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Paper Roundup

Paper Roundup November 2025: Mars lightning, language processing, and autism microbiome

This month's curated list of interesting new papers

Elise Cutts

Elise Cutts

— 17 min read
Paper Roundup November 2025: Mars lightning, language processing, and autism microbiome
Magpies are notorious thieves, but I like to think they see themselves as curators. Art: American Magpie by Robert Havell after John James Audubon (1837) in the National Gallery of Art

Every month, I publish a curated list of new scholarship on big ideas at the frontiers of science. Inclusion is not endorsement. Think something should be included in next month's paper roundup? Shoot me an email at elise@reviewertoo.com. 

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Highlights

The sound of Mars lightning

Detection of triboelectric discharges during dust events on Mars (Nature, November 26) by Baptiste Chide, Ralph D. Lorenz, Franck Montmessin, Sylvestre Maurice, Yann Parot, Ricardo Hueso, German Martinez, Alvaro Vicente-Retortillo, Xavier Jacob, Mark Lemmon, Bruno Dubois, Pierre-Yves Meslin, Claire Newman, Tanguy Bertrand, Grégoire Deprez, Daniel Toledo, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega, Agnès Cousin, and Roger C. Wiens

Mars has some truly wild dust devils: its tornado-like columns of spinning dust can be kilometers high. And any time you're throwing dust around in dry air, you're wont to build up static electricity. We still don't really know why or how — static is weirdly mysterious — but it happens. And now, thanks to some lucky observations captured by the Perseverance's SuperCam microphone, scientists have strong evidence that this static charge discharges in crackles of "mini lightning" on Mars.

Solving the 250-year-old puzzle of how static electricity works
You may think you know static electricity, but its true nature has long eluded scientists. We’ve now made a huge leap towards finally figuring it out
New Scientist#author.fullName}

That's right: scientists detected Mars lightning by "hearing" it on a rover's microphone. You can even listen to it. It sounds a bit like someone tapping their microphone.

This is one of those cases where I'm a little confused why the paper is getting press now, since the result has been out for a while and was even covered in popular media already. New Scientist published a short news story on this work back in May, after the team presented the results at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. I know this because I wanted to write a story about it based on a presentation the team gave at another conference — but by then, this was old news!

Side-note: I'm honestly surprised that Perseverance even has a microphone; microphones are not common instruments on spacecraft. So that makes the sound all the more remarkable. And I sincerely hope that we'll start putting more microphones on spacecraft headed for destinations with atmospheres! Having a microphone on Titan or submerged in Europa's ocean would be incredible.

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Why foreign words sound blurry

Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe (Nature, 2025) by Ilina Bhaya-Grossman, Matthew K. Leonard, Yizhen Zhang, Laura Gwilliams, Keith Johnson, Junfeng Lu & Edward F. Chang

Human cortical dynamics of auditory word form encoding (Nature, November 7) by Yizhen Zhang, Matthew K. Leonard, Ilina Bhaya-Grossman, Laura Gwilliams & Edward F. Chang

Listening to a string of foreign words — even in a language you speak well — can feel like watching a train stream by in a blur. This rarely happens to me speaking German anymore — unless I'm tired. Then I really, really notice it. Instead of hearing each word clearly, sleepy me perceives a smeared-together utterance to which I can only respond: "Wie bitte?"

A German sentence zooming past my tired brain late at night in an incomprehensible blur. Image: Christian Meyer-Hentschel on Unsplash

With the other two languages I'm learning (candy cane flag pals Italian and Hungarian 🇮🇹🇭🇺), this blurring-togetherness is a constant struggle. And this recent work, published in two studies, suggests that my brain is to blame. The researchers found that, while there's overlap between the brain areas that activate when we listen to our mother tongues and process a foreign language, that overlap isn't perfect — especially in areas involved in perceiving the boundaries of individual words, our brains don't react to second languages as robustly as they do to our first language. That could explain why foreign languages sometimes sound so blurry.

This paper is not just another WEIRD study of Bostonian college kids. The team amassed brain scans collected over 10 years taken as speakers of Spanish, English, and Mandarin monolinguals listening to sentences in their mother tongues and in foreign languages. They also looked at data from cohorts of Spanish-English bilinguals and found that bilingual brains reacted to both languages more like a mother tongue than a second language. But it's not hopeless for us later-life language learners: greater proficiency in a second language was associated with more native-like brain activity when listening to it.

There's really so much interesting stuff in this paper, that's only the start. If you're interested in language and the brain, give it a read — the Nature paper is about as accessible for general readers as a scientific paper can be.

Another casualty of the dying internet: research surveys

The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research (PNAS, November 20, 2025) by Sean J. Westwood

Researchers in many domains rely on survey data for their work. And online surveys are the easiest way to reach the greatest number of people. Surveys often compensate participants for their time. But why fill out the survey yourself when you can have an LLM do it? Sean Westwood designed an LLM agent to fill out survey data with "plausibly human" responses. It achieved a 99.8% pass rate on 6,000 trials of humanity-checks used by surveys. And what's worse: the model could figure out a researcher's hypothesis and tailor its responses to confirm the hypothesis. AI sycophants even yes-man research surveys! Incredible.

If you're a researcher and this makes you sad, consider this your invitation to start sending paper surveys in the mail. I would truly love nothing more than a mailbox full of nerdy requests to fill out science surveys.

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A mosaic of a man

A comprehensive view of somatic mosaicism by single-cell DNA analysis (bioRxiv preprint, October 31) by Lovelace J. Luquette, Tim H. H. Coorens, Abhiram Natu, Milovan Suvakov, Ann Caplin, Mee Sook Jun, Alisa Mo, Joe Pelt, Lisa Anderson, Michele Berselli, Sravya Bhamidipati, Thomas Blanchard, Joseph Brew, Hye-Jung E. Chun, Hyunbin Chun, Mrunal K. Dehankar, William C. Feng, Rob Furatero, Christopher M. Grochowski, Eric Ho, Yeongjun Jang, Kavya Kottapalli, M. Kathryn Leonard, Nam Seop Lim, Tina Lindsay, Sarah Nicholson, Ivan Raimondi, Alexi Runnels, Constantijn Scharlee, JaeEun Shin, Alexander D. Veit, Melissa VonDran, Yifan Wang, Dennis J. Yuan, Yifan Zhao, the SMaHT Single Cell Focus Group, Thomas J. Bell, Kristin Ardlie, Harsha Doddapaneni, Robert Fulton, Soren Germer, Dan Landau, Ji Won Oh, Peter J. Park, Flora M. Vaccarino, Christopher Walsh & Alexej Abyzov

This man's mutations reflect decades of accumulated errors in DNA replication. And since mutations are passed on from mother cell to daughter cell, the research team could even use these mutations to reconstruct family trees of the cells in this man's body — which cells descended from others

As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my post on the genetic blueprint and X-inactivation, women have no genetic blueprint; different patches of tissue express different X chromosomes and silence the other. But this study is a great example of how we're all mosaics. While we might have started off with one genome, our bodies are complicated communities of cells that don't all carry the same genetic instructions — and don't always get along. A high degrees of mosaicism is associated with several different genetic diseases.

Women have no genetic blueprint
Neither do men, but women *really* don’t
Reviewer, tooElise Cutts

An exhaustive "cell census" of the developing brain

The new frontier in understanding human and mammalian brain development (Nature, November 5, 2025) by Tomasz J. Nowakowski, Patricia R. Nano, Katherine S. Matho, Xiaoyin Chen, Emily K. Corrigan, Wubin Ding, Yuan Gao, Matthew Heffel, Jaikishan Jayakumar, Harris S. Kaplan, Fae N. Kronman, Rothem Kovner, Camiel C. A. Mannens, Mengyi Song, Marilyn R. Steyert, Sridevi Venkatesan, Jenelle L. Wallace, Li Wang, Jonathan M. Werner, Di Zhang, Guohua Yuan, Guolong Zuo, Seth A. Ament, Carlo Colantuoni, Catherine Dulac, Rong Fan, Jesse Gillis, Arnold R. Kriegstein, Fenna M. Krienen, Yongsoo Kim, Sten Linnarsson, Partha P. Mitra, Alex A. Pollen, and Nenad Sestan

From a single cell, an entire organism develops. That means that every neuron in your brain descends from a cell that wasn't a neuron at all — a stem cell. Researchers are building detailed atlases of cell types during development, and have recently unveiled the fruits of that effort in a collection of several papers in Nature and Nature Neuroscience. It's more on the technical end, probably more interesting to scientists than laypeople. But to me this seems like a serious and needed advance in our understanding of how stem cells proliferate into the many distinct populations of cells that cooperate in a working brain.

You can find all the papers involved here, including a magazine-style feature in plain language that explains the advance:

BICCN: A cell census of the developing human brain
Expanding cell-type atlases to include developing human, mouse and non-human primate brains using multimodal genomics.
Nature
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Stop saying the gut microbiome causes autism

Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism (Neuron, November 13) by Kevin J. Mitchell, Darren L. Dahly & Dorothy V. M. Bishop

For more than a decade, researchers have been trying to prove that the gut microbiome causes autism. Well, turns out most of that research is pretty bad. Correlations are inconsistent. And even if they weren't... well, who'd have thought that a population prone to disordered eating and sensory issues around food would have screwed up gut microbiomes?

Look, if you know you know.

Without rummaging too much through my own personal neuro-spice rack, let's just say that I have some very weird, restrictive, and repetitive dietary habits that my gut microbes have probably noticed. I asked the expert (my mom) and I did not always have these habits — toddler Elise allegedly ate everything and presumably had a pretty different gut microbiome than 28 year-old Elise, whose favorite flavor is beige. The weird emerged as I developed, as symptoms of developmental disorders are wont to do. I can't prove anything, of course. But wouldn't it make more sense for my weird behavioral symptoms to have caused changes to my gut microbiome and not vice versa? It honestly baffles me that scientists got so obsessed with trying to flip the causal arrow around.

One of the study authors, Kevin Mitchell, went on the Decoding the Gurus podcast to talk about this study, for those of you who prefer your hot science takes delivered in conversation form:

Honestly, the episode is worth a listen even just for the Irish accents.

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The Rest

And now for the big list of papers. If you're not already a member, you'll need to join up before reading more — it's free, and unlocks comments, too.

The Universe

  • A black hole in a near‑pristine galaxy 700 million years after the Big Bang (arXiv preprint, November 21) by Roberto Maiolino, Hannah Uebler, Francesco D’Eugenio, Jan Scholtz, Ignas Juodzbalis, Xihan Ji, Michele Perna, Volker Bromm, Pratika Dayal, Sophie Koudmani, Boyuan Liu, Raffaella Schneider, Debora Sijacki, Rosa Valiante, Alessandro Trinca, Saiyang Zhang, Marta Volonteri, Kohei Inayoshi, Stefano Carniani, Kimihiko Nakajima, Yuki Isobe, Joris Witstok, Gareth C. Jones, Sandro Tacchella, Santiago Arribas, Andrew Bunker, Elisa Cataldi, Stéphane Charlot, Giovanni Cresci, Mirko Curti, Andrew C. Fabian, Harley Katz, Nimisha Kumari, Nicolas Laporte, Giovanni Mazzolari, Brant Robertson, Fengwu Sun, Bruno Rodriguez Del Pino, Giacomo Venturi
  • Radio burst from a stellar coronal mass ejection (Nature, November 12) by J. R. Callingham, C. Tasse, R. Keers, R. D. Kavanagh, H. K. Vedantham, P. Zarka, S. Bellotti, P. I. Cristofari, S. Bloot, D. C. Konijn, M. J. Hardcastle, L. Lamy, E. K. Pass, B. J. S. Pope, H. Reid, H. J. A. Röttgering, T. W. Shimwell & P. Zucca
  • The First RELHIC? Cloud-9 is a Starless Gas Cloud (Astrophysical Journal Letters, November 10) by Gagandeep S. Anand, Alejandro Benítez-Llambay, Rachael Beaton, Andrew J. Fox, Julio F. Navarro & Elena D’Onghia
  • An extremely luminous flare recorded from a supermassive black hole (Nature Astronomy, November 4, 2025) by Matthew J. Graham, Barry McKernan, K. E. Saavik Ford, Daniel Stern, Matteo Cantiello, Andrew J. Drake, Yuanze Ding, Mansi Kasliwal, Mike Koss, Raffaella Margutti, Sam Rose, Jean Somalwar, Phil Wiseman, S. G. Djorgovski, Patrik M. Veres, Eric C. Bellm, Tracy X. Chen, Steven L. Groom, Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, and Ashish Mahabal

Planets and Habitability

  • Evidence of 1:1 slope between rocky Super-Earths and their host stars (arXiv preprint, November 21) by Mykhaylo Plotnykov, Diana Valencia, Alejandra Ross, Henrique Reggiani & Kevin C. Schlaufman
  • Horizontal and vertical exoplanet thermal structure from a JWST spectroscopic eclipse map (Nature Astronomy, October 28) by Ryan C. Challener, Megan Weiner Mansfield, Patricio E. Cubillos, Anjali A. A. Piette, Louis‑Philippe Coulombe, Hayley Beltz, Jasmina Blecic, Emily Rauscher, Jacob L. Bean, Björn Benneke, Eliza M.-R. Kempton, Joseph Harrington, Thaddeus D. Komacek, Vivien Parmentier, S. L. Casewell, Nicolas Iro, Luigi Mancini, Matthew C. Nixon, Michael Radica, Maria E. Steinrueck, Luis Welbanks, Natalie M. Batalha, Claudio Caceres, Ian J. M. Crossfield, Nicolas Crouzet, Jean‑Michel Désert, Karan Molaverdikhani, Nikolay K. Nikolov, Enric Palle, Benjamin V. Rackham, Everett Schlawin, David K. Sing, Kevin B. Stevenson, Xianyu Tan, Jake D. Turner & Xi Zhang
  • TESS Discovers a Second System of Transiting Exocomets in the Extreme Debris Disk of RZ Psc (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, October 29) by Adalyn Gibson, Meredith A. MacGregor, Ward S. Howard, Ann Marie Cody, Mark Swain, Jennifer A. Burt, Laura Venuti, Evgenya Shkolnik, Neal J. Turner & Alan Didion

Astrobiology and SETI

Origins and Artificial Life

Earth

Human Origins & Prehistory

  • New finds shed light on diet and locomotion in Australopithecus deyiremeda (Nature, November 26) by Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Gary T. Schwartz, Thomas C. Prang, Beverly Z. Saylor, Alan Deino, Luis Gibert, Anna Ragni, and Naomi E. Levin
  • What enables human language? A biocultural framework (Science, November 20) by Inbal Arnon, Liran Carmel, Nicolas Claidière, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Simon Kirby, Kazuo Okanoya, Limor Raviv, Lucie Wolters & Simon E. Fisher
  • The emergence and diversification of dog morphology (Science, November 13) by Allowen Evin, Carly Ameen, Colline Brassard, Sophie Dennis, Ekaterina E. Antipina, Vincent Bonhomme, Myriam Boudadi-Maligne, Kate Britton, Francisco Gil Cano, Ruth F. Carden, Julien Claude, Lídia Colominas, Stefan Curth, Sergey Egorovich Fedorov, Joan Frances, Daniela C. Kalthoff, Andrew C. Kitchener, Rick Knecht, Pavel Kosintsev, Anna Linderholm, Robert Losey, Ilia Merts, Viktor Merts, Maria Mostadius, Mark Omura, Vedat Onar, Alan K. Outram, Joris Peters, André Rehazek, Erika Rosengren, Mikhail Sablin, Paul Sciulli, Maria Seguí, Z. Jack Tseng, Emma Usmanova, Victor Varfolomeev, Susan Crockford, Yaroslav Kuzmin, Laurent Frantz, Keith Dobney & Greger Larson
  • Eight millennia of continuity of a previously unknown lineage in Argentina (Nature, November 5) by Javier Maravall-López, Josefina M. B. Motti, Nicolás Pastor, María Pía Tavella, Mariana Fabra, Pilar Babot, Mariano Bonomo, Silvia E. Cornero, Guillermo N. Lamenza, Diego Catriel Leon, Paula C. Miranda de Zela, Gustavo G. Politis, Sofía C. Angeletti, G. Roxana Cattáneo, Mariana Dantas, Hilton Drube, Lucia G. Gonzalez Baroni, Salomón Hocsman, Andrés D. Izeta, Reinaldo A. Moralejo, Verónica Aldazabal, Diego M. Basso, Cristina Bayón, María Guillermina Couso, Ulises D’Andrea, Paula Del Río, Germán G. Figueroa, Romina Frontini, Mariela Edith Gonzalez, Andrés G. Laguens, Jorge G. Martínez, Pablo G. Messineo, Beatriz Nores, Daniel E. Olivera, Gisela M. Sario, Analía Sbattella, Clara Scabuzzo, Aldana M. Tavarone, Rodrigo Vecchi, Kim Callan, Ella Caughran, Oscar Estrada, Trudi Frost, Lora Iliev, Aisling Kearns, Jack Kellogg, Kim-Louise Krettek, Ann Marie Lawson, Matthew Mah, Nihal Manjila, Adam Micco, Iris Patterson, Lijun Qiu, Xavier Roca-Rada, Gregory Soos, Peter A. Webb, J. Noah Workman, Nadin Rohland, Nick Patterson, Iosif Lazaridis, Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Cosimo Posth, Bastien Llamas, Swapan Mallick, Darío A. Demarchi, Graciela S. Cabana, David Reich & Rodrigo Nores

Evolution and Ecosystems

Physics and Chemistry

Information and Computation

Self-Organization

Society

Brain and Cognition

  • Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain (Nature, November 26) by Nicholas Hedger, Thomas Naselaris, Kendrick Kay, and Tomas Knapen
  • Rare genetic variants confer a high risk of ADHD and implicate neuronal biology (Nature, November 12) by Ditte Demontis, Jinjie Duan, Yu-Han H. Hsu, Greta Pintacuda, Jakob Grove, Trine Tollerup Nielsen, Janne Thirstrup, Makayla Martorana, Travis Botts, F. Kyle Satterstrom, Jonas Bybjerg-Grauholm, Jason H. Y. Tsai, Simon Glerup, Martine Hoogman, Jan Buitelaar, Marieke Klein, Georg C. Ziegler, Christian Jacob, Oliver Grimm, Maximilian Bayas, Nene F. Kobayashi, Sarah Kittel-Schneider, Klaus-Peter Lesch, Barbara Franke, Andreas Reif, Esben Agerbo, Thomas Werge, Merete Nordentoft, Ole Mors, Preben Bo Mortensen, Kasper Lage, Mark J. Daly, Benjamin M. Neale & Anders D. Børglum
  • Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries (Nature Aging, November 10) by Lucia Amoruso, Hernan Hernandez, Hernando Santamaria-Garcia, Sebastian Moguilner, Agustina Legaz, Pavel Prado, Jhosmary Cuadros, Liset Gonzalez, Raul Gonzalez-Gomez, Joaquín Migeot, Carlos Coronel-Oliveros, Josephine Cruzat, Manuel Carreiras, Vicente Medel, Marcelo Adrián Maito, Claudia Duran-Aniotz, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Sandra Baez, Adolfo M. García & Agustin Ibanez
  • Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs (Science, October 30) by Hanna Schleihauf, Emily M. Sanford, Bill D. Thompson, Snow Zhang, Joshua Rukundo, Josep Call, Esther Herrmann & Jan M. Engelmann

Artificial Intelligence

Robotics and Artificial Life

Just for Fun

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