Mammals can regenerate tissue after all, and Alzheimer's protein protects neurons

But a team at Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine now has evidence that the limitation isn't absolute. In a study published in Nature Communications, they show that the mammalian healing system has two paths: the one it almost always takes, closing a wound with scar tissue, and one it almost never takes, building a blastema, the cellular foundation that regenerative animals use to grow new tissue. By applying a growth factor called FGF2 to a wound after it has healed over, the researchers redirected fibroblasts away from scarring and toward blastema formation. A second molecule guided those cells toward rebuilding bone, joint structures, and ligament. In mouse models, the regrown tissues weren't perfect, but they were real: bone, joints, and connective tissue where the amputation had been. [2]

For years, the working assumption was that less APP would be better. New research from Niigata University's Brain Research Institute says that assumption was wrong. Full-length APP is not the villain. When neurons age, or come under stress, the nucleus can break down and leak DNA fragments, histones, and chromatin into the cytoplasm. Left there, this debris triggers inflammation and kills the cell. APP binds that debris and routes it to lysosomes, which then fuse with the cell membrane and eject the waste outside. When APP levels are reduced, or when familial Alzheimer's mutations disable this function, the system fails. The waste accumulates, the cell fills with its own garbage, and it dies. The team confirmed this in human iPSC-derived neurons, mouse models, and postmortem brain tissue from Alzheimer's patients. [117] That same week, a large study in Alzheimer's & Dementia found that receiving the live shingles vaccine is associated with a slightly reduced risk of developing memory disorders and Alzheimer's. The connection appears to run through neuroinflammation: the varicella-zoster virus, which causes shingles by reactivating from the nervous system, drives brain inflammation when it wakes up, and some researchers suspect that inflammation contributes to the conditions that precede Alzheimer's. Blocking the virus from reactivating may protect neurons from one specific inflammatory source. [150]

Dutch startup The Protein Brewery has been working toward this for six years. The product comes from a fungal strain grown in fermentation tanks: 26 times more protein per kilo than beef, using 1% of the land, 5% of the water, and 3% of the emissions. It launches in Q3 2026. [258] Solar Foods, the Finnish company that makes protein from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, secured $90 million in grants and loans from Business Finland to build its industrial factory. The product, Solein, produces 1% of the emissions of conventional meat. No farmland, no growing season, no animals. The factory opens in 2028 and will make 12,800 tonnes per year. [257] Dutch precision fermentation startup Vivici received €12.5 million from the EU Innovation Council to scale its animal-free whey protein, which offers 66% lower emissions and 86% less water use than conventional whey. [256] Separately, a study of 87,000 grocery trips across Canada and Finland found that when food prices rise, shoppers cut back on meat more sharply than on plant-based products. Meat purchases proved more price-sensitive. The researchers concluded that for many buyers, the choice to buy plant-based is driven more by values than by price, making it stickier when costs go up. [260]

The arrays were already in place for epilepsy monitoring. The scientists recorded naturally flowing conversations across many topics, then aligned transcriptions with the activity of hundreds of individual neurons in the frontotemporal cortex. What they found was a division of labor. Some neurons encode basic information: the meaning and grammatical role of specific words. Others handle more complex tasks, grouping phrases into grammatical structures. Using AI models trained on the neural recordings, the researchers could distinguish between similar sentences from the brain activity alone, including the full context of each utterance. The recordings predicted grammar, meaning, and context in data from just before a person spoke. [110]

After it, children born to parents who had been legal residents for at least eight years received conditional citizenship at birth. The cutoff was sharp: children born on December 31, 1999 were governed by the old rule; children born the next day were not. A new paper published through VoxEU used that hard cutoff as a natural experiment. Researchers tracked second- and third-generation immigrant youth born just before and just after the change, then compared their likelihood of criminal activity during adolescence. The difference was a 70% reduction in the probability of criminal activity for those who received citizenship at birth. [194] The proposed mechanism runs through identity and opportunity. Citizenship from birth changes how institutions see a child and, critically, how a child sees their own future. It expands access to education, employment, and civic participation from the start of life rather than as a conditional status to be earned or lost. [194]

Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology at the University of Tübingen who has spent years recording the neural activity of both monkeys and crows, confirmed this in a detailed Live Science interview and explained what makes the finding genuinely strange. Birds diverged from mammals more than 360 million years ago, roughly six times further back in evolutionary history than the primate-rodent split. Yet when Nieder mapped the neural activity of crows doing numerical tasks, he found patterns that closely resembled what he had seen in rhesus monkeys. The same abstract concepts being processed in brains that evolved completely independently, across hundreds of millions of years of separate history. [13]