A "useless" chest organ turns out to guard your whole life

A new Nature study led by Harvard oncologist Hugo Aerts says that's wrong. His team scored the thymus health of more than 27,000 people across two long-running studies, the Framingham Heart Study and the National Lung Screening Trial, by feeding CT scans into a deep learning system 65. People with high thymic health had roughly 50% lower risk of death within 12 years than people with low thymic health, after accounting for age, sex, and smoking. They were 36% less likely to get lung cancer, 50% less likely to die of it if they did, and their risk of dying of cardiovascular disease was 63 to 92% lower depending on the cohort. "We did not expect these differences to be so strongly and consistently associated with longevity, cancer incidence, cardiovascular disease, and cancer therapy response," Aerts said.

Since 2014, a team calling itself the Taiwan Tree Seekers, climbers, ecologists, geologists, and remote sensing specialists, has been hunting the island's steepest, most logged-over terrain for what survived. In 2023 they confirmed an 84.1-meter Taiwania fir, the tallest tree ever recorded in East Asia 4. The Indigenous Rukai people already had a name for trees like it: the one that hits the moon. The team has also found "temples of giants," clusters where dozens of these firs grow together, ranking among the most carbon-dense forests on Earth. Industrial logging stripped much of Taiwan's primary forest between 1912 and 1991, but the same cliffs and ravines that made logging brutal also kept crews out, and that's exactly where these groves survived.

A month on, the treated group's sleep efficiency, the share of time in bed actually asleep, jumped from 79% to 93%, measured with overnight polysomnography that tracks brain waves, breathing, and oxygen. The placebo group barely moved, 85% to 87%. Time spent lying awake after falling asleep fell from 79 minutes to 17 in the treated group; it got slightly worse in the placebo group. "These results should be regarded as promising proof-of-concept evidence rather than confirmation," cautioned Chiba University's Kenji Hashimoto, who wasn't involved.

Aspen trees turned up more than twice as often at fire perimeters as inside them, while conifers like spruce and pine showed up equally in both. More aspen in an area also meant less forest burned per day during a fire, and the trees kept that protective effect even in spring, before their leaves had fully opened. Individual aspens actually burn easily, thin bark and all, but whole stands of them resist fire in a way conifer stands don't, likely from moist leaves and undergrowth, resin-free wood, and canopy height that keeps flames from leaping tree to tree. "This is proof that aspen has an impact on fire perimeter formation and can slow fire progression," Pelletier said.

It's the sixth cultivated meat product cleared in Singapore, which has now approved more than the US has. Aleph is targeting a 2027 production line and launch with select restaurant partners, working through a local hub it set up with contract manufacturer Cell Agritech. "As an epicentre of climate finance and food security innovation, Singapore is uniquely well-positioned to pioneer, refine, and introduce innovative alternative proteins," said Mirte Gosker of the Good Food Institute APAC.

The rising bubbles push floating plastic, and material lower in the water, sideways to a collection point at the riverbank, without blocking fish or boat traffic, since the barrier's just air. Universities and independent institutes have now validated the system at roughly 86% capture of surface plastic across installations in Amsterdam, Katwijk, and Harlingen in the Netherlands, and Vila do Conde in Portugal. "That number is indeed quite stable," says chief business development officer Anne Marieke Eveleens. Each deployment also logs what kind of plastic shows up and where, data that feeds back to local waste policy. The company, boosted by winning Prince William's Earthshot Prize, is now eyeing Southeast Asia, where some of the world's most polluted rivers flow.

Using fMRI scans before and after, her team tracked how a hub called the posterior cingulate cortex, involved in self-referential thinking, communicated with other brain regions. The program focused on cultivating inner warmth and coping skills rather than talk therapy in the usual sense, and it measurably shifted those neural connections alongside real drops in self-judgment and rumination, the kind of harsh, looping self-criticism that shows up across depression, anxiety, and PTSD alike. Joss had previously found similar plasticity in the hippocampus and amygdala of childhood trauma survivors after mindfulness training; this work starts pinning down the actual mechanism.