2026-08-17の世界

Sometimes an athlete can surprise even herself. On Saturday, August 15, at the Pan Pacific Championships in Irvine, California, American swimmer Kate Douglass broke the women's 50-meter freestyle world record twice in a single day. In the morning heat, she touched the wall in 23.49 seconds, edging past the 23.55 mark that her training partner, Gretchen Walsh, had set on June 28. About nine hours later, in the evening final, Douglass smashed her own brand-new record with a stunning time of 23.19 seconds. That 0.30-second drop within a single meet is the biggest one-time improvement in this event since 1988, when China's Yang Wenyi achieved a similarly large jump. Douglass later admitted, "I had to do a few double takes, not really sure I was seeing that right, because that time just seems like crazy fast to me." The record-breaking final was only part of an extraordinary two-hour stretch, during which Douglass also won silver in the 200-meter breaststroke and helped the United States win gold in the 4x100-meter medley relay. Her summer-long rivalry with Walsh, who had first snatched the record away from her in June, kept swimming fans watching closely all season.

Anyone who owns a dog suspects their pet can read their mood, and now brain scans back that up in surprising detail. Researchers at the University of Vienna, working with colleagues in Mexico and Hungary, used a functional MRI scanner, or fMRI, to study how dogs' brains react to human facial expressions. Twelve trained pet dogs lay still and awake inside the scanner while viewing photos of people looking happy, angry, fearful, or sad. Happy faces activated a brain network linked to reward, called the temporal cortex-caudate nucleus network, clearly separating happiness from all three negative expressions. More surprisingly, the dogs' brains also showed distinct patterns for fear compared with both anger and sadness. This is the first evidence that dogs can tell specific negative human emotions apart, rather than simply sensing good moods versus bad ones. Senior researcher Laura Cuaya said dogs have evolved alongside humans to understand our expressions and cooperate with us. The team's earlier study, using eight dogs, had already shown they recognize happiness; this new work expands that picture to fear, anger, and sadness, hinting at just how closely dogs pay attention to the humans around them.

Turning a clever lab experiment into a real computer chip usually takes years, but a new partnership hopes to speed that up. On August 11, Applied Materials announced that the University of California, Berkeley will join its EPIC Center, a giant research facility in Silicon Valley whose full name stands for Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization. Applied Materials calls the center its largest-ever U.S. investment in advanced semiconductor equipment research and development. Berkeley now joins an impressive partner list that already includes chipmaking giants TSMC and Samsung Electronics, along with Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Stanford University. Under the agreement, Berkeley faculty and students will work side by side with Applied Materials engineers, testing new materials and manufacturing processes that could power future artificial intelligence computers. Mark Asta, dean of Berkeley's College of Engineering, said the partnership could help move university inventions toward real commercial products much faster than before. The EPIC Center itself is on track to become fully operational later in 2026, giving Berkeley researchers rare hands-on access to industry-scale chipmaking tools that few universities ever get to use.

Sometimes the smallest wrinkle can carry an enormous punch. Engineers at Rice University have shown that tiny, sharply curved wrinkles in graphene, a material just one atom thick, can dramatically change how electricity behaves inside it. The wrinkles they studied were smaller than a billionth of a meter, yet they created an effect called flexoelectricity, in which bending a material unevenly generates an electric charge. According to the team, this charge separation was between 100,000 and 10 million times stronger than in earlier, larger flexoelectric materials. When about one volt of electricity was applied, the wrinkles acted like tiny electrical speed bumps, consistently producing a current that matched computer models. Lead author Sathvik Ajay Iyengar explained that the sharpness of each wrinkle mattered far more than its overall size. Professor Pulickel Ajayan added that showing geometry alone can reshape graphene's electrical behavior opens a new pathway for designing materials. Because no new chemicals were needed, only a change in shape, the discovery, published in the journal Advanced Materials, could eventually lead to more sensitive sensors and ultra-thin electronic devices.

Imagine a star that is not really a star at all. Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have found a strange new kind of object, nicknamed a black hole star, hiding in the early universe. The object, officially called MoM-BH*-1, appeared as a tiny red dot in images taken from a survey nicknamed 'Mirage or Miracle.' It formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. At its center sits a black hole about 100,000 times as massive as the sun, wrapped in a thick, glowing cocoon of hydrogen gas. The whole object is roughly the size of our solar system, yet it puts out 100 billion times more energy than any known star could ever produce on its own. Lead researcher Rohan Naidu, a postdoctoral associate at MIT, explained that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot explain such power, so the hungry black hole itself must be the true engine. Naidu believes black hole stars may explain many of the mysterious 'Little Red Dots' that Webb keeps spotting across the early universe, suggesting that even huge black holes, like the one at the center of our own Milky Way, might have once looked exactly like this.

For more than 60 years, biologists have had a favorite explanation for why ants, bees, and some wasps live in highly organized societies with queens and workers. The theory blames a special genetic system called haplodiploidy, in which fertilized eggs become females with two sets of chromosomes, while unfertilized eggs become males with only one set. Under this system, sisters can end up more closely related to each other than to their own offspring, which was thought to encourage cooperation. Researchers Sachin Suresh and Timothy Linksvayer at Arizona State University decided to test this idea properly. They gathered data on nearly 69,000 insect species and mapped the information onto huge family trees. The team found no real overall link between haplodiploidy and complex, cooperative societies, called eusociality. Almost the entire pattern people had noticed before came from just one group, the stinging ants, bees, and wasps. Suresh said the genetic system alone simply does not predict eusociality. Instead, the researchers think traits like stingers and specialized nests may better explain why these particular insects kept forming societies again and again.

At La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, scientists just met a toad that has been waiting in a drawer for more than 70 years. Researchers studying old bone collections identified a brand-new extinct species, a spadefoot toad they named Spea labreae. The key piece of evidence was a single, incomplete bone from the base of the spine, called the sacro-urostyle. Lead researcher Alberto Cruz first assumed it belonged to a modern spadefoot toad that had suffered an injury or disease. But after comparing it with about 80 modern specimens, he realized the bone's shape was simply different, and unlike anything known before. Spea labreae is only the second extinct Ice Age amphibian species ever identified in North America; the first was a tiny treefrog found in Florida. The same study also found the first Mexican burrowing toad ever recorded in Los Angeles, even though that species now lives only around 2,500 kilometers away, in southern Mexico. Paleontologist Emily Lindsey called the discovery one of the best clues yet about what the climate was like in Ice Age Los Angeles.

Every August, the city of Shinjo in Yamagata Prefecture turns its streets into a moving picture book. The Shinjo Festival began in 1756, when a local lord held a special celebration to lift the spirits of farmers after a terrible harvest, and to pray for a better one. This year, the festival marks its 270th run, still held every August 24, 25, and 26. Twenty magnificent floats, called yatai, roll through the city, each one built completely from scratch every single year and decorated with scenes from kabuki plays and old legends. Alongside the floats, the festival also includes a portable shrine parade and traditional dances passed down for generations. In 2016, the Shinjo Festival's float procession was registered as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, as part of a nationwide group of 33 float festivals across Japan; it remains the only one of its kind in Yamagata Prefecture. To celebrate the 270th anniversary, all seats for the main parade on August 26 will be free, available on a first-come, first-served basis.