A 50-year blood mystery is solved, and pregnancy brain earns a rewrite

This year a team at NHS Blood and Transplant in Bristol, working with the University of Bristol, finally ran it down: a gene called MAL, hiding in plain sight the whole time. More than 99.9 percent of people carry AnWj without ever knowing it exists. The tiny sliver who don't, either from an inherited change or a disease that silences it, are the ones who need this discovery. Give an AnWj-negative patient AnWj-positive blood and the body can mount a dangerous immune attack against the very transfusion meant to save it. MAL is now the newest official human blood group system, joining ABO and Rh on a list most people assume closed decades ago.

Puberty and pregnancy share a strikingly similar signature of widespread gray matter reduction. Menopause looks nothing like either one. Rather than speeding up the brain's aging, it appears to pause the typical rate of age-related change altogether. "That was interesting, as when we found the gray matter reduction during pregnancy, people often assumed it as something bad," van 't Hof told PsyPost. Her lab's working idea now is the opposite: this is neural fine-tuning, the same kind of optimization adolescent brains go through on the way to adulthood 26.

The single strongest predictor of a child's brain organization wasn't a cognition or mental health score at all. It was the socioeconomic opportunity tied to their home zip code, school quality, environmental toxins, and access to resources bundled into one number. Sleep duration and screen time ranked high too. Traditional cognitive and clinical measures fell well behind 28.

Mary Elting's team at North Carolina State used electron and immunofluorescence microscopy to find out how a single cell pulls that off, and the answer is a structure built like a fishnet: calcium-binding proteins called centrin and Sfi1, woven into a web wrapped around the organism's exterior that cinches inward the instant calcium ions flood in. Human muscle can shorten by a comparable fraction, but it takes roughly ten times longer to do it. "The fishnet geometry is unique because it lets Spirostomum contract uniformly, which protects its internal organelles," Elting says 8.

A compound called bistrifluron blocks the chitin their new exoskeleton needs to form, so the next molt simply fails. In lab trials it killed 95.7 percent of colonies when termites had a choice between treated and untreated wood, and close to 99 percent when they didn't. Because chitin only exists in insects, fungi, and a few other invertebrates, not in anything with a spine, the chemical has nothing to grab onto in a human body. "It's specific to insects and can't harm humans," Poulos says 5.

The van needed more than 300 charging stops and 16 container-ship crossings to cross the oceans in between, and across parts of Zambia and Tanzania the team charged straight off national power substations because nothing else was available. Guinness now credits the trip with the record for most countries visited in a continuous journey by a battery-powered vehicle. Volkswagen says it finished without a single technical breakdown. Afterward, TÜV Nord tested the high-voltage battery and found it still held 95.75 percent of its original health, after nearly 100,000 kilometers and more than 300 charging cycles 63.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science run the count together every winter, and after years of decline this is the first survey that reads like the turnaround conservationists have been chasing. Catch limits in both states appear to be working: a separate assessment confirmed no overfishing in the bay. Underwater seagrass, which crabs and countless other species depend on, expanded nearly 13 percent in a single year, from 36,799 acres to 41,419 87.

The project rides on top of a bigger piece of infrastructure work already underway: the MTA is rebuilding the century-old Grand Central Terminal train shed that sits directly beneath the avenue, so the city timed its redesign to land right as the street had to be dug up anyway. "New Yorkers asked us to make more room for people to walk, bike and enjoy their city, and we listened," said Mayor Mamdani 85.