A telescope launched for deep space, astrocytes remembered how to be neurons

Roman's camera has 300 megapixels and a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's; it could survey the entire Milky Way in about a month, a job that would take Hubble a century 200. It's built to hunt dark matter and dark energy, the 95 percent of the universe's stuff that nobody can directly see, and to find exoplanets using a coronagraph that blocks out starlight 200. Once fully operational it will beam back 1.4 terabytes of data a day 2.

A team at the University of South Carolina built a tiny molecular cage packed with antibodies that, once inside an astrocyte, releases a protein "brake" normally holding that cell's identity in place. Freed from the brake, astrocytes in lab dishes and human brain organoids took on the molecular signature of neurons and started firing electrically 175. In mice modeling Alzheimer's, the treatment grew new neurons in the hippocampus, the memory region that fails first in the disease, and treated mice performed like healthy mice on maze tests of learning and memory 175.

At least a half dozen new medications have been FDA-approved since then, many targeting the CGRP pathway implicated in migraine: atogepant, eptinezumab, erenumab, fremanezumab, and galcanezumab all earned high marks for effectiveness and tolerability 75. The new advice is to offer preventive treatment to anyone with four or more migraine or severe headache days a month, or whose migraines interfere with work, and to check in eight to twelve weeks later to see if it's working 75. About 15 percent of Americans get migraines, women disproportionately, and older standbys like Botox, propranolol, and topiramate remain solid options with long safety track records 75.

Muhammad Ehab Rasul of the National University of Singapore and Samantha Moore-Berg of the University of Utah ran three studies, in the United States and Israel, starting with a survey of 2,707 Americans, to test whether consuming media made by the opposing group changes that 91. Watching or reading outgroup news was linked to feeling a stronger sense of connection to people in that group, described as a kind of one-sided "political parasocial relationship," and that felt connection in turn predicted assuming the other side viewed you more favorably than you'd feared 91.

Curious about the physics underlying that behavior, the team built a stripped-down computational model: a chain of self-propelled beads, each with its own tiny push, meant to mimic a worm's flexible, wriggling body. When they simulated a single worm-like chain moving through two channels of equal length but different widths, one barely wider than the worm's own body, the other much wider, the simulated worm consistently moved faster through the narrow one 129. Nobody was expecting that.

Fermentation companies, the ones engineering microbes to brew bioidentical dairy and egg proteins or grow mycoprotein like Quorn's, took 84 percent of that total. Precision fermentation firms alone pulled in €100 million, already beating their entire 2025 haul, with individual raises like French startup Standing Ovation's €30 million and the Dutch Protein Brewery's €18 million Series B extension 178. Europe still attracts more than three-quarters of the world's alternative-protein investment 178.

At the outset, Luton actually had cleaner air and faster lung development. But as nitrogen dioxide and exhaust particulates fell faster inside London's zone than in Luton, London kids' lung capacity gains accelerated to 233 milliliters of air per year, edging past Luton's 223 milliliters, and within four years London had closed the gap entirely 198. The share of Central London children with impaired lung function dropped from 14 percent to 9 percent over the same period 198.

For centuries it was credited to an anonymous "gentleman of excellent gifts." The actual author was a woman, Juliana Barnes, who had retreated to a convent after some unnamed heartbreak, one of the only places a 15th-century woman could get access to books, and used that solitude to become first a diarist, then a published writer on subjects considered strictly male: hunting, fishing, hawking 240.