| 6 January 2026 |
| Today’s Deep Dive looks at how lizards play rock-paper-scissors. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including a big rogue planet and evidence that an ancient hominin may have walked like we do. |
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| Earth Science | News from Science |
| Earthquakes shake nutrients loose in the deep |
| Eighteen hundred meters below Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, a volcanic ridge lined by hydrothermal vents burbles in the dark. As these vents belch out scalding water rich with iron and other compounds, they nourish the microscopic plankton that krill and other crustaceans eat, sustaining a food web that culminates in predators such as penguins and whales. Now, new research reveals these vents can be supercharged by a surprising source: earthquakes. According to a study published last month in Nature Geoscience, earthquakes cause these vents to violently burp up essential nutrients , which travel to the surface and enable the formation of massive plankton blooms.
Even though the waters off Antarctica are cold and harsh, researchers have long spotted these sorts of blooms. Each year, the waters above the Australian Antarctic Ridge, at the junction between the Australian and Antarctic tectonic plates, host a bloom that once covered 266,000 square kilometers of ocean (an area about the size of New Zealand). To test their hunch that undersea quakes could be driving these blooms, researchers consulted seismic records, satellite imagery, and deep-sea chemical samples collected from the area around the ridge. They found that blooms grew largest when earthquakes of magnitude 5 or greater occurred ahead of the Antarctic phytoplankton’s growing season. This link suggests volcanic iron can be transported to the ocean’s surface much more quickly than once thought.
“We are clearly underestimating some physical mechanisms at play in the Southern Ocean,” said lead author and earth and climatology scientist Casey Schine. |
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| Anthropology | Science Advances |
| Fossils suggest humans took their first steps 7 million years ago |
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| Crania, ulnae, and femora from (left to right): a chimpanzee, Sahelanthropus, and Australopithecus. Scott Williams/NYU and Jason Heaton/University of Alabama Birmingham |
| When did humans start walking upright? Newly analyzed fossils of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, an ancient hominin that lived 7 million years ago, are helping researchers take a step towards the right answer.
In the study, published last week in Science Advances, anthropologists revealed that the femur of Sahelanthropus naturally twists and has a bump where it once attached to butt muscles—two anatomical features that help modern humans stand, walk, and run stably. The femur also has a bump used by a ligament to attach the leg bone to the pelvis. In modern humans, this ligament keeps the torso from falling backward when we stand up. This is what “ really sold the case for bipedalism,” study leader and evolutionary morphologist Scott Williams told The Washington Post. “It’s a subtle feature, so it wasn’t recognized by the other groups.”
At 7 million years old, Sahelanthropus would be the earliest human ancestor to walk on two feet—if the new interpretation withstands further scrutiny—and could therefore help clarify the ongoing debate of exactly when hominins stood up straight. “I’m fairly convinced that this thing was a biped,” said William. However, “I’d be foolish to think that it would settle it,” he added. |
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| Astronomy | Science |
| A planet as massive as Saturn went rogue |
| Planets are clingy objects, locked into their orbits by the strong gravity of one or more stars. But some can go rogue, breaking away from their orbit and meandering through the galaxy. Researchers have discovered one such free floater, named Gaia24cdn, which they reported last week in Science.
Spotting rogue planets is challenging because they emit hardly any light. While astronomers typically track exoplanets by the dips in light they cause when passing in front of a star, astronomers must find rogue planets through subtle gravitational effects. Unfortunately, the gravitational method cannot reveal the distance or mass of a planet, making our knowledge of these floaters limited.
Using Polish and Korean-run ground-based telescope networks and the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, a team detected a fleeting gravitational event where an object magnified the light from a star behind it. Due to the multiple telescope angles, the team was able to determine the object’s location and mass: about 10,000 light-years from Earth and comparable to the mass of Saturn. Since the telescopes did not detect a host star, the researchers determined the object was a rogue planet. They think it likely formed in a typical solar system, then got expelled during a period of gravitational turmoil caused by interactions with neighboring planets or unstable stars.
Rogue planets like Gaia24cdn won’t be so sneaky for long. In a related Perspective, astronomer Gavin A. L. Coleman noted that the impending launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will “allow [for] the detection of thousands of new planets and the rigorous testing of planet formation models.” |
| Read the Science Paper |
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| Advancing precision oncology with spatial biomarkers |
| Spatial analysis of the tumor microenvironment is offering a new perspective. This Science Webinar examines how multiplex imaging and AI-based spatial analysis can identify immune niches associated with melanoma immunotherapy response. |
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| Deep Dive |
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| The emergence and spread of “nigriventris syndrome” (top left) in common wall lizards has disrupted the ancient balance between white (bottom left), yellow (top right), and orange (bottom right) color morphs. Roberto García Roa |
| Reptilian rock-paper-scissors: Two paths for polymorphism in lizards |
| Phie Jacobs, General Assignment Reporter, News from Science |
| At the beginning of each breeding season, male side-blotched lizards—so named for the distinctive dark spot behind the front leg—prepare for a biological game of rock-paper-scissors. These reptilian Romeos develop one of three colors on their throats, with each hue corresponding to a different mating strategy.
Dominant orange males establish control over large territories containing multiple females; they even steal potential mates from blue males, which are less aggressive and guard only one or two females. Yellow males don’t bother to secure any territory at all, instead sneaking onto their competitors’ turf to secretly mate with females. And while vigilant blue males have an easier time spotting and chasing off intruders, orange males struggle to keep watch over their larger territories.
Orange beats blue, blue beats yellow, and yellow beats orange. And just like rock-paper-scissors, it’s really anyone’s game. While one color morph may be more successful for a few seasons, it eventually gives way to a second, which gives way to the third, until the cycle starts over again.
While scientists previously assumed that the side-blotched lizard’s color diversity stemmed from three separate genetic variants, a new analysis suggests the reality is more nuanced. As researchers report in Science, orange males inherit two copies of a particular gene variant, causing them to produce lower levels of a protein that helps make both pigments and neurotransmitters—potentially explaining the link between coloration and behavior. Because the variant is recessive, lizards that only inherit one copy end up blue. “ It’s a near-perfect association,” lead study author Ammon Corl tells The New York Times. “This really couldn’t arise by chance.”
When the researchers looked for a third variant to explain the yellow color morph, however, they couldn’t find one. In fact, yellow lizards turned out to be genetically identical to their blue counterparts, suggesting that the same genetic makeup interacts with the environment to produce two different traits—a phenomenon known as plasticity. The rock-paper-scissors strategy actually works better with two variants and plasticity than it would with three separate gene variants, the team writes, allowing all three color morphs to persist.
But such variations don’t always stick around. In a second study published in Science, researchers investigated the curious case of the common wall lizard . White, orange, and yellow color morphs have stably coexisted within the species for millions of years, but this long-standing equilibrium was recently disrupted. Many wall lizards have developed a set of traits known as “nigriventris syndrome,” which is characterized by a darker and greener body color, larger body and head size, and dominant behavior. Individuals with this combination of traits apparently proved hard to resist; sexual selection has strongly favored this phenotype and caused a single white form to become fixed across populations. The genes underlying nigriventris syndrome, the team reports, are separate from those responsible for the original color morphs.
As biologists Siddharth Gopalan and Todd Cosroe note in a related Science Perspective, both new studies provide insight into why polymorphic traits—variations in color, shape, and behavior—persist within a species when natural selection should theoretically favor a single, optimal form. “Rather than being static genetic states,” they write, “polymorphisms may represent transient outcomes of dynamic interactions between genomes, plasticity, behavior, and ecology.” |
| REad Science Paper 1 | Science Paper 2 |
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| Formic self-sacrifice |
| If you get sick, one of the best things you can do for your fellow humans is stay home to minimize others’ exposure. For sick ants, staying in when ill with a fungal infection could mean devastation to an entire colony. But pupae can’t just up and leave—so they chemically tell their caretakers to get rid of them instead. “The ants are proactively signaling their destruction,” one expert explained. |
| Nature Communications Paper | Read more at Science News |
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| Cuts not so deep |
| Trump wanted to roughly halve U.S. spending on research via the National Science Foundation, NASA, and Department of Energy. But lawmakers have hammered out bills that only drop budgets by a few percent instead. |
| Read more at ScienceInsider |
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| A shot at healthy aging |
| Vaccines don’t just protect older people from nasty diseases like shingles and RSV—they have a growing list of likely “off-target” benefits, including reducing dementia risk. These “downstream effects,” as one researcher described them, make vaccines “key tools to promote healthy aging and prevent physical and cognitive decline.” |
| Age and Ageing Paper | Read more at The New York Times |
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| Framing alcohol use as simply “safe” or “dangerous” oversimplifies a complex evidence base … Recognizing that I may be accepting a small risk, I am sticking with an occasional glass of wine with dinner during Dry January. |
| STAT FIRST OPINION | 1 January 2026 | Robert M. Kaplan |
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