21 April 2026

In today’s Logbook, Science Senior Producer Sarah Crespi gives us a peek at the making of The Normals, Science’s three-part limited podcast series (the last episode of which comes out today!). But first, catch up on the latest science news, including how a broken beak didn’t keep Bruce down and why roots don’t get bent out of shape.

Ecotoxicology | News from Science

Cocaine pollution gives salmon wanderlust

Long after the high is gone, illegal drugs linger in the environment. Cocaine and its breakdown products, for example, are found in rivers and lakes worldwide. Wildlife in polluted waters—including tiny crustaceans, fish, and even sharks—can’t help but take up these drugs. In laboratory studies, cocaine can alter animal behavior. Now, a research team has conducted the first experiment with drug-exposed fish in the wild.

To mimic the effect of living in polluted water, the researchers surgically implanted small devices into 2-year-old Atlantic salmon from a hatchery that slowly released chemicals. One group of 35 fish received implants containing cocaine. Another group got implants with benzoylecgonine, the main breakdown product of cocaine. A third group received control implants with no chemicals. All the fish were outfitted with small tags so the research team could track their movements over 2 months in a large lake in Sweden.

In general, young hatchery salmon tend to explore more after they are released. As they learn about their new environment, they move around less and less. This is what the researchers observed—with a twist. The salmon with drug implants retained more of their adventuresome spirit. Compared with the controls, fish exposed to the metabolite benzoylecgonine swam as much as 1.9 times farther each week.

The larger effect from the metabolite compared with cocaine itself is consistent with previous lab research, which found that benzoylecgonine persists longer in fish. What these altered behaviors mean for salmon in the long term isn’t clear. It’s possible they affect how they hunt and are hunted, the researchers said, but that will take more study.

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Animals | News from Science

This disabled parrot is winning at life

a barrot with one half of his beak missing

Bruce found a way to win without a full beak. Alex Grabham and Ximena Nelson

It’s usually not a great idea to bring a knife to a sword fight. But Bruce, a disabled kea parrot living in a wildlife reserve in New Zealand, isn’t one to back down from a challenge. Despite missing the entire upper half of his beak, he reigns as the most dominant male in his social group—a spot he earned using a unique, seemingly unbeatable “jousting” technique.

Researchers at the preserve closely watched kea as they moved about the aviary, recording any combative encounters and collecting droppings to test for glucocorticoid metabolites—a key hormonal marker of stress. While most of the birds fought by opening their beaks and biting down on an opponent’s neck, Bruce tended to lunge forward with his lower beak in a style reminiscent of jousting or fencing. This technique proved remarkably effective: Over the course of the study period, Bruce was involved in 36 confrontations with other birds, and in all of them, he emerged as the winner.

Bruce appears to be reaping the rewards of his combat prowess. As the study authors report this week in Current Biology, he has preferential access to all the feeders in the aviary and exhibits the lowest levels of glucocorticoid metabolites, suggesting he is less stressed than his peers. He is also the only male kea in the group to be groomed by other males—a sign of dominance. “I think it’s very clear that Bruce has made the most of his half-beak in a captive setting,” Amalia Bastos, a comparative psychologist who previously observed the talented parrot using stone tools to preen himself, told ScienceAdviser.

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Botany | Science

Deeply rooted

If you’ve ever tried to thread a needle, you know just how difficult getting a floppy string through a stiff eye can be. So, it’s a marvel that tiny plant roots can bury straight down into the soil, navigating nutrients, changing densities, and humidity without bending.

To probe the journeys of plant roots, researchers turned to reactive oxygen species (ROS), which are present in many plant signaling processes. They stained roots so they fluoresced when producing ROS on their surfaces, then allowed plant roots to grow while imaging them. The roots indeed lit up in bursts when a root got bent.

The authors concluded that as roots dig, a calcium channel detects any bending. Then, the plant boosts up ROS production on the over-extended side, which stiffens cell walls and gets the root back on track. Plants genetically engineered to have disrupted ROS production weren’t able to get their bendy roots straightened out.

There are myriad signaling pathways that help a plant readjust its course in the soil. Still, when the calcium-ROS mechanism fails, “the root will continue bending and ultimately fail to penetrate the soil,” explained the authors.

Read the paper

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Logbook

Just a Normal podcast

Sarah Crespi, Senior Producer and Host, Science Podcast

This month we finally launched a three-part podcast series on a topic I have been thinking about since March 2023: healthy human subjects. I attended the 2023 AAAS Annual meeting and saw a session by Laura Stark , a history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. She talked about a unique set of research subjects she called “The Normals”—people who had participated in research studies to provide a baseline for “normal” physiology and behavior.

As a podcast host for Science, I’ve talked to many researchers about their work when it’s all done and published, but I rarely talk to research participants anymore. Listening to Laura Stark talk about tracking down research participants and collecting oral histories had me thinking back to my own early experiences. Back in 2003, I spent a year as an in-person interviewer for an election study where I was randomly assigned doors to knock on and ask people questions about their politics. It was often a real challenge to convince them to answer the door and talk to me. I also interviewed participants for about an hour each on the phone for a panel study on income. The study required the same people to answer the same questions over the course of many years, but only some had made it a habit. Many disappeared—they moved, were jailed, or died before the next survey round. So, I know firsthand how the fight for participants is always there.

As Laura continued, I got sucked in by all the twists and turns in the story. Where do researchers get “normal” human subjects for studies—not prisoners, not sick people? How about conscientious objectors that have to do some kind of service to avoid the draft? What if they like being human guinea pigs even though they were being given LSD and other experimental drugs? And what does a historian of science do with that?

As a podcast producer, I work with sound: interview clips, sometimes event recordings, narration I write and voice. But as I talked with Laura about the old days of human experimentation, so many visuals kept cropping up. As part of the research for her book, she had documents from the early days of the Normals and pictures of the participants. How could I get these into a podcast?

As we worked on the show, we found different ways to incorporate some of these documents: Sometimes I voiced them, sometimes also with a jazzy music track; whenever possible we asked people to read their own words. I loved the jargon of science from the 1950s and the first-hand accounts that revealed the participants’ vulnerability, fear, and at times, profound boredom. Hearing some of the outdated descriptions of psychiatric disorders was quite a treat.

But there was so much more that I wished I could squeeze in. So for ScienceAdviser, I have included a few of the archival documents, letters, and personal journal entries that stood out in my mind. Laura also plans to make the transcripts from her 100-plus interviews with Normals subjects available as an archive at Harvard University once her book is published in early 2027. Having the joy of speaking with just four Normals, I can’t imagine what treasure this trove will hold.

A Normal NIH Staff Meeting, 1958
From the NIH itself, we had a transcript of a 1958 meeting—years after the start of the program—about how normal the Normals actually were.

Transcript of the combined clinical staff meeting at the National Institutes of Health, The Clinical Center, February 13, 1958. NIH, courtesy of Laura Stark

I loved reading the somewhat ornate writing and gaining insight into how researchers were thinking about psychiatric disorders and normalcy at the time.

It turned out that this sort of writing doesn’t play well to the ear and we sadly cut all mention of it from the audio. The whole transcript is worth a read, especially since in a break between discussions of normalcy, the group goes on to talk about blood tests for schizophrenia being considered at the time. As we highlight in the episode, there was a lot of confidence at the time that a schizophrenia cure was right around the corner.

Letter from a Normal, 1955
Over the course of The Normals podcast production, we did manage to squeeze in other documents using a few tricks of the audio trade. Episode one features a letter written by Normal volunteer Dale Horst to a friend who had graduated from being a Normal. Dale wrote lightheartedly about a weekend living at the Clinical Center and people they knew in common. I decided to voice part of the letter to give the audience a taste of the kind of non-science activities happening on the project, like giving each other haircuts.

Transcribing Dale’s scrawling handwriting might have been one of the toughest challenges on this project.

Letter by Dale Horst, 1955 courtesy of Laura Stark

Diary of a Normal, 1979
One of the Normal subjects we interviewed, Cindy Jansen, shared her journal from her Normals stint in summer 1979 with Laura Stark. You can tell by reading these pages that Cindy was enthusiastic about her work with researchers studying speech pathology—as part of her internship she observed patients and recorded their speech by hand. Her participation in research as a Normal was a mixed experience for Cindy though. We shared that portion of her journal in episode two , with her reading an abridged version of her decision to not to take part in a particular study. I was glad to have her read her own words aloud but seeing them documented in her own bubbly handwriting in 1979, page after page, has a different impact.

Journal of Cindy Jansen, 1979 COURTESY OF LAURA STARK

1962 FBI file, conscientious objector
One other document we were not able to get into the podcast was an FBI file that had been compiled on a former Normal regarding his conscientious objector status. We talked about including this information for the part of episode two when we covered hippies joining the Normals project. Eventually we decided it was too much of a tangent off the main story line.

Notes from an FBI file about one of the Normal participants. FBI, courtesy of Laura Stark

black and white picture of people sitting in rows

Normals cohort photo at NIH Clinical Center, summer 1961, including a contentious objector who was investigated by the FBI (second from right, bottom row) courtesy of Laura Stark

Listen to The Normals

Et Cetera

Without breaking a sweat

The winner of a half-marathon last weekend in Beijing finished in just 50 minutes, 26 seconds—about 7 minutes faster than the current world record. The runner hasn’t unseated Jacob Kiplimo, however, given that it’s a robot. Perhaps the more impressive comparison is that the machine, dubbed Lightning, completed the race about three times faster than last year’s best mechanical racers. “What appears to have changed this year is that some of China’s many humanoid companies have invested the engineering effort needed to make these systems robust enough for a long-duration race,” one expert noted. “That is genuinely impressive.”