The brightest take on this week’s science
Welcome back to Spark!
This week, we're looking at an injection that doesn't just shrink fat cells – it tells them to self-destruct.
Plus, the Bering Sea has filled up with crabs nobody ordered.
Also in this issue:
🤯 A microbe that makes viruses look big
🔬 A microscope mystery
Let's see where the science takes us!
LOOK IN
A New Injection Tells Fat Cells to Self-Destruct
(Jian Fan/iStockphoto/Getty Images)
Most weight-loss drugs shrink fat cells, but one experimental injection seems to tell them to quit altogether.
It's called CBL-514, and it's given as a shot just under the skin.
Two phase 2 trials, with 280 participants in total, have now found that this drug reduced subcutaneous fat in most cases.
In 41 of those participants, up to 12 weeks of injections also cut visceral fat – the kind packed around your organs – by about 12 percent.
By comparison, the placebo group gained almost 6 percent more visceral fat.
These results come from a conference presentation, not a peer-reviewed paper, so it's too early for firm conclusions.
Still, a study in rats hints at a possible two-for-one.
When rats were given CBL-514 plus a GLP-1 drug, they lost more weight than on the GLP-1 drug alone.
HEADLINES
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LOOK OUT
Hybrid Crabs Are Booming in The Bering Sea
(NOAA Fisheries/Erin Fedewa)
For years, snow crabs ruled the floor of the Bering Sea.
Then a marine heatwave in 2018 starved them, and a population of roughly 8 billion crabs fell to about 1 billion within three years.
NOAA scientists have now worked out who moved into the gap.
Hybrid crabs, part snow crab and part Tanner crab, were once a rare catch.
In 2025, they were 13.4 times more abundant than the historical average.
In fact, nearly half the snow crabs big enough to sell were hybrids.
No one yet knows whether the hybrids can breed.
And that's already causing a headache for the people who set fishing quotas…
ZOOM ZONE
Microscope Mystery: What Do You See?
(STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/Science Photo Library RF/Getty Images)
A) Malignant cancer cells
B) Alzheimer’s plaques
C) Lung alveoli
D) Kidney capillaries
Answer at the bottom.
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LOOK DOWN
The Oldest Known Homo Sapiens Finally Has a Face
(Cícero Moraes)
Some of the earliest members of our species might not turn heads on a street today.
Researchers have now reconstructed a face from 315,000-year-old fossils found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, the oldest known Homo sapiens remains.
The skull combines bones from several individuals, with soft tissue modeled on a modern adult's CT scan.
"He might go unnoticed in a crowd," 3D designer Cícero Moraes told ScienceAlert, though his robust features and projecting jaw would stand out.
No skin or muscle survives to check the face against, so it is not an exact portrait.
Still, the bones do most of the work, and the skull's proportions match earlier measurements.
The oldest known face of our species, it seems, is a surprisingly familiar one.
WOW FACTOR
Science Fact of The Week
(Takuro Nakayama/University of Tsukuba)
Some viruses have bigger genomes than this living microbe, featured above.
Sukunaarchaeum mirabile was found hiding inside plankton off Japan, and it gets by on just 238,000 base pairs of DNA.
Some viruses carry 2.5 million – and by most definitions, viruses aren't even alive.
Clearly size isn't everything!
DOPAMINE HIT
Before You Go…
Check out a school of baby fish hitching a ride on a six-meter giant phantom jellyfish, 250 meters down off Patagonia.
A giant phantom jellyfish with its entourage of juvenile rudderfish. (ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute)
Microscope answer: Kidney capillaries.
These are tiny knots of blood vessels from a kidney, called glomeruli, magnified about 60 times. Each little ball is a filter that strains waste out of your blood – the first step in making urine.
That's all for today… now go and tell someone about the crabs.
See you next week!
- the ScienceAlert team
