Not just one, but two planets might be orbiting the nearest star to our sun, a small red dwarf called Proxima Centauri that’s about 4.24 light-years away. In 2016, scientists with the Pale Red Dot project revealed the first known world orbiting Proxima Centauri—a planet at least 1.3 times as massive as Earth that’s perhaps warm enough for life as we know it to thrive on its surface. Scientists identified that planet, called Proxima Centauri b, by studying how its gravity tugs on Proxima Centauri and causes the star to wobble.

Katie Bouman, a researcher who helped create the first image of a black hole, quickly gained internet fame Thursday for her role in the project after a photo of her went viral. By Friday, falsehoods claiming it was not Bouman but a male colleague who deserved credit for the black hole image overtook legitimate coverage in search results on YouTube and Instagram. On YouTube, the first video result for users who search for “Katie Bouman” returns a video titled “Woman Does 6% of the Work but Gets 100% of the Credit: Black Hole Photo.”

But now, 11 months after the Army Corps of Engineers completed one of the largest public works projects in world history, the agency says the system will stop providing adequate protection in as little as four years because of rising sea levels and shrinking levees. The growing vulnerability of the New Orleans area is forcing the Army Corps to begin assessing repair work, including raising hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls that form a meandering earth and concrete fortress around the city and its adjacent suburbs. But the Army Corps said in its Federal Register notice that “absent future levee lifts to offset consolidation, settlement, subsidence, and sea level rise, risk to life and property in the Greater New Orleans area will progressively increase.”

Even before he was born, it was clear that the boy’s brain was unusual—so much so that his expecting parents flew from rural Alaska to Seattle, where specialists could attend to their son from birth. The answer was ultimately stranger than doctors could have imagined: The boy’s brain was missing an entire type of cell, called microglia, the result of mutations in a single gene, called CSF1R. Microglia make up 10 percent of the brain’s cells, but they are not neurons and therefore have long been overlooked.

At the same time, his twin brother Mark, also an astronaut, tested his intracranial pressure back on Earth. The idea behind the study has a simple logic: Because the twins share the same genome, comparing the changes that occurred while one was in space and the other on Earth would give new insights into the impact of long-duration spaceflight on human health. During their NASA careers, Mark was the pilot or commander of four Space Shuttle missions; Scott piloted and commanded two Shuttles and spent six months on the ISS before his year in space.

Now scientists in southern China report that they’ve tried to narrow the evolutionary gap, creating several transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence. “The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take,” says James Sikela, a geneticist who carries out comparative studies among primates at the University of Colorado. In 2010, Sikela and three colleagues wrote a paper called “The ethics of using transgenic non-human primates to study what makes us human,” in which they concluded that human brain genes should never be added to apes, such as chimpanzees, because they are too similar to us.

A couple of weeks later, the hot doctor cut out my rotting tonsils. When he paid me a surprise visit in the recovery room, I was consumed again by the irrational belief that people at the far end of the physical-beauty bell curve should at least give the rest of us some time to compose ourselves before we have to deal with them. I’ve chafed under this onerous expectation periodically in the intervening 10 years: There was another hot doctor, to whom I had described a rash in detail over the phone, as well as a hot mover and the occasional hot delivery guy.

As a boy, Francisco Ramirez Cruz loved hiking with his grandfather up into the mountains of central Mexico. While the old man grazed sheep or hunted for wild mushrooms, Ramirez would play amid the throngs of monarch butterflies that migrated 3,000 miles to this forest each autumn, turning the blue sky into a sea of orange. In the middle of Ramirez’s orchard of apple and plum trees, the scientists helped him construct a small greenhouse, where he tends to several dozen saplings that were taken from the forest and will eventually be replanted.

Nutrition experts like to point out why people on low-carb or no-carb diets might feel more awake throughout the day: Glucose is the brain’s chosen fuel, and it typically gets it from carbs and sugar. “The best thing is to understand that for your brain to feel clear, you need to cut down on the sugars, your gut needs to be happy, and you need to have a nutrient-rich diet,” says Dr. Eva Selhub, a former instructor at Harvard Medical School who now runs her own wellness consultancy. In the keto and carnivore diets—as in Woo’s fasting diet—the body uses fat as its energy source instead, converting it into liver-produced chemicals called ketones, which the brain can also use as fuel.

The Event Horizon Telescope, an international array of observatories teaming up to form a virtual, Earth-sized telescope in the hopes of capturing the first real image of a black hole, held six simultaneous press conferences across the globe today — and what those conferences announced did not disappoint. It’s actually 100 billion kilometers across, and what we’re looking at — that dark spot surrounded by the orange-red ring — is the “shadow” created by the black hole’s event horizon, the point where gravity is so intense that light cannot escape. We’ve observed one, we can study it and, hopefully not long from now, we’ll know even more about black holes than we’ve been able to piece together without having seen one.