El Salvador ends trachoma, and Utah sells power from engineered heat

WHO announced the validation on 13 July, and the Pan American Health Organization marked it again on 29 September, alongside elimination milestones in Brazil, Chile, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos 203. Between 2023 and 2026, trained teams surveyed communities chosen for environmental and social risk, which means the places most likely to still hold the disease. They found no active transmission in children and no advanced trichiasis, the blinding eyelid damage, in adults 203. Canada financed the work through a PAHO elimination initiative 203.

It is the first utility-scale plant of its kind. Where other geothermal facilities tap naturally occurring hot water and steam, Fervo uses oil-and-gas drilling techniques to build reservoirs in hot, dry rock that make steam on demand 135. "Traditional geothermal would have never been done in southern Utah," says Dawn Owens, the company's head of development and commercial markets 135. Two more 33-MW blocks are targeted by 1 January 2027, and the remaining 400 MW, backed by a new agreement with Google, is slated for 2028 135.

DRT10 uses a reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that "uses RNA as a template to write new sequences of DNA," in Samuel Sternberg's words 50. The enzyme came from a group of dozens of reverse transcriptases the field had labeled the "Unknown Group" back in 2008, for want of any idea what they did 50. Graduate student Stephen Tang found DRT10 inside it 50. The paper also reveals a likely, and surprising, relationship between the bacterial defense and telomerase 50.

It took about five and a half years, against Opportunity's nearly fifteen 138. The final record-setting drive covered 299.6 feet 138. Much of the pace comes from AutoNav, which has guided more than 90 percent of Perseverance's distance, compared with about 5 percent for Opportunity's early system 138. Each look at the terrain gives it about 600,000 measurement points to plan around. Sojourner, NASA's first Mars rover, had 20 138.

On pitch discrimination, a computation done in the brain, early-blind participants were markedly better 77. Modeling showed the blind brain has less moment-to-moment random variability, which the team calls internal noise, when it encodes sound frequency 77. The same reduction appeared in sighted people with extensive musical training 77.

They randomly chose 468 students and paid about $5 for every night they logged at least seven hours, over four weeks 179. The paid group hit seven hours on 26 percent more nights than 380 students who were not offered money 179. The effect persisted up to a month after payments stopped, and the authors report better grades 179.

The shaded corals began recovering their color. The 20 unshaded colonies grew paler through the hottest stretch of the season, a year that ranked second for heat stress at the site since 1985 206. The shades did not cool the water. They blocked the intense sunlight and ultraviolet radiation that amplify heat-related bleaching 206. The results appear in Frontiers in Marine Science 206.

She had nowhere to go until July, when she arrived at Pangea Elephant Sanctuary, a 1,000-acre refuge in Portugal's Alentejo region and Europe's first large-scale elephant sanctuary 163. Photos and video show "rigorous" dust baths, splashing, digging, and apples and onions. She now feels comfortable enough to lie down for mud bathing 163. Wenhaston Primary School in Suffolk adopted her, and eight-year-old Zoe told the BBC that in a circus "you would be upset and you would want to get out" 163.