Science

A research team led by scientists at the University of Waterloo, Ontario is developing a novel tool to treat cancer by engineering hungry bacteria to literally eat tumors from the inside out.

Key to the approach is a bacterium called Clostridium sporogenes, which is commonly found in soil and can only grow in environments with absolutely no oxygen.

The core of a solid, cancerous tumor is comprised of dead cells and is oxygen-free, making it an ideal breeding ground for the bacterium to multiply.

“Bacteria spores enter the tumor, finding an environment where there are lots of nutrients and no oxygen, which this organism prefers, and so it starts eating those nutrients and growing in size,” said Dr. Marc Aucoin, a chemical engineering professor at Waterloo. “So, we are now colonizing that central space, and the bacterium is essentially ridding the body of the tumor.”

the frog news is hopping today

When a new species is discovered, it's tempting to imagine an adventure novel, said Chan Kin Onn of Michigan State University. "Most people have this image of an intrepid explorer braving an isolated mountain or some other remote place, and stumbling across a creature that no one has ever seen before," Chan said. Sure, that still happens occasionally. "But most of the time it's far less glamorous," he added.

Instead, the vast majority of new vertebrate species are "discovered" by revisiting known populations with new data or tools, and showing they were more distinct than previously thought.

Chan is a herpetologist, a scientist who specializes in studying amphibians and reptiles like frogs, turtles, lizards, and snakes. There are more than 9,000 species of amphibians on the planet, and each year roughly 100 to 200 are added to the list, he said.

Take a group of little brown frogs from Southeast Asia called the Bornean fanged frogs, so called because of tooth-like projections on their jaws. One of them, Limnonectes kuhlii, has been known to science since 1838. But in the last two decades, genetic analyses have found that what looks like one species might actually be as many as 18.

"Animals that look similar but are genetically distinct are called cryptic species," said Chan, who is also Curator of Vertebrate Collections and a core faculty member in MSU's Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program.

Due to advances in genetic sequencing, "a ton of cryptic species are being discovered left and right."

To see if, in fact, these frogs had been woefully undercounted, Chan and colleagues extracted DNA from specimens collected across the mountain rainforests of Malaysian Borneo and analyzed more than 13,000 genes across their genomes.

According to their work, published Jan. 14 in the journal Systematic Biology, the frogs do indeed fall into multiple genetic clusters. But only six or seven clusters could be classified as distinct species.

"It's not just one species. But it's not 18 species, either," Chan said.

The question is more than an academic hairsplitting exercise.

That's because the world's frogs are in trouble. A 2023 study of some 8,000 amphibian species worldwide revealed that two out of five amphibian species are threatened with extinction, making them the most endangered group of vertebrates on the planet.

On the one hand, if we don't know a species exists, we can't protect it, said Chan, who was a co-author on the 2023 study.

"There are so many species in the world that we still haven't discovered, and that could go extinct before we can give them a name," Chan said.

"But there's a flip side to that coin too," he added.

Overzealously splitting what was once considered one species into multiples can create problems for conservation biologists, making the geographic range of newly described cryptic species seem more restricted—and their situation more dire—than it really is.

"We cannot possibly conserve everything, so we have to triage and decide how to allocate limited resources toward what we think are the highest priorities," Chan said. "We could be putting names on things that shouldn't be prioritized."

The researchers also found a lot of interbreeding between these different frogs.

"We found a ton of gene flow going on," Chan said.

All the DNA moving back and forth can make for blurry dividing lines. As a result, some of the growing number of cryptic species may be more methodological artifact than biological reality, he added.

The fanged frogs in Borneo show that species don't evolve instantaneously. "It's not like all of a sudden, boom. It's more of a continuum," Chan said.

Fanged frogs are by no means the only group of animals whose numbers scientists may have miscalculated.

Over the past two decades, genetic studies of animals ranging from insects and fish to birds and mammals suggest there may be a staggering number of species hiding in plain sight.

Where once the total number of species on Earth was thought to be 8.7 million, more recent models accounting for cryptic species suggest the true number may be anywhere from 7 to 250 times that.

So where does the true number lie? "This study shows that there's a speciation 'gray zone' that can make it hard to draw the line," Chan said.

ⓘ This user is suspected of really liking frogs. Send newts (or something like that).

Smithsonian researchers in Panama have begun to reintroduce native golden frogs to the wild in special enclosures

The last known time that someone saw bright yellow frogs bespeckled with black dots in Panama’s wilderness was in 2009. These Panamanian golden frogs probably succumbed to a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, which has decimated amphibian populations across the globe.

Now, researchers who have captive-bred the critically endangered golden frogs recently soft-released 100 of them into nature. The creatures stayed in special pens in late 2025 so that the scientists could assess how the deadly disease affects the animals—and how they might eventually adapt to it.

“This project was designed to see what would happen if we put these golden frogs back into a wild situation, just to kind of understand what are the disease dynamics, and how do these frogs regain their skin toxins,” Brian Gratwicke, a conservation biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI), tells Smithsonian magazine.

Chytridiomycosis is an infectious disease caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, also called chytrid fungus. It’s thought to have reached southern Central America—where Panama is located—in the late 1980s. In 2019, researchers estimated that Bd had led to the extinction of 90 species worldwide as well as the decline of at least 491 others, and chytridiomycosis is often considered the most devastating wildlife disease on record.

Fungal spores can travel in water and even catch rides with other animals, including humans. Once they reach an amphibian, chytrid fungus can have devastating effects.

“It attacks the skin and kind of forms the ability to grow in and on the skin, and then causes, usually, the skin to fall off of the animal,” Jason Stajich, a microbiologist at the University of California, Riverside, who is not involved in the Panama project, tells Smithsonian magazine. “Because amphibians breathe through their skin, that can really impair them.”

Fun facts: Deceptive, deadly frog

• Despite their name, Panamanian golden frogs are actually toads.
• Research suggests that each frog has enough toxins in its skin to kill more than 1,000 mice.

Around two decades ago, experts at NZCBI and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute predicted the decline of golden frogs and other creatures in Panama based on how Bd was spreading. So, they partnered with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and Zoo New England to build the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project (PARC) to protect animals at the highest risk of extinction from the fungal disease.

Gratwicke and his colleagues at PARC have been captive-breeding these amphibians for about 20 years. Now, the team has begun to release them back into nature to understand how to rewild these threatened species. In August 2025, the researchers put golden frogs in pens called mesocosms, which Gratwicke likens to outdoor patios.

“We put a big layer of leaf litter on the bottom that’s full of little insects and food so the frogs can forage,” he says. “It keeps the frogs inside where we can find them again, and it also keeps some of the predators out.”

The frogs spent 12 weeks inside these mesocosms, while researchers kept tabs on the creatures. During that time, about 70 percent of the frogs died from chytridiomycosis. Most of the surviving frogs were fully released into the wild afterwards.

Although the death rate was high, the data collected during this trial period is crucial to understanding how chytridiomycosis spreads and persists, and how amphibians might be able to adapt to chytrid fungus, Gratwicke says. “This experiment is probably the first experiment where we’ve actually been able to really get a full understanding of the disease dynamics of these animals.”

This might help researchers eventually place golden frogs in environments that are at adequate temperatures for the animals but too hot for the fungus. In recent research, for example, individuals of a frog species that lives in southeastern Australia seemed to have an easier time fending off chytrid fungus if they spent time in warm, sunny “saunas” than those in cooler temperatures.

And in some regions, amphibians whose numbers declined due to chytrid are beginning to bounce back. Tom Smith, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has seen this happen with certain frogs in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. “These populations have now been living with that pathogen for several generations across several decades, and we’re actually seeing adaptation and evolution to that in some of the populations,” he tells Smithsonian magazine.

Additionally, some frog species in the region do not seem to be susceptible to chytrid fungus, and scientists hope to use those species to “discover what the mechanism of tolerance and or resistance is to the disease,” says Smith, who is not involved in the Panama project.

For now, the team at PARC will continue to keep an eye on the Panamanian golden frogs to better understand fungal resilience in the creatures.

“I’ve been very pleased with the progress,” Gratwicke says. “It’s really important to actually make progress towards our ultimate goal, which is to create healthy, thriving populations of these animals to the wild. This experiment is one of the first steps towards achieving that.”

One of the links had another great photo of one:

Sponges are among earth’s most ancient animals, but exactly when they evolved has long puzzled scientists. Genetic information from living sponges, as well as chemical signals from ancient rocks, suggest sponges evolved at least 650 million years ago. This evidence has proved highly controversial as it predates the fossil record of sponges by a minimum of 100 million years. Now an international team of scientists led by Dr Eleonora Rossi, from the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, have solved this conflict by examining the evolution of sponge skeletons. The research is published in Science Advances.

In this study led by Jie V. Zhao, Yitang Sun, Junmeng Zhang, and Kaixiong Ye from the University of Hong Kong and the University of Georgia, researchers investigated whether two amino acids, phenylalanine and tyrosine, affect how long people live (lifespan). The results suggest that higher levels of tyrosine are linked to shorter life expectancy in men, pointing to potential sex-specific approaches to promoting longevity.

A groundbreaking 2026 study reveals that early humans in Europe used a sophisticated system of geometric signs 40,000 years ago, with complexity matching early writing systems[^1]. Researchers analyzed over 3,000 signs on 260 Aurignacian artifacts from the Swabian Jura region, dated between 43,000-34,000 years ago[^2].

The signs - dots, lines, crosses, and notches - were carved into tools, figurines, and other objects. While not writing in the modern sense, these markings showed deliberate patterns. Figurines carried denser and more complex sequences than tools, and specific symbols were reserved for particular subjects - dots appeared on human and feline figures, while crosses marked animals like mammoths[^3].

The statistical properties of these signs matched the information density of proto-cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, which emerged 40,000 years later[^4]. "Sign sequences in protocuneiform script are also repetitive and the individual signs are repeated at a similar rate," said Professor Christian Bentz of Saarland University[^3].

The study suggests these weren't mere decorations but represented an early system for storing and sharing information. The objects were portable, fitting "right in the palm of your hand," according to archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz[^4].

[^1]: PubMed - Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs [^2]: Science Daily - 40,000-year-old signs show humans were recording information long before writing [^3]: Sci.News - Early Humans May Have Invented System of Symbols Long Before Writing [^4]: Discover Magazine - 40,000-Year-Old Stone Age Symbols May Be a Precursor to Written Language

An investigation into headphones has found every single pair tested contained substances hazardous to human health, including chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminisation of males.

Even products by market-leading brands such as Bose, Panasonic, Samsung and Sennheiser were found to contain harmful chemicals in the formulation of the plastics from which they are made.

Researchers bought 81 pairs of in-ear and over-ear headphones, either on the market in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and Austria, or from the online marketplaces Shein and Temu, and took them for laboratory analysis, testing for a range of harmful chemicals.

“Hazardous substances were detected in every product tested,” they said.

Bisphenol A (BPA) appeared in 98% of samples, and its substitute, bisphenol S (BPS), was found in more than three-quarters. Synthetic chemicals used to stiffen plastic, BPA and BPS mimic the action of oestrogen inside organisms, causing a range of adverse effects including the feminisation of males, early onset puberty in girls, and cancer. Previous studies have shown that bisphenols can migrate from synthetic materials into sweat, and that they can be absorbed through the skin.