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Today:
Rival ‘shadow’ group to RFK, Jr.’s autism science committee meets in D.C.
NEWS | 21 March 2026
Called the Independent Autism Coordinating Committee (I-ACC), the group rapidly came together as a response to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., overhauling of the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which provides guidance on autism research. The federal autism committee now has a “striking absence of scientific expertise,” said Craig Snyder, policy lead at the Autism Science Foundation, during the rival group’s meeting on Thursday. Notably, the federal autism committee was meant to meet on Thursday, too, but postponed its own meeting after the independent group announced it would convene on the same day. Fears about vaccines had become tied to rising autism rates, and the government had to dedicate the proper attention and funding to autism science, he adds. Now the federal group has less representation from autistic people than before, and the independent group has only one autistic member.

Top Stories:
Agnes Pockels’ pioneering work was unfairly dismissed by tropes about women’s domestic roles
NEWS | 21 March 2026
Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Brigitte Van Tiggelen: Lord Rayleigh is really interested in what Agnes Pockels is doing. Don Opitz: So when you Google Agnes Pockels, the Wikipedia entry that comes up will identify her as a citizen scientist. So, that Agnes Pockels was an amateur in her contacts was actually a pretty cool thing. Springer Dordrecht, 2002“On the Relative Contamination of the Water-Surface by Equal Quantities of Different Substances,” by Agnes Pockels, in Nature, Vol.

World:
How accurate is the science in Project Hail Mary?
NEWS | 21 March 2026
The much-anticipated sci-fi film Project Hail Mary is out in theaters today. Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary. In the film, Astrophage make up the fuel that powers the Hail Mary, the ship that takes Gosling’s character to Tau Ceti. Adrian, the Tau Ceti world that the characters visit, really exists in astronomers’ exoplanet catalogs as Tau Ceti e (although we know very little about it). Artificial gravity can exist in theory and could work much like it does on the Hail Mary.

Current Events:
Scientists reveal why Rocky Mountain lakes are turning green
NEWS | 21 March 2026
The opaque, pale-green water looked alien; normally, mountain lakes are so pure you can see through 20 feet of crystal blue water. In August 2019 Josh Kurz, a high school science teacher from Pagosa Springs, ran up to Turkey Creek Lake. “It shouldn’t be turning green.”In the Rocky Mountains, lakes famous for water so clear you can see 20 feet down are turning into opaque green soup. Last April, in an analysis of mountain lakes across the continental U.S., researchers reported that 25 percent were eutrophic, or nutrient-rich. Geographically, all that separates it from Turkey Creek Lake is a mile of alpine tundra and 665 feet of added elevation.

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SPONSORED | 21 March 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

News Flash:
Galaxies without dark matter mystify astronomers
NEWS | 21 March 2026
No one knows what dark matter is made of, but astronomers are fairly sure it’s real, and it’s ubiquitous. Dark matter is what seems to hold most galaxies together—without it their stars would fly out of formation. The fact that the dark matter appears to have passed through the collision without interacting, while the gas collided and shocked, places constraints on how strongly dark matter particles can interact with one another. In other words, dwarf galaxies without dark matter may help rule out certain particle models and refine our theories of how galaxies assemble. These galaxies, lacking dark matter but rich in stars and globular clusters, now trace a linear path across the group.

Latest:
How the corpse flower evolved its bizarre traits
NEWS | 21 March 2026
The blooming of a titan arum, or corpse plant, is a spectacle like none other in the plant world. Recent investigations have illuminated how the corpse plant acquired its bizarre traits. Işık GünerOnce the tuber is big enough to fuel a more ambitious undertaking, the corpse plant can flower. People tend to think of the spadix and spathe as the corpse plant’s flower. In other words, larger flowers beget larger flowers.

Breaking:
New drugs and treatments transform kidney care
NEWS | 21 March 2026
This article is part of “Innovations In: Kidney Disease,” an editorially independent special report that was produced with financial support from Vertex. Although more than one in seven adults in the U.S. have chronic kidney disease, as many as 90 percent of them don’t know they have it. Another area that has advanced rapidly during the past few years is the treatment of autoimmune kidney disease. As helpful as medications can be for treating kidney disease, some drugs aimed at other conditions can harm kidneys or even cause them to fail. Living with chronic kidney disease can be grueling, and people with kidney failure must make time for dialysis at least three to four times a week.

Trending:
Why there is a distressing rise in kidney disease
NEWS | 21 March 2026
This article is part of “Innovations In: Kidney Disease,” an editorially independent special report that was produced with financial support from Vertex. The global burden of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is high and getting higher. COUNTRIES THAT STRUGGLE AGAINST KIDNEY DISEASEIn 1990 an estimated 378 million people aged 20 and older were living with chronic kidney disease (CKD). 406; November 22, 2025 (data)WHAT IS KIDNEY DISEASE? Physicians divide chronic kidney disease (CKD) into five stages depending on how well the kidneys function, something that helps guide care.

This Just In:
Surprising ways that sunlight might heal autoimmune diseases
NEWS | 21 March 2026
Now scientists are hoping to decipher the pathways through which UV light causes the immune system to back down from its alarm state. This finding was a breakthrough in our understanding of how skin cancer develops, but it also seemed nonsensical from an evolutionary perspective. How could it possibly be beneficial for our immune system to relax in the presence of a common carcinogen? PLE sufferers develop itchy rashes and plaques after sun exposure, but they are less likely to develop skin cancer. Skin cancer was known to be caused by sunlight, but Apperly suggested that something about the sun was also conferring protection against internal cancers.

Today:
New treatments can free kids from the deadly threat of peanut allergy
NEWS | 21 March 2026
“One out of 10 individuals in the U.S., more than 33 million, has a food allergy,” says Sung Poblete, CEO of Food Allergy Research and Education, an advocacy organization. Based on those results, and anticipating more data, the FDA immediately approved Xolair as a protection against peanut allergy. The results revealed that the occurrence of peanut allergy in Israeli kids was one-tenth the rate among U.K. ones. The babies were tested for preexisting peanut allergy, and if they were negative, they went into one of two groups. But “an allergist isn’t going to see somebody who doesn’t have peanut allergy already,” NIH’s Fulkerson says.

Top Stories:
How much vitamin D do you need to stay healthy?
NEWS | 21 March 2026
Numerous celebrities and vitamin companies raised hopes that vitamin D could be a panacea, says JoAnn Manson, an endocrinologist and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and a lead investigator on some of the biggest vitamin D studies to date. These observational studies looked for associations between vitamin D levels and a particular health issue or compared vitamin D status among people with a condition and those without. Holick made a name for himself espousing the health-promoting powers of vitamin D and wrote a book called The Vitamin D Solution: A 3-Step Strategy to Cure Our Most Common Health Problems. Given the VITAL trial’s large size and wide scope, many vitamin D researchers hoped it would put many of the purported benefits of vitamin D supplements to rest. Manson is quick to caution that more isn’t necessarily better when it comes to vitamin D. “Vitamin D is essential to good health, but we require only small to moderate amounts,” she says.

World:
Personalized mRNA vaccines will revolutionize cancer treatment—if federal funding cuts don’t doom them
NEWS | 21 March 2026
Personalized melanoma vaccines could be available as early as 2028, with mRNA vaccines for other cancers to follow. Another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines. After obtaining positive results for the mRNA vaccine for melanoma, Sahin agreed to partner with Balachandran to develop an mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer. Lennard Lee, an adviser to the U.K.’s National Health Service overseeing the rollout of clinical trials for cancer vaccines, says the pandemic gave regulators there a running start on trials for mRNA cancer vaccines. By May 2025 another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 21 March 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

Current Events:
These new cancer drugs improve outcomes for people with hard-to-treat tumors
NEWS | 21 March 2026
This drug for breast cancer was the first to use a tumor-specific protein as a homing beacon to find and kill cancer cells. It was really so satisfying.” —Shanu Modi, MSK Cancer CenterEnhertu belongs to an ingenious and growing class of targeted cancer drugs called antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs. If highly toxic forms of chemotherapy could be strapped onto antibodies, the toxins would reach only the cancer cells and no others. A negative result typically means 10 percent or fewer of the tumor’s cells have HER2 on their surfaces. Another explanation for these nasty effects is that there are no protein targets that are exclusive to cancer cells.