Could Advanced Aliens Be Living Nearby? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely

By Northern Arizona U., Sept. 30, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/could-advanced-aliens-be-living-nearby-scientists-say-its-unlikely/

Some nearby exoplanets may be far older than Earth yet still host only simple life. A new study suggests that the decisive factor may be how much photosynthetic energy a planet has accumulated over billions of years.

 Credit: Shutterstock

Even planets billions of years older than Earth may host only microbes if photosynthesis supplies too little energy.

Science fiction often imagines Earth’s galactic neighborhood teeming with hyper-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, but the actual cosmos near us may be far quieter.

A study published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, led by Chris Doughty, a professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University, proposes that the evolution of complex life on exoplanets depends heavily on cumulative plant energy rather than just the passage of time. Although many of the planets orbiting Earth’s stellar neighbors are several billion years older than our world, worse conditions for cumulative photosynthesis mean life on those planets likely evolved much more slowly.

Among 29 nearby exoplanets, worlds outside our solar system that could potentially have liquid water, the team identified only two where life might have progressed beyond Earth’s evolutionary stage. Those planets, GJ 1061c and K2-3d, are larger, hotter, brighter, and older than most Earth-like planets in our stellar neighborhood. Three others could have reached a stage roughly comparable to Earth’s Mesozoic Era, the age of dinosaurs.

Photosynthesis as an evolutionary clock

Warm, wet regions on Earth generally support more plant growth and more species than cold, dry regions. Scientists believe that greater plant growth provides more energy and ecological space for animals, linking the conditions that favor photosynthesis to opportunities for life to diversify. Photosynthesis converts light into chemical energy, and the researchers hypothesize that the amount captured over a planet’s entire history could influence its evolutionary development. Under that relationship, a younger, warmer, wetter planet could support more evolutionary development than an older, colder, drier one.

During the 3.2 billion years before more efficient vascular plants evolved on Earth, photosynthesis fixed roughly 2.4 × 10²⁵ grams of carbon, incorporating it into organic matter. After the emergence of those plants, which have specialized tissues that transport water and nutrients, another 7 × 10²⁵ grams were fixed before humans evolved. Those quantities gave the researchers a way to compare Earth’s evolutionary history with the amount of photosynthesis other planets might have sustained.

The TRAPPIST-1 System. Credit: Northern Arizona University

Older worlds under dimmer stars

Planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common stars in our galaxy, are considered among the likeliest places to find life, but their growing conditions differ from Earth’s. Many are tidally locked, meaning the same side always faces their star while the other faces away.

“If photosynthetic life evolved on these planets, that life has been photosynthesizing for potentially billions of years longer than on Earth,” said Michael Gowanlock, a study coauthor and associate professor of informatics at Northern Arizona University. “However, the total annual photosynthesis is likely lower because there is less light and half the planetary surface area available for photosynthesis. Who is ahead? That is the mystery we are quantitatively trying to solve.”

Because plant growth also depends on temperature and rainfall, estimating photosynthesis required more than knowing how much light a planet receives. Coauthor Denis Sergeev, a lecturer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, had simulated possible exoplanet climates, producing maps of temperature, light, and precipitation. The team used those maps, which describe the main variables used to predict plant growth on Earth, to estimate potential growth over the planets’ lifetimes and infer how far evolution might have progressed.

For TRAPPIST-1e, a planet 40 light-years from Earth, the calculation yielded potential lifetime carbon fixation of just 21% of Earth’s total, despite the planet being several billion years older.

What would it be like to vacation in the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system? The poster invites you to “Take a planet-hopping excursion through the TRAPPIST-1 system.” The star system was revealed by the TRansiting Planets and PlanetIsmals Small Telescope, or TRAPPIST, and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Since this is less than the Earth had fixed before the evolution of more efficient vascular plants, we estimated that TRAPPIST-1e may only be at the microbial stage of evolution,” said coauthor Cameron Hrabak, a Northern Arizona University alumnus. “That’s well behind Earth.”

The atmosphere surrounding TRAPPIST-1e or any of the other planets could profoundly change its climate and capacity for photosynthesis, altering the evolutionary stage predicted by the model. Future observations with the James Webb Space Telescope could provide atmospheric data to refine those estimates, which assume that life exists and develops much as it did on Earth. The calculations therefore leave open the possibility of advanced extraterrestrial life nearby while suggesting conditions that could make it less likely.

“Physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, given the high likelihood of intelligent life in the galaxy, ‘Where are they?’” Doughty said. “This paper suggests that our exoplanet stellar neighborhood may be quiet because most Earth-like planets near us are likely to be evolutionarily behind us and still at the microbial stage. Which means we can sleep well, because if life on those exoplanets evolved just like on Earth, most of those planets will just be filled with microbes and not advanced aliens.”

Scarce rain could shape alien civilizations

Rainfall was generally the main constraint on plant growth among the worlds most likely to surpass Earth’s total carbon fixation and evolutionary stage. On Earth, growth can be limited by light, temperature, or precipitation, and a desert can receive abundant sunlight while supporting relatively little plant growth because water is scarce. Such restrictions also shape which organisms thrive, helping explain why desert life has little overlap with life in tropical forests.

If intelligent creatures evolved on those exoplanets, the researchers suggest, the ecosystems shaping them might therefore resemble deserts or temperate environments. Humans could offer a parallel, having likely evolved in savanna woodlands where rainfall limited plant growth.

“To use two pop culture references, the ecological characteristics that shape advanced life on those exoplanets might be more ‘Dune’ than ‘Avatar,’” Doughty said.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

When Your Eyes Mislead You, the Brain Finds Common Ground

By S. Bolakhe, Cold Spring Harbor Lab., Sept. 30, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/when-your-eyes-mislead-you-the-brain-finds-common-ground/

New research indicates that neighboring visual areas may settle on a common interpretation by reinforcing activity patterns they share. Conflicting patterns, by contrast, fade rapidly, hinting at a neural mechanism that could help the brain maintain a coherent view of the world. 

Credit: Shutterstock

A mouse study suggests that neighboring visual areas may build agreement by sustaining shared activity patterns while mismatches fade.

A shape in the dark might briefly resemble a face, or an orange might momentarily look like an apple. To make sense of what we see, the brain must coordinate information from regions with different specialties. A study in mice now suggests how two neighboring visual areas may reach a consistent interpretation, with shared activity persisting while mismatches quickly fade.

The research, published in Nature Neuroscience, examined the primary visual cortex, known as V1, and the lateromedial visual area, or LM. Both belong to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes sight. When activity patterns in the two areas agreed, they lasted longer. When the patterns disagreed, the mismatch dissipated within a fraction of a second.

The finding addresses a question that extends beyond vision for Mitra Javadzadeh, a Cynthia R. Stebbins Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who conducted the research with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and University College London.

CSHL Cynthia R. Stebbins Fellow Mitra Javadzadeh and collaborators have developed circuit models of the primary visual cortex (V1) and lateromedial visual area (LM) in the brain’s neocortex. These models allowed the team to map and predict neural activity in response to different visual stimuli.

 Credit: Javadzadeh lab/CSHL



“While we understand individual building blocks of the brain, what is the glue that puts them together?” Javadzadeh asks. “Knowing that can finally help us understand how the brain works as a whole.”

Mitra Javadzadeh.

 Credit: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

How two visual areas build consensus

V1 and LM communicate in both directions, allowing each area to influence its neighbor rather than simply pass information along a one-way route. To investigate that relationship, the researchers trained mice to distinguish between two visual patterns tilted at opposite angles. The mice received a reward for only one orientation. During the task, the team briefly silenced either V1 or LM and recorded how the other area functioned without its partner’s input.

Using those recordings, the researchers built an artificial neural network model representing the V1-LM circuit. The model allowed them to simulate how the circuit would respond when specific neurons were manipulated and investigate how connections between the areas shaped the persistence of their activity.
“We find that over time, these types of connections between areas implement a mechanism we call consensus building,” Javadzadeh explains.

Such coordination could help explain how specialized groups of neurons, each receiving distinct streams of sensory information, contribute to a unified interpretation. “We are trying to understand how you can have such a high level of specialization between these different blocks, yet always have a consistent holistic outcome,” Javadzadeh says.

Javadzadeh and her collaborators measured the activity of a combined 194 V1 neurons and 228 LM neurons across seven mice to build accurate circuit models of each brain region. 

Credit: Javadzadeh lab/CSHL
When sight and sound disagree



The experiments tested mice distinguishing tilted patterns, rather than the everyday visual mix-ups that help illustrate the broader question. They also focused on just two visual areas. Javadzadeh’s team is now investigating whether similar principles apply throughout the neocortex, the larger brain structure that includes V1 and LM, and potentially help reconcile information from different senses.

“For example, when what you see contradicts with what you hear, do you still use the same kind of mechanisms to reconcile these two?” she wonders.

If consensus building operates more broadly, it could help researchers understand what happens when brain regions fail to reach a consistent interpretation of the world. The same principles could also inspire approaches to reconciling conflicting information in artificial intelligence systems.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Could Earth’s Magnetic Field Be Secretly Influencing How We Age?

By U. of Nottingham, Sept. 30, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/could-earths-magnetic-field-be-secretly-influencing-how-we-age/

Reducing Earth’s magnetic field to near zero changed how fruit flies aged, moved, and produced cellular energy. The effects depended on mitochondrial health, suggesting that this invisible environmental force may interact with metabolism in unexpected ways.

 Credit: Shutterstock

Shielded from most of Earth’s magnetic field, fruit flies with faulty mitochondria lived about 20% longer, but their physical performance declined.

Life on Earth has always operated within a constant, invisible background. The planet’s magnetic field continuously passes through every living cell, yet biologists still know very little about whether organisms actually need this environmental force to function.

When scientists nearly stripped away that magnetic background in an experiment with fruit flies, they found changes in how the insects’ cells generated energy, how well the flies moved, and how long they lived.

The effects centered on mitochondria, the tiny structures inside cells that produce much of the energy needed for life. Research led by Professor Lisa Chakrabarti and Jacob Reed at the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine & Science found that the flies’ responses depended on the health of this cellular machinery. Removing most of the magnetic field could improve one aspect of their lives while worsening another.

A longer life with a physical cost

For the study, published in Aging, the team used a specially designed shielding system to reduce the magnetic field surrounding the flies to near zero. They tested healthy flies alongside flies carrying a defect in Pink1, a gene associated with inherited early-onset Parkinson’s disease in humans. Comparing the two groups allowed them to investigate how flies with impaired mitochondrial function responded to the same environmental change.

The Pink1 flies lived about 20% longer under magnetic shielding, but their physical performance declined. Healthy flies showed improved movement along with changes in their health span, or the time spent in good health. The results suggest that an animal’s metabolic state helps determine its response to magnetic field strength, with longer survival and better physical function not necessarily going together.

Fruit flies in Earth’s magnetic field (replicated). 

Credit: University of Nottingham

Magnetic fields do more than guide migration

Doctoral candidate Reed said: “Research in this area is sparse, focusing mainly on how migrating animals sense magnetic fields, or on preparing humans for space travel. Yet we still know very little about why all living organisms need or don’t need a magnetic field to function normally in the first place.”

He continues, “This project brought expertise from physics, engineering, and biology to study fruit flies with novel, highly specialized techniques and equipment; to not only look at physiology but pathology too. It opens a potential new avenue for a non-invasive, mitochondria-targeted approaches that many diseases have been longing for. Hopefully, emphasizing that magnetic fields are fundamental to life beyond certain scientific niches.”

To investigate what was happening inside the cells, the team took high-resolution measurements of mitochondrial respiration, the process through which mitochondria use oxygen to help produce usable energy. They also used highly sensitive quantum sensors that exploit tiny defects within diamonds to detect changes associated with mitochondrial activity.

Reducing the magnetic field altered mitochondrial energy metabolism and levels of superoxide, a highly reactive molecule produced by mitochondria. These measurements linked the changes in the flies’ movement and lifespan to shifts in the cellular processes that supply their energy. They also showed why the effects of magnetic shielding could not be described as uniformly beneficial or harmful.

Has evolution made cells dependent on magnetism?

The findings raise questions about whether Earth’s magnetic field is part of the environment that cells have evolved to function within. Any use of magnetic fields to influence mitochondrial function in aging or neurodegenerative disease remains a prospect for further research.

Chakrabarti said: “We live our entire lives within the Earth’s magnetic field. It passes through our bodies, our cells and every living organism on the planet, yet we know surprisingly little about whether and how this invisible force affects the way our cells work.

“Our results raise the intriguing possibility that the Earth’s magnetic field forms part of the biological environment to which life has adapted throughout evolution. Understanding how cells sense and respond to magnetic fields could ultimately reveal new ways of manipulating mitochondrial function in aging and disease.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Arctic Landslide Triggers 1,580-Foot Tsunami in Alaska

By M. E. West, E. Karasözen, U, of Alaska Fairbanks, Sept. 30, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/arctic-landslide-triggers-1580-foot-tsunami-in-alaska/

Artist’s rendering of a massive landslide-generated tsunami surging through a steep Arctic fjord.

 Credit: SciTechDaily.com

As glaciers retreat, steep Arctic fjords may face rising landslide-tsunami risks that could be reduced through better monitoring and faster warnings.

On the evening of August 9, 2025, passengers aboard the Hanse Explorer had just finished photographing and filming South Sawyer Glacier before the vessel began its trip back through the fjord. About 12 hours later, part of a nearby mountain suddenly collapsed into the water, triggering the second-highest tsunami ever recorded.

We study earthquakes and tsunamis at the Alaska Earthquake Center, and one of us is Alaska state seismologist. In a new study with colleagues, we describe how the landslide drove water and debris 1,580 feet (481 meters) up the opposite wall of the fjord, higher than the top floor of the Taipei 101 skyscraper, before surging onward through Tracy Arm. The wave was powerful enough to scour the fjord walls down to bare rock.

The Tracy Arm landslide sent a tsunami wave far up the opposite side of the fjord near South Sawyer Glacier.

 Credit: John Lyons/U.S. Geological Survey

The collapse happened shortly after 5 o’clock in the morning on a gray, rainy day. Fortunately, no ships were in the area at the time. In the following months, some cruise lines began avoiding Tracy Arm. Still, the conditions that produced the disaster are not unique to this location.

Landslides are a regular hazard in Alaska’s coastal mountains, where fast uplift from tectonic forces and long-term ice loss meet the wearing effects of rain, snow, and moving glaciers. In recent years, however, a striking pattern has appeared: Several major landslides have occurred exactly where a retreating glacier ends.

Though the mechanics are still poorly understood, these mountains appear to become unstable when the ice disappears. When the landslide hits the water, the momentum of millions of tons of rock is transferred into tsunami waves.

The Tracy Arm landslide generated a tsunami that sent a wave so high up the opposite fjord wall that it would have overtopped some of the world’s tallest buildings. Here’s how it compares to other large tsunamis around the world.

 Credit: Steve Hicks/University College London

This same phenomenon is playing out from Alaska to Greenland and Norway, sometimes with deadly consequences. Across the Arctic, countries are trying to come to terms with this growing hazard. The options are not attractive: avoid vast swaths of coastline, or live with a poorly understood risk. We believe there is an obvious role for alert systems, but only if scientists have a better understanding of where and when landslides are likely to occur.

Signs that a landslide might be coming

The Tracy Arm landslide is a powerful example.

The landslide occurred in August, when warm ocean waters and heavier precipitation favor both glacier retreat and slope failure. The glacier below the landslide area had experienced rapid calving – large chunks of ice breaking off and falling into the water – and it had retreated more than a third of a mile in the two months prior. Heavy rain had been falling. Rain enters fractures in the mountain and pushes them closer to failure by increasing the water pressure in cracks.

Most provocative are the thousands of small seismic tremors that emanated from the area of the slide in the days prior to the mountainside collapsing.

We believe that this combination of signs would have been sufficient to issue progressive alerts to any ships in the vicinity and homes and businesses that could have been harmed by a tsunami at least a day prior to the failure – had a monitoring program existed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBgydzF6Ezw

The last view of Tracy Arm, taken from the Hanse Explorer motoring away from the South Sawyer glacier, before a landslide from a mountain just out of view on the left crashed into the fjord. The landslide generated a tsunami that sent a wave nearly 1,600 feet (about 490 meters) up the mountain on the right.

 Credit: Alaska Earthquake Center

Escalating alerts are used for everything from terrorism and nuclear plant safety to avalanches and volcanic unrest. They don’t remove the risk, but they do make it easier for people to safely coexist with hazards.

For example, though people are still killed in avalanches, alert systems have played an essential role in making winter backcountry travel safer for more people. The collapse at Tracy Arm demonstrates what could be possible for landslides.
What an alert system could look like

We believe that the combination of weather and rapid glacier retreat in early August 2025 was likely sufficient to issue an alert notifying people that the hazard may be temporarily elevated in a general area. On a yellow-orange-red scale, this would be a yellow alert.

Maps show how the glacier has retreated over the years, moving past the section of mountain that collapsed (outlined in white on the right) in the days prior to the slide. The map on the right shows the height the tsunami reached on the fjord walls. 

Credit: Planet Labs

In the hours prior to the landslide, the exponential increase in seismic events and telltale transition to what is known as seismic tremor – a continuous “hum” of seismic energy – were sufficient to communicate a time-sensitive warning for a specific region.

These observations, recorded as a byproduct of regional earthquake monitoring, warranted an “orange” alert noting immediate concern. The signs were arguably sufficient to recommend keeping boats and ships out of the fjord.

Our research over the past few years has demonstrated that once a large landslide has started, it is possible to detect and measure the event within a couple of minutes. In this amount of time, seismic waves in the surrounding area can indicate the rough size of the landslide and whether it occurred near open water.

A monitoring program that could quickly communicate this would be able to issue a red alert, signaling an event in progress.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami warning program has spent decades fine-tuning rapid message dissemination. A warning system would have offered little help for ships in the immediate vicinity, but it could have provided perhaps 10 minutes of warning for those who rode out the harrowing tsunami farther away.

There is no landslide monitoring system operating yet at this scale in the U.S. Building one will require cooperation across state and federal agencies, and strengthened monitoring and communication networks. Even then, it will not be fail-proof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_DZqYrlp4A

Seismic data from the closest monitoring station to the landslide, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away, shows the “hum” of seismic energy increasing just ahead of the landslide, indicated by the tall yellow spike shortly after 5 a.m. Credit: Alaska Earthquake Center.

Understanding risk, not removing it

Alert systems do not remove the risk entirely, but they are a better option than no warning at all. Over time, they also build awareness as communities and visitors get used to thinking about these hazards.

Many of the most alluring places on Earth come with significant hazards. Arctic fjords are among them. The same processes that create this hazard – glacier retreat, steep terrain, dynamic geology – are also what make these landscapes so compelling. The mix of glaciers, ice-choked waters and steep mountains is exactly what draws people to these places. People will continue to visit and experience them.

The view from the deck of the Hanse Explorer on Aug. 9, 2025, shows the mountain where the landslide occurred just 12 hours before it happened. 

Credit: Hanse Explorer

The question is not whether these places should be avoided altogether, but how to help people make more informed decisions. We believe that stronger geophysical and meteorological monitoring, coupled with new research and communication channels, is the first step.

On Aug. 9, visitors unknowingly passed through a landscape on the cusp of failure. An alert system might have given tour companies and people in the area the information they needed to make more informed choices and avoid being caught by surprise.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

“Crawzilla” – Scientists Just Found North America’s Biggest Known Crayfish

By U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Sept. 29, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/crawzilla-scientists-just-found-north-americas-biggest-known-crayfish/

The Crawzilla crawdad specimen that inspired a competition among scientists to find the largest crayfish in North America. 

Credit: Caitlin Bloomer, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The search for North America’s biggest crayfish has turned a friendly rivalry into a scientific question about what limits their growth.

A Tennessee bottlebrush crayfish in a West Virginia university collection has taken the top spot in a new ranking of North America’s largest known crayfish. Its carapace, the hard shell covering its head and midsection, measures 86.6 millimeters, or about 3.4 inches, without counting the tail, claws, or antennae.

The specimen, housed at West Liberty University, led a list of 20 large individuals representing 18 species. The rankings, published in Ecology, grew out of a friendly disagreement that sent researchers searching through museum collections around the country.
Museum specimens settle a crayfish rivalry

Caitlin Bloomer had pulled a huge crayfish known as a Crawzilla crawdad from the muck during a biological survey in Kentucky. A teaching assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she brought the animal back to campus.

“I thought, ‘There’s no doubt I have caught the biggest crayfish anyone’s ever seen!’ I brought it back to campus to show my colleague, naturally bragging about having caught the biggest-ever crayfish. But, as all biologists and sport fisherman do, he took one look and said, ‘No way, I’ve caught bigger,’” Bloomer said.

To settle the question, Bloomer enlisted biologists and museum curators to find the largest specimens in their collections. The researchers used calipers, tools for taking precise measurements, to compare the animals and determine their places in the rankings.

Six of the top 20 came from the Illinois Natural History Survey, part of the university’s Prairie Research Institute. Another four belonged to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

“I knew we had some massive crayfish in the West Liberty University Astacology Collection, but it was a surprise to learn we had the two largest specimens known from North America! Our record-holder, a Tennessee bottlebrush crayfish collected by Dr. Zac Loughman and West Liberty students back in 2011, shows just how amazing and diverse crayfish can be,” said Zackary Graham, an assistant professor of biology at West Liberty University. “Its carapace alone is about the length of a credit card, and with the tail and claws, it stretches nearly the width of a sheet of notebook paper. Both of these giants are now proudly displayed in my office, and I show them to just about everyone who walks in.”

“Mine was not the biggest, but it did make the top 20, so I’m super proud of it,” Bloomer said. “And it was also the only burrowing crayfish to make the list, so I’ll take the win.”

What keeps North American crayfish smaller?

Comparing specimens across collections provided some of the first estimates of maximum size for North American crayfish. Those measurements also allowed the researchers to investigate whether the largest animals shared environmental conditions that might help explain their growth.

“They all seemed to max out around that 80-millimeter mark, but we weren’t sure why, especially given that there are absolutely massive crayfish in other parts of the world,” Bloomer said. “We started looking at things like latitude, oxygen availability, and habitat type as possible correlates to explain why certain species and individuals were larger than others, but we weren’t seeing any patterns.”

Without a clear environmental explanation, the researchers suspect that the limits may come from the animals’ own bodies. The makeup of their exoskeletons, or outer coverings, and aspects of their muscles could constrain how large they become. Those possibilities remain to be tested.

“This was a case where we saw something unusual in the field, and it sparked a future research direction,” Bloomer said. “We think that it could really be worthwhile to look at the physiology of crayfish to see if something there is influencing their body size.”

Bloomer said the team could address this basic question only by drawing on museum collections, underscoring the scientific value of these public resources. Even for animals familiar to generations of creek explorers, those collections can help fill gaps in what researchers know.

“Anyone that goes to a stream as a kid knows what crayfish are — they’re almost a universal onboarding for people to care about aquatic life. I still go out with people who are in their 50s or 60s, who recall catching crawfish in the creek when they were seven,” Bloomer said. “It’s just amazing how much we still have to learn about them.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientist Reveals 7 of the Strangest Things Coffee Does to Your Body

By E. Beckett, Australian Catholic U., Sept. 29, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientist-reveals-7-of-the-strangest-things-coffee-does-to-your-body/

Coffee is a brewed drink made from roasted coffee beans, the seeds of the Coffea plant. It contains caffeine along with hundreds of other natural compounds that contribute to its flavor, aroma, and effects on the body.

 Credit: Shutterstock

Some of coffee’s most unusual effects have little to do with caffeine. Its other bioactive compounds can interact with the gut, medications, and nutrients in ways researchers are still trying to understand.

Coffee is best known, and perhaps most valued, for its caffeine and its ability to make us feel more awake and alert.

But coffee is much more than caffeine dissolved in hot water.

Coffee is a chemically complicated plant extract containing hundreds of bioactive compounds. These can have all kinds of weird and wonderful effects in your body, even when you’re drinking decaf.

Here are seven of the strangest.

1. Coffee can make you poo

One study shows about three in ten people say they get the urge to poo shortly after drinking coffee.

This happens quickly, and with both regular and decaf. So it’s down to more than just the caffeine. But it’s not clear exactly which coffee compounds cause this.

Your colon can also be more active in the morning, and this is when most people drink their first coffee.

What you add to your coffee can also affect your bowels. The lactose in milk or some sugar-free sweeteners can also get the bowels moving, particularly if you consume a lot.

2. Coffee can affect your reflux, eyes and ears

Coffee can worsen reflux symptoms for some people. Reflux, when your stomach acid flows back up into your food pipe, isn’t always just felt as heartburn. It can contribute to coughing, wheezing, and other respiratory symptoms when reflux affects the throat and airways.

Caffeine can temporarily increase pressure inside the eye in some people with glaucoma or ocular hypertension, where pressure in the eye can already be high. Controlling this pressure is an important part of protecting the major nerve of the eye from damage. So some people with these conditions might be advised to limit their coffee and caffeine intake.

There’s also an ear condition where the tube connecting the middle ear to the back of the nose stays abnormally open, which can make you hear your own voice, or your breathing, unusually loudly. People with this condition, known as patulous Eustachian tube dysfunction, are sometimes advised to drink fewer caffeinated drinks and stay well hydrated, because dehydration can worsen symptoms. However, there is little direct evidence that coffee itself causes the condition.

Caffeine’s relationship with migraine is complicated: caffeine can help relieve a migraine, but too much, or suddenly having less than usual, can trigger one in some people.

3. Coffee can interact with your medicines

Coffee can change the way some medicines behave in the body. For instance, it can reduce absorption of the thyroid medication levothyroxine and the osteoporosis drug alendronate.

Caffeine can slow the metabolism of the antipsychotic clozapine, increasing its concentration in the blood.

Sometimes medicines change the way your coffee behaves. For example, the antibiotic ciprofloxacin slows your breakdown of caffeine. So, your usual coffee may stay in your system for longer.

4. Coffee can affect your cholesterol

Coffee contains compounds called diterpenes. Two of these, cafestol and kahweol, can increase total and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol.

But in short-term trials, the same compounds lower lipoprotein(a), which may indicate a lower risk of a heart attack or stroke.

Other coffee compounds, including chlorogenic acids, may modestly lower blood pressure and improve blood vessel function.

So overall, it’s unclear what coffee means for markers of heart health.

5. Coffee may feed your gut microbes

You’re not the only one getting something from your coffee. Laboratory experiments suggest your gut microbes do too.

Some of coffee’s chlorogenic acids aren’t absorbed in the small intestine and reach the colon. There, microbes break them down into other compounds.

Coffee contains complex carbohydrates and roasting products called melanoidins that can reach the colon, where gut microbes can ferment them.

Small human studies suggest drinking coffee can also change the composition of the gut microbiome. But the evidence is still developing, so it’s too early to call coffee a prebiotic.

6. Coffee can influence your iron levels

Coffee can also limit how much iron you get from your food. Drinking coffee with a meal can substantially reduce the absorption of non-haem iron – the form found mainly in plant foods.

This isn’t primarily a caffeine effect. Polyphenols in coffee, including chlorogenic acids, can bind with iron in the digestive tract, making it harder to absorb.

This matters most for people who already have low iron stores or rely heavily on plant sources of iron, rather than being a reason for everyone to give up coffee with breakfast.

7. Coffee can kick-start the gut

Coffee can kick parts of your digestive system into action even when there’s no food to digest. It can stimulate the pancreas to release trypsin, an enzyme involved in digesting protein.

This happens with both regular and decaffeinated coffee, suggesting other compounds in your cup are talking to your digestive system.

Whether this digestive “heads-up” changes how hungry you feel isn’t clear.

Coffee can also affect gut hormones involved in appetite and fullness. But studies haven’t consistently shown whether this translates into eating more or less.

So, what does all this mean?

Caffeine and feeling more alert might be coffee’s most popular feature, but this is far from the whole story. Caffeine can do much more than that.

A cup of coffee contains hundreds of compounds that can interact with our digestive system, microbes, medicines, nutrients, and more—sometimes in confusing and unexpected ways.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Chuck's picture corner to Sept. 29, 2026

The great fall has begun, leaves have begun to cover the ground, night time temps are cool. We enjoyed entertainment from long ago society.

Heading to the airport as R. and B. are leaving on a jet plane.

The Ottawa River

Leaving the mountains.

Taking R. to vote before she leaves for Spain

We enjoyed a good Quebec meal here after an afternoon of entertainment.

Sticks and stones.

The shiny armour of the French knight.

The tournament lasted about an hour.

The Polish knight is on the left.

Sadly the local Montpellier knight was the looser.

even the wee folk were there.

This fellow was an excellent rider.

attendees wore their finest furs

lots of vendors

lol

on our way to the fair

Enjoy your day.

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Medieval Manuscripts Reveal a 3,500-Year-Old Viral Secret Hidden in Parchment

By D. Kearns, U. College Dublin, Sept. 23, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/medieval-manuscripts-reveal-a-3500-year-old-viral-secret-hidden-in-parchment/

Created in Northumbria in the eighth century, this copy of the Epistles of St Paul is among the oldest books held in the Trinity College Cambridge Library. 

Credit: Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

Medieval parchment preserved two histories: the words written by scribes and the DNA of a sheep virus that had circulated for thousands of years.

Animal skins used to make historic manuscripts have revealed the 3,500-year history of the sheep pox virus (SPPV). By recovering viral DNA from parchment, researchers traced the pathogen across Bronze Age Eurasia and medieval Europe, turning celebrated documents such as the York Gospels into unexpected records of animal health.

The international project, led by University College Dublin, brought together geneticists, historians, virologists, protein chemists, and conservators. Their findings provide the first genetic evidence that sheep pox was affecting European flocks centuries before modern veterinary records began.

A Virus Hidden In Parchment

Sheep pox is a highly contagious disease that can spread quickly through a flock. It is especially dangerous to young animals and can cause high death rates while reducing the production of wool, meat, and milk.

Parchment was commonly made from processed sheep, goat, or cattle hides. Although the manufacturing process removed most visible signs of the animal, fragments of its DNA and traces of pathogens could remain trapped in the material. Each surviving page can therefore preserve information about the animal from which it was made.

DNA recovered from the medieval manuscripts revealed that the sheep pox virus has been affecting livestock for thousands of years. 

Credit: Reproduced with kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge

“The recording of ancient DNA of pathogens has completely changed our understanding of infectious disease in the past, and here we show that parchment can also preserve animal pathogen DNA. It is possible that archives and libraries around the world also contain the genetic traces of disease outbreaks in animals in the past,” said Louis L’Hôte, a UCD PhD candidate and the study’s lead author.

“These genomes help us understand how these pathogens evolved and how they impacted past societies, such as sheep pox virus, which we show has been affecting Eurasian sheep herds for at least three and a half millennia.”

Historic Manuscripts Reveal Infected Flocks

In the study, published in Science Advances, the researchers reconstructed more than 3,500 years of sheep pox virus evolution. They identified its DNA in several medieval manuscripts, including documents with considerable historical importance.

One was the 1,000-year-old York Gospels, among the finest illuminated manuscripts to survive from the early Anglo-Saxon period. The researchers also examined the Corpus Glossary at Corpus Christi College Cambridge, one of the earliest English dictionaries, and other medieval works from Britain and continental Europe.

Several pages within the same manuscripts carried sheep pox virus DNA. That pattern suggests the books were assembled using hides from multiple infected animals and raises the possibility that their pages captured evidence of outbreaks affecting entire flocks.

The discovery shows that manuscripts can reveal more than intellectual and artistic history. Because livestock were central to medieval farming, clothing, food production, and trade, the diseases recorded in parchment may also offer clues about the economic pressures faced by past communities.

Unexpected DNA on Goat and Cattle Skins

One particularly surprising result was the detection of sheep pox virus on parchment identified as calfskin and goatskin. These findings could represent rare cross-species infections, although the researchers said contamination during the parchment-making process is another possible explanation.

“Parchment making has been considered a vanishing craft, but we are beginning to understand just how much of the past it has retained. This project shows that parchments not only preserve our cultural history for hundreds of years, but also the landscape of disease in our livestock in the medieval period,” said Dr. Kevin G. Daly, an associate professor at the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science and the study’s supervising author.

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Just 5 Infections Responsible For More Than 2 Million New Cancer Cases Annually

29 Sept. 2026, By J. Cockerill

https://www.sciencealert.com/just-5-infections-responsible-for-more-than-2-million-new-cancer-cases-annually

(Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library RF/Getty Images)

Cancer may seem like an inevitable part of life, but there are so many factors that can help reduce your risk.

When we think about reducing cancer risk, we usually think of lifestyle factors: smoking, alcohol consumption, exercise.

But a new study by a team of cancer epidemiologists, published in The Lancet Oncology, highlights just how much infections actually contribute to your cancer risk.

Based on global data, infections were linked to 12 percent of all cancers that were diagnosed in 2024. That's 2.3 million new cancer cases.

Five key pathogens were responsible for nearly all of those infection-linked cases.

The most common offender was a stomach bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, which was involved in 4 percent of the total cancers diagnosed in 2024 – that's 760,000 cases.

H. pylori is a really common bug: statistically speaking, every second person in the world is infected with it. For most people, infection with H. pylori causes no symptoms, but certain strains can cause gastric ulcers and ultimately stomach cancers.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) was also linked to 4 percent of the total new cancers diagnosed in 2024, which is 750,000 cases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNJgf9Z5v4M

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) was linked to 2 percent of new cases, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) was linked to 1 percent, and hepatitis C virus (HCV) was linked to less than 1 percent.

EBV is a newcomer to this list. Since previous global estimates were published, the evidence that EBV causes cancer has grown substantially.

It's pretty freaky to think that these infections, which can already make us very sick in their own right, could also lead to cancer, but these findings also give us an opportunity.

They suggest proper treatment and prevention of these infections could make a really big difference to cancer rates across the world.

"Our updated estimates highlight the continued importance of infection control in global cancer prevention strategies," lead author Harriet Rumgay and her colleagues note.

"Many carcinogenic infectious agents have existing or potential preventive interventions, including vaccines, diagnostics, treatments, and safe injection practices."

For many of these pathogens, it's a matter of actually getting those public health interventions to people.

"Despite progress in vaccination and screening, infection-related cancers remain a major challenge globally, with persistent inequities especially impacting low-income and middle-income countries," the authors add.

Three-quarters of infection-related cancers came from low-income and middle-income countries, predominantly in eastern Asia, African nations south of the Sahara, and southeastern Asia.

The bulk of infection-linked cancer diagnoses in 2024 were made in eastern Asia, making up 42 percent of the global total. The infections linked to those diagnoses were mainly H. pylori and HBV.

Getting more people vaccinated for HPV (especially men, who have often not been targeted for HPV vaccines) and HBV should make a huge dent in global cancer rates, but for H. pylori, the answer is not so simple.

"So far, there has been little progress in developing H. pylori vaccines or highly effective H. pylori therapies that can minimize ineffective antibiotic exposure, which would be highly impactful for controlling gastric cancer globally," the authors write.

We also have no vaccine or any other methods to control the spread of EBV (which infects about 95 percent of adults), though several clinical trials for vaccines are underway.

"Although investment in the development of new preventive vaccinations for EBV, H. pylori, and Kaposi's sarcoma [another cancer linked to viruses] is key, many prevention strategies are known to be cost-effective," the authors write.

"Unfortunately, such strategies are often underused due to societal, financial, and political barriers, often in the settings that need them most.

"Considering the overwhelming economic and social costs of cancer, investment in prevention is crucial."

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Dogs Can Pick Out Word Patterns in Speech, a Trick Once Thought Uniquely Human

28 Sept. 2026, By E. Öz

https://www.sciencealert.com/dogs-can-pick-out-word-patterns-in-speech-a-trick-once-thought-uniquely-human

(Mary Swift/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Your dog may prick up its ears at its name or run to the door when it hears "walk." But can its brain separate unfamiliar words when it hears them without a pause?

In a new experiment, dogs listened to a continuous recording of invented words.

No pause indicated where one word ended and the next began.

Yet their brains responded to recurring consonants, a clue to which syllables belonged together.

The same clear word-level response did not appear when vowels defined the words.

The study published in Science does not show that dogs learned what the words meant.

It reveals a preference previously demonstrated only in humans: when dividing continuous speech into parts, the brain can prioritize consonant patterns over the louder vowels.

At first, that preference sounds odd. Vowels carry more acoustic energy and stand out more clearly than consonants. Why would a listener favor quieter sounds?

Across many human languages, consonants often provide more information about which word is being spoken.

The researchers wanted to know whether dogs, who spend their lives hearing us talk, might pick up on that usefulness too.

Boglárka Morvai and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary devised a way to ask without relying on dogs to follow commands.

They played recordings of meaningless, three-syllable words to 20 adult dogs while electrodes resting on their heads measured electrical brain activity.

Twenty adults heard the same recordings.

The speech flowed continuously. No silence announced the next word. In one recording, recurring consonant patterns grouped syllables into invented words. In another, vowel patterns did that job.

A third scrambled the syllables, leaving no recurring word pattern to discover.

Zeila wears electrodes used to record dogs' brain activity while they listen to speech.

 (Sarolta Szilágyi)



The vowels were acoustically stronger. If dogs' brains merely followed the most prominent sounds, vowels had the advantage. If the animals tracked the patterns useful for dividing up the stream, consonants might win despite being quieter.

The researchers measured whether brain signals lined up with the invented words' rhythm despite the absence of audible boundaries. They also compared responses to the different streams.

The result was clear.

When consonants repeated, dogs' brain signals synchronized with the rhythm of the three-syllable invented words, indicating that they followed the recurring units in the stream.

With vowel-defined words, the word-level response was not significantly stronger than in the scrambled recording. Humans also favored consonants, but their brains tracked the vowel-defined pattern more strongly than the scrambled stream too.

"What made the result especially interesting was that this bias had not previously been demonstrated in other species, not even in non-human primates, yet we found it in dogs," Morvai and study co-author Dorottya Rácz told ScienceAlert in a joint response.

They considered two possibilities: Perhaps consonant preference requires the specialized language abilities of a human brain. Or perhaps repeated experience with speech can help an animal learn which sounds provide useful clues.

"This suggests that at least some aspects of speech processing do not require a brain that is specifically pre-wired for language; regular experience with speech may be enough for them to develop," Morvai and Rácz said.

The experiment cannot establish what caused the dogs' preference. Nor does finding the same bias mean dogs process speech exactly as humans do.

Both species' brains followed the rhythm of syllables, but only humans showed clear tracking of individual speech sounds. "For us, each speech sound is a separate unit, whereas for dogs, syllables form the smallest units of processing," Morvai and Rácz explained.

Researcher Attila Andics prepares an EEG recording with Zeila. The electrodes on her head measure brain activity. 

(Sarolta Szilágyi)



That does not mean dogs cannot distinguish individual sounds. Previous research from the team indicates that they can, although they may give small sound changes less attention when processing familiar words. The invented words in this experiment had no assigned meanings, so the results reveal pattern tracking, not comprehension.

The researchers also examined whether dogs needed to hear human speech from early puppyhood. Eleven dogs were thought to have entered a speech-rich home before 12 weeks of age, while nine were thought to have done so later. Both groups showed a consonant bias.

"Although the sample was small, we were still able to detect a consonant bias in dogs that had not lived in a speech-rich home during their first weeks of life," Morvai and Rácz said.

Intensive early exposure may therefore not be essential, though the dogs' histories before adoption were not always complete.

Dogs whose early lives are better documented could help answer when the preference develops. Comparing dogs with wolves could address a different mystery: whether the underlying capacity predates domestication or emerged during dogs' long association with humans.

Your dog might know what follows the word "walk." The surprising finding here is that even when the sounds carry no meaning, its brain can follow a pattern in the uninterrupted flow of speech.

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