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10 April 2026 |
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Today’s Protostar is Fábio Rosa, winner of the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including Yellowstone’s strange plumbing and an ape war. |
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Volcanology | Science |
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Strange plumbing in the West |
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Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring is located in the Midway Geyser Basin within a massive caldera. These features point to an underlying magma reservoir in Earth’s crust. AVALON/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES |
Every year, millions of people flock to Yellowstone National Park, one of the most volcanically active places in the United States. Keeping visitors safe depends on how well hazard managers can forecast the region’s rumblings. New research published in Science rewrites our understanding of just what drives Yellowstone’s volcanic activity.
Researchers know Yellowstone sits atop a magma reservoir—a pool of gooey rock about 4 kilometers beneath the surface. For years, it’s been thought that the reservoir gets its heat from a mantle plume, a rising pillar of molten earth. But imaging the plumelike areas at Yellowstone has revealed them to be weaker than those associated with plumes under volcanoes elsewhere in the world.
A team ran complex 3D models of the magma underneath Yellowstone to find that a centralized mantle plume isn’t needed to build the magma reservoir. Instead, excess heat and decompression in the upper mantle can be enough to generate the molten rock, they propose. And a vast vertical network of plumbing helps transport that magma closer to the surface, where it may one day erupt again.
“The finding is crucial for evaluating hazards at the Yellowstone volcanic system and other similar volcanic systems around the world,” wrote seismologist Jamie Farrell in a related Perspective. |
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read the Science paper |
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Animal Behavior | News from Science |
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Chimpanzee civil war sheds light on the biology of warfare |
Chimpanzees, like humans, routinely fight, and sometimes even kill each other. But unlike us, their communities rarely split into two groups and launch a civil war. By observing a chimp community in Uganda for 30 years, the researchers behind a new Science study reveal how friends turned into foes without shortages of food or cultural rifts dividing them.
More than 200 chimps in a densely forested Kibale region called Ngogo lived peacefully between 1995, when researchers first started tracking their movements and behaviors, and 2015. Although they separated into so-called Central and Western groups, the chimps frequently intermingled, with many cross-group matings. But following the rapid death of five adult males who apparently served as peacekeepers, the Western group turned against the Central one. Over 6 years, males in the Western group killed seven adult males and 17 infants in the Central group. Even though they were larger in number, the Central group males curiously never ganged up to kill any of the Western chimps.
The civil war—only the second one ever documented in wild chimps—both clarifies motivations for human warfare and spotlights how we differ from one of our closest relatives. “You do not need ideology to generate hostilities
,” said Richard Wrangham, who has studied wild chimps for more than 50 years. “The motivations for warfare are much more concerned with our biology than people would have believed a long time ago.”
As James Brooks put it in a related Perspective: “A hostile split among wild chimpanzees is a reminder of the danger that group divisions can present to human societies.”
But primatologist and co-author John Mitani said his main take home lesson is that chimps aren’t as cooperative and prosocial as humans. “Instead of attacking our neighbors, we go out of [our] way to help them, even if they are complete strangers,” he said. “I try to be optimistic, especially in these times as the world becomes increasingly polarized.” |
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Read the SCIENCE PAPER and
RELATED PERSPECTIVE | listen to the
Science Podcast |
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Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology: Call for Entries 2026 |
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This prize is awarded to young scientists for their outstanding contributions to neurobiological research based on experimental methods of molecular, cellular, systems, or organismic biology. Researchers not older than 35 years are invited to apply. |
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Protostar |
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PHOTO COURTESY OF KENNET RUONA |
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Fábio Rosa |
Co-founder, Vice President and Head of Research at Asgard Therapeutics
Rosa, F. Turning tumors against themselves. Science 392, 44–45 (2026). 10.1126/science.aef9967 |
When Fábio Rosa began his academic career, he explored many different aspects of biology, from zoology to biomedicine. But he was always fascinated by one fundamental truth: The human body contains hundreds of distinct cell types, yet all share the same DNA. “How is it possible,” he wondered, “that the same genetic information gives rise to such a diversity of cell types?”
Rosa was also captivated by the idea that, under the right conditions, cells could be coaxed into taking on new identities—a strategy scientists in the field of regenerative medicine have used to grow neurons, heart muscle, and other types of tissue. This interest inspired him to join the lab of Felipe Pereira, whose research focuses on reprogramming cells into ones that trigger responses from the immune system.
During his master’s and Ph.D. studies, Rosa specifically focused on creating rare, functionally specialized immune cells known as conventional type 1 dendritic (cDC1) cells, that play a critical role in rallying the immune system to fight tumors. He eventually discovered a trio of transcription factors—proteins that regulate gene expression—that could convert ordinary fibroblasts from the skin into cDC1 cells.
Rosa and his colleagues originally planned to use this technique to create dendritic cell vaccines. During discussions with clinicians, however, they realized they could go one step farther. What if, instead of starting with fibroblasts, they reprogrammed the cancer cells themselves, essentially forcing them to become their own vaccines?
To advance this Trojan-Horse-inspired concept, the team founded the biotechnology company Asgard Therapeutics—named for the legendary city of the gods from Norse mythology, which according to one account was founded by Trojan warriors who traveled to Scandinavia. As Rosa explains, he and his fellow researchers made a similar journey, beginning their work at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and later moving to Lund University in Sweden. The team now aims to submit a clinical trial application, with the goal of bringing their therapy to the clinic in 2027.
For this work, Rosa recently received the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. ScienceAdviser sat down with Rosa to talk about the research. Below is that conversation, edited for brevity.
What makes cDC1 cells so important?
Dendritic cells in general have been tested in clinical settings in the past, with the purpose of inducing immunity against specific tumor antigens. But these approaches didn’t result in very successful clinical outcomes, and the reason was that the dendritic cells being used were derived mostly from the monocytes that circulate in our blood. These monocyte-derived dendritic cells are not as functionally specialized as cDC1 cells.
The problem is that cDC1 cells are very rare in the body, so we cannot isolate them in sufficient numbers, and there was previously no way to generate a pure population of immunogenic cDC1s for therapy. During my master’s degree and Ph.D., I identified a combination of three transcription factors that were able to impose a cDC1-like fate in any related cell type, including fibroblasts. Later on, we demonstrated that we could do this across a panoply of different healthy and cancerous tissues.
How did you land on the idea of turning cancer cells into their own vaccines?
The original idea was not to target cancer cells, per se. It was to take a skin punch biopsy from a patient, get some fibroblasts, and reprogram those fibroblasts into dendritic cells so that we could have a source to develop novel dendritic cell–based vaccines harnessing the functional specialization of cDC1s.
We later realized that the best way to harness this cell reprogramming technology was to apply it directly to cancer cells and force them to present their own antigens to the other cells of the immune system. This is more attractive from a therapeutic perspective, because you don’t need to know exactly what antigens are being targeted to induce an immune response against them while also bypassing the complexities of ex vivo cell manipulation.
How does the technique actually work?
The transcription factors are encoded in an adenoviral vector, which is injected inside a solid tumor, delivering the transcription factors directly to cancer cells. The overexpression of these three transcription factors leads to a complete transcriptional and epigenomic change, and after 3 to 9 days, we have a cDC1-like cell that was derived from a cancer cell.
These cells have all the features of naturally occurring cDC1s, including their ability to efficiently present endogenous and exogenous antigens, leading to the activation of antigen-specific T cell responses locally within the tumor microenvironment, which then leads to the clearance of the solid tumors.
Importantly, this also induces a systemic immune response, which means we can detect antigen-specific T cells that are reactive against cancer cells in the peripheral blood of mice treated with our therapy. In mice that have two tumors, when we only treat one tumor, the systemic response leads to the eradication of the nontreated tumor. |
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podcast |
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A chimpanzee ‘civil war,’ and NASA plans for nuclear propulsion |
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By Sarah Crespi, Hannah Richter | 9 April 2026 |
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On this week’s show: An ambitious plan to launch a fission-powered mission to Mars by 2028, and lethal division of a chimpanzee community in Uganda. |
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A tweak for testes |
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A point mutation to both copies of a noncoding region in female mice leads the animals to produce testes, a research team has discovered. The study suggests this region, dubbed enhancer 13, can act as both an enhancer and a repressor; it also reveals how even the changing of a single letter of DNA can have big developmental consequences. |
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Nature Communications Paper | Read more at
Nature |
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Three in one |
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Specially engineered CAR-T cells treated three different autoimmune conditions in a single patient. “She was deathly sick and bedridden at the time we met her, and we treated her, and 7 days later, she got out of bed,” said one of the researchers behind the novel therapy. She’s still doing well almost a year later. “The really crazy thing is that you have three autoimmune diseases, and all three of them, by chance, you can tackle with one treatment.” |
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Med Paper | Read more at
New Scientist |
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Don’t hold your breath |
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By taking advantage of how bacteria metabolize certain compounds, researchers can detect their presence deep inside a body. The method involves injecting certain sugars containing an isotope of carbon into the bloodstream; in mouse tests, when the animal had an internal infection, their breath contained labeled carbon dioxide within minutes of the injection. “The study addresses a genuinely important diagnostic gap,” one expert said. |
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ACS Central Science Paper | Read more at
C&EN |
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Brought to you by Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology
Now accepting entries for the US$ 25,000
Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology
Application Deadline June 15, 2026
www.eppendorf.com/prize | | |
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