Polar Bears, Shrinking Sea Ice and a Scientific Surprise

Posted on by Kelly Grooms
A polar bear sits on a snow-covered ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, gazing toward the horizon as sunlight filters through clouds over icy water.

When you think about climate change in the Arctic, you might imagine melting sea ice or maybe hungry polar bears. After all, polar bears depend on sea ice to hunt seals, and seals are their main source of energy. The negative effects of decreasing sea ice on polar bear body condition index (BCI), survival and reproduction have been documented in polar bear populations from regions such as the Western Hudson Bay and the Southern Beaufort Sea. So, when researchers started studying the polar bears in Svalbard, Norway (Barents Sea region), which is losing sea ice at a faster rate than any other region, they expected the BCI of those bears would also be declining. Except it isn’t.

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The Science of Slipping… Blame the Molecules!

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Whether it’s Home Alone’s booby-trapped icy steps, Bambi learning his legs have zero traction, or an Ice Age chase scene defying gravity, ice has been comedy gold for decades. In real life, the joke lands a little harder (sometimes literally).

Slippery Ice

We all know ice is slippery. The more surprising part is why it’s slippery and how long it took scientists to start agreeing on something closer to an answer. Researchers have long known the surface of ice behaves like it’s wearing a microscopic “wet” layer that lubricates motion. What they’ve argued about for nearly 200 years is what creates that layer in the first place (3,4).

So, let’s treat this like a mystery. Ice is the crime scene. Your dignity is the victim. Here are the main suspects.

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The Breakthrough Was There All Along: Rethinking “Undruggable” Targets Through New Ways of Seeing

Posted on by Elise Johnson

If you’ve ever played The New York Times game Connections, you know the feeling. You’re staring at a grid of words, knowing the solution is there, but unable to see how the pieces fit together. All you can do is work with the words in front of you. There are no extra clues, no new information coming. The only option is to shuffle, to look at the same information in a different arrangement until patterns begin to appear. 

Nothing about the problem changes. Then something about how you see it does. 

This pattern of reframing is a familiar truth in scientific research as well. In a recent NPR podcast, “The Medical Matchmaking Machine,” Radiolab explores this idea through a deeply human story. The episode features Dr. David Fajgenbaum, who survived a rare, life-threatening illness and came away with a new realization about the limits of how existing knowledge was being connected. By systematically reexamining existing data and research through a new lens, he was able to identify life-saving connections for his own disease. Through his nonprofit research organization Every Cure, Fajgenbaum then began applying the same approach more broadly across diseases.  

In many cases, potential treatments already exist, but they are buried in data, scattered across studies, or confined to discovery pathways that make connections difficult to see. 

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Your Media Choice Might Be Designing Your T-Cell Fate

Posted on by Simon Moe

Why Metabolism Matters in T-Cell Expansion

Adoptive T-cell therapies rely on generating metabolically fit, functional cells during ex vivo expansion—but this process often pushes T cells toward highly glycolytic, terminally differentiated states that limit their persistence and therapeutic potential. These metabolic programs begin shifting within hours of activation, therefore understanding early metabolic remodeling is essential for designing culture conditions that support durable, cytotoxic, and memory-enriched T-cell populations.

Researchers at Promega set out to address this challenge by systematically mapping how media composition and activation strength shape T-cell metabolism during the first 72 hours after stimulation. Using a suite of bioluminescent assays, they profiled intracellular energy cofactors, redox balance, and extracellular metabolites across several conditions. This approach revealed distinct, media-driven metabolic states that not only emerged early but also predicted downstream expansion, proliferation, and cytotoxic function.

Their work demonstrates how integrating metabolic profiling into in vitro expansion workflows can provide a more informed framework for optimizing T-cell manufacturing strategies.

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Brewing Immunity: The Vaccine Beer Experiment

Posted on by Sara Millevolte

What if a vaccine didn’t come in a vial or a syringe, but in a pint glass?

It’s the kind of question that sounds hypothetical–something meant to provoke discussion rather than describe a real experiment. And yet, it’s one that a virologist claims to have taken seriously enough to test in his own kitchen.

Since publicly sharing his experiment and preliminary results, the idea of “vaccine beer” has drawn fascination, skepticism and no small amount of discomfort from across the scientific community.

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From Forever Chemicals to Ancient Proteins: Five Science Stories from 2025

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

As science advances, its most meaningful moments often come not in a single breakthrough, but in the accumulation of insights that reshape how we understand our world. As we close the door on 2025 it is worth pausing to reflect on some of the discoveries of the past year that stood out—not just for their technical achievement, but for what they reveal about our planet, our past and ourselves. From dismantling so-called “forever chemicals” to reading molecular histories written millions of years ago, these five stories offer a snapshot of the breadth, creativity and impact of modern scientific inquiry.

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From Young Researcher Award Finalist to International Collaborator: Two Visits to Promega

Posted on by Jordan Villanueva

In 2022, Luiza Abdo traveled from her home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to the United States to visit the Promega campus in Madison, WI. A PhD student at the time, Luiza was one of ten finalists for the inaugural Young Researchers Award sponsored by Promega Brazil.

Luiza (center) visited Promega Madison in 2025 with Martin Bonamino (far left).

In 2025, Luiza was invited to Promega Madison once again, but this time she came as a customer and collaborator. Now a postdoctoral researcher at the Brazil National Cancer Institute, she was excited to return to Madison to discuss technologies that may help advance her project.

“Once I saw the Kornberg Center, I remembered everything from my last visit,” Luiza says. “It was one of the best travels I’ve ever had, and I made great friends.”

Luiza studies immunotherapy in the lab of Martin Bonamino, Head of Cell and Gene Therapy, at the National Cancer Institute. When she visited Promega in 2022, Luiza presented her project aimed at producing CAR-T cell therapies in under 24 hours. She and the other nine award finalists toured Promega facilities, networked with industry researchers, and went on adventures around the Madison area. They went to a baseball game, played sand volleyball against Promega employees and manipulated giant molecules in virtual reality.

“This was a different kind of visit. I’m here with my PI, and we learned several ways Promega technology can make our lives and research easier,” Luiza says in 2025. “The conversations are more specific to our field of work.”

Luiza (front row, left) visited Promega Madison in 2022 with 9 other Young Researchers Award finalists.

Today, she’s working on translating her CAR-T production methods into clinical applications. This visit introduced her to new technologies like cell fitness and metabolism assays that may help with this new phase. Promega researchers such as Julia Gilden joined to talk through challenges and solutions in cell therapy research.

“We’re making a new kind of product, which is very innovative, but we also have to prove a lot of different things to translate it to the clinic. We have many challenges, but we’ve found several ways Promega can help us solve our problems.”

Three years after her initial visit, Luiza says that visiting Promega has impacted not only her research, but also how she looks at her research field and potential career paths.

“My first visit was very good for me because I come from academic research, and we don’t have many interactions with industry. After touring Promega, I started to look at industry with new eyes. Even if I’m not working in an industry position, I see how there are people who can help with your needs, and work with you to solve problems.”

“I’m very happy to be here again,” she laughs. “I’m thankful to have this opportunity twice.”

Your Science in Review: Our Top Blogs of 2025

Posted on by Johanna Lee

As we look back on 2025, it’s clear that this year brought incredible innovation, practical solutions, and inspiring stories from labs around the world. From cutting-edge cellular imaging to behind-the-scenes looks at manufacturing, our readers showed us what matters most: tools that work, science that inspires, and stories that connect us to the bigger picture.

Here are the five most popular blogs from 2025:

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Ancient RNA From a Woolly Mammoth?

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

Most of us first meet woolly mammoths as Manny from Ice Age (a gentle giant with main character energy) or as towering skeletons in museum halls. In the lab, though, mammoths can show up in many ways: such as fragile molecules preserved in permafrost for tens of thousands of years.

Woolly Mammoth

Ancient DNA has already helped scientists piece together mammoth genomes. Now scientists have done something wilder: they’ve pulled ancient RNA out of a ~39,000-year-old woolly mammoth and used it to see which genes were being expressed in its muscle tissue. In a new study, researchers showed that not only can woolly mammoth DNA survive tens of thousands of years in permafrost, but RNA, the fragile, quick-to-degrade “live feed” of the cell, can too.

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CRISPR/Cas9 Endogenous Tagging in Drug Discovery

Posted on by Teresa Simon

Limitations of Traditional Protein Study Methods 

Studying proteins in their native biological context has long been a major challenge in molecular biology. Traditional methods, although widely used, often distort the actual cellular environment and limit functional interpretation. Techniques like antibody-based detection or plasmid-driven overexpression can introduce artifacts and do not allow real-time analysis in living cells. 

In this context, the need for tools that enable the observation of proteins as they naturally occur, under physiological conditions, and within live cells is becoming increasingly evident in molecular biology. 

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