The controversial discovery that our brains can generate new neurons surprisingly late in life is now prompting a rethink of adult brain health, pointing the way to better treatments for stroke, dementia and depression By Jamie Ducharme
Often described as a genius, physicist Sabrina Pasterski built and flew her own plane by the age of 16 and is now developing a mind-bending idea that could finally unify gravity and quantum theory By Miriam Frankel
We know that this monster El Niño will bring floods, droughts, cyclones and wildfires, but some governments aren’t putting in the necessary resources to prepare for disaster
This El Niño is forecast to end around June next year after smashing all records, but its impacts could persist indefinitely in some parts of the world By Michael Le Page
In the early 2000s, geneticists Helen Hobbs and Jonathan Cohen at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center launched an ambitious effort to investigate cardiovascular health in Dallas County. Their study was unusual for the time. Rather than largely focusing on people of European ancestry, the Dallas Heart Study deliberately recruited a diverse population that reflected the region’s demographics.
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Rare genetic changes in a gene called PCSK9 help control low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the “bad” cholesterol linked to heart disease.
People who naturally make less of the PCSK9 protein have much lower LDL levels, pointing researchers toward new possibilities for lowering cholesterol.
That insight led to a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs and showed how studying diverse populations can uncover important clues about disease.
I spent much of my childhood in Colorado, which means that I, like millions of others living in the American West, grew up hearing warnings about the dangers of plague. People often find it shocking to learn that Yersinia pestis, the bacterium discovered in 1894 that is believed to have caused the mid-14th-century Black Death and other plague pandemics, is still around and dangerous, but that is one of many misperceptions about plague that need correcting. Plague’s multiple pandemics were not limited to the Black Death nor to Europe. And it is not a disease that disappears simply because no human cases are being reported at epidemic levels. Plague is not a thing of the past, and infections most definitely occur to this day.
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For centuries, our understanding of plague was riddled with assumptions based on a few historical accounts and data from modern plague victims.
Advances in genomics and bioarcheology now allow us to tie historical plague pandemics to human remains and even reconstruct the full plague family tree.
These data tell a new, broader story in which plague arrives earlier, stays later, and lurks in rural animal reservoirs before spilling over into human populations.
Seeking and evaluating explanations can shape the very process of learning. Just like tasting the soup as you’re cooking can shift the final product toward a closer approximation of soupy perfection, explaining as you learn can change the course of learning itself, pushing you to find a closer approximation of a truly great explanation: one that covers all the relevant observations in the simplest way possible. But how does that work?
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The process of explaining is a powerful learning tool.From a young age, humans ask “why”; answering that question can reveal deeper meanings and reveal hidden patterns.
Explaining can unlock abstraction, a complex thought process that allows people to generalize from specific examples to identify common themes.
The need to know why can unlock learning, but it can also drive some people to latch on to patterns that do not exist, such as conspiracy theories.
The Fall 2026 issue explores how artificial intelligence might affect public policy in a variety of domains. Take biosecurity: Despite the fear that AI could be used to engineer dangerous pathogens, a former FBI special agent argues that the technology can also be used to uncover suspicious activity and possible bad actors before they become a threat. On economic policy: Spectacular wealth from AI will accrue to relatively few companies and individuals. What if a country were to create an AI sovereign wealth fund to distribute these profits more equitably? A group of Canadian scholars and legislators proposes to set up just such a fund. And when it comes to trust, a cultural anthropologist argues that CERN, the world’s most successful large-scale science collaboration, has many lessons to offer European regulators about how to build trust and transparency when using AI for science.
What Are the Goals for AI?
In “Escaping AI’s Measurement Trap” (Issues, Summer 2026), Urs Gasser, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and Fabienne Marco make a compelling case that governance of artificial intelligence faces a problem. Once benchmarks become targets, systems and their developers adapt to them, and measured performance may increasingly diverge from behavior in the real world. Their argument leads to a broader question: How can democratic societies not only improve the oversight of increasingly optimized AI systems, but shape what gets optimized in the first place?
There is much discussion on how artificial intelligence poses threats to biosecurity; there should be at least as much focus on how AI can expand the solutions.
Today’s biosecurity approach is still grounded in a foundation laid nearly two decades ago. In 2008, when I reported to Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters as a newly minted supervisory special agent to support biosecurity policy, one important, emerging question was how providers of synthetic DNA should screen orders from customers. As commercial gene synthesis became increasingly accessible, many people worried that individuals could order genetic sequences coding for toxins and pathogens and then use them to cause harm.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
