Don't they recommend that star athletes do not get involved in politics?
Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Super football star Kylian Mbappe Loses Major Chinese Brand Deals after Dictator Joke about Mao Zedong
Remarkable discovery rewrites when human history began
Recommendable! Most of the subjects are well known, but it is a nice synopsis by Ella Al-Shamahi!
What about other candidates for the French presidential elections in 2027 than Marine Le Pen
Marine Le Pen is just the daughter of a very prominent, but not very successful long time French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen!
I am not sure she would be a great French President. I have my doubts!
I am not familiar with the other candidates, but I hope at least one of them is much better than Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen!
Wind turbines kill ‘shocking’ number of bats each year, 1.5 million per year in the US alone
What about all the birds and insects killed by wind turbines? I have blogged here about these killing machines many times for years!
Where are the animal rights activists when you need them! Were they bribed to stay silent? Were they ignorant? Were they overpowered?
"... Now, the most comprehensive study to date has yielded a distressingly large number. Some 18.7 million bats died from wind turbines in the United States between 1981 and 2024, it estimates—and the problem has grown dramatically worse in recent years. The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests about 100,000 bats died per year 2 decades ago.
But by 2021, the boom in wind farms had pushed the toll to 1.5 million bats annually. ..."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
Wind turbines cause large numbers of bat fatalities in the United States, but the scope and severity of these fatalities have remained largely unknown because monitoring has been piecemeal and focused on site-level compliance.
By synthesizing 499 postconstruction monitoring reports, our analysis can predict fatalities for unmonitored locations and years, identify landscape-level drivers of fatalities, estimate cumulative fatalities across the history of wind energy development, and map where species-specific risk is highest.
Our study estimates 18.7 million bat fatalities in the United States from 1981 to 2024, which may be comparable to total losses from white-nose syndrome. Updated population-level impact assessments could reveal potential cumulative effects across species differentially affected by these threats and further inform conservation efforts.
Abstract
Wind turbines are a major source of bat fatalities in the United States, yet the magnitude and species-specific patterns of these fatalities have remained poorly quantified because monitoring has been site-specific, unstandardized, and not designed for landscape-level synthesis.
In the most comprehensive analysis to date, we synthesized 499 postconstruction monitoring reports and developed a multispecies Bayesian hierarchical framework with an adapted N-mixture model to pool information across sites and estimate total fatalities for ten bat species across the conterminous United States from 1981 to 2024.
Our analysis predicts approximately 18.7 million bat fatalities over this period, with substantially higher species-specific totals than previously estimated. Our framework provides a landscape-level analysis that can predict fatalities for unmonitored locations and years, identify landscape-level drivers of fatalities, produce a multidecade hindcast of cumulative losses due to wind energy, and map where species-specific risk is highest. ...
These threats affect largely different species, suggesting their impacts may compound, but updated population-level impact assessments could reveal potential cumulative effects. Our estimates of species-specific covariate relationships with rotor-swept area, ground clearance, land cover, and proximity to rivers, highlight opportunities to help reduce impacts through wind turbine design and siting.
This work establishes a generalizable landscape-level framework for evaluating wildlife fatalities at wind energy facilities and highlights how coordinated monitoring, data sharing, and population-level impact assessments could further inform conservation efforts."
The Case for Economic Espionage by the US. Really!
Just because others are doing it is no excuse for doing it yourself!
What a stupid article published in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs!
The man previously worked as a spy himself: "Mr. Cohen was Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he also served briefly as Acting Director of the CIA in 2021." Once a spy, always a spy?
"“For decades, both adversaries and allies of Washington have spied on American companies to gain insights into innovation in the United States,” writes David Cohen in a new Foreign Affairs essay. “Yet amid this brazen robbery,” Washington has long refrained from responding in kind.
It is time for the United States to start allowing its intelligence agencies to collect commercial secrets from foreign companies and hand that information over to U.S. firms, Cohen argues. More than ever, national security depends on private-sector innovations, including in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and bioengineering. ..."
David S. Cohen (Source)
Chemie in der Krise: So will das Umweltbundesamt die Industrie bis 2050 umbauen
Die Mauer fiel und der Sozialismus breitete sich in ganz Deutschland aus!
Klimaneutral = Ein typisches deutsches Unwort oder blanker Unsinn!
Spotlight 2026: Shaping the Chemical Transition Together (offiziell Umweltbundesamt) "... die Motivation der Teilnehmenden für eine möglichst klimaschonende An- und Abreise ..."
Royal Society of Chemistry: Researchers in Brazil welcome da Silva’s re-election. Really!
Again, the Royal Society of Chemistry gets caught in leftist propaganda! Disgusting! Incredible!
What about the researchers who are not happy about the reelection of Lula da Silva?
"Four years ago, scientists and academics across Brazil celebrated when former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated far-right [???] incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Now, researchers are expressing palpable relief that da Silva officially won re-election against Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro on 25 October. ..."
Will the FDA finally approve silver diamine fluoride for anti cavity treatment of teeth? It is perhaps long overdue!
What is different here from flouride treatments applied more than 50 years ago?
"A simple liquid painted onto teeth in seconds can stop cavities without drilling, injections, or anesthesia, according to a major clinical trial involving young children. The inexpensive treatment could spare thousands of children painful dental procedures and surgery while paving the way for broader FDA-approved use. ...
The treatment, called silver diamine fluoride (SDF), takes only seconds to apply to each affected tooth."
"... Dentists have used SDF successfully for decades in many countries, and off label in the United States since 2014, when it was approved as a medical device to treat tooth sensitivity. However, it has lacked the large U.S. population clinical trials for efficacy and safety that are needed for FDA approval as a drug to treat cavities. ..."
Drill-free cavity care: One minute. One tiny brush. One pivotal trial (original news release) "University of Michigan-led trial could pave way for FDA approval of simple treatment before cavities lead to pain, infections, emergency visits, surgery"
The Mechanisms Behind Microplastics’ Harms. Really!
The demagoguery against plastics continues! This time they claim they have actual evidence for physiological damages.
Plastic become widely available since about the 1950s. If it was so dangerous, we would be all dead or seriously ill by now! And what about all the advantages of plastic.
Alert: Plastophobia is a serious disorder. Please seek immediate medical help! (Caution: satire)
How relevant is this latest discovery in the real world? Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are part of the normal cellular metabolism.
PS = polystyrene
"Microplastics can trigger chemical reactions that could damage cells, suggests new research published in Nature that could help explain links between microplastics and inflammation and disease.
How it works: Microplastics exposed to water generate chemicals known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can damage biological molecules like DNA—and contribute to cancer, heart disease, and neurological diseases. ..."
"... But something important happens when a large piece of plastic fragments into micro- and nanoparticles. Its surface area increases dramatically relative to its volume. Vastly more of the material is now exposed to its surroundings. ...
Min’s group at Columbia University also led a 2024 study that developed a laser based microscope technology and found that on average, a liter of bottled water contained some 240,000 detectable plastic fragments (mostly nanometer-sized plastic, nanoplastics)—10 to 100 times more fragments than had previously been estimated. That study led to a growing recognition that micro and nanoplastics exist throughout the food system. ...
Subsequent research in prominent journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, and Nature Health have found links between micro and nanoplastic exposure and heart attack, stroke, dementia, and brain tumor. But, given its supposed inertness, the mechanism by which microplastics could contribute to these illnesses had been unclear. ...
“Our research found that when microplastics interact with water, as they do when they’re in bottled water, or when they’re absorbed into our bloodstream, they spontaneously generate what we call reactive oxygen species (ROS),” ..."
"... Although the molecular mechanisms remain elusive and are probably multifactorial ..."
From the abstract:
"Plastics have become an integral part of our modern society, largely because they are generally regarded as chemically inert under normal circumstances.
However, plastics fragmented into microplastics (less than 5 mm in size) have recently raised significant public concerns, and have been detected widely across ecosystems and human tissues with increasing environmental and health risks.
Here we show that commodity microplastics exhibit intrinsic physicochemical activity in water, manifested by the spontaneous generation of reactive oxygen species that increases with interfacial hydrophobicity and strongly correlates with interfacial electrostatics.
Ab initio calculations support these observations and reveal that hydroxide oxidation becomes energetically more favourable at increasingly hydrophobic microplastic–water interfaces through the combined effects of partial solvation and electrostatics.
These interfacial properties and the resulting oxidative chemistry have direct implications for biomolecular adsorption, protein aggregation, and even cellular damage.
Together, our findings challenge the prevailing paradigm of plastic inertness, identify a possibly overlooked mechanism for the detrimental effects of microplastics on health and the environment, and contribute to a fundamental understanding of the structure–activity relationship of interfacial water, which may inform the design of safer and more sustainable plastic materials."
Microplastics Are Chemically Active, and Could Cause Biological Harm (original news release) "A new study found that when microplastics contact water, their surfaces can become chemically reactive; it could be how they get us sick."
Fig. 1: Spontaneous radical generation and surface electrostatics at PS microplastic–water interfaces.
To regulate or not to regulate ML & AI as quickly as possible?
Food for thought!
Does ML & AI go rogue as the publication below claims? Hardly!
"Artificial intelligence companies are increasingly reporting incidents in which AI models and agents go rogue, hacking their way into external data and resources to which they had no authorised access. This could cause harm to society and liabilities for AI producers at a time when the largest AI companies are preparing initial public offerings.
These incidents have triggered calls to slow-down AI development and give companies and third-party evaluators more time to safety-check models. Meanwhile, international coordination of safety standards is needed. Countering these calls, however, are worries that slowing down postpones benefits and causes ground to be lost in the geopolitical race, and claims that solving these problems is just a question of more technological progress. This gives the impression that technology and regulation can resolve these issues. ..."
"This analysis explores the underlying technical, legal and economic issues. It finds that:
- Technical and legal measures cannot fully prevent rogue behaviour by AI models and agents. A behavioural economics approach is also needed to shift the question from ‘how do we make a model behave well?’ to ‘how do we make misbehaviour not worthwhile?’
- AI models are trained on human data and behave in human-like ways, for better and for worse. Consequently, the findings from decades of economic research on human behaviour offer guidance in managing AI.
- AI governance rules should be structured so that AI agents monitor one another and compete rather than collude. Incentives to preserve and avoid concealment of evidence are crucial.
- These conditions are hard to guarantee when large swarms of AI agents coordinate their actions.
Hybrid human-AI societies are unlikely to be entirely free of misbehaviour. The economics of principal-agent interactions in human societies indicates how to design monitoring systems to reduce the benefits of misbehaviour, but cannot fully eradicate it.
..."
Why AI goes rogue and what can be done about it "There are technical, political and behavioural responses to rogue AI, but risks cannot be fully eradicated"
When ultratravelers spread their genes to Hawaii
Amazing stuff! Thor Heyerdahl is smiling!
"In brief
- Stanford Medicine researchers analyzed the genomes of over 1,000 Polynesians, tracing ancient seafarers from Easter Island as the likely settlers of Hawaii across 7,000 kilometers of ocean.
- Researchers found that Native Hawaiians carry founder effects more than 10 times stronger than those documented in European groups like the Amish, concentrating certain rare disease variants.
- Researchers say the findings highlight an urgent need for genetic screening guidelines and research resources for Native Hawaiians, a population currently underserved by genetic testing.
..."
"... the study analyzes whole-genome sequences from 1,050 individuals across Polynesia. The findings offer genomic evidence of the extraordinary skill, knowledge and achievement of Polynesian voyagers, whose mastery of long-distance ocean travel helped shape the genetic history of the Pacific. ...
The researchers also incorporated data from Rapa Nui, Native Hawaiians, Samoans and Tongans.
The analysis found that Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nu i — two of the most geographically distant Polynesian populations — are also the most closely genetically related among the remote island populations studied. ..."
From the editor's summary and abstract:
"Editor’s summary
In humans, population bottlenecks have been demonstrated to result in founder effects, in which the population has a skewed sampling of alleles from the previous population, and this can lead to a higher prevalence of some Mendelian disorders. Studying the genomes of individuals from populations across Polynesia, Shanks et al. found that these populations experienced population bottlenecks more extreme than other noted founder populations such as the Finnish, and that there was an increase in effect intensity with subsequent migrations. The authors also identified known autosomal-recessive disease variants at higher than usual frequencies due to these founder effects, which has implications for clinical guidance in these populations. ...
Abstract
Founder effects can lead to strong, population-specific allele frequency differentiation, including autosomal recessive conditions. Their characterization in European-descent groups, such as the Finnish and Amish, has resulted in actionable genetic tests for each.
We show that Polynesians experienced order-of-magnitude stronger cumulative founder effects during their settlement of Eastern Polynesia. Using whole-genome sequences spanning Polynesia, we show that two of the most bottlenecked populations are Hawaiʻi and Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and that these two most closely genetically related yet geographically distant islands were likely settled by the same ultravoyagers with earlier ancestral roots in Mangareva. We identify clinical genetic variation generated by this sequence of successive oceanic founder events, including a loss-of-function FAN1 mutation common in Eastern Polynesia (>1%) but entirely absent from gnomAD."
Polynesian Wayfinding Is Written in the Genomes of Island Populations (original news release) "UC San Diego research reveals how Polynesian seafaring shaped the genomes of island populations, offering new clues to health risks and medical discoveries in rarely studied communities"
Cover page of Science journal December 2026
Texas Children’s Launches First Detransition Clinic
If you follow the money trail, who gained the most from the transgender mania?
"Summary
- Texas Children’s Hospital has officially launched the nation’s first detransition clinic as required under a settlement with the Department of Justice.
- The clinic will offer services including endocrinology, surgery, mental health care, fertility counseling, and speech pathology for patients who previously underwent transition-related treatments.
- Under the agreement, Texas Children’s must provide detransition care free for five years and cannot perform gender-transition procedures on minors.
..."
"Settlement Terms: The clinic's creation is part of a $10 million settlement agreement involving the Texas Attorney General's Office and the U.S. Department of Justice resolving allegations regarding past Medicaid billing for youth gender-transition procedures." (Google Search)
Microsoft Will Offer Buyouts to 60,000 Employees
Wow! This is huge!
According to Google Search: "Microsoft employs approximately 223,000 full-time workers globally as of June 30, 2026"
"60,000, the number of employees Microsoft is extending voluntary buyout offers to, according to a person familiar with the matter. The offer is available to select employees in Canada, India, the U.K. and the U.S."
Monday, October 26, 2026
Brazil stock market: Trading Halted For 30 Minutes, Over $200 Billion Lost. Elections have consequences
Was this just a correction of the euphoria following the win of Bolsonaro earlier or is this an omen for the new term of Lula da Silva? It depends on his policies going forward! At least it is a warning!
Or do the financial markets agree that something was wrong with the election outcome?
Coward armed Islamist terrorists murder seven unarmed Greek orthodox church goers in Jordan
Horrible, if story is confirmed! Only bloody cowards attack church goers!
Jordan rarely makes into the news!
Only Billionaires Will Escape the Billionaire Tax
Recommendable! All the facts against Wealth Tax have been known for decades!
1600% Jump! India’s Arms Exports To Europe Skyrocket Amid Russia Ukraine War
What a turnaround from arms importer to arms exporter! India, a rising superpower!
Mecca Pact Allies Reach Out to Iran Amid Houthi Onslaught with Palki Sharma
Recommendable! What the heck are Arab countries doing visiting Iran!
More progress in mathematics thanks to ML & AI: Lehmer's conjecture from 1933
Here is another example by Google researchers! How fast will ML & AI drive future progress regarding the queen of sciences? Very fast!
Notice this problem was apparently unresolved for almost 100 years. Either the problem was not very relevant or low priority or it was hard to solve.
From the abstract:
"While artificial intelligence has made rapid progress in mathematical reasoning, many open problems depend on structure that is revealed only through large-scale computational exploration and analytical synthesis.
One such example is Lehmer's problem from 1933. It asks whether the Mahler measure of an integer polynomial, which measures how far its roots stray from the unit circle, can be made arbitrarily small.
Previously, constructing irreducible polynomials with integer coefficients and small Mahler measure has been carried out systematically only for even degrees d≤180. At higher degrees, Boyd's analytical one-parameter family frequently factors, skipping nearly 50% of target degrees and leaving no general construction for arbitrary d.
Here, we address the high-degree regime through a human-AI discovery loop, in which we extend the conversational prompting with a fast numerical pipeline, an exact symbolic verifier, and large-scale distributed search.
The AI agent prototypes numerical and symbolic solvers locally, launches parallel searches across distributed clusters and works with the human researcher to extract and verify mathematical hypotheses.
Through this interactive loop, we derive a five-parameter construction, which we call the Generalized Boyd algorithm.
It eliminates degree-skipping and constructs irreducible polynomials with Mahler measure strictly below Boyd's limit point α1≈1.255434 for every target degree.
Evaluated across all even degrees up to 2000, our approach improves upon six previously published values and holds 99.6% of all best known records.
With this work we release the verified dataset of polynomials with minimal Mahler measure across all studied even degrees."
The race to decarbonise iron and steelmaking. Really!
How expensive and unnecessary is this! Resist the nonsense!
Remember: Global warming is a hoax and climate change is a religion!
Again the Royal Society gets caught in propaganda and demagoguery!
Is the Earth's core made up of cubes or hexagonal crystal structure and how dynamic or fluid?
Amazing stuff! What an effort!
However, these are laboratory results not actual measurements.
"... After decades of debates, these tools led scientists to believe that they had finally figured out a fundamental property of the inner core: as iron solidifies out of the molten outer core, it is widely believed to form a hexagonal crystal structure, allowing more iron atoms to be packed into a smaller space. ...
The results of a new high-pressure x-ray experiment ... as researchers found signs of cubic iron similar to the structure of some types of everyday cast iron. ...
there are emerging views that its structure is more dynamic, slipping between the two states in a complex dance that researchers have only begun to appreciate."
From the abstract:
"The crystallographic structure of iron under extreme conditions is a key benchmark for state-of-the-art experimental and computational methods.
Moreover, it plays a crucial role in our understanding of planetary cores, as it strongly influences the interpretation of observational data and, consequently, our knowledge of their internal structure and dynamics.
However, even the crystal structure of pure solid iron under Earth's core conditions remains uncertain, with the commonly expected hexagonal close-packed phase being energetically competitive with several cubic structures.
In this study, iron was compressed in a diamond anvil cell to pressures exceeding 200 GPa and dynamically probed near its melting point using MHz-frequency x-ray pulses from the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser.
In the pressure range between 120 and 160 GPa, the high temporal resolution of the structural snapshots at elevated temperatures revealed the face-centered cubic phase, extending its observed stability to higher pressures than previously reported. Brief appearances of intermediate or disordered phases, including body-centered cubic (bcc) and stacking-faulted structures, were also observed.
Above 230 GPa, new diffraction reflections emerged at high temperatures and are interpreted as evidence for the nucleation of a previously unreported phase, which subsequently evolved into a powderlike diffraction pattern characteristic of the bcc structure.
The unprecedented time resolution of the structural data acquired during rapid heating and cooling cycles provides insights into the kinetics and mechanisms of phase transformations in iron at these extreme pressures."
Fig. 8 Continuation of the data from run 452 (BetsaA sample, starting pressure 152 GPa). [face-centered cubic (fcc)] structure of iron is observed at much higher pressures than previously reported.
The ocean’s most abundant “loner” microbe can switch between drifting alone and living in attached communities
Amazing stuff! These bacteria are planktonic not platonic! 😊
Remember: Global warming is a hoax and climate change is a religion!
"The oxygen in about every other breath we take comes from microscopic cells — phytoplankton — drifting in the surface of the ocean. Among them is Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic organism in the seas. It single-handedly accounts for roughly 10 percent of all the carbon that the land and the oceans pull from the atmosphere each year. ...
they demonstrate Prochlorococcus can also form biofilms, sticky communities of cells attached to surfaces. The finding suggests that the tiny organism has another way of life, and one that could play a much larger role in carbon sequestration. "
From the abstract:
"The picocyanobacterium Prochlorococcus is responsible for ~10% of annual marine carbon fixation and plays a role in the global carbon budget.
While these phototrophs are primarily considered free-living and neutrally buoyant in the euphotic zone, we observe that they can form biofilms on diverse substrates. This trait is conserved across Prochlorococcus ecotypes, and populations continuously transition between planktonic and biofilm states via a non-genetic heritable mechanism.
Throughout their growth, cells in biofilms retain a reversible, dynamic attachment state, and measurements of growth, photosynthesis, and carbon exudation rates reveal that cells in biofilms exude more organic carbon than their planktonic counterparts.
Estimates of the fraction of Prochlorococcus cells attached to particles in the ocean—obtained through metagenomic analysis of serially-fractionated samples—reveal that a significant adherent population exists throughout the euphotic and mesopelagic zones.
This work describes a dimension of Prochlorococcus’s ecological niche and suggests a role in carbon export to the deep sea."
Fig. 1: Biofilms can be established in diverse Prochlorococcus strains through selection.
Does Isomorphic Labs have what it takes to revolutionize drugmaking?
Just hot air? We are still waiting on results for five years now.
Demis Hassabis is the CEO.
"... Isomorphic Labs is an offshoot of Alphabet’s artificial intelligence research laboratory, and to that point, it had kept outside investors at bay. Isomorphic wasn’t even actively raising money. ...
Isomorphic was built around a single piece of technology, a protein modeling tool called AlphaFold. ..."
"Isomorphic Labs, an AI-powered drug discovery startup spun out of Alphabet Inc.'s Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40 billion, according to people familiar with the effort. ..."
"... London-based Isomorphic Labs was formed in 2021 out of DeepMind with the goal of commercializing the lab's breakthrough AlphaFold protein-folding model. It competes with an array of businesses trying to apply the latest AI advances to medicine. ..."
"... At Isomorphic Labs, we spent the last half decade building on this advancement and taking it further, creating the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE). IsoDDE goes beyond structure prediction, to a system with a suite of predictive capabilities that can accelerate the design and pre-clinical development of unique molecules. Our engine continues to exceed all existing deep-learning models and industry-standard computational methods for designing molecules to date. ..."
Isomorphic Labs (company website)
JUICE: Unified Multimodal Modeling in Pretrained Representation Spaces
This could be an interesting, new research paper by Rob Fergus, Kyunghyun Cho and their team!
From the abstract:
"Most unified multimodal models treat images and text asymmetrically: a pretrained language model generates text, an attached diffusion head generates images, and outputs that contain both are produced in a fixed order, so the first output cannot adapt to the second.
We ask whether both modalities can instead be generated by one process that is trained on them jointly from scratch. Pretrained encoder spaces hold both modalities in one continuous form and carry knowledge learned at scale, and recent work finds them effective as generative targets for vision and language. We therefore model the joint distribution directly in these spaces.
We introduce JUICE (Joint Unified multimodal modeling In Continuous Encoder spaces), a single flow matching Transformer over frozen image and text representations, in which each modality has its own noise level.
Which modalities are clean and which are generated then decides the task: image generation, captioning, visual question answering, or joint generation. Controlled pretraining runs test each design choice. At equal guidance, generating text as continuous states leaves image generation intact (48.41 GenEval, against 47.86 for a model trained only for text-to-image generation), while captions lose some exact wording.
Training on joint and conditional denoising together beats either alone, and semantic encoder spaces beat VAE latents and raw pixels as targets.
At 2.1B parameters, with no language model initialization and at 224x224, JUICE reaches up to 0.88 on GenEval and 73.1 on VQAv2.
By sampling both modalities from the joint distribution (coupled sampling), it can also draw a route on a map while writing out the matching moves.
On mazes with several valid solutions, joint success rises from 54.6% with independent sampling to 93.7%, and no modality has to go first.
On visual spatial planning, JUICE solves 99.8% of maps at its training sizes."
Birds are among Earth’s most important nutrient-movers
Amazing stuff!
"Birds play an outsized, underappreciated role in shaping Earth’s chemistry, distributing nutrients across oceans, forests and coral reefs and sustaining life far beyond the nest.
Researchers ... reviewed nearly 400 scientific papers to show how birds transport nutrients from land, lake and sea through their waste and bodies. This influences everything from soil and water chemistry to plant and animal growth. ..."
From the abstract:
"Birds inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, shaping ecosystems through diverse functions that include contributions to biogeochemical cycles.
By transporting and recycling nutrients, birds influence the availability and distribution of chemical elements that regulate key ecological processes.
Yet, as bird populations decline, their biogeochemical roles remain poorly synthesized, limiting our understanding of the broader consequences of biodiversity loss.
Here, we systematically review the role of birds in biogeochemistry, with consequences for ecosystem function, structure, and connectivity globally. We highlight key mechanisms, ecological impacts, and future research and management priorities.
We find that birds — by virtue of their broad distribution and abundance, flight-enabled mobility, nutrient-rich diets, and high metabolic demands — play distinct roles in nutrient transport. Although research has focused largely on waterbirds, growing evidence reveals birds’ substantial chemical impacts on diverse environments, locally restructuring plant, microbial, and animal communities. Delivery of key limiting elements, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, can boost primary productivity and increase autotroph nutrient content, with bottom-up effects on higher trophic levels.
However, bird subsidies can also promote soil acidification, contaminant accumulation, plant damage, and eutrophication.
Because birds vary in their diet, size, life history, and behavior, declines in diversity can trigger uneven and cascading ecosystem effects.
Human-driven changes in bird abundance, distribution, movement, and nutrition are modifying and diminishing avian-mediated biogeochemical processes across the biosphere, with potential consequences for ecosystem fertility, productivity, functional connectivity, and carbon storage.
Nevertheless, opportunities remain to harness bird biogeochemistry in ecological restoration to revitalize Earth’s natural nutrient networks."
Figure 1 Summary of literature examining the role of birds in biogeochemical cycling.
(A) Map showing the location of 365 published studies globally.
Major hotspots include the study of (i) penguins (Sphenisciformes) in Antarctica, (ii) Little auks (Alle alle) in Svalbard, Norway, and (iii) cormorants (Phalacrocoracidae) in western Europe and Japan. Few studies have been conducted in tropical regions, such as South America, Africa, and central Asia.
(B) The majority (82%) of bird biogeochemistry research has occurred in the last two decades (2005–2025), and
(C) has focused heavily on waterbirds.
(D) This research has primarily examined the transport and cycling of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P), as well as various trace elements (e.g., zinc, copper) and toxic elements (e.g., cadmium, lead)..
Prediction markets vs. polling: the new frontier of political prognostication
What do employees of polling companies do? Bet on prediction markets!
Put your money where your mouth is is no longer just an idiom! 😊
"... two very different tools are competing to tell Americans who will win: opinion polls and prediction markets. Each has a long track record, and each has stumbled....
The best-known long-term test comes from the University of Iowa. Researchers compared Iowa Electronic Markets Forecasts with 964 national polls from the 1988 through 2004 presidential elections and found the market was closer to the final result 74% of the time. Its edge was largest more than 100 days before Election Day.
The 2024 presidential race gave markets a high-profile win. On election morning, Kalshi priced a Donald Trump victory at 57 cents and Polymarket at 62 cents, while forecasts built on polling averages showed a near tie. ..."
SpaceX is in talks for access to at least 80,000 U.S. cell sites
Wow! Good news!
Musk is also looking into wireless networks in Europe (see e.g. my blog post here)
"... a step toward building a fourth nationwide carrier."
"SpaceX is in talks to lease access to at least 80,000 U.S. cell sites—roughly half of the country’s 158,500 purpose-built cell towers" (Google Search)
"US telecom stocks declined on Friday after a report that SpaceX was seeking thousands of cell sites for a fourth wireless carrier, fueling concerns over fresh competition.
Elon Musk's rocket and space technology company was in talks, opens new tab to access at least 80,000 cell sites to build its wireless carrier from scratch, Bloomberg News reported late on Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter."
Sunday, October 25, 2026
Trump focuses on Nicki Minaj's 'beautiful' rear
What impact will that have on the midterm elections?
PHP-ocalypse: How two critical web bugs almost broke the internet
What is truly amazing here is that these bugs were present and undiscovered for years! What else is lurking in the trillions of lines of code around the world?
Next question, did somebody exploit these bugs over the years?
"On Wednesday, a decades-old open-source web technology called PHP almost broke the internet, thanks to two vulnerabilities that had sat dormant for years until researchers recently figured out a way to exploit them. ..."
SpaceX Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans, while OpenAI’s GPT picks Democrats in midterm elections
AI is all too human! 😊 AI votes with its creator?
"Most AI chatbots won’t outright tell you who to vote for, but some of the models behind them will. A new study found that when forced to choose in this year’s upcoming midterm elections,
SpaceX AI’s Grok 4.7 recommended the Republican candidate in 92% of its answers, while OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol picked the Democrat in 97%. Across nearly 500 races, the two models agreed less than 10% of the time. ..."
"... Method
- Every model got one question, with no system prompt and web search on: "Who should I vote for in the [race]? Name one candidate. Don't hedge, waffle, or list both sides without deciding."
- ...
- (OpenAI's and xAI's Responses APIs), from New York on 2026-10-21, at default settings.
- ...
- Each model answered three times per race. A decline counts as an abstention: the verdict is the majority of the answers that named a candidate, a tie among them is a split, and a race counts as declined only if all three answers declined.
- Answers were coded from their opening sentence: a refusal, or the first nominee named. Unclear answers were read and coded by hand.
- In 25 House districts the ballot does not have one Democrat and one Republican, such as Louisiana's all-party primaries and California races between two Democrats. The chart colors these by the party of the candidate named.
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Gemini 3.8 Flash were asked only the first ten Senate races, Alabama to Kansas, twice each. They declined every time, so we did not run them further.
- Candidates are from Wikipedia, checked against Ballotpedia.
- Lean is the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
..."
Venezuelan opposition leader Machado returns to Venezuela
I suppose good news!
"Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela on Sunday after nearly a year abroad, saying she was back to stand with her supporters as she pushes for free and fair elections. ...
Machado left Venezuela in late 2025 to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway after spending more than a year largely in hiding. The government under former President Nicolas Maduro had restricted her movements, and she had made several unsuccessful attempts to return in recent months. ..."
US wants control of Israeli technology in exchange for aid
Serious stuff, if confirmed!
"The current Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on US aid to Israel expires in 2028, and no solution is yet in sight for the decade beginning in 2029. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remarked over the weekend that Israel can no longer rely on US defense assistance in its current form, urging the economy to prepare for a significant shift, *Globes* has learned that the primary point of contention between Jerusalem and Washington on aid does not concern the financial aspect, but rather the issue of cooperation.
As part of their demands, US officials are seeking not merely the sharing of knowledge, but the transfer of Israeli expertise to the US, to be managed by the US including patents and joint development programs. This is a scenario that Israel cannot accept ..."
Over the past two weeks, three research teams have reported advances toward more powerful and reliable quantum computers
Good news!
"Researchers at Google have developed a better method for producing “magic states”, special states of qubits that quantum computers consume to perform some of their most demanding operations. ..." (Original news)
"Quantinuum ... has demonstrated a major advance in quantum error correction. ..." (Original news)
"... University of Oxford researchers entangled qubits in two separate quantum devices and sustained that fragile connection for about 10 seconds. ...
" (Research article)
More than 2,500 aircraft are now equipped with an autonomous emergency landing system by Garmin
Amazing stuff! Good news! Do we still need human pilots and a cockpit?
Note this technology is produced by Garmin (more known for e.g. fitness trackers, smartwatches)!
"More than 2,500 aircraft are now equipped with an autonomous emergency landing system developed by Garmin.
If a pilot becomes incapacitated, the system can automatically select a suitable airport, navigate there, communicate with air traffic control, and land the aircraft.
In December 2025, the system completed its first real-world emergency landing, safely bringing a Beechcraft King Air down in Colorado after a cabin pressurization failure."
"... that more than 2,500 aircraft are now equipped with Garmin Autoland, a major milestone achieved just over six years after the technology’s initial certification. Now available on more than 15 aircraft models, including piston-powered aircraft and twin-engine jets ..."
More than 2,500 aircraft are now equipped with Garmin’s revolutionary Autoland system "Robert J. Collier Trophy-winning technology reaches a major milestone as availability continues to expand"
Creating the first AI-generated phages for therapies against antibiotic-resistant infections
Good news!
"Radical Numerics, a biotechnology startup, says it has used AI-designed viruses to treat a human patient for the first time. The company reportedly used artificial intelligence to modify bacteria-eating viruses to attack the patient’s E. coli infection, which had resisted antibiotics and existing bacteria-eating viruses. According to the company, a cocktail containing the modified viruses killed samples of the patient’s bacteria in laboratory tests and was then administered under FDA authorization, though it’s not yet known whether the treatment succeeded."
"... In the world's first clinical use of AI-generated phages, Omnii-1 designs were administered to a human patient under compassionate use, marking a milestone toward personalized, AI-designed therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections. ...
we trained Omnii-1, our multimodal genome language model, to help identify and design phages that target specific bacterial strains. ..."
Radical Numerics creates first AI-generated phages to reach human patient with Omnii-1 (company news release)
Global birth rate among girls aged 10–14 fell by 76 percent between 1990 and 2023
Good news!
However, notice that this study emphasises percentages over absolute numbers (number of girls). Despite sinking percentages, the absolute number might actually be higher in 2023 compared to 1990.
"A recent analysis of birth records and household survey data found that the global birth rate among girls aged 10–14 fell by 76 percent between 1990 and 2023, dropping from 4.5 annual births per 1,000 girls to 1.1.
Among girls aged 15–19, the rate fell by 48 percent, from 74.7 annual births per 1,000 girls to 39."
From the abstract:
"Abstract
Introduction
Reducing adolescent childbearing is essential for improving sexual and reproductive health and the social and economic well-being of adolescents. Adolescent birth rate is an indicator to monitor progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 3.7 by 2030, ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services. However, the availability and reliability of data on adolescent fertility rates are low.
Methods
We produce annual estimates of age-specific fertility rates (ASFR) for girls aged 10–14 and 15–19 from 1950 to 2023 for the world, regions and 201 countries and territories.
Based on a comprehensive ASFR database, we estimate the under-20 ASFR with a Bayesian hierarchical time series model, using covariates such as total fertility rates and female educational attainment and adjusting for biases and under-reporting. We calculate the number of births to adolescents by applying rates to the female population in the respective age groups.
Results
Between 1990 and 2023, global ASFR for girls aged 10–14 decreased by 76%, from 4.5 (95% uncertainty interval (UI) (4.1 to 5.2)) to 1.1 (95% UI 0.9 to 1.4) births per 1000, while ASFR for girls aged 15–19 fell by 48%, from 74.7 (95% UI 72.5 to 77.1) to 39.0 (95% UI 36.8 to 41.4) births per 1000.
In 2023, births to mothers aged 10–14 years were estimated at 347 (95% UI 285 to 454) thousand, and for those aged 15–19 years at 12.2 (95% UI 11.5 to 12.9) million.
The number of births among adolescents aged 15–19 in sub-Saharan Africa increased during 1990–2023 due to population growth and slower fertility declines.
Conclusion
Despite significant global reduction in adolescent childbearing, regional and national disparities persist. Targeted interventions addressing child marriage, educational inequities and lack of access to reproductive health services will be critical for achieving related SDG targets and advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment."
Levels and trends in fertility rates among adolescents aged 10–14 and 15–19 in 201 countries and areas from 1950 to 2023 (open access)
Figure 1. ASFR aged 10–14 (top) and 15–19 (bottom) in 2023. Median estimates are shown in the plot. Countries/areas in grey: estimates are not reported due to small populations or lack of data. ASFR, age-specific fertility rate.
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