Bleached corals recover by touch, and a zombie star won't budge

The bleached fragments in the touching pairs recovered fully within seven weeks, the fastest documented recovery to date. The ones without contact died 28. The idea began in 2025, when Steve Palumbi found two fragments from one colony had tipped over in a tank. Color had returned to the bleached one wherever they touched, which meant its algae partners were back. Palumbi says genetically identical corals recognize each other, and their tissues fuse if they are the same clone. The paper is in Science Advances 28.

4 and 6, and it stayed visible for 185 days. It is one of only five Milky Way supernovae known to have been witnessed before the telescope 18. The remnant, Pa 30, sits 7,500 light-years away. New Gemini North images from Hawaii show about 10 times more filamentary structure than anyone had seen before 18. The filaments turn out to be chains of tiny knots, not smooth streaks, and the work appears in The Astrophysical Journal 18. Ilaria Caiazzo says the planetary region of our solar system could fit inside each knot about ten times, and that the knots are strikingly uniform 98.

Lasting improvement tracked with stimulation reaching three white matter pathways: the cingulum bundle, the forceps minor, and the medial uncinate fasciculus/ventral amygdalofugal pathways. Patients who had not improved after two years shared a pattern of too little stimulation of one crucial connection. The paper appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry on October 1 8.

The antibody blocks activin A 145. In the OPTIMA trial, 63 adults (mean age 26.6) were split into placebo (21), 3 mg/kg (19) and 10 mg/kg (23). At 56 weeks, published in The Lancet, new bone lesions numbered 19 on placebo, 1 on the lower dose and 2 on the higher dose, with no deaths. A company readout from weeks 56 to 84 reports no new lesions on the drug and nine on placebo 145. That later figure is the company's, not a second journal paper.

The average cliff stood about 30 metres tall, and a few topped 100. The theory called marine ice cliff instability says a cliff taller than about 100 metres should collapse under its own weight, expose a taller cliff behind it, and keep going. When cliffs did retreat, they went faster than the models assumed. The retreat then ended: the glaciers they watched spread back toward the ocean and stabilised, and the team does not see the runaway effect. The paper is in Science, dated 15 October 146.

Now expanded excavations have found 20 separate sediment horizons holding footprints, spanning about 23,500 to 21,700 years ago, in the depth of the last ice age. Pollen and plant waxes preserved in the sediment record the surroundings. Lake Otero filled much of the basin, conifer forest covered the mountains, and temperatures ran about 4°C colder than today. From about 23,600 years ago the lake shrank, oak and sagebrush replaced conifers, and a short severe drought hit around 23,200 years ago, matching a rapid shift seen in Greenland ice cores. The earliest footprint layer sits near that transition 157.

A 75 percent usage subsidy had a precise zero effect on adoption and use. A discount on the stove itself produced large welfare gains 85. Credit constraints made the purchase subsidy work 35 to 73 percent better, up to US$10 to US$12 of observable welfare gain per subsidy dollar. The cost of abatement fell to US$12 per tonne of CO2e, against US$137 in a counterfactual with no such constraints 85.