Indigo light stops nearsightedness, and a 190-year pangolin secret

Researchers at Cincinnati Children's and the University of Alabama at Birmingham raised tree shrews, animals whose eyes closely mirror human ones, under indigo light and found it completely prevented the animals from developing myopia, even under conditions designed to force it 9. Myopia happens when the eyeball grows too long front to back, so incoming light lands in front of the retina instead of on it. It is already the most common eye condition on the planet, and some researchers estimate it could affect half of humanity, nearly 5 billion people, by 2050. The tree shrews wore tiny custom spectacles to induce the effect in one eye while the other served as a comparison, and the indigo light shut the process down entirely.

More than 90% of pancreatic tumors are driven by a mutated gene called KRAS, a switch stuck permanently in the "grow" position. For decades, its surface was considered too smooth for any drug to grip. Daraxonrasib gets around that by binding a different molecule, cyclophilin A, which then locks onto the active KRAS protein and shuts it down 158.

Field Museum curator Anderson Feijó and Nepal Engineering College researcher Narayan Koju led the work, published in Communications Biology, capping more than five years of fieldwork that started when Koju first noticed the Himalayan animals didn't quite fit.

His team's new tool, AGENTEX, skips the cell entirely. Researchers custom-build the tRNAs and ribosomes needed for new amino acids and drop them into a cell-free lab mixture that manufactures proteins using up to 34 building blocks instead of 20, with no genome to edit and no organism required 73. Along the way, first author Felix Radford's team turned up new basics about how DNA becomes protein that nobody had mapped before.

The piece opens with Liz Cahill, who left generations of Philadelphia roots for a Bay Area internship and knew literally no one, until two strangers, her new roommates Lauren and Deirdre, simply took her in. Darilys Matos Acevedo had the opposite experience moving from Puerto Rico, where a stranger smiles at you on the street, to Boston, where she got glares instead, until she found other transplants who felt exactly the same isolation.

Their range has grown from roughly 30,000 to nearly 35,000 square kilometers across 11 districts. In Barda Wildlife Sanctuary, where lions vanished in the 19th century, 17 have recolonized the area on their own since 2023. Much of the credit goes to a patient, unglamorous effort: rebuilding populations of the deer and wild pigs the lions actually eat.

Tofu came out on top of all twenty. The next three spots went to chia seeds, beans, and quinoa, all plant-based. The bottom four, in order from bad to worst, were mozzarella, lamb, beef, and cheddar cheese, which finished dead last.

Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have floated the region's mineral-rich soil as one factor. But the residents themselves describe something plainer: 105-year-old Gao Tingkuan is up before 5am for a walk, then does his own grocery shopping, buying whatever he feels like eating that day. Researchers studying similar longevity hotspots elsewhere have found the common threads are curiosity, low reported stress, and staying socially and physically engaged.