Science

Science

What Happens When a Chicken Eats a Leech? The Answer Is Inside the Gizzard
If a chicken eats a leech, will the leech bore through its stomach and feed on its blood long-term? A chicken pecks by a pond and swallows a leech. The leech will not enjoy what happens next.
By Jina day ago in FYI
The 88 Hours That Broke Mathematics
88 Hours September 8, 2026, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. Tristan Buckmaster stood at the blackboard in his office, writing an equation with his left hand. Chalk dust fell on his cuff. He did not brush it off. The coffee on the desk had gone cold, and the rim of the cup had a chip. He took a sip, then set it down. He texted his wife: "Today might be a big day." Then he turned his phone over, screen down.
By Jin3 days ago in FYI
Zhang Yuanfu lost on his first night. Then he went back to his 300 clay crocks, and let fermentation take the trophy.
Zhang Yuanfu stood at the stove of the Hundred Chefs Battle for the first time, and the dish he sent up was returned. The judge did not say anything harsh, only tasted a bite, put down the spoon, and did not take a second chopstickful. Liang Jinglun later said the dish was “right in flavor, but wrong.” Zhang Yuanfu stood at the stove, his apron speckled with oil, the back of his hand stained with splattered sauce. He did not argue. He carried the dish back to the kitchen, dumped it in the trash, and washed the pan.
By Jin4 days ago in FYI
AI Just Did in 6 Months What Mathematicians Couldn't Do in 50 Years. Now 25 Fields Medalists Are Begging It to Slow Down.
When AI starts clearing out mathematical conjectures In 2026, if you only read headlines, you would think mathematics had suddenly entered harvest season.
By Jin4 days ago in FYI
AI Is Solving Math. That’s the Problem.
Is AI Killing the Open Tradition of Mathematics? On the third day after Terence Tao posted in the math community, the comment section had hundreds of replies. He answered them one by one, sometimes still online at 3 a.m. He had discussed AI in public before. This time the tone was different. He wrote: “Those open problems that can generate new methods and new insights are a kind of non-renewable resource that may be rapidly consumed.”
By Jin5 days ago in FYI
Memory Is a Mirage: The Past You Remember Is a Story Your Present Rewrites
At 3 a.m. I searched "Mandela effect." The phone screen lit the half-empty packet of stomach medicine on my desk. I remembered Mandela dying in prison. A television news report. Black and white. Someone crying. Then I found out he became president of South Africa in 1994 and died in 2013. I typed "parallel universe" into the search bar. Then I deleted it.
By Jin7 days ago in FYI
The Prism Effect
Most of us, upon learning that the skies and oceans are blue, hear the myth that “one is blue because it reflects the other.” This is simply not true.
By Edward Smith8 days ago in FYI
How Vocal Comments Can Enhance Our Stories
Introduction Yesterday I published a story addressing the fact that I might hit two thousand Vocal stories by the end of this year, and I got a lot of comments (for me) with excellent insights and observations. You can read it here.
By Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred 15 days ago in FYI
When Solar Farms Meet Birds, the Data War That Broke Science in 2026
I In the summer of 2026, Science published a paper. Solar farms expanding, bird diversity declining—the study estimated that for each standard deviation increase in PV policy stringency, the local Shannon diversity index dropped by an average of about 2.10%.
By Jin21 days ago in FYI
The 4-Meter Invisible Wall
I. A Traffic Crossroads Hidden by the Numbers In 2023, the Kowloon Motor Bus in Hong Kong carried roughly 2.6 million passengers per day, with double-deckers accounting for over 85% of its ground capacity. In Shenzhen, at roughly the same latitude, fewer than 1.5% of the 16,000-plus buses are double-deckers.
By Jin23 days ago in FYI
Stuck in Traffic, Staring at the Sky. You Have No Idea.
Rush hour. Traffic on the elevated highway crawls forward at five kilometers an hour. You shift into neutral, pull the handbrake, and tap your fingers on the steering wheel for the seventeenth time. Then you look up.
By Jin24 days ago in FYI
Why American Highways Are Straight to Heaven (And Why China's Won't Stop Bending)
Search online for images of America's U.S. Route 50, and almost every photo looks the same: a black ribbon of asphalt slicing through desert or grassland, vanishing straight into a horizon that seems drawn with a ruler. Flat. Unbroken. Without a single rise or fall. Stare at it long enough, and you start to feel an odd illusion: if you were driving on that road, you could let go of the wheel forever, until you fall asleep.
By Jin26 days ago in FYI