Your brain is not done yet

Even participants in their 80s showed measurable improvements across thinking clarity, emotional balance, and sense of purpose. A Kyoto University team followed the same group from a 2020 study four years later and found that adults in their early 70s who kept practicing a musical instrument maintained their verbal memory and showed significantly less shrinkage in the brain's putamen compared to those who stopped [4]. Stopping the practice reversed the benefit. Continuing it preserved it. And in a randomized trial of 120 adults aged 66 to 89, three tablespoons of peanut butter daily for six months improved sit-to-stand performance, a direct measure of lower-body muscle power and fall risk, without any weight gain [52]. A second arm of that study found that peanut and peanut butter consumption improved memory scores and reduced stress in younger adults over the same period.

From those conserved regions, the AI designed a "super-antigen" that forms the core of a vaccine targeting the entire sarbecovirus family: SARS, COVID-19, and related animal coronaviruses that haven't jumped to humans yet. In a trial of 39 people, the vaccine produced antibodies at all four doses with no significant safety concerns. It is a DNA vaccine rather than mRNA, which means it does not require needle injection and stays stable without the frigid storage conditions COVID boosters demand [46]. Separately, Princeton researchers used a neural network to sort images of a cellular structure called the nucleolus into four shape categories [17]. The network found a completely new shape, which they named "flower," and detected that two known anti-cancer drugs produce a nucleolus shape change that had never before been reported for those drugs.

Its most distinctive feature was a prominent hump on its snout. Researcher Christopher Brochu, who has spent 35 years studying ancient crocodilians, first saw the specimens at a museum in Addis Ababa in 2016. "It was the largest predator in that ecosystem, more so than lions and hyenas, and the biggest threat to our ancestors who lived there during that time," Brochu said. "It would have seen Lucy's kind and thought, 'Dinner.'"

The New Scientist piece, written by a survivor who nearly died at 15, describes the paradox clearly: fearing weight gain can feel more immediate than the reality of cardiac failure. Roughly a third of anorexia patients do not recover even with treatment. The emerging research suggests part of the reason has to do with what starvation does to the brain, not just to the body. Separately, Psychology Today reports on the growing body of evidence for AI chatbots as a bridge for people who cannot access eating disorder care quickly enough [32]. In a 2025 clinical trial, a chatbot called Therabot produced large reductions in eating disorder symptoms among high-risk adults, who rated the experience comparable to working with a human therapist. Only 20 to 25 percent of people with eating disorders ever reach professional care.

Combined with earlier protected zones announced in 2024, 30 percent of French Polynesia's total ocean territory will now be shielded from extractive activity. Traditional artisanal fishing continues in designated coastal zones, connecting conservation to the communities that have managed these waters for generations. Meanwhile, scuba divers filming a great white shark near a Sicilian shipwreck prompted marine scientists to explain what most people don't know: Mediterranean great whites have always been there [12]. A 2020 genetic study confirmed that this population has been isolated for 3.2 million years, making it one of the oldest and most distinct white shark lineages on Earth. They are not lost individuals drifting in from the Atlantic. They are residents, and critically endangered ones.

The claim would have overturned the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics and nearly 30 years of cosmological research. A new investigation led by the University of Southampton, co-authored by Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt, found the critical error: the 2025 analysis failed to properly account for how supernovae behave differently depending on the properties of the galaxies they explode in. When researchers corrected for this, the evidence for cosmic acceleration came back "remarkably consistent." "Extraordinary claims require especially careful testing," Riess said [7].

They broke three world records: fastest bicycle circumnavigation by a father and son, longest bicycle journey by a father and son, and most countries visited in a continuous bicycle journey by a father and son. George is a chimney sweep. When Josh proposed the idea, his father's response was: "Perfect, why not?" Among the highlights was a shepherd in rural Turkey who spotted them from a hillside, beckoned them over, and shared his breakfast over a campfire, the two of them speaking no common language. Their one unwritten rule over all 400 days was never to go to sleep on an argument.