The advice has been repeated so consistently it has become career canon: negotiate your salary. Ask for more. The worst they can say is no. Research backs it up. Workers who negotiate earn significantly more over their careers than those who accept the initial offer. The advice is correct, and it works.
For some people.
A team of researchers across Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Columbia Business School, and Stanford University just published a five-study investigation in PNAS asking a question that career advice literature has largely avoided: does the same negotiation behavior produce the same result for everyone, regardless of where they came from?
They surveyed 7,883 employees in Australia. They tracked 634 MBA students who had just accepted job offers. They ran controlled experiments with nearly 700 adults and nearly 1,000 full-time workers. And finally, they recruited 1,133 HR professionals and showed them two identical salary negotiations, conducted by candidates who were identical in every way except one: their social class background, signaled by subtle cues in their resumes.
The HR professionals rated the working-class candidate as significantly less cooperative than the upper-class candidate. For the same negotiation. The same words. The same request.
Working-class employees are not avoiding salary negotiations because they lack confidence or skill. They are avoiding them because the negotiation that advances an upper-class colleague's career gets them labeled as difficult.
For the past decade, limiting children's screen time has been one of parenting's most confident positions. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued guidelines. Schools have banned phones. Parents have negotiated, bargained, and enforced limits. The underlying assumption has been consistent: screens displace the activities that build children's brains, and more time on them means worse cognitive outcomes.
A research team at the Universities of Jyväskylä and Eastern Finland decided to test that assumption longitudinally. They enrolled children at around age 7 and followed them for eight years, measuring their physical activity, sedentary behavior, and screen time at regular intervals. At the end of the follow-up, when participants were around 15 years old, they sat the children down and tested their cognitive performance using a validated battery measuring learning, attention, and working memory.
The children who had accumulated more screen time over those eight years did not score worse. They scored better.
The researchers say the finding does not mean unlimited screen time is harmless. But it does challenge the assumption that screen time and brain development are simply in opposition, and it raises a question that the decade of warning labels, app timers, and parental anxiety largely skipped over: what are children actually doing on those screens?
This summer, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory launched its 10-year astronomical survey to create the most comprehensive, cinematic record of the universe. Equipped with the largest digital camera ever built, this observatory, located in northern Chile, can capture in a single image an area 45 times the size of the moon. By tracking the night sky over 10 years, researchers hope to map the solar system and Milky Way galaxy in unprecedented detail, learn more about the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and advance science in ways we can’t even predict.
While thousands of people played a part in making the Rubin Observatory a reality, Tony Tyson played a formative role, acting initially as the facility’s founding director and now its chief scientist.
Global investment in nuclear fusion has surged in recent years, as governments and companies race to unlock its potential and solve one of the world’s greatest challenges of decarbonising the energy supply.
The latest UK investment will help fund the construction of one of the world’s first prototype fusion power plants, as well as create up to 10,000 jobs over the next five years.
The prototype nuclear fusion power plant project, called STEP, will be built on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire and is expected to be operational by the early 2040s.
“It’s quite an aggressive programme,” said Paul Methven, chief executive of the government-owned UK Industrial Fusion Solutions.
“We need to show that we can achieve genuine ‘wall socket’ energy which has not been done before.”
As part of the UK fusion strategy, the government also announced the country’s first AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy.
The £45 million machine, named Sunrise, is targeted for operation in June this year and is expected to be the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy.
The idea that suffering leaves a mark isn’t new, but recent studies in epigenetics show it might literally alter how our DNA behaves. When someone goes through a life-shattering experience, it can trigger chemical tags—like methyl groups—that turn specific genes on or off without altering the underlying code itself. Scientists like Dr. Rachel Yehuda have traced these molecular "signals" in descendants of trauma survivors, finding that alterations to stress-response genes can be passed down. Essentially, your body’s stress baseline might be carrying the software update of an event you never even lived through.
What makes this research so wild is how it reframes mental health conditions like chronic anxiety, PTSD, and depression. Rather than these being purely individual psychological responses or random genetic bad luck, they could partially be an evolutionary attempt at preparedness—our ancestors' biology trying to warn us about a hostile world. It definitely raises huge questions about free will versus biological destiny. I’m really curious to hear what you guys think: does viewing intergenerational struggle through a genetic lens make you feel more connected to your lineage, or does it feel daunting to think we’re carrying legacy code we didn't ask for?
A postbiotic could reduce the risk of damage after a traumatic brain injury, such as a concussion. Mice that had traumatic brain injuries experienced less damage and performed better on cognitive tests if they were given a postbiotic – a byproduct produced when gut bacteria digest food – before injury. This suggests the postbiotic could be given preventatively to people who are particularly at risk of traumatic brain injuries, such as military personnel.
The gut microbiome is known to influence the brain, and vice versa. Research suggests it may help modulate the effects of traumatic brain injuries, which affect tens of millions of people worldwide each year.
China is mounting a sustained push to become the first nation to master large-scale, commercial nuclear fusion.
Through a coordinated strategy combining heavy state funding, returnee scientific recruitment and fast-paced reactor development, Beijing is aiming to challenge Western dominance in a field long viewed as both energetically transformative and strategically critical.
China is now pushing ahead with its next reactor milestone: the BEST (Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak), which aims to generate five times the energy input (a gain factor of five) and begin operation in 2027.
In 2002, a large clinical trial called the Women's Health Initiative published findings that changed how doctors and patients thought about hormone therapy. The study reported elevated risks of breast cancer, heart disease, and dementia in women taking combined hormone therapy. The reaction was swift and lasting. Hormone therapy prescriptions fell by more than 70% in the years that followed. Women who had been using it to manage menopause symptoms stopped. Women who might have started never did. The FDA placed black-box warnings on hormone therapy products citing dementia risk.
That story has been slowly unraveling for the past decade. Researchers identified serious methodological problems with the original findings: the women in the study were older, many were already symptomatic, and the combined estrogen-progestin therapy they received differed from the estrogen-only therapy used by women who have had hysterectomies. The FDA removed the black-box dementia warnings from several hormone therapy products in February 2026 following a comprehensive scientific review.
Now a study from Stanford Medicine, published August 12 in Neurology, has done something no prior study had managed to do at scale: it looked directly inside the brains of women who had used estrogen-only hormone therapy and measured the physical deposits that define Alzheimer's disease.
The study analyzed data from 21,462 women drawn from two of the largest Alzheimer's research databases in the United States. For the nearly 3,000 women whose brains were examined at autopsy, researchers scored the presence and density of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the hallmark proteins of Alzheimer's, and compared women who had used estrogen-only therapy against those who had used none.
Women who had taken estrogen-only hormone therapy had 35% lower odds of Alzheimer's pathology in their brains. They had 39% lower odds of ever receiving a dementia diagnosis during their lives. Among estrogen users, 18% had no signs of Alzheimer's at autopsy at all, compared with 10% of non-users.