Welcome to Peer Review'd, the podcast where we break down the latest science news and make it make sense. I'm your host, and today we have an absolutely packed episode — from metal asteroids to living without lungs, from ancient Martian water to feathered dinosaurs that gave up on flying. Let's dive in.

We're going to start in space, because honestly, where better to begin?

NASA's Psyche mission is closing in on one of the most mysterious objects in our solar system — asteroid 16 Psyche. This metal-rich rock was discovered over 200 years ago, and scientists still can't agree on what it actually is. The leading theory is that it's the exposed core of a long-dead protoplanet — basically, the iron heart of a world that never fully formed. But new simulations suggest a massive crater on its surface could hold the key to finally solving the mystery. When the spacecraft arrives, it might tell us whether we're looking at a planetary core or something far more complex. A metal world with secrets — honestly, that sounds like the setup to a sci-fi novel, but it's very much real science.

And staying in the Mars neighborhood for a moment — NASA's ESCAPADE mission is gearing up to answer one of the biggest questions in planetary science: what happened to Mars? The planet used to have a thicker atmosphere, liquid water, and a warmer climate. Today, it's a frozen, barren desert. ESCAPADE will send twin spacecraft to study how the Sun gradually stripped Mars of its atmosphere over billions of years. It's essentially a forensic investigation of a planetary-scale catastrophe.

Speaking of Mars — NASA's Curiosity rover has been spending about six months exploring a region that, from orbit, looks like a giant spiderweb. These crisscrossing ridges, called boxwork formations, are about one to two meters tall and stretch across the landscape. Scientists believe they formed when ancient water moved through cracks in the rock and deposited minerals. So every time Curiosity drives through one of these spiderweb structures, it's essentially reading a page from Mars's ancient water history.

Now let's come back to Earth — way back to Earth, actually. Scientists have found something extraordinary hidden beneath Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier. Pink granite boulders sitting on top of the Hudson Mountains had puzzled geologists for decades. Where did they come from? Well, researchers dated them to the Jurassic period and matched them with gravity signals detected from aircraft, and the answer turned out to be stunning: there's a hidden granite mass buried beneath the glacier — nearly one hundred kilometers wide and seven kilometers thick. That's an enormous geological feature that was essentially invisible until now. Antarctica, it seems, still has secrets buried under all that ice.

And speaking of secrets — something strange is happening inside Greenland's ice sheet too. Scientists have detected enormous swirling, plume-like formations buried deep below the surface. These structures have baffled researchers for more than a decade, but scientists at the University of Bergen now believe the ice sheet may be slowly churning from within. This hidden process could have major implications for how we predict ice loss and sea level rise. The more we look at our planet's ice, the more complex it turns out to be.

Okay, let's talk dinosaurs, because this one is delightful. You might know that birds evolved from feathered dinosaurs, but a new study suggests that the evolutionary path to flight wasn't a straight line. Researchers studying the dinosaur Anchiornis — a small, feathered creature that lived about 160 million years ago — found a surprising clue hidden in its molting patterns. In birds that fly, feathers are replaced in a neat, symmetrical sequence. But Anchiornis showed a messy, irregular molt — exactly the pattern seen in flightless animals today. So despite having wings, these dinosaurs likely couldn't fly at all. Evolution apparently tried out flight, and some lineages just... passed on it.

From ancient life to the cutting edge of modern medicine — and this story is genuinely remarkable. A 33-year-old man survived 48 hours without lungs. Let that sink in. A severe flu-triggered infection destroyed both of his lungs and caused multiple organ failure. Doctors made the extraordinary decision to remove both lungs entirely to stop the spread of infection, and in their place, used a specially engineered artificial lung system to oxygenate his blood while his body stabilized. He eventually received a lung transplant and survived. It's one of those stories that reminds you just how far medicine has come.

On the medical front, there's also exciting news for the hundreds of millions of people living with diabetes. Scientists have achieved a long-sought breakthrough toward oral insulin pills. For over a century, delivering insulin as a pill has been the holy grail — but insulin breaks down in the digestive system before it can do its job. A new peptide-based drug delivery strategy may finally solve that problem. No more injections could be life-changing for so many people.

And there's more good news in the diabetes world — the widely used drug metformin may also slow the progression of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in Western countries. Researchers found that people with diabetes who took metformin had a significantly lower risk of developing an intermediate stage of the disease. One drug, multiple benefits — science loves a two-for-one.

Let's talk cholesterol. A new experimental medication called enlicitide has shown the ability to slash LDL — the so-called bad cholesterol — by sixty percent with a once-daily pill. That's a striking result from a phase three clinical trial. For millions of people who can't control their cholesterol through existing medications, this could be a major new option for preventing heart attacks and strokes.

And since we're on the topic of heart health — a large study presented at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting found that people who eat large amounts of ultra-processed foods face up to a sixty-seven percent higher risk of serious heart problems. Each additional serving adds to the danger. This isn't the first study to link ultra-processed foods to poor health outcomes, but the scale of this effect is striking.

In other good news — well, potentially good news — scientists have engineered bacteria to hunt tumors. Researchers published a study showing that bacteria can be turned into tiny drug factories that specifically target cancer cells. The bacteria navigate to tumors and deliver therapeutic compounds directly where they're needed. It's a bold, creative approach to one of medicine's hardest problems.

Now for a story about something mind-bending happening at MIT. Physicists have built a new microscope that uses terahertz light — a frequency that's normally very hard to work with — to observe electrons moving inside superconductors in real time. For the first time, they could see electrons moving together in a frictionless, wave-like state — the quantum behavior that makes superconductors so special. This opens a new window into understanding how superconductors actually work, which could eventually lead to breakthroughs in everything from power transmission to high-speed wireless communication.

Out in the cosmos, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to surprise us. Astronomers have found a planet called L 98-59 d that appears to contain a vast ocean of molten rock beneath its surface, trapping large amounts of sulfur deep inside. Sulfur-rich gases in the atmosphere and an unusually low density for its size make this world unlike anything in our solar system. It challenges how we classify planets entirely.

And JWST ran into a wall with another exoplanet — Kepler-51d, a so-called super-puff planet that is enormous but incredibly light. It's wrapped in a haze so thick that even the most powerful space telescope ever built can't see through it. The haze may stretch as wide as Earth itself. Scientists are left scratching their heads about how this strange, fluffy world even exists.

Before we wrap up — a few more stories worth noting. Bull sharks, long thought of as solitary hunters, actually form social bonds and have preferred companions. After six years observing sharks in Fiji, researchers found they choose friends and swim together in coordinated ways. Who knew sharks were so sociable?

Kids exposed to PFAS — those persistent so-called forever chemicals found in countless everyday products — may grow up with weaker bones, according to new research. Early life exposure appears to interfere with how bones develop during adolescence. It's yet another reason to be concerned about the ubiquity of these chemicals in our environment.

And a fascinating quirk of human perception — many of us instinctively close our eyes when trying to hear something faint, thinking it helps us focus. But new research suggests that in noisy environments, keeping your eyes open might actually help you hear better. The visual system, it turns out, can give the brain useful context that improves how we process sound. Sometimes our instincts just get it backwards.

And finally — deep in the ocean, a key microbe called Nitrosopumilus maritimus may already be adapting to rising temperatures caused by climate change. As heat waves push deeper into the ocean, this organism appears to be shifting its biology to cope. Whether that's a hopeful sign or just a sign of how much has already changed is a question worth sitting with.

And that's a wrap for today's episode of Peer Review'd. From metal asteroids to social sharks, from oxygen-free survival to quantum microscopes — science, as always, is full of surprises. Thanks for listening, stay curious, and we'll see you next time.