Netanyahu fires back at Obama over ‘stolen land’ accusation: ‘We’re Jews in Judea’

 

Image courtesy of WIN

Joel Kontinen

Obama lashed out at the Israelis—in Ireland, of all places In Ireland, which hates Israelis. Obama has been attacking Israel since 2015, when he gifted Iran many millions of euros.

The clash erupted after Obama told an audience in Northern Ireland that Israelis “took land off people and they were excessive,” arguing that Palestinians were justified in demanding their land back.

During his Belfast appearance, Obama argued that Israel’s military and technological superiority could not provide a lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “You have ceded moral ground if that is the position you take,” he warned. He specifically cited the presence of seven million Palestinians, saying they were “not going anywhere.”

“The obstacle to peace is not Israel,” Netanyahu said, arguing that the fundamental problem is the rejection of the Jewish people’s right to a state of their own. Netanyahu also pointed out that the Jews were in Judea first, as history clearly shows.

He also linked Israel’s struggle for security to the broader confrontation between the United States and hostile regimes in the Middle East.

Pointing to chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” Netanyahu said the hostility directed at the Jewish state is part of a wider campaign against the West. “We are the ‘Little Satan,’ you are the ‘Great Satan,'” he said, referring to the labels used by Iran’s leadership for Israel and the United States. Both countries, he argued, are defending a shared civilization against common enemies. The prime minister concluded with a warning against diplomatic arrangements that fail to account for the threats Israel faces.

“A peace built on illusions will crash against the rocks of Middle Eastern reality,” Netanyahu said. He insisted that Israel would not compromise its security simply to satisfy international demands or reach an agreement with adversaries unwilling to recognize its legitimacy.

“Israel will not gamble with its survival to accommodate those who refuse to accept the facts of history, to accept our right to exist, or who wish to appease terror.”

Source:

World Israel News Staff 2026Netanyahu fires back at Obama over 'stolen land' accusation: 'We're Jews in Judea' | World Israel News October 16

 

Two large asteroids found spinning as fast as a fairground ride

 

Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

Joel Kontinen 

Space is wonderful and surprising odd, but this does not mean that it was not planned by God because everything has been planned by Him.

Large asteroids have been found spinning so fast they should break apart, suggesting they might be stronger than we thought.

Dmitrii Vavilov at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues analysed some of the first data collected by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which began a 10-year survey of the sky in June 2026. From a sample of more than 9000 asteroids, they measured the rotation of 260, based on a change in their brightness caused by the spinning asteroids’ irregular shapes.

Of these, 66 were deemed to be super-fast rotators, spinning quickly enough to complete a rotation in less than 2.2 hours, a limit at which asteroids should no longer be able to hold themselves together under their own gravity.

Source:

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2026 Two large asteroids found spinning as fast as a fairground ride | New Scientist 9 October 

The land’s ability to store carbon has bounced back after two bad years

 

Image courtesy of Junhwan Hyun / Alamy Stock Photo.

Joel Kontinen

Carbon absorption by forests and grasslands bounced back in 2025 thanks to favourable growing conditions, but El Niño could lead to another sharp slump next year

For the past two years, scientists studying the health of forests, grasslands and swamps have been worried. Since 2023, the amount of carbon dioxide Earth’s landscapes have been able to absorb has dropped dramatically in the face of extreme weather, resulting in a record jump in atmospheric CO2 concentrations in two successive years.

But 2025 has bucked that worrying trend, with preliminary research revealing a strong rebound in the land carbon sink and a corresponding decline in the growth rate of atmospheric CO2.

However, the next season with high carbon dioxide could break havoc on the globe.  But the ones who believe in global warming say that carbon dioxide will arise in the future.

Source:

 Madeleine Cuff  2026 The land's ability to store carbon has bounced back after two bad years | New Scientist 13 October

A "Peace Prize" for the Vilification of Israel

 

Image courtesy of AP Photo/Paul Schemm

Joel Kontinen

There are bad decisions and disgraceful ones. And then there’s the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay.

Donald trump has castigated Norway for its design, and so has Israel.

The choice is hardly out of character for an award whose history has repeatedly shown that its name guarantees nothing about its recipients’ merit.

Indeed, this isn’t an aberration of the Norwegian committee. It has also provided Jasser Arafat with the peace price. 

But it’s an especially egregious example of a familiar pattern: an international establishment congratulating itself for advancing peace while rewarding people whose records make a mockery of the concept.

Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, has become a symbol of the double standards permeating the global system.

The woman now being feted in the name of peace presided over a more aptly dubbed “inquisition” whose whole purpose was to brand the Jewish state with a bloody—blood libelous.

The term “genocide” has a specific legal definition, including the requirement to establish intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

It’s laughable to suggest that Israel’s behavior even remotely fits that description, as it took great pains to avoid civilian casualties and flooded Gaza with humanitarian aid.

Source: 

Ruthie Blum 2026 A ‘Peace Prize’ for the Vilification of Israel | United with Israel October 11

 

 

Record El Niño threatens Great Barrier Reef with ecological shift

 

Image courtesy of fadhlanbr/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Australian Researchers are worried about the impact the strongest-known El Niño will have on the Great Barrier Reef, and whether anything can be done to avert the World Heritage Area’s demise.

With the potentially catastrophic, record-smashing El Niño still peaking in the Pacific Ocean, scientists are warning of a fundamental ecological shift that would see swathes of the Great Barrier Reef become dominated by seaweed instead of coral.

During El Niño events, warmer ocean waters pool in the eastern and central Pacific. However, the phenomenon also dramatically disrupts the usual monsoon troughs, low-pressure zones that bring cooling clouds and rain to the Great Barrier Reef region.

This is why the worst Great Barrier Reef coral-bleaching events have coincided with past El Niños, such as the devastating reef mortality that occurred in 2024.

But corrals have their own way to avert disasters. Coral reefs around the world are at risk of collapse due to rising temperatures and ocean acidification, but the natural adaptability of some species may help buy time.

Coral reefs may be able to adapt better to warmer and more acidic oceans than previously thought, raising hopes that efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and restore reefs could offer a chance to preserve these biodiverse ecosystems.

"These results offer us a potential path forward, but it depends entirely on what we decide to do about climate change and local stressors," says Chris Jury of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

God created corals as part of the animal kingdom, and they help fish and octopuses survive amidst dangers.

Sources: 

James Woodford 2026 Record El Niño threatens Great Barrier Reef with ecological shift | New Scientist 8 October

James Dinneen 2024 Here's how coral reefs might survive hotter, more acidic oceans | New Scientist 30 September 

Stunning early mammal fossil sheds light on the evolution of suckling

 

Image courtesy of April I. Neander,

Joel Kontinen

“Wood, plant fibres, hides, bone and other organic materials must have been central to daily life, but they normally disappear,” says Mariana Nabais, also at the Catalan Institute. “So when a site like Abric Romaní preserves wooden imprints and charred wooden objects, it is almost like suddenly seeing the missing half of the toolkit.”

Naoki Morimoto at Kyoto University in Japan describes the wooden objects as “remarkable”.

“The mammalian ways of swallowing and suckling are unique,” says Zhe-Xi Luo at the University of Chicago. “It is one of several biological adaptations of mammals that stand out from all other vertebrates.”

Luo and his colleagues have discovered a new genus of mammaliform, a creature that lived before the last common ancestor of the living mammalian groups – monotremes, marsupials and placentals – that would have been able to chew and suck.

It is also the earliest known example of a mammal that evolved for a semi-aquatic lifestyle. The animal has been dubbed Megacauda sungei, referencing its broad tail and palaeontologist Sun Ge.

The fossil, which evolutionist say is dated to between 163 million and 168 million years ago, was found by local farmers in the Daohugou area of Inner Mongolia, China.

“It is a chimera,” says Luo. “The back half of Megacauda is more similar to the platypus, of all mammals. But the skull and teeth are analogous to river otters.”

With an estimated weight of 1 kilogram, the creature is the largest known mammaliform from the Middle-Late Jurassic, when the planet was dominated by dinosaurs.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Stunning early mammal fossil sheds light on the evolution of suckling | New Scientist 7 October 

Fly Dubai Hijacker Was Targeting Ben Gurion

 

Fly Dubai Hijacker Was Targeting Ben Gurion airport in Israel.

Fossil mammal with reptile-like teeth changes picture of our evolution

 

Image courtesy of Paul Bowden. This shows an animal known as Dongoconodon platycauda,

Joel Kontinen

A newly discovered, semi-aquatic mammal – which would have lived alongside the dinosaurs – had the streamlined appearance of a water rodent, feet almost identical to a platypus and teeth that grew like a reptile’s. It is an ancient mammal that replace  its teeth throughout its life.

The researchers who studied the near-complete, 120-million-year-old fossil, named Dongoconodon platycauda, say its disparate anatomy offers a window into early mammal evolution. That is what the evolutionists say.

Evolution and millions of years are not the way some animals evolve.  The believe in millions of years is not a scientific one.

D. platycauda was found in 2018 in Liaoning, China. Shundong Bi at Yunnan University, China, and his colleagues studied the fossil after the collector who found it took it to the Mongolia Museum of Natural History. When it was alive, the mammal would have weighed up to 190 grams and measured about 40 centimetres long

 Source:

James Woodford 2026 Fossil mammal with reptile-like teeth changes picture of our evolution | New Scientist 2 October 

Elephants imitate each other when they produce deep rumbling sounds

 

Image courtesy of ElephantVoices

Joel Kontinen

Elephants appear to harmonise their vocal rumbles when they join together to form choruses, tuning their voices to sound more alike as the chorus unfolds.

Elephants  talk with each other with deep rumbling sounds.

“It’s sort of like what humans do in conversation, where you almost start to adopt the speaking patterns or accents of whoever you’re interacting with,” says Sara Keen at Earth Species Project. 

Elephants communicate using a rich repertoire of body language, but also a wide range of sounds. These include their iconic trumpet call, and also throatier roars. The most common call is the rumble – so low-pitched it is often undetectable by humans – which can travel up to 10 kilometres, transmitting long-distance information that can potentially include the identity of the caller and what’s happening at the time.

Joyce Poole at Elephant Voices, a non-profit organisation based in Washington DC, that promotes the study and protection of elephants, says scientists have long been intrigued by the way elephants will rumble together in choruses. Studying those complex sounds, however, has proved extremely difficult because it is hard to pick out any given rumbling elephant in the chorus – what researchers call “the cocktail party problem”.

 Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Elephants imitate each other when they produce deep rumbling sounds | New Scientist 1 October

Spectacular feathered dinosaur fossil shows bird-like adaptations

 

Image courtesy of Andrea Cau et al., Nature Communications (2026)

Joel Kontinen

The 57-centimetre-long fossil is between 100 million and 145 million years old, and was discovered by a farmer near the town of Lamadong in Liaoning, China.

Some Darwinist sat  that a bird like dinosaur was found in China,  it was was donated to a museum at Hebei GEO University in 2023, where Ji Qiang and his colleagues examined the exquisitely preserved specimen, complete with plumage, teeth, wings and articulated spine.

he researchers determined that the dinosaur was a new species, which they named Norellraptor barsboldi in honour of palaeontologists Mark Allen Norell and Rinchen Barsbold. It belongs in a group of small dinosaurs with both feathers and wings known as microraptorines.

Based on evolutionary relationships, the researchers found that around 30 per cent of anatomical changes in microraptorines also evolved in the bird lineage, but in a different order, providing evidence that the two groups evolved flight separately and for different reasons.

Analyses of N. barsboldi’s bone microstructure, its growth patterns and its evolutionary relationships show that the evolutionary sequences leading to flight adaptations in living birds and in bird-like dinosaurs were quite different, says Jacqueline  Nguyen.

This survey does not say that dinosaurs and birds are relatives.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Spectacular feathered dinosaur fossil shows bird-like adaptations | New Scientist 29 September 

Why is this monster El Niño so strong?

 

Image courtesy of CSU/CIRA & JMA/JAXA

Joel Kontinen

Some researchers are thinking why is the el Niño so powerful this autumn, although the time for it is gone.   

Many who spoke a lot about evolution are now talking about global warming.

Mind-blowing. Unprecedented. Off the charts. Jaw-dropping. Godzilla-level. Superlatives have been flying about the current El Niño climate pattern, which is already the strongest on record months before it is expected to peak – and unusually, they are coming from scientists, rather than the media. So, what has made this such an exceptional event?

This will no doubt be the subject of many studies to come, but the broad picture is clear. Two main factors have driven the formation of this record-smashing El Niño, the first of which was set in motion long before it began.

Source:

Michael Le Page 2026 Why is this monster El Niño so strong? | New Scientist 28 September 

Milei rips apart the UN:s anti-Israel circus

 

The Argentinian president Javier Milei rips apart the UN:s anti-Israel circus.

Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet

 

Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet

Image courtesy of Guilhem Duvot, SUAQ Project

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution,  orangutans  are almost human,  so they are able to copy some of the traits of humans and from other apes. But animal intelligence is not something we would smirk at. Some birds are intelligent than apes. 

Young orangutans acquire a substantial body of knowledge before they can survive independently, which they must do by the time they are 8.5 years old. This includes understanding what foods are safe to eat, where to fi intelligrent than apes. nd them and how to process them in a rainforest offering hundreds of food options of varying levels of accessibility – from easy-to-access leaves to the more inaccessible but also manimal ore nutritious seeds at the heart of a tough, spiny neesia fruit.

The findings suggest that orangutans have different strategies for developing broad survival skills, says Revathe Thillaikumar at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

Scientists already know that orangutans can acquire this knowledge both by observing their mothers and other individuals in their social circle – a process known as social learning – and by exploring entirely on their own without any input from others, which is known as individual learning. But how these two forms of learning work together – and how they affect what orangutans learn to eat before becoming independent – hasn’t been clear.

To find out, Thillaikumar and her colleagues analysed nearly 7000 instances of learning recorded during more than 1700 hours of observations of wild Sumatran orangutans at Suaq Balimbing, a research station in Indonesia.

Youngsters who learned by watching others also tended to continue manipulating new objects or trying new foods for about 145 minutes after they had closely observed another orangutan. This activity is reminiscent of the way in which children will spend time imitating an activity they have just seen demonstrated by an adult, says Thillaikumar. “Yeah, it’s practice.”

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Copying others can help young orangutans build a broad diet | New Scientist 24 September 

Fire amoeba breaks heat tolerance record for complex life

 

Incendiamoeba cell reproducing at 63°C Image courtesy of Felix Mikus.

Joel Kontinen

Animals cam be incredible,  A species of amoeba discovered in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park can survive and thrive in temperatures that had been considered impossibly high for complex life.

Previously, according to Angela Oliverio at Syracuse University, New York, 60°C was considered the “4-minute mile” barrier for eukaryotes.

But the four minute mile has been broken.

Oliverio and her colleagues collected I. cascadensis from a small geothermal stream within California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, flowing through a “beautiful meadow” less than half a metre wide for most of its length. Temperatures in the stream range from 49°C to 65°C, with a pH range of 6 to 7.

At full stretch, I. cascadensis is, on average, about 40 micrometres long and 10 µm wide, says Oliverio.

“This is over 10 times the size of the average bacterial cell, and closer to the width of a human white blood cell,” she says. In such a hot environment, the fire amoeba is the top-order predator, feeding on thermophile bacteria, which are far more common.

Bob Leung at Monash University, Australia, says the discovery means he will have to rewrite his lectures on extremophiles.

Source:

James Woodford 2026 Fire amoeba breaks heat tolerance record for complex life | New Scientist 22 September

Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged

 A 9.5-day-old mouse embryo. The front of the brain is blue and the back of the brain is red, which extends into the spinal cord.  Loh Laboratory/Stanford Medicine

Joel Kontinen

Our brain may be a hybrid of two ancient nervous systems that were packaged together hundreds of millions of years ago. This is based on the finding that the front and back brain regions in people and several other species develop from two distinct cell types in embryos, instead of sharing the same developmental origin, as previously thought..

This is based on Darwinian speculation that has no backfiring in real science.

This is what the evolutionists say of this incredible fusion;

The research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” says Kyle Loh at Stanford University. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

Loh and his colleagues studied early stages of mouse embryo development and found its brain develops from two types of early progenitor cells, proliferative cells with a limited capacity of self-renewal. One type expresses a gene called OTX2 and turns into the neurons found in the front part of the brain, comprising the forebrain and midbrain.

The hindbrain coordinates fundamental life-sustaining processes, such as breathing, sleeping, eating and the beating of the heart, .

The researchers also studied early-stage embryos of chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms, and found their nervous systems are similarly derived from two different types of progenitor cells. This suggests our shared two-origin brain system arose at least 550 million years ago.

What would, evolution do without millions of years.

Source:

Alice Klein 2026 Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged | New Scientist 18 September 

Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century

 

The tilcayo (Leopardus tilcayo) in an animal refuge in La Paz, Bolivia. Image courtesy of Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionist say that animal species die all the time.  Contrast to this a tiger cat recently found in Bolivia.    

The tiger cat is one of the creatures they describe as Lazarus animals.

Tiger cats, which are about the size of a house cat are found in Costa Rica in Central America, and across a vast swathe of South America including Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Historically, there have been many local and scientific names for them, but they all got subsumed into a single species, Leopardus tigrinus.

Eduardo Eizirik at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and his colleagues have analysed the complete genomes of 38 individuals from the Leopardus genus, including 26 tiger cats from across their known range.

L. tilcayo has a combined head and body length of between about 42 and 50 centimetres and weighs between 1.5 and 2 kilograms. The genomes revealed that it diverged from the lineage containing L. tigrinus and L. pardinoides nearly 1.4 million years ago.

Source:  

Chris Simms 2026 Beautiful new cat species is first to be named in a century | New Scientist 17 September 

Asteroid hit the moon and flung rocks 120 kilometres from the crater

 

The crater site, before and after impact  Image courtesy of NASA/Mark S. Robinson et al. 2026

Joel Kontinen 

An asteroid hit the moon. The area was  222 metres across.

A newly formed crater on the moon is teaching us about our nearest neighbour’s complex geology. The crater, formed by an asteroid impact in 2024, is the largest that we’ve ever watched form in real time.

It was first spotted last year, when researchers compared sets of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in both 2024 and 2025, and was named McGetchin crater. According to models of how often impacts occur on the moon, one this big – about 222 metres across – is only expected to occur about once every 132 years.

Thus gives us an opportunity to learn about the lunar surface and its geology. “Cratering is probably the most common process that happens in the solar system, so we spend a lot of time trying to understand how a new crater will modify a surface and watching that degrade over time,” says Tyler Powell at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

Some evolutionist think that this  incident will help us to understand what happened on the moon tens or thousands of years ago.

 Source: 

Leah Crane 2026 Asteroid hit the moon and flung rocks 120 kilometres from the crater | New Scientist 16 September

Exquisite 66-million-year-old bird feather preserved in dinosaur dropping

 

Image courtesy of O'Connor et al.

Joel Kontinen

A bird that was eaten and partially excreted by a dinosaur 66 million years ago has left behind the best-preserved feathers ever recovered by scientists from dinosaur-age rock.

“This is the best feather we’ve ever seen in a Mesozoic [252 million to 66 million years ago] deposit,” says Jingmai O’Connor at the Field Museum in Chicago. “[It’s] like a feather you could pick up off the ground.”

Further analyses showed that the 9.3-millimetre-long primary feather had a water-repellent structure, similar to that of modern pelicans, says O’Connor. Both this and a second, smaller wing feather also had lightweight, spongy cores surrounded by a harder outer layer. This combination makes them both light and stiff, which is typical of modern feathers.

According to evolution, millions of years have gone by. So where is the evolution?

“These are the feathers that are responsible for keeping the body warm, right?” says O’Connor. “So maybe these primitive feathers were good enough to keep them warm during the greenhouse world of the Mesozoic, but not good enough to keep them warm during this environmental catastrophe that was triggered by this impact event.”

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2026 Exquisite 66-million-year-old bird feather preserved in dinosaur dropping | New Scientist 10 September

Gamma ray burst may have been two supernovae in one

 

Image courtesy of Stocktrek Images, Inc./Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Some researchers are guesting whether a black hole and a pulser  were born at the same time, but others say that the conclusion is premature.

On New Year’s Day in 2022, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a massive burst of gamma rays from a distant galaxy. After four years of analysis, a group of astronomers has proposed a dramatic story for the burst of light – known as GRB 220101A – in which a collapsing star triggered the formation of both a pulsar and a black hole.

The event began, according to a team led by Remo Ruffini, an astronomer at the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network in Italy, with the collapse of the core of a massive older star, which had earlier been transformed via nuclear reactions into a mix of carbon and oxygen.

Yes, space is wonderful. We never think what may happen next.

 Source:

Matt von Hippel 2026 Gamma ray burst may have been two supernovae in one | New Scientist 10 September

25 years of the Twin Towers catastrophe

 

Atheists do not like this cross-shaped object. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

I write this after the catastrophe of 2001:

"A group of American atheists are attempting to stop the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York from displaying a cross-shaped beam.

They see it as a religious symbol and as they are intolerant of all other ideologies except their own godless one, they are resorting to a lawsuit to get the offending beam from disturbing their peace of mind.

The beam was found by Frank Silecchia, who took part in clearing the rubble after 9/11, and it has been a symbol of hope.

However, atheists do not see the cross as a sign of hope. For them, it is foolishness – just like the apostle Paul wrote:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.”

It’s an entirely different story for us:

“But to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18, NIV)."

Source:

Merica, Dan. 2012. Atheists continue battle against World Trade Center cross at memorial. CNN. (September 10th).

NASA’s next major telescope might see alien oceans and rainbows

 

Image courtesy of Aaron Alien/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

A NASA telescope in early development should be able to detect light bouncing off the surface of oceans on alien planets, vital information in the hunt for alien life.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is currently earmarked for launch in the 2040s. It will sport an advanced coronagraph, a device that can block out much of the light emanating from other stars. This will allow us to take images of potentially habitable Earth-like wsorlds outside our solar system for the first time.

Some researchers think that in the 2040 we will see oceans and rainbows on habitable exoplanets.

Source: 

Jonathan O’Callaghans 2026 NASA’s next major telescope might see alien oceans and rainbows | New Scientist 9 September

Pygmy raccoons teach each other to make toys out of paper and sand

 

Image cour.tesy of Nessie O'Neil

Joel Kontinen

Young pygmy raccoons on a Mexican island have been seen teaching each other to make toy balls out of rubbish, in a rare example of animals crafting objects purely to play with.

“My first reaction was, oh my gosh, that’s absolutely adorable!” says Nessie O’Neil at Miami University in Ohio, who is researching the impact of tourism on the critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) of Cozumel Island.

O’Neil filmed as one of the younger raccoons fished paper out of a rubbish bin, dipped it in a bowl of water and rolled it in sand, making a ball.

Over days of observation, she recorded the animals as they made more balls and used them to play “football” with other raccoons and dwarf coatis (Nasua narica nelsoni), another raccoon-like animal. Siblings taught each other the ball-making procedure, and even tried to get their mother involved, though she couldn’t quite figure it out – her coordination seemed to have been impaired after drinking a margarita she found at a beach bar earlier that day.

“The observations show how complex animal play behaviour can be,” says Marek Špinka at the Institute of Animal Science in the Czech Republic. “It will be intriguing to see whether the behaviour will get a hold in the population as a new cultural trait or will disappear.”

Some animals like to show off their intelligence, like the tiny racoons in México. They did not want to eat them but to play with them.

Source:

Matt von Hippel 2026 Pygmy raccoons teach each other to make toys out of paper and sand | New Scientist 3 September

 

Pacific Island Nation opens embassy in Jerusalem

 

Image courtesy of Instagram

Joel Kontinen

The Pacific nation of Naoero (formerly known as Nauru) opened an embassy in Jerusalem on Monday, becoming the ninth country to locate its diplomatic mission in Israel’s capital.

Linking the Pacific nation’s reclaimed indigenous name to Jewish history, Sa’ar added that “we, too, are the indigenous people of this land” and that “Jews are called Jews because we are from Judea.”

“Our support for Israel has been unwavering,” said Naoero’s Foreign Minister Lionel Aingimea. “Naoero is historically one of Israel’s most reliable and consistent diplomatic allies at the United Nations.”

The island nation is one of the smallest countries in the world, with a population of about 12,000 people.

Nine countries now have embassies in Israel’s capital: the United States, Fiji, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Naoero, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Somaliland.

Source:

Etgar Lefkovitz, 2026 Pacific Island Nation Opens Embassy in Jerusalem | United with Israel 7 September

‘Not-quite-primordial’ black holes may explain baffling JWST discovery

 

Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and D. Kocevski (Colby U.)/Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists believe that there  were some black holes before the creation of the world, This probably occurred before the big bang that started it all.

There may have been black holes in the early universe before the first stars, and a group of theoretical physicists has proposed a new way to explain how they could have formed using the heat of the cosmic microwave background. The idea may be a better explanation for the “little red dots” identified by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – distant galaxies that seem to host surprisingly large numbers of astonishingly ancient black holes.

 Source: 

 Matt von Hippel 2026 'Not-quite primordial' black holes may explain baffling JWST discovery | New Scientist 3 September

 

Venus may have had a moon for nearly "2 billion years"

 

Image courtesy of NASA imiages/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Darwinian fables are interesting, as there is no proof of them being true. As with Venus having a moon many billions of years ago.    

Venus has no moon, but a modelling study suggests it probably did have one for "nearly 2 billion years" – before the planet ate it. Understanding this could help us learn about Venus’s previous habitability.

Many large objects probably hit Venus in the early solar system, which could have formed a moon, similar to the giant impact that is thought to have formed Earth’s moon. “There’s a very good chance that Venus did have a moon-forming impact,” says Stephen Kane at the University of California, Riverside..

 Kane and his colleagues modelled what would have happened if Venus did have a moon, and found that in almost all scenarios, it would have been consumed by the planet,.

Venus rotates quite strangely with respect to the sun, completing a rotation once every 243 days, compared with its orbit of 225 days. This is possibly a result of its thick atmosphere slowing its spin.

In contrast, Earth’s much faster spin transfers angular momentum to our moon, meaning it is moving away a few centimetres each year. For Venus, the opposite would have been true. “The moon is transferring angular momentum inward instead of outward,” says Kane. “It causes the moon’s orbit to catastrophically collapse.”

The researchers found that at the upper limit of their models, a moon about half the mass of our own could have survived around Venus for 1.7 billion years. At twice the mass of our moon, it would have survived just 30 million years, because of the stronger tidal effect.

Paul Byrne at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says the model is interesting but hard to prove. “It’s exceedingly hard to test this idea because there is basically nothing left behind.” This is because Venus’s surface has been repeatedly resurfaced by volcanism, he says.

In Genesis, God created the Earth and its moon without any evolution.

Source:

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2026 Venus may have had a moon for nearly 2 billion years | New Scientist 2 September 

The first signs of dark matter particles may finally have been spotted

 Inside the LUX-ZEPLIN detector. Image courtesy of Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Laboratory

Joel Kontinen

Most of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but for decades physicists haven’t been able to directly observe it – that may have just changed.

Some researchers think that dark matter does not exist.  Some think that it does.

Researchers may have spotted the first signs of a dark matter particle. If the result is confirmed, it could be one of the most monumental discoveries in the history of physics.

Dark matter makes up about 85 per cent of the universe, but for decades physicists have been unable to determine what it itself is made of. Hypotheses have ranged from different sorts of particles and forces to strangely-behaving gravity and everything in between – but the leading idea has always been that of the weakly-interacting massive particle, or WIMP. As we have built more and more powerful detectors to search for WIMPs, though, their failure to show up has led many to doubt their existence and move on to more exotic ideas.

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Leah Crane 2026 The first signs of dark matter particles may finally have been spotted | New Scientist 1 September 

Galapagos corals suggest climate change drives stronger El Niños

 

Image courtesy of NOAA.

Joel Kontinen

A super El Niño that is gathering strength in the Pacific Ocean may have been made worse by climate change, according to new analysis of coral records that suggest El Niños have become more intense as global temperatures have climbed.

Julia Cole at the University of Michigan and her colleagues hope corals can provide the answer. They collected living and dead corals from around the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific ocean, where El Niños first develop.

They used uranium and thorium dating to identify the age of the corals, then analysed the chemistry of their skeletons to track changes to sea temperatures during their lifetime. In that way, they built a time series of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific spanning the past 1000 years.

El Niño and La Niña events are measured by changes to sea surface temperatures in the Pacific, so by building this time series, Cole and her colleagues could track the fluctuating ENSO cycle through the centuries.

Climate change and evolution seem to be  trends of the day.

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Madeleine Cuff 2026 Galapagos corals suggest climate change drives stronger El Niños | New Scientist 27 August 

Fastest star ever spotted at the centre of our galaxy

 

Image courtesy of ESO and Digitized Sky Survey 2 O.

Joel Kontinen

Some stars are slow but others are fast. Now scientist have discovered the fastest star at the centre of our galaxy.

Stefan Gillessen at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and his colleagues found S301 using the Very Large Telescope in Chile.

At its closest approach, S301 is only about 1.8 billion kilometres from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. That’s just 12 times the distance between Earth and the sun, 10 times closer to Sagittarius A* than the previous record-holder. “If you were living on a planet around this star, the size of the black hole at the closest approach would appear similar to the full moon from Earth – it would be absolutely stunning,” says Gillessen.

“Earth does this as well, and we can measure with satellites around Earth that there is a very, very slight frame dragging from Earth’s rotation,” says Tuan Do at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This is doing the same thing, just with much different objects.”

Measuring Earth’s spin is relatively easy, but a black hole’s spin is much harder to determine because of its lack of a visible surface. The most precise way to measure it would be by measuring frame dragging, and S301 is the first star close enough to feel that effect.

“We drop a leaf in the wind and see how the air is moving by measuring that leaf,” says Gillessen. “A star is just the perfect leaf to drop to see the movement of space-time.”

Actually measuring the spin of Sagittarius A* using this method will probably take around a decade, he says, but that may speed up if we find more stars like it.

“With one star, it would take a while, but it would still be the best constraint on spin that we’ve ever had by far,” says Ziri Younsi at University College London. “If you can find another star that’s even closer, that’s better still. If you can find a population of these stars, then you’re in business.”

But when we finally do measure the spin of a black hole, it will be a crucial piece of the cosmic jigsaw. It will not only help us understand how black holes have contributed to the evolution of the universe, but will also provide a probe into the behaviour of gravity in extreme environments, which has proved extremely difficult to study.

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By Leah Crane 2026 Fastest star ever spotted at the centre of our galaxy | New Scientist 28 August