2026-08-13の世界

Paleontologists in Brazil have named a new reptile species that lived roughly 240 million years ago, filling in a hidden chapter just before the rise of dinosaurs and crocodiles. The fossil, called Silescelida acristata, was unearthed near the town of Dona Francisca in Rio Grande do Sul state, within the UNESCO Quarta Colonia Geopark. It lived during the Middle Triassic Period, not long after a mass extinction wiped out most life on Earth around 252 million years ago. The animal was roughly the size of a small alligator, with a slender, four-legged body. A team led by doctoral student Mauricio Garcia at the Federal University of Santa Maria found that its leg bones sat in a semi-erect position, a trait that likely made its movements more efficient by reducing drag as it walked. That detail places the species among the archosauriforms, the reptile group that later gave rise to both crocodiles and dinosaurs. A key fossil fragment holding details about where the bones were found went missing for more than 20 years after it was first collected. Researchers finally located the lost piece in 2022 during a routine visit to a museum collection at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, letting them formally name the species at last. The study appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

Streets in Tokushima, Japan, are filling with taiko drums, flutes, and dancers this week, as one of the country's most famous traditional festivals, Awa Odori, holds its main run from August 12 to 15, 2026. According to Japan's official tourism organization, the tradition traces back more than 400 years, and one popular theory links its origins to celebrations after Tokushima Castle was completed in 1587. Every summer during the Obon season, when families traditionally honor their ancestors, well over a million people crowd into Tokushima City to watch or join in. Dancers organize into groups called "ren" and move through downtown streets past six public stages, wearing traditional happi coats and yukata robes. A famous local saying captures the festival's playful spirit: dancers and watchers are both fools, so everyone might as well dance. Visitors do not need experience to join, since anyone can dance with the beginner-friendly "Niwaka Ren" group without registering in advance or wearing a special costume. Food stalls called yatai line the riverside, selling classic festival snacks to hungry spectators late into the evening. Travelers who miss the summer dates can still visit the year-round Awa Odori Kaikan hall in the city, which offers daily performances and dance lessons. A separate theory traces the dance back even further, to furyu dance traditions that may date to 1578.

A National Geographic Pristine Seas research team has begun a four-week scientific expedition across Samoa to study one of the most ambitious ocean protection plans in the Pacific. Earlier in 2026, Samoa's government brought a Marine Spatial Plan into effect that legally protects 30 percent of the country's ocean, an area of roughly 36,000 square kilometers spread across 9 new offshore marine protected areas plus coastal community reserves. Samoa's Prime Minister, Laauli Polataivao Fosi Schmidt, said the country had taken an important step by bringing the plan into effect, adding that strong scientific information is essential for managing the ocean. Using submersibles, environmental DNA sampling, and deep-sea cameras, the Pristine Seas scientists are surveying reef, mid-ocean, and deepwater sites, some of which have never been studied before. Samoa's waters are home to nearly 1000 recorded marine species, including roughly 2000 kinds of sea snails and 200 species of coral, and they also serve as a migration route for endangered humpback whales and hawksbill sea turtles. Expedition head Paul Rose called Samoa's approach to ocean protection "the solution the ocean and the world needs right now." Scientific lead Tye Kindinger said local communities have deep knowledge of these waters and will be essential partners in the survey. The data gathered will help Samoa track how well its new protected areas are working over time.

Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Sardis in western Turkey have uncovered a colossal marble statue of a young man that is about 2500 years old. The sculpture, which would have stood about 2.2 meters, or 7.2 feet, tall when whole, was found broken into two large pieces at the UNESCO World Heritage site in Manisa's Salihli district. Stylistically, the statue appears to date to the first half of the fifth century B.C., a time when the region was under Achaemenid Persian rule. The young man wears a Greek-style cloak called a himation over a tunic decorated with horizontal bands, and he holds a piece of fruit, likely a quince, in his right hand as a votive offering. Archaeologists say this combination of clothing has never been seen before on a comparable statue from Anatolia or Greece. Remarkably, the statue survived so well because Romans later broke it apart and reused the pieces face down as paving stones on a colonnaded street, a placement that protected its finely carved details for centuries. Field director Nicholas Cahill said the discovery left the team "astounded," and archaeologist Hector Williams called it one of the most unusual sculptures found in western Turkey in decades. After conservation and scientific analysis, the statue will go on public display at the Manisa Museum.

On August 12, 2026, the Moon briefly blotted out the Sun over parts of the Atlantic, and millions of people across Spain witnessed something nobody alive there had ever seen. The path of totality swept across a remote stretch of northern Russia, eastern Greenland, the west coast of Iceland, and finally northern Spain and a tiny corner of Portugal. Totality lasted just under two and a half minutes at its longest, off Iceland's west coast, but by the time the shadow reached Spain it had shrunk to only about one minute. Even so, that one minute was worth the wait, because it was Spain's first total solar eclipse in more than a century. For Iceland the moment was even rarer, since a total eclipse had not been visible there since 1954, and the capital Reykjavik had not seen one since 1433. In the Spanish hilltop town of Medinaceli, crowds staked out grassy viewpoints hours early, carrying folding chairs and snacks. A 24-year-old physics student who had traveled from Germany said it was his first chance ever to watch totality in Spain. As the sky darkened and the temperature dropped, onlookers all along the path cheered and applauded together.

For centuries the dodo has been a byword for stupidity, but a new CT-scan study suggests that reputation is undeserved. Researchers led by Sara Citron and Andrew Iwaniuk at Canada's University of Lethbridge, working with Flinders University in Australia and museums in Denmark, Scotland, and the United States, examined one of only two complete dodo skulls known to exist anywhere in the world. It is kept at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, while the other complete skull sits at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Using high-resolution CT scanning, the team built a detailed digital model of the skull without damaging the rare bones, then compared it with the brains of 36 living species of pigeons and doves. The forebrain, the region linked to memory and problem-solving, turned out to be exactly the size expected for a bird of the dodo's proportions, showing no sign that it was less clever than its relatives. The dodo also had unusually small optic lobes and a surprisingly large smell center, features typical of birds that stay active at dawn and dusk rather than only in daylight. Its oversized upper beak likely helped it feel its way around, adding touch to the list of underrated dodo senses.

Japan's satellite navigation network gained a new member on August 11, 2026, when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA, launched its H3 rocket carrying the Michibiki 7 satellite into space. Liftoff happened at 4:23 AM Japan Standard Time from the Tanegashima Space Center, and about 29 minutes and 4 seconds later, controllers confirmed that Michibiki 7 had separated from the rocket and reached its planned orbit successfully. Michibiki 7 joins Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, or QZSS, a homegrown answer to a problem that ordinary GPS often has inside Japan. Because Japan has so many mountains and cities packed with tall buildings, GPS signals frequently get blocked, leaving typical positioning errors of 5 to 10 meters. QZSS satellites travel in a special orbit that keeps at least one of them almost directly overhead Japan at all times, so their signals can still reach receivers in valleys or narrow city streets. When combined with QZSS's own augmentation signals, positioning accuracy can improve to just a few centimeters. Michibiki 7 is part of Japan's plan to expand the system to 7 satellites, making everyday tools such as car navigation, farming equipment, and disaster response even more precise.

Weather forecasters may never be able to tell you the weather more than about 129 days in advance, according to a new study, and the reason is not a lack of computing power but a fundamental limit on the atmosphere's predictability. The research, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, was led by climate scientist Wei Zhang of the University of Miami and NOAA's Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, together with NOAA scientist emeritus Zoltan Toth and several co-authors. Earlier studies mostly asked how quickly small errors in today's forecast snowball into big ones, but Zhang's team focused on something different: the tiny, unavoidable uncertainty in exactly when individual photons of sunlight strike the atmosphere. As solar energy spreads through the atmosphere's circulation, that quantum-scale uncertainty gradually wipes out information about the starting conditions, until predicting the weather becomes mathematically impossible. Today's forecast skill lasts about 14 days, but the team calculated that better data and models could stretch that skillful range to roughly 62 days. Adding in a second, less certain extension, the researchers estimated a full theoretical ceiling of 129 days, plus or minus 7 days, beyond which no forecast, however advanced, could ever succeed.

Most people know Starlink as a way to get fast internet from space, but scientists in Japan just used it for something completely different. Researchers led by Mamoru Yamamoto at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Sustainable Humanosphere borrowed a technique called tomography, the same method doctors use for body scans, and applied it to almost 1,200 Starlink satellites orbiting about 482 kilometers above Earth. Instead of scanning a human body, the team measured how each satellite's orbit slowly decays because of atmospheric drag, then used that data to build the first detailed map of the thermosphere, a thin and hard-to-study layer of the upper atmosphere. The new map closely matched independent measurements from the European Space Agency's Swarm satellites, a result that surprised even the researchers. Yamamoto called the project a multidisciplinary study between space science and space engineering. Because thousands of satellites now circle Earth, denser or thinner patches of this invisible layer can quietly speed up or slow down spacecraft, raising the risk of dangerous collisions with other satellites or space debris. The team hopes their method could eventually offer near-real-time monitoring, helping operators dodge crashes and improving space-weather forecasts for everyone who depends on satellites every day.

For years, many scientists believed that once part of the brain was damaged, its support cells called astrocytes could never fully rebuild what was lost. A new study from the University of Zurich suggests that belief may be wrong. Researchers Marina Herwerth and Matthias Wyss, working in a lab led by Bruno Weber, used a method called two-photon microscopy to watch the brains of living mice for several weeks after a small injury. They discovered a special group of astrocytes, which the team calls regenerative astrocytes, that gather right at the edge of the damaged area. Instead of simply dividing like ordinary cells, these astrocytes build brand-new nuclei inside daughter cells, then send those nuclei gliding along long, thread-like extensions deep into the injured zone. Step by step, this process rebuilds the astrocyte network that keeps brain tissue healthy and connected. The findings, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, come only from experiments on mice so far, so scientists do not yet know whether human brains repair themselves the same way. Still, the team hopes that learning to switch on this natural repair process on purpose could someday help people recover from brain injuries or from conditions such as neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, an autoimmune disease that damages astrocytes.

One of Tokyo's biggest, and wettest, festivals is filling the streets of Koto City this week. The Fukagawa Hachiman Festival, the main annual celebration of Tomioka Hachiman Shrine, runs from August 12 to 16, and this year is extra special because the shrine's largest version of the festival happens only once every three years. According to the shrine's history, the tradition dates back to 1642, when it began as a celebration for the coming heir of the shogun, the eldest son of Tokugawa Iemitsu. Today the festival is counted as one of Edo's three great festivals, alongside the Kanda and Sanno festivals. On August 15, a golden portable shrine called a horen travels roughly 70 kilometers through the neighborhood, carried by parishioners. The next day, more than 50 neighborhood mikoshi, or portable shrines, join together for a huge parade through the streets. The event earned its nickname, the water-throwing festival, because crowds lining the route splash purification water onto the shrine carriers as they pass, and the carriers often laugh and splash water right back. Visitors are warned that they will likely get wet if they stand close to the parade route, so waterproof bags and clothing are a smart idea.

Basketball fans in Minnesota watched a new page of WNBA history get written on August 9, when Lynx guard Kayla McBride made more three-pointers in a single game than anyone else ever had. McBride sank 10 of her 14 three-point attempts and finished 16 of 21 shooting overall, ending the night with a career-high 43 points as the Lynx beat the Dallas Wings 103-90. The previous record of nine three-pointers in a game had been reached eight times before by six different players, most recently by Toronto's Marina Mabrey on June 25. McBride left the court with 1 minute and 21 seconds still on the clock, walking off to a standing ovation from the home crowd. Her huge night helped Minnesota improve to 27 wins and 7 losses, and the team also set its own franchise record with 18 three-pointers made as a group. With the victory, the Lynx became the very first team in the league to officially clinch a spot in this year's playoffs, extending their remarkable run to 12 wins in their last 13 games. Teammate Olivia Miles also had a strong night, adding 20 points and 13 assists to the winning effort.