A feather explains why birds outlived the asteroid, and DNA that keeps healing itself

Something, probably a T. rex or its smaller cousin Nanotyrannus, had eaten a bird, and that bird's plumage survived the digestive trip. Paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor of Chicago's Field Museum, who led the study published in Current Biology, says the feather belonged to a more primitive, less insulated kind of bird than the ones that made it through the mass extinction. The lineage that did survive, Neornithes, is the ancestor of every bird alive today, and this fossil suggests better insulation may have been the difference between freezing in an impact winter and living to raise chicks in it.

Dr. Emmanuel Mignot, now director of the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy, got there by studying narcoleptic dogs, including his own Chihuahua, Watson, who has the condition. Orexin, it turns out, is the chemical that keeps you awake, the mirror image of melatonin easing you toward sleep. Mignot told Live Science he was drawn to narcolepsy because it affects roughly 1 in 3,000 people yet almost no neurologist had ever knowingly seen a case: "I would talk to neurologists and they'd say, 'Oh, I've never seen one case in my entire life.' So I would say, 'Yes, of course; you miss them all.'" The discovery has since led directly to new drugs for insomnia and narcolepsy.

But one species, Adineta vaga, does something evolutionary biologist Karine Van Doninck says has never been documented in any organism before, not even in tardigrades 66. After radiation shattered its chromosomes, the rotifer reproduced anyway, without fully repairing the damage first, and its offspring inherited the broken pieces and kept fixing them across generations. Researchers noticed the anomaly almost by accident: clones from a single irradiated egg should have shown identical damage, but instead the deletions varied and seemed to be shrinking over time. "It suggested a progressive repair, and we thought that's impossible," Van Doninck said. They checked and rechecked the sequencing before accepting what was actually happening.

In the late-stage trial, children who took it alongside their existing medication kept improving their motor skills over a year, while children on placebo declined. Scholar Rock's approach blocks myostatin, a protein that normally limits muscle growth, an idea the industry had chased for years without a working drug. "After decades of failed industry-wide efforts to unlock the potential of myostatin inhibition, Scholar Rock has delivered a therapeutic breakthrough," said CEO David Hallal.

"We were interested in a more basic question: how much meaning does something actually need to have before it starts to matter for motivation?" Liu told PsyPost. It did, in both kids and adults, suggesting the need to leave some small mark on the world isn't a grown-up idea we learn later. It's there almost from the start.

The city's Operation Peacemaker Fellowship, started in 2010, pairs 14 street-outreach workers with 123 active participants, mentoring people at the highest risk of shooting or being shot rather than waiting for police to make an arrest. Researchers compared Richmond's actual trajectory against a model built from dozens of similar U.S. cities to estimate what would have happened without the program, and the gap held up even as Richmond's police force shrank from over 300 officers in 2014 to 121 by 2024. One former fellowship participant put it plainly: "Before the ONS came to me, I didn't care if I survived past 19."

The math is stark once you see it. A family eating a rotisserie chicken consumes roughly one whole bird, while a family eating a steak dinner consumes about half a percent of one cow, so a diet built around small animals like chickens and farmed fish requires killing far more individual creatures, and typically under harsher conditions, than the same amount of meat from cattle. Faunalytics research director Allison Troy said the team wanted to build something like a carbon footprint calculator, but for suffering: "We felt like there was a gap in terms of thinking about more of a 'suffering footprint.'"

It took the company eight years and roughly $1 billion in private financing to get there, on just its second launch attempt, after its first ended in failure. The mission carried a batch of CubeSats, and satellite operators like Japan's Astroscale had already signed launch contracts with Isar before it ever reached orbit, a bet on an unproven rocket that paid off 146.