An HIV drug reversed MS damage in mice, and bats finally got their real family tree

They gave the resulting drug, kamuvudine-9, to mice with MS-like disease, but not right away: they waited until the mice were already paralyzed and losing their sight, the way a real MS patient would be diagnosed 69. Over the next two weeks, those mice didn't just stop getting worse. They got their eyesight and their mobility back, something no mouse on a standard MS drug managed. A separate look at more than 3 million patient records found the same pattern in people: those already taking antiviral drugs related to K-9 had fewer MS relapses.

"It's like winning the lottery," said physicist Mauricio Barbi. Iron-rich blood had flooded the injury site, new vessels had formed to knit it back together, and then Scotty died in a salty marsh, the one kind of environment slow enough to let soft tissue like that survive 66 million years instead of rotting away in weeks.

Researchers at the University of Vienna have now traced how that trick, called CAM photosynthesis, evolved inside the genus Clusia by comparing the genomes of three tropical tree species 9. It didn't happen through one clean genetic switch. Ancient genome duplications, followed by millions of years of shuffling the copies around, produced at least three different versions of the same water-saving strategy in close relatives.

The result, published in Nature, overturns decades of guessing. Bats arose in Europe around 65 million years ago, not Asia, Africa, or North America 50 million years ago as earlier theories held, and both echolocation and true powered flight evolved early and just once, rather than popping up independently in different bat lineages later on. The dataset includes the bumblebee bat, at about an inch long the smallest mammal on Earth, and Madagascar's sucker-footed bat, which clings to smooth leaves with suction cups on its wrists and ankles.

A DNA study of 38 cats across South America, published in Current Biology, backed the locals up 222. The tilcayo is now formally named Leopardus tilcayo, the first new living feline species named in more than a century, and it split off from other tiger cat lineages about 1.4 million years ago. It's tiny, about 18 inches long and lighter than most housecats, and researchers have examined exactly two live individuals, one a former pet now living at a Bolivian wildlife sanctuary.

One agent noticed something odd sitting next to an otherwise unremarkable reverse transcriptase gene: a long, evenly spaced array of DNA repeats, the same architecture CRISPR systems use. It counted the repeats, measured the spacing, cross-checked the literature, and flagged it as a possible new biological system. Early lab work confirmed the repeat array does what CRISPR arrays do: it gets copied into multiple short RNAs. Feng Zhang, one of the scientists who helped turn CRISPR into a gene-editing tool, called it worth pursuing further.

It took thirty years of escalating policy, not a single fix: pay-as-you-throw fees starting in 1995, mandatory separation in 1997, a landfill ban in 2005, and RFID smart bins from 2010 that weigh what each household throws away and bill them for it. Today more than 340 facilities convert that waste into energy, and Seoul's Daejeon Bio Energy Centre alone powers roughly 6,000 households a day. New York City made food waste separation mandatory in October 2024, citing South Korea explicitly as its model, and is already managing about 140,000 metric tons of residential organic waste a year across 3.4 million households.