How Goa ended rabies, and why slow breathing calms the brain

A team led by Yann Carteret, a PhD student at the University of Geneva, watched the planet cross its star five separate times with the 3.6-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, tracking the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, the subtle reddening and bluing of starlight as a transiting planet blocks first one spinning hemisphere of the star, then the other. In a normal system the planet crosses in the same direction the star spins. Every single time, GJ 3090 b did the opposite 41. That works out to an orbital tilt of roughly 136 degrees, compared with about 7 degrees of wobble among our own eight planets.

A team at Washington University School of Medicine, led by John F. DiPersio and Miriam Y. Kim, used CRISPR to strip a protein called CD33 off donor stem cells before transplant in a 30-patient trial run across 15 sites in the US and Canada, published in Nature Medicine 3. The edited cells engrafted successfully and, in early results, shielded the patients' new blood supply from a CD33-targeted cancer treatment.

Using optogenetics, they lit up the olfactory sensory neurons inside mice's noses with a blue laser at three fixed rates, two, four, and seven pulses a second, matching slow, moderate, and fast natural breathing, without changing how fast the mice were actually breathing 55. At the slow rate, the mice spent more time in the open arms of an elevated plus maze and showed less anxious behavior in an open field test than at the fast rate. "Our answer: the airflow itself is the signal," Wu told PsyPost. "Its frequency alone, independent of breathing effort or conscious control, shifts anxiety up or down" 55.

Running both Bayesian and standard statistical models to see whether app use predicted a person's satisfaction three months later, they found almost nothing: little credible evidence that any of the ten technologies moved life satisfaction in either direction over time. The one signal that held up was a comparison between different people rather than the same person over time: those who texted more often reported higher life satisfaction, while those who used YouTube and TikTok more often reported lower life satisfaction.

A South Korean research team built a dense palladium foil membrane that sidesteps the problem entirely 125. Incoming hydrogen ions gain electrons at the membrane's surface, turn into neutral hydrogen atoms, and diffuse straight through the solid metal lattice, since palladium can absorb hydrogen the way a sponge holds water, then get released as ions again on the far side, with water left behind because it can't dissolve into solid metal. Connected to a continuous-flow ammonia electrolyzer, the membrane kept the reaction dry while ammonia formed on the other side. Platinum and nickel, tested for comparison, couldn't pull off the same trick, because neither one stores hydrogen inside its structure the way palladium does.

Since March 2014, a single hotline has operated 24 hours a day: a bite call triggers both a walk toward standardized, free post-exposure treatment at the hospital and a field investigation of the dog itself while the trail is still fresh. The second system targets the dogs directly, built around one number: vaccinate at least 70% of a free-roaming dog population and transmission collapses under its own weight, because too few susceptible hosts are left for the virus to keep jumping between them. Goa hit that threshold not with more vaccine doses but with better bookkeeping, tracking coverage block by block until "we vaccinated a lot of dogs" became a verified percentage in a specific area.

Denmark launched the world's first national plant-based action plan in 2023, backed by one billion kronor, about €168 million, in grants, introduced by a right-leaning agriculture minister after farmers, politicians, and environmental groups negotiated it out. Ireland's own numbers explain the urgency: the country now imports around 83% of its fruits and vegetables, and fewer than 70 commercial vegetable growers remain, down from more than 600 in the 1990s. A nationally representative survey by Opinions Market Research found 81% of Irish adults want to eat more fruit, vegetables, and legumes, and 51% think government policy should prioritize diversifying farming toward plant-based production.

Benioff started out in astronomy in 1917 at the Mount Wilson and Lick observatories, but he also played violin, and by the time he joined Caltech's Seismo Lab in 1924 he was trying to reconcile the two. In 1932 he invented the strain seismometer: two piers sunk 24 meters apart into granite bedrock, connected by an iron pipe with a deliberate tiny gap, so that as the earth strained and the gap's size shifted, a transducer could record it. That same instrument was sensitive enough to pick up ocean surf, storms, and traffic, and learning to separate that noise from real seismic signal taught Benioff how to convert vibrational energy into electrical energy and back again. In 1938 he filed patents for an electric violin and cello, and a June concert at Caltech featured what the Los Angeles Times called a "seismographic fiddle."