The Corps of Discovery Expedition set out in 1804, directed by President Thomas Jefferson to survey the United States’ newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. The exploration forms a core piece of early U.S. history. Picture a scene from the journey: It’s a cool morning, the silence punctuated by birdsong and the rustle of the breeze through the cottonwood trees. To one side, Commander William Clark, his rifle leaning against a plum tree and his rucksack nearby, squats over a latrine pit, unceremoniously heeding the call of nature. 

The Louisiana Purchase constituted a territory of around 828,000 square miles, which the U.S. had bought from France in 1803. This was, it is worth noting, largely without the consent of the Indigenous groups who had lived there for millennia. The purpose of the expedition was threefold: to find a practical trade route westward to the Pacific coast, to explore and document the territory, and to stake a claim to the area before any other European powers butted in. Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the 40-man team, plus their guide Sacagawea, spent more than two years trekking westward.

Believe it or not, the holes that were used as toilets along the march to the Pacific have been invaluable for archaeologists and historians. This is thanks especially to a type of treatment included in the expedition’s medical kit. 

How Lewis and Clark went to the bathroom

Everybody poops—it’s a universal human need. But most accounts of the Corps of Discovery’s journey leave out the details of how the Corps members dealt with bathroom business. 

Each of the campsites where the expedition spent time had an accompanying latrine pit, situated well away from camp for sanitary (and privacy) reasons. The latrines would have seen a lot of use, because the Corps of Discovery’s diet wasn’t the best for gut health. 

While the expedition members relied heavily on foraged and hunted food, they also carried backup rations. These included nearly 14,000 pounds of dry goods, including flour, salt, coffee, dried pork, and lard. All told, each member of the Corps ate around nine pounds of meat per day. All of that protein without lots and lots of fiber added up to frequent constipation. The untreated water they drank from rivers and creeks they encountered probably didn’t help their circumstances. Enter…Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills. 

The mercury constipation pills known as “thunderclappers”

In 1803, as preparation for the upcoming expedition, William Clark traveled to Philadelphia for a two-week medical crash course with Dr. Benjamin Rush. Rush was a prominent physician in his day, and a Founding Father of the United States. His signature is one of the 56 on the Declaration of Independence.

Rush taught Clark some basic field skills, such as bone-setting and wound treatment. Clark left Philadelphia with new skills and a well-stocked medical kit that included 50 dozen of Doctor Rush’s Bilious Pills. These were compounded tablets about the size of a raisin, composed of powerful laxative ingredients. The pills were nicknamed “thunderclappers” because of the speed with which they took effect. The main ingredient of the thunderclappers was calomel, or mercury chloride. 

Mercury, historically also called quicksilver, has been thought to have curative effects for centuries. It’s a metal that is liquid at room temperature, which seems miraculous in and of itself. 

It was also a popular treatment for syphilis. This is not to say it was an effective treatment for syphilis. When it was administered for that disease, slowly in low doses, patients were more likely to die from mercury poisoning than from the STI. 

When taken in larger doses, though, as in the thunderclapper pills, it prompted a quick evacuation, the body’s way of ejecting poison. The men of the Lewis and Clark expedition used these pills freely as a way to compensate for their high-protein and low-fiber diet. As a result, all the latrine pits they used between the Midwest and the Pacific coast were laced with high concentrations of mercury. 

Lewis and Clark pooped mercury. Today archaeologists use it to map their route.

As many an environmentalist will caution, mercury does not decompose when it’s in the ground. It stays put, and is detectable through modern soil testing techniques. The 600-plus latrines dug and used by the Corps of Discovery form a trail of their own, marked by mercury. 

The expedition was a government-sanctioned military expedition, so Lewis and Clark both kept copious notes on every aspect of their travels. Historians have tried to pinpoint the locations of these camps based on the expedition journals, with minimal success. 

The only campsite that archaeologists have been able to confirm so far is the Traveler’s Rest camp, just outside of Missoula, Montana. This is all thanks to the remains of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills, which left enough mercury in the ground to differentiate the remains of a latrine pit (or “sink” as they were called in the 1800s) from animal burrows or agricultural ditches. 

Archaeology is all about reconstructing the lives of people in the past, and it’s worth remembering that this means all aspects of life. Our own bodily functions remind us that we all share complex and interwoven histories, and that even the most mundane parts of our lives can be important in the future. 

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

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When the U.S. almost nuked Alaska—on purpose

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The post Lewis and Clark’s mercury-laced poop helped archaeologists trace their expedition appeared first on Popular Science.

Since February 2026, the United States Department of War (DOW), under the direction of President Donald Trump, has released an unprecedented number of documents, videos, and firsthand witness accounts detailing the United States’ extensive history of encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena, or “UAP.”

Despite the questions that remain, this initiative under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) has been nothing short of historic. For more than 75 years, Americans pleading for the truth on the issue have been routinely ridiculed and even misled by their own government. It’s difficult to imagine the nation’s posture being anything other than one of obfuscation, secrecy, and resistance to transparency.

Documents, particularly those detailing reports from senior intelligence officials encountering “orbs”, are a stark departure from the U.S. government’s nearly century-long position of secrecy.

Lawmakers, however, have been left with more questions than answers. Who or what flies with such impunity over our sensitive military installations? Who owns this technology? Are they a threat to national security?

Across the Pacific, members of Japan’s National Diet are confronting the same questions. The May 2026 file releases from the U.S. DOW disclosed two unresolved UAP incidents from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Japanese legislators only learned the details of these cases near their own territory after the American file release—not through any internal channels.

Democratic allies, it seems, face a shared challenge. For too long, elected officials in our respective nations have been denied adequate information about the phenomena operating in our common security environment. And in the U.S., whenever we are informed, it’s only through the preferred methods and timing of unelected bureaucrats deeply entrenched in our national security apparatus. In Japan, by contrast, the Ministry of Defense has stated that information may be made public when something arises that it determines should be explained.

But this raises a fundamental question: should the government alone decide what should be explained to the public?

If a grave national security threat truly exists, then elected representatives have been left with little choice but to entrust the security of their nations to the very institutions that have obscured the truth from us and even each other.

It is therefore incumbent upon us—Representatives solely accountable to the citizens of our respective nations—to work together and to seek the truth wherever we may find it; both for the good of our people and to defend against whatever threats we face from strategic competitors.

As mentioned above, among the files released by the U.S. DOW were highly significant firsthand reports from high-ranking officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The documents detail a search operation at a classified missile testing site in the Western United States, explicitly for aerial phenomena:

En route, ground teams reported spotting a UAP on FLIR [Forward Looking Infrared], describing it as “super-hot,” low to the ground, and moving east then south at high speed. The object then split into two and changed direction. Upon arrival, we scanned the area using NVG [Night Vision Goggles], FLIR, and the naked eye. The ground team suddenly radioed that the object had risen from the ground, approached within ten feet of the helicopter, dropped below us, and then sped away.

The documents were accompanied by what the DOW labeled as “related photos.”

Accounts such as these are hardly “proof” of anything, but for elected officials, they do cement the reality of our national security concerns. Missing from this account—or any account we have been allowed to access—is an answer to a fundamental question: What do the various U.S. government agencies believe these objects are? Are they merely civilian drones? Do they represent technology belonging to a foreign actor? And if someone within the government does know, who decides that elected officials shouldn’t?

Members of Japan’s UAP Parliamentary League, led by former Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada, share similar concerns.

DOW data, released through the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in August of 2023, identified specific regions of Japan, particularly in the western and southern parts of the country, as being among the world’s notable hotspots for UAP reports.

One such instance occurred as recently as July of last year. Security guards at the Genkai Nuclear Power Station in Saga Prefecture observed three luminous objects in the sky above the facility. The lights remained visible for nearly two hours; long enough for local police to arrive and observe them. The police stated that what they themselves observed was an airplane, leaving a discrepancy between the two accounts. The incident was also recorded by Kyushu Electric Power’s security cameras, but the footage has not been made available even to members of the National Diet. Police have likewise declined to disclose related information on the grounds that the matter remains under investigation. As a result, elected lawmakers still lack access to the information necessary to independently assess the incident, and to this day, members of Japan’s National Diet have no answers.

Like their American counterparts, Japanese lawmakers have been left without the tools or information for proper oversight despite reports of UAP operating near critical infrastructure within restricted airspace.

It is no longer acceptable for elected representatives to be agnostic on this issue. Events such as these, along with countless videos now made publicly available, are more than mere optical illusions and cannot be dismissed on account of prosaic explanations like parallax effect. For many members of Congress and members of Japan’s UAP Parliamentary League, the evidence presented before us indicates an unknown technology.

Our understanding of what is technologically feasible in propulsion, the manipulation of physical matter, and even space-time itself is being challenged. From what we know, our current defense capabilities appear insufficient. Furthermore, the origin of these phenomena remains unknown—not only to the U.S. and Japan, but seemingly to other nations as well. China, for instance, recently established its own military body dedicated to investigating UAP, even supplementing human resources with artificial intelligence dedicated to tracking what the People’s Liberation Army refers to as “Unidentified Air Conditions.”

We are, by all indications, in a global arms race for technological supremacy, one that is rapidly rendering today’s weapons obsolete through advances in quantum technology, artificial intelligence, and drone warfare. UAP and whatever technology allows them to operate with apparent impunity over sensitive military and nuclear installations could redefine the competition.

If harnessed by democratic allies, breakthroughs could bolster deterrence and stability in the South China Sea. Conversely, failure to establish a coordinated effort among democratic allies could give China an unforeseen technological advantage over a future invasion of Taiwan, making an already difficult fight impossible.

U.S. global leadership, along with the territorial integrity of the Pacific are at stake. For members of Japan’s National Diet, UAP investigations are of great national importance—an issue that demands cross-party attention.

As for their American counterparts, it’s clear representatives can’t reach the truth through traditional pathways that amount to asking the Central Intelligence Agency ‘nicely.’ It stands to reason that close alliances with democratic allies like Japan may be the most viable pathway for disclosure.

Indeed, if our tools are limited in scope, perhaps new revelations made by democratic allies provide a unique leverage point. After all, it was the Trump administration’s disclosure under the PURSUE program that significantly increased pressure on Japan’s Defense Ministry to acknowledge its own previously undisclosed UAP-related activities.

This is why we, as elected representatives of our nations, have engaged the Emerging Technologies Interparliamentary Caucus (ETIC) as a platform for international dialogue regarding emerging technologies and the security threats presented by UAP. Comprised of representatives from across the globe, the ETIC presents a rare opportunity to ensure elected representatives are equipped to assess potential threats, safeguard our nations, and prepare for the realities of emerging technologies in the 21st century.

Whether the phenomena we are encountering originate from an adversary or something else entirely, democratic nations cannot afford to be complacent.

The people of our nations deserve answers, and we intend to find them.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO-07) is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs. 

Yasukazu Hamada is a Member of the House of Representatives, Japan, Former Minister of Defense, and Chairman of the UAP Parliamentary League.  

Yoshiharu Asakawa is a Former Member of the House of Representatives, Japan, and Assistant to the Chairman of the UAP Parliamentary League.

The Apple Watch Ultra 4 is now available for pre-order, bringing a new health sensing system, more memory, and longer battery life over its predecessor. Here's everything that's new.


Last year, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 introduced a larger, more efficient display, satellite connectivity, 5G, and improved battery life. The Ultra 4 retains the same basic design and display, but focuses on more detailed health and fitness insights, new Audio Intelligence features, and further battery life improvements.

It launches on Friday, September 18, at the same $799 starting price as the Ultra 3. The comparison below outlines the differences between the two generations:

Apple Watch Ultra 3	Apple Watch Ultra 4
S10 chip (2024)	S11 chip (2026)
2GB RAM	4GB RAM
Electrical heart sensor	"Health Sensing System" with second-generation electrical heart sensor
Third-generation optical heart sensor	Always-on optical heart sensor
Background heart rate tracking	High-frequency background heart rate tracking every five seconds, 60x more frequently
HRV	Recovery HRV and overall HRV, measured up to 24x more often
Vitals app with heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, and sleep duration	Vitals app heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, sleep duration, HRV, and a daytime vitals view
	Readiness app
	Real-time heart rate complication
Step tracking	More accurate step tracking and indoor workout distance measurements
	Steps complication
	Audio Intelligence (Live Rewind, Siri Recap, Sound Recognition, and automatic music identification with Shazam)
Up to 42 hours of normal use	Up to 50 hours of normal use
Up to 72 hours in Low Power Mode	Up to 84 hours in Low Power Mode
Up to 14 hours of outdoor workout tracking with full GPS and heart rate readings	Up to 18 hours of standard outdoor workout tracking
Up to 20 hours of outdoor workout tracking in Low Power Mode with full GPS and heart rate readings	Up to 25 hours in Extended Workout mode with full GPS and heart rate readings
Up to 35 hours of outdoor workout tracking in Low Power Mode with Fewer GPS and Heart Rate Readings enabled	Up to 45 hours in Max Extended Workout mode, retaining GPS readings every second
15 minutes of charging for up to 12 hours of normal use	15 minutes of charging for up to 18 hours of normal use
5 minutes of charging for up to 8 hours of sleep tracking	5 minutes of charging for up to 10 hours of sleep tracking
Natural titanium: 61.6 grams Black titanium: 61.8 grams	Natural titanium: 63.0 grams Black titanium: 63.1 grams
GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, and BeiDou	GPS, Galileo, QZSS, and BeiDou
40% recycled content	45% recycled content
Now discontinued	From $799

Is It Worth Upgrading From Ultra 3 to Ultra 4?

For the vast majority of Apple Watch Ultra 3 owners, the Ultra 4 is not worth upgrading to. The Ultra 3 already offers all of the headline display, durability, satellite connectivity, and established health features. If it comfortably lasts between your usual charging sessions and records your longest workouts, the new model is unlikely to meaningfully change how you use your watch.

The strongest reason to upgrade is if you want recovery tracking to play a larger role in your training. The Ultra 4's more frequent measurements feed into Readiness and Recovery HRV, making it easier to assess when to push harder or take a lighter day. These features are more compelling if you will regularly use them to adjust your training, rather than simply check another set of health metrics.

Battery life is a more practical reason for endurance athletes. If you currently change settings to finish long events or recharge during an extended outing, the Ultra 4 gives you a little more flexibility. For shorter daily workouts, however, the improvement mainly means less frequent charging, which is difficult to justify replacing a year-old $799 watch for.

Audio Intelligence may also justify upgrading for specific users, particularly deaf or hard of hearing users who would benefit from Sound Recognition on their wrist. Live Rewind and ‌Siri‌ Recap are less convincing reasons to upgrade immediately, since they arrive in beta later this year and require a compatible newer iPhone.

Should You Buy Ultra 3 or Ultra 4?

For new buyers, the Ultra 4 should be the default choice when the price difference is modest. If you plan to wear it for several years, paying a little more for the new chip, more memory, better battery life, and health tracking enhancements is easier to justify than replacing an Ultra 3 you already own.

The Ultra 3 becomes the better value when it is heavily discounted. If you mainly want a "rugged"-style Apple Watch with a large screen, satellite connectivity, and enough battery life for everyday use and regular workouts, it delivers much of the same experience. Buyers interested in Readiness and recovery insights, or who regularly record very long activities, have a stronger reason to pay more for the ‌Apple Watch Ultra 4‌.

For used or refurbished Ultra 3 models, factor battery condition and warranty coverage into the saving. A cheaper watch with a degraded battery is less appealing if endurance is your main reason for buying an Ultra.
This article, "Apple Watch Ultra 3 vs. Ultra 4 Buyer's Guide" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Two high-profile computer scientists from Princeton University, and coauthors of the book AI Snake Oil, have weighed in on the question of whether AI will kill us all by the end of the decade.

The pair have become well known for their work in separating fact from fiction in the AI world, and have now responded to an admission by Anthropic that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next ten years …

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Rivian spin-off ALSO is finally getting its futuristic TM-B electric bikes out across the United States.

Unfortunately for the customers who ordered them nearly a year ago, those bikes aren’t headed to their garages. They’re headed on tour.

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The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple doubling down on what it thinks a “Pro” iPhone should be. It’s faster, heavier, has longer-lasting battery life, and more capable. Plus, there’s a new variable aperture camera leading the way.

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A truck wedged under a bridge, its roof peeled back like a sardine can, is such a familiar sight that the Australian city of Melbourne turned one bridge into a folk legend. The Montague Street rail bridge has claimed so many trucks that someone built a website tracking how many days since it was last hit. Bridge strikes are not exotic. They are one of the most repetitive failures in road transport.

Which brings us to a stretch of Central New York in the spring of 2026, and a load that never should have been on the road at the height it was.

What happened over 60 miles of the Thruway

On March 18, 2026, a tractor-trailer hauling an over-height excavator on a flatbed struck multiple overpasses as it traveled west on the Thruway.

The scope is what makes it notable: more than a dozen overpasses hit across roughly 60 miles between Exits 30 and 36.

The driver, 38-year-old Oleksander Tarakanovskyi of North Carolina, was apparently unaware that his load had struck the bridges. After the Thruway Authority alerted State Police, troopers found the truck and stopped it at the Mattydale tandem lot in the town of Salina.

Tarakanovskyi was charged with reckless endangerment in the second degree and issued more than 20 traffic tickets, including violations of federal commercial motor vehicle safety regulations. He was released with an appearance ticket returnable to Salina Town Court on April 8.

The reaction from officials was blunt. Frank G. Hoare, executive director of the Thruway Authority, said, “How a tractor trailer driver could be unaware that his load hit more than a dozen bridges is beyond comprehension.” State Police Major Brian T. Ferrone added, “Reckless, egregious behavior will not be tolerated.”

Why bridge strikes keep happening

The public record does not explain how Tarakanovskyi failed to notice the impacts. But the larger bridge-strike problem often starts before a truck reaches the bridge: with the vehicle’s height and route.

A Network Rail survey in the UK, part of its “Wise Up, Size Up” campaign, found that 43 per cent of lorry drivers admitted they did not measure their vehicle before setting off, while 52 per cent said they did not take low bridges into account. That’s UK data, not a direct explanation for this New York incident, but it shows why height checks and route planning are central to bridge-strike prevention.

Where the safeguards are supposed to catch it

In the US, there is no single federal vehicle-height limit; state limits for standard commercial vehicles commonly run from 13 feet 6 inches to 14 feet. On the New York State Thruway, loads 13 feet 7 inches or higher require a special hauling permit.

Permits, approved routes, escorts and height poles are all meant to move the moment of discovery to before the trip, rather than after a bridge is hit.

Take the King Street Bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway in Westchester County. It was 

The wider problem has been documented for years. A 2013 City College of New York study found that bridges in the state were experiencing roughly 200 strikes annually at the time, with many concentrated on a much smaller group of repeatedly hit bridges.

A solvable problem that stays unsolved

At a 2018 meeting about bridge strikes on the Hutchinson River Parkway, Westchester County Executive George Latimer captured the exasperation. “This is a solvable problem,” he said, adding, “If government can’t solve a problem like this, then government can’t do anything.”

The engineering measures are familiar: know the vehicle’s height, plan a legal route, use permits and escorts where required, and install detection systems where repeated strikes justify them. The hard part is making those checks work consistently across a large road network.

The 2026 Thruway incident stands out because one over-height load allegedly produced a 60-mile trail of damage before police stopped it. But the underlying failure was not new. Bridge strikes are repetitive precisely because the safeguards depend on measurements, route choices and warnings being acted on before the truck reaches the bridge.

The post A driver hauling an excavator struck more than a dozen overpasses along 60 miles of the New York State Thruway. The driver did not stop or report it, only realizing the damage when troopers flagged him down at a tandem lot. appeared first on Space Daily.

A little more than a year into its lifespan, the Nintendo Switch 2 has almost everything you could ask for. We've gotten a great 3D platformer from the core Mario team, the triumphant return of Star Fox, a bevy of excellent third-party ports, and a library full of older games that look and run fantastic on the new console.

But one thing it's been lacking is a new, exclusive, original RPG to sink dozens and dozens of hours into. I feel the pain of people who have been begging for this since launch; I put a collective few hundred hours into the Xenoblade Chronicles series on Switch 1, and while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is not strictly an RPG, it was a huge game you could devote your entire life to right when the older console came out in 2017.

Without beating around the bush, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave fixes that problem. Developer Intelligent Systems' latest entry in the long-running series of tactics RPGs is almost exactly what I wanted out of the true follow-up to 2019's Three Houses: A big, dense tactics game with memorable characters, a setting with lots of cool stories to tell, and multiple ways to experience it all.

While Fortune's Weave falls short of Three Houses in some respects, it outshines its predecessor in others, and gives Switch 2 owners exactly what they've been missing since last June.

Fire Emblem weaves a compelling, if occasionally scattershot, tale

Part of what endeared Three Houses to so many, including myself, was its grandiose story that followed a few dozen characters in a large-scale conflict across a period of years. Fortune's Weave is broadly similar, though it carves its own path, for better and worse.

After a relatively quick prologue, you're asked to choose from one of four protagonists for the first part of the story, which revolves around a large martial tournament in Dagsion, the capital city of the massive Dagdan Empire. The winner of the tournament will have one wish granted, and naturally, each of our heroes has their own motive for being there. Leda is a dancer hell-bent on revenge for the death of her father, Cai is a teenage boy who wants to rescue his father from prison and certain execution, Dietrich is a foreign warrior who live to fight increasingly stronger opponents, and Theodora is the newly crowned queen of a semi-autonomous nation within the empire with distinct cultural needs.

There isn't a dud among the crowd here, which is one of Fortune's Weave's strengths. I like all four protagonists a great deal, and thoroughly enjoyed playing through all four of their campaigns. What makes it work is that each of them gives the player roughly 25 percent of the information they need to piece together what's going on in the grander story, while showing off different parts of the very cool setting. Leda's campaign takes you through Dagda's seedy underworld, Cai's exposes some of the underlying tensions in its system of worship, Dietrich's illuminates the continent's relationship with wider Fire Emblem lore, and Theodora's adeptly sets up the latter half of the story.

Where things get a little jarring is that the tournament only represents a third of the story. Parts two and three almost tell entirely different stories of their own, though the events of each part do lead into the next. My problems begin here, as I found more to chew on and enjoy in the tournament arc than in the arcs that come after it. I became invested in each of the four protagonists' individual struggles, only for those struggles to largely get resolved and fall by the wayside about halfway through the game in favor of something grander and a little more conventional.

In contrast, from beginning to end, Three Houses had a pretty consistent thematic throughline about class stratification and the role of the church in that game's setting from beginning to end. Fortune's Weave touches on a lot of different things, like the relationship between the Dagdan populace and its gods to the way that seemingly minor decisions about imperial land transfers can destroy the lives of regular people. But ultimately, there isn't one single thread carrying you all the way through the story, and it's a slightly lesser experience for it.

You're doing tactics even when you're not doing tactics in Fortune's Weave

Of course, Fortune's Weave is a video game, so there's more to it than just watching cutscenes and pondering themes. As with every other Fire Emblem game, it's a turn-based tactics game with a strong emphasis on individual units in your army having their own personalities and relationships with one another that you nurture as you go along. That includes doing things like inviting people out to meals or to theatrical performances in order to increase their bonds with each other, which in turn has benefits in battle.

Battles work about the same as they always have. Each unit has its own class, which dictates what kinds of weapons and abilities they can use, as well as how many spaces they can move on the grid-based map. Different maps will have their own bespoke hazards and objectives, and these become increasingly challenging to work around as the game progresses. I am honestly not much of a tactics game guy, but I found myself consistently engaged with what Fortune's Weave threw at me. Some of the later battles are so large in scale and complex in strategy that I found myself legitimately exhausted by the time they were over, in a good way.

When you're not engaging in these chess-like battle sequences, Fortune's Weave throws almost an entire other game's worth of things to do at you. Aside from the aforementioned character-building activities, there is a board-game-like world map to traverse, and a limited number of turns with which to traverse it, depending on which part of the story you're in.

I really, really liked this aspect of Fortune's Weave, as it adds a second layer of strategizing on top of the tactical thinking you have to do in battles. It pays off to look at the world map and decide what you want to accomplish before the story deadline, and how you plan on accomplishing it without running out of time. Each protagonist also has unique actions only they can perform on the map, such as Dietrich's ability to conjure powerful opponents and Theodora's ability to recruit soldiers for her army in towns and cities. These serve to make each campaign feel a little different from one another, even when what you're doing is broadly the same across all of them.

All of that expands even more in the third part of the story, as you'll eventually have to command several squads on the map at once. At that point, Fortune's Weave feels like a tactics game on top of another tactics game, and it's absolutely riveting. I love being forced to think strategically outside of battles, and there's plenty of that here.

My only real issue with this aspect of the game is that one of the main activities on the world map becomes a little tiresome over time. I'm talking about dungeons, which are short, little areas you explore in third-person to find treasure and fight enemies. Dungeons are extremely useful for leveling up several units at a time, and the treasures hidden within can be game-changing. But the conventional RPG-style combat in these dungeons is fairly simple, and over time, I found myself opting to just let the game auto-battle my way through all of them.

These dungeons typically don't take longer than about 10 minutes to complete, but you might find yourself doing the same ones multiple times before the story is over, and that's kind of a bummer. I respect the ambition of adding these onto an already very large and experience-rich game, but they're not the best part of it.

The structure fixes the biggest problem with Three Houses

Quickly, I'd like to mention that Fortune's Weave allows you to play through each of the four protagonist campaigns in parallel with one another. You can bookmark and suspend one and go to another at any time with no penalty. This stands in contrast with Three Houses, which had several branching paths in the story, but no real way to see everything in one playthrough.

Fortune's Weave is structured in such a way that playing through each campaign is not only encouraged but also extremely rewarding. Not only do you get the full breadth of the story that way, but you can bring the armies you've recruited in each campaign into the game's exceptionally challenging final act. I sincerely cannot imagine finishing this game without doing all of that. It just wouldn't be a great experience, narratively or mechanically.

Be ready to lock in for the long haul with this one

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave took me a clean 100 hours to finish. Yes, that says 100. This is a beast of a game, almost as if it's trying to over-compensate for the lack of a big Switch 2 RPG up to this point. Fortune's Weave does earn that length, as you'll get as much out of it as you put into it, but the fact that it's so long means it isn't for the faint of heart.

One minor disappointment I should acknowledge before closing out here is that Fortune's Weave is not exactly a visual showcase for the Switch 2 hardware. Character models are largely excellent, thanks in part to outstanding art direction, but environments are pretty plain. It is also one of the few first-party Nintendo games to be locked to 30 frames per second, despite looking worse than several games that run more smoothly. This is not a particularly huge deal, as frame rate does not impact playability in turn-based tactics games to any real extent, but it does stand out among Nintendo's other Switch 2 titles.

Despite a handful of shortcomings, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is that beefy, juicy Switch 2 RPG you've been looking for. It marries great character work with demanding tactics, battles, and a lot of things to do when you're not engaging in said battles. Even with its somewhat unfocused story and some kinda boring dungeons, this is one of the best Switch 2 games yet, and one of the best games of 2026 so far.

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It was already clear that Samsung was worried about the impact of the iPhone Duo on its foldable phone range, and there’s now further evidence of the Korean company’s concern.

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Orcas have been known to slap around stingrays, punt seals into the air and otherwise play with their food. But orcas, or killer whales, don’t just toy with live prey. Some also seem to enjoy destroying the corpses of their kills like piñatas.

Scientists documented this brutal activity in the Gulf of California in 2024 and 2025. In both cases, one adult orca held a dead sharp-tail sunfish steady. A second then slammed into it with enough force to smash the sunfish to smithereens.

Killer whales might pulverize sunfish to break them into smaller bites for young orcas. Or they might just find it entertaining.

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Orcas are known for brutal hunting tactics. A researcher has filmed one using a new strategy. Kathryn Ayres/Getty Images/happywhale/Footage of the World/Waluyo 66/500px #Orca #killerwhale

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Researchers shared the findings July 23 in Frontiers in Ethology.

“I was absolutely gobsmacked,” says Marianne Nyegaard. “I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.” Nyegaard is a marine biologist at Auckland Museum in New Zealand who did not take part in the work. She’d seen a couple videos of orcas battering sunfish on social media. The new paper now does a deep dive into this behavior.

Nyegaard is not surprised that orcas have come up with a creative way to deal with sharp-tail sunfish. Those humungous fish can get up to a few meters (10 feet) long.

“Orcas will do all sorts of things,” Nyegaard says. “They are so clever at figuring out how to hunt and deal with a ton of different prey types.” That hunting is often a team sport. Orcas band together to ambush blue whales and whale sharks. They also team up to make waves to knock penguins off ice.

Orcas most likely smash sunfish into small pieces to help feed their young, says Francesca Pancaldi. After one of the sunfish explosions described in the paper, a young orca fed on the small bits of carnage, she notes. Pancaldi is a marine biologist who also was not involved in the study. She works at the marine science center in La Paz associated with Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute.

Feeding may not be the only reason orcas play sunfish piñata, Pancaldi adds. “Killer whales are highly social animals.” A single activity, she explains, can provide nutrition, help orcas bond and offer a way for young orcas to learn how to hunt.

A wind turbine blade is basically glass fibre set in hardened resin. The fibres give it strength, the resin holds them in place, and the two are bonded so tightly that a blade can survive wind, rain and stress.

That same toughness is the problem once the blade comes down. Thermoset epoxy does not melt back into a workable liquid, and its stable chemical bonds are difficult to break. So retired blades are typically cut into sections and sent to landfill.

That is the waste a group of researchers decided to work with. In a 2026 study published in ACS Applied Engineering Materials, a team at Xi’an Shiyou University, with collaborators at the Beijing Institute of Technology and Monash University, ground old blade material into powder and turned it into a lightweight, sponge-like insulation.

Here is what came out of the lab, and how it stacks up against the size of the problem.

It squashes to a fifth of its thickness and springs back

The most surprising thing about the material is how far you can crush it without wrecking it. The team reports it took a squeeze of over 80 percent and recovered, meaning you can press it down to roughly a fifth of its height and it bounces back. That matters because conventional silica aerogels are famously fragile. They insulate well but can be brittle. A material that can take a squeeze and spring back is far easier to handle and install.

The trick is in the structure. Instead of a solid block, the composite is a network full of tiny connected pores, with the blade powder stiffening a soft, springy scaffold. 

It combined low density with unusually high compressibility

Weight is where the main result sits. The material reached a density of 0.184 grams per cubic centimetre while sustaining more than 80 percent compressive strain. The authors say the composite showed “a superior combination of low bulk density (0.184 g cm–3) and high compressive strain (>80%), outperforming a wide range of reported silica-based or organic aerogels and composites.”

A caution is warranted: that line is the researchers describing their own work, not an outside verdict. “Outperforming” is their framing, and the comparison is against numbers from other published papers rather than a head-to-head test by a neutral lab. The figures themselves are measurable; whether the material performs as well in practice is the kind of thing other labs and larger-scale testing would need to settle.

It holds heat in about as well as ordinary insulation

Being light and squishy would not count for much if heat poured straight through it. It doesn’t. The composite measured a thermal conductivity of 0.068 watts per metre-kelvin, and lower is better here because it means less heat gets across. For comparison, ordinary glass wool building insulation sits around 0.04. So the blade composite is not a record-setting insulator, but it is in a sensible range for the job while remaining highly compressible.

It self-extinguishes instead of feeding a flame

Insulation lives inside walls and roofs, so how it behaves near fire matters. The team reports enhanced flame self-extinguishing capability, meaning it tended to stop burning once the flame source was removed rather than carrying the fire along. Again, this is one lab result on lab samples, though, and real fire-safety ratings require standardised testing. Read it as promising, not certified.

It turns a landfill problem into the raw material

The reason any of this is interesting is the sheer number of blades headed for the ground. Worldwide, the mass of blades expected to be discarded by 2050 may reach about 43 million tonnes. Right now, around 12,000 blades are retired across Europe and the US each year, and they are typically cut up and sent to landfill. A process that takes that same material and makes something useful flips the equation.

As the authors put it, reusing the blade waste “not only helps to reduce environmental burdens and resource waste but also opens up avenues for generating high-performing, useful materials.”

Where this actually sits

This is one study and one set of lab measurements. The chemistry is clever and the numbers look good, but the gap between a lab composite and a pallet of insulation shipped to a building site is wide. The paper doesn’t answer the questions that fill that gap: cost, batch-to-batch consistency, how the material holds up over years inside a wall, and whether grinding and processing old blades at scale actually makes economic sense.

That last question is the real hinge. Something has to make the recycled route cheaper or required before a lab result becomes a real supply chain.

None of that takes away from what the team built. This is a good answer to a narrow question, which is whether hard-to-recycle blade waste can be turned into a useful, light, tough insulating material at all. The evidence here says yes. The bigger question, whether it can be done by the tonne cheaply enough to matter, is still open.

The post In 2025, researchers ground retired wind turbine blades into powder, stirred it into a gel and set it into an insulation composite. The composite combined low density with much greater compressibility than many of the insulating aerogels and composites it was compared with, squashing to a fifth of its thickness without breaking apart. appeared first on Space Daily.

Venus' sluggish spin may be the key to why it doesn't have a moon — anymore, at least, new research says.

The study, led by University of California, Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane, appears in The Astrophysical Journal. Kane's team built computer simulations of how gravity ties a planet to a moon in space, then ran Venus through them again and again.

Nearly every run ended the same way. An ancient Venusian moon crashed onto its host planet — sometimes within 30 million years, sometimes after 1.7 billion. At any rate, it was destined for demise.

That may crack one of the solar system's oldest cases: why Earth and Venus, near-twins in size, weight class, and composition, turned out nothing alike. Though scientists don't yet know whether a world needs a moon to be habitable, they do know that our moon plays many crucial roles for Earth, such as steadying its tilt and controlling ocean tides. It's not far-fetched to suppose the moon may also help keep the planet geologically active. If Venus once had a moon but lost it, its absence could have bent the arc of that scorched world's history.

"Venus didn't require a catastrophe to arrive at what we can see today," Kane said in a statement. 

The physics comes down to spin. Earth turns once every 24 hours — fast enough to fling energy outward into the moon's orbit. NASA astronauts left mirrors on the lunar surface during Apollo 11, and by bouncing lasers off them, scientists have been able to measure the moon retreating about four centimeters per year — roughly the rate your fingernails grow.

Venus does the opposite. It takes 243 Earth days to turn around once. At that pace, the planet's gravity wins the tug-of-war and reels in an orbiting moon instead of pushing it away.

Kane tested moons ranging from half the mass of ours to 10 times heavier. The heavier the moon, the faster it spiraled in.

"When I made this discovery, I was shocked," Kane said. "I thought surely the broad range of scenarios I was exploring would lead to a variety of results. But it all went pretty much in the same direction."

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Earlier explanations of why Venus doesn't have a moon leaned on drama. Perhaps something enormous smashed Venus' ancient moon apart. Perhaps Venus never suffered the kind of collision that builds a moon in the first place. Kane's research undercuts both — and the reason centers on how moons get made.

Moons don't come from nowhere. Ours formed when a massive object struck the young Earth and threw debris into orbit, where it clumped together. That same blow did something else: It set how fast the planet spun for billions of years afterward.

On Venus, those two outcomes work against each other. A big moon lasts only if the collision leads to the planet spinning once every 10 to 12 hours. But impacts that leave a planet spinning that fast scatter their debris too close, where the rubble falls back to the surface before it can coalesce into anything in space. The crashes that throw debris far enough away to build a moon leave the planet turning slower than that.

If there had been a moon-forming collision in Venus' ancient history, it resulted in the planet turning once every 12 hours at best — most likely slower. That means one blow could hypothetically give the planet a satellite, along with the power to destroy it, with nothing else having to go wrong.

But proving whether Venus swallowed a moon is hard. A resurfacing event about a billion years ago paved over roughly 80 percent of the planet, wiping out older scars. Any evidence now lies deep below the surface. 

Scientists have detected strange structures within Earth that may be leftovers from the collision that created our own moon; similar measurements at Venus could turn up something comparable. NASA's planned DAVINCI mission, which could drop a probe through the Venusian atmosphere in the early 2030s, may also catch chemical traces of a moon that broke apart.

The researchers stop short of claiming Venus once had a moon. Though Kane suspects it did, he insists that remains an open question. What his team's work shows is that a massive moon could not have lasted — something he believes astronomers should keep in mind as they hunt the galaxy for habitable exoplanets, the rocky worlds around other stars. 

"My feeling is there are benefits to having a moon, but it isn't required for habitability," Kane said. "The moon has definitely changed the way Earth has evolved through time, but we don't fully know how important that role is." 

The post APOD: 2026 September 16 – Webb’s View of M64 appeared first on NASA Science.

One of the inspirations for Jimi Hendrix’s iconic 1967 hit “Purple Haze” is said to be the sci-fi novel Night of Light, about a distant planet in a binary star system. Every seven years, the story goes, the stars bathe the planet in a bizarre purple radiance with the power to rearrange physical reality in profound and unexpected ways. The atmosphere’s purple glow, for instance, turned some people into trees and brought statues to life.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, for an astronaut on the International Space Station to invoke the iconic song after witnessing the aurora illuminate Earth’s atmosphere with ethereal greens, reds, and purples. Hendrix would have “rejoiced” at the “brilliant purple,” NASA astronaut Jessica Meir posted on September 8. It “makes me want to kiss the sky,” she added in a nod to the lyrics of the Hendrix song.

The photograph above is one of many that the astronauts took on September 7, 2026, as they orbited an atmosphere quivering with color. The station was at an altitude of 255 miles (411 kilometers) and above Kyrgyzstan when the photo was taken. Stacking several of the photos also yielded a long-exposure series in which the aurora’s green glow mingles with star trails, moonlight, passing satellites, and city lights in a dazzling jumble of illumination.

Aurora is the Latin word for “dawn” and also the name of the Roman goddess of the dawn. Its use in reference to the atmospheric phenomenon likely comes from Europeans living far from the Arctic Circle, who would have experienced the aurora as a faint red glow to the north, resembling the reddish glow in the east at dawn.

The colorful phenomenon typically starts when the Sun sends charged particles toward Earth through solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or an active solar wind. These particles interact with the magnetosphere—the invisible, comet-shaped bubble of magnetic field lines surrounding the planet—compressing and changing the configuration of the magnetic field. In the process, some particles within the field are drawn into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they excite nitrogen and oxygen atoms and molecules, causing them to release photons.

The aurora Meir photographed occurred amid a disturbance associated with a high-speed stream of solar wind from a coronal hole and the lingering effects of multiple coronal mass ejections, according to updates from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. These solar wind disturbances interacted with Earth’s magnetosphere, causing minor (G1) geomagnetic storms.

The colors of auroras are influenced by the type of gas involved and the altitude at which they occur in the atmosphere. Oxygen excited to different energy levels can produce green and red. Green occurs roughly between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 kilometers) altitude, and red occurs above 120 miles (200 kilometers). Excited nitrogen gas, from about 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 kilometers), glows blue or pink depending on the type and energy of the particles it interacts with. Sometimes, the light emitted by gases can appear to mix, making the auroras seem purple, pink, or even white.

While auroras can occur any time of the year, astronauts are especially likely to enjoy the light shows in the spring and fall, around the equinoxes. That’s because the geometry of Earth’s magnetic field relative to the solar wind makes it especially favorable for transferring solar-wind energy into the magnetosphere, a phenomenon known as the Russell-McPherron effect.

This isn’t the only example of Jimi Hendrix’s music making an impression beyond Earth. A selection of Hendrix’s music touched down on the Moon in 2024 with the Odysseus lander. Another Hendrix song, “Voodoo Chile,” made the list of wake-up songs for STS-110, according to a report from NASA’s History Division.

Astronaut photograph ISS075-E-88592 was acquired on September 7, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 15 millimeters. It is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 75 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Adam Voiland.

References & Resources

• Far Out (2021, September 15) The book that inspired Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic masterpiece ‘Purple Haze.’ Accessed September 15, 2026.
• ISS in Real Time (2026, September 7) A real-time journey onboard the International Space Station. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• Meir, J., via X (2026, September 8) Purple Haze. Jimi Hendrix would have rejoiced at the site of the northern lights last night. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NASA (2026, July 20) Chronology of wakeup calls. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NASA Science (2025) Aurora. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NASA Space Place (2026) Aurora. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NOAA (2026, September) Forecast discussions. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• NOAA (2026, September 15) Current Space Weather Conditions: Alerts, Watches, and Warnings. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• Open Culture (2020, October 12) How Science Fiction Formed Jimi Hendrix. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• Russell, C.T. & McPherron, R.L. (1973) Semiannual variation of geomagnetic activity. Journal of Geophysical Research, 78(1), 92-108.
• Spaceweather.com (2026, September 8) Here’s proof that autumn is approaching. Accessed September 15, 2026.
• UCR (2024, February 28) An unheard Jimi Hendrix song now lives on the Moon. Accessed September 15, 2026.

The post Purple Haze Aurora appeared first on NASA Science.

La astrónoma Beryl H. Potter (1900–1985) nació un 16 de septiembre.

Fue asistente de investigación en el Programa de Asteroides de Indiana en el Observatorio Goethe Link en Indiana entre 1942 y 1965.

Era asistente del astrónomo Frank K. Edmondson cuando descubrió una estrella enana en 1944. Analizó miles de placas fotográficas usando un dispositivo llamado comparador de parpadeo.

En 1952, colaboró en el descubrimiento del asteroide 1578 Kirkwood. En 1955, formó parte del equipo que descubrió el asteroide 1602 Indiana.

El asteroide 1729 Beryl fue nombrado oficialmente en su honor en 1968.

Más información

• Beryl H. Potter, Wikipedia

Edición realizada por Marta Macho Stadler

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