Bleached coral healed by a clone's touch, and a possible world past Pluto

So he ran it properly: ten pairs, each a healthy fragment and a bleached fragment cut from the same animal. In five pairs the tissue touched, and in five the fragments sat a few millimetres apart 248. All five touching pairs recovered fully, in seven weeks, which the Science Advances paper (14 October 2026) calls the fastest documented recovery of bleached coral. All five pairs with a gap died 248. In some cases three days of contact was enough to start the transfer, as the algae that feed the coral moved across tissue that had fused 248.

The object, provisionally 2026 ED138, was bright for its distance, about 46 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, which pointed to something big 75182. Mario Jurić at the University of Washington dug 20 more detections out of Rubin's records, and older survey images pushed the object's history back to 2016, roughly a decade of evidence for reconstructing its orbit 75200. Current estimates put it at 600 to 1,500 kilometers across, on an orbit tilted 25 degrees from the plane of the planets 69182. "My first reaction was one of excited disbelief," Holman said, and he began checking whether he or the code had made a mistake 75. The images had been on file for years before any code connected them.

On average 25.9 percent of prenatal neurons carried them, and in some samples up to 46 percent. After birth the average falls to 6.2 percent 81. Neurons with a heavy load of these variants turn down genes needed to build and maintain synapses. They lose the competition to wire into working circuits and die off 81. The work was published in Nature on October 28. The fetal cortex makes an astronomical surplus of neurons and discards a large share around birth, and this is the first account of which ones go and why 81.

A study in Science Immunology (October 23) offers a reason 16. Dr. Heng Xu of Ninth People's Hospital in Shanghai and colleagues started with single-cell sequencing from patients with ulcerative colitis and from mice with the disease. One cell type stood out: an immune cell that lives permanently in the gut wall and sits touching nerve endings. It was more numerous in colitis and carried more of the protein Piezo1, which contributes to pain signals in neurons 16. When the team pressed a probe on the gut tissue, it was stiffer in two mouse models, one with visible inflammation and one with almost none. The mice with almost none still showed pain 16. In Xu's words, that stiffness "alone keeps triggering the alarm even after the fire is out." 16

The advantage held at one-month follow-up 121. The therapy, developed by Michelle Craske, Alicia Meuret and colleagues, goes after the reward system directly. It trains people to anticipate good experiences, to savor them while they happen, and to notice what made them good so they can repeat them 121.

The lions ate a duck and chicken dinner, were chased off, and killed a dozen dogs on a neighbouring farm 229. Kordom joined the Lion Rangers programme, launched that year and now running across 11 conservancies. He is now field coordinator for more than 40 rangers, patrol leaders and rapid response team members, many of them farmers, covering 40,000 square kilometers from the Skeleton Coast to the edge of Etosha 229. They use smartphones, camera traps and GPS collars, and patrol up to 40 kilometers a day on foot. They log every sighting, kill, track and scat, plus each lion's body condition and injuries 229.

It is the first such letter issued for precision-fermented casein in the country 210. The FDA reviewed the full dossier filed in December 2025: identity, manufacturing, allergenicity, toxicology and dietary exposure. The letter covers use in cheese alternatives at up to 25 percent inclusion 210. Casein is the group of proteins that makes up 80 percent of dairy protein, and it is what makes hard cheeses melt and stretch 210. Microbes fed a specific DNA sequence make it in bioreactors. The two companies worked together on R&D for two years and have since gone separate ways, so they now share one letter and two roadmaps 210.