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| 31 August 2026 | | In today’s Logbook, News from Science Contributing Correspondent Kai Kupferschmidt reflects on how conversations with chatbots are changing. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including some helpful narwhals and superfish. | |
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| Earth Science | ScienceINsider | | Unraveling a disaster | Last week, a devastating flood in Tibet and Nepal claimed the lives of over 900 people, left more than 4000 others missing, and ravaged towns and hydropower plants along the Lhenda Khola river. Hundreds of scientists around the world collaborated to piece together the terrifying chain of events.
At first, reports from the U.S. Geological Survey showed the event might have been a magnitude 4.4 earthquake, which could have shaken rocks and ice loose in a landslide. But when researchers dug into the seismic data, they found no sign of the quick, intense seismic jolt of a quake, but the low-frequency, prolonged rumbles of a giant magnitude 5.7 landslide.
Cloudy satellite imagery of a distinctive split in a glacier 5200 meters above sea level then sparked hypotheses that the landslide was actually a glacial collapse, triggered by meltwater forming between the mountain and the glacier attached to it. But again, that first explanation wasn’t necessarily the full story: Cloud-free satellite images later that day revealed that hundreds of millions of tons of mountain also broke off in the landslide, triggering a flow of ice, rock, and debris that raced along at up to 150 kilometers per hour.
It’s not yet clear where all the water in the flood came from, though some researchers think old ice on the valley floor may have been pulverized, melted, and incorporated into the flow. Regardless of its exact source, “the magnitude of this event is mindboggling,” geomorphologist Kristen Cook, who has been piecing together the story of events, told ScienceAdviser. “It’s really difficult to see the destruction.” | | |
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| Oceanography | Science Advances | | Helpful narwhals map the ocean for scientists |  | | A CTD sensor on the back of a narwhal Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen | The waters in the narrow fjords of eastern Greenland are tough to study. When there’s thick sea ice, it is tricky to maneuver research boats, and icebergs are a constant danger. Plus, it’s simply expensive to buy time on polar vessels—to do fine-scale conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) mapping of the complex network of currents in the area would require an inordinate amount of funding. Unless, of course, you can convince a native of those waters to do it for you.
To gather data that they couldn’t gather themselves, researchers enlisted a group of local hunters from the town of Ittoqqortoormiit to help them catch narwhals, so they could get close enough to attach electronic tags that conduct CTD measurements. Why narwhals, you might ask? “They are known to perform uniquely deep dives (1500–2000 meter depth) in predictable areas, often under thick sea ice,” explained glaciologist Tom Chudley for The Conversation. “These almost perfectly match the movements that scientists need.”
By tagging six individuals in this manner, the team obtained 2060 CTD profiles from the target study area, which revealed “an influx of warm Atlantic water that is much more pronounced than we believed before ,” co-author Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen told Kevin McLean in the most recent episode of the Science Podcast. “If you go below 200 meters … you can see that it’s completely dominated by Atlantic water.”
“This is the water that helps melt the glaciers,” noted Heide-Jørgensen in a statement. “We show how the warm water can contribute to accelerating the rate at which glaciers lose ice.” | | Listen to the Science Podcast | | |
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| Conservation | News from Science | | To doom invasive fish, scientists are breeding ‘supermales’ | Many native fishes struggle to compete with invasive species such as brook trout. So, it might seem strange that biologists, in a bid to help the natives, are stocking rivers with even more hatchery-raised trout. But these new fish have a genetic quirk designed to doom the population.
For decades, the primary weapons used to battle invasive fish have been poisons and electrofishing, which uses an electric current to stun fish en masse, so workers can remove unwanted individuals as they float to the surface. However, toxins kill both native and invasive fish, while electrofishing doesn’t work well on larger water bodies—and sometimes the fish adapt.
In 2008, researchers at Idaho Fish and Game decided to breed “supermale” brook trout. Sometimes called Trojan YY males, these fish have two Y chromosomes instead of one. When supermales mate with female wild trout, the offspring are all male—eventually producing a population that consists only of elderly bachelors.
They followed a protocol from the aquaculture industry, and 8 years later, they were able to start testing supermales in central Idaho. The supermales soon outnumbered wild males. This July, the team reported genetic evidence that the supermales had eradicated brook trout from two streams in Idaho. “It’s a tool that will become very useful,” predicted conservation geneticist Thaïs Bernos, who was not involved.
Other researchers are now developing supermales to combat an array of invasive fishes, such as common carp, that pose a serious threat to native species. | | |
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| | | | Where will organoids be in 2031? | | Join experts from academia and industry for a forward-looking discussion on where organoids and other advanced 3D cell models are headed—and what it will take to realize their full potential. | |
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| | | Logbook |  | | ADRIA VOLTA | | Let’s chat, bot | | Kai Kupferschmidt, Contributing Correspondent, News from Science | I recently wrote a story about an interesting aspect of chatbots: how good they have become at persuading people. At least, in experiments in which people are paid to have an online conversation, chatbots do better at changing people’s minds on controversial issues than even world-class debaters. For some people I spoke to, that raises big concerns about how this persuasive power might be used—and that is what my story focuses on.
But while researching the story, I read dozens and dozens of transcripts of conversations between humans and chatbots, and one of the things that struck me was just how differently people interact with them. In one study, in which chatbots were tasked with persuading people out of conspiracy theories, one participant wrote to the chatbot: “There is an emotional aspect you do not possess, a gut feeling that often leads humans to truth.” Other participants in the same study anthropomorphized the chatbot, chastising it as gullible or naive, or argued that it was a helpless tool that had simply been fed information by the mainstream media or the government. “I was astounded by how many people talked about the training data,” said researcher Claire Wardle, who, together with colleagues, has done an in-depth analysis of the transcripts.
Much of the research (and most of my reporting) has focused on probing the capabilities of AI. But reading all those chats made me think about the other side of the equation: all the ways that humans react, respond, and resist when chatting with a large language model. Just as the capabilities of these machines are evolving rapidly, so is the way humans view and interact with them.
It reminded me of what digital forensics expert Hany Farid told me earlier this year, when I visited him in Berkeley for a profile. He still says please and thank you when chatting with a bot, he told me. After all, the machines might remember the little kindness, if they ever took over. | |
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| Toxic water, toxic air | | Toxic algal blooms can be devastating for life in the water. Unfortunately, “What happens in the water doesn’t stay in the water,” one expert explained. Now, researchers are racing to understand the health implications of the blooms’ toxins going airborne. | | Read more at C&EN | |
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| Sssso many more sssssoundsss | | Outside of snake hisses, the sounds of reptiles have fallen largely on deaf ears. “There are hundreds of reptile species, and most of them are not studied at all,” one behavioral biologist noted. But that’s starting to change, and researchers studying vocalizations in these scaly species are finally beginning “to better understand what they’re saying.” | | Read more at Knowable Magazine | |
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| Are AIs as good as they seem at drug discovery? | | Benchmark datasets are used to rank AIs when it comes to drug discovery. But the datasets themselves aren’t stellar, according to a recent analysis—many contain improper labels or the same molecules as in the AI’s training data, a phenomenon known as test-train leakage. “If you have data leak, training and test that are similar or duplicated, the performance will become much better than it actually is,” one expert explained. | | Chemical Science Paper | Read more at Chemistry World | |
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| | Consumer fuel subsidies are the worst kind of energy policy. | | EDITORIAL | 27 August 2026 | Paasha Mahdavi and Michael L. Ross | | . | |
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