Category: 7. Science

Antibiotics usually save lives—but against some bacteria, they can make things worse. That’s the case with the Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli, where bacterial death releases a flood of a cell-killing toxin. Now scientists have developed a new gene-editing approach that circumvents this problem. Instead of killing the pathogens, it reprograms them to stop producing the toxin and instead make a helpful molecule (Nat. Biomed. Eng. 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41551-025-01453-1).

Developed by researchers led by Harris Wang at Columbia University, the system, named Bacterial CRISPR–Transposase Reduction of Virulence In Situ (BACTRINS), operates by using a combination of CRISPR-Cas and transposases to neutralize pathogenic E. coli. The Shiga toxin is produced from two genes, stx1 and stx2, and BACTRINS uses guide RNAs to direct Cas proteins to regions in the genes that are less subject to mutations over time. There, the Cas complex recruits a transposase, which inserts new DNA that disrupts the gene, all without cutting the genome.

“We’re essentially converting a pathogenic strain into a nonpathogenic one,” Wang says.

This method prevents toxins from spilling into the gut. But by avoiding double-stranded DNA breaks, it also sidesteps the bacterial repair responses that often introduce mutations at the target site and lead to CRISPR resistance and ineffective treatments.

To make the approach even more potent, the researchers also programmed the inserted DNA to produce nanobodies—tiny antibody-like proteins that are secreted by the engineered bacteria. These nanobodies bind to Tir, a surface protein on pathogenic E. coli that facilitates the bacteria’s attachment to gut cells. Without functional Tir, the bacteria struggle to colonize the gut and establish infection.

To deliver the treatment, the system is first introduced into a harmless bacterium. Once ingested, the engineered microbe acts as a delivery vehicle and transfers the system to harmful bacteria through bacterial conjugation—a natural form of gene sharing between microbes.

The researchers report that in studies of mice that were infected with a Shiga toxin–producing E. coli strain, all untreated mice died. But in mice that received the new treatment, toxin levels dropped by two-thirds and survival rates improved. Although many of the treated mice died, Wang says the bacteria strain used in the study is more virulent in mice than in humans, and that the reduced toxin levels suggest that the strategy could be effective in a clinical setting.

“I think this is a really great study, and has great potential,” says Byeonghwa Jeon, an expert in bacterial pathogenesis at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study. But there is a need for further research before BACTRINS can be introduced into a clinical setting, he adds.

Because CRISPR-Cas machinery is widespread in nature, Wang thinks a similar BACTRINS platform could be applied to different bacteria in other areas of the body, or even to soil microbes. The team is now looking into that line of investigation. The researchers also plan to explore ways to use the system in commensal microbes to boost their beneficial effects. “This adds to the genetic toolbox of potential strategies and is hopefully widely applicable to a lot of different situations,” Wang says.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – Sea urchins have no brains or hearts. But put them in the proximity of the unmistakable sunflower sea star—with its array of up to two dozen arms—and somewhere in their pin cushion-like body, they sense trouble. That’s the main finding in a new scientific study by ecologists and undergraduates at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wanted to see if this particular type of sea star would deter urchins from eating kelp.

For this study , published on July 9 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, UC Santa Cruz students who completed the university’s highly regarded scientific diving training donned SCUBA gear and placed caged sunflower sea stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) on the sea floor a few miles east of Sitka, Alaska, where resident urchins have turned once-thriving kelp beds into barrens.

The course, BIOE 159 Marine Ecology Field Quarter , is an immersive and immensely rewarding experience—offering students not only the opportunity to do true aquatic research, but also have their work published and give them a sense of what’s possible career-wise. In past years, students in the course have spent the quarter in the Gulf of California in Mexico and Moorea in French Polynesia.

“I feel very grateful to have had the privilege of working on this study alongside my peers. Participating in the entire process, from diving to scientific writing, was exciting and impactful as an undergraduate student,” said the study’s lead author, Rae Mancuso. “I hope the findings from this field experiment contribute in some way to the restoration of our all-important kelp forests.”

Importance of kelp

Collectively, these underwater forests act as nurseries for thousands of marine species, including commercially important ones like abalone and rockfish. Beyond their ecological value, kelp forests contribute an estimated $500 billion annually to the global economy, serving as a key ingredient in products ranging from toothpaste and pharmaceuticals to salad dressings.

Then about a decade ago, kelp forests in some large regions of California and Oregon were lost at roughly the same time that sunflower sea stars went locally extinct—largely due to an outbreak of a devastating wasting disease in 2013. Many of the affected areas have not seen recovery of either Pycnopodia or kelp, prompting interest in how to restore the forests, as well as questions about the role of sunflower sea stars in the loss of kelp forests and their potential use in recovery.

“We show that the sea stars create a ‘landscape of fear’ among red sea urchins in degraded urchins barrens that reduces grazing on kelp,” said the study’s senior author, Kristy Kroeker , professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. “These are very hungry urchins that are dissuaded enough by the scent of a sea star to deter grazing on kelp forests, which is promising for thinking about their role in kelp-forest recovery.”

How they did it

Mancuso said Kroeker and other faculty leading the field course generously helped his classmates develop the research project that the paper was based on. The students then placed pairs of cages made of plastic pipe and covered with fine mesh at each of three different locations where degraded urchin barrens existed. Kelp blades were fastened to lines tied to all the cages as bait, and with them spaced about 60 to 100 feet apart, one cage was kept empty as the experiment’s control condition, while a sunflower sea star was placed in the other.

After just 24 hours, the results were in: Red urchins stayed an average of about 6 feet away from the kelp tethered to the cages with sea stars in them. This stood in stark contrast to the behavior of green sea urchins also in the area, which weren’t deterred at all and ate the fastened kelp.

Despite the mixed results, the study found that the sea stars clearly deterred one type of urchin, and for that reason, Pycnopodia conservation should be considered alongside other approaches to kelp-forest recovery. The authors suggested that an increase in the presence of sunflower sea stars, either natural or artificial, could have a beneficial effect on kelp forests by deterring urchin herbivory without requiring divers to manually and continually remove urchins.

Purple urchin eaters?

The authors also hypothesized that free-roaming sea stars may keep urchins further away from kelp forests, and that additional research is needed to test whether the presence of Pycnopodia would have a similar effect on purple sea urchins—the most notorious kelp deforester in the region.

“My educated guess is that they will deter purple urchin grazing as well, but it’s a question of how much and for how long,” Kroeker said. “There are many unknowns that need to be addressed and many steps that need to be taken between our results and the reintroduction of Pycnopodia for kelp-forest recovery.”

Other authors from UC Santa Cruz on the paper, “Sunflower sea star chemical cues locally reduce kelp consumption by eliciting a flee response in red sea urchins,” include Mancuso’s former classmates Rosie Campbell and Nathan Hunter, and Pete Raimondi, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Sarah Gravem at Oregon State University and Aaron Galloway at the University of Oregon also contributed to the study.

This work was supported by a grant from the Nature Conservancy and the National Science Foundation.

Should robots be able to cannibalize each other so they can accelerate their evolution, bringing them closer to resembling self-sufficient lifeforms capable of living independently of their human masters?

Good news if your answer to that question is “yes”: a team of researchers from Columbia University have built a robot that can seek out and merge with other robots to grow bigger, stronger, and adapt its abilities to its environment — perhaps one day enabling entire “robot ecologies” to blossom.

What their efforts have produced so far, as detailed in a new study in the journal Science, is a prototype called the “Truss Link,” a rod-shaped module that can expand, contract, crawl, and use its magnetic tips to connect with other modules. It may not look like much on its own, but it’s a versatile platform that can build complex structures that can move and interact with their environment in adaptable ways.

“True autonomy means robots must not only think for themselves but also physically sustain themselves,” lead author Philippe Martin Wyder, a researcher at Columbia Engineering and the University of Washington, said in a statement about the work. “Just as biological life absorbs and integrates resources, these robots grow, adapt, and repair using materials from their environment or from other robots.”

In a fascinating video shared by the researchers, a jumble of six, separated Truss Links teleoperated by the researchers writhe towards each other until they form one robot with two triangular halves, with one half having an extra link, or “tail.” The researchers call this process “robot metabolism,” in that it crudely mirrors how biological organisms can absorb each other, like a rough mechanical equivalent of what you might have done with that salad at lunch.

The newly formed shape then inches towards a ledge, throws itself off but leaves the tail lingering above, props up one half against a nearby object, and uses the height difference so the tail can close the shape to form a tetrahedron, demonstrating that the robots could use their environment to transform themselves from a 2D structure to a 3D one.

From there, the tetrahedron robot then absorbs another truss link to use it as a “walking stick.” Now a “ratchet tetrahedron,” the robot can move 66 percent faster than before up a ten-degree incline, the researchers said. 

In a further testament to their versatility, the robots also showed that they can assist other machines upgrade themselves: in a video, a ratchet tetrahedron on a platform uses its walking stick like an appendage to yoink up another robot below it so it can complete its tetrahedron transformation. The robots also showed they can maintain themselves by discarding modules that are low on battery and replacing them with fresh ones.

Wyder’s inspiration, per an interview with Ars Technica, came from the observation that in the biological world, just 20 standard amino acids can combine into a practically limitless number of proteins. Each Truss Link module, in Wyder’s mind, serves as a single amino acid. 

It’s part of his philosophy of avoiding what he sees as a common pitfall in the field of robotics, which is merely seeking to mimic biology. “In doing so, we’ve been just replicating the results of biological evolution,” he told Ars. “I say we need to replicate its methods.” 

Still, the bots have their work cut out for them before they can rival the living world. That they were teleoperated by the researchers instead of operating entirely independently is one shortcoming — though in fairness to the team that built them, life had billions of years to let random processes play out before forming the first multicellular organisms.

Computer simulations conducted by the researchers suggest the robots could spontaneously produce most of the tested shapes with random motor commands within 2,000 attempts — except a tetrahedron, for complex geometrical reasons. That’s a big exception, but they’re adamant that with more runs and more simulation time, the robots would’ve been able to eventually form the 3D structure. Thus, the “Truss Links could ‘grow’ on their own even if they acted randomly,” they write.

Next, Wyder wants to build even more types of these modules. “Life uses around 20 different amino acids to work, so we’re currently focusing on integrating additional modules with various sensors,” he told Ars.

More on robots: Detroit’s Using Robots to Pick Up Garbage, Mow Grass, Clear Snow, and Much More

On July 18, NASA successfully launched a sounding rocket mission from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, carrying a remarkable new technology. Its goal is to capture high-speed, high-resolution, multidimensional data from one of the Sun’s least understood regions, the chromosphere and transition region.

The chromosphere is a layer of the Sun’s atmosphere between its visible surface and the corona, or outer atmosphere. This region is where solar flares, jets and coronal mass ejections develop. Temperatures in this region rise rapidly, ranging from ~6000°C in the photosphere to over a million degrees in the corona. The instrument, the Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS), will provide researchers with insights about how this region of the Sun heats so quickly.

“SNIFS is a unique instrument where we implement novel integral field spectroscopy (IFS) technique for the first time to probe the sun’s chromosphere in UV from space,” Said SETI Institute research scientist and co-investigator of the SNIFS sounding rocket mission, Dr. Souvik Bose.

Understanding the Sun’s dynamic outer atmosphere is important because space weather and solar storms can impact communications on Earth, potentially causing GPS blackouts, satellite damage, and affecting the safety of astronauts.

SNIFS is a first-of-its-kind instrument in solar science. It’s an ultraviolet integral field spectrograph (IFS), and this mission marks the first time scientists have used this powerful IFS technology in a heliophysics space mission. Unlike instruments that scan a scene one slit position at a time, SNIFS will observe the chromosphere using rarely explored spectral lines, such as hydrogen Lyman-alpha and Si III/O V, allowing the team to trace plasma flows, heating, and energy release in real-time. It captures full spectral data across a 2D field of view at 1-second cadence — no scanning.

NASA’s sounding rocket missions are small, quick, and less expensive missions with smaller payloads. Teams design them to test new technologies and instruments and determine whether to scale up the technology for larger, multi-year missions in the future. SNIFS observed the Sun for just 10 minutes during its flight, but the data it collected could offer critical insights into the nature of heating of the outer atmosphere of the Sun.

SNIFS targeted a complex active region (AR4143) located slightly to the North-West of the Sun’s disk center, along with NASA’s IRIS and JAXA’s Hinode satellite. While no flares erupted during the flight, targeting this active region ensured that a detailed study could be performed to investigate the heating and mass flows in the solar atmosphere.

The rocket was retrieved immediately upon its return to Earth (landed 50 miles away from the launch site), allowing the team to begin processing the data, which is expected to take a few months.

Despite SNIFS’ short, suborbital flight, the science and technology it’s demonstrating could shape the next generation of solar observatories — and set a precedent for rapid, high-fidelity diagnostics of eruptive events.

Using mathematical analysis of patterns of human and animal cell behavior, scientists say they have developed a computer program that mimics the behavior of such cells in any part of the body. Led by investigators at Indiana University, Johns Hopkins Medicine, the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Oregon Health & Science University, the new work was designed to advance ways of testing and predicting biological processes, drug responses and other cell dynamics before undertaking more costly experiments with live cells. 

With further work on the program, the researchers say it could eventually serve as a “digital twin” for testing any drug’s effect on cancer or other conditions, gene environment interactions during brain development, or any number of dynamic cellular molecular processes in people where such studies are not possible. 

Funded primarily by the Jayne Koskinas Ted Giovanis Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and leveraging prior knowledge and data funded by the Lustgarten Foundation and National Foundation for Cancer Research, the new study and examples of cell simulations are described online July 25 in the journal Cell. 

According to Genevieve Stein-O’Brien, Ph.D., the Terkowitz Family Rising Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the research project began at a workshop for an earlier version of computer software, called PhysiCell, designed by Indiana University engineering professor Paul Macklin, Ph.D. 

PhysiCell is based on so-called agents, “essentially, math robots that act on [a set of] rules that reflect the cells’ DNA and RNA,” says Stein-O’Brien. Each type of cell in the body is mapped to an agent and then digitally manipulated to do things, such as interact with other cells and environmental factors such as therapeutics, oxygen, and other molecules in the process of form tissues, organs and sometimes, cancer. 

By tracking cells following their assigned rules, scientists can virtually see such things as how tumors emerge and interact with therapeutics and the immune system. They can track cells that form layers of the brain’s cortex, and see how brain cells organize to lay the foundation they will need to create circuits. Stein-O’Brien’s lab in collaboration with co-first author Daniel Bergman, Ph.D., assistant professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Institute for Genome Sciences, is leading the further development of the software to go all the way from cells to circuits in the brain.

Macklin says that typical computer modeling programs exist but generally require sophisticated knowledge of math models and computer coding to use and interpret. The new PhysiCell software, he says, formulated a new “grammar” that makes the agent-based computer model more accessible to scientists who know a lot about biology but aren’t proficient in programming. 

“It used to take months to write the code for these models, and now we can teach other scientists to create a basic immunology model in an hour or two,” says Macklin. “We can also use this program to model spatial transcriptomics, a longtime goal for scientists, to visualize where each cell type can be found and how they function in 3D replicas of tissues and tumors.” 

Stein-O’Brien describes the new coding grammar as “literally, an Excel spreadsheet that, on each line, matches a cell type with a rule in human legible syntax. For example: this cell increases division as oxygen concentration increases.” 

Then, the program automatically translates the biological grammar from the spreadsheet into math equations that produce a guide for cell behavior. The program can also tune the model to match established data from studies of the transcriptome, the output of genetic material. 

Study author David Zhou, a Johns Hopkins University Neuroscience undergraduate student at the time, worked with Stein-O’Brien to provide many of the cell behaviors included in the new program. He and Zachary Nicholas, a Johns Hopkins Human Genetics Ph.D. candidate and NIH/NINDS D-SPAN Scholar, built the model of brain development-believed to be the first of its kind-using data from the Allen Brain Atlas. 

This was enabled by new advancements in software that uses spatially resolved data to connect snapshots of cell behavior to build a movie that shows cell and tissue interactions over time.

This is very important for human disease. We want to test changes in the cell rules, patterns and paths to see how cells change their behavior.” 

Genevieve Stein-O’Brien, Ph.D., the Terkowitz Family Rising Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

The models involving cancer cell behavior were initially based on data from a large collection of human pancreatic tumors at Johns Hopkins, and on laboratory experiments in mice, says Elana Fertig, Ph.D., professor and director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Fertig co-led the project, beginning in her previous role at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and continuing in her current role. 

In one experiment designed to validate the new program, co-first author, Jeanette Johnson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Genome Sciences and recent graduate of the Immunology Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins, ran the model to simulate how macrophages, a type of immune cell, invaded breast tumors by increasing expression of a genetic pathway called EGFR. Increasing this pathway typically promotes cancer growth. The simulation showed that tumors grew because cancer cells increased their ability to move. 

With live breast cancer cells grown in the laboratory, the researchers observed the same type of tumor growth linked to an increase in cell movement. 

“We still have a lot of work to do to add more cell behavior data to the program,” says Johnson, who is continuing this work as postdoctoral fellow with Fertig at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. 

“We’re thinking of this project in terms of a virtual cell laboratory,” says Stein-O’Brien. Instead of doing all experiments from the outset at the laboratory bench with living cells, the goal is to use these tools, which eventually could work as a “digital twin,” to prioritize hypotheses and therapeutic targets. “Then,” she says, “we can focus our bench work on what seems most promising.” 

In ongoing work, the team is using artificial intelligence to write simulation models using the new grammar, opening new possibilities for connecting models to new data and allowing medical research to improve digital twin models. 

Funding was provided by the Jayne Koskinas Ted Giovanis Foundation for Health and Policy, the National Institutes of Health (P01CA247886, K08CA248624, U24CA284156, 1U01CA294548-01, P50CA062924, U01CA253403, U54CA274371, U01CA212007, U54CA268083, R00NS122085, U01CA284090, T32GM148383, T32CA153952, T32 AG058527, T32CA254888, R35 GM157099, U01CA232137, R01CA169702, R01CA197296, P30CA006973, P30 CA069533, T32GM141938-03, CA054174, F99NS139554, P30CA134274), the Lustgarten Foundation, the Anna Fuller Fund, the Kuni Foundation, the National Foundation for Cancer Research, the National Science Foundation, the Leidos Biomedical Research Foundation, the Maryland Cancer Moonshot Research Grant, a Luddy Faculty Fellowship, the Susan G Komen Foundation, the Brenden-Colson Center for Pancreatic Care, the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, the Buffone Family Gastrointestinal Cancer Research Fund, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Break Through Cancer, the Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund and Lilly Endowment, Inc. through its support for the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute. 

In addition to Stein-O’Brien, Macklin, Zhou, Nicholas, Johnson and Fertig, authors include Daniel Bergman, Heber Rocha, Eric Cramer, Ian Mclean, Yoseph Dance, Max Booth, Tamara Lopez-Vidal, Atul Deshpande, Randy Heiland, Elmar Bucher, Fatemeh Shojaeian, Matthew Dunworth, André Forjaz, Michael Getz, Inês Godet, Furkan Kurtoglu, Melissa Lyman, John Metzcar, Jacob Mitchell, Andrew Raddatz, Jacobo Solorzano, Aneequa Sundus, Yafei Wang, David DeNardo, Andrew Ewald, Daniele Gilkes, Luciane Kagohara, Ashley Kiemen, Elizabeth Thompson, Denis Wirtz, Laura Wood, Pei-Hsun Wu, Neeha Zaidi, Lei Zheng, Jacquelyn Zimmerman, Jude Phillip, Elizabeth Jaffee, Joe Gray, Lisa Coussens, Young Hwan Chang and Laura M. Heiser. 

Apart from carrying the information to encode proteins in, RNA molecules can adopt intricate 2D and 3D structures. Specifically, the same RNA molecule can switch between ON and OFF structures, modulating the ability of ribosomes to bind to the RNA and translate it into proteins. A new study, led by University of Groningen molecular biologist Danny Incarnato and authored by postdoctoral researcher Dr Ivana Borovska, identifies hundreds of such regulatory RNA switches in E.coli bacteria and human cells. It was published in Nature Biotechnology on 25 July.

Several years ago, Incarnato developed a method to map the alternative shapes adopted by RNA molecules in living cells. Using this method, he identified regions of RNA capable of shapeshifting between two different structures, each with its own effect. Incarnato: ‘The ability of RNA to switch between alternative structures usually implies some sort of regulation, similar to an ON-OFF switch.’

Incarnato’s team has now used this method to study the complexity of RNA structures in living cells. Moreover, they developed a new tool that leverages evolutionary information to identify functional RNA structural switches with high accuracy. They used the tool to uncover hundreds of them. One example is a switch that reacts to temperature and helps bacteria to respond to cold stress. Incarnato: ‘Identifying a significant number of switches is a first step. The next step is to find ways to influence their functioning.’ For example, small molecules could be designed to modulate these switches, which could ultimately lead to new treatments for diseases.

The current research, which has taken more than three years to complete, builds on some six years of fundamental research into the detection of 2D RNA shapes. Incarnato: ‘This is revolutionary, something the whole field has been seeking for years.’

Paleontologists say they have discovered the 76-million-year-old footprints of a ceratopsian dinosaur-dominated herd in Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. The discovery provides the first evidence of mixed-species herding behavior in dinosaurs, similar to how modern wildebeest and zebra travel together on the African plains.

Dinosaur Provincial Park in southern Alberta, Canada, is unquestionably one of the premier localities worldwide for understanding Late Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystems.

The Park has yielded hundreds of dinosaur skeletons and huge numbers of bones and teeth, making it a model system for understanding dinosaur evolution, behavior, biostratigraphy, and paleoecology.

Despite the remarkable abundance of skeletal elements, dinosaur footprints and trackways are surprisingly rare.

“In 2024, we discovered a new tracksite, the Skyline Tracksite comprising ‘typical’ natural mould tracks, which had heretofore not been identified in the Park,” said University of New England’s Dr. Phil Bell and colleagues.

At the site, the paleontologists unearthed 13 ceratopsian (horned dinosaur) tracks from at least five animals walking side by side, with a probable ankylosaurid (armored dinosaur) walking in the midst of the others.

They were also surprised to find the tracks of two large tyrannosaurs walking side-by-side and perpendicular to the herd, raising the prospect that the multispecies herding may have been a defence strategy against common apex predators. One footprint of a small meat-eating dinosaur was also discovered.

Views of the Skyline Tracksite shortly after discovery (A) and following excavation (B). Image credit: Bell et al., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324913.

“I’ve collected dinosaur bones in Dinosaur Provincial Park for nearly 20 years, but I’d never given footprints much thought,” Dr. Bell said.

“This rim of rock had the look of mud that had been squelched out between your toes, and I was immediately intrigued.”

“The tyrannosaur tracks give the sense that they were really eyeing up the herd, which is a pretty chilling thought, but we don’t know for certain whether they actually crossed paths.”

“It was incredibly exciting to be walking in the footsteps of dinosaurs 76 million years after they laid them down,” said Dr. Brian Pickles from the University of Reading.

“Using the new search images for these footprints, we have been able to discover several more tracksites within the varied terrain of the Park, which I am sure will tell us even more about how these fascinating creatures interacted with each other and behaved in their natural environment.”

“This discovery shows just how much there is still to uncover in dinosaur paleontology,” said Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology’s Dr. Caleb Brown.

“Dinosaur Park is one of the best understood dinosaur assemblages globally, with more than a century of intense collection and study, but it is only now that we are getting a sense for its full potential for dinosaur trackways.”

The discovery is described in a paper in the journal PLoS ONE.

_____

P.R. Bell et al. 2025. A ceratopsid-dominated tracksite from the Dinosaur Park Formation (Campanian) at Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada. PLoS One 20 (7): e0324913; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0324913

Outside, the wind is icy and the temperature hovers around zero degrees, but inside the cave, a group of Neanderthals huddles around a fire. On flat stones, adults, children, and even an elderly person wait for a piece of gazelle they managed to hunt that morning to finish cooking. There are no pots or spoons, but there is technique. The piece of meat was dismembered following a specific cutting pattern, using something similar to a knife made from a sharpened piece of flint. For those who are still hungry, there are also seeds, remains of a tuber, and, of course, the house specialty: rotting meat teeming with nutritious larvae and maggots.

This scene could have taken place 300,000 years ago somewhere between what is now central and western Europe. But unraveling with certainty how the Neanderthal communities that inhabited the region lived and, above all, what they ate is a titanic and painstaking task. However, little by little and thanks to scientific work, information is beginning to become increasingly conclusive. A pair of recently published studies elaborate on the idea that, while we cannot speak of gastronomy among Neanderthals, we can say that certain cultural practices existed around food.

One of these studies, published last Friday in the journal Science Advances, proposes that worm consumption was the secret ingredient responsible for the extremely high nitrogen levels found in Neanderthal bones. For decades, analyses of bone remains from this species have shown exceptionally high levels of stable nitrogen isotopes, often higher than those of carnivorous animals such as wolves, hyenas, or lions. This has been interpreted to mean that Neanderthals were hypercarnivorous humans, occupying the highest level of the food chain. However, this hypothesis has been challenged. Human metabolism does not allow for the consumption of high amounts of protein, as specialized carnivores do. Therefore, a paradox arises: could Neanderthals show isotopic signatures typical of extreme carnivores if their physiology did not allow it?

“There are elements that could explain many things about the lives of Neanderthals that we don’t usually consider because they’re not part of our food imagination, but they must be taken into account,” says Ainara Sistiaga, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen who did not participate in the study. This includes, for example, eating rotten meat, full of maggots. Something that today, except in some specific cultures like the Inuit (who eat seal meat fermented underground), is unthinkable and dangerous.

This research suggests that Neanderthals’ signature dish was rotting meat infested with fly larvae, which are responsible for the extremely high nitrogen levels discovered at various sites throughout history. The authors’ explanation is as follows: the larvae, feeding on rotting meat, have even higher nitrogen levels than the meat itself, and when consumed along with the tissues, they significantly alter the isotopic record of the person who ingested them — in this case, the Neanderthals. It is also believed that this was a deliberate and strategic decision to increase the consumption of fats and proteins, especially during the colder months.

The study has its limitations. Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, a professor at the University of Alcalá, Spain, points out that the hypothesis posed by the new research is “highly speculative.” For the academic, the high presence of nitrogen in prehistoric populations “could be the result of many different processes.” He gives as an example the fact that if Neanderthals had consumed large amounts of manure, they would have had the same level of nitrogen in their bones. “The problem is how to move from a speculative idea, such as the one presented in this article, to a scientifically verifiable proposition,” he summarizes. Until this happens, the expert asserts that the extremely high meat consumption among these humans continues to be more heuristic than “unproven alternative scenarios.”

These uncertainties surrounding what really happened “demonstrate the complexity of reconstructing the diet of an extinct species that survived for thousands and thousands of years in climatic and geographic contexts so changing that we can’t even understand them today,” says Sistiaga. These types of studies, the expert points out, “contribute new pieces to the puzzle of human evolution.”

From generation to generation

Another piece of research comes from a study published on June 17 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. The authors compared the differences in the way two Neanderthal lineages that lived in nearby caves in the Levant (Near East) butchered animals they intended to eat.

Anaëlle Jallon, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-author of the study, explains that “finding differences between these two sites indicates that there was a certain cultural diversity surrounding food among contemporary Neanderthal groups.” These communities used the caves for the same purposes: residential sections with areas dedicated to daily activities such as flint knapping, cooking, and garbage disposal, as well as for the burial of the deceased. Furthermore, both were surrounded by Mediterranean vegetation with the same animal species, and were occupied primarily during the winter.

“For these reasons,” Jallon ventures, “we might expect that, if all Neanderthal groups behaved the same way, we would recover the same animal butchering techniques at these sites.” However, scientists now know that this was not the case and that each community had its own method of processing food. They also discovered that the differences persisted over time, indicating that the knowledge or traditions underlying these variations endured and were passed down from generation to generation.

While the available evidence is insufficient to accurately reconstruct specific food preparation techniques, the researchers suggest that there were likely differences in tastes and cooking skills. “We can imagine that different Neanderthal groups used similar ingredients, but each had their own signature dishes, or that they cooked similar dishes, albeit following different recipes,” the author emphasizes.

A food atlas

Defining the Neanderthal diet is almost as difficult as trying to define a single human diet. Today, people in the Mediterranean don’t eat the same way people do in Southeast Asia. The same is true of our cousins. They occupied such a vast territory that compiling their food atlas is a risky undertaking. Furthermore, some foods, like meat, leave their mark, in this case on the bones. But others, like legumes or vegetables, don’t.

Sistiaga goes into detail: “Plant remains, for example, are difficult to find in bones. Techniques such as dental tartar analysis have been used to detect plant DNA or proteins, but the findings are anecdotal.” The plant fibers found in the teeth of different individuals could have gotten there in many ways, not just through ingestion. “Plant remains are less well preserved in archaeological sites, so we still have an overrepresentation of animal proteins.” Hence the myth of hypercarnivores.

But there was much more. A study published in 2023 found that 90,000 years ago, in what is now Lisbon, Portugal, Neanderthals feasted on charred seafood. Further into the central Iberian Peninsula, a 2017 study found that these early humans gathered and ate mushrooms. A 2011 review even suggests that honey may have been an important source of energy back then.

What is beyond doubt is that the race for good food decisively shaped the genus Homo. A 2015 study suggested that the germ of the ability to cook appeared more than six million years ago. And that since then, the taste for cooked food has helped the human brain achieve its modern size and power, since once cooked, food becomes easier to digest and, in the same quantities as raw food, leaves more calories in the body.

Evidence suggests that flavor optimization may have been one of the major evolutionary drivers. And it all began, perhaps, with a piece of maggot-infested meat.

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Earth has dodged a celestial bullet, but the moon might not be so lucky, and that has scientists keeping their telescopes and minds trained on a massive asteroid called “2024 YR4.” That’s not its official name, but more on that later.

When it was first discovered, this asteroid had a very small chance of impacting Earth in December of 2032, but later observations concluded the space rock no longer poses any significant risk to our planet.

Since then, additional data has helped experts refine the asteroid’s potential trajectory and they say the probability of it striking the moon in 2032 has now risen to 4.3%. That’s still a very small chance, but there could be some complications for our planet if that collision happens.

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Back To The Beginning

2024 YR4 first caught astronomers’ attention in December 2024. It made headlines when its probability of impacting Earth got as high as 3%.

It’s so far away that it appears as just a tiny glimmer, but using infrared images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scientists estimate that it’s the size of a 10-story building, about 200 feet in diameter.

It’s considered a near-Earth asteroid, meaning it’s in an orbit that brings it within Earth’s region of the solar system.

Its size earned the asteroid the nickname “city killer” since it could cause severe damage to a city or region if it struck Earth.

2024 YR4 is the temporary name given to the rock. While those who discovered it will get to suggest an official name, it could be months or years before that official name is decided by the International Astronomical Union.

What Happens If It Strikes The Moon?

While it’s unlikely the Earth would face any significant danger from the lunar strike, that debris could put nearby astronauts at risk, as well as satellites that we depend on for GPS, cellphones, internet and weather forecasting.

What about the International Space Station? Well that would be at risk, except that NASA plans to decommission and deorbit the ISS in 2031, a year before the asteroid’s potential impact.

(MORE: New Images Show Universe Like Never Before)

Would We Be Able To See The Collision?

The latest calculations from June suggest it’s likely the asteroid could hit the near side of the moon, the side pointing towards us.

So we could be able to see the once-in-a-lifetime collision here on Earth. Dr. Paul Wiegert, a physics and astronomy professor at Western University told Western News, “If YR4 hits the moon, it will be the largest asteroid to have hit the moon in about 5,000 years. It’s quite a rare event.”

Wiegert says, “People at home will be able to see the explosion with small telescopes or even binoculars.”

He also says that if moon rock is launched into space, “We should also get to see quite a spectacular meteor shower,” within a week of the collision.

So What Now?

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is currently too far away to detect with space or ground-based telescopes, as it orbits around the sun. But out of sight, does not mean out of mind – NASA expects to make more observations and collect new data when the asteroid’s orbit brings it back into Earth’s vicinity in 2028.