Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and FarWestGirl.
Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, JeremyBloom, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP), jlms qkw, and doomandgloom .
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Space
Chinese astronauts film music video in space to celebrate Lunar New Year 2026.
Happy Lunar New Year 2026!
This holiday is celebrated by billions of people worldwide and marks the start of a new lunisolar calendar, which follows the phases of the moon as well as the changing positions of the sun and moon in the sky. Because the holiday occurs on the second new moon that follows the winter solstice, the date moves from year to year. Lunar New Year 2026 occurs on Tuesday (Feb. 17) this year.
China's Shenzhou 21 crew rang in the Year of the Horse with an impressive celebration aboard the nation's Tiangong Space Station this week. The three astronauts (or "taikonauts," a term that borrows from the Mandarin word for space, (太空), or "taikong") celebrated with a special feast, a party and traditional calligraphy. But the crew went one step further this year, filming a zero-gravity music video that celebrates the nation's many recent spaceflight achievements — and it's a banger.
On this day in space: Feb. 18, 1930: Pluto discovered by Clyde Tombaugh.
On Feb. 18, 1930, the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto!
Before he discovered Pluto, another astronomer named Percival Lowell had spent over a decade trying to find it. He had theorized that a ninth planet existed based on wobbles seen in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. But it wasn't until Tombaugh started using a new observation technique that Pluto was first spotted.
World/General
Year of the fire horse - explained: the Chinese zodiac sign that’s all about intensity.
Lunar new year has ushered in a rare zodiac symbol with a reputation for energy and independence
As the lunar new year begins, the focus has turned to the Chinese zodiac and the arrival of the year of the fire horse – a rare pairing in the 60-year lunar cycle.
Drawing on Chinese metaphysics, the fire horse blends the horse’s reputation for energy and independence with the intensity of the fire element, giving it a distinct place in the zodiac tradition.
What is the Chinese zodiac and the five elements?
The Chinese zodiac is a 12-year cycle in which each year is represented by an animal sign: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. With roots in ancient lunar calendar traditions, the system places certain personality traits under various birth years.
Alongside the animals, Chinese astrology incorporates the five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. These elements rotate with the zodiac animals, creating a 60-year cycle. Each element is believed to influence one’s traits and destiny.
Hundred-year reveal: Catalonian chalet confirmed as Gaudí work in centenary year.
An elegant modernist building in the mountains north of Barcelona, originally constructed to house engineers establishing a nearby mine, has been confirmed as a work of Antoni Gaudí, Catalonia’s most celebrated and distinctive architect.
The Xalet del Catllaràs, about 80 miles from Barcelona in the county of Berguedà, was built in 1905 and commissioned by Eusebi Güell, Gaudí’s lifelong patron. Güell was the owner of a cement company with mines in the region and he needed somewhere to house the engineers, many of them British, who would help extract the coal for his factories.
It has long been suspected that the chalet, now not in use, was the work of Gaudí but historians had not firmly established the architect. The building contains elements of Gaudí’s naturalistic style, evoking the forms of plants and animals that would later be expressed in works such as Park Güell and the Casa Batllò in Barcelona. The pointed arch structure also foreshadows Gaudí’s best-known work, the Sagrada Família in Barcelona.
Tech billionaires fly in for Delhi AI expo as Modi jostles to lead in south.
Silicon Valley tech billionaires will land in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, where leaders of the global south will wrestle for control over the fast-developing technology.
During the week-long AI Impact Summit, attended by thousands of tech executives, government officials and AI safety experts, tech companies valued at trillions of dollars will rub along with leaders of countries such as Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages dip well below $1,000 a month.
Amid a push to speed up AI adoption across the globe, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, the heads of Google,
OpenAI and Anthropic, will all be there. Rishi Sunak and George Osborne, a former British prime minister and a former chancellor, will each be pushing for greater adoption of AI. Sunak has taken jobs for Microsoft and Anthropic and Osborne leads OpenAI’s push to deepen and widen the use of ChatGPT beyond its existing 800 million users.
Meanwhile Modi, who will address the summit on Thursday, is positioning
India as the AI hub for south Asia and Africa. On the agenda will be AI’s potential to transform agriculture, water supplies and public health. Governments in Kenya, Senegal, Mauritius, Togo, Indonesia and Egypt will send ministers.
The Bangladesh Nationalist party, led by Tarique Rahman, has won a sweeping victory in the country’s first election since a gen Z uprising toppled the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina.
Results from the election commission confirmed the BNP alliance had won 212 seats, returning the party to power after 20 years, while the rival alliance, led by the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, won 77 seats.
The vote had been seen as the first free and fair election held in Bangladesh for almost two decades and came after a period of significant political upheaval in the country.
US and Japan unveil $36bn of oil, gas and critical minerals projects in challenge to China.
Japan has drawn up plans for investments in US oil, gas and critical mineral projects worth about $36bn under the first wave of a deal with Donald Trump.
The US president and Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, announced a trio of projects including a power plant in Portsmouth, Ohio, billed by the Trump administration as the largest natural gas-fired generating facility in US history.
As a diplomatic row between Japan and China over the security of Taiwan continues, testing the Japanese economy, Takaichi said the projects would strengthen her country’s ties with the US.
Credit cards cancelled, Google accounts closed: ICC judges on life under Trump sanctions.
When the Canadian Kimberly Prost learned Donald Trump’s administration had imposed sanctions on her, it came as a shock.
For years, she has sat as a judge at the international criminal court, weighing accusations of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity; now she is on the same list as terrorists and those involved in organised crime. “It really was a moment of a bit of disbelief,” she said.
The fallout was both material and psychological. As her credit cards, Amazon and Google accounts were cancelled, she reeled from what she described as a “direct and flagrant attack” on one of the world’s most prominent courts.
“These are coercive measures designed to attack our ability to do our jobs objectively and independently,” she said. “We want people to appreciate how wrong this is.”
Since Trump returned to power last year, his administration has worked steadily to hobble the Hague-based court. To date, 11 of the court’s officials – including the chief prosecutor and eight judges – have been placed under sanctions, subjecting them to measures that include bans on travel to the US and fines and prison sentences for American companies who provide them services.
Science Chaser
A super stable laser on the moon could guide future lunar missions and improve our timekeeping.
Scientists are proposing to build a laser in a crater on the moon to help future lunar missions land safely in the dark and find their way around. This ultra-stable light source could also help us keep time more accurately, as they explain in a paper available on the arXiv preprint server.
The moon has many permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), which are craters that never see sunlight and are located at the lunar poles. They are ideal spots for high-precision instruments because they are extremely cold and remarkably quiet. Our planet experiences many environmental disturbances that can affect laser stability, such as ground shaking and changes in air pressure.
Lunar laser plan
To solve this, an international team, including researchers from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has developed a conceptual plan for a lunar-based master clock. This would involve transporting the materials to the moon and building the laser system inside a dark, freezing crater.
How the humble silkworm could help us discover new anti-aging treatments.
When scientists want to study aging and how to slow it down, they often turn to microscopic worms or lab mice among other models. The former are too different from humans, while the latter are expensive and take too long to study. But there's a new model in town that can potentially help us wind the clock back, and that is the silkworm (Bombyx mori).
A major focus of aging research is a molecule called NAD⁺ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which is present in all living cells and regulates metabolism, longevity and DNA repair. As we age, our NAD⁺ levels decline, leading to impaired DNA repair and increased vulnerability to age-related diseases, among other problems. However, finding the right animal model to study this process has been challenging.
Silkworms and longevity
In a paper published in the journal Insect Science, researchers at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, wanted to determine whether silkworms could be viable models for this research. They share many genes with humans, have a short life cycle and are easy to breed. However, research on NAD⁺ aging mechanisms in silkworms is limited.
The cooling system that lets bees beat the heat when hovering.
To stay in the air when hovering over a flower, bumble bees continually flap their wings rapidly, a metabolic process that generates a massive amount of internal heat. Their flight muscles work so intensely that they can raise the insect's body temperature by 30°C to 35°C above the surrounding air. On a scorching summer day, this can put them at risk of overheating, which may be fatal.
When temperatures soar, bumble bees have several ways to keep cool, such as shunting heat from their thorax to the abdomen, where it can escape from their body. And now, scientists have discovered another way that bees beat the heat.
A built-in fan
A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B reports that, when they hover, the breeze their wings generate is not just a byproduct of flight; it acts like a fan, keeping them cool.
Chitosan-nickel biomaterial becomes stronger when wet, and could replace plastics.
A new study led by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) has unveiled the first biomaterial that is not only waterproof but actually becomes stronger in contact with water. The material is produced by the incorporation of nickel into the structure of chitosan, a chitinous polymer obtained from discarded shrimp shells. The development of this new biomaterial marks a departure from the plastic-age mindset of making materials that must isolate from their environment to perform well. Instead, it shows how sustainable materials can connect and leverage their environment, using their surrounding water to achieve mechanical performance that surpasses common plastics.
Plastics have become an integral part of modern society thanks to their durability and resistance to water. However, precisely these properties turn them into persistent disruptors of ecological cycles. As a result, unrecovered plastic is accumulating across ecosystems and becoming an increasingly ubiquitous component of global food chains, raising growing concerns about potential impacts on human health.
In an effort to address this challenge, the use of biomaterials as substitutes for conventional plastics has long been explored. However, their widespread adoption has been limited by a fundamental drawback: Most biological materials weaken when exposed to water. Traditionally, this vulnerability has forced engineers to rely on chemical modifications or protective coatings, thereby undermining the sustainability benefits of biomaterial-based solutions.
The Princess of Bagicz: Dendrochronology settles debate over age of rare Roman-era wooden coffin.
Dr. Marta Chmiel-Chrzanowska and her colleagues conducted a multidisciplinary analysis of the only known preserved wooden coffin from the Roman Iron Age, the Princess of Bagicz. The study, published in Archaeometry, used dendrochronology to resolve a long-standing dating discrepancy between typological analysis and radiocarbon dating, which had placed the burial close to 100 years apart.
The Princess of Bagicz
The Wielbark culture (1st–4th centuries AD) was known to have frequently interred its deceased in hollowed-out log coffins or, at times, in burials lined with twigs at the graves' base. However, these burials often leave little or no trace of the original coffin.
In 1898, the only known well-preserved wooden coffin of its kind, dated to the Roman Iron Age, was discovered.
"The coffin was revealed as a result of coastal abrasion," explained Dr. Chmiel-Chrzanowska. "The cliff at this location can retreat by up to 1 m per year. The coffin was very well preserved, together with a small wooden stool and a cattle hide. Unfortunately, these materials did not survive until the National Museum in Szczecin was established."
Beyond this, the coffin also contained the remains of a woman, buried with a pin, a pair of bronze bracelets, a necklace of beads, including glass and amber, and a bronze fibula. Due to her isolated location and the presence of these grave goods, the burial was interpreted as belonging to a woman of high social status; hence, she was referred to as the "Princess of Bagicz."
Seems that heavy, wet snow is harder for the phone tether to punch through. :sigh::
Hope everyone is safe & warm. :-)
