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Axolotls are famous for their ability to regrow significant parts of their bodies. But according to recent research, these frilly-headed salamanders, which are native to lakes and wetlands around Mexico City, can perform an even more extraordinary biological feat: they can completely regrow their thymus, a complex organ instrumental to the immune system in most vertebrates.

Previous work suggested that some animals can partially regrow thymuses, but the co-authors of the new paper, published in Science Immunology, were surprised to see axolotls completely rebuild the intricately structured organ from nothing.

“Axolotls are legendary for regenerating limbs and parts of the central nervous system,” says study co-author Maximina H. Yun, a biologist at the Chinese Institutes for Medical Research in Beijing. “The realization that these animals can regrow their full thymus from scratch is a breakthrough moment.”

The thymus is responsible for producing the body’s T cells, which help to target and destroy invading pathogens. “In humans and most other vertebrates, the thymus is famous for being one of the first organs to degenerate,” says Turan Demircan, a biologist and regeneration expert at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University in Turkey who was not involved in the new research. “Until now, it was believed that once this tissue is gone or removed, it cannot be fully rebuilt.”

For the new study, Yun and her colleagues removed the thymus from several juvenile axolotls. After seven days, many of the animals were already budding new thymuses. After 35 days, more than 60 percent of them had fully regenerated the organ. “I was genuinely surprised,” says study co-author René Maehr, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. “A full, functional regeneration of a complex immune organ wasn’t something I expected.”

The team next tested the function of the regenerated thymuses by transplanting them into other axolotls. “Remarkably, the transplanted organs integrated perfectly,” Demircan says.

Further analysis identified two key features essential to the regeneration process: the Foxn1 gene, which scientists already knew was involved in thymus development, and a signaling molecule called midkine, which Demircan says appears in human embryos but is largely inactive in adults. The results indicate there may be a biological pathway involving these components that could be useful for treating thymus-related conditions in humans.

“Axolotls are essentially nature’s ‘master key’ for regeneration research,” Demircan says. “If we could reawaken this specific pathway in humans, we might be able to stimulate the thymus to regrow, potentially reversing immune aging or helping patients who have undergone thymectomies.”

According to Yun, researchers might someday tweak human stem cells to emulate the axolotl and recover thymus function. “We are laying the groundwork for transformative therapies that could redefine our approach to immune restoration.”

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Paul Starosta/Getty Images

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Hmmmm … administrative secrets!

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At least a half-dozen top officials in the current Trump administration have connections to Jeffrey Epstein, according to an NBC News review of some of the over 3 million documents the Justice Department has released.

The degree to which each individual was connected to Epstein varies significantly, from a single email to years of communications. President Donald Trump, who had a lengthy relationship with Epstein, is mentioned thousands of times in the files. Trump has never been accused by authorities of any wrongdoing connected to Epstein, and has said he parted ways with him in the mid-2000s because he was a “creep.” He has also denied any wrongdoing.

During a testy oversight hearing on Wednesday. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi on whether any current administration officials have been questioned by the Justice Department about their ties to Epstein.

“I’m stunned that you want to continue talking about Epstein,” Bondi replied while sidestepping the question.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump praised Bondi’s appearance at the Senate hearing and claimed that the files provide “conclusively” that he “has been 100% exonerated.”

Some officials from previous Democratic administrations have appeared in the files — including former President Bill Clinton, his former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and former Obama White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler.

Ruemmler announced this week that she would leave her position as Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer amid blowback over her extensive emails with Epstein. Ruemmler has said she was friendly with Epstein only in the context of being a criminal defense attorney and that she regrets ever having known him.

Summers announced in November that he was taking a leave of absence from his teaching at Harvard University and would step back from other public commitments. Summers said in November that he was “deeply ashamed” of emails that came out last year showing him corresponding with Epstein as recently as July 2019. He has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes.

Clinton has said that he cut ties with Epstein before the financier was accused in 2006 of having sex with a minor. His spokesperson said the emails “prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing.” He has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein by authorities.

Two other ex-Trump administration officials — former DOGE chief Elon Musk and former chief strategist Steve Bannon — also made appearances in the files. Neither has been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes.

Alex Acosta, who was Trump’s Labor secretary during his first term, led the first federal criminal probe into Epstein as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Acosta approved a much-maligned secret nonprosecutorial agreement that allowed Epstein to plead guilty in 2008 to lesser state charges, which helped him avoid potentially decades of jail time. Acosta has defended the plea deal and said that his office “acted appropriately” given the context of the 2008 case. “Times have changed, and coverage of this case has certainly changed,” he said in 2019 after Epstein’s arrest in New York.

Reached for comment, a White House spokesperson referred NBC News to remarks Trump made on Thursday about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who admitted this week to visiting Epstein’s island in 2012.

“No, I wasn’t aware of it,” he said of Lutnick’s trip, adding, “I actually haven’t spoken to him about it, I wasn’t, but from what I hear, he was there with his wife and children. And I guess in some cases, some people were. I wasn’t. I was never there. Somebody will someday say that. I was never there.”

No major U.S. political figure has been accused by law enforcement of any crimes, and all have denied wrongdoing. A joint DOJ-FBI memo released last year found that there was no evidence of a so-called “client list” and that no one else would be investigated in connection with Epstein.

Here’s a look at administration officials’ ties to Epstein and his co-conspirator in a sex tracking ring, Ghislaine Maxwell:

Epstein and Trump’s overlap

Numerous people in President Donald Trump’s administrations, past and present, showed up in Epstein file dumps.

NBC News mapped out the web of connections between Jeffrey Epstein and those in President Trump’s administration

This chart shows Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, and eight others who serve or served in Trump’s administration. Mouse over or tap an artist name to hear how they showed up in an Epstein files dump.

Jeffrey Epstein

Trump, who was friends with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s, and was president when Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2019, is mentioned in the files thousands of times.
Kennedy Jr. shows up in the flight logs of Epstein’s private jet and is referenced in an email exchange between Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein.
Lutnick and Epstein emailed in 2012 about a possible boat trip to Epstein’s island. He and his family ended up taking that trip, Lutnick told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday.
A 2016 email from Oz to Epstein appeared to contain an invitation to a Valentine’s Day party.
Feinberg, a billionaire investor, is named on business documents included in the January Epstein document dump.
In a 2025 Epstein document dump, Phelan’s name was listed in a 2006 flight manifest for Epstein’s private jet.
Warsh was on a list of people a redacted sender forwarded to Epstein, labeled “St. Barth’s Christmas 2010.”
Musk made numerous appearances in the newly released files in friendly-sounding email exchanges with Epstein in 2012 and 2013.
Bannon and Epstein frequently emailed and texted each other from January 2018 and up until days before Epstein’s June 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.

RFK Jr. : Kennedy Jr. shows up in the flight logs of Epstein’s private jet and is referenced in an email exchange between Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein.

JeffreyEpsteinSteveBannonElonMuskKevinWarshJohnPhelanMehmetOzStephenFeinbergRFK Jr.HowardLutnickDonaldTrump

RFK Jr.

Health and Human Services Secretary

Kennedy Jr. shows up in the flight logs of Epstein’s private jet and is referenced in an email exchange between Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein.

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Secretary Lutnick

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Hmmmm … who flooded Harlem with drugs? Payback?

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Leading this expansion was Hannibal of the Barca family, whose brother Mago is credited with bringing elephants to the Iberian peninsula around 228 B.C. Hannibal then revolutionized warfare by deploying armored pachyderms against local tribes. This terrifying shock force broke battle lines and provided elevated, commanding positions for his archers.

“It is quite possible that the bone uncovered around Cordoba belonged to one of the elephants that Hannibal used to crush the Carpetani tribe in central Spain,” Dr. Quesada said.

The Second Punic War was ignited in 219 B.C. by Hannibal’s brutal, eight-month siege of Saguntum, a strategic Spanish stronghold allied with Rome. Believing the siege to be a rogue act, Rome demanded that Hannibal be handed over. When Carthage refused, the two powers declared war, setting the stage for a colossal 17-year conflict.

Before his invasion of Italy, Hannibal left 21 war elephants in Spain under the authority of his brother Hasdrubal. Those so-called tanks of antiquity were distributed among Mago and other generals. Dr. Quesada said the bones in his team’s archaeological find might be linked to those elephants.

The four-inch bone fragment was dug up six years ago, ahead of construction work at the Iron Age site Colina de los Quemados. The excavation revealed a violent past for the fortified village. Sealed beneath a collapsed adobe wall, the remnant was found with 12 large stone catapult projectiles, suggesting that a fierce clash had taken place on the grounds of the settlement.

The artifact was found in isolation, with the rest of the animal’s remains lost. This anomaly has led researchers to a curious possibility: The relic might have been intentionally spared, salvaged by someone who found its small size ideal for a souvenir.

Researchers identified the specimen as the third carpal bone from an elephant’s right foreleg by comparing it with anatomical collections at the University of Valladolid in Spain and the Leiden University in the Netherlands. The anatomical match for the bone was confirmed through measurements against Asian elephant and steppe mammoth samples.

Eve MacDonald, a historian at Cardiff University and the author of “Carthage: A New History,” who was not involved in the new study, said that while a single ankle bone limits interpretation, “the association alone adds to the understanding of the significance of the elephant in the Carthaginian war machine.”

The fate of the Córdoba elephant was undoubtedly grim, but it was probably a swifter mercy than the marathon of misery endured by Hannibal’s herd. Over five grueling months, the elephants caravaned from Catalonia across the Pyrenees and the Rhone, ultimately scaling the snow-slicked Alps. Their thousand-mile journey was less a military feat and more a slow-motion catastrophe.

While accounts vary, many historians believe a significant number of the elephants — perhaps nearly all 37 — initially survived the passage. But by the spring of 217 B.C., Hannibal’s grand trunk show had been reduced to a lone survivor: a tusk-shorn animal named Surus, meaning the Syrian. The others had died following the Battle of Trebia because of exhaustion, wounds, and a severe winter ice storm.

Hannibal is said to have ridden Surus across the treacherous Arno marshes after losing an eye to an infection. The chilling admission of the Roman playwright Plautus — that Surus “set my heart a-freezing” — endures as the ultimate testimonial to a creature that commanded absolute, frosty respect.

Uncovering the Past, One Discovery at a Time

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• War Elephants: Archaeologists say a 2,200-year-old specimen is the first direct evidence of how the Carthaginians used the giant mammals in the Punic Wars.

• The Lighthouse of Alexandria: An ancient skyscraper considered the seventh wonder of the world crumbled to ruin centuries ago. Now an ambitious archaeological project aims to reassemble it in 3-D.

• Rock Art: An ancient handprint in a cave on an Indonesian island may be the oldest known rock art, created at least 67,800 years ago.

• Roman Villa Under Deer Park: The unexpected discovery of a well-preserved and fortified villa in Margam Park in South Wales sheds new light on the Roman occupation there, an expert said.

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A Renaissance-era fresco attributed to Jacopo Ripanda depicting Hannibal on the back of an elephant during the Second Punic War, in the third century B.C. Credit…Adam Eastland/Alamy

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In the run-up to this year’s Winter Olympics, and even as the Games have got underway, a scandal has been brewing: allegedly, some competitive ski jumpers may have artificially enlarged their crotch area by injecting their genitals with engorging chemicals or stuffing their underwear to create bigger bulges. The apparent reason: to alter their suit measurements—ski jumpsuits are precisely tailored to jumpers’ bodies—and, reportedly, to gain a boost in jumps.

The allegations, first reported by a German media outlet and since dubbed “Penisgate,” have caught not only the Internet’s attention but also the World Anti-Doping Agency’s eye, although no athletes have been implicated by name.

Still the affair raises an important science question: How does a slight increase in a ski jumper’s suit surface area actually change their jumping distance?

Let’s start with the crotch. According to rules issued by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), the body that regulates ski jumping, “crotch height” measurements for an athlete’s suit are taken by laser. So, in theory, if an athlete’s crotch is temporarily a little larger, they would get a slightly roomier suit than they might otherwise.

The extra fabric might be enough to minimally lengthen their jumps by providing a little more lift in the air—much like the patagium of a flying squirrel—and, in turn, more distance. In a sport that’s often decided by a matter of centimeters, any additional hang time can be the difference between gold and silver.

“It has a huge impact,” says Lasse Ottesen, now race director for the Nordic Combined event at FIS and a former Olympic ski jumper. He said research conducted in the 2000s suggested jumpers with a single centimeter of extra material at the crotch could increase jump length by as much as four meters. And according to a more recent study accepted for publication by Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, scientists found that adding one centimeter to the overall circumference of ski jumpers’ suits could lengthen jumps by 3.2 meters.

Athletes, coaches, and regulators are aware of this. In January, before “Penisgate” went viral, several officials from Norway’s ski jumping team were temporarily banned from competition after they were found to have altered athletes’ suits with extra crotch stitching at last year’s Nordic World Ski Championships. That incident went “way beyond what we have ever seen before,” Ottesen says, adding that the FIS is working to refine ski jumping regulations—not least to make sure that “everyone is measured in the correct way.”

Suit size is far from the only factor to influence ski jump lengths, however.

Amy Pope, a principal lecturer in physics and astronomy at Clemson University, explains that how far a ski jumper flies is ultimately the result of physics.

To prepare for their jumps, ski jumpers race down ramps etched with ice grooves in the snow, Pope says. As they descend, the jumpers are aiming to minimize air resistance and the friction on their skis to juice their speed. By the time they reach the bottom, they’re hitting speeds of about 60 miles per hour and a “huge” wall of air resistance—imagine sticking your hand out the window of a car barreling down the highway. “That’s exactly what the athletes are feeling,” she says. And then they jump.

At this point, if the jumper was in a vacuum, their trajectory would be parabolic, with the ideal launch angle of 45 degrees, says Philip Langill, an associate professor in the department of physics at the University of Calgary. A degree more or less, and they wouldn’t travel as far as possible.

Of course, no one is jumping in a vacuum at the Winter Olympics. Instead, the athletes harness “the power of the air around them” to stay aloft longer, Pope says. They contort their bodies to maximize lift, reduce drag, and fight the pull of gravity.

That’s where the sport’s signature “V” style jump comes in—the “biggest revolution” in ski jumping in the last three decades, Ottesen says. In the early 1980s, long jumpers would often keep their skis parallel in the air, he says. But by the 1990s skiers started to fly with their skis in a “V,” increasing their surface area and lift. “All of a sudden, we were jumping a lot farther than we used to,” he says, “and we were crashing more.”

Do the athletes think about all this physics? Sometimes, according to Ottesen, at least—in training, he recalls being “more observant” of the forces acting on his body. But when it comes to competition time, muscle memory takes over. “You’re not thinking about any of this at all. The body and mind are just doing what it’s been practicing,” he says.

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Be Present in the Feeling

When the former First Lady was caring for her mom, Marian Robinson, near the end of her life, she said something that changed how Obama approached her sixth decade.

“She said, ‘Wow, that quick.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and she said, ‘Life.’ What I got from that was that you’re never ready,” said Obama. “And I was like, let me hear that. Let me understand that. Even with a wonderful life, I want to be present. And I think that feeling of 60 is about me trying to be present in the feeling—trying to be present in this moment in my life so that this last chapter is exactly how I want it to be.”

There’s Freedom in Being an Empty Nester

Everything Michelle Obama has done since becoming a mother has been to ensure her girls turn out whole. But with her daughters now out of the house, she’s embracing life rather than mourning the past like so many other empty nesters might do.

“This is the first time in my life where every single decision I make is mine,” she said. “It’s what I want to do. And there’s a burden in that, too. This is the first time I’ve been able to do that for me with no excuses, so that means the consequences are mine too. There’s freedom with that.”

Only Take Advice From Seasoned Moms

The conversation would not have been complete without her making us laugh. Several times. The most memorable? A playful PSA reminding attendees to stop listening to young mommy bloggers. All in jest, she reminded us that none of us has any idea what we’re doing during those first few years.

“Let me hear what you have to say when they’re 27. That’s when I’ll take your advice,” she said. “I don’t know you’re right until I see the final product. I want to talk to Mariane Robinson. I want to talk to the woman who raised the First Lady. All parent bloggers should be grown people.” 

Who are we to disagree?

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama & La La Anthony discuss her new book ‘The Look’ at People Inc. Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock for People, Inc.

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