A spit test now finds endometriosis in days, not years

Both replace what used to require a laparoscopy under general anesthesia just to look. Ami Robertson, a 23-year-old Pilates instructor from Glasgow, spent years being told she had irritable bowel syndrome. The new test took under an hour and gave her, in her words, "concrete evidence I could take to my doctor." Fifteen-year-old Simran Chavda had been in pain since age 13; her mother, a GP herself, couldn't get a referral until the test results came back showing widespread endometriosis.

One group, AERS+, runs hypersomnia and weight gain, higher BMI, earlier onset, more relapses. The other, AERS-, runs insomnia and weight loss. They found 27 gene variants tied to depression risk, several never reported before, evidence that "weight gain or loss" isn't one diagnosis wearing two faces, it's two different diagnoses. Meanwhile, in nearly 120 people with persistent depressive disorder treated with the antidepressants duloxetine or desvenlafaxine, brain scans showed tissue microstructure that had changed under chronic depression actually normalizing with treatment [36], and how much it normalized tracked with how much the person's symptoms improved.

Molecular biologist Oran Wasserman and the Jones Spider Silk Lab at Utah State just became the first team to make a film out of bee silk, working with cocoons from the blue orchard bee, an important solitary orchard pollinator. Unlike a silkworm, which spins one continuous thread, a bee larva builds its cocoon almost architecturally: anchoring a strand to the cell wall, pulling it across with head movements, fastening it, and repeating, layer by layer, until it's sealed and can manage gas exchange, moisture, and parasite resistance all at once.

Within a day, NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites had caught steam-rich plumes rising off the water. The PACE satellite's ocean-color sensor picked up huge patches of discolored, disturbed water. By May 10 and 11, Europe's Sentinel-2 and NASA's Landsat 9 had close-up views of ash reaching kilometers into the sky, and by May 12 the VIIRS instrument had mapped a thermal hotspot covering about seven square kilometers underwater. "The good news is that there are huge opportunities to explore and learn using both government and commercial satellite platforms already in orbit," said Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA Goddard.

Bioprinting's oldest problem is gravity itself: cells mixed into bio-ink settle unevenly, the way blueberries sink to the bottom of muffin batter, leaving some regions of an organ crowded with cells and others starved of them. In microgravity, that settling simply doesn't happen, and cells stayed far more evenly distributed through the printed tissue. "Successfully bioprinting living liver and kidney tissue aboard the International Space Station marks an important step forward for regenerative medicine," said Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

In Srinagar, Gulam Hassan and his daughter Tanzila revived the Kashmiri Wuguv grass mat, once woven from wetland reeds in nearly every home before factory mats replaced it; more than 20 women now earn 10,000 to 12,000 rupees a month weaving from home. Shambhavi Pandey left an HR career managing 3,000 people to found Folkstroke, which has raised the incomes of 200 folk artisans across seven states by 30 percent over six years. And Sushmita Kaneri turned down a software engineering job after meeting a Nirmal painting artisan who was planning to tell his son to get a "real" job instead; her company Gullakaari now connects more than 1,000 artisans to 13 once-endangered crafts.

In Italy, doctors at the IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute gave two people with neuromyelitis optica, a severe autoimmune disease in which rogue antibodies destroy support cells in the brain and spinal cord, a stem cell transplant from a donor to "reset" their immune system entirely. Both are now in remission.

Chef Maciel and her husband opened the shop in 2022, building meats in-house from seitan, tofu, jackfruit, beans, and beets, engineered for protein and fiber as much as flavor. "This is not just a restaurant for vegans," Maciel says. "Everybody's welcome to come and to try."