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The Atlantic hurricane season just set a new record. While it’s not unusual for the Atlantic hurricane season to take a while to get going—the typical peak in storm activity is late August through September—it is unusual not to see a single hurricane form by September 11. But that’s exactly what has happened this year for the very first time since reliable records began.

And with no likely contenders set to turn into a hurricane for at least the next seven days, that record will extend. In fact, the 2026 season is easily set to have the latest-forming hurricane whenever one does spin up, meteorologist Michael Lowry wrote on his blog. That’s assuming that one spins up at all.

There has been some meager storm activity this year, with five tropical storms so far. These have included Tropical Storm Dolly, which coincidentally formed only days after singer Dolly Parton died.

The reason the Atlantic has been so quiet this year is the same reason the eastern Pacific—and particularly Hawaii—has seen a bonanza of storms: El Niño. The cyclical climate phenomenon features an eastward shift in a pool of warm water in the tropical Pacific that changes where heat enters the atmosphere. That shift causes a domino effect in the atmosphere, altering major wind patterns around the world.

Over the Atlantic, El Niño tends to create more of what is called wind shear, or winds that travel in different directions and speeds at various levels of the atmosphere, which cuts off the convection that fuels tropical cyclones. As a result, any seeds of storms may have ample warm ocean water to feed on, but wind shear cuts them down before they can really develop.

On the flip side, wind shear decreases over the eastern Pacific during an El Niño, leaving more room for storms to spin up into destructive beasts. And shear has been particularly low around Hawaii, leaving it uncharacteristically vulnerable to storms.

This El Niño is a doozy, already at record strength for this time of the year and expected to be among the strongest events in living memory. Its effects on the world’s weather will be more pronounced than in the past. And there is more recent evidence that climate change may be driving more of these “Super El Niños.”

Lowry noted that “it’s still more likely than not we’ll see a hurricane or two on the back side of the season” because there hasn’t been a season in the reliable records (going back to about 1950) without a single hurricane. There are no recorded hurricanes for the 1907 and 1914 seasons, but those happened before we had satellites to spot storms that remained out at sea, he explained. But if there were to be a year without a single Atlantic hurricane, “this would probably be the year,” Lowry said.

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When someone we deeply care about is hurting, our immediate, very human instinct is to try and fix it. We see a close friend crying over a sudden job loss, a family member stressed about an unexpected medical diagnosis or a coworker reeling from a devastating breakup, and we frantically scramble for the right words. More often than not, the phrase that tumbles out of our mouths is a reflex: “I’m sorry.”

While usually well-intentioned and polite, “I’m sorry” can sometimes fall entirely flat in moments of severe emotional distress. It can accidentally shut down the conversation, placing a subtle wall between you and the person in pain. Sometimes, it feels more like a “pity” response rather than a sturdy bridge of true connection. When someone is in the thick of anxiety or grief, an apology for a situation you didn’t even cause doesn’t always offer the deep, grounding support they actually crave.

Instead of trying to search for a silver lining or offering a hasty apology, psychologists suggest a radically different approach. The fastest and most effective way to comfort someone isn’t actually about fixing their complex problem or apologizing for their pain. It’s about practicing what mental health experts call “empathic listening”—a specific communication style rooted in deep compassion, genuine presence and intentional focus. Empathic listening allows the person suffering to feel entirely seen and validated, giving them the reassurance that they aren’t carrying their heavy emotional burden all by themselves.

And according to experts, unlocking this level of interpersonal support doesn’t require a psychology degree, a perfect script or a long, poetic speech. In fact, psychologists have pinpointed a remarkably simple, three-word phrase that instantly provides comfort, de-escalates emotional distress and builds lasting trust. This specific phrase cuts directly through the noise of empty platitudes, acting as an emotional lifeline for someone who feels isolated.

If you want to transform the way you support the people you love, swapping out “I’m sorry” for this powerful alternative is the ultimate place to start.

The 3-Word Phrase That Instantly Comforts

When a loved one is pouring their heart out, the most powerful three words you can offer are simply: “I’m with you.”

This short, declarative sentence carries immense emotional weight. Unlike “I’m sorry,” which can sometimes shift the focus to your own feelings of pity or helplessness, “I’m with you” centers the person in pain. It sends a clear, unwavering signal of solidarity and empathy.

“Sometimes the most powerful thing is not advice, but presence,” licensed psychologist Dr. Brittany McGeehanpreviously told Parade. “This phrase reminds them they’re not alone.”

By saying “I’m with you,” you are telling the other person that you are willing to sit in the dark with them. You aren’t rushing them to heal, and you aren’t minimizing their experience with toxic positivity. For someone terrified that their struggles make them a burden, hearing that a loved one is standing firmly by their side provides an immediate sense of safety and relief.

Why Empathic Listening Matters More Than Fixing the Problem

Most of us are natural problem-solvers. When we hear about a conflict, our brains immediately start mapping out solutions. However, empathic listening requires us to turn off that fixer instinct.

“[It’s] the practice of tuning into someone’s experience with the intention to understand rather than fix,” Dr. McGeehan explained. “It’s more than just hearing words—it’s being present with the emotions behind them and responding in a way that makes the speaker feel seen, not analyzed or managed.”

Why is this shift in communication so critical? When someone feels truly heard and understood without the threat of judgment, their nervous system physically relaxes. Your calm, steadfast presence actually gives them the emotional room they need to process their own complex feelings and find their own clarity.

Other Validating Phrases To Keep in Your Back Pocket

While “I’m with you” is an incredible tool for instant connection, there are other three-word variations of empathic listening that can be just as impactful depending on the situation, according to Dr. McGeehan.

If someone is dealing with an objectively terrible situation that has no immediate solution, try saying, “That sounds hard.”

Many people tend to unintentionally gaslight themselves, minimizing their own pain by comparing it to others. By stating that their situation sounds hard, you are validating their reality.

“You’re not comparing or minimizing—you’re recognizing that what they’re going through matters and simply being with them,” Dr. McGeehan said.

Similarly, simply stating “I hear you” can work wonders for someone who feels invisible. It directly acknowledges that they aren’t speaking into a void, serving as a basic but incredibly effective anchor in a difficult conversation.

Ultimately, true comfort doesn’t come from having the perfect answers. It comes from being brave enough to sit with someone in their pain, offering your presence instead of your apologies.

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I’m sorry, doesn’t always work as intended

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China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.

The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.

“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.

Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China:

• Undermining the security of the Communist Party. The government’s top priority has long been maintaining the power of the ruling party. Mr. Chen’s article warns that those with “ulterior motives” could use A.I. to generate fake videos and audio to wage a “propaganda war” against China.

  “They’re worried, among other things, of say a deepfake of a Chinese official saying something that wasn’t actually said, and that spreading rapidly and destabilizing everything,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and industrial policy. “Someone thinks that Xi Jinping made some announcement which he didn’t actually. That could sow chaos.”

• Attacks on China’s critical infrastructure. Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure. Last week, a small team of researchers in California demonstrated that risk when they disclosed a hacking tool that could take control of millions of users’ accounts on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging app.

• Leaks of sensitive information. Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies.

• More intense military competition. The U.S. military’s use of A.I. in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was an example of how warfare has been “fundamentally transformed,” Mr. Chen wrote. He says that whoever can harness the power of tools such as algorithms to achieve more precise sensing and targeting, “will gain the initiative on the battlefield.”

The warning adds to a growing drumbeat of concern from Chinese officials about the risks of A.I. Under Mr. Xi, China has deemed A.I. a strategic technology that is critical to the country’s development and ability to compete with the United States. At the same time, officials have begun to issue warnings and new guidelines for regulating the industry.

Previous warnings from Chinese regulators have tended to focus on specific issues, such as when the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in July that it had detected a security risk in some versions of Anthropic’s coding tool, Claude Code. Regulators have also repeatedly warned domestic users about the risks of A.I. assistants like OpenClaw.

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The Great Hall of the People in Beijing. China’s spy chief called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight of the industry. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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One of the stranger things I’m known for among my friends is that I never get thirsty. Ever. Not after exercising, not even after a sauna. Unless I actively remind myself, I simply forget to drink. It’s only in the extraordinarily hot UK weather of late that I’ve begun to wonder whether this biological blind spot is contributing to my recent brain fog and general lack of cognitive sparkle. Is dehydration to blame, and if so, how much should I drink to keep my brain working at its best?

Water is, needless to say, essential for the brain. It helps neurons transmit electrical impulses, delivers vital nutrients to power cells and flushes out toxins while we sleep, among other things. Unfortunately, pinning down its exact effect on cognition is challenging, partly because most studies on hydration and brain function are fairly small. Nevertheless, together they offer some intriguing clues.

For instance, in one study, 29 adults completed a bunch of cognitive tests on two occasions, each following 12 hours without food or water. Before one testing session, they were offered a 500-millilitre bottle of water and were told they could drink as much as they wanted. People scored better in tests of judgement and decision-making that required them to suppress a quick gut feeling and instead engage slower, more reflective thinking after they had drunk water. This result held regardless of how thirsty or motivated they felt.

This was the first study to suggest that water might influence this ability, known as “cognitive reflection”, but the study was small, so it is difficult to say why. One possibility, suggest the researchers, is that dehydration reduces blood flow to the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a brain region we use to inhibit actions. Dehydration can also increase blood levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that has been shown to interfere with decision-making.

In other studies, dehydration wasn’t found to have a significant impact on cognitive performance, but participants reported that the tasks felt more effortful when they were dehydrated. To investigate further, Matthew Kempton at Kings College London and his colleagues asked 10 students to spend 90 minutes cycling on a stationary bike – once wearing regular exercise wear and another time wearing a black bin liner next to their skin, followed by a chemical warfare protective suit and finally a tracksuit. “The idea was this was impermeable, so they would sweat lots,” says Kempton. “In [this] condition, they lost over 1 kilogram in weight in 90 minutes.”

Although that sounds fairly extreme, Kempton reckons you might lose this amount of water on a hot day if you didn’t drink. The students drank 500 ml of water the night before the trial and another 500 ml just before they began exercising. The team then used fMRI to measure activity in the students’ brains during a test of executive functions like planning ahead and spatial processing.

The students performed no worse when dehydrated, but their brain activity told a different story. While dehydrated, completing the task produced greater activation in their frontoparietal network, involved in attention and solving problems. This suggests that their brain was working harder to achieve the same result, says Kempton.

Harder work means increased metabolism and energy use. Kempton’s hypothesis is that if dehydration uses up more energy, performance may eventually begin to suffer. “We use the analogy of a car using up more petrol to go the same distance as a more efficient car – we would expect it to run out of gas faster,” he says.

Perhaps I’ve been running low on gas lately, so to speak, trying to maintain my usual level of functioning with a parched and increasingly inefficient brain. But just how dehydrated might you need to be before performance actually declines?

A 2018 analysis of 33 studies found that dehydration can cause small but significant deficits in cognitive performance – particularly for tasks involving attention, executive function and motor coordination – when water loss exceeds 2 per cent of body mass. For a 70 kg person, that’s about 1.4 kg.

It’s worth bearing in mind that not everyone is affected equally. Older people are particularly sensitive to dehydration, in part because our sense of thirst diminishes with age, and kidneys can become less efficient at conserving water. Prolonged dehydration in older adults is associated with several conditions, including increased frailty, heart disease, poor oral health and worse recovery from surgery. It also appears to worsen symptoms of dementia, possibly because dehydration can cause proteins to misfold, and makes it harder to clear these proteins from the brain – two processes implicated in the progression of dementia.

Young children are also especially vulnerable, due to immature renal development, extra physical exertion, quicker fluid loss through sweat and a reliance on adults to provide their drinks. Still, I had assumed, given the increased awareness of being well hydrated (you can’t send your kids anywhere without a water bottle permanently attached to them) this wouldn’t be a problem in the UK or other high-income countries. Yet several studies suggest that many school children around the world regularly arrive at school dehydrated.

In December, a study of 9- and 10-year-olds in the UK found that 17 per cent were dehydrated at the beginning of the school day, and that this increased to 40 per cent by the end of the day – despite having free access to water.

This increase in dehydration correlated with worsening mood between morning and afternoon and was associated with poorer performance on memory tests. Several other studies have linked dehydration in children with poorer attention, processing speed, accuracy and concentration. Small intervention studies have also shown that giving children a drink before a test can improve visual attention, visual memory and mood.

This makes me wonder whether my own defective thirst cues could be a problem for my whole family. The researchers behind the UK study argue that it’s not enough for children to have access to water throughout the day, because they are overly reliant on external cues – like parents and teachers reminding them to drink.

As for how much we should be drinking for maximum brain health: “We probably shouldn’t get too neurotic about this,” says Kempton. “It’s good to remember we also get water from food as well as drink… but it’s definitely something to bear in mind.”

We often hear that we should drink eight glasses, or 2 litres, a day, while some National Health Service websites recommend as much as 3 litres a day for people aged 14 and over. In reality, there’s no single answer.

A huge global study from 2022 of more than 5000 people aged between 8 days and 96 years found that this blanket recommendation of eight cups seldom matches our actual needs. It found that water turnover – the amount entering and leaving the body each day – was highest in men between the ages of 20 and 30, averaging around 4.3 litres of water a day, while in women aged 25 to 60 it averaged around 3.4 litres.

Crucially, some of this value comes from water produced by metabolism, and in higher-income countries, around half of what is left can often be provided by food.

For a typical person in the US or Europe, that leaves a rough drinking requirement of around 1.5 to 1.8 litres, according to John Speakman at the University of Aberdeen, who led the study. Obviously, pregnancy, lifestyle factors, age and exercise, among other things, can shift these numbers substantially.

But given how trendy it’s become to carry around enormous canisters of water, it’s fair to say that anyone diligently draining one each day may be overdoing it. Children, on the other hand, may benefit from more encouragement from adults to drink regularly.

As for me, I’m fairly certain I fall on the wrong side of the equation and that I should increase my own intake – and that of my children. Although perhaps our shared love of cucumber and strawberries, which are both more than 90 per cent water, is doing some heavy lifting.

I won’t get too stressed about it, but I will be adding a few more glasses to my daily routine, in the hope of recovering a little of that cognitive sparkle.

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Focused ultrasound, a groundbreaking treatment, lets doctors perform brain surgery without a scalpel. The non-invasive procedure has been used to treat Parkinson’s and other conditions, and now shows promise for treating drug addiction, per Wired.

A sorely needed solution

• Nearly 45m Americans met the criteria for a substance use disorder in 2025.
• While drug overdose deaths have declined for the past three years, there were nearly 70k deaths in 2025.

Neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, a pioneer of deep brain stimulation, saw an opportunity to develop new treatments for drug addiction at the epicenter of the opioid epidemic, West Virginia.

While deep brain stimulation — used to treat Parkinson’s, OCD, traumatic brain injury, and addiction — involves cutting into a patient’s skull to implant electrodes, focused ultrasound targets the same area without the cutting. The outpatient procedure could take just 20 minutes.

To address addiction, Dr. Rezai and his team at West Virginia University focus on the behavioral regulation, anxiety, and craving portions of the brain.

Buckle up, future brain surgeons:

• Focused ultrasound machines emit dozens of beams through a helmet-like device into the skull.
• Waves are targeted with millimeter precision and converge on the nucleus accumbens, zapping the region of the brain that highly addictive drugs like opioids flood with dopamine.
• Patients view images of substances through special goggles, and the ultrasound resets the nucleus accumbens, breaking the connection the brain made with the drugs.

While the treatment is still in its infancy, many patients reported reduced cravings and sustained abstinence.

Dr. Rezai hopes to expand treatment access, and the team is testing a portable device that looks like a salon hair dryer. They’re also testing the treatment for binge eating disorder and want to adapt it for dogs with anxiety.

Focused ultrasound in Silicon Valley

While still highly experimental, numerous tech companies are ultra-focused on focused ultrasound:

• Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam’s Nudge
• Sam Altman’s Merge Labs
• Mary Lou Jepsen’s Openwater

• Sanmai Technologies, backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman

And they’re not alone.

Maybe you could be a brain surgeon after all. Though there’s still that whole medical school thing.

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If you dream of becoming a brain surgeon, but the idea of cutting open someone’s noggin makes you squeamish, there’s still hope for you.

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Even for a man, and a movement, defined by bizarre spectacles, President Trump’s “midterm convention” in Dallas this week was a bizarre spectacle.

I say President Trump’s midterm convention because it wasn’t really about the Republican Party. Yes, the president made his appeal to attendees and viewers to think of him when they cast a ballot for the Republican candidate in their state or district. “Please pretend that I’m running and get out and vote on Nov. 3 or sooner, because in actuality I really am running,” he said during his keynote address on Wednesday night.

But much of the programming was less about the party than it was about the man at its helm. And to say that it was a lovefest is to understate the extent of the worship. Speakers praised Trump as something like a savior.

Trump, declared the chairman of the Republican National Committee, is “the greatest Republican messenger of our lifetime, the leader of America’s comeback” and “the best president this country has ever had.” Or, as one video put it, “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

The basic story told at the convention was a familiar one. The United States was on the verge of total collapse before Trump took over. Under him, there has been a glorious revitalization of the nation’s fortunes — a golden age of wealth and prosperity for all. Democrats threaten this paradise, and the only way to protect the success of the past two years is to send Republicans back to Congress with their majorities intact.

As usual, this isn’t a collaborative story. It is not that Trump and the Republican Party have worked together to produce a golden age; it’s that Trump, in his infinite glory, has bestowed prosperity on the American people. Rejecting Republicans is rejecting him, and rejecting him is akin to blasphemy, a demonstration not just of a lack of resolve, but of a lack of faith.

The single strangest moment in all of this was when Trump led the audience in a pledge to himself, which included a promise to cheat if necessary.

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3, or we are going to vote before that.

I don’t think anything like this has ever happened in mainstream American politics. It is as if the Republican Party has simply given in to the fact that it is little more than a cult of personality centered on an aging celebrity real estate developer.

Now, the central gamble of all this is to energize Trump voters to turn out in the midterms. Specifically, the low-frequency and less-attached voters who have only come out to support the president when he is on the ballot, and who otherwise abstain from elections. The thinking is that if these people can come to the polls, then Republicans might be able to overcome their deep deficit.

The deficit is indeed deep. Trump’s approval rating has sunk, in the most reputable polls, down to the low 30s. The generic ballot — which measures the relative position of each party in the upcoming elections — shows Democrats with about a seven-point advantage. Democratic Senate candidates aren’t ahead only in swing states like North Carolina and Michigan; they are also either ahead or neck-and-neck in Republican-leaning states such as Texas, Alaska, Ohio and Iowa.

There is a real chance that Republicans will suffer a decisive defeat in the Senate and a potentially catastrophic one in the House. Anything that can be done to minimize the damage makes sense, from the Republican point of view. The question, then, is: Does this midterm convention make sense?

If the goal was to show the public that the Republican Party, as Vice President JD Vance argued in his keynote, was the party of normalcy, then the cultlike atmosphere of the proceedings made that difficult. If the goal is simply to energize the low-propensity Trump voter, then it is also a crapshoot, given the low likelihood that this type of person was even aware of the convention, much less watching it.

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Damon Winter/The New York Times

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You finish a lecture, a meeting, a conversation with someone you care about. And what do you do? You reach for your phone. You stick in your earbuds. You fire up a podcast, a playlist or whatever algorithmic feed is currently consuming your life.

It feels productive. It feels like filling empty time.

But here’s what may be happening: you have interrupted your brain mid-sentence.

When you learn something new, whether it is a colleague’s name or the material covered in a morning lecture, your brain does not simply file it away neatly. The memory is fragile at first, more like wet cement than carved stone. In the minutes and hours following new learning, the brain works to strengthen what it has taken in. This is known as memory consolidation, the process through which newly formed memories become more stable.

Research suggests that quiet rest can help this process. Two recent meta-analyses, drawing on dozens of studies, found that people generally retained more information when learning was followed by several minutes of quiet rest rather than an absorbing task. One of the reviews found that the effect varied considerably between groups and was weaker in healthy younger adults. However, the overall advantage has been detected as long as seven days after learning.

One leading explanation is that quiet rest gives the brain fewer competing demands and more opportunity to reactivate a new experience, like an internal highlight reel reinforcing what has just been learned. Researchers have found that increased coordination between the hippocampus and areas of the cortex during post-learning rest is associated with better later memory.

The precise source of interference remains uncertain. One experiment found that engaging in a task after learning was more detrimental than resting, but that the task’s attentional demands did not explain the difference.

Sleep isn’t the whole story

Decades of research have established that sleep supports memory consolidation. But some researchers argue that sleep may form part of a broader process rather than acting as an entirely unique memory state.

The opportunistic consolidation hypothesis proposes that the brain takes advantage of periods with little new information or interference to stabilize what it has recently learned. These periods can include overnight sleep, shorter bouts of sleep and quiet wakeful rest.

In one experiment, participants completed memory tasks and then spent 30 minutes sleeping, resting with their eyes closed or performing a distracting task. Sleep and quiet rest produced similar memory benefits over this short interval, while both were more beneficial than the distracting task.

Doing nothing is harder than it sounds

Achieving genuine quiet rest can be difficult. The memory-consolidation window may be disrupted by internal mental activity as well as external stimulation.

In one series of experiments, participants who spent the rest period recalling past experiences or imagining future events retained less of the newly learned material than those who rested without being prompted to think autobiographically. Participants who reported the most vivid thoughts also tended to show greater disruption.

Resting on the sofa, then, may work best when the mind settles too.

A recent study of adults without clinical anxiety adds a further complication. Moderate anxiety during quiet rest was associated with poorer memory consolidation, while lower and higher anxiety levels left new memories relatively intact. The study found only a modest overall advantage for rest and no significant difference in its main measure of recognition sensitivity, so the anxiety finding needs further investigation.

Even so, it raises the possibility that ordinary background worry can interfere with consolidation by pulling the brain into a vigilant state when it would otherwise be processing what it has just learned.

Exam pressure and a full inbox may therefore make effective rest harder to achieve.

A note of caution

This is not settled science. Translating laboratory findings into classrooms, offices and other everyday settings is difficult, and individual studies have sometimes failed to reproduce the expected benefit. The size of the effect also varies with age, the type of memory being tested and the characteristics of the participants.

A recent classroom study involving children aged ten to 12 found better word retention after ten minutes of quiet rest, although the benefit appeared only when the rest condition came first. Earlier research involving 13- and 14-year-olds found that rest supported memory over seven days, but the benefit was concentrated among children whose initial recall was lower.

We still do not know how reliably this can be applied in a school, during workplace training or in a care home. Nor do we know why some people benefit more than others.

What this means for real life

Quiet rest does not appear to require complete silence, closed eyes or a particular body position. A 2025 meta-analysis found that these factors did not significantly alter the average effect, although the evidence cannot yet tell us what the ideal real-world routine would look like.

For now, the practical implication is modest: after learning something you want to remember, consider leaving a brief gap before introducing more information.

It might mean waiting a few minutes after a lecture before reaching for your phone. It could mean travelling home after an important conversation without immediately putting on a podcast. It might involve spending the space between two tasks looking out of a window.

These are the moments we increasingly fill with new input. If the emerging evidence is right, leaving some of them empty may give the brain a better chance to hold on to what just happened.

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In December 2025, a 45-year-old woman in the United Kingdom hopped online to take part in a popular internet pastime: arguing with strangers about politics. But whereas most people online likely believe they are debating a real person, she quickly figured out her counterpart wasn’t human. Instead, it was an artificial intelligence (AI) model instructed to persuade people on a policy issue. In this case: Should the U.K. government impose stricter penalties on peaceful protesters who block roads or energy sites?

These protests—primarily aimed at opposing new fossil fuel licenses for energy companies—had gained traction in recent years. And the woman was clearly against stopping them with further legal measures. “Locking oneself to equipment has historically often been the only resort available when working against corporate interests,” she wrote. Besides, there were already laws against criminal damage or aggravated trespass. “Why do we need a new mechanism here?”

The AI chatbot responded first by flattering the woman: “You raise an excellent point about existing legislation.” Then it delivered facts and examples to try to change her mind. It brought up a statistic showing most trespassers faced just small fines, for instance, and pointed out that others were not prosecuted because trials took so much time. It claimed that in Germany, strict new laws had reduced coercive blocking without suppressing demonstrations more generally, and suggested Scotland had found a good solution by issuing fines without a trial, in a similar way to speeding tickets.

Over the course of the conversation, the woman began to change her mind. At the beginning of the chat, she had registered her support for harsher penalties at zero out of 100. By the end, it had risen to 84.7. The AI, a large language model (LLM) called Claude from the company Anthropic, had responded to all her concerns and explained the Scottish system well, she wrote afterward. “I’d be inclined to send the bot to talk to the cabinet at this point.”

The woman wasn’t the only one persuaded by software. She was part of a study in which more than 2000 people debated either a chatbot or a human about political issues, ranging from a social media ban for teenagers to assisted suicide. When Kobi Hackenburg, an AI researcher at the University of Oxford who led the study, posted a preprint on the results in June, they were sobering: No matter whether it was ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Claude, the AI was consistently better than humans at swaying the other participants. “To my mind, this is already a landmark publication in the fields of political persuasion and AI and human behavior,” says Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the work.

Hackenburg’s paper is the latest in a string of studies showing the power of AI to sway people. “It’s a whole new field that is emerging,” says Sander van der Linden, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge. “People are very interested in the persuasive powers of AI, I think, both for ethical and unethical reasons.” As the field gathers steam, it is raising a host of theoretical and practical questions. How exactly do chatbots win over people? (Warning: Lying is one answer.) How much better could they get? And who will control them?

How to persuade others has been on our minds for millennia. Texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, written around 2300 B.C.E. in ancient Egypt, give advice on how to win an argument. And from the beginning, people were wary of the power of new technologies—including writing itself—to persuade. In the fourth century B.C.E., the Greek philosopher Plato analyzed rhetoric and persuasion in his work Phaedrus and warned that the written word allowed people to convince others of their ideas without presenting them an opportunity to challenge them. Many technologies since then—from radio to TV to computers—have brought up similar concerns.

Now, it’s AI’s turn in the spotlight. Research into the technology’s persuasiveness began in earnest in 2022. ChatGPT from OpenAI was still a few months from being released to the public, but Willer had been playing around with an early version called GPT Playground that was available to researchers. It seemed to be advanced enough that it might produce convincing messages, he thought, with potentially big consequences. “We were thinking primarily about negative use cases,” he says: flooding politicians with AI-written letters from fake constituents, for instance, or making arguments en masse on social media or in the comments section of news sites. “That struck me as really important to study.”

Willer and his colleagues asked the AI model to generate 200-word messages that would persuade people to back policies such as a carbon tax or a ban on assault weapons. When they compared the success of those arguments with human-generated ones, both were equally effective at shifting participants’ support for the policies. But the way they persuaded people seemed to be different: Whereas humans tended to use stories or personal appeals, the AI-generated messages were perceived as more rational and relying more on evidence—a difference that would become a common theme in AI persuasion research.

But the results had trouble passing muster at a journal. Reviewers of the group’s manuscript argued other researchers had already shown that bots on social media were persuading people, Willer says. His team pushed back: Those bots were just fake profiles being handled by humans, not creating the content they were posting. “Reviewers and editors didn’t necessarily track what a big distinction that was, and that LLM generation of persuasive content really was a huge invention,” Willer says. “It shows just how nascent the AI and behavioral science literature was.” The study, which was posted as a preprint in 2023 and finally published in Nature Communications in 2025, really started the current wave of research on AI persuasion, Hackenburg says. “It was ahead of its time.”

It didn’t take long, however, for the rest of the field to catch up. While Willer’s paper was stuck in limbo, other studies began to demonstrate AI’s persuasive powers. In one, LLM-generated messages on political issues such as immigration or vaccine mandates were at least as convincing as messages written by political consultants. In another, LLM messages on vaccines were seen as more persuasive than those from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Research quickly moved on from static messages written by AIs to entire conversations. Francesco Salvi, then a master’s student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, paired up online participants with another human or an AI for a 10-minute debate on topics ranging from school uniforms to abortion and found that AI was as persuasive as humans.

Then in September 2024, Tom Costello, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, and colleagues published a Science paper showing that ChatGPT could even persuade people out of conspiracy beliefs. In the experiments, participants described a conspiracy theory that they believed in, from the U.S. government being behind the 9/11 attacks to the British royal family orchestrating Princess Diana’s death, and then had a three-round conversation on it with the chatbot. On average, participants’ embrace of their chosen conspiracy theory declined by almost 17 points on a 100-point scale.

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Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.

Top executives of other major A.I. companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on A.I.; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace.

Mr. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote in his essay that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too rapid a pace for researchers to continue safely.

“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei wrote. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

Mr. Amodei has warned about the safety risks of A.I. for years. But his essay amounted to one of the most full-throated calls for urgent action from a leading A.I. company executive to date.

He called for independent auditors to check the companies for safety standards and urged global cooperation in creating rules around A.I. development.

The appeal for an industrywide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as A.I. model development has made significant strides at companies like Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, as well as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Google’s DeepMind.

Tensions rose further after the leading A.I. labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge. In one incident this year, OpenAI’s systems breached an A.I. start-up called HuggingFace, which was not detected until HuggingFace informed OpenAI weeks after it had happened. Since then, A.I. researchers have conferred to discuss what to do.

On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, resigned and posted a series of social media posts about how the leading A.I. labs were not responsibly developing the technology and were gambling with people’s lives, setting off a furor. Other A.I. researchers have called on their leaders to pause A.I. development, while some are forming splinter groups to raise more awareness about the risks of A.I.

A.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call “recursive self improvement,” is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.

“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” Mr. Amodei said.

Hours after Mr. Amodei published his essay, Mr. Altman posted a statement to social media agreeing that a slowdown of A.I. development was necessary.

“This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Mr. Altman wrote. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

Mr. Musk, in a post on his social media platform X, said simply, “Dario is right.”

On Saturday evening, Mr. Hassabis said Mr. Amodei’s essay was a step in the right direction. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment,” Mr. Hassabis posted on social media.

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Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, in February. “Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence,” he wrote in an essay. Credit…Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Our best equations for describing the way fluids move were first written down 200 years ago. Ever since, we have been unable to answer a simple question about them: do they sometimes blow up? This explosive phrase has a precise mathematical meaning describing a situation where, apparently out of nowhere, part of the fluid starts to move infinitely fast. It would be like an infinite whirlpool forming in your bathtub in response to a flick of your toes.

Understanding the Navier-Stokes equations – named after the pair who discovered them – has been a long-running quest for mathematicians. So much so that the blow-up question sits on the list of prestigious Millennium Prize Problems, each of which comes with a $1 million reward for solving.

This week, OpenAI stunned the world of mathematics with its announcement that its AI agents have finally found the answer: the equations do sometimes blow up. The implication isn’t that fluids will start misbehaving, but instead that the equations aren’t perfect. This is good news for your bathtub. Mathematics, however, may never be the same again.

The reason for this isn’t the result itself. The Navier-Stokes equations have already proven themselves to be incredibly useful many times over, in applications ranging from making better airplane wings to modelling the flow of fluids through artificial hearts. Mathematicians had a suspicion that blow-ups were possible; now they know for sure.

That isn’t to underplay the discovery – it is one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs in decades. But the way it has happened, and the resulting fallout, is what will have the most dramatic effect on mathematics for years to come.

OpenAI began working on the problem after it got wind that a pair of mathematicians had made some progress on it, which hadn’t yet been published. Researchers at the tech company decided to set thousands of AI agents on solving the problem. Just 88 hours later, they were done.

Over the past few months, AI has made breakthrough after breakthrough in mathematics, with this most recent development being by far the most impressive. It wasn’t that long ago that mathematics was a bit of an embarrassment for AI because it was so bad at it; now it is shockingly good. How many other long-standing mathematical conundrums will fall to AI is uncertain, but it will surely be many. OpenAI has already said it has made “substantial progress” on another of the Millennium Prize Problems.

But AI proofs aren’t a straight replacement for human ones. Mathematicians want to know the why; AIs not so much.

The great mathematician Paul Erdős believed that mathematical truth exists independently of humanity in a sort of celestial book, and it is the job of mathematicians to discover what is in it. Sometimes, a mathematician would discover a logical argument that was so insightful and so elegant that it would bring a fresh understanding or a completely new way of thinking. Erdős would declare that a proof like this was “straight from The Book”. It’s fair to say that OpenAI’s effort wouldn’t make the cut.

That is because AIs tend to produce hard-to-follow, convoluted arguments. For the sake of proving a theorem, this doesn’t really matter, thanks to the magic of a process called formalization, where proofs can be turned into code that can be rigorously checked by computers. But for the sake of gaining insight, it is lacking.

So, where does this leave mathematics? Clearly, the AI mathematical revolution has arrived. It is a new era where we will have many more answers than explanations, and unpicking it all won’t be easy. It isn’t just the Navier-Stokes equations that AI has blown up, but mathematics itself.

These are unprecedented times, and yet mathematics has gone through upheaval before. When René Descartes made the link between geometry and algebra in the 17^th century, showing that shapes could be written as equations, he completely transformed the toolkit available to mathematicians.

Geometry, however, had been the darling of mathematics since the ancient Greeks. It was trusted and considered pure. Mathematicians worried that the job would make them drones who simply manipulated symbols and came up with no new insights. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the approach as a “scab of symbols”.

But 300 years later, it is indisputable that making this link between algebra and geometry was a good thing. Without it, there would be no calculus or relativity – in fact, modern science would be completely unrecognizable. Perhaps AI will have a similar effect.

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