A planet caught mid-birth, and an app protecting elephants and crops

Working memory, attention, and the ability to resist impulsive reactions all ticked up immediately afterward, and the boost got stronger the longer people kept the habit and when it happened at school or work rather than at home 22. Separately, researchers led by Johanna Rehder at the University of Salzburg tracked 8,223 people across 14 countries with wearable accelerometers, gathering 321,345 well-being check-ins against nearly a million hours of recorded movement 84. Going from sitting to walking was tied to a 0.62-point jump in energetic arousal on a 1-to-4 scale, the single strongest effect they found 84.

Astronomers first noticed something was off in 2017: a gap in the star's protoplanetary disk, the ring of leftover gas and dust that planets form from. This year, a team led by doctoral student Andrea Bernardi combined three telescopes, the Keck Observatory, ALMA, and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, to directly image the object sitting in that gap and confirm it's still actively pulling in material from its surroundings 6. Scaled to a human lifespan, Bernardi's team put it plainly: Elias 2-24 b is roughly a two- or three-day-old baby 6.

Launched publicly in March 2020 in India and Thailand, the app now feeds a shared database, mapped with heatmaps, that NGOs, scientists, and government agencies can also draw on 213. In areas using it, crop loss reportedly dropped from 50 percent to 5 percent 213.

They didn't find one. Even FOXO3A, the best-known longevity gene, showed none of the variants usually linked to long life in her genome 104. What they found instead was a scatter of small advantages across immune function, metabolism, and lipid regulation, plus an unusually diverse gut microbiome and a notably favorable lipid profile 104. Her telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes that shorten with age, were actually shorter than a young person's; her immune cells looked properly aged too. She wasn't biologically young. She was just remarkably resistant to what that aging usually causes 104.

A team of geobiologists led by researchers at UCLA has now measured it directly, using a technique that needs 90 percent less sample material than earlier methods, and a single donated tooth from Thomas, the T. rex on display at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County 232.

The previous record for portable CT, a German Fraunhofer device, weighed 42 pounds, more than three times as much 183. The Xtomo-Cube runs at just 50 kVp, far below a hospital scanner's energy, which means it needs far less radiation shielding, and its detector pixels are 18.5 micrometers across, fine enough to resolve details about the width of a human hair 183.

The actual news is that it's no longer inevitable. In-ovo sexing technology can now identify a chick embryo's sex before it hatches, letting hatcheries sort eggs before any animal is involved at all, and it's already running commercially in markets including the United States and Brazil 190. Canada has gone further, developing methods that can determine sex as early as day four of incubation 190. Germany and France have already banned chick culling outright 187190. Mercy For Animals is now running a campaign called Crack the System to push more hatcheries and countries toward the technology that already exists 187.