August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
2 launchers on Larak Island, then 8 missiles in Jordan's airspace
A US official said the strike hit 2 launchers on Iran's Larak Island, the first known American strike on Iran since late July. Centcom spokesman Tim Hawkins said Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces had been observed preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. Jordan's armed forces said air defence systems intercepted 8 missiles at dawn on Monday; Iran's army said it attacked the United Arab Emirates' Al Minhad air base with drones, and the United Arab Emirates has not confirmed the claim.
9 GWh from 2027, against a 20 GWh target this year
SK On signed a five-year deal to supply NeoVolta Power with 9 GWh of lithium iron phosphate cells from 2027 and did not disclose the value. Industry estimates put it at about 1.09 billion dollars. This year's target of more than 20 GWh of storage orders has to be filled elsewhere.
A no-confidence motion keeps Wale from Palau and the 55th Pacific Islands Forum
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale cancelled his appearance at the 55th Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting after home affairs minister Manasseh Maelanga lodged a no-confidence motion at home. Fiji's Sitiveni Rabuka, Vanuatu's Jotham Napat and Samoa's La'auli Leuatea Schmidt are also staying away; Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed he will attend. Australia had hoped for further security treaty talks on the margins, and Oliver Nobetau of the Lowy Institute said the withdrawals dilute what the meeting can produce before Cop31 in November.
A xenon-filled fiber converts quantum light in a UCLA-led model; phase stayed above 0.95
Researchers at UCLA, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa modelled a hollow capillary fiber filled with xenon gas. Through four-wave mixing the fiber moves light between the wavelengths different quantum technologies need. In the calculations reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus, phase correlations stayed above 0.95 and rose above 0.99 under favourable conditions. The three modelled cases were conversion from 1,030 nanometres to 343, from 1,550 to 308 and from 1,550 to 516, with efficiencies of up to 28 per cent, up to 8.4 per cent and about 10.8 per cent. The authors report a trade-off: the conditions that raise conversion efficiency also raise phase distortion. The work is computational and contains no direct measurement of the converted quantum states.
ASPIRED reached the sample it promised and its primary endpoint still did not move
Three trials in two Hot Line sessions in Munich found no difference on their primary endpoint. Only one of them had reached the patient count and the power it declared in advance, and its null is the one worth reading.
Brent at 90.07 dollars beside 7 million barrels of Kharg capacity
Brent crude traded at 90.07 dollars a barrel on Monday morning in the Gulf, up 2.24 per cent, after US forces struck rocket launchers on Larak Island near the Strait of Hormuz. Kharg Island, which handles about 90 per cent of Iran's oil exports, has a loading capacity of 7 million barrels a day and storage for 30 million barrels.
Copilot's website and the Bing button now require a sign-in
Users who go to copilot.microsoft.com or press the Copilot button on the Bing homepage must now sign in. Copilot Search answers inside Bing search results remain visible without signing in.
El Niño runs roughly 36 per cent stronger; the series that can test it runs 75 years
A team led by Julia Cole at the University of Michigan reconstructed about 900 years of sea temperature from 29 fossil corals in the Galápagos Islands. The study, published in Science, puts El Niño events roughly 36 per cent stronger than before the industrial era, with 16 per cent of that rise in the past 40 years. The instrumental series that can test the measurement reaches back only about 75 years. Michael Mann and John Bruno see a decline in peak water temperatures in recent Galápagos measurements; Cole says El Niño's own swings can hide a trend across a short window. The event now under way is running 2.7 degrees Celsius above normal.
Greece writes technology transfer into Achilles Shield and pays for systems already tested in combat
Israel's defence ministry put the Achilles Shield contract at 3 billion euros and presented it as its largest defence export deal with Greece. The system list matters less than two terms around it: Greece takes transfers of technology and expertise into its own industry, and the 28 billion euro programme the contract belongs to is being spread across Israeli, American, French and Italian suppliers.
Leap second faces an October vote; the replacement is a leap hour of 3,600 seconds
Member states of the General Conference on Weights and Measures take a proposal to end the leap second immediately to a vote at their 28th meeting outside Paris on 13-15 October. An extra second has been added to Coordinated Universal Time 27 times since the 1970s, most recently in 2016, to keep atomic clocks in step with the Earth's uneven rotation. The practice was already set to stop in 2035. The proposed replacement is a leap hour, which aligns atomic time with the Earth's rotation only once the gap between them reaches 3,600 seconds. What moves the timetable now is the prospect of a negative leap second, in which clocks skip a second instead of gaining one; that has never been done. Google spreads the extra second across the day, and some exchanges shift trading hours to avoid a minute lasting 61 seconds. Georgette Macdonald, director-general of the Metrology Research Centre in Halifax, Canada, describes the result as a discontinuity in a system that is meant to be continuous.