A placenta is, by definition, new tissue: It grows from scratch over nine months of pregnancy. So when a team of researchers found microplastics in every human placenta they sampled, they were a little bit shocked, Matthew Campen, a professor at the University of New Mexico and a researcher on the team, told me. But in hindsight, he thinks perhaps they shouldn’t have been. Microplastics are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the rain and snow falling from the sky, the food we eat.

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Scientific American has been a mainstay of science and technology journalism in the United States. (It’s been in business 179 years, even longer than The Atlantic.) As an aspiring nerd in my youth—I began college as a chemistry major—I read it regularly.

Yesterday, pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands. Today brought another mass detonation in Lebanon, this time involving walkie-talkies. The attacks are gruesome and shocking. An expert told the Associated Press that the pagers received a message that caused them to vibrate in a way that required someone to press buttons to stop it. That action appears to have triggered the explosion.

The Federal Reserve has declared victory in the war on inflation. At its meeting today, the central bank announced that, after setting higher interest rates for two years in an effort to tame prices, it is finally beginning to bring them back down.
The Fed lowered interest rates by 0.50 percent (or 50 basis points), and has suggested that future cuts will be similarly sized.

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Updated at 1:05 p.m. ET on September 18, 2024
A first draft of this story opened: “It’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at you.”
Backspace, backspace, backspace. Although it’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at me personally, it is almost every day that Senator J. D. Vance rage-tweets at somebody.

The minivan dilemma: It is the least cool vehicle ever designed, yet the most useful. Offering the best value for the most function to a plurality of American drivers, a minivan can cart seven passengers or more in comfort if not style, haul more cargo than many larger trucks, and do so for a sticker price roughly a quarter cheaper than competing options. Even so, minivan sales have been falling steadily since their peak in 2000, when about 1.3 million were sold in the United States.