The first animals moved 10 million years early, and a pill calmed a peanut allergy

Some of the specimens date to roughly 567 million years old, which pushes back the earliest evidence of animals moving under their own power and reproducing sexually by 5 to 10 million years. "For 3 billion years, life on Earth was dominated by microbes," said lead author Scott Evans. "Then, all the sudden, we get these strange-looking marine animals big enough to see and capable of behaviors we would find familiar today" 4. Sites with more than 10 Ediacaran species are rare enough that scientists have had to reconstruct 40 million years of history from scraps; this one, published in Science Advances, is a rare exception.

Postdoc Chew Chai found the cells while testing whether flatworms can tell their own tissue from another worm's; she sliced worms lengthwise and fused each half with part of a different worm, and the fused "Frankenstein" worms rejected the foreign tissue in a burst of inflammation. "We never expected that a cell could just explode like a bomb and kill the cells surrounding it," said senior author Bo Wang. The team named the cells ruptoblasts, and traced the trigger to a hormone called activin. Published in Cell, the work also solved a smaller mystery: injecting activin into an uninjured, unfused flatworm produced the same explosive response on its own 11.

Four months later, six of them could eat far more peanut than before without reacting; most tolerated peanut flour equal to a whole peanut, and one participant handled the equivalent of four peanuts. "These responses represent a marked improvement," said lead researcher Rima Rachid of Boston Children's Hospital 42. The results, published in Science Translational Medicine, mark one of the first human trials to test whether a food allergy can be dialed back by changing gut bacteria rather than by the slow, daily dose-escalation of oral immunotherapy.

Tracked for an average of 3.4 to 5.4 years, these fast walkers had a 51 percent lower relative risk of developing new cognitive impairment than their slower-walking peers. Brain scans found something unexpected: super movers didn't necessarily have less of the plaque buildup associated with Alzheimer's. Instead, they seemed to have structural advantages that helped their brains cope with aging anyway. "We wanted to understand the opposite [of why people slow down]: why some adults over 80 maintain exceptional mobility and whether that reflects healthier brain aging," Verghese said 128.

Scanning more than 800,000 DNA methylation sites, the team found the vegan group showed changes linked to lower inflammation, including fewer neutrophils and higher levels of the immune cells that help regulate inflammatory response. Two separate epigenetic clocks, tools that estimate biological age from these DNA marks, suggested biological aging had slowed in just those four weeks. "Our genes are not our destiny," said co-senior author Jerome Mertens. "The remarkable finding isn't simply that one diet outperformed another. It's that the epigenome responded measurably in just four weeks" 235.

It's designed for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of dry age-related macular degeneration that slowly destroys the light-sensing cells in the center of the retina, leaving a widening blind patch in a person's direct line of sight even as their peripheral vision survives. The implant itself is a 2-by-2-millimeter chip, thinner than a human hair, carrying 378 photovoltaic pixels; a camera built into a pair of glasses captures the scene and beams it to the chip as invisible infrared light, and each lit pixel fires an electrical pulse into the retina's surviving circuitry. Because the light itself both powers the chip and carries the image, there's no battery or wire running through the eye. The first commercial implantation is expected soon in Germany 208.

At 18 she started building SkoBots: small, shoulder-sized robots decorated in Native floral patterns that kids program to answer questions in their own language, so asking one what a bear is gets back "makwa." Now 25, Boyer has mentored hundreds of Native children, including 12-year-old Ojibwe student Holden Hoy, who named his SkoBot Sabe after the Anishinaabemowin word for Bigfoot and programmed it to introduce itself in his own recorded voice at a school science fair. Crucially, the robots run on pre-recorded audio triggered by keywords, not generative AI. "If we're not learning our language correctly, we shouldn't learn it at all," Boyer said, noting she's watched ChatGPT invent fake Anishinaabemowin words 256.

Seven countries, Benin, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Nepal, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, have cut new infections by almost 80 percent since 2010, and 11 countries have hit the "95-95-95" benchmark: 95 percent of people with HIV know their status, 95 percent of those diagnosed are on treatment, and 95 percent of those on treatment have the virus suppressed to undetectable levels. Brazil has expanded access to prevention medicines by 41 percent in the past year alone. UNAIDS also pointed to a coming wave of longer-acting prevention drugs, twice-yearly and monthly injections offering close to vaccine-level protection, as a genuine turning point still working its way to market 238.