A real narcolepsy fix lands, and navigating for a living guards the brain

Earlier this year he volunteered for a Takeda Pharmaceuticals trial testing oveporexton, now approved as Orzeyful, the first drug in a new class called orexin agonists 23. Narcolepsy comes from a loss of orexin, the brain chemical that keeps people awake and stable; instead of just masking the daytime sleepiness, the new drug replaces what's missing. Chapman can now stay alert all day and sleep through the night. He and his mother are planning a trip to Everest base camp to celebrate.

After adjusting for age, sex, race and education, about 1 in 100 died of Alzheimer's, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. The advantage didn't extend to bus drivers or airline pilots, whose routes are fixed. The researchers point to continuous, real-time navigation as the likely mechanism, the constant work of locating yourself, tracking a destination and updating a mental map. It echoes a landmark 2000 study of London cabbies, who spend three to four years memorizing 25,000 streets within six miles of Charing Cross and end up with measurably more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus.

Lead author Davide Massari and his team, working at the Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna, nicknamed the consumed galaxy LKH. They pieced the story together by studying globular clusters, ancient balls of up to a few million stars that survive as leftovers from galaxies the Milky Way has absorbed over billions of years. Hubble's precision let the team measure the age and metal content of those clusters closely enough to date the merger. "We do not know how our house was built," Massari said. "In this paper we discover where the first significant batch of bricks came from."

Working with the National Hurricane Center, the AI predicted Melissa's sudden jump to Category 5 with nearly 100 percent confidence three days ahead of landfall, the first time a storm that started with relatively mild winds was successfully forecast to reach that strength that early 185. Standard physics-based models top out at about two days of reliable warning for this kind of rapid intensification; WeatherNext stretched it to three. DeepMind's team called the jump "roughly a decade's worth of meteorological progress."

Every red wolf alive today descends from those 14 196. Four breeding pairs went back into North Carolina's Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in 1987, the first carnivore ever returned from total wild extinction to its native range. The population climbed to around 120-130 animals by 2011 before gunshots, vehicle strikes and coyote hybridization collapsed it back down to fewer than 30. This year, four litters and 23 pups were born, with roughly 12 to 16 expected to survive their first months, three of them in the wild and one through a program that pays private landowners for hosting wolves on their land.

The reserve, called Te Moana Tapu a Hotu Matu'a, is funded partly by the Packard Foundation and recently won a 2026 Blue Park Award for meeting rigorous conservation standards. Scientists suspect its waters may hold undocumented breeding grounds for blue, fin and humpback whales.

At the clinic, physician Djoumé Diakité gave his own blood for the transfusion the boy needed, who then spent 10 days recovering, 10 days his father couldn't work. That case helped push Diakité and his colleagues at the nonprofit Muso to build "Rapid Care," a model that puts trained local women, already known and trusted in their own neighborhoods, at the front of the health system instead of the periphery of it, finding sick kids fast rather than waiting for families to make an impossible five-kilometer choice.

One shows a bird at rest, possibly brooding over eggs, with a clearly carved head, beak and eyes; the other has its wings partly spread, feather markings still visible. They date to when the first modern humans were arriving in the Upper Danube region during the last Ice Age. "The figurines demonstrate that the earliest artists were skilled ivory-carvers, who could depict delicate motifs in miniature form," said excavation director Nicholas Conard. Bird carvings from this period are rare, vastly outnumbered by mammoths, lions, bears and horses, and these two were found close enough together that the same hand may have made both.