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“mRNA could be the key to a universal cancer vaccine.”

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Accessed on 13 May 2026, 1443 UTC.

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13 May 2026

Today’s Protostar is Elias Sayour, a pediatric oncologist whose work on “universal” mRNA cancer vaccines made him a finalist for the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including polymers designed for reuse and recycling and dinosaurs that dug with weird-looking arms.

polymer Chemistry | Science

A new step toward recyclable plastic

Scientists are constantly coming up with creative strategies for dealing with plastic pollution. To break down polystyrene, one of the world’s most stubborn plastic polymers, one team even turned to cockroaches. Other researchers are looking to create synthetic versions of natural polymers, with many efforts focused on mimicking biodegradable polyesters known as polyhydroxyalkanoates. Such materials, however, have proven difficult to recycle and expensive to manufacture at large scales.

Now, scientists may have found a way to address these problems. One of the main problems with synthetic polyhydroxyalkanoates, the team notes in a new paper, is that the chains that make up the polymers tend to degrade during chemical recycling processes, breaking down into random fragments rather than reusable building blocks.

Using a compound called isobutyric acid, which can be derived from organic material, researchers developed a new type of building block that resists this degradation. By tinkering with the material’s structure and properties, the team was able to transform their new polymer into strong fibers, powerful adhesives, and flexible plastics that can be easily heated and reshaped.

Read the paper

Paleontology | Proceedings of the ROyal Society B

My, what strange arms you have! All the better to dig with…

artist's reconstruction of Manipulonyx, an alvarezsaurid theropod

Alvarezsaurid theropods like this Manipulonyx may have used their teeny arms to dig deep. TotalDino via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY

Folks love to make fun of Tyrannosaurus rex for having wimpy little arms, but the lizard king’s forelimbs weren’t nearly as bizarre as those belonging to the alvarezsauroids. These tiny theropod dinosaurs had stupendously stubby arms, which ended in one large, clawed finger and two much smaller digits. Some scientists have long suspected that alvarezsauroids used their oddly shaped forelimbs to dig into ant and termite mounds, but other research suggests that the dinosaurs pilfered eggs instead.

Now, a new study may have revived this debate. Researchers used digital models of bones from two alvarezsauroid species to assess the range of motion in the dinosaurs’ shoulder and elbow joints, demonstrating that digging behaviors would indeed have been feasible for them. The team also found some similarities between the forelimb muscles of alvarezsauroid dinosaurs and those of modern mammals known to specialize in digging, such as anteaters and moles.

These results, the study authors explained, support the idea that alvarezsauroids fed on ants and termites: “Despite their short length, the powerful forelimb could have been used to break into above-ground substrates like dead logs.” T. rex’s puny arms, by contrast, may have just been an evolutionary tradeoff for its enormous head.

Read the paper

Neuroscience | PNAS

Your brain on anesthesia

If you’ve undergone major surgery, chances are you’ve had anesthesia. It’s great for eliminating the perception of pain—but with brain activity significantly suppressed, you don’t experience the benefits of sleep, either. Scientists wanted to better understand what the anesthetized brain is actually doing—and whether it more closely mimics sleeping or a coma.

Researchers recorded whole-head electroencephalograms (EEGs) for 28 patients under anesthesia, 14 patients who were resting but awake, 20 patients in REM sleep, and 40 comatose patients. They found that, at different frequencies, the brain waves of anesthetized patients shared properties of both sleep and comas. Brains in REM sleep, in particular, overlapped heavily with those under anesthesia. But there were brain waves unique to anesthesia, too, leading the authors to conclude it is indeed its own state of neural activity.

The team hopes their findings can be used to improve the experience of anesthesia for patients. Tuning anesthesia to “resemble sleep-like activity patterns rather than coma-like states may help mitigate postoperative complications and minimize cognitive side effects,” they explain.

Read the paper

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Mapping the forces shaping global food systems

A new AI-enabled research approach is mapping the people, institutions, and incentives driving change across global food systems—offering insight into how sustainable transitions take hold.

“Fiber optic cables can eavesdrop on nearby conversations.”

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Accessed on 11 May 2026, 1553 UTC.

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11 May 2026

Today’s SciencePrudence discusses the newest ruling against the Trump administration’s steep grant cuts. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including locustlike microbots and a chat with the new head of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Earth Science | News from Science

Earthquake-sensing fiber cables can also pick up speech

Fiber optic cables used to detect earthquakes may also be able to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. Researchers reported last week at the European Geosciences Union meeting that distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) can accurately capture the faint vibrations of human speech.

DAS works by firing laser pulses down a fiber cable and measuring tiny changes in any light that reflects back. Geophysicists increasingly use the technique to study earthquakes, volcanoes, traffic, and even pedestrian footfalls, taking advantage of both dedicated research cables and unused “dark fiber” already buried beneath cities and oceans. But in field tests, researchers found that exposed, coiled cables could also pick up nearby speech from several meters away. Feeding the signals into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, produced readable real-time transcripts.

“Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves,” said geophysicist Jack Lee Smith. “This could be a privacy concern.”

The effect was limited: buried cables and straight fiber lines recorded speech poorly. Still, researchers say the findings highlight unexpected privacy risks as DAS use expands.

Read the full story

Robotics | Science Advances

Algae-based microbots swarm like locusts in response to light

Exposure to blue light makes these microscopic robots cluster together, allowing researchers to coax them into different patterns, while red light makes them disperse. de la Asunción-Nadal et al./Science Advances (2026)

Scientists frequently use biology as inspiration for robots, resulting in devices that swim like zebrafish, fly like birds, and grow like vines . Some teams have gone beyond mere inspiration, creating “biohybrid” robots that directly combine living tissue with artificial materials. One contraption combines rat muscle tissue with steel, while another integrates fungal cells with electronics.

Now, the authors of a new study have harnessed the properties of green algae to create microscopic robotic swarms that change their shape and size in response to light. Exposure to blue light causes these biohybrid microbots to swarm and cluster together, while red light triggers dispersal. Using custom laser-cut masks, the researchers coaxed the swarms into simple shapes like squares, circles, and stars—or more complex patterns, like logos and maps of different world regions. By manipulating light exposure and switching between masks, scientists also made the swarms rapidly split, merge, and fluidly switch from one shape to another. “ The reversible nature of the generated swarms and their remarkable versatility and reconfigurability hold considerable promise for a myriad of possible microrobotic applications,” the team explained.

In one set of experiments, the researchers integrated their approach with artificial intelligence to target wound healing, creating tailored dressings of algae-based biohybrid bots that can function as smart bandages and deliver drugs directly to infected tissue.

Read the paper

Politics | News from Science

Computer scientist to lead storied DOE lab through ‘exciting and threatening’ AI revolution

Often, the director of a Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory is chosen to guide the lab through a particular project or transition. That would appear to be the case with Katherine Yelick, a computer scientist, who on 1 July will take over as director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the lab announced last week.

Yelick’s appointment is a departure for the DOE national labs, which trace their origins to the Manhattan Project. Historically, most directors of the 17 labs have been physicists or chemists. But Yelick takes the reins at Berkeley Lab as DOE launches the Genesis Mission, President Donald Trump’s initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to double the productivity of federally funded science.

With nearly 4000 employees and an annual budget of $1.4 billion, Berkeley Lab claims 17 Nobel Prize winners. Yelick, currently the vice provost for research at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, knows the place inside and out. UC runs Berkeley Lab for DOE as a contractor, and from 2010 to 2019, Yelick served as the lab’s associate director for computing sciences. She will succeed Michael Witherell, a particle physicist who is retiring after 10 years as director.

Yelick spoke with Science about the lab’s future, the intricacies of melding its broad research portfolio with Genesis, and scientists’ apprehensions about AI.

Read the interview

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Mapping the forces shaping global food systems

A new AI-enabled research approach is mapping the people, institutions, and incentives driving change across global food systems—offering insight into how sustainable transitions take hold.

Read more at ScienceInsider

When the going gets tough, the tough double their genome

Many branches of the tree of life have undergone partial or whole genome duplications —massive changes that have the potential to throw a wrench in reproduction. Yet these “hopeful monsters” may have gotten flowering plants through multiple catastrophic events, including the mass extinction that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs. “We see clusterings of whole genome duplications in time,” explained one researcher on a recent study, “and every time it corresponds with a described, important geological event, whether it’s a global cooling period, whether it’s a global warming period, or whether there’s an extinction event.”

Cell Paper | Read more at Live Science

A wing and a scare

Dinosaurs had wings before they could fly. To test what they might have used these ‘protowings’ for, researchers built a robotic turkey-sized dinosaur with detachable wings, and then tested how well this “Robopteryx” scared grasshoppers out of hiding when it had or lacked such plumage. The wings were much more effective. “What this shows, rather elegantly and persuasively, is that it’s possible” proto-wings aided in flushing out prey, said one paleontologist.

Scientific Reports Paper | Read more at Science News

You don’t all have to be troublemakers, but there have got to be some … who are way out of the box who are shifting where the center of the conversation is.
—Timothy Snyder, University of Toronto

EDITORIAL | 7 May 2026 | H. Holden Thorp

Snyder, professor and author of best-seller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, spoke with Science’s editor-in-chief about how his lessons apply to the scientific community.

Last but not least

I can only imagine how exciting it must be to find a trove of fossils—especially ones as beautiful as these.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Eric Hand, Phie Jacobs, Adrian Cho

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May 11, 2026

ScienceAdviser (AAAS).

“Hacking the shape of deltas, Finding a lost city, and New stellar objects from old data.”

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.

Accessed on 05 May 2026, 1625 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).

5 May 2026

Today’s Exemplar from Science Senior Editor Angela Hessler looks at the elegant math of river deltas. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how scientists found a lost city and are spotting new stellar objects from old data.

Bioengineering | Science Advances

Cell-based bots on cancer’s TRAIL

Microrobots are a promising avenue for delivering medicines in the body. But when it comes to fighting cancer, there’s a big problem: The bots typically can’t distinguish between cancerous and noncancerous cells. A similarly tiny workhorse does a better job: our body’s own cells.

Researchers aimed to design a therapeutic that merged the drug delivery abilities of microrobots with the biological hunting abilities of natural cells. They genetically engineered living human embryonic kidney cells to express a special molecule called tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand, or TRAIL. When TRAIL binds to so-called “death receptors” in cancer cells, it sparks a series of signals that cause the cell to undergo programmed death. Healthy cells, which have comparatively lower levels of death receptors, get left unharmed.

The researchers then outfitted the TRAIL-modified cells with tiny magnetic beads that enabled the team to magnetically navigate the cells to their targets. Across all kinds of cancer cells the team tested, including colon, brain, kidney, and ovarian cancer cells, the cell-based bot significantly harmed cancerous cells while leaving normal cells alive.

The authors envision the cell-based robot approach working for diseases beyond cancer. “Because of its versatility, the platform can be adapted to a wide range of biomedical applications while maintaining a high degree of specificity and targeting,” they explained.

Read the paper

Archaeology | News from Science

Has the lost Maya city of Sac Balam been found?

Archaeologists discovered a 16-meter-long stone wall, which matches the described dimensions of Sac Balam’s communal buildings. Yuko Shiratori

After Spanish conquistadors repeatedly sacked the Maya capital Lakam Tun throughout the 16th century, its residents decided the jungle would be a safer refuge. They formed a new city in the thickly wooded environs of what is today Chiapas, Mexico. They called their new city Sac Balam, meaning “white jaguar.”

In 1695, the Spanish conquered this, too, and forcibly relocated its people a few decades later. While descriptions of the city can be found in historical documents, its location—along with archaeologists’ ability to understand life in a stronghold of Maya resistance that endured for over a century—has been lost.

In 2023, researchers visited a site called Sol y Paraíso and found many small mounds that could have been the remains of houses, ceramics that fit the style made by the Maya during the late precolonial and early colonial period, and two natural springs, which matched Spanish descriptions of the area around the town.

Could this have been Sac Balam? New evidence presented last week at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in San Francisco bolsters the case. Archaeologist Yuko Shiratori revealed that she and her team had found ceramic fragments as well as a monkey figurine that most likely date to the same period as Sac Balam . Crucially, she also found an imposing stone wall, 16 meters long and 1 meter high, that matches Spanish accounts of the size of Sac Balam’s three communal buildings. “I wasn’t sure [the site was Sac Balam] until I found that wall,” she said.

More evidence will be needed to fully convince the archaeological community, but those who attended Shiratori’s talk say it’s a good start. She and colleagues will be heading back to Sol y Paraíso this summer to dig for more clues.

Read the full story

Astronomy | Science

A sharper eye on the sky thanks to AI

Astronomers are always designing new instruments, aiming to see fainter objects and farther into space. But even the most powerful telescopes run into the problem of noise. Background light pollution, instrumental effects, and random photon fluctuations can all blur or bury the faintest objects in an image. The standard workaround is to stack multiple exposures of the same patch of sky, which helps to average out some of that noise. While the technique works, it also requires dramatically longer observation times.

In a new paper published in Science, researchers describe a machine learning method that learns to recognize and remove noise by looking across many exposures at once . The approach, called ASTERIS, takes advantage of the fact that real astronomical signals stay consistent from one exposure to the next, while noise varies. By combining spatial information within each image with temporal information across exposures, the system can tease apart the two. It is trained in a self-supervised way, meaning it does not rely on ideal “clean” reference images, but instead learns directly from the data itself, focusing on the faintest, noisiest regions.

ASTERIS is “unlocking faint sources in terabytes of existing data without additional telescope time,” said co-author Zheng Cai in an interview with Sky & Telescope. When applied to data from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Subaru Telescope, the method pushed detection limits more than one magnitude deeper, allowing astronomers to reliably identify objects about 2.5 times fainter than before. In one test, the algorithm uncovered roughly three times as many candidate galaxies at extreme distances compared with conventional methods.

For astronomers trying to map the early universe, that extra depth could translate into a clearer picture of how the first galaxies formed and evolved.

Read the paper

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Exemplar

Here in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, the delta demonstrates the magnificent braiding that flows from elegant math. Lower Cook Inlet, Kachemak Bay, Alaska. Mandy Lindeberg/Alaska ShoreZone Program/NOAA/NMFS/AKFSC | CC BY

Hacking the shape of deltas

Angela Hessler, Senior Editor, Science

Dong, TY et al. Apparent Hack’s law in river deltas. Science 392, 493–498 (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.ady6805

Your local river is built by math. This is hard to see if you are standing on its bank, but looking at the river on a map, or from a satellite image, you can see how it is part of a network of branches that come together to form ever longer and wider channels. Those branches look like a tangle of tree roots, but as builders of river drainages, they conform to a simple rule: Hack’s law.

Hack’s law is named after observations by U.S. Geological Survey researcher John T. Hack in 1957. He noticed that a number of river branches, or tributaries, in the eastern United States could be described by

L = 1.4 A^0.6

which is a short way of saying that the longest length (L) tributary is scaled to its drainage area (A). The equation was applied to rivers in other places, and it kept working, aside from the exponent being sometimes a little below or above 0.6, depending on whether drainage growth was more side-to-side or elongated. Being able to describe complex river networks in this simple way made it much easier to estimate things like seasonal flux, landscape change, and flood risk.

The study by Tian Dong and colleagues flips this idea around. If an equation can describe the tributary branches at a river’s head, shouldn’t one also describe the distributary branches at its mouth? The patterns look very similar after all. This is not a new question. But answers for deltas have been elusive, probably because of one key difference between the head of a river and its mouth: topographic relief. Very low relief across deltas makes it hard to see and measure the channels themselves, not to mention that many of these channels are submerged. Early work has therefore focused on smaller-scale deltas and laboratory or numerical simulations.

The researchers were able to take a global approach by applying graph theory to satellite-imaged channel patterns across 30 river deltas. They systematically tagged “nodes” where channels split and “edges” at channel boundaries, which allowed the authors to extract measurements for length and area across nearly 6000 points. Plotted together, their data form a trend defined by this equation:

L = 1.43 A^0.60

which, nearly 70 years later, looks a lot like Hack’s law!

What is surprising is that the constant (1.4) and exponent (0.6) are so similar, despite tributaries and distributaries being built by fundamentally different systems. Tributary systems are convergent, where flow comes together and accelerates; distributary systems are divergent, where flow splits and decelerates. Specifically, the A for distributary systems is related to area of nourishment (deposition), not drainage and erosion.

Like Hack’s law for rivers, the equation for deltas changes slightly when the data are broken into certain subsets, an indication that local processes can help control the shape of a delta’s nourishment areas. Overall, as for rivers, the equations presented in this paper provide a framework for understanding how deltas organize over time to build and change their landscapes.

For me, this study was a reminder there are still fundamental discoveries to be made in areas we’ve long studied, where time and early tests and certain tools can come together to launch an old idea in new directions.

Read the paper

Et Cetera

NIH whistleblower gets job back

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated an outspoken scientist put on leave last November. Jenna Norton, a grant program officer, was lead organizer of the Bethesda Declaration, an open letter signed by hundreds of NIH staffers last June that protested cuts to diversity-related grants and other changes under the Trump administration. Norton, who later filed a whistleblower complaint, was notified by email on Friday that she should return to work on Monday.

ScienceAdviser (AAAS)

“Mitochondria: The mother of organelles and Black Hole singularities.”

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Accessed on 29 April 2026, 1640 UTC.

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29 April 2026

Today’s Future News examines the origins of organelles. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including a possible solution to the vexing physics problem of black hole singularities.

Animals | Physical Review Fluids

Dolphin dash

computer illustration of dolphin and eddies

Visualization of the vortices created by a swimming dolphin. Yutaro Motoori

More than a few children have abruptly decided they’d like to be dolphin riders when they grow up. The job might be harder than it sounds—dolphins can swim at speeds of more than 25 miles per hour! Now, scientists have determined just what makes these ocean favorites such speedy swimmers.

When dolphins swim, they flap their tails up and down, which pushes water backward. That jostled water contains dozens of eddies of different sizes. To see if this turbulent water propels dolphins forward, researchers ran numerical simulations of the fluid dynamics on a supercomputer to see how the water swirls under different flapping conditions. They found that the dolphin’s tail produces a few large vortices that boost it along. The rest of the eddies are byproducts of the larger swirls and don’t help the creatures zip by. “We find that our results are unchanged across a wide range of swimming speeds ,” said lead author Yutaro Motoori in a statement.

In the future, the team hopes their findings could be applied to engineering, where researchers are always trying to make faster and more energy-efficient swimming robots.

Read the paper

Physics | News from Science

Hawking’s signature prediction may smooth the jagged hearts of black holes

It’s a longstanding pain point for physicists: Their theory of gravity—general relativity—predicts that a black hole must contain a singularity, a point where space and time are infinitely warped and the laws of physics break down. Many researchers hope that a theory combining gravity and quantum mechanics, if it can ever be discovered, will remove the thorn. However, a pinch of quantum mechanics, in the form of an effect called Hawking radiation, may do the trick instead , two theorists predict independently in a pair of recent papers.

Quantum uncertainty implies that empty space roils with pairs of particles flitting in and out of existence. In 1974, Stephen Hawking realized that if a pair of such “virtual” particles were to straddle a black hole’s event horizon—within which not even light can escape—one particle could be ripped from the vacuum and fall in while the other shoots into space, creating Hawking radiation.

Hawking radiation could destabilize an electrically charged black hole, argue theorists Francesco Di Filippo and Samuel Gralla, independently. A charged black hole would have two event horizons nested like Russian dolls. The outer horizon is the familiar point of no return. The inner horizon is weirder, marking where gravity becomes repulsive.

Hawking radiation would make the outer horizon inch inward. Bizarrely, inside the black hole, Hawking radiation has negative energy, which would accumulate on the inner horizon and make it balloon outward. Eventually, the inner and outer horizons would coincide, effectively canceling each other and disappearing before a singularity forms. Notably, Di Filippo and Gralla say the argument could apply to real, spinning black holes, which also have two event horizons.

Read the full story

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Smells complicated

Two studies suggest olfactory receptors in mice are far more organized than previously thought. “For 30 years, we’ve taught students that the mouse olfactory epithelium is divided into a handful of broad zones, within which receptor choice is essentially random,” explained a psychologist and experimental neuroscientist. “This … overturns one of the foundational textbook models of olfactory organization.”

Cell Papers 1 and 2 | Read more at Nature

[David Morens] is a bit of a scatterbrained intellectual (I say that fondly) who was devoted to NIH and its mission and to science but a bit clueless about email protocol and such.
—Former NIH employee

ScienceInsider | 28 April 2026 | Jon Cohen

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official David Morens was indicted for allegedly concealing related federal records. The U.S. Department of Justice claims he was part of “a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in connection with COVID-19 research grants.” Morens, 78, faces major prison time if convicted—5 years for a charge of conspiracy; 20 years each for multiple counts of destroying, altering, or falsifying records in a federal investigation; and another 3 years each for several counts of records concealment, removal, or mutilation.

Last but not least

As cool as it is that an electric current can tell you if coffee is too strong, I can tell you that without even touching it: Coffee is gross, and therefore, always too strong.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Hannah Richter and Adrian Cho

Do you have a burning science question you can’t seem to find a good answer for? Submit it to Ask Science! Selected questions will receive responses from Science editors right here in ScienceAdviser.

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April 29, 2026

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“How an HIV/AIDS tragedy spurred human evolution.”

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28 April 2026

Today’s Visualized watches a robot untie itself. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how HIV drove human evolution in a little over a decade.

Atmospheric Science | Science

The stratosphere is filled with particles so small even scientists overlooked them

NASA’s WB-57 high-altitude research aircraft flies over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge during a 2023 SABRE mission to study particles in the stratosphere. NASA

Some of the particles with the biggest impact on stratospheric chemistry are so small they have remained mostly invisible to scientists—until now. New research in Science suggests the lower stratosphere contains tons more ultrafine aerosol particles than previously thought; they are carried upward by rising air currents and atmospheric mixing from the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Despite their tiny size, the specks add up to large amounts of surface area where atmospheric reactions can occur, some of which can break down ozone and scatter sunlight.

To study these hard-to-detect particles, researchers used instruments aboard NASA’s WB-57 high-altitude research aircraft during the Stratospheric Aerosol Processes, Budget, and Radiative Effects (SABRE) mission in 2023, and measured aerosols up to 19 kilometers above Earth. Particles smaller than 150 nanometers across made up most of the total aerosol surface area, accounting for as much as 90% of the surface area in some regions.

These sub-150-nanometer particles also acted like sponges for condensable vapors: Gases that might otherwise form new aerosols or bulk up larger ones instead stuck to the tiny particles. As they aged, the specks collided, clumped together, and gradually grew larger and fewer.

“Understanding these small particles is critical for predicting how the stratosphere would respond to any sort of perturbation, whether natural, like a volcano, or human-caused,” said lead author Ming Lyu in a statement. The overlooked particles could also complicate one proposed geoengineering strategy that aims to cool the planet by injecting aerosol precursors into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, as the added material may stick to them first.

Read the paper

Genetics | News from Science

How an HIV/AIDS tragedy spurred human evolution

Before the arrival of powerful anti-HIV drugs, AIDS took such a heavy toll in one region of South Africa that it left a mark on the human genome. In just over a decade, the virus drove changes to the frequency of immune-system genes, a new study shows. As access to antiretroviral drugs increased two decades ago, those evolutionary forces eased, and the genetic changes slowed.

The researchers, who reported their findings yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, assessed genetic changes in the population of KwaZulu-Natal, the hardest hit province in South Africa—a country that today is home to 20% of the estimated 40.8 million people in the world living with HIV. The study relied on stored blood samples collected between 1998 and 2025 from nearly 1600 mothers in the province, with and without HIV infections, and more than 400 of their babies.

The study focused on variations in human leucocyte antigen (HLA) genes that control a key immune response that clears infected cells. One group of these HLA genes hampered this clearance (“susceptible”) and the other (“protective”) bolstered it. Prior to anti-HIV drugs becoming widely available, the frequency of the susceptible genes decreased and the protective ones went up—a reflection of the huge impact the virus had on mortality in the region.

Other studies have shown how infectious diseases, including malaria and tuberculosis, have altered the human genome. But those changes took thousands of years. “That’s what is quite exciting about this is: You can see how rapidly evolution actually can occur,” said immunologist Philip Goulder, who led the study.

Read the full story

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ScienceAdviser (AAAS)

“A sweet path to memory loss” and “Demystifying fog.”

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 15 April 2026, 1416 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).

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.

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.

Read the paper

Meteorology | News from Science

Demistifying fog

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.”

Read the full story

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.”

Read the full story

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What we’re Enjoying

Traversal

Maria Popova

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

Spare Parts

David Glass

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

Paradise

Hulu

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

Be sure to check out all the reviews in our Books et al. section.

Et Cetera

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

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

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

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

Last but not least

I haven’t played Pokémon Pokopia yet, but I am a huge fan of the biology and ecology in the franchise.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Ana Georgescu, Hannah Richter, and Phie Jacobs

Do you have a burning science question you can’t seem to find a good answer for? Submit it to Ask Science! Selected questions will receive responses from Science editors right here in ScienceAdviser.

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April 15, 2026

ScienceAdviser (AAAS)

“The mind’s eye sees, thanks to deja view and AI is obsessed with protein.”

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 13 April 2026, 1420 UTC.

Content and Source: “ScienceAdviser (AAAS).”

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).

13 April 2026

In today’s Visualized, Science Photography Managing Editor Emily Petersen showcases a photo that truly caught her eye. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including new insights into how the mind’s eye sees and the risk of moving wildlife around the world.

Artificial Intelligence | Science

Even AI is obsessed with protein

Over billions of years, proteins—the drivers of nearly every biological process—have evolved into an uncountable number of shapes and roles throughout the biosphere. Speeding up that evolution to mere years has been a focus for biomedical engineers, who seek to design better therapeutics and new materials on human timescales. And artificial intelligence might shrink the process even further, to days.

In a review, researchers looked at the growing field of protein engineering . There are two main branches, they say: one where a known, existing protein gets tweaked, and one where pure biophysical modeling is used. AI could be especially useful to both routes, thanks to its ability to wade through the mind-bending number of possible amino acid sequences to predict and find proteins far faster than humans can. One small protein with 100 amino acids has a number of possible sequences that’s more than one thousand time larger than the number of atoms in the universe!

Though AI is promising, the authors cautioned, “Even the most sophisticated machine learning models described, trained on large corpuses of data, are not so accurate that we can simply take a single output and be done.” In other words, even encouraging sequences may turn out to be duds, since only laboratory testing can confirm if they are stable, foldable, and functional.

Read the review

Disease Ecology | Science

Trading with our lives

snakes, pangolins, and other animals in cages

Selling live animals, even legally, is a risky business. Dan Bennett Via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY

HIV. SARS. Ebola. There is a litany of viruses that humans have contracted from wildlife. It seems obvious to say, then, that increased contact with animals increases the odds of a pathogen jumping into people. Now, thanks to 40 years’ worth of data on the international wildlife trade, a team of researchers has quantified that risk on the global scale, and their findings are sobering.

Out of 2079 traded mammal species, 41% share at least one pathogen with humans , while only 6.4% of nontraded species do. And the longer a species has been traded and shipped, the more likely it is to carry pathogens that can infect us. “On average, a wild mammal species shares one additional pathogen with humans for every 10 years it is present in the global wildlife trade,” the team wrote. Furthermore, those that are sold alive are more likely to share pathogens with us. “It is important to understand that the probability of being infected by playing a piano with ivory keys or wearing fur is almost nonexistent,” explained the study’s lead author, Jérôme Gilpert, in a statement. “The problem lies at the beginning of the chain: Someone had to hunt the animal, skin it, transport it.”

The data suggest it’s not just about stopping illegal trade—while illegally traded species were more likely to host a potential human pathogen, numerous viruses with pandemic potential reside inside legally marketed species. “Cross-species pathogen transmission is an inherent consequence of diverse uses of wildlife by humans,” the team wrote, adding that the findings “underscore the need to strengthen biosurveillance and integrate zoonotic risk considerations into wildlife trade regulations to help prevent future pandemics.”

Read the paper

Neuroscience | Science

The mind’s eye sees, thanks to déjà view

Trying to remember an object we’ve previously been shown can feel like running through a mental archive, searching for the right memory to piece an image back together and “see” it again. A new study published in Science suggests that this feeling might reflect a real neurological process, as the brain reactivates the same neural areas during recall that were used to see that image in the first place.

To measure this, researchers recorded the activity of over 700 neurons in the visual temporal cortex (VTC), a region involved in recognizing complex features and categorizing images, across 16 patients with previously implanted electrodes for epilepsy monitoring. The team tracked how individual brain cells responded as participants viewed a series of images of plants, animals, objects, and faces, and then later reconstructed them from memory.

Many of the same neurons were activated in both cases, with recall engaging 40% of the same visually responsive neurons active when an object was initially perceived. Based on this preserved structure, researchers were able to reconstruct which images patients were recalling from patterns of neural activity. In some cases, the reconstruction captured enough detail to distinguish general categories, like animals or faces. Still, the two processes were not identical, with recall producing less precise representations.

Exactly how these signals are generated and coordinated is still unclear, with authors noting that although the same regions of the brain are involved in both perception and recall, it’s not yet clear how the brain reactivates these patterns; current methods cannot fully distinguish which neurons are involved in each process.

Read the paper

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Visualized

a clump of tumor cells in a microfluidic device

Successful metastases are rarely lone voyagers. Martin Oeggerli, supported by School of Life Sciences FHNW

Zooming in on cancer

Emily Petersen, Photography Managing Editor, Science

As a photo editor, it’s rare to come across an exact storytelling moment in one image, especially when it’s about work that has already been documented, and even more so when it’s on a subject that is generally too small to see. So, it was a genuine surprise when the lead researcher said he had the exact work already commissioned by a renowned photographer who specializes in cell microscopy.

To illustrate this week’s news feature, I worked with photographer and artist Martin Oeggerli . He collaborates with Nicola Aceto of ETH Zurich, who uses microfluidic devices to study how circulating tumor cell (CTC) clusters clump together and interact. Aceto was familiar with Oeggerli’s work and commissioned him to create images of his cell cancer research. Oeggerli uses a scanning electron microscope (SEM) like a camera. He hunts for the right group of cells and frames his shot with purpose. Then he spends hours intricately coloring the fine detail of the cell surfaces to create a stunning scene of the microscopic world.

“The coolest thing about being a scientist is that you are at the forefront of new discoveries. However, they are often invisibly small,” Oeggerli explained to me for ScienceAdviser. “Luckily, we found a way to look inside a microfluidic device that allows Nicola and his team to identify CTC clusters—and to share pictures from exactly where it happens in this very important area of research.”

After loading the microfluidic device with a blood sample from a breast cancer patient, they cracked it open and prepared it for the SEM. The triangular structure of the device traps the cells, and the smooth surfaces allow for them to be closely identified and examined. In a cancer patient, once metastasis has started, the number of circulating tumor cells continues to increase. As many as a billion cells may be shed by a tumor each day.

The ability to examine these rogue cell clusters up close is providing new insights into how metastases successfully create tumors away from the primary cancer—and hopefully, will lead to better ways to prevent them from doing so. It’s a beautiful example of what happens when artists and scientists work together: their visual presence expands.

Read the feature

Et Cetera

Anglerfishes’ alluring feature

Anglerfishes are so named for the wriggly lures on the ends of stalks that sit atop their heads. In the deep sea, females’ lures light up—but a study suggests this glow isn’t simply better bait. Instead, the light may act as a beacon for their miniscule mates. “The evolution of this group may be driven because of the sexual attraction of the lures,” explained one of the researchers behind the work. “That’s the fun, weird part about all this.”

Ichthyology & Herpetology Paper | Read more at News from Science

On a supermassive collision course

A distant galaxy seems to be firing off two beams of radiation from its center at different angles—a sign that a pair of supermassive black holes lurks at its heart. In as little as 100 years, the black holes should collide, shaking spacetime itself in a titanic burst of gravitational waves. That final burst “would be a really fantastic gravitational wave signal,” said one astronomer.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Paper | Read more at News from Science

Variance in manufacturing

Ribosomes construct proteins, and until recently, it was thought that they were all basically the same in individuals of a single species. But data from UK Biobank suggest that small differences between these molecular factories influence traits like height and weight—and could play underappreciated roles in health and disease. “It’s really exciting to think about this variation in the human population,” one expert said.

Cell Genomics Paper | Read more at News from Science

Passing along employees who have committed misconduct to other institutions, in silence, violates accountability and does nothing to solve the problem.

EDITORIAL | 9 April 2026 | Michael Lauer and Mark Barnes

Last but not least

Welcome back, crew of Artemis II! So glad you landed safely.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Hannah Richter and Ana Georgescu

Do you have a burning science question you can’t seem to find a good answer for? Submit it to Ask Science! Selected questions will receive responses from Science editors right here in ScienceAdviser.

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April 13, 2026

ScienceAdviser (AAAS)

“Seeing a tsunami from the sky and when bugs were big.”

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.

Accessed on 01 April 2026, 1600 UTC.

Content and Source: “ScienceAdviser (AAAS).”

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).

1 April 2026

In today’s Visualized, the world’s most dangerous birds get their glow on. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including doubts about the supposed connection between oxygen and giant insects, and how satellite data revealed hidden details of a tsunami.

Paleobiology | News from Science

When bugs were big

Back 300 million years ago, some bugs would have swatted you rather than the other way around. Gargantuan insects roamed and flew through primal swamps and forests, including the biggest insect ever documented: Meganeuropsis permiana, a dragonflylike critter with a 60-centimeter wingspan.

How did these ancient insects grow so big? The textbook answer is that they took advantage of abundant available oxygen—about 30% of Earth’s atmospheric air, compared with 21% today. By developing more respiratory tubes, called tracheoles, to deliver that gas to their muscles, they just grew and grew. To get bigger insects, the idea goes, you need more oxygen in the air and more tracheoles to effectively get it to the muscles.

But a study out last week in Nature undercuts that popular hypothesis. Researchers analyzed the respiratory anatomy of 44 species of modern flying insects of various sizes, scanning and plotting the relationship between body size and the number of oxygen-carrying tracheoles. They found that regardless of size, tracheoles made up less than 1% of the insects’ muscle volume.

Then, they looked at that same relationship in fossils from the colossal M. permiana and found that, just as in modern insects, its tracheoles would have constituted less than 1% of its muscles. That suggests that relative to their size, these ancient behemoths didn’t incorporate much more oxygen into their muscles than their more diminutive, modern relatives.

“This study places what may be the final nail in the coffin for the prevailing view that more oxygen made ancient insects bigger,” says paleontologist Caleb Gordon, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Read the full story

seismology | Science

Seeing a tsunami from the sky

Using observations from the SWOT satellite, scientists were able to reconstruct a tsunami triggered by the 2025 Kamchatka earthquake. The path of the satellite is indicated by two parallel lines. bjarke nilsson

When a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in July 2025, it generated a Pacific-spanning tsunami tracked by coastal gauges and deep-ocean sensors. But about 70 minutes after the quake began, a satellite passing roughly 600 kilometers from the epicenter captured something other instruments could not. In a study published in Science, researchers reconstructed a full, two-dimensional snapshot of the wave as it moved across the open ocean.

Although tsunamis are often associated with towering waves crashing onto shore, they pass almost unnoticed in the deep ocean; as slow-moving undulations they can span hundreds of kilometers but rise only timidly above the surrounding water. In this case, the tsunami measured only 20 to 50 centimeters in height. The data, collected by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, showed that the leading wave was followed by a series of shorter, trailing waves, with tens of kilometers in wavelength and slower speeds, lagging behind the main front and forming a dispersive wave train. This phenomenon has long been predicted but rarely observed. After filtering out longer background ocean waves, SWOT resolved this structure down to a few centimeters, revealing fine-scale patterns that conventional sensors either miss or capture only along a single line.

Short-wavelength waves are generated when an earthquake rupture reaches very shallow depths near the seafloor trench. By capturing this trailing signal across the entire wavefield, the satellite data pinpointed the tsunami’s origin within roughly 10 kilometers of the trench, reaching a level of precision not possible with land-based seismic data or sparse deep-water sensors.

Read the Paper

physics | Science

A supercool discovery

Most liquids behave similarly when cooled, becoming denser, harder to compress, and easier to heat up. Water, however, does the complete opposite.

When water is cooled below freezing to a “supercooled” state, there must be a “hidden reorganization of water molecules,” to account for this strange behavior, physical chemist Francesco Paesani wrote in a recent Science Perspective. This rearrangement should occur at a critical point, where one phase of water transitions to another.

To search for this elusive phase transition, scientists typically study temperatures between −42°C and −172°C, the “no man’s land” zone where water has a tendency to crystallize to ice within microseconds and evade observational techniques. Instead, the authors of a new study chose to begin with two phases of amorphous ice, one high-density and one low-density, that mirrored the liquid states they were trying to catch. They quickly heated the ice using nanosecond pulses of infrared light. When it melted to a liquid state for just a nanosecond, they probed its structure using an x-ray laser.

The team repeated the process at conditions below, near, and above the predicted critical point. Around −63°C and 1000 times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, they found success: a quick change in water’s density that indicated it was switching between high-density and low-density liquid states.

“For 20 years or more, many people were waiting to see direct evidence” of this elusive critical point, physicist Nicolas Giovambattista, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Science News. “It’s amazing that it finally came.”

Read the Science Paper

Read the Perspective

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Visualized

This cassowary would be right at home at a rave. Todd l. green

Often labeled “the world’s most dangerous birds,” cassowaries just got even more intriguing. These aggressive flightless birds have structures on top of their heads called casques, the purpose of which has long confused scientists. To the human eye, casques look fairly plain; new research published last month in Scientific Reports finds that this headgear fluoresces under ultraviolet light, possibly aiding the birds’ visual displays.

When researchers examined casques under UV light, they discovered that the structures’ outermost sheath of keratin—the same protein that makes our fingernails and hair—glowed, with different species of cassowaries each giving off a distinct pattern. Some fluoresced towards the front of their casques, some towards the back, and others throughout the entire structure. No matter the species, the glow theoretically fell in the range of wavelengths of light that cassowaries can see.

There’s more to this bird than meets the eye. Todd l. green

Researchers note that biofluorescence like this typically requires specific lighting conditions—such as sunlight filtered through dense forest canopies—to be visible, meaning the effect may be most relevant in the cassowaries’ rainforest habitat.

Still, study co-author Todd Green says it’s not yet clear whether the birds can actually perceive differences in the patterns, and further behavioral studies are needed to determine whether cassowaries use the glowing casques to communicate.

Most dangerous, or most iconic? todd l. green

While the casques’ exact function remains uncertain, Green says the height they add might help birds intimidate any intruders on their territories. He adds that this work may apply to all animals with mysterious head ornaments, not just cassowaries. “If we can come to understand what modern animals are using this strange headgear for,” he says, “we can take it back into the fossil record to better understand extinct dinosaurs.”

Green also hopes that this discovery will serve as a sort of fingerprinting of individual wild cassowaries for researchers. “With the biofluorescence alone, we may be able to have better contrasted patterns which we can use to identify individuals within a species at a field site,” he says.

Read the Paper

Et Cetera

Turtle tracking

Earlier this month, scientists deployed the first satellite tag on an endangered leatherback sea turtle in Ecuador. The team hopes to discover where these endangered animals are most vulnerable to threats from fishing activity.

Read more at ScienceInsider

Our assumption that information is likely wrong, until we see reasonable evidence otherwise, is part of what makes us successful as scientists. Now, we just need to apply it to citations as well.

EXPERIMENTAL ERROR | 30 March 2026 | adam ruben

When artificial intelligence hallucinates convincing—and totally bogus—citations, a healthy dose of skepticism may be a researcher’s most powerful tool.

Last but not least

Since its inception in 2003, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has prevented transmission of HIV to 5.5 million babies and saved an estimated 25 million lives. I find it infuriating that, under the Trump administration, this celebrated global health effort may be slowly dying.

Phie Jacobs, General Assignment Reporter, Science

With contributions from Michael Price, Ana Georgescu, Hannah Richter, and Perri Thaler

Do you have a burning science question you can’t seem to find a good answer for? Submit it to Ask Science! Selected questions will receive responses from Science editors right here in ScienceAdviser.

Have feedback on this newsletter? Let us know what you think using this form or drop us a note at ScienceAdviser@aaas.org.

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April 1, 2026

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“Why hot water freezes faster that cold water” and “How long have dogs been our best friends?”

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Accessed on 26 March 2026, 1621 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).

26 March 2026

Today’s Visualized peers at a drone’s uniquely batty navigation system. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including why hot water freezes faster than cold water and just how long dogs have been our best friends.

Biology | News from Science

Polar algae get by with a little help from… giant viruses?!

Some forms of the single-cell, green algae called Chlamydomonas do just fine in polar waters despite the fierce cold, harsh UV radiation, and other extremes. Their success may stem in part from genes given them by so-called giant viruses.

Uncommonly large and complex, and often sporting unusual tendrils, giant viruses were first discovered in 2003. They most often infect algae or amoebae, but can invade more complex multicellular organisms, and are found throughout the world, including in marine, aquatic, and terrestrial habitats.

In Current Biology yesterday, a team reported that polar algae have hundreds of genes given to them by these viruses—roughly 5% of their genome. Further studies showed these genes, remnants of past infection, were active and made proteins that could help the algae—some of the genes encode ice-binding proteins, which help keep the algae from freezing in waters that can dip as low as –2°C. “ The amount of virus-derived DNA described here is remarkable ,” said virologist Jônatas Santos Abrahão, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The study really adds to the view that giant viruses can leave a deep and lasting imprint.”

Read the full story

Physics | News from Science

Unified theory explains paradox of freezing water

Throwing hot water into cold air to instantly create snow is a manifestation of the Mpemba effect. TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGEs

Here’s an oddity of nature: Hot water seems to freeze faster than cold water. But it turns out that the phenomenon, called the Mpemba effect after a Tanzanian teenager who first noticed it in the 1960s, occurs in a variety of materials, from crystallizing polymers to magnets. More recently, the effects have turned up in the quantum realm, such as single ions suspended with lasers.

Now, a new theoretical framework, published yesterday in Physics Review X, stitches the assorted Mpemba effects together. It explains how, in each case, a system that’s pushed farther from equilibrium can find a quicker path back to a steady state. “ All these effects you might think of as completely different are actually sort of the same thing,” said physicist John Bechhoefer.

The shortcuts to equilibrium are not just curios of nature; if scientists can identify the initial conditions that give rise to Mpemba effects, they could optimize all kinds of processes. That could lead to more efficient cooling and heating schemes, and in the quantum realm, could help speed up quantum computers and the preparation of quantum states.

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Ancient DNA | News from Science

World’s oldest dog identified at ancient hunter-gatherer site

Despite decades of study, dogs remain one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology. Scientists know that they descend from gray wolves, but exactly when this happened—and whether it happened more than once —has been unclear. Archaeologists have unearthed suspected dogs—animals whose shorter and wider skulls, for example, are a hallmark of changes that took place as wolves became domesticated—that are much older than the reigning 11,000-year-old genetically confirmed record. But they did not have the detailed genetic information needed to close the case—until now.

Ancient DNA analyses of suspected dogs revealed that the animals were indeed dogs and that our canine pals were widespread across Europe by 14,000 years ago. The oldest dog in the samples dates to about 15,800 years ago, making it the oldest genetically confirmed dog to date and pushing back the definitive origins of dogs nearly 5000 years.

The genomes of the animals are strikingly similar to one another, despite the vast geographical distances separating the sites—from the UK to Switzerland to Italy. As such, they may represent Europe’s ur-dogs, an ancient lineage that had yet to become specialized , said Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist and co-author on both studies. Whereas later dogs were bred to perform a wide variety of tasks, these early dogs were more of a “Swiss Army knife,” explained Larson. “It’s almost as if this is a new, super-cool thing that everyone wants.”

Neither study answers the age-old question of exactly where and when dogs arose. More digging should help clarify that story, said Natalie Munro, an archaezoologist who was not involved with either study. “There’s a chance they will find more dogs,” she told ScienceAdviser. “And that’s super exciting.”

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Visualized

Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh, BATDRONE! Manoj Velmurugan

Bats can detect objects just a few millimeters across, track moving prey midair, and navigate at speed in total darkness, all using sound. Despite echolocation’s appeal to robotics, replicating that process has been a difficult engineering problem. A new study in Science Robotics reports a palm-sized drone that can fly through complex environments using ultrasound alone, matching the performance of camera- and lidar-based systems in conditions where optical sensing fails.

Inspired by the bumblebee bat, researchers built a wee drone, PeARBat160, that navigates using ultrasound. Instead of relying on single echoes, the system analyzes streams of returning signals over time using a neural network called Saranga (named for a mythological bow said to pierce any target), extracting structures in the environment from noisy data.

The system’s performance relies on two components. On the hardware side, a physical barrier reduces interference from the drone’s propellers, which can otherwise overwhelm faint echoes. On the software side, Saranga processes echo sequences over time, improving detection of small or low-reflectivity objects such as thin wires and transparent membranes.

In tests, PeARBat160 navigated cluttered indoor and outdoor environments using only onboard sensing, maintaining performance in fog, snow, and low light where optical systems typically fail. It also operated at milliwatt-scale power with no external infrastructure, making it viable for smoke-filled buildings, disaster zones, or underground tunnels.

In a related Focus, roboticists Xin Zhou and Fei Gao note that ultrasound has long been dismissed as too noisy and limited for real autonomy. They suggest that by choosing sensors based on which physical signals remain reliable in a given environment, modern computation could revive older sensing approaches.

REad the Science Robotics paper

Read the Focus

Et Cetera

PCASTing a narrow net

Donald Trump’s new President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is heavily skewed toward artificial intelligence and quantum computing—topics his administration has emphasized. But unlike previous iterations, this council features some of the world’s wealthiest people and several of Trump’s biggest political supporters from high-tech industry—and only one academic scientist. “The unfortunate part of these choices is that it leaves out the ‘S’ in ‘S&T’ [science and technology],” said one higher ed lobbyist.

Read more at ScienceInsider

Falcon and Eagle take flight

NASA is moving ahead with its next generation of flagship Earth-observing satellites, which aim to study clouds and map the planet’s surface in hundreds of color bands, despite White House efforts to kill them last year in its proposed budget. Though, the missions have been given new names: Falcon (Fleet for the Atmosphere Linking Commercial Observations with NASA) and Eagle (Explorer for Artemis Geology Lunar and Earth).

Read more at ScienceInsider

Egypt’s not-so-wicked stepmother

Queen Hatshepsut, a rare female pharaoh who ruled over ancient Egypt for nearly 20 years, has always been depicted as an evil stepmother whose stepson, Thutmose III, hated so much that he ordered the vicious destruction of her statues. But a new analysis suggests much of the damage came later, and that the queen’s statuary was treated no differently than that of other pharaohs after their deaths. The work “clearly demonstrates that individual statues were broken with different processes and therefore different intentions,” said one expert. “There is no one-size-fits-all explanation for this destruction, and personal animosity is the least likely explanation.”

Antiquity Paper | Read more at The New York Times

If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).

EXPERT VOICES | 19 March 2026 | James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Last but not least

According to Albert Einstein, wisdom “is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” I can’t help but wonder whether the researchers that study wisdom will prove him wrong on its teachability.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from John Travis, Zack Savitsky, David Grimm, and Ana Georgescu

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March 26, 2026

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Today’s top science story: “Turning astrocytes against Alzheimer’s…”

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Accessed on 09 March 2026, 1524 UTC.

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).

9 March 2026

Today’s What We’re Enjoying features a review from Science Careers Global Marketing Manager Allison Prichard. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how scientists could beef up the brain’s trash collection and why cockroaches could be our allies in protecting the environment.

Materials Science | Science Advances

Quantum fakeout

Quantum materials are keen targets for transmitting energy, storing information, and sensing subtle changes in systems. But while scientists are always on the lookout for more, some materials can be deceptive.

Researchers had been excited about a material called cerium magnesium hexaaluminate (CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉), which seemed to exhibit quantum properties in its liquid form. Many magnetic materials tend to exist in one of two states: ferromagnetic, where the magnetic moment, a quantum property of atoms, is aligned parallel and the substance is strongly magnetized, or antiferromagnetic, where the atoms are aligned oppositely and the substance is not magnetized. Scientists can determine which state a material exhibits when they bring it to near-absolute zero temperatures.

When researchers first looked at the elusive liquid CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉, it displayed a continuum of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic behavior: a sign the material exhibited both states in a way only quantum mechanics could describe. But additional tests showed scientists that they had been fooled.

Bombarding CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉ with neutrons revealed that the material didn’t exhibit a true continuum, but was “choosing” between different magnetic states. The team thinks the material’s boundary between its ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic states is weaker than in other traditional materials, giving it a near-quantum look. “This is a new state of matter that, to our knowledge, we are the first to describe ,” said author Pengcheng Dai in a statement.

Read the paper

Biodegradation | ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND ECOTECHNOLOGY

A creepy-crawly solution to plastic waste

Roaches like this little guy could be allies in the war against plastic pollution. Sebastián Gómez Barboza Silveira via iNaturalist | CC0

Cockroaches are traditionally viewed as disgusting pests—a reputation they frequently deserve, as infestations can pose serious health risks by spreading disease and triggering allergic reactions. According to new research, however, these undesirable insects could help solve a different kind of hazard: plastic pollution.

Polystyrene, one of the most widely used plastic polymers, is also one of the hardest to break down. Some insect species, such as mealworms, can digest small amounts of this material, but they aren’t particularly efficient. In a new study, scientists wanted to find out if the cockroach Blaptica dubia could do better. In controlled feeding experiments, each cockroach consumed an average of six milligrams of polystyrene per day. Over 42 days, the critters managed to degrade nearly 55% of the plastic they had ingested —far higher than rates reported for other plastic-munching insects. The key to the cockroach’s success, researchers reported, is its remarkably cooperative relationship with the microbes living in its gut. These microbes break the polymer down into smaller, more manageable pieces, which the cockroach’s own enzymes can then convert to energy.

“Plastic degradation in insects is not merely a microbial phenomenon, but a fully integrated metabolic collaboration,” study corresponding author Shan-Shan Yang explained in a statement. Setting a bunch of cockroaches loose on the world’s garbage heap is, of course, a terrible idea, but the discovery could help scientists develop other biological strategies for dealing with plastic waste.

Read the paper

Neuroscience | Science

Turning astrocytes against Alzheimer’s

Astrocytes are star-shaped support cells in the brain that help keep neurons functioning properly. They regulate the chemical environment around synapses, supply nutrients, and help remove cellular debris. They can also engulf unwanted material through a process known as phagocytosis. In Alzheimer’s disease, however, one form of debris accumulates faster than the brain can clear it: sticky aggregates of amyloid-β protein that build up into plaques and are thought to contribute to neurodegeneration.

In a study published in Science, researchers explored whether astrocytes could be engineered to remove these plaques more efficiently . Borrowing a strategy from cancer immunotherapy, they equipped astrocytes with chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs—synthetic receptors that allow cells to recognize a specific target. The engineered CAR-astrocytes were designed to bind amyloid-β and trigger engulfment when the protein was detected. In laboratory tests, the modified cells readily internalized amyloid aggregates. The researchers then delivered the CAR constructs into the brains of mice using a viral vector that selectively targets astrocytes.

In a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, the engineered astrocytes accumulated around plaques and increased amyloid clearance. In some animals treated early, a single intervention prevented much of the plaque buildup that typically appears later in life. However, the team didn’t see a lessening of the behavioral symptoms of the disease, which mirrors the inconsistent cognitive benefits seen with anti-amyloid-β antibodies in clinical trials , wrote Jake Boles and David Gate in a related Perspective. Perhaps, they posit, amyloid plaques aren’t the best treatment target.

Still, the work provides a proof of concept that the brain’s support cells can be genetically programmed to remove harmful proteins; it also “helps to establish a foundation for increasingly innovative CAR strategies in [Alzheimer’s],” Boles and Gate added. “Together, these findings position CAR engineering as a scalable and tunable strategy for treating neurodegenerative disease,” the authors concluded.

Read the Science paper

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“mRNA could be the key to a universal cancer vaccine.”

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“Hacking the shape of deltas, Finding a lost city, and New stellar objects from old data.”

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“A sweet path to memory loss” and “Demystifying fog.”

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“The mind’s eye sees, thanks to deja view and AI is obsessed with protein.”

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“Why hot water freezes faster that cold water” and “How long have dogs been our best friends?”

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