LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 5:52 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback For nearly 4 decades, researchers have tracked one of the most prominent harbingers of global warming—dwindling Arctic sea ice—with data from aging weather satellites run by the U.S. military. But this continuous record is now at risk, after the Department of Defense (DOD) quietly told climate scientists it would be “deprioritizing” access to the data. The move comes as Arctic sea ice approaches a possible new record low. “The [satellites] are up there and functioning,” says Walt Meier, a remote-sensing scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). “But we’re not getting all the data anymore, at least regularly.” NSIDC and Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service compile the two most prominent global records of sea ice, and both groups rely on these data. The only options for similar observations come from either an aging Japanese satellite, launched in 2012, or a series of Chinese weather satellites, which the country is already using to produce its own record of sea ice. A new DOD weather satellite, launched last year, is also capable of collecting similar data, but its data have not yet been made public. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up NSIDC announced on Wednesday it would begin to use data from the Japanese sensor, noting that the transition would take time. That means sea ice monitoring in the United States, at least for now, will be reliant on a single source, says Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “Any kind of single point of failure is a real risk,” he says, adding that researchers could get lucky and experience no interruption, he says. But satellites can fail at any time. “If data is lost for 1 day, we can live with it. If it’s lost for 8 months, that’s a wholly different story.” The three satellites in the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) were never intended to track sea ice. Rather, their passive microwave sensors, which can peer through clouds, have been used to track wind speeds over the oceans. But they are also perfectly suited for detecting the distinct reflections of sea ice. For a long time, the risk was that the DMSP satellites—only two of which remain fully operational—would expire before a successor flew. But last year, the agency launched the Weather System Follow-on–Microwave satellite. After a year, the military is still closely holding its data. Then, in May, DOD officials told NSIDC scientists that, because of staffing cuts at the facility that receives and processes the data, the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, they could not continue to reliably provide full coverage of sea ice. Already, more gaps in NSIDC’s daily sea ice charts have become apparent, Meier says. Advertisement DOD has also told NSIDC that, after September, operational support for the instruments will cease. And it plans to turn off all three of the older satellites at the end of the 2026 fiscal year, in October 2026. (The U.S. Space Command, which manages the satellites, did not respond to questions about the reasons for these decisions.) The undependable military data isn’t the only challenge NSDIC is facing. Last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended some of its financial support for NSIDC to produce records of sea ice extent and thickness. And NASA funds supporting the center’s influential Sea Ice Today website, which makes it easy to track Arctic and Antarctic sea ice trends, have expired. Although NSIDC has downgraded support for some of its products, it has continued to produce its daily sea ice record. Satellites that could bolster the tenuous record are in the pipeline. A new Japanese satellite is expected to launch this year, and Europe is developing several satellites that will carry passive microwave sensors, the first of which could launch before decade’s end. Scientists who study sea ice extent have been “blessed” with such a long and almost uninterrupted record from the U.S. satellites, says Thomas Lavergne of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. With the planned satellites, it is likely the record can continue. Ensuring consistency between these different satellites will not be straightforward, Lavergne adds, “but with careful considerations and adequate research efforts, we can make it happen.” But given all the potential cuts looming for U.S. climate research, Julienne Stroeve, a climate scientist at University College London who also works with NSIDC, wonders whether NSIDC will remain the go-to source for sea ice data. Many industries rely on the center’s forecasts for sea ice, she says. If the cuts continue, she says, “I guess they’ll have to go elsewhere. They’ll have to go to Europe to find the information that they need.” The changes come as ice at the poles is more endangered than ever. The annual peak in Arctic sea ice comes in March, after the long polar night. But this year, NSIDC researchers determined that the peak was the lowest since continuous satellite monitoring began in 1979. Ice extent was some 80,000 square kilometers less than the previous low in peak ice, set in 2017. Whether that trend will continue to an all-time low in September—and whether that low will be seen at all—is anyone’s guess.

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 5:14 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback More than a decade after psychologists began to seriously wrestle with questions about the rigor and reliability of their work, there are signals that the field is improving. A recent analysis of 240,355 psychology papers reports that “fragile” statistical results—a potential marker of poor research practices or samples that are too small—decreased substantially between 2004 and 2024. It’s a “thorough and impressive piece of work,” says Mark Rubin, a psychologist at Durham University who was not involved in the study, published in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science in April. He adds that the finding is consistent with other recent signs of improvement in psychology, such as an increase in sample sizes reported in an April preprint. In the early 2010s, critics started pointing out that much of the psychology literature was unreliable, because of poor use of statistics, small sample sizes, and a tendency to publish flashier findings. They proposed a range of reforms—including thoroughly describing a research plan before embarking on it, and making data and analysis code public—to help improve rigor. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up To search for improvement, Duke University psychologist Paul Bogdan turned to p values, a measure of statistical significance. In psychology and many other fields, a result is considered “significant” if the p value is lower than 0.05. An unusual number of papers reporting p values just below that threshold can indicate that researchers have engaged in dubious practices to produce publishable findings, such as analyzing the data in different ways until they got the results they wanted, or cherry-picking results. Bogdan wrote code to comb through 240,355 psychology papers published over the past 20 years across a range of subdisciplines, and automatically extract the p values. Then, he looked at how many of these values appeared in what he called the “fragile” range—between 0.01 and 0.05, or close to the conventional threshold of significance. Simply by chance, about 26% of results should fall in this range; higher numbers suggest biases are at play. In 2004, 32% of p values were in the fragile range, implying that behaviors such as cherry-picking results were indeed occurring. By 2024, the percentage had dropped to just over 26%—close to the number that would be expected. That suggests psychologists are conducting higher quality studies with fewer of the problems that sparked the concerns about rigor, Bogdan says. The improvement varied across subfields, with clinical psychology and developmental psychology still reporting more fragile p values than fields such as cognitive psychology and social psychology. Advertisement Smaller sample sizes can also lead to shaky findings, and Bogdan’s analysis showed that sample sizes have increased over time: On average, studies in most fields used fewer than 100 participants in 2004, with some increasing to about 250 by 2024. The increase in sample size was especially marked in social psychology, which has been able to make use of online experiment platforms to recruit large samples, says Anne Scheel, a metascientist at Utrecht University who peer reviewed the paper. (The practice has raised concerns about data quality because online studies can draw bots or inattentive respondents.) In fields such as clinical psychology, where researchers still need to recruit participants in person, the change was less marked. Bogdan thinks changes in psychology’s culture of incentives and rewards drove the improvements. He found that papers with lower p values were more likely to be published in higher prestige journals and receive more citations, suggesting that peers recognize and reward robust work. In the past, work that was flashy, but not necessarily robust, was more likely to be rewarded, he says: “But now, I think the field has progressed to where that no longer happens and we’re in a much better place.” But Scheel and others caution against extrapolating too much from the findings. It’s impossible to say how much the changes in p values reflect actual reform in the field, and how much they stem from online studies boosting sample sizes, for instance. Ian Hussey, a metascientist at the University of Bern, agrees that it’s difficult to establish exactly why fragile p values have decreased over time. But that result seems like good news, he says. Not all fields are changing evenly, and there is clearly still room for improvement, but “I would say it is a big win.”

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 01:56 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback A tower made of worms might seem like something out of a horror movie, but it’s the real deal. For the first time, scientists have filmed microscopic worms called nematodes in the wild as they glom together and form large wriggling masses, they report today in Current Biology. Researchers went hunting for the odd agglomerations in a local orchard in Konstanz, Germany. There, they used a digital microscope to film towers made by two different species of nematodes (genus Caenorhabditis). They found 52 towers, each made of an average of 14 individuals from the same species. In lab experiments, the team showed the towers behave like a superorganism, wiggling and responding to touch as if the entire tower is a single entity (as seen in the above video). The tower can move over a gap from one surface to the next, and it’s also able to attach and hitch a ride on passing insects to disperse. Scientists previously thought only nematode larvae could form such towers, but the new work reveals they can be constructed by individuals from all life stages. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up Why the worms form towers in the first place remains a mystery. The researchers speculate that being in group may give the worms better collective odds of survival, as the towers could improve the worms’ ability to sense their environment, move around, attach to insects, and disperse. Arriving at a new location as a group also could make it easier for the worms to find food and reproduce—making it that much likelier for the next generation of worms to form wriggling towers all their own.

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 06:26 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback The self-reported race and ethnicity of people in the United States don’t always match their genetic ancestry. That’s the takeaway of a new paper that analyzed ancestries of people participating in the All of Us Research Program—the flagship genetics and health project of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that has been working to sequence 1 million genomes from people across the U.S. Published today in The American Journal of Human Genetics, the new findings have implications for how genetic databases can help scientists better understand disparities in health between populations, especially as researchers move away from racial categories and into ancestry categories in studies. “It’s a step in the right direction,” says Mashaal Sohail, an evolutionary geneticist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who was not involved in the new study. “I think it’s important to recognize and look at race and ethnicity, and genetic ancestry separately.” Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups. Some geneticists have pushed to use ancestry—genetic differences resulting from the part of the world a person’s ancestors came from—to explain those differences. Still, researchers have not settled on the best categories to use in genetics studies—or even whether categories are needed at all—and how to best use self-reported race and ethnicity. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up To better understand these categories in people living in the U.S., Charles Rotimi, a genetic epidemiologist and scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and his colleagues analyzed approximately 2 million genetic variants in more than 230,000 participants, a subset of the more than 400,000 people whose whole genomes are in the All of Us database. Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today. For example, those who identified as Black or African American had varying proportions of African and European genetic variation. This complexity was especially striking among those who declined to self-report their race, more than 90% of whom reported Hispanic or Latino ancestry. Their DNA revealed a broad mix of African, European, and Native American ancestries. Most of these individuals may not identify within any specific U.S. racial category or they can identify with all racial categories, Rotimi wrote in an email to Science. The researchers also found that the ancestries represented in the All of Us database not only match, but even surpass in diversity those found in other widely used reference data sets from global genetic panels—including the 1000 Genomes Project and the Simons Genome Diversity Project, which aimed to include underrepresented groups across the globe. Advertisement “Nearly all major global populations are represented by at least a few people in All of Us—that’s really remarkable,” says human geneticist Alexander Bick of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the new study. “It just shows how Americans come from every corner of the world,” which adds complexity to understanding how different ancestries affect health. To better understand specific ancestries’ influence on health, the team went beyond continental categories—such as African, European, and Asian—and analyzed the data using markers for more local categories in each continent. They showed that narrower ancestry categories have measurable links to on traits such as body mass index (BMI)—even after adjusting for a wide range of social and environmental factors. For example, West-Central African ancestry was associated with a higher BMI, whereas East African ancestry was associated with a lower BMI, showing that even two very closely related ancestries—which are often lumped into a single African ancestry category—can shape traits in different ways. The results underscore why “we shouldn’t just always default to these big continental categories—they are so artificial,” says Anna Lewis, a bioethicist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who was not involved in the study. She and others have suggested describing genetic variation in an ancestry recombination graph instead, which shows how individuals are connected genetically with other individuals and how DNA has been passed down. However, the authors of the new paper “do a nice job of complexifying a bit what’s going on, and that’s what we need—we need to lean into the nuance, lean into the complexity,” she says. Geneticists have now mostly stopped using the term “race” as a label in studies, although the authors of the new paper say self-reported race or ethnicity might still capture important social and environmental factors that influence health, such as systemic discrimination. Genetics and environmental exposures can also vary considerably among individuals that may self-identify as belonging to the same racial or ethnic category, Rotimi wrote. Already some policy decisions are following the science. Rotimi noted that the U.S. Census Bureau has changed the 2030 census to combine race and ethnicity into a single question, in recognition of the complex nature of ancestry and to encourage people to check all categories that apply to them. These results are only valid in the U.S. context, Sohail cautions, because the same social categories of race and ethnicity might not be equivalent in other countries with highly mixed populations, such as Mexico and Brazil. “Over time, we may move away from these categories altogether, but it will take some time,” she says.

Table of contents A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 388, Issue 6751. Download PDF LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 04:05 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback With brutal winters and poor soil, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula seems an unlikely place to grow crops. But researchers working with the region’s local Menominee tribe have uncovered evidence that Indigenous peoples in the area built a vast, sophisticated agricultural network that yielded prolific quantities of corn, beans, and squash for 6 centuries before Europeans arrived. “The extent of these systems is quite amazing,” says archaeologist Susan Kooiman at Michigan State University, who wasn’t involved with the work, which appears today in Science. “This really challenges our preconceived notions about agriculture in the northern Great Lakes region.” Kooiman adds that the fields’ scale and sophistication surpass anything seen before in the pre-Columbian eastern United States. The work centered on the Sixty Islands site, an area just across the border from Wisconsin long associated with the Menominee people. “This special place tells us where we’ve come from and where we’re going,” says David Grignon, the tribe’s historic preservation officer and study co-author. The Menominee partnered with Dartmouth College environmental archaeologist Madeleine McLeester and colleagues to survey the site with drone-based lidar, which uses lasers to map hidden surface features. SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up The researchers were stunned to find an intricate system of fields made up of long, low ridges spanning nearly 100 hectares. Excavating confirmed that farmers used compost and likely gathered rich soil from nearby wetlands to improve the land’s fertility. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal showed these activities took place between 1000 and 1600 C.E. “The agriculture here is so much bigger and denser than what we see anywhere else in eastern North America,” McLeester says. With no sign of nearby large population centers, “these results blew our minds.” She notes such ridges, between 10 to 35 centimeters high, function as raised beds, retaining moisture and heat that provide for a slightly longer and more productive growing season than conventional fields. “There were no beasts of burden, so this was all done by hand,” McLeester says. Advertisement Diseases brought by Europeans devastated the communities who farmed these lands. After, forests grew and hid its agricultural legacy. The ridges were of variable lengths and orientations, suggesting they were created by different groups rather than the result of a master plan. “This shows that you can have really significant changes to the landscape without chiefs or kings,” notes Michael Adler, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University. The ridges were in use during the Mississippian culture, which between 600 and 1400 C.E. produced the only pre-Columbian urban areas north of the Rio Grande. Although its heartland was around Cahokia, in today’s East St. Louis, Illinois, its influence reached at least as far as Aztalan, a large Mississippi-style settlement 300 kilometers south of Sixty Islands in today’s southern Wisconsin. Kooiman speculates that the ridges reflect the influence of these mound builders, and that the fields may have produced food to trade with the copper-producing areas around Lake Superior. Alder hopes lidar will be used to search for more traces of agriculture across the wooded areas of the Great Lakes as well as New York state and New England. Kooiman agrees. “We haven’t looked carefully enough and assumed that only complex societies could make these kinds of dramatic landscape changes.” She also notes that the Dartmouth-Menominee partnership is an important model for future studies. “Such collaboration is the future of American archaeology.”

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 06:26 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Even as mpox continues to spread in Africa, recently gaining a serious foothold in Sierra Leone, vaccination efforts are falling far short, imperiling efforts to control the debilitating and sometimes fatal disease. “It is a difficult time,” says Yap Boum, who leads the mpox response for the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). In September 2024, Africa CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) jointly issued an mpox “continental preparedness and response plan” that called for vaccinating 10 million people in Africa within 6 months. An updated version of the plan, issued in April, narrowed who should be offered the vaccine and scaled back the target to 6.4 million people by August. But according to a 29 May WHO situation report, only 720,000 people in seven African countries have received mpox vaccines. Doses are scarce, vaccination teams are short on health workers and transportation, and identifying who might have been exposed to the mpox virus and should get the vaccine first is a challenge. In May 2022, a global outbreak that mainly affected men who have sex with men illustrated the power of vaccination. Thanks in large part to aggressive vaccination of those communities in many countries, WHO declared the international emergency was over 1 year later. But a different mpox outbreak that began in September 2023 persists in Africa, surfacing in 26 countries over the past 12 months. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been hardest hit, accounting for more than half of the 30,000-plus cases confirmed in Africa. (Because testing is scarce, the real number is surely much higher.) SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up “The virus is spreading rapidly in several parts of Africa impacted by armed conflict and political instability,” says South African epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim, who chairs Africa CDC’s emergency consultative group. Last year, WHO determined that the upsurge qualified as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a designation WHO plans to revisit on 5 June. The supply of vaccines, though tight, is improving. So far, 11 African countries have received nearly 1.3 million doses of a vaccine called modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) and 50,000 of one dubbed LC16m8. This week, after months of negotiation, Japan sent the DRC another 1.5 million doses of LC16m8. That vaccine, however, is more difficult to administer than MVA—it requires a special bifurcated needle that is repeatedly jabbed into the skin—and is a live but weakened virus that copies itself after injection. For safety reasons it cannot be used in pregnant people or people who have immune systems compromised by HIV or other factors. The administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to donate up to 1 million doses of MVA from its stockpile, but only about half of that amount has arrived, Boum says. UNICEF also promised up to 1 million doses of MVA, but that effort, too, has fallen short. UNICEF told ScienceInsider it did provide more than 500,000 doses to nine countries. Countries are struggling to get the doses that are available into arms. “Once you have the vaccines, delivering is not easy, because you need to fund the health workers, and you need to fund awareness programs,” says Mohga Kamal-Yanni, a senior policy adviser for the People’s Medicines Alliance, a global coalition that advocates for equitable distribution of vaccines and drugs. Advertisement Karim says President Donald Trump’s cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have hampered those efforts. “The abrupt closure of USAID support for the mpox control effort in Africa is a major blow, especially since it played a key role in the logistics of vaccine storage and distribution,” he says. The DRC and many other countries have also relied on $6.2 million from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to support their distribution of mpox vaccine. A centerpiece of the Africa CDC plan is to stop spread by “ring vaccination,” which focuses on immunizing contacts of confirmed cases. But the approach requires collecting samples from suspected cases and sending them to laboratories to confirm an infection. Those procedures are “not able to operate properly in the midst of armed conflict and strained health services,” Karim notes. The work is especially difficult in the eastern DRC, a hot spot of mpox spread, because of the M23 rebel incursion that began in January. For all steps of the effort, “We are still highly dependent on donation,” says Placide Mbala, an mpox researcher at the DRC’s National Institute of Biomedical Research. Africa CDC is “pushing” its member countries to “mobilize domestic resources,” Boum says, and hoping African companies can soon produce mpox vaccines at more affordable prices. Bavarian Nordic, the manufacturer of MVA, in December 2024 announced a licensing agreement with the Serum Institute of India to produce doses for India, and said it “continues to explore additional opportunities to establish partnerships” with African manufacturers. Kamal-Yanni is not satisfied. “The company doesn’t want to share the technology, and therefore, they monopolize the market.” For now, the DRC is stretching its vaccine supply by only giving people one of two recommended doses of MVA, and Boum says it’s also considering a “dose-sparing” strategy endorsed by WHO that would give people two shots of one-fifth the normal dose of the vaccine. “We really have to do more and better with less,” Boum says.