The research team set out to reconstruct what actually happened to population levels across Japan in the centuries surrounding the eruption. Rather than relying on a single line of evidence, the study examined patterns of human presence across different regions, comparing the situation before the disaster with the situation after it. The volcanic ash itself provides a convenient marker for archaeologists: the so-called disaster layer runs across the landscape of southern Kyushu like a horizontal line, and by studying what life was like below this line and above it, researchers can trace human impacts and responses across the catastrophic boundary. This approach allowed the team to move beyond sweeping narratives of total collapse or unbroken continuity and to identify regionally distinct demographic trajectories that had never been recognized before.

One of the study’s most striking findings concerns southern Kyushu, the region closest to the eruption. The evidence indicates that Jomon forager populations there were already in decline long before the volcano exploded. The disaster, in other words, struck a region that was already sparsely populated and that was only being visited by highly mobile groups rather than densely settled communities. This pre-existing pattern of low and declining population fundamentally shaped how the eruption was experienced in the area. The devastation near the epicenter was real and severe, but the human cost was distributed across a landscape that had already been largely emptied of permanent settlement, a nuance that earlier debates about the eruption had largely overlooked.

In northern Kyushu, the picture was dramatically different. Populations there had been growing before the eruption, and remarkably, this growth trend continued right through the disaster and its aftermath, despite the massive and enduring damage that the eruption inflicted on regional ecosystems. The authors suggest that this resilient growth may have been driven in part by refugees moving out of the worst-hit areas immediately after the catastrophe. Survivors fleeing the ash-buried landscapes of the south appear to have been absorbed into communities further north, where they forged new social relations and contributed to continued demographic expansion. The finding challenges any assumption that a volcanic disaster of this magnitude must produce uniform demographic collapse across an entire archipelago, and instead reveals a patchwork of local outcomes shaped by geography, mobility and social connection.

The study also identified a distinctive pattern of movement and adaptation among inland survivors. Rather than remaining in the devastated interior, these groups appear to have moved away and clustered along northern coastlines, where marine ecosystems recovered relatively quickly after the eruption. Population growth in these coastal zones may have been accelerated by new kinds of adaptation focused on exploiting the abundant resources of the sea. In this sense, the disaster did not merely destroy; it also redirected human settlement and subsistence, pushing communities toward the coast and encouraging economic innovations centered on marine resources. Lead author Enrico Crema, a professor at Cambridge University, notes that while the disaster caused major loss of life, survivors migrated, forged new social relations, innovated new kinds of economy, and appear to have found creative ways to exist and later thrive in the new post-disaster conditions.

Perhaps the most unexpected discovery lies in the more distant regions of Japan, far from the eruption itself. These areas had experienced population growth before the disaster, but after it they saw demographic stagnation or even decline. Such far-reaching effects had never been identified before, and their causes remain under investigation. The authors propose several possible explanations. The eruption may have triggered short-term climate change with consequences that rippled across the archipelago. Alternatively, or additionally, the deer and boar that the Jomon relied on for their food supplies may have suffered catastrophic tooth attrition, possibly a consequence of the animals grazing in ash-covered landscapes, undermining a critical food source for hunter-gatherer communities far from the epicenter. A suite of other volcanic impacts on human health and well-being may also have played a role. Whatever the precise mechanism, the finding demonstrates that a catastrophic eruption can reshape human demography across an entire region, not only in its immediate blast zone.

Taken together, these divergent regional trajectories paint a picture of disaster response that is contingent, uneven and deeply human. Senior author Peter Jordan, professor in archaeology at Lund University, emphasizes that the eruption must have been devastating, exploding out of the sea bed with little warning, battering the Japanese islands with powerful earthquakes and enormous tsunamis, and then blanketing the landscape with meters of volcanic ash. Yet the study shows that even in the most impossible situations, survivors and communities have choices, however limited. They need to act and make decisions, to adjust, to collaborate and to find new connections and social networks. The archaeological record of the Kikai-Akahoya aftermath captures exactly these processes: migration, alliance-building, economic reinvention and the gradual reweaving of social life in the shadow of a catastrophe.

The research also carries broader implications for how scientists and societies think about disasters today. By demonstrating how unpredictable and complex the aftermath of a major disaster can be, the study helps create a deeper understanding of the contingent ways in which cultures and societies cope with sudden shocks and catastrophes. The Jomon foragers of mid-Holocene Japan had no warning systems, no emergency services and no external aid, yet their responses, migration toward refugia, concentration along productive coastlines, and innovation in subsistence strategies, echo patterns familiar from modern disaster studies. The lesson from seven millennia ago is that demographic outcomes after catastrophe are not predetermined by the scale of the event itself, but emerge from the interplay of pre-existing population conditions, environmental recovery rates, mobility and the social capacity of survivors to reorganize.

For archaeologists, the Kikai-Akahoya eruption offers a rare natural experiment: a single, precisely dated, regionally variable catastrophe whose effects can be read in the layers of ash and the traces of human activity above and below them. The new study replaces a decades-old binary debate, total apocalypse versus local survival, with a far richer account in which some regions declined before the disaster even struck, others absorbed refugees and kept growing, coastal communities reinvented themselves around marine resources, and distant populations faltered for reasons that may connect to climate, animal health or wider volcanic impacts. In doing so, it reminds us that the deepest lessons of past disasters concern not the violence of nature but the resourcefulness of the people who endured it.

Subject of Research: Demographic responses of Jomon forager societies to the Kikai-Akahoya volcanic eruption in mid-Holocene Japan

Article Title: How one of Earth’s worst volcanic disasters affected societies

Article References: How one of Earth’s worst volcanic disasters affected societies. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Kikai-Akahoya eruption, Jomon, volcanic disaster, archaeology, demography, prehistoric Japan, Kyushu, hunter-gatherers, Science Advances, Lund University, tsunami, population resilience

The central clue comes from an unexpected place: sodium gas. Water vapour had already been detected in the inner regions of PDS 70 as early as 2023, a puzzling observation in its own right, because the inner parts of a young planetary system are hot and irradiated, conditions in which water should not easily survive unless it is being replenished. The Lund researchers have now shown that variations in sodium gas observed in front of the star may be the signature of comets sweeping through the inner parts of the system. As a comet approaches its host star, the rising temperature causes the ice on its surface to transform directly into gas, a process known as sublimation. The escaping gas leaves a measurable imprint in the starlight, and it is precisely such an imprint that the team believes it has detected.

The observations analysed by the researchers date from 2018, and they reveal sodium gas moving at several kilometres per second relative to the star. More telling than the speed alone is the behaviour of the gas over time: it appears and then disappears over the course of several nights. That transient pattern is exactly what one would expect if comets were passing in front of the star, briefly releasing gas as they are heated and then moving on. A permanent reservoir of gas would not behave this way. The episodic appearance and vanishing of the absorption signal is the kind of fingerprint that astronomers have learned to associate with cometary activity, and it is the first time such a signal has been linked to a star of this type.

“This is the first time we have seen evidence of exocomets orbiting a star that is relatively cool, much like our Sun. Furthermore, this system is the youngest in which exocomet activity has been proposed,” says Aline Novais, an astronomy researcher at Lund University who led the analysis. The comparison with the Sun matters because most previous detections of exocomets have come from hotter stars, where the observational signatures are easier to isolate. Finding evidence of cometary activity around a cool, Sun-like star that is barely five million years old opens a window onto the earliest chapter of planetary development, the very phase during which the Earth and its neighbours were being assembled from dust, gas, and the volatile compounds delivered from farther out.

The implications reach well beyond a single system. Comets form in the cold outer regions of a planetary system, where water and other volatile substances exist as stable ices. In their distant homes, they are effectively frozen reservoirs of the raw materials of habitability. If nothing disturbs them, they remain there indefinitely. But young planetary systems are dynamically restless places, and the Lund team has used computer simulations to model how the comets around PDS 70 might be set in motion. The results show that objects far out in the system can be affected by the gravitational pull of the system’s gas giants and flung inward toward the star. The two massive planets still forming in PDS 70 are therefore not merely spectators; they may be the engines that redirect icy bodies into the inner system.

“Our study suggests that comets may be responsible for transporting water to the inner parts of the planetary system, where planets can form, in the same way as in the early Solar System,” says Novais. The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. A comet that forms in the frigid outskirts carries ice from the moment of its birth. If a gravitational encounter with a giant planet alters its orbit and sends it plunging toward the star, sublimation releases that water, along with carbon-bearing molecules and other volatiles, into the inner regions where rocky planets are taking shape. In effect, the comets function as delivery vehicles, ferrying material across the vast temperature gradient that separates the outer system from the warm inner zone where terrestrial planets can hold liquid water on their surfaces.

That picture resonates strongly with one of the oldest questions in planetary science: where did Earth’s water come from? The young Earth formed in a region of the early Solar System that was almost certainly too hot for water ice to condense, which means the water in our oceans must have arrived from somewhere else. Water-rich asteroids and comets are the two leading candidate sources, and researchers have debated for decades which of the two played the dominant role. Isotopic measurements, particularly the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in Earth’s water, have provided partial constraints, but the question remains open. What the PDS 70 observations offer is the chance to watch a comparable delivery process unfold in a system that is still in its infancy, rather than inferring it from the ancient, heavily altered record preserved in our own Solar System.

“It is reminiscent of a possible process in the early Solar System, in which comets may have helped to deliver water to the young Earth,” says Alexandra Stockwell Murphy, an astronomer at Lund University and a co-author of the study. The parallel is not exact, of course. PDS 70 is a specific system with its own architecture, its own giant planets, and its own history of dynamical evolution. But the physical processes at play, gravitational scattering by giant planets followed by sublimation of icy bodies in the inner system, are universal. If those processes are operating in PDS 70 today, they likely operated in the young Solar System as well, during the era when the giant planets were migrating and the population of small icy bodies was being reshuffled across the system.

The technical achievement behind the detection should not be understated. Sodium is a trace element in cometary material, but it is a valuable diagnostic because it produces strong, narrow absorption lines that stand out clearly against the spectrum of a star. Detecting the gas requires not only high-resolution spectroscopy but also careful discrimination between the signal from the passing comet and the much larger signal from the star itself and from the surrounding disc. The transient nature of the absorption, appearing and disappearing over several nights, combined with the measured velocity offset of several kilometres per second relative to the star, together provide a consistent picture of small, fast-moving bodies releasing gas as they pass through the inner system. The orbital simulations then close the loop, demonstrating that the gravitational influence of the system’s gas giants is sufficient to populate such orbits from the outer reservoir.

The next chapter of the story may arrive soon. “And when the Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently being built in Chile, becomes operational in the coming years, we will be able to find out whether there are any further planets in the system and thus gain an even clearer picture of how water and other building blocks of planets are transported,” concludes Jens Hoeijmakers, an astronomy researcher at Lund University. The Extremely Large Telescope, with its enormous collecting area and advanced instrumentation, will be capable of imaging and characterising planets around nearby young stars with unprecedented sensitivity, and PDS 70 is certain to be among its prime targets. If additional planets are found, their gravitational influence could be incorporated into more refined models of how icy bodies are scattered inward. For now, the sodium signal flickering in front of a five-million-year-old star offers a rare and tantalising glimpse of a process that may have made Earth habitable, playing out again, 370 light-years away, in a system still writing its opening pages.

Subject of Research: Evidence of water-delivering exocomets orbiting the young star PDS 70

Article Title: Comets may have transported water to a young planetary system

Article References: Comets may have transported water to a young planetary system. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: exocomets, PDS 70, water delivery, planetary formation, protoplanetary disk, sodium gas, sublimation, Lund University, Nature Communications, Extremely Large Telescope, young star, gas giants

The study grew out of a Master’s thesis by Hannes Bonhoff, who recently completed his degree in biology at Lund University, and was co-authored with Heikki Helanterä, professor of evolutionary biology and genomics at the University of Oulu. Their starting point was a conceptual one: what does it actually mean, biologically, for a colony to be a single organism rather than a society of many? The superorganism idea has circulated in biology for more than a century, but the authors argue that it has rarely been worked through in a genuinely biological context for honey bees. By taking the concept seriously, they say, previously familiar features of colony life fall into a new and revealing pattern.

The most striking of these patterns concerns the life cycle. Bonhoff likens the colony to an individual mammal that passes through gestation and extensive parental care. Every generation of a honey bee colony, he notes, develops from a single bee — the queen — and progresses through stages that parallel those of a mammal: embryo, foetus, juvenile, and adult. The comparison extends to mortality. Just as an individual animal ages, the colony as a superorganism undergoes an inevitable biological ageing process, which means that a colony dies after only a few years. In this framing, the death of a colony is not a failure of management but a normal stage in the life history of a single, long-lived organism.

Reproduction is where the analogy becomes most vivid. Honey bees reproduce by swarming: the queen and roughly half of the colony’s workers fly off together to find a new hive, while a newly raised queen remains in the old nest to found the next generation. Viewed through the superorganism lens, this is parental care of an extraordinary kind. The offspring colony inherits the mother’s nest — a fully built, climate-controlled structure stocked with food — while the parent organism risks its life by flying away to settle elsewhere. “When this superorganism reproduces, the offspring are cared for with great dedication by the parent, in some cases even at the cost of the parent’s life,” Bonhoff says.

The care does not end with real estate. The developing offspring colony matures inside the safety of its mother colony, supplied with food, shelter, and a well-constructed hive. The mother colony also transmits knowledge. Young bees learn the species’ famous dance language, the symbolic communication system used to direct nestmates to flowers, and the parent colony guides the new generation toward the most nutritious foraging sites. In biological terms, the researchers describe a form of cultural and nutritional provisioning that parallels the extended parental investment seen in mammals and birds, here spread across thousands of individual workers acting, functionally, as the organs of a single body.

Niklas Wahlberg, professor of systematic biology at Lund University and one of Bonhoff’s thesis supervisors alongside Helanterä, finds the reframing valuable precisely because it gives the superorganism concept concrete biological content. “The concept itself has been around for a long time, but this is the first time it has been applied in a genuine biological context,” he says. “It’s fascinating to think that, just as individual cells make up an organism, individual bees with different roles make up the superorganism.” His comment underscores the intellectual appeal of the paper: it takes a term that has often served as an evocative analogy and asks what follows if it is treated as a literal description of the colony’s biology.

The practical stakes emerge when the framework is applied to modern beekeeping. Contemporary management, the authors argue, is built on the assumption that a colony can be kept young and healthy indefinitely. Two of the most widespread interventions — the forced replacement of queens and the artificial prevention of swarming — are designed precisely to interrupt the colony’s natural life cycle, suppressing reproduction and resetting the superorganism’s biological clock. Bonhoff’s analysis suggests that these practices do not merely inconvenience the bees; they fundamentally conflict with the colony’s natural reproductive strategy and, in doing so, may undermine its ability to cope with disease.

The most urgent example is the Varroa mite, a parasitic arachnid that preys on honey bees worldwide and is widely regarded as one of the greatest threats to managed pollination. Because the superorganism framework ties colony health to the natural life history — including swarming, which naturally breaks the reproductive cycle of parasites within a nest — Bonhoff argues that understanding colonies as single organisms offers crucial insights into how to deal with such parasites. A shift in perspective, he suggests, is valuable for the global beekeeping community as it works to safeguard this essential pollinator, pointing toward more sustainable and animal-friendly methods rather than indefinite artificial rejuvenation.

“We have analysed what it means for a bee colony to be a single organism, which opens up new insights into the fascinating life of the honey bee,” Bonhoff says. Whether the field adopts the superorganism as a working biological category or treats it as a productive heuristic, the study makes a clear case that the choice is not cosmetic. If a colony is an individual — developing, ageing, reproducing, and dying on its own schedule — then every management decision that interrupts that schedule becomes a biological intervention with consequences that beekeepers have not fully accounted for. For an animal on which much of the world’s food production depends, that reframing may prove to be more than a philosophical exercise.

Subject of Research: The honey bee colony as a superorganism and its implications for beekeeping

Article Title: A honey bee colony can be viewed as a superorganism

Article References: A honey bee colony can be viewed as a superorganism. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: honey bees, superorganism, colony biology, swarming, Varroa mite, beekeeping, parental care, life history, Insectes Sociaux, Lund University, evolutionary biology, pollinators

The first of two recent studies from Lund University draws on insurance data spanning six seasons. All ice hockey-related injuries that led to a claim under the players’ licence insurance were recorded by the insurance company, providing a nationwide, objective measure of injury burden across the league. In the season before body-checking was introduced, the reported injury rate stood at 6.6 injuries per 1,000 player-hours. The following season, the figure surged to 16.7 injuries per 1,000 player-hours, an increase that represents far more than a statistical fluctuation in a league of this size.

The numbers did not remain at that peak. Injury rates fell slightly in subsequent seasons, and the average across the six seasons studied settled at 11 injuries per 1,000 player-hours, compared with an average of 6.0 for the corresponding period before the rule change. Amanda Lahti, a researcher at the Centre for Primary Care Research at Lund University and lead author of both studies, cautions that the long-term trajectory remains uncertain. Injury rates may continue to fall as players adapt to the physical nature of play, but that remains to be seen. She also notes that it is not possible to say with certainty that the higher injury figures are due to body-checking, although she and her colleagues speculate that this is the case, since everything else remains the same compared with previous seasons.

The pattern of injuries offers clues about the mechanisms at work. Shoulder and knee injuries were the most common claims handled by the insurance company, and Lahti speculates that this may be because players take body-checks against the boards with their arms outstretched, a position that loads the shoulder complex and exposes the knee to rotational forces. From a biomechanical standpoint, this is consistent with what is known about board collisions in ice hockey: when a player is checked into the boards with an extended arm, the impact energy is transferred through the glenohumeral joint, while the lower body absorbs unpredictable twisting forces on the ice surface. The apparent levelling-off of the figures could possibly be interpreted, according to Lahti, as players learning to play a more physical game over time, acquiring the positioning, anticipation and body control that male players in checking leagues typically develop from junior levels onward.

The second study took a different methodological approach, drawing on a prospective injury register maintained by the medical staff within the league. Rather than relying on insurance claims, this study identified injuries that resulted in absence from training or matches, giving a clinical picture of the burden that directly affects team availability. A total of 46 match-related injuries were recorded during the study period. The results show that body-checking is now the most frequent cause of injury in the league, and that it is often associated with concussion, which has become the most common type of injury overall.

Two further findings from the clinical register deserve particular attention. First, players often continued to play in games despite being injured: in six out of ten cases of concussion, the player remained on the ice. This is a troubling figure for anyone involved in athlete welfare, since continuing to play with a concussive injury risks second-impact syndrome and prolongs recovery. Second, most of the injuries, including concussions, occurred in the third period, towards the end of the game. Lahti suggests this could indicate that fatigue increases the risk of injury, a well-recognised phenomenon in contact sports, where deteriorating neuromuscular control late in play compromises a player’s ability to prepare for and absorb impacts.

Lahti points out that the explanation for late-game injuries may extend beyond simple tiredness after a tough match. As female ice hockey players generally earn less than their male counterparts, many combine elite sport with paid work, which can limit their recovery and contribute to increased fatigue. She would like to go on and gain a deeper understanding of how sleep and recovery might affect the risk of injury, a question that sits at the intersection of sports medicine, physiology and the social realities of semi-professional women’s sport. Chronic under-recovery, whether driven by compressed schedules, employment demands or insufficient sleep, is increasingly recognised as a modifiable risk factor for both traumatic and overuse injuries.

She is careful to emphasise the limitations of the work. The clinical study tracked the development of injuries over only two years and is based on a relatively small number of injury incidents, which means the results should be interpreted with some caution. Nevertheless, the findings raise important questions and form the basis for further research. Lahti argues that female athletes should not be regarded as “little men”: biological, anatomical and social differences influence the risk of sports injuries, yet only a small proportion of sports medicine research is carried out on women. This makes women-specific studies essential. Although the study has its limitations, she says, it provides important insights and baseline data for the continued monitoring of the cohort and the progression of injuries over time. As a specialist in general medicine and a sports doctor, she works on the prevention of injuries on a daily basis, giving the research a direct clinical grounding.

Perhaps the most intriguing result is a discrepancy at the heart of the findings: the players themselves remain positive about body-checking, and they do not believe it leads to more injuries. This stands in sharp contrast to the objective injury data, which show a marked rise in claims and a new leading cause of injury. Lahti will be examining this mismatch between the players’ own perceptions and the injury data in more detail in a forthcoming paper. Among other things, she has sought the help of a gender researcher from the International Olympic Committee to gain a better understanding of it. The divergence may reflect how athletes weigh the costs and benefits of physical play, how norms within the sport shape perceptions of risk, or how the identity and legitimacy that body-checking confers on the women’s game influence players’ willingness to accept its consequences.

The international significance of the Swedish experiment is considerable. Both the United States and Canada have also recently started to allow body-checking in women’s hockey, and they are keen to know what impact the change has had in Sweden. The Lund studies offer the first rigorous baseline against which other hockey nations can measure their own experience. Lahti’s work has now received a further boost in the form of a grant of SEK 1.2 million from the Dr P Håkansson Foundation, which she describes as very significant and one she hopes will help generate more knowledge that promotes women’s participation in sport at both recreational and elite levels, as well as contributing to the development of the sport. Whether injury rates continue to decline as players adapt, whether concussion prevention measures can blunt the most serious risks, and why players perceive the game as safer than the data suggest, are questions that the coming years of monitoring this unique cohort are expected to answer.

Subject of Research: Effects of legalising body-checking on injury rates in elite women's ice hockey

Article Title: More injuries following the policy change of body-checking in women’s ice hockey – but the players are positive about the change

Article References: More injuries following the policy change of body-checking in women’s ice hockey – but the players are positive about the change. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: women's ice hockey, body-checking, SDHL, injury epidemiology, concussion, sports medicine, Lund University, insurance data, athlete recovery, female athletes, Sweden, injury prevention

Researchers led by Christoffer Johansson, associate professor at Lund University, set out to understand how a single wing design can serve both long-distance migration and the demanding, low-speed manoeuvres of aerial insect hunting. Using a wind tunnel, they observed nightjars flying at different speeds and measured the airflow behind the birds. This technique allows scientists to quantify the forces a flying animal generates with each wingbeat, by analysing how the wake it leaves behind carries momentum into the surrounding air. By examining the wake at a range of flight speeds, the team could reconstruct how efficiently the wings produced lift and thrust as the birds adjusted their flight style.

The results revealed a clear aerodynamic cost tied to the nightjar’s wing shape. The bird has broad wing tips, a feature that is likely advantageous when flying slowly, because broad wings generate more lift at low speeds and give the animal greater control during tight turns and slow pursuit of prey. That is exactly what a nocturnal insect hunter needs. But the wind tunnel measurements showed that as the nightjar increases its flight speed, lift production becomes less efficient. The very feature that helps the bird hunt appears to penalise it during fast, sustained flight, the kind of performance that matters most on a migratory journey of thousands of kilometres.

“This runs counter to the intuitive image of a long-distance migrant as a perfectly optimised flying machine. Instead, the nightjar’s wings appear to be a compromise between several different demands. The bird can fly slowly and manoeuvre while hunting, but the trade-off is reduced efficiency in lift generation at higher speeds,” says Christoffer Johansson. In other words, the nightjar pays a measurable aerodynamic price at cruising speeds for the ability to fly slowly and agilely when catching insects. Its wings are not specialised for either task alone; they are shaped by the sum of everything the bird must do to survive.

This finding challenges a common way of thinking about migratory birds. Long-distance migrants are often assumed to have wings finely tuned for efficient forward flight, with shapes that minimise the energy cost of covering vast distances. The nightjar tells a more nuanced story. Evolution does not optimise a single performance metric; it balances multiple tasks that an animal must perform throughout its life. For the nightjar, the ability to forage effectively at night is at least as important as migratory efficiency, and its wing morphology reflects that balance between long-distance travel, foraging, slow flight and advanced manoeuvrability.

The study also produced a second, unexpected discovery that reaches well beyond nightjars. The researchers found that the nightjar generates thrust even when its wings move upward during the wingbeat. In most birds, the upstroke is largely a recovery phase: the wings fold and are brought back into position, contributing little or no forward force. An actively thrust-producing upstroke, in which the wings push against the air on the way up, had previously been associated mainly with bats and insects rather than birds. Bats, whose wing membranes cannot fold as compactly as feathered wings, rely on active upstrokes to keep generating force throughout the beat cycle.

“What’s interesting is that the same type of aerodynamic solution seems to appear in quite different animals. This suggests that the upstroke does not have to be merely a passive or lift generating part of the wingbeat. It can be actively used to generate thrust when the wings cannot be folded very much,” says Christoffer Johansson. The nightjar’s broad wings, so useful for slow flight, apparently cannot be folded very much during each wingbeat. That constraint, it turns out, links the two discoveries in the study. The same wing geometry that reduces lift efficiency at high speed also restricts wing folding, and when folding is restricted, the bird turns its upstroke into a source of thrust rather than letting it go to waste.

This convergence between birds, bats and insects is scientifically striking because these groups evolved flight independently and have very different wing structures. Birds fly with feathered wings attached to modified forelimbs, bats with elastic membranes stretched between elongated finger bones, and insects with rigid or flexible chitinous plates. Yet when the mechanical constraints are similar, when wings cannot be folded much during the stroke, similar aerodynamic solutions emerge. The finding suggests that active upstroke thrust is not an exotic peculiarity of bats and insects, but a general principle of flapping flight that appears whenever wing anatomy demands it, and that birds can and do make use of it as well.

The broader significance of the work lies in what it says about how evolution shapes animals that must perform several different tasks. A wing does not need to be optimised for a single type of flight to be successful. Instead, it may represent a balance among migration, foraging, slow flight and manoeuvrability, with each function pulling the morphology in a different direction. For the nightjar, the compromise is visible in the numbers: broad wing tips that enable slow, agile hunting at the cost of less efficient lift generation at higher speeds, and limited wing folding that turns the upstroke into an active thrust-producing phase. The bird’s flight performance is thus a record of the ecological demands placed on it, readable through careful measurement of the air it leaves behind.

The findings may also prove relevant beyond biology. Flapping drones and other flying robots face constraints similar to those of birds, including limits on how much their wings can fold during each wingbeat. Understanding how the nightjar extracts thrust from its upstroke could inform the design of flapping-wing aircraft that must operate efficiently across a range of speeds and flight styles. “We now want to investigate how common this way of generating force is among other birds and flying animals. It could help us understand which aerodynamic principles are specific to the nightjar and which are more general. This knowledge may also inspire the development of new types of flapping aircraft,” Christoffer Johansson concludes. The nightjar, a bird long known for its silent, ghostly flight through summer nights, has now shown that even a seemingly familiar wing can hold surprises about the physics of flight and the compromises that evolution strikes between living fast, flying far and hunting slow.

Subject of Research: Aerodynamic trade-offs in the flight mechanics of the European nightjar

Article Title: Nightjar wings reveal a trade-off between hunting slowly and travelling far

Article References: Nightjar wings reveal a trade-off between hunting slowly and travelling far. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: nightjar, flight mechanics, aerodynamics, migration, wind tunnel, upstroke thrust, wing morphology, PLOS Biology, Lund University, evolution, flapping flight, biomechanics

The research, published in the journal The Holocene, reconstructs the immigration history and extinction dynamics of the Scandinavian aurochs, Bos primigenius, using a combination of ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and osteological analysis. The team extracted genetic material from aurochs bones recovered from bogs and archaeological settlement sites across southern Sweden and Denmark, then tracked how the frequency of dated specimens and the number of bones at archaeological sites changed over time. By comparing the age composition of the bones at different sites and relating the results to regional palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records, the researchers were able to piece together a timeline of arrival, isolation and decline that differs in important ways from what scientists had previously assumed.

The story begins around 11,700 years ago, at the close of the last Ice Age, when aurochs first began colonising Scandinavia as the ice sheets retreated and new land opened up for grazing animals. What the researchers discovered about that colonisation surprised them. As the animals moved north from mainland Europe up through the Jutland peninsula and then across Zealand and Scania, their genetic diversity did not stay constant. Instead, it dropped steadily with each step northward, a pattern the team interprets as a severe population bottleneck suffered during the migration itself. The aurochs that reached Scandinavia were therefore a genetically impoverished subset of the wider European population from the very start, carrying far less of the variation that helps species weather environmental change.

“I found it incredibly interesting to see how the genetic diversity of the aurochs decreased as you moved north from mainland Europe up through Jutland and then dropped further across Zealand and Scania. It’s a textbook example of a bottleneck in evolutionary genetics,” says Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and a senior author of the study. In evolutionary terms, a bottleneck occurs when a population passes through a phase in which only a small number of individuals contribute to the next generations, stripping out genetic variation. For a large-bodied species with naturally low population densities, such a loss of diversity can have consequences that persist for millennia, reducing fertility, increasing vulnerability to disease and limiting the ability to adapt to shifting climates and habitats.

One of the study’s most significant revisions concerns when the Scandinavian aurochs became isolated from their continental relatives. It had previously been believed that the population was cut off around 10,000 years ago, early in the postglacial recolonisation. The genetic evidence tells a different story. The Scandinavian aurochs remained in contact with the main European population well beyond that date, with genes continuing to flow across the connection between the two regions. True isolation came only when the land bridge linking Scandinavia to the European mainland was finally flooded around 8,000 years ago, an event that created the Danish-Swedish straits and severed the population for good. From that moment, the aurochs of southern Scandinavia were on their own, a small, genetically depleted group with no possibility of reinforcement from the healthier populations to the south.

The timing of that isolation proved fateful in another way as well. The formation of the straits coincided with a period of apparently intense human hunting, and the archaeological record shows a sharp decline in the Swedish aurochs population during this window. On the island of Zealand in Denmark, the pressure was even more decisive: the aurochs disappeared from the island completely. For a species already squeezed by low genetic diversity, the combination of rising seas cutting off escape routes and human hunters targeting the remaining animals appears to have pushed local populations past the point of recovery. The study thus reframes the Scandinavian extinction not as a single catastrophic event but as a cascade of pressures arriving in quick succession.

Even so, the aurochs did not vanish from the entire region immediately. In southern Sweden, a remnant population persisted in low numbers until at least 6,500 years ago, hanging on for some fifteen centuries after the straits formed. What finally finished them off, the researchers argue, was a change in the landscape itself. The open, park-like environments that aurochs favoured after the Ice Age gradually gave way to dense forests as the climate warmed and woodland spread across the region. This shift is thought to have been detrimental to the species, which depended on more open habitats for grazing. Habitat fragmentation and degradation, layered on top of genetic depletion and continued human pressure, closed the last chapter of the aurochs in Scandinavia thousands of years before the species finally blinked out in Poland.

“These ancient case studies reveal long-term patterns – which species are most vulnerable, how ecosystems shift and transform over time, and when and how human activity began shaping these environments,” says Erika Rosengren, a doctoral student in historical osteology at Lund University and lead author of the paper. The research team concludes that it was the combined effects of genetic depletion, human pressure, habitat fragmentation and habitat degradation that set the Scandinavian extinction in motion, a more intricate set of causes than the simple human-overexploitation narrative that had dominated earlier thinking. The finding matters because it demonstrates that even a large, widespread and ecologically flexible species can be driven to regional extinction when several stressors overlap, each one individually survivable but collectively lethal.

The implications reach well beyond the aurochs. As Rosengren points out, the results add nuance to the understanding of human impact on animal populations and confirm that species rarely disappear because of a single factor. Conservation plans, she argues, must therefore be comprehensive and consider multiple stressors at the same time, rather than focusing on one threat in isolation. The study also lends scientific weight to a specific practical recommendation: the establishment of ecological corridors for threatened wildlife, rather than relying on isolated nature reserves. The fate of the Scandinavian aurochs, trapped on a newly isolated peninsula with depleted genes, shrinking habitat and persistent hunting, is a vivid illustration of why connectivity between populations can be as important as protecting the animals themselves.

In that sense, an extinction that unfolded more than six millennia ago speaks directly to the present. Many of today’s threatened large mammals face the same stacked pressures: small and fragmented populations, shrinking genetic diversity, habitat loss and continuing human exploitation. The aurochs, whose domestic descendants now number more than a billion animals worldwide, offer a rare and unusually well-documented case study of how those pressures interact over thousands of years. By combining ancient DNA from bog-preserved bones with radiocarbon chronologies and archaeological assemblages, the Lund-led team has shown that the earliest regional extinction of Europe’s wild cattle was neither sudden nor simple, but a slow-motion collision of genetics, geography and human ambition whose lessons conservationists are still learning to apply.

Subject of Research: The extinction dynamics of the Scandinavian aurochs reconstructed through ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating and archaeological evidence.

Article Title: Study sheds new light on why aurochs disappeared in Scandinavia

Article References: Study sheds new light on why aurochs disappeared in Scandinavia. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: aurochs, Scandinavia, ancient DNA, population bottleneck, extinction, Holocene, habitat fragmentation, conservation, Lund University, Bos primigenius, ecological corridors, zooarchaeology

The scientific significance of the study lies in its deductive design. Rather than letting themes emerge freely from interview data, the researchers deliberately mapped participants’ narratives onto the CHIME framework, a widely accepted conceptual model of personal recovery developed through systematic review. CHIME stands for Connectedness, Hope and optimism, Identity, Meaning and purpose, and Empowerment, and it has become something of a gold standard for characterising what recovery from mental health problems actually involves. By testing whether the experiences of Balancing Everyday Life participants fit this established framework, the investigators could determine both whether the intervention promotes recovery in the sense that the field recognises and whether it offers anything the framework itself has overlooked.

The data came from a re-analysis of in-depth qualitative interviews originally collected during and after a randomised controlled trial of the intervention. From nineteen original interviewees, the researchers purposefully selected eleven information-rich cases: nine women and two men aged between thirty and sixty-three, with an average age of forty-six. Their diagnoses spanned bipolar disorder, psychosis, emotionally unstable personality disorder, ADHD, PTSD, eating disorders, panic disorder, depression, stress-related problems and previous substance abuse. Crucially, all had been interviewed at the completion of the intervention, allowing the researchers to capture recovery reflections at a consistent point in time. Semi-structured interviews lasting between thirty minutes and two and a half hours were transcribed verbatim and then analysed using the three phases of deductive content analysis: preparation, organising and reporting.

The results were striking in their breadth. Every one of the five CHIME categories was represented in the participants’ accounts, and most of the framework’s subcategories appeared as well. Two categories dominated the narratives, however: Connectedness and Empowerment. Participants repeatedly described how the safe, accepting climate of the group allowed them to open up to others, share experiences, exchange tips and support each other’s goals. One participant described recognising fellow group members as comrades in a shared fight, even when their specific goals differed. Another explained that the group was the first place she felt able to talk with people who had also been through hardship, expanding a social network she had not previously had and breaking a cycle of isolation that many mental health service users know intimately.

The importance of trusting relationships extended beyond the peer group to the healthcare staff who led the sessions. Participants emphasised that group leaders who listened without rushing, who radiated calmness and who responded to missed sessions with empathy rather than critique strengthened their confidence in the care system and in themselves. Support from family, friends and even new acquaintances made through the intervention also featured prominently, with one participant describing how a friend introduced through a fellow group member helped her get to a gym activity and became a source of mutual inspiration. These findings align with a substantial body of occupational therapy research showing that group-based activity interventions carry therapeutic value precisely because belonging and shared occupation reinforce one another.

The Empowerment category proved equally central. Participants spoke about personal responsibility in their own care, including having a voice in decisions about medication, and about regaining control over daily life through concrete strategies. One participant set a goal of reducing his sleeping pills and valued the freedom to experiment with his doctor rather than simply following a prescription. Others described learning to set limits, to tell an employment agency when they could not cope with too many changes, to break housework into manageable half-hour segments, and to let go of activities that drained them, such as one participant who abandoned a photography hobby when the fear of failure outweighed the joy. Balancing rest and activity, setting realistic goals matched to one’s abilities, and pacing oneself step by step emerged as practical recovery tools that participants carried into their everyday lives.

Beyond confirming the CHIME categories, the study made a discovery with potentially broader implications: two recovery experiences that the framework does not cover appeared consistently in the data. The first was occupational balance, the sense that daily activities are satisfyingly mixed, aligned with personal values and matched to one’s abilities. Because Balancing Everyday Life is explicitly built around learning about and self-analysing occupational balance, its prominence among participants’ recovery experiences may reflect what is distinctive about occupational therapy as a discipline. The second was self-esteem and self-confidence, which participants reported had grown through the course and which the researchers suggest could be added to CHIME’s Identity category. These additions hint that recovery frameworks developed in psychology and psychiatry may benefit from incorporating occupational science concepts that capture how people structure and experience their daily doing.

The study’s findings also illuminate the temporal nature of recovery. Categories such as Hope and optimism, Identity and Meaning and purpose appeared in the narratives but less prominently, and not all of their subcategories were identified. The researchers propose a plausible explanation: participants were interviewed shortly after completing the intervention, at a relatively early stage of what is often a long, multi-phase recovery journey. People earlier in that journey may experience belonging and connection most vividly, while hope, a redefined identity and a rebuilt sense of meaning may consolidate later. This interpretation is supported by the intervention’s randomised trial data, which showed that quality-of-life improvements among Balancing Everyday Life participants emerged only at a six-month follow-up rather than immediately after completion. The authors therefore call for follow-up studies that track recovery after occupational therapy interventions over longer horizons.

Methodologically, the researchers took deliberate steps to ensure trustworthiness. Two occupational therapy students coded transcripts independently and reached consensus under supervision, while one author independently re-analysed an entire interview, with discrepancies resolved through iterative discussion at the subcategory level. The selection of participants across different regions, group leaders, genders, ages and service contexts strengthened dependability, and illustrative participant quotes bolstered credibility. The authors acknowledge that the interview data was originally collected for earlier inductive studies and that the interview guide did not probe recovery specifically, but they argue that this openness was actually a strength, since questions framed around CHIME would have led participants toward the framework’s own concepts rather than testing whether those concepts genuinely fit their experience.

The clinical implications are concrete. The study concludes that Balancing Everyday Life supports recovery in the way the field has conceptualised it, providing evidence that practitioners can use when encouraging service users to enrol. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates that an occupational therapy intervention, grounded in everyday activity rather than symptom management, can foster the connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment that define personal recovery. For a population that research consistently shows to be under-occupied, isolated at home and struggling with imbalanced daily routines, the message is quietly radical: recovery can be built through the ordinary architecture of daily life, one goal, one homework assignment and one shared group session at a time. As mental health systems worldwide search for recovery-oriented services, this Swedish study suggests that the humble tools of occupational therapy, goal setting, self-reflection, activity strategies and peer belonging, deserve a central place in that conversation.

The broader context of the study’s intervention is worth noting. Balancing Everyday Life was evaluated in a randomised controlled trial across community-based and specialist psychiatry units in southern and western Sweden, where it demonstrated significant gains in occupational engagement, activity level and occupational balance compared with standardised treatment. The intervention itself unfolds over sixteen weeks through fourteen themed group sessions covering topics such as meaning and motivation, daily habits and social activities. Between sessions, participants pursue individually chosen homework activities, a structure rooted in self-reflection, goal setting and the testing of activity strategies in real-world settings.

The concept of personal recovery that anchors the analysis has its own history. Established during the 1990s as an alternative to purely biomedical notions of clinical recovery, it emphasises that individuals can experience health and well-being despite persisting symptoms, regaining control over their lives and participating more actively in meaningful activity. The CHIME framework was developed to bring clarity to this process and is now used in both research and clinical practice internationally.

The study also situates itself within a documented problem: mental health service users tend to live low-active lives, spending much of their time on sleep, meals, self-care and quiet pursuits, with isolation at home common and under-occupation far more frequent than overload. Occupational balance, defined as a subjectively satisfying mix of work, leisure, housework and rest aligned with personal values, has been shown to link with well-being and recovery, making it a natural target for therapeutic attention. The study was approved by the ethical review board in Lund and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Subject of Research: Recovery experiences of mental health service users participating in the Balancing Everyday Life occupational therapy intervention, analysed with the CHIME recovery framework

Article Title: Recovery experiences among mental health service users going through the Balancing Everyday Life™ intervention – A deductive qualitative study

Article References: Eklund, M., & Argentzell, E. (2025). Recovery experiences among mental health service users going through the Balancing Everyday Life ™ intervention – A deductive qualitative study. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 32(1), Article 2451267. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2451267

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2451267

Keywords: occupational therapy, mental health recovery, Balancing Everyday Life, CHIME framework, personal recovery, occupational balance, empowerment, connectedness, qualitative research, group intervention, mental illness, Lund University