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| 27 May 2026 | | Today’s The Life Academic looks at how one group of scientists closed the Wikipedia gender gap. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including why mosquitoes might be bitier than usual and the vagus nerve’s mixed signals. | |
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| Animal Behavior | News from Science | | Porch lights may be making mosquito season longer |  | | The glow of outdoor lights might be enough to delay when the primary carrier of West Nile virus in the United States goes dormant during the winter. Herbert SCHWIND/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images | Every fall, Culex pipiens mosquitoes—the primary carriers of West Nile virus in the United States—are supposed to take their cues from the waning daylight and go dormant for the winter. Now, a new real-world study finds that the glow of a backyard floodlight may be enough to delay that shutdown—raising the possibility that as cities grow brighter, disease transmission seasons could extend.
Earlier lab work showed that low levels of artificial light could confuse mosquitoes and delay the onset of their dormant state, known as diapause. The question was whether the same would hold in a real city. To find out, researchers asked homeowners in Columbus, Ohio to host small containers of mosquito larvae in their yards, with some placed directly under existing outdoor lights, others tucked into naturally dark nooks. After allowing the larvae to mature into adults, the researchers then collected the containers to test whether the mosquitoes had entered diapause or were still primed to blood-feed and reproduce.
Mosquitoes raised under light in September entered diapause at roughly one quarter of the rate of those kept in the dark. By October, the contrast was stark: Every mosquito in a dark enclosure went dormant, while 59 percent of those exposed to light stayed active—with multiple consequences. More biting in the fall means more chances to pick up and transmit disease, as well as potential for an extra generation of mosquitoes before winter—and a larger population heading into the summer. “The longer the season, the more generations of Culex you get ,” said Dina Fonseca, a vector biologist who was not involved in the work. “Compound interest.” | | |
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| Physiology | Science Signaling | | Your pancreas might be getting mixed signals | The vagus nerve connects the brain to organs throughout the body, helping coordinate everything from digestion to heart rate. It also plays a key role in preparing the body for a meal by triggering insulin release almost immediately after food is seen, smelled, tasted, or eaten. However, experiments in mice suggest that the nerve actually sends opposing signals—and in obese mice, the message to suppress insulin production wins out.
Researchers engineered mice whose vagus nerves could be switched on or off using a drug called clozapine-N-oxide, or CNO. In experiments involving groups of about six mice each, activating the vagus nerve in lean mice produced a rapid spike in insulin within about 15 minutes. But in obese mice, which had been fed a high-fat diet for 6 weeks, the same stimulation didn’t trigger the spike and instead caused insulin levels to steadily fall over the following 2 hours.
The researchers traced this fall in insulin to nitric oxide, a signaling molecule better known for roles in blood vessels and neurotransmission. When the team blocked the production of the enzyme that makes nitric oxide in vagal cells, obese mice had more typical insulin responses after feeding. Mathematical models suggested the vagus nerve simultaneously sends two competing signals, one that boosts insulin release and another that suppresses it, with the suppressive pathway appearing to be stronger in cases of obesity.
The findings could have implications beyond obesity research. Vagus nerve stimulation is already FDA-approved for conditions including epilepsy, depression, migraines, and cluster headaches, suggesting such treatments may also have underappreciated metabolic effects. | | |
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 | | | Recent PhD? Apply for the Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists! | | Win up to $30,000 USD, have your research published in Science, and visit Sweden for a unique week of events celebrating science. Apply by July 15! | |
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| | | The Life Academic |  | | Wikimedia Foundation | CC BY-SA | | Editing the gender gap one bio at a time | Women have long been underrepresented in science—and on Wikipedia. But one corner of academia may have quietly reversed part of that trend. Among biology faculty at top U.S. research universities, women are now more likely than men to have Wikipedia biographies. The latest data likely reflect, at least in part, the work of organized editing campaigns aiming to include more women on the website.
“It’s amazing,” Kelly Doyle Kim, who studies Wikipedia’s gender gap and was not involved with the work, tells ScienceAdviser. She says she was surprised by the findings, particularly because previous studies in other STEM fields found women academics were less likely to appear on Wikipedia than men with similar publication records. She also thinks the authors went about the work in the same way “a ‘Wikipedian’ with lots of experience would have: cross examining research output, type of position or professorship held, number of citations, and looking at the back end of Wikipedia.”
The study authors were also surprised. David Alvarez-Ponce, an evolutionary genomicist and co-author of the study, says he expected women to be underrepresented. “That was the original hypothesis,” he notes.
Alvarez-Ponce and his colleague embarked on the study after seeing the news 2 years ago that women had finally reached 20% of biography subjects on the English-language Wikipedia—a number that editors and volunteers had spent years trying to boost. The scientists wondered whether the statistic held true for women in their field, too. They manually searched for Wikipedia entries for all 5825 tenure-track and tenured faculty who were affiliated with biology departments at 146 universities as of 2024, collecting data including page length, number of edits, and annual page views. The gender of the faculty members was surmised using listed pronouns or photographs.
The team found that 9.4% of women in the dataset had Wikipedia biographies, compared with 7.5% of men. The gap widened among more senior faculty—female full professors were almost 7% more likely than male full professors to appear on the site.
These trends are recent, though. By analyzing when the Wikipedia pages were created, the team found that male biologists were more likely to have biographies until 2018. Between 2019 and 2021, women and men had similar chances. Then, in 2022 the pattern reversed and women were more likely to have a Wikipedia page than men.
The researchers suspect that organized editing campaigns likely helped drive the shift. Nearly half of the women’s biographies created since 2015 were written by editors affiliated with Women in Red, a volunteer effort aimed at addressing Wikipedia’s gender imbalance.
The findings don’t mean broader inequities in academia have been solved, Alvarez-Ponce cautions. Women remain underrepresented in senior STEM positions and often face barriers in funding, recognition, and promotion. “Many pieces of research suggest strongly that women are discriminated in many aspects in science,” he says. “Hopefully this means that things are changing.” | |
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| Bird’s eye view | | Birds have excellent vision, but how exactly has puzzled biologists. Unlike other visually acute vertebrates, their energetically expensive retinas are almost entirely devoid of oxygen-delivering blood vessels. Now, scientists have shown that these tissues simply don’t use aerobic processes to make their cellular fuel. As one expert put it: “Half of the retina lives in a chronic state of anoxia, where there’s no oxygen present at all.” | | Nature Paper | Read more at Quanta Magazine | |
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| Why gold always glitters | | Gold’s geometry explains why it doesn’t tarnish like other metals when cut and exposed to air: The way atoms on the surface of the element rearrange is simply bad at splitting oxygen, the first step in oxidization. “It’s something like a billion to a trillion times slower oxidation once you rearrange,” one expert explained. | | Physical Review Letters Paper | Read more at Science News | |
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| Ancient anesthetics | | In the 15th century, a surgeon in China laced his scissors and tweezers in wolfsbane and monkshood—plants with known anesthetic properties. The findings, experts said, are the earliest direct evidence for the use of painkillers during a medical procedure. “Now we can understand why this surgery may have been present or may have been so prolific and actually manageable in the past,” one noted. | | Antiquity Paper | Read more at New Scientist | |
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| | The victims of MiDAS are what we might call “sacrifice subjects” … people [who] are harmed systematically as the public and private sectors pursue technological innovation without appropriate governance. | | Expert Voices | 21 May 2026 | Shobita Parthasarathy | |
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