r/InterstellarKinetics

The city council of Bandera, Texas, a town of approximately 900 residents located roughly 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, voted 3-2 in mid-May 2026 to immediately terminate its contract with Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based automated license plate reader and surveillance camera company, after months of public outrage over the deal and after residents learned that the city had incurred a $17,000 termination fee that council members had previously assured them would not exist, according to 404 Media’s May 19, 2026, report by journalist Joseph Cox. Resident Jason Mayhew told the council directly, “We were deceived,” adding that both Flock representative Kerry McCormack and Councilmember Jeff Flowers had “repeatedly assured us that terminating the contract would not incur any costs for the city, claiming that all expenses were being funded by a grant,” according to 404 Media’s reporting on the council meeting.

Following the losing vote, Councilmember Jeff Flowers, who had been a staunch advocate for keeping the Flock contract, announced he would introduce a package of new regulations at an upcoming council meeting, which he titled the “Bandera Declaration of Digital Independence,” according to a letter Flowers published in the local newspaper the Bandera Bulletin and reviewed by 404 Media. In the letter, Flowers said that in the name of privacy he would propose “a total ban on all cellular and GPS-capable devices for all operations within city limits,” a “total ban on outward facing cameras,” and “a total termination of all internet services and electronic record-keeping,” stating that residents who wanted true privacy would have to “leave our smartphones at the city line” and that the town would go back to “paper ledgers and cash only,” according to 404 Media.

Flock Safety, the company at the center of the dispute, operates automated license plate reader networks in thousands of cities and towns across the United States and has faced growing opposition from civil liberties advocates who argue that its systems enable mass, warrantless surveillance of ordinary residents without their knowledge or consent, according to prior 404 Media reporting. Bandera’s vote to terminate its Flock contract makes it one of the few small municipalities in Texas to formally reverse course after initially adopting the technology, though Flowers’ proposed countermeasures, if introduced at the next council meeting, are widely expected to fail given that the same 3-2 majority that voted to ban Flock would need to approve any new ordinances, according to 404 Media’s May 19, 2026, report.

OpenAI said on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, that one of its general-purpose reasoning models made a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946, according to OpenAI’s announcement and reporting by Interesting Engineering. The company said the model discovered an entirely new family of constructions that outperforms the square-grid approach mathematicians had long believed was close to optimal. OpenAI described the result as the first time an AI system had autonomously solved a prominent open problem at the center of a major field of mathematics.

The planar unit distance problem asks how many pairs of points at exactly unit distance can be placed among n points in a plane. OpenAI said the previous best-known constructions were thought to be essentially optimal, but the model found a better one using ideas that were not developed for this specific problem. The company said the proof came from a general-purpose reasoning model rather than a system built specifically for mathematics, which it framed as a major milestone for both AI and math research.

OpenAI’s description suggests the result is not just a small incremental improvement but a genuine counterexample to a long-standing assumption in combinatorial geometry. The company also said the solution involved deep tools from algebraic number theory, even though the problem itself is easy to state. OpenAI has not yet shown that the result has been independently peer reviewed, so the claim should be treated as a company-announced breakthrough until the underlying paper is formally evaluated.

The Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to open source license compliance, filed a lawsuit against Vizio in Orange County Superior Court in October 2021 after Vizio refused to provide the complete corresponding source code for the Linux-based operating system running on its smart televisions, a disclosure legally required under the GNU General Public License Version 2 that Vizio accepted when it chose to build its TV software on the Linux kernel. The SFC purchased a Vizio television from a retail store in Orange County, California, made a formal request for the source code as any consumer is entitled to do under GPLv2, and filed suit when Vizio declined, making the case one of the first major open source enforcement actions argued as a contract dispute rather than a copyright infringement claim, a legal distinction that determines which court has jurisdiction and what remedies are available. A trial date of August 10 through 19, 2026, is now set in Orange County Superior Court, according to the SFC’s case page updated February 27, 2026.

The legal theory at the center of the case is the concept of third-party beneficiary rights, which holds that when Vizio licensed Linux under the GPLv2, it entered into a contract with the software’s developers that was specifically intended to benefit downstream users, meaning the consumers who purchased Vizio televisions have an enforceable right to demand the source code, not merely the original Linux authors. A California state court ruled in 2023 that whether the SFC qualifies as a third-party beneficiary was a triable issue of material fact, meaning a reasonable person could find in the SFC’s favor, and declined to dismiss the case at the summary judgment stage, a significant early win for the organization. In December 2025, the same judge issued a partial summary judgment ruling that the GPLv2 does create a legal duty for Vizio to share source code, leaving the scope of that duty, meaning exactly how much code and documentation must be disclosed, as the primary question to be resolved at trial.

The outcome of the August trial carries implications that extend far beyond Vizio’s televisions and into the broader consumer electronics industry, where hundreds of manufacturers ship products built on Linux and other open source software without providing consumers the source code that the license legally requires them to disclose. If the court rules in the SFC’s favor and confirms that individual purchasers have standing to enforce GPLv2 compliance as third-party beneficiaries, it would fundamentally shift the balance of power in open source license enforcement by removing the requirement that only the original software authors can sue, and would expose any company shipping GPL-licensed software without providing source code to lawsuits from any consumer who purchased their product. Linus Torvalds, the original creator of the Linux kernel and a foundational figure in the open source community, publicly commented on the case in late 2025, expressing concern not about the underlying goal of GPL compliance but about the specific legal strategy the SFC pursued, according to discussions documented on Reddit and YouTube.

Boston Dynamics, the robotics company and Hyundai subsidiary known for its four-legged Spot robot and bipedal Atlas humanoid, reversed course on a planned sale of Spot to a company that supplies equipment to law enforcement agencies after employees objected to the proposed use of flash bang grenades as a payload for the robot, according to a Semafor report citing former employees familiar with the matter. Workers said they feared the robot equipped with noise-flash distraction devices could be deployed for crowd control during protests, a characterization Boston Dynamics disputed, with a company spokesperson saying the proposed deal would have restricted Spot’s use to scenarios involving armed suspects or hostage situations only, according to Semafor. The spokesperson confirmed the sale was canceled to avoid compromising the company’s commitment to preventing weaponization but declined to identify the other party involved in the transaction.

Boston Dynamics has maintained a formal policy since at least 2021 against the weaponization of its robots, and the company reaffirmed that policy in an open letter signed by multiple major robotics companies in 2023, stating that general purpose robots should not be weaponized and that the company does not support others doing so either. According to a former employee cited by Semafor, the sale initially received approval from Boston Dynamics’ internal ethics committee, which evaluated how the technology could be used to enhance safety for law enforcement. The deal became known to the broader workforce when the company held an internal announcement, and the following company-wide meeting quickly became a forum for employee concerns, after which Boston Dynamics withdrew from the sale entirely.

The cancellation cuts off what would have been a potentially significant revenue source for Boston Dynamics at a time when the company is still relying substantially on Spot sales to fund development of its more ambitious humanoid robot Atlas, which began industrial deployments at Hyundai facilities in 2026. The incident underscores a tension that has become increasingly common across the technology industry between companies developing dual-use technologies and the employees who build them, echoing similar worker-led reversals at Google over Project Maven in 2018 and at Microsoft and Amazon over facial recognition contracts with law enforcement agencies in subsequent years. Hyundai holds an 80 percent ownership stake in Boston Dynamics, with SoftBank holding the remaining 20 percent, according to financial reporting on the company’s ownership structure.

An international team of climate scientists, led by researchers at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published a study on May 20, 2026, in the journal Science Advances under (DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aea0652) that for the first time fully accounts for every driver of global mean sea level rise across the past six decades, resolving what researchers had long described as a stubborn closure problem in climate science, according to EurekAlert’s May 19, 2026, release of the findings. The study finds that global average sea level has risen at a rate of 2.06 millimeters per year since 1960, but that the pace has doubled in recent decades to 3.94 millimeters per year between 2005 and 2023, according to the paper published in Science Advances.

The team identified ocean thermal expansion, in which warming seawater physically expands and takes up more volume, as the single largest contributor, accounting for 43 percent of all sea level rise since 1960, according to the study. Mountain glacier melt contributed 27 percent, Greenland Ice Sheet loss contributed 15 percent, Antarctic Ice Sheet loss contributed 12 percent, and changes in land water storage accounted for the remaining 3 percent, according to EurekAlert’s summary of the Science Advances paper published May 19, 2026.

The study also explains why the rate of rise has accelerated. Since 1960, the primary drivers were ocean warming and reduced land water storage, but since 1993 accelerating ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica has become an increasingly dominant factor, shifting the composition of sea level rise in ways that carry more severe long-term consequences because ice sheet loss, unlike thermal expansion, is largely irreversible on human timescales, according to the paper published in Science Advances on May 20, 2026.

A team of researchers led by scientists at UC Santa Barbara and McGill University has found that the oldest known eukaryotes, the domain of life that includes all animals, plants, fungi, and most complex organisms, spent hundreds of millions of years confined to oxygenated seafloor environments rather than living freely in the water column as scientists had long assumed, according to a study published in Nature. The researchers analyzed drill core material from the McArthur and Birrindudu basins of Australia’s Northern Territory, which preserve the oldest well-accepted eukaryote fossils dating between 1.75 and 1.4 billion years ago, and used sedimentology, geochemistry, and mineralogy to match ancient fossil organisms to their original environments. Co-lead author Leigh Anne Riedman, a paleontologist at UC Santa Barbara, said the team found that the oldest eukaryotes already needed oxygen in some capacity and were living on or within the seafloor based on how their remains were distributed across sediment samples.

To determine oxygen levels in the ancient environments, the team examined which minerals were preserved in the surrounding rock, as different concentrations of dissolved oxygen produce different mineral assemblages. The presence of iron pyrite indicated anoxic conditions, while elevated concentrations of vanadium, molybdenum, and uranium signaled more oxygenated environments, and the correlation between oxygenated zones and eukaryote fossil locations was consistent across all four environments analyzed including lagoons, tidal areas, coastal regions, and offshore waters. Senior author Susannah Porter, a professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Earth Science Department, said the restriction of early eukaryotes to a very limited environment on the seafloor may explain a long-standing puzzle in evolutionary biology: why eukaryotes were neither abundant nor diverse for nearly one billion years after genetic and fossil evidence suggests they first arose.

The findings also suggest that eukaryotes acquired mitochondria, the energy-generating organelles present in every living eukaryotic cell today, very early in their evolutionary history, as even the oldest fossil specimens already displayed a diversity and variety of form that implies the group had a deeper history than the current fossil record can show. The extreme conditions of the Cryogenian period, known as Snowball Earth, approximately 720 million years ago would have caused mass extinctions that cleared previously occupied niches, and the Ediacaran Period that followed, ending around 538 million years ago, marks the first emergence of visible, complex multicellular life, all of it eukaryotic. Porter, Riedman, and a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Barbara are currently examining microfossils from even older layers in the McArthur Basin and the Animikie Basin of Minnesota in hopes of pushing the eukaryotic origin story further back in time.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Liverpool have found evidence that early Homo sapiens were living inside dense tropical rainforests in present-day Côte d’Ivoire approximately 150,000 years ago, more than doubling the previous record for rainforest habitation in Africa and surpassing the previous global record of 70,000 years from Southeast Asia, according to a study published May 20, 2026, in Nature. The discovery was made at a site called Bété I, first excavated in the 1980s by Professor Yodé Guédé of l’Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny during a joint Ivorian-Soviet research mission that uncovered layers of stone tools buried deep underground but could not determine their age with the technology available at the time. An international team returned to the site using modern dating techniques including Optically Stimulated Luminescence and Electron-Spin Resonance, both of which independently confirmed human occupation around 150,000 years ago.

To confirm that the site was genuinely forested and not simply adjacent to forest when humans lived there, researchers analyzed pollen, phytoliths, and chemical traces preserved in the sediments. The samples contained pollen and plant waxes specifically associated with humid West African rainforests, while very low levels of grass pollen ruled out the possibility that the site sat within a savanna or thin woodland corridor, according to lead author Dr. Eslem Ben Arous. Dr. James Blinkhorn of the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute noted the timing of the new excavation was critical, as mining activity has since destroyed the site entirely, making the recovered data irreplaceable.

The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that early Homo sapiens were far more ecologically flexible than a generation of research had suggested, thriving not only on open grasslands and coastlines but also inside some of the most challenging environments on Earth. Senior author Professor Eleanor Scerri said convergent evidence shows beyond doubt that ecological diversity sits at the heart of the human species, reflecting a complex history of population subdivision in which different populations lived in different regions and habitat types. Researchers said the discovery also raises larger questions about how long humans have shaped tropical ecosystems through hunting, fire use, and plant management, and noted that several additional sites in the region remain largely unexplored, meaning even older evidence of rainforest habitation could still be uncovered.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine analyzed data from more than 17,000 middle-aged and older adults and found that several common modifiable dementia risk factors are linked to steeper declines in cognitive function in women than in men, according to a study published May 19, 2026, in Biology of Sex Differences. The researchers examined 12 known risk factors including education level, hearing loss, smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, depression, physical inactivity, hypertension, diabetes, and other cardiometabolic conditions, comparing how each factor correlated with cognitive test performance across male and female participants. Conditions related to heart and metabolic health, including hypertension and elevated body mass index, showed the strongest differential impact, with women experiencing steeper negative associations with cognition than men facing the same conditions.

Hearing loss and diabetes were among the most notable findings because both conditions are more common in men, yet both were tied to lower cognitive scores more strongly in women, suggesting that biological sex modifies how the brain responds to these risk factors independent of how often they occur. The researchers said the findings point toward a need to tailor dementia prevention strategies specifically for women rather than treating Alzheimer's risk as a uniform population-level problem with identical interventions across sexes. Lead authors Megan Fitzhugh and Judy Pa of UC San Diego said the study offers important clues about why women not only face higher rates of Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia but also appear to be more cognitively vulnerable to the same risk exposures that affect both sexes.

Women account for approximately 65 percent of all Alzheimer's cases in the United States, a disparity that has historically been attributed primarily to women's longer average lifespan rather than any difference in biological susceptibility. The new findings suggest that lifespan alone does not explain the gap, and that women's brains may respond more acutely to modifiable risk factors that are largely preventable through lifestyle and medical intervention. The researchers said the results support a broader shift toward sex-specific clinical guidelines for dementia prevention, and that controlling hypertension, managing obesity, and addressing hearing loss may produce disproportionately larger cognitive benefits in women than current gender-neutral protocols account for.

James Murdoch, the youngest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch who resigned from Fox Corporation’s board in 2020 over editorial disagreements with his family, has completed the acquisition of New York magazine and Vox Media’s podcast network through his investment firm Lupa Systems in a deal valued at $300 million or more, according to Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Deadline. The acquisition includes the flagship New York magazine print publication and its digital portfolio encompassing The Cut, Vulture, and Intelligencer, along with Vox Media’s library of more than 40 original podcasts including Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, Today Explained, Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara, and the Waveform podcast with Marques Brownlee. The deal returns New York magazine to a Murdoch for the first time since 1991, when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp sold the publication after holding it for 15 years following a hostile takeover in 1976.

The acquisition marks a significant escalation of James Murdoch’s ambitions in American media following his formal separation from his family’s conservative media empire. After resigning from Fox Corp.’s board in 2020, Murdoch described his departure as a response to what he called the propagation of disinformation through the news media, and he and his wife Kathryn have since invested in progressive and independent media ventures through Lupa Systems, including stakes in the Tribeca Film Festival and a major entertainment production company in India. Vox Media acquired New York magazine in 2019 from New York Media, the company run by Pam Wasserstein, daughter of late investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, in an all-stock deal that valued it at $105 million, meaning the $300 million sale price to Lupa Systems represents a nearly threefold increase in valuation in just seven years.

Vox Media has been exploring a sale of all or parts of its portfolio amid a challenging environment for digital media, and the deal allows the company to retain ownership of its core technology and media brands including The Verge, Eater, SB Nation, and Polygon while separating the New York magazine portfolio and podcast network into Murdoch’s hands. New York magazine has remained financially resilient relative to most legacy print publications, largely due to strong digital subscription growth, the outsized success of its vertical brands, and a loyal readership drawn to long-form journalism and cultural criticism. James and his wife Kathryn also reached a legal settlement with Rupert Murdoch last fall, alongside siblings Liz and Prudence, that formally named Lachlan Murdoch as the designated successor to the family’s media empire, completing James Murdoch’s formal disconnection from the conservative media dynasty his father built.

GitHub, the Microsoft-owned software development platform used by more than 100 million developers worldwide, confirmed on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, that a cybercriminal group known as TeamPCP gained unauthorized access to approximately 3,800 of the company’s internal repositories after a single GitHub employee installed a poisoned Visual Studio Code extension on their machine, according to a statement published by GitHub on X and confirmed by BleepingComputer, SecurityWeek, and Help Net Security. TeamPCP had claimed responsibility for the breach on the Breached underground cybercrime forum on Tuesday, May 19, offering the allegedly stolen internal source code and repository data to any buyer willing to pay at least $50,000, and stating it would leak the data publicly if no buyer emerged, according to reporting by Tom’s Hardware and SecurityWeek.

GitHub said in its statement that its security team detected the malicious extension, removed it from the Visual Studio Code Marketplace, isolated the compromised employee endpoint, and began incident response the same day the activity was identified, according to the company’s confirmed disclosure reported by Help Net Security on May 20, 2026. The company said it immediately rotated critical secrets and credentials, prioritizing highest-impact credentials first, and stated that its current assessment is that the attacker’s claim of roughly 3,800 repositories is “directionally consistent” with findings uncovered so far, while noting that no evidence has emerged of customer repositories, enterprise environments, or organizational accounts outside GitHub’s internal systems being affected, according to the GitHub statement.

Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido Security, told Help Net Security that Visual Studio Code extensions have unrestricted access to everything on a developer’s machine, including credentials, SSH keys, cloud access keys, and all stored secrets, making a developer workstation with a compromised extension functionally equivalent to handing an attacker full access to every authenticated service the developer uses. The breach occurred one day after a separate incident in which version 18.95.0 of the Nx Console VS Code extension, which has 2.2 million installs and carries a verified publisher badge, was uploaded to the Visual Studio Marketplace on May 18, 2026 at 12:30 UTC by an attacker using a contributor’s GitHub token stolen in an earlier supply chain attack, remaining live and auto-installing for approximately 18 minutes before being taken down, according to a technical analysis published by Aikido Security on May 19, 2026.

Researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience examined brain tissue from deceased donors over age 80 and found that so-called immature neurons, brain cells resembling young developing cells, were present in the hippocampus of all participants regardless of whether they had Alzheimer’s disease, cognitive decline, or remained cognitively sharp until death, according to a study published April 24, 2026, in Cell Stem Cell. The hippocampus is a small region involved in memory formation and one of the few areas in the adult brain where new neurons may still develop, and the researchers analyzed gene expression profiles from thousands of individual cells to determine whether these immature neurons behaved differently across the three groups. Lead researcher Dr. Evgenia Salta said that even at an average age of over 80, immature neurons were present in all groups, contradicting assumptions that neurogenesis effectively ceases in old age or is entirely abolished by Alzheimer’s pathology.

The most striking finding was that the difference between resilient and diseased brains was not the number of immature neurons but how they functioned. In individuals who showed Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain but remained cognitively intact, the immature neurons activated programs promoting cell survival and suppressed signals related to inflammation and cell death compared to individuals who had both Alzheimer’s pathology and cognitive decline, according to the study. Salta said the cells in resilient individuals seemed to activate programs that helped them survive and cope with damage, and that lower signals for inflammation and cell death in these neurons may be a key part of why some people remain sharp even as amyloid and tau accumulate in their brains.

The researchers said the immature neurons may contribute to cognitive resilience through a mechanism beyond simply replacing dying neurons. Salta described the cells as potentially acting like fertilizer in a garden that has started falling apart, suggesting they support surrounding tissue and help the brain maintain function and biological youth rather than acting purely as cellular replacements. Future studies from the team will examine how these immature neurons interact with other brain cell types and whether those interactions can be therapeutically targeted to enhance cognitive resilience in people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, according to the researchers.

A Texas man identified by the Grapevine Police Department as Jimmy Jack McDaniel was arrested on Monday May 18, 2026, after he intentionally drove his Tesla Cybertruck off the boat ramp at Katie’s Woods Park at Grapevine Lake in North Texas to test the vehicle’s Wade Mode feature, according to the Grapevine Police Department. McDaniel told officers on the scene that he drove the vehicle into the lake on purpose, and the Cybertruck quickly became inoperable and began filling with water, forcing McDaniel and a passenger to abandon the vehicle before first responders arrived. The Grapevine Fire Department’s Water Rescue Team deployed to the scene and later used a crane to retrieve the submerged truck from the lake.

Wade Mode is one of four off-road capabilities built into the Tesla Cybertruck, designed to allow the vehicle to traverse shallow bodies of water such as rivers and streams, but the feature does not engage automatically and requires manual activation by the driver. According to Tesla’s official owner’s manual, the maximum wading depth for the Cybertruck using Wade Mode is approximately 32 inches measured from the bottom of the tires, and the manual specifically warns owners to assess water depth and conditions before entry, exercise sound judgment, avoid fast currents or rapids, and be aware that soft or muddy underwater terrain can cause the vehicle to sink. Any water damage incurred from improper use of Wade Mode is explicitly excluded from Tesla’s warranty coverage, according to the owner’s manual.

McDaniel remained in the Grapevine Jail as of Tuesday and faces multiple charges including operating a vehicle in a closed section of a park or lake, having no valid boat registration, and several violations related to water safety equipment requirements under Texas law, according to the Grapevine Police Department. Grapevine police said in an official statement that while a vehicle may be physically capable of entering shallow freshwater areas, doing so can create legal and safety concerns under Texas law and cautioned other drivers against attempting similar stunts. The extent of damage to the Cybertruck was not disclosed.

Minnesota has become the first state in the United States to ban prediction markets after the state legislature passed legislation with broad bipartisan support making it a felony to host, operate, or advertise prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket within state borders, according to reporting on the legislation. The Minnesota Senate passed the bill 56-10 in late April, authored by Senator John Marty, a Democrat representing Roseville, and the House subsequently voted to add the prediction market ban as an amendment to the state’s public safety policy bill with bipartisan support, according to the Minnesota House of Representatives. The legislation covers wagers on sports, casino-style gambling, elections, people, catastrophes, war, weather, events in popular culture, and death, according to the bill text.

Proponents of the ban argue that prediction markets have deliberately exploited legal loopholes by marketing themselves as futures contracts rather than bets in order to bypass state gambling regulations, and that Minnesota receives zero tax revenue from the platforms while counties and local governments are left to handle the social consequences of problem gambling they generate, according to state lawmaker testimony. Senator Marty said that unless the state acts quickly, prediction markets will create a massive increase in gambling addiction and dramatically cut into revenue for Minnesota’s regulated gambling industry including charitable gambling, tribal casinos, and racetracks, according to the Senate Democratic caucus. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, the Minnesota Family Council, the Catholic Conference, and the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition all formally supported the ban, according to the Minnesota Senate Democratic caucus.

Opponents of the ban including House Republican leadership argued the legislation could expose the state to federal lawsuits because platforms like Kalshi operate under oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, creating a potential conflict between state and federal jurisdiction, according to reporting on the House debate. Prediction market operators argue their platforms are fundamentally different from gambling because there is no house setting the odds and the markets provide genuine information about the probability of future events, according to reporting on their arguments. Minnesota has not legalized any form of online sports betting or online casino gambling, making the state’s outright ban on prediction markets one of the most restrictive stances on digital wagering in the country, and legislators and legal scholars say the Minnesota law will almost certainly face a federal court challenge from Kalshi, which previously sued the state of New Jersey over similar regulatory actions, according to NPR.

Researchers at the University of Lancashire found that taking 100 microliters of peppermint oil twice daily for 20 days lowered systolic blood pressure by an average of 8.5 mmHg in adults with prehypertension or stage 1 hypertension, according to a placebo-controlled randomized trial published April 23, 2026, in the journal PLOS One. The 40 participants were randomly divided into two groups, with one receiving the active peppermint oil supplement and the other a peppermint-flavored placebo containing none of the active oil, and only those who received the active oil showed measurable improvement, according to the study. Lead author Dr. Jonnie Sinclair, Reader in Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Lancashire, said peppermint oil is low in calories and price and has proved to be a very simple and cost-effective solution to potentially treat millions of people around the world.

Peppermint contains active compounds including menthol and flavonoids that researchers believe are responsible for the blood pressure reduction observed in the trial. The 8.5 mmHg reduction is clinically meaningful, as a drop of just 5 mmHg in systolic blood pressure is associated with a 9 percent decrease in the risk of dying from heart disease and a 14 percent decrease in the risk of dying from stroke, according to established hypertension literature. The researchers also monitored body measurements, blood test results, diastolic blood pressure, heart rate, mental well-being, and sleep quality throughout the 20-day period.

High blood pressure affects approximately 1.28 billion adults globally, according to the World Health Organization, and the majority live in low and middle income countries where the long-term cost of pharmaceutical treatment remains a significant barrier to consistent care. The researchers acknowledged that 40 participants over 20 days represents a proof-of-concept result and that larger, longer-term trials are needed before peppermint oil can be formally recommended as a clinical hypertension treatment. Patients currently taking blood pressure medication should consult their physician before adding any supplement.

The United States Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the 17th chair of the Federal Reserve Board in a vote on May 13, 2026, succeeding Jerome Powell, whose second four-year term as chair expired on May 15, according to the Brookings Institution and the Federal Reserve Board. The Federal Reserve Board named Powell as chair pro tempore on May 15 to maintain continuity during the transition period between Powell’s departure and Warsh’s swearing in, a procedural step consistent with past practice during similar leadership transitions, according to the Federal Reserve’s official press release. President Donald Trump nominated Warsh in late January 2026, calling him central casting and predicting he would be one of the great Fed chairmen, according to the Darden School of Business.

Warsh, who is 56 years old, previously served as a Federal Reserve governor from 2006 to 2011 and was the youngest person ever appointed to the Fed’s seven-member board at age 35, according to the Federal Reserve History website. A former investment banker with deep Wall Street contacts rather than a traditional Ph.D. economist, Warsh made his name during the 2008 financial crisis and has since been a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Warsh has personal investments including stakes in Polymarket and SpaceX, though he has not publicly revealed the size of those holdings, according to reporting on his Senate confirmation.

While historically viewed as an inflation hawk, Warsh has recently aligned with the Trump administration’s push for lower interest rates, arguing that productivity gains from artificial intelligence can help keep inflation in check without requiring the Fed to maintain restrictive monetary policy, according to the Darden Report. No immediate changes to the federal funds rate are expected following his swearing in, but Warsh’s first press conference and policy statement will be closely scrutinized by financial markets and economists watching for any signals about the pace of potential rate cuts, according to reporting on the transition. Warsh was confirmed for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board through a term running until 2040, replacing Trump appointee Stephen Miran, who vacated the seat to make room for the nomination, according to the Brookings Institution.

A research team from the California Institute of Technology used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to analyze the composition of Nereid, Neptune’s third-largest moon, and found that its surface chemistry does not match that of Kuiper Belt objects as scientists had long assumed, but instead shows an excess of ice consistent with a body that formed within Neptune’s original moon system, according to a study published May 20, 2026, in Science Advances. The findings strongly eliminate the possibility that Nereid drifted in from the outer solar system and was captured by Neptune’s gravitational pull, as had been the leading hypothesis since its discovery in 1949, according to lead researcher Mikhail Belyakov and his colleagues at Caltech. Belyakov said the team does not have much evidence remaining around Neptune because the system has very few moons left, underscoring how significant Nereid may be as the sole surviving witness to the planet’s original architecture.

Nereid spans approximately 220 miles in diameter and possesses the second most eccentric orbit of any known moon in the entire solar system, bringing it as close as roughly 870,000 miles from Neptune at its nearest point and carrying it as far as nearly 6 million miles away at its farthest, completing one full orbit in nearly a complete Earth year. Scientists now believe Nereid was once a regular inner moon of Neptune that was violently flung outward into its extreme elongated orbit when Triton, a large Kuiper Belt object, was gravitationally captured by Neptune billions of years ago. That capture event was catastrophic for Neptune’s original moon system, as Triton’s insertion into a retrograde orbit around the planet destabilized and destroyed nearly all of Neptune’s original companions, and Nereid appears to have survived only by migrating into the highly elliptical orbit it holds today rather than being destroyed or ejected entirely.

Scott Sheppard, a planetary astronomer at Carnegie Science who was not involved in the research, called the result exciting and said the observations demonstrate for the first time that Nereid’s unusual orbit matches the history expected from a moon that originally formed near Neptune and was later displaced outward due to Triton’s capture, according to the Associated Press. Neptune’s innermost small moons are believed to have formed from the debris of the original moons destroyed during Triton’s arrival, making Nereid a uniquely intact survivor from a completely different era of the Neptunian system. No spacecraft missions to Neptune are currently planned, and researchers said a future dedicated mission could provide definitive insights into the origins of Neptune’s moon system that Webb’s remote observations cannot fully resolve.

Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based de-extinction biotech company previously known for engineering mice with woolly mammoth traits and wolf pups resembling dire wolves, announced Tuesday that it has successfully hatched 26 live baby chickens from a 3D printed artificial eggshell in what it calls the world’s first system to grow birds completely outside a natural shell to term, successfully, repeatably, and healthy, according to the Associated Press. The artificial egg resembles a tea infuser with a lid that opens for observation, with a rigid 3D printed shell featuring a hexagonal grid and a silicone-based membrane on the inside that mimics the interior of a natural egg, and a breathable membrane that facilitates oxygen diffusion at normal temperatures, according to Colossal chief science officer Beth Shapiro. The device is compatible with standard incubators, and scientists transferred fertilized embryos from freshly laid chicken eggs into the system, supplemented calcium that is normally absorbed from the shell, and imaged embryonic development in real time over a 21-day period, according to the company.

Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said the artificial egg technology is designed to eventually be scaled up to genetically engineer living birds to resemble New Zealand’s South Island giant moa, an extinct flightless bird that disappeared approximately 600 years ago and whose eggs are 80 times the size of a chicken egg, a size no modern bird surrogate could lay, according to the Associated Press. The goal is a fully modular system capable of scaling exogenous development of birds of any size ranging from small parrots to chickens to eventually large extinct species, entirely without the need of surrogates or a natural shell, according to Lamm. The artificial egg is also adaptable to aid endangered birds with low hatching success rates, potentially serving conservation applications well beyond de-extinction, according to Colossal’s announcement.

Independent scientists offered measured praise alongside significant skepticism. Researchers not affiliated with Colossal told the Associated Press that while the technology is impressive, what the company built is more accurately described as an artificial eggshell rather than a true artificial egg, as several biological components of a natural egg remain absent from the system. Scientists also maintained that the broader goal of reviving fully extinct species remains likely impossible, and critics of Colossal’s de-extinction mission said the company continues to oversell its claims, a charge the company denies, according to the Associated Press. Colossal said the more than 30 chickens that have hatched from the artificial system are thriving at the company’s avian facility in Texas, where it has committed to their long-term health and welfare, according to head of animal husbandry Steve Metzler.

U.S. lawmakers proposed bipartisan legislation that would impose a $130 annual fee on electric vehicle drivers under a bill called the BUILD America 250 Act, introduced by Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves, a Republican from Missouri, according to InsideEVs. The fee is intended to replace the federal gas tax revenue that EV drivers do not pay, as the federal gas tax funds road repairs nationwide and has not been increased since 1993, when it was set at 18.3 cents per gallon, according to the legislation. Starting in 2029, the $130 fee would increase by $5 every two years until it reaches $150, and plug-in hybrid drivers would be charged $35 per year rising over time to $50, according to the bill.

Critics from environmental and EV advocacy groups immediately pushed back, arguing the proposed fee is disproportionately high and fails to account for actual driving behavior. According to research from Consumer Reports, the average American pays between $70 and $90 annually in federal gas taxes, far less than the proposed $130 EV fee, meaning EV drivers would be charged more than the typical gasoline driver despite the stated goal of parity. Consumer Reports analysts also noted that flat fees are problematic because they do not account for how much a person actually drives, with seniors and occasional drivers paying only $40 to $50 in gas taxes annually, while commercially driven vehicles such as delivery vans and robotaxis that drive up to 10 times as many miles as a personal vehicle would face no additional burden under the proposal.

The federal fee would stack on top of existing state-level EV registration fees that are already among the highest in the country. In Michigan, EV drivers pay $267 in 2026, up from the previous year, and in New Jersey the registration fee is $270 with the first four years required upfront, according to InsideEVs. The bill has not yet been formally introduced and must pass both chambers of Congress before reaching President Trump’s desk, with the bill’s authors targeting September 30 as their deadline, when the current federal highway funding law expires, according to InsideEVs.

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that humpback whales travel between breeding grounds in eastern Australia and Brazil across more than 14,000 kilometers of open ocean, with one whale setting a new world record by covering at least 15,100 kilometers between documented sightings, according to a study published May 19, 2026, in Royal Society Open Science by researchers from Griffith University, Pacific Whale Foundation, and international collaborators. The record-breaking whale was first photographed in 2003 at Brazil’s Abrolhos Bank, the country’s primary humpback whale nursery off the coast of Bahia, swimming among a group of nine adults, and was identified again 22 years later in September 2025 at Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia, according to the study. Griffith University Ph.D. candidate and co-author Stephanie Stack said the whales were photographed decades apart, by different people, in opposite parts of the world, separated by two different oceans, and yet researchers were able to connect their journey.

A second whale produced a similarly extraordinary result. First photographed at Hervey Bay in Queensland in 2007 and again in the same area in 2013, this whale later appeared near São Paulo, Brazil, in 2019, covering a minimum straight-line distance of approximately 14,200 kilometers, roughly equivalent to the distance from Sydney to London, according to the study. Researchers used automated image recognition software to compare 19,283 high-quality photographs of whale tail flukes, known as flukes, collected between 1984 and 2025 from eastern Australia and Latin America through the global whale tracking platform Happywhale, manually confirming every potential match, according to lead researcher Dr. Cristina Castro of the Pacific Whale Foundation.

Despite the extraordinary distances involved, the researchers emphasized how rare these crossings appear to be. Across more than four decades of data covering nearly 20,000 individually identified humpback whales, only two animals were found to have traveled between the two breeding regions, representing just 0.01 percent of all whales in the records, according to the study. Stack said that despite their rarity, these exchanges matter for the long-term health of whale populations because occasional individuals moving between distant breeding grounds can help maintain genetic diversity and may even carry new song styles from one region to another, adding that humpback whale songs are known to spread culturally across ocean basins much like music trends in human populations. Researchers also noted that climate change could make these rare crossings more common as shifts in Antarctic sea ice and changes in Antarctic krill distribution alter whale migration patterns over time.