It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Scientists engineer unsinkable metal tubes
The superhydrophobic design could lead to resilient ships, floating platforms, and renewable energy innovations
Credit: University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster
More than a century after the Titanic sank, engineers still have hopes of someday creating “unsinkable” ships. In a step toward reaching that lofty goal, researchers at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics have developed a new process that turns ordinary metal tubes unsinkable—meaning they will stay afloat no matter how long they are forced into water or how heavily they are damaged.
When the treated tube enters water, the superhydrophobic surface traps a stable bubble of air inside the tube, which prevents the tube from getting waterlogged and sinking. The mechanism is similar to how diving bell spiders trap an air bubble to stay buoyant underwater or how fire ants form floating rafts with their hydrophobic bodies.
“Importantly, we added a divider to the middle of the tube so that even if you push it vertically into the water, the bubble of air remains trapped inside and the tube retains its floating ability,” says Guo.
Guo and his lab first demonstrated superhydrophobic floating devices in 2019, featuring two superhydrophobic disks that were sealed together to create their buoyancy. But the current tube design simplifies and improves the technology in several key areas. The disks that the researchers previously developed could lose their ability to float when turned at extreme angles, but the tubes are resilient against turbulent conditions like those found at sea.
“We tested them in some really rough environments for weeks at a time and found no degradation to their buoyancy,” says Guo. “You can poke big holes in them, and we showed that even if you severely damage the tubes with as many holes as you can punch, they still float.”
Multiple tubes can be linked together to create rafts that could be the basis for ships, buoys, and floating platforms. In lab experiments, the team tested the design using tubes of varying lengths, up to almost half a meter, and Guo says the technology could be easily scaled to the larger sizes needed for load-bearing floating devices.
The researchers also showed how rafts made from superhydrophobic tubes could be used to harvest water waves to generate electricity, offering a promising renewable energy application.
The prenatal period is a critical window for brain development, yet few studies have examined the impact of air pollution exposure during pregnancy on child cognition. A new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center supported by the ”la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Barcelona (UB), shows that prenatal exposure to pollution is associated with lower cognitive performance in newborns. These findings highlight the importance of reducing air pollution exposure, especially during pregnancy, to protect neurodevelopment.
The study, published in Environmental Pollution, included data from 168 mother-child pairs participating in the BiSC (Barcelona Life Study Cohort) project, conducted in Barcelona between 2018 and 2023. Researchers assessed total exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), black carbon (BC), particulate matter (PM2.5), and the copper (Cu) and iron (Fe) content in PM2.5 during pregnancy using advanced models that combined pollution estimates with time-activity information at home, workplaces, and during commuting.
A novel method for assessing cognitive development
Cognitive development was assessed using eye-tracking, a non-invasive technique that evaluates how infants process visual information. A total of 180 infants participated at 6 months of age, with 75 re-evaluated at 18 months. During the test, infants were first familiarized with an image and then presented with two images simultaneously: one familiar and one new. The system recorded gaze duration for each image. A longer gaze at the new image, known as “novelty preference”, indicates recognition of the familiar image and better memory performance.
“This is the first study to examine the relationship between prenatal exposure to air pollution and child neurodevelopment using an eye-tracking task. This approach provides a more objective, direct measure that does not rely on clinician-administered scoring or caregiver reports, making it a robust and innovative tool for assessing early cognitive development,” says Carmen Peuters, ISGlobal researcher and first author of the study.
Exposure to pollution reduces cognitive performance
The analysis found that higher prenatal exposure to air pollutants leads to lower novelty preference in visual memory tasks, indicating lower cognitive performance in newborns. The strongest associations were observed for black carbon, PM2.5, and copper content in PM2.5. For all pollutants, associations were stronger in boys than in girls, suggesting potential sex-specific vulnerability.
“Several biological mechanisms may explain how prenatal exposure to air pollution affects neurodevelopment. Pollutants can cross the placental barrier, triggering systemic inflammation and oxidative stress in the fetus, which may interfere with brain development,” notes Jordi Sunyer, BiSC project coordinator and senior author of the study.
Public health implications
These findings add to growing evidence that air pollution not only harms lung and cardiovascular health but also affects neurodevelopment. In this sense, a previous study by the same team showed that prenatal pollution exposure is associated with changes in fetal brain structures.
Prenatal exposure to air pollution and infant cognitive development using an eye-tracking visual paired-comparison task
COI Statement
The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests. Jordi Sunyer reports financial support was provided by European Research Council. Payam Dadvand reports financial support was provided by European Commission. Jordi Sunyer reports financial support was provided by Health Effects Institute. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
This flower evolved a new shape so that different birds could pollinate it. Then, it spread.
Most lipstick vines have flowers that are shaped like a tube of lipstick— but not this one. Scientists dug into the plants’ family tree to figure out when and where this oddball evolved.
White-eared Sibia (Heterophasia auricularis) visiting the shorter and wider flowers of Aeschynanthus acuminatus in Xitou, central Taiwan. Pollen deposited during the visit is visible on the Sibia's forehead. Photo by Jing-Yi Lu.
Lipstick vines get their name from their bright red, tube-shaped flowers. But one member of this group of plants has lost its lipstick-like appearance— its flowers are shorter, wider, and yellowish green in color. It also attracts shorter-beaked birds than its crimson cousins do, and it’s found in different places. Scientists wanted to know how this plant evolved from its lipstick-like relatives. After observing birds visiting hundreds of plants and examining the plants’ DNA, the researchers found that the story of the green flower’s evolution contradicts a long-standing scientific “rule” about how plants evolve into new species.
The green flower at the center of the discovery (and the subject of a paper detailing said discovery in the journal New Phytologist) is called Aeschynanthus acuminatus. Its range extends across Southeast Asia from northern India and the Himalayas, across Indo-Chinese countries like Vietnam and Thailand, and into southern China. It’s also found off the coast of mainland China on the island of Taiwan.
“Compared to the rest of its genus, this species has weird, unique flowers,” says Jing-Yi Lu, the study’s lead author and a research associate at the Field Museum who recently graduated with his PhD at the University of Chicago. Lu wanted to know how these flowers got to be so odd.
The red flowers of the other lipstick vines help attract sunbirds, whose long, slender beaks fit perfectly into the skinny, tube-shaped blooms. By going from flower to flower and drinking nectar, the sunbirds spread the plants’ pollen. But while sunbirds are found throughout the mainland where the other lipstick vines live, there are no sunbirds on Taiwan.
When Lu was an undergraduate student in Taiwan, he began wondering about the short, green-flowered A. acuminatus growing on the island. “It made me curious about how this species could occur in Taiwan. Since we don’t have sunbirds, there must be something else to pollinate it,” says Lu.
Figuring out which species of birds pollinate a type of plant can be a tricky task. “Most of the time, you don't really see the birds, because they don't come too often, and they are shy,” says Lu. To solve this problem, he set up camera traps that recorded birds coming and going from the flowers, and determined that a variety of birds with shorter beaks than sunbirds were visiting the short, wide, green flowers of A. acuminatus.
However, A. acuminatus doesn’t only live in Taiwan— it’s also found throughout mainland Southeast Asia, where there are plenty of long-beaked sunbirds. This presented an evolutionary riddle to Lu and his fellow scientists, something like the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg. Did A. acuminatus’s ancestors find themselves transported to sunbird-less Taiwan, where they then had to evolve shorter, wider flowers to accommodate the shorter-beaked birds that lived there? Or did they split off from their tube-shaped cousins while they were still on the mainland, even though there were sunbirds around, and arrive in Taiwan later on? And, what kinds of birds pollinate the shorter, wider A. acuminatus flowers on the mainland?
“At the heart of our study is a question of where species originate,” says Rick Ree, a curator at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center and the study’s senior author. “There must have been a switch when this species evolved, when it went from having narrow flowers for sunbirds to wider flowers for more generalist birds. Where and when did the switch occur?”
For more than 50 years, botanists have turned to a sort of rule called the Grant-Stebbins model that aims to answer questions like these. “The Grant-Stebbins model says that when a plant species extends its range into an area with new pollinators or without its ancestral pollinator, that switch to a new pollinator will drive speciation,” says Ree. “This model basically predicted that A. acuminatus should have evolved in Taiwan— when its ancestor colonized Taiwan, it left behind its old pollinators and evolved into a new species that could accommodate the new pollinators in its new home.”
To test whether the Grant-Stebbins model was accurate for A. acuminatus, Ree and Lu analyzed the DNA of A. acuminatus specimens growing in Taiwan and in mainland Asia, as well as the DNA of other species of lipstick vines. The researchers used software that compared the similarities and differences in these plants’ DNA and built family trees showing the likeliest explanations for how the plants were related to each other. The results were surprising.
“The branching patterns on the family trees we made revealed that the A. acuminatus plants on Taiwan descended from other A. acuminatus plants from the mainland— the species originated on the mainland,” says Ree. Even though the lipstick vines on the mainland lived alongside sunbirds that could pollinate their skinny flowers, some of them split off into a new species that accommodated birds with shorter beaks (in addition to sunbirds, which were still capable of feeding from the shorter flowers). The Grant-Stebbins model, for this particular example of plant evolution, didn’t fit.
“It was really exciting to get these results, because they don’t follow the classic ideas of how we would have imagined the species evolved,” says Lu.
While the mystery of A. acuminatus’s origin has been solved, that discovery opens up new questions. “Why did this pollinator switch happen, when the original pollinator, the sunbird, is still there?” says Ree. “Our hypothesis is that at some point in the past, sunbirds stopped being optimal or sufficient pollinators for some of the plants on the mainland. There must have been circumstances under which natural selection favored this transition toward generalist passerine birds with shorter beaks as pollinators.”
Beyond answering questions about the evolution of one particular species of flowering vine, Ree says that the project offers a look at the work that goes into scientific discoveries.
“This study shows the importance of natural history, of actually going out into nature and observing ecological interactions,” says Ree. “It takes a lot of human effort that cannot be replicated by AI, it can’t be sped up by computers— there’s no substitute for getting out there like Jing-Yi did and spending months traveling to different field sites to see where these plants grow and what kinds of birds pollinate them. There’s no substitute for that.”
Testing macroevolutionary predictions of the Grant-Stebbins model in the origin of Aeschynanthus acuminatus
Article Publication Date
27-Jan-2026
Female Black-throated Sunbird (Aethopyga saturata) visiting the typical sunbird-pollinated Aeschynanthus bracteatus in Pingbian, southeastern Yunnan, China. Photo captured by a motion-triggered camera, courtesy of Jing-Yi Lu
White-eared Sibia (Heterophasia auricularis) visiting the shorter and wider flowers of Aeschynanthus acuminatus in Xitou, central Taiwan. Pollen deposited during the visit is visible on the Sibia's forehead. Photo by Jing-Yi Lu.
Female Black-throated Sunbird (Aethopyga saturata) visiting the typical sunbird-pollinated Aeschynanthus bracteatus in Pingbian, southeastern Yunnan, China. Photo captured by a motion-triggered camera, courtesy of Jing-Yi Lu.
The short, yellowish-green flowers of A. acuminatus, compared with the long, red flowers of its cousin, A. bracteatus, a more typical lipstick vine. Courtesy of Jing-Yi Lu.
The short, wide, yellow-green flowers of A. acuminatus, an atypical lipstick vine.
Courtesy of Jing-Yi Lu.
Looking for plants of Aeschynanthus acuminatus in the subtropical montane cloud forest in Malipo, southeastern Yunnan, China. Photo by Dr. Chih-Chieh Yu.
