News at a glance: Domestic U.S. postdocs, edited pig organs, and the Milky Way ’s central black hole
FUNDING South Korea joins Horizon Europe South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol (center) and EU leaders announced a research funding deal. KYODO VIA AP IMAGES South Korea will participate in the €95.5 billion ($104 billion) Horizon Europe R&D program, the first East Asian country to do so, the European Commission announced last week. South Korean scientists will compete for grants on an equal footing with their European counterparts; in return, South Korea will contribute an as-yet-undisclosed amount to the 7-year program, which expires in 20...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 28, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

A muon collider could revolutionize particle physics —if it can be built
Young people supposedly enjoy the luxury of time, but perhaps not if they’re particle physicists. For decades, physicists have peered into the universe’s inner workings by smashing subatomic particles together at ever higher energies. But the next highest energy collider may not be built for 50 years. And Tova Holmes, 34 and a particle physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, worries her career could slip away before she ever sees such a machine. “I will be definitely not still working, possibly not alive,” Holmes says. That’s one reason she and dozens of her contemporaries are pushing to develo...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 28, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Early-career researchers lament potential loss of Europe ’s largest transdisciplinary science conference
EuroScience Open Forum gave early-career researchers an opportunity to interact with policymakers and scientists from across Europe. EuroScience Over the past 2 decades, the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) has brought together scientists, policymakers, businesspeople, journalists, and citizens to discuss European science and its broader policy and societal implications. For early-career researchers, it has offered a unique platform to network beyond their own field, access career development resources, raise awareness of the issues they face, and build up momentum to tackle them. But as the pre...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 28, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

‘I need your urine!’ Unusual experiment tests whether human pee can help save forests
In the mountains of southeastern Spain, a tiny wood mouse ( Apodemus sylvaticus ) sniffs out its dinner. The shrubs and pine trees of the Sierra Nevada give off several intriguing smells, including the nutty aroma of acorns from the Holm oak ( Quercus ilex ). But these particular acorns have another, more pungent odor—as though they just emerged from an ammonia bath. As it turns out, they have—thanks to a peculiar experiment in forestry management. The project, led by University of Granada ecologist Jorge Castro, is part of a larger effort to repel mice, birds, and other forest creatures that ...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 27, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Bird flu discovered in U.S. dairy cows is ‘disturbing’
The bird flu virus that has wreaked havoc around the world appears to have surfaced in U.S. dairy cows, the first time this viral subtype has been documented in any cattle. Three U.S. states—Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico—on 25 March reported cows sickened with what scientists are presuming is the same H5N1 strain of influenza that has killed hundreds of millions of poultry and wild birds. The cattle infections are spoiling milk and causing limited disease in mostly older animals. Dead birds have also been found on some of the farms, which may explain the source of the virus. Public health officials have stressed ...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Startups aim to curb climate change by pulling carbon dioxide from the ocean —not the air
Every year, hundreds of container ships slide into the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest in the Western Hemisphere. Belching carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), they deliver some $300 billion in goods to trucks and railcars that add their own pollution to our warming planet. But one long gray barge docked at the port is doing its part to combat climate change. On the barge, which belongs to Captura, a Los Angeles–based startup, is a system of pipes, pumps, and containers that ingests seawater and sucks out CO 2 , which can be used to make plastics and fuels or buried. The decarbonated seawater ...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Smallpox may be gone but U.S. should better prepare for its return, report says
Nearly 5 decades after the last documented case, smallpox remains the only human disease that has been officially eradicated. But a new report concludes that the United States can do much to strengthen its ability to respond if the dreaded disease resurfaces, whether naturally, through a lab “leak” of the responsible virus, or from an act of terrorism. The authors of the smallpox report, however, do not offer a recommendation on the long-running debate over whether the only two labs that still hold samples of variola, the smallpox virus, should destroy them for safety reasons—that issue was outside th...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

‘After you!’ A female bird’s flutter conveys a polite message to her mate
A wave goodbye. A bow. A thumbs-up. Human culture is full of gestures that can convey more than words ever could. Now, scientists have observed a pair of chivalrous birds joining the conversation. Video taken in Nagano, Japan, shows two Japanese tits ( Parus minor ) as they return to their nest inside a birdhouse with food for their young. The female lands on a nearby branch and flutters her wings toward her mate, who enters the house first; she follows shortly afterward. Observations of eight pairs of birds returning to the nest more than 300 times revealed that the females were the dominant fluttere...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 25, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Ancient brains, cannibal birds, and more stories you might have missed this week
How does 3D-printed wood compare to the real thing? Do long genes age faster than short ones? And why did scientists teach a robot how to do parkour? Check out the answers below in some of our favorite selections from Science ’s daily newsletter, Science Adviser . How much wood would a 3D printer print if a 3D printer could print wood? According to The Three Little Pigs , building your home out of sticks is a recipe for disaster. But wood is actually quite a sturdy construction material—one that humans have been using to make houses, furniture, and other st...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Failure to share scientific data is undermining efforts to protect major Asian rivers, reports find
Asian nations need to expand scientific collaborations and data sharing if they are to address the “enormous and growing” risks that climate change poses to three major rivers that support key ecosystems and nearly 1 billion people, a series of new reports from a regional research organization say. All three rivers—the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra—originate in the rugged, icy mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush Himalaya region , where rapid warming is accelerating the melting of some glaciers and altering precipitation patterns. Those changes, together with gr...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Pregnancy may increase biological age by 2 years —though some people end up ‘younger’
Pregnancy is the ultimate stress test. Nurturing a growing fetus requires a series of profound physical, hormonal, and chemical changes that may rewire every major organ in the body and can cause serious health complications such as hypertension and preeclampsia. But does being pregnant actually take years off your life? According to the results of a new study, it just might. Today in Cell Metabolism , scientists report that the stress of pregnancy can cause a person’s biological age to increase by up to 2 years—a trend that may reverse itself in the months that follow . In som...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Final NIH budget for 2024 is essentially flat
Congress has given the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a 0.6% increase, to $47.1 billion, in a final 2024 spending bill that lawmakers are expected to approve in time to avert a partial government shutdown this weekend. And several policy directives opposed by researchers have been stripped from the legislation. The tiny, $300 million bump is only one-third of the $920 million increase requested by President Joe Biden, who has promised to sign the $1.2 trillion package covering six federal agencies, and it comes after years of generous increases for NIH. But it was no surprise: Once the president and Congress agr...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 21, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

RNA deserves its own massive counterpart to the human genome project, researchers argue
This report is very much modeled on the NASEM report that initiated the Human Genome Project, ” completed in 2003, says Cheung, who wasn’t involved in the new report’s drafting. But as the report notes, “The RNome is much more complex ” than a genome. For one thing, frequent modifications to RNA mean there will be no fixed, reference sequence like the one researchers produced for the human genome. For a given RNA molecule, researchers will have to document “not only the sequence, but also the type and location of the modifica...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 21, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Number of known moonquakes tripled with discovery in Apollo archive
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS— The Moon suddenly seems more alive. From 1969 to 1977, seismometers left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts detected thousands of distinctive “moonquakes.” Now, half a century later, a new analysis has cut through the noise in the old data and nearly tripled the number of moonquakes, adding more than 22,000 new quakes to 13,000 previously identified ones. The finding, presented last week here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, shows “that the Moon may be more seismically and tectonically active today than we had thought,” says Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 20, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news

Pressure grows to ditch controversial forced swim test in rodent studies of depression
For the past few decades, scientists studying candidate antidepressant drugs have had a convenient animal test: how long a rodent dropped in water keeps swimming. Invented in 1977 , the forced swim test (FST) hinged on the idea that a depressed animal would give up quickly. It seemed to work: Antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy often made the animal try harder. The test remains popular, appearing in about 600 papers per year . But researchers have recently begun to question the assumption that the test really gauges depression and is a good predictor of human responses to drugs. Oppositi...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 20, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news