An extra school year cut dementia risk, and malaria's door is imaged

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Southern California treated that law as an experiment nobody planned to run. They analyzed more than 100,000 people in the UK Biobank. Dementia diagnoses came from medical histories, hospital records and death registries, so that people who died before being diagnosed would not skew the count 76. The extra year of school lowered Alzheimer's and related dementia incidence over the following 50 years by .88%. NIH calls that a considerably large effect, since dementia rates in the group were low to begin with. The benefit was biggest for people carrying genetic variants known to raise risk 76. "These findings reinforce the understanding that dementia risk is determined by factors beyond one's genetic makeup," said Richard Hodes, director of NIH's National Institute on Aging, "and that changes such as additional schooling can offset inherited vulnerability" 76.

A patient forum pointed her toward testing for a ROS1 rearrangement, which drives 1% to 2% of non-small cell lung cancers. On a visit to Denver she dropped in on the researcher whose lab had built the test, and he still had her tumor slides. The result came back wildly positive, and the lab was holding its last trial slot for her 101. She started the pill crizotinib on Nov. 6, 2012, and has had no evidence of disease on any scan since. In May she marked 15 years 101. Dana Senaha told the pancreatic cancer version. Her husband Bobby had run out of standard options when he enrolled in the daraxonrasib trial. Within 24 hours his pain eased enough that he cut his pain medication in half. By day three they walked more than three miles along the San Antonio River Walk, and within six weeks his scans showed a 45% reduction in disease and his lung metastases had vanished 102. The side effects were hard, a painful rash and bleeding around the fingernails among them. He stayed on the trial 29 weeks before his cancer mutated around the drug, and he died on Aug. 25, 2024 102.

What nobody had was a picture of the door. To get into a red blood cell, a cell about 8 micrometers across, the parasite builds a ring-shaped structure called the moving junction, which opens a brief gap in the membrane and then closes without a trace. It happens too fast and too small for imaging to catch 60. Chi-Min Ho's lab at Columbia University has now imaged the junction at the moment of invasion. Their cryo-electron work shows the parasite installing molecular gaskets in the host cell and remodeling the membrane so it can slip through 60. "We didn't really know anything about how it works," Ho said of the earlier blind spot. Jake Baum, a parasitologist at the University of New South Wales who was not involved, called it "a totally mind-blowing paper" and added, "this is not molecular biology. This is biophysics" 60.

For years the working assumption was that it acts like a loudspeaker, sending much the same signal everywhere. A new Nature study from the Allen Institute used brain imaging, neural recordings, genetic tools and behavioral experiments in mice. It found distinct pathways instead. Neurons in the upper (dorsal) part connect mainly to the cerebral cortex and forebrain, while those in the lower (ventral) part send signals to the brainstem and spinal cord, and different groups respond to different experiences 8. "The brain's norepinephrine system is far more like a targeted postal network than a foghorn," said co-author Karel Svoboda 8.

Aim light at the left fin or the right, and change how often it flashes, and the robot's speed and direction change with it. In the study, published in Advanced Functional Materials, it swam and turned through a simple underwater maze 6. Top speed was about four body lengths per minute. An Olympic swimmer manages up to 65, and the researchers compare the robot's pace to a cow shark moving leisurely through the ocean 6. "It takes a lot of force to move through water versus air," said Ritu Raman, the senior author. "The robot's quite strong, given its size" 6.

A new Science Advances study sequenced genomes from several Gravettian individuals who lived between 30,000 and 22,000 years ago in different parts of Europe. One was a woman from Isturitz Cave in southwestern France, near the Spanish border, whose genome is the oldest complete one found in the region 266. Most of her ancestry matched western European lineages, but she also carried genes from central and eastern Europe. Genetic modeling points to a pulse of gene flow from east to west around 32,500 to 31,500 years ago 266. The same signal turns up in another Gravettian individual from Ormesson, France 266.

The Skincubator is a wearable device for preterm infants under 4.4 pounds that allows skin-to-skin contact as early as the day of birth, with the arterial, umbilical, feeding and airway lines left in place. The baby moves from the incubator via a retractable pad that is pulled down slowly 233. At Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, Tiffany Ikwuagwu and Dorian Ojemen became the first US couple to use it. Their twins were born in August at 26 weeks, and for about 10 days the couple could not hold them 233. "You can have them on your chest, you can look in their eyes, you can hold them, feel them breathe," Ojemen told CNN 233.