Wiki News Live
Today:
Daniel Yon Explains Why Your Brain Is a Brilliant Illusionist
NEWS | 14 September 2025
You probably think you’re listening to my voice right now. Daniel is also the author of a recent book called A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality. Yon: Doesn’t mean that, in some sense, it’s an invention as much as something that’s really out there. You know, what are the benefits to our brain making these kind of inferences? It’s really kind of, in a strict sense, impossible to work out what the world is like just from the signals alone.

Top Stories:
Polar Geoengineering Debate Rages as Climate Change Melts Ice
NEWS | 14 September 2025
As climate change rapidly melts Earth’s ice, sides are being drawn among scientists on whether—and how—science should intervene to save it. The other is a responding commentary that argues that such polar geoengineering could effectively soften the blow of disastrous warming. The polar sea ice that has long reflected sunlight back into space is quickly vanishing: Arctic sea ice is expected to be completely gone during summers in the 2030s, further heating the planet. It allocated about 57 million (around $77 million today) to various projects, including two companies conducting trials this year to drill holes into Canadian Arctic sea ice and pump seawater on top of Arctic sea ice, where it can freeze into new layers and thicken the ice. The new study argues that sea ice thickening and the other ideas simply wouldn’t work in the real world.

World:
Magic Mushroom Edibles Found to Contain No Psilocybin
NEWS | 14 September 2025
Researchers tested 12 “magic mushroom” edible products sold in Portland, Ore., and found no trace of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound that gives magic mushrooms their name. “And as usage rates increase across the U.S., harms from retail products are also likely to increase.”Are Any Commercial Psilocybin Products Legal? The edibles were first tested at a state-licensed facility that normally certifies the quality of the drug for Oregon’s psilocybin service centers. To determine what they actually did contain, van Breemen and his colleagues turned to more advanced mass spectrometry techniques. Such compounds turned out to be absent, leading van Breemen and his colleagues to conclude that the psilocin was likely synthetic.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 14 September 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:
U.S. Science Has Weathered Attacks Before and Won
NEWS | 14 September 2025
Worth recalling in this anniversary year, one of Scientific American’s proudest moments came in a past era of attacks on science. But a war on scientists not toeing the political line was in full swing then, and Scientific American was in the thick of it. This scientists-as-writers approach came about by happenstance, Scientific American editor Gary Stix found while researching the history of the magazine. “Scientific American runs to the sort of stuff which the Soviets would like to see in a popular science journal,” claimed an AEC memorandum that same year. This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

News Flash:
What 100 Years of Quantum Physics Has Taught Us about Reality—And Ourselves
NEWS | 14 September 2025
This year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, according to UNESCO, marking 100 years since quantum mechanics was proposed. In analyzing who wrote these articles, what they chose to write about and how they conveyed the often-confusing quantum world to general readers, I hoped to discover what the public found so compelling about quantum physics. It turns out that what draws us to quantum physics are the same things its founders found repulsive about it. Physicist John Gribbin, author of the 1984 book In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, covered this early period of turmoil. In contrast, writers tended to describe the quantum world as “strange,” “bizarre” and “surreal.”Of course, these are fair adjectives when it comes to quantum theory.

Latest:
New Treatments Can Free Kids from the Deadly Threat of Peanut Allergy
NEWS | 14 September 2025
“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.

Breaking:
What Happens When an Entire Scientific Field Changes Its Mind
NEWS | 14 September 2025
The image of scientific rebels forcing other researchers to reverse themselves was codified in philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Physics as a field of knowledge has existed at least since the times of Greek savant Thales (circa 625–545 B.C.E.). In the early 1970s the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer Society launched the Breast Cancer Detection Demonstration Project (BCDDP) to test the potential of large-scale mammography. The American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology, and other medical groups conceded that there weren’t good data to support under-50 mammography. As for reversals in fields where scientific ideas compete in disciplines that lack adequate investigatory tools, who knows?

Trending:
How Scientists Finally Learned That Nerves Regrow
NEWS | 14 September 2025
In recent decades this knowledge has inspired promising treatments for nerve injuries and has led researchers to investigate interventions for neurodegenerative disease. Attempts to suture together the ends of damaged neurons in the peripheral nervous system date back to the seventh century. Through his experiments on frogs, British physiologist Augustus Waller described in detail what happens to a peripheral nerve after injury. Over time physicians learned that some peripheral nerve injuries are more conducive to repair than others. Even today many peripheral nerve injuries remain difficult to treat, and scientists are striving to better understand the mechanisms of regeneration to facilitate healing.

This Just In:
How Plastics Went from a Sustainability Solution to an Environmental Crisis
NEWS | 14 September 2025
There were only so many elephants, tortoises and silkworms to go around, and their tusks, shells and fibers were increasingly in demand. Articles and advertisements from the early era of the plastics industry portray such materials as relieving pressure on natural resources. The billiard ball and other reinforced polymer composites were predecessors to commercial plastics. The solution to one environmental sustainability problem has become one of the biggest and most intractable environmental crises of our time. As Rebecca Altman wrote in a 2021 article in Science, celluloid “purportedly spared the elephant, especially from the billiard ball industry.

Today:
The Universe Keeps Rewriting Cosmology
NEWS | 14 September 2025
To astronomers in the 1990s, these three facts were self-evident: The universe is expanding; all the matter in the universe is gravitationally attracting all the other matter in the universe; therefore, the expansion of the universe is slowing. Is the expansion slowing just enough that it will eventually come to a halt? The supernovae were dimmer, and thus farther away, than they would be in a universe expanding at a constant rate. Dark energy—as cosmologists came to call whatever was causing the acceleration—soon became part of the standard cosmological model, along with dark matter and “regular” matter, the stuff of us. What is dark matter?

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 14 September 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

Top Stories:
The Brain Science of Elusive ‘Aha! Moments’
NEWS | 14 September 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.

World:
The Quest to Build a Truly Intelligent Machine Helps Us Learn about Our Own Intelligence
NEWS | 14 September 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.

Current Events:
Lifting the Veil on Near-Death Experiences
NEWS | 14 September 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.