The brain can rebuild itself, and dogs have a built-in smile detector

They send newly formed cell nuclei gliding down their own long, star-shaped arms, deep into the injured core, and rebuild a working astrocyte network from there 144. Astrocytes handle the unglamorous jobs that keep neurons alive: feeding them, regulating blood flow, keeping brain chemistry in balance. Lose enough of them, in a stroke or in the rare autoimmune disease neuromyelitis optica, and neurons have nowhere left to live. The finding overturns an assumption that's held for decades, that the adult brain's support cells have little ability to replace themselves after injury.

In a second experiment, machine learning teased apart the negative expressions too: dogs' brains didn't lump anger, fear, and sadness into one "bad mood" bin. Each produced its own distinct signature 146. None of this came from shared ancestry. Dogs and humans split off from a common ancestor long before either species existed, so whatever lets a dog read our faces this precisely was built from scratch, over thousands of years of living alongside us.

Geochemist Ann Ollila of Los Alamos called it "very unexpectedly" detected. The problem is chemistry, not romance. Corundum needs rock rich in aluminum and starved of silicon, but all three rocks were dominated by plagioclase feldspar, a mineral that normally grabs every scrap of available aluminum for itself before corundum ever gets the chance to form.

About one in 7,000 people inherit the protective version, and on average they carry a 60 percent lower risk of heart disease and metabolic disorders 314. When researchers silenced FNIP1 in human liver cells, it switched on a genetic program that breaks down fat. In mice fed a high-fat diet, disabling the gene curbed weight gain, prevented fatty liver disease, and kept blood sugar steady.

The company blamed new administrative review requirements. Everyone watching knew better. More than a hundred scientists had written to the journal Science in 2024 laying out octopus intelligence and the ecological absurdity of farming a carnivorous, solitary species; Compassion in World Farming's Elena Lara had spent years explaining why; and, per campaigners, a 9-year-old girl in Portugal was among the tens of thousands of ordinary people who wrote in.

It's called La Mojana, and it's visible from an airplane at cruising altitude 339. A new University of Cambridge study, led by Dr. Jasmine Vieri and published in Communications Sustainability, mapped 1,600 ridges and 63 housing platforms across a 500-hectare slice near San Marcos, Sucre, at a level of detail nobody had attempted before. The long-standing assumption was that a project this ambitious needed powerful rulers to organize it. The evidence points the other way: this looks like family groups coordinating locally, no chiefdom required, working at the same time as the Maya and the early Mesoamerican and Andean societies.

At kindergarten entry, parents reported their household income and education alongside how often they read, sang, or did arts and crafts with their child. Children from wealthier, more educated families started school with stronger working memory, no surprise there. But kids from less-resourced families whose parents engaged them often in these activities showed protected cognitive growth over the following years, the gap narrowing rather than widening.