U.S. senators push against giving political appointees control over science funding ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
August 3, 2026—A Senate bill released yesterday would block a controversial proposal on approving scientific funding. Plus, Emma Gometz reports on timekeepers' plan to abandon the leap second and it's 90 degrees in the Arctic right now.
—Andrea Gawrylewski
Chief Newsletter Editor
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Researchers collecting samples at Blood Falls. Bryan Minnea
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Researchers discovered an assortment of eukaryotic species (those whose cells have organelles bound by membranes) in the waters of Antarctica's Blood Falls. The tiny organisms offer clues about how the mysterious formation came to be. | 2 min read
A Senate bill to fund the government through December 11 would block a controversial proposal from the Office of Budget and Management giving political appointees, not independent reviewers, control over which scientific grants get funded. | 2 min read
Cyclospora caused two deaths in Michigan, the state reported. As of July 30, Michigan reported 11,234 cases of cyclosporiasis. | 2 min read
Weird spider sex facts: Some female daddy longlegs will perform fellatio, perhaps to avoid potential violence from males. Click through to watch some wild videos. | 3 min read
A new 98-bit quantum computer sets a high watermark for accuracy. Is the field on the verge of a breakthrough? | 4 min rad
We sit down with biologist and author David George Haskell to discuss his latest book How Flowers Made Our World. Did you know 90 percent of flowers are both male and female within the same structure? | 6 min read
The Arctic is cooking. Temperatures this week have routinely passed 90 degrees F (32.2 degrees C). The Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the planet. | 2 min read
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A Leap Hour?
Timekeepers all over the world are coming together to vote on a new proposal for Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Since 1972, UTC has added “leap seconds” to keep the time in tune with Earth’s rotation, which was gradually slowing down. But now, the leap second might become the leap hour—meaning we only align the time with Earth’s rotation when it falls out of sync by an hour.
Why a leap hour? There’s no other way of saying this: Leap seconds are a pain. There’s no way of predicting them and adding them manually produces all kinds of technical issues in our digital world. However, there’s been a special sense of urgency lately, because Earth’s rotation started speeding up in 2016. So much so that we might need our first ever “negative leap second,” which some researchers have characterized as a potentially Y2K-like event. To avoid this outcome, timekeepers have been trying to find a way to unlink UTC from the whims of the Earth. Unlike a leap second, which was needed about every year or so until 2016, a leap hour probably wouldn’t be needed for centuries.
What the experts say: Most countries around the world are thrilled to be rid of the leap second. But some scientists say it’s a shame that we couldn’t figure out a better solution to keep time aligned with Earth. When I visited his offices in Boulder, Colorado, a retired physicist at National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division called the new proposal “a fig leaf,” meaning it’s a gesture toward keeping the time aligned with astronomy, but, really, we'll be acting as though that obligation doesn’t exist. —Emma Gometz, Newsletter Editor
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Folks, there are still reservations available to join me in Mexico next year! This will be a trip of a lifetime. We'll hike into the mountains among the oyamel fir trees to witness the migration of monarch butterflies. Plus, we'll see some other fabulous cultural sites and eat some bangin' food. Email me with questions or click below for more details. I hope you'll join me!
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Coins can be arranged to form isosceles trapezoids and equilateral triangles. If these shapes consist of at least two rows of coins, the number of coins required to form them is called a trapezoidal number. The three examples represent the trapezoidal numbers 10, 11, and 12.
Exactly one natural number between 1000 and 2000 is not a trapezoidal number. Which number is this exception?
This math puzzle appeared in last week's edition of Proof Positive, our math newsletter. Sign up today to see the solution in tomorrow's email (and to get fun math puzzles every week)!
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A JetBlue airplane went into free-fall. The only possible explanation was baffling. | New York Magazine ($)
Smart glasses are pushing up against privacy concerns. | WIRED ($)
Anthropic's AI is catching bugs in Microsoft faster than the computer company can fix them, a ProPublica investigation found. | ProPublica
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The thing that fascinates me about time is that no civilization in history tracked time in exactly the same way. You can read more about how time and calendars have changed in the past thousands of years in A Brief History of Timekeeping by physicist Chad Orzel. In modern times, the best clocks in the world, he told us in 2022, are cesium clocks. "Cesium clocks are good to a part in 1016 ," but "there are experimental clocks that are two, maybe three, orders of magnitude better than that."
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—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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