Cells that cheat death, and a robot pen that could catch Parkinson's for $200

Nobody could fully explain how until now. A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science, publishing in Nature Communications, found that certain cells can start down the path of apoptosis, the carefully orchestrated process that kills damaged or unwanted cells, and then simply not finish it 8. The molecular machinery involved, enzymes called caspases that are usually cast as the executioners of the cell world, instead helps these survivors come out the other side hardier than before, ready to help rebuild whatever tissue was destroyed. It is the biological equivalent of walking into surgery and walking out with armor.

Researchers led by Lige Leng at Xiamen University found that a protein called Menin declines with age in a specific set of hypothalamic neurons, and that this decline tracks with weaker bones, thinner skin, and worse memory in mice 5. When they engineered young mice to lose Menin early, those mice developed the same problems on a shortened timeline, aging faster and dying sooner. Restore the protein, and several of those effects reversed. A related amino acid, D-serine, whose levels fall when Menin does, separately improved the mice's cognition when supplemented on its own.

What he'd found, reported September 16 in Science Advances, was a brand-new impact crater, 728 feet wide and 141 feet deep, big enough to swallow three school buses stacked on top of each other. It formed sometime between April and May of 2024, when a rock the size of a small building slammed into the Moon's surface with no atmosphere to slow it down. Scientists estimate an impact this size happens on the Moon roughly once a century.

He's in good company. The same round backed Sarthak Ahuja's Hypertensight, a smartphone-based tool for detecting hypertensive retinopathy already deployed in 18 Indian villages, and Avi Mohan Kumar Shukla's solar-powered AI system that uses seismic and radar sensors to warn villages in Jharkhand before elephants wander into farmland.

Everyone did both, so each woman served as her own comparison. Blood pressure cuffs and EEG headbands measuring frontal lobe activity, the brain region tied to attention and emotional regulation, showed that watering plants produced measurably calmer readings than the card game did.

Learning a language forces the brain to juggle sound recognition, vocabulary retrieval, grammar rules, and real-time listening and speaking all at once, and studies of bilingual brains have found measurable differences in both gray matter density and white matter integrity compared to people who speak only one language. Some research has also found that bilingual people who go on to develop dementia show symptoms at a later age than people who speak just one language.

A new investigation filmed inside a Brazilian hatchery documented the standard method, chicks conveyed into a macerator alive. But the story here is that the alternative isn't hypothetical. In-ovo sexing technology, which determines a chick's sex before it hatches, is already working at scale: Norway adopted it in 2023 and has committed to phasing out chick culling entirely by July 2027, and Switzerland began its own transition in 2025. The technology has reached the US and Brazilian markets too, and Canada is developing a version that can detect sex as early as day four of incubation.

Dr. Kenneth Pierce, a board-certified veterinary ophthalmologist, performed the procedure, the first cataract surgery in the sanctuary's history. Within hours, Pierre was responding visually to a longtime caregiver. Within days, he'd reunited with Jill, one of his closest chimpanzee companions, and returned to his social group earlier than the team expected.