Uranus and Neptune are the two furthest planets in the Solar System and have been visited only once by human spacecraft – by Voyager 2 over 30 years ago – so there is a lot about them that we do not know. One thing we thought we knew, however, was what type of planet they are. Now, a new study wants to challenge something quite crucial about how we classify them: these worlds, it argues, are not ice giants.

The four "rocky" planets of the Solar System – Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury – are small terrestrial planets made of solid rock and metal. The four giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – are divided into two categories because, though large, they are not the same. The first two are "gas giants" because they are overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen and helium, over 90 percent by mass. The latter two are known as "ice giants". Hydrogen and helium comprise less than 20 percent of the planets' masses. Uranus and Neptune, instead, are rich in numerous molecules like water and ammonia that were present in solid ice when the planets formed billions of years ago, as models tell us.

For decades, our understanding of Uranus and Neptune's interiors has been based on what we can glean from their surface features, the behaviors of their moons, their magnetic fields, and other indirect means. Which has occasionally led us astray. 

If I was one of these billionaires… just floating around with all my money, I would fund two missions: I'd fund an orbiter to Uranus and an orbiter to Neptune.
— Prof Brian Cox

This new work suggests a different way of looking at these outer planets. Instead of modeling the interior of these two worlds based on the potentially flawed information we have, they created random models and then compared those to observational data, building a catalog of models that fit. They looked at both water-dominated and rock-dominated scenarios and concluded that while the planets have this mixture of molecules, a rockier internal structure makes more sense with the current observations. 

“Overall, our findings challenge the conventional classification of Uranus and Neptune as ’ice giants’ and underscore the need for improved observational data or formation constraints to break compositional degeneracy,” the authors write in their paper.

The cavendish experiment shows that even the very week force of gravity can be seen between two room scale objects. Even with the naked eye.

The effects of a COVID-19 infection can sometimes persist for months or years after the initial symptoms have gone, but could some of the impact even be transferred to the next generation? Scientists studying male mice infected with SARS-CoV-2 discovered that it could alter their sperm, leading to behavioral changes in their offspring. It remains to be seen whether the same is true in humans.

“We already knew that when male mice were exposed to specific environmental and lifestyle factors, like poor diet before mating, it could change brain development and behaviour in offspring,” said lead researcher Professor Anthony Hannan from The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in a statement.

“This is because the father’s experiences can alter the information carried in sperm, including specific RNA molecules, which transmit instructions for offspring development.”

Research had already shown how COVID-19 – which we know has effects way beyond the respiratory system – can alter sperm, potentially hanging around for up to 110 days. The team wanted to investigate whether COVID also had the potential to cause this type of RNA damage.

Green auroras stretching as far as the eye can see, almost mistakable for another planet rather than the blue Earth we call home.

New research has shown, for the first time, how mixtures of commonly used medications that end up in our waterways and natural environments might increase the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

When humans or animals take medications, as much as 90% can pass through the body and into natural environments, via waste water, or run-off from fields, ending up in the ocean.

In the environment, this build-up of antibiotic medicines can accumulate to a strength sufficient to kill the bacteria that live there. This can result in bacteria evolving defenses that help them to survive these concentrations, which can mean they are also resistant to antibiotics used to treat them if they later infect humans.

However, less is known about how the build-up of other medicines also affects bacteria, and until now, scientists have largely investigated the effect of these medications on triggering this antibiotic resistance one-at-a-time.

Now, new research led by the University of Exeter and published in the journal ISME Communications, has revealed that regular drugs used for pain relief, diabetes medication, and hormone replacement can increase the tendency for bacteria to develop the genes needed to resist antibiotic treatments, when combined with a common antibiotic as happens in the environment.

How do you spot pregnant individuals in the archaeological record? With great difficulty, it turns out. But that could be about to change, as a test capable of identifying hormones in skeletons breaks new ground in our understanding of ancient pregnancy.

For the first time, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone have been detected in multiple human hard tissues, which could serve as an indicator of pregnancy, explain the authors of a recent study presenting the findings.

Nowadays, pregnancy tests work by identifying the hormone human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) in urine – at one time, this involved frogs, believe it or not. However, hCG doesn’t linger in the body for long enough to be detectable in ancient remains. This means that archaeologists have, until now, had to rely on discovering fetal remains in the abdomens of pregnant people, which is incredibly difficult, nigh on impossible, to do.

“New methods that can accurately identify pregnancy from skeletal remains are needed if we are to accurately reconstruct past women's reproductive histories, interpret their experiences within social and cultural contexts, and make effective comparisons between modern and archaeological populations,” the team behind the latest breakthrough explains.

The Sahara Desert is one of the driest areas in the world. It gets just 3 inches of precipitation per year—one-tenth of the amount of Chicago's rain, sleet and snow.

But by the second half of the 21st century, rising global temperatures could make the Sahara much wetter, according to UIC researchers. By that time, the North African desert could see 75% more precipitation than its historical norm, as reported in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. Under extreme climate conditions, rainfall is expected to increase in southeastern and south-central Africa, too, the researchers said.

"Changing rainfall patterns will affect billions of people, both in and outside Africa," said lead author Thierry Ndetatsin Taguela, a postdoctoral climate researcher in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "We have to start planning to face these changes, from flood management to drought-resistant crops."

For thousands of years, people in the Andes have chewed the leaves of the coca plant to stave off hunger, treat altitude sickness, and sustain energy. Yet under international law, this ancient crop is treated as harshly as cocaine and fentanyl. Now, scientists say it's time to end that contradiction.

A new international perspective published in Science argues that scientific evidence clearly supports the coca leaf as a benign, useful, and culturally paramount crop plant that should be removed from the list of Schedule I substances—where it currently appears alongside cocaine and fentanyl—under the 1961 "Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs."

"Coca's record of safe use and cultural importance stands in stark contrast to the harms of purified cocaine," said lead author Dawson M. White, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.

"Recognizing this difference is essential for evidence-based policy and for aligning with the goals expressed by South American communities most affected by prohibition."

The analysis arrives at a pivotal moment, as the World Health Organization (WHO) is currently reviewing the legal status of coca. An expert report compiled by the WHO confirms both the lack of harm from the coca leaf and the tangible harms caused by its prohibition. The WHO's Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) will meet in Geneva from October 20–22, 2025, to formalize a recommendation to the United Nations (UN) Commission on Narcotic Drugs.

The Biodiversity Collections Network (BCoN), in collaboration with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), has developed a comprehensive roadmap toward an integrated biological and environmental data network.

The initiative, known as the Building an Integrated, Open, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (BIOFAIR) Data Network project, addresses the urgent need to connect fragmented data held in biodiversity collections and other biological and environmental data repositories to tackle pressing societal challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, invasive species, and emerging public health threats.

The project, described in a recent article in the journal BioScience, was underpinned by extensive community engagement with ecological, climate, environmental, genetic, health, biodiversity informatics, and federal stakeholders.

Through six virtual listening sessions, project organizers engaged 199 stakeholders representing 142 organizations, followed by a workshop with 75 participants affiliated with 110 organizations and initiatives. The collaborative effort developed five cross-cutting themes to guide data integration: stock-taking and gap analysis, technological capacity building, best practices and standards, education and training, and community building.

"Biodiversity collections, including over a billion specimens in the United States, offer unparalleled information for understanding evolution, biological processes, and biodiversity responses to environmental change," the authors explain.

Scientists have identified a unique population of brain cells responsible for forming memories of meals, capturing both what was eaten and when it occurred. The research, published in Nature Communications, may help explain why individuals with memory difficulties are more prone to overeating and why forgetting a recent meal can heighten hunger and contribute to unhealthy eating behaviors.

As eating takes place, neurons in a part of the brain called the ventral hippocampus become active, creating what the researchers describe as “meal engrams.” These are specialized memory traces that record details of eating experiences. Although engrams have long been known to store general memories and experiences, this study is the first to reveal a set of engrams specifically linked to meals.

“An engram is the physical trace that a memory leaves behind in the brain,” said Scott Kanoski, professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and corresponding author of the study. “Meal engrams function like sophisticated biological databases that store multiple types of information such as where you were eating, as well as the time that you ate.”

Distracted eating implications
The discovery has immediate relevance for understanding human eating disorders. Patients with memory impairments, such as those with dementia or brain injuries that affect memory formation, may often consume multiple meals in quick succession because they cannot remember eating.

Furthermore, distracted eating — such as mindlessly snacking while watching television or scrolling on a phone — may impair meal memories and contribute to overconsumption.

Based on the experiment’s findings, meal engrams are formed during brief pauses between bites when the brain of laboratory rats naturally survey the eating environment. These moments of awareness allow specialized hippocampal neurons to integrate multiple streams of information.

The amount of REM sleep you get may influence which details of your memories remain in storage, a new brain study suggests.

Previous research had found that sleep helps fortify our memories, but the question of how it shapes the contents of these memories has been harder to pin down. Now, a study published Oct. 1 in the journal Communications Biology hints that the time spent in different stages of sleep may influence this aspect of memory storage.

The sleep cycle is split into four stages: one stage of rapid eye movement (REM) and three non-REM stages, including "deep sleep," marked by slow brain waves. To test how these sleep stages impact our memories, the researchers asked 32 healthy young adults to learn 96 word-picture pairs — such as an action word linked to an image of an animal or plant — while their brain activity was recorded with an electroencephalogram (EEG), which monitors brain waves that wash over the surface of the brain.

The volunteers were then monitored with EEG as they slept overnight and had their recall tested the next morning. The researchers compared the before-and-after brain patterns using a technique called representational similarity analysis. These data enabled the scientists to focus both on detailed memories tied to specific images — like a photo of a beagle — and on broader, categorical memories, covering all the animal images, for instance.

"By using EEG, we could track how brain activity linked to memories changed from before to after sleep," first study author Jing Liu, a research assistant professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, told Live Science in an email.

The team uncovered a pattern: Brainwaves linked to the individual images weakened after sleep, while the broader category signals remained stable.

The shift was stronger when REM made up more of an individual's total sleep time, compared to deep sleep. Liu explained that this pattern suggests REM sleep may help the brain link new memories with what it already knows, while slow-wave sleep helps keep those memories in their original, more-detailed form.

Dark Matter, which makes up most of the Universe, might not be entirely invisible after all. According to new research from the University of York, this mysterious substance could leave behind a faint red or blue tint on light as it passes through regions where Dark Matter is present, creating a detectable “fingerprint.”

Until now, scientists have believed that Dark Matter cannot interact with light and can only be observed through its gravitational influence, which shapes and stabilizes galaxies.

However, the York researchers suggest that light may actually change slightly in color depending on the kind of Dark Matter it encounters. If confirmed, this effect could provide a new method for exploring the hidden material that makes up the majority of the cosmos.

The theoretical study uses the idea of the “six handshake rule” – the notion that any two people on Earth are connected by just a few mutual acquaintances. They suggest a similar chain of connections might exist among particles.

The Particle Connection
Even if Dark Matter doesn’t interact directly with light, it might still influence it indirectly through other particles. For example, some Dark Matter candidates, known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) could connect to light via a series of intermediate particles such as the Higgs boson and the top quark.

Dr. Mikhail Bashkanov, from the University of York’s, School of Physics, Engineering and Technology, said: “It’s a fairly unusual question to ask in the scientific world, because most researchers would agree that Dark Matter is dark, but we have shown that even Dark Matter that is the darkest kind imaginable – it could still have a kind of color signature.

“It’s a fascinating idea, and what is even more exciting is that, under certain conditions, this ‘color’ might actually be detectable. With the right kind of next-generation telescopes, we could measure it. That means astronomy could tell us something completely new about the nature of Dark Matter, making the search for it much simpler.

Testing the Theory
The study outlines how these indirect particle interactions could be tested in future experiments, potentially allowing scientists to rule out some theories of Dark Matter while focusing on others, and so researchers argue that the new study could point to the importance of factoring these possibilities in future developments of telescopes.

Charred coffee grounds could make concrete up to 30 percent stronger, scientists in Australia found.

Their clever recipe could solve multiple problems at once.

Each year, the world produces about 10 billion kilograms (22 billion pounds) of coffee waste, most of which ends up in landfills.

"The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change," explained RMIT University engineer Rajeev Roychand when the research was published in 2023.

With a booming construction market globally, there's also an ever-increasing demand for resource-intensive concrete, causing another set of environmental challenges.

"The ongoing extraction of natural sand around the world – typically taken from river beds and banks – to meet the rapidly growing demands of the construction industry has a big impact on the environment," said RMIT engineer Jie Li.

"There are critical and long-lasting challenges in maintaining a sustainable supply of sand due to the finite nature of resources and the environmental impacts of sand mining. With a circular-economy approach, we could keep organic waste out of landfill and also better preserve our natural resources like sand."

Organic products like coffee grounds can't be added directly to concrete because they leak chemicals that weaken the building material's strength.

So using low energy levels, the team heated coffee waste to over 350 °C (around 660 °F) while depriving it of oxygen.

This process is called pyrolyzing. It breaks down the organic molecules, resulting in a porous, carbon-rich charcoal called biochar that can form bonds with and thereby incorporate itself into the cement matrix.

The researchers cautioned that they still need to assess the long-term durability of their cement product.

After a decade of work, researchers are closer than ever to a key breakthrough in kidney organ transplants: being able to transfer kidneys from donors with different blood types than the recipients, which could significantly speed up waiting times and save lives.

A team from institutions across Canada and China has managed to create a 'universal' kidney, which can, in theory, be accepted by any patient.

Their test organ survived and functioned for several days in the body of a brain-dead recipient, whose family consented to the research.

"This is the first time we've seen this play out in a human model," says biochemist Stephen Withers, from the University of British Columbia in Canada. "It gives us invaluable insight into how to improve long-term outcomes."

As it stands today, people with type O blood who need a kidney usually have to wait for a type O kidney to become available from a donor. That accounts for more than half the people on waitlists, but because type O kidneys can function in people with other blood types, they're in short supply.

While it is currently possible to transplant kidneys of different blood types, by training the recipient's body not to reject the organ, the existing process is far from perfect and not particularly practical.

It's time-consuming, expensive, and risky, and it also requires living donors to work, as the recipient needs time to be prepped.

Here, the researchers effectively converted a type A kidney into a type O kidney, using special, previously identified enzymes that strip away the sugar molecules (antigens) acting as markers of type A blood.

Waving from orbit — Thomas Reiter’s historic hello from space! 👋🌍

30 years ago today, Thomas Reiter became the first esa astronaut to perform a spacewalk during his 179-day EuroMir-95 mission.

🔗 esa.int/ESA_Multimedia…

Chemists at Université de Montréal have developed "signaling cascades" made with DNA molecules to report and quantify the concentration of various molecules in a drop of blood, all within five minutes.

Their findings, validated by experiments on mice, are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and may aid efforts to build point-of-care devices for monitoring and optimizing the treatment of various diseases.

This result was achieved by a research group led by UdeM chemistry professor Alexis Vallée-Bélisle.

"One of the key factors in successfully treating various diseases is to provide and maintain a therapeutic drug dosage throughout treatment," he said. "Sub-optimal therapeutic exposure reduces efficiency and typically leads to drug resistance, while overexposure increases side effects."

Maintaining the right concentration of drugs in the blood remains, however, a major challenge in modern medicine. Since each patient has a distinct pharmacokinetic profile, the concentration of medications in their blood varies significantly. In chemotherapy, for example, many cancer patients do not get the optimal dosage of drugs, and few or no tests are currently rapid enough to flag this issue.

"Easy-to-perform tests could make therapeutic drug monitoring more widely available and enable more personalized treatments," said Vincent De Guire, a clinical biochemist at the UdeM-affiliated Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and chair of the Working Group on Laboratory Errors and Patient Safety of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine.

"A connected solution, similar to a glucometer in terms of portability, affordability, and accuracy, that would measure drug concentrations at the right time and transmit the results directly to the health care team, would ensure that patients receive the optimal dose that maximizes their chances of recovery," De Guire said in an independent assessment of the study.

Holder of a Canada Research Chair in Bioengineering and Bio-nanotechnology, Vallée-Bélisle has spent many years exploring how biological systems monitor the concentration of molecules in their surroundings in real time.

The breakthrough with this new technology came by observing how cells detect and quantify the concentration of molecules in their surroundings.

"Cells have developed nanoscale 'signaling cascades' made of biomolecules that are programmed to interact together to activate specific cellular activities in the presence of specific amounts of external stimuli or molecules," said the study's first author Guichi Zhu, a postdoctoral fellow at UdeM.

"Inspired by the modularity of nature's signaling systems and by the ease with which they can evolve to detect novel molecular targets, we have developed similar DNA-based signaling cascades that can detect and quantify specific molecules via the generation of an easy measurable electrochemical signal," she said.

To help mitigate climate change, companies are using bioreactors to grow algae and other microorganisms that are hundreds of times more efficient at absorbing CO2 than trees. Meanwhile, in the pharmaceutical industry, cell culture is used to manufacture biologic drugs and other advanced treatments, including lifesaving gene and cell therapies.

Both processes are hampered by cells' tendency to stick to surfaces, which leads to a huge amount of waste and downtime for cleaning. A similar problem slows down biofuel production, interferes with biosensors and implants, and makes the food and beverage industry less efficient.

Now, MIT researchers have developed an approach for detaching cells from surfaces on demand, using electrochemically generated bubbles. In an open-access paper published in Science Advances, the researchers demonstrated their approach in a lab prototype and showed it could work across a range of cells and surfaces without harming the cells.

"We wanted to develop a technology that could be high-throughput and plug-and-play, and that would allow cells to attach and detach on demand to improve the workflow in these industrial processes," says Professor Kripa Varanasi, senior author of the study. "This is a fundamental issue with cells, and we've solved it with a process that can scale. It lends itself to many different applications."

Nature’s Blueprint for Robot Swarms
Animals such as bats, whales, and insects have long relied on sound to communicate and find their way. Drawing inspiration from this, an international group of scientists has developed a model for tiny robots that use sound waves to move and work together in large, coordinated swarms that behave almost intelligently. According to team leader Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State, these robotic collectives could eventually take on challenging missions like exploring disaster areas, cleaning polluted environments, or performing medical procedures inside the human body.

“Picture swarms of bees or midges,” Aronson said. “They move, that creates sound, and the sound keeps them cohesive, many individuals acting as one.”

The team’s findings were published in the journal Physical Review X.

Self-Organizing Machines With a Mission
Because these miniature, sound-emitting micromachines can organize themselves, they are capable of navigating confined spaces and reassembling if they are disrupted. This collective or “emergent” intelligence could make them valuable for cleaning contaminated environments, Aronson explained.

In addition to environmental applications, the robotic swarms might one day operate inside the body to deliver medication directly to targeted sites. Their ability to sense environmental changes and “self-heal” allows them to remain functional even after being separated, which could be particularly advantageous for detecting threats or serving as advanced sensors, Aronson said.

The increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year was the biggest ever recorded, the United Nations said Wednesday, calling for urgent action to slash emissions.

Levels of the three main greenhouse gases—the climate-warming CO2, methane and nitrous oxide—all increased yet again in 2024, with each setting new record highs, the UN's weather and climate agency said.

The World Meteorological Organization said the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere from 2023 to 2024 marked the biggest one-year jump since records began in 1957.

Continued fossil CO2 emissions, greater emissions from wildfires, and a troubling reduced absorption by land and sea all drove the increase, the WMO said.

Wednesday's update, which comes ahead of the November 10-21 COP30 UN climate summit in Belem, Brazil, focused exclusively on concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

A separate UN report, out next month, will detail shifts in emissions of the gases, but those numbers are also expected to rise, as they have every year with the world continuing to burn more oil, gas and coal.

This defies commitments made under the 2015 Paris Agreement to cap global warming at "well below" 2C above average levels measured between 1850 and 1900—and 1.5C if possible.

2024 was the warmest year ever recorded.

Feedback loop
The WMO voiced "significant concern" that the land and oceans were becoming unable to soak up CO2, leaving the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

It warned that the planet could be witnessing a so-called "vicious cycle" of climate feedback—whereby increasing greenhouse gas emissions fuel rising temperatures and trigger wildfires that release more CO2, while warmer oceans cannot absorb as much CO2 from the air.

WMO senior scientific officer Oksana Tarasova said feedback may eventually push natural systems to a tipping point—for example, melting permafrost, leading to further emissions.

"Our actions should be towards the side of emission reduction as fast as possible if we don't want to see the domino effect," she told reporters.

Given CO2's role in driving climate change, "achieving net-zero anthropogenic CO2 emissions must be the focus of climate action", according to the report.

Johns Hopkins researchers may have identified a compelling clue in the ongoing hunt to prove the existence of dark matter. A mysterious diffuse glow of gamma rays near the center of the Milky Way has stumped researchers for decades, as they've tried to discern whether the light comes from colliding particles of dark matter or quickly spinning neutron stars.

It turns out that both theories are equally likely, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

If excess gamma light is not from dying stars, it could become the first proof that dark matter exists.

"Dark matter dominates the universe and holds galaxies together. It's extremely consequential and we're desperately thinking all the time of ideas as to how we could detect it," said co-author Joseph Silk, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins and a researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and Sorbonne University. "Gamma rays, and specifically the excess light we're observing at the center of our galaxy, could be our first clue."

Silk and an international team of researchers used supercomputers to create maps of where dark matter should be located in the Milky Way, taking into account for the first time the history of how the galaxy formed.

Today, the Milky Way is a relatively closed system, without materials coming in or going out of it. But this hasn't always been the case. During the first billion years, many smaller galaxy-like systems made of dark matter and other materials entered and became the building blocks of the young Milky Way. As dark matter particles gravitated toward the center of the galaxy and clustered, the number of dark matter collisions increased.

When the researchers factored in more realistic collisions, their simulated maps matched actual gamma ray maps taken by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

These matching maps round out a triad of evidence that suggests excess gamma rays in the center of the Milky Way could originate with dark matter. Gamma rays coming from dark matter particle collisions would produce the same signal and have the same properties as those observed in the real world, the researchers said—though it's not definitive proof.

There's no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound impact on our economies, work and lifestyle. But could this technology also shape the way we think and speak?

AI can be used to draft essays and solve problems in mere seconds that otherwise might take us minutes or hours. When we shift to an over-reliance on such tools, we arguably fail to exercise key skills such as critical thinking and our ability to use language creatively. Precedents from psychology and neuroscience research hint that we should take the possibility seriously.

There are several precedents for technology reconfiguring our minds, rather than just assisting them. Research shows that people who rely on GPS tend to lose part of their ability to form mental maps.

London taxi drivers once memorized hundreds of streets before the advent of satellite navigation. These drivers developed enlarged hippocampi as a result of this. The hippocampus is the brain region associated with spatial memory.

In one of his most striking studies, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky examined patients who suffered from aphasia, a disorder that impairs the ability to understand or produce speech.

When asked to say "snow is black" or to misname a color, they could not. Their minds resisted any separation between words and things. Vygotsky saw this as the loss of a key ability: to use language as an instrument for thinking creatively, and going beyond what is given to us.

Could an over-reliance on AI produce similar problems? When language comes pre-packaged from screens, feeds, or AI systems, the link between thought and speech may begin to wither.

In education, students are using generative AI to compose essays, summarize books, and solve problems in seconds. Within an academic culture already shaped by competition, performance metrics, and quick results, such tools promise efficiency at the cost of reflection.

Many teachers will recognize those students who produce eloquent, grammatically flawless texts but reveal little understanding of what they have written. This represents the quiet erosion of thinking as a creative activity.