Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2025 från Discover

EARTHQUAKES, tornadoes, air strikes — all around the world, countless lives are lost to disasters and to the wreckage they leave behind. But search-and-rescue efforts are dangerous, and time is short: The larger the affected area, the harder it is to search efficiently and effectively. To aid in these efforts, scientists out of Singapore and Japan have developed a rather unconventional tool: swarms of cyborg cockroaches. FOR THE last two decades, researchers have been developing technology to remotely control live insects, including cockroaches, through implants to their nervous systems. “I have communicated with rescue teams and found that they urgently need insect-sized vehicles capable of traversing small openings in rubble to locate humans trapped in disasters,” says Hirotaka Sato, a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who has long…

THE STORY OF the Red Planet may be due for a revision. At one time, scientists thought that Mars turned red when it was arid and dry — when its rocks, rich in iron, reacted to oxygen in the air. That reaction formed rust, the theory went, which was broken down into dust and spread by wind over billions of years, until the planet’s whole surface was covered in scarlet. But a February 2025 study in Nature Communications instead suggests that the planet’s color traces back to a time when water covered much of Mars’ surface. After reacting to the iron and oxygen in the planet’s rocks and air, that water receded, then disappeared, leaving rust behind to break down and spread. “One of the most exciting aspects of this…

IN THE 1960S, researchers Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that whales sing to one another. Payne, scientist though he was, missed neither the romance nor the possibilities of this discovery. In 1970, he produced Songs of the Humpback Whale, an album with five tracks of hauntingly beautiful humpback songs. The album became a catalyst for the Save the Whales movement, which led to the end of whaling in the U.S. and eventually a global ban that saved many whale populations from extinction. Payne died in 2023, but not before inspiring a new generation of scientists to study the voices of whales. This time, though, their plan is even bolder: These scientists hope to decipher the meaning of whale sounds to gain insight into what life is like for another…

More than 2,000 years ago, Greek philosopher Metrodorus of Chios said that “to consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field sown with millet, only one grain will grow.” Today, we’re still looking for extraterrestrial life, and Lewis Alcott, a biogeochemist and lecturer at the University of Bristol, has developed a new lens for the search. In April 2024, Alcott published a study in Nature Geoscience looking at the cycles of carbon and other nutrients on Earth. The result of the study — a sophisticated computer model that charts the changes in those cycles over time — has revealed that the accumulation of carbon-rich rocks in the planet’s crust has accelerated oxygen’s production and release into the…

IN AUGUST 2023, a video of a mother bear and her two little cubs at Yellowstone National Park was trending all over the internet. Yet the clip didn’t circulate so widely online because of the precious baby bears themselves. Instead, it went viral because of how an eager group of tourists reacted when they saw the bears. At first, in the video, people stopped their cars and stared at the bears in a field next to the roadway. The bears ignored the humans, even as some got out of their cars and stood at a distance in the road. Then, a van pulled up, and its passengers quickly jumped out. Three men — one of them holding a young girl — began sprinting toward the mother bear and her cubs.…

Muscle Power Every move we make relies on our muscles — even the involuntary movement of our eyes. The lab-grown muscle pictured above mimics the complex anatomy of the human iris, which dilates and constricts the pupil. This structure, described in a March 2025 Biomaterials Science study, took shape when MIT engineers pressed a 3D-printed stamp with tiny grooves into a soft hydrogel sheet. The precise imprint left by the stamp was then suffused with real muscle cells that grew to flex like an actual iris. Unlike prior artificial muscles with a limited range of motion, this tissue contracts in multiple directions when exposed to light. Artificial muscles like this one could soon push the boundaries of “biohybrid” robotics, empowering machines to move like never before.…

Nature has some peculiar ways of creating molecules. For example, many of the essential molecules of life, like DNA, proteins, and sugars, have a property called chirality. Basically, chiral molecules are molecules that are shaped so that they can’t be superimposed on their mirror image. Scientists refer to this property as “handedness,” and it’s a great analogy for helping the rest of us understand chirality. If you put your right hand on top of your left hand, both palms down, they don’t match up. No matter how you twist and turn your hands, you won’t get one to perfectly cover the other. Of course, molecules don’t have hands. But they do have shapes, and those shapes are very important when it comes to — among other things — creating drugs.…

AS IT TURNS OUT, nature’s soothing effects are much stronger — and much easier to access — than traditionally thought, according to a March 2025 study in Nature Communications. Monitoring people’s pain perception, or nociception, while immersed in nature, the research reveals that outdoor settings are an analgesic for the brain, providing pain relief through sight and sound alone. “From past studies we know that being in contact with nature is associated with this very broad range of beneficial effects,” says Maximilian Steininger, a study author and a Ph.D. student at the University of Vienna. But whether that range includes an actual pain-relieving response, represented by reduced activity in the pain-perceiving regions in the brain, was previously debated. TO UNDERSTAND this better, the study authors administered shocks to dozens of…

“MY DAUGHTER NEEDS A COLONOSCOPY,” the mother kept repeating. “She’s stable,” I said, not trying to argue, but merely trying to soothe her. “Her blood test results are not critical.” “They keep telling us that,” she said, inhaling deeply, eyes boring into me. Veronica, the daughter in question, lay on the stretcher observing. Twenty-seven years old, slim, and soft-spoken, Veronica had come into the ER by herself with a complaint of rectal bleeding. It had been early evening; the surge of patients was peaking. She’d explained: Not a lot of bleeding, just some drops, going on for weeks. I’d wondered — as ER docs often do — how this was now an emergency. “So, tell me again when it started?” I asked. “Three months ago,” she answered. “Three months ago?…

According to Alcott, biogeochemistry leads people to unexpected places, like faraway solar systems and planets. But what brings people into the field is even less expected. Chatting with Discover about his efforts to encourage biogeochemistry education, Alcott says that video games are one of the greatest avenues for getting today’s students involved in science. Q You’ve said that your love of video games inspired you as a young student. Did it foster your interest in biogeochemistry? LA: My passion as a kid was video games, and that helped make me want to know how Earth works. A really obvious example that impacted me personally was Pokémon. Seeing such a diverse menagerie of creatures living in diverse environments, including creatures based on real world fossils like trilobites and ammonites, inspired me…

THE STORY of Homo sapiens is written largely in artifacts. Countless tools, potsherds, and other relics line museum shelves, illuminating the world of our ancestors. But most of the time, this record lacks what would most bring it to life — the people themselves. To fill that void, Swedish archaeologist Oscar Nilsson has spent around three decades reconstructing the faces of the dead. With an artist’s touch and almost 150 years of anatomical data at his disposal, he can transform any skull into a strikingly realistic visage. His sculptures — some 80 of which appear in museums around the globe — offer a mesmerizing link to the past. “When you see a human face, you get an emotional response,” Nilsson says. “It makes us understand history in a much more…

Some stains aren’t meant to be removed. In 2023 and 2024, researchers took 7,500 images of salt stains, including the images of stains containing sodium (Na) above. The researchers captured the images to train a machine-learning algorithm to identify the chemical composition of drops of 42 different aqueous salt solutions from the appearance of their dried deposits. Considering 16 characteristics of the images (among them the dried-out droplets’ compactness and connectedness), the algorithm was able to identify the chemistry of stains in unfamiliar images with 90 percent accuracy. Published in PNAS in June 2024 (and subsequently improved to identify seven salt solutions with 99 percent accuracy in a Digital Discovery paper in February 2025), the approach could serve as an alternative to chemical analysis, with future applications in medical settings…

TWO DECADES after its discovery, a 444-million-year-old fossil has finally been described. The fossil, which a team of researchers identified as a new species of arthropod in a March 2025 study in Papers in Palaeontology, has been dubbed Keurbos susanae, or “Sue” for short, after the discoverer’s mom. “I tell my mum in jest that I named the fossil ‘Sue’ after her because she is a well-preserved specimen,” said paleontologist Sarah Gabbott in a statement. “But, in truth, I named her ‘Sue’ because my mum always said I should follow a career that makes me happy — whatever that may be. For me that is digging rocks, finding fossils.” ARTHROPODS MAKE UP around 85 percent of the animals on Earth and have an extensive fossil record that traces back about 500 million…

It was 1911 — or maybe 1912 — when Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish antiquarian, acquired a strange medieval manuscript from a Jesuit archive in Italy. Similar in size to the average modern paperback, the book bore few indications of its authors, its audience, or its intended purpose. Instead, its approximately 232 pages were packed with illustrations of bathing female figures and of plants, planets, and stars — all mystifying — and with text written in symbols that were not known to Voynich, nor to any other antiquarian at the time. Today, this manuscript, the “Voynich Manuscript,” remains a mystery. Its illustrations are still unusual, its text is still unreadable, and its authors are still tormentingly out of reach. Some researchers say that the manuscript’s meaning is there, buried in ink…

We know that Neanderthals and early modern humans — distant relatives on the same family tree — must have had children together. Why? Because many people now carry a tiny percentage of Neanderthal DNA in their genome, with populations outside of Africa generally retaining anywhere from 1 to 4 percent. Modern humans express a potpourri of “Neanderthal-inspired” traits and mannerisms: In our hair and skin, our mood, and our body’s defenses against disease. Homo neanderthalensis genes that once guaranteed our species’ survival now subtly help — or in some cases, hinder — our health today. For better or for worse, our identities wouldn’t be complete without a dash of Neanderthal, but the ingredient list doesn’t just stop there. Some people even have a pinch of Denisovan (another extinct relative of…

MY HOME IN Indiana sits at the edge of a small woods. Far away from any city lights, these woods come alive when the sun sets in the summer, twinkling with a gentle, rhythmic glow. This dancing lightshow marks the arrival of the fireflies. Against the backdrop of darkness, these floating bugs flash in and out of sync, mimicking the soft gleam of candlelight. I send my children outside to catch the fragile creatures, showing them how to cradle the beetles in their palms, letting the bugs flash between their fingers. An animal that produces its own light summons a visceral feeling of awe. Light empowers. Light transforms. Perhaps it is our human-centric way of understanding the world, as creatures who rely on sight above all other senses, to attach such…