Dinosaur blood chemistry, and the 600 switches behind big brains

The bone came out of a mine in 2008 66. Inside the vascular canals, where blood vessels once ran, the team found numerous cell-sized ellipsoids 66. Bone extracts were dominated by heme B and an altered relative that was about 90 times more abundant, which fits most of the heme having changed chemically as the bone fossilized 178. Spectroscopy found porphyrin inside the cell-like forms, and elemental maps showed iron, nitrogen and carbon tied to them 178. The team also went looking for fungi and microbes that could fake cells, and found no filaments, spores or biofilms, and no pyrite grains that could pass as cells 66. Grice was firm that this is not "a vial of dinosaur blood" but "a mineral and molecular echo of ancient biology" 152.

Blood levels of beta-amyloid 42 rose by 35 percent on average 30. The reasoning is that a rise in blood marks protein leaving the brain through the glymphatic system, the network of channels around brain blood vessels that carries waste out 30. Vibration activates a motion-sensing protein called Piezo1 in vessel walls (shown in mice), and nitric oxide dilates vessels and seems to narrow the glymphatic channels around them, which raises the pressure on waste fluid 30. Other teams have tried ultrasound, pink noise and bursts of high-dose carbon dioxide, so a mattress is the homely entry in the field 30. Side effects were mild and minimal 30.

They found nearly 600 non-coding regulatory switches that are more active in human neural stem cells 80. The genes those switches turn up promote long, branched extensions on the stem cells, which helps them pick up signals from their surroundings, divide more and produce more neurons 80.

Egyptian researchers started with the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite, whose radar showed an oval anomaly beneath Kom C measuring 128 by 62 meters (420 by 203 feet) 16. They then ran 15 parallel lines of electrical resistivity tomography across about 5,400 square meters 16. The top 3 meters held scattered Ptolemaic and Roman debris, including displaced mudbricks, pottery and broken limestone 16. Between 3 and 6 meters down sat a large mudbrick structure from Egypt's 26th dynasty 16.

It stitches existing reserves to more than 178,000 hectares of former state forest and Crown Land, and the legislation survived about 160 amendments and over 14 hours of parliamentary debate 208. Conservationist Ashley Love started lobbying after residents told him koalas were getting scarcer; Labor took the park to the 2015 and 2019 elections, lost both, and won government in 2023 with it on the ticket 208. The federal Clean Energy Regulator has registered a carbon project covering more than 117,000 hectares of the park's state forest, so ending native-forest logging there lets the government sell credits 208. The article says protected forest earns more than logged timber 208.

People rated themselves as more receptive than the average person, rated their own side as more open than the other side, and then underestimated how receptive their opponents said they were 96. The lower they expected an opponent's receptiveness to be, the more frustrating and stressful they expected a political conversation to be 96. Telling people the real picture made them more willing to talk across party lines, according to the paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 96.

Mihaly Kollo of the Francis Crick Institute watched the recording sites in real time while an audio sequence of repeating terms played, including "blind spot," "parking spot" and "piggy bank," to see how the brain represents transitions between stimuli and how familiarity changes them 28. When some words played, perturbations swept across the waveforms, which showed the probe was picking up activity 28. Since their debut in 2017, Neuropixels have let researchers record hundreds, sometimes tens of thousands, of neurons at once in animals 28. Over the past year, the London team has been collaborating on recordings in people 28.