When people in the Niassa Special Reserve of northern Mozambique hanker for something sweet, they don’t call DoorDash or Uber Eats. They call a bird. The aptly named honeyguide will lead them to a bee nest so they can harvest the honey. The bird obtains a treat, too—scrumptious wax and bee larvae. A new study suggests this partnership, which occurs in several places in Africa, is even...

In what could become a rare case of U.S.-Chinese cooperation on space research, NASA is urging scientists it funds to apply to China’s space agency for access to the 1.7 kilograms of lunar soil and rock returned to Earth in 2020 by the Chang’e 5 mission. Such research collaborations are barred by a long-standing U.S. law that forbids the use of NASA funds for projects with...

A growing field of research is challenging long-held assumptions about goats, pigs, and other farm animals

Dedicated fans of the Olympics know many tall athletes swim faster because their long limbs churn more water with each stroke. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that for bacteria, body sizes don’t affect their swimming speeds , settling a long debate in the field. Bacteria, big and small,...

CLIMATE POLICY Climate damage fund launched At the U.N. climate conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, last week, nations agreed to a draft resolution for a “loss and damage” fund to compensate developing countries for harms caused by climate change when adapting to them is not possible. Many of those countries face risks from increased...

The new director of the National Institutes of Health said today her highest priority is making NIH-funded clinical research more inclusive and more accessible to the public. “Equity will guide my approach to leading NIH,” Monica Bertagnolli told reporters in her first news conference, a 40-minute Zoom call. But Bertagnolli, a cancer surgeon who became head of NIH last month,...

The New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM ) is launching a new series today examining its own complicity in perpetuating slavery and its legacy in the United States. In doing so, the 211-year-old journal joins several other publications and medical organizations that have, in recent years, interrogated harmful aspects of their own histories. In...

The Southeastern Archaeological Conference (SEAC) announced yesterday it will maintain a new image policy that prohibits its flagship journal from publishing photographs of objects buried with Indigenous ancestors. The decision reflects a vote held on the issue that concluded on 4 December. Many tribes with ties to the U.S. Southeast say seeing such images is a...

You’re only as old as you feel, so the adage goes. But new research suggests you may really be as old as your oldest organ. Scientists say they have developed a simple, blood test–based method to measure the speed of aging in individual organs such as the heart and brain. When an organ is substantially “older” than a person’s actual age, the risk of death and diseases related to...

Even after the billions of doses given during the pandemic, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines still hold surprises. A study out today reveals they may unexpectedly prompt cells to produce small amounts of unintended proteins. There is no evidence that these mistakes compromise the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives, and the researchers have already proposed a fix...

Centrifuges: They’re not just for jet pilots and James Bond villains . Scientists in Germany have raised locusts in the spinning devices to see how the enhanced gravity affects their skeletons. It turns out that, just like in people, the mechanical stresses make their “bones” stronger. The findings, published today in Proceedings of the...

Polar bears are tough animals to track. Scientists must brave frigid Arctic landscapes to observe them, if they can spot them at all. And if they want to collect genetic information, they often have to dart and capture the animals—a risky proposition for both researcher and bear. A new approach may lend a paw to such efforts. In two new studies, scientists report that they can...

Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform. But users beware, a new study warns. As of September, the database listed 67 “hijacked” journals—legitimate...

Once touted as the next big thing in cancer therapy, tumor-attacking viruses have been a letdown, failing in multiple clinical trials as far back as 1949. But preliminary results from a small phase 3 study presented at a conference last week suggest these unconventional cancer treatments, known as oncolytic viruses, might work after all. The data showed that an oncolytic virus developed...

It’s not easy to work with captive horseshoe bats, as Linfa Wang discovered. In 2005, the molecular virologist wanted to infect the animals with the virus that had caused the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) a few years earlier to find out whether it would evolve to grow well in the bats. Working in a maximum-biosecurity lab, he and his team at the Australian Animal...

In a trial beginning today in Maryland, a jury will consider whether the powerful Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) discriminated against a scientist by terminating her plum investigator award after she became disabled and asked for accommodations. Experts on disability rights say the trial will bring attention to an overlooked and pervasive form of discrimination in science. HHMI...

The carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ) that have such palpable effects on climate are frustratingly elusive. Even advanced satellites struggle to pinpoint plumes of the gases, which are the dominant drivers of global warming. Instead, countries assess their emissions by piecing together direct measurements, statistics on agriculture and fossil fuel...

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really...

Last week, a day after voters in the Netherlands delivered a surprise victory to far-right parties that have vowed to restrict immigration, Vinod Subramaniam, a nanoscientist and president of the board at the University of Twente, sent a letter to students and employees. “We are concerned about the effects of these results on higher education in general, and...

Related article Misconduct concerns, possible drug risks should stop major stroke trial, whistleblowers say BY Charles Piller The National Institutes of...

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began nearly 2 years ago, international observers have verified damage to hundreds of buildings , including museums and more than 150 churches. Now, a team of Ukrainian and U.S. archaeologists is surveying another category of destruction: damage to Ukraine’s archaeological heritage, much of which remains underground, often unexcavated...

Pitcher plants in the genus Nepenthes thrive in places where they shouldn’t. There’s very little nitrogen in the Southeast Asian and Australian soils where they grow—but they do just fine, thanks to a macabre source for this essential nutrient: the dissolved flesh of small animals, mostly insects, that slip into their bulbous traps. A new study suggests...

For sleepy humans, nodding off can be inconvenient—say, during a boring lecture—or even downright dangerous, such as while driving a car. But for Antarctica’s nesting chinstrap penguins ( Pygoscelis antarcticus ), these secondslong bits of shuteye known as “microsleeps” may help them survive. These mininaps net the birds about 11 hours of sleep per...

In the medicine of the future, molecular physicians built from a patient’s own cells might ferret out cancer, repair injured tissue, and even remove plaque from blood vessels. Researchers have now taken a step toward that vision: They’ve coaxed tracheal cells to form coordinated groups called organoids that can propel themselves with tiny appendages. When added to wounded neurons...

Maize is one of the world’s most important crops, but its origins have long bedeviled scientists. It took more than a century for scientists to settle on the idea that it was domesticated about 9000 years ago in the lowlands of Mexico from a wild grass: a subspecies of teosinte called parviglumis . But now, a team of geneticists has complicated that...

People who lived in central Siberia thousands of years ago enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle despite the area’s cold winters. They fished abundant pike and salmonids from the Amnya River and hunted migrating elk and reindeer with bone and stonetipped spears. To preserve their rich stores of fish oil and meat, they created elaborately decorated pottery. And they built the world’s...

Approach that effectively adds antacids to seawater could grow into a multibillion-dollar industry

LEADERSHIP Argentina’s president targets science The election last week of libertarian Javier Milei as Argentina’s next president has many of the nation’s scientists fearing the future. Milei, who won 55.7% of the vote, has vowed to close or dramatically restructure the National Scientific and Technical Research Council...

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was experiencing its largest, most deadly outbreak of mpox ever, with more than 12,000 suspected cases so far this year and nearly 600 deaths, far surpassing those from the global outbreak of the same viral disease over the past 2 years. The WHO report and a study out today also explore...

One of the world’s largest databases of whole genomes has just become a lot larger. The British health study known as the UK Biobank today made the full genetic sequences of nearly 500,000 people available to scientists for analysis, more than doubling the size of an earlier data set. Combined with long-term health data on participants, this “treasure trove” has the potential to...

Cancer treatments that harness the immune system to fight the disease have revolutionized its care in recent years. One strategy, chimeric antigen receptor T cell, or CAR-T, therapy, is a personalized treatment that engineers a cancer patient’s own immune cells to target and destroy their malignant cells. Several such lifesaving treatments are on the market for blood cancers and...

Spain’s much-maligned system for evaluating scientists, in which the sole criterion for career advancement is the publication of papers, is set to be overhauled under new proposals from the country’s National Evaluation and Accreditation Agency (ANECA). The reforms, announced earlier this month, would for the first time see researchers at Spain’s public universities...

The materials cookbook has suddenly grown tens of times longer. Modern technologies, from electronics to airplanes, draw on just 20,000 inorganic materials, largely discovered through trial and error; scientists have predicted but not made tens of thousands more. This week, however, researchers report that with a new artificial intelligence (AI), they have predicted the ingredients and...

Astronomers have discovered a highly unusual planetary system around a nearby star. It holds six planets, all bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, a variety that is absent in our Solar System but common across the Milky Way. Moreover, all of the planets orbit in rhythmic harmony, which suggests the system has remained undisturbed since its formation billions of years ago. The...

The XPRIZE Foundation today announced $101 million in prizes for researchers who can restore the function of an elderly person’s muscle, cognition, and immune system to a more youthful state. The competition, backed by Saudi money and the success of a women’s athletic clothing line, seeks drugs, other therapies, and lifestyle strategies that target the biology of human aging...

In 2017, marine biologist James Morin was snorkeling at night in the shallow Caribbean waters off the coast of Panama when he briefly switched on his flashlight. He was shocked to see a large wave of blue light cascading across the seagrass beds below him—“bigger and more impressive than anything I’ve seen before.” The glow was emanating from a group of marine...

The first proposed update in nearly 20 years to U.S. rules governing research misconduct by biomedical scientists is drawing mixed reviews. The revamped rules would give universities less time to decide whether to pursue an allegation against a faculty member, require more record-keeping, and bar institutions from quickly closing a case they believe reflects “honest error.” At the...

The orchid mantis ( Hymenopus coronatus ) looks so much like a flower that you might be tempted to take a sniff. Now there’s another reason it’s exceptional. Researchers will report tomorrow in Current Biology that the insect’s petal-shaped legs allow it to glide 50% to 200% farther than other invertebrates. The orchid mantis (pictured) looks...

Talk to any structural biologist, and they’ll tell you how a cool new method is taking over their field. By flash freezing proteins and bombarding them with electrons, cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can map protein shapes with near-atomic resolution, offering clues to their function and revealing bumps and valleys that drug developers can target. The technique can catch wriggly...

One of Earth’s largest rats is also among its most endangered . Researchers have discovered that four individuals of the Vangunu giant rat ( Uromys vika ) survive in the wild, but even they may soon disappear. The rodent lives in the tropical forests of its namesake island of Vangunu, part of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. Although...

The number of top researchers affiliated with universities in Saudi Arabia has dropped sharply, months after the institutions were revealed to be enticing eminent scientists abroad to declare a Saudi affiliation—often in exchange for cash—in a bid to boost their rankings. Saudi Arabian universities now boast affiliations with just 76 of the world’s most cited researchers,...

Science and commerce may be headed for a clash on remote terrain: the Moon. For the first time in half a century, NASA is sending a craft to the lunar surface, with the launch at the end of this year of Peregrine Mission 1, a lander built by the private company Astrobotic. Dozens of other craft will soon follow, many as part of NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts to the...

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), known for fighting to defend evolution’s place in school curricula, has a new leader who knows how hard that work can be. Amanda (Glaze) Townley, who next month becomes executive director of the Oakland, California–based nonprofit, grew up in rural northeastern Alabama, where she learned firsthand how religion and...

BIOMEDICINE U.K. approves CRISPR therapy for sickle cell In a world first, U.K. regulators last week approved a therapy that uses CRISPR, the Nobel Prize–winning gene-editing tool invented in 2012. The treatment has been shown to help people with beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease, both inherited blood disorders that involve defects in the...

Astronomy research is notoriously dominated by men. But in just 5 years, an Australian astrophysics center achieved gender parity, researchers report in a Nature Astronomy paper published last week. The results highlight the potential to make significant progress with thoughtful, multifaceted initiatives. “I’ve never seen a program like this,” says Ramón...

As millions in the United States settle down to Thanksgiving dinner this week, few will be pondering a major question in neuroscience: Why, when so much of life across the animal kingdom revolves around finding and consuming food, do we ever stop eating? Scientists have identified brain regions and even specific cells involved in terminating meals. But exactly how...

About 145 million years ago, volcanoes erupted all over Earth, darkening skies and snuffing out thousands of species. One group that vanished was the Mesturidae, deep-bodied fish with powerful teeth for crushing coral. But some fish that swam in the same waters, such as the pointy-snouted Acipenseriformes, survived the upheaval, and later evolved into today’s sturgeons....

Deadly, mosquito-borne Japanese encephalitis, which haunts the tropics, had never been seen in the country’s temperate southeast

When Iosif Gidiotis began his doctoral studies in educational technology this year, he was intrigued by reports that new tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could help him digest the literature in his discipline. With the number of papers burgeoning—across all of science, close to 3 million were published last year—an AI research assistant “sounds great,” says...