Scientists built life from scratch, and a blood test sees Alzheimer's two years early

After five generations, about 30% of the daughter bubbles were still carrying the DNA. They are calling it SpudCell. Kate Adamala, who led the work, was direct about what this means: "the most fundamental functions of life don't need a mysterious magical spark." [93] A cell is a set of chemical instructions, and you can write them yourself. [119] This is not a living organism. It does not eat, evolve, or respond to its environment. But it does the three things biologists have long considered the core of life: it maintains a boundary between itself and the world, it copies its genetic information, and it splits into daughter cells. All three in one. No previous synthetic cell had pulled off all three at once. [190]

The first found 34 circular RNA molecules in the blood that predict Alzheimer's onset years before symptoms appear. People with elevated levels faced nearly three times the normal risk, and the signals were already diverging from healthy baselines two to four years before clinical diagnosis. [103] The second, a 12-year follow-up of 6,226 adults, found that depression was a stronger predictor of future dementia than insomnia — a reversal of what many clinicians had assumed. [132]

The first, drawn from 82,918 mother-infant pairs in Japan, measured how quickly mothers responded to their infant's vocalizations. Every 10% increase in the probability of a response within one second was associated with a 17% reduction in the odds of a psychiatric diagnosis by age seven. [105] The second found that breastfeeding in the first six months of life was associated with significantly less abnormally short sleep at twelve months. [127]

The tumor reprograms them to suppress the immune response instead of mounting one. Researchers at King's College London and McMaster University found that a protein called GPNMB is what makes this happen. The tumor uses it to co-opt the macrophages. Their CAR-T therapy targets GPNMB directly — and because GPNMB appears on both the cancer cells and the corrupted macrophages, a single treatment attacks both at once. In preclinical models using tissue from actual human patients, it eliminated all detectable tumor. [110]

The answer: 64,000 square miles of reef — roughly the size of Wisconsin — in sheltered locations, deep enough to stay cool, connected to water systems that buffer temperature swings. They are concentrated in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cuba, the Bahamas, Australia, Belize, Nicaragua, and the Turks and Caicos. The findings were presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, where Papua New Guinea announced protection for 77,000 square miles of its waters this year alone. [247]

The federal bill would nullify them all. Separately, a British survey found that 74% of shoppers believe hens are no longer kept in cages in the UK. They are wrong. As of now, 7.3 million hens are kept in what the industry calls "enriched colony cages" — spaces smaller than an A4 sheet of paper. Of the survey respondents who were told the truth about enriched cages, 94% said it was unacceptable. [234]