Learning over an extended childhood has been fundamental to survival during human evolutionary history. Researchers show how Sumatran orangutans use their 8 years of dependency to master a broad diet, necessary for independent survival. They find that infants have individual tendencies to engage in social and individual learning, which together determine diet profile breadth acquired by independence. The finding offers insights into the evolutionary roots of the complex learning mechanisms that characterize humans. Read more in this week’s issue: scim.ag/4ydaJLi

In July, 700 of OpenAI's agents—artificial intelligence (#AI) systems that can autonomously perform tasks—teamed up to secretly hack the online platform Hugging Face. Earlier this month, the same company used 10,000 agents to solve the 90-year-old Navier-Stokes problem—one of the six Millennium Prize Problems that are among the hardest and most important challenges in the field of math. As more agent “swarms” are deployed, researchers have begun to turn their attention to how these communities interact—with a new study offering insight into how, if left to their own devices, agents start to communicate in a language that is increasingly difficult for humans to understand. Learn more: scim.ag/471GXgV

Aging does not appear to follow the same molecular script for everyone, according to an 8-year study of more than 300 women. The findings in Science reveal that individual molecular trajectories of aging can diverge substantially from population-wide patterns and are shaped not only by genetics but also by factors such as circadian rhythm, seasonality, and environmental exposures. Learn more: scim.ag/4ikMUfG

As the planet warms and forests burn, can we replant them with new trees that will thrive in the decades ahead? Learn more: scim.ag/4dURU7s @NewsfromScience

A psychedelic compound best known for its effects on the brain may help prevent one of chemotherapy's most debilitating side effects—chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, researchers report in Science. In mouse models, as few as two doses of psilocybin given before treatment durably prevented CIPN through multiple cycles of chemotherapy, while preserving both nerve function and the therapies’ tumor-killing effects. 📄: scim.ag/4ctTNaF #SciencePerspective: scim.ag/466LJcj

A new proximity labeling and biophysical analysis shows that the protein Girdin-L is an unexpected ligand of the PDZ domain of the Dishevelled protein and plays an important role in promoting the breakdown of primary cilia on cells. @SciSignal scim.ag/4rs0gZP

An AI model called RADAR, designed to provide broad diagnostic interpretation of abdominal CT scans, substantially outperformed existing AI systems across a wide range of diseases and clinical settings, researchers report in Science. The findings demonstrate the potential of vision–language models to advance expert-level generalist AI tools for radiology. scim.ag/3SVbLwm

Now out in @ScienceMagazine! What gives some colorectal cancer cells the ability to spread? We found that ceramides made by cancer cells help activate a reparative program to metastasize. @qiming_kelly @ohyilmaz @Aslan_Tasdogan @UpasanaDA @aburakyildiz science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

How much space junk is too much? A recent preprint suggests that swarms of satellites may reach a threshold known as Kessler syndrome. Learn more: scim.ag/4hCV1TY @NewsfromScience

Japan’s 2025 bear crisis, which produced 232 casualties, has been widely attributed to rapid population growth, but a new @ScienceAdvances study shows that a compounding breakdown of the forest’s food supply drove the surge in bear attacks. scim.ag/47gULE4

Dogs, like humans, may favor consonants over vowels when parsing continuous speech, according to a new Science study comparing brain activity in the two species. The findings suggest that similar ways of processing speech can emerge in humans and dogs without requiring humanlike language abilities. Learn more: scim.ag/46GklSU

New results in @SciSignal reveal that the T cell adaptor protein PAG supports the function of #TCell immune synapses by connecting with actin, suggesting that it could offer a target to improve #immunotherapy in patients that show poor responses. scim.ag/4rsHYYJ

On the latest #SciencePodcast🎙️, Staff Reporter Tom Howarth joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the language AI agents evolve inside their swarms. 🎧 Listen here: scim.ag/47ldz53

In the popular imagination, the defining image of the Paleolithic era—a time period stretching from the appearance of the first humans to the end of the last ice age, during which early humans and our ancestors fashioned stone tools for a variety of purposes—might be male hunters chasing mammoths and woolly rhinos across frozen steppes of Eurasia. But prehistoric art paints a different picture: The vast majority depicts women, suggesting the prehistoric past operated under very different rules from Western societies today. Austrian comic book artist Ulli Lust spent years reading everything she could find about ice age archaeology before starting her book, Early Man was a Woman (Die Frau als Mensch). An exploration of women’s underappreciated role in prehistory, the first volume was published in German in 2025. It won the prize for best German-language nonfiction book earlier this year, the first time a comic has ever won the award. The first of three volumes have now come out in English translation. Science spoke with Lust about the challenges of accurately capturing the archaeological record in a comic book and why the Stone Age is synonymous with cave men and not cave women. Learn more: scim.ag/3VkFHTb @NewsfromScience

Sustainable fuels and lean-burn engines can substantially reduce aircraft particulate pollution, a new @ScienceAdvances study finds. scim.ag/4AgDGr8

In a new Science study, researchers present the Virtual Biotech, a multi-agent AI system to inform drug-development decisions. By combining diverse biomedical and clinical evidence in a unified platform, the system may help identify therapeutic opportunities that would otherwise be missed. Learn more: scim.ag/4jaXFBv

Doing research that's crossing over into entrepreneurship? Through the BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation, the editors of Science seek to recognize bold researchers who are asking fundamental questions at the intersection of the life sciences and entrepreneurship. The Grand Prize winner will be awarded a cash prize of $25,000 and an essay published in Science. Apply by 1 November 2026: bit.ly/474qcS0

This dolphin chased a fish until it puked—then ate the vomit. The surprising behavior, known as kleptoparasitism, marks one of the few well-documented examples of a cetacean stealing food. Learn more: scim.ag/4y6Blxr @NewsfromScience

Time to reveal the question marks! Thrilled to share my dissertation work in the @CChu_89 Lab at @Tsinghua_Uni @IITU_Tsinghua, now published in @ScienceMagazine. Together with our collaborators Qingxia and Qiang (from the Lei Zhou Lab) and Lan (from the Gregory Sonnenberg Lab), we identified the fibroblast–ILC3–pDC axis and extended our findings from experimental #colitis to human #IBD. 👉🏻 science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

New @ScienceMagazine, a feature The obscure, unsung CD1 branch of our immune system, and how it could be exploited in the future science.org/content/article/…

🎉 I'm excited to share our @ScienceMagazine study on "Targeting an atypical G protein-coupled receptor signaling pathway for cardiac fibrosis therapy". Congrats to all co-authors. @StanfordCVI @StanfordMed @StanfordDeptMed @Stanford_ChEMH @GreenstoneBio doi.org/10.1126/science.aej5…