Paper Roundup 13.1.2026

Each Tuesday, I send out a human-curated list of research papers that aer interesting, inflammatory, or just plain fun. Free subscribers get my top 3 highlights, paid subscribers get the whole list. Sign up to keep tabs on the frontiers of science!

1. Little to no active faulting likely at Europa’s seafloor today by Paul K. Byrne et al. (Nature Communications, January 6 2026)

Bad news for life on Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. The reactions that fuel hydrothermal vents — and life — rely on a continuous supply of fresh rock to Europa's seas. Faulting could do the job, but Byrne et al. report that it's unlikely that much faulting is happening at Europa's seafloor today.

2. E. coli chemosensing accuracy is not limited by stochastic molecule arrivals by Henry Mattingly et al. (Nature Physics, January 8, 2026)

If you ever feel bad about not having achieved enough in life, just remember: bacteria are bad at moving towards their goals, and they still ended up being the most successful organisms on Earth. (For a newsy summary of this study, check out Bacteria may not be good at chemotaxis by Robert G. Endres)

3. The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant by Matthias Grabenhorst et al. (PNAS, January 7, 2026)

How do people predict when something will happen? Matthias Grabenhorst, David Poeppel, and Georgios Michalareas show that we do so in the same way across contexts regardless of whether we're waiting on something that happens once a year or several times per second: we count estimate the probability of events over time. This has important implications for how accurately we can anticipate the future across different time scales.

Last week also saw new papers on same-sex behavior in primates, surprise European dinosaurs, ancient poison arrows, and more: