3+ hour, 16+ min ago (679+ words) Home " Environment " Environmental Issues Facing record drought, sinking land, and ecological collapse, Iran says it has "no choice." Tehran is literally sinking. Faced with exhausted aquifers, choking pollution, and a landscape that can no longer support its population, Iran's president has announced a historic and desperate plan to move the nation's capital to the coast. What was once a thriving capital at the foot of the Alborz Mountains is now faced with dire consequences. Last week, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian admitted that the country is forced to move its capital. "We no longer have a choice," he announced in a televised speech. "Protecting the environment is not a joke. Ignoring it means signing our own destruction." For the first time in modern history, Iran is preparing to move its capital away from Tehran not for political gain, but for survival....

3+ hour, 28+ min ago (642+ words) Home " Health " Mind & Brain Our eyelids may dance to the rhythm, revealing how deeply music moves the brain. When a melody begins, most people begin to tap their feet, nod their heads, or sway slightly to the rhythm. But according to a new study, our eyes join in as well. In a paper published this week in PLOS Biology, neuroscientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences report that spontaneous eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during listening. Even when people sit still, their eyelids naturally blink along with the beat of the music. The research team, led by Yi Du, tracked eye movements and brain activity in 123 young adults as they listened to classical music with steady tempos'mainly Bach chorales. "We found that people's spontaneous eye blinks fall in step with the musical beat'even without being told to move'revealing a…...

3+ hour, 42+ min ago (779+ words) Archaeologists uncover the only known mosaic patolli board, built into a Maya home's floor. Archaeologists working at Naachtun, a Maya city between Tikal and Calakmul, have uncovered a unique fifth-century patolli board. Patolli or patole is one of the oldest known games in America. It was a game of strategy and luck played by commoners and nobles alike. Unlike other boards that were simply scratched or painted onto plaster, this one was built directly into the floor'a mosaic of hundreds of ceramic fragments set into fresh mortar. "This way of creating the board may provide a fresh perspective on the way the game was played," wrote archaeologists Julien Hiquet and R'mi M'reuze of the French CNRS in Latin American Antiquity. "It indicates boards could be included in the architecture from the planning stage and also potentially have a long use…...

4+ hour, 5+ min ago (303+ words) A new website makes Epstein's leaked emails unsettlingly easy to read. Two software developers have built a website that lets you browse Jeffrey Epstein's leaked emails as if you were in his inbox. The project, called Jmail, mimics Gmail's layout to display more than 20,000 messages released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee earlier this month. The trove reveals exchanges between the disgraced financier and high-profile names: Ghislaine Maxwell, Steve Bannon, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and even Donald Trump. Many of the messages refer directly to the then'future president. Now, instead of combing through thousands of dry PDFs, you can explore Epstein's inbox in a format that feels familiar. Luke Igel, cofounder of the AI company Kino, and Riley Walz, a software engineer known for digital stunts, built the site in a single night using an AI coding assistant. "We cloned…...

4+ hour, 38+ min ago (568+ words) New research ties epilepsy in older adults to sleep habits and regional heat. Where you grow old in the United States may change your odds of developing epilepsy. A new study in JAMA Neurology has mapped where older Americans are most likely to be diagnosed with epilepsy and points to a broad "epilepsy belt" running through the South, from Louisiana and Mississippi through Eastern Texas and Central Oklahoma. The work, led by researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Houston Methodist, focused on those 65 and older enrolled in traditional Medicare. This is the group that already faces the highest rate of new epilepsy diagnoses in the country, yet until now, no one had a detailed map of where those cases cluster and what local conditions might be linked to them. The team analyzed Medicare claims in the United States between…...

16+ hour, 43+ min ago (704+ words) Home " Science " Chemistry CERN's ALPHA collaboration has pulled off a stunning breakthrough. Trapping antimatter is kind of like trying to catch snowflakes with a frying pan " if the snowflakes wanted to blow up the pan every time they touched it. That's basically the daily grind for CERN physicists who study antihydrogen. For years, they've been capturing these fragile anti-atoms one by one, inching toward answers about one of the universe's biggest mysteries. Now, they've made a major leap. The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has trapped more than 15,000 antihydrogen atoms at once, smashing their previous record. To accomplish this, they used a clever cooling method that uses laser-chilled beryllium ions to siphon heat away from positrons before they combine with antiprotons. The result is a stable, frigid "bucket" of antimatter big enough to turbocharge studies that used to take months. "These…...

16+ hour, 48+ min ago (1036+ words) Your tax dollars fund the research. You pay again to read it. If you tried to pitch this on Shark Tank, you'd be laughed out of the room. But in the world of scientific publishing, this is just regular business. Why do academics put up with this? Because they have to. Academics need to constantly prove their worth, and that usually means publishing studies, preferably in top journals. This is the infamous "publish or perish" doctrine. If you don't have a steady stream of papers appearing in "high-impact" journals, you don't get the grant, you don't get tenure, and you effectively cease to exist as a viable scientist. Publishers have weaponized this anxiety. They know that researchers are desperate to publish to climb the career ladder, so they have turned the system into a volume business. Scientific publishing is now…...

16+ hour, 48+ min ago (1036+ words) Your tax dollars fund the research. You pay again to read it. If you tried to pitch this on Shark Tank, you'd be laughed out of the room. But in the world of scientific publishing, this is just regular business. Why do academics put up with this? Because they have to. Academics need to constantly prove their worth, and that usually means publishing studies, preferably in top journals. This is the infamous "publish or perish" doctrine. If you don't have a steady stream of papers appearing in "high-impact" journals, you don't get the grant, you don't get tenure, and you effectively cease to exist as a viable scientist. Publishers have weaponized this anxiety. They know that researchers are desperate to publish to climb the career ladder, so they have turned the system into a volume business. Scientific publishing is now…...

17+ hour, 8+ min ago (907+ words) What happens in parking lots reveals how we think about obligation, decency, and one another. Early one Saturday morning, psychologist and behavioral scientist Hannah B. Waldfogel arrived at a parking lot to find a crime scene of sorts. "One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot," she wrote. Her question was simple: Why don't people return their shopping carts? It sounds trivial, but it's a question most of us have asked ourselves before. Yet in Waldfogel's hands, the shopping cart becomes a mirror " one that reflects our relationship to responsibility, hierarchy, and the invisible rules that hold social life together. To answer her question, Waldfogel did something few social scientists had done before. She turned to YouTube. Her data source of choice was Cart…...

17+ hour, 52+ min ago (348+ words) Or so we thought. In today's digital networks, light signals carrying ones and zeros are regularly boosted by amplifiers. But in quantum communication, any attempt to copy or amplify information would destroy it. Instead, information must be teleported, in the sense that it must be transferred from one particle to another without physically moving it, through a process based on quantum entanglement. Quantum teleportation isn't teleportation in the sci-fi sense. No material is jumping through space. What moves is the quantum state, a particle's unique set of physical properties like its spin. "Light quanta from different quantum dots have never been teleported before because it is so challenging," said Tim Strobel, the study's first author. In their lab, the team connected the two quantum dots with a 10-meter optical fiber. That's short by internet standards, but prior work by the…...