Do you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYour PhD competition? We want you to top last year’s winning entry from a scientist who translated physics’ piezoelectric effect into dance. Submit your entry by 29 January 2027: scim.ag/4i5WelJ

Do you have what it takes to win Science’s #DanceYour PhD competition? We want you to top last year’s winning entry from a scientist who translated physics’ piezoelectric effect into dance. Submit your entry by 29 January 2027: scim.ag/4i5WelJ

A Massachusetts jury has awarded biologist David Sabatini $6 million—plus interest—in damages in his defamation case against Kristin Knouse, a former colleague at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. The physician-scientist’s claims led one research institution to fire Sabatini and precipitated his resignations from Whitehead and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a tenured faculty member. Read more: scim.ag/4jxig3b

A dump of 722 AI-generated papers has mathematicians wondering: Has their field been decimated or invigorated? Read more: scim.ag/4jXnLbu

A lavish 1919 dinner party that ended up killing five people. An attempt to save the canning industry in the 1920s. A World War II biological weapons program and a CIA plot against Fidel Castro. A cosmetic product, best known as Botox, that erases facial wrinkles and exploded into a multibillion-dollar business. A new analysis of more than 1000 bacterial genomes connects these disparate episodes in U.S. history in a piece of microbiological detective work. Detailed in a new paper, the study shows how scientists unwittingly triggered the evolution of a dangerous bacterium into one with major medical and commercial advantages. Learn more: scim.ag/4yuuayu

Uranium cubes recovered from Nazi Germany’s nuclear program have helped reveal how far its scientists were from building a working reactor. scim.ag/4xY3iHa

All or almost all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their heart, astronomers suspect. But when galaxies merge, do their black holes do the same? Simulations suggest the answer is not always: Sometimes, one of the two escapes the gravitational clutches of the merged galaxy, wandering the cosmos as an exile. Now, a research team has found long-sought evidence of a supermassive black hole with very few stars around it that appears to have slipped the leash after a galactic mashup. Learn more: scim.ag/4hAIUal

Within 2 weeks in September 2017, a pair of hurricanes blasted the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. The storms spelled disaster for the island’s human and nonhuman residents alike, including small lizards known as silver key anoles. But some of the islands’ anoles endured the storms better than others—and now scientists have uncovered a possible reason why in their genes. Learn more: scim.ag/4vRsAFG

About 14,700 years ago, a large cat hobbled through what is now the heart of Los Angeles, toward the panicked cries of a camel trapped in tar. But as the fearsome feline approached the hapless herbivore, it, too, became ensnared in the pit of burbling oil—condemning itself to a similar fate. Why were these saber-toothed felines drawn to the pits? One reason, researchers now suggest, is that picking off trapped prey may have been the cats’ only reliable way to hunt: Many had hampered mobility, a side effect of heritable deformities and rare nerve tumors brought on by generations of inbreeding. This research provides one of the first direct indicators of how North America’s megafauna suffered the consequences of population decline through the end of the last ice age. Learn more: scim.ag/4x3PTgs

Peptide enthusiasts—including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—might soon be able to buy the controversial products more easily from regulated sources. scim.ag/4fkMeVN