Oxygen fossils, a heart that learns its owner's age, and bees saved by smell

The rocks, dated to as far back as 1.75 billion years, come from an ancient inland sea that once covered northern Australia, and they preserve eukaryotes, the category of life that includes every animal, plant, and fungus alive today, at the very edge of their known existence. The researchers found these early cells living everywhere from coastal mudflats to open water, but only in places where oxygen was present; oxygen-free settings held only simpler microbes instead.

The assumption going in was that adults and children sharing a grave were usually family. "We often assume that adults and children sharing a grave were parents and children or other close family members. In most cases, that was not what we found," says lead author Maja Krzewińska. The DNA also let researchers determine the sex of children too young to identify from bone alone, and found that boys and girls followed the same cemetery placement customs as adult men and women, at Västerhus buried on separate sides of the churchyard just like their elders.

Four to six months later, the grafted hearts had shifted: young hearts placed in old mice aged faster, and old hearts placed in young mice grew measurably younger. The same pattern showed up when the team checked human heart transplant tissue, not yet peer-reviewed and posted to bioRxiv.

At every stage, more self-disclosure meant higher likability and a stronger desire to keep talking to that person, and the effect held regardless of whether the speaker themselves felt anxious.

The same material generates a small triboelectric charge from ordinary skin-on-fabric motion, the same effect behind a static shock off carpet, enough to power a small wearable sensor.

About 130 came back as promising candidates. "Bees rely heavily on their sense of smell to forage, but that sensitivity makes it tough to find odors that push them away instead of drawing them in," Ray said. "Our goal was to find a way to use scent as a deterrent, safely and effectively." Field trials with freely foraging bees confirmed seven of the compounds reliably kept bees away from treated combs without harming them.

Beaver dams slow and pool water, creating wetland refuges where fish can wait out dry stretches instead of dying off. Not every relocated beaver stayed or survived, but enough built dams that six years on, the river holds its healthiest water levels in years and its fish populations are thriving. A 2025 column in the Salt Lake Tribune put it plainly: the beavers "helped save our Utah town."