2
[2026-09-07] · src Lee, Jin, Chandra, Goodge, Lesne, Confalone, Nielsch, Büchner, Tafuri, Massarotti, Haider, Poccia, Felser, Chowdhury, Vool; arXiv:2609.00964 (2026-09)
Kagome superconductors' pairing symmetry has stayed unsettled for years because the standard probe of gap structure - electrodynamic response - needs more material than the field's best flakes provide, and different groups measuring different flakes of CsV3Sb5 have reported everything from fully gapped to anisotropic to nodal behavior. This group instead couples an exfoliated CsV3Sb5 flake (Tc = 4.5 K) into a lambda/4 superconducting microwave resonator near 4.9 GHz, contactlessly, and engineers the device geometry to suppress the two-level-system losses that normally swamp a bare chip's intrinsic signal. Measured from the millikelvin regime up past 1 K, the extracted superfluid density falls off linearly with temperature at low T - the signature of a nodal gap - rather than the exponential falloff a fully gapped superconductor would show.
This doesn't end the disagreement in the literature by itself - the authors are explicit that fully gapped, anisotropic and nodal reports all still stand - but it removes the confound that made the disagreement hard to interpret: whether different flakes, or different techniques with different sensitivities to disorder and geometry, were driving the different answers. A contactless method sensitive enough to work on the same fragile flakes STM and transport measurements use, without the contacts, gives the field a way to check technique against technique on nominally the same material rather than trusting whichever paper came out on top of a citation stack. That is worth more right now than one more vote for "nodal."
[2026-09-07] · src Fan-Yuan, Shan, Zhang, Wang, Fan, Xie, He, Wang, Yin, Chen, Fu, Guo, Han (USTC); Nature Physics (2026-09-03), arXiv:2602.01787 (2026-02)
Classical position claims - a GPS fix, a network address - are trivially spoofable, because nothing stops a prover from lying about where a signal originated. Quantum position verification closes that gap using relativity: a prover must correctly combine information arriving simultaneously from verifiers on opposite sides, and no-cloning plus the speed-of-light limit makes forging a response from the wrong location provably (not just practically) impossible. Every prior demonstration needed true single-photon sources, which cap the achievable rate and distance. This group instead uses phase-randomized weak coherent states - ordinary attenuated laser pulses - and gets two verifiers 2 km apart to jointly confirm a prover's position to better than 75 meters, within the same information-theoretic security framework, at a rate single-photon sources can't sustain.
75 meters over 2 km is a poor number next to GPS, and everything here still depends on trusted, synchronized verifier stations rather than being a drop-in replacement for satellite positioning - so this is not a location technology announcement. What it establishes is that the security guarantee - unconditional, rather than resting on an adversary's compute budget - survives the move to hardware that can actually run at useful rates and be deployed outside a single lab. That was the missing piece between "quantum position verification is theoretically sound" and "quantum position verification could authenticate something that matters," and closing it with coherent-state optics rather than exotic photon sources is what makes the next step - more verifiers, longer baselines - an engineering problem now instead of a physics one.
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[2026-09-07] · src —
Alto takes today's slot — three days since its last session is the longest gap of the three instruments right now, and trumpet went yesterday, so the two chops-dependent instruments don't land back to back. With no method book chosen yet, the assignment stays inside the brief's placeholder: long tones, overtones, a scale pattern, nothing invented. Today's fundamental is low F♯, continuing the upward semitone climb the survey has held since it passed E♭, and both the warmup shape and the musical-target pattern open their second circuit in the same order the first one used — a held, level tone after last time's swell, and a wider skip than any tried before.
5 minutes: long tones on low F♯ and G, whole notes at a fixed mf, quarter=60, eight full counts each with no swell — the target is a pitch that doesn't drift or thin across the full eight counts, which a swelling tone can hide and a held one can't, the same demand 08-26 tested two fundamentals back down the climb.
Overtone series from fundamental low F♯: voice up through F♯–F♯–C♯–F♯–A♯ using only the low F♯ fingering, changing partials with throat and voicing, not embouchure — the same method as every prior session, now a sixth semitone higher than where the climb started. Success criterion: three clean ascents in a row, each partial speaking immediately at a steady dynamic, no pinch or pitch smear at the change, and the fundamental still centered after dropping back down each time.
F♯ major scale, one octave, in broken fifths (1-5-2-6-3-7-4-8) rather than the thirds, fourths or triads this survey has already broken up — the widest skip tried yet, and one that forces the ear to track where the line actually is rather than where a stepwise scale would predict. Shape it as a phrase: lean into the upper note of each pair, taper into the one that follows it, rather than playing the pattern metronomically.
Stop the moment the held tone loses its center — a drift sharp or flat, or a thinning partway through the eight counts — or an overtone needs a jaw shove or throat squeeze to speak. Both are fatigue standing in for support, and reps past that point train the substitute instead of the real thing.
[2026-09-07] · src —
hearPaul Desmond — For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her (Bridge Over Troubled Water) · Tidal · Spotify
Cut in 1969 with Herbie Hancock on electric piano under Don Sebesky's arrangement, Desmond's reading of the Simon & Garfunkel tune sits at one hushed dynamic for nearly the whole take — long notes that neither swell into the next phrase nor thin out at the end of a breath, the exact quality today's held-tone warmup is chasing. The tune's own melody keeps stepping up by a wide skip and settling there rather than resolving stepwise, which is most of what a phrase built from broken fifths is asking the ear to do.
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[2026-09-07] · src D. Mass. (No. 1:26-cv-13917); Supreme Court No. 26A305 (No. 26A297 withdrawn as moot)
On September 4, following the hearing covered here last week, Judge Talwani granted a preliminary injunction in California v. USPS, superseding the 14-day temporary restraining order before it expired. The new order again bars USPS from enforcing the mandatory ballot-envelope and return-envelope design standards, the portal-registration and voter-data-upload requirements, and USPS's claimed authority to refuse noncompliant ballots, for elections on or before November 3, 2026 — the same relief as the TRO, on a standard requiring likelihood of success rather than only a threat of immediate harm. Talwani found the states likely to succeed on claims that USPS lacked statutory authority to issue the rule and that its mandates on states and mail carriers are independently unconstitutional, and again wrote that the record contains no evidence of the mail-voting fraud the rule was written to address. The government's first emergency application at the Supreme Court (No. 26A297), filed September 3 against the about-to-expire TRO, was withdrawn as moot once the preliminary injunction issued; the government filed a second application (No. 26A305) on September 6 asking the Court to stay the new injunction so USPS can enforce the rule while the case proceeds. Justice Jackson, who handles emergency applications arising from the First Circuit, set a deadline of 4:00pm EDT September 9 for the states to respond.
Like the TRO before it, this is not a ruling that the rule is unlawful — only that the states are likely enough to prevail and the harm of proceeding is great enough to justify blocking the rule while the case is litigated on the merits. Nothing has been decided by the Supreme Court; September 9 is the response deadline the Court set, not a ruling date, and the Court has given no indication of when it will act once briefing closes.
The rule's mandatory provisions remain unenforceable against any state for a covered election, exactly as under the TRO — but that status now rests on an order the government has explicitly asked the Supreme Court to lift. Whether USPS can enforce the rule before the midterms turns on the Court's timing as much as on either side's legal argument, and nothing here stops the Court from acting on the application before, or instead of, waiting for the First Circuit appeal the government filed August 31 to be decided.
[2026-09-07] · src Supreme Court of the United States (No. 26A203)
On August 31 the Supreme Court stayed, 5-4, the D.D.C. district court's March 31 preliminary injunction in National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, which had let below-ground work on the new East Wing military installation continue but barred any above-ground construction of the new ballroom except as "strictly necessary" to protect the White House, the President, and his staff. The stay runs pending the government's petition for certiorari, if timely sought, and lapses automatically if certiorari is denied. The per curiam majority — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — held the government is likely to prevail on the theory that the Trust's plaintiff, preservationist Elizabeth Hoagland, lacked Article III standing: her stated injury, distress at a structure she found aesthetically incompatible with the White House, was "disagreement with the activities of others," not a concrete harm, in the majority's view. The Court also found irreparable harm favored the government, citing intelligence and military declarations that delaying the project's integrated design threatened security operations. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, dissented, arguing Hoagland's documented preservation expertise and regular access to the White House grounds supported standing on the same footing courts recognize for plaintiffs with aesthetic interests in particular wildlife or landscapes, and that Congress had barred construction on the grounds without express statutory authority the government does not have.
The Court did not reach the merits — whether the National Historic Preservation Act required Section 106 review before this construction, or whether the government has the statutory authority Roberts says it lacks. The stay is conditioned expressly on a pending certiorari petition; if the government does not timely seek certiorari, or if the Court denies it, the injunction resumes force by the stay order's own terms.
Above-ground construction of the ballroom, halted since March 31, can resume now and continue unless certiorari is denied (reviving the injunction) or granted and the government later loses on the merits. Because the ruling turns entirely on standing, no court has yet held whether the National Historic Preservation Act required the consultation the Trust sued to enforce — a different plaintiff with a more concrete injury could still bring that question back.
[2026-09-07] · src 119th Congress, H.R. 6500, Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027 (Public Law, signed 2026-09-02)
The Senate passed its version of H.R. 6500 90-6 on August 8; the House concurred in the Senate amendment 370-48 on September 1; the President signed it September
The act funds federal agencies at FY2026 levels through the earlier of
December 11, 2026, or enactment of the applicable full-year appropriations bill, and extends a set of expiring authorizations, including surface-transportation programs, veterans' homelessness and rural-health grants, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act (through 2028), plus customs user fees through March 31,
Government funding that would otherwise have lapsed at midnight October 1 is now extended, at current levels, to December 11 — averting a shutdown at the start of fiscal year 2027, but not resolving anything: Congress still has to pass, and the President still has to sign, whatever funds the government past that date, on the same timeline three months on.
[2026-09-07] · src Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation — August 2026
BLS's Employment Situation report for August, released September 4, put nonfarm payroll growth at +162,000, above the prior 12-month average of +31,000, with the unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% and labor-force participation up slightly to 61.6% — still 0.5 points below January. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% on the month and 3.1% over the year, to $37.75. June and July payrolls were revised up a combined 55,000: June from +20,000 to +31,000, and July from -23,000 to +21,000.
This is the last Employment Situation report before the Federal Reserve's next rate decision at the September 15-16 FOMC meeting, and it replaces, on the official record, two prior months that had shown much weaker or negative job growth with upwardly revised, positive ones. What weight the Fed gives it is a question for that meeting, not for this report.
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[2026-09-07] · src latex-lab-sec-template.dtx, v0.9l (2026-08-08), latex3/latex2e develop branch
LaTeX News 43 (June 2026) said of the kernel's new template-based heading
commands: "Over the summer we intend to add emulations for the titlesec
package interfaces ... so stay tuned." Summer is over; the answer, read
straight out of the experimental latex-lab bundle's own source, is not yet.
latex-lab-sec-template.dtx, the file implementing the new heading commands,
carries a subsection titled "Support for the titlesec package interfaces" —
and the line directly under that heading is the literal word TODO. Below it
are the intended call signatures for \titleformat and \titlespacing,
copied from titlesec's own syntax, with no macro definition anywhere in the
3,613-line file that implements either one. Its companion file,
latex-lab-sec.dtx, mentions titlesec exactly once, to warn that the new
code "will probably break with ... titlesec." No LaTeX News issue has shipped
since 43; the next is due 2026-11-01, per the project's own six-month
cadence, so this is the freshest answer available, not a stale one.
Nothing has changed about the answer to last week's question — reaching for
titlesec on a newly \DocumentMetadata{taggingon}= document still means the
kernel's own tagged heading commands and titlesec's patches are two systems
that do not yet know about each other, exactly as the limitations section of
latex-lab-sec.dtx says outright. What is new is that the interface has
moved from "promised" to "specified but empty": the function signatures are
now fixed and documented, so a document relying on titlesec's exact syntax
has a real target to watch land, rather than a sentence in a newsletter to
watch for.
[2026-09-07] · src Overleaf LaTeX table documentation; Typst grid reference
Set one bar of a lead sheet line — "A-ma-zing grace, how sweet the sound" —
with the chord that falls on each syllable sitting directly above it, using a
two-row table rather than hand-placed boxes: chords in the top row, one
syllable per cell in the bottom row, chord cells left blank wherever the
harmony hasn't changed. Something like C on "A-", F on "-zing", C again on
"grace,". In LaTeX, build it as a tabular with two rows and no visible
rules; in Typst, the same shape as a grid with two rows and one column per
syllable. Both engines then guarantee the alignment as a side effect of the
column model — nothing is nudged into place by hand.
Success criterion: pick any syllable where the chord changes, and confirm in
the rendered output that the chord symbol's cell and the syllable's cell are
the same column — check by counting columns in your source against what
you see, not by eye-balling whether it "looks" aligned. Under an hour: eight
columns, two rows, no packages beyond what tabular and grid already give
you, and Overleaf plus the Typst web app skip installing anything.
This is the general answer to "how do I keep two lines of text in lock-step per character" — a lead sheet's chords over lyrics, an interlinear gloss under a quoted line in a language you're translating, units stacked under a column of numbers — and a table is the tool for all three because it makes the alignment a property of the structure rather than of manually measured whitespace, which breaks the moment the font, size or one word's length changes. Doing it once on a lead sheet — the shape closest to hand as a music reader — is the same move to reach for the next time it's a citation in a paper rather than a hymn.