Early heat waves hit wheat yields hardest but boost their resilience to subsequent heat waves

Society for Experimental Biology

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New research published in the Journal of Experimental Botany reveals that wheat crops are more sensitive to grain yield losses from heat waves that occur before reaching their flowering stage than those occuring later. However, exposure to heat waves early in the growing season may reduce yield losses during additional heat waves through a protective “priming” effect.

A team of researchers from the University of Lleida in Catalonia, Spain, investigated the roles of heat wave intensity, frequency, and their timing relative to crop flowering during the growing season to identify how these factors interacted to impact wheat crop yield.

Heat waves are increasing in frequency and intensity around the world, and their durations are also expanding to cover more of the wheat crop growing season, which can include the pivotal flowering stage where wheat shifts from setting grains to grain growth.

This research demonstrates that heat wave damage in wheat depends not only on the intensity of the heat wave, but also when it occurs and whether the crop has experienced a heatwave earlier in the season.

“Most studies have examined heat stress as a single event, and have done so under controlled conditions rather than under field conditions,” says co-author Dr Gustavo Slafer. “We investigated whether an earlier heat wave could alter how wheat responds to a later one during reproductive development”.

Field experiments were carried out across two growing seasons using two modern wheat varieties. Both varieties responded similarly to the heat wave treatments, despite having contrasting yield-building strategies.

Heat wave treatments were created by growing wheat inside transparent tents that created a daily temperature rise due to a greenhouse effect, and the pre-flowering and post-flowering conditions were standardised to relative heat load to allow for comparisons. Heat load was measured as the additional hourly degrees of temperature accumulated over an average day compared to the control treatment, and giving more emphasis to the heat load above 32 °C.

The major findings of this study are that wheat grain yield is more sensitive to heat waves that occur before flowering than after flowering, and that while the earlier heat waves reduced the overall number of grains produced, later heat waves reduced the weight of those grains.

Surprisingly, the team also found that when exposed to sequential heat waves in one season, wheat appears to be primed by the early pre-flowering heat waves to reduce the impact of the later post-flowering heat waves, compared to those experiencing only post-flowering heat waves.

Priming is a type of physiological memory, where exposure to an initial stress can trigger protective responses that remain partly active, allowing the plant to respond more effectively to a later stress.

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence of this type of antagonistic interaction between successive heat waves in field-grown crops,” says Dr Slafer.

These findings can help farmers to improve predictive models of crop yields and help identify where and when adaptation measures will be most useful.

“This study reinforces the importance of protecting wheat during the stages when grain number is determined, particularly around flowering,” says Dr Slafer. “The most effective adaptation measures are therefore likely to be those that reduce exposure during the most sensitive reproductive stages.”

These findings are expected not to be unique to wheat and may be relevant to other temperate field crops such as barley, oats and rye, but specific heat thresholds are likely to differ among a wide range of crop species.

This study also highlights the importance of considering multiple heat wave events when predicting crop yield damage under future climate scenarios.

“Wheat is one of the world’s most important staple crops, so safeguarding its yield under climate change is a major priority,” says Dr Slafer. “As a crop of temperate origin, wheat is generally less adapted to high-temperature episodes than crops with tropical origins, such as maize or rice.”

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Additional authors: Breno Bicego and Roxana Savin

The Journal of Experimental Botany is a partially open access journal published on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology by Oxford University Press. The aim of the Journal of Experimental Botany is to publish papers that advance our understanding of plant biology.

The graphs show that even though the expansion and transport histories of the magnetic fields and reconnection timings differed substantially, the reconnection rates were strikingly similar once a current sheet had formed.

Credit

Taichi Morita/Kyushu University

Journal

Journal of Experimental Botany

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Heat waves at pre-anthesis, post-anthesis, and sequentially across both stages on wheat yield under field conditions

Article Publication Date

18-Sep-2026

 

Bio-inspired whiskers enable tiny drones to navigate in darkness using touch

Delft University of Technology

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Using its bio-inspired whiskers, a flying drone navigates a course of see-through clear walls to find its way.

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Credit: Delft University of Technology

Rats and mice can scurry through dark and tight spaces with ease. In caves,  underground burrows, buildings or sewers. Their superpower for this are their whiskers. Now tiny autonomous drones could soon navigate through darkness, dust and smoke using artificial whiskers inspired by these animals. Their small size limits the use of large or heavy sensors for navigation. That's why researchers at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) have developed a lightweight whisker-based tactile sensor that enables drones to navigate and explore their surroundings through gentle touch.

Navigating complex environments is a fundamental skill for autonomous robots. However, drones weighing less than 100 grams face severe constraints in terms of sensing, computing power and energy. Conventional sensors like cameras, LiDAR, or rangefinders are often too heavy and become unreliable in low-visibility environments such as smoke-filled buildings, or caves. To address this,  Dr. Salua Hamaza and her team developed a lightweight and low-latency tactile perception framework that enables vision-independent navigation. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

Inspired by rodent whiskers

Mounted at the front of a tiny drone, a pair of artificial whiskers inspired by rodent vibrissae provides continuous feedback about the environment during contact. Unlike previous contact-based systems, which often rely on larger drones equipped with robotic arms or mechanical bumpers, this approach enables active, real-time tactile sensing onboard a tiny flying robot, using touch as its primary sensing modality.

“Here, we aim to equip drones with rich tactile sensing—not for manipulation in the air, but for a novel concept of tactile navigation: using touch to explore and fly through the unknown. But this comes with a challenge: for tactile sensing to work on drones, it needs to be lightweight, low-latency, and low-power. Inspired by nature, we found the answer in whiskers.” —Salua Hamaza, Associate Professor Aerial Physical Interaction & Embodied Intelligence in Aerial robots at Delft University of Technology.

Each whisker is equipped with three miniature pressure sensors at its base allowing the drone to detect contact in three dimensions. As the whisker bends after making contact with a surface, pressure changes are used to estimate the contact's depth and location in space. This gives the drone detailed information about nearby surfaces and enables behaviors such as obstacle avoidance, surface following and tactile mapping.

Filtering out the noise

A major challenge was separating genuine touch signals from disturbances caused by the drone itself. Airflow generated by the propellers can introduce noise, drift and other distortions. To address this, the team developed a lightweight real-time processing pipeline that corrects for these effects and converts whisker signals into millimetre-precision depth estimates.  Using advanced onboard software, the system separates meaningful touch information from the turbulence generated by the drone's own propellers and extracts reliable tactile information during flight only  using 34 kilobytes of memory.

“We wanted to show that touch does not have to come at the cost of size or computational power. Our entire tactile perception pipeline runs onboard using just 34 kilobytes of memory, allowing a tiny drone to sense and respond to its environment in real time.”
— Chaoxiang Ye, Delft University of Technology.

Running entirely onboard a microcontroller, this pipeline enables real-time sensing, decision-making and autonomous flight without external computing or positioning systems.

Navigating through touch alone

In experiments, the drone was able to follow both rigid and soft surface contours in complete darkness and explore enclosed spaces through wall-following behaviour. By continuously gathering information through its whiskers, it could also build tactile maps of unfamiliar environments and find the exit without relying on cameras or other vision-based sensors.

The work brings aerial robotics a step closer to the capabilities of rats, which use their whiskers to navigate dark and cluttered environments. By combining lightweight hardware with sophisticated onboard processing, the researchers demonstrate that touch can serve as a robust sensing modality even for the smallest, autonomous flying robots.

A flying whiskered drone navigates just like a rat. Who gets the cheese?

Credit

Delft University of Technology - Studio

Drone researchers at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) Salua Hamaza & Chaoxiang Ye with their whiskered drone

Credit

Delft University of Technology - Studio Oostrum

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-77366-7

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Publication Date

18-Sep-2026

  

From the start, the solar system chose fire over ice to build its first bodies

Yale University

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When the solar system first took up the task of building solid bodies — such as planets, moons, and protoplanets — it basically had a choice between two ingredients. There were heat-forged chondrules, which were millimeter-sized bits of rock; and there was matrix, a fine-grained, cold dust loaded with water ice and organic molecules.

And from the get-go, the solar system chose fire.

In a new, Yale-led study, researchers provide the first geochemical evidence that within the first million years after the solar system began to form, it was already preferentially sorting for chondrules over matrix. Prior research had only been able to document this sorting process in objects that formed 2 to 4 million years after the solar system’s origin.

The study was published Sept. 18 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“Our work shows that this assembly process was remarkably selective from the very beginning,” said Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and first author of the study. “The earliest bodies in the outer solar system were built from 83% to 92% chondrules, with very little of the icy, volatile-rich dust that dominates later-forming objects.”

Chondrules are found inside chondrites — the most primitive meteorites in geological collections. “You can hold them in your hand and know that they began as part of a process that started billions of years ago,” Grewal said. “It’s a timescale that’s hard to wrap your head around.”

It has been known for some time that among carbonaceous chondrites (primitive, stony meteorites that contain organic compounds and water among their silicate minerals) from the outer solar system, chondrites that formed earlier contained a higher percentage of chondrules and a lower percent of matrix. This suggested that in areas where the first solid bodies — called planetesimals — were forming, icy dust was already being muscled out in favor of heat-forged chondrules.

But no preserved undifferentiated bodies survive from that early epoch — the first million years of the solar system — to confirm the original chondrule-to-matrix ratio.

Grewal’s solution was to look for chemical tracers within iron meteorites from the outer solar system that would point to an earlier era. The parent bodies sampled by these meteorites had accumulated so much radioactive aluminum-26 that they melted completely, destroying all physical traces of what they were originally made of. Yet a pair of independent chemical tracers enabled the researchers to reconstruct the original composition.

Both tracers are tied to matrix: sulfur, which exists in concentrated form in matrix, and the oxidation state of iron, which reveals how much water ice and oxidized dust the original body incorporated.

Using the tracers, the researchers calculated matrix levels of only 8% to 17% in the original bodies sampled by these iron meteorites — lower than what had been found in any known chondrites. “Both tracers independently tell the same story: these early planetesimals were remarkably matrix-poor,” Grewal said. “That convergence is what makes the result robust.”

The findings, he said, also help explain why older chondrules are scarce in the meteorite record; they were incorporated into bodies that later melted, erasing the physical evidence.

“These ubiquitous little beads of rock are the basic building blocks from which the planets themselves were eventually assembled,” Grewal said. “And now we know they were already being sorted and incorporated into the first generation of solid bodies from the very start.”

Co-authors of the study are Zhongtian Zhang of Princeton University and Joanna Drążkowska of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

Funding for the research came from Yale University.

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Journal

Nature Astronomy

Article Publication Date

18-Sep-2026

 

Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds

Human brain is two separate organs

Stanford Medicine

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For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.

The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades researchers have subscribed to the theory that there is a single progenitor cell early in development that gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin.

The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.

The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions.”

The findings will be published in Nature Neuroscience Sept. 18. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.

Two brains

The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking — language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping, and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. The hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.

Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

SMA is a leading genetic cause of death in children under 1 year of age. ALS, which is often diagnosed between the ages of 40 and 70, affects both the forebrain and the hindbrain. In both disorders, certain hindbrain neurons gradually cease to function, and the patient loses the ability to swallow, which can cause pneumonia when food or liquid is inhaled into the lungs; eventually, patients lose the ability to breathe.

The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain.

The researchers learned this from examining developing mouse embryos. They identified two different brain progenitor cells. One, which expresses a gene called Otx2, is destined to become the forebrain and midbrain. The other, which expresses a gene called Gbx2, is committed to forming the hindbrain. They showed that these two cell populations never overlap; they are mutually exclusive from the earliest stages of development.

The team then examined the DNA packaging, or chromatin, in these cells. Chromatin is a way cells determine which genes can be easily accessed and which are bundled away out of reach. What they found was striking: The anterior neural ectoderm (future forebrain and midbrain) and posterior neural ectoderm (future hindbrain) have fundamentally different chromatin configurations. These differences essentially locked each progenitor cell into its respective fate, like travelers on parallel tracks that never cross.

“Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” Jokhai said.

This revelation explained decades of frustration in the field — scientists had been trying to turn one type of progenitor cell into another that it is fundamentally incapable of becoming.

“In stem cell biology, people are always fixated with creating the end cell type, like the neuron,” Jokhai said. “But it’s important to begin at the earliest stages of embryonic development. Our careful attention to that early time point allowed us to find this fundamental split in brain development.”

Growing hindbrain neurons

Armed with this knowledge, the researchers for the first time successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells (a kind of cell that can create any cell in the human body) to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the laboratory. These lab-grown neurons displayed all the hallmarks of authentic hindbrain cells: They exhibited waves of electrical activity called action potentials and made proteins that identify the segments of the hindbrain that control facial and swallowing muscles.

Finally, the researchers looked back over 550 million years of evolutionary time. They found the same two-origin brain pattern in chickens; zebrafish; and, remarkably, in acorn worms, tiny creatures living on the ocean floor that share a distant common ancestor with humans. Jellyfish, which diverged from humans about 600 to 700 million years ago, have two nervous systems at different ends of their body.

“Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” Loh said. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

“I was surprised at our findings because the word ‘brain’ implies a contiguous organ that likely has a singular origin,” Jokhai said. “But even 500 million years ago, there were these separate neural systems, which now almost operate as one, which is very cool.”

The research also has implications for investigating treatments for SMA, ALS and other conditions affecting the brain stem. Until now, studying these diseases has been nearly impossible because scientists cannot obtain brain stem tissue from living patients. The ability to grow these neurons in a dish opens new possibilities for understanding what goes wrong. There’s even an unexpected connection to obesity treatment: The hindbrain contains circuits that regulate hunger — which is precisely how weight-loss drugs like semaglutide work.

The researchers would like to extend their studies to determine the developmental origins of the spinal cord and to learn exactly how SMA and ALS compromise the function of hindbrain neurons.

“Now we have a model to better understand these devastating diseases, and work toward regenerative therapies for them,” Jokhai said. “This is a very exciting new frontier in brain research.”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco contributed to the study.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants DP5OD024558, DP2GM146258, R00GM121852, R01DK115728, R01DE027538, T32GM119995, T32GM007365, T32GM007790 and F31DE031154); the National Science Foundation; the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine; the Spinal Muscular Atrophy Foundation; a Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute grant; the Stanford Beckman and Ludwig Centers; the Siebel Stem Cell Institute; a Stinehart-Reed Foundation grant; the Gatsby Charitable Foundation; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; the Packard Foundation; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the Baxter Foundation; the Human Frontier Science Program; and the anonymous, Fickel, Gilbert, and Stinehart-Reed families.

# # #

 

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu.

 

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Journal

Nature Neuroscience

DOI

10.1038/s41593-026-02433-7

Article Title

Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

Article Publication Date

18-Sep-2026

 

Capybaras in the desert? Fossil casts doubt on Atacama as world's oldest continuously dry region

Scientists were stunned when they discovered a fossilized tooth from a capybara that lived in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile almost 9 million years ago

University of Arizona

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image: 

Paleoenvironmental reconstruction of a group of Cardiatherium, a genus of extinct, direct relatives of modern capybaras, pictured in the late Miocene coastal wetlands and forestry canopy of the Atacama Region of northern Chile. Freshwater crocodiles float in the river, and seals can be seen basking on rocks while seabirds soar above the shoreline.

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Credit: Mauricio Alvarez

Ask any zoogoer and they will tell you that capybaras are adorable. Ask a scientist specializing on the rodents, which resemble oversized guinea pigs, and they will tell you they are obligate semiaquatic herbivores indicative of persistent riparian ecosystems. In plain English: capybaras like it wet. 

Accordingly, scientists were stunned when they discovered a fossilized tooth from a capybara that lived in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile almost 9 million years ago. Currently in press at Nature's Scientific Reports, the discovery not only provides the first and oldest record of a capybara in coastal Chile – a country where no capybaras live today – but it also calls into question the longstanding textbook version of the Atacama Desert being one of oldest continuously dry regions on Earth, going back an estimated 40 million years.

The fossil was found in a layer of sediments deposited in a shallow marine environment between 10 and 7 million years ago, at a site called El Morro – part of the fossil-rich Bahía Inglesa Formation, which also hosts Cerro Ballena, or "Whale Hill," famously recognized as the world's largest concentration of whale fossils. But a capybara?

"Finding a capybara tooth in a marine deposit in what today is one of the driest regions on Earth is just freakish," said Priscilla Martinez, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences.

 Capybaras, the largest living rodents, and their close cousins, guinea pigs, are native to South America. Today, capybaras thrive east of the Andes in low elevation wetlands, with their core range roughly outlining the Amazon River basin. Their semi-aquatic lifestyle tightly links them to persistent surface water, wetland vegetation and being able to migrate along riparian corridors along creeks and rivers. 

"We don't have any other evidence of capybaras in that part of coastal Chile," added co-author Barbara Carrapa, professor of Geosciences and Martinez' doctoral advisor. "They're not supposed to be there. So, we immediately asked ourselves, 'Why were they there? Where did they come from?'"

Geologists estimate that beginning long before capybaras appeared roughly 9 million years ago, the Andean mountain chain would have presented a formidable barrier jutting up to 18,000 feet, effectively walling off the Atacama Desert from the eastern lowlands stretching across parts of Venezuela and Colombia down to northeastern Argentina and Urugay, the animal's current range.

Geography is one factor in determining the range of a species, but by far not the only one. Climate plays a huge role, too, according to Martinez.

"Not only are the plateau lands of the Central Andes very tall, they're also extremely arid, she said. "So, if capybaras originated east of the Andes in this foreland region, how in the world could these short-legged rodents make it across?"

The most likely answer, of course, is that they didn't. 

Instead, the authors propose a scenario in which the capybaras took advantage of low-elevation wetlands connecting their original range along the coastal areas going "counterclockwise" around the northern portion of South America – from today's Venezuela into Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, into northern Chile. 

"We have multiple lines of evidence indicative of really wet conditions that are typically associated with capybara today," said professor Mark Clementz, paleobiology expert and head of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming and is one of the study's co-authors. "The same deposits contain fossils of freshwater fishes and gavials (freshwater crocodiles)." 

In addition, the team unearthed so-called phytoliths, microscopically small accumulations of silica that form inside plant cells and tissues as they absorb dissolved silica from groundwater through their roots. Specialists like co-author Caroline Strömberg, professor at the University of Washington, can analyze these structures to find out what type of plants likely made them. In this case, the fossil evidence pointed to palms and other flowering plants, including dicots – not anything that would grow in the Atacama Desert of today.

"Think sunny Southern California full of palm trees," Martinez said. "You don't really expect the Atacama Desert to have palms, and we're not sure if they were blooming extensively there, but they were definitely there."

"All this supports the idea that there was enough of an ecological community to support capybara populations long term," Clementz added.

No other remains of capybaras this old have been found in Chile to date, so finding a lone tooth within a three-foot thick bed preserved in the desert that turned out to be the linchpin in this discovery was a miracle, according to Martinez. The assembly of strange creatures not typically found in a desert was not lost on the local population, and many sought to make a profit by digging for fossils and selling them to collectors.

"Many of the fossils originally discovered at that location are lost in time," Martinez said, "but certain merchants were interested in understanding them a little bit better, and so they donated them to local scientists."

One of them was the study's first author, Carolina Gutstein, head of paleontology at Chilean mining company Fosfatos de Caldera and professor at the Universidad Santo Tomás in Santiago, Chile, who has a long relationship working with local fossil experts in the area.

Clementz added that the findings show it is worth challenging assumptions, in this case, about the Atacama being an ancient desert for millions and millions of years.

"No one really argued with that paradigm, even in the face of these other fossil finds suggesting that things were different in the past," he said. "Finding this capybara – which I think everyone can agree is not a desert animal by any means – at that location is going to challenge many of the ideas about the Atacama's history."

The study has implications beyond capybaras and the Atacama, Martinez pointed out. 

"The more we understand deserts, which are extremely sensitive to changes in climate, including shifts in monsoon intensity from year to year, the better we can predict how they fare long term," she said. "And if we can understand past climate changes that had nothing to do with humans, it gives us a baseline to work off of to understand how climate can evolve over time with humans in the mix."

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Journal

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-026-67368-2

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Late Miocene capybara in the Atacama Desert reveals a wetter climate and a transcontinental dispersal pathway

Article Publication Date

15-Sep-2026

Close-up view of the chewing surface of the fossilized capybara tooth described in the research paper. The specimen is about two thirds of an inch long (scale equals 10 mm or 0.4 inches).

Credit

Carolina Gutstein et al.

U of A doctoral student Priscilla Martinez conducting fieldwork in an ancient dry riverbed where minerals were found proving that standard, temperate-climate plants once covered the now-arid Chilean coast.

Priscilla Martinez conducting field work in Caldera, Chile

Credit

Joao Gabriel Martínez López

Paleoenvironmental reconstruction of a group of Cardiatherium, a genus of extinct, direct relatives of modern capybaras, pictured in the late Miocene coastal wetlands and forestry canopy of the Atacama Region of northern Chile. Freshwater crocodiles float in the river, and seals can be seen basking on rocks while seabirds soar above the shoreline.

Credit

Mauricio Alvarez