Cervical cancer hit zero in young women, and a comet from before our sun

The first such five-year window in the country's recorded history [231]. The girls who received the HPV vaccine at ages 12 and 13 starting in 2008 are now in their late 20s. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London, publishing in The Lancet, calculated that roughly 23 deaths would have occurred in that age group over those five years without vaccination. About 200 lives have been saved since the program launched. "It's incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer," said Professor Peter Sasieni, who led the study [231].

The isotope ratios are the giveaway. Its water carries an unusual abundance of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. Its carbon isotopes match nothing in our solar system, in nearby star-forming regions, or in meteorites. "Suddenly, we are no longer asking 'is this a comet?'", said molecular astrophysicist Martin Cordiner of NASA Goddard, "but 'what can this unique object tell us about the history of our galaxy?'" [65]

Johns Hopkins researchers just overturned a significant piece of that. A circuit of inhibitory neurons in the brainstem, a structure all vertebrates share, turns out to be a foundational attention engine [77]. When they silenced these specific neurons in mice, the animals became hyper-distractible to even faint peripheral stimuli. That is exactly the hallmark behavior of ADHD. When they reactivated the neurons the next day, the same animals could once again ignore strong distractions. Vision and motor control were unaffected throughout. The impairment was purely attentional [77].

The STAR trial at King's College London — 305 participants, five UK sites, five years, the largest randomized controlled trial of its kind ever conducted — just proved that concern wrong [82]. Participants received integrated therapy combining trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy with standard cognitive therapy for psychosis. Fifty percent of the treatment group no longer met clinical criteria for PTSD at the end of the study, compared to just over 20% in standard care. The trial recorded a disengagement rate of only 6.5%, remarkably low for a heavily traumatized population. Improvements appeared across 22 of 27 clinical outcomes, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, paranoia, and hallucinations [82].

Close to 36,000 of them died during that time, which gave researchers a clean mortality signal [62]. People who did around 90 to 120 minutes of strength training per week — an hour and a half to two hours — had about 13% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those who did none. The benefit was sharpest for cardiovascular disease, at 19% lower risk, and for neurological conditions — mainly dementia — at 27% lower risk. Beyond about two hours per week, the benefit did not increase further. People who combined 90 to 120 minutes of strength training with at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity saw total mortality risk fall by around 45% [62].

A study at the University of Lisbon, published in Nature Mental Health, offers a clear mechanism: serotonin reduces what the researchers call "belief stickiness," the tendency to hold onto a model of how the world works even when the evidence says it has changed [112]. In an experiment with 50 healthy adult men, those who received an SSRI were significantly better at updating their behavior when the rules of a task shifted without warning. The placebo group kept acting on their old belief well after new evidence rendered it wrong. People with higher OCD-related trait scores showed more belief stickiness to begin with, and the SSRI specifically reduced that rigidity [112].

The law was triggered after campaign investigators found that Colombian supermarkets were unknowingly stocking beef from cattle raised on illegally deforested land inside the country's national parks. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, more than 200,000 cattle were sourced from protected areas. The law will be phased in over two years and will reach every link in the supply chain: auction houses, slaughterhouses, and retailers all carry accountability [194].