24 April 2026

Today’s Protostar is physician-scientist James Byrne, whose work on gas-entrapping materials made him a finalist for the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including ancient sea monsters and genetic signatures of language.

Cell Biology | News from Science

Sperm cargo is richer than we thought

Sperm have long been thought of as streamlined DNA delivery vehicles, carrying little more than a father’s genes to the egg. But a new study shows that in mice, sperm may transmit the father’s influence in another way: During their passage through the epididymis, the coiled tube where they mature after leaving the testes, sperm pick up messenger RNAs (mRNAs)—RNA transcripts of genes that contain the genetic instructions for making proteins. And these mRNAs seem to be transferred to the fertilized egg, a team reports this week in Nucleic Acids Research.

Researchers already knew sperm ferry small RNAs, RNA fragments that can silence gene expression and have been implicated in transmitting the effects of paternal diet, stress, and exercise to offspring. But mRNAs could be a far more direct route for paternal influence, said Bluma Lesch, a geneticist who studies gene regulation in sperm and egg cells and was not involved in the study. The work doesn’t prove these mRNAs from sperm actually function in embryos, she noted, but the discovery of unexpected cargo is “potentially very significant.”

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Paleontology | News from Science

Octopuses as large as semi-trucks stalked ancient seas

This massive octopus may have grown to 19 meters in length. Yohei Utsuki/Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences/Hokkaido University

Tales of sea monsters with tentacles big enough to drown ships have long haunted sailors’ nightmares (and delighted moviegoers). Those krakens may be fantastical, but a study published this week in Science suggests creatures approaching such mythic proportions prowled Earth’s oceans during the Cretaceous period, back when dinosaurs ruled the land.

Using a technique known as digital fossil mining, researchers revealed dozens of octopus jaws trapped inside Cretaceous sediments, including some truly massive specimens. At more than 80 millimeters long, one specimen surpasses that of the living giant squid, whose body can stretch up to 12 meters. The team estimates that one species, Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, might have been 7 to 19 meters long. At the larger end of this range, it would have been about as long as a semitrailer truck—and the largest invertebrate ever described.

Scientists previously assumed that sharks and giant marine reptiles, including the long-necked plesiosaurus and terrifying mosasaurus, dominated ocean food chains during the Cretaceous. But chips and scratches on the jaws of early octopuses suggest that they too were ferocious apex predators. These giant cephalopods likely used their long tentacles to seize bony fish and sizable mollusks before crushing them with their powerful beaks.

read the Science paper

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Genetics | Science Advances

Born to talk

The question of what makes us human can get philosophical pretty fast. But for those who point to our language capabilities, new genetics research will back you up.

Researchers built on past studies documenting the language abilities—and saliva—of 350 elementary school children. They wanted to analyze genetic regulatory sequences called Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs), which influence how genes get expressed. The students’ DNA helped the team confirm HAQERs’ importance in processing and demonstrating language. Then, the researchers looked for the presence of HAQERs in regions of DNA known to have evolved in ancient primates and hominins.

They found that HAQERs evolved after hominins split from chimps but before Homo sapiens diverged from Neanderthals—meaning complex communication likely preceded our own species. This “sliver of the genome has remained relatively constant, even as other aspects have been going up and up and up to make modern humans smarter and smarter ,” author Jacob Michaelson said in a statement. “We can say humans at least had the ‘hardware’ for language earlier than what we previously thought.”

As for why the HAQERs didn’t continue to evolve much after the Neanderthal-human split, the researchers suggest it’s because they promote fetal development—and give babies bigger heads. That tradeoff would have quickly cost the lives of ancient mothers and infants.

Read the paper

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Designing targeted therapies for cancer's next move

Targeted therapies are reshaping cancer care, but tumors evolve to resist them. In this Q&A, Jeff Settleman of Pfizer Oncology discusses strategies to anticipate resistance, target multiple pathways, and design more precise treatments.

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL PHOTOGRAPHY DEPARTMENT

James Byrne

Assistant Professor, University of Iowa Health Care

Byrne, J. Healing in a bubble. Science 392, 45 (2026). 10.1126/science.aef9968

James Byrne has always loved a challenge. When considering majors as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, he decided to go with the one that sounded the hardest: biomedical engineering. He never looked back. “I just realized this is what I’m meant to do and what I’m passionate about,” he recalls.

The deeper he got in his studies, however, the more he felt something was missing. “I wanted to try to facilitate a bridge between the benchtop and the bedside,” he explains. That goal inspired him to pursue a combined M.D.-Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina. He later completed his residency at the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was introduced to an idea that would end up shaping his future research.

Byrne worked in the lab of physician-scientist Giovanni Traverso, who had been investigating new gastrointestinal devices and drug delivery systems. After a serendipitous meeting with Leo Otterbein, a leader in carbon monoxide therapeutics, their discussions often turned to edible substances like latte foam, whipped cream, popping candy.

Byrne went on to found his own lab at the University of Iowa, where he employs a number of tools—many of which wouldn’t look out of place in a restaurant kitchen—to create substances known as gas-entrapping materials (GEMs). Byrne and his colleagues have used this technology to deliver carbon monoxide, successfully healing wounds and ulcers in diabetic mice and healthy pigs. But GEMs, which can take the form of foams, hydrogels, and solids, also have incredible potential when it comes to treating tumors.

As a practicing radiation oncologist, Byrne often works with patients who require multiple rounds of radiation—often enduring brutal side effects. “I see where the need is,” he says. What if there was a way to sensitize these patients’ tumors to radiation, increasing the odds that the treatment worked on the first try?

This work recently made Byrne a finalist for the 2026 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. ScienceAdviser chatted with him about the research; below is that conversation, edited for brevity.

What inspired you to use techniques from cooking?
It all started when I was a postdoc. We started discussing these different ideas, including things like foams and other things that are edible, like Pop Rocks. When I started to look into the techniques of molecular gastronomy, I was like, this is perfect. This is actually the ideal way to deliver a gas.

How did you figure out how to make GEMs?
When we first kicked around the idea of Pop Rocks, we realized how hard it is to make them. You need to melt sugar until it has a very low water content, pressurize it to 600 pounds per square inch, stir it for five minutes, and rapidly cool it. We didn’t have any of the equipment necessary to do that, but there was this one mechanical engineer on YouTube who had created what looked like, for lack of a better word, a pipe bomb. It was a high-pressure stirring reactor.

I reached out to him on LinkedIn and said “Hey, I saw your video. Do you still have that high-pressure stirring reactor?” He was so kind. He said “No, but let me just make you one.” So, he made me one, sent it to me, and we ended up being able to make the first carbon monoxide Pop Rocks. From there, it really evolved into a whole platform.

How can these materials be used to treat tumors?
The whole idea is founded on the oxygen fixation hypothesis. We know that tumors have really low oxygen levels, and that in low oxygen settings, DNA repair can happen at a much faster rate. If you boost the oxygen within that local environment, you can increase your active oxygen species and create these fixed DNA lesions in cancer cells. People have had success with things like hyperbaric oxygen chamber treatments, but we realized that we can do a more targeted approach by directly injecting a biomaterial that’s rich with oxygen into tumors.

What’s next?
We saw a very nice result in multiple tumor types that we treated. We’re currently setting up a clinical trial using this technique in sarcomas, which are soft tissue tumors, to sensitize them to radiation. We have a number of different ideas, but I would say I’m most excited about bringing this to patients.

Read the Prize Essay

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Regeneron hears good news

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just approved a gene therapy from Regeneron that treats deafness caused by inherited mutations in the OTOF gene. The company has said it will make the treatment available for free in the United States.