Of hundreds of occupations tracked in death records, taxi and ambulance drivers show among the lowest rates of dying from Alzheimer's disease. The proposed explanation is that a career spent building and rebuilding mental maps of a city keeps the hippocampus, the first region the disease usually attacks, unusually busy. It is a correlation, not a prescription, but it is a strange and specific one.
If dark matter particles occasionally decay into gravitons, the giant filaments of matter strung across the universe should be very slightly lighter than they ought to be. A team has used exactly that logic to set the first limits on how often such a decay could happen. It is a way of weighing the invisible by noticing what is missing.
Dogs have been buried alongside people for 14,000 years, and the shapes they took differ region by region in ways that track the humans who kept them: hunting partners here, herders there, haulers somewhere colder. Researchers pulling together archaeology, genetics and folklore argue the co-evolution ran in both directions. No other animal has followed us so closely for so long.
Squeezing a fuel-cell catalyst under controlled mechanical pressure changes its atomic spacing enough that it performs like pure platinum while containing a quarter as much. Platinum cost is one of the main reasons hydrogen fuel cells remain expensive. The trick here is not new chemistry but geometry: compress the lattice, and the surface behaves differently.
The Perseids return this week, and the Northern Hemisphere gets one of the better viewing years: dark skies at the peak, with the debris trail of comet Swift-Tuttle burning up at around 60 kilometres per second. No equipment helps. Lie back, let your eyes adjust for twenty minutes, and look away from the radiant.
A tool converts satellite imagery into printable gores, the pointed petal shapes that cartographers have used since the 1500s to wrap a flat sheet around a sphere. Print, cut, fold, and you have a globe of the actual Earth as photographed from orbit. The geometry problem it solves is the same one Mercator was wrestling with.
Cracks are usually the failure mode in thin films. Here researchers deliberately induce them in a controlled pattern, then use the resulting channels as moulds to deposit quantum dots into pixels far smaller than conventional printing allows. Breakage becomes the printing press.
The Philippines' outsourcing industry, long named as the sector AI would erase first, is still hiring. Call centres and back offices there have absorbed the tools instead of being replaced by them, with agents handling the cases the software escalates. It is one of the clearest real-world tests of the automation prediction so far, and the prediction is losing.
Marc Padeu paints Cameroonian cocoa workers in the compositions of Renaissance altarpieces: last suppers held at plantation tables, sacred groupings staged among the trees his hometown depends on. The show opening in London puts the borrowed grammar of Italian religious painting to work on the economics of chocolate.
Count Binface, a satirical candidate who campaigns dressed as a wheelie bin, is standing against Nigel Farage in Clacton. Beneath the costume is Jon Harvey, an Oxford-educated comedian whose manifesto pledges have included capping croissant prices and renaming the ravens at the Tower of London. British ballot papers have permitted this sort of thing for decades.