How do you find an invasive species that no net can catch?

Taylor Swift's 'Patient Zero' inverts the term's meaning — and her video goes further. The real history: a misread letter, a scapegoat, a posthumous vindication.

New research on 58,319 infection records finds the geography of emerging disease tracks healthcare access more than deforestation or climate change

A handheld H5N1 test nears USDA approval. Challenge trials show ducks and chickens need opposite testing strategies, complicating a new waterfowl alert system.

The first genomes from Congo's Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak point to a recent animal spillover, but are too few to date when the jump happened.

A field study found more than 500 Bundibugyo Ebola cases in Mongbwalu from mid-January, months before Congo declared the outbreak and earlier than any model suggested.

Only four transmissible cancers are known, contagious cell lineages that spread between animals. Meet the dog, devil and shellfish cancers behind the catfish.

Scientists found the fourth type of transmissible cancer, and the first in a fish: a melanoma whose tumor cells spread between catfish in a Vermont lake.

When a bee visits a flower, what decides the match?

Silence is the sound of a seminar no one is steering, and for my first years as a professor, I was the one who should have been steering it. The course was

Finding the lettuce took days. Finding Taco Bell took two months. Mastercard patented a fix in 2014 and shelved it, chasing the wrong half of the problem.

A new study prices the environmental damage of the world's richest 10% at up to $5.7 trillion a year, and finds biodiversity loss, not carbon, is the biggest share.

Dispatch #10

A new field study finds that city lights suppress mosquito dormancy more powerfully than urban warming, extending biting season and West Nile virus risk into late fall.

Using behavioral observations and network simulations, we evaluate direct and indirect transmission of the MTBC pathogen M. mungi in banded mongooses. Incorporating intergroup scent marking reveals t....

Jay Bhattacharya dismissed the test-negative design as 'crap.' The biostatistics literature tells a different story.

An ecologist explains why the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak, while serious, will not become the next pandemic. The biology of Andes virus limits large-scale spread.

A new study in Science finds that the longer a mammal species is traded, the more pathogens it shares with humans. An ant ecologist's data reframe zoonotic risk.

Three dead from hantavirus on Antarctic cruise ship MV Hondius. An ecologist explains the three scenarios for how passengers contracted this rare rodent-borne disease.

A top management journal measured AI’s impact on submissions and reviews. Submissions rose 42%, writing quality declined and AI reviews proved uninformative to editors.

Lab-grown miniature airways from wildlife reveal which species influenza can infect and how the virus adapts to new hosts.

I find myself in conversation almost daily about how AI—especially large language models and agentic systems—is changing our lives.

Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees NSF. The institutional design that built American science is at stake.

Author summary Climate change is expected to cause drastic changes in the spread of mosquito-borne disease outbreaks, both in where they occur and in their size. A key aspect of climate change is an i...

A shrimp virus called CMNV has jumped into humans, causing a new eye disease linked to handling and eating raw seafood. The virus is already global.

Understanding and explaining the dynamics of complex systems is a critical yet challenging task. Such a challenge often arises from high dimensionality, nonlinearity, and randomness, which together ma...

Economist Scott Cunningham showed the Fed how AI agents can replicate studies for $11—and why the same tools could erode the expertise that makes research worth reading.

Abstract. Infectious disease forecasting is important to public health decision-making, particularly for mitigating the burden of seasonal influenza. We pr

An AI system automated the full arc of scientific research and passed peer review. Its creators say it could fix science's worst habits — but the risks are just as real.

Plants on remote islands get less disease — but isolation reshapes which species dominate, and those species are the most vulnerable to infection.

I’m going to risk sounding contrarian: I like receiving AI-written emails.

Occasional essays and reflections on science, health, environment, and the policies that shape them. Click to read Drake's Dispatches, by John Drake, a Substack publication.

Species distribution models (SDMs) predict where species live or could potentially live and are a key resource for ecological research and conservation decision-making. However, current SDM methods o....

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant gaps in the coordination and integration of efforts required to effectively manage large-scale infectious disease outbreaks. A successful response to such cri...

Three theories could explain why the North American H5N1 epidemic has not been more deadly