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Indonesia's fires grew roughly fourfold after June as the strongest El Niño on record began forming, with emissions on track to match 2015. The event is still strengthening on 1.4C of warming, and the year's outlook leans on a short record of past El Niños.
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Petter Brodin's team found 39% of infants with a strong first-week immune 'seeding' reaction had eczema or food allergy by age 1, against 12% of the rest. The data, from nearly 600 Swedish babies, tie the risk to gut bacteria and feeding, and would put any prevention window within days of birth if the link proves causal.
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Nirao Shah's Stanford team found that female mice need a neuron type making up under 0.001 per cent of brain cells to sustain a pregnancy. Any role in unexplained miscarriage or failed IVF in women is still a hypothesis, because the deletion experiment can only be done in animals.
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Trees for Cities says half the saplings it planted in London in the past year died this summer, when 80 to 90 per cent normally survive. Kew's modelling suggests the replacements will need to be different species.
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Safa Donmez's Ankara team found a VR river scene plus classical music added about 4 mmHg to the drug-driven blood pressure drop in 130 emergency patients. By 60 minutes the groups matched, so hospitals would be adopting a faster first quarter-hour of care.
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Amazon clearing has halved since Lula restored the environmental agencies in 2023. The Brazilian researchers who watch the forest expect a win for Flavio Bolsonaro to push the rate back up toward its 2021 peak.
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In a Deakin University trial, an independent rater scored the lifestyle arm 8.55 points down on a 60-point depression scale against 6.82 for CBT, clearing a non-inferiority margin the team set at 1.6 points before randomisation.
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Martin Maiden's team sequenced the bacterium from six Kent patients and matched it against 48,000 archived Neisseria genomes, finding iron-uptake and pilus genes acquired from species that live harmlessly in ordinary throats.
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Estimates of the chance AI kills everyone run from zero to more than 95 per cent, so the column sets that range beside risks whose numbers come from counted lottery tickets, WHO death tolls, climate model ensembles and asteroid surveys.
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The 350-million-year-old radius is triangular and pointed where the wrist would be, and the upper arm bone is missing. It matches none of the 16 fishapods that Thomas Stewart's team at Penn State compared it against.
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LZ's liquid xenon detector recorded a single burst of light on 1 September, with roughly a 1-in-200 chance it was background. Its energy alone is enough to make the simplest dark matter candidate a poor fit.
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A review of 25 randomised trials spanning mean ages 8 to 78 puts the immediate cognitive effect of a two-minute movement break at a Hedges' g of 0.24. The larger figures in the review are comparisons between sets of trials.
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Michel Raymond's team modelled whether unrecorded losses of male embryos could produce the pattern seen in eight populations, and the share of fertilised eggs the model demands sits well above the rate clinics record.
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Plug-in kits became legal in the UK on 27 August, and the Institution of Engineering and Technology says most residual current devices in British fuse boxes were never suitable for current flowing both ways.
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UKHSA says the larvae in east London have been destroyed and the public health threat is very low. This is the fourth UK detection of the species in recent years and the first with breeding, though a summer generation is not a population that overwinters.
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Almost 650,000 hectares have burned across the EU in more than 1,913 large fires, close to double the long-term average, with the anomaly concentrated in the north and west rather than the fire-prone south.
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Radiodonts sat near the top of the Cambrian food web, and one of them appears to have been bitten and survived. Whether that mark is a bite or a tear from moulting rests on one fossil flap of a kind that hardly ever survives.
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Totality runs 6 minutes 23 seconds over parts of northern Africa and south-west Asia, the longest anyone gets until 2114, which turns instrument siting and a hotel booking into the same decision made a year early.
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Zoos have bred short-beaked echidnas before, but repeated attempts at a dedicated research colony failed. Oliver Griffith's group at Macquarie has now reared a pouch baby, which is the precondition for sampling monotreme reproduction on a schedule.
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Jay Tasson's group spent seven years computing how hard you would have to look for each candidate field in the standard model extension. Experiments have already closed 89 of them, which leaves 43 with a target and no bound.
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Science · August 21, 2026 · 1 publisher
Science · August 20, 2026 · 2 publishers