A black hole wearing a star's disguise, and cartilage that grows back

"We usually think of the brain as a closed system," said Julia Belk, the study's first author. "What we found is that actually a lot of immune cells enter the human brain during aging." Almost simultaneously, a Mount Sinai team pinned down one reason those aging microglia stop doing their job well: a protein called TIMP2. When they deleted it from mice, the animals' microglia rapidly took on hallmarks of old age, senescence, sluggish debris-clearing, and a surge of inflammatory signaling. When they injected TIMP2 into already-old mice, the effect ran in reverse: microglia shifted away from their pro-inflammatory state and got back to work clearing cellular junk 85.

When they blocked it in old mice, cartilage that had already worn away started thickening again. In young mice given the mouse equivalent of a torn ACL, blocking the enzyme prevented the arthritis that would normally follow the injury entirely. Stranger still, stem cells had nothing to do with it: chondrocytes, the ordinary adult cells that already build and maintain cartilage, simply became healthier once 15-PGDH was reduced. The team confirmed the same pattern on human cartilage pulled from people undergoing knee replacements, tissue that stiffened and calmed down after treatment.

Led by MIT's Rohan Naidu, the team's best explanation is a black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of the sun, wrapped in a dense envelope of hydrogen gas so thick it mimics a star's surface from the outside. They're calling it a "black hole star," and the discovery, published August 12 in Nature, may finally explain the mysterious "little red dots" that keep turning up in nearly every deep JWST image and then vanish from the record by the present day.

Neighborhoods that saw their undocumented population grow saw property and violent crime fall, not rise. "Our study is the first to analyze these numbers across neighborhoods and using such a diverse national sample," said co-author Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at UC Irvine. The team's own estimate of the undocumented population, about 5.6% of residents in 2010, dropping to 4.8% by 2018, closely matched independent Department of Homeland Security figures, and the findings echo similar research out of the UK.

Neuroscience now offers a real mechanism: predictive processing, the idea that the brain is constantly forecasting what your body is about to do, using past experience and signals from inside the body, then updating when reality doesn't match. In FND, researchers believe that updating process misfires. One neurologist at a multidisciplinary FND clinic now tells patients, "it's good that it's all in your head, because that's where your brain is."

Since 2011, nearly 200 orangutans have been brought there. At least 10 babies have now been born in the wild there, never caged, never carried in by a human. Sumatran orangutan mothers typically raise a single infant for years before having another, one of the longest birth intervals of any mammal, so a population like this grows slowly by nature.

Four wing-mounted electric motors delivered more than a megawatt of power to get a plane with a maximum takeoff weight over 25,000 pounds into the air, all for about $5 worth of electricity. The X1 is a testbed for Heart's real commercial goal, a 30-seat hybrid-electric regional airliner called the ES-30, which pairs electric motors with jet-fuel turboprops for 125 miles of all-electric flight and 500 miles in hybrid mode. United Airlines has already committed to buying 100 of them.

With help from Mercy For Animals' Transfarmation Project, they converted their barns into a mushroom farming operation with four grow rooms, a commercial kitchen, and a lab space. What used to be a cesspool of hog waste is now a freshwater pond that migratory birds stop at. The Faaborgs are one of seven farms Transfarmation has helped transition so far, alongside families in Texas who now grow hemp, in North Carolina who grow fruits and vegetables, and another North Carolina family who traded 540,000 chickens a year for mushrooms.