September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Real hourly pay fell 0.1 per cent in August; the week lengthened 0.3 per cent
Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 per cent in August and prices rose 0.4 per cent, so hourly pay lost ground in real terms. The weekly figure still improved by 0.2 per cent, because the average week lengthened 0.3 per cent. The improvement is in hours worked, and the twelve-month numbers say the same thing.
Six ways to estimate evaporative demand, and a sixfold gap in the drying trend
One drought index, two families of formula for the atmosphere's evaporative demand, and a drying trend that differs sixfold between them. The acceleration reported earlier shows up under neither.
Svalbard: allied hulls were there while the rehearsal was still running
Britain, Norway and the United States tracked Russian submarines rehearsing a cable attack near Svalbard and pushed them out before the drill finished. The capability remains, the rehearsal was cut short.
The EU list needs one more unanimous vote; the Tartus convoy needed none
Individual Russia listings lapse on 15 September unless every EU government renews them together, and this week France joined Slovakia in asking for one name to come off the list first. While that vote waits for Monday, a sanctioned cargo ship and a sanctioned tanker crossed the Mediterranean with their transponders switched off and reached Tartus, three Royal Navy vessels and an Italian frigate keeping them in sight.
The gas bill split itself between a postponed appointment and a shortened shift
Ipsos found 23 per cent of Europeans postponing a medical appointment to pay energy and fuel bills. The same gas price shows up at Bridgnorth Aluminium as 18 per cent of total costs. One bill, two places for it to land, and neither of them appears in the headline rate.
The Security Council held the agenda by 11 to 2, and the Iran committee still has no chair
A procedural vote kept the Iran sanctions item on the Council's agenda. The same arithmetic has not produced a chair for the 1737 committee or a panel of experts, and the day's enforcement came from a national list instead.
Two screens had to agree, and kraken and Alkbh7 were what was left
Fifty generations of selection produced a fly about five times likelier to survive octanoic acid, and a genomic signal so broad that two statistical tests on the same sequences returned 1,238 and 174 candidate genes. Cutting that to two took a second screen with a blind spot of its own.
Which hand does the 65 per cent describe?
Four groups report touch-learning results in the same week, and every headline number comes from the group's own hand and its own task list. The one effort that changes the robot body reports no comparable success rate at all.
A Hell Creek coprolite keeps a diving bird's feathers in three dimensions
A walnut-sized coprolite, fossilised dung collected in 2016 from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, in the United States, holds feathers together with gar scales and leg bones of a diving hesperornithiform bird. Two feathers show a square shaft with a sponge-like core, a pairing known in living birds and their nearest ancestors. The specimen records one predator's meal. Whether that plumage shaped which lineages came through the extinction is the researchers' interpretation.
Adobe lifts quarterly revenue to 6.76 billion dollars as AI subscriptions accelerate
Adobe lifted fiscal 2026 third-quarter revenue 13 per cent to 6.76 billion dollars, or 12 per cent in constant currency. Annualised recurring revenue from AI-first products grew more than 150 per cent, and total annualised recurring revenue reached 27.50 billion dollars. The Verge recorded the same 6.76 billion dollar quarter and more than 1 billion monthly active users across the software suite.