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July 1, 2025—Bird flu showed up on dairy farms and surprised everyone. Plus, radar views of Earth's forests and astronomers are preparing to be very busy.
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | The telescope inside the dome of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/H. Stockebrand (CC BY 4.0) | | This week, we're doing a deep dive on bird flu. Today is part two of a three-part series. | | Carolyn Kokko, the director of the Teaching Dairy Barn at Cornell, New York. Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American | | Poultry farmers are accustomed to detecting bird flu in their flocks. But when H5N1 was detected in sick cows on a Texas dairy farm in February 2024, farmers were shocked. How did this happen? Scientists have pinpointed the likely spillover source: an interaction between a sick wild bird and a dairy cow around December 2023. From there, researchers determined, most sick cows (in more than 1,000 herds to date) have caught the virus from other cows.Why this matters: The more bird flu keeps circulating in mammals like cows, the higher the chance the virus will develop mutations that will make it more adapted to the human viral receptor. "That could increase the risk of infection in humans, severity of disease in humans and the potential transmissibility of the virus from human to human," says Diego Diel, who leads the Virology Lab at Cornell's Animal Health Diagnostic Center. And humans are getting sick from H5N1, although not very frequently. So far the CDC has reported 70 confirmed bird flu infections in humans since 2024. The majority of these cases occurred in farmworkers who had contact with sick cows or chickens, and most of the infections were pretty mild.
| | Esref Dogan, a lab processing supervisor at the Cornell Animal Health Diagnostic Center, processes milk samples to be tested for highly-pathogenic avian influenza in Cornell, New York. Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American | | What can be done: Scientists have found that in cattle, the virus is present in the highest concentrations in mammary glands and milk. So testing labs can conduct genetic analyses of milk samples to track infections. Senior reporter Meghan Bartels traveled to the lab at Cornell University in upstate New York, where scientists test samples from local farms and from states like California where local testing facilities need back-up. Dairies aren't allowed to transport lactating cows across state lines without clean test results. Click here to learn more about the spread of bird flu in cows. | | What do you want to know about bird flu? Send us your questions and we'll publish the answers to some in a future issue of Today in Science. | | | | |
Images of forests around the world. Each color represents a distinct ecological feature sensed by the radar, including forests, bodies of water, wetlands, and grasslands. ESA (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) | | | Earth's Forests as Never Seen Before | In these images, Earth's forests and topography are captured like never before. Each color represents a different geological feature: black for rivers and lakes, pink for wetlands and floodplains, green for rainforests, and purple for grasslands. The images were taken by the European Space Agency Biomass satellite, which uses advanced radar tech to pierce through dense vegetation and sprawling canopies to capture snapshots of tree trunks, stems, and other woody biomass. By surveying forests around the world, scientists are hoping to monitor deforestation trends and track the flow of carbon to better understand climate change. —Andrea Tamayo, newsletter intern | | - On social media, videos touting cancer-curing diets garner billions of views. On Amazon and other retailers, cancer diet books and purported cancer-curing herbs and untested treatments abound. "Dietary evangelists seem to have missed the last century of cancer research," writes David Robert Grimes, a scientist and author. "There are no miracle diets that cure cancer, nor is any particular diet responsible for it," he says. Namely, "assertions that sugar or carbohydrates 'feed' cancer feature prominently, giving rise to the related claim that high-protein ketogenic or all-meat diets cure it... These claims are false, stemming from a glaring misunderstanding of a real phenomenon in cancer biology involving the way cells are fueled." | 5 min read
| | Modern milking operations are simultaneously high-tech and extremely hands-on, Meghan Bartels told me after her reporting trip upstate to Cornell's Teaching Dairy Barn. Yes, complex mechanic milkers do the bulk of the milking work, but humans still touch every single cow, three times a day, to ensure the milking process goes smoothly and is hygienic. If cows get sick, dairy workers are on the frontlines caring for them, which is something no machine can do. | | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor With contributions by Andrea Tamayo | | | | |
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