Nature Communications, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-72566-7.

How did Botticelli’s model really die?

Credit: Sandro Botticelli/Public domain

One of 15th-century painter Sandro Botticelli’s most famous works is the Birth of Venus, depicting the naked goddess, newly birthed, standing in a giant scallop shell. The model for the painting (disputed by some historians) was allegedly Simonetta Vespucci (nee Cattaneo), a renowned beauty in Florentine high society whom Botticelli greatly admired. He painted her five times before her untimely death in her early 20s. Her open coffin was carried through the streets of Florence. The poet Poliziano dubbed her “the Unrivaled” (La Sans Par).

It was long believed that Simonetta had succumbed to tuberculosis, but in 2019, Paolo Pozzilli of Queen Mary University of London and several co-authors argued that she may have suffered from a pituitary tumor (adenoma) that gradually increased in size due to prolactin and growth hormone secretions, citing her appearance in several portraits as evidence. This could have caused a sudden tumor-related fatal apoplexy.

Pozzilli et al. have now expanded their analysis in a paper published in the journal Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism. For instance, they examined letters between Simonetta’s father-in-law, Piero Vespucci, and Lorenzo de Medici, which described how Simonetta had collapsed during a ball a few days before her death. Her symptoms included headache, hallucinations, vomiting, and a high fever, all symptoms of a rapidly expanding pituitary tumor, per the authors. Pozzilli et al. also think the tumor would explain the irregular eye positioning in the Birth of Venus, suggesting the model had a squint or a misalignment of the eyes, which will be the subject of future research.

Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism, 2026. DOI: 10.1002/edm2.70261.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/june-research-roundup-6-cool-science-stories-we-almost-missed/

The real issue is whether publishers of scientific journals should retroactively apply contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers. The journal publishing norms in the early 20th century were substantially different. The emphasis was on achieving the widest dissemination of knowledge across a fragmented scientific community separated by language and geographical distance, publishing in many different journals. As a result, the boundaries were heavily blurred between lectures, conference proceedings, booklets, collected essays, published journal articles and so forth.

The scientific enterprise has since evolved to the point where it is dominated by large commercial publishing groups that are much more sensitive to protecting copyrights and turning a profit. Duplication/self-plagiarism is also more of an issue now, when publications are a major factor when it comes to hiring and promoting scientists, as well as acquiring research fundings. Applying these contemporary standards can be problematic for the “digital circulation of historical texts,” the authors concluded.

The journal’s publisher, Springer Nature, killed an editorial Scarlata planned to run addressing the issue. Springer Nature also declined to comment for the Science article, merely telling Kean through a representative that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”

Given that Planck died in 1947, he can’t get a direct answer either. Both papers are now in the public domain in most countries, so it’s not like copyright violation is even an issue anymore. It’s still possible to access both papers via the Internet archive. But as Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in the their preprint, removing the two papers distorts the historical record.  “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” Gingras told Science. “Just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/why-did-this-journal-retract-two-1940s-papers-by-max-planck/

It’s “an exciting advance in efforts to restock the antibiotic arsenal,” Steven Rutherford, a microbial sciences expert at Genentech, wrote in an accompanying commentary piece in Nature. “More broadly, the study provides a road map showing how genome mining can be used to identify new antibacterial natural products and strategies for using them.”

The pathway the megacluster’s products attack is one for making biotin, also known as vitamin B7. The nutrient is required for growth and virulence in many human pathogens, and, more specifically, it’s a cofactor that critical metabolic enzymes need to work properly. Some bacteria can scavenge biotin from their surroundings, but it’s generally scarce, and bacteria contain evolutionarily conserved pathways to make it themselves.

Brown and his colleagues interestingly found the biotin-targeting megacluster in Streptomyces species, which are very well studied. Streptomyces are bacteria that live in soil and are known as gold mines for antibiotic molecule discovery. Many natural products have already been extracted from them, including the antibiotic streptomycin, an essential medicine discovered in the 1940s. Despite this, the megacluster has been overlooked until now, possibly in part because bacteria in labs are often grown in nutrient-rich media.

Fresh strategy

Also, when researchers are looking for new antibiotics in bacterial genomes, they scan for biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) that could be responsible for producing single molecules. But Brown’s team identified a cluster of four clusters—the megacluster—that produces not just one, but four molecules that work in different ways to trip up the biotin pathway. Careful study revealed that three of the clusters produce antibiotics molecules—stravidins, acidomycins, dapamycins—that each thwart a different enzyme in the biotin biosynthesis pathway. The remaining fourth cluster produces 2-methyl-7-keto-8-aminopelargonic acid, or α-Me-KAPA, which appears to be a dummy molecule that takes the place of a biotin precursor, basically hijacking the pathway to yield a useless biotin lookalike.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/antibiotic-megacluster-discovery-provides-new-strategy-to-fight-superbugs/

“Lo and behold, we end up finding that we can explain this apparent discrepancy,” said Hilton. In other words, weathering of organic carbon amplified the warming initiated by volcanic CO₂, so the planet warmed more than it would have if only the volcanic CO₂ had been emitted.

Acid-digested rock samples being prepared for analysis using column chromatography.

Credit: Bob Hilton

But Rugenstein is skeptical of the amount of CO₂ released by the weathering. “Their estimates of the total amount of carbon delivered by this feedback are enormous,” said Rugenstein. “I find it difficult to believe that these carbon fluxes are going to be as big as they think they are.”

Where does that leave Earth’s “thermostat”?

If rock weathering emits CO₂, where does this leave our widely accepted understanding of Earth’s climate “thermostat,” where weathering of rock (specifically weathering of silicate minerals) reduces atmospheric CO₂, preventing runaway global warming?

“Silicate weathering is still playing a major role. We’re not challenging that,” said Hilton. “It means that silicate weathering has to work harder.”

“While [organic carbon weathering] could be a big positive feedback, in the end, that tells you that the silicate weathering feedback has to be even stronger,” said Rugenstein.

The strength of the competition between silicate weathering and organic carbon weathering depends on the amount of organic-carbon-rich sediment that’s exposed on land. “At some point, you’re going to run out of organic carbon to oxidize, and that’s then going to place a hard limit on the strength of this feedback,” said Rugenstein.

By contrast, the volume of silicate minerals available to weather and draw down CO₂ is much greater. “That’s why that feedback ultimately is a stronger one—we have a much bigger buffer to play with,” said Rugenstein.

A small, long-term uncertain impact for humans

The study suggests that this feedback is likely to apply to other climate warming events, including our own today. Hilton foresees organic carbon weathering adding CO₂ to the atmosphere over the next few centuries, with a small amplifying effect to human-caused warming. “It’s not disaster stations,” said Hilton, “but it is an amount of carbon that could be released at a rate more than it is right now, and that does eat into our carbon budget.”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/feedbacks-upon-feedbacks-rock-weathering-and-the-climate/

The second issue was that in some observations, there were no periodic signals at all. Because we have enough archival observation data, however, the researchers were able to track when the signal appeared and disappeared. And they were able to find a periodicity to that—one that lined up precisely with the star’s cyclic activity. (Think of our Sun’s solar cycle, and apply that to a different star.)

The researchers suspect that, during high solar activity, the signal from the planet’s magnetic influence is swamped. At low periods in the cycle, the researchers suspect that there simply isn’t enough activity there for the magnetic interactions to enhance. So, they think that we see the enhanced chromosphere emissions only at intermediate levels of stellar activity.

How is the magnetic influence showing up on the star in the first place? The researchers consider a number of theoretical models, but the only one that produces enough energy at the chromosphere is one where loops of magnetic field connect the fields of the planet and the star. This model allows them to estimate the strength of the planet’s magnetic field, which they put at a minimum of 6 Gauss, over 10 times the strength of Earth’s.

While that all may seem a bit extreme, it’s not especially unusual, even in our Solar System. The magnetic field strength is similar to that of Jupiter, and Neptune’s magnetosphere extends out to far greater distances than the gap between GJ 436 and its planet.

As we noted above, this is the most comprehensive look at magnetic-driven flaring in an exosolar system, but it’s not the first. And there are hundreds of additional systems with close-in planets that we can still examine. So, in time, having measurements of exoplanet magnetic fields may become commonplace.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv3075 (About DOIs).

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/planet-orbits-so-close-to-its-star-that-their-magnetic-fields-connect/

“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”

With the planet on track to exceed 1.5° Celsius of human-induced warming, it is no surprise that extreme heat events increase in frequency, intensity, and duration, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources at University of California, Los Angeles.

“A rising tide raises all boats,” he said. Climate warming doesn’t just worsen heat waves by increasing temperatures by a few degrees. For the most extreme events, scientists have found that a warmer climate can amplify meteorological feedback loops, further worsening heat waves and sometimes even leading to droughts.

In Western Europe, the incidence of a type of weather system called a blocking pattern—essentially an atmospheric traffic jam that can extend weather patterns—has increased, and scientists are currently researching the link between these patterns, human-induced global warming, and heat waves.

“Heat waves are going to keep getting hotter and more frequent until we reach net zero,” Helen Millman, a climate scientist and postdoctoral research fellow at the Global Systems Institute at University of Exeter, said in an email. “While people worry about the upfront cost of decarbonising, that investment is tiny compared to what we will pay to constantly repair a country battered by a harsher climate.”

Noah Diffenbaugh, an earth system sciences professor at Stanford University who has served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that even if the European Union meets its goal of reaching net zero by 2050, that’s still another quarter-century of planet-warming greenhouse emissions being released into the atmosphere.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/the-sad-inevitability-of-europes-heat-wave/

The new announcement, however, has a clear conservation focus. Colossal has already announced what it’s calling a BioVault, a site where tissues and reproductive cells from at-risk species can be preserved, which requires a lot of power and a constant supply of liquid nitrogen. The new program will see it add samples from all of the US’s endangered species to that vault. Those samples will also be used to create whole genome sequences for each of these species. The announcement calls these “biological materials that enable assisted reproduction, population genetic management, and, where species are lost, the possibility of future restoration.”

The US Fish and Wildlife Service will provide the field collection and sampling expertise to populate this archive. They (and anyone else who initially obtains samples) will retain the ability to determine how any biological materials that result are used.

“All genomic data generated through this partnership will be deposited into open-access repositories, and provided at no cost, providing the global scientific and conservation community with the reference genomes, population-level sequence data, and bioinformatic tools needed to accelerate recovery efforts far beyond what any single agency or institution could accomplish alone,” the company’s announcement states. It clarified to Ars that there may be some limits on this. This is due in part to some samples originating from lands under tribal authority, and in part to specific population information that could put species at risk of poaching.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/new-effort-will-get-genome-sequences-for-entire-endangered-species-list/

But the people who put together climate.gov didn’t go away. While the government didn’t hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down.

The website features Climate.gov’s 15-year collection of climate news and stories, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps and data pathways, climate literacy resources, classroom materials, and restored access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.

The team behind it, which includes several key people who built climate.gov, says it’s not satisfied with simply restoring what was lost. Having established a nonprofit to maintain the new website, the organization will shift its focus to what it calls “long-term public service.” It plans to establish new resources and develop additional materials to help explain the changing climate to the public.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/uss-climate-gov-site-taken-down-by-trump-relaunched-by-nonprofit/

Without the tadpole phase and metamorphosis, though, the transition from water to land was probably way tougher than we thought.

Amphibian innovation

“We have lots of assumptions in our field that are based on relatively limited data,” Pardo said. One of those assumptions was that a distinct aquatic larval stage made the water-to-land transition easier for early tetrapods. While direct development, without undergoing a radical metamorphosis early in the animal’s lifecycle, might appear to be a simpler solution, it likely made the lives of young embolomers considerably harder.

The first challenge they faced was being tied to the same environment throughout their entire lifespan. Unlike amphibian tadpoles, they lived in the same ecological niche as larger juveniles and three-meter-long adults and had to compete with them for resources. Then there was the problem of supporting their body mass on land. The team noted in the paper that juvenile embolomers had weak, poorly developed limbs at hatching, which probably left them unable to move long distances across land. They were likely stuck wherever they hatched.

“It certainly makes it harder to not have a tadpole stage,” Pardo said.

He suggested that this is evidence that amphibian metamorphosis is not an ancient evolutionary stepping stone that enabled the first animals to expand out of water and conquer the land, which was then preserved in modern frogs or toads. Instead, it might be an evolutionary innovation that amphibians developed much later in response to challenges coming with the water-to-land transition.

“It may be something unique to amphibians that emerged as an adaptation to their specific way of living on land,” Pardo said. “Instead of being primitive, it may actually be something new, something novel and exciting. We’ve never thought about it this way.”

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb7635

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/early-land-animals-skipped-the-tadpole-phase/

The FAA’s environmental review approved SpaceX’s proposal for two Starfall reentry demonstrations. It did not specify if these demos would happen on one or two missions. SpaceX intends to recover the vehicle, including parachutes and heat shields, “to the to the maximum extent practicable,” the FAA said.

The Starfall vehicle is cylindrical in shape, with a diameter of 10.2 feet (3.1 meters) and a height of 2.5 feet (0.75 meters). Starfall weighs approximately 4,600 pounds (2.1 metric tons) with capacity for about 2,200 pounds (1 metric ton) of payload, for a total weight of 6,800 pounds (3.1 metric tons). Designed exclusively for cargo, Starfall is smaller than SpaceX’s human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft used for ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

A closer look at the Starfall reentry vehicle.

Credit: SpaceX

The first Starfall Demo mission will spend a few hours in low-Earth orbit, but the vehicle could also fly on shorter suborbital trajectories after launching on either Falcon 9 or the much larger Starship rocket. This version of Starfall is not capable of de-orbiting itself, but instead relies upon its launch vehicle to guide it back into the atmosphere. After separating from its rocket carrier, the disc-shaped vehicle uses compressed nitrogen gas to point its heat shield in the right direction for reentry.

So who might use something like Starfall? The US military is one obvious answer. The Pentagon is already working with SpaceX on a concept named Rocket Cargo or Point-to-Point Delivery, which would use Starship to deliver massive loads of equipment and supplies to far-flung locations in less than an hour. Starship is an enormous vehicle, nearly 20 stories tall and 30 feet wide, that must land at prepared sites. Starfall could prove to be a more versatile option for lighter deliveries.

The military has also signed agreements with Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Anduril for studies and development of technologies for global cargo delivery from space. Notwithstanding Starship, which is still undergoing experimental flight tests, SpaceX may have an early advantage with the Starfall delivery vehicle.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/with-starfall-spacex-eyes-an-edge-in-global-cargo-delivery-from-orbit/