180106049
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In September, three dozen leaders from institutions funding work to help protect the world from the next disaster like COVID-19—or worse—gathered in Ottawa, Canada, to coordinate their efforts. Countries on four continents were represented, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the roundtable’s co-organizer, the nonprofit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). But one major player turned down the invitation: the United States.
Its absence represents a rapid, historic retreat. Not so long ago, the U.S. had resolved to learn from the trauma and tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early months, when humanity had no effective vaccine or treatment to throw at the disease and thousands were dying every day. The country embarked on an urgent search for countermeasures, not just for COVID-19, but for a wide range of potential pandemic threats. It set out to spend billions searching for broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and vaccines that could work against known viruses and others yet to emerge.
Yet in the past 10 months, President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has abruptly dismantled those efforts—along with parallel initiatives to spot emerging viral threats. Cuts to specific programs are difficult to track. But it’s clear that more than $1 billion in drug and vaccine development investments have been scuttled and more than $1 billion in anticipated funding is in limbo. “What they’re doing is incredibly damaging to our level of preparedness in the U.S.,” says virologist Cristina Cassetti, who helped oversee what for years has been the world’s largest portfolio of pandemic preparedness R&D at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) until she quit in April. “The U.S. is leaving a huge gap.”
180054758
submission
sciencehabit writes:
The long road to building a fully functioning quantum computer may have shortened thanks to a new version of a gizmo called a superconducting qubit. The new qubit can maintain its delicate quantum states for more than 1 millisecond, three times the previous best for such a device. Reported in Nature, the result suggests a full-fledged quantum computer may need far fewer qubits than previously thought. Most important, the advance was made not by redesigning the qubit, but by improving the materials from which it was fashioned.
“This is great for the field and I’m glad that they published enough data that we really know how [the qubit] is working,” says John Martinis, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who in October shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum effects in electrical circuits. “To me, that’s the best part.”
179909342
submission
sciencehabit writes:
From enabling life as we know it to greasing the geological machinery of plate tectonics, water can have a huge influence on a planet’s behavior. But how do planets get their water? An infant world might be bombarded by icy comets and waterlogged asteroids, for instance, or it could form far enough from its host star that water can precipitate as ice. However, certain exoplanets pose a puzzle to astronomers: alien worlds that closely orbit their scorching home stars yet somehow appear to hold significant amounts of water.
A new series of laboratory experiments, published today in Nature, has revealed a deceptively straightforward solution to this enigma: These planets make their own water. Using diamond anvils and pulsed lasers, researchers managed to re-create the intense temperatures and pressures present at the boundary between these planets’ hydrogen atmospheres and molten rocky cores. Water emerged as the minerals cooked within the hydrogen soup.
Because this kind of geologic cauldron could theoretically boil and bubble for billions of years, the mechanism could even give hellishly hot planets bodies of water—implying that ocean worlds, and the potentially habitable ones among them, may be more common than scientists already thought. “They can basically be their own water engines,” says Quentin Williams, an experimental geochemist at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not involved with the new work.
179909262
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Earlier today, OpenAI completed a controversial restructuring of its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation: the latest gust in a whirlwind that has swept up hundreds of billions of dollars of global investment for artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
But even as the AI company—founded as a nonprofit, now valued at $500 billion—completes its long-awaited restructuring, a nagging issue with its core offering remains unresolved: hallucinations. Large language models (LLMs) such as those that underpin OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT platform are prone to confidently spouting factually incorrect statements. These blips are often attributed to bad input data, but in a preprint posted last month, a team from OpenAI and the Georgia Institute of Technology proves that even with flawless training data, LLMs can never be all-knowing—in part because some questions are just inherently unanswerable.
However, that doesn’t mean hallucinations are inevitable. An AI could just admit three magic words: I don’t know. So why don’t they?
The root problem, the researchers say, may lie in how LLMs are trained. They learn to bluff because their performance is ranked using standardized benchmarks that reward confident guesses and penalize honest uncertainty. In response, the team calls for a rehaul of benchmarking so accuracy and self-awareness count as much as confidence.
Although some experts find the preprint technically compelling, reactions to its suggested remedy vary. Some even question how far OpenAI will go in taking its own medicine to train its models to prioritize truthfulness over engagement. The awkward reality may be that if ChatGPT admitted “I don’t know” too often, then users would simply seek answers elsewhere. That could be a serious problem for a company that is still trying to grow its user base and achieve profitability. “Fixing hallucinations would kill the product,” says Wei Xing, an AI researcher at the University of Sheffield.
178513366
submission
sciencehabit writes:
It’s as if the baby universe had caught a case of measles. Since NASA’s JWST observatory began peering into the distant universe in 2022, it has discovered a rash of “little red dots”—hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation. Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole.
“I think we’re closing in on an answer,” says Jenny Greene, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. The objects, which some astronomers are calling “black hole stars,” could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. “The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we’ve been playing with before,” says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.
Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. “We’re probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn’t know about before,” de Graaff says. Greene agrees: “I can totally imagine that the Milky Way was a little red dot that got its black hole started and then kind of piddled along for the rest of cosmic time.”
If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST—and the kind of discovery astronomers live for. Unraveling the mystery of little red dots has “been the most fun I’ve ever had in my career,” Greene says.
178513170
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom.
Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit “structural color”—nature’s pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity.
After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers’ eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure.
Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn’t mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects—viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps—could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says.
The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. “I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”
178438092
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Flossing may be good for more than getting your dentist off your back—one day, it may also protect you from the flu. In an unorthodox approach to needle-free vaccines, researchers have developed a special kind of floss that can deliver proteins and inactive viruses to mice’s gumlines and trigger immune responses that protect against infectious disease, they report today in Nature Bioengineering.
For many years, scientists have tried to develop alternatives to delivering vaccines via syringes by turning to the moist areas in your mouth and nose where most viruses enter. But it’s tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules.
To test this idea, researchers at Texas Tech University had to do something no scientist had done before: Try to floss a mouse. It was a “quite difficult” two-person job: One scientist gently pulled the mouse’s jaw down with the metal ring from a keychain while the other administered the floss.
During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with a fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse’s gums. And even 2 months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.
Next, the engineers added an inactive flu virus—a common vaccine component—to the floss, which in theory could teach the mouse’s body to build up immunity to the flu. Over a 28-day period, the researchers flossed 50 mice with the coated floss every 2 weeks. Then, 4 weeks after the final dose, they infected those mice with the real flu virus. All the mice that were flossed three times survived, whereas all the unvaccinated mice died.
The flossed mice also had a more systemic immune response: Not only were flu antibodies present in their feces and saliva, but the mice had more T cells—the directors of the body’s immune response—in their lungs and spleens, as well as larger lymph nodes. What’s more, the team found flu antibodies in the mice’s bone marrow, signaling that their immune systems were “fully engaged” by the inactive flu virus. Overall, the immune response to the floss resembled the response to vaccines that are sprayed into the nose, such as FluMist.
To gauge whether the method could work in humans, the researchers asked 27 healthy volunteers to floss with dental picks coated with colored food dye. On average, roughly 60% of the dye was delivered to the participants’ gums. They then surveyed the participants on what they thought of the approach. Most said they were open to trying a floss-based vaccine and would prefer it to a shot.
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."
