Semaglutide slows aging in mice, and ex-poachers now guard a forest

Jason Keagy and his team at Penn State used that quirk to ask a question that's hard to test in mice and rats, since those species are so heavily maternal: does early paternal care actually change an animal for life 77? It does. Sticklebacks raised by attentive fathers for just their first 10 days grew up bolder and more sociable than fish raised without that care, and brain genomics showed the difference wasn't just behavioral; gene expression itself had shifted. Fish brains share the same deep hormonal wiring as ours, minus the elaborate cortex, which is exactly why the comparison is useful.

Three months in, treated mice had better muscle function, sharper spatial memory, and lower markers of inflammation than untreated controls. Mice kept on the drug for life lived a median of nearly 100 days longer. Then came the real test: the researchers compared semaglutide directly against calorie restriction, the oldest known way to extend a mouse's lifespan, matching the two groups' feeding schedules exactly. The drug matched or beat calorie restriction on most measures, and semaglutide-treated mice actually surpassed their own baseline on exploratory behavior and blood-sugar control, something the calorie-restricted mice didn't do.

Scotland saw deaths fall 13% and Canada 9% over the same stretch. Nobody expected this: epidemiologist Brandon Marshall at Brown University called it "unprecedented," and a new Commonwealth Fund report, based on interviews with public health officials in two dozen states and countries, found no single cause. Instead it was everything at once: wider naloxone access, more medication-assisted treatment, better care in and around prisons. Virginia's overdose deaths dropped 40% after a statewide naloxone saturation plan; Maryland more than doubled its naloxone distribution, including vending machines, and saw a 25% decline.

A year later, the exercise group reported lasting relief and better quality of life, and brain scans traced the improvement to measurable changes in the cerebellum, the region that handles both movement and pain processing.

Santa Clara County now writes grazing formally into its wildfire management plans, and the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are pushing to expand the practice under a 2025 Grazing Action Plan. Some land managers even graze an area before an intentional burn, to make the fire itself safer to control.

What changed his mind wasn't a lecture; it was watching the buffalo and leopards he remembered from childhood simply stop showing up. In 2017 he joined the Nigerian Conservation Foundation as a volunteer ranger, and now tracks the same wire snares and poachers he used to be one of. The NCF's approach recruits former hunters specifically, on the theory that the people who know a forest best are often the ones who once hunted in it. Omo spans about 130,500 hectares, part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve sheltering forest elephants, chimpanzees, and the endangered white-throated guenon monkey.

It survived two separate White House proposals to cancel it outright, including a 2025 plan analysts called "extinction level." The $4.3 billion telescope carries a 300-megapixel camera that matches Hubble's sharpness but covers at least 100 times more sky in a single image, plus a coronagraph built to block a star's glare so scientists can photograph the planets orbiting it directly. "It's like if you were to throw a ball in the air, and instead of the ball coming back down, it just keeps shooting away," says senior project scientist Julie McEnery, describing the accelerating expansion of the universe Roman was built to help explain. All of its imagery becomes public as it's captured, starting in early 2027.

In a paper in Royal Society B, they argue the usual explanations don't hold up under scrutiny. Tool use doesn't require speech; chimps, birds and octopuses manage tools fine without it. Sharing knowledge and coordinating socially aren't universal to spoken language either. What is uniquely human, and what closely tracks the timeline of language's evolution, is the controlled use of fire: sitting together after dark, safe, fed, with nothing to do but talk.