Tonight’s collection avoids the true but dire science news and focuses on the true “this works!” and “best of 2025” stories I found this week. After looking over the titles, I decided that this is tonight’s theme: AI mirrors humans—both think we’re smarter than we really are.
Reindeer Eyes Do Something Incredible When Winter Comes — science alert
In 2013, scientists discovered that reindeer eyes change hues with the seasons, reflecting the color of the Arctic sky.
If you look into the eyes of an Arctic reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in the summer, when the days are long and the Sun is bright, you will see shining back a gold and turquoise glow, similar to the emerald reflection of cats’ eyes in the night.
In wintertime, however, when darkness reigns, a reindeer’s eye does something unique. It turns a stunning, deep blue … This is a natural metamorphosis – a unique adaptation that scientists suggest may serve as reindeer ‘sunglasses’.
12 Favorite Stories and Photos from 2025 — wildlife conservation society
“Over the course of the year, these developments, favorites of our WCS Communications Team, inspired wonder, advanced science, and demonstrated tangible progress for wildlife and wild places around the world.”
Among the fave stories are the following:
- Signs of Lion Recovery (Central African Republic)
- Gorillas Scratch the Ground for Truffles (Republic of Congo)
- Underwater Exploration of Hudson Canyon (New York Seascape)
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Seized Corals Are Rehabilitated (New York Aquarium)
These medical breakthroughs and advances gave patients new hope in 2025 — science news
American science took a beating this year, with cuts to funding, jobs and credibility. And yet, scientists persisted and made progress.
- Slowing Huntington’s for the first time
- Gene editing saved baby KJ
This vaccine appears to reduce dementia risk
The first bladder transplant was a success
COVID vax boosts cancer therapy
Staying safe from RSV
Nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains between Lake Tahoe and the site of the infamous Donner party encampment, Truckee, California is a ski town best known for trees and snow. But once the snow melts, the pines become a wildfire liability. In response, Truckee is spearheading what just might be the future of wildfire insurance.
overnight news digest publishes daily around 9 pm pacific time. saturday is science news! we invite you to share your stories in the comments.
Glowing urine and shining bark: Scientists discover the secret visual language of deer — phys.org
The “so” I underlined in the blurb is carrying a lot of (unnecessary) intention!
During mating season, when male white-tailed deer want to get noticed by the opposite sex and warn off rivals, they rub their antlers against trees and scrape the forest floor. Then they pee on these patches. But there is more to these physical and scent markers than meets the eye—or nose. According to a new study published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, they also glow so that other deer can see them when it’s dark.
Researchers from the University of Georgia, U.S., wanted to learn more about how deer communicate with one another. It has long been known that they leave these signposts behind to share their scent, but the team suspected there was a hidden visual element that humans cannot see.
Unlike humans, deer can see in ultraviolet light. They don’t have a filter that we have in our eyes that blocks out these rays. When they are active at dawn and dusk, this is a useful feature because there is generally more UV light during these hours.
Global protection has historically favored areas with well-documented terrestrial vertebrates — mainly mammals and birds — while plants and invertebrates remain underrepresented. Limited habitat data for these taxa have hindered balanced conservation planning. Effective protection requires detailed knowledge of species distributions — information still missing for large parts of the world.
In recent World Bank research, we used machine-based pattern recognition to map distributions for over 600,000 terrestrial and marine species based on millions of occurrence records from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Unlike earlier datasets focused on vertebrates, this database provides much greater representation for plants, invertebrates, fungi, and other taxa. Vertebrates account for 8.6% of species, plants 37.8%, and invertebrates 35.5%, marking a major advance in representativeness. The dataset enables countries to identify conservation-critical species, detect protection gaps, and prioritize new protected areas.
Americans overestimate how many social media users post harmful content — pnas nexus
Americans can become more cynical about the state of society when they see harmful behavior online. Three studies of the American public (n = 1,090) revealed that they consistently and substantially overestimated how many social media users contribute to harmful behavior online.
On average, they believed that 43% of all Reddit users have posted severely toxic comments and that 47% of all Facebook users have shared false news online. In reality, platform-level data shows that most of these forms of harmful content are produced by small but highly active groups of users (3–7%). […]
An experiment revealed that overestimating the proportion of social media users who post harmful content makes people feel more negative emotion, perceive the United States to be in greater moral decline, and cultivate distorted perceptions of what others want to see on social media. However, these effects can be mitigated through a targeted educational intervention that corrects this misperception. Together, our findings highlight a mechanism that helps explain how people’s perceptions and interactions with social media may undermine social cohesion.
AI overestimates how smart people are, according to economists — phys.org
Scientists at HSE University have found that current AI models, including ChatGPT and Claude, tend to overestimate the rationality of their human opponents—whether first-year undergraduate students or experienced scientists—in strategic thinking games, such as the Keynesian beauty contest. While these models attempt to predict human behavior, they often end up playing “too smart” and losing because they assume a higher level of logic in people than is actually present.
The study has been published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
New species are now being discovered faster than ever before, study suggests — Eureka Alert
According to a new University of Arizona-led study published in Science Advances, scientists are discovering species quicker than ever before, with more than 16,000 new species discovered each year.
“Some scientists have suggested that the pace of new species descriptions has slowed down and that this indicates that we are running out of new species to discover, but our results show the opposite. In fact, we’re finding new species at a faster rate than ever before.”
Africa’s rarest carnivore: The story of the first Ethiopian wolf ever captured, nursed and returned to the wild — phys.org
What’s the value of one animal? When a wild animal is found badly injured, the most humane option is often euthanasia to prevent further suffering. That’s what usually happens, and often for good reason. Even when the resources to rescue one animal are available, a rehabilitated animal brought back into the wild might be rejected by its group, or struggle to find food or escape predators. If it does survive, it may fail to reproduce, and leave no lasting mark on the population.
But every so often, a single case comes along where one animal becomes evidence that intervention can do more than save a life on the spot. It can also change what we think is possible.
This is a story of a second chance that played out in the Simien Mountains, Ethiopia.
Transfer to a naturalistic setting restructures fear responses in laboratory mice — current biology
Appropriate classification of a novel stimulus as threatening or benign depends on a repertoire of prior environmental experiences involving challenge, risk, and opportunity1,2. Without this library, individuals may classify harmless stimuli as dangerous — a hallmark of generalized anxiety1,2. In humans, insufficient exposure to uncertainty or manageable risks is associated with heightened anxiety and maladaptive fear generalization and is theorized to contribute to rising rates of anxiety in children3,4,5. Although animals in natural environments accumulate a wide range of experiences that allow them to calibrate threat assessment, most behavioral studies of anxiety rely on laboratory animals housed in static, impoverished conditions.