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| 3 July 2026 | | In today’s Logbook, News from Science Senior International Correspondent Richard Stone reflects on his time in Norway talking to scientists about their Arctic research. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including the tale of the modern bird tail and why some scientists are getting excited about flesh-eating worms. | |
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| Earth Science | News from Science | | Boosting into an ice age | The formation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet 34 million years ago has always been a bit of a puzzle. Researchers have long known that falling global temperatures, caused by declining greenhouse gases, played a role. But similar ice sheets in the northern hemisphere didn’t develop for another 20 million years.
Now, researchers are proposing an answer to this conundrum, rooted in deep time: Some 160 million years ago, the Gondwana supercontinent broke apart, separating Africa from Antarctica. This rifting likely created waves of hot rock in the mantle, below the Earth’s crust, that over the span of 100 million years, reached the interior of East Antarctica, causing it to rise by more than a kilometer over a span of 15 million years.
This rise, along with some other tectonic activity and the continuing drop in temperature, could have been enough to allow the first alpine glaciers to take hold on Antarctica’s mountains, including the enigmatic Gamburtsevs, which are hidden completely under ice and visible only with radar. These isolated glaciers connected once the land rose high enough, helping to create the South Pole—and global climate—we know today. “It’s like a chain reaction,” explained geologist Thomas Gernon, who led the study. | | Read the Science paper and Listen to the RELATED PODCAST | | |
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| Paleontology | Science Advances | The tale of the modern bird tail started as a short story vertebra |  | | 3D reconstruction of the Jurassic avialan Zhengheornis buyu. Min Wang/Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology/Chinese Academy of Sciences | Birds of a feather may flock together, but feathery wings aren’t the only trait that defines these animals. Dinosaurs in the Avialae clade—the group that eventually gave way to modern birds—also traded in their long, lizardlike tails for a shorter, more aerodynamic appendage, with the final few vertebrae shortened and fused together to form a structure called a pygostyle. Now, thanks to a newly discovered fossil, scientists can finally tell the tale of how this tail emerged.
The fossil, which was unearthed in southeastern China and dates back to the Upper Jurassic, belongs to a small, previously unidentified avialan species that researchers have dubbed Zhengheornis buyu—homage to Zhenghe County, where the specimen was found, paired with a Mandarin word meaning “unexpected,” for its unique anatomy. When researchers analyzed the dinosaur’s tail, they determined that, while Zhengheornis had fewer and shorter vertebrae at the tip of its tail than earlier avialans, these bones showed no evidence of fusion. This finding, the team reports in Science Advances, suggests that vertebrae shortening was the first step in the evolution of the modern bird tail, with the bones becoming fused in later species.
Further analysis identified Zhengheornis as one of the earliest diverging avialans, placing it just crownward of the famous Archaeopteryx—often considered the “missing link” between birds and non-avian dinosaurs—on the clade’s family tree. | | |
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| Museology | News from Science | | Flesh-eating ‘superworms’ can clean a skeleton in hours | Museum curators faced with cleaning animal skeletons for display may soon turn to an unusual new tool: flesh-eating beetle larvae known as “superworms.”
Currently, many museums use chemicals or enzymes to strip away flesh from animal skeletons, but these methods can damage bones and pose environmental risks. Some use colonies of dermestid beetles, although if these metamorphize into adults they can infest collections if not carefully contained. Superworms—the larvae of the darkling beetle and commonly used as food for reptile pets—are a better alternative, researchers argue in a paper published this week in PLOS One . The team found that hungry superworms effectively stripped the flesh from animals, ranging from a mouse to a gray wolf, within a few hours or days. At the right ratio—about 10-15 grams of larvae for every gram of carcass—the larvae left the bones undamaged.
Crucially, superworms don’t pupate when in a group, so are unlikely to escape. Using superworms “is going to be a less risky way of having insects,” said Mike Rutherford, a zoology and anatomy curator who was not involved in the work. Rutherford says he is excited to try them out. “I’ve been wanting to find a way to try to deflesh [a snake] skeleton without all of the hundreds and hundreds of little ribs … all collapsing into each other,” he said. “I think I’ll give this a shot.” | | |
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| | | Logbook |  | | Unseasonable warmth sent meltwater rushing through Longyearbyen, turning roads and snowmobile routes to slush. R. Stone/Science | | I came to Svalbard for Arctic winter. I found meltwater and dust | | Richard Stone, Senior International Correspondent, News from Science | I went to Svalbard to report on a paradox. The Norwegian archipelago, halfway between mainland Europe and the North Pole, has become one of the world’s most valuable places to study Arctic change. Glaciers, fjords, wildlife—almost everything scientists want to understand about a warming Arctic is unfolding there in fast-forward.
But Svalbard is also becoming harder to study. Norway is tightening control over research in response to growing concerns about Russia, China, and security in the High North. A place long celebrated as a rare arena for international Arctic science is being pulled into the geopolitics of a more suspicious age.
I arrived at the world’s northernmost commercial airport in April expecting a winter wonderland. This is supposed to be snowmobile season in the high Arctic. Instead, streams of meltwater were rushing through Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s capital. Snow had collapsed into slush. Water ran down roads and pooled in low spots. The routes snowmobiles normally follow were impassable.
For local guides and tourism operators, the lost snow was a blow to business. For me, it changed the reporting trip. I had hoped to snowmobile to Barentsburg, the Russian mining settlement down the coast, to meet researchers there and learn more about Russia’s plans to expand its scientific presence in Svalbard. The trip was out of the question.
I encountered the same weather whiplash in Ny-Ålesund, the former coal-mining town turned international research village on Svalbard’s northwest coast. Scientists there embrace cold as a basic operating condition. Warmth is disruptive. Snowmobile routes were mush. Outside Ny-Ålesund, my snowmobile lurched through soft snow and tilted on mushy inclines. More than once, I felt sure it was about to roll. My previous snowmobiling experience came from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I had mostly ridden across forgiving, flat terrain. It was useless preparation for Svalbard. For the researchers, the stakes were higher: getting out for fieldwork had become too treacherous.
Then, abruptly, a cold snap swept through, followed by blizzard conditions that erased the thaw overnight. The research village snapped back into motion. Field teams dug snow pits, hauled instruments, sampled water, and measured the Arctic as if the interruption had been only a nuisance. |  | Andy Hodson sampling groundwater at a pingo in Adventdalen. By late April, warmth had exposed the valley floor. R. Stone/Science
| A few days later, I flew back to Longyearbyen. Southeast of the airport, a brown plume rose from Adventdalen valley, twisting into the sky like smoke. Dust storms were not part of my mental picture of Svalbard. But when snow disappears and the ground dries out, fierce winds can scour the exposed valley floor and send dust billowing upward. It is a phenomenon more typical of autumn. This was late April.
The next day I was inside that plume. I was following Andy Hodson, a biogeochemist who studies methane seeping from groundwater systems beneath Svalbard’s permafrost. A warm spell had stripped the landscape of much of its snow before temperatures plunged and sealed pools of meltwater beneath a skin of ice. Now a hard wind drove dust across Adventdalen. Hodson trudged ahead, dragging sampling gear toward pingos—small, ice-cored hills fed by groundwater rising through the permafrost. I followed with my head down, trying to breathe sparingly through my balaclava.
It was a miserable walk. It was also, in a way, the clearest image of Svalbard I brought home: not a pristine Arctic wilderness, but a place where the seasons are becoming harder to read.
A single warm spell is not climate change. Weather is noisy. But in Svalbard, where mean annual air temperatures have risen at roughly seven times the global rate, anomalies no longer feel like distant warnings. They alter what scientists can observe, and when.
That is what makes Svalbard so unsettling—and so important. It is often described as a sentinel for the Arctic, a place where the future arrives early. But from the ground, that metaphor feels too tidy. The future I glimpsed was meltwater in the streets, grounded snowmobiles, idle researchers, refrozen valleys. And dust in your teeth. | | Listen to the Related Podcast | |
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| | podcast |  | | How Antarctica got its ice sheets, and what happens when geopolitical relationships turn chilly in the Arctic | | By Sarah Crespi, Meagan Cantwell, Richard Stone | 2 July 2026 | | On this week’s show: As geopolitical tensions rise, scientific collaborations on the Norwegian archipelago are strained, and the role of continental uplift in the glaciation of Antarctica. | |
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| ‘A real disaster for biological science in Ukraine’ | | Kyiv’s century-old O.V. Palladin Institute of Biochemistry was struck by Russian drones in a recent attack. Buildings were destroyed, causing untold damage to the center’s biomedical research. “This is a real disaster for biological science in Ukraine,” said the vice president of the Academy of Sciences of Higher Education of Ukraine. | | Read more at ScienceInsider | |
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| Bundibugyo on trial | | The first clinical trial to test the effectiveness of treatments for the Ebola Bundibugyo virus kicked off yesterday, according to the World Health Organization. The trial will test two drugs separately and combined to determine their effectiveness against the potentially fatal virus. “It’s a really important step,” a WHO scientist said. “It’s hope for the community.” | | Read more at ScienceInsider | |
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| Post-quantum gravity | | Quantum mechanics gets its name because it involves quantized things—but its laws only work on small scales. Gravity, the ruler of the large-scale physics of general relativity, has long defied quantization, puzzling physicists. Now, another idea, dubbed post-quantum gravity, has followed the math if gravity and spacetime simply are continuous, with no quantifiable pieces—and that’s led to an intriguing prediction that could finally reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. Confirmation of its predictions “would be a big deal, first and foremost because it would be very different from all of the other interactions that we’ve analyzed throughout the past century,” one expert noted. | | Physical Review X Paper | Read more at New Scientist | |
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| Last but not least | | Tomorrow is Independence Day here in the United States, which means I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th inside—so I can comfort a terrified pup while the fireworks go off. At least I’ll be somewhat protected from the air pollution that the pyrotechnics will cause! |  | Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser
With contributions from Paul Voosen, Phie Jacobs, and Matthew Warren
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