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The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests

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Monday, September 29, 2025

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge.In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that they have identified “chemical fossils” that may have been left by ancient sponges in rocks that are more than 541 million years old. A chemical fossil is a remnant of a biomolecule that originated from a living organism that has since been buried, transformed, and preserved in sediment, sometimes for hundreds of millions of years.The newly identified chemical fossils are special types of steranes, which are the geologically stable form of sterols, such as cholesterol, that are found in the cell membranes of complex organisms. The researchers traced these special steranes to a class of sea sponges known as demosponges. Today, demosponges come in a huge variety of sizes and colors, and live throughout the oceans as soft and squishy filter feeders. Their ancient counterparts may have shared similar characteristics.“We don’t know exactly what these organisms would have looked like back then, but they absolutely would have lived in the ocean, they would have been soft-bodied, and we presume they didn’t have a silica skeleton,” says Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Emeritus in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).The group’s discovery of sponge-specific chemical fossils offers strong evidence that the ancestors of demosponges were among the first animals to evolve, and that they likely did so much earlier than the rest of Earth’s major animal groups.The study’s authors, including Summons, are lead author and former MIT EAPS Crosby Postdoctoral Fellow Lubna Shawar, who is now a research scientist at Caltech, along with Gordon Love from the University of California at Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.Sponges on steroidsThe new study builds on findings that the group first reported in 2009. In that study, the team identified the first chemical fossils that appeared to derive from ancient sponges. They analyzed rock samples from an outcrop in Oman and found a surprising abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C30) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was likely derived from ancient sea sponges.The steranes were found in rocks that were very old and formed during the Ediacaran Period — which spans from roughly 541 million to about 635 million years ago. This period took place just before the Cambrian, when the Earth experienced a sudden and global explosion of complex multicellular life. The team’s discovery suggested that ancient sponges appeared much earlier than most multicellular life, and were possibly one of Earth’s first animals.However, soon after these findings were released, alternative hypotheses swirled to explain the C30 steranes’ origins, including that the chemicals could have been generated by other groups of organisms or by nonliving geological processes.The team says the new study reinforces their earlier hypothesis that ancient sponges left behind this special chemical record, as they have identified a new chemical fossil in the same Precambrian rocks that is almost certainly biological in origin.Building evidenceJust as in their previous work, the researchers looked for chemical fossils in rocks that date back to the Ediacaran Period. They acquired samples from drill cores and outcrops in Oman, western India, and Siberia, and analyzed the rocks for signatures of steranes, the geologically stable form of sterols found in all eukaryotes (plants, animals, and any organism with a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles).“You’re not a eukaryote if you don’t have sterols or comparable membrane lipids,” Summons says.A sterol’s core structure consists of four fused carbon rings. Additional carbon side chain and chemical add-ons can attach to and extend a sterol’s structure, depending on what an organism’s particular genes can produce. In humans, for instance, the sterol cholesterol contains 27 carbon atoms, while the sterols in plants generally have 29 carbon atoms.“It’s very unusual to find a sterol with 30 carbons,” Shawar says.The chemical fossil the researchers identified in 2009 was a 30-carbon sterol. What’s more, the team determined that the compound could be synthesized because of the presence of a distinctive enzyme which is encoded by a gene that is common to demosponges.In their new study, the team focused on the chemistry of these compounds and realized the same sponge-derived gene could produce an even rarer sterol, with 31 carbon atoms (C31). When they analyzed their rock samples for C31 steranes, they found it in surprising abundance, along with the aforementioned C30 steranes.“These special steranes were there all along,” Shawar says. “It took asking the right questions to seek them out and to really understand their meaning and from where they come.”The researchers also obtained samples of modern-day demosponges and analyzed them for C31 sterols. They found that, indeed, the sterols — biological precursors of the C31 steranes found in rocks — are present in some species of contemporary demosponges. Going a step further, they chemically synthesized eight different C31 sterols in the lab as reference standards to verify their chemical structures. Then, they processed the molecules in ways that simulate how the sterols would change when deposited, buried, and pressurized over hundreds of millions of years. They found that the products of only two such sterols were an exact match with the form of C31 sterols that they found in ancient rock samples. The presence of two and the absence of the other six demonstrates that these compounds were not produced by a random nonbiological process.The findings, reinforced by multiple lines of inquiry, strongly support the idea that the steranes that were found in ancient rocks were indeed produced by living organisms, rather than through geological processes. What’s more, those organisms were likely the ancestors of demosponges, which to this day have retained the ability to produce the same series of compounds.“It’s a combination of what’s in the rock, what’s in the sponge, and what you can make in a chemistry laboratory,” Summons says. “You’ve got three supportive, mutually agreeing lines of evidence, pointing to these sponges being among the earliest animals on Earth.”“In this study we show how to authenticate a biomarker, verifying that a signal truly comes from life rather than contamination or non-biological chemistry,” Shawar adds.Now that the team has shown C30 and C31 sterols are reliable signals of ancient sponges, they plan to look for the chemical fossils in ancient rocks from other regions of the world. They can only tell from the rocks they’ve sampled so far that the sediments, and the sponges, formed some time during the Ediacaran Period. With more samples, they will have a chance to narrow in on when some of the first animals took form.This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Crosby Fund, the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship program, the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and the NASA Exobiology Program. 

MIT researchers traced chemical fossils in ancient rocks to the ancestors of modern-day demosponges.

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge.

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that they have identified “chemical fossils” that may have been left by ancient sponges in rocks that are more than 541 million years old. A chemical fossil is a remnant of a biomolecule that originated from a living organism that has since been buried, transformed, and preserved in sediment, sometimes for hundreds of millions of years.

The newly identified chemical fossils are special types of steranes, which are the geologically stable form of sterols, such as cholesterol, that are found in the cell membranes of complex organisms. The researchers traced these special steranes to a class of sea sponges known as demosponges. Today, demosponges come in a huge variety of sizes and colors, and live throughout the oceans as soft and squishy filter feeders. Their ancient counterparts may have shared similar characteristics.

“We don’t know exactly what these organisms would have looked like back then, but they absolutely would have lived in the ocean, they would have been soft-bodied, and we presume they didn’t have a silica skeleton,” says Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Emeritus in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

The group’s discovery of sponge-specific chemical fossils offers strong evidence that the ancestors of demosponges were among the first animals to evolve, and that they likely did so much earlier than the rest of Earth’s major animal groups.

The study’s authors, including Summons, are lead author and former MIT EAPS Crosby Postdoctoral Fellow Lubna Shawar, who is now a research scientist at Caltech, along with Gordon Love from the University of California at Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Sponges on steroids

The new study builds on findings that the group first reported in 2009. In that study, the team identified the first chemical fossils that appeared to derive from ancient sponges. They analyzed rock samples from an outcrop in Oman and found a surprising abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C30) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was likely derived from ancient sea sponges.

The steranes were found in rocks that were very old and formed during the Ediacaran Period — which spans from roughly 541 million to about 635 million years ago. This period took place just before the Cambrian, when the Earth experienced a sudden and global explosion of complex multicellular life. The team’s discovery suggested that ancient sponges appeared much earlier than most multicellular life, and were possibly one of Earth’s first animals.

However, soon after these findings were released, alternative hypotheses swirled to explain the C30 steranes’ origins, including that the chemicals could have been generated by other groups of organisms or by nonliving geological processes.

The team says the new study reinforces their earlier hypothesis that ancient sponges left behind this special chemical record, as they have identified a new chemical fossil in the same Precambrian rocks that is almost certainly biological in origin.

Building evidence

Just as in their previous work, the researchers looked for chemical fossils in rocks that date back to the Ediacaran Period. They acquired samples from drill cores and outcrops in Oman, western India, and Siberia, and analyzed the rocks for signatures of steranes, the geologically stable form of sterols found in all eukaryotes (plants, animals, and any organism with a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles).

“You’re not a eukaryote if you don’t have sterols or comparable membrane lipids,” Summons says.

A sterol’s core structure consists of four fused carbon rings. Additional carbon side chain and chemical add-ons can attach to and extend a sterol’s structure, depending on what an organism’s particular genes can produce. In humans, for instance, the sterol cholesterol contains 27 carbon atoms, while the sterols in plants generally have 29 carbon atoms.

“It’s very unusual to find a sterol with 30 carbons,” Shawar says.

The chemical fossil the researchers identified in 2009 was a 30-carbon sterol. What’s more, the team determined that the compound could be synthesized because of the presence of a distinctive enzyme which is encoded by a gene that is common to demosponges.

In their new study, the team focused on the chemistry of these compounds and realized the same sponge-derived gene could produce an even rarer sterol, with 31 carbon atoms (C31). When they analyzed their rock samples for C31 steranes, they found it in surprising abundance, along with the aforementioned C30 steranes.

“These special steranes were there all along,” Shawar says. “It took asking the right questions to seek them out and to really understand their meaning and from where they come.”

The researchers also obtained samples of modern-day demosponges and analyzed them for C31 sterols. They found that, indeed, the sterols — biological precursors of the C31 steranes found in rocks — are present in some species of contemporary demosponges. Going a step further, they chemically synthesized eight different C31 sterols in the lab as reference standards to verify their chemical structures. Then, they processed the molecules in ways that simulate how the sterols would change when deposited, buried, and pressurized over hundreds of millions of years. They found that the products of only two such sterols were an exact match with the form of C31 sterols that they found in ancient rock samples. The presence of two and the absence of the other six demonstrates that these compounds were not produced by a random nonbiological process.

The findings, reinforced by multiple lines of inquiry, strongly support the idea that the steranes that were found in ancient rocks were indeed produced by living organisms, rather than through geological processes. What’s more, those organisms were likely the ancestors of demosponges, which to this day have retained the ability to produce the same series of compounds.

“It’s a combination of what’s in the rock, what’s in the sponge, and what you can make in a chemistry laboratory,” Summons says. “You’ve got three supportive, mutually agreeing lines of evidence, pointing to these sponges being among the earliest animals on Earth.”

“In this study we show how to authenticate a biomarker, verifying that a signal truly comes from life rather than contamination or non-biological chemistry,” Shawar adds.

Now that the team has shown C30 and C31 sterols are reliable signals of ancient sponges, they plan to look for the chemical fossils in ancient rocks from other regions of the world. They can only tell from the rocks they’ve sampled so far that the sediments, and the sponges, formed some time during the Ediacaran Period. With more samples, they will have a chance to narrow in on when some of the first animals took form.

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Crosby Fund, the Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship program, the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and the NASA Exobiology Program. 

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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A Revolution in Tracking Life on Earth

A suite of technologies are helping taxonomists speed up species identification.

Across a Swiss meadow and into its forested edges, the drone dragged a jumbo-size cotton swab from a 13-foot tether. Along its path, the moistened swab collected scraps of life: some combination of sloughed skin and hair; mucus, saliva, and blood splatters; pollen flecks and fungal spores.Later, biologists used a sequencer about the size of a phone to stream the landscape’s DNA into code, revealing dozens upon dozens of species, some endangered, some invasive. The researchers never saw the wasps, stink bugs, or hawk moths whose genetic signatures they collected. But all of those, and many more, were out there.The researchers, from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, were field-testing a new approach to biodiversity monitoring, in this case to map insect life across different kinds of vegetation. They make up one of many teams now deploying a suite of technologies to track nature at a resolution and pace once unimaginable for taxonomists. “We know a lot more about what’s happening,” Camille Albouy, an environmental scientist at ETH Zurich, and member of the team, told me, “even if a lot still escapes us.”Today, autonomous robots collect DNA while state-of-the-art sequencers process genetic samples quickly and cheaply, and machine-learning algorithms detect life by sound or shape. These technologies are revolutionizing humanity’s ability to catalog Earth’s species, which are estimated to number 8 million—though perhaps far, far more—by illuminating the teeming life that so often eludes human observation. Only about 2.3 million species have been formally described. The rest are nameless and unstudied—part of what biologists call dark taxa.Insects, for example, likely compose more than half of all animal species, yet most (an estimated four out of five) have never been recorded by science. From the tropics to the poles, on land and in water, they pollinate, prey, scavenge, burrow, and parasitize—an unobserved majority of life on Earth. “It is difficult to relate to nonspecialists how vast our ignorance truly is,” an international consortium of insect scientists lamented in 2018. Valerio Caruso, an entomologist at the University of Padua, in Italy, studies scuttle flies, a skittering family containing an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 species. Only about 4,000 have been described, Caruso told me. “One lifetime is not enough to understand them all.”The minute distinctions within even one family of flies matter more than they might seem to: Species that look identical can occupy entirely different ecological niches—evading different predators and hunting different prey, parasitizing different hosts, pollinating different plants, decomposing different materials, or carrying different diseases. Each is a unique evolutionary experiment that might give rise to compounds that unlock new medicines, behaviors that offer agricultural solutions, and other adaptations that could further our understanding of how life persists.Only with today’s machines and technology do scientists stand a chance of keeping up with life’s abundance. For most of history, humans have relied primarily on their eyes to classify the natural world: Observations of shape, size, and color helped Carl Linnaeus catalog about 12,000 species in the 18th century—a monumental undertaking, but a laughable fraction of reality. Accounting for each creature demanded the meticulous labor of dehydrating, dissecting, mounting, pinning, labeling—essentially the main techniques available until the turn of the 21st century, when genetic sequencing allowed taxonomists to zoom in on DNA bar codes. Even then, those might not have identified specimens beyond genus or family.Now technologies such as eDNA, high-throughput sequencing, autonomous robotics, and AI have broadened our vision of the natural world. They decode the genomes of fungi, bacteria, and yeasts that are difficult or impossible to culture in a lab. Specialized AI isolates species’ calls from noisy recordings, translating air vibrations into an acoustic field guide. Others parse photo pixels to tease out variations in wing veins or bristles as fine as a dust mote to identify and classify closely related species. High-resolution 3-D scans allow researchers to visualize minuscule anatomies without lifting a scalpel. Other tools can map dynamic ecosystems as they transform in real time, tracking how wetlands contract and expand season by season or harnessing hundreds of millions of observations from citizen-science databases to identify species and map their shifting ranges.One unassuming setup in a lush Panamanian rainforest involved a UV light luring moths to a white panel and a solar-powered camera that snapped a photo every 10 seconds, from dusk to dawn. In a single week, AI processed many thousands of images each night, in which experts detected 2,000 moth species—half of them unknown to science. “It breaks my heart to see people think science is about wrapping up the last details of understanding, and that all the big discoveries are done,” David Rolnick, a computer scientist at McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute, who was part of the expedition, told me. In Colombia, one of the world’s most biodiverse countries, the combination of drone-collected data and machine learning has helped describe tens of thousands of species, 200 of which are new to science.These tools’ field of view is still finite. AI algorithms see only as far as their training data, and taxonomical data overrepresent the global North and charismatic organisms. In a major open-access biodiversity database, for example, less than 5 percent of the entries in recent years pertained to insects, while more than 80 percent related to birds (which account for less than 1 percent of named species). Because many dark taxa are absent from training data sets, even the most advanced image-recognition models work best as triage—rapidly sorting through familiar taxa and flagging likely new discoveries for human taxonomists to investigate.AI systems “don’t have intuition; they don’t have creativity,” said Rolnick, whose team co-created Antenna, a ready-to-use AI platform for ecologists. Human taxonomists are still better at imagining how a rare feature arose evolutionarily, or exploring the slight differences that can mark an entirely new species. And ultimately, every identification—whether by algorithm or DNA or human expert—still depends on people.That human labor is also a dwindling resource, especially in entomology. “The number of people who are paid to be taxonomists in the world is practically nil,” Rolnick said. And time is against them. The world’s largest natural-history museums hold a wealth of specimens and objects (more than 1 billion, according to one study) yet only a fraction of those have digitally accessible records, and genomic records are accessible for just 0.2 percent of biological specimens. Many historical collections—all those drawers packed with pinned, flattened, and stuffed specimens; all those jars of floating beings—are chronically underfunded, and their contents are vulnerable to the physical consequences of neglect. Preservation fluids evaporate, poor storage conditions invite pests and mold, and DNA degrades until it is unsequenceable.Today’s tools are still far from fully capturing the extent and complexity of Earth’s biodiversity, and much of that could vanish before anyone catalogs it. “We are too few, studying too many things,” Caruso, the Padua entomologist, said. Many liken taxonomy to cataloging an already burning library. As Mehrdad Hajibabaei, chief scientific officer for the Center for Biodiversity Genomics at the University of Guelph, in Canada, told me: “We’re not stamp-collecting here.” Taxonomists are instead working to preserve a planetary memory—an archive of life—and to decode which traits help creatures adapt, migrate, or otherwise survive in a rapidly changing climate.The climate crisis is unraveling the life cycles of wildlife around the world—by one estimate, for about half of all species. Flowers now bloom weeks before pollinators stir; fruit withers before migrating birds can reach it. Butterflies attuned to rainfall falter in drought. Tropical birds and alpine plants climb toward cooler, though finite, mountaintops. Fish slip farther out to sea; disease-carrying mosquitoes ride the heat into new territories. Extreme weather at the poles stresses crucial moss and lichen, and shreds entire habitats in hours. Mass die-offs are now routine.“Once you lose one species, you’ll probably lose more species,” Caruso said. “Over time, everything is going to collapse.” One in eight could vanish by century’s end—many of them dark taxa, lost before we ever meet them. Most countries—and global bodies such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature—cannot assess, and therefore cannot protect, unnamed organisms. As Edward O. Wilson told Time in 1986: “It’s like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.”Today’s machine-assisted taxonomy faces the same problem Linnaeus did: Nature’s complexity still far outstrips human insight, even with machines’ assistance. “We don’t perceive the world as it is in all its chaotic glory,” the biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon wrote in her 2010 book, Naming Nature. “We sense a very particular subset of what surrounds us, and we see it in a particularly human way.” On the flip side, every new data point sharpens the predictive models guiding conservation, says Evgeny Zakharov, genomics director for the Center for Biodiversity Genomics. “The more we know about the world, the more power we have to properly manage and protect it,” he told me. With tools, the speed of taxonomists’ work is accelerating, but so is the countdown—they will take all the help they can get.

Animals
Climate
Conservation

The used oil from your french fry order may be fueling your next flight

We followed the trail of grease from the kitchens of Le Diplomat and other D.C. restaurants to the commercial planes using alternative fuels.

Le Diplomate had an emergency. After a week of frying frites, the kitchen at Washington’s famous standby for French cuisine was full to bursting with used grease.Two waist-high storage tanks in the back of the restaurant sloshed to the brim with dark, viscous oil. During the weekend rush, the staff stored some of the spent grease in plastic tubs, but they were quickly running out of places to put it.Restaurants are prohibited from dumping grease down the drain because it would clog city sewers. So on a Tuesday afternoon, James Howell nimbly backed his truck into an alley behind Le Diplomate. He hopped down from the cab and snaked a rubber hose to the kitchen. Then with the flip of a switch and a loud drone, the hose slurped the used cooking oil into the truck’s gleaming steel 2,200-gallon tank.James Howell of Mahoney Environmental collects used cooking oil behind Duke’s Grocery in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Three bottles — with raw oil on the left, half-processed produce in the middle and refined aviation fuel on the right — in the Neste laboratory in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)The spent grease that restaurants unload as waste has become a valuable commodity. If you’ve been on a plane lately, there’s a chance that used cooking oil has helped launch you into the sky. Refineries recycle waste oil into kerosene pure enough to power a Boeing 777. The process is expensive — but it can create 70 to 80 percent less planet-warming pollution than making jet fuel out of crude oil, experts say.Last year, airlines burned 340 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) — nearly all of it made from used cooking oil or animal fat leftover from meat packaging.A series examining innovative and impactful approaches to addressing waste.That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 114 billion gallons of fuel airlines burned overall, which create 2.5 percent of humanity’s carbon pollution, according to the International Energy Agency. But airlines have vowed to use much more SAF to lower their greenhouse emissions. European regulators have set strict rules requiring airlines to use more SAF over time, while U.S. regulators dole out tax credits to coax companies into buying it.This is the airlines’ main plan for dealing with their greenhouse emissions. Upgrading new planes with more efficient engines helps a little. And, one day, planes may run on electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells — but those are still decades away and may never work for long flights. To manage most of their climate impact for the foreseeable future, airlines are betting everything on alternative fuels.“Ninety-eight percent of [our greenhouse emissions] come from the fuel we burn,” said Lauren Riley, chief sustainability officer at United Airlines. “We’ll continue to look everywhere we can around technology and innovation of the aircraft itself and the engine, but we have to look at replacing our fuel.”Experts say this plan can work, but it’ll require fuel refiners to dramatically raise SAF production and find new raw materials besides old cooking oil to turn into kerosene. Depending on what they use and how they refine it, this new class of fuel could make flying more sustainable or cause a whole new set of environmental headaches.Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Harvesting the world’s greaseOn his rounds one day in early May, Howell made about two dozen stops at commercial kitchens around Washington, including an upscale cafe in the Michelin Guide, an assisted-living facility, a soul food spot where old chicken bones clogged the hose and an Italian restaurant where two unfortunate rats had drowned in a grease bin while diving for a wayward meatball. By midafternoon, his truck had about 1,200 gallons of grease in its belly.The company he works for, Mahoney Environmental, pays a few cents a gallon for the waste fat it collects from 90,000 businesses in the United States. Hundreds of companies gather grease around the globe — with an especially large haul in Southeast Asia, where densely packed restaurants serve up so much fried food that they’ve become the waste oil equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s rich petroleum fields.Waste oil from kitchens and animal tallow leftover from meatpacking plants used to be recycled into livestock feed. But now, they are mostly turned into fuel: Fat molecules hold a lot of energy, and they’re relatively easy to rearrange into diesel and kerosene.Turning fat into fuel keeps grease out of the landfill and petroleum in the ground. The demand, though, has begun to outstrip the supply.“There’s only so many waste oils to go around, and … you can’t really squeeze out much more,” said Nikita Pavlenko, who leads the aviation and fuels team at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “People aren’t going to be frying more food or processing more cattle to get waste tallow to make fuel. You’re kind of stuck with what you have.”A hose is deployed to suck used cooking oil into the tank of a collection truck. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Storage tanks for the feedstock (oil or tallow) at Neste in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)As regulators push companies to buy and make more fuel from fat, the price of grease has been rising, along with the crime surrounding it.Thieves sometimes steal grease from collection bins and sell it themselves. Once, Howell said, he stopped at a restaurant only to find an empty bin and a confused cook, who told him an unmarked van had come by earlier and siphoned off their oil.Grease fraud is a problem, too. In some areas, used cooking oil sells for more than new cooking oil, prompting hucksters to sell virgin oil — including palm oil, which is associated with deforestation in Southeast Asia — as if it were used. It’s hard to catch, since fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.“You’re potentially paying a premium for something that is worse than fossil fuel,” Pavlenko said.Fuel companies crack down on fraud by hiring inspectors to go out and check that their grease suppliers really are pumping their product out of deep fat fryers. On his route, Howell takes pictures of every bin before and after he drains it and uploads the proof to a Mahoney Environmental app that verifies where his oil came from.At the end of the day, Howell unloads his truck at a depot, where the oil is filtered to remove water, flour, spices and any other floating food chunks.Lab shift supervisor Jeroen van der Heijden in the laboratory at Neste. Neste produces sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), with a key presence in the Netherlands at its Rotterdam refinery. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Turning fat into fuelUsed grease is a global commodity. Once it’s collected, tanker ships and pipelines carry it to fuel refineries around the world — much like they do for crude oil.Grease ships arrive a couple of times a week at a refinery in Rotterdam run by Neste, the world’s top producer of sustainable jet fuel.How grease is turned into jet fuelThe Neste facility, located in Europe’s largest port, is ramping up production of SAF made from used cooking oil. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Fueling the appetite for sustainable fuelIn 2023, a Boeing 777 flew across the Atlantic Ocean burning fuel made from nothing but waste fat and sugar. The flight was a first, but it was really a publicity stunt — carrying Virgin Atlantic bigwigs, not paying passengers. The fuel is too expensive, and too scarce, for that to make business sense.Instead, Neste blends its french fry fuel with standard kerosene made from crude oil before delivering it to airports.SAF is almost identical to standard jet fuel, and it releases just as much CO2 when it’s burned. But experts say there’s a key difference: Drilling for oil takes carbon that was locked away underground and releases it into the atmosphere. Making fuel from used cooking oil and tallow takes carbon that was already circulating through the air and the bodies of plants and animals and recycles it. No new carbon moves from underground storage into the atmosphere.Sample vials at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Site director Hanna van Luijk at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)It takes energy to collect and transport used cooking oil, rearrange fat molecules into jet fuel and get that fuel to planes. But, overall, making and burning SAF adds as much as 80 percent less carbon to the atmosphere as making and burning fossil fuel from crude oil.Because there isn’t enough waste oil in the world to satisfy the airline industry’s thirst, companies are developing other ways to make low-carbon jet fuel. One option is to grow more crops like soy that can be crushed for oil and turned into jet fuel — although that raises the risk that more land will be cleared for farming in fragile ecosystems like the Brazilian Amazon. Environmentalists have raised similar concerns about raising more corn, sugar cane or beets to create ethanol and convert it into kerosene.“The problem with crop-based biofuels is it takes land to produce them at a time when we’re already expanding cropland … which means more deforestation, and the carbon losses are far greater than the potential savings from reducing fossil fuel use,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment.Alternately, farmers could grow more cover crops on their fields between their regular planting seasons, which would create a new source of plant oils or ethanol without using extra land. Some companies have experimented with turning trash into jet fuel, but the most prominent player went bankrupt last year. Others are splitting water molecules to harvest their hydrogen and combining it with captured carbon to make fuel.Experts say it will take a combination of all these methods to make enough green fuel to power the world’s planes.Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil behind Umai Nori. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)The one thing every alternative fuel recipe has in common is that they are more expensive than fossil fuel — and experts say they always will be. Making SAF from waste oil is “locked in at a cost which is about two times the cost of fossil jet, and it’s going to be entirely reliant on subsidies,” according to Pavlenko. The other methods could be even more expensive, even after they’ve had time to raise production and lower costs.The future of the industry will depend on whether the United States keeps tax credits in place and the European Union stands by its green fuel mandates. Neste is expanding its Rotterdam refinery in anticipation of stricter E.U. blending rules, and in the United States, the first large-scale SAF operations started pumping out fuel in recent years in response to new tax credits that have since been weakened.Back at Le Diplomate, amid the evening dinner rush, frites flow out of the kitchen to feed hungry diners who are unwittingly helping launch planes into the sky with every bite.

Animals
Business
Climate

Crisafulli insists on more shark nets to protect human lives despite trapped mother and baby whale

Queensland premier says he won’t protect whales ‘at the expense of one single human’Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastQueensland’s premier said the state is “not for turning” on its plan to expand shark netting, and won’t put protecting whales “at the expense of one single human”.A mother and baby humpback were discovered trapped in shark netting near Rainbow Beach on Saturday, the eighth and ninth whales to become entangled in nine days. Continue reading...

Queensland’s premier said the state is “not for turning” on its plan to expand shark netting, and won’t put protecting whales “at the expense of one single human”.A mother and baby humpback were discovered trapped in shark netting near Rainbow Beach on Saturday, the eighth and ninth whales to become entangled in nine days.Mother whale and calf caught in shark net off Rainbow Beach – video Queensland’s premier, David Crisafulli, announced an expansion of the program in May.A KPMG report on the state’s shark control program had recommended the state government trial removing shark nets during whale migration season from April to October, as is done in New South Wales.But on Sunday Crisafulli said he was “not for turning” on the plan, and that the government had already announced its response to the KPMG report.He said the state government would do “all we can to protect environmental lives as well”.Sign up: AU Breaking News email“We will do everything we can to be good environmental stewards, but it’s not going to come at the expense of one single human. We just won’t, and I’m not for turning on that,” Crisafulli said.Queensland is one of three jurisdictions in the world to use shark nets. The state also employs drum lines, which bait sharks on to a baited hook.The NSW government recently paused a rollback of its shark net program after a fatal shark attack in Sydney.Crisafulli said the state would be rolling out more protection for swimmers “and we’ll do it as environmentally sensibly as we can but, but the life of one child on one beach anywhere in this state, is worth everything to me”.According to Humane World for Animals, about five in six animals trapped in Queensland’s shark nets are not target shark species.There have been 131 whales, 298 turtles and 327 dolphins trapped in them since 2001.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Breaking News AustraliaGet the most important news as it breaksPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThere have been 11 whale entanglements this year associated with the shark control program, according to the conservation group, compared with eight whales last year, and 11 in 2023.A spokesperson for the department of primary industries said the latest entangled whales had been released.The department of primary industries deputy director-general of fisheries, Pauline Jacob, said “interference from two scuba divers unfortunately made the entanglement worse,” complicating attempts to release the whales.Humane World for Animals marine biologist Lawrence Chlebeck said the entanglement could have done serious long-term damage to the two whales, on their long journey to Antarctica.He said there was no basis for the argument that shark nets protect swimmers.

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Government

Lab-Grown Organoids Could Transform Female Reproductive Medicine

Artificial tissues that mimic the placenta, endometrium, ovary and vagina could point to treatments for common conditions such as preeclampsia and endometriosis

In 2017, Ashley Moffett, a reproductive immunologist, walked to the pharmacy near her laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, to buy a pregnancy test. But it wasn’t for Moffett. Her postdoc, Margherita Turco, had created what she thought might be the first cluster of cells capable of mimicking the tissue of the placenta — a placental organoid. But she needed a way to be sure.“We must do a pregnancy test on them,” Moffett said.If Turco was correct, the miniature ball of cells she had created would secrete HCG, the hormone that triggers a positive pregnancy test. “I took the stick, put it in, and it was positive,” says Turco, now a reproductive biologist at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. “It was the best celebration.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Scientists make organoids such as this by coaxing stem cells to grow in a jelly-like substance and to self-assemble into clumps of tissue. The typically hollow or solid balls of cells don’t look anything like real organs. But they do take on key aspects of the organ that they’re meant to represent — liver, brain, lung or stomach, for instance.The mini-organs have the advantage of being more realistic than a 2D cell culture — the conventional in vitro workhorses — because they behave more like tissue. The cells divide, differentiate, communicate, respond to their environment and, just like in a real organ, die. And, because they contain human cells, they can be more representative than many animal models. “Animals are good models in the generalities, but they start to fall down in the particulars,” says Linda Griffith, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.Over the past decade, organoid research has exploded. Researchers have used them to study early brain development, test cancer therapies and much more. And these 3D models stand to become even more crucial as US agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, aim to move away from animal testing.Now researchers are using organoids to study female reproduction, an area in which animal models can be especially limited. Lab mice, for example, don’t menstruate. And their placentas don’t develop in the same way as human placentas do. That challenge, along with a historical lack of funding for women’s health research, has left basic questions unanswered.“I really see it as a powerful model to do science,” says Mirjana Kessler, a cell biologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, who has developed an organoid that mimics the fallopian tube and a biobank of ovarian cancer organoids.Organoids of the placenta, endometrium, ovary and vagina could help to reveal how these organs function, and what happens when things go awry.“There’s so much work to do to understand the normal biology,” Turco says.The placenta invadesThe placenta plays a key part in maternal health during pregnancy. Humans aren’t the only species that develops a placenta, but the “human placenta is quite different than most other species, even primates actually, apart from apes”, says Moffett. Mice and humans, for example, both have placentas that invade the uterine lining, but the timing of development and the depth of invasion differ. Exactly what happens during the early days of placental development is still unclear, but problems at this stage can have serious consequences later.One of the placenta’s first jobs is to create a link between the mother and the developing embryo. To do this, the placenta invades the spiral arteries that feed the uterus. The invasive cells open up the arteries, “essentially making a channel so that mom can provide what she needs through her blood supply”, says Victoria Roberts, a developmental biologist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton. (Nature recognizes that transgender men and non-binary people might have female reproductive organs and might become pregnant. ‘Mother’ is used in this article to reflect language used by the field.)The process can be deadly if it goes wrong. If the placenta invades too deeply, a condition called placenta accreta, the expectant mother can lose too much blood during birth. And if the organ doesn’t invade deeply enough, then the fetus might not get enough nutrients to sustain its growth.Organoids made of placental cells can help reveal how the organ invades the uterine lining.Turco lab, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical ResearchShallow invasion can also impact the mother’s health. When the placenta doesn’t get enough blood, research suggests it can become inflamed and secrete harmful factors into the mother’s blood that trigger pre-eclampsia, a condition characterized by protein build-up in the blood and dangerously high blood pressure. Worldwide, 2–8% of pregnant people develop the condition. “It’s a very serious pregnancy complication that goes silent and undetected until very late into pregnancy,” says Quinton Smith, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Irvine. The only way to cure the condition is to deliver the baby, even if that means a preterm birth.To better understand the condition, Smith, Turco and other researchers are using organoids made of placental cells called trophoblasts to model the molecular processes involved. Turco is focused on the basic biology of how invasion is regulated, a process that seems to be controlled by both the fetus and the mother. “It’s got to be a compromise,” Moffett says. “It’s an absolute dialogue.”That dialogue seems to be happening between the placenta and the uterine lining. As a case in point, when an embryo implants somewhere the lining doesn’t exist — on a scar left by a previous caesarean delivery or in a fallopian tube, for example — “there’s no control of the invasion at all”, Turco says.Research suggests that immune cells called uterine natural killer cells have a key role in this conversation. The cells don’t kill but instead send out chemical signals that help to regulate the invasion of the uterine lining.When Turco, Moffett and their colleagues exposed the mini-placentas to these chemical signals and analysed which genes the cells expressed, they found that many were associated with pre-eclampsia.“I’m sure it’s not the whole story,” Moffett says. “But it does show you how you can use those organoids to ask these fundamental questions about human pregnancy.”Mimicking menstruationTurco’s first attempt to create a mini-placenta in 2016 didn’t go as planned. The placental tissue she was working with contained not only trophoblasts, but also a few rogue maternal cells from the endometrium, the uterine lining that builds up and then sheds each month during menstruation. Those maternal cells “kept on growing and taking over,” she says. “It was a setback at that time.”But now Turco sees it as a wonderful discovery, because she instead grew organoids that represent the endometrium. This, along with another endometrial model published in the same year, really opened the door for everyone else, says Griffith.Griffith has been studying the endometrium for more than a decade. The research is personal. When Griffith hit puberty, she developed a debilitating condition called endometriosis. The disease, which affects about 10% of people with a uterus who are of reproductive age, occurs when endometrium-like tissue grows in places it doesn’t belong.Because this tissue is trapped inside the body, it can’t be shed properly. Instead, it can irritate surrounding healthy tissue, causing inflammation, pain and scar tissue. Although existing therapies address some of the symptoms, they don’t provide a cure.Organoids are typically grown in Matrigel, a jelly-like substance extracted from mouse tumour cells that allows the cells to assemble into 3D structures. Griffith wanted to put epithelial cells, which compose the uterine lining, with stromal cells that support that lining. In the body, these cells need to communicate with each other to bring about the changes that occur with the monthly cycle. But Matrigel is packed with proteins that can hamper the cell-to-cell communication. So Griffith and her colleagues developed a hydrogel that’s entirely synthetic.Griffith’s team has also been working on the next step, a model of abnormal endometrial tissue that the researchers can use to test therapies for the condition. Because blood vessels are crucial to maintaining this tissue, Griffith knew she wanted to include them. To do this, she and her colleagues placed the organoid on a microfluidic chip surrounded by cells that form blood vessels. “We put all of these cells in together at the beginning in a gel, and the blood vessels form spontaneously,” she says. “So the organoids turn into lesion-like structures,” she adds. “It’s actually kind of wild.”Griffith and her team have created these model systems from the cells of about a dozen people with endometriosis, and they’re beginning to use them to test compounds that could be promising therapies for the condition.Turco, meanwhile, has developed her endometrial organoid into a model of menstruation. Her team treated the endometrial organoids with hormones to mimic what happens when the endometrial lining is regenerating. Then the researchers stopped the hormones to mimic the start of menstruation. In the uterus, the lining breaks up naturally. In the model, however, the researchers break the organoids up mechanically. When the cells are put back into a gel, the organoids reform. “And you can keep doing this over and over again,” she says.The model allows them to study the mechanisms at work during regeneration. “That’s not possible to study in humans — like ever,” Turco says. Researchers have long thought that the stem cells that lie beneath the surface of the lining are solely responsible for regenerating it. But Turco’s research suggests that cells on the surface might have a role, too.The vagina, ovaries and moreFor Kathryn Patras, a microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, organoids are a way to explore the diversity of bacteria that colonize the vagina and how they influence human health. A healthy vaginal microbiome can help to prevent harmful bacteria from taking over. A disrupted microbiome, however, seems to increase a woman’s risk of catching a sexually transmitted infection and of experiencing complications during pregnancy.The vaginal microbiome is particularly tricky to study in mice. Its composition is entirely different from that of humans. And introducing a human microbiome into the mouse vagina is nearly impossible. Patras tried for years. “It just failed splendidly,” she says.So Patras and her colleagues harvest naturally existing stem cells from the human vagina and coax these cells to form organoids. These mini-vaginas are hollow balls, not tubes. And because the researchers are trying to study the vaginal lining, which isn’t spherical, they break up the organoids to make “open-faced tissue layers”, says Patras. On one side, the cells have media that nourishes them. On the other, “they’re seeing air, which is what they would see in the human tissue,” she says.One of the team’s goals is to look at whether beneficial microorganisms that are found typically in the vagina, such as Lactobacillus, can protect the vaginal tract from being colonized by harmful microbes. Although the assumption has long been that the pathogens that cause urinary tract infections come from the gut, some research suggests that the vaginal microbiome could play a part. Preventing colonization there might reduce the risk of infections in the urinary tract.Ovaries are also getting the organoid treatment, both for studying fertility and the transition to menopause, which comes with a host of aggravating symptoms and an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and osteoporosis.Francesca Duncan, a reproductive biologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, and her colleagues are using ovarian organoids to study reproductive ageing. Researchers in this field have focused conventionally on the ovary’s follicle. “That’s the kind of functional unit,” says Duncan. It’s the part that generates hormones and contains the developing egg. About a decade ago, however, researchers in her lab discovered that, in mice, it’s not just the egg that ages — the ovary becomes inflamed and stiffer with age. She suspects that this ovarian ageing could influence both the number and quality of the eggs and, therefore, affect fertility.Duncan wanted an in vitro model to study this ageing process and whether drugs might be able to reverse it. Plenty of labs have managed to grow follicles outside the ovary. They’ve even managed to get those follicles to give rise to eggs. But Duncan wanted to study the other cells that make up the ovary. When a graduate student suggested trying to grow an ovarian organoid, Duncan was sceptical. “It seemed like a fad,” she says. But the student was so enthusiastic that Duncan gave the project the green light. The research has already been “really, really fruitful”, she says.So far, Duncan’s team has created ovarian organoids from the ovaries of mice and rhesus macaques, finding, for example, that the stiffening of individual cells in the ovary might be responsible for how the ovary tissue stiffens as it ages.The team’s next step is to develop human ovarian organoids to screen compounds that could stave off this stiffening or even reverse it, Duncan says.Researchers are also using organoids to study ovarian cancer, the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Some teams are studying how the disease emerges by examining organoids that mimic the fallopian tube. That’s because research suggests that the vast majority of the deadliest ovarian cancers actually originate there. Other groups are modelling ovarian and other cancers of the female reproductive tract by growing organoids from tumour tissue that has been taken from people with the disease.Although researchers are learning a great deal from organoids that represent a single tissue or cell type, some teams are hoping to learn even more by combining them with other organoids or incorporating them into more-complex systems. Endometrial organoids can be combined with placental organoids to study a fuller picture of invasion, for example. Or they can be mixed with lab-created embryo models to study implantation.Even these more-intricate organoids won’t capture the full complexity of human tissue. But they don’t have to. Organoids might be a reductionist model, but “still they’re revealing so much,” Turco says. “I keep getting surprised.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 23, 2025.

Animals
Chemicals
Culture

Scientists Find Brain Circuit That Locks Alcohol Users in Addiction Cycle

Researchers at Scripps Research have shown in an animal model that the brain learns to pursue alcohol as a way to find relief, rather than only for its rewarding effects. What drives a person to keep drinking alcohol despite the harm it causes to their health, relationships, and overall well-being? New research from Scripps Research [...]

Scientists have pinpointed a hidden brain circuit that may explain why withdrawal drives people back to alcohol. Credit: ShutterstockResearchers at Scripps Research have shown in an animal model that the brain learns to pursue alcohol as a way to find relief, rather than only for its rewarding effects. What drives a person to keep drinking alcohol despite the harm it causes to their health, relationships, and overall well-being? New research from Scripps Research points to a possible answer: a small midline brain region helps shape how animals learn to drink in order to relieve the stress and discomfort of withdrawal. In a study recently published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the Scripps Research team examined brain activity in the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT) in rats. They discovered that when rats linked environmental cues with alcohol’s ability to ease withdrawal symptoms, activity in this brain region increased, reinforcing relapse behaviors. By uncovering this pathway, the study highlights one of addiction’s most persistent aspects—using alcohol not for enjoyment but to avoid suffering—and may pave the way for new therapies for substance use disorders (SUDs) and related conditions such as anxiety. “What makes addiction so hard to break is that people aren’t simply chasing a high,” says Friedbert Weiss, professor of neuroscience at Scripps Research and senior author of the study. “They’re also trying to get rid of powerful negative states, like the stress and anxiety of withdrawal. This work shows us which brain systems are responsible for locking in that kind of learning, and why it can make relapse so persistent.” “This brain region just lit up in every rat that had gone through withdrawal-related learning,” says co-senior author Hermina Nedelescu of Scripps Research. “It shows us which circuits are recruited when the brain links alcohol with relief from stress—and that could be a game-changer in how we think about relapse.” From behavior to brain maps About 14.5 million people in the United States are estimated to have alcohol use disorder, a condition that includes a spectrum of harmful drinking behaviors. Similar to other forms of substance addiction, it is marked by recurring cycles of withdrawal, abstinence, and relapse. In 2022, researchers Weiss and Nedelescu investigated these processes in rats to better understand how learning shapes addiction in the brain. At the outset, the animals linked alcohol with pleasurable effects and were motivated to drink more. But as they went through repeated periods of withdrawal and relapse, the drive to drink became much stronger. Once the rats learned that alcohol could relieve the distress of withdrawal—an example of negative reinforcement, or the easing of a “negative hedonic state”—they pursued alcohol more intensely and continued seeking it even in challenging conditions. “When rats learn to associate environmental stimuli or contexts with the experience of relief, they end up with an incredibly powerful urge to seek alcohol in the presence of that stimuli –even if conditions are introduced that require great effort to engage in alcohol seeking,” says Weiss. “That is, these rats seek alcohol even if that behavior is punished.” In this study, the researchers set out to identify the specific networks of brain cells that drive the learning process in which environmental cues become linked to the relief of a negative hedonic state. Using advanced whole-brain imaging in rats, they analyzed cellular activity to determine which regions became more responsive to alcohol-associated cues. Four groups of rats were compared: one group that had experienced withdrawal and learned that alcohol reduced a negative hedonic state, and three separate control groups that had not developed this association. Although multiple brain regions showed heightened activity in the withdrawal-experienced group, one region in particular stood out: the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT), a structure already recognized for its involvement in stress and anxiety. “In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense,” says Nedelescu. “The unpleasant effects of alcohol withdrawal are strongly associated with stress, and alcohol is providing relief from the agony of that stressful state.” The researchers hypothesize that this negative hedonic state, and the activation of the PVT in the brain as a response, is critical for how the brain learns and perpetuates addiction. A better understanding of addiction The implications of the new study extend well beyond alcohol, the researchers say. Environmental stimuli conditioned to negative reinforcement—the drive to act in order to escape pain or stress—is a universal feature of the brain, and can drive human behavior beyond substance use disorders such as anxiety disorders, fear-conditioning and traumatic avoidance learning. “This work has potential applications not only for alcohol addiction, but also other disorders where people get trapped in harmful cycles,” says Nedelescu. Future research will zoom in even further. Nedelescu and colleagues at Scripps Research want to expand the study to females and to study neurochemicals released in the PVT when subjects encounter environments associated with the experience of this relief from a negative hedonic state. If they can pinpoint molecules that are involved, it could open new avenues for drug development by targeting those molecules. For now, the new study underscores a key shift in how basic scientists think about addiction. “As psychologists, we’ve long known that addiction isn’t just about chasing pleasure—it’s about escaping those negative hedonic states,” says Weiss. “This study shows us where in the brain that learning takes root, which is a step forward.” Reference: “Recruitment of Neuronal Populations in the Paraventricular Thalamus of Alcohol-Seeking Rats With Withdrawal-Related Learning Experience” by Hermina Nedelescu, Elias Meamari, Nami Rajaei, Alexus Grey, Ryan Bullard, Nathan O’Connor, Nobuyoshi Suto and Friedbert Weiss, 5 August 2025, Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science.DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsgos.2025.100578 This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award T32AA007456, K01 DA054449, R01 AA027555, and R01 AA023183). Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.

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