🫘 We asked the experts, and yes, we should all be fibermaxxing.
✍️ Claudia Steiner: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/fiber-feeds-the-microbiome-and-improves-health
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mastodon 4.6.8Sound science, smart stories. Knowable Magazine is a nonprofit, mission-driven publication that seeks to make scientific knowledge accessible to all. Free to read, republish and share. An editorially independent journalistic endeavor published by @AnnualReviews@mstdn.science
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A small trial testing the effectiveness of customized mRNA vaccines for treating pancreatic cancer has some promising new results. Seven of the eight people who responded to the treatment are still alive six years later, compared with only two of the eight people who didn’t respond, a team reports at NBC News.
🐜 We know ants can build castles — it turns out some species farm, too!
Check out our latest Q&A with biologist Guillaume Chomicki on mutualistic partnerships in nature. #KnowableMagazine #ScienceMastodon
✍️ Tim Vernimmen: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/ants-and-plants-keep-symbiotic-partnerships-in-balance
🍫 Hungry for some new bites of chocolate science? Take a look at our latest, by Georgia Michelman: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2026/how-scientists-are-perfecting-chocolate
“Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.”
👀 On our radar: Parents are rejecting a vitamin shot that saves babies’ lives, by Duaa Eldeib, ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/more-parents-decline-vitamin-k-shot-newborns
Is scarless healing (with functioning hair follicles, sweat glands and nerve endings) possible? Scientists are using bioink and 3D printers to find out. #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Andrea Teagle: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/can-3d-printed-skin-heal-burns-without-scars
👃 We smell with our brains. Loss of the sense is pointing scientists to new insights about neurological disorders. #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Victoria Clayton: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/what-happens-brain-lose-sense-of-smell
"The tapestry of life ... means that all living beings are interwoven into a tapestry in which we share evolutionary, ecological and symbolic connections. It sounds poetic, but it’s actually based on the latest scientific evidence. We share genes with other organisms because we all descend from a single primordial organism. There is no biological discontinuity." #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
- Biologist and ecologist Sandra Díaz
✍️ Valeria Román: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2026/fragile-future-of-biodiversity
🔥 In some overheating cities, slums are taking the lead on climate solutions. #KnowableMagazine #ClimateMastodon
✍️ Laura Spinney: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2026/slums-bear-brunt-climate-crisis-solutions-are-emerging
🌃 Astronomers and stargazers have long campaigned for a return to darker skies.
Now it’s the turn of ecologists, alarmed by the toll on birds, moths and other insects lured to their deaths; by animals no longer able to navigate; by night foragers afraid to go out at night; and by creatures that use light to communicate but are unable to transmit their messages.
✍️ Stephanie Pain: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2018/there-goes-night
🐆 Saving Nepal's leopards — and their human neighbors.
Conflicts with people are growing as expanded forest land and climate change push the creatures into human settlements. There are solutions to try.
✍️ Saugat Bolakhe: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/living-with-leopards-in-nepal
"In so many ways, we saunter through our built environments with our electric lights and think it’s going to be fine,” visual neuroscientist David Berson says.
“But we’re making ourselves sick."
✍️ Emily Laber-Warren: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/animals-sense-light-many-ways-with-opsins
🩻 It’s not that AI will replace radiologists. Radiologists who use AI will replace radiologists who don’t, says Curtis Langlotz, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging at Stanford University.
Read more in Knowable's latest... #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Lola Butcher: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/ai-wont-replace-radiologists-but-will-change-their-jobs
👀 On our radar: A Chinese national has been arrested in Kenya's main airport accused of attempting to smuggle more than 2,000 queen garden ants out of the country.
✍️ Wycliffe Muia, via BBC.
Chronic pain affects an estimated 50 million to 100 million Americans, disabling up to 20 million of them. Yet there are few effective drugs to treat chronic pain beyond opioids, which can be dangerous and addictive. What’s the way ahead?
✍️ Stephani Sutherland: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2020/genetic-causes-of-pain
Glow-in-the-dark materials are already used in some bike lanes, and in the future could be applied to sidewalks, streets and buildings — saving energy and reducing urban heat.
✍️ Kurt Kleiner: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2021/will-glow-in-the-dark-materials-someday-light-our-cities
CAR T cell therapy was originally designed to target and wipe out cancer by reprogramming a patient’s immune cells.
Now, researchers are testing this "game changer" treatment on patients with autoimmune diseases like lupus, Graves', and multiple sclerosis. #KnowableMagazine #ScienceMastodon
✍️ Amber Dance: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/car-t-cell-therapy-could-treat-autoimmune-diseases
🏥 Doctors are saying that 2026 is going to be a particularly bad year for tick bites, and CDC data shows that weekly ER visits for tick bites are already way up.
Why are lyme and other tick-borne diseases on the rise?
✍️ Ula Chrobak: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2022/lyme-other-tickborne-diseases-rise #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
RE: @arstechnica@mastodon.social
Thanks to Ars Technica for republishing our article!
👨 Chip off the old gene block? How Dad's habits get passed down...
✍️ Holly Barker: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/epigenetic-effects-of-sperm-on-offspring
🐍 New fossils and modern techniques are updating the story of how our favorite sssslithering reptiles came to be.
✍️ Amber Dance: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/evolution-of-snakes
Ultracold gases in the lab could help scientists to better understand the universe. ✍️ Katie McCormick
🤖 Behind every machine and chatbot is a moral psychology — datasets and information that drive the decisions they make for us. Trouble is, we don’t quite yet understand it. #KnowableMagazine
In our latest expert Q&A, Tim Vernimmen talks to computer scientist Iyad Rahwan about the moral dilemmas AI may soon be facing.
Read the article: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2026/what-shapes-ai-moral-decisions
Slow-healing lesions — common in diabetics and burn victims — can lead to lingering infections that resist antibiotic treatment.
A new approach using light-activated therapies may offer a solution 💡
#ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Zunnash Khan: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/to-heal-chronic-wounds-scientists-look-to-nanomaterials
💭 Do cockroaches get lonely? #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Elizabeth Preston: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/why-we-crave-social-interaction
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Better outcomes may come from new drugs, strategies to rev up the immune system and learning to identify the disease sooner in its course — here's how scientists are making progress fighting pancreatic cancer 👇
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2025/progress-for-pancreatic-cancer#sciencemastodon #knowablemagazine #cancerresearch
Adult children vs. parents, siblings vs. siblings — calling quits on one’s kin seems increasingly common.
As more adults cut off their parents, a researcher calls for closer scrutiny of causes and effects, and suggests paths to reconciliation.
✍️ Katherine Ellison
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/causes-of-family-estrangement
Scientists are trying to name the qualities that make someone wise and figure out how to cultivate them. ✍️ Emily Laber-Warren
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/what-is-wisdom-can-it-be-taught
A growing body of research suggests that our closest known relatives, the Neanderthals, had brains to go with their brawn 🧠 💪
The latest finding: Neanderthals may have used birch tar as an antibiotic salve.
✍️ Laura Baisas reports at Popular Science: https://www.popsci.com/health/neanderthals-antibiotic-birch-tar-medicine/
For more evidence of Neanderthal creativity, read our 2023 story.
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2023/new-finds-about-neanderthal-brains-and-behavior
The Cybathlon is unabashedly "technotopian." ... It is about the fullest possible collaboration of technology and human effort.
✍️ Dana Mackenzie: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2024/cybathlon-competition-bionic-athletes-use-assistive-tech
🥵 There's a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves.
When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. #KnowableMagazine #ScienceMastodon
✍️ Marta Zaraska: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/heat-waves-scramble-animal-minds-trigger-aggression
🧠 Trust, fear, concern for others and other emotions have their basis in the amygdala. What happens when it stops working? #ScienceMastodon #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Richard Stone: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/genetic-disease-reveals-role-of-brain-amygdala
Across the United States, an array of 1,800 stations has been probing the electrical conductivity of rocks deep beneath the surface. This Magnetotelluric Array has uncovered hidden fragments of continent, the stretching of crust and places likely to harbor mineral deposits, Paul Voosen reports at Science.
https://www.science.org/content/article/deep-earth-map-reveals-lost-u-s-continent
Keeping global warming to manageable levels will require removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere else. The world’s oceans may be a promising option.
✍️ Sandy Ong
Replying to
To explore the science further:
👉 Check out her recent paper in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-102722-122317
👉 And for a look at the implications of beavers expanding their range into the thawing Arctic read our 2022 story by the late, much-admired science writer Sharon Levy: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2022/as-arctic-warms-beavers-move-in
Replying to
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Metacognition refers to what we know about what we know, think about what we think, believe about what we believe.
🔗 https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/science-of-self-awareness-and-decision-making
👀 On our radar: The familiar phenomenon has puzzled researchers for centuries, but experiments are finally making sense of its unruly behaviours.
✍️ Jenna Ahart, via Nature.
Once considered cellular junk, non-coding RNAs are emerging as key players in everything from brain development to cancer — with much still to be discovered.
✍️ Christina Szalinski
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/noncoding-rna-molecules-in-cells
🦟 The humble (yet deadly) mosquito can now list wildlife geneticist "field assistant" on its resume.
✍️ Alice Sun: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/dna-bugs-feast-blood-carcasses-help-map-biodiversity
A worn pair of nurse’s shoes. That coronavirus model Anthony Fauci used in public briefings. Oral histories, iconic photos and social media posts. All of us are curators now, and what we preserve — as well as what we don’t — will write the Covid pandemic story. #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Read this 2021 story by Karen Emslie: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2021/what-will-history-say-about-covid
🧑💻 Our latest: 4 tips to help you be an eco-friendlier AI user
Escalating use of tools like Gemini and ChatGPT saps more and more power. While the onus is on tech companies to reduce AI’s resource consumption, there are a few simple things individuals can do to lighten the load. #KnowableMagazine #AIMastodon #ScienceMastodon
✍️ Katarina Zimmer: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2026/four-ways-to-reduce-energy-use-with-ai-chatbots
🐦⬛ It's prime-time for spring bird migration in the US! How do they know where to go?
✍️ Sophie Fessl: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2020/earth-birds-take-next-left
⚡️ AI isn't built to save energy. Perhaps it could be.
Katarina Zimmer takes us through the latest techniques and technologies that researchers are working on to reduce AI's "voracious appetite for energy." #KnowableMagazine #ClimateMastodon
🪹 Millions of songbirds in Southeast Asia are trapped and smuggled each year for keeping as pets or entering in competitions. Scientists warn that it's fueling a crisis. #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Sandy Ong: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/high-stakes-singing-contests-fueling-songbird-crisis
"The core issue here isn’t actually that difficult. It’s just about good design," says human factors specialist Ron Mcleod in our latest expert Q&A about the fraught union of automation and human behavior. #KnowableMagazine
✍️ Amber Dance: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/design-automated-systems-with-human-psychology-in-mind
🔥 “We should fight fire with fire.”
- Jevin West, expert on misinformation and generative AI, talking about using AI to help sort fact from fiction online
✍️ Katarina Zimmer: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2026/fighting-false-facts-with-artificial-intelligence-tools