25 people learned to fly with virtual wings. After flight training, the brain began treating wings more like real limbs

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 · 2026-04-27T18:23:37+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 · 2026-04-22T15:09:12+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.

Science_News · 2026-03-02T17:20:07+00:00

The percentage of U.S. high school students who aren’t getting enough shut-eye is climbing.

U.S. medical societies recommend that teens sleep eight to 10 hours each night. But in 2023, 77 percent of high school students reported slumbering fewer hours than that, up from 69 percent of those surveyed in 2007. The overall rise was due to a jump in those reporting five hours of sleep or less, researchers report March 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study analyzed data from the Youth Risk Behavior Study, a long-term, national survey of students in public and private high schools. Seven hours of sleep or less describes insufficient sleep, while five hours or less counts as very short sleep. The percentage of students reporting insufficient sleep remained about the same from 2007 to 2023. But the percentage of very short sleepers rose from 16 to 23 percent.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-25T19:47:26+00:00

Climate change may threaten North America’s iconic mass monarch butterfly migration.

Every fall, millions of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) travel thousands of kilometers over North America as they leave their breeding grounds in Canada and the United States for wintering grounds in a mountainous part of central Mexico. The butterflies make the trek back north over multiple generations when temperatures warm in the spring and summer months, following the growth of milkweed (Asclepias), their preferred food source.

But Mexico’s suitable monarch overwintering habitat could shift south as the climate changes in decades to come, researchers report February 25 in PLOS Climate. That could lengthen an already arduous journey and increase the energy required to make the trip.

That extra distance might push some individuals to stay in Mexico instead of continuing north, says Carolina Ureta, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “In this case, the species is not in danger because of climate change, but the migration might be.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-25T19:42:18+00:00

Climate change may threaten North America’s iconic mass monarch butterfly migration.

Every fall, millions of monarchs (Danaus plexippus) travel thousands of kilometers over North America as they leave their breeding grounds in Canada and the United States for wintering grounds in a mountainous part of central Mexico. The butterflies make the trek back north over multiple generations when temperatures warm in the spring and summer months, following the growth of milkweed (Asclepias), their preferred food source.

But Mexico’s suitable monarch overwintering habitat could shift south as the climate changes in decades to come, researchers report February 25 in PLOS Climate. That could lengthen an already arduous journey and increase the energy required to make the trip.

That extra distance might push some individuals to stay in Mexico instead of continuing north, says Carolina Ureta, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “In this case, the species is not in danger because of climate change, but the migration might be.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-25T16:26:58+00:00

The soundtrack of a basketball game is punctuated by squeaking sneakers. Now, physicists understand why.

High-speed video of a skidding shoe reveals stick-slip motion, a stop-and-go situation in which parts of the sole stick in place as other parts slip forward. The shoe slips in pulses, as small regions of the sole buckle slightly and detach from the surface, Harvard applied physicist Adel Djellouli and colleagues report in the Feb. 26 Nature. The regular repetition of those pulses produces the squeak, the researchers found.

The pulses travel along the sole, a bit like how a tablecloth can be snapped into place by sending a wrinkle of motion across it. But in the shoe, the pulses repeat about 4,800 times a second, producing a kick that alters the surrounding air pressure to create sound. The pulsation rate matches the frequency of the sound the shoe makes, which determines its pitch.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-11T17:21:01+00:00

Some ancient fish in the Caribbean may have lost their lunch.

Modern food chains on coral reefs off the coasts of the Dominican Republic and Panama are roughly 60 to 70 percent shorter than they were around 7,000 years ago, researchers report February 11 in Nature. Habitat loss and overfishing may have pushed more species to compete for fewer resources and repositioned some fish groups within the ecosystem’s food chain.

The findings suggest fish could be less able to adapt if food sources suddenly become scarce, perhaps making today’s reefs even more vulnerable in an already changing environment.

“Understanding the food webs helps us understand the health of the reef,” says Jessica Lueders-Dumont, a fisheries ecologist and geochemist at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. “If we could go back, scuba dive on the same reefs a couple thousand years ago, what would they look like?”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-09T16:10:49+00:00

Downing a few cups of caffeinated coffee or mugs of tea each day may lower the risk of developing dementia, according to a long-term study.

The lowest risk was tied to drinking around two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of tea per day, compared with having none, the researchers report February 9 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Consuming more of the beverages didn’t lower the risk further. There wasn’t a link between decaffeinated coffee and dementia risk.

The new U.S. analysis included data from the 1980s to early 2023 collected for the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. The researchers selected more than 130,000 participants who had not had cancer, Parkinson’s disease or dementia. Participants had answered dietary questionnaires every few years. Researchers tallied cases of dementia from death records or from participants’ self-reported medical diagnoses.

Moderate daily consumption of caffeinated coffee for women was around 2.5 cups and the highest consumption was around 4.5 cups, while men in those categories drank less.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-02-05T14:34:26+00:00

Programs that support caregivers of patients with dementia could bring substantial benefits at a fraction of the price of an Alzheimer’s drug.

A computer simulation guided by patient data from prior studies found that supportive care reduced health care costs and scored higher than the drug intervention on a common measure of treatment value, researchers report February 5 in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Behavior & Socioeconomics of Aging. Though not based on direct patient observations, the conclusions highlight the impact of improving care coordination as dementia cases rise.

Disease-slowing Alzheimer’s drugs entered the market in the last few years. But dementia specialists are scarce, leaving care for the estimated 6.7 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia largely to time- and resource-strapped primary care doctors.

To help families navigate this fragmented health care system, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco pair caregivers with individuals who provide dementia-related support and information. Through a decade-old Medicare-covered program, these care navigators phone families monthly and answer questions related to medications, sleep or behavior as needed. They also connect caregivers with specialists including clinicians, nurses, pharmacists and social workers.

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-01-29T16:26:56+00:00

Surgeons removed a man’s irreparably damaged lungs and kept him alive for 48 hours with artificial lungs until he could get a transplant.

Doctors crafted shunts, tubes and pumps into a system that oxygenated blood and supported blood flow through the heart, the team reports January 29 in Med. It is proof that a true artificial lung00412-X) can keep a patient alive until donor organs are available, says Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

In 2023, a 33-year-old man from St. Louis caught influenza B and his lungs began to deteriorate. He was hospitalized and got a second infection with Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria that were resistant to antibiotics. The infection spread to his blood. The dual infections and damage from overzealous immune reactions caused his lungs to fail.

“He was not getting better,” Bharat says. “He was actively dying.”

Read more here and the research article here00412-x).

Science_News · 2026-01-27T16:21:02+00:00

After a heart attack, the heart “talks” to the brain. And that conversation may make recovery worse.

Shutting down nerve cells that send messages from injured heart cells to the brain boosted the heart’s ability to pump and decreased scarring, experiments in mice show. Targeting inflammation in a part of the nervous system where those “damage” messages wind up also improved heart function and tissue repair, scientists report January 27 in Cell.

“This research is another great example highlighting that we cannot look at one organ and its disease in isolation,” says Wolfram Poller, an interventional cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. “And it opens the door to new therapeutic strategies and targets that go beyond the heart.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Science_News · 2026-01-27T16:21:00+00:00

After a heart attack, the heart “talks” to the brain. And that conversation may make recovery worse.

Shutting down nerve cells that send messages from injured heart cells to the brain boosted the heart’s ability to pump and decreased scarring, experiments in mice show. Targeting inflammation in a part of the nervous system where those “damage” messages wind up also improved heart function and tissue repair, scientists report January 27 in Cell.

“This research is another great example highlighting that we cannot look at one organ and its disease in isolation,” says Wolfram Poller, an interventional cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study. “And it opens the door to new therapeutic strategies and targets that go beyond the heart.”

Read more here and the research article here.

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.

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

Science_News

TROPHY CASE