A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romania’s Iași County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a paper published this month in the journal Antiquity by Diana Măriuca Vornicu, Felix-Adrian Tencariu and colleagues from the Romanian Academy and Alexandru Ioan Cuza […]

Apple (xip, downloads):

Xcode 27 includes Swift 6.4 and SDKs for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27. Xcode 27 supports on-device debugging in iOS 17 and later, tvOS 17 and later, watchOS 10 and later, and visionOS. Xcode 27 requires a Mac running macOS Tahoe 26.6 or later.

Peter Witham:

Is this new in Xcode 27? Pretty sure it as and I approve whole heartedly! I really hate setting up Xcode settings more than once.

Christian Beer:

Building with Xcode 27 doesn’t work because of some intransparent XCStrings error… and I even can’t check with Xcode 26 anymore because Apple decided to not let me run it on macOS 27…

Steven Woolgar:

After all these years Apple has finally broken cmd-e in Xcode 27.

Previously:

• iPhone Duo
• Ending the Golden Era for Backward-Compatible Apps
• Xcode 26.6
• Xcode 27’s Device Hub
• Swift 6.4
• Xcode 27 Announced

iPhone 18 Pro arrives with Apple concentrating its biggest changes in three areas: camera control, sustained performance, and battery life. The new Pro models retain familiar 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch display sizes, but introduce a variable-aperture main camera, the 2-nanometer A20 Pro chip, redesigned thermal hardware, and a smaller Dynamic Island.

The lineup consists of iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, starting at $1,199 and $1,299 in the U.S., respectively. Both begin with 256GB of storage and are available in black, silver, glacier, and a new burgundy finish. Preorders opened September 12, with retail availability beginning September 18 in more than 65 countries and regions.

Rather than treating the Pro models as a cosmetic update, Apple has focused on changes that become more noticeable during demanding use, particularly photography, video work, gaming, AI processing, and long sessions away from a charger.

iPhone 18 Pro brings variable aperture to the main camera

The centerpiece is a new 48MP Fusion Main camera with a physical variable aperture, a first for the iPhone.

Six laser-cut aperture blades can adjust the amount of light reaching the sensor while also changing depth of field. The camera supports four aperture settings: ƒ/1.48, ƒ/1.8, ƒ/2.8, and ƒ/4.0.

At the wider end, the camera can gather more light in darker scenes. A narrower aperture can keep more people or background detail in focus, giving photographers another tool beyond computational depth effects and Portrait mode.

Apple also gives users direct access to those settings through new Pro controls in the Camera app. Aperture, shutter speed, and white balance can be adjusted manually, while a histogram provides a more conventional way to monitor exposure.

The feature is paired with a new main-camera sensor and updated computational imaging pipeline. Apple says the combination improves low-light performance and detail, while Photographic Styles gain texture and grain controls for additional control over an image’s appearance.

Video receives several additions as well. Cinematic effects can now be applied after recording to footage captured at up to 60 frames per second, while Time-lapse can record in 4K with Dolby Vision HDR. Audio Mix has also been updated with improved voice processing and the ability to isolate music.

For photographers who want more evidence of how an image originated, Apple is introducing Apple Reference Image. In Reference mode, the main camera signs sensor data, which Private Cloud Compute uses to create an unalterable reference version that can be compared with an edited image in Photos. Apple is also preparing support for the SynthID standard as another way of identifying AI-generated or altered content.

iPhone 18 Pro uses A20 Pro and a redesigned vapor chamber

A20 Pro is built using a 2-nanometer manufacturing process and contains a six-core CPU, seven-core GPU, and dual 16-core Neural Engine.

Apple says memory bandwidth is 50% higher than on A19 Pro, while GPU performance can be up to 40% faster. The Neural Engine provides 32 cores in total, doubling the AI processing capability of the previous Pro chip.

The silicon change is closely tied to a redesigned cooling system. Apple has rearranged the chip package so that the silicon die sits beside the memory rather than beneath it in the thermal path, allowing A20 Pro to connect more directly to a next-generation vapor chamber.

That vapor chamber has three times the surface area of the previous generation and uses new materials to move heat away from the processor more effectively. Apple claims the design can deliver up to a 40% gain in sustained performance compared with iPhone 17 Pro.

That distinction is more relevant than peak benchmark numbers for workloads such as extended gaming sessions, video editing, computational photography, and local AI models, where heat can force a phone to reduce performance over time.

Connectivity has also moved further toward Apple-designed silicon. The N1 wireless chip supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread, while the new C2 modem succeeds C1X. Apple says C2 uses 15% less energy while offering faster uploads and adds mmWave support in the U.S.

iPhone 18 Pro Max reaches 45 hours of video playback

Battery improvements are another major part of the new hardware.

Apple rates eSIM-only versions of iPhone 18 Pro for up to 36 hours of video playback, while iPhone 18 Pro Max reaches as much as 45 hours. Apple says Pro Max receives the largest battery-life increase ever delivered in an iPhone.

Some of that gain comes from using the space previously occupied by a physical SIM tray. In markets receiving eSIM-only models, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the larger internal battery provides an additional two hours of rated video playback.

Charging has accelerated as well. iPhone 18 Pro can reach 50% charge in approximately 15 minutes using a supported wired setup, while wireless charging reaches 50% in around 30 minutes. Apple says five minutes of wired charging on iPhone 18 Pro Max can provide roughly seven hours of video playback.

Both devices use aluminum unibody construction with Ceramic Shield 2 on the front and Ceramic Shield on the back. Storage options run from 256GB through 2TB.

The iPhone 18 Pro weighs 211 grams, while iPhone 18 Pro Max weighs 249 grams. Display sizes remain 6.3 inches and 6.9 inches, respectively.

iOS 27 brings Siri AI and new Apple Intelligence tools

The hardware launches alongside iOS 27, which places Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI more prominently across the system.

Siri AI can use personal context from information stored across apps, respond to onscreen content, perform actions in supported apps, and handle more open-ended questions. A new Siri mode in Camera lets users ask questions and take action based on objects or information visible through the viewfinder.

Photo tools include Spatial Reframing, Extend, and an upgraded Clean Up feature, while Safari can monitor selected webpages for changes such as a product restock or price adjustment.

The Dynamic Island has also been physically reduced and redesigned. It can display up to three Live Activities simultaneously while continuing to support Face ID.

Apple released iOS 27 on September 14, while Siri AI is rolling out initially as a beta in English, with additional language support planned. iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max reach stores September 18, giving Apple a Pro lineup whose most substantial additions are less about a new exterior shape and more about physical camera control, heat management, and how long the hardware can sustain demanding workloads.

The post iPhone 18 Pro adds variable aperture, A20 Pro, and longer battery life appeared first on AppleMagazine.

Des chercheurs chinois ont publié une étonnante étude sur une solution radicale pour protéger la Terre d'un astéroïde géant : l'enfouissement d'une bombe nucléaire dans le rocher spatial. Ce n'est pas de la fiction, rien que de la physique, des simulations et des calculs. La menace est réelle,...

The idea of finding an intelligent message encoded in the standard genetic code is certainly a fascinating possibility.

Source

Apple (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):

Explore what’s new for macOS 27.

The page is designed in an annoying way that requires sideways scrolling, and there doesn’t seem to be a PDF list of the new features like in previous years.

See also:

• Jason Snell
• Juli Clover
• Marcus Mendes
• William Gallagher
• Mr. Macintosh
• Reddit

Jeff Johnson:

There’s also a DEPRECATION NOTICE at the top of the man page that lists the diskutil replacements for hdiutil subcommands.

Patrick Wardle:

Fixed: launchd no longer supports loading launchd property list files with the quarantine extended attribute.

Dave Nanian:

[Even] though a bootable backup is properly configured to boot, they aren’t showing up as choices in either the startup disk preference pane or the startup picker. (FB24210103, reported quite a while ago, Apple friends.)

Previously:

• Golden Gate Release Candidate
• Preparing to Update to Golden Gate
• macOS 27 Public Beta
• Glow Leopard
• macOS 27 Golden Gate Announced
• macOS Tahoe 26

In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen […]

A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied […]

A researcher surveying a San Mateo County creek stumbled upon a preserved Pacific mastodon molar estimated to be at least 10,000 years old.

When a tunnel catches fire, temperatures inside the concrete lining can soar to 800 or 900 degrees Celsius, and the emergency response almost always involves dousing the structure with water. A new study suggests that this familiar firefighting image—flames followed by a torrent of cooling water—may be doing far more damage to the concrete than engineers have typically accounted for. Researchers investigating basalt fiber-reinforced concrete have found that how a fire-damaged structure is cooled can be as important as how hot it got in the first place, with water quenching consistently inflicting greater strength loss than slow, natural cooling across every temperature they tested.

The research, published in Case Studies in Construction Materials, systematically examined how heating temperature, cooling regime, fiber content, and impact loading combine to determine whether concrete survives a fire with its load-bearing capacity intact. The team, led by Yang Liu and colleagues including Delin Li, Jinyue Dong, Yingda Zhang, Xianliang Zhou, and Qiong Zhou, chose basalt fiber-reinforced concrete, or BFRC, as their test material because of the fiber’s unusual combination of properties. Basalt fibers, drawn from volcanic rock, offer high tensile strength, thermal stability up to melting points between 1350 and 1450 degrees Celsius, and a cost profile far more attractive than premium alternatives such as carbon fiber. This makes them an appealing candidate for tunnel linings, where fire resistance and economy must be balanced.

The experimental design was exhaustive. The researchers prepared a C35-grade concrete mix—the grade commonly recommended for tunnel design—using ordinary Portland cement, medium sand, and continuously graded gravel between 5 and 10 millimeters. Into this base mix they incorporated chopped basalt fibers, 12 millimeters long with a monofilament diameter of 17 micrometers, at volume fractions of 0, 0.1, and 0.2 percent. The fibers were added in small batches during dry mixing to prevent agglomeration, and the fresh concrete was cast into cylindrical specimens measuring 50 millimeters in diameter and 25 millimeters in height, then cured under standard conditions at 20 degrees Celsius and 95 percent relative humidity.

The thermal assault began in a high-temperature electric oven capable of reaching 1200 degrees Celsius. Specimens were heated at a controlled rate of 5 degrees Celsius per minute to target temperatures of 200, 400, 600, and 800 degrees Celsius, then held at temperature for a full hour to ensure the heat penetrated the interior. Half the specimens were then removed and allowed to cool naturally in ambient air, mimicking a structure left to cool on its own after a fire. The other half were plunged immediately into a tank of tap water, replicating the thermal shock of firefighting operations. After cooling, the water-immersed specimens were conditioned in air for seven days to return them to a natural moisture state before testing.

The dynamic mechanical properties were then probed using a split Hopkinson pressure bar, the workhorse instrument for measuring how materials behave under the extreme strain rates produced by impacts and blasts. The apparatus used bars 75 millimeters in diameter, made of high-strength steel with an elastic modulus of 210 gigapascals, with a striker bar propelled by compressed gas striking an incident bar that transmitted stress waves through the specimen. Three impact velocities—3.5, 4.4, and 5.2 meters per second—were tested, achieved by varying the operating gas pressure, with three specimens per condition. A thin pulse shaper was pasted at the impact end of the incident bar to smooth out high-frequency oscillations, and stress equilibrium between the two faces of each specimen was verified from strain-gauge signals, confirming the reliability of the data. Fragments from each impact were sieved through meshes ranging from 4.75 millimeters down to 75 micrometers so that a fractal dimension could be calculated, providing a quantitative measure of how thoroughly each specimen shattered.

The visual evidence of thermal damage followed a familiar but telling progression. At 200 degrees Celsius, the concrete surfaces turned bluish-gray, with no cracking. By 400 degrees, the color shifted to yellowish-gray, still structurally sound. At 600 degrees, fine cracks appeared along with slight surface peeling, and by 800 degrees the specimens showed severe cracking, spalling, and edge breakage. Water-cooled specimens generally exhibited more pronounced surface damage than their naturally cooled counterparts, and at 800 degrees the concave shape at the start of the stress-strain curve—evidence of pre-existing microcracks being closed under compression—was especially marked in the water-quenched samples.

The strength data told a stark quantitative story. For naturally cooled specimens containing 0.2 percent basalt fiber, the dynamic peak stress at an impact velocity of 3.5 meters per second fell from 51.1 megapascals at room temperature to 18.6 megapascals at 800 degrees—a reduction of 63.6 percent. Water cooling made matters worse across the board: at the same impact velocity, the reductions reached 23.9 percent at just 200 degrees and climbed to 64.9 percent at 800 degrees. Averaged across the temperature range, each 100-degree increment cost naturally cooled specimens roughly 6.7 to 8.0 percent of their strength, while water-cooled specimens lost about 7.5 to 8.1 percent per 100 degrees. The gap between the two cooling regimes widened at higher impact velocities: at 5.2 meters per second and 800 degrees, the water-cooled specimens suffered 6.4 percent greater strength loss than the naturally cooled ones, whereas at the lowest velocity the difference was a mere 1.3 percent. The explanation lies in competing timescales—at slow loading rates, cracks have time to propagate and dissipate energy, blunting the effect of water-induced damage, but at high rates the loading outpaces the material’s energy dissipation, and the microcracks created by thermal shock propagate catastrophically.

Against this backdrop of degradation, the basalt fibers demonstrated genuine protective power. At every temperature from 200 to 800 degrees, specimens with 0.2 percent fiber content outperformed both plain concrete and the 0.1 percent mix. At 400 degrees and an impact velocity of 3.5 meters per second, the naturally cooled fiber-reinforced specimens reached peak stresses of 40.1 megapascals, some 16.9 percent above plain concrete, while at 200 degrees under water cooling the 0.2 percent mix achieved 38.8 megapascals—a remarkable 32.4 percent improvement over unreinforced concrete. The mechanism, the authors explain, is architectural: randomly distributed fibers form a three-dimensional network that binds tightly with the cementitious matrix, reduces internal pores and cracks, and bridges microcracks before they can coalesce into fracture surfaces. But this protection has a ceiling. Above roughly 600 degrees, the fibers begin to degrade and lose their reinforcing capability, and the fiber-matrix interface—already weakened by thermal mismatch between fiber and paste—becomes a liability during water quenching.

Fractal analysis of the impact debris added another layer of insight. The fractal dimension of the fragments rose steadily with temperature, from around 1.82 at 200 degrees to above 2.3 at 800 degrees under the highest loading rate, indicating progressively finer and more complex fragmentation. Water-cooled specimens consistently shattered into finer pieces than naturally cooled ones, particularly at 600 and 800 degrees, confirming that the steep thermal gradients during quenching seed dense populations of microcracks that later explode into fracture networks under impact.

Microstructural investigation grounded these observations in chemistry and physics. X-ray diffraction of specimens heated to 800 degrees showed the disappearance of calcium hydroxide peaks and weakened calcium carbonate signals, evidence that these phases had thermally decomposed—reactions that release vapor, increase porosity, and weaken the matrix. Scanning electron microscopy revealed the deterioration in vivid detail: an unheated specimen showed a dense microstructure with abundant calcium-silicate-hydrate gel and a compact interfacial transition zone around each aggregate, while specimens heated to 800 degrees contained no detectable C-S-H gel at all, their structure riddled with pores and cracks and hosting instead a dicalcium silicate-like phase. Comparing cooling regimes at 400 degrees, the naturally cooled sample remained relatively dense and rich in hydration products, whereas its water-quenched twin displayed obvious cracks at the interfacial transition zone and a loosened surrounding matrix—the fingerprint of thermal shock stress racing through the cooling material.

The practical implications reach well beyond the laboratory. Tunnel linings that survive a fire are routinely assessed and, if necessary, repaired, but this study shows that the assessment itself must account for the cooling history. A lining quenched by firefighting water may be significantly weaker than its peak temperature alone would suggest, particularly if it subsequently faces dynamic loads from traffic vibration, rockfall impacts, or secondary events. Conversely, the results give engineers a positive tool: specifying basalt fiber reinforcement at around 0.2 percent by volume can meaningfully bolster the impact resistance of fire-exposed concrete below 600 degrees, at a modest material cost. The authors frame their work as a theoretical foundation for post-fire safety assessment of tunnel linings and for the wider engineering adoption of basalt fiber-reinforced concrete—a reminder that in structural fire engineering, what happens in the minutes after the flames matter almost as much as the fire itself.

Scientists in Brazil have demonstrated that a combination of three non-destructive imaging techniques, visible-spectrum (RGB) photography, X-ray radiography, and three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), can detect and characterize hidden damage in soybean seeds that conventional quality tests frequently miss. The study, published in Smart Agricultural Technology, comes at a critical moment: Brazil is the world’s largest soybean producer and exporter, with an estimated harvest of 166 million tons for the 2024/2025 growing season, and seed quality is increasingly under threat from the very climate extremes that help drive the country’s agricultural productivity.

The research, led by Rafael Mateus Alves and colleagues at institutions including the Seed Technology Center of Embrapa Soybean and the University of São Paulo, was funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Its central premise is deceptively simple: because seed quality is largely determined in the field, before harvest even begins, researchers and seed companies need tools that can look inside a seed without killing it. Destructive assays such as the tetrazolium viability test, which stains metabolically active tissue red, are the industry standard, but they end the life of the sample. That is a particular problem for breeding programs, where each seed represents a unique genetic combination that must survive analysis if it is to be planted.

The seed itself is a small miracle of engineering. A protective coat, derived from the ovule integuments and marked by a scar called the hilum, regulates water uptake and shields the embryo within. The embryo contains the plumule, which gives rise to the plant’s first true leaves; the apical meristem, precursor of the aerial plant; and the hypocotyl–radicle axis, which breaks through the soil and forms the primary root. Flanking this axis are the cotyledons, storage organs packed with macromolecules that are metabolized and shipped to the growing axis during germination. Damage to any of these structures, from insects, fungi, drought, heat, or rough handling during harvest, can silently reduce a seed lot’s vigor, the capacity for rapid, uniform germination that underpins successful crop establishment.

To interrogate this architecture non-invasively, the team assembled ten representative seeds from production fields, commercial lots, and storage samples, each embodying a distinct damage category: stink bug injury, purple seed stain caused by fungi, green seeds from incomplete maturation, wrinkled seeds from heat and drought stress, weathering-related coat ruptures, severe structural failure, mechanical harvest damage, and internal galleries bored by the cigarette beetle (Lasioderma serricorne) during storage. Every seed was imaged sequentially with each of the three modalities and then subjected to the tetrazolium test as a qualitative reference standard.

The technical pipeline was meticulously standardized. For visible-light imaging, seeds were mounted on acetate sheets and photographed with a Leica DMLB microscope equipped with a DFC 310FX digital camera, oriented in four standardized positions with the hilum consistently to the right. X-ray radiographs were acquired on a Faxitron MX-20 DC-12 system operating at 34 kilovolts, with a nine-second exposure and an object-to-source distance of 11.4 centimeters; uniform contrast settings were applied to all images to make damaged tissues directly comparable. The MRI work used a horizontal 2 Tesla superconducting magnet coupled to a Bruker Avance III spectrometer operating at 85.24 megahertz for proton nuclei. Before scanning, seeds were conditioned to raise their moisture content from roughly 8–10 percent (wet basis) by incubation on moistened germination paper for three hours at 25 °C, a step that ensured sufficient hydrogen signal for imaging. A three-dimensional FLASH pulse sequence, with a 3-millisecond echo time and 75-millisecond repetition time, collected data on a 128×128×128 matrix over a 12.8-millimeter field of view, yielding isotropic voxels of 100 micrometers per side. Datasets were zero-padded to 256³ before Fourier transformation and rendered in three dimensions using ImageJ with the 3Dscript plugin.

The resulting image galleries are striking. On seeds punctured by stink bugs, the dominant pest of Brazilian soybean fields, RGB images revealed darkened patches on the cotyledons and near the plumule, the visible legacy of insect feeding that lacerates tissue and injects yeasts that degrade it from within. X-ray images flagged zones of reduced radiation absorption in the same darkened regions, while MRI cross-sections exposed the depth of tissue destruction with unusual clarity, precisely because degraded tissue no longer absorbs water and therefore produces no magnetic resonance signal. The tetrazolium test confirmed that these zones lacked respiratory activity, meaning they were metabolically dead.

Not every symptom tells the same story, however, and the multimodal approach proved especially powerful at distinguishing superficial from structural damage. Seeds with purple seed stain, caused by Cercospora fungi that secrete the toxin cercosporin, showed internal structures that appeared entirely normal in both X-ray and MRI. Yet the tetrazolium test produced an unusually intense red coloration at the stained coat, indicating that fungal activity had compromised the seed coat’s ability to regulate water uptake, allowing the staining solution to penetrate more deeply into the embryo. Similarly, green seeds, which retain chlorophyll because heat and drought interrupted maturation, showed no structural anomalies under X-ray or MRI, but their membranes proved unusually permeable to the tetrazolium solution, hinting at the physiological deterioration typical of immature tissue.

Where MRI truly distinguished itself was in detecting damage invisible to every other method. One seed that appeared flawless in visible light and radiographically normal in X-ray images revealed, in its three-dimensional MRI reconstruction, internal ruptures running through the central cotyledons, the likely consequence of rapid, uneven drying that forces differential cellular expansion and eventual tissue collapse. In mechanically damaged seeds, the X-ray images showed a crack in the hypocotyl–radicle axis that the camera could not see, but MRI went further, revealing the full extent of the fissure and the displacement of the axis relative to the cotyledons. The team also documented a dramatic structural failure nicknamed the “popcorn effect,” in which alternating wetting and rapid drying cycles tear the seed coat and force the cotyledons apart, a phenomenon increasingly reported in Brazilian seed lots as late-season weather grows more erratic.

To move beyond qualitative observation, the researchers extracted grayscale histograms from each X-ray image, normalizing pixel frequencies across the full 0–255 intensity range. Two statistical descriptors, mean gray level and Shannon entropy, were then compared across damage categories using one-way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s honest significance test. The analysis yielded clear separation: undamaged seeds showed the narrowest distributions with peaks at high grayscale values, while beetle-infested seeds and wrinkled seeds displayed the broadest distributions with heavy weight in the lower gray ranges, reflecting hollowed-out tissues and sparse, deformed structures. Mean gray level differed significantly across categories, peaking in undamaged seeds and bottoming out in wrinkled ones, while Shannon entropy, a measure of histogram complexity, was highest in beetle-damaged seeds and lowest in healthy ones. Because each damage category produced a characteristic radiographic fingerprint, the authors suggest these histogram metrics could support automated, quantitative screening in commercial seed laboratories.

Each modality, the authors stress, occupies a distinct niche. RGB imaging is fast, cheap, and ideal for surface screening but blind to anything beneath the coat. X-ray radiography, already a mainstay of seed testing labs, reveals internal voids, malformations, and cavities rapidly and non-destructively, though it cannot report on metabolic viability and demands careful standardization. MRI, with its superb soft-tissue contrast and genuine three-dimensional resolution, excels at detecting subtle physiological and structural alterations, latent mechanical injury, hydration-induced ruptures, and moisture redistribution, but its cost and acquisition time currently confine it to research settings. The tetrazolium test remains valuable as a reference but is destructive and subject to interpreter bias.

The authors argue the techniques should be viewed as complementary rather than competing, and they sketch a future in which RGB and X-ray screening handle high-throughput commercial quality control while MRI resolves ambiguous or high-stakes cases, such as breeding lines and seed physiology studies. Advances in imaging hardware, automation, and artificial intelligence-based analysis, they note, could eventually fuse these modalities into scalable phenotyping workflows. For now, the message is clear: in an era when a single season of heat, drought, and hungry insects can undermine an entire seed lot, the ability to see damage in all three dimensions, without sacrificing the seed itself, may prove as transformative for agriculture as it has been for medicine.

Beneath every step we take, soils hold one of the planet’s largest reservoirs of carbon, a vast, slow-moving bank of organic matter that quietly regulates how much of the world’s carbon stays locked away and how much escapes into the atmosphere as greenhouse gas. Now a sweeping new review warns that climate-driven extremes, droughts, floods, and wildfires, are rewriting the rules of that subterranean economy in ways that conventional models and land-management practices have not yet caught up with. The analysis, led by environmental scientist Nanthi Bolan of the University of Western Australia and colleagues, including a corresponding authorship by Bolan himself, synthesizes a substantial body of global evidence on how extreme weather reshapes carbon inputs to soil, microbial processing, erosion, and the sequestration of carbon that underpins soil health, water retention, nutrient cycling, and agricultural productivity.

The work, published in the journal Carbon Research, is notable for the scale of its underlying evidence base. On 14 January 2026, the authors searched Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science using terms spanning climate change, extreme weather, soil carbon, microbial activity, decomposition, erosion, dissolved organic matter, and leaching. The initial sweep returned 14,218 records; after removing duplicates and screening for eligibility, 3,754 articles remained for bibliometric and qualitative analysis. From those, 187 publications were selected for detailed synthesis based on relevance, methodological rigor, and the substantive quality of their findings. Keyword co-occurrence patterns were mapped with VOSviewer, a bibliometric tool that reveals the intellectual architecture of a research field. The result is a critical review grounded in structured literature screening rather than new experimental data, but its synthesis offers one of the most comprehensive maps yet of how extremes rearrange the soil carbon cycle.

The review’s central finding is that no two extremes act alike. Drought, the most widespread disturbance, operates largely through the plant side of the equation. When rainfall fails, photosynthesis slows, plant biomass production falls, and the total flux of carbon entering soils through roots, residues, and litter declines. There is a nuance here: under moderate water stress, plants may temporarily shift a greater proportion of their fixed carbon belowground, investing in roots to chase moisture. But prolonged drought overwhelms that compensatory response. Microbial biomass shrinks, litter decomposition stalls, and the living engine of the soil carbon cycle idles. Then comes the deceptive twist: when rain finally returns, rewetting triggers a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide as starved soil microbes seize upon the accumulated substrates left behind by months of suspended activity. That post-drought CO₂ flush, the review emphasizes, can erase much of the apparent “savings” that accumulated during the dry period. Across the assembled evidence, repeated and multi-year drought was consistently associated with declining soil organic carbon, with grasslands and arable croplands showing particularly pronounced losses, ecosystems that happen to anchor much of the world’s food production.

Flooding tells the opposite story, but it ends in many of the same places. Water saturation chokes off oxygen diffusion through soil pores, forcing microbial metabolism into anaerobic pathways. That shift changes everything downstream. Prolonged waterlogging can drive the chemical reduction of iron oxyhydroxides, minerals that in oxygenated conditions act as microscopic glues binding organic carbon to soil particles. When those minerals dissolve, the carbon they held is released as dissolved organic carbon, which can then be stripped away by erosion and leaching and exported to rivers, lakes, and ultimately the ocean. The review stresses, however, that flooding is not unambiguously a carbon loss story. Wetlands and other periodically inundated ecosystems can accumulate and retain enormous carbon stocks precisely because water constrains decomposition. Whether a flood event releases carbon or banks it depends on the interplay between plant inputs, oxygen availability, and hydrological transport, a delicate balance that shifting rainfall regimes are actively destabilizing.

Wildfire is the most dramatic and immediately visible of the three forces, and its effects cascade on multiple timescales. Combustion directly strips vegetation, litter, and soil organic matter, transferring carbon to the atmosphere in hours. But fire also rearranges the physical and biological landscape of the soil in subtler ways: it can increase erosion by removing protective ground cover, alter soil wettability in ways that change hydrological behavior, restructure microbial communities, and expose previously protected carbon, once shielded inside aggregates or mineral associations, to fresh decomposition. There is a paradoxical bright spot. Pyrogenic carbon, the charcoal-like residue of incomplete combustion, is chemically recalcitrant and can persist in soils for centuries or millennia, functioning as a long-term carbon sink. Whether a fire leaves a landscape as a net carbon source or stabilizes some of its carbon in pyrogenic form depends on fire severity, soil moisture, fuel load, ecosystem type, and the trajectory of post-fire recovery. The review is clear that this balance cannot be predicted from fire alone; it is contingent, site by site, on conditions that vary widely across the globe.

Perhaps the most consequential theme running through the synthesis is that carbon responses cannot be inferred from the type of extreme event alone. Land use, soil mineralogy, hydrology, salinity, vegetation composition, microbial community makeup, and the timing of events within a season all determine whether carbon ends up stored, mobilized, or released. Iron and aluminum oxyhydroxides and clay minerals, for instance, provide mineral protection that can shield organic matter even under stress, while sandy or low-clay soils offer little such refuge. Managed croplands respond differently from native grasslands; saline coastal soils behave differently from acidic forest soils. And compound events, drought followed by wildfire, or alternating drought and flooding in rapid succession, may produce effects that are qualitatively different from those of isolated disturbances, as when a dried landscape burns more intensely, or when post-fire soils, stripped of vegetation, wash away in the first heavy rain. The review argues that the climate science and soil science communities have largely studied these disturbances one at a time, while the real world increasingly delivers them in combination.

The implications for climate mitigation and adaptation are substantial. Soil organic carbon is frequently invoked in national climate pledges and voluntary carbon markets as a bankable sink, yet the review suggests that the security of that bank depends heavily on how often and how severely extremes strike. If multi-year droughts steadily drain carbon from grasslands and croplands, or if fires repeatedly reset accumulation cycles, the effective permanence of soil carbon storage becomes far more fragile than many accounting frameworks assume. Conversely, protecting and rebuilding soil carbon delivers benefits well beyond climate: it improves water retention in drought-prone regions, supports nutrient cycling, stabilizes soil structure against erosion, and sustains the microbial diversity on which fertility depends. Carbon stewardship, in other words, is not separable from food security or ecosystem resilience; it is the same problem viewed from different angles.

The authors are candid about the limits of the current evidence base. The article does not report newly generated datasets and does not present a dedicated limitations section, and its conclusions rest on a qualitative synthesis of selected publications. Consequently, they call for improved and more consistent evidence across soil types, land uses, and both terrestrial and aquatic environments, and across multiple temporal scales, from the instantaneous CO₂ pulse after rewetting to the multi-decadal trajectory of carbon storage. Standardizing measurements of carbon pools, microbial functions, and event intensity, they argue, would make results comparable across ecosystems and enable more confident generalization, something the field currently struggles to achieve given heterogeneous methods and site-specific reporting.

Looking forward, the review sketches a research agenda that is as technologically ambitious as it is mechanistically focused. The authors recommend integrating high-resolution remote sensing with ground observations, advanced spectroscopy, molecular analyses, and integrated modeling to track carbon as it moves through soils and into waterways. They single out several priorities: characterizing microbial genomic and functional diversity as it responds to stress, quantifying carbon stoichiometry, probing the interactions between organic matter and iron and aluminum oxyhydroxides, understanding clay-mineral protection mechanisms, tracking long-term storage outcomes, and systematically studying the sequencing of compound extreme events. Each of these threads addresses a gap in the mechanistic chain that links a weather event in the atmosphere to a molecule of carbon, stabilized or released, in the soil.

What emerges from the review is a picture of the soil carbon cycle not as a stable background process but as a dynamic, contested system whose behavior under climate extremes is far less predictable than once assumed. The same storm that floods a rice paddy and exports carbon to a river delta may, a few hundred kilometers away, end a drought and briefly green a grassland, with opposite consequences for the atmosphere. As extremes grow more frequent and more compound, the review makes the case that understanding, and safeguarding, the carbon held beneath our feet will require science that is as interconnected and as restless as the weather itself.

Keywords

soil organic carbon, extreme weather, drought, flooding, wildfire, carbon sequestration, microbial activity, dissolved organic carbon, erosion, pyrogenic carbon, climate change, soil health

Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough
The playwright explores our relationship with technology, asks if robots have souls and even questions the value of art in this sci-fi courtroom drama

For play number 92, Alan Ayckbourn returns to his preoccupation of exploring where we as a species are heading through a science-fiction lens. He goes back to the future. In The Trial of Romeo Oscar, the playwright famed for his domestic comedies looks to the year 2194 when humans have spread about the galaxy and androids live alongside us. One of them, RSDO83, is on trial for the murder of a teenage girl in his charge.

This is Ayckbourn philosophising about the future of humanity as we sit at an obvious inflection point, asking what this moment in our relationship with technology means and where it will lead us. The questions running through the play are manifold, complex and echo those asked by sci-fi writers for decades: can robots hurt humans? Do they have souls? He is also questioning the value of art and even its purpose.

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© Photograph: Tony Bartholomew

© Photograph: Tony Bartholomew

© Photograph: Tony Bartholomew

On the slope below the cemetery of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, in Italy’s Le Marche region, recent heavy rains loosened the hillside enough to expose something no one was looking for: a rounded ceramic vessel, decoration still visible, sitting almost intact in the displaced earth. It looked, at first, like debris. It turned out to be […]

Apple has published three performance claims for iOS 27, each with the device it was tested on. It has published nothing about what the update does to battery life, nothing about how large the download is, and nothing about how much free space it needs. Those are the three things people actually search for on […]

The post iOS 27 Battery and Storage: The Numbers Apple Did Not Publish Before Monday appeared first on The Mac Observer.

O Instagram anunciou que agora será possível adicionar as publicações em que você foi marcado ao grid principal do seu perfil.

Com a novidade, é possível adicionar uma publicação com uma marcação ao seu perfil tanto a partir de uma notificação recebida por mensagem direta quando você é marcado quanto por meio da aba de Marcações. Também é possível remover a publicação do seu perfil a qualquer momento, sem excluir a sua marcação da postagem original.

Filtros de IA nos Stories

Agora, conforme relatou o site TudoCelular.com, a Meta liberou para os usuários brasileiros do Instagram novos filtros desenvolvidos com o modelo de inteligência artificial (IA) recentemente lançado pela empresa, o Muse Image, para os Stories.

Há efeitos que emulam cabines fotográficas, a estética de câmeras digitais dos anos 2000 ou transformam as pessoas em bonecos de crochê ou papel, dentre outras possibilidades. Também é possível modificar os efeitos existentes ou criar suas próprias versões.

Genuine death threats against politicians are no joke. But that doesn't mean every joke – such as threatening to turn someone into a sausage roll – should be taken as an actual death threat, says Steven Tucker.

The post Promising to Turn Someone Into a Sausage Roll is Not a Genuine ‘Death Threat’ appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Já imaginou assistir a uma cena de filme em que um rosto muda completamente e, pouco depois, ver algo parecido viralizar nas redes sociais? O que antes parecia reservado ao cinema hoje está ao alcance de qualquer pessoa.

Com ferramentas de inteligência artificial, trocar rostos deixou de ser uma tarefa complexa de edição. Em poucos passos, uma foto comum pode ganhar um novo contexto, permitindo transformar ideias criativas em imagens e vídeos compartilháveis.

Como o face swap com IA está mudando a edição de fotos e vídeos

Durante muito tempo, fazer uma troca de rosto convincente exigia softwares de edição, conhecimento técnico e bastante trabalho manual. Era necessário recortar imagens, ajustar proporções, combinar cores e corrigir imperfeições para obter um resultado natural.

Com a IA, boa parte dessas etapas pode ser automatizada. Os modelos conseguem identificar rostos, analisar características visuais e adaptar uma face à posição, iluminação e expressão da imagem original.

Essa evolução também mudou a produção de conteúdo. Uma ferramenta de troca de rostos como o VidMage permite experimentar diferentes ideias sem passar horas em um editor tradicional, tornando o face swap mais acessível para criadores e usuários comuns.

O que é possível criar com face swap hoje

O face swap atual vai muito além de simplesmente colocar um rosto em outra fotografia. A combinação entre IA e edição visual permite explorar diferentes estilos, personagens e situações, seja para entretenimento, redes sociais ou expressão criativa.

Algumas possibilidades incluem:

Estilos criativos

Uma selfie pode ganhar uma nova identidade visual ao ser inserida em uma pintura clássica, uma cena de ficção científica, um universo de fantasia ou uma temática sazonal. É uma forma simples de experimentar diferentes estilos sem precisar criar a imagem do zero.

Memes para redes sociais

O face swap também pode transformar modelos conhecidos de memes em conteúdos personalizados. Colocar o próprio rosto em uma situação divertida pode gerar imagens rápidas para compartilhar com amigos e seguidores.

Personagens fictícios

Outra possibilidade é assumir o papel de personagens fictícios, como cavaleiros, exploradores espaciais ou heróis de histórias em quadrinhos. Esse tipo de edição pode ser útil para narrativas visuais, fantasias e avatares.

Correção e edição de fotos

Nem todo uso precisa ser apenas criativo. O face swap pode ajudar a corrigir uma expressão, substituir uma foto em que alguém piscou ou combinar diferentes registros para obter uma imagem mais interessante, sem exigir experiência em edição.

Da criação ao resultado: como escolher um software de face swap

Com tantas ferramentas disponíveis, vale observar mais do que apenas a qualidade do efeito. Uma boa solução deve equilibrar facilidade de uso, controle criativo e segurança, especialmente para quem pretende trabalhar regularmente com fotos e vídeos.

Ao escolher um software, vale considerar:

• Facilidade de uso: uma interface simples permite criar resultados sem conhecimentos avançados de edição.
• Qualidade do resultado: rostos, expressões e proporções devem ser integrados de maneira natural.
• Variedade de recursos: suporte a diferentes formatos e possibilidades de edição amplia os usos da ferramenta.
• Privacidade: é importante entender como as imagens enviadas são processadas e armazenadas.
• Compatibilidade: ferramentas disponíveis tanto online quanto em desktop oferecem mais flexibilidade para diferentes fluxos de trabalho.

Nesse sentido, o VidMage para troca de rostos no Mac é uma opção voltada para usuários que preferem realizar esse tipo de edição diretamente no computador. Ter uma versão para desktop também pode ser interessante para quem trabalha com um volume maior de imagens e busca mais praticidade no processo.

Privacidade, segurança e controle sobre suas imagens

As imagens devem ser usadas apenas com a autorização das pessoas retratadas. O face swap não deve ser usado para enganar, prejudicar ou constranger terceiros. Também é importante respeitar os direitos de imagem e evitar conteúdos que possam causar confusão sobre a identidade de alguém.

A privacidade é outro ponto importante. Segundo a política do VidMage, fotos, vídeos e informações de características faciais usados no processamento não são armazenados nem compartilhados com terceiros. Os arquivos enviados para os serviços online são excluídos automaticamente dos servidores em até duas horas.

Além disso, o VidMage informa que os dados dos usuários, incluindo fotos e vídeos enviados, não são utilizados para treinar modelos de IA. Nos aplicativos para desktop, os arquivos permanecem armazenados localmente no dispositivo, oferecendo ao usuário maior controle sobre seus próprios dados.

O futuro do face swap na criação de conteúdo

O face swap com IA está tornando a edição visual mais rápida e acessível. O que antes dependia de ferramentas complexas agora pode ser explorado por qualquer pessoa interessada em experimentar novas ideias com fotos e vídeos.

À medida que os modelos de IA evoluem, a tecnologia tende a oferecer resultados mais naturais e maior controle sobre as criações. O desafio será encontrar o equilíbrio entre liberdade criativa, qualidade e uso responsável, para que o face swap continue sendo uma ferramenta de expressão e não apenas um efeito visual.

A Curtin University-led research team has successfully identified the mysterious origin of several 4,000-year-old 25-ton stones, which ancient architects used to construct Britain’s iconic Devil’s Arrows, as Birmingham Rocks in North Yorkshire, over 11 miles (18 kilometers) from the monument’s location.

The researcher behind the first-ever geological source identification of the ancient stone monument said the quarry’s distance and the work required to move such massive stones suggest the ancient architects intentionally selected the material used to construct Devil’s Arrows.

Unraveling the Mysterious Origin of the 4,000-Year-Old Devil’s Arrows

Announcing the discovery, the research team, which included scientists from the University of York, UK, noted that the famous stone pillars stand up to seven meters (22 feet) tall. The team also said the site is unusual because such alignments are rare in lowland settings. Still, researchers have struggled to locate the mysterious origin of the massive stone pillars used to create the over 4,000-year-old monument.

The Curtin-led team noted that previous studies determined that the stones used in Devil’s Arrows were transported to the site during the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. This range means the site could have been constructed as early as 2000 BC.

Lead author Dr Anthony Clarke, from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, noted the significant challenges with moving the stones over such difficult terrain.

“Each stone weighs more than 25 tonnes, so moving them would have required incredible planning, coordination and engineering skill,” the researcher explained.

Dr. Clarke also highlighted the value this effort suggests these ancient Britons “placed real importance” on the material used in the monument’s construction and the landscape itself.

“It wasn’t just about convenience – the location the stones came from likely held meaning for them,” the researcher explained.

Low Impact Sampling Method Confirms Ancient Stone’s ‘Fingerprints’

To unravel the ancient site’s mysterious origin, the researchers placed tiny pieces of low-adhesion tape on the stones and then removed them. The team said this “low impact” sampling process collected several tiny mineral grains on the tape without measurable damage to the ancient monuments.

According to the statement announcing their solution to the Devil’s Arrows origin mystery, the team performed an analysis of the “fingerprints” of the selected grains. The results matched material from Brimham Rocks.

Critically, the mystery’s solution also addressed the possibility that glacial movement or other natural processes moved the stones over the needed distance. Instead, the team said their results demonstrated that “the stones were intentionally transported by people.”

“Our research shows these stones weren’t simply taken from the nearest available source – they were deliberately chosen from a challenging landscape 18 kilometers away,” Dr Clarke said.

Clarke also said that the results eliminate the nearer site of Plimpton Rocks, which “had previously been identified as the probable source of the stones.”

“Our findings instead point to Brimham Rocks, showing that prehistoric builders transported these enormous stones significantly further than thought,” he explained.

Solving Similar Stone Monument Origin Mysteries

After discovering the mysterious origin of the 4,000-year-old pillars, Dr Clarke said the team will apply its low-impact sampling method to similar stone monument origin mysteries. The team also hopes to conduct future “targeted excavations” at the Devil’s Arrows site and the newly identified source.

Dr. Clarke said that analysis might help explain how these ancient architects moved the massive stone pillars several miles over rugged terrain over 4,000 years ago. The research said the work could also unravel “how these extraordinary monuments were constructed.”

Co-author Dr Jim Leary from the University of York echoed Dr Clarke’s sentiments, while also suggesting that the team’s findings ‘reshaped’ how researchers understand the art of prehistoric monument-building.

“These results show that ancient communities were making deliberate and meaningful choices about where their stones came from,” Dr Leary explained.

The York researcher said their solution to the Devil’s Arrows origin mystery also “highlights the importance of landscape and shared belief systems, as well as the remarkable effort involved in transporting and raising stones of this size.”

The study, “Deliberate Prehistoric Sourcing of the Devil’s Arrows, Britain’s Tallest Stone Row,” was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. 

Christopher Plain has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Reporter at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his novels at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org.