Heavy water helps weather forecasts

Isotopes of atmospheric water leave fingerprints that can improve weather modeling

University of Tokyo

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Satellite observations reveal how the abundance of naturally occurring heavy water molecules changes around the world about 4 kilometers above the surface. These subtle differences reflect the history of evaporation, condensation and atmospheric transport, providing weather models with information that ordinary humidity measurements cannot capture. ©2026 Yoshimura et al. CC-BY-ND

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Credit: ©2026 Yoshimura et al. CC-BY-ND

Weather forecasts rely on many and various kinds of data, including temperature, humidity and wind data. For the first time, researchers including those at the University of Tokyo demonstrate that a long-theorized improvement to weather models by adding data on water isotopes in the atmosphere does in fact work. They showed that incorporating satellite measurements of water vapor isotopes into weather models improves forecasts of atmospheric conditions for up to five days, including better predictions of heavy rainfall in many regions.  

Isotopes are alternate forms of atoms, where the number of neutrons is different to the number found in the typical atom. This means that isotopes are often heavier than their atomic counterparts and in the case of water, yields what is known as heavy water. It’s been known for some time that heavy water exists in the atmosphere in forms such as water with a heavy hydrogen isotope, or with a heavy oxygen isotope. It’s also known the way these evaporate and condense is a little different to normal too. 

“Water isotopes occur naturally in very small amounts. Their relative abundance changes slightly during processes such as evaporation and condensation. By taking advantage of these changes, we can obtain information about where water came from and what happened to it along the way,” said Kinya Toride, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US and Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo. “In this study, we incorporated satellite observations of water vapor isotope ratios into a weather model, using a technique called data assimilation. We found that this additional information improved our estimates of basic atmospheric conditions, such as winds, temperature and water vapor, which in turn led to more accurate weather forecasts.” 

Somewhat intuitively, as heavy water is slightly heavier, and it doesn’t evaporate quite as easily as normal water, it also precipitates more readily. These and some other subtle differences in behavior alter the distribution of water isotopes in the atmosphere. Although valuable, the observations alone don't reveal which atmospheric variables, such as temperature, wind or humidity, are responsible for a particular isotope signal. To use this information, the researchers had to develop a way to disentangle isotope signals and translate them into atmospheric variables used in weather forecasting. Real-world observations also contain uncertainties and influences that are not yet fully understood, meaning that simply adding more data to models does not automatically produce better forecasts.  

“This is the first study to show that water vapor isotope information can improve weather forecasts under conditions close to real operational forecasting. But it is not something that can be introduced overnight. We still have very little real-time isotope data, and today’s operational forecast models are not designed to use it,” said Professor Kei Yoshimura of the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo. “Now that we’ve demonstrated clear benefits, especially when forecasting heavy rainfall, we have a strong reason to change that. Our long-term goal is to develop more accurate satellite observations of water vapor isotopes and integrate them into operational weather forecasting systems, so this additional layer of information can help make everyday forecasts more reliable.” 

For isotope observations to become part of everyday weather forecasting, large amounts of data will need to be processed in real time, and operational weather prediction models will need to incorporate water isotopes. Given the ever-decreasing cost of launching satellites such as the kind that would be necessary, it’s increasingly likely that the kinds of data needed will soon be in the hands of researchers, climate modelers, and even weather presenters. 

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The researchers combined many individual satellite observations collected over six hours into a single, high-quality measurement for each region. By filtering out areas with too little data, they created a reliable global dataset that could be fed directly into their weather forecasting model. ©2026 Yoshimura et al. CC-BY-ND

Credit

©2026 Yoshimura et al. CC-BY-ND

 
Journal: 

Kinya Toride, Kei Yoshimura, Matthias Schneider, Christopher Diekmann, Farahnaz Khosrawi, Benjamin Ertl, Hayoung Bong. “The significance of water vapor isotopes in improving weather prediction”, Communications Earth & Environment, DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03917-x 

Funding: 

JSPS KAKENHI: 21H05002, 22H04938, 19J01337. 

Japanese MEXT Program: JPMXD0722680395. 

JST SICORP: JPMJSC22E4. 

JST Moonshot: JPMJMS2282-08. 

JST Mirai: JPMJMI24I1. 

MEXT ArCS2: JPMXD1420318865. 

ERCA S20: JPMEERF21S12020. 

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (MOTIV project): 290612604. 

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (TEDDY project): 416767181. 

European Space Agency 

 

About The University of Tokyo: 

The University of Tokyo is Japan's leading university and one of the world's top research universities. The vast research output of some 6,000 researchers is published in the world's top journals across the arts and sciences. Our vibrant student body of around 15,000 undergraduate and 15,000 graduate students includes over 5,000 international students. Find out more at www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ or follow us on X (formerly Twitter) at @UTokyo_News_en. 

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Journal

Communications Earth & Environment

DOI

10.1038/s43247-026-03917-x 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The significance of water vapor isotopes in improving weather prediction

Article Publication Date

3-Sep-2026

 

Researchers identify potential new target to delay preterm birth

Research has identified a potential new target for preventing preterm labour.

King's College London

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Scientists have found that targeting a particular group of proteins in the uterus muscle (myometrium) can suppress human uterine contractions in laboratory studies and delay preterm birth in a preclinical model.

The findings, published today in Communications Medicine, highlight a potential future avenue for developing new drugs, or repurposing existing drugs, that act on these proteins to delay early labour.

In the study led by King’s College London, researchers looked at a group of proteins in the membranes of cells in the uterus wall called KV7 channels. Using a drug that activates these channels, they were able to reduce uterine contractions in human tissue and delay preterm birth in mice.

Preterm birth, defined as birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy, affects around 1 in 12 babies in the UK and is the leading cause of neonatal death worldwide. Babies born too early are at increased risk of serious health complications from birth and throughout their lives. Despite its substantial health burden, treatment options to prevent spontaneous preterm birth (when a mother goes into labour spontaneously) remain limited, partly because the biological pathways that trigger labour are not yet fully understood.

Rachel Tribe, Professor of Maternal and Perinatal Sciences at King’s College London and senior author of the paper, said: “For many years, my research team has focused on understanding what drives preterm birth and looking for predictors of early labour. About 6-7% of all pregnancies in the UK are preterm, with about two thirds of these due to a mother going into spontaneous labour early, often without any warning or notable risk factors – these are the women we want to help treat.

“We need new treatments to delay preterm birth and improve outcomes for babies, and our findings provide a proof-of-principle that specific types of KV7 channels could offer a promising target for drug development.”

KV7 channels are present throughout the body, including in smooth muscle found in the uterus wall. Activation of these channels regulates the movement of potassium in and out of cells, helping to control the electrical activity and contraction of uterine muscle.

The researchers looked at samples of human myometrium (the muscular layer of the uterus wall) collected from women during active preterm and term labour, and during caesarean section at term and preterm. By analysing gene and protein expression, they identified several KV7 channel components that were present in the myometrium in both term and preterm pregnancies, at the end of pregnancy and after labour had started.

They identified the main type of active KV7 channel (called KV7.4) present in the uterus, providing important information for the future development or repurposing of drugs that selectively target these channels.

The team then simulated uterine contraction in the lab, using myometrium tissue from humans and mice. When human and mouse tissue samples were treated with retigabine, a drug that opens KV7 channels, contractions were reduced. In a mouse model of preterm birth, retigabine delayed preterm delivery.

Iain Greenwood, Professor of Vascular Pharmacology at City St George's University of London and co-author on the paper, said: “KV7 channels are key regulators of cellular physiology. Research into these important players is facilitated by the existence of many chemical modifiers of KV7 channels spawned by the discovery that boosting KV7 channel activity in neurones is an effective anti-epileptic mechanism. Repurposing some of these molecules may offer the potential of new treatments for labour issues sooner rather than later.”

Women experiencing preterm labour, who do not have an underlying infection, can be given medicines to delay labour temporarily, but current treatments offer only modest benefits and can cause side effects.

Against a backdrop of limited options for preventing spontaneous preterm labour, identifying a new biological pathway involved in regulating uterine contractions could open new opportunities for treatment development. In the future, this may help provide valuable time for interventions that improve outcomes for babies born too soon.

The authors say the next steps for this work include demonstrating the benefits to neonates in addition to delaying preterm birth. The researchers hope to translate these findings towards future clinical application by working in partnership with pharmaceutical companies and collaborators to investigate more targeted KV7 activators and innovative drug-delivery systems that target the uterus.

The research was supported by the UKRI Medical Research Council, The Borne Foundation and Action Medical Research.

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Journal

Communications Medicine

 

Students with lower grades and test scores earn degrees more often when they belong to an academic major’s majority group

Researchers find that academic preparation and interest in a major do not fully explain representation and retention gaps

New York University

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Despite efforts to encourage broader participation, women earn about 25 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees and 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees—and men remain a small minority among nursing and education degree earners. Shedding new light on these discrepancies, a study—published in Nature Human Behaviour and examining two US Department of Education datasets—finds that these long-standing patterns tend to be most pronounced among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores, although prior academic performance alone does not explain who stays in a major and who leaves.

The researchers found that in male-majority majors such as physics, engineering, computer science, business, and economics, straight cisgender men with lower-than-average high-school grades and test scores were substantially overrepresented compared to straight cisgender women with similar levels of academic performance. That gap narrowed considerably among the highest-achieving students. LGBTQ+ men were also underrepresented in these fields.

In female-majority fields, evidence for a parallel pattern of overrepresentation for straight cisgender women was mixed. However, some models showed that LGBTQ+ women tend to be overrepresented in female-majority fields among students with the highest pre-college achievement—suggesting that LGBTQ+ women may need stronger academic credentials to gain a foothold even in seemingly welcoming fields.

For the study, the researchers used two large and nationally representative datasets collected by the US Department of Education to analyze patterns of high school performance and college major selection and persistence for straight cisgender men and women, and LGBTQ+ men and women. The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 provided demographic information including sex and LGBTQ+ identity as well as academic preparation, interests, and outcomes for 6,340 students from their first year of high school in 2009-2010 through their junior year of college. The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2016 provided academic and demographic data for 12,950 students who obtained a bachelor’s degree in 2016.

“Across both datasets, we found evidence that when there was a representation gap that varied across the achievement distribution, that gap tended to be more in favor of the major’s historically dominant demographic group among the students with lower pre-college grades and test scores—and less so at other points in the distribution,” says lead author Joseph Cimpian, professor of economics and education policy at NYU Steinhardt and NYU Wagner. “Those gaps tend to narrow considerably among the students with the strongest pre-college performance, highlighting the importance of looking more closely at how these gaps differ by achievement level rather than just overall representation to better understand who is entering these different fields.”

The researchers suggest these more pronounced gaps among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores may be due to social norms and institutional environments that subtly favor a field’s historically dominant demographic group. Because the study is correlational, the authors are careful to note that it cannot establish that these norms directly cause these gaps—only that individual academic and demographic factors on their own do not fully account for the observed patterns.

The study is among the first to use nationally representative data to examine how LGBTQ+ students sort across the full range of college majors, not just STEM. LGBTQ+ students—regardless of sex—were underrepresented in male-majority fields like engineering, computer science, and business. LGBTQ+ males were also underrepresented in nursing and other health fields.

“These patterns suggest a kind of missed opportunity,” Cimpian notes. “If talented students are leaving—or never entering—majors where they would do well and contribute, partly based on factors unrelated to their preparation or even interest in these fields, that’s a loss for the students and for the fields themselves.”

This study is co-authored by Zachary T. McDermott at Abt Global, Jo R. King at Boston University, Nathaniel Woznicki at the NYU Department of Psychology, and Taek H. Kim at the Korean Educational Development Institute.

This research was supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education (R305B140037 and R305B200010).

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Journal

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-026-02510-8 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Gender and LGBTQ+ representation across college majors and achievement levels using nationally representative US data

Article Publication Date

3-Sep-2026

 

Sir Stephen Fry announced as Patron of the Primate Society of Great Britain

The Primate Society of Great Britain (PSGB) has announced that Sir Stephen Fry will become its new Patron

Nottingham Trent University

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 Sir Stephen Fry announced as Patron of the Primate Society of Great Britain

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Credit: Sir Stephen Fry

Sir Stephen is an actor, comedian, writer, and broadcaster who has championed wildlife conservation throughout his career, including raising awareness of endangered primates and campaigning against keeping monkeys as pets.

The appointment has been made following the death of former PSGB Patron, Jane Goodall, a renowned primatologist and anthropologist, in 2025.

Many primate species are facing unprecedented threats from habitat loss, climate change, hunting, and the illegal wildlife trade. The work of PSGB members spans conservation, behavioural and cognitive research, captive welfare, education, and public outreach.

Speaking about his invitation to become Patron, Sir Stephen said: “I am lucky to have met and communed with a large number of quite different primates from the varied branches of our extended family.  

“When I consider my time with mountain gorillas in Bwindi; adventures with Mme Berthe lemurs; dancing with sifakas; howling with indris and goggling back at staring aye-ayes in Madagascar; befriending proboscis monkeys and orangutang infants in Saba; chimps on Ngamba Island on Lake Victoria; tamarins, capuchin, spider and woolly monkeys in South America; and vervet, colobus monkeys and savannah baboons in Africa, I realise I have been luckier than most with so many opportunities to come close to so many of our cousins.

“At one end of things the world reeled with the astonishing news quite recently of the discovery of an entirely new species of monkey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at the other end there are species of gibbon and leaf monkey, of gorilla and lemur that are down to the last hundred, and fewer, living representatives, through poaching, habitat degradation, deforestation and the depredations of climate change.

“There is so much we can learn from primates - about ourselves and about our place in the world. Human primates and their fellows can coexist and flourish. I am very proud to have been asked to be a patron of the Primate Society of Great Britain whose work nationally and internationally in conservation and research is hugely respected.”

Bridget Waller is President of PSGB and Professor of Evolution and Social Behaviour at Nottingham Trent University – part of the Evolution and Social Interaction Research Group where researchers are investigating the social behaviour, communication, cognition, health and welfare of primates, and what these behaviours can tell us about our own evolution.

Professor Waller said: “Primates hold a unique place in our understanding of evolution, behaviour, cognition, and what it means to be human. As a society dedicated to advancing the scientific study, conservation, welfare, and understanding of primates, we wanted a Patron who could help communicate the importance of our work beyond academia.

“Sir Stephen Fry brings an extraordinary combination of intellectual curiosity, a deep appreciation for science and the natural world, and public engagement. Throughout his career, he has inspired people to think critically, embrace learning, and engage with important societal challenges, qualities that resonate strongly with the mission of PSGB.

"Sir Stephen’s patronage is both a valuable opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of primate research to science and conservation, and a recognition of the need to connect science with society by promoting evidence-based understanding, inspiring public interest, and championing the conservation and welfare of our closest living relatives."

It is hoped that Sir Stephen’s involvement will encourage new generations of students, researchers, and wildlife enthusiasts to engage with primatology and support the vital work being undertaken by PSGB members around the world.

For further information on the work of PSGB visit the website at www.psgb.org
 

Ends

 

Printing with ice

Universiteit van Amsterdam

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Using the method, ice pillars can be printed in essentially any desired profile, making angles as small as 14 degrees with the surface. 

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Credit: Image from the publication in PNAS, Demmenie et al.

Physicists from the University of Amsterdam have developed a method to print three-dimensional structures in ice. Last December, the work gathered a lot of attention when the researchers 3D-printed a Christmas tree. In the scientific publication that came out this week, the researchers also show how small pillars can be printed under an angle, making it possible to print arbitrary profiles in ice that don’t need any additional support.

Cooling through evaporation
The secret of ice printing lies in so-called evaporative cooling – a principle that mammals, including humans, also use to regulate their body temperature. When you sweat, the water on your skin evaporates and the skin cools down.

The same thing happens when printing with water in a low-pressure vacuum chamber: even at room temperature, the water evaporates very quickly. As each water molecule evaporates, it takes with it a small amount of heat, causing the remaining water to become increasingly colder, eventually cooling to below zero degrees Celsius. At that point the water is still liquid, but supercooled. As soon as the ultra-thin stream (thinner than a human hair: 16 micrometres) hits the already formed layer of ice, it freezes instantly.

Printing a profile
Last December, the work of physicists Menno Demmenie, Stefan Kooij and Daniel Bonn gathered a lot of attention when the researchers 3D-printed a Christmas tree. In the article that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, they show that the method can also be used to print small pillars of ice under an angle, simply by varying the speed of the 3D printer. This makes it possible to print profiles in ice that can have almost any shape and are strong enough that they don’t need to be supported from below – in contrast to how ordinary 3D-printing works. A video shows how the profile of a human face, making angles as small as 14 degrees with the surface, is printed.

The method is versatile and very clean: when you turn off the vacuum pump, everything melts neatly back into clean water. And the results are not just aesthetically nice and a demonstration of physics in action; there are practical applications as well. The technique opens doors for biology, where pure ice structures can be used as scaffolding for tissue, and for microfluidics where it can form intricate channels by melting away the ice. Looking ahead further, the technique could even be used on Mars, where it is cold and the atmosphere is thin – perfect conditions for using the same technique to build structures with local water.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Three-Dimensional Printing of Ice Structures via Evaporative Cooling in Vacuum

Article Publication Date

2-Sep-2026

 

When biology inspires mathematics: new discovery explains why a widely used evolutionary method can give false answers

University of Helsinki

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Helictopleurus sicardi, a dung beetle that motivated this study.

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Credit: Michele Rossini, Sergei Tarasov.

Researchers have identified a previously unrecognised mathematical property that explains why one of evolutionary biology's most widely used statistical models can produce convincing but incorrect conclusions. They also offer a practical way to recognise and avoid this problem.

Why do some groups of organisms contain thousands of species while others have only a handful? Evolutionary biologists have spent decades trying to answer this question using mathematical models that estimate how biological traits and environmental factors influence the formation and extinction of species.

These models have become a cornerstone of modern biology and have been used in more than a thousand scientific studies. Yet the models carry a known weakness: they can sometimes lead scientists to the wrong conclusions.  For years, no one fully understood why.

A puzzle hidden in mathematics

Several years ago, researchers found that many evolutionary models can generate exactly the same observations even when they rest on entirely different assumptions about evolutionary history. This meant that scientists could unknowingly reach different conclusions that were all equally consistent with the same data.  Whether the same ambiguity also affected the more sophisticated models used to study how traits shape biodiversity remained unclear, because their mathematics was too complex to analyse directly.

From beetles to apples – and mathematics

Sergei Tarasov at the Finnish Museum of Natural History and Josef Uyeda at Virginia Tech approached the problem from a different angle. Their path to the solution started with a simple but unusual question: imagine three apples – one red, one light green and one dark green. Should the two green apples be grouped together, or treated as different colours? The researchers ran into the same classification puzzle while studying beetle anatomy. Searching for an answer led them to lumpability, a mathematical concept introduced in the 1960s that defines when different states of a Markov model can be safely grouped together without changing how a system behaves. Building on it, they unexpectedly discovered a new way of representing Markov models, one of the most fundamental classes of stochastic models used across science.

They showed that every discrete-state Markov model can be rewritten as an equivalent hidden-state model, a decomposition they call Hidden Expansion. Although the rewritten model looks larger, it is built from simple, identical mathematical components. This representation exposed previously hidden mathematical symmetries and turned an intractable problem into a solvable one.

"This mathematical property had gone unnoticed despite decades of research on Markov models," says Tarasov.

From mathematics back to biology 

The new decomposition allowed the researchers to answer the question that had resisted mathematical analysis for years. They showed that the same hidden symmetries also affect the sophisticated models used to study biodiversity, and that the misleading conclusions these models sometimes produce are not isolated statistical mistakes. Instead, they stem from a deeper mathematical ambiguity built into the models themselves.

"For years, researchers could see the symptoms," says Tarasov. "Our work uncovered the underlying mathematical cause. Once we recognised that many fundamentally different evolutionary histories can produce exactly the same observations, it became clear why these methods can sometimes point to a convincing but ultimately incorrect biological explanation."

“A good concrete example comes from our own paper. We reanalysed a published dataset on stick insects (Phasmatodea) that asked whether the evolution of male weapons – leg protrusions used in fights over females – was associated with diversification,” Tarasov describes.

“The original study found no evidence that these weapons affected diversification, and we agree with that conclusion. However, when we analysed the same data using a broader range of models, standard statistical methods favoured scenarios suggesting that the weapons did affect diversification.  In other words, the same dataset can appear to support a compelling story about a trait driving diversification even when that story is false.”

The new framework does not remove the ambiguity entirely, but shows where these misleading results can come from and clarifies the limits of what current methods can tell us.

 “We don’t claim to have solved the entire problem,” says Tarasov. “But we now have a much clearer picture of the problem and where to look for solutions.”

When biology inspires mathematics

Scientific discoveries often begin with advances in mathematics that later transform biology. This study followed the opposite path. A biological question about how to represent anatomical traits of beetles led to a new mathematical discovery, which in turn solved a long-standing problem in evolutionary biology.

"It's a wonderful example of biology and mathematics driving each other forward," says Tarasov.

How many previous studies could this have affected?

Should some well-known results be revisited, or is this more of a caution for future work?

“The first problem we identify – congruence – does not compromise most previous studies, and we provide a practical solution for it. The second problem – false inference – is much more concerning. Current statistical approaches cannot reliably distinguish between alternative trait-diversification scenarios, and we do not yet have a definite solution. This makes it difficult to know how many previous studies may be affected. Our work helps explain why this occurs and provides practical recommendations to reduce the risk of misleading conclusions, while more reliable methods still need to be developed,” says Tarasov.

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-75829-5 

Article Title

Unidentifiability and false-positive inference in state-dependent diversification models