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June 16, 2025—The human brain glows, a new way to find prime numbers, and how to join a watch party for the release of the first batch of images from the Vera C. Rubin space telescope.
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits on the peak of Cerro Pachón in Chilean Andes. RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/H. Stockebrand (CC BY 4.0) | | - The world's biggest digital camera will soon release its first photos of the cosmos. Here's how to watch live. | 3 min read
- An emergency-room doctor, critics of COVID-19 vaccines and an obstetrician who advises a supplement company are among the advisers handpicked by RFK, Jr. to advise the government on vaccine policy. | 7 min read
- Your air-conditioning can surprisingly help the power grid during extreme heat. Here's how. | 6 min read
| | Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library/Getty Images | | For the first time, neuroscientists detected (from outside the skull) glowing photons emitted by the human brain. Those emissions changed when participants performed cognitive tasks (like listening for a musical cue). In a blacked-out room, 20 participants wore head caps studded with electroencephalography electrodes to measure the brain's electrical activity. Photon-amplifying tubes to detect ultraweak photon emission were positioned around their heads over two brain regions: the area responsible for visual processing and another where auditory processing occurs. "The very first finding is that photons are coming out of the head—full stop. It's independent, it's not spurious, it's not random," says study lead Nirosha Murugan, a biophysicist at Wilfrid Lurier University in Ontario. How it works: All living tissue emits a continuous stream of low-intensity light, or biophotons. Scientists think that this light comes from biomolecular reactions that generate energy, which create photons as by-products. The more energy a tissue burns, the more light it gives off—which means, of all our body's tissues, our brain should glow the brightest of all.
What the experts say: "I think this is a very intriguing and potentially groundbreaking approach [for measuring brain activity, though] there are still many uncertainties that need to be explored," says Michael Gramlich, a biophysicist at Auburn University, who was not involved in the new study. "The essential question to address," he says, is whether ultraweak photon emissions actually impact cognition. | | Mathematicians found a surprising new way to identify prime numbers—those are numbers, like 2, 3, 5, or 7, that can only be divided evenly by 1 and themselves. Instead of using long, complicated checks to see if a number fits that rule, the researchers figured out how to use integer partitions—basically, the different ways a number can be broken into smaller numbers that add up to it (for example, the number 5 has seven partitions: 4 + 1, 3 + 2, 3 + 1 + 1, 2 + 2 + 1, 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1). Certain patterns in those partitions can perfectly predict whether a number is prime. Why this matters: Prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics and critical to fields like cryptography, yet their distribution (when they occur and why) remains one of math's biggest mysteries. This discovery reframes the definition of primes using an 18th century mathematical idea—partitions—that reveals hidden structure among the numbers where chaos was once assumed. This could lead to deeper insights into longstanding puzzles like the twin prime and Goldbach conjectures.
What the experts say: "It's almost like our work gives you infinitely many new definitions for prime," says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia, and lead author of the new paper. "That's kind of mind-blowing."
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A CUSTOM PUBLICATION SPONSORED BY GOOGLE CLOUD | | The Doctors Pioneering Healthspan Medicine | | By incorporating healthspan science into clinical practice, some doctors are navigating a gray area between mainstream science and more speculative therapies. | | | | |
- Games require strict rules and come in an endless variety. Training AI's on game play may be an ideal route to achieving artificial general intelligence, writes Vinay K. Chaudhri, an AI researcher who works on knowledge axiomatization. "Game playing with a novel set of rules is crucial to the next evolution of AI because it will potentially let us create AIs that will be capable of anything—but that will also meticulously and reliably follow the rules we set for them," he says. | 4 min read
| | - Marie has one regular die labeled with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, and a second cube that is completely blank. She labels this cube in a special way. If you roll both dice, you can get the following totals: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. The special part: all 12 total values are equally likely to be rolled. How did Marie label the cube? Click here for the solution.
| | Humans are truly creatures of light. The sun's energy is converted into the fuel that feeds us; our eyes can only see in the visible light spectrum; our moods, energy levels and bodily rhythms are set by light; sunlight may even heal some autoimmune diseases. And now, it seems, that our bodies in turn create photons through the activity of living. In temperate climates, the longer days of late spring do seem to soothe the soul. I always celebrate the brightest season.
| | Welcome to another week of discovery! Email me anytime with thoughts, feedback or ideas: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow!
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | | |
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