Christopher Beha's path to atheism began in college. Close encounters with death'a brother's car accident, his own cancer diagnosis'led to a period of disenchantment. He picked up Bertrand Russell's anti-religious diatribes and started skipping Mass, which he'd attended since childhood. In the years that followed, he immersed himself in the work of atheists such as Albert Camus and Arthur Schopenhauer. As he grew older, something shifted. In his new book, Why I Am Not an Atheist, Beha'a novelist and a former editor of Harper's Magazine'describes why he ultimately rejected the conclusions of these thinkers and others. The choice was, in part, due to philosophical objections. But he describes another motive for his return to faith'a refreshing counter to how religious conversions, and religion more broadly, are frequently talked about today. Comparisons between faith and romantic love crop up throughout the centuries, appearing in the Bible'the 'Song of Songs' is one long love poem'and the reflections of early Christians such as Origen and Saint Augustine. In his 1923 biography of Francis of Assisi, the British critic G. K. Chesterton remarked that for the medieval saint, 'religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair,' a proposition echoed by David Brooks a century later when he wrote that 'faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question.' With both faith and romance, the comparison suggests, abstractions and proofs only approximate what experience reveals: ineffable wonder, a shout-it-from-the-mountaintops elation, confidence in the unconditionality of another's love....

Just as Darwin's finches evolved in response to natural selection in order to endure, the cells that make up a cancerous tumor similarly counter selective pressures in order to survive, evolve, and spread. Tumors are, in fact, complex sets of cells with their own unique structure and ability to change. Today, artificial Intelligence and machine learning tools offer an unparalleled opportunity to illuminate the generalizable rules governing tumor progression on the genetic, epigenetic, metabolic, and microenvironmental levels. Matthew G. Jones, an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Biology, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, hopes to use computational approaches to build predictive models ' to play a game of chess with cancer, making sense of a tumor's ability to evolve and resist treatment with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes. In this interview, he describes his current work. A: A very common story with cancer is that patients will respond to a therapy at first, and then eventually that treatment will stop working. The reason this largely happens is that tumors have an incredible, and very challenging, ability to evolve: the ability to change their genetic makeup, protein signaling composition, and cellular dynamics. The tumor as a system also evolves at a structural level. Oftentimes, the reason why a patient succumbs to a tumor is because either the tumor has evolved to a state we can no longer control, or it evolves in an unpredictable manner....

Over the past five years, dermatologist Rajani Katta has noticed a change in the people who come into her office. Their skincare routines have been getting more complicated ' some stretching to 12 steps ' and often involve products that they found through social media, many of which don't have a lot of scientific backing. They didn't realize that some of those products were doing damage to their skin, says Katta, who specializes in sensitive skin and allergies at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. 'People are much more likely to experiment on themselves' than they have been in the past, she says. Globally, there seems to be more interest in skincare than ever before, with the industry expected to generate more than US$200 billion worldwide in 2026. Social-media platforms such as TikTok seem to be a main driver of the hot pursuit of youthful, glowing skin, with hashtags such as #SkinTok generating more than one billion views per month. The platforms have helped to kick-start a wave of skincare trends, from using beef tallow as a moisturizer to achieving 'glass skin' ' a smooth, shiny complexion ' using dozens of pricey products. They're also rife with harmful misinformation, such as the false claim that sunscreens cause skin cancer and vitamin-D deficiency....

This television advertisement, aired during American football's Super Bowl last month, promotes a simple blood test that promises to detect the early signs of more than 50 cancer types ' or provide the reassurance of an all-clear. The test, called Galleri, is one of around 40 such multi-cancer early detection (MCED) tests that are either in development or already on sale. But very few have been through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) ' which are considered the gold standard of testing ' and none has received approval from regulators. Last month, the developers of the Galleri test, biotechnology company Grail in Menlo Park, California, released some details from the first RCT of an MCED test. The trial, run in collaboration with the UK National Health Service (NHS), aimed to find out whether Galleri can improve outcomes by reducing the number of cancers detected at advanced stages, when used alongside existing screening programmes ' but the results indicate that the test did not meet this goal....