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Today:
JWST Spots Signs of Exomoon Birth in Alien Planet’s Disk
NEWS | 02 December 2025
For the first time, scientists have directly detected molecules in a Frisbee of gas and dust swirling around an alien gas-giant planet. Grant and Cugno used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to pick out the infrared glow from the disk of gas and dust encircling a Goliath world called CT Cha b. Spotting light cast by a planet—let alone a disk around one—is like making out a firefly against a floodlight. CT Cha b weighs a whopping 14 to 24 Jupiter masses and orbits its star about 17 times farther out than Neptune does the sun. Disks such as CT Cha b’s offer a chance to understand not only moons of alien systems but also the moons in ours.

Top Stories:
Changing the FDA's Vaccine Approval Process Could Threaten COVID, Flu Protection for Children
NEWS | 02 December 2025
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration plans to change how COVID vaccines and other shots are approved and administered. In the case of the COVID shots, scientists identified rare cases of heart inflammation, or myocarditis, in some boys and young men who received mRNA COVID vaccines. “The COVID vaccine, and mRNA vaccines in general, remain one of the safest vaccine platforms that we’ve ever seen developed,” Permar says. The COVID vaccines were approved for children six months and older as a way to provide continuing protection. The FDA is also reportedly reconsidering whether COVID and flu shots should be given together.

World:
NASA Recruits Mars Perseverance Rover to Monitor Sun’s Activity
NEWS | 02 December 2025
By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. NASA has drafted its Mars rover Perseverance to help monitor the sun’s activity. Mars is currently passing behind the sun, giving the rover a view of the star’s far side—a perspective we can’t see from Earth. But it is sensitive enough to see large sunspots. This is not the first time NASA has recruited Perseverance as a solar observatory—the agency also used the rover to image sunspots in 2024.

Current Events:
How to Really See the Stars
NEWS | 02 December 2025
A standard wide-field view of the sky around the bright pair of stars π 1 Gruis (center-right, very red) and π 2 Gruis (center-left, bluish-white). If we crunch the numbers, there are quite a few stars that appear large enough in the sky to be resolved by our biggest telescopes. In the 1970s astronomers used a variation on this technique to get sharp images of several nearby large stars, including Antares in Scorpius and everyone’s favorite incipient supernova, Betelgeuse in Orion. As clever as these techniques are, they still face the more fundamental obstacle of aperture size defining a telescope’s resolution. Typically the interference isn’t as simple as interacting pairs of crests or troughs; a star’s light has multiple wavelengths, and the resulting pattern it forms in any telescope is quite complex.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 02 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:
Personalized mRNA Vaccines Will Revolutionize Cancer Treatment—If Federal Funding Cuts Don’t Doom Them
NEWS | 02 December 2025
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 another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus: mounting federal hostility to vaccines.

Latest:
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission in Jeopardy as U.S. Considers Abandoning Retrieval
NEWS | 02 December 2025
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on Mars in July 2024. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of a multistep mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), and the next step is dangling by a thread. Now that Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, scientists are faced with the prospect of leaving them on Mars to languish. “I’m on record for having criticized Mars Sample Return,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. The plan called for widespread cuts, scrapping existing space missions, shelving many climate programs and ending Mars Sample Return—which the administration described as “financially unstable”—in favor of one day sending humans to Mars.

Breaking:
New Pill Can Save Moms from Postpartum Depression within Days
NEWS | 02 December 2025
Emerging research on the biology of postpartum depression shows that it is not like other severe mood disorders neurologically or biochemically. Leos finally got relief from her postpartum depression with a new medication, zuranolone; she felt better within days of her first dose. Arin YoonGrowing knowledge of the neurobiology of postpartum depression is also pointing toward methods for earlier and more reliable detection. “That’s a game changer.”For centuries medicine has struggled to fully grasp the causes and consequences of postpartum depression. Because postpartum depression has been lumped in with major depression, the two have often been treated the same way.

Trending:
Can AI ‘Griefbots’ Help Us Heal?
NEWS | 02 December 2025
And that’s exactly the therapeutic effect Robert Neimeyer, a therapist and professor at the University of Memphis, had told me might be possible with AI ghosts. One of the few completed studies of digital ghost users, however, found that the AIs were largely beneficial for mourners. Ten grieving people who underwent in-depth interviews for the study said digital ghosts helped them in ways people could not. Creating and interacting with an AI ghost, Kurzweil argues, “is not like [getting] a painting. Like Wales, I had found that the work of creating a digital ghost wasn’t just pouring data into an app.

This Just In:
The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha! Moments’
NEWS | 02 December 2025
Experiences in Insight Problem Solving,” by Jennifer Wiley and Amory H. Danek, in Nature Reviews Psychology, Vol. moments and compare the brain activity during them with the brain activity for analytical solutions. That part of the brain, the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, connects with many other brain regions. Our findings linking this specific area of the brain to the aha! Fortunately, insightful thinking is largely unconscious and does not tax attention or working memory the way analytical thinking does.

Today:
The Quest to Build a Truly Intelligent Machine Helps Us Learn about Our Own Intelligence
NEWS | 02 December 2025
Researchers seek not simply artificial intelligence but artificial general intelligence, or AGI—a system with humanlike adaptability and creativity. Further, and invisibly to users, the core language system may itself be modular in some sense. “How does information go from the language system to logical reasoning systems or to social reasoning systems?” wonders neuroscientist Anna Ivanova of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Whether or not Franklin’s machine was truly conscious—Baars and Franklin themselves were dubious—it at least reproduced various quirks of human psychology. In this scheme, brain modules operate mostly independently, but every tenth of a second or so they have one of their staff meetings.

Top Stories:
Lifting the Veil on Near-Death Experiences
NEWS | 02 December 2025
For decades François d’Adesky, a retired diplomat and civil servant who now lives in Brussels, spoke to no one about his near-death experience (NDE). An astounding 5 to 10 percent of the general population is estimated to have memories of an NDE, including somewhere between 10 and 23 percent of cardiac arrest survivors. “Now, clearly, we don’t question anymore the reality of near-death experiences,” says Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. But their findings are already challenging long-held beliefs about the dying brain, including that consciousness ceases almost immediately after the heart stops beating. Participants reported stronger sensory effects during their NDE, including the sensation of being disembodied, but stronger visual imagery during their drug trip.

World:
How the Brain 'Constructs' the Outside World
NEWS | 02 December 2025
They nudged me to develop a perspective that provides an alternative description of how the brain interacts with the outside world. Fluctuations in neuronal activity are meaningful only for the scientist who is in the privileged position of observing both events in the brain and events in the outside world and then comparing the two perspectives. A brain that remakes itself constantly would be unable to adapt quickly to fast-changing events in the outside world. When you close your eyes, you still know where you are because a great deal of what defines “seeing” is rooted in brain activity. In this sense, our thoughts and plans are deferred actions, and disengaged brain activity is an active, essential brain operation.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 02 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:
Could Inducing Lucid Dreams Treat Insomnia and Nightmares?
NEWS | 02 December 2025
Imaging studies revealed more wakelike activity in the brain during lucid dreams than nonlucid dreams. To have stable lucid dreams, you need to remain calm and attentive, or you will probably wake up from excitement. Lucid dreamers who can conjure up characters rate these dreams as more positive and mystical than other dreams. Headbands and watches could help them call for help to escape nightmares—or just help to induce lucid dreams or direct the content for more satisfying dreams. Such measures could lead to algorithms that detect opportune moments to deliver sensory cues and induce lucid dreams.