La mise sous contrat du vétéran par le Canadien de Montréal est salutaire à plusieurs points de vue.

Group no longer faces voter misconduct case over wrongly marked box after appeals court throws out felony charges

Alaska prosecutors are dropping voter misconduct cases against a group of residents born in American Samoa after a state appeals court threw out felony charges against a woman who wrongly checked a box saying she was a US citizen.

The state’s department of law announced the decision on Friday, after a three-judge court of appeals panel ruled a week earlier that state law requires proof that defendants who erroneously filled out voter registration forms had a “consciousness of wrongdoing” and intended to break the law.

• Rybakina wins 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 despite first-serve problems

• Overcomes top seed and two-time defending champion

Even after she had won grand slam titles and conquered all surfaces, Elena Rybakina has always been considered lesser than the greatest players of her era. She has long been one of the most devastating shotmakers in the world, but there were always a couple more consistent and mentally tougher players above her.

She leaves New York, finally, as the undisputed best tennis player on the planet, the new standard bearer of the women’s game, after following up her snatching of the No 1 ranking from Aryna Sabalenka by succeeding her as the US Open champion. As she has done throughout this unforgettable week, the Kazakhstani showed her toughness in another spectacular tussle with her great rival, nervelessly closing out a 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 victory over Sabalenka, the top seed and two-time defending champion.

Les Grands Prix cyclistes de Québec et de Montréal n'offrent pas de volet féminin pour leur course respective.

L'attaquant de 35 ans signe une entente d'une saison avec l'équipe montréalaise.

In the occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson Oblast, people are foraging for grass and picking through bombed-out basements for anything to eat, Natalia Soboleva, an Odesa volunteer who tracks the town, says, Espreso reports. The city turned 942 years old this week and marked the day, as it has more than two hundred before it, under a Russian blockade that lets no food in and no one out.

The starvation is engineered. Oleshky, on the Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro, was flooded when Russia blew the Kakhovka dam in 2023 and has been sealed off since late 2025, its roads mined and its aid convoys fired on. In July, OSCE monitors confirmed the blockade, describing a place where the living starve and the dead go unburied.

According to Kherson Regional Administration Head Oleksandr Prokudin, in Oleshky, hundreds of people remain, elderly, children, while food deliveries have all but stopped for months, and Russian forces prohibit the evacuation.

Residents forage through the ruins

Soboleva describes a population reduced to scavenging.

"People walk around gathering grass and cooking whatever they can, going through wrecked basements looking for scraps of food. There is hunger there, real hunger," she said.

Hundreds of abandoned animals are starving, too, and the residents who remain share what little they scavenge with them.

Russia shells the aid convoys

The blockade is enforced with fire. Russian forces attack the humanitarian vehicles that try to bring in food and water, Soboleva said.

The last attempt, on 1 September, ended with Russian troops shelling four volunteer cars. The turn for the worse came around January and February, she said, after a food run from Kopani was hit last summer, killing people and halting deliveries for good.

No corridor lets anyone leave

The one thing that could save the town, its officials and volunteers agree, is a guaranteed humanitarian corridor, and Russia will not grant one.

Volunteers, working with Ukraine's human rights ombudsperson, have twice collected lists of residents who want to leave, and the lists were reportedly cleared with the Russian side, but the occupiers still refused to open a route.

"We have not forgotten Oleshky, or the unspeakable pain the city's residents are living through," Prokudin said, adding that Ukraine keeps pressing to get people out.

A German environmental group is going to court to stop Russia's state nuclear corporation from helping run a nuclear-fuel plant on German soil. BUND Niedersachsen has sued the state of Lower Saxony to overturn a July permit allowing the Lingen plant to produce Russian-designed fuel under a license from Rosatom, arguing that the arrangement gives Moscow access to critical infrastructure in the middle of its war on Ukraine.

The case turns on a gap in Europe's sanctions. Germany approved the deal not because it wanted Rosatom in Lingen, but because the European Union has never sanctioned Russia's civilian nuclear sector, leaving no legal grounds under German nuclear law to refuse, according to the Ministry for the Environment, Energy and Climate Protection of Lower Saxony.

BUND wants a court to override that logic. The July permit allows Advanced Nuclear Fuels, a subsidiary of France's Framatome, to expand the 45-year-old plant to build hexagonal fuel assemblies for Soviet-designed VVER-1000 reactors under a license from TVEL, Rosatom's fuel division, the trade journal Nuclear Engineering International reported.

BUND warns of Russian access

The group frames the deal as a security breach dressed as an energy contract.

Russia is continuing its war of aggression against Ukraine, and dangerous sabotage attempts are increasing in Germany, said Olaf Bandt, head of BUND's national organization.

"The EU is trying to stop the Russian shadow fleet. At the same time, Russia's Rosatom is gaining access to critical infrastructure in Lingen," he added.

Because both production and part of the quality control run on Rosatom-supplied equipment, Bandt argued, the process could be manipulated.

Susanne Gerstner, who leads BUND in Lower Saxony, said Rosatom's role was never fully disclosed in the application and that the operator hid material information from the public.

The permit came with limits

Lower Saxony's Green environment minister, Christian Meyer, has said he personally opposes doing business with Rosatom but that, absent sanctions, he had no legal basis to reject the application, which a federal security assessment had cleared.

The Ukrainian soldiers simultaneously perform defensive, logistical, and humanitarian functions. Ukraine’s Third Army Corps is launching a separate AB3.HUMANITARIAN initiative to evacuate civilians from frontline settlements. This means saving families, elderly people, children, people with disabilities, from Russian attacks, and those who often have no way to leave on their own.

Recently, the 3rd Army Corps, led by Andrii Biletskyi, the Azov founder, has been tasked with stabilizing the Donetsk front, where Russia is battering the fortress cities that have held since 2014. As that fighting grinds toward towns like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the civilians still living in them have to be moved, often under fire.

Robots and boats reach cut-off towns

The corps says its soldiers already regularly pull residents out of settlements near the front. The hard part is the routes: roads watched by Russian drones, approaches too dangerous for a bus or an ambulance. To work them, the evacuation teams use ground robots, armored vehicles, motorboats, and whatever else the terrain demands, reaching places that an ordinary rescue cannot.

Unmanned ground vehicles have become a fixture of Ukrainian evacuations, part of a wider shift in which the military ran more than 100,000 robot logistics and evacuation missions in the first eight months of 2026.

A fund pays for more trips

Making it a formal mission is also about money. The corps' own Staff Fund is opening financing for the vehicles and equipment that the evacuation teams need. The corps expects this dedicated support to enable it to run more trips, into more places, more often, than volunteer improvisation allowed.

The corps urges people to leave early

The appeal underneath the announcement is blunt.

"Take care of yourselves and your loved ones, and leave in good time, because the lives of our people are the most precious thing," the corps wrote.

The plea matters because many who remain on the front line are the least able to move on short notice, and the window to reach them narrows every time the front creeps closer, while roads get more dangerous.

Russia is using AI-generated women to lure Ukrainian soldiers to their deaths. The fabricated profiles are one of three versions of a "honey trap" scheme Russia has escalated this year, and Ukraine's military counterintelligence has foiled more than 50 such attempts in 2026, said Artem Dekhtiarenko, spokesperson for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

In an army of more than a million, six soldiers have been killed this way, cases Dekhtiarenko called isolated but real, and Russia will spend months grooming a fake romance for a single one of them. It has revived a classic Soviet tactic, but not to compromise soldiers as the KGB once did. The aim now is to kill them and to spread the panic that makes the war feel uncontrolled.

The scheme runs in three versions

The first relies on technology. Artificial intelligence can now generate a woman's photos convincingly enough that, without close analysis, it is hard to tell whether she exists, Dekhtiarenko said.

The second uses real women living in occupied territory who work for Russia's services.

The third, and rarest, uses women on Ukrainian-held ground who agree to help and are eventually caught.

"There is an inevitability of punishment," Dekhtiarenko said, adding that the SBU and police will detain every agent, and the sentences are severe.

Russia plays the long game

The traps are not always quick. Russia wants to recruit, use a target, and move on quickly, Dekhtiarenko explained, but investigators have logged correspondence that spanned months of steady messaging before the strike. That patience is itself a warning to soldiers, he added, and reason to watch such contacts carefully.

The killings aim to sow panic

Asked why Russia would spend so much on a single soldier, Dekhtiarenko said the goal is psychological: to sow panic, destabilize, and make the situation look beyond Ukraine's control.

L’homme de 22 ans a été atteint au haut du corps et transporté à l'hôpital, mais on ne craint pas pour sa vie.

New changes to the legislation from Ukraine's parliament have jammed the money in one of the war's cleverest supply schemes: the system that lets frontline units turn confirmed kills into new weapons. Under the program, known as eBaly, a military unit can earn points for verified strikes on Russian targets and spend them on Ukrainian-made drones and other gear, which the makers deliver first and get paid for later. The makers have kept delivering. The payments have stopped, according to Ihor Fedirko, who runs the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry.

The freeze is real money to real firms. Fedirko says the companies are owed between $540,000 and several million dollars each for equipment already handed over and have gone roughly two months without payment. It matters because eBaly is not a fringe experiment: units have ordered and received more than 181,000 drones, robots, and electronic-warfare systems through it in 2026, choosing the gear that performs best in combat.

The Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry brings together more than 300 private manufacturers and key associations of Ukraine’s defense-industrial sector.

A budget change froze the money

The problem, Fedirko said, affects every delivery made through eBaly. Under the updated 2026 budget, the split of Ukraine's military income tax stayed the same: 60 percent to the Defense Ministry, 30 percent to the state communications service, and 10 percent straight to military units.

But the ministry's and the communications service's shares now have to be signed off by the Ukrainian National Security Committee.

"Now, the committee approves not individual payments or deliveries but the general directions of spending," Fedirko wrote.

It is unclear what is causing such delays in obtaining signatures on committee decisions and what is lacking to enable swift decision-making.

It is worth noting that the Ebaly system reduces the risk of ministries approving procurement through “their own” companies, since hundreds of companies participate in it and are selected by hundreds of commanders.

Small firms feel it first

For the largest defense companies, a delay of a million or two dollars is a manageable cash-flow gap, Fedirko said. For small ones, the same money was meant to cover wages, buy components, and fund the next production run.

"Some enterprises have already run into problems paying salaries," he wrote.

Producers have spent about two months appealing to the responsible institutions to clear the debt for gear already delivered, without result.

L’employé travaillait sur la voie ferrée en pleine nuit, tout près du pont Jacques-Cartier.

Sacked after less than two weeks as Donald Trump’s communications director, the financier and podcaster reflects on the mistakes he made in an exclusive extract from his new book

• Plus: What it’s like to be fired by Trump, by four people who know

19 July 2017. My phone rings. White House operator: “Please hold for the president.”

I do. Of course.

Silicosis sufferers are getting younger as Trump and the coal mining industry push back on protections

Silicosis is one of the oldest workplace hazards and public health experts have known for decades how to prevent it. Yet a new wave of workers, from Appalachian coalminers to Latino countertop fabrication workers, are developing and dying from the disease as industry fights new protections and regulators fail to defend the rules that could protect them.

John Robinson’s grandfather developed black lung back when coalminers could spend decades in the mines before being diagnosed with the disease, often dying in their 60s, 70s and 80s. But Robinson, who mined for coal in south-west Virginia, was diagnosed when he was 47. He’s part of a trend that has grown over the past two decades in central Appalachia, where more coalminers are developing black lung disease at younger ages.

Chickens – which can test positive for viruses but cannot spread them – an ideal early warning system for mosquito-borne disease

The start of West Nile virus transmission began unusually early in some US states, with the most cases in early summer since 2004, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned in July – so Delaware turned to chickens.

“They kind of are the proverbial canary in the coal mine,” said Tom Moran, head of the mosquito control section at the Delaware department of natural resources and environmental control.

What’s it like to be shown the door by the US president? A former national security adviser, an Apprentice contestant and more share their stories

• Plus: The truth about my 11 days in the White House, by Anthony Scaramucci

Gene Folkes, 62, based in Manhattan, was a contestant on season 10 of The Apprentice, which aired in 2010. A former air force recruiter until 1991, he retrained as an investment banker, then launched his own business before appearing on the reality show. He was fired by Trump in episode 5. He now runs the technology consulting firm OshunX and hosts a podcast, Folkes Unfettered.

I didn’t audition to be on The Apprentice. I received the call out of the blue: “Would you be interested in doing this show?” I didn’t know a lot about it. However, like any young business person, you look for people who you consider titans. There’s this mythology around Trump. He was one of the people I wanted to emulate.

Russia had to shut its airports 993 times in August, as Ukrainian drones scrambled its skies. It was the worst month for Russian civil aviation since the full-scale war began in 2022, with restrictions affecting 32 airports, including those serving Moscow and St. Petersburg, Euronews reported, citing the aviation security firm Osprey.

Ukraine is closing Russia's skies without firing at a single airliner. The summer brought 2,182 temporary shutdowns, more than Russia logged in all of 2025. August alone ran more than six times the 2025 monthly average, by the investigative outlet The Insider's count.

The fallout from Ukrainian attacks is economic: passenger traffic between Moscow and St. Petersburg has dropped by 20 to 23 percent, while rail demand has risen by about a fifth as travelers give up on flying.

The "Carpet" protocol grounds the planes

The closures are triggered by Russia's own defense response to Ukrainian attacks. When a drone is detected near an airport, Russia activates a protocol it calls "Kover", or "Carpet", an emergency procedure that grounds or reroutes every civil aircraft in the area. Ukraine has leaned into that reflex.

FlightRadar24 recorded an average of 86 flights canceled per day in the first three days of September, and on the worst nights around Moscow, between 77 and more than 100 flights were delayed or scrapped.

The disruption drains the economy

The point is exhaustion. Airport closures sit alongside rising insurance premiums, foreign carriers pulling out, and shrinking domestic mobility, said Mykhailo Samus of the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies.

"Airport closures are the new reality for Russian aviation," he said.

Foreign airlines have begun diverting: Turkiye's Pegasus and the UAE's Flydubai both turned Moscow-bound flights back in early September.

Zelenskyy warns airlines and insurers

Zelenskyy made the strategy explicit on 1 September, warning airlines and insurers that Russian skies were no longer safe.

"We in Ukraine do not want innocent lives to be lost. The days of safety in Russia's skies are over," he said.

Exclusives

Ukraine is working down the short list of ships that shell its cities with cruise missiles. A Neptune reached one of them tied up at its own pier. Drones went in with the missile, and the general staff counts three more vessels and the port's fuel-oil storage hit the same night.

One Russian drone held up seven flights in Moldova, Zelenskyy's trip to Norway for King Harald V's funeral among them. The drone crossed Moldova twice that afternoon, and controllers shut the airspace over the center of the country for more than an hour, until after it came down in the north.

Military

Ukraine hits key Russia-Iran logistics hub in Caspian Sea, damages three Russian warships. A fire broke out at the Makhachkala port after Ukrainian forces struck its oil infrastructure, while separate attacks damaged Russian vessels in Novorossiysk.

Intelligence and technology

"Its task is not cargo. Its task is people": After Russian FPV drone hit their house, K-2 brigade sent ground robot to carry casualties out.

Future wars will be won not only by those who have the best technological systems, Ukraine's former top general says in London. Valerii Zaluzhnyi says an expensive Cold War missile has become a cheap weapon fired in bulk.

"Credit to the Russians, they know how to scale," Ukrainian military spokesperson says. Ukraine's jet-drone interceptors show early promise, but harder job ahead. Scaling them up to match Ukraine's success against slower drones is the real test.

Ukraine shows its drones in Canada as Ottawa pledges a third of its future output. The presentation followed a declaration on defense cooperation that Kyiv calls the first step toward a drone deal still to be signed.

Money, not engineering, is what stands between Ukraine and Russia's fastest drones, Zelenskyy says. Dozens of firms are chasing the problem, but nobody has funded production at the scale the nightly waves demand.

International

A drone beside a Ukrainian cargo plane is costing Russia its last consulate in Germany. Four others closed in 2023, leaving Moscow with an embassy and, from this month, no consular presence outside it.

Humanitarian and social impact

"Sometimes I forget I don't have a leg": how two Ukrainian infantry soldiers returned to war behind screens. Two Ukrainian soldiers who lost limbs to mines have returned to Khartiia, their National Guard unit, working the drone screens—instead of walking into positions on the ground.

Political and legal developments

Russia has fired its Oreshnik with six warheads at Ukraine three times. State Duma defense committee member says "hour is not far" before fourth one. He cast it as revenge for a naval drone strike on Sochi.

Canada sanctions eight Russians over deported Ukrainian children as only about 2,500 of more than 20,000 have come home. Ottawa's listing bars anyone in Canada from handling the property of the eight, and it took effect a week before Ukraine's leader arrived for talks.

Read our earlier daily review here.

The EU's ambassadors failed again on 11 September to extend the bloc's sanctions on individual Russians, days before the listings lapse, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Europe editor Rikard Jozwiak. Slovakia wants two Russian oligarchs delisted, and France now backs the same for one of them, Alisher Usmanov. The EU listed him in 2022 as a pro-Kremlin oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

France picks up a demand Bratislava has carried for years

Paris has called for the delisting of Usmanov, an Uzbek-born multi-billionaire under EU sanctions since the full-scale invasion in 2022, four EU diplomats told Euronews. His money came out of metals and mining and later out of telecoms and tech holdings. Usmanov denies being close to the Kremlin. Forbes ranks him 10th among Russia's wealthiest people this year, at $14.5 billion.

One diplomat, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the discussions, said the request raised questions about the motive and that it "seems mostly economic reasons at play here." All four diplomats described huge frustration among other member states, against the background of Russia's widening hybrid attacks in Europe, among them the explosive-laden drone found beside a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport. A French official said Paris supports renewing the sanctions but would not discuss the negotiations.

Explore further

Italy joins Bulgaria in resisting EU sanctions on Patriarch Kirill

Slovakia holds out for two names

Bratislava has pushed for years to remove both Usmanov and a second Russian oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, and it repeated the demand when the sanctions were last extended in March. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico's government has threatened to block EU decisions on Ukraine before, and it halted all military aid to Kyiv in January. It has opposed the rollover across several ambassadors' meetings and wants the six-month review cycle kept.

Paris pitched the move as a political trade-off, wagering that Bratislava would stand by both of its delisting demands this time instead of dropping them as it did at the last renewal, Euronews reported.

Explore further

EU lawmakers renew push to seize frozen Russian assets as Ukraine faces its toughest winter yet with a €23 billion defense funding gap

What runs out on 15 September

The deadline falls on 15 September. The listings at stake cover around 2,600 people and companies by the Council's own count, while Euronews puts the whole regime at more than 3,000, from arms-industry firms to individuals the bloc blames for sustaining the war against Ukraine. Individual listings have run in six-month blocks, and a 12-month cycle is now under discussion. The bloc's economic measures switched to annual renewals over the summer, and a July package added 218 names. Renewal requires unanimity, so one capital can let everything lapse. Ambassadors return to it on Monday.

How the last delisting in Usmanov's family was arranged

Recordings of a 2024 call, published this spring, showed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asking Hungary's then-foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, to help remove Usmanov's sister, Gulbahor Ismailova, from the list. The Hungarian minister replied that his country and Slovakia were submitting a delisting proposal together. Ismailova came off the list in March 2025.

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got dumped, went high, shrank in size, and got the blues.

First, you’ve heard of getting a feather in your cap, but what about a feather in some crap? That’s the upshot of a new study about rare bird remains found in dino doodoo. Then: a walk on titanosaur eggshells, the contractions of Mercury, and a luxe fishpond painting.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

Birds of a feather are pooped out together

O'Connor, Jingmai et al. “Bird feathers from a Late Cretaceous coprolite.” Current Biology.

Some 66 million years ago, a bird ate a fish, and then a dinosaur—perhaps a T. rex—ate that bird. Subsequent to these events, the dinosaur took a dump. 

Time passed. The poop fossilized. A space rock hit Earth and wiped out most life. Fast forward to 2016, when the dino dookie was unearthed at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, complete with exquisitely-preserved feathers from the bird, and fish scales from its last meal.

This incredible story is reported by scientists who have spent years studying the fossilized feces, known as a coprolite, with advanced imaging techniques. By sheer luck, this fossil contains extremely rare feathers from the Late Cretaceous, including “arguably the best-preserved feather ever recovered from Mesozoic lithic deposits,” according to the study.

“Here we report on an exceptionally preserved three-dimensional pennaceous feather preserved in a medium-sized theropod dinosaur coprolite,” said researchers led by Jingmai O’Connor of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The specimen “begins to fill in a critical gap in our understanding of feather morphology in the Late Cretaceous.” 

The fossil record contains some feathers from extinct birds, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, which can be found etched into stone or encased in amber. But hardly any feathers from the final days of the age of dinosaurs, the Late Cretaceous, have survived. This gap in the record has stymied efforts to explain why only one family of birds, the Neornithes, survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event to become the ancestors of all modern birds.

Sometimes the answer to profound existential questions is hidden in unexpected places, like a very old piece of poop. O’Connor and her colleagues determined that the coprolite contains the first known feathers from a family of aquatic birds known as hesperornithiformes, which did not survive the asteroid impact. The team speculate that the birds’ plumage might have been less efficient at insulating the birds compared to Neornithean feathers, dooming the former lineage to death.

“These primitive plumaceous morphotypes may have been less effective for trapping air, resulting in extinction during the asteroid-induced impact winter largely responsible for the K-Pg mass extinction,” the researchers said.

The whole sequence of events reminds me of an infamous scene in Jurassic World in which a woman is captured by a pterosaur that is then swallowed by a giant mosasaur. I shudder to imagine what that coprolite would look like.

In other news…

If you want to make a titanosaur omelette…

Tanaka, Kohei et al. “Titanosaur eggshells from the latest Cretaceous of Patagonia, Argentina: implications for nesting at high latitude.” Royal Society Open Science.

What a treat—there is even more breaking news from the Late Cretaceous! Paleontologists have discovered a clutch of fossilized titanosaur eggs at the Chorrillo Formation of Patagonia, shedding new light on the breeding behaviors of the largest animals ever to walk on land.

The biggest titanosaurs tipped the scales at 70 metric tonnes—as heavy as the Space Shuttle, or ten African elephants in a trenchcoat—and they exceeded 120 feet in length. (If you ever visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, I recommend checking out the scale model of a titanosaur to behold the sheer spectacle of these extinct behemoths.) 

But even heavyweights start small; titanosaur hatchlings weighed in at six to eight pounds, on par with human newborns. Most of their eggshells have been discovered at low latitudes, suggesting that the animals preferred to lay their young in warm regions with maximum sunlight to aid incubation. But the new specimens were laid in a cool climate at unprecedented latitudes, around 55 to 60°S, and were likely buried under vegetation and warmed by microbial activity above them. 

“These eggshells provide, to our knowledge, the first indication that titanosaurs nested at relatively high latitudes,” said researchers led by Kohei Tanaka of the University of Tsukuba

“The eggs…would have been incubated in nests buried by nesting materials and would have used the heat generated by decaying vegetation” in order to nest in habitats “where sufficient heat from solar radiation was probably unavailable.”

Poopy feathers from the North and the eggshells of giants from the South?What a bounty of global offerings from the orifices of long-lost dinosaurs. 

A shrinking planetary violet

Nishiyama, Gaku et al. “Underestimation of Planetary Contraction due to 2 Obscuration by Surface Roughness: The Case of 3 Mercury.” Geophysical Research Letters.

Mercury is the solar system’s smallest planet, with a surface area roughly comparable to the size of the Indian Ocean. But scientists have discovered that the planet was much bigger at its birth, with a radius that may have been anywhere from four to six miles longer than it is today.

While it has long been known that Mercury has shrunk as it cooled over time, the extent of this “planetary contraction” may have been “underestimated by 10–30 percent,” according to a new study. By examining updated maps of the planet’s surface, scientists noticed that the rocky wrinkles left by its contraction, known as “shortening structures,” are not evenly distributed across its terrain, as predicted by models. 

The team realized that the messy fallout left over from impacts on the planet, known as “ejecta,” is obscuring a lot of these shortening structures, leading to previous underestimates of its shrinkage.  

“Our correction for Mercury’s radial contraction provides new insights into the planet’s thermal evolution” and “has a wide range of implications for the interior structure of the planet,” said researchers led by Gaku Nishiyama of the German Aerospace Center.

Fortunately, the mercurial nature of this world will be explored in more detail by BepiColombo, a European-Japanese space mission that is currently on track to scooch into orbit around the planet this November. Though this is the only planet in the solar system to be outranked by mere moons—Jupiter’s Ganymede and Saturn’s Titan are both bigger than Mercury—it still has plenty of big secrets left to spill.

Out of the Egyptian blue

Dilaria, Simone et al. “An Uncommon Instance of Egyptian Blue in the “Pigmented Intonachino” of the Fishpond Wall Painting From the Roman Villa of Torre di Pordenone (Northeast Italy).” Archaeometry.

To close, let’s step back in time 2,000 years to visit a luxury villa decorated with ostentatious displays of wealth, including a captivating painting of a fishpond. This colorful artwork once adorned the wall of the “Torre di Pordenone,” a resplendent home near Friuli-Venezia-Giulia in northeast Italy, and which now survives only as puzzle-piece remnants. 

Scientists have now discovered that the painting included the famous pigment “Egyptian blue,” which is considered the world’s oldest synthetic hue, dating back at least 5,000 years. The pigment was deliberately mixed with lime "to obtain homogeneous, pale blue tones for the marine background” offering “a rare example of Roman ‘blue lime-painted mortar,’ according to a new study.

Apart from one other similar painting found at Tivoli, “the case of the Roman villa of Torre di Pordenone seems to represent a singular instance within the Roman wall painting production,” said researchers led by Simone Dilaria of the University of Padua, who added the pigment was “utilized with a notable degree of abundance, an ‘excess’ that permitted its direct incorporation into the mortar matrix itself.”

“Beyond merely reflecting the immense wealth of the villa's owner, this scale of consumption of Egyptian blue at Torre prompts a reconsideration of the pigment's value, availability, and modes of use in antiquity,” the team said. “Ultimately, this evidence suggests that while Egyptian blue remained a valuable commodity, its supply in ancient markets was significantly more consistent and well established than traditionally assumed, with quantities sufficient to support large-scale, high-quality decorative programs.”

While the full painting itself no longer survives, its fragments open a fascinating window into the luxury commodities of the era—and the timeless compulsion for the ultra-wealthy to splurge on flashy status symbols.

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here:

• Full story: Donald Trump says he would ‘love’ to see united Ireland

Reuters has issued a series of alerts on Trump’s latest comments (he is currently meeting with Micheál Martin). Here is what the news agency has reported:

On Iran: War will end very soon.