Week in Science: "Corn sweat" is making this heat wave worse

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July 25—This week, "corn sweat" is real and it can make humidity terrible. Plus, test your logic with these puzzles, and the U.S. axed the most ambitious cosmology experiment in history. All that and more below! —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

Top Stories

'Corn Sweat' Is Making This Heat Wave Even Worse Humid heat is blanketing the eastern U.S. this week, exacerbated by "corn sweat" in the Midwest Andrea Thompson

How Logical Are You? Test Your Skills With These Problems from the New International Logic Olympiad In only its second year, the International Logic Olympiad is already booming as logic becomes more and more crucial in our ever changing world Emma R. Hasson

Breakthrough Proof Brings Mathematics Closer to a Grand Unified Theory after More Than 50 Years of Work The Langlands program has inspired and befuddled mathematicians for more than 50 years. A major advance has now opened up new worlds for them to explore Ananyo Bhattacharya, Nature magazine

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Optimists Are Alike, but Pessimists Are Unique, Brain Scan Study Suggests Optimists have similar patterns of brain activation when they think about the future—but pessimists are all different from one another, a brain scan study suggests Allison Parshall

Ozzy Osbourne's Death Puts Spotlight on Parkinson's Disease Ozzy Osbourne, lead singer of Black Sabbath, has died at age 76. He said he had been previously diagnosed with a form of Parkinson's disease linked to the gene PRKN Lauren J. Young

Millions Swelter under Relentless Heat Dome Smothering Eastern U.S. High humidity and low overnight temperatures will put tens of millions of people under heat alerts over the course of the coming week Meghan Bartels

This Number System Beats Binary, But Most Computers Can't Use It Why do computers only work with the numbers 0 and 1? There are machines that process three digits with more efficiency than you might expect Manon Bischoff

Math Is Quietly in Crisis over NSF Funding Cuts A 72 percent reduction in federal funding is devastating to math research. The American Mathematical Society is offering $1 million in backstop grants—but it's likely not enough Emma R. Hasson

The Biggest Trial Yet Confirms Four-Day Workweek Makes Employees Happier The largest yet study on a four-day workweek included 141 companies, 90 percent of which retained the arrangement at the end of the six-month experiment Jenna Ahart, Nature magazine

The U.S. Just Axed Its Boldest Cosmology Experiment in Generations Researchers hoped CMB-S4, a $900-million cosmology experiment, would answer one of the greatest questions in physics. Instead it's become another cautionary tale of pursuing big science amid shrinking budgets Nadia Drake

Superheated Gold Defies 'Entropy Catastrophe' Limit, Overturning 40-Year-Old Physics Physicists superheated gold to 14 times its melting point, disproving a long-standing prediction about the temperature limits of solids Clara Moskowitz

Why I'm Suing OpenAI, the Creator of ChatGPT My lawsuit in Hawaii lays out the safety issues in OpenAI's products and how they could irreparably harm both Hawaii and the rest of the U.S. Tamlyn Hunt

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