With everything happening in the world—nonstop conflicts, tense discourses, collapsing ecosystems—sometimes one wonders if watching the news serves any purpose other than adding to the anguish of the day. And perhaps that's why, increasingly, the refuge of a book, the starry sky, or the inside of a cell don't seem like bad places to lose yourself for a while. Not to escape reality, but to remind ourselves that there are still spaces that can amaze us. That science, however, continues to discover and open windows.
This August, the James Webb Telescope identified a new moon orbiting Uranus: S/2025 U 1, a small body just eight kilometers across that has been hidden from our eyes for millennia. It won't change the world, but it reminds us that we are still capable of looking outside and finding what we didn't know we were looking for.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, a team of physicists in Delft has managed to capture the precise moment in which an atomic nucleus changes its magnetic state. A feat of microscopy and engineering that, beyond its complexity, demonstrates that we can also look inward, to the limits of matter.
There are also advances that affect us much more directly. Scientists have developed nanovesicles capable of delivering chemotherapy much more precisely, improving effectiveness against difficult-to-treat cancers. And the famous CRISPR-Cas9 'molecular scissors' have demonstrated, once again, that we can edit the genome to attack tumors at their roots, whose precision only ten years ago seemed like science fiction.
Even the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases takes a giant step forward with the Fastball EEG, a three-minute brain test that can identify the risk of Alzheimer's long before its symptoms appear. The mechanism is surprisingly simple: while the person watches a rapid series of images on the screen, an electrode cap records the brain waves. When repeated images appear, the brain generates an immediate and detectable electrical response; if the response fails or is very weak, it may indicate memory alterations.
And so, between molecules and moons, science continues to advance. Not as a magic solution to our ills, but as a space of pause and meaning. In a world saturated with noise, fake news and immediacy, perhaps looking into infinity or the microscopic is, paradoxically, a way of grounding oneself in the present. Sometimes, the best antidote to chaos is to observe its component parts.
