research roundup

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. January’s list includes a lip-syncing robot; using brewer’s yeast as scaffolding for lab-grown meat;  hunting for Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA in his art; and new evidence that humans really did transport the stones to build Stonehenge from Wales and northern Scotland, rather than being transported by glaciers.

Humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Stonehenge is an iconic landmark of endless fascination to tourists and researchers alike. There has been a lot of recent chemical analysis identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. So how were the stones transported to their current location?

One theory holds that glaciers moved the bluestones at least part of the way from Wales to Salisbury Plain in southern England, while others contend that humans moved them—although precisely how that was done has yet to be conclusively determined. Researchers at Curtin University have now produced the strongest scientific evidence to date that it was humans, not glaciers, that transported the stones, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Curtin’s Anthony Clarke and co-authors relied on mineral fingerprinting to arrive at their conclusions. In 2024, Clarke’s team discovered the Stonehenge Altar Stone originated from the Orkney region in the very northeast corner of Scotland, rather than Wales. This time, they analyzed hundreds of zircon crystals collected from rivers close to the historic monument, looking for evidence of Pleistocene-era sediment. Per Clarke, if the stones had “sailed” to the plain from further north, there would be a distinct mineral signature in that sediment as the transported rocks eroded over time. They didn’t find that signature, making it far more likely that humans transported the stone.

DOI: Communications Earth & Environment, 2026. 10.1038/s43247-025-03105-3  (About DOIs).

When grasshoppers fly

Everyone knows grasshoppers can hop, but they can also flap their wings, jump, and glide, moving seamlessly across both the ground and through the air. That ability inspired scientists from Princeton University to devise a novel approach to building robotic wings, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This could one day enable multimodal locomotion for miniature robots with extended flight times.

According to the authors, grasshoppers have two sets of wings: forewings and hindwings. Forewings are mostly used for protection and camouflage, while the latter are involved in flapping and gliding, and are corrugated to allow them to fold into the insect’s body. The team took CT scans to capture the geometry of grasshopper wings and used the scans to 3D print model wings with varying designs. Next they tested each variant in a water channel to study how water flowed around the wing, isolating key features like a wing’s shape or corrugation to see how this impacted the flow.

Once they had perfected their design, they printed new wings and attached them to small frames to create grasshopper-sized gliders. The team then launched the gliders across the lab and used motion capture to evaluate how well they flew. The glider performed as well as actual grasshoppers. In addition, they found that a smooth wing resulted in more efficient gliding. So why do real grasshopper wings have corrugations? The authors suggest that these evolved because they help with executing steep angles.

DOI: Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2026. 10.1098/rsif.2025.0117  (About DOIs).

Lip-syncing robot

Humanoid robots are fascinating, but nobody would mistake them for actual humans, in part because even the ones that have faces are far too limited in facial gestures, including lip motion—hence, the “Uncanny Valley.” Columbia University engineers have now created a robot capable of learning facial lip motions for speaking and singing. According to a paper published in Science Robotics, the resulting robotic face was able to speak words in several different languages and sing an AI-generated song. (Its AI-generated debut album is aptly titled hello world.).

What makes human faces so uniquely capable of expression are the dozens of muscles lying just under the skin. Robotic faces are rigid and hence only have a limited range of motion. The Columbia team built their robotic face out of flexible material augmented with 26 motors (actuators). The robot learned to how its face moved in response to different actuator activity by watching itself in a mirror as it attempted thousands of random facial expressions. Eventually it learned how to achieve specific facial gestures.

The next step was to let the robot watch recorded videos of humans talking and singing, augmented with an AI algorithm that enabled it to learn exactly how the human mouths moved when performing those tasks so it could lip sync along. The resulting lip motion wasn’t perfect;  the robot struggled with “B” and “W” sounds in particular. But the authors believe the robot will improve with more practice; combining this ability with ChatGPT or Gemini could further improve its lip-syncing ability.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2026. 10.1126/scirobotics.adx3017  (About DOIs).

Is Leonardo’s DNA preserved in his art?

In 2020, scientists analyzed the microbes found on several of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and discovered that each had its own distinct microbiome/. A second team, working with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project in France, collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy. They concluded that microbial signatures could be used to differentiate artwork according to the materials used—dubbing this emerging subfield “arteomics.”

Yet another team collaborating with the project painstakingly assembled Leonardo’s family tree in 2021, spanning 21 generations from 1331 to the present, resulting a full-length book published last year. The idea was that this will one day provide a means of conducting DNA testing to confirm whether the bones interred in Leonardo’s grave are actually the his. And now the project’s scientists are back with a preprint posted to the bioRxiv, announcing the successful sequencing of human DNA collected from a handful of artifacts associated with Leonardo—including a drawing of the Holy Child that some scholars attribute to Leonardo, as well as letters from a da Vinci family member.

The team lightly swabbed samples from the artifacts’ surfaces and were able to recover human Y-chromosome sequences from several of the samples. Several of these sequences were related and the authors speculate that some might even be Leonardo’s, although they cautioned that the samples would need to be compared to samples taken from the artist’s notebooks, burial site, and family tomb to make a definitive identification. The authors also found DNA from bacteria, fungi, flowers, and animals in some of the samples, as well as traces of viruses and parasites.

DOI: bioRxiv, 2026. 10.64898/2026.01.06.697880  (About DOIs).

From pint to plate

Lab-grown meat is often touted as a more environmentally responsible alternative to the real deal, but carnivorous consumers are often put off by the unappealing mouthfeel and texture (and, for me, a weird oily aftertaste). A new method using spent brewer’s yeast to make edible “scaffolding” for cultivating meat in the lab might one day offer a solution, according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in  Nutrition.

Typically, a nutrient broth is used as a source of bacteria for the scaffolding. But Richard Day of University College London and his co-authors decided to use brewer’s yeast, usually discarded as waste, to culture a species of bacteria known for making high-quality cellulose. Then they tested the mechanical and structural properties of that cellulose with a “chewing machine.” They concluded that the cellulose made from spent brewer’s yeast was much closer in texture to real meat than the cellulose scaffolding made from a nutrient broth. The next step is to incorporate fat and muscle cells into the cellulose, as well as testing yeast from different kinds of beer.

DOI: Frontiers in Nutrition, 2026. 10.3389/fnut.2025.1656960  (About DOIs).

Water-driven gears

Gears have been around for thousands of years; the Chinese were using them in two-wheeled chariots as far back as 3000 BCE, and they are a mainstay in windmills, clocks, and the famed Antikythera mechanism. Roboticists also use gears in their inventions, but whether they are made of wood, metal or plastic, such gears tend to be inflexible and hence more prone to breakage. That’s why New York University mathematician Leif Reistroph and colleagues decided to see if flowing air or water could be used to rotate robotic structures.

Ristroph’s lab frequently addresses all manner of colorful real-world puzzles: fine-tuning the recipe for the perfect bubble, for instance; exploring the physics of the Hula-Hoop; or the formation processes underlying so-called “stone forests” common in China and Madagascar. In 2021, his lab built a working Tesla valve, in accordance with the inventor’s design; the following year they studied the complex aerodynamics of what makes a good paper airplane—specifically what is needed for smooth gliding; and in 2024 they cracked the conundrum of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, had grappled with since the 1940s.

For their latest paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Ristroph et al. wanted to devise something that functioned like a gear only with flowing liquid driving the motion, instead of teeth grinding against each other. They conducted a series of experiments in which they immersed cylindrical rotors in a glycerol-and-water solution. One cylinder would rotate while the other was passive.

They found that the rotating cylinder, combined with fluid flow, was sufficient to induce rotation in the passive cylinder. The flows functioned much in the same way as gear teeth when the cylinders were close together. Moving the cylinders further apart caused the active cylinder to rotate faster, looping the flows around the passive cylinder—essentially mimicking a belt and pulley system.

DOI: Physical Review Letters, 2026. 10.1103/m6ft-ll2c  (About DOIs).

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’ve experimented with a monthly collection. December’s list includes a fossilized bird that choked to death on rocks; a double-detonating “superkilonova”; recovering an ancient seafarer’s fingerprint; the biomechanics of kangaroo movement; and cracking a dark matter puzzle that stumped fictional physicists on The Big Bang Theory, among other tantalizing tidbits

Secrets of kangaroo posture

Kangaroos and wallabies belong to a class of animals called macropods, with unique form and style of movement. Their four limbs and tail all contact the ground at slow speeds, while they use a hopping gait at higher speeds. Typically, high-speed movements are more energy-intensive than slow-speed motion, but the opposite is true for macropods like kangaroos; somehow the hopping speed and energy cost become uncoupled. According to a paper published in the journal eLife, this may be due to changes in a kangaroo’s posture at higher hopping speeds.

To investigate their hypothesis, the authors used 3D motion capture and data from force plates to create a 3D musculoskeletal model to analyze the motions of red and grey kangaroos, focusing on how body mass and speed influence three factors during hopping: hindlimb posture, efficiency of movement and associated tendon stress; and the ankles. This revealed that kangaroos adjust their posture so that the hindlimbs are more crouched while hopping, with the ankle joint doing most of the work per hop. The crouching position increases energy absorption, thus improving efficiency.

DOI: eLife, 2025. 10.7554/eLife.96437.3  (About DOIs).

Fossilized bird choked on rocks

Some 120 million years ago, a tiny bird choked to death on a bunch of small rocks lodged in its throat. Paleontologists recently discovered the fossil among the many specimens housed at the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in China. Not only does it represent a new species—dubbed Chromeornis funkyi, after techno-funk duo Chromeo—the fossilized bird is the first such specimen to be found with a throat filled with stones, according to a paper published in the journal Palaeontologica Electronica.

Certain bird species, like chickens, swallow small stones and store them in their gizzards to help grind up food. The authors examined prior CT scans of fossilized birds with gizzards and quantified how many gizzard stones were present, then compared that data to a CT scan of the C. funkyi fossil. The scan showed that the more than 800 tiny stones lodged in the throat were not gizzard stones. So the bird didn’t swallow the stones to help grind up food. The authors suggest the bird was sick; sick birds will sometimes eat stones. When it tried to regurgitate the stones, they got stuck in the esophagus and the poor bird choked to death.

DOI: Palaeontologica Electronica, 2025. 10.26879/1589  (About DOIs).

“Superkilonova” exploded twice

Back in 2017, astronomers detected a phenomenon known as a “kilonova”: the merger of two neutron stars accompanied by powerful gamma-ray bursts. Recording this kind of celestial event was unprecedented, and it officially marked the dawn of a new era in so-called “multi-messenger astronomy.” It’s the only unambiguously confirmed kilonova to date, but astrophysicists reported evidence of a possible second such event in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. And it’s unusual because this kilonova may have originated from a supernova blast mere hours before, making it a “superkilonova.”

Supernovae are the spectacular explosions that result from dying massive stars, seeding the universe with heavy elements like carbon and iron. Kilonovae occur when two binary neutron stars begin circling into their death spiral, sending out powerful gravitational waves and stripping neutron-rich matter from each other. Then the stars collide and merge, producing a hot cloud of debris that glows with light of multiple wavelengths. It’s the neutron-rich debris that astronomers believe creates a kilonova’s visible and infrared light—the glow is brighter in the infrared than in the visible spectrum, a distinctive signature that results from heavy elements in the ejecta that block visible light but let the infrared through.

This latest kilonova candidate event, dubbed AT2025ulz, initially looked like the 2017 event, but over time, its properties started resembling a supernova, making it less interesting to many astronomers. But it wasn’t a classic supernova either. So some astronomers kept tracking the event and analyzing combined “multimessenger” data from other collaborations and telescopes during the same time frame. They concluded that this was a multi-stage event: specifically, a supernova gave birth to twin baby neutron stars, which then merged to produce a kilonova. That said, the evidence isn’t quite strong enough to claim this is what definitely happened; astronomers need to find more such superkilnova to confirm.

DOI: Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2025. 10.3847/2041-8213/ae2000  (About DOIs).

An ancient seafarer’s fingerprint

In the 4th century BCE, an invading mini-armada of about four boats attacked an island off the coast of Denmark. The attack failed and the victorious islanders celebrated by sinking one of the boats, filled with their foes’ weapons, into a bog, where it remained until it was discovered by archaeologists in the 1880s. It’s known as the Hjortspring boat, and archaeologists were recently surprised when their analysis uncovered an intact human fingerprint in the tars used to waterproof the vessel. They described their find in a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The fingerprint is significant because it offers a hint into where those would-be raiders from the sea originally hailed from. Prior scholars had suggested they came from somewhere near what is now Hamburg, Germany. But the authors of this latest paper noticed that the waterproofing tars were pine pitch, concluding that the raiders may have originated in the coastal regions of the Baltic Sea, along which pine-rich forests flourished. That would require the raiders to travel over hundreds of kilometers of open sea. The authors hope they can extract some ancient DNA from the tar to learn more about the ancient people who built the boat.

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2025. 10.1371/journal.pone.0336965  (About DOIs).

Roman liquid gypsum burials

Speaking of ancient fingerprints, archaeologists at the University of York found finger marks and fingerprints preserved in hardened gypsum used by Romans in Britain in their funerary practices in the third and fourth centuries CE. The university is home to the Seeing the Dead project, which studies the bodies preserved by pouring liquid gypsum (plaster of paris) over them in their coffins prior to burial. The gypsum hardened around the decomposing bodies, creating a cavity while preserving clear imprints of the body contours, clothing, and shrouding. It’s similar to the method used to create casts of the victims of Pompeii.

Some 70 gypsum burials have been found in Yorkshire thus far. In this case, researchers were examining a stone sarcophagus excavated in the 1870s that had yet to be analyzed. While cleaning the artifact and subjecting it to 3D scanning, they noticed a handprint with fingers clearly delineated in the hardened gypsum. They also found distinct fingerprints close to the edges of the coffin. The team had previously thought that the gypsum was heated to at least 300 degrees F (150 degrees C) before being poured over the body, but the handprint and fingerprints suggests someone had smoothed the gypsum over the body by hand, suggesting significantly cooler temperatures. While acknowledging it’s a long shot, the team hopes to extract DNA samples from the sarcophagus which might enable them to determine genetic sex.

Playing Super Mario combats  burnout

Young adulthood in the 2020s is fraught with a range of interconnected pressures: soaring cost of living, student loan debt, pressure to excel academically, and an “always on” digital culture, to name a few of the most common stressors. This in turn can lead to burnout. Perhaps playing video games can help—the right kind of video games, like Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi., as opposed to dystopian survival horror games or highly competitive multiplayer games. According to a study published in the journal JMIR Serious Games, Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi can help young adults recapture childlike wonder and reduce stress and anxiety that can lead to burnout.

The authors employed a mixed-methods approach for their study. First, they collected qualitative data from 41 college-aged subjects via in-depth interviews; all were experienced players of those two games. They followed this with a cross-sectional survey to collect quantitative data from 336 players. The resulting analysis showed that those who felt greater childlike wonder while playing also reported higher overall happiness; and the happiest players showed significantly lower risk of burnout. “By moving beyond escapism and nostalgia, [this study] offers a new perspective on how well-designed, globally familiar games can function as accessible, resilience-building digital microenvironments,” the authors concluded.

DOI: JMIR Serious Games, 2025. 10.2196/84219  (About DOIs).

Cracking a Big Bang Theory problem

Physicists may have had mixed feelings about The Big Bang Theory‘s depiction of their profession, but one thing the sitcom consistently got right was the equations featured on the ubiquitous white board—clever Easter eggs for physicists, courtesy of science advisor David Saltzberg. In one episode, Sheldon and Leonard are pondering an equation about how axions are generated from the sun—part of the duo’s efforts to estimate the likelihood of detecting axions produced by a fusion reactor. Leonard and Sheldon failed on that point, but real-world physicists think they’ve now cracked the case, according to a paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

Axions are hypothetical particles that could explain dark matter— the mysterious substance that comprises about 23 percent of all the mass in our universe—and represent a theoretical alternative to WIMPs, which thus far have eluded detection by physicists. Particles can exhibit wavelike behavior as well as particle characteristics. So an axion would behave more like a wave (or wave packet) than a particle, and the size of the wave packets is inversely proportional to their mass. That means these very light particles don’t necessarily need to be tiny. The downside is that they interact even more weakly with regular matter than WIMPS, so they cannot be produced in large colliders.

So physicists have been developing all kinds of smaller experiments for detecting axions, from atomic clocks and resonating bars, to shining lasers at walls on the off-chance a bit of dark matter seeps through the other side. Co-author Jure Zupan of the University of Cincinnati and colleagues proposed that axions could be produced by a fusion reactor powered by deuterium and tritium contained in a lithium-lined vessel. Among the fusion byproducts of such a reactor would be a large flux of neutrons which would interact with materials in the walls, or collide with other particles, thereby releasing energy and creating new particles: possibly axions or axion-like particles.

DOI: Journal of High Energy Physics, 2025. 10.1007/JHEP10(2025)215  (About DOIs).

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. June’s list includes the final results from the Muon g-2 experiment, re-creating the recipe for Egyptian blue, embedding coded messages in ice bubbles, and why cats seem to have a marked preference for sleeping on their left sides.

Re-creating Egyptian blues

Artists in ancient Egypt were particularly fond of the color known as Egyptian blue—deemed the world’s oldest synthetic pigment—since it was a cheap substitute for pricier materials like lapis lazuli or turquoise. But archaeologists have puzzled over exactly how it was made, particularly given the wide range of hues, from deep blue to gray or green. That knowledge had long been forgotten. However, scientists at Washington State University have finally succeeded in recreating the recipe, according to a paper published in the journal npj Heritage Science.

The interdisciplinary team came up with 12 different potential recipes using varying percentages of silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, and sodium carbonate. They heated the samples to 1,000° Celsius (about what ancient artists could have achieved), varying the time between one and 11 hours. They also cooled the samples at different rates. Then they analyzed the samples using microscopy and other modern techniques and compared them to the Egyptian blue on actual Egyptian artifacts to find the best match.

Their samples are now on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Apart from its historical interest, Egyptian blue also has fascinating optical, magnetic, and biological properties that could prove useful in practical applications today, per the authors. For instance, it might be used for counterfeit-proof inks, since it emits light in the near-infrared, and its chemistry is similar to high-temperature superconductors.

npj Heritage Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s40494-025-01699-7  (About DOIs).

World’s smallest violin

It’s an old joke, possibly dating back to the 1970s. Whenever someone is complaining about an issue that seems trivial in the grand scheme of things, it’s tradition to rub one’s thumb and forefinger together and declare, “This the world’s smallest violin playing just for you.” (In my snarky circles we used to say the violin was “playing ‘My Heart Bleeds for You.'”) Physicists at Loughborough University have now made what they claim really is the world’s smallest violin, just 35 microns long and 13 microns wide.

There are various lithographic methods for creating patterned electronic devices, such as photolithography, which can be used either with a mask or without. The authors relied on scanning probe thermal lithography instead, specifically a cutting-edge nano-sculpting machine they dubbed the NanoFrazor. The first step was to coat a small chip with two layers of a gel material and then place it under the NanoFrazor. The instrument’s heated tip burned the violin pattern into the gel. Then they “developed” the gel by dissolving the underlayer so that only a violin-shaped cavity remained.

Next, they poured on a thin layer of platinum and rinsed off the chip with acetone. The resulting violin is a microscopic image rather than a playable tiny instrument—you can’t even see it without a microscope—but it’s still an impressive achievement that demonstrates the capabilities of the lab’s new nano lithography system. And the whole process can take as little as three hours.

Muon g-2 anomaly no more?

The Muon g-2 experiment (pronounced “gee minus two”) is designed to look for tantalizing hints of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. It does this by measuring the magnetic field (aka the magnetic moment) generated by a subatomic particle known as the muon. Back in 2001, an earlier run of the experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory found a slight discrepancy, hinting at possible new physics, but that controversial result fell short of the critical threshold required to claim discovery.

Physicists have been making new measurements ever since in hopes of resolving this anomaly. For instance, in 2021, we reported on data from the updated Muon g-2 experiment that showed “excellent agreement” with the discrepancy Brookhaven recorded. They improved on their measurement precision in 2023. And now it seems the anomaly is very close to being resolved, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv based on analysis of a data set triple the size as the one used for the 2023 analysis. (You can watch a video explanation here.)

The final Muon g-2 result is in agreement with the 2021 and 2023 results, but much more precise, with error bars four times smaller than those of the original Brookhaven experiment. Combine that with new predictions by the related Muon g-2 Theory Initiative using a new means of calculating the muon’s magnetic moment, and the discrepancy between theoretical prediction and experiment narrows even further.

While some have declared victory, and the Muon g-2 experiment is completed, theorists are still sounding a note of caution as they seek to further refine their models. Meanwhile, Fermilab is building a new experiment designed to hunt for muon-to-electron conversions. If they find any, that would definitely comprise new physics beyond the Standard Model.

arXiv, 2025. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2506.03069 (About DOIs).

Message in a bubble

Forget sending messages in a bottle. Scientists have figured out how to encode messages in both binary and Morse code in air bubbles trapped in ice, according to a paper published in the journal Cell Physical Science. Trapped air bubbles are usually shaped like eggs or needles, and the authors discovered that they could manipulate the sizes, shapes, and distribution of those ice bubbles by varying the freezing rate. (Faster rates produce egg-shaped bubbles, slower rates produce needle-shaped ones, for example.)

To encode messages, the researchers assigned different bubble sizes, shapes, and orientations to Morse code and binary characters and used their freezing method to produce ice bubbles representing the desired characters. Next, they took a photograph of the ice layer and converted it to gray scale, training a computer to identify the position and the size of the bubbles and decode the message into English letters and Arabic numerals. The team found that binary coding could store messages 10 times longer than Morse code.

Someday, this freezing method could be used for short message storage in Antarctica and similar very cold regions where traditional information storage methods are difficult and/or too costly, per the authors. However, Qiang Tang of the University of Australia, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist that he did not see much practical application for the breakthrough in cryptography or security, “unless a polar bear may want to tell someone something.”

Cell Physical Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2025.102622 (About DOIs).

Cats prefer to sleep on left side

The Internet was made for cats, especially YouTube, which features millions of videos of varying quality, documenting the crazy antics of our furry feline friends. Those videos can also serve the interests of science, as evidenced by the international team of researchers who analyzed 408 publicly available videos of sleeping cats to study whether the kitties showed any preference for sleeping on their right or left sides. According to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, two-thirds of those videos showed cats sleeping on their left sides.

Why should this behavioral asymmetry be the case? There are likely various reasons, but the authors hypothesize that it has something to do with kitty perception and their vulnerability to predators while asleep (usually between 12 to 16 hours a day). The right hemisphere of the brain dominates in spatial attention, while the right amygdala is dominant for processing threats. That’s why most species react more quickly when a predator approaches from the left. Because a cat’s left visual field is processed in the dominant right hemisphere of their brains, “sleeping on the left side can therefore be a survival strategy,” the authors concluded.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.04.043 (About DOIs).

A mobile ultrasonic brain imaging helmet

Brain imaging is a powerful tool for both medical diagnosis and neuroscience research, from noninvasive methods like EEGs, MRI,  fMRI, and diffuse optical tomography, to more invasive techniques like intracranial EEG. But the dream is to be able to capture the human brain functioning in real-world scenarios instead of in the lab. Dutch scientists are one step closer to achieving that goal with a specially designed 3D-printed helmet that relies upon functional ultrasound imaging (fUSi) to enable high-quality 2D imaging, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

Unlike fMRI, which requires subjects to remain stationary, the helmet monitors the brain as subjects are walking and talking (accompanied by a custom mobile fUSi acquisition cart). The team recruited two 30-something male subjects who had undergone cranioplasty to embed an implant made of polyetheretherketone (PEEK). While wearing the helmet, the subjects were asked to perform stationary motor and sensory tasks: pouting or brushing their lips, for example. Then the subjects walked in a straight line, pushing the cart for a minute up to 30 meters while licking their lips to demonstrate multitasking. The sessions ran over a 20-month period, thereby demonstrating that the helmet is suitable for long-term use. The next step is to improve the technology to enable mobile 3D imaging of the brain.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu9133  (About DOIs).

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection of such stories. March’s list includes fascinating papers on such topics as how the brain responds to speaking Klingon (or Dothraki, or Navi), the discovery of creepy preclassic Salvadoran puppets, the effectiveness of “dazzle camouflage,” and how male blue-lined octopuses manage not to be cannibalized by their chosen mates.

Wind Cave’s rocks fluoresce under black light

South Dakota’s Wind Cave gets its name from the flow of air moving continually through its many passages and equalizing the atmospheric pressure between the air inside and outside—almost like the cave is “breathing.” Its rock and mineral formations also boast a unique chemistry that fluoresces when exposed to black light, according to talks presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego. That fluorescence could shed light on how life can thrive in extreme environments, including that of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

University of Northern Iowa astrobiologist Joshua Sebree and several students have been mapping new areas of Wind Cave (as well as other caves in the US), recording the passages, rock formations, minerals, and lifeforms they encounter in the process. They noticed that under UV light, certain parts of Wind Cave took on otherworldly hues, thanks to different concentrations of organic and inorganic fossilized chemical compounds. Those areas seem to indicate where water once flowed, carrying minerals into the cave from the surface 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, according to their analysis of the fluorescent spectra. Sebree et al. found that Wind Cave was likely carved out by waters rich in manganese, producing zebra stripes that glow pink under UV light, revealing the calcites that grew within as a result of those waters.

The physics of swing-top beer bottles

So-called kitchen science is all the rage these days, with champagne, wine, and beer being particularly favorite subjects for experimentation. German physicist Max Koch of the University of Goettingen is as passionate about home brewing as he is about fluid dynamics. So naturally, Koch became fascinated by the distinctive “pop and slosh” sounds produced whenever he opened one of his home-brewed swing-top beer bottles. His experiments used a high-speed camera to capture the acoustics and underlying physics, augmented by audio recording and computer simulations.

Rather than producing a single shockwave, Koch and his co-authors discovered that the unique sound occurs because popping the lid produces a vibrating standing wave, thanks to condensation within the bottleneck, according to a paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids. They were surprised to find that the frequency of the pop was significantly lower than the resonance produced by blowing across the open bottle top, which they attributed to the sudden expansion of the carbon dioxide and a strong cooling effect that reduces sound speed. The sloshing is due to the bottle’s motion, and it’s possible that the lid hitting the glass after popping could produce more bubbles and hence gushing.

Physics of Fluids, 2025. DOI: 10.1063/5.0248739  (About DOIs).

How effective was WWI “dazzle paint”?

During World War I, ships were often painted with complex geometric shapes in contrasting and intersecting colors, dubbed “dazzle camouflage” and usually attributed to British marine artist Norman Wilkinson. The objective was to confuse enemy U-boat captains trying to determine the speed and direction of those ships, and a 1919 study seemed to support that hypothesis. Aston University researchers have revisited that original study and concluded that the horizon effect—in which ships viewed from a distance seem to be traveling along the horizon—is a more effective means of confusing enemy combatants, according to a paper published in the journal i-Perception.

The author of the 1919 study was an MIT marine engineering student named Leo Blodgett, who painted model ships in those geometric patterns and observed them with a model periscope in a mechanical test theater to see if he could determine whether an observer’s perception of the direction of travel was markedly different from the actual direction. He concluded that this was indeed the case and therefore dazzle paint was effective.

But according to the Aston scientists, Blodgett’s experiment did not have a solid control condition to warrant such a conclusion. So they revisited his 105-year-old data and ran their own version of Blodgett’s experiment, comparing results from his photographs showing the original dazzle camouflage with versions that had the camouflage patterns edited out. The results: the dazzle camouflage did work via a twist on perspective, but it was a small effect. The horizon effect had a much stronger confounding effect.

i-Perception, 2025. DOI: 10.1177/20416695241312316  (About DOIs).

Early Salvadoran clay puppets

Archaeologists excavating the San Isidro pyramid in El Salvador have discovered five carved clay figurines dating back to around 400 BCE that may have been controlled with string like modern marionettes. Such “Bolinas” figures have also been found at a Mayan burial site in Guatemala, suggesting the two areas may have shared culture and civilization, according to a paper published in the journal Antiquity.

Three of the puppets were about a foot tall, with the other two measuring about 18 centimeters. The larger ones had adjustable heads connected to their bodies via matching sockets. The carved faces feature tongues, tattoos, and facial expressions that shift depending on the viewing angle: fearful when viewed from below and grinning from above, for example. The authors suggest that these puppets weren’t used as toys, but as “clay actors” in ritualistic funeral performances. “The universal impetus for creating scaled-down humanoid figures appears to be mimetic—that is, imbuing these handheld objects with deeper meanings that are readily decoded by the intended audience,” they concluded, although the shared cultural “code” for interpreting those meanings has been lost.

Antiquity, 2025. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.37  (About DOIs).

This is your brain on Esperanto and Klingon

J.R.R. Tolkien invented two Elvish languages (Quenya and Sindarin) when writing The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Star Trek has Klingon, the Avatar films have Na’vi, and Game of Thrones boasts two constructed languages, or conlangs: Dothraki and High Valyrian. There are even hardcore fans who have diligently become proficient in those invented languages. And apparently conlangs activate the same parts of the brain as their native tongues, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

MIT neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko previously spearheaded studies on how the brain responds to stimuli that share certain language features—music, gestures, facial expressions, and computer programming languages like Python. None seemed to engage the language-processing areas of the brain. Curious about what makes natural language unique, Fedorenko et al. turned to conlangs. They organized a weekend conference featuring conlang creators as speakers and invited people fluent in Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki, and High Valyrian to participate. They scanned 44 conlang speakers with fMRI as they listened to sentences in both their chosen conlang and their native tongue, performing nonlinguistic tasks as a control.

The results: The same language regions lit up regardless of whether they were speaking in their chosen conlang or native natural language. This helped the group determine that language responses appear to be driven in part by how they convey meaning about the interior and exterior world—objects, properties of objects, events, etc. Python, by contrast, is highly symbolic and abstract, disconnected from the everyday “real” world we experience. The group next plans to study how the brain responds to a different conlang called Lojban, created in the 1990s, to learn more about which language features activate the brain’s language centers.

PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2313473122  (About DOIs).

Venom as a protective strategy for male octopuses

Sexual cannibalism—in which a female of the species consumes the male after copulating—is a very real thing in nature, seen in insect species like mantises and spiders, certain crustaceans and gastropods, and even certain species of octopus. Case in point: the blue-lined octopus (Hapalochlaena fasciata), a tiny creature found in shallow waters whose venom can be quite deadly, especially to humans. The females of the species might be the size of golf balls, but they are nonetheless significantly larger than the males and have a tendency to eat their mates.

Fortunately, the males have developed an effective defense strategy, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology: They inject their chosen females with tetrodotoxin (a venom also produced by pufferfish) just before mating, temporarily paralyzing the females so the males can avoid being eaten. Scientists at the University of Queensland studied the behavior of mating blue-lined octopuses in the lab and noticed that males would bite the females near the aorta as the mating ritual commenced, flooding their systems with the venom.

This immobilized the females for the duration of the mating sessions (which lasted between 40 and 75 minutes); they largely stopped breathing, turned pale, and did not respond to visual stimuli during that time. The males actually increased their respiration rate as they used a specialized mating arm to deposit their sperm into the females’ oviducts to fertilize the eggs. The effects of the venom eventually wore off sufficiently for the females to push the males away without suffering any permanent effects. The authors suggest that female blue-lined octopuses may have evolved a tolerance to tetrodotoxin, ensuring they survive to lay their eggs and propagate the species.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.027  (About DOIs).

Rubber hand illusion alleviates pain

One of the many strange things to come out of 21st-century neuroscience is the so-called rubber hand illusion, in which a subject’s hand is hidden and replaced by a rubber hand in the position where the real hand would be. When both the real and fake hands are stroked simultaneously, subjects respond as if the rubber hand were part of their body. Threaten the rubber hand by attempting to stab it with a dagger, for instance, and the participants exhibit an involuntary startle or fear response. It’s the combination of visual and tactile feedback that does it, and it only takes a few seconds for the illusion to kick in. And it’s not a purely psychological effect; there have been measurable physiological responses as well.

Scientists in Bochum, Germany, have now shown that the rubber hand illusion can also alleviate pain, according to a paper published in the journal Pain Reports. They recruited 34 right-handed subjects, evaluated their individual pain thresholds, then placed the subjects’ left hands behind a screen. A left rubber hand was placed in front of the subjects, which could be lit from below with red light. Then heat was applied at different temperatures to the hidden hand, while red light increased on the visible rubber hand. Subjects were asked to rate their pain in response.

The results: subjects’ perception of pain decreased noticeably when the rubber hand illusion was used, compared to control conditions. The authors don’t yet know what the underlying mechanism might be but suggest it could be related to visual analgesia, in which pain is considered less intense if someone can see the part of the body that is being hurt.

Pain Reports, 2025. DOI: 10.1097/PR9.0000000000001252  (About DOIs).