The most interesting things that happened in the last 12 hours, on Earth and off it.
Meanwhile, at a collider in Beijing…
Physicists say they have finally cornered a particle made of nothing but force: a glueball, bound purely from the gluons that normally glue quarks together. It was predicted decades ago and has spent that time hiding among lookalike particles in collider debris.
Meanwhile, in rattlesnake blood…
Rattlesnakes carry their own antidote. A mixture of proteins in their blood kept mice alive after doses of venom that should have killed them, hinting at a snakebite treatment sourced from the snake itself.
Meanwhile, on a drying stretch of the Danube…
As the Danube dropped to record lows, the receding water gave up a remarkably intact motorcycle, human remains and identification tags from the Second World War. Drought has been peeling back the riverbed all summer, and the river is handing over a battlefield it swallowed 80 years ago.
Meanwhile, on the ancient seafloor…
Complex animal life may owe something to the invention of the fecal pellet. Compact droppings sink far faster than loose organic haze, and a new study argues that this plumbing change moved carbon out of the water column and helped make ancient seas breathable enough for big, energetic bodies.
Meanwhile, on the Sun's surface…
New images show whirlpools turning in the Sun's visible surface, seen directly for the first time. The vortices appear to braid magnetic field lines together, which may be how energy piles up before a flare and how the outer atmosphere ends up millions of degrees hotter than the surface below it.
Meanwhile, on the Olympic Peninsula…
Where pumas prowl, deer stay off the road. On Washington's Olympic Peninsula, five years of data showed a 67 percent drop in the chance of a deer-vehicle collision in cat territory, and 76 percent fewer wrecks overall, apparently because deer avoid open ground where they can be ambushed.
Meanwhile, in the Helix Nebula…
Deep imaging of the Helix Nebula found dozens of curved shock waves in its outskirts, where shells of gas flung off a dying Sun-like star are breaking into fragments and racing outward. The shapes show the fragments being stripped and shredded, mixing back into interstellar space over roughly 10,000 years.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo…
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is on course to become the deadliest on record, surpassing the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016 if it keeps its current pace. The WHO's warning is an extrapolation, not a count, which is why it is being made now.
Meanwhile, in the mathematics of fractals…
A graduate student has proved an uncertainty principle for fractals, showing that a quantum wave spread over an infinitely crinkled set cannot be sharply localized in both position and momentum. Colleagues are calling it foundational: it welds together quantum mechanics, chaos and fractal geometry, three fields that rarely share a page.
Meanwhile, in a production database…
Engineers chasing corrupted databases traced the damage to a bug that had been sitting in SQLite, one of the most widely deployed pieces of software on Earth, for 16 years. It involved resetting the write-ahead log at exactly the wrong moment, a combination nobody had managed to hit until now.