Pikas help yaks thrive, and older brains keep their balance

A field experiment 40 just found the opposite. When researchers removed pikas from test plots, cover of a poisonous plant called Stellera doubled, crowding out the grasses and sedges yaks actually eat; yak foraging efficiency dropped, and their weight gain fell by as much as 42 percent. The relationship isn't simple generosity: at moderate densities, around 200 burrows per hectare, pikas kept the poisonous weed in check and yaks thrived, but above about 400 burrows per hectare the balance flipped and pikas became competitors again.

Brain scans confirmed what's long been known: the cerebellum visibly shrinks with age, even in the healthiest agers. But the function it's supposed to lose right along with that structure barely budged. Cerebellar-specific motor skills held up in the over-80 group nearly as well as in the 20-somethings, while general sensorimotor measures, the ones not tied to this one brain region, declined exactly as expected.

After eight weeks, both the laughter group and the breathing-exercise group reported less difficulty breathing and better overall health than the control group, and the improvement was still holding a month after the program ended.

Yet patients across all five report nearly identical symptoms, crushing fatigue, brain fog, disturbed sleep, a body that just won't cooperate. Researchers from the University of East Anglia and Oxford BioDynamics mapped the genome's 3D architecture across all five conditions using a platform called EpiSwitch 26, and found something unexpected: the genes involved barely overlap directly, but they all funnel into the same small set of biological "hub" networks, like separate streams feeding one river.

A team led by Marcello Benedetti and Harry Buhrman at Quantinuum designed a game called complement sampling with a mathematically proven ceiling on how well any classical computer could ever play it 23. They ran the game on a trapped-ion quantum computer, and it sailed past that ceiling easily; as the game got harder, the gap between quantum and the best possible classical performance only grew.

Plant-based burgers ran 31 percent cheaper than beef ones, mince 21 percent cheaper. Meanwhile in the UK, Redefine Meat's 3D-printed meat alternatives just landed in nearly 400 Tesco stores less than a year after launching there 105, even as Tesco reports its biggest plant-based growth is coming from whole foods like beans, tofu, and lentils rather than meat lookalikes.

The wells have already measured temperatures of 135 degrees Celsius just 400 meters down, with testing ongoing. India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy estimates the country holds a theoretical 10 gigawatts of geothermal potential, useful for heating homes, warming greenhouses through brutal winters, and drying crops, not just generating electricity.