0:12
Italy displays paintings from an ancient Etruscan tomb, its latest cultural acquisition
Italy on Tuesday put on display one of the best known examples of Etruscan painting, panels from a tomb that it acquired for 15 million euros ($17 million) in the Culture Ministry's buying spree of big-ticket pieces of the country's cultural heritage.
0:36
Flame plasma pyrolysis process turns spent coffee grounds into biofuel
Humans drink approximately 400 billion cups of coffee annually, leaving behind 18 million tonnes of wet coffee grounds, roughly the weight of the three Great Pyramids of Giza. These grounds, which mostly end up in landfill, have the potential to be fuel. However, their moisture poses a significant challenge. Scientists at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) have devised a technique to turn still-wet coffee grounds into high-grade biofuel in as little as 90 seconds.
Category: Energy, Engineering
1:18
Recent discoveries of ‘lost’ Mekong giant salmon carp renews hope for the fish
A large fish once feared extinct in Cambodia has been recorded in the country’s waters for the fourth time since 2020, renewing hope for the species. The Mekong giant salmon carp (Aaptosyax grypus), a critically endangered large-sized freshwater fish, was formally described from the Mekong River in 1991. Over the next 14 years, there had been only 20 formal records of the species; none since 2005. However, Bunyeth Chan, a researcher at Svay Rieng University in Cambodia, and his colleagues confirmed three observations in a 2024 study. The three carps had been caught by fishers from different parts of the lower Mekong River Basin between 2020 and 2023. “Those recent observations indicate that the species persists, and that one or more populations of A. grypus inhabit the Cambodian Mekong and its tributaries,” the researchers wrote. The same team confirmed a fourth record of the species, captured by a fisher on Nov. 27, 2025, according to a note recently published in the journal Oryx. “The rediscovery of the giant salmon carp is a reason for hope, not just for this species but for the entire Mekong ecosystem,” Chan said in a statement to Nevada Today in 2024. “The Mekong ecosystem is the most productive river on Earth, producing over two million tons of fish per year worth over $10 billion.” The Mekong giant salmon carp, endemic to the middle and lower reaches of the Mekong River basin, can grow up to 130 centimeters (more than 4 feet) in length and weigh…This article was originally published on Mongabay
3:06
Physicists and AI model Claude 'collaborate' to prove a 10-year-old jamming conjecture
A new paper in a peer‑reviewed physics journal shows a concrete proof of a ten‑year‑old conjecture about how particles jam together. The work comes from two theoretical physicists—one a Nobel laureate—and an AI system called Claude, which helped explore the math and spot the missing step.
The researchers built the proof by feeding the conjecture into Claude, letting the model generate candidate equations, then testing those against the rigorous criteria of statistical mechanics. The AI’s suggestions narrowed the search space dramatically, so the physicists could focus on the few viable paths.
The final result is a mathematically sound relation that explains the jamming transition, confirming what many had suspected but could not demonstrate. It’s a clear example of how AI can assist, rather than replace, human insight in pure theory.
Overall, the study is solidly grounded in established physics and adds a concrete piece to the puzzle of complex systems, showing that collaborative AI tools can accelerate progress on long‑standing problems.
4:24
Chip Off The Old Block
I.
Having kids has given me new appreciation for old poetry. The first time I read Song of Hiawatha, I skimmed over the part in Book 3 where Hiawatha first meets his father Mudjekeewis:
Filled with joy was Mudjekeewis
When he looked on Hiawatha,
Saw his youth rise up before him
In the face of Hiawatha,
Saw the beauty of Wenonah
From the grave rise up before him."Welcome!" said he, "Hiawatha,
To the kingdom of the West-Wind!
Long have I been waiting for you!
Youth is lovely, age is lonely,
Youth is fiery, age is frosty;
You bring back the days departed,
You bring back my youth of passion."
But this passage communicates a secret of parenthood, something I’ve never seen discussed anywhere else. By the time you’re a parent, you’re on your way to being old, ugly, tired, and cynical. I certainly was. This felt like a brute fact about the world: we all know time only moves one direction. Then I had kids, and got confronted with people who were basically me, but young and beautiful and happy. That part of them which wasn’t me was the other person I love best in the world, also transmuted into a young and beautiful and happy form. This was a completely unexpected delight which nothing besides this one fragment of poetry had ever tried to prepare me for.
I might never have noticed this if I’d only had girls. I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me. It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you.
Sometimes this is fire and passion and beauty and so on. But also, I was a bit of a weird child. I understand lots of children love trains. But probably not many get an article in the local newspaper about how train-obsessed they are. My mother still has it, framed in the guest bedroom, to embarrass me whenever I visit. Beside it are little pictures of me in my train engineer’s cap and train t-shirt and train pants holding my train book in one hand and railroad caboose lantern in the other. Every so often I will find I still remember some weird fact about the maximum speeds of various 1980s train designs, memorized before I could consistently use the potty.
Surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession. And I certainly didn’t pass it down on purpose. But my son is obsessed with trains. He describes the bars of his crib as a choo choo because, if you turn your head sideways, they look like a railroad track. He describes the wall around the neighbor’s yard as a choo choo because, if you’re standing on top of it, the pattern of bricks looks like a railroad track. He describes the armrest of his rocking chair as a choo choo, because . . . I still don’t understand this one. He insists on reading Blue Train, Green Train again and again. His favorite toy is a wooden railroad set. His favorite place to go is the train station.
(I asked some of my friends with male children how into trains they seemed, and they all answered “not particularly”. Then I mentioned this to an uncle, who informed me that my cousin is a top model train reseller on eBay. Maybe it is genetic.)
When I was young, my OCD was much more disabling. The worst was my closet door. I had to close it seven times every night before I was satisfied. It’s been decades since I was that bad; my children can’t know anything about it. But lately, my son has taken to obsessively closing the door to the cabinet in his room at night. One evening, after he must have shut it ten or twenty times, I almost yelled at him: “COME ON! YOU KNOW YOU ONLY HAVE TO DO IT SEVEN TIMES!” But maybe he doesn’t know; maybe the genetic transmission isn’t that high-fidelity.
The good news is that all of this gives me a new ally in all my little quarrels with my wife. I’m hypersensitive to being startled when I’m drifting off to sleep; I used to grumble whenever my wife made a tiny amount of noise, and she would grumble about my grumbling, and finally we learned to compromise at some level that worked for both of us. But now it’s great! Whenever my wife makes a tiny amount of noise around bedtime, my son will wake up and complain, and he literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “compromise”. As a result, everything is much quieter. Except for the screaming.
Or: I get irrationally annoyed if someone leaves a room without closing the door, but it’s fine, it would be weird to bother people about it, it would seem too confrontational to conspicuously get up and close the door, so I just take a deep breath and forget about it. Except that now I don’t have to, because my son immediately gets up from whatever he’s playing with and closes the door for me.
The bad news is that my daughter has inherited all of my wife’s traits, so now it’s 2-2. My room and my son’s room are spotless - my son refuses to sleep if there’s even one toy on the floor. My wife’s and daughter’s room look like a trailer park after a tornado.
9:49
AI-based demand forecasting creates planning reliability in the textile industry
How can sales figures be forecast more reliably, production capacities planned fully digitally, and employee know-how systematically integrated at the same time? To address this issue, Fraunhofer IWU developed an AI-powered demand forecasting tool for frottana Textil GmbH & Co. KG, the company behind the MÖVE brand. The tool intelligently analyzes historical sales data and provides companies with a robust, data-driven basis for sales and order planning; in a subsequent step, production planning could also be adapted.
10:31
Struggling Fish and Wildlife Service Celebrates Its Birthday. Meanwhile, Anti-Conservationists Trump and Burgum Pretend to Be Teddy Roosevelt
In 1939, the federal Bureau of Fisheries and Bureau of Biological Survey, which were then respectively under the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, were transferred to the Department of the Interior.
This was the first step in a reorganization effort by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and Congress to make the federal government more efficient and streamline conservation on a national scale.
On Sunday, June 30, 1940, Congress consolidated both agencies to create the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which still exists today and has been hugely successful in its mission to protect and save our wildlife.
At the time, the merging of two federal agencies was “somewhat unusual,” says EBSCO, “because the trend had long been to divide and expand government bureaucracies instead of consolidating them for greater efficiency and less duplication of effort.”
The Bureau of Fisheries’ origins date back to 1871, when Congress created the U.S. Fish Commission to address the depletion of marine fisheries. It also became responsible for managing federal fish hatcheries and stocking public lakes and rivers with “food fish.”
Its core mission was to promote commercial fishing—fish as food—on public waters, which is why it was housed under the Department of Commerce. The Bureau of Fisheries’ fish culture development eventually led to National Fish Hatchery System, which today encompasses 70 hatcheries, seven fish technology centers, and six fish health centers.
In 1885, the Department of Agriculture established a Division of Entomology, which studied “the positive effects of birds in controlling agricultural pests.” It was soon expanded to include the relationships between mammals, agriculture, and forestry and was eventually renamed the Bureau of Biological Survey.
Its activities included rodent and predator control, studying wildlife, and implementing game laws, such as the landmark Lacey Act of 1900, which criminalizes the purchase, trade, or transport of plants and wildlife harvested illegally. It’s still one of the most powerful conservation laws in the U.S.
In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt established Pelican Island in Florida as the first Federal Bird Reservation. Then managed by the Bureau of Biological Survey under the Department of Agriculture, it was the first unit of what grew into our sprawling National Wildlife Refuge System.
However, because both agencies were responsible for the management of public fish and wildlife, they didn’t belong in separate federal departments, argued President FDR.
“These two Bureaus have to do with conservation and utilization of the wildlife resources of the country, terrestrial and aquatic,” he said. “Therefore, they should be grouped under the same departmental administration, and in that Department which, more than any other, is directly responsible for the administration and conservation of the public domain.”
For that reason, they were transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1939.
Interestingly, as “part of this reorganization, the Secretary of the Interior unsuccessfully lobbied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to transfer the Forest Service from Agriculture to Interior,” the USFWS says on its website.
Nowadays, the Forest Service is still under the Department of Agriculture, where it remains responsible for forestry and timber production on public lands.
Upon the merger of Fisheries and Biological Survey into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on June 30, 1940, FDR said that the “natural areas of operation of these two bureaus frequently coincide, and their activities are interrelated and similar in character. Consolidation will eliminate duplication of work, facilitate coordination of programs, and improve service to the public.”
Since that day, the responsibilities of the USFWS have evolved and expanded greatly.
Now, the agency is responsible for habitat conservation, all kinds of research on fauna and flora, and public education. But arguably most importantly, one of its main purposes is the enforcement of wildlife protection laws, particularly the Endangered Species Act.
Additionally, the USFWS also runs the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. Located in Ashland, Oregon, it’s the only lab dedicated to wildlife-related crimes in the world.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, created by consolidating two former federal agencies, now manages more than 570 individual National Wildlife Refuges across the entire country.
Thanks to its wildlife conservation work, mandated by the Endangered Species Act, the agency has helped save numerous species from extinction in the United States. That includes such iconic animals as American alligators, wild turkeys, bald eagles, and grizzly bears.
And through its iconic Federal Duck Stamp program, it has raised over $1.3 billion to acquire and protect more than six million acres of public wetland habitat.
16:05
Chronic pain eased by a common sleep supplement
So researchers looked at whether melatonin, a common sleep supplement, could help with chronic pain. They found that it did seem to ease pain in people with chronic conditions. This is interesting because it could potentially reduce the need for pain medications that have more risks, like opioids. The study suggests that melatonin might be a useful addition to treatment plans for chronic pain, but it's not a replacement for other treatments.
The idea behind this is that melatonin can affect the way the body processes pain signals. It's not entirely clear how it works, but the study found that people taking melatonin reported less pain. This was a small study, so more research is needed to confirm the findings. But if it holds up, it could be a useful option for people with chronic pain who are looking for alternative treatments.
It's worth noting that melatonin is generally considered safe and is often used to help with sleep. So, if it does turn out to be helpful for chronic pain, it could be a relatively low-risk option. Of course, anyone considering taking melatonin for pain should talk to their doctor first, especially if they're already taking other medications. But overall, this is a promising area of research that could potentially lead to new treatment options for people with chronic pain.
17:37
Ordinary Mysteries: Stories from an Unfinished Town (Part Three)
These are stories about ordinary people in an ordinary town.
No one is the hero.
No one possesses the answers.
They gather in diners, churches, waiting rooms, living rooms, and funeral homes. They fall in love, disappoint one another, bury parents, worry about their children, question old beliefs, laugh unexpectedly, and continue with the difficult work of being human.
Their lives overlap. Their stories do not proceed in straight lines.
Like life itself, they remain unfinished.
This is the third story in the Ordinary Mysteries series. If you’d like to meet these characters from the beginning, you can read Part One, The Thursday Table; and Part Two, Maria’s Thursday.
Tyler measured almost everything.
Boards.
Doorways.
Concrete forms.
Roof pitches.
The distance between fence posts.
He trusted a tape measure more than memory because wood had no interest in opinions. It was either square or it wasn’t. A board was either long enough or it wasn’t. If something didn’t fit, there was usually a reason, and if there was a reason, there was usually a way to fix it.
People, he had discovered, were built differently.
By the time Thursday arrived, his shoulders carried the familiar ache that came from lifting things all week no one was supposed to lift alone. Sawdust still clung to the cuffs of his jeans when he climbed the steps to Sam’s diner. He brushed at it absentmindedly before opening the door.
The bell announced him.
“There he is,” Sam called. “Bringing half the lumberyard with him.”
“It follows me.”
“You’re sweeping before you sit down.”
Tyler laughed.
“I knew there was a catch.”
The others were already gathered beneath the old photograph of the train depot.
Harold folded his newspaper.
Elaine was explaining why ceiling fans had become unnecessarily complicated.
Jenna had only three essays left in her stack and looked as though she intended to celebrate the occasion.
Maria wrapped both hands around her coffee.
Sophie was watching a little boy outside pressing his face against the bakery window.
Tyler pulled out his chair.
“Morning.”
The greetings came back in different voices.
No ceremony.
Just recognition.
Sam arrived with coffee before Tyler had settled.
“You’ll want the usual.”
“I usually do.”
Outside, the boy’s mother gently redirected him from the pastries toward whatever appointment awaited them. He looked back twice before disappearing around the corner.
Elaine noticed Sophie watching.
“You thinking about having children someday?”
Sophie laughed.
“I can barely keep a houseplant alive.”
“Fair.”
The conversation wandered somewhere else.
It usually did.
Nobody seemed interested in winning discussions. They simply followed them until another one appeared.
Tyler appreciated that.
Construction sites were rarely like that.
Every day someone wanted certainty.
How long?
How much?
Will it hold?
Can you guarantee it?
He understood why.
People wanted homes to feel permanent.
The strange thing was that permanence required constant repair.
Roofs aged.
Paint cracked.
Foundations shifted.
Wood expanded through humid summers and contracted again in winter.
Nothing stayed finished.
Not even houses.
Especially not houses.
Sam set a plate of eggs in front of him.
“You’ve gone quiet.”
“Thinking.”
“That’s usually expensive.”
Tyler smiled.
“Not this time.”
Harold looked over his glasses.
“What about?”
Tyler hesitated.
He wasn’t accustomed to speaking about thoughts that had no practical use.
“I finished a porch yesterday.”
Everyone waited.
“The homeowner stood there looking at it after we’d packed the truck.”
He took a sip of coffee.
“She said it looked exactly like the porch her husband always wanted.”
No one interrupted.
“He died last year.”
The table remained still.
“She thanked me like I’d given something back.”
He looked down at his hands.
“I just built a porch.”
Maria shook her head almost imperceptibly.
“No.”
Tyler looked at her.
“You built the place where she’ll drink coffee in the morning.”
The sentence rested gently between them.
Harold stared through the front window.
Elaine looked down into her cup.
Even Sam paused behind the counter before returning to the register.
Outside, a breeze lifted the leaves of the maple tree across the street.
22:21
Science Integrity And The Worst Offenders Of All Time
In the world of science, the main process we have to deal with seriously bad research is called retraction. This hearkens back to the old days of scientific publishing when articles were in paper journals read by a small handful of academics. They would issue a retraction notice in the newest issue of the journal to let everyone know that the editors no longer trusted an article for whatever reason—obviously, in paper journals, you couldn’t simply remove everyone’s access to the article from a previous issue.
These days, the process is much simpler, because most scientific articles are published online. While some journals do still exist in print, and will issue old-style retractions, most will simply update the online page to note that the journal has retracted the paper and slap a big red RETRACTED watermark on the PDF. This process is used for everything from studies with serious mathematical errors to plagiarism to numeric fabrication—it’s mostly reserved for the biggest mistakes or crimes of academia.
I’ve written before about how this whole process is a bit broken. It often takes years for journals to do anything about even the most obvious misconduct, and sometimes they simply never do. I was once told by an editor that he wouldn’t retract a paper even after the author sent through a clearly fake dataset because he thought readers would still be interested in the work.
It’s a system that relies on trust to the point that you might call it painfully naive.
But what about the worst of the worst? People who’ve had dozens of retractions for all sorts of problematic issues, and whose papers are undeniably unreliable? Not all of their work gets retracted, largely due to the endless swathe of red tape involved, but surely no one would cite their work?
We set out to look at precisely that question. The answer is a bit depressing.
