A woman with Alzheimer's speaks again, and Southeast Asia nears the end of malaria

Under medical supervision in Brazil, she was given a large dose of psilocybin. Three days later she was recounting memories and speaking in full sentences [201]. A week in, she was recognising family, asking where they were, pointing out cars that looked out of place. The team is careful about the story. It is one patient, no scans, no biomarkers, no cognitive tests, purely observational. They think psilocybin may have briefly opened a channel through the plaques and let dormant networks fire again [201]. In a separate Danish study of chronic cluster headache patients, psilocybin improved sleep quality in proportion to how many attacks it prevented [108].

Among them: the clearest signal ever recorded, the most precise sky location for a merger to date, and the first measurement of three vibrational modes ringing off a black hole after it formed. The network is now catching three to four events every week [8]. And one of last November's signals is very strange. It looks like a merger involving something smaller than the sun. Stars cannot make a black hole that small. University of Miami physicists argue the best explanation is a primordial black hole, born in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and possibly a piece of the dark matter puzzle [2].

The 1,100 or so olfactory receptors in a mouse nose seemed to scatter almost randomly across the tissue, and nobody could find the order. A team at Harvard Medical School has now found it. Each receptor has a home. It sits at a specific average position along the top-to-bottom axis of the nasal cavity, cleanly banded, like streets in a grid city [194]. A gene program of about 250 genes lays down the pattern, with retinoic acid acting as the painter's brush, telling each neuron where it is and which receptor to switch on [194].

Then it shared the chocolate [67]. A new systematic audit tried to rule out easy explanations. Reflex? No. The helping only happens with rats they know, not strangers. Selfishness? No. The behaviour is directed at the other rat, not at getting a reward. The team broke empathy into five measurable dimensions and rats scored moderately to high on four of them. The one they don't do well: reading the other rat's specific mental state beyond immediate distress [67].

The trick was structural. Instead of the ultrafine solar-absorbing powders that used to clump like flour, they threaded billions of nanoparticle spheres onto polymer strands, like beads on a string. The result: 90.2 percent of incoming sunlight captured, spheres bouncing heat into each other, and enough evaporation to irrigate a 50-square-foot vegetable patch of bok choi, beans and corn all year round [228]. At scale, the researchers calculate the water would cost less per litre than bottled water.

Lao Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone told the summit his country is committed to elimination by 2030 [229]. To be certified malaria-free by the WHO, a country has to keep transmission broken for three straight years. Egypt got there recently. Cape Verde before that.

It also lost hundreds of millions of dollars to recalls and warranty costs because the AI did not know what those engineers knew. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool," Ford's Charles Poon told the Guardian, "but it's only as good as the information you use to train it." The rehires flagged failure points long before parts hit the plant floor. Ford says the move saved the company a billion dollars in 2026 [258].

What he built, the Hospital de Sant Pau, is a 16-pavilion "garden city of health" with stained glass, hand-painted mosaics, orange trees and lavender in the courtyards, and underground tunnels so supplies could move without disturbing the calm above. Domènech believed the space around a patient shaped how the patient healed. Light, colour, fresh air, a garden. Not decoration, not luxury, part of the cure [253].