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29 January 2026 |
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Today’s Deep Dive delves into how a team of researchers hopes to help kids with crossed eyes. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including a fishy robot and a very Earthy planet. |
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Physiology | Science Advances |
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Scientists’ two cents on placenta sensing |
Placentas have been the subject of various wacky trends over the years, from painting them to planting them to cooking them up for an iron-rich snack. We should apply similar creativity to sensing placentas for abnormalities, scientists propose in a new Science Advances review paper.
Placentas serve critical functions during pregnancy, including transferring nutrients and providing immune protection to the fetus and regulating the endocrine system. When the organ dysfunctions, it can cause preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, preterm births, and even miscarriages.
At present, ultrasound imaging is the standard way to monitor the placenta’s condition. But imaging techniques have majorly advanced, argue the authors. Now, doctors should turn to Doppler imaging, which operates several orders of magnitude faster than standard imaging, and photoacoustic imaging, which is sensitive to deeper layers of tissue. However, a tradeoff still exists between resolution and depth, and none of the imaging techniques are great at interpreting movement of the fetus or the circulation of oxygen and nutrients.
Other techniques doctors could try include wearable placenta sensors, as well as integrating artificial intelligence into evaluating images to predict perinatal diseases. All of the above advancements “could ultimately redefine the paradigm of maternal and fetal care as indispensable tools for the future,” wrote the authors. |
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Biomimetics | Science Robotics |
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Just keep swimming (and gliding) |
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This little bot (right) swims much like a zebrafish (left). Liu et al./Science Robotics (2026) |
Interval training isn’t just for athletes. Many aquatic animals, from tiny zebrafish larvae to massive humpback whales, alternate between brief periods of active movement and passive gliding—a style known as “bout-and-glide” or “burst-and-coast” swimming. Now, new experiments with a fish-inspired robot help illustrate the advantages of this strategy.
Although scientists previously uncovered some of the brain networks that drive intermittent swimming in zebrafish, they have struggled to replicate these mechanisms in fishlike robots, which typically flap their tails with a continuous oscillation pattern. For this new study, researchers used brain and body recordings of live zebrafish larvae to create a neural model, which they integrated into a bioinspired robot called Zbot
. They found that the bout-and-glide technique used less energy and enhanced the efficiency of the robot’s actuator “muscles” when compared with sustained swimming.
As engineer Daniel Quinn notes in a related Focus, the findings “show that the advantages of burst-and-coast swimming can be explained using motor efficiency, offering a robotic explanation for what has historically been viewed as a hydrodynamic phenomenon.” In the future, he adds, similar mechanisms could be used for robots inspired by birds. |
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read the Science Robotics paper |
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Astronomy | News from Science |
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Promising Earth-sized planet spotted with yearlong orbit |
Of the more than 6000 distant exoplanets discovered so far, there are only a handful of Earth-sized worlds that orbit in the Goldilocks zone around Sun-like stars where water could be liquid on the surface. Astronomers can now add a new world to this exclusive list.
Hidden within nearly decade old data from NASA’s Kepler telescope, the planet, called HD 137010 b, is almost exactly Earth-sized. At 355 days, its orbit is almost exactly Earth-like, too. And its star is bright and just 146 light-years away—close enough to be observed in detail with future telescopes.
Although astronomers only got one look at the planet in 2017, they think its orbit around its star, a K dwarf that is 1000 degrees cooler than the Sun, places it at the icy edge of the star’s habitable zone. So the planet might be more like Mars — cold and inhospitable. But there’s a 40% chance that it orbits its star more closely, in which case it would sit squarely within the star’s habitable zone. You can expect this new world to be the target of many planet-hunting telescopes. “
I’m really looking forward to seeing what we find out next about it,” said astronomer Stephen Kane. |
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The latest advances in cancer immunotherapy will be presented at AACR IO |
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This must-attend event will feature cutting-edge research across the spectrum of basic, translational, and clinical science in immunology, inflammation, and cancer immunotherapies, presented by leading experts from both academia and industry. |
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Deep Dive |
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The signal processing circuit (right) for Eyelectronics is small and flexible, so it can sit on the side of the head (middle) while a sensor monitors eye movements (left). Yang et al./Science Advances (2026) |
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The eyelids have it |
A lot of people’s eyes don’t quite line up. This condition, known scientifically as strabismus and colloquially as crossed eyes, can be innate, induced by trauma, or even indicate other issues such as neurological problems. And it’s often uncomfortable—having your eyes pointing in different directions can mess up your depth perception, make it hard to read, cause eye strain, and even give you headaches. For some people, corrective glasses or vision therapy can fix a misalignment. But for others, surgery is the only way to achieve relief.
Trouble is, between one fifth and one half of these surgeries have to be redone because of inaccurate measurements of the patient’s strabismus. It’s just really tricky to capture eye movements accurately; the methods that do exist involve bulky instruments and/or rely on patient participation, which makes these measurements especially difficult to obtain for children. After all, it’s hard enough to get younger kids to sit perfectly still when they’re comfortable—imagine trying to get them to do so while they cover one eye or wear weird goggles, and then reliably tell a doctor when they see a light.
Tsinghua University scientists Xue Feng and Yihao Chen were chatting one day with Capital Medical University’s Yonghong Jiao and other colleagues about this exact issue when they realized something “obvious but often overlooked,” they told ScienceAdviser via email: “When the eye moves, the eyelid always moves with it.”
That got them thinking: Could eyelid movement serve as a proxy for eye movement? “From an engineering perspective, this is a very familiar idea—using a small number of well-placed strain sensors to capture rich mechanical information,” they noted. Chen and Feng’s research group had been working on just this sort of flexible electronic for years. So, they tinkered with their designs, and sure enough, they developed a sensor that can sit above the eye and measure how the eyelid moves. “Rather than adding more rigid components, cameras, or bulky modules, we wanted the hardware to be as simple and comfortable as possible, so that it could be realistically used in clinical settings, including in children,” they explained.
But a sensor alone wasn’t enough—they needed to interpret those eyelid movements to obtain accurate measurements for strabismus. The key, they realized, was combining traditional strain measurements with AI. And just like that, Eyelectronics was born.
“In a way, Eyelectronics is about doing more with less,” the trio explained. “Instead of relying on bulky optics or rigid hardware, we show that a very lightweight, skinlike sensor—when combined with physics-based modeling and AI—can extract clinically meaningful information that traditionally required complex instrumentation.”
The team tested their device with real people—including themselves, Chen and Tsinghua University colleagues Yong Yang and Xin Liu admitted. “The device is ultrathin, soft, and lightweight, so it does not noticeably interfere with normal blinking or eye movements. After a short period, most users adapt to the sensation and can perform eye movement tasks naturally,” Liu, Chen, and Yang told ScienceAdviser.
Now, the team plans to conduct largescale clinical trials, especially with children—but they’re also thinking beyond crossed eyes. “Because eye movement is tightly linked to the nervous system, we believe this approach could also contribute to the assessment of certain neurological disorders, opening the door to wider clinical use of wearable eye-movement diagnostics.” |
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Catfishing surveys |
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Paid online surveys have become a cornerstone of social science research. They’re also a way to make some quick cash—if you can impersonate a bunch of people well enough to fool the researchers’ fraud detectors. Unfortunately, a new study demonstrates that a well-designed chatbot can do exactly that. “We need to start rethinking the way that we have traditionally done survey research,” one expert said. |
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PNAS Paper | Read more at
Nature |
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Not opening that can of worms |
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In a proof-of-concept study, researchers have used a kind of Raman spectroscopy to discern between different preservation fluids inside specimen jars from Charles Darwin’s famous voyage on the HMS Beagle. The technique was accurate 80% of the time—which is good, but could be better. Still, the method could be extremely useful for museum curators. “Until now, understanding what preservation fluid is in each jar [usually] meant opening them, which risks evaporation, contamination, and exposing specimens to environmental damage,” one expert noted. “This technique allows us to monitor and care for these invaluable specimens without compromising their integrity.” |
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ACS Omega Paper | Read more at
Chemistry World |
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A galaxy far, far away |
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NASA’s JWST has spotted a galaxy that existed a mere 280 million years after the big bang, the oldest yet observed. The light from this bright spot in the universe—dubbed MoM-z14—took more than 13 billion years to reach us. “It’s an incredibly exciting time, with Webb revealing the early universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover,” one scientist said. |
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arXiv Preprint | Read more at
Scientific American |
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Like many, I believe that the May 2025 White House executive order, “Restoring Gold Standard Science” ... was the worst kind of poison: It looks, smells, and tastes exactly like a healthy meal. |
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Undark Viewpoints | 28 January 2026 | C. Brandon Ogbunu |
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