EurekAlert! Staff Picks

I've only recently started watching American football regularly, and one thing that's surprised me is just how prevalent the advertisements for online sports betting are. I knew it was a bigger deal these days, but it feels like every other commercial is some new gambling app or another. That concerns me as someone from a family with a history of addiction issues, and that concern drew me to this release from Bournemouth University that zoomed in on the psychology of matched betting where victims are enticed by "free" bets to entice new "customers".

The research team analyzed 2,112 UK adults and 2,954 personal stories of experiences with matched betting and whether they considered it "real" gambling. The results were stark: many described matched betting as "risk-free", but over half reported losing money doing it. When they were willing to attribute their losses to a particular cause, they would nearly always cite their own misunderstandings or wrong calculations over any inherent risk of the activity itself. If they thought of it as a "side hustle" over gambling exactly, it became much more difficult for them to recognize the harm they were causing.

This is a study that some might call obvious: of course the betting promos aren't really free, everyone knows that! Addiction though can and very often does impact people who are careful and discerning in other areas of their lives. I won't pretend a little more data on the pile will convince everyone in the throes of a gambling addiction, but for someone interested in science, a study and release like this could give them the "out" they need to see through the obfuscation and manipulation of gambling companies.

There's a fine art to headline choices in science communication, and lots of different ways to draft one that will make a release stand out from the crowd. Often though the best approach is the simplest, like in this release with a 4 word headline that still immediately generated a dozen questions in my head. Namely: what do you mean ate? Does that mean the moon crashed into the surface, and if so when? How if at all did it modify Venus' orbit or position in our solar system? What did the moon taste like???

Circumstantial evidence has led astronomers to theorize that Venus had a moon at one point, but what's been less clear is what exactly happened to it. Some theories pointed to some sort of catastrophic collision event that knocked the moon out of orbit or even outright destroyed it, but the Astrophysical Journal article mapped out a less violent conclusion: because Venus spins drastically slower than Earth, the orbit of it's moon might have just slowly decayed before eventually impacting the surface. Lead researcher Stephen Kane ran simulations first on Earth's moon orbit to confirm the math, then applied them to theoretical moons of different sizes orbiting Venus. The results were always the same: Venus' slower rotation was not enough to keep it's moon at a safe distance as Earth does, and eventually the moon was always "eaten" by the planet.

Though they aren't definitive proof Venus once had a moon, the simulations still ask some important questions on the search for other Earth-like planets. Earth's moon serves a vital role in maintaining our living ecosystems, but astronomers looking for other moons as a benchmark for that need to ask not just "does the planet have a moon?" but "can it keep it?".

My last staff pick was about a relatively simple question being answered by complex technological analysis, and this one is about the opposite. Biologists have always wondered why and how snake embryos exhibit their characteristic spiral shape, but even sophisticated genetic research has not led to a perfect explanation. Dr. Tetsuto Miyashita at the Canadian Museum of Nature along with their research team took a more holistic approach by gathering photos of over 900 snake embryos and just...studying the patterns as they developed. With the additional help of some CT scans, the team was able to paint a surprisingly robust picture of how snake embryos develop and take on their spiral shape.

I also appreciated the "handedness" angle of this release, both for the comedy of snakes having "preferred hands" and because I'm personally left-handed and have always been fascinated by how consistent quirks like that work their way into our collective evolution. Snake embryo direction isn't quite as lopsided as human handedness at about 50/50 right vs. left coiling but it's still neat to see even vaguely related phenomena play out in entirely different species.

I always love stories where questions of human behavior and history can be answered in unexpected technical ways. In the case, the question is simple: what sort of food did the people of premodern Japan eat? SOKENDAI researchers looked beyond the traditional archaeological approaches of skeleton analysis to zoom in on teeth, or more specifically dental plague that can still adhere to skeletal teeth thousands of years later. Their analysis of 8 samples from Umeda Cemetery in modern-day Osaka found traces of not just the local fish you'd expect, but cold-water salmonids not actually present in Osaka Bay. This in turn implies that even poor commoners of the day may have had access to imported "luxury" foods due to their location in Japan's "Kitchen of the Realm". It's such a neat social extrapolation from relatively "hard" data, and the researchers plan to continue their approach with other Japanese cities and rural communities.

As someone who's been at office jobs for most of my working life and struggled with posture even before that, I'm always on the lookout for research on the topic. This study detailed by a McGill University release took a more psychological approach than others: rather than just outright telling their sample groups which posture to adapt, they had them do "risk-taking" tests but placed the associated tablets in different positions that encouraged upright or hunched postures. Despite the participants having no knowledge that their posture was a part of the experiment at all, the ones who were environmentally encouraged to stand up straight took bigger risks and ultimately got higher scores.

I like this approach to studying the topic: most people are already aware that proper posture has physical benefits, but the influence on mood feels a little less understood. The impact the researchers found was modest but noticeable, and I have to say it tracks to my own life as I finish writing this blurb only after moving my standing desk* from sitting to upright position.

*If you're an office worker and you have the ability to get a standing desk, absolutely do it! Mine is some of the best money I've ever spent.

I've always been interested in the idea of evolutionary adaptations that allow humans to be the dominant species having real trade-offs, and that our success has been both because of and in some cases in spite of them. This release from the University of Tokyo highlights one of the most important of those adaptations: memory. The researchers frame it as a cost: at what point is the extra energy required for high level memory worthwhile, and when might it be better to dump it in favor of instinct and sensory input? It makes intuitive sense to me: of course our strong memories give us enormous capacity for long-term planning and environmental adaptation...but I also doubt my sudden remembrance at 2 AM of the most embarrassing thing I did in high school has much value from an evolutionary perspective.

The study's conclusions found that the answer lies somewhere in the middle: memory is most useful when the sensory inputs it's recording from are moderately unclear. If the input is too clear, storing it for later recall isn't as useful, but similarly if the input is too noisy or incoherent, there's not much to actually record. Therefore: humans with our senses that are good but not great compared to more specialized organisms get more mileage out of our recall skills, and as the researchers note behavioral experiments have indicated that even we tend to vary our reliance on memory in situations where sensory input becomes more or less clear.

I always love a science story that reads a bit like shlocky science fiction: a New Jersey homeowner was minding his own business when a meteor fragment blew right through his master bedroom window. Instead of panicking or running for cover, he was able to document and preserve it well enough to hand it off to researchers as one of the most pristine examples of it's meteor classification. This is the part in the movie where samples of alien life would be found on it, but the reality is just as interesting in it's own way: the meteor contained significant evidence of influence by water and salt on whatever asteroid it broke off from.

The paper and release highlight the associated implications for the theory that some of the "building blocks" for life on Earth may have origins outside our solar system, one that I've always found fascinating and has showed up a few times in my previous staff picks. It really does sound like science fiction when you say it out loud! Happenings like this though highlight that while it's certainly not 100% confirmed, it's far from complete fiction.

I sometimes think about the fact that humans went to the moon using computers orders of magnitude less powerful than the one we have in our pockets every day. This was an interesting release in the same vein, focusing not on the increased computing power we have today but on the associated incredible reduction in how much it costs to launch anything into space. The cited PNAS Nexus paper tracked 4,400 space launches from countries around the world since 1960 and found that the average cost to launch one kilogram into space went from $87,000 that year...to under $4000 today (even accounting for inflation!).

I also appreciated the section of the release and paper speculating and clarifying on the potential future costs as well. It can be tempting in "good news" stories like this to assume the good numbers will just keep getting better, but there's a few very human factors at play that might mean that same rate of change won't hold over the next 60 years.

It's fascinating to me in the first place that whales have the depth of communication to have dialects in their "speech", but even more interesting still that those dialects can have the same sort of regional micro-differences you'd see in human communities. This University of St. Andrews release details a collaborative study that focused on this: researchers had theorized that most whales in the Mediterranean belonged to the same "clan" with an associated call, but they noticed a particular population around the Hellenic Trench with a variant of it distinct to them. Not only that, but whales in that Hellenic sub-population will sometimes switch to use the broader dialect when interacting with other Mediterranean whales. So they're not only aware of the dialects themselves, they recognize when other whales speak it! It's like an immigrant slipping into their native intonation when visiting home. I want to call it very human behavior, but it's clear it's not behavior limited to humans in the first place.

Also this release features a sometimes underutilized aspect of EurekAlert!'s offerings: audio files! I was hoping when reading the release that some sounds of the calls were included, and sure enough it provided examples of both dialects. I don't speak whale, but you can definitely still tell how the dialects are related to but evolved from each other, and it gave the release an extra dimension that really helped it stand out.

I tend to be a very artistically critical person in general, up to and in some cases especially towards some of my favorite media. If I see a movie and it's just bad, I'm not likely to remember it for long, but a great movie marred by some crucial flaw or three will often stick with me for years. This can be read as bitterness or cynicism if I'm not careful, but it's quite the opposite! I want the things I love to be even better so I can love them even more!

It was nice then to see this tendency validated by some scientific research. A team at Flinders University used an LLM to study 23,000 Reddit comments made in communities for Battlefield and Call of Duty, two massive decade-spanning video game franchises. They found that in both communities, some of the users with the harshest criticisms for their respective games were also some of the most dedicated and prolific posters. In cases though where an "outsider" was perceived as attacking the game, those same harsh critics were also some of it's strongest defenders. The researchers highlight some obvious implications for video game developers in particular and artists in general: don't try to silence your critics! Beyond being enormously toxic for the sort of organic brand loyalty they should want, they might also be your most passionate defenders when they're not complaining.

A friend of mine recently bought a house, and among the usual hurdles facing him as a first-time homeowner was a nest of spotted lanternflys in his backyard. He'd told me about it but during his housewarming party, I was still shocked at how many there actually were. It was like something from a Biblical plague, just sheets of bugs all over a nearby tree and jumping and crawling around everything else in the yard (including our drinks). And of course he wasn't the only one: that summer you literally could not turn a corner without seeing at least a few hanging around.

Since then, I've been wondering about what can even be done about an infestation that prolific, which drew my eye to this Virgina Tech release that highlighted an unexpected ringer in the fight: dogs. The research team tested a group of human expert lanternfly detectors against dogs trained to find their scent, and found that the dogs outperformed the humans by more than 2 to 1. And these weren't even highly trained dogs raised from birth to do the job: the release features the efforts of Xephyr, a 12 year old Boston terrier owned by a local and given a crash course in lanternfly hunting. The researchers hope their findings will have positive implications for not just lanternfly infestations but also other invasive species and even things like plant diseases.

It's getting to be summer again and my friend's lanternfly issue is about to come back around, so maybe I'll suggest he get a dog.

Turns out that just as some humans feel a particular draw towards dolphins, so too are some dolphins more inclined than others to interact with humans. This study of dolphins in Florida's Sarasota Bay details this dynamic: studying a population of dolphins in the area between 1995 and 2012, the researchers found that not only did the overall proportion of dolphins interacting with humans rise from 12% to 41% over the observation period, but the human-friendly dolphins actually tended to stick together in their own social sub-groups. It evokes an amusing image to me of rebellious dolphins wanting to make friends with humans and not being understood by their more isolationist peers. Very Little Mermaid sort of vibes.

Of course it's not all fun and games: the most significant decrease in human/dolphin interaction over the period was associated with harmful "red tide" algal blooms, which are often contributed to by human activity. The researchers also highlighted the importance of keeping human/dolphin interactions to healthy levels, and of education about the potential unintended consequences of things like human fishers feeding dolphins their extra bait. It can be interesting to read about how animals as intelligent and social as dolphins consider humans, but even small actions on our part can have big impacts on not just their physical health but how those social dynamics develop.

In my lifetime, I've seen cigarette smoking go from a universally accepted part of modern life to a niche vice literally pushed out of most public spaces. That change did not happen overnight: many people fought and sacrificed for decades to expose the truth about smoking, fighting uphill against people with many times their money and influence pushing for the exact opposite.

It's hard not to see parallels with the ongoing rise of generative AI, a tool that's useful in the right context but without careful regulation can seed dangerous and (hopefully) unintended consequences ranging from an epidemic of plagiarism to triggering psychosis in those susceptible to it. This study from the University of Edinburgh makes the connection even more clear: researchers scanned 100 AI-related news articles published between 2023 and 2025 for instances of "corporate capture", echoes of the same sort of pro-AI, anti-regulation narratives and talking points often deployed by AI companies themselves. Between the 100 articles, they found 249 cases matching their taxonomy.

I'm hoping studies like this mean we're somewhere near the bottom of the "Big Tobacco" curve, where massive corporations still broadly controlled the narratives but the cracks that became a shattering of that control were starting to form. With the sheer amount of money flowing through the AI space and the scale of the harm it can cause, might not be too much longer before we all find out.

I thought for sure while reading this MIT release that it's use of "mini-Neptune" was a choice on the part of the writer to simplify a complex astronomical description. After clicking through to the cited paper though, sure enough there's "mini-Neptune" right there in the title (alongside the planet's official name of course). I love it when the quirks and personality of scientists peek through the abstracts and data like that (a little more specific but see also the Sonic hedgehog gene, not a coincidence it's the only one I can name off the top of my head).

It's a good fit too for the story itself about our intrepid mini-Neptune and it's unlikely relationship with a "hot Jupiter" (the fan fiction writes itself). Hot Jupiters are generally too massive to keep stellar companions in their orbit, but this pair appears to be an exception and astronomers have been trying to determine why since the planets were discovered in 2020. After wrestling with their unusual orbits impacted by each other's gravity, the team extrapolated from some unexpected chemical compositions that both planets may have formed beyond their star's "frost line" where potentially planetary gasses tend to freeze instead and migrated to their current positions over years (much like the stellar "immigrant" story I shared a few weeks back).

I had a friend in college who was born and raised in Texas but had no trace of a US Southern accent...except when it got really hot in the summer, at which point she'd constantly and unknowingly slip into an iconic Houston drawl. It was always so funny, and I thought of her and her variable accent when reading this release from Ohio State University about a study on other instances of dialects coming from somewhere other than physical location.

Published in the journal American Speech, the cited study recorded interviews with 22 men in Ohio's Defiance County, a "transition zone" between the Inland North accent common to the Great Lakes, Chicago and Detroit and the Midland accent associated with western and southern Ohio. Only, as I'm sure you can guess, the recorded accents didn't entirely line up with those regional markers. Instead, they found subjects who listed identity markers more in line with "country" living (farming, hunting, gardening) exhibited traces of vocal patterns associated with Appalachia, a region hundreds of miles from Ohio and with no significant population overlap. Those with more "urban" lifestyles (art, golf, video games) meanwhile lacked this quirk.

The study made no definite conclusion, but the potential implications are fascinating: as the world gets increasingly connected and fluid, so too may our identities and even the way we talk.

Keeping on theme from my last pick of "feel-good stories about non-professional scientists", I got a kick out of this story of University of Chicago undergraduate students contributing to the discovery of a particularly fascinating star. Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (a collaboration of 75 scientific institutions worldwide dedicated to the open sharing of astronomy data), students in a "Field Course in Astrophysics" class spent their spring break in Chile at the Las Campanas Observatory reviewing a list of potentially interesting stars they'd whittled down over the course of the class. By just the second day, they hit the jackpot with SDSSJ0715-7334.

The star was immediately notable for it's extremely low "metallicity" (the presence of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), just 0.005 as many metals as our own star and twice as little as the previous record holder. Since elements heavier than hydrogen and helium only come about in star formation from supernovae explosions, it implies the star is from the very first few generations of stars before many could occur. And it's been busy in all that time: using further data from the European Space Agency, they tracked the star's motion over the course of it's existence and found that it actually "migrated" all the way to the Milky Way from our neighbor the Large Magellanic Cloud. With that in mind, the class's professor dubbed SDSSJ0715-7334 the "Ancient Immigrant".

This is close to the perfect story for me. It has it all: fascinating science, amateur involvement, international collaboration, just a stellar narrative overall.

I appreciated this feel-good story from the Florida Museum of Natural History where researchers weighed the relative impact and usefulness of citizen scientist contributions from "dedicated" and "casual" participants to the online crowdsourcing platform iNaturalist. It didn't quite make sense at first: the release sets up that volunteers with the most time and energy do indeed contribute the most by volume, so how could their contributions be just as valuable as ones coming in less frequently? It goes on to highlight though that it's not just about quantity, but the context of where the contributions are coming from.

The most dedicated users also tend to be the ones with the time, energy and expertise to travel to areas with significant green space and biodiversity. Observations from those places are of course useful, but can come at the expense of similar ones made closer to home, and those "less interesting" locations are still ones researchers often need data on. One of the cited researchers brought up the example of studying how urban heat and light impact animal behavior: more of the citizen science contributions for a study like that would come from regular people making casual observations of bird nests in their backyard compared to the regular world traveler sighting a rare bird in the rainforest.

It's a heartening pushback against the idea that to do science you need to go somewhere or even do something exotic. Science exists everywhere including the patterns of our banal daily lives, and we can all contribute to it in ways that might not be obvious.

I've never really had a reason to challenge the belief that closing your eyes can make you hear better, but this study from the American Institute of Physics and Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers brings that "common knowledge" into question. They tested the theory in an obvious but clever way: subjects listened to a collection of sounds through headphones with eyes open, then closed, then viewing a blank screen, and finally viewing a video that matched the sound they were listening for. After finding that the subjects actually performed worse with their eyes closed, they hooked them up to EEG devices and found that the brains of the participants lit up in ways associated with more aggressive noise filtering...that worked so well it also filtered out the target sound they were listening for!

That last bit is key: the researchers emphasize that the tests were done in the specific context of pulling a sound out of a noisy background, and that removing visual processing may indeed help if you're just looking to hear one thing in an otherwise quiet room. Still, it's interesting to see a study taking a widely held belief like that into question and emphasizing that it's truth is more complex. I know there have been times in my life when I've been certain that closing my eyes helped me hear something better, and if I try it again I'm going to be considering the context of whether I'm in a loud or quiet room. A pretty small but noticeable impact on my life from science!

I always liked the idea that the origin of life could potentially be traced to interplanetary hitchhikers, so this Johns Hopkins release about a study on how bacteria might survive the harsh environments of space caught my eye. The researchers took samples of the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans known for thriving in the most brutal desert conditions on Earth and subjected them to pressures 10-30x greater then you'd find at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The tests got so brutal that the steel plates used to hold the experiment together fell apart (which I love, huge respect to researchers willing to go so hard that their testing apparatus breaks), but at the end of it all the bacteria survived significantly more abuse then expected and not too far off from what they'd go through on a rock pushed into space by an asteroid impact. And that's for a bacteria that already exists right now on Earth! If the conditions are right, who knows what else might be able to hitch a ride in the future.

I sometimes feel like there's a sense of vagueness associated with stories around plastic pollution: we know there's a lot of it, we know it's very likely to have negative impacts in multiple ways, but it's not always clear exactly what the dangers might be (to us or to the environment). That's part of why I appreciate this story from Florida Atlantic University that zoomed in on the impact of the plastic chemical oleamide on the predator/prey relationship of a species of South Florida-native octopus. Like many animals, octopuses (I know it's technically more correct but man it sounds so much worse than "octopi") hunt based on chemical signals, and it was clear from the experiments that the presence of oleamide had a notable impact on the hunting behavior of the octopuses and their prey.

Findings like these can be a little less sexy compared to finding the plastic chemicals are leading to mass sickness or die-offs, but like any marine population the relationship between an octopus and it's prey is carefully calibrated over hundreds of thousands of years and even a seemingly tiny impact can have enormous ramifications. It's also interesting to me how even a material as exotic and "unnatural" as plastic is still composed of materials that have their own places in the natural order, and our use of it should always come with an acknowledgement of that. Octopuses/pi are some of the smartest creatures in the sea and that's part of what makes them personal favorite, but alas they are not smart enough (yet) to fix alterations to their environment that are entirely on us.

A few years ago, I remember reading a story about dogs left behind in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and how scientists were fascinated not just by how the radiation might impact their genes but how those genes would propagate in a domesticated population suddenly introduced to a "wild" area. I like those sorts of stories where the advancement of science sometimes comes on the back of scientific failures over successes, which drew me to this release detailing similar research done on pigs in the Fukushima area by a university directly impacted by the 2011 nuclear accident in their own backyard.

Specifically, Fukushima University researchers were studying the genetic hybridization between escaped domestic pigs and wild boars, a significant problem even outside Japan. With an environment similar to Chernobyl of a human occupied area suddenly being devoid of humans, they were able to study in higher detail how this hybridization process plays out with no interference. From that data, they made some surprising findings on how the rapid-reproduction genes present in domestic pigs but not wild boars are specifically passed from the maternal side. They hope these findings can provide insight useful to pig and boar conservation efforts around the world, hopefully bringing a little good out of the tragedy that impacted Fukushima those years ago.

I have an uncle who is an avid ice fisher, and he's mentioned to me that the solitary nature of it is part of the appeal. Just him and at most one other person, in a tent for hours on end not speaking to another soul. This research though by Max Planck Institute for Human Development social scientists highlights how even such a solo-focused endeavor has it's own web of social influences and interactions.

Together with collaborators from TU Berlin and the University of Eastern Finland, the researchers not only studied but actively organized a series of ice fishing competitions held over a period of two years. Using GPS cameras, they studied an array of the fisher's choices such as how they chose spots, how long they stuck around at each and how often they collaborated with each other. This provided a unique framework to study how groups of humans make foraging decisions "in the wild", and how much those decisions are influenced by environmental conditions, individual experience and indirect influence from their peers. It's interesting research that highlights how anything humans do in a group exists in the social context of that group (even if the thing is sitting by yourself in an ice tent all day).

"Space junk" has always seemed like an interesting and underrated problem to me. A lot of the things we think about in space are so distant, black holes and galaxies unfathomable distances away. Turns out though that one of the most pressing space-related problems is close enough to us to be essentially ecological: in space, no one can hear you litter.

...or at least they can't until your litter reenters the atmosphere. When space debris falls back down to Earth, it does so fast enough to create the same sort of sonic booms produced by jets breaking the sound barrier. Johns Hopkins scientist Benjamin Fernando and collaborators at Imperial College London used this fact to tackle an aspect of the space junk problem from an unexpected direction: seismology. They set up a network of 127 seismometers in California to track the path of debris left by a Chinese satellite entering the atmosphere. Results were encouraging, noticeably more accurate and faster than traditional radar estimates. With luck, their research will give us a much better general handle on when and where our space junk returns to us.

I love when a press release can open with a claim as absurd-sounding as "we have no idea what most of the universe is made of". That might feel like marketing hyperbole in a lot of other contexts, but when the subject is dark matter/energy, it's not far off the scientific mark. Astronomy is always a subject where the objects of study are usually theoretical in the sense we can't reach out and observe them in person, but even in most of those cases we know where things theoretically are. Not so with dark matter: it's all theory, a huge proportion of the total matter in the universe that we can't see or touch or feel at all even if we could get to it.

That quality also makes writing about it extremely difficult, and this release from Texas A&M University does an excellent job bridging the gap. It covers some of recent research Dr. Rupak Mahapatra has contributed to a team of scientists using a super-sensitive detector called TESSARACT, but also takes care to frame his work with a generous and not too technical overview of the dark matter "problem" and how they're aiming to move the needle on solving it. I understand the details on the topic probably even less than I understand most in astronomy, but the sheer novelty of it means I love reading about it every time it comes up and good interlocutors are always appreciated.

I grew up loving stories about artificial intelligence, especially ones that tackle questions of the "humanity" of that intelligence (shout out Legion from Mass Effect, you will always have a soul in my book). While ChatGPT is a far cry from Hal 9000 (for now), it's still so incredibly surreal to be living as an adult in a world in which we can reasonably ask some of those same questions of actually existing technologies.

Researchers at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Google Research and Princeton University asked the question by studying language processing in humans: they took electrocorticography recordings of a group of people after 30 minutes of listening to a podcast and tracked how different parts of the brain were activated as they processed the information. Their findings observed a layered "step-by-step" pattern where early responses sort out basic visual info in one area of the brain and later processing of context happens later in "deeper" layers. According to the researchers, this process is not all that dissimilar from the multi-tiered approach AI uses to "understand" the world.

What stands out at me so starkly from this story is not just that the human brain readings apparently matched AI methods closer than expected, but that this understanding of our own brain needed to be filled in in the first place. You hear people talk about how modern AI is a "black box" where we can set the output parameters but don't really understand exactly what's going on under the hood. And yet...is our understanding of our own brains that much more advanced*? Even with all our modern technology and centuries of research to build off of, there are still aspects of the brain that we just don't have a full understanding of how they work, and I like the idea that only once we have an even vaguely similar parallel to compare to will we be able to truly complete that understanding.

(*it is, I just think it's still an interesting question)

Echolocation is my pick for one of the absolute coolest biological adaptations running, but I'd never really considered how the ones being echo-located might respond to it. This Chiba University release studied that topic, specifically a species of moth (Autographa nigrisigna) that changes it's behavior when it senses the echolocation calls of nearby bats. They exposed various moth specimens to a wide range of pulse frequencies intended to mimic bat calls and found that egg-bearing moths in particular greatly changed their flight behavior or even stopped altogether in response to the lab-generated sound pulses. The implications for moth reproductive behavior being tied so directly to bat predation makes it an interesting study for bat and moth enthusiasts, but there are also some fascinating "real world" implications at play: getting a better handle on how moths respond to bat calls may allow for the use of ultrasonic emitters instead of pesticide to keep moth pests off of crops!

I love a release that tells a broader story. This one from the Florida Museum of Natural History details recent findings on the coiled optics nerve of chameleons that allow for their distinctive 360-degree eye movement and ability to look in two directions at once. The team laid these structures out in more detail than ever before through the use of modern imaging techniques. It's interesting research on it's own: on a hunch after seeing coil-like optic nerves in an unrelated CT scan of a particular chameleon species, they took 30 more cans of over various lizards and snakes, created full 3D brain models of 18 of those and finally found all 3 chameleon species represented had the same longer and coiled optic nerves compared to the scans of their fellow reptiles.

Where this release especially succeeds though is how it answers a question posed by one of the researchers themselves: how had no one else noticed this distinct structure before? Chameleons hold cultural significance in regions across the world so it's not like no one has been paying them any attention, but in all their efforts the researchers weren't able to find any historical description of what they'd found. The release does an excellent job framing this context by providing an informative history of our understanding on chameleon biology all the way from Aristotle's writings to a 2015 University of Haifa thesis that described the optic nerve as "c-shaped". The historical focus of both the research itself and the concise but not too exhaustive way the release lays out the relevant history does a really great job of situating the research in it's broader context, a difficult task in an environment where press officers are often pushed to focus only on what's most immediately relevant right this very second.

My general interest in volcanoes drew me to the image of a lava field featured in this Natural Science Institute of Iceland release, but as it turns out the ecological research on display in it's associated release was just as interesting. NSII researchers studied plant life on the volcanic island of Surtsey, famous for it's relatively recent arrival from an eruption in 1963 and associated status as an untouched piece of land where biologists and ecologists could study how life spreads in real time. What the NSII ecologists found though challenges some long-held beliefs in the field with the finding that many of the plants found on the island lack the traits commonly associated with long-distance dispersal. Instead, the researchers cited birds as the primary mechanism by which plants reached the island. Study author Dr. Pawel Wasowicz quoted in the release put it best: "Life does not move in isolation - it follows life", which is certainly something to consider in an age where human activity has a very real impact on where other life goes.

I'm always interested in the intersection of science and culture, which drew me to this University of Hawai'i at Manoa release about a team of researchers that linked references in traditional Okinawan songs of the Ryukyu Islands to modern knowledge of the region's geological and climate history. And their efforts were fruitful: a collection of 18th century Ryukyuan music describes wind and wave patterns that closely match 21st century scientific records. They even found mention of a particular 18th-century volcanic eruption on an isolated island!

The researcher's interest in the topic was not just idle fascination however: all of the paper authors are actually long-time practitioners of classical Ryukyuan music themselves! I really like that concept: if there's something you're interested in and passionate about and you have the scientific know-how, there's nothing stopping you from putting it into a scientific context!

When I read this ESO release about observations of a "rogue planet" forming 620 million light years from us, I'm remind that among the many reasons I'm not cut out to be an astronomer is the sheer existential intimidation of it. Figures like "six billions tons per second" and "5-10 times the mass of Jupiter" are so unfathomably beyond our terrestrial scale of reference but when you put your eye to space they're just another data point. I don't know how I'd be able to deal with those constant reminders of just how incredibly small a place in the universe we occupy.

This story itself is also fascinating. The word "planet" probably brings to mind for most an image of our solar system planets making their collective run around the sun, but there's nothing in the definition that requires that sort of order. Some in fact are so chaotic and enormous that they could actually be mistaken for stars from the right angle!

It's been pretty common through most of my life for news about the rainforests to trend negative: threats from climate change, deforestation, that sort of thing. This release caught my eye then with the surprising finding that despite the ongoing threats to their overall livelihood...the average tree size in the Amazon forest has actually increased. And according to the researchers, the cause is actually the rising CO2 levels associated with the changing climate! Interesting and unexpectedly positive knock-on effect, though the researchers also note how impossible it would be to re-plant those massive and ancient trees in the event that are ever removed so we're not off the hook yet.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this release about a possible new hybrid species produced from the pairing of a blue and green jay. First, it's an example of an evolutionary process happening on a time scale we can actually see, with the two component species only coming into contact after 1950s. Even if we can only see the full process of evolution through collected evidence stretching back millions of years, it's cool to see a little sliver of the sort of occurrence that when repeated enough and for long enough constitutes the process of evolution. The researchers also explicitly indicate climate change as what moved the two populations closer together, so that adds some illustrative context into how our actions fit in to that process.

Beyond all that, the actual story of how the species was found demonstrates how much in science still comes down to luck and the right timing. The researcher saw a post online in a birdwatching group and worked with the poster to find and catalogue the bird. In his words from the release: "If it had gone two houses down, probably it would have never been reported anywhere.”

I mentioned in a previous edition of this newsletter that orangutans were my favorite of the great apes. My favorite sea animal meanwhile is the octopus. Guess I have a weakness for surprisingly intelligent but often-overlooked species.

That intelligence is very much on display in this release from Florida Atlantic University which covers the efforts of FAU marine biologists and their colleagues at Marine Biological Laboratory to detail the complex arm movements of octopuses (I prefer "octopi" but apparently that's not the technically correct term). And they were certainly thorough: 4000 arms movements and 7000 individual arm deformations across 25 different video recordings in different environments gives an exhaustive categorization of just how these fascinating creatures interact with their world.

I always love seeing research where scientists are attempting to replicate a particular natural feature or behavior through the lens of our technology. It impresses on me not just the ingenuity of the researchers and how far our tech has come but also the incredible designs of nature that are often so difficult to replicate in the first place. In this case it was an international team including New York University robotics researchers that worked to capture the "swarming" behavior of fish, birds and other tight-knit biological communities, taking inspiration from physics with the positive/negative charges of electrons matching the "positive" and "negative" charges of a robot swarm. We're still a long way from a 1 to 1 reproduction swarming in our robots, but in a time when "humanoid" robots are getting more attention it's interesting to see how researchers are approaching an entirely different type of robotic intelligence.

I absolutely love orangutans, easily my favorite of the great ape family. Very cool then to see a window into how their brains work in this University of Warwick release on a Nature Communications Biology paper. It can be easy to think of even relatively intelligent animals like apes as creatures of pure instinct, just doing whatever their biological programming commands, but as you can see in this release: orangutans learn and teach! They're not born with the skills that make them such fascinating creatures, they have families and different peer networks that they "graduate" to as their skills develop. Not all that different from how we learn things in the end.

I come from a family with a strong history of diabetes, so news about research on it tends to catch my eye more than most other medical news. When we think of the brain's relationship to diabetes, it tends to be in a more "abstract" sense, things like the willpower to avoid unhealthy foods or sugar addictions. Studies like these though highlight that the brain's role in diabetes isn't just in how it manifests in our behavior but in a real physical process with a role in managing our glucose levels. In a time when diabetes seems so much easier to manage compared to when I was a kid, I hope that studies like these continue to sharpen our understanding of how diabetes operates.

I'm fascinated with this Nagoya University release on a Science study where the mating behaviors of one species of fruit fly were transferred to another through editing just a single gene. Granted fruit flies are significantly less complex than humans, but it's still so interesting to me that we can "undo" 30-35 million years of evolutionary behavior through one experiment. Also an interesting companion to my pick from a couple weeks ago: a few million years after those diet changes and we're successful enough to make changes of our own to evolutionary behavior.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies, and I include the ending sequence with the black hole in that despite it pushing the bounds of scientific accuracy a bit. That love draws me to a release like this on a iScience paper where a physicist looks at the prospect of sending a spacecraft into a black hole and says "yeah that could be possible with the right technology". That's the sort of mindset that makes astrophysics and space exploration so fascinating to me, the sheer scale of it all making that future focus almost a necessity even if it looks like science fiction.

One of the things I find interesting about evolutionary science is that evolution is not a perfect process, for example leaving behind obsolete traits like our tailbone for tails we no longer have. This study published in Science and reported by Dartmouth College shows a cool example of evolution moving in a different direction: some of our early ancestors "adapted" to their environment before the relevant traits had actually evolved, and evolution only caught up hundreds of thousands of years later! I find that a really fascinating example of how behavior, environment and physical changes all intersect in ways you might not necessarily expect.

I was happy to read this University of Florida release about a paper studying the impact of the citizen-science app iNaturalist on species research from all around the world. We've been collectively reckoning in recent years with the negative effects of social media and other "connective" technologies, so it's nice to see a clear example of a decentralized app having a positive impact.

Even during the height of the COVID pandemic when I'd always wear a mask outside the house, I can't deny that they were uncomfortable in some circumstances. I appreciate research, like this study from Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, that recognizes this possible impediment to mask usage and focuses not just on increasing their virus-blocking efficiency but also their comfort for the wearer. Hopefully research like this will make the future pandemics (*knocks wood*) just a little more bearable.

I love it when developments in different technologies (in this case robotics and 3D printing) intersect to allow scientists to create something they may not have considered before. "Electronics-free robots" might be a phrase that wouldn't make any sense to researchers from a few decades ago, but as described in this release, UC San Diego roboticists made it real with $20 worth of off-the-shelf 3D printing materials.

Mantis shrimp are just so cool! I love the idea that something so small can have such an incredibly complex biology. I also appreciate the potential applicability to human technology like blast shields and sound filtering in this study. This study really hammers (punches?) home the idea that while we humans have done pretty well for ourselves, it's hard for us to outdo nature.