By F.D. Flam
IT WAS a tough year for science in the US. Thousands of research grants, including more than 3,800 from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation alone, were frozen or canceled. NASA was threatened with sweeping budget cuts. Top scientists are leaving the US in search of better opportunities. And misinformation about vaccines and other important scientific matters continues to spread.
But despite these setbacks, scientists around the world produced amazing discoveries every day — some of which made a big splash while others didn’t get nearly the attention they deserved. Here’s a sample of findings that were perhaps more significant than some of the major headline-makers.
OF DIRE WOLVES AND BUTTERFLIES
The spring of 2025 brought the attention-grabbing claim from Colossal Biosciences that it had “resurrected” dire wolves — a species that had been extinct for 12,500 years. Around the same time, a group of researchers published a report documenting a rapid decline in global butterfly populations.
The butterfly report matters because it shows that genetic engineering feats such as “de-extinction” are insufficient to stop the rapid decline of wild species of all kinds, because such efforts can’t restore the ecosystems that support them. Butterfly populations have declined by 22% over the past 20 years. Pesticides are wiping out some species, while others are losing habitat and food sources to humanity’s needs for homes and farmland.
This is part of a broader decline in insect populations worldwide, which means plants are losing pollinators and animals are losing an essential source of food.
Meanwhile, biologists continue to debate whether the dire wolves were really just genetically modified gray wolves. Whatever you call the three pups the company produced, they represent an impressive technological achievement and innovative fundraising effort. Imagine what we could accomplish if we put that same effort and brainpower into inventing new, sustainable ways to grow food without crowding out or poisoning the insects we all depend on.
SUPER SMART HUMANS 30,000 YEARS AGO
In 2025, it was hard to avoid gloomy pronouncements about human intelligence — from brain fog to shrinking attention spans to declining IQ scores. But archaeology tells a different story — one of humans possessing similar intellectual abilities for tens of thousands of years.
Here’s an IQ test nature posed to Stone Age humans 30,000 years ago: There’s a vast stretch of rough, cold ocean in front of you with a raging current cutting across it, and a faint outline of land barely visible from your highest peak. You have only stone tools. How do you get to the other side?
Archaeologists know that people must have passed this test to settle the Ryukyu Islands, a chain that stretches from Kyushu, Japan, to what’s now Taiwan. Models published earlier this year indicate that 30,000 years ago, this 137-mile-wide stretch of ocean was driven by the same strong current observed there today. A similar feat of island hopping brought people to Australia around 50,000 years ago, but anthropologist Yousuke Kaifu believes that the Ryukyu Islands trip was the world’s most treacherous Stone Age boating voyage.
The best way to figure out how Stone Age humans might have done it, he reasoned, was to assemble a team of athletic and adventurous modern-day humans to build a boat and attempt the same feat of stellar and solar navigation using nothing but Stone Age technology and local materials.
They built reed and bamboo boats, which either swamped, capsized, or were swept off course by the current. Eventually, they constructed a dugout canoe from a felled cedar tree. After several false starts, a group of paddlers completed the journey in 44 hours and 10 minutes, publishing their findings in Science Advances in June.
Kaifu said he believes people did it for the same reason we build deep-sea submersibles and spacecraft. It’s humbling but also reassuring to realize that humanity has likely always had brainpower and grit — and probably won’t lose these abilities anytime soon.
UNIVERSAL BLOOD AND MORE
If you’re okay with having your organs removed for transplant when you die, how would you feel about doctors implanting organs into your recently deceased body as part of an experiment? That’s what happened earlier this year when doctors in Canada and China collaborated to transplant a kidney into a brain-dead man to test a new way to avoid organ rejection.
For those of us who’ve read Robin Cook’s thriller Coma, this experiment evokes the book’s chilling fictional portrayal of comatose patients being exploited — people who are in no position to advocate for themselves. But in real life, experts say it is relatively easy to distinguish between patients who have been declared brain-dead — and therefore legally considered dead — and those who are comatose or in a persistent vegetative state, said Arthur Caplan, head of the department of bioethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. Caplan said he was an early advocate of using people who have irreversibly lost all brain function, not just for organ donation, but also as test subjects.
You could think of it as donating your immune system to science. Not everyone who wants to donate their organs will be able to, said Caplan, and the person whose body was used for this kidney transplant experiment probably did more good for humanity than he could have with an organ donation. The technique promises to increase not only the number of available organs but also the blood supply for transfusions.
There are four blood types — A, B, AB, and O — and receiving blood or an organ from a mismatched type can trigger rejection. The one exception is type O, which is universal. However, people with type O blood can only receive type O. So, it was a significant finding when researchers identified an enzyme that can convert type A to O. This enzyme was used on the kidney transplanted into the brain-dead recipient.
Human bodies are likely to be better research models than animals, and using deceased humans makes more ethical sense than killing dogs or monkeys. The finding, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in October, deserves more attention — both because it’s an impressive achievement and because the ethical questions it raises are worth public discussion.
DON’T BLAME MOM
It was a rough year for moms. First, President Donald Trump made an unsupported claim that in utero exposure to acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — can cause autism. Then, even those debunking the claim pointed out that mothers could harm their kids with other painkillers or just by developing a fever.
However, we paid insufficient attention to several recent findings regarding fathers and sperm. These studies revealed a surprisingly powerful influence a father’s health and environment can have on his offspring. Sperm, despite being tiny, carry more than just a package of genes. They also carry RNA fragments that play a role in fetal development, and these are affected by a wide range of environmental factors, including viral infections and even physical fitness.
In one study, published in October in Nature Communications, scientists infected mice with a virus similar to SARS-CoV-2, then let them mate. They observed that the virus altered RNA in sperm and that the offspring exhibited more anxious behavior.
An even more unusual study in mice — published in November in Cell Metabolism — tested the effects of exercise on their sperm. Researchers put male mice on a regimen of intense treadmill exercise for two weeks before they were allowed to mate.
The result: The offspring of the fit fathers showed better endurance and healthier metabolic markers than the offspring of a control group of sedentary males. The scientists identified a specific RNA molecule, called a microRNA, and found that they could improve the health of mice by injecting it into embryos from sedentary fathers.
While these effects might not translate directly to humans, the findings suggest that a father’s environment, health habits, and drug use can affect his sperm in ways that may affect the health, behavior, and even athletic abilities of his children.
SOME FAT MIGHT BE HEALTHIER
Polls show that more than 13% of Americans are taking Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs — about twice as many as last year. But doctors still struggle to understand the health implications of fat — especially among people who are overweight by standard BMI charts but not obese.
Some overweight patients are frustrated that they can’t go to a doctor for a rash without being lectured about their weight, even though they show no signs of diabetes or heart disease. Others in the same situation are angry that they can’t get reimbursed for GLP-1 injections.
Americans bring some Puritanical cultural baggage to this topic, making it easy to dismiss findings that seem counterintuitive, such as the striking 2013 study that showed overweight (but not obese) people lived as long as those of normal weight. Americans also tend to be skeptical of the idea that people can be overweight yet metabolically healthy; however, a study published in August, based on more than 21,000 volunteers, found that women with extra weight around the hips and thighs had healthier hearts than slimmer women.
The study, which used multiple types of medical imaging, also reinforced the finding that visceral fat, which surrounds vital organs, is the most dangerous type of fat. From reporting on a column several years ago, I learned that visceral fat is part of the immune system. Those most prone to it are people who had a low birth weight.
Its function is to protect infants’ organs from infection; however, later in life, it can promote chronic inflammation and cause organs to age prematurely.
All this might eventually help explain the many side benefits people are discovering with GLP-1 drugs — protection from cancer, heart disease, and even Alzheimer’s disease — though the latest research says they can’t actually reverse dementia. There’s still much to learn, not just about the drugs but about the human body itself, and why it comes in so many different shapes and sizes.
BLOOMBERG OPINION
