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Today:
Why Active Rest Is Important During the Holidays
NEWS | 30 December 2025
And is more restorative rest possible during this busy season? These active rest periods include physical, social and creative experiences that can occur throughout the day – not just while mindlessly scrolling on the couch. Planning for good restTo combat the pitfall of poor rest cycles, science suggests planning for active rest and pleasant activities, and carrying through with those plans. Wrestling with guiltEven with perfectly planned and executed rest periods, guilt can loom. If the answer to poor-quality rest cycles is planned active rest periods, then what is the solution to feelings of guilt?

Top Stories:
Seven Feel-Good Science Stories to Restore Your Faith in 2025
NEWS | 30 December 2025
From gene-editing firsts to rapid disease containment and policy victories, Nature takes a look at some positive science stories of 2025. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. Ozone hole shrinksThe hole in the Antarctic ozone layer has shrunk to its smallest size since 2019, indicating the continued recovery of Earth’s protective upper atmosphere. The first gene therapy for Huntington’s disease proved striking, slowing the rate of cognitive decline in participants by 75%. New malaria drugsIn November, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved the first malaria treatment for infants.

World:
SpaceX Could Go Public in 2026. What Does That Mean for Space Exploration?
NEWS | 30 December 2025
The move could raise tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX, but there’s more than money at stake—the future of space exploration hangs in the balance, too. “The fact that it’s maybe an all-in, holistic SpaceX IPO is a bit of a surprise,” says Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School researcher, who studies the private space sector. If SpaceX goes public, that will mean more scrutiny, more shareholder interest and—perhaps most critically for space science—more investment to bolster its research and development work. He flew to space with Space on two missions: Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn. To support Artemis, SpaceX plans to launch multiple Starships that would be able to refuel while in orbit and to send a modified Starship lander to the lunar surface.

Current Events:
What’s the Most Distant Galaxy?
NEWS | 30 December 2025
But a very common claim is a distance record: the farthest galaxy from Earth ever seen, for example. The more distant a galaxy we find, the more data we have to unravel those mysteries. Also, that database of distant objects can be used to learn about them in general. We might find that most distant galaxies have some average luminosity, with a few topping out a bit above that and none being brighter. If there is a single most brilliant distant galaxy, that could put firm limits on how they behave.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 30 December 2025
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:
Mysterious Bright Flashes in the Night Sky Baffle Astronomers
NEWS | 30 December 2025
These “nuclear transients,” the second overall category of transients, have turned up only in the past decade. Astronomers must distinguish the flashes of nuclear transients from supermassive black holes whose behavior varies. Or they could be supermassive black holes moving from inactive flickering to active fiery accretion—black holes “turning on,” Graham says. “The holy grail is understanding what produced the transient,” says Eliot Quataert of Princeton, a theoretical astrophysicist studying nuclear transients. Both tidal disruption events and quasi-periodic eruptions hold evidence about supermassive black holes that are quiescent and therefore invisible, as well as about the all but theoretical class of black holes whose masses are between those of stellar black holes and supermassive ones.

Latest:
Meet Your Future Robot Servants, Caregivers and Explorers
NEWS | 30 December 2025
To see how close we’re getting to this vision, I visit the Stanford Robotics Center, which has 3,000 square feet for experiments and opened in November 2024 at Stanford University. In practice, this meant the robot used its gripper to grab and lift hot metal casts from an assembly line. In a departure from other designs for robot hands, which tend to emphasize fingers, Liu inserted a GelSight sensor into a rubber palm. I follow the Stanford Robotics Center’s ceiling ripples down a passage that leads to a large pool, still under construction, that will host the merperson-shaped robot OceanOne. “It is the only [robot] in the world capable of reaching the seabed” and sensing it with haptic feedback, Khatib says.

Breaking:
Interoception Is Our Sixth Sense, and It May Be Key to Mental Health
NEWS | 30 December 2025
Studies have implicated problems with this inner sense in a wide variety of conditions, including anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and borderline personality disorder. Some researchers and clinicians now think that problems in interoception might contribute to many mental illnesses. They found that people with a range of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety disorders and schizophrenia, shared similar alterations in the insula, a key brain region linked with interoception during body-sensing-related tasks. Some experts say answers may come from treatment trials investigating whether interventions that target disturbances in this inner sense might boost mental health. These conditions tend to overlap with anxiety disorders, and Green is now advocating for interoception-based therapies to help affected people.

Trending:
Global Warming Could Skew Reptile Sex Ratios and Lead to Extinctions
NEWS | 30 December 2025
Newly hatched green sea turtles climb across the sand at Alagadi Beach on the island of Cyprus. The scent of freshly dug sand is often their first clue that a green sea turtle has arrived. Since the 1990s green sea turtles have been laying their first nests at Alagadi Beach almost one day earlier each year. In other words, the sea turtles seem to be adjusting their habits in response to warming. If tuatara sex ratios reach a crisis, Cree suspects it will be a symptom of a larger emergency that’s already underway.

This Just In:
Heart and Kidney Diseases, plus Type 2 Diabetes, May Be One Illness Treatable with Ozempic-like Drugs
NEWS | 30 December 2025
More than a century before Bies entered the hospital, doctors had noticed that many of the conditions CKM syndrome comprises often occur together. Heart disease causes 40 to 50 percent of all deaths in people with advanced chronic kidney disease. But at the time, the physician didn’t mention that this illness also increased her risk of heart disease. In 2024 researchers compared one drug with a placebo in more than 3,500 participants with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease. “Although they are clearly related, CKM syndrome and metabolic syndrome have some very important differences,” he says.

Today:
Mathematicians Discover a New Kind of Shape That’s All over Nature
NEWS | 30 December 2025
Violet FrancesWhen the trio eventually identified a space-filling 3D shape with just two corners, Domokos thought they’d found their answer. By mapping an infinite category of polyhedral tilings to soft tilings, he proved the existence of an infinite class of soft cells. But the researchers struggled to identify these 3D soft cells in the real world. Zebra stripes, river estuaries, cross sections of onions, seashells, heads of wheat, red blood cells, plants and fungi all resembled 2D soft cells. Asked where he thinks soft cells belong in the scientific landscape, he doesn’t skip a beat.

Top Stories:
These Mysterious Shapes Are at the Heart of Math’s Biggest Puzzles
NEWS | 30 December 2025
When most people think of shapes, they imagine a triangle, a rectangle, or maybe even a fancier-sounding rhombus or trapezoid. We asked mathematicians to choose their favorite shapes and surfaces and tell us why they find them so exciting and intriguing. We can construct every hyperbolic surface by sewing together hyperbolic pairs of pants and describe all of them entirely in terms of the boundary lengths and twist angles in this decomposition. A topological image of a curve (shape) is a set of points in the plane that satisfies an equation and has a complicated topological structure. The slice-ribbon conjecture, a major open problem in low-dimensional topology, says every such simple knot in 4D comes from a ribbon disk.

World:
How Squishy Math Is Revealing Doughnuts in the Brain
NEWS | 30 December 2025
A computer’s inability to see these relationships is a problem for scientists who want to identify circular patterns within huge masses of data points. To expand this structure into a simplicial complex, the mathematicians colored in this hollow triangle with a solid, two-dimensional triangle. They converted each of these maps into a simplicial complex and analyzed how its shape changed in time using the tools of topology. Because this mesh contains fewer data points, its simplicial complex contains shapes of lower dimensions. In effect, as the researchers recorded the state of the system at different instants, they accumulated high-dimensional data points.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 30 December 2025
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:
Citizens' Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program
NEWS | 30 December 2025
The Irish citizens’ assembly is just one example of a widespread phenomenon. Citizens’ assemblies in France, Germany, the U.K., Washington State, and elsewhere have charted pathways for reducing carbon emissions. The effectiveness of citizens’ assemblies isn’t surprising. Descriptive representation, in turn, lends legitimacy to the assembly: citizens seem to find decisions more acceptable when they are made by people like themselves. Our algorithm was released as open source in 2020 and has since become a common method for selecting citizens’ assemblies.