ScienceAdviser (AAAS)

It all starts in lysosomes, organelles in cells whose primary job is to break things apart—from invaders to waste. When a cell lacks enough fuel due to starvation, these organelles start recycling bits of the cell itself. And it turns out that when it breaks apart certain lipids, it frees up signaling factors that tell intestinal cells to make a protein called HIS-71—a kind of DNA-wrapping protein called a histone that can alter gene expression patterns. These HIS-71s are then shuttled via yolk from the intestines to reproductive tissues, where they are incorporated into the cells that become eggs.

Intriguingly, we have a homologous histone variant, called H3.3, noted K. Adam Bohnert in a related Perspective. Also, a similar extension of children’s lifespan is seen in people who experience starvation—but we don’t yet know if a similar mechanism underlies the phenomenon in our species.

A team of astronomers say they’ve resolved this chicken-and-egg puzzle using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 dish antennas high up in the Chilean Andes which can see dust in disks but not the planets themselves. If the spiral arms formed in the disk spontaneously, over time they would wind tighter, like the spring in a wind-up clock. Arms formed by planets would keep their shape as they move around the nascent star.

The team used archival and new images taken over 7 years of the young star IM Lup to make a stop-motion video of the spiral disk around it. The video shows the spiral winding tighter as it turns which, the team says in Nature Astronomy on 24 September, shows it is a disk on the cusp of forming planets. “When I saw the outcome of the analysis—the dynamic visualization of the spiral in motion— I screamed with excitement,” team leader Tomohiro Yoshida said in a statement.

Students of planet formation will now be settling down with buckets of popcorn to see what happens next around IM Lup.

HHMI already requires investigators to make their papers available open access when published; over half of their recently published work appeared first as a preprint. The new policy goes even further, requiring investigators to publish their “major works”—defined as papers on which the investigator is a first, last, or corresponding author—as preprints when the manuscript is first completed and again after it is “substantially revised” in response to peer review or for other reasons. The policy is also triggered by such revisions after nontraditional forms of peer review, such as by reviewing services unaffiliated with a journal or public comments on a preprint server.

When the new rule takes effect 1 January 2026, HHMI will also stop paying author fees for publications in journals that do not publish all their content open access—which includes many coveted titles such as Nature and Cell.

The policy’s implementation likely faces pushback from publishers who have pressured authors not to immediately and publicly post manuscripts that underwent their peer review unless they pay an open-access fee. But such publishers “cannot thrive by insisting on exclusivity,” said Bodo Stern, HHMI’s chief of strategic initiatives. He envisions a future where journals get paid for conducting peer review and authors preprint the resulting manuscript, then later decide whether to submit the best ones to a journal, even a paywalled one, for final publication and curation— a model like the one adopted by the prominent open-access journal eLife.

The egg-shaped stone above, reminiscent of a yule log dessert but for its bright orange and blue colors, is a time capsule to a period more than 1 billion years ago. On the outside, the iron oxide stone appears as unremarkable as a grain of sand. But it actually forms more like a snowball, its crystal structure growing in layers as waves slosh the stone around the seafloor. Each layer traps carbon pulled from the surrounding water, in turn creating an isotopic record of the ocean throughout geologic history.

Researchers analyzed the carbon in 26 of the snowball-like stones, called ooids, and found that the oceans between 1 billion and 541 million years ago contained 90 to 99 percent less dissolved organic carbon than oceans today. “Our results contradict all previous assumptions ,” the authors say in a press release, since paleoclimatologists previously thought oceanic carbon boomed in that time period.

Now, scientists have to adjust their explanation for the evolution of complex life. Before, they thought that as single-celled and tiny multicellular photosynthetic organisms flourished, they added oxygen to the air and carbon to the seas upon sinking and dissolving. Both elements then helped larger-bodied animals grow. Instead, suggest the ooids, the photosynthetic organisms sank without dissolving because of existing low oxygen levels in the deep ocean (meaning microbes couldn’t digest carbon-rich matter efficiently). It wasn’t until the amount of oxygen in the deep oceans caught up closer to 541 million years ago that dissolved carbon spiked and larger-bodied animals grew.

The authors write that the ooids can lead to new explanations of glaciations on Earth, or even help hypothesize about the emergence of life on other planets. Although for many kids and adults alike, they’re just plain pretty.

With contributions from Daniel Clery and Jeffrey Brainard

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