Corals heal by touching, and deep sleep turns out to talk back

When a bleached fragment touches a healthy fragment cloned from the same colony, their tissues fuse. Microscopic channels line up, and the healthy coral's algae and the nutrients they make flow across 79. The idea started with an accident in 2025. Professor Steve Palumbi saw two fragments from one colony tip over in a tank, and color came back to the bleached one exactly where they touched 79. Danny Collins, the lead author, then set up pairs close enough to touch and pairs with a few millimeters of gap. The bleached fragments in touching pairs recovered fully; those without contact died 79. The tissues began to recover in three days 79. The work is in Science Advances.

They also found a loop nobody had described. Sleep drives growth hormone up, and growth hormone sends signals back to the brain that influence when we wake 1. The study is in Cell. People have known the sleep-hormone link for years, but mostly from drawing blood overnight and checking levels. First author Xinlu Ding's team recorded neural activity directly in mice, so they could watch the circuit work instead of inferring it from blood samples 1.

The human evidence comes from re-reading two practice-changing trials, IMpower133 and CASPIAN. Patients whose tumours carried more gamma delta cells did better 88. In lab experiments, zoledronate, an existing drug used for osteoporosis and for cancer in bone, increased the number of these cells and improved their recognition of tumours. Tarlatamab, already approved for this cancer, was the other drug in those experiments 88.

A team from ULiège and Humboldt University in Berlin tested all 17 visual opsins in the shrimp's median band, the strip of the eye devoted to color. Twelve were standard green-sensitive pigments, close to our own. Three were infrared-sensitive, including two red-blue bistable ones, and two were blue-orange bistable 15. Four of the pigments are bistable, meaning light can flip them reversibly between two stable states. With the colored filters in the shrimp's eye, sensitivity reaches 687 nanometers, into the deep red that very few animals can see 15. The result is in Science Advances.

They moved the instrument from the deliberately unfocused position used during launch to its sharpest position. One mirror adjustment of about one-sixteenth the width of a human hair brought the optics into near-perfect alignment. Image quality came out nearly 30% better than predicted 4.

The pre-Tideway average was more than 21 million, hence the 86 percent 87. About 84 tonnes of sewage-derived litter, wet wipes and sanitary products included, did not reach the river 87. Thames21's foreshore counts put sewage-related items at 30 percent of recorded litter before the tunnel and 18 percent in 2025 87. The BBC counted days of raised health risk linked to sewage overflows: 269 in 2023, 38 in 2025 87. Trade outlets reported the same idea as a rate, from an average of 75.7 percent of days down to 10.4 percent 87. Those are two measures of the same thing, so they should not be added together.

The 3D-knit structure lets sunlight, air, and rainwater through but blocks insects; in lab tests, aphids could not get through at all 74. The plants under it were consistently warmer, so they reached fruiting sooner. At harvest they produced 3.56 times as many fruits as uncovered plants, without growing bigger or producing more leaves 74. Lead author Gabriel Olawuyi had expected the opposite: that reduced light would push the plants to grow stems and leaves at the expense of fruit. The fabric did not impede light at all 74. The study is in Agriculture.