Nautilus Magazine

06/01/2026

There’s a Far Side cartoon depicting a bunch of chickens splayed out flat on the ground unable to move, with a sign over them reading “Boneless Chicken Ranch.” According to research recently published in Science China Life Sciences, geneticists have brought the panel to life—using carp.

Grass carp are some of the most popular fish farmed across the globe, but for different reasons. In the United States and Europe, non-breeding triploid varieties are used to keep aquatic plant growth from choking waterways. In Asia, however, they’re farmed for food. Unfortunately, the 118 needle-like bones lining their bodies make the species a bit of a chore to eat, and can also throw 118 tiny wrenches into the processing pipeline.

That’s why researchers from China’s Huazhong Agricultural University set out to create grass carp without any bones. By editing the gene runx2b, crucial for the development of bones, they were able to establish a stable population of grass carp without any of the annoying bones.

Of course, tinkering with genes comes with consequences. To find out if the fish were otherwise fine, the researchers subjected them to a battery of tests. Micro-CT scans showed no other major skeletal deformities or changes to the proportion of fat or muscle tissue volume. Similarly, a chemical analysis showed no significant differences in moisture, protein, fat, amino acids, sugars, collagen, or other nutrients, compared to wild grass carp. However they did find the boneless carp had less calcium in their muscles and more potassium, most likely related to the role bones play in balancing minerals in their bodies.

Basically, boneless carp could one day be coming to a grocery store near you—or at least a grocery store near those in Asia.

06/01/2026

Faith that science will conquer aging is common in Silicon Valley these days. In recent years, public institutions like the National Institutes of Health have been slow to commit any more than a token of their overall budgets to aging research. It is the private funders with big dreams who are galvanizing the field.

https://nautil.us/the-immortality-hype-235946?

Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

06/01/2026

From the keen hearing of owls to the echolocating sonar of dolphins, a suite of animal senses have evolved to support their particular lifestyles. But sensory systems are energetically expensive, so an animal isn’t likely to have more than it needs. Case in point: the eyeless cave fish that spends its entire life in dark Mexican caves.

Parasitic flies that attack deer, on the other hand, rely on sight to find a suitable host. If you’ve ever suffered a painful bite from one of these “deer keds,” you know all-too-well that they feed on the blood of deer and other mammals. In fact, once they’ve found their host, deer keds shed their wings and spend the rest of their lives on it—so much so that a study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that they undergo a radical shift in sensory priorities after they’ve found their new home.

“Some blood-feeding flies rely heavily on vision, while others live permanently on hosts and have little need for it,” explained study author Roger Santer, biologist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, in a press release. “Deer keds are especially interesting because they switch between these two lifestyles.”

Santer and co-authors from the United Kingdom and Italy sampled deer keds (Lipoptena andaluciensis) from woodland edges in Tuscany. Winged keds in the host-finding stage were captured from vegetation, researchers’ clothing, or other perches, while keds already enjoying a good bloody meal were collected from recent hunting kills. Once preserved, the keds’ heads were removed and sampled for RNA to see which genes were expressed in their brains before and after landing on their hosts.

The activity of five genes related to vision, or opsin genes, dropped to about half in keds that had settled on a host, suggesting reduced use of vision. No single aspect of vision was eliminated, but decreased opsin expression, according to the study authors, makes for reduced sensitivity to light. It makes sense: Once a ked has found its host, there’s likely less need to see and more physiological incentive to devote resources to other functions. “We think the fly might be sacrificing sight to conserve energy for functions such as digestion and reproduction,” explained Santer.

An appetite for blood so strong that it’s blinding.

06/01/2026

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

"Today, 60 percent of my short-term memory can be gone in 30 seconds. I often don’t recognize friends, including, on two occasions, my wife. I get lost in familiar places, fly into inexorable rages, put my keys and cellphone in the refrigerator, my laptop in the microwave, and wash business cards in the dishwasher simply because they are dirty."

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

06/01/2026

As an inquisitive species, humans are interested in figuring out where we came from. Paleontological evidence has shown that the great ape lineage of “hominoids,” which includes gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and us, diverged from monkeys more than 25 million years ago. But when modern apes took their own evolutionary path has remained murky.

To date, our focus has been East Africa (namely, Kenya and Uganda), where most of the oldest great ape fossils have been found. That might have been misguided, though, as paleontologists from Egypt and the United States recently discovered a lower jawbone of an ape in rock deposits called Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt, a finding they just published in a new paper in Science.

The jawbone’s unique combination of dental traits— “large canine and third lower premolar relative to posterior molar size-length, relatively low-crowned and highly crenulate molars, etc.”—merited a new genus and species. Dubbed Masripithecus moghraensis (“Egyptian ape from Moghra”), the ancient ape dates to about 17 or 18 million years ago, or the Early Miocene.

“[The] findings on Masripithecus confirm that paleontologists might have been looking for crown-hominoid ancestors in the wrong place,” paleontologists David Alba and Júlia Arias-Martorell wrote in a related Perspective.

To figure out where M. moghraensis fits into the family tree of humans, lead study author Shorouq F. Al-Ashqar from Mansoura University and colleagues modeled its anatomy and age relative to other known fossil ancestors. It looks to be the closest known relative of the lineage that spawned modern apes, including humans, closer even than the species found in East Africa.

During the Early Miocene, Afro-Arabia was connected to Eurasia as their continental plates drifted together, creating the potential for migration between the continents. Either way, by the Middle Miocene, apes were geographically widespread and diverse beyond Africa. Indeed, concluded the study authors, “hominoid populations in northeastern Afro-Arabia were geographically and ecologically best positioned to disperse into Eurasia as soon as marine barriers diminished.”

Based on their models, the researchers propose a migration of apes from Egypt, skirting northward around what is now the Red Sea, then dispersing westward into Europe and eastward into the Middle East.

Whatever the route, we may all have deeper Egyptian roots than we ever imagined.

06/01/2026

All living things eventually die. But some of us take a little bit longer to say goodbye, particularly certain nonhuman and ocean-dwelling members of the animal kingdom. Many of these creatures continue celebrating birthdays well past the 200-year mark, while others rarely suffer from the diseases of aging that humans tend to accumulate: cancerous cells, degenerated brains, diseased hearts. Scientists have been studying long-lived creatures for decades to divine their secrets, hoping that they might use what they find to extend human lives. Here are a few of the longest lasting creatures on Earth, what we know about how they pull it off, and whether any potential human applications exist.

Longevity Secrets of the Animal Kingdom: These animals beat the odds and cheat death longer than most

06/01/2026

"Historians of science have long debated both the typical shape of a scientist’s output curve and the reasons for its particular slopes, traced throughout the arc of a career in research. Creativity declines with age. Or not. Young scientists are more likely to crack open a field and explore uncharted territory. Older researchers acquire the necessary experience and knowledge necessary to shift paradigms and point inquiry in new directions. And so on."

Is This Why Science Advances One Funeral at a Time? As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work.

05/31/2026

In 1914, a bird named Martha, aged 29, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was the last of the passenger pigeons. In the mid 1800s, flocks of these birds numbered in the billions. But by the 1890s, they had almost entirely disappeared due to intense commercial hunting and habitat loss. ⁠
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The extinction of the passenger pigeon was a transformative loss. Bird lovers and hunters of the time began to realize it wasn’t the only bird in trouble. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many birds were in crisis: long-billed curlews, red knots, greater and lesser yellowlegs. Soon an unlikely coalition of sportsmen, ornithologists, wardens, artists, and politicians came together to put conservationist protections in place.⁠
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This is the story that James McCommons, a long-time environmental and travel journalist, tells in his new book The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds. But first he describes all of the gruesome ways these birds were done in: skinned and blown to bits, eggs pocketed, specimens displayed in cabinets, feathers plucked for hats. McCommons stumbled upon his story while working on an earlier book, and saw its relevance to our current predicament. A few years ago, studies began to roll in that pointed once again to vast losses in North America: A third of birds had vanished. McCommons wanted to inspire hope that we could pull off another miracle of conservation.⁠
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Nautilus recently spoke with McCommons about the wars between sportsmen and subsistence bird hunters that broke out in the swamps, the woman who created the first bird of prey refuge, and what gives him hope for bird conservation today. ⁠
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Read the full conversation, link in comments.

05/31/2026

Psychedelic mushrooms have attracted quite a bit of interest from researchers lately. Recent research has hinted both at the effectiveness of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms, in treating clinical depression and at the ways that the hallucinogenic compound works to temporarily remodel the human brain.

But exactly how psilocybin wields its mind-altering magic on a neural level remains mysterious. Researchers in December of last year co-opted defanged rabies viruses to help map the changes that the psychedelic molecule makes in mouse brains.

They suggest that psilocybin works by weakening feedback loops that typically fuel negative thinking in a brain’s outer layer and by increasing the connectivity of brain circuits that translate sensory perception into action. The international team of scientists from China, Hong Kong, and the United States recently published their findings in Cell.

Psilocybin administered to mice seemed to affect much of the rodents’ brains. “This is really looking at brain-wide changes,” said Cornell University biomedical engineer and co-author Alex Kwan, in a statement. “That’s a scale that we have not worked at before. A lot of times, we’re focusing on a small part of the neural circuit.”

Kwan and his colleagues constructed that brain wide map by hooking psilocybin to two viruses, one of which was a rabies virus that had been genetically engineered to only infect and spread to designated neurons in the mouses’ brains. Capitalizing on the rabies virus’s ability to jump across neuronal synapses—part of why the pathogen is so deadly in nature—the team could trace the march of psilocybin across the brain as it led to neuronal changes that introduced more synapses into the organ.

The authors admit that such rabies tracing does have limitations. The virus could spread to neighboring neurons using a non-synaptic route, they wrote, and of course a mouse brain is very different from that of a human.

But the findings do offer tantalizing clues, and potentially useful therapeutic insights, into how psilocybin changes brains.

05/31/2026

Swimming through a flooded underground cave littered with bones might sound like a nightmare, but for paleontologists at the University of Texas the aquatic spelunking trip uncovered a rich cache of fossils left by prehistoric megafauna.

“There were fossils everywhere, just everywhere, in a way that I haven’t seen in any other cave,” John Moretti said in a statement. “It was just bones all over the floor.”

Moretti, along with his colleague John Young, strapped on goggles and snorkels to venture into the watery cave six times to hunt for fossils, detailing their findings in the journal Quaternary Research. There, they discovered bones from giant tortoises, saber-tooth cats, camels, ground sloths, mastodons, and pampatheres—massive armadillos that grew to the size of lions.

Unfortunately, what made the fossil hunt relatively easy—the bones were just lying in the stream bed, ripe for the picking—also made dating them difficult. Without encasing material to study, the researchers were left to piece together their ages from other clues.

While the ground sloth and mastodon lived in forests, the giant tortoise and humongous armadillos required warmer temperatures. Because of this, researchers say the bones were likely from an interglacial period that occurred 100,000 years ago, when a relatively warm period offered a respite from frigid Ice Age temperatures. Despite excavations in the area for almost a century, this is the first time these fossils have been found in the area.

“This site is showing us something different, and that’s really important because of all the work that’s been done in this region,” Moretti said. “If it is interglacial in age, it’s a new window into the past and into a landscape, environment, and animal community that we haven’t observed in this part of Texas before.”

The site of this particular find, Bender’s Cave in Comal County near San Antonio, was located on private property, and Moretti said it’s important to have cooperation from local landowners for future finds. “These connections and partnerships make possible a lot of the natural science that gets done in Texas,” he explained. “It takes contributions from everyone—not just scientists at universities—to learn about the natural world we live in and depend on.”

Central Texas is filled with limestone caves like this one, carved by erosion over millenia, and there could be even more treasure troves of prehistoric fossils just waiting to be found. All it takes is a little cooperation, and of course, the courage to venture into a dark, watery tunnel