Science News – JD Stillwater

Science News

…as headlined from the Newsletter.

[Subscribe]

Feb/Mar 2026

Headline: Gut Microbiome Also Controls Your Aging

Revelation: If you’ve seen my One Song talk, you know that the microbes in our guts influence our hunger, food preferences, weight and emotions. Now add how fast we age. The bacterial diversity in us generally decreases as we get old, but not for everyone – some centenarians have youthful microbiomes. A mouse study transplanted poop between young mice and old ones. The young mice showed increased brain, eye, and metabolic inflammation like much older mice, with the reverse happening in the older mice. These results hint that the microbiome ages with us, and if that’s reversible, we might be healthier longer. Unfortunately, poop transplants have risks.

Insights: The words “me” and “you” refer to not one organism, but an entire ecosystem of critters that make up a single human body. It takes a village (of species) to be alive, both outside and inside of us. We are one with our microbiomes.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Like You, Baby Chicks Associate Sounds With Shapes

Revelation: Newborn chicks chose spiky shapes after hearing the word “kiki” and blobby ones after “bouba.” This “bouba-kiki phenomenon” was well-known in primates, but finding it in newborn birds is… unexpected, with implications for brains, language, and ancestry.

Insights: Every week new results come out that chip away at our notions of human exceptionalism. We are animals who evolved from animal ancestors, so of course our distant cousins would have some qualities we once thought unique to us. The question for each of us is, “how should we treat our relatives?”

Plain-English Article

Headline: Stress – Inspiring Videos Can Help (as much as meditation)

Revelation: Short, inspirational videos were nearly as effective as meditation in reducing stress, and far more so than reels, comedy videos, or no media in a four-week study of 1,001 U.S. Adults, at just a few minutes per day. Other studies by the same team show that our media choices tend to reflect, and then accentuate, our current mood.

Insights: Our brains are susceptible to suggestion: garbage in; garbage out. We knew this, but this study and others are demonstrating how integrated our thoughts are with our feelings, our moods, our stress levels, and ultimately, our joy of life, our eudaemonia, our spirits. The reference to meditation is interesting – it seems that both mindful silence and active inspiration have similar effects.

Plain-English Article

The Rubin telescope, photo CC-4 by NOIRLab

Headline: 800,000 Discoveries Each Night

Revelation: Last month the “What We’re Reading” section of the newsletter included a link to the new sky map revealed by the Vera C. Rubin observatory. That was the baseline; now, the Rubin’s computers compare each night’s sky to that baseline looking for changes (any change represents something worth examining closer. This is how Pluto was discovered: comparing two photos a few nights apart). Then, after filtering for the most significant changes, and categorizing by kind of change, it sends an alert to astronomers who specialize in each phenomenon. On its very first night, Feb 24, 2026, Rubin sent out 800,000 alerts! Astronomers expect that number to soon exceed ten million alerts per night.

Astronomy is about to take a giant leap forward, across many fronts.

Insights: Investments in new scientific equipment yield new revelations, which, in turn, changes our relationship with all of existence. Carl Sagan said, “Science is, at least in part, informed worship.” Funding for science is an investment in our own humanity, our own souls, our common spiritual welfare. The universe is examining itself with the Rubin telescope, and calling us to greatness. A million times a night.

Plain-English Article

Rubin’s Website

Headline: Some People Have No “Mind’s Eye,” Offering Clues About Consciousness

Revelation: About 4% of us can’t close their eyes and picture (in their imagination) a sunrise. Or their favorite breakfast. They are “aphantasic.” Study of their brains offers insights into all brains. For example, hearing a dog bark, their visual cortex acts just like everyone else’s, but they don’t “see” a dog in their imagination, while other people do. More research is in progress.

Insights: Consciousness is one of the most frequent questions I get after speaking events. What is it? How does it work? Is it in our skulls, or something not entirely bio-chemical? Is it emergent? No one knows, and one approach is to relate the bio-chemistry to our inner experience, in as many different ways we can. Aphantasic people offer intriguing potential for understanding what underlies the experience of visual imagination.

Plain-English Article

A Few Studies:

Distinguishing between seen and imagined

Adapted from an image by MissLunaRose12, CC-4

Headline: Female Reindeer Have Antlers So That … They Can Eat Them

Revelation: The previous (and still contending) hypothesis is that female caribou have antlers for defense, but no other deer species have them, only migratory arctic caribou. Turns out, caribou calving grounds show clear signs that antlers shed by females there are nibbled by caribou, year after year, as a source of precious minerals after calving, minerals needed for nursing. Before leaving more abundant regions, females stock up on minerals… in their antlers.

Insights: Our more-than-human cousins have some surprising abilities and habits. Evolution has filled the world with astounding diversity, much of which we are only beginning to discover.

Plain-English Article

January 2026

Just one story this month, due to the limitation of being on tour. Also, this one is a bit involved.

Headline: A Fundamental Law Gets Violated, Revealing New Physics

Revelations: The most exciting thing that can happen in science is when an experimental result is “impossible.” In September, we learned that, contrary to the Wiedemann–Franz law, heat and electric charge can flow independently, in graphene at the Dirac point. I know, some of those terms are probably unfamiliar to you, and some of them to me, too! But it seems that electrons under certain conditions in pure graphene behave like the quantum soup in the first moments of time, before the Big Bang. This discovery opens up a whole new field of experimental physics, with graphene as the laboratory.

Insights: (1) Scientists like nothing better than to be proved wrong about long-established understandings. This particular violation is especially exciting, because it hints at new understandings of the universe’s underlying “operating system,” but without the expense of huge particle accelerators. (2) The ability to model the early universe in the lab is extremely exciting, potentially a great leap forward in reconciling the quantum world with cosmology, and therefore the origins of everything, including ourselves. (3) Science gives us awe while also keeping us humble. There is still so much yet to be revealed.

Plain-English Article

December 2025

Headline: Breast Milk: Fingerprint and Dialogue

Revelations: (1) Breast milk is customized by mothers’ bodies for each infant; (2) female babies get more milk, while male babies get milk richer in protein and fat; (3) breast milk + baby saliva –> hydrogen peroxide, which inhibits salmonella and staph infections; (4) baby saliva “backwashes” into the breast, where the mother’s immune system adds custom-tailored antibodies to the milk to fight specific infections in the infant; (5) breast milk includes indigestible oligosaccharides whose only known function is to spur a healthy microbiome in the infant by feeding “good-guy” bacteria. Much of this knowledge comes from early studies by a single primate researcher, Katie Hinde.

Insights: (1) There is so much yet to discover, even in fields that might seem “tapped out.” Until Katie Hinde, no one thought there might be scientific and evolutionary gems hidden in breast milk. Another reason to encourage women in science, and to fund studies that seem bizarre, like analyzing the contents of monkey milk; (2) In our arrogance, we think we can improve on evolution’s gifts with products like baby formula, thereby missing the complexities hidden under our babies’ noses. For sure, formula is essential in some cases, but it simply cannot duplicate (let along improve on) the complex interactions inherent in the breastfeeding relationship. (3) That relationship is itself interconnected (interbeing, even) with the larger ecosystem of the infant’s microbiome, bacterial and viral pathogens in the environment, and so on. Wonders never cease!

Thanks to subscriber and Patron Barbara Dewey for the tip on this one. (She’s also my mom, and yes, all four of her babies were breast-fed.)

Plain-English Article

Another, on the”viral” photo shown here 😁

Katie Hinde TED talk (9 min)

A Few Studies:

– Maternal immune response to baby spit

– On Peroxide from spit+milk
– On infant-sex differences in milk volume & content

– On oligosaccharides

Headline: 20 Diverse Species; One Alarm Call

Revelation: Researchers have found that birds from all over the world and from distant branches of the bird-family tree all use (and respond to) very similar alarm calls related to “brood parasites,” birds that lay their eggs in other birds’ nests.

Insights: Another example of cooperation being a significant evolutionary strategy. Species that are victims of brood parasites benefit from understanding each others’ alarm calls, so much that those calls have become universally-understood bird language for “Watch out!”

Thanks to Antony Van der Mude, Patron and subscriber, for the heads-up about this study.

Plain-English Article (includes audio of the calls)

Headline: Fluoride in Tapwater – No Effect on IQ

Revelation: A massive, long-term study found no links between fluoride in tapwater (at recommended levels) and cognitive deficits. This study is unlikely to quell the debate.

Insights: Fluoride, a fairly potent toxin at fairly low concentrations, has been controversial for decades, with heightened politicalization since RFK Jr.’s appointment as HHS Secretary. Added to some municipal tapwater, fluoride decreases dental cavities in children. Earlier studies that showed fluoride causes IQ deficits involved much higher levels of fluoride than those normally used in the U.S. On the other hand, with fluoride present in most toothpastes now, the benefit of drinking fluoride may have waned since the 1940s and ’50s. Expect the debate to continue, with this study being debated alongside many others.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Raccoons are Domesticating

Revelation: No, not as pets, but as a result of association with humans and human food sources. A study finds that raccoon snouts are shortening, but only in those who live in urban areas. Human trash is, as E.B. White called it in Charlotte’s Web, “a smorgasbord” of food for scavengers like rats and raccoons. Access to it requires being less afraid of humans. That trend toward “tameness” is associated with shorter animal snouts – “domestication syndrome.”

Insights: Perhaps it was NOT humans who domesticated dogs and cats, but they themselves, as they dug through our trash. Evolution is always co-evolution, because each of us is part of one another’s environment. The critters and plants that we interact with (which is just about all life on Earth) co-influence each other’s development and evolution.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Update on 3i/Atlas

Revelation: 3i/Atlas is a visitor from outside our solar system, only the third one ever detected. 3i/Atlas ignited a firestorm among non-astronomers (and one or two highly regarded astronomers, too) when it behaved in ways comets usually don’t, fueling speculation that it was alien technology. Best guess is still: comet. It has now passed its closest approach to Earth with no attempt to interact with us. It’s on a path out of our solar system, but will come within 33 million miles of Jupiter first, on March 15. 3i/Atlas is an unusual and fascinating glimpse into other distant solar systems, sure, but probably not a spaceship.

Insights: The cool thing (to me) is all the questions it has raised. While we have learned that planets are common around other stars, we don’t know how diverse they are. 3i/Atlas suggests that comets can be very different from our home-grown ones. There is still much to learn and discover.

Plain-English Article

A Study by Breakthrough Listen (SETI Berkeley)

November 2025

Headline: Antimatter Asymmetry Quantified

Revelation: The first moments of time produced matter and antimatter in equal quantities. They should have annihilated each other, leaving nothing. But the universe is, obviously, something, which is a puzzle. A new analysis of data from CERN measured a difference in decay rates of matter and antimatter. The difference? 2.5%. Sounds small, but it’s hugely significant, because it may explain the existence of everything. The details of how this difference made all the difference are still unknown.

Insights: If the existence of everything, including ourselves, depends on a tiny flaw in the otherwise perfect symmetry of physical laws, what does this suggest for our own flaws? Could it be that flaws and quirks are the fundamental drivers of innovation?

Plain-English Article

Headline: Starlings Are the Best Imitators (of R2D2)

Revelation: Evolutionary biologists analyzed audio of pet birds that had been exposed to the sound of R2D2, a robot from the Star Wars movies. European Starlings, which can sing two notes at once, had the most accurate renditions, beating out parrots. Among parrots, smaller-brained species were better than larger ones. While fun, the study also reveals the limitations of avian vocal anatomy, and offers clues about evolutionary selection pressures on birds.

Insights: Evolution often seems to favor imitation. There’s a power that comes with the ability to mimic others. Human children excel at it, for better and worse. We humans are blessed with the ability to choose who and what we imitate, and to choose to be people worthy of imitation.

Plain-English Article with a great diagram

Plain-English Article

Video of Starling doing R2D2 (1 min)

Headline: Migrating Monarch Butterflies Tracked

Revelation: For the first time, tiny tags allow entomologists to track migrating monarchs. It is revealing the exact routes taken by the monarchs from Canada to Mexico. Those routes include backyard pollinator gardens like ours. You can track the monarchs in real time from your phone.

Insights: At a time when monarchs and other pollinators are in serious decline, this breakthrough technology offers clarity about their strengths and needs, and how each of us can help. The more people who use the app, the more accurate the data on monarch migrations.

Plain-English Article with maps (NYT)

Get the Phone App

image from the study

Headline: A New Twist in Ant Queen Savagery

Revelation: An amateur ant enthusiast discovered one way parasitic ant queens take over another colony. The parasite queen sneaks in and sprays the existing queen with a chemical that induces workers to attack and kill their own mother, after which they unwittingly raise the attacker’s offspring. Matricide is extremely rare in our animal cousins, but does exist.

Insights: Nature is not all sweetness and light. The savage and predacious behavior of some people isn’t uniquely human. We evolved, and evolution gifted us with both empathy and cruelty. Most importantly—and unlike ants—we can choose.

Plain-English Article

(both links have videos)

Headline: Wolf Tool Use Documented

Revelation: Video from a remote area of western Canada shows a wolf dragging a crab trap from deep water by its buoy to get at the bait. The article below includes the video.

Insights: Until a few decades ago, scientists presumed that what makes humans unique was our use of tools. Now, a flood of data shows that tool use is downright common among our animal cousins. It only makes sense that close genetic relatives would share many of our traits. Letting go of the mindset that humans are unique and special opens our eyes to see the kinship that has always been obvious to indigenous cultures.

Plain-English Article

October 2025

Headline: Blame the Y for Why Women Live Longer

Revelation: It’s not stress, machismo, or smoking; having two X chromosomes probably explains why women live longer than men. A study of 1,176 species of mammals and birds lends support to the hypothesis that, because the Y chromosome is shorter—with no “backup” for many genes that reside on the X—having two X chromosomes provides a life-expectancy advantage over XY. This is not conclusive, just strong support. There are many complicating factors, starting with the fact that birds have it reversed: female birds have the stunted chromosome and shorter longevity than male birds.

Insights: As I focus on in my Flowers talk, the evolution of sexual reproduction brought only one advantage: diversity. Sexual dimorphism (the differences between sexes) is part of that legacy of diversity, but it isn’t all upside. The ever-shrinking Y chromosome is one of the downsides, with impacts on longevity. However, that legacy makes us who we are, and on balance, it’s a net positive, even for those with a Y chromosome.

Plain-English Article

Headline: JD Was Wrong! (and a cool new periodic table)

Revelation: It’s true that dying stars can create almost all of the elements we find in nature, but MOST of the high-mass elements (like silver, gold, lead) come from neutron-star mergers, which are still huge explosions, but different from supernovae. JD learned this from Jennifer Johnson’s periodic table of element origins, pictured at right. (Her blog post is delightful.)

Insights: Science is both a body of knowledge and a method for extending and refining it. As revelations come in, we embrace the new knowledge and incorporate it into our frameworks and worldviews. That’s a good thing; it’s a spiritual practice we can apply in all aspects of our lives.

An article about neutron-star mergers and heavy metals

The 2021 Study Paper that quantified heavy element sources

Headline: REVEALED: the Family Saga of Potatoes

Revelation: Potatoes—whose family tree was a mystery but known to be related to tomatoes somehow—descended from the interspecies mating of ancestral tomatoes and “Etuberosum,” a South American plant, about nine million years ago. The combination allowed for the growth of the large delicious tubers we call potatoes.

Insights: We knew potatoes are related to tomatoes; people graft tomato stems onto potato roots to make a pomato/tomtato “plant,” and it actually works, so they must be cousins at least.

Every living thing is related if we go back far enough, but lots of details are still obscure. It’s nice to know the story. Here again, sexual reproduction’s main evolutionary advantage is diversity, in this case creating potatoes.

Plain-English Article
The Study

image & caption: Pinterest/ShiroFeather

Headline: A Habitable Exoplanet Nearby?

Revelation: The Webb telescope is busy – observations reported in August revealed the probable presence of a Jupiter-sized planet in the habitable zone of … [drumroll] the closest solar system to our own, Alpha Centauri, only four light-years away. It’s a binary system—two stars in orbit together. More studies are needed to confirm this, and even if it pans out, the planet is likely a gas giant, not Earth-like, but if it has moons, they could have liquid water. Maybe even life.

Insights: In the last two decades, our estimates of the numbers and conditions of other planets around other stars has exploded. Currently that means between 300 million and 40 billion potentially-habitable earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. Maybe there’s one right next door.

Plain-English Article
The Study

(full disclosure – to get to the Centauri system with current technology would take 78,000 years. There’s still no Planet B. (But we might have neighbors. It only takes four years to send them a message.))

Headline: Trees Have Microbiomes, Too

Revelation: Approximately a trillion microbes live inside your average tree. A research team sampled the microbiomes of 150 trees from 16 species, and found that each tree, each part of the tree, and each tree species has a unique microbiome.

Insights: No living thing stands alone, even inside itself. Humans and other complex critters are entire ecosystems, uncountable creatures working in tandem to maintain the whole, the patterned flow of matter that is a living body. And those wholes are, in turn, parts of larger cooperative ecosystems like forests and cities.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Hip Bone Development Responsible for Upright Walking

Revelation: A comprehensive study of ilium bone development in 18 primate species and mice, from the genes involved to adult pelvis shapes, revealed that humans use the same genes as other primates to make a pelvis, but in strikingly different ways. In the womb, our pelvises start out with a similar bit of cartilage, but perpendicular to the spine rather than parallel as in primates and mice. This knowledge offers potential for advances in treatment of some skeletal disorders.

Insights: Evolution works with what is to explore what can be, allowing for incredible complexity and fine-tuning, but also retaining clues as to what came before. Little is lost, but much gets repurposed.

Note: this Harvard research team was two years into a five year project on human development when federal funding approved by Congress was impounded by the White House this spring. Work has stopped.

Plain-English Article

September 2025

Headline: Mitochondria Talk to Each Other… Long Distance

Background: Mitochondria are the tiny parts of our cells that burn sugar to make energy. They have their own DNA in little ringlets, abbreviated as mtDNA, separate from the DNA in your chromosomes. They descend from ancient bacteria that got eaten (but not digested) by our simple single-celled ancestors billions of years ago.

Revelation: Now, they appear to have sociality—lives of their own. The wonderful article in Scientific American is paywalled, but here are some quotes:

“For the first time in humans, Vincent and I saw that mitochondria send thin tubular structures [nanotunnels] out toward one another…”
“Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the mitochondrial collective, however, is that mitochondria from different parts of the body talk to one another, using hormones as their language.”
“Mitochondrial signals alter the expression of more than 66% of genes in the chromosomes.”
“I found that mental stress induced by having to speak in public for five minutes increased the amount of free floating mtDNA in the blood. People in intensive care units who are grievously ill tend to have very high levels of mtDNA in their blood. Because mtDNA resemble bacterial DNA, immune cells see them as pathogens and mount an attack that can develop into inflammation.”
“Rather than being like battery chargers, mitochondria are more like the motherboard of the cell.”

Insights: (1) Our bodies are entire ecosystems of living things, from bacteria in our guts and on our skins to each human cell, cells which now appear to be ecosystems in their own right. When we draw boundaries around ourselves and our parts, and when we define terms precisely to reinforce those boundaries, we lose sight of the dynamics of life, the interactions and interactivity of this earthly and universal interbeing. (2) These revelations paint a picture of our bodies less as systems of interacting parts, and more like dynamic flows of energy, regulated and shared among mitochondria. One last quote from the article, which I love:
“Think of yourself as a waterfall… The waterfall cannot be understood from its parts, only from its movement. And once the flow stops there is no more waterfall. The waterfall is not a thing that appears and disappears. It is a process–a process that flows and stops flowing. Like a waterfall, you are not a thing. You are a process–an energetic process, to be precise.”

SciAm Article (paywalled, I think)
Summary and Author Interview (with GREAT images)
One Study by the Author that is the basis for the article

Headline: The Extremist Mind (4 Psychological Markers of Extremism)

Revelation: Psychologist and Neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod has identified four characteristics common to people with extreme political and religious ideologies. Note: these are correlations, so they could be causes, effects, neither, or coincidental. Two markers are observable from the outside, and the other two require brain scans: Cognitive rigidity (related to creativity); Emotional volatility (related to impulsivity and thrill-seeking); Enlarged amygdala (processes fear, threat, disgust); Thinner Pre-Frontal Cortex (rationality and problem-solving). These correlations apply to both extremes of the political landscape.

Insights: As politics in the U.S.A. get increasingly polarized, it’s helpful to know that the two extremes have much in common, and that those commonalities can be identified. That knowledge, with further study, could help mediate extremism during childhood, before it starts.

Plain-English Article
More in-depth Plain English Article, with examples
List of Zmigrod’s Related Studies

Headline: Your Immune System Kicks In at the Mere Sight of Illness

Revelation: Subjects wearing virtual reality headsets, when “approached” by simulated faces with visible rashes or illness, had a spike in immune cells in their blood, along with activation of brain regions that register threats. It is likely that looking at the picture here has caused an immune response in your bloodstream.

Insight: The mind is powerful, and perfectly integrated with the body. It’s not just the placebo effect; millions of years of evolution fine-tuned us to protect ourselves, in this case without even knowing it.

Plain-English Article
The Study

(full disclosure: the man pictured has poison ivy, not an infection)

Headline: Longest Lightning Ever Recorded

Revelation: A storm in October 2017 spawned a single lightning flash with 116 strikes to ground, lasting over 7 seconds and ranging from Dallas to Kansas City, some 515 miles. It took eight years for meteorologists to notice the “megaflash” when they re-analyzed the satellite data in 2024.

Insights: There is a reason our ancestors assigned lightning to the realm of the gods! Powerful stuff, beyond the capabilities of our technology thus far. Mysterious stuff, beyond the full understanding of our sciences thus far. And yet it springs from the same forces, the same laws, the same Earth systems as ourselves.

Plain-English Article
Official Announcement of the New Record (World Meteorological Org)

Photo: Edward Mitchell, licensed to WMO

Headline: Mysterious Light from Before the First Stars

Revelation: The James Webb Space Telescope has detected light sources from millions of years before the first stars formed. (Remember, looking out in space is looking back in time, because light takes time to reach us.) Stretched into the infra-red by cosmic expansion, the light started out as ultra-violet, hinting that “primordial black holes” may have formed during the Big Bang and began eating matter long before the first stars lit up, when the only elements were hydrogen and helium.

Previously, black holes were assumed to form only in the centers of galaxies from mergers of dead stars. Now, two separate studies, one on the mysterious early light, followed quickly by the discovery of a “naked black hole,” suggest that the early universe was much more dynamic than previously thought. Cosmologists now have the exciting task of adjusting their understandings to accommodate the new data.

Insights: As the island of knowledge grows, we are exposed to even more ignorance, as the shoreline with the Sea of Mystery expands, offering new puzzles to explore. Each new bit of knowledge brings us closer to understanding Ultimate Reality.

May full understanding always lie beyond the horizon.

Plain-English Article
The Study on Freakishly-early UV Light
The “Naked Black Hole” Study

Headline: Moore’s Law for Fake Science?

Revelation: A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half.

Insights: Science, and the knowledge it offers us about reality, is only as good as it is accurate. Rigorous peer review and the absence of financial incentives are essential. I receive email offers several times a week to publish in obscure journals – for a fee. It started after I published my first (and so far only) paper in Zygon.

I also get requests to serve as a peer-reviewer in fields I know little about – for pay. All of this is a disaster for the global human endeavor to explore reality.

Plain-English Article
The Study

August 2025

Headline: Social Inequality Ages People at the Cellular Level

Revelation: A massive study (162,000 patients from 40 countries) reveals the association of social disadvantage with rapid aging: restricted voting rights; unfair elections; lack of access to education; gender inequality; exposure to air pollution. Those and other political, social, and environmental conditions make us age faster and die sooner.

A closely-related study in UK and Finland tracked the effects of social disadvantage at the cellular level, using six biomarkers of age-related disease like cancer, dementia, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Cell biomarkers included: stem cell exhaustion; deregulated nutrient sensing; altered intercellular communication; mitochondrial dysfunction; epigenetic alterations; and telomere attrition. All showed a strong association with social disadvantage. In short, poor and downtrodden people age faster, and you can see that aging in their cells.

Insights: Who knew that gerrymandering accelerates aging in voters? We knew poverty and lack of education shorten lives, but now we know political dysfunction does, too, and we can begin to parse out the precise biochemical mechanisms in our cells that make it so. With wisdom, we can address the inequality and dysfunctions, too.

Plain-English Article
The Study
The Related Study

Headline: Landlord Plant Keeps Tenant Ants from Fighting

Revelation: This gets confusing. In Fiji, a species of epiphytic plants (epiphyte: grows on other trees, no roots) creates bulgy tubers to house ants. The ants’ poop nourishes the plant, and ants carry seeds to new trees. Ants get a strong nest out of the elements and safe from predation, high in the air. Win/win. But sometimes, the plant’s tuber contains multiple species of ants, which would normally fight each other to the death. Somehow, the plant keeps the ants in separate internal compartments, with separate entrances. Learning this knowledge required CT scans of the tubers.

Insights: So many layers here (literally). The mutual relationship between the plant and the ants is cool enough (and further evidence that evolution favors cooperation), but the plant’s ability to keep the ant species separate in concentric layers is a bit mysterious, and involves the plant somehow keeping track (learning and remembering) where the different ant colonies are within the plant. It’s also a reminder that strong fences make good neighbors. Check out the article – it’s amazing.

Plain-English Article (includes fascinating videos)
The Study

Image copied from the study (Chomicki et al)

July 2025

Headline: Inattentional Blindness is Partial

Revelation: A famous 1999 experiment (try it yourself in 2 min) showed that we literally cannot see things we aren’t paying attention to. New research adds nuance to that conclusion, revealing that even when we’re sure we didn’t see it, part of our brain remembers some details.

Insights: Human brains are absurdly complex and mysterious. There is still so much to know, starting with the nature of consciousness, and how the brain performs the miracle of creating a model of the world inside our heads. The human brain offers itself as a rich source of awe and gratitude.

Plain-English Article
The Study

RELATED (and worth checking out)
New Optical Illusions Probe Brain Function (and are really fun!)

Headline: Mitochondria Have Immune Functions, Too.

Revelation: Mitochondria are tiny organelles inside living cells that convert sugars to energy (the “powerhouse of the cell.” They are the descendants of ancient bacteria that took up residence inside their neighbors, an impressive feat of evolutionary cooperation. Now we know mitochondria also play a role in the immune system, helping fight off their pathogenic bacterial cousins.

Mitochondria detect the presence of foreign bacteria, and signal immune neutrophil cells to release sticky stuff that traps the invaders. Auto-immune diseases may be caused or aggravated by mitochondrial failures in that role.

Insights: The boundaries between the various systems in living bodies are dissolving as we reveal the complex interactions between them. This feels like an echo of how Earth’s systems are also deeply interconnected. For example, speaking of the atmosphere as if it’s unrelated to the oceans and the crust is dangerously simplistic. Are mitochondria part of the body’s metabolic (energy) system, or the immune system? Answer: Both. Do rising CO2 concentrations affect the air or the water or the soil? Answer: Yes. All of ’em.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Orcas’ Exfoliation Routine

Revelation: Orcas join the exclusive club of non-humans that use tools, in this case, strands of kelp which they use as exfoliants. Interestingly, they do not use it on themselves, but whales of all ages and social status groom one another with the kelp, cooperatively. Called “allokelping,”—meaning “kelping another”—this behavior is both highly cooperative and uncannily similar to primate grooming behaviors. It is an aspect of whale culture.

Insights:

This reminds me of special meals we used to have at summer camp, where, for fun, you weren’t allowed to feed yourself; you had to feed someone else for the duration of the meal. Past issues of this newsletter reported many surprising finds that make our animal (and plant!) cousins seem even more like us than we imagined previously.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Addiction—The “Gateway Drug” is Your Genome

Revelation: Kids who experiment with drugs and alcohol at an early age showed brain differences before they took their first sip or puff. This flips the script on so-called gateway drugs and brain changes in users; it’s not the drugs that change the brain, but rather brain differences that make some kids vulnerable. To be fair, it is not yet known if these brain differences are genetic or due to other influences such as childhood trauma, which is also correlated with addiction.

Insights: As with “the five* senses,” cultural inertia can blind us to underlying realities, some of which should be self-evident but are obvious only with hindsight. At its best, science cuts through that bias and inertia by continually challenging our assumptions and doubting conventional wisdom.

*We have way more than five senses. Details here.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Want the Job? Buy a Decent Microphone

Revelation: Researchers had subjects rate the intelligence, hireability, credibility, and romantic desirability of job applicants recorded using a variety of audio effects that didn’t affect listener comprehension of the spoken words. Recordings that were tinny, or otherwise lower-quality reproductions, led to harsher judgements of the person speaking.

Insights: There is a long and growing list of biases that evolution built into the default human operating system. Science is making huge strides in understanding those natural biases. Understanding precedes remedy, and in this case, it’s as easy as making sure your microphone is of good quality.

Plain-English Article

June 2025

JD took June off to prepare for three major presentations.

See you in July!

May 2025

Headline: Your Orange Cat is a Mutant (aren’t we all?)

Revelation: We knew the gene for orange cat fur is on the X chromosome, but no one could find the gene. There isn’t one. Instead, orange fur arises from an odd mutation in a section of the chromosome that regulates the activity of a gene that is (seemingly) unrelated to fur color. Surprise!

Insights: Sex-linkage in cats features prominently in JD’s talk Bædlings, Two-Spirits, & the Science of Sex. This discovery is an interesting wrinkle. Evolution has made mammalian genetics incredibly complex. There is much yet to learn.

Plain-English Article

Headline: “Ow!” is Ancient

Revelation: The sounds humans make when in pain are similar across all languages, containing the sound “ah” in conjunction with other vowels. Such similarity between languages does NOT happen with expressions of joy or disgust. The study compared 131 languages.

Insights: “Ow” and its cousins may predate language itself, and offer clues to how language has evolved with humanity. As diverse as our languages are, we all feel—and express—pain the same.

Plain-English Article

Headline: “Transcendant Thinking” Builds Brains

Revelation: A long article in Scientific American summarized decades of research on adolescents, focused on kids who connected their experiences and learnings to larger world and historic contexts.

fMRI scans of teen brains illustrated how emotional engagement, and thinking beyond the immediate, led to broader connections, larger brain mass, and stronger identity development, irrespective of IQ. Consistent with PTSD studies, exposure to violence is associated with stunted brain regions that process pain, but transcendent thinking offered some protection in teens who considered broader contexts in which the violence happened.

Insights: Education systems that encourage teens to engage their emotions, and to consider both personal and global implications of lessons, build bigger, stronger brains.

Plain-English Article

The ALICE detector at CERN

Headline: Alchemy Finally Realized

Revelation: Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have been turning lead into gold. For a while. What’s new is detecting and counting the minuscule amounts of gold produced by the rare collisions where a high-speed lead ion forces another lead nucleus to eject three protons, making an unstable gold nucleus. From 2015-2018, they made 86 billion gold nuclei or about 0.000000000029 grams of gold. The gold lasts only about a microsecond before shattering into separate particles.

Insights: No profound insights here, except to note how far we’ve come, from attempting the impossible using chemistry, to learning it’s impossible, to doing it accidentally, to counting how often it happens.

Plain-English Article

April 2025

Headline: When Empathy is a Norm, People Do It More.

Revelation: Mirroring the feelings of others takes effort. Compassion fatigue is real. Empathy evolved—in spite of the costs—because group bonding in social species is essential. Experiments reveal that when group norms include active listening, people are more willing to make the investment.

Insights: Curiosity with empathy opens people to alternative perspectives. Argument and debate tend to entrench current positions.

Great Article, but paywalled. Sorry.

Another Good Article, free.

A Study Summary

A 2016 Study on “Deep Canvassing”

Deep Canvassing Applied to Climate

Headline: Dangerous Radiation from Lightning (not just outer space)

Revelation: Usually safely contained by magnetic fields in Earth’s two radiation belts, “killer electrons” can escape when freed by high-energy radiation from the sun. That’s a hazard for astronauts and orbiting equipment. It now appears that killer electrons are also released by magnetic pulses from lightning strikes in the lower atmosphere. This discovery links Earth weather with space weather.

Insights: It’s all connected! (and we’re still learning the myriad ways…)

Plain-English Article

Revelation: Focussed ultrasound waves targeting the brain’s Default Mode Network decreased mind-wandering, negative thoughts, and induced mindful meditative states in subjects.

Insights: Experiences previously considered “spiritual” are increasingly found to have natural corollaries, if not causes. Body, mind, and spirit are one.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Shark-like Electroreception in Caterpillars

Revelation: Caterpillars responded to the approach of an electrode with the unique electric charge of a predatory wasp. Common in sharks, this ability is rare in land animals.

Insights: One more amazing skill possessed by our Earthling cousins.

Plain-English Article

March 2025

Headline: Still Plenty of Undiscovered Species

Revelation: An expedition to a recently developed but remote region of Peru yielded 27 previously unknown species – not microbes but big things: mice that swim (very unusual) and three other mammals; salamanders; vipers; hummingbirds; butterflies. Plus many known endangered species.

Insights: There is still SO MUCH to explore and learn, so much we don’t know. Let us approach the unknown with a humility and deference appropriate to our ignorance.

Plain-English Article Many photos of exotic species.

Headline: The Coolest Bird (Literally)

Revelation: Black Metaltail hummingbirds in the Peruvian Andes can enter a state of “torpor” in which their body temperature drops to just 3° above freezing (birds are warm-blooded). This is a new record.

Insights: Count this as one more amazing capacity of our cousins in the tree of life. At such temperatures we (and most other warm-blooded animals) would be long dead of hypothermia.

Plain-English Article

Headline: No, Monkeys Can’t Type the Complete Works of Shakespeare (in this Universe)

Revelation: Mathematicians allege that infinite monkeys typing randomly for infinite time would eventually type everything, but what about all the known monkeys typing until the heat death of the universe? A new calculation says no way, not even in a googol years.

Insights: Math is fun, and often theoretical math ends up predicting later-discovered natural phenomena in uncanny ways. But this universe has limits. Not everything theoretically possible IS possible.

Plain-English Article

Headline: Postpartum Depression – Visible in Brain Before Childbirth

Revelation: A new study scanned brains of pregnant women and found measurable changes in women who later experienced PPD.

Insights: The ability to examine the brain from the outside reveals that many ailments we previously thought “psychological,” with advice to “just get over it already,” are instead physiological. Yes, it IS “all in your head,” but not in a way you control. Such knowledge is a gift that invites patience, kindness, and nurturing, just when new mothers need it most.

Plain-English Article