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Today:
Kamala Sohonie: The biochemist who wanted to feed a nation
NEWS | 29 May 2026
Biochemist Kamala Baghvat, later known as Kamala Sohonie, forced open the doors of India’s male-only laboratories and used her knowledge to help feed a nationIn India in the 1930s, Kamala Baghvat, later known as Kamala Sohonie, dreamed of working alongside the world’s greatest scientific minds. Mohua Chinappa: Kamala and her family think an in-person meeting will rectify the situation. Mohua Chinappa: Kamala joined a medical college in New Delhi, as a biochemist. Aarati Asundi: Kamala Sohonie was not the first person to discover cytochrome c in general. Mohua Chinappa: Kamala designed a simple kit that housewives could use to check the food they bought for any signs of adulteration.

Top Stories:
What will happen if the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide?
NEWS | 29 May 2026
This illustration shows a possible view from Earth of the early stages of a predicted merger billions of years from now between our Milky Way galaxy ( right ) and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy ( left ). When it comes to the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, there’s a whole “will they or won’t they” thing going on. This would have the effect of stretching the Milky Way. But the chances for this are astronomically low—at least for our neighborhood in the Milky Way. Located at the core of the Milky Way, the black hole Sagittarius A* is about four million times the mass of the sun.

World:
White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants
NEWS | 29 May 2026
On Thursday the White House released long-anticipated draft regulations that, if enacted, would give political appointees the final word on federal research grants and other funding across government agencies. Scheduled to be officially published in the Federal Register on Friday, the 412-page proposal on federal spending rules would centralize Office of Management and Budget (OMB) control over releases of government funds, including for scientific research grants. The new rules would mandate political appointees at scientific agencies to sign off on all research awards for compliance with presidential priorities, including those on race and gender. Many experts noted that political appointees at agencies such as the NIH, which funds tens of thousands of research grants every year, may not be sufficiently able to judge grant proposals on their scientific merit. The new rules would give political appointees, "termination based on the discretion of the agency," according to the proposal.

Current Events:
The secret to immortality might be a sea cucumber
NEWS | 29 May 2026
That grim reality may be the eternal condition of severed sea cucumber tissue, according to a new study. That isn’t so with Psolus fabricii, a sea cucumber that is native to the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. “Something like this has never been seen before,” says lead author Sara Jobson, a doctoral student at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Sara Jobson (Mercier Lab, MUN)These are all hallmarks of living systems, but severed P. fabricii tissue sits in a biological gray zone. Whatever the case, Jobson reckons that self-sufficient sea cucumber fragments—immortal or not, with or without a purpose in this world—are drifting through Earth’s oceans right now.

News Flash:
Gigantic ‘little red dot’ threatens to upend cosmic history
NEWS | 29 May 2026
Debate still swirls around the nature of “little red dots,” black holes glimpsed in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope. Ever since, these “little red dots” (LRDs) have challenged practically everything scientists thought they knew about the early universe. These first attempts at gauging LRD masses used a common, indirect technique for weighing black holes in later, more contemporary cosmic epochs—the “supermassive” black holes at the center of every galaxy. “The black hole appears to be more massive than the host galaxy itself—if a host galaxy is present at all,” Maiolino says. “Definitely within my lifetime, we’ll figure out not only LRDs but where the supermassive black holes in general come from.”

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 29 May 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

Latest:
Tiny quantum computers could help create giant telescopes
NEWS | 29 May 2026
A laser shoots into the night sky from an 8.2-meter optical telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. In the future, quantum technology could allow arrays of optical telescopes to work in unison, effectively acting as a single giant observatory. One key impediment to making bigger optical interferometers has been the loss of precious photons along the path between them. Now, however, quantum-driven advances are revealing a possible way to solve this problem and create giant optical interferometers by using tiny quantum storage systems—quantum memories—to hold onto incoming photons. “This is really a completely new way to make interferometers work.”Many hurdles must still be overcome, Monnier cautions, before quantum-enhanced optical interferometers become at all practical for astronomical applications.

Breaking:
Tiny alienlike blue octopus discovered lurking off the Galápagos Islands
NEWS | 29 May 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. A golf-ball-size octopus found on the deep seafloor off the Galápagos Islands is an entirely new species, scientists just announced. On an underwater mountainside some 1,773 meters below the sea’s surface, the team discovered a little blue octopus. They sent an image to octopus expert Janet Voight, curator emerita of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago. The Galápagos Islands, sitting off the coast of Ecuador, are famous for the unique animals and plants that live on them.

Trending:
Are the roots of consciousness hidden in the ancient deep brain?
NEWS | 29 May 2026
Here’s one of the more unsettling schemes to recently emerge from Silicon Valley: human clones grown without a conscious brain. Most theorists have long assumed that the cortex is where consciousness, or our subjective experience of the world, arises. A growing number of consciousness researchers are seriously considering the possibility that consciousness could originate deep within the brain’s most evolutionarily ancient realm: the subcortex. “They’re reporting by their behavior that they’re feeling things.”Of course, the appearance of consciousness and consciousness itself are not the same thing. Somehow, the thinking goes, cortical information must be distilled into a single stream of awareness.

This Just In:
This sci-fi novel asks—can what you will never know kill you?
NEWS | 29 May 2026
It’s an idea that is in some way catchy or invites you to spread it to other people. Some ideas really do catch on and can circle the globe really quickly, and some ideas kind of—don’t. And that basic fictional concept of an antimeme gives rise to a lot of really interesting fiction, in my opinion. Is there anything you think people can take from the book about the crucially important ways ideas spread or don’t spread in the world? They know how to turn a good story into a better one, and I absolutely trust them in that kind of thing.

Today:
How the mathematician Gödel proved that not everything can be proven
NEWS | 29 May 2026
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. But in 1931, a logician who was then just 25 years old, Kurt Gödel, destroyed these hopes. Therefore, his colleagues initially hoped that the young mathematician had found a purely academic oddity that would have no practical implications. And the ZFC system has numerous examples of statements that cannot be proven—underscoring that Gödel was right. Without extending the foundation of mathematics, we will never be able to get to the bottom of this question.

Top Stories:
NASA’s Jared Isaacman unveiled the first moon base rovers and landers
NEWS | 29 May 2026
This remote lunar region is the intended site of future Artemis astronaut landings and, of course, the much ballyhooed moon base. In response, NASA turned to the private space industry to follow a $30-billion-plus plan that would end with a nuclear-powered moon base. Wrapping up Tuesday’s announcements, NASA also revealed new details for “Moon Base II” and “Moon Base III” missions, each of which are planned to launch later this year as part of a broader surge in U.S. moon rovers. Moon Base III would involve yet another private U.S. cargo lander, the Intuitive Machines–built Nova-C Trinity lander, transporting an international assortment of science payloads to the moon. “We’re going to experiment on the things that we know are ahead of us that we’re going to need to build a permanent infrastructure,” said NASA’s moon base chief Carlos García-Galán.

World:
Why lawyers keep citing fake cases invented by AI
NEWS | 29 May 2026
In April the Alabama Supreme Court sanctioned an attorney who had filed legal briefs laden with inaccurate citations generated by AI, including numerous references to cases that did not exist. Courtroom proceedings are public, and lawyers face sanctions for false claims, making such errors comparatively easy to track. The pattern emerging across these cases is that people keep trusting AI’s answers even when they know the systems can be wrong. A study published this past February asked participants to complete an image classification task with guidance they were told came from either humans or AI. And as AI improves at many tasks, users may grow less inclined to double-check it at all.

Current Events:
Trump plan to give start-ups plutonium harvested from Cold War–era nuclear weapons is risky, experts say
NEWS | 29 May 2026
Weapons-grade plutonium can fuel nuclear reactors known as mixed oxide reactors, but none of these exist in the U.S. The Trump administration’s plan to offer plutonium from dismantled Cold War–era nuclear weapons to private energy companies is drawing criticism from experts who say it makes little economic sense and presents a national security threat. There are currently no operational nuclear reactors in the country that are built to use plutonium-derived fuel. Plutonium, meanwhile, is considered a human-made element and is a by-product of the reactions that take place inside nuclear reactors. That plutonium can be mixed back with uranium to be used as fuel in specific nuclear reactors called mixed oxide reactors.

News Flash:
Iran threats expose the aging fleet that repairs undersea Internet cables
NEWS | 29 May 2026
More vulnerable, though, is the small, aging global fleet of ships that fixes the cables when they break. Many vessels in the maintenance fleet are themselves in need of maintenance, according to a recent study from TeleGeography that was co-authored by Constable. About half the vessels in the global cable fleet, and nearly two thirds of those in the maintenance fleet, will be nearing the end of their service life by 2040, the study finds. Permitting is another obstacle, says Sheryl Ong, head of Asia at Global Marine, a U.K.-based company with its own fleet of cable ships. A ship dragging an anchor can still damage a cable, Constable says.