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      Scientific Study Shows Bogong Moths Use Sky For Migration

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      A new study suggests that these Australian insects may be the first invertebrates to use the night sky as a compass during migration.In the summer, the walls of the caves in the Australian Alps are tiled with Bogong moths.Months before, billions of these small, nocturnal insects migrate about 600 miles to this destination — a place they have never visited before. Seeking refuge from the summer heat, they travel across southeast Australia to these cool alpine caves. Then, in the fall, they migrate back to their breeding grounds, where they eventually die.This remarkable journey has long puzzled scientists like Eric Warrant, a neurobiologist at Lund University in Sweden. “How on earth do these moths know where to go?” he said.Now, a study in the journal Nature by Dr. Warrant and his colleagues reveals the details of the insect’s impressive feat, showing that the Bogong moth may be the first invertebrate to use the starry night sky for migration. The findings suggest the insects use a set of internal compasses, one guided by the Earth’s magnetic field and the other by the night sky, to reach their destination.“That an insect brain that is smaller than a grain of rice is able to do this is just remarkable,” said Basil el Jundi, a neuroscientist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany who was not involved in the study.The Australian Bogong moth could fit in the palm of your hand. It has a two-inch-long wingspan, a small set of eyes and a brain that is roughly a tenth of the volume of a grain of rice. Despite their small size, they have played a big role in Australia. Once an important source of food for Indigenous Australians, the insect also holds a strong cultural value because of its impressive migration.Few insects undertake long-distance migration from dispersed breeding grounds to meet in a single, specific destination. The most famous example is the monarch butterfly, which relies on the sun as a visual compass. Like monarchs, Bogong moths use the Earth’s magnetic field for their long journey. They combine the magnetic compass with visual cues or markers, though researchers did not know what these were.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Highlights From the Pianist Alfred Brendel’s Sprawling Career

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      Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, concentrated on a small number of canonical composers, mainly Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.The classical music industry valorizes sweeping range, favoring artists whose programs cross centuries. But the magisterial pianist Alfred Brendel, who died on Tuesday at 94, was of the old school, focusing his long career on a small number of canonical composers from the same era: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.He nurtured their works with almost spiritual diligence, performing and reperforming, recording and rerecording. Scholarly and eccentric, acute in essays as well as in concert, Brendel rose from obscurity in Austria to become a best-selling, hall-filling star. His extended period under the radar perhaps contributed to his confidence in his idiosyncrasies: both his rumpled onstage manner and his fearless deployment of a sound that could be cool, even hard.That sound was part of Brendel’s resolutely lucid approach to music. Avoiding the impression of milking scores for excess emotion, he gained a reputation for intellectual, analytical performances. Some found his playing a little dry, but others heard a kind of transcendently austere authority.Here are a few highlights from his enormous discography.HaydnBrendel championed Haydn’s and Schubert’s sonatas at a time when not everyone placed those pieces at the center of the pantheon. You can hear some of his flintiness of tone in the Presto from Haydn’s Sonata in E minor, the feeling that he’s poking at the notes. But the livelier passages alternate with slightly, alluringly softened ones, for an effect of unexpected complexity in fairly straightforward music. His fast playing never seems dashed off; he is always palpably thinking. And his diamond-sharp pointedness in the opening of the sonata’s Adagio second movement eventually travels toward mysterious tenderness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Teenage Soldier’s Wartime Scrapbook Inspired His Granddaughter’s First Novel

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      Heather Clark’s debut novel, “The Scrapbook,” considers young love as buffeted by historical ruptures.To write historical fiction is to know that the past finds many places to hide. For Heather Clark it was in her grandfather’s scrapbook, stowed away in an attic until after he died.With a burgundy cover now so faded the gold tooling on the front barely stands out, it speaks to the experiences of a fresh-faced, perpetually grinning 19-year-old Irish American G.I. deployed to Europe in the last stretch of World War II, his trusty camera almost always slung around his neck. He returned ravaged by encounters in a war he refused to speak about for the rest of his long life.Along with birthday cards and holiday telegrams, Army rosters and food ration certificates, Nazi uniform badges and Gen. Omar Bradley’s sternly worded “Special Orders for German American Relations,” the album includes Herbert J. Clark’s photographs of the place that had drained the smile from his face: Dachau.His granddaughter is an award-winning literary historian and critic, whose “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” (2020) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “The Scrapbook,” however, is fiction, a debut novel inspired by her grandfather’s attic trove, which she had heard about, but hadn’t seen, until after his funeral.“I wanted to see what happens in the space where biography and fiction collide,” she said.Clark was seated with the album open in front of her recently, at a long table in the gray clapboard house in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., she shares with her husband, two children and many walls of books.A photograph from Bud Clark’s scrapbook shows an Army buddy taking in the view of a French harbor from atop a river barge.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Read the Supreme Court’s Decision on Transgender Care for Minors

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      26

      UNITED STATES v. SKRMETTI

      SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting

      espouse support for transgender individuals. 13
      Transgender persons, moreover, have a defining charac- teristic (incongruence between sex and gender identity) that plainly “bears no relation to [the individual’s] ability to perform or contribute to society.”” Cleburne, 473 U. S., at 441. As a group, the class is no more “large, diverse, and amorphous,”” ante, at 4 (opinion of BARRETT, J.); ante, at 14 (ALITO, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment), than most races or ethnic groups, many of which similarly include individuals with “a huge variety”” of identities and experiences, ante, at 5 (opinion of BARRETT, J.). (Not all racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, for example, “carry an obvious badge’ of their membership in the disadvan- taged class.” Cf. ante, at 16 (opinion of ALITO, J.).) 14 As evidenced by the recent rise in discriminatory state and fed- eral policies and the fact that transgender people “are un- derrepresented in every branch of government,” Grimm, 972 F. 3d, at 611–613, moreover, the class lacks the politi- cal power to vindicate its interests before the very legisla- tures and executive agents actively singling them out for discriminatory treatment. See Lyng v. Castillo, 477 U. S. 635, 638 (1986). In refusing to say as much, the Court today renders transgender Americans doubly vulnerable to state- sanctioned discrimination.¹

      13 See Order, United States v. Shilling, No. 24A1030 (2025); see also Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Bi- ological Truth to the Federal Government, Exec. Order No. 14168, 90 Fed. Reg. 8615 (2025).
      14 See, e.g., L. Noe-Bustamante, A. Gonzalez-Barrera, K. Edwards, L. Mora, & M. Hugo Lopez, Measuring the Racial Identity of Latinos, Pew Research Center, https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnic-
      ity/2021/11/04/measuring-the-racial-identity-of-latinos/

      (highlighting

      the range of self-reported skin color among people who identify as La- tino).
      15 Of course, regardless of whether transgender persons constitute a suspect class, courts must strike down any law that reflects the kind of “irrational prejudice” that this Court has recognized as an illegitimate More

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      How Florida’s Attempt to Let Teens Sleep Longer Fell Apart

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      After lawmakers required high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., school administrators complained that it was unworkable. Last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a repeal.Florida’s brief attempt to let high school students sleep longer began two years ago when one of the state’s most powerful politicians listened to an audiobook.The book, “Why We Sleep,” argues that sufficient sleep is fundamental to nearly every aspect of human functioning. Paul Renner, then the Republican speaker of the State House, said reading it turned him into a “sleep evangelist”; he started tracking his own sleep and pressing the book on other lawmakers.To give teenagers more time to rest, he pushed for a new law that would require public high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. and middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m. In 2023, Florida became only the second state — after California, its political opposite — to adopt such a requirement, and it asked schools to comply by 2026.“School start times are one of those issues that both Republicans and Democrats can get behind,” Mr. Renner said in an interview.This year, it all fell apart.Facing growing opposition from school administrators who said the later times were unworkable and costly, the Legislature repealed the requirement last month.Florida’s experiment was over before it began, an example of a policy driven by a single powerful lawmaker that flopped once he was termed out of office. It also illustrates how, even as concerns grow about the well-being of American teenagers, a modest scheduling shift with broad support from scientific and medical experts can struggle to gain traction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In a Year of Working Dangerously, Fear of Trump Marks Public Service Awards

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      The Trump administration’s large cuts to the federal work force turned an annual celebration of federal workers into a reminder of loss.Every year in Washington, hundreds of federal workers put on gowns and tuxedos to honor colleagues who battle disease, pursue criminals and invent new technology, in what is billed as the Oscars of public service. Tearful honorees call co-workers and families onstage, and cabinet secretaries and the president offer thanks in person or by video.Things looked different this year.These are difficult times to be a nonpartisan federal expert, as the Trump administration has cast civil servants as villains and forced out a quarter-million of them. For the first time in the two-decade history of the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, the federal employee of the year — the biggest honor — was no longer a federal employee.David Lebryk, a former top Treasury Department official, was forced out of his career position for refusing to grant Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency what he considered unlawful access to the government’s payment system.In accepting his award on Tuesday night, Mr. Lebryk noted that “most of my career was spent trying to be unnoticed.” But he referred to the circumstances that led to his resignation, and offered a credo for public service.“It is important to exercise principled leadership, make difficult decisions, have the courage and conviction to stand behind those decisions and be accountable and ultimately prepared to accept the consequences of those decisions,” he said.There were no other acceptance speeches for awards given at the event — a departure from previous years — because some honorees said they were fearful of even inadvertently irking the administration. At least one winner turned down the award because the worker’s boss, a Trump appointee, forbade the worker to accept it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ohio Officer Won’t Be Charged in Fatal Shooting of Teenager

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      The teenager, Ryan Hinton, was shot by a police officer responding to a stolen vehicle report on May 1. The youth’s father is accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy with his car.A police officer in Cincinnati will not be charged in the fatal shooting of a teenager whose father is accused of intentionally striking and killing a sheriff’s deputy with his car the day after his son’s death, prosecutors said.Connie Pillich, the prosecuting attorney for Hamilton County, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the officer, whom she did not identify, was “legally justified in his use of force” and declined to send the case to a grand jury.The teenager, Ryan Hinton, was fatally shot by a police officer who was responding to a report of a stolen vehicle on May 1. Mr. Hinton had a fully loaded gun that he pointed at officers when they confronted him, Ms. Pillich said.“I’m confident that my decision was based on every fact available and was made with due diligence and the utmost care,” the prosecutor said.Fanon A. Rucker, a lawyer for Mr. Hinton’s family, said in remarks after the news conference that the family planned to file a lawsuit.The police were investigating a report of a stolen vehicle when they found Mr. Hinton and three other people in the stolen car. When officers approached the vehicle, the four men ran. One of the officers saw Mr. Hinton fall as he ran away and heard the sound of metal hitting the pavement, Ms. Pillich said.In audio from police dash camera footage played at the news conference, another responding officer can be heard yelling, “He’s got a gun,” before shots are fired.Ms. Pillich said the officer who had fired the fatal shots told investigators that he had heard the warning about the gun and saw Mr. Hinton point a gun at him, after which the officer fired his weapon.The father, Rodney L. Hinton, 38, is accused of intentionally driving his car into a Hamilton County sheriff’s deputy who was directing traffic outside a University of Cincinnati graduation event on May 2, a day after the son’s death, according to the prosecutor’s office, which filed charges last month.A lawyer who had been representing the family said that they had gone to the Cincinnati police chief’s office earlier that day to see the body-camera footage of the confrontation and that Mr. Hinton had become visibly upset and left before the video was over.The elder Mr. Hinton pleaded not guilty last month to two counts of aggravated murder, one count of murder and two counts of felonious assault. He faces the death penalty if he is convicted of aggravated murder.Clyde Bennett, Mr. Hinton’s lawyer, said that he was being held without bond at the Clermont County jail. More

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      NYT Crossword Answers for June 18, 2025

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      Eli Cotham floats an idea.Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky CluesWEDNESDAY PUZZLE — No one can predict the life span of an internet meme. When a new snowclone (i.e. replicable phrase) or image macro is making its way through social media sites, it’s anyone’s guess as to when the joke will die a cringe-y death. You won’t see anyone today posting about how “one does not simply” do something. Plays on the William Carlos Williams poem about the plums in the icebox have largely fallen out of favor.The meme that inspired today’s theme and crossword, constructed by Eli Cotham, became popular online in 2017. Honestly, I didn’t get the appeal. When it spawned a game show on Netflix in 2020, I was genuinely baffled. But now that the expression has made its way into the New York Times Crossword, I have no choice but to concede defeat. I guess 58A is here to stay.Today’s ThemeA certain modern-day [Rainy-day game for children] is the witty grounds for entries at 16-, 24-, 35- and 50-Across. THE FLOOR IS LAVA (58A) has one rule: Players need to avoid touching the floor at all costs.When interpreted in a different way, each of these themed entries describes a means of staying off the ground. You can COUNTERBALANCE (16A), as in balance on top of a counter. From there, you may TABLE-HOP (24A) or COUCH SURF (35A). You can even BAR CRAWL (50A). Any other strategies for avoiding the lava? Feel free to share them in the comments.Tricky Clues13A. As a figure of speech, [Look bad?] normally refers to optics. But this clue ends in a question mark, which usually means that the entry has a more literal interpretation. Here, it’s about giving someone a bad look: OGLE.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More