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ScienceInsider retweeted
Do you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYour PhD competition? We want you to top last year’s winning entry from a scientist who translated physics’ piezoelectric effect into dance.
Submit your entry by 29 January 2027: scim.ag/4i5WelJ
ScienceInsider retweeted
Do you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYour PhD competition? We want you to top last year’s winning entry from a scientist who translated physics’ piezoelectric effect into dance.
Submit your entry by 29 January 2027: scim.ag/4i5WelJ
ScienceInsider retweeted
A Massachusetts jury has awarded biologist David Sabatini $6 million—plus interest—in damages in his defamation case against Kristin Knouse, a former colleague at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
The physician-scientist’s claims led one research institution to fire Sabatini and precipitated his resignations from Whitehead and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a tenured faculty member.
Read more: scim.ag/4jxig3b
ALT Biologist David Sabatini wins $6 million in defamation lawsuit A jury ruled in favor of the former Whitehead Institute scientist, dismissing accuser’s claims of sexual harassment and retaliation
ScienceInsider retweeted
A dump of 722 AI-generated papers has mathematicians wondering: Has their field been decimated or invigorated?
Read more: scim.ag/4jXnLbu
ALT Title: "OpenAI just changed math forever. Exactly how, no one yet knows."
ScienceInsider retweeted
A lavish 1919 dinner party that ended up killing five people. An attempt to save the canning industry in the 1920s. A World War II biological weapons program and a CIA plot against Fidel Castro. A cosmetic product, best known as Botox, that erases facial wrinkles and exploded into a multibillion-dollar business.
A new analysis of more than 1000 bacterial genomes connects these disparate episodes in U.S. history in a piece of microbiological detective work. Detailed in a new paper, the study shows how scientists unwittingly triggered the evolution of a dangerous bacterium into one with major medical and commercial advantages.
Learn more: scim.ag/4yuuayu
ALT Botox was born by domesticating a killer bacterium Genome analysis shows how decades of lab cultivation turned C. botulinum, the canned food killer, into a potent tool for medicine and the beauty industry
ScienceInsider retweeted
Uranium cubes recovered from Nazi Germany’s nuclear program have helped reveal how far its scientists were from building a working reactor. scim.ag/4xY3iHa
ScienceInsider retweeted
All or almost all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their heart, astronomers suspect. But when galaxies merge, do their black holes do the same?
Simulations suggest the answer is not always: Sometimes, one of the two escapes the gravitational clutches of the merged galaxy, wandering the cosmos as an exile.
Now, a research team has found long-sought evidence of a supermassive black hole with very few stars around it that appears to have slipped the leash after a galactic mashup.
Learn more: scim.ag/4hAIUal
ALT Clear sighting of ‘wandering’ black hole reveals escapee from galaxy merger
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Within 2 weeks in September 2017, a pair of hurricanes blasted the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. The storms spelled disaster for the island’s human and nonhuman residents alike, including small lizards known as silver key anoles.
But some of the islands’ anoles endured the storms better than others—and now scientists have uncovered a possible reason why in their genes.
Learn more: scim.ag/4vRsAFG
ALT Gene may help lizards get a grip in hurricane-force winds “Huge” new study of Caribbean anole populations catches evolution in real time
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About 14,700 years ago, a large cat hobbled through what is now the heart of Los Angeles, toward the panicked cries of a camel trapped in tar. But as the fearsome feline approached the hapless herbivore, it, too, became ensnared in the pit of burbling oil—condemning itself to a similar fate.
Why were these saber-toothed felines drawn to the pits? One reason, researchers now suggest, is that picking off trapped prey may have been the cats’ only reliable way to hunt: Many had hampered mobility, a side effect of heritable deformities and rare nerve tumors brought on by generations of inbreeding.
This research provides one of the first direct indicators of how North America’s megafauna suffered the consequences of population decline through the end of the last ice age.
Learn more: scim.ag/4x3PTgs
ALT Saber-toothed cats became inbred—and struggled to move—before they went extinct
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Peptide enthusiasts—including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—might soon be able to buy the controversial products more easily from regulated sources. scim.ag/4fkMeVN
ScienceInsider retweeted
About a decade ago, a baker in a small mountainous village in southern Austria noticed his cow doing something unusual. When Veronika had an itch, she would grab a stick in her mouth and use it to scratch her body. Over the years, the brown bovid’s technique improved. She could pick up objects as large as a broom or rake and move them around with her prehensile tongue, changing their length and orientation to ensure the best possible scratch.
The behavior isn’t just a clever trick: It’s the first documented case of tool use in cattle, scientists report.
And, it turns out, one of Veronika’s skills has only been seen in humans and chimpanzees. Learn more: scim.ag/3LHywjF
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The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard has become a key outpost for Arctic science. But geopolitical tensions are complicating research efforts. #LongReads scim.ag/3QT8Gvu
ScienceInsider retweeted
It’s just a microscopic water droplet surrounded by a fatty membrane and stuffed with chemicals and snippets of DNA encoding a mere 36 genes.
But it’s also arguably the closest researchers have come to building a living cell from scratch.
Learn more: scim.ag/4eS5JmR
ALT Lab-created ‘SpudCell’ marks ‘stunning’ step toward building life from scratch A synthetic cell can now grow and divide—but it’s still far from alive
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The new president of @theNASciences, @NeilShubin, sat down with ScienceInsider to discuss the current political landscape, the state of U.S. science, and the challenges facing NASEM. scim.ag/4gQk85E
ScienceInsider retweeted
Neanderthals survived for hundreds of thousands of years in Eurasia, enduring ice ages and eking out a hardscrabble living hunting woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses and harvesting edible grasses, tubers, and legumes. Why they ultimately perished has long been a mystery.
New research appears to strike out a leading hypothesis: that they succumbed to harmful mutations brought on by inbreeding within tiny, isolated populations.
Analyzing 27 high-quality Neanderthal genomes from Western Europe, researchers find that at the tail end of their existence approximately 45,000 years ago, our close evolutionary cousins were genetically healthy and appear to have lived in large, well-connected groups.
Learn more: scim.ag/3SJsUsb @NewsfromScience
ScienceInsider retweeted
The NIH expects to make up for a grantmaking lag and spend its full budget by 30 September. But because it plans to fund many multiyear grants up front as a lump sum, the agency will likely award fewer new grants and competitive renewals. scim.ag/3QLuVng
ScienceInsider retweeted
After the tumultuous Fable 5 takedown, scientists fear #AI safety rules could reshape open research. scim.ag/4vpeV9l
ScienceInsider retweeted
Exclusive: The National Science Foundation is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by roughly 20% to 30%, even though its overall budget is down just 3%. scim.ag/4gFf2Jk
ScienceInsider retweeted
An Ecuadorian biologist says his mission is to save the country’s ecosystems. But critics accuse him of misconduct, mishandling animals, and distorting biodiversity science in the process.For more than a year, I investigated him for @NewsfromScience 🧵science.org/content/article/…
ScienceInsider retweeted
Herpetologist Alejandro Arteaga has won accolades for his efforts to identify and protect Ecuador’s reptiles and amphibians. But his methods have entangled him in controversy. #LongReads scim.ag/4doSmtJ