A frog's gut bacteria erases tumors, and teens are safer than ever

Early on, the task lit up the prefrontal cortex, the brain's effortful, conscious-decision hub. After all that practice, brain scans showed something remarkable: the skill had moved out of the prefrontal cortex and into specialized circuits that could run largely on their own, freeing the "thinking" part of the brain to do something else at the same time. "There is actually a way to remodel your brain architecture and use other parts of your brain," said senior author Maximilian Riesenhuber [2].

A team led by Glauco Machado at the University of São Paulo combined nearly 30 years of fieldwork with photos submitted by ordinary nature-lovers on iNaturalist, and in the process more than doubled the documented cases of egg-guarding behavior. The pattern that emerged was messier than expected: maternal care always evolved from species with no care at all, but paternal care took two separate routes, sometimes arising directly, sometimes evolving out of maternal guarding after males started favoring females who were already tending eggs [3].

The new analysis found a genuine dose-response relationship: the more classes a person attended, the more their depression eased, the same kind of curve pharmacologists look for when they're trying to prove a drug actually works.

It isn't an isolated number. Teen drinking, smoking, fighting, and drug use have all collapsed since the 1990s peak, juvenile arrests are down from their 1996 high of nearly 2.7 million, and a teenager today is roughly a third less likely to die than one was in 1990.

It's the first time any country has recovered a booster this way, the first maritime rocket recovery for China, and only the fifth orbital-class rocket system ever recovered after a propulsive landing, joining a short list that includes SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron.

One strain, isolated from a Japanese tree frog and named Ewingella americana, achieved a 100% tumor elimination rate in mice with colorectal cancer after a single intravenous dose, beating standard treatments including a checkpoint inhibitor and a chemotherapy drug, while engaging the animal's own immune system to finish the job.

In animals with arthritic joints, the injection brought joints back to a healthy state within four to eight weeks; where the team patched cartilage or bone defects directly, they saw what Bryant called "full regeneration and repair."

Some of the black holes being found are heavier than a single dying star should be able to produce on its own, and the leading explanation is that they are "second generation": black holes that already merged once before, then merged again.