science | wellnessrounds

Dark Matter (and how incredible scientists are)

Dark matter has evaded direct detection for decades because it does not emit, absorb or reflect any light. It is as pervasive as it is inaccessible, making up 85 percent of the matter in our universe, a tease for the particle physicists keen on deciphering its nature.
NY Times September 1, 2026

I’m not a scientist, but I’m fairly fluent in most scientific concepts… and this blows my mind.

This paper (published this week) is a very complicated (for me, not for physicists) description of what the NY Times described “a single, tiny nudge of one particle into another”.

The best part is that the LZ team (250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions) who published this finding have been looking for this “nudge” for a long time. Even though there’s only a small number of people who can understand this science, it’s clear this may be a game changer in our understanding of the universe… since this amazing team may have actually “seen” dark matter for the first. time.

Rules for a pilgrimage

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Dad this week. After he retired, he took to the road in his Prius for what turned out to be close to 100 “pilgrimages”. The process started with choosing a distant goal – and then he’d just head out in that general direction. He decided day by day on a route using five “rules” (see below). Sometime in the mid afternoon he’d find one of the many hotels on the road that had breakfast included and he’d pull in. He’d check in, pour a Scotch, and start writing.

1. Freeways are to be crossed, not driven on.
2. If the sun gets in your eyes – turn
3. If you see a Dairy Queen with pick-ups in front of it, stop to join the conversation.
4. Ask anyone who is alone at breakfast if you can join them and take the time to learn their story
5. Anything beautiful warrants a stop.
FLOYD BRANDT

Exercise Snacks

I was able to spend some time with medical students this week as a substitute teacher for their ethics course. We had a great conversation about ethics… but (not surprisingly) we also spent some time talking about more general topics like how hard it is to keep your life in balance as a medical student.

I’ve recently started reading Howard Luks’s blog, an orthopedic surgeon who mostly directs his advice towards people like me (people “of a certain age” as the French say). His advice this week was about “exercise snacks”, which is a great strategy for medical students, residents, and other busy folks (not just those of us who have a few years under our belts) when life it too busy to work exercise into your schedule. “Exercise snacks” are basically “exercise” that takes 30 seconds to a few minutes done multiple times during the day. That’s all. You can do pushups, dance to a song, or (always available in medical schools and hospitals) just take the stairs. Worth trying!

It’s not too late. Find a great end of season tomato and make a BLT or a “Harriet the Spy” tomato sandwich!

#Delight

Noticing things that delight you is a life changing practice that I first learned about reading Ross Gay’s work. (If you haven’t read any of his books, I’d start with The Book of Delights.)

And then there is 1000 Awesome Things, a blog that catalogues (as it promises!) awesome things that usually go unnoticed, but warrant celebration.

“Joy is an act of resistance.”
Toi Derricotte

Scarcity is a choice, not a condition

The socioeconomic issues we face today aren’t new, so maybe it’s not a surprise that we struggle to even imagine a world where hunger, homelessness, and illness are faced with kindness and equity… which is why I was so intrigued with this article by Swapan Samanta, an economist who uses mathematics to understand social inequities.

“They [the prophets of five major religions] knew that food is never just food, that meals reveal the soul of a civilization, that the way we eat together – or fail to – determines whether we survive or collapse. Ancient wisdom and modern mathematics point to the same truth…Scarcity is a choice, not a condition.”

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein

A reminder that today’s dogma is tomorrow’s history…

There was a beautifully designed study published this week that, for those of us who care (or have cared) for premature newborns is important.

For those not in medicine… the ductus arteriosus is a one of the necessary shunts around the lungs when babies are in the womb. (You don’t want blood going to the lungs which can’t oxygenate the blood because the baby isn’t breathing yet.) At the moment of birth, all that has to change… and pretty quickly. In term babies, it starts immediately, and the closure is done by 48-72 hours. In premature babies, it can take longer. And, in rare cases, it doesn’t close at all. When it stays open, we call it a patent ductus arteriosus (PDA).

Since the first surgical closure in 1938, PDAs have been closed by surgery, catheters, and medications. Over the last several decades there has been a progression in which way was the “right” way (and when it should be done). To summarize the overall trend, we began to move away from surgery and towards less invasive catheter and/or pharmacologic closure. Like all good research, there were lots of studies that preceded and led to the work published this week – which showed that just waiting (without medicines, surgery, or catheter closure) had the same outcome (a composite of death and/or bronchopulmonary dysplasia at 36 weeks) when compared to using medicines to close the PDA. Importantly, it also showed that the overall death rate was less in the babies who were just observed.

No difference in early death or lung disease, and a higher survival without any direct treatment.

This is why we do science.

This is why funding science is so very important.

p.s. Here’s another example of dogma becoming history… Surgically removing colons to cure schizophrenia. (😳)