Undefeated Hughes tries 2 turns in American Pharoah on Saturday at Santa Anita.

The Downtown Billings organization’s mixed-use dreams for the corner of North 29th Street and First Avenue North in downtown Billings shift, plan to reissue request for proposals for site.

New research suggests the Moon once had an internal magnetic field. Unlike the earth, the Moon no longer has a core-generated magnetic field today. On our planet, the movement of liquid iron in the outer core generates a global magnetic field. This so-called geodynamo works on a similar principle to a dynamo on a bicycle, which converts mechanical motion into electrical energy. “Today, there is an ongoing heated debate as to whether the Moon also operated a dynamo in the past,” says Xi Yang, a PhD student in the Earth and planetary sciences department at ETH Zurich. This is because the analysis of rock samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts is contradictory. “Some researchers assume there was a strong magnetic field that existed over a long period between 4.25 and 3.5 billion years ago, while others, however, find no evidence of this,” says geophysicist Anna Mittelholz, who is a lecturer in the same department. In addition to the dynamo theory, there is a second possible explanation for the magnetised lunar rock: impacts from massive meteorites or asteroids could have triggered magnetization processes on the Moon. A study by the two ETH researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at...

The largest study ever of bat genome research combined with bat fossils reveals that bats originated in Europe some 65 million years ago, not in Africa, Asia, or North America as scientists have long thought. The research also shows that echolocation, like flight, evolved near the dawn of bat evolution. Overall, the work in Nature helps to resolve scientific debates about bat evolution and rewrites the bat family tree. Bats are the only mammals that are capable of powered flight. After their European origins, they quickly spread to Africa and then worldwide. There are more than 1,500 species of bats globally, and they account for more than one-fifth of Earth’s mammals. Bats play a key role in maintaining healthy ecosystems in most areas of the world by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and consuming vast numbers of insect pests. The research provides the first-ever reconstruction of the genome of the ancestor of all living bats. This reconstruction shows what the ancestral genome of a mammal capable of flight would have looked like. Data from genomes of a total of 103 species and traits from 44 fossil species were generated and analyzed by 137 researchers from 64 countries to complete the study...

College football is a uniquely American tradition. Each weekend, hundreds of thousands of fans converge on campuses across the country, firing up grills in parking lots, gathering with friends and family and streaming into stadiums to cheer on their teams. But extreme late-summer heat waves are threatening to change the way that tradition is experienced, particularly during the early weeks of the season. Rising temperatures and humidity are already prompting safety delays and, in some cases, sending fans to the hospital. South Carolina’s 2026 season opener, for example, had its fourth quarter trimmed by 10 minutes because the heat index inside Williams-Brice Stadium spiked to a record 110 degrees. Emergency services and fire crews responded to more than 700 heat-related incidents. These impacts are likely to become more common as climate change drives more frequent and intense heat waves. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the average rate of extreme heat events increased from two per year in the 1960s to ten per year between 2010 and 2020. Jonathan Casper, a professor in the parks, recreation, and tourism management department at North Carolina State University, studies how environmental and sustainability challenges influence the way sports are organized, experienced...

New sample analyses point to a surprising origin for the asteroid Bennu. The asteroid Bennu orbits the Sun once every 1.2 years and approaches Earth every six years, passing within around 300,000 kilometres. NASA took advantage of this to collect material from the celestial body. In a spectacular operation in 2023, the US space agency collected samples from the surface of the asteroid Bennu by its OSIRIS-REx probe. On September 23, the sample container landed in the Utah desert, carrying around 120 grams of material from Bennu. From there, a small but precious portion made its way to ETH Zurich: Maria Schönbächler, professor of isotope geochemistry, received half a gram for analysis. The ETH researcher’s laboratory began analyzing the samples immediately. The investigations have now been completed, and the results have just been published in the Science Advances journal. They not only reveal the chemical fingerprint of the Bennu minerals but also provide new insights into how our Solar System formed. The ETH researchers analyzed isotopes of iron, titanium, and chromium. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that differ slightly in mass. Together, they create a distinctive fingerprint that the researchers can use to determine the origin and, to...

Backstage at Indigenous New York Fashion Week (INYFW), Dusty LeGrande helped lace up garments from his sibling Cheyenne Rain LeGrande’s collection. A year

This article proposes novel definitions of endogenous and exogenous money. Such definitions are designed to eschew heterodoxy’s underexamined tendency to equate money’s endogeneity with the operati...

When an AI chatbot agrees with our reasoning in resolving a social dilemma, we may become more confident in our opinions. But when the chatbot disagrees, we may simply dismiss the challenge rather than reconsider our views. That’s according to new research from the University of Michigan examining how people respond when artificial intelligence weighs in on personal and interpersonal dilemmas. The study, appearing in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, highlights a challenge for developers trying to reduce the tendency of chatbots to agree too readily with users. The authors note that AI models are often designed to be agreeable, which can lead them to validate users’ reasoning even when that reasoning may be flawed. They describe how this kind of confirmation can reinforce harmful ideas and distorted perceptions of reality. “Developers have been working to make AI models more willing to disagree when necessary, but having an AI disagree with the user does not necessarily mean that people will reconsider their own views,” says Atakan Atamer, the study’s co-lead author and UM psychology doctoral student. “Instead, they may simply discount the AI’s response.” Atamer and colleagues recruited 482 US adults who considered one of three hypothetical interpersonal dilemmas with...

Election officials can build public trust in procedures and results—even among suspicious voters who fear partisan manipulation—by creating videos that factually explain their security safeguards in simple terms. Such are the findings of studies coauthored by a University of California, Riverside scholar, offering sound strategies for election officials to respond to false claims and conspiracy theories about election fraud and security, as well as suspicions that arise when the counting of mail-in ballots delays results. “If election officials explain why a delay might occur in advance, then voters are less likely to have a negative response,” says Jennifer Gaudette, an assistant professor in the UCR School of Public Policy and coauthor of the research published in the Election Law Journal, British Journal of Political Science, and PNAS Nexus. In their recently published Election Law Journal article, the researchers examined a challenge built into America’s decentralized election system. While states have broad authority to set their own election rules, they mostly follow the same security procedures. But voters typically know little about how elections are run in other states. Partisan distrust can fill that information gap. For example, Gaudette and her colleagues found that Republicans nationwide were less likely to trust...

Researchers have used CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to model how high-energy cosmic rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The Northern Lights, which occur when particles from the Sun enter the Earth’s atmosphere, generate brilliant sky displays in our Northern Hemisphere, offering an occasional cosmic show enjoyed by millions. But how collisions between these particles, or low-energy cosmic rays, and the Earth’s gases result in the Northern Lights are less well-understood. Even more puzzling are collisions involving high-energy cosmic rays, which possess more than one million times the energy than those from the Sun and emanate from exploding stars, or supernovae. Scientists have typically relied on computer simulations to unpack their collision with Earth’s atmosphere, but these methods have produced varied, and sometimes conflicting, results. New research by an international team of physicists takes an unprecedented approach that offers a clearer understanding of these interstellar wonders. Using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the scientists have recreated how high-energy cosmic rays enter the Earth’s atmosphere and collide with our planet’s gases. The results in the journal Physical Review Letters help decipher the origins of interstellar particles from the cosmos. “We now have a better understanding of how particles from objects more exotic than the...

A new study has found that El Niño events have become nearly 40% stronger in the last 40 years than they were in the pre-industrial era. An El Niño of historic proportion is taking shape in the tropical Pacific. As a result, water temperatures off Santa Barbara climbed into the low 70s Fahrenheit in late August, and anglers have reported catching dorado and yellowtail around the Channel Islands. The authors of the new research—who examined modern and ancient corals in the Galápagos Islands—found that El Niño events in the last four decades were stronger than in any of the 1,000 years prior to about 1850, when humans began impacting the climate with greenhouse gases. The research appears in the journal Science. “Thanks to these new coral reconstructions, we can go farther back in the eastern Pacific’s past than we ever could before,” says coauthor Samantha Stevenson, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “When we do that, we see that El Niño has been getting stronger, and that the changes have really taken off in the past few hundred years.” “We show that the strength of El Niño changes in parallel with the...

...

Details at Cheyenne LeGrande’s show at Indigenous NYFW on Sept. 11. Photo by Dionne Philips

In its second year, the event brought together 30 Indigenous designers, with collections exploring relationships, culture and the possibilities ahead