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| 20 July 2026 | | Today’s Protostar is Erik Bakkeren, whose research involving “bacterial fight clubs” made him a finalist for this year’s NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how DNA from graves on a remote island is providing new insight into the history of the slave trade and a rocky exoplanet leaking helium gas. | |
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| archaeology | News from Science | | St. Helena’s liberated African history | The tiny, remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean is perhaps best known as Napoleon Bonaparte’s final place of exile; his first grave was on the island before his body was repatriated to France. But the island’s history doesn’t end there. Throughout the 19th century, it was a waypoint for formerly enslaved Africans who had been liberated by British forces. Some of these people stayed on St. Helena and became part of the island’s small, tightknit community.
Now, an analysis of graves from this era published this week in Science reveals heretofore unknown information about where these people came from, and their journey during enslavement. The data—garnered with the local government’s permission and the community’s support—show many were trafficked from Africa’s western coast, but also reveal slavers swept up adults and children from deep within the continent’s interior. “ The findings offer an important window into the history of the slave trade,” said historian Daniel Domingues da Silva, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Isotope analyses shed even more light on these journeys. Strontium isotopes in teeth can reveal where people grew up and spent time as youths. The study shows that some individuals were moving when they were between 7 and 9 years old. “It’s not just adults; it’s also children who were ripped from their homes,” said anthropological geneticist Raquel Fleskes, who wasn’t part of the research team.
These remains were reburied in a 2022 ceremony on the island. Local schoolchildren made the caskets, and each was painted with the handprint of a St. Helena child. | | Read the Science Paper | | |
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| space | news from Science | | Nearby, potentially habitable alien world has helium atmosphere |  | | LHS 1140 b orbits its star, with another rocky planet in the distance, in this artist’s conception. Melissa Weiss/CfA | If there’s life on LHS 1140 b, it might speak in a high-pitched voice. That’s because the planet—located a mere 49 light years away with a rocky surface much like Earth’s—is surrounded by helium, astronomers reported last week in Science. The find marks the first time scientists have spotted an atmosphere around a potentially habitable alien world, a key discovery in the search for extraterrestrial life.
It’s not easy to find alien atmospheres, especially around temperate planets like LHS 1140 b where liquid water could potentially exist. The bright light from a planet’s parent star makes it difficult to spot these worlds in the first place, and detecting the far fainter signal of an atmosphere is harder still.
To find that atmosphere on LHS 1140 b, astronomers used the 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes in Chile, which recently had a new high-resolution spectrometer installed. When the planet passed in front of its parent star, the researchers saw starlight dropping in brightness at a wavelength known to be absorbed by helium. When a smaller planet in the system crossed, they saw no such signal.
LHS 1140 b could be hiding other gases in its lower atmosphere, such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide—much like Earth. And if those gases provide an element of greenhouse warming, it could possess a liquid water ocean warm enough to swim in. “I expect many, many telescopes to take a look at it,” said astronomer René Doyon, who was not involved in the work. | | read the Science Paper | | |
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| medicine | News from Science | | Tau drug trial for Alzheimer’s creates buzz | Alzheimer’s disease has long been seen as a tale of two proteins: beta amyloid, which forms sticky plaques in the brain, and tau, which in its diseased state creates tangles inside neurons. Antibodies that clear beta amyloid have been approved to treat Alzheimer’s, but it was tau that made headlines last week: At the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, researchers shared results from a phase 2 trial testing diranersen, a drug developed by Biogen to lower the body’s production of tau, in more than 400 patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s.
On the study’s main measure of cognition, participants getting diranersen saw as much as a 26% slowing of decline—about on par with the effect seen in earlier trials of approved antiamyloid drugs. Although the presentation sparked enthusiasm, it also drew attention to puzzling aspects of the trial results. Patients taking the lowest of three possible doses saw the greatest benefit, which caused the trial to fall short of the dose-dependent effect the investigators had chosen as its primary endpoint. And some people in the higher dose groups experienced a potentially worrisome side effect—a “confusional state” lasting up to a week after diranersen was administered. | | |
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| | | | Take Action with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) Science Network | | Use your expertise to advance science for the public good. Receive specialized trainings, gain resources for science advocacy, and more—designed for experts like you—and be part of UCS’ Science Rising initiative to protect science and democracy. | |
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| | | Protostar |  | | photo courtesy of erik bakkeren |
| | | Erik Bakkeren | Assistant Professor, University of Calgary
Bakkeren, E. Ecology of the microbiome. Science 393, 49 (2026). 10.1126/science.aej2365 |
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| Going into college, microbiology was the last thing that Erik Bakkeren wanted to study. Chalk it up to teenage angst: Both of his parents were microbiologists. His act of rebellion was to study theoretical physics, but he lasted only a semester before a project observing how apples browned in different conditions piqued his interest. “That was enough to get me interested in biology again,” he says.
After researching fungal pathogens as an undergraduate, Bakkeren studied disease caused by Salmonella bacteria while obtaining his Master’s and Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. There in Wolf-Dietrich Hardt’s lab, Bakkeren’s work focused on how the relationship between the pathogen and its host shaped the spread of antimicrobial resistance. But Bakkeren realized that something was missing from the equation.
“In the mouse models we were using, we were often ignoring the rest of the species that colonized the gut,” he says. “That got me really interested in what those microbes are actually doing.”
As a postdoctoral fellow in Kevin Foster’s lab at the University of Oxford, Bakkeren began to study pathogens in the context of the entire gut microbiome’s ecology, examining how the presence of individual microbes and the diversity of the community as a whole impact resistance to infection. He discovered that competition—both indirect for shared food resources and direct through chemical weaponry—is a crucial force shaping whether or not pathogens can become established in the gut. Applying this ecological principle, Bakkeren has engineered microbes reliant upon particular nutrients that can target pathogens through their microbial weaponry, offering an intriguing new approach to combat pathogens that do not respond to traditional antimicrobials.
For an essay chronicling his work, Bakkeren, now an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, was recently named a runner up for the NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize. ScienceAdviser recently spoke with him about his work on the gut microbiome; below is that conversation, edited for clarity.
How did you discover the relationship between microbiome diversity and its ability to protect against pathogens?
We wanted to understand why there seems to be a general rule that when you have a diverse microbiome, it’s more protective against infectious disease than a non-diverse one. To test this, we started with individual species and observed how protective they were. Then, we compared that to a large community, then broke that community up into two, three, five or 10 different species to see when this rule started to break down. We found that individual species can be important, but only in the context of others.
With that, we could see what these protective communities have in common. We realized that it can be quite simple: If you look at the overlap in the nutrient requirements of a community compared to a pathogen, you can start to predict which microbiomes are protective and which are not.
How did you use this knowledge to remove pathogens that had already become established in the microbiome?
In the previous experiments, we were only thinking about competition for nutrients, but there’s a whole different form of competition by which microbes compete: They have all these bacterial weapons and crazy toxins that they can use to eliminate each other.
We started thinking about experiments like little bacterial fight clubs, where you would put two individual microbes together and see who wins and by which strategy. We realized that these weapons can be really potent, but it depends on the context. So, then we asked if you add a new microbe into a microbiome to get rid of an established pathogen, what would it take for the new microbe to kill the pathogen?
We realized that the only way this works is if there’s differences in the nutrients the new microbe and the rest of the community can consume. That ties back to the previous project: If a therapeutic strain with a pathogen-targeting weapon can consume a nutrient that no other microbe in the community can use, you can get it to grow and then use its weapon to kill the pathogen once it has grown to a sufficient abundance.
This pieced together two things that were disparate at the time: the ideas of collective nutrient overlap and bacterial fight clubs. When you combine them, we realize that you can powerfully engineer a microbiome.
What are the challenges to translating these findings into clinical applications?
The challenge is that human microbiomes are so complex and variable. Our simple rules sound great, but in practice, there’s little opportunity to find a nutrient that only a species you want to introduce can use in such a complex microbiome. Still, we think this could potentially be useful when the microbiome is disrupted, like after a course of antibiotics or a diet shift. If you can predict how that landscape changes, it might give you a window of opportunity to introduce microbes with pathogen-targeting weapons.
Another approach is to potentially try to engineer microbes that can use nutrients that no other species can use, and in turn supplement those nutrients. But that comes with a lot of challenges as well, including identifying a rare nutrient and then in turn engineering potentially complex metabolic pathways in your therapeutic microbe.
Additionally, a major challenge is figuring out the relationships between the types of metabolism that microbes have and the nutrients available in the gut system. It’s not trivial to know which nutrients are available at all times, so we need to work more to figure out what is available and how that relates to what each microbe can use. If we can predict all that, then we could much more accurately engineer microbiomes to both block pathogens from growing and eliminating them.
What are the next steps for your research?
These ideas open opportunities to engineer microbiomes for a lot of different applications. So far, we have thought about how to deal with “low-hanging fruit” microbes—pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli. These are problematic species, and we are still working on the best solutions to manage them, but in principle, you can use the same ideas to target other groups of microbes that predispose you to colorectal cancer or other diseases. We’re therefore also thinking about how we can apply these same ideas of niche competition to other disease systems. | |
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| Synthetic snips | | With the help of artificial intelligence, scientists have designed synthetic CRISPR enzymes—which cut through DNA like a pair of molecular scissors—that edit the genome more efficiently than their naturally occurring counterparts. | | Science Paper | Read more at Nature | |
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| Dangerous beauty | | Flowerhead cichlids, ornamental aquarium fish prized for their vibrant color and prominent head humps, are believed to have escaped into Lake Sampaloc in the Philippines. These human-bred hybrids may pose a threat to native species, and scientists have also raised concerns about parasites capable of infecting humans. | | Read more at The Guardian | |
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| Warrior princess | | The skeletons of 4000-year-old mummified Egyptian princesses suggest the daggers, bows, and other weapons buried with them weren’t just for show. The royal women’s bodies showed evidence of healed traumatic injuries, enlarged forearm bones, and other signs of intensive martial activities. “These princesses were not leading sedentary lives of luxury,” the lead study author said. “They were well-conditioned athletes whose bodies were hardened by the same skilled force and disciplined movement as the men of their time.” | | Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology Paper | Read more at Science News | |
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| | Sometimes, the most useful thing to do is not to stop the tears, but to notice what they might be telling us about a person—and about the work lives we share. | | CAREERS | 16 july 2026 | Gavin Schwarz | |
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