12 May 2026

Today’s The Life Academic delves into the question of whether a scientist’s age impacts their creativity. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including the identity of a seal serial killer and whales screaming to be heard in noisy seas.

Wildfires | News from Science

Putting a price on wildfire prevention

Wildfires damage ecological communities, human infrastructure—and our pockets. Firefighting efforts, and the long road of rebuilding damaged structures, can cost billions.

Now, researchers have put a price on “fuel treatment,” a long-practiced Indigenous strategy to reduce wildfire risks by burning or clearing fire-prone areas of vegetation. For every dollar spent on fuel treatment, the new analysis found, the United States saves $3.73.

To make their estimate, researchers analyzed data from 285 wildfires between 2017 and 2023 that overlapped with areas where the U.S. Forest Service had conducted fuel treatment. They compared actual fire data with models where fuel treatment hadn’t occurred, finding that the fuel treatments reduced total burned area by 36% compared to untreated areas. The treatments also lowered carbon dioxide emissions, wildfire smoke, and structural damages.

The work shows that “we could have these economic and ecological benefits if we scaled [fuel treatment] up,” lead author Frederik Strabo told Grist. “It’s a critically underfunded public good.”

Read the paper

Animals | News from Science

Seal serial killer nabbed at last

An adult male gray seal attacks a pup of its own species. Hanne Siebers

For decades, scientists have been hunting for an unusual serial killer. Every year, hundreds of seal pups turn up dead on a remote Canadian island. Their injuries are gruesome: Deep gashes start at their mouth and corkscrew down to their chest, tearing down to the bone but leaving the rest of the body intact. Scientists had blamed local sharks and boat propellers for the bizarre deaths. But recently published research reveals an even grimmer truth: The freshly weaned animals were brutally killed by their own kind.

The cold case began to thaw in 2024, when scientists equipping gray seals on Sable Island with tracking devices witnessed an adult gray seal male attacking a pup. Scouring the island’s beaches, the team ear-tagged every pup corpse they could find: 765 corkscrew-ravaged pups in that 2024 breeding season alone. In 2025, the scientists sighted a whopping 359 carcasses in a single day. Taking a deeper look inside the cadavers, the researchers found bite marks from large fangs and traces of claws raking through blubber—the clear work of gray seals.

Thus far, all evidence points to adult males taking advantage of unsuspecting youngsters. “These pups don’t recognize the adult males next to them as a threat , which likely makes the attacks especially shocking to witness,” said marine biologist Claudia Hernández-Camacho. The males may be seeking added nutrients in high-calorie blubber to boost their mating value during the breeding season, a time when bulls usually fast, speculated research team member Izzy Langley. “It’s almost as if an individual learns this behavior and then becomes kind of specialized on exploiting this to top up its energy reserves.”

Read the full story

Conservation | Journal of Experimental Biology

Whales struggle to be heard in noisy shipping lane

For many people, the mention of whale song might call to mind those soothing, melodic recordings often played in spas and yoga studios. But for long-finned pilot whales in the Strait of Gibraltar, where more than 60,000 ships pass each year, life is far from soothing. As scientists report in a new study, these endangered whales must shout to be heard over the noise of ship engines—and may struggle to rejoin their pod after deep dives.

Between 2012 and 2016, researchers armed with a 6-meter-long pole headed out into the Strait, where they attached recording devices to the backs of 23 pilot whales. In addition to picking up the whales’ various calls, the recorders also captured levels of background noise ranging from 79 to 144 decibels. The scientists found that, as the din from busy ship traffic increases, the whales crank up their volume in response. While this strategy may work for some sounds, the low-frequency and two-component calls these animals use to find members of their pod are already about as loud as can be.

“Increasing noise essentially decreases the effective communication range, making it harder for distant animals to find each other,” senior study author Frants Jensen explained in a statement. As a result, whales diving deep in search of food may have a hard time reuniting with their podmates once they resurface.

Read the paper

SPONSORED

Mapping the forces shaping global food systems

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.

The LIfe Academic

Albert Einstein in 1904, a year before his “miracle year.” Lucien Chavan | CC0

Can old scientists learn new tricks?

Famed polymath Sir Isaac Newton did much of his work developing calculus in the mid-1660s, when he had not yet celebrated his 25th birthday. Albert Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” during which he published the revolutionary papers that would become the foundation of modern physics, occurred when he was only 26 years old. And Maria Skłodowska-Curie was just 31 when she discovered radium and polonium.

These anecdotes give the impression that scientists hit their creative peak relatively early in their careers, an idea that has been supported by some studies. Other research, however, has found no such relationship between age and declining creativity, while one theory holds that more experienced researchers are better poised to generate new ideas. According to a Policy Article published yesterday in Science, the relationship between age and innovation may be more complicated than that.

The authors of the new study analyzed a dataset of more than 12.5 million scientists who published between 1960 and 2020. They found that, as the years since initial publication increased, scientists became more adept at forging links between previously unconnected ideas. At the same time, however, their capacity for truly disruptive innovation—work that overturns established paradigms with transformative breakthroughs—sharply declined. This cycle held true across disciplines, from computer science to biology. The study authors also note the existence of a “nostalgia effect,” in which scientists increasingly cite older papers as their career progresses. “These findings highlight a universal tension between science’s forward momentum and aging scientists’ growing attachment to the intellectual past,” the team writes.

The researchers also found that nations with younger scientific workforces, such as China and India, tend to produce a larger share of disruptive papers. The United States, which has a comparatively older workforce (in part thanks to a 1994 Supreme Court decision that removed mandatory university retirement), has lower rates of disruption. “Together with the nostalgia effect, these results suggest that familiarity with established ideas narrows the scope of creative search,” the study authors write. “Aging scientists grow more adept at recombining what they know but become less inclined (or able) to abandon old concepts and replace them with new ones.”

Of course, referencing foundational papers and building on existing knowledge remains an integral part of the scientific enterprise. “Aging people are not less creative, they are just creative differently ,” senior study author Lingfei Wu said in a statement. But the community should also find ways to balance novelty with disruption, he argues, potentially by encouraging more collaborations across generations and welcoming young scientists from other nations. “Science needs both continuity and renewal,” Wu said. “We need to keep the continuity of science and these classic papers, and also welcome new ideas that challenge them.”

Even the greatest minds, the study authors note in their paper, risk becoming set in their ways as they age. In his later years, for example, Einstein struggled to develop a unified field theory and refused to accept the rise of quantum mechanics. Speaking of quantum theory, physicist Werner Heisenberg published his pioneering work on the subject in 1925, when he was just 23 years old.

Read the policy article

Et Cetera

Llama llama AI drama

The scientific publishing giant Elsevier has joined a class action lawsuit alleging the reproduction of copyrighted works by Meta in the development of its Llama AI model. “This case is the first AI action brought by major publishing houses, who have their own story to tell about Meta’s flagrant violation of their rights,” said the Association of American Publishers in a statement.

Read more at Nature

Dam strait?

Some fear that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—the massive ocean current that helps regulate global temperatures by funneling warmer waters northward—is at risk of collapsing. A pair of scientists have a bold proposal to keep that from happening: build a dam across the Bering Strait. According to one of the researchers, after seeing paleomodeling that indicated the AMOC was stronger when there was a land bridge from Alaska to Russia, “I was like: ok, could we do this again?”

SCIENCE ADVANCES Paper and EGU26 Presentation | Read more at New Scientist

‘Impossible’ yet possible secrecy

Mathematical proofs known as ‘zero-knowledge proofs’ have a unique trait to them: simply knowing the solution allows one to prove its existence without revealing the details of the actual solution. “Until you see an example, it sounds like something which is impossible,” said one computer scientist—but it turns out this could be the foundation for basically uncrackable cryptography.

Cryptology ePrint | Read more at Quanta Magazine

If Kennedy collected a raccoon specimen without a defined scientific or educational purpose, the ethical justification becomes less clear. Indeed, the public has no idea about why he would stop a car filled with his family members and cut out a raccoon’s penis from a carcass … As the nation’s top health official, his position depends on public trust, scientific credibility, and a commitment to the responsible stewardship of life.

STAT first opinion | 9 May 2026 | Sam Zeveloff

Last but not least

I giggled like the teenager I was when I learned about the relationship between pearlfishes and sea cucumbers in my undergraduate invertebrate biology class. You would think that, decades later, my sense of humor would have matured. Turns out it hasn’t.

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Hannah Richter, David Grimm, and Phie Jacobs

Do you have a burning science question you can’t seem to find a good answer for? Submit it to Ask Science! Selected questions will receive responses from Science editors right here in ScienceAdviser.

Have feedback on this newsletter? Let us know what you think using this form or drop us a note at ScienceAdviser@aaas.org.

Want more? Catch up on past issues of ScienceAdviser.

If you were forwarded this newsletter by a friend, you can subscribe for free here.

To ensure ScienceAdviser lands in your inbox, consider taking a moment to add scienceadviser@aaas.sciencepubs.org as a trusted sender or contact in your email client. These instructions provide more information on whitelisting ScienceAdviser based on email client.