DOD Research Bill Cuts Basic Science, Restores Biomedical Funds as Immigration Fight Threatens Shutdown: Congress is moving a 2026 Defense Department spending bill that trims DOD’s university-focused basic and applied research even as it restores money for a popular biomedical program and blocks a steep overhead cap. The legislation would raise overall DOD science and technology spending about 4% to nearly $150 billion, but cut basic research 4.9% to $2.3 billion and applied research 3.4% to $6.7 billion—less severe than President Donald Trump’s requested reductions, yet still below what advocates say inflation and security needs require. In contrast, lawmakers reset the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs to $1.3 billion after last year’s 57% drop. The bill also keeps university indirect-cost rates at 2024 levels, rejecting a proposed 15% cap. Passage may stall amid Senate Democrats’ response to immigration enforcement deaths, risking a Jan. 31 shutdown. (Science)

A Towering Mystery: Prototaxites May Not Be a Fungus After All: For more than a century, paleontologists have argued over Prototaxites—towering, tube-filled fossils from the Devonian that could rise like telephone poles, long before forests. A new analysis of Prototaxites taiti from Scotland’s 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert hot-spring ecosystem re-examines its anatomy and chemistry and says it does not fit cleanly among fungi, plants, or animals. Past work often treated Prototaxites as a giant fungus, but the new study compares it with fossil fungi from the same deposit and highlights branching and construction that do not match. The authors argue it may represent an extinct lineage of complex life, implying early land ecosystems hosted large organisms outside today’s kingdoms and challenging textbook pictures of pre-forest landscapes. Its lifestyle—decomposer, symbiont, or something else—remains uncertain. (Scientific American)

Oldest Camera Eyes: 443-Million-Year-Old Fish Fossils Reveal Early Vision: Two tiny jawless fish fossils from Scotland—Jamoytius and Lasanius—are helping rewrite the early story of vertebrate vision. Researchers at the University of Manchester used the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource to map chemical signatures inside 443-million-year-old specimens from near Lesmahagow, south of Glasgow. They report the oldest “camera-type” eyes yet identified, plus evidence consistent with early bone or bone-like tissues, in work published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The synchrotron scans let the team detect subtle element patterns that can trace soft-tissue structures otherwise lost to time. If confirmed, the results suggest advanced visual systems and skeletal innovation appeared surprisingly early in vertebrate evolution—and that the first fishes were not as anatomically primitive as textbooks often imply in remarkable chemical detail. (University of Manchester)

Asteroid Impact Spared Sharks and Rays—But Their Big Decline Came Later: Sharks and rays seem like obvious victims of the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs, but a new analysis suggests the hit was comparatively modest for them. Swansea University describes an AI-driven study that pairs a global fossil dataset with deep-learning methods designed to correct for uneven sampling. The team estimates shark and ray diversity reached roughly modern levels during the Cretaceous and then dipped by about 10% at the end-Cretaceous, before recovering. They also report diversity peaked in the mid-Eocene, around 50 million years ago, and has fallen by more than 40% since then. Published in Current Biology, the results suggest today’s declines are piling onto a long-term downward trend. The work reframes the extinction: the asteroid was not the main driver of their modern losses. (University of Swansea)

A 2.6-Million-Year-Old Jaw Expands the Map for Early Human Relatives: A partial lower jaw from Ethiopia, dated to 2.6 million years old, is among the oldest known fossils of Paranthropus—and it complicates the idea that early Homo simply outcompeted its robust-jawed relatives. The University of Chicago reports the specimen comes from the Mille-Logya area of the Afar and was described in Nature. Its age and location expand the known geographic and ecological reach of Paranthropus at a pivotal time near the dawn of early Homo. After recovering many fragments, the team used micro-CT scans to study internal anatomy and refit the jaw. The researchers argue Paranthropus was widespread and versatile, potentially sharing landscapes with Homo rather than being quickly displaced. That overlap raises new questions about how these hominins partitioned food, water, and habitat. (University of Chicago)