If this presidential cycle has unified us on anything, it might be that cognitive decline is a hard thing to talk about. Both President Biden and former President Trump face plenty of criticism, pundits playing armchair psychologists, and voter skepticism over their age and cognitive abilities. It seems at once fair game to ask about an impossible thing to answer. But cognitive researchers could have told you that.

If you look to science, you’ll find that cognitive aging is not a uniformly downhill slope that inevitably ends with something like dementia. And our understanding of cognitive aging is still incomplete. “This is really an emerging area of research,” says Ana Daugherty, a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in aging at Wayne State University. “There's just so much that we still don't know.”

What we do know is that there are many forms of cognitive decline and how it occurs is different for everyone. One person’s 50 might look a bit like another person’s 80 when it comes to working memory whereas it could be reversed when it comes to, say, problem-solving. “People are different,” Daugherty says. “It would be nice if it's a very straightforward process,” adds Jessica Damoiseaux, an associate professor in the Institute of Gerontology and the Department of Psychology at Wayne State University, “but it's just not like that.”

So, there are a lot of unknowns (no doubt fueling partisan bickering), but we do know an incredible amount about the brain and how it develops (and, shall we say, unravels) throughout life. A look at the brain’s broad growth shows just how complicated decline is, how much more we need to learn about it, and how imperative this knowledge is. After all, you too will in all likelihood one day be there.

The Sun’s growing prowess is on full display in a new video from space.

These are the stitched-together first images of CCOR-1, short for Compact Coronagraph. It sits atop a new weather satellite that launched this past summer. As the spacecraft is gearing up to monitor ferocious storms, CCOR-1 will stare at the Sun when the star transforms into its most volatile self.

The footage, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on October 22, showcases the capabilities of a new coronagraph. This telescope is designed to block light coming from the bright solar disk. By doing so, it gives scientists a glimpse of the high-octane activity in the Sun’s outermost layer, the corona. Since the Sun will reach its 11-year peak in activity next year, the coronagraph’s footage will be more important than ever.