| 9 July 2026 | | Today’s Protostar is Taichi Suzuki, whose work understanding how people and their gut microbiomes coevolve made him a runner up for the 2026 NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how octopuses are weird all the way down to their molecules and how science might help spot nuclear weapons in orbit. | |
|
|
| Materials Science | Science ADvances | | Built to last | We all know Rome wasn’t built in a day—and its buildings certainly haven’t broken down in one, either. Roman concrete is one of the toughest ancient building materials, and scientists wanted to learn its tricks to help develop more durable, low-emissions building blocks.
Researchers turned to nearly 2000-year-old concrete from a latrine in an emperor’s retreat called Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, Italy. They used high-resolution imaging to determine which minerals were present in the ancient toilet, and how they bonded together. The sample revealed black volcanic rock, lime, and strengthening compounds called pozzolans, all of which were common in Roman structures.
But when looking at tiny features, such as the rocks’ pores and rings of new minerals that formed around older minerals, the researchers determined that a crucial method of mechanical support and crack prevention came from the formation of dense layers of calcite . Calcite also filled small holes within the concrete’s structure, making it stronger and preventing water from seeping in. “Over time,” explained the authors, “the continual growth of calcite creates a self-healing effect, closing cracks and mitigating further damage caused by environmental stresses or mechanical loads.” If materials scientists can apply the principle to modern building materials, we may have an ancient bathroom to thank! | | |
|
|
| Molecular Biology | News from Science | | Octopus RNA breaks the rules to build better proteins |  | | Meticulous molecular machinery allows octopuses to produce proteins with few errors, even when their RNA instructions are unclear. Anik Grearson | Octopuses are among the strangest creatures on Earth—right down to their molecules. New research has found that octopuses of a certain lineage have a mutation not seen in any other organism that makes their cellular machinery extremely accurate at creating proteins. As a result, their proteins are less likely to form toxic clumps.
The evolutionary innovation seems to have appeared around the same time that octopuses began rapidly developing large nervous systems and new, complex behaviors that require big brains—though some researchers point out there’s no direct evidence yet to suggest these developments are linked.
The team serendipitously discovered a change in the octopus gene encoding ribosomal RNA (rRNA), which is part of the cellular machinery that translates mRNA messages into proteins. This region of the rRNA sequence is identical in every other known organism, from humans to bacteria. But in octopuses, the mutation causes the rRNA to break into two fragments and occurs right at a crucial spot where the rRNA matches the right amino acid to the right genetic instruction. Ribosomes with this break made about 50% fewer errors than other species’ ribosomes when incorporating amino acids into a protein.
The researchers also discovered that the rRNA break seems to help octopus ribosomes accurately process mRNA sequences that have been edited prior to translation. The octopus, said senior author Nicholas Bellono, “is a great example of an animal that evolves novelty, but in a different way than we’ve traditionally thought.” | | |
|
|
| Space | News from Science | | Hunting down space nukes | If a hostile state secretly placed a nuclear weapon in space—where it could knock out thousands of satellites with a single blast—how would anyone know? That question has become more urgent in recent years, which got scientists thinking: How could you detect a nuclear weapon that is already in orbit?
Nuclear physicist Areg Danagoulian decided to look for a way to detect nuclear materials from a distance. He noted that a Russian satellite, which the U.S. intelligence officials suspected was a test-run for space-based nukes, was in an unusually high orbit—one that took it through the Van Allen radiation belts, which trap high-energy protons and electrons along Earth’s magnetic field lines. When these protons strike heavy radioactive elements—like the uranium in a nuclear weapon—they would knock neutrons free. In a Nature study published this week, Danagoulian calculated that a neutron detector in a small satellite stationed 4 kilometers away could identify a concealed warhead after about 1 week of observations.
There are other options. For example, a pair of orbiting spacecraft—one emitting x-rays, the other detecting them—could snap an x-ray image of the shape of a nuclear warhead inside a suspect satellite as the duo flew past. Or, a gamma-ray detector could directly capture the distinct radioactive emission of uranium or plutonium. Because those signals are weak, that approach would take hours of observations from just tens of meters away—perhaps too close for comfort.
Even though the ideas have not been tested, studying and developing them could make potential “bad actors” think twice about deploying orbital warheads, said risk expert Mallory Stewart. “It’s showing them, hey, we’re going to figure it out.” | | |
|
|
 | | | Researchers Invited to Apply for ASU–Science Prize for Transformational Impact | | This prize recognizes transformational research that uses innovative methods to identify problems and develop solutions directly influencing policy and decision-making. Winner receives $30K + publication. | |
|
|
|
| | | Protostar |  | | PHOTO: COURTESY OF TAICHI SUZUKI |
| | | Taichi Suzuki | Assistant Professor, Arizona State University
Suziku, T. The missing thriftiness. Science 393, 49 (2026). 10.1126/science.aej2367 |
|
|
| Growing up in Japan, Taichi Suzuki was a classic konchū shōnen—literally, an “insect kid.” He spent hours observing, collecting, and drawing bugs and other wildlife, giving him an enduring appreciation for the natural world and a curiosity for how its parts fit together.
“As you grow up, everyone moves on to more cool things,” he said. “I was the one who stuck with the wonder of nature.”
While Suzuki still enjoys exploring the outside world, his academic work now looks inward. He did not set out to study the gut: As a graduate student at the University of Arizona and the University of California Berkeley, advisor Michael Nachman’s lab explored the genetics of health and evolution. But during the first year of his Ph.D., a rotation in evolutionary biologist Mike Worobey’s lab exposed Suzuki to the relationship between gut bacteria and obesity. He began to wonder whether some health issues that were difficult to explain through genetics alone may arise from the microbiome.
It would help to explain a lot. For decades, Suzuki explained, scientists have speculated that the rise of metabolic diseases like diabetes and obesity may be linked to genes that once helped our ancestors store fat when food was scarce but have proved harmful now that calories are abundant. But as neat as this “thrifty gene hypothesis” sounds, results have been complex. “When we look for these genes that make us extract energy more efficiently, we’re missing what alleles, what genetic loci can explain this complex phenotype,” Suzuki said. “I’m trying to frame how microbiomes can maybe explain part of this variation.”
Thus far, Suzuki has found compelling evidence. Through his research on mice and humans, Suzuki has shown that animals living in colder regions have microbiomes associated with obesity, revealing how gut microbes facilitate adaptation to new places. He has also found that humans and their microbiomes evolve together to shape one another’s survival and activity.
Now a professor at Arizona State University, Suzuki was recently named a NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize runner up for his essay summarizing his career to date. ScienceAdviser spoke with him about his research; below is that conversation, edited for brevity.
What connections have you made between the microbiome and health?
Historically, in a colder place, having fat stores must be important. Think about bears: polar bears and grizzlies are bigger than black bears. I was interested in how I could explain these general patterns from the microbiome. As a graduate student, the first thing I did was to look through all the published human microbiome research at the time. I started seeing a signature of obesity-looking microbiomes in colder places compared to warmer places.
I experimentally tested how this might work by comparing mice from Canada with ones from Brazil. People have done fecal transplants showing that certain microbiomes can extract energy more efficiently in lab mice, so I wanted to see if there was a geographic factor. Even with the same lab environment and diet, somehow mice from colder places can still extract more energy from food. They’re bigger, too—almost double the size. Mice from colder places are also more highly active and have a higher metabolic rate. The difference between these mice is only a couple hundred years old since that’s when house mice were brought to the Americas from Europe. So, it’s really recent, but we’re already seeing an adaptation.
How did you demonstrate that animals and their microbiomes evolve together?
To look for these bacteria in the gut that have a shared history with humans, we made phylogenetic trees—a depiction of the genetic relatedness for both the human side and the bacterial side. The bacteria that share history with us have smaller genomes, and they’re bad at living outside the gut. It seems like they evolved to live inside the gut.
So, there are gut bacteria that follow our history. But are they imposing selection on us?
In a really strict sense, to claim coevolution, the partners have to impose selection on one another: The microbiome has to respond to selection from the host and vice versa. But it can be hard to prove this connection. Consider when you breed dogs: You have diversity first, and then you pick for a certain trait. The common explanation will be, if you’re breeding for dogs that are small, the genes that make the dogs small will be selected. But if microbes can also make the dogs small—say, by restricting energy intake—then maybe the bacteria can also explain it.
In this experiment, we kept the host side—the mice genome—constant by using inbred mice that are basically clones. We started with a single microbiome and gave it to these mice that were raised in a sterile environment and are germ-free. After two weeks, we measured their behavior, since we found that is the trait mediated most by the microbiome. We took the feces from low-activity mice and put them into a new set of germ-free mice. You repeat this four times, and you start to see a reduction in behavior.
This is pretty interesting—it’s kind of engineering the microbiome for a desired trait without changing any of the mouse genome. It’s selecting a microbe, and the microbe is mediating the behavior. It’s a coevolution loop.
What are the medical implications of your research?
There’s a whole movement of personalizing medicine because our genomes are different, so [presumably] our requirements are different. It’s reasonable to think maybe we should use ancestry-specific microbiome therapy, too. There’s already a study showing that if you compare commercial probiotics compared with locally sourced ones—the same bacteria, but different strains carrying different genes—the local strain is better for malnutrition. If our genome is expecting certain microbes to be there, that’s something we can customize based on our ancestry.
What I’m currently claiming is that if you look at certain microbiome bacteria, we can kind of predict your genotype even without access to genetic data. But I’m from Japan, and I’m living in Arizona. Do I still have my Japanese microbes, or did some get lost or replaced? Can that predict some health biomarkers? That’s something we’re just starting, but that’s the direction we’re heading: to look for a mismatch and better predict human health. | |
| |
|
| Hopes of dual protection are almost gone(orrhea) | | When researchers were studying gonorrhea almost a decade ago, they found something exciting: People had a 31% reduced risk of infection if they had previously been vaccinated against related bacteria, meningococcal group B, raising hopes that the already available vaccine could help tackle the sexually transmitted infection. But a randomized clinical trial just found no protection from the vaccine in a group of men at high risk of the infection. “Although the outcome of the trial was not what we had hoped for, the study provides valuable insights into the complexity of gonorrhea immunity and vaccine cross‑protection,” one expert said. | | NEJM Paper | Read more at News from Science | |
|
|
| An oceanic break-up | | Our planet is split up into tectonic plates, which shrink along some seams and grow along others. Now, this growth has been observed by scientists: Two sections of crust shifted, moving at least 2 meters; follow up work revealed that some 160 million cubic meters of lava spilled out from the split. “We have been very lucky to have had all these instruments set up when it happened,” said the lead author of the study. “But also we are lucky because these big piles of lava outpoured 1 or 2 kilometers away from our instruments, so we didn’t lose any data.” | | Nature Paper | Read more at The New York Times | |
|
|
| A sea change in El Niño? | | By sprinkling seawater into the atmosphere, scientists can seed the formation of clouds, a phenomenon known as marine cloud brightening. A modeling study suggests this geoengineering technique could put a wet blanket on the formation of a super El Niño. “You can basically stop the dominoes from falling early when you do marine cloud brightening,” one of the researchers said—but some experts worry about unintended consequences. | | Science Advances Paper | Read more at New Scientist | |
|
|
| | There is no world in which this is not utterly remarkable. | | X POST | 5 July 2026 | Euan Ashley | | The sentiment above is Ashley’s final thought in an X thread about having the AI Claude analyze his genome, a process that only took about half an hour and cost around $5. | |
| |
|
| Last but not least | | I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve corrected fully grown adults—let alone children—about the myth that so-called daddy long-legs (harvestmen) are the most venomous spider in the world, but simply have fangs too short to hurt us. So I applaud science journalist Jason Bittel for finally setting the record straight on these wonderful creatures (though not for the mental image of diving into a pool of them and being tickled to death). |  | Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser
With contributions from Hannah Richter, Sara Reardon, Daniel Clery, Phie Jacobs, and Benjamin Hack
Do you have a burning science question you can’t seem to find a good answer for? Submit it to Ask Science! Selected questions will receive responses from Science editors right here in ScienceAdviser. | | Have feedback on this newsletter? Let us know what you think using this form or drop us a note at ScienceAdviser@aaas.org.
Want more? Catch up on past issues of ScienceAdviser.
If you were forwarded this newsletter by a friend, you can subscribe for free here. | | | To ensure ScienceAdviser lands in your inbox, consider taking a moment to add scienceadviser@aaas.sciencepubs.org as a trusted sender or contact in your email client. These instructions provide more information on whitelisting ScienceAdviser based on email client. | |
|
|
|
|
Comments
Post a Comment