Psilocybin briefly restored speech in an 80-year-old with Alzheimer's, and beavers fixed London's flooding

What followed surprised him. After a high-dose session, the patient temporarily regained specific communication abilities and daily-living functions that had been lost to the disease. The case report, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, documents what the team describes as dormant capacities reawakening in late-stage neurodegeneration [94]. The proposed mechanism: psilocybin's active metabolite, psilocin, binds to serotonin 5-HT2A receptors and appears to briefly stimulate neuroplasticity, temporarily reshuffling large-scale brain networks including the default mode network, which is heavily disrupted in Alzheimer's [94].

The team used portable EEG headsets to track the brain activity of thousands of participants in high schools, museums, and even a studio session with musicians Bad Bunny and Residente, who were wired up while composing the song "Bellacoso" [73]. The data consistently showed that deeper social engagement produces measurable neural alignment. Lonely people show distinctly idiosyncratic brain activity that struggles to sync with others, a neurobiological signature of isolation. Armed with a new $4 million federal health grant, the team is now moving this into clinical trials to test whether engineering high synchrony between therapists and patients can accelerate psychological healing [73].

The target is FSHD, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder where a gene called DUX4 gets switched on when it should not be, causing progressive muscle damage. Epicrispr's approach is to reach in and flip that switch without touching the underlying code [19]. At the same time, a separate group at Cambridge published research using base editing in human embryos to study the NANOG gene, demonstrating that you can make a single-letter change in a genome of 3 billion base pairs with enough precision to deactivate a master regulator gene without the chromosomal damage that older CRISPR techniques often caused [71][77].

Within a year, they had dismantled a dam volunteers had built and replaced it with a better one. They created a new lake. They bred. And as of this week, engineers and conservationists confirmed that the area around Greenford Tube station, which had flooded regularly for years and left the local council facing expensive engineering works, had not flooded even during heavy rainfall [210]. England's first urban beaver officer, Seniz Mustafa, described watching it happen: "Even in situations like on Monday, where there was really heavy rainfall, the area didn't flood. When they put their minds to it, they really get things finished" [210]. The beavers also brought in four new species to the area in eleven months alone, including stickleback fish and rare red pole birds. At least fourteen species of butterfly were counted in one recent month [210].

The brain organizes incoming sensory data from these very different technologies into the same pre-coordinated movement patterns, what researchers call cortical synergies, whole-hand grasp trajectories rather than isolated finger signals [66]. A 34-year-old Italian amputee who underwent a six-week trial with the Sant'Anna system reported high-fidelity perceptions of hand opening and finger closing that felt close to natural proprioception [66]. In parallel, a MultiSensy platform combining VR with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation achieved nearly twice the motor recovery rate on standardized assessments compared to conventional stroke rehabilitation, and the gains transferred into real daily life activities [68].

Multiple lines of evidence are now dismantling that story. Ancient rock art found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, dated to nearly 70,000 years ago, is the oldest known rock art in the world, and it is in the tropics [12]. Fossil and genetic evidence is pointing toward early Homo sapiens originating from multiple subdivided populations across Africa, not one parent group, and some of those populations would have been living in tropical forest biomes from the very beginning [12]. Researchers like archaeologist Patrick Roberts at the Max Planck Institute argue that understanding how modern humans adapted to rainforests, with their dense canopy, venomous animals, parasites, and seasonal food availability, may illuminate something essential about what makes our species distinctive [12].

The reversal is a product of decades of rural depopulation: young people leaving mountain and plains villages for cities, agricultural land falling out of use, and nature quietly filling the gap [208]. The milestone was officially reached in 2020 but was revealed this week in a report from Italy's National Union of Mountain Municipalities. In one municipality in the Rieti Province, Marcetelli, where 94 percent of the land is now forest, the natural functions of those trees, carbon storage, water filtration, air cleaning, erosion prevention, would cost roughly $9.5 million if provided by industrial systems [208]. And since 2021, 932 Italian municipalities showed positive net migration back into heavily forested areas, reversing a two-decade trend [208].

The telescope is now in the clean room at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where technicians are testing its six solar panels, inspecting thermal blankets, and loading its fuel tanks with 290 gallons of hydrazine [61]. The Roman telescope carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror and a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's. During its five-year primary mission at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, it is predicted to detect over 100,000 exoplanets and image light from a billion galaxies [61]. It is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first female executive and its first Chief of Astronomy, who spent the 1960s and 70s classifying stars and advocating for space-based observatories, work that eventually led to the Hubble Space Telescope [61].