A paralyzed man petted his dog again, and mice outlast a volcano

After 35 weeks of training, the strength in his right arm is up 86 percent, his left arm 62 percent. He can scratch his nose now. He can wipe his mouth. He can scratch behind his dog's ears and feel the fur under his fingers, and some of that function has stuck around even with the computer switched off. The work was published in Nature.

Before that, scientists assumed no mammal could survive above roughly 18,000 feet. Storz and his team have spent three years since, from 2020 to 2023, trapping and studying the same species, Phyllotis vaccarum, at low, middle, and summit elevations, and their results, published July 9 in Science, show the mice have picked up an unusual trick: they eat desert plants that would poison almost anything else, in an environment so thin and cold that even an acclimatized mountaineer can only tolerate it briefly. One of Storz's own colleagues needed emergency evacuation for altitude sickness during a related expedition.

It's happened at least three times since the behavior was first filmed in December 2021, most recently in 2024 and 2025, and the pattern is oddly consistent. Careful review of the footage showed the sunfish were already dead, their nutrient-rich organs already removed, before the ramming even started, so this isn't a killing blow. It looks more like violent, practiced butchery, breaking apart a carcass whose skin is famously too tough to simply peel 68. Afterward, a juvenile orca moved in to eat the smaller pieces.

Within decades the blight had wiped out nearly every mature tree from Maine to Mississippi. For a century, breeders have crossed American chestnuts with blight-resistant Asian ones, and for about 20 years a single inserted wheat gene, nicknamed OXO, looked like it might make the trees fully blight-resistant on its own. Recent field results show that approach underperforming. So researchers, drawing on decades of progress in reading the tree's full genome, are now designing new genetic strategies rather than betting on one gene.

Company founder Max Hodak's own summary is blunt and telling: "We have a cochlear implant for vision now." The device restores enough central sight that patients can read books and make out road signs again, and the company expects a US launch as soon as 2027.

Earlier studies of sociology, economics, and physics found male academics roughly twice as likely to have a page. Volunteer projects like Women in Red and Women Scientists, formed specifically to close that gap, get real credit here. As a reminder of how recent this shift is: Donna Strickland didn't have a Wikipedia page in 2018, the year she won the Nobel Prize in Physics, because an editor had previously ruled her work not notable enough.

Using molecular farming, plant cells rather than animal or microbial ones, the company says it has successfully expressed all four forms of casein found in cow's milk and matched its coagulation behavior, at a price point of $15 to $20 per kilogram, on par with the conventional dairy version. Production starts this quarter at a facility in Kibbutz Sdot Yam.

Instead they have to mark it down, sell it through other channels, or donate it, with narrow exceptions for goods that are unsafe, counterfeit, or too damaged to use. They also have to publish an annual public report on anything they do discard, and keep those records for five years. The European Environment Agency estimates 4 to 9 percent of unsold textiles in the EU were being destroyed every year before this.