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After running the world’s first doctoral program in radiation biology, James Newell Stannard spent his retirement researching “Radioactivity and Health: A History.” The exhaustive record of the field’s early days, published in 1988, mentions some of the work done at a U.S. Navy radiation lab headquartered in San Francisco. Some but not all, because the paper trail was incomplete. When the Navy closed the lab in 1969, “they threw out nearly all records, and there is nowhere, at least so far as I can find, one complete set of Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory reports!” Stannard said in a 1979 interview. (Roberts, 12/12)

One of the world’s largest funders of biomedical research is looking to spread the wealth around a little more evenly. The nonprofit Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will bar institutions that already have two or more beneficiaries of its Investigator Program from applying for a round of funds to be awarded in 2027. (Oza, 12/13)

In handwritten cursive, a Russian immigrant named Marina wrote out the story of the day U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents took away her 1-year-old baby while she was being held in a detention facility in southern California. “I cried and begged, kneeling, not to do this, that this was a mistake, not justice and not right,” she wrote. “She was so little that no one knew anything about her. I was very afraid for her and still am!” This didn’t happen during the Trump administration, which separated more than 4,000 migrant children from their families under its controversial “zero tolerance” policy. Marina was separated from her baby in April of this year. (Rosenberg, 12/12)

A pair of new studies sheds light on a pivotal but mysterious chapter of the human origin story, revealing that modern humans and Neanderthals had babies together for an extended period, peaking 47,000 years ago — leaving genetic fingerprints in modern-day people. (Johnson, 12/12)

An investigation into how women in India, Argentina, Greece, and Taiwan are paid for their eggs—and sometimes exploited—in the billion-dollar global fertility industry. (Pearson, Brice, Berfield, Silver, Matsuyama, Wang, Rangarajan and Nikiforaki, 12/12)

The average American first sees online pornography at age 12, and nearly three-quarters of all teenagers have encountered it, according to a 2023 survey of adolescents by Common Sense. It’s enough to make most any parent squirm, but Brian Willoughby, a social scientist at Brigham Young University who studies the pornography habits of adolescents and the impact on relationships, has some advice: “Don’t panic.” Instead, he says, help your child understand that “this is a normal and acceptable topic, even if you’re stressed out.” Here are some suggestions for how to broach the subject. (Richtel, 12/12)

Brian Willoughby knows he’s doing a good job when parents become uncomfortable. That’s because part of his job involves telling them that their teenagers are looking at pornography — hard-core, explicit, often violent. Sometimes, the conversation is with a church group. Dr. Willoughby is a social scientist at Brigham Young University, where he studies the pornography habits of adolescents and the impact this has on relationships. When he goes into the community to explain what the modern world is like, he speaks plainly. (Richtel, 12/12)