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RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
13 August 2025
A humidity index has been developed that considers lateral flow along rivers and groundwater systems, as well as precipitation, potential evaporation and plant transpiration. It performs better than a conventional humidity index when describing water availability for ecosystems and societies in arid regions. More
“In this picture, I’m working with my four-legged companion, Yang Mei (Little Sheep) near a small village called Nanxi on the eastern coast of Taiwan. I’m an ecologist studying lowland evergreen subtropical forests. I’ve been conducting research here for the past three years and have known Yang Mei since she was a puppy.Not all forest areas are safe for her. In some places, local people have set traps for deer and wild pigs, so she has to stay behind, which she hates.My research is on secondary forest succession, for my doctorate at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I want to understand how forests grow back after agricultural abandonment. The plot I’m studying in this photo was once a citronella plantation (Cymbopogon nardus), then a rice paddy (Oryza sp.), then an orchard. For the past 16 years, it’s been regenerating back into forest.To select areas to survey, I use a compass to get a bearing, and measuring tapes to mark out a specific plot across the slope. When this photo was taken, besides Yang Mei, my team members were Chance, a volunteer from Utah, and Mr Lai, a local landowner. He’s extremely knowledgeable about local plants.
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Download the Nature Podcast 06 August 2025In this episode:00:45 Researchers develop a new glue and test it on a rubber duckAided by machine learning, researchers have developed a super-sticky compound that works as an underwater adhesive. Inspired by animals like barnacles, the team developed a new kind of a material called a hydrogel. The material is capable of securely fastening objects together even when immersed in salty water— a challenge for existing adhesives. To show off its properties the researchers applied it to a rubber duck, which stuck firmly to a rock on a beach despite being battered by waves.Research Article: Liao et al.News and Views: AI learns from nature to design super-adhesive gels that work underwater07:37 Research HighlightsThe tomato-infused origins of the modern potato — plus, a specific group of stem cells that may help to drive osteoarthritis.Research Highlight: Potato, tomato: the roots of the modern taterResearch Highlight: Ageing stem cells in the knees drive arthritis damage09:46 The diversity of microbes within living treesBy taking samples from more than 150 trees in a forest in the United States, researchers have revealed a previously unknown community of microorganisms living there. Although the microbiomes of animals have been well explored, studies looking at the microbes living inside trees are limited. In this work, the team shows distinct populations of microbes living within different parts of a tree, and huge diversity in populations between trees. The team behind the work hopes these findings will lead to a greater understanding of tree physiology and the role these microbes play in broader ecosystems.Research Article: Arnold et al.18:46 The ‘de-extinction’ debateBack in April, the company Colossal Biosciences claimed to have de-extincted dire wolves, a large-bodied wolf species that once roamed North America. We discuss the science behind this technology, and the debates within the research community surrounding Colossal’s announcement.News Feature: This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting started.Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too. More
Farming of giant prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) is a booming industry, worth more than US$2.45 billion. But the gene pool from which prawns are bred is narrowing. China farms more than half of all giant prawns, depending entirely on cultured strains that have substantially less genetic diversity than do wild populations (Q. Shen et al. Aquac. Rep. 38, 102356; 2024) — and so are more susceptible to disease. By contrast, countries such as India, which mainly uses wild, genetically diverse prawns, rather than strains bred for desirable traits, are struggling with low larval survival and yields (B. R. Pillai and D. Panda J. Aquac. 33, 1–14; 2024).
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More
At the third United Nations Ocean Conference in June, UN member states committed to reducing the flow of pollutants from rivers to oceans (see go.nature.com/44yengt). But discussions missed a key factor in how land and sea are connected — through the migratory fish, birds and marine mammals, such as seals, that move between oceans or rivers and land (S. A. Sandin et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 119, e2122354119; 2022).
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More
Growing up in the forests of Chicago, Illinois, and the deserts of Phoenix, Arizona, Jaida Elcock never had much access to the ocean — and was even afraid of sharks. But the more she learnt on TV documentaries, the more she realized that we should be advocating for their conservation. “I really don’t want to know what an ocean without sharks looks like,” she says. Having earnt a biology degree at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, and worked her way up through various internships and laboratory technician positions, Elcock is now a graduate student based in Falmouth, Massachusetts, studying the movement ecology of basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus). Along the way, she faced racism, sexism and discrimination, she says.In 2020, the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, sparked civil unrest in the United States. On the same day as Floyd’s murder, a white dog walker falsely reported Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper after he asked her to put her dog on a lead. This inspired many Black naturalists, including Elcock, to speak out on social media about their right to exist and occupy outdoor spaces, she says. It also led to the #BlackInNature hashtag, through which Elcock started chatting with fellow shark researchers Amani Webber-Schultz, Jasmin Graham and Carlee Jackson-Bohannon. Pleasantly surprised to realize there were other Black women working in shark science, the four came together and founded Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS), registered in Bradenton, Florida. Its mission is to advance marine sciences by challenging the status quo of what people think a scientist looks like. MISS works to support under-represented and historically excluded communities to help them to feel confident and accepted in science by providing them with access to a community, knowledge and training opportunities. Five years later, the organization has around 400 members in more than 30 countries. What was it like for you as a young Black shark scientist?I got a lot of pushback for wanting to become a marine scientist. I was once told that I got my university scholarship because of affirmative action, not because I deserved it. People would say things like “Black people can’t swim. How are you going to work with sharks?”. These ridiculous stereotypes exist because of systemic racism that has led to a generational fear of water in a lot of Black communities, and that is not our fault. (When public swimming pools became popular in the United States in the 1920s and 30s, segregation meant that Black people had less access and so less opportunity to learn to swim.)I was also told that, as a woman, I wouldn’t be strong enough to handle sharks and I should be in the kitchen or raising a family. The Minorities in Shark Science team.Credit: Julia Wester, Field SchoolFor many people, encountering racism and sexism is incredibly discouraging. Why would you want to start a career in which you might hear those things all the time? But I used this pushback as fuel. If you tell me I can’t do something because of a terrible and irrational reason that’s based in hate, racism and sexism, I’m going to say: ‘Okay, watch me’. When we co-founded MISS, we wanted to create a community of people with shared experiences who would support each other, provide a safe space and create opportunities to help them further their careers. Breaking down the social and financial barriers to getting opportunities in the field of marine science was a key goal.We launched on Juneteenth (19 June) 2020. This is a really important day for the Black community in the United States: it’s the day that the last enslaved people received word that they had been freed, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, in which president Abraham Lincoln declared that all slaves in the Confederate states were now considered free. Launching on this day was a way of showing our dedication, support and pride in who we are. Do you feel like the perception of what a shark scientist looks like is changing?Yes, at least in the spaces I’m in. With MISS, we now have a community of minority scientists that people can contact when they want to highlight certain people in science, whether that’s for a TV show or a school talk. TV production teams now have somewhere to go to when most shark scientists on their shows are white dudes and they want to highlight the amazing work of other scientists as well. That’s not to say that these white guys aren’t also good at their job, but we want to remind people that there are other scientists out there. For younger people, seeing themselves represented is so important, and I think we’re seeing a shift. Young people are now more exposed than before to all these diverse people in science. Seeing someone else who looks like them doing it shows that it could be an option for them, too. Do you see any parallels between the stereotypes of who can be a shark scientist and which of the 500 or so shark species typically get more attention, such as great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias)? On nature shows, you always see the same thing — great whites breaching — and that’s cool. But what about the swell shark (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum), which swallows seawater to prevent itself from getting eaten by predators? What about the pocket shark (Mollisquama parini) that spews bioluminescent goo out of a pocket behind its fins? There are parallels with diversity in science, for sure. You often see this one type of scientist — in the same way you see this one type of shark — but there are so many other cool options. We can show appreciation for all these other sharks and shark scientists as well. The more diversity we have in people, the more diversity we’ll get in thought. That’s going to lead to more innovation, more discovery and better science as a whole.How does MISS help its members?We run webinars and pair people up with mentors to help them apply for funding opportunities, fellowship programmes or graduate school. We also fundraise and apply for grants to support marine scientists from minority groups. We also run collaborative working groups, opportunities such as shark-tagging workshops and our Diversifying Ocean Sciences programme, in which people can learn lab and fieldwork techniques. Jaida Elcock handling a shark tail while at sea.Credit: Jackson Coles, Field School
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For months, researchers in a laboratory in Dallas, Texas, worked in secrecy, culturing grey-wolf blood cells and altering the DNA within. The scientists then plucked nuclei from these gene-edited cells and injected them into egg cells from a domestic dog to form clones.They transferred dozens of the cloned embryos into the wombs of surrogate dogs, eventually bringing into the world three animals of a type that had never been seen before. Two males named Romulus and Remus were born in October 2024, and a female, Khaleesi, was born in January.A few months later, Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based company that produced the creatures, declared: “The first de-extinct animals are here.” Of 20 edits made to the animals’ genomes, the company says that 15 match sequences identified in dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), a large-bodied wolf species that last roamed North America during the ice age that ended some 11,500 years ago.Ancient proteins rewrite the rhino family tree — are dinosaurs next?The company’s announcement of the pups in April, which described them as dire wolves, set off a media maelstrom. The ensuing debates over the nature of the animals — and the advisability of doing such work — have opened a chasm between Colossal’s team and other scientists.“I don’t think they de-extincted anything,” says Jeanne Loring, a stem-cell biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She and many others say that the hype surrounding Colossal’s announcement has the potential to confuse the public about what de-extinction technologies can achieve.Colossal, meanwhile, has taken an increasingly combative tone in addressing criticisms, issuing rapid rebuttals to researchers and conservationists who have publicly questioned the company’s work. The firm has also been accused of taking part in a campaign to undermine the credibility of some critics. The company denies having played any part in this.Colossal stands by its claims and insists that it is listening to dissenters and seeking advice from them. “We have had this attitude of running towards critics, not away,” says Ben Lamm, a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the company.Colossal ambitionsDe-extinction is an emerging field that represents the meeting point of several groundbreaking biotechnologies: ancient genomics, cloning and genome editing, ostensibly in the service of conservation. The field has roots in science fiction, with the term seeming first to have appeared in a 1979 novel by Piers Anthony called The Source of Magic. And Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park — itself inspired by ancient-DNA investigations — popularized the possibility that long-dead organisms could be cloned from preserved DNA.There has never been perfect agreement on what counts as de-extinction — such as whether it means cloning exact replicas of extinct species, creating proxies that fulfil their roles in ecosystems, or something in between. Some count the birth of a cloned bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), a type of wild goat, as a first example. The animal’s genome was transferred into goat (Capra hircus) egg cells from frozen cell samples taken from one of the last living bucardo specimens in 2000. (The resulting creature died within minutes of birth1.) But this pathway to de-extinction isn’t an option for most species. DNA degrades over time, and without a sample of carefully preserved DNA, researchers would have to engineer the whole genome.The advent of CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing in 2012 provided another option. Researchers can identify genetic variants that contribute to key traits of extinct animals and edit these variants into cells of living relatives. They can then use that manipulated DNA to create a new animal through cloning.Plans to bring back animals such as the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) and the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) began to flourish. Even though there was interest among researchers and the public, funding was an issue. “We had been unable to get really any philanthropic interest in de-extinction,” says Ben Novak, who leads a passenger-pigeon de-extinction effort at the non-profit organization Revive & Restore in Sausalito, California.But in 2021, geneticist George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was working with Revive & Restore, caught a break. He teamed up with Lamm to launch Colossal Biosciences with US$15 million in funding, much of which came from venture capitalists. De-extinction of the woolly mammoth would be the firm’s flagship project, using elephants as surrogates.Beth Shapiro joined US firm Colossal Biosciences in 2024 to focus on de-extinction work.Credit: Shelby Tauber/The Washington Post/GettyBeth Shapiro, an evolutionary geneticist who is chief scientific officer at Colossal, was initially sceptical that there was a strong conservation argument for creating elephants that had key mammoth traits. In 2015, she told Nature that her book on de-extinction, called How To Clone A Mammoth, might have been more accurately titled ‘How One Might Go About Cloning a Mammoth (Should It Become Technically Possible, And If It Were, In Fact, a Good Idea, Which It’s Probably Not)’.Shapiro turned down an offer to join the company at first, but started seriously entertaining the idea when Colossal expanded its de-extinction ambitions. It began projects to bring back the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), which was wiped out in the seventeenth century, and to restore thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus), the Australian marsupials that are sometimes referred to as Tasmanian tigers and that were hunted to extinction in the 1930s.She was especially interested in seeing de-extinction technologies applied to existing endangered species. Shapiro joined Colossal in 2024 as its chief scientist. “This is an opportunity to scale up the impact that I have the potential to make,” she says. “Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis.”The company, now valued at around US$10 billion, has attracted celebrity investors, including the media personality Paris Hilton and film director Peter Jackson, alongside a handful of leading scientists as staff and advisers.Dire disagreementsThe dire-wolf project was different from many of Colossal’s other efforts because it proceeded quietly. Few people knew about the work until this year, and that irked some researchers. “They didn’t invite any kind of conversation about whether or not that is a good use of funds or a good project to do,” says Novak.Shapiro says the secrecy around the dire-wolf project was designed to generate surprise, and to counter public perceptions that the company overpromises and under-delivers. She also says that the company talked extensively to scientists, conservationists and others about the project and how it should proceed.The firm has not released the full list of edits that it made — 20 changes to 14 genome locations. Fifteen of the changes were identified in two dire-wolf genomes obtained from the remains of animals that lived 13,000 and 72,000 years ago. The genome differs from that of the grey wolf (Canis lupus) by about 12 million DNA letters.The dodo (Raphus cucullatus) went extinct in the seventeenth century. Colossal Biosciences aims to edit the genome of a related pigeon species to mimic the dodo’s traits.Credit: Klaus Nigge/Nature Picture LibraryColossal says that other edits, including changes that led to the creatures’ white coats and contributed to their large size, were intended to replicate dire-wolf traits using gene variants found in grey wolves. Many scientists say that the coat colour in particular was probably inspired more by the animals’ appearance in the fantasy television series Game of Thrones than by reality.“There is no chance in hell a dire wolf is going to look like that,” says Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a scientific adviser to Colossal. He says he agrees with other scientists who have argued that, on the basis of what is known about the dire wolf’s range, it “basically would have looked like a slightly larger coyote”. Colossal notes that the coat colour is based on the discovery of variants in two dire-wolf genomes that it says would have resulted in light-coloured fur.According to an update from Colossal in late June, Romulus and Remus weigh around 40 kilograms, around 20% heavier than a standard grey wolf of the same age, and Khaleesi is about 16 kilograms. They live on an 800-hectare ecological preserve surrounded by a 3-metre wall. Colossal plans to make more of the animals, and to study their health and development in depth. It says it will not release them into the wild.The mysterious extinction of the dire wolfShapiro argued in her 2015 book that forming a wild population is a requirement for successful de-extinction. She nevertheless considers the dire wolves to be an example of de-extinction, and says that creating them will have conservation benefits for wolves and other species.Many scientists disagree. A group of experts on canids that advises the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued a statement in mid-April rejecting Colossal’s claim that gene-edited wolves could be considered dire wolves, or even proxies for the extinct species. The statement cites a 2016 IUCN definition for de-extinction that emphasizes that the animal must fill an ecological niche. The work, the group said, “may demonstrate technical capabilities, but it does not contribute to conservation”. Colossal has disputed this on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) saying that the dire-wolf project “develops vital conservation technologies and provides an ideal platform for the next stage of this research”.Novak says: “The dire wolf fits the Jurassic Park model of de-extinction beautifully.” The animals have the traits of extinct species and are, to his knowledge, not intended for release into the wild, he says. “It is clearly for spectacle.”Gilbert, who was a co-author of a preprint describing the ancient dire-wolf genomes2, says he is concerned that Colossal is not being sufficiently clear to the public about what it has done. “It’s a dog with 20 edits,” he says. “If you’re putting out descriptions that are going to be so easily falsified, the risk is you do damage to science’s reputation.”The Tasmanian tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was a carnivorous marsupial that once roamed Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. The last known specimen died in the 1930s. Credit: Chronicle/AlamyLamm rejects the idea that Colossal’s messaging undermines public credibility in science, pointing to what he says was an overwhelmingly positive reaction.Loring, who is part of an effort to use stem-cell technology in conservation, says that she sees merit in Colossal’s work. It has, she says, changed her views on how to repopulate northern white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). But she worries that Colossal’s messaging overshadows those contributions. “It may create an opportunity for us to educate the public,” she says. “More often, it creates an opportunity for us to be ignored.”To Love Dalén, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Stockholm and a scientific adviser to Colossal, the controversy is “a storm in a teacup” that detracts from Colossal’s achievement. “It makes me a little bit sad there is this huge debate and angry voices about the common name,” he says.DogfightShapiro says she was surprised and saddened by the strength of reactions to Colossal’s announcement. “It was harder than I thought it would be, and the questions were getting meaner and meaner,” she says.
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This is a summary of: Peng, X. et al. Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest depths of hadal trenches. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09317-z (2025).
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