Denisovan Genes Help Protect Papua New Guinea Inhabitants from Infections

The genes of Denisovans, an ancient human species, are helping the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea fight infections.

Isolated for millennia, the island's inhabitants lived under extremely harsh conditions, making them a "fantastic cocktail" for studying genetic adaptation. Modern humans arrived in Papua New Guinea from Africa around 50,000 years ago and interbred with Denisovans, who had lived in Asia for tens of thousands of years.

Today, the people of Papua New Guinea carry up to 5% Denisovan DNA in their genomes. Scientists analyzed the genomes of 54 highlanders from Mount Wilhelm, living at elevations between 2300 and 2700 meters, and 74 lowland residents from Daru Island.

They discovered that mutations likely inherited from Denisovans increase the number of immune cells in the blood of lowlanders. Denisovan gene variants influence the function of a protein called GBP2, which helps the body combat pathogens found at low altitudes, such as the malaria parasite. Meanwhile, highlanders developed mutations that increase the number of red blood cells, helping to reduce hypoxia.

@science
#science #news #biology

🔬 Incredible Journey of a Red Blood Cell

Captured by a scanning electron microscope and magnified 9000 times, this image showcases a red blood cell squeezing through a capillary. The intricate details, brought to life through colorization, reveal the remarkable flexibility and resilience of our body's tiny couriers of oxygen.

@science #Science #Microscopy #Biology #RedBloodCells

A Strange Spider Within a Spider: Cyclosa’s Astonishing Decoy

Something large and bizarre, seemingly assembled from whatever was available – web threads, debris, and remnants – isn’t a creature of nightmares. It’s a decoy.

The real spider, much smaller (only about 5 mm), hides beneath the “abdomen” of its intimidating counterpart.

These clever decoys are crafted by spiders of the Cyclosa genus from the orb-weaver family (Araneidae). Typically, the real spider positions itself on the edge of the web, subtly pulling on the silk threads. This causes the fake spider to move, creating the illusion of a living, menacing predator from afar.

The decoy itself is a masterpiece of recycling. Cyclosa spiders construct it from leaf fragments, leftover egg sacs, and the desiccated bodies of previous victims. These creations serve as a diversion, tricking predators like paper wasps, birds, or lizards into attacking the decoy instead of the spider. This distraction gives the real spider precious time to escape.

There’s also a hypothesis that these web decorations attract more prey. Organic debris on the web hosts yeast-like fungi, which release chemicals that lure insects into the trap, increasing Cyclosa’s hunting success.

#Science #Biology #Arachnology #Spiders #Nature #Evolution #Insects #Survival #Decoy

Why do cats always land on their feet? The physics of a feline free-fall.

🐾 You’ve probably marveled at a cat’s incredible ability to land on all four paws, no matter how they fall. It’s not magic—it’s a brilliant combination of physics and feline anatomy.

🤸‍♀️ This ability is called the righting reflex, and it starts developing in kittens as early as 3–4 weeks old, becoming fully refined by 7 weeks. So what exactly happens mid-air?

1️⃣ Figuring out up from down: First, the cat uses its inner “gyroscope” (the vestibular system in its inner ear) to detect which way is down.

2️⃣ Rotating in parts: Here’s the fascinating part—cats don’t rotate their whole body at once. Instead, they twist different parts independently, which helps them bypass the law of conservation of angular momentum (which states that a body can’t start spinning without an external force). They do it like this:
• First, they turn their head, followed by the front half of the body, tucking in their front legs to reduce rotational inertia and spin faster.
• Then, they stretch out their front legs while tucking in the hind legs, twisting the rear half of the body in the opposite direction. The tail (if present) helps with balance, but even tailless cats manage just fine!

3️⃣ Flexibility is key: Cats have extremely flexible spines (more vertebrae than humans, and more mobile ones), and no collarbone—this allows for complex mid-air twists and turns.

4️⃣ Landing prep: Once aligned, cats arch their backs to absorb the impact and stretch their legs down to act as shock absorbers.

🤯 So, a cat is unknowingly applying advanced physics every time it falls! It’s a perfect example of evolution fine-tuning natural survival mechanisms.

What other animal superpowers amaze you and feel almost magical? ✨ Share in the comments below! 👇

Hashtags: #science #howitworks #physics #biology #cats #animals

🦜 Parrots Don't Just Mimic — They Use Names Like Humans Do, a Massive Study Confirms

For decades, we've known parrots can mimic human speech with uncanny precision. But a new study suggests something far more remarkable: they may actually understand and use names the way humans do — assigning specific vocal labels to specific individuals, and using them flexibly in social situations.

Researchers from the University of Northern Colorado, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Vienna analyzed recordings and survey data from nearly 900 captive parrots through the ManyParrots project, a global research network studying parrot cognition.

Out of 413 audio clips submitted by parrot owners, 88 showed clear evidence of birds using names as labels for specific people or animals — not just mimicking sounds, but deploying them in context-appropriate ways.

The team found that parrots don't just categorize broadly ("that's a person"). They can zero in on one specific individual. Some birds even used names to refer to someone who wasn't physically present — a cognitive leap that requires holding an abstract representation of another being in mind.

At the same time, parrots showed their own quirky twists: some would say their own name simply to attract attention, a behavior humans rarely exhibit.

• Nearly half of 889 surveyed parrot owners reported their birds using names
• 88 of 413 audio clips showed parrots labeling specific people or animals
• Parrots can refer to individuals who aren't present — a sign of abstract thinking
• Some birds use their own name as an attention-getting call, unlike humans
• The ability spans multiple parrot species, not just famous talkers like African Greys

While dolphins use signature whistles and some primates have distinct alarm calls, no previous study had shown such a diverse group of animals producing and flexibly using proper names under human linguistic conventions. It challenges our assumptions about what makes human language unique — and suggests the cognitive building blocks of naming may be more widespread than we ever imagined.

If a parrot can hold an abstract name for someone who isn't even in the room, what else is going on in that feathered brain?

📄 Original paper (PLOS ONE) · SciTechDaily summary

#AnimalCognition #Parrots #Language #Biology #PLOSONE #science

🐝 What If Queen Bees Aren’t Made by Royal Jelly Alone?

For decades, the textbook story sounded simple: feed an ordinary honeybee larva royal jelly, and it becomes a queen.

A new study in Nature suggests the real story is far more sophisticated.

Researchers found that future queens are not just fed differently — they are raised inside specially engineered “royal cribs”: peanut-shaped queen cells built from unusual wax, kept warmer and more humid, and maintained by dedicated young worker bees.

These queen cells are not passive containers. Their wax is physically and chemically distinct from ordinary worker-cell wax: softer, less dense, more flexible, and better at holding heat and moisture. In other words, the nursery itself helps shape development.

The key experiment was simple but powerful. Scientists raised queen-destined larvae with the same royal jelly, but changed the wax environment. Larvae exposed to ordinary worker-cell wax were more likely to die and developed into smaller, weaker queens.

So royal jelly matters — but it is not the whole mechanism.

🔹 Queen development depends on diet + architecture + microclimate
🔹 Queen-cell wax is chemically and physically different from ordinary comb wax
🔹 Young “queen cell builders” appear specially adapted to construct and maintain these royal nurseries
🔹 Extra warmth may help queens mature faster: about 16 days vs about 21 days for workers
🔹 Similar patterns were found in western and eastern honeybees, suggesting deep evolutionary roots

Important caveat: this study focused on honeybees, not all social insects. And scientists still need to identify exactly which physical or chemical features of the wax are doing the biological work.

Still, the implication is fascinating: development is not shaped by genes and nutrition alone. Built environments — even tiny wax chambers — can influence what an organism becomes.

If a wax cradle can help decide the fate of a future queen, what other biological outcomes are being shaped by structures we barely notice?

📄 Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10534-3

#Science #Biology #Bees #Nature #Entomology

👁️ Your Eyes May Have Evolved From an Ancient “Cyclops” Organ

Every vertebrate eye — including yours — may trace its origins to a single light-sensitive organ that sat in the middle of the head of a distant ancestor nearly 600 million years ago.

In a new Current Biology study, researchers from Lund University and the University of Sussex propose that an early worm-like ancestor lost its paired eyes after adopting a sedentary lifestyle. What remained was a simple median light-sensitive organ.

Millions of years later, as its descendants became active swimmers, evolution may have repurposed this central organ to form the paired retinas of vertebrates. The same ancestral system also appears to have given rise to the pineal gland, which today regulates our circadian rhythms and melatonin production.

If correct, this model could explain why vertebrate eyes are fundamentally different from those of insects and squid — and why the systems controlling vision and sleep may share a common evolutionary origin.

One important caveat: this is an evolutionary reconstruction, supported by anatomy, developmental biology, and neuroscience, rather than the discovery of a fossil “cyclops.”

📄 Paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01676-8

#Evolution #Biology #Vision #Neuroscience #Science

🪱 Animals Have Been Eating Nature’s “Bioplastic” for Millions of Years

Long before humans invented biodegradable plastics, bacteria were already making their own.

Many microorganisms produce compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs — natural polyester-like materials that they store inside their cells as reserves of carbon and energy. Scientists had long assumed that breaking down these microbial plastics was essentially a job for microorganisms themselves.

Then researchers studied a very strange animal: Olavius algarvensis, a tiny marine worm with no mouth and no gut. It survives by hosting bacteria beneath its skin and digesting them for nutrition. Some of those bacteria store as much as 42% of their cellular carbon in PHA.

The researchers discovered that the worm produces its own enzyme capable of breaking PHA into smaller molecules it can use. And it is not alone. Related enzymes turned up in more than 66 animal species across nine major animal groups, including sponges, starfish, earthworms and springtails. Laboratory experiments confirmed that enzymes from several distantly related animals really can degrade PHA.

The finding reveals a previously overlooked route through which carbon stored by microbes enters animal food webs — and suggests animals may have been consuming nature’s original bioplastics for hundreds of millions of years.

Humans invented biodegradable plastic.

Evolution apparently invented both the plastic and something to eat it.

#Biology #Evolution #Bioplastic #Ecology #Microbiology #Science

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03153-8

🧬 Scientists Just Found a Hidden Layer of the Mammalian Genome

Our genes may be considerably more combinatorial than we realized.

Researchers have discovered that mammalian cells can take pieces of RNA copied from completely different genes — sometimes located on different chromosomes — and splice them together into a single messenger RNA. That hybrid RNA can then be used to manufacture a new protein containing parts encoded by both genes.

Using direct RNA sequencing, the team detected more than 30,000 candidate chimeric RNAs in mouse immune cells and more than 900 in human macrophages. Crucially, they then showed that at least one of these strange hybrids is not biological noise.

In mice, an inflammatory response causes two genes called Gsdmd and Tmem106a to combine into a chimeric RNA. Its resulting hybrid protein helps accelerate pyroptosis — the dramatic process in which infected immune cells rupture and release inflammatory signals. When researchers specifically blocked the hybrid protein, the mice became worse at controlling Salmonella infection. But they were also dramatically more resistant to lethal inflammation in a sepsis model.

Even stranger, inflammation appears to physically reorganize the genome: normally distant chromosome regions move closer together inside the nucleus, helping their RNA transcripts combine.

There is a major caveat. The detailed functional experiments were performed in mice. Similar chimeric RNAs exist in human immune cells, but scientists have not yet established what most of them do. The researchers themselves say it could take years to map their biological importance.

Still, if the phenomenon is widespread, our current catalogue of proteins may be missing an entire class of molecules hiding in combinations of genes we already thought we understood.

We finished sequencing the human genome more than two decades ago.

Apparently, reading the instruction manual was another problem entirely.

#Genetics #Biology #RNA #Genome #Immunology #Biotechnology #Science

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10982-x

🧬 An AI Just Made a Biological Discovery

Not summarized a paper.
Not predicted a protein structure.

Found something in nature that scientists apparently hadn’t noticed before.

Researchers gave Claude AI agents a relatively broad task: search enormous DNA databases for unusual reverse transcriptases — enzymes that copy RNA into DNA.

Then they mostly stepped aside.

About 950 AI agents spent 21 hours analyzing more than 200,000 enzymes, narrowing them to 3,500 candidate systems and eventually 20 especially interesting ones.

One agent noticed something strange.

Next to a reverse transcriptase gene in a bacteriophage — a virus that infects bacteria — it found a long, organized array of repeating DNA sequences.

The pattern looked oddly familiar.

It resembled the repeat architecture of CRISPR.

Claude investigated the sequence, measured the repeats, compared them with known systems and searched the scientific literature. It concluded that the combination appeared to represent a previously uncharacterized biological system.

Human scientists then took over in the laboratory.

Their initial experiments supported a key prediction: the mysterious DNA array is actually expressed into multiple short RNA molecules.

The researchers named the system ART — array-associated reverse transcriptases.

And this is where the story gets interesting.

CRISPR also contains arrays that generate short RNAs, which ultimately help make the system programmable. Several other recently discovered molecular systems with similar combinations of features can cut, copy or insert genetic material.

But an important warning: nobody yet knows what ART actually does.

This is an early preprint, not a peer-reviewed discovery, and there is currently no evidence that ART is a new gene-editing system. Experiments are still underway to determine its biological function.

The bigger story may therefore be Claude itself.

For decades, biological discovery depended partly on humans noticing something strange hidden inside enormous datasets.

Now we may have machines capable of doing the noticing.

What happens when thousands — or millions — of AI scientists start searching nature simultaneously?

#AI #Biology #CRISPR #Genetics #Biotechnology #Claude #Science

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-discovers-novel-enzyme-system

🔬 An AI Scientist Just Made a Discovery by Running Its Own Lab Experiments

We’ve seen AI write scientific papers.

We’ve seen it predict proteins and search enormous biological databases.

This is different.

Researchers built a closed-loop AI scientist connected to a physical laboratory. It can generate a hypothesis, design an experiment, turn that experiment into instructions for laboratory automation, analyze the resulting data — and then decide what to investigate next.

The system was given knowledge about Saccharomyces cerevisiae — ordinary baker’s yeast — including roughly 60,000 known biological relationships involving its metabolism, physiology and phenotype.

From these, it generated 1,933 testable hypotheses about how different compounds might affect yeast growth under stress.

Then came the important part:

the hypotheses met reality.

The system selected experiments and controls, converted them into machine-readable laboratory procedures and analyzed the resulting biological data. Some predictions worked.

Others failed.

And one failure produced the most interesting result.

The AI initially predicted that glutamate might protect yeast from formic-acid stress.

The experiment contradicted it.

Instead of simply recording “wrong,” the system analyzed the new metabolomic data, searched for another explanation and identified aminoadipate, a molecule involved in lysine metabolism, as a candidate.

It formulated a new hypothesis.

The lab tested it.

And aminoadipate did improve yeast growth under formic-acid stress — by about 7% for each millimolar increase in the experiment. The researchers report this as a previously unknown protective interaction.

There is an important caveat.

This was not a completely autonomous robot scientist. Humans defined the research domain and safety boundaries, moved some physical samples between instruments and supplied the overall experimental infrastructure. The biological questions were also relatively narrow yeast-metabolism problems — not Nobel-level discoveries.

But something important has happened.

AI has already become very good at generating hypotheses from existing information.

Now the loop can close:

Hypothesis → physical experiment → unexpected result → new hypothesis → new experiment.

That is no longer just AI analyzing science.

It is AI participating in the scientific method.

What happens when systems like this can run 10,000 experiments while a human scientist sleeps?

#AI #Science #Biology #Robotics #Biotechnology #Automation #Research

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2026.0043