I keep a small mental list of things that are supposed to be settled, and every week it gets a little shorter. This week a bumble bee did it to me. Researchers in Finland gave the bees two ordinary facts, learned separately, and then set up a problem that required stitching those facts together into a move nobody had taught them. The bees did it. The test was designed for apes. I sat with that longer than I meant to, partly because it is charming, and partly because it is a quiet rebuke to how confidently we draw the line around who gets to reason.
That is the thread I could not shake all week: how often the thing we were sure we understood turns out to have a second face. A protein that keeps your immune cells fighting cancer is the same one feeding autoimmune disease. A stroke doctors treated for decades as a clog looks, on closer reading, like arteries that grew too wide. Biology keeps refusing to be one thing.
I find that reassuring, honestly. It means the questions are still open, and open questions are where the honest work lives. The press release wants the story closed. The evidence rarely agrees.
Investigations
Australia Switched Off Social Media for a Generation of Kids. Nepal Already Ran That Experiment.
The ban is sold as youth mental-health protection, but its own university researchers call the harm evidence overblown, and the one nation that already banned a platform got ID checks and VPN workarounds, not healthier kids.
Two Journals That Buried the Lab-Leak Question Now Warn of a ‘Gilded Age’ in American Science
The Lancet and Science marked America’s 250th by casting the administration’s research cuts as vandalism. Both journals spent the public trust they now invoke, and the editorials never mention how.
Drugs & FDA
The Last Time Washington Went After Hospital Drug Markups, the Supreme Court Blocked It. This Time CMS Brought Receipts.
In 2018 the Supreme Court blocked CMS from cutting the markup 340B hospitals charge Medicare for discounted drugs, because the agency skipped a required survey. CMS ran the survey this time, and found seniors paying co-pays bigger than what the hospital paid for the drug.
The FDA Cleared a Sickle-Cell Cure for Two-Year-Olds in 53 Days. It Starts With Chemo That Can Sterilize Them.
Casgevy is a real advance against a brutal disease. It is also a $2.2 million therapy that requires sterilizing chemotherapy, saw a child die in trials, and reached toddlers on a 53-day review Makary’s FDA hands out as a favor.
Cancer
One Protein Keeps Your T Cells in the Fight. The Same Protein Feeds Autoimmune Disease.
In mice, deleting the LEF1 gene collapsed the reserve T cells that sustain the fight against chronic infection and cancer. The same deletion protected against autoimmune diabetes.
No Gene Editing, No Catheter Into the Skull: A Pediatric Brain-Cancer T-Cell Trial Reported One Complete Response in 33 Young Patients
Children with diffuse pontine glioma rarely live past a year. A first-in-human trial infused 33 young patients with pediatric brain tumors, including DIPG, with T cells trained on three tumor proteins, no genetic engineering, and reported one complete response and three survivors still alive years l
Infectious Disease
Five Years After COVID, Japan Is Still Dying at Pandemic Rates, and Confirmed COVID Explains Only a Tenth
Japan’s excess deaths peaked at 7.55 percent in 2022 and still ran at 5.76 percent through 2023, after Tokyo downgraded COVID to a routine infectious disease, in one of the most heavily mRNA-dosed countries on earth.
Against Omicron, a Second COVID Dose Added Almost Nothing for Kids Who Were Already Infected
In Austria’s own registry, one dose protected previously infected people slightly better than two; in children against the omicron they actually faced, the second dose’s benefit could not be told apart from zero. The guidance never moved.
Metabolic & Weight
Switch Off One Protein Called Mitch, and Cells Start Eating Their Own Fat
Women with obesity carry more of it. Disable it in mice and they turn lean and muscular at once, the opposite of what the injectable weight-loss drugs do to your body.
Obesity Stopped Denting Older Adults’ Metabolic Numbers: In the Young It’s Biting Harder Than Ever
For middle-aged and older adults, extra weight no longer tracks with the cardiovascular damage it once did. For the young, the same fat is biting harder and earlier. The lab panels converged; the fat didn’t.
Brain & Aging
The Box-and-Banana Test Was Built for Apes. A Bumble Bee Worked It Out on Its Own.
Researchers in Finland trained bumble bees on two unrelated facts, a flower with sugar and a ball that rolls. With the flower moved out of reach, the bees combined the two into a solution nobody had shown them, on a task built for apes.
For Decades They Treated This Stroke Like a Clog. The Arteries Were Actually Too Wide.
People with widened brain arteries were four times more likely to have had a lacunar stroke, the type doctors have treated for decades as if it were a clog.