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"Carry on, my costly son."

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).

9 September 2026

Today’s Visualized investigates a strange shape at Saturn’s south pole. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including why scientists in China blew up a pumpkin patch and evidence that baby boys make childbirth harder.

geology | News from Science

China peers deep into its geological past

In a pumpkin patch in southwestern China, scientists recently set off 500 kilograms of dynamite to send seismic waves deep into the crust. The experiment is part of SinoProbe II, a $1 billion effort to map China’s deep geology at unprecedented scale. Early results from the seismic survey have revealed a structure that researchers interpret as the buried boundary between two ancient continental blocks. If confirmed, the finding could help resolve competing ideas about how South China formed hundreds of millions of years ago.

But the survey is just one piece of a massive project. In Tibet, dense networks of seismometers will probe how the Indian plate is being torn and deformed beneath the plateau. And in northern China, researchers are looking for remnants of a vanished continental root. The work could also guide the search for critical minerals and other resources.

SinoProbe II has even inspired a more ambitious idea: Earth CT, a proposed international effort to combine geophysical surveys from around the world. But making it work would require something harder than deploying instruments: getting countries to share data.

Read the full story

Archaeology | news from Science

Drawing women into prehistory

In modern depictions of the Paleolithic era—a time stretching from the appearance of the first humans to the end of the last ice age—male hunters often chase mammoths and woolly rhinos across the frozen steppes of Eurasia. But prehistoric art paints a different picture: The vast majority of examples depict women, suggesting the prehistoric past operated under very different rules than Western societies today.

Science correspondent Andrew Curry spoke with illustrator Ulli Lust, whose work is countering ice age gender myths. Her book, Die Frau als Mensch (“Early Man was a Woman”), explores women’s underappreciated role in prehistory. It won the prize for best German-language nonfiction book earlier this year, the first time a comic has ever won the award.

Read the Q+A

evolutionary anthropolgy | News from Science

Carry on, my costly son

Every day, about 700 people die giving birth around the world. A leading cause is obstructed labor, often due to the baby’s head exceeding the size of the birth canal. Even successful births require fetal acrobatics to navigate the narrow path from womb to world: Babies typically enter the pelvis sideways, twist, and rotate as they emerge. Anthropologists have long assumed such perilous births evolved through a tug-of-war between large brains and upright walking, which ultimately has favored a pelvis that’s scrunched front to back.

But recent studies have questioned the simplicity of this explanation—and whether the phenomenon, known as the obstetrical dilemma, is even unique to humans. Now, a new study out in The Anatomical Record adds another wrinkle to the dilemma: fetal sex.

Reviewing birth data for 140 species, the authors argue that sons are more difficult to birth than daughters for many mammals, including humans and our ancient ancestors. The authors found this pattern in five domesticated animals: cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats, and a breed of American racehorse. That’s also the case in captive antelope and Asian elephants. The pattern holds in cattle and sheep, even when controlling for birth weight, suggesting in addition to sheer size, factors such as sex differences in fetal shape and behavior could contribute to males causing more trouble during birth.

This added risk of this phenomenon, which the researchers dubbed the “costly son” hypothesis, may be offset by an evolutionary reward: Bigger male babies grow into bigger male adults, who tend to have more grandbabies, meaning more of that mother’s genes are passed down.

Read the Full Story

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visualized

This projection of Saturn’s southern hemisphere, obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, illustrates the strange decagonal shape at the planet’s pole. A. Sánchez-Lavega/Basque Country University, EHU/NASA/ESA

In the early 1980s, scientists spotted a strange, six-sided shape above Saturn’s north pole. The hexagon, which was made of gas, turned out to be an atmospheric wave created as different currents swirled around the planet. Now, 40 years later, an even odder shape has popped up in observations of Saturn’s opposite pole: a decagon.

Scientists first noticed the 10-sided shape in images from the Hubble Space Telescope taken between 2023 and 2024. The feature moves eastward at 2.5 meters per second and measures 13,000 kilometers across, making it wider than Earth and a bit bigger and more mobile than the hexagon at Saturn’s north pole. But researchers can’t tell when the feature first developed, because the planet’s south pole had been tilted away from Earth from 2012 to 2023, and the Cassini spacecraft orbiting the planet plummeted into its atmosphere in 2017.

Early observations show that the south pole decagon changes more than the north pole hexagon does. It might have been triggered by a nearby storm, and could potentially reveal details about Saturn’s deeper atmosphere, researchers reported last week in Science Advances. More information should come later this month, when Hubble is due to observe the planet again.

“We’ll be watching it, and we’ll go from there,” study co-author Amy Simon told Science News.

Read the Paper

Et Cetera

Droves of doves

This past spring, conservationists released 30 turtle doves—a species on the verge of extinction in the United Kingdom—into South Downs National Park. The attempt to boost population numbers appears to be showing some early signs of success, with at least one newly released female returning to the enclosure to lay eggs.

Read more at New Scientist

The little photon that could

In 2022, scientists detected a strange, energy-dense photon that, according to the rules of standard physics, never should have made it to Earth. Now, two physicists argue that hypothetical, ultralight particles called axion-like particles could have helped the cosmic traveler evade destruction.

Physical Review Letters Paper | Read more at Scientific American

The Ozempic era could recalibrate power and profit across the food, pharmaceutical, and wellness industries in ways that suppress access to both GLP-1s and healthier food environments.

EDITORIAL | 24 March 2026 | Luc Hagenaars and Laura Schmidt

Last but not least

I’ve always found slime molds to be cool, if a little creepy, but it never occurred to me to wonder if they could be considered “intelligent”—or that the question would turn out to be so controversial.

Phie Jacobs, General Assignment Reporter, Science

With contributions from Eric Hand, Hannah Richter, and Michael Price

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