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Latest Trends

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Latest Trends

A Hundred Radio Flashes From Deep Space Have Given Astronomers a New Way to Weigh the Universe's Missing Matter

Fast radio bursts last a millisecond and arrive smeared by everything they pass through. Caltech's Kritti Sharma and Vikram Ravi used that smear from about a hundred of them to measure how clumpy the gas between galaxies is. It is smoother than anyone thought.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

Radio dishes at Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California, home of the Deep Synoptic Array that caught the bursts

Latest Trends

Europe's Leaders Met in Lapland to Talk About the Arctic, and a Russian Drone Hit a Train Two Kilometres From Poland

Merz, Frederiksen, Costa and Kallas went to Rovaniemi to talk icebreakers, satellites and the Northern Sea Route. Then a drone struck a Kyiv to Warsaw locomotive minutes after Boris Johnson's train had passed. Berlin called it a calculated escalation.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

Finnish icebreakers moored at Katajanokka in Helsinki in July 2026; the Rovaniemi summit discussed pooling icebreakers that Finland would help build

Latest Trends

Sweden Voted 176 to 173 for the Left, the Far Right Fell for the First Time in Twenty Years, and Nobody Has Conceded

Magdalena Andersson's bloc reversed the 2022 result to the seat, on a turnout above eighty per cent, with overseas votes still to count. The Sweden Democrats lost eleven seats. The same night the AfD more than tripled its vote in Lower Saxony.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

Magdalena Andersson, leader of Sweden's Social Democrats, speaking at a campaign event in Gothenburg in August 2026

Latest Trends

The Hormuz Talks Collapsed Before They Began, a Ship Was Hit Off Qeshm, and Trump Said the US Could Keep Iran's Oil

Oman's Salalah meeting was meant to draw the corridor maps and settle a toll. Saudi Arabia objected to language fixing a new status quo, Bahrain called it appeasement, and it was postponed. Hours earlier an Iranian cargo ship burned off Qeshm with one dead.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

The Qasr al-Hosn palace on the seafront at Salalah, Oman, where the postponed meeting between Iran and the Gulf states was to have been held

Latest Trends

Saudi Arabia Shut Its Only Way Round Hormuz After Drones From Iraq Hit the Pipeline. The Houthis Took Two More Islands

The 1,200-kilometre line to Yanbu carried the crude that could no longer leave through the Gulf. Riyadh chose not to hit back at Iraq, flew more than 300 strikes on Yemen instead, and took dozens of missiles at Khamis Mushait. Brent is near 108.

Sep 15, 2026/3 min read

Oil pipelines running across the desert near Jubail in eastern Saudi Arabia, photographed in 2012; the East-West line begins at Abqaiq in the same province

Latest Trends

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

With Hormuz reduced to a trickle, Saudi exports go out through the Red Sea. On Thursday the Houthis took Mocha, eighty kilometres from Bab al-Mandeb, after the heaviest fighting since the 2022 truce. Hours later four projectiles hit two ships off Khasab.

Sep 12, 2026/3 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

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

A nodule half the size of a golf ball, picked up in Montana in 2016, holds feathers, gar scales and the leg bones of a diving bird eaten 66 million years ago. Two of the feathers have a structure otherwise unknown until ten million years after the extinction.

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

At Hadrian's Villa, a Marble Slab Still in Its Place Marks Where Lightning Struck at Night and the Ground Became Sacred

Two words cut into a slab forty centimetres across, FVLGVR SVBMANIVM, record a rite the Romans performed wherever a bolt came down: bury what it touched, mark the spot, never build on it. Found in place near the Amphitheatre by the University of Urbino.

Sep 12, 2026/3 min read

The Maritime Theatre at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, a circular island villa ringed by a moat; the lightning marker was found in the Amphitheatre area elsewhere on the site

Latest Trends

Twenty-Five Years On: Four Former Presidents at Ground Zero, Trump on Iran at the Pentagon, and a Seventh Silence

The names of 2,983 people were read in Lower Manhattan, 184 at the Pentagon and forty in Shanksville. For the first time a seventh silence marked the thousands who have since died of what they breathed. And 2,977 drones drew two towers over the harbour.

Sep 12, 2026/3 min read

The Tribute in Light installation on the roof of the Battery Parking Garage in Lower Manhattan, seen from above at its switch-on on the evening of 10 September 2026

Latest Trends

The US Sank Five Iranian Tankers, Iran Fired Twenty Missiles at a Base in Jordan, and Oil Closed Above a Hundred Dollars

CENTCOM named the five crude carriers it disabled after two missile attacks on one of its warships. Iran answered at Al-Azraq, where Jordan says it intercepted eighteen of twenty missiles, and claimed strikes on ten ships. Brent closed at 101 dollars.

Sep 10, 2026/3 min read

A United States guided-missile destroyer under way in the Gulf of Oman, in an archive US Navy photograph; not one of the ships involved this week

Latest Trends

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

The EU's climate service puts last month at 16.96 degrees Celsius globally, level with July 2023 and 1.65 degrees above pre-industrial. The oceans set their own record, western Europe had its hottest summer, and its rivers ran low. What the numbers mean.

Sep 10, 2026/3 min read

The Rhine at Bacharach with its gravel bed exposed at low water in August 2022, the last time the river ran this dry; Copernicus reports exceptionally low flows again this August