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Forget Beer: Ice Age Hunters Were Getting High 12,000 Years Earlier — With Betel Nuts

Two skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi had something strange going on in their mouths. Not cavities. Not the usual wear from a tough diet. Deep, rounded grooves cut into the teeth — a pattern no archaeologist had documented before, and one nobody could explain. The answer, published in Science Advances, pushes the known […]

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The Children a Scientist Took Home

Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took from the field to the US—many of whom he sexually molested, with the knowledge and, in some cases, approval of his professional peers and colleagues:

In his journals and in letters to colleagues, Gajdusek was self-righteous, arguing that what he’d done was “no more serious than lying on the grass or picking a dandelion,” and he cited the Anga initiation rites as justification. These ceremonies had brought boys into their communities, as part of a shared passage into manhood, but Gajdusek treated them as a timeless license for the acts that he’d committed privately, one boy at a time. George Klein, a professor at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, who was part of the Nobel Assembly for thirty-six years, validated Gajdusek’s opinions, telling him that he wondered if “the Western world can ‘catch up with you.’” He wrote, “I share your indignation about the typically Jewish-Christian-Moslem hypocrisy on sexual matters.” Gajdusek was troubled, though, by how many colleagues wrote letters saying that they knew the charges must be untrue. “I thought better of my friends,” he said. “They are dissimulating and lying.”



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A Fatal Reaction

In this harrowing, incredibly reported story co-published by Science and Retraction Watch, Brendan Borrell uncovers how “Mei,” a 6-year-old girl in China, died a week after an experimental gene-editing trial went wrong—and how her medical team, led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu, downplayed the risks to her parents, did not publicly disclose her death, and has faced no real accountability.

On 23 March 2025, the day before the procedure, the family settled into a shared room inside a crowded pediatric ward. When the other girl in the room broke into tears, Mei handed her one of her favorite stuffed animals: a blue bird. “She liked to give things to other kids,” Jason said.

The next day Mei put on a brave face as she was taken to the procedure room. Yu’s handpicked doctor inserted a needle between two vertebrae on her lower back and withdrew just over a teaspoon of spinal fluid to create space for the drug. Then, he swapped syringes and gently pressed down on the plunger, filling her spinal canal with viruses.

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The Anti-Sunscreen Movement Is Coming for You

For Men’s Health, Brian Underwood investigates the flood of sunscreen misinformation on Instagram and TikTok, where influencers push inaccurate data about chemical UV filters, play chemist and promote their own DIY formulas, or even encourage no sun protection at all. Underwood sorts fact from fear, talking with dermatologists, chemists, and professionals who are working to reshape the messaging around sun exposure and sunscreen.

Environmental concerns may have also shown up in your feed, with suggestions that these same filters are poisoning our oceans, giving rise to a whole category of sunscreens labeled “reef safe”—a meaningless marketing term that’s not regulated by the FDA (the same goes for products labeled “natural” or “organic”). Dr. Nelson’s point about “low-relevance models” is something to consider here too: The research demonstrating that oxybenzone, octinoxate, and other active ingredients may lead to reef bleaching was done in a lab setting where coral was exposed to levels of these chemicals significantly higher than has been found in the natural environment. It conveniently left out the fact that inorganic filters like zinc oxide (the one typically used in “reef safe” formulas) would have the same effect in similar doses.

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