August eNews

Welcome to this month's eNews

From cutting-edge tools that detect crop damage from the sky to a fossil that could rewrite reptile evolution, this edition of our newsletter features our Top 5 most-read research stories of the month.

In this issue:

• Drones reveal herbicide damage

• Forensic science gets a bloodstain breakthrough

• Weight loss drug benefits that persist post-treatment

• Tackling the thermal limits of high-speed optical tech

• A microendemic gecko hidden in Madagascar's sacred forests

Plus, don’t miss our Editor’s Choice — a ‘wonder reptile’ fossil that challenges long-held ideas about the origin of feathers and body coverings — and our Image of the Month, showcasing a newly discovered interstellar comet that may be the oldest ever observed.

As usual, if you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to contact us at news@alphagalileo.org.

We hope you enjoy this issue!

The AlphaGalileo News Team

Top 5

1. New land grant research detects dicamba damage from the sky, published on 7 July by the University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES)

Drones can now detect subtle soybean canopy damage from dicamba at one ten-thousandth of the herbicide’s label rate — simulating vapor drift — eight days after application. This advancement in remote sensing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides a science-based tool to accurately detect and report crop damage at the field scale, reducing human error and bias.

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2. Forensics Study Helps Investigators Draw New Clues From Bloodstains, published on 14 July by the North Carolina State University

New research offers key insights into how blood stains cotton fabrics, allowing investigators to gather additional information from forensic evidence.

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3. Weight loss benefits of Tirzepatide persist after stopping treatment in Chinese adults, published on 23 July by Frontiers Journal

Obesity has become a global epidemic, contributing to a host of chronic health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. In China, rising rates of overweight and obesity have become a major public health concern. While lifestyle interventions such as diet and exercise remain first-line treatments, long-term success is often limited due to frequent weight regain once interventions stop.

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4. Heat dissipation difficulties of co-packaged optics (CPO) limit its development, published on 8 July by Frontiers Journal

A thermal management scheme is designed in this paper that can be applied to 51.2 Tbit/s co-packaged optics (CPO), which successfully solved the heat dissipation difficulties of high-bandwidth co-packaged optics.

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5. Hidden in sacred forests: A newly described microendemic gecko from Madagascar, published on 25 July by Pensoft Publishers

A team of international herpetologists has described a new gecko species that has managed to hide in plain sight among the granite boulders around the western flanks of the Andringitra Massif, in south-eastern Madagascar. “Paragehyra tsaranoro is named after the Tsaranoro valley, where it was first observed,” explains first author Francesco Belluardo from the Department of Bioscience and Territory at the University of Molise (Italy). “It is not only endemic to Madagascar, but also what we describe as a microendemic species—restricted to an extremely small range.”

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Editor's Choice

A ‘wonder’ fossil changes our understanding of reptile evolution, published on 21/07/2025 by Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart

Body coverings such as hair and feathers have played a central role in evolution. They enabled warm-bloodedness by insulating the body, and were used for courtship, display, deterrence of enemies and, in the case of feathers, flight. Their structure is characterised by longer and more complex skin outgrowths that differ significantly from the simple and flat scales of reptiles. Complex skin outgrowths have previously only been observed in mammals in the form of hair and in birds and their closest fossil relatives, dinosaurs and pterosaurs, in the form of feathers. An international team led by palaeontologists Dr Stephan Spiekman and Prof Dr Rainer Schoch from the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany, describes a previously unknown tree-dwelling reptile from the early Middle Triassic in a recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature. The 247-million-year-old reptile 'Mirasaura grauvogeli', whose name means 'Grauvogel's Wonder Reptile', had a dorsal crest with previously unknown, structurally complex appendages growing from its skin with some similarities to feathers. The crest was probably used for display to other members of the same species. The find shows that complex skin structures are not only found in birds and their closest relatives but may predate modern reptiles. This important discovery forces us to reconsider our understanding of reptile evolution.

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Image caption: Dr Stephan Spiekman with the Mirasaura fossil in the permanent exhibition at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart.Copyright notice: SMNS, Yannik Scheurer

Image of the month

Newly discovered interstellar object 'may be oldest comet ever seen', published on 10/07/2025 by Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)

A mystery interstellar object discovered last week is likely to be the oldest comet ever seen – possibly predating our solar system by more than three billion years, researchers say.

The "water ice-rich" visitor, named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third known object from beyond our solar system ever spotted in our cosmic neighbourhood and the first to reach us from a completely different region of our Milky Way galaxy.

It could be more than seven billion years old, according to University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins – who is discussing his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham – and may be the most remarkable interstellar visitor yet.

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Image caption: Top view of the Milky Way galaxy showing the estimated orbits of both our Sun and the 3I/ATLAS comet. 3I/ATLAS is shown in red dashed lines, and the Sun is shown in yellow dotted lines. The large extent of 3I’s orbit into the outer thick disk is clear, while the Sun stays nearer the core of the galaxy. Credit: M. Hopkins/Ōtautahi-Oxford team. Base map: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar, CC-BY-SA 4.0