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| 29 June 2026 | | Today’s Deep Dive explores advances in predicting—and tweaking—the timing of birth. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how asteroids created continental chaos and birds that are born to fly far. | |
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| GEology | Science | | Continental chaos from asteroid rain erased Earth’s early history | It’s a safe bet that visiting a new continent is on your bucket list. But a period in Earth’s early history had to end billions of years before travelers’ dreams could begin: the Hadean, when an asteroid onslaught made the planet too hot and chaotic to form continents.
Scientists wanted to investigate a longstanding geological curiosity: that there are essentially no surviving rocks from Earth’s first 500 million years. Suspecting that the violence of the period might play a role, researchers turned to the Moon, whose craters reveal its own history of asteroid bombardment. Through modeling, the researchers found that asteroid impacts of such frequency and intensity would have brought more heat energy to Earth than the planet itself generated , melting away our early crusts. The collisions would also have caused the mantle beneath the impact sites to melt, generating magma that could break through Earth’s surface and solidify into the earliest continents when the bombardment ceased 3.9 billion years ago.
“The young Earth was not just scarred by impacts,” wrote the authors in The Conversation. “It was reshaped by them, and the first continents may only have endured once the violence began to fade.
Early Earth’s tumultuous history could even give scientists insights into the evolution of other nearby planets. “Because heavy bombardment of asteroids was also common on other planets within the Solar System, it may have inhibited continental crust formation on them” wrote geodynamicist Qian Yuan in a related Science Perspective. | | Read the Science paper | | |
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| Animal Behavior | Science | | A born traveler |  | | This male pied flycatcher hatched from a Dutch egg translocated to Sweden; he returned to Sweden the next year as an adult, but spent the winter apart from fully Swedish birds. Koosje Lamers/University of Groningen | In summer, pied flycatchers can be found as far west as the United Kingdom and as far east as Siberia. But come autumn, they all make their way through Spain and Portugal to head south along the western coast of Africa to spend the winter where it’s warmer. That’s when things really get weird: The birds that already flew some 10,000 kilometers farther to get to warmer lands don’t stop—they head eastward, ending up hundreds of kilometers away for the winter.
Unlike some birds, pied flycatchers migrate solo at night, and young birds leave after their parents—so they aren’t taught the route directly. That left researchers wondering what exactly dictates these birds’ choice of overwintering spot. So, they took some pied flycatcher eggs laid in the Netherlands, placed them in the nests of Swedish parents, and tracked their movements. The team also tracked both fully Swedish and fully Dutch birds.
The fully Swedish birds ended up about 500 km to the west of the fully Dutch ones for the winter. But the genetically Dutch birds raised by Swedish parents overwintered in between, returning to Sweden for the summer. “So, it is probably not the case that the direction of the migration is inherited and differs per location ,” co-author Koosje Lamers explained in a statement. “Instead, it is probably the length of the route that is fixed.” Now, the team can start to model how climate change may affect the different populations. | | |
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| Neuroscience | Science | | Timing is everything for the genetics of mental illness | For decades, scientists have worked to understand how genetics affect neurological disorders like schizophrenia. But while previous research has located regions of DNA that are associated with mental illness, pinpointing which sections are most relevant—and teasing out what they do functionally—remains challenging. Many of the identified DNA segments do not directly create any proteins, suggesting they may be involved in genetic pathways that are triggered by fleeting biological cues. This makes their roles especially difficult to elucidate when studying dead tissue samples.
To study how living brain cells react to stimuli, researchers took cell samples from donors with and without schizophrenia and grew them into neurons using a stem cell technique. By prodding the cells with chemical signals akin to ones they would receive in the brain, the scientists observed how different portions of DNA activate in response to stimuli. They found that several schizophrenia-linked stretches of the genetic code become accessible to the regulatory proteins responsible for gene expression only after receiving a nudge , indicating that these portions of DNA may have the strongest impact on the mental illness. Interestingly, genes associated with cholesterol synthesis were especially active in patients with schizophrenia, suggesting a possible connection that could one day be used to treat the disorder.
“The study … heralds a new phase of research focused on determining when genetic risk becomes functional,” wrote neuroscientists Biao Zeng and Panos Roussos in a Science Perspective. “To understand disease genetics, we might need to study the genome in motion and not at rest.” | | Read the Science paper | | |
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| | | Deep Dive |  | | Preterm birth is a leading cause of infant morbidity and mortality. US Navy | | Scientists search for ways to predict and prevent preterm labor | Although every labor and delivery carries its fair share of risks, babies born too early—before they’ve had a chance to finish developing—are particularly vulnerable to health complications. Preterm birth, defined as delivery before 37 weeks of pregnancy, remains a leading cause of infant illness and death.
Because scientists still don’t fully understand why some people go into labor too soon, they often struggle to predict when a baby will be born prematurely, let alone prevent it from happening. Over the past month, however, several different research teams have gained new insight into the causes of preterm labor.
One group investigated the role of Mycoplasma genitalium, a common sexually transmitted infection that can affect the genital tract. Because this bacterium causes inflammation, researchers have suspected that it might play a role in pregnancy complications, including recurrent preterm labor. Results from nearly 500 pregnant study participants with a history of preterm birth or related complications, however, found that while Mycoplasma genitalium was indeed more common in those who had previously experienced preterm birth, it didn’t increase the risk for subsequent pregnancies. “For individuals already at high risk of preterm birth, Mycoplasma genitalium infection alone does not seem to increase the likelihood of another early delivery,” lead study author Irene Stafford said in a statement.
Another study, published in Science, revealed a major metabolic trigger for preterm labor. The authors found that, in mice nearing the final stages of pregnancy, a steep decline in a metabolite called NAD+ in the placenta appeared to hasten labor and delivery. Intriguingly, this molecule is also associated with the aging of other organs. Depleting NAD+ in mouse placentas shortened their pregnancies by more than a day on average—a significant length for mice—while supplementing NAD+ in a mouse model of preterm birth lengthened pregnancy by nearly a day.
These findings “are clinically relevant because they uncover a potential strategy to prevent unexplained preterm births or to precisely control the induction of labor,” Kiyoshi Yoshioka and Shin-ichiro Imai, researchers who study aging, wrote in a related Science Perspective. The concept of programmed NAD+ decline, they add, could have broad implications for how scientists think about aging and longevity: “As the changing role of the placenta from pregnancy to labor illustrates, the end of one tissue’s life is the catalyst for the beginning of another. In this regard, aging could also be viewed not merely as a process of decline, but as an active, vital system that ensures the succession of generations by coordinating transitions across life stages.”
As other recent research has emphasized, preterm labor is influenced by a complex variety of factors, not just a single trigger. In one study, scientists determined that pregnant individuals are exposed to an average of 45 different chemicals, including many harmful substances associated with earlier delivery and lower birth weight. “Pregnant people are at risk of chemical exposure through multiple sources, many of them beyond their control ,” senior researcher Tracey Woodruff said in a statement. “Governments and companies need to do a better job of reducing harmful chemicals in everyday products and ensuring new chemicals are safe, which will lead to healthier children and families”
In another study, researchers analyzed blood samples from pregnant African American women in Atlanta, looking for molecular differences between pregnancies that ended prematurely and those that reached full term. The team uncovered molecular signs linked to preterm, early-term, and full-term births and also found that signs differed between babies that were spontaneously born early and those that were delivered early for medical reasons.
“Preterm and early-term births are not one single condition with one single cause,” lead study author Donghai Liang said in a statement. “Our study shows that different types of early birth carry distinct molecular fingerprints during pregnancy.” These and other recent findings “may help us better understand the biology of early birth and, eventually, develop better tools to identify risk earlier and guide prevention strategies.” | | Read The SCIENCE PAPER | |
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| | podcast |  | | Cracking color vision, U.S. science policy changes, and a trailblazing biography | | By Sarah Crespi, Angela Saini, Michael A. Funk, Jocelyn Kaiser | 25 June 2025 | | On this week’s show: A roundup of the latest ScienceInsider stories on changes to science wrought by the Trump administration, solving the structures for the proteins behind color vision, and an interview with science writer Georgina Ferry. | |
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| From words to worlds | | To make AI models smarter, computer scientists are training them not on text but in custom worlds. The trouble with large language models—which essentially learn by reading—is that they’re reaching the limits of what they can do. “You cannot just throw more data at it and expect it to magically improve,” one expert explained. For an AI to truly learn how to reason, it’ll have to learn from experience. | | Read more at News from Science | |
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| Catastrophically overdue | | Researchers had flagged the faults that ruptured in Venezuela last week; the pressure had been building in one, for example, for a couple centuries. While earthquakes are “impossible to predict,” one expert noted, the region was “overdue” for a big one. | | Read more at ScienceInsider | |
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| Cheaper, sure, but less bang for the buck | | Which is more cost-effective: keeping a space mission’s budget tight or going all out for latest tech? An analysis suggests that spendy missions are actually worth their cost. Making new discoveries is simply expensive. “There’s nothing you can do that’s going to push the frontier in a low-cost budget heading to Europa, Enceladus, or Titan,” one expert said. “It takes a long time, it takes technologies, and it takes a lot of smart people working on those projects.” | | International Planetary Probe Workshop Presentation | Read more at News from Science | |
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