Hot news

Oil Above a Hundred Has Made Next Week's Fed Meeting a Coin Toss on a Rate Rise, and the Treasury Tripled Its Buybacks August Was the Joint Hottest Month Ever Measured, and the First Above 1.5 Degrees Since Last November PISA 2025: Fifteen-Year-Olds Across the Rich World Read Worse Than Any Cohort the OECD Has Measured Britain, France and Canada Ban Settlement Goods, Nine States Follow, and Israel Closes the British Consulate Emaar's Founder Expects Dubai Property to Give Back Five to Ten Per Cent, and Says It Could Turn Just as Fast Iran Says It Will Declare a Restricted Zone Beyond Hormuz, Names Oman as Corridor Partner, and Jizan Is Hit Again

A man sitting alone on a bench in silhouette against a sunset sky, seen from behind

Loneliness Raises the Risk of Early Death by About a Quarter, and the World Health Organization Now Counts It as a Cause

Aug 23, 2026/4 min read

A petrol station price board in the United States showing regular, mid-grade and premium prices, photographed in April; the gasoline index has risen 27 per cent in a year

Business

Petrol Drove a Third of August's Inflation, Core Ran Hot, and the Market Now Treats Wednesday's Rate Rise as Done

Sep 12, 2026/4 min read

Perim Island and the Shaikh Said peninsula at Bab al-Mandeb, the strait between Yemen and Djibouti, photographed from the International Space Station in 2010

Latest Trends

The Houthis Took Mocha, the Red Sea Is Now the Second Strait in Play, and Two Ships Were Hit Off Oman Overnight

Sep 12, 2026/3 min read

A mounted skeleton of Hesperornis, the flightless diving bird of the Late Cretaceous, in a museum display; the Montana coprolite holds the bones and feathers of a bird from the same group

Latest Trends

A Feather Inside a Tyrannosaur's Droppings Is the First Ever Found That Way, and It May Say Why Some Birds Survived

Sep 12, 2026/3 min read

01/05

Just In

Sep 10, 2026

Business

Oil Above a Hundred Has Made Next Week's Fed Meeting a Coin Toss on a Rate Rise, and the Treasury Tripled Its Buybacks

Sep 10, 2026

Latest Trends

August Was the Joint Hottest Month Ever Measured, and the First Above 1.5 Degrees Since Last November

Sep 10, 2026

Latest Trends

PISA 2025: Fifteen-Year-Olds Across the Rich World Read Worse Than Any Cohort the OECD Has Measured

Sep 10, 2026

Latest Trends

Britain, France and Canada Ban Settlement Goods, Nine States Follow, and Israel Closes the British Consulate

The Latest

Technology

Apple's Event Is Tomorrow, John Ternus's First as Chief Executive. Only the Foldable Would Count as a Surprise

Surprise and Shine begins at 10am Pacific on Wednesday at Apple Park, a week after Tim Cook handed over. What is confirmed, which is almost nothing, and what is expected: a foldable iPhone above two thousand dollars, two Pro models and two watches.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

An aerial view of the ring of Apple Park in Cupertino, where Wednesday's event takes place

Business

The Thirty-Year Treasury Has Held Above Five Per Cent for a Month, and the Two-Year Is Rising Faster

The long bond closed at 5.27 per cent on 1 and 2 September and has not been below five since July. The two-year has climbed from 4.17 to 4.39 in a week. What the Federal Reserve's own data shows, and why the shape of the move matters more than the level.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

The United States Treasury building in Washington seen from above, with the Washington Monument behind

Technology

MIT Wired Bacteria Into Transistors. Its Biggest Circuit Is Twenty-Four Colonies on a Dish That Takes Eight Hours to Add

Engineered colonies of a plant bacterium pass chemical signals across five millimetres of agar, switching each other on and off like components on a board. The team built adders, routers and logic gates. The point is a computer that can grow on a leaf.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

Bacterial colonies grown in patterns on an agar plate. These are E. coli; the MIT circuits use colonies of Pantoea agglomerans printed onto agar in the same way

Health

Slow Breathing Made People Take More Risks, Not Fewer, in a Berlin Brain-Scan Study

Forty-one volunteers who breathed with a long exhale accepted riskier bets for money in an MRI scanner, and those whose heart rhythm responded most showed the strongest reward activity in the brain. A neat result, a small sample, a lesson about calm.

Sep 8, 2026/3 min read

A magnetic resonance imaging scanner in a hospital room, the kind of machine the volunteers lay in while making their choices

Latest Trends

A Crocodile Keeper in Port Moresby Was Held in the Water for an Hour, and Died the Next Morning

A handler at Adventure Park in Papua New Guinea was seized at feeding time on Saturday and died at 7am on Sunday. Witnesses say his legs were in the animal's jaws for about an hour before help arrived.

Sep 6, 2026/4 min read

A saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, lunging into shallow water beside mangroves. The species, not the animal involved, which has not been identified

Also in the Digest

An adult American alligator resting on a bank, head towards the camera with teeth showing along the jawline

Latest Trends

The American Alligator Recovered Forty Years Ago and Is Still Listed as Threatened, Because It Looks Like a Crocodile

Sep 6, 2026

A whole tortilla de patatas on a bar counter in San Sebastián, deep gold and thick, with cocktail sticks and slices of bread around it

Recipes

Tortilla Española: Six Eggs, Three Potatoes, a Great Deal of Olive Oil and One Nerve-Testing Flip

Sep 6, 2026

A cup of gazpacho andaluz with a thread of olive oil on top, beside small dishes of diced pepper, cucumber, onion and croutons for garnish

Recipes

Gazpacho Andaluz: Bread, Oil, Vinegar and Garlic Were the Soup Before the Tomato Arrived, and They Still Are

Sep 6, 2026

Saturn and its rings in natural colour, imaged by the Cassini spacecraft. The new decagon at the south pole is not visible in this view

Technology

Saturn Has Grown a Ten-Sided Storm at Its South Pole, and Nobody Saw It Start

Sep 6, 2026

A plate of trofie al pesto, the short twisted Ligurian pasta coated in bright green pesto alla genovese and topped with a basil leaf

Recipes

Pesto alla Genovese in a Mortar, With the Trofie, Potatoes and Green Beans It Was Made For

Sep 6, 2026

Researchers loading a sample into a cryo-electron microscope, the instrument the UC San Diego team used to image the enzyme at work

Technology

Life Runs on Four Letters. A Bacterial Enzyme Has Just Read Eight Without Being Told

Sep 6, 2026

A dark bowl of panzanella, chunks of ripe tomato and toasted bread tossed with herbs and dressed in oil

Recipes

Panzanella Is a Salad Built to Use Up Stale Bread, and the Tomatoes Came Later

Sep 6, 2026

A tray of imam bayildi, whole aubergines split and filled with onion and tomato, each topped with a slice of tomato, glossy from the oil

Recipes

İmam Bayıldı: The Turkish Aubergine Dish Named for a Man Who Fainted, and the Olive Oil That Explains Why

Sep 6, 2026

In Pictures

Sunset over the ridgeline at Khao Chang Phueak in Thong Pha Phum National Park, western Thailand, where the new species was found. The plant itself is not pictured

Latest Trends

A Black Flower That Lives Underground and Eats Fungi Has Been Found on a Thai Hillside, and There Are Fewer Than Fifty

Thismia daemona has no leaves, no chlorophyll and no need for sunlight. It surfaces only to flower, black with horn-like appendages and two orange patches that look like eyes, in an area smaller than a football pitch.

Sep 6, 2026