Sunday, 27 September 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
Gladiolus dalenii (parrot gladiolus) flower in the rain. About 4–5 cm (1.6–2.0 in) across. Garden plant in Ooty, The Nilgiris, south India. Focus-stack of 38 images.
Scientists walk through what a Yellowstone super-eruption would actually look like hour by hour — from the first swarm of tiny quakes to global food prices and a decade of ash — and find that the hard part is not the magma but moving twenty million people.
Internal figures from a frontier lab show AI completing research tasks that take humans about 15 minutes, while benchmarks and forecasts put the same number at 4 to 11 hours.
Two new studies show that Enceladus's alkaline ocean could support methane-making microbes and that its ice grains pre-sort organic molecules, so a single sampling mission could settle the question.
Japan's wars and diplomacy follow almost mechanically from its geography: merge the four main islands, hold the five sea gates that lead to them, block the land powers that could invade, and keep the sea lanes open for imported food and ore.
