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29 April 2026 |
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Today’s Future News examines the origins of organelles. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including a possible solution to the vexing physics problem of black hole singularities. |
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Animals | Physical Review Fluids |
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Dolphin dash |
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Visualization of the vortices created by a swimming dolphin. Yutaro Motoori |
More than a few children have abruptly decided they’d like to be dolphin riders when they grow up. The job might be harder than it sounds—dolphins can swim at speeds of more than 25 miles per hour! Now, scientists have determined just what makes these ocean favorites such speedy swimmers.
When dolphins swim, they flap their tails up and down, which pushes water backward. That jostled water contains dozens of eddies of different sizes. To see if this turbulent water propels dolphins forward, researchers ran numerical simulations of the fluid dynamics on a supercomputer to see how the water swirls under different flapping conditions. They found that the dolphin’s tail produces a few large vortices that boost it along. The rest of the eddies are byproducts of the larger swirls and don’t help the creatures zip by. “We find that our results are unchanged across a wide range of swimming speeds
,” said lead author Yutaro Motoori in a statement.
In the future, the team hopes their findings could be applied to engineering, where researchers are always trying to make faster and more energy-efficient swimming robots. |
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Physics | News from Science |
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Hawking’s signature prediction may smooth the jagged hearts of black holes |
It’s a longstanding pain point for physicists: Their theory of gravity—general relativity—predicts that a black hole must contain a singularity, a point where space and time are infinitely warped and the laws of physics break down. Many researchers hope that a theory combining gravity and quantum mechanics, if it can ever be discovered, will remove the thorn. However, a pinch of quantum mechanics, in the form of an effect called Hawking radiation, may do the trick instead
, two theorists predict independently in a pair of recent papers.
Quantum uncertainty implies that empty space roils with pairs of particles flitting in and out of existence. In 1974, Stephen Hawking realized that if a pair of such “virtual” particles were to straddle a black hole’s event horizon—within which not even light can escape—one particle could be ripped from the vacuum and fall in while the other shoots into space, creating Hawking radiation.
Hawking radiation could destabilize an electrically charged black hole, argue theorists Francesco Di Filippo and Samuel Gralla, independently. A charged black hole would have two event horizons nested like Russian dolls. The outer horizon is the familiar point of no return. The inner horizon is weirder, marking where gravity becomes repulsive.
Hawking radiation would make the outer horizon inch inward. Bizarrely, inside the black hole, Hawking radiation has negative energy, which would accumulate on the inner horizon and make it balloon outward. Eventually, the inner and outer horizons would coincide, effectively canceling each other and disappearing before a singularity forms. Notably, Di Filippo and Gralla say the argument could apply to real, spinning black holes, which also have two event horizons. |
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Future News |
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Did these essential organelles give birth to the others? Louisa Howard via Wikimedia Commons |
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Mitochondria: The mother of organelles? |
Inside our cells are small compartments that look a bit like a striped bean: our mitochondria. These so-called cellular powerhouses are also found in the cells of other animals, plants, fungi, and even certain single-celled organisms—but they’re entirely absent from bacteria and archaea. They are one of the features that set our branch of the tree of life, the eukaryotes, apart from those microbial ones. Though, they aren’t the only key feature: all eukaryotes possess other organelles, too.
Scientists are pretty sure that mitochondria came to exist when an archaeon somehow engulfed a bacterium, and the bacterium settled in. But how all the other organelles—the endoplasmic reticulum, lysosomes, the Golgi apparatus, and so on—came to exist is hotly debated. One hypothesis is that
they resulted from little blebs shed by the mitochondria-to-be. That idea may have just gotten a boost from a seemingly odd source: research on the parasite Toxoplasma gondii.
Toxoplasma is perhaps most well-known as a mind-altering parasite. It makes its way into its final feline host by tinkering with the minds of its intermediate rodent hosts, dulling their fear. Lots of research has investigated how else this parasite manipulates its hosts, right the way down to cellular mechanisms. As an intracellular parasite, Toxoplasma has to thwart a cell’s defenses to survive. And it was in the course of studying how it pulls off this trick that researchers started paying extra close attention to its interactions with mitochondria.
One of the ways the cell can fight back against T. gondii is by hoarding nutrients in its mitochondria. But a lot of the time, the parasite gets the upper hand. It essentially glues mitochondria onto itself, forcing the organelles to spin off blebs of outer mitochondrial membrane. Several years ago, researchers showed that these structures positive for outer mitochondrial membrane, or SPOTs as the team dubbed them, help the parasite survive and grow. Now, the same group has figured out part of that process:
SPOTs engulf lysosomes.
If mitochondria are powerhouses, then lysosomes are waste disposal centers; when there’s something to destroy inside a cell, these organelles are acidified, creating an environment that shreds biomolecules. The researchers found that after lysosomes are engulfed by SPOTs, they remain acidified—and this step is key to the parasite’s reproduction. If acidification is prevented with a specific inhibitor, the T. gondii struggle hard.
What’s really intriguing, though, is these SPOT-eaten lysosomes seem to become something else entirely. They’re not identifiable as lysosomes anymore. Thus, the team wrote, “mitochondrial membranes can be repurposed to create new cellular compartments.” Or, as study leader Lena Pernas explained at a symposium earlier this year: “Mitochondria are able to give rise to new organelles during infection.”
So, if they give rise to new organelles during infection, could they perhaps once have given rise to the organelles we know today?
The work isn’t actually the first time scientists have shown mitochondrial membranes can spawn organelles. Almost a decade ago, cell biologist Heidi McBride and colleagues discovered that cells engineered to lack peroxisomes—organelles that act a bit like sewage treatment plants, detoxifying harmful substances—made new ones by fusing mitochondrial vesicles with vesicles from the endoplasmic reticulum. McBride told Knowable that this strongly supports the notion that “the presence of mitochondria launched the biogenesis of new organelles.”
Many brushed off McBride’s findings as exceedingly rare or an artifact of engineered cells, but the new evidence from Pernas and colleagues—on top of other studies that have found unexpected roles for mitochondrial vesicles—is forcing another look. At the symposium, Pernas even made the “heretical” suggestion that this is part of what mitochondria do: They act as a “reservoir” for constructing new organelles in response to stress. And in light of the growing body of evidence that mitochondria are key to
surviving all sorts of stressful conditions, the idea doesn’t sound quite so radical.
And really, that would just make what T. gondii does all the more impressive. “What is so cool and surprising is the ability of a pathogen to completely, not only manipulate the mitochondria, but use the mitochondria to generate an entire new organelle in the cell, with such precision,” cell biologist and immunologist Shaeri Mukherjee told Nature. |
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Underreported sex |
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Fewer than half of all studies funded by the National Institutes of Health analyze or report results by sex, according to a new analysis. “Just including women is not enough,” said the leader of the work. And studies were especially unlikely to break down results by sex when the subjects were nonhuman animals, which could increase the risk of missing sex-specific effects of potential treatments. |
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Communications Medicine Paper | Read more at News from Science |
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Homeward bound |
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A massive skull of Irritator challengeri was taken from Brazil and sold to a museum in Germany. Now, it’s making its way home—a move applauded by paleontologists worldwide. “This fossil will be widely celebrated and holds great importance for Brazil,” said one. “It carries deep scientific, cultural, and symbolic meaning.” |
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Read more at ScienceInsider |
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Smells complicated |
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Two studies suggest olfactory receptors in mice are far more organized than previously thought. “For 30 years, we’ve taught students that the mouse olfactory epithelium is divided into a handful of broad zones, within which receptor choice is essentially random,” explained a psychologist and experimental neuroscientist. “This … overturns one of the foundational textbook models of olfactory organization.” |
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Cell Papers 1 and 2 | Read more at Nature |
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[David Morens] is a bit of a scatterbrained intellectual (I say that fondly) who was devoted to NIH and its mission and to science but a bit clueless about email protocol and such.
—Former NIH employee |
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ScienceInsider | 28 April 2026 | Jon Cohen |
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Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases official David Morens was indicted for allegedly concealing related federal records. The U.S. Department of Justice claims he was part of “a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in connection with COVID-19 research grants.” Morens, 78, faces major prison time if convicted—5 years for a charge of conspiracy; 20 years each for multiple counts of destroying, altering, or falsifying records in a federal investigation; and another 3 years each for several counts of records concealment, removal, or mutilation. |
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