Animals may be 200 million years older; tiny neurons guard pregnancy

That is up to 200 million years before the oldest fossil evidence, which sits around 574 million years ago in the Ediacaran. The study appeared Friday in Science Advances 3. Researchers have often treated the roughly 590-million-year-old Weng'an Biota in China as a ceiling. Its rocks preserve microscopic organisms in exquisite detail, yet hold no definitive animals. The authors argue that this absence proves little. Fossils can be missing because scientists are looking in the wrong places or because conditions never suited preservation 3.

The neurons carry receptors for pregnancy hormones such as progesterone. They make up fewer than 0.001 percent of the brain's cells. When the researchers bred mice without them, the females mated and conceived, but every pregnancy ended early because the embryos could not implant in the uterine lining 20.

Cannabinoids weaken the inhibitory brake on them, so fear circuits fire hard when the environment looks threatening, a result published in Nature Communications 47. In mice, genetically silencing those neurons reversed the cannabinoid-driven threat avoidance 47.

By age 1, 39 percent of the strong reactors had developed eczema or a food allergy, against 12 percent of the weak reactors 19. Brodin's explanation is that newborns have a leaky gut that closes after about a week, which lets gut bacteria reach the bloodstream and rouse immune cells 19.

Plants under the panels took 25 days longer to reach harvest but ended with similar yields, and the two panel setups matched each other despite their different transparency 42. Because the shaded plants got far less light, that works out to much more efficient use of it: 4.5 times greater under the 50 percent panels and 2.8 times under the 70 percent ones 42. The study was published in Cell Reports Physical Science 42.

In a flowing two-dimensional system, energy has long been thought to cascade in only one direction, from large scales to small or the reverse depending on the dimensions. Lei Fang's group at the University of Pittsburgh found, while watching the shrimp, that a small obstacle angled the right way can steer which way the energy flows. "The geometry matters," Fang said 36.

They now sell tinctures, coffee blends and flavored salt 164. The timeline: they began working with the project in 2021, left hog production in 2022, and got a $15,000 grant in 2023 for a yearlong pilot. The former manure pit is now a freshwater pond ringed with native grasses and flowers 164.

The cipher is homophonic: common letters have several interchangeable symbols, with 155 distinct signs across about 1,300 in total 6. Carter Church, an AI engineer at SentinelOne, gave OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra one prompt and a low-resolution scan from a 1969 French army journal. He says that six hours later the letter was decoded 6. Along the way the model found a partial key by cryptology historian Daniel Tant covering 33 symbols, about a third of the letter, that had never been linked to it. Church suspects a naming slip, Grammont for Marmont, kept it apart 6.