T. rex ran warm as you do, and REM sleep guards against 83 diseases

Working with the museum's specimen known as Thomas the T. rex, and after a decade spent shrinking the amount of fossil material the technique needs by about 90%, they got a reading of roughly 36 degrees Celsius, 97 Fahrenheit 8. That's within a couple degrees of you, and close enough to an elephant that Ars Technica used the comparison in its own headline 96. Published September 16 in Science Advances, it is the first direct temperature measurement ever taken from the animal, not an inference from bone growth rings or guesswork about ancient seawater.

When he finally opened the envelope holding the answer that would decode his own data, his new number for big G didn't match another leading recent measurement 1. That gap sounds small, but for a constant this fundamental, it's large enough to matter. Gravity is oddly hard to pin down for the simple reason that it is astonishingly weak: a pinhead-sized magnet can lift a paperclip against the pull of the entire planet. Physicists have been chasing this number for more than 225 years, since roughly a century after Newton, and it remains less precisely known than the constants governing electromagnetism or the nuclear forces.

REM sleep, the stage where most dreaming happens and the brain looks almost as active as when awake, stood out: more of it tracked with lower risk of 83 different diseases, including heart failure, Alzheimer's, and atrial fibrillation. Deep sleep mattered too, tied to lower risk of 7 conditions including type 2 diabetes. The sweet spot for total sleep landed between six and eight hours; under five hours tracked with higher risk of 37 diseases.

Gray matter normally shrinks a little every year as a brain ages. During puberty and pregnancy, that shrinkage sped up, consistent with a brain reorganizing itself for a new phase. Menopause did the opposite: when it began, the usual gradual loss of cortical volume simply stopped. "Menopause, in other words, is defined not by what changes," van 't Hof wrote, "but by what does not."

All of the teens reported feeling calmer afterward, regardless of which they did. But researchers led by UC Davis's Rebecca Calisi-Rodríguez tracked something nobody had measured before: how the animal reacted. Teens who saw a donkey wriggle its lips, a sign of pleasure, showed bigger drops in loneliness. Even teens whose donkey walked away, a signal it wanted space, reported bigger drops in sadness. "You can't stand in a pasture watching a child and a donkey interact and pretend only one of them is having an experience," Calisi-Rodríguez said.

Both treatments reduced that negative bias, the study found, suggesting they may relieve depression through a shared mechanism: correcting how the brain reads ambiguous emotional cues. Psilocybin trials have shown faster symptom relief than daily pills, but until now nobody knew whether it worked through that same channel.

Separate testing by University of the Arts London found no performance gap in a hand balm formulation from a major cosmetics brand either. The company also says it slashed its own production costs, building a fermentation setup for under £1,000 instead of the roughly £250,000 a standard pilot plant would run.

Today Babojola's residents sweep their streets three times daily, sort and compost their waste, ban plastic and smoking, and fine anyone, resident or visitor, who litters 144. They pooled their own money for CCTV cameras, dustbins, and solar panels. The village is also known for Bhit Potaw, wall art made by the village's women using pigments from riverside clay, stone, and bark, so the same relationship with the land shows up on the houses as it does in the streets.