A sea squirt molecule turned back aging in mice, and salmon came home

Researchers from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Stanford, and two other institutions fed plasmalogen supplements to aged mice and watched them relearn a maze faster, grow stronger connections between brain cells, calm down inflammation, and, almost as an afterthought, sprout new hair that came in thicker, glossier, and darker than their untreated peers 7. "Our research suggests that plasmalogens may not just stop cognitive decline, but may reverse cognitive impairments in the aging brain," says lead researcher Lei Fu. Days later, a separate study out of biologist Danica Chen's lab found that semaglutide, the GLP-1 drug sold as Wegovy, made older female mice live longer and dulled several signs of aging like inflammation, and the treated mice outperformed untreated ones on cognitive tests even under an identical strict diet, meaning the benefit wasn't just about eating less 24.

They're really key to making us human." Two new studies, one in Cell and one in Science, mapped out how these cells actually make their choices 5. The Cell study, built from donated human tissue and lab-grown brain organoids, found that radial glia lean hard on a specific metabolic pathway, meaning the way a cell burns sugar can steer which neurons it ultimately becomes, not just fuel the process quietly in the background. The companion study found the cells also respond to physical touch signals arriving from the thalamus, and that this contact can shift them toward producing the upper-layer neurons especially abundant in human cortex.

The open question hanging over the field was whether living with a temporary pig kidney would prime a patient's immune system to reject a human kidney later. STAT's Eric Boodman reports the early returns as promising, "though not without hiccups." The milestone traveled well beyond the medical trade press, too: an economics blog rounding up the week's links simply noted, "The pig kidney worked" 106.

So Aurore Perrault, Sophie Schwartz, and Laurence Bayer tried it on people who actually struggle to sleep: 16 young adults with mild to moderate insomnia, tracked for three weeks at home, then wired up in a sleep lab. Continuous, slow rocking through the night cut nighttime awakenings and improved overall sleep quality, according to the results published in the Journal of Sleep Research.

On one visit, tangled in someone else's leash, she caught two conversations running at once: a regular having a rough year getting gently ribbed by four people about the weight he'd put on against doctor's orders, and an argument about a public health official that people took sides on freely. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg had a name for spaces like this decades ago: third places, "public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work." The regulars don't share politics, income, or age. They share a dog that needs to run in the morning.

NOAA's Joe Pecharich has supported restoration work in these watersheds for 20 years: "I am overjoyed, everybody's just ecstatic about how many coho there are. We have conducted intensive sampling since 2009 in these watersheds and many of us never thought we'd see something like this in our lifetime." The recovery didn't happen by accident. Since before the millennium, NOAA pulled together tribes, NGOs, timber companies, and the fishing nonprofit Trout Unlimited on more than 100 small fixes across the North Fork Navarro, Noyo, Garcia, and Big river watersheds, widening undersized road culverts, clearing log jams, and coaxing straightened waterways back into their natural meandering shape.

They also checked it for the usual suspects, psilocybin, ibotenic acid, and found neither. And yet for hundreds of years, people across southwestern China and the Philippines have reported the same thing after eating it raw or undercooked: tiny people, jumping, climbing, running around them, a condition researchers have nicknamed a Lilliputian hallucination. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's favorite illustration of how perception actually works involves a soldier in a civil war who nearly shoots a ten-year-old herding cows, his brain having built a rifle out of a stick from pure prediction, corrected only at the last second by a comrade's hand on his arm.

"We're doing something that was long thought to be nearly impossible," CTO Chandler Hatton told Ars Technica, "which is delivering high-performing modular smartphones that can last for a very long time." The company avoids conflict minerals, uses recycled materials, and pays workers a living wage, and it tracks something unusual as a company metric: it wants every buyer to keep using the same phone for at least five years.