Ancient burial cave held only women, and $500 million wants to end the common cold

Nobody had been able to determine their sex. Now a team has used proteomics, reading ancient proteins preserved in dental enamel long after DNA would have degraded, to analyze 20 teeth from the skeletons [17]. Every single one is female. That includes Neo and DH1, the two most complete skeletons, both assumed for years to be male. The gene variant AMELY, found only in biological males, was simply absent from every sample [17]. There are no known human cemeteries anywhere on Earth, and no collections of ancient nonhuman primate bones, that consist entirely of one sex. The Rising Star team has argued for years that Homo naledi intentionally buried its dead, an unexpected behavior in a hominin with a brain roughly the size of an orange. If the new proteomic data holds up, the implication is stranger still: that these small-brained relatives of ours may have practiced sex-specific mortuary rituals.

The funders include Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation, Flu Lab, Bill Gates, and several traders at the quantitative hedge fund Jane Street Capital. Stripe executive Nan Ransohoff is leading it alongside venture capitalist Charlie Petty. The case they make is simple: people spend 5 percent of their lives fighting a cold or the flu, and yet pharmaceutical companies have had almost no commercial incentive to fix it, because the sniffles are caused by more than 200 different viruses and no single vaccine could be profitable enough to justify the research [194]. Intercept will fund vaccines alongside large-scale air-cleaning systems for schools, offices, and other public spaces. The scientific inspiration came from David Veesler, a structural biologist at the University of Washington, who argued that broad countermeasures working against whole virus families are technically feasible, using RNA drugs, antibodies, and computational protein design [194]. This is the same Stripe that organized the $1.8 billion Frontier program for carbon removal, building on a thesis that the most important problems in the world are often the ones the market will not bother with.

The problem has always been identifying who needs one before something happens [96]. A study published in Nature used artificial intelligence to analyze cardiac imaging across a large dataset and look for the features shared by patients who went on to die of sudden cardiac arrest. The AI found something that clinicians had largely dismissed: scattered cardiac fibrosis, scar tissue distributed throughout the heart rather than concentrated in one visible area, is the marker most commonly present in the highest-risk patients. Fibrosis of this kind had been considered relatively benign. The AI said otherwise [96].

She noticed that Shanbhag could sing more fluently than he could speak. So she asked him to sing his sentences. Three years later, he still does it: every morning when he heads out to buy milk and groceries, his shopping list is a song [236]. The lab serves dozens of patients a month at $42 for 20 sessions. Patients regain functional speech, coordination, and independence in daily tasks. The mechanism is neuroplasticity. Specific musical exercises engage the entire brain and strengthen the connections between areas, allowing undamaged tissue to compensate for what the stroke destroyed. Simply listening to music has its own well-documented effects, but the exercises are what produce rehabilitation gains [236].

Combined with contributions from other herbariums, 145 million plant, animal, and fungi samples are now open access. The practical payoff is already arriving. AI models trained on the digitized specimens can identify species from microscopic details that human eyes miss, including mosses and small flowering plants that look nearly identical across species. The archive has already revealed that flowers worldwide are blooming weeks earlier than in previous decades, a climate signal embedded in 180 years of collected material [233]. This is happening in the middle of what the Progress Network describes as the fastest era of species discovery in the history of taxonomy: between 2015 and 2020, scientists described new species at more than 16,000 per year, partly because DNA sequencing has dropped from tens of millions of dollars to a few hundred [250].

Their petition gathered thousands of signatures. The Finance Minister, in his announcement, called sanitary products "daily necessities that are indispensable for women's health, dignity and full participation in social activities." That language is new in Pakistani official policy [249]. The context: UNICEF data shows only a minority of Pakistani women currently use commercial period products, with most relying on cloth or homemade alternatives that carry higher infection risks. Removing the tax will not immediately change that, because income and geography remain larger barriers. But the government also scrapped the 18 percent tax on contraceptives at the same time, and Omer's team is already working on removing the additional 25 percent customs charge on imported period products [249].

That view had a persistent problem: birds, fish, and frogs are excellent at focusing their attention, and they lack a well-developed prefrontal cortex [108]. A new study published in Nature Communications, led by postdoctoral researcher Ninad Kothari at Johns Hopkins, has identified the brain structure that explains this. It is a small cluster of inhibitory neurons in the brainstem called the parabigemino-lateral tegmental inhibitory complex, or PLTi. When these neurons were silenced in mice with precise genetic tools, the animals could still see normally and move normally, but they lost the ability to select which object in their environment deserved attention [108]. They could perceive; they just could not prioritize. The PLTi is evolutionarily ancient, present in mice and closely related to structures found in birds, frogs, and turtles. The machinery of attention has been running in vertebrate brains for hundreds of millions of years, long before the prefrontal cortex existed [108].