The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, in a London AI lab…
DeepMind's open-source WeatherNext model tracks hurricanes accurately even when it is fed deliberately coarsened, low-resolution data — a result that has puzzled the forecasters who assumed fine-grained inputs were the whole game. If it holds, cyclone warnings stop being something only countries with supercomputers can produce.
Swarms of millimetre-scale robots have been set loose to gather microplastics out of soil and water, hunting particles too small and too dispersed for filters or nets. The pollution problem is now measured in fragments under five millimetres, so the cleanup crew has been scaled to match.
Meanwhile, in a bird orientation lab…
Migratory birds exposed to pulsed radiofrequency magnetic fields lost their bearings in experiments, suggesting the compass they read from Earth's own field can be jammed by the electromagnetic noise humans now broadcast everywhere. The pulses were weak — far below the strength that heats tissue.
The dodo's reputation for stupidity appears to be slander invented by the sailors who ate it. New work on its skull and brain suggests a bird with ordinary pigeon smarts, and possibly the only member of its group to live in the dark.
Meanwhile, in a fruit fly's gut…
Fruit fly gut cells replace themselves faster when food is scarce, and the trigger is not any particular nutrient — it is how watery and dilute the inside of the cell becomes. Hunger, at the cellular level, may simply be a reading of osmotic pressure.
Meanwhile, in a Costa Rican coffee farm…
A tiny greenish nocturnal frog previously unknown to science has turned up in Costa Rica's coffee plantations, apparently thriving among the shrubs. Its chosen habitat is also its hazard: the agrochemicals sprayed on the crop.
Meanwhile, in the Moon's shadow…
Someone has built a free, open-source interactive map for the total solar eclipse on 12 August, so anyone can see exactly what the Moon will cover from their own patch of ground. Parts of the United States get a bite out of the Sun; the full shadow falls elsewhere.
Across 1,758 butterfly species — a tenth of all known butterflies — 80% have pushed their ranges into new territory, and 79% of the recorded shifts trace to climate change and extreme weather. Expansion is not the whole story: 27% also lost ground, and a fifth moved up or down in elevation.
Os8088 is a graphical, Mac-like operating system written to run on IBM XT-class machines — hardware with an 8088 processor and no business supporting windows, menus or a mouse pointer. It boots on a 286 and 386 too.
Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine…
For two decades Oleksiy Yukov retrieved the bodies of dead soldiers from Ukrainian battlefields and returned them to their families, Russians included. He was killed on a recovery mission after stepping on a landmine.