Today’s Logbook comes from News from Science Associate Editor Katie Langin, reflecting on her recent story about U.S. conference attendance. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including why snakes don’t seem to feel starved between meals and the moving threat of freezing rain.
Cell Biology | News from Science
They’re not dead yet: Cell spits off ‘zombosomes’
Take a mysterious new cellular phenomenon and give it a zombie-inspired name, and we simply couldn’t resist looking into it.
A research team recently described large extracellular vesicles shed by astrocytes grown in lab dishes. The oddities contain intact mitochondria and other cellular features and can move like cells for a period but don’t have a gene-filled nucleus to govern their behavior. Neurobiologist Anna Erlandsson recalled first seeing these strange structures a decade ago. “ We didn’t even have a name for them because we haven’t seen anything like that before … For some years they were just odd features,” Erlandsson recalled. But that changed when Abdulkhalek Dakhel joined her lab. To finally assign them a name, Erlandsson, Dakhel, and colleagues mashed together “zombie” and “ectosomes” (a generic name for extracellular vesicles that bud off from a cell surface) to get “zombosomes.”
The team also found clumps of alpha-synuclein in the blobs, similar to the protein clumps seen in Parkinson’s disease; the group suggests zombosomes may contribute to the disease’s pathology—although probing that hypothesis will require additional research.
Many snakes, such as this Burmese python, eat enormous meals followed by long fasting periods. Thoai Pham/Alamy
Snakes are remarkable for their ability to fast. Some can go for a year or more without a meal. How do they do it? The trick may be losing the genes that produce ghrelin, a key hormone that regulates appetite, digestion, and fat storage.
The team scanned the genomes of 112 species, seeking changes in the DNA that makes ghrelin, dubbed the “hunger hormone ” because it was once thought to be the key to obesity in humans. In snakes, chameleons, and toadhead agamas, ghrelin genes were either missing or so warped by mutations they could no longer encode the hormone, the scientists found. When the researchers looked at MBOAT4, an enzyme that makes ghrelin function, they found that it too was lost in snakes, chameleons, and the agamas.
Losing ghrelin and MBOAT4 may have been part of how these ambush predators adapted to a boom-and-bust feeding schedule. Normally, ghrelin can help the body turn fat into energy when food is scarce. Without ghrelin and MBOAT4, the reptiles may be able to hold onto their energy reserves for longer, letting them persist in low power mode for months to a year between meals.
Understanding how these reptiles’ bodies process food and fat without ghrelin might help us better understand how the hormone works in other species , like humans, said genomicist Todd Castoe, who was not involved with the study. Though the applications to people are still unclear, he noted that it was basic research decades ago on another reptile—the gila monster—that eventually led to the development of GLP-1 drugs. “You never know where things are going to go.”
More than one million people lost power in the winter storm that swept across the eastern half of the United States two weekends ago. New research shows the region may need to get used to it: Freezing rain, a dangerous form of precipitation that downs power lines and slickens roads, has been shifting to the south.
“[Freezing rain] does not happen every day in the winter,” earth systems scientist Zong-Liang Yang told ScienceAdviser. “But once it happens, it’s disastrous.”
To form, freezing rain requires a cold-warm-cold atmospheric sandwich: high, cold air yields snow, which melts to rain as it falls, then gets cold-shocked near the ground; it freezes on contact into characteristically “sticky” ice. To analyze freezing rain patterns over time, Yang and his postdoctoral student compiled more than 54,000 county-level reports of freezing rain from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database covering 1996 to 2025. They saw that the precipitation had shifted south over time, to a band from eastern Texas to western Pennsylvania. The highest frequency of freezing rain events also moved from December to February.
While it’s too early to say if climate change is playing a role, global warming does make the warm “meat” layer of the atmospheric sandwich more prevalent. If, as predicted, climate change begins to shift global wind circulation and bring low, cold air south from the Arctic, researchers think the Goldilocks conditions behind freezing rain could get all too common.
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Last year’s Entomological Society of America conference was held in Portland, Oregon, during an especially politically turbulent moment. Entomological Society of America
Is attendance down at U.S. conferences?
Katie Langin, Associate Editor, News from Science
Ahead of last year’s summer conference season, the chatter on Bluesky came through loud and clear: In post after post, scientists shared how they, and others, were going to skip meetings on U.S. soil.
“I work at a Canadian university located less than 100 miles from the U.S. border,” one physics professor posted. “I have yet to find a professor colleague who plans to attend a conference in the U.S. this summer.”
Their reasons were varied. Some feared being detained by U.S. customs—a worry that was amplified by a highly publicized case involving a French scientist who was detained in March while traveling to a conference in Texas. Others stated that, given the political situation, they didn’t want to spend grant dollars supporting the U.S. economy. That was particularly the case among Canadians, who were furious about President Donald Trump’s repeated references to Canada as the “51st state.”
I reported on those concerns in March, sharing the stories of researchers who were rethinking their travel plans. But it wasn’t clear at the time whether a sizeable U.S. boycott would actually take hold among conference-goers and, if it did, how much it would affect attendance.
So, last August I started emailing scientific societies that regularly hold their annual meetings in the U.S. to find out what their numbers were looking like. I was hoping to write up a story about what I found by the end of the summer. But it didn’t turn out that way.
I only got a few responses by September, not enough to feel as though I had a clear picture of what was actually happening. I also had a sneaking suspicion that, given the low response rate, my data might be biased toward conferences that didn’t have major problems. It wasn’t until recently, after months of emailing, that I finally felt as though I had a critical mass of responses.
As I report in this week’s issue of Science, the data I ended up with tell a complicated story. Many conferences were fine, drawing roughly the same number of attendees as prior years. “Attendance was down slightly from the previous year, but overall, 2025 was the third highest-attended AACR Annual Meeting,” a spokesperson for the American Association for Cancer Research told me.
But some conferences ran into problems, with drops in attendance as large as 32% compared to 2024. Some of that was due to a decline in international attendance. But many societies also reported receiving fewer conference registrations from U.S.-based attendees, particularly those who work for the U.S. government. That created real problems for some societies, including one which was forced to renegotiate its contract with conference hotels.
“I think that the worries for this upcoming year have got to be way bigger,” one scientist told me when discussing what the future might hold. “I don’t think people from outside the U.S. are going to come. … And God knows, the funding thing changes at any moment.”
It’s a situation many U.S.-based scientific societies are keeping an eye on. “We are quite concerned,” a society representative told me.
Specially etched aluminum tubes don’t sink, even if they’re riddled with holes—seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. Their secret? Tiny ridges that create a superhydrophobic surface that traps air bubbles, and keeps water from entering the tube. The tubes could be scaled up, researchers said, to create new kinds of unsinkable structures.
People taught to regulate their brain activity using positive thinking produce more antibodies when given a vaccine, a team of scientists has found. “Placebo is a self-help mechanism, and here we actually harness it,” said one of the researchers.
A Senate panel came down hard on the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health for cuts to clinical trials, grant-funding delays, and other chaos at his agency. Answering criticisms from both Republican and Democratic members of the panel, Jay Bhattacharya claimed that the disruptions have been overblown and the agency is back on track. But when asked for his own estimate for the drop in research grants last year, Bhattacharya said, “I don’t have an answer.”
With contributions from John Travis, David Grimm, and Hannah Richter
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