Ein syrisches Gericht hat den gestürzten Präsidenten Assad in Abwesenheit zum Tode verurteilt. Ihm wurden unter anderem Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit vorgeworfen. Assad hält sich wohl weiter in Russland auf.

30 Grad im Klassenzimmer sind keine Seltenheit. Hitze erschwert die Konzentration und kann für Kinder gesundheitlich problematisch werden. Doch viele Schulen sind auf hohe Temperaturen noch nicht ausreichend vorbereitet. Von K. Wilhelm.

Schutzbrillen, Eis in Sonnenform, Sonderangebote und vor allem viele Besucher - die Sonnenfinsternis soll Spanien einen wirtschaftlichen Schub bescheren. Vor allem in der Provinz hoffen die Menschen auf "SoFi-Touristen". Von Christian Sachsinger.

Innerhalb von 20 Jahren hat sich die Zahl der jungen Frauen und Mädchen, die wegen Essstörungen im Krankenhaus behandelt werden mussten, mehr als verdoppelt. Die häufigste Diagnose ist Magersucht.

Für die großen Autobauer wird es immer schwieriger, mit ihren Fahrzeugen Geld zu verdienen. Eine Auswertung zeigt, dass der Gewinn auf knapp 1.200 Euro im ersten Halbjahr sank. Besserung ist nicht in Sicht.

Schwindende Hoffnungen auf eine Öffnung der Straße von Hormus lassen auch den DAX nicht kalt. Trotzdem bleibt das Rekordhoch für das Börsenbarometer in Reichweite. Es fehlen aber neue Impulse.

Nach wenigen Monaten im Amt hat der Chef der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung seine Posten aufgegeben. Sein Rückzug weckt Befürchtungen über den künftigen Kurs und ihre Rolle als "intellektueller Verfassungsschutz". Von D.K. Mäurer.

US-Präsident Trump hat die Straße von Hormus für frei befahrbar erklärt. Die Meerenge sei von Minen geräumt und werde von den USA kontrolliert. Iran hat sich zu der Darstellung bisher noch nicht geäußert.

Köln und Düsseldorf möchten einen Modellversuch mit dem sogenannten Drogen-Mikrohandel starten. Vorbild ist Zürich. Dort wird er in "Drogenkonsumräumen" geduldet - mit einigem Erfolg. Von T. Wagner

Tausende Quadratmeter Wald stehen in Hessen in Flammen. Damit die Wasserreserven für die Brandbekämpfung ausreichen, sind Bewohner mehrerer Orte nun aufgerufen, möglichst nicht zu duschen oder zu baden.

US-Präsident Trump ist laut US-Medien nach dem NATO-Gipfel in der Türkei mit einem Täuschungsmanöver ausgeflogen worden. Demnach wurde er in ein kleineres Flugzeug geschleust. Hintergrund soll eine Drohung Irans gewesen sein.

In internationale Konflikte mischt sich die Schweiz militärisch nicht ein - diese Neutralität ist sogar in der Verfassung festgeschrieben. Einigen im Parlament geht das aber noch nicht weit genug. Von Thomas Wagner.

In Ungarn wird heute eine neues Staatsoberhaupt gewählt - ein weiterer Teil des Machtwechsels. Mit András Baka soll ein Jurist Präsident werden, der die Willkür der Orban-Zeit hautnah erlebt hat. Von C. Verenkotte.

Dem Konzern hinter WhatsApp, Instagram und Facebook wird vorgeworfen, Nutzerinnen und Nutzer auch auf fremden Internetseiten zu verfolgen. Betroffen sind 50 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland. Von Edgar Verheyen.

In Thüringen gibt es seit Jahren eine Zusammenarbeit zwischen Linkspartei und CDU - weil keine Partei im Landtag mit der AfD koalieren will. So eine Kooperation empfiehlt Thüringens Ex-Regierungschef Ramelow auch Sachsen-Anhalt.

Mehr als 2.000 Menschen gelten nach dem schweren Erdbeben in Kolumbien als vermisst, mehr als 100 sind ums Leben gekommen. Der Präsident hat den Notstand ausgerufen, während Rettungskräfte in den Trümmern nach Verschütteten suchen.

Um sich gegen die russischen Angriffe wehren zu können, braucht die Ukraine immer bessere Drohnen - zu möglichst niedrigen Preisen. Die meisten Drohnen aus Europa sind bisher zu teuer. Von Jerzy Sobotta.

In der Nacht hat die Ukraine neue russische Angriffe im ganzen Land gemeldet. Allein in Saporischschja wurden mindestens sechs Menschen getötet. Laut Präsident Selenskyj setzte Russland dort ballistische Raketen aus Nordkorea ein.

Mit großer Mehrheit hat das türkische Parlament ein Gesetz gebilligt, das den Friedensprozess mit der verbotenen kurdischen Arbeiterpartei PKK voranbringen soll. Es sieht Straferleichterungen für viele Mitglieder vor - geknüpft an Bedingungen.

Die russische Oppositionspartei Jabloko stellt sich offen gegen den Krieg - nun hat das Oberste Gericht sie von der Parlamentswahl ausgeschlossen. Geklagt hatte eine kremltreue Partei. Jabloko will das Urteil anfechten.

Bei einem schweren Erdbeben in Kolumbien sind viele Menschen ums Leben gekommen. Der Präsident nannte inzwischen eine Zahl von 111 Toten. Der Geologische Dienst des Landes spricht vom schwersten Erdbeben seit einem Jahrzehnt.

Flüsse wie Rhein und Elbe haben derzeit historische Tiefstände, immer weniger Güter können per Schiff transportiert werden. Zwei weitere Bundesländer haben deshalb jetzt das Sonntagsfahrverbot für Lkw gelockert.

Laut Sicherheitskreisen soll der mutmaßliche Anschlagsversuch am Flughafen Leipzig Parallelen zu der spektakulären Anschlagsserie auf Luftfrachtpakete aufweisen. Recherchen von WDR, NDR und SZ zeigen, wie schon damals Drohnen eine wichtige Rolle spielten.

Noch immer ist unklar, wie es mit der Straße von Hormus weitergeht. Iran erklärte nun, mit Oman an neuen Regeln für die Meerenge zu arbeiten. Demnach erwägt Teheran, dort Gebühren zu erheben - als Entgelt für Dienstleistungen.

Am Mittwoch schiebt sich der Mond über Deutschland zwischen Sonne und Erde und erzeugt eine partielle Sonnenfinsternis. Viele wollen das Himmelsereignis verfolgen, aber es gibt dabei ein paar Dinge zu beachten. Von Juliane Orth.

Über weiten Teilen Spaniens ist am Mittwoch die totale Sonnenfinsternis zu sehen. Einheimische und Urlauber wollen sich das Spektakel nicht entgehen lassen. Wegen der Waldbrände gelten strenge Regeln. Nach Mallorca wurde sogar die Armee geschickt.

In vielen Ländern Europas herrscht extreme Trockenheit: Von den Niederlanden bis Bulgarien trocknen die Gewässer aus, Landwirte erwarten massive Ernterückgänge, Kraftwerke werden abgeschaltet. Ein Blick in verschiedene Regionen Europas.

Die Flut an Geschäftszahlen von den Unternehmen ebbt ab, nun rücken wieder die Zinsen in den Blick. Während jüngste Daten aus den USA Entspannung signalisierten, zieht nun auch der Ölpreis wieder an.

Mit einer starken Erinnerungskultur gegen Desinformation und Geschichtsverfälschung: Kulturstaatsminister Weimer will Gedenkstätten mit zusätzlichen zehn Millionen Euro fördern - auch um sie besser vor Angriffen zu schützen.

Die Einkommensteuerreform sollte eines der großen Projekte von Schwarz-Rot werden. Ein erster Entwurf enttäuscht jedoch, meint Mario Kubina. Statt für Dynamik zu sorgen, verliert sich die Koalition im Klein-Klein - etwa den Vereinssteuern.

True Crime, etwa in Podcasts, fasziniert viele Menschen und gibt ihnen das Gefühl, Gefahren besser einschätzen zu können. Doch bizarre Kriminalfälle können die Wahrnehmung von Risiken auch verzerren. Von Lukas Baumann.

Am Wochenende waren Details aus einem Gesetzentwurf des Finanzministers durchgesickert. Für Kritik sorgte vor allem der Punkt zu den Vereinssteuern. Den nahm Klingbeil nun zurück - betonte aber zugleich, es sei ein falscher Eindruck entstanden.

Die Bundespolizei soll künftig für mehr Schutz vor Drohnenangriffen an deutschen Flughäfen sorgen. 300 Spezialkräfte sollen deutschlandweit an acht Standorten im Einsatz sein. Auch mehr Technik zur Abwehr ist geplant.

Von allen Parteien, die bei der russischen Parlamentswahl antreten dürfen, lehnt nur Jabloko den Krieg gegen die Ukraine ab. Die kremltreue Partei Rodina hat deshalb geklagt. Sie will, dass Jabloko von der Wahl ausgeschlossen wird. Von E. Nembach.

Alle zwei Jahre beschäftigt sich das Weltsozialforum mit der Lage des Globalen Südens. In diesem Jahr kam man in Benin zusammen - und hatte eine selbstbewusste Botschaft für die Staaten des Nordens. Von Georg Restle.

Sie gehören unterschiedlichen politischen Lagern an, haben nun aber eine gemeinsame Erklärung veröffentlicht: Darin warnen die Ministerpräsidentinnen Italiens und Dänemarks vor "unkontrollierter Migration".

Am Rohstoffmarkt fällt der Goldpreis mit einer deutlichen Erholung auf. Das hat vor allem mit den Zinserwartungen zu tun. Daneben zeichnen sich aber auch andere Kurstreiber ab. Von Detlev Landmesser.

Mit der geplanten Steuerreform will Finanzminister Klingbeil Menschen mit kleinen und mittleren Einkommen entlasten. Doch sein erster Entwurf, der bereits in Berlin kursiert, sorgt für scharfe Kritik - auch vom Koalitionspartner.

Erneut ist der Ätna ausgebrochen, Europas aktivster Vulkan. Der Flugverkehr auf der beliebten italienischen Ferieninsel Sizilien wurde zeitweise eingeschränkt. Noch immer gilt die Warnstufe Rot.

Die Zahl der Übergriffe auf Zugbegleiter im Regionalverkehr hat nach Angaben der Bahn zugenommen. Der Konzern will gegensteuern - etwa mit stichsicheren Westen und Tonaufnahmen. Auch soll es mehr Personal in Zügen geben.

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> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to advocate for digital ID laws that would prevent adults from using the internet anonymously. Of course. Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

All the information Gemini surfaced was created with human effort and published on the internet with the expectation that humans would visit the website and the creator would get some reward - advertising dollars, bragging rights, popularity, subscribers or whatever else. If the only visitors to websites are now LLM training bots then what incentive is there to publish anything new? For how long can we continue to rely on pre-2024 non-AI generated content?

Linux distro founder here (stagex) I will never be compelled to implement this, and would never merge it. Every release requires quorum signatures by an international maintainer team, and the distro is designed to work offline-first, with some variants not even supporting network drivers in the kernel, so Illinois legislators can eat shit.

I feel like all of these laws are being designed backwards. Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion. Requiring my kids' devices to advertise their age (or their age "bucket", as if that was a meaningful difference) to protect them is not doing me or my kids any favors.

Disclaimer, I work on Gemma and open models at Deepmind and the opinions here are my own There were open models from EleutherAI (GPT-Neo), Google Brain (T5X, Bert), and HuggingFace was promoting open models (and others doing open work I haven't listed here) all prior to 2023 and the big Chatgpt moment. https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo/releases https://github.com/google-research/bert https://github.com/google-research/t5x If you're learning about AI models it's still worthwhile to review these models and codebases because they continue to be the basis of the technology that's being produced today! It'll give you a good perspective of how things have changed, similar to say learning about propeller planes before moving onto modern jet engines.

I think something that doesn't get said enough is Meta did, albeit intentionally kick off the origin of the open source race back in 2023 with the release of llama. I'm not a big fan of meta in general, but they've done enough good, and it's possible that it was intentional as well. I don't know, I wasn't in the rooms, and I think it's worth giving them some reasonable doubt. No one is purely good, and no one is purely evil. This is net good regardless.

You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt? Yeah, for me, that's what parsing huge volumes of LLM-produced text like "direct model calls as replaceable semantic workers" does to my brain. Maybe others don't really have this issue, but after any long output, I prompt the agent "Go back and decompress any LLM-speak in light of the higher level task goals. Eliminate deictic language." The revised output documents are solely for my personal usage to expedite understanding. The LLMs can slowly converge on their own language for all I care; I retain raw agent output for future agent usage (to avoid the "lossy" problem the author mentions), but that doesn't eliminate the need for some intermediate translation I can use to actually help get my work done instead of spending hours attempting to understand what a "load-bearing pinned gate" is.

Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment. Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research; simply having an idea is not costly (but it makes in medical research for example). All that software patents do is creating a minefield that hinders competition. For software Copyright is a far better instrument. Let the one with best implementation win... That's where the cost is: Implementing, testing, shipping, maintaining. Protect that. Sorry for the rant. Edit: Spelling

Shrinkflation is all over. Burger buns at fast food places were more dense 20 years ago. The small burgers had 1/8th pound patties instead of the current 1/10th pound. It's hard to find a product that hasn't gotten worse or more expensive, even adjusted for inflation.

Most probably believe this is a good thing, but don't want to give Zuckerberg credit because a) he's had a profoundly negative impact on society and b) the strategy is transparent, he's trying to commoditize his closed rivals, it's not out of principle. I personally think more open models are a good thing regardless of motive.

Remember when we needed 200 servers for an enterprise website because Apache used one process or thread per connection - and Nginx collapsed that into a single box overnight? That moment for LLMs is near. It’s going to move us from the big iron era of AI to small portable brains. Nature has already proved it’s possible with 20 watts and very little heat generation. And I think the data center buildout will end in carnage.

It's hilarious how these companies handle security breaches. I once reported superadmin user/pass committed to github at a major YC backed background check company I worked at and everyone tried to make it seem like it was my fault. I had just started working there and found it in the first week. Anyway, had to show that it was committed by their main Staff engineer 2 years before I even worked there. For 2 years everyone's background check data in the United States that went through this thing - millions per year - thousands of Uber drivers, DoorDash, etc. all were viewable with no clearance. Anyone including overseas contractors, new hires, etc. could just login and check anyone's criminal history. Reporting it was a disaster. They all tried to cover their asses, this huge drama and hand waving started. They tried to blame anyone and everyone. Eventually it was just AWS fault somehow (it wasn't, the Staff engineer was a dumbass, he committed it to a ruby seed file). ----- I digress, the CTO didn't respond because he was more worried about how it would make him look. This industry is dead - the wrong people work in it.

It’s rather amusing to me to read comments like this, and then simultaneously whenever a Chinese company or team releases open-weight models or whatever there is a giant round of applause, America is so behind, and there’s nothing but positive things to say about the intelligent, creative, and well-intentioned Chinese engineers (which is true, America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on great people). Don’t you know? Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI. When an American company does anything? Doom. And. Gloom. The engineers? Taken to the slaughterhouse! America? Behind! The public? Bamboozeled! > This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation. I’ve been told over and over this doesn’t matter. Just needs to be cheap and open. Or maybe that’s only when Chyna is involved? Sorry this post is a bit snarky but it really is something to behold. And certainly I don’t know the OP’s opinions on Chinese open weight models. Perhaps they agree with me.

I lament the comments saying this in any way redeems Meta (the company). The researchers releasing this stuff have almost nothing to do with Meta other than being bankrolled by the slaughterhouse. You aren't the customer, you are the pawn in big tech's game of thrones. Your good will is a commodity to be traded, almost literally. It will be used against you the moment it's convenient. This is open weights because Meta couldn't monetize it in any other way than to cloud developer's judgement of their reputation. But I guess most people just don't care. I'm glad it's open. It does not make me think any better of Meta.

Will be interesting to see how Qwen3.8 27B compares against this once it releases this week. Seems like dense 30B is back in fashion? EDIT: An open weight version of Muse Spark 1.2 is going to be released as well: https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792 https://xcancel.com/alexandr_wang/status/2086756152034066792

Hallo! Von Dienstag bis Freitag ist es heiter oder sogar ganz wolkenlos und niederschlagsfrei. Die Tageshöchsttemperaturen klettern von 28 Grad am Dienstag auf 33 Grad am Freitag. Der schwache Wind dreht langsam von Nord über Ost auf Süd. Mit Taupunkten um 5 Grad ist die Luft außerordentlich trocken. Am Samstag wird es noch einmal sehr heiß mit Temperaturen von 35 Grad. Aber es beginnt auch schon eine Umstellung der Großwetterlage, eine Kaltfront nähert sich, so dass gegen Abend erste Gewitter möglich sind. Das gewohnte Muster, bei dem sich hinter jeder Kaltfront rasch das nächste Hoch aufbaut, setzt sich anschließend ab Sonntag nicht fort. Stattdessen wandern immer wieder Tiefdruckgebiete vom Atlantik zu uns nach Mitteleuropa. Durchwachsenes, normales Sommerwetter ist die Folge, bei dem sich sonnige Phasen mit Regengebieten abwechseln bei Höchsttemperaturen nahe 25 Grad. Die Nächte zum Mittwoch und zum Donnerstag sind recht frisch mit Temperaturminima nahe 10 Grad. Anschließend dann wieder Tiefsttemperaturen nahe 13 Grad, was dem langjährigen Durchschnitt entspricht. Bis Samstag leiden die Pflanzen noch sehr unter der Trockenheit. Wenn man sich umschaut, dann zeigen vor allem Bäume und Sträucher in bebauten Gebieten Trockenschäden, und zwar ganz besonders in Gärten direkt neben der Straße. Also am besten mal im Garten umsehen, auf schlaff herabhängende und braun verfärbte Blätter achten und bei Bedarf wässern. Wetterochs Bitte unterstützen Sie die Wetterochs-Wettermail durch eine Spende!

Border images are an overlooked feature. One neat fact is that border image slices can run across entire borders on an element, and animating it creates beautiful effects. Animating CSS border-image originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.

Smashing Magazine’s in-person conferences are back and returning to the wonderful city of Freiburg next month, September 7–10. SmashingConf Freiburg 2026, September 7-10 originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.

Some "open" agentic tools: Open Chamber Open Agents Open Design Open Design HTML Video Open Montage Wonder if they use Open Props 😏

I first noticed web scroll areas had scroll locking behavior when making 2D scroll snap demos; I couldn't scroll diagonally without getting hijacked and locked into an x or y axis. Even on a touch device, where a diagonal gesture is so easy and natural. by Adam Argyle (@argyleink) on CodePen. Thanks to Bramus's rad interactive blog post I saw Chrome 153 with the remedy: .scroller { overflow: auto; overscroll-behavior: contain; scroll-axis-lock: none; 👈 } spec | check for support Freedom from the axis lock 🤘🏻 # I was thinking: swipe to dismiss interactions flings maps or infinite canvas navigating datagrids or tables image zoom scrolling around 360 pano images or 3D model panning data vis exploration Just seems worth while to use the natural inertia, tensions, perf and feels that scroll snap has for the snap feedback of "didnt swipe far enough" and the browser owned easing. Can also mitigate scrollTo strangeness that might do x then y. # I saw some performance regressions in the first 2 demo's I pulled up to test with swipe prototype snap matrix Filed a bug. I wouldn't necessarily file this as perfectly fixed, I still felt it was a bit clumsy or not enabling diagonal scrolling as smoothly as I'd like. Overall exciting and meaningful IMO tho. Your thoughts?

Until Shere Hite’s Report, even the most daring sexologists refused to listen to what women desired and hated in sex - by Rosa Campbell Read on Aeon

If you want to view the Universe in way that take us past our current frontiers, you only have a few options. You can build a larger telescope: with greater surface area to collect light and a larger diameter to increase your resolution. You can polish your mirror’s surface to be more reflective and smoother: down to nanometer-scale precision. You can keep it clean and pristine: reducing your noise. You can build improved adaptive optics systems: better correcting for the distortion of the atmosphere. And you can build next-generation instruments that make better scientific use of the information encoded in each and every photon collected. When it comes to ground-based optical astronomy — using the same types of light that humans have been using since the invention of the telescope — there are three current planned facilities that seek to do all of these at once. The ELT, or European Extremely Large Telescope, which plans to be the largest of a new generation of telescopes at 39 meters in diameter. The GMT, or Giant Magellan Telescope, whose clever design will provide the best wide-field views and be the most successful at several scientific application despite its smaller, 25 meter size. And the TMT, or Thirty Meter Telescope, which blends many of GMT’s and ELT’s advantages together with an intermediate 30 meter size, but will be located in the northern hemisphere: giving humanity access to parts of the sky that cannot be seen by ELT or GMT. The truth of the matter is, despite the challenges each observatory faces, humanity would truly be better with all three of them functioning: delivering science, together, that no one of them can accomplish on their own. Here’s what the world is waiting for. This photograph shows the Large Magellanic Cloud shining brilliantly in the dark skies provided in the region surrounding Las Campanas Observatory: the future home of the Giant Magellan Telescope. This location is one of the best in the world for ground-based astronomy: with clear skies, high altitudes, dry and still air, excellent seeing, and an astronomy-friendly latitude of 29 degrees south. Credit: Yuri Beletsky The most important thing to recognize is that — while nobody is denying the power of space telescopes — there are plenty of advantages that come with building an observatory on the ground, as opposed to in space. Some of the biggest ones include: No size and weight restrictions. To take a telescope to space, you’re limited by the physical size, dimensions, and payload capacity of the launch vehicle. On the ground, you can build a device that’s as large and heavy as you can design and afford. No launch costs; no risk of a launch failure. Even though launch costs have plummeted since the 20th century, it’s still an expensive proposition, and every rocket launch carries a risk of failure. The Ariane 5 rocket that launched just prior to the one that launched JWST failed; with no launch, there’s no risk of a catastrophic loss. Infinite repairability and easy maintenance. In space, if something goes wrong with your observatory, it’s very difficult — if not entirely prohibitive — to service it with a repair mission. On the ground, your facilities and infrastructure for maintenance and repairs can even be built on the same site as the telescope itself. Upgradeability. Many of today’s greatest ground-based observatories were actually build in the 20th century; the optical hardware is essentially the same. However, advances in instrumentation, including in adaptive optics and CCD/camera technology, have kept those observatories relevant for decades beyond their original planned lifetime. In space, your telescope gets a finite lifetime, and once it runs out of fuel, resources, functioning gyroscopes, functioning antennae, etc., its useful lifetime ends. On the ground, you can extend the life of your telescope for decades; these three 30 meter class telescopes should remain world class observatories for the entirety of the 21st century. This photograph of the under-construction ELT (ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope) atop Cerro Armazones, taken in 2023, shows the all-important roads that connect to the observatory and the summit. Such stable infrastructure is necessary to allow the construction and support of a world-class astronomical observatory. Credit: G. Hüdepohl (atacamaphoto.com)/ESO The biggest aspect of a ground based telescope that cannot be overemphasized enough is size: the size of the primary mirror, both in terms of its light-gathering power, or collecting area, and in terms of resolution, or the number of wavelengths of light that fit across your primary mirror’s diameter. It’s true that size, alone, isn’t everything, but it is the single most important factor in determining the quality of many aspects of your telescope and what it can do. A telescope, at its most basic, is a “light bucket,” with a collecting area that takes incoming light from arbitrarily far away and focuses it, either through mirrors, lenses, or a combination (but most often, in modern times, mirrors), in order to direct that light into the telescope’s instruments: where it can be put to good use. The collecting area of the telescope determines how much light you gather, where a telescope that’s twice the diameter (say, four meters versus two meters) will have four times the collecting area. The more light you gather, the more you can see. That includes: dimmer and fainter objects, faint, extended structures around objects that are bigger than a point source, greater numbers of objects in the same field of view, and more distant objects, whose light has spread out over a greater area by the time it reaches your observatory’s eyes. This simulated view of a dense star cluster shows how JWST would see it (left) and how GMT would see it (right). Owing to GMT’s unique architecture, there are no diffraction spikes present: just a faint series of concentric circles around the brightest stars in the field. However, the increase in sharpness comes from the higher resolutions that are achievable with larger primary mirrors, enabling greater numbers of wavelengths of light to fit across the larger diameters. Credit: Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation The largest optical telescope today, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, is 10.4 meters in diameter. If you took a circle that was 10.4 meters in diameter and asked what its area is, you’d get a number that was just about 85 square meters (85 m²), but that doesn’t quite correspond to the amount of light that gets collected and put to use. Because telescopes: typically have holes in the centers of the mirrors in order for the collected light to reach the instruments, are usually segmented, with gaps between the various mirror segments, sometimes have support struts and secondary mirrors that block a portion of the incoming light, and lose some of that collected light before it reaches the instruments due to imperfect reflectivity of the mirrors (some due to the mirror material itself, some due to the coatings, and some due to the imperfect cleanliness of the mirror, which naturally worsens over time), the Gran Telescopio Canarias “only” has a true primary mirror area of 78.54 m², and an effective collecting area (when all of the losses are accounted for) of 73 m². By all metrics, however, that still makes the Gran Telescopio Canarias the current record-holder for largest optical telescope in the world. It can fit greater numbers of wavelengths of light across its primary mirror than any other optical telescope, giving it the highest resolution as well. However, it’s only the largest of the current generation of telescopes. The three next-generation ground-based telescopes — the ELT, the GMT, and the TMT — all will far surpass the capabilities of every currently existing telescope. The three largest telescopes in this image, located along the right, are the TMT, ELT, and GMT, and represent a new 30 meter class, from 25.4 to 39 meters in diameter. For comparison, today’s cutting-edge modern day telescopes range from 6.5 to 10.4 meters in diameter, and are represented by the majority of ground-based telescopes shown in the two middle columns. The leap from the current to the next generation will be transformative, but even the largest of the proposed optical telescopes cannot compare with the resolutions achievable by VLBI. Credit: Cmglee/Wikimedia Commons Scaling up in size has significant implications for the type of science that can be conducted, and the types of things we can learn from doing it. Expected improvements include: the ability to study galactic substructures, even in faint, low-mass dwarf galaxies, to the highest-resolution ever, creating a new probe of the structure of dark matter halos, the ability to probe the feedback from supermassive black holes on star-formation within the host galaxy as never before, teaching us about the growth and activity of the black holes as well as their influence on cosmic evolution and star-formation, the ability to probe fainter, lower-mass stars than ever before, including across our Milky Way, granting us the ability to reconstruct our own galactic assembly history in superior fashion, the ability to resolve individual young stars, including substructures and the presence and abundance of complex molecules within their protoplanetary disks, the ability to map out the distribution of various heavy elements in the interstellar medium and in the remnants of exploded stars and stellar remnants, such as supernovae and kilonovae, the ability to find, measure, and characterize exoplanets down to lower masses and smaller radii around all classes of stars than ever before, and much, much more. This applies to every one of the three next-generation telescopes that are currently being planned, designed, and built, but each one has their own special properties that make them important in their own right. This diagram shows the novel 5-mirror optical system of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Before reaching the science instruments the light is first reflected from the telescope’s giant concave 39-meter segmented primary mirror (M1), it then bounces off two further 4-meter-class mirrors, one convex (M2) and one concave (M3). The final two mirrors (M4 and M5) form a built-in adaptive optics system to allow extremely sharp images to be formed at the final focal plane. The primary mirror consists of 798 segments to form the 39-meter mirror, but the light that matters most isn’t just the light that’s collected, but rather the light that reaches the instruments. Credit: ESO ELT (formerly the “E-ELT”), the European Extremely Large Telescope. While the United States was busy building JWST — humanity’s most up-to-date flagship space telescope — Europe decided to invest in a different direction: building the most up-to-date flagship ground-based telescope. The ELT will the largest and most expensive of the new telescopes, with the most reflective coatings and the greatest number of mirror segments of them all. They will also have the smallest surface errors, down to 6 nanometers on average (what we call root-mean-squared errors), which is around a factor of four smaller than its competitors. Because it has a larger primary mirror diameter (39 m), a greater overall collecting area (978 m²) and a larger effective collecting area (929 m²) than all the other telescopes, it’s going to be far and away the best of the next-generation telescopes for all applications involving point-sources. That means, for: faint, low-mass stars, including within nebulae, star clusters, and the halo of the Milky Way, identifying and viewing exoplanets, including Earth-sized exoplanets, or taking spectroscopic measurements, including follow-ups of candidate galaxies identified by JWST, of galaxies at the highest redshifts and greatest distances of all, the ELT will be unrivaled, even by the other telescopes in the 30 meter class. In these regards, from its location on the summit of Cerro Armazones in Chile, the ELT truly stands alone at the top of its class. Other ELTs need to take as many as 13x more images to capture the same view of the Universe. With the Many Instrument Fiber System, or MANIFEST, the Giant Magellan Telescope will be able to concurrently observe 100’s of objects and increase the number of targets that can be studied at once. MANIFEST is a multi-object fiber positioning system that allows the telescope to feed light from 100’s of celestial objects simultaneously to its spectrographs. Credit: Damien Jemison, Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation GMT, the Giant Magellan Telescope. It’s true: there’s no making up for the fact that GMT is smaller than ELT, and is in fact the smallest of all of the three next-generation, 30 meter class telescopes proposed. Although it has a 25.4 meter diameter primary mirror, there are significant blank spaces between the mirrors, meaning that it has a much smaller overall collecting area for light (368 m²) and an even smaller effective collecting area (326 m²). However, it has its benefits, too. Its field of view is several times larger than the ELT field of view, meaning it will be superior for wide-field studies. Its optimized for shorter wavelengths, making it superior for bluer optical studies and capable of ultraviolet studies, which ELT cannot do. Since resolution equates to the number of wavelengths of light that fit across your telescope’s primary mirror’s diameter, it can potentially equal or exceed ELT’s resolution for the same object by observing at significantly shorter wavelengths. And because of its optical design, it will have the smallest instruments of any of the three telescopes, meaning it should be more easily upgradeable (and for lower costs) with new instruments in the future. Located just a little bit further south in Chile (at 29 °S latitude, rather than 24 °S latitude) than the ELT, the GMT will be able to observe nearly the same set of objects that the ELT will: at slightly lower resolution and with slightly less sensitivity, but with a much larger field-of-view. While it’s less ideal for viewing point sources, it’s much better optimized for conducting large-area, survey-related studies, and for operating at short wavelengths. These renderings compare similar science instruments that the ELT, TMT, and GMT are all planned to be outfitted with. Compared with the largest telescope’s (the ELT’s) instruments, GMT’s comparable instruments are three times smaller in each of three dimensions: a factor of 27 different in volume, mass, and likely cost and time to complete construction as well. Despite this size reduction, there is no compromise in the instrument’s performance. TMT’s instrument size, much like its collecting area size, are in between GMT’s and ELT’s. Credit: Damien Jemison, Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation TMT, the Thirty Meter Telescope. The TMT has its own unique architecture, and for most science cases, falls somewhere in between the other two telescopes. It’s larger than GMT but smaller than ELT at 30 meters in diameter, it has a filled aperture and an intermediate collecting area (655 m²) and effective collecting area (524 m²), it has 492 hexagonal segments tiled together, and its instruments are larger than GMT’s but smaller than ELT’s. However, unlike either GMT or ELT, the TMT can do one thing that neither of its rivals can do: observe objects that are very far north in the northern celestial hemisphere. Because of the latitude at which GMT and ELT are located, they can observe the entire southern and equatorial skies over the course of a year, but will be severely limited when it comes to viewing objects north of about 53-55 °N latitude: or about 9-10% of the entire sky. While the initial plan was to construct the TMT atop the summit of Mauna Kea, a combination of factors — particularly in the form of active resistance from the local community, as well as the loss of major federal construction funding support from the National Science Foundation — have made the alternate site, the Roque de los Muchachos summit of La Palma in the Canary Islands, arguably the leading choice for a construction site. A recent pledge from the government of Spain for up to €1B in funding support for the TMT’s construction on that site makes it a more attractive option than ever. The Thirty Meter Telescope is shown at a very low elevation angle in this digital rendering. The segmented primary mirror reflects the convex secondary mirror. The tertiary mirror in the center of the primary mirror is oriented to send light to the Wide Field Optical Spectrograph, the gray structure located on the right side of the image: one of the observatory’s main instruments. The left and right instrument platforms are seen and the dark blue adaptive optics enclosure is seen on the upper left on the instrument support structure. Credit: TMT International Observatory There’s a saying in astronomy that normally comes up when skywatchers first think about getting into amateur astronomy as a hobby and wonder which telescope they should get: “the best telescope to get is the one you’ll use and look through.” In amateur astronomy, this is usually a warning to new hobbyists not to get a large, complex telescope at first, but rather one that’s easy to set up and that you’ll want to use frequently. In the world of flagship-class professional telescopes, however, it could just as easily serve as a warning to TMT leadership: that if they cling to the small advantages in conditions that the Mauna Kea site has over the La Palma site, they’ll be even farther behind the other two telescopes than they already are. The local opposition in Hawaii to TMT was clear and significant in 2015, intensified further in 2019, and has only solidified in all the time since. There is still time to make the right decision — a decision that will result in a ground-based flagship optical telescope for the northern hemisphere — and to assemble the funding consortium that will bring that telescope to fruition. There is still a very bright long-term future to be built as far as astronomy on the summit of Mauna Kea is concerned, but for 21st century science, the northern hemisphere needs a 30 meter class telescope, and opportunities for colleges, universities, research consortia, and nations to be a part of the TMT on La Palma is as bright as it’s ever been. This photograph, outside the Gran Telescopio Canarias, showcases an outside view of the world’s largest optical telescope as of 2026. Atop the summit of La Palma, it’s one of Earth’s three great astronomical sites. Although the ELT and the GMT, both in the Chilean Andes, will someday surpass it as the world’s largest optical telescope, there is a fascinating opportunity for La Palma to host the TMT: providing the northern hemisphere with a new flagship optical astronomy facility fit for the 21st century. Credit: Pedro José Luengo Rarmírez/flickr What’s important to remember is that Earth’s flagship observatories, both on the ground and in space, are both: the most oversubscribed observatories in the whole world, with far more meritorious research proposals submitted than there are available observing slots to accommodate them, and also the most scientifically productive facilities in all of astronomy and astrophysics, with the current ground-based 6.5 meter Magellan Telescope, the 8 meter Subaru and Gemini Telescopes, the 10 meter Keck Telescopes, and the 10.4 meter Gran Telescopio Canarias all leading to comparable scientific outputs on a year-over-year basis. The truth is that all three of these new facilities should be built; all of them offer incredible scientific potential; all of them can benefit researchers, human knowledge, and investing countries and funding partners in ways that no other endeavor is capable of. The loss of funding from the US federal government doesn’t need to be a catastrophe for the GMT and TMT; rather, they could be an opportunity for other nations, as Spain is attempting to prove, to become leaders in astronomy here in 2026 and well beyond. This article Why the world needs all three 30-meter class telescopes is featured on Big Think.

“Some people will hate what I say,” the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy tells me, “because it’s all about unweaving the rainbow. Some people want to retain the magic and don’t want to know why something’s working. That’s fine. But actually, for me, you know, the rainbow becomes much more interesting when you understand what is happening to the light that makes the rainbow like that.” Du Sautoy, the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and I are speaking about “formalism” in the philosophy of art — the idea that we can explain why something is beautiful by pointing out the formal parts that make it up. Formalism holds that we can account for aesthetic judgments in non-aesthetic terms. Maybe we find a song beautiful because of its tertian harmonies, or we like a certain photo because the angular lines converge on a point. Formalism “unweaves the rainbow” by telling you exactly why you find something beautiful. Not everyone is a formalist. Some aestheticians do not think you can “reduce” art to its composite parts. They think beauty is beauty entirely because it is irreducibly subjective — a pleasurable phenomenon that walks the line between emotion and mysticism. Du Sautoy is not one of these people. He’s not only a formalist but a card-carrying, hard-lined sort of formalist. Du Sautoy believes that beauty has everything to do with mathematics. “So, mathematics — as a subject — has a history and an evolution,” he says. “And mathematicians play a role in that. But I’m very much a Platonist at heart. I believe that there are these structures to nature that do not need a moment of creation. And so, I believe that our Universe around us is a physical piece of mathematics. And that’s why we see so many of the structures that we recognize, bubbling under the natural world. And how did mathematics emerge? It emerged out of humans trying to understand the natural world around us. So, it’s inevitable that if there is structure in nature, that they will be the first structures we discover, as mathematicians and as humans.” The structures all around Du Sautoy argues that the Universe is made up of structures — and mathematics is the language that we have developed to explain and represent those structures. This is true for every corner of the Universe, and it’s true in observable, day-to-day life. It’s there in nature. Du Sautoy gives a few examples: Chickens “always order their numbers. Smallest to the left, largest to the right.” Cicadas “hide underground for 17 years, doing absolutely nothing. How are these cicadas counting 17 years?” And symmetry, he explains, “is often a signal in the natural world, that of something we should take notice of, because symmetry very often is an indication of an animal.” The mathematics of beauty Du Sautoy’s formalism is an extension of his Platonism: If everything we experience is “a physical piece of mathematics,” then art will be no different. We looked at three examples from his upcoming book, Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity. The Golden Ratio: “Mozart, for example, used the idea of the golden ratio in The Magic Flute. Debussy and Bartók really loved the idea as well. Le Corbusier uses Fibonacci numbers as a kind of blueprint for building. Perhaps more interesting is the idea of a prime number being a blueprint. For example, a composer like Messiaen uses them to create a kind of a sense of tension in the Quartet for the End of Time.” Pollock’s Fractals: “Jackson Pollock is famous for very abstract expressionist art — flicking paint around. And a lot of people say, ‘Well, anyone could do that.’ Turns out not everyone can, because he’s doing something quite special in his painting style, which is that he’s actually creating with his body and the paintbrush a chaotic system. And the geometry of chaos is this thing called a ‘fractal.’ So actually, what he’s making is a lot of fractal geometry, and a fractal has this wonderful property that it will never simplify. Of course, at some point and with the painting you have, it has to simplify because you will see the pixels of paint. But it’s actually one of the beautiful things about Pollock that when you’re standing in front of it, you lose your sense of scale. As you walk towards it, you’re not quite sure how close you are.” The Number-crunching Wordsmith. “Shakespeare is obsessed with number. You think he’s a wordsmith, but actually, he was a great number cruncher, too. Number is really important to indicate something significant in his poetry. For example, what’s the most famous line in Shakespeare? You know, everything normally comes in tens; it’s iambic pentameter. But the most famous line in Shakespeare — ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ — it’s 11 and uses the prime number to spark you out of your haze. You know, you’re sitting there listening to Hamlet and being lulled by the iambic pentameter, and then suddenly there’s this extra beat. And that’s very deliberate. He uses 11-beat and seven-beat things at significant moments.” For du Sautoy, mathematics is the hidden scaffolding of beauty, the invisible thread that connects art, nature, and the cosmos. If we look closely enough, we can see how far mathematics unweaves the rainbow to reveal deeper patterns beneath. Does that diminish the beauty? Does that dispel the magic? I think I’m with du Sautoy on this. It only makes it stronger. This article The hidden mathematics behind why you find things beautiful is featured on Big Think.

In parts of West Africa, getting sick used to mean navigating a maze of barriers — distance, cost, time spent away from work — before ever seeing a health worker. Muso set out to change that. Working hand-in-hand with governments, they built a model where professional community health workers bring care directly to patients’ doors within 24 hours, at no cost. And because these health workers are from the communities they serve, trust in the new process is already built in; they’re not strangers showing up at the door. In addition to the community health worker program, a big part of Muso’s work includes upgrading primary care clinics — through rehabilitating infrastructure and training clinic staff — to better accommodate patient referrals when home care is too complex.  The impact has been historic, resulting in an over 90% drop in infant mortality rates in Mali alone. Today, governments across the region are funding and scaling the model themselves, bringing it to over 12M people and growing. This video The community healthcare model transforming lives across West Africa is featured on Big Think.

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