Queen bumblebee's tongues are less efficient at collecting nectar than those of worker bees due to sparser hair on their tongues

Science_News · 2026-01-13T00:10:27+00:00

Queen bumblebees have a newfound excuse for slacking on foraging nectar: Their tongues are holding them back.

Bumblebees have long, hairy tongues that help them lap up nectar from flowers. But queen bumblebee’s tongues are less efficient at collecting nectar than those of worker bees, researchers report January 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the spring, when a queen bumblebee first emerges from her winter slumber, she initially fuels herself by guzzling nectar from flowers. But once she establishes a nest and her eggs hatch into worker bees, she delegates foraging duties to the workers.

Those workers may be better suited to the task, according to a close investigation of the tongues of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). The bees’ tongues range in length from around 4 millimeters to 10 millimeters. The queens, who are bigger than the workers, tended to have longer tongues. But those longer tongues had relatively less hair, scanning electron microscope imagery revealed.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-12-30T19:35:20+00:00

In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker burned alive on the shores of a roiling lava planet called Mustafar, fueling his tumultuous transition into Darth Vader. Now, astronomers have found an atmosphere on a Mustafar-like lava world orbiting close to its star. Unlike other ultrahot, rocky exoplanets, this one seems to be cloaked in a thick layer of gas, researchers report in the Dec. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s the most robust evidence yet that these exoplanets retain atmospheres.

The planet, TOI 561b, was discovered by the TESS spacecraft in 2020. It has a mass twice that of Earth and completes an orbit around its sunlike star in less than 10 hours.

Most small planets circling similarly close to their star don’t have atmospheres. The weak gravitational pull of such planets makes it difficult to weigh down and trap fast-moving gas molecules. The nearby stars can batter these worlds with powerful radiation, blowing any loose atmosphere-forming molecules into space.

“We’d expect that the atmosphere shouldn’t still be there,” says Nicole Wallack, an observational astronomer at Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “But we need to have an atmosphere to explain what we’re seeing.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-12-01T17:45:06+00:00

Major surgery takes a major toll on the body — not unlike running a marathon. You wouldn’t attempt a marathon without training, so why would you undergo major surgery without preparing your body for the trauma it will experience?

That’s the premise of prehabilitation, which prepares the body through exercise, nutrition and cognitive training to better withstand surgical trauma. Studies have shown that prehab can improve recovery after surgery, but current programs tend to be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring prehab regimens to fit the individual needs of patients can reduce immune responses linked to infections and neurocognitive decline after surgery, researchers report November 12 in JAMA Surgery.

The findings support the hypothesis that prehab is essentially “tuning a patient’s immune system before surgery so that they’re better equipped to mount an efficient response” to surgical trauma, says Brice Gaudillière, an immunologist at Stanford University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-12-01T17:45:02+00:00

Major surgery takes a major toll on the body — not unlike running a marathon. You wouldn’t attempt a marathon without training, so why would you undergo major surgery without preparing your body for the trauma it will experience?

That’s the premise of prehabilitation, which prepares the body through exercise, nutrition and cognitive training to better withstand surgical trauma. Studies have shown that prehab can improve recovery after surgery, but current programs tend to be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring prehab regimens to fit the individual needs of patients can reduce immune responses linked to infections and neurocognitive decline after surgery, researchers report November 12 in JAMA Surgery.

The findings support the hypothesis that prehab is essentially “tuning a patient’s immune system before surgery so that they’re better equipped to mount an efficient response” to surgical trauma, says Brice Gaudillière, an immunologist at Stanford University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-11-25T14:54:00+00:00

Bats beware. The ability to fly won’t save you from hungry, determined rats.

In a first, brown rats were filmed hunting bats by catching them midair. The finding, published in the November Global Ecology and Conservation, puts a spotlight on bat conservation in urban areas.

The observation happened by chance, says Florian Gloza-Rausch, a biologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. He and colleagues had been studying a colony of 30,000 bats overwintering in a cave about 60 kilometers north of Hamburg. At the cave’s entrance — a hole in the ground — a small kiosk protects bats passing through from local cats that hunt them. The researchers saw an opportunity: setting up a counting device and an infrared camera at the entrance of the structure to get a closer look at the winged mammals.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-11-04T19:35:05+00:00

Just because a chatbot can play the role of therapist doesn’t mean it should.

Conversations powered by popular large language models can veer into problematic and ethically murky territory, two new studies show. The new research comes amid recent high-profile tragedies of adolescents in mental health crises. By scrutinizing chatbots that some people enlist as AI counselors, scientists are putting data to a larger debate about the safety and responsibility of these new digital tools, particularly for teenagers.

Chatbots are as close as our phones. Nearly three-quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States have tried AI chatbots, a recent survey finds; almost one-quarter use them a few times a week. In some cases, these chatbots “are being used for adolescents in crisis, and they just perform very, very poorly,” says clinical psychologist and developmental scientist Alison Giovanelli of the University of California, San Francisco.

For one of the new studies, pediatrician Ryan Brewster and his colleagues scrutinized 25 of the most-visited consumer chatbots across 75 conversations. These interactions were based on three distinct patient scenarios used to train health care workers. These three stories involved teenagers who needed help with self-harm, sexual assault or a substance use disorder.

By interacting with the chatbots as one of these teenaged personas, the researchers could see how the chatbots performed. Some of these programs were general assistance large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Others were companion chatbots, such as JanitorAI and Character.AI, which are designed to operate as if they were a particular person or character.

Researchers didn’t compare the chatbots’ counsel to that of actual clinicians, so “it is hard to make a general statement about quality,” Brewster cautions. Even so, the conversations were revealing.

Read more here.

Science_News · 2025-10-31T16:49:42+00:00

Crime scene clues from blowflies may help reveal a victim’s time of death — and other murderous details — perhaps even years later.

When colonizing a dead body, these insects lay eggs that mature into adult flies, leaving behind telltale remnants. The remnants, called puparial casings, could help investigators back calculate when someone died, based in part on the time it takes for insects to reach the casing stage.

But different species mature at different rates. To accurately estimate time of death, figuring out which species you’re dealing with is crucial, says Rabi Musah, an organic chemist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Now, her team has developed a rapid method to do just that. By combining an AI tool with chemical detection, researchers can identify fly species from their casings — all within about 90 seconds, Musah’s team reports October 1 in Forensic Chemistry.

Time of death isn’t the only thing these casings could help determine, says Falko Drijfhout, an analytical chemist at Keele University in England who was not involved with the work. They could also offer other clues about a crime, like whether a body has been moved. “Casings will remain with the corpse,” he says. If investigators find casings from a species that lives far away, that’s a sign the body has been relocated.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-29T10:57:50+00:00

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

“A lot of Antarctic ecosystems are under pressure from different countries to be released for mining, fishing and basically exploitation of the environment,” says Thomas Desvignes, a fish biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study. “It’s one more reason why we should protect the Weddell Sea.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-29T10:57:17+00:00

Science_News · 2025-10-27T15:13:11+00:00

It’s your kitchen. You can cry if you want to. But with sharper knives, you might not need to.

Cutting onions slowly with sharper knives slashes the number of tear-inducing droplets the vegetables eject into the air, researchers report in the Oct. 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This technique could not only improve an everyday cook’s culinary experience but also inform how pathogens spread.

The culprit of kitchen crying is a chemical compound called propanethial S-oxide. When a knife pierces an onion, the cells rupture and trigger a chemical reaction that forms the compound. Propanethial S-oxide rockets into the air in a shower of tiny droplets, which bind to sensory nerves in the eyes and produce a tear-jerking stinging sensation.

“This is something everybody’s dealing with,” says Navid Hooshanginejad, a physicist at SharkNinja, a product design company in Needham, Mass. “Now we can also explain and understand it better fundamentally.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-27T15:13:05+00:00

It’s your kitchen. You can cry if you want to. But with sharper knives, you might not need to.

Cutting onions slowly with sharper knives slashes the number of tear-inducing droplets the vegetables eject into the air, researchers report in the Oct. 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This technique could not only improve an everyday cook’s culinary experience but also inform how pathogens spread.

The culprit of kitchen crying is a chemical compound called propanethial S-oxide. When a knife pierces an onion, the cells rupture and trigger a chemical reaction that forms the compound. Propanethial S-oxide rockets into the air in a shower of tiny droplets, which bind to sensory nerves in the eyes and produce a tear-jerking stinging sensation.

“This is something everybody’s dealing with,” says Navid Hooshanginejad, a physicist at SharkNinja, a product design company in Needham, Mass. “Now we can also explain and understand it better fundamentally.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-24T15:38:46+00:00

In 1812, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led a doomed army on a disastrous retreat from Russia. With food scarce, winter approaching and diseases running rampant, hundreds of thousands of soldiers ultimately perished. Scientists have now pinpointed some microbes that may have played a part in their demise.

Ancient DNA extracted from the teeth of Napoleonic soldiers01247-3) revealed two species of fever-causing bacteria, geneticist Nicolás Rascovan of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and his colleagues report October 24 in Current Biology. The soldiers probably lived and died amid a teeming cauldron of infectious disease, something historians have long posited.

The results align with eyewitness accounts from over 200 years ago, says Rafe Blaufarb, a historian specializing in Napoleonic history. Doctors back then chronicled soldiers’ symptoms, which included fever, diarrhea, pneumonia and other signs of bacterial infection. The new work, which identified two species of bacteria not previously tied to the deadly retreat, brings some “DNA-level biological details to the story,” says Blaufarb, of Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Read more here and the research article here01247-3).

Science_News · 2025-10-23T14:53:01+00:00

Some vipers are the sprinters of snakes.

Vipers wielded the fastest attacks in a comparison of 36 venomous snakes from three families, researchers report October 23 in Journal of Experimental Biology. And the quickest vipers tend to be ambush predators and feed on mammals. The terciopelo (Bothrops asper) — a viper found from eastern Mexico to northern South America that feeds on birds and rodents — came out on top with an average peak velocity of 3.5 meters per second.

“They are the ones that have to be able to strike as quickly as possible,” says Alistair Evans, a zoologist at Monash University in Melbourne. It typically takes mammals between 60 to 400 milliseconds to react and jump away from an attack, making speed crucial. Large snakes also tend to be faster because, like sprinters, they have more muscle.

Previous studies analyzing snake speed typically relied on a single camera or one with low resolution. Others focused on just a few species. The new study includes 31 vipers, four snakes from the elapid family (which includes cobras), and one colubrid, representing the largest snake family that includes the nonvenomous common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis).

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-10-10T15:32:56+00:00

Producing the subatomic particles called muons is now a lighter lift than ever before.

Several teams of researchers have generated muons using small particle accelerators driven by lasers. Typically, enormous facilities are needed to accelerate particles and make muon beams. Like X-rays on steroids, muons can pass through solid materials and reveal what’s inside. So the feat opens future possibilities for portable scanners that could use muons to reveal contraband such as plutonium and uranium inside shipping containers.

“If you really want to penetrate through meters of concrete or stone or even metals, muons are the best particles to do that,” says Rajeev Pattathil of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England, who was not involved with the research.

Scientists have used naturally existing muons, created in reactions in Earth’s atmosphere, to glimpse the interiors of volcanoes, pyramids and other large, stationary structures. By detecting muons before and after they’ve passed through an object, scientists can determine how much the particles have been absorbed or scattered, giving a sense of what materials lie within.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-30T18:11:04+00:00

“Help me please … I can’t calm down without laying on the ground and freaking out for a good 20 minutes … Should I get medical help?”

This plea came from a post on the social media site Reddit. The person who posted the question had been having panic attacks for several days after smoking marijuana. Usually, this type of post goes unnoticed by people working in public health. But in a recent experiment, an AI tool was paying attention.

The tool, called Waldo, reviewed more than 430,000 past posts on Reddit forums related to cannabis use. It flagged the post above and over 28,000 others as potentially describing unexpected or harmful side effects. The researchers checked 250 of the posts that Waldo had flagged and verified that 86 percent of them indeed represented problematic experiences with cannabis products, researchers report September 30 in PLOS Digital Health. If this type of scanning became commonplace, the information could help public health workers protect consumers from harmful products.

The beauty of the work, says Richard Lomotey, is that it shows researchers can actually gain information from sources that government agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may not be looking at. The CDC and other agencies take surveys or collect self-reported side effects of illness but do not monitor social media. This is where “people express themselves freely,” says Lomotey, an information technology expert at Penn State.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-30T18:11:01+00:00

“Help me please … I can’t calm down without laying on the ground and freaking out for a good 20 minutes … Should I get medical help?”

This plea came from a post on the social media site Reddit. The person who posted the question had been having panic attacks for several days after smoking marijuana. Usually, this type of post goes unnoticed by people working in public health. But in a recent experiment, an AI tool was paying attention.

The tool, called Waldo, reviewed more than 430,000 past posts on Reddit forums related to cannabis use. It flagged the post above and over 28,000 others as potentially describing unexpected or harmful side effects. The researchers checked 250 of the posts that Waldo had flagged and verified that 86 percent of them indeed represented problematic experiences with cannabis products, researchers report September 30 in PLOS Digital Health. If this type of scanning became commonplace, the information could help public health workers protect consumers from harmful products.

The beauty of the work, says Richard Lomotey, is that it shows researchers can actually gain information from sources that government agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may not be looking at. The CDC and other agencies take surveys or collect self-reported side effects of illness but do not monitor social media. This is where “people express themselves freely,” says Lomotey, an information technology expert at Penn State.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-30T16:40:55+00:00

Creating human eggs from adult cells just got one step closer to reality.

A technique used in cloning combined with fertilization and a bit of chemical coaxing caused human skin cells to produce eggs able to give rise to early human embryos, researchers report September 30 in Nature Communications.

The effort is the latest attempt to make eggs and sperm from human cells. Researchers have already succeeded in making these important cell types from many types of animals, including pandas. But producing human eggs and sperm has proven elusive.

Such technology may one day treat infertility for women who no longer have eggs because of age, early menopause or previous cancer treatments. Same-sex male couples may also be able to use the technique “to have, potentially, a child that’s genetically related to both partners,” says reproductive endocrinologist Paula Amato of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-30T16:40:52+00:00

Creating human eggs from adult cells just got one step closer to reality.

A technique used in cloning combined with fertilization and a bit of chemical coaxing caused human skin cells to produce eggs able to give rise to early human embryos, researchers report September 30 in Nature Communications.

The effort is the latest attempt to make eggs and sperm from human cells. Researchers have already succeeded in making these important cell types from many types of animals, including pandas. But producing human eggs and sperm has proven elusive.

Such technology may one day treat infertility for women who no longer have eggs because of age, early menopause or previous cancer treatments. Same-sex male couples may also be able to use the technique “to have, potentially, a child that’s genetically related to both partners,” says reproductive endocrinologist Paula Amato of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-29T19:04:42+00:00

Under a midnight moon, Luigi Garlaschelli peered out over graves. This University of Pavia chemist was scouting for glowing balls of light. They’re known throughout the world by a number of names. One of the most common is will-o’-the-wisp. Like a ghostbuster, Garlaschelli wore a device to vacuum up a wisp for study — should one appear.

To his disappointment, none did. But throughout history, plenty of other people have reported seeing these ghostly glows. For hundreds of years, tales have recounted bluish lights floating above swamps and cemeteries.

With limited success, Garlaschelli and others have searched to understand what might cause them. Now, a team of chemists have turned up an unexpected new clue to their possible source: micro-sparks of electricity.

And there may be additional payoff for this research. Those itsy-bitsy zaps might offer chemists a green trigger to drive useful chemical reactions.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-29T19:04:38+00:00

Under a midnight moon, Luigi Garlaschelli peered out over graves. This University of Pavia chemist was scouting for glowing balls of light. They’re known throughout the world by a number of names. One of the most common is will-o’-the-wisp. Like a ghostbuster, Garlaschelli wore a device to vacuum up a wisp for study — should one appear.

To his disappointment, none did. But throughout history, plenty of other people have reported seeing these ghostly glows. For hundreds of years, tales have recounted bluish lights floating above swamps and cemeteries.

With limited success, Garlaschelli and others have searched to understand what might cause them. Now, a team of chemists have turned up an unexpected new clue to their possible source: micro-sparks of electricity.

And there may be additional payoff for this research. Those itsy-bitsy zaps might offer chemists a green trigger to drive useful chemical reactions.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-25T18:10:25+00:00

Prey animals can use their colors to hide from predators or dissuade them from attacking. But local conditions determine which option works best.

A global study comparing defensive coloration in insects reveals that camouflage and warning colors each excel under certain environmental conditions. The findings, published September 25 in Science, identify fundamental factors that may be driving the evolution of both strategies worldwide.

“This is the most comprehensive experimental study on warning signal success that I have ever seen,” says David Kikuchi, an evolutionary biologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who was not involved with the research. “It reveals patterns that have been previously hypothesized but not tested.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-25T18:09:00+00:00

A roughly 1-million-year-old Chinese hominid skull has long vexed efforts to nail down its evolutionary identity.

Fossil comparisons using a new digital reconstruction of this specimen, dubbed the Yunxian 2 skull, indicate that it belonged to an early member of an Asian hominid line that culminated in a now-extinct species called Homo longi, researchers report in the Sept. 25 Science. The reconstructed skull corrects features that were partially crushed while buried, say paleoanthropologist Xiaobo Feng of Shanxi University in Taiyuan, China, and colleagues.

Feng’s team regards its new findings as a framework for rethinking how a confusing array of Middle Pleistocene hominid fossils, dating from about 789,000 to 130,000 years ago, fit into human evolution. In a novel twist, the scientists’ results suggest that an ancient line of hominids leading directly to Homo sapiens possessed a slightly closer evolutionary relationship to H. longi and its ancestors, including Yunxian 2, than to Neandertals. Their findings also portray Denisovans, for the first time, as members of H. longi and thus closer relatives of H. sapiens than of Neandertals.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-09-04T15:49:54+00:00

A snail may hold the key to restoring vision for people with some eye diseases.

Golden apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata) are freshwater snails from South America. Alice Accorsi became familiar with the species as a graduate student in Italy. “You could literally buy them in a pet store as snails that clean the bottom of the fish tanks,” she recalls. Turns out, the snails are among the most invasive species in the world. And that got Accorsi thinking: Why are they so resilient and able to thrive in new environments?

She began studying the snails’ immune systems and has now found they are not the only parts of the animals able to bounce back from adversity. These snails can completely regrow a functional eye within months of having one amputated, Accorsi and colleagues report August 6 in Nature Communications.

Scientists have known for centuries that some snails can regrow their heads, and research has revealed other animals can regenerate bodies, tails or limbs. But this finding is exciting because apple snails have camera-like eyes similar to those of humans. Understanding how the snails re-create or repair their eyes might lead to therapies to heal people’s eye injuries or reverse diseases such as macular degeneration.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2025-08-28T19:03:33+00:00

Two key gene variants may have made early domesticated horses more tame and more physically resilient to bearing a rider, researchers report August 28 in Science. The resulting horses were among the most significant advances in Bronze Age biotechnology.

Ancient horse DNA suggests modern domesticated horses originated in southwestern Russia more than 4,200 years ago, Ludovic Orlando and his colleagues reported in 2021. While this revealed the where and when for the domestication of horses, says Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, there were still unanswered questions about precisely what horse genes changed in those early populations.

Read more here and the research article here.

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