Laundering and evasion in response to antislavery policies in Brazil’s cattle sector

October 12, 2026| Source: PNAS

Modern slavery remains pervasive across many economic sectors. Progress toward eradicating it has been partially hindered by a lack of tested, comprehensive policy responses. Using data on millions of cattle transactions in Brazil, we evaluated how ranchers changed their selling behavior after being added to the “Dirty List,” a public registry that names and shames employers found to use modern slavery. Dirty Listed ranchers significantly reduced direct sales to slaughterhouses that signed sustainable supply chain commitments but evaded sanctions by laundering cattle through compliant intermediaries or selling to nonsignatory slaughterhouses. These responses weakened the financial cost of listing to ranchers, and likely allowed beef and leather linked to modern slave labor to enter international supply chains. Our findings highlight the limits of downstream enforcement and underscore the need to monitor upstream suppliers to ensure slavery-free supply chains.

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Extensive glacier loss in the coterminous United States.

Glaciers populate the mountain ranges of the western conterminous United States and despite their importance to alpine hydrology, their area and volume change have never been comprehensively evaluated. Our study shows that since the mid-twentieth century about one-quarter of the glaciers have disappeared and the overall area and volume are reduced by one-third. The pattern of glacier shrinkage suggests most glaciers in the conterminous United States are largely maintained by local topographic in

Physical/TechOctober 20, 2026

Ancient DNA challenges to admixture narratives: Insights from Notre-Dame Cemetery (1683-1796) in Colonial Montreal, Canada.

Historical narratives of early colonization in Quebec frequently portray French-Indigenous relations as cooperative and characterized by admixture; which are often mobilized in modern debates on false-indigeneity. These narratives have been studied through genealogical, genetic, and bioarchaeological analyses, yet individuals of African descent remain mostly absent from them, while Indigenous peoples are framed largely in relation to colonists. Notre-Dame Cemetery (1683-1796) in Tiohtià:ke-

Physical/TechOctober 20, 2026

Reaction-based cryo-EM resolves the continuous conformational spectrum of CTP synthase catalysis.

Capturing enzymes under native turnover conditions remains a grand challenge in structural biology. Here, we develop a reaction-based cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) strategy that directly samples Drosophila melanogaster cytidine triphosphate synthase (CTPS) from actively catalyzing mixtures containing only natural substrates and allosteric effectors. By integrating reaction-based sampling with three-dimensional variability analysis, we resolve a continuous conformational spectrum of CTPS dur

Physical/TechOctober 20, 2026

GTP orchestrates CTP synthase via an allosteric effector-cycling mechanism.

Cytidine triphosphate (CTP), a fundamental building block of RNA, plays vital roles in diverse biological processes. CTP synthase (CTPS) is the only known enzyme for de novo synthesis of CTP. Efficient CTPS catalysis requires guanosine triphosphate (GTP) in a dose-dependent, nonconsumptive manner; however, the precise mechanism by which GTP drives CTP formation remains unclear. Here, we integrate a series of cryo-EM structures of Drosophila melanogaster CTPS captured from actively catalyzing sam

Physical/TechOctober 20, 2026

Understanding consciousness (biological and artificial) as a society of self-schemas.

This article argues that human cognition is more than the performance of functions such as memory, decision-making, and attention. The brain also builds schematic models of those cognitive functions and uses those models to monitor, predict, and partially control them. When you introspect, your understanding of who you are and what is happening inside of you is derived from those schematic, sometimes inaccurate, but generally useful models, rather than from the actual cognitive functions that ar