Dying corals heal by touching their clones; a gene shields the brain

As little as five days of contact sometimes started the recovery 9. The study, published October 14 in Science Advances, describes the fastest documented recovery from bleaching 9. It began as an accident. In 2025, coauthor Steve Palumbi noticed that two fragments of one coral colony, one healthy and one bleached, had fallen against each other in an aquarium, and the bleached one was regaining color where they touched 9. "While bleached corals may be dying, they are not dead yet," said lead author Danny Collins 9.

Two years ago a Columbia team found that a subset of those resilient carriers also have a rare mutation in FN1, the gene for fibronectin, a protein that helps hold tissue together 3246. A new Nature Aging paper, with Caghan Kizil as corresponding author, shows what the mutation protects against 3. In mice carrying the human APOE ε4 gene, fibronectin around the brain's blood vessels ran at nearly twice the level seen in mice carrying the common APOE ε3 version 246. Raising fibronectin made the blood-brain barrier leak, and lowering it let the barrier hold 246. The excess protein signals through integrins and an enzyme called focal adhesion kinase, which throws off three growth factors (VEGF, HBEGF and IGF1) that astrocytes and vessel cells use to maintain the barrier 246. Human data agreed: higher fibronectin in brain tissue and cerebrospinal fluid tracked with inflamed astrocytes 246.

Age- and sex-standardised type 2 diabetes prevalence climbed from 14.7% in 1987 to 23.3% in 2009, then fell to 19.9% in 2021 247. That is 11% lower in men and 16% lower in women than at the peak 247. Prediabetes dropped from 24.9% to 15.6%, and the share of cases that were newly diagnosed, meaning people who had the disease and did not know, fell from 67% in 1987 to 32.5% in 2021 247. The paper is in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 247.

Wages do not fall, and full-time workers get two paid days off 229248. It phases in: 42 hours 60 days after publication, then 40 hours a year after that 229248. The government estimates more than 37 million formal-sector workers are covered 248. It is the first change to labor hours by the legislature since 1988, when full-time work went from 48 hours to 44 229. The text had no trouble getting through. It needed 49 of 81 votes and got 75 in both rounds, and the lone no was Hamilton Mourão 248. Flávio Bolsonaro, the runoff opponent of the sitting president, had opposed the measure for months and voted yes 248.

Four trajectories emerged. Resilience, meaning consistently low distress, described 54%. Recovery, severe early distress that steadily eased, described 27%. Chronic distress described 18%, and delayed onset 2.5% 70. That puts 81% in the first two groups 70. The shape of the curve over time predicted later PTSD symptoms significantly better than symptom severity at any single point 70. Regular volunteering before the war and early positive emotions went with resilience, while high emotional empathy, resonating with others' suffering, went with higher distress and worse trajectories 70.

It had no GPS, no motion capture, no stereo cameras and no preloaded map 13. On the Abu Dhabi course it completed two laps around 11 gates in 16.56 seconds, topping out at about 63 mph, and it won the 2025 Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League, posting faster times than three former human world-champion pilots 13. The whole thing weighs 966 grams, so the neural network runs entirely aboard, issuing motor commands to the four propellers 500 times a second 13. Study coauthor Guido de Croon noted that the released video mixes real flights with computer-generated segments. The real training happened in a stripped-down physics simulator, not the pretty one shown on screen 13.

It was about 6 meters long, trailing its arms, and 19 small blue-grey juvenile rudderfish (Centrolophus niger) were flitting beneath its bell and among those arms 63. A team led by María Emilia Bravo of the University of Buenos Aires calls it the first documented observation of the association in the deep ocean 63. Scientists had suspected it for more than 50 years 63. The jellyfish's bell can pass a meter across and its four ribbon-like arms can exceed 10 meters, but fewer than 120 sightings have been logged since the first specimen was collected in 1899 63.