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11 May 2026 |
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Today’s SciencePrudence discusses the newest ruling against the Trump administration’s steep grant cuts. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including locustlike microbots and a chat with the new head of the U.S. Department of Energy. |
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Earth Science | News from Science |
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Earthquake-sensing fiber cables can also pick up speech |
Fiber optic cables used to detect earthquakes may also be able to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. Researchers reported last week at the European Geosciences Union meeting that distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) can accurately capture the faint vibrations of human speech.
DAS works by firing laser pulses down a fiber cable and measuring tiny changes in any light that reflects back. Geophysicists increasingly use the technique to study earthquakes, volcanoes, traffic, and even pedestrian footfalls, taking advantage of both dedicated research cables and unused “dark fiber” already buried beneath cities and oceans. But in field tests, researchers found that exposed, coiled cables could also pick up nearby speech from several meters away. Feeding the signals into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, produced readable real-time transcripts.
“Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves,” said geophysicist Jack Lee Smith. “This could be a privacy concern.”
The effect was limited: buried cables and straight fiber lines recorded speech poorly. Still, researchers say the findings highlight unexpected privacy risks as DAS use expands. |
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Robotics | Science Advances |
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Algae-based microbots swarm like locusts in response to light |
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Exposure to blue light makes these microscopic robots cluster together, allowing researchers to coax them into different patterns, while red light makes them disperse. de la Asunción-Nadal et al./Science Advances (2026) |
Scientists frequently use biology as inspiration for robots, resulting in devices that swim like zebrafish, fly like birds, and
grow like vines
. Some teams have gone beyond mere inspiration, creating “biohybrid” robots that directly combine living tissue with artificial materials. One contraption combines rat muscle tissue with steel, while another integrates fungal cells with electronics.
Now, the authors of a new study have harnessed the properties of green algae to create microscopic robotic swarms that change their shape and size in response to light. Exposure to blue light causes these biohybrid microbots to swarm and cluster together, while red light triggers dispersal. Using custom laser-cut masks, the researchers coaxed the swarms into simple shapes like squares, circles, and stars—or more complex patterns, like logos and maps of different world regions. By manipulating light exposure and switching between masks, scientists also made the swarms rapidly split, merge, and fluidly switch from one shape to another. “
The reversible nature of the generated swarms and their remarkable versatility and reconfigurability hold considerable promise for a myriad of possible microrobotic applications,” the team explained.
In one set of experiments, the researchers integrated their approach with artificial intelligence to target wound healing, creating tailored dressings of algae-based biohybrid bots that can function as smart bandages and deliver drugs directly to infected tissue. |
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Politics | News from Science |
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Computer scientist to lead storied DOE lab through ‘exciting and threatening’ AI revolution |
Often, the director of a Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory is chosen to guide the lab through a particular project or transition. That would appear to be the case with Katherine Yelick, a computer scientist, who on 1 July will take over as director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the lab announced last week.
Yelick’s appointment is a departure for the DOE national labs, which trace their origins to the Manhattan Project. Historically, most directors of the 17 labs have been physicists or chemists. But Yelick takes the reins at Berkeley Lab as DOE launches the Genesis Mission, President Donald Trump’s initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to double the productivity of federally funded science.
With nearly 4000 employees and an annual budget of $1.4 billion, Berkeley Lab claims 17 Nobel Prize winners. Yelick, currently the vice provost for research at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, knows the place inside and out. UC runs Berkeley Lab for DOE as a contractor, and from 2010 to 2019, Yelick served as the lab’s associate director for computing sciences. She will succeed Michael Witherell, a particle physicist who is retiring after 10 years as director.
Yelick spoke with Science about the lab’s future, the intricacies of melding its broad research portfolio with Genesis, and scientists’ apprehensions about AI. |
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Mapping the forces shaping global food systems |
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A new AI-enabled research approach is mapping the people, institutions, and incentives driving change across global food systems—offering insight into how sustainable transitions take hold. |
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SciencePrudence |
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DOGE adviser Elon Musk in a White House press conference on Friday 30 May 2025. The White House |
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U.S. judge trashes DOGE tactics, backs peer review in ruling that humanities grants shouldn’t have been terminated |
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Jeffrey Mervis, Senior Correspondent, News from Science |
Last week’s ruling by a federal judge that the White House illegally terminated almost 1500 grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) contains a strong defense of scientific peer review—and an equally vocal repudiation of the actions of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) once led by Elon Musk.
“The review process implemented by DOGE did not conform to, or even resemble, NEH’s ordinary grant-review process, which itself was designed to comply with the mandates of its authorizing statute,” U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon wrote in a 143-page opinion handed down on 7 May in New York City.
McMahon was equally dismissive of DOGE’s use of artificial intelligence to target grants that allegedly violated President Donald Trump’s ban on federal support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. “ChatGPT inferred that [the two DOGE staffers behind the cancellations] were looking for reasons why grants could be characterized as DEI—and therefore terminable—and supplied ‘rationales’ simply in order to satisfy the user’s perceived demand,” McMahon wrote. “The utter lack of reasoning behind so many of its ‘rationales’ certainly suggests as much.”
What happened at NEH shouldn’t have come as a surprise, McMahon added. The 20-something-year-old DOGE staffers assigned to the agency, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, lacked “any experience in government, public grant administration, private grant administration, or reviewing humanities projects for scholarly merit … and did not have much experience in anything at all,” she wrote.
The judge cited several examples of grants terminated for what she blamed on the “hallucinations” of ChatGPT. One of the more egregious: A grant to recover and analyze writings attributed to Moses was flagged as DEI, she wrote, because it contained the phrase “Jewish thought” in describing its goal of providing “important insight into Jewish thought from two thousand years ago.”
The suit was brought by several professional organizations, including the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), on behalf of members whose grants were terminated in April 2025. ACLS President Joy Connelly called the ruling “a victory” for anyone—including scholars, universities, museums, state institutions, and the public—“interested in understanding our democracy.” The ruling, she added, affirms that the humanities “are not a luxury.”
Although McMahon declared that the terminations were illegal, her decision does not automatically restore the more than $100 million appropriated by Congress for the projects. That’s because the plaintiffs asked her to rule only on the legality of the government’s decision, not for immediate reimbursement by the government.
McMahon’s decision allows the researchers and their institutions to take that step. But those requests must be submitted to federal claims court because they involve a contractual agreement between the government and a private party.
Similar attempts to overturn other decisions by the Trump administration to terminate research grants have hinged on the question of jurisdiction. Last August, in a case involving scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health, a divided Supreme Court ruled that NIH could continue to suspend the grants until the jurisdictional question was decided by a lower court.
In her ruling, McMahon said she would “await” such a ruling, while asserting that she had the authority to rule on the constitutionality of what NEH had done.
The Trump administration has 60 days to appeal the ruling. In the meantime, Connelly believes McMahon’s decision shines a much-needed light on the tactics used by DOGE. “They stepped all over the process of peer review, completely disregarding its value in selecting the best ideas,” Connelly told ScienceAdviser. “I don’t think that is what the public expects from its government.” |
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Sick at sea |
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Public health experts had precious little time to figure out what to do with the almost 150 apparently healthy people on board the cruise ship MV Hondius after several passengers became ill with hantavirus. “It’s a tough question,” one expert said. “Honestly, I feel lucky that I am not in a situation that I need to make any decision,” said another. |
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Read more at ScienceInsider |
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When the going gets tough, the tough double their genome |
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Many branches of the tree of life have undergone partial or whole genome duplications
—massive changes that have the potential to throw a wrench in reproduction. Yet these “hopeful monsters” may have gotten flowering plants through multiple catastrophic events, including the mass extinction that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs. “We see clusterings of whole genome duplications in time,” explained one researcher on a recent study, “and every time it corresponds with a described, important geological event, whether it’s a global cooling period, whether it’s a global warming period, or whether there’s an extinction event.” |
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Cell Paper | Read more at Live Science |
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A wing and a scare |
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Dinosaurs had wings before they could fly. To test what they might have used these ‘protowings’ for, researchers built a robotic turkey-sized dinosaur with detachable wings, and then tested how well this “Robopteryx” scared grasshoppers out of hiding when it had or lacked such plumage. The wings were much more effective. “What this shows, rather elegantly and persuasively, is that it’s possible” proto-wings aided in flushing out prey, said one paleontologist. |
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Scientific Reports Paper | Read more at Science News |
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You don’t all have to be troublemakers, but there have got to be some … who are way out of the box who are shifting where the center of the conversation is.
—Timothy Snyder, University of Toronto |
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EDITORIAL | 7 May 2026 | H. Holden Thorp |
Snyder, professor and author of best-seller On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, spoke with Science’s editor-in-chief about how his lessons apply to the scientific community.
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