Ghost ancestors surface in our DNA, and Betelgeuse's hidden companion

Two distinct "ghost lineages" turned up: one that left its mark in every person alive today, and a "super-archaic" one whose branch may have broken away from the rest of us nearly 2 million years ago. We already knew modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans; this is evidence of at least two more populations that vanished so completely no fossil or scrap of ancient DNA has ever surfaced, yet their genetic fingerprints survived hundreds of thousands of years inside us.

An international team led by Vanessa Bieker at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, found that separate daisy lineages independently evolved the same heat-tolerant leaf shape to survive the islands' hot, dry lowlands, each one using a completely different combination of genes to get there. The team also found major genetic differences among populations isolated on different islands, the kind of divergence that suggests brand-new species are forming right now, not in some deep evolutionary past.

Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, a team led by astronomer Miguel Montargès captured the clearest image yet of that hidden companion in December 2024, a star nicknamed Siwarha with roughly two to three times the mass of the sun, larger than anyone had predicted 79. "This is the conclusion of a century-long quest," Montargès said, adding that he'd assumed the telescope wouldn't be sensitive enough to catch it. "Because it is more massive than predicted, we see it."

A team at Stanford led by postdoctoral scholar Adam Pines and senior author Leanne Williams borrowed a technique from computer vision called optical flow, normally used to track moving objects across video frames, and applied it to brain scans instead, letting them watch signals physically travel across the cortex frame by frame 113. Combining data from four independent studies of LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA, they found a consistent pattern: all three drugs reliably reduce the flow of information rising into the default mode network, the collection of brain regions tied to self-reflection, daydreaming, and a rigid sense of self.

That message went out over the Western James Bay Telecom Network, a fiber-to-the-home internet system the Cree community built and owns itself, after telecom giants decided there was no profit in wiring the subarctic coast. Finance officer Brian Nakogee had to secure capital from funders unfamiliar with the realities of remote northern life, and today the nonprofit network outperforms Starlink while keeping every dollar of infrastructure and revenue inside the communities it serves.

Scientists classify mature banyans as keystone species, meaning a single tree can feed, shelter, and sustain hundreds of birds, mammals, insects, and other creatures over its lifetime. The Great Banyan in Kolkata's Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden spans nearly 4.7 acres through more than 3,700 aerial roots and now behaves less like one tree than a living forest, sheltering fruit bats, palm squirrels, barbets, bulbuls, and koels, while a roughly 400-year-old banyan near Bengaluru draws Indian flying foxes in at dusk to feast on ripe figs and carry the seeds onward.

Their farm, 1100 Farm in Radcliffe, just opened as Transfarmation's second demonstration hub, a living example other farmers can walk through and see for themselves. "We spent generations raising pigs. Today, we're showing that the next generation of farming can look different," said Tanner Faaborg, whose family is betting on a specialty mushroom market projected to reach $5.58 billion in North America by 2030.