Your skin secretly senses light, and ancient humans were master toolmakers

Melanopsin, encephalopsin and neuropsin, the "three sisters" as one researcher calls them, turn up in the retina, sure, but also in skin, blood vessels, and immune cells. Octopus skin uses similar molecules to trigger instant camouflage the moment sunlight hits it. Bird skulls use them to sense day length and decide when to migrate or mate. In humans, the strongest evidence so far ties these non-visual opsins to mood regulation and the body's daily rhythms, with early studies hinting they may also shape fat storage, metabolism, and how our eyes develop in the first place 1.

It sat unrecognized in a collection since the early 1990s until researchers ran it through 3D scanning and electron microscopy and found notches, impact damage, and tiny flakes of flint still lodged in the marks, proof that someone used this exact piece of bone, over and over, to resharpen worn stone handaxes 7. "This remarkable discovery showcases the ingenuity and resourcefulness of our ancient ancestors," said lead author Simon Parfitt of UCL, noting that elephant bone would have been rare and valuable, so whoever made this chose their material with real intention 7.

He got only a brief tremor and a shattered glass bulb, and the question sat unresolved for nearly 80 years, drawing in theories from Feynman himself and, further back, from Ernst Mach, plus decades of experiments that landed on every possible answer 12. A team at New York University led by Leif Ristroph settled it this month by building seven deliberately "silly" sprinklers, including one with arms spiraling several times over and another with a nozzle bent backward, and pitting the old theories against each other in a new paper in PNAS 12. Neither Mach's angular-momentum idea nor Feynman's pressure-and-suction theory held up. What actually happens, the team found, is that the water flow at the nozzle flips direction depending on whether the sprinkler is spraying or sucking, and that flip alone explains why a reverse sprinkler always spins backward from a forward one 12.

Researchers analyzed blood plasma from 137 study participants using a high-throughput method that measured more than 5,000 proteins, then used machine learning to find which ones shifted before people actually got sick 71. They landed on a panel of 19 proteins, including the neurofilament light chain already known to spike before ALS symptoms appear, that together can estimate when someone will become symptomatic to within about 18 months on average 71. "If someone carrying an ALS-associated genetic variant had asked me in the past when they would become symptomatic, I would have struggled to provide a reasonable estimate," said senior author Michael Benatar of the University of Miami. "These biomarkers give us a far better idea of the timing... that's something we can work with" 71.

Conservation group Panthera worked with local communities to develop convincing synthetic "Heritage Furs," secured the Litunga's royal seal of approval, and has now supplied more than 22,000 of them across southern Africa 213. A new study in Conservation Biology found leopard numbers in western Zambia genuinely recovering, poaching down, and only 10% of the king's paddlers still choosing real fur over synthetic, a shift researchers estimate could save between 204 and 1,310 leopards over the next decade 213. Separately, a Cornell and NYU analysis of leather's true climate cost, published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, found that a kilogram of finished cow leather carries a carbon footprint of 187kg of CO2 equivalent, 70% higher than earlier estimates and 12.5 times that of vegan leather made from mycelium, plants, or plastic 186.

Sixty percent said they'd regularly seen someone act kindly, 65% said they'd personally been on the receiving end of a kind act in just the past seven days, and 73% described their fellow Americans as generally kind 86. Even more strikingly, 90% said they'd feel comfortable initiating a kind act toward a total stranger. "Kindness is swirling all around us, but the perception by ordinary people is that it's not," said Stuart Muszynski, who co-designed the poll. "There's a kindness perception gap" 86.

The bird walk produced substantially larger increases in mindfulness, that sense of being present and aware of your own body and emotions, than either alternative, echoing an earlier study that found a bird-focused walk boosted well-being and cut distress more than a plain nature walk did 132. The effect seems to run through the same channels as other nature exposure, mood, stress, attention, but with one added ingredient: birding gives your attention something specific and slightly effortful to track, rather than letting your mind simply wander through greenery.

"The speed we're seeing with D-Wave challenges what's currently possible," said Lucus Haugen, director of data science for AT&T's Chief Data Office, adding that the company will now test whether that speedup holds across a wider range of real network problems, not just the one workload already proven 166. AT&T's network operations already lean on other automated tools that helped cut customer downtime by 12 million hours in 2025, and this quantum layer is meant to sit on top of that, not replace it 166.