Loneliness's overlooked upside, and a wave conservationists rewild sharks for the first time

Roadside nitrogen dioxide had already fallen 54% in central London since the policy began. The children's lungs told the rest of the story: those growing up inside the zone showed measurably better lung growth trajectories than their Luton counterparts, published this month in The Lancet Public Health 12. It's the first hard evidence, anywhere, that a clean air zone changes a child's body, not just the air around it.

This year the program released its 82nd satellite-tagged pup into a 46,000-square-kilometer marine sanctuary, and the tracking data shows something genuinely new: captive-bred sharks foraging well and staying inside the sanctuary's boundaries, exactly as hoped 79. Rewilding has been done with wolves and condors before. It has never been done with a shark, because sharks don't usually cooperate with captive breeding the way egg-layers like the zebra shark do.

Each spatula gets close enough to a surface that weak intermolecular forces called van der Waals forces kick in, the same forces that let two flat, clean surfaces cling together with nothing between them. Multiply that tiny pull by hundreds of thousands of contact points and researchers calculate a gecko could theoretically support around 133 kilograms, roughly 293 pounds, far more than it ever actually uses crossing a ceiling 11. Just as impressive: it can unstick a toe mid-stride by peeling upward at a precise angle, releasing the grip almost instantly, a trick engineers still haven't fully copied in synthetic adhesives.

Fiber, starch, and sweetener get added, and the whole mixture is extruded through a 3D printer into cookies the team calls µBites. They haven't tasted one yet; the university hasn't approved the taste test. "I think it has a pleasant, appealing aroma," said researcher Sandhya Jayasekara. "We've not tasted it, but it smells good" 9.

When that stop signal appeared over a happy face, dancers braked significantly faster than non-dancers. No such advantage showed up for neutral or negative expressions. The effect held even though both groups exercised at similar levels, ruling out general fitness as the explanation 29.

Simply labeling the same behavior illegal made people rate it more morally wrong and its author less moral, on a seven-point scale. The effect held even when the law came from a totalitarian government rather than a democratic one, and even when people broke the law by accident 28.

That changed in 2018, when Neil Theise at NYU Grossman School of Medicine combined a laser with an endoscope to watch fluorescent dye move through living tissue during pancreatic surgery, revealing a network of channels and cavities where dense connective tissue was supposed to be 8. That fluid makes up about 12% of body weight and is now understood to form an interconnected network, the interstitium, that carries signals between and inside tissues, not just cushions them.