A ghostly star stream maps dark matter, and sleep finds its sweet spot

Because those shed stars keep traveling along nearly the same orbit, an orbit shaped entirely by their host galaxy's gravity, the team could work backward from the stream's shape to estimate how much invisible dark matter surrounds that galaxy and how it's distributed. Astronomers had predicted these streams should exist around other galaxies for decades; they're simply too faint to have been caught before now. The findings, co-led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen and the Technical University of Denmark, were published August 12 in Nature.

Across almost every organ, the lowest aging scores showed up in people sleeping between roughly 6.4 and 7.8 hours a day. Both shorter and longer sleep were linked to faster aging and to a broad range of diseases affecting the brain, heart, lungs, metabolism, and gut. Study leader Junhao Wen, who has described himself as a light sleeper, says the goal now is finding lifestyle factors that can actually be changed in time to matter.

Their fix was microscopic fibers built from a purple metal-organic framework and zinc oxide nanoparticles, and in outdoor testing the resulting textile still reflected 87.6 percent of incoming sunlight, staying up to 11.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ordinary dyed purple cotton. Skin covered by the fabric ran up to 14.4 degrees cooler than bare skin in direct sun, beating even plain white cotton. "We have traditionally had to make a choice between cooling performance and appearance," said co-author Jun Ma. "Our research shows that we can have both."

The law followed more than a million messages from supporters flooding lawmakers between March and April alone, then another 17,000 emails urging Lula to sign once the bill reached his desk. Foie gras production typically means pumping large volumes of food directly into a duck or goose's digestive system through a tube until its liver swells to as much as ten times its normal size. The ban takes effect 180 days after publication.

The third took just 19 months, and the world crossed the 3-terawatt mark in early 2026 174. In 2025 alone, 664 gigawatts of new solar went up worldwide, 12 percent more than the year before, and in the first quarter of 2026, solar and battery storage together made up 91 percent of all new grid capacity added in the United States. Globally, wind and solar combined generated 22 percent of the world's electricity in April 2026, edging past natural gas's 20 percent for the first time, according to energy research group Ember.

Miller drew a clean line between two things people often confuse: shyness, which tracks with low social confidence, and embarrassability, which tracks with how closely someone monitors unwritten social rules. Separately, researcher David Moscovitch found that socially anxious people systematically overestimate the fallout from small blunders, a trip on the stairs, a joke met with silence, expecting harsher judgment and longer memories than actually follow, even when they're just imagining someone else making the mistake.

Her invention, the iThrone, rapidly evaporates 95 percent of the water content in urine and waste, and it's now installed in about 20,000 households across Uganda, Panama, and the United States. Yousef, who holds degrees from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard, just won this year's Global Citizen Waislitz Award, which comes with $100,000 to help her startup, change:WATER, scale distribution.