The Island That Ate Itself: Nauru’s Highs and Ruin From the ring road you can look inland and see a jagged forest of limestone spires, chalk white under the equatorial sun. Locals call the plateau Topside. It was once a canopy of pandanus and palm. Today it looks like a set of broken teeth, a landscape mined so thoroughly that most of the island’s heart is uninhabitable.

The library is packed, the coffee is burnt, and the soft glow that once meant study groups and Google Docs now signals something else entirely. During finals this spring, a quiet chorus of chimes rolled across campuses as students opened premium chatbots that had been handed to them for free. The help did not arrive as a tutor or a cram session, but as an irresistible offer: try the most advanced AI, on us.

On a gray Monday morning, a university sophomore powers down her phone and slides it into a desk drawer. For seven days she will resist the reflex to tap, scroll, refresh. By Sunday night, she is sleeping a little easier and feeling a little lighter. A new study suggests she is not alone. A short break, measurable gains Young adults who reduced their social media use for just one week reported notable improvements in mental health, according to research published in JAMA Network Open.

From a distance, inequality looks like a sterile graph. Up close, it feels personal. A new study suggests that the simple act of seeing how wealthy the wealthiest really are can change how people vote on taxes and redistribution. It also suggests that seeing more can make us angrier. An experiment in seeing The research, published in PNAS Nexus by a team that includes Milena Tsvetkova of the London School of Economics and Political Science, tested a proposition that is as intuitive as it is rarely measured: visibility shapes how people understand inequality, and that understanding shapes how they vote.

The suitcase was packed with braid and ceremony. On a bright July morning in 1936, a light aircraft clawed at the air over Portugal’s coast, heavy with the expectations of a coup and the luggage of a returning general. Seconds later it fell, the wreckage scattering across scrub just outside Estoril. Inside lay José Sanjurjo, the man many conspirators expected to lead Spain’s military uprising.

On a spring evening not so long ago in the sweep of history, an American farmhouse went bright for the first time. A single bulb snapped on. The shadows retreated from the kitchen table, and chores shifted from what could be done by daylight to what could be done by will. For millions of families, that moment happened within living memory.

A surprise drop in Austin revived a 2004 anthem and reopened an old, thorny story about sampling, credit, and what it means to be defined by a single song. A shock return for a song its creator sidelined Near the end of a recent set at The Concourse Project in Austin, a chorus drifted over the room that thousands of club nights have baked into collective muscle memory.

The cabbage leaf hardly moves, yet a small drama is underway. A caterpillar inches along the midrib. A slender black wasp lands, curls her abdomen and touches it lightly to the caterpillar's skin. Inside the larva, her eggs will hatch and begin to feed. Days later, a cluster of pale cocoons appears on the leaf like a spill of pearls. Then another wasp arrives, smaller still, seeking those cocoons.

In the autumn of 23 CE, as rebels surged into the imperial capital of Chang'an, the emperor who had promised to rebuild China on ancient lines waited inside Weiyang Palace. Outside, the Yellow River had already redrawn the map with catastrophic floods, coins of bewildering new shapes clinked uselessly in markets, and armies loyal to dynastic restoration closed in. Within hours, Wang Mang, a Confucian classicist who had made himself emperor, would be dead, his short-lived Xin dynasty overrun.

At 2 a.m., the lights in a San Francisco co-working space are still on. A founder studies a dashboard tracking GPU usage and burn, two lines moving in opposite directions. The product demo gets applause, early customers are engaged, and the compute invoice is due on Friday. The clock that defines the next yearMost generative AI startups founded in 2023 raised 18–24 months of runway.

The tab snaps, fizz rises, and for a split second it feels like relief. A new study suggests the comfort may come with a cost, especially for women, and the trail runs through the trillions of microbes living in the gut. What the research found In a recent peer-reviewed analysis of adults, researchers reported that people who drank more soft drinks were more likely to have a diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

On a weekday afternoon, the fluorescent heart of the grocery store hums. Aisles of boxes and bags promise dinner in minutes, flavors dialed up to eleven, colors that do not occur in nature. The produce section is a quiet cul-de-sac by comparison. Into this contrast steps the American Heart Association with a blunt reminder: what we reach for most often shapes how long and how well our hearts work.

In a quiet room a phone timer glows, a soft tone marks five seconds in and five seconds out. On a chest strap monitor the jagged trace of heartbeats begins to roll into a smooth wave, each inhale lifting the rate, each exhale lowering it. The shift looks small. It feels bigger than that. The practice has several names, but most people now know it as coherent or resonance breathing.

The instant you catch a whiff of coffee or smoke, your body is already making moves your mind has not yet noticed. The question that keeps scientists busy is which judgment lands first in the brain: what the odor is, or whether it is good or bad. Walk into a kitchen at 7 a.m. One burner warms a pan of butter and onions, another hides a scrap of plastic melting near a coil.

The hardest part comes on day three. Hunger has ebbed and returned in waves, the fridge has become a study in restraint, and the body is no longer improvising. It is reorganizing. A team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London’s Precision Healthcare University Research Institute and the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences set out to watch that reorganization unfold in real time.

Thirty miles north of Istanbul, the Bosporus narrows to a mile-wide strait where salt water runs like a river between seas. On sonar, the Black Sea floor nearby shows what looks like an old shoreline, a ghostly terrace now in the dark. For some scientists, that drowned edge is a clue to one of humanity's most enduring stories. A deluge at the threshold of two seas…

Your brain may be older than your birth certificate suggests, and what sits on your plate could be part of the reason. A large study of more than 21,000 adults in the UK has linked diets that promote inflammation with signs of faster brain aging, particularly in people 60 and older. The work, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology, estimates that those eating the most pro-inflammatory diets had brains that appeared about half a year older than their peers, even after accounting for age, education, lifestyle, and cardiovascular conditions.

When the timer dings, the russet that knocked like a stone now yields to a fork as if it is full of air. The same vegetable, same shape, same earthy scent, yet it has crossed a line: from rigid to tender, from raw to ready. What changes inside a potato in that hour of heat is a small master class in plant biology and kitchen physics.

In clinics from southern India to parts of East and Central Africa, physicians still encounter a familiar, uneasy picture. A lean young adult arrives with blood sugar soaring and a long history of stomach pain and scant meals in childhood. Imaging shows a pancreas freckled with calcifications. This is diabetes, but not the kind most readers know. It is a form rooted in early-life deprivation, not genetics or autoimmunity.

The riverboat eased into Leopoldville at dusk, its whistle mixing with cicada drone and the clatter of freight. On the docks, porters with numbered brass tags unloaded crates under the gaze of colonial officers. No one there knew that somewhere in this swirl of rails and riverways, in the fast-growing capital later renamed Kinshasa, a human virus was settling in. It would remain mostly invisible for decades, then change the world.

On a recent morning in São Paulo, a school cafeteria worker lifted a lid to reveal trays of beans, rice and sautéed greens. The menu is part of a nationwide shift: Brazil's school food program has eliminated most ultra-processed products and, by 2026, aims for 90 percent of food served to be fresh or minimally processed. The change arrives amid a global reckoning with what we eat, and what, exactly, counts as food.

The barcode scanner chirps, the late-night snack is logged, and a little red number appears that feels less like information and more like judgment. For millions of people, that tiny alert is the nudge that keeps them honest. For others, it is the moment motivation starts to fray. New research, familiar feelings A team led by researchers at University College London and Loughborough University examined how that fray forms.

In a country where medical records and newborn blood spots have quietly powered some of the world’s largest psychiatric studies, researchers have traced a surprisingly large share of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder risk to just three rare genetic variants. What the scientists found In a Nature study drawing on whole exome data from 8,895 people diagnosed with ADHD and 53,780 control individuals, an international team led by Aarhus University’s iPSYCH project identified rare variants in three genes with unusually large effects: …

The cave opens like a dark mouth in the limestone of the Zagros Mountains, high above the Great Zab River. In this rock shelter in northern Iraq, archaeologists found a Neanderthal who should not have been alive and yet was. His bones tell a story of injury, repair and, most strikingly, other people. Shanidar Cave is a storied place in paleoanthropology.

The first body was found in summer grass, not far from a huddle of cattle and a boundary of firs. In 1764, in the rugged Margeride hills of south-central France, a rural province began to whisper the same word each time another villager failed to come home: the Beast. A province under siege Between 1764 and 1767, dozens of people in Gévaudan, a sparsely populated corner that now lies mostly in the department of Lozère, were killed by a predatory animal or animals.