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A red giant orbiting a dormant black hole is spinning impossibly fast and contains chemistry that makes it look ancient when it's actually relatively young. By listening to faint vibrations rippling through the star, astronomers have decoded a violent secret, that this star likely collided with and absorbed another star billions of years ago, an explosive merger that left it chemically confused and rotating once every 398 days. The discovery reveals how even quiet black hole systems can have turbulent histories written in starlight.

Ninety five years after Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred its existence from galaxies moving impossibly fast, researchers may have detected the first direct evidence of dark matter, the invisible scaffolding that holds the universe together. Using gamma ray data from NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, a Japanese physicist has identified a halo of extremely energetic photons around the Milky Way's center that matches predictions for annihilating dark matter particles. If confirmed, humanity has finally "seen" the unseeable.

Hotter temperatures and a series of droughts in what is now Pakistan and India fragmented one of the world’s major early civilisations, providing a "warning shot" for today

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Sure, there are all the twinkly lights on display and family dinners, but really, it’s all about the shopping. Isn’t it? After all, each year we spend thousands of dollars around this time (retail sales in the U.S. between Black Friday and Christmas will likely surpass $1 trillion for the first time this year, up from $994 billion in 2024)—and not all of it on gifts either. It’s the Super Bowl of consumerism.

It’s hard to resist. Every few minutes I’ll get some sort of notification of a once-a-year sale that I must take advantage of immediately. I’m being primed to want things that I never really even thought of because they happen to be 20 percent off. I get nagging follow-up messages to get the items I happened to have glanced at but didn’t succumb to—before it’s too late, before they are gone forever (or at least the discount is)! That’s the annual ritual.

Some, however, are more disciplined than I. They wait until this time of year to buy the things they actually want and need at a discount. They are the real unsung heroes of the season. Just the other day a woman in my writers’ group proudly showed off her new Apple Watch that she had waited all this time to get. “I got it for cheap,” she exclaimed proudly, “I don’t know if it’s any good.” 

As for me, I’ve been eyeing a Mason Pearson brush for at least 15 years. Girl math dictates that had I bought it 10 years ago, I would have gotten it for half off. I’m told the quality is so good that it will last long enough to pass on to my children—because that’s what every child craves: a used hairbrush. Maybe in a few years, when it’s twice the price?

The Mason Pearson website showcases “luxury and efficacy” alongside 130 years of heritage—a masterclass in how legacy brands use elegant design and storytelling to justify premium pricing.

Mason Pearson, though, represents a “legacy” brand in an increasingly disposable world. It is characterized by its longevity (think: Levi’s and Tiffany & Co), rich history, perception of quality, and cultural relevance. Brands come and go, but Mason Pearson gets its name from its founder, an engineer who first created it in 1885. Multiple generations have enjoyed smooth hair from these high-quality durable brushes that continue to be handcrafted in England and are referred to as “the Ferrari of brushes.” It has cult status. I hear that spoilt pets like it too.

But this isn’t an ad for Mason Pearson. It’s a column about psychology.

Legacy brands tend to evoke nostalgia, one of the most powerful feelings a brand that wants to sell lots of products can invoke. It reminds us of simpler or happier times, or connects us to family members who might have used the same products. Or people like Marilyn Monroe, who to this day is still partially responsible for the sales of Erno Laszlo skincare products and Chanel No. 5 perfume. If you wear the latter to bed, you too can continue the legacy. This emotional resonance and sentimental bond help foster brand loyalty by transforming the product into something more meaningful.

The Ed Feingersh photograph that launched decades of marketing: Monroe with Chanel No. 5 in 1955. One interview answer in 1952 became eternal brand mythology—and continues selling perfume in 2025.

As Mad Men’s Don Draper describes it, nostalgia is a “twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.”

The legacy brand also comes with a story.

Successful legacy brands leverage their rich history and craftsmanship through compelling storytelling. This narrative allows consumers to feel like they are part of an ongoing legacy, connecting them with tradition and artistry that defines the brand. A good example of this type of marketing is deployed by Grado Labs, a company that produces headphones “handmade in Brooklyn, producing the finest audio products since 1953 in the building that our father/grandfather/great grandfather Pasquale bought back in 1918.”

The Maker Stories website featured Grado Labs exemplary legacy brand marketing: four generations of family craftsmanship in the same Brooklyn building since 1918, triggering nostalgia and trust in consumers.

Indeed, research shows that our brains respond to stories, triggering the release of oxytocin, a hormone that happens to promote trust. This helps explain the results of the 2009 Significant Objects experiment conducted by Robert Walker and Joshua Glenn where they found that pairing a story with a product was able to increase its perceived value by up to 2,706 percent.

According to clinical psychologist Clary Tepper, when consumers buy into a brand they are engaging in what is deemed by psychologists to be “symbolic consumption” whereby the brand becomes a representative of a set of ideals or values.

“From a psychological point of view, the principles of memory, identity, and emotional security are all at work here,” she tells me, “For consumers who feel like the world is constantly changing, legacy brands offer a sense of stability and continuity. Those brands also tap into shared cultural history, collective memory, and identity, all of which can foster a sense of belonging and trust. If consumers have had positive experiences with these brands in the past, engaging with them again can activate reward pathways in the brain.”

Deidre Popovich, Associate Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, agrees: “People are quite drawn to legacy brands because they feel very familiar and comforting. From a consumer psychology perspective, these brands may be tied to early personal memories, such as thinking back to certain family routines when you were a kid. When someone sees a legacy brand, they often feel this sense of recognition that links back to earlier points in their life. That is what creates a feeling of nostalgia. It is usually less about the product itself or its functional purpose, and more about reconnecting with family moments and/or positive feelings.”

Ownership of a legacy brand’s products can also be a way for consumers to signal their aspirations or social status. It’s part of an identity that they can choose to put on—or change. 

Sarah Seung-McFarland is a psychologist and founder of Trulery, where her focus is specifically on fashion and design psychology. She tells me: “In psychology, we know that consumers don’t just buy a product, they buy into the identity, lifestyle, and social meaning connected to it. Brands like Louis Vuitton have spent decades being linked to wealth, status, and an aspirational lifestyle through film, celebrity culture, and consistent visual storytelling.”

Brands, in a sense, become a stand-in for a world that might be within our reach. Though, says, Seung-McFarland, “For many, the desire came from the inaccessibility itself. Owning a legacy piece represented the version of themselves they hoped to become.”

It’s also a type of reassurance about the quality and reliability of the brand. Its longevity is a testimony to that. That’s why we’re seeing a bit of a revival towards appreciation for long-standing brands. 

The reddit message board “BuyItForLife” receives 1.7M weekly visitors. There the focus seems to be on brands that, as the title suggests, last. Some items are expensive status symbols like Rolex watches and Birkin bags, but others are more practical items like eiderdown bedding, Montblanc fountain pens, Le Creuset cookware, knives with a lifetime of sharpening, Canada Goose coats that can be passed on as a family heirloom, microwaves that don’t break within a year or two, Zojirushi rice cookers, Dyson vacuums, Viberg boots, Barbour’s waxed jacket, Herman Miller office chairs, and on the more affordable side—Stanley water bottles. And yes, my coveted Mason Pearson brush is also a common recommendation. But most surprisingly, there’s even a laptop that users believe can last a lifetime. The purpose—at whichever price point—is the pursuit of quality and longevity.

According to Popovich, going with a long-standing brand helps consumers reduce the cognitive effort involved in making a choice. “Shoppers don’t have to work hard to evaluate it; the feeling of familiarity makes it seem like an obvious decision,” she says, adding, “This is due to cognitive fluency, which is the feeling of ease we get when our brain can process information quickly and without effort. This feeling influences our judgments, making us more likely to perceive information as truthful and likable, simply because it’s familiar.”

I’ll keep that in mind as I inch toward buying that expensive hairbrush that somehow keeps feeling more and more like the “obvious” choice.

Here’s a lovely 52-minute PBS nature documentary that aired in 2011 (h/t Debi).  Instead of thinking of turkeys as comestibles today, this will show you how they live real lives in the wild. It’s a wonderful video of a naturalist who, raising a passel of wild turkeys from eggs to adult, is allowed a fantastic and informative glimpse into the lives of birds that nobody thinks about.

Here is the PBS description:

After a local farmer left a bowl of eggs on Joe Hutto’s front porch, his life was forever changed. Hutto, possessing a broad background in the natural sciences and an interest in imprinting young animals, incubated the eggs and waited for them to hatch. As the chicks emerged from their shells, they locked eyes with an unusual but dedicated mother.

Deep in the wilds of Florida’s Flatlands, Hutto spent each day living as a turkey mother, taking on the full-time job of raising sixteen turkey chicks. Hutto dutifully cared for his family around the clock, roosting with them, taking them foraging, and immersing himself in their world. In the process, they revealed their charming curiosity and surprising intellect. There was little he could teach them that they did not already know, but he showed them the lay of the land and protected them from the dangers of the forest as best he could. In return, they taught him how to see the world through their eyes.

Based on his true story, My Life as a Turkey chronicles Hutto’s remarkable and moving experience of raising a group of wild turkey hatchlings to adulthood.

YouTube notes that “My Life as a Turkey” premiered on November 16, 2011. There’s more information on this page, inbcluding a Q&A with Joe Hutto.

Chytrid fungus is a scourge to global amphibian populations, but before it kills some frogs, it can produce symptoms that may help the infected animals find mates and spread the fungus further

Researchers have discovered a low-energy way to recycle Teflon® by using mechanical motion and sodium metal. The process turns the notoriously durable plastic into sodium fluoride that can be reused directly in chemical manufacturing. This creates a potential circular economy for fluorine and reduces environmental harm from PFAS-related waste.

On Earth, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) like the one we experienced earlier this month are aesthetic, even disruptive events, sending aurora southward and interrupting radio signals. But around other stars, they could prove lethal to life. This point was driven home by a recent CME detection from an M-class red dwarf star. This marks the first detection of an energetic Type II radio burst from a nearby star.

A planet’s habitability is determined by a confluence of many factors. So far, our explorations of potentially habitable worlds beyond our solar system have focused exclusively on their position in the “Goldilocks Zone” of their solar system, where their temperature determines whether or not liquid water can exist on their surface, and, more recently, what their atmospheres are composed of. That’s in part due to the technical limitations of the instruments available to us - even the powerful James Webb Space Telescope is capable only of seeing atmospheres of very large planets nearby. But in the coming decades, we’ll get new tools, like the Habitable Worlds Observatory, that are more specifically tailored to search for those potentially habitable worlds. So what should we use them to look for? A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv by Benjamin Farcy of the University of Maryland and his colleagues, argues that we should look to how a planet formed to understand its chances of harboring life.

Since comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object, was discovered on 1 July 2025, astronomers worldwide have worked to predict its trajectory. ESA has now improved the comet’s predicted location by a factor of 10, thanks to the innovative use of observation data from our ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Daily steroid pills are often necessary for severe cases of asthma, but they raise the risk of several serious conditions. Now, scientists have shown that a monthly antibody injection can eliminate the need for the pills

In 2028, Hong Kong will launch its first dedicated lunar orbiter not to study craters or map minerals, but to monitor something far more urgent, the constant barrage of meteoroids slamming into the Moon's surface at thousands of kilometres per hour. As China prepares to build a permanent lunar research station, understanding this relentless bombardment has become a matter of safety for future astronauts living and working on the Moon.

Beneath the frozen shells of Saturn's tiny moons, hidden oceans might occasionally boil, not from heat, but from dropping pressure as ice melts from below. This strange phenomenon could explain the bizarre geology of worlds like Miranda and Mimas, and reshape our understanding of where to search for life in the outer Solar System. A new study reveals how these distant water worlds operate under physics unlike anything on Earth.

Seven billion year old meteorites carrying DNA building blocks. Frozen water on Mars. Amino acids floating in interstellar dust clouds. After seventy years of searching, we've found the ingredients for life scattered throughout the universe but have we found life itself? A new review examines every major claim of extraterrestrial life, from ancient space rocks to UFO sightings, revealing what the evidence actually supports and where wishful thinking has filled the gaps.

Mapping of the main quarry on Easter Island where giant statues were carved has uncovered evidence that the monuments may not have been created under the direction of a single chief

There is a growing body of research on the physical benefits of going for a dip in chilly water, but now researchers are starting to find that cold-water swimming may also be reshaping our brains for the better in lasting ways

The final COP30 agreement fails to even mention fossil fuels. Countries wanting to tackle climate change must not wait for the next meeting to take action

A chaotic schedule over the holiday season often derails Grace Wade’s workout routine. But this year she has a plan…

From drowned worlds to virtual utopias via deep space, wild ideas abound in Emily H. Wilson's picks for her favourite sci-fi reads of the year

We can't see dark matter directly, so studying it pushes the boundaries of our creativity as scientists. How exciting, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein