The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, in an Australian library…
A copy of "The Antiquities of Athens" checked out in the 1870s has just come back to the library it vanished from, roughly 150 years late. At the old daily rate the fine would run past $20,000; staff are waiving it and calling the return a redemption.
Meanwhile, in a lab in Houston…
Engineers built an implant of living cells that release timing signals on cue, pushing the body's internal clock onto a new schedule faster than daylight alone can. In animals it shortened the days-long fog of a time-zone jump or a shift change.
Meanwhile, in low Earth orbit…
Constipation is a well-documented hazard of spaceflight, and nobody knew why. Blood samples from astronauts now point to how the gut's own signalling changes when gravity stops pulling its contents downward.
Fully homomorphic encryption lets a computer do arithmetic on data it cannot read, and for decades it was too slow to use for anything. Google says it is now fast enough to run AI models over encrypted inputs, so the server answering your query never sees the query.
Meanwhile, off the coast of Namibia…
Blue and fin whales are turning up again off Namibia and South Africa's west coast, where industrial whaling had all but erased them. Of six decades of confirmed sightings and strandings compiled by researchers, 95 percent came after 2012.
Meanwhile, above the clouds off Iceland…
Heavy cloud off Iceland would have wrecked the eclipse observation, so the team flew above it: a WB-57 jet at 50,000 feet chasing the Moon's shadow, recording the solar corona in nine wavelengths from visible to infrared. Ground observers under the same clouds saw nothing.
Meanwhile, in a lab at Cornell…
A genetically engineered bacterium chews through one of the planet's most common minerals fast enough to be useful, locking up carbon dioxide as it goes and leaving behind the rare elements used in EV batteries. Two problems, one microbe.
Meanwhile, in the constellation Cygnus…
The Cygnus Bubble is a cloud of ultra-high-energy gamma rays thousands of light-years wide, usually credited to a nearby nursery of massive stars. A new analysis argues its most energetic light fits something smaller and nastier: a microquasar, a black hole or neutron star firing jets as it feeds.
Meanwhile, off Flores island in Indonesia…
A magnitude 7.7 quake struck off Flores island early Saturday, collapsing buildings and prompting a tsunami warning that sent coastal residents uphill in the dark. At least 20 people have died and search teams expect the toll to rise.
Chinese texts describe brass-making in the 10th century, but the oldest physical proof lagged the writing by nearly 600 years. Crucibles unearthed in Guangzhou finally close the gap, carrying residue from the alloying of copper and zinc.