Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” - MIT Technology Review

The heart is, inarguably, one of the most important organs in the body. It sits in your chest, carefully armored by sternum and ribs, constantly pulsing to maintain the flow of blood, transporting oxygen, nutrients, and other essential substances to every extremity of your body. It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in – the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other. But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens. The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner. Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging. That's the fascinating finding of a study led by molecular biologist Jesse Poganik of Harvard Medical School, suggesting that an organ's biological age isn't entirely intrinsic to the organ itself, but is strongly influenced by the body around it.

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 959 on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026. Today’s Strands theme was tricky. It helps to be a runner. Read on for all the answers.

A supply-chain attack involving ConnectWise’s cloud services has exposed Microsoft 365 customers to unauthorized application access, with researchers reporting successful sign-ins across 173 partner and customer tenants. The incident centres on credentials associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly SkyKick, and raises concerns about attackers exploiting permissions already entrusted to business software. ConnectWise has confirmed unauthorized access to application identities within its Cloud Backup environment. In an October 17 update on its service-status page, the company said it was shutting off application access, interrupting customer backups while investigation and remediation continued.