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Today:
Why tornadoes touched down near New York City
NEWS | 23 August 2026
The Long Island twister made landfall in Atlantic Beach and began as a tornadic waterspout—essentially, a tornado that forms over water. There was also a radar signature showing cloud rotation near Far Rockaway, Queens, but there is no photographic evidence or reported damage, Radell says. Between 1950 and 2022, there were 88 tornadoes reported across all of New York State, most of which would equate to a 0 or 1, the lowest ratings, on the Enhanced Fujita scale used to rank tornadoes. One of the last times that tornadoes were reported in the greater New York City area was on November 13, 2021, when several hit Long Island. And a situation similar to yesterday’s happened in 2012, when what began as a waterspout came onshore in Queens, Radell says.

Top Stories:
How psilocybin alters consciousness to create a sense of ‘oneness’
NEWS | 23 August 2026
Psychedelics can create a new “hidden order” in brain activity that could explain how these drugs alter our sense of selfTaking psychedelics can dissolve the boundary between yourself and the rest of the world, leaving a profound sense of oneness. Now scientists have revealed that specific changes to the brain may cause this altered sense of consciousness. During a psilocybin trip, brain activity becomes more random or chaotic. Specifically, they analyzed individual participants’ brain activity while the trip evolved and as they did different tasks. But for people who felt a strong sense of oneness, key dimensions of their brain activity tended to look the same as each other, forming distinct patterns for each activity they performed.

World:
The national debt is $40 trillion. What does that mean mathematically?
NEWS | 23 August 2026
The U.S. national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time on Wednesday. The number 40 trillion is 4 with 13 zeroes after it. A single person trying to spend $40 trillion would need 1.27 million years to do it if they spent a dollar every second. The difference between 38 trillion or 39 trillion and 40 trillion isn’t something we can picture, just as the difference between a billion and a trillion is hard to fathom. By the year’s end, the national debt may well reach $41 trillion.

Current Events:
Why this El Niño will be the largest in living memory
NEWS | 23 August 2026
Darker orange-red colors are above normal temperatures and are indicative of El Niño. The already superlative El Niño that began earlier this year is looking to be the largest El Niño in living memory and likely the strongest since the 19th century, the U.K. Met Office reports. And because El Niño typically peaks in late fall to early winter, this event is likely to be a blockbuster. El Niño changes the weather around the world by adjusting where heat is released into the atmosphere, which alters major wind patterns. The strength of this El Niño could cause 2026 to become the hottest year on record—it will certainly be among the hottest years.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 23 August 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

News Flash:
Life’s ‘last universal common ancestor’ may predate life itself
NEWS | 23 August 2026
This source is often called the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) and is generally regarded as a kind of ur-organism: a primitive bacteriumlike cell from which all life on Earth has descended. Such differences within the networks of metabolic reactions seem to extend all the way down to these domains’ earliest stages: to the last bacterial and archaeal common ancestors (LBCA and LACA, respectively). Metabolism involves a complex cycle of chemical reactions. Those gaps, the researchers argue, could have been filled by chemical reactions catalyzed by metals in the vent systems such as nickel, iron, cobalt and palladium. Instead it would then represent a stage at which interactions between LACA and LBCA caused convergence that gave them both a common genetic code.

Latest:
The brain doesn’t just experience reality. It edits it into a story
NEWS | 23 August 2026
But decades later many scientists saw them as support for another default for the human brain: storytelling. The researchers found synchrony in brain activity among people in the group as they watched the show, as well as when they recalled it. The researchers identified patterns of brain activity that corresponded to each part of an airport or restaurant script. People with different goals, or frames, for an experience show differences in brain activity that reflect variations in their narratives. The researchers found that the brain activity of people given the same context—affair or misplaced suspicion—was tightly aligned, but the brain activity of people who were given different contexts was different.

Breaking:
What really happened on Easter Island?
NEWS | 23 August 2026
The island, known to its Indigenous people as Rapa Nui, was barely inhabited; little more than 100 people remained. Rapa Nui lies in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, 3,700 kilometers west of Chile and 1,900 km east of Pitcairn Island, the nearest inhabited land. Rapa Nui, the easternmost island in this dispersal, was permanently settled around C.E. Written accounts of Rapa Nui begin with that of Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch sailor whose fleet sighted the island on April 5, 1722. In the 20th century archaeologists confirmed that Rapa Nui had been deforested and its native palm had gone extinct.

Trending:
Orbital data centers could transform our night sky forever
NEWS | 23 August 2026
Even among those who rely on AI-powered tools, these data centers are deeply unpopular—proposals to build new ones are increasingly met with the familiar refrain of “not in my backyard.” To dodge those concerns and offload environmental costs, some entrepreneurs plan on building solar-powered data centers in orbit. But megaconstellations of such satellites could completely transform the night sky, astronomers report in a paper posted to the preprint repository arXiv.org on August 3. Orbital data centers are not a far-fetched hypothetical. Regardless of the configuration, the team’s modeling showed that the proposed satellites would profoundly change the night sky. Orbital data centers may be billed as a panacea for reducing stress on Earth’s resources, but any spaceward shift will not actually address the root of those problems—and will introduce new ones—Boley argues.

This Just In:
Why parabolas are crucial to cryptography
NEWS | 23 August 2026
Quadratic functions plague many students during school, popping up everywhere from binomial expansions to the geometry of parabolas and accelerated motion in physics. Perhaps more surprisingly, using parabolas for multiplication forms an important branch of cryptography. For example, multiplying two large prime numbers is easy, but determining the two prime factors that led to a particular product is difficult. This form of cryptography is secure and involves relatively small numbers, making it a more efficient option than the RSA method, which relies on large prime numbers. Mathematicians perform simple arithmetic using points on an elliptic curve—a technique that is essential in a form of cryptography.

Today:
What you need to know about West Nile virus
NEWS | 23 August 2026
Culex mosquitoes, shown here, are the most common carriers of West Nile virus in the U.S. This week New York City reported its first human case of West Nile virus for the year; health officials said the infected individual may have contracted the virus outside of the city. But officials have found West Nile virus in mosquitoes across every borough of New York City this summer—and that’s not unusual. West Nile virus is the most common mosquito-borne illness in the U.S. But in some cases, West Nile can reach the brain and cause extreme headaches, meningitis, tremors, convulsions and paralysis.

Top Stories:
Should you be taking testosterone?
NEWS | 23 August 2026
In women, testosterone plays a role in bone health, fertility and sex drive, as well as menstrual health. “There’s this narrative that, if you have higher testosterone levels, you’re healthier, and you’re going to live longer,” Irwig says. “But there actually isn’t any evidence showing that.”Importantly, for people diagnosed with testosterone deficiency, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) can be an effective treatment. But doctors often diagnose low testosterone as below 300 nanograms per deciliter (ng/dl) across multiple tests. “There isn’t much evidence for dietary supplements to boost testosterone levels,” Irwig says.

World:
‘Earth-like’ exoplanets may exist—but we don’t know of any yet
NEWS | 23 August 2026
Eventually, astronomers uncovered ones with dimensions similar to Earth’s, and these were sometimes dubbed Earth-like worlds. That’s because the mix of gases in their atmosphere—and the presence of one in the first place—can wildly change a planet’s surface temperature. So even if the planet’s surface were somehow more charitable toward humans, we still couldn’t breathe there. While this was a breakthrough discovery, it unfortunately still doesn’t tell us much about the atmosphere’s overall composition or anything about the planet’s surface conditions. This may seem to be a nitpick, but overpromising about “Earth-like” exoplanets can easily backfire, spreading disappointment and disillusionment—two things we very much do not need—among the general public.

Current Events:
What happened when people with anorexia tried magic mushrooms
NEWS | 23 August 2026
According to a 2020 report, as much as 9 percent of the U.S. population—nearly 31 million people—will have some kind of eating disorder during their lifetime. That same study found that someone dies as a direct consequence of an eating disorder every 52 minutes. Anorexia nervosa—an eating disorder defined by strict restriction of one’s food intake—is particularly fatal. But after the dosing sessions were over, she felt a shift in her behavior and in her eating disorder symptoms. So people can become more sensitive to fear and closed off to change as their eating disorder or anorexia develops.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 23 August 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here