He broke his neck diving into a pool. Four years later, he can pet his dog again

Happy Friday. Today's lead story is about Keith Thomas, who broke his neck four years ago and was paralyzed from the chest down. What doctors and engineers at the Feinstein Institutes just made possible for him, I'll let you read it yourself.

We also have wild avocado varieties hiding in Nicaraguan rainforests that could protect the entire global crop from collapse, five new marine reserves entering force off New Zealand's South Island next month, and India's first private spaceflight company successfully launching its first orbital rocket.

Have a great weekend.

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—Stephanie S

In the summer of 2020, Keith Thomas of Massapequa, New York dove into a swimming pool and broke his neck. The injury severed his spinal cord at the C4-C5 vertebrae, paralyzing him from the chest down. Three months later, researchers from the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research contacted him about a three-year trial. He said yes.

What Professor Chad Bouton's team built is called a double neural bypass. Electrodes implanted in Keith's brain detect his intention to move before his muscles receive any signal. That intention is routed around the break in his spinal cord and sent directly to his arms and hands. A second layer runs the other direction: sensors embedded in his fingers transmit touch information back to his brain. The system is bidirectional — Keith doesn't just move, he feels. He can distinguish whether he's holding an egg, a coffee cup, or a tennis ball. He can adjust his grip pressure accordingly. He can feel his dog's fur and his sister's hands.

After 35 weeks of training, his right arm had recovered 86% of its strength and his left arm 62%. Before the trial, he couldn't lift his hand above his neck. Now he can scratch his nose and wipe his mouth. What makes the finding particularly extraordinary is what happens when the computer is switched off: the function persists. His brain and body have been quietly rewiring themselves all along. The study is published in Nature. Read the full story.

Every Hass avocado in the world is genetically identical. Not similar — identical. The entire global crop is propagated through clonal grafting, meaning 11 million metric tons grown annually represent a single organism reproduced at planetary scale. One well-adapted disease could theoretically collapse the whole supply overnight. It's the same vulnerability that wiped out the Gros Michel banana in the 1950s.

Kevin Wann, a doctoral student at Texas A&M, traveled to Nicaragua to map what genetic diversity still existed in the wild. He found 47 native avocado landraces that have never been commercially cultivated. DNA analysis of 32 of them, compared against 200+ global lineages, revealed that lowland Nicaraguan avocados are genetically tied to Colombian populations rather than Mexican ones — an entirely distinct branch of the avocado family tree that commercial growers have never accessed.

The local landraces showed no evidence of root rot, the most common disease in commercial avocado farming, and are adapted to warmer, wetter climates. Published in Plants People Planet. If even a handful of these traits can be bred into commercial varieties, the global avocado supply becomes dramatically less fragile. Read the full story.

Off the southeastern coast of New Zealand's South Island, in the waters of the Otago district, five new marine reserves are entering force next month. Together they protect 308 square miles of ocean as strict no-take zones, making them New Zealand's first significant marine protections in a decade.

The reserves are part of Te Au Roa o Te Rakihouia, named for the first-known person to journey around the South Island coastline, and were developed in formal partnership with Kāi Tahu, the local Māori community. Nine Kāi Tahu rangers are currently being trained to monitor and protect the area. The species they'll be watching over include the hoiho, New Zealand's rare yellow-eyed penguin, the pakake sea lion, and the tutumairekurai, the Hector's dolphin, one of the world's smallest and rarest marine dolphins, along with the kelp forests that anchor the entire ecosystem.

"This is game-changing," said Jamie Fowler of WWF New Zealand. A sixth reserve was blocked by a legal challenge from the Otago Rock Lobster Industry Association and remains pending. But five are in. Read the full story.

In 2022, Skyroot Aerospace became the third private company in the world to reach space with a rocket of its own design, beating Russia to the milestone. That was a suborbital flight. Last week, the Hyderabad-based startup went further: its new four-stage Vikram-1 rocket lifted off from the Sriharikota launch pad at 12:05pm local time and achieved every performance metric within 17 minutes. India's first private orbital rocket launch was, in the words of co-founder and CEO Pawan Kumar Chandana, "a grand success."

The Vikram-1 carries more than 770 pounds of payload into low-Earth orbit. Its customers on this mission included DCUBED of Germany, Grahaa Space of India, and Cosmoserve Space of India, whose Embrace robotic space drone is designed to grab and hurl space debris out of orbit, one piece at a time.

India joins the United States and China as the only countries with a domestic private route to orbit. For a nation of 1.4 billion people with a growing commercial space industry, this is more than a milestone. It's an opening. Read the full story.

🥗 Global: An international team modeling ten economic scenarios found that a global shift to healthier diets could cut agriculture-related CO2 emissions by 85% by 2050, while increasing the value of fruit, vegetable, nut, and legume production by 57%, published in Nature.

🚀 USA: NASA has confirmed that Artemis III in 2027 will serve as a full dress rehearsal for returning to the Moon, with four astronauts practicing rendezvous and docking with both SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander in Earth orbit before the actual 2028 Moon landing.

🐝 Germany: Scientists at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf have discovered the specific brain circuits that determine which jobs honeybees perform as they age, finding that switching these circuits off caused older worker bees to revert to caring for the queen, revealing how complex colony behavior emerges without any central planning.

🐳 Mexico: Researchers have documented a never-before-seen orca hunting behavior in the Gulf of California, in which one whale grips a massive sunfish by the fin while a second torpedoes into it at full speed, blasting it apart in what scientists are calling "ram-to-fragment" behavior, possibly to feed young calves or simply for the joy of it.

On July 24, 1911, American explorer Hiram Bingham III was led up a steep Peruvian mountainside by local indigenous farmers who knew exactly where they were going. What he found at the top stopped him cold: a vast, immaculately constructed Incan citadel of temples, terraces, and stone buildings that had been built in the 15th century and abandoned roughly a century later. The Spanish colonizers who had spent decades scouring the Andes for Incan gold had never found it. The jungle had simply grown over it and kept its secret for 400 years.

Bingham returned with a Yale expedition the following year, excavated the site, and brought it to the attention of the wider world. His 1948 bestseller Lost City of the Incas made Machu Picchu a global symbol of ancient wonder. He later became a US senator. Today the site draws roughly 1.5 million visitors a year and is considered one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. The farmers who led him there that morning are not named in most accounts.

Other notable July 24 events:

1975: Giorgio Armani founded Giorgio Armani S.p.A. in Milan, 51 years ago today, with his partner Sergio Galeotti and the proceeds from selling his Volkswagen. He had no formal design education — he had studied medicine and worked in department stores. By 2001 he was the most successful designer of Italian origin in the world.

1998: Saving Private Ryan was released in US cinemas, 28 years ago today, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon, earning 11 Oscar nominations and 5 wins including Best Director, and widely regarded as one of the most significant war films ever made.

1929: The Kellogg-Briand Pact went into effect, 97 years ago today, a treaty signed by 62 nations that formally renounced war as an instrument of national policy and laid important groundwork for the international legal frameworks that followed.

1847: Brigham Young led 148 Mormon settlers into the Salt Lake Valley, 179 years ago today, completing a 17-month journey under religious persecution to found what would become Salt Lake City, Utah.

— John Keats

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🔬 Catching Cancer in the Blood: Liquid biopsy tests that detect fragments of tumour DNA circulating in the bloodstream can now identify cancers at earlier stages than any physical symptom, with several tests already approved or in late-stage trials across multiple cancer types.

🧠 Brains That Talk Back to Implants: Closed-loop brain stimulation devices monitor neural activity in real time and deliver precisely timed electrical pulses only when the brain needs them, showing strong clinical results for treatment-resistant epilepsy, depression, and OCD, with several already FDA-approved.

🌱 Grain That Grows Back: Perennial wheat and grain varieties grow back year after year without replanting, dramatically cutting soil erosion, fuel use, and carbon emissions compared to conventional annual crops, while maintaining competitive yields.

🔭 Listening to the Universe Hum: Networks of ultra-precise pulsar clocks spread across the galaxy are detecting the gravitational wave background, the faint cosmic hum produced by billions of merging supermassive black holes, giving astronomers an entirely new way to hear the universe.

🌍 Paint That Cools Buildings Without Power: Ultra-white radiative cooling paints that reflect sunlight and emit heat directly into space are now commercially available and being applied to rooftops and urban surfaces, reducing building temperatures by up to 10 degrees with no electricity required.

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