September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
London's share reached 32.1 per cent while the reserve stayed at 612.4 tonnes
De Nederlandsche Bank moved approximately 86 tonnes of gold to London between March and August, and the Dutch holding stayed at 612.4 tonnes. What changed is the address and the bar standard, the two things that set how quickly an ounce can be turned into something else.
OFAC's Venezuela licences reach coal and gold, and stop at the contract
Washington authorised Venezuelan coal, minerals and gold on 2 September through three amended general licences. The third one goes as far as a contingent contract, so the capital behind it remains subject to a further permission, while the oil leg travels on its own announcements.
OpenAI can absorb 1 billion dollars; the developers using Cursor were not asked
OpenAI ended a partnership it had valued at more than 1 billion dollars a year because it no longer trusts Cursor's new owner. The decision belonged to the owners on both sides, and the developers who had built their working day around that editor were not part of it.
Rubio's Nicaragua plan runs through an organisation Managua already quit
Nicaragua left the Organization of American States in 2022, so the meeting Washington now points to can deliver only what the members who stayed choose to do on their own. Coalition arithmetic, rather than enforcement, is the test of Rubio's announcement.
The AI line at Broadcom grew 221 per cent, the guided margin fell
Third-quarter AI semiconductor revenue reached 16.7 billion dollars and the company guides the fourth quarter to 21.7 billion dollars. In the same guidance the non-GAAP operating margin is approximately 66 per cent of projected revenue, below the ratio this quarter's own two figures produce. The mix is doing the work, and it is worth naming which side of it.
The chimpanzee result rides on four species ordered the same way twice
A voice-selective patch of human temporal cortex answered chimpanzee calls more strongly than bonobo or macaque calls in 23 listeners. With four species in the set, phylogenetic distance and acoustic distance run in nearly the same order, and the study's three acoustic covariate models narrow that overlap without closing it. The authors say so themselves, which is a good reason to take the result seriously.
The oxygen sits on top, and the copper underneath measures plus 0.3
Before copper turns into copper oxide it passes through an ordered copper and oxygen surface structure, and in that layer the metal measures an oxidation state of about plus 0.3, close to metallic. A computational screen published in npj Computational Materials leaves three of 56 high-entropy MBene compositions taking carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide with no added voltage — as calculations, on surfaces nobody has measured.
The robotaxi arrives at the standard fare, and the person at the wheel is in the licence
In London a rider ticks a preference in the app, pays a standard UberX fare and may be matched with one of 15 licensed cars. No published figure shows how often the supervisor takes the wheel.
The same forest soil ate one bioplastic and stalled on another
A bioplastic's fate is decided by a chemical bond meeting an enzyme in a particular soil. Buried in forest humus at Konstanz, two long-chain polyesters gave up 50 per cent to 58 per cent of their carbon by day 250 while a third stopped near 22 per cent, and the enzyme doing the work turned out to hydrolyse penicillin as well.
Türkiye's August basket took 0.22 per cent from food and 4.82 per cent from transport
The annual rate came down to 31.51 per cent, and the month's increase gathered in transport and housing. For a household whose budget is dominated by rent, bills and the journey to work, the rate that lands is above the published one; and the August basket closed before the fuel tax rose on 1 September.