178246576
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Bon appétit, Jedis. Scientists have created the first lasers made entirely from edible materials, which could someday help monitor and track the properties of foods and medications with sensors that can be harmlessly swallowed.
The advance, reported earlier this month in Advanced Optical Materials, shows that tiny droplets of everyday cooking oils can act like echo chambers of light, otherwise known as lasers. By providing the right amount of energy to an atom, the atom’s electrons will excite to a higher energy level and then relax, releasing a photon of light in the process. Trap a cloud of atoms in a house of mirrors and blast them with the right amount of energy, and the light emitted by one excited atom will stimulate one of its neighbors, amplifying the atoms’ collective glow.
Typically, this amplification takes place within decidedly inedible substances. Many red laser pointers, for instance, source their electrons from a combination of aluminum, gallium, and arsenic. To make this process more palatable, scientists in Slovenia and Greece attempted to construct “microlasers” from more than a dozen different types of edible materials. In one experiment, they shot purple light at droplets of olive oil, whose surfaces can keep photons of light bouncing around, trapping them in the process. This reflected light excited the electrons in the oil’s chlorophyll molecules, causing them to emit photons that triggered the glow of other chlorophyll molecules—transforming the droplet into a laser.
The energy of the chlorophyll’s radiation depends on the oil droplets’ size, density, and other properties. The study’s authors suggest this sensitivity can be exploited to track different properties of food or pharmaceutical products. When researchers added oil droplets to foods and then measured changes in the laser light the droplets emitted, they could reliably infer the foods’ sugar concentration, acidity, exposure to high temperatures, and growth of microorganisms. They also used the lasers to encode information, with droplets of different diameters functioning like the lines of a barcode. By mixing in sunflower oil droplets of seven specific sizes—all less than 100 microns wide—the researchers encoded a date directly into peach compote: 26 April, 2017, the first international Stop Food Waste Day.
178243874
submission
sciencehabit writes:
U.S. beekeepers had a disastrous winter. Between June 2024 and January 2025, a full 62% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States died, according to an extensive survey. It was the largest die-off on record, coming on the heels of a 55% die-off the previous winter.
As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration. Now, 6 months later, USDA scientists have finally identified a culprit.
According to a preprint posted to the bioRxiv server this month, nearly all the dead colonies tested positive for bee viruses spread by parasitic mites. Alarmingly, every single one of the mites the researchers screened was resistant to amitraz, the only viable mite-specific pesticide—or miticide—of its kind left in humans’ arsenal.
Tracking the rise of miticide resistance is critical, experts say. Honey bees pollinate more than 90 commercial crops in the United States, generate between $20 billion and $30 billion in agricultural revenue, and play a key role in keeping the U.S. food supply stable.
But it may already be too late to stop it.
178206846
submission
sciencehabit writes:
If you’ve ever gotten burned at the beach or swimming pool, you’re no stranger to the Sun bombarding Earth with ultraviolet rays. But the UV light that keeps beachgoers reaching for the sunblock isn’t even the worst the Sun sends our way. Lucky for us, Earth’s ozone layer blocks the Sun’s shortest wave radiation, called UV-C, which is so damaging to cells in high doses that it’s a go-to sterilizer in hospitals.
UV-C is such a killer, in fact, that scientists have questioned whether life can survive on worlds that lack an ozone layer, such as Mars or distant exoplanets. But research published this month in Astrobiology suggests one hardy lichen, a hybrid organism made of algae and fungi, may have cracked the UV-C code with a built-in sunscreen, despite never experiencing these rays in its long evolutionary history.
When scientists brought a sample of the species, the common desert dweller Clavascidium lacinulatum, back to the lab, graduate student Tejinder Singh put the lichen through the wringer. First, Singh dehydrated the lichen, to make sure it couldn’t grow back in real time and mask any UV damage. Then he placed the lichen a few centimeters under a UV lamp and blasted it with radiation. The lichen seemed just fine.
So Singh purchased the most powerful UV-C lamp he could find online, capable of sending out 20 times more radiation than the amount expected on Mars. When he tested the lamp on the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, it died in less than a minute.
After 3 months—likely the highest amount of UV-C radiation ever tested on an organism—Singh pulled the sample so he could finish his master’s thesis in time. About half of the lichen’s algal cells had survived. Then, when the team ground up and cultured part of the surviving lichen, about half of its algal cells sprouted new, green colonies after 2 weeks, showing it maintained the ability to reproduce.
The species may provide a blueprint for surviving on Mars or exoplanets, which don’t have an ozone layer to protect them.
178064691
submission
sciencehabit writes:
The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself.
As far as scientists can tell from its genome—the only evidence of its existence so far—it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.
The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”
Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms—or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”
What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.
177690643
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Perfumes and lotions do more than soften our skin and give us signature aromas. They can chemically alter the air we breathe, weakening a phenomenon called the human oxidation field, researchers report today in Science Advances.
The new results lend further credence to the idea that the human body can meaningfully alter the chemistry of indoor air, says Nicola Carslaw, an indoor air chemist at the University of York who wasn’t involved with the research. “What’s fascinating about this paper is that it shows what simple bodies in a space can do.” Whether these chemical reactions help—or harm—us, however, remains unclear.
Scientists coined the term “human oxidation field” in 2022. A study published in Science found that when oils in our skin are exposed to ozone—an oxidant that can creep in from the outdoors or from some air purifiers—they can spawn highly reactive molecules called hydroxyl radicals. These in turn can break down other gases in the air around us, creating a haze of radicals—the human oxidation field.
The researchers are still figuring out exactly what fewer hydroxyl radicals mean for everyday life. If the radicals react with other molecules to form toxic substances, wearing personal care products could be a safeguard; if they are breaking down dangerous gases, then the same products could leave someone more vulnerable. But there’s such a wide variety of compounds in indoor air—created by everything from cooking to cleaning—that researchers don’t have any easy answers.
“We can’t give any public advice on whether this means you should wear a lot of lotion,” says study author, Manabu Shiraiwa, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine.
177690613
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Hummingbird feeders are a beloved pastime for millions of backyard birders and a convenient dining spot for the birds. But for the Anna’s hummingbird, a common species in the western United States, feeders have become a major evolutionary force. According to research published this week in Global Change Biology, artificial feeders have allowed the birds to expand their range out of Southern California up to the state’s northern end. They have also driven a transformation of the birds themselves. Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.
As feeders proliferated, Anna’s hummingbird beaks got longer and larger, which may reflect an adaptation to slurp up far more nectar than flowers can naturally provide. Developing a bigger beak to access feeders “is like having a large spoon to eat with,” says study author, Alejandro Rico-Guevara.
This change was more pronounced in areas where feeders were dense. But in birds that lived in colder regions north of the species’ historical range, the researchers spotted the opposite trend: Their beaks became shorter and smaller. This finding also makes sense: The researchers used an infrared camera to show for the first time that hummingbirds use their beaks to thermoregulate, by dissipating heat while they are perched. A smaller beak has less surface area—and would therefore help conserve heat.
It wasn’t just the size and shape of beaks that changed. In areas where feeders are dense, male hummingbirds have also developed beaks that are pointier and sharper than usual. Pointy beaks in hummingbird species often indicate aggressiveness, and the researchers think male skirmishes over feeder control may have made these birds feistier. “Anyone who has a feeder knows that hummingbirds fight like crazy,” Rico-Guevara says.
The most surprising finding, though, was how quickly these changes took place. By the 1950s, hummingbirds were noticeably different from those of the 1930s: a time span of only about 10 generations of birds.
Carleton University animal behaviorist Roslyn Dakin, who wasn’t involved with the study, adds that the new paper beautifully shows “evolution in action.”
177675019
submission
sciencehabit writes:
It’s a truism almost as old as modern weather prediction: Any forecast beyond 2 weeks will fall apart because of the way tiny perturbations compound in the atmosphere. The 2-week limit, grounded in chaos theory and notions of the “butterfly effect” from the 1960s, has been handed down from generation to generation, says Peter Dueben, head of earth system modeling at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the world’s leading forecaster. “It’s basically a God-given rule.”
But even the gods can be wrong.
Using an artificial intelligence (AI) weather model developed by Google, atmospheric scientists have found that forecasts of 1 month or more into the future might be possible. “We haven’t found a limit to how far you can go out,” says Trent Vonich, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW) who led the work, released late last month as a preprint on arXiv. “We ran out of memory first.”
The result has caused a stir ever since Vonich and Gregory Hakim, his adviser, spoke this year at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, says Amy McGovern, a computer scientist and meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma. Using powerful computer models, researchers have already pushed meaningful forecasts out to about 10 days, coming ever closer to the 2-week limit. Showing this limit can in principle be broken “means that AI will be able to do this someday, which is really exciting,” she says.
177556861
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Can a robot arm wave hello to a cuttlefish—and get a hello back? Could a dolphin’s whistle actually mean “Where are you?” And are monkeys quietly naming each other while we fail to notice?
These are just a few of the questions tackled by the finalists for this year’s Dolittle prize, a $100,000 award recognizing early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interspecies communication. The winning project—announced today—explores how dolphins use shared, learned whistles that may carry specific meanings—possibly even warning each other about danger, or just expressing confusion. The other contending teams—working with marmosets, cuttlefish, and nightingales—are also pushing the boundaries of what human-animal communication might look like.
The prize marks an important milestone in the Coller Dolittle Challenge, a 5-year competition offering up to $10 million to the first team that can achieve genuine two-way communication with animals. “Part of how this initiative was born came from my skepticism,” says Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the prize’s organizers. “But we really have much better tools now. So this is the time to revisit a lot of our previous assumptions about two-way communication within the animal’s own world.”
Science caught up with the four finalists to hear how close we really are to cracking the animal code. One amusing exerpt:
"Male [dolphins] form pairs and call each other’s [signature] whistles if they get separated. But once, we were just testing our equipment and played one of those whistles while the pair was still together. They responded with a totally different whistle—one we hadn’t documented before. We’ve since heard it in other confusing situations. We call it the 'WTF whistle,' because it really did seem like that’s what they were asking."
177392655
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Habemus papam! Minutes ago, the Vatican announced that U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost would be the next pope. Artificial intelligence (AI) made its own prediction earlier this week—but Prevost was not on the shortlist. In a paper posted on the preprint site arXiv, a machine learning algorithm that analyzed the ideological positions of the 133 high-ranking Catholic Church officials who made this decision predicted that Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin would be the next head of the Catholic Church. Though the program was off this time, experts say its approach could eventually be useful in predicting other types of electoral contests.
AI algorithms that analyze text, such as social media posts and candidates’ speeches, can be very accurate at predicting political election outcomes. But papal conclaves present a unique challenge. The election process, which takes place over multiple rounds until one person receives two-thirds of the vote, has remained the same for centuries. There are no polls or primary elections to analyze, and the papabili are sworn to secrecy about their votes.
So with the help of Michele Re Fiorentin, a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin, and University of Madrid mathematician Alberto Antonioni, Valdano set out to develop a way to predict papal elections. When it was announced in February that Pope Francis was ill, this group was already studying the emergence of political and ideological factions within the church, using an algorithm the researchers had trained on five centuries of meticulous “genealogical” records of bishops and the successors they appointed. The researchers’ logic is that a bishop’s or pope’s decision to appoint a new bishop or to elevate one to a cardinal may be partly determined by shared ideology. And when the time comes to appoint a new pope, the thinking goes, each elector is more likely to vote for a colleague who shares his own stances.
To model how these dynamics could play out in the current conclave, the researchers chose four broad topics likely to be important to this year’s papabili: attitudes toward same-sex couples, international migration and poverty, the Catholic Church’s ongoing dialogues with other religions, and synodality—the degree of autonomy and authority enjoyed by local church leaders relative to the pope. Using data from a website that compiles cardinals’ public statements, the researchers trained an AI model to determine how progressive or conservative each elector’s stance on each issue is. The model then categorized the 135 eligible electors (two cardinals didn’t attend the conclave)—and Pope Francis—by their ideological similarity to other candidates.
Next, the scientists simulated the conclave election process among their virtual cardinals. After eight or nine rounds of voting, the electors typically converged on one candidate: Parolin, currently the Vatican’s secretary of state. As the Vatican’s top diplomat and second-in-command to Pope Francis, Parolin is widely considered a front-runner and has the best odds on online betting sites.
The authors’ analysis had put Prevost’s views near the center on all four ideological topics, meaning he was likely elected as a compromise candidate. Electing a U.S. pope could also help shore up support from Catholic communities there.
Re Fiorentin says the model probably missed Prevost as a likely pope because it didn’t consider political and geographical factors that played a role in the election. Lacking that information, he says, “is a major shortcoming of our model.”
In the future, he adds, the model could incorporate geographic information about the candidates. “However, we think that other important data about geopolitical influence, lobbying, etc., are much more difficult to obtain and to use.”
177368081
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have captured fungal spores cruising in the inhospitable environment of the stratosphere, much higher than commercial aircraft fly. When brought back to the lab, the researchers found that some of the spores—including pathogens of plants and people—had survived intercontinental trips and could be cultured in the lab.
Made possible via a cheap, homespun sampling device dangled from weather balloons, the project could help researchers figure out what traits and conditions allow spores to survive a swing through the stratosphere and how they get up there in the first place. The work could also be a first step towards an atmospheric monitoring system that could nip emerging fungal pathogens in the bud, the study’s authors reported at a conference of the European Geophysical Union.
After five preliminary flights, the team has already learned a lot. Based on DNA sequencing analysis, they identified spores from 235 genera, including fungi that infect blackberries and carrots in the United States and Japan, and one species, Naganishia albida, that can make immunocompromised people sick. In the lab, they were able to revive and culture spores from 15 different fungal species, among them several plant pathogens.
Mostly the results show that their sampler works. Now, the researchers want to set up regular flights to track airborne fungal biodiversity and seasonal variations. They also want to identify how events such as wildfires or volcanic eruptions inject spores into the stratosphere.
177364857
submission
sciencehabit writes:
As John Rick excavated one of the many underground chambers at the ancient Peruvian site of Chavín de Huántar in 2017 his trowel hit something intriguing, and exceedingly delicate. It was a cigarette-size tube made of animal bone and packed full of sediment. The following year, his team found almost two dozen more. Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University, suspected these bone tubes were pieces of ancient drug paraphernalia.
Now, a chemical analysis of plant material preserved inside the bone tubes confirms ancient people used them to inhale snuffs made of tobacco and a hallucinogenic plant known as vilca. Rick and colleagues say the rituals involving these drugs may have helped the people of Chavín consolidate their power and influence some 2500 years ago, a time when complex social and political hierarchies were first taking shape in Peru.
Although researchers have long suspected rituals at Chavín involved hallucinogenic drugs, “What’s exciting about this paper is that, for first time, we have actual evidence,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University who wasn’t involved in the research but has studied psychoactive drugs used by ancient people.
Rick thinks Chavín may have been a pilgrimage site for people belonging to a nascent rulership class taking shape all over the Andes. “They’ve been looking for ways to develop authority,” he says. Perhaps the rituals in Chavín’s underground chamber were initiation rites, inducting a chosen few into a higher status within the religion, conferring prestige upon them back home—and ensuring these newly local powerful rulers would stay indebted to Chavín, which could then attract even more tribute and pilgrims. During these rituals, “the idea of social order may be meddled with,” all to Chavín’s benefit, Rick says.
177350855
submission
sciencehabit writes:
New NIH director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya sat down for an interview with Science about the future of NIH. The encounter was brief, sometimes confrontational, and even personal.
When asked about low morale at NIH following two waves of firings, and about concerns at academic institutions about funding delays and grant cuts, Bhattacharya wanted to know whom the reporter had talked to. After Science mentioned past NIH Director Harold Varmus, he noted that the Nobel Prize winner had “attacked me pretty viciously” in an op-ed. He complained about the Science's reporter's past coverage of a nonprofit group, the EcoHealth Alliance, that used NIH funding for virus studies in China that some scientists and Republican politicians claim caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bhattacharya blamed some NIH restrictions since January on “panicked overreaction to directions from above” and decried “panicked reporting” among media covering NIH. He dismissed an article in Nature on the pending policy on foreign collaborators as “rumors”:
“No, that’s false. There’s going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money’s going... I’m really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you’re like, actually spreading rumors that you don’t know anything about. Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that’s not true.”
Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.
177268743
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Before the silver or gold in your favorite piece of jewelry made its way to Earth, it first had to spawn during one of the universe’s most energetic explosions. At first, astronomers knew of only one cosmic scenario that fit the bill for this violent formation of “jewelry shop” elements: the collision of two ultra-dense stellar corpses called neutron stars. Now, a second has stepped onto the scene.
As they report this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered signatures of this heavy element formation — called the r-process — in a giant flare first detected from a highly magnetic neutron star in 2004.
The flare, which released more energy than our Sun does in a million years as it spewed electrically charged material, has remained shrouded in mystery since its discovery 20 years ago. Researchers quickly traced the outburst to a nearby magnetar, a special breed of neutron star whose magnetic fields are trillions times stronger than Earth’s. But ten minutes after the massive flare, a second, fainter signal inexplicably came from the same star.
More r-process sources may still be looming in the dark. The new study accounts for about 10% of the Milky Way’s heavy elements, suggesting that astronomers will have to scour the cosmos for even more places where the r-process is hiding. One potential spot is a rare type of supernova that births rapidly rotating neutron stars, says says Anirudh Patel, the new study’s lead author and an astronomer at Columbia University. He
hopes that with more observations, astronomers will be able to sharpen that picture. But for now, he says it’s exciting enough to find a new birthplace for what makes up so much of our world: “These heavy elements pervade our lives — we make use of them every day. It’s humbling to realize that these were made in such extreme astrophysical environments.”
177236075
submission
sciencehabit writes:
On a cool, sunny, mid-April day, the cheerful redbuds and other flowering trees amid the sprawling labs on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) main campus belied the pervasive gloom. Nearly 3 months into President Donald Trump’s administration, NIH in-house scientists and other workers were reeling from mass layoffs of colleagues; the removal of leaders; and limits on travel, communication, and purchasing that have shut the agency off from the outside world, hamstrung experiments, and crushed the community’s spirits.
On that spring day in Bethesda, Maryland, one senior scientist lamented that two star colleagues in his institute were heading back to their native China from NIH, abandoning a destination that had always drawn talent from around the world. “I want to cry,” he said. Another pointed to the abrupt retirement the previous day of a noted NIH nutrition scientist who said the agency had censored his publications and interactions with the media.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk’s quasi-official White House enforcer, “pops in and out” of online meetings of senior leaders, the scientists said. Another researcher, who is not a U.S. citizen, mentioned that he has prepared a “deportation plan,” including a company lined up to ship belongings back to his native country, in case he’s fired and loses his work visa.
The atmosphere is one of “chaos and fear and frustration and anger,” said a senior scientist with NIH’s intramural research program who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves and others from retribution. This scientist added: “It’s this feeling of utter powerlessness and repeated insults.”
A former top NIH official who was forced out believes that’s the intent. “I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.”
It’s working. Hundreds of NIH employees took voluntary buyouts offered by the Trump administration. And at least 25 of the roughly 320 physician-researchers who lead trials of drugs, cell therapies, and vaccines at NIH’s massive Clinical Center are leaving, as are consulting physicians, a researcher there told Science.
176995035
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In 2001, archaeologists made a discovery that promised to rewrite the history of cat domestication. Scientists had long believed cats became our friends in ancient Egypt, where they’ve been immortalized in mummies and art. But when researchers dug beneath a 9500-year-old home in a farming village on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, they discovered what appeared to be a pet cat buried with a human—more than 4000 years before ancient Egypt even existed.
And so a new story began to take shape. The discovery of other ancient cat bones across Europe persuaded many scientists that domestication began when wildcats slunk into the villages of early farmers—perhaps in what is now Turkey—and eventually evolved into the housecats we know today. As these farmers migrated to new parts of Europe, they brought their feline companions with them.
Now, two studies—both posted late last month on the preprint server bioRxiv—restore the focus on Egypt. Ancient bones and DNA from cats across Europe and the Mediterranean suggest they may have been domesticated in Egypt after all, possibly as recently as 3000 years ago. The process, one of the new papers theorizes, was a gruesome one: Mass sacrifices of cats tied to a religious cult instilled tameness over many generations. “It’s the murder pathway of domestication,” says Greger Larson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford and author on both studies.
