Damaged DNA can spread between human cells via tubelike structures. If tumors use this DNA transfer trick, harmful mutations could potentially spread from cancer cells to healthy cells.

Science_News · 2026-05-19T15:19:36+00:00

Damaged DNA can escape from one human cell and infiltrate another.

Like prisoners tunneling out of jail, this DNA travels via tubelike structures between neighboring cells, scientists report May 19 in Cell. Once it has arrived at its new location, the dodgy DNA can start acting up, potentially transferring trouble between cells.

“This is an important and exciting discovery,” says cancer biologist Paul Mischel of Stanford University. The new study, which shows that one human cell can influence another by passing DNA directly, raises all sorts of questions about what role the phenomenon may play in cancer.

If tumors use this DNA transfer trick, harmful mutations could potentially spread from cancer cells to healthy cells, says cancer cell biologist Peter Ly of the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern in Dallas. How — or if — these roaming chunks of DNA might contribute to disease is “an area that we’re actively exploring,” Ly says.

Read more here and the research article here00508-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867426005088%3Fshowall%3Dtrue).

Science_News · 2026-05-07T15:03:22+00:00

In X-Men, Warren Worthington III sprouts huge white wings from his back and shoots into the sky. Scientists have yet to fully turn the comic book gift from fiction into fact, but virtual reality is offering hints of what it’s like to learn to fly.

After training to use virtual wings, people’s brains responded to wings more similarly to how they respond to real limbs, making wings seem more like body parts, researchers report May 7 in Cell Reports.

“This is an intriguing study that nicely demonstrates how plastic the brain is,” says cognitive neuroscientist Jane Aspell of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. “If the brain can incorporate something as unhuman as a wing, it may also be able to incorporate many other kinds of limb enhancements.”

Read more here and the research article here00398-0?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2211124726003980%3Fshowall%3Dtrue).

Science_News · 2026-04-27T18:54:55+00:00

A memorable shot of espresso is less about roast and more about percolation — and now there is an equation to back that up.

The physics explaining how gases bubble through volcanoes or how water and oils flow through Earth’s crust can also help quantify the perfect percolation of hot water through ground coffee, researchers report in the April 1 Royal Society Open Science.

“I mostly work on volcanic eruptions,” says Fabian Wadsworth, an earth scientist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. He first became interested in the physics of making espresso as a pedagogical tool to teach students fundamental concepts of percolation. “Coffee felt like a natural way that students might get engaged with those problems,” he says.

Read more here.

Science_News · 2026-04-27T18:23:37+00:00

Filtering a protein out of a pregnant person’s blood may help ease a dangerous complication of pregnancy.

In a study of 16 women with early preeclampsia, pulling a particular protein from their blood slightly lowered blood pressure and extended some pregnancies, researchers report April 27 in Nature Medicine. If larger trials confirm the results, the technique may one day be a treatment for the sometimes-fatal condition.

Preeclampsia affects 3 to 8 percent of people who give birth worldwide. “It doesn’t spare any races or ethnicities, and while there are some populations that are increased risk, for the most part, it affects really all women around the world,” says Ravi Thadhani, a nephrologist at Cedars-Sinai Health System in Los Angeles.

The exact causes aren’t known, but evidence collected by Thadhani and colleagues point to a protein called soluble Flt-1, made naturally by the placenta. Flt-1 helps control growth of placental blood vessels and, at some point, slows placental growth so the baby can grow.

Read more here

Science_News · 2026-04-23T12:24:14+00:00

Climate change could increase hard-to-treat bacterial infections, two studies suggest.

Heat boosted antibiotic resistance among bacteria found in artificially warmed grassland soils, researchers report April 22 in Nature. And as drought strips the soil of moisture, antibiotics in the environment become concentrated in the little water that remains, encouraging the growth of resistant microbes, another team reports in the April Nature Microbiology.

The two studies point to heat and drought driven by climate change as forces behind a rise in antibiotic resistance in natural environments, which could in turn threaten human health.

Antibiotic resistance has long been linked to human misuse or overuse. The risk arises when patients cut treatment short or when physicians mistakenly prescribe the drugs to treat viral infections that antibiotics can’t cure. But “we often forget or even neglect the historical fact that these clinical drugs are not only present in CVS pharmacies,” says Xiaoyu Shan, a microbial ecologist at Caltech.

Read more here.

Science_News · 2026-04-22T15:12:39+00:00

The 988 Lifeline appears to be making a difference for teens and young adults in crisis.

Since 988 replaced the ten digit lifeline in the United States, the suicide mortality of those aged 15 to 34 was 11 percent lower than predicted, suggesting an association between 988 and the decrease, researchers reported April 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. From the mid-2022 introduction to the end of 2024, there were about 35,500 suicides in that age group, fewer than the nearly 40,000 expected.

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death of adolescents and young adults. Past research has found that lifeline calls can help individuals. In one study, more than 400 adult callers with suicidal thoughts — largely between 18 and 34 years old — discussed their experiences contacting the former lifeline number from 2020 to 2021. Eighty-eight percent of the study participants gave the crisis call a little or a lot of credit for stopping them from committing suicide.

Read more here.

Science_News · 2026-04-22T15:09:12+00:00

The 988 Lifeline appears to be making a difference for teens and young adults in crisis.

Since 988 replaced the ten digit lifeline in the United States, the suicide mortality of those aged 15 to 34 was 11 percent lower than predicted, suggesting an association between 988 and the decrease, researchers reported April 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. From the mid-2022 introduction to the end of 2024, there were about 35,500 suicides in that age group, fewer than the nearly 40,000 expected.

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death of adolescents and young adults. Past research has found that lifeline calls can help individuals. In one study, more than 400 adult callers with suicidal thoughts — largely between 18 and 34 years old — discussed their experiences contacting the former lifeline number from 2020 to 2021. Eighty-eight percent of the study participants gave the crisis call a little or a lot of credit for stopping them from committing suicide.

Read more here

Science_News · 2026-04-13T19:15:01+00:00

Two U.S. states and more than a dozen cities and counties have moved in the past year to stop adding fluoride to community drinking water, citing research suggesting the mineral could harm children’s brain development.

But a new analysis of cognitive outcomes tracked over decades finds no evidence that water fluoridation is associated with lower adolescent IQ or diminished mental abilities later in life, researchers report April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results, based on standardized intelligence testing of more than 10,000 people in Wisconsin followed since their senior year of high school in 1957, challenge the idea that typical fluoridation levels in public drinking water pose a neurodevelopmental risk, a central point of contention in ongoing policy debates.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-04-02T19:39:38+00:00

When periodical cicadas surface after years underground, they don’t grope blindly for trees. They head for the shadows, researchers report March 20 in the American Naturalist.

A detailed analysis of Brood XIII cicadas — which spend 17 years developing in subterranean tunnels before emerging all at once — found that newly arrived, wingless nymphs use darkness cues to move with striking precision toward tree trunks.

Across dozens of recorded trajectories, the insects deviated only slightly from the most direct route. “They just zoomed in, marching toward the trees,” says Martha Weiss, an evolutionary ecologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

This near-direct movement, Weiss and her colleagues found, hinges on the cicadas’ ability to detect dark shapes against paler backgrounds in the dim evening light. That cue guides the nymphs to the vertical surfaces they must climb to become winged adults.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-04-02T18:05:00+00:00

More than 539 million years ago, soft, clarinet-shaped animals anchored themselves to the seafloor on disc-shaped bases, swaying alongside stalked animals resembling worms and baskets. These woodwindlike creatures are just a few of those coming to life from a treasure trove of newly discovered fossils in southwestern China.

It’s surprising to see some of these weird creatures this far back in the fossil record, and their discovery is unearthing crucial new details about one of the most notable explosions in the diversity of animals in fossil history, researchers report April 2 in Science.

“This paper is absolutely fascinating,” says paleontologist Emily Mitchell at the University of Cambridge. “It provides vital insights into life around the end of the Ediacaran Period.”

The Ediacaran preceded a pivotal moment in animal prehistory called the Cambrian explosion, which started around 539 million years ago and marked a dramatic and rapid diversification, an “explosion” of physical forms and complexity. How that explosion happened isn’t clear. Fossils from the late Ediacaran Period, from 575 million to 539 million years ago, show this is when the first unambiguous animal fossils appear but don’t offer many details about the animals’ bodies or biology. Many of the Cambrian animal groups also do not appear in the Ediacaran record, suggesting that Cambrian animal diversity may have exploded from only a small number of species.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-04-01T19:03:29+00:00

A stunningly preserved fossil shows that early relatives of spiders and scorpions were already armed with their hallmark front claws about half a billion years ago.

The newly described animal preserves the oldest clear example yet found of these specialized appendages, paleontologist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and colleagues report April 1 in Nature. The find helps settle a long-standing debate over how the claws evolved and shows that chelicerates — the group that today includes horseshoe crabs, ticks and daddy longlegs — had already taken on a surprisingly modern body plan.

“This creature is super-modern in anatomy for an animal that is 500 million years old,” says Lerosey-Aubril, of Harvard University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-03-26T18:23:15+00:00

It takes a village to deliver a whale calf.

The birth of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) has been captured on camera in more intimate detail than ever before, researchers report March 26 in Science. The female sperm whale giving birth was aided by 10 other sperm whales, almost all female, but not all kin. The footage makes clear that, like humans, sperm whales benefit from cooperation, so much so that the instinct to help transcends family barriers.

“Not only did we capture such an amazing dataset, but we actually knew each of these whales,” says marine biologist David Gruber with Project CETI, a nonprofit based in the Caribbean island Dominica dedicated to sperm whale research. That made it possible to tease out the role of each whale in the birthing process.

Observing the birth of a whale is extremely rare, and there have been only a handful of scientific studies that describe a sperm whale birth. While scientists had seen sperm whales helping each other during birth before, none of those accounts were recorded on video.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-03-26T18:13:08+00:00

Modern apes may have swung into existence in North Africa or the Middle East.
New fossil findings — published March 26 in Science — unveil Masripithecus, a roughly 17-million-year-old early ape that lived in what is now Egypt.

The discovery expands the earliest ancestry of primates like gibbons, chimpanzees and humans beyond East Africa. That’s where the vast majority of the fossil evidence for early apes came from until now, says paleontologist Shorouq Al-Ashqar at Mansoura University in Egypt.

“The entire story [of early ape evolution] was told by only a small corner of the continent,” she says. Fossil monkeys from North Africa and the Middle East have been dated to this same prehistoric timing of the Early Miocene sub-epoch, up to around 20 million years ago. But no apes, says Al-Ashqar. Al-Ashqar and her colleagues were curious if there were lost fossil apes in the region.

So, in 2021, they started a project looking for ape fossils at Wadi Moghra, a fossil hot spot in northern Egypt. There, in 2024, Al-Ashqar discovered something unusual underfoot. “I found a piece of [lower jaw] with a wisdom tooth,” she says. “I immediately realized that it was an ape.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Ten-Year Club	Verified Email
Wearing is Caring	100 Awards Club

Science_News

TROPHY CASE

Welcome to Reddit,