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Today:
How to build self-control, according to psychologists
NEWS | 30 March 2026
People frequently think of self-control as something that requires willpower—the effort of giving up some immediate pleasure for a long-term goal. People who possess naturally high levels of self-control may create habits that rarely expose them to temptations to veer off course, says psychologist Denise de Ridder, who studies self-control at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In six varied experiments—one of which lasted more than a year—researchers studied high school students’ self-control. The result: whether students who reported high self-control were pursuing good grades, regular exercise or better sleep, they relied on routines for studying, exercising or going to bed. Practice Makes Habits EasierEstablishing habits like these can make sticking with a challenging behavior feel easier over time, de Ridder says.

Top Stories:
How human neurons on a chip learned to play Doom
NEWS | 30 March 2026
The Australian biotech company Cortical Labs recently posted a video in which 200,000 living human neurons grown on a silicon chip played the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. When brain cells are active, they generate small electrical pulses, and the system can deliver small pulses back to them. Many of those drugs are tested in neurons in a dish, but he points out that brain cells are not meant to sit in an information void. “The complexity of it far exceeds anything we’ve built with silicon.” Silicon transistors, he says, have first-order complexity—a binary state, 0’s and 1’s. “If you want to create a similar computing power for the silicon-based AI computing system, that would be at least a million times higher,” he says.

World:
NASA’s Artemis II astronauts arrive in Florida ahead of moon launch
NEWS | 30 March 2026
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover speak with press after arriving at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 27 in preparation for the Artemis II mission. Before they set off on a historic flight to the moon next week, the four astronauts of the Artemis II crew had to make one final terrestrial commute—to Florida. The astronauts flew themselves from Houston, which houses NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in two T-38 training jets and then disembarked to speak with reporters. Depending on the precise trajectory their spacecraft takes, the Artemis II crew may travel farther from Earth than any humans to date. “Hey, let’s go to the moon!” said Wiseman, the mission commander, to open the crew’s remarks.

Current Events:
Scientists reveal why Rocky Mountain lakes are turning green
NEWS | 30 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.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 30 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 | 30 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 | 30 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 | 30 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:
Surprising ways that sunlight might heal autoimmune diseases
NEWS | 30 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.

This Just In:
New treatments can free kids from the deadly threat of peanut allergy
NEWS | 30 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.

Today:
How much vitamin D do you need to stay healthy?
NEWS | 30 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.

Top Stories:
Personalized mRNA vaccines will revolutionize cancer treatment—if federal funding cuts don’t doom them
NEWS | 30 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.

World:
New nasal vaccines offer stronger protection from COVID, flu, and more—no needle needed
NEWS | 30 March 2026
A few nasal vaccines have been introduced in the past, but they’ve been beset by problems. But nasal vaccines still face technical hurdles, such as how best to deliver them into the body. This type of caution is one reason a COVID nasal vaccine approved in India hasn’t been adopted by the U.S. or other countries. Although many of the new vaccine strategies are aimed at COVID, nasal vaccines for other diseases are already being planned. But for nasal vaccines, Iwasaki says, “we don’t have a standard way to collect nasal mucus or measure antibody titers.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 30 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:
The truth about pain that your doctor might not tell you
NEWS | 30 March 2026
“Sensitization” because the nervous system, our pain system in particular, becomes hypersensitive over time. And when that happens we say that our brain and our pain system have become sensitive to pain. So when it comes to chronic pain, we know chronic pain is a disease process in its own right, and the brain has become sensitive—central sensitization has occurred. Pierre-Louis: Your book’s central thesis is that because we so fundamentally misunderstand pain, especially chronic pain, we don’t have great treatments for it. Painsomnia is that thing where we have pain, and pain makes sleep hard, but the poorer our sleep, the worse pain feels.