| 37 August 2025 |
| Today’s Deep Dive delves into the newest neutrino detector on the block. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including the toxic reason some tube worms are yellow and how the Atlantic might get its own “ring of fire.” |
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| Ecology | News from Science |
| When the moon hits your eye like a big wind turbine |
| For all of wind energy’s benefits, it causes problems for bats. The winged mammals seem to be unusually attracted to turbines, often loitering in the air next to them. As a result, millions of them slam into turbine blades every year and die, making turbines one of the top killers of the animals worldwide. But what exactly lures bats to turbines has remained a mystery.
New experiments suggest the key is light. To navigate, bats orient themselves toward bright patches of the open sky. Researchers hypothesized that at dusk and dawn, turbine blades might reflect just enough moonlight to make them look like the bright sky. These reflections may create an “ecological trap” that draws bats into fatal collisions.
To test this idea, the team collected wild hoary and silver-haired bats, two of the biggest victims of wind turbines in North America. Back in the lab, they released the animals into a dark maze with two exits, one of which was partially blocked by a white turbine blade reflecting artificial moonlight. Nearly three-fourths of the hoary bats and all but one of the 31 silver-haired bats flew toward the white blade, despite the bats’ theoretical ability to use echolocation to avoid it.
Case closed? Not quite. Both bat species in the study roost on trees and haven’t evolved to fly in tunnels, so the experiment didn’t exactly replicate their behavior in the wild. Even so, the study may point to other ways of keeping bats away from turbines, such as changing blades’ color so they reflect less moonlight. |
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| Biochemistry | News from Science |
| Hydrothermal vent worms go for gold |
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| This deep-sea worm gets its distinctive yellow hue from a mineral called orpiment, which was once prized by painters for its golden color. Wang et al./PLOS Biology (2025) | CC-BY |
| As a general rule, the deep sea is not particularly colorful. Many animals, accustomed to total darkness, are dull white—like the ghostly crustaceans that scuttle around on hydrothermal vents, themselves coated with pale microbial biofilms. Others, like the giant tubeworm, come in a range of oranges and reds due to the hemoglobin that suffuses their cells. So Paralvinella hessleri worms, which are bright yellow, really stand out.
According to new research, that eye-catching golden hue is part of a unique strategy that P. hessleri uses to survive in extreme conditions. Hydrothermal vents belch out plumes of superheated fluid, which are laden with heavy metals and other toxic substances. This tiny worm endures dangerous levels of arsenic and sulfide by combining the two chemicals in its cells, fighting poison with poison to create orpiment—a mineral that, oddly enough, was once prized by painters for its striking yellow color.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it does the job: While still toxic, orpiment is far less hazardous than either of its components. After all, living in such a hostile environment is “a bit of a Faustian bargain,” says marine biologist Peter Girguis, who wasn’t involved in the new study. While hydrothermal vents provide plenty of food, animals must also figure out how to withstand crushing pressure, scalding temperatures, and concentrations of toxins that would prove lethal for most creatures. Under these conditions, he notes, “there is no silver bullet.” |
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| Earth Science | News from Science |
| Will the Atlantic get its own ‘ring of fire’? |
| On 1 November 1755, the earth shuddered violently beneath Lisbon, Portugal, killing tens of thousands and laying waste to 85% of the city’s buildings. Scientists now estimate this earthquake’s magnitude at 8.7, making it Europe’s most destructive. But mysteriously, the quake struck far from any known subduction zone—regions where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, fueling volcanoes and driving some of Earth’s largest quakes. A study may finally explain the Lisbon disaster, while also hinting at the Atlantic Ocean’s geological future.
Researchers built and tested a computer simulation of the crust and mantle in the region. In their “best fit” model, the uppermost part of the mantle—the hot, dense layer that makes up much of Earth’s interior—is sloughing off beneath offshore Portugal, kind of like the sole peeling off an old shoe. This mantle is sinking into Earth, potentially generating enormous stresses and major earthquakes. And as it peels away from the thin crust, more mantle is drawn into the depths.
This self-reinforcing process may explain how subduction begins in the first place, with large earthquakes of the kind that rocked Lisbon in 1755 possibly serving as the “fingerprint” of this mechanism in action. And it may point to a future millions of years from now when subduction could spread into the Atlantic, eventually creating a version of the Pacific Ocean’s vast “ring of fire.” |
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| How skin microbes train the immune system |
| Join us for a Science webinar exploring how skin-resident microbes shape immune responses beyond the surface. Learn how the immune system partners with commensals—and how these insights are inspiring new immunotherapies and vaccines. |
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| Deep Dive |
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| Bird’s eye view of the JUNO neutrino detector with its photomultiplier tubes installed inside the empty water pool. Enrico Sacchetti |
| World’s most sensitive scintillation neutrino detector comes online |
| Dennis Normile, Contributing Correspondent, News from Science |
| Chinese physicists are out to answer one of the weightiest questions in particle physics: Which of the three neutrino mass states has the greatest mass? The answer may affect our understanding of the nature of matter and the evolution of the universe.
The vehicle for tackling this question is the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), the largest and most sensitive scintillation detector yet. Built by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the observatory started taking data yesterday.
Neutrinos are the most abundant matter particles in the universe, but they are fiendishly difficult to observe. They have no electric charge and most pass right through the atoms of ordinary matter. Very rarely, a neutrino collides with the nuclei of an atom. If this occurs in certain liquids the interaction produces telltale flashes of light. As they travel through space, neutrinos change, or oscillate, between three types or “flavors”: electron, muon, and tau. Each flavor is a quantum mechanical mix of three mass states—m1, m2, and m3. It’s known that m2 is slightly heavier than m1. But it is not known if m3 is heavier than m2—what’s called the normal ordering—or lighter than m1, the inverted ordering. Significantly, the relative mass of m3 subtly affects how the neutrino’s oscillation rate varies with their energy.
That’s where JUNO comes in. At the observatory’s heart is a 35.4-meter-diameter acrylic sphere located in a cavern 700 meters under a small mountain in China’s southern Guangdong Province. The sphere is now filled with 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator—an organic solution that fluoresces, or scintillates, when a neutrino slams into nuclei in its atoms. Some 43,000 photomultiplier tubes arrayed around the sphere will detect those faint flashes of light. Eight reactors at two nuclear power plants 53 kilometers away provide streams of antineutrinos, which as the antimatter counterparts of neutrinos, can help determine key parameters of oscillation. JUNO’s observations will show whether the energy spectrum matches that expected for normal or inverted ordering, a difference so minute that researchers will need to accumulate 100,000 events to achieve statistical significance, something expected to take about six years.
In addition to reactor antineutrinos, JUNO will detect solar neutrinos for hints of the processes at the center of the Sun, supernovae neutrinos from across the universe, and geoneutrinos generated by the decay of radioactive elements in Earth’s crust that might shed light on geophysical processes.
More than 700 researchers from 74 institutions across 17 countries and regions are participating in the JUNO collaboration. The Chinese Academy of Sciences put up $300 million to build JUNO. The Guangdong local government provided $60 million for civil construction works. International collaborators contributed about $30 million in in-kind support for the detector.
“The worldwide liquid scintillator community has pushed the technology to its ultimate frontier, opening the path towards the ambitious physics goals of the experiment,” physicist Gioacchino Ranucci, JUNO’s deputy spokesman, said in a statement released by the Chinese Academy of Science. |
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| Aging heat |
| Heatwaves aren’t just dangerous while they’re happening: According to a new study, they speed up our bodies’ biological clocks, much like smoking and drinking do. “The fact that heatwaves age us is surprising,” one environmental health scientist noted. |
| Nature Climate Change Paper | Read more at Nature |
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| These electronics definitely aren’t waterproof |
| Researchers have developed 3D printed electronics that dissolve in water in a matter of hours—a feature, not a bug, as they could make e-waste recycling more efficient as well as aid in rapid prototyping. “Here you design something, print within 30 minutes and then you have a circuit—and if it’s not working, you dissolve it into the water for new things,” one expert pointed out. |
| ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Paper | Read more at New Scientist |
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| A big thumbs up |
| Primates with longer thumbs tend to have bigger brains—predominately because of an increase in the size of the neocortex, the seat of planning. “The fact that it isn’t one of the other very important parts of the brain associated with motor control [such as the cerebellum] was really surprising,” said one expert. |
| Communications Biology Paper | Read more at The Guardian |
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I couldn’t sit and be victimized anymore. I’m running because I’m standing up to this administration. I’m standing up for science.
—Megan O’Rourke |
| ScienceInsider | 16 August 2025 | Dan Charles |
| O’Rourke, an ecologist, is hoping to unseat her local congressman, Republican Thomas Kean Jr.—who is in his second term representing New Jersey’s 7th congressional district—this November. |
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