I found many interesting stories in the May 14 issue of Science, which I’ve just gotten around to reading. Two are examples of scientists using new data to study the distant past. Scientists in China sequenced proteins (more stable than DNA) from 400,000-year old teeth of human ancestors, using a new minimally-destructive technique. The sequence matched that from Denisovans and humans with Denisovan ancestry, perhaps indicating mating of Denisovan populations with Homo erectus and then with modern humans.

Another group reported on a continuous ice core from Antarctica covering the past 1.2 million years (hundreds of times Bible-based estimates of the age of the earth, for those who worry about such things). They found some interesting changes in CO2 about the time that glacial cycles changed from a 40,000 to a 100,000-year period.

The news stories about the present are discouraging: Trump’s war on science continues with the National Institute of Health arbitrarily canceling grants, CDC disconnecting from global fight against HIV, and a scientist being locked out of his lab for writing a letter defending a Chinese postdoc who apparently violated some export restrictions. (I’m not defending the postdoc; don’t lock me out.) Meanwhile, kelp forests are in trouble.

The future could have some bright spots, though, once we restore sanity to the White House and Congress. Harimoto and colleagues developed materials to encapsulate living bacteria as a drug-delivery system. The bacteria were engineered to lyse themselves and release an antibiotic when they detect quorum-sensing signals from a pathogen. So they’d release the antibiotic only when and where needed. Much of the focus was on the physical properties of the containment system, which needed to wrap the bacteria tightly enough to keep them from growing or dividing. The treatment worked in a mouse model of an infected prosthetic.

The same issue reported a new technique to process space telescope data (revealing volcanoes on Io), the use of genetic diversity rather than raw counts to predict disease outbreaks from sewage samples, and improved solar cells designed with AI help. We really need an administration that supports science rather than attacking it.