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"How a horse flu virus fueled animal rights advocacy in the U.S."

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).

Today

How a horse flu crisis fueled animals rights advocacy in the U.S.

In 1872, New York’s devastating epizootic gave the ASPCA’s young founder a powerful moral argument for animal protection

How the body’s own immune system can attack the brain

Antibodies made by the immune system can sometimes target human brain cells, producing psychiatric symptoms. Researchers aim to better identify such rare cases as well as fine-tune treatments.

Yesterday

Scientists just found a bizarre cosmic object ‘hiding in plain sight’

Meet the Milky Way’s first microblazar

2026 could be the turning point on climate action, Al Gore says

Al Gore predicts 2026 tipping

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The former vice president thinks this year is when we’ll get serious about climate change

Why Hawaii is facing an unprecedented hurricane season

Tropical disturbance threatens Big Island

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Hawaii has never had three hurricanes come within 50 miles in the same year

Jupiter-bound spacecraft Juice to fly by Earth Monday

Juice performs Earth gravity assist

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To get to the outer solar system, the Juice spacecraft needs an assist from Earth’s gravity—and it’s going to be taking pictures along the way

What’s the point of the interstellar Fermi Explorer mission?

Fermi Explorer, a proposed low-cost private mission to Alpha Centauri, seeks to address a question that’s already been answered

Vox’s Unexplainable and Scientific American explore the mystery of dark matter and the limits of science

What if the universe’s biggest mystery has no answer?

Sep 24, 2026

Trump’s FDA nominee Heidi Overton affirms MMR vaccine and mifepristone are safe at crucial Senate hearing

Senators question FDA nominee Overton

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Heidi Overton also said at the hearing on Thursday that Tylenol does not cause autism

OpenAI’s agent hacking Australia is a warning for governments everywhere

OpenAI AI hacks Australian Medicare

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In what appears to be a first, an OpenAI agent secretly accessed Australian government health care records during an internal test

Diesel fuel prices are rising—chemistry can help explain why

US diesel hits record

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Diesel prices have almost doubled over the past year, spelling trouble for farmers, truckers and the entire U.S. economy

AI solves 79-year-old math mystery of six-dimensional spheres

Can a six-dimensional sphere be described using imaginary numbers? For decades, experts puzzled over this question. Now an AI has apparently answered it

China’s open AI models are testing America’s approach to AI safety

With Donald Trump and Xi Jinping set to discuss AI safety, the growing popularity of Chinese open-weight models highlights the limits of developer-controlled safeguards

Sep 23, 2026

Blood test for multiple cancers clears crucial hurdle on track to FDA approval

Grail Galleri wins FDA praise

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If approved, the test could help catch cancers early—but more research is still needed, experts say

See the Taurids light up the fall sky with brilliant shooting stars

Lasting from mid-September until mid-November, the Taurid meteor showers are among the longest of the year

Watch a robot dog run a marathon faster than the average human

KAIST robot dog completes marathon

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The quadrupedal machine finished the course in a solid four hours, 19 minutes and 52 seconds—and on just one battery charge

When it comes to ‘poop maxxing,’ are you optimizing or obsessing?

Is it possible to optimize our poop?

Is football too dangerous for kids’ brains? These scientists are racing to find out

A new study found that one in four professional football players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE—a degenerative brain disease—but what about children who play these sports?

Sep 22, 2026

Scientists discover largest new impact crater in the solar system ever—on our moon

LRO discovers 222m lunar crater

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The crater, named after geologist and lunar surface expert Tom McGetchin, spans more than two football fields wide

Why mathematicians are hiding research results in zero-knowledge proofs

Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. To prevent the results from being misused, the company kept them secret. That backfired

Trump rejects AI regulation, citing parallels with climate change, in U.N. address

Trump renames AI superintelligence

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The president also said artificial intelligence should be rebranded as “super intelligence”

RFK, Jr., is focusing attention on electromagnetic fields. Here’s what the science says about exposure

HHS reviews wireless radiation risks

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The research into how electromagnetic waves and radio frequency radiation influence health has been plagued by low-quality studies

This year’s El Niño just broke another sobering record

Supersized El Nino threatens world

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“This is probably going to be the superlative El Niño event of our lives so far,” a climate scientist says

Mathematicians use AI to find mysterious symmetries, solving decades-old problem

In parallel, a race by amateurs and mathematicians has found all 25,000 cases of one “inverse Galois problem”

NASA Goddard’s shrinking workforce could stifle future space missions, experts say

2025 was a brutal year of budget cuts and workforce attrition at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the home base for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Experts worry Goddard—and NASA’s space science—may never recover

Mathematician reveals the truth behind the Parthenon’s optical illusion

Parthenon optical illusion myth debunked

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