Single-cell analysis reveals immune cell abnormalities underlying the clinical heterogeneity of patients with systemic sclerosis

The clinical heterogeneity in systemic autoimmune diseases often complicates the management of individual patients1. Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is primarily characterized by Raynaud’s phenomenon and skin sclerosis, with an estimated global prevalence of approximately one million individuals. Patients with SSc present with a particularly diverse range of organ manifestations2. These complications directly impact the daily activities of SSc patients and are associated with a poor prognosis.

The specific organs affected vary between patients; 50–65% develop interstitial lung disease (ILD), approximately 50% develop digital ulcers, and 1–14% develop scleroderma renal crisis (SRC), which is the most severe acute organ complication leading to end-stage renal disease and even death.

While vascular damage and tissue fibrosis due to immune dysregulation play a central role in the pathogenesis of SSc, the immunological abnormalities underlying the clinical heterogeneity of the disease and the diversity of organ involvement have not been sufficiently investigated.

Therefore, it is of great interest to explore the variation of immune abnormalities underlying the diversity of organ involvement in SSc.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a technique that comprehensively captures the diversity of individual cells. Since 2018, scRNA-seq studies of SSc patient samples have provided important insights into the pathology of the disease.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60034-7#Abs1

83% of Earth’s climate-critical fungi are still unknown

Underground fungi may be one of Earth s most powerful and overlooked allies in the fight against climate change, yet most of them remain unknown to science. Known only by DNA, these "dark taxa" make up a shocking 83% of ectomycorrhizal species fungi that help forests store carbon and thrive. Their hotspots lie in tropical forests and other underfunded regions. Without names, they re invisible to conservation efforts. But scientists are urging more DNA sequencing and global collaboration to bring these critical organisms into the light before their habitats, or the fungi themselves, disappear forever.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250615020607.htm

Fruit-eating mastodons? Ancient fossils confirm a long-lost ecological alliance

Ten thousand years after mastodons disappeared, scientists have unearthed powerful fossil evidence proving these elephant cousins were vital seed spreaders for large-fruited trees in South America. Using dental wear, isotope analysis, and fossilized plant residue, researchers confirmed that mastodons regularly consumed fruit supporting a decades-old theory that many tropical plants evolved alongside giant animals. The extinction of these megafauna left a permanent ecological void, with some plants now teetering on the edge of extinction. Their story isn t just prehistoric it s a warning for today s conservation efforts.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250614121947.htm

How pterosaurs can inspire aircraft design

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. They were in the air 80 million years before birds and around 180 million years before bats. However, their flight apparatus was rather different to either. The wings of bats are supported by multiple digits (like our fingers). Birds use feathers as structural units in the wings.

But pterosaurs primarily had one finger to support their wings. Their main wing was composed of a single giant “spar” – a structural unit – made of up of the bones of the arm and the greatly elongated fourth finger, with a membrane that stretched from the tip of the finger down to the ankle. This membrane acted as a flight surface.

As a group, pterosaurs were diverse – some were specialist fishers, filter feeders, terrestrial predators, insect hunters, seed crackers, and more. Some could climb well and many species were highly mobile on the ground.

They also got very large. The biggest pterosaurs had wingspans of over 10m and could weigh over 250kg. Even the smallest pterosaurs could fly: juveniles with 10cm wingspans were probably capable of flight within days or even hours of hatching.

https://theconversation.com/how-pterosaurs-can-inspire-aircraft-design-256823

Semi-heavy water ice detected around young sunlike star for first time

One way that astronomers trace the origin of water is through measuring its deuteration ratio. That is the fraction of water that contains one deuterium atom instead of one of the hydrogens. So instead of H2O, it's HDO, which is also called semi-heavy water. A high fraction of semi-heavy water is a sign that the water formed in a very cold place, such as the primitive dark clouds of dust, ice, and gas from which stars are born.

In our oceans and in comets and on icy moons, as many as one out of a few thousand water molecules consists of semi-heavy water. This is about 10 times higher than expected based on the composition of our sun. Therefore, astronomers hypothesize that some of the water in our solar system originated as ice in dark clouds, hundreds of thousands of years before the birth of our sun. To confirm this hypothesis, they must measure the deuteration ratio of water ice in such star-forming regions.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-semi-heavy-ice-young-sunlike.html

@LapTop006 @dragonfrog @dgar

#signs

Advancing Proteomics and Unveiling the Evolutionary History of Cancer in Dinosaurs

The discovery of tumors, particularly in hadrosaurs and the recent finding in Telmatosaurus transsylvanicus, highlights the potential of studying cancer in extinct species. The integration of life-history theory with advanced proteomic methods aims to reveal how evolutionary trade-offs influenced cancer susceptibility and may uncover new mechanisms of cancer suppression.

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/14/4/370

Injured Skin Cells Fire like Neurons to ‘Scream’ for Help

Neurons talk to one another using electricity. If you could hear these impulses, they might sound like constant, rapid-fire chatter all over the nervous system. Heart muscle cells do something similar, issuing electrical “heave-ho” signals that make the organ beat.

Skin and other epithelial cells, however, were thought to be silent; they form barrier tissues that protect the body’s interior from the outside world, and they weren’t assumed to need this kind of communication. So researchers were amazed to discover recently that, when wounded, these cells emit a slow electric pulse in a way that resembles neuron firing.

“The epithelial cells are making a signal kind of like a scream: ‘We got injured, we need repair, you need to come over here.’”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/injured-skin-cells-fire-like-neurons-to-scream-for-help/

Urban Consumption of Thrushes in the Early Roman City of Pollentia, Mallorca (Spain)

In the Roman city of Pollentia (Mallorca, Western Mediterranean), an exceptional zooarchaeological assemblage was recovered from a cesspit dated between the first century BC and the first century ad.

The structure, situated in a commercial area adjacent to the forum, was connected to a food shop (taberna) via an underground drainage system used for waste disposal.

The faunal remains from the cesspit include mammals, fish, reptiles, and birds, with song thrushes (Turdus cf. philomelos) constituting the most abundant avian species.
The unique depositional context and zooarchaeological indicators, such as skeletal part representation, provide valuable insights into the preparation and consumption of these small birds.

This evidence suggests that thrushes were commonly sold and consumed in Roman urban spaces, challenging the prevailing notion based on written sources that thrushes were exclusively a luxury food item for elite banquets.

The study offers new perspectives on the role of street food and everyday culinary practices in the Roman Mediterranean.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.3416

Inside the chimpanzee medicine cabinet: we’ve found a new way chimps treat wounds with plants

As it turns out, chimpanzees make pretty good doctors. For decades, scientists have been studying what chimpanzees do when they fall ill. This search has led to the identification of medicinal behaviour, which often involves the ingestion of plants with chemical or physical properties that can help the animal’s recovery.

Previous studies have shown that wild chimpanzees appear to treat their wounds and maintain sexual hygiene using medicinal plants found in their environment. What’s more, they treat other group members, even ones who are unrelated to them....

We also headed into the field to collect eight months of our own behavioural data. The aim: to accumulate all the cases we could find of external healthcare behaviour and see if a pattern emerged.

What we found surprised us. The Budongo chimpanzees appear to have quite a diverse behavioural toolkit for tending to their own wounds and maintaining hygiene in the wild. This behaviour ranges from simple actions like wound licking, to more complicated behaviour such as applying plant material to an injury.

In some cases, chimpanzees dabbed their open wounds with leaves. In rarer cases, they chewed up plant material (like leaves or stem bark) and applied it directly to the affected area with their mouths. Similar behaviour was shown in Sumatran orangutans in 2024.

https://theconversation.com/inside-the-chimpanzee-medicine-cabinet-weve-found-a-new-way-chimps-treat-wounds-with-plants-258094

Cancer cells use cholesterol armor to survive heat shock treatment, study discovers

Since the time of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, cancer has been recognized as being sensitive to heat. Today, this principle forms the basis of hyperthermia treatment—a promising cancer therapy that uses controlled heat to kill tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

Unlike chemotherapy or radiation, hyperthermia works by heating cancerous tissue to temperatures around 50°C, causing cancer cell death while simultaneously activating the body's immune system against the tumor. This approach holds particular promise when combined with immunotherapy, as heat-killed cancer cells can trigger a stronger anti-tumor immune response.

However, a few major challenges have limited hyperthermia's clinical success. One of the main hurdles is the limited understanding of the biological mechanisms behind heat sensitivity in cancer cells.

Researchers have discovered that some cancer cells—even those from the same organ—react differently to heat shock, with some surprisingly more heat-resistant than others.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-cancer-cells-cholesterol-armor-survive.html

While the sun “sets” in Norway in June, it barely gets dark. This picture was taken at 11 pm and this is about it. Just 4 hours of “golden hour” light. It’s wild.

75 years after Fermi's paradox, are we any closer to finding alien life?

We now know that 1 in every 4 stars, at least, has a planet that is the same size as Earth and is rocky, and is the same temperature as Earth, so it's what we would call a habitable-zone planet. Those are very secure conclusions.

The next step is identifying biosignatures—chemicals in a planet's atmosphere that could only be there because of biological processes. Charbonneau says that the necessary evidence faces a major technological hurdle: It requires far more data than our current instruments can provide.

There's still the question of just how common life, let alone intelligent life, really is. It's possible, Charbonneau said, that if you take any habitable-zone planet, add water, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, and give it about a billion years, life will develop. Or you could have those very same conditions, and it would all remain stubbornly lifeless. You only have to look at the first habitable planet to have a much better idea how common life is.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-years-fermi-paradox-closer-alien.html

How was the wheel invented? Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago

According to our theory, there was no precise moment at which the wheel was invented. Rather, just like the evolution of species, the wheel emerged gradually from an accumulation of small improvements.

This is just one of the many chapters in the wheel’s long and ongoing evolution. More than 5,000 years after the contributions of the Carpathian miners, a Parisian bicycle mechanic invented radial ball bearings, which once again revolutionized wheeled transportation.

Ironically, ball bearings are conceptually identical to rollers, the wheel’s evolutionary precursor. Ball bearings form a ring around the axle, creating a rolling interface between the axle and the wheel hub, thereby circumventing friction. With this innovation, the evolution of the wheel came full circle.

This example also shows how the wheel’s evolution, much like its iconic shape, traces a circuitous path – one with no clear beginning, no end, and countless quiet revolutions along the way.

https://theconversation.com/how-was-the-wheel-invented-computer-simulations-reveal-the-unlikely-birth-of-a-world-changing-technology-nearly-6-000-years-ago-244038

Scientists unlock recipe for Kryptonite-like mineral that could power a greener future

Scientists from the Natural History Museum have unraveled the geological mysteries behind jadarite, a rare lithium-bearing mineral with the potential to power Europe's green energy transition which, so far, has only been found in one place on Earth, Serbia's Jadar Basin.

Discovered in 2004 and described by museum scientists Chris Stanley and Mike Rumsey, jadarite made headlines for its uncanny resemblance to the chemical formula of Kryptonite, the fictional alien mineral which depletes Superman's powers. However, today its value is more economic and environmental, offering a high lithium content and lower-energy route to extraction compared to traditional sources like spodumene.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-scientists-recipe-kryptonite-mineral-power.html

Gorilla Gourmets Are Actually Truffle Hunting

Other researchers had observed gorillas scratching at soil in a few places in Congo, Gabon and the Central African Republic, and they had also assumed it was an insect-foraging strategy. Abea and his colleagues cleared things up by following four groups of Ndoki gorillas for years, documenting their actions and collecting specimens of the small, round objects they saw the apes picking up and eating from the scratched earth.

Taxonomic and molecular analysis revealed that the subterranean morsels were Elaphomyces labyrinthinus, a truffle species that looks like a smaller version of the kind humans eat. Not all the area’s gorilla groups engaged in regular soil scratching, but all seemed capable of it. One individual doubled the time she spent consuming truffles after she switched from a group that rarely foraged for the fungi to one that frequently did. Such observations suggest that truffle-foraging strategies are flexible and might be socially transmitted rather than linked to some environmental factor.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gorilla-gourmets-are-actually-truffle-hunting/

Fake news and real cannibalism: a cautionary tale from the Dutch Golden Age

In 1672, enraged by a fake news campaign, rioters killed the recently ousted head of state Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis. The mob hung them upside down, removed their organs, ate parts of the corpses, and sold fingers and tongues as souvenirs.

Even in a period characterised by torture and assassination, this grisly act stands out as extreme. But it also stands as a warning from history about what can happen when disinformation is allowed to run rampant.

The attack on Johan and Cornelis de Witt was fuelled by a relentless flood of malicious propaganda and forgeries claiming the brothers were corrupt, immoral elitists who had conspired with enemies of the Dutch Republic.

The anonymous authors of the smear campaigns blamed Johan for war with England and “all the bloodshed, killing and injuring, the crippled and mutilated people, including widows and orphans” that allegedly kept him in power.

https://theconversation.com/fake-news-and-real-cannibalism-a-cautionary-tale-from-the-dutch-golden-age-257104

Unsubstantiated 'chemtrail' conspiracy theories lead to legislation proposed in US statehouses

Such bills being crafted is indicative of how misinformation is moving beyond the online world and into public policy. Elevating unsubstantiated theories or outright falsehoods into the legislative arena not only erodes democratic processes, according to experts, it provides credibility where there is none and takes away resources from actual issues that need to be addressed.

https://apnews.com/article/chemtrail-louisiana-ban-conspiracy-e7562efe0251588978153cef30034e63

How do axolotls regenerate limbs and organs? A researcher has started to uncover their secret

Once he understood how key retinoic acid was to the body's signaling, Monaghan started testing the limits of this system in ways that were "pretty Frankensteiny," he says. By adding extra retinoic acid in an axolotl's hand, the salamander grew a duplicated limb instead of just a hand.

Understanding the signal for regeneration is a major step toward applying these lessons to humans, Monaghan says. Humans have retinoic acid and fibroblasts too, but unlike the axolotl's body, where signals are getting sent between all these biological players, the cells in the human body are just not listening in the same way.

When we injure an arm, our fibroblasts lay down collagen and start making a scar. In axolotls, the fibroblasts listen to retinoic acid and "turn back time just a little bit," growing a new skeleton.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-axolotls-regenerate-limbs-uncover-secret.html

Teen girl from 6,200 years ago with cone-shaped skull unearthed in Iran

The researchers focused their efforts on the skull of a young girl dated to approximately 6,200 years ago. They estimated her to have been under the age of 20 when she died, and she had also undergone tight head bandaging from a young age—a practice that had left her head cone-shaped. After taking CT scans of the skull, the researchers were able to see changes to the bone making up the skull—much of it was thinner than normal, putting the girl at higher risk of a head injury.

They were also able to see that it was a head injury that had killed the girl—her skull was fractured from near the front all the way to the back, and there were no signs of healing. The researchers suggest the fracture had been caused by someone wielding a broad-edged object. There was no bone penetration, but the reduced bone thickness allowed the force of the strike to make its way to the brain. The rest of her skeleton has not yet been found due to the density of remains in the gravesite.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-teen-girl-years-cone-skull.html