Class of 2023
72 things have changed since you graduated
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What’s changed since 2023
Everything here shifted in 2023 or later, some of it too recently to be in any textbook you were handed. These are the corrections the next edition hasn’t printed yet.
Revision level: Partially updated. 28% of the archive changed after 2023. The broad strokes held. The details moved.
- 72things changed
- 31were actually wrong
- 41just got sharper
- 10subjects affected
- Health & NutritionDisproved
A daily glass of red wine is good for your heart
Changed in2023TaughtModerate drinking is healthier than not drinking at all. A glass of red wine a day protects your heart: the famous J-shaped curve, backed by the 'French paradox.'
NowIn January 2023 the WHO stated plainly that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health, and better-controlled studies have shown the apparent benefit of moderate drinking largely dissolves once confounding is removed. Alcohol is a Group 1 carcinogen.
- Physics & ChemistryDisproved
TaughtThere is a fundamental physics limit (the Shockley-Queisser limit, about 33.7%) on how much sunlight a single-junction solar cell can turn into electricity. Real silicon panels top out around 27%, and the theoretical ceiling of roughly one-third is a wall you cannot climb over.
NowIn November 2023, LONGi's crystalline-silicon/perovskite tandem cell was certified at 33.9% efficiency by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the first time a solar cell exceeded the 33.7% single-junction Shockley-Queisser limit.
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- Health & NutritionRefined
BMI tells you whether you are healthy
Changed in2023TaughtCalculate your Body Mass Index, look it up on the chart, and find out if you are underweight, normal, overweight, or obese.
NowIn 2023 the American Medical Association adopted policy stating that BMI is an imperfect measure that should not be used alone, because it ignores body composition and differs in meaning across ethnic groups and sexes.
- Earth ScienceUpdated
Earth's spin axis only wobbles from natural forces
Changed in2023TaughtEarth's rotational axis wanders slightly over time, a natural wobble driven by things like the melting of ancient ice sheets and shifts deep in the planet. It's a geological process, far beyond human influence.
NowA 2023 study found that humans pumping groundwater have measurably shifted Earth's spin axis. Extracting about 2,150 gigatonnes of groundwater between 1993 and 2010, and moving that water to the oceans, tilted the rotational pole roughly 80 cm eastward, about 4.3 cm per year.
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- GeographyUpdated
Every continent has been fully mapped
Changed in2023TaughtThe age of exploration is over. Every continent has been surveyed, charted, and mapped; there are no blank spaces left on the map of Earth's landmasses.
NowIn 2023, Zealandia became the first continent in the world to have its full geology mapped, and it only counts as a continent at all because of work completed after 2017. Almost 95 percent of its five million square kilometres sits underwater, which is exactly why it took until 2023 to chart.
- MedicineUpdated
Gene editing is experimental, with no approved therapy
Changed in2023TaughtCRISPR is a remarkable laboratory tool for editing DNA, but using it to treat patients is years away and purely experimental. No gene-editing therapy has been approved for use in people.
NowOn 8 December 2023 the US FDA approved Casgevy, a CRISPR-based therapy for sickle cell disease, the first approved medicine that edits a patient's DNA. The UK had authorized it weeks earlier.
- Language & CultureDisproved
Good readers guess words from context
Changed in2023TaughtStuck on a word? Look at the picture. Think about what would make sense in the sentence. Check the first letter and take a guess. Sounding it out letter by letter is a last resort.
NowIn the 2023 legislative session alone, eight US states banned this method, called three-cueing, from K-3 classrooms: Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Decades of cognitive science show skilled readers decode words letter by letter; guessing from context is what struggling readers do.
- Technology & ComputingDisproved
TaughtDiscovering a new stable material, the kind that could make a better battery or a superconductor, is slow, hard lab work. Across all of history, chemists had characterized only a few tens of thousands of stable inorganic crystals, each the product of careful synthesis and testing.
NowIn November 2023, Google DeepMind reported in Nature that its GNoME AI had predicted 2.2 million new crystal structures, about 380,000 of them stable: roughly a tenfold jump over all the stable inorganic crystals humanity had catalogued before, generated in a matter of weeks.
- Technology & ComputingDisproved
TaughtA gruelling professional licensing exam (the bar for lawyers, the medical boards for doctors) tests years of specialized human judgement. A computer might answer trivia, but it could not pass the kind of exam that certifies a person to practice a profession.
NowIn March 2023, OpenAI reported that GPT-4 scored high enough on the Uniform Bar Exam to pass in most US jurisdictions, around 75%, and it cleared other professional and graduate exams too. A machine passing the bar went from thought experiment to done.
- Astronomy & SpaceDisproved
No spacecraft has ever landed near the Moon's south pole
Changed in2023TaughtEvery Moon landing (Apollo, the Soviet and Chinese landers) touched down in the relatively flat, easy terrain near the equator. The south polar region, with its rugged shadows and craters that may hold water ice, was a place probes flew over or crashed into, never a place anyone had softly landed.
NowOn 23 August 2023, India's Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down at about 69° south: the first soft landing anywhere near the lunar south pole, and the fourth country ever to land on the Moon.
- MedicineDisproved
Nothing can slow Alzheimer's, only ease the symptoms
Changed in2023TaughtThere is no way to slow or stop Alzheimer's disease. The available drugs treat symptoms like memory loss and agitation for a while, but the underlying decline is unstoppable.
NowIn 2023 the FDA fully approved lecanemab (Leqembi), an antibody that clears amyloid from the brain and modestly slows cognitive decline, the first treatment shown to change the course of the disease rather than only its symptoms.
- Earth ScienceRefined
The Earth has a crust, a mantle, and a core
Changed in2023TaughtCut the Earth in half and you get neat concentric shells: crust, mantle, liquid outer core, solid inner core. Four layers, colored on the diagram.
NowThere is evidence of a distinct innermost inner core, roughly 650 kilometers across, with a different crystal alignment from the rest of the inner core. Published in Nature Communications in February 2023, it makes a fifth layer.
- Astronomy & SpaceDisproved
TaughtLIGO can catch the sharp chirp of two black holes merging nearby, but the deep background hum (the overlapping ripples of countless supermassive black holes across all of cosmic history, stretching spacetime over years and decades) is far too slow and too faint for any instrument to pick out.
NowIn June 2023, the NANOGrav collaboration and three other pulsar-timing arrays announced compelling evidence for exactly that background: a sea of nanohertz gravitational waves, most likely from supermassive black-hole binaries, detected by watching pulsars scattered across the galaxy tick out of sync.
- MedicineUpdated
TaughtNaloxone (Narcan) can reverse an opioid overdose in minutes, but it is a medication; you get it through a pharmacist, a prescription, or a special standing order. It is not something you buy off a shelf like aspirin.
NowOn 29 March 2023 the FDA approved Narcan nasal spray for over-the-counter sale, the first naloxone product cleared for use without any prescription, clearing the way for it to be stocked in supermarkets, convenience stores, vending machines, and online.
- HistoryUpdated
The world is in a COVID-19 public health emergency
Changed in2023TaughtCOVID-19 is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern: the World Health Organization's highest level of global alarm, declared on 30 January 2020. The world is in an active, emergency phase of the pandemic.
NowOn 5 May 2023, the WHO declared that COVID-19 is no longer a public health emergency of international concern, ending the emergency phase after more than three years as immunity rose and deaths and hospitalizations fell.
- MedicineDisproved
There is no pill for postpartum depression
Changed in2023TaughtPostpartum depression is treated with the same general antidepressants used for everything else, which take weeks to work. There is no medication designed specifically for it, and the one dedicated drug that existed required a 60-hour IV infusion in a hospital.
NowOn 4 August 2023 the FDA approved Zurzuvae (zuranolone), the first oral medication developed specifically for postpartum depression, a once-daily pill taken for 14 days that can improve symptoms within days rather than weeks.
- MedicineDisproved
There is no vaccine for RSV
Changed in2023TaughtRespiratory syncytial virus (RSV) sends tens of thousands of older adults and infants to the hospital every year, and there is nothing to prevent it. Sixty years of vaccine attempts had failed (one 1960s trial made the disease worse) so RSV was the textbook example of a virus we could not vaccinate against.
NowIn May 2023 the FDA approved Arexvy, the world's first RSV vaccine, for adults 60 and older, followed within weeks by a second. In trials a single dose cut the risk of symptomatic RSV illness by about 83% and severe illness by roughly 94%.
- BiologyDisproved
Tyrannosaurus rex bared its huge teeth like a crocodile
Changed in2023TaughtPicture T. rex and you picture the teeth: rows of banana-sized daggers jutting out even when the mouth is shut, exposed to the air like a crocodile's. Every model, museum mount, and movie monster agreed.
NowA March 2023 study in Science concluded that T. rex and other big theropods had scaly, lizard-like lips that fully covered their teeth when the mouth was closed. The crocodile-style permanent snarl appears to be wrong.
- BiologyUpdated
We will never know what killed Beethoven
Changed in2023TaughtBeethoven died in 1827 after years of illness, deafness, and abdominal suffering, and the cause was lost to history. Without a body to examine, the best anyone could offer was speculation: lead poisoning, syphilis, a dozen guesses.
NowIn March 2023, researchers sequenced Beethoven's genome from authenticated locks of his hair and reported, in Current Biology, that he carried strong genetic risk factors for liver disease and had been infected with hepatitis B, a combination that, with his drinking, points to liver failure as the likely cause of death.
- Health & NutritionDisproved
TaughtA daily multivitamin is basic health insurance; it fills the gaps in an imperfect diet and, over a lifetime, helps you stay healthy and live longer.
NowA June 2024 analysis in JAMA Network Open, pooling nearly 400,000 healthy US adults followed for more than 20 years, found that daily multivitamin use was not associated with any lower risk of death.
- Physics & ChemistryDisproved
TaughtTwo-dimensional materials are a carbon curiosity. Graphene works because graphite is already made of weakly bound sheets you can peel apart; a true metal like gold is a three-dimensional lattice and would simply clump up long before you reached a single free-standing atomic layer.
NowIn 2024 researchers at Linköping University made 'goldene': a free-standing sheet of gold exactly one atom thick, the first two-dimensional metal. Cornered into two dimensions, gold even stops behaving like a normal metal and takes on semiconductor-like properties.
- Technology & ComputingDisproved
TaughtReusable rockets land the way SpaceX's Falcon 9 does, deploying legs and setting down on a pad or a drone ship. The idea of a skyscraper-sized booster steering itself back and being plucked out of mid-air by the launch tower is a rendering, not something anyone has done.
NowOn 13 October 2024, on the fifth Starship test flight, SpaceX's Super Heavy booster flew itself back to the launch tower and was caught in mid-descent by two giant mechanical arms, the 'chopsticks', on the first attempt. No booster had ever been recovered that way before.
- Technology & ComputingDisproved
TaughtQubits are so fragile that the more of them you string together, the more errors pile up. Error correction was a beautiful theory, but in practice every extra qubit added more noise than it removed, so a useful, scaled quantum computer stayed permanently over the horizon.
NowIn December 2024 Google reported in Nature that its Willow chip crossed the error-correction threshold: as it went from a 3×3 to a 5×5 to a 7×7 grid of physical qubits, the logical error rate was cut roughly in half at each step. For the first time, adding qubits made the encoded information more reliable, not less.
- Language & CultureUpdated
Cursive is obsolete, you'll never need it
Changed in2024TaughtWe don't do cursive anymore. It was dropped from the standards because you'll type everything that matters. Print your name, learn to keyboard, move on.
NowCursive is being legislated back into classrooms. California's AB 446, passed unanimously and in effect since January 2024, requires cursive instruction in grades one through six, joining a growing list of states that have re-mandated it after Common Core dropped it in 2010.
- BiologyUpdated
TaughtBeyond ABO and Rh, blood typing is a mostly closed book. The International Society of Blood Transfusion recognises a fixed roster of blood group systems, 44 of them, and the mysteries were solved long ago.
NowIn 2024, researchers at NHS Blood and Transplant and the University of Bristol described the MAL blood group system, the 47th recognised system, finally explaining the AnWj antigen, whose genetic basis had been a mystery since 1972.
- GeographyUpdated
Mount Everest's height is fixed
Changed in2024TaughtMount Everest is a certain fixed height. It rose when India collided with Asia millions of years ago, and now it just stands there as the world's tallest mountain.
NowA 2024 study found Everest is actively growing, rising up to about 2 millimetres a year, and is 15 to 50 metres taller than it 'should' be because a river gorge 75 km away is eroding away rock and letting the crust below rebound upward. The mountain is being pushed up by the loss of land nearby.
- Astronomy & SpaceUpdated
Nothing humanmade can survive flying close to the Sun
Changed in2024TaughtThe Sun's surface is thousands of degrees, and its corona is hotter still. Any spacecraft that ventured near it would be destroyed, so our star can only ever be studied from a safe distance.
NowOn 24 December 2024, NASA's Parker Solar Probe passed just 3.8 million miles from the Sun's surface (flying through the corona at about 430,000 mph, the closest and fastest any human-made object has ever come to a star) and radioed home days later, intact.
- BiologyDisproved
TaughtThe only complete wiring diagram of a brain (a 'connectome') belongs to the roundworm C. elegans, with its 302 neurons. Mapping every neuron and every connection in anything more complex is far beyond what anyone can do.
NowOn 2 October 2024, the FlyWire consortium published in Nature the complete connectome of an adult fruit fly brain: all 139,255 neurons and more than 50 million synapses, mapped and annotated. It is the most complex brain ever fully wired up.
- Astronomy & SpaceDisproved
TaughtSoft-landing on the Moon is so hard that only three superpowers (the United States, the Soviet Union, and China) have ever managed it. A soft landing is a feat of national space programs, not something a private company can do.
NowOn 22 February 2024, Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander touched down near the Moon's south pole: the first soft landing on the Moon by a privately built spacecraft, and the first American landing of any kind since Apollo 17 in 1972.
- MedicineUpdated
TaughtThe U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that routine screening mammograms begin at age 50. For women in their 40s, whether to screen was an individual decision to weigh with a doctor, not a blanket recommendation.
NowOn 30 April 2024, the USPSTF issued a final recommendation that all women at average risk begin screening mammography at age 40, every other year, through age 74, moving the universal starting age down a full decade.
- HistoryUpdated
Stonehenge's Altar Stone came from Wales
Changed in2024TaughtStonehenge's bluestones, including the large recumbent Altar Stone at the center, were brought from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, roughly 150 miles away.
NowA 2024 Nature study showed the six-tonne Altar Stone does not match Welsh rock at all. Its mineral ages and chemistry match the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland, more than 460 miles (750 km) away, the longest-distance megalith transport known from Neolithic Europe.
- Earth ScienceUpdated
The Dragon Hole is the deepest blue hole on Earth
Changed in2024TaughtThe deepest known underwater sinkhole (a 'blue hole') is the Dragon Hole in the South China Sea, plunging about 300 metres. That is the record you would have found in any recent reference.
NowIn 2024, researchers reported that Taam Ja' Blue Hole in Mexico's Chetumal Bay reaches at least 420 metres deep, more than 100 metres deeper than the Dragon Hole, and that the instrument never touched the bottom, so the true depth is greater still.
- HistoryDisproved
TaughtThe earliest figurative cave paintings are the European ones, Chauvet and Lascaux in France, Altamira in Spain, and Europe is where prehistoric art and visual storytelling began, around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.
NowIn July 2024, a scene on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi was dated to at least 51,200 years ago, making it the oldest known figurative art anywhere. It shows three human-like figures around a wild pig, which also makes it the oldest known example of narrative storytelling in art.
- Earth ScienceUpdated
The world has never crossed the 1.5°C warming line
Changed in2024TaughtThe Paris Agreement's 1.5°C limit is a distant guardrail. Global temperatures are rising, but no calendar year has ever averaged more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels; that threshold is something to prevent in the decades ahead.
Now2024 was the first calendar year to average more than 1.5°C above the 1850–1900 baseline: about 1.55°C by the WMO's consolidated analysis of six datasets, and the warmest year on record. The line that anchored a generation of climate targets was crossed for a full year for the first time.
- MedicineDisproved
TaughtNon-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), the serious, scarring form of fatty liver disease, has no medication. Despite affecting millions, the only treatment is losing weight through diet and exercise; every drug candidate had failed in trials.
NowOn 14 March 2024, the FDA approved resmetirom (Rezdiffra) for NASH, now called MASH, with moderate-to-advanced liver fibrosis. It is the first drug ever approved for the disease, after decades in which every candidate fell short.
- Earth ScienceUpdated
We have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene
Changed in2024TaughtHuman activity has pushed Earth out of the Holocene and into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, defined by our impact on the planet. It is the epoch we now live in.
NowIn March 2024 the scientific bodies that name geological time formally rejected the proposal to add the Anthropocene as an epoch. Officially, we are still in the Holocene. "Anthropocene" survives as a useful informal term, not a unit on the geological timescale.
- MedicineUpdated
You cannot transplant an animal's organ into a human
Changed in2024TaughtTransplants have to come from human donors. An organ from another species would be rejected by the immune system within minutes, so cross-species transplants are impossible.
NowOn 16 March 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a gene-edited pig kidney into a living patient, the first time an animal organ was placed in a living human. Earlier gene-edited pig hearts and kidneys had been tried in brain-dead recipients and, in 2022, in one living heart patient.
- Language & CultureReplaced
You'll take the SAT with a No. 2 pencil
Changed in2024TaughtBring two sharpened No. 2 pencils. Fill the bubble completely. Erase cleanly. Three hours, a paper booklet, and a proctor telling you when to put your pencil down.
NowThe paper SAT no longer exists. As of March 9, 2024, the test is digital-only, taken on a laptop or tablet through an app called Bluebook. It is also a different test: about two hours instead of three, adaptive, with shorter reading passages and a calculator allowed on all of the math.
A day on Uranus is 17 hours and 14 minutes long
Changed in2025TaughtUranus rotates once every 17 hours and 14 minutes. Voyager 2 measured it during its 1986 flyby by timing the planet's radio emissions and magnetic field, and that has been the figure ever since.
NowIn April 2025, using a decade of Hubble observations of Uranus's auroras, astronomers pinned the rotation period at 17 hours, 14 minutes and 52 seconds: about 28 seconds longer than Voyager's value, and a thousand times more precise.
A gene therapy has to be developed for a whole patient population, never for one child
Changed in2025TaughtDeveloping a gene-editing therapy takes many years and enormous cost, so it only makes sense for diseases shared by thousands of patients. A treatment designed and manufactured for a single individual's exact mutation is science fiction.
NowIn May 2025 a team at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia treated an infant known as KJ Muldoon, who had a severe CPS1 urea-cycle disorder, with a CRISPR base-editing therapy custom-built for his specific mutation, from diagnosis to dosing in about six months. It was the first personalized in-vivo gene-editing medicine made for one person.
Computers can't do original mathematical reasoning; no machine could win a math olympiad
Changed in2025TaughtComputers are fast calculators, but genuine mathematical creativity (reading a hard, unseen olympiad problem and inventing a multi-step proof) is a distinctly human act. A machine can crunch numbers; it cannot reason its way to a novel proof under exam conditions.
NowIn July 2025, AI systems from Google DeepMind and OpenAI both scored 35 out of 42 on the International Mathematical Olympiad, gold-medal level, solving five of six problems as free-form written proofs, under the same rules and time limits as human contestants.
Earth's inner core is a solid, rigid ball of iron
Changed in2025TaughtAt the centre of the Earth is the inner core, a solid ball of iron and nickel, frozen rigid by immense pressure despite being as hot as the Sun's surface. It's the one solid, unchanging part of the deep Earth.
NowA 2025 study found the inner core's surface is deforming and changing shape over time, its boundary flexing like something viscous, not standing rigid. Turbulence in the liquid outer core appears to be reshaping the inner core's near-surface at a surprisingly fast rate.
Internet slang isn't real English
Changed in2025TaughtSlang from the internet is not proper English. It's a fad, it won't last, and it certainly doesn't belong anywhere near a dictionary.
NowIn August 2025 the Cambridge Dictionary added 'skibidi', 'delulu', and 'tradwife' among 6,212 new words, phrases, and senses in a single year. The editors' stated bar was staying power: these words were tracked in real usage and stuck around long enough to earn entries.
Nothing you can be given lowers your risk of dementia
Changed in2025TaughtDementia is a matter of genes and age. There is no vaccine and no ordinary medication that measurably lowers a person's chance of developing it; prevention is limited to vague lifestyle advice.
NowIn April 2025 a study in Nature exploited a vaccine-eligibility cutoff in Wales as a natural experiment and found that people who received the shingles vaccine were about 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over the following seven years, the strongest causal-leaning evidence yet that a widely used vaccine is associated with lower dementia risk.
TaughtObesity is one thing: a BMI of 30 or above. You either cross that line or you don't, and crossing it means you have the disease of obesity.
NowIn January 2025 a Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission of 58 experts split the concept in two ('clinical obesity,' an actual disease with organ dysfunction caused by excess body fat, and 'preclinical obesity,' excess fat with raised future risk but no current illness) and moved diagnosis beyond BMI alone.
TaughtInterstellar visitors are vanishingly rare. We have seen exactly two objects confirmed to come from beyond our solar system: 'Oumuamua in 2017 and comet Borisov in 2019. Catching a third is a someday hope.
NowOn 1 July 2025 the NASA-funded ATLAS survey spotted 3I/ATLAS, the third confirmed interstellar object, a comet on a wildly hyperbolic orbit that could only have come from another star system.
Pompeii was buried and abandoned in 79 CE
Changed in2025TaughtMount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE, killing its inhabitants and sealing the city under ash. It lay empty and forgotten until its rediscovery and excavation in the eighteenth century.
NowExcavations reported in 2025 show people moved back into the ruins after the eruption and lived there for centuries. Survivors and newcomers built dwellings among the buried upper storeys, with coins, ceramics, ovens, and oil lamps documenting occupation from the late first century into the fifth.
TaughtFD&C Red No. 3 (erythrosine) is a federally approved color additive, used for decades in candy, drinks, and medicines. It is on the shelf, so it must be considered safe to eat.
NowOn 15 January 2025 the FDA revoked the authorization for Red No. 3 in food and ingested drugs, ordering it removed from the food supply. The dye had already been banned from cosmetics in 1990; the food ban closes a 35-year gap.
Saturn has 82 moons
Changed in2025TaughtSaturn is the moon champion of the solar system with 82 moons, having narrowly overtaken Jupiter. That is the tidy, memorizable number for the ringed planet's family.
NowIn March 2025 the International Astronomical Union recognized 128 newly confirmed moons of Saturn in one stroke, bringing its total to 274, more than every other planet in the solar system combined.
TaughtThe brain is the body's most protected organ, sealed off by the blood-brain barrier, a tight lining that evolution spent half a billion years perfecting to keep foreign material out. Environmental particles like microplastics circulate in the body but do not reach the brain.
NowA February 2025 study in Nature Medicine found that human brains contain roughly a plastic spoon's worth of micro- and nanoplastics, far more than the liver or kidneys, and that the amount rose about 50% between 2016 and 2024. The barrier is not the seal it was assumed to be.
The body of water south of the US is the Gulf of Mexico
Changed in2025TaughtThe large body of water bordered by the United States, Mexico, and Cuba is the Gulf of Mexico, a name it has held on maps for over four centuries.
NowIn 2025, a US executive order renamed it the 'Gulf of America' for federal use, and the US Geographic Names Information System updated the name on 10 February 2025. The change is binding only inside the US government, Mexico and most of the world still call it the Gulf of Mexico, and there is no international authority that can settle it.
TaughtOur galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are falling toward each other and will smash together in roughly 4.5 billion years, merging into a single giant elliptical galaxy sometimes nicknamed 'Milkomeda.' It is a certainty, just a distant one.
NowA June 2025 study in Nature Astronomy ran 100,000 simulations with the latest Gaia and Hubble data and found only about a 50-50 chance the two galaxies collide within the next 10 billion years. The head-on merger is no longer a sure thing.
The tokamak is the only serious path to fusion; the stellarator is a scientific curiosity
Changed in2025TaughtMagnetic-confinement fusion means the tokamak, the doughnut design that holds every record. The stellarator, with its baroque twisted magnets, is an elegant idea that never kept up. It is a research sideline, not a contender.
NowOn 22 May 2025 the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator held the fusion 'triple product' (the combination of density, temperature and confinement time that gauges how close you are to a power plant) at a record level for 43 seconds, outperforming what any tokamak had sustained for that long.
TaughtThere is no HIV vaccine and no long-lasting way to prevent infection. Prevention comes down to condoms or, more recently, a pill taken every single day without fail.
NowIn June 2025 the FDA approved lenacapavir (Yeztugo), an injection given just twice a year that prevented HIV in essentially everyone who received it in trials, close to 100% effective.
We have no idea what a Denisovan looked like
Changed in2025TaughtDenisovans are an extinct human cousin known almost entirely from a finger bone, a few teeth, and the DNA inside them. There is no skull, and no real idea what their faces looked like.
NowIn June 2025, molecular analysis identified the near-complete "Dragon Man" skull from Harbin, China as Denisovan, the first Denisovan skull ever recognized and the first genuine look at their face.
We have no idea what a Denisovan looked like
Changed in2025TaughtDenisovans are an extinct human relative known only from a few teeth and a finger bone from a Siberian cave. We have their DNA but no skull, so we don't know what they looked like.
NowIn 2025, molecular analysis identified the near-complete 'Dragon Man' skull from Harbin, China, as Denisovan, giving the group its first face. Ancient proteins and DNA from the skull's tooth plaque tied the massive, heavy-browed cranium, at least 146,000 years old, to the Denisovan lineage.
TaughtMedicines work by binding a target protein and blocking it, like a key jammed in a lock. The drug has to stay bound to keep working, and proteins the body considers 'undruggable', with no good pocket to grab, are simply out of reach.
NowOn 1 May 2026 the FDA approved vepdegestrant (Veppanu), the first PROTAC ever authorized anywhere. Instead of blocking its target, it tags the protein for the cell's own disposal machinery, so the protein is destroyed rather than merely occupied.
TaughtThe CRISPR therapy Casgevy that can functionally cure sickle cell disease was approved for people twelve and older. Young children, who suffer the most damage from the disease early on, were left waiting on the sidelines.
NowOn 1 July 2026 the FDA expanded Casgevy (exagamglogene autotemcel) to children as young as two with severe sickle cell disease or transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia: the first one-time genetic therapy approved for that age group, adding roughly 5,500 eligible children in the US.
Cerebral folate deficiency has no treatment
Changed in2026TaughtWhen a genetic fault blocks folate from reaching the brain, children develop seizures, movement disorders, and severe developmental delay. It is a devastating, untreatable condition; you manage the symptoms and little else.
NowOn 10 March 2026 the FDA approved Wellcovorin (leucovorin calcium) as the first treatment for cerebral folate transport deficiency caused by variants in the FOLR1 gene. Leucovorin is a form of folate that can slip into the brain by a different route, bypassing the broken transporter.
TaughtWhen a child is born deaf because of a genetic defect, the ear is broken at the source. A cochlear implant can route sound around the damage, but there is no way to fix the underlying biology and give the ear its own hearing back.
NowOn 23 April 2026 the FDA approved Otarmeni (lunsotogene parvec), a one-time gene therapy for deafness caused by variants in the OTOF gene. It delivers a working copy of the gene to the inner ear, and most treated patients gained usable hearing, some reaching normal levels, including whispers.
TaughtArginase 1 deficiency lets the amino acid arginine build to toxic levels, causing stiffness, seizures, and developmental regression. There is no drug for it. Management means a severely protein-restricted diet, for life, and it is rarely enough.
NowOn 23 February 2026 the FDA granted accelerated approval to Loargys (pegzilarginase), an engineered enzyme injected to break down the excess arginine the body cannot clear on its own, the first therapy that directly targets the disease.
For early bladder cancer, BCG is the only option, and nothing has improved on it in decades
Changed in2026TaughtHigh-risk bladder cancer that hasn't invaded the muscle is treated by putting BCG, a tuberculosis vaccine, into the bladder. It has been the standard since the 1970s, and despite the cancer often coming back, nothing has been added to it in a generation.
NowOn 28 May 2026 the FDA approved durvalumab (Imfinzi) in combination with BCG for high-risk, non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer: the first immunotherapy combination for the disease, and the first genuinely new approach layered onto BCG in decades.
TaughtThree hundred million years ago, dragonfly-like insects grew to the size of hawks. The standard explanation: atmospheric oxygen was around 45% higher than today, and because insects breathe through passive tubes rather than lungs, only that oxygen-rich air could supply a body that large. When oxygen fell, giant insects became impossible.
NowA 2026 study in Nature found that the insect breathing system is nowhere near its oxygen-delivery limit, so oxygen alone cannot explain the giants. The prevailing high-oxygen theory of insect gigantism doesn't hold up.
TaughtFinding a new asteroid, or catching a supernova as it flares, is painstaking work: an astronomer comparing images, spotting a moving dot or a new point of light, confirming it night by night. Discoveries come in ones and tens, and the vast majority of the sky's changes pass unseen.
NowOn 30 June 2026, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory began its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, imaging the entire southern sky every few nights. In just six weeks of early optimization runs it had already found over 11,000 new asteroids, and in full operation it issues up to about 7 million alerts of changes in the sky every single night.
No human has traveled beyond Earth orbit since 1972, and none will for the foreseeable future
Changed in2026TaughtThe last people to leave low-Earth orbit were the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. Ever since, human spaceflight has been stuck circling a few hundred kilometres up (the Space Shuttle, the ISS) and returning to deep space felt perpetually a decade away.
NowOn 1 April 2026, NASA's Artemis II launched four astronauts on a flight around the Moon, the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17. They looped around the far side and splashed down safely on 10 April, traveling farther from Earth than any humans in history.
Nothing can reach the brain damage of Hunter syndrome
Changed in2026TaughtIn Hunter syndrome, a missing enzyme lets sugary molecules pile up in cells throughout the body and the brain. Enzyme replacement can help the body, but the replacement enzyme cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, so the cognitive decline is untouchable.
NowOn 25 March 2026 the FDA approved Avlayah (tividenofusp alfa), an enzyme replacement engineered to cross the blood-brain barrier: the first treatment for Hunter syndrome aimed at its neurological damage, and the first FDA approval for the disease in nearly twenty years.
The charred Herculaneum scrolls can never be read
Changed in2026TaughtThe library of carbonized papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum, charred solid by the same eruption that buried Pompeii, is unreadable. Unrolling them destroys them, so their contents are lost forever, a whole ancient library we can see but never open.
NowThey can be read without being opened. Using high-resolution CT scans and machine learning, the Vesuvius Challenge recovered the first words in 2023 and full passages in 2024, and in 2026 an entire scroll, PHerc. 1667, was virtually unwrapped and read end to end for the first time.
TaughtThe blockbuster weight-loss and diabetes drugs (semaglutide, tirzepatide) are peptides, fragile protein-like chains your stomach digests. That is why they come as weekly injections. You cannot simply put them in a swallowable, mass-produced tablet.
NowOn 1 April 2026 the FDA approved Foundayo (orforglipron), the first small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist: a once-daily pill you can take any time of day, with no food or water restrictions, and that can be manufactured at pharmaceutical scale like an ordinary tablet.
TaughtThe biologics that clear moderate-to-severe psoriasis are large antibody proteins. Swallow one and your gut digests it like food, so they only work as injections. A pill that targets the same pathway is not chemically possible.
NowOn 18 March 2026 the FDA approved Icotyde (icotrokinra), the first oral IL-23 pathway drug for plaque psoriasis. It is a small engineered peptide designed to survive the gut and block the same target the injected biologics hit.
TaughtHigh blood pressure is treated with the same handful of drug families your parents took: diuretics, ACE inhibitors, ARBs, calcium-channel blockers, beta-blockers. Nothing mechanistically new has arrived in decades, and for resistant patients the cupboard is bare.
NowOn 18 May 2026 the FDA approved baxdrostat (Baxfendy), an aldosterone synthase inhibitor, the first mechanistically new class of blood-pressure drug in decades. It blocks the enzyme that makes aldosterone, a hormone that drives hard-to-treat hypertension.
TaughtFocal segmental glomerulosclerosis scars the kidney's filters and marches toward dialysis or a transplant. There is no drug approved specifically for it; doctors borrow steroids and blood-pressure medicines off-label and hope.
NowOn 13 April 2026 the FDA gave full approval to sparsentan (Filspari) as the first medicine ever approved specifically to treat FSGS, based on the phase 3 DUPLEX trial showing it reduced the protein leakage that drives the disease.
TaughtTriple-negative breast cancer lacks the three receptors that targeted drugs aim at, which is what 'triple-negative' means. With no target to hit, treatment falls back on general chemotherapy, and outcomes are poor.
NowOn 22 May 2026 the FDA approved Datroway (datopotamab deruxtecan), the first targeted therapy to beat chemotherapy on survival in first-line metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. It homes in on a protein called TROP2 and delivers a chemotherapy payload directly to the tumor cells.
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