A new legal waiver allows current and former U.S. government personnel to disclose information related to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to representatives of the government’s  Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) initiative. 

The waiver “establishes an authorized, legally protected disclosure mechanism for current and former personnel to provide UAP-related National Defense Information (NDI) to designated representatives of the PURSUE effort,” the U.S. Department of War announced on Monday. 

The PURSUE initiative, initiated earlier this year by the Trump administration, is not a UAP investigative office like the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), but rather an effort to identify, review, declassify, and publicly release UAP-related records held by U.S. federal agencies.

According to the Department of War, the waiver supports President Donald Trump’s mandate for greater transparency surrounding UAP by creating a protected channel for military and government personnel to provide UAP-related National Defense Information (NDI) to designated PURSUE representatives. The directive applies to current and former Department of War service members, veterans, civilian employees, and contractors who currently have or previously had access to UAP-related NDI.

For covered disclosures made to designated PURSUE representatives, the waiver provides targeted relief from certain civil and administrative enforcement provisions contained in Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) and Special Access Program Indoctrination Agreements (SAPIAs). The waiver applies specifically to authorized communications with PURSUE representatives.

Michael Gold, President of Civil and International Space Business Development at Redwire and a former NASA official who supported the efforts of AARO’s predecessor office, the UAP Task Force, and NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team, told The Debrief the move was “unprecedented.”

“To the best of my knowledge, this action by the Department of War is nearly, if not entirely, unprecedented,” Gold said. “I have never seen anything like this before on any topic, and it demonstrates the seriousness with which the Department of War and the Trump administration are treating UAP transparency.”

“This administration’s handling of UAP transparency has been extraordinary and should be applauded by all of those who care about the issue and good government generally,” Gold added.

Why does this matter for past whistleblowers? 

The new PURSUE order comes after several UAP whistleblowers have come forward with allegations that the government possesses more information about UAP than has been publicly disclosed. Individuals who have claimed knowledge of UAP-related programs have also cited legal and professional risks as barriers to publicly discussing what they say they know. Those concerns have included potential violations of nondisclosure agreements, loss of security clearances, and administrative or legal consequences for revealing protected information.

The Department of War says the new waiver is designed to address some of those barriers. Importantly, however, the waiver does not mean that previously classified UAP information has been declassified or cleared for public release. Instead, it creates an authorized pathway for individuals with relevant information to provide it to PURSUE for review.

The Department of War says information submitted through PURSUE will undergo security review and, where appropriate, potential declassification before it can be publicly released.

“Disclosures of any kind made to PURSUE would need to be reviewed and classified information redacted before such information could be released publicly,” Gold told The Debrief. “The administration, through the National Archives and other executive branch agencies and departments, has already gone through this process to release information in the various tranches, and the same could be done for information disclosed via this waiver,” Gold said.

Gold said he was “optimistic that some very significant information could be publicly released through this process,” says Gold. 

Gold also argued that members of Congress involved in UAP oversight should eventually be given access to information provided under the waiver.

“In addition to select representatives of PURSUE, I think it would be very beneficial if Members of the House UAP caucus and other select Representatives and Senators would be granted access to whatever information is provided under the waiver.  For example, Representatives Burlison, Luna, Burchett, and others have been fearless champions for UAP transparency, and including them in this process would substantially bolster the credibility and efficacy of the overall effort.”

The change could provide former government personnel with an authorized route to disclose UAP-related information to PURSUE without triggering certain civil or administrative enforcement provisions that might otherwise apply under NDAs or Special Access Program agreements.

However, the waiver is specifically directed at authorized disclosures to PURSUE representatives. It does not provide blanket authorization for individuals to publicly reveal protected or classified information.

The potential implications for the commercial and private sectors also remain unclear. Gold, however, believes greater UAP transparency could have consequences for aerospace and aviation.

“UAP transparency could have tremendous beneficial impacts on the aerospace sector,” Gold said in an email to The Debrief.

“Understanding what the phenomenon is could lead to new scientific discoveries and technologies,” he said, adding that a better understanding of UAP “will benefit the safety of air traffic and space operations.”

Fundamentally, Gold says that any new information whistleblowers may now be willing to provide could also help reduce stigmas surrounding the topic that have impeded U.S. progress in the past, and which may even have aided foreign adversaries.

“By diluting the stigma surrounding UAP, it will close a loophole that I suspect is being used by adversary nations to hide advanced drone activity around critical American national security and civil infrastructure and facilities.”

Whether this new pathway produces substantive new information and opens the door for legitimate whistleblowers remains to be seen. As with previous UAP disclosure efforts, distinguishing well-supported testimony and documentation from misinformation, disinformation, or unsubstantiated claims will remain an important part of that process.

If the waiver results in significant new information reaching the public, it will depend on what is submitted to PURSUE, how that information is evaluated, and what can ultimately be cleared for public release following the security review process.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Whether consciousness arises entirely within the brain or involves processes beyond it has long been debated in scientific and philosophical circles. Historically, most academics have associated consciousness with neurons firing and communicating information; however, precisely how neural activity gives rise to subjective experience remains an open question.

Neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Christof Koch, a former faculty member at institutions including MIT and Caltech, challenges academics to take a closer look at what philosophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness: how the physical processes of the brain could produce subjective experiences in humans.

Earlier this year, Koch presented his arguments at the “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposium organized by the Bial Foundation, where he argued that the nature of consciousness, as well as phenomena like near-death experiences, may require a broader scientific framework.

Koch focused on three areas. First is the physical brain itself; second is the question of how we can truly agree on what is “real.” What does blue actually look like to you? What does pain feel like? These questions are difficult to answer scientifically as universal truths.

Third are unexplained experiences that may not fit neatly within a materialistic scientific framework, such as near-death experiences.

Revisiting an old approach 

Looking at older philosophical models might lead researchers toward new understandings or modern ways of approaching consciousness. Koch points to concepts such as idealism and panpsychism.

Idealism holds that consciousness or mind is fundamental to reality—mind comes first, matter second—while panpsychism holds that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe.

If mainstream science adopted such a shift, it could profoundly change how we understand ourselves. A paradigm shift of sorts may be coming for humanity, potentially through the integration of these ideas and a move away from strictly materialistic approaches to consciousness.

Koch points to these concepts as potential frameworks in which consciousness remains a fundamental aspect of reality. He also supports the controversial Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which proposes that systems possessing sufficiently integrated information may have some form of subjective experience.

Consciousness in Perspective

For additional perspectives, The Debrief reached out to Julia Mossbridge, a neuroscientist and Sr Distinguished Fellow in AI, Mind and Society at Florida Atlantic University, and co-author of Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness (2017), the first American Psychological Association textbook on consciousness to not assume consciousness is reducible to brain activity.

“To many neuroscientists, the brain is starting to seem more like a radio receiver and potentially also a transmitter of consciousness,” Mossbridge said in an email to The Debrief. “The idea that’s losing more ground with every new credible report of so-called ‘anomalous cognition’ is the old one—that the brain creates consciousness like the gallbladder creates bile. Maybe it’s more apt to compare the brain to the heart—it doesn’t create blood, it circulates it. But because you can use a machine to circulate the blood, it’s very clear the heart is important, but in modern times, not essential for circulation.”

Mossbridge points to reports of what she calls “veridical conscious observations” that occur when a patient’s brain shows little or no measurable activity to researchers, or what is described as “brain death,” as proof that consciousness may not be produced entirely by the brain.

These experiences led Mossbridge to consider the brain as a “transformer of consciousness rather than a creator of it.” She compares the relationship to a broken radio: “If you have a disruption in your brain, like a broken radio, you might have a disruption of consciousness.”

To test this hypothesis, Mossbridge says researchers could investigate whether people can perceive and later accurately recall “veridical information” while in deep sleep or under general anesthesia. Although she acknowledges that even positive findings might have another explanation, noting that they “could be explained by basic psychic functioning using some unknown physical mechanism.”

“So if that kind of experiment produces a positive result, and is replicated, you either have to argue that psychic ability is real but is something the brain does nonlocally (like maybe through entanglement) or that consciousness can wander from the body and observe things, or both,” Mossbridge concluded.

“The physical but nonlocal explanation is a bit like a heart pumping the blood, the brain guiding consciousness. The consciousness-wandering explanation is a bit like a heart being fully separated from the blood–and another method is used to circulate consciousness.”

“Either way, the standard model fails,” she added.

Taken together, Koch and Mossbridge’s perspectives point to a provocative possibility: that understanding consciousness may ultimately require science to reconsider some of its most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and founder of VOCAB Communications. She hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton and at chrissynewton.com.

Growing news coverage of UFOs is influencing people’s views about extraterrestrial life, particularly among younger Americans, according to a new survey. 

According to the survey’s findings, more than a third of respondents—and particularly younger adults—say recent reporting on unexplained aerial phenomena has strengthened their belief that aliens exist.

Connecting data from over 2,000 Americans, the survey found that 37% say recent news coverage about UFOs has increased their belief in extraterrestrial life (ET). Meanwhile, 54% say their views have not changed, and just 10% report that the coverage has made them less likely to believe in ET. The survey was conducted by Talker Research between July 1 and July 6, 2026. 

Gen Z Data 

According to the survey’s findings, more than half of Gen Z respondents—54%—said recent UAP news has increased their belief in ET. That figure drops to 45% among millennials, 36% among Gen X, and 23% among baby boomers.

These results arrive amid an increasingly mainstream conversation surrounding government hearings, military UAP reports, whistleblowers, broadcast and online news coverage, and podcasts. Such exposure may be helping shape how Gen Z views what is possible and whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the cosmos.

Looking at the results through a gender lens, 34% of men say UFO news coverage has made them more likely to accept that we are not alone in the universe, compared with 33% of women.

Media and Entertainment Culture Feedback Loops 

Historically, widely publicized UFO reports have helped shape the language and imagery Western society uses to describe unexplained aerial phenomena. One famous example occurred in 1947, when pilot and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported seeing unusual objects flying near Mount Rainier, an incident that received widespread media coverage.

The idea behind such a cultural feedback loop is relatively straightforward: someone sees something outside their normal understanding of reality and reports it. Media and entertainment then pick up the concept and expand upon it, creating their own interpretations of what extraterrestrial beings or UFOs might look like. Audiences absorb those representations, which may subsequently influence how some people perceive, remember, or describe their own unusual experiences. Those accounts can then return to popular culture, potentially reinforcing the cycle.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that what a person saw wasn’t anomalous. Instead, it suggests that media and entertainment may influence how people interpret or describe what they experience.

A 2025 paper in Evolutionary Human Sciences deconstructs a “two-way feedback loop between behavior and beliefs.” The framework suggests that existing beliefs influence behavior; people then observe that behavior, and the observed behavior influences what people believe others think/do. Finally, those beliefs influence subsequent behavior.

The new survey also considered the potential influence of popular culture. More than half of respondents (54%) believed alien movies and television make Americans more likely to believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life; 27% saw no connection between entertainment and belief, while 8% believed such programming actually makes people less likely to believe.

UFOs as a Belief System and Common Misconceptions 

An additional consideration when reading this survey is whether UFOs themselves should be characterized as a belief system. The subject is also an area of study examined by researchers from a range of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, physics, anthropology, neuroscience, and others.

Many academics would argue that categorizing UFOs solely as a belief system risks pigeonholing the subject as a form of religion rather than recognizing it as an area of study. A belief system, by contrast, is a framework of ideas through which people interpret reality according to a particular set of assumptions or principles.

Jeffrey Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University’s Department of Religion, addressed related questions in his March 2026 keynote, “Mind-Manifesting Shock: Comparing Psychedelic and Abduction Experiences, Religion and Psychedelics: Critical Cross-Cultural, Cross-Disciplinary Approaches,” at the Center for the Study of Religion at Ohio State University.

“We are often ‘believing backwards,’ taking comfort in someone else’s altered states, or in the present ‘explanations’ of this or that neuroscience or physics,” Kripal said at the time.

In other words, when people experience something anomalous and ask why it happened or what the experience might mean, they may immediately reach backward for an existing framework through which to interpret it.

In an email to The Debrief, Kripal adds, “I think the existing frameworks of religion and science ‘explain’ to people what happens, though they do not.”

The Debrief also reached out to Matthew Halsted, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Executive Team/Registrar at Eternity College, and asked how he would classify UAP—as an area of belief or a subject of study—and why.

“When it comes to ‘UAP,’ we have to see it as a two-sided coin,” Halsted told The Debrief. “On one side, we have the phenomenon itself (the actual sighting of the thing in the sky); on the other side of the coin, we have the public narrative (how we as people, and our respective governments, talk about reported sightings).”

Halsted adds, “The UAP topic (the ‘coin’) creates a lot of questions for the public, which inevitably gives rise to some sort of belief system. Some walk away believing it’s all nonsense, while others believe there’s something real about this whole thing.”

Halsted’s view, therefore, appears more nuanced than simply classifying UAP as a belief system: the topic can generate belief systems and competing interpretations around reported phenomena, but the subject itself extends beyond a simple question of belief versus nonbelief.

National Security Considerations

When asked how they would react if extraterrestrial life were definitively confirmed, 38% of Americans said their first response would be curiosity, more than twice the 17% who said they would be fearful. Men were also more likely than women to say they would be excited by such a discovery, at 20% compared with 11%.

Perhaps more strikingly, 60% of participants believed that governments know more about UFOs than they have disclosed to date.

The bigger question is whether participants believe society is prepared to accept confirmation that extraterrestrial life exists. Forty-five percent believe society would be prepared if governments confirmed the existence of alien life, while 55% say society would not be adequately prepared to comprehend the implications.

“It’s clear that the public—across age groups—is clamoring for greater UAP transparency,” said Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and current Chairman of the Board with the Disclosure Foundation, which also conducted a recent survey on the subject in June. According to Mellon, the survey found that “more than 84% of Americans want greater transparency, regardless of whether they consider themselves believers, skeptics, or unsure. And a recent Talker Research poll found that 54% of Gen Z say recent news stories have increased their belief in UAP.”

An era of misinformation and disinformation? 

The survey’s findings are compelling, but they leave another important factor largely unaddressed: not simply how information is perceived, but how easily misinformation and disinformation can proliferate in an era of online news, podcasts with inconsistent fact-checking standards, questionable or compromised sources, and clickbait headlines engineered to capture attention.

The issue, then, is not merely what a generation believes, but how people decide what is real and what is not. Within today’s fragmented information environment, audiences increasingly face the difficult task of distinguishing credible evidence from speculation, honest mistakes from misinformation, and legitimate reporting from deliberate deception.

None of this means that the broader UFO enigma can simply be dismissed. Rather, it underscores an additional challenge surrounding the subject: misleading or demonstrably false claims can now reach large audiences very quickly.

Addressing that problem will require better media literacy, stronger sourcing and fact-checking standards, and greater attention to the often-blurred distinction between evidence and interpretation. Ultimately, younger generations coming of age amid an unprecedented volume of digital information will have to navigate those distinctions for themselves. How successfully they learn to do so may have consequences extending far beyond what they believe about UFOs—shaping how they understand science, institutions, current events, and reality itself.

This is why it’s critically important that we understand UAP as accurately as possible. Whether information is being communicated between family members, friends, researchers, journalists, or policymakers, distinguishing established facts from interpretations and unverified claims gives people a better foundation for understanding the world around them and making informed decisions.

This survey suggests that UFOs are no longer confined to a subculture or counterculture; the topic has entered the mainstream. The question now is what that shift will mean for the future.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

New research from Indiana University suggests that when your brain makes a decision, it may not actually “make” it in the way neuroscientists have traditionally assumed.

Conventionally, decision-making has been described as a sequence: you have options to consider, you choose one, and then you act. However, neuroscientist Tom James argues that this sequence may not accurately reflect what actually happens in the brain.

Traditional models suggest that the brain has centralized processes responsible for making decisions. James argues that what people experience as “decision-making” may instead arise from ongoing interactions among perception, movement, the body, and the environment. If correct, this perspective could significantly change how scientists understand human behavior.

The Sandwich Model Debated 

James describes one traditional approach to cognition as the “sandwich model”: sensory systems take in information, cognitive processes evaluate it and determine what to do, and motor systems then carry out the chosen action.

The problem, James argues, is that while scientists can identify many of the physical mechanisms involved in sensation and movement, it is much harder to locate a central point in the brain where a “decision” actually occurs.

Instead, James proposes thinking in terms of “action selection,” in which sensory, sensorimotor, and motor processes continually interact to produce behavior. But does that mean humans don’t actually make decisions?

“Of course they do. We use this language all the time, and it’s very helpful in terms of describing behavior,” James said in a statement. “The leap, I think, is to say that the brain works by having decision-making or control processes. It produces behavior that is well described in that way. But it doesn’t need a process that does that to make it look that way.”

In his view, “decision-making” may therefore be a useful way of describing human behavior rather than something the brain accomplishes through a specific, centralized process or system.

“As mental phenomena, they are defined on too abstract a level for the goals of cognitive neuroscience,” adds James.

Decisions are not “things”

Bridging neuroscience and philosophy, James draws on a physicalist framework associated with philosopher Daniel Dennett. Consider an object’s center of mass: it helps us describe and predict how the object behaves, but it isn’t a separate physical component causing the object to move.

James suggests decisions may work similarly. We can say someone “decided” to pick up a glass, but that does not necessarily mean there is a central location in the brain where that decision was made. Instead, the action could emerge from multiple brain and bodily processes working together.

As an analogy, James describes a robot programmed to follow a wall. Someone watching it might interpret its movements as a series of decisions, yet the robot does not require a centralized decision-making system. Instead, its sensors continually interact with its surroundings to guide its behavior.

James suggests that aspects of human behavior could be understood in much the same way.

A philosophical challenge 

James’s argument also addresses a longstanding philosophical problem. If the brain contains a central system that observes information and decides how we should act, what controls that controller?

This resembles what Dennett famously called the “Cartesian Theater”: the idea of an internal observer somehow watching and interpreting what happens inside the brain. But proposing such an observer only pushes the problem back another step—who, then, observes the observer?

Rather than placing a hypothetical decision-maker somewhere inside the brain, James argues that researchers should focus on the interacting physical systems that produce behavior.

That could mean studying cognition as something that emerges through the ongoing relationship between the brain, body, and environment, rather than as a sequence of isolated stages.

The feeling that “I made a decision” may remain perfectly real and useful as a description of human experience, even if there is no single place or process in the brain where that decision occurs. From James’s perspective, what we call a decision may instead be the outcome of interactions among the brain, body, and surrounding world.

This study can be found in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

The human brain is remarkably adept at juggling different kinds of information, allowing us to switch rapidly between tasks and adapt our behavior as circumstances change. A new study by MIT neuroscientists takes a closer look at how the brain accomplishes this, providing evidence for flexible neural modules that may help support this cognitive versatility.

Using mice, scientists found that a group of neurons in the prefrontal cortex could switch between retaining sensory information and maintaining an action plan in working memory.

“We found that the brain doesn’t dedicate a separate group of neurons for every type of information,” says Yuma Osako, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the new study. “Instead, it uses the same populations of neurons to perform the same computation on different kinds of information, which means the same subset of neurons can hold both an action and a sensory stimulus in working memory,”

The findings also lend support to a longstanding theory known as compositionality—the idea that cognition can be constructed by combining and reusing neural components.

“One of the solutions that’s always been proposed has been this idea of compositionality — that you can take pieces of cognition that perform part of a task and reuse them in another task,” says Timothy Buschman, a professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and the senior author of the paper, in a statement. 

Another way to see this is to view it as “cognitive Legos,” Buschman suggests. Instead of building a new neural circuit when a new task starts, the brain reuses existing circuits and combines them in different ways.

The Test 

To see how this neural network operates, the scientists trained mice to compare two tones and respond depending on whether the sounds matched. As the mice performed the tasks, the scientists recorded electrical activity from thousands of neurons. 

“When mice do tasks that test whether memory computations can be reused, the answer is they are,” notes Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “There are subspaces of functional activity in the prefrontal cortex that can be the substrate of mixing and matching toward flexible cognition.”

Two important components of the task allowed the researchers to examine how different kinds of information were maintained. First, the mice had to remember the initial tone for a short period. They then had to retain their decision and form an action plan.

In the parietal cortex, neurons were dedicated to storing information about the tone. However, researchers found something different in the prefrontal cortex: a specific group of neurons could switch roles.

During one stage of the task, the circuit helped maintain a sensory memory. During another, the same population was involved in maintaining an action plan. This flexibility may help explain how a finite number of neurons can support an enormous range of behaviors.

“Our everyday life requires us to temporarily hold many different kinds of information. One big question is how the brain can represent an unlimited variability of information using only a finite number of neurons,” Osako says.

The researchers view these reusable neural circuits as potential building blocks for flexible cognition. More broadly, the findings suggest that the brain may be less like a machine filled with components dedicated to individual tasks and more like an interconnected system that continually repurposes its existing neural resources.

The recent study appeared in the journal Nature.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Scientists have uncovered new details about how the brain’s “information hub” responds to uncertainty, revealing a remarkably flexible system that rapidly changes how it communicates with other brain regions as we make decisions.

Every second of our lives, the human brain sorts through enormous amounts of information. From remembering a driving route and handling daily tasks to making decisions, the brain must continually determine what information matters and how to respond. Researchers at the University of Iowa wanted to better understand how the human brain manages and processes this information and found that it may be more flexible than previously thought.

At the center of this sorting process is an area of the brain known as the frontoparietal cortex. This region supports decision-making and behavioral control and can function as a kind of “information hub” for the brain.

The Study 

Using MRI scans, behavioral experiments, and computational modeling, researchers took a deeper look at how the frontoparietal cortex responds when people are uncertain about what they should do next.

“That’s the main contribution,” says Kai Hwang, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the study’s corresponding author, in a statement. 

“Our study shows in more detail how the frontoparietal cortex operates — what kind of information it extracts from other systems and how it uses its connectivity pattern to integrate information that is coming in from different areas of the brain,” Hwang adds. 

The research team recruited 38 participants between the ages of 18 and 35 and had each person learn associations between combinations of colors, faces, and scenes and particular actions—for example, pressing a button with the index or middle finger of either hand. The researchers then intentionally changed those associations.

When an action or rule changes, the brain has to determine what went wrong.

Did the situation change? Was the information unclear? Or did the person simply make a mistake? This uncertainty allowed researchers to observe how the brain’s “information hub” responds under different circumstances.

“It’s like where other areas of the brain don’t have all the information, so they send what they have to the frontoparietal cortex for guidance,” Hwang explains.

The results from the team’s research suggest the frontoparietal cortex does more than become more active when a task becomes difficult. Instead, the region changes how it communicates with other brain regions. This also depends on what information is needed at different decision-making stages. 

Hwang notes, “If they always get it right, they know they’ve made the correct association, but once they start doing it wrong, they will have to guess, ‘Oh, did the context change, or did I not see the color clearly?’ That creates uncertainty.” 

Your Brain Has an Air Traffic Controller

Hwang describes the brain’s “information hub” as a system that gathers information from different regions, determines what is relevant, and integrates those signals into a broader picture. One way to think of this function is as an air traffic controller, monitoring incoming information and adjusting communications as circumstances change.

“These are situations where people struggle with regulating their behavior. That, to me, is an integration problem. If that integration function is not working properly, then that could very likely mean they didn’t use the right context to regulate their behavior,” Hwang adds.

The study does not address how neurodiversity might affect this information-sorting process, although the findings could provide a foundation for researchers to investigate that question.

“It remains an open question how neurodiversity might affect frontoparietal integration. It is a very interesting question that, as far as I know, has not been studied directly, so I don’t have a definitive answer. One of our goals in conducting this study is to lay the foundation for future clinical investigations,” Hwang tells The Debrief in an email.

The findings suggest that the frontoparietal cortex can rapidly integrate and update information as circumstances change. Understanding this flexibility could eventually improve researchers’ understanding of neurological and psychiatric conditions involving behavioral regulation and decision-making. In particular, studying these communication patterns could help inform future investigations of conditions such as ADHD and schizophrenia, in which behavioral regulation and the use of contextual information can be impaired.

The new research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Scientists have theorized for decades about how the human brain evolved and grew dramatically in size. Now, new research points to one common ingredient that may have played a crucial role in the brain’s evolution over time: sugar.

A research team at the University of Sydney and the University of Glasgow created a model comparing modern nutrition with that of our ancestors over a span of four million years. The findings suggest that our ancestors relied on naturally occurring carbohydrate-rich foods, which could have played an important role in not only their overall dietary nutrition but also the evolution of the human brain.

These new findings challenge an older scientific model that emphasizes meat as a primary driving force behind human evolution.

“Raw starch does not release glucose, meaning early humans likely relied on naturally sweet foods long before grains became a regular part of the diet,” said lead author Professor Jennie Brand-Miller, Professor of Human Nutrition at the University of Sydney Charles Perkins Center and School of Life and Environmental Sciences, in a statement. 

While meat played a role in our ancestors’ diets, the new research suggests that the amount of energy required by a growing brain also needs to be considered. Throughout human evolution, brain size increased from roughly 300 grams in early hominins to approximately 1,500 grams in modern humans. Glucose is the brain’s primary energy source, creating increasing nutritional demands as brain size grew over time.

“While animal foods were important, the brain’s need for glucose has largely received little attention from anthropologists,” Professor Brand-Miller said.  

The Research

To better understand this hypothesis, the team created a model encompassing six evolutionary stages. Researchers estimated the “obligatory glucose demand” of the brain and other glucose-dependent tissues, including red blood cells, kidneys, and reproductive tissues. They then compared these glucose requirements with the carbohydrate sources that would have been readily available to humans during different stages of evolution.

“The human brain is unusually large for our body size and requires substantial amounts of energy,” Professor Brand-Miller said.  “Glucose is the brain’s primary energy source, and for much of human evolution, would have come from carbohydrates found in foods such as fruit and honey.” 

The model incorporated evidence from numerous fields, including metabolism, food composition, fossil isotope studies, dental morphology, archaeology, primate diets, and genetics.

Overall, the research suggests that early hominins, including Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, were highly dependent on carbohydrate-rich foods, with fruit representing an important source. Later, as humans began using fire to cook food, starch-rich plants could also provide significant amounts of glucose. Grains, meanwhile, appear to have entered the human diet much later. The researchers point to archaeological evidence of seed grinding dating to around 65,000 years ago.

“People often think of carbohydrates as breads and cereals, but for most of human evolution carbohydrates came from fruits, honey and underground plant foods,” said Professor Brand-Miller. “The earliest evidence of seed grinding is 65,000 years ago, when we see the first evidence of grinding stones to make flour.” 

The study also examined the role of glucose in reproduction and pregnancy. Pregnancy and lactation significantly increase glucose demands, since energy is required not only by the mother but also by the developing fetus and placenta, as well as for milk production.

The new findings may also help explain humans’ longstanding attraction to sweet foods. For much of human evolution, naturally sweet foods such as fruit and honey provided concentrated sources of energy while also supplying fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients.

That doesn’t mean people should start making a run for the candy aisle. The findings do not suggest that modern humans should consume more refined sugar. Instead, the researchers distinguish between naturally occurring sugars found in whole foods and highly processed foods containing large quantities of added sugar.

Sugar was also not the human brain’s only source of fuel, nor were carbohydrates the sole dietary factor influencing human evolution. Rather, the researchers argue that glucose requirements have often received less attention than other dietary factors, including meat, fat, and protein. Our ancient appetite for naturally sweet, carbohydrate-rich foods, however, may have helped fuel the extraordinary expansion of the human brain.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Throughout recorded history, humans have experienced events that challenge their understanding of reality. These include purported out-of-body and near-death experiences, anomalous events or perceptions, and even profound spiritual awakenings.

Depending on an individual’s culture, belief system, or worldview, these experiences may be interpreted as mythical, psychological, pathological, or even deeply spiritual. However, a new study by Ronald Fischer of the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino in São Paulo, Brazil, and colleagues suggests that these types of experiences may be more universal than previously thought.

Published in PLOS ONE, the research team took a deeper look into how people understand or personally interpret “nonordinary experiences,” what those factors might include, and how they could be seen as distress or personal growth. 

The Study 

The researchers examined how thousands of people interpreted unusual experiences. For example, one person might view an out-of-body or near-death experience as evidence of a spiritual awakening, while another might interpret the same event as a neurological phenomenon or the result of normal brain chemistry.

Similarly, hearing voices may be regarded as a symptom of mental illness in some cultures, while others interpret it as a spiritual or supernatural experience. The study argues that both perspectives can be valid, depending on the individual’s cultural and personal framework.

“Experiences like sensing a presence, having a vision, or feeling as though you are observing yourself from outside your own body are far more common in the general population than clinical diagnosis rates would suggest,” Fischer said in a statement. “We observed that most people in our sample of over 5000 participants who report them are not unwell, and most describe them as neutral or positive — both at the time they occur and also when looking back and reflecting on that experience.” 

The research team first reviewed and validated the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences. They then developed a questionnaire designed to assess both the universal and cultural influences shaping participants’ interpretations of these events. After refining the survey based on feedback from 160 Brazilian participants, the researchers administered the final 47-question questionnaire to 5,117 individuals representing the general population.

“Previous research has often failed to differentiate the experience and how people make sense of such diverse and challenging experiences,” Fischer explained. “Our work stands out in that we squarely focus on where and when these experiences happened and how people tried to make sense of them.”

“By clearly separating the context, the experience and the meaning-making processes, the patterns we observe challenge various assumptions that have guided previous theory, research but also clinical practice,” he added. 

Among the findings, 20% of participants reported that their nonordinary experience had a negative impact, while 25% said it caused suffering or discomfort. However, 51% reported that their experience ultimately produced positive long-term effects.

The researchers also found that 39% of participants experienced these events while alone, and approximately 57% reported being awake and alert at the time. While some participants attributed their experiences to random chance, most reported having at least some degree of perceived control over the experience.

“For many people, such experiences can be meaningful and lead to personal growth and insight,” Fischer says. “Highlighting these possible positive outcomes is important to help people make sense of them and help to normalize them. Importantly, we hope our work can help to remove stigma by focusing on the diverse ways that people experience and make sense of them.”

“However, we would also stress that if people feel that these experiences interfere with their daily activities, then they should talk to a professional or seek help from somebody that they trust,” Fischer adds.

Overall, the survey challenges the assumption that anomalous experiences should primarily be viewed through the lens of mental illness.

“What struck us was the mismatch. These experiences share features with symptoms used to define psychosis and dissociation yet are frequently observed in a general-population sample,” said Pedro Fortes, a Researcher at the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino (IDOR). “Our prevalence study suggests they most often arrive in entirely ordinary moments, when we’re awake, alert, and by ourselves, and are commonly remembered as meaningful rather than frightening.”

Jorge Moll, neurologist and neuroscientist at the Instituto D’Or de Pesquisa e Ensino (IDOR), adds that “How a person interprets an unusual experience matters more than the experience itself in determining whether it becomes a source of distress or of meaning.”

“That has direct consequences for how clinicians and families respond when someone describes something extraordinary,” Moll concluded. 

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Not all meteorites are created equal, and one that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home is giving scientists a rare glimpse into the chemistry of an ancient asteroid while offering new clues to the puzzle of how life began on Earth.

On July 16, 2024, a daytime meteor streaked across the sky and produced a sonic boom as it passed south of the Statue of Liberty.

“A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids—a process not previously known from this type of proto-planet world,” said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley in a statement.

Two years later, after analyzing fragments from the event, researchers found that the meteorite contained evidence of ancient salty fluids, complex organic chemistry, and processes that occurred on a primitive asteroid billions of years ago.

Daytime meteor (left), impact site, and a fragment of the Hillsborough meteorite (Image Credit: (A) M. Kirschner and M. Hankey, American Meteor Society; [(B) to (D)] A. Gordon/SETI Institute).The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, come from an international team led by meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.

“Our cameras in Northford, Connecticut, and Douglassville, Pennsylvania, as well as a doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey, captured the meteor, and from that we measured its trajectory,” said American Meteor Society operations manager Mike Hankey. 

Traveling at approximately 32,000 miles per hour (14.4 kilometers per second), witnesses from the surrounding areas, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, reported seeing a bright fireball that broke apart while a part of it broke through the roof of a New Jersey residence.

“The path traced back to low in the asteroid belt,” Hankey adds. 

Using footage from meteor cameras, including systems in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, researchers reconstructed the meteor’s path. The trajectory traced back to a region of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock disappeared from view about 22 miles above the surface. Shortly afterward, weather radar at Newark Airport detected a cloud of falling debris stretching from Staten Island into New Jersey. 

The homeowner acted quickly, handling the space rock with gloves and aluminum foil before placing it in a glass container to protect the material from contamination.

The meteorite was classified as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of primitive meteorite known for containing organic compounds and evidence of water weathering. 

According to researchers, the Hillsborough meteorite is only the second witnessed fall of a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite ever recorded. Most known CM meteorites belong to the less-altered CM2 category, while no CM1-type meteorite fall has ever been observed.

“A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals,” said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. “We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes.”

The final analysis showed tiny salt-rich pockets inside the meteorite, pointing to a formation where water once evaporated on its parent asteroid, leaving behind highly saline fluids. Scientists are comparing these minerals with samples from the asteroids Ryugu and Bennu to better understand early solar system chemistry.

These ancient salty waters may have helped protect and change the molecules needed for life before life first began. The meteorite contained carbon, nitrogen, amino acids, and other organic compounds, many of which appear to have formed through interactions between water, minerals, and carbon-rich chemistry.

“We are thrilled that nature delivered such a precious asteroid sample on our doorstep,” said curator Denton Ebel from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History.

The recent paper, “Meteor over New York City: Brines in a primitive CM asteroid,” appeared in the journal Science.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

An international team of researchers who extracted ancient mammoth DNA from a sample of 500 bones reports that Ice Age humans selectively targeted female woolly mammoths. 

The results of the team’s work show a contrast in sex ratio and mammoth remains, and found that the connection to large bones associated with ancient human activity was dominated by females.

“Whether these massive mammoth bone accumulations were formed naturally or by human hunting has been debated for decades”, says David Díez del Molino, Researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics and co-senior author of the study, in a statement. “By comparing the genetic sex ratios of hundreds of mammoths from natural settings with those found in these archaeological contexts, we can now infer that human activity was the primary driver behind these bone accumulations.” 

The team took samples from a total of 521 woolly mammoths, including 448 individuals whose DNA was sequenced for the first time. The study, the team says, became the largest genetic analysis of mammoths ever conducted.

Archaeologists have been wondering for years if the large bone piles they found were created naturally or organized by humans. The new research pointed to a clear answer: these discoveries can be attributed directly to human hunting and organization. 

The researchers determined the sex of each mammoth based on genetics and found that remains from natural settings were more likely to be male, with around 66 percent being males and 34 percent females. Scientists believe these reveal a direct connection to the behavior of mammoths, much like modern elephants, where adult males were more likely to be trapped in sinkholes or other related natural disasters, which would increase the chances of their bones being preserved, compared to females. 

However, the sites connected to human organization and consumption told a different story. Around 70 percent of the mammoths found were female, suggesting that during the Ice Age, strategic hunting was being undertaken. The question remains why hunters preferred females over males, which also seems unusual since killing more female mammoths would decrease the population, and therefore decrease the overall food supply of Ice Age hunters.

“While it is tempting to assume that hunters would have targeted females because they were smaller than adult males, the reality may have been more complex. If mammoths behaved like modern elephants, females living in matriarchal herds may have had group defences that would have made encounters with herds equally or even more risky,” says Hannah M. Moots, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics and lead author of the study.

Although females were generally smaller than fully grown bulls, researchers caution against assuming they were easier prey.

“Another possibility is that female-led herds moved across the landscape in more predictable ways than solitary males, meaning Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers may simply have encountered them more frequently, whether for hunting or scavenging”, Moots adds. The researchers also suggest that female herds could have followed migration routes, therefore making their movements more predictable for Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. 

The study examined 11 major archaeological sites dating from 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, a time when mammoths were essential to human survival. Hunters during this period used nearly every part of the animal for food, clothing, shelter, tools, and even art.

By analyzing DNA from 100 mammoths found at archaeological sites and 421 from natural deposits, researchers assembled the largest dataset of its kind, revealing new insights into mammoth behavior and Ice Age hunting practices.

The analysis also uncovered the first known case of X0/XX mosaicism, a genetic condition similar to Turner syndrome in modern humans, in an extinct species. The affected mammoth, from Wrangel Island, provides a rare glimpse into the biology of these ancient giants.

The recent study, “Palaeogenomic sex inference of mammoth remains sheds light on the anthropogenic nature of bone accumulations,” appeared in the journal Current Biology. 

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

As AI reshapes the way we communicate, researchers at Texas A&M University are developing an artificial intelligence-powered platform that could transform care for children with autism and older adults living with dementia. The technology learns each person’s unique communication style, behaviors, and preferences, enabling increasingly personalized support for caregivers, therapists, and families over time.

Called VoiceLove, it is one of three projects being developed with support from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).

At the core of the system is an AI engine that analyzes both speech and nonverbal behaviors documented through short videos recorded by caregivers or therapists during daily communications and interactions. Rather than comparing participants against a general model, the platform focuses on understanding each person’s individual patterns and communication style.

“Every child with autism is unique, and effective support should reflect that,” he said. “Our project leverages artificial intelligence to understand each child’s individual behaviors, communication styles, and preferences. The goal is to deliver personalized recommendations that help families, educators, and clinicians work together more effectively, enabling more responsive, data-driven care and improving the health and well-being of children with autism,” says Dr. Junhyoung Kim, associate professor in the School of Public Health, one of the principal investigators on the project, in a statement. 

The AI system was created to identify behavioral patterns in communication, interests, and responses across different situations. Based on its observations, the program provides personalized recommendations that could help therapists or caregivers create individualized intervention plans.

“The key innovation behind this platform is its ability to understand each child individually and learn their unique preferences, needs, communication styles, and strengths to deliver personalized recommendations,” Kim said. “For people living with dementia, the platform is designed to enhance person-centered care by helping residents communicate their needs, preferences, and daily experiences more effectively.”

Researchers say the technology could support a wide range of developmental goals, including improving communication skills, encouraging self-care, strengthening social engagement, and enhancing a person’s quality of life.

The same personalized approach could also benefit people living with dementia, where communication challenges often make it difficult for individuals to express their needs and wants. 

“Our vision is to create an AI platform that continuously learns from each child’s daily experiences,” Kim said. “As the system identifies patterns in behaviors, preferences, and responses to different activities, it can provide therapists and caregivers with personalized recommendations that evolve over time.”

“This adaptive approach helps explain why certain behaviors occur and supports more individualized, proactive care,” Kim added. 

VoiceLove is designed to keep learning. As caregivers continue using the app, the AI analyzes new interactions while also incorporating caregiver observations, experiences, and responses to daily prompts. 

The research team plans to begin with a small pilot study involving children with autism and older adults living with dementia after receiving Institutional Review Board approval.

Participants will use the platform for approximately one month while researchers evaluate its usability, feasibility, and overall user experience, and from there, insights derived from the pilot will help to inform a larger-scale study at some point in the future. 

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology is advancing rapidly worldwide. Far more than just the innovative technology promoted by prominent advocates involved in its expansion, like Elon Musk, BCIs are being developed in countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, and China.

Beyond their life-changing potential for treating neurological conditions, BCIs could fundamentally reshape what it means to be human, and soon. If that’s the case, is a global BCI coalition needed? 

Before Elon Musk: Jacques Vidal and Thomas Oxley

A common misconception is that Elon Musk and his company, Neuralink, launched the BCI revolution we see today. In reality, the origins of the technology date back to the 1960s. Jacques Vidal published the first paper introducing the term “brain-computer interface” in 1973, demonstrating how electroencephalographic (EEG) signals could be used for direct communication. Vidal’s pioneering work laid the foundation for all modern BCI research.

Fast forward to 2012, when Australian-born physician, neuroscientist, and Synchron founder and CEO Thomas (Tom) Oxley entered the BCI conversation. Oxley was among the first physicians to bring BCI technology into clinical practice at Mount Sinai Hospital. With early funding from DARPA, he and his team began clinical trials in Australia in 2019. Oxley’s minimally invasive Stentrode device attracted significant business and media attention well before Neuralink’s highly publicized demonstrations in 2023.

What the BCI community can thank Elon Musk for is the unprecedented level of global investor attention he has brought to the field. Without that influx of funding, BCI technology might still be in its infancy, and fewer people would have access to devices capable of addressing life-changing healthcare needs.

China’s Rapid Advancement into BCI

Since 2010, China has moved aggressively to advance BCI technology while making clear that the field is a national priority—one viewed as nearly as important as breakthroughs in quantum computing.

Recently, the Chinese BCI company NEO announced approval for the country’s first commercial use of a coin-sized brain-computer interface for patients living with paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries.

Tsinghua University and Shanghai-based Neuracle Technology designed the brain chip to be less invasive than many competing technologies. Rather than penetrating deep into brain tissue, the NEO device is implanted beneath the skull, where its electrodes are attached to the dura mater—the protective membrane surrounding the brain.

The first Chinese-designed and developed brain chip was implanted last November in volunteer Dong Hui. Hui, 39, sustained a spinal cord injury in a car accident six years earlier that left him paralyzed. During a video interview with MIT Technology Review, Hui said excitedly, “I couldn’t believe I was able to write again. I was so excited, I even missed a stroke in my name.”

This past March, Hui became the first person in the world to receive an invasive brain-computer interface approved for use beyond a clinical trial. But what does “commercial” use actually mean?

The NEO device, developed by Neuracle Technology, was reportedly approved by Chinese regulators for use outside clinical trials in certain patients with spinal cord injuries. In practical terms, that means the technology has moved beyond the experimental stage and can now be offered in clinical settings to eligible patients. Hospitals may provide it as a treatment, Neuracle can manufacture and sell the system commercially, and qualifying patients may receive the implant as part of standard clinical care rather than solely through an experimental research program, representing a major milestone for BCI technology.

Another competitor in China’s BCI market is Gestalt, founded by Phoenix Peng. Surprisingly, the two companies are pursuing very different approaches. NEO’s system places sensors directly on the brain’s protective covering, allowing the electrodes to measure electrical activity generated by neurons. This approach can provide stronger and faster signals but requires neurosurgery.

Gestalt, by contrast, is attempting to eliminate the need for surgery. According to Peng, the company aims to use phased-array ultrasound to both read brain activity and stimulate specific neural pathways without requiring invasive procedures. If successful, this approach could make brain-computer interfaces safer, more accessible, and available to a much broader population.

In a recent podcast interview, Peng told The Debrief that this is why he and others in the industry have begun pursuing ultrasound-based BCIs. He noted that such systems are now being developed not only in China but also by several companies in the United States. “The whole technology is just rising up,” Peng said.

Competitors Chime In 

With the Chinese government investing heavily in and prioritizing BCI technology, it is becoming increasingly clear that the country is positioning itself to set the “gold standard” for BCI development worldwide. Last July, the Chinese government announced its intention to establish a global standard, outlining plans to do so through new guidelines issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, along with the creation of a committee to oversee the development and implementation of those standards.

“China progresses fast and is likely to win the race,” said Dr. Martin Schüttler, the CTO, co-founder, and managing director of CorTec Neuro, in an email to The Debrief. “However, young Chinese implantable BCI companies might run into challenges when demonstrating long-term robustness and efficacy, which validations are difficult to accelerate.”

“From my perspective, the Chinese governmental orchestration of the BCI race provides a major advantage over Europe and the USA, where each BCI company struggles individually with similar challenges,” he adds. As an example, he notes China’s move to define reimbursement of implantable BCI, which occurred months before Neuracle received its market approval. “Therefore, the Chinese government also published a definition of a BCI and issued ethical guidelines for BCI technology,” Schüttler said.

“It also funds BCI initiatives and companies, leading to a boom of start-ups in the field,” he says, though noting that this is not strictly restricted to implants. 

Florian Solzbacher, PhD, co-founder of Blackrock Neurotech, adds more context on BCI commercialization by telling The Debrief that “this is more than just a technology race. This is about which nations and values will lead the world and likely set standards in a completely new, strategically important field of technology.”

“There are several aspects of the current processes for translation and regulatory approval that could be adjusted to new technological capabilities without throwing safety overboard,” Solzbacher adds. “And with all the concern about China’s pace, speed to commercialization alone is not the right metric. The concern, in any market, is whether long-term safety and security, technological maturity, clinical evidence, regulatory oversight, and patient support can keep pace with deployment.”

“One can only hope that China’s pace wakes up our own nation and creates incentives and pressure for the US and EU to coordinate far more effectively and to support translational neurotechnology with far more conviction and focus, without jeopardizing patient safety,” he says.

High Volume in 2026?

This recent commercial BCI announcement from China comes on the heels of Elon Musk declaring that Neuralink will ramp up its efforts in a “high volume” attempt for 2026. 

“This is a big deal,” Musk’s posting on X read. 

But what does high volume really consist of? This past January, Barcelona, Spain-based BCI company and co-founder Carolina Aguilar, INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, one of Neuralink’s competitors, told The Debrief, “At this stage, we interpret ‘high-volume’ realistically as hundreds moving toward low thousands of implants per year.” She also notes that it could eventually reach “tens of thousands”. 

Solzbacher said the challenges presented with scaling “usually come in all areas.”

“It starts with capability, the processes, and the capacity to actually make that many devices,” Solzbacher said in an email to The Debrief, adding that that number—should it reach “tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of devices” would require “well-qualified, validated processes.”

With China accelerating the commercial deployment of BCI technology, how do European and American BCI companies view the pace of its advancements, and what impact could this have on the global race for brain technology leadership?

Defense Applications 

The commercialization of brain-computer interfaces is now at the forefront of the brain-chip revolution. Citizens around the world should be engaged in discussions about how this technology will be implemented within their countries. At the same time, the conversation should also acknowledge the role the military-industrial complex has played in funding BCI research through DARPA, as well as how the technology has been explored for potential defense, intelligence, and counterintelligence applications.

DARPA has been one of the leading funders of BCI research for decades. Programs (that we know of) such as Revolutionizing Prosthetics (LUKE Arm), NESD (Neural Engineering System Design), and N3 (Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology were created with the goals of restoring movement to wounded service members, enabling direct communication between the brain and computers, and developing high-bandwidth, minimally invasive, or noninvasive neural interfaces. Collectively, these efforts aim to improve decision-making, situational awareness, pilot workload management, and human-machine teaming.

It remains unclear how other nations are integrating BCI technology into their own military-industrial complexes or how these systems may ultimately be employed. That uncertainty underscores the growing need for international collaboration and the establishment of a global BCI framework sooner rather than later. Because of this, continued oversight and transparency are necessary to ensure future applications respect civil liberties and ethical standards, and many believe safeguards should be established to prevent any future civilian-targeted programs from emerging.

Ethics of BCI and Global Counsel 

Humanity may be approaching a tipping point in its biological and technological evolution. Some would describe this as a “singularity”—a historic moment when technology and human development converge in a transformative way, fundamentally reshaping what it means to be human.

On October 8, a private Morgan Stanley report titled Neuralink: AI in Your BrAIn focused on Elon Musk’s Neuralink. The report argues that Musk and his BCI team are positioned at the forefront of a broader technological shift—one for which society may be unprepared. The implications could be profound, potentially changing the fabric of society itself.

The report warns that “the ability for human beings to ‘keep up’ and communicate with the AI apparatus may deteriorate at an exponential rate,” noting that “one of Elon Musk’s many goals in founding Neuralink is to ‘give humanity a chance’ to keep up with AGI.” It also suggests that Musk is using a “back door” into healthcare to enter the consumer market and, in turn, create a “Neuro Elite.”

Such a development could further widen existing wealth and educational gaps, particularly in emerging economies already struggling to keep pace with wealthier Western nations.

“Many countries, particularly those in the Global South, have limited involvement in BCI research and are understandably focused on more immediate public health, economic, and social priorities. As a result, they may have little incentive to invest in developing or enforcing BCI-specific regulations,” says Kerry Bowman, PhD, a bioethicist, environmentalist, and professor at the University of Toronto, in an email to The Debrief.

“At the same time, researchers seeking to avoid restrictive oversight may simply relocate their work to jurisdictions with few or no regulations, creating opportunities for regulatory arbitrage,” Bowman adds.  “Furthermore, meaningful global consensus is complicated by profound cultural differences regarding individual autonomy, collective welfare, human enhancement, and the role of the state. Recognizing these challenges, it remains a good and positive step in the right direction.”

With these concerns on the horizon, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with Senators John Cornyn and Ron Wyden, introduced the Management of Individuals’ Neural Data Act of 2025, or MIND Act, on September 24. The proposed legislation seeks to establish safeguards for brain-computer interface technology by directing federal agencies to develop guidelines addressing ethical concerns, safety, and privacy risks associated with neural data.

As BCIs advance, concerns about their potential ability to influence thoughts, memories, and emotions have become increasingly central to policy discussions.

Without global safeguards and international agreements governing BCI development, scientists could potentially collaborate with foreign adversaries, black-market organizations, or extremist groups seeking to advance radical visions of human enhancement. Technologies developed through such collaborations could then be sold illegally or distributed commercially around the world.

For instance, former Harvard professor Charles Lieber, 67, who was convicted in the United States of concealing ties to a Chinese talent program, is now leading a state-funded brain-computer interface laboratory in Shenzhen, China. Lieber currently directs the Institute for Brain Research, Advanced Interfaces and Neurotechnologies, or i-BRAIN, raising renewed concerns about the geopolitical competition surrounding emerging technologies.

This may appear to be the work of a single controversial scientist, but it also illustrates how quickly advanced technologies, expertise, and intellectual property can move between nations and research communities. The question, therefore, remains: Where do we go from here if a “singularity” arrives, and what might it look like?

“Carbon-based lifestyles and silica-based lifestyles may merge,” Peng offered for this potential event in a podcast interview. “Artificial intelligence and neuroscience are two sides of the same coin. BCI will be the collector between these two shapes of life, probably because AI will have consciousness.”

A Global Coalition? 

One proposed approach would be to create a global coalition of academics and experts representing a broad range of disciplines, including physics, philosophy, neurology, psychology, psychiatry, and other hard and social sciences. What might such a global BCI coalition look like, and how could it be structured to guide research, governance, ethics, and the responsible development of brain-computer interface technologies?

Schüttler suggests that if a global BCI coalition enabled technologies developed in China, the United States, and Europe to be shared and approved across regions, its impact would depend largely on who was involved.

For patients, such a framework could mean faster access to breakthrough treatments, particularly because, according to Schüttler, “Chinese approval processes can be substantially faster.”

For U.S. and European companies, however, it could disrupt existing business models. Companies that have invested heavily in Western clinical trials may face significant challenges if Chinese data becomes widely accepted, since he says “a coalition could risk their business model once they are already committed to costly approval studies.”

The shift could prove even more disruptive for clinical research organizations, since trials in China can often be “cheaper and faster to conduct,” Schüttler says. Ultimately, a global BCI partnership could provide substantial benefits or create major disruptions, depending on “who you are in the game, and at what stage you are.”

By contrast, Solzbacher believes a “coalition needs to be informed and driven by a deep understanding of patient and caregiver needs as well as the underlying technologies and their associated risks and opportunities. Practical and multi-stakeholder, with international representation.”

“Regulators, clinicians, engineers, neuroscientists, companies, ethicists, advocates, and, above all, patients and caregivers,” he says, would allow such a coalition to “work alongside national regulators and support their authority, setting shared expectations on trial design, safety reporting, post-market surveillance, cybersecurity, interoperability, patient access, and long-term device stewardship.”

“The center of gravity must stay on the patients. This field will carry strategic and economic weight regardless,” Solzbacher says. “We need to get this technology to the people who could benefit most, responsibly and with as much urgency as possible.”

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Scientists have discovered an abundance of molecules in the cosmos, but for the first time ever, they were able to detect one in interstellar space very familiar to us here on Earth: sugar. 

The discovery, made in the vast clouds of gas and dust between stars, could help scientists better understand how some of the chemical ingredients necessary for life formed long before Earth existed.

Researchers at the Centro de Astrobiología, part of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), identified the sugar molecule erythrulose within the interstellar medium.

Sugars are considered fundamental building blocks of life. On Earth, they play vital biological roles, including forming the backbone of RNA and contributing to the chemistry that ultimately supports DNA, while also serving as an important source of energy. Scientists studying the origins of life have long sought to understand how the first sugars formed, since they are essential ingredients in the molecules associated with life’s earliest development.

“The detection of erythrulose is very exciting because it opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life,” says Carlos Briones, co-author of the study, in a statement. 

Even so, one major question remains: where did the first biologically important sugars originate?

Previous studies have identified sugars such as ribose and glucose in meteorites and asteroid samples, suggesting that some organic compounds may have been delivered to the early Earth from space. Until now, however, no sugar had been directly detected in the cold molecular clouds where stars and planets form.

The newly identified molecule, erythrulose, was found in the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 near the center of the Milky Way. On Earth, erythrulose is a naturally occurring four-carbon ketose sugar.

The discovery was made using highly sensitive radio astronomy observations from the Yebes Observatory’s 40-meter radio telescope and the 30-meter telescope operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range. Researchers analyzed the unique radio signatures, or spectral fingerprints, emitted by molecules in space.

The team identified 12 spectral lines matching laboratory measurements of erythrulose, confirming the molecule’s presence.

The findings also challenge some existing ideas about how complex molecules form in space. Scientists have generally proposed that interstellar chemistry builds larger molecules by gradually adding carbon atoms. Yet erythrulose proved to be more abundant than related three-carbon sugars that researchers expected would appear first.

“This finding was unexpected, as the prevailing view in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules grow in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms,” said Izaskun Jimenez Serra (CAB), the lead author of the recent study. 

Instead, the researchers found that erythrulose could form inside icy dust grains from simpler two-carbon alcohols and aldehydes. These frozen environments may function as natural chemical laboratories, allowing increasingly complex organic molecules to develop over time.

The team estimates that during the Late Heavy Bombardment—roughly 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago, when Earth experienced intense asteroid and comet impacts—between 500,000 and 50 million tonnes of erythrulose may have been delivered to the planet’s surface.

The discovery adds another piece to the puzzle of life’s origins, suggesting that some of its essential ingredients may have arrived with something surprisingly sweet.

This paper was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Neuroscientists have long believed that language processing was only found in regions of the brain’s left hemisphere, including the well-known Broca’s area. However, new evidence suggests the brain’s language network is far more widespread than previously thought. 

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans from 772 participants and identified 17 additional brain regions involved in language comprehension. These newly discovered areas are distributed across the brain, including the cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, and several regions of the cerebral cortex. In total, this accounts for five percent of the adult brain volume (roughly the size of a large strawberry). 

“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says senior author Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, in a statement. 

Locating the Brain’s Hidden Language Centers

To find these hidden language-related regions in the brain, the researchers revisited years of brain imaging data collected since 2013. Additionally, participants completed a standard “language localizer” task, during which they read or listened to meaningful sentences and sequences of meaningless nonwords. By comparing brain activity between these two conditions, the research team identified regions that responded more strongly to language.

“When we initially started looking at language, in the first couple of papers, I tried to be comprehensive and include anything that seemed consistent across participants, and there was a huge amount of resistance,” said Fedorenko. “People would say things like, ‘Well, we know those are not language areas, so please focus on the language areas.’”

The team decided to adopt a more flexible statistical approach to detect weaker signals and identify previously overlooked language-sensitive regions beyond the classical language areas. They then compared these regions’ responses during a spatial working memory task to distinguish language-specific areas from those involved in what would be considered general cognitive functions.

Cerebellum Discoveries

Interestingly, five of the newly identified language regions are located in the cerebellum, a structure traditionally associated with movement and coordination. Some of these cerebellar regions were also active during non-language tasks, suggesting they may help integrate information across different brain systems rather than process language alone.

“It’s a very simple paradigm that lets you identify this core language system in individual brains,” says MIT postdoc Agata Wolna, the lead author of the paper.

Additional language-sensitive regions were identified in the hippocampus and amygdala, areas better known for their roles in memory and emotion. Their involvement suggests that understanding language may rely more on integrating memory, emotional context, and higher-order cognitive functions than previously understood in science.

“We always see this frontal temporal network, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that there are other regions that are also critical for language processing,” said Wolna. “By using a laxer threshold and zooming in on areas with weak MRI signal, we tried to maximize the chances of finding small and weakly responsive regions outside of this left frontal temporal system.”

The findings challenge long-held assumptions about the brain’s organization and can open new avenues for research into how language processing is understood in neuroscience.

The recent study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. 

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have become a major focus of technological innovation in recent months, with China leading the commercialization of the emerging technology. However, neighboring Australia may soon make its own mark, as the University of Melbourne startup Fluent develops a new device designed to transform how people with speech impairments communicate.

Many communication technologies currently available remain limited for people living with neurological conditions such as motor neuron disease and multiple sclerosis. As these conditions progress, many patients experience increasing difficulty speaking and may eventually lose the ability to communicate verbally altogether.

Fluent is developing a different approach from many existing BCI systems. While invasive BCIs require brain surgery to implant electrodes inside the skull, Fluent’s device is designed to sit beneath the scalp but outside the skull, offering what the company hopes will be a safer and more accessible alternative.

“Until now, this technological capability was only thought possible using highly invasive electrodes implanted inside the skull,” said Fluent co-founder and biomedical engineer Dr. Tim Mahoney in a statement.

Mahoney’s research suggests that signals captured by the device are comparable whether electrodes are placed beneath or outside the skull. If validated through further testing, this could represent a significant advance in BCI development, as invasive systems have historically captured higher-quality brain signals and outperformed non-invasive approaches.

“Our device will be positioned above an area of the brain called the motor cortex, which controls speech muscles. If you think of electrical signals as QR codes: when a person speaks, every individual mouth and jaw movement produces different ‘QR codes’ in their motor cortex,” said Mahoney.

“These ‘QR codes’ also occur when a person with impaired speech is attempting to speak. Our device can capture these codes in a sequence, which tells us what someone is trying to say,” Mahoney adds.

The device captures brain signals and records them in sequence, allowing researchers to understand what a person is attempting to communicate. A machine learning system is being developed to translate brain activity into written text or audio by just thinking about speaking.

“After building the largest English dataset of its kind, we partnered with a Japanese team leveraging an even larger dataset,” Mahoney explained. “This collaboration proved that a model can accurately isolate the correct phrase from a pool of 128 options with 96 percent accuracy.”

To date, the technology has undergone preliminary human testing at the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. During those trials, participants wore a cap fitted with 144 electrodes positioned over the motor cortex while speaking, miming words, and imagining different phrases.

The team’s work resulted in one of the largest English-language brain activity datasets assembled to date. In collaboration with Japanese researchers using an even larger dataset, they demonstrated that an AI model could correctly identify a target phrase from a pool of 128 possibilities with 96% accuracy.

Like other advanced medical technologies, BCIs must undergo rigorous regulatory review before they can be brought to market, and Fluent expects Australia’s approval process to follow internationally recognized standards.

“BCI is a relatively new technology, with the first devices currently being approved in China and the US. The regulatory process for BCI technology follows the same safety and efficacy data requirements used for medical device approval across the various countries’ regulatory bodies. Australia is a fantastic place to perform clinical trials due to its R&D tax incentives, meaning Fluent is well-positioned to streamline our pathway to regulatory clearance,” Mahoney said in an email to The Debrief. 

With China and the United States both advancing minimally invasive BCI technologies toward commercialization, Fluent hopes its approach can distinguish itself by prioritizing accessibility over maximum signal fidelity.

“The field of BCI has made enormous progress in the past 5 years. Neuralink is close to commercializing cursor control, research groups have demonstrated online speech decoding with electrodes placed directly on the brain, and META just released their Brain2Qwerty model that can convert non-invasive ‘typing’ brain activity into text,” says Mahoney. 

“The subscalp speech BCI that Fluent is building will not have the same performance as more invasive devices,” he adds. “However, we believe our solution is far more accessible, given the low-risk, set-and-forget nature of the device.”

“We also believe that our low-risk approach can deliver near-perfect speech decoding performance when paired with context-aware large language models to correct errors in an informed way,” Mahoney said.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign say underground aquifers could offer an unexpected solution to one of artificial intelligence’s fastest-growing environmental challenges: cooling the massive data centers that power the technology.

As protests and debates continue over the rapid expansion of AI data centers around the world, researchers are exploring new ways to manage the enormous amounts of energy and water required to keep these facilities running. To meet such demands, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign team has proposed an innovative solution: using underground aquifers as natural “thermal batteries” to cool data centers while reducing their environmental footprint.

Critics have raised concerns ranging from the vast quantities of water consumed by AI infrastructure to the ethical implications of job displacement and the broader societal impacts of artificial intelligence. Against that backdrop, designing AI systems that reduce their climate impact could represent an important step toward more sustainable computing.

Researchers Yu-Feng Lin, Andrew Stumpf, and postdoctoral researcher Upasana Pandey from the Prairie Research Institute’s Illinois State Geological Survey explored the potential of Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) as a cooling strategy for data centers. The team suggests underground water systems could provide an efficient alternative to traditional cooling methods. Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Groundwater.

“Data centers use large amounts of electricity, and 10 to 40% of that energy can go just to cooling, depending on the design,” Pandey said in a statement. “They also consume tremendous volumes of water, often through cooling methods where water is evaporated and effectively lost from the local supply.”

To address both challenges, the researchers propose using groundwater stored beneath Earth’s surface as a reusable thermal energy storage system. ATES can provide direct or supplemental cooling by circulating groundwater through underground pipes. Cool groundwater absorbs heat through a heat exchanger before the warmed water is returned to the aquifer for seasonal storage. The system can also store excess summer heat for winter heating and preserve cold winter water for use during the summer months.

“In places like Illinois, where we experience seasonality, and when the subsurface geology is ideal, instead of constantly trying to moderate the outdoor temperatures that swing from 90°F in summer to minus 10°F in winter, we can tap into the Earth’s near-constant temperature,” Stumpf said. “You’re no longer adjusting from 90°F to 70°F; you’re adjusting from about 55°F to 70°F. That’s a huge energy savings.”

Illinois is particularly well-suited for aquifer thermal energy storage because of its pronounced seasonal temperature swings, favorable aquifer characteristics, and suitable subsurface geology. The system can utilize non-potable water sources, including deep saline aquifers, contaminated groundwater, and even abandoned mines.

According to the researchers, the primary barriers to broader adoption are the high upfront installation costs and relatively short investment timelines, rather than technical feasibility.

“Data centers sit at the center of the water-energy nexus: If you try to reduce energy use, you often use more water, and if you reduce water use, you may need more energy,” Lin said. “Our work looks for solutions that address both together.”

“Water is a magic material in this context because it has high heat capacity and can be a good thermal carrier with flow,” he adds.

“That combination is rare, and in groundwater, we can tap those same properties for energy storage.”

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Human laughter may hold a deeper connection to our primate ancestors than previously realized, preserving a 15-million-year-old evolutionary legacy. New research from the University of Warwick suggests the rhythm of laughter has remained largely unchanged across millions of years, offering surprising new insights into the origins of human speech.

Great apes are humanity’s closest living relatives, and species including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans all produce laughter-like vocalizations accompanied by smile-like facial expressions.

For years, scientists have wondered whether these vocal expressions share a common evolutionary origin. To investigate, researchers analyzed laughter recordings from 17 apes and humans representing five species: four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees, and four humans. Examining 140 laughter sequences, they found that every species produced laughter with evenly spaced rhythmic intervals between sounds—a pattern that appears to have been inherited from a common ancestor.

“It is impossible to assess the precursor forms of language directly from our extinct ancestors,” said Dr Adriano Lameria, an Associate Professor with the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick and a researcher with its ApeTank, said in a statement. “Laughter, being evolutionarily older and having remained shared between all living great apes, provides a rare evolutionary window into the vocal transformations that unfolded across hominid evolution until the first humans appeared on scene.”

“Contrary to the classic notion that the first humans suddenly acquired vocal control capacities remarkably different from their predecessors, laughter evolution tells us that humans lay on a continuum, a prolongation of vocal control capacities that were already being cumulatively honed in for 15 million years,” Lameria added.

The discovery suggests that this rhythmic connection and foundation of laughter was already present around 15 million years ago and has persisted through millions of years of evolutionary change.

“How did humans evolve the remarkable ability to speak? Speech leaves no fossils, and complex language exists only in our own species. But we’ve found a 15-million-year-old clue in an unexpected place: our laughter,” said Dr. Chiara De Gregorio, Honorary Research Associate, Department of Psychology, University of Warwick. 

“Unlike speech, laughter is shared by all living great apes. By comparing how different species laugh, we can see that a basic rhythmic structure has remained unchanged since our last common ancestor. That’s extraordinary,” De Gregorio added.

Even though humans and apes share similarities—with ape vocalizations generally having a deeper resonance and tone—the underlying timing of laughter has remained remarkably stable over millions of years. What distinguishes humans is our greater voluntary control over laughter, allowing us to laugh intentionally in social situations in ways that our primate relatives cannot.

Scientists believe this increased vocal control may have played a key role in the evolution of speech. The human ability to precisely regulate vocal timing, tone, and expression is considered a fundamental component of producing complex spoken language.

The new findings challenge the idea that humans suddenly developed advanced speech abilities unlike those of earlier species. Instead, the research suggests that human communication evolved gradually, building upon vocal capacities that had already been developing in our ancient primate relatives.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

New findings published in PLOS Digital Health highlight the challenges public health experts face in combating misleading health information on social media, particularly amid ongoing debates over whether sunscreen is truly beneficial.

To investigate how sunscreen is portrayed online, researchers at the University of Alberta analyzed 971 of the most-viewed TikTok videos associated with five popular sunscreen-related hashtags: #sunscreen, #sunscreenviral, #spf, #sunscreenreview, and #sunprotection.

The researchers examined how sunscreen was represented in the videos and measured audience engagement through views, likes, shares, and comments.

“Sunscreen misinformation may attract disproportionate attention,” says Alessandro Marcon of the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues in a statement.

The findings showed that most of the TikTok videos analyzed promoted sunscreen use, accounting for 86.8% of the content. Only 6% contained health-related criticism, including claims that sunscreen is harmful (1.5%) or that it interferes with the benefits of sun exposure, such as vitamin D production (1.2%). Despite representing only a small fraction of the content, these videos attracted disproportionately high levels of engagement, receiving more likes, shares, and comments on average than pro-sunscreen videos.

“Sunscreen misinformation on TikTok constitutes an area of concern not for the total sum of overarching influence in terms of content production but rather in how strongly some sunscreen misinformation ideas resonated among particular audiences,” adds Marcon.

The researchers suggest that the elevated engagement may be driven by the controversial and attention-grabbing nature of the content, which can help videos spread more widely on social media platforms.

They also found that even videos promoting sunscreen often omitted key public health messaging. Most focused on beauty and skincare benefits rather than health outcomes, with only 6% specifically mentioning sunscreen’s role in reducing skin cancer risk.

“Our analysis showed TikTok is not necessarily flooded with sunscreen misinformation, but TikToks that dangerously claim that sunscreen is harmful or unnecessary receive comparatively high levels of audience engagement. TikTok content creators commonly promoted sunscreen as part of skincare regimens where sunscreen benefits were more commonly related to beauty rather than health,” said Marcon.

“It was surprising to see so many TikToks promoting sunscreen use without specifically mentioning the important role it plays in cancer prevention. Only 6% of the TikToks analyzed explicitly mentioned the benefits of reducing the risk of skin cancer.”

The study suggests that misinformation can spread widely not because it is more common, but because it is often more controversial and attention-grabbing. It also highlights a broader communication gap, as many creators emphasize sunscreen’s cosmetic benefits while overlooking its well-established role in preventing skin cancer.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

Have you ever considered buying a DNA kit for a family member as a special gift, such as Father’s Day? On the surface, it may seem like a good idea, as it allows loved ones or friends to peer into their past and family history; however, psychologists have recently warned against it, as it might have profound psychological implications.

In a new book titled The Psychology of Genealogy, Dr. Susan Moore, a retired Australian university researcher in social and developmental psychology, examines the complex emotions associated with DNA testing and uses real-life case studies to illustrate its psychological impact.

“Should you give DNA kits as gifts? It can be fun, [but] it can be risky,” Moore says in a statement. 

Moore cautions that the psychological impact of DNA testing may be far greater than many people anticipate. These tests can reveal unexpected family secrets, uncover cases of misattributed paternity, disclose donor conception, and even link individuals to hundreds of previously unknown half-siblings or relatives they may not want to be connected with.

“Do first think carefully about how your intended recipient might cope with unexpected outcomes,” Moore says.

“Hobbyist family historians are uncovering joyful and inspiring stories of the past as well as sad and unsettling secrets of their ancestry,” Moore explains. “Records and DNA matches provide boosts, challenges, and even threats to one’s sense of self, and this is occurring at unprecedented levels.”

Unexpected DNA results can deeply impact a person’s sense of self and identity, along with family belonging and dynamics—a phenomenon psychologists call “identity disruption.” Moore’s book highlights cases involving revelations of misattributed parentage, late-discovered adoption, and donor conception uncovered through genetic testing, all of which caused more physical harm than good. 

“At the personal level, these may be findings that cause you great distress, that destabilize your sense of who you are, that initially at least, you would have preferred not to know. Once known, however, they cannot be unknown,” says Moore.

DNA testing has also raised privacy concerns in recent years. A 2023 23andMe data breach exposed millions of users’ genetic information, while financial challenges that DNA companies have faced raise questions about what happens to genetic data if these companies fail.

Surprising statistics show that, presently, over 30 million people have tested their DNA through genealogical services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. 

Still, for many people, even with data breaches and larger companies buying up DNA data sets, it’s still enticing to buy, as their curiosity seems to outweigh the risks.

“How exciting it can be to discover the identity of an ancestor, solve a family mystery, prove or disprove family ‘legends’ or discover previously unknown living relatives,” Moore says. 

“Indeed, genealogists regularly report elation and joy as they unearth lost relatives, discover the identity of a ‘missing’ ancestor, or otherwise break down ‘brick walls’ (genealogical puzzles that seem to resist solutions due to missing, inaccurate, or hard-to-access records).”

“Curiosity is a great motivator,” Moore adds.

Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.

NASA’s Curiosity rover and its mission to investigate whether Mars could have ever supported microbial life have taken one step closer to achieving its goal, with one of the most significant discoveries in the ongoing search for evidence of life on the Red Planet.

While exploring Gale Crater, NASA’s robotic rover uncovered a sample in 2020 and, using a chemical technique, determined that 21 carbon-based molecules were preserved in the clay-rich sedimentary rock. This also included seven that had never been identified on Mars before. 

While the discovery does not definitively point to life on the Red Planet, it does strengthen the case that Mars has the chemical conditions to support life. 

According to scientists, the most remarkable aspect of the discovery is not the molecules themselves, but their preservation

“The actual organic components they found are not strong evidence for life,” said Texas A&M University astrobiologist and geobiologist Dr. Michael Tice in a statement. Tice acknowledged that these compounds may also have evolved through abiotic processes, including formation in meteorites or other non-biological pathways.

“These organics were likely preserved in the rocks for a very long time, possibly billions of years, despite radiation and other harsh conditions on Mars,” Tice said.

“It blows my mind.”

Building Blocks of Life

Organic molecules are critical building blocks of life, but they can also form through non-biological processes, such as geological reactions or meteorite delivery. Similar preserved compounds on Earth help scientists study ancient environments, and their discovery on Mars provides new clues about the planet’s billion-year-old history.

“Studying how those compounds vary between different rocks can tell a story of how life and environments changed,” Tice recently said in a statement issued by Texas A&M. “Finding organics stored in similar ways on Mars tells us that there could be similar stories preserved there as well.”

The findings also suggest that Martian rocks may contain evidence from a time before life began, a record of sorts that Earth’s past geology has mostly erased.

“It is even possible that some Mars rocks will tell us about times when there was no life there,” he said, with organics formed instead through prebiotic chemistry or delivered from space. “We do not have an equivalent record of such a time preserved on Earth.”

The findings build on earlier research by Tice and his team that identified possible biosignatures in Mars rocks studied by NASA’s Perseverance rover. 

Tice suggests, “When we looked even closer, we saw things that are easy to explain with early Martian life but very difficult to explain with only geological processes.”

The rocks contained organic carbon and key elements connected to microbial energy sources, along with chemical patterns that may show redox reactions (processes often associated with life on Earth).

“With the right collection, we could find the next step in evidence for past life on Mars or learn about the kinds of processes that eventually led to life on our planet.”

Tice and his colleagues will continue their work exploring the Martian land. 

“I’m continuing to study the record of early Martian evolution as part of the PIXL instrument team on the Perseverance rover,” he said.

“In addition, I’m comparing how organisms affected some of the oldest sediments on Earth — now preserved in rocks in South Africa—with the potential biosignatures we discovered on Mars.”

Additional details about Tice and his team’s work can be found in a pair of papers, “Diverse organic molecules on Mars revealed by the first SAM TMAH experiment,” which appeared in Nature Communications, and “Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars,” which was published in the journal Nature.