Sunburn could put the future of frogs at risk

University of Queensland

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A tadpole of the common eastern Australian species, the striped marsh frog (Limnodynastes peronii).

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Credit: Dr Niclas Lundsgaard

Australian research has shown exposure to intense UV radiation for short periods causes catastrophic DNA damage in tadpoles, potentially contributing to the global decline of frog populations.

Aquatic ecologist Dr Niclas Lundsgaard said short bursts of exposure to high levels of ultraviolet B (UVB) – a recognised cause of sunburn in people – caused 50 per cent more damage to tadpoles than a lower level of UVB for a longer period.

“We found it was not just the total amount of UVB but also the intensity at which it was delivered that was overwhelming cell repair mechanisms leaving the tadpoles with residual DNA damage,” Dr Lundsgaard said.

“It’s the kind of damage that could impact their growth, ability to metamorphose into frogs or even kill them.

“This is an important finding as we work to understand the impacts environmental changes such as a warming climate and changes to cloud cover along with habitat loss are having on frog populations.”

The laboratory study at The University of Queensland’s School of the Environment compared 2 groups of tadpoles from a common eastern Australian species, the striped marsh frog (Limnodynastes peronii).

One group experienced short-duration exposure to UV light at midday intensity levels, while the other spent twice as long under lamps with half of the UV intensity.

Dr Lundsgaard said by the end of the exposure periods, each group had received the same total UVB radiation dose.

“The hypothesis traditionally has been that because the tadpoles were getting the same amount of radiation, the effects should also be the same,” he said

“But we saw that high intensity exposure was much more damaging.

“Molecular analysis revealed high intensity exposure caused DNA damage to accumulate 3 times faster, with more damage carrying over into the following day.

“We also found smaller tadpoles were the most sensitive and had more DNA damage.

“Knowing all of this for frogs raises questions for other animals and is an area for further research.”

The research paper is published in Journal of Experimental Biology.

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Journal

Journal of Experimental Biology

DOI

10.1242/jeb.252227 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

When repair mechanisms fail to keep up: high UVB irradiance causes disproportionate accumulation of DNA lesions

Article Publication Date

2-Jul-2026

COI Statement

C.E.F. is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Experimental Biology. C.E.F. was not involved in the editorial assessment of this submission. The authors declare no other competing interests.

Strong sunburn causes catastrophic DNA damage for tadpoles

Intense sunburn causes 47% more DNA damage for tadpoles in Australia with lethal consequences

The Company of Biologists

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Sunburn is a serious problem in the Southern Hemisphere where depleted ozone provides less protection from UVB. Tadpoles are at particular risk because they are growing rapidly, making them vulnerable to UVB DNA damage. Niclas Lundsgaard, of The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia says that the seriousness of sunburn was thought to be directly linked to the degree of exposure, so that a long weak dose of UVB would yield the same DNA damage as a short intense dose that resulted in the same overall exposure. But Lundsgaard, Craig Franklin and Rebecca Cramp (also from UQ), weren’t sure. A short intense UVB dose can be 3 times more lethal for striped marsh frog tadpoles (Limnodynastes peronii) than a long weak UVB dose amounting to the same overall exposure. The team publishes their discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology that sunburned tadpoles suffer significantly more DNA damage from short intense doses of UVB than longer weaker doses, which could dramatically increase mortality on sunny days.

Collecting recently laid frogspawn from a creek in Brisbane, Lundsgaard took them to the UV-free lab where they developed for 5 weeks. Then, he turned on the UVB, making sure that different tadpoles got the same total exposure of UVB, no matter how strong the dose, by adjusting how long the UV lights were on for.

Some tadpoles received one intense (80μW/cm2) dose of UVB – simulating the light levels in a clear pond – for an hour, while others received a second strong hour-long dose a day later. Meanwhile, he turned down the sun lamps for other tadpoles, so the UVB was less intense (40μW/cm2), but kept the lamps on for 2 h so the tadpoles received the same overall exposure, with a fourth group of tadpoles receiving a second weak dose of UVB a day later.

Finally, Lundsgaard checked for evidence of DNA damage.

Alarmingly, the strength of UVB that the developing tadpoles experienced had a dramatic impact.

The tadpoles that experienced the most intense doses of UVB accumulated damage almost 3 times faster, resulting in 47% more DNA damage than the tadpoles exposed to mild sunburn.

Lundsgaard then checked the tadpoles that were exposed to UVB on consecutive days, and the tadpoles that had experienced the strongest sunburn were in worse shape than the tadpoles that had only received mild UVB doses.

The intensely sunburned tadpoles carried over twice as much DNA damage into the second day, and the tadpoles that experienced 2 days of sunburn had 20% more DNA damage than the tadpoles that only experienced sunburn on a single day.

Surprisingly, Lundsgaard noticed that the smallest tadpoles seemed to suffer the most DNA damage, experiencing 50% more than their larger siblings, thanks possibly to their larger surface area relative to their mass.

Even though the striped marsh frog tadpoles had experienced the same amount of UVB, the strength of the sunburn made an enormous difference.

The tadpoles exposed to the high UVB dose accumulated more dangerous DNA damage than those that had received the same total UVB exposure over longer periods, leaving them at greater risk of mortality.

Lundsgaard warns also that fish and corals could be in similar danger from the sun’s rays. ‘The larvae of other aquatic animals might struggle with more frequent exposure to short, intense UVB’, he says.

However, Lundsgaard adds that we cannot draw any conclusions about whether stronger sunburn is more dangerous for people. ‘Frogs and humans have different mechanisms for repairing DNA damage caused by UV radiation’, he says, but adds, ‘Our study has highlighted that the risk of sun exposure is not necessarily measured simply by how much radiation you are exposed to’.

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IF REPORTING THIS STORY, PLEASE MENTION JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY AS THE SOURCE AND, IF REPORTING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A LINK TO:  https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article-lookup/doi/10.1242/jeb.252227

REFERENCE: Lundsgaard, N. U., Franklin, C. E. and Cramp, R. L. (2026). When repair mechanisms fail to keep up: high UVB irradiance causes disproportionate accumulation of DNA lesions. J. Exp. Biol. 229, jeb252227. doi:10.1242/jeb.252227

DOI: 10.1242/jeb.252227

This article is posted on this site to give advance access to other authorised media who may wish to report on this story. Full attribution is required and if reporting online a link to https://journals.biologists.com/jeb is also required. The story posted here is COPYRIGHTED. Advance permission is required before any and every reproduction of each article in full from permissions@biologists.com.

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Journal

Journal of Experimental Biology

DOI

10.1242/jeb.252227 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

When repair mechanisms fail to keep up: high UVB irradiance causes disproportionate accumulation of DNA lesions

Article Publication Date

2-Jul-2026

 

Rising from the ashes: A hidden supply of critical elements

Georgia Tech researchers turn a widespread waste product into materials that power modern technology

Georgia Institute of Technology

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Anuja Tripathi grew up in Kanpur, India, where coal fly ash from a nearby power plant coated rooftops, windowsills, and laundry hung outside to dry.

“I used to see ash settling on our terrace from time to time and thought it was just waste,” Tripathi said.

Years later, at Georgia Tech, Tripathi started looking at that ash differently. What once appeared to be ordinary industrial waste became the focal point for her work.

As a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tripathi, along with Ching-Hua Huang, Turnipseed Family Chair and Professor, and Xing Xie, Carlton S. Wilder Assistant Professor, both in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, developed a method to recover rare earth elements from coal fly ash.

Rare earth elements (REEs) help power electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, MRI machines, smartphones, and defense systems because of their unusually strong magnetic and electrical properties. Despite the name, most REEs are not actually rare in quantity. They’re rare in concentration. REEs are scattered through the Earth’s crust in amounts too small to mine easily, and much of their global supply chain remains concentrated outside of the United States.

That imbalance has turned REEs into both an economic and national security concern. Countries are competing for the materials sustaining advanced manufacturing, energy systems, and military technologies, increasing pressure to find domestic sources. That urgency has pushed researchers like Tripathi, Huang, and Xie to look at coal fly ash differently: not just as industrial waste but as a potential source of materials that modern technology depends on.

Coal naturally contains trace amounts of rare earth elements. Burning the coal concentrates those elements in the ash left behind.

Tripathi developed a method for extracting rare earth elements that avoids the corrosive chemicals used in conventional extraction. The same ash that once coated her rooftop could now become a secondary domestic source of critical materials.

Mining What Was Left Behind

Coal fly ash already exists in enormous quantities across the United States. About 2 billion tons are stored in impoundments, such as storage ponds and landfills, according to the Department of Energy.

Those sites require long-term monitoring because coal fly ash can release contaminants into soil and groundwater. Major storms can also damage storage sites and spread the material into surrounding communities and waterways.

Inside that ash, REEs are dispersed in tiny concentrations. Recovering them is a challenge; recovering them cleanly is an even greater one. Many existing recovery methods rely on concentrated acids, large amounts of water, or extreme heat during extraction. Some techniques require temperatures high enough to rival industrial furnaces. Others create additional waste streams.

Tripathi and her team wanted a different approach.

They built the system around a recyclable ionic liquid, a salt-based substance stable enough to operate under conditions that would break down water-based systems. The liquid pulls rare earth elements away from the ash. An applied electrical current then causes the recovered elements to collect onto a surface where they can be removed. Afterward, the liquid can be cleaned and reused.

“The beauty of this system is that it works beyond the limits of water,” Tripathi said.
“The ionic liquid allows us to recover rare earth elements under conditions that water-based systems just can’t handle.”

The process also changes depending on the voltage applied. At lower voltages, the system selectively recovers neodymium, an REE used in high-strength permanent magnets found in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and defense systems. At higher voltages, it recovers a broader mixture. The system recovered nearly half of the available neodymium during testing.
 

Beyond Coal Ash

Tripathi has shown that the chemistry works in small batches. The next challenge is scale: whether the system can recover enough rare earth elements efficiently enough to make the process commercially practical.

The same approach could extend beyond coal fly ash. Batteries, discarded electronics, and medical waste all contain valuable metals that often end up buried in landfills or destroyed during disposal.

For Tripathi, the idea began at home, where fly ash would settle on her terrace. What once seemed like an ordinary nuisance could help reshape how critical materials are recovered from waste.

Tripathi’s research is published in Environmental Science and Technology.
It was supported by the US Department of Energy.

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Journal

Environmental Science & Technology

 

COVID’s lingering shadow faded after Omicron — but not for everyone

Study across five periods of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals changing long COVID patterns and the need for continued support

Hiroshima University

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Survival analysis was conducted using the Turnbull method to estimate the prevalence of persistent post-COVID-19 symptoms. The x-axis indicates months since recovery from acute infection. Curves represent infection period groups: blue, Wild (Apr 2020–Feb 2021); light blue, Alpha (Mar 2021–Jun 2021); green, Delta (Jul 2021–Nov 2021); red, Omicron 2022 (Dec 2021–Jul 2022); and orange, Omicron 2024 (Jan 2024–Jun 2024). A) Adults; B) Children. Left panels: any level of symptom severity; right panels: symptoms interfering with daily life.

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Credit: Sugiyama et al., PLOS One (2026), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0348954

Six years after the world first learned of COVID-19, the pandemic has faded into an unpleasant memory for many. For others, however, it never fully ended.

A long-term study by Hiroshima University found that whilst lingering symptoms became far less common after the Omicron variant arrived, some people have continued to experience health problems years after infection.

The results were published in PLOS One on May 8.

Recovery from COVID-19 does not always end when the infection clears. Some people suffer persistent symptoms for months, regardless of how mild or severe their initial illness was. Often referred to as long COVID or post-COVID-19 syndrome, the condition commonly includes extreme tiredness, cognitive difficulties known as brain fog, dizziness, and disrupted taste or smell, among other symptoms.

“Although reports suggested that long COVID became less common after Omicron emerged, few studies had compared long-term outcomes across multiple pandemic waves, examined newer Omicron sublineages, or followed patients for more than two years after infection,” said Aya Sugiyama, lecturer at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences and lead author of the study.

To address these gaps, the researchers expanded an ongoing cohort study launched in 2020 in collaboration with medical institutions within Hiroshima Prefecture. The team followed 2,689 people diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 2020 and June 2024, including 1,524 adults and 1,165 children.

Participants completed surveys tracking 13 post-COVID symptoms and how long they lasted, allowing researchers to compare long-term recovery patterns across five pandemic periods — the original strain, Alpha, Delta, Omicron-2022 and Omicron-2024.

“We found that the long-term course of post-COVID-19 symptoms varies significantly depending on the period of infection and age,” Sugiyama said.

At six months after infection, adults infected during the Delta period had the highest rate of lingering symptoms, with an estimated 47% still reporting symptoms. By comparison, prevalence of such symptoms dropped to 23% during the Omicron wave in 2022 and 21% during Omicron infections in 2024.

Children generally fared better than adults.

“The prevalence among children remained about one-quarter to one-third that of adults throughout all epidemic waves,” Sugiyama said. “Notably, no children in the study experienced disruptions to daily life for more than two years after infection, even when symptoms persisted.”

The study showed that recovery was not universal. Two years after infection, around 20% of adults infected before Omicron and 10% infected during Omicron periods still reported symptoms. Among children, persistent symptoms were much less common, affecting 4.1% of those infected during the Delta period and 1.9% during Omicron-2022.

The researchers also found that symptoms continuing beyond two years showed little additional improvement over time, suggesting recovery may plateau for some individuals, though improvement beyond the observation period remains possible.

The analysis further revealed that recovery speed differed by infection period and age. Symptoms resolved more slowly in people infected during the Delta period, whilst those infected during Omicron waves recovered faster. Younger age was strongly associated with quicker recovery; this was especially true with children aged 12 years and younger.

The findings confirm that even as the overall burden has declined since the height of the pandemic, long COVID has not disappeared, underscoring the continuing need for long-term monitoring and support.

“Building on the long-term cohort established in this study, we plan to develop a model for predicting the risk of persistent symptoms. We further aim to create and publicly release a web-based tool that uses this model to display, for individuals with similar characteristics, the proportion who experienced persistent symptoms at each time point — making the trajectory of post-COVID symptoms visible and enabling appropriate care and support from the early stages of illness,” Sugiyama said.

The research team also includes Toshiro Takafuta and Tomoki Sato at Hiroshima City Funairi Citizens Hospital; Kanon Abe at the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology; Yayoi Yoshinaga, Ko Ko, Tomoyuki Akita, Shingo Fukuma, and Junko Tanaka at Hiroshima University; and Masao Kuwabara at the Hiroshima Prefecture Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

This study was supported by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) and the Hiroshima Prefecture Government-academia collaboration project funding.

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About Hiroshima University
Since its foundation in 1949, Hiroshima University has striven to become one of the most prominent and comprehensive universities in Japan for the promotion and development of scholarship and education. Consisting of 12 schools for undergraduate level and 5 graduate schools, ranging from natural sciences to humanities and social sciences, the university has grown into one of the most distinguished comprehensive research universities in Japan. English website: https://www.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/en

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0348954 

Article Title

Differences in the long-term course of post-COVID-19 symptoms in adults and children across epidemic periods: A retrospective cohort study in Japan, 2020–2024

 

Dynamic black holes explained by simple thermodynamics?

New research led by Penn State scientists extends renowned physicist Stephen Hawking’s laws of black hole mechanics to dynamic black holes that form, merge and evaporate

Penn State

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Illustration of a black hole that is growing in response to an influx of energy. New research from Penn State suggests a new measure for a black hole’s entropy that extends Stephen Hawking’s laws of black hole mechanics to such out-of-equilibrium, dynamic black holes that form, merge and evaporate.

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Credit: Jonathan Shu and Daniel Paraizo, Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Of the known things in the universe, black holes are among the most extreme. They pack huge amounts of mass densely into a small area, producing gravity that is so strong that even light cannot escape. To describe their properties, physicists have relied on complex equations from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But in the early 1970s, Stephen Hawking and other physicists found parallels between the thermodynamics laws describing ordinary things — like how a stovetop boils a pot of water — and black hole mechanics.

“Hawking’s laws of black hole mechanics provided a satisfying connecting between extreme and ordinary physics and have been the paradigm for 50 years, but they have a serious limitation,” said Abhay Ashtekar, Atherton University Professor and Evan Pugh Professor of Physics Emeritus in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State and the leader of the research team. “They were formulated for black holes at equilibrium — or unchanging over time — but black holes are constantly changing, they form, merge and eventually evaporate. We wanted to find a way to overcome this limitation and extend the laws to black holes that are out of equilibrium.”

Now, new research by Ashtekar and his team published and highlighted as an editor’s suggestion in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests an alternative way to determine a black hole’s entropy — a measure of disorder that can never decrease according to the second law of thermodynamics. The proposed new measure for entropy is more closely tied to the black hole’s physical properties of spin and energy and could open new doors for better understanding the dynamic processes black holes experience — from evaporation to merging with another black hole.

“The laws of black hole mechanics came directly from Einstein’s equations,” said Daniel E. Paraizo, a graduate student in physics at Penn State and an author of the paper. “Because you cannot see into a black hole, it seemed that there could be an infinite number of ways to make a black hole making their entropy infinite as well. They were also thought to only absorb energy and never radiate, so their temperature was zero.”

With infinite entropy and zero temperature, black holes seemed beyond what thermodynamics could explain, but then Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes can radiate energy and particles.

“This changed the thinking about the thermodynamic properties black holes from a sort of mathematical concept described by equations, to being more of a physical reality,” Paraizo said. “This opened the door to finding analogies in black holes of entropy and temperature used in thermodynamics.”

Hawking suggested that the area of a black hole’s event horizon, the boundary around a black hole where gravity is still strong enough to prevent the escape of light, is proportional to its entropy and its temperature is inversely proportional to its a combination of its mass and spin. 

“There is a problem, though,” said Jonathan Shu, a graduate student in physics at Penn State and an author of the paper. “These analogies only really work for a black hole that is at equilibrium. In dynamic situations, event horizons can form and grow in what we call flat regions of space-time, where nothing is happening. This makes them teleological — their properties cannot be determined just by the local physics of the black hole but instead rely on prediction of events that may or may not happen in the future. Therefore, the area of event horizons cannot be a measure of the physical entropy of dynamical black holes. If we want to understand black holes that are growing, evaporating, and merging, we need a viable alternative.”

The team’s new research shows that event horizons can be replaced by so-called “dynamical horizons” that are already used in numerical simulations of black holes. The dynamical horizon is characterized using properties of the black hole at a given instant of time and is thus free from the problem of teleology. 

“This allows us to extend the first and second laws of thermodynamics to black holes that are not at equilibrium, thereby overcoming the limitations of the paradigm that has been used for over half a century,” Ashtekar said.  “We can apply these generalized laws to better understand evaporating black holes in quantum theory and black hole mergers, like those detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration using gravitational waves.”

Funding from the Penn State Atherton Professorship Program and the Penn State Eberly College of Science supported the research.

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Journal

Physical Review Letters

DOI

10.1103/3c1r-v8f1 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Thermodynamics of Black Holes, Far from Equilibrium

 

A new theoretical framework to identify what quantum gravity would look like

Researchers develop ‘Relativity of Spacetime Superpositions,’ a theoretical framework that will show what experimental signatures identify quantum gravity

Kyushu University

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A quantum superposition of gravitational fields or spacetimes (top) and a “test” particle in a quantum superposition of locations in an ordinary gravitational field (bottom). The gravitational field could be that produced by a star, black hole, or even another quantum “source” particle.

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Credit: Joshua Foo/Kyushu University

Fukuoka, Japan—Everything around us, from atoms and molecules to planets and galaxies, is governed by two extraordinarily successful theories of physics: Quantum mechanics and gravity. Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of the microscopic world, while Einstein’s theory of gravity describes the motion of stars, black holes, and the expansion of the Universe. Yet despite their successes, physicists are still searching for a theory of “quantum gravity” that would unite them into a single description of nature.

One of the most widely expected features of such a theory is that gravity should obey the laws of quantum mechanics. And this where it gets difficult: quantum mechanics predicts that any object can be delocalized over multiple places at once, which is routinely tested in experiments with atoms and even small clumps of metal. Gravity, according to Einstein’s theory, is the space and time itself—it can be curved, flat or even have waves propagating through it, as confirmed by gravitational wave detectors. And so many physicists believe that spacetime around a quantum object would also exist in multiple “states” simultaneously.

But what would such a situation actually look like?

Publishing in npj Quantum Information, researchers from Kyushu University, the University of Waterloo, and Stockholm University have shown that despite the lack of a universal framework we may sometimes know the answer.

The team developed a new theoretical framework demonstrating that many scenarios described as a “quantum superposition of gravity” are equivalent to a situation where quantum particles are in quantum superpositions but feel ordinary gravity and spacetime, with no quantum gravity signatures.

“Many researchers have proposed experiments that could potentially reveal the quantum nature of gravity,” explains Associate Professor Joshua Foo of Kyushu University’s Institute for Advanced Study and lead author of the study. “What we found is that some of these scenarios can be viewed from two equally valid perspectives. One interpretation describes gravity as being in a quantum superposition, while the other describes quantum particles moving in an ordinary gravitational field.”

The researchers refer to this idea as the “Relativity of Spacetime Superpositions.” Much like two maps can describe the same landscape using different projections, the researchers found that what looks like quantum gravity can in many cases be described using classical gravity and spacetime while mapping the motion of any particle within it to an appropriate quantum state.

This does not mean that gravity is classical, nor does it rule out the existence of quantum gravity. Instead, it reveals an important ambiguity in how experiments testing gravity’s quantum side can be interpreted.

“Our work does not tell us that such experiments rule out quantum gravity,” says Magdalena Zych of Stockholm University and a co-author on the paper. “Rather, it helps us identify which experimental signatures would genuinely require a quantum description of gravity and which ones could arise from more familiar physics. That distinction is crucial for designing future experiments.”

While the research addresses highly fundamental questions, history shows that studying the deepest laws of nature often leads to unexpected advances. Technologies such as GPS navigation, lasers, and modern electronics all grew from discoveries in theoretical quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

More immediately, the work provides researchers a roadmap for designing experiments. By identifying which observations can truly distinguish between classical and quantum descriptions of gravity, the framework narrows the search for evidence of one of the most sought-after theories in modern science.

“Understanding how gravity and quantum mechanics fit together is one of the greatest challenges in physics,” concludes Foo. “Before we can test gravity’s quantum nature, we first need to know what evidence would prove that we’ve found it. Our work helps clarify that question.”

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For more information about this research, see "Relativity and decoherence of spacetime superpositions," Joshua Foo, Cendikiawan Suryaatmadja, Robert B. Mann, and Magdalena Zych npj Quantum Information, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41534-026-01234-x

About Kyushu University 
Founded in 1911, Kyushu University is one of Japan's leading research-oriented institutions of higher education, consistently ranking as one of the top ten Japanese universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World Rankings. Located in Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu—the most southwestern of Japan’s four main islands—Kyushu U sits in a coastal metropolis frequently ranked among the world’s most livable cities and historically known as Japan’s gateway to Asia. Its multiple campuses are home to around 19,000 students and 8,000 faculty and staff. Through its VISION 2030, Kyushu U will “drive social change with integrative knowledge.” By fusing the spectrum of knowledge, from the humanities and arts to engineering and medical sciences, Kyushu U will strengthen its research in the key areas of decarbonization, medicine and health, and environment and food, to tackle society’s most pressing issues.

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Journal

npj Quantum Information

DOI

10.1038/s41534-026-01234-x 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Relativity and decoherence of spacetime superpositions