Science

The Oldest Evidence of Habitual Drug Use Rests on Two Sets of Teeth

Arecoline in the dental calculus of two Sulawesi hunter-gatherers, 15,000 years apart. Oldest evidence is a statement about what survives, not about when people started.

11 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

The standard behind your headphone warning advises against the warning

Your iPhone's 80 dB for 40 hours limit comes from ITU-T H.870, implementing WHO recommendations. That standard says dose estimates can be uncertain by hundreds of percent, advises against signalling 'safe' from them, and states that auto-reducing the volume at 100% is not fully protective.

11 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

A TDS meter cannot measure total dissolved solids

Total dissolved solids is defined as a weight — filter, evaporate, weigh the residue at 180 °C. A handheld pen measures electrical conductivity and multiplies by a factor chosen to mimic an assumed water chemistry. Published factors run 0.50 to 0.82, so one sample can read 110 or 180 ppm depending on which curve the meter is set to.

11 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

The Fluid Blowup Proofs Are Machine-Checkable. The Competing Claim Was a Press Call.

Buckmaster and Alpöge published three preprints with Lean formalisations anyone can run. The results are for forced equations, and they are not the Millennium Prize problem.

9 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

One Event at 2.6 Sigma Is Not a Dark Matter Discovery, and LZ Says So

A single interaction in ten tonnes of xenon that the background model cannot easily place. The collaboration's spokesperson: we are not claiming to have seen dark matter.

7 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

One sky, three verdicts: why Singapore says unhealthy and Malaysia says moderate

The same 70 micrograms of fine particulate reads 116 on Singapore's PSI, 96 on Malaysia's API and 161 on the US AQI. Almost all of the difference sits in one number — the concentration each treats as index 100 — and Malaysia's is 75.5, which is 2.16 times its own national standard and a WHO interim target rather than a destination.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

NASA's Roman Telescope Has Hubble's Mirror and a Hundred Times the Field

Launched 30 August and en route to L2, with first images expected in early 2027. It is a survey instrument, so the output that matters is a catalogue, not a picture.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read

Science

China's New Reusable Rocket Reached Orbit and Skipped the Recovery Attempt

Galactic Energy's Pallas-1 flew from Jiuquan on 1 September and delivered its payload. The booster came down uncontrolled, because reuse testing starts later.

4 Sep 2026 · 7 min read

Science

Your CO2 monitor's red line is a 19th-century number, and it is drifting

The 1000 ppm line is Pettenkofer's, proposed in the 19th century as a proxy for whether a room smelled stuffy. ASHRAE removed it from its standard in the 1990s and says in print that it sets no CO2 limit at all. Europe writes its criteria as ppm above outdoors instead — so as outdoor CO2 rises, the fixed line is quietly changing sides, and there is a date on it.

4 Sep 2026 · 7 min read

Science

Leap seconds end on 20 May 2027, and the Earth has already turned around

The committee that has inserted 27 leap seconds since 1972 is proposing to stop, and to let clock time drift up to an hour from solar time. We ran the projection everyone runs from the published rotation data — and then found it obsolete, because the trend it depends on reversed sign within eight months of the last usable data point.

3 Sep 2026 · 8 min read