This researcher, Katie Bouman, was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and a member of the team running Event Horizon Telescope, the effort to capture visual evidence of a black hole for the first time. After astronomers released that image last week, Bouman’s spread across the internet just as rapidly, on social media and in news stories. A round of stories celebrated Bouman’s work on the algorithms that forged a mesmerizing photograph from a vat of telescope data.

Clausius’s great paper on disorder, ‘On the Moving Force of Heat’ (1850), was published the same year that he became a professor of physics at the Royal Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin. In that paper, Clausius showed that change in the physical world is associated with the inevitable movement of order to disorder. If that seems like a preposterous statement, consider a glass goblet falling off a table and shattering on the floor – a transformation from order to disorder of the most obvious kind.

And while graphene is made of carbon, this new material–called borophene–is made of the element boron. But the potential of materials that are only one atom thick, like borophene and graphene, to revolutionize computing and energy continues. Before that can be realized, scientists will have to keep studying borophene’s properties and find ways to produce the material at scale.

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.