June 16, 2025—The human brain glows, a new way to find prime numbers, and how to join a watch party for the release of the first batch of images from the Vera C. Rubin space telescope.
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits on the peak of Cerro Pachón in Chilean Andes. RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/H. Stockebrand (CC BY 4.0)
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Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
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For the first time, neuroscientists detected (from outside the skull) glowing photons emitted by the human brain. Those emissions changed when participants performed cognitive tasks (like listening for a musical cue). In a blacked-out room, 20 participants wore head caps studded with electroencephalography electrodes to measure the brain’s electrical activity. Photon-amplifying tubes to detect ultraweak photon emission were positioned around their heads over two brain regions: the area responsible for visual processing and another where auditory processing occurs. “The very first finding is that photons are coming out of the head—full stop. It’s independent, it’s not spurious, it’s not random,” says study lead Nirosha Murugan, a biophysicist at Wilfrid Lurier University in Ontario. How it works: All living tissue emits a continuous stream of low-intensity light, or biophotons. Scientists think that this light comes from biomolecular reactions that generate energy, which create photons as by-products. The more energy a tissue burns, the more light it gives off—which means, of all our body’s tissues, our brain should glow the brightest of all.
What the experts say: “I think this is a very intriguing and potentially groundbreaking approach [for measuring brain activity, though] there are still many uncertainties that need to be explored,” says Michael Gramlich, a biophysicist at Auburn University, who was not involved in the new study. “The essential question to address,” he says, is whether ultraweak photon emissions actually impact cognition.
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Mathematicians found a surprising new way to identify prime numbers—those are numbers, like 2, 3, 5, or 7, that can only be divided evenly by 1 and themselves. Instead of using long, complicated checks to see if a number fits that rule, the researchers figured out how to use integer partitions—basically, the different ways a number can be broken into smaller numbers that add up to it (for example, the number 5 has seven partitions: 4 + 1, 3 + 2, 3 + 1 + 1, 2 + 2 + 1, 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1). Certain patterns in those partitions can perfectly predict whether a number is prime.
Why this matters: Prime numbers are the building blocks of mathematics and critical to fields like cryptography, yet their distribution (when they occur and why) remains one of math’s biggest mysteries. This discovery reframes the definition of primes using an 18th century mathematical idea—partitions—that reveals hidden structure among the numbers where chaos was once assumed. This could lead to deeper insights into longstanding puzzles like the twin prime and Goldbach conjectures.
What the experts say: “It’s almost like our work gives you infinitely many new definitions for prime,” says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia, and lead author of the new paper. “That’s kind of mind-blowing.”
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