Lester and Dr. Krishna dive into:

• Beetlejuice & “Bracelet” – why a red super-giant may soon swallow its tiny partner

• Atomic Harlem Shake – 0.15 Å resolution images of thermal jiggles in 2-D materials

• Too Fast, Too Furious – IceCube’s constraints on proton fractions in 10²⁰ eV cosmic rays

• Interstellar Google Maps – New Horizons proves star-pattern navigation works

• Mind-Body Woo-Woo – VR coughs that literally raise your white-blood-cell count

Last week the Earth finished a full rotation one millisecond early – but that’s just the opener.

In this week’s From First Principles we dive into six mind-bending headlines with our trademark mix of hard science and light-hearted banter:

Earth’s fastest spin ever recorded – what shaved a millisecond off the day and why your chakras are still safe.

ALMA spots a “baby Earth” forming 1,300 light years away – the first direct look at rocky planets in the making.

Biggest black-hole merger on record – 15 ☉ of mass vaporized into pure gravitational waves, detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA.

CRISPR reveals a vitamin-D “kill switch” for tumors – how silencing one gene in pancreatic & colon cancers triggers 4,000 downstream changes.

A star that died… then died again – the first confirmed “double-detonation” white-dwarf supernova.

DeepMind’s Aeneas AI deciphers broken Latin tablets – giving historians new text, provenance and dating in seconds.

👋 Hosts • Lester Nare – storyteller & professional curiosity machine • Dr. Krishna Choudhary – Princeton-trained physicist & cosmic tour guide

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