Seminal research reveals that sperm change their cargo as they travel the reproductive tract - and the differences can have consequences for fertility

Eat poorly, and your body will remember - and possibly pass the consequences onto your kids. In the past several years, mounting evidence has shown that sperm can take note of a father's lifestyle decisions, and transfer this baggage to offspring. Today, in two complementary studies, scientists tell us how.

As sperm traverse the male reproductive system, they jettison and acquire non-genetic cargo that fundamentally alters sperm before ejaculation. These modifications not only communicate the father's current state of wellbeing, but can also have drastic consequences on the viability of future offspring.

Each year, over 76,000 children are born as a result of assisted reproduction techniques, the majority of which involve some type of in vitro fertilization (IVF). These procedures unite egg and sperm outside the human body, then transfer the resulting fertilized egg - the embryo - into a woman's uterus. Multiple variations on IVF exist, but in some cases that involve male infertility - for instance, sperm that struggle to swim - sperm must be surgically extracted from the testes or epididymis, a lengthy, convoluted duct that cradles each testis.

Anxiety can run in families. Key differences in how an anxious monkey's brain operates can be passed along too, a large study suggests.

By finding a pattern of brain activity linked to anxiety, and by tracing it through generations of monkeys, the results bring researchers closer to understanding the brain characteristics involved in severe anxiety - and how these characteristics can be inherited.

"We can trace how anxiety falls through the family tree," which parents pass it on to which children, how cousins are affected and so on, says study coauthor Ned Kalin of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. The newly identified brain activity pattern takes the same path through the family tree as the anxious behavior, Kalin and colleagues report July 30 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Kalin and colleagues studied rhesus monkeys that, as youngsters, displayed an anxious temperament. Human children with this trait are often painfully shy, and are at much higher risk of going on to develop anxiety and depression than other children, studies have shown.

If you want to break the world record for human longevity, the person you need to beat is Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122 years and 5 months. As her record has stood for 21 years, does it represent a limit for human lifespan, or will it be eclipsed?

Dislodging Calment is not an easy prospect. When you get really old - above 105 - your odds of making it from one birthday to the next are a little less than evens. How often have you tossed a coin and come up heads 17 times in a row? And, apparently, the odds could be even worse than this. For the average person past puberty, the risk of dying doubles with every eight additional candles on the birthday cake.

The good news - which comes from an analysis just published in Science that was based on demographic records from Italy - is that the inexorable rise in death rate with age appears to reach a plateau around 105 and remain level thereafter. The existence of a plateau could suggest that lifespan has no strict limit, and the authors conclude that if a limit does exist, we have not yet seen it.

All this is controversial. The existence of extreme-age mortality plateaus has been claimed before, and the new study, conducted by a highly respected team, supports this case. Yet what such plateaus signify remains an enigma. Ageing appears overwhelmingly likely to be driven by the build-up of damage in the body's cells and organs, so it would be surprising if there really is a stage when things stop getting worse.

A towering skyscraper of stone built without computers or complex machinery, the Great Pyramid in Egypt has fascinated historians and archeologists for centuries.

A team of German and Russian physicists studying the properties of the Great Pyramid, also known as the Khufu Pyramid, have found that it can concentrate electromagnetic energy inside its hidden chambers and focus the electromagnetic waves into the substrate region, according to a study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Physics.

Built on the plateau of Giza in the third millennium BC by Pharaoh Khufu, the 138.8-meter (455-foot) high Great Pyramid is one of the biggest and tallest structures ever built by man.

Over the past two centuries, scientists have discovered three chambers inside the Great Pyramid with one believed to hold the mummified remains of Pharaoh Khufu himself, another - that of his wife and one thought to be a trap for tomb raiders.

NASA's Juno spacecraft recently spotted a possible new volcano at the south pole of Jupiter's most lava-licious moon, Io. But this volcanically active moon is not alone in the solar system, where sizzling-hot rocks explode and ooze onto the surface of several worlds. So how do Earthly volcanoes differ from those erupting across the rest of the solar system?

Let's start with Io. The moon is famous for its hundreds of volcanoes, including fountains that sometimes spurt lava dozens of miles above the surface, according to NASA. This Jupiter moon is constantly re-forming its surface through volcanic eruptions, even to this day. Io's volcanism results from strong gravitational encounters between Jupiter and two of its large moons, Europa and Ganymede, which shake up Io's insides.


Rosaly Lopes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed observations of Io between 1996 and 2001, during the Galileo spacecraft mission to Jupiter.

"Io has lots of caldera-like features, but they are on the surface," Lopes told Live Science. "There are lots of lava flows and lots of lakes. Lava lakes are pretty rare on Earth. We have half a dozen of them. We think they have occurred in the past on Venus and Mars. But on Io, we actually see lava lakes at the present time." Hawaii's Kilauea volcano is one such spot on Earth dotted with lava lakes.

Juno scientists asked for Lopes' help in identifying Io's newly found hotspot. She said the new observations of Io are welcome, because Galileo was in an equatorial orbit and could rarely see the poles; by contrast, Juno is in a polar orbit and has a much better view. There are some hints that Io might have larger and less-frequent eruptions at the poles, she said, but scientists need more observations to be sure.

There's a first time for everything. The Russian Avangard was the first hypersonic boost-glide vehicle to have passed its development stage and gone into production. The news was announced by Deputy Commander of the Strategic Missile Forces Major General Sergey Poroskun on July 19. The 13th missile regiment, deployed near the town of Dombarovka in the Orenburg region (southern Russia), will be the first unit armed with the new weapon. The regiment's infrastructure is ready to receive it. According to Deputy Defense Minister Yury Borisov, the system is to be fully operational by 2020.

The pace of the weapon's development takes one's breath away. Few people knew about the Avangard's existence just a few months ago, yet after a series of successful tests the vehicle has already reached the production phase!

No other country is yet able to produce hypersonic weapons - only Russia.

Launched from Russian territory, the Avangard can reach Washington in 15 minutes. No one in the world has a weapon with a speed exceeding Mach 20 or about 15,300 miles per hour (four miles per second). The Avangard also stands out for its ability to withstand extreme heat during the final phase of its trajectory. The use of composite materials enables it to resist temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Celsius. The Russian media reported on July 17 that the Avangard will be upgraded with a heat-resistant titanium casing. It also boasts special protection from lasers, in addition to its unique flight trajectory, with rapid course changes in the atmosphere as well as signatures quite different from traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Advanced countermeasure systems increase its ability to sidestep missile defenses.

• Team studying epithelial cells pinpointed shape that occurs as they pack closely
• This shape makes for the most energy-efficient method of cell organization
• They're calling it the scutoid after the shield-like 'scutellum' of a beetle's thorax

Researchers have discovered a new geometric shape that's been hiding in plain sight.

A team studying the cells that give rise to embryos and can be found lining our organs and blood vessels pinpointed a three-dimensional shape that occurs as they bend and pack together.

The new shape, dubbed the scutoid, allows these epithelial cells to organize with the most efficiency, as opposed to the column or bottle-like shapes scientists previously attributed to this process.

The biotech industry has long insisted that genetic engineering is no different than, or at the very least a continuum, of traditional plant breeding techniques-a myth perpetuated by the industry to shield it from public criticism, as well as from regulatory oversight.

But a new study from the biotech industry itself admits that there are in fact significant differences between new methods of genetic engineering, including the gene-editing technique CRISPR, and conventional plant breeding, further dispelling the claim that the two methods are one in the same.

The study lends support to the July 25, 2018, ruling by the European Court of Justice that food and crops produced using new gene-editing technologies must be regulated in the same way as genetically modified organisms (GMOs)-which in the EU means they must be labeled as GMOs.

Researchers find evidence that neural systems actively remove memories, which suggests that forgetting may be the default mode of the brain.
Decades of research have focused on how the brain acquires information, resulting in theories that suggest short-term memories are encoded in the brain as patterns of activity among neurons, while long-term memories reflect a change in the connections between neurons.

What hasn't received nearly as much attention from memory researchers is how the brain forgets. "The vast majority of the things that are happening to me in my life - the conscious experience I'm having right now - I'm most likely not going to remember when I'm 80," said Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying forgetting since the 1990s. "How is it that the field of neurobiology has actually never taken forgetting seriously?"

Natural selection happening in front of our eyes.
Caribbean lizards that survived the tough 2017 hurricane season have larger toe pads, on both front and back limbs, report researchers.

The work is first to demonstrate the effects of hurricane-induced natural selection.