your science briefing for 04.09.2025

The impressive sort of return of the dire wolf, how junk science sends thousands to jail and keeps them there, the very likely future revolution on Mars, and more...

Colossal Biosciences, the company which promises to bring the mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine from extinction, recently announced that they resurrected the North American dire wolf. Technically, that’s not exactly what happened. Instead of reviving the genome of a dire wolf and making a clone, the team used genetic engineering on gray wolf embryos to encode either the features of a dire wolf, or very similar ones. It may be argued that this isn’t a true de-extinction, but this is still impressive work, and the resulting pups are very cute and seem to be doing very well… (SyFy)

If you’re a fan of true crime, you already know that despite what so many popular cop dramas generally made for older audiences and lean very heavily into what civil rights lawyers call “copaganda,” false confessions and innocent people rotting in jail are not nearly as infrequent as we’d like them to be. Likewise, the forensic science often used to get convictions is anything but scientific and prone to circular thinking and outright pseudoscience masquerading as unimpeachable fact. In fact, in 2015, FBI admitted its hair analysis was absolute bunk. Same for bite mark analysis last year. But people who were convicted on junk science are still languishing in jail… (Texas Tribune)

Just a spoon full of kind of sugar helps the… drug resistant germ die by shredding its cell wall and scattering its biological machinery? Turns out that saccharin, an intense sweetener used as a substitute for sugar in baking, soda, and low calorie condiments, can be extremely effective against several extremely dangerous antibiotic-resistant microbes already complicating care in hospitals and nursing homes. Now, scientists just need to figure out and test the right delivery mechanism… (Brunel U)

Co-President of the U.S. and incompetent cyberpunk dystopia advocate Elon Musk, wants to colonize Mars. His plan may be terrible according to his own former mentor, but he doesn’t seem interested in the science and is trying to somehow will a city on the red planet into existence. But as he tries to staff it with indentured servants who take out loans to live and work on Mars, he should be concerned about a very likely revolution according to a historian who studies what causes them, warning that we’ll definitely have one if we colonize space the way we did Earth… (BigThink)

According to periodic articles, some Gen Z is giving up their smartphones for digital minimalism. Instead of social media in their hands, dumb phones that can only call or text, and take a low resolution photo. They claim that reverting to older devices is not just better for managing distractions, it’s also freeing for their mental health. There is some evidence for these assertions, and it can be argued that we really do need a lot fewer apps designed to waste our time to show us ads, but this trend seems more like a movement the media is trying to make happen than a real sea change… (Yahoo!)