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Late ballot rejections nearly doubled in counties whose post offices lost their afternoon truck, a Brookings analysis of three states’ 2026 primaries finds, and voters there can offset the delay by mailing a few days early.
A three-variable simulation of the primary visual cortex settled from chaotic activity into a steady rhythm once two feedback loops were added. The chaos never left the math, which hints that stable seeing is something the brain keeps working at.
Ultraviolet spectra of 29 massive O-type stars in six nearby dwarf galaxies show winds weakening as metals thin out, and hint at a sharper drop in the most metal-poor, with consequences for how astronomers read Webb’s earliest galaxies.
Six children with developmental delay or autism carry the same rare change in a signaling gene. Expressed in fruit flies, the human variant switched on cell signaling without its usual trigger and disrupted neural development.
A screen of 74 genes in planarian flatworms found 10 needed to rebuild dopamine-producing neurons, work the authors say could improve stem cell therapies for brain injury or disease, though nothing has been tested beyond worms.
A 40-year Finnish study links a higher BMI in adolescence with a faster DNA-based pace of aging decades later. Genetics sharpen the signal, but the study also reveals why that does not make teenage weight a simple, standalone cause.
Computer models of head-on collisions between icy moons thickened one large moon’s buried ocean for about two billion years but cost smaller moons an early one. Saturn’s Rhea, a cratered test case, was not simulated.
Stanford researchers traced two separate progenitor cells in mouse embryos, one wiring up the thinking brain and the other the life support system of breathing and heartbeat, explaining why hindbrain neurons have been nearly impossible to grow in a lab.
Stanford scientists genetically stripped mouse pups of most of their cortex, then filled the gap with human stem cell derived brain tissue that wired into the mouse’s nervous system and reached its spinal cord.
Mouse experiments testing rapamycin, acarbose and calorie restriction turned up twelve shared molecular changes marking a slow-aging body, potentially letting researchers screen new anti-aging drugs in months rather than years.
Stevens Neuroimaging Institute researchers built a brain scan measure that lines up blood flow with cell density layer by layer, revealing regions whose mitochondria run at higher capacity, a clue that could eventually help flag disease.
Off Australia’s Gold Coast, a female humpback spent hours beside a newborn that never drew breath, repeatedly nudging it but never lifting the body toward the surface.