A gene that guards the aging brain, and a tigress raising four cubs

Researchers at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging think they've found it 3. They engineered human stem cells that were identical except for their APOE variant, turned them into two kinds of neurons, and compared what happened as the cells aged. APOE2 neurons accumulated less DNA damage. RNA sequencing showed them switching on repair pathways hard, and resisting senescence, the burned-out cellular state that piles up with age and feeds neurodegeneration. Aged mice engineered to carry the human APOE2 gene showed the same pattern in their hippocampal tissue. "We've known for years that APOE2 carriers tend to live longer and have a lower risk of Alzheimer's, but the protective mechanism has been a black box," said senior author Lisa Ellerby. Now it isn't.

They named it Masripithecus moghraensis, after Masr, the Arabic word for Egypt. Before this, every Early Miocene site in North Africa had turned up monkeys, never apes, which led researchers to assume apes stayed further south. Masripithecus proves that assumption wrong, and it looks distinct enough from East African apes of the same age to suggest North Africa and the Middle East were their own evolutionary crossroads. "We spent five years searching for this kind of fossil because, when we look closely at the early ape family tree, it becomes clear that something is missing, and North Africa holds that missing piece," Sallam said.

They tested it on pig kidneys, since pig organs run close to human size. The kidneys sat supercooled for days, then went back into pigs and worked. Researchers are calling it a landmark achievement, and it didn't even require the antifreeze-like cryoprotective chemicals other teams are chasing.

That made for a tidy story: the brain as a collection of specialists. Stefano Fusi at Columbia University decided to test how true that story actually is, using the International Brain Laboratory's dataset covering more than 100 mice doing a decision-making task, screen, wheel, reward 28. Across 14,000 neurons, his team found that only the dedicated sensory cortices, like the primary visual cortex, held genuine specialists. Nearly everywhere else, individual neurons responded to a jumble of things at once, the image, which side it was on, the motor plan to turn the wheel. "This is a giant smack in the face saying: fine, we got 14,000 neurons and we still didn't find it," said Baylor's Ben Hayden, of the specialist hypothesis.

Her team analyzed the World Values Survey, 97,220 people across 66 countries, testing two competing theories. The individualistic path says a happy society is just the sum of people chasing their own joy. The communitarian path says societies get happy when people build environments that look after each other, even when that costs the individual something. The data favored the second one clearly. Living around tolerant people, for instance, lifts everyone's happiness even though being tolerant doesn't especially boost the tolerant person's own mood.

Because the deals are royalty-free, the generic makers can plan their costs now and start building manufacturing capacity well before any regulator signs off, instead of scrambling for years afterward the way past HIV drugs have gone.

Headlines called her elusive, restless, a runaway. A camera trap image released this month tells the rest of the story: Zeenat, walking through Similipal carrying one of her four cubs in her jaws. "She was never a trouble-tiger," said Dr Ravikant Khobragade, the vet who first collared her. "She was simply looking for space." Her litter is the first real success of Odisha's tiger supplementation program, and it has pushed Similipal's cub count from 12 to 16.

Researchers are now using AlphaFold-style AI to fix that. In one study, AI redesigned existing nucleases for higher fidelity than earlier hand-tuned versions. In a second, AI designed entirely new gene-editing proteins from scratch, structures with no natural counterpart, and they worked, successfully editing genes in cells from multiple species. "The ability to customize the molecular geometry of genome editors will drive progress towards safer and more efficient therapies," wrote researchers not involved in either study.