El Niño Goes Viral — Suggesting What Makes People Care About Climate Change

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El Niño Goes Viral — and Scientists Learn What Makes People Care About Climate Change (Maria)

The author writes, “As warnings about a potential ‘mega’ El Niño grab headlines and spread through social media, communicators face a familiar challenge: how to persuade people to pay attention to climate risks — and act. A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, suggests that emotionally engaging forms of communication are more effective than scientific facts in motivating climate action.”

ICE Seizes Phone Records of Twin Cities Anti-ICE, Anti-War Activists (Sean)

From Fight Back! News: “On August 30, T-Mobile and AT&T disclosed that they had sent the phone records of several Twin Cities activists to ICE and Homeland Security Investigations agents after receiving a summons filed by Homeland Security on April 12, 2026. These included the telecommunications data of Jess Sundin, Steff Yorek and other anti-ICE and anti-war activists, such records for the phone line for Minnesota Council for American-Islamic Relations. T-Mobile and AT&T complied with the summons even though none of the three were charged with any criminal charges, nor were they notified or asked to consent to such disclosures. Given the fraudulent nature of the summons, other companies, such as Google, declined to disclose any data.” 

Senior UK Rabbis Come Out in Support of Sanctions on Israeli Settlements (Siobhán)

The author writes, “Prominent British rabbis have backed Ed Miliband’s sanctions on Israeli settlements, warning that the time for inaction on settler violence must come to an end. The intervention comes after the UK’s chief rabbi, the spiritual leader of mainstream Orthodox Jews in the UK, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, described UK sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as a ‘dark day for British Jews.’ … But other senior rabbis, many from the progressive wing of the community, have come forward to stress the diversity of views within the British Jewish community, with some backing Miliband’s sanctions, while others warned that concern about the measures should not become an excuse for ignoring settler violence and expansion, and others calling for the government to go further.” 

The Search for Consciousness Inside AI (Gerry)

From The Economist: “In a recent experiment on Claude Sonnet 4.5, a large language model (LLM) from Anthropic, researchers asked it to count to five and, at the same time, ‘introspect deeply.’ The artificial-intelligence model complied, returning: ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five.’ So far, so normal. During the task, the researchers were watching what was going on inside the LLM’s many layers of artificial neural networks. … What they found surprised them.”

Sharks Take the Temperature (Laura)

From Sierra: “The clock was ticking when Laura McDonnell and her team, dubbed ‘The Pit Crew,’ reeled in 19 sharks over the course of a week off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, during the fall of 2021. The Pit Crew had one goal: In under five minutes, they needed to secure a satellite tag on the dorsal fin of each shortfin mako or blue shark before releasing it back into the ocean. The tags then tracked the sharks until March 2022, as they migrated throughout the Northwest Atlantic, a few even reaching Florida. Some dove to 6,483 feet, recording temperatures between 39° and 93°F, transmitting data to satellites each time they surfaced. Researchers, including Ben Kirtman, used the information to fill critical gaps in climate forecasts. One study showed that forecasts incorporating shark-collected data reduced errors in surface-temperature predictions by up to 40 percent. These forecasts help us understand the broader climate system, in which oceans play a critical role.” 

The Generation That’s Never Had to Say ‘Hello?’ (Russ)

The author writes, “In an era where caller ID has blossomed into avatars, pseudonyms, terms of endearment and special ringtones, saying an indiscriminate ‘Hello?’ when answering the phone can seem almost redundant. What has emerged instead is an idiosyncratic patois that denotes a ranking system of relationships for those born around the time or after caller ID was popularized in the 1990s.”

Rare Ice Age Mastodon Tooth Discovered in Bay Area Creek (Reader Steve)

The author writes, “A researcher surveying a San Mateo County creek for a frog habitat stumbled upon a remarkably preserved Pacific mastodon molar, a rare Ice Age relic estimated to be at least 10,000 years old. Paleontologists call it the most complete mastodon molar ever found in the Bay Area, offering fresh clues about the recently recognized species Mammut pacificus and California’s vanished Pleistocene megafauna.”