An immune switch keeps mice young, and ancient microbes hint at life's first handshake

That failure appears to drive inflammation throughout the body. When the team blocked a single receptor on those macrophages in mice, the effects showed up almost everywhere: leaner bodies, sharper memory, stronger hearts and muscles, and younger-looking tissue in the brain, liver, spleen, bone marrow, kidney and colon. "We've been trying to figure out why we age," said senior author Katrin Andreasson. "Now we know at least one big reason for it" 3. The receptor responds to a hormone already known for its role in inflammation and pain in both mice and people, which is part of why the team thinks a drug candidate could follow.

One long-standing theory holds that the first complex cell arose when an ancient archaeon and a bacterium formed just this kind of partnership, with one eventually engulfing the other and becoming mitochondria, the cell's power plant. Nobody had actually seen a plausible early version of that handshake until now. "Stromatolites could be more than 'just' a cradle of life where early microbial life flourished," Burns said. "They could also tell us how complex life first emerged" 2.

Clozapine is, by the account of physicians who have spent careers prescribing it, close to miraculous: roughly one in three people with schizophrenia don't respond to any other medicine, and clozapine can, in the words of one longtime pediatric psychiatrist, "give a person back to themselves." He describes watching children lost to relentless psychosis begin returning to their families within days of starting it. And yet only about 4% of eligible patients in the US ever receive it, even though the weekly blood draws that once gated every prescription are gone.

Researchers tested two kinds of intelligence: crystallized (accumulated knowledge, tested through word recognition and math) and fluid (the ability to solve new problems and reason on the fly, tested through memory and number sequences). Both improved, and the researchers trace the gains to better physical health, more educational investment and wider job opportunity, the very things chronic financial stress tends to crowd out.

The genuinely strange part came next: engineered yeast added to the material produced its own pigment, in blue, red, orange and purple, without a drop of conventional dye. Feed the fabric certain nutrients under humid conditions and it regrows and repairs damaged patches, forming new patterns as it heals. Different nutrients trigger a water-repellent, self-cleaning surface, and a second fungus species, Aspergillus niger, adds built-in UV protection through its own melanin-rich threads. The team's proof of concept was, fittingly, an actual dress.

It is the first trial to test statins specifically as prevention in otherwise healthy older adults, a group that earlier statin research mostly skipped because heart disease researchers of decades past focused on middle-aged smokers. One cardiac event was prevented for every 37 people treated over roughly six years. The trial also found no significant difference in dementia rates between the statin and placebo groups, addressing a long-standing worry that had kept some older patients away from the drug.

Monitoring later turned up a second adult, and now the site has confirmed two kits, meaning the pair bred successfully in the wild 213. "When that first beaver appeared last year, none of us really thought it would lead us to this announcement," said reserve manager Richard Spowage, who described the kits as "very playful." Nobody knows exactly how the original pair got there, though an unsanctioned release is suspected. As a keystone species, beavers reshape the water around them: Pensthorpe has already logged blue tits, water rails, otters, foxes and roe deer using the pool their dam created, and a Cornish farmer told reporters in August that a local beaver dam held water through this summer's record heatwaves.