A rain-fed canal braces for El Niño, a giant moon that may circle a failed star, and a court that redraws the line for neutral platforms

The canal is not a sea-level ditch but a water staircase. Ships climb about 26 metres (85 feet) to Gatún Lake and descend again through locks that fill and drain by gravity alone, with no pumps involved.[6] Each transit draws on the order of 52 million gallons, roughly 200 million litres, of fresh water, and about 22 million gallons of it spills to the ocean and is lost.[6] The lakes that feed those locks, Gatún and Alhajuela, are filled by rain, so the canal is in effect a rain-fed machine.[6]

The stress test came in 2023. Rainfall that October ran 41 per cent below normal, and 2023 finished as one of the driest years in the canal's records.[3] With Gatún Lake at its lowest level since at least 1965, the authority cut daily crossings to 24 from a normal band of 34 to 36 beginning on 7 November 2023, and imposed draft limits that forced ships to sail lighter.[5] Draft is how deep a loaded hull sits in the water, and shallower drafts mean less cargo per ship.

The canal has squeezed hard on the demand side. Its 2016 expansion added larger locks fitted with water-saving basins that recycle about 60 per cent of the water used in each lockage.[6] Older techniques help as well; cross-filling one chamber from another saves the equivalent of six daily transits, and the full suite of conservation measures can save as much as half the water a lockage would otherwise use.[3] Those measures stretch a fixed supply, but they cannot make rain.

The durable fix is a new lake. The authority plans the Río Indio reservoir, a US$1.6 billion project pairing a rockfill dam with an 8,350-metre tunnel that would carry water to Gatún Lake.[4] The reservoir would hold about 1,577 million cubic metres across roughly 46 square kilometres and, the authority says, secure water for the canal and for more than half of Panama's population for decades.[2] It also requires moving about 2,000 residents and negotiating with some 12,000 property owners, and it became legally possible only after Panama's Supreme Court in July 2024 struck down a 2006 law that had walled off the watershed.[4]

For now the numbers look buoyant. In the nine months to June 2026 the canal logged 10,726 transits, up 5.2 per cent, and 389.96 million tons by its Universal Measurement System, a volume-based gauge, up 7.2 per cent, lifting revenue to about $4.8 billion.[1] Yet Administrator Ricaurte Vásquez Morales noted that the probability of a severe El Niño, the Pacific pattern that tends to parch Panama, had climbed from 25 per cent in April to 81 per cent by July, and he signalled that draft and booking-slot restrictions would likely return.[1] Engineering on Río Indio is advancing ahead of a tender expected in 2027.[1]

The canal carries a large share of seaborne trade between Asia and the U.S. East Coast, and the mechanics above tie that flow to one region's rainfall. Conservation and the new reservoir buy resilience, but the reservoir is years and thousands of relocations away, and the next dry season is already forecast to be hard.[1]

The object is about the mass of Jupiter, and it circles a brown dwarf named CD-35 2722 B once every 170 days or so, according to a study published in Nature on 22 July 2026.[2] A brown dwarf is a body too heavy to be a planet but too light to ignite as a star, sometimes called a failed star.[1] If the signal holds up, it would be the first plausible detection of what the team calls an exosatellite, a moon-like companion orbiting something outside the Solar System.[1]

The setting is a young, nearby system. The host star, CD-35 2722, is a red dwarf about half the Sun's mass, and it belongs to a stellar group thought to be somewhere between 50 and 200 million years old.[3] Its brown-dwarf companion weighs more than 30 times Jupiter and sits about 67 astronomical units from the star, a distance first mapped when the object was discovered in 2011.[4] The newly reported body orbits that brown dwarf, not the star.[2]

The trouble is one of proportion. The satellite is about one-thirtieth the mass of the brown dwarf, a far larger ratio than the tiny fractions typical of moons around Solar-System planets.[6] A Jupiter-mass object orbiting an ordinary star would simply be called a planet, yet here it circles a failed star that is itself bound to a real one.[6] "This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like 'planet' and 'moon'," said lead author Kevin Hoy.[1]

The detection leaned on an old workhorse used in a new place. The team pointed the CRIRES+ infrared spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope directly at the brown dwarf and watched for a rhythmic wobble in its light, the telltale tug of an unseen companion.[1] That radial-velocity method is the same technique that revealed the first planet around a Sun-like star, but earlier exomoon hunts had watched host stars, where a moon's faint pull is drowned out by the planet's.[6]

More than 6,000 exoplanets are now catalogued, but confirmed moons beyond our system have remained stubbornly absent, which is what gives this candidate its weight.[1] "As exotic as it is, this system is truly unique and represents a breakthrough: the first plausible detection of an exosatellite," said co-author Alice Zurlo.[5]

The claim is not yet settled. The authors caution that a brown dwarf's turbulent, cloudy atmosphere can itself mimic the periodic wobble a companion produces, so follow-up is needed to rule that out.[6] They expect the Extremely Large Telescope, whose far larger mirror will test the signal with more statistical confidence.[6] Should it survive that scrutiny, the find would push astronomers to widen the vocabulary of what orbits what, and to rethink how such companions form.[2]

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on 16 July 2026 that hosting videos remains covered by EU electronic-commerce law even when the videos advertise gambling, so a member state cannot treat gambling content as falling outside those rules automatically.[1] The more consequential part of the decision concerns the safe harbour itself, the rule that spares a host from liability for material it neither knew about nor controlled.[2] The Court held that this protection is not available to an operator that reviews a channel’s theme and most-watched videos in order to admit it to a revenue-sharing scheme.[1]

The dispute began in Italy, where the communications regulator AGCOM fined Google Ireland €750,000 for videos promoting online betting, conduct banned under the 2018 Dignity Decree.[3] Google prevailed at first instance on the ground that it was a passive host, and AGCOM appealed to the Consiglio di Stato, Italy’s supreme administrative court, which referred the questions to Luxembourg.[4] The videos came from channels tied to Google through commercial agreements, and the platform had examined each channel before the partnership began.[2]

The reasoning turns on an older idea that the Court has now applied to a new business model. The hosting exemption under Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive rests on the host’s role being, in the Court’s words, of a “mere technical, automatic and passive nature.”[2] Vetting a channel’s subject matter to qualify it for payment is not passive, the Court found, because it hands the operator knowledge of what the channel is really about.[5]

"it gives the operator of that platform specific knowledge of the essential content of a set of videos"[2]

What the ruling changes is the price of monetisation. A platform can host at arm’s length and keep its shield, or it can curate and reward creators and accept a greater risk of liability for what they publish, but the Court has made it harder to do the second while claiming the legal comfort of the first.[3] The decision does not itself declare Google liable; it sends the case back to the Consiglio di Stato to decide, on these principles, whether Google could reasonably have been unaware of the channels’ gambling theme.[6]

The judgment rests on the e-Commerce Directive because the events predate the Digital Services Act, but its reach is unlikely to stop there. The newer Act carries the hosting exemption forward in Article 6 in nearly identical wording, and its recitals codify the same case law on when a provider’s active role gives it knowledge or control, so the neutrality test the Court applied here reads as guidance for the years ahead as much as an epilogue to the old rules.[5]