Nullary Sources

Nauru, the world’s third-smallest country, changes its name to Naoero

chz — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:00:48 -0700

The Pacific Island country of Nauru has changed its name to the Republic of Naoero, its president said, matching the spelling and pronunciation in the national language.

The country’s international code will change from NRU to NRO and its people will be known as dei-Naoero instead of Nauruan. Commonly known abroad by the pronunciation of Now-roo, the new name is spoken as Now-ero.

The move would return the remote South Pacific island nation to its traditional name, a statement posted Thursday to the government’s Facebook account said. The country became known internationally as Nauru only because its local name was difficult for foreigners to pronounce and was a matter of convenience rather than one of choice, according to an earlier government statement.

Nice. I feel like Naoero isn’t actually substantially weirder to pronounce than Nauru though, but I guess it’s difficult for me to relate to the mindset of the linguistically incurious 1800s European colonialist

Doctors took a look at man’s painful shoulder—they found the joint was missing

chz — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:01:08 -0700

Beth Mole for Ars Technica:

A 45-year-old construction worker went to the emergency department for his right shoulder, which was extremely swollen and becoming progressively more painful. Doctors took an X-ray to try to see what was causing the problem. But when the images came through, it was what they didn’t see that explained the situation: His entire shoulder joint was gone, seemingly blasted apart into small, lingering pieces.

…

The doctors diagnosed the man with a rare, ruinous condition called “Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome” or MSS. The term was coined in 1981 based on the cases of four elderly women in Wisconsin who, like the man, had severe destruction of their shoulder joints and massive tears to their rotator cuffs. The condition is similar to—and possibly a subtype of—rapid destructive arthritis, which was identified a year later in 1982.

“Milwaukee Shoulder Syndrome” is probably the least serious-sounding medical term I’ve heard in a bit

(the article contains a photo of the X-ray showing a concerning lack of a shoulder joint, so there’s a warning for you if you feel like that might ick you out)

In a sweet discovery, astronomers find sugar lurking in the space between stars

chz — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:00:59 -0700

Adithi Ramakrishnan for the AP:

Astronomers have detected a type of sugar in space that’s also found in raspberries and self-tanners. The sugar, called erythrulose, lurks in what’s called the interstellar medium: thin clouds of gas and dust littered between stars.

Sugar does more than sweeten tea and powder doughnuts. Different varieties fuel our cells and even make up DNA. Scientists are itching to know how sugars form because they’re a key ingredient for life as we know it.

Using two dish-shaped radio telescopes in Spain, researchers collected data from a large gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. They identified the sugar in gas form by comparing telescope signals to samples in the lab. It’s the latest kind of sugar detected in space — in a region crossed by NASA’s twin Voyager, the farthest spacecraft to ever travel from Earth.

Oh hell yeah on my way to get the space sugar right now this next batch of cookies is going to rule

Here’s a 37 minute video by Steve over at Mac84 that’s all about SCSI, an older standard for…

chz — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:02:07 -0700

Here’s a 37 minute video by Steve over at Mac84 that’s all about SCSI, an older standard for connecting computer parts and peripherals used primarily in the ‘80s and '90s by computers that weren’t IBM PCs, particularly Macs. I found it a fun watch in a “dang, I forgot we used to live like that” way

Monkey friendships with dogs, deer, and pigs offer clues to the evolutionary origins of pet-keeping

chz — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:01:11 -0700

News release from the University of Oxford:

Why do humans keep pets? Researchers from the University of Oxford and collaborators around the world have compiled the first comprehensive review of friendly interactions between non-human primates and other species. The review documents 427 cases involving 88 primate species and 127 partner species, 55 of them non-primates, and finds that monkeys and apes frequently play, groom, hold, carry and even adopt individuals from other species.

Published in Primates, the study draws together evidence from the scientific literature (303 cases), media reports (58) and a survey of primatologists (66), making it the most comprehensive overview to date of cross-species social behaviour in primates.

Among the examples are stump-tailed macaques grooming domestic dogs in Thailand, tufted gray langurs gently stroking giant squirrels in Sri Lanka, young black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys playing with domestic pigs in China, and ring-tailed lemurs grooming bamboo lemurs in Madagascar. In one extraordinary case, first documented in Brazil in 2006, wild capuchin monkeys adopted an infant marmoset and cared for it over many months.

Hey Siri, post the biggest pleading face emoji possible

(do note as a potential warning that the article gets a little less wholesome at the end, just like how human people aren’t always the best pet owners either)

Long-lost love story by Alan Turing rediscovered in archive

chz — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:01:18 -0700

Andrew Paul for Popular Science:

[Sarah] Dillon recently took the time to examine a very unique, often overlooked archival item from Turing’s life: a six-page, handwritten and incomplete short story known as Pryce’s Buoy written by the man himself. After transcribing the draft and publishing her analysis in The Review of English Studies, Dillon is certain the mathematician was a much different man than the one described today.

…

Turing likely wrote the untitled story in late 1952 or early 1953. The narrative centers on a potential sexual encounter between a working-class man named Ron Miller and Alec Pryce, a scientist famous for inventing the ascribed title device. Dillon said it’s obvious that Pryce is a stand-in for Turing, and she is confident that the author intended the tale as a fictionalization of the real event that led to his arrest for “gross indecency” in 1951.

The long and proud history of gay self-insert fanfics

I was clicking on random stuff again, so apologies in advance for this one, but here’s “Servility”…

chz — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:02:29 -0700

I was clicking on random stuff again, so apologies in advance for this one, but here’s “Servility” by the group Sound Terro-Rhythm (this is a pun on the word “terrorism”), off of the 1997 compilation album junk.test for…. On their old website they described their first album as being “perfect for harassing people,” which you can probably gather from this song and why I apologized up front.

Fake IDs, dummy books. How rare UCLA library manuscripts were stolen

chz — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:00:32 -0700

Marc Ramirez for USA TODAY:

Last year, staffers at the University of California, Los Angeles’ East Asian Library were going through a box of viewed books from the school’s special collections when they noticed something was amiss.

The box included rare and timeworn Chinese texts, some worth thousands of dollars – but closer inspection revealed the bound manuscripts were not what they seemed. Instead, they were counterfeits, affixed with fake identification tags; printed characters spilled down their unweathered pages rather than hand-scrawled ones.

They checked the records to see who’d last requested to see the books. The name: Alan Fujimori, a name they’d been tipped off to after similar incidents at other university libraries. UCLA’s growing probe found that Fujimori and others had borrowed other Chinese texts since 2020 worth more than $200,000 – some of them centuries old – and also returned fake copies in their place.

The investigation ultimately led to the August 2025 arrest of one man – Northern California resident Jeffrey Ying, 39 – and the unveiling of an elaborate ruse involving fakery and multiple back-to-back flights to Asia, where federal authorities said the stolen items were sold.

Wild

Robot snakes searched for Venezuela earthquake survivors in collapsed buildings

chz — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:02:09 -0700

Jeremy Hsu for Ars Technica:

Robots slithered like snakes into the rubble of collapsed buildings to search for trapped survivors in the aftermath of Venezuela’s double earthquake disaster.

The so-called snake robots represented a unique technological aid for international search and rescue efforts following two earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24, killing more than 5,000 people and leaving behind 16,740 injured. Rescuers from around the world used trained dogs, seismic and acoustic listening devices, video cameras on sticks, or thermal imaging cameras to search for signs of survivors—but the snakebots equipped with a video camera could squeeze through tight spaces to search deep within fallen building debris.

What the fuck, we have robot snakes now??? I’ll take five million

Sperm Whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep

chz — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:00:40 -0700

News release from the University of St Andrews:

New research from the University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel, has uncovered the mechanism which allows sperm whales to sleep in a unique vertical position, just under the ocean surface.

Sperm whales are the only whale known to rest vertically. It’s thought to enable them to sleep effectively by buffering them from surface wave action, while avoiding the energy needed to dive to deeper depths. However, until now, it’s been unclear how they maintained their position just below the sea surface.

In a paper published today (23rd July) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers discovered that while resting, sperm whales release gas bubbles to help them regulate their buoyancy and remain below the sea surface. This regulation is crucial as Sperm Whales are positively buoyant naturally due to the large amounts of spermaceti oil in their heads. Additionally, sperm whales are breath-hold divers, if they slowly drift up while resting, the gas in their lung will slowly expand, releasing bubbles enables them to counteract the expanding diving gas and achieve neutral buoyancy.

Nice, now that we know how they do it I can try it for myself

Risk of Parkinson’s disease may increase with prolonged exposure to road traffic noise

chz — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:01:40 -0700

Ushika Kidd for The Guardian:

Long-term exposure to road traffic noise is associated with a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, the biggest study of its kind has found.

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disorder in which parts of the brain become damaged over time, affecting movement and balance.

Existing research has found potential biological pathways that link noise exposure to Parkinson’s disease, largely due to stress responses and disrupted sleep. The researchers modelled noise exposure at the most and least exposed exterior of the residence of each participant and calculated the difference in noise levels.

The magnitude of the effect was modest but consistent; at the most exposed facade, for every 11.5dB rise in noise level, the risk of Parkinson’s disease rose by 3% over the study period.

More proof that cars were yet another one of our classic blunders

Portugal’s ancient giant bears shrank over thousands of years and humans may be to blame

chz — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:48 -0700

Sandee Oster for Phys.org:

About 22,000 years ago, a giant brown bear lumbered across what is now Portugal. The creature weighed around 385 kg (about 850 pounds), making it one of the largest of its kind ever found, dwarfing even the largest brown bears today.

The bear is one of several surprises researchers uncovered during an analysis of hundreds of ancient bear bones from caves across Portugal. Their study, published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, reveals that Iberian brown bears were once colossi that have since lost nearly half their bulk, a trend researchers say is due to thousands of years of evolution linked to environmental pressure and human hunting.

Have we considered that the bears just discovered GLP-1s before we did

Milky Way flipped in collision with dwarf galaxy 10bn years ago, astronomers say

chz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:00:48 -0700

Ian Sample for The Guardian:

Astronomers have found evidence that the Milky Way was flipped on its side following a direct hit from a wayward galaxy long before the solar system was born.

The cataclysmic collision took place about 10bn years ago when the Milky Way was struck head-on by an incoming dwarf galaxy known – for purely astronomical reasons – as the Gaia Sausage.

The Milky Way tore the interloper to shreds and absorbed its stars, but the chaos unleashed in the event probably flipped the entire disc of the Milky Way by more than 90 degrees into the position seen today, researchers said.

I saw the headline for this and immediately assumed I was going to make another stupid reference to this tweet and say “galaxy goes sideways,” and then I got to the part about the Gaia Sausage and are you kidding me, how the fuck do you call something the Gaia Sausage

Here’s a 2014 graduate animation project by Saki Nakano called “Flower bud.” The music was by Kayoko…

chz — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:48 -0700

Here’s a 2014 graduate animation project by Saki Nakano called “Flower bud.” The music was by Kayoko Naoe, a composer who primarily works as an orchestral arranger, though it turns out she wrote some insane and weird orchestral/electronic/metal hybrid tunes for the game Shadow Labyrinth, so I poked around her works a little bit to see if she had ever done that anywhere else. And I couldn’t find her having done that anywhere else, but I did find this little film and the music was nice.

Why AI’s environmental footprint won’t disappear into orbit

chz — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:55 -0700

Peter Howson for The Conversation:

AI companies increasingly want to move their operations into space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to launch over a million AI data centre satellites and ultimately build them on the moon.

Jeff Bezos, Google, OpenAI and others have similar plans. The idea is to harness 24/7 solar energy and, in Bezos’s vision at least, to move all polluting industries off-world, re-zoning Earth for humans and nature.

It’s an intriguing plan. But once you factor in the whole life cycle, from water and rocket fuel used to launch these satellites into space, to keeping them cool and eventually disposing of old satellites, the environmental case becomes less clear.

This is a pretty good quick primer on why putting data centers in space is a dumbass idea if you actually know anything about physics

MLB restricts dugout iPad use to prevent AI help with strategy. Ottavino says Mets were involved

chz — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:00:36 -0700

Ronald Blum for the AP:

Major League Baseball is restricting iPad usage in dugouts to prevent the tablets from running artificial intelligence to help make strategy decisions, and former reliever Adam Ottavino said the New York Mets’ use of technology helped prompt the move.

The tablets have access to video and league-provided data, and also included a custom tab where teams could access other programs. MLB made the custom tabs inaccessible to teams starting Wednesday night, when the second half of the season started.

“In many cases, the custom tab had expanded the use of the dugout iPads beyond their originally intended purpose to include recommendations regarding substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches,” MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword wrote in a June 11 memo to general managers, assistant GMs and video coordinators.

Asking Grok how to get Shohei Ohtani out and following its expert advice to sub in Elon Musk as the pitcher

Common diet tips about water intake and spicy foods could be dead wrong

chz — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:01:04 -0700

Laura Reiley with a news story from Cornell University:

The common rationale for drinking water at meals is that it physically stretches the stomach, triggering fullness so you don’t eat too much.

But a new Cornell study found no support for that idea in practice.

Instead, for every additional 100 grams of water participants drank, they ate about 39 more grams of food – roughly 49 more calories. People who frequently switched back and forth between bites of food and sips of water ate even more: each additional switch was tied to about 4.4 more grams of food consumed.

Honestly, that explanation does sound 100% like something some rando made up because they felt full after drinking a lot of water one day

Bronze Age ‘shaman,’ previously assumed to be a male metalworker, was actually a woman

chz — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:01:07 -0700

Jack Guy for CNN:

Bronze Age remains once thought to belong to a revered male metalworker are in fact female, new DNA analysis has found, calling into question long-held beliefs about ancient British society.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, which became known as the Upton Lovell Shaman, was found in a barrow, a special type of burial mound reserved for high-status individuals, researcher Tom Booth, senior research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told CNN on Thursday.

Can’t wait to find out about her roommate next

New Species of African Monkey Discovered in the Congo Rainforest

chz — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:01:48 -0700

Gisele Galoustian in a news post from Florida Atlantic University:

In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), scientists have identified a previously unknown species of African monkey – one of the rarest discoveries in modern primatology.

Named Colobus congoensis and known locally as “Likweli,” the monkey, which is mainly black with striking orange face patches is only the fifth new monkey species identified in Africa the last 75 years. Hidden within a remote region of the Congo Basin, the species remained undocumented despite decades of scientific exploration in Central Africa.

Trying out some orange makeup

Meet Sak Tahn Waax, a Maya Math Whiz Who Lived More Than 1,000 Years Ago and Left Behind a ‘Really Elegant, Complex’ Formula

chz — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:34 -0700

Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine:

The Maya were gifted mathematicians, famously using sophisticated calculations to chart the heavens and create various calendars. Yet, the individuals behind these complex numerical feats were unknown to modern researchers—until now.

Archaeologists for the first time deciphered the name of a Maya mathematician and astronomer from the Maya Classic Period: Sak Tahn Waax, which means “White-chested fox,” they report in a new paper published in the journal Antiquity.

Can’t believe STEM folks had fursonas even way back then