#groundbreaking-science

[dickgreyson]

... did u kno that for the first time ever, in a way that is so cutting edge u would not believe, we r starting to also consider the MATERNAL effects of ceasing regular medications taken before pregnancy, not just fetal impacts...........

[bottledclxuds]

jayce has a very 0.5able face. like if arcane was set in modern times he would be that one friend you always take 0.5 pics of

[blueiscoool]

Groundbreaking Pig Heart Transplant is Performed for the Second Time

For the second time ever, a pig heart has been transplanted into a living human recipient, the University of Maryland Medical Center announced on Friday.

The groundbreaking surgery was done on September 20 at UMMC by the same transplant team that preformed the first such experimental surgery in 2022.

In a news release, the hospital said the recipient, 58-year-old Lawrence Faucette, “is currently breathing on his own, and his heart is functioning well without any assistance from supportive devices.”

Faucette had end-stage heart disease. He had pre-existing peripheral vascular disease and complications with internal bleeding making him ineligible for a traditional heart transplant, the hospital said in the release. He was admitted to UMMC on September 14 after experiencing symptoms of heart failure.

“My only real hope left is to go with the pig heart, the xenotransplant,” Faucette told the hospital in an internal interview several days before the surgery.

The experimental xenotransplant surgery was green lit under the US Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” program. According to the FDA, the program is “a potential pathway for a patient with a serious or immediately life-threatening disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product (drug, biologic, or medical device) for treatment outside of clinical trials when no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy options are available.”

The pig heart used came from a genetically modified pig from Revivcor, a subsidiary the United Therapeutics Corporation. The pig had 10 genes edited, including three genes “knocked out” or inactivated to eliminate the alpha gal sugar in the pig’s blood cells, which can trigger a severe reaction in the human immune system, causing organ rejection. An additional pig gene was modified to control for the growth of the pig’s heart while 6 human genes were added into the pig’s genome to increase acceptance by the immune system. The FDA first approved the gene edited pigs in 2020 for potential therapeutic use and consumption.

Doctors are also treating Faucette with an experimental antibody treatment to further suppress the immune system and prevent rejection. He will be closely monitored for any signs of rejection or any development of pig related viruses. The donor pig was also closely screened for any signs of virus or pathogens.

“We are once again offering a dying patient a shot at a longer life, and we are incredibly grateful to Mr. Faucette for his bravery and willingness to help advance our knowledge of this field,” said Dr. Bartley Griffith, in the release. Griffith is the surgeon who performed the transplant and is a professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The hospital said Faucette fully consented to the experimental treatment and was informed of all the risks. In addition, he underwent a full psychiatric evaluation and discussed his case with a medical ethicist.

According to the hospital’s news release, Faucette is a married father of two from Frederick, Maryland and a 20-year Navy veteran who had most recently worked as a lab technician at the National Institutes of Health before retiring.

“We have no expectations other than hoping for more time together,” said his wife Ann Faucette, in the release. “That could be as simple as sitting on the front porch and having coffee together.” There are currently no clinical trials that utilize pig organs for transplants in living human beings. The University of Maryland performed the first such experimental surgery on 57-year-old David Bennett in January 2022. Bennett died two months following the surgery.

While there were no signs of rejection in the initial weeks following the transplant, an autopsy concluded that Bennett ultimately died of heart failure from “a complex array of factors,” including Bennett’s condition prior to the surgery. Bennet had already been hospitalized and kept on a heart lung bypass machine for 6 weeks prior to the transplant. However, a case study by the doctors published in the Lancet also noted there was evidence of pig virus that had not been identified previously.

According to the federal government, there are more than 113,000 people on the organ transplant list, including 3,354 people in need of a heart. The group Donate Life America says that 17 people die each day waiting for a donor organ.

By Nadia Kounang,

[pendragora]

I’m pregnant and it’s yours

...Can you tell my father that I got you pregnant? Maybe he will finally forgive me for being born without a dick 🥴

[variousqueerthings]

the hottest old movie woman poll keeps pitting hindi cinema against hollywood and i just cant do it. you're all perfect.

[cactusbaseball]

Tucson has a LOT of cool shit actually what are you on about

tucson aint got much but it does have a bridge shaped like a rattlesnake

[zentarablog]

The Evolution of TV Sci-Fi: 10 Series That Pushed Boundaries

Science fiction has always been a genre that pushes boundaries, not just in its imaginative content but also in its ability to reflect, question, and sometimes even predict the future. On television, sci-fi has evolved from rudimentary special effects and simplistic narratives to complex, thought-provoking sagas that tackle profound philosophical questions and showcase cinematic-quality visuals.…

[newscientistsawards]

Theoretical Science Award Celebrating #sciencefather #TheoreticalScienc...

[milliebobbyflay]

Imagine a world where creationism was unanimously central both to the ruling class's conception of self and to the logic that justifies their power. Darwin's work still exists, attempts to suppress it outright would only drive interest; curious and rigorous scholars who've sought out his work can testify to its quality and relevance, and often teach natural selection in their courses. Still, there remains an understanding that Darwin is not what the people with money and power want to hear, and so when proposing research grants or attempting to climb the academic ladder, Darwin is typically ignored in favor of alternative theoretical frameworks which, while less useful, are far more likely to receive funding.

This creates a cycle where, because Darwinism has been ignored in all of the most influential and groundbreaking research, it becomes inessential. Scholars can receive their PhDs without ever having read a single work on natural selection. Despite its utility as a theory, intuition and an implicit trust in the social reality created by and within these institions creates the sense that Darwinism is, to put it bluntly "crank shit," the sort of thing you study to amuse your own curiosity and stroke your ego rather than actually trying to change the world.

Of course, none of this changes the fact that Darwin was correct, that evolution by natural selection is the primary mechanism by which species develop and change over time. However, since using Darwinist theory (or any alternative routes taken to similar models and conclusions) as anything but a garnish will get you labeled as a crank, the entire discipline of biology becomes warped around its absence. Entire fields form to cobble together makeshift solutions to the gaps Darwinism fills, further cementing it's irrelevance. Thousands of scholars devote their lives to fleshing out the forest of asterisks and duct tape holding on a vastly overstretched lamarckian and at times implictly creationist framework.

From the outside, the discipline begins looking absurd. Clearly driven by internal politics, sprawling in a million directions without any consistent underlying theory, shy on results. Despite billions pouring in year after year trying to answer some of the most fundamental questions about humanity, history, health, all lines of inquiry seem to eventually terminate in a shrug of "life is complex, how could we hope to understand everything about it?"

Okay now switch Darwin with Marx. This is the state of contemporary western social science.

[sovamurka]

Still a little bit annoyed and angry that it's Domodedovo airport that was named after Lomonosov and not Talagi airport.

[frangipani-wanderlust]

"We showed this kid one video that was interesting to him and also a video that is so boring it will make your eyeballs bleed. He fidgeted watching the boring video. Our methodology is flawless and perfect and definitely we did not construct this "study" such that it would magically look like our hypothesis was right all along.

"That'll be $500,000 grant money, please!"

Scientists once thought that ADHD symptoms were always present. But previous research from Rapport, who has been studying ADHD for more than 36 years, has shown the fidgeting was most often present when children were using their brains' executive functions, particularly "working memory." That's the system we use for temporarily storing and managing information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehension.

Here’s full study: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/478386

If you enjoyed this post, please give it a ❤️ and check out @scienceisdope for more science and daily facts.

[louderfade]

Light spectrum, from Theory of Colours – Goethe observed that colour arises at the edges, and the spectrum occurs where these coloured edges overlap.

Goethe's Theory of Colors

[michaelgabrill]

Groundbreaking Results from Space Station Science in 2023

Lee esta historia en español aquí. The International Space Station is a microgravity research lab hosting groundbreaking technology demonstrations and scientific investigations. More than 3,700 investigations conducted to date have generated roughly 500 research articles published in scientific journals. In 2023, the orbiting lab hosted more than 500 investigations. See more space station research achievements […] from NASA https://ift.tt/8yJc9PG

[3liza]

after meaning to get around to it for years i finally listened to almost the entirety of Sold a Story and it is as groundbreaking as everyone says it is. it's also the most confusing, to me, single event in American culture in my lifetime and my reasons for thinking that are pretty complex so im not sure theyre fully formed yet. there's a list of shit in this podcast that made me feel like i was going insane

i KNEW something was going on at a population level, i've been noticing it for years, people kept telling me i was imagining things, but i was RIGHT, two generations of kids have been reduced to barely-literate levels of language function because of this shit and you CAN see it and hear it while talking to people in the world!

the entire adoption of the Calkins programs in the first place were based on the majority of people responsible for American child education deciding basically overnight that "children don't need to learn phonics in order to become strong readers" which is literally and not figuratively equivalent to saying "children can learn algebra without learning what numbers are". it is so self-evidently false i dont even know how to respond to such an assertion. you have to be fundamentally devoid of common sense to think this is true. language is comprised of sounds (phonemes), sounds are represented by letters, letters make up the alphabet, the alphabet makes up words, and words make up sentences. you cant just skip over the parts of this you dont like, it's the basis of our entire civilization. "i dont need to learn individual notes i just want to play to saxophone" okay well. too bad? you cant

american primary education apparently has no communication whatsoever with the scientific fields of human behaviorism, pediatrics, neurology, linguistics, the science of learning generally, and there is next to zero communication between teachers who are actively responsible for educating children and the entire research field of educating children. they just dont talk to each other, at least in huge swaths of the country. in retrospect this is obvious, i just have been assuming incorrectly this entire time that maybe, surely, some aspect of how our public schools are administered is in some way being guided by scientific evidence and research. this has apparently not been the case for 20+ years. Lucy Calkins herself claims she "didn't know" that the research on how children acquire language had been essentially settled by the 1990s, she just wrote her stupid book based on her own self-assurance that what she THOUGHT children were doing when they learned language was correct. she ddin't check, she didnt ask about research or studies, she didn't test her hypothesis, she just told everyone she had figured out how to teach kids to read based on nothing but her own untested assumptions. and everyone was like "okay sounds good". every single person involved in this process is or was in a position of responsibility for educating american children. and almost none of them thought to ask "okay, but have you tested it? does it work?" because they didn't test it, and it doesnt work, and for some reason that was never even brought up

teachers kept being interviewed on this podcast who kept saying things like: "they never taught us how to teach children to read" and "they didn't teach us how children learn so i had no idea how it worked" and then explaining this was why they were so easily hoodwinked by the Calkins program. i don't understand this. what is actually taught during the two year degree programs at teaching colleges? if it's not child psychology, pedagogy, neurology, and actual techniques for teaching children, what are they teaching you to do there? one of my friends who went to a teaching college told me they mostly provided classes on lesson planning.

individual teachers apparently are not reading books or articles or papers on any of these subjects either. so having graduated from a teaching college knowing nothing about children, teaching, or even basic english literacy ("i didn't know how to teach phonics and no one told me" is another thing actual teachers kept saying on the podcast. girl, SESAME STREET can teach basic english phonics, and it does), almost none of them actually do any investigation on their own. they just show up to their workplace (the school) and "teach" whatever admin hands them. ?????????????? how is this possible?

i realized last night in a fugue of post-exertional malaise that the three-cueing method of teaching reading is training children to approach language very similarly to how a large language model does it. they laboriously instruct the children to guess what the next word in a sentence will be, often by actually covering the word with a post-it note and then cajoling and badgering the child until he guesses the word under the post-it, based on the vibes on the sentence he's reading. this doesnt teach you to read, it teaches you to act like youre reading

this isnt directly addressed in the podcast but we used to just teach everyone english like it was an actual system that has parts and rules and structures, because that's what a language is. everyone would start with phonics and the alphabet, then later do stuff like sentence diagramming and grammar, neither of which have been taught in primary schools in decades. i think i was probably the very last generation of kids to get ANY of that stuff unless they went to an exceptional school, and it was only because my 8th grade teacher knew it was important and went against school admin's instructions in order to teach it. the couple days of sentence diagramming and grammar he gave us, out of SPITE, have been more useful to me in reading and writing than the entire rest of primary english education i received in public school, and i didn't even go to a school that had adopted three-cueing stuff yet.

[rjzimmerman]

Surprising New Research Links Infant Mortality to Crashing Bat Populations. (New York Times)

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The connections are commonsense but the conclusion is shocking.

Bats eat insects. When a fatal disease hit bats, farmers used more pesticides to protect crops. And that, according to a new study, led to an increase in infant mortality.

According to the research, published Thursday in the journal Science, farmers in affected U.S. counties increased their use of insecticides by 31 percent when bat populations declined. In those places, infant mortality rose by an estimated 8 percent.

“It’s a seminal piece,” said Carmen Messerlian, a reproductive epidemiologist at Harvard who was not involved with the research. “I actually think it’s groundbreaking.”

The new study tested various alternatives to see if something else could have driven the increase: Unemployment or drug overdoses, for example. Nothing else was found to cause it.

Dr. Messerlian, who studies how the environment affects fertility, pregnancy and child health, said a growing body of research is showing health effects from toxic chemicals in our environment, even if scientists can’t put their fingers on the causal links.

“If we were to reduce the population-level exposure today, we would save lives,” she said. “It’s as easy as that.”

The new study is the latest to find dire consequences for humans when ecosystems are thrown out of balance. Recent research by the same author, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, found that a die-off of vultures in India had led to half a million excess human deaths as rotting livestock carcasses polluted water and spurred an increase in feral dogs, spreading waterborne diseases and rabies.

“We often pay a lot of attention to global extinctions, where species completely disappear,” Dr. Frank said. “But we start experiencing loss and damages well before that.”

[cressidagrey]

Formidable

Pairing: Oscar Piastri x Felicity Leong-Piastri (Original Character)

Summary:  Andrea Stella figures out that Felicity Piastri is more than “just” Oscar’s wife. 

Notes: Big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble and checks my science-y mumbo jumbo 😂

(divider thanks to @saradika-graphics )

It started the way most breakthroughs did—not with a groundbreaking discovery, but with a tired engineer holding a half-wrinkled printout and a hopeful expression.

“Boss,” James said, hovering just inside the doorway of Andrea’s office. “I think you should read this.”

Andrea looked up from his laptop. “If it’s another CFD model from that Reddit forum, I swear—”

“It’s not. It’s from a paper. Academic. Legit. Published in Race Systems & Applied Motion last month.”

Andrea raised an eyebrow. “Obscure.”

“Very. It has like 20 readers,” the engineer agreed. “But I think it’s real. It’s clean. It’s sharp. It’s…” He hesitated. “We might want to test it.”

That got Andrea’s attention.

He took the paper and began to skim.

Title: Redefining Compliance: Adaptive Suspension Geometry Under Load-Sensitive Parameters for Mid-Field Chassis Configurations.

Andrea kept reading. It was dense—academic, yes—but it was also practical. It spoke the language of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. There were no ego traps. No unnecessary complexity. Just hard math and hard-earned insight.

Andrea flipped the page. Then another. His eyes caught a note referencing flex dynamics in chassis response curves and passive recovery lag.

It was correct. More than correct. It was insightful.

The author wasn’t spitballing ideas from afar—this was the work of someone who had lived in the theory and understood the application. Who referenced real-world tolerances. Racing examples. The math was sound. The diagrams were better than half the ones their CFD team managed.

Andrea flipped back to the byline.

Dr. F. Piastri.

Piastri. 

James grinned. “Fun coincidence in the name, right? He’s smart.”

Andrea didn’t correct him.

Because yes—coincidence. Probably. But something about it stuck in his brain, like a whisper he couldn’t quite place.

He read the essay in full that night—twice. It was elegant, sharp, and frustratingly precise in the way only truly experienced voices ever were. The type of clarity that came from years of not just understanding a concept, but translating it into reality.

The next morning, Andrea sent out an internal email.

Subject: Additional Works by Dr. F. Piastri If anyone has access to prior publications by this author, please forward them to me.

By the end of the week, his inbox was full.

One essay became three. Three became eleven. Eleven became twenty. 

Each one published under the name F.Piastri, buried in obscure journals and small-circulation engineering reviews that didn’t get traffic unless someone was either deeply curious or incredibly desperate. 

Andrea was both.

Each article was smarter than the last—strange, elegant engineering thought-pieces published across the most obscure academic mechanical journals Andrea had ever encountered. Niche ones. The kind that only the most obsessive minds contributed to, with names like Thermoelasticity in Microstructured Materials and Lateral Load Adaptation Quarterly.

F.Piastri had written:

An article about Load-dependent understeer in transitional corners (with math that Andrea double-checked twice because it was too clean).

A 2019 think-piece on long-run stability under thermal degradation.

An essay about Aerodynamic oscillation buffering for short-track endurance vehicles.

An article about the economic viability of 3D printed carbon struts under rotational shear (he actually flagged that one for McLaren Applied).

 A thesis that corrected a widely accepted torque model—buried in a conference archive.

A published rebuttal in Journal of Vehicle Design so politely worded it read like a love letter—until you realized she’d rewritten the reviewer’s assumptions line by line.

There was even one article on fluid dynamics that had been cited in a grad-level textbook from ETH Zurich. 

Andrea devoured them all.

He—She?—wrote like someone who saw the car before it was built. Who understood not just how suspension worked, but how it felt. How energy passed through a chassis not as force but as intent.

The writing style was sharp. Practical. Absolutely ruthless in its logic. There was clarity there—an elegance—that reminded him of only a few people he’d ever worked with.

It was revolutionary. It was poetic.

By the time he tracked down the doctoral thesis from Oxford, Andrea wasn’t breathing properly.

Reinforcement Through Flexibility: Dynamic Adaptation in Composite- Structured Performance Environments.

By: F. Piastri.

 Submitted: December 2022

Andrea stared at the name.

F. Piastri.

He stared for so long his tea went cold beside him.

His hands were shaking—not because of nerves, but because he already knew.

He opened the PDF. Skimmed past the table of contents. Scrolled through diagrams that made his heart stutter.

There was no photo. No biographical section. Just a clean Oxford University seal, 284 pages of dense, brilliant theory, and then—

A dedication.

To Oscar: For believing in a future that didn’t exist yet, and building it with me anyway. Every lap, every choice, every time—you’ve been my constant.

And to Bee: For reminding me that softness and strength aren’t opposites. You are the best thing I’ve ever helped create.

Andrea sat back in his chair like he’d been physically shoved.

Bee.

Oscar. 

F. Piastri. 

Felicity Piastri. 

Felicity.

Oscar’s wife.

Dr. F. Piastri wasn’t some reclusive academic or distant uncle with a gift for simulation modeling.

She lived in Oscar’s house.

 She packed his lunchbox.

 She raised their daughter.

 And she had published papers on suspension theory that half of F1 would kill to understand. Quietly. Efficiently. Correctly.

Andrea leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling for a long moment, and whispered:

“…Of course it’s his wife.”

Of course the quiet, composed driver who rarely raised his voice and always had one hand on the bigger picture had married someone brilliant. Of course she wasn’t just talented—she was a published expert with a doctorate from Oxford.

Not a coincidence. 

Not a mystery engineer.

Not some guy.

But Oscar’s wife.

Oscar Piastri—quiet, methodical Oscar—had married a genius.

A doctor of mechanical engineering from Oxford who wrote better technical documentation in a margin note than most engineers did in a year. Who published under initials. Who could probably solve half their handling inconsistencies while holding a toddler on her hip.

Andrea sat in silence for a full minute.

Then he exhaled. “...of course he did.”

He opened a new tab.

Email draft: 

To: Technical Team 

Subject: URGENT – Reference Reading Required Attached: Every single thing Dr. F. Piastri had ever published.

***

The meeting was meant to be quick.

Just a routine Monday touchpoint—debrief, run through media notes with Sophie, talk sponsor appearances, maybe discuss Oscar’s upcoming comms obligations.

Zak had rolled in with a protein shake.

Lando was lounging sideways in a chair like he’d melted into it.

Oscar had a protein bar and an expression of polite mildness, as usual.

Andrea, meanwhile, had not slept.

 Not because of the race.

 Because he’d spent the entire weekend reading Dr. Felicity Piastri’s entire body of work. Every published paper. Every obscenely niche journal article.

And her doctoral thesis.

He hadn’t meant to do it all in one sitting. He just couldn’t stop.

By 2 a.m. he was muttering things like “Of course she used Euler-Bernoulli assumptions, she’s too smart for non-parametric bullshit.”

 By 4 a.m., he’d highlighted her proposed solution to dampen micro-vibration load in corner exits.

 By 6 a.m., he had a headache, an existential crisis, and a desperate need to know: Why had Oscar Piastri never mentioned this?!

So at the end of the meeting—just as Sophie was wrapping up and Lando was aimlessly spinning a pen like a propeller—Andrea set down a file on the table.

Calmly. Casually. Like he hadn’t just had his entire mechanical worldview rattled by a woman who wasn’t even on the payroll.

“Oscar,” Andrea said, voice deceptively neutral. “Why didn’t you ever mention that your wife holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering?”

Oscar, halfway through eating his protein bar, blinked. “What?”

Andrea gestured vaguely, as if the thesis were still radiating brilliance from his desk. “Felicity. Doctorate. Thesis. Dozens of published papers. Half of them useful to our current car design issues. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Oscar blinked once. “Oh. Yeah. She gets bored sometimes.”

Andrea blinked back.

Lando stared like he’d been smacked with a front wing. “Wait—she got a doctorate?!”

Oscar nodded, chewing. “Yeah. Finished it in 2022. She was stuck in that horrible flat in Enstone while I was back and forth with Alpine, and she got bored. Wrote most of it at the kitchen table while Bee napped.”

Andrea just… stared. 

He had read the thesis. Studied it. The mathematical modeling alone had kept him awake at night—and she had apparently written it during toddler nap times, while stuck in a damp shoebox flat in Oxfordshire.

Zak looked up slowly from his tablet. “Your wife was bored. So she got a PhD in mechanical engineering.”

Oscar shrugged. “She already had the research mostly done before Bee was even born in 2020. She just had to write it up. Bee was napping a lot anyway.”

Sophie blinked. “She wrote a 200-page dissertation with a toddler in the house?”

Oscar just shrugged. “It helped that Bee liked the sound of the keyboard.”

Andrea turned to Zak, still stunned. “She predicted the kind of high-frequency oscillation we’re seeing this season. Two years ago. In a footnote.”

Lando leaned forward like he was watching a live feed of someone discovering aliens. “She’s just, like, a genius?” he asked, voice too loud, too incredulous. “And you never brought it up?”

Oscar just sighed. “She hates that word.”

Andrea just stared at him. “Oscar, she’s not just good. She’s formidable. Has she ever applied anywhere formally?”

Oscar looked genuinely confused. “Why would she apply anywhere?”

Andrea stared. “To work. In engineering. In motorsport. Academia.”

Oscar blinked. “She does work. She manages our lives, Bee, the house, and the chickens.”

Lando leaned toward Andrea, wide-eyed: “I’ve never felt dumber in my entire life.”

Andrea sighed. “Join the club.”

***

The kitchen smelled like vanilla and wood polish and faintly like chicken coop — which meant Felicity had mopped and baked and wrangled Mansell, the escape artist hen, all while probably rebalancing one of their stock portfolios.

Oscar dropped his bag by the door and leaned against the kitchen entryway.

Felicity was sitting at the table in her old university hoodie, feet bare, Bee curled up under her arm asleep with Button the frog as a pillow. There were spreadsheets open on one side of her laptop screen, a half-watched nature documentary on the other, and one of Bee’s plastic toy bulls standing solemnly in the middle of the table for reasons unknown.

He smiled.

God, he loved her.

“Hey,” he said softly.

Felicity glanced up. “Hey. Dinner’s in the oven. Bee passed out mid-pie crust.”

“Excellent,” Oscar said, dropping into the chair beside her. “Because I need carbs.”

She raised an eyebrow, equal parts amusement and curiosity. “Bad day?”

“No. Just... intellectually humbling.”

Felicity made a low amused noise and went back to her laptop. “Did Lando try to explain crypto again?”

Oscar snorted and reached over to carefully lift Bee into his lap, her curls warm against his hoodie. She barely stirred.

He could have let it sit. Saved it for later. But it was buzzing under his skin.

“Stella read your papers.”

That got her attention.

Felicity paused, her fingers stilled mid-scroll. “Which one?”

“All of them,” Oscar said. “Apparently it started with one of the engineers, who brought an article in from Race Systems & Applied Motion. Then he spiraled.”

“Ah,” Felicity murmured, unsurprised. “That one had a good diagram.”

“He found your thesis,” Oscar added.

This time she didn’t answer right away.

He reached for one of Bee’s crayons and twirled it idly in his fingers, watching her.

“He read the dedication,” he said, voice quieter now.

Felicity’s eyes softened in that way that always undid him a little. Always had.

“Did he say anything?” she asked.

Oscar smiled faintly. “He said you’re formidable.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Felicity laughed—not loud, not startled, just warm and wry and a little disbelieving.

“God help the man,” she said. “He must have hit the rebuttal piece from the Vehicle Design Journal. That one made a few engineers cry.”

Oscar grinned. “Yeah, well. He was halfway to building you a shrine by the end of the meeting. I also told him you got bored in Enstone and wrote your PhD while Bee was napping.”

Felicity gave him a look. “You make it sound like I was scrapbooking.”

“Weren’t you also doing that at the time?”

Felicity blinked. “...Okay, fair.”

Bee stirred slightly in his lap, a tiny sigh escaping her lips as she nuzzled deeper into his hoodie sleeve.

Oscar looked down at her—this tiny human they somehow made and raised—and then back at the woman across the table. 

Her hair was messier than usual, strands escaping her braid, and there was a faint flour smudge near her temple. She hadn’t bought herself a new pair of jeans in two years. She sometimes forgot to eat when she was buried in simulations. She once fixed the bathroom plumbing at midnight because she didn’t like how the guy from the hardware store spoke to her.

She was the smartest person he knew.

Oscar knew most people wouldn’t think it when they first met her. She smiled too easily. She didn’t correct anyone. She let others assume things—that she was just the girlfriend, just the wife, just the mother.

But she had a doctorate from Oxford, and more published academic papers than most career professors. She could hold court with race engineers and theoretical physicists in the same breath, then go home and teach Bee how to build a pulley system out of Lego and twine. She spoke in quiet, exact terms, and when she challenged people, she did it so gently they sometimes didn’t notice until it was too late.

He’d long since stopped being surprised by her. He’d just—normalized it. Integrated it. Felicity being a genius was like oxygen to him: invisible, essential, and easy to take for granted until someone else nearly passed out from the realization.

She was just Fliss to him. 

The woman who sold her designer bags to pay rent when her family cut her off. The mother of his child. His fiercest critic and his most devoted supporter. The one person he trusted without hesitation.

She didn’t want headlines or praise. She wanted quiet mornings and clever puzzles. She wanted Bee to grow up confident. She wanted Oscar to remember to eat something green.

She was the smartest person he knew — and she hated being called smart. So he didn’t. He just came home.

“He called you formidable,” he repeated. “And I agree. For what it’s worth.”

Felicity smiled then—slow and quiet, the kind that reached all the way to her eyes.

She leaned across the table and kissed his temple. “Thanks,” she said. “But if he asks me to consult, I’m charging him triple.”

Oscar laughed softly and ran a hand through Bee’s curls. “Deal.”

And he meant it. Because maybe it was easy for him to forget sometimes, tucked into the quiet rhythm of their life, that the world hadn’t caught up to how brilliant she was.

But he never stopped being proud of her.

Not for a second.