deeper as they grow, to reach bigger roots. Each nymph passes through five growth stages, called instars, before it surfaces. One account holds that the gap between the 13-year and 17-year cycles comes down to how long the second instar takes.

Al-Azhar: how a Fatimid mosque became a university

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:35 +0000

Jawhar al-Siqilli, the general who conquered Egypt for the Fatimid caliphate, laid the foundation of a mosque in his new city of al-Qahira in 970. Eighteen years later, that mosque held its first organised classes. Al-Azhar has kept that role as a seat of learning throughout Muslim history.

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Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, founded by the Fatimids in 970.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Who built it, and why

The Fatimids were Isma’ili Shi’a rulers who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, through her marriage to Ali. Caliph al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah made Cairo his capital between 969 and 973, and the mosque he ordered built took its name from the title al-Zahra, “the luminous”, one of the honorifics linked to Fatima.

Alden Global Capital bought US newspapers, then stripped them

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:35 +0000

Alden Global Capital owns newspapers across the United States, from the Denver Post to the Chicago Tribune. The industry fears it for cutting staff and selling off real estate, and a federal inquiry found it had probably moved pension money into its own funds.

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Newspapers yellowLicence: CC BY 2.0

Alden is a hedge fund, not a publisher. It built its stake in the American press over more than a decade, starting with a stake in MediaNews Group. Its distressed-opportunities fund, launched in 2008, was worth nearly $3 billion by 2011. By 2021 it held stakes in about 200 US newspapers, and hedge funds or private equity firms together owned half of the country’s daily titles.

Employers are retraining staff instead of hiring AI engineers

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:35 +0000

Job postings for generative AI skills rose 1,848% in 2023, and more than 385,000 postings for AI roles ran that year, according to a labour-market analysis reported by IEEE Spectrum. Government forecasters expect AI engineering roles in the US to grow 23% by 2030, and machine-learning engineering roles by as much as 22%, an outlook that comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Most of the free AI courses now on offer take under half an hour at a desk like this one.Licence: CC0

There are not enough trained engineers to meet that demand, so companies cannot hire their way out of the gap. Alexander Sukharevsky, a senior partner at McKinsey, says reskilling existing staff is the most common way companies find AI talent, and that close to half the firms McKinsey surveyed take that route.

A blowout preventer failed to stop the Deepwater Horizon well

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:32 +0000

A blowout preventer is a stack of valves bolted to the well head on the seabed, built to close automatically and seal a well the moment pressure surges out of control. On the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, that stack failed to engage. Oil and gas shot up the well fast enough to ignite, and the resulting explosions killed eleven workers.

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Deepwater Horizon Offshore Drilling Platform on FireLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The rig sat over the Macondo well, roughly 5,000 feet above the seabed. The blowout preventer is the last line of defence at that depth, where nobody can reach the well head by hand. It is meant to shut off the reservoir from below before oil or gas ever reaches the surface.

Bletchley's Bombe cut Enigma's settings to about a million

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:32 +0000

The Bombe helped break Enigma by shrinking the number of settings to search. Once wartime additions were counted, an Enigma machine could be set up in 158 million million million ways. Simon Greenish, then executive director of the Bletchley Park Trust, told the BBC that the Bombe and its mathematics brought that down to about a million. Greenish added that a million was still an unmanageable number.

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Bletchley Park House home of the World War Two Codebreakers, .mw-parser-output .messagebox{margin:4px 0;width:auto;border-collapse:collapse;border:2px solid var(--border-color-progressive,#6485d1);background-color:var(--Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Why speed mattered

German operators reset the wheels across the whole network every day, usually around midnight. Each reset produced a new key, and Bletchley Park had to find it again. A message read three months late was of no use, as Greenish put it.

How a breeder reactor makes more fuel than it burns

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:32 +0000

A breeder reactor leaves the fuel rod with more usable fuel in it than it started with. It does this with fast-moving neutrons, left unslowed, which convert the uranium an ordinary reactor cannot burn into new plutonium that can. Around 20 fast reactors have been built worldwide since the 1950s.

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Experimental Breeder Reactor I was the world's first reactor of any kind to generate electricity from nuclear power.Licence: Public domain

Most reactors running today cool their core with water, which also slows the neutrons released by fission. That slowing, called moderation, keeps the chain reaction going in low-enriched fuel. A fast reactor skips it. It cools the core with a liquid metal such as sodium or lead, sometimes gas or molten salt. The neutrons keep their speed.

A 1606 English law turned a foiled plot into Bonfire Night

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

Bonfire Night began as a legal duty. A year earlier, Guy Fawkes had been found in a cellar under the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder. In 1606, after Londoners lit bonfires for King James I’s escape, an Act of Parliament decreed that 5 November be celebrated every year. That law stayed in force until 1859. Four centuries on, the bonfires still burn, though the law behind them no longer stands.

Banyan roots grow from branches, then thicken into trunks

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

A banyan grows roots from its branches, and lets them hang until they touch the ground. Once anchored in the soil, those roots thicken into pillars that look and work like extra trunks. That is how a banyan spreads sideways.

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Banyan treeLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

It starts life on another tree

The Indian banyan, Ficus benghalensis, belongs to the mulberry family and is native to the Indian subcontinent. It often begins as an epiphyte, a plant that sprouts in the branches of a host tree. From there it sends vine-like roots downwards, which shade the host as they wind towards the forest floor.

Bell Labs built the first practical solar cell in 1954

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

Three researchers at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, built the first practical solar cell in 1954, converting 6% of incoming light into usable electricity. Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson made it by working thin strips of silicon, bathing the material in different elements until it became a strong conductor. When they attached an ammeter to the treated silicon and switched on a lamp, they saw at once that the cell could generate power.

Bernard Williams used Gauguin to put luck into morality

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

Bernard Williams dramatised moral luck with a thought experiment about a painter. In his 1976 essay “Moral Luck”, he took Paul Gauguin’s move from Paris to Tahiti and asked whether the art that came of it could justify abandoning a wife and children. His answer was that Gauguin’s eventual success counted as a kind of moral luck: the achievement justified a choice many would call morally indefensible.

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Landscape of Martinique - Paul GauguinLicence: CC BY 4.0

A Gauguin built for the argument

Williams said openly that his Gauguin need not match the real French artist in every detail. The figure was a prop. Williams assumed, for the sake of the argument, that the gamble paid off and the paintings were a true expression of Gauguin’s gift.

Bessemer's process made steel ten times faster

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

Henry Bessemer patented a new way to make steel on October 17, 1855, and it cut the time to produce a batch by a factor of ten. Before it, steel could only be made in small batches, using large amounts of costly fuel.

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Sir Henry Bessemer plaqueLicence: CC BY 2.0

What the process actually did

Bessemer built his process around a discovery he made in 1856, while studying what happened when air was blown across a mass of molten iron. He found that a blast of compressed air, forced through the molten metal, burned out excess carbon and other impurities. The result was a form of steel that was lighter and easier to shape than traditionally made metals, and it could be made at ten times the speed of older methods.

How a 1992 law turned Britain's polytechnics into universities

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

A single law ended Britain’s divide between polytechnics and universities. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 gave 34 British polytechnics the power to award their own degrees, and with it the right to call themselves universities.

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A photo of the reception at the Gipsy Lane campus of Oxford Brookes University in Headington.Licence: CC BY 4.0

The change ended what had been known as the binary divide: one line of institutions called universities, another called polytechnics. Before 1992, a polytechnic could teach a student to degree level but could not itself confer the degree.

The panopticon was designed so no one had to watch all the time

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:31 +0000

Most people picture the panopticon as a building where a guard watches every prisoner at every moment. Bentham’s design aimed at something cheaper. Prisoners would only ever know that they might be watched, and that possibility would do the guard’s work for him.

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Inside one of the prison buildings at Presidio Modelo, Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The layout puts a tower in the middle of a ring of cells. Light lets the watchman see into every cell, while the people inside the cells cannot see him. So they have to assume that someone is always looking.

Australia's School of the Air: outback lessons by phone

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:30 +0000

Australia’s School of the Air reaches children on remote outback stations by putting a teacher and a class on the same call at the same time, for a lesson of about 45 minutes a day. That call ran over two-way radio at first, then moved to phone and teleconference. The rest of the school day is homework, done at the kitchen table with a parent or governess close by.

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Alice Springs 002 - School of the AirLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The Mount Isa branch, based in the Queensland mining town, covers roughly 800,000 square kilometres, a catchment often compared to the size of France. Its students live on cattle and sheep stations too far from any town for a daily school run, and in the wet season some properties are cut off by flooding for weeks at a time.

Houthi attacks pushed global shipping around Africa

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:30 +0000

Houthi attacks in the Red Sea pushed shippers onto the long route around Africa, and it cost them in fuel, time and rented vessels. The detour around the Cape of Good Hope adds roughly 3,500 nautical miles and 10 to 12 days to a voyage, and around $1m in extra fuel for a single ship.

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A bulk carrier passes under the Suez Canal Bridge.Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The diversion began after Yemen’s Houthi rebels stepped up attacks on commercial vessels passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait, a channel only about 20 miles wide between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The group said it was targeting ships connected to Israel, in response to the war in Gaza, though vessels with no such link were also hit.

Henry Cole sold the first printed Christmas card in 1843

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:29 +0000

Henry Cole had too many letters to write and too little December to write them in, so in 1843 he commissioned an artist instead. The result was the first printed Christmas card sold to the public, a single sheet that let a busy man discharge an entire season’s correspondence with a signature.

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A mosaic portrait of Henry Cole at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which he helped to found.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Cole was a civil servant at the Public Record Office in London. Christmas correspondence was one more task competing for his time, and he solved it the way he solved most things: by commissioning someone else to do the work once, at scale.

Arm position matters more than which arm for blood pressure

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:24 +0000

Which arm you use barely changes a blood pressure reading. How you hold that arm changes it a great deal. A Johns Hopkins Medicine trial compared an arm hanging unsupported at the side with one resting on a desk at heart level. The hanging arm pushed the systolic number up by 6.5 mmHg on average and the diastolic number up by 4.4 mmHg. Swap arms instead of positions, and Harvard Health puts the usual left-right gap at 5 mmHg systolic or less.

Disneyland's chaotic 1955 opening set the theme park standard

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:24 +0000

Disneyland did not invent the theme park. Americans had visited amusement parks and world’s fairs for decades before it opened. What Walt Disney’s park in Anaheim did, from July 17, 1955, was set the standard for what theme parks could and should be. It split one site into themed lands, told stories with its rides and sold the whole thing through television.

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Disneyland sign, Harbor Blvd, Anaheim, 1974Licence: CC BY 2.0

Where the idea came from

Disney had wanted to build it since watching his daughters ride the carousel in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. He pictured a place where parents and children could enjoy themselves together. Frommer’s traces the seed to 1947, when he began collecting miniatures for his model trains and wanted somewhere to show them.

A 30-point credit score rise can cut a US mortgage rate

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:23 +0000

A US mortgage lender prices a conventional loan off where your credit score sits against cut-off points called tiers. Cross into a higher tier and the rate on offer can drop by a quarter of a percentage point or more.

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Personal FinanceLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

That gap is not small. On a US conventional mortgage, a rise from a 670 score to 700 can improve the rate by 0.25 percentage points or more, according to Jeremy Schachter, branch manager at lender Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation. On a home bought at the recent US average price of $534,000, that difference can cut a monthly payment by nearly $100. Over a 30-year loan it can cut the total interest paid by more than $30,000.

Chicago's steel frame, and the iron mill that came first

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:20 +0000

Chicago’s ten-storey Home Insurance Building, completed in 1884, carried its floors on a skeleton of iron and Bessemer steel rather than on its own masonry walls. It is often called the world’s first skyscraper.

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Chicago SkylineLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Why the frame mattered

Until the middle of the 19th century, homes and offices rarely rose above five storeys. People could not be expected to walk any higher, let alone carry goods up.

Half the mining power lets one party rewrite a blockchain

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:14 +0000

Rewriting a blockchain takes more than half its mining power. A miner who controls over 50% of a network’s hashing power can, on average, grow a longer chain than everyone else combined. The network accepts the longer chain, so that miner decides which recent transactions count.

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Bitcoin statistic coin ANTANALicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

A blockchain is a shared ledger that the machines processing payments build and hold between them. Its job is to stop anyone spending the same token twice. Wired puts the catch plainly: that guarantee holds only until someone takes over at least 51% of those machines.

Irish heating oil jumped about €200 a tank in one week

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:14 +0000

A full tank of heating oil in Ireland cost about €200 more in a single week in July 2026, after fighting between the US and Iran flared up again. A 1,000-litre order now averages around €1,300. More than 700,000 Irish households burn oil to heat their homes, close to 45% of the total, and the share climbs higher in the west and along the border.

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A heating oil delivery lorry waits at the kerb.Licence: CC0

The jump undid months of relief. A full tank ran under €1,000 before the conflict began, and briefly neared €1,800 earlier in the year before falling back. In Northern Ireland, prices reached a four-month low by the end of June. Once the strikes resumed, Brent crude, the global benchmark, gained 15% to roughly $85 a barrel as tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz thinned out.

Grenfell's fire forced a rewrite of England's cladding rules

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:13 +0000

A fire killed 72 people at Grenfell Tower in June 2017. The cladding blamed for helping it spread had failed fire tests for 12 years before the fire. The disaster ended with a new law, the Building Safety Act, and a regulator empowered to prosecute builders who ignore it.

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Grenfell TowerLicence: CC BY 2.0

The panels on the tower

The panels wrapping Grenfell Tower were Aluminium Composite Material, plastic sandwiched between two thin sheets of aluminium. Arconic, the French manufacturer, sold its version as Reynobond PE. The version fitted at Grenfell was folded into “cassette” panels that hid the fixings behind a cleaner finish.

Chile fought a war and gained a third of its territory

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:11 +0000

Chile runs more than 4,000 miles down South America’s Pacific coast, yet it is only about 61 miles wide. Its borders also owe much to history, above all a 19th-century war that grew its territory.

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Panoramic view of the Tara Cathedrals (left) and the Tara salt flat in the Atacama Desert , northern Chile .Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Where the colony’s limits sat

Before the Spanish arrived, the Inca held the north of what is now Chile, while the Mapuche lived across the south and centre. Pedro de Valdivia began the Spanish conquest and founded Santiago in 1541, but the Indigenous Araucanian people resisted the first invasion and later killed Valdivia himself, in 1553.

A cat-food tin, and the invention of the hovercraft

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:10 +0000

Christopher Cockerell proved that a heavy vehicle can ride on a cushion of air. He did it on his boatyard’s mud floor, with a can of cat food, a coffee tin and a vacuum cleaner run in reverse. Four years later, his design flew.

Image: Andrew Berridge more

SRN4 Hovercraft Mountbatten ClassLicence: CC BY-SA 2.5

Cockerell had resigned from the electronics firm Marconi to build cabin cruisers, and was living in a caravan in Norfolk when the idea took hold. The idea itself was not new. For fifty years, others had tried to build such a craft. Cockerell solved the part that had beaten them, which was keeping the cushion of air in place. His tin-can rig let him test the theory on the cheap, and it proved him right.

A major book prize does not always lift sales

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:10 +0000

Winning a major literary prize can move thousands of copies within a day, or it can barely move the needle at all. The New York Times found no easy explanation for which one a book gets.

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0720 Winner of the Man Booker PrizeLicence: CC BY 2.0

In Britain, the jump in sales a Booker Prize nomination can bring became known as “the Booker bounce.”

A steel arch now covers Chernobyl's wrecked reactor 4

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:10 +0000

When Chernobyl’s reactor 4 exploded in 1986, it had no primary containment structure to hold the blast in. The steel arch that now covers the ruin, called the New Safe Confinement, is designed to keep its radioactive remains from leaking out.

Image: IAEA Imagebank more

Aerial view Chernobyl nuclear power plant with sarcophagus. (Chernobyl, Ukraine) Photo Credit: Vadim Mouchkin / IAEALicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What the reactor was missing

The RBMK-type reactor at Chernobyl was water-cooled and graphite-moderated, a Soviet design still in use in Russia in 2011. It had no steel-reinforced-concrete containment building around the core, and such a reactor would not have been licensed in the West. When a botched safety test on April 26, 1986 sent the reactor’s power surging out of control, hydrogen and steam explosions blew the 1,000-tonne reactor lid aside and tore a hole in the roof. Pieces of core and fuel landed on the roof. The wind carried radioactive smoke and dust across Europe.

One Bronze Age wreck off Turkey began underwater archaeology

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:10 +0000

Underwater archaeology began as a discipline in 1960, when a graduate student named George Bass went down to a Bronze Age shipwreck at Cape Gelidonya, off Turkey. The Archaeological Institute of America describes it as the first excavation of an ancient wreck under the sea to be led by an archaeologist.

Image: Flickr user: I was in Turkey https://www.flickr.com/photos/iwasinturkey/ more

The lighthouse on the Cape Gelidonya, south of Antalya, Turkey, accessible by Lycian Way Location: Antalya (province)Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The student chosen to dive

Bass was not meant to be an archaeologist at all. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1932, he was the son and grandson of English professors and planned to follow them. He enrolled at Johns Hopkins University in 1950, and then a trip to Italy and its Roman ruins changed his mind.

Galton's ox: a crowd's average guess landed within one per cent

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:07 +0000

Francis Galton’s ox showed that a crowd of poor guessers can, taken together, be almost exactly right. At a livestock show, 787 people paid to guess one animal’s weight. Many guesses were far off, but their average came within one per cent of what the ox actually weighed.

Image: Charles Wellington Furse more

فرانسيس غالنونLicence: Public domain

Where did the contest happen?

The contest ran in Plymouth in 1906, at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition. A guess cost sixpence, and prizes went to whoever came closest. Galton wrote the result up in the journal Nature in 1907.

George de Mestral turned burrs stuck to his dog into Velcro

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:02 +0000

George de Mestral came home from a walk with his dog in the Alps and found the dog covered in burrs. He put a few under a microscope, saw how their tiny hooks grabbed onto loops of thread and fur, and set out to build a fastener that worked the same way.

Image: AMagill more

VelcroLicence: CC BY 2.0

A holiday that would not let go

Accounts differ on exactly when the walk happened. Smithsonian Magazine dates it to a skiing trip in 1941. Ars Technica dates it to a game-bird hunting holiday in the Jura Mountains in 1948, with de Mestral’s Irish pointer as the dog that came back covered in burdock seeds. Both agree on what followed: de Mestral examined the burrs and found each one studded with hundreds of tiny hooks that caught on anything looped, whether thread or fur.

Germany's small firms lead niche markets worldwide

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:02 +0000

Almost every company in Germany, about 99% of them, belongs to the Mittelstand, the country’s tier of small and mid-sized firms. In 2020 they employed 57.6% of the German workforce and produced 34.4% of national revenue, according to Morad Elhafed, a Battery Ventures partner who writes for Forbes. Officially the label needs fewer than 500 employees, but Winfried Weber, a professor of management at Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, says it has grown into something closer to a mindset than a headcount. There are about 3.3 million of them.

Play style decides how long a game takes to beat

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:02 +0000

Two people can buy the same game and finish it ten hours apart, and skill has little to do with it. IGN sent six staff members through the Resident Evil 4 remake and published every one of their times: the fastest reached the credits in 12 hours, the slowest in 22.

Image: qubodup more

A player works through a game with an Xbox 360 controller.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Why one game produces six different numbers

The IGN staff were not playing at different speeds so much as playing different games inside the same one. Tristan Ogilvie took just under 16 hours and still finished only 61 of the game’s 101 challenges and 15 of its 19 merchant side quests. Ronny Barrier spent about 17 hours and cleared roughly half the merchant requests. Brian Altano took the full 22 hours chasing every treasure and side quest he could find, and still had cleanup left for a second run. Jesse Gomez finished in just under 12 hours, doing many of the merchant’s side missions but leaving a few behind.

Thalidomide: the sedative that rewrote US drug law

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:14:01 +0000

Frances Oldham Kelsey, a medical officer at the US Food and Drug Administration, spent more than a year refusing to approve a German sedative called thalidomide. Her refusal changed how the agency tests and approves drugs.

Image: Olaf_Janssen more

Thalomid (thalidomide) capsules, 1999 - Science Museum London April 2013Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Chemie Grünenthal had patented thalidomide in Germany in 1954 and launched it as a sedative in 1957, marketed as gentle enough to give a pregnant woman for morning sickness. By 1958 it was licensed in the UK and much of the world, but not in the United States. The Cincinnati firm William S. Merrell applied to the FDA in late 1960, hoping to have the drug, branded Kevadon, on US shelves in time for Christmas.

Bulgaria's women's choirs sing from an open throat

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:59 +0000

Bulgaria’s state women’s choir gets its sound from what its oldest singer, Elena Bozhkova, calls “open-throat singing”. She told the Guardian it is not painful if studied from childhood. Without the technique, she warned, a singer can damage the vocal cords.

Image: dhaun more

Bulgarian Voices - AngeliteLicence: CC BY 2.0

The open throat sits on top of other devices. Bozhkova lists quarter tones, drones and unexpected rhythms as parts of the same style.

Bolivia's Law of Mother Earth gives nature legal rights

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:58 +0000

Bolivia’s Law of Mother Earth sets out 11 legal rights for nature, giving it rights equal to those of humans. They include the right to exist, the right to clean air and water, and the right not to have “cellular structure modified or genetically altered”.

Image: Diego Delso more

The Salvador Dalí Desert is located in the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve , Potosí Department , southwestern Bolivia . The place is called like this because similar landscapes have been painted by Salvador Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The law treats nature and humans as equals. It draws on an Andean world view that places the earth deity Pachamama at the centre of life. The law is part of a wider rebuild of the legal system, one that followed a change of constitution in 2009.

Cheap Broadway tickets: rush, lottery and standing room

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:58 +0000

Most Broadway shows sell cut-price tickets to people who turn up early, enter a draw, or stand. The three systems are rush, lottery and standing room. Standing room goes on sale only when a show has sold out.

Image: BroadwayTour.net more

Studio 54 on BroadwayLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

The idea of rush began with Rent, which at the height of its run sold the first two rows of the orchestra for $20 each to whoever reached the box office first on the day of the performance. Today’s rush tickets work the same way, in person or through an app such as TodayTix. A seat goes to whoever claims it first, not to whoever asks nicest.

Neolithic builders aligned monuments to the solstice sun

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:58 +0000

Two wooden posts on a hillside at Bulford, three miles from Stonehenge, may have formed the earliest known solar alignment on the Stonehenge landscape. They lined up with the spot where the midsummer sun broke the horizon.

Image: Loco Steve more

StonehengeLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Later Neolithic builders caught the solstice sun with passages and standing stones.

Ecuador's Panama hat took its name from where it was sold

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:55 +0000

The Panama hat is named after where people bought it, not where it was made. Weavers in Ecuador make it from toquilla straw, and the hats reached the wider world through Panama. Buyers named them after the country of sale, and the label stuck. Roads & Kingdoms says its more correct name is the Montecristi hat, after the town where the hats are finished and sold.

Image: Lamarquezahats more

Montecristi Hats are the most precious classic and timeless 'Panama Hats' in the world. Entirely hand woven in Montecristi - Ecuador, truly masterpieces that take weeks and even several months of weaving, by one of the fLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

When the name took hold

The sources agree on the route but not on the moment. Rough Guides dates it to the mid-19th century, when Ecuadorian straw hats traded in Panama became popular with gold prospectors. The Paris World Fair of 1855 then showed the hat to Europe as the “Panama hat”.

England's FA Cup draw handed Mansfield a tie with Arsenal

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:52 +0000

The FA Cup draw is where a small club learns whether its season will be remembered. In 2025-26 it gave League One Mansfield Town a fifth-round home tie against Arsenal, then leading the Premier League. Months earlier, it had sent eighth-tier Maldon & Tiptree to Port Vale.

Image: joncandy more

Watching the FA Cup drawLicence: CC BY-SA 2.0

Who is in the hat, and when

The first-round draw took place on Monday, October 13, 2025. It brought all 48 League One and League Two clubs into the competition alongside the 32 non-league sides that had come through qualifying. The Premier League and Championship clubs wait until the third round to join.

Ethiopia's constitution builds each state around an ethnic group

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:52 +0000

Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution divides the country into states built around ethnicity. It lets any ethnic group that meets the standard form a new one, complete with its own president and security force. The result is a federation of nations rather than a federation of provinces.

Image: Rod Waddington more

The Ethiopian countryside, divided by the constitution into regions drawn along ethnic lines.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

That design was the compromise struck after a communist regime fell and a civil war ended. Politician Yitina Belay put the choice plainly: earlier governments had tried to hold Ethiopia together as one country by force, and it cost lives. Ethnic federalism instead gave dozens of ethnic groups a chance to stay or go.

Parish birth books gave way to civil records from 1837 to 1878

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:52 +0000

A birth in England and Wales became a matter for the state on 1 July 1837, when the law began requiring a report to a local registrar rather than an entry in the parish book. Scotland followed in 1855, Ireland in 1864, and Jamaica held out until 1878, forty-one years after England and Wales started.

Some parents refused to take part at all once the English registers opened. They mistrusted the new system enough to skip it, so a birth could go unregistered.

Delays sent the first nuclear reactor to a Chicago squash court

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:51 +0000

Arthur Compton put the first nuclear reactor in an abandoned squash court under Stagg Field’s football stands because the site he had actually planned for it, west of Chicago, ran into construction delays. Rather than wait, he moved the project to the University of Chicago court where his team’s earlier experiments had already been running.

Image: davidwilson1949 more

19841104 15 Chicago StadiumLicence: CC BY 2.0

That put an untested chain reaction in a city of more than three million people, with no shielding and no way to cool the pile if it ran away. Compton later said he never told the university’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, what his team was building under the stands, and Chicago’s mayor was not told either.

Fei-Fei Li built ImageNet while her field doubted data

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:51 +0000

Fei-Fei Li labelled millions of images before anyone asked for them because she thought the field had the problem backwards. Most artificial intelligence researchers of the mid-2000s were refining algorithms and feeding them small amounts of data. “Pre-ImageNet, people did not believe in data,” Li said in an interview at the Computer History Museum. ImageNet was her bet that a big enough collection of labelled pictures would change what machines could learn.

The 1982 Falklands war left who owns the islands unsettled

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:51 +0000

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982, and Britain took them back ten weeks later. Neither event touched the underlying argument over who owns the islands, which is the same argument the two countries were having before a single shot was fired. The war changed who governed the islands day to day. It changed nothing about who has the stronger legal claim to them.

Image: John5199 more

A memorial to the Battle for Mount Harriet, fought in June 1982, on the Falkland Islands.Licence: CC BY 2.0

That gap between military outcome and legal settlement is the whole story. Britain proved it would fight to keep the islands. Argentina never withdrew its claim. Both things are still true today.

The obituary said to inspire the Nobel Peace Prize is unproven

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:51 +0000

Alfred Nobel built his fortune on explosives, and his will gave most of it away to fund five prizes, one of them for peace. The usual explanation is a newspaper’s mistake: in 1888 a French paper wrongly reported Nobel dead and printed an obituary calling him a merchant of death. Smithsonian Magazine traced that story to its source and could not find the newspaper anywhere except attached to the tale itself. History Today points instead to the self-loathing that came with a family fortune built on instruments of destruction.

The UK's £400 energy bill grant cost £12bn and has closed

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:51 +0000

The Energy Bills Support Scheme gave every UK household with a domestic electricity connection £400 off its bills over winter 2022-23. It started life as a £200 discount households would have repaid. The Office for Budget Responsibility put its final cost at £12.0 billion. It was one of eight support schemes, and the National Audit Office reported in November 2024 that all eight had closed for payments.

Image: Asurnipal more

Household electricity meters like these track the usage that support schemes are meant to help pay for.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

From a loan to a grant

Energy bills climbed fast. The price cap rose 54% in April 2022, and wholesale prices jumped again after Russia invaded Ukraine. The National Audit Office says the average household bill for gas and electricity stood at £1,277 in winter 2021-22. By early 2023 it had passed £4,000.

Zoe Slater leaves EastEnders as the Hawkins family adds Meghan

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:50 +0000

Michelle Ryan is leaving EastEnders again. A BBC spokesperson confirmed that her character, Zoe Slater, will depart the soap later in 2026, more than a year after Zoe returned to Walford.

Image: JaceMerlyn more

Cast of Eastenders winning Soap at BAFTA TV Awards May 26Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Ryan first played Zoe between 2000 and 2005. She came back two decades later for a reunion with her estranged mother, Kat Moon, played by Jessie Wallace. Asked how the exit unfolds, the spokesperson added only that the BBC does not discuss upcoming storylines.

A dual-flush toilet saves water with one valve, not two

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:49 +0000

A dual-flush toilet does not keep two tanks of water for two jobs. Most models use one cistern and a single drop valve. The buttons offer a small or a large flush. Typical volumes are four litres for the short flush and six for the full one.

Image: eliduke more

Dual-flush buttons on a toilet in Hobart, Tasmania.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What actually opens

Most dual-flush toilets use what is called a drop valve, which sits underwater at the bottom of the cistern and opens for a flush. The drop valve reached the UK market in 2001, after a change in plumbing regulations allowed it. Before that, cisterns mostly used a siphon, which forces a set volume of water up over a lip and down a tube to the pan. Siphons are now also made in dual-flush versions.

The classic smiley face cost $45, and no trademark came with it

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:48 +0000

Harvey Ball, an ad-man from Worcester, Massachusetts, drew the smiley face in its most iconic form in 1963. It took him ten minutes, and he was paid $45 for it. He never trademarked the design.

Image: Whoisjohngalt more

A plaque honoring Harvey Ball and his contribution to the Smiley Face at Boston's Logan International Airport.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Ball drew the icon for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company, which wanted an image to boost staff morale. The company produced pins with the face on them.

Congress counts the votes that name the next US president

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:42 +0000

Congress’s job on 6 January is a narrow one. The House and Senate meet together, open the sealed votes each state’s electors already cast, count them out loud, and declare who won. The vice president presides, and under the 12th Amendment has no authority to reject a state’s votes or delay the count. The role is to open envelopes and read totals, nothing more.

Image: Sen. Jeff Merkley more

Mahogany boxes containing the electoral certificates of the 2020 US Presidential election, after they had been removed from the Senate floor by staffers on Jan 6, 2021. These ceremonial mahogany ballot boxes have been usLicence: Public domain

That single afternoon is the last of several steps, not the first. Electors chosen in each state cast their votes for president in December, and those votes travel to Washington as paperwork rather than ballots. A governor signs a document naming the state’s electors, and it goes to the National Archives along with the count. Congress is not reopening the vote when it meets in January. It is checking that the documents in front of it match what each state has already certified.

Goldbach's 1742 claim about primes still has no proof

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:42 +0000

On June 7, 1742, Christian Goldbach wrote to Leonhard Euler with a claim about even numbers: take any one greater than 2, and it can be written as the sum of two primes. Euler wrote back that he regarded it as certain, though he could not prove it. Nobody else has proved it either, and the claim is still known as Goldbach’s conjecture.

Image: thekirbster more

Number theory, the branch of mathematics Goldbach wrote about in 1742.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Try it and the pattern holds instantly. Four is 2 plus 2. Six is 3 plus 3. Eight is 3 plus 5. At first, Euler thought the result trivial and answered the letter with some disdain. That dismissal did not age well.

Chile's flat school voucher sorted pupils by family income

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:41 +0000

Chile introduced a nationwide school voucher in the early 1980s, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, and paid every pupil the same flat amount wherever they enrolled. That single design choice gave schools an incentive to enrol pupils from economically advantaged families.

Image: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America more

A school choice rally, similar to the debates over Chile's own voucher system.Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

What the voucher changed

Pinochet’s government decentralised the public school system, handing control to municipalities, and introduced the flat, per-pupil payment that both municipal and non-fee-charging private schools could claim. Elite private schools that charged their own fees kept operating outside the state-funded system entirely.

Argentine adults can change legal gender with no doctor or judge

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:36 +0000

Argentina’s Gender Identity Law, adopted in 2012, lets a person’s legal gender rest on their own declaration and nothing else. Any adult can change the gender or first name on their official documents without first getting sign-off from a doctor or a judge. The same law makes sex-change surgery a legal right, paid for by public and private insurance.

What the law covers

Two things, and they sit side by side. The first is paperwork. Legal recognition turns on self-determination, so the state does not ask for a doctor’s or a judge’s approval before it updates a record.

A.S. Neill let his pupils choose whether to go to lessons at all

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:30 +0000

At Summerhill School in Suffolk, a child can walk past the maths classroom every day for two years and never once go in. A.S. Neill, who founded the school in 1921, built that choice into its design. Lessons ran, teachers stood ready, and pupils decided for themselves whether attending was worth their morning.

Image: Axel Kühn at German Wikipedia more

Mainbuilding of the Summerhill School in Leiston, Suffolk (1993)Licence: Public domain

Neill was a Scottish teacher who had grown to loathe the discipline he was expected to impose on pupils elsewhere. Rather than adjust that system, he set out to build a different one: a school where children could have as much freedom as they wanted, in an old Victorian house at Leiston.

Apple v the FBI: the US fight that one iPhone started

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:13:30 +0000

One locked phone became a national fight because the FBI asked a US court to make Apple write software that did not exist. On February 16, 2016, Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple to build a custom version of iOS for the FBI. It would switch off the phone’s auto-erase feature and let agents feed in passcodes electronically, with no added delay between guesses. Apple said that tool would be a backdoor to the iPhone, and refused.

Rivals gave Emily Atack the role she spent years chasing

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:15:08 +0000

For years Emily Atack was known for one part: Charlotte Hinchcliffe in The Inbetweeners. The Guardian described her spending years after it chasing the respect and the roles she felt she had earned. Playing Sarah Stratton in the TV version of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals changed that. She told the paper it was “the best job” of her life.

Image: vagueonthehow, derivative work by January more

Fred Palascak and Emily Atack on the 2010 Dancing on Ice tour in Manchester.Licence: CC BY 2.0

The part that stuck

Atack was 17 when she won the role of Charlotte, the popular girl in the Channel 4 school comedy. She told BBC News that audiences link an actor with the characters they play, even a fictional one. She says some men began paying her unwanted attention from a very young age.

Some skyscrapers wear their frame on the outside

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:14:48 +0000

A diagrid moves a tall building’s structure from the middle to the skin. Instead of relying mostly on a central core, the tower carries its weight and wind load through a crisscross lattice of diagonal members on its outside. The payoff can be height. In London, the architects of one diagrid tower say a conventional core-led design would have had to be 30 per cent shorter.

Image: The wub more

Eden Dock and Newfoundland, Canary Wharf, LondonLicence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Why the London tower needed one

That tower is Newfoundland, a 225-metre, 58-storey residential block in Canary Wharf by the studio Horden Cherry Lee. It stands directly above an Underground train tunnel. The ground near a tunnel can bear only so much, so the building had to be fairly light and had to pass its loads down at a few chosen points around the tunnels.

Forty-eight teams, one trophy: how the World Cup runs

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:14:42 +0000

The men’s World Cup is a tournament for national teams, held every four years, that starts with groups and ends in knockout football. Since 2026 it has taken 48 teams, split into 12 groups of four, and cut them down to one champion over 104 matches.

Before any of that, a team has to earn its place, and that takes longer than the tournament itself.

How a team qualifies

Qualifying runs through FIFA’s six regional confederations over the three years before each tournament. For 2026, five of them finished their qualifiers with the last international dates of 2025: the AFC, CAF, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL and OFC. That still left six places open when the draw for the finals took place on December 5, 2025, at the John F. Kennedy Center.

Bindi Irwin marks 20 years since Steve Irwin's death

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:14:09 +0000

Steve Irwin’s family has marked 20 years since the Crocodile Hunter died, and his daughter Bindi called him a “superhero” in a post on Instagram. Irwin died on September 4, 2006, aged 44, when a stingray’s barb pierced his chest as he filmed underwater at the Great Barrier Reef.

Image: Biatch2 more

Steve Irwin, Crocoseum, Australia Zoo in 2003Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

What his children said

Bindi, now 28, was eight when her father died. She wrote that she had always thought his legacy was wildlife conservation, and had come to see it as love instead. She said her own five-year-old daughter watches his documentaries every morning and feels loved by her “grandpa crocodile” without ever meeting him.

A ventriloquist never throws a voice, the audience's eyes do

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:22:09 +0000

A ventriloquist does not throw a voice anywhere. The sound leaves the performer’s own mouth, and the audience’s brain decides it came from the dummy. A 2011 report in The Paris Review explains that a performer can make the voice seem near, far or muffled inside a box, but the placing is done by the people watching.

Image: Egon Eagle more

Cecilia Andren, Swedish ventriloquist known as Zillah & Totte, photo taken in Nora, SwedenLicence: CC BY 3.0

Why your eyes win the argument

Researchers call it the “ventriloquist effect”. A study first noticed it in the 1890s, and a research team gave it that name in the 1960s. The finding is that what you see biases where you hear a sound coming from.

Macadamias are Australian, but the world grows Hawaiian ones

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:17:37 +0000

Macadamia is an Australian tree, but the crop the world grows is Hawaiian. Seed from Queensland reached Hawaii in the late 19th century, and Hawaii was where the nut first became a commercial crop, in the 1930s. World production is still dominated by cultivars bred there, some of them from the first generation released. Genetic work suggests most of those cultivars descend from one small wild population, perhaps one tree, near Gympie in Queensland.

No Child Left Behind tied some US school funding to test scores

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:17:37 +0000

No Child Left Behind tied part of a US school’s funding to how its pupils did on standardised tests in reading and maths. A school that kept missing its targets faced penalties that ran up to restructuring or closure.

Congress backed it by margins that now look unreal: 384 to 45 in the House of Representatives and 91 to 8 in the Senate. President George W. Bush signed it in 2002.

The 1903 Chicago theatre fire that killed over 500 people

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:14:31 +0000

On the afternoon of December 30, 1903, fire swept through the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago and killed more than 500 people. The Library of Congress records that it caused national horror and outrage, and led to widespread reform of fire codes. The building was five weeks old and had been sold to the public as “absolutely fireproof”.

Image: Henry Albert Ericson more

The Iroquois Theatre's burned auditorium after the fire.Licence: Public domain

Firefighters reached the theatre about 15 minutes after the fire began. By then, the Library of Congress guide says, nobody inside was left to save.

You dream for about two hours a night, and nobody knows why

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:17:53 +0000

Nobody has proved why we dream. Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard, told Popular Science that every dream psychologist will give you a different answer. What the field does have is a handful of serious hypotheses, each with a study or two behind it.

The dreaming itself is not in doubt. BBC Bitesize puts it at around two hours a night, often about the day just gone.

Image: Lewis Wickes Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection more

A boy asleep, photographed by Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee.Licence: Public domain

Where dreams happen in the night

Dream science started properly in 1953. That year Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago woke EEG-wired volunteers at different stages of sleep and found REM sleep. BBC Bitesize says roughly a quarter of sleep is REM, when the brain runs close to its waking level.

Why AI's water use is so hard to pin down

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:17:06 +0000

AI uses water mainly to keep hot processors cool inside data centres, and some of that water is lost to the air as it evaporates. How much any one model or query uses is another matter. The answer changes with the building, the local climate and the time of year, and there is still no agreed way to measure it.

Image: Daniel Laity, US National Archives more

Water basins beside a cooling tower, 1980. Evaporative towers of this kind are one way a data centre sheds heat.Licence: Public domain

Where the water actually goes

Chips in a data centre run hot. One common way to cool them is to pump water past them, then carry the warmed water to a cooling tower, where part of it evaporates away.

Every UN member but the US signed the children's rights treaty

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:04:52 +0000

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the treaty that sets out what every child is owed. All UN member states except the United States have signed it, according to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. It was written in 1989 and came into force in September 1990.

Image: PaoloMazzoleni more

Convention on the Rights of the ChildLicence: CC BY 2.0

Who counts as a child

The convention’s answer is plain. A child is every human being under 18. Its rights apply to each child in a state’s jurisdiction, whatever the race, sex, religion, disability or birth status of the child or the parents.

At Grasshopper Pueblo, teeth showed who came from elsewhere

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:04:22 +0000

A child’s teeth carry a chemical record of the ground they grew up on. Strontium from local rock enters the body through water and plant food, and it settles in tooth enamel as the teeth form. Enamel then stays fixed for life, so an adult’s molars still show where they lived as a small child.

Bone keeps changing. National Geographic notes that bone cells turn over constantly and pick up the strontium of wherever a person later lived. Compare the two, and you can tell whether someone moved between childhood and death.

Foil is fine in an air fryer. The heating element is the risk

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:03:11 +0000

Yes, you can. Food Republic calls foil generally fine in an air fryer, with one rule above the rest: keep it away from the heating element and the fan. The delicious. magazine food team goes further and recommends a sheet of it as a drip tray.

The worry most people bring to the question comes from the microwave. An air fryer is a different machine. Taste of Home points out that it cooks with hot air moved by a fan, not with electromagnetic radiation, so foil does not throw sparks the way it does in a microwave.

Four under-40 mathematicians took the 2026 Fields Medals

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:16:12 +0000

Four mathematicians under 40 won the 2026 Fields Medals: Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University, Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto, and Hong Wang of New York University and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. The prize, widely treated as the highest honour in mathematics, goes only to mathematicians under that age.

Image: Simons Foundation more

Yu Deng in 2026. Winner of the Fields MedalLicence: CC BY 4.0

What it rewards is written into the award itself. The London Mathematical Society notes that the medal recognises outstanding achievement for existing work and for the promise of future achievement. Two of this year’s winners show what both halves of that sentence look like.

Maeslantkering: the Dutch barrier that shuts in half an hour

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:12:06 +0000

The Maeslantkering closes by swinging two doors out from opposite banks of the Nieuwe Waterweg until they meet across a channel 360 metres wide. The first time it did so for real, the doors took half an hour to come together, the BBC reported. For that half hour and the hours after, nothing sailed in or out of Rotterdam, the largest port in Europe.

Image: Ambuj Saxena more

Delta WorksLicence: CC BY 2.0

That is the barrier’s whole design problem. It guards a shipping lane, so it must stay out of the way almost all the time. Then, on the night a surge comes, it has to shut.

News sites test two headlines and keep the one you click

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:15:11 +0000

A news site running a headline test shows a small share of its readers one version of a page and another share a different one. It then tracks what each group does and keeps the version that performs better, often while the story is still live. The headline you read may be the one that won.

Image: James Cridland more

News room at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation where journalists work to produce news to web, TV, and radio.Licence: CC BY 2.0

How big the habit is

An outside analysis in 2021 found that The New York Times A/B tests 29% of its headlines, Nieman Lab reported.

Women are taking up the blowpipe in Murano's glass furnaces

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:14:14 +0000

A Murano glassblower dips a long metal blowpipe, the ferro sbuso, into an oven running at about 1,200C and draws out a gather of molten glass. Then the work is in the hands. The maker keeps the rod turning without pause, now and then blowing down its length to swell the glowing blob. From that start the island’s masters, the maestri, make chandeliers, vases and prancing glass horses.

Image: Wknight94 more

Glassblowing demonstration at a Murano glass factory in Venezia .Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

The heat is the first obstacle. Glass needs up to 1,600C to be worked in the kiln, the BBC reports. The second is weight, because a mass of molten glass is heavy to lift and turn.

Katie Taylor retires a three-time champion at Croke Park

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:42:58 +0000

Katie Taylor closed her career on September 5 with a unanimous points win over France’s Flora Pili at Croke Park in Dublin. The victory made her a three-time undisputed world champion, and it was the first defeat of Pili’s professional career. All three judges had Taylor clear, at 100-90, 100-90 and 98-91.

Image: cormac70 from London more

Katie Taylor won Olympic lightweight gold at London 2012.Licence: CC BY 2.0

Taylor took the vacant WBC super-lightweight belt and added it to the WBA, IBF and WBO titles she already held. She also collected the IBO belt from Pili. She was 40, and she had announced beforehand that this would be her last fight. That age made her the oldest boxer, male or female, to become undisputed champion, passing the mark Bernard Hopkins set at 39.

Every Time I Die guitarist and wrestler Andy Williams dies at 48

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:42:14 +0000

Andy Williams, the founding guitarist of the Buffalo metalcore band Every Time I Die, has died at 48. He collapsed on September 5, 2026, after a tag-team match at an Enjoy Wrestling event in Millvale, Pennsylvania, where he wrestled as “The Butcher”.

Image: Illustration generated for this article more

Every Time I Die played small stages like this for most of its 24 years.Licence: Generated, no third-party rightsThis image is an illustration generated for this article, not a photograph.

What happened in Millvale

Williams and his regular partner, Jesse “The Blade” Guilmette, had just finished their match at Mr. Small’s Theater when he went down. Enjoy Wrestling said its doctors on staff gave him CPR until an ambulance came. He was taken to a local hospital and died there that night.

The Gentlemen season 3: what's confirmed so far

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:41:48 +0000

The Gentlemen is coming back for a third season, and Netflix ordered it before season two had even aired. Variety confirmed the renewal on August 24, 2026, for a run of eight episodes. Season two followed on September 3.

Image: Margaret Gardiner more

Daniel Ings and Theo James, who play Freddy and Eddie Horniman.Licence: CC BY 3.0

Guy Ritchie returns to direct, and he writes the new season with Matthew Read. In his renewal statement Ritchie said a third season “felt inevitable”.

Artemis II flew people farther from Earth than ever before

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:41:19 +0000

Artemis II lifted off on 1 April 2026 and carried four people farther from Earth than anyone had travelled before. It splashed down in the Pacific off San Diego on 10 April, closing the first crewed trip toward the Moon since the Apollo programme ended in 1972.

Image: Olga Ernst more

Artemis II at Launch Complex 39B on 18 January 2026, seen from The Gantry (observation tower)Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

It was also the first time astronauts rode NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and sat inside an Orion capsule. Artemis I had sent Orion around the Moon empty in late 2022, so this flight was the test with people aboard.

Doctors rarely find one cause for high blood pressure

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:16:20 +0000

In most people with high blood pressure, doctors cannot name one cause. The British Heart Foundation says there is usually no specific reason, only things that push the risk up. Cleveland Clinic calls this primary hypertension, where ageing, genes and family history combine over time.

A smaller group has what doctors call secondary hypertension. Here a condition, a medicine or a drug is doing the damage, often quickly.

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A blood pressure reading taken in a clinic.Licence: CC0

What the two numbers measure

Blood pressure is the push of blood against the walls of the arteries. A reading has two figures. The higher one, systolic, is the pressure while the heart pumps. The lower one, diastolic, is the pressure while it relaxes between beats.

Quick Assist lets a trusted helper fix your Windows 11 PC

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:15:23 +0000

When a Windows 11 problem beats you, the most direct help is a person who can see your screen. Quick Assist is the app Microsoft builds for that. It lets a friend, a relative, or a Microsoft support agent connect to your PC over a remote link, watch what you see, and take control if you allow it.

ZDNET’s writer, the family’s go-to fixer, calls it the first choice for support visits that happen at a distance. The writer rates it easier to use than Microsoft’s Remote Desktop.

Dogs eat grass, and the upset-stomach story doesn't hold up

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:09:03 +0000

Nobody knows for certain why dogs eat grass. Dogs Trust, the UK dog welfare charity, says there are no firm answers, largely because the behaviour has had little research. What the research does show is that grazing is common and usually harmless, and that the popular explanation, a dog making itself sick to settle its stomach, is mostly wrong.

How common is it?

Very. BBC Bitesize cites a 2008 survey of 1,500 dog owners in which nearly 70% said their dog ate plant material daily or at least weekly. Puppies and younger dogs were especially likely to do it.

Dissolved minerals crystallise into kidney stones

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:24:40 +0000

A kidney stone forms when urine carries too much of certain substances and too little water to keep them dissolved. Calcium, oxalate and uric acid are the usual culprits. Once there are too many particles for the liquid, they stick together into crystals, and the crystals grow into stones over months or years.

The US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) makes the same point about minerals. Calcium, oxalate and phosphorus sit in everyone’s urine and cause no harm at low levels. Trouble starts when the levels climb.

Disney's Snow White opened to $43m in North America

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:22:27 +0000

On August 12, 2024, Rachel Zegler thanked fans on X for pushing the first Snow White trailer to 120 million views in a day. A minute later she added a line to the same thread: “and always remember, free palestine.” Variety reported that the second post drew 8.8 million views, nearly four times the first.

Inside Disney, Variety’s sources said, executives were shocked that the star had mixed a political statement into the launch of a $270 million film. The producer, Marc Platt, flew to New York to talk to her. The post stayed up. Seven months later the film opened to $43 million in North America, below even the lowest forecasts.

A comet's tail points away from the sun, whichever way it flies

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:21:47 +0000

A comet’s tail points away from the sun, not away from wherever the comet has just been. Sunlight and the solar wind push gas and dust off the icy nucleus as it nears the sun. Neither force has anything to do with which way the comet itself is heading.

Image: NASA more

A 35mm camera was used to record this time-exposed image of Comet Hale-Bopp at sunset. As a spin-off of the more lengthy time exposure, city lights and petroleum fires are seen as distorted streaks.Licence: Public domain

That fact undoes the usual mental picture: smoke behind a chimney, or a scarf trailing a runner. A comet’s tail isn’t exhaust from its motion. It’s material the sun pushes outward, and the sun doesn’t care which way the comet happens to be going.

Rupert Lowe won't say if King Charles is a 'white Briton'

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:21:45 +0000

Rupert Lowe would not say whether King Charles counts as a “white Briton”. Nick Robinson put the question to him on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and the Great Yarmouth MP and Restore Britain leader talked round it rather than answer.

Official portrait of Rupert Lowe MP, 3:2 crop.Licence: CC BY 3.0

How the question arose

Robinson was pressing Lowe on his claim that white Britons will be a minority by 2063. The forecast Lowe relied on treats a person as a white Briton only when both parents were born in the UK. Prince Philip, the King’s late father, was born on Corfu, so by that measure Charles falls outside the group.

A US habeas petition makes the government justify detention

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:15:11 +0000

A habeas corpus petition asks a judge to order the body of a detained person brought before the court. The government then has to show a lawful basis for the detention. If it cannot, the judge can order release, or a conditional order telling the government to fix the unlawful part of the custody or let the person go.

Image: *rboed* more

US Supreme CourtLicence: CC BY 2.0

Immigration lawyers in the US are filing habeas petitions, SCOTUSblog reports. It counts more than 52,000 filed in federal district courts by lawyers for people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE now holds more than 60,000 people on a typical day, against about 40,000 in January 2025.

A barrel vault carries a roof, and shoves its walls outwards

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:14:54 +0000

A barrel vault is a round arch drawn out in depth, like a tunnel. According to ArchDaily, it carries a roof by keeping its whole curve in compression, then passing that load down and outwards into an abutment or pillar on each side.

Image: Stanzilla more

A painted barrel vault runs the length of a church nave.Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

Where the weight goes

Paula Pintos, writing in ArchDaily, describes the vault as a run of arches that press evenly through their form. The weight bears down on the crown at the top. Lower down, the curve turns that load sideways, so the base of the vault shoves outwards.

Teachers' forecasts track exam results, and can also move them

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:14:44 +0000

A teacher’s belief about a pupil does two jobs at once. It predicts how the pupil will do, and it can change how the pupil does. The second job works as a prophecy that fulfils itself in the classroom.

The mechanism runs through the pupil. What a teacher expects can shape how a child rates their own ability, and that self-judgement feeds into behaviour and marks.

The effect can reach well past school. Nicholas Papageorge and colleagues put a number on it in 2020. Their model gave the college graduation rate an elasticity of 0.12 against what teachers expected. Put plainly, a higher forecast went with a higher chance of finishing university.

Australia's parliament passed compulsory voting in under an hour

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:14:40 +0000

Australia requires every eligible citizen to turn up and hand in a ballot paper, and it has done so since the 1920s. What the law demands is narrower than its name suggests. A voter must place a ballot in the box, but nothing obliges them to back a party or a candidate.

Where the rule came from

The idea did not come from the left. Herbert Payne, a Nationalist senator from Tasmania sitting in a Coalition government, put forward a private member’s bill on 16 July 1924. He was reacting to the 1922 election, when a little under 60% of eligible Australians voted.

Greenland became Danish in three steps, from 1721 to 1953

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:14:31 +0000

Greenland became Danish in three steps. A missionary founded a settlement at Nuuk in 1721, a treaty made the island a Danish colony in 1814, and in 1953 it stopped being a colony and became part of the Kingdom of Denmark itself.

Image: Quintin Soloviev more

View of Nuuk, Greenland, near Nuuk Cathedral.Licence: CC BY 4.0

The man at the start was Hans Egede, a Danish-Norwegian Protestant missionary. A 7ft bronze of him still stands on a hill above Nuuk’s cathedral. In the late 1970s somebody covered it in red paint, the BBC’s correspondent recalls from his school days in the town.

How Darwin said atolls form, and what drilling found

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:14:23 +0000

Charles Darwin explained an atoll as the last stage of a reef around a sinking volcano. A reef first grows on the edge of a volcanic island. As the dead volcano slowly subsides, the reef keeps building upward and ends up separated from the shore by a lagoon. When the island has sunk out of sight, only a ring of reef is left round a central lagoon. That ring is the atoll.

Harry Harlow's monkeys preferred a cloth mother to a wire one

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:14:14 +0000

Harry Harlow’s infant monkeys chose the soft mother. He gave baby rhesus monkeys two stand-in mothers, one of bare wire and one wrapped in terry cloth. When only the wire one held a bottle, the babies went to it to feed. Then they hurried back to cling to the cloth one.

The set-up

Harlow ran the work at the primate laboratory of the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s and 1960s. He took infants from their mothers soon after birth. The wire figure was built from wire and wood. The other was covered in foam rubber and terry cloth. Harlow named them the “feeding mother” and the “cloth mother”.

China's Peking opera roles: one character type for a lifetime

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:13:42 +0000

A Peking opera performance is built from a fixed cast of role types rather than from individual characters. BBC Bitesize names five of them: sheng, lao sheng, huadan, qingyi and hualian. Each performer spends a working life perfecting one of these types.

Image: Just some dust more

Peking Opera: The Legend of the White SnakeLicence: CC BY 2.0

Chinese performers describe the form as “leading-role” theatre, the Guardian reported in 2015. The show exists to display the actor’s craft.

Why Jung broke with Freud, and the school he built after

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:48:59 +0000

Carl Jung left Sigmund Freud because he stopped believing two of Freud’s central claims. Freud held that human motivation is at root sexual and that the unconscious is personal to each of us. Jung came to see sex as one part of a wider life force. Below the personal unconscious he placed a deeper, shared layer. After the break he built his own school and gave it the name “analytical psychology”.