Enlarge (credit: Getty | Florian Gaertner)

The maker of a homeopathic nasal spray with a history of contamination is refusing to recall its product after the Food and Drug Administration once again found evidence of dangerous microbial contamination.

In a warning Thursday, the FDA advised consumers to immediately stop using SnoreStop nasal spray—made by Green Pharmaceuticals—because it may contain microbes that, when sprayed directly into nasal cavities, can cause life-threatening infections. The FDA highlighted the risk to people with compromised immune systems and also children, since SnoreStop is marketed to kids as young as age 5.

According to the regulator, an FDA inspection in April uncovered laboratory test results showing that a batch of SnoreStop contained "significant microbial contamination." But, instead of discarding the batch, FDA inspectors found evidence that Green Pharmaceuticals had repackaged some of the contaminated lot and distributed it as single spray bottles or as part of a starter kit.

Enlarge (credit: Ben Orlin)

Math teacher Ben Orlin writes and draws the (aptly named) blog Math With Drawings and is the author of a new book, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. To mark its publication, he devised this entertaining accompanying quiz. You can read the Ars interview with Orlin here.

Math, we like to say, is math. It often seems that mathematics is something beyond our control—something unyielding, universal, inhuman.

But is it really?

Enlarge / Math for English Majors talks about numbers as nouns, verbs as calculations, and algebra as grammar. (credit: Ben Orlin)

Galileo once famously described the universe as a great book "written in mathematical language and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures." Unfortunately, it's a language that many people outside of math and science simply do not speak, largely because they are flummoxed and/or intimidated by the sheer density of all that strange symbolic notation.

Math teacher extraordinaire Ben Orlin is here to help with his latest book: Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. And just like Orlin's previous outings, it's filled with the author's trademark bad drawings. Bonus: Orlin created a fun personality quiz, which you can take here to find out your mathematical style.

Orlin's first book, Math with Bad Drawings, after his blog of the same name, was published in 2018. It included such highlights as placing a discussion of the correlation coefficient and "Anscombe's Quartet" into the world of Harry Potter and arguing that building the Death Star in the shape of a sphere may not have been the Galactic Empire's wisest move. We declared it "a great, entertaining read for neophytes and math fans alike, because Orlin excels at finding novel ways to connect the math to real-world problems—or in the case of the Death Star, to problems in fictional worlds."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Most living organisms easily surpass machines when it comes to navigating real-world environments and adaptability to changing conditions. One way to bridge that gap is building biohybrid robots that merge synthetic machinery with biological components like animal muscles, bacteria, or plants.

But living muscles are very hard to keep alive in a machine, bacteria have a very short lifespan, and plants tend to react to things a bit slowly, like Ents in The Lord of the Rings. So, a team of scientists at Cornell University went down a different path and built biohybrid robots controlled by fungi, specifically, oyster mushrooms.

Understanding mushrooms’ signals

Robots controlled by fungi, despite giving strong Last of Us vibes, are a good idea on paper. Fungi are very easy to sustain and can live pretty much everywhere, including extreme environments like the Arctic, or even amid nuclear contamination. They're also cheap to culture in large quantities and excel at reacting to environmental cues like exposure to light.

(credit: USGS)

Droughts in the coming decades could be longer than projected by current climate models, a new study published Wednesday in Nature warns.

The international team of scientists examined potential biases that could skew climate models used to make drought projections under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change midrange and high emissions scenarios. The researchers corrected for the bias by calibrating those models with observations of the longest annual dry spells between 1998 and 2018.

By the end of this century, they found that the average longest periods of drought could be 10 days longer than previously projected. Trouble spots included North America, Southern Africa, and Madagascar, where the newly calibrated models showed that the increase in the longest annual dry spell could be about twice what the older models predicted.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a dark matter filament containing a galaxy with large jets. (Caltech noted that some details of this image were created using AI.) (credit: Martijn Oei (Caltech) / Dylan Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration).)

The supermassive black holes that sit at the center of galaxies aren't just decorative. The intense radiation they emit when feeding helps drive away gas and dust that would otherwise form stars, providing feedback that limits the growth of the galaxy. But their influence may extend beyond the galaxy they inhabit. Many black holes produce jets and, in the case of supermassive versions, these jets can eject material entirely out of the galaxy.

Now, researchers are getting a clearer picture of just how far outside of the galaxy their influence can reach. A new study describes the largest-ever jets observed, extending across a total distance of 23 million light-years (seven megaparsecs). At those distances, the jets could easily send material into other galaxies and across the cosmic web of dark matter that structures the Universe.

Extreme jets

Jets are formed in the complex environment near a black hole. The intense heating of infalling material ionizes and heats it, creating electromagnetic fields that act as a natural particle accelerator. This creates jets of particles that travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. These will ultimately slam into nearby material, creating shockwaves that heat and accelerate that, too. Over time, this leads to large-scale, coordinated outflows of material, with the scale of the jet being proportional to a combination of the size of the black hole and the amount of material it is feeding on.

Enlarge / The Kalalau Valley between sheer cliffs in the Na Pali Coast State Park on the western shore of the island of Kauai in Hawaii, United States. This view is from the Pihea Trail in the Kokee State Park. (credit: Getty | Jon G. Fuller)

The Hawaiian island of Kauai may not have any spewing lava, but hikers along the magnificent Napali coast have brought their own volcanic action recently, violently hollowing their innards amid the gushing waterfalls and deeply carved valleys.

Between August and early September, at least 50 hikers fell ill with norovirus along the famed Kalalau Trail, which has been closed since September 4 for a deep cleaning. The rugged 11-mile trail runs along the northwest coast of the island, giving adventurers breathtaking views of stunning sea cliffs and Kauai's lush valleys. It's situated just north of Waimea Canyon State Park, also known as the Grand Canyon of the Pacific.

"It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. I feel really fortunate to be able to be there, and appreciate and respect that land,” one hiker who fell ill in late August told The Washington Post. "My guts exploding all over that land was not what I wanted to do at all."

Enlarge / Rendering of an individual crew quarter within the Axiom habitat module. (credit: Axiom Space)

Axiom Space is facing significant financial headwinds as the company attempts to deliver on two key commercial programs for NASA—the development of a private space station in low-Earth orbit and spacesuits that could one day be worn by astronauts on the Moon.

Forbes reports that Axiom Space, which was founded by billionaire Kam Ghaffarian and NASA executive Mike Suffredini in 2016, has been struggling to raise money to keep its doors open and has had difficulties meeting its payroll dating back to at least early 2023. In addition, the Houston-based company has fallen behind on payments to key suppliers, including Thales Alenia Space for its space station and SpaceX for crewed launches.

"The lack of fresh capital has exacerbated long-standing financial challenges that have grown alongside Axiom’s payroll, which earlier this year was nearly 1,000 employees," the publication reports. "Sources familiar with the company’s operations told Forbes that co-founder and CEO Michael Suffredini, who spent 30 years at NASA, ran Axiom like a big government program instead of the resource-constrained startup it really was. His mandate to staff up to 800 workers by the end of 2022 led to mass hiring so detached from product development needs that new engineers often found themselves with nothing to do."

Enlarge / Many have seen a reflection of Vincent van Gogh's inner turmoil in the swirling vortices of The Starry Night. (credit: Public doman)

Vincent van Gogh's most famous painting is The Starry Night (1889), created (along with several other masterpieces) during the artist's stay at an asylum in Arles following his breakdown in December 1888. Where some have seen the swirling vortices of the night sky depicted in Starry Night as a reflection of van Gogh's own inner turmoil, physicists often see a masterful depiction of atmospheric turbulence. According to a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids, the illusion of movement in van Gogh's blue sky is also due to the scale of the paint strokes—a second kind of "hidden turbulence" at the microscale that diffuses throughout the entire canvas.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” said co-author Yongxiang Huang of Xiamen University in China. “Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

Physicists have long been fascinated by van Gogh's innate feel for turbulence. As previously reported, in a 2014 TED-Ed talk, Natalya St. Clair, a research associate at the Concord Consortium and coauthor of The Art of Mental Calculation, used Starry Night to illuminate the concept of turbulence in a flowing fluid. In particular, she talked about how van Gogh's technique allowed him (and other Impressionist painters) to represent the movement of light across water or in the twinkling of stars. We see this as a kind of shimmering effect, because the eye is more sensitive to changes in the intensity of light (a property called luminance) than to changes in color.

Enlarge / Portion of a reproduction of cave paintings in France, showing rhinos (among other species). (credit: JEFF PACHOUD)

For most people, an extinct species is an abstraction, a set of bones they might have seen on display in a museum. For Gennady Boeskorov, they are things he has interacted with directly, studying their fur, their skin, their internal organs—experiencing these animals much as they existed thousands of years ago. Some of the well-preserved Pleistocene animals he has worked with include the mummified remains of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct form of rabbit (Lepus tanaiticus), and cave lion cubs (Panthera spelaea).

His latest paper also makes it clear that woolly rhinoceroses belong on this list. Boeskorov is a senior researcher at the Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. This July, he and his colleagues described the relatively recent discovery of three woolly rhinoceros mummies, one of which is new to science, in a paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences.

Woolly rhinos (Coelodonta antiquitatis) were stocky, long-haired, two-horned denizens that inhabited Eurasia during the Pleistocene, a period that includes the most recent glacial expansion. They coexisted with woolly mammoths, placing second on the list of largest animals in this ecosystem (behind their tusked proboscidean coevals), and shared a similar dense coat of hair to protect against the cold.

Enlarge / The Windy Fire blazes through the Long Meadow Grove of giant sequoia trees near The Trail of 100 Giants overnight in Sequoia National Forest on September 21, 2021, near California Hot Springs, California. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Space is more accessible than ever thanks to the proliferation of small satellites and more affordable launch prices, which opened the door to bespoke applications like global pollution monitoring, crop observations, and new ways of collecting weather and climate data.

Now you can add wildfire detection to the list. Satellites have observed wildfires from space for decades, but a new initiative partially funded by Google's philanthropic arm aims to deploy more than 50 small satellites in low-Earth orbit to pinpoint flare-ups as small as a classroom anywhere in the world.

The FireSat constellation, managed by a nonprofit called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA), will be the first satellite fleet dedicated to detecting and tracking wildfires. Google announced a fresh investment of $13 million in the FireSat constellation Monday, building on the tech giant's previous contributions to support the development of custom infrared sensors for the FireSat satellites.

Enlarge / The Fifty-Eight holes board from Çapmalı. (credit: W. Crist et al., 2024)

An ancient board game known as Hounds and Jackals has long been believed to have originated in Egypt. However, according to a paper published in the European Journal of Archaeology, a version of the game board found in present-day Azerbaijan might date back even earlier, suggesting that the game originated in Asia.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

Last year, archaeologists discovered a 500-year-old game board in the ruins of Ćmielów Castle in Poland. It was a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.

Enlarge / A recall notice is posted next to Boar's Head meats that are displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Rafael, California. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan)

The Boar's Head deli-meat plant at the epicenter of a nationwide Listeria outbreak that killed nine people so far harbored the deadly germ in a common area of the facility deemed "low risk" for Listeria. Further, it had no written plans to prevent cross-contamination of the dangerous bacteria to other products and areas. That's according to a federal document newly released by Boar's Head.

On Friday, the company announced that it is indefinitely closing that Jarratt, Virginia-based plant and will never again produce liverwurst—the product that Maryland health investigators first identified as the source of the outbreak strain of Listeria monocytogenes. The finding led to the recall of more than 7 million pounds of Boar's Head meat. The Jarratt plant, where the company's liverwurst is made, has been shuttered since late July amid the investigation into how the outbreak occurred.

In the September 13 update, Boar's Head explained that "our investigation has identified the root cause of the contamination as a specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was used only for liverwurst. With this discovery, we have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst."