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| 18 August 2025 | | Today’s Future News looks at how social media leads to toxic behaviors. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including the genes behind fly romance and a fossilized fish out of water. | |
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| Plant communication | Science | | Signals of the corn | Although plants seem like the strong, silent type, they actually chat with each other quite often through volatile organic compounds, electrical signals, and mycorrhizal networks. One of their most common topics of gossip: potential threats. And this chatter can make a big difference for crops, which is why agricultural scientists are eager to listen in. Turns out that maize, one of the world’s most valuable crops, is especially chatty when planted in a crowded field—chemical communication protects the plants from disease and herbivores.
While studying densely planted corn fields, researchers noticed that even though stalks in the inner rows were smaller, they were much safer from herbivores than those on the outskirts. And this had nothing to do with them being tucked inside: In greenhouse experiments, the team found that corn planted in soils that previously had grown the plants close together gained increased resistance to insects, nematodes, and pathogens, too, indicating that the crowded plants had altered the soil they grew in.
Using chemical, physiological, and genetic analyses, the team dug up the dirt on the corn’s methods: Densely planted shoots release the volatile linalool, which increases production of the hormone jasmonate. Jasmonate goes on to promote the release of benzoxazinoids, which foster a lasting change in the soil microbiome; this leads to both pest protection and hindered growth after only three days of high-density planting.
In a related Science Perspective, plant geneticists Niklas Schandry and Claude Becker were surprised that the corn was able to mount this defense so quickly. The study “highlights the importance of balancing defense and growth in response to a combination of environmental factors” and points to linalool production as a possible breeding target to help the critical crop maintain this balance, they write. | | Read the Science Paper | | |
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| Animal behavior | Science | | The gene that keeps on gifting |  | | A male (R) regurgitates the contents of his digestive tract (purple) as a gift for his lady—romantic, right? Tanaka et al./Science (2025) | Picture this: You’ve just had the most amazing first date. They are charming, good looking, and funny—they could be the one. They walk you home and your heart swells as they lean closer to you. As you prepare for the perfect first kiss, they ... throw up in your mouth. Is that a red flag? Not if you’re a Drosophila subobscura, fruit flies whose males give females regurgitated food gifts during their courtship. This unique gift-giving ritual sets them apart from the closely related Drosophila melanogaster; the males of this species prefer to woo lady flies with a song instead. But with a little genetic mutation, researchers were able to get D. melanogaster to turn on the charm D. subobscura-style.
Both flies have the fruitless (fru) gene which encodes for FruM proteins that drive male courtship practices. The reason for their differing strategies comes down to which cells produce this protein. Using heat-activated proteins, the researchers found that insulin-producing neurons connected to the “courtship center” make FruM in D. subobscura brains, but not in D. melanogaster. When these same neurons in D. melanogaster were modified to start producing FruM, they grew projections that hitched them to the courtship center—leading to regurgitation behavior.
The study indicates how diverse behaviors don’t “necessarily require the emergence of new neurons” but can instead be traced to small-scale genetic changes, co-lead author Yusuke Hara said in a statement. Maybe next scientists can look for the gene that makes humans want to give (non-regurgitated) gifts to their potential partners. | | |
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| Paleontology | News from Science | | From surf to turf | Some 410 million years ago a distant ancestor of modern lungfish slurped out of the sea and plodded along an ancient shoreline near today's Holy Cross Mountains in Poland. That’s the story told by more than 240 fossilized pits, gouges, and furrows, which researchers behind a recent study say were most likely left behind by ancient crawling fish.
These ancient lungfish would have been closely related to the earliest ancestor of all four-limbed land animals, called tetrapods. In addition to having lungs that breathed air, they also possessed fins near where limbs would later develop in land-dwelling vertebrates. Today, lungfish move on land by pressing their mouths into underlying sediment and using them as “levers” to pull themselves upward and forward, correcting their direction with their tail and fins—a behavior that likely originated in their distant ancestors.
The marks found in the 410-million-year-old sandstone closely resemble such marks, the scientists behind the work say, perhaps revealing the fossilized trail of one of the first animals to make its way out of the sea and onto land. If the findings pan out, they would push back the earliest known surf-to-turf exploration by about 10 million years. | | |
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 | | | How skin microbes train the immune system | | Join us for a Science webinar exploring how skin-resident microbes shape immune responses beyond the surface. Learn how the immune system partners with commensals—and how these insights are inspiring new immunotherapies and vaccines. | |
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| | | Future News | | Social media was doomed from the start | Most every social media platform seems to devolve into some flavor of nastiness. Whether the aggressor is mis- or disinformation, partisan vitriol, or AI spam, social media sites seem far from offering the positive social connectivity they initially strove to foster. A new study posted to the preprint server ArXiv may have found the root cause: not some fancy algorithm, but the most basic functions of social media—posting, reposting, and following.
In recent years, “researchers have become more and more interested in [saying], ‘So we know that there's all of these problems, but what can we do about them? Can we be a little bit more constructive about things?’” study author and computational social scientist Petter Törnberg told ScienceAdviser.
So he and his master’s student designed a scaled-down social media platform to be populated by artificial intelligence (AI)-generated users. Each user had a profile based on a real American, complete with traits like age, gender, religion, and political leaning. Then, a large-language model AI (either ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or Llama) would embellish the profile with hobbies and an occupation. In each of 10,000 turns, a randomly selected AI-based user could choose to post about news it had been served, repost something, or follow another user based on their profile. Each user’s feed was restricted to 10 posts, drawn from a mix of people it did and didn’t follow, with no algorithm to keep them doom scrolling.
No matter the AI model, by the end of the test, the platform had become a partisan echo chamber complete with loud, extreme posters garnering many followers. Even more disheartening, six interventions designed to fix the situation—things like ordering a user’s feed chronologically or serving up content from the other side of the political spectrum—all failed. “I was a bit disappointed, to be honest,” Törnberg told Science. “Because this was supposed to be the optimistic paper.”
Though one might want to throw the social media baby out with the bathwater, information scientist Kate Starbird cautioned that the AI-based users may be “recreating the toxicities of a certain cultural moment.” In other words, the chatbots set up to reveal the unbiased underpinnings of social media may instead be incidentally trained on data that show us the polarized hole we’ve dug for ourselves. | |
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| On the list? | | NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya released a widely anticipated list of a dozen research priorities for his agency on Friday, sparking concern within and outside of NIH by ordering a new internal review of the agency’s entire funding portfolio. “It makes it sound [like] we will need to review every single award AGAIN,” one agency staffer said. | | Read more at ScienceInsider | |
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| Some don’t like it hot | | This summer has been exceptionally warm—and a closer look at the data showcases just how scalding the heat has been, from heatwaves to big blazes. “This year is already record-breaking when it comes to wildfires,” one expert noted. | | Read more at Nature | |
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| Life-giving cosmic rays | | Cosmic rays from outside the Solar System could be enough to fuel the chemical reactions to sustain microbes on other worlds, according to experts. “This whole idea of unconventional habitability, especially afforded by ... radiation, I think is really under explored,” said one astrobiologist. | | International Journal of Astrobiology Paper | Read more at Science News | |
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| | The ability to tell the truth, especially when it does not suit any particularly partisan aims, is an essential prerequisite for a free society. | | EDITORIAL | 14 August 2025 | Gretchen Goldman and Erica Chenoweth | |
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| Last but not least | |  | Christie Wilcox, Editor, ScienceAdviser
With contributions from Jasmin Galvan, Michael Price, and Hannah Richter
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Welcome to "Hawaii Science Journal". Here you'll find the latest stories from science, technology, medicine, and the environment.