your science briefing for 05.12.2025

How tardigrades may soon be helping cancer patients, how to talk to cats, Europeans brace for killer fungi in a warming world, and more...

Tardigrades are amazing little creatures. Understanding them could help us survive radiation, desiccation, and offer hints of how to unlock hibernation abilities, all thanks to proteins which make their cells far more resilient under stress. And in a new study, researchers used mRNA on mice with cancer to trigger the production of a signature tardigrade anti-radiation protein called DSUP. When the mice were subjected to very precise radiation treatment for their cancers, the damage to the surrounding healthy tissue was notably less… (The Scientist)

We usually talk about dogs as friendly goofballs filled with love and joy, while cats are described as aloof, awkward, weirdoes who just kind of tolerate us because we feed them. Even cat people will describe their relationships as suffering regents to an alien noble perplexed and outraged by Earth. But scientists who study them say that we, as pack animals, just understand dogs better than cats, and cats like us just fine and are just loners with a different communication style we’re figuring out. For example, if you look calm and slowly blink at them, cats take it as a friendly smile and will want to say hi even if they’ve never seen you before… (ScienceAlert)

When you think of the shingles vaccine, you usually think of itchy old people. But as of late, it shows promise in reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, and now, it might also be responsible for reducing heart attacks and strokes by as much as 26% based on a survey of South Korean healthcare data. We’re not sure why or how, but a sample size in the millions, decades of data, and strong correlations, says that there’s a dynamic at play here worth investigating further… (Gizmodo)

The problem with getting people to care about climate change, or accept that it’s very important issue is that, by definition, climate is a complex, slowly moving thing. Even a horrific scenario that re-does the Permian extinction would still take generations, and humans are pretty resilient and adapt to challenges very quickly. Paradoxically, we’re also creatures of habit, and need a lot of shortcuts to help our brains deal with all the new information coming at us daily. If we want to make people care about the climate, we need to do what political parties catering to older voters have been doing over the past 75 years: weaponize people’s nostalgia… (Grist)

One of the biggest dangers of global warming only scientists and doctors seem to be talking about is the potential for killer fungi to start regularly invading our bodies with disastrous results as they grow more tolerant to the heat of mammalian bodies. Think less Last of Us and more Pandemic. We’ve already seen increases in infections across the United States and parts of Asia, but now scientists are also warning Europeans of fungal spores becoming more widespread and invasive… (The Independent)