Tag: ScienceAdviser (AAAS)

During a heart attack, the heart stops getting enough blood. That naturally strains the organ, which causes the body to release a hormone called ANP that reduces heart stress. But since the body only produces a small quantity of ANP, a team of researchers set out to bolster the body’s ANP production, reducing the harmful tissue scarring that occurs in the window after a heart attack.

Researchers turned to a kind of genetic material called self-amplifying RNA (saRNA). The benefits of saRNA were twofold: It contained the genetic instructions to produce ANP, and the instructions for the RNA to copy itself, meaning the shot dose could be small but the effects could persist. When delivered via an injection to the skeletal muscles of mice and pigs, the saRNA boosted ANP levels and reduced heart inflammation for 4 weeks.

Previous research on bolstering heart-healing hormones required chest-opening surgery, so a simple shot is a giant step toward eventual human trials. “We’re trying to give patients a treatment that works with the body rather than against it,” said author Ke Huang in a statement. “If we can ease that early stress and support repair, we may be able to change the trajectory of recovery for patients.”

Usually, when such distantly related species have highly similar proteins, it’s assumed that they’re homologous: that the protein evolved long, long ago, in the common ancestor of all the species that possess versions of it. Certainly, that’s true of the bradykinins that help vertebrates heal wounds, so researchers long believed the bradykininlike peptides in wasp venoms and frog secretions were simply their versions of an ancient protein. But when researchers dug into the genomics of their toxins, they discovered that peptides extraordinarily similar to bradykinin arose over and over again in both groups. “ They are evolutionary doppelgängers—molecules that look the same but evolved independently,” explained lead author Sam Robininson in a statement. “The findings overturn decades of assumptions about the origins of these peptides.”

In fact, “bradykinin evolved independently at least four times in wasps and ants—and probably even more times in frogs,” Robinson wrote for The Conversation . As he explained, having one doppelgänger could be a fluke—but having several is a pattern. “Convergent evolution demonstrates that life is not a random, unpredictable muddle of improbable outcomes but is in fact progressing in an ordered, constrained, predictable, perhaps even inevitable, way,” he said. And this idea could be applied to other fields, such as predicting herbicide resistance in weeds or drug resistance in pathogens.

In a study published in Science, researchers analyzed whole-genome sequences from 418 koalas across 27 populations to examine how that bottleneck shaped the species’ genetics. Their analyses showed that effective population size in Victorian koalas fell by more than 90% before expanding rapidly in the following decades.

To see how the crash affected genetic diversity, the team grouped variants across the genome by how common they were—rare, low-frequency, or widespread—and compared their distribution among populations. Rare variants, which are most likely to disappear when populations shrink, appeared at higher frequencies in populations that had expanded.

Computer simulations suggested that as populations grew, the animals were able to rebuild variation even when overall diversity remained low. “Recombination reshuffles the genetic variation,” study co-author and biologist Collin Ahrens told Scientific American. “That’s really important and something that’s been really difficult to measure.”

The results suggest that population rebounds themselves may help restore evolutionary resilience, an effect that could be replicated in other endangered populations.

“I share your passion for science,” Matthew Anderson, Trump’s choice to be deputy NASA administrator, told Senator Andy Kim (D–NJ) after Kim sought his commitment to protect research aboard the International Space Station and across the agency. “And we also share the same county [in New Jersey] where I graduated from high school,” added Anderson, a retired Air Force colonel and decorated pilot.

“You’re trying to butter me up, I get it,” Kim responded.

“Is it working?” Anderson asked. “If you follow it up with a commitment to continue investing in science,” Kim replied, “then yes, it’s working.”

Senator Gary Peters (D–MI) had less luck in extracting a promise from Arvind Raman, Trump’s choice to lead the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to reverse NIST’s decision last summer to freeze funding for its Manufacturing Extension Program (MEP) that helps small and midsized companies commercialize new technologies.

“Will you commit to spending the $175 million that Congress appropriated for MEP [last month in a final spending bill for FY2026],” Peters asked. “I will follow the law,” replied Raman, dean of engineering at Purdue University, choosing his words carefully because of the administration’s long opposition to the program.

“Appropriations are the law of the land … you don’t get to second-guess them,” Peters shot back. “I want to hear the words.”

“Yes, I will follow the law,” Raman repeated.

With contributions from Hannah Richter and Ana Georgescu

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To make the find, scientists placed seven of the birds in a soft cradle. Then they used an ophthalmoscope (the same kind you’d see in a doctor’s office) to shine a light into the their eyes. The toupee of “love feathers” compromised the males’ binocular vision—especially their ability to look above them— by an average of 41% more than that of their female counterparts . For us, it would be a bit like sitting in the front row of a theater and trying to look up while wearing a baseball cap.

When the birds molt in September and October, their vision improves due to shedding of the cranial ornaments. In addition to being the first known case of sex-based vision difference in birds, the team says, the find represents the first known case of a bird’s visual field changing as the year progresses.

Bats live in dense groups, making it easier for viruses to pass from one animal to the other; they could become a permanent new reservoir for H5N1 more easily than other mammalian species. And because some of Peru’s vampire bats dine on livestock, they could form a bridge that carries the virus from marine to terrestrial mammals, the researchers say.

But, as scary as H5N1-infected vampire bats may sound, influenza scientists aren’t alarmed just yet, because the virus did not spread between bats, a prerequisite for them becoming a viral reservoir. “Anytime we find H5N1 in a different species, or a different route of infection, that increases the [pandemic] risk. But in itself, this is not something that we should get too worried about,” explained flu virologist Richard Webby. Still, “It’s a very cool paper,” Webby said.

This iconic feline trait gave Ricardo Cortez, a bionic engineer at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, the idea for a robotic sensing system that—like a cat’s whiskers—detects and identifies nearby objects by colliding with them. He drew inspiration from his own cat, who served as the “first participant” for a study describing the work, published last month in the journal Processes.

Cortez and his students began the project by collecting test subjects’ whiskers and examining them under a microscope. This task required some patience, Cortez notes, since cats only shed their whiskers every few months, usually losing only one or two at a time. The analysis revealed that a whisker’s inner and outer sections are composed of slightly different materials, influencing the way it reacts when it hits something. To replicate this, the team gave their artificial whiskers a core of soft silicon and an exterior of semi-flexible 3D printing resin. This latter material, Cortez says, is similar to the stiff keratin that composes real cat whiskers.

To figure out how these phony whiskers should move, the team also collected extensive video footage of cats as the animals reacted to audio recordings of mewling kittens, devoured wet food, sniffed catnip, and interacted with a variety of toys and other objects. And while real cat whiskers are connected to multiple sensitive nerve endings that pick up on every slight movement and vibration when the whisker collides with an object, the robotic system relies on a software algorithm known as an extended state observer (ESO) to estimate the size of the disturbance.

ScienceAdviser sat down with Cortez to learn more about the project. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It seems like this project involved a lot of playing with cats. What was that like?
There were several challenges. First, we needed to restrict the number of people that were present during the experiment. We also needed to eliminate any odor or sign of other cats. But once we had video footage of all the cats, we could use image processing to determine the range of motion of their whiskers. We found that whiskers are capable of two types of motion, translational and rotational, so we created a robotic system actuated with motors that can do both.

Cat whiskers themselves don’t have any nerve endings. They’re just made of keratin, like hair. But there are nerve endings in the cat’s skin that detect when the whiskers move. We tried to emulate this with a tool called an extended state observer or ESO, which was developed by researchers in the field of automatic control to estimate and counteract disturbances on control strategies.

How does an ESO work?
In every robotic system, you have the input, the output, and all the external disturbances that affect the behavior of the system. If the artificial whisker moves but doesn’t make contact with anything, then the disturbance affecting its motor is very small. But when the whisker collides with an object, that perturbation changes, and you can capture information about it with the ESO. A rigid material, like metal or wood, creates vibrations that perturb the motor in a different way than a soft material—like foam, rubber, or sponge—does.

So what does this robot look like in action?
The robotic system has a routine: Move forward, rotate whiskers, and return. This process takes around five to ten seconds, and then we obtain the data, estimate the perturbation, and analyze the frequency of the vibrations. Once we get that, we use a machine-learning model to differentiate between hard and soft materials. In this paper, our algorithm accurately classified about 70% of samples.

What could this type of robotic system be used for?
It could be useful in cases where visibility is very low and a traditional camera just doesn’t work. You could use an expensive infrared camera or an ultrasonic sensor to get a 360-degree view of a room, but that still wouldn’t tell you the characteristics of objects in that room. Our robot, by contrast, could determine what material an object is made of without taking a physical sample, which can be invasive or destructive.

What’s next for this line of research?
This current system is a prototype that could be improved. As you can see, it only has two whiskers, while cats have many, many whiskers. I’m already excited to continue this work, because the first thing we need to improve is the sample size. That means more cats, and more time with the cats.

With contributions from David Grimm and Martin Enserink

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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