New Yorkers eat 3 million oysters a year and the shells are rebuilding the harbor

Happy Friday. New York Harbor once had so many oysters that a single adult could filter 50 gallons of water a day. Then we ate them all. Today, a nonprofit on Governor's Island is turning discarded shells from 75 restaurants into new reefs, one hatchery at a time, working toward a billion oysters by 2035.

We also have omega-3 and a daily aspirin matching antibiotics for severe gum disease in a year-long clinical trial, scientists who ranked 123 bird songs for beauty and found the common blackbird comes out on top, and a home in Kerala that stays cool all summer through clay walls, lattice brickwork, and physics.

Have a great weekend

—Stephanie S

New York Harbor once contained roughly half of the world's oysters. They filtered the water, absorbed wave energy, and provided habitat for fish, crabs, and birds across hundreds of acres of reef. Then overharvesting and pollution eliminated them almost entirely. The harbor that had once cleaned itself every three days was left to manage its own waste without its most powerful natural tool.

The Billion Oyster Project, based on Governor's Island, is changing that. Seventy-five New York City restaurants now divert their discarded oyster shells to the project rather than the landfill. The shells are cured in a pile until bacteria and invasive species are eliminated, then seeded with larvae in a hatchery that can raise ten million baby oysters at once. Trucked out to reef sites across the harbor, the oysters get to work filtering water, building habitat, and absorbing the energy of incoming waves that might otherwise contribute to flooding.

So far the project has raised 200 million live oysters across 19 acres of restored reef, filtering tens of trillions of gallons of harbor water in the process. Their goal is one billion oysters and 100 acres of reef by 2035. "Oysters are what we call a keystone species," said Bela Altman, the project's volunteer coordinator. "If the oysters are thriving in an environment, all other biodiversity is thriving in that environment."

At one billion oysters, those 100 new reefs would refresh the entire water volume of New York Harbor every three days. Exactly as they once did.

Periodontitis is a chronic inflammatory disease that develops when bacteria accumulate below the gumline and destroy the tissue and bone that hold teeth in place. In advanced cases it causes tooth loss. The standard treatment is scaling, a procedure that clears bacterial deposits from below the gums, often followed by antibiotics. A new study from Brazil suggests there may be a meaningful alternative for some patients.

The São Paulo Research Foundation study followed 109 people with advanced periodontitis for one year, dividing them into four groups. Everyone received scaling. One group added antibiotics for two weeks. Another added three grams of omega-3 daily plus low-dose aspirin for six months. After a year, 58% of the antibiotic group and 57.7% of the omega-3 and aspirin group had reached the clinical target, defined as no more than four remaining deep periodontal pockets. Among those who received scaling alone, only 23.1% hit that mark.

The effects in the omega-3 group persisted six months after supplementation ended, which surprised the researchers. Omega-3 triggers the body's own inflammation-resolving molecules, and aspirin enhances that process. "We have a promising, scientifically plausible alternative to antibiotics in select cases," said lead author Magda Feres of Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Demonstrating that severe periodontitis can be treated by working with the body's own response rather than killing bacteria is new and relevant information.

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Researchers at the University of Tübingen wanted to know what actually makes a bird song pleasant to human ears, so they asked people to rate 123 different bird songs on a scale of one to five, then cross-referenced the results with the acoustic properties of the calls that scored highest. The answer turns out to be surprisingly consistent, and surprisingly explainable.

The common blackbird topped the rankings with an average score of 4.52 out of 5, ahead of the willow warbler at 4.45 and the blackcap at 4.43. At the bottom sat the barn owl at 1.32. The songs people found most pleasant were varied, higher-pitched, and not too loud, with a narrower range of frequencies and more complex arrangements of notes. They also tended to avoid a specific frequency range where human hearing is highly sensitive and easily overwhelmed.

Crucially, knowing about birds made no difference. People who could identify species by sight or sound rated songs almost identically to those who couldn't. "We might be wired to prefer more variable sounds with moderate amplitudes and frequencies," said study author Dr. Nadine Kalb, "because they signal a safe, healthy, and restorative environment where we can relax." The next time you hear a blackbird outside your window, you are listening to what science now confirms is the most beautiful sound in the avian world.

When architect Amrutha Kishor of Elemental Architects proposed building a home in Kerala without air conditioning, the clients were skeptical. Kerala summers are punishing, and humidity regularly sits around 80%. Sisters Renu Krishnadas and Rekha Utham agreed to try. Krishnadas stayed for 21 days during peak summer. "I never once switched on an AC," she said. "I did not feel the need for an AC at all. Even today, fans are good enough."

The house works by behaving like a living organism. Built along a north-south axis to align with the natural airflow, its northern face features low clay lattice walls called jali, whose narrow openings accelerate air as it passes through, using the same physics that makes air blown through pursed lips cool enough to extinguish a candle. Interior walls are made of perforated clay blocks that allow both air and moisture to pass through. High angled ceilings channel heated air upward and out through a series of upper windows designed to admit light without admitting the heat that eye-level windows would.

The skeleton is built from laterite, a local mineral with very low thermal transmission that also absorbs moisture, and the pitched roof uses two layers of local clay tiles with an air gap between them to slow heat transfer from direct sun. Every material was chosen to delay, redirect, or exhaust heat before it reaches the people inside. Elemental Architects has now built dozens of structures using these principles. Read the full story.

🎲 USA: Native Americans were crafting dice and playing games as far back as 13,000 years ago, thousands of years before the practice was previously documented, according to new analysis of artifacts pushing the origins of gaming further back than anyone expected. GNN USA.

🪐 Global: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a giant 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn's south pole, the first large regular-sided jet pattern ever observed in the planet's southern hemisphere, still strengthening and possibly representing a new class of planetary atmospheric phenomenon. Published in Science Advances.

🧫 Global: Stanford Medicine researchers found that blocking a single receptor on immune cells restored their ability to clear damaged cells throughout the body, keeping the brains, hearts, muscles, livers, and kidneys of old mice remarkably youthful. "We've been trying to figure out why we age. Now we know at least one big reason."

🦇 Global: Scientists discovered that more than 500 species of vesper bats carry two completely separate sets of antibody genes, an immune arrangement never before found in any mammal, which may explain how bats harbor dangerous viruses without getting sick.

💎 Global: Chemists at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory have developed a method to create nanocrystals from metal nitrides that had previously resisted synthesis for 30 years, including gallium nitride used in LED lighting, titanium nitride used in medical implants, and niobium nitride used in superconductors. Published in Nature.

On September 4, 1989, a few hundred East Germans gathered at St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig after a weekly prayer service for peace and began peacefully demanding democratic reforms: the right to travel, the right to vote, the right to be heard. The gathering was small enough to dismiss. The authorities did not dismiss it.

The following week 70,000 people came. The week after that, 120,000. Then 320,000, chanting "Wir sind das Volk!" — We are the people. The local Lutheran churches offered sanctuary, financial support, and a place to organize. Within two months, the Berlin Wall had fallen. The peaceful revolution that began in a church with a few hundred people had ended a regime.

Other notable September 4 events:

1998: Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 28 years ago today, two Stanford Ph.D. students who adopted the unofficial motto "Don't be evil" and built the world's most widely used search engine.

1781: Los Angeles was founded by 12 Spanish colonial families, 245 years ago today, with eight of the 23 adults being Indigenous and ten being of African descent, making the city's founding population remarkably diverse from its very first day.

1915: Rocky Mountain National Park was established by Congress, 111 years ago today, thanks largely to Enos Mills, who first visited the mountains as a sickly 14-year-old and spent his adult life lobbying for their protection.

1972: Mark Spitz became the first Olympian to win seven gold medals at a single Games, 54 years ago today, swimming seven events at the Munich Olympics and setting a world record in each one.

— George Santayana

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Turning Genes Off Without Touching Them: Modified CRISPR systems that silence genes without cutting DNA at all are now being used to reversibly switch off disease-causing genes in specific cell types, with applications in cancer, neurodegeneration, and metabolic disease, and none of the permanent changes that standard gene editing carries.

🌱 Farming With Trees: Researchers and farmers are planting trees throughout crop fields and pastures in deliberate patterns that improve soil health, sequester carbon, provide shade for livestock, and increase overall farm productivity compared to conventional monoculture, turning one of our oldest land management practices into a scalable climate solution.

🔬 Unlocking the Brain With Sound: Focused ultrasound beams can temporarily open the blood-brain barrier at precise locations, allowing cancer drugs, gene therapies, and other treatments to reach brain tumors and neurological conditions that were previously inaccessible without surgery, and the barrier closes again naturally within hours.

🌊 Watching Salt Before It Arrives: Sensor networks being deployed in river deltas and coastal aquifers can detect saltwater intrusion weeks or even months before it reaches critical areas, giving communities and farmers time to switch water sources and protect agricultural land from the salinization that has already damaged vast tracts of farmland globally.

🔭 Catching the Universe in the Act: Wide-field survey telescopes scanning the entire visible sky every few nights are catching transient events including supernovae, neutron star mergers, and near-Earth asteroid flybys hours to days earlier than previous generations of observatories, opening a new era of rapid-response astronomy.

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