Loneliness cracks like hunger, and forgotten languages leave a mark

Using diffusion imaging to map white matter, the team led by Elise Barbeau and neuroscientist Denise Klein compared these adoptees against Mandarin-French bilinguals, French monolinguals, and English-French bilinguals who'd never heard a tonal language at all. The adoptees' brains still carried the physical wiring of a tonal-language speaker: the arcuate fasciculus and superior longitudinal fasciculus, the cable bundles that link sound-processing regions to speech-production areas, showed the same right-hemisphere involvement typical of people who actively speak Mandarin, in which pitch carries meaning and both hemispheres have to coordinate. French, like English, leans almost entirely on the left hemisphere for language. These adults speak only French. Their brains never got the memo.

The changes showed up almost everywhere they looked: shifts in brain connectivity tied to neuroplasticity, altered immune signaling, changed metabolism, and activity in the body's natural pain-control systems. Some participants also showed brain connectivity patterns that resembled those seen during psychedelic experiences, without having taken anything. "This isn't about just stress relief or relaxation," said senior author Hemal Patel, "this is about fundamentally changing how the brain engages with reality and quantifying these changes biologically."

Within 130 days, about 95 percent of it vanished, converted by the microbes into an unusually stable uranium compound that had mostly been considered a fleeting, temporary state before. The bacteria weren't specially engineered; they were already living in that mine water, waiting for the right food source. The study, published in Nature Communications, is the first to show this transformation happening from dissolved uranium under real mine conditions.

Near-extinct oryx are returning, farmers are irrigating fields for the first time in decades, and Lake Chad, once shriveled to a fraction of its size, is recovering. Hydrogeologist Richard Taylor of University College London has tracked the rewetting since the 1990s, but says it has accelerated sharply in the last five years. Heavier, more erratic monsoon rain explains part of it, but researchers also point to the internationally funded Great Green Wall tree-planting project and revived traditional water-harvesting methods as real contributors, not just luck.

The impressions left in that bone suggest the dodo had a stronger sense of smell than modern pigeons and doves, a highly sensitive beak capable of detecting touch, and a daily rhythm that may have stretched into dawn and dusk rather than a strict day-only schedule. "Its behavior and foraging ecology have been debated for centuries," said co-author Peter Hosner. "Having access to one of only two complete dodo skulls has given us a unique opportunity to compare the dodo with its closest living relatives."

That spin control pushed the unwanted hydrogen reaction out of the way, while the chiral copper kept producing carbon monoxide and formate, useful building blocks for fuels and chemicals. Ordinary, non-twisted copper electrodes tested side by side showed none of the same effect, and ultrafast optical measurements confirmed the electron spin was actually shifting at the twisted surface.

The plants took up the genes and began stably producing myoglobin, the protein that gives meat much of its color, texture, and flavor, and passed the trait on to their seed offspring. The lettuce and tobacco plants yielded about 800 and 810 milligrams of myoglobin per kilogram of dry weight respectively, roughly a tenth of what beef contains by that measure. "Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that higher plants can stably produce myoglobin," Groff said, describing it as a possible step toward reducing reliance on animal meat.