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Chimps’ love for crystals could help us understand our own ancestors’ fascination with these stones

Crystals have repeatedly been found at archaeological sites alongside Homo remains. Evidence shows that hominins have been collecting these stones for as long as 780,000 years. Yet, we know that our ancestors did not use them as weapons, tools, or even jewelry. So why did they collect them at all?

Now, in a new study appearing in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists in Spain have investigated which characteristics of crystals may have made them so fascinating to our ancestors. They designed experiments with chimpanzees—one of the two great ape species most closely related to modern humans—to identify the physical properties of crystals that may have attracted early hominins.

“We show that enculturated chimpanzees can distinguish crystals from other stones,” said lead author Prof. Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, an Ikerbasque Research Professor of crystallography at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián. “We were pleasantly surprised by how strong and seemingly natural the chimpanzees’ attraction to crystals was. This suggests that sensitivity to such objects may have deep evolutionary roots.”

Ancient Greece’s most famous oracle was just high on gas fumes

For centuries, people traveled to Delphi in southern Greece hoping for a glimpse of their future. There, at the temple of the god Apollo, a priestess was said to enter a trance and issue prophecies in the voice of Apollo himself. Everyday people, kings, even Alexander the Great traveled for miles to hear the priestess’s input on important decisions, from personal finance to matters of state.

Known as the Pythia or the Oracle of Delphi, the priestess wasn’t believed to be a psychic. Ancient writers like Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi in the first and second centuries, described her as a vessel for a power that came from the Earth.

According to Plutarch’s account, the temple of Delphi was constructed around a natural spring, where the water and fissures in the rock produced a sweet-smelling gas called pneuma. On designated days a few times per year, the chosen priestess sat amidst the pneuma on a tripod stool and inhaled enough to enter her trance. This was an exhausting ordeal for the woman. She might cry out, become hysterical, or collapse.

Beyond amyloid plaques: AI reveals hidden chemical changes across the Alzheimer’s brain

Scientists at Rice University have produced the first full, dye-free molecular atlas of an Alzheimer’s brain. By combining laser-based imaging with machine learning, they uncovered chemical changes that spread unevenly across the brain and extend beyond amyloid plaques. Key memory regions showed major shifts in cholesterol and energy-related molecules. The findings hint that Alzheimer’s is a whole-brain metabolic disruption—not just a protein problem.

The End of Work: Vinod Khosla’s Bold AI Prediction

What if AI made your paycheck optional? Vinod Khosla, one of the world’s greatest venture capitalists and an early backer of AI, believes the technology will take over 80% of labor, freeing humans to live on passion instead.

His track record backs up the boldness, as early bets on OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, and Square have made him one of the most consequential investors of our time.

In this episode of Titans, Khosla sits down with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to unpack his abundant vision for the AI future, what government policy should tackle for a more equitable 2040, and what the U.S. needs to do to win the global AI race.

The anatomy of pain and suffering in the brain and its clinical implications

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Chronic pain, with a prevalence of 20–30% is the major cause of human suffering worldwide, because effective, specific and safe therapies have yet to be developed. It is unevenly distributed among sexes, with women experiencing more pain and suffering. Chronic pain can be anatomically and phenomenologically dissected into three separable but interacting pathways, a lateral ‘painfulness’ pathway, a medial ‘suffering’ pathway and a descending pain inhibitory pathway. One may have pain(fullness) without suffering and suffering without pain(fullness). Pain sensation leads to suffering via a cognitive, emotional and autonomic processing, and is expressed as anger, fear, frustration, anxiety and depression.

Using tiny ripples at skin level to monitor for possible health problems below

Caltech scientists have developed a method that detects tiny, imperceptible movements at the surface of objects to reveal details about what lies beneath. By analyzing the physics of waves traveling across the surface of an object—whether that be a manufactured product or the human body—the new technique can determine both the stiffness and thickness of the underlying material or tissue. This lays the groundwork for the project’s ultimate goal of enabling inexpensive, at-home health monitoring using little more than a smartphone camera.

“There is information scattered all around us in plain sight that we just haven’t learned to tap into. Our work is trying to leverage that information to recover material properties from inside objects by studying tiny movements on the surface,” says Katie L. Bouman, professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering, and astronomy at Caltech and both a Rosenberg Scholar and a Heritage Medical Research Institute (HMRI) Investigator.

Bouman and her colleagues from Caltech presented the technique, called visual surface wave elastography, and its medical applications in a paper presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Honolulu last fall. The lead authors are Alexander C. Ogren, Ph.D., and Berthy T. Feng, Ph.D., who completed the work while at Caltech.

Functional photoacoustic microscopy reaches super-resolution by tracking red blood cells

The brain relies on real-time delivery of oxygen and nutrients through its microvasculature, which threads through neural tissue like electrical wires. While modern imaging technologies allow researchers to follow the activity of individual neurons in the brain, they are not yet advanced enough to dissect the microvascular function at a comparable spatial scale. This gap hinders our understanding of cerebral small vessel disease and its contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia.

To address this challenge, a team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University, led by Song Hu, professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, have developed super-resolution functional photoacoustic microscopy (SR-fPAM).

By tracking the movement and oxygenation-dependent color change of red blood cells, SR-fPAM allows researchers to image blood flow and oxygenation at single-cell resolution in the mouse brain, which bridges a critical gap in functional microvascular imaging and could provide new insight into microvascular health and disease, such as stroke, vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

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