LA's wildlife bridge opens, and mushrooms may protect nerves during chemo

It started in 2012 with a conversation in Griffith Park between wildlife advocate Beth Pratt and biologist Jeff Sikich, who mentioned, almost in passing, that the local puma population needed a corridor. "I'm like, 'Sure, how hard can it be?'" Pratt recalls. Fourteen years later, it is finally real: a vegetated overpass big enough to feel like a hillside rather than a bridge. The project's unlikely mascot was P-22, the celebrated "loneliest lion in LA," who crossed the 405 as a young cat, built a following roaming the Hollywood Hills, and died in 2022 without ever getting to use the crossing built partly because of him. Wildlife collisions kill hundreds of Americans and hundreds of millions of animals every year and cost billions in damage 121, and this one structure is designed to make a dent in all three numbers at once.

At first it looked like a status symbol. Then archaeologist Nicholas Conard noticed each hole was lined with tiny spiral grooves, the kind you'd get from something being twisted through it. His team tried threading cattail fibers through the holes and twisting: within ten minutes, they had woven five meters of thick, strong rope 1. The tool is more than 35,000 years old, which makes it, indirectly, evidence of a rope-making industry that has otherwise vanished completely, because plant fiber simply doesn't survive tens of thousands of years the way stone and ivory do.

Every single one of the 14 measures researchers tracked, wakefulness, sleepiness, cataplexy, disease severity, quality of life, improved significantly over placebo, and the benefit showed up at the very first check-in and held for all 12 weeks 59. Median weekly cataplexy episodes dropped 79 to 89 percent on the drug, compared to 28 to 39 percent on placebo. What makes it different from every prior narcolepsy treatment: instead of managing symptoms one at a time, it restores the actual brain signaling, orexin, that the disease destroys.

It's severe enough that doctors often have to cut chemo doses, even though those doses are already set below what would fully kill the cancer, just to spare the nerves. In a new mouse study published in Science, researchers gave psilocybin before chemotherapy and found it kept the tiny mitochondria inside nerve axons moving and functioning, which appears to be the key to preventing the degeneration entirely 96. Psilocybin activates the same serotonin 2A receptor involved in nerve growth and mitochondrial regulation, and the team essentially connected two separate lines of research, one on how chemo damages mitochondria and one on how psychedelics protect nerve connections, into a single protective mechanism.

The first attempt, in March 2025, ended 30 seconds after liftoff when the rocket lost control and fell into the sea. This time the 28-meter, two-stage vehicle worked. "Today, Isar Aerospace opened space from continental Europe," CEO Daniel Metzler said, and it's not a small claim: Europe has relied on the state-run Arianespace or foreign providers like SpaceX for satellite launches, and this is the first real private alternative to come from the continent itself 189. The company already has five more Spectrum rockets in production, a 40,000-square-meter factory near Munich nearing completion, and roughly 10 billion euros in customer deals lined up.

The details are the interesting part: dried beans, peas, and lentils rose 16.7 percent, tempeh jumped a startling 71.6 percent, and tofu grew 7.2 percent, even as burger and sausage substitutes lost ground. "The bounce back in plant-based sales shows consumers are choosing foods that are a win for their health, their budgets and can compete on taste," said Madre Brava's UK director Sara Ayech 194. The pattern lines up with a prediction industry analysts made back in December: people aren't giving up on plant proteins, they're just moving toward the simpler, higher-fiber versions.

In a 67,000-patient US trial, it caught up to 81 percent of heart failure cases and up to 90 percent of valve disease cases, in under two seconds 224. Roughly a billion ECGs are performed worldwide every year, almost always to check for heart attacks or rhythm problems, while people with quietly failing hearts or damaged valves have had to wait, often months, for a separate echocardiogram to find out. This tool doesn't replace that scan. It just tells doctors who to move to the front of the line.