Science Research Weekly

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 15, Expand Your Scientific Scope. Get ready for algal microplastics remediation, cosmic large-scale structure, coffee and dementia risk, tales of outer membrane vesicles and tumor microenvironment subtypes, why a high R-squared can be misleading, and the MIRA award from the NIH. Science On.

References:
Remediation and upcycling of microplastics by algae with wastewater nutrient removal and bioproduction potential
Large-scale Structure in COSMOS-Web: Tracing Galaxy Evolution in the Cosmic Web up to z ∼ 7 with the Largest JWST Survey
Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function
Load Identification in Bistable Spacecraft Booms
via Parametric Data-Driven Modeling
"Like Taking the Path of Least Resistance": Exploring the Impact of LLM Interaction on the Creative Process of Programming
Discovery and characterisation of OMVs produced by the bee gut microbiota
TumorArchetypeR: A modular framework to derive
signature-based tumor subtypes
Learning Data Science: Why a High R^2 Can Be Misleading
Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) for Early Stage Investigators (ESI)

R Packages:
marsruntime: Portable Mars Runtime Replay
QsRutils: R Functions Useful for Community Ecology
ROCsurvcomp: ROC-Based Methods for Comparing Survival Distributions with Right, Left, and Doubly Censored Data
warmthcompetence: Warmth and Competence Detectors

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 14, Get ready for chemical synthesis a la LMMs, an amino acid for Alzheimer’s pathology suppression, a trans-Neptunian object with an atmosphere, PhysForge vs. ProtSpace, and cancer grants from the Department of War.

References:
Chemical reasoning in LLMs unlocks strategy-aware synthesis planning and reaction mechanism elucidation
Oral administration of arginine suppresses Aβ pathology in animal models of Alzheimer's disease
Multiple independent genetic code reassignments of the UAG stop codon in phyllopharyngean ciliates
Detection of an atmosphere on a trans-Neptunian object beyond Pluto
Bioprinting of Microtissues Within Mechanically Tunable Support Baths to Engineer Anisotropic Musculoskeletal Tissues
PhysForge: Generating Physics-Grounded 3D Assets for Interactive Virtual World
ProtSpace: Protein Universe in Your Browser
DoW Peer Reviewed Cancer, Idea Award
Bioengineering Research Grants

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 13, Attack of the 50-foot Octopus! Get ready for giant predatory Cretaceous octopuses, ice-water clouds on a distant Jupiter, anti-viral acrylic surfaces, 3D printing inside living cells, March’s top 40 new CRAN packages, and a grant on Engineering Biological and Biomedical Systems. Science On.

References:
Compositional selection of phospholipid compartments in icy environments drives the enrichment of encapsulated genetic information
Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans
A Second Visit to Eps Ind Ab with JWST: New Photometry Confirms Ammonia and Suggests Thick Clouds in the Exoplanet Atmosphere of the Closest Super-Jupiter
Designing Scalable Mechano-Virucidal Nanostructured Acrylic Surfaces for Enhanced Viral Inactivation
Removal of Microplastics from Drinking Water by Moringa oleifera Seed: Comparative Performance with Alum in Direct and in-Line Filtration Systems
Two-Photon 3D Printing of Functional Microstructures Inside Living Cells
CAN WE TEACH GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THE DESIGN
LANGUAGE OF ENGINEERED LIVING MATERIALS?
Harnessing AI to Build Virtual Cells
Urban soil microbiomes exhibit taxonomic and functional potential for enhanced contaminant cycling
R 4.6.0 is released
March 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages
Little useless-useful R functions – Desk plant simulator
Design your plots (ggplot) for mobile
Engineering Biological and Biomedical Systems (EBBS)
INSPIRING GENERATIONS OF NEW INNOVATORS TO IMPACT TECHNOLOGIES IN ENERGY 2026 (IGNIITE 2026)
John Templeton Foundation - Life Sciences

R Packages:
rPandas: Translating from R to Python's Pandas Package

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 12, Dropping the PepHammer. Get ready for ancient soft sponges, astronomical biosignature spotting via grouped planets, the Epidemiology of AI, crop management via smartphone, an examination of NIH funding outputs, dropping the PepHammer, asking if AI agents save time for scientists, and a grant on specialty crops. Science On.

References:
A late-Ediacaran crown-group sponge animal
Pearling drives mitochondrial DNA nucleoid distribution
p21+TREM2+ senescent macrophages fuel inflammaging and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease
An Agnostic Biosignature Based on Modeling Panspermia and Terraforming
Visplot: A visibility plot and observation scheduling tool for
astronomical observatories
AI-assisted writing and the reorganization of scientific knowledge
The Epidemiology of Artificial Intelligence
The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE)
Image-based leaf SPAD value and chlorophyll measurement using a mobile
phone: enabling accessible and sustainable crop management
Comparing the outputs of intramural and extramural grants funded by National Institutes of Health
PepHammer – a lightweight web-based tool for bioactive peptide matching and identification
My Domain: proteome-wide scanning of TMDs
Why Most Time Series Models Fail Before They Start
Do AI coding agents save scientists time?
Using R to Teach R: Lessons for Software Development
Specialty Crop Research Initiative
What is a Specialty Crop?
Translational Medicine Postdoctoral Fellowship
Science Café Mini-Grant

R Packages:
glm4: Fitting Generalized Linear Models Using Sparse Matrices
tinyrox: Minimal R Documentation Generator
baseverse: Modern Base-R Functions
tidyfun: Tidy Functional Data Wrangling and Visualization

Welcome to Science Research Weekly, Season 5, Episode 11. Get ready for Vitamin D and dementia-protection, exploding black holes, semi-autonomous robots for Martian exploration, a forbidden planet, a pristine star, Mothbox and Mothbot, One-pass statistical formulas in SAS, and building your own programming language. Science On.

References:
Association of Circulating Vitamin D in Midlife With Increased Tau-PET Burden in Dementia-Free Adults
DNA–drug conjugates enable logic-gated drug delivery amplified by hybridization chain reactions
Explaining the PeV Neutrino Fluxes at KM3NeT and IceCube with Quasiextremal Primordial Black Holes
Semi-autonomous exploration of martian and lunar analogues with a legged robot using a Raman-equipped robotic arm and microscopic imager
GEMS JWST: Transmission Spectroscopy of TOI-5205b Reveals Significant Stellar Contamination and a Metal-poor Atmosphere
A nearly pristine star from the Large Magellanic Cloud
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Ectopic NMDAR expression in cancer unmasks germline-encoded autoimmunity
RoSHI: A Versatile Robot-oriented Suit for Human Data In-the-Wild
ClickGuard: A Trustworthy Adaptive Fusion Framework for Clickbait Detection
Mothbox and Mothbot: automated light trap and data processing system for scalable insect monitoring
Patterns of host plant use by monarch butterflies revealed through annotation of more than 35,000 community science records
iNaturalist
One-pass formulas for mean and variance
Hold On Hope: publication lag times at cell biology journals
Collaborating between Bioconductor and R-universe on Development of Common Infrastructure
R-Universe
You can just build your own programming language
T — The Orchestration Engine for Polyglot Data Science

R Packages:
aggreCAT: Mathematically Aggregating Expert Judgments
ravel: AI Copilot for R Analysis Workflows in 'RStudio'