The obesity curve finally bent, and dolphins passed on a hunting trick

Over that same stretch, the share of adults who say they're currently taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss jumped from 3% in 2024 to 11% in 2026, roughly 29 million people 78. Nobody can yet prove the drugs caused the whole shift, but the timing is hard to ignore. Cambridge researchers, meanwhile, worked out something that had puzzled the field: some obesity drugs work by switching a brain receptor called GIPR on, others by switching it off, and both cause weight loss. In mice, activating GIPR in the brainstem cut appetite, while blocking the same receptor in the hypothalamus released a kind of brake on fullness signals, a different mechanism arriving at the same result 3. Combine the two approaches with an existing GLP-1 drug and the effect gets stronger still.

Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology and NYU's Tandon School built a mathematical model to find out what starts the wave, giving each simulated ant three states, active, inactive, or briefly unresponsive, and letting switches happen spontaneously or through contact with an already-active neighbor 15. Most collective systems need a quorum before a cascade catches. This one didn't. When ant density, speed and sensing distance lined up just right, a single ant moving was enough to ripple activity through a meaningful share of the colony, a finding the researchers, publishing in PRX Life on August 5, called their most surprising result 15.

"The second I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening," behavioral ecologist Alexis Leven said. The new footage, published in Marine Mammal Biology, hints at something more than one clever animal: the possibility that the skill is being passed from dolphin to dolphin 25.

What the researchers found: hormone shifts, including in oxytocin, the so-called bonding hormone, alongside heart rates that fell into sync across the crowd, both of which lined up with how much unity and enjoyment people reported and whether they wanted to come back 53. "We wondered whether spectators might similarly become connected simply by sharing their attention and emotions at a live sporting event," said lead researcher Takashi Matsui, whose earlier work found the same oxytocin bump in judo practice and even in competitive esports played with no physical contact at all 53.

The payoff, tracked by researchers from Cal Poly Humboldt and the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission with tiny microchip tags: juvenile coho using the restored habitat grew up to twice as fast as fish in the main channel, and 2.6% of the 2023 cohort survived their years at sea and returned to spawn, compared with roughly 1% before 124. "In certain sites and certain years, the fish using restoration sites grew up to twice as fast," said fish biologist Carter Adamson 124.

The Jomon lineage split from mainland East Eurasian populations 27,000 to 19,000 years ago, right at the tail end of the last glacial period, and its long isolation preserved genetic evidence that's otherwise scarce. Several variants stood out, several tied to nonshivering thermogenesis, the way the body generates heat through brown fat without shivering at all, a trait the researchers describe as "an evolutionary legacy from a colder past" still detectable in people today 23.

It's the latest marker in a decade of firsts. Kanth was one of the first three women commissioned into the IAF's fighter stream in 2016, started out on the unforgiving MiG-21 Bison, and in 2019 became the first Indian woman fighter pilot cleared for daytime combat missions 128. Graduates of the course return to their squadrons as combat leaders, the people who shape air-combat tactics and train the pilots who fly frontline missions after them.

For over a century archaeologists filed them under "unknown ice age marks." A researcher building on doctoral work surveying plants used in shamanic ritual worldwide now argues they're flowers, specifically the drooping, five-lobed bell of belladonna or henbane, psychoactive nightshades whose active compounds produce vivid hallucinations and a sensation described across centuries as skin sprouting fur or feathers 133. If the reading holds, it would be the oldest known depiction of a mind-altering plant anywhere, by thousands of years.