Brief – Others 2026-09-25

Worth Noting

Chinook salmon are returning to the Klamath River faster than anyone predicted, offering the clearest evidence yet that dam removal works.

Salmon Are Thriving After Klamath River Dam Removals, Study Finds

The first fall chinook runs since the four-dam removal project finished have exceeded researcher expectations by a significant margin, a result that will strengthen the case for similar projects on other constrained rivers across the American West.

A multi-cancer blood test has cleared a pivotal regulatory hurdle and is now on track for FDA approval.

Blood test for multiple cancers clears crucial hurdle on track to FDA approval

The test promises to catch several cancer types from a single draw at early, more treatable stages; experts caution that questions about false-positive rates and clinical utility remain, but approval would mark a genuine shift in how routine screening is practiced.

New brain imaging and blood-biomarker research may finally make CTE diagnosable in living patients, not only at autopsy.

C.T.E. Can’t Be Detected in the Living. New Brain Research Offers Hope.

Currently the degenerative disease linked to repeated head trauma can only be confirmed post-mortem, which has hampered both treatment and legal accountability; the emerging techniques described here would change that calculus for athletes, veterans, and their families.

The 2026 El Niño has now broken another intensity record and is being called the strongest in living memory.

This year’s El Niño just broke another sobering record

Its fingerprints are already visible across multiple simultaneous crises: beaches vanishing along the Southern California coast, Indonesia choking under months of wildfire haze, and Hawaii experiencing an unprecedented cluster of close-approach hurricanes — a convergence that makes this event a useful real-time stress test of climate adaptation capacity worldwide.

A new analysis of bat genomes and fossils rewrites the mammal’s origin story, placing the first bats in Europe 65 million years ago and suggesting echolocation emerged very early.

The Secret History of Bats: A New Study Redraws Their Family Tree

The largest genomic study of bats ever conducted resolves longstanding disputes about when and where the group emerged and challenges previous assumptions that flight and echolocation evolved at different times — with implications for understanding how complex sensory traits arise rapidly in evolution.

Seven of nine planetary boundaries that keep Earth’s climate and ecosystems within human-compatible ranges have now been breached.

9 ‘boundaries’ keep Earth livable. We’ve breached 7 of them

The annual assessment adds freshwater and novel entities (synthetic chemicals, microplastics) to the list of crossed thresholds alongside climate, biodiversity, and land-use limits; the compounding nature of multiple simultaneous breaches is the key concern, as each makes the others harder to reverse.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

The Urgent Mystery of Where Viruses Hide

David Quammen, one of the sharpest science writers working today, examines one of the most consequential unsolved problems in infectious disease: what happens to viruses like Ebola between outbreaks, and which animals are silently carrying them back toward us. The piece is not simply a retrospective on past epidemics but a forward-looking investigation into the surveillance gaps and ecological disruptions — deforestation chief among them — that repeatedly bring reservoir hosts into contact with humans. Quammen makes the science accessible without flattening its genuine difficulty, and the piece serves as a quiet argument that pandemic preparedness depends as much on ecology and field biology as it does on vaccines and hospital capacity.