Science Research Weekly

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 15, Expand Your Scientific Scope. Get ready for algal microplastics remediation, cosmic large-scale structure, coffee and dementia risk, tales of outer membrane vesicles and tumor microenvironment subtypes, why a high R-squared can be misleading, and the MIRA award from the NIH. Science On.

References:

• Remediation and upcycling of microplastics by algae with wastewater nutrient removal and bioproduction potential
• Large-scale Structure in COSMOS-Web: Tracing Galaxy Evolution in the Cosmic Web up to z ∼ 7 with the Largest JWST Survey
• Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function
• Load Identification in Bistable Spacecraft Booms
• via Parametric Data-Driven Modeling
• "Like Taking the Path of Least Resistance": Exploring the Impact of LLM Interaction on the Creative Process of Programming
• Discovery and characterisation of OMVs produced by the bee gut microbiota
• TumorArchetypeR: A modular framework to derive
• signature-based tumor subtypes
• Learning Data Science: Why a High R^2 Can Be Misleading
• Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) for Early Stage Investigators (ESI)

R Packages:

• marsruntime: Portable Mars Runtime Replay
• QsRutils: R Functions Useful for Community Ecology
• ROCsurvcomp: ROC-Based Methods for Comparing Survival Distributions with Right, Left, and Doubly Censored Data
• warmthcompetence: Warmth and Competence Detectors

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 14, Get ready for chemical synthesis a la LMMs, an amino acid for Alzheimer’s pathology suppression, a trans-Neptunian object with an atmosphere, PhysForge vs. ProtSpace, and cancer grants from the Department of War.

References:

• Chemical reasoning in LLMs unlocks strategy-aware synthesis planning and reaction mechanism elucidation
• Oral administration of arginine suppresses Aβ pathology in animal models of Alzheimer's disease
• Multiple independent genetic code reassignments of the UAG stop codon in phyllopharyngean ciliates
• Detection of an atmosphere on a trans-Neptunian object beyond Pluto
• Bioprinting of Microtissues Within Mechanically Tunable Support Baths to Engineer Anisotropic Musculoskeletal Tissues
• PhysForge: Generating Physics-Grounded 3D Assets for Interactive Virtual World
• ProtSpace: Protein Universe in Your Browser
• DoW Peer Reviewed Cancer, Idea Award
• Bioengineering Research Grants

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 13, Attack of the 50-foot Octopus! Get ready for giant predatory Cretaceous octopuses, ice-water clouds on a distant Jupiter, anti-viral acrylic surfaces, 3D printing inside living cells, March’s top 40 new CRAN packages, and a grant on Engineering Biological and Biomedical Systems. Science On.

References:

• Compositional selection of phospholipid compartments in icy environments drives the enrichment of encapsulated genetic information
• Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans
• A Second Visit to Eps Ind Ab with JWST: New Photometry Confirms Ammonia and Suggests Thick Clouds in the Exoplanet Atmosphere of the Closest Super-Jupiter
• Designing Scalable Mechano-Virucidal Nanostructured Acrylic Surfaces for Enhanced Viral Inactivation
• Removal of Microplastics from Drinking Water by Moringa oleifera Seed: Comparative Performance with Alum in Direct and in-Line Filtration Systems
• Two-Photon 3D Printing of Functional Microstructures Inside Living Cells
• CAN WE TEACH GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THE DESIGN
• LANGUAGE OF ENGINEERED LIVING MATERIALS?
• Harnessing AI to Build Virtual Cells
• Urban soil microbiomes exhibit taxonomic and functional potential for enhanced contaminant cycling
• R 4.6.0 is released
• March 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages
• Little useless-useful R functions – Desk plant simulator
• Design your plots (ggplot) for mobile
• Engineering Biological and Biomedical Systems (EBBS)
• INSPIRING GENERATIONS OF NEW INNOVATORS TO IMPACT TECHNOLOGIES IN ENERGY 2026 (IGNIITE 2026)
• John Templeton Foundation - Life Sciences

R Packages:

• rPandas: Translating from R to Python's Pandas Package

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 12, Dropping the PepHammer. Get ready for ancient soft sponges, astronomical biosignature spotting via grouped planets, the Epidemiology of AI, crop management via smartphone, an examination of NIH funding outputs, dropping the PepHammer, asking if AI agents save time for scientists, and a grant on specialty crops. Science On.

References:

• A late-Ediacaran crown-group sponge animal
• Pearling drives mitochondrial DNA nucleoid distribution
• p21+TREM2+ senescent macrophages fuel inflammaging and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease
• An Agnostic Biosignature Based on Modeling Panspermia and Terraforming
• Visplot: A visibility plot and observation scheduling tool for
• astronomical observatories
• AI-assisted writing and the reorganization of scientific knowledge
• The Epidemiology of Artificial Intelligence
• The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE)
• Image-based leaf SPAD value and chlorophyll measurement using a mobile
• phone: enabling accessible and sustainable crop management
• Comparing the outputs of intramural and extramural grants funded by National Institutes of Health
• PepHammer – a lightweight web-based tool for bioactive peptide matching and identification
• My Domain: proteome-wide scanning of TMDs
• Why Most Time Series Models Fail Before They Start
• Do AI coding agents save scientists time?
• Using R to Teach R: Lessons for Software Development
• Specialty Crop Research Initiative
• What is a Specialty Crop?
• Translational Medicine Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Science Café Mini-Grant

R Packages:

• glm4: Fitting Generalized Linear Models Using Sparse Matrices
• tinyrox: Minimal R Documentation Generator
• baseverse: Modern Base-R Functions
• tidyfun: Tidy Functional Data Wrangling and Visualization

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 11. Get ready for Vitamin D and dementia-protection, exploding black holes, semi-autonomous robots for Martian exploration, a forbidden planet, a pristine star, Mothbox and Mothbot, One-pass statistical formulas in SAS, and building your own programming language. Science On.

References:

• Association of Circulating Vitamin D in Midlife With Increased Tau-PET Burden in Dementia-Free Adults
• DNA–drug conjugates enable logic-gated drug delivery amplified by hybridization chain reactions
• Explaining the PeV Neutrino Fluxes at KM3NeT and IceCube with Quasiextremal Primordial Black Holes
• Semi-autonomous exploration of martian and lunar analogues with a legged robot using a Raman-equipped robotic arm and microscopic imager
• GEMS JWST: Transmission Spectroscopy of TOI-5205b Reveals Significant Stellar Contamination and a Metal-poor Atmosphere
• A nearly pristine star from the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Ectopic NMDAR expression in cancer unmasks germline-encoded autoimmunity
• RoSHI: A Versatile Robot-oriented Suit for Human Data In-the-Wild
• ClickGuard: A Trustworthy Adaptive Fusion Framework for Clickbait Detection
• Mothbox and Mothbot: automated light trap and data processing system for scalable insect monitoring
• Patterns of host plant use by monarch butterflies revealed through annotation of more than 35,000 community science records
• iNaturalist
• One-pass formulas for mean and variance
• Hold On Hope: publication lag times at cell biology journals
• Collaborating between Bioconductor and R-universe on Development of Common Infrastructure
• R-Universe
• You can just build your own programming language
• T — The Orchestration Engine for Polyglot Data Science

R Packages:

• aggreCAT: Mathematically Aggregating Expert Judgments
• ravel: AI Copilot for R Analysis Workflows in 'RStudio'

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 10, Call me Isoptera. Get ready for fusion plasma corrections, Alzheimer’s and meat consumption, cytoplasmic tradewinds, a new termite that looks like Moby Dick, immersive dreaming and restfulness, the Artemis II Crew launch, why learning R in 2026 is a good career move, and the top 40 new CRAN packages for February 2026. Science On.

References:

• Combined Influence of Rotation and Scrape-Off Layer Drifts on Recycling Asymmetries in Tokamak Plasmas
• Meat Consumption and Cognitive Health by APOE Genotype
• The landscape of microbial associations in human cancer
• Compartmentalized cytoplasmic tradewinds direct soluble proteins
• Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact
• Cryptotermes mobydicki (Isoptera, Kalotermitidae), an extraordinary new termite species from French Guiana
• Rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of squid and cuttlefish preceded radiation into coastal niches
• Immersive NREM2 dreaming preserves subjective sleep depth against declining sleep pressure
• A chelicera-bearing arthropod reveals the Cambrian origin of chelicerates
• NASA’s Artemis II Crew Launches to the Moon
• How much information is there for inferring
• species trees?
• Microdiversity is higher in temperate than in virulent
• bacteriophages from soil environments
• Baktfold: Sensitive protein functional annotation across
• the microbial tree of life using structural information
• Meet dataviewR: The View() You Always Wanted
• Why Learning R is a Good Career Move in 2026
• February 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

R Packages:

• Taxdiv: Taxonomic Diversity Indices Using Deng Entropy
• Ggrefine: Pretty 'ggplot2' Themes
• Hexsession: Create a Tile of Logos for Loaded Packages
• InsectLabelR: Create Labels for Insect in Collection

Hello and welcome to Science Research Weekly. Get ready for the dangers of cold weather on cardiovascular health, new amphipods aplenty, a list of habitable rocky exoplanet, pico-satellite concepts, mitochondrial flickers, toxin-antidotesystems in vertebrates, and using science to find the best decaf coffee. Science On.

References:

• Cardiovascular disease mortality attributable to monthly non-optimal temperature in the united states: a county-level analysis
• New deep-sea Amphipoda from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone: 24 new species described under the Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative: One Thousand Reasons campaign
• Biodiversity boost: 24 new deep-sea species discovered in major Pacific research
• Probing the limits of habitability: a catalogue of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone
• Text embedding models yield detailed conceptual knowledge maps derived from short multiple-choice quizzes
• Thousands of pico-satellites may transform how phones connect to space
• Dynamical Systems in Cosmology: Reviewing An Alternative Approach
• Massive star clusters detected by JWST as natural birth places to form intermediate-mass black holes
• Beyond Pulsing Dyes: Are Flickers the Language of the Mitochondrial
• Network?
• The morphotype approach to classification of aerial animals in radar data
• A Vertebrate Toxin-Antidote System That Sabotages Mouse Embryogenesis
• Digital Biology with R: Advanced Bioinformatics, Predictive Modeling, and Time Series Analysis for Modern Life Science
• Using science to find the best decaf

R Packages:

• Ixsurface: Interactive 3D Surface Plots for Multi-Factor Interaction Visualization
• longitree: Decision Tree Analysis for Longitudinal Measurement Data
• ggforestplotR: Publication-Ready Forest Plots with 'ggplot2'
• ksformat: 'SAS'-Style 'PROC FORMAT' for R
• stopmotion: Build Stop Motion Animations from Image Sequences
• subtools: Read and Manipulate Video Subtitles
• taxodist: Taxonomic Distance and Phylogenetic Lineage Computation

Cardiovascular diseasemortality attributable to monthly non-optimal temperature in the united states:a county-level analysis

New deep-sea Amphipodafrom the Clarion-Clipperton Zone: 24 new species described under theSustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative: One Thousand Reasons campaign

Biodiversity boost: 24new deep-sea species discovered in major Pacific research

Probing the limits ofhabitability: a catalogue of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone

Text embedding modelsyield detailed conceptual knowledge maps derived from short multiple-choicequizzes

Thousands ofpico-satellites may transform how phones connect to space

Dynamical Systems inCosmology: Reviewing An Alternative Approach

Massive star clustersdetected by JWST as natural birth places to form intermediate-mass black holes

Beyond Pulsing Dyes: AreFlickers the Language of the Mitochondrial

Network?

The morphotype approachto classification of aerial animals in radar data

A VertebrateToxin-Antidote System That Sabotages Mouse Embryogenesis

Digital Biology with R:Advanced Bioinformatics, Predictive Modeling, and Time Series Analysis forModern Life Science

Using science to findthe best decaf

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 8, Cellular Senses and Psyche’s Interior. Get ready for cellular mechanosensing, modeling the interior structure of Psyche, microbial succession in soil restoration, and Bayesian Linear regression in R. Science On.

References:

• Emergent depth-mechanosensing of epithelial collectives regulates cell clustering and dispersal on layered matrices
• Exploring the Interior Structure of (16) Psyche Through Basin-Scale Collisions
• Organic, Transparent, and Flexible Films Exhibiting White-Light Emission via Polymer-Network Engineering: A Non-Dye-Centric Strategy
• Genome-wide discovery of cis-regulatory elements in a large genome
• Taxonomic filtering accompanies functional expansion during long-term soil restoration
• Microscale spatial fragmentation promotes bacterial survival under
• antibiotics
• Bayesian Linear Regression in R: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

R Packages:

• SCIproj: Creates a Scientific Project Skeleton as an R Package
• Causalplot: Create Publication-Ready Causal Diagrams
• Scimetr: Analysis of Scientific Publication Data with R

Hello and welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 7. Get ready for 3D ants via synchrotron, recycled aluminum alloys, chickpeas in lunar regolith, planet collisions, World Mouse, R version "Reassured Reassurer", estimating pi by tossing coins, and a grant on reducing housing hazards. Science On.

References:

• High-throughput phenomics of global ant biodiversity
• New ORNL aluminum alloy to strengthen domestic auto supply chain
• Bioremediation of lunar regolith simulant through mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbioses enables chickpea to seed
• Gaia-GIC-1: An Evolving Catastrophic Planetesimal Collision Candidate
• The 3D architecture of the ctenophore aboral organ and the evolution of complex integrative centers in animals
• Cryptic species are widespread across vertebrates
• Searching for Magnetic White Dwarfs in LAMOST DR10
• World Mouse: Exploring Interactions with a Cross-Reality Cursor
• Hunting for microsatellite instability in long-read data with Owl
• R 4.5.3 is released
• Estimate pi by tossing coins
• Housing-Related Hazards and Lead-Based Paint Capital Fund Program

• R Packages:
• wstats: Weighted Descriptive Statistics
• ggwidth: Standardise 'ggplot2' Geom Width
• AV1R: 'AV1' Video Encoding for Biological Microscopy Data

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 6. Get ready for quorum sensing for bacterial engineering, an antibiotic-resistant microbe on ice, a new scimitar-crested spinosaurid, planetesimal snowmen, sheepox viral evolution, the fate of horizontally acquired genes, the R Journal Volume 17/4, and a grant for Feed the Future innovation labs. Science On.

References:

Revision of the trematosaurid Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis confirms a cryptic marine temnospondyl community from the Lower Triassic of Western Australia

Construction and Functional Characterization of a Heterologous Quorum Sensing Circuit in Clostridium sporogenes

First genome sequence and functional profiling of Psychrobacter SC65A.3 preserved in 5,000-year-old cave ice: insights into ancient resistome, antimicrobial potential, and enzymatic activities

Scimitar-crested Spinosaurus species from the Sahara caps stepwise spinosaurid radiation

Direct contact binary planetesimal formation from gravitational collapse

Oxygen metabolism in descendants of the archaeal-eukaryotic ancestor

Exocometary physics: material release and tails

Searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model in hyperon sector

3,500 years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes

The fate of horizontally acquired genes: rapid initial turnover followed by long-term persistence

The R Journal: Volume 17/4

Comparing flavor characteristics of Scotch whiskies: A principal component analysis

Little useless-useful R functions – Typing speed benchmark

Pathways to Enable Secure Open-Source Ecosystems

Feed the Future Innovation Labs

R Packages:

bigMICE: Multiple Imputation of Big Data

bracketeer: Tournament Generator

phymapnet: Phylogeny-Guided Bayesian Microbial Network Inference

tReeTraits: Calculate Tree Traits from Terrestrial Lidar

ort: Create a Data Frame Representation of an Image

tinyimg: Optimize and Compress Images