25 February 2026

Today’s Deep Dive delves into the connection between sight and sound. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including ancient writing and the cause of Earth’s recent climatic flickering.

Organoids | Science

Cyborgs tackle diabetes

Organoids—structures grown in the lab from stem cells to mimic the functions of real organs—can help researchers study how organs develop and break down. But designing organoids for the pancreas, the key organ involved in diabetes, has historically been difficult due to the varied neurological signals it processes. Now, researchers report a cyborglike pancreatic organoid in Science that combines stem cells with implanted miniature electronics.

In the pancreas, complex networks of endocrine cells secrete glucagon and insulin. In people with types 1 and 2 diabetes, such endocrine cells are dysregulated. To study how the pancreas’ electrical signals arise from the endocrine cells, researchers integrated flexible, tissuelike nanoelectronics into an organoid’s usual stem cell structure. Then, the researchers stimulated the organoid with glucose and a compound called forskolin that simulates the effect of hormones released when you eat. The electronics were able to precisely measure spikes in the organoid’s electric signals that happen when glucagon and insulin get secreted.

In a related Perspective, biomedical researchers Jochen Lang and Matthieu Raoux suggest that future cyborg organoids could test diabetes medications or even become the basis for artificial pancreases that deliver insulin themselves. Such systems have “enormous potential for human disease modeling and personalized cell-based therapies,” they wrote.

Read the Science paper

Read the Perspective

Archaeology | News from Science

Flipping the script

The 35,000-year-old Adorant figurine from a cave in the Swabian Alps contains symbols that may encode similar amounts of information as the earliest forms of written language. Hendrik Zwietasch/Landesmuseum Württemberg | CC BY 4.0

The oldest known written language is Sumerian, which appeared in Mesopotamia around 5500 years ago. Its script, cuneiform, grew out of an earlier symbol system called protocuneiform that was probably used for bookkeeping and other administrative tasks—though it lacked the syntactic cohesion of a formal written language.

A study out this week finds that a series of engravings made between 43,000 and 34,000 years and deposited in caves in southwestern Germany suggest people have been capable of such protowriting for far longer than typically thought.

The engravings include dots as well as geometric and figurative symbols carved into mammoth ivory and the bones of cave lions, cave bears and other animals. A statistical analysis of the variety of symbols revealed their structure, diversity, and repetition rates resembled that of protocuneiform, suggesting these early European hunter-gatherers had the same cognitive capacities and could encode similar amounts of information in physical objects as the people who developed written language tens of millennia later.

Why did the makers of these symbols never develop them into formal written language? Perhaps they simply had no reason to. “These hunter-gatherers had a system that worked perfectly for their needs and felt no pressure to change it,” noted archaeologist Ben Marwick.

Read the full story

Climate | Science

Why ice ages lost their cool

About 2.7 million years ago, Earth’s climate had a personality crisis. Before then, ice ages waxed and waned in long, predictable cycles tied to Earth’s orbit, tens of thousands of years at a time. But new research in Science suggests that as Northern Hemisphere ice sheets grew larger, the planet’s climate system began behaving very differently . And ice ages started “flickering,” swinging abruptly every couple thousand years.

To understand when and why this shift occurred, researchers analyzed sediment cores drilled from the seafloor off the Iberian margin, near Portugal. Because sediments accumulate quickly there, they preserve unusually detailed climate signals stretching back more than five million years. By examining ratios of elements such as calcium and titanium, researchers traced changes in sediment delivered from land and by drifting icebergs.

For most of the Pliocene, from about 5.3 to 2.7 million years ago, the record shows only slow orbital cycles, with little to no sign of any rapid swings. But after 2.7 million years ago, during the intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, the first isolated cold events begin to appear. Within 200,000 years, rapid oscillations became frequent and persistent. The timing coincides with the expansion of glaciers large enough to reach the ocean in places like Greenland. As these ice masses grew, more icebergs broke off and melted into the North Atlantic—activity that may have disrupted ocean circulation, making the climate system more prone to abrupt shifts.

With ice sheets growing larger, millennial-scale variability became an enduring feature of ice ages and a new mode of climate behavior that would define the Quaternary, the ice-age period that continues today. The shift overlaps with the emergence of the genus Homo, indicating that our earliest ancestors evolved in an increasingly variable world that could have influenced hominin evolution.

Read the paper

Mass timber is poised to reshape construction

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Deep Dive

Still images from the various colors of concert halls that were tested on listeners. Drouzas et al./JASA (2026)

Rhapsody in blue?

Many jazz musicians train their ears to recognize the distinct impression or “color” of different chord tones, allowing them to improvise beautifully over everything from old standards to experimental new arrangements. For individuals with synesthesia, the concept of “hearing” colors is more literal: A B-flat musical note, for example, might trigger flashes of blue, while the sight of a yellow coffee cup could evoke a high-pitched humming noise.

Synesthesia is a rare neurological phenomenon, which may result from hyperconnected neurons. But some research suggests this mingling of senses may be more common than previously thought. In one set of experiments, researchers were able to induce an effect similar to sound-color synesthesia in study participants, more than half of whom experienced flashes of light when exposed to beeping sounds in a dark room. Another study revealed shared intuitions about the color of vowel sounds, with a majority of people agreeing that “aa” was more red than green and “ee” more light than dark. There is also evidence that certain sounds can suppress visual perception, while certain colors can improve visual acuity via sound.

Other studies have found that people tend to rate red sports cars and trains as being louder than green ones, even when there is no actual difference in volume. Because the color of a vehicle can affect how its loudness is perceived, scientists wondered if the color design of a concert hall might affect how the audience perceives music. According to previous research, the color of music halls doesn’t seem to have much impact on perceived loudness and reverberance. But what about timbre, sometimes understood as the “sound color” of music?

In a new study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, participants listened to recordings of four different musical performances—two on violin and two on clarinet—while wearing a virtual reality headset, which displayed three-dimensional models of a concert hall. These virtual venues varied in hues, brightness, and saturation, creating 12 different environments.

As expected, the color of the concert hall didn’t have any influence on perceived loudness, but it did affect how listeners perceived the timbre of the music , frequently described in terms of warmth and brilliance. More saturated colors, which appear visually cooler—especially in green and blue—evoked a colder sound color, while brighter colors lead to an acoustically warmer tone. Study participants also tended to report that they liked music better in darker concert halls.

The results suggest that architects should consider the interplay between visual aesthetics and auditory experiences when designing the spaces where music will be performed. “If you design a concert hall, don’t forget to think about the visual appearance,” study corresponding author Stefan Weinzierl explains in a statement. “It will have an effect on how the sound is perceived.”

Read the paper

Et Cetera

Bloom the dew

Dewdrops set off a chemical cascade that tells plants it’s time to blossom, new research shows—which could explain why plants around the world are flowering earlier over time. “It is global warming, but in a less obvious way,” explained the study’s senior author. “As it’s getting warmer, we’re getting more humidity in the air, meaning the formation of dewdrops earlier in the year.”

PNAS Paper | Read more at News from Science

The family that stays together isn’t slain together

Researchers suspect that orca fins that washed up on Bering Island are evidence of cannibalism. The fins were identified as coming from resident orcas, a fish-eating subspecies that lives near the coast in large family groups. Based on tooth marks, the team suspects the fins were removed by transient orcas—a different subspecies that forms fleeting hunting pods to take out marine mammals and sharks. These roving orcas may consume their kin when times are lean—and may have even provided the evolutionary pressure for large family units in the first place. After all, as one expert noted, “If they can’t find any food, and there’s a young tasty resident killer whale alone, why not?”

Marine Mammal Science Paper | Read more at New Scientist

Venusian spelunking

A reanalysis of orbital radar data from the 1990s has spotted a lava tube on Venus—the first confirmed on the planet. The find suggests many more caverns await discovery. “This helps us better understand how the planet evolved and how its geology compares with that of other rocky bodies in the solar system,” one remote sensing scientist explained.

Nature Communications Paper | Read more at Science News

Nothing in the information so far revealed about the seismic signal is uniquely explosive as opposed to natural, uniquely nuclear if nonnatural, or even uniquely from the Chinese nuclear test site.
—Christopher Wright, nuclear analyst

ScienceInsider | 24 February 2026 | Richard STone

The U.S. has now accused China of testing nuclear weapons, based on quakes detected by a seismic station in eastern Kazakhstan. The claim is being used to justify the nation restarting its own nuclear weapons testing, a move that could initiate a new nuclear arms race.

Last but not least

Though it’s often the butt of planetary jokes, Uranus is far stranger—and cooler—that its reputation would suggest. I mean, just look at this 3D movie of the ice giant’s upper atmosphere!

Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser

With contributions from Hannah Richter, Michael Price, Ana Georgescu, and Phie Jacobs

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