Nullary Sources

Lauran Neergaard for the AP:

A novel pill helped people with advanced pancreatic cancer live longer, researchers reported Sunday, raising hopes of long-needed better treatments for one of the deadliest types of cancer.

"While not curing the cancer, it is a very large step forward," said Dr. Zev Wainberg, of the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the study.

The drug is called daraxonrasib and it blocks a mutated protein that fuels tumor growth in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases — a target that had eluded treatment for decades.

The daily pills nearly doubled survival time, with fewer severe side effects, in a study that randomly assigned the experimental drug or more chemotherapy to 500 patients whose metastatic, or spreading, cancer had quit responding to prior treatment. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented Sunday at the American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

Brigitta Rongstad Strong with a news release from the University of Colorado Boulder:

When China banned plastic waste imports in 2018, countries like the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and Japan didn't stop exporting plastic waste — they diverted their shipments to countries in Southeast Asia.

New research led by CIRES Fellow Ellen Considine shows that air pollution in Indonesia worsened in 2018 and 2019, when the country began receiving some of the plastic waste that previously went to China. Municipal waste collection is limited in Indonesia and open burning of solid waste is common.

Mike Peña for the University of California, Santa Cruz:

By analyzing the light passing through WASP-94A b's limbs as it crossed its star, the team found that the "morning" side is completely covered in thick clouds, while the "evening" side is much hotter and clear enough to show signs of water vapor. This distinct split helps solve a long-standing mystery: the clouds on these hot, giant planets are likely made of minerals like iron and silicates that cycle through the atmosphere, rather than being a permanent "smog" caused by chemical reactions driven by high-energy starlight.

On the cooler night side of the planet, these mineral vapors condense into droplets deep in the atmosphere. Intense winds then lift them high into the sky, creating a total whiteout on the morning side. As these clouds are blown toward the evening side, where temperatures are about 300 degrees hotter, they evaporate and vanish, leaving the sky clear, Mukherjee explained.

Here's a new post by Misty De Méo at CD Journal:

If you've been reading this blog, you can probably tell that I buy a lot of CD-ROMs. I usually do my research ahead of time but if something is cheap enough, or has a cool-enough looking cover, I'll take a chance on it just in case. This was one of those discs, which I stumbled into while browsing the Mac CDs at Suruga-ya; I could find almost nothing about it online, but something struck me about the sketchy cover art and the "XD FirstClass Network" title.

XD-submit Vol. 1, as it turns out, is a promotional disc for a Kansai-area bulletin board system (BBS) called XD FirstClass Network. As I started digging into it I assumed this would be sort of a basic information kit, a digital pamphlet or something, but it's something a lot more exotic: a functioning archive of the BBS with its original client software for Mac. This was supposed to be a demo so you could browse it offline and decide if you wanted to join, but here in 2026, when this BBS has been offline for three decades, it gives us a chance to actually see what it was like when it was alive.

I've read plenty of archived web forums before, but I've never seen a BBS archive quite like this before.

Nicola Davis for The Guardian:

It is a spray used worldwide to protect humans from mosquito bites, but now research suggests Deet can become attractive to the insects if they associate it with feeding.

…

Writing in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the researchers said they initially observed how trapped mosquitoes attempted to bite a bag of warm blood that they could not quite reach.

Further investigation revealed that 60% of mosquitoes that fed when presented with warm blood alongside exposure to Deet subsequently showed biting attempts when exposed to Deet alone.

Rob Jordan in a news release from Stanford:

A tiny sea creature might hold the secret to reversing the aging process. When treated with a brief series of electrical pulses, sea squirts experience dramatic and long-lasting health improvements that can significantly extend their lifespans, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford and other institutions.

The findings, published this week in PNAS, open new possibilities for protecting marine species from warming waters, learning what causes stem cells in our own bodies to degrade, and potentially finding new ways to use these cells to treat medical conditions.

Philip Marcelo for the AP:

A former senior CIA official with top secret-level clearance is accused of stealing hundreds of gold bars worth more than $40 million from the federal government and stashing them in his home.

David Rush was arrested and charged with criminal theft of public money last week, according to federal court filings in Virginia, where he lives.

From November to March, Rush requested and received a "significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses," according to an affidavit from an FBI agent investigating the case.

Jorge A. Herrera-Flores for Phys.org:

The Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is famous because adults look like overgrown babies, or tadpoles, retaining juvenile features as adults and capable of remarkable regeneration of lost limbs or tails. New studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico have revealed a new species related to this living form.

In our study, we identified a new species based on several specimens from the State of Hidalgo, about 100 km north of Mexico City. The paper is published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

The new species of salamander was named Ambystoma quetzalcoatli, making reference to the Aztec deity "Quetzalcóatl," a mythological feathered serpent relevant for Mexican culture. All the specimens used in our research were recovered in Pliocene sediments of what used to be an ancient lake.

Hell yeah new salamander just dropped. Also Ambystoma is a pretty cool-sounding genus name, though I looked it up and the etymology is less exciting:

Raphael Rashid for The Guardian:

The chief executive of Starbucks in South Korea has been dismissed after the company ran a promotional event using slogans that evoked a massacre of pro-democracy protesters during the country's dictatorship era, sparking outrage and boycott calls.

The coffee chain launched a "Tank Day" campaign on 18 May for its "Tank" tumbler series. The date coincides with one of the most politically sensitive days in South Korea's calendar, when citizens commemorate the 1980 democratisation movement in Gwangju, 167 miles (270km) south-west of Seoul.

…

The Starbucks promotion also featured the phrase "thwack on the desk", which echoed the dictatorship's infamous 1987 cover-up of the torture death of the student activist Park Jong-chul.

Authorities initially claimed that an officer "hit the desk with a thwack", causing him to collapse and die, a lie that became shorthand for regime brutality when the torture was exposed, helping spark the nationwide protests that forced the regime to accept direct presidential elections.

Ashley Strickland for CNN:

An unusual collection of stars may represent the remnants of a dwarf galaxy that the Milky Way devoured about 10 billion years ago. Astronomers have dubbed the ancient galaxy Loki, after the Norse god of mischief. The finding could change the current understanding of how the Milky Way evolved in the distant past.

Article from the European Space Agency:

The liquid iron in Earth's outer core doesn't always behave as expected. When it changed direction in an unexplained way, ESA satellites provided data on the direction of flow, helping scientists gain better insight into the dynamics at the centre of our planet.

The molten core, which swirls about 2200 km beneath our feet, generates Earth's geomagnetic field as it moves. By measuring small changes in the magnetic field, scientists have historically inferred the core flowing mainly westwards.

But in 2010, it unexpectedly changed direction deep beneath the Pacific Ocean and started moving strongly eastwards. The reasons for this unexplained reversal in the flow of molten material are still a mystery.

Nate Anderson for Ars Technica:

Imagine the life of a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida back in 2005. On Monday, you hold a hearing on contested legislation. On Tuesday, you rule in a national security case. But on Wednesday—bah, there's just something about Wednesday—you have to spend a sunny day indoors, reading technical affidavits on satellite TV bootloaders, electronic countermeasures, and smartcard voltage dips that take place 522 clock ticks after startup.

Tedious, really. Not the kind of thing one seeks a federal judgeship for. A satellite TV piracy case. Against some random dude in Miami.

You flip through the papers on your desk with a sigh but stop when you see the case caption. DirecTV is not suing some random dude in Miami. It's suing someone famous, perhaps one of the most famous people in the world now, thanks in large part to that murder charge—though of course he had beaten the rap. Still, a celebrity of his stature surely has the money to pay for satellite TV?

Wednesday promises to be more interesting than usual. You settle into your leather chair and begin reading the filings in DirecTV, Inc. v. O.J. Simpson.

Shreejaya Karantha for Phys.org:

Astronomers have identified a possible new member of one of astronomy's strangest classes of objects: Odd radio circles (ORCs), enormous ring-like structures visible only at radio wavelengths. The newly discovered source, J1248+4826, appears to be the most compact ORC candidate identified so far, with a ring only about 30,000 parsecs across. The paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on May 6.

First reported in 2021, odd radio circles are faint ring-shaped radio emissions that are not detected at other wavelengths. They typically have a massive early-type galaxy with hundreds of billions of solar masses at their center, existing somewhere when the universe was roughly 8–11 billion years old. They span hundreds of kiloparsecs across.

Where they come from is still an open question. Leading ideas include remnants of magnetized plasma ejected roughly a billion years ago by a supermassive black hole, a past starburst episode, merging galaxy groups, or large-scale active galactic nuclei-driven outflows.

Jules Bernstein for the University of California Riverside:

Some birds sing to attract a mate. Others dance or display colorful feathers. But in the moonlit forests and shrublands of northern Argentina, one bird courts romance by snapping its wrists together, producing a sharp clapping sound scientists have puzzled over for decades.

Now, researchers have captured the behavior in detail for the first time, revealing how scissor-tailed nightjars create one of the most curious sounds in the avian world.

Here's one recording of "Song of the Grid," a procedurally-generated composition by Peter Langston for the 1985 game Ballblazer for the original Atari 400 & 800 computers. Basically, the music engine just glues a bunch of prewritten riffs together, randomly tweaking them a little for variety. It's one of the first examples of procedural music generation in video games.

I've been under the impression for years that Langston wrote all the riffs himself, but I only just learned now that that's not true; he actually got a bunch of his music friends to write riffs for him. Including, in an insane factoid.................................

.......................... Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays.

Yeah. Those fuckin' legends. Contributed to a random game's music engine. Yeah.