A sunless flower thrives in the dark, and elephants resist temptation

It has no chlorophyll at all, so it cannot use sunlight for energy the way almost every other plant does. Instead it plugs into fungi living in the soil and pulls carbon straight from them, a lifestyle called mycoheterotrophy that lets it spend most of its life hidden under leaf litter, surfacing only to flower. Researchers from Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University, who described it in PhytoKeys, found it growing nearly 1,000 meters up a seasonal mountain forest, not the constantly humid lowland rainforest where its relatives usually turn up.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Washington examined postmortem prefrontal cortex tissue from people who had, and had not, donated their brains after taking part in a long-term dementia study, and found that this folding pattern is disrupted in several types of brain cells affected by Alzheimer's 2. Using a technique called GAGE-seq, which reads gene activity and genome folding from the same individual cell, combined with spatial maps that preserve where in the tissue each change happens, the team connected altered genome architecture to shifts in gene activity and to the physical organization of the tissue itself. "Alzheimer's disease cannot be understood one layer at a time," said Jian Ma, who led the study, arguing that genome folding is a fundamental regulatory layer on top of amyloid and tau.

After a half-hour buffer to shake off any grogginess, everyone viewed 150 images and rated how emotionally intense each felt, then had their memory for those images tested three days later while wearing EEG caps. Both the brief workout and the long nap protected memory about equally well against the usual toll of sleep deprivation, but the EEG recordings showed the two strategies were doing it through completely different brain mechanisms, not the same shortcut in disguise.

Economists tracking its staggered rollout across districts found it raises test scores for struggling kids, and those gains hold up long enough to lift high school graduation rates and adult earnings. Test scores only explain about half of that graduation boost; the rest comes from harder-to-measure shifts like showing up to class more and behaving differently once there. Coordinators tailor their help to each kid's specific gap, yet students with very different needs, housing instability versus a reading deficit versus a mental health crisis, end up with comparably strong long-term outcomes.

Researchers at Switzerland's Empa institute and Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi introduced specific bacteria and fungi into both lab sand and real dune sand collected in Abu Dhabi, and the microbes spun out networks of fibers and biopolymers between the grains, essentially a natural glue. In one version, the treated sand slowed water movement sixfold; in a second approach, bacteria that produce nanocellulose formed thin sheets layered into the sand, and that version slowed water seepage by a factor of 28. The microbes need food too, but the researchers point out that sugars from organic waste could supply it, so the fuel for the process is already sitting around.

He reached back more than 50 years to a statute, Article 47 of the Natural Resources Code, that lets the state exclude a region from private extraction rights, and applied it to the whole Colombian Amazon at once for the first time. The 164 active mining titles and 39 oil and gas contracts already running can finish out their terms, but none can be renewed, and one narrow carve-out for small-scale road-repair material remains, except inside indigenous territories. Between 2016 and 2023 the Colombian Amazon lost 1.95 million acres of forest, three-fifths of all deforestation nationwide, largely through what officials call the "fishbone effect": one road cut in for an extraction project branches into a spreading lattice of side roads and settlement.

Paul's counter-argument, built from both scientific studies and the working habits of real scientists, artists, and inventors, is that thinking regularly happens outside the skull: in the gestures we learn to make before we can speak, in the physical spaces we work in, in the minds of the people around us. Babies build a language of sensemaking gestures long before words arrive. Time spent in nature appears to fuel the brain's associative networks in ways sitting at a desk doesn't. None of this is mysticism; it's an argument that reaching for the whiteboard, the walk, or the collaborator isn't a workaround for thinking, it is thinking.