NuseReal

Science News: September 2026

CERN detects quantum entanglement in particles born from the Higgs boson (LINK) — 15 September 2026

— Scientists have found the first strong evidence of entanglement between a pair of Z bosons produced in the decay of a Higgs boson — their spins so inextricably linked that one cannot be fully described without the other.

U.S.: EPA eliminates rule that limits emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas: also announced it is taking a separate but related step to prevent future administrations from regulating climate pollution from power plants (LINK) — 14 September 2026

US 'super-emitters' of planet heating methane identified by satellite analysis: Energy Transfer, whose CEO is a major Trump donor, named as biggest single methane producer in new rankings (LINK) — 14 September 2026

Bangladesh has lost 1,000 lives to measles despite record 20m vaccine drive (LINK) — 14 September 2026

— epidemic that is now believed to have killed more than 1,000 people since March 15 this year. Last year, Bangladesh recorded 132 measles cases in total, with zero deaths.

Trump administration changed how it counts measles deaths on 4 September amid Pennsylvania outbreak, reducing number (LINK) — 14 September 2026

— The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now using data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which is a way to track mortality trends over time, according to a note published to the agency's website on 4 September: system is "not meant to confirm an individual case." The CDC put an asterisk under its tally of deaths that leads to a note saying the NCHS "does not currently have any death records from 2026 that indicate measles is the underlying cause".

Southern California: Organic eggs recalled on 8 September due to salmonella outbreak — over 20 illnesses reported (LINK) — 14 September 2026

U.S. CDC report finds 71.5 percent of U.S. adults experience fatigue. Experts point to 1 workplace factor that amplifies it (LINK) — 14 September 2026

— Inc: Women and younger adults were more likely than men and older adults to report frequent fatigue. It was also more common among adults with lower family incomes and among those living in the South, the Midwest, and less urbanized areas.

— "In the knowledge work setting, fatigue is amplified by the constant context shifting demanded by a communication culture where issues are largely worked out through ad hoc email and instant messages," Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of Slow Productivity, told Inc. "Our brain cannot easily shift its target of attention so frequently, so the result is a sense of cognitive exhaustion." A fatigue-resistant workplace, Newport said, cuts down on the unscheduled messages that demand a prompt reply.

The founder effect in Bahamas: In 2005, scientists left one male and one female lizard on each of seven empty Bahamian islands; four years later, every colony had evolved shorter legs but still carried the body shape of its founding pair (LINK) — 11 September 2026

Global warming will exceed limit, UNEP says in a report that maps path to get back below danger zone "If we act now we can limit overshoot," the report said. "Not a safe world, but safer than remaining above" 1.5 degrees for the long term (LINK) — 2 September 2026

— Earth is soon going to exceed the safe temperature threshold agreed upon by the world in the 2015 Paris climate accord because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a bleak first-of-its-kind report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme Wednesday. The world is now at 1.4 C (2.5 F) above pre-industrial levels, some scientists have calculated. The measure is based on a 20-year average, rather than a single year's temperatures. Wednesday's report finally admitted that the world will cross the 1.5 threshold "in the next few years." The report said the most optimistic scenario has warming peaking at 1.8 C (3.2 F) around mid-century if countries pursue ambitious climate goals, but that governments' current policies should push temperatures to 2.6 C (4.7 F) above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

An AI capable of doubt can optimize scientific discovery: A team at EPFL have developed a framework that trains Large Language Models to create AI systems that can find the best possible setup or "recipe" for a scientific experiment (LINK) — 1 September 2026

— Bojana Rankovic and Philippe Schwaller at EPFL's Laboratory of Artificial Chemical Intelligence have developed a method that combines an LLM with a a Gaussian process, a kind of 'doubt detector", the probabilistic model commonly used in Bayesian optimization." Rather than asking the LLM to choose experiments directly ("direct prompting"), GOLLuM trains it using the Gaussian process's way of scoring uncertainty and performance of each option. Because of this, as the LLM learns from past experiments, it adjusts how it "organizes" the search space, the "master list" of every possible choice for an experiment.

— The researchers evaluated GOLLuM across 23 benchmark tasks covering organic synthesis, analytical and process chemistry, materials and catalysis, and molecular property optimization. Each optimization run began with ten low-performing observations, and the team used the same GOLLuM configuration across all benchmark tasks rather than tuning it separately for each problem, showing its versatility. Across the 23 benchmarks, GOLLuM ranked first on average, finding high-performing experimental conditions more consistently than Bayesian optimization with expert-designed descriptors.

New autism study deals blow to RFK Jr. theory: no evidence that exposure during pregnancy to traces of pesticides commonly found on fruits and vegetables is linked to autism-related traits in children (LINK) — 1 September 2026