Category: 7. Science

air pressure: The force exerted by the weight of air molecules. 

Antarctica: A continent mostly covered in ice, which sits in the southernmost part of the world. 

arid: A description of dry areas of the world, where the climate brings too little rainfall or other precipitation to support much plant growth. 

asteroid: A rocky object in orbit around the sun. Most asteroids orbit in a region that falls between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers refer to this region as the asteroid belt. 

astronaut: Someone trained to travel into space for research and exploration. 

astrophysicist: A scientist who works in an area of astronomy that deals with understanding the physical nature of stars and other objects in space. 

atmosphere: The envelope of gases surrounding Earth, another planet or a moon. 

cyanobacteria: A type of bacteria that can convert carbon dioxide into other molecules, including oxygen. 

engineer: A person who uses science and math to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need. 

eruption: (in geoscience) The sudden bursting or spraying of hot material from deep inside a planet or moon and out through its surface. Volcanic eruptions on Earth usually send hot lava, hot gases or ash into the air and across surrounding land. In colder parts of the solar system, eruptions often involve liquid water spraying out through cracks in an icy crust. This happens on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn that is covered in ice. 

evaporate: To turn from liquid into vapor. 

fiction: (adj. fictional) An idea or a story that is made-up, not a depiction of real events. 

fluctuation: (v. fluctuate) Some type of change in a pattern or signal that varies at irregular intervals and often by amounts that are hard to predict. 

gene: (adj. genetic) A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for a cell’s production of a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves. 

gravity: The force that attracts anything with mass, or bulk, toward any other thing with mass. The more mass that something has, the greater its gravity. 

greenhouse: A light-filled structure, often with windows serving as walls and ceiling materials, in which plants are grown. It provides a controlled environment in which set amounts of water, humidity and nutrients can be applied — and pests can be prevented entry. 

greenhouse effect: The warming of Earth’s atmosphere due to the buildup of heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane. Scientists refer to these pollutants as greenhouse gases. The greenhouse effect also can occur in smaller environments. For instance, when cars are left in the sun, the incoming sunlight turns to heat, becomes trapped inside and quickly can make the indoor temperature a health risk. 

greenhouse gas: A gas that contributes to the greenhouse effect by absorbing heat. Carbon dioxide is one example of a greenhouse gas. 

liquid: A material that flows freely but keeps a constant volume, like water or oil. 

Mars: The fourth planet from the sun, just one planet out from Earth. Like Earth, it has seasons and moisture. But its diameter is only about half as big as Earth’s. 

methane: A hydrocarbon with the chemical formula CH₄ (meaning there are four hydrogen atoms bound to one carbon atom). It’s a natural constituent of what’s known as natural gas. It’s also emitted by decomposing plant material in wetlands and is belched out by cows and other ruminant livestock. From a climate perspective, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide is in trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere, making it a very important greenhouse gas. 

microbe: Short for microorganism. A living thing that is too small to see with the unaided eye, including bacteria, some fungi and many other organisms such as amoebas. Most consist of a single cell. 

microbiology: The study of microorganisms, principally bacteria, fungi and viruses. Scientists who study microbes and the infections they can cause or ways that they can interact with their environment are known as microbiologists. 

mineral: Crystal-forming substances that make up rock, such as quartz, apatite or various carbonates. Most rocks contain several different minerals mish-mashed together. A mineral usually is solid and stable at room temperatures and has a specific formula, or recipe (with atoms occurring in certain proportions) and a specific crystalline structure (meaning that its atoms are organized in regular three-dimensional patterns). (in physiology) The same chemicals that are needed by the body to make and feed tissues to maintain health. 

muscle: A type of tissue used to produce movement by contracting its cells, known as muscle fibers. Muscle is rich in protein, which is why predatory species seek prey containing lots of this tissue. 

NASA: Short for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Created in 1958, this U.S. agency has become a leader in space research and in stimulating public interest in space exploration. It was through NASA that the United States sent people into orbit and ultimately to the moon. It also has sent research craft to study planets and other celestial objects in our solar system. 

nitrogen: A colorless, odorless and nonreactive gaseous element that forms about 78 percent of Earth’s atmosphere. Its scientific symbol is N. Nitrogen is released in the form of nitrogen oxides as fossil fuels burn. It comes in two stable forms. Both have 14 protons in the nucleus. But one has 14 neutrons in that nucleus; the other has 15. For that difference, they are known, respectively, as nitrogen-14 and nitrogen-15 (or ¹⁴N and ¹⁵N). 

orbit: The curved path of a celestial object or spacecraft around a galaxy, star, planet or moon. One complete circuit around a celestial body. 

oxygen: A gas that makes up about 21 percent of Earth’s atmosphere. All animals and many microorganisms need oxygen to fuel their growth (and metabolism). 

perchlorate: This naturally occurring chemical is a potentially cancer-causing component of certain jet fuels, explosives and fertilizers. In animals, this pollutant can perturb levels of thyroid hormones. It also appears capable of acting like an androgen (a male sex hormone). 

photosynthesis: (verb: photosynthesize) The process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to produce foods from carbon dioxide and water. 

pressure: Force applied uniformly over a surface, measured as force per unit of area. 

radiation: (in physics) One of the three major ways that energy is transferred. (The other two are conduction and convection.) In radiation, electromagnetic waves carry energy from one place to another. Unlike conduction and convection, which need material to help transfer the energy, radiation can transfer energy across empty space. 

Red Planet: A nickname for Mars. 

replicate: (in biology) To copy something. When viruses make new copies of themselves — essentially reproducing — this process is called replication. (in experimentation) To copy an earlier test or experiment — often an earlier test performed by someone else — and get the same general result. Replication depends upon repeating every step of a test, one by one. If a repeated experiment generates the same result as in earlier trials, scientists view this as verifying that the initial result is reliable. If results differ, the initial findings may fall into doubt. Generally, a scientific finding is not fully accepted as being real or true without replication. 

risk: The chance or mathematical likelihood that some bad thing might happen. For instance, exposure to radiation poses a risk of cancer. Or the hazard — or peril — itself. (For instance: Among cancer risks that the people faced were radiation and drinking water tainted with arsenic.) 

salt: A compound made by combining an acid with a base (in a reaction that also creates water). The ocean contains many different salts — collectively called “sea salt.” Common table salt is a made of sodium and chlorine. 

science fiction: A field of literary or filmed stories that take place against a backdrop of fantasy, usually based on speculations about how science and engineering will direct developments in the distant future. The plots in many of these stories focus on space travel, exaggerated changes attributed to evolution or life in (or on) alien worlds. 

solar: Having to do with the sun or the radiation it emits. It comes from sol, Latin for sun. 

solar system: The eight major planets and their moons in orbit around our sun, together with smaller bodies in the form of dwarf planets, asteroids, meteoroids and comets. 

star: The basic building block from which galaxies are made. Stars develop when gravity compacts clouds of gas. When they become hot enough, stars will emit light and sometimes other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The sun is our closest star. 

suffocate: To be unable to breathe, or to cause a person or other organism to be unable to breathe. 

technology: The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry — or the devices, processes and systems that result from those efforts. 

toxic: Poisonous or able to harm or kill cells, tissues or whole organisms. The measure of risk posed by such a poison is its toxicity. 

Venus: The second planet out from the sun, it has a rocky core, just as Earth does. Venus lost most of its water long ago. The sun’s ultraviolet radiation broke apart those water molecules, allowing their hydrogen atoms to escape into space. Volcanoes on the planet’s surface spewed high levels of carbon dioxide, which built up in the planet’s atmosphere. Today the air pressure at the planet’s surface is 100 times greater than on Earth, and the atmosphere now keeps the surface of Venus a brutal 460° Celsius (860° Fahrenheit). 

volcano: A place on Earth’s crust that opens, allowing magma and gases to spew out from underground reservoirs of molten material. The magma rises through a system of pipes or channels, sometimes spending time in chambers where it bubbles with gas and undergoes chemical transformations. This plumbing system can become more complex over time. This can result in a change, over time, to the chemical composition of the lava as well. The surface around a volcano’s opening can grow into a mound or cone shape as successive eruptions send more lava onto the surface, where it cools into hard rock. 

water vapor: Water in its gaseous state, capable of being suspended in the air. 

A groundbreaking study from NYU Abu Dhabi has revealed that cosmic rays — high-energy particles from space — could provide the energy needed to support life beneath the surfaces of planets and moons in our solar system.

The research, published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, challenges long-standing beliefs that life requires sunlight or geothermal heat to survive.

Led by Dimitra Atri, principal investigator of the Space Exploration Laboratory at NYUAD’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Science (CASS), the study shows that cosmic rays may not only be harmless in certain subsurface environments, but could actively fuel microscopic life.

The process, known as radiolysis, occurs when cosmic rays interact with water or ice underground, breaking water molecules and releasing electrons.

Read: MBRU scientists publish first Arab Pangenome Reference in major genomic breakthrough

Energy source for microorganisms

Some Earth bacteria use these electrons as an energy source, much like plants rely on sunlight.

Using advanced computer simulations, the team examined how much energy radiolysis could generate on Mars and on the icy moons Enceladus (Saturn) and Europa (Jupiter).

Enceladus showed the highest potential to support life, followed by Mars and Europa.

Research breakthrough

“This discovery changes the way we think about where life might exist,” said Atri. “Instead of looking only for warm planets with sunlight, we can now consider places that are cold and dark, as long as they have some water beneath the surface and are exposed to cosmic rays. Life might be able to survive in more places than we ever imagined.”

Radiolytic Habitable Zone

The study introduces the concept of the Radiolytic Habitable Zone — a new way of identifying potentially life-supporting environments not based on proximity to a star, but on the presence of subsurface water and exposure to cosmic radiation.

This expands the possibilities for habitable worlds beyond the traditional “Goldilocks Zone”, also known as the habitable zone. It is the region around a star where a planet’s temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface.

Redefining future space exploration

The findings provide critical direction for future space exploration. Rather than focusing solely on surface conditions, missions may begin targeting underground environments on Mars and icy moons, using instruments designed to detect the chemical energy generated by cosmic radiation.

The research opens exciting new frontiers in the search for extraterrestrial life, suggesting that even the darkest, coldest places in the solar system could harbor the necessary conditions for life to survive.

What do you get when you stare at the same dead star for more than 20 years? Insight into the weirdest physics in the universe.

The star PSR J0922+0638 is a pulsar. Pulsars are neutron stars — the ultradense leftover cores of long-dead stars — that spin rapidly and emit radiation at regular intervals. Pulsars have some of the wildest physics in the cosmos, with matter compressed right to the brink of ultimate collapse into a black hole. The only thing preventing that catastrophe is exotic quantum pressures.

A tiny red star not far from Earth is turning out to be a heavyweight in the search for rocky worlds.

Nestled just 35 light-years away in space, the star L 98-59 is home to a tight-knit pack of exoplanets, including one that now appears to orbit at just the right distance to harbor liquid water. 

Using data from NASA’s TESS space telescope and a pair of high-precision instruments in Chile, scientists led by the Université de Montréal have confirmed a fifth planet in the system — and this one is in the so-called habitable zone. The team thinks it could receive as much warmth from its star as Earth does from the sun.

And it’s not alone. The L 98-59 system already has a reputation for its wide variety of intriguing exoplanets. 

“With its diversity of rocky worlds and range of planetary compositions, L 98-59 offers a unique laboratory to address some of the field’s most pressing questions,” said René Doyon, one of the study’s researchers, in a statement. “What are super-Earths and sub-Neptunes made of? Do planets form differently around small stars? Can rocky planets around red dwarfs retain atmospheres over time?”

Red dwarf stars like L 98-59, sometimes referred to as M-type stars, are the most ubiquitous kind in the Milky Way, yet nobody knows whether planets closely orbiting them can hold onto atmospheres, Néstor Espinoza, a Space Telescope Science Institute researcher, previously told Mashable. Though these host stars aren’t as hot as the sun, nearby worlds would be exposed to their extreme stellar radiation.

Most astronomers agree that detecting atmospheres in general is crucial in the search for habitable worlds. NASA has playfully called Earth’s own atmosphere its “security blanket”: Without it, the type of life flourishing here wouldn’t exist. This cocoon holds oxygen in the air and filters out harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun, all while keeping the world warm. Furthermore, it creates pressure that allows liquid water to pool on the surface.

Espinoza is a leader in the new massive James Webb Space Telescope study of rocky worlds, specifically to find out if planets around red dwarfs could have air. The campaign, first reported by Mashable, will take a closer look at a dozen nearby-ish planets outside the solar system over the next two years.

One of the exoplanets in the L 98-59 system, located in the constellation Volans, has already gotten a first look from Webb. A separate research team revealed that L 98-59 d, a bit larger and heavier than Earth, could have a sulfur-rich atmosphere that reeks of burnt matches and rotten eggs. Agnibha Banerjee, one of the researchers, said the team will need more observations to confirm those findings.

“If these findings can be confirmed and turn out to be true, this planet won’t be pleasant on human noses,” Banerjee previously told Mashable. “Then again, if a human in the far future were to ever visit, the smell would be the least of their problems — in the midst of crushing pressure, boiling temperatures, and toxic gases.”

The latest discovery by the Montreal team of a fifth planet, known as L 98-59 f — along with insights into its planetary neighbors — will be presented in a new paper accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

“These new results paint the most complete picture we’ve ever had of the fascinating L 98-59 system,” said Charles Cadieux, first author of the paper, in a statement. “It’s a powerful demonstration of what we can achieve by combining data from space telescopes and high-precision instruments on Earth, and it gives us key targets for future atmospheric studies with the James Webb Space Telescope.”

To discover the planet, the scientists didn’t need new telescope time. Instead, they used cutting-edge techniques to squeeze more juice out of existing data. For instance, L 98-59 f doesn’t cross in front of its star from Earth’s point of view, making it invisible to planet-hunting cameras. But researchers were able to detect it through subtle wobbles in the star’s motion, caused by the tug of the unseen planet’s gravity. 

By combining and reanalyzing records, they also dramatically improved estimates of the other planets’ sizes, weights, and orbits. One planet is smaller and lighter than Earth — a rare confirmed “sub-Earth” — while others show signs of being rich in water or heated by internal volcanic activity like Jupiter’s moon Io, thanks to gravitational stretching. 

Many planet hunters haven’t been this optimistic about the search for habitable worlds since the tantalizing TRAPPIST-1 system.

“With these new results,” said coauthor Alexandrine L’Heureux in a statement, “L 98-59 joins the select group of nearby, compact planetary systems that we hope to understand in greater detail over the coming years.”

Here’s something you’ve probably noticed in recent years: it’s been getting hotter. The planet is setting new high temperature records, which has an effect on everything from travel plans to mental health. That doesn’t just mean that it’s hotter outdoors, though: a newly-published study reveals that record-setting temperatures are also happening in the aquatic realm. And if you think that could have implications outside of the water as well, you are correct.

The title of the paper, published earlier this month in Science, gets right to the point: “Record-breaking 2023 marine heatwaves.” The authors note that marine heatwaves “[set] new records in duration, extent, and intensity” in 2023 and were significantly above “the historical norm since 1982.”

As Perri Thaler reported in Live Science, the heatwaves covered 96% of the planet’s oceans. Marine heatwaves mean more than just uncomfortable temperatures the next time you go swimming. Instead, as Ryan Walter of California Polytechnic State University told Live Science, marine heatwaves can have a destructive impact on oceanic life. In 2023, NASA scientist Angela Colbert, Ph.D. wrote that “the total heat stored by the oceans (ocean heat content) rose 187 zettajoules from 1992 through 2019. And most corals can’t take the heat.”

A paper published last year in Nature Communications looked at the impact of marine heatwaves on nearby ecosystems. In this case, the researchers observed that the effects of marine heatwaves included “disrupted or novel communities and changes in predator-prey relationships, which likely lead to changes in the overall structure of marine ecosystems as a consequence of MHWs.”

Live Science’s report on the Science study points to another area of interest for scientists: whether 2023 represents a “tipping point” for oceanic temperatures. One of the scientists who Live Science spoke with pointed to the strength of El Niño in 2023 as a potential factor in the record-breaking marine temperatures. Those temperatures are still trending upwards over time, though — and even without setting a record in 2023, these marine temperatures are still worrisome.

In a new study, Northwestern University neurobiologists found the brain’s internal GPS changes each time we navigate a familiar, static environment.

This means that if someone walks the same path every day — and the path and surrounding conditions remain identical — each walk still activates different “map-making” brain cells, or neurons.

Not only does this discovery shed light on the fundamental mystery of how the brain processes and stores spatial memories, but it also could have profound implications for scientists’ understanding of memory, learning and even aging.

The study will publish on Wednesday (July 23) in the journal Nature.

“Our study confirms that spatial memories in the brain aren’t stable and fixed,” said Northwestern’s Daniel Dombeck, the study’s senior author. “You can’t point to one group of neurons in the brain and say: ‘That memory is stored right there.’ Instead, we’re finding that memories are passed among neurons. The exact same experience will involve different neurons every time. It’s not a sudden change, but it slowly evolves.”

Dombeck is a professor of neurobiology and the Wender-Lewis Teaching and Research Professor at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The study was a collaboration among Dombeck and three members of his laboratory: Jason Climer, Heydar Davoudi and Jun Young Oh. Climer, who is one of the study’s co-first authors, is now an assistant professor of molecular and integrated physiology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

A memory mystery

Located deep within the brain’s temporal lobe, the hippocampus stores memories related to spatial navigation. For decades, neurobiologists thought the same hippocampal neurons encoded memories of the same places. In other words, the path someone might take from their bedroom to their kitchen should activate the exact same sequence of neurons during each midnight walk for a glass of water.

About 10 years ago, however, scientists imaged mice’s brains as they ran through a maze. Even as the mice ran through the same maze day after day, different neurons fired during each run. Scientists wondered if the results were a fluke.

“People in the field started to wonder if the mice were truly having the same experience during each run through the maze,” Dombeck said. “Maybe they run faster on some days. Maybe the smells change from day to day. Maybe there are subtle, unavoidable environmental or behavioral differences that change the overall experience.”

‘We controlled for everything we possibly could’

To probe these questions, Dombeck and his team designed an experiment that gave them unprecedented control over the mice’s sensory input. First, the team employed a cutting-edge multisensory virtual reality system — previously developed in Dombeck’s laboratory — to guarantee the animals’ experienced identical visual cues. Then, the mice ran through the virtual maze on treadmills, ensuring precise measurement of speed. Finally, the scientists put cones on the mice’s noses to provide identical smells for every session.

After running the experiment several times, the results were clear. Even in a highly reproducible virtual world, the encoded neurons still drifted. The finding confirmed that the brain’s spatial maps are inherently dynamic, constantly updating regardless of how static a space might be.

“We controlled for everything we possibly could,” Dombeck said. “I was convinced we were going to get the opposite result and show that memories really are identical for the same space. But it turns out, they are not. A slightly different group of neurons activated each time.”

Implications for aging

Although few patterns arose throughout the course of the experiment, Dombeck and his team did notice one consistent factor. The most excitable neurons, which were more easily activated, maintained more stable spatial memories throughout multiple runs through the virtual maze. Because neuron excitability decreases with age, the finding could help scientists understand the role of aging as it relates to the brain’s ability to encode new memories.

“Some neurons do seem to be better at holding onto the original memory than others,” Dombeck said. “Really excitable neurons seem to store memories the best. The ones that fire more weakly are the ones that end up changing. So there does seem to be some small component of the original memory that’s still there in this small fraction of neurons.”

Dombeck and his team are still pondering why the activated neurons change even though the space remains exactly the same. Although he’s still unsure, Dombeck said the reason might be related to time.

“Even if you have the exact same experience, it has to be occurring at a different time,” Dombeck said. “If I hike the same path twice, and it’s identical both times, I probably still want to remember that I did the same hike twice. It’s possible that the brain forces us to take very similar experiences that occur at different times and remember them in slightly different ways. That gives us access to memories of those individual experiences.”

Reference: Climer JR, Davoudi H, Oh JY, Dombeck DA. Hippocampal representations drift in stable multisensory environments. Nature. 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09245-y

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A new artificial intelligence model can improve the process of drug and vaccine discovery by predicting how efficiently specific mRNA sequences will produce proteins, both generally and in various cell types. The new advance, developed through an academic-industrial partnership between The University of Texas at Austin and Sanofi, helps predict how much protein cells will produce, which can minimize the need for trial-and-error experimentation, accelerating the next generation of mRNA therapeutics.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) contains instructions for which proteins to make and how to make them, enabling our bodies to grow and carry out the day-to-day processes of life. Among the most promising areas of health and medicine, the ability to develop new mRNA vaccines and drugs — able to fight viruses, cancers and genetic disorders — involves the frequently challenging process of coaxing cells in a patient’s body to produce enough protein from therapeutic mRNA to effectively combat disease.

The new model, called RiboNN, stands to guide the design of new mRNA-based therapeutics by illuminating what will yield the highest amount of a protein or better target specific parts of the body such as the heart or liver. The team described their model today in one of two related papers in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

“When we started this project over six years ago, there was no obvious application,” said Can Cenik, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at UT Austin, who co-led the work with Vikram Agarwal, head of mRNA platform design data science in Sanofi’s mRNA Center of Excellence. “We were curious whether cells coordinate which mRNAs they produce and how efficiently they are translated into proteins. That is the value of curiosity-driven research. It builds the foundation for advances like RiboNN, which only become possible much later.”

The work was made possible by funding support from the National Institutes of Health, The Welch Foundation and the Lonestar6 supercomputer at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center.

In tests spanning more than 140 human and mouse cell types, RiboNN was about twice as accurate at predicting translation efficiency as earlier approaches. This advance may lend researchers the ability to make predictions in cells in ways that could help expedite treatments for cancer and infectious and hereditary diseases.

You can think of the way cells in your body make proteins as the way a team of chefs might bake cakes. To cook up a batch of proteins, the chefs in one of your cells (ribosomes) look up the recipe in your own unique protein cookbook (a.k.a. DNA), copy the recipe onto notecards called messenger RNAs (mRNAs), and then combine ingredients (amino acids) according to the recipe to bake up the cakes (proteins).

An mRNA vaccine or therapeutic coaxes these chefs in your cells into making proteins. In the case of a vaccine, they might produce a protein found on the surface of a pathogenic virus or cancer cells, essentially waving a big red flag in front of your immune system to make antibodies against the virus or cancer. In the case of a disorder caused by a genetic mutation, they might produce a protein that your body can’t properly make on its own, reversing the disorder.

Before developing their new predictive model, Cenik and the UT team first curated a set of publicly available data from over 10,000 experiments measuring how efficiently different mRNAs are translated into proteins in different human and mouse cell types. Once they had created this training dataset, AI and machine learning experts from UT and Sanofi came together to develop RiboNN.

One goal of the predictive tool is to one day make therapies that are targeted to a particular cell type, said Cenik, who also is affiliate faculty at UT’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and a CPRIT scholar, receiving research support from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

“Maybe you need a next-generation therapy to be made in the liver or the lung or in immune cells,” he said. “This opens up an opportunity to change the mRNA sequence to increase the production of that protein in that cell type.”

In a companion paper also in Nature Biotechnology, the team demonstrated that mRNAs with related biological functions are translated into proteins at similar levels across different cell types. Scientists have long known that the process of transcribing genes with related functions into mRNAs is coordinated, but it hadn’t been previously shown that translating mRNAs into proteins is also coordinated.

Reference: Zheng D, Persyn L, Wang J, et al. Predicting the translation efficiency of messenger RNA in mammalian cells. Nat Biotechnol. 2025. doi: 10.1038/s41587-025-02712-x

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Consider the delicate web of fat in a Wagyu steak. The “marbling” that makes carnivore connoisseurs swoon is a visual heuristic for quality flavor.

Now, a new study suggests the very same marbling of fat inside our own muscles points to trouble.

This condition, known as intramuscular adipose tissue, or IMAT, has long been recognized by scientists as a strong indicator of poor health. It’s linked to a wide range of diseases: obesity, Type 2 diabetes, neuromuscular disorders (including Duchenne muscular dystrophy) and neurogenerative conditions such as ALS. In some cases, clinicians can even track the progress of a disease by the amount of fat in muscle tissue.

“We wanted to understand the precise function IMAT might play on muscle health,” said Daniel Kopinke, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of pharmacology and therapeutics in the UF College of Medicine. “Now, we have functional evidence that it is an active driver of declining muscle function.”

The study shows that intramuscular fat acts as a physical barrier, obstructing the traditional healing process and regeneration that typically follows a muscle injury.

Kopinke’s team developed a genetic model called mFATBLOCK that allowed researchers to damage the muscle while preventing the infiltration of IMAT.

When fat cells were present in the muscle, the muscle fibers were unable to properly form and grow. The fat tissue’s roadblock led to a disorganized and chaotic healing process that ultimately resulted in smaller, weaker muscle fibers.

“This directly translated to a loss of strength,” said Kopinke, whose background is a veritable scientific smorgasbord of developmental biology, mouse genetics, stem cell biology and muscle regeneration.

The muscle with fatty interlopers was not capable of producing the same amount of force as the healthy, unobstructed muscle.

One metaphor Kopinke’s students often reference is a forest fire. When everything is burned down and you’re seeking to encourage new trees to grow, a boulder is an impediment. Wherever there’s a boulder, a tree cannot properly germinate or grow.

Similarly, where space is occupied by fat cells, muscle fibers cannot grow. Notably, without any hampering of the fat cells’ growth, the fat tissue ultimately took up 12% of the whole muscle tissue.

This isn’t to say that individuals seeking to change their weight are out of luck. Much like weight gain, weight loss relies on an energy imbalance — in this case, expending more energy than is put into your body, often through diet and exercise.

Fortunately, the solution to reducing intramuscular fat is the same method for general weight loss: creating an energy imbalance. By expending more energy than consumed, the body is forced to shrink its fat cells, including those marbled within the muscle. This clears the path for muscle fibers to regenerate and grow.

“If you make the area that fat cells occupy in your muscles smaller, the muscle fibers would have more space to grow into,” Kopinke said.

“You can shrink your fat cells,” he added. “Based on everything we found, we would speculate that if you make the area that fat cells occupy in your muscles smaller, the muscle fibers would have more space to grow into.”

These findings could fundamentally shift the research area’s understanding of the role of fat in muscle disease and aging. It poses major implications regarding current therapies for severe muscle injuries and for chronic diseases like muscular dystrophy or age-related muscle loss. Now, experts may incorporate strategies on reducing or removing the physical blockage of fat, rather than solely promoting muscle growth.

“By clearing the path for muscle fibers to heal correctly, we may be able to restore function and improve strength in millions of people affected by these debilitating conditions,” Kopinke said.

In 2025, a humpback whale hit the headlines when it briefly trapped a South American kayaker in its mouth, only to promptly spit him back out again, says Helen Pilcher.

That’s a big mouth, but it’s not as big as that of the bowhead whale. Its orifice is even bigger, and at 5 meters long – one third of the bowhead whale’s total body length – it is, undisputedly, the biggest mouth in the ocean. 

Bowheads and humpbacks are both baleen whales, whose enormous cakeholes have evolved for filter feeding. Bowhead whales maintain their mass by consuming around 300kg of krill and other tiny ocean critters per day, which they sift from a whopping 80 million litres of water.

This is done by passing the water through keratinous comb-like structures, called baleen plates, that hang down from the upper jaw. The baleen plates of the bowhead whale are up to 4 meters long, and its upper jaw is arched to accommodate them.

On land, meanwhile, the award for biggest mouth goes to the hippopotamus. These famously grumpy animals, native to sub-Saharan Africa, dine mainly on grasses, but their enormous jaws have evolved for defense and dominance.

When closed, the mouth may not look like much, but when open wide, at an angle of over 100 degrees, the hippo has a gape of 1.2 meters. This is achieved by a combination of powerful muscles and unique jaw anatomy. The orbicularis oris muscle, which surrounds the mouth, unfolds like an accordion to facilitate extreme stretching, whilst the jaw joint is far back in the skull, to enable a large range of motion. 

When the size of the mouth is considered relative to body size, however, there is another animal deserving of an honorable mention.

The pelican eel may only grow to around a meter long, but when you exclude the creature’s whip-like tail, its mouth is actually bigger than its body. The pelican eel can even swallow prey that is larger than it is.

This Tardis-like achievement is made possible by a loosely hinged lower jaw, with billowing folds of stretchy skin that unfurl to create a balloon-like structure when the eel is pursuing prey, such as squid. Few people, however, ever get to witness this spectacle. The pelican eel is a deep-sea dweller. It lives in waters up to 3 kilometers deep and so is rarely filmed, yet now its big-mouthed reputation precedes it. 

Which animal has the biggest nose?
What animal has the biggest brain?
Which animal has the biggest penis? (Hint: it’s probably not what you think)
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Scientists at the University of California, Davis, used artificial intelligence to help plants recognize a wider range of bacterial threats — which may lead to new ways to protect crops like tomatoes and potatoes from devastating diseases. The study was published in Nature Plants.

Plants, like animals, have immune systems. Part of their defense toolkit includes immune receptors, which give them the ability to detect bacteria and defend against it. One of those receptors, called FLS2, helps plants recognize flagellin — a protein in the tiny tails bacteria use to swim. But bacteria are sneaky and constantly evolving to avoid detection.

“Bacteria are in an arms race with their plant hosts, and they can change the underlying amino acids in flagellin to evade detection,” said lead author Gitta Coaker , professor in the Department of Plant Pathology.

To help plants keep up, Coaker’s team turned to using natural variation coupled with artificial intelligence — specifically AlphaFold, a tool developed to predict the 3D shape of proteins and reengineered FLS2, essentially upgrading its immune system to catch more intruders.

The team focused on receptors already known to recognize more bacteria, even if they weren’t found in useful crop species. By comparing them with more narrowly focused receptors, the researchers were able to identify which amino acids to change.

“We were able to resurrect a defeated receptor, one where the pathogen has won, and enable the plant to have a chance to resist infection in a much more targeted and precise way,” Coaker said.

Why it matters

Coaker said this opens the door to developing broad-spectrum disease resistance in crops using predictive design.

One of the researchers’ targets is a major crop threat: Ralstonia solanacearum, the cause of bacterial wilt. Some strains of the soil-borne pathogen can infect more than 200 plant species, including staple crops like tomato and potato.

Looking ahead, the team is developing machine learning tools to predict which immune receptors are worth editing in the future. They’re also trying to narrow down the number of amino acids that need to be changed.

This approach could be used to boost the perception capability of other immune receptors using a similar strategy.

Other authors of the study include Tianrun Li, Esteban Jarquin Bolaños, Danielle M. Stevens and Hanxu Sha of UC Davis and Daniil M. Prigozhin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture.