Two candy-floss planets, and a brain that still reads under anesthesia

Both are roughly the size of Jupiter. Jupiter's density is 1.33 grams per cubic centimeter. These two manage just 0.038 and 0.047, making them lighter, gram for gram, than cotton candy. They are, essentially, planet-shaped clouds [17]. The planets are siblings, formed from the same swirling disc of gas around their young star, and they travel in a 5:3 orbital resonance: for every five laps the inner planet completes, the outer finishes almost exactly three. Each transit across their host star lasts more than 11 hours, far too long for a single night at most observatories. To catch one in full, the team turned to Antarctica, where Concordia Station sits under months of continuous polar darkness. They did it. Neither planet was found by professional astronomers. Citizen science volunteers in the Planet Hunters TESS project spotted them first, picking anomalies out of NASA satellite data in their spare time [121].

The patients were unconscious. They felt nothing and would remember nothing. But their brains, listening to stories playing in the operating room, could distinguish nouns from verbs from adjectives. The neural patterns even predicted upcoming words before the patients heard them. Something like reading ahead was happening, in complete darkness as far as the conscious patient was concerned [2]. The study was published in Nature. The researchers also found that the brain became better at detecting unexpected sounds over time, suggesting that learning was still taking place during full anesthesia. A separate study, a meta-analysis pooling data from nearly 2,000 healthy people, found that the electrical bursts that ripple through the brain during deep sleep, called sleep spindles, predict performance on intelligence tests. Spindle density, amplitude, and frequency shift systematically with age and differ between men and women, which has direct implications for anyone trying to improve sleep quality through medical interventions [31].

As supplies fall, mitochondria lose their ability to fuse into the long, flexible chains they use to distribute energy across a cell. They become fragmented. They slow down. In worm models, restoring phosphatidylcholine through diet returned mitochondria to a more youthful, flexible state. In human tissue samples, lower levels correlated with diabetes and obesity; higher levels correlated with faster walking pace and better memory, both well-established markers of healthy aging [12]. Separately, a 30-year study following nearly 150,000 nurses and health professionals found that 90 to 120 minutes of strength training per week is associated with a 13% lower risk of dying from any cause, a 19% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, and a 27% lower risk of neurological death, mainly dementia. Adding regular aerobic exercise brought total risk reduction to around 45%. Benefits plateau beyond about two hours of lifting per week [104].

When his prosthetic hand moved, the magnets vibrated, stimulating his muscles and restoring something that standard prosthetics cannot provide: kinesthesia, the sense of where your hand is and how it is moving. Standard prosthetic users must watch the mechanical hand grasp an object to know if their command worked. With the magnetic interface, the patient felt coordinated, whole-hand movement rather than isolated finger twitches. The system, called the myokinetic kinesthetic interface, required no nerve-redirection surgery, and it was integrated with the Mia Hand, a commercial robotic hand [30]. Separately, researchers at Texas A&M applied fibroblast growth factor 2 to the stumps of amputated mouse digits and observed something mammals almost never produce: tissue resembling a blastema, the regenerative structure that salamanders use to rebuild lost limbs. Adding bone morphogenetic protein 2 prompted that tissue to produce actual bone, ligament, and tendon. This is not a regrown digit. It is the first demonstration that mammalian fibroblast cells have the toolkit to begin the process, and that something specific is suppressing it in us [99].

Instead of blocking salt uptake, as researchers expected, these bacteria stimulate the plants to produce more lignin, the compound that physically strengthens root cell walls. Plants grown with the bacteria showed healthier growth and higher yields in saline conditions. The effect held across maize, tomato, and rapeseed grown in multiple soil types [1]. In the Netherlands, The Protein Brewery received the first EU novel food approval for whole-food mycelium protein and raised $20.5 million to bring its ingredient to European markets. Their product, Fermotein, is made by fermenting a heat-tolerant fungal strain on glucose, drying it, and milling it into a powder that contains 50 grams of complete protein per 100 grams, 26 times more protein than beef by weight. It uses 1% of beef's land, 5% of its water, and produces 3% of its greenhouse gas emissions [108]. And in the Amazon, a tree that cannot survive outside intact rainforest is protecting that forest. Brazil nut trees can only be pollinated by orchid bees, which in turn can only reproduce by gathering scent from forest orchids. The whole ecosystem depends on itself. Bolivia alone exports 28,000 tons of Brazil nuts annually; the industry is worth more than $70 million worldwide, and because the nut cannot be farmed, every dollar earned requires the forest to be standing [97].

These changes improve learning and memory in female mice long after the pups were weaned and pregnancy hormones had returned to baseline. The researchers compared mice who had gone through pregnancy and nursing with same-age mice who had never bred, sampling eleven different brain regions using RNA sequencing. The differences were durable and real. One critical finding cut both ways: chronic stress after birth disrupted the natural neurological upgrade. The biological improvements from motherhood were measurable; the damage from postpartum stress was equally measurable [36].