Solar geoengineering could buy humanity time against climate change—or trigger a dangerous new arms race. A first-of-its-kind simulation offered a glimpse of what happens when geopolitics takes the wheel.
According to an extensive study published in Nature Medicine, being a woman is painful. Or rather, women experience more pain throughout their entire bodies than men. (That conclusion had previously been reached by the Stanford University School of Medicine, which wasn’t quite sure whether my fellow ladies were actually feeling more pain or just reporting it.)
Nature Medicine penned:
“In this study, we harmonized individual-level self-reported pain data from 6,125,459 participants across 902 population-based data sources in 118 countries to establish global reference trajectories of pain. […] Pain prevalence ranged from roughly 2% for facial pain to 40% for back pain, was consistently higher in women across all 11 anatomical sites (risk ratio range: 1.08−1.83) and increased most steeply before age 55 years.”
Participants included in the study ranged from 5 years of age to 100. Unsurprisingly, Nature Medicine found that a fair amount of global pain prevalent in men and women can be attributed to smoking, obesity, and low-income status.
Author Matt Fillingim, a researcher at Montreal’s McGill University, while stating that the exact reasons for higher levels of pain among women are still unclear, offered his explanation to Medical News Today:
“The difference probably reflects a combination of biological and social factors, including sex hormones, immune function, nervous-system pain processing, stress, reproductive burdens, occupational exposures, healthcare use, and differences in how symptoms are reported.”
A Study of 6 Million People Found a Pain Gap Researchers Still Can’t Fully Explain
While some research has suggested that women have lower pain thresholds than men, it is, of course, always extremely important that women listen to the warnings that their bodies are giving them and be assertive. Not only are women less likely to be prescribed pain medication, but they are also more likely to become victims of medical gaslighting. Not all medical professionals approach women’s health with the care and understanding it deserves.
Here is one of the endless proofs: According to Yale Medicine Magazine, “On average, it takes women 10 years to receive an accurate diagnosis of endometriosis, and many see at least four or five doctors before their pain is taken seriously.” Treatment for women’s health conditions can also come with a set of unique risks.
In closing, always remember to be your own advocate, ladies.
A crew annotated image showing where the Artemis II team observed impact flashes on the dark side of the Moon. | Image: NASA
If you thought you'd seen all there is to see from the Artemis II mission, you're wrong. This week NASA posted over 800GB worth of science data, images, and videos on the Artemis II: Sights & Sounds of Science site. The archive includes over 11,000 photos and videos, over 8.5 hours of audio, and crew-annotated images, such as the one marking where they saw impact flashes on the dark side of the Moon. Together, they offer an unprecedented view inside a historic space mission.
One of the more exciting reveals was footage of the Artemis II team telling the ground team back in Houston about its observation of impact flashes. Impact flashes have …
Humans have taken the mighty wolf and turned it into the pug, a dog so malformed it struggles to breathe. That, of course, is not our only attempt at playing God with dogs. We crossbreed and create new kinds of dogs all the time, and every once in a while we try to do it on a mass scale.
The BBC recently ran a feature on one such large-scale attempt: scientists in Maine in the 1940s built a huge facility to create a kind of “super-dog,” an experiment that went quite terribly, though thankfully fell short of devolving into an Island of Doctor Monroe-style disaster.
After World War II, according to the BBC, a eugenics-obsessed Rockefeller Foundation director named Alan Gregg put up a ton of money, which today would equal about $9 million, for a 13-year project called the “School For Dogs.” That sounds like a fun Disney-produced family film from 2007, but it was actually a bit more nefarious.
The idea was to subject over 500 puppies of varying species to a series of maze runs and intelligence tests to prove that dog smarts are purely genetic, and then use that to breed some kind of hyper-intelligent super dog.
More Than 500 Puppies Were Part of a ‘Super-Dog’ Experiment. Here’s What Happened.
The research team, led by John Paul Scott and John Fuller, quickly found a rather funny universal truth: no single dog breed is smarter than any other. Yes, some breeds excel at specific tasks, but overall they found that trying to find one dog breed that was definitively, cumulatively smarter than any other was a waste of time.
The result of all this was a series of experiments that intended to prove eugenics right, but instead proved that eugenics is in itself a stupid pursuit that will not lead to the creation of any kind of master race, dog or otherwise, and it did that by proving that social species thrive on a mix of diverse personalities rather than a single genetically engineered master race.
When the dream of building the genetically superior super dog fell apart, the researchers pivoted to even darker experiments, like raising puppies in total isolation behind eight-foot fences to study attachment styles, which led to discovering that puppies deprived of human contact between four and 12 weeks turned into unmanageable a**holes.
The Rockefeller Foundation pulled its funding when the higher-ups realized they weren’t going to get an ingenious dog from it. The facility was eventually shut down in 1958.
It’s never really been a question of whether sharks can hear well. They can. But measuring how well is difficult.
If hearing is somewhat subjective for us humans, imagine how hard it would be to objectively judge a shark’s hearing. But we recently learned more about a particular breed’s sharp hearing: according to a study published in Integrative Organismal Biology, blacktip sharks off the Florida coast have surprisingly sensitive hearing and can instantly pinpoint where a noise is coming from.
Scientists at Florida Atlantic University parked a boat off southeast Florida. They cranked low-frequency sounds through an underwater speaker and tracked the local shark population using aerial drones. The idea was to startle the sharks with noise they’re not used to and see how they react.
Scientists Played Sounds for Sharks. They Reacted From 243 Feet Away.
And so they did. The blacktips reacted to low-frequency noise up to 74 meters away, or 243 feet. When they heard it, they made sharp, quick turns away from the sound, assuming it was an oncoming threat they’d rather flee than confront. More than 70 percent of the reactions
There is a zone called the “acoustic far field” where sound waves have stretched themselves thin. Researchers previously assumed sharks were basically deaf to sounds in this field, yet 70 percent of black tip sharks’ reactions occurred within the acoustic far field.
This is a little surprising because sharks lack a gas-filled swim bladder, the organ bony fish use to translate sound pressure into vibrations, much like a human eardrum. Marine biologists think black tips rely on a specialized inner-ear structure called a macula neglecta to detect tiny particle movements in distant water.
While it’s fascinating that sharks can hear much better than we give them credit for, it’s probably not reassuring to anyone who already has an innate fear of taking a dip in the ocean because of them. You are probably already pretty terrified of them, and now you know that they can hear you from about three-quarters of an American football field away.
Let’s get it out in the open early: Beaver Fever sounds like the title of a 1970s porn flick, but that’s not what it is. Beaver Fever is the extremely porny nickname for Giardiasis, an intestinal illness caused by a parasite called Giardia. According to a study published in PLoS One, 1 in 15 cats are infected and can transmit it to humans.
Researchers analyzed over 150,000 cat poop samples across North America. They discovered that roughly 6.5 percent of our kitties are walking biohazards harboring a microscopic intestinal parasite. Roughly one in five infected cats carries a specific strain that can jump into your digestive tract.
The Parasite Behind ‘Beaver Fever’ Turned Up in 6.5% of Tested Cats
If you catch it, a prolonged bout of greasy diarrhea is in your future, along with severe bloating and cramping. The parasite thrives in cold, moist environments, meaning winter is its peak season and, oh, look at that, winter is just around the corner. Midwest cats showed “1.36 (95% CI: 1.28, 1.46) times greater odds of being Gd detected than cats in the South,” according to the study’s text.
Half of infected humans never show symptoms, but severe cases can drag on for years, triggering chronic irritable bowel syndrome or joint inflammation. Children and immunocompromised folks are at the highest risk for complications.
If you suspect your cat might be a carrier, it’s probably best to not let it walk across your kitchen counters. The infection is treatable with antiparasitic meds, but if you don’t want to get it, scrub down its litter box and wash your hands after cleaning it.
Also, keep your toddlers away from playground sandboxes, as those are, after all, nature’s litter boxes.
According to a comprehensive analysis compiled by StudyFinds, at some point or another, a cat owner will have to choke down their disgust and thank their cat for bringing them the “gift” of a dead animal. It’s usually a small mouse. But are cats actually bestowing a gift on you out of love and appreciation for all you do for them?
StudyFinds dug into several multi-year studies to see whether cats drop off little presents or are just the little household psychos we’ve long known them to be. The evidence leaned more toward the psycho side of your beloved kitty cat.
For instance, a 2013 study in Biological Conservation tracked roaming cats using “KittyCams” and found they brought home only 23 percent of their kills, ate 28 percent on the spot, and abandoned almost half where they died. If your cat were genuinely trying to keep you fed, they’re not doing a good job.
Your Cat’s Dead-Mouse ‘Gift’ May Have Nothing to Do With You
Research in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery shows that cats are solitary hunters; they hunt alone, and they don’t hunt for anyone but themselves. That mouse they brought before you wasn’t for you; it’s for them, and they just so happen to drop it around you.
What may seem like a gift honoring their lord and master of the house is actually a dinner reservation for one. If you don’t want that dead animal around at all, a 2021 study published in Current Biology found that feeding your cat a meat-heavy, grain-free diet can cut those deliveries by 36 percent.
Those researchers also found that playing with the cat for 5 to 10 minutes a day cuts back on dead animal gifts by about 25 percent.
Two birds in Brazil are, scientifically speaking, loud as heck, So loud that these relatively small birds rival the earsplitting obnoxiousness of machinery like jackhammers and chainsaws. They’re even louder than much larger animals, like elephants.
According to a study published in Evolution, researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst hiked into the Brazilian wilderness armed with laser rangefinders and portable sound level meters to measure the song volume of 123 different species. While hummingbirds let out a gentle 50 to 64 decibels, about on par with a normal conversation, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema seemed to be trying to tear a hole in the universe with their birdsong.
It’s especially impressive considering that, for instance, the bare-throated bellbird is about the size of a common dove; both species screeched out vocalizations that hit around 122 to 122 decibels, putting these little birds alongside classically loud construction equipment, and easily making them louder than wolves, lions, bison, and elephants.
These Two Birds Reach Around 122 Decibels. Imagine That Outside Your Window.
Speaking to The New York Times, study co-author Dr. Jeff Podos compared birds that can really belt out sounds to having internal tubing that functions a bit like a brass musical instrument: “It’s like a tube which serves the same function that a tube on a musical instrument does, like a trombone or a trumpet…It helps concentrate the energy into a narrow range of frequencies, so it’s easier to hit louder peaks.”
Birds project air using a syrinx, the trumpet/trombone-like organ mentioned above. It focuses audio frequencies. Scientists found that birds with wider beaks project sound like the bell end of a brass instrument, while their large throat muscles generate huge gushes of internal air pressure that crank up the volume.
The Blue Jays and mockingbirds screeching just outside your window every morning may be the all-natural alarm clock that haunts your mornings, but be thankful that you don’t live anywhere near Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, where the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema seem to be locked in an eternal contest to see who could be the most obnoxious.
According to the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a team of Latin American and European scientists identified 57 new species and 5 new genera in just two weeks! Most interestingly, one discovery from a 2025 mission they analyzed, though not a new species, is back in the news: Meet the starfish that strongly resembles Patrick Star—the beloved dunderhead companion of children’s cartoon protagonist SpongeBob SquarePants.
The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census led the Species Discovery Workshop, which, in partnership with the Schmidt Ocean Institute, resulted in the identifications. It took place in Buenos Aires from July 13-24, 2026. Participants examined deep-sea biological samples, mostly from the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Underwater Oasis of the Mar del Plata Canyon expedition.
The expedition ran from July 23 to August 12, 2025, aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor (too), with help from the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian.
A Patrick Star Look-Alike and a ‘Loki’ Sea Cucumber Made This Ocean Expedition Hard to Forget
Over 4 million people witnessed the 2025 deep-sea live stream, where “Patrick Star” first captivated the public. Fortunately, however, he was left to his own devices rather than captured. During the event, viewers compared a crab to a “drag queen.” One look-alike deemed a new species this year was “Loki the Sea Cucumber” (Peniagone sp.), whose horn-like appendages earned him his name.
Many will remember that SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg (1961-2018) was a marine biologist, so it’s a shame he couldn’t be around to see the findings.
“Loki the Sea Cucumber” (Peniagone sp.), courtesy of ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean InstituteResearch Vessel Falkor (too), Courtesy of The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census / Schmidt Ocean InstituteThe Argentina Species Discovery Workshop Team, Courtesy of The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census / Schmidt Ocean InstituteDr. Daniel Lauretta at the Species Discovery Workshop, Courtesy of The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census / Schmidt Ocean Institute
The three-body problem remains unsolved—we can't generally predict the motion of three bodies for all starting conditions using regular maths—but there are many solutions showing periodic orbits given specific conditions. Three Body Orbits is a beautiful "atlas" animating 3,942 of them. — Read the rest
Castelion—a next-generation defense tech company—is building a facility in Rio Rancho Estates that documents show could pose a major fire and chemical hazard to neighboring communities.
SpaceX has acquired a portfolio of low-band spectrum licenses - a move the company says "will pave the way" for its Starlink Mobile service to become a "major" US carrier. When the Federal Communications Commission signs off on the deal, SpaceX says it will deploy its new architecture that combines its satellite-to-mobile constellation with a terrestrial mobile network, directly competing with T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.
The licenses include up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum in the 800 MHz band, which SpaceX says will allow Starlink Mobile's signal to penetrate through walls and buildings. SpaceX previously acquired 2GHz spectrum from …
A newly discovered 45 million-year-old fossilized crocodile skull has been classified by paleontologists as a whole new kind of crocodile genus that has been appropriately named after the Egyptian God Heru, the same god who likely inspired the design of the Great Sphinx.
According to a study published in Royal Society Open Science, Herugavialis cairensis shares more with the Great Sphinx than just a name. It was found in the same rock formation that the Great Sphinx was carved from. On top of that, the Great Sphinx is famously missing the tip of its nose, just as the newly discovered crocodile skull seems to be missing the very tip of its snout.
There seems to be a running theme in the paleontology world of late: researchers are making grand discoveries from bones dug up decades earlier and left to gather dust in museum storerooms. This discovery is no different: it was originally excavated in the 1920s from northern Egypt’s Mokattam Formation, the limestone quarry used to build the pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx.
Scientists Used CT Scans to Correct a Crocodile Mix-Up in a German Museum
The skull spent nearly a century mislabeled and sitting in a German museum. Scientists originally thought it was a relative of the modern false gharial, a long-snouted fish-eating croc. An international team of researchers ran the skull through a high-tech micro-CT scanner that revealed internal anatomy that looks nothing like its alleged living relatives.
The three scans revealed distinct features, like “telescoped” eye sockets with raised rims and a blunt peak on its brain cavity that scientists have never seen in any other gharial relative. Computer analyses scored 331 physical traits, confirming that Herugavialis belonged on an entirely different evolutionary branch leading to the Indian gharial.
The Mediterranean region it called home was filled with warm, shallow water and a diverse array of crocodile species, which all came crashing down around 6 million years ago when global cooling and the drying of the Mediterranean wiped out the region’s crocs entirely.
Luckily, modern science is helping us track the animals that once called this neck of the world home tens of millions of years ago.
Scientists in the US and Europe are exploring whether an experimental surgery can treat Alzheimer’s disease. | Fiordaliso/Getty Images
The videos are astonishing. In one scene, a senior Chinese woman appears lost in the wilderness of dementia, unable to answer basic questions; in the next, she seems to be lucidly chatting and shucking beans for dinner. By all appearances, years of cognitive decline had been rapidly reversed after the patient underwent an experimental new surgery.
The only problem is: No one is sure if it’s real.
It’s difficult to take any video at face value in the age of AI, and this experimental procedure happened in China, a country with a recent history of controversial sciencetouting extraordinary but questionable claims. In the past few years, researchers there have published several papers reporting promising results from a procedure that purports to attack Alzheimer’s disease in a peculiar way: by connecting vessels from the lymph nodes in the neck to nearby veins in an attempt to drain the brain of harmful waste. But these have been small studies that did not include a control group. The doctor who first pioneered the surgery there has reportedly been placed under arrest, and the Chinese government has sought to stop most physicians from performing any more of these operations.
Is that because it’s a scam? Or because it’s dangerous? Or could it be because there have not yet been proper randomized trials, tested against a placebo, to assess the procedure’s safety and efficacy? There are new studies being planned in China to more rigorously evaluate the surgery.
But scientists elsewhere in the world have a lot of questions. And now, a small group of researchers in the US and Europe are endeavoring to find the answers. Within the next few years, we should know whether this surgery really could be the miracle that the viral videos make it appear to be — or another much-hyped treatment that ultimately fizzles out.
Dr. Adnan Siddiqui, a neurosurgeon at the University at Buffalo who is leading an initial US-based study of this procedure, previously helped develop a new treatment for severe stroke patients. This gave doctors a valuable new technique for treating patients during an emergency, and he told me he saw it rapidly change the standard of care around the world. In an interview, he cautioned that a lot more work needs to be done to assess this proposed new Alzheimer’s treatment — but at the same time, he’s optimistic.
“The whole world’s paradigm changed in literally a blink of an eye. It can happen. And I’m hoping this might be that second home run,” he said. In “2027, we’ll start getting clear signals in one direction or the other. By 2028, 2029, we would know whether this is real or not.”
Why this Alzheimer’s surgery really might work
The promise of this controversial new procedure lies in the lymphatic system, which is essentially the body’s drainage system. According to scientists’ best current theories about Alzheimer’s, the brain’s filtration system gets worse as we age, and as a result, plaque made up of amyloid proteins as well as tangles of tau proteins can accumulate in people’s brains and eventually lead to neurological damage, leading to the severe memory loss of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers have found evidence that those amyloid and tau proteins also accumulate, not just in the brains, but also in the lymph nodes in older people.
So could a minimally invasive surgery to improve the brain’s drainage have such a dramatic impact on Alzheimer’s disease?
Siddiqui, who also runs the Jacobs Institute at the University of Buffalo, which is focused on new technology for vascular and neurological disease, had been interested in the lymphatic system’s role in Alzheimer’s before he ever heard about this experimental work out of China from a colleague years ago. The colleague had gone to see Dr. Qingping Xie, the surgeon who started performing lymphatic surgery on Alzheimer’s patients about six years ago. To investigate further for himself, Siddiqui went to South Korea to meet a plastic surgeon, Dr. Joon Pio Hong, who was performing a new “more refined” version of the same basic procedure, as Siddiqui put it. But as in China, these were not proper randomized experiments. There was no placebo.
So Siddiqui wanted to see if he could test it himself. After performing proof of concept operations in 2025 with a new microrobotic tool (for a rare disorder involving constricted blood vessels in the brain), he and his colleagues decided to take an even bigger swing: testing this new technology to perform the lymphatic surgery for Alzheimer’s.
The researchers applied to the US Food and Drug Administration and received approval late last year for five initial procedures; over the summer, they got the green light to perform the procedure on 15 patients. Several operations have already been performed, and Siddiqui told me he had four more lined up next week.
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The mechanism makes superficial sense: If Alzheimer’s is the byproduct of amyloid and tau building up in the brain because the body gets worse at filtering them out, bypassing a clogged “drain” in the lymphatic system could help to clear the proteins and relieve symptoms. It is, by a different method, the same therapeutic target as recent breakthrough drugs that slow down the cognitive decline of an Alzheimer’s patient.
But instead of an injection, the procedure involves a small incision in the neck, allowing surgeons to connect lymph nodes to a vein. The hope is that creating this new drainage route will help the brain clear amyloid and tau more effectively and “hopefully bypass whatever plugs that might be there in the system,” Siddiqui said.
This first round of US surgeries are part of what’s called an early feasibility study. “You’re just trying to prove that it’s definitely safe and definitely doable and maybe effective,” Siddiqui said. They’re measuring not only the patients’ cognitive performance but other data points — such as changes to their gait — for any sign of benefit or harm.
If results are promising, a second feasibility study will involve a larger number of patients — 50 or so. After that, if the evidence suggests they should move forward, the scientists would start to introduce placebos. In the case of surgery, that means some patients would receive “sham” surgeries that wouldn’t actually do anything. Then investigators would compare the experiences of the two groups: the people who received the fake surgery and the people who got the real thing.
If the latter group improves significantly more than the former, that would allow scientists to say definitively: Yes, this surgery actually works to treat Alzheimer’s.
“Obviously, this is exactly the kind of disease where there’s so much hype and so much hope,” Siddiqui told me. So it is essential to build out the careful research to substantiate it.
But let’s not get ahead of the science
Siddiqui has been in this position before — and he’s seen it go both ways. There was the new stroke treatment that proved successful and has since become the standard around the world. But he was also an early investigator of a multiple sclerosis treatment, somewhat similar to the Alzheimer’s surgery. After initial promise, it failed when the randomized trials began.
“I wouldn’t be a neurosurgeon if I was not an eternal optimist,” he said. “However, I’m a clinical trialist, and I always respect placebo.”
Placebos are essential, but they are also tricky. If somebody thinks they have received an active treatment in a study, they tend to think they’re going to benefit. This goes for surgical treatments as well. So following patients’ and their symptoms after the intervention is essential to seeing just how much of the effects can be attributed to the treatment and how much could be placebo effect. The latter of which could also be reinforced by loved ones who are desperate to see their parent or spouse get better.
Alzheimer’s is also a complicated disease that we still don’t totally understand. While scientists think there is a relationship between amyloid and tau proteins and Alzheimer’s disease, other factors, such as inflammation and vascular health, could also have a role. Some prior drug candidates have successfully cleared amyloid plaque, but patients didn’t get better. Some people have amyloid build-up in their brains but never develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, division chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Yale School of Medicine, is overseeing studies designed to establish more of the basics of how these proteins pass through the lymphatic system. This research includes investigating whether obstruction actually occurs in Alzheimer’s patients, and if so, where exactly those blockages usually are. Only after they do this work, he said, would his team be comfortable proposing surgeries to relieve the blockage and see if that helps improve Alzheimer’s patients’ symptoms.
He told me about having seen Xie, the procedure-pioneering Chinese surgeon, speak during a plastic surgery conference a few years ago. (Plastic surgeons are experts in the kind of microsurgery necessary for the procedure, and several are involved in the ongoing Alzheimer’s trials.)
“I think most people, including myself at the time, dismissed it as, ‘This is some sort of a charlatan.’” Pomahac said. “But he kept coming back to conferences every year and started to show more and more videos. We were not sure. Is it actors? You couldn’t tell what’s going on.”
Which is why he is dedicated to doing more of the foundational research to understand Alzheimer’s first. “Rushing to the operating room makes no sense in my mind at this point,” Pomahac said. “I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to really identify the site of surgery and what type of intervention would be most effective.”
Even if you set this surgery aside, this is an exciting moment for Alzheimer’s science. And although waiting any longer is excruciating for those watching loved ones with the disease progress, progress’ velocity by all accounts is increasing.
“We are finally doing the kinds of rigorous studies that will give us some degree of confidence that there’s something real here or not,” Siddiqui told me. “We’re not quite there yet.” But in just a year or two, we should know much more.
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