People have been using flat, ribbonlike materials, such as reed strips, to make woven baskets for thousands of years. This weaving method has reemerged as a technique for engineers to create textile and fabric structures with complex geometry. While beautiful and intricate, these baskets can also be surprisingly strong.

We are a team of structures and materials scientists at the University of Michigan. We wanted to figure out how basketlike structures that use traditional weaving techniques can be so sturdy, load-bearing and resilient.

A new image of comet 3I/ATLAS has revealed that the interstellar visitor is glowing green and hiding its tail, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it.

Qicheng Zhang, a researcher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, used the observatory's powerful Discovery Telescope to make fresh observations of the comet as it zoomed away from the sun on Wednesday (Nov. 5). The comet recently became visible again after swinging around the far side of our star.

Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with prominent white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying Hitler fan, has triggered a right-wing civil war over the last week, drawing in Republican politicians and reportedly triggering a meltdown at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative movement’s most prominent think tank.

On Wednesday, Carlson opened up a new front in that conflict that seems likely to put him in direct opposition to his former colleagues at Fox News.

The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to bar transgender people from changing the gender markers on their passports, it announced in an order Thursday. The order is the latest in a back-and-forth on the policy as the country debates the right for its transgender citizens to live openly.

LGBTQ+ advocates quickly called the order dangerous and discriminatory.

“This decision will cause immediate, widespread and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “The Trump administration’s policy is an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate and endanger transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans, and we will continue to seek its ultimate reversal in the courts.”

As the sun sets, the surface of the Earth cools. This makes the air denser and increases relative humidity, condensing more water vapor, and resulting in a phenomenon known as radiation fog. This type of thick, low-lying cloud typically appears late at night or just before dawn—exactly the moment our tired minds are likely to start seeing shapes in the dark. It’s small wonder fiction’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, faced the savage Hound of the Baskervilles amid the nocturnal mists of a mire.

PlayStation players claim that Sony is engaging in a targeted pricing strategy on PS5. According to a viral post on Reddit, the Japanese publisher is now charging different game prices for different PlayStation 5 users.

A new prototype of a knitting machine creates solid, knitted shapes, adding stitches in any direction – forward, backward and diagonal – so users can construct a wide variety of shapes and add stiffness to different parts of the object.

Unlike traditional knitting, which yields a 2D sheet of stitches, this proof-of-concept machine – developed by researchers at Cornell and Carnegie Mellon University – functions more like a 3D printer, building up solid shapes with horizontal layers of stitches.

London’s prized Royal Albert Hall has seen symphonies, rock concerts and ballets. But today it smells like wet dirt, as 11 tonnes of specially selected soil is shovelled from the marshes of Kettering (the only place with the perfect ratio of clay and sand) into its central stage. Without speaking, a team of Japanese builders churn into action – first compressing the soil with wooden mallets, then old Asahi beer bottles, before shaping the mound into a perfect 4.55 metre circle. Finally, the edges are sliced off the now-hardened clay to reveal a smooth, flat ring. This is the dohyō — the sacred stage of sumo. It’s an hours-long process, performed with laser-focused familiarity.

CORCAN, an agency within the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), employs federal inmates across the country in agriculture, manufacturing and services. Inmates produce office furniture, textiles, food and other goods for government departments and in some cases for public consumption.

“Very few actually gain skills that are transferable,” said Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, the federal government’s prison watchdog. “In my view, it even amounts to a human rights violation.”

The sun is governed by a strict rhythm. The magnetic activity of the sun displays a cyclic variation, reaching a maximum approximately every eleven years. Two enormous plasma circulations, each in one solar hemisphere, set the pace for this rhythm, thus defining the sun's eleven-year cycle. Near the surface, the plasma flows carry the magnetic field lines from the equator to the poles; in the solar interior, the plasma flows back to the equator in a huge cycle spanning the entire hemisphere.

The term sustainability usually elicits ideas of a green planet, solar panels, electric vehicles, and plastic-free oceans.

However, this outlook—sustainability primarily focused on the environment—lacks a critical component that University of Georgia researchers are elevating in the realm of food systems and agriculture.

“All pillars of sustainability matter, but social sustainability can get left out of the conversation,” said Jennifer Jo Thompson, senior research scientist in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) Department of Crop and Soil Sciences.

William Shakespeare was wildly prolific. According to one estimate, his complete works add up to 884,647 words. And all these hundreds of years after his death, people still reference him and his works constantly. No one did it like The Bard, so it’s no surprise that some myths about him and his writing have seeped into our culture over time. Let’s debunk some of the biggest ones.

• Misconception: Historians debate whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare.

• Misconception: Shakespeare invented 1700 words.

• Misconception: Saying Macbeth in a theater is dangerous.

• Misconception: Shakespeare’s plays all contained original storylines.

• Misconception: Shakespeare worked alone.

• Misconception: Wherefore means “where.”

• Misconception: As Hamlet says, “to be or not to be,” he’s holding a skull.

• Misconception: Shakespeare was a playwright during Elizabethan times.

• Misconception: The Globe Theatre was round.

"Today is a significant event for us – the heavy nuclear-powered missile cruiser Khabarovsk is being launched from the renowned Sevmash shipyard," Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said after Navy Commander Admiral Aleksandr Moiseev smashed the traditional bottle of champagne into the hull of submarine.

The Defence Ministry confirms on Telegram that the new submarine will carry robotic weapons systems "for various purposes."

The Poseidon is a post-doomsday weapon unlike any ever seen in any previous arms race. Formed like a giant torpedo, the weapon is nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed, and can allegedly travel down deep with intercontinental range.

Three decades after a landmark summit in Copenhagen, leaders in the Qatari capital warned that inequality remains high, climate shocks are intensifying, and nearly two billion people still lack social protection, pushing the world off course for the 2030 deadline.

Alberta’s leading labour organization is asserting that it intends to forcefully respond to the government’s back-to-work order for Alberta teachers, but has stopped short of directly calling for an imminent general strike.

This week, Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, signalled his intent to topple the United Conservatives in response to Bill 2, through an organized campaign involving 24 of the province’s unions under a coalition called the Common Front.

“We will begin the process of organizing towards a potential general strike,” he said at a press conference Wednesday.

Six people have died and several dozen have been hospitalized across the US after an outbreak of listeria in precooked pasta meals.

The outbreak was first declared in June, leading to a wave of recalls of the pasta meals. It has now spread, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recently said that six people have died and 25 have been hospitalized across 18 states.

"German-born political cartoonist Thomas Nast gave America some of its most enduring symbols: the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and Uncle Sam. Publishing regularly in Harper's Weekly, the celebrated Nast drew thousands of cartoons during the second half of the nineteenth century."

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are worse at retrieving accurate information and reasoning when trained on large amounts of low-quality content, particularly if the content is popular on social media1, finds a preprint posted on arXiv on 15 October.

In data science, good-quality data need to meet certain criteria, such as being grammatically correct and understandable, says co-author Zhangyang Wang, who studies generative AI at the University of Texas at Austin. But these criteria fail to capture differences in content quality, he says.

"Every product sells itself with a story. The story Ford tells us is that its cars are America.

Ford has described itself as the most American automaker. They make their cars in America, and have since Henry Ford developed the automobile assembly line and used it to build the Model T in 1913. So American is it that the Japanese prime minister recently parked a Ford F-150 truck outside the venue for her meeting with President Donald Trump in an attempt to curry favor. (“That’s a hot truck,” Trump said.)

So effective and evocative is Ford’s myth-making that it has even influenced the narratives of economic policy. Part of the subtext of Trump’s tariffs is that they were going to bring back the America of Ford’s glory days, the one where strapping blue-collar men worked good factory jobs and could provide for their families. (Ford CEO Jim Farley has said the tariffs will actually drive up Ford costs.)"

It’s no secret that we live in a sleep-deprived society. More than a third of Americans don’t get enough shuteye, defined as a minimum of seven hours a night. It’s not just the U.S.: much of the developed world is in a similar situation. “Sleep deprivation abounds,” says Eva Winnebeck, a chronobiologist at the University of Surrey in the U.K. “People do struggle to get up. Alarm clock use is high, lack of sleep is high.” (A rule of thumb: If you need an alarm clock to wake up, it probably means you aren’t sleeping enough.)

Researchers don’t know exactly how psilocybin, a psychoactive compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, evolved. Now, a new study adds to the mystery: Its findings reveal that two different groups of fungi came up with independent ways to produce the seemingly magical molecule.

In a paper published September 21 in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, scientists analyzed the genes and proteins used by Psilocybe and Inocybe mushrooms to make psilocybin. To their surprise, they found that the two genera of mushrooms produce the compound using completely different pathways.

A mayor in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán was shot dead in a plaza in front of dozens of people who had gathered for Day of the Dead festivities, authorities have said.

The mayor of the Uruapan municipality, Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez, was gunned down Saturday night in the town’s historic centre. He was rushed to a hospital where he later died, according to state prosecutor Carlos Torres Piña.

A city council member and a body

Taylor Swift circa 2017 was rumored to have hidden in a suitcase a few times in order to escape the gaze of paparazzi when exiting her Tribeca apartment. In a statement to the Spin, the photographer from the Splash (who obtained the exclusive shot) retreated and denied confidence of its accuracy and cited the photo merely as evidence as to why fans had that theory in the first place. Here, the media was quick to adjust its reporting ethics to satisfy the demand of online discourse –– in a decade when social media wasn’t even close to having the immense significance it has on the news cycle today. This power imbalance between audience and outlet has only grown more unstable over the years as more and more information is easily accessible about your favorite internet celebrity or microinfluencer, either because the person offers up personal information, or because they are constantly exploited by unethical reporting practices.

For centuries, something beneath Seneca Lake in upstate New York has been making a very loud, very disturbing noise. Locals called it the “Seneca Guns,” a cannon-like boom that erupted without warning and rolled across the water like distant thunder. The Seneca people once said it was the voice of an angry spirit. Early settlers blamed ghostly soldiers still fighting the Revolution. James Fenimore Cooper turned it into myth in his 1850 story The Lake Guns. Every few years, the lake would roar again, then fall silent, as if taunting anyone who tried to explain it.