Australia’s Indigenous Population May Have Been Far Larger Before Colonization Than Historians Thought

By Flinders U., Sept. 20, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/australias-indigenous-population-may-have-been-far-larger-before-colonization-than-historians-thought/

Australia’s Indigenous population has a history stretching back tens of thousands of years, shaped by deep cultural traditions, diverse communities, and close connections to the land. 

Credit: Shutterstock

New estimates suggest Australia’s Indigenous population was much larger before European colonization and declined by roughly 93% between 1788 and 1861.

European colonization of Australia began in 1788 with the arrival of Britain’s First Fleet. By the time early censuses counted Indigenous people, disease and violence had already devastated their communities, leaving those records an incomplete guide to how many people had lived on the continent before colonization.

A new study puts the median estimate of that population at 2.22 million, far above the 250,000 to 1 million suggested by earlier historical estimates. Starting from this larger population, the researchers calculate that the losses following colonization were also much greater than previously believed. Their model suggests that by 1861, the Indigenous population had fallen to about 7% of its estimated size in 1788, a decline of roughly 93% in 73 years.

To align that starting population with early census records, the model estimates 2.06 million excess deaths between 1788 and 1861. That amounts to an average of about 28,200 deaths per year beyond what would otherwise have been expected.

“These research findings challenge us to rethink the scale of what happened after 1788. We are not talking about a marginal consequence of colonization but a demographic catastrophe at the heart of the Australian story. But the research also tells us something extraordinary. Our survival is one of Australian history’s most remarkable stories,” said Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt AO, chair of the Centre Advisory Committee at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures (CIEHF).

Early estimates understated Australia’s Indigenous population

Many earlier population estimates trace back to work by anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s. He calculated that about 250,000 Indigenous people had lived in Australia before colonization, while acknowledging that his estimate did not account for the effects of lethal diseases, frontier violence, and structural violence, meaning harm caused by social systems and institutions. Subsequent evidence has shown that these effects reached further than previously understood, strengthening the case that early figures substantially underestimated the population.

The national research team worked with Indigenous partners to investigate population sizes through time, bringing together evidence that could help fill the gaps in written records. They reviewed ethnographic observations, or descriptions of people and their communities, alongside archaeological and genetic reconstructions. They also modeled the continent’s environmental carrying capacity, an estimate of how many people its environments could support.

The resulting population calculations rested on modeling and genetic evidence, with historical and ethnographic accounts providing support rather than determining the estimates. The researchers report estimates up to seven times larger than previous calculations. Their median figure corresponds to an average population density of 0.29 people per square kilometer, or about 0.75 people per square mile.

Colonization’s losses still shape Indigenous lives

The team says that using multiple approaches is essential when reconstructing population histories from incomplete or biased records. For Professor Corey Bradshaw, a member of the research team, professor of global ecology at Flinders University, and a chief investigator in CIEHF, establishing the population before colonization also has a public purpose.

“Understanding the size of Indigenous populations in Australia before European invasion in 1788 is essential to truth-telling and reconciliation,” says Bradshaw. Co-author Distinguished Professor Lynette Russell, of the Monash University Indigenous Studies Centre and CIEHF, connects the findings to the ways colonization continues to shape people’s lives.

“The findings highlight the scale of demographic catastrophe experienced by Indigenous Australians due to colonization, with the implications being a heightened understanding of intergenerational trauma and to inform future policy that assists Indigenous people. In addition to recognizing this intergenerational trauma and disadvantage, it is also time to recognize intergenerational privilege”, says Russell.

Australia’s Indigenous population has grown since the 1950s, although the 2021 census count was still only about 37% of the study’s median estimate for the population before colonization. “These devastating findings highlight the major impacts of invasion experienced by Indigenous Australians, and demonstrate their remarkable survival, resilience and recovery over the past century,” says lead author Associate Professor Alan Williams, a partner investigator in CIEHF representing EMM Consulting and an adjunct research fellow at James Cook University. If current growth trends continue, the researchers estimate that the population would reach its estimated 1788 size around 2047.

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Scientists Discover Trees Have a Hidden “Muscle” That Helps Them Straighten Themselves

By INRAE - National Research Inst. for Ag., Food and Enviro. Sept. 20, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-trees-have-a-hidden-muscle-that-helps-them-straighten-themselves/

Trees may rely on more than light and gravity to control their posture. New experiments reveal a hidden feedback system in woody tissue that helps poplars detect and correct their own curvature. 

Credit: Shutterstock

Young poplar trees can sense bends in their stems and straighten them by changing where they grow wood that pulls like a muscle.

Young poplar trees can straighten a bent stem even without light or gravity to guide them. In an experiment that removed those directional cues, the trees corrected their curves over several weeks, relying on their ability to sense their own shape.

Researchers from INRAE and the University Clermont Auvergne traced that adjustment to tension wood, a specialized type of wood that contracts and pulls on a stem, acting somewhat like a muscle. Their study, published in New Phytologist, shows that trees can change where they produce this wood to correct a bend.

Growing upward is not enough

Until now, tension wood was thought to form only on the upper side of a leaning stem, pulling it upward. It can be seen, for example, at the base of trees growing on mountain slopes. But a stem that bends upward may still be curved. Straightening it requires the tree to respond to the bend itself, as well as its orientation.

The ability to sense the position of one’s own body parts is called proprioception. Long considered exclusive to animals, it was also demonstrated in plants in 2012 by a research team involving INRAE. That work helped explain how plants control their posture, but the biological mechanism that translates the perception of a bend into a correction remained unknown.

Forest in Alps. Credit: INRAE/Hervé Cochard



Straightening stems by switching the pull

To investigate that mechanism, the researchers first laid young poplars horizontally. Tension wood formed on the upper side of their stems, pulling their tops upward toward a vertical position. After about ten days, the stems had developed enough curvature for the team to test whether the trees could straighten themselves without the usual environmental guidance.

The researchers transferred the trees to a specially designed device with a horizontal platform that rotated around its own axis inside a sphere illuminated from every direction. The setup prevented the trees from using gravity or the direction of incoming light to guide their posture, leaving their perception of their own curvature.

Over the following weeks, the stems gradually became straight. Examining the newly formed wood revealed that tension wood had stopped forming on the side that had drawn the stems upward once the device was activated. Wood identical in every respect instead formed on the opposite side. This new growth appeared to act as an opposing muscle, progressively drawing the bend out of each stem.

Clinostat : specially designed experimental set-up to study trees’ proprioception. 

Credit: INRAE/Bruno Moulia



Producing tension wood involves several successive stages regulated at the cellular level. The findings show that proprioception helps govern this complex process, allowing tension wood to serve opposing functions rather than simply pulling a stem upward.

“Revealing the remarkable capabilities of trees requires a great deal of ingenuity. In this project, we achieved it by bringing together researchers from different disciplines, with complementary skills and perspectives. This requires time and perseverance, but these interdisciplinary discoveries show that the effort is worthwhile,” said Félix Hartman, INRAE research engineer.

Staying straight without straining the wood

Under natural conditions, trees combine information about their shape with signals from light and gravity to achieve or maintain an appropriate posture. This coordination helps them respond when storms or landslides alter their position, contributing to their resilience in the context of climate change.

“What we have uncovered is a genuine sensorimotor loop operating in the woody parts of trees! Poor coordination in the successive activation of tension wood results in excessive internal tension, which can affect wood quality. These findings therefore reshape more applied research aimed at improving wood quality… and at obtaining trees that are as straight and as relaxed as possible, whatever life throws at them!” said Bruno Moulia, INRAE research director.

Beyond forestry, the findings suggest new possibilities for selecting cultivated plants based on their proprioception. Favoring plants that maintain an upright posture could, for example, help reduce lodging in cereal crops, when stems bend or fall over.

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This Simple Walking Habit May Have Helped Humans Conquer the World

By F. Tutella, Penn State, Sept. 21, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/this-simple-walking-habit-may-have-helped-humans-conquer-the-world/

A new comparison of humans and chimpanzees suggests that the way our feet strike the ground may be a surprisingly important part of human evolution. 

Credit: Shutterstock

Consistently walking from heel to toe distinguished early humans from other great apes and helped them hunt and gather food efficiently, according to new research.

Landing on the ball of your foot makes for a softer step, but keeping that up takes more energy than walking heel first. A new comparison of humans and chimpanzees suggests that our habit of rolling from heel to toe helped our ancestors cover more ground, even as it put greater demands on their bones and joints.

The study, led by a Penn State researcher and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges an earlier view that humans and other great apes share much the same heel-first walking style. Chimpanzees can land on their heels, but they often touch down elsewhere on the foot. Humans in the study landed heel first every time they walked normally.

“When people think about what makes human walking unique, they talk about upright walking — our backs are straight and our legs are extended,” said study author Nicholas Holowka, an assistant professor of anthropology and co-hire with the Huck Institute of Life Sciences at Penn State. “What we’re saying in this article is that landing on our heel is a unique aspect of human walking that’s maybe been underappreciated. This study presents the best measurable comparison of humans to our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, which shows that what we’re doing when we land is distinctive in key ways.”

Softer steps take more energy

To find out what people gain from that consistent stride, the researchers asked human volunteers to try walking more like chimpanzees. Instead of landing on the heel, they touched down on the ball of the foot just behind the little toe, then lowered the heel, a pattern the researchers called a midfoot-strike.

Participants walked on a treadmill wearing a portable system that measured oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production, allowing the researchers to calculate the energy each gait required. Heel-first walking saved an estimated 26% to 41% in metabolic energy compared with midfoot strikes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPtufGxHe5k

Nicholas Holowka, assistant professor of anthropology at Penn State, explains the differences between human and chimpanzee walking styles and why humans evolved to walk heel first. 

Credit: Ben Manning / Penn State

Rolling from the back of the foot toward the toes allows people to move forward efficiently. Landing farther forward offers a different advantage, as study co-author Nathan Thompson, an associate professor at New York Institute of Technology, College of Osteopathic Medicine, explained.

“Imagine you are trying to sneak across a creaky wooden floor,” Thompson said. “You tend to walk on the balls of your feet, because this reduces the rate of loading on the floor and creates less creaking. It’s a softer way to walk.”

Chimpanzees vary their landings

The team measured those landings as part of laboratory experiments involving 12 people at the University at Buffalo. Nine participants wore reflective markers and walked barefoot along an approximately 25-foot runway, making repeated passes with both their normal gait and the altered gait. Metal force plates recorded the forces underfoot while high-speed, high-resolution cameras captured their movements.

Similar equipment at Stony Brook University recorded three male chimpanzees walking along an approximately 36-foot walkway, both upright and on all fours. The researchers added walking data from three more chimpanzees studied by another team and reviewed two additional studies covering a combined 15 chimpanzees.

A diagram showing the foot-strike posture of a chimpanzee on all fours, an early human ancestor and a modern human. The modern human consistently lands heel-to-toe, while the chimpanzee and early human are shown landing on the side or ball of the foot.

 Credit: Provided by Nicholas Holowka.



Earlier comparisons had relied on descriptive observations. These measurements revealed how much the chimpanzees varied from step to step. They landed on the side or ball of the foot most of the time and used heel-strikes less often when walking on two legs than when moving on all fours.

“It seems that when walking on two legs, chimpanzees prefer the ‘softer’ way to land on their feet,” Thompson said.

The human volunteers were much more consistent. During normal walking, both their heel-first landings and the angle at which their feet met the ground varied little, within each person’s strides or between participants. The chimpanzees’ ranges of foot-strike angles were 2.4 to 8.6 times greater.

Efficient strides come with harder impacts

For both species, landing on the heel meant that force built up more abruptly. In chimpanzees walking on two legs, the impact loading rate was up to 138% higher for heel-strikes than for midfoot-strikes. In humans, it was up to 162% higher.

Those forces help explain why adopting an efficient stride would also have required changes to the body. Holowka said the earliest human ancestors probably walked with more varied landings, much as chimpanzees do, sometimes placing the heel down first, sometimes landing flat-footed, and sometimes touching down on the ball of the foot. He suggested that the energy cost of this gait likely restricted how far they could travel.

Consistent heel-first walking could have extended that range, but coping with the potentially damaging impacts would have required sturdier bones and joints.

“It seems like humans needed to evolve anatomical adaptations — thicker heel bones and bigger knee and ankle joints — to cope with these high forces,” Holowka said. “We think that the heel-strike played a role in enabling key human behaviors, such as using hunting and gathering strategies that require people to walk really long distances every day to get food, but for a big payoff in food resources.”

The team suggests that this ability to cover ground efficiently ultimately helped humans spread across the world. Holowka also raised a question about how that inherited stride fares on the surfaces people walk on today.

“We humans have evolved to use this high-impact walking style in a way that is safe and natural for us,” Holowka said. “The novel environments that we currently live in with their hard, paved surfaces might upset the evolutionary balance in some ways. It’s something that we’d be interested in looking at in future research. Still, walking a lot is a very healthy exercise and, although high impact, our bodies evolved to cope with it, so we shouldn’t avoid it.”

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Mountains That Helped Complex Life Flourish May Lie Hidden Beneath Antarctic Ice

20 Sept. 2026, By S. Vartan

https://www.sciencealert.com/mountains-that-helped-complex-life-flourish-may-lie-hidden-beneath-antarctic-ice

(Goinyk Production/Canva)

Antarctica is famous for being a continent buried under ice. But beneath those frozen expanses may lie evidence of mountains that once rivaled today's Himalayas, and which profoundly shaped the trajectory of life on Earth.

Previous work from 2022 has suggested that enormous mountain ranges formed as the supercontinent Gondwana assembled roughly 650 to 450 million years ago.

But a new study adds to the story: It finds that while those mountains have long since eroded away, their buried 'roots' and the sediments they shed may preserve clues to an enormously consequential aspect of their existence.

Researchers think those mountains helped create the environmental conditions that allowed complex animal life to flourish.

This big idea comes from the smallest of geological time capsules: Zircons.

Zircon crystals are unusually durable, and their chemistry and uranium-lead ages can reveal when and where the rocks that produced them formed.

Because more than 99.5 percent of Antarctica is covered by ice, directly sampling its geology is difficult.

Instead, two geologists from the Australian National University looked at zircons carried into ocean sediments from the continent, combining 1,712 newly analyzed grains with thousands of previously studied Antarctic zircons.

Reconstruction of Gondwana highlighting core blocks, interior orogens, and peripheral orogens.

 (Chen and Campbell, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2026.)

They found that Antarctica has a particularly strong zircon age signature between 650 and 450 million years ago – the period when Gondwana was coming together.

When the Antarctic data were incorporated into a global database and weighted according to the area represented by different samples, the Gondwanan signal became the largest supercontinent-related mountain-building signal in the dataset.

The zircons suggest something much bigger (pun intended) than ancient mountains, though.

Some carry chemical signatures associated with the deep roots of very high mountains – places where rocks were subjected to enormous pressures. These zircons are particularly abundant in the Gondwanan record, supporting the idea that some of the mountain belts were genuinely Himalayan-scale.

The researchers argue that collisions involving what are now known as Antarctica, India, Australia, and the Kalahari produced Himalayan-style ranges.

As these mountains rose, they were simultaneously attacked by the forces of erosion.

That erosion would have dumped enormous quantities of sediment into surrounding oceans, potentially creating "the largest turbidite fan system in the geological record," according to the paper.

Some of the older portion of that fan may itself now be buried beneath the Antarctic ice.

And this is where geology potentially becomes biology.

Eroding mountains don't just produce sand and mud. They release nutrients, including phosphorus and iron, into the oceans. Those nutrients can stimulate primary production by algae and cyanobacteria – the organisms that sit at the bottom of the marine food web and produce oxygen through photosynthesis.

But just creating more oxygen isn't enough – for atmospheric oxygen to rise substantially, organic carbon and other reduced materials need to be buried before they can react with oxygen and return it to the atmosphere.

The Gondwanan mountains may have provided exactly the machinery for doing that. Huge quantities of organic-carbon- and pyrite-rich shale got buried quickly and deeply.

So the sustained nutrient delivery from those eroding mountains helped boost primary production, increasing oxygen production while rapid burial of organic carbon and pyrite prevented some of that oxygen from being consumed again.

That balanced system provided just the right ingredients – oxygen, food, and the chemical building blocks needed for biomineralized skeletons – for animals to rise.

That doesn't mean Antarctic mountains somehow caused the Cambrian explosion (the time in the early Paleozoic during which nearly all animal life originated).

In fact, the authors explicitly stop short of making that claim. Instead, they suggest the mountain building created favorable environmental conditions that helped facilitate the extraordinary diversification of animal life.

There are also important uncertainties.

The timing and magnitude of the rise in atmospheric oxygen aren't as well constrained as the researchers would like; they acknowledge that their oxygen calculations do not prove their hypothesis.

They also note evidence for changes in oxygen-related chemistry as early as around 800 million years ago that their model does not fully explain.

But this new evidence backs up a story that makes sense: Continents collide, mountains rise, mountains erode, nutrients flood the oceans, carbon gets buried – and hundreds of millions of years later, animals diversify into a world that looks increasingly like our own.

And somewhere underneath today's Antarctic ice, the ancient roots of those mountains may still be waiting for us to do more digging.

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Scientists Have Uncovered Previously Hidden Microbial Activity on Human Skin

By Agency for Science, Tech. and Research (A*STAR), Sept. 18, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-have-uncovered-previously-hidden-microbial-activity-on-human-skin/

Human skin is home to a vast community of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that help shape its protective barrier, immune defenses, and overall health. These microbes constantly interact with the skin and with one another, influencing everything from inflammation to protection against harmful organisms.

 Credit: Stock

The most abundant microbes on your skin may not be the ones doing most of the work.

Human skin supports vast communities of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that can influence its protective barrier, immune defenses, and overall health. Yet simply cataloging these organisms cannot reveal which ones are active, how they respond to their surroundings, or what substances they produce.

Researchers at the A*STAR Genome Institute of Singapore (A*STAR GIS) and the A*STAR Skin Research Labs (A*STAR SRL) have now developed a way to analyze microbial RNA collected directly from the skin. Described in Nature Biotechnology, the method captures gene activity rather than microbial presence alone, offering a closer look at how these communities behave on the body.

Beyond a Microbial Head Count

Most skin microbiome studies examine DNA. This can identify organisms and the genes they carry, but it cannot show whether those genes are being used. DNA may also come from inactive or dead cells, meaning abundance does not necessarily reflect biological influence.

RNA provides a more immediate record of which genes microbes have switched on. Recovering it from skin is difficult, however, because microbial material is scarce compared with samples from environments such as the gut. Human genetic material can overwhelm the microbial signal, while RNA itself is fragile and can deteriorate quickly.

The researchers overcame these obstacles with a workflow designed to enrich microbial RNA and filter out misleading signals. They tested it at five skin sites in 27 healthy adults, pairing metatranscriptomics, which measures RNA activity, with metagenomics, which identifies organisms through DNA.

The Busiest Microbes Were Not Always the Most Common

The comparison exposed a striking mismatch between population size and activity. Cutibacterium acnes accounted for 46% to 90% of the microbial DNA at most sites outside the toe webs, yet contributed only 2% to 31% of the RNA. By contrast, Malassezia fungi and Staphylococcus bacteria generated an unexpectedly large share of microbial transcripts despite sometimes appearing far less prominent in the DNA data.

This means a microbe that looks minor in a conventional survey may still be performing a major role. Measuring activity could therefore help researchers distinguish organisms that merely occupy the skin from those actively shaping its chemistry and microbial community.

Microbial activity also varied sharply across different parts of the body. Microbes altered their gene activity across the scalp, cheek, forearm, inner elbow, and toe web, each of which offers a different combination of oils, moisture, nutrients, and environmental exposure.

On the scalp and cheek, for example, microbes expressed different lipid-related genes as they adapted to the distinct oils available at each site. Organisms in toe webs showed activity suited to a moist, sweat-rich environment, while microbes on exposed forearms increased genes involved in protection against oxidative stress. Such local specialization may help explain why acne, eczema, psoriasis, and other skin conditions tend to favor particular parts of the body.

A Chemical Battle on the Skin

The team also detected genes used to produce antimicrobial substances directly on human skin. Among them were previously uncharacterized bacteriocins, compounds that bacteria can deploy against microbial competitors. Some were expressed at levels comparable to known antimicrobial genes, suggesting they may be active participants in maintaining the skin’s ecological balance.

By comparing gene expression with changes in microbial abundance, the researchers identified more than 20 genes that may help mediate interactions among skin organisms. These findings offer potential starting points for discovering natural antimicrobial molecules or developing treatments that influence selected microbes without broadly disrupting the microbiome.

Dr. Chia Minghao, Senior Scientist at A*STAR GIS, said, “With this workflow, we can now see what skin microbes are actually doing on the skin. That gives us a much richer picture of how microbial communities function, adapt to different skin sites, and potentially influence health and disease.”

New Clues for Skin Disease Research

The workflow can now be combined with genomics, metabolic modeling, and culture-based experiments to investigate how microbial activity affects human skin. Researchers could use it to identify pathways associated with disease, search for useful microbial molecules, and examine whether shifts in gene activity appear before or during symptoms.

This could be especially valuable for studying acne, eczema, and psoriasis, where the behavior of familiar microbes may matter as much as their abundance. The same organism can live harmlessly on one person or body site while contributing to inflammation under different conditions, making activity a potentially important part of the explanation.

Dr. Niranjan Nagarajan, Associate Director, AI & Compute, at A*STAR GIS, said, “This approach gives researchers and clinicians a new way to profile microbial activity directly on the skin. By revealing biological pathways linked to microbial activity and skin health, it can help identify markers and mechanisms that may be relevant for prediction, diagnosis, and treatment.”

The current research involved a relatively small group of healthy adults, so it does not yet establish which patterns cause or predict skin disease. The team plans to refine the technique and apply it in clinical studies, where comparisons between healthy and affected skin could eventually support more precise and personalized approaches to diagnosis and treatment.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Chinese Scientists Say They've Detected A Quantum State Inside Living Cells

18 Sept. 2026, By E. Öz

https://www.sciencealert.com/chinese-scientists-say-theyve-detected-a-quantum-state-inside-living-cells

(Iana Kunitsa/Moment/Getty Images)

Every cell in your body is running on tiny power stations.

Mitochondria turn energy from food into ATP, the molecule that powers almost everything cells do. How they achieve such efficiency remains unclear.

Now, researchers in China think part of the answer may involve quantum physics.

In experiments involving living cells, mouse tissues, and isolated mitochondria, the team detected an unusual vibration that appeared only while mitochondrial structures remained intact.

A model linked the vibration to a possible quantum interaction. When researchers illuminated cells with selected infrared frequencies, the cells produced 10 percent more ATP.

Together, the results suggest mitochondria may contain a quantum state that influences cellular energy production.

The study has been posted on bioRxiv as a preprint, which means it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Bo Song of the School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and colleagues studied a human cell line and tissues from mouse kidneys, livers, hearts, and skeletal muscles.

They used Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, a technique that shows how samples respond to different frequencies of infrared light.

Molecules and structures vibrate at characteristic frequencies, like radio stations on separate channels. Those frequencies offer clues about what is happening inside a sample.

The researchers found an unusual signal at 71 terahertz, meaning it oscillated 71 trillion times per second.

This signal appeared in living cells, mouse tissues, and isolated mitochondria. But it disappeared after the samples were dried and ground, destroying their organized structures.

"Mitochondrial quantum state provides a good way to explain the unknown frequency," Song told ScienceAlert.

That interpretation remains hypothetical, not direct proof.

The team then focused on cristae, the tightly folded inner membranes of mitochondria. These folds are packed with lipids containing carbon-hydrogen, or CH2, bonds, which naturally vibrate at around 87 terahertz.

So what exactly is "quantum" here?

The researchers are not proposing a mysterious form of energy. Their model suggests that light particles inside a mitochondrion couple with the collective vibrations of its CH2 bonds. They form a shared hybrid state called a polariton, combining properties of light and matter.

This is a quantum effect because the coupled system is described as a superposition of light and molecular vibration with distinct, quantized energy levels.

According to the model, the interaction splits the original 87-terahertz vibration into two new levels, one near 71 terahertz and another near 103 terahertz.

This is why the numbers matter.

The predicted lower level matches the mysterious 71-terahertz signal detected in living samples. The higher level would overlap with vibrations from water and other biological molecules, making it difficult to distinguish.

The average length of active mitochondria matched the wavelength of 87-terahertz light inside them. Mitochondria might therefore act like microscopic chambers that briefly confine light and enable this interaction.

A colored image of mitochondria in a pancreas cell, via transmission electron microscopy.

 (Callista Images/Connect Images/Getty Images)



But was this proposed state doing anything useful?

Song proposes a link. Its frequency overlaps with carbon dioxide vibrations. CO2 is produced during the tricarboxylic acid, or TCA, cycle, a process supplying energy for ATP production.

In an earlier theoretical study, Song and colleagues proposed that NAD+ reduction during this cycle could release 87-terahertz photons.

"The mitochondrial quantum state might increase the efficiency of TCA cycles, influencing the ATP production," he said.

This mechanism has not been demonstrated directly.

To find out, the team exposed living cells to weak mid-infrared light for 10 minutes.

The 71-terahertz light matched the unusual signal, while 87-terahertz light matched the CH2 vibration thought to produce it.

Both produced a similar result. The 71-terahertz light increased ATP production by 10.3 percent, while the 87-terahertz light increased it by 10.1 percent.

Weak mid-infrared light at 71 and 87 terahertz increased ATP production in living HEK-293T cells, while the unrelated 53.7-terahertz control frequency produced no significant change. Each experimental group contained eight samples.

 (Yang et al., bioRxiv, 2026)



An unrelated control frequency caused no significant change, suggesting the result depended on frequency rather than infrared exposure alone.

The team interprets the findings as evidence that the proposed quantum state may provide an energy-efficient route for influencing ATP production.

That interpretation is not definitive.

An unusual spectral signal does not prove that a quantum state exists. The polariton was inferred by matching observations to a model, not directly observed. Other explanations must still be excluded.

The ATP experiment also involved one cultured human cell line, with eight samples in each group. It does not show that the same mechanism controls metabolism in whole animals or humans.

Heating is another concern, although the light was very weak and the control frequency did not affect ATP.

"Our main limitation is the lack of 87-THz light-related energy transfer dynamics," Song added.

Measuring those dynamics could clarify the proposed relationship. Independent laboratories must also reproduce the signal and directly test for quantum behavior.

For now, the findings raise an intriguing possibility: the cell's power stations may not operate through chemistry alone.

Deep inside their folded membranes, mitochondria might also exploit the strange rules of quantum physics.

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While Other Animals Flee Fire, Raptors Make a Killing

19 Sept. 2026, By J. Cockerill

https://www.sciencealert.com/while-other-animals-flee-fire-raptors-make-a-killing

A black kite soars close to the flames. 

(Jacobs et al., bioRxiv, 2026)

When faced with fire, most animals flee.

But some audacious raptors in Australia's northern savanna see the glint of opportunity in the flames and instead head towards them.

A team of scientists has reported this strange phenomenon in a paper uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv.

Their research is yet to be peer-reviewed, but it offers us an early glimpse at a fascinating adaptation to an element most animals fear.

A selection of the birds spotted around the active fires: 

(A) Torresian crow within a meter of fire. 

(B) Black kite feeding on a cane toad. 

(C) Rainbow bee-eater with invertebrate prey.

 (D) Brown falcon overlooking recently burned savanna. 

(E) Blue-winged kookaburra on a charred, smoldering snag.

 (F) Black kite flying and 

(G) perching close to fire.

 (H) Brown falcon flying low over fire. 

(Jacobs et al., bioRxiv, 2026)

Humans have been using fire deliberately to maintain the landscape in the country now known as Australia for at least 11,000 years.

Rangers from the Mimal Land Management Aboriginal Corporation in central Arnhem Land continue this practice today, lighting small patches of relatively cool fires throughout the landscape early in the dry season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJa2CdDH9HM

It was around these prescribed burns that cognitive zoologist Ivo Jacobs and team made their observations, in collaboration with the Mimal rangers.

Humans are not alone in using fire to their advantage in this landscape.

"Fires appear to attract raptors by increasing prey detectability and catchability," Jacobs and team report.

"Pyrophilic [fire-loving] birds can detect fire from great distances, likely through visual cues such as smoke plumes, although this has not yet been examined in detail."

Black kites (Milvus migrans) and white-breasted woodswallows (Artamus leucorynchus) were the species seemingly most drawn to the flames, being 23 and 20 times more abundant when fire was around than when it wasn't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHKkKsvF6xM

The researchers also noticed that raptors caught prey at, on average, ten times the rate when they took advantage of a prescribed burn than when there was no fire.

Most of the prey the birds caught were insects (especially grasshoppers), though some black kites caught toads and a snake, and a nankeen kestrel got a lizard.

"Raptors seemed to forage mostly over unburned ground in front of the advancing fire, where more prey is likely flushed," the team writes.

"Black kites, the most pyrophilic birds observed, were more numerous during larger fires and foraged more efficiently on the ground than in the air."

Previous research describes reports of how some 'firehawk raptors' – black kites among them – carry burning sticks from one site to another, apparently to spread fire.

"Most of the data that we've worked with is collaborative with Aboriginal peoples… They've known this for probably 40,000 years or more," geographer Mark Bonta from Penn State Altoona told National Geographic when that research was published.

Jacobs and team didn't spot any firehawk behavior during their recent fieldwork, but their observations add further detail to a picture of the birds' clever and complex relationship with the fires that have been part of their habitats for millennia.

It also adds further evidence to why the firehawks would risk carrying flaming sticks through the sky.

Wildfires in Australia are occurring more frequently and at greater intensity as time passes, largely due to climate change.

These uncontrolled fires are very different from the ones the raptors seem drawn to.

What this changing climate means for the fire-loving birds is unknown.

"Similar observations should be performed at natural wildfires, which differ in many respects from prescribed fires," the researchers suggest.

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Walking for Just 20 Minutes Caused an Immediate Change in the Gut

By Fujita Health U., Sept. 18, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/walking-for-just-20-minutes-caused-an-immediate-change-in-the-gut/

A brief, easy walk may trigger a surprisingly rapid response in the digestive system. Researchers found that several measures of bowel activity rose within minutes after light exercise, offering clues to how movement might support gut motility. Credit: Stock

Just 20 minutes of easy walking appeared to jolt the gut into action, nearly doubling the intensity of bowel sounds within minutes.

Constipation is one of the most common digestive complaints, affecting people of all ages. Beyond bloating, straining, and infrequent bowel movements, persistent symptoms can cause stress, interfere with work and daily routines, and substantially reduce quality of life.

If it continues untreated, constipation can contribute to hemorrhoids, cardiovascular strain during bowel movements, and other colorectal problems. Yet many people do not seek help until the condition becomes difficult to ignore.

Why Walking May Help Constipation

Movement is routinely recommended as a simple way to support regular bowel function. People who are more active tend to report fewer digestive problems, while prolonged inactivity is associated with slower intestinal movement. The biological explanation, however, remains incomplete.

Most studies have examined exercise habits over weeks, months, or years. Far less is known about the gut’s response during the first few minutes after physical activity, even though that immediate reaction could help explain why a short walk sometimes provides relief.

Researchers at Fujita Health University investigated this rapid response in healthy adults. In their study, published in Scientific Reports, they used bowel sounds (BS) as a noninvasive window into intestinal activity.

Listening to the Intestines

Bowel sounds form as contractions move gas and liquid through the digestive tract. Although these noises do not reveal every aspect of digestion, their frequency, duration, and intensity can provide useful clues about changes in gut motility.

The study included 21 healthy young adults. While each participant rested lying down, researchers used an electronic stethoscope and signal processing software to collect a one-minute baseline recording. Participants then walked on a treadmill for 20 minutes at a comfortable, self-selected pace.

The upper panel illustrates reduced gut motility in patients with constipation and its improvement following physical activity through an unknown mechanism. 

The middle panel depicts the experimental protocol, with bowel sound assessments performed at rest and after physical activity as an indirect measure of gut motility. 

The lower panel shows representative bowel sound waveforms at rest and 1–2 minutes after physical activity, along with quantitative analysis demonstrating an immediate increase in the gut motility index following exercise, which may contribute to constipation relief. 

Credit: Professor Yohei Otaka and Professor Shigeo Tanabe from Fujita Health University

Afterward, they returned to the lying position while the team made several more recordings over 15 minutes. The researchers assessed three indicators: the Sound Index (SI), which represents total sound amplitude; the percentage of recording time containing bowel sounds; and the number of separate sound events per minute.

A Rapid but Brief Gut Response

All three measures increased significantly within one to two minutes after the walk. Sound amplitude nearly doubled, bowel noises occupied more of the recording period, and the number of individual events per minute also rose.

The effect faded within two to three minutes, suggesting that the immediate response was short-lived. Even so, the speed of the change provides evidence that light physical activity can rapidly stimulate measurable intestinal activity rather than influencing digestion only through long-term fitness.

Professor Yohei Otaka, the study’s senior author, said, “Walking can serve as an effective, immediate tool for stimulating bowel function. The findings also point to potential underlying mechanisms, such as changes in autonomic nervous system activity or reflexes triggered by the body’s natural oscillations during movement.”

Promising Clues, but Important Limits

The researchers also highlighted bowel sound analysis as a potentially useful tool for future gastrointestinal research. Because it does not require instruments to be placed inside the body, the technique could make it easier to monitor short-term changes repeatedly and in real time.

However, the experiment was small and involved healthy young adults rather than people experiencing constipation. It measured bowel sounds as an indicator of motility, not whether participants passed stool more easily or experienced lasting symptom relief. Further research will be needed to determine whether the same response occurs in older adults and people with digestive disorders.

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Sperm Teamwork Is Far More Common Than Scientists Realized

By D. Bernardi, Syracuse U., Sept. 17, 2020

https://scitechdaily.com/sperm-teamwork-is-far-more-common-than-scientists-realized/

The sperm race may be more of a team sport, with evolution repeatedly favoring microscopic cooperation.

 Credit: Stock

A new study by Syracuse University biologists examines how cooperation among sperm has evolved over the past 500 million years.

In sperm conjugation, sperm cells work together like a crew of rowers, forming coordinated groups that may improve their chances of reaching and fertilizing an egg. A new study suggests this cooperation is widespread among arthropods, the animal group that includes insects, spiders, crabs, and centipedes.

Scientists first described sperm conjugation more than a century ago, yet long considered it rare. Now, evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy, and the University of Szeged in Hungary have traced a history of sperm cooperation stretching back hundreds of millions of years. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, indicate that even the ancestor of all insects had conjugated sperm.

“What makes this pattern so fascinating is that evolution keeps arriving at similar cooperative solutions in very different groups and across vast expanses of time,” says Steve Dorus, a study co-author and professor of biology at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. “These examples remind us that cooperation can be just as important as competition in shaping biological success.”

Microscopic view of sperm cells joined together in a cooperative group, illustrating how teamwork can shape reproductive success. 

Credit: Romano Dallai, Department of Life Sciences, University of Siena, Siena, Italy

Sperm cooperation evolves, disappears, and returns

To reconstruct that history, the researchers drew on decades of published studies describing sperm form across hundreds of arthropod species. They mapped those traits onto an evolutionary family tree to estimate when different forms of cooperation emerged, disappeared, and arose again. The resulting timeline spans the past 600 million years and shows repeated gains and losses across major arthropod groups.

“Evolution has effectively run the same experiment over and over again across different groups of arthropods,” says lead author R. Antonio Gomez, a postdoctoral scholar in the college’s Department of Biology. “That allows us to see not only when sperm cooperation emerges, but also when it disappears and reappears under different evolutionary conditions.”

The team also tracked sperm-associated material, or SAM, a membrane-bound substance that can bind sperm together or form external structures that organize them into groups. In numerous species, this material helps hold the cooperative arrangement together. The researchers suspect SAM initially evolved to package or protect sperm and may subsequently have played a key role in the origin of conjugation.

“Sperm are the most rapidly evolving cell type,” says Scott Pitnick, the study’s senior author and Weeden Professor of Biology at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. “They are shaped by the unique challenge of operating outside the body in the complex environment of the female reproductive tract.”

This evolutionary timeline shows how sperm conjugation and sperm-associated material (SAM) have appeared across major animal groups over the past 600 million years, revealing a pattern of repeated innovation and loss. 

Credit: Syracuse University

Sperm behave differently inside the body

Pitnick describes fertilization as an obstacle course involving complex interactions between sperm and the female reproductive tract. Researchers propose that grouping could improve sperm movement or coordination, or help deliver important molecules to particular locations along that route. Establishing which advantages favor the evolution of cooperation requires observing what the cells actually do within reproductive systems.

That is difficult because sperm behave differently on glass slides, where scientists can easily observe them, than they do inside the female body. Future research will examine how sperm groups function in that environment and identify the benefits and trade-offs of working together.

“Fertilization is often viewed as a competition among individual sperm, but in many species we see cells working together in ways that can influence reproductive success,” Dorus says.

The findings encourage researchers studying animal fertility to consider collective behavior alongside the performance of individual sperm. The authors suggest that understanding how cells cooperate and use shared structures could eventually inform new approaches to human reproductive challenges.

Could sperm coatings help control lanternflies?

Researchers are also exploring whether sperm conjugation and SAM could offer ways to disrupt reproduction in harmful species. One potential target is the spotted lanternfly, an invasive insect that poses a growing agricultural threat in New York and other eastern states.

Lanternfly sperm do not form cooperative groups. Each sperm cell is instead encased in a thick coating of SAM, giving researchers a different reproductive arrangement to investigate.

“Their sperm are highly unusual,” Pitnick says. “They do not have conjugation, but each individual sperm is completely embedded in this material, and we do not even know how they are motile.”

How these coated sperm function remains unresolved. If SAM proves essential to lanternfly reproduction, disrupting it could provide a highly targeted control strategy.

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A Few Mountain Lions Transformed an Entire Ecosystem

By S. Zaske, Stanford U., Sept. 17, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/a-few-mountain-lions-transformed-an-entire-ecosystem/

Visiting mountain lions set off a surprising ecological chain reaction across a tiny California preserve. 

Credit: Shutterstock

A Stanford study found that mountain lion visits to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve set off a chain of changes affecting deer, smaller predators, and plant life.

As mountain lions began visiting Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve more often, deer and smaller predators became less active, while young oak trees began to thrive. A long-term study of this small suburban refuge, about 45 miles south of San Francisco, suggests that the cats’ influence may extend through the food chain to the vegetation.

The preserve, also known as ‘Ootchamin ‘Ooyakma, is too small to support its own mountain lion population. These cats (Puma concolor) range across 20 to 170 square kilometers, about 8 to 66 square miles, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Researchers do not know why they started visiting Jasper Ridge more often. A mother with kittens appeared on camera during the study, raising the possibility that females found it a safe place to raise their young.

A mountain lion photographed by a motion-activated camera on Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. 

Credit: Image courtesy of Trevor Hébert/Stanford University
Less deer activity as young oaks thrive



The visits offered researchers a chance to examine how a large predator influences a small patch of protected habitat. For the long-term study, published in Ecology and Evolution, the team combined records from motion-activated cameras with vegetation surveys. Mountain lions appeared increasingly often on the cameras from 2015 to 2020, allowing comparisons with earlier years when puma activity was lower or absent.

The researchers identified two chains of effects linking the cats to other parts of the ecosystem. Such connections are called trophic cascades, in which a predator’s influence extends through feeding relationships to organisms further down the food chain.

One chain linked mountain lions, deer, and vegetation. Camera records showed a drop in deer activity as puma visits increased, while surveys found that many woody plants deer eat or trample were flourishing, including young oaks. Reduced deer activity could help explain that growth. This three-level relationship is called a tri-trophic cascade.

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

A mountain lion and her cubs at night in Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. 

Credit: Trevor Hébert/Stanford University

The other chain involved smaller predators. As mountain lion activity increased, coyote and bobcat activity declined. Those animals may have left the area or shifted the times they were active to avoid the larger cats. Foxes, meanwhile, appeared more often, perhaps taking advantage of reduced activity by coyotes and bobcats. The increased fox activity may then have suppressed activity among rabbits, their main prey.

The indirect effects on plants, foxes, and rabbits remain provisional. Changes in fog, temperature, or other conditions could also have contributed to those patterns. The researchers found a clearer impact of mountain lion presence on deer, coyotes, and bobcats.

A bobcat photographed by motion-activated cameras at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. When puma numbers increased at the preserve, the activity of mid-sized predators, including bobcats and coyotes, also went down. 

Credit: Image courtesy of Trevor Hébert/Stanford University
Mountain lions fear people, too



Behavioral shifts in response to predators are often described as the “ecology of fear.” An animal’s perception that a large predator is nearby can change its behavior, with consequences for the organisms it eats.

Mountain lions face their own version of that pressure from people. Although sightings occasionally draw attention in San Francisco and nearby suburbs, the cats generally stay far from humans. They are also nocturnal, so their activity often occurs when people are less active.

“Pumas are afraid of our smell and our sounds; they don’t like to see us moving,” said Elizabeth Hadly, the study’s senior author, a Stanford professor emerita of biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), and former faculty director at Jasper Ridge. “Pumas use all of their senses to avoid humans.”

Humans are the leading cause of mountain lion deaths, through hunting and car accidents, Hadly noted.

“Clearly, we exert our own ecology of fear,” she said. “Humans are the ultimate predator on almost every landscape.”

A deer photographed by motion-activated cameras at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. When mountain lions started increasing their presence on the preserve in 2015, deer, their primary prey, decreased.

 Credit: Image courtesy of Trevor Hébert/Stanford University

Small preserves can support trophic cascades

That sensitivity to people makes the setting at Jasper Ridge particularly relevant. Research on trophic cascades has largely focused on extensive wilderness areas, including the effects of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park. The Jasper Ridge findings indicate that these ecological relationships can also persist in much smaller preserves near cities.

“In the past, small preserves like Jasper Ridge have often been dismissed for holding very little ecological value, but this study shows that when these small preserves are connected to large wilderness like the Santa Cruz Mountains, you can still see magnificent ecological phenomena like trophic cascades,” said Chinmay Sonawane, the study’s first author and a doctoral student in biology in Stanford’s H&S. “They are not just things that happen in places like Yellowstone far away from the city and people. They can happen in these places that are quite small and more urban as well.”

Small preserves make up a substantial share of protected land sites in the United States. About 82% of protected areas are smaller than 5 square kilometers, or about 2 square miles. As urbanization accelerates, these places will likely be critical for wildlife and plants, said Rodolfo Dirzo, a study co-author and Stanford professor of biology in H&S.

“Maintaining sites where there is an entire community of animals, from predators to prey to the prey’s resource base, is very important,” he said. “When one piece is missing – and it’s typically the top predators that require larger areas and are more sensitive to human impact – we will no longer have fully functioning ecosystems.”

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Textbook Rewrite: The Human Brain Has Two Distinct Origins, Scientists Discover

18 Sept. 2026, By J. Cockerill

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-human-brain-has-two-distinct-origins-scientists-discover

(Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)

The brain is an immeasurably complex organ, and we're only just scratching the surface of how it even comes into existence.

In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience today, a Stanford-led research team says the brains of humans and other animals are actually made up of two collaborating neural systems that start developing in parallel in an embryo's earliest moments.

The study suggests that the different brain regions arise from separate kinds of embryonic cells known as progenitors.

They found one progenitor cell type leads to the development of the forebrain and midbrain, while another goes on a totally different path to form the hindbrain.

The scientists made their initial discovery by analyzing the way mouse brains developed from the very early embryonic stage known as gastrulation.

Then, they confirmed that human pluripotent stem cells also follow these same paths, depending on the signals they receive.

Human pluripotent stem cells were differentiated into either anterior (aNE) or posterior (pNE) neural ectoderm-like cells within 2 days. pNE was fluorescently labeled, and then aNE (uncolored) and pNE (dye-labeled) were mixed. Co-cultures were treated with either forebrain-, midbrain-, or hindbrain-inducing signals for two additional days, before immunostaining.

 (Jokhai et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2026)

In a scientific first, they successfully encouraged the human stem cells to develop into hindbrain motor neurons, complete with electrical activity and proteins characteristic of these cells.

The progenitor cells that create the fore- and midbrain regions produce a specific protein using a gene called Otx2, while the soon-to-be hindbrain cells express a gene called Gbx2.

Both kinds of progenitor cells form the basis for the complete organ that is our brain, but their roles are not interchangeable.

The way their DNA is packaged is fundamentally different too, with totally distinct chromatin 'landscapes'.

This could explain why experiments to grow the cells that make up the hindbrain in the laboratory have often failed: They may have been using the wrong building blocks, those fated to become forebrain tissue.

"In stem cell biology, people are always fixated with creating the end cell type, like the neuron… But it's important to begin at the earliest stages of embryonic development," says developmental biologist Rayyan Jokhai, who is co-first author with his colleague Carolyn Dundes on the paper.

"Our careful attention to that early time point allowed us to find this fundamental split in brain development," Jokhai adds.

This element of the research will probably accelerate research investigating diseases that affect the brainstem, hitting at our bodies' most basic functions.

Beyond the medical research implications, the discovery also raises a lot of questions about the evolutionary history of animal brains.

"Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially," says developmental biologist Kyle Loh, whose lab hosted the research.

"Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces."

"I was surprised at our findings because the word 'brain' implies a contiguous organ that likely has a singular origin," Jokhai says.

"But even 500 million years ago, there were these separate neural systems, which now almost operate as one, which is very cool."

Those statements need a bit of extra context: Loh and Jokhai don't mean that the neural systems were necessarily two separate organs to start with.

What they are describing is a bit of evolutionary inference, based on how the brains of modern animals develop in gastrulation.

The researchers found this composite brain system (with the two progenitor cell types co-operating to form a complete organ) was present in the gastrulation stage of modern mouse, macaque, chicken, zebrafish, and acorn worm embryos.

All of these animals share a common ancestor in the evolutionary tree of life, and scientists estimate that they all diverged from that singular node around 550 million years ago.

The study suggests animal brains – including our own – have been following this two-part blueprint for hundreds of millions of years.

But the evidence so far cannot tell us whether those two parts actually evolved independently: that's a question for future research.

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