A paralyzed man's avatar can gesture while he speaks, and old livers turn young

A UCSF team led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang tested that assumption on three patients with vocal-tract and body paralysis from ALS or brainstem stroke, using a thin strip of sensors on the motor cortex to read their attempts at both speech and gestures like a thumbs-up or a wave 59. Two participants used the decoded signals to control a full-body avatar in real time, speaking and gesturing together, and the brain activity for combined expression turned out to be more than the sum of its parts, not the muddle scientists expected.

Its jaw looked far too thin and delicate to survive that kind of abuse, so he and colleagues in Vienna went looking for why it doesn't snap 1. The answer: the jaw is built from proteins bonded with metal ions like zinc, forming what the team calls a "bio-metal," a substance as hard as crystalline metal but as elastic as some polymers, and the worm makes it at room temperature and ordinary pressure, no furnace required.

A team including the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks analyzed 16,000 soil samples from across the globe and, writing in Science in June, estimated the total length of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal hyphae at roughly 110 quadrillion kilometers, about 68 quadrillion miles 227. Laid end to end, that would stretch from Earth to the sun nearly a billion times; the whole network weighs around 300 million tons, five times the biomass of every human alive.

Using epigenetic "aging clocks" on 37 samples from 19 livers, they found perfused livers had a biological age lower than same-age livers kept on ice; a larger follow-up of 208 samples from 103 livers, measured with a different kind of clock that tracks gene activity, confirmed it. Researcher Jesse Poganik called the pattern "striking."

The old rule requiring meat on the menu three or more days a week is gone entirely, replaced by language that treats pulses as an equal protein source, and the approved plant-milk list now includes fortified pea milk alongside oat and soy 176 183. Processed meat, sausages, bacon, salami, is capped at once a week, and deep-fried food is banned outright.

"It's the only way we can compete," he says, and his company isn't alone: by the end of 2025, global solar capacity hit almost 1.2 terawatts, roughly three times the size of the entire world nuclear fleet, most of it built with cheap Chinese-made panels 139. Millions of households and small businesses in developing and industrialized countries alike are installing it themselves, cutting bills and, in poorer countries, getting reliable power for the first time without waiting on massive infrastructure projects.

Getting there took a 2025 survey testing nearly 5,000 children across all 13 of the country's municipalities for the bacteria that causes the disease and finding no evidence of transmission, the capstone of work that began with house-to-house searches back in 2015. Laos got there in 2017, Nepal in 2018, Myanmar in 2020, India in 2024; now the whole region has closed the book on a disease strongly tied to poverty and lack of clean water.

Puberty and pregnancy both showed the expected drop in cortical gray matter. Menopause didn't. Women who transitioned from pre- to post-menopausal between scans showed no significant loss in brain volume, while women who stayed in either state the whole time kept losing volume at the normal aging rate, meaning the transition itself may have briefly slowed the decline rather than caused one.