Today in Science: These summer days are going fast

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August 1, 2025—These are the shortest summer days ever. Plus, why humility should go hand-in-hand with expertise, and the mental health benefits of playing Dungeons & Dragons. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor TODAY'S NEWS NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center The Earth is spinning extra fast this summer, shortening our days by milliseconds. | 6 min read Why do allergies make us cough and sneeze? Proteins that create holes in airway cells might be to blame. | 3 min read Black holes can launch jets, warp spacetime, and shape the cosmos–just as long as they're spinning. Scientists are beginning to understand why this characteristic matters so much to these cosmic ballerinas. | 5 min read. Tech writer Deni Ellis Béchard discusses a recent conversation he had with chatbot Claude 4, a large language model that believes it might be conscious. | 22 min listen More News Support essential science journalism with a subscription to Scientific American! Today in Science readers get a special discount. TOP STORIES Gorodenkoff/Getty Images What Experts Are When you think about an expert, the word "humility" might not come to mind. But humility is a trait worth valuing in experts, as much as competence and knowledge, write Benjamin Walker and Lauren Keating, researchers in behavior and psychology. In their research, they showed hundreds of study participants videos that explained the value of humility and how people who project confidence do not necessarily have more knowledge. In follow-up survey questions participants rated humility—admitting what one does not know—as a desirable trait of experts. Why this matters: Expecting experts to be all-knowing might contribute to significant problems, the authors write. "For example, people could develop unrealistically high expectations of those in expert roles, leading to disappointment, anger or resentment when they [the experts] inevitably fail to deliver on those expectations." For example, during the early days of the COVID pandemic, when much remained unknown about the virus and how it spread, many people blamed experts for not automatically having all the answers.   Real-world application: Helping people prize intellectual humility in experts might make them better at detecting when someone is venturing beyond the boundaries of their expertise, say Walker and Keating. No one can know everything about anything. And acknowledging the limits of their own knowledge makes experts more trustworthy.   WATCH THIS Roll For Mental Health From building confidence to processing trauma, tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are powerful tools for mental health. Science Quickly's Rachel Feltman spoke to researchers and professional dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan to explore how collaborative storytelling can help us thrive—and even be used as therapy. Watch the full conversation here. | 13 min watch

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PLAY NOW How closely did you read Today in Science this week? Test your knowledge with a science quiz. Plus, here is today's Spellements puzzle and a killer hard Sudoku.​  MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK You Don't Remember Being a Baby, but Your Brain Was Making Memories | 4 min read Why the Russian Earthquake Didn't Cause a Huge Tsunami | ​5 min read Tampa Breaks 100 Degrees F for First Time on Record as Heat Wave Bakes Eastern U.S. | 3 min read EXPERT PERSPECTIVES One of Scientific American's proudest moments came in a past era of attacks on science, writes senior editor Dan Vergano. In the 1950s, when the "red scare" and an arms race with the Soviet Union were fully underway, U.S. security officials continuously pressured scientists and the press to toe the political line. One U.S. Atomic Energy Commission agent even burned 3,000 issues of Scientific American because he believed those issues held atomic secrets. Despite the persecution, Scientific American remained a platform for scientists to speak out: "Scientists led calls for test ban treaties and disarmament; they warned of nuclear winter throughout the cold war," Vergano says. This type of dissent remains as important as ever, especially with U.S. science facing severe cuts, and nuclear weapons a renewed flashpoint in geopolitics, he adds. "We will continue to speak out and provide scientists with a place to make their voices heard." | 4 min read RECOMMENDED READS Every Friday in summer we're recommending a great, freshly-published science read. Tell us what you're reading, or if you try any of our recommendations! Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI By Karen Hao. Penguin Random House, May 2025 . History is filled with tales of the rise and fall of empires. Such political entities, governed by a singular unelected leader, drag millions of people along for the ride, often to the benefit of only a small ruling class (and the exploitation of the masses). In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao makes a bold but simple claim: the AI companies intricately woven into our digital lives are de facto empires, and it takes a keen sense to sort the powerful leaders' self-aggrandizing promises from the realistic implications of the technology. Seemingly overnight every website or app has its own AI tool, meaning this technology is suddenly unavoidable, if unquestionably important and likely misunderstood. Hao, a former AI editor for MIT Tech Review and former foreign correspondent with the Washington Post, brings robust "boots-on-the-ground"-style journalism to this extensive book— with more than 65 pages of notes and sources. It's an extraordinary example of nonfiction, both beautifully written and deeply researched. And it takes an uncompromising stance on the global impacts of AI and the explosion of money and power behind the technology. —Brianne Kane August has arrived and that means just a handful of weeks left to enjoy slower days and brighter evenings (SOB). If you've been keeping up with our recommended reads every week, great! Let us know what you think by sending an email. Still looking for a summer book? Check out what we read in June and July. If you're a summer lover like me, savor the month! Send book thoughts to: newsletters@sciam.com. And have a lovely weekend.   —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor With contributions by Andrea Tamayo

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Week in Science: Giant earthquake, but no deadly tsunami

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August 1—This week, you may not remember anything from being a baby, but your brain was making memories. Plus, Wednesday's 8.8 magnitude earthquake off eastern Russia was one of the strongest, but didn't cause a deadly tsunami. Why? And the first antimatter quantum bit. All that and more below! —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

Top Stories

You Don't Remember Being a Baby, but Your Brain Was Making Memories Brain scans capture memory formation in babies, raising new questions about why people forget their earliest years Nick Turk-Browne

Tampa Breaks 100 Degrees F for First Time on Record as Heat Wave Bakes Eastern U.S. Records are starting to fall to the continuing heat dome that is covering much of the eastern U.S. Meghan Bartels

Why the Russian Earthquake Didn't Cause a Huge Tsunami Russia's magnitude 8.8 earthquake spawned serious tsunami warnings, but waves have been moderate so far. Here's the geological reason why Robin George Andrews

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Archaeologists Stumble upon Tomb of Ancient Maya City's First Ruler A team of archaeologists excavating the ancient Maya city of Caracol discovered the tomb of its first ruler, which contained pottery, jadeite jewelry and a rare death mask Nora Bradford

Hidden Lake Bursts through Greenland Ice in 'Extremely Surprising' Event Water usually flows downward, but something strange happened under Greenland's ice sheet when a deluge punched through the surface to scour an area nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park Stephanie Pappas

Russia's 8.8 Earthquake Is One of the Strongest Ever Recorded Russia's earthquake was estimated at magnitude 8.8, among the strongest since scientists began monitoring Mark Fischetti

Organs Age in Waves Accelerating at 50 Years Old Aging is a complex process that plays out differently across different organs, according to growing evidence Heidi Ledford, Nature magazine

The Impossible Problems Hidden in a Simple Game of Tetris How complex can a simple game be? Tetris pushes even supercomputers to their limits and amazes mathematicians Manon Bischoff

First-Ever Antimatter Qubit Could Help Crack Cosmic Mysteries The first antimatter qubit will help search for differences between matter and antimatter Clara Moskowitz

515-Mile-Long Lightning Megaflash Sets New World Record A lighting flash that spanned from East Texas to an area near Kansas City in 2017 is officially the longest lightning strike ever measured, according to the World Meteorological Organization Emma R. Hasson

Tsunami Warnings Issued after Magnitude 8.8 Earthquake Strikes off Russian Coast Tsunami warnings and advisories were issued around the Pacific Ocean after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Russia, the largest earthquake since the 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan Andrea Thompson

The Potato's Mysterious Family Tree Revealed—And It Includes Tomatoes About nine million years ago, a hybridization involving the lineage of another farmers market star gave rise to the modern-day cultivated potato Nora Bradford

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