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An adult flanged male Sumatran orangutan sitting in a tree. — Rakus, two months after he was observed applying a poultice to an open wound on his cheek. The wound is healed and the scar is barely visible.Credit: Safruddin

For the first time, a wild animal has been documented using a medicinal plant to treat a wound. Rakus, a Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), sustained a gash in his cheek, probably by fighting other males for status. Two days later, scientists noticed him eating the leaves of a vine known for its medicinal properties. He also applied a poultice of chewed leaves to his injury. Just eight days later, his wound was fully closed. Self-medication of other kinds has been observed in some animals, but this “shows that orangutans and humans share knowledge,” says primatologist Caroline Schuppli, who co-authored a study on the event. “Since they live in the same habitat, I would say that’s quite obvious, but still intriguing to realize.”

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Scientific Reports paper

A trial vaccine for recurring urinary tract infections (UTIs) has kept half its recipients UTI-free for nine years. Recurring UTIs are common but can have debilitating symptoms, especially for women. They are usually treated with antibiotics, which can cause side effects, including an irregular heartbeat. But a urology conference in Paris heard that vaccines, targeted treatment and a non-antibiotic medication are all candidates for preventing recurrent infections. Still, it could take years before improved therapies are widely available. “This won’t be a quick process,” says urologist Bob Yang, who has been working on trials of the oral vaccine, which is called MV140.

Nature | 4 min read

The contest to elect the next president of Paris-Saclay University, one of Europe’s biggest research campuses, has collapsed — reflecting wider issues at the giant research centre. A huge merger of four of France’s grandes écoles — elite higher-education institutions — and several other faculties and institutes has led to some teething pains. The two presidential contenders had different visions for the future of the university, but neither was able to reach the bar for election. Now recruitment must start afresh.

Nature | 5 min read

Sex and gender in science

Fraught societal debates, particularly surrounding gender identity, are raising questions about how to best take sex and gender into account in research, both in studies of human health and in other contexts. At the same time, scientists are increasingly recognizing that they must move past assumptions that findings from mainly male individuals will apply to everyone.

The articles in this special collection, with contributors who work in fields such as neuroscience, psychology, immunology and cancer explore the value of considering sex and gender in research, as well as the perils and pitfalls. They explain why progress in this long-neglected area of research is crucial — and consider how differences between individuals can be explored responsibly, inclusively and for the benefit of as many people as possible.

• Some scientists are reluctant to investigate questions about sex and gender, particularly given today’s sociopolitical tensions around gender identity. But they should lean in and embrace the complexity, argue health scientist Stacey Ritz and gender and equity specialist Lorraine Greaves. (10 min read)

• Binary sex studies have been denounced as too simplistic — but abandoning them altogether would impede progress in a long-neglected area of biomedicine, argue immunologist Sabra Klein, pharmacologist Margaret McCarthy, pain researcher Jeffrey Mogil and Arthur Arnold, who studies sex differences in physiology and disease. (15 min read)

Read the whole collection

Features & opinion

A pioneering cosmic-mapping project seems to show that dark energy could be getting weaker, with potential implications for theories of how the Universe has evolved and for what its future might hold. The mysterious force is like reverse gravity, pushing everything apart and causing the Universe to expand faster and faster, getting colder and emptier. Initial results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument in Arizona hint that dark energy is not a constant after all, which means the Universe’s expansion could start to slow down. But researchers say that the evidence for changes in dark energy is still very uncertain.

Nature | 8 min read

“I wanted to write a story showing that the messy and problematic parts of humanity are the essential ingredients of connection,” says author Joanna Friedman about her latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.

Nature | 6 min read

Andrew Robinson’s pick of the top five science books to read this week includes a deep dive into the debate-inspiring idea of the multiverse, a personal, unshrinking call to action about fatphobia and a fundamentally optimistic book on increasing sustainability.

Nature | 4 min read

Male mice given antibiotics targeting gut microbes showed changes to their testes and sperm, which led to their offspring having a higher probability of severe growth issues and premature death. It’s unknown whether a similar effect would be seen in humans, but the finding suggests that factors other than genetics play a role in intergenerational disease susceptibility.

Nature Podcast | 25 min listen

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Today in our penguin-seeking puzzle, Leif Penguinson is hiding somewhere in Tassili N’ajjer national park in Algeria. This huge plateau in the Sahara desert is a UNESCO world heritage site that hosts thousands of drawings and engravings as old as 7,000 years ago. Can you find the penguin?

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With contributions by Katrina Krämer, Smriti Mallapaty, Gemma Conroy, Dyani Lewis, Sarah Tomlin and Sara Phillips

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An orangutan in Sumatra surprised scientists when he was seen treating an open wound on his cheek with a poultice made from a medicinal plant. It’s the first scientific record of a wild animal healing a wound using a plant with known medicinal properties. The findings were published this week in Scientific Reports¹.

“It shows that orangutans and humans share knowledge. Since they live in the same habitat, I would say that’s quite obvious, but still intriguing to realize,” says Caroline Schuppli, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, and a co-author of the study.

In 2009, Schuppli’s team was observing Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) in the Gunung Leuser National Park in South Aceh, Indonesia, when a young male moved into the forest. He did not have a mature male’s big cheek pads, called flanges, and was probably around 20 years old, Schuppli says. He was named Rakus, or ‘greedy’ in Indonesian, after he ate all the flowers off a gardenia bush in one sitting.

In 2021, Rakus underwent a growth spurt and became a mature flanged male. The researchers observed Rakus fighting with other flanged males to establish dominance and, in June 2022, a field assistant noted an open wound on his face, possibly made by the canines of another male, Schuppli says.

Adult flanged male orangutan sitting in a tree, with a large wound on his right cheek. — Rakus with his wound, two days before he was observed applying a poultice of medicinal leaves.Credit: Armas

Days later, Rakus was observed eating the stems and leaves of the creeper akar kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), which local people use to treat diabetes, dysentery and malaria, among other conditions. Orangutans in the area rarely eat this plant.

In addition to eating the leaves, Rakus chewed them without swallowing and used his fingers to smear the juice on his facial wound over seven minutes. Some flies settled on the wound, whereupon Rakus spread a poultice of leaf-mash on the wound. He ate the plant again the next day. Eight days after his injury, his wound was fully closed.

The research group has seen no other orangutans in the national park self-medicate using akar kuning in 21 years of observation. This could be because wild orangutans in the region are rarely injured. Or perhaps Rakus is the only one who knows of this treatment, which could be a behaviour he picked up before he moved into the area.

“It is the first study to scientifically demonstrate that an animal is using a plant with medicinal properties applicable to wounds, and putting those on the wounds and consistently treating over a period of time,” says Michael Huffman, who studies animal self-medication at the Institute for Tropical Medicine at Nagasaki University in Japan.

Huffman says self-medication is seen in many species. Canadian snow geese (Anser caerulescens) swallow leaves whole to expel tape worms². Dusky-footed wood rats (Neotoma fuscipes) line their nests with aromatic plants to fumigate parasites³. And chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in Gabon have been observed rubbing insects near their wounds², potentially as treatment.

Humans might even have discovered some remedies by watching animals, he says. “Probably our ancestors were looking at other animals and learning about medicines.” When social animals communicate, “that information sticks and can last over generations”.

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