Loneliness and belonging share one brain circuit, drawn out by drawing together

In both groups, brain activity between partners synced up more while they drew together than while they drew alone, a phenomenon called interpersonal neural synchrony. But the two groups diverged over time: synchrony between generations actually dropped across sessions, while it climbed between same-age pairs. The regions that lit up together predicted something concrete, too. Synchrony in one area tracked with how lonely people felt; synchrony in another tracked with how close they felt to their partner.

The vaccine, called intismeran autogene, is built from each patient's own tumor: a biopsy is sequenced, compared against healthy cells, and up to 34 mutated proteins unique to that person's cancer get coded into mRNA and injected, essentially handing the immune system a wanted poster it wrote itself 28. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel called it "a pivotal moment," and Oxford's Dr. Lennard Lee called it a "landmark moment for cancer vaccines" 218. Trials are already underway for lung, kidney, and bladder cancers, and BioNTech is chasing the same approach.

That worked because the same layer happened to contain zircon crystals, which can be radiometrically dated, sitting right alongside what appears to be a fossilized microbial mat. "Finding both well-preserved biological material and datable zircons in the same rock is extremely rare," Chaudhuri told ScienceAlert. Raman spectroscopy on the carbon's structure helped confirm it hadn't been baked past recognition by 3.5 billion years of heat and pressure.

The catch was that their measured melting temperatures were off from theoretical predictions by about 20%, a gap nobody could close. Now LLNL's Marius Millot and colleagues shock-compressed diamond samples to pressures higher than the center of Neptune and temperatures hotter than the sun's surface, and still managed to measure atomic structure, density, and reflectivity in the process 6. The new numbers finally match quantum-mechanical simulations.

The prevailing view has been that psilocybin just scrambles the brain's normal network organization into disorder. Instead, lead author Devon Stoliker found that as networks lost their usual sharp boundaries, they reorganized into new patterns that tracked what people were actually experiencing in the moment. That reorganization was strongest in people who reported the most positive trips and the strongest sense of dissolving into the world around them.

The CPR Environmental Education Centre has documented 13,270 of these groves so far, though researchers suspect the real number runs far higher since many exist only through oral tradition, not government maps. In dry regions, these groves double as informal water catchments and grazing reserves for the communities that protect them.