August 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
What removed the ads, the review or the question?
Meta's ad library shows the 32 ads, who they were shown to and how long they ran. What it does not show is why the review before publication let them through. The ads came down after Wired asked.
What would it take to get from six mice to a patient with MRSA?
MOTS-c punctures bacterial membranes and reprogrammes monocytes at the same time. Both claims rest on groups of five and six animals, and on a cell line the reviewers themselves want replaced.
A 320-metre strike may have buried Deimos; a buried blast triples the shove
A Hera-fed simulation has a 320-metre asteroid draping Deimos in debris after a 45-degree strike. A peer-reviewed model finds a 3-megaton warhead delivers at least 30 centimetres per second in a 30-metre crater.
A spinal cuff reads the body as a magnetic field flips a gene switch
A flexible cuff read movement, sensory and organ signals from rodent spinal cords; a magnetic field switched on gene expression in mice. ULTRA’s three-dimensional scans separated glioma margins in human tissue better than flat sections. All remain early-stage.
A strike kills 10 at Pechenigy as Moscow manages the war's foreign costs
A Russian rocket strike killed 10 people in Pechenigy as 620 drones headed for the Moscow region. Concurrently, Russia faced questions from Accra about recruited citizens and warned London over the use of British-made drones.
After the free year ended, Perplexity kept most of its Indian users
After the Airtel campaign ended, Perplexity still had 14 million monthly users in India. Firefox Smart Window now brings back pages already visited, and AI Observatory finds about 48 per cent of chat traffic sits outside the work filter.
AMD agents clear most driver issues while a research redo fails author review
AMD says agents now close more than 75 per cent of a driver issue queue. A Princeton redo of two unpublished NeurIPS papers failed author review. Claude Code added an unmeasured design step before the code.
Atlantic circulation shapes both the heat budget and the deep ocean’s oxygen supply
Models find weaker Atlantic circulation traps more ocean heat; moored sensors measured over 27 teramoles of oxygen flowing from the Labrador Sea into the depths yearly. Regional data still struggle to separate North Atlantic warming from natural variability.
Atlantic circulation, regional fingerprints and Alpine butterflies trace a warming planet
Researchers linked weaker Atlantic circulation to extra retained heat, mapped human warming across most regions since 1850, and found Alpine butterflies moving uphill rather than adapting in place.
Canada's tariff talks stall as Algoma's furnace outage adds an industrial shock
Canada-US talks ended without an agreement two days before new duties, while a turbine fault stopped Algoma Steel's electric arc furnace and threatened shipments.