Greenland sharks are surprisingly eagle-eyed, even in old age. Plus, a call to ‘defossilize’ chemistry and the best books to help shape your science career.
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“We’re used to working with mouse eyeballs, which are the size of a papaya seed, so we had to figure out how to scale up to [the Greenland shark’s] baseball-sized eyeball,” says study co-author Emily Tom. (Doug Perrine/Alamy)
Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) can live to be up to 400 years old, making them the longest-lived vertebrate. They dwell in the almost-sunless waters of the Arctic deep sea, and are often infested with parasites that attach to their eyes, leading scientists to suppose that the animals might be functionally blind. But researchers who studied the sharks’ eyeball in the lab say that it’s quite the contrary: the sharks seem to maintain their vision over centuries with no signs of retinal degeneration — perhaps thanks to a DNA repair mechanism in the retina — and could offer clues to treating age-related vision loss in people.
Nautilus | 4 min read
Reference: Nature Communications paper
The US Congress has released a spending bill that backs the Trump administration’s plan to terminate the Mars Sample Return (MSR) programme — NASA’s plan to return rocks collected by its Perseverance rover on Mars to Earth. The bill allocates the space agency US$7.25 billion for the upcoming financial year — a cut of only 1% from the previous year’s allowance — but explicitly states that the funding does not support the MSR programme. The end of the MSR is “deeply disappointing”, says planetary scientist Victoria Hamilton. But it could free up funding for other NASA projects that have stalled in recent years, such as two missions bound for Venus.
Science | 5 min read
Features & opinion
Artificial-intelligence and remote-monitoring technologies are allowing ecologists to do more and more research from the comfort of the lab. The shift lets researchers monitor ecosystems on a scale that was previously unimaginable, but comes at the cost of field experience, say some ecologists. They argue that this loss could lead to error, bias and oversimplification of results. “If it becomes a world where you don’t actually have to go out in order to become an ecologist, we kind of lose sight of what the actual world is like,” says conservation biologist Bill Sutherland.
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