| Anthropology | News Feature |
| Three ancient human relatives once shared the same valley. Did they meet—and compete? |
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| Hominins who might have seen each other 2 million years ago (top, left to right: Homo erectus, Australopithecus sediba, and Paranthropus robustus) in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa (mapped). Photos and reconstructions: © 2025 John Gurche; Map: M. Hersher and V. Penney/Science |
| Today, our species, Homo sapiens, is the last hominin standing on this pale blue dot. That singularity can give us a bit of a solipsistic view of our place in the span of human history. But new research is revealing that our distant forebears lived among a motley company of different types of early humans, each occupying a different niche and more than likely overlapping in time and space. Ann Gibbons’s delightful story about a trio of hominins who lived roughly 2 million years ago—an early species of Homo, a species of Paranthropus and a species of Australopithecus sheds light on a crowded landscape in a site known as the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa.
All of these early hominins likely had short, hairy bodies, walked upright, and used stone and bone tools. But they diverged in fascinating ways. P. robustus, as its name suggests, was a short, squat, sturdy sort of fellow. “If you saw Paranthropus walking around, the first thing you’d notice was its enormous freaking jaws and disproportionately huge head,” paleoanthropologist David Strait told Ann. A. africanus, meanwhile, was more chimplike. Both it and Paranthropus climbed trees. Then there was early Homo , with smaller jaws and molars and a flatter midface than its contemporaries, and with body proportions more similar to humans today. Scientists speculate that while each species was adaptable and munched on a variety of different foods, they specialized in certain niches, allowing all three to thrive together in a relatively small area.
Finally, Ann’s story highlights the care, passion and dedication that drives the researchers—some of whom were in the past rivals of a sort—to work together, hunt for, and painstakingly excavate these precious fossils. It’s a story of the best of humanity, then and now.
—Michael Price, Deputy News Editor, News from Science |
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| Health | News Feature |
| Driven by the pain of endometriosis, this scientist is uncovering clues to its causes |
| I knew something about endometriosis, when tissue from the uterine lining grows in the wrong places and can cause pain and infertility. But I had no idea that around 10% of women will suffer from this disorder. This feature by staff writer Meredith Wadman was an eyeopener into how devastating this condition can be, told through a scientist whose personal life (the opening about her childhood is absolutely wrenching) and career have been profoundly shaped by her own experiences with endometriosis.
The story led me easily through some pretty complicated science that is helping shed light on a condition once thought to be driven solely by hormones, but that probably involves the immune system as well. And I learned that despite its prevalence, research on endometriosis is severely underfunded, perhaps because it’s a women’s disease that isn’t fatal. The piece was a perfect swan song for Meredith, an immensely talented science writer and treasured co-worker who retired this year.
—Jocelyn Kaiser, Editor, ScienceInsider |
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| ecology | In dEpth |
| Australia’s unprecedented toxic algal bloom has a surprise culprit |
| Sometimes science unfolds like a mystery novel. That was the case when Erik Stokstad looked into a mysterious toxic algal bloom for a story last month. Along the coast of South Australia, millions of rays, octopuses, and other marine organisms have turned up dead since March. Initially scientists thought the culprit was a common algal species. But after a detailed DNA analysis, reported in a preprint posted on 3 November, the team presented evidence that the lethal bloom was dominated by an obscure species that had only been documented twice previously in other parts of the world. Scientists are racing to understand why it is blooming in Australia now, and what can be done to predict future blooms. “ It makes me wonder where else we’ll start seeing this problem appear,” one researcher told Erik.
—Katie Langin, Associate Editor, News from Science |
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| Condensed Matter Physics | News FEature |
| Strange metals point to a whole new way to understand electricity |
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| Two tiny fingers of a strange metal (at right) are ready for their closeup, in which a beam of neutrons will probe the behavior of the sample’s electrons. DMYTRO INOSOV/DRESDEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY |
| When it comes to covering physics, atom smashers and cosmology tend to get all the love. It’s easy to seduce readers with, say, the discovery of the Higgs boson, the “god particle” that conveys mass, or with probes of dark energy, the mysterious stuff that seems on track to accelerate the stretching of space until the Milky Way is a lonely island, permanently beyond the reach of light from other galaxies. But physics contains a multitude of subfields, and the biggest one of all—condensed matter physics, the study of how interacting atoms and electrons give rise to the properties of liquids and solids—is virtually ignored by science journalists.
This year, Contributing Correspondent Zack Savitsky took readers on a tour of what some researchers say is the hardest problem in condensed matter physics : efforts to understand “strange metals,” materials with an electrical resistivity that climbs higher than ordinary metals when they are warmed from low temperatures. Sounds pretty dull, right? But, as Zack explains, understanding strange metals could be key in the hunt for room temperature superconductors, which would revolutionize global energy technology. New insights could also upend a 75-year-old theory that explains how electricity flows. Physicists typically treat electric current as a noisy agglomeration of quasiparticles—the collective scattering of electrons off atoms or other electrons as they bounce through the atomic lattice. Superconductors, in which electrons pair up and skate through the lattice frictionlessly, require a separate theory. But in strange metals, the electrons suddenly get quiet, and cease to be the primary carriers of charge: Current seems to flow as some sort of bloblike quantum liquid. One scientist says charge might even be carried by what he calls an “unparticle”—a hypothetical particle with a variable mass.
It’s all heady, complicated stuff—yet Zack carries readers along with his deft and patient explanations. The vivid characters also help: a terminally ill physicist who threw his own memorial party in part to stoke interest in solving strange metals; a physicist who moonlights as a classically trained opera singer. The piece shows how even the most difficult kinds of physics can be swallowed if you give readers a spoonful of sugar.
—Eric Hand, Deputy News Editor, News from Science |
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| Research Ethics | In Depth |
| Blood taken from Danish babies ended up in huge genetic study—without consent |
| This past summer, 140,000 people in Denmark received a message asking whether they wanted to keep participating in a research project led by scientists at the country’s Aarhus University. The iPsych study, the messages said, had sequenced their DNA from blood samples taken at birth. And for years, researchers had used those data to help investigate the genetic and environmental causes of mental illnesses—sparking criticism from both Danish media outlets and many of the people who found out their data had been used.
This story is a fascinating, knotty examination of informed consent’s importance in large-scale scientific studies. After all, when the project began in 2012, an ethics committee deemed iPsych exempt from obtaining informed consent, and the project’s leaders say it has anonymized and protected all sensitive information in accordance with privacy laws. The piece also represents just one of the many amazing stories that Science’s talented interns contributed this past year. The story’s writer, Annika Inampudi, reported this story during her time in our Diverse Voices in Science Journalism program.
—Michael Greshko, Associate Editor, News from Science |
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| Genetics | In Depth |
| After bizarre journey, prized history of molecular biology archive finds new home |
| We don’t do many history of science stories, but this remarkable story from Jon Cohen had the added fascination of a con man named Al Seckel who claimed to be a Caltech neuroscientist and deceived prominent researchers into selling him treasured mementos of molecular biology’s early era, including Rosalind Franklin’s famed x-ray image of DNA. Seckel was a well-known expert on and collector of optical illusions and hung out with high rollers like disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, rock stars, and celebrity scientists, including geneticist Francis Crick and physicist Richard Feynman. He helped accumulate a major collection of DNA-related memorabilia, which this year was sold to a science museum in Philadelphia; during mounting legal fights over the collection, Seckel’s false credentials were exposed and he died under mysterious circumstances.
—John Travis, Managing News Editor, News from Science |
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| Ecology | News FEature |
| Farmers are abandoning land worldwide—what should happen to it? |
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| An abandoned house in Kreslyuvtsi, Bulgaria, one of the country’s hundreds of uninhabited “ghost villages” D. Charles/Science |
| Over millennia, humans have converted nearly five billion hectares of land to farming and settlement. And over the past few centuries, there’s been growing global concern about the impact that conversion has had on wildlife and ecosystems. But in January, Contributing Correspondent Dan Charles took readers to the tiny village of Tyurkmen, Bulgaria, to explore a surprising—and in places growing—issue: What should happen after farmers abandon their land? Since 1990, Europe’s farmers have fallowed an estimated 120 million hectares. Globally, the figure since 1950 could be as high as 400 million hectares—half the area of Australia—and is increasing.
The phenomenon, Dan notes in his elegiac and sometimes mournful story, raises thorny questions for ecologists and policymakers. What sort of nature should reclaim this land? Does it add up to environmental restoration or degradation? Should we try to steer the process, or leave it alone? There are few easy answers, Dan found in his visit to Tyurkmen, which has lost 80% of its population. Wildlife is returning, fields are overgrown, but decaying homesteads are also being overrun by invasive species. “It’s quite sad,” conservation biologist Gergana Daskalova, whose family lived in the village for generations, told Dan. “It’s not just birds coming in. It’s little bits of human history disappearing.”
—David Malakoff, International News Editor, News from Science |
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| Neuroscience | News Feature |
| Indian police are trying to ‘read minds’ of suspects, over neuroscientists’ objections |
| Imagine if the police could scan a suspect’s brain to figure out whether they had committed a crime. Depending on your perspective, this kind of mind-reading technology might sound like a revolutionary tool for law enforcement—or like something out of a dystopian sci-fi flick. But a company in India purports to have created such a test, and over the past two decades it has been used in hundreds of police investigations in the country to generate leads, corroborate findings, and screen suspects.
Neuroscientists are highly skeptical of the technology, known as brain electrical oscillation signature profiling (BEOS). And evidence derived from BEOS hasn’t been admissible in Indian courts since 2010. Yet in his investigative feature for Science, Jonathan Moens found that the use of BEOS shows no sign of stopping. Jonathan identified multiple recent rulings where judges considered the results of BEOS tests in bail decisions. He also found that forensic scientists have been promoting the technology abroad, and that some overseas groups have already bought BEOS-related equipment.
Most of the experts Moens talked to consider BEOS a fringe technology. But they also say there is an urgent need for international regulations governing such devices. At some point, a neurotechnology will come along that lives up to the hype—and it’s important we’re ready for it.
—Matthew Warren, European News Editor, News from Science |
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| Anthropology | News FEature |
| Thousands buried in 17th century Italian crypt reveal lives of working poor |
| Here’s a ghoulish treat: Andrew Curry’s story about the lives of ordinary people four centuries ago , written in tens of thousands of partially decayed bodies. We know plenty about the headline characters of European history: the rulers, generals, and churchmen. But stories of the common people who kept the glittering cities functioning—the servants, laborers, and craftspeople—are mostly lost. Now archaeologists have resurrected fascinating details about the urban poor in 17th century Milan thanks to the burial practices at a vast public hospital, the Ospedale Maggiore, funded by the city’s rulers.
The hospital was free to all comers and provided a wide range of treatments, often ineffective. When patients died, as they did by the scores each week, their bodies were dropped into the crypt beneath the facility. They were supposed to decay, but moisture and low oxygen slowed the process, and the ceaseless rain of bodies built up in deep layers, forming a treasure trove for modern forensic archaeologists. By analyzing the remains, researchers have learned that the diet of Milan’s working poor included the potato, recently arrived from the New World; that they eased their suffering with cannabis and coca, another New World import; and that infections including tuberculosis and syphilis were common.
You may start to read the story through morbid fascination, but the details of how these long-forgotten people lived are what will hold you to the end.
—Tim Appenzeller, News Editor, Science |
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| Global Health | News Feature |
| The U.S. reneged on aid commitments. Nepal’s malnourished children are paying the price |
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| Ten-month-old Radha Maurya in Nausahara, Nepal. Radha’s mother died 1 month after giving birth. Radha was diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition earlier this year. Uma Bista |
| As we began to hear about the fallout from cuts to foreign aid by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, my global health–focused colleagues made an ambitious proposal to explore the cost of this withdrawal on children in Lesotho, Eswatini, Guinea, and Nepal, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Catherine Offord’s story on Nepali families threatened by malnutrition and the health system straining to support them is a detailed snapshot of the situation on the ground. Through the stories of families stuffing themselves to avert severe wasting as some support systems for delivering therapeutic food and other resources are dismantled, Catherine helps us understand the complex causes of malnutrition and the fragile aid structure that has helped keep it at bay. The story—and the whole series—made me proud to work on a team that commits to documenting the effect of global policy on the health of the most vulnerable.
—Kelly Servick, Deputy News Editor, News from Science |
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| Public Health | News Feature |
| Vaccine given during pregnancy could protect babies from an invisible killer |
| Talk about persistence. Half a century ago, Carol Baker, then a pediatric resident at Baylor College of Medicine, was roundly dismissed when she argued that a little-known bacterium named group B streptococcus (GBS) was killing newborns. The microbe was not known to be a human pathogen; it caused udder infections in cows. Even crazier, fellow scientists said, was Baker’s idea to give women a vaccine against GBS late in pregnancy to prevent their babies from becoming infected.
But Baker never gave up—and she was vindicated. Today, GBS is known as a leading cause of sepsis and meningitis among newborns, sickening about 400,000 babies a year and killing at least 91,000. It also causes tens of thousands of stillbirths and is implicated in many preterm births. And one candidate vaccine entered a phase 3 trial last August; another is likely to follow soon.
In a feature story published in September, Leslie Roberts chronicled Baker’s long, often frustrating journey. Sexism and her youth played a role in the initial rejection of her ideas—“The microbiologists who knew more said I was mad,” she says—but vaccinating pregnant women was long seen as risky as well. It didn’t help that GBS’s massive toll has long remained mostly invisible, or that sub-Saharan Africa, where there’s little money to be made from vaccines, shoulders the largest burden. With support from the Pulitzer Center, Leslie also traveled to Johannesburg, to talk to another leading GBS researcher, vaccinologist Shabir Madhi, and to mothers of babies infected with GBS.
Global health was plunged into crisis this year, but this was, in the end, an uplifting story about the promise of preventing disease and death—and the role of perseverance in science. As Baker told Leslie: “No one would listen to me. It inspired me.”
—Martin Enserink, Deputy News Editor, News from Science |
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| Botany | News from Science |
| Shocker: This tropical tree thrives after being struck by lightning |
| Every year, I put together a collection of Science’s favorite news stories.” These are typically a mix of my personal favorites and our most-read items. For me, the story that best exemplifies the list this year is Erik Stokstad’s “Shocker: This tropical tree thrives after being struck by lightning .” It’s a really fun news story about the almendro, a tall, tropical tree in Panama that not only survives lightning strikes but seems to thrive on them. The millions of volts that course through this species during a strike electrocute parasitic vines and leap from branches, killing nearby trees that compete with the almendro for sunlight. The story exemplifies the three things Science’s news department does best: find cool, exclusive, and surprising stories. Erik actually appeared twice on our Top 10 list this year, penning another fun story about how early tomato plants may have given rise to potatoes. That article also gave us my favorite headline of the year: “ Thank ketchup for your French fries.”
—David Grimm, Online News Editor, Science |
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