your science briefing for 03.07.2025

The cry of a zombie planet across space, AI may have found a much better version of Ozempic, making diamonds better than the real thing, and more...

An odd, shrill cry pierces the night. But it’s not a bird, a fox, or a coyote. It’s a darker, raspier, more desperate sound. A sound that couldn’t have come from a living being, a sound distorted by necrotic tissue that can no longer move the way it should. The cry of a zombie. And astronomers just found the cosmic equivalent of this in the eye catching and iconic Helix Nebula: the death rattle of a planet being pulled apart by a white dwarf after being pushed too close to it… (Newsweek)

It’s not a secret that our media is addicted to bad news and the traffic they generate, and our social platforms are addicted to rage and fear inducing clickbait. And so are we, since our brains are natural pessimists with confirmation bias. So the reason you may be feeling so overwhelmed with bad news and as if you’re living during the worst of times may be because you’re drowning in more news than humanity has ever had, and most of that news is on your feed specifically because it’s bad… (Vox)

Diamonds are very valuable. No, not as decorations because they’re rare stones that we struggle to find. They’re anything but rare, and the idea that they are, and should be worth fortunes, is the result of a campaign by the DeBeers company. In reality, the diamond industry is filled with horrific human rights abuses, and we tend to use them in industrial applications because they’re the toughest naturally occurring material on the planet. This is why scientists have been working on making artificial ones in labs, so we don’t have to mine for them and hope we get what we need. And now, they’re finally able to make them even tougher than the real thing… (ScienceAlert)

Ozempic, or semaglutide, has been a massive boon for people who need help losing weight and may also be a treatment for substance abuse. But like any drug, it comes with side effects, specifically nausea, constipation, and in some cases, muscle loss, which means scientists are on the lookout for something better. Thanks to an AI built to analyze peptides that control blood sugar, they might have just found it. It’s called BRP, and instead of working in your gut, it works in your brain, which means it turns a switch for appetite control without affecting your gut and its biome… (Stanford)

Much of our life has been taken over by near-worship of “productivity” and wannabe influencers swarm LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok promising to teach us the secrets of how to hustle harder. There are just two problems with waking up only to get that bread and grind your life away. First, AI is making the idea of working around the clock wasteful and unnecessary. The second is that it sets us up for failure because it’s just not possible for us to work like machines, and we also actually hate it… (BigThink)