| 15 April 2026 |
| Today’s What We’re Enjoying features a review of the recently concluded season of Paradise by Science Managing News Editor John Travis. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including efforts to understand fog and how researchers spot invisible birds. |
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| Neuroscience | Science Signaling |
| A sweet path to memory loss |
| Diabetes is often thought of as a disease of the body, given its effects on the kidneys, eyes, and heart. But it also affects the brain: Patients with type 2 diabetes are nearly three times as likely to develop cognitive impairment, and up to one in five patients over 60 develops dementia. Despite this, the cellular mechanisms linking high blood sugar to cognitive decline have been difficult to isolate.
A new study in Science Signaling combines patient data with mouse experiments to map a pathway connecting elevated glucose to the death of memory-forming neurons. In a cohort of more than 2000 older adults with type 2 diabetes followed for nearly 5 years, higher levels of lactate, a byproduct of how the body processes glucose, were associated with an increased risk of mild cognitive impairment.
To probe causality, the researchers turned to mice, focusing on neurons from the hippocampus, a region central to learning and memory. Under high glucose conditions, these neurons overstabilized a protein called Creb3, which, in turn, ramped up production of an enzyme that generates lactate. The excess piled up, overwhelming the cell’s energy systems and disrupting mitochondria, eventually triggering neuronal death. These changes were then reflected in behavior; in tests like the Morris water maze, which measures spatial learning and memory, diabetic mice performed worse than controls.
Interrupting this pathway with a specially designed peptide reversed the damage. In diabetic mice, the treatment lowered lactate levels, protected hippocampal neurons, and improved performance on memory tests. Because the peptide can cross the blood-brain barrier, it points to a potential strategy for slowing or preventing diabetes-related cognitive decline.
Although human studies are still needed, the findings suggest that what starts as a subtle metabolic buildup may eventually take a toll on the brain—but could potentially be treatable. |
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| Meteorology | News from Science |
| Demistifying fog |
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| Fog delivers water critical for California’s vineyards. But researchers don’t know whether climate change will deplete it. JAK WONDERLY |
| On the U.S. West Coast, people have a love-hate relationship with fog. When summer temperatures climb, fog provides free air conditioning and a welcome spritz. But it also casts a moody pall over cities and roads, leading to nicknames like “May Grey” and “June Gloom.”
For such a common form of weather, it’s perhaps shocking that scientists don’t know what makes some years foggier than others, what pollutants fog carries, or if fog harbors life. And they also don’t know how it might change in a warming world.
For decades, “People would say, well, you know, why does it matter? It’s just a small strip of the world where fog is important,” ecosystem scientist Kathleen Weathers, who dubs herself the “senior stateswoman of fog,” told ScienceAdviser. But fog occurs along the hot western coasts of nations including Peru, South Africa, and Namibia, and is of growing interest for drinking water in Chile’s parched Atacama desert.
Now, the Heising-Simons Foundation has listened, granting $3.65 million to a project studying coastal fog in California. For the first time, researchers will use models and fog collectors from San Diego to Mendocino to systematically measure coastal fog’s chemistry, ecological role, and response to warming. Sunshine-loving Californians won’t be the only benefactors; fog is crucial to the agriculture-heavy Central Valley, which produces more than half of the United States’ lettuce and wine grapes and a quarter of its strawberries.
“People are sort of captivated by the fog, and there’s not a lot of information out there on it,” project co-lead Peter Weiss-Penzias told ScienceAdviser. “I feel extremely fortunate to be able to do this work and to do it at a level that it deserves.” |
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| Ornithology | News from Science |
| Shining a light on birds that fly by night |
| Every fall, hundreds of thousands of birds soar through the skies above New Jersey’s Cape May peninsula on the way to their wintering grounds. The vast majority migrate at night; while some make their presence known with hoots, trills, and other calls, many fly in silence. Now, scientists have found a way to spot these nighttime travelers with thermal imaging devices, which detect the infrared radiation emitted by objects and animals. The technique, described in this month’s issue of Ornithology, quite literally shines a light on birds that would otherwise be invisible.
“There’s a lot of hand-eye coordination involved ,” study co-author Guatum Apte explained. A first observer scans the night sky with a thermal imaging monocular, identifying the heat signature of a bird, and briefly illuminating it with a flashlight. A second observer snaps a photo with a digital camera. Over three autumns, the researchers documented thousands of nocturnally migrating birds, including some surprises. The eastern kingbird, for example, is thought to mainly travel during the day, but the team regularly witnessed members of the species migrating at night. The team also photographed several common backyard birds that are generally considered to be sedentary, year-round residents.
Photographing night-flying birds certainly isn’t for the faint of heart, as it often involves waking up many hours before sunrise and staying out long after sunset. But it’s all worth it to catch a glimpse of a previously invisible bird in flight, said study co-author Cameron Rutt. “It just feels like a magic trick. You’re standing out there in complete darkness, and then voila.” |
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| Danaher combines AI-driven discovery with a proven strategic framework to expand what’s possible for the future of healthcare. |
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| Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were considered renegades; their out-of-the-box thinking helped steer the field away from scientific racism. Their stories are among the many tales of orthodoxy-challenging scientists, artists, and writers journalist Maria Popova recounts in Traversal. “A review can barely scratch the surface of Traversal, but one recurring theme is the social ostracism that radical thinkers must expect to encounter, especially if they are female or from a minority,” writes reviewer Philip Ball. “Ultimately, Traversal develops a picture of what it takes to change the way we think: scientifically, artistically, socially, and politically.” |
| Read the full review |
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| A university professor worries that conflicts with the U.S. government will lead to a loss of funding. Luckily, a billionaire who has made his fortune launching satellites wants to live forever and agrees to bankroll the professor’s work. No, this isn’t the latest New York Times exclusive—it’s the plot of Spare Parts, a new play by David Glass. “The play’s plot provides a scaffold on which to hang much bigger questions about identity and autonomy and about who should pay for scientific research and who gets to own it,” writes reviewer (and Science Editor-in-Chief) Holden Thorp. “Glass has succeeded at writing a play that is both funny and fast-paced while providing biting social commentary.” |
| Read the full review |
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| Several of us on the Science news team love the Hulu series Paradise, and last month’s epic episode brought a shocking, largely satisfying, and science-filled conclusion to the show’s second season (The show is best enjoyed spoiler free so you may want to stop here if you haven’t watched any of it or are behind). I’ve compared Paradise to Lost, another hit show, as both combine quality acting, crazy twists, survivalist themes and tinges of science fiction (Paradise earns a bonus for cool remakes of 80s rock pop hits). The show’s first apocalyptic season explored topics like supervolcanoes, megatsunamis, nuclear winter, EMPs, and more; the second season expanded the show’s world view to a greater cast of characters and a central scientific mystery: Who, or what, was the often-referenced Alex? Lo and behold, Alex turned out to be an AI-controlled quantum computer—named for its creator’s wife. Alex somehow seems able to predict the future—and perhaps change the disastrous past. Or that is what Paradise hints might happen in its third and reportedly final season. Somehow, I’ve avoided giving away the huge twist at the end of the show’s very first episode so I highly recommend you watch that—and I bet you will be hooked too. |
| —John Travis, Managing News Editor, Science |
| Read the New Yorker review |
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| Be sure to check out all the reviews in our Books et al. section. |
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| Increasingly PrEPped |
| The U.S. Department of State and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria jointly announced their plan to scale up the use of the Gilead Sciences drug lenacapavir. The prevention strategy known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) aims to reach 50% more people at risk of becoming infected with HIV, and expand the number of countries eligible to receive the drug. “Back in November 2024, we thought two million was a good starting point number, but the experience we’ve had so far suggests that actually, if we really want to make the most of this, we have to go bigger, and we have to go bigger faster,” Global Fund Executive Director Peter Sands said. |
| Read more at ScienceInsider |
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| Not fool’s gold |
| Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, European traders often claimed that the gold they received in trade from West Africa was intentionally diluted with other materials. But artifacts recently recovered from a wrecked pirate ship indicate otherwise. Tests revealed purities consistent with the ore mined from the region—suggesting tales of swindling are nothing but “nonsense,” as one expert put it. |
| Heritage Sicence Paper | Read more at The New York Times |
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| Tweak, test, repeat |
| Bisphenol A—or BPA for short—is widely used to strengthen plastics and resins. But the chemical can leach from the materials, and in animals, it mimics the hormone estrogen. For decades, scientists have sought alternatives. Now, by playing to their different strengths, a multidisciplinary team has narrowed a pool of 170 options to three potential replacements. “We could do things together that we couldn’t do alone, and we could do it more efficiently because the findings from one part of the team informed the decision-making of other parts of the team,” one of the researchers noted. |
| Nature Sustainability Paper | Read more at Chemistry World |
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| 2599 |
| The record-setting number of students receiving U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships this year |
| The 2026 cohort is 42% larger than last year’s unusually small class of just 1500 fellows. “My take is that the STEM community’s activism around last year’s cuts appears to have had significant positive impacts on this year’s class,” said one former fellowship program officer. |
| ScienceInsider |
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