September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Semaglutide extended lifespan: 834 days against 742, in female C57BL/6 mice
Semaglutide moved the median lifespan from 742 to 834 days in 20-month-old female C57BL/6 mice and reproduced many of calorie restriction's functional benefits. On the human side, what was measured this week is a cross-section of 104,208 adults at one moment.
The Bank of Canada waits at 2.25 per cent: gasoline carries the 3 per cent while core stays close to 2 per cent
The Bank of Canada left its target for the overnight rate at 2.25 per cent; headline inflation is running near 3 per cent while the rate excluding gasoline was 2.2 per cent in July and core measures stayed close to 2 per cent. In the same week ADP reported 38,000 private-sector jobs in August and base pay of 3.0 per cent for job-stayers.
The G20 Asheville statement carries no tariff schedule
Scott Bessent said in Asheville that he had warned the US tariff wall would push Chinese goods into other markets, and that he had been right. A chair's statement backed by 19 G20 members tries to close that detour; the text still carries no tariff schedule.
The more than 95 per cent 10 September 2026 hike price is in the Nagel interview
Joachim Nagel said markets are pricing a more than 95 per cent probability of a rate increase at the European Central Bank meeting on 10 September 2026. Eurostat's August flash put annual inflation at 3.3 per cent and energy at 14.3 per cent; the July corporate composite borrowing cost held at 3.80 per cent.
The sanctions list grew faster than the bank that had to read it
The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation, part of the UK Treasury, fined Citibank's London branch 4,732,830.58 pounds, and the ground is the late review of alerts that piled up in 2022 rather than deliberate evasion. In the same week Brussels multiplies listings by name, while Washington leaves the naming to the intermediary through a sectoral determination.
Venezuela's assembly approved a 100-year oil lease whose text is unpublished
Jorge Rodriguez announced that support for the binational energy treaty between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the United States was approved. Luis Emilio Rondon said the opposition abstained and that they are obliged to see the full text of the arrangement, which covers 65 billion barrels across 17 large fields on a 100-year lease.
A 13,000 kilometre ten-sided wave over Saturn's south pole is confirmed in Hubble images
A ten-sided wave, its edges drawn by strong winds, sits over Saturn's south pole; the pattern is about 13,000 kilometres across, slightly wider than Earth. Amy Simon and colleagues examined images taken with Hubble between 2023 and 2025, and the results appeared in Science Advances. Older Hubble and Cassini imaging shows no such structure: the wave began to take shape in 2023 and looks fully developed in the frames from August and September 2025.
ADAMTSL4 switches on dormant TGF-β1 in mouse muscle and fat and advances cachexia
Helmholtz Munich researchers, with Heidelberg University and the Technical University of Munich, report that ADAMTSL4 binds the latent TGF-β1 complex and releases the active signal in muscle and fat. In mouse models of cancer cachexia ADAMTSL4 was elevated in the blood; switching it off in cachexia-inducing tumour cells left mice losing less muscle and fat, while raising it in other tumour cells turned them into cachexia-inducing tumours. In colorectal and lung cancer patients, higher ADAMTSL4 went with greater weight loss. The study appears in Cancer Discovery.
Alexa for Shopping checks whether a message really came from Amazon
Amazon has given Alexa for Shopping the job of answering whether an email, text message or call really came from the company. The assistant compares it with the billions of messages Amazon has sent globally, weighs the sender, wording, formatting and timing, and confirms only when it is certain. About 360,000 customers a year had been carrying that question to human support instead.
AlgorithmWatch finds Google's election AI Overviews thin and skewed
AlgorithmWatch used the Google Search Researcher Result API, opened under Article 40(12) of the EU Digital Services Act, to run 4,480 searches about the 2026 state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin. netzpolitik.org reports AlgorithmWatch ran almost 4,500 election-related queries in July. AI Overviews appeared on 39.1 per cent of election searches against 65.3 per cent of non-political queries. Google has shown the overviews on about half of all searches in Germany since early 2025.