For four decades, a controversial idea has shaped how autism is understood by researchers, healthcare professionals and the public: the claim that autistic people are “mind blind”. The phrase suggests an inability to grasp what others think or feel. It is simple, memorable – and wrong. The claim rests on a concept called “theory of mind”. In everyday terms, theory of mind is the ability to recognise that other people’s thoughts, beliefs and emotions may differ from your own. This idea explains w…

The gut bacterium Bacteroides fragilis has long presented researchers with a paradox. It has been associated with colorectal cancer, yet it also lives quite happily in most healthy people. A new study from a Danish research team offers a possible clue. When they looked beyond the bacterium itself and into its genome, they found a previously unknown virus embedded within it – one that was significantly more common in cancer patients. read more

By this time 26 years ago, the "Dot-Com Bubble" was ready to burst. People who wanted to raise investor money claimed that they could sell anything affordably on a website; three companies were devoted just to pet food and buying ad space on broadcast television.



So-called AI is enjoying a similar frenzy. Though they are still just Large Language Models (LLMs), and the best analogy for that is a fancy autocomplete, they are attracting huge levels of financial investment partly because of the po…

During the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Office of Naval Research created a Young Investigator Program for early-career academics in science, technology, engineering and mathematics with innovative solutions to ensure the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps maintain warfighter superiority. 



This year, ~$17 million in funding will be shared by 23 researchers who obtained a Ph.D. on or after Jan. 1st, 2018 and are working on significant scientific breakthroughs in coastal forecasting, mac…

Once the weather got political, more attention became focused on the cyclical climate phenomenon El Niño. Critics charged that too many early models were shaped by understating its effects while proponents insisted its efforts were worse due to CO2 emissions.



There is something for everyone. It is cyclical, but not predictable, because it might bring wetter conditions to some areas and drier to others every two years. Or every seven. Experts can't agree on when it begins or ends, only that it's…

For many people living with psoriasis, the red, scaly skin patches are only part of the story. Another challenge is the uncertainty about whether there is anything they can do themselves to help manage their skin. Treatments have improved greatly in recent years. Creams, tablets and injectable medicines can all help control symptoms. Even so, many people still ask a straightforward question in clinic: is there anything I can do alongside my medication that might make a difference? Weight often c…

These days I am putting the finishing touches on a hybrid algorithm that optimizes a system (a gamma-ray observatory) by combining reinforcement-learning with gradient descent. Although I published an optimization strategy for that application already, I am going back to it to demonstrate a case where the simultaneous optimization of hardware and software is necessary, for a paper on co-design I am writing with several colleagues.

In the course of the software development, I ran into a simple bu…

A new paper says that players where a few superstars get the money leads to less cooperation and poor team performance. The authors say this salary compression is why teams won fewer games.



The authors also suggest that companies should strive for more equity in pay, to increase synchronized effort. Because individual effort by key people isn't enough.



They may have a point. The U.S. Army pays everyone, good or bad, the same, and it is the best in the world. But current military and veterans w…

In late January 2026, New York Magazine published a striking piece of cultural reporting: wellness clinics, influencer funnels, and WhatsApp “consultants” selling the dream of brighter skin, faster fat loss, and cleaner energy—often via compounds framed as “peptides,” sometimes as other “cellular” molecules bundled alongside them . read more

Olympians Chloe Kim and Eileen Gu are both Americans but have Asian descent. Yet Kim competed for her country in 2018 while Gu chose to instead compete for Communist China, which does not allow dual citizenship yet actively recruits foreign athletes to be on their Olympic team even if they have no Chinese ancestry at all .



Humanities academics say American media have been hard on Gu because she chose to compete for China, whereas Kim was celebrated. Maybe. She'd have lost her passport if she ha…

Glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer, is treated with surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible and then radiation and chemotherapy.



Like all cancer, that may not be the end of it. Sometimes, the aggressive cancer returns. A recent study sought to find out if high doses of vitamin B3 or niacin could help, by rejuvenating compromised immune cells to kill tumor cells, the way it had with mice. The researchers found that while glioblastoma suppresses the immune system, niacin in mice gave …

Valentine's Day is when the social sciences get to shine. It's when people revisit things about the science of kissing ( kissing is good , unless it's bad ) by anthropologists like Dr. read more

Strange how time goes by. And strange I would say that, since I know time does not flow, it is just our perception of one of the spacetime coordinates of our block universe... 

The thing is, on February 5 I will turn 60. An important date for anybody - I could say a milestone. First of all, let me say that we give for granted all the days of our life we got to live, but in truth we did not know it from the start we would make it far. I do feel rather young still, but I am very well aware that th…

At two months of age, infants lack language and fine motor control but their minds may be understanding how things look and figuring out to which category they belong, which would push back earlier beliefs about the foundations of visual cognition.



A new study recruited 130 two-month-old infants who were placed on a beanbag chair wearing sound-canceling headphones, while shown bright, colorful images which kept them engaged for 15-20 minutes. The team used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure chang…

Opportunistic salpingectomy, proactively removing a person’s fallopian tubes when they are already undergoing a gyecological surgery such as hysterectomy or tubal ligation, may be a way to reduce ovarian cancer risk. Most ovarian cancers originate in the fallopian tubes rather than the ovaries and ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological cancer.

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A  recent survey of 2,000 Americans aged 18-28 wanted to get insights on how "AI" Large Language Models are shaping behavior. 

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In the modern world, it is easy to be newly concerned about the World Health Organisation. They were the last to declare COVID-19 a pandemic, they said not to blame China, and stood by while China bullied them into staying silence while the communist dictatorship tried to blame COVID-19 on American frozen food, and not their sloppy coronavirus lab next to the Wuhan wet market, where employees from the lab had already been caught selling experimental animals.



It's not new. Once upon time, they d…

Professor Peter Mitchell got a Nobel Prize in 1978 for a chemiosmotic hypothesis of how ATP is made. Basically, how mitochondria turn fat, protein, and sugar into energy. Like most science, his breakthrough was built on 70 years of work by people before him, including Professor Fred Crane, who discovered Coenzyme Q, the body's natural antioxidant, in 1957.

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Survey results conducted among registered nurses and advanced practice nurses in Michigan shows that the reason a third of them left the health care field is student loan debt. The Michigan Nurses' Study is a survey of 13,687 license holders that began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022.



In the 1980s, colleges and universities began to lobby for unlimited student loans, arguing that a college education meant higher lifetime earnings. Congress agreed, but schools quickly began charging tuition…

I recently listened again to Richard Feynman explaining why the flowing of time is probably an illusion. In modern physics time is just a coordinate, on the same footing as space, and the universe can be described as a four-dimensional object — a spacetime block. In that view, nothing really “flows”. All events simply are , laid out in a 4D structure. What we experience as the passage of time is tied instead to the arrow of entropy: the fact that we move through a sequence of states ordered by i…

Today I was saddened to hear of the passing of Hans Jensen, a physicist and former colleague in the CDF experiment at Fermilab. There is an obituary page here with nice pics and a bio if you want detail on his interesting, accomplished life. Here I thought I would remember him by pasting an excerpt of my 2016 book, "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab", where he is featured. The topic of the anecdote is the data collection for the top quark search. The date is D…

This year opened in slow motion for me, at least work-wise. I have been on parental leave since December 16, when my third and fourth sons were born within one minute from one another, but of course a workaholic can never stand completely still. In fact, even as we speak I am sitting and typing at the keyboard with my right hand only (about 3-4 letters per second), while I hold Alessandro with the left one on my lap and I move my legs rythmically to keep him entertained.

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Existing treatments control HIV but the immune system does not revert to normal. They is why people living with HIV remain susceptible to infections and it underscores the need for immunotherapies.



That requires modern tools like CRISPR-Cas9 and others. Tools that environmentalists oppose, insisting all science is a corporate conspiracy. As they have historically done with natural gas and GMOs and vaccines. Antiretroviral therapy is highly effective at suppressing HIV, so the virus is no longer…

In older countries it has become common for young people to live with their parents until, and sometimes well after, they get married. 



A new study finds that some parts of the animal kingdom don't even stop growing until what it middle age for humans. An analysis of 17 tyrannosaurus rex specimens, from early juveniles to older adults, concludes they took 40 years to reach their full size of around eight tons.

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For the first time in 25 years of continuous crewed operations, an astronaut has been medically evacuated from the International Space Station (ISS). The Crew-11 mission ended when a SpaceX Dragon capsule brought the four astronauts of Crew 11 home following a medical incident in early January 2026 . To protect the crewmember’s privacy, Nasa hasn’t yet disclosed details about what happened – and this article won’t speculate. But the evacuation raises a question worth exploring: how do astronauts…

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation has announced its 2026 awardees , providing 15-month mentored research experiencesfor basic research in the chemistry and life sciences.







The awards total over $2.1 million in funding for 84 undergraduate Beckman Scholars at the following 14 institutions:



SUNY Binghamton

Bowdoin College

Butler University

Emory University

Harvey Mudd College

Pomona College

San Jose State University

St. Olaf College

Syracuse University

University of Arkansas

UCLA

Universi…

Colorectal cancer, cancer of the colon and rectum, is the third most common form of cancer in the world and has the second highest mortality rate. When caught early enough, it is usually treated with surgery, radiation or chemotherapy, methods that can have significant side effects.



A new study highlights a fourth way, one the researchers hope could have fewer side effects. They found that a purified toxin secreted by cholera bacteria can slow the growth of colorectal cancer and has not shown a…

Diabetic foot infections are a serious complications of diabetes and a leading cause of lower-limb amputation but little is known about the specific pathogens involved in these chronic foot infections, particularly E. coli , despite its frequent detection in clinical samples.



A new genomic characterization of E. coli strains isolated directly from diabetic foot ulcers across multiple continents may help explain why some infections become difficult to treat and lead to severe, even life-threaten…