We’re in a biodiversity crisis, but it’s tough to compare it to past periods of mass death.

A new understanding of how tumours exploit our nervous system is leading to new ways to treat cancer using familiar drugs like Botox and beta blockers

Another ocular condition tied to GLP-1 drugs when taken by patients with diabetes

Prehistoric humans made the projectiles roughly 20,000 years ago.

A recent study conducted in southern Italy presented some surprising findings that linked the regular consumption of poultry to potential increases in gastrointestinal cancers and all-cause mortality. This has caused one question to arise — is eating chicken really as healthy as we think it is?

The study’s findings indicated that exceeding the weekly recommended amounts — that is, eating more than 300 grams (g) of poultry, such as chicken and turkey, per week — resulted in a 27% higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to eating moderate amounts.

Moreover, the research suggested that higher poultry intake was linked to a 2.3% increase in the risk of gastrointestinal cancers, with a higher observed risk among men at 2.6%. The findings were published in the journal Nutrients.

“I think, therefore I am,” René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, famously wrote in 1637. His idea was straightforward: even if your senses, the world, or your body deceives you, the very act of thinking proves you exist because there’s a thinker doing the thinking. Cogito, ergo sum, as the phrase goes in Latin, cemented the way the Western world would continue to define the self for the next 400 years—as a thinking mind, first and foremost.

But a growing body of neuroscience studies suggest the father of modern thought got it backward: the true foundation of consciousness isn’t thought, some scientists say—it’s feeling. A massive international study published in Nature late last month is further driving the theory forward. That means “I feel, therefore I am” may be the new maxim of consciousness. We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling bodies that think. And it’s more than a philosophical debate, too. Determining where consciousness resides could reshape life-or-death decisions and force society to rethink who, or what, truly counts as being self-aware.

The experiment used a rare “adversarial collaboration” model, bringing together scientists with opposing views to test two major theories of consciousness: integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT). Put simply, IIT says consciousness arises when information in the brain is deeply connected, especially in the back of the brain. GNWT argues that consciousness arises when the front of the brain broadcasts important information across a wide network, like a brain-wide alert.

Beyond basic blood work: a systems approach to cardiac risk assessment

NASA scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Japan’s University of Toho, have used supercomputers to model the far future of Earth’s habitability. Their findings offer a clear—if distant—timeline for the end of life on our planet.

According to the study, the Sun will be the ultimate cause of the end of life on Earth. Over the next billion years, its output will continue to increase, gradually heating the planet beyond the threshold of life. The research estimates that life on Earth will end around the year 1,000,002,021, when surface conditions become too extreme to support even the most resilient organisms.

But the decline will begin much earlier. As the Sun grows hotter, Earth’s atmosphere will undergo significant changes. Oxygen levels will fall, temperatures will rise exponentially, and air quality will worsen. These shifts, projected through detailed climate change and solar radiation models, map out when life on Earth will end, not as a sudden collapse but as a slow and irreversible decline.

The researchers discovered that AP2A1 seemed to be responsible for switching cells between their “young” and “old” states—senescent cells were rejuvenated by the suppression of the protein, and younger cells aged by its overexpression.

The scientists also found that the AP2A1 was frequently in close proximity to another protein: integrin β1, which aids cells in binding to the collagen scaffold that envelops them. Both proteins, the researchers described, travel along stress fibers within cells.

A new species of bacteria that functions like electrical wiring has recently been discovered on a brackish beach in Oregon. The species was named Candidatus Electrothrix yaqonensis in honor of the Yaquina tribe of Native Americans that once lived in and around Yaquina Bay, where the bacteria were found.

This species is a type of cable bacteria: rod-shaped microbes that are connected at both ends to one another to create a chain and which share an outer membrane, forming filaments several centimeters long. Cable bacteria are found in marine and freshwater sediments and, unusually among bacteria, are electrically conductive. This is due to their special metabolism, in which electrons generated by oxidizing sulfides in their deeper layers are sent to their surface layer, where they are received by oxygen and nitric acid.