Memories outlast massive synapse loss, and aging's rust reverses

Five days later, the hibernated mice still froze in fear at that same scent, even though brain scans showed more than half the synapses in their hippocampus's memory-storing neurons had disappeared while they slept. The prevailing theory has long held that a memory lives or dies with the exact pattern of synapses that encoded it. This one didn't need most of them.

The pattern was consistent and striking: women's maternal lineage could be traced through burials for up to nine generations, while men usually show up with no relatives buried nearby at all, meaning husbands moved to join their wives' communities rather than the reverse. In a few cases the team could even prove a man fathered children at a site far from where he was buried. Archaeologist Rachel Pope called it revolutionary, noting bone evidence that some of these women fought Rome directly.

Applied to tissue from a 75-year-old donor, the enzyme brought AGE levels down to what you'd see in a 30-year-old's tissue. That matters because these structural proteins, which make up roughly 70 percent of the body, are astonishingly long-lived; it takes 15 years just to replace half the body's collagen, giving damage decades to accumulate. Earlier attempts to design enzymes for this job failed for lack of a natural starting point to engineer from.

Most ospreys prefer to breed near others, and males typically return close to their own birthplace, which normally makes for painfully slow range expansion. The pioneers break that pattern.

Tanner Faaborg did much of the construction himself over two years, starting small with a pilot batch of mushrooms before committing to the full build, and walked away from a guaranteed paycheck to do it. The site opened this month as Transfarmation's second public demonstration hub, where other farmers can come see the whole conversion in person.

Stone and brick conduct heat so poorly that even buildings blackened from floor to roof often have damage running only a few centimeters deep, since the load-bearing shell survives while timber roofs and floors burn. Clay brick fares especially well because it was already fired at temperatures higher than most wildfires reach.

In adult mice showing those changes, a single dose of rapamycin, an existing immunosuppressant already used in transplant medicine, rapidly reduced autism-like behaviors, apparently by shifting brain function rather than rebuilding brain structure. Earlier work required weeks of the drug to prevent physical brain changes; this is the first time a single dose produced a fast behavioral effect in already-adult animals.

Itinerant Buddhist monks found them there, valued them for both their medicinal use in Chinese medicine and their beauty, and began deliberately planting them at temples and shrines across Japan, which is almost certainly the reason the species exists today. German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer encountered them there in the 1690s and brought the tree to European attention.