Black holes too old to exist, and a grandson's gift of walking again

These aren't faint smudges. Each one is powered by a black hole billions of times the mass of the sun, already blazing with the light of roughly a trillion suns before galaxies had much time to build anything that large. "These monsters, weighing billions of times the mass of our sun, somehow already existed when the universe was in its infancy," said co-author Joseph Hennawi of UC Santa Barbara and Leiden University. "We don't yet have a good understanding of how they grew so massive, so fast" [38].

What makes them different from today's leading blood test, which looks for the protein pTau217, is timing. The circRNA levels started drifting from normal two to four years before people actually developed symptoms, and the pattern held up in two separate validation groups. "Being able to identify patients on the verge of symptom onset would be invaluable," said NIH's Richard Hodes. "It could help us select the right patients for clinical trials and better determine which treatments are effective" [196].

Instead she found about 2,500 boys, many from disadvantaged households, doing homework, swimming, and teasing each other, ordinary and unremarkable in the best way. NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way, who has tracked kids' friendships for almost 40 years, has a theory for why: "Mental health is not the problem. It's a symptom of a social health problem." Her research finds no gender gap in the desire for close friendship, boys want it just as much as anyone [207]. A separate study out of Michigan State backs up why belonging works the way it does. Psychologist Hyewon Yang found that friends really are somewhat alike in personality, but that similarity does nothing to predict how satisfied people are with the friendship. What actually matters is whether your friends generally have positive traits, and how you perceive them [275].

The standout case is Japan: at the start of the 1900s, more than 70 percent of Japanese children were stunted. Today, very few are. It's not a fluke or a one-off; the same data shows dramatic declines across many countries that are now considered high-income.

The trick is a low-geared tendon-drive system that lets contact forces pass back through the mechanism, so the robot can feel how hard something is pushing against its fingers without relying only on external sensors. In demonstrations, NEO assembled LEGO and caught balls. "With these hands, NEO crosses a critical threshold," said 1X founder and CEO Bernt Børnich. "The robot can now do the things humans do with their hands, every day" [539].

Yet meat consumption keeps climbing globally, and 85 percent of farmed animals in the UK, 99 percent in the US, are raised on factory farms. This month, that gap started closing from the policy side: the UK government's Farming Roadmap 2050 explicitly encourages farmers to shift from high-emission livestock into crops like lentils and pulses, citing rising demand for plant-based food [641]. Meanwhile in Canada, a new scorecard shows some companies proving the shift is achievable: McDonald's Canada, A&W, Subway, and Boston Pizza have all hit 100 percent cage-free egg sourcing, some ahead of schedule [604].

That gap stuck with him. Now 30, Robin and three co-founders, Alex M Sunny, Jithin Vidya Ajith, and Vishnu Sankar, run Astrek Innovations in Kochi, building robotic exoskeletons for rehab. One of their machines helped Mohan, a 69-year-old retired engineer from Ernakulam who couldn't move either leg after spine surgery. The suit straps around the lower body, reads the wearer's intended movement, and triggers the walking motion itself. "It activates something I was not able to do on my own," Mohan said. "Slowly, slowly, I was able to move my legs" [779].