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You are what you eat, but what happens to those calories after you eat may depend more on your genes than you think.

Scientists have long suspected that how our bodies deal with calories is somewhat determined by our genetic makeup. Now they’ve zoomed in on one gene—FNIP1—that plays an outsize role in how we burn energy and what our risks of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease are. Around one in 7,000 people carries a broken copy of this gene that almost acts like a GLP-1 drug—the body burns fuel more efficiently, and the risk of disease lowers.

To find the gene, scientists sequenced the coding DNA of more than a million people across three continents to scour for mutations that influence how the body stores and uses fat. FNIP1 stood out.

Paired with a protein called folliculin, FNIP1 slows down cells’ calorie-burning machinery to conserve extra energy when food is plentiful. That’s proved useful over most of human history, enabling us to survive through times when food has been scarce. But if you nix the gene, the opposite happens: the body burns through energy faster and uses up fat instead of storing it, says Viktoria Gusarova, a researcher at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and a co-author of a study detailing the work.

We inherit two copies of a gene, one from each parent. As noted, around one in 7,000 people will inherit a broken copy of FNIP1. In the study, around 150 people had this mutation. They also had lower blood lipids, less liver fat, lower blood sugar, proportionally more muscle and roughly 60 percent lower odds of cardiometabolic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes.

“These individuals consume, store and utilize energy more than individuals without those mutations, and that’s the protective factor,” explains Luca Lotta, a geneticist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and the study’s co-senior author.

The researchers went further, looking at liver cells in the lab to see if silencing FNIP1 could turn on fat-burning genes. And in mice fed a fatty, sugary diet, shutting the pathway down in the liver curbed weight gain, cleared out fat and improved insulin sensitivity. Over 30 weeks, it also prevented the fibrosis and liver damage the diet would otherwise cause. The research was published in Nature.

The mutation is so rare, Lotta says, because evolution can’t keep up with our changing world. “Nowadays, we are living in a very calorie-rich environment, and historically there’s no precedent for this”, Lotta says. “These incredibly rare mutations, which might have been unfavorable for many millennia, are now favorable to the body.”

The team hopes the mutation could help lead to drugs that mimic its effects.

“Individuals with loss-of-function genetic variants can naturally mimic effects of pharmacologic inhibitors, and such studies have led to important therapeutic advances in other diseases,” says Svati Shah, director of the Center for Precision Health at Duke University, who was not involved in the study. Whether deliberately switching off FNIP1 in humans is safe, however, is unclear.

Notably, people who inherit two broken copies of FNIP1 instead of just one are prone to heart disease and immune deficiency. “If you were to therapeutically inhibit the gene everywhere in the body at 100 percent, that could have a negative impact on health,” Lotta says. He suspects that targeting the gene in the liver alone might mitigate the risks. “Any therapy is many years away, though,” he says.

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Josh Hawley/Getty Images

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The scene is set. You’re hyped up for your date night at home. You’ve got salmon in the oven—you even sprung for the wild-caught Alaskan stuff. The side dishes are done, the mood is set, you take the salmon out of the oven, and…it’s covered in white slime. Killjoy.

Don’t worry. It might not be the most appetizing to look at, but those expensive filets are still good.

What Is That White Stuff Oozing Out of My Salmon While It Cooks?

It’s called albumin. And it lives in your salmon, whether it’s cooked or not, no matter where it’s from, how it’s raised, or how much you paid for it.

Albumin is a liquid protein that solidifies when the fish is cooked, seeping out as the muscle fibers contract under heat, thickening and turning bright white. Think of your salmon as a wet towel being rung out. The wringing is the heat, and the water being pushed out is that white stuff you’re seeing. The higher the heat, the more albumin.

Whether you see no albumin at all or your salmon is nearly coated in what looks like glue is completely unrelated to what type of salmon you’re cooking or whether you splurged to buy it. It’s entirely dependent on how you cook it; more on that later.

Is It Safe To Eat?

Albumin may be off-putting, but it’s completely harmless. It is flavorless and has no impact whatsoever on your dinner, other than aesthetically. (And perhaps your ego. Instagram-worthy, it is not.) The fish might be a bit tough, though, as the muscle fibers have contracted so much.

In fact, since albumin is a protein, it’s actually good for you, should you decide not to remove it.

How Do You Prevent It?

An excess of albumin indicates overcooked salmon and/or salmon that was cooked too quickly.

Eliminating albumin completely isn’t likely (sorry, perfectionists), even if you undercook or perfectly cook that fish, but you can get close. If you hope to keep the protein inside your fish instead of dotted on top of it, there are a few things you can do: 

• Don’t overcook it. Salmon should be cooked to 145 degrees F (63 degrees C) and no further. Pulling it off the heat slightly before that (don’t be afraid) will help you hit that number without galloping past it. Using a meat thermometer is the best way to keep tabs on temp, but if you use one, be sure to blot the place where you inserted it with a paper towel before continuing to cook the fish.

• Pat the fish dry with paper towels before cooking. This will discourage the moisture on the surface from steaming your fish.

• Attempt to cook evenly sized pieces. Even if it means cutting into your filets.

• Use a medium temperature instead of a high temperature to cook it. Longer and lower is the name of the game.

Keep it skin-side down for as long as possible when searing. The skin will protect the delicate flesh. Try to cook it 90 percent of the way through before flipping it. You can even turn the heat off when you flip it—the cooking will continue even without the direct heat.

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President Trump’s war against Iran has depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles to troubling levels, siphoning supplies from Asia and Europe, according to senior officials.

The rapidly shrinking supply of air-defense missiles and other critical weaponry in Europe and Asia not only leaves the U.S. military less equipped, but could also leave Russia and China feeling emboldened should they contemplate a potential conflict with the United States, experts said.

Bombing Iran burned through thousands of multimillion-dollar missiles that contain precision parts from a global web of suppliers and can take years to produce. Defending against Iran’s retaliatory barrages has worn down U.S. stocks of air-defense missiles to an extent that has privately alarmed top officials in the Trump administration and has led to the United States’ delaying deliveries to European and Asian customers.

The Iran campaign has forced the Pentagon to rush ships, aircraft and air-defense units from across Europe and Asia to the Middle East, an effort with cascading consequences for equipment maintenance and troop morale, U.S. officials said. The result is a significant erosion of American firepower in those regions, a shift with long-term implications that are a growing concern in the military and intelligence communities, senior U.S. and Western officials said.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the United States has “more than enough firepower to carry out any operation the president orders at any time and place.” But experts say the munitions crisis — part of which Mr. Trump inherited from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — is almost certain to outlast his presidency.

Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the depletion of munitions was a “generational annihilation of the means of conventional deterrence.” The impact on how decisions are made in Beijing and Moscow, he said, could resonate for years.

“It’s impossible for that not to have a significant effect on the decision calculus of Russia and China,” said Mr. Karako, who has been tracking U.S. weapons stockpiles. “They may do something quite deliberate and at the time of their choosing, because keep in mind — we’re going to take years to reconstitute.”

In meetings in the lead-up to the Iran war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the president of the risks of dipping deeper into drained stockpiles, according to two officials with knowledge of the exchanges. Mr. Trump still decided to go ahead, believing the war would be over quickly. A spokesman for General Caine declined to comment on his private conversations with the president.

After attacking Iran alongside Israel on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump repeatedly promised victory within weeks. More than five months later, he remains unable to bend Iran to his will, or even to find a way to end the war. The munitions shortage is said to have played a role in persuading Mr. Trump to put aside a major bombing campaign late last month. But it also shows how the president’s decision to attack Iran has left the United States and its allies more vulnerable to other threats.

The Trump administration has worked with military contractors to try to accelerate and expand production. But even accounting for those efforts, it could take more than two years for the United States to replenish the more than 1,500 Patriot air-defense interceptor missiles that have been used in the Iran war. The current U.S. inventory of those missiles is fewer than 1,700, according to two people briefed on the stockpile who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military details.

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Buildings targeted by airstrikes in Tehran in April. Bombing Iran burned through thousands of multimillion-dollar missiles that contain precision parts from a global web of suppliers and can take years to produce. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is on its way to a metal-rich asteroid beyond Mars—and it’s enjoying the scenic route.

In a flyby maneuver earlier this year, Psyche used the planet’s gravity to reshape its trajectory, all while capturing images that NASA has stitched into a mesmerizing time-lapse video.

The sequence opens with the faint crescent of Mars growing steadily larger before gliding over the planet’s sweeping ocher vistas. The surface is pockmarked with impact craters. Gleaming polar ice caps shine in the sun’s light. The series culminates in a close pass over the planet that was taken before the Psyche spacecraft slipped into interplanetary space.

Launched in 2023, the Psyche mission is headed for an asteroid that scientists suspect may be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet, stripped bare by violent collisions during the solar system’s youth.

As Mars’s gravity slung the spacecraft onto the next leg of its journey, mission scientists used the opportunity to put its multispectral imager through a full dress rehearsal.

“The imager performed brilliantly,” said Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University, in a statement.

“We were also able to fully test its calibration and sensitivity to scattered light, including picking out the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos from very far away as a part of a practice for the satellite search that we’ll use at the asteroid Psyche to look for any moonlets there.”

Already three years into its journey, the Psyche spacecraft still has three more to go until it reaches its destination. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid in 2029.

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In the weeks leading up to the U.S. war with Iran, President Trump cheered on the Iranian protesters rising up against their government, telling them that they should “save the names of the killers and abusers” and that he would come to their aid.

“HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” he promised.

But more than five months into the conflict, liberating the Iranian people has been one of the war’s most glaring unfulfilled objectives.

Iran has executed at least 26 people in connection with the January protests since Mr. Trump made his promise, with many more protesters potentially at risk, according to Amnesty International. U.S. officials believe Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even more interested in pursuing a nuclear weapon than his father, who was killed in an airstrike on the opening day of the war.

And as Iranians remain locked in crisis, Mr. Trump is looking for a way out. Negotiators are working on a deal to restart shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively shut down, as Mr. Trump tries to extricate the United States from a conflict that has lasted far longer, and proved far more costly, than he anticipated.

In an interview this summer, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he never really believed that the uprising he encouraged would happen anyway because Iranian security forces would crush the demonstrators.

“I never thought, unless they could be completely armed, I never thought they’d have that kind of uprising, because these people are violent,” Mr. Trump told the conservative podcaster Hugh Hewitt.

But for Iranians who listened to Mr. Trump’s early promises, the sense of betrayal is real.

“I genuinely thought that help was on the way, but I was so wrong,” said Vahid, a 35-year-old from Tehran who works at a start-up company, echoing a sentiment expressed by numerous Iranians in interviews with The New York Times. All spoke on the condition that The Times identify them only by their first names, out of fear of reprisals from their government.

Maryam, a 36-year-old from Tehran who participated in the January anti-government protests, said Mr. Trump took advantage of a citizen uprising to further his own agenda.

“I feel that Trump and the U.S. are deceitful, and Trump is a showman,” Maryam said. “They used the language of human rights toward only their own benefit.”

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Anti-government protesters in Tehran in January. Iran has executed at least 26 people in connection with the protests since President Trump made his promise. Credit…Getty Images

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Math’s most prestigious prizes were announced today at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Following a lively brass-band performance by the West Philadelphia Orchestra in a massive auditorium at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the president of the International Mathematical Union bestowed the prizes to four mathematicians for work ranging from the theory of knots to the motion of fluids.

The Fields Medals went to Hong Wang of New York University and France’s Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies (IHES), Yu Deng of the University of Chicago, John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.

In the awards’ 90-year history, Wang is only the third woman to win one, after mathematicians Maryam Mirzakhani and Maryna Viazovska in 2014 and 2022, respectively. Wang and Deng represent the prizes’ only Chinese-born recipients besides mathematician Shing-Tung Yau, who won a Fields Medal in 1982.

The awards, often referred to as math’s Nobel Prizes, are named for John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician who led the push for their creation in the 1920s as a way to bring the international math community together. But unlike the Nobels, they are only bestowed every four years and, starting in 1966, only go to researchers who are less than 40 years old.

Hong Wang

When Wang rose to speak during a symposium at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., this past February, she opened with a characteristic note of humility. “Thank you for having me; it’s a great honor,” she said. “Especially when I saw the speaker list, I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t speak.’”

But no one in the rapt audience shared Wang’s opinion. At age 34, her work at the interface of two mathematical fields—taking collections of wavelike equations and using them to explore how shapes fill space—had already transformed both subjects. In particular, a 2025 proof of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture that she co-authored with mathematician Joshua Zahl marked a triumphant end to what had been a fervent, field-defining 50-year search.

Now Wang possesses the ultimate qualification for any list of mathematical greats: a Fields Medal.

The Kakeya conjecture is the answer to a mathematical game: swirl your pencil around in the air so that it points in every direction exactly once while also swiveling it through as little space as possible. Wang and Zahl proved a fundamental limit to how small that space can possibly be.

“She solved the ‘holy grail’ problem,” says Nets Katz, a mathematician at Rice University, adding that this is only one of the accomplishments that “has made her a central figure” in the area. Wang’s Fields Medal, he says, “is well deserved.”

Wang remembers being excited when Mirzakhani became the first woman to win a Fields medal in 2014. But like it was for the late Mirzakhani, who was a reticent public figure, this aspect of the achievement is somewhat secondary to Wang. “I didn’t think too much about it,” she says.

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