{"id":81364,"date":"2026-07-30T09:44:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T01:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=81364"},"modified":"2026-07-30T09:44:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T01:44:34","slug":"science-news-july-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=81364","title":{"rendered":"Science News (July 2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A decent number of articles for this month from different fields to boot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>To start off, we have an astonishing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/science-and-technology\/2026\/07\/01\/scientists-take-another-step-towards-lab-made-life\">announcement <\/a>about fully <strong>synthetic cells<\/strong>, that is living cells that have no ancestors and they are entirely made in the laboratory. Nicknamed Spudcells, these are bubbles of liposomes containing chromosomes engineered to be a minimum viable set. The cells can reproduce after a fashion but arguably are not truly alive because they are dependent on a diet of DNA-free liposomes to survive and thrive. They have no metabolism and do nothing but execute the instructions in their DNA to replicate provided they have the right building materials available. Even so this is a huge step in creating the earliest forms of purely synthetic life and is the stuff of real science-fiction brought to reality.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Next we have a more modest but still interesting <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/full\/10.1111\/obes.70104\">paper <\/a>that studies the cognitive impact of participating in the annual <strong>Ramadan fasting<\/strong>. What&#8217;s cool here is that to measure potential differences in cognitive performance, the researchers used data from tournament chess games, covering almost 10,000 players from 178 countries. The result is that they were unable to detect substantial differences in between Muslim players&#8217; during Ramadan and outside of it, implying that the cognitive impact is minimal.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>It has become a truism that discourse on all <strong>social media trends towards the negative<\/strong>. This <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2527316123\">paper <\/a>expands on that, arguing that when many people comment on the same topic online, there is a natural urge to differentiate yourself, to say something different from what has already been said. To that end, users tend to make increasingly negative comments over time. They observe that this tendency is especially strong when the initial post is positive, prompting users to counteract that positivity by making critical comments.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Finally we have the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cfa.harvard.edu\/news\/first-atmosphere-detected-habitable-zone-rocky-world\">news <\/a>that astronomers have detected for the first time an <strong>atmosphere <\/strong>surrounding an Earth-like rock planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star. Before anyone gets too excited though, what they actually detected was helium escaping from the upper atmosphere of the planet in question, LS 1140 b about 48 light-years away. This is enough evidence that the planet retains an atmosphere but should not be construed as meaning that the atmosphere is mainly made of helium. It does serve as a good demonstration that their methodology for detecting atmospheres around exoplanets work and suggests that this is only the first of many such discoveries.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A decent number of articles for this month from different fields to boot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81364"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81518,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81364\/revisions\/81518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}