US’ Office of Management And Budget head Russ Vought is trying to push through changes that will allow the Trump administration extensive control over how science is done in this country, leaving it open to graft, mismanagement, and bias. This blog post gives some context on what’s happening, links to an extensive discussion of the changes being proposed, and helps explain how you can help.

A research team in Germany has published new data on how pigeons use magnetic fields as a navigation method when visibility is limited. A key part of the long-sought answer could lie in an unexpected organ, their livers.

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But given the birds' inability to navigate magnetically without the assistance from their livers, the researchers concluded: "We propose that in homing pigeons, superparamagnetic macrophages in the liver are required for finding magnetic direction."

Macrophages are immune cells that break down old red blood cells. As part of this process, they accumulate iron, which may allow them to respond to magnetic fields.

Link to the paper

In the long term, this work could play a similar role in digital security as atomic clocks do for timekeeping: a physically certified source of randomness that other systems can rely on. Possible applications range from the encryption of sensitive communications and digital identities to public randomness services for lotteries and blockchain applications.

Such methods could also become crucial for quantum-secure communications systems. This is because even the strongest cryptographic methods are only as secure as the random numbers on which they are based: the better the randomness, the more robust the encryption—if it is weak, the entire system becomes vulnerable.