Researchers analyzing DNA from 1,313 ancient humans across Eurasia found that zoonotic pathogens first appeared in human populations around 6,500 years ago, coinciding with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to livestock farming.

The genomic study, published in Nature, identified 5,486 DNA sequences from bacteria, viruses and parasites in blood remnants from bones and teeth spanning 37,000 years. Zoonotic pathogens were detected only in remains 6,500 years old or younger, peaking around 5,000 years ago when pastoralist communities from the Steppe region migrated into Europe with large herds. The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis first appears in the dataset between 5,700-5,300 years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are one of the most serious contenders for dark matter -- the "missing" mass supposedly constituting 85% of our universe. Given its elusiveness, dark matter tests the patience and creativity of physicists. But the latest results from LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), the South Dakota-based detector, may have brought scientists a small step closer to catching WIMPs in action. In a recent Physical Review Letters paper, scientists analyzed 280 days' worth of data from LUX-ZEPLIN, reporting the tightest ever upper limit on the interaction strength of WIMPs. The result -- a near fivefold improvement -- demonstrates how physicists are increasingly getting better at circumventing the problem that dark matter is, well, dark; the elusive stuff evades any detection method that depends on materials interacting with visible light or other types of radiation.

The LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, located one mile underground in a decommissioned South Dakota gold mine, employs nearly 15,000 pounds (7 tons) of liquid xenon. The chemical element's high atomic mass and density make it potentially easier for scientists to detect any unknown particles that may pass through the detector. Also, liquid xenon is transparent, preventing any unwanted noise -- usually arising from radioactive matter around the detector -- from spoiling an experiment. "These results firmly establish that LZ is the world's most sensitive search for dark matter heavier than 10 GeV, that's about 10 times heavier than a proton," explained Scott Haselschwart, a physicist at the University of Michigan and LZ physics coordinator, in an email to Gizmodo. "To put our result in perspective: we have ruled out dark matter that would interact only once in a single kilogram of xenon every four millennia!" "LZ is the most sensitive search for WIMP dark matter to date, but we still have another two years of data to collect," Haselschwart said. "This means that a discovery of dark matter in LZ could come anytime now. We are truly looking for dark matter where no one has ever looked before and that is extremely exciting!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species. On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa -- which once stood 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall -- with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngai Tahu Research Centre. "The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do," said Jackson. "Every New Zealand schoolchild has a fascination with the moa."

The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird. Unlike Colossal's work with dire wolves, the moa project is in very early stages. It started with a phone call about two years ago after Jackson heard about the company's efforts to "de-extinct" -- or create genetically similar animals to -- species like the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf. Then Jackson put Colossal in touch with experts he'd met through his own moa bone-collecting. At that point, he'd amassed between 300 and 400 bones, he said.

In New Zealand, it's legal to buy and sell moa bones found on private lands, but not on public conservation areas -- nor to export them. The first stage of the moa project will be to identify well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, said Colossal's chief scientist Beth Shapiro. Those DNA sequences will be compared to genomes of living bird species, including the ground-dwelling tinamou and emu, "to figure out what it is that made the moa unique compared to other birds," she said. [...] The direction of the project will be shaped by Mori scholars at the University of Canterbury's Ngi Tahu Research Centre. Ngi Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, an expert in moa bones, said the work has "really reinvigorated the interest in examining our own traditions and mythology."

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers at Princeton University, Boston University and other institutes used machine learning to predict the strategic decisions of humans in various games. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows that a deep neural network trained on human decisions could predict the strategic choices of players with high levels of accuracy. [...] Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people's choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the "noise" affecting their behavior would increase.

As part of their future studies, the researchers would also like to shed more light on what makes a game "complex" or "easy." This could be achieved using the context-dependent noise parameter that they integrated into their model as a signature of "perceived difficulty." "Our analysis provides a robust model comparison across a wide range of candidate models of decision-making," said [Jian-Qiao Zhu, first author of the paper]. "We now have strong evidence that introducing context-dependence into the quantal response model significantly improves its ability to capture human strategic behavior. More specifically, we identified key factors in the game matrix that shape game complexity: considerations of efficiency, the arithmetic difficulty of computing payoff differences, and the depth of reasoning required to arrive at a rational solution."

The findings gathered as part of this recent study also highlight the "lightness" with which many people approach strategic decisions, which could make them vulnerable to parties looking to sway them towards making irrational decisions. Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows. The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards, and is increasingly sprayed elsewhere as the use of controversial herbicide substances such as glyphosate and paraquat drops in the US. But the new piece of data suggests diquat is more toxic than glyphosate, and the substance is banned over its risks in the UK, EU, China and many other countries. Still, the EPA has resisted calls for a ban, and Roundup formulas with the ingredient hit the shelves last year. [...]

Diquat is also thought to be a neurotoxin, carcinogen and linked to Parkinson's disease. An October analysis of EPA data by the Friends of the Earth non-profit found it is about 200 times more toxic than glyphosate in terms of chronic exposure. [...] The new review of scientific literature in part focuses on the multiple ways in which diquat damages organs and gut bacteria, including by reducing the level of proteins that are key pieces of the gut lining. The weakening can allow toxins and pathogens to move from the stomach into the bloodstream, and trigger inflammation in the intestines and throughout the body. Meanwhile, diquat can inhibit the production of beneficial bacteria that maintain the gut lining. Damage to the lining also inhibits the absorption of nutrients and energy metabolism, the authors said.

The research further scrutinizes how the substance harms the kidneys, lungs and liver. Diquat "causes irreversible structural and functional damage to the kidneys" because it can destroy kidney cells' membranes and interfere with cell signals. The effects on the liver are similar, and the ingredient causes the production of proteins that inflame the organ. Meanwhile, it seems to attack the lungs by triggering inflammation that damages the organ's tissue. More broadly, the inflammation caused by diquat may cause multiple organ dysfunction syndrome, a scenario in which organ systems begin to fail. The authors note that many of the studies are on rodents and more research on low, long-term exposure is needed. The report notes that the EPA is not reviewing the chemical, "and even non-profits that push for tighter pesticide regulations have largely focused their attention elsewhere."

"[T]hat was in part because U.S. pesticide regulations are so weak that advocates are tied up with battles over ingredients like glyphosate, paraquat and chlorpyrifos -- substances that are banned elsewhere but still widely used here. Diquat is 'overshadowed' by those ingredients."

A team of U.S. and German researchers analyzed over 15 million biomedical papers and found that AI-generated content has subtly infiltrated academic writing, with telltale stylistic shifts -- such as a rise in flowery verbs and adjectives. "Their investigation revealed that since the emergence of LLMs there has been a corresponding increase in the frequency of certain stylist word choices within the academic literature," reports Phys.Org. "These data suggest that at least 13.5% of the papers published in 2024 were written with some amount of LLM processing." From the report: The researchers modeled their investigation on prior COVID-19 public-health research, which was able to infer COVID-19's impact on mortality by comparing excess deaths before and after the pandemic. By applying the same before-and-after approach, the new study analyzed patterns of excess word use prior to the emergence of LLMs and after. The researchers found that after the release of LLMs, there was a significant shift away from the excess use of "content words" to an excess use of "stylistic and flowery" word choices, such as "showcasing," "pivotal," and "grappling."

By manually assigning parts of speech to each excess word, the authors determined that before 2024, 79.2% of excess word choices were nouns. During 2024 there was a clearly identifiable shift. 66% of excess word choices were verbs and 14% were adjectives. The team also identified notable differences in LLM usage between research fields, countries, and venues. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

Springer Nature published a $169 machine learning textbook in April containing citations that appear to be largely fabricated, according to an investigation by Retraction Watch. The site checked 18 of the 46 citations in "Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced" by Govindakumar Madhavan and found two-thirds either did not exist or contained substantial errors.

Three researchers contacted by Retraction Watch confirmed their supposedly authored works were fake or incorrectly cited. Yehuda Dar of Ben-Gurion University said a paper cited as appearing in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine was actually an unpublished arXiv preprint. Aaron Courville of Universite de Montreal confirmed he was cited for sections of his "Deep Learning" book that "doesn't seem to exist."

The pattern of nonexistent citations matches known hallmarks of large language model-generated text. Madhavan did not answer whether he used AI to generate the book's content. The book contains no AI disclosure despite Springer Nature policies requiring authors to declare AI use beyond basic copy editing.

"Citizen scientists have successfully located thousands of previously unknown pairs of 'eclipsing binary' stars," reports the Washington Post, citing a recent announcement from NASA. The ongoing initiative helps space researchers hunt for "eclipsing binary" stars, a rare phenomenon in which two stars orbit one another, periodically blocking each other's light. These star pairs offer important data to astrophysicists, who consider the many measurable properties of eclipsing binaries — and the information they bear about the history of star formation and destruction — as a foundation of the field...

The citizen science project in question, the Eclipsing Binary Patrol, validates images from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. The satellite, launched in 2018, is "exceptionally capable at detecting varying stars," the researchers write in a preprint paper describing the initiative. The researchers used machine learning to identify about 1.2 million potential eclipsing star pairs. Citizen scientists then validated a subset of about 60,000... manually inspecting hundreds of thousands of images of eclipse-like events and weeding out actual binaries from images that tricked the algorithm. "Thankfully," the researchers write, "to the rescue come volunteers from all walks of life that boost the capacity of bandwidth-limited professional astronomers many-fold and help tackle the ever-increasing volume of publicly available astronomical data."
Universe Today describes how they limited the dataset to only stars with a magnitude brighter than 15, then used a Python tool to generate a massive dataset of millions of light curves... The outcome of all the work resulted in the identification of 10,001 eclipsing binary systems. 7,936 of them are new to science, while the other 2,065 were previously known, but the study provided updated, more accurate, parameters for their periods, as TESS' dataset provided better insight. There were also some particularly interesting systems that could hold new discoveries, including several that had variable eclipse timings, and plenty that might have a third star, and some that show a significant dynamic between the star being orbited and the one doing the orbiting.

All of those systems await further research, but there's another, unspoken factor at play in this data — exoplanets. TESS was originally designed as an exoplanet hunter, and this kind of large scale AI/human collaboration of lightcurve analysis is exactly the kind of work that could potentially produce even more accurate exoplanet catalogues, as evidenced by some of the work already done in this paper. That seems to be the next step for this dataset, with Dr. Kostov telling an interviewer "I can't wait to search them for exoplanets!" Given the data has already been collected, and the team has already been assembled, it's very likely he'll get his chance soon.

Google DeepMind's chief business officer says Alphabet's drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs "is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs," according to a report in Fortune, "pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately." "There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer," said Colin Murdoch [DeepMind's chief business officer and president of Isomorphic Labs]. "That's happening right now."

After years in development, Murdoch says human clinical trials for Isomorphic's AI-assisted drugs are finally in sight. "The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings," he said. "We're staffing up now. We're getting very close."

The company, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures with a high level of accuracy. Interactions of AlphaFold progressed from being able to accurately predict individual protein structures to modeling how proteins interact with other molecules like DNA and drugs. These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping researchers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition... In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major research collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly. A year later, in April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Thrive Capital. The deals are part of Isomorphic's plan to build a "world-class drug design engine..."

Today, pharma companies often spend millions attempting to bring a single drug to market, sometimes with just a 10% chance of success once trials begin. Murdoch believes Isomorphic's tech could radically improve those odds. "We're trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really improve the chance that we can be successful," he says. He wants to harness AlphaFold's technology to get to a point where researchers have 100% conviction that the drugs they are developing are going to work in human trials. "One day we hope to be able to say — well, here's a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease," Murdoch said. "All powered by these amazing AI tools."

Three space probes are leaving our solar system — yet are still functioning. After the two Voyager space probes, New Horizons "was launched in 2006, initially to study Pluto," remembers New Scientist. But "it has since travelled way beyond this point, ploughing on through the Kuiper belt, a vast, wide band of rocks and dust billions of miles from the sun. It is now speeding at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour..."

And it's just performed the first ever example of interstellar navigation... As it hurtles out of our solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is so far from Earth that the stars in the Milky Way appear in markedly different positions compared with our own view... due to the parallax effect. This was demonstrated in 2020 when the probe beamed back pictures of two nearby stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, to Earth.

Now, Tod Lauer at the US National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona and his colleagues have used this effect to work out the position of New Horizons... Almost all spacecraft calculate their bearings to within tens of metres using NASA's Deep Space Network, a collection of radio transmitters on Earth that send regular signals out to space. In comparison, the parallax method was far less accurate, locating New Horizons within a sphere with a radius of 60 million kilometres, about half the distance between Earth and the sun. "We're not going to put the Deep Space Network out of business — this is only a demo proof of concept," says Lauer. However, with a better camera and equipment they could improve the accuracy by up to 100 times, he says.

Using this technique for interstellar navigation could offer advantages over the DSN because it could give more accurate location readings as a spacecraft gets further away from Earth, as well as being able to operate autonomously without needing to wait for a radio signal to come from our solar system, says Massimiliano Vasile at the University of Strathclyde, UK. "If you travel to an actual star, we are talking about light years," says Vasile. "What happens is that your signal from the Deep Space Network has to travel all the way there and then all the way back, and it's travelling at the speed of light, so it takes years."
Just like a ship's captain sailing by the stars, "We have a good enough three-dimensional map of the galaxy around us that you can find out where you are," Lauer says.

So even when limiting your navigation to what's on-board the spacecraft, "It's a remarkable accuracy, with your own camera!"

"Scientists have created the first lasers made entirely from edible materials," reports Science magazine "which could someday help monitor and track the properties of foods and medications with sensors that can be harmlessly swallowed." [The researchers' report] shows that tiny droplets of everyday cooking oils can act like echo chambers of light, otherwise known as lasers. By providing the right amount of energy to an atom, the atom's electrons will excite to a higher energy level and then relax, releasing a photon of light in the process. Trap a cloud of atoms in a house of mirrors and blast them with the right amount of energy, and the light emitted by one excited atom will stimulate one of its neighbors, amplifying the atoms' collective glow...

[The researchers] shot purple light at droplets of olive oil, whose surfaces can keep photons of light bouncing around, trapping them in the process. This reflected light excited the electrons in the oil's chlorophyll molecules, causing them to emit photons that triggered the glow of other chlorophyll molecules — transforming the droplet into a laser. The energy of the chlorophyll's radiation depends on the oil droplets' size, density, and other properties. The study's authors suggest this sensitivity can be exploited to track different properties of food or pharmaceutical products.

When researchers added oil droplets to foods and then measured changes in the laser light the droplets emitted, they could reliably infer the foods' sugar concentration, acidity, exposure to high temperatures, and growth of microorganisms. They also used the lasers to encode information, with droplets of different diameters functioning like the lines of a barcode. By mixing in sunflower oil droplets of seven specific sizes — all less than 100 microns wide — the researchers encoded a date directly into peach compote: 26 April, 2017, the first international Stop Food Waste Day.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

"Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong," reports the New York Times — citing new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [Alternate URL here.] Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as "inflammaging" — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. "Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions," he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

"How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.," said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there's much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added... McDade, who has previously studied inflammation in the Tsimane group, speculated that populations in nonindustrialized regions might be exposed to certain microbes in water, food, soil and domestic animals earlier in their lives, bolstering their immune response later in life.
More from The Independent: Chronic inflammation is thought to speed up the ageing process and contribute to various health conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes... However, other experts shared a word of caution before jumping to conclusions from the study. Vishwa Deep Dixit, director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, told the New York Times it's not surprising that people less exposed to pollution would see lower rates of chronic disease.
Aurelia Santoro, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, also cautioned about the results, according to the Times. "While they had lower rates of chronic disease, the two Indigenous populations tended to have life spans shorter than those of people in industrialized regions, meaning they may simply not have lived long enough to develop inflammaging, Santoro said."

And Bimal Desai, a professor of pharmacology who studies inflammation at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told the Times that the study "sparks valuable discussion" but needs more follow-up "before we rewrite the inflammaging narrative."

Science Daily reports: Wild orcas across four continents have repeatedly floated fish and other prey to astonished swimmers and boaters, hinting that the ocean's top predator likes to make friends. Researchers cataloged 34 such gifts over 20 years, noting the whales often lingered expectantly — and sometimes tried again — after humans declined their offerings, suggesting a curious, relationship-building motive...

"Orcas often share food with each other — it's a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other," said study lead author Jared Towers, of Bay Cetology in British Columbia, Canada. "That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well."
The complete research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Its title? "Testing the Waters: Attempts by Wild Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) to Provision People (Homo sapiens)."

A new study analyzing data from more than 60 previous research projects has found evidence that there is "no safe amount" of processed meat consumption -- so much so that even small daily portions are being linked to increased disease risk.

The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, examined connections between processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages and trans fatty acids and the risk of type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer and ischemic heart disease. People who ate as little as one hot dog daily showed an 11% greater risk of type 2 diabetes and 7% increased risk of colorectal cancer compared to those who consumed none. Drinking approximately one 12-ounce soda per day was associated with an 8% increase in type 2 diabetes risk and 2% increased risk of ischemic heart disease.

Moderna's mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine proved 27% more effective at preventing influenza infections than standard flu shots in a Phase 3 trial involving nearly 41,000 people aged 50 and above, the firm said this week.

The company announced that mRNA-1010 had an overall vaccine efficacy that was 26.6% higher than conventional shots, rising to 27.4% higher in participants aged 65 and older during the six-month study period. The 2024-2025 flu season hospitalized an estimated 770,000 Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.