23 February 2026

Today’s Protostar is Meha Jain, whose work on using satellite data to transform food systems made her the inaugural winner of the ASU-Science Prize for Transformational Impact. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how our favorite felines could help us battle cancer and an unorthodox “universal” vaccine.

Health | Science Immunology

Women really do feel more pain

“Beauty is pain,” goes a famous maxim. Physiologically, there’s some truth to it; studies have shown that chronic pain does last longer and feel stronger for women than men, despite such claims often being dismissed. New research published last week in Science Immunology might finally suggest why.

The first clue came when researchers noticed higher levels of inflammation-controlling proteins in male mice during induced pain. They determined that such proteins, called IL-10, come from hormone-regulating immune cells called monocytes, which were previously thought not to be important in the nervous system. To see if monocytes were truly more active in males, the researchers removed the testes of male mice and found that IL-10 levels decreased. In the reverse, when they removed female mice’s ovaries and injected a hormone similar to testosterone, the mice’s cells produced more IL-10 and resolved pain faster.

The same pattern in IL-10 could be seen in data on men and women who suffered traumatic injuries from car accidents. That finding makes the authors hopeful that future treatments for chronic pain could attempt to increase cells’ IL-10 production. “This opens new avenues for non-opioid therapies aimed at preventing chronic pain before it’s established,” said lead author Geoffroy Laumet in a statement.

Read the paper

Cancer genomics | Science

Cat genes could hold the key to future cancer treatments

Cures for cats could prove useful against human cancers. Mohsen Sajjadi via WIKIMEDIA COMMONS | CC BY-SA

Although we adore our feline friends, it doesn’t often seem like we have much in common with them—unless, of course, you also have a passion for attacking furniture legs and licking your own rear. When it comes to health, however, cats are exposed to many of the same environmental risks as their owners and they fall victim to many of the same ailments. Cancer, for example, is one of the leading causes of illness and death in cats, but the genetics of this disease in felines remain relatively unexplored.

“Cat cancer genetics has totally been a black box up until now,” cancer researcher Louise van der Weyden told the BBC. Van der Weyden is the senior author of a new study, which analyzed tumor DNA from almost 500 domestic cats across five countries—the first time that feline cancers have been genetically profiled at a large scale. Certain genetic changes commonly found in cat cancers, the scientists report, closely mirror those seen in dogs and humans. The work revealed particularly strong similarities between mammary carcinomas, a notoriously aggressive form of cancer in cats, and human breast cancer: In both, mutations in the FBXW7 gene seem to be associated with a worse prognosis.

Excitingly, the team also found that certain chemotherapy drugs were more effective at treating cats with tumors that carried mutations in this gene, potentially opening avenues for therapies that could benefit both cats and humans. “This confirms that the domestic cat is not just a beloved pet, but a vital partner in the fight against cancer,” study co-author Latasha Ludwig told the Cornell Chronicle.

Read the paper

Medicine | News from Science

Unorthodox ‘universal vaccine’ offers broad protection in mice

Usually, one of the great powers of a vaccine is its specificity—it typically teaches the immune system to remember and quickly raise immune defenses against a single pathogen. But there are hints that some vaccines boost the immune system more broadly.

Inspired by reports that the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine for tuberculosis protects against multiple kinds of bacteria and even viruses, a team recently tried to recreate this effect with a mix of immune-provoking molecules. Their latest cocktail protected mice for several months against a variety of respiratory pathogens , including SARS-CoV-2. Two of the components were adjuvants—additives often incorporated into vaccines to boost defensive responses—that trip pathogen-detecting molecules on so-called innate immune cells. The third ingredient was ovalbumin, a protein from egg whites that stimulates T cells, part of the adaptive branch of the immune system.

“It’s a new blueprint” for how to boost our defenses against infectious diseases, says vaccinologist Maria Elena Bottazzi, who wasn’t involved in the research. The researchers now hope to test a version of their “universal vaccine” in people.

Read the Science Paper

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Mass timber is poised to reshape construction

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Protostar

PHOTO: Dave Brenner

Meha Jain

Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Jain, M. Satellite data can help transform food systems. Science 391 (2026). 10.1126/science.aee1344

“I’ve always been really interested in the environment,” Meha Jain told ScienceAdviser. “I remember being a young kid sitting on the playground just watching ants go into their little ant hill and being so fascinated.” As an undergraduate, she majored in ecology. “As I spent more time in this field doing research, I realized that you can’t separate people from the environment, and I became really fascinated by human-environment interactions”—the subfield that would become the focus for her graduate studies and beyond.

During her Ph.D., she worked with farmers in India to understand how climate change was impacting their crops, mostly via household surveys. “While that was a powerful way to get a very rich understanding of individual-level decision-making, it was hard to understand what was happening at scale,” she explained. She began to wonder if remote sensing data could capture similar patterns as her in-person work, but at a much larger scale. And yes, it turns out it can—work that garnered Jain the inaugural ASU-Science Prize for Transformational Impact.

ScienceAdviser chatted with Jain about the work and the prize; below is that conversation edited for brevity and clarity.

What did you learn from tapping into satellite data?
I think the most impactful and maybe surprising result that we’ve come up with so far is collaborative work with a postdoc that I had in my lab a few years ago, where we were trying to understand how climate change was impacting farmers’ groundwater use decisions in India. And the reason this is really important is because India is the largest consumer of fresh water worldwide. It’s the country with the largest groundwater withdrawals, and it’s also a place where there’s severe groundwater depletion. Over 50% of aquifers there are already over exploited. And what we were learning from speaking with farmers in the field was that one of the main ways they were coping with warming temperatures was increasing the amount of irrigation they used. But that made us worry that this is exacerbating the groundwater depletion problem. So, we created some new remote sensing data sets to actually test these questions, and estimated that under future climate change, groundwater depletion rates could triple if these current adaptation strategies, which are beneficial for yield, were to continue into the future.

Wow, that does not sound good. So, what are you working on now?
The body of work that I’m most excited about now, and that my lab is really putting a lot of effort into, is thinking about how we can use the satellite data sets for influencing decision-making on the ground. We work with a lot of great partner organizations, particularly through the CGIAR network , to think about how we can develop satellite data products to measure the impacts of the interventions they’re doing on the ground, and to also inform where those interventions could be even more impactful.

Sounds great! How does it feel to have won this prize?
I’m really honored to be the inaugural winner of this award. I think it’s a really exciting new prize—one that truly values translational research’s impact on society. Traditionally, when you follow the path of becoming a professor in academia, you always hear that all anybody cares about is publishing, and the impact factor of the journal you’re publishing in, or the number of citations you have. So it’s really exciting that big players like Science and ASU are highlighting how it’s not just the research piece but actually the impact on society that’s important as well.

One more thing—I’d like to say to researchers who are thinking about doing this kind of real-world application or society-driven work: Follow your passion. I found that just by doing that, it makes you want to show up every day; it helps you create these partnerships with people who are really engaged and want to make the world a better place.

Read the Essay

Et Cetera

Radio silence from K2-18b

The presence of gases often produced on Earth by living organisms fueled speculations of life on the distant planet K2-18b . But when astronomers listened out for signals, they heard nothing. “Of course, a non-detection doesn’t tell us that the system is uninhabited. It simply constrains a very specific and possibly rare class of signals: persistent, relatively narrow-band radio transmitters operating in the observed frequency range and illuminating Earth during the observing windows,” one expert said.

arxiv Preprint | Read more at New Scientist

Taking flight

How birds took flight is one of the enduring mysteries of evolution. Now, a new paper argues that the animals’ efficient mouths—stemming from a suite of features found in the oldest flyers—may have enabled them to take to the air. “Because flying takes more energy than walking or running or swimming, then it should have features associated with more efficient feeding,” explained one expert.

The Innovation Paper | Read more at Science News

Cloudy forecasting

Clouds are a bit of a wrench in the gears of climate models because they’re incredibly hard to forecast. “If you are off by a few percent—2 or 3%—of cloud cover, you will get warming that is several degrees Celsius different,” one expert noted. But scientists are getting closer to predicting the skies.