About 20,000 kilometers beneath the sun’s surface, magnetic fields rise no faster than about 500 kilometers per hour. That speed (roughly one-third of previous estimates) is about the same speed that gas rises and falls within the sun, implying that moving parcels of gas help steer magnetic fields toward the surface, researchers report July 13 in Science Advances.

Aaron Birch of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and colleagues estimated the speed by combining observations of the sun’s surface with computer simulations of how gas moves within the hot orb. By studying the sun’s inner workings, researchers hope to understand what drives sunspots and flares — the blemishes and eruptions triggered by magnetic fields punching through the surface.

Butterflies look so delicate as they flitter from flower to flower. And yet, they are capable of migrating incredibly long distances. The monarch, for example, migrates between Canada and Mexico, covering distances of up to 4,800 kilometers, riding a combination of columns of rising air, called thermals, and air currents to travel around 80 to 160 kilometers per day.

No single monarch makes this entire journey, though. The round trip is done by a succession of as many as five generations of butterflies. But now scientists have found that there’s a species of butterfly that may rival the monarch’s migratory record — the painted lady (Vanessa cardui).

Painted ladies are found throughout much of the world, except for South America and Australia. They’ve been seen as far north as Svalbard, Norway, and nearly as far south as Antarctica. The butterflies are known to migrate, particularly between Europe and Africa, but their route has been largely unknown. Scientists had tracked the butterflies to northern Africa (the region known as the Maghreb), but there have been hints that they may fly across the Sahara. Two new studies back up this claim.

Gerard Talavera and Roger Vila of Harvard University visited four sub-Saharan nations — Benin, Chad, Ethiopia and Senegal — in 2014. They found butterflies moving south through Chad. There were dense aggregations of breeding butterflies in Benin and Ethiopia. And as the dry season approached in Senegal, the pair found butterflies old and worn, as if they had just finished a long, tortuous journey. Plus, the timing of these appearances coincided with the butterflies’ fall and winter disappearance from Europe.

“Taken together, the results of our fieldwork provide evidence suggesting that most European populations may undertake long-range migratory flights to tropical Africa, thus crossing the combined hazards of the Mediterranean Sea and the completely hostile Sahara,” the pair write September 21 in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

If butterflies truly are making that flight, they could be traveling more than 4,000 kilometers in a single generation — a potential record for a migratory insect, the researchers note. And while this seems nearly impossible, it may not be. A previous study found that with favorable winds, painted butterflies could travel as fast as 45 kilometers per hour. At that speed, it would take them as little as four days to make it from Central Europe to Central Africa. Since an adult painted butterfly lives for around four weeks, such a journey is feasible, Talavera and Vila argue.

But this evidence is only circumstantial; it doesn’t prove that butterflies are truly making that journey. So while Tavalera and Vila were in sub-Saharan Africa, they collected hundreds of adult painted ladies and larvae. Some of these were used in a second study, published October 4 in Biology Letters and led by Constantí Stefanescu of the Natural History Museum of Granollers in Spain. In this study, the team analyzed the isotopes of hydrogen found in the adult butterflies’ wings.
The hydrogen in the water that falls as precipitation can come in different isotopes, or forms, that vary in the number of neutrons. The ratio of these isotopes varies geographically. And the ratio present wherever the butterflies lived as larvae correlates with that later found in the adults’ wings. So researchers can tell where the adults were born.

Stefanescu and his team analyzed butterflies collected in seven European and seven African countries and developed a rough map of where the adults were moving. Those in sub-Saharan Africa had indeed started in Europe. But those in the Maghreb came from both sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.

What explains all this movement? The butterflies are following a combination of prevailing winds and favorable conditions for breeding. As rains come and go, the butterflies breed and move on. And while crossing the Sahara may seem like quite a way to go just for some rainy days and lush vegetation, painted lady butterflies are hardly the only creatures willing to go that far, Stefanescu and his colleagues note. There are plenty of other insects that make such a journey — as well as billions of birds.

Observations of the dense remnant of an exploded star have provided the first sign of a quantum effect on light passing through empty space.

Light from the stellar remnant, a neutron star located about 400 light-years away, is polarized, meaning that its electromagnetic waves are oriented preferentially in a particular direction like light that reflects off the surface of water (SN: 7/8/06, p. 24). That polarization is evidence of “vacuum birefringence,” a quantum effect first predicted 80 years ago caused by light interacting with the vacuum of space in a strong magnetic field. Scientists report the result in a paper to be published in the Feb. 11, 2017 issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“It’s the most natural explanation,” says astrophysicist Jeremy Heyl of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who was not involved with the new result. But he cautions, other sources of polarization could mimic the effect, and additional observations are necessary.

According to quantum electrodynamics, the theory describing how light interacts with charged particles such as electrons, empty space isn’t really empty. It is filled with a roiling soup of ethereal particles, constantly blipping into and out of existence (SN: 11/26/16, p. 28). As light passes through the void, its wiggling electromagnetic waves interact with those particles. Under strong magnetic fields, light waves that wiggle along the direction of the magnetic field will travel slightly slower than light oscillating perpendicular to the direction of the magnetic field, which rotates the overall polarization of light coming from the star.

A similar effect commonly occurs in a more familiar situation, in what are known as birefringent materials. The liquid crystals in computer monitors similarly rotate the polarization of light. Horizontally polarized light, for example, is sent to each pixel, but a filter lets only vertically polarized light escape. To switch on a pixel, the liquid crystals twist the light waves 90 degrees so the waves will pass through.

But evidence for the quantum version of the effect was not easy to come by. Observing it requires a magnetic field stronger than those that can be produced in the laboratory, says astrophysicist Roberto Mignani of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Milan, coauthor of the new study. The magnetic field around the neutron star that Mignani and colleagues studied is about 10 trillion times the strength of Earth’s. But the star is incredibly faint, making measurements of its polarization difficult. “A neutron star of this kind is about as bright as a candle halfway between the Earth and the moon,” Mignani says.

Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the scientists found that visible light from the neutron star was about 16 percent polarized, a result consistent with scientists’ theories of vacuum birefringence. But, says Heyl, the polarization could also occur as a result of an unexpectedly large amount of plasma surrounding the star.
For airtight evidence of the effect, scientists could study X-rays from neutron stars, where the polarization effect should be even stronger. Although no telescope currently exists that can make such measurements, there are several proposed X-ray satellites that may soon be able to clinch the case for vacuum birefringence.

Scientists might want to keep their fingers crossed. If future measurements overturned the evidence for vacuum birefringence, the effect’s absence would be difficult to reconcile with the theory of quantum electrodynamics, Heyl says. “It’s essentially one of the basic predictions of the theory, so to fix it you’d really have to rip the theory all the way back down to the foundations and rebuild it.”

How well, not how much, people sleep may affect Alzheimer’s disease risk.

Healthy adults built up Alzheimer’s-associated proteins in their cerebral spinal fluid when prevented from getting slow-wave sleep, the deepest stage of sleep, researchers report July 10 in Brain. Just one night of deep-sleep disruption was enough to increase the amount of amyloid-beta, a protein that clumps into brain cell‒killing plaques in people with Alzheimer’s. People in the study who slept poorly for a week also had more of a protein called tau in their spinal fluid than they did when well rested. Tau snarls itself into tangles inside brain cells of people with the disease.
These findings support a growing body of evidence that lack of Zs is linked to Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Specifically, “this suggests that there’s something special about deep, slow-wave sleep,” says Kristine Yaffe, a neurologist and psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study.

People with Alzheimer’s are notoriously poor sleepers, but scientists aren’t sure if that is a cause or a consequence of the disease. Evidence from recent animal and human studies suggests the problem goes both ways, Yaffe says. Lack of sleep may make people more prone to brain disorders. And once a person has the disease, disruptions in the brain may make it hard to sleep. Still, it wasn’t clear why not getting enough shut-eye promotes Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers led by neurologist David Holtzman of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis speculated that lower levels of brain cell activity during deep sleep would produce less A-beta, tau and other proteins than other stages of sleep or wakefulness. Holtzman, Washington University sleep medicine physician Yo-El Ju and colleagues recruited 17 volunteers, all healthy adults between ages 35 and 65, who had no sleep disorders. “These are good sleepers,” Ju says.
Volunteers wore activity monitors to track their sleep at home and visited the sleep lab at least twice. On one visit, the volunteers slept normally while wearing headphones. On the other visit, researchers played beeps through headphones whenever the volunteers were about to go into deep sleep. The sounds usually didn’t wake the people up but kept them from getting any slow-wave sleep. Volunteers slept just as much on the night when deep sleep was disrupted as they did on the night when no sound was played through the headphones.
Spinal taps showed that the more deep sleep people missed out on, the higher their levels of A-beta in the morning. Tau levels didn’t budge because of just one night of slow-wave sleep disruption, but people whose activity monitors indicated they had slept poorly the week before the test also had higher levels of that protein.

“This study in humans is really an elegant experimental demonstration” that bolsters Holtzman’s hypothesis that lack of rest for brain cells could be detrimental, says Adam Spira, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Without proper deep sleep, brain cells continue to churn out, producing more A-beta and tau than a well-rested brain.

Some research has suggested that toxic proteins get flushed out of the brain during sleep (SN: 11/16/13, p. 7). Messing with slow-wave sleep doesn’t seem to interfere with this wash cycle, Ju says. Levels of other proteins made by nerve cells didn’t vary with the lack of deep sleep, she says.

Cube-shaped ice is rare, at least at the microscopic level of the ice crystal. Now researchers have coaxed typically hexagonal 3-D ice crystals to form the most cubic ice ever created in the lab.

Cubed ice crystals — which may exist naturally in cold, high-altitude clouds — could help improve scientists’ understanding of clouds and how they interact with Earth’s atmosphere and sunlight, two interactions that influence climate.

Engineer Barbara Wyslouzil of Ohio State University and colleagues made the cubed ice by shooting nitrogen and water vapor through nozzles at supersonic speeds. The gas mixture expanded and cooled, and then the vapor formed nanodroplets. Quickly cooling the droplets further kept them liquid at normally freezing temperatures. Then, at around –48° Celsius, the droplets froze in about one millionth of a second.

The low-temperature quick freeze allowed the cubic ice to form, the team reports in the July 20 Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The crystals weren’t perfect cubes but were about 80 percent cubic. That’s better than previous studies, which made ice that was 73 percent cubic.

Planetary scientists now know how thick the Martian crust is, thanks to the strongest Marsquake ever observed.

On average, the crust is between 42 and 56 kilometers thick, researchers report in a paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters. That’s roughly 70 percent thicker than the average continental crust on Earth.

The measurement was based on data from NASA’s InSight lander, a stationary seismometer that recorded waves rippling through Mars’ interior for four Earth years. Last May, the entire planet shook with a magnitude 4.7 quake that lasted more than six hours (SN: 5/13/22). “We were really fortunate that we got this quake,” says seismologist Doyeon Kim of ETH Zurich.
InSight recorded seismic waves from the quake that circled Mars up to three times. That let Kim and colleagues infer the crust thickness over the whole planet.

Not only is the crust thicker than that of the Earth and the moon, but it’s also inconsistent across the Red Planet, the team found. And that might explain a known north-south elevation difference on Mars.

Topological and gravity data from Mars orbiters have shown that the planet’s northern hemisphere is substantially lower than the southern one. Researchers had suspected that density might play a part: Perhaps the rocks that make up northern Mars have a different density than those of southern Mars.

But the crust is thinner in the northern hemisphere, Kim and colleagues found, so the rocks in both hemispheres probably have the same average densities. That finding helps scientists narrow down the explanations for why the difference exists in the first place.

Knowing the crust’s depth, the team also calculated that much of Mars’ internal heat probably originates in the crust. Most of this heat comes from radioactive elements such as potassium, uranium and thorium. An estimated 50 to 70 percent of those elements are probably in the crust rather than the underlying mantle, computer simulations suggest. That supports the idea that parts of Mars still have volcanic activity, contrary to a long-held belief that the Red Planet is dead (SN: 11/3/22).

As the chill of autumn encroaches on Siberia’s grasslands, Richard’s pipits usually begin their southward trek to warmer latitudes. But a growing number of the slender, larklike songbirds seem to be heading west instead, possibly establishing a new migratory route for the species.

This would be the first new route known to emerge on an east-west axis in a long-distance migratory bird, researchers report October 22 in Current Biology. The finding could have implications for how scientists understand the evolution of bird migration routes over time and how the animals adapt to a shifting climate.

Richard’s pipits (Anthus richardi) typically breed in Siberia during the summer and travel south for the winter to southern Asia. Occasionally, “vagrant” birds get lost and show up far from this range, including in Europe. But as a Ph.D. student at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, evolutionary biologist Paul Dufour noticed, along with colleagues, that described sightings and photo records of the pipits wintering in southern France had increased from a handful of birds annually in the 1980s and 1990s to many dozens in recent years.

So, Dufour, now at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and his team started monitoring the pipits in France and Spain to see where the birds were coming from, and if the birds were visiting Europe on purpose or just getting lost.

The researchers captured seven pipits in France during the winter of 2019–2020, tagging them with a sensor that estimates the birds’ geographic positions based on light levels and length of day. The team then released the birds. The next winter, the team successfully recaptured three of them. Those sensors showed that the birds had all flown back to the same part of southwestern Siberia for the summer before returning to France.

The researchers also examined images in citizen-science databases of 331 Richard’s pipits that were photographed in Europe and North Africa, categorizing the birds by apparent age. Among songbirds, Dufour says, vagrants are always young birds. Songbirds tend to follow a route based on instincts written into their DNA, replicating the trip their ancestors took. But storms or mutations that create faulty wayfinding abilities can send young songbirds off target.
Wherever it arrives, the songbird’s first migration creates a mental map for every migration after, so any adult birds in Europe have made the trip more than once. Since more than half of the birds in southern Europe and nearby northwestern Africa documented in the winter were adults, Dufour and his colleagues think that many of these pipits are seasonal migrants.

Contemporary shifts in migration routes are more common in species that travel via the cues of a traveling group, like geese or cranes. Songbirds usually migrate alone, following their instinctual route when young, Dufour says, so changes to migration patterns are rarer.

What’s more, east-west migration is unusual in birds. Most species that travel this way are ones that migrate short distances within the tropics, says Jessie Williamson, an ornithologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque who was not involved with the research. “It’s exciting that an understudied migratory behavior like east-west migration is in the spotlight,” she says.

If the pipits’ European trek is in fact now an established route, it’s possible that the detour was facilitated by climate change, which may also be meddling with birds’ migrations in other ways (SN: 12/17/19). Dufour and his team used computer models that estimate climate suitability for the pipits in Europe based on variables like temperature and precipitation. The researchers compared two periods — 1961 to 1990 and 1990 to 2018 — and found that warmer temperatures in the latter period have made most parts of southern Europe a better wintering location for the birds than they were before.
The selection of European wintering grounds may also involve the deterioration of ancestral, southern Asian sites, but the researchers haven’t investigated that yet. Climate change could be affecting that too, Dufour says. But “we suspect that habitat modification in Southeast Asia — increasing urbanization, less open areas — may also be part of the equation.”

Ginny Chan, an ecologist at the Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach who was not involved with the research, says that the types of environmental changes that could be hurting bird populations “are happening very quickly in the traditional wintering range [for Richard’s pipits] in South and East Asia.” In India, the Richard’s pipit population has declined by more than 90 percent over the last couple of decades, Chan says.

Other Siberian bird species that typically migrate south but have recently shown up in Europe in growing numbers, like the yellow-browed warbler and Siberian chiffchaff, may also be making their own westward routes, Dufour suspects.

If other Siberian songbird species are also establishing new western migration routes, this could mean that migratory songbirds are more flexible travelers than scientists previously thought, Dufour says.

That could have hopeful implications for some birds as species worldwide deal with a changing climate. But the new research, he adds, shouldn’t overshadow other studies of migratory birds — like barnacle geese and the European pied flycatcher — which show that some of these species are not as able to cope with climate change.

Kyle Rittenhouse has been found not guilty.

A jury in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Friday found Rittenhouse not guilty of homicide and other charges.
On Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse shot at four men, killing two and wounding a third, with a semiautomatic rifle. Rittenhouse was in downtown Kenosha to protect a car dealership during unrest following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
Blake, a Black man, had been shot multiple times by Rusten Sheskey, a white police officer, in Kenosha, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Sheskey was ultimately not charged by state or federal prosecutors.

Rittenhouse, then a 17-year-old from Antioch, Ill., joined a group of other armed people in downtown Kenosha. He shot Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz, the latter of whom survived. Rittenhouse turned himself in to police in Antioch on Aug. 26, and was extradited to Kenosha, where he was charged with the following:

First-degree reckless homicide, use of a dangerous weapon
First-degree recklessly endangering safety, use of a dangerous weapon
First-degree intentional homicide, use of a dangerous weapon
Attempted first-degree intentional homicide, use of a dangerous weapon
First-degree recklessly endangering safety, use of a dangerous weapon
Possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18 (later dismissed)
Failure to comply with an emergency order from state or local government (later dismissed)
Most of the incident was captured on video, and the subsequent trial became heavily polarized. The prosecution in the case argued that Rittenhouse provoked protesters before shooting at them, while the defense argued that Rittenhouse acted in self defense.

The Milwaukee Bucks are scheduled to play at home tonight at 8 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CT. The Bucks, who play 40 miles from Kenosha, were the first NBA team to boycott following the protests in the summer of 2020.

Following the verdict in the case that captured national attention, the sports world responded to the news that Rittenhouse was ruled not guilty.
Sporting News will continue to monitor and update news from around the sports world as it unfolds.

Leading up to the 2018 NBA Draft, Luka Doncic dominated the discussion.

A standout in Europe for years as a kid playing against men, Doncic seemed to be a surefire future NBA star.
Debuting for Real Madrid as a 15-year-old, it took all of two seasons as a professional before he led the team to the EuroLeague title, claiming EuroLeague MVP honors in the process.

Four years on, Doncic is a legitimate MVP candidate, with many wondering how and why he slipped through the Suns' fingers.
Predraft
Despite flashing the obvious talent of a potential No. 1 overall pick, ESPN's Jonathan Givony highlighted some of the potential challenges that International prospects face.

"With as small as the world has become, and even though we have more film and information at our fingertips than ever, I still believe that international players are at a disadvantage in the NBA draft process compared with their NCAA peers," Givony wrote.

"There is simply a comfort level and a familiarity for NBA teams in scouting college players that internationals don't enjoy. Most NBA execs will get over to Europe once or twice, and what if you happen to fall on one or two bad games?"

Of course, America has produced endless top picks that have failed to reach expectations, but perhaps the international prospects are more memorable. Andrea Bargnani comes to mind, the No. 1 overall pick from the 2006 Draft. Or even Ricky Rubio, who similarly to Doncic, had carved out an impressive resume as a teenager in Europe. Now in season 11 in the NBA after being taken with the No. 5 pick in the 2009 NBA Draft, Rubio has had a successful pro career without doubt, but he hasn't reached the All-Star level that many once hoped he would.

Prior to the Draft, there were some question marks whether or not Doncic would want to play for Sacramento, Atlanta or Memphis, who held the selections immediately after Phoenix. Of course, Doncic would have the option to continue playing in Europe after Draft night and not make his way to the NBA.
Draft night
With Phoenix firming on selecting Deandre Ayton with the first overall pick and Doncic reportedly distancing himself from Atlanta, the Hawks began conversations with the Mavericks.

What followed was a blockbuster trade that saw Doncic end up in Dallas, with Trae Young heading to Atlanta.

Of course, Ayton would go No. 1, with Marvin Bagley II heading to Sacramento with pick No. 2 and Jaren Jackson Jr. heading to Memphis with pick No. 4.

"[Dallas] been talking to me," Doncic told the ESPN/ABC broadcast on Draft night. "They were so nice to me. And I'm glad, you know? Just happy to be in the NBA. Just happy to be a part of that."

Adding to the intrigue was the presence of Phoenix head coach Igor Kokoskov, who had close knowledge on Doncic's talents as the head coach of the Slovenian national team. Kokoskov was fired in April of Ayton's rookie season. After returning to Europe for a stint, he is now on the staff in Dallas…once again working with Doncic.

Why did Phoenix select Ayton?
While the obvious guard comparison between Doncic and Young will be equally evergreen, the biggest question that remains is why the Suns chose a center in an era where the traditional big man's importance has seemingly waned?

Givony was on the money with his pre-lottery analysis, reporting that Ayton was firming as the likely top selection.

"After canvassing most of the league in recent weeks, there seems to be somewhat of a consensus forming around Ayton as the 'safe pick' at No. 1," Givony wrote.

"Which team ends up getting the pick will obviously play a role, but Ayton's sheer productivity combined with his freakish physical tools are making it increasingly difficult to keep Luka Doncic up top, especially after a somewhat lackluster month of February by his standards."

It's no knock on Ayton, who was a premier prospect, but for a Phoenix franchise that had been out of the playoffs for several years, the idea of taking the 'safe pick' feels like a disappointing approach. At the time, the Suns lacked a franchise point guard, with a mix of players from Tyler Johnson, Isaiah Canaan and Elie Okobo picking up starts throughout Ayton's rookie campaign.

Interestingly enough, international prospect Okobo, who was once thought of as a potential first-round selection was taken with the 31st pick out of France. He is no longer in the league.

Is it possible the Suns were shying away from using another top selection on an international player given just two drafts earlier they had used the fourth overall pick on Croatian talent, Dragan Bender?

Bender would play just 171 games with the franchise across three seasons, averaging 5.3 points and 3.8 rebounds.

Speaking with Basketball Network, former scout, Antonio Williams discussed part of the decision-making process when it came to moving towards Ayton ahead of Doncic or Young.

“With Deandre, one of the things was, you look at the things that he does, at his size when you combine the athleticism and the dexterity and the agility there are just things he can just roll out of bed and do," Williams said.

"Of course, we knew Luka and Trae Young were going to be great, but when we’re looking at Deandre again, there are just things that we felt he inherently can just roll out of bed and do that we didn’t have on our roster.”

The early returns
In many ways, the comparison between Ayton and Doncic was always going to be skewed. Doncic had the ball in his hands from opening night as a ball-dominant guard, while Ayton would ply his trade battling in the paint, working as a screen and roll man with Booker.

The young Suns finished Ayton's rookie campaign with a 19-63 record, though the big man impressed by averaging 16.3 points and 10.3 rebounds.

Doncic was box office from game one, finishing the season tallying 21.2 points, 7.8 rebounds and 6.1 assists on a Dallas team that finished 33-49.

From night one it was clear Doncic is a franchise-changing talent, immediately sparking the discussion on how he slipped through the fingers of multiple franchises.

The Suns would eventually find their point guard, trading for Chris Paul in a move that sparked a surprising run to the 2021 NBA Finals. Ayton was at times spectacular through the postseason run, producing a monster 22-point, 19-rebound effort in Game 1 of the Finals against Milwaukee.
Ayton's emergence on the biggest stage is further indication that Phoenix got a really, really good player on the night of the 2018 NBA Draft, which led many to believe he was in for a major payday.

What's next?
On the back of that breakout playoff run, Ayton loomed as the next player from the 2018 class to cash in with a major payday.

Doncic signed a five-year, $207 million supermax rookie extension as soon as possible this offseason.

Young also inked a five-year extension that can climb up to a value of $207 million with an All-NBA extension in the allotted time frame.

Jackson Jr. agreed to a four-year, $105 million dollar extension in Memphis.

Ayton on the other hand, could not come to an agreement with Phoenix on an extension, with ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reporting that ownership does not believe he is on the same tier as Doncic, Young, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and other classmen that have received big-time contracts in the offseason.

"I mean, obviously, we're disappointed that we couldn't reach an extension agreement this offseason," Suns General Manager James Jones told The Athletic's Sam Amick. "Deandre is important for us. He means a lot to us and was vital in what we did and what we've done this past season."
Last month, the team came to terms on a four-year, $90 million deal with versatile wing Mikal Bridges. Bridges joins Devin Booker as a core piece locked up for the future, with Paul also inking a four-year deal worth up to $120 million in August.

Whether it be the Suns trio of Paul, Booker and Bridges, or the 2018 draft class of Doncic, Young and Gilgeous-Alexander, the collection of talent cashing in on major paydays all have something in common.

They aren't a center.

Ayton will now have the opportunity to sign an offer sheet with a rival team next offseason as a restricted free agent.

The failure to lock down Ayton caused many Suns fans to blame owner Robert Sarver, with the Suns a non-luxury tax team since 2010. Coming off a run to The Finals, potentially straining a relationship with your No. 1 overall pick from three years earlier is certainly a curious decision.

The 23-year-old has gotten off to an injury-interrupted start to 2021-22, appearing in just six games while battling with a leg contusion. A consistent double-double player as he has been throughout his career, Ayton is averaging 14.2 points, 11.3 rebounds and 1.2 assists per game thus far.

Ayton is sure to become one of the talking points of the 2022 free agency period, with the rising big man's relationship with the franchise seemingly tested through last summer's failed contract negotiations.

Now we wait for the next chapter of the 2018 Draft night story to unfold.

Former Raiders receiver Henry Ruggs III has been ordered to appear in Las Vegas court on Monday following a missed alcohol test. That is a violation of his bond release restrictions following a fatal crash in which prosecutors say he was driving under the influence at 156 mph.

According to Clarke County court records, Ruggs missed one of four daily court-mandated alcohol tests at 4:41 p.m. local time on Saturday before completing "a client initiated remote breath test" at 6:28 p.m. the same day. The alcohol monitoring agency noted in court filings that it couldn't verify Ruggs' sobriety at the time he was supposed to complete his test earlier in the day.
Ruggs' attorney David Chesnoff told Judge Suzan Baucum — who has ordered his reappearance in court — that the delay in his test was related to trouble with equipment provided to him. Ruggs, 22, could face a return to jail for violating the terms of his release. Ruggs was released on $150,000 bond on Wednesday, Nov. 3 and was ordered to remain on house arrest while undergoing electronic surveillance. He is also to refrain from alcohol or other controlled substances, among other restrictions.

Ruggs was arrested after his involvement in a fatal drunk-driving accident on Tuesday, Nov. 2. Prosecutors said he was driving 156 mph at the time of the crash, with a blood alcohol content level of .16 — twice the legal limit for Nevada drivers. Ruggs' Chevrolet Corvette struck the back of 23-year-old Tina Tintor's Toyota Rav4. Witnesses to the event indicated they tried to help Tintor and her dog escape the vehicle, but were ultimately forced back from flames emanating from the car.
Ruggs faces two felony charges of DUI resulting in death or serious injury. That is considered a category B felony in Nevada, the second-worst violation of state law. The charges are non-probationary, meaning Ruggs will face jail time if convicted. Each charge carries a minimum two-year sentence, but can go as long as 20 years. He also faces two counts of felony reckless driving — charges with penalties of one to six years in prison — and a misdemeanor weapon charge.

The Raiders released Ruggs on Nov. 2 following his DUI arrest. He was the No. 12 overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, and the highest receiver taken in the draft.