Life reconstruction of Ajkaceratops kozmai. Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09897-w

Happy new year! If you’re a redhead, the pigments in your hair are protecting you from cellular damage. A post-stroke injection comprising regenerative nanomaterial can protect the brain. And researchers have developed a method to extract rare earth elements from coal tailings.

Plus: Astronomers report evidence that the quiescent black hole at the center of the galaxy was extremely active quite recently. Paleontologists found a missing class of European dinosaurs right there in the fossil record where it belongs. And biologists report that a common blood protein protects healthy people from a devastating fungal infection:

Sagittarius A* just resting

Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in residence at the center of the Milky Way, is generally dim, exhibiting a lack of flaring behavior observed in flashier, more extroverted gravity wells elsewhere in the universe. But new research using the XRISM space telescope, which detects X-rays at the level of individual photons, reveals that sometime within the past few hundred to 1,000 years, SagA* flared extremely dramatically.

Michigan State University researcher Stephen DiKerby and an international team studied the X-ray emissions from a giant gas cloud near the galactic center; it’s one of several that float around Sagittarius A*. The astronomers focused on two extremely narrow X-ray emission lines it emitted, measuring their energy and shape. This allowed the team to determine the cloud’s motion and compare it to previous radio observations.

They determined that the emission was a "light echo"—the cloud was reflecting an X-ray outburst from the supermassive black hole that had occurred hundreds of years previously.

Missing dinosaurs leap out of the fossil record, terrify paleontologists

Good news! All of the missing European dinosaurs—ceratopsians found basically everywhere else at the same geological depth—were only misfiled. Well, more accurately, paleontologists misidentified them as a different group of dinosaurs, iguanodontians, which have similarly shaped skulls. This result emerged from a CT scan of an Ajkaceratops skull found in Hungary.

The analysis, along with a comparison to Asian specimens, revealed a sharp beak similar to those of primitive horned dinosaurs, and a deeply vaulted mouth roof, a feature not found in iguanodons but common among ceratopsians. The researchers then examined other fossils uncovered over the years and determined that the species was a horned dinosaur. They renamed it Ferenceratops and refiled it with the ceratopsians.

Blood protein blocks fungal infection

Mucormycosis, also called black fungus, is a severe fungal infection that can be deadly, especially for immunocompromised people and those with metabolic health issues. It is spread by spores of the Mucorales order, growing into blood vessels and killing tissue. A new study in Nature now reports that albumin, the most common protein in blood, plays a key role in fighting the disease.

The researchers studied clinical data from hundreds of patients and noticed that patients who died of mucormycosis had low levels of albumin. So they conducted lab experiments exposing the fungus to blood samples from which they had removed albumin, and the fungus grew out of control.

In a follow-up experiment, restoring albumin levels stopped the growth of the fungus. As it turns out, albumin has pockets that bind to fatty acids and when the fungus encounters it, albumin releases the fats, preventing the fungus from producing the tissue-destroying toxin mucorisin.

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Journal information: Nature

© 2026 Science X Network

Citation: Saturday Citations: Missing dinosaurs, quiescent black holes and infectious fungi (2026, January 10) retrieved 10 January 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-01-saturday-citations-dinosaurs-quiescent-black.html

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