Curiosity shapes brain-like wiring, and a lost firefly flashes again

Whenever a baby's rate of learning dropped below their own average, the baby looked away to find something new 19. The team built that rule into thousands of artificial neural networks and trained them on 20 tasks. The high-curiosity networks switched tasks as soon as learning slowed, while the low-curiosity ones switched at random 19. All of them became experts at their training tasks. Only the curious ones did significantly better on tests they had never seen 19. Placed in a virtual 3D space modelled on the human brain, with long-distance wiring penalised, the curious networks formed linked modules of densely connected areas. Their connection density also rose early and then fell as connections were pruned, which is the human pattern 19.

A team from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center and the University of Southern California described it in Science on March 26, 2026 4. The site had long produced Early Miocene monkeys but never an ape, and that absence helped shape theories that put early ape evolution farther south in Africa 4. "We spent five years searching for this kind of fossil," said senior author Hesham Sallam, a paleontologist at Mansoura University 4.

He suspected Pyractomena similis, the similar firefly, and confirmed it under a microscope by examining the males' genitalia 126. The species was last recorded in 1983, and conservation group Re:wild had listed it among its "Most Wanted" lost species 126. Two years earlier, a search at two historical sites near Appomattox, Virginia, had found nothing 126. The Delaware meadow was grasses, shrubs and low vegetation that had largely been left to grow naturally 126.

Professor Mihir Kumar Purkait and his team at IIT Guwahati modified electrocoagulation, a method that uses electricity and metal electrodes. They made the aluminium anode rotate 165. The spinning mixes the water and keeps renewing the electrode's surface, which prevents the coating that builds up on stationary electrodes and dulls them 165. Arsenic and fluoride compete for the same removal sites, so a treatment that catches one often misses the other 165. On real Assam groundwater, under optimal conditions, the reactor removed 98.20% of arsenate and 91.46% of fluoride within three minutes 165. The estimated cost is Rs 18 to Rs 58 per 1,000 litres 165.

State Senator Scott Wiener wrote it, and it passed with bipartisan support 168. Systems must stay under 1,200 watts per home, pass third-party safety certification and block backfeeding into the grid during outages 168. Registration becomes free and immediate. Under the old rules, a plug-in panel needed the same interconnection paperwork as a full rooftop system, which could cost up to $800 and take days, sometimes more than the panels themselves 168. California is the tenth state to pass such a law, after Utah in March 2025, followed by Colorado, Virginia and Maine 168.

The reason is Cory's shearwater fledglings, which leave the nest at night to avoid predators and get blinded and grounded by town lights 156. The Azores host roughly 65% to 75% of the world's breeding population 156. Volunteers collect the stranded birds, sometimes in cardboard boxes, and release them to the sea 156. More than 30,000 fledglings have been rescued in the Azores since 2015, about 6,000 of them on Corvo, according to The Guardian's reporting 156.

In a double-blind trial in Australia, patients aged 18 to 25 in a first episode of psychosis, all on low-dose antipsychotics, received either 4 grams of taurine or a placebo daily for 12 weeks. Among 86 people analyzed, taurine reduced overall and psychotic symptoms, improved depressive symptoms and everyday functioning, and was well tolerated 78. Separately, a Yale School of Medicine team led by Vishwa Deep Dixit found that taurine plays a role in how the innate immune system picks up danger signals, which may help explain why it matters for inflammaging, the chronic inflammation of old age 136.