It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. September's list includes how prebunking can restore public trust in election results; why ghost sharks grow weird forehead teeth; and using neutrinos to make a frickin' laser beam, among other highlights.
Prebunking increases trust in elections
False claims of voter fraud abounded in the wake of the 2020 US general election, when Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump himself amplified those false claims, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Two years later, Brazil faced a similar scenario in the wake of its 2022 general election in which voters ousted incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Once again, claims of fraud ran rampant as Bolsonaro supporters stormed their country's capital.
How can we combat this kind of disinformation and restore public trust in elections? It might be possible to essentially "vaccinate" people against any viral post-election conspiracies that may emerge with a "prebunking" strategy, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
More than 5,500 participants from the US and Brazil participated in the online studies, which were conducted in the US (by YouGov) before the 2022 midterms, and in Brazil (by Qualtrics) after its 2022 presidential election. For the first two studies, participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group got the "prebunking" treatment, providing them with factual information on all the election security measures in place to counter false claims about voter fraud.
The second group was given information about how certain Trump or Bolsonaro allies had attested to the legitimacy of the 2020 or 2022 election results—a "credible sources" treatment. It's the fact that such allies affirm the validity of election results, despite it being against their own political interests, that makes them more credible. A third study conducted only with US participants compared prebunking alone versus prebunking with a forewarning message featuring specific conspiracies, focusing on the 2022 midterms and the 2024 US general election.
The results: Prebunking proved to be the most successful in re-establishing participants' confidence in election results. Credible source corrections also proved effective but less consistently so. And prebunking alone was more effective than combining prebunking with warnings about conspiracies, likely because even a little exposure to false claims is sufficient to induce skepticism in certain people. "The effectiveness of the prebunking correction appears to be driven by the novel factual information about election security as opposed to the forewarning," said co-author Brian Fogarty of the University of Notre Dame during a media briefing. "And the effects of the corrections were greater among those who are most misinformed or those who are most susceptible to being misinformed."
That said, combating election misinformation will require a massive coordinated counter-effort, according to co-author Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth University. "It's going to be really critical to have the kind of consensus-oriented messaging that was previously more common in this country where all sorts of institutions were affirming the legitimacy integrity of the election system and saying, we can trust it," he said during the media briefing. "Churches, businesses, religious groups, education, everyone in society coming together and saying, 'It's important for you to vote and you can trust the results when you go to the polls.' That kind of context is probably going to help people be more open-minded when they encounter this kind of information."
The authors acknowledge that whether or not these promising results can translate to real-world scenarios remains to be seen. The most alarming possibility is conspiracy theorists' worst fears coming true, with elections that truly are compromised or corrupted, as often occurs in authoritarian governments like those of Russia and Hungary. As Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol told Scientific American, “The US is now best characterized as an emerging autocracy with a very tenuous hold on democracy and lawfulness.”
Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv3758 (About DOIs).
A rare Einstein cross
It's extremely rare for astronomers to spot an "Einstein cross," in which light from a distant galaxy is being held by the gravity of the galaxies in front of it so that four separate images appear, in keeping with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Astrophysicists have spotted an even rarer configuration, according to a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal: an Einstein cross with a fifth image smack in the middle, most likely the result of an invisible dark matter halo.
French astronomers first spotted the anomaly in observational data collected by NOEMA radio telescopes in the French Alps, specifically while studying a distant galaxy known as HerS-3. Intrigued, they compared their findings with data from the ALMA array in Chile and realized that in both cases, the galaxy's light split into five rather than the expected four images. And it wasn't an instrumentation problem either, since computer modeling of the gravitational lensing effect demonstrated that only a dark matter halo could account for the observational anomaly. The team predicts there might also be outflowing gas that should be visible in future observations—a testable prediction that will help prove or disprove their computational model.
The Astrophysical Journal, 2025. DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/adf204
Male ghost sharks have forehead teeth
When one thinks of teeth, one naturally associates these vital structures with a mouth or jaws. But the males of a certain shark-like species known as a "ghost shark," or spotted ratfish, actually have teeth sprouting from their foreheads, part of an appendage made of cartilage known as the tenaculum. The male ghost shark uses those teeth to hang onto a female by her pectoral fin while mating. The tenaculum appears to be a developmental relic that could shed light on the origins of teeth, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There are two competing theories about those tenaculum teeth: either they were denticles, i.e., the tooth-like structures commonly found on the skin of sharks, rays, and skates; or they are true teeth arising when a clump of tooth-forming cells migrated into the ghost shark's head. A team of scientists decided to test those theories, analyzing hundreds of fish and taking micro-CT scans, as well as conducting genetic analysis of tissue samples, and comparing the modern ratfish to ancestral fossils.
One 315-million-year-old fossil had the same tooth-bearing tenaculum attached to its upper jaw, while the CT scans showed that both male and female ghost sharks show signs of a tenaculum early in development. Males eventually grow the telltale white pimple between the eyes, attached to muscles that control the jaw. When mature, teeth sprout, which the males can flex to intimidate competitors and to use as a grasping structure when mating. The later developmental stages never occur in females, although some evidence of that early structure remains.
Furthermore, the tissue samples showed that the tenaculum had the genes associated with teeth in vertebrates but not the genes for denticles. This combination of experimental data and paleontological evidence bolsters the theory that the ghost fish co-opted a pre-existing mechanism for making teeth to develop an appendage essential for successful reproduction, per the authors.
PNAS, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2508054122
Neutrino laser beams
Physicists typically require nuclear reactors and massive particle accelerators to generate beams of neutrinos. Those beams can then be used to measure properties of neutrinos, a difficult task because neutrinos interact so rarely with matter. MIT scientists have proposed a tabletop method for creating a neutrino laser in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The critical element is clouds of ultracold quantum gases known as Bose-Einstein condensates. At normal temperatures, atoms act like billiard balls and bounce off one another. Lowering the temperature reduces their speed. If the temperature gets low enough (billionths of a degree above absolute zero) and the atoms are densely packed enough, the different matter waves will be able to "sense" one another and coordinate themselves as if they were one big "superatom."
The MIT team proposed that a BEC of radioactive atoms—say, rubidium-83—could radioactively decay in sync to produce a laser beam. Neutrinos are released naturally during radioactive decay, and in the quantum BEC state, that decay should accelerate, an effect that should produce an amplified beam of neutrinos akin to how stimulated emission amplifies photons to produce a conventional laser beam. The next step is to build a tabletop demonstration of the concept. If that works, the team envisions using neutrino lasers as a new tool for underground communication and as a source of radioisotopes for medical imaging and cancer diagnostics.
Physical Review Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1103/l3c1-yg2l
Reviving the pinhole camera for IR imaging
The earliest forms of the pinhole camera have been around for millennia, dating as far back as the 4th century BCE in China. Light passes through a tiny hole punched into a light-proof box, projecting an inverted image of the scene outside onto the opposite interior wall. Lens-based imaging is prone to distortion and has limitations on depth of field and wavelength. So scientists have revived the pinhole technology to create a prototype pinhole camera for infrared imaging, according to a paper published in the journal Optica.
To make their IR pinhole imaging system, the authors used a laser to create an optical hole inside a nonlinear crystal with a "chirped-period" structure capable of gathering light rays from a wide range of directions, resulting in a wider field of view. The crystal's unique optical properties essentially convert infrared images into visible light, making it possible for a standard silicon camera to record those images. The process also naturally suppresses noise, so it can work even in low-light conditions.
To test their prototype, the team used 3D time-of-flight IR imaging to image a matte ceramic rabbit and reconstruct its 3D shape by synchronizing ultrafast pulses. The IR pinhole camera can even be adapted to far-infrared or terahertz wavelengths. It's still very much in the proof-of-concept stage, but once their innovation makes IR imaging systems more affordable, portable, and energy-efficient, the authors envision applications in night vision, industrial quality control, and environmental monitoring, among other uses.
Optica, 2025. DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.566042
Evolution of Taylor Swift’s dialect
Scientists who want to study dialects of different geographic regions typically compare the speech patterns—especially vowel sounds—of people from different regions. But they could learn even more by studying the evolution of dialect in an individual, such as Queen Elizabeth II or pop star Taylor Swift. Researchers from the University of Minnesota have done just that, documenting the changes in Swift's speech over a decade, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
It's the sheer cultural ubiquity of Swift that made the study possible, as there are years of exhaustive media interviews publicly available that can be analyzed for more than 1,400 vowel sounds using software that measures vocal resonances. The researchers chronologically sequenced those interviews spanning the years 2008–2019 and mapped them to distinct periods in the singer's life when she was living in different regions with specific dialect features. For instance, Swift grew up in Philadelphia's western suburbs, moving to Nashville in 2003.
They found that when Swift moved to Nashville, she temporarily adopted certain aspects of that dialect, pronouncing "ride" more like "rod," for example, or "two" like "tee-you." When she relocated again, first to Philadelphia and then to New York City, those aspects disappeared, and she also lowered her voice pitch. The authors acknowledge that it isn't really possible to interpret exactly why Swift may have altered her dialect, especially since this might have been unconscious on the singer's part. People do inadvertently take on accents and speech patterns of a region even if they aren't native to it, after all. Adopting a dialect can be a means of conveying identity and community belonging, and past research has shown that this can be a malleable characteristic across an individual's life.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2025. DOI: 10.1121/10.0039052
