Two mathematicians proved a fair election is impossible

🔥 Most Enraging

The protein advice doubled and now a review says most of us are eating too much

American dietary guidance recently pushed the recommended protein intake to nearly twice what it used to be. A researcher at Wisconsin has now gone through more than three hundred studies and concluded that for people who are not especially active, that much protein may raise inflammation and switch on the pathways involved in aging. Athletes are fine. Pregnant women and some older people need more. Everyone else has been choking down chicken they may not have needed. The guidance moved. Nobody came to tell me.

😩 Most Exhausting

Seventy-five minutes once a week did as much as three sessions

Researchers in Hong Kong split adults carrying weight around the middle into three groups for four months: one brisk interval walk a week, three a week, or nothing but health advice. The once-a-week group lost as much around the waist as the three-times-a-week group. Seventy-five minutes. One session. All the guilt I have carried about the days I did not go, and the answer was one walk a week done properly.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Dark matter may have a hidden force that slows the universe down instead

Everything we know about dark matter comes from watching gravity, which leaves room for it to be doing other things where we cannot see. A theorist at the Perimeter Institute worked out what would happen if dark matter particles pulled on each other with a second force of their own. You would expect an extra pull to make galaxies clump together faster. It does the reverse, because that same force makes the particles effectively lighter as the universe expands. Even the invisible majority of everything declines to behave.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

The world's oldest cat is thirty-one and drinks only bottled spring water

A man in Greater Manchester says his tortoiseshell cat Millie was born in 1995, which would make her thirty-one. She will drink only Buxton spring water, a habit that began when the pipes near the house were being repaired, and she eats salmon, prawns, chicken and tuna. In hot weather she gets two fans and ice in the bowl. Guinness cannot verify the age, because the only evidence is a photograph from 1995. I believe him. Nobody invents the fans.

▸ Cancer may be snapping its own DNA in order to keep growing — Researchers in Jerusalem found that tumors drive their growth genes so hard that the DNA at those sites physically breaks. The cell repairs each break, makes small errors doing it, and those errors become the next round of mutations. So the instability that makes cancer so hard to treat is not a side effect of the disease. It is the cost of running the engine that fast. The team thinks those same overworked sites may be where a tumor is most vulnerable.

▸ Something in the Milky Way is flinging protons harder than the Large Hadron Collider — There is an object in the constellation Aquila, out near Altair, that is accelerating protons past a quadrillion electron volts. The Large Hadron Collider does not reach that energy, and it has an electricity bill. An observatory in China spotted the source, and telescopes in Japan and America helped confirm the finding. Nobody knows yet what the thing actually is.

▸ Tiny specks of pollution may be making tropical storm clouds worse — The air high over the tropical ocean is unusually clean, and it carries far more water vapor than it should be able to hold without forming droplets. Add small particles of pollution and that surplus vapor has something to condense onto, which releases heat, which shoves the air upward harder. Earlier work missed this because it had been looking at the wrong sort of cloud. The dirt we put into the air is what pushes the storms higher.

Fine. A metal band from Detroit called the Autumn Kings had their van die on a highway in rural Wisconsin, with two days of repairs ahead of them and ten hours to reach a festival in Michigan five hundred miles away. A man in his sixties named Ernie pulled over, listened to the situation, and handed them the keys to his Ford Explorer. They put more than a thousand miles on it across several days and made the show. Asked afterwards why he had done it, Ernie said he had never met a live band before, and that he just wanted to help three strangers at the side of the road. The guitarist says it was the best the band has ever played. I am going to go and be quiet for a bit.