- All articles

All articles

- How Trump’s Science Cuts Threaten National Security

- Thousands of Scientists Sign Letter to Combat Science Board’s Firing

- A Powerful New Tool to Find Alien Life

- New Fathers Are Dying, and We Don’t Know Why

- Stare Into the Heart of an Ancient Iceberg

- The Tonga Volcano Cleaned Up After Itself

- These Small Ants Act Like Cleaner Fish

- Is This Why Science Advances One Funeral at a Time?

- The Healing Powers of an Accidentally Caught Jellyfish

- Doting Duck-Billed Dinosaur Parents Fed Their Young Like Birds

Sociology

How Trump’s Science Cuts Threaten National Security

Weak science leads to bad forecasting and poor decision making

By Kristen French

6:00 PM CDT on May 12, 2026

On April 28, President Donald Trump fired all 22 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation, a 76-year-old research agency that some members of Congress have described as the envy of the world and the “crown jewel” of American science agencies. Today, members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology condemned the annihilation of the NSB in a letter to Trump, calling it “essentially a middle finger to Congressional intent.”

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“The writing is on the wall, and it spells disaster for our scientific excellence,” they continued.

In fact, Trump’s firings of the National Science Board and his other attacks on science over the past year plus do more than just undermine science. They undermine national security, according to Rod Schoonover, ecological security expert and former director for the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and Bradley J. Cardinale, professor at Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences. The pair of scientists recently collaborated on a paper that explores some of the overlooked ways that ecological disruptions can threaten the ability of nations to protect their citizens, institutions, and interests against foreign and domestic threats. When I spoke with them about that work they also noted more broadly how essential good science is for nations to protect against security threats.

Read more: “When Climate Change Starts Wars”

“There’s a long history in the United States where national security and scientific integrity go hand-in-hand,” says Schoonover. “From the security standpoint, when you weaken science, governments become worse at detecting threats before they become emergencies.” The loss of people, data, models, monitoring networks, and institutional memory leads to poor decision making, he says. Everything costs more and is more susceptible to failure.

Forecasting systems are already suffering, points out Cardinale. Just take a look at weather apps. Because of all of the dismissals in the weather service at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association under Trump, their predictive models are fumbling, whereas European and Australian models are doing fine, he says.

“We’re pretty good at predicting locust outbreaks. We’re pretty good at predicting certain kinds of disease outbreaks. We can give people forewarning for some of these things—at least now,” says Cardinale. “But as soon as we start to ignore the science, those forewarnings and those forecasts are going away.”

The consequences could be with us for a very long time—long past the expiration date of the current administration, whenever that may be. “China is pouring money into science because they want to become the world leader now that the United States is giving it up,” says Cardinale. Virtually all of his students are all looking for jobs overseas.

“This is going to get far worse in the United States,” he warns, “before it gets better.”

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Lead image: NMacTavish / Adobe Stock

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Kristen French

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

Sociology

Thousands of Scientists Sign Letter to Combat Science Board’s Firing

The signatories, including more than 35 Nobel laureates, decry the “alarming attack on the ability of the US to engage in basic and applied research”

By Bob Grant

5:00 PM CDT on May 12, 2026

The scientific community is imploring the United States Congress to intercede in the Trump administration’s war on science. The latest salvo in that war came in April, with Donald Trump firing the 22 members of the National Science Board, an apolitical body that advises the executive and legislative branches on the nation’s scientific enterprise and establishes the policies of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Scientists and lawmakers expressed outrage then. But this week, scores of researchers signed a letter from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine and posted by advocacy group Stand Up for Science, urging legislators to demand that Trump reinstate the board members.

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Citing the fact that China is now outpacing the U.S. in research spending, the letter criticizes both the move to dismiss the National Science Board and other Trump administration efforts to dismantle parts of the country’s scientific enterprise. “This dismantling of a critical national advisory body is but one of many such actions taken by the current administration that deprives our government of independent, apolitical, oversight and expert advice, not only in the sciences but also in healthcare and technology.”

Read more: “Trump’s War on Science Continues”

The letter represents one of the sharpest criticisms of the Trump administration’s moves to research and science policy advice yet. More than 2,500 names, including more than 35 Nobel-Prize-winning scientists, appear on the letter. While individuals within the scientific community have spoken out about the state of the research enterprise in the U.S., many researchers fear reprisals from the administration in the form of cancelled grants, shrunken budgets, or firing of key science agency staffers.

Under the Trump administration, the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and other federal science funders have cancelled hundreds of research grants with little justification for the cuts. And Trump’s 2027 budget proposes even deeper cuts to the budgets of NSF, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

It appears now that scientists are looking to Congress to broker something of a ceasefire in Trump’s apparent war on science. “Congress has in the past been a responsible and wise steward of our nation’s scientific infrastructure,” the letter reads, “and we ask that it once again meets the moment to protect our nation’s scientific competitiveness, economic well-being, and national security.”

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Lead image: ELG Photography / Adobe Stock

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Bob Grant

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Astronomy

A Powerful New Tool to Find Alien Life

Life leaves a pattern, not just a trace

By Jake Currie

4:00 PM CDT on May 12, 2026

Fatty acids on Mars! Amino acids on asteroids! Complex carbon chains in interstellar clouds!

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There have been plenty of exciting headlines about the discovery of organic molecules in space—but so far, no life. That’s because there are several non-living processes—like the fusion within stars—that are capable of producing these molecules. That raises an important question: If we do detect organic compounds that come from extraterrestrial life, how will we be able to tell? New research published in Nature Astronomy adds a powerful new tool to our toolkit.

According to planetary scientists from the University of California, Riverside, the key to telling apart biotic organic compounds from abiotic ones lies in their organization. “We’re showing that life does not only produce molecules,” study author Fabian Klenner explained in a statement. “Life also produces an organizational principle that we can see by applying statistics.”

Read more: “Will We Know Alien Life When We See It?”

The researchers applied a statistical framework used in ecology to describe different ecosystems by quantifying their richness (how many species live there) and evenness (how uniformly they’re spread). After examining 100 different datasets of organic compounds found in microbes, fossils, meteorites, and more, the researchers were able to determine the unique characteristics that set biotic compounds apart from abiotic ones.

Amino acids produced by life are more evenly distributed than abiotic amino acids, which tend to be shorter, simpler chains. Abiotic fatty acids, on the other hand, show a more even distribution than those that occur in living cells (and primarily make up cell membranes). Incredibly, this simple test is sensitive enough to detect a compound’s biological origins when the sample has been substantially degraded. The researchers were able to distinguish statistical signals of life from fossilized dinosaur eggshells.

Still, the researchers stress that this new test can’t be used to definitively “prove” the existence of extraterrestrial life on its own. Instead, it’s another arrow in our biosignature-detecting quiver. “Our approach is one more way to assess whether life may have been there,” Klenner said. “And if different techniques all point in the same direction, then that becomes very powerful.”

The next headline you read about finding organic compounds in space might include a few more exclamation points.

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Lead image: NASA

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Jake Currie

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Health

New Fathers Are Dying, and We Don’t Know Why

A conversation with a pediatrician about the first study to track paternal mortality

By Kristen French

2:00 PM CDT on May 12, 2026

Chicago pediatrician Craig Garfield noticed a few years ago that mothers in the neonatal unit where he works were often dealing with the sudden death of a partner, whether from a car accident, shooting, a drug overdose, or another cause. He wondered whether this reflected a larger pattern, and whether there might have been a way to intervene. While maternal mortality is closely tracked today, paternal mortality is not. And so, Garfield and some colleagues at Northwestern University decided to launch one of the first studies of paternal mortality in Georgia, where they’d already begun collecting data on fathers.

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They found that of 130,000 men who became new fathers between 2017 and 2022, almost 800 died during that same 5-year period, and 60 percent of those deaths were from potentially preventable causes like homicide, accidental injury, and suicide. Though it’s not an apples to apples comparison, Georgia's maternal death rate reached 37.9 deaths per 100,000 live births between 2019 and 2023. These are deaths that occurred in the first year after birth, as opposed to the first five years. (Georgia’s maternal mortality rate is much higher than the national average.) On the other hand, Garfield and his team found, fatherhood seems to be protective of men’s health overall, as fathers died at a lower rate than non-fathers. They published their results in JAMA Pediatrics.

I spoke with Garfield about why understanding these numbers better is important for families, whether the deaths among new fathers are somehow linked to paternity or just a reflection of the higher rates of death among men more broadly, and what hospitals and pediatricians might be able to do about it.

Garfield told me that he doesn’t want to take resources away from maternal healthcare, but believes fathers are essential to the health of families, too. New fatherhood could serve as a point of intervention. Or as he put it, “From the pediatrician’s perspective of the child, both mother and father are really important to the health of the child and the family.”

What inspired you to study paternal mortality?

I’ve been a pediatrician for 25 years. A lot of my research looks at how to support families. We have a program called the Family Child Health Innovations Program, and our motto is, “Children Thrive When Families Thrive.” I spend a lot of time thinking about what thriving is and also what a family is and how we think about families.

Fathers are an area that we’ve been focusing on and thinking about—the role of fathers and how to support them. Also, I learned a lot from looking at how we think about mothers and how we think about supporting mothers. One of the newer things that’s come into public health are maternal mortality review committees, or MRCs, multidisciplinary groups at state or local level that review all deaths that occur within a year of childbirth.

Read more: “We Need More Feminist Dads”

But oddly enough, in my clinical experience—and I work in a neonatal intensive care unit—it’s more common to come across a family where the partner has died during pregnancy or after the birth of the baby, as opposed to the mother. I got to thinking that no one really has looked at that. This concept of paternal mortality is really novel. This is one of the first studies to use that term. One reason for that is that maternal mortality is often something where we’re looking at pregnancy-related complications or ways the healthcare system failed the mother.

We also know that men are less likely to be in the healthcare system in general, but particularly at child-rearing ages. It’s a travesty when a mother with young children dies, for sure. But it’s a travesty when a father dies, also. And no one has really put numbers to it.

You described certain kinds of death—homicide, suicide, unintentional, and drug overdose—as preventable. What do you mean by preventable in that context?

Yes, so natural causes include if someone develops cancer and they’re not responsive to treatment, and so they die. There’s very little that we could do to prevent that. But preventable or largely preventable causes include if someone is shot and killed, or if someone dies by suicide or by overdose.

You might imagine that there might have been somewhere along the line that, collectively as a society or as public-health practitioners, we could have intervened. Maybe mental-health screening of fathers, the way we do with mothers, could have caught someone who was suicidal and needed some help. We might have different ways to protect against other accidents or drug overdoses.

With this study, the hope is that people will realize that maybe there is something that we can be doing for these fathers, but also for the children and the families more broadly.

Do you think the causes of these preventable deaths might have some relationship to the fact that these men had just become fathers?

It’s a little bit of both. This is publicly available public-health data. It’s population-level data. We don’t know the individual stories of the 800 dads that died. By comparison, the MRCs do get into the details of why that particular mother died within a year after the birth of a child. It would be great to have that kind of data for fathers, to think about preventative actions that we could take.

But the other interesting finding of the study was that fatherhood was actually protective. At all ages, from 25 up until almost 60, when you looked at men who are fathers and compared them with men who are not fathers, the death rate for men who are fathers was lower or better than it was for men who are not fathers. There seems to be something protective about becoming a father, and yet, there’s still a sizable number of men who are dying when their children are still young. That’s going to have a really negative impact on the family and on the child.

Read more: “My Visit with My Dead Father’s Brain”

Is your hypothesis that the causes of death change after fatherhood or more that this is a point of contact, where the healthcare system could make a difference? Because you talk about paternal mortality as a crisis, but if fatherhood is actually protective, then are these deaths related to paternity or just to being a man?

Those are the right questions to be asking. We don’t have answers because we haven’t looked at this before. This study is a place to start. But there might be something we could be doing in the healthcare system, since dads are least likely to be in the health system, but they do come in with their partners when children are born, and they come in as a chaperone to their child. There may be missed opportunities there.

Our research has shown that for many dads, that transition to fatherhood is a real awakening. It changes their priorities and their view of the future. In long semi-structured interviews, they describe an idea of wanting to be there when their baby enters kindergarten. They want to be there when their baby goes to middle school or graduates high school. As a result, some men start to try to reduce their risks in the general community. This isn’t a study of causality. But clearly, there are more dads who are dying than moms who are dying. And this was only in one state.

What do the data tell us about the impact of the death of a father in the first five years of a child’s life?

The death of a parent is a major adverse childhood experience, right? It’s one of 10 circumstances included on a standardized clinical survey of major adverse childhood experiences. We know that it puts kids at risk. There’s a tremendous amount of research also on the benefit of father involvement with the child in terms of development and language development. We know that it’s beneficial for mothers. When they have a partner, they get more and earlier prenatal care, more appropriate care over the time of their pregnancy. It can be protective for maternal mental health, too. The research on the benefits of father involvement has been out for a while. This study gives at least a data point of how many dads may be dying. I think it’s going to lead to more research down the line.

Read more: “When Your Father Is a Magician, What Do You Believe?”

What will you study next?

To me, it’s even more important that we do PRAMs for dads. We started in one state—in Georgia in 2018—and now we’re in 10 different states. We have over 10,000 fathers surveyed in that transition to fatherhood period right now, and we’re expanding. In that survey, we do some screening for depression and anxiety symptoms, substance use—all the things that we worry about from a public-health perspective and all the positive things, too. How is dad supportive of breastfeeding? How is dad supportive of safe sleep behaviors? That’s an ongoing study, and we’re always looking for more states that are interested in taking this holistic approach to families.

We can’t change what we don’t measure, and we don’t know what we don’t know, so let’s at least get some measurement going so we can understand what exactly is happening.

We’re just about to publish a study about where we can reach dads in the whole continuum of healthcare. Could you recruit fathers in the newborn nursery after the baby’s born where it’s getting real for the dad? Like, “Oh wait, this baby’s really here. I didn’t study. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t watch the YouTube video. What do I need to know?” We came up with a series of short videos with a real dad and his two-week-old baby where we filmed different things like how to deal with crying, how to deal with car seat safety, safe sleep behaviors, breastfeeding support, that sort of thing. We did it as an intervention. We wanted to know: Could you recruit dads in the nursery, would they watch these videos, and would they learn from these videos? And it turns out you totally can. They’re interested. They wanna be involved. They will watch the videos and learn from them.

Taking a holistic approach to the best outcomes for children really requires that you think about what’s happening with the non-birth partner, and how we might engage them in this. The data shows that if fathers feel comfortable and confident early on, they’re more likely to be involved later on, as well.

Lead image: sonyachny / Adobe

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Kristen French

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

Environment

Stare Into the Heart of an Ancient Iceberg

The beauty of the blue ice belies a fragility exposed by human activity

By Bob Grant

1:00 PM CDT on May 12, 2026

Nature photographer Jon McCormack notices patterns. He’s made a career out of noticing and documenting the patterns that flash across his field of view as he traverses the Earth, from southern Iceland, to Svalbard, to Antarctica. But, as he illustrates in his most recent book of photographs, Patterns: Art of the Natural World, he’s been seeing patterns change. It’s like the beautiful repeating forms he captures are shouting out a warning—the world is changing, and even impossibly solid forms are fragile under the touch of humanity.

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Such was the case as he sat in his cabin on a boat off the Antarctic Peninsula, exhausted from a day spent diving the icy waters of the Gerlach Strait. “I just started to see this pattern go by, and I did what every reasonable photographer would do,” McCormack recalls. “I just grabbed my camera and just like ran straight out to the deck.

Read more: “What Happens When Icebergs Collide With Art”

“This is a time that I can truly point to where that thing when awe happens and the vigilance of the sympathetic nervous system crashes and the parasympathetic nervous kind of unleash it at the same time,” he continues. “It drove that true sense of there is something much bigger here that I find in so much of our world.”

In the beauty and awe in those azure columns slowly processing past McCormack’s camera, a message was written. “It's just these stripes of this deep cobalt blue. But the reason that that happens is that's the old ice. That's ice that's been around for so long that the weight of the iceberg has actually compressed the ice and has squeezed out all of the air bubbles,” he says. “That ice is at the core of the berg. The only way that you get to see that is through the icebergs melting.”

McCormack adds that the images he brings to life are meant to share his wonder at the fragile patterns in the natural world—stunning and precarious. “I think we spend so much time as environmentalists telling people what not to do. You shouldn't drive cars and you shouldn't do this and you shouldn't do that,” he says. “I'm looking for a different way to think about that. I'm looking for people to be inspired by how staggering nature is and with a hope that we will realize that we're actually taking nature for granted.”

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Lead photo copyright © Jon McCormack; courtesy of and published by Damiani Books, in the book Patterns. All proceeds of book sales will be donated to Vital Impacts, a nonprofit organization that uses visual storytelling to inspire environmental awareness.

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Bob Grant

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Environment

The Tonga Volcano Cleaned Up After Itself

The blast scrubbed some of its own methane emissions from the atmosphere

By Jake Currie

6:00 PM CDT on May 11, 2026

When the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano off the coast of Tonga violently erupted in January of 2022, the force of the explosion was more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb. The blast sent a shock wave rippling across the globe that was heard as far away as Alaska, and its plume of smoke and ash stretched 36 miles above the Earth. At the time, scientists cautioned that we’d be dealing with its effects for years to come, especially the enormous quantities of water vapor it launched into the atmosphere. Now, new research published in Nature Communications details one unexpected effect—the Tonga volcano cleaned up some of the greenhouse gases it belched out.

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Examining data from advanced satellite imagery, an international team of researchers discovered a high concentration of formaldehyde in the volcano’s plume shortly after eruption. This was a major clue that the methane from the eruption was being rapidly broken down, with the formaldehyde as an intermediary. “Because formaldehyde only exists for a few hours, this showed that the cloud must have been destroying methane continuously for more than a week,” study co-author Maarten van Herpen from Acacia Impact Innovation BV said in a statement. “It is known that volcanoes emit methane during eruptions, but until now it was not known that volcanic ash is also capable of partially cleaning up this pollution.”

Read more: “Are We Ready for the Next Massive Volcano?”

While this was a new phenomenon, it was also familiar territory for the researchers. They discovered a similar chemical process taking place over 10,000 miles away in 2023. When sand from the Sahara desert gets blown into the Atlantic Ocean, it mixes with seawater to form iron salt aerosols. When these aerosols are excited by sunlight, they produce highly reactive chlorine atoms that can help break down methane. Because the underwater Tonga eruption blasted seawater along with ash, the researchers think a similar process is taking place.

“What is new—and completely surprising—is that the same mechanism appears to occur in a volcanic plume high up in the stratosphere, where the physical conditions are entirely different,” said study co-author Matthew Johnson from the University of Copenhagen. Methane, which usually takes around 10 years to naturally decompose in the atmosphere, is responsible for around a third of global warming. The researchers say these new findings could help inform efforts to curb methane emissions.

Of course, chlorine’s activity in our atmosphere isn’t limited to breaking down methane. As a major reactive component of the now-banned chlorofluorocarbons, chlorine ions can wreak havoc on the ozone layer that protects us from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. In fact, the Tonga volcano also caused a short-term erosion in the ozone layer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Not exactly nature healing itself, after all.

Lead image: Courtesy of Tonga Geological Services

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Jake Currie

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Zoology

These Small Ants Act Like Cleaner Fish

It’s the first documented case of the behavior in ants

By Jake Currie

5:00 PM CDT on May 11, 2026

Humans aren’t alone in their penchant for warfare. Ants have been known to launch full-pitched battles against competing colonies, and even abscond with slaves to serve their queens. That’s one reason biologist and Nautilus contributor, Mark Moffett was surprised to come across two different species of ants playing nice in the Arizona desert.

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He watched as larger harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) froze in place near the entrance to the colonies of a much smaller species of cone ants, flexing their legs to assume an elevated posture while the cone ants scurried over their bodies. The cone ants seemed to be licking and nipping at the harvester ants, a peculiar behavior that suggested they were “cleaning” them. “This new ant species is the insect equivalent of cleaner fish in the ocean,” Moffett explained in a statement. “The potentially dangerous harvester ants even permit the visitors to groom between their open jaws.”

Read more: “The Collective Power of Ants”

For days, Moffet watched the behavior—the first observed case in ants—and described the unique relationship in a paper published in Ecology and Evolution. The cleaning sessions were initiated by the harvester ants, which seemed to be soliciting cone ants for a scrubbing that lasted anywhere from 15 seconds to five minutes. The sessions ended when the harvester ants violently shook the smaller ants off their bodies.

How did this odd partnership come about?

Moffett isn’t sure, but he has some ideas. For cleaner fish and their clients, the relationship tends to be mutually beneficial: The clients get dead skin cells and ectoparasites stripped off their bodies while the cleaner fish get a free meal. A similar dynamic could be at play with the ants.

Harvester ants tend to eat seeds that are rich in fats, and the cone ants might be feeding on the detritus attached to their exoskeletons. While harvester ants regularly groom one another, the more nimble cone ants could be better at scouring hard-to-reach spots. It’s also possible the two ants are sharing beneficial microbes, making the cone ant pile-ons a back-and-forth that results in a healthier microbiome for both species.

Whatever the reason, it proves that peace is possible—in the ant world, at least.

Lead image: from Moffett., M.W. Ecology and Evolution (2026).

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Jake Currie

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

History

Is This Why Science Advances One Funeral at a Time?

As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

By Bob Grant

4:00 PM CDT on May 11, 2026

For centuries, science has been a top-heavy enterprise. A vanishingly small number of field-leading experts has the propensity to shape knowledge. They who win the Nobels. They who secure the multi-year, millions-of-dollars grants. They who rewrite the textbooks. Other workers in science are merely passing through, riding the coattails of these giants.

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But how does a researcher’s capacity for invention, innovation, and insight change over the course of a career in science?

Even the giants seem to have something of a use-by date. In one year of publishing—1905—Albert Einstein turned physics on its head and revolutionized humanity’s understanding of our universe with his concepts of special relativity, mass energy equivalence (E=mc^2, anyone?), the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion. He was 26 years old. The shockwaves of the ideas contained in four papers continue to ripple through the fabric of spacetime and shape the intellectual evolution of our species. But toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics, the ideas that are shaking up physics yet again and may lay bare even more of our universe’s mysteries.

Read more: “A Letter to Einstein from the Future”

Historians of science have long debated both the typical shape of a scientist’s output curve and the reasons for its particular slopes, traced throughout the arc of a career in research. Creativity declines with age. Or not. Young scientists are more likely to crack open a field and explore uncharted territory. Older researchers acquire the necessary experience and knowledge necessary to shift paradigms and point inquiry in new directions. And so on.

Now, researchers from the universities of Pittsburgh and Chicago have proposed a new model. The key lies in splitting creativity into two separate expressions—novelty through recombining existing insights into new connective ideas and disruptive innovation, the Einsteinian flashes of brilliance that rewrite a field’s trajectory. By analyzing the output of more than 12 million scientists over the course of six decades, from 1960 to 2020, they find that researchers across the world tend to increase their capacity for connective novelty as they age and decrease in their ability to disrupt. They published their findings in Science last week.

The authors invoke Douglas Adam’s take on a life spent wandering through the intellectual wilds. “This life-cycle pattern accords with science-fiction author Douglas Adams’ observation about technological change,” they wrote. “What exists at one’s intellectual ‘birth’ feels normal, what appears during early career feels revolutionary, and what emerges after maturity feels suspect.”

They contend that, as scientists age and their experience deepens, they become attached to the ideas upon which they built their career. This makes replacing this foundation harder as time wears on. But it also makes it more likely that they notice some connection between two or more established, familiar ideas. “Even the greatest minds, such as Einstein, transitioned from disruptor to gatekeeper when quantum mechanics threatened his nostalgic view of the universe,” they wrote.

It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right.

Lead image: Oren Jack Turner / Wikimedia

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Bob Grant

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Environment

The Healing Powers of an Accidentally Caught Jellyfish

How jellyfish in bycatch yield collagen for skin care, drug capsules, and nutritional supplements

By Devin Reese

2:00 PM CDT on May 11, 2026

Every commercial fishing operation grapples with the incidental capture of animals other than the target species. Whether it’s sea turtles caught in shrimp trawls or salmon trapped in Alaska’s pollock fishery, such “bycatch” is both ecologically and economically costly. Habitats are deprived of species that are crucial components of ocean communities, and fisheries may have to shorten their seasons or install expensive equipment.

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Jellyfish haven’t received much attention as bycatch. Yet, they’re common victims of small-scale net fisheries. A study published today in Frontiers in Marine Science, led by marine biologists from the Universidad Católica de Valencia in Spain, proposed a way to valorize jellyfish bycatch by extracting collagen instead of considering them unfortunate waste products of commercial fishing.

The researchers interviewed members of four fishing guilds in the Spanish Mediterranean. Their questions were designed to assess the fishers’ level of motivation for finding uses for the discarded jellyfish. Overall, the fishers noted an appreciation for jellyfish, but they clearly lacked the know-how to monetize them.

Read more: “It’s Time to Redefine What Sustainable Fishing Means”

The most common bycatch species was the barrel jellyfish (Rhizostoma pulmo). In the lab, collagen was extracted from those caught as bycatch as well as those intentionally caught in hand nets. The collagen extracted from bycatch jellyfish didn’t prove appreciably different from collagen obtained from jellyfish harvest. Or as lead study author, marine scientist Raquel Torres, put it in an interview with EurekAlert: “The accidental capture did not significantly damage the collagen.”

Collagen is used in many products—including skin-care lotions, wound dressings, drug capsules, and nutritional supplements. It’s become popular in regenerative medicine as well, which seeks to restore body joints and tissues. And so, the incidentally caught jellyfish, instead of just getting tossed, might offer a valuable commercial resource if viable modes of extraction can be put in place.

“By demonstrating that jellyfish bycatch can provide collagen without compromising quality, we propose a circular bioeconomy solution: reducing waste, creating new economic opportunities, and supporting small-scale fisheries at the same time,” explained Torres.

All of which is to say, one fisher’s trashed wild jellyfish could be another’s treasure.

Lead image: Marimont Studio / Wirestock / Adobe

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Devin Reese

Devin Reese is the executive editor of Natural History and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Paleontology

Doting Duck-Billed Dinosaur Parents Fed Their Young Like Birds

Their teeth tell the tale

By Jake Currie

1:00 PM CDT on May 11, 2026

Animals can be doting parents, too—even dinosaurs. A new study published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology shows just how far hadrosaur parents of the genus Maiasaura went to raise their young.

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These duck-billed herbivores were likely very social animals, living and moving in herds. Fossil evidence shows they also cared for their young. Young Maiasaura discovered among fossilized nests had leg bones that weren’t fully ossified, meaning they couldn’t walk well and relied on their parents for food. In fact, this relatively unique nurturing behavior is what gave the dinosaurs their name: “Maiasaura” means “good mother lizard.”

Read more: “How a Simulated Dinosaur Nest Revealed Prehistoric Parenting Strategies”

Paleontologists from Ohio State University studying the wear patterns on Maiasaura teeth determined just what kind of food mom or dad likely brought to the nest. Arranged in a compact array, these narrow honeycomb-shaped teeth showed different wear patterns in juveniles and adults. By comparing these wear patterns to those on the teeth of herbivorous mammals living today, they were able to make some educated guesses about their diets.

Juvenile teeth were polka-dotted with pits (like the teeth of fruit-eating tapirs), consistent with crushing soft foods. Adult teeth, on the other hand, showed striped striations consistent with shearing activity (like the teeth of grass-eating cows). In other words, Maiasaura parents fed their kids nutritious, protein-rich fruit as they opted for high-fiber salads for themselves. With such huge infusions of nutrients, baby Maiasaura were able to grow more quickly.

While not all dinosaurs cared for their young like Maiasaura, the behavior is quite common in dinosaurs' closest living relatives—birds. “The urge for a bird to feed a youngster is a very old behavior,” study author John Hunter explained in a statement. “What we’re providing is that evidence for that behavior probably goes much further than the origin of birds, perhaps to the origin of dinosaurs.”

Paying your mom back with an annual brunch, on the other hand, is a relatively new innovation.

Lead image: Mineo / Adobe

JC

Jake Currie

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2026 May 12

All articles

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