Category: ScienceNews

There are over 200 species of deep-sea anglerfish; some are long and thin, some are squat and round, some have fins that they use to "walk" along the sea floor, and others have huge eyes set far back into their heads. But how did all this morphological diversity first come to be? Thanks to a new anglerfish family tree, now we know.

Scientists built this evolutionary tree using genetic information from hundreds of samples and anglerfish specimens across the globe. It indicates that anglerfish originated from an ancestor that crawled along the seafloor ... and sheds new light on how experts could think about biodiversity as a whole.

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As artificial intelligence seeps into some realms of society, it rushes into others. One area it's making a big difference is protein science — as in the "building blocks of life," proteins! Producer Berly McCoy talks to host Emily Kwong about the newest advance in protein science: AlphaFold3, an AI program from Google DeepMind. Plus, they talk about the wider field of AI protein science and why researchers hope it will solve a range of problems, from disease to the climate.

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When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examines two momentous changes to global economics and how they play out for individuals. He explains to interviewer David Edmonds how the rise of China’s manufacturing dominance and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence likely are and will affect individual people accustomed to do specific tasks for pay.

What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States.

“[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it's hard to imagine Apple's growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that's not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs -- even in those places where those trade shock occurs -- but it's not really the same people doing them. It's not the people who lost manufacturing work.”

Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million.

“We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we're in, not the last war.”

At MIT, Autor is co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, while off campus he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

For hundreds of years sailors have told stories about miles of glowing ocean during moonless nights. This phenomenon is known as "milky seas," but the only scientific sample was collected in 1985. So atmospheric scientist Justin Hudson, a PhD candidate at Colorado State University, used accounts spanning 400 years to create a database of milky seas. By also using satellite images to visually confirm the tales, Justin hopes his research brings us one step closer to unraveling this maritime mystery.

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A group of gray seals in Rhode Island are making a splash. They were rescued in March and April after becoming entangled in fishing gear and other debris near Block Island. Several were recently released after being rehabilitated. John Yang has the story. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Listener Christine wants to understand one of the strangest phenomena in the universe. But to get to grips with it, she’ll need a crash course in the bizarre behaviour of the very small. Here, things don’t act the way you might expect — and it’s famously hard to wrap your head around.

Anand Jagatia has assembled some of the sharpest minds in the field and locked them in a studio. No one’s getting out until Christine and Anand know exactly what’s going on. Or at least, that’s the plan.

On hand to help are Kanta Dihal, lecturer in science communication at Imperial College London; James Millen, King’s Quantum Director at King’s College London; and particle physicist Harry Cliff from the University of Cambridge.

Prepare to enter the world of the very small—and the very weird—where particles can be in two places at once, influence each other across vast distances, and seem to decide what they are only when observed. Hear how these once-theoretical oddities are now driving a technological revolution, transforming everything from computing to communication.

Presenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Harrison Lewis Series Producer: Ben Motley

With the new Mission Impossible film playing in cinemas, the Unexpected Elements team is channelling Tom Cruise’s energy to see if scientists can push the boundaries of what is considered ‘impossible.’

First up, we fuse medieval alchemy with particle physics and explore a method to turn lead into gold. We then look at the latest research that uses artificial intelligence to help us humans communicate with animals.

We put the spotlight on a favourite trope of science-fiction films – time travel! String theorist Brian Greene of Columbia University explains how going to the past, or back to the future, may or may not be hypothetically possible.

We also ponder ancient auroras, whether ants can plan a Hollywood-style heist, and what it takes to understand our consciousness.    Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Affelia Wibisono and Andrada Fiscutean Producer: Imaan Moin, with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Studio engineer: Mike Mallen

Depending on what time it is, your body responds differently to an injury or infection. During the day, you're likely to heal faster and fight infection better than at night. And historically, scientists weren't entirely sure why. That picture is starting to clear up thanks to a new study published last week in the journal Science Immunology. The research finds a missing piece of the puzzle in neutrophils, powerful immune cells that — despite living less than 24 hours — know the difference between day and night.

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China is aiming to join the small club of nations who have successfully returned scientific samples of asteroids for analysis on earth, teaching us more about how our and potentially other solar systems formed. Tianwen-2 launched successfully this week, bound for an asteroid known as Kamo‘oalewa, which sits in a very strange orbit of both the earth and the sun, making it a “quasi-satellite”.

Last year, scientists including Patrick Michel of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, published an intriguing suggestion that Kamo‘oalewa might in fact not be a conventional asteroid, but instead be a small piece of our moon that was ejected when the Giordano Bruno crater formed. In a little over a year from now, we might find out if that is right.

Do you have to hold text at arm’s length to read properly? Qiang Zhang, professor of physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, whose team recently published their demonstration of using a technique from radio astronomy but using optical light. Active Optical Interferometry involves using laser beams to achieve resolutions at distances far in excess of conventional imaging with lenses. As his team showed, and as Miles Paggett of Glasgow University admires, they managed to read newsprint sized letters at a distance of over 1.3km.

Finally, how did the Inca Empire write things down, and who did the writing? It has been thought that ornate threads of strings and baubles known as khipu are how records were made for business and administration, probably by a decimal code of knots in strings. But the exact purpose, nature and any meaning encoded therein, has eluded scholars for decades. Sabine Hyland, an anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, has been studying them for years, and recently was granted access to the records of a village, only the fourth known, to have continued a form of the khipu tradition after the Spanish conquest to this day. She believes that they could even provide us in the modern world with valuable climate data.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production co-ordinator: Jazz George

(A Long March-3B Y110 carrier rocket carrying China's Tianwen-2 probe blasts off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on 29 May, 2025 in Sichuan Province of China. Credit: VCG/Getty Images)

Around 40 million people around the world have bipolar disorder, which involves cyclical swings between moods: from depression to mania. Kay Redfield Jamison is one of those people. She's also a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and has written extensively about the topic, from medical textbooks to personal memoirs. Today on Short Wave, she joins us to talk about the diagnosis process, treating and managing bipolar disorder.

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