A volcano's ash ate its own methane, and cells rebuilt broken bone

The cloud kept producing it for more than a week, drifting all the way from the South Pacific to South America, destroying methane at a rate of about 900 megagrams a day, roughly what two million cows exhale daily. The likely recipe, still being worked out: volcanic ash, seawater, and sunlight, reacting in a way nobody had documented before.

It started the way a lot of good discoveries do: a friend of study co-author Alberto Cobos thought he'd spotted bones on a mountainside, and by that afternoon the team was standing over a sauropod's tail. The bones carry the telltale air-sac cavities and tail grooves of Diplodocus, and they date to a moment when the Atlantic was just beginning to split North America from Europe, thin enough, apparently, for a several-ton herbivore to wander across.

Moraleda took bone marrow from 10 women aged 51 to 72 with advanced osteoporosis, extracted their own mesenchymal stem cells, and edited a surface molecule so the cells would find their way home to bone marrow after being infused back into the bloodstream, a step earlier versions of this therapy couldn't manage. Over roughly six years of follow-up, the women showed a durable drop in fragility fractures, higher levels of bone-building biomarkers, and imaging evidence that their trabecular bone, the spongy interior lattice that gives bone its strength, was actually regenerating.

In a new trial, researchers instead injected a single dose of a virus carrying genetic instructions straight into 16 patients with autoimmune nervous-system disorders, including multiple sclerosis, and let their own T cells get reprogrammed in place 209. Side effects were manageable, and across three different diseases, symptoms and molecular markers of autoimmune activity improved for more than six months, with no sign that the "friendly fire" immune response had returned.

They found 1,260 specific genome locations tied to personality, 824 of them never linked to it before. The signal held up consistently across countries, age groups, and different personality surveys, which was the real point of the study: earlier researchers worried that genetic links to traits like personality might just be picking up shared family environment rather than biology passed down through genes.

The vegetarians came out 45 percent less likely to develop stomach cancer, 25 percent less likely to develop lymphoma, and 12 percent less likely to develop cancer of any kind. "Many of those non-vegetarian Adventist people in this study were still very health-conscious," lead author Gary Fraser noted, "so in some ways, it's amazing that we found anything at all."

"The biological response has been much faster than I, and most of us, expected," lead author Damon Goodman told Inside Climate News.

While parked and running its full medical kit, including an X-ray machine, ultrasound, and vaccine refrigeration, the vehicle actually generates more power than it uses. On one rough stretch, a steering part broke, exactly the part engineers had designed to fail first so it could be swapped in 30 minutes. Over two days, the team estimated the vehicle could reach roughly 200 people, including up to 40 pregnant women getting ultrasounds in a single outreach session.