It’s rare to find a new, relatively large mammal. Unsurprisingly, most newly discovered animal species are small in size, said Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, who co-authored the study and leads a wild cat conservation program called Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia (Bolivian Felid Research and Conservation Program).

“This time, it’s a cat. That’s really novel. And it hasn’t happened in 100 years,” she said. “No one else had named it. No one else had described it.”

The size of the Leopardus tilcayo population is not clear yet.

“We really don’t know how many cats are still in the wild,” said Nogales-Ascarrunz, whose work as a conservationist is funded by National Geographic. “We need science, we need more studies to answer this question, which is actually critical for its conservation.”

…

The cat had been brought in by a man living in a community in the forest near La Paz who had mistaken the cat for a domestic kitten, according to details recorded by the sanctuary. He had fed the animal noodles, rice and eggs, only to realize it was wild and that he could not take care of it. So he brought it to the sanctuary.

Initially, colleagues at the sanctuary thought the animal might be a known tiger cat species from Brazil, but Nogales-Ascarrunz wasn’t convinced.

“If you look at the spots or the tail, they really don’t match,” she said.

Nogales-Ascarrunz did genetic testing, using tissue from the tiger cat and a second animal that also turned up at Senda Verde. The results from those specimens revealed that the two cats were unique and from the same species, which had diverged from other tiger cat lineages about 1.4 million years ago. That’s enough genetic distance to consider it a new species.

Nogales-Ascarrunz said, however, that local communities in Bolivia have been aware of the species’ presence for generations.

“This cat, they call it tilcayo. And when you ask, ‘Does it have some meaning in Quechua or Almyra and other Indigenous languages?’ they say, ‘No, my grandpa told me that’s the tilcayo,’” Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “This is a traditional knowledge that they have in the community. We want to preserve that knowledge and we didn’t want to give it another name.”

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You can read more about these cute wildcats here, in National Geographic, and here, in Current Biology.

The post First new cat species IDed in a century. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

As the caption from Popular Electronics says (found here, on archive.org):

A fossil particle was magnified 3000 times by a conventional light microscope, and then by the electron microscope. The electron micrograph (right) is sharp, clear, and detailed. RCA’s newest unit provides magnification up to 200.000 diameters— 50 percent greater than previously possible.

It’s from an article describing “one of science’s most powerful weapons in its attack on the frontier of the unknown,” tracing the electron microscope’s history back to 1873… using “practical electronic lenses.”

The post Science Art: Power of RCA Electron Microscope, May 1955 first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Over the past 6 years, killer whales have been ramming boats off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, sinking nine, and parading fiberglass remnants around like trophies. Vessels are frequently towed into shipyards with tooth rakes on their undersides and rudders ripped off, causing millions of dollars in damage.

…

Joana Castro, a marine ecologist at the Marine Environment Research Association (AIMM), has found a more benign explanation. Over the past 8 years, she and her colleagues have analyzed seven encounters they’ve filmed during routine surveys of large sea animals along the southern coast of Portugal in their single-engine, 6.5-meter inflatable boat. Orca interactions with the vessel ranged from light touches to full-on high-speed ramming that knocked some students—who’d tagged along on the expeditions—to the floor, says Guilherme Estrela, a skipper and biologist at AIMM. To get a picture of what was happening underwater, brave participants plunged hand-held GoPros below the surface.

In a few videos, the orcas could be seen opening their mouths or blowing bubbles—behaviors scientists often associate with aggression, Castro says. But the rest of the evidence seemed to fit more with the idea that the animals were simply playing: Almost all the actual boat contact was made by juveniles—“teenagers who do reckless things”—and never adult males, Rose says. And the animals’ contact was often simple touching or gentle nudging, Castro adds. Sometimes, they would show their bellies—a friendly posture—while pushing the boats.

Some of the orcas also came bearing gifts. In 2021, for example, 3-year-old Eli dragged a chunk of tuna in her mouth to show the researchers. “That’s supersocial and bonding in their own system,” Castro says. “A killer whale does not do that to an enemy.”

Andre has had similar experiences with Estrella—the one boaters call White Gladis—and her 5-year-old son Atlas, who bears deep scars from a 2025 propeller strike. “If you want to avenge yourself, you don’t bring food, you know?” he says.

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You can read more of the whale-recreation research here, in Marine Mammal Science.

The post Boat-wrecking orcas might only be playing. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

The new study homes in on a type of dendritic cells, immune cells that, in effect, give the killer T cells their orders. After cutting up the invader’s proteins, the dendritic cells present the antigens as bite-size pieces that T cells can recognize. T cells with compatible receptors can then become activated, which causes the cells to start to clone themselves, attack cells bearing the antigen, and cause inflammation.

[David] Holtzman and [Hao] Hu studied the role of dendritic cells by ensuring that half of their tau-overexpressing mice were genetically incapable of making them. The researchers then observed mice from both groups—some 80 animals in all—through about 10 months of age, when they normally have brain damage and severe behavioral symptoms, including trouble building nests. Both groups continued to accumulate tau, but those lacking the dendritic cells were largely protected from neurodegeneration and behavioral problems.

The finding suggests tau, suspected of killing neurons in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, does not act alone. Tau probably leads to some injury, Holtzman thinks, “but the inflammation is really amplifying the injury. It’s an important issue [to consider] in developing future therapies.”

…

The finding that this process occurs in the neck, not the brain, is crucial, says neuroimmunology researcher John Lukens of the University of Virginia. That’s because it suggests tamping down the number of destructive T cells in the brain would not require a drug to cross the blood-brain barrier—a persistent challenge in developing drugs for neurodegenerative disease.

Better yet, existing drugs may be able to help. Several treatments for multiple sclerosis work by trapping T cells in the lymph nodes, away from the brain and spinal cord. In theory, Lukens says, these drugs “could be rapidly co-opted for the treatment of tauopathies and Alzheimer’s disease.” The next step “would be to uncover the specific [signaling proteins] that orchestrate T cell recruitment to the brain in tau-driven neurodegenerative diseases.”

—
You can read more of the T-cell brain research here, in Nature Neuroscience.

The post Immune cells from the neck cause Alzheimer’s in the brain first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

New drugs can improve memory or slow the rate of cognitive decline in some patients, but in most cases, by the time symptoms appear, extensive and irreversible brain damage means there is no hope of a cure.

Except now, there might be. Thirteen years ago, the Welsh government unintentionally created an experiment that might just change the future of dementia care, unmasking a game-changing treatment that was there all along.

…

Welsh officials introduced a new national programme on 1 September 2013, offering a shingles vaccine to people aged 70. It wasn’t a blanket rollout, it was age-targeted.

Shingles vaccines were offered in phases and the timing was largely arbitrary. If you turned 70 on or just after 1 September, you’d be offered the vaccine. If you turned 70 just before the cutoff, you were ineligible.

That seemingly insignificant detail turned out to be the most vital part of the trial – it created what’s known as a ‘natural experiment’. People on either side of the cutoff were effectively randomised, like participants in a clinical trial.

…

Here’s where the payoff for dementia comes in. In 2025, Geldsetzer and other researchers sifted through the data of the Welsh septuagenarians and found something astonishing.

The people offered a vaccine were 20 per cent less likely to develop dementia.

In dementia research, 20 per cent is a big number – much higher than a lot of lifestyle factors believed to affect an individual’s risk. A follow-up study even found that the vaccine could slow the progression of the disease in people who already had it.

In other words, researchers made the near-chance discovery that this most cruel of diseases could be treated – and even prevented – by a jab in the arm. In public health terms, that’s potentially seismic.

…

But the idea of a vaccine for dementia isn’t new. In the 1990s, British researchers discovered the DNA of a herpes virus in the brain cells of elderly people – specifically the common HSV-1 virus, which causes cold sores.

Later, they found that the virus was much more likely to appear in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients than people without the disease.

…

Studies in multiple countries later showed that people with severe herpes infections were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s – and also that herpes patients treated with strong antivirals showed a dramatically lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s in later life.

Next came 2025 data from the US and elsewhere, suggesting a link between another herpes virus and dementia: herpes zoster, which causes chickenpox and shingles.

Researchers noticed a correlation between people who’d had the shingles vaccine and a lower risk of dementia.

…

Intriguingly, however, the shingles jab is not the only existing vaccine shown to lower a person’s risk of dementia.

In 2019, researchers found that the BCG vaccine, which protects against tuberculosis, also lowers the risk of a person developing Alzheimer’s.

The team analysed data on bladder cancer patients up to eight years after treatment (the BCG vaccine is a standard treatment in bladder cancer therapy). At the same time of receiving the vaccine, none of the patients had Alzheimer’s.

In the following eight years, just 2.4 per cent of people who’d had the vaccine developed Alzheimer’s, compared with 8.9 per cent of patients who didn’t receive BCG. Those findings have since been observed in other datasets.

…

Some studies have found that people who have annual flu shots see a greater benefit than those who don’t.

Likewise, in April 2026, a team at the University of Texas in the US found that a high-dose flu vaccine is linked to 20 per cent lower risk of getting dementia compared with a standard dose.

…

“The first conclusion is it doesn’t really matter which vaccine you use. All are protective,” says Prof Richard Lathe, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. “The second thing is that the more vaccines you get, the more protection you receive.”

…

Lathe says the most likely mechanism is trained immunity: that vaccines don’t just prime the immune system against a specific pathogen (like herpes in the case of the shingles jab).

They also reprogramme immune cells to make the immune system better able to respond to other future challenges.

The post Accidental vaccines against dementia first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Just below this picture on the page is an equally colorful image of tomato, a cure for cholera infantum.

The image comes from Vitalogy: an encyclopedia of health and home, adapted for home, the layman, the family by E.H. Ruddock, which I found on archive.org thanks to a post by Nemfrog.

The book is a collection of “Food and Harmless Home Remedies for all diseases, which neither injure health nor destroy life.” It’s got some lists of vitamins in various fruits and vegetables, and calories for foods, and “How to banish ‘OLD AGE’ matter.” There are recipes for carrot-poultices and mustard-poultices, and recommendations for using lemon and sugar to banish “malarial diseases.” There are recipes for kerosene oil and coal oil.

So it’s not exactly the best health advice, from our perspective, but it’s something.

The post Science Art: Red Pepper, 1910. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

A brown dwarf is already something of a cosmic maverick — too large to be called a planet, too small to be a star. Experts sometimes refer to brown dwarfs as “failed stars” because they’re not quite massive enough to sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores.

That leaves researchers at a loss for what exactly to call this thing circling it. Because the object orbits a brown dwarf that is orbiting a star, it’s kind of an “exomoon,” they said, a satellite of a planet found outside the solar system.

“Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system,” said Kevin Hoy, lead author of the study published in Nature, in a statement.

…

“The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star,” Hoy said, “though it orbits an object that orbits a star.”

This is not the first time astronomers have found something that appears to be orbiting a brown dwarf, but previous detections involved objects that were much more separated. Because of that, whether those companions were moons or planets is debatable. In this case, the satellite orbiting CD-35 2722 B is hugging the brown dwarf so closely, it completes a trip every 170 days.

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to make the discovery. Instead of taking a picture of the moon, the researchers used the observatory to see wobbles in the brown dwarf.

…

Though a handful of exomoon candidates has been reported in scientific journals over the years, none of them have been confirmed yet. The CD-35 2722 B candidate also will require more observations before it gets such a designation, but Alice Zurlo, an astrophysicist at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and a coauthor, is convinced this is the first “plausible” detection of an exosatellite.

—

You can read more about the exosatellite here, in Nature.

The post Strange space object: not a planet, orbiting not a star. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

This study identifies dermcidin, an antimicrobial peptide previously found in sweat, as a key factor in innate resistance to influenza symptoms. We demonstrate that dermcidin possesses antiviral activity both in vitro and in vivo and establish its link to disease susceptibility. Dermcidin is present in all respiratory virus entry routes (saliva, nasopharynx, and tears), with levels increasing during viral infections. It protects mice from influenza A disease in vivo and exhibits broad-spectrum antiviral activity in vitro, inhibiting all influenza A virus strains tested and other respiratory viruses. These findings underscore dermcidin’s potential as an antiviral therapy, offering a promising avenue for combating respiratory viral infections through a naturally occurring human peptide with a unique mechanism of action.

The post Sweat against influenza first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

Roman pairs a large field of view with crisp infrared vision to explore vast swaths of the sky and probe deeply into cosmic history. This flagship mission will help astronomers explore dark matter, dark energy, and worlds outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets. Its surveys will support a broad range of research extending far beyond the mission’s main science goals.

“Roman is exactly the kind of success story we want to see across NASA,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Delivered ahead of schedule and on budget, this mission reflects more than a decade of dedication from the NASA workforce and our industry partners. Now, Roman will give us a new atlas of the universe, push the boundaries of discovery, and demonstrate what is possible when America’s space program pairs bold ambition with disciplined execution.”

The ground control team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, began receiving telemetry data from Roman seven minutes after launch. The Falcon Heavy rocket performed as expected, separating from the observatory 31 minutes into the flight. After separating from the center core, the rocket’s boosters safely returned to the launch site for refurbishment.

…

During launch and early orbit, Roman uses the Near Space Network’s ground stations and relay satellites to exchange tracking, telemetry, and command data with ground controllers. About 70 minutes after launch, the Deep Space Network takes over communications and guides Roman toward the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or L2, about one million miles from Earth. Roman connects to that network through the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex in Australia first. Approximately six hours later it will transfer to the Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex in Spain and then to the Goldstone Deep Space Communication Complex in California, ensuring continuous contact with Roman throughout its journey.

The Roman team also confirmed successful deployment of the observatory’s solar panels and lower instrument sun shade an hour and 23 minutes after launch.

…

A few weeks into Roman’s voyage, its primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument, will activate. This 300-megapixel infrared camera has 18 4K detectors, each about the size of a saltine cracker. These detectors collect photons of light that will be decoded into crisp cosmic panoramas. Thanks to the observatory’s rigid design and stable optical performance, it will rapidly scan the sky without needing substantial time between separate observations. The Roman telescope is designed to survey the universe a thousand times faster than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period, scientists will run the instruments through a series of calibrations and tests. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.

Roman will send back 1.4 terabytes of data every day, the highest data rate of any NASA astrophysics mission, so far.

The post Roman telescope heads for deep space. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

It’s almost like an Arts & Crafts wallpaper swatch.

The engines here are mostly rotary piston engines, with the last, Fig. 1333, being Mellor’s patent pump, which “has a rocking vane or partition, with packing device which accommodates itself to the revolving oval piston.” Some of these are different perspectives on the same mechanism; Fig 1316: “The small crescent-shaped piston revolves three times to one revolution of the three-armed piston,” or Fig. 1326, “a modification of Fig. 1323.” Fig. 1325 is simply labeled “Baker’s pressure blower.”

Each of these little shapes was thought out to solve a specific problem, and then shared in this massive compendium of cleverly conceived bits and pieces.

I found the book, with many more pages like this one, on archive.org.

The post Science Art: Figs. 1315-1333 (Various rotary piston engines), 1890. first appeared on The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.