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FACT: Pueblo peoples might have moved huge logs for over 60 miles by strapping them to their heads

By Sandra Gutierrez G. 

Researchers always seem to be wondering how ancient civilizations moved big stuff around, but they rarely get the opportunity to try their theories empirically. 

Enter a team of anthropologists and physiologists from the University of Colorado Boulder. In the true spirit of experimental science, they strapped 136-pound logs to their heads to figure out how Pueblo peoples from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico might have carried the timber necessary to build their extraordinary architecture. 

Chaco Canyon was the most important political and ceremonial center for the Ancestral Puebloans. There, they built their famous stone and adobe dwellings along the cliff walls, ritual structures called kivas, as well as semi-circular constructions known as great houses. 

Scientists calculate that 200 thousand timbers were used in the construction of this particular site—but there are no trees anywhere nearby. In 2001, tree-ring experts at the University of Arizona used chemical analyses and discovered that the wood in the Puebloan constructions was sourced from mountain ranges at least 46 miles away—the furthermost, Chuska mountains, are 62 miles away from Chaco Canyon. 

Puebloans had no wheel, no draft animals, nor any other type of modern carriage system that we know of. Plus, archeologists have not found scrape marks on the grounds around Chaco Canyon that would hint at the logs being dragged or pushed. So, logs as big as 16 feet and 190 pounds had to be carried by hand. 

There have been a number of theories but the researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder tested the one proposing that the timbers in the Chacoan constructions were actually moved only by a few people at a time using tumplines: a technique that involves carrying a load on the lower back by strapping it to the head. 

Three of the four authors of this study trained for three months to figure out if the theory was humanly possible and how long would it take them to transport a 132-pound pine timber over 15.5 miles using tumplines made out of nylon webbing and foam padding. 

Considering small breaks every 20 minutes and longer breaks every two and a half miles, researchers completed the test in a total time of 9 hours and 44 minutes, walking at an average speed of 2.8 miles per hour.

So yes, tumplines are a perfectly feasible method of carrying heavy timbers over long distances. Researchers say the tumplines were “surprisingly comfortable” and communication was key to coordinating the walk and avoiding the timber from swaying.

FACT: Wolves can help humans get into fewer car crashes 

By Rachel Feltman

Anyone who’s spent time driving in an even vaguely rural area knows that deer have a preternatural ability to get hit by human cars. In 2021, a study in Wisconsin found an interesting connection between the all-too-common phenomenon of deer collisions and the presence of wild wolves. According to 22 years of data, having wolves around means people hit deer less often. 

You might assume that’s because the wolves ate the deer. After all, deer populations have a tendency to run amok if there aren’t predators keeping them in check. Wolves eating deer could explain a six percent reduction in crashes, according to the study. But the researchers saw a 24 percent drop.

That remaining three-quarters of the impact came from “a landscape of fear.” Wolves tend to follow whatever the clearest path is in a wooded area, like a stream. When humans come in and build up the landscape, that means artificial clearings for things like roads, pipelines, and rail tracks. Deer are known to change their behavior and location to avoid predators. So when wolves are in town, they roam the roadside—and deers stay off the streets. 
The study estimates that wolves save Wisconsin about $10.9 million in losses each year by preventing car crashes, which more than covers what the state pays out to people who lose pets or livestock to wolves, which tends to be the biggest public objection to letting their populations bounce back. The researchers also noted that there were other potential economic benefits they hadn’t calculated, like the lowered risk in lyme disease transmission we see when deer populations are well managed.

FACT: Sometimes articles published in academic journals are totally made up

By Ali Hazelwood

In 1996, NYU physics professor Alan Sokal wrote and submitted a scholarly paper to the journal Social Text. The paper was accepted and published—and after a few weeks Sokal revealed that the paper was a hoax: it was full of nonsense and jargon, and he’d written it to demonstrate the pitfalls of the academic peer-review process.

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The dangerous smoke from more than 100 wildfires burning in Quebec, Canada is drifting south into the United States. The smog can cause burning eyes and headaches, making it dangerous to go outside, particularly for those with asthma and heart diseases. 

[Related: Here’s exactly how wildfires are polluting our air.]

New York City had the worst air quality of any major metropolitan area late last night on Tuesday June 6, according to IQAIR. The city has since dropped to second place in terms of air pollution in the world following New Delhi, India.

Early on Wednesday June 7, New York City’s air quality was considered “very unhealthy,” according to the US Air Quality Index. This metric is maintained by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New York City’s AQI was 226 out of a maximum of over 300. The EPA characterizes this level as Code Purple, which means elevated health risk for all groups. 

In a health advisory, NYC officials urged at-risk residents to wear high-quality masks outdoors and try to stay indoors. 

“If you are an older adult or have heart or breathing problems and need to be outside, wear a high-quality mask (e.g. N95 or KN95),” the office of Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.

“Currently, we are taking precautions out of an abundance of caution to protect New Yorkers’ health until we are able to get a better sense of future air quality reports,” Adams said.

Nearly 100 million people across numerous states are affected by the dangerous conditions, with sunrises turning red under gray skies. The smoke is expected to continue with air quality alerts issued for New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont,  New Hampshire and as far south as Washington DC and North Carolina.

This fire season is shaping up to be among the worst in Canadian history, and the province of Quebec is seeking international support to help fight the fires. With 480 wilderness firefighters on the ground, Quebec can fight around 30 fires, Quebec Premier François Legault told the Associated Press on June 5. Usually, he said, firefighters would come from other provinces to help.

“When I talk to the premiers of other provinces, they have their hands full,” Legault said in a press briefing in Quebec City.

Wildfire smoke has very tiny particulate matter, or PM2.5. This is an extremely small pollutant, but is the most dangerous. It can travel deep into lung tissue and enter the bloodstream. In addition to wildfires, tiny particulate matter comes from sources like dust storms and the combustion of fossil fuels. Studies have linked it to numerous health problems including heart diseases, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 4.2 million premature deaths were associated with fine particulate matter in 2016.  The concentration of PM2.5 in NYC was over 10 times the guideline set by the WHO.

[Related: Less ice in the Arctic could mean more wildfires in the US.]

“If you can see or smell smoke, know that you’re being exposed,” William Barrett, the national senior director of clean air advocacy with the American Lung Association told CNN. “And it’s important that you do everything you can to remain indoors during those high, high pollution episodes, and it’s really important to keep an eye on your health or any development of symptoms.”

To live with wildfire smoke, experts suggest learning how to check and monitor air quality early and often, in addition to closing windows, using air filtration if possible, and keeping pets indoors. It is also feasible to build your own air purifier for as low as $30.

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Excerpt from The Boy Who Reached for the Stars: A Memoir by Elio Morillo. Published by HarperOne. Copyright © 2022 HarperCollins.

On September 20, 2017, Category 5 Hurricane María hit my beloved Puerto Rico, hovering over the island for the next 48 hours, uprooting trees, causing power and phone outages, and inflicting catastrophic devastation throughout the land. It was a terrifying stretch of time when those of us with loved ones in the path of this

destruction could only hope and pray they were okay. As we waited to get any type of news, my fix-it mentality kicked in—I needed to do something to channel my helplessness into action. I joined forces with a Puerto Rican who worked in another team at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to begin collecting donations, so we would be ready to ship them out as soon as it was possible. Relief washed over us both when the worry laden silence was finally broken and we heard from our respective families and friends. More than anything, they had suffered material damage to their homes and surrounding streets, but everyone within our circles was okay otherwise. Rosa and Sonia described the experience as a powered-on jet engine sucking everything up into the air.

As more news was released of the extent of the damage people had suffered, my friend and I continued to organize donation efforts in Los Angeles. It was all we could do at the time. I had to carry my worry while I continued to work. I was assigned to avionics and thermal functions testing. In simple terms, the rover has two brains: its main day-to-day brain and what I call its lizard brain. The lizard brain is always running in the background, ready for fight or flight. It checks to make sure that the main computer, or main brain, is working well. If something goes south with the main brain, then the lizard brain can go through particular states to keep the system at a basic level of safety, putting the rover in a partially autonomous configuration that allows us time to figure out what to input to safely reconfigure its hardware.

The rover’s thermal behaviors are what helps keep it alive overnight, when Mars temperatures can drop to −100°F or lower, depending on the season. There are particular instruments and mechanisms that can only operate within a specific range of temperatures.

If they become too cold, we must be able to heat them up. If they’re too warm, we have to stop using them or actively cool them down to the range we want them to operate in. As we gradually entered an all-hands-on-deck phase ahead of our July 2020 launch date, I knew that if I was going to be an effective and successful member of the team, I needed to make the conscious decision to put my work first, but not before making my all-important pit stop to spend Christmas with my family.

This time we met up in Florida. My grandparents, who didn’t travel often, joined us from New York. And I got to reunite with Sonia and Robert, who were temporarily living in the area while they sorted through Hurricane María’s damage back home. While my abuelo made sure the TV and music were set up and ready for our gathering, my abuela got busy in the kitchen, whipping up her famous casuela or caldo de bola together with extra sides to keep us all fed, full, and happy. My tías and tíos would give them a hand while making fun of each other and roasting my cousins. And a round of Telefunken (a game similar to rummy) was always in order, with bets of up to two dollars per person per round.

The highlight of this break wasn’t just spending quality time with my relatives and chosen family; it was also getting the chance to take my 91-year-old grandfather and my brother to the Kennedy Space Center—a first for the three of us. Walking into the center and suddenly being in the presence of all this antiquated hardware took my breath away. The exhibit featuring the Saturn V launch vehicle made me feel so small. I was mesmerized by how the 1950s team was able to design the stunning hardware displayed before me with the limited technology they had access to in comparison to what we have now. Sure, they had a relatively bigger budget and thousands of people working on one problem, which is not a luxury we enjoy, but they didn’t have our software and automated procedures, and they were doing it all for the first time. As if taking all of this in wasn’t enough, being there as a NASA engineer, walking the entire center by my grandfather’s side, with me as our tour guide, explaining each piece before us, was an unparalleled full-circle moment for me. I stopped several times, glanced at my grandfather, and quietly asked, “Abuelo, are you okay? Would you like us to sit down for a little while to rest?” but he outright refused any break, likely pushed forward by a sense of pride for his walking abilities as well as the sense of wonder that had taken hold of us all as we witnessed this history-making equipment. It was an unequivocal reminder of the legacy I was now helping build with the Mars 2020 mission.

Inspired by the history I had witnessed at the Kennedy Center, and with a renewed sense of purpose, I was more eager than ever to dive even deeper into the mission at stake. February 2018 found me interacting with the Ingenuity helicopter for the first time, more specifically its base station, a component of the helicopter system that would live on the rover. This is the piece of hardware that would communicate with the helicopter on Mars. We were developing the capabilities, the hardware, all of it, to fulfill a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars, but NASA HQ still hadn’t given the okay to add it to the Mars 2020 mission. So we were operating with the hope this green light would eventually be given, and we kept plowing ahead on the rover side, considering how we’d carry the helicopter, how we’d communicate with it, how we’d operate it from this base station. Initially, many of the people on the integration side of the rover were against the idea of integrating the helicopter as a separate system, because that meant it would also have its own separate battery. What if its battery caught fire while cruising through space or on the Mars surface? How would that damage the rover itself? “There’s no way the helicopter will work” was one line of thought. The other: “There’s no way you’ll be able to get all of this work done in time.” And the third: “This helicopter will be a distraction from the rest of the science the rover has to accomplish.” Was it a risk to do this tremendous amount of work for a helicopter that might never launch? Yes, but it was one some of us were willing to take.

As the summer neared, I set my mind on Puerto Rico and the risks and sacrifices they had been forced to take when Hurricane María hit their shores. The island had far from recovered from the damage sustained a little less than a year earlier, and my colleague (turned girlfriend) and I were still eager to help in any way we could. I decided to use my social media to reach out to teachers in Puerto Rico to see how we could help that summer. I quickly received a reply from a University of Michigan friend whose mom had a colleague, Marisa, in need of some help. With the community’s blessing, she and her husband had decided to take over an abandoned school in Los Naranjos, a neighborhood in Vega Baja, located near Dorado, and turn it into a community center. The local residents had lost so much during the hurricane that she was hell-bent on making a difference. Now they were looking for volunteer to get the center off the ground. My girlfriend and I created a three-day STEM program for kids between the ages of eight and 15, called Ingenieros del Futuro (Engineers of the Future). The activities we planned introduced the kids to basic engineering concepts and revolved around three themes: robotics, electricity, and rockets. I set up a GoFundMe to help pay for some of the materials, while we paid for everything else out of pocket.

When we arrived, seeing the devastation firsthand threw me off my orbit and momentarily pushed me into an impotent void. As I painstakingly drove through intersections where the traffic lights had gone dark due to the lack of power, I slowly took in the trees scattered around the area like giant twigs, displaced rooftops, cut-down electricity cables, and attempted to store this harrowing data in a corner of my mind so I could find my way back to our main focus: the kids. I’d give myself time to process this emotional oscillation later, when I returned home.

We immediately got the kids working and building several projects—a basic robot, an electric car that used a solar panel to power it, a satellite model, and a wind turbine—to illustrate robotics, sustainable energy, and space exploration. We also scheduled outdoor time to give their brains a break and burn some energy playing soccer with us. For the last project of their three-day journey, I taught them how to build a rocket with a two-liter plastic bottle and a few other readily available components. I had also purchased a bottle launch system that pumped up the rockets and had a trigger that allowed each kid to send their own rocket into the air.

Once it reached a certain height, a parachute they had built into their system with their own hands deployed, safely landing their creation. Their excitement during each launch, descent, and landing, about further engaging with technology and pursuing opportunities in STEM, gave me hope for the people of Puerto Rico. The island currently has to import most of its food, despite once being fully reliant on its own agriculture sector. With agritech becoming more accessible, combined with the development of hydroponics, vertical farming, and more, I see this as a potentially booming sector for Puerto Rico in the future. But they will need dedicated STEM workers to make it happen. The same goes for the ever-controversial power grid. As energy storage and solar, hydro, and wind power become more accessible, microgrids will thrive, and so will the jobs related to those renewable systems.

Sinergia Los Naranjos is still active in the community. Marisa successfully launched a kitchen for folks to run catering businesses, and her husband, Ricardo, runs a reef restoration effort where many of the kids participate and get scuba training. Workshops occur in partnership with local student groups from nearby universities, mostly through grassroots funding and efforts. These kids have the power to build a better future, and I hope to continue to be able to come alongside them and encourage these developments through outreach, philanthropy, and policy influence.

By the spring of 2019, I was working with a few team members to test the capability of our rover to charge the helicopter battery through its base station while traversing space. Batteries, including those in computers and cell phones, left uncharged for a long period of time lose their properties and can’t regain their full charging potential.

Similarly, overcharging a battery and leaving it stored for a long period of time will degrade its lifetime. We had to figure out the sweet spot for the helicopter battery, then find how to measure that charge and, based on that, how to charge it from the rover battery.

Once we figured this out through tests and failures and finally verified what worked, we had to come up with the sequence of steps that needed to be taken to charge the helicopter while flying through space. It was a complicated set of tests that took up a lot of our time but was essential to the helicopter’s functionality and safety.

That summer I began to write and execute integration procedures for the helicopter deployment system, which is the assembly at the bottom of the rover that would hold the helicopter and deploy it. The system consisted of a tiny robotic arm with a motor that would keep the helicopter upright so that it could be successfully dropped onto the Martian surface. After testing this capability and gathering the necessary parameters, we determined that we could indeed deploy it on Mars. A short while after this, JPL finally approved the addition of the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission. We got the green light. Like most times in my life, the risk proved to be worth taking.

Buy The Boy Who Reached for the Stars by Elio Morillo here.

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Despite centuries of taboo and titillation, masturbation in primates appears to serve an evolutionary purpose. A study published June 6 in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B, found that self-stimulating increases reproductive success and helps primates avoid sexually transmitted infections (STI), at least in males. 

[Related from PopSci+: These sex toys are designed to heal, one orgasm at a time.]

Self-pleasure is common across the animal kingdom, but is particularly frequent in primates including humans. The behavior was considered by some scientists to be either pathological or simply a by-product of sexual arousal. Recorded observations were also too fragmented to fully understand masturbation’s distribution, evolutionary history, or adaptive significance. 

In this new study, a team of researchers built a dataset on primate masturbation from close to 400 sources, including 246 published academic papers, and 150 questionnaires and personal communications from zookeepers and primatologists. To understand why and when the practice evolved in both females and males, the authors tracked the distribution of autosexual behavior across primates.

They found that masturbation has a long evolutionary history amongst primates, and was likely present in the common ancestry of all monkeys and apes, humans included. What was less clear is whether the common ancestor of other primates—lemurs, lorises and tarsiers—masturbated, largely because there was less data on these groups.

The team tested multiple hypotheses to better understand why this seemingly non-functional trait would evolve. According to the postcopulatory selection hypothesis, masturbation aids successful fertilization that can be achieved in various ways. 

Masturbation without ejaculation can increase arousal before sexual intercourse, which may be a useful tactic for low-ranking primate males that are likely to be interrupted during sex. 

Masturbation with ejaculation allows males to shed their more inferior semen, which leaves the fresh, high-quality semen available for mating. This super semen may be more likely to outcompete the semen of other males, which is necessary in primate communities with steep competition for mates. The study found support for this second hypothesis, namely that male masturbation co-evolved within multi-male mating systems where competition between males is high.

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins.]

According to the pathogen avoidance hypothesis, male masturbation reduces the chance of contracting an STI by cleansing the urethra with ejaculate. The team also found evidence to support this hypothesis, with the data revealing that masturbation in males co-evolved with high STI load across the primate tree of life.

The significance of female masturbation remains less clear. While it is frequent, fewer studies and reports describe female self-pleasure.The team argues that more data on female sexual behavior is needed before understanding masturbation’s evolutionary role in females. 

“Our findings help shed light on a very common, but little understood, sexual behavior and represent a significant advance in our understanding of the functions of masturbation,” study co-author and University College London anthropologist Matilda Brindle said in a statement. “The fact that autosexual behavior may serve an adaptive function, is ubiquitous throughout the primate order, and is practiced by captive and wild-living members of both sexes, demonstrates that masturbation is part of a repertoire of healthy sexual behaviors.”

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NASA’s upcoming Psyche mission will send a small probe to a unique metal asteroid—a curious object that may be the exposed heart of a former planet. But to prepare for the 280-million-mile journey, engineers have had to attend to a million little details over the course of years of planning and construction. Working those out took more time than anticipated: NASA delayed Psyche’s launch last year, prompting concerns about the mission’s future and triggering an investigation into what caused the set back. On Monday, NASA announced that Psyche is thriving and on track for a new launch date in October 2023.

“The 2023 launch date is credible, and the probability of mission success is high,” said A. Thomas Young, chair of the independent review board that assessed Psyche’s missteps, at a news conference. NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) Director Laurie Leshin confirmed the fall blast-off: Psyche is “green across the board, and on track for October launch.” Of the 18 weeks to go until launch, seven are buffer time—a pretty impressive margin for such an intense engineering project.

Psyche, announced in 2017, was first delayed in June 2022 when issues with its flight software arose during testing. NASA commissioned the review board soon after, which delivered its findings last fall. The review cited issues across the entire laboratory—understaffing, a lack of experienced managerial oversight, budget strain, and the COVID-19 pandemic—as factors contributing to the mission’s woes. JPL’s reckoning with this review had ripple effects, including the controversial indefinite pause of the VERITAS mission to Venus.

[Related: 5 ways we know DART crushed that asteroid (but not literally)]

Now, in May 2023, the review board has reassessed JPL’s readiness. The Psyche debacle may have raised questions about the ability of JPL to juggle building more than a dozen spacecraft, but NASA officials emphasized the concerns plaguing the center’s operations has been addressed. The progress made at JPL is “not only outstanding, but world-class as determined by our review board,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

JPL’s changes include hiring more experienced staff (including luring back talent that left JPL for commercial spaceflight companies), reorganizing the engineering teams to focus on high-priority work, and updating their hybrid work policy to bring more people back in-person to the lab. “We’ve overcome our workforce issues, our missions are staffed,” said Leshin.

[Related: The asteroid that created Earth’s largest crater may have been way bigger than we thought]

If Psyche leaves Earth as scheduled in the fall, it will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029. The mission will hopefully reveal information about how planets form, and will confirm if 16 Psyche is the leftover metal core of a failed planet as hypothesized. Some companies even see the Psyche mission as a potential first step toward mining asteroids for precious metals, as the space rock contains approximately 10 quintillion dollars worth of materials. 

And things are looking up for other missions, too—especially since JPL recently delivered the NISAR Earth-radar satellite on schedule and is making good progress for next year’s launch of Europa Clipper. The laboratory’s strong progress is a good sign for the hopeful restart of VERITAS, which would be a huge win for planetary scientists and a monumental return to our sister planet.

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Since its initial discovery was announced in 2015, an extinct hominid species named Homo naledi (H. naledi) has been making anthropological waves. Now, three new preprint studies published June 5 in the journal eLife and presented at the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference suggest that these human cousins may have buried their dead and carved symbols into cave walls, showing that they were capable of complex behavior despite their smaller brains. 

[Related: New Species On Human Family Tree Discovered In Ancient Mass Grave.]

While the research hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, some outside scientists believe that more evidence is needed to challenge what is already known about how complex thinking evolved in humans. If these new findings are true, it would overthrow the current belief that humans are the only species to bury their dead.

H. naledi’s brain is roughly one-third the size of the human brain. Previously, most scientists believed that the mental capacity behind burial, making marks, and other more complex cultural behaviors required a bigger brain, like those of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. 

“It’s not how big your brain is, it’s how you use it and what it’s structured for,” study co-author and University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks said in a statement. Hawks has helped lead the H. naledi  team since its beginning.

The fossil remains of the species were first uncovered about 10 years ago in the Rising Star cave system northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Since then, team members have descended into the tight underground caves that they say show this species in a new light. 

One study describes the potential intentional burial sites that held fossilized remains of children and adults in the fetal position and buried in shallow holes in the ground. One of the other studies describes a series of marks carved into the cave’s limestone walls that include cross-hatched lines, squares, and triangles. 

Additionally,  H. naledi  had a smaller frame based on the skeletons that have been excavated. Archaeologists estimate that the average  individual weighed less than 90 pounds and was under five feet tall. This small stature would have helped them navigate the extremely narrow and cramped passageways in this cave system. Some of the cave system’s labyrinth of passages are as narrow as seven inches and are located 300 feet underground. 

The bones found in the cave are between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, which is older than the graves at Qafzeh cave in Israel. These 92,000-year-old graves are commonly cited as the earliest known examples of human burial.

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

“This is a great moment in human history,” Lee Berger, the South African paleontologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence who co-wrote all three papers, told The Washington Post. Berger said people have wondered, “‘What will we do when we meet another culture as complex as us?’ Well, you just did.”

Berger has drawn criticism in his three-decades-long career for announcing or publishing research before gathering sufficient supporting evidence. He, in turn, has criticized the practice of waiting years to share discoveries with the public, calling it “elitist,” according to The Washington Post. 

These new findings show that the caves still have more to offer scientists working to understand human evolution, according to Hawks. The team hopes to have more trained eyes and experts into the caves to search for more evidence. 

“We have to approach it like an escape room. We have to study every hidden detail now,” Hawks says. “This whole cave system might be part of some kind of cultural space.”

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The International Space Station received roughly 7,000 pounds of supplies and scientific experiment materials early Tuesday morning following the successful autonomous docking of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. According to NASA, the Dragon will remain attached to the ISS for about three weeks before returning back to Earth with research and cargo. In addition to a pair of International Space Station Roll Out Solar Arrays (IROSAs) designed to expand the microgravity complex’s energy-production ability, ISS crew members are receiving materials for a host of new and ongoing experiments.

[Related: Microgravity tomatoes, yogurt bacteria, and plastic eating microbes are headed to the ISS.]

THOR, an aptly named investigation courtesy of the European Space Agency, will observe Earth’s thunderstorms from above the atmosphere to examine and document electrical activity. Researchers plan to specifically analyze the “inception, frequency, and altitude of recently discovered blue discharges,” i.e. lightning occurring within the upper atmosphere. Scientists still know very little about such phenomena’s effects on the planet’s climate and weather, but the upcoming observations could potentially shed more light on the processes.

Meanwhile, researchers are hoping to stretch out telomeres in microgravity via Genes in Space-10, part of an ongoing national contest for students in grades 7 through 12 to develop their own biotech experiments. These genetic structures protect humans’ chromosomes, but generally shorten over time as they age. Observing telomere lengthening in ISS microgravity will give scientists a chance to determine if their size change relates to stem cell proliferation. Results could help NASA and other researchers better understand effects on astronauts’ health during long-term missions, a particularly topical subject given their hopes for upcoming excursions to the moon and Mars.

ISS will also deploy the Educational Space Science and Engineering CubeSat Experiment (ESSENCE), a tiny satellite housing a wide-angle camera capable of monitoring ice and permafrost thawing within the Canadian Arctic. This satellite comes alongside another student collaboration project called Iris, which is meant to observe geological samples’ weathering upon exposure to direct solar and background cosmic radiation.

[Related: The ISS’s latest arrivals: a 3D printer, seeds, and ovarian cow cells.]

Finally, a set of plants that germinated from seeds first produced in space and subsequently traveled to Earth are returning to the ISS as part of Plant Habitat-03. According to NASA, plantlife often adapts to the environmental stresses imposed on them via spaceflight, but it’s still unclear if these changes are genetically passed on to future generations. PH-03 will hopefully help scientists better understand these issues, which could prove critical to food generation during future space missions and exploration efforts.

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Earth is facing a biodiversity crisis, with species extinction accelerating at a startling pace. Policy action is finally catching up with the dilemma, as the United Nations reached a historic deal to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wilderness by 2030 in December 2022. Addressing this crisis will face an uphill battle– including the infrastructure needed to quantify these losses.

[Related: Why you can’t put a price on biodiversity.]

This crucial data may now come from a surprising source: air quality monitoring stations. In a study published June 5 in the journal Current Biology finds that for decades, thousands of these ambient air quality monitoring stations all over the world have inadvertently been collecting environmental DNA (eDNA) in their filters.

“One of the biggest challenges in biodiversity is monitoring at landscape scales—and our data suggest this could be addressed using the already existing networks of air quality monitoring stations, which are regulated by many public and private operators,” study co-author and York University ecologist Elizabeth Clare said in a statement. “These networks have existed for decades, but we have not really considered the ecological value of the samples they collect.”

Air quality monitoring stations have been around for decades, but methods of capturing and analyzing eDNA are relatively new. Data from previous studies offered proof-of-concept evidence that it was possible to identify the species in a zoo by sampling the air.

In this new study, a team of researchers tested whether airborne eDNA that holds information on local plant, insect, and other animal life is captured on these filters as a by-product of the normal operations of air quality monitoring networks. These networks  typically monitor for heavy metals and other pollutants. 

They extracted and amplified DNA from the filters at two locations in the United Kingdom and recovered eDNA from over 180 different fungi, plants, insects, mammals, birds, amphibians, and other animal groups. The species list included many charismatic species, including badgers, dormice, little owls, and smooth newts. Additionally, they were able to pick up DNA from species of special conservation interest such as hedgehogs and songbirds. Trees and plants included ash, linden, pine, willow, oak, yarrows, mallows, daisy, nettles, and grasses. DNA from arable crops such as wheat, soybean, and cabbage was also identified, according to the study.

Additionally, the filters contained DNA from 34 species of birds. Data showed that longer sampling times captured a larger number of vertebrate species, possibly as more birds and mammals visited the area over time. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

According to the team, air quality monitoring networks have been gathering local biodiversity data in a very standardized way, but the ecological significance has long gone unnoticed. Samples are kept for decades in some places, which suggests that existing samples that capture ecological data over time may already exist. With only some minor changes, these samples could be used for detailed monitoring of land-based biodiversity using a network already in full operation.

“The most important finding, to my mind, is the demonstration that aerosol samplers typically used in national networks for ambient air quality monitoring can also collect eDNA,” James Allerton, a co-author and an air quality specialist from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory. said in a statement. “One can infer that such networks—for all their years of operation and in other countries around the world—must have been inadvertently picking up eDNA from the very air we breathe.”

The team is currently working to preserve as many of these samples as they can with eDNA in mind. The team says it will take a global effort to reach all of their trove of biodiversity data. 

“The potential of this cannot be overstated,” study co-author and Queen Mary University of London biologist Joanne Littlefair said in a statement. “It could be an absolute game changer for tracking and monitoring biodiversity. Almost every country has some kind of air pollution monitoring system or network, either government owned or private, and in many cases both. This could solve a global problem of how to measure biodiversity at a massive scale.”

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Brazil’s coastal waters teem with a rich array of species that paint a living tapestry beneath the waves. This underwater world is particularly special because many of its species are endemic – they are found nowhere else on Earth. The southwestern Atlantic is home to 111 endemic reef fish species, each of which plays a crucial role in the intricate web of marine life.

An uninvited guest has arrived in these tropical waters: the Pacific red lionfish (Pterois volitans). Renowned for its stunning appearance and voracious appetite, the lionfish was first detected off of Florida in 1985 and has spread throughout the Caribbean, killing reef fish in large numbers.

Now it has breached a formidable obstacle: the Amazon-Orinoco river plume, which flows into the Atlantic from northeastern Brazil. This massive discharge of fresh water has long functioned as a barrier separating Caribbean fish species from those farther south along Brazil’s coastline.

Scientists and environmental managers widely agree that the lionfish invasion in Brazil is a potential ecological disaster. As a marine ecologist, I believe mitigating the damage will require a comprehensive approach that addresses the ecological, social and economic harms wrought by this predatory fish.

Tracing the lionfish’s spread

It’s easy to see why lionfish appeal to aquarium enthusiasts. Native to the warm waters of the Indo-Pacific ocean, they are 12 to 15 inches long, with red and white stripes and long, showy fins. They protect themselves with dorsal spines that deliver painful venomous stings.

Lionfish were first detected in the Atlantic Ocean in 1985 off Dania Beach, Florida, probably discarded by a tropical fish collector. Since then they have spread throughout the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and northward as far as Bermuda and North Carolina – one of the most successful marine invasions on record. A close relative, the common lionfish or devil firefish (Pterois miles), has invaded the Mediterranean Sea and is spreading rapidly there.

Lionfish can be eaten safely if they are properly prepared to remove their venomous spines. In Florida and the Caribbean, lionfish hunting tournaments have become popular as a control method. However, lionfish move to deeper waters as they grow, so hunting alone can’t prevent them from spreading.

Marine scientists have anticipated for years that lionfish would someday arrive along the eastern coast of South America. A single sighting in 2014, far removed from the Amazon-Orinoco plume, was likely a result of an aquarium release rather than a natural migration.

Then in December 2020, local fishermen caught a pair of lionfish on coral reefs in the mesophotic, or “twilight,” zone several hundred feet below the mighty Amazon River plume. A scuba diver also encountered a lionfish in the oceanic archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 220 miles (350 kilometers) off Brazil’s tropical coast.

New invasion fronts have quickly opened along Brazil’s north and northeast coasts, covering eight states and diverse marine habitats. More than 350 lionfish have been tallied along a 1,720-mile (2,765-kilometer) swath of coastline.

Aggressive predators without natural enemies

Like many introduced species, lionfish in the Atlantic don’t face natural population control mechanisms such as predation, disease and parasitism that limit their numbers in the Indo-Pacific. A 2011 study found that lionfish on reefs in the Bahamas were larger and more abundant than their Pacific counterparts.

Lionfish thrive in many marine habitats, from mangroves and seagrass beds to deepwater reefs and shipwrecks. They are aggressive, persistent hunters that feed on smaller fish, including species that keep coral reefs clean and others that are food for important commercial species like snappers and groupers. In a 2008 study, when lionfish appeared on reefs in the Bahamas, populations of small juvenile reef fish declined by 80% within five weeks.

Brazil’s northeast coast, with its rich artisanal fishing activity, stands on the front line of this invasive threat. Lionfish are present in coastal mangrove forests and estuaries – brackish water bodies where rivers meet the sea. These areas serve as nurseries for important commercial fish species. Losing them would increase the risk of hunger in a region that is already grappling with substantial social inequality.

Fishers also face the threat of lionfish stings, which are not lethal to humans but can cause painful wounds that may require medical treatment.

Facing the invasion: Brazil’s challenges

Biological invasions are easiest to control in early stages, when the invader population is still growing slowly. However, Brazil has been slow to react to the lionfish incursion.

The equatorial southwestern Atlantic, where the invasion is taking place, has been less thoroughly surveyed than the Caribbean. There has been little high-resolution seabed mapping, which would help scientists identifying potential lionfish habitats and anticipate where lionfish might spread next or concentrate their populations. Understanding of the scale of the invasion is largely based on estimates, which likely underrepresent its true extent.

Moreover, turbid waters along much of Brazil’s coast make it hard for scientists to monitor and document the invasion. Despite their distinctive appearance, lionfish are difficult to spot and record in murky water, which makes it challenging for scientists, divers and fishers to keep an accurate record of their spread.

Still another factor is that from 2018 through 2022, under former President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s government sharply cut the national science budget, reducing funding for field surveys. The COVID-19 pandemic further reduced field research because of lockdowns and social distancing measures.

Making up for lost time

Brazil has a history of inadequately monitoring for early detection of marine invasions. The lionfish is no exception. Actions thus far have been reactive and often initiated too late to be fully effective.

As one of many Brazilian scientists who warned repeatedly about a potential lionfish invasion over the past decade, I’m disheartened that my country missed the window to take early action. Now, however, marine researchers and local communities are stepping up.

Given the length of Brazil’s coast, traditional monitoring methods are often insufficient. So we’ve turned to citizen science and information technology to fill the gaps in our knowledge.

In April 2022, a group of academic researchers spearheaded the launch of an online dashboard, which is updated continuously with data from scientific surveys and local community self-reports. This interactive platform is maintained by a research group led by marine scientists Marcelo Soares and Tommaso Giarrizzo from the Federal University of Ceará.

The dashboard allows anyone, from fishers to recreational divers and tourists, to upload data on lionfish observations. This information supports rapid response efforts, strategic planning for preventive measures in areas still free from lionfish, and the development of localized lionfish removal programs.

I believe lionfish are here to stay and will integrate over time into Brazil’s marine ecosystems, much as they have in the Caribbean. Given this reality, our most pragmatic and effective strategy is to reduce lionfish populations below levels that cause unacceptable ecological harm.

Regions along the coast that are still lionfish-free might benefit from early and preventive actions. Comprehensive surveillance plans should include environmental education programs about exotic species; early detection approaches, using techniques such as analyzing environmental DNA; citizen science initiatives to monitor and report lionfish sightings, participate in organized culls and help collect research data; and genetic surveys to identify patterns of connectivity among lionfish populations along Brazil’s coast and between Brazilian and Caribbean populations.

Brazil missed its initial opportunity to prevent the lionfish invasion, but I believe that with strategic, swift action and international collaboration, it can mitigate the impacts of this invasive species and safeguard its marine ecosystems.

This article has been updated to reflect that the correct number of endemic reef fish species in the southwestern Atlantic is 111.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The quote “take only memories, leave nothing but footprints” is most often attributed to Duwamish Chief Si’ahl, or Chief Seattle. This saying is a core value for the 400 plus parks that make up the United States National Park Service (NPS). However, it is a lesser known quote from Seattle, Washington’s namesake that is at the heart of the second season of National Geographic’s series America’s National Parks.

“This we know; The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know, all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.”

[Related: The 10 most underrated national parks in the US.]

That human-Earth connection is a consistent presence in the five-part series that covers the mountain tops of Grand Teton National Park and the interconnected biodiversity in some of the more off-the-beaten-path parks. Such hidden gems include the tropical marinescape of Biscayne National Park in Florida, Voyageurs National Park in the wilds of northern Minnesota, the rugged Channel Islands National Park off the coast of Southern California, and Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park and Preserve.

Code of ethics

Even amongst the dramatic landscapes or the bioluminescent glow of coral reef spawning, the presence of people never fully disappears. Wildlife documentaries must strike a balance between getting the best footage for their films without disturbing nature.

“Most wildlife production companies will have codes of ethics, and will have the same motivation,”  America’s National Parks executive producer Anwar Mamon tells PopSci. “Our motivation is always natural behavior. Animal welfare comes first and it comes above anything that we’re doing. The secret weapon in all of this is local intel.”

For Mamon, working alongside local camera crews, NPS rangers, and indigenous peoples was the first tool in centering priceless local knowledge in producing the series. Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic meant that Mamon was often working with local crews who practically called these parks home, and had years of experience  filming wildlife while impacting their behavior as little as possible. Special attention was also taken to limit the number of crew members at a shoot.

Tools of the trade

Mixed in with this local knowledge, some new tech aided the effort to leave only footprints. Wildstar Films has a department dedicated to helping filmmakers create new gear for their productions. “We’re very lucky. I’m not sure the tech department likes it, but we can go to them and say, ‘we want to do this, is that possible,’” laughs Mamon.

[Related: Connecting national parks could help generations of wildlife thrive.]

A new camera was used for an up-close-and-personal look at some wolf pups in a den in Voyageurs National Park. This part of Minnesota is one of the only places in the lower 48 states that wolves have lived continuously for 8,000 years, and some of the newest members of that legacy hung out in this hideout while their parents hunt. Inside the den are remote cameras about the size of a shoebox capturing their sibling squabbles and slumbers. To hide their scent, the crew covered the cameras in mud and other vegetation in the area. 

“Wolf packs, like all parents, are very protective of their young and won’t let people or any perceived threats near them. But with them being monitored by scientists and with us working very closely with the local rangers, we were able to put quite a few cameras around the den,” says Mamon.

The series also harnesses the power of tech to film some of the parks’ critical, but admittedly less flashy flora and fauna. They used a motion controlled macro rig, which is a robotic arm that can be programmed to capture incredible detail on tiny creatures like the round-leaved sundew in Lake Clark. These “little land mines” are carnivorous plants that use glistening droplets to entice and then eat unsuspecting flies, in an equally beautiful and frightful dinner display.

“Every time we send a crew out, the changing planet, becomes more and more obvious”

Another scary reality that hangs over the series like a specter is climate change in the parks. An analysis by Climate Central of over a century’s worth of warming in 62 national parks found that all 63 percent of the parks have warmed by 2°F or more. 

Alaska’s temperatures are heating up faster than any other state, thus putting the future of the unique animals that live in the extreme elevations and tundra of Lake Clark conditions in jeopardy. Further south, it’s the saltwater mangrove forests in Florida’s Biscayne National Park that store five times more carbon dioxide than tropical forests that play a “priceless role” in the fight against climate change. 

“Most of our production was impacted in some way by our changing planet. And it’s often about the unpredictability of things. That goes to everything from birthing seasons, to the change of any seasons, and weather, especially,” says Mamon. 

The series packages a harsh reality with the hopeful message of connectivity and responsibility that Americans have to these precious landscapes. One of the core messages that the team had was that the parks need our help and that we must look after our own backyards. 

[Related: Yellowstone National Park was never built to take on the rain and snow that comes with climate change.]

The conservation success of California’s Channel Islands National Park is a prime example. After serving as an agricultural powerhouse during the Civil War to keep up with demand for wool, escaped livestock harmed the native population. The island was given the time and space to heal when it was made a National Park in 1980, and animals once presumed extinct, like the northern elephant seal, bounced back. The California brown pelican was taken off the endangered species in 2009.

“It is essentially about a national park that was very much impacted by human activity, agriculture, and has made a staggering comeback, because of the amazing work of local communities and scientists,” says Mamon.

Connecting to the future

You can’t have the signature elk herds of the Grand Tetons or the largest sockeye salmon run on Earth in Lake Clark without the vegetation and smaller animals needed to sustain the big boys. Biodiversity is essential to keeping flora and fauna thriving in the parks. 

That connection extends to the indigenous people who both visit these places and have lived there for thousands of years. In Lake Clark National Park, Ruth Miller, a member of the Dena’ina tribe and Climate Justice co-director for the Native Movement, performs a salmon ceremony. Miller offers the bones of the previous year’s salmon to help the fish recognize their pathway home. “To live sustainably means practicing gratitude and giving more than you take,” she said.

To sustain the bounty of our National Parks for the future, its visitors will need to embrace this same level of gratitude.

America’s National Parks airs on National Geographic on June 5 at 9/8c. All episodes will be available to stream on Disney+ June 7.

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Ancient Romans were apparently staunch believers that “pain is beauty,” especially when body hair removal is involved. A collection of tweezers once used to remove armpit hair are amidst over 400 new artifacts on display at a Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire, England. 

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

Some of the objects related to both cleanliness and beauty in Roman times include a skin scraper called a strigil, bottles of perfume, jewelry made from jet and bone, amulets to ward off evil, and make-up applicators. 

“At Wroxeter alone we have discovered over 50 pairs of tweezers, one of the largest collections of this item in Britain, indicating that it was a popular accessory! The advantage of the tweezer was that it was safe, simple and cheap, but unfortunately not pain free,” site curator Cameron Moffett said in a statement. 

Wroxeter Roman City was once known as Viroconium Cornoviorum, which was a thriving urban spot that was once about the size of the ill-fated Pompeii, Italy during the Flavian dynasty. It was once the fourth largest town in Roman Britain and was founded as a legionary fortress in the mid-first century. It was officially established as a town in the 90s CE and was inhabited until the fifth century.

Various excavations of the site have uncovered a forum where laws were made, market, a multipurpose office, community center, and shopping center, and a bath house. In the bath house, Roman Britons would have bathed and socialized, as Romans generally cared a great deal about cleanliness and public image. 

Roman cities throughout their empire had toilets in addition to these communal baths, and many Romans owned personal cleaning kits. These kits included an ear scoop for wax removal, a nail cleaner, and tweezers. Roman tweezers were used for way more than crafting the perfect eyebrow arch. They were used on all unwanted body hair, which sounds a bit like its own form of torture, and was usually performed by slaves, according to English Heritage, a charitable organization that oversees over 400 historic sites in England.

“It may come as a surprise to some that in Roman Britain the removal of body hair was as common with men as it was with women. Particularly for sports like wrestling, there was a social expectation that men engaging in exercise that required minimal clothing would have prepared themselves by removing all their visible body hair,” said Moffett. “It’s interesting to see this vogue for the removal of body hair around again after millennia, for everyone, although luckily modern methods are slightly less excruciating!”

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins.]

To help set them apart from “barbarians,” Roman Britons preferred a cleanly shaved face on men. Hair plucking was so painful that Roman author and politician Seneca once wrote a letter complaining about the noise coming from from the public baths, noting “the skinny armpit hair-plucker whose cries are shrill, so as to draw people’s attention, and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him.”

For women, removing hair was often the perception of beauty. “There are many, many written sources including Pliny and Ovid,” Moffett told The Guardian. “They are all writing about how you will need to keep on top of the body hair and you know, gosh, no man is going to be interested in you if you’ve got armpit hair.”

A reconstructed Roman town house stands among the city’s surviving ruins, and many of the objects discovered at Wroxeter depict the daily lives of those who once lived there. 

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Bees are not just the only precious pollinators in need of strong conservation and protection efforts. A study published June 5 in the journal Ecology Letters found that not only do night-time pollinators such as moths likely visit just as many plants as bees, but they may be less resilient than bees due to their more complex life cycle and more specific plant requirements.

[Related: Move over, bees: The lowly weevil is a power pollinator.]

The study also found that despite these threats and pressures, moths play a critical role in supporting plant communities in urban settings, accounting for roughly a third of all pollination in trees, crops, and flowering plants. In more urbanized areas, the diversity of pollen that is carried by bees and moths decreases, and the urban pollinators have fewer flower resources available.  

The team behind the study suggests that supporting the introduction of plant species that are beneficial to moths and bees will only be more important to the health of urban ecosystems. 

“As moths and bees both rely on plants for survival, plant populations also rely on insects for pollination,” study co-author and pollinator ecologist at the University of Sheffield Emilie Ellis said in a statement. “Protecting urban green spaces and ensuring they are developed in such a way that moves beyond bee-only conservation but also supports a diverse array of wildlife, will ensure both bee and moth populations remain resilient and our towns and cities remain healthier, greener places.”

According to the study, bees and moths also visit very different plant communities. Moths were found to be carrying more pollen than previously believed, and tend to visit more types of trees and fruit crops, along with their usual pale fragrant flower species. Urbanized areas can sometimes have less diversity in plant species and an overabundance of non-native plant species. These can both lead to lower insect interactions for less attractive plant species, which harms both insect and plant populations. 

The team used DNA sequencing to identify the pollen that sticks to night-flying moths as they visit flowers. This analysis revealed the wide range of plant species that are not likely pollinated by bees.

[Related: The alluring tail of the Luna moth is surprisingly useless for finding a mate.]

“It’s clear from this study that pollination is achieved by complex networks of insects and plants, and these networks may be delicate, and sensitive to urbanization,” co-author and University of Sheffield evolutionary and chemical ecologist Stuart Campbell said in a statement. “We can also learn which plant species might be the best sources of food for different insects, including nocturnal ones like adult moths, and use that information to better provide for all our pollinators”.

Better understanding how crucial moths are to pollinating plants has implications for urban planning, policy, and wildlife-friendly garden initiatives, especially since populations have dropped by about 33 percent in the United Kingdom over the past half century alone.

“When planning green spaces, consideration needs to be given to ensure planting is diverse and moth-friendly as well as bee-friendly, to ensure both our plants and insects remain resilient in the face of the climate crisis and further losses,” said Ellis.

Some advice for making your own garden more pollinator friendly include using plants that attract both specialist pollinators and generalist pollinators, planting a wide variety of plant species, and keeping those weeds growing.

The post This massively underrated pollinator needs your help appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: ten golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in eastern Africa within the last few hundreds or thousands of years. Still, they offered a glimpse into a lost past: the dry evergreen forests of coastal Tanzania.

An international team of scientists recently took a close look at the lumps, which had been first collected more than a century ago by resin traders and then housed at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Many of the insects encased within them were stingless bees, tropical pollinators that can get stuck in the sticky substance while gathering it to construct nests. Three of the species still live in Africa, but two had such a unique combination of features that last year, the scientists reported them to be new to science: Axestotrigona kitingae and Hypotrigona kleineri.

Species discoveries can be joyous occasions, but not in this case. Eastern African forests have nearly disappeared in the past century, and neither bee species has been spotted in surveys conducted in the area since the 1990s, noted coauthor and entomologist Michael Engel, who recently moved from a position at the University of Kansas to the American Museum of Natural History. Given that these social bees are usually abundant, it’s unlikely that the people looking for insects had simply missed them. Sometime in the last 50 to 60 years, Engel suspects, the bees vanished along with their habitat.

“It seems trivial on a planet with millions of species to sit back and go, ‘Okay, well, you documented two stingless bees that were lost,’” Engel said. “But it’s really far more troubling than that,” he added, because scientists increasingly recognize that extinction is “a very common phenomenon.”

The stingless bees are part of an overlooked but growing trend of species that are already deemed extinct by the time they’re discovered. Scientists have identified new species of bats, birds, beetles, fish, frogs, snails, orchids, lichen, marsh plants, and wildflowers by studying old museum specimens, only to find that they are at risk of vanishing or may not exist in the wild anymore. Such discoveries illustrate how little is still known about Earth’s biodiversity and the mounting scale of extinctions. They also hint at the silent extinctions among species that haven’t yet been described — what scientists call dark extinctions.

It’s critical to identify undescribed species and the threats they face, said Martin Cheek, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom, because if experts and policymakers don’t know an endangered species exists, they can’t take action to preserve it. With no way to count how many undescribed species are going extinct, researchers also risk underestimating the scale of human-caused extinctions — including the loss of ecologically vital species like pollinators. And if species go extinct unnoticed, scientists also miss the chance to capture the complete richness of life on Earth for future generations. “I think we want to have a full assessment of humans’ impact on nature,” said theoretical ecologist Ryan Chisholm of the National University of Singapore. “And to do that, we need to take account of these dark extinctions as well as the extinctions that we know about.”

Many scientists agree that humans have pushed extinctions higher than the natural rate of species turnover, but nobody knows the actual toll. In the tens of millions of years before humans came along, scientists estimate that for every 10,000 species, between 0.1 and 2 went extinct each century. (Even these rates are uncertain because many species didn’t leave behind fossils.) Some studies suggest that extinction rates picked up at least in the past 10,000 years as humans expanded across the globe, hunting large mammals along the way.

Islands were particularly hard hit, for instance in the Pacific, where Polynesian settlers introduced pigs and rats that wiped out native species. Then, starting in the 16th century, contact with European explorers caused additional extinctions in many places by intensifying habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species — issues that often continued in places that became colonies. But again, scientists have a poor record of biodiversity during this time; some species’ extinctions were only recognized much later, most famously the dodo, which had disappeared by 1700 after 200 years of Europeans hunting and then settling on the island in the Indian Ocean island it inhabited.

Key drivers of extinction, such as industrialization, have ramped up ever since. For the past century, some scientists have estimated an average of 200 extinctions per 10,000 species— levels so high that they believe they portend a mass extinction, a term reserved for geological events of the scale of the ordeal that annihalated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Yet some scientists, including the authors of those estimates, caution that even these numbers are conservative. The figures are based on the Red List compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, a bookkeeper of species and their conservation statuses. As several experts have noted, the organization is slow to declare species extinct, wary that if the classification is wrong, they may cause threatened species to lose protections.

The Red List doesn’t include undescribed species, which some estimate could account for roughly 86 percent of the possibly 8.7 million species on Earth. That’s partly due to the sheer numbers of the largest species groups like invertebrates, plants, and fungi, especially in the little-explored regions around the tropics. It’s also because there are increasingly fewer experts to describe them due to a widespread lack of funding and training, noted conservation ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ocampo-Peñuela told Undark that she has no doubt that many species are going extinct without anyone noticing. “I think it is a phenomenon that will continue to happen and that it maybe has happened a lot more than we realize,” she said.

Studies of animal and plant specimens in museum and herbaria collections can uncover some of these dark extinctions. This can happen when scientists take a closer look at or conduct DNA analysis on specimens believed to represent known species and realize that these have actually been mislabeled, and instead represent new species that haven’t been seen in the wild in decades. Such a case unfolded recently for the ichthyologist Wilson Costa of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who has long studied the diversity of killifish inhabiting southeastern Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. These fish live in shady, tea-colored acidic pools that form during the rainy season and lay eggs that survive through the dry period. These fragile conditions make these species extremely vulnerable to changes in water supply or deforestation, Costa wrote to Undark via email.

In 2019, Costa discovered that certain fish specimens collected in the 1980s weren’t members of Leptopanchax splendens, as previously believed, but actually represented a new species, which he called Leptopanchax sanguineus. With a few differences, both fish sport alternating red and metallic blue stripes on their flanks. While Leptopanchax splendens is critically endangered, Leptopanchax sanguineus hasn’t been spotted at all since its last collection in 1987. Pools no longer form where it was first found, probably because a nearby breeding facility for ornamental fish has diverted the water supply, said Costa, who has already witnessed the extinctions of several killifish species. “In the case discussed here, it was particularly sad because it is a species with unique characteristics and unusual beauty,” he added, “the product of millions of years of evolution stupidly interrupted.”

Similar discoveries have come from undescribed specimens, which exist in troves for diverse and poorly-studied groups of species, such as the land snails that have evolved across Pacific Islands. The mollusk specialist Alan Solem estimated in 1990 that, of roughly 200 Hawaiian species of one snail family, the Endodontidae, in Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, fewer than 40 had been described. All but a few are now likely extinct, said University of Hawaii biologist Robert Cowie, perhaps because invasive ants feasted off the snails’ eggs, which this snail family carries in a cavity underneath their shells. Meanwhile, Cheek said he’s publishing more and more new plant species from undescribed herbaria specimens that are likely already extinct in the wild.

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to identify species based on individual specimens, noted botanist Naomi Fraga, who directs conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden. And describing new species is not often a research priority. Studies that report new species aren’t often cited by other scientists, and they typically also don’t help towards pulling in new funding, both of which are key to academic success, Cheek said. One 2012 study concluded it takes an average of 21 years for a collected species to be formally described in the scientific literature. The authors added that if these difficulties — and the general dearth of taxonomists — persist, experts will continue to find extinct species in museum collections, “just as astronomers observe stars that vanished thousands of years ago.”

Museum records may only represent a fraction of undescribed species, causing some scientists to worry that many species could disappear unnoticed. For some groups, like snails, this is less likely, as extinct species may leave behind a shell that serves as a record of their existence even if collectors weren’t around to collect live specimens, noted Cowie. For instance, this allowed scientists to identify nine new and already-extinct species of helicinid land snails by combing the Gambier Islands in the Pacific for empty shells and combining these with specimens that already existed in museums. However, Cowie worries about the many invertebrates such as insects and spiders that won’t leave behind long-lasting physical remains. “What I worry about is that all this squishy biodiversity will just vanish without leaving a trace, and we’ll never know existed,” Cowie said.

Even some species that are found while they are still alive are already on the brink. In fact, research suggests that it’s precisely the newly described species that tend to have the highest risk of going extinct. Many new species are only now being discovered because they’re rare, isolated, or both — factors that also make them easier to wipe out, said Fraga. In 2018 in Guinea, for instance, botanist Denise Molmou of the National Herbarium of Guinea in Conakry discovered a new plant species which, like many of its relatives, appeared to inhabit a single waterfall, enveloping rocks amid the bubbly, air-rich water. Molmou was the last known person to see it alive.

Just before her team published their findings in the Kew Bulletin last year, Cheek looked at the waterfall’s location on Google Earth. A reservoir, created by a hydroelectric dam downriver, had flooded the waterfall, surely drowning any plants there, Cheek said. “Had we not got in there, and Denise had not gotten that specimen, we would not know that that species existed,” he added. “I felt sick, I felt, you know, it’s hopeless, like what’s the point?” Even if the team had known at the point of discovery that the dam was going to wipe it out, Cheek said, “it’d be quite difficult to do anything about it.”

While extinction is likely for many of these cases, it’s often hard to prove. The IUCN requires targeted searches to declare an extinction — something that Costa is still planning on doing for the killifish, four years after its discovery. But these surveys cost money, and aren’t always possible.

Meanwhile, some scientists have turned to computational techniques to estimate the scale of dark extinction, by extrapolating rates of species discovery and extinctions among known species. When Chisholm’s group applied this method to the estimated 195 species of birds in Singapore, they estimated that 9.6 undescribed species have vanished from the area in the past 200 years, in addition to the disappearance of 58 known species. For butterflies in Singapore, accounting for dark extinction roughly doubled the extinction toll of 132 known species.

Using similar approaches, a different research team estimated that the proportion of dark extinctions could account for up to just over a half of all extinctions, depending on the region and species group. Of course, “the main challenge in estimating dark extinction is that it is exactly that: an estimate. We can never be sure,” noted Quentin Cronk, a botanist of the University of British Columbia who has produced similar estimates.

Considering the current trends, some scientists doubt whether it’s even possible to name all species before they go extinct. To Cowie, who expressed little optimism extinctions will abate, the priority should be collecting species, especially invertebrates, from the wild so there will at least be museum specimens to mark their existence. “It’s sort of doing a disservice to our descendants if we let everything just vanish such that 200 years from now, nobody would know the biodiversity — the true biodiversity — that had evolved in the Amazon, for instance,” he said. “I want to know what lives and lived on this Earth,” he continued. “And it’s not just dinosaurs and mammoths and what have you; it’s all these little things that make the world go round.”

Other scientists, like Fraga, find hope in the fact that the presumption of extinction is just that — a presumption. As long as there’s still habitat, there’s a slim chance that species deemed extinct can be rediscovered and returned to healthy populations. In 2021, Japanese scientists stumbled across the fairy lantern Thismia kobensis, a fleshy orange flower only known from a single specimen collected in 1992. Now efforts are underway to protect its location and cultivate specimens for conservation.

Fraga is tracking down reported sightings of a monkeyflower species she identified in herbaria specimens: Erythranthe marmorata, which has bright yellow petals with red spots. Ultimately, she said, species are not just names. They are participants of ecological networks, upon which many other species, including humans, depend.

“We don’t want museum specimens,” she said. “We want to have thriving ecosystems and habitats. And in order to do that, we need to make sure that these species are thriving in, you know, populations in their ecological context, not just living in a museum.”

Katarina Zimmer is a science journalist. Her work has been published in The Scientist, National Geographic, Grist, Outside Magazine, and more.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Perhaps you think of X-rays as the strange, lightly radioactive waves that phase through your body to scan broken bones or teeth. When you get an X-ray image taken, your medical professionals are essentially using it to characterize your body.

Many scientists use X-rays in a very similar role—they just have different targets. Instead of scanning living things (which likely wouldn’t last long when exposed to the high-powered research X-rays), they scan molecules or materials. In the past, scientists have X-rayed batches of atoms, to understand what they are and predict how those atoms might fare in a particular chemical reaction.

But no one has been able to X-ray an individual atom—until now. Physicists used X-rays to study the insides of two different single atoms, in work published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“The X-ray…has been used in so many different ways,” says Saw-Wai Hla, a physicist at Ohio University and Argonne National Laboratory, and an author of the paper. “But it’s amazing what people don’t know. We cannot measure one atom—until now.”

Beyond atomic snapshots

Characterizing an atom doesn’t mean just snapping a picture of it; scientists first did that way back in 1955. Since the 1980s, atom-photographers’ tool of choice has been the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The key to an STM is its bacterium-sized tip. As scientists move the tip a millionth of a hair’s breadth above the atom’s surface, electrons tunnel through the space in between, creating a current. The tip detects that current, and the microscope transforms it into an image. (An STM can drag and drop atoms, too. In 1989, two scientists at IBM became the first STM artists, spelling the letters “IBM” with xenon atoms.)

But actually characterizing an atom—scanning the lone object, sorting it by its element, decoding its properties, understanding how it will behave in chemical reactions—is a far more complex endeavor. 

X-rays allow scientists to characterize larger batches of atoms. When X-rays strike atoms, they transfer their energy into those atoms’ electrons, exciting them. All good things must end, of course, and when those electrons come down, they release their newfound energy as, again, X-rays. Scientists can study that fresh radiation to study the properties of the atoms in between.

[Related: How scientists managed to store information in a single atom]

That’s a fantastic tool, and it’s been a boon to scientists who need to tinker with molecular structures. X-ray spectroscopy, as the process is called, helped create COVID-19 vaccines, for instance. The technique allows scientists to study a group of atoms—identifying which elements are in a batch and what their electron configurations are in general—but it doesn’t enable scientists to match them up to individual atoms. “We might be able to see, ‘Oh, there’s a whole team of soccer players,’ and ‘There’s a whole team of dancers,’ but we weren’t able to identify a single soccer player or a single dancer,” says Volker Rose, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and another of the authors.

Peering with high-power beams

You can’t create a molecule-crunching machine with the X-ray source at your dentist’s office. To reach its full potential, you need a beam that is far brighter, far more powerful. You’ve got to go to a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron.

The device the Nature authors used is located at Argonne National Laboratory, which zips electrons around a ring in the plains of Illinois, two-thirds of a mile long. Rather than crashing particles into each other, however, a synchrotron sends its high-speed electrons through an undulating magnetic gauntlet. As the electrons pass through, they unleash much of their energy as an X-ray beam.

The authors combined the power of such an X-ray beam with the precision of an STM. In this case, the X-rays energized the atom’s electrons. The STM, however, pulled some of the electrons out, giving scientists a far closer look. Scientists have given this process a name that wouldn’t feel out of place in a PlayStation 1 snowboarding game: synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy (SX-STM).

[Related: How neutral atoms could help power next-gen quantum computers]

Combining X-rays and STM isn’t so simple. More than simple technical tinkering, they’re two separate technologies used by two completely separate batches of scientists. Getting them to work together took years of work.

Using SX-STM, the authors successfully detected the electron arrangement within two different atoms: one of iron; and another of terbium, a rare-earth element (number 65) that’s often used in electronic devices that contain magnets as well as in green fluorescent lamps. “That’s totally new, and wasn’t possible before,” says Rose.

The scientists believe that their technique can find use in a broad array of fields. Quantum computers can store information in atoms’ electron states; researchers could use this technique to read them. If the technique catches on, materials scientists might be able to control chemical reactions with far greater precision.

Hla believes that SX-STM characterization can build upon the work that X-ray science already does. “The X-ray has changed many lives in our civilization,” he says. For instance, knowing what specific atoms do is critical to creating better materials and to studying proteins, perhaps for future immunizations. 

Now that Hla and his colleagues have proven it’s possible to examine one or two atoms at a time, he says the road is clear for scientists to characterize whole batches of them at once. “If you can detect one atom,” Hla says, “you can detect 10 atoms and 20 atoms.”

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Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) will livestream imagery from its Mars Express orbiter in near-real time. The live stream is scheduled to begin on June 2 at 12:00 PM EDT. You can watch the hour-long live stream on the ESA’s YouTube channel. 

Mars Express has been orbiting Mars for the past 20 years, sending back data on the vast landscape of the Red Planet along the way. Slight technical delays have hampered these views, and sometimes the images take hours and even days to transmit to Earth. 

[Related: The Mars Express just got up close and personal with Phobos.]

That changes with today’s historic livestream. If all goes according to plan, today’s images will get to Earth about 18 minutes after they are taken. It will take 17 minutes for light to travel from Mars to Earth and then about one minute to pass through the servers and wires on the ground.

According to the ESA, “This will be the closest you can get to a live view from the Red Planet.”

New images will be seen roughly every 50 seconds as they are beamed down directly from the orbiter’s Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC).

On June 2, 2003, Mars Express launched with a lander called Beagle 2. The pair arrived in orbit on December 25, 2003, and Beagle 2 touched ground the same day. However, Beagle 2 never made contact with Earth because at least one of its four solar panels failed to deploy properly, thus blacking the landers communications antenna. 

Mars Express still moved on as planned and began to study our celestial neighbor with seven different instruments. In two decades, the orbiter has already accomplished a great deal, including detecting methane in the Martian atmosphere, spotting a possible subsurface lake near the Red Planet’s south pole, and mapping the composition of ice near both of the planet’s poles. 

The VMC, or Mars Webcam, was not initially planned to break so many records. Its primary job was just to monitor the separation of the Beagle 2 lander from the Mars Express spacecraft. After completing that first mission, the camera was turned off. 

In 2007, the VMC was turned back on and used for science and educational outreach activities. It even took advantage of the social media boom of the aughts and got its own Flickr page and a Twitter account that has now moved to Mastodon. Scientists realized a little later that these images could be used for “proper” science.

[Related: The ill-fated Beagle 2 may have landed on Mars after all.]

“We developed new, more sophisticated methods of operations and image processing, to get better results from the camera, turning it into Mars Express’s 8th science instrument,” VMC team member Jorge Hernández Bernal said in a statement. “From these images, we discovered a great deal, including the evolution of a rare elongated cloud formation hovering above one of Mars’ most famous volcanoes – the 20 km-high [12 miles] Arsia Mons.”

To celebrate Mars Express’ 20th birthday, multiple ESA teams have spent months developing the tools that will allow for higher-quality, science-processed images to be streamed live for a full hour back on Earth. 

“This is an old camera, originally planned for engineering purposes, at a distance of almost three million kilometers [18 million miles] from Earth—this hasn’t been tried before and to be honest, we’re not 100 percent certain it’ll work,” Spacecraft Operations Manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany James Godfrey said in a statement. “But I’m pretty optimistic. Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!’

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Today, elephants roam the savannas of Africa and rainforests in Asia, but elephant ancestors once lived in Europe and North America before going extinct like the region’s other ancient megafauna. Scientists and a team of volunteers recently uncovered a prehistoric elephant graveyard in northern Florida near Gainesville. 

[Related: Elephants and humans share surprising similarities. A new docuseries dives deep into that relationship.]

Roughly five and a half million years ago, several extinct relatives of elephants called gomphotheres died in or near a now dried up river. Today,  their fossils are giving scientists a unique view into prehistoric Florida.  

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime find,” curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History Jonathan Bloch said in a statement. “It’s the most complete gomphothere skeleton from this time period in Florida and among the best in North America.”

Collectively, proboscideans include modern elephants and their extinct relatives. They were found on every continent before humans even arrived, and the gomphotheres like the ones found in Florida were among the most diverse. 

Gomphotheres first evolved about 23 million years ago in the early Miocene period and dispersed into Asia and Europe. They likely crossed the Bering land bridge into North America 16 million years ago, and then crossed into South America via the newly risen Isthmus of Panama around 13 million years later. Rapid climate change and overhunting from humans led to the gomphotheres’ extinction around the end of the last ice age. 

Teams of paleontologists and volunteers began digging at the Montbrook Fossil Dig in 2022. Portions of a gomphothere skeleton were uncovered early in the spring of 2022, and while isolated bones have been found at this site, paleontologists didn’t suspect any out of the ordinary finds until a volunteer found the fossilized foot of something very large.

“I started coming upon one after another of toe and ankle bones,” said retired chemistry teacher and volunteer fossil-hunter Dean Warner. “As I continued to dig, what turned out to be the ulna and radius started to be uncovered. We all knew that something special had been found.”

The team found several complete skeletons, including one adult and at least seven juveniles, within the next few days. The skeletons will need to be fully excavated before their size can be accurately determined, but Bloch estimates that the adult animal was about eight feet tall at its shoulders.  The skull measures over nine feet long with tusks included. 

The elephants were likely deposited or transported to the area over time. “Modern elephants travel in herds and can be very protective of their young, but I don’t think this was a situation in which they all died at once,” said Rachel Narducci, the collection manager of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum. “It seems like members of one or multiple herds got stuck in this one spot at different times.”

[Related: Extinct ‘thunder beasts’ went from mini to massive in the blink of an evolutionary eye.]

These fossil beds are about 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but this area was closer to the sea when these bones were deposited during the late Miocene. This period of Earth’s history was marked by higher temperatures and sea levels. Remnants of ancient land-dwelling camels, rhinoceroses, and llamas are encased next to fresh and saltwater fish, turtles, alligators, and burrowing shrimp. This long-gone Florida river cut through limestone, and fossils of older marine species like sharks are occasionally found in the ancient remnants of its bed.  

The Montbrook gomphothere represents a new opportunity for scientists to learn about the long lost fauna of North America.

“The best part has been to share this process of discovery with so many volunteers from all over the state of Florida,” Bloch said. “Our goal is to assemble this gigantic skeleton and put it on display, taking its place alongside the iconic mammoth and mastodon already at the Florida Museum of Natural History.”

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It’s been a little over four years since a major fire ravaged France’s iconic Notre Dame de Paris cathedral, causing an estimated $865 million of damage to the majority of its roof and recognizable spire. Since then, the French government, engineers, and a cadre of other dedicated restoration experts have been hard at work rebuilding the architectural wonder, which is currently slated to reopen to the public by the end of 2024.

It’s a tight turnaround, and one that would be much easier to meet if carpenters used modern technology and techniques to repair the iconic building. But as AP News explained earlier this week, it’s far more important to use the same approaches that helped first construct Notre Dame—well over 800 years ago. According to the recent dispatch, rebuilders are consciously employing medieval era tools such as hand axes, mallets, and chisels to reforge the cathedral’s hundreds of tons’ worth of oak wood roofing beams.

Although it would progress faster with the use of modern equipment and materials, that’s not the point. Instead, it’s ethically and artistically far more imperative to stay true to “this cathedral as it was built in the Middle Ages,” explained Jean-Louis Georgelin, a retired general for the French overseeing the project.

[Related: The Notre Dame fire revealed a long-lost architectural marvel.]

Thankfully, everything appears to be on track for the December 2024 reopening. Last month, overseers successfully conducted a “dry run” to assemble and erect large sections of the timber frame at a workshop in western France’s Loire Valley. The next time the pieces are put together will be atop the actual Notre Dame cathedral.

As rudimentary as some of these construction techniques may seem now, at the time they were considered extremely advanced. Earlier this year, in fact, researchers discovered Notre Dame was likely the first Gothic-style cathedral to utilize iron for binding sections of stonework together.

It’s not all old-school handiwork, however. The team behind Notre Dame’s rebuilt roofing plans to transport the massive components to Paris via trucks, and then lifted into place with help from a large mechanical crane. Over this entire process, detailed computer analysis was utilized to make absolutely sure carpenters’ measurements and handhewn work were on the right track. Still, the melding of bygone and modern technology appears to perfectly complement one another, ensuring that when Notre Dame finally literally and figuratively rises from the ashes, it will be as stunning as ever.

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Cold weather is prime time for humans to stay inside and snuggle up with loved ones. For our primate cousins, cuddling may even keep them healthy, as frosty temps and social bonds seem to go together like hot chocolate and marshmallows. Chilly temperature behavior, as it turns out, may also alter the course of evolution.

A study published June 1 in the journal Science found that a species’ long-term adaptation to life in extremely cold climates led to the evolution of successful social behaviors. Asian colobines living in colder regions saw genetic changes and adaptations to their social behaviors including extended care by mothers, which increased infant survival and the primates’ ability to live in the large complex multilevel societies we see today.

[Related: These primate ancestors were totally chill with a colder climate.]

An international team of researchers from the United States, China, the United Kingdom, and Australia studied how langurs and odd-nosed monkeys adapted over time. These members of the colobine family are leaf-eating monkeys that have been on Earth for about 10 million years. Their ancient ancestors dispersed across the planet’s continents and learned to live in tropical, temperate, and colder climates. 

“Virtually all primates are social and live in social groups,” study co-author and  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropologist Paul A. Garber said in a statement. “But the groups differ in size and cohesiveness. There are those that live in units of two or three individuals and others living in communities of up to 1,000 individuals.”

According to Garber, genomic studies suggest that the harem unit of organization—one male with two or more females and their offspring—was the ancestral norm for Asian colobines. Males are intolerant of other rival males and will fight to protect their turf. In some species, the females will stay with their natal group, while in others, both sexes leave to join or form new harems.

More complex societies formed over time. Some odd-nosed monkeys still form harems, but aren’t territorial. “This means their group territories can overlap and there are times they may come together to forage, rest and travel,” said Garber. 

Snub-nosed monkeys form a multilevel or modular society where multiple harems remain together throughout the year and create a large, cohesive breeding band. The team on this study recorded a society of about 400 individuals and breeding between individuals from different harems was common in golden snub-nosed monkeys. This inter-harem breeding happened roughly 50 percent of the time.

The study used ecological, geological, fossil, behavioral, and genomic analyses, and found that the colobine primates that lived in colder places tended to live in larger and more complex social groups. The glacial periods over the past six million years likely promoted the selection of genes that are involved in cold-related energy metabolism and hormonal regulation in the nervous system.

[Related: Baboons can recover from childhood trauma with a little help from their friends.]

Black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in some parts of China live in low-oxygen elevations up to about 13,500 feet where night time temperatures can drop below zero on the coldest evenings. The Odd-nosed monkeys living in extremely cold locations developed more efficient pathways for dopamine and oxytocin. Oxytocin particularly is an important neurohormone for social bonding and this hormonal efficiency may lengthen the time a mother monkey takes care of her baby. This led to longer periods of breast-feeding and increase in infant survival.  

These adaptive changes appear to have further strengthened the relationships between individual monkeys, increased tolerance between males, and encouraged the evolution of more complex and larger multi level societies that go a long way. Strong social bonds can even help gut bacteria health in some monkeys.

In future studies, the team is interested in studying how changes in mating and social behavior may be the result of genetic changes from past environments and other social factors from the past. 

“With climate change becoming an hugely important environmental pressure on animals, it is hoped that this study will raise awareness for the need to investigate what course social evolution will take as the prevailing climate changes,” study co-author and University fo Western Australia biological anthropologist Cyril Grueter said in a statement. “Our finding that complex multilevel societies have roots stretching back to climatic events in the distant evolutionary past also has implications for a reconstruction of the human social system which is decidedly multilevel.”

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We live our entire lives surrounded by them. They slam into us constantly at more than 700 miles per hour, sometimes hurting, sometimes soothing. They have the power to communicate ideas, evoke fond memories, start fights, entertain an audience, scare the heck out of us, or help us fall in love. They can trigger a range of emotions and they even cause physical damage. This reads like something out of science fiction, but what we’re talking about is very much real and already part of our day-to-day lives. They’re sound waves. So, what are sound waves and how do they work?

If you’re not in the industry of audio, you probably don’t think too much about the mechanics of sound. Sure, most people care about how sounds make them feel, but they aren’t as concerned with how the sound actually affects them. Understanding how sound works does have a number of practical applications, however, and you don’t have to be a physicist or engineer to explore this fascinating subject. Here’s a primer on the science of sound to help get you started.

We can experience sound waves in ways that are more physical, not just physiological, too. If sound waves reach a microphone—whether it’s a plug-n-play USB livestream mic or a studio-quality microphone for vocals—it transforms them into electronic impulses that are turned back into sound by vibrating speakers. Whether listening at home or at a concert, we can feel the deep bass in our chest. Opera singers can use them to shatter glass. It’s even possible to see sound waves sent through a medium like sand, which leaves behind a kind of sonic footprint. 

That shape is rolling peaks and valleys, the signature of a sine (aka sinusoid) wave. If the wave travels faster, those peaks and valleys form closer together. If it moves slower, they spread out. It’s not a poor analogy to think of them somewhat like waves in the ocean. It’s this movement that allows sound waves to do so many other things. 

It’s all about frequency

When we talk about a sound wave’s speed, we’re referring to how fast these longitudinal waves move from peak to trough and back to peak. Up … and then down … and then up … and then down. The technical term is frequency, but many of us know it as pitch. We measure sound frequency in hertz (Hz), which represents cycles-per-second, with faster frequencies creating higher-pitched sounds. For instance, the A note right above Middle C on a piano is measured at 440 Hz—it travels up and down at 440 cycles per second. Middle C itself is 261.63 Hz—a lower pitch, vibrating at a slower frequency.

Understanding frequencies can be useful in many ways. You can precisely tune an instrument by analyzing the frequencies of its strings. Recording engineers use their understanding of frequency ranges to dial in equalization settings that help sculpt the sound of the music they’re mixing. Car designers work with frequencies—and materials that can block them—to help make engines quieter. And active noise cancellation uses artificial intelligence and algorithms to measure external frequencies and generate inverse waves to cancel environmental rumble and hum, allowing top-tier ANC headphones and earphones to isolate the wearer from the noise around them. The average frequency range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz.

We measure amplitude in decibels (dB). The dB scale is logarithmic, which means there’s a fixed ratio between measurement units. And what does that mean? Let’s say you have a dial on your guitar amp with evenly spaced steps on it numbered one through five. If the knob is following a logarithmic scale, the volume won’t increase evenly as you turn the dial from marker to marker. If the ratio is 4, let’s say, then turning the dial from the first to the second marker increases the sound by 4 dB. But going from the second to the third marker increases it by 16 dB. Turn the dial again and your amp becomes 64 dB louder. Turn it once more, and you’ll blast out a blistering 256 dB—more than loud enough to rupture your eardrums. But if you’re somehow still standing, you can turn that knob one more time to increase your volume to a brain-walloping 1,024 decibels. That’s almost 10 times louder than any rock concert you’ll ever encounter, and it will definitely get you kicked out of your rehearsal space. All of which is why real amps aren’t designed that way.

Twice as nice

We interpret a 10 dB increase in amplitude as a doubling of volume. 

Parts of a sound wave

Timbre and envelope are two characteristics of sound waves that help determine why, say, two instruments can play the same chords but sound nothing alike. 

Timbre is determined by the unique harmonics formed by the combination of notes in a chord. The A in an A chord is only its fundamental note—you also have overtones and undertones. The way these sound together helps keep a piano from sounding like a guitar, or an angry grizzly bear from sounding like a rumbling tractor engine. 

[Related: Even plants pick up on good vibes]

But we also rely on envelopes, which determine how a sound’s amplitude changes over time. A cello’s note might swell slowly to its maximum volume, then hold for a bit before gently fading out again. On the other hand, a slamming door delivers a quick, sharp, loud sound that cuts off almost instantly. Envelopes comprise four parts: Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release. In fact, they’re more formally known as ADSR Envelopes. 

• Attack: This is how quickly the sound achieves its maximum volume. A barking dog has a very short attack; a rising orchestra has a slower one. 
• Decay: This describes how fast the sound settles into its sustained volume. When a guitar player plucks a string, the note starts off loudly but quickly settles into something quieter before fading out completely. The time it takes to hit that sustained volume is decay. 
• Sustain: Sustain isn’t a measure of time; it’s a measure of amplitude, or volume. It’s how loud the plucked guitar note is after the initial attack but before it fades out. 
• Release: This is the time it takes for the note to drift off to silence. 

Sound’s velocity, or the speed it travels at, differs depending on the density (and even temperature) of the medium it’s moving through—it’s faster in the air than water, for instance. Generally, sound moves at 1,127 feet per second, or 767.54 miles per hour. When jets break the sound barrier, they’re traveling faster than that. And knowing these numbers lets you estimate the distance of a lightning strike by counting the time between the flash and thunder’s boom—if you count to 10, it’s approximately 11,270 feet away, or about a quarter-mile. (Very roughly, of course.) 

A stimulating experience

Anyone can benefit from understanding the fundamentals of sound and what sound waves are. Musicians and content creators with home recording set-ups and studio monitors obviously need a working knowledge of frequencies and amplitude. If you host a podcast, you’ll want as many tools as possible to ensure your voice sounds clear and rich, and this can include understanding the frequencies of your voice, what microphones are best suited to them, and how to set up your room to reflect or dampen the sounds you do or do not want. Having some foundational information is also useful when doing home-improvement projects—when treating a recording workstation, for instance, or just soundproofing a new enclosed deck. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll want to shatter glass. Having a better understanding of the physics of sound opens up wonderful new ways to explore and experience the world around us. Now, go out there and make some noise!

This post has been updated. It was originally published on July 27, 2021.

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The fictional and deadly Jurassic Park has nothing on the real-life Dinosaur Cove on the southern tip of Victoria, Australia. Using bones from the fossil-filled hotspot, a team of paleontologists have confirmed that pterosaurs—more commonly known as pterodactyls—flew over Australian skies as far back as 107 million years ago. Their findings are detailed in a study published May 31 in the journal History Biology.

[Related: This pterosaur ancestor was a tiny, flightless dog-like dinosaur.]

The team examined two pieces of prehistoric bone that were extracted from Dinosaur Cove over 30 years ago. The bones belonged to two different pterosaurs, and were examined by experts from Curtin University in Perth and Melbourne’s Museums Victoria. A partial pelvis bone belonged to a pterosaur with a wingspan over 6.5 feet, and the smaller wing bone belonged to a juvenile pterosaur. These bones turned out to be the oldest remains of the giant winged reptiles ever recovered in Australia, which is better known for its larger sauropod fossils. 

Closely related to dinosaurs, pterosaurs soared through the skies during the Mesozoic Era, about 252 million years ago.

“During the Cretaceous Period (145–66 million years ago), Australia was further south than it is today, and the state of Victoria was within the polar circle—covered in darkness for weeks on end during the winter. Despite these seasonally harsh conditions, it is clear that pterosaurs found a way to survive and thrive,” study co-author and Curtin University PhD student Adele Pentland said in a statement. 

According to Pentland, remains of pterosaurs are a rare find worldwide. Even fewer remains have been discovered at regions that were once high paleolatitude locations, including Victoria. She told CNN that less than 25 sets of pterosaur remains from four species have been found in Australia since the 1980s, compared to more than 100 sets in countries like Argentina and Brazil.  

“So these bones give us a better idea as to where pterosaurs lived and how big they were. By analyzing these bones, we have also been able to confirm the existence of the first ever Australian juvenile pterosaur, which resided in the Victorian forests around 107 million years ago,” said Pentland.

[Related: The biggest animal ever to fly was a reptile with a giraffe-like neck.]

The specimens were found in the 1980s in a Dinosaur Cove expedition led by paleontologists Tom Rich and Pat Vickers-Rich. Their discovery of big-eyed dinosaurs along this area of coastline helped spark a major shift in how dinosaurs were more generally perceived. These “dinosaurs of darkness” gave paleontologists a glimpse of survival without sunlight and reframed questions about whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded creatures. 

“These two fossils were the outcome of a labor-intensive effort by more than 100 volunteers over a decade,” Tom Rich said in a statement. “That effort involved excavating more than 60 meters [196 feet] of tunnel where the two fossils were found in a seaside cliff at Dinosaur Cove.”

The biggest pterosaur scientists know of so far is Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which was found in Texas. Since everything is bigger in Texas, this pterosaur had a wingspan of about 32 to 36 feet. Australia’s largest pterosaur is the Thapunngaka shawi. It was discovered in 2021 by a team from the University of Queensland and boasts a wingspan of roughly 22 feet. 

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Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1—and a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico is already brewing. On June 2, tropical wave Invest 91-L officially became the first named system of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season: Tropical Storm Arlene. It will bring downpours and gusty thunderstorms to parts of Florida.

[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]

For the 2023 season, NOAA forecasts a pretty average amount of hurricane activity. In their annual outlook, NOAA predicts a 40 percent chance of a “near-normal season”, a 30 percent chance of an “above-normal season”, and a 30 percent chance of a “below-normal season”. 

The forecast calls for 12 to 17 total named storms—those with winds of 39 MPH or higher. NOAA anticipates that five to nine of these storms could become hurricanes (winds of 74 MPH or higher), including one to four major hurricanes. Major hurricanes are category 3, 4, or 5 storms with 111 MPH winds or higher.

Some of the names for this year’s storms include Cindy, Harold, and Sean among others.

The 2023 season is anticipated to be less active than recent years, partially due to a tug-of-war between some factors that suppress storm development and some that fuel it. This is the first year in three years without a La Niña pattern present, and the latest forecasts say there is a 90 percent likelihood that El Niño will develop by August and then remain strong in the fall. 

El Niño’s influence on storm development may be offset by favorable conditions in the tropical Atlantic Basin. Those conditions include a potentially above-normal West African monsoon that helps create some of the Atlantic’s stronger and longer-lived storms, all while creating  warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and tropical Atlantic Ocean. 

These warm waters are pure hurricane fuel, and those temperatures have been incredibly high this spring. But the temperatures in the North Atlantic basin, where the storms are born and intensify, and the eastern-central tropical Pacific Ocean, where El Niño forms, are the places to watch.

“This year, the two are in conflict—and likely to exert counteracting influences on the crucial conditions that can make or break an Atlantic hurricane season,” Iowa State University atmospheric scientist Christina Patricola writes in The Conversation. “The result could be good news for the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts: a near-average hurricane season. But forecasters are warning that that hurricane forecast hinges on El Niño panning out.”

[Related: El Niño is probably back—here’s what that means.]

Ocean temperatures in the Atlantic’s tropical regions were unusually warm during the most recent active hurricane seasons. In 2020, the Atlantic produced a record 30 named storms and the 2005 season produced 15 hurricanes including Hurricane Katrina.

The tropical Pacific Ocean influences the Atlantic hurricanes by forming teleconnections—a chain of processes that change the ocean or atmosphere in one region which then leads to larger scale changes that can influence the weather in other places.

“During El Niño events, the warm upper-ocean temperatures change the vertical and east-west atmospheric circulation in the tropics,” Patricola writes. “That initiates a teleconnection by affecting the east-west winds in the upper atmosphere throughout the tropics, ultimately resulting in stronger vertical wind shear in the Atlantic basin. That wind shear can tamp down hurricanes.”

Atlantic hurricane season ends on November 30. In the meantime, NOAA encourages those who could be affected by tropical systems to understand watches and warnings for their area and prepare emergency supplies ahead of time. 

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After decades of the US government generally avoiding discussion of UFOs, NASA and the Department of Defense have embarked on investigations into mysterious, unexplained sightings, aerial or otherwise: what are now being dubbed unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. NASA launched a nine-month UAP investigation in October. In the spirit of the space agency’s goal of transparency for that work, on Wednesday it live-streamed a public meeting of its independent UAP study team. The panel concluded it needed quality data, noting the fragmentary nature of what was available to analyze has restricted research into UAPs.  

The subject of UAPs “has captured the attention of the public, the scientific community, and the government alike,” said Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, at the meeting’s outset. “It’s now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with a rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve.” 

The 16-person study group includes planetary scientist David Grinspoon, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and science journalist Nadia Drake. It’s chaired by David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the nonprofit science organization the Simons Foundation.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

The NASA team will write a final report by sometime in July. The study team’s mission is not to render a verdict on the nature of UAPs, Spergel said, but to set the stage for later research. They aim to clarify how NASA can go about scientifically investigating UAPs. To that end, in Wednesday’s meeting, they discussed the current knowledge about UAPs (these are not extraterrestrial), standards of evidence for determining just what they might be, and the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human reports. 

“Our role here is not to resolve the nature of these events, but rather to give NASA guidance to provide a roadmap of how it can contribute to this area,” Spergel said. 

The team has sifted through available UAP data and found that many reports can be pinned down to known sources, such as distant aircraft, sensor artifacts, high altitude balloons, or atmospheric events. When it comes to learning more about the persistently unidentifiable phenomena on record, though, the team found the information lacking. 

“The current data collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection,” Spergel said. “Existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event.”

[Related: The truth about Area 51 UFO sightings, according to a local expert]

It’s possible that more direct, targeted observations of UAPs could help, using everything from FAA radar installations to sensors on commercial aircraft to government spy installations. But as Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) told the team, “Most people, including the government, don’t like it when I point our entire collection apparatus to your backyard.”

“We’ve got to figure out how to do this only in the areas that I can get high confidence there’s going to be something there,” Kirkpatrick continued, “and high confidence I’m not going to break any laws.”

While AARO may deal with some classified UAP data, the NASA team is only working with unclassified information so that its report can be made fully public. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the data NASA has to work with is inferior to the Department of Defense’s information—many times, the classification of a UAP sighting has nothing to do with UAPs, according to Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and everything to do with what snapped the photo.

“Unidentified anomalous phenomena sightings themselves are not classified. It’s often the sensor platform that is classified,” she said, to prevent foreign adversaries from understanding those sensor’s capabilities. “If a fighter jet took a picture of the Statue of Liberty then that image will be classified, not because of the subject in the picture, but because of the sensors on the plane.”

There are drawbacks for the NASA investigators working in public, however. Although he did not specify exactly what happened, Evans noted that members of study team “have been subjected to online abuse due to their decision to participate on this panel,” adding that “any form of harassment towards our panelists only serves to detract from the scientific process, which requires an environment of respect and openness.”

Harassment of NASA study team members also highlights another problem with seriously studying UAPs, according to Spergel: the stigma associated with reporting a UAP sighting, especially among some professionals. ”Despite NASA’s extensive efforts to reduce the stigma, the origin of the UAPs remain unclear, and we feel many events remain unreported,” he said. “Commercial pilots, for example, are very reluctant to report anomalies, and one of our goals in having NASA play a role is to remove stigma and get high quality data.”

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Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the longest daylight hours of the year ahead of the summer solstice, and across the world many may even be able to see a unique sunspot on the surface of our favorite star.  Summer stargazing season is quickly approaching, but summer skies can be hazy which makes  some celestial events difficult to see. But there is still plenty to see in the mild night skies this June. Here are some events to look out for and if you happen to get any stellar sky photos, tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

[Related: The Strawberry Moon, explained.]

June 1 and 2- Mars passes through Beehive star cluster

To kick off the month, Mars will be passing through a star cluster called the Beehive cluster or M44. It’s located in the crabby constellation Cancer, and Mars will appear as a brilliant red ruby surrounded by sparkly diamonds.  

To find Mars, first look for the bright planet Venus in the western sky. The two bright stars that are strung out to one side of Venus are the constellation Gemini’s twin stars Castor and Pollux. Mars should be the reddish light just above Venus, Pollux, and Castor. Binoculars and a dark sky will help you see a smattering of stars just beside Mars. 

The Beehive cluster is about 557 light-years away from Earth and is home to at least two planets. 

June 3 and 4- Full Strawberry Moon

June’s full moon will reach peak illumination at 11:43 PM EDT on June 3. Just after sunset, look in the southeastern sky to watch the moon rise above the horizon. June’s full moon is typically the last full moon of the spring or the first of the summer. 

The name Strawberry Moon is not a description of its color, but instead a reference to the ripening of “June-bearing” strawberries that are ready to be gathered and gobbled. For thousands of years, the  Algonquian, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota peoples used this term to describe a time of great abundance. Some tribal nations in the northeastern US, including the Wampanoag nation, celebrate Strawberry Thanksgiving to show appreciation for the spring and summer’s first fruits. 

Other names for June’s full moon include the Gardening Moon or Gitige-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Moon of Birthing or Ignivik in Inupiat, and the River Moon or Iswa Nuti in the Catawba Language of the Catawba Indian Nation in South Carolina.

[Related: See hot plasma bubble on the sun’s surface in powerful closeup images.]

June 21- Summer Solstice

Summer officially begins in the Northern Hemisphere at 10:58 AM EDT on June 21 which marks the summer solstice. This is when the sun travels along its northernmost path in the sky. At the solstice, Earth’s North Pole is at its maximum tilt of roughly 23.5 degrees towards the sun. It is also the longest day of the year, and you can expect roughly 16 hours of daylight on June 21 in some spots in the Northeast.

After June 21, the sun appears to reverse course and head back in the opposite direction, towards the south, until the next solstice in December. 

June 27- Bootid Meteor Shower Maximum

June’s Bootid meteor shower begins on June 22, but it is expected to reach its peak rate of meteors around 7 PM EDT on June 27. The Bootid meteors should be visible when the constellation Bootes is just above the horizon. The moon will be in its first quarter phase at the shower’s peak, and will set at about 1:30 in the morning, making for minimal light interference later in the night. 

June’s Bootid meteor shower was created by the comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke and expected to last until July 2.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. Then, just sit back and let the summer skies dazzle.

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Libraries are full of unique and missing oddities from long lost letters to famous forgeries. A newly discovered record of live comedy performance in medieval England is yet another example of how deep the roots of British theater run. In a study published May 30 in The Review of English Studies, researchers describe a 15th century manuscript with slapstick, lively text mocking everyone from kings and priests down to lower classes. If that’s not enough, the naughty narrative encourages drunkenness and features a killer rabbit.

[Related: Codebreakers have finally deciphered the lost letters of Mary, Queen of Scots.]

These new texts also contain the earliest recorded use of a ‘red herring’ in the English language, which is a misleading statement, question, or argument that is meant to redirect the conversation or text conversation away from its original subject. Additionally, it fills in some knowledge gaps regarding comic culture in England between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Renaissance’s William Shakespeare.

In the Middle Ages, minstrels often traveled from taverns and fairs to entertain people. Fictional minstrels such as Robin Hood’s Allan-a-Dale, are common in literature, but historical references to actual performers are more rare. When the minstrel was performing these newly found works, the Wars of the Roses were still raging. Life was very difficult for the majority of English people. However, study author James Wade, an early English literature specialist from Cambridge University, says this text shows that fun entertainment was still flourishing as social mobility increased.

Wade found the text when researching in the National Library of Scotland. Wade saw that a scribe had written: “By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink.”

“It was an intriguing display of humor and it’s rare for medieval scribes to share that much of their character,” Wade said. This little joke encouraged him to look into why, how, and where Heege had copied these texts.

This new study focuses on the first of nine booklets that make up the larger Heege Manuscript. The booklet contains three texts that Wade concludes were copied down in 1480 from a memory-aid written by an unknown minstrel that likely performed them near the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border in central England. The three texts are a mock sermon written in prose, a tail-rhyme burlesque romance titled “The Hunting of the Hare,” and an alliterative nonsense verse called “The Battle of Brackonwet.” 

“Most medieval poetry, song and storytelling has been lost,” Wade said in a statement. “Manuscripts often preserve relics of high art. This is something else. It’s mad and offensive, but just as valuable. Stand-up comedy has always involved taking risks and these texts are risky! They poke fun at everyone, high and low.”

[Related: Medieval knights rode tiny horses into battle.]

All three texts are comedic and designed for live performance, since the narrator tells the audience to pay attention and even to pass him a drink. The texts also feature regional humor and inside jokes for a local audience.

Wade believes that this minstrel wrote part of his act down since the many nonsensical sequences would have been very difficult to recall solely by memory. 

“He didn’t give himself the kind of repetition or story trajectory which would have made things simpler to remember,” he said “Here we have a self-made entertainer with very little education creating really original, ironic material. To get an insight into someone like that from this period is incredibly rare and exciting.”

Like many present day comedians and actors, medieval minstrels are believed to have had day jobs as peddlers and plowmen, but performed their theatrical gigs at night. Some also may have even gone on tour by traveling the county, while others stuck to local venues. Wade believes the minstrel in these new texts was more of a local performer. 

“You can find echoes of this minstrel’s humor in shows like Mock the Week, situational comedies and slapstick,” said Wade.“The self-irony and making audiences the butt of the joke are still very characteristic of British stand-up comedy.

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Over three million years ago, a 500-plus pound marsupial roamed Australia, winning the prize of the continent’s first long-distance walking champion. In a study published May 31 in the Journal of Royal Society Open Science, a team of scientists described the discovery of this new genus using advanced 3D scans and the partial remains of a 3.5 million year old specimen. 

Most earlier studies on this group have focused on its skull since other skeletal remains are rare in Australia’s fossil record. The skeleton described in this new study, found at Kalamurina Station in southern Australia in 2017, is special since it is the first that was found with associated soft tissue structures. The authors used 3D-scanning to compare the partial skeleton with other diprotodontid material housed in collections all over the world. A hard concretion that formed shortly after the animal died encased its foot, and CT scans revealed the soft tissue impressions on the outline of its footpad.

[Related: Giant wombats the size of small cars once roamed Australia.]

The new genus Ambulator, meaning “walker” or “wanderer,” had four giant legs which would have helped it roam long distances in search of food and water compared to its earlier relatives. It belongs to the Diprotodontidae family, an extinct family of big, four-legged, herbivorous marsupials that lived in New Guinea and Australia. The largest species was Diprotodon optatum, which was about the size of a car and weighed almost 6,000 pounds. Diprotodontids were an integral part of the region’s ecosystem before going extinct about 40,000 years ago. 

“Diprotodontids are distantly related to wombats – the same distance as kangaroos are to possums – so unfortunately there is nothing quite like them today. As a result, paleontologists have had a hard time reconstructing their biology,” study author and Flinders University PhD student Jacob van Zoelen said in a statement. 

Ambulator keanei lived during the Pliocene era when Australia saw an increase in grasslands and open habitats become more dry. To have enough to eat and drink, diprotodontids likely had to travel great distances. 

“We don’t often think of walking as a special skill but when you’re big any movement can be energetically costly so efficiency is key,” said van Zoelen. “Most large herbivores today such as elephants and rhinoceroses are digitigrade, meaning they walk on the tips of their toes with their heel not touching the ground.  “

Diprotodontids are plantigrade animals, which means that their heel-bone makes contact with the ground as they walk. This is similar to the way humans walk and helps distribute the weight while walking, but does use more energy when running. According to van Zoelen, diprotodontids also have extreme plantigrady in their hands. The bone of the wrist is modified into a secondary heel and this “heeled hand” may have made early reconstructions of the animal look a little bit bizarre.

“Development of the wrist and ankle for weight-bearing meant that the digits became essentially functionless and likely did not make contact with the ground while walking.” said van Zoelen. “This may be why no finger or toe impressions are observed in the trackways of diprotodontids.”

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Over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the coronavirus directly or indirectly killed about 15 million people worldwide, according to estimates from the World Health Organization. In the United States, more people died in 2020 and 2021 than during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was widely called the most deadly in recorded history. 

The word “deadly” certainly applies to the virus that causes COVID-19. And yet, epidemiologists hesitate to give SARS-CoV-2 the superlative of deadliest virus in human history. To them, the raw number of mortalities caused by a given virus doesn’t always paint the full picture of a pathogen’s danger—especially when comparing viral outbreaks across time.

Raw mortality numbers have to be taken in the context of the world’s total population, says Jennifer Nuzzo, professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. “A lot of people talk about how COVID deaths eclipsed what we saw in 1918,” she says. “It’s really important to remember that the population of 1918 was a fraction of what it is today.” In that context, the flu of 1918 rises back up in the ranks in terms of deadliness.

Using the “case fatality rate” metric to determine what virus is the deadliest, rabies would likely come out on top. That’s because, if an infection becomes symptomatic, rabies is fatal to humans in more than 99 percent of cases. Globally, approximately 59,000 people die from rabies every year. Very few of those deaths—an average of two in the US—occur in the developed world because of rabies vaccines for household pets and swift medical interventions after bites.

But “a virus doesn’t have to have a very high case fatality ratio to cause a tremendous amount of death and disruption,” Nuzzo says. “It’s more about looking at the environments in which the viruses are spreading, and our social and human vulnerabilities to it.” 

A virus with a lower case fatality rate can kill more people if it’s highly transmissible, with a long period of time before severe or obvious symptoms set in. This allows an infected person to expose many others. That’s why SARS-CoV-2 caused such a rapid and devastating outbreak around the globe. It’s easily transmitted via airborne droplets, and doesn’t always or immediately cause severe illness. 

[Related: Can viruses be good for us?]

Globalization sped it along, too. “When a virus spreads at the pace of a human being walking, that’s very different than when you can hop on an airplane and be anywhere in the world in 36 hours,” Nuzzo says. 

During large outbreaks such as epidemics or pandemics, epidemiologists look at another metric, called excess deaths: how many more people died during a period of time than typically do over that same window. Excess deaths can account for other indirect ways that a virus causes death, Nuzzo says, such as patients who need critical care but can’t get it in overburdened hospitals.

Here’s how some of the most devastating viruses in human history tell different stories of how high a death toll can rise:

Influenza

The 1918 influenza pandemic still far and away ranks as the deadliest global outbreak of the 20th century. Thought to be caused by an H1N1 virus, it spread globally in 1918 and 1919. An estimated 500 million people were infected (approximately a third of the global population) and 50 million people died worldwide, about 675,000 of whom were in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Without sophisticated testing and tracking, death toll estimates rely heavily on excess death calculations. Some suggest the true toll was closer to 17 million, while others set it much higher at 100 million. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, cautions against over-interpreting comparisons between the historic flu data and modern viral outbreaks.

[Related: Can you get diseases from bad bathroom smells?]

 “We are determining cases and even counting deaths with much more precision now than we did then,” he says. At the time, there were also no flu vaccines and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections, which likely drove the excess death toll higher.

Today, the youngest and oldest people are most likely to die from influenza. But during the pandemic over 100 years ago, Schaffner says, deaths bore a different signature: mortality peaked among young and middle-aged adults, too. Why that happened is still unclear, he says, but it contributed to the historic toll of that pandemic.

Influenza continues to hold its place as one of the deadliest viruses, despite the availability of vaccines. Variants of the influenza virus have led to other pandemic-level events, such as the 2009 outbreak colloquially called the swine flu pandemic. But the virus is also endemic in our society, and infects an estimated 1 billion people globally every year, according to the World Health Organization. Of those cases, the WHO reported in 2019, somewhere between 290,000 to 650,000 result directly or indirectly in deaths. 

An estimated 40.1 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS. That is nearly half of the number of people estimated to have become infected with HIV since the start of the epidemic, at an estimated 84.2 million. 

The case fatality rate of HIV/AIDS was historically quite high. Some estimates put it around 80 percent without treatment. But much has changed since the 1980s. Today, there are ways to manage HIV and mitigate the immunodeficiencies associated with an infection, and most patients are diagnosed sooner after an infection. In the United States, the rate of HIV-related deaths fell by nearly half from 2010 to 2017, according to the CDC. 

That excess deaths metric likely reached a much higher number by the time officials declared the public health emergency over in early May. The Omicron wave that swept around the globe in late 2021 and early 2022 saw one of the largest surges in cases of COVID-19 and, although the variant didn’t seem to be more deadly than previous variants, with millions of people infected, a high death toll in the hundreds of thousands was inevitable. 

Early in the pandemic, the case fatality rates calculated for SARS-Cov-2 varied considerably. Many estimates were likely higher than the true number, as researchers scrambled to devise tests for the virus and milder cases slipped through the cracks. In early 2020, estimates of the case fatality rate by country ranged as high as 25 percent or more. Since then, case fatality rates have dropped, and now, according to Johns Hopkins University, they are as high as 4.9 percent. In the US, the case fatality rate is 1.1 percent. 

Mortalities continued to stack up into the 20th century, with an average of three out of every 10 people infected dying. The disease, which is caused by variola virus, is estimated to have killed more than 300 million people from 1900, until a global vaccination campaign halted its path of devastation in 1977. It was the first disease ever to be eradicated. 

[Related: The first honeybee vaccine could protect the entire hive, starting with the queen]

But it was the very thing that made it particularly fearsome that was its downfall, Schaffner says. “It created such a distinctive rash that people could identify it and fear it. And that was one of its Achilles heels,” he says. Because it was so easily identifiable, and spread so slowly, vaccinating the local population near an outbreak swiftly curtailed transmission. Such an approach, he says, was part of the vaccination strategy that eradicated the great pestilence. 

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The persistent pathogen known as the plague was circulating around Europe and Asia centuries before it wiped out about 25 million people. A team of scientists have just recently found 4,000 year-old DNA belonging to Yersinia pestis, or the bacteria that causes the plague. That’s about 3,000 years before the plague before the Black Death began. The findings were detailed in a study published May 30 in the journal Nature Communications and represent the oldest evidence of the plague in Britain found to date. 

[Related: Scientists tracked the plague’s journey through Denmark using really old teeth.]

The team identified two cases of Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) from human remains found uncovered in a mass burial site in southwest England near Somerset and another in a ring cairn monument in Cumbria in northwest England. After taking small skeletal samples from 34 individuals at both sites, they screened for plague bacteria in the teeth. Dental pulp can trap the DNA remnants of infectious diseases and has helped scientists find evidence of the plague before. 

After extracting dental pulp, they analyzed the DNA inside and identified three cases of Y. pestis in two children that are estimated to be about 10 to 12 years-old when they died, as well as one case in a woman who was between 35 and 45 years-old. It is likely that these people lived at roughly the same time, according to radiocarbon dating.  

“The ability to detect ancient pathogens from degraded samples, from thousands of years ago, is incredible. These genomes can inform us of the spread and evolutionary changes of pathogens in the past, and hopefully help us understand which genes may be important in the spread of infectious diseases,” study co-author and PhD student from the Francis Crick Institute Pooja Swali said in a statement. “We see that this Yersinia pestis lineage, including genomes from this study, loses genes over time, a pattern that has emerged with later epidemics caused by the same pathogen.”

Plague has been identified in multiple individuals who lived in Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age (LNBA). Evidence of the plague, however, hadn’t been seen in Britain at this point in time. This LNBA strain was likely brought into Central and Western Europe about 4,800 years ago as humans expanded into Eurasia, and this study suggests it extended even further west into Britain. The LNBA strain’s wide geographic range suggests that it could have been easily transmitted.

Genome sequencing found that the strain of Y. pestis found in these sites looks very similar to the strain identified further east into Eurasia at the same time and not later strains of the disease. It lacked the yapC and ymt genes, which are both seen in later strains of plague. The ymt gene is also known to play an important role in plague transmission via fleas. It is likely that the LNBA strain was not transmitted on fleas, unlike later strains of the plague, such as the one that caused the Black Death in the Fourteenth Century. 

[Related: You could get the plague (but probably won’t).]

The team is not fully certain that the individuals at these old burial sites were infected with the exact same strain of plague, since pathogenic DNA that causes disease degrades very quickly in samples that could be incomplete or eroded. 

The Somerset site is also rare since it doesn’t match other funeral sites dating back to this time period. The individuals buried there appear to have died from trauma. The team believes that the mass burial here was not due to an outbreak of plague, but the individuals studied may have been infected when they died.  

“We understand the huge impact of many historical plague outbreaks, such as the Black Death, on human societies and health, but ancient DNA can document infectious disease much further into the past,” co-author and geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute Pontus Skoglund said in a statement. “Future research will do more to understand how our genomes responded to such diseases in the past, and the evolutionary arms race with the pathogens themselves, which can help us to understand the impact of diseases in the present or in the future.”

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Efficiently standing up and walking and running on two feet  stands out among the traits that separates Homo sapiens from great apes—and we can owe a lot of that to a raised medial arch. While crucial, the mechanics behind bipedal walking are still a bit of an evolutionary mystery.  A study published May 30 in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology found that helpful and spring-like arches may have evolved for the purpose of helping us walk on two feet.

[Related: Foraging in trees might have pushed human ancestors to walk on two feet.]

The team found that the recoil of a flexible arch repositions in the ankle upright for more efficient walking and is particularly effective for running. 

“We thought originally that the spring-like arch helped to lift the body into the next step,” study co-author and University of Wisconsin-Madison biomechanical engineer Lauren Welte said in a statement. “It turns out that instead, the spring-like arch recoils to help the ankle lift the body.”

The raised arch in the center of the human foot is believed to give hominins more leverage while walking upright. When arch motion is restricted, like it could be in those with more flat feet, running demands more energy from the body. Arch recoil could potentially make our species more efficient by propelling the body’s center of mass forward, essentially making up for the mechanical work that the muscles would have to do otherwise.

In this new study, the team selected seven participants with varying arch mobility and filmed their walking and running patterns with high-speed x-ray motion capture cameras. The team measured the height of each participant’s arch and took CT scans of their right feet. They also created rigid models that were compared to the measured motion of the bones in the foot. Scientists then measured which joints added the most to arch recoil and the contribution of arch recoil to center of mass and ankle propulsion.

Surprisingly, they found that a rigid arch without recoil caused the foot to prematurely leave the ground, likely decreasing the efficiency of the calf muscle. A rigid arch also leaned the ankle bones too far forward. A forward lean looks more like the posture of walking chimpanzees instead of the straight upright stance of a human gait.

A flexible arch helped reposition the ankle upright, allowing the leg to push off the ground more effectively. This effect is greater while running, suggesting that a flexible arch for more efficient running may have been a desired evolutionary trait.

The team also found that a joint between two bones in the medial arch–the navicular and the medial cuneiform–is crucial to flexibility. Investigating the changes in this joint over time could help scientists track the development of bipedalism in our own fossil record. 

[Related: The Monty Python ‘silly walk’ could replace your gym workout.]

“The mobility of our feet seems to allow us to walk and run upright instead of either crouching forward or pushing off into the next step too soon,” study co-author and Queen’s University mechanical and materials engineer Michael Rainbow said in a statement.

These findings and understanding more about arch flexibility could help people who have rigid arches due to illness or injury. Their hypothesis still needs more testing, but could help solve a plethora of modern-day foot dilemmas. 

“Our work suggests that allowing the arch to move during propulsion makes movement more efficient,” said Welte. “If we restrict arch motion, it’s likely that there are corresponding changes in how the other joints function.”

The post Evolution of human foot arches put the necessary pep in our upright steps appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Celestron Inspire 100AZ		SEE IT	This lightweight telescope is also easy to assemble and comes with a carrying case.
Best for travel		Gskyer 70mm Aperture 400mm AZ Mount Astronomical Refractor Telescope		SEE IT	This telescope lets kids take pictures with their phones and is great for camping.
Best budget		MaxUSee Kids Telescope 400x40mm with Tripod & Finder Scope		SEE IT	Comes with a moon filter and maps of the moon and stars—at a wallet-friendly price.

While trips to the Moon may not be commonplace yet, you can foster curiosity about the universe by letting kids see the lunar surface and the rings of Saturn up close with a telescope for kids. It’s one thing to learn about the Moon in school, and it’s another thing to see it up close. The best telescopes for kids are designed for amateur astronomers, and can provide night after night of out-of-this-world entertainment.

• Best overall: Celestron Inspire 100AZ
• Best for young kids: Celestron FirstScope 76 Tablestop Telescope 
• Best for older kids: Celestron Astro Fi 102 WiFi Maksutov Wireless Reflecting Telescope
• Best for travel: Gskyer 70mm Aperture 400mm AZ Mount Astronomical Refractor Telescope
• Best for smartphone photography: POPULAR SCIENCE AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope
• Best budget: MaxUSee Kids Telescope 400x40mm with Tripod & Finder Scope

How we chose the best telescopes for kids

Popular Science covers the latest developments in astronomy, from stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope’s discovery of its first exoplanet to meteor showers you can see from your backyard. Telescopes are a great way to help kids explore the galaxy and see the planets up close. But they can also be complicated instruments with many moving parts for the uninitiated.

In compiling our list of recommendations for the best telescopes for kids, we considered models from trusted brands like Celestron, optical quality and magnification, ease of set up and use, supplemental educational tools that explain what to look for in the night sky, durability, and portability. We also weighed user reviews, what kids look for at different ages, and prices.

The best telescopes for kids: Reviews & Recommendations

Looking for a telescope for the first time can be a daunting experience. Many of the considerations are the same finding telescopes for adults. Figuring out what type of telescope is best for your needs, what aperture you should look for, and the relationship between focal length and magnification are all important factors to consider. The best telescopes for kids should also be durable and easy to use. We break down what you should look for and our picks so you can compare telescopes and find the best option for your family.

Best overall: Celestron Inspire 100AZ

Celestron

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Specs

• Weight: 12.4 pounds
• Eyepieces: 10mm and 20mm
• Aperture: 100mm
• Type: Refractor

Pros

• Good for both stargazing and birdwatching
• Wide aperture for better focus
• Comes with smartphone adapter
• Plenty of training resources

Cons

• Some users say the build quality is not great

Celestron has been making telescopes for nearly 60 years. Its Inspire AZ100 is a great tool for older kids (and adults) to start stargazing at night and observing objects on Earth during the day. 

This short refractor telescope is a good telescope for beginners as it’s easy to set up and doesn’t require any special tools. Its short optical tube of 436mm provides a wide field of view, while its higher 100mm aperture allows aspiring astronomers to focus on the planets, moons, and stars. At 12.4 pounds, this telescope is relatively lightweight, and it comes with a tripod that’s easy to adjust. The AZ1000’s alt-az mount allows users to move the telescope up and down and pan left and right. 

The 10mm and 20mm eyepieces increase magnification by 33 times and 66 times, respectively. A finderscope makes it easier for beginning astronomers to spot the surface of the Moon. And your purchase also gives you access to Celestron’s Starry Night software, which teaches kids about what they see in the night sky. This telescope is also equipped with a smartphone adapter that allows kids to capture images of both the planets and wildlife.

Best for young kids: Celestron FirstScope

Celestron

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Specs

• Weight: 4.5 pounds
• Eyepieces: 4mm and 20mm
• Aperture: 76mm
• Type: Dobsonian/Newtonian

Pros

• Easy to use
• Portable
• Less expensive

Cons

• Small aperture

Designed for kids from ages 4 to 8, Celestron’s FirstScope is an ideal introductory telescope. Inspired by Galileo, this telescope features the names of he and other esteemed astronomers through the ages on its optical tube. This telescope comes with 20mm and 4mm eyepieces that result in magnification of 15 times and 75 times, respectively. The FirstScope is also light and easy to transport at 4.5 pounds. Its tabletop design makes it simple to set up on level surfaces outdoors. It’s a good telescope for a 5-year-old kid, and when the child is done stargazing, it looks great on a bookshelf.

Best for older kids: Celestron Astro Fi 102 WiFi Maksutov Wireless Reflecting Telescope

Celestron

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Specs

• Weight: 16.8 pounds
• Eyepieces: 25mm, 10mm
• Aperture: 125mm
• Type: Schmidt-Cassegrain

Pros

• Works with smartphones and iPads
• WiFi-enabled
• Lens cap doubles as a smartphone adapter

Cons

• Challenging to use if WiFi connection is spotty
• Some users report difficulty focusing

To get kids who are always on their devices interested in the Andromeda Galaxy, consider the Celestron Astro Fi 102 WiFi Maksutov Wireless Reflecting Telescope. Kids can control the WiFi-enabled telescope using an iPhone, iPad, or Android device and Celestron’s SkyPortal app, making this a good teen telescope. Instead of searching the night sky for planets, teens can use this telescope’s interactive sky map to tap the object they want to see on their screen. Then the telescope will move to find the object and focus upon it.

Set up is easy, and at 16 pounds with an adjustable tripod, this telescope is quite portable. Its two eyepieces (25mm and 10mm) provide magnification of 50 times and 125 times, respectively. That power will help kids locate the rings of Saturn, the red spot on Jupiter, the craters on the Moon at night, and wildlife and birds during the day. And the lens cap doubles as a smartphone adapter so that kids can show off images of their cosmic and terrestrial explorations.

Best for travel: Gskyer 70mm Aperture 400mm AZ Mount Astronomical Refractor Telescope

Gskyer

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Specs

• Weight: 5.73 pounds
• Magnification: 25mm, 10mm
• Aperture: 70mm
• Type: Refractor

Pros

• Lightweight
• Strong magnification
• Comes with smartphone adapter

Cons

• Some users say its poorly made
• May not locate celestial objects as well as other telescopes

This beginner’s telescope from Gskyer is designed for portability. This compact model weighs just under 6 pounds and comes with a travel case and an adjustable tripod so kids can take it on the go. The magnification power of the two eyepieces (25mm and 10mm) increase magnification by 16 times and 40 times, respectively, which can then be tripled using the included 3x Barlow lens. The Gskyer also comes with a smartphone eyepiece adapter so your kids can take photos of their discoveries, making it a solid telescope for 10-year-olds and other kids around that age.

Best for smartphone photography: POPULAR SCIENCE AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope

Celestron

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Popular Science has teamed up with Celestron on a line of products. The decision to include this model in our recommendations was made by our reviewer independently of that relationship, but we do earn a commission on its sales—all of which helps power Popular Science.

Specs

• Weight: 10 pounds 
• Magnification: 20mm and 10mm
• Aperture: 70mm
• Type: Refractor

Pros

• High-quality optics
• Can operate it remotely
• Comes with educational software

Cons

• Some users said components arrived broken

If your kid is a budding photographer who’s looking to capture images of the planets, the AstroMaster 80mm is a great option.  A collaboration between Celestron and Popular Science, this telescope combines high-quality optics, including an 80mm objective lens, with a smartphone adapter that allows users to take photos and videos of the Moon, planets, and birds through the eyepiece. This refractor model comes with two eyepieces (20mm and 10mm) and a Barlow lens that doubles its magnification power. It also features an erect image diagonal that allows you to use it to spot wildlife and other terrestrial objects during the day. 

This telescope allows you to connect via Bluetooth and control the shutter release remotely on both iOS and Android phones. It’s also easy to assemble and super portable at 10 pounds. And kids can get a primer on the night sky with Celestron’s Starry Night Astronomy software, which provides sky maps and details about thousands of celestial objects.

Best budget: MaxUSee Kids Telescope 400x40mm with Tripod & Finder Scope

MaxUSee

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Specs

• Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Eyepieces: 20mm, 12.5mm, 6mm
• Aperture: 40mm
• Type: Refractor

Pros

• Lightweight
• Inexpensive
• Comes with viewfinder scope

Cons

• Lenses not powerful 
• No connectivity

The maps of the moon and stars are a big hit with kids, and adults will love the price of these budget-friendly telescopes. With easy assembly and included moon filter, the MaxUSee telescope is a good tool to get your child stargazing. That said, its eyepieces are not very powerful and it doesn’t come with a lot of features, so if having a good quality telescope that you can use for years is important, this may not be the best option.

Things to consider before purchasing a telescope for kids

If you’ve purchased cameras before, some terminology around lenses and light will be familiar. While telescopes can be incredibly intricate, when it comes to finding the best telescopes for kids, look for options that are easy to set up and use, durability, and lightweight for easy portability.

Type of telescope

There are three main types of telescope: refracting, reflecting, and catadioptric.

Refractor: These telescopes use both an objective lens and an eyepiece to display an image. Light enters the telescope and is bent or refracted as it travels through the optical tube. The eyepiece then magnifies the light and straightens out the image for the viewer.

Reflector: Reflecting telescopes use mirrors to bring an image into focus. These telescopes typically have a primary mirror opposite the aperture, where light comes into the telescope, and a secondary mirror. The light is reflected from the second mirror toward the eyepiece for the viewer to see the image. 

Catadioptric: These telescopes are designed with both lenses and mirrors to show an image, combining refraction and reflection. One of the categories of this type of telescope is known as Schmidt-Cassegrain.

Focal length, magnification, and aperture

The focal length of a telescope is the distance between where the telescope’s main lens or mirror and where light enters the telescope. It can range between 300 and 4,000 millimeters. The shorter the focal length, the wider the field of view. Conversely, higher focal lengths provide greater magnification to focus on a specific object.

To find out the magnification of a telescope using a specific eyepiece, divide the focal length of the optical tube by the eyepiece.  

Aperture: A telescope’s aperture indicates the diameter of the objective lens or mirror in millimeters. The larger the aperture, the more light the telescope can let in, making images brighter and easier to see.

Mounts

The three categories of mounts of telescopes are Altazimuth, Dobsonian, and Equatorial. Alt-az mounts, as they are also known, refer to the horizontal and vertical axes. They allow users to move the telescopes left and right and up and down on a tripod. Dobsonian mounts are a type of alt-az mount that are designed to support heavy telescopes with large apertures. 

Equatorial mounts are used with more sophisticated telescopes. One of their axes aligns with Earth’s rotation axis. These mounts are designed for long-term observation and astrophotography.

Ease of use

When considering what telescope to buy, look for options that will be easy for them to operate. Keep an eye out for models that are easy to set up and come with tripods. Many options are also lightweight and come with a carrying case or backpack for easy portability, such as the Gskyer 70mm Aperture 400mm AZ Mount Astronomical Refractor Telescope.

Age of your child

Kids age 4 to 8 starting stargazing will do well with a tabletop model with simple controls, such as the Celestron FirstScope. Meanwhile, older kids with some experience will appreciate the flexibility of telescopes with smartphone adapters that let them take photos and images of their cosmic finds, or they can use to take photos with their smartphone and the Celestron Astro Fi 102 WiFi Maksutov Wireless Reflecting Telescope, which they can operate remotely using their smartphone or an iPad.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best telescopes for kids

• Best overall: Celestron Inspire 100AZ
• Best for young kids: Celestron FirstScope 76 Tablestop Telescope 
• Best for older kids: Celestron Astro Fi 102 WiFi Maksutov Wireless Reflecting Telescope
• Best for travel: Gskyer 70mm Aperture 400mm AZ Mount Astronomical Refractor Telescope
• Best for smartphone photography: POPULAR SCIENCE AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope
• Best budget: MaxUSee Kids Telescope 400x40mm with Tripod & Finder Scope

If you’re looking to give your children an appreciation for the galaxy, these telescopes for kids can help them see the stars and the planets close up. These models are easy to assemble and are designed with features that kids will appreciate, such as the ability to take photos with their phones. You’ll be glad you have one of the best telescopes on hand for the next cosmic event.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best telescopes for kids in 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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As they creep through tropical environments appearing not to have a care in the world, sloths give off some of the chillest vibes in the animal kingdom. This relaxed and elusive nature does make studying sloths a bit difficult, but a study published May 29 in the journal PeerJ Life & Environment is shedding some new light on activity patterns and behaviors adaptations of two sloth species.

[Related: Sloths aren’t the picky eaters we thought they were.]

The team looked at Bradypus variegatus and Choloepus hoffmanni, two sloth species that live in the lowland rainforests of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Costa Rica is home to six species of sloths, who have the slowest digestive system of any animal on Earth. It can take the mammals two weeks to digest an entire meal, and they sleep about 20 hours a day to conserve energy. 

Using micro data loggers, the team continuously monitored the behavior of both three-toed sloths (Bradypus) and two-toed sloths (Choloepus) for periods ranging from days to weeks. These recordings enabled the team to explore how fluctuating environmental influences sloth activity and how that correlates with their uniquely chill and low-energy lifestyle. 

Choloepus sloths are cathemeral, meaning that they have irregular variable periods of activity throughout a 24-hour cycle. Cathemeral behavior allows them to take advantage of better environmental conditions while minimizing the risk of predation. 

The study also observed a large amount of variability in activity levels between the animals and also within individual sloths. This flexibility suggests that the animals have developed diverse strategies to adapt to their surroundings, which enhances their chances of survival when the environment fluctuates. 

The team initially expected that daily temperatures, which can hit the mid-90s, would influence sloth activity, but their observations did not support that initial hypothesis. However, Bradypus sloths did increase their night time activity on colder nights and the nights that followed colder days. The authors believe that this indicates a potential correlation between sloth behavior and temperature variations.

[Related: Our bravest ancestors may have hunted giant sloths.]

While this study adds more understanding to sloth ecology, it also highlights the importance of preserving and protecting tropical rainforests and their unique inhabitants. According to Global Forest Watch, Costa Rica lost about 2.4 percent of its forest cover between 2000 and 2020, but the country has gained international recognition for its efforts to mitigate climate change and promote animal welfare.

“Understanding the drivers of sloth activity and their ability to withstand environmental fluctuations is of growing importance for the development of effective conservation measures, particularly when we consider the vulnerability of tropical ecosystems to climate change and the escalating impacts of anthropogenic activities in South and Central America,” the team wrote in the paper.

As these tropical ecosystems become more vulnerable due to human-made climate change, understanding wildlife patterns are crucial for conservation methods. While long-term observational research is a challenge, this study could pave the way for more studies on this cryptic and elusive species. 

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When it comes to the critical process of pollination, butterflies and especially bees are typically the most lauded participants. These pollinators fly from flower to flower to feed and fertilize plants by spreading pollen around. But, these fluttery creatures are far from the only species that help flowers reproduce and bloom. It turns out that some of nature’s most unsung and diverse pollinators are a type of long-snouted beetles called weevils.

[Related: Build a garden that’ll have pollinators buzzin’.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Peer Community in Ecology wiggles into the world of weevils, including some who spend their entire lifecycle in tandem with a specific plant they help pollinate. 

“Even people who work on pollination don’t usually consider weevils as one of the main pollinators, and people who work on weevils don’t usually consider pollination as something relevant to the group,” study co-author and assistant curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago said in a statement. “There are lots of important things that people are missing because of preconceptions.”

The quarter-of-an-inch long  weevils can be considered pests, especially when found munching on pasta and flour in pantries. Weevils used to find their way into the biscuits on Nineteenth Century ships that even highly ranked officers ate, as depicted in the 2003 seafaring film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. They can be so destructive that from 1829 to 1920, boll weevils completely disrupted the cotton economy in the South as they fed on cotton buds. 

Despite this less than stellar reputation, the insects are still beneficial to many of the world’s plant species. 

Scientists have identified roughly 400,000 species of beetles, making them one of the largest groups of animals in the world. Among this already big bunch of bugs, weevils are the largest group. “There are 60,000 species of weevils that we know about, which is about the same as the number of all vertebrate animals put together,” said de Medeiros.

The authors looked at 600 species of weevil, reviewing hundreds of previously published data on how weevils and plants interact to get a better sense of their role as prime pollinators. It focused on brood-site pollinators—insects that use the same plants that they pollinate as the breeding sites for their larvae. It is similar to the relationship between Monarch butterflies and milkweed, which is the only plant that Monarch caterpillars can eat. 

“It is a special kind of pollination interaction because it is usually associated with high specialization: because the insects spend their whole life cycle in the plant, they often only pollinate that plant,” said de Medeiros.  And because the plants have very reliable pollinators, they mostly use those pollinators.” 

[Related: This lawn-mowing robot can save part of your yard for pollinators.]

Unlike Monarchs, brood-site pollinators take the relationship with the plant a step further. They rely on only one plant partner as a source for both food and egg laying, unlike adult Monarchs who will eat the nectar of many different types of flowers. 

“This kind of pollination interaction is generally thought to be rare or unusual,” said de Medeiros. “In this study, we show that there are hundreds of weevil species and plants for which this has been documented already, and many, many more yet to be discovered.”

The relationship like the one between weevils and their plants means that they both need each other to flourish. Some industries, like palm oil,  have already hurt forests, therefore disturbing the animal species that rely on them. 

“Oil palm, which is used to make peanut butter and Nutella, was not a viable industry until someone figured out that the weevils found with them were their pollinators. And because people had an incorrect preconception that weevils were not pollinators, it took much, much longer than it could have taken,” said de Medeiros.

Misconceptions about weevils were one of this team’s motivations for the study. The team hopes that by summarizing what is known about the pollinators, more scientists and the general public appreciate the role of weevils as pollinators, particularly in the tropics. 

The post Move over, bees: The lowly weevil is a power pollinator appeared first on Popular Science.

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Million of years ago, before land connected Earth’s North and South American continents, about 21 million light years away an aged and bloated star gave up the ghost in dramatic fashion, dying in a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

On Friday, May 19, the light from that massive explosion finally reached the telescope of Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki, who alerted the larger astronomical community: The supernova is now officially named SN2023ixf. 

”Those photons that left that exploding star 20 million years ago have just now washed upon our shores from this long, long voyage through the cosmos,” says Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Institute Center for Astrophysics, who has been actively spreading the word of the supernova on social media. “It’s happening now, in that we’re watching this thing finally explode, but the star has been dead for 20 million years.”

SN2023ixf is the closest supernova of its kind to Earth to pop off in five years, and the second closest in the past decade, according to NASA. That makes SN2023ixf a rare opportunity for astronomers to study the fiery death of a star. While too faint to be seen by the naked eye, the supernova should be visible to modest hobbyist telescopes, according to Tremblay. 

Because the supernova will fade rapidly, stargazers have to seize the opportunity to observe it, including at multiple wavelengths.“The whole global community has rallied, from community astronomers to big multibillion-dollar space telescopes,” Tremblay says. 

How to spot supernova SN2023ixf 

SN2023ixf exploded in M101, also known as the Pinwheel galaxy, which is located in the night sky near the constellation Ursa Major. M101 is a bright spiral galaxy that lies face-on from the perspective of Earth and is a member of the Messier catalog of celestial objects, making it a common target for backyard astronomers. A 4.5-inch telescope should be sufficient to view the supernova, which will appear as a bright point of light, according to Sky and Telescope. You can find M101 by first finding Mizar, the star at the bend in Ursa Major’s tail, and following the five stars that lead away from it. Or, to be more precise, you want to point your telescope at a right ascension of 14:03:38.580 and a declination of +54:18:42.10. 

[Related: Astronomers just confirmed a new type of supernova]

Alternatively, the Virtual Telescope Project, a worldwide network of quality amateur telescopes, will livestream an observation of the supernova beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on May 26. 

“M101 is imaged by human beings every single night, all around the world, from hobbyists to all sky observatories like [The Sloan Digital Sky Survey], and so it was inevitable that this thing would be found eventually. But I just loved that Itagaki found yet another supernova,” Tremblay says. Itagaki is not a professional scientist, but he is the co-author of more than a dozen scientific papers based on his supernova observations. Tremblay says Itagaki has a “legendary” ability to spot supernovas, and he’s collecting these “discoveries like Thanos and infinity stones.” Itagaki’s findings include the 2018 supernova SN 2018zd, which proved to be an entirely new type of supernova in the universe. 

Catching the bright burst of SN2023ixf on May 19, Itagki submitted his discovery to the International Astronomical Union’s transient name server website. From there, professional astronomers picked up the call, and within a few days, researchers began pointing major ground and space telescopes at the supernova, including the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray observatory.

All those telescopes will be measuring SN2023ixf’s light curve, “meaning the brightening and fading of this target in multiple wavelengths,” Tremblay says, on the spectrum from X-rays to optical light to infrared.

Lessons from an exploded sun

Those observations will help scientists characterize the star that exploded to create SN2023ixf, and more precisely define the type of supernova it is. Astronomers can already tell that SN2023ixf is a Type II, or “core collapse” supernova. This occurs when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel. The nuclear fusion reactions in its core can no longer push outward against the force of the star’s own gravity. The star’s core collapses in on itself, and then explodes outward in less than a second. 

“This shock wave propagates outward, and it plows up gas in the ambient surroundings that can light up in all different wavelengths,” Tremblay says. Studying how that afterglow evolves over time will tell scientists about the mass and make up of the late star.

And the makeup of the star is connected to life on Earth—and life anywhere else in the cosmos, if it exists. Stars increase chemical complexity throughout their life cycles: They formed from primordial hydrogen after the Big Bang, fusing it first into helium and then into heavier elements right up to iron. When those stars die in supernovas, the intense heat and pressure form all of the known elements heavier than iron, and seed them throughout the cosmos, providing the raw material for rocky planets and life itself. “The story of life in the universe can be reduced, in many ways, to the story of increasing complexity,” Tremblay says.

The explosion of SN2023ixf is literally shedding light on the process that brought human beings into existence. Though the supernova will rapidly fade, it will remain an object of study for years to come, according to Tremblay. In the meantime, he says, the worldwide excitement around the supernova “is a beautiful illustration of the fact that the global public so effortlessly shares in our wonderment of the cosmos. An exploding star in a distant galaxy just lights up people’s hearts.”

The post An amateur astronomer spotted a new supernova remarkably close to Earth appeared first on Popular Science.

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What is life? It’s a fuzzy concept without a single answer. If you asked a philosopher, they might quote Plato and tell you it’s the ability to support yourself and reproduce, though that would make sterile donkeys non-living objects. Ask a biologist and they’ll likely hit you with a textbook definition of life as organized matter with genes—as diverse as a paramecium and an elephant.  

Oliver Trapp, a professor of chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, offers a different description. He says life is a “self-sustainable reaction network,” in which organisms have the processes necessary to survive and adapt. This is in line with the definition NASA uses when looking for extraterrestrial life. Having a clear idea of what makes up life, and the conditions needed to sustain it, helps astronomers get a better picture of what to look for when searching for life on other planets. 

Specifically, they could look for the environments that have collected the essential ingredients. Prerequisites to making life, based on what happened during early Earth, are materials for organic chemical reactions. In a new study published today in Scientific Reports, Trapp and his colleagues simulated how our planet received the supplies for life-producing chemical reactions 4.4 billion years ago. They suggest that no special or lucky conditions were necessary. Instead, life on Earth was created from volcanic particles and iron-rich meteorites. These carried the building blocks essential to living things: amino acids, lipids, nucleosides, and sugars.

[Related: Here’s how life on Earth might have formed out of thin air and water]

“Understanding the origins of biology is one of the greatest unsolved scientific questions. It has important implications for understanding how common life may be beyond Earth and for understanding humanity’s place in the universe,” says Henderson (Jim) Cleaves, a chemistry professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology and president of the International Society for the Study of the Origins of Life, who was not involved in the study.

Previous theories suggested that Earth’s volcanoes were the starting points. Lava shaped the continents, and volcanic gases helped create oceans and atmosphere. Early Earth may have had another important boost, too, in the form of chemical-rich meteors falling from the sky. 

Trapp’s new study suggests it was the iron from fallen asteroids that helped convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic molecules such as hydrocarbons, aldehydes, and alcohol. “The meteorites entered the dense atmosphere, heated up and then you have this ablation of nanoparticles,” he explains. The natural minerals found on volcanoes would have helped support these chemical reactions.

To determine the interplay of space rocks and Earthly eruptions, the authors simulated the conditions of our young planet in the lab. They purchased chunks of two iron and stony meteorites and dissolved them in acid to create a solution, and soaked in crushed samples of volcanic ash and minerals assumed to have been present billions of years ago. The result was a model of meteorites crash landing on volcanic islands. The team also simulated atmospheric conditions on early Earth by combining carbon dioxide gas with hydrogen gas or water under a high-pressure and high-heat system. 

[Related: A new finding raises an old question: Where and when did life begin?]

Observing the reactions in this pressurized model, the team noticed an increase in the production of aldehydes, formaldehydes, alcohol, hydrocarbons, and acetaldehyde. These organic compounds would then be used in further chemical reactions to make amino acids, lipids, DNA, and RNA molecules. “Even at lower temperatures, the particles were highly reactive and quite robust,” Trapp says. The authors suggest that as Earth’s atmosphere cooled down and became more reactive, it was probably easier for iron to speed along the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen-containing organic compounds. 

“It is very interesting to see a demonstration of how micrometeorites could have contributed to prebiotic organic synthesis during their infall,” notes Cleaves. While he says the work provides ample evidence for this theory of how life first emerged, he warns this simulation is dependent on the composition of the early atmosphere. It’s unclear if those conditions existed exactly how the lab simulated them, he says.

Trapp says the findings are a start to uncover what makes up life. As long as the right materials are present, the conditions to sustain living things may not be unique to Earth. This could help space explorers decide if a planet is worth exploring. For example, inactive volcanoes have already been spotted in other places like Jupiter’s moon Io and Europa—a strong contender for extraterrestrial life since it holds a liquid water ocean underneath its icy surface.  

Alternatively, these simulations could rule out otherwise promising worlds. “If a planet is cooling down too quickly and no longer able to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds, this process would completely stop and essentially cause life to die.” Even if we do stumble on a planet with the optimal environment for life, whether we actually find aliens is another matter entirely.

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In a groundbreaking new study published earlier this month in the journal Nature, a team of neuroscientists and other researchers detail how electrical devices implanted into the brain and spinal cord of a paralyzed man have helped him walk and even climb stars. 

[Related: The slow, but promising progress of electrode therapy for paralysis.]

The implants communicate wirelessly and fuse together two experimental technologies that are being developed to treat paralysis. One of the devices is inserted into the skull and sits above the brain’s surface. It decodes the patterns involved in walking and sends a signal to the second device that is implanted in the spinal cord. The spinal cord is then stimulated by the electrodes in a precise sequence that activates the leg muscles needed to walk.

According to the study’s authors, the devices provide a “digital bridge” between the brain and the spinal cord that bypasses the injured areas of the spinal cord. The brain-spine interface uses an artificial intelligence thought decoder to read the brain’s intentions. These intentions are detectable as electrical signals in the brain and then match them to muscle movements. 

The patient in this new study is Gert-Jan Oskam, a 40-year-old man from The Netherlands who was paralyzed in a cycling accident in 2011. Oskam received an experimental spinal-cord stimulator in 2017 that retired his ability to walk, according to CEO Dave Marver of Onward Medical. The Netherlands-based biotechnology company manufactures the spinal cord device used in the study.

“We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” study co-author and spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne Grégoire Courtine, said in a press briefing according to The New York Times.

Brain-computer interfaces like these allow for more natural movement than just using spinal cord stimulation alone. Oskam now can even pause mid-gait, adjust his stride, and navigate on irregular terrain like stairs.

Previously, the Onward Medical device was used in a study that restored the ability to walk to nine patients by mapping out the neurons that are associated with the body’s complex commands for walking. Marver told The Washington Post that the company is likely five years away from being able to commercialize a system like the one used in this study and that his aspirations are even broader. “Ultimately, our vision is that a person with paralysis will be able to visit the doctor and select what function they want to restore,” he said.

[Related: I became a cyborg to manage my chronic pain.]

The brain implant that was used in this study was developed by Clinatec and a French government-backed research institute called CEA. 

Some of the limitations to this work include that the brain’s subtle intentions are difficult to distinguish and the same brain-spine interface used for walking, may not be suitable for restoring movement in the upper body. The treatment is also invasive, requiring multiple surgeries and hours of physical therapy. The system, as it currently stands, does not fix all spinal cord paralysis.

This study is one of a number of spinal cord injury treatment advances in recent years. In 2016, a group of scientists restored paralyzed monkey’s ability to walk. In 2018, scientists figured out a way to use electrical-pulse generators to stimulate the brain and allowed partially paralyzed people to walk and ride bicycles again. 

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Industrial mining of the deep ends of the ocean for valuable minerals is becoming more of a possibility as companies search for new sources of needed minerals, such as cobalt and lithium. The devastating impacts that this noisy and extractive process could have on the ocean’s numerous species is front of mind for scientists around the world, particularly in the mineral-rich Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. Now, experts are attaching some numbers to the concerns.

[Related: Deep-sea mining has murky aftereffects.]

A study published May 25 in the journal Current Biology found 5,578 different species in the CCZ, and roughly 88 to 92 percent of these species are entirely new to science. The authors compiled a CCZ checklist of all the species and records to better understand what may be at risk when mining begins. 

“We share this planet with all this amazing biodiversity, and we have a responsibility to understand it and protect it,” co-author and Natural History Museum London deep-sea ecologist Muriel Rabone said in a statement. 

Spanning six million square kilometers from Hawaii to Mexico, the CCZ is one of the most pristine wilderness regions in the world. According to NOAA, it is also home to polymetallic nodules that are a potential source of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements. These materials are becoming increasingly important for modern life, since they are used in making a range of electronics. Polymetallic nodules are also found in deeper regions of the Indian Ocean.

To study the CCZ, researchers travel throughout the Pacific Ocean using techniques such as using remote-controlled vehicles to travel the ocean. They also use simple box core sampling, where a study box is placed on the bottom of the ocean floor to collect samples.  

“It’s a big boat, but it feels tiny in the middle of the ocean. You could see storms rolling in; it’s very dramatic,” said Rabone. “And it was amazing—in every single box core sample, we would see new species.”

In the study, the team sifted through over 100,000 records of the creatures found in the CCZ taken during these expeditions. They found that only six of the new species found in the CCZ—including a carnivorous sponge, a nematode, and a sea cucumber—have been seen in other regions of the world. The most common type of animals in the CCZ are arthropods, worms, sponges, and echinoderms like sea urchins.

[Related: Even mining in shallow waters is bad news for the environment.]

“There’s some just remarkable species down there. Some of the sponges look like classic bath sponges, and some look like vases. They’re just beautiful,” said Rabone. “One of my favorites is the glass sponges. They have these little spines, and under the microscope, they look like tiny chandeliers or little sculptures.”

In the future, the team emphasizes the importance of increasing research efforts in the CCZ that are collaborative, cohesive, and multidisciplinary so that scientists and business alike can gain a deeper grasp of the region’s vast biodiversity. They also stress the importance of learning more about these new species, how they are connected to the greater environment around them, and the biogeography of the area to understand why some species cluster in specific regions more than others.   

“There are so many wonderful species in the CCZ,” said Rabone, “and with the possibility of mining looming, it’s doubly important that we know more about these really understudied habitats.”

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Behind a beautiful oil-on-canvas painting is, well, its canvas. To most art museum visitors, that fabric might be no more than an afterthought. But the canvas and its chemical composition are tremendously important to scientists and conservators who devote their lives to studying and caring for works of art.

When they examine a canvas, sometimes those art specialists are surprised by what they find. For instance, few conservators expected a 200-year-old canvas to contain proteins from yeast and fermented grains: the fingerprints of beer-brewing.

But those very proteins sit in the canvases of paintings from early 19th century Denmark. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, researchers from across Europe say that Danes may have applied brewing byproducts as a base layer to a canvas before painters had their way with it.

“To find these yeast products—it’s not something that I have come across before,” says Cecil Krarup Andersen, an art conservator at the Royal Danish Academy, and one of the authors. “For us also, as conservators, it was a big surprise.”

The authors did not set out in search of brewing proteins. Instead, they sought traces of animal-based glue, which they knew was used to prepare canvases. Conservators care about animal glue since it reacts poorly with humid air, potentially cracking and deforming paintings over the decades.

[Related: 5 essential apps for brewing your own beer]

The authors chose 10 paintings created between 1828 and 1837 by two Danes: Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the so-called “Father of Danish Painting,” fond of painting ships and sea life; and Christen Schiellerup Købke, one of Eckersberg’s students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, who went on to become a distinguished artist in his own right.

The authors tested the paintings with protein mass spectrometry: a technique that allows scientists to break a sample down into the proteins within. The technique isn’t selective, meaning that the experimenters could find substances they weren’t seeking.

Mass spectrometry destroys its sample. Fortunately, conservators in the 1960s had trimmed the paintings’ edges during a preservation treatment. The National Gallery of Denmark—the country’s largest art museum—had preserved the scraps, allowing the authors to test them without actually touching the original paintings.

Scraps from eight of the 10 paintings contained structural proteins from cows, sheep, or goats, whose body parts might have been reduced into animal glue. But seven paintings also contained something else: proteins from baker’s yeast and from fermented grains—wheat, barley, buckwheat, rye.

[Related: Classic Mexican art stood the test of time with the help of this secret ingredient]

That yeast and those grains feature in the process of brewing beer. While beer does occasionally turn up in recipes for 19th century house-paint, it’s alien to works of fine art.

“We weren’t even sure what they meant,” says study author Fabiana Di Gianvincenzo, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.

The authors considered the possibility that stray proteins might have contaminated the canvas from the air. But three of the paintings contained virtually no brewer’s proteins at all, while the other seven contained too much protein for contamination to reasonably explain.

“It was not something random,” says Enrico Cappellini, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and another of the authors.

To learn more, the authors whipped up some mock substances containing those ingredients: recipes that 19th-century Danes could have created. The yeast proved an excellent emulsifier, creating a smooth, glue-like paste. If applied to a canvas, the paste would create a smooth base layer that painters could beautify with oil colors.

Eckersberg, Købke, and their fellow painters likely didn’t interact with the beer. The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts provided its professors and students with pre-prepared art materials. Curiously, the paintings that contained grain proteins all came from earlier in the time period, between 1827 and 1833. Købke then left the Academy and produced the three paintings that didn’t contain grain proteins, suggesting that his new source of canvases didn’t use the same preparation method.

The authors aren’t certain how widespread the brewer’s method might have been. If the technique was localized to early 19th century Denmark or even to the Academy, art historians today could use the knowledge to authenticate a painting from that era, which historians sometimes call the Danish Golden Age. 

This was a time of blossoming in literature, in architecture, in sculpture, and, indeed, in painting. In art historians’ reckoning, it was when Denmark developed its own unique painting tradition, which vividly depicted Norse mythology and the Danish countryside. The authors’ work lets them glimpse lost details of the society under that Golden Age. “Beer is so important in Danish culture,” says Cappellini. “Finding it literally at the base of the artwork that defined the origin of modern painting in Denmark…is very meaningful.” 

[Related: The world’s art is under attack—by microbes]

The work also demonstrates how craftspeople repurposed the materials they had. “Denmark was a very poor country at the time, so everything was reused,” says Andersen. “When you have scraps of something, you could boil it to glue, or you could use it in the grounds, or use it for canvas, to paint on.”

The authors are far from done. For one, they want to study their mock substances as they age. Combing through the historical record—artists’ diaries, letters, books, and other period documents—might also reveal tantalizing details of who used the yeast and how. Their work, then, makes for a rather colorful crossover of science with art conservation. “That has been the beauty of this study,” says Andersen. “We needed each other to get to this result.”

This story has been updated to clarify the source of canvases for Købke’s later works.

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Joel Cramer was at the pool with his kids when another dad, competing in a big splash contest, got up onto the diving board. He bounced up once, and when he landed on the board for the second time, his quadriceps muscle tore. “It rolled up his leg and balled up near the top of his thigh,” says Cramer, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Nebraska. “[It was] like rolling up a window shade.”

That’s an extreme (and extremely rare) example of a muscle strain, a common injury that happens to high school soccer stars, recreational runners, and middle-aged racquetball players alike. “Strain” is the medical term for the condition, though it’s colloquially known as a pulled muscle. The term is a catch-all that covers everything from a small twinge to a full-on rupture.

What we call a “tear” and what we coin a “pull or strain” all boil down to the same type of injury: A rip to some part of the muscle. But some are worse than others. A mild or “grade one” strain—what many people call a “pulled muscle”—happens when you tear about 5 percent of the fibers in a particular muscle. This typically feels like an uncomfortable twinge that may force you off the court for a few weeks. A moderate sprain involves a higher percentage of fibers, and might sideline you for a month or more. A full rupture severs the muscle entirely, and usually requires surgery to repair.

[Related: Why do my muscles ache the day after a big workout?]

Okay, but how exactly do these tears occur? And why do some instances result in more muscle fiber damage than others? Cramer says three major factors contribute to this muscle busting. Muscles that cover two joints, like the hamstring which extends across the hip and knee joints, are at the highest risk. That’s because having both joints moving and stretching the muscle simultaneously adds tension, which can lead to strains.

Muscles are also more likely to strain while they are contracting. At this point, muscles are shortening and lengthening at the same time. During a dumbbell curl, for example, raising the weight up towards the shoulder compresses the bicep, and lowering it back down stretches it back out again. The muscle can create and sustain much more force during the lengthening portion of the activity, says Cramer, which makes it easier for it to strain.

Finally, muscles that have a higher proportion of fast-twitch to slow-twitch fibers strain more readily. Fast-twitch fibers contract quickly and generate more power, says Cramer. For that reason, they are the ones recruited for explosive tasks like sprinting. “It’s relatively uncommon for slow twitch [muscles] to strain,” he says. “They’re used to being active all the time.”

Technically, Cramer says, it’s possible to strain any of the skeletal muscles in your body. “For some, it’s not physiologically impossible, just very highly unlikely,” he says. “You’re probably not going to strain deep muscles with very specific functions.” The muscles in the finger, for example, are probably not going to cause much trouble, since they only have one task and don’t do much heavy lifting.

[Related: How to get muscle gains: A beginner’s guide to becoming buff]

Low flexibility and range of motion are major factors at risk for muscle strain, says Cramer. Despite the popular belief that larger muscles are tighter, Cramer says greater muscle mass is actually associated with greater give. “There’s evidence to suggest that weight training done with a good range of motion increases flexibility,” he says. And even though it may not seem like it when you’re struggling to touch your toes, Cramer says most people can teach their body to be springy enough to do the splits. So, to help keep your muscle fibers intact—pick up the weights and don’t skip your stretching routine, no matter how tedious it is.

How does a pulled muscle heal?

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The armadillo is beloved for its ability to scrunch itself up in a ball with their protective flexible shells. They’ve long been considered the only living mammals with these reptilian and fish-like suits of bony or scaly armor instead of hairy mammalian skin. However, a study published May 24 in the journal iScience, shows that African spiny mice actually produce the same spiny structures beneath the skin of their tails, which has gone largely undetected by scientists.

[Related: How science came to rely on the humble lab rat.]

African spiny mice are small to medium sized rodents with spiny hairs on their upper body, large eyes and ears, and scaly tails. Some species are found in Egypt, other parts of eastern Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan and while others are native to South Africa.  

A team of scientists made this spiny discovery while conducting routine CT scanning of museum specimens for the openVertebrate program. 

“I was scanning a mouse specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum, and the tails looked abnormally dark,” co-author and director of Florida Museum of Natural History’s digital imaging laboratory Edward Stanley said in a statement. 

Stanley initially assumed the discoloration was caused by an imperfection that was introduced when the specimen was preserved, but analysis of the X-Rays revealed an unmistakable feature that he was intimately familiar with.

“My entire PhD was focused on osteoderm development in lizards,” he said. “Once the specimen scans had been processed, the tail was very clearly covered in osteoderms.”

Osteoderms are the bony deposits that form scales or plates on the skin. They are also distinct from the scales of pangolins or the quills of hedgehogs and porcupines. These parts are composed of keratin, the same tissue that makes up hair, skin, and nails.

Osteoderms on spiny mice have been observed since the mid-1970s. A 2012 study demonstrated spiny mice can regenerate injured tissue without scarring. This ability is very common among reptiles and invertebrates, but was previously unknown in mammals. While mammalian skin is particularly fragile, spiny mice can heal twice as fast as their rodent relatives.

Spiny mice belong to four genera in the subfamily Deomyinae, but other than similarities in their DNA and possibly the shape of their teeth, scientists have been unable to find a single shared feature among the species of this group that distinguishes them from other rodents.

[Related: This newly discovered gecko can literally squirm right out of its skin.]

The team scanned additional museum specimens from all four genera and found that the spiny mice tails were covered in the same sheather of bone. Gerbils are the closest relatives of Deomyinae and they do not have osteoderms, which means that this trait likely evolved only once in the ancestor of spiny mice. 

“Spiny mice can regenerate skin, muscle, nerves, spinal cord and perhaps even cardiac tissue, so we maintain a colony of these rare creatures for research,” co-author and University of Florida biologist Malcolm Maden said in a statement. 

Maden and his team are mapping the genetic pathways that give spiny mice these healing powers to hopefully find a model for human tissue regeneration. The team further analyzed the development of spiny mice osteoderms and confirmed that they were similar to those of armadillos, but likely evolved independently. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: These insects have a pee-related superpower 

By Rachel Feltman

Glassy-winged sharpshooters aren’t exactly the most lovable bugs. They’ve got wiggly abdomens that they use to make vibrations to communicate when it’s time to mate, bulbous eyes, and red-veined wings. They’re also considered pests: when they and other sharpshooters feed off of grapevines, they leave a bacterium called Xylella fastidiosa behind that causes leaves to yellow and wither with a condition known as Pierce’s disease. That plague can wipe out more than half of a vineyard’s vines in a single outbreak, and is estimated to cost $100 million in lost grapevines and mitigation efforts in California alone. And unlike the blue-green sharpshooter that tends to spread the disease most in Napa and Sonoma counties and along the coast, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, which causes trouble in Southern California, is invasive—it likely came over from its natural habitat in the southeastern US on the back of a nursery plant in the early 1990s. 

But in addition to posing a threat to the wine industry, glassy-winged sharpshooters pose a more immediate threat to any humans who happen to pass by them: The threat of being sprayed with a constant mist of bug urine.

Learn more about the super-powered urinary capabilities of these insects by listening to this week’s episode—or by hopping on over to this article about the prolific pee-ers. 

FACT: A fear of clowns may stem from the makeup itself

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Despite the cultural cache that a fear of clowns holds, and the fact that it’s super common for pop culture to reference it, there hasn’t been much academic research on the fear of clowns.

So the authors of a new study from the International Journal of Mental Health decided to examine the fear of clowns in an international population with the appropriately named “Fear of Clowns Questionnaire,” which was adapted from the “Fear of Spiders Questionnaire.”

Out of 927 participants, 27% said they had a fear of clowns, with 5% saying they were extremely afraid of clowns. More women reported that they were afraid of clowns and they had a more extreme fear of clowns than men, which actually follows a similar pattern in phobias just generally.

The strongest factor the researchers found causing people’s fear of clowns was that a clown’s makeup keeps people guessing at what their actual intentions are. They may have a permanently happy face, but that conceals whether they’re angry or upset, so the authors believe that being unable to know what a clown is really thinking or what they might do puts us on edge.

FACT: In the 18^th Century, toilets were not just for poop

By Melissa Dunphy

We’ve all come across signs in toilets begging us not to flush anything other than waste and sewer-safe toilet paper for fear of clogging or damaging plumbing. But before modern sewer systems, no such rules applied. Colonial Americans who used privy pits—shafts dug into the ground beneath an outhouse—tossed all kinds of trash into the depths along with their sewage. Wine bottles, kitchen waste, unwanted ceramic plates and bowls, old buttons, toys, cannon balls, smoking pipes, waste from cottage industries such as tanning and metalwork, and anything else they needed to get rid of from their households often ended up down the toilet hole, since in addition to lacking sewage pipes, they also lacked the convenience of modern trash collection. If, for example, your horse died while you were too busy to find a better means of disposal, you might simply heave it into the privy instead. It certainly couldn’t have made the smell any worse.

During this time period, specialists known as nightsoil men were paid to manually clean out privies every now and then, but after sewer systems came along, many privies were simply filled in, trash intact. Modern archaeologists especially value these privy pits as rich time capsules that provide fascinating snapshots into the everyday lives of the people who once used them, demonstrating that just about any trash will become treasure if you wait long enough.

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Our solar system has a suite of eight planets—rocky Mars and Earth, the ice giants, and massive gas planets—but other stars often have a much smaller group. Some suns have just one exoplanet orbiting around them. These loner worlds are often one specific type: A huge gas giant that orbits very close to its star, known as a hot Jupiter.

A newly discovered exoplanet, however, has challenged this view, showing that maybe not all hot Jupiters go solo. Last week, astronomers announced that a hot Jupiter orbiting a star 400 light years away has a pal: It shares its solar system with WASP-84c, a rocky planet so large it’s known as a super-Earth. This discovery was made public as a preprint, a research paper that has yet to undergo peer review, and submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for official publication.

Hot Jupiters are a weird kind of planet. We don’t have any in our own solar system. Until the first was spotted, astronomers never expected them to exist. Gas giants like Jupiter usually only form far away from their stars, where things are cool enough for gas to stay safe from blazing solar heat. If a Jupiter-like planet has to be born at a distance, then, how can it get so close to its star? 

Astronomers have three main theories for how this happens. Two are gentle, and one is catastrophic. First, a hot Jupiter could move inward from its birthplace due to little gravitational nudges from the protoplanetary disk, a collection of dust and gas used to form planets in a star’s youth. Second, maybe we’re wrong about the theory that Jupiter-like planets must form far from stars. Instead, these planets are simply born where we see them. Both of these scenarios would allow hot Jupiters to have smaller friend planets hanging out nearby.

[Related: Ridiculously hot gas giant exoplanet is about to be swallowed by its dying sun]

But the third option is the most dynamic. Jupiters could form far out, but then encounter other planets that change the gas giants’ orbits. The gravity of the other planets would force a hot Jupiter into a stretched out, elliptical path, and then the gravity of the star would pull the gas giant in close, resulting in a circular, super-short orbit. In this violent dance, any low mass planets would be destroyed—creating the lonely hot Jupiter.

The best theory for the origin of this particular hot Jupiter, named WASP-84b, is the first—that a disk helped shepherd the planet through the solar system. Previous observations showed that the gas giant’s spin is aligned with the star’s, a sign that the large planet migrated within the protoplanetary disk instead of pinballing around with other planets. The discovery of super-Earth WASP-84c now adds more evidence to the case that this hot Jupiter formed with a nudge, not a planet-destroying bang—and that scenario may be more common than previously thought.

WASP-84c joins a growing list of smaller planetary buddies to hot Jupiters: WASP-47 b, Kepler 730 b, and WASP-132 b, to name a few. “The discovery of low-mass planetary companions like WASP-84c suggests that not all hot Jupiter systems formed under violent scenarios, as previously thought,” says lead author Gracjan Maciejewski from the Institute of Astronomy of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.

Maciejewski and his colleagues used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to spot WASP-84c. TESS hunts for exoplanets using the transit method, where a telescope watches a star for teensy dips in its brightness, caused by a dark planet passing in front. 

[Related: A deep-space telescope spied an exoplanet so hot it can vaporize iron]

WASP-84c “was too small in radius to have been discovered by the original WASP survey, who discovered the hot Jupiter,” according to Caltech astronomer Juliette Becker, who is not affiliated with the new discovery. “It’s a great example of what TESS can do,” she adds.

With the transit method, astronomers can figure out a planet’s dimensions. However, to find out how much it weighs, they need different data, from another exoplanet-detecting technique known as the radial velocity method. When WASP-84c’s discoverers gathered this extra data, they determined that the planet has about 15 times the mass of Earth. Like our Blue Marble, it’s probably made of iron and rocks, too.

Jonathan Brande, a University of Kansas astronomer not involved in the discovery, thinks such discoveries will become even more common as the James Webb Space Telescope brings in new exoplanet data, deepening our understanding of how these planet pairs came to be. “I would not be surprised if we see further results on this system in the near future,” he says.

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The decades-old international treaty that banned ozone-depleting substances has successfully averted huge amounts of sea ice loss—delaying the first ice-free Arctic summer by as much as 15 years, according to a new study. The study published May 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that regulating these harmful substances helped delay further globalc heating.

[Related: Fixing the ozone hole was a bigger deal than anyone realized.]

In 1985, scientists first discovered a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica on the Earth’s south pole. Representatives from countries around the world gathered to craft a treaty to protect the ozone layer, which shields the planet from harmful levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. The resulting Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 and went into effect in 1989 with the purpose of reducing atmospheric concentrations of ozone-depleting substances (OSDs) that were commonly used in refrigerators, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, and aerosols. It remains the only United Nations treaty ratified by every country in the world. 

This new study demonstrates that the treaty’s impact depends on future emissions and the impact goes as far north as the Arctic. 

“The first ice-free Arctic summer–with the Arctic Ocean practically free of sea ice–will be a major milestone in the process of climate change, and our findings were a surprise to us,” study co-author and Columbia University geophysicist Lorenzo Polvani said in a statement. “Our results show that the climate benefits from the Montreal Protocol are not in some faraway future: the Protocol is delaying the melting of Arctic sea ice at this very moment. That’s what a successful climate treaty does: it yields measurable results within a few decades of its implementation.”

According to Polvani and other climate scientists, the rapid melting of sea ice in the Arctic is the largest and most clear sign of human-made climate change. The first completely ice-free Arctic summer will likely occur by 2050, largely due to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Other powerful greenhouse gasses like ODS’ also contributed to this warming, but their concentrations in the atmosphere began to decline in the mid-1990s. 

In this new study, the two authors analyzed new climate model simulations and found that the changes implemented by the Montreal Protocol is delaying the first appearance of an ice-free Arctic summer by up to 15 years, depending on future carbon dioxide emissions. They compared the estimated warming from ODS’ with and without the Montreal Protocol under two scenarios of future carbon dioxide emissions from 1985 to 2050. If the Montreal Protocol had not been enacted, the estimated global mean surface temperature would be about 0.9°F warmer and the Arctic polar cap would be almost 1.8°F warmer in 2050, according to their results.

[Related: Fixing the ozone hole was a bigger deal than anyone realized.]

“This important climate mitigation stems entirely from the reduced greenhouse gas warming from the regulated ODSs, with the avoided stratospheric ozone losses playing no role,” co-author and University of Exeter applied mathematician and atmospheric scientist Mark England said in a statement. “While ODSs aren’t as abundant as other greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, they can have a real impact on global warming. ODSs have particularly powerful effects in the Arctic, and they were an important driver of Arctic climate change in the second half of the 20th Century. While stopping these effects was not the primary goal of the Montreal Protocol, it has been a fantastic by-product.” 

Both authors stressed the importance of remaining vigilant to atmospheric concentrations as the ozone layer is healing, especially due to a slight rise in ODS concentrations from 2010 to 2020.  In 2016, an amendment to the Montreal Protocol (called the Kigali Amendment) that required the phase out of the production and consumption of some hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) was added. While HFCs do not directly deplete ozone, they are powerful climate change-inducing gasses which can accelerate warming. An uptick in CFC use was detected in 2018 and tracked to China, but that was quickly fixed. Scientists say that the Kigali Amendment is estimated to avoid 0.5–0.9°F of warming by 2100, not including contributions from HFC-23 emissions.

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One large part of managing egg-laying hens is a process called sexing, or determining the sex of a baby chick after it hatches. A study published May 22 in the journal PLOS ONE finds that fertilized chicken eggs can be sexed by “sniffing” the volatile chemicals that are emitted through the chicken’s shell.

About a day after hatching, chicks are sorted by sex. Male chicks are killed almost  immediately, a process that kills an estimated 6.5 billion male chicks per year. Sexing is largely used due to both economics and biology—male chickens are of little use to the egg and meat industry since they do not lay eggs and do not fatten up quickly enough to be sold as meat. The practice costs egg producers about $500 million annually, but some European countries including Germany and France have already banned culling of male chicks or plan to phase it out. 

[Release: 6 things to know before deciding to raise backyard chickens.]

If hatcheries could identify the sex of an egg earlier in incubation, billions of male eggs could be humanely killed before the chick can feel pain, as well as reducing waste and environmental impact. The technology that is already on the market for this process called in-ovo sexing depends on either imaging through the shell or sampling the shell through a tiny hole. 

In this new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis and a startup company at the university called Sensit Ventures Inc., it is possible to sniff out the egg’s volatile organic chemicals and determine the egg’s sex. 

The team first had to find out if the chemicals released by male and female embryos give off reliably detectable differences. At study co-author Cristina Davis’s lab at the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the team developed sensing chip technology that can collect and analyze organic chemicals in the air.  

They adapted suction cups that are already used for industrial handling of eggs to “sniff” air from the eggs without actually opening them up. Gas chromatography and mass spectrometry analyzed the air samples and the sex of the eggs was confirmed by DNA analysis at the UC Davis Department of Animal Science. 

[Related: Which Came First, The Chicken Or The Egg?]

“We found that there are volatile chemicals from the egg, a scent that you can capture and sort statistically,” study co-author and CEO of Sensit Ventures Tom Turpen said in a statement. 

According to the study, this air-sniffing technique was able to identify male and female embryos at eight days of incubation with 80 percent accuracy, based on two minutes of air sampling. Using this rapid suction-cup sampling method could also be carried out in rows that test multiple eggs at the same time 

“We think that the hardware platform invented at UC Davis could be integrated into hatcheries,” Turpen said.

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On May 22, the Biden Administration and the states along the Colorado River announced that they had reached an agreement to conserve an unprecedented amount of the river’s water supply. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada have agreed to save an additional 3 million acre-feet of Colorado River Water in the Lower Basin by the end of 2026, or about 13 percent of these states’ total allocation of water from the river.

In return, the federal government will compensate the three states for three-quarters of the water savings, or about $1.2 billion. The money will come from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Actf and is intended to pay Native American tribes, farmers, cities, and others who will voluntarily forgo their supplies.

[Related: What California’s weird winter means for its water problems.]

The Colorado River is a critical water supply in the Western United States and 20 years of severe drought, population growth, and climate change have strained its supply. The three states in the river’s Lower Basin all agreed to take less water from the river for now, in an effort to keep the water levels from falling so low that it jeopardizes the water supply to major cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix, as well as some of the most productive farmland in the country.

The agreement follows almost a year of negotiations and numerous missed deadlines. The plan intended to protect both Lake Powell and Lake Mead—two of the largest reservoirs in the US. Recent  droughts have reduced the Colorado River’s natural water flow by roughly 20 percent. In summer 2022, the water levels in both reservoirs fell so low that officials worried that the hydroelectric turbines they powered might stop working. 

In June 2022, the federal government told the seven states that rely on the river—including Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—that they must find a way to reduce their water use by two to four million acre-feet of water per year. An agreement was not reached among the states, and the federal government considered unilaterally imposing water cuts on those states last summer. 

The states had until May 30 to take a position on future unilateral reductions, but a deal was being negotiated behind closed doors to reach a deal and avoid imposing cuts that would likely  face legal challenges and delaying any serious action, according to The New York Times.

“There are 40 million people, seven states, and 30 Tribal Nations who rely on the Colorado River Basin for basic services such as drinking water and electricity. Today’s announcement is a testament to the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to working with states, Tribes and communities throughout the West to find consensus solutions in the face of climate change and sustained drought,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in a statement. “In particular I want to thank Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau and Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, who have led the discussions with Basin state commissioners, Tribes, irrigators, local communities, and valued stakeholders to reach this critical moment.”

[Related: What the Colorado River’s record lows mean for western US.]

The agreement runs through the end of 2026 and still needs to be formally adopted by the federal government. By 2026, all seven states that rely on the Colorado River may face a deeper water reckoning and the river’s decline is likely to continue. 

According to The Washington Post, Arizona’s commissioner to the Colorado River Tom Buschatzke emphasized that the deal is not the final outcome, and the parties have also agreed to a new proposal that will be analyzed by the Interior Department. 

“It is important to note that this is not an agreement — this is an agreement to submit a proposal and an agreement to the terms of that proposal to be analyzed by the federal government,” Buschatzke told reporters. “That is a really critical point for everyone to understand.”

The heavy snow and rain that fell in the West during the winter helped ease the crisis and gave the negotiators some breathing room, but this winter was “extraordinary” and was not a solution. 
“This wet winter definitely is great news for the Colorado River because of the snowpack. That snow runoff from the mountains will drain into the Colorado River and increase the stream flow,” Utah State University climate scientist Wei Zhang told PopSci in March. “But that cannot solve the water problem in the Colorado River—that demand is still much larger than the supply.”

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High altitude balloons have drawn a lot of fire lately. In February, the US military shot down a spy balloon potentially operated by the Chinese government and an “unidentified aerial phenomenon” that was later revealed to likely be a hobbyist balloon.

So, when people caught sight of another large balloon in the southern hemisphere in early May, there was concern it could be another spy device. Instead, it represents the future of astronomy: balloon-borne telescopes that peer deep into space without leaving the stratosphere.

“We’re looking up, not down,” says William Jones, a professor of physics at Princeton University and head of NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) team. Launched from Wānaka, New Zealand, on April 15, the nearly 10-foot-tall telescope has already circled the southern hemisphere four times on a football stadium-sized balloon made from polyethylene film. Its three onboard cameras also took stunning images of the Tarantula Nebula and Antennae galaxies to rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope. The findings from SuperBIT could help scientists unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: the nature of dark matter, a theoretically invisible material only known from its gravitational effects on visible objects.

[Related: $130,000 could buy you a Michelin-star meal with a view of the stars]

Scientists can use next-level observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate dark matter, relying on their large mirrors and positions outside Earth’s turbulent atmosphere to obtain pristine views of extremely distant celestial objects. But developing a space telescope and launching it on a powerful rocket is expensive. Lofting Hubble into orbit cost around $1.5 billion, for instance, and sending JWST to Lagrange point 2 cost nearly $10 billion.

SuperBIT took just $5 million to launch—a price cut stemming from the relative cheapness of balloons versus rockets and the lower barrier of entry for skilled workers to build the system.

“The whole thing is run by students. That’s what makes projects such as these so nimble and able to do so much with limited resources,” Jones says, referring to the SuperBIT collaborative between Princeton, the University of Durham in the UK, and the University of Toronto in Canada. “We have no professional engineers or technicians working on this full time—only the grad students have the luxury of being able to devote their full-time attention to the project.”

SuperBIT is not the first telescope carried aloft with a balloon: That honor goes to Stratoscope I, which was built in 1957 by another astronomy group at Princeton. But SuperBIT is one of a handful of new observatories made possible by 20 years of NASA research into so-called super pressure balloons. That work finally culminated in tests flights beginning in 2015 and the groundbreaking launch of SuperBIT.

Traditional balloons contain a lifting gas that expands as the sun heats it and as atmospheric pressure changes with altitude. That changes the volume of the envelope and, in turn, the balloon’s buoyancy, making it impossible to maintain a constant altitude over time.

Superpressure balloons keep the lifting gas, typically helium, pressurized inside a main envelope so that volume and buoyancy remain constant across day and night. The balloon then uses a smaller balloon—a ballonet—inside or beneath the main envelope as a ballast, filling or emptying the pocket of compressed air to change altitude and effectively steer the ship.

The super pressure balloon carrying SuperBIT can maintain an altitude of 108,000 feet (higher than 99.2 percent of Earth’s atmosphere) while carrying the 3,500-pound payload of scientific instruments. Unlike JWST and other missions, the purpose of the SuperBIT telescope isn’t to see farther or wider swaths of the universe or to detect exoplanets. Instead, it’s hunting for signs of a more ubiquitous and enigmatic entity.  

“Dark matter is not made of any of the elements or particles that we are familiar with through everyday observations,” Jones says. That said, there’s a lot of it around us: It might make up about 27 percent of the universe. “We know this through the gravitational influence that it has on the usual matter—stars and gas, and the like—that we can see,” which make up around 5 percent of the universe, Jones explains.

Scientists estimate that the remaining 67 percent of the cosmos is made of dark energy, another largely mysterious material not to be confused with dark matter. Whereas the gravity of dark matter may help pull galaxies together and structure the way they populate the cosmos, dark energy may be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the entire universe.

Researchers probe extreme forces where dark matter might exist and calculate its presence by observing galactic clusters so massive their gravity bends the light that passes by them from more distant objects—a technique known as gravitational lensing. Astronomers can use this approach to turn galaxies into a sort of magnifying lens to see more distant objects than they normally could (something JWST excels at). It can also reveal the mass of the galactic clusters that make up the “lens,” including the amount of dark matter around them.

“After measuring how much dark matter there is, and where it is, we’re trying to figure out what dark matter is,” says Richard Massey, a member of the SuperBIT science team and a professor of physics at Durham University. “We do this by looking at the few special places in the universe where lumps of dark matter happen to be smashing into each other.”

Those places include the two large Antennae galaxies, which are in the process of colliding about 60 million light-years from Earth. Massey and others have studied the Antennae galaxies using Hubble, but it “gives it a field of view too small to see the titanic collisions of dark matter,” Massey says. “So, we had to build SuperBIT.”

Like Hubble, SuperBIT sees light in the visible to ultraviolet range, or 300- to 1,000-nanometer wavelengths. But while Hubble’s widest field of view is less than a tenth of degree, SuperBIT’s field of view is wider at half a degree, allowing it to image wider swaths of the sky at once. That’s despite it having a smaller mirror (half a meter in diameter compared to Hubble’s 1.5 meters).

SuperBIT has another advantage over space telescopes. With less time from development to deployment and without complex accessories needed to protect it from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space debris, the SuperBIT team was able to use far more advanced camera sensors than those on existing space telescopes. Where Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 contains a pair of 8-megapixel sensors, Jones says, SuperBIT contains a 60-megapixel sensor. The balloon-carried telescope is also designed to float down on a parachute after the end of each flight, which means scientists can update the technology regularly from the ground.

“We’re currently communicating with SuperBIT live, 24 hours a day, for the next 100 days,” Massey says. “It has just finished its fourth trip around the world, experiencing the southern lights, turbulence over the Andes, and the quiet cold above the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” The team expects to retrieve the system sometime in late August, likely in southern Argentina, according to Jones.

[Related on PopSci+: Alien-looking balloons might be the next weapon in the fight against wildfires]

SuperBIT may just be the beginning. NASA has already funded the development of a Gigapixel class Balloon Imaging Telescope (GigaBIT), which will sport a mirror as wide as Hubble’s. Not only is it expected to be cheaper than any space telescope sensing the same spectrum of light, GigaBIT would also be “much more powerful than anything likely to be put into space in the near term,” Jones says.

As to whether SuperBIT will crack the mystery of just what dark matter is, it’s too early to tell. After a few flights, the grad students will have to pore over the project’s findings.

“What will the [data] tell us? Who knows! That’s the excitement of it—and also the guilty secret,” Massey says. “After 2,000 years of science, we still have absolutely no idea what the two most common types of stuff in the universe are, or how they behave.”

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Just in time for the light-filled days before the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) has released some stellar new images of the sun. Observations from the biggest and most powerful solar telescope on Earth show the movement of plasma in the solar atmosphere, intricate details of the sunspot regions, and the sun’s roiling convective cells. One of DKIST’s first-generation instruments, called the Visible-Broadband Imager, obtained these snaps of the sun that were released to the public on May 19.

The sunspots in the images are cool and dark regions on the sun’s “surface,” called the photosphere. Although sunspots are short-lived, strong magnetic fields persist here. The sunspots vary in size, but many are about the size of Earth, if not even bigger. Groups of sunspots can erupt in explosive events such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections (CME), which generate solar storms. Flares and CMEs influence the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer called the heliosphere, and these disturbances have a long reach, even messing with Earth’s infrastructure.

[Related: The sun’s chromosphere is shades of golden in these new images.]

Sunspot activity is also tied to cycles of about 11 years. During a cycle, sunspot and flare activity will rise to a peak solar maximum, when the sun’s poles switch places. Then the activity recedes, falling to almost zero at solar minimum. Our most recent solar cycle, Solar Cycle 25, began in 2019, and is on the upswing: The next solar maximum is expected to take place in 2025.

Astronomers and solar physicists don’t know what creates sunspots or drives these solar cycles, but understanding more can help Earth prepare for CMEs. These ejections can hurl giant clouds of charged particles that slam into our planet’s magnetic field, affecting satellites, radio communications, and even the power grid. 

Not all CMEs wreak havoc, though. Some cause the colorful aurora borealis (or northern lights) in the Northern Hemisphere and aurora australis in the Southern Hemisphere. In April, a CME generated a severe geomagnetic storm. While this geomagnetic storm was not disruptive, the northern lights it made were visible as far south as Arizona. 

[Related: How hundreds of college students are helping solve a centuries-old mystery about the sun.]

The images also show convection cells, which measure up to 994 miles across, in the sun’s quiet regions down to a resolution of about 12 miles. The convection cells give the protosphere, or the visible surface of the sun, a speckled popcorn-like texture, as piping hot plasma rises up from the cells’ center and then travels out to the edges before cooling and falling. 

In the layers of the solar atmosphere, the chromosphere sits above the photosphere. The chromosphere sometimes has dark hair-like threads of plasma called fibrils or spicules. They range from 125 to 280 miles in diameter and erupt up to the chromosphere from the photosphere and last only for a few minutes. 

We can expect to see more stunning images of the cells and other solar features in the coming years, as the solar telescope becomes fully operational. DKIST is named in honor of the late Hawaiian Senator Daniel K. Inouye, is the largest solar telescope in the world at 13 feet-wide. It rests on the peak of the mountain and volcano Haleakalā (or “House of the Sun”) on the island of Maui. It is currently in Operations Commissioning Phase, the observatory’s learning and transitioning period. Scientists will use the solar telescope’s unique ability to capture data in unprecedented detail to better understand the sun’s magnetic field and drivers behind solar storms.

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About 250 million years ago, massive volcanic eruptions triggered catastrophic climate changes that killed 80 to 90 percent of species on Earth. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, or the “Great Dying,” paved the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth, but was even worse than the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now, with a new fossil discovery described May 22 in the journal Current Biology, scientists believe that a tiger-sized, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia migrated 7,000 miles across Pangea. When it arrived in the southern part of Pangea, Inostrancevia filled a gap in an ecosystem that was devoid of top predators before Inostrancevia too went extinct, as Earth’s species fought to gain a foothold on a changing planet. 

[Related: UV radiation might be behind the planet’s biggest mass extinction.]

Inostrancevia was a gorgonopsian and a saber-toothed predator. It was about the size of a tiger and likely had tough skin similar to a rhinoceros or elephant and looked more like a reptile than most mammals alive today.

“It is equally closely related to all living mammals. Inostrancevia and other gorgonopsians have no direct living descendants. The group went completely extinct in the Permian-Triassic extinction, but distant proto-mammal relatives of gorgonopsians called cynodonts survived the extinction and evolved into mammals in the Triassic Period,” study co-author Christian Kammerer told PopSci. Kammerer is the research curator in Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Previously, scientists had only found Inostrancevia fossils in Russia, but the fossils in this study were found almost 7,000 miles away. A team of researchers led by co-author Jennifer Botha of the GENUS Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences and the University of the Witwatersrand were digging in South Africa’s fossil-rich Karoo Basin when they unearthed two giant nine to 13-foot-long saber-toothed predators in rocks that date back between 252 and 255 million years.

After reviewing the geographic ranges and ages of the other top predators called the rubidgeine gorgonopsians that were normally found in the area, the team found that these local carnivores went extinct early in the Great Dying. By the time other animals began to go extinct, these apex predators were already gone.

“We did not have a good understanding of when these large predators appeared and went extinct in the African record,” study co-author and Field Museum research scientist Pia Viglietti told PopSci. “This was an important piece in the puzzle to answer because large-bodied predators tend to be at high levels of extinction risk. So, knowing when they went extinct is important for understanding the Great Dying.”

[Related: With bulging eyes and a killer smile, this sabertooth was an absolute nightmare.]

According to the team, these findings demonstrate that fossil-rich locations in South Africa are crucial to better understanding the most catastrophic event in Earth’s history. The team plans to look for more gorgonopsians from more northern parts of Africa and in Europe and to search for earlier records of Northern Hemisphere gorgonopsians moving into the southern part of Pangea.

This peek into the past also bears a warning for our future, since the team says The Great Dying is the historical event that most closely parallels Earth’s current environmental crisis.

“Both involve global warming related to the release of greenhouse gasses, driven by volcanoes in the Permian and human actions currently,” said Kammerer. “[They] represent a very rare case of rapid shifts between icehouse and hothouse Earth. So, the turmoil we observe in late Permian ecosystems, with whole sections of the food web being lost, represents a preview for our world if we don’t change things fast.”

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The catastrophic flooding from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy inundated parts of the New York City subway system with corrosive salt water and brought with it a warning for the future. Now, scientists have learned that the city is sinking, and it’s not just the underground trains that are in trouble.

[Related: New York City’s subway system isn’t ready for a storm-filled future.]

A study published earlier this month in the Earth’s Future journal found that New York City is sinking at a rate of roughly one to two millimeters per year, but certain parts of northern Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and lower Manhattan are actually sinking faster at 2.75mm per year. 

There is not one cause for this sinking, but the weight from giant skyscrapers is magnifying the problem. In the study, the team calculated that all of the city’s structures weigh 842 million tons (1.68 trillion pounds), about the weight of 140 million elephants.   

Many of the city’s largest buildings sit upon solid bedrock called Manhattan schist, but there is a mixture of sand and other clays holding up some of the other structures. For example, the Manhattan stanchion of the famed Brooklyn Bridge is built on a hard layer of sand, since it was too dangerous for the workers building it to keep drilling down to bedrock. 

“The softer the soil, the more compression there is from the buildings. It wasn’t a mistake to build such large buildings in New York but we’ve just got to keep in mind every time you build something there you push down the ground a little bit more,” study co-author and a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey Tom Parsons told The Guardian. 

The clay and sand is adding to the sinking effect that might be due to the way that the Earth below continues to shift following the Earth’s most recent ice age–about 10,000 years ago. Giant ice sheets covered Earth during the coldest parts of the planet’s last ice age, which caused the ground right underneath them to sink. The landmasses tilted up and after the ice sheets melted, the areas that were propped up like New York and other cities in eastern North America are now sinking back down. Earlier studies suggest the East Coast could see as much as 19 to 59 inches of sinking by 2100. 

Climate change is compounding the issue, as the sea level rise continues to accelerate. The waters surrounding New York City are rising at about twice the global average due the glaciers melting from the effects of climate change and seawater expanding. Since 1950, the sea level around New York City has increased about nine inches. According to the NYC Panel on Climate Change, the sea level could rise between eight inches and 30 inches by the 2050s and as much as 15 inches to 75 inches by the end of this century.

“A deeply concentrated population of 8.4 million people faces varying degrees of hazard from inundation in New York City,” the team wrote in the study.

[Related: At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier.]

New York is not the only city that will be facing this crisis. A report from the C40 Group, a network of mayors from some of the world’s biggest cities dedicated to confronting the effects of climate change, found that 800 million people are expected to live in coastal cities where sea levels are expected to rise by over a foot by 2050.

The study’s authors also stress the need to adapt to these threats of increased flooding. “Every additional high-rise building constructed at coastal, river, or lakefront settings could contribute to future flood risk,” the authors wrote. 

In the fall of 2020, New York City began construction on the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project which is aimed at reducing the flood risk and sea level rise along Manhattan’s east side. According to the city government, the boundaries of this project correspond with the natural “pinch-points” in the 100-year floodplain. These are areas where the land is higher along the coastline, making it easier to close the system off from water entering from the north and south. The project is expected to be complete in 2026 and will eventually span 2.4 miles and include 18 movable floodgates. 

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On Friday, NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract to provide a lunar lander for the Artemis V moon mission scheduled for 2029—two years after they lost a bid to build similar vehicles for the Artemis III and IV missions.

Blue Origin will lead a consortium that also includes Lockheed Martin and Boeing to design and build the lander, with NASA contributing $3.4 billion in funding. According to The New York Times, Blue Origin’s VP for lunar transportation also confirmed their company would also add “well north” of that number for the project.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

“We are in a golden age of human spaceflight, which is made possible by NASA’s commercial and international partnerships,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on Friday. “Together, we are making an investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first astronauts on Mars.”

Now comes the hard part: Blue Origin will soon begin designing, building, and testing a new lander that meets NASA’s mission requirements, such as the ability to dock with Gateway, a planned space station that will transfer crew into lunar orbit. The contract encompasses both an uncrewed moon landing demo, as well as the crewed Artemis V mission on track for 2029.

In 2021, Blue Origin and another company lost out to SpaceX on a contract to supply vehicles for Artemis III and IV, which both aim to put humans back on the moon’s surface for the first time in over half a century. SpaceX turned in a proposal estimated to cost $2.9 billion, while Blue Origin’s was tallied at $6 billion.

[Related: Watch SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket explode.]

Blue Origin then attempted to sue NASA in federal court over the bidding process, claiming their proposal had been unfairly evaluated. A 76-page report subsequently issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) laid out all the reasons NASA had every legal right to choose a contract with SpaceX, which cost around half as much as Blue Origin’s $6 billion proposal. NASA’s other concerns included the fact that Blue Origin’s proposal vehicle did not reportedly include proper safeguards for landing in the dark. As Business Insider noted at the time, “The GAO contended that NASA was not required to lay out all minute details, and Blue Origin should take into account the conditions on the moon or space itself—which is dark.”

Jeff Bezos’ company eventually lost the legal fight. “Not the decision we wanted,” Bezos tweeted afterwards, adding that he would respect the court’s judgment while wishing “full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract.” Two years later, however, it appears Blue Origin has properly revised its proposal process—hopefully including plans for landing in the dark.

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In its two years and three months of exploring the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been one busy moving Martian science lab. It has detected signs of past chemical reactions, begun building  a Martian rock depot, and recorded audio of a dust devil for the first time.

[Related: Mars’s barren Jezero crater had a wet and dramatic past.]

Here are a few of the “six-wheeled scientist’s” most recent highlights this month.

New Belva Crater images

Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument collected 152 images while looking deep into Belva Crater. Belva is a large impact crater that lies within the far larger Jezero Crater, which is where Perseverance landed in 2021. The new images are dramatic to look at, but also provide the science team with new insights into Jezero crater’s interior. 

“Mars rover missions usually end up exploring bedrock in small, flat exposures in the immediate workspace of the rover,” deputy project scientist of Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Katie Stack Morgan said in a statement. “That’s why our science team was so keen to image and study Belva. Impact craters can offer grand views and vertical cuts that provide important clues to the origin of these rocks with a perspective and at a scale that we don’t usually experience.”

According to NASA, it is similar to a geology professor on Earth taking their students to visit highway “roadcuts.” These are places where rock layers and other geological features are visible after construction crews have sliced vertically into the rock. Belva Crater represents a natural Martian roadcut. 

The rover took the images on April 22– the mission’s 772nd Martian day, or “sol”. It was parked just west of Belva Crater’s rim on a light-toned rocky outcrop that Perseverance’s science team calls “Echo Creek.” This 0.6-mile-wide crater was created by a meteorite impact eons ago, and shows multiple locations of exposed bedrock and a region where the sedimentary layers angle downward. 

These steep “dipping beds” potentially indicate the presence of a large Martian sandbar that was deposited by a river channel flowing into the ancient lake that Jezero Crater once held. The science team believes that the large boulders in the crater’s foreground are either chunks of bedrock that the meteorite impact exposed, or the rocks were potentially carried to the crater by a long gone river system.

NASA says the team will continue to search for answers by comparing the features found in the bedrock near the rover with the larger larger-scale rock layers that are visible in the distant crater walls.

Ancient and wild Martian river

Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument also took some new images that possibly show signs of an ancient Martian river. Some evidence shows that this rocky river was possibly very deep and incredibly fast. This now-dry river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater.

[Related: Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter.]

Better understanding of these watery environments could help scientists find signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in the reddish-hued rocks of Mars.

The rover is exploring the top of an 820 feet tall fan-shaped pile of sedimentary rock, with curving layers that suggest water once flowed there. Scientists want to answer whether the water flowed into relatively shallow streams like one that NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence of in Gale Crater or if Jezero Crater’s was a more powerful river system.

When stitched together, the images come together like a patchwork quilt with evidence of a more raging river because of the coarse sediment grains and cobbles. 

“Those indicate a high-energy river that’s truckin’ and carrying a lot of debris. The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it’s able to move larger pieces of material,” postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Libby Ives, said in a statement.

Ives has a background in studying Earth’s rivers, and spent the last six months analyzing images of Mars’ surface. “It’s been a delight to look at rocks on another planet and see processes that are so familiar,” Ives said.

Both of these discoveries will help Perseverance’s astrobiology mission that includes the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will continue to characterize and study Mars’ geology and past climate, while paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and will also be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

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On May 9, a baby California condor hatched at Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation, education, and conservation organization in Phoenix, Arizona. The hatching is a ray of hope and welcome good news for the struggling species that was only recently brought back from the brink of extinction. 

Only 22 condors were believed to be alive during the 1980s after a maelstrom of habitat loss, poaching, lead poisoning accidents with power lines, and the insecticide DDT. Currently, about 275 wild birds are cruising the skies about California, Utah, Arizona, and Baja California, Mexico, more than 160 are in captivity, and more than 400 live worldwide. 

[Related: Inside the Yurok Tribe’s mission to make critically endangered condors thrive.]

The largest bird species in North America and a crucial part of the ecosystem, California condors are considered sacred to many indigenous peoples. The Yurok Tribe of the Pacific Northwest call California condors “prey-go-neesh,” and say the birds have been tied to the Yurok Hlkelonah, or the cultural and ecological landscape, since the beginning of time. The tribe has officially been a driving force on condor reintroduction since 2008. 

Now, these sacred and important birds face a grave threat in the form of a tiny pathogen. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), also called bird flu, is threatening condors at an alarming rate. It was first detected in the California condor in late March, and more than 20 are known to have died since. 

“It is scary particularly for endangered species like the California condors. It has the ability to wipe out an entire species,” Liberty Wildlife’s Animal Care Coordinator Jan Miller tells PopSci. 

One of the birds that succumbed to the disease was the new hatchling’s mother, part of a breeding pair of wild California condors. The mother was found acting suspicious in a cave near the Grand Canyon and was brought to Liberty Wildlife due to suspected bird flu. She died eight days later.  

“Using telemetry, it was assumed that she had laid an egg, probably between March 13 and March 17, and it was predicted to hatch between May 9 and May 17,” Liberty Wildlife’s Executive Director Megan Mosby tells PopSci. “The limited movement of the male led to the assumption that he was trying to incubate an egg.  The biologists at the Arizona Vermilion Cliff site decided that it wasn’t safe for the male, a known breeder, to attempt to raise a chick solo and feed himself, especially in a dank, cool cave … a perfect place for flu contamination.”

[Related: Spy tech and rigged eggs help scientists study the secret lives of animals.]

Biologists brought the egg back to Liberty Wildlife, where it was monitored in a structure called a brooder.  When the egg began to “pip,” the Los Angeles Zoo’s propagation team advised Liberty Wildlife on best practices for monitoring the hatchling’s progress. The team noticed that the chick was in the wrong position in the egg due to where it had pipped, or poked through its membrane, and that it would need assistance in order for the hatch to be successful. 

“Veterinarian Dr. Stephanie Lamb assisted in the freeing of the baby from the egg and the operation was successful.  After a health check, a swab to test for Avian Flu was obtained, and the chick was placed in an incubator with a surrogate (stuffed animal) ‘mother’ condor,” Miller says. 

The hatchling was negative for bird flu and continued to eat solid food and bond with her surrogate plush parent. According to Mosby, the team was excited to find out she was female because 11 of the 21 condors that have died due to bird flu were breeding age females.

On May 17, she was flown to The Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho. There she will be raised by foster parents so that she can one day be released back into Arizona’s skies.  

“At this age it is very easy for the chick to imprint on humans so getting her with her own species is critical to her releasability,” says Miller. “The Peregrine Fund has a very advanced propagation department with proven foster parents to help raise chicks for release into the wild. It is a very large operation with proven results.”

According to the team, vultures like the California condor are not only intelligent, but are incredibly necessary to help clean up the environment since they handle dead and decaying animals that can spread disease. 

“Vultures are part of the natural cleanup crew in nature. They deserve every fair chance they can get to continue to survive and be a part of this world,” says Miller. 

In addition to this welcome hatchling’s continued success this week, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service approved the emergency use of bird flu vaccine on May 16. The Yurok Tribe called this move, “a huge step in the effort to combat this virulent threat, but still a long road ahead.”

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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Humans are born with instincts for crying and smiling, but not for kissing. Sometime in the past, our ancestors had the idea to smack their mouths together and call it romantic. And though we may not know who gave the first smooch, ancient records of these steamy sessions are helping us piece together when people started locking lips. 

The generally accepted earliest evidence we have of making out is religious text written in India in 1500 BCE. And while there was no official word for kissing back then, sentences like “young lord of the house repeatedly licks the young woman” and lovers “setting mouth to mouth” implied more than platonic relationships. But whether this was when kissing all began is still up for debate. In fact, an overlooked collection of written texts from ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq and Syria) suggests people were kissing further in the past. 

Citing those texts, authors of a new perspective article published today in the journal Science argue romantic kissing occurred 1,000 years earlier than historians first predicted. And as kissing became more of the norm, old medical records reveal the widespread transmission of viruses that spread through lip-to-lip contact.

“Given what we know about the history of kissing in humans and the myriad of similar kissing-like behaviors observed around the animal kingdom, I’m not surprised by these findings,” says Sheril Kirshenbaum, the author of The Science of Kissing, who was not involved in the study. “Whether romantic or not, kissing influences our bodies and brains in so many meaningful ways by guiding our emotions and decisions.”

[Related: Scientists think they found a 2,000-year-old dildo in ancient Roman ruins]

Clay tablets left behind by ancient Mesopotamians in 2500 BCE describe two types of kissing. The first was the friendly-parental kiss. People kissed the feet of their elders or the ground as a sign of respect or submission. 

The second was the lip kiss with a more erotic and intimate overtone. However, there were a few cultural expectations when it came to this type of kissing. Romantic kissing was an action reserved for married couples, as people frowned upon any PDA in Mesopotamia. Kissing among unmarried folks was taboo, considered to be giving in to sexual temptation. People not meant to be sexually active, such as priestesses, were thought to lose their ability to speak if they kissed someone. “The need for such norms indicates that romantic kissing must have been practiced in society at large,” explains lead author Troels Pank Arbøll, an assyriologist (a person studying the language and civilization of ancient Mesopotamia) at the University of Copenhagen.

As more people adopted the practice of kissing on the lips, ancient medical texts described illnesses whose symptoms resemble viral infections spread through mouth-to-mouth contact. The authors note this aligns with DNA analysis from ancient human remains detecting viruses such as herpes simplex virus 1, Epstein-Barr virus, and human parvovirus. All three viruses transmit through saliva.

One example is a disease that the ancient Mesopotamians labeled bu’šānu. The infection involved boils in or around the mouth area. Its name also implies that the infected person might have stunk. While Arbøll says bu’šānu shares several symptoms with herpes, he warns people not to make any assumptions. “As with all ancient disease concepts, they do not match any modern diseases 1:1, and one should be very careful when applying these modern identifications. A disease concept like bu’šānu likely incorporated several modern diseases.”

Mesopotamians likely did not think infectious diseases were spread through kissing, since it is not listed anywhere in the medical texts. However, they had some religiously influenced ideas of contamination, which spurred some measures to avoid spreading the disease. For example, a letter from around 1775 BCE describes a woman in a palace harem with lesions all over her body. Assuming it was contagious, people avoided drinking from any cups she drank, sleeping in her bed, or sitting on her chair.

[Related: When you give octopus MDMA they hug it out]

The findings show that this form of kissing did not originate in a single place. Mesopotamia, India, and other societies separately learned to associate pecks on the lips as romantic. Arbøll says it’s possible other areas also learned about kissing but didn’t have the writing tools to record this behavior. This opens the question of how widely sexual kissing was practiced in the ancient world. 

Some experts are less convinced that kissing was a universal behavior. William Jankowiak, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study, points out that written records of kissing often occurred in complex societies and less so in people living in smaller foraging groups. It’s also difficult to know if romantic kissing was practiced in more than one class or reserved for elite groups in ancient civilizations. Additionally, other factors, such as living in tropical versus colder regions, could influence whether people wanted to lock lips. 

There’s still a long way to go in understanding the ancient history of kissing. But the study does clear up one thing—all the smooching our ancestors did is probably why oral herpes and other kiss-transmitted diseases are a global problem today.

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A dinosaur specimen unearthed in Castellón, Spain in 2011 is likely a brand new species and genus of spinosaur, a family of dinosaurs whose fossils have been found in Europe, Asia, South America, and Asia. The new findings were published May 18 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

[Related: What was going on inside of this spinosaur’s brain?]

This new species is named Protathlitis cinctorrensis—which comes from the Greek word for “champion” in reference to football club Villarreal C.F. ‘s Europa League win in 2021.

“Three of the authors of this paper live in Villarreal, and with the club’s centenary this year, we wanted to recognise its work both on and off the pitch by naming a dinosaur genus after it,” co-author and Jaume I University paleontologist Andrés Santos‑Cubedo, said in a statement. 

The discovery, alongside another the uncovering of a moderately sized dinosaur named Vallibonavenatrix cani, suggests that the Iberian peninsula  could have been a very diverse area for medium-to-large bodied spinosaurid dinosaurs. 

Spinosaurs were carnivorous theropod dinosaurs that were typically large and stood on two feet. Some of the better known spinosaurids include the crocodile-mouthed 4,000 pound Baryonyx and Spinosaurus, who might be recognizable from its fictional fight with Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park III. Many of these unusual 13 to 22 ton dinos stalked ancient riverbanks preying on large fish and lived a different lifestyle than more familiar theropods, such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus.

“The spinosaurs are quite special theropods. They ate fish and lived in and around water, but there’s a lot of debate about just how aquatic they were,” Cassius Morrison, a co-author of the study and PhD student from the UK’s Natural History Museum, said in a statement. “Some scientists suggest they were like herons, snapping up fish while wading, while others think they were more like a penguin, and could move underwater to hunt fish. Suchomimus seems to be more like a heron, while Baryonyx and Spinosaurus had higher bone density which might mean they could have spent time underwater.”

Spinosaurs are believed to have originated in Europe before moving to Africa and Asia sometime during the Late Cretaceous, but the evidence of their existence in present-day Spain is primarily based on fossilized tooth remains.  

In this study, a team of paleontologists analyzed a right jaw bone, one tooth, and five vertebraediscovered in the Arcillas de Morella Formation in eastern Spain. This formation is known for containing fossils of Iguanodon and its relatives and titanosaur-like dinosaurs.

[Related: Spinosaurus bones hint that the spiny dinosaurs enjoyed water sports.]

The fragments were dated to between 127 and 126 million years ago, during the late Barremian or Early Cretaceous period. The team estimates that the new specimen was around 32 to 36 feet long—about the length of a telephone pole.  

The team compared this newly-named specimen to data on other spinosaurs to figure out its evolutionary relationship to other species within the family of dinosaurs. They believe that this new dinosaur appeared in the Early Cretaceous in a large area of land in the Northern hemisphere called Laurasia. 

“Our research demonstrates that two subfamilies of spinosaur occupied western Europe during the Early Cretaceous (145-100 million years ago) before later migrating to Africa and Asia,” Andrés said. “Baryonyx-like spinosaurs became dominant in Europe, while Spinosaurus-like spinosaurs were most abundant in Africa.”

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Humans might fear the nuclear bomb, but it is not even a blip against what the cosmos can unleash. Take, for example, the gamma ray burst: a stark flash of light and radiation erupting from a colossal star in its death throes. Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a gamma ray burst that they’ve labeled “the brightest of all time.”

Yet a gamma ray burst is only a single exploding star. When far more mass is involved, the universe can set off even larger bangs. In a paper published May 11 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers announced what, in their words, is the most energetic astronomical event ever seen.

Still ongoing, this event isn’t as bright as a gamma ray burst—but, lasting far longer, it has unleashed far more energy into the universe. Although this explosion, an event named AT2021lwx, defies easy explanation, the astronomers who found it have an idea involving lucky black holes. If they’re right, their observatories may have sighted something like this event more than once before.

In a bit of irony, this “largest explosion ever seen” evaded astronomers’ detection for nearly a year. The Samuel Oschin Telescope, nestled at Palomar Observatory in the mountains northeast of San Diego, California, first picked up a brightening blip in June 2020. But as often happens in astronomy, a field inundated with data from a sky constantly bursting with activity, the event remained unnoticed.

Only in April 2021 did an automated system called Lasair bring AT2021lwx to human astronomers’ attention. By then, the blip in the sky had been steadily brightening for more than 300 days. While the blip was peculiar, astronomers thought little of it, until they estimated the object’s brightness by calculating how far away the event was: 8 billion light-years.

“That’s, suddenly, when we realized: ‘Hang on, this is something very, very unusual,’” says study author Philip Wiseman, an astronomer at the University of Southampton in the UK.

[Related: Astronomers now know how supermassive black holes blast us with energy]

“I haven’t seen anything changing brightness and becoming this bright on such a short timescale,” says Tonima Ananna, a black hole astrophysicist at Dartmouth College, who wasn’t an author.

At first, the authors didn’t know what to make of AT2021lwx. They asked their colleagues. Some thought it was a tidal disruption event, where a black hole violently tears apart a captured star. But this event was far, far brighter than any known star-eating episode. Others thought it was a quasar, a young galaxy with an active nucleus: a supermassive black hole churning out bright jets of radiation. But this event’s hundredfold surge in brightness was far greater than anything astronomers had seen in quasars.

“You have the tidal disruption people saying, ‘No, I don’t think it’s one of ours.’ You’ve got the quasar people saying, ‘No, I don’t think it’s one of ours.’ That’s where you have to start coming up with a new scenario,” Wiseman says.

Their new scenario also involves a black hole: a supermassive one, more than a million times the mass of the sun, at the heart of a galaxy. Normally, a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a gas accretion disc, drawn in by the immense gravity. Some supermassive black holes, like those in quasars, actively devour that gas; as they do, they glow in response. Others, like the one in the center of the Milky Way, are dormant, quiet, and dark.

Wiseman and his colleagues believe that, abruptly, a dormant black hole might suddenly find itself inundated by a very large quantity of gas—potentially thousands of times the mass of the sun. The black hole would respond to its newfound banquet by brilliantly awakening, bursting far more brightly than even an active counterpart.. 

Wiseman and his colleagues believe that such a windfall triggered AT2021lwx, causing a dormant supermassive black hole to light up the night.

“I think they make a compelling case that this is a supermassive black hole … suddenly being ‘switched on,’” says Ananna.

Astronomers might have seen accretion events like AT2021lwx before. Wiseman and his colleagues pored through past observations and found multiple needles in the haystack of astronomical data that resembled the record event. None of them were even close to this one’s brightness, but they also increased in luminosity along a similar pattern. These events occurred in galaxies known to have black holes at their centers, showering in streams of gas that fall inward.

[Related: Astronomers just caught a ‘micronova’—a small but mighty star explosion]

“There’s a chance that [the record event] is the same, but just the amount of gas that has been dumped on is much, much, much, much larger,” says Wiseman.

Wiseman and his colleagues plan to put their ideas to the test in the form of computer simulations. By doing this, they can learn if accretion events could have caused this record explosion and the other bright patterns they’d found.

Meanwhile, they’re planning to follow the trail they’ve found. AT2021lwx’s brightness has peaked and begun to steadily decline. They’ve begun watching the object’s X-ray emissions and plan to follow up with radio waves. Once the object has faded to black, they plan to zoom in with something like the Hubble Space Telescope, which can see if there’s a galaxy behind the burst—and what it looks like.

The need for more observations underscores that astronomers still have many unanswered questions about some of the universe’s most extreme events.

“There may be things out there already that have been larger and brighter, but because they are so slow, our detection algorithms never actually flagged them as being an explosion themselves—and they kind of just got lost,” Wiseman says.

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An international team of archaeologists digging in Saudi Arabia and Jordan reportedly found the world’s oldest architectural plans. The findings were published in a study May 17 in the journal PLOS ONE and includes precise engravings that date back between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago.

[Related: Details of life in Bronze Age Mycenae could lie at the bottom of a well.]

These ancient blueprints depict large structures used to trap and funnel animals for slaughter into enclosures called kites. First spotted by aviators in the 1920s, the contraptions are called “kites” because of the shape they form. The converging walls range from hundreds of feet up to 3.1 miles long and drive the animals towards a corral surrounded by pits up to 13.1 feet deep. 

According to the authors, plans like these for kites represent a milestone in human development because intelligent behavior is needed to transpose the plans for such a large space onto a small two dimensional surface. A kite would have also helped people hunt a larger group of animals in a shorter period of time. 

“Although human constructions have modified natural spaces for millennia, few plans or maps predate the period of the literate civilizations of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt,” the authors wrote in a statement. “The ability to transpose large space onto a small, two dimensional surface represents a milestone in intelligent behavior. Such structures are visible as a whole only from the air, yet this calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time.”

In this new study, the team reports two new engravings first unearthed in 2015 that represent the ruins of kites in present-day Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The Jibal al-Khasabiyeh area in Jordan has eight kite areas. The stone found with a representation of how to build them that was carved with stone tools measures two feet long and one foot wide and is about 7,000 years old. 

In Saudi Arabia, Zebel az-Zilliyat has two pairs of visible kites that are about two miles apart.  A massive to-scale engraving of the plans was excavated nearby. The 10 feet long by seven feet wide blueprint dated to about 8,000 years ago. In this engraving, it was reportedly pecked instead of carved into the stone, possibly with hand picks. It was created at a scale of roughly 1:175, so actual kites were 175 times larger than the engraving itself.

The study also found that the proportions, layout, and shape of the engravings were consistent with the actual remains of the ancient kites. They are also in keeping with the four cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west).

[Related: Cave drawings from 20,000 years ago may feature an early form of writing.]

Over 6,000 kite structures have been found across central Asia and the Middle East, with the majority in present-day Saudi Arabia, eastern Jordan, and southern Syria. There are other  ancient engravings in Europe that are believed to portray maps, but scientists have yet to discover depictions of hunting kites on the continent.

Little is known about the people who made the kites thousands of years ago and a project like this likely would have been a large group undertaking, according to the authors. 

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If Spiderman and Antman took their DNA and mixed it together in a petri dish, the result might be something like the spider species Siler collingwoodi (S. collingwoodi). This tiny, colorful, jumping spider found in China and Japan uses a combination of camouflage and some award-worthy mimicry to deter some hungry predators. In a stressful scenario, these spiders will imitate the way an ant walks to avoid being eaten.

[Related: Black widows battle their even deadlier cousins in a brutal spider war.]

A study published May 17 in the journal iScience found that the combo of camouflage and ant mimicry works to evade spiders that eat other spiders, but not hungry praying mantises. It’s advantageous to mimic an ant because they are typically not very tasty, and can have spiny defenses, chemical repellents, or venom. Not to mention, species of “exploding” ants like Colobopsis saundersi that are not afraid to fight and bite back. While scientists already knew that S. collingwoodi walked like an ant, the team on this study were curious how accurate the mimicry is, whether it imitates multiple species of ants, and how effective it is at discouraging predators. 

“Unlike typical ant-mimicking spiders that mimic the brown or black body color of ants, S. collingwoodi has brilliant body coloration,” co-author and Peking University in China ecologist Hua Zeng said in a statement. “From a human’s perspective, it seems to blend well with plants in its environment, but we wanted to test whether their body coloration served as camouflage to protect against predators.”

To better understand how these ant-inspired theatrics help the spiders avoid becoming dinner, the team collected wild ant-mimicking spiders from four spots in southern Hainan, China, and brought them back to the lab. They also collected another type of jumping spider that does not mimic ants as a comparison and five co-occurring ant species as potential models.  

The team then compared and characterized how the insects and arachnids moved in terms of how they used their individual limbs, their speed, acceleration, and whether they followed a straight path or took a more roundabout way. 

Inside of jumping like most jumping spiders, S. collingwoodi scuttle around like ants. They raise their front legs to mimic an ant’s antennae, bob their abdomens, and lift their legs to walk more ant-like. Out of the five ant species studied, the spider’s style of walking more closely resembled three of the smaller ant species that are closer in size.

“S. collingwoodi is not necessarily a perfect mimic, because its gait and trajectory showed high similarity with multiple ant species,” said Zeng. “Being a general mimic rather than perfectly mimicking one ant species could benefit the spiders by allowing them to expand their range if the ant models occupy different habitats.”

Then it was time to test these defenses against two likely predators. Portia labiata and the praying mantis. Portia labiata is a similarly sized jumping spider with color vision who specializes in preying upon other spiders. The praying mantis is a more generalist predator that has a monochromatic visual system–meaning it has trouble telling multiple colors apart. 

[Related: Jumping spiders might be able to sleep—perchance to dream.]

To see how the color camouflaging was working, they modeled how the two predators would perceive S. collingwoodi relative to the other prey species. They used a background of two plants that the spiders live on—the red-flowering West Indian jasmine and the Fukien tea tree The ant-mimicking spiders were better camouflaged from both predators on the jasmine plant than on the tea tree plant.

The predators were more likely to attack the non-mimicking spider than the ones that imitate ants. Out of 17 trials, the spider launched five attacks—all of them were launched towards a non-mimicking spider. However, praying mantises attacked both prey species with equal readiness.

“We initially thought that both predators would behave similarly in the anti predation experiments, but in fact the simulated ant locomotion of Siler collingwoodi only worked for the jumping spider predator, while the praying mantis showed indiscriminate attacks on both ants and mimics,” co-author and Peking University evolutionary ecologist Wei Zhang said in a statement. 

It is possible that this difference might be driven by each predator’s likelihood of being injured if they eat an ant. The praying mantises are much larger than their prey, and they have a better chance of eating spiny ants without risking catastrophic injury. Predatory spiders do not have this margin for error. 

“For the spider predator, a random attack on an ant could result in injury,” says Zhang, “so they are very careful predators and will only attack if they can distinguish S. collingwoodi from ants with a high degree of certainty.”

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Everything we’ve learned about dinosaurs essentially comes from fossils. But million-year-old rocks and bones have left a few hulking gaps in our understanding of the prehistoric world. Dinosaur Mysteries digs into the more secretive side of the “terrible lizards,” and all the questions that keep paleontologists up at night.

WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE of history’s greatest fossil rush. Forget about the 19^th-century Bone Wars or the early 20^th-century rise of US museums—paleontologists today are finding more dinosaurs faster than before. On average, they name a new nonavian dinosaur species every two weeks. Some of this year’s fresh arrivals include the long-necked herbivore Chucarosaurus, the duckbill Malefica, and the dome-headed Platytholus.

Despite this incredible rate of discovery, however, plenty of dinosaurs are missing from the paleontological history we’re trying to piece together.

If dinosaur seekers had their druthers, Earth’s geology would look something like an onion. Experts would work through perfectly stacked layers of sedimentary rock that contain comprehensive records of all the species that lived in ancient habitats through time. But such good fortune has eluded scientists. Since the 1800s, geologists and paleontologists have recognized that the fossil record is uneven and sporadic, made up of sediment that accumulated in environments such as streams, oceans, and dune-covered deserts. Most living things were eaten or decayed long before they could become fossilized.

Circumstances have to be just right for a fossil to form. The most ideal settings include relatively wet lowlands where rivers, streams, and other flowing waters could carry the requisite sand and silt to cover bodies. The blanket of sediment helped keep fossils-to-be from being nibbled on by scavengers or destroyed by the elements. As sediment turned to stone, mineral-laden water trickled through the encased body and replaced bone and sometimes soft tissues in a process called permineralization. The nature of the reaction varied from case to case, affected by everything from the size of the dinosaur to the local environment. This explains why we find some prehistoric creatures as partial, jumbled skeletons and others as delicately preserved fossils surrounded by feathers with not a bone out of place. 

In the end, paleontologists need to work with a fraction of a fraction of life’s story. Even some of the best fossil-hunting spots in the world are far from perfect. Consider the gorgeous banded rock layers of Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada, a hotspot for the discovery of stunning Late Cretaceous species such as the crested duckbill Lambeosaurus and the toothy tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus. In a 2013 review of fossils discovered in the park, paleontologists found that dinosaurs that weighed more than 130 pounds are often found at about 78 percent completeness while those below 130 pounds are usually found at about 7.6 percent completeness. (Paleontologists can often differentiate species even from such limited remains based on subtle anatomical traits that experts catalog over time.) Evidently, ancient ecosystems were much harsher on small specimens, masking how numerous they were in thriving times.

The fossil record runs rampant with sampling biases as well. Paleontologists come into the field with their own ideas of what to look for, and many are motivated to study megafauna, which hold more public allure and pose less of a challenge to excavate. A little more than a century ago, when paleontologists were beginning to search Alberta’s 75-million-year-old rocks, the big dinosaurs were much easier to find. Museums—both in the province and in faraway cities like New York—were hungry for near-complete, showstopping reptiles to lure in visitors. No surprise then that the same 2013 assessment from Dinosaur Provincial Park found it took paleontologists an average of 33.6 years to discover and name species above the 130-pound threshold and 65.9 years for those below.

The pattern holds for other dinosaur-bearing rocks, like the famous multistate Hell Creek Formation that preserves the last days of the dinosaurs in western North America. Even though paleontologists have named small dinosaurs when they’ve happened across their fossils, experts have been actively considering the more diminutive reptiles only in the past decade or so.

Of course, it’s a wonder that we know about any dinosaurs at all. Every single fossilized skeleton or footprint has beaten long odds to tell us about ecosystems that we’ll never get to experience directly. Details of how these ancient habitats changed are critical to debates on whether dinosaurs were flourishing or struggling as the great Age of Dinosaurs approached its closing act 66 million years ago.

For example, paleontologists used to wonder why there seemed to be far more dinosaur species roaming western North America 75 million years ago than 66 million years ago, just prior to the K/Pg extinction that decimated them. Some experts reasoned that the creatures were already in decline. But when researchers looked at how prehistoric habitats shifted during that 9-million-year window, they found that environments better at preserving fossils diminished over time. A warm, shallow sea that divided North America drained off the continent, taking with it the wet, marshy lowlands that immortalized dinosaurs so extensively. So there were probably more dinosaur species running around the continent 66 million years ago than we’ll ever know about, a gap created by changes to the land itself.

So where would these missing fauna have dwelled? There’s every reason to think that dinosaurs clambered around ancient mountain ranges—but mountains are hotspots of erosion, not deposition, so the accumulations of sediment needed to preserve dinosaur bodies weren’t present there. The erosion problem also applies to some deserts, like the one in modern-day Arches National Park. Even though it’s perfectly natural to think of dinosaurs wandering between the expanses of bright sandstone, these landscapes were too dry and disintegrated for dinosaurs to be buried and fossilized in them.

It’s also entirely possible that some “rare” species in well-documented fossil beds were transported there by the elements after death. Think of the heavily armored ankylosaurs that were swept out to burials at sea, or the long-necked sauropods that dwelled in the hills but are known by the bones washed into cave systems, where they were buried. Fossil beds often represent where organisms became preserved, not necessarily where they lived.

Because the Earth is not an onion, much of the fossil record remains uneven and unexposed. While somewhat dated now, one 2006 estimate proposed that more than 70 percent of discoverable dinosaur species are still hidden beyond detection.

Much of what we’ve learned about the dinosaur story comes from the later parts of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. We have way less information on the middle of each Mesozoic period, times when new dinosaur dynasties were forming and the ecosystems they thrived in were evolving with them. When experts uncover these animals, they enrich our knowledge of these mysterious times in dinosaur history. In 2019, for example, paleontologists described the sharp-toothed Asfaltovenator from the Middle Jurassic in Argentina. The species offers some context for the rise of the world’s first truly giant carnivores, like Allosaurus. It’s in these middle chapters that we stand to learn the most—to learn about the dinosaurs that are most likely to change and challenge what we think we know about a world millions of years ago.

We hope you enjoyed Riley Black’s column, Dinosaur Mysteries. Check back on PopSci+ in June for the next article.

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Within the next five years, the planet is 66 percent likely to reach 2.7°F (1.5°C ) of warming according to a jarring new update from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 2.7°F is the internationally accepted global temperature threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change.

[Related: For marine life to survive, we must cut carbon emissions.]

The WMO forecasts that global temperatures are expected to surge to record levels fueled by heat trapping gasses and a naturally occurring El Niño event. The organization also predicts that the annual average near-surface temperature will be over the threshold for at least one year between 2023 and 2027.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set 2.7°F as a guardrail against increasingly dangerous atmospheric warming, and over 100 countries including the United States, Argentina, China, and Egypt, pledged to prevent long-term warming if possible. A special United Nations report from 2018 said going past this point would be dangerous and lead to significantly more death, destruction, and damage to global ecosystems.

According to the WMO, these new findings do not mean that Earth will permanently exceed the 2.7°F level that was specified in the Paris Agreement. The organization believes that the jump would be a temporary, and is not as worrisome as the agreed-upon climate danger point.

“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory. This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Scientists believe that there is a 62 percent chance that an El Niño will develop by the end of this year. El Niño is a natural part of an oscillating weather system that develops in the Pacific Ocean. Earth has been in a rare “triple dip” of the opposing phase called La Niña for the past three years. La Niña typically has had a dampening effect on temperature increases around the world. With the new El Niño developing, there is a 98 percent chance that at least one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, according to the WMO.

Warming in the arctic is also disproportionately high. This region heats much faster than the rest of the world, largely because as sea ice melts, solar radiation can no longer be reflected back and the heat is absorbed. This rapid warming is affecting global weather patterns and the jet stream. 

[Related: The past 8 years have been the hottest on human record, according to new report.]

Reaching this point, even just for a single year, would represent an acceleration of human impacts on the global climate system and send the world into “uncharted territory,” since average surface temperatures have never breached the threshold in recorded history. The highest average in previous years was 2.5 °F (1.28°C) above pre-industrial levels.

Scientists do not believe that the anomaly will occur this year, but the chance of temporarily exceeding this threshold has risen steadily since 2015, when it was close to zero. Between 2017 and 2021, there was only a 10 percent chance of exceeding this target.

“Global mean temperatures are predicted to continue increasing, moving us away further and further away from the climate we are used to,” Leon Hermanson, a Met Office expert scientist who led the report, said in a statement. 

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The preserved ancient Roman city of Pompeii is best known for the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the city in 79 CE. But the discovery of two skeletons at Italy’s Pompeii Archaeological Park adds to growing evidence that earthquakes  accompanied the fateful eruption. The details of the excavation were published by the Pompeii Archaeological Park on May 16 in the E-Journal of Pompeii Excavations.

[Related: This ancient Roman villa was equipped with wine fountains.]

As the ground shook, massive plumes of volcanic ash and pumice and boiling hot gasses shot out of the volcano which covered and suffocated its residents. The bodies of those caught in the eruption were well preserved by the ash, offering scientists a unique window into the event. Archaeologists have found the remains of over 1,300 victims in the site southeast of Naples over the last 250 years

According to Pompeii Archaeological Park, the skeletons were discovered during a recent excavation of the Casti Amanti, or the House of the Chaste Lovers. 

“In recent years, we have realized there were violent, powerful seismic events that were happening at the time of the eruption,″ Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park told the Associated Press. 

Zuchtriegel added that advances in archaeological techniques and methodology, “allow us to understand better the inferno that in two days completely destroyed the city of Pompeii, killing many inhabitants.” These technological advances are making it possible to figure out the dynamic of the deaths right down to the final seconds. 

The remains were found in a utility room where the pair had possibly sought shelter beneath a collapsed wall. The skeletons are believed to belong to two men that were at least 55 years old at the time of the eruption. 

The team also believes that the house was likely undergoing reconstruction when the eruption and earthquake struck due to a stone kitchen counter covered in powdered lime.

[Related: As Rome digs its first new metro route in decades, an archaeologist safeguards the city’s buried treasures.]

Part of the southern facing wall collapsed and crushed one of the men and the skeleton’s raised arm, “offers a tragic image of his vain attempt to protect himself from the falling masonry.” At the western wall, the entire upper section detached and fell into the room and crushed and buried the other man. 

The team also found some organic matter that they believe is a bundle of fabric, vessels, bowls, jugs, six coins, and a glass paste that possibly used to be the beads of a necklace.

“The discovery of the remains of these two Pompeians in the context of the construction site in the Insula of the Chaste Lovers shows how much there is still to discover about the terrible eruption of AD 79 and confirms the necessity of continuing scientific investigation and excavations. Pompeii is an immense archaeological laboratory that has regained vigor in recent years, astonishing the world with the continuous discoveries brought to light and demonstrating Italian excellence in this sector,” Italy’s Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano said in a statement.

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A team of more than 1,000 astronomers and college students just took a step closer to solving one of the long-lasting mysteries of astronomy: Why is the sun’s outer layer, known as the corona, so ridiculously hot? The solar surface is 10,000°F, but a thousand miles up, the sun’s corona flares hundreds of times hotter. It’s like walking across the room to escape an overzealous space heater, but you feel warmer far away from the source instead of cooler, totally contrary to expectations.

The research team used hundreds of observations of solar flares—huge ejections of hot plasma from our star’s surface—to determine what’s heating up the sun’s corona, in results published May 9 in The Astrophysical Journal. What’s really striking about this result, though, is how they did it: with the help of hundreds of undergrads taking physics classes at the University of Colorado, totaling a whopping 56,000 hours of work over multiple years.

Lead author James Paul Mason, research scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, calls this a “win-win-win scenario.” He adds, “We were able to harness a ton of brainpower and apply it to a real scientific challenge, the students got to learn firsthand what the scientific process looks like.”

[Related: Volunteer astronomers bring wonders of the universe into prisons]

The classroom project began in 2020, when University of Colorado physics professor Heather Lewandowski found herself teaching a class on experimental physics, which suddenly had to pivot online due to the COVID-19 pandemic—quite the challenge, especially for a hands-on science course. Luckily, Mason had an idea for a solar flare project that needed a lot of hands, and Lewandowski, who usually researches a totally different topic in quantum mechanics, saw that as an opportunity for her students. 

“The question of why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than the ‘surface’ of the sun is one of the main outstanding questions in solar physics,” says Lewandowski. There are two leading explanations for this dilemma, known as the coronal heating problem. One theory suggests that waves in the sun’s mega-sized magnetic field push heat into the corona. The other claims that small, unseen solar flares called nanoflares heat it up, like using a thousand matches instead of one big blow torch. 

Nanoflares are too small for our telescopes to spot, but by studying the sizes of other larger flares, scientists can estimate the prevalence of these little radiation bursts. And, although artificial intelligence is improving every day, automated programs can’t yet do the kind of analysis that Mason and Lewandowski needed. Groups of students in Lewandowski’s class each used data on a different solar flare, getting into nitty-gritty detail to measure how much energy each one dumped into the corona. Together, their results suggest nanoflares might not be powerful enough to heat up the corona to the wild temperatures we see.

[Related: Small ‘sparks’ on the sun could be key to forecasting dramatic solar weather]

The scientific result is only half of the news, though. Lewandowski and Mason pioneered a new way to bring real research into the classroom, giving students a way to not only learn about science, but do it themselves. This type of large-scale student research effort is more common in biology and chemistry, but was pretty much unheard of in physics—until now. “The students participated in all aspects of the research from literature review, meetings with the principal investigator, a proposal phase, data analysis, and peer review of their analysis,” says Lewandowski. The involvement of many students, and their work in groups, is also a reminder that “science is inherently a collaborative endeavor,” she adds.

“I hope that we inspire some professors out there to try this with their classes,” says Mason. “I’m excited to see what kinds of results they’re able to achieve.”

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A golden, tissue box-sized satellite has set a new record for the fastest data transfer rate ever achieved by orbital laser light communications—breaking its own previous milestone set less than a year ago. According to a recent announcement from NASA, the agency’s TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system achieved a 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) space-to-ground optical link speed on April 28 during a six-minute pass high above its corresponding ground station.

Within that time frame, NASA estimates TBIRD can transmit multiple terabytes of test data back to Earth. That’s equivalent to thousands of hours of HD video data. “This capability will change the way we communicate in space,” said Beth Keer, TBIRD’s mission manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

[Related: NASA’s newest office is all about putting humans on Mars.]

Since 1958, radio waves have transmitted the majority of all space communications via the Deep Space Network, a global antenna array capable of sending and receiving information for satellites and astronaut crews. As NASA explains, switching to “ultra-high-speed” optical communications crams more data into each lasers’ infrared light waves that are invisible to the naked eye. This alternative—as showcased in TBIRD’s recent record breaking demonstrations—will prove vital to future space research and exploration, particularly as humans look to return to the moon, and eventually attempt to make their way to Mars.

The TBIRD system was first delivered into space last year via NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) as a tiny satellite (also known as a CubeSat) roughly the size of two stacked cereal boxes. CubeSats are popular for both their relative simplicity and cost-effectiveness. After launching aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-5 rideshare mission in May 2022, PTD-3 synchronized with the Earth’s solar orbit so that the CubeSat entered a “fixed” position relative to the sun. Once established, the TBIRD satellite could begin transmitting data twice a day as it passed over its space-to-ground command center link. Within less than a year, its capabilities have broken records twice over.

[Related: This tiny, trailblazing satellite is taking on a big moon mission.]

“Just imagine the power of space science instruments when they can be designed to fully take advantage of the advancements in detector speeds and sensitivities, furthering what artificial intelligence can do with huge amounts of data,” Kerr added. “Laser communications is the missing link that will enable the science discoveries of the future.”

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Doctors may have a new tool to protect patients against multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. But the new defense against increasingly difficult-to-treat bacteria isn’t a brand new development—it is an 80 year-old antibiotic. A study published May 16 in the open access journal PLOS Biology looked at a natural product made in soil called nourseothricin that was discovered in 1942.

[Related: Kids all over the US are getting strep, but antibiotics are hard to come by.]

The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections has encouraged a search for new antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is a very serious and growing medical problem—according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antimicrobial resistance killed at least 1.27 million people worldwide and was associated with close to 5 million deaths in 2019. In the United States, more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year, and over 35,000 people die as a result.

Nourseothricin contains multiple forms of a complex molecule called streptothricin. There were high hopes that the streptothricin inside would be a powerful agent against bacteria called gram-negative bacteria. These bacteria, such as E.coli., have a thick outer protective layer and are particularly hard for antibiotics to kill. 

Unfortunately, nourseothricin was toxic to kidneys according to the results of an unpublished limited human trial sometime in the 1940’s and its development was dropped. The team in this study decided to go back and take a second look at nourseothricin.

“We started searching around for drugs that we could use, and it turns out these super resistant bugs were highly susceptible to streptothricin, so we were able to use it as a selection agent to do these experiments,” study co-author and pathologist at Harvard Medical School James Kirby said in a statement. “What scientists were isolating in 1942 was not as pure as what we are working with today. In fact, what was then called streptothricin is actually a mixture of several streptothricin variants. The natural mixture of different types of streptothricins is now referred to as nourseothricin.”

Kirby is also the director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

In the earlier studies on the antibiotic, nourseothricin suffered from incomplete purification of  streptothricin which was likely causing the toxicity. A study published in 2022 showed that multiple forms of streptothricin actually have different toxicities. 

One called streptothricin-F was significantly less toxic while also working against present day pathogens that are resistant to multiple drugs. 

[Related: Raw dog food can harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria.]

In this study, the team looked closely at streptothricin-F and also streptothricin- D. Streptothricin-D strain was also highly selective for the gram-negative bacteria and was even more powerful than streptothricin-F against drug-resistant Enterobacterales and other bacterial species. However, it caused renal toxicity at a lower dose. 

The team used cryo-electron microscopy to show that streptothricin-F bound extensively to a subunit of the bacterial ribosome. This binding causes translation errors in the bacteria, which helps antibiotics inhibit the spread of a bacterial infection.  

“It works by inhibiting the ability of the organism to produce proteins in a very sneaky way. When a cell makes proteins, they make them off a blueprint or message that tells the cell what amino acids to link together to build the protein. Our studies help explain how this antibiotic confuses the machinery so that the message is read incorrectly, and it starts to put together gibberish. Essentially the cell gets poisoned because it’s producing all this junk,” said Kirby.

The team is still trying to figure out the mechanism behind how nourseothricin works, but found that it acts differently than other antibiotics. Kirby will continue studying nourseothricin with collaborators at Northwestern University and Case Western Reserve University Medical Center to dive deeper and understand how it actually works.

“We have great collaborators that have allowed us to pursue a project that crosses multiple fields. This work is an example of collaborative science really at its best,” said Kirby. 

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Up until 100 million years ago, butterflies were night creatures. Only nocturnal moths were living on Earth until some rogue moths began to fly during the day. These enterprising members of the order Lepidoptera took advantage of the nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees by flying during the day. From there, close to 19,000 butterfly species were born.

[Related: Save caterpillars by turning off your outdoor lights.]

In 2019, a large-scale analysis of DNA helped solve the question of when they evolved. Now,  the mystery of where in the world colorful winged insects evolved plagues lepidopterists and museum curators. A study published May 15 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found that butterflies likely evolved in North and Central America, and they forged strong botanical bonds with host plants as they settled around the world.

Getting to this conclusion took a four-dimensional puzzle that makes 3D chess look like a game of Candyland. Scientists from multiple countries had to assemble a massive “butterfly tree of life” using 100 million years of natural history on their distribution and favorite plants, as well as the DNA of more than 2,000 species representing 90 percent of butterfly genera and all butterfly families. 

Within the data were 11 rare butterfly fossils that proved to be crucial pieces to the story.  Butterflies are not common in the fossil record due to their thin wings and very threadlike hair. The 11 in this study were used as calibration and comparison points on the genetic trees, so the team could record timing of key evolutionary events.

They found that butterflies first appeared somewhere in central and western North America. 100 million years ago, North America was bisected by an expansive seaway called the Western Interior Seaway. Present day Mexico was joined in an arc with the United States, Canada, and Russia. North and South America were also separated by a strait of water that butterflies had little difficulty crossing.

The study believes that butterflies took a long way around to Africa, first moving into Asia along the Bering Land Bridge. They then radiated into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and eventually the Horn of Africa. They were even able to reach India, which was an isolated island separated by miles of open sea at this time. 

[Related: The monarch butterfly is scientifically endangered. So why isn’t it legally protected yet?]

Australia was still connected to Antarctica, one of the last remnants of the supercontinent Pangaea. Butterflies possibly lived in Antarctica when global temperatures were warmer, and made their way north towards Australia before the landmasses broke up. 

Butterflies likely lingered along the western edge of Asia for up to 45 million years before making the journey into Europe. The effects of this pause are still apparent today, according to the authors. 

“Europe doesn’t have many butterfly species compared to other parts of the world, and the ones it does have can often be found elsewhere. Many butterflies in Europe are also found in Siberia and Asia, for example,” study co-author and curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History Akito Kawahara said in a statement. 

Once butterflies were established all over the world, they rapidly diversified alongside their plant hosts. Nearly all modern butterfly families were on Earth by the time dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. Each butterfly family appears to have had a special affinity for a specific group of plants.

“We looked at this association over an evolutionary timescale, and in pretty much every family of butterflies, bean plants came out to be the ancestral hosts,” Kawahara said. “This was true in the ancestor of all butterflies as well.”

Over time, bean plants have increased their roster of pollinators to include multiple types of bees, flies, hummingbirds, and mammals, while butterflies have similarly expanded their palate. These botanical partnerships helped make butterflies blossom from a minor offshoot of moths to one of the world’s largest groups of insects, according to the study.

“The evolution of butterflies and flowering plants has been inexorably intertwined since the origin of the former, and the close relationship between them has resulted in remarkable diversification events in both lineages,” study co-author and Florida Museum curator Pamela Soltis said in a statement. 

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A dark side effect of the electricity that helps society run around the clock is the pollution caused by our increasing numbers of lights at night. Light pollution can obscure stargazing, confusing sea turtles when they hatch, and also could be harming coral reefs.   

[Related: The switch to LEDs in Europe is visible from space.]

The light pollution from cities along the coast can trick the reefs into spawning outside of their optimal reproductive times, according to a study published May 15 in the journal Nature Communications.

“Corals are critical for the health of the global ocean, but are being increasingly damaged by human activity. This study shows it is not just changes in the ocean that are impacting them, but the continued development of coastal cities as we try and accommodate the growing global population,” Thomas Davies, a study co-author and conservation ecologist at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom,  said in a statement. 

The moon’s cycles trigger coral to spawn. During these spawning events, hundreds of eggs are released on certain nights of the year. These nights are critical to maintain and recover coral reefs after mass bleaching or other adverse events.

By using a combination of spawning observations and data on light pollution, an international team of researchers showed that the corals exposed to artificial light at night (ALAN) are spawning about one to three days closer to the full moon compared to reefs that are not.

If coral spawn on different nights, coral eggs are less likely to be fertilized and survive to produce adult corals. Population growth is needed now more than ever to help the population recover after disturbing events like bleaching.

The study builds on research from 2021 that mapped out the areas of the ocean that are most affected by light pollution. It found that at 3.2 feet deep, over 7 million square miles of coastal ocean are exposed to biologically important ALAN.  

“This study further emphasizes the importance of artificial light pollution as a stressor of coastal and marine ecosystems, with the impacts on various aspects of biodiversity only now being discovered and quantified,” Tim Smyth, a co-author and biogeochemist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, said in a statement. 

The team paired their new data with a global dataset representing 2,135 coral spawning observations taken over the last 23 years. They saw that ALAN is possibly advancing the triggers for spawning by creating a fake illuminance between sunset and sunrise on the nights after the full moon. 

[Related: The best ways to reduce light pollution and improve your quality of life.]

The study looked at coastal regions around the world, but the coral reefs of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf in the Middle East are particularly affected by light pollution. These coastlines have been heavily developed in recent years, putting the reefs near the shore at risk. 

“Despite the challenges posed by ALAN, corals in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba are known for their thermal tolerance and ability to withstand high temperatures. However, a disturbance in the timing of coral spawning with the moon phases can result in a decline in new coral recruits and a reduction in the coral population,” Oren Levy, co-author and marine ecologist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said in a statement. 

Some individual methods to reduce light pollution, especially for those along the coast, include removing nighttime lighting that is not necessarily needed for public safety, removing all unnecessary light even if it is just one in a backyard, and switching away from white lights to more muted red lights that are less intense.

“By implementing measures to limit light pollution, we can protect these vital habitats and safeguard the future of the world’s oceans. It’s our responsibility to ensure that we preserve the biodiversity of our planet and maintain a healthy and sustainable environment for generations to come,” said Levy.

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In an environment without light, or where sight is otherwise useless, some creatures have learned to thrive by sound. They rely on calls, clicks, and twitters to create a kind of map of their surroundings or pinpoint prey. That ability is called echolocation, and a simple way to understand how it works is to crack open the word itself. 

What is echolocation?

Imagine an echo that locates things. The sound hits an object and bounces back, relaying information about a target’s whereabouts or cues for navigation. When Harvard University zoologist Donald Griffin coined the word “echolocation” in the journal Science in 1944, he was describing how bats rely on sounds to “fly through the total darkness of caves without striking the walls or the jutting stalactites.”

In the decades since, scientists have identified many other animals that use echolocation, aka biosonar. For example, at least 16 species of birds echolocate, including swiftlets and nocturnal oilbirds, which roost deep in South America’s caves. Laura Kloepper, an expert in animal acoustics at the University of New Hampshire, calls this shared ability an example of convergent evolution, in which “you have two unrelated species evolve the same adaptive strategy.” 

How does echolocation work?

To find fish in deep waters, or avoid crashing in the inky night, whales and bats produce loud ultrasonic sounds at frequencies all the way up to 200 kilohertz. That is way beyond human hearing (most adults can’t perceive pitches above 17 kilohertz). 

[Related on PopSci+: 5 sounds not meant for the human ear]

Why do specialized echolocators use ultrasonic sound? “High-frequency sounds give really fine spatial resolution,” Kloepper explains. Hertz is a measure of the distance between each acoustic wave: The higher the hertz, the tighter the wave, and the smaller the detail captured by the vibration of energy in the air. If you were to echolocate in a room, a big, low-frequency wave might simply reflect off a wall, Kloepper says, while an echo from a higher-frequency sound could tell you where the doorway or even the knob was.

Echoes, if you know how to interpret them, are rich in information. As Kloepper explains it, when an animal with the ability hears a reflection, it examines that sound against an “internalized template” of the call it sent out. That comparison of echo versus signal can yield the distance to a target, the direction it might be traveling in, and even its material make-up.

Ultrasonic calls give another bats boost, too—they rely on next-level frequencies to find mates. Many species of moths hunted by bats have evolved ears attuned to these frequencies as a means of survival.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight?]

To make ultrasound, a bat vibrates a specialized organ in its throat called a larynx. It’s not too different from how the human voice box works, except the bat produces a much higher frequency sound. Certain bat species then release the sound from their mouths, while others screech from the snout, using an elaborate nasal structure nicknamed a nose-leaf. 

Whales

Dolphins, orcas, and other toothed whales echolocate for the same reasons as bats do: to chase down tasty prey and navigate through darkness. But these aquatic mammals emit ultrasound in a completely different way. Inside whale heads, often close to their blowholes, sit lip-like flaps. When the animals push air across the flaps, the appendages vibrate, producing clicks. “It’s just like if you inflate a balloon and let all the air out of that balloon. It makes a pbbft noise,” Kloepper says. 

The curves of dolphin skulls propel that noise into fatty structures at the front of their heads, called melons. These, in turn, efficiently transmit vibrations in seawater. The waves bounce off prey or other objects, but the whales don’t rely on external ears to hear the echo (their ear canals are plugged up with wax). Instead, the vibrations are channeled via their jawbones, where sound is received by fat-filled cavities so thin that light can pass through them. The cavities are near the whales’ inner ears, which sense the echoing clicks. The process can reveal all sorts of details: where a fish is, where it’s going, and how fast it’s swimming.

Shrews

Shrews have sensitive whiskers but poor eyesight. To supplement their senses as they explore their forest and grassy meadow habitats, they might use a coarse form of echolocation, which Sophie von Merten, a mammalogist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, calls “echo-orientation” or “echo-navigation.” This ability could “give them a hint that there is an obstacle coming,” she says, such as a fallen branch detected by the shrews’ twitters. Their bird-like sounds are faint, but audible to humans. 

The extent of shrew echo-navigation isn’t entirely clear. In a 2020 “experiment, von Merten and a colleague found that, when shrews are introduced to new environments, the wee mammals twitter more frequently. Von Merten says it’s likely they are sensing the unfamiliar location by these vocalizations, but another interpretation could be that the captive animals are stressed. That’s a hypothesis she doesn’t find very convincing, though her ongoing research will measure shrew stress, too.

Could there be other undiscovered creatures out there that echolocate? “I think it’s very likely,” Kloepper says. She adds that it’s hard to tell which animals beyond mammals and birds display the behavior, given “just how little we know about vocalizations of many cryptic species.”

Humans

Unlike bats, people aren’t born with the innate power of echolocation—but we can still make it work. In his original 1944 paper, Griffin discussed a, such as captains listening for echoes of ship horns against cliff faces, or those who are blind following the taps of their canes. 

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Video games are back in a big way. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most anticipated games this year, sure to draw in hardcore players and casual fans alike. From the trailers and teasers, you can see how Tears of the Kingdom will feature ways to make flying machines and manipulate time. It’s a natural question, then, to wonder how Zelda’s laws of nature line up with real-world physics.

In one of the trailers, Link takes flight on a paraglider, dropping from any height and exploring ravines and chasms at speeds that could kill a human in real-life. Like its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom offers an immersive, somewhat realistic world that still incorporates plenty of magical and superhuman abilities. Game developers say that this bending of the rules that we know adds to the game’s overall level of fun and to the player’s enjoyment.

Charles Pratt, assistant arts professor at NYU Game Center, who has used physics when developing games, says that the reason why the fantastical elements of Zelda still work is because they “follow people’s intuitions about physics” and use their understanding of real-life rules as a jumping off point.

“Gravity isn’t exactly gravity, right?” Pratt says. “Gravity gets applied in certain cases, and not in others to make it feel like you’re bounding through the air. Because jumping is really fun.”

Breath of Wild, which came out in 2017, was a smash hit. It sold 29.81 million copies and shaped a whole generation of video games, pushing developers to make more open-world titles—and arguably influencing Pokémon to open up its borders and feature a wild area for players to ride around and explore.

Aspects of Link’s world line up with the Earth that we inhabit and recognize, and, like our reality, it follows the basic rules of physics. The first Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild game follows the same natural laws as Tears. The general force of gravity still exist. Projectile objects fly on a curved trajectory and need to be aimed with skill to hit their targets. Items lose durability and break over time.

[Related: Marvel’s Spider-Man PS4 game twists physics to make web-swinging super fun]

Breath of the Wild also played around with the elements. Metal objects conduct electricity and attract lightning during a storm. Link took damage when entering a cold environment without wearing the right clothes. And setting enemies on fire deals them damage over time, and opens up the possibility of setting the nearby area on fire.

“If you drop a stone, it falls, and if you drop a piece of wood in water, it floats, but unlike the real world, it looks like you will have access to jetpacks and magical objects that our world doesn’t,” says Lasse Astrup, lead designer on the new Apple Arcade game What the Car?, which features its own unusual physics, in which players can drive cars that have multiple human legs or propel into the sky as rockets. Astrup, who is no stranger to exploring physics in video games, says he plans to buy the new Zelda game and spend days playing it—and then seeing what kinds of creations other gamers come up with.

Using weird physics games—whether it’s in Zelda games or one of Astrup’s creations—adds more fun to the titles, Astrup says. “You never have full control over what happens in the scene or which way a thing flies when it explodes,” he says. “This allows for emergent gameplay where players can explore and find their own solutions.”

Other ways that Tears of the Kingdom defies our laws of physics include how Link can stand on a fast-accelerating platform without falling over, when a regular human in our world would have been knocked over by the accelerating force.

Lindley Winslow, an experimental nuclear and particle physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that, based on the trailer, “It continues to be a beautifully coded game. The details are what make it compelling, the movement of the grass, the air moving off the paraglider.”

[Related: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla avoids Dark Age cliches thanks to intense research (and Google Earth)]

Winslow adds, “The power comes from the fact that the physics are correct until it is fantastical. This allows us to immerse ourselves in the world and believe in the fantastical. My favorite is the floating islands.” Magic also exists in Tears of the Kingdom: Link can use his extraordinary powers to stop time, use magnets, and lift extremely heavy objects.

Alex Rose, an indie game developer who is also a physics programmer and lecturer at the University of Applied Science Vienna, points out that there’s plenty of accurate physics in Tears of the Kingdom, too. Link’s terminal velocity drops after he spreads out his body slows even further when he releases his parachute. 

Tears of the Kingdom introduces a system to concoct fanciful machines: platforms lifted into the air by balloons and jetpack-like rockets affixed to Link’s shield. In our world, a person riding a platform would get sent flying by inertia when the vehicle they were riding turned the corner quickly. But Link, being a video game character, is able to stay on the platform, even during quick turns, Rose notes. He’s also somehow able to sling around an arm rocket without losing his limbs.

“In the real world, even the best gymnast would be sent flying to the ground,” Rose says, “like an old firecracker stunt from a certain MTV show.”

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This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first human hopping aboard a hot air balloon. But Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier only hovered about 85 feet above the ground, so it’s safe to say he would be stunned at what his country’s modern denizens are planning. As CNN reported on Thursday, a French company called Zephalto aims to begin “edge of space” hot air balloon tourist sojourns as early as next year—for $130,000 a seat.

After ponying up the hefty price tag, passengers will board Zephalto’s pressurized capsule, Celeste, which is attached to a massive, helium-filled stratospheric balloon. Over the course of roughly ninety minutes, the balloon will ascend at 4 meters per second to an altitude of 25 kilometers (about 15.5 miles). Once at the edge of space, tourists will enjoy a fancy meal during their three-hour hover time in front of 7-square-meter window views of the Earth’s curvature before descending back down to terra firma.

[Related: How will NASA keep up with space tourism?]

Other high-profile space tourism ventures such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic travel much higher than the capabilities of even a high-end hot air balloon such as Zephalto’s. In July 2021, Virgin Galactic’s founder, Richard Branson, soared 86 km above Earth. Just one week later, Blue Origin took its co-founder and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos above the Karman Line, the internationally recognized (if somewhat disputed) boundary for outer space.

Unlike those high-profile space tourism ventures, however, Zephalto bills itself as being a much more eco-friendly alternative. According to its official description page, only 26.6 kg of CO2 are purportedly needed for a single journey—the lowest amount required for a space flight, says the company, or akin to “as little as the production of a pair of denim trousers.” By comparison, a single suborbital rocket launch can put out as much as 300 tons of CO2 into the upper atmosphere during its journey.

[Related: Blue Origin brought the first official tourists to space.]

As reservations quickly fill for the trips—Zephalto told CNN it’s already booked out until mid-2025. The company’s founder recently explained they were working closely with France’s space agency, CNES, alongside partners at Airbus to ensure all safety and logistical regulations are met. Once in full swing, Zephalto aims to launch as many as 60 flights per year, each with six passengers alongside two pilots.

And if the six-hour-total journey and fancy meal aren’t enough to sell you on a $130,000 ticket, Zephalto says it’s throwing in complementary psychological counseling ahead of the outing to help deal with what’s known as the “overview effect,” the existential weight that reportedly comes from viewing the entirety of Earth from high above its surface.

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It turns out that Saturn’s signature rings are a relatively new accessory. A study published May 12 in the journal Science Advances found that the planet’s colorful rings are no more than 400 million years old, while Saturn itself is about 4.5 billion years old.

[Related: Hubble telescope spies Saturn’s rings in ‘spoke season.’]

Saturn’s rings have captivated astronomers for over four centuries. In 1610, famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei first observed the rings using a telescope, but he did not know what they were. By the 19th century, a Scottish scientist named James Clerk Maxwell concluded that the rings couldn’t be solid, but were actually made up of many individual pieces. 

Throughout the 20th century, it was assumed that the rings came about at the same time as Saturn. This raised some questions, particularly why the rings were sparkling clean. To figure out why, the team on this study looked closely at an object that annoys allergy sufferers and neatniks alike–dust. Tiny grains of rocky material constantly wash through the solar system and this flux of material can leave behind a thin layer of dust on planetary bodies– including Saturn’s icy rings. Like running your finger along the dusty surface of an old house, the team used these dust layers to see how quickly the layer builds on Saturn’s rings.

“Think about the rings like the carpet in your house,” study co-author and physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder Sascha Kempfsaid Kempf said in a statement. “If you have a clean carpet laid out, you just have to wait. Dust will settle on your carpet. The same is true for the rings.”

From 2004 to 2017, the team used an instrument aboard NASA’s late Cassini spacecraft called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer. The bucket-shaped Cosmic Dust Analyzer scooped up small particles as they whizzed by. 

The team collected 163 grains over 13 years that had all originated from beyond Saturn’s close neighborhood. Using the grains, they calculated that Saturn’s rings have likely been gathering dust in space for only a few hundred million years–making them relatively new in space terms. 

[Related: NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.]

“We know approximately how old the rings are, but it doesn’t solve any of our other problems,” Kempf said. “We still don’t know how these rings formed in the first place.”

The team estimated that this interplanetary grime would add far less than a single gram of dust to each square foot on Saturn’s rings every year. This is not a lot of dust, but would still add up over millions of years. 

Scientists now know that the seven rings are made of countless ice chunks, most of which are about the size of a boulder. The ice of the rings weighs about half as much as Saturn’s moon Mimas and stretches close to 175,000 miles from the planet’s surface. 

Future studies into the space dust could reveal more about planetary age, thanks to a more sophisticated dust analyzer that will be aboard NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission. This mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024 and will explore Jupiter’s moon Europa and if this icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life.

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After an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs struck the Earth, the prehistoric giants lost their dominion over the planet. The mammals that rose up about 66 million years ago during the Eocene Epoch had some big shoes to fill—and they certainly grew into the challenge over time.

[Related: We’re one step closer to identifying the first-ever mammals.]

In a study published May 11 in the journal Science, found that a family of extinct rhinoceros-like herbivores called brontotheres began their time on Earth about the size of a dog, but evolved to reach elephant size over a relatively short amount of time. Brontotheres also may have not reached its full size potential before it went extinct roughly 34 million years ago due to changes in their environment.

With the dinosaurs gone at the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago), the mammals of the world had significantly less competition for resources, and scientists believe this led to their success as a family. Brontotheres was one of the biggest winners among mammals, and grew from about coyote-sized, 40 pound creatures into 2,000 pound goliaths. According to the study, they did this over a period of only 16 million years, which is very quick in evolutionary terms.

Brontothere means “thunder beasts,” and their powerful name was inspired by Lakota oral histories of violent thunderstorms accompanied by giants, according to the National Park Service.The animals lived in Asia, Europe, and North America. Most species weighed over a ton, but the biggest roamed what is now the South Dakota Badlands. These giants clocked in at about 8 feet tall and 16 feet long. They are the relatives of modern tapirs, horses, and rhinos, and were equipped with Y-shaped horns on their noses. 

The team of researchers on this brontothere size evolution study peered back at the evidence from the family’s fossil record and a family tree of 276 known brontothere individuals. They were fortunate that the fossil record shows most of their evolutionary record, and the team generated computer models to track how the genetic traits of different brontothere species changed. 

They also conducted phylogenetic analysis, or an evaluation of the evolutionary avenues that causes a new species to take shape. This helped them determine how such evolutionary changes may be linked or connected to their increase in body size. 

The data showed that body size actually evolved in both directions across brontothere species. Some would evolve bigger, while other times a species would evolve smaller. They found that the smaller species were more prone to extinction compared to their bigger cousins, and a trend of bulkier brontotheres persisted longer than the smaller species emerged.  

[Related from PopSci+: An ancient era of global warming could hint at our scorching future.]

Towards the end of the Eocene, the remaining brontotheres were true thunder beasts. Their status as megaherbivores likely benefited the beasts, with the smaller animals being more vulnerable to become a carnivore’s dinner. Competition from other big and small herbivores could hardly stand up to the beasts, according to the study.

Unfortunately, at this same time, the climate drastically changed from a more humid herbivore’s paradise to something much more dry. The brontotheres thus lost their evolutionary advantages when the previously lush and green ecosystem dried up. They eventually went extinct about 34 million years ago.

Further research into this family could model the ecological factors like ancient climate shifts that affected how much edible vegetation covered the planet and how it led to the demise of these megaherbivores.

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For more than 22 years, astronauts and cosmonauts have continuously inhabited the International Space Station, making the orbital laboratory the longest flying spacecraft ever. But it’s an achievement that would be impossible if not for an earlier space station, NASA’s Skylab, launched 50 years ago on May 14, 1973. 

Born out of the disappointment and leftovers over the canceled Apollo moon missions, Skylab never captured the public imagination the way the space race had during the decade prior. But the mission was crucial to all human spaceflight that came after, teaching NASA valuable lessons about how to build spacecraft safe for long-term habitation, and how to design missions around the humans that would fly them. 

“Every corner of the ISS has a lesson that’s grounded in Skylab,” says NASA’s Chief Historian Brian Odom. “Skylab is the turning point where humanity says, ‘We’re going to become a species that lives off of Earth for long periods of time.” 

Moonshots and space stations

NASA had always wanted a space station. The plan, according to Odom, was to learn to get off Earth with Project Mercury—in which Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space—then to rendezvous and dock in orbit with Gemini, and “the next stop from that would be to build a space station,” he says. That space station would be the waypoint from which humans could venture farther out to the moon, and later to Mars. 

But everything changed with President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech announcing a race against the Soviet Union to land on the moon.

“Some people talk about Apollo as leapfrogging what was expected, as the natural process or the natural progression in spaceflight,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian curator of the Apollo collection at the National Air and Space Museum. “Instead of building a space station, we went right to the moon.”

Immense amounts of money and political capital were spent so Americans got to the moon first. But public support—and congressional funding—began to wane almost immediately after the July 20, 1969, Moon landing. Apollo missions 18, 19 and 20 were canceled by 1971, and the crew of Apollo 17 would be the last humans to touch the moon for decades to come. 

The idea for Skylab originated in 1965, when NASA budgets were plump. The agency decided the program could go forward even after money tightened up, in part because the satellite would use existing Apollo infrastructure. A Saturn V rocket, originally intended to launch the Apollo 12 mission, could place Skylab in orbit. And the space station itself would be constructed out of a rocket’s third stage. 

“It was a really ingenious and practical approach to creating a space station,” Muir-Harmony says. 

[Related: A brief history of space stations before the ISS]

The architecture of Skylab wasn’t the only creative use of materials. During the May 14 launch, Skylab’s micrometeorite shield, which also functioned as a sun shade, was shorn off, leaving the newly orbital space station to roast in the direct sunlight. NASA’s “Mr. Fix It,” Jack Kinzler, officially the chief of the Technical Services Center at Johnson Space Center, used telescoping fishing rods to develop a prototype parasol-like sunshield astronauts could deploy through an airlock on Skylab. They did this in just six days, saving the space station. It was one of the first important lessons of Skylab, according to Odom. 

“It’s one of these remarkable moments that teaches us that you can respond in a crisis” Odom says. 

The lessons of Skylab 

Skylab hosted three crews from 1973 through 1974. The Skylab I crew flew for 28 days, while the Skylab II mission lasted 59 days. 

But Skylab 3, the third and final crew to fly aboard the space station, lasted 84 days, launching on November 16, 1973 and returning to Earth on February 8, 1974. 

This was a huge deal at the time. Later NASA astronauts, such as Scott Kelly and Peggy Whitson, would work for hundreds of days aboard the ISS, but in 1973, no one knew if humans could actually live in space for such a period. The Skylab III crew’s stay was longer “than all of earlier spaceflight combined,” Odom says. 

Skylab affirmatively answered the question of whether humans could endure long-term spaceflight, but it also made clear there were costs. 

“They noticed increased calcium in the urine of the astronauts, tied to bone loss,” Muir-Harmony says, which highlighted the importance of movement while in space. Exercise is now considered a key part of an ISS astronaut’s schedule. 

Skylab also identified small quality-of-life changes that could make orbit more comfortable, such as the cuisine. “The food was generally considered a bit too bland,” Muir-Harmony says. “Your ability to taste is limited by how the fluid in your body blocks your nasal cavity [in microgravity], so it’s important to have more flavorful food in space.” 

And Skylab’s supposedly water-tight microgravity shower, a cylindrical tent-like contraption, will likely be the last shower on a space station, according to Muir-Harmony. “It didn’t work all that well,” she says. “That was an important lesson to learn, that it was better to use wet wipes as opposed to trying to shower in space.” 

Another lasting lesson was that all the clever engineering in the world won’t help you if you don’t pay attention to your crew’s human needs. The Skylab III crew nearly burned out, with barely any time between tasks or to rest, forcing NASA to reassess their work schedule. “You can’t task people with just working themselves full on and then falling asleep, sleeping eight hours, waking up, and immediately going back to work,” Odom says. “They learned those lessons the hard way on Skylab by putting people to some degree through the wringer.”

[Related: 11 of NASA’s most out-of-this-world illustrations]

Skylab’s final teaching might be the most important for anyone operating in space today, particularly as the number of satellites and other spacecraft in low Earth orbit increase. Unlike the ISS, Skylab was not equipped with thrusters. It could not manage its own altitude, because it was assumed that the Space Shuttle would be operational by 1977 and could boost the station higher when necessary. But the development program dragged, and the first shuttle didn’t fly until 1981. With Skylab’s orbit degrading, NASA decided to allow the station to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on July 11, 1979, hoping the station would burn up over the Indian Ocean. Pieces of debris ended up scattered over parts of Western Australia, though no one was hurt. 

The NASA of today would consider such a reentry reckless. It’s a problem, Odom says, if you don’t know exactly where your spacecraft is going to come down. “NASA has definitely learned that lesson from 1979, in a big way.”

Skylab’s enduring legacy

Without regular rides to space, Skylab crews had only what they brought with them. Astronauts flying aboard the ISS today face fewer constraints than Skylab crews did. The ISS recycles most of its water, for instance, and regular cargo resupply missions deliver food to the astronauts there. There are now exercise facilities and more thoughtfully planned out work schedules. 

“Skylab was just a massive step forward from what anyone had experienced before,” Odom says. “Somebody’s got to be the pioneer and put the risk on. And Skylab was all about risk.”

The ISS has hosted astronauts for more than 350 days at a time—a remarkable achievement, and one that would not be possible without Skylab’s experience. 

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It’s been just about 20 years since Finding Nemo was released in theaters and the lost “little clownfish from the reef” swam his way into our hearts. However, there is way more to coral reef fish than their beautiful scales and fictional tales. 

[Related: This rainbow reef fish is just as magical as it looks.]

A study published May 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology found that some of the fish that live in anemones and reefs go through intense physiological changes when they switch from speedy swimming in the open ocean as larvae to settling down to life on the reef.  

Nemo and his young sea turtle pal named Squirt may have had a bit more in common than their age. Like sea turtles, many coral reef fish spawn away from where the animals will eventually settle and live. Adult coral reef fish spawn their larvae in the open ocean and the larvae swim against strong currents to get back to the reef where they will live as adults. Other bottom dwelling marine organisms like sea stars, corals, and urchins also follow this pattern. 

“These first weeks of life can be the most vulnerable for coral reef fishes, and if they don’t make it, that means they cannot grow up to be healthy adults and contribute to coral reef ecosystems,” co-author and James Cook University marine biologist Jodie L. Rummer told PopSci.

All of this swimming demands a lot of energy from the tiny fish, but then once they are settled on the reef floor, they must drastically switch gears and survive in a low-oxygen, or hypoxic, environment at night. 

To learn more about how this adjustment  works, the team collected daily measurements of the cinnamon anemonefish (Amphiprion melanopus) larvae’s swimming speed, oxygen update, and hypoxia tolerance. They observed them in a laboratory setting from the time that they hatched until when they settled down, usually around day nine of life.

“Coral reef fishes, including anemonefishes, as larvae are swimming among the fastest relative to their body size,” study co-author Adam Downie told PopSci. Downie is currently an animal physiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and conducted the research as part of his PhD at James Cook University. “In our study, maximum speeds were over 12 centimeters [4.7 inches] per second, but for a fish that is the size of your pinky finger nail, that is 10-12 body lengths per second. Comparatively, relative to their size, larval coral reef fishes, including clownfish, outcompete most other marine life in a swimming test and all humans!”

Additionally, they saw that their hypoxia tolerance in the fish increased around day five while their oxygen intake decreased. To investigate how their bodies cope with these lack of oxygen, they sequenced mRNA from larvae of different ages to look for changes in gene activity that occurs during development. These physiological changes were correlated to areas of the gene where hemoglobin are produced and the activity of 2,470 genes changed during development.

[Related: Invasive rats are making some reef fish more peaceful, and that’s bad, actually.]

“These baby fish can change the expression patterns of certain genes that code for oxygen transporting and storage proteins just in time to cope with such low oxygen conditions on the reef,” said Rummer. “These proteins, like hemoglobin and myoglobin, are found in our bodies too and are important in getting oxygen from the environment and delivering it to the muscles, heart, and other organs. Indeed, timing is everything!”

The study found that relative to their body size, cinnamon anemonefish (also called cinnamon clownfish) larvae have the highest oxygen uptake rate of any bony fish currently measured. The genetic changes they can make to take in more oxygen underpin how reef fish can swim at speeds that would make even the most decorated Olympians envious. According to Downie, some studies have clocked clownfish at up to 50 body lengths per second, compared with Michael Phelps’ just under two body lengths per second. 

Since the effects of climate change threatens all marine life, the team believes that warmer ocean temperatures could impair clownfish swimming since the energy demands are so high. The warming waters put reef ecosystems at even more risk, in addition to coral bleaching, ocean acidification, disease, and more. 

“Next steps would be to see how different climate change stressors, such as temperature and pollutants may impact swimming performance of larval clownfishes and their ability to successfully transition from the open ocean to coral reefs,” said Downie. 

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An experimental “peanut patch” is showing some promise for toddlers who are highly allergic to peanuts. The patch, called Viaskin, was tested on children ages one to three for a late-stage trial, and the results show that the patch helped children whose bodies could not tolerate even a small piece of peanuts safely eat a few. The findings were published May 10 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

[Related: Feeding Peanuts To High-Risk Infants Could Prevent Allergy Development.]

Peanut allergies are a common and dangerous food allergy that affects about 2.5 percent of children in the United States. In children with allergies, their immune system overreacts to peanut-containing foods, which triggers everything from hives, to wheezing, to airway obstruction that can lead children hospitalized or worse. About 20 percent of these children will outgrow the allergy over time, but the majority must avoid peanuts for the rest of their lives. Additionally, they must carry rescue medication in the form of an injectable epinephrine divide like an EpiPen to prevent a severe allergic reaction if peanuts are accidentally eaten.

Peanut products and traces of peanuts can be found in a surprising number of foods: from candies to dipping sauces to ice cream. There is currently no cure for such an allergy. The only treatment is a peanut powder that protects against a severe reaction in children over 4 years-old. First approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2020, the “oral immunotherapy” called Palforzia is consumed daily by children ages four to 17 to keep up their protection. It is now being tested in children under age four. 

France’s DBV Technologies, makers of the new patch, is pursuing this skin-based immunotherapy treatment as an alternative way to desensitize the body and on younger children. 

The trial of this new patch included 362 toddlers from eight countries. 244 of them were randomly assigned to receive the Viaskin patch. The patch contains 250 micrograms of peanut protein which is the equivalent of roughly 1/1000th of one peanut. 118 children received a placebo patch. They wore the patches every day for a year before undergoing screening.

After one year, two-thirds of the children who used the patch and one-third of the placebo group met the trial’s primary endpoint. The participants with a less sensitive peanut allergy could safely tolerate the peanut protein equivalent of eating three or four peanuts. Children who were more sensitive to peanut proteins could tolerate the equivalent of consuming one peanut.

If more patch testing works out, “this would fill a huge unmet need,” Matthew Greenhawt, an allergist at Children’s Hospital Colorado who helped lead the study told the Associated Press. 

[Related: I hardly ever use my Nima allergen sensor. I’m still glad I bought it.]

Almost all of the participants did have some adverse events, most commonly reactions at the application site like swelling, itching, and redness. Serious events were reported in 21 children who had the Viaskin patch and three that were in the placebo group. Anaphylaxis–a very dangerous allergic reaction–was reported in 7.8 percent of the patch recipients and 3.4 percent of the placebo group. The parents of eight participants pulled their children from the study due to the adverse events. 

The study does have several limitations including that young children with a history of severe allergic reactions were excluded due to safety concerns. Additionally, there was a lack of racial diversity among the study’s participants.

“Peanut allergy can be very substantially reduced if peanut is introduced into the diet as early as 4 to 6 months of age,” Alkis Togias of the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wrote in an editorial published alongside the study. “Toddlers are of particular interest since their immune systems have plasticity that can theoretically allow for higher efficacy and longer-lasting benefits from allergen immunotherapy after therapy is discontinued.”

Togias also cited that skin patches may be less protective, but have a better safety profile compared to an oral medication, but still said that the findings, “are very good news for toddlers and their families as the next step toward a future with more treatments for food allergies.”

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Sadly, vitamins and supplements will not really keep the mosquitoes from biting you this summer, but scientists are still trying to figure out why the insects seem to love sucking some blood more than others.

[Related: How can we control mosquitos? Deactivate their sperm.]

In a small study published May 10 in the journal iScience, a team of researchers looked at the possible effects that soap has on mosquitoes. While some soaps did appear to repel the bugs and others attracted them, the effects varied greatly based on how the soap interacts with an individual’s unique odor profile.

“It’s remarkable that the same individual that is extremely attractive to mosquitoes when they are unwashed can be turned even more attractive to mosquitoes with one soap, and then become repellent or repulsive to mosquitoes with another soap,” co-author and Virginia Tech neuroethologist Clément Vinauger said in a statement.

Soaps and other stink-reducing products have been used for millennia, and while we know that they change our perception of another person’s natural body odor, it is less clear if soap also acts this way for mosquitoes. Since mosquitoes mainly feed on plant nectar and not animal blood alone, using plant-mimicking or plant-derived scents may confuse their decision making on what to feast on next.  

In the study, the team began by characterizing the chemical odors emitted by four human volunteers when unwashed and then after they had washed with four common brands of soap (Dial, Dove, Native, and Simple Truth). The odor profiles of the soaps themselves were also characterized. 

They found that each of the volunteers emitted their own unique odor profile and some of those odor profiles were more attractive to mosquitoes than others. The soap significantly changed the odor profiles, not just by adding some floral fragrances. 

“Everybody smells different, even after the application of soap; your physiological status, the way you live, what you eat, and the places you go all affect the way you smell,” co author and Virginia Tech biologist Chloé Lahondère said in a statement. “And soaps drastically change the way we smell, not only by adding chemicals, but also by causing variations in the emission of compounds that we are already naturally producing.”

The researchers then compared the relative attractiveness of each human volunteer–unwashed and an hour after using the four soaps–to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. These mosquitoes are known to spread yellow fever, malaria, and Zika among other diseases. After mating, male mosquitoes feed mostly on nectar and females feed exclusively on blood, so the team exclusively tested the attractiveness using adult female mosquitoes who had recently mated. They also took out the effects of exhaled carbon dioxide by using fabrics that had absorbed the human’s odors instead of on the breathing humans themselves.   

[Related from PopSci+: Can a bold new plan to stop mosquitoes catch on?]

They found that soap-washing did impact the mosquitoes’ preferences, but the size and direction of this impact varied between the types of soap and humans. Washing with Dove and Simple Truth increased the attractiveness of some, but not all of the volunteers, and washing with Native soap tended to repel mosquitoes.

“What really matters to the mosquito is not the most abundant chemical, but rather the specific associations and combinations of chemicals, not only from the soap, but also from our personal body odors,” said Vinauger. “All of the soaps contained a chemical called limonene which is a known mosquito repellent, but in spite of that being the main chemical in all four soaps, three out of the four soaps we tested increased mosquitoes’ attraction.”

To look closer at the specific soap ingredients that could be attracting or repelling the insects, they analyzed the chemical compositions of the soaps. They identified four chemicals associated with mosquito attraction and three chemicals associated with repulsion. Two of the mosquito-repellers are a coconut-scented chemical that is a key component in American Bourbon and a floral compound that is used to treat scabies and lice. They combined these chemicals to test attractive and repellent odor blends and this concoction had strong impacts on mosquito preference.

“With these mixtures, we eliminated all the noise in the signal by only including those chemicals that the statistics were telling us are important for attraction or repulsion,” said Vinauger. “I would choose a coconut-scented soap if I wanted to reduce mosquito attraction.”

The team hopes to test these results using more varieties of soap and more people and explore how soap impacts mosquito preference over a longer period of time. 

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When the Human Genome Project launched in 1990, it was hailed as one of the greatest scientific endeavors of all time. The 13-year project identified about 20,000 genes and gave researchers a genetic blueprint to transform modern medicine. Doctors can now use genetic information to better diagnose diseases and debilitating conditions, such as linking a rare case of leg pain to a single mutation. The research also ushered in hope for an age of precision medicine, where every treatment would be tailored to the individual. There was only one problem—the work wasn’t really finished.

That’s because humans are 99.9 percent identical. But the 0.1 percent in genetic differences explains our uniqueness, and can also account for why some people are more susceptible to disease. Having one map of a single genome, which the 90s-era project produced, does not adequately represent the breadth of the human population.

An international study published today in Nature is filling in these gaps by analyzing a much more diverse set of genetic sequences. “We’re retooling the foundation of genomics to create a diverse and inclusive representation of human variation as the fundamental reference structure,” says senior study author Benedict Paten, an associate director at the University of California, Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. 

[Related: The benchmark for human diversity is based on one man’s genome. A new tool could change that.]

By eliminating bias and analyzing more inclusive genomic data, geneticists will have a better understanding of how mutations affect a person’s genes and move us closer to a future with equitable healthcare. 

What is a pangenome?

The research focused on creating a pangenome—a collection of DNA sequences within a single species. Past work focused on a reference genome, built from a few individuals, that was supposed to represent a broader set of genes. A pangenome, on the other hand, is created from multiple people worldwide to more accurately reflect our genetic diversity. 

It’s not as though past geneticists did not want to sequence more genetic variations—they just couldn’t. Erich Jarvis, a genetic professor at Rockefeller University Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a co-author of the study, says technology in the 90s and early 2000s did not allow researchers to see large variations between haplotypes—groups of genes inherited together from a single parent—within and across individuals. 

The focus of a pangenome is to study the genetic differences among individuals from across the world. Jarvis says knowing about genomic variations is important, because some mutations are associated with different traits and diseases. For example, the lipoprotein (a) gene has a complex structure that has not been sequenced in humans. But variations in the gene are known to be associated with an increased risk of heart disease among Black people. By sequencing the entire gene and understanding its variations, doctors may be able to revisit and treat previously unexplained cases of coronary heart disease.

“This paper helps us to understand that DNA [is] more than a sequence of letters; DNA is structurally organized, and human variation that structure is important for genomic function and trait diversity,” says Sarah Fong, a postdoctoral scholar studying human population variation at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study.

What does the first draft reveal?

The authors collected data on 47 genetically diverse individuals. About half came from Africa, with the others representing four other continents (excluding Australia and Antarctica). The genomic information added information on 119 million base pairs and 1,115 duplications—mutations where a portion of DNA on a gene is repeated. As expected, more than 99 percent of the genetic sequences were similar across individuals. But by including the less than one percent of variations in this new pangenome draft, the authors found that structural changes to genes explained 90 million of the identified base pairs. 

[Related: What we might learn about embryos and evolution from the most complete human genome map yet]

“By moving beyond a single, arbitrary, and linear representation of the genome, the work by the Pangenome Reference Consortium more accurately describes the diversity that exists in our species,” says Rajiv McCoy, an assistant professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the current study but was recently involved in the first complete sequencing of the human genome.

With the latest pangenome model, it may become easier for geneticists to detect and characterize hard-to-find genetic mutations. When the authors analyzed a separate set of genetic information using the pangenome draft as a reference, they detected 104 percent more structural variants. They also improved the accuracy of the comparison sequence, reducing the  variant error rate by 34 percent.

Still a work in progress

Creating the first draft of the pangenome is only phase one of this two-part project. The second phase will take a couple of years, as the authors build collaborations among other international researchers and perform community outreach in areas where there is less genomic data, such as including members of indigenous cultures.

It might take decades before we see the drafts finalized into a complete picture of the human genome. There are several challenges to address, Fong says, such as the development of an efficient strategy to compare multiple human genomes and a concrete plan for testing for genetic variations in the medical field.

Still, Fong says the benefits will be worth the effort. Having complete, diverse human genomes will advance the way genetics is studied, and create a future where people’s genes are more fully considered when treating diseases.

The post What is a pangenome? Scientists just released their first draft. appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: A bunch of 18th-century dudes hung out in very hot rooms together in the name of science 

By Rachel Feltman

This story comes from a paper I read about in the Public Domain Review called “Experiments and Observations in a Heated Room,” circa 1774, which sounds like the name of a one-act play, and frankly should have been turned into one. 

The paper, by British physician and scientist Charles Blagden, recounts his experience being invited to the home of the scientist George Fordyce to see the man’s very very hot rooms. 

Fordyce had constructed a series of sealed rooms that were basically saunas, with pipes radiating heat into them and thermometers mounted on the walls. According to Blagden’s paper—and the sequel he published in 1775—he and several other gentlemen worked with Fordyce to test the limits of the human body with regard to heat. 

They started out in a 100 degree Fahrenheit room, which is not particularly impressive. But by the time they finished their second bout of experiments in 1775, they’d worked their way up to 260 degrees.

They made a lot of observations that might seem obvious now. They noticed that, at those higher temperatures, it was actually more comfortable to have clothing on than to be naked, since the heat scorched the skin much more quickly than it actually raised core body temperature. Blagden also noted that they could tolerate higher heat in dryer rooms, and correctly surmised that this was because water carried the heat to the body more efficiently than air, and that sweating—which is more effective when the air has more room to take up moisture and evaporate your sweat—was the key to the body’s heat-destroying powers. He was one of the first western scientists to make this connection, though it’s reasonable to assume that people living in hotter climates had probably figured this out by necessity. Keep in mind that the first thermometers designed to measure human temperature only showed up in the 1600s, and they wouldn’t be part of standard clinical medicine until the 1800s. 

But it is worth pointing out that they were being a bit obtuse about the temperatures previously endured by humankind. In his initial paper, Blagden actually made reference to “the experiments of M. Tillet,”—the botanist and metalworker Mathieu Tillet. In 1760, while trying to figure out how to heat grain enough to kill pests without wrecking the crop, Tillet ran into trouble with his data. He was using a thermometer attached to a long shovel to get the exact temperature inside the sugar-baking ovens he was using, but the temperature went down in the time it took to take it out. The girl tending the oven offered to just walk in and mark the level of the thermometer with a pencil, and told the scientist, at least according to his notes, that she “felt no inconvenience” in the 288 degree furnace. He and his colleague proceeded to basically goof off with a bunch of random items in the oven to see how the heat affected them. Blagden notes that the maid in question endured temperatures of 280 degrees for upwards of 10 minutes, and basically seems to be saying that he thinks girls who work by hot stoves probably get used to working by hot stoves, seemingly as a nod to the very obvious reality that he and his friends did not actually find and test the upper limits of human heat endurance. 

We now know that Blagden was very correct about the importance of moisture in the air: The more humid it is, the less heat we can take before our bodies start breaking down, because we’re not able to dump heat back into the air by way of evaporating sweat. A forecast of 120 degrees in death valley can be as physiologically tolerable as a sub-90 degree day in a swampy area. 

When you see weather reports refer to the “wet bulb” temperature, that’s a measurement of the combo of heat and humidity. Once it gets to 95 F wet bulb, give or take a couple degrees, we’re in trouble. At 100 percent humidity, we can only handle temperatures up to 87 degrees. 

On a lighter note, here’s a quick aside about the guy who built the hot rooms, who was memorialized in a local restaurant guide in the early 1800s for his absolutely bananas diet. 

FACT: When whales die, they create entire cities

By Sabrina Imbler

In 1987, a submersible scanning the seafloor of the Santa Catalina Basin detected something unusually large, 1,240 meters below the surface of the sea. It was a 65-foot-long whale skeleton. The whale had been dead for years, but its remains had become a thriving community on the seafloor, feeding clams, mussels, limpets and snails.

A natural burial for a whale—dying in the ocean and sinking to the seafloor—is called a whale fall. Ecosystems this deep are food limited, and many creatures rely on the constant drizzle of decaying flesh, poop, dust, and snot called marine snow to survive. But a whale fall is like a spontaneous deep-sea banquet that can sustain entire communities for years. Scientists estimate one whale fall is the equivalent of a thousand years of marine snow.

Whale falls are devoured in multiple stages. First, mobile scavengers like sleeper sharks, hagfish, and isopods travel long distances to feast on the carcass. This stage can last for several years until all the soft tissue is chewed away. The next stage is called the enrichment-opportunist stage, where worms, crustaceans, and bacteria feast on the whale nutrients sunken into the surrounding sand. The third, sulfophilic stage, can last for decades. Here, bone-eating Osedax worms and sulfur-oxidizing bacteria break down the fat inside whale bones. The fourth and final stage of a whale fall is called the reef stage, can last somewhat indefinitely. Now, the whale has become hard substrate, where suspension feeders like anemones and sponges can latch on and grow.

Whale falls were much more abundant hundreds of years ago, before whale populations drastically diminished the number of whales sinking to the seafloor. This has likely led to a ripple of extinctions in species that specialize on whale falls and rely on these carcasses to complete their life cycles. One whale researcher suggests about a third of whale fall specialists may have already gone extinct in the North Atlantic, where whaling reduced populations by about 75 percent. It’s only fitting that a creature this awe-inspiring in life would also be so consequential in death.

FACT: Neanderthals couldn’t smell just how stinky they were

By Sara Kiley Watson

You probably have a unique aroma that you can’t smell at all. And in your brain, it’s not that you don’t stink—it’s that you’re so used to your own stink that it doesn’t phase you anymore. In fact your own odor is comfortingly kinda familiar. After all, if you were constantly sniffing yourself, you’d probably have a breakdown from the sensory input of all of the stinks of your microbes, sweat, farts, etc. So–when some of your self produced stink, well, stinks, your nose gets used to it. And really, it’s not just your own stink after a while, eventually you’ll get used to the smell of your pets and family members and favorite foods.

But smelling is unique to all species, and individuals. For a study published in December, scientists looked at 30 different olfactory receptors across the Neanderthal, Denisovian, and ancient homo sapien genomes. They found 11 receptors in the extinct humans that had unique DNA that didn’t appear in humans. 

Via a difference in receptors, Neanderthals had a bit of a superpower. They couldn’t smell body odors as well as their cousins—specifically one neanderthal had a genetic mutation that slimmed their ability to smell androstadienone, a chemical we associate with urine and sweat smells. Considering these guys were living in caves, building complex structures there from around 176,000 years ago, this probably came in handy when it comes to living in a world without deodorant. 

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Behold the microscopic power of cheese. The dairy product has been a dietary staple for generations, but it is also helping microbiologists better understand nature’s microbiomes. In a study published May 10 in the journal mBio, a team of researchers used cheese rinds to demonstrate how fungal antibiotics can influence how microbiomes develop. 

[Related: Beehives are the honeypot for a city’s microbial secrets.]

Metabolites produced by fungi can improve human health. Some secrete penicillin, which is then purified and used as an antibiotic. For this study, scientists set out to better understand how fungi interact with the microbes living alongside them in microbial communities, with a particular focus on how fungi and bacteria’s relationship.

“My lab is interested in how fungi shape the diversity of microbial communities where they live. Fungi are widespread in many microbial ecosystems, from soils to our own bodies, but we know much less about their diversity and roles in microbiomes compared to more widely studied bacteria,” co-author and Tufts University microbiologist Benjamin Wolfe said in a statement. “To study the ecology of fungi and their interactions with bacteria, we use cheese rinds as a model microbial ecosystem to understand these basic biology questions.

Cheese rinds themselves are microbial communities that form on the surfaces of naturally aged cheeses like brie, taleggio, and some types of cheddar. As the cheeses age, fuzzy and sometimes sticky layers of microbes form on the surfaces of the cheese. The microbes slowly decompose as the cheeses curd and they grow on the surface to create the aromas and colors that give the cheese in the fancy part of the grocery store their more unique properties. 

Wolfe and his team began by investigating a cheesemaker’s problem with mold spreading on the surface of the cheeses and disrupting the normal development of the rind. This causes the cheese to look like the rinds were disappearing as the mold invaded their cheese cave. They collaborated with microbiologist Nancy Keller’s lab at the University of Wisconsin to find out what this mold was doing to the rind microbes and what chemicals the mold may be producing that disrupted the rind. 

They researchers first deleted a gene (laeA) in the Penicillium mold that can control the expression of chemicals that fungi can secrete into their environment. These compounds are called specialized or secondary metabolites. 

“We know that many fungi can produce metabolites that are antibiotics because we have used these as drugs for humans, but we know surprisingly little about how fungal antibiotics work in nature,” said Wolfe. “Do fungi actually use these compounds to kill other microbes? How do these antibiotics produced by fungi affect the development of bacterial communities? We added our normal and our laeA-deleted Penicillium to a community of cheese rind bacteria to see whether deleting laeA caused changes in how the community of bacteria developed.” 

[Related: You might be overusing hand sanitizer.]

When laeA was deleted, most of the antibacterial activity of the Penicillium mold was lost. This discovery helped the team narrow down specific regions of the fungal genome that could produce antibacterial compounds. They narrowed it down to one class of compounds called pseurotins. The metabolites are produced by multiple types of fungi and that can modulate the immune system, kill insects, and inhibit bacteria. 

The study showed that pseurotins can also control how bacterial communities living with that fungi grow and develop. The pseurotins are strongly antibacterial, which means they inhibit some of the bacteria found in artisanal cheeses including Staphylococcus, Brevibacterium, Brachybacterium, and Psychrobacter. This process caused a shift in the cheese rind microbiome’s composition.

It also shows that the antibiotics secreted by fungi can control how microbiomes develop, since the metabolites are in other ecosystems, including the human human microbiome and soil ecosystems. The team expects that these mechanisms of fungal-bacterial interactions are likely very widespread. 

“Our results suggest that some pesky mold species in artisan cheeses may disrupt normal cheese development by deploying antibiotics,” said Wolfe. “These findings allow us to work with cheesemakers to identify which molds are the bad ones and how to manage them in their cheese caves. It also helps us appreciate that every time we eat artisan cheese, we are consuming the metabolites that microbes use to compete and cooperate in communities.”

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Best overall		Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ		SEE IT	A solid build and specs, paired with smartphone-guided sky recognition technology, makes this telescope perfect for starry-eyed explorers.
Best for viewing planets		Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope		SEE IT	This telescope punches above its weight class in size and power, making it an ideal scope for checking out neighboring orbs.
Best for kids		Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit		SEE IT	The entire package is designed to inspire kids during the window where they stare curiously out of the windows.

Telescopes under $500 can provide a passport to the universe without emptying your wallet. In their basic function, telescopes are our connection to the stars. For millennia, humankind has gazed skyward with wonder into the infinite reaches of outer space. And as humans are a curious bunch, our ancestors devised patterns in the movements of celestial bodies and gave them names and built stories around them. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks indulged in star worship. But you don’t have to follow those lines to geek out over the vastness of the night sky. It’s just so cool. Fortunately, whatever your motivation for getting under the stars, there is an affordable option for you on our list of the best telescopes under $500.

• Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ
• Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope
• Best for astrophotography: William Optics Guide Star 61
• Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit
• Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

How we chose the best telescopes under $500

The under-$500 telescope market is crowded with worthy brands and models, so we looked at offerings in that price range from several well-known manufacturers in the space. After narrowing our focus based on personal experience, peer suggestions, critical reviews, and user impressions, we considered aperture, focal length, magnification, build quality, and value to select these five models.

The best telescopes under $500: Reviews & Recommendations

To get the best views of the stars, planets, and other phenomena of outer space, not just any old telescope will get the job done. There are levels of quality and a wide range of price points and features to sort through before you can be sure you’re making the right purchase for what you want out of your telescope, whether it’s multi-thousands or one of the best telescopes for under $1,000, or one of our top picks under $500.

Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ

Celestron

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Why it made the cut: Solid build and specs, paired with the remarkable StarSense Explorer app, make this telescope a perfect introduction to celestial observation.

Specs

• Focal length: 650mm
• Aperture: 130mm, f/5
• Magnification: 65x, 26x

Pros

• App aids in finding stars
• Easy to operate
• Steady altazimuth mount

Cons

• Eyepieces are both low power

Newbies to astronomy today can have a decidedly different experience than beginners who started stargazing before smartphones were a thing. Instead of carting out maps of the night sky to find constellations, the StarSense Explorer series from Celestron, including the DX 130AZ refractor, makes ample use of your device to bring you closer to the stars. 

With your smartphone resting in the telescope’s built-in dock, the StarSense Explorer app will find your location using the device’s GPS and serve up a detailed list of celestial objects viewable in real time. Looking for the Pleiades cluster? This app will tell you how far away it is from you and then lead you there with on-screen navigation. The app also includes descriptions of those objects, tips for observing them, and other useful info. 

The StarSense Explorer ships with an altazimuth mount equipped with slow-moving fine-tuning controls for both axes so you can find your target smoothly. And for those times you want to explore the night sky without tethering a smartphone, the scope’s red dot finder will help you zero in on your targets. The two eyepieces, measuring 25mm and 10mm, are powerful enough to snag stellar views of the planets but not quite enough to see the details a high-powered eyepiece would deliver.

Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope

Sky-Watcher

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Why it made the cut: This telescope punches above its weight class in size and power, making it an ideal scope for viewing planets.

Specs

• Focal length: 1300mm
• Aperture: 102mm, f/12.7
• Magnification: 130x, 52x

Pros

• Great for viewing planets and galaxies
• Sharp focus and contrast
• Powerful

Cons

• Not ideal for deep-space viewing

Let’s be real—most consumers in the market for a moderately priced telescope are in it to gain spectacular views of the planets and galaxies, but probably not much else. And it’s easy to see why. Nothing makes celestial bodies come alive like viewing them in real time, in all their colorful glory.

If that sounds like you, allow us to direct you to the Sky-Watcher Skymax 102, a refracting telescope specializing in crisp views of objects like planets and galaxies with ample contrast to make them pop against the dark night sky. The Skymax 102 is based on a Maksutov-Cassegrains design that uses both mirrors and lenses, resulting in a heavy-hitting scope in a very compact and portable unit. A generous 102mm aperture pulls in plenty of light to illuminate the details in objects, and the 1300mm focal length results in intense magnification.

Two included wide-angle eyepieces measuring 25mm and 10mm deliver 130x and 52x magnification, respectively. The package also includes a red-dot finder, V-rail for mounting, 1.25-inch diagonal viewing piece, and a case for transport and storage. Look no further if you’re looking for pure colors across a perfectly flat field in a take-anywhere form factor.

Best for astrophotography: William Optics GuideStar 61 

William Optics

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Why it made the cut: Top-notch specs and an enviable lens setup make this telescope ideal for astrophotography.

Specs

• Focal length: 360mm
• Aperture: f/5.9
• Magnification: 7x (with 2-inch eyepiece)

Pros

• Well-appointed specs
• Sturdy, durable construction
• Carrying case included

Cons

• Flattener is an extra purchase

Sometimes you want to share more than descriptions of what you see in the night sky, and that’s where this guidescope comes in, helping you to focus on the best full-frame image. You can go as deep into the details (not to mention debt) as your line of credit will allow in your quest to capture the most impressive images of space. Luckily, though, this is a worthy option at a reasonable price. 

The Williams Optics Guide Star 61 telescope is a refracting-type scope with a 360mm focal length, f/5.9 aperture, and 61mm diameter well-suited to capturing sharp images of planets, moon, and bright deep-sky objects. The GS61 shares many specs with the now-discontinued Zenith Star 61, including focal length, aperture, and diameter, as well as the FPL53 ED doublet lens for high-contrast images.

The scope’s optical tube is about 13 inches long and weighs just 3 lbs.—great for traveling with the included carrying case—with a draw-tube (push-pull) focuser for coarse focusing and a rotating lens assembly for fine focus. Attaching a DSLR camera to the Guide Star 61 is a fairly easy job, but note that the flattener for making that connection is a separate purchase.

Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit

Orion

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Why it made the cut: The entire package is designed to get kids exploring space right out of the box.

Specs

• Focal length: 700mm
• Aperture: 60mm, f/11.7
• Magnification: 70x, 28x

Pros

• Capable of detailed views of moon and planets
• Lightweight construction
• Lots of handy accessories

Cons

• Not enough optical power to reach deep space

Parents have a limited window of time to recognize and develop their kids’ interests. That’s what makes the Orion Observer II such a great buy. Seeing the craters on the moon or the rings of Saturn for the first time can affirm your kids’ curiosity about space and expand their concept of the universe—and they can get those goosebumps while learning through this altazimuth refractor telescope.

The Orion Observer II is built to impressive specifications, with a 700mm focal length that provides 71x magnification for viewing the vivid details of planets in our solar system. True glass lenses (not plastic) are a bonus at this price point, and combined with either included Kellner eyepieces (25mm and 10mm), the telescope delivers crisp views of some of space’s most dazzling objects. 

Kids and parents can locate celestial objects with the included red-dot finder. The kit also includes MoonMap 260, a fold-out map that directs viewers to 260 lunar features, such as craters, valleys, ancient lava flows, mountain ranges, and every U.S. and Soviet lunar mission landing site. An included copy of Exploring the Cosmos: An Introduction to the Night Sky gives a solid background before they go stargazing. And with its aluminum tube and tripod, the entire rig is very portable, even for young ones, with a total weight of 4.3 pounds.

Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

Celestron

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Popular Science has teamed up with Celestron on a line of products. The decision to include this model in our recommendations was made by our reviewer independently of that relationship, but we do earn a commission on its sales—all of which helps power Popular Science.

Why it made the cut: With its feature set, portability, and nice price point, this scope is ready for some serious stargazing without a serious investment.

Specs

• Focal length: 400mm
• Aperture: 70mm, f/5.7
• Magnification: 168x

Pros

• Bluetooth remote shutter release
• Ships with two eyepieces
• Pack included

Cons

• Lacks optical power for deep space

Getting out of town, whether you’re camping in the wilderness or taking a drive in the countryside, is one of the attractions of stargazing. Out in the great wide open, far away from streetlights, the stars explode even to the naked eye. Add a handy telescope like the Popular Science Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope—our pick for the best portable telescope under $500—and you’ll see much farther into space. The fact that it’s as affordable as it is moveable just adds to the value.

The Popular Science Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope is a well-equipped refractor telescope built for backpacking and adventuring but without skimping on cool gadgets. Whether you’re gazing at celestial or terrestrial objects, the smartphone adapter will aid you in capturing images with your personal device, with an included Bluetooth remote shutter release.

Designed with portability and weight in mind, the entire package fits into an included pack with a total of 3.3 pounds—that includes the telescope, tripod stand, 20mm and 10mm eyepieces, 3x Barlow lens, and more. Download Celestron’s Starry Night software to help you get the most from your astronomy experience. 

Here are some other options from the Celestron and Popular Science collaboration:

• Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 100AZ Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope
• Popular Science AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope
• Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 5” Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope 
• Popular Science by Celestron Outland X 12x50mm Monocular with Tripod, Smartphone Adapter, and Bluetooth remote

What to consider when buying the best telescopes under $500

Optics

There are three types of optics available on consumer telescopes, and they will help you achieve three different goals. Refractor telescopes use a series of glass lenses to bring celestial bodies like the moon and near planets into focus easily. Reflector telescopes—also known as Newtonian scopes for their inventor, Sir Isaac Newton—swap lenses for mirrors and allow stargazers to see deeper into space. Versatile compound telescopes combine these two methods in a smaller, more portable form factor, with results that land right in the middle of the pack. 

Aperture

Photographers will recognize this: The aperture controls the amount of light entering the telescope, like on a manual camera. Aperture is the diameter of the lens or the primary mirror, so a telescope with a large aperture draws more light than a small aperture, resulting in views into deeper space. F-ratio is the spec to watch here. Low f-ratios, such as f/4 or f/5, are usually best for wide-field observation and photography, while high f-ratios like f/15 can make deep-space nebulae and other bodies easier to see and capture. Midpoint f-ratios can get the job done for both.

Mounts

All the lens and mirror power in the world won’t mean much if you attach your telescope to a subpar mount. In general, the more lightweight and portable the tripod mount, the more movement you’ll likely get while gazing or photographing the stars. Investing in a stable mount will improve the viewing experience. The two common mount types are alt-az (altitude-azimuth) and equatorial. Altazimuth mounts operate in the same way as a camera tripod, allowing you to adjust both axes (left-right, up-down), while equatorial mounts also tilt to make it easier to follow celestial objects.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best telescopes under $500

• Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ
• Best for viewing planets: Sky-Watcher Skymax 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope
• Best for astrophotography: William Optics Guide Star 61
• Best for kids: Orion Observer II 60mm AZ Refractor Telescope Starter Kit
• Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

Although this group of sub-$500 scopes is fairly diverse, the Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ stands out in our best telescopes under $500 as the best place to start your interstellar journey due to its versatility and sky recognition app, which make for a fun evening of guided tours through the star patterns, no experience necessary. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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The piercing and malevolent gaze of Sauron, the powerful villain The Lord of the Rings, is being honored in a way that may even make Gandalf’s heroic eagles envious. A new genus of butterflies has been named Saurona in honor of one of fiction’s greatest villains.

[Related: Scientists Calculate Calories Needed To Walk To Mordor.]

With their fiery orange hindwings and piercingly dark eyespots, Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera are the first two species described in this new genus, described in a study published April 10 in the journal Systematic Entomology. Scientists believe that there are more species within this genus waiting to be described.  

“Giving these butterflies an unusual name helps to draw attention to this underappreciated group,” study co-author and Senior Curator of Butterflies at London’s Natural History Museum Blanca Huertas said in a statement. “It shows that, even among a group of very similar-looking species, you can find beauty among the dullness. Naming a genus is not something that happens very often, and it’s even more rare to be able to name two at once. It was a great privilege to do so, and now means that we can start describing new species that we have uncovered as a result of this research.”

Saurona triangula and Saurona aurigera are the first butterflies to be named after the epic villain, but they are not the only animals named after Sauron and other characters from JRR Tolkien’s epic trilogy. A dinosaur (Sauroniops pachytholus) and an insect (Macropsis sauroni), and has also been named after the antagonist and his eye that constantly surveys the lands of Middle Earth. Sauron’s foil and heroic wizard Gandalf also has some animals named for him, including a species of crab, moth, and beetle and a group of fossil mammals. The tragic and troubled creature Gollum has fish, wasps, and fish named after him. 

Naming animals after fictional characters can help draw attention to them in the real world. A recent example comes from the devastating 2019-202 wildfires that struck Australia. The fires burned over 42 million acres and harmed 3 billion animals. Three Australian beetles that were devastated by the fires were named after Pokémon in an effort to attract conservation funding.

The Saurona butterflies are found in the southwestern Amazon rainforest and belong to a butterfly group Euptychiina. This group is difficult to tell apart by their physical characteristics alone, and the scientists on this study used genetic sequencing to help differentiate the new species.

“These butterflies are widely distributed in the tropical lowlands of the Americas, but despite their abundance they weren’t well-studied,” Blanca said. “Historically, the Euptychiina have been overlooked because they tend to be small, brown, and share a similar appearance. This has made them one of the most complex groups of butterflies in the tropics of the Americas.”

[Related: How are dinosaurs named?]

Even with major advances in DNA sequencing like target enrichment and Sanger sequencing that can produce vast amounts of DNA from samples, it took the team over 10 years to assess more than 400 different butterfly species. 

They deciphered the relations between groups and described nine new genera including one called Argenteria. In English, Argenteria translates to “silver mine,” and was named by Blanca and her team due to the silver scales on their wings. Argenteria currently has six species within the genus, but there are likely more out there waiting to be discovered.

The researchers on this study estimate they uncovered up to 20 percent more uncovered species than there were before the project began, and they hope to describe even more. More description will help scientists to better understand the relationships between the different species and the issues they face. 

“It’s important to study groups like the Euptychiina because it reveals that there are many species we didn’t know about, including rare and endemic ones,” said Blanca. “Some of these species are threatened with extinction, and so there’s a lot to do now we can put a name to them. There are also many other butterfly and insect groups that need attention so that they can be better understood and protected.”

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The humble sea star is an ancient marine creature that possibly goes back about 480 million years. They are beloved in touch tanks in aquariums for their celestial shape, spongy skin, and arm suckers. These beautiful five-limbed echinoderms are also helping scientists figure out a crucial life process called tubulogenesis. 

[Related: What’s killing sea stars?]

A study published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications, examined this process of hollow tube formation in sea stars that provides a blueprint for how the organs of other creatures develop.

Tubulogenesis is the formation of various kinds of hollow, tube-like structures. in the body. These tubes eventually form blood vessels, digestive tracts, and even complex organs like the heart, kidneys and mammary glands. It is a basic and crucial process that occurs in the embryo stage, and abnormalities during these processes can cause dysfunctional, displaced, or non-symmetrical organs and even regeneration defects in structures like blood vessel. 

Little is known about the general mechanisms of the hollow tube formation during embryogenesis since animals all use very different strategies to form these tubular structures.

That’s where the sea star comes in. Their process of tubulogenesis is relatively easy to observe since their embryos are very transparent and can be observed without disturbing them. Not to mention, they breed in large numbers year round. This new study reveals the initiation and early stages of tube formation in the sea star Patiria miniata or bat star.

“Most of our organs are tubular, because they need to transport fluids or gasses or food or blood. And more complex organs like the heart start as a tube and then develop different structures. So, tubulogenesis is a very basic step to form all our organs,” study co-author and cell biologist Margherita Perillo of the University of Chicago-affiliated Marine Biological Laboratory said in a statement. 

Not only is the sea star an ideal because of its translucence, the researchers needed an animal that was along the base of the tree of life and evolved before the phylum Chordata– vertebrates including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, Perillo adds.

Perillo and her colleagues used CRISPR gene editing and other techniques to analyze the gene functions in the sea stars and long time-lapse videos of developing larvae. The team worked out how the sea star generates the tubes that branch out from its gut. From these observations, they could define the basic tools needed for more advanced chordate tubular organs that may have developed. Now, they are getting closer to answering how organisms developed up from one cell into the more complex 3D tubular structures that make up various organisms. 

According to Perillo, in some organisms such as flies, “there is a big round of cell proliferation before all the cells start to make very complex migration patterns to elongate, change their shapes, and become a tube.”

[Related: These urchin-eating sea stars might be helping us reduce carbon levels.]

In other animals, including mammals, cell proliferation and migration occur together. The team found that in sea stars, cells can also proliferate and migrate at the same time in order for the tubes to form the way they do in vertebrate formation. The mechanism behind making organs must have already been established at the base or root of chordate evolution, according to the team. 

Beyond providing evolutionary insights into organ formation, sea stars can also aid in biomedical research. Perillo found that a gene called Six1/2 is a key regulator of the branching process in tube formation. If Six1/2 is taken out of mice, their kidneys form abnormally, but the mice that lack the gene also resist tumor formation, even if they are injected with tumor cells. Understanding this gene, that is overexpressed in cancer cells, may lead to new ways to study disease progression.  

“I can now use this gene to understand not only how our organs develop, but what happens to organs when we have a disease, especially cancer,” said Perillo. “My hope is that, in five to 10 years maximum, we will be able to use this gene to test how organs develop cancer and how cancer becomes metastatic.”

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This story from the March 2012 issue of Popular Science covered the nuclear fusion experiments of Taylor Wilson, who was then 16. Wilson is currently 28 and a nuclear physicist who’s collaborated with multiple US agencies on developing reactors and defense technology. The author of this profile, Tom Clynes, went on to write a book about Wilson titled The Boy Who Played With Fusion.

“PROPULSION,” the nine-year-old says as he leads his dad through the gates of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “I just want to see the propulsion stuff.”

A young woman guides their group toward a full-scale replica of the massive Saturn V rocket that brought America to the moon. As they duck under the exhaust nozzles, Kenneth Wilson glances at his awestruck boy and feels his burden beginning to lighten. For a few minutes, at least, someone else will feed his son’s boundless appetite for knowledge.

Then Taylor raises his hand, not with a question but an answer. He knows what makes this thing, the biggest rocket ever launched, go up.

And he wants—no, he obviously needs—to tell everyone about it, about how speed relates to exhaust velocity and dynamic mass, about payload ratios, about the pros and cons of liquid versus solid fuel. The tour guide takes a step back, yielding the floor to this slender kid with a deep-Arkansas drawl, pouring out a torrent of Ph.D.-level concepts as if there might not be enough seconds in the day to blurt it all out. The other adults take a step back too, perhaps jolted off balance by the incongruities of age and audacity, intelligence and exuberance.

As the guide runs off to fetch the center’s director—You gotta see this kid!—Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science.

This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve nuclear fusion.

WHEN I MEET Taylor Wilson, he is 16 and busy—far too busy, he says, to pursue a driver’s license. And so he rides shotgun as his father zigzags the family’s Land Rover up a steep trail in the Virginia Mountains north of Reno, Nevada, where they’ve come to prospect for uranium.

From the backseat, I can see Taylor’s gull-like profile, his forehead plunging from under his sandy blond bangs and continuing, in an almost unwavering line, along his prominent nose. His thinness gives him a wraithlike appearance, but when he’s lit up about something (as he is most waking moments), he does not seem frail. He has spent the past hour—the past few days, really—talking, analyzing, and breathlessly evangelizing about nuclear energy. We’ve gone back to the big bang and forward to mutually assured destruction and nuclear winter. In between are fission and fusion, Einstein and Oppenheimer, Chernobyl and Fukushima, matter and antimatter.

“Where does it come from?” Kenneth and his wife, Tiffany, have asked themselves many times. Kenneth is a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. Tiffany is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” Kenneth says.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground. It started with his first, and most pedestrian, interest: construction. As a toddler in Texarkana, the family’s hometown, Taylor wanted nothing to do with toys. He played with real traffic cones, real barricades. At age four, he donned a fluorescent orange vest and hard hat and stood in front of the house, directing traffic. For his fifth birthday, he said, he wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.”

This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive.

To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”

At 10, Taylor hung a periodic table of the elements in his room. Within a week he memorized all the atomic numbers, masses and melting points. At the family’s Thanksgiving gathering, the boy appeared wearing a monogrammed lab coat and armed with a handful of medical lancets. He announced that he’d be drawing blood from everyone, for “comparative genetic experiments” in the laboratory he had set up in his maternal grandmother’s garage. Each member of the extended family duly offered a finger to be pricked.

The next summer, Taylor invited everyone out to the backyard, where he dramatically held up a pill bottle packed with a mixture of sugar and stump remover (potassium nitrate) that he’d discovered in the garage. He set the bottle down and, with a showman’s flourish, ignited the fuse that poked out of the top. What happened next was not the firecracker’s bang everyone expected, but a thunderous blast that brought panicked neighbors running from their houses. Looking up, they watched as a small mushroom cloud rose, unsettlingly, over the Wilsons’ yard.

For his 11th birthday, Taylor’s grandmother took him to Books-A-Million, where he picked out The Radioactive Boy Scout, by Ken Silverstein. The book told the disquieting tale of David Hahn, a Michigan teenager who, in the mid-1990s, attempted to build a breeder reactor in a backyard shed. Taylor was so excited by the book that he read much of it aloud: the boy raiding smoke detectors for radioactive americium . . . the cobbled-together reactor . . . the Superfund team in hazmat suits hauling away the family’s contaminated belongings. Kenneth and Tiffany heard Hahn’s story as a cautionary tale. But Taylor, who had recently taken a particular interest in the bottom two rows of the periodic table—the highly radioactive elements—read it as a challenge. “Know what?” he said. “The things that kid was trying to do, I’m pretty sure I can actually do them.”

A rational society would know what to do with a kid like Taylor Wilson, especially now that America’s technical leadership is slipping and scientific talent increasingly has to be imported. But by the time Taylor was 12, both he and his brother, Joey, who is three years younger and gifted in mathematics, had moved far beyond their school’s (and parents’) ability to meaningfully teach them. Both boys were spending most of their school days on autopilot, their minds wandering away from course work they’d long outgrown.

David Hahn had been bored too—and, like Taylor, smart enough to be dangerous. But here is where the two stories begin to diverge. When Hahn’s parents forbade his atomic endeavors, the angry teenager pressed on in secret. But Kenneth and Tiffany resisted their impulse to steer Taylor toward more benign pursuits. That can’t be easy when a child with a demonstrated talent and fondness for blowing things up proposes to dabble in nukes.

Kenneth and Tiffany agreed to let Taylor assemble a “survey of everyday radioactive materials” for his school’s science fair. Kenneth borrowed a Geiger counter from a friend at Texarkana’s emergency-management agency. Over the next few weekends, he and Tiffany shuttled Taylor around to nearby antique stores, where he pointed the clicking detector at old
radium-dial alarm clocks, thorium lantern mantles and uranium-glazed Fiesta plates. Taylor spent his allowance money on a radioactive dining set.

Drawn in by what he calls “the surprise properties” of radioactive materials, he wanted to know more. How can a speck of metal the size of a grain of salt put out such tremendous amounts of energy? Why do certain rocks expose film? Why does one isotope decay away in a millionth of a second while another has a half-life of two million years?

As Taylor began to wrap his head around the mind-blowing mysteries at the base of all matter, he could see that atoms, so small but potentially so powerful, offered a lifetime’s worth of secrets to unlock. Whereas Hahn’s resources had been limited, Taylor found that there was almost no end to the information he could find on the Internet, or to the oddities that he could purchase and store in the garage.

On top of tables crowded with chemicals and microscopes and germicidal black lights, an expanding array of nuclear fuel pellets, chunks of uranium and “pigs” (lead-lined containers) began to appear. When his parents pressed him about safety, Taylor responded in the convoluted jargon of inverse-square laws and distance intensities, time doses and roentgen submultiples. With his newfound command of these concepts, he assured them, he could master the furtive energy sneaking away from those rocks and metals and liquids—a strange and ever-multiplying cache that literally cast a glow into the corners of the garage.

Kenneth asked a nuclear-pharmacist friend to come over to check on Taylor’s safety practices. As far as he could tell, the friend said, the boy was getting it right. But he warned that radiation works in quick and complex ways. By the time Taylor learned from a mistake, it might be too late.

Lead pigs and glazed plates were only the beginning. Soon Taylor was getting into more esoteric “naughties”—radium quack cures, depleted uranium, radio-luminescent materials—and collecting mysterious machines, such as the mass spectrometer given to him by a former astronaut in Houston. As visions of Chernobyl haunted his parents, Taylor tried to reassure them. “I’m the responsible radioactive boy scout,” he told them. “I know what I’m doing.”

One afternoon, Tiffany ducked her head out of the door to the garage and spotted Taylor, in his canary yellow nuclear-technician’s coveralls, watching a pool of liquid spreading across the concrete floor. “Tay, it’s time for supper.”
“I think I’m going to have to clean this up first.”
“That’s not the stuff you said would kill us if it broke open, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not instantly.”

THAT SUMMER, Kenneth’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ashlee, then a college student, came to live with the Wilsons. “The explosions in the backyard were getting to be a bit much,” she told me, shortly before my own visit to the family’s home. “I could see everyone getting frustrated. They’d say something and Taylor would argue back, and his argument would be legitimate. He knows how to out-think you. I was saying, ‘You guys need to be parents. He’s ruling the roost.’ “

“What she didn’t understand,” Kenneth says, “is that we didn’t have a choice. Taylor doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘can’t.’ “

“And when he does,” Tiffany adds, “he doesn’t listen.”

“Looking back, I can see that,” Ashlee concedes. “I mean, you can tell Taylor that the world doesn’t revolve around him. But he doesn’t really get that. He’s not being selfish, it’s just that there’s so much going on in his head.”

Tiffany, for her part, could have done with less drama. She had just lost her sister, her only sibling. And her mother’s cancer had recently come out of remission. “Those were some tough times,” Taylor tells me one day, as he uses his mom’s gardening trowel to mix up a batch of yellowcake (the partially processed uranium that’s the stuff of WMD infamy) in a five-gallon bucket. “But as bad as it was with Grandma dying and all, that urine sure was something.”

Taylor looks sheepish. He knows this is weird. “After her PET scan she let me have a sample. It was so hot I had to keep it in a lead pig.

“The other thing is . . .” He pauses, unsure whether to continue but, being Taylor, unable to stop himself. “She had lung cancer, and she’d cough up little bits of tumor for me to dissect. Some people might think that’s gross, but I found it scientifically very interesting.”

What no one understood, at least not at first, was that as his grandmother was withering, Taylor was growing, moving beyond mere self-centeredness. The world that he saw revolving around him, the boy was coming to believe, was one that he could actually change.

The problem, as he saw it, is that isotopes for diagnosing and treating cancer are extremely short-lived. They need to be, so they can get in and kill the targeted tumors and then decay away quickly, sparing healthy cells. Delivering them safely and on time requires expensive handling—including, often, delivery by private jet. But what if there were a way to make those medical isotopes at or near the patients? How many more people could they reach, and how much earlier could they reach them? How many more people like his grandmother could be saved?

As Taylor stirred the toxic urine sample, holding the clicking Geiger counter over it, inspiration took hold. He peered into the swirling yellow center, and the answer shone up at him, bright as the sun. In fact, it was the sun—or, more precisely, nuclear fusion, the process (defined by Einstein as E=mc2) that powers the sun. By harnessing fusion—the moment when atomic nuclei collide and fuse together, releasing energy in the process—Taylor could produce the high-energy neutrons he would need to irradiate materials for medical isotopes. Instead of creating those isotopes in multimillion-dollar cyclotrons and then rushing them to patients, what if he could build a fusion reactor small enough, cheap enough and safe enough to produce isotopes as needed, in every hospital in the world?

At that point, only 10 individuals had managed to build working fusion reactors. Taylor contacted one of them, Carl Willis, then a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate living in Albuquerque, and the two hit it off. But Willis, like the other successful fusioneers, had an advanced degree and access to a high-tech lab and precision equipment. How could a middle-school kid living on the Texas/Arkansas border ever hope to make his own star?

When Taylor was 13, just after his grandmother’s doctor had given her a few weeks to live, Ashlee sent Tiffany and Kenneth an article about a new school in Reno. The Davidson Academy is a subsidized public school for the nation’s smartest and most motivated students, those who score in the top 99.9th percentile on standardized tests. The school, which allows students to pursue advanced research at the adjacent University of Nevada–Reno, was founded in 2006 by software entrepreneurs Janice and Robert Davidson. Since then, the Davidsons have championed the idea that the most underserved students in the country are those at the top.

On the family’s first trip to Reno, even before Taylor and Joey were accepted to the academy, Taylor made an appointment with Friedwardt Winterberg, a celebrated physicist at the University of Nevada who had studied under the Nobel Prize–winning quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg. When Taylor told Winterberg that he wanted to build a fusion reactor, also called a fusor, the notoriously cranky professor erupted: “You’re 13 years old! And you want to play with tens of thousands of electron volts and deadly x-rays?” Such a project would be far too technically challenging and hazardous, Winterberg insisted, even for most doctoral candidates. “First you must master calculus, the language of science,” he boomed. “After that,” Tiffany said, “we didn’t think it would go anywhere. Kenneth and I were a bit relieved.”

But Taylor still hadn’t learned the word “can’t.” In the fall, when he began at Davidson, he found the two advocates he needed, one in the office right next door to Winterberg’s. “He had a depth of understanding I’d never seen in someone that young,” says atomic physicist Ronald Phaneuf. “But he was telling me he wanted to build the reactor in his garage, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my lord, we can’t let him do that.’ But maybe we can help him try to do it here.”

Phaneuf invited Taylor to sit in on his upper-division nuclear physics class and introduced him to technician Bill Brinsmead. Brinsmead, a Burning Man devotee who often rides a wheeled replica of the Little Boy bomb through the desert, was at first reluctant to get involved in this 13-year-old’s project. But as he and Phaneuf showed Taylor around the department’s equipment room, Brinsmead recalled his own boyhood, when he was bored and unchallenged and aching to build something really cool and difficult (like a laser, which he eventually did build) but dissuaded by most of the adults who might have helped.

Rummaging through storerooms crowded with a geeky abundance of electron microscopes and instrumentation modules, they came across a high-vacuum chamber made of thick-walled stainless steel, capable of withstanding extreme heat and negative pressure. “Think I could use that for my fusor?” Taylor asked Brinsmead. “I can’t think of a more worthy cause,” Brinsmead said.

NOW IT’S TIFFANY who drives, along a dirt road that wends across a vast, open mesa a few miles south of the runways shared by Albuquerque’s airport and Kirkland Air Force Base. Taylor has convinced her to bring him to New Mexico to spend a week with Carl Willis, whom Taylor describes as “my best nuke friend.” Cocking my ear toward the backseat, I catch snippets of Taylor and Willis’s conversation.

“The idea is to make a gamma-ray laser from stimulated decay of dipositronium.”

“I’m thinking about building a portable, beam-on-target neutron source.”

“Need some deuterated polyethylene?”

Willis is now 30; tall and thin and much quieter than Taylor. When he’s interested in something, his face opens up with a blend of amusement and curiosity. When he’s uninterested, he slips into the far-off distractedness that’s common among the super-smart. Taylor and Willis like to get together a few times a year for what they call “nuclear tourism”—they visit research facilities, prospect for uranium, or run experiments.

Earlier in the week, we prospected for uranium in the desert and shopped for secondhand laboratory equipment in Los Alamos. The next day, we wandered through Bayo Canyon, where Manhattan Project engineers set off some of the largest dirty bombs in history in the course of perfecting Fat Man, which leveled Nagasaki.

Today we’re searching for remnants of a “broken arrow,” military lingo for a lost nuclear weapon. While researching declassified military reports, Taylor discovered that a Mark 17 “Peacemaker” hydrogen bomb, which was designed to be 700 times as powerful as the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, was accidentally dropped onto this mesa in May 1957. For the U.S. military, it was an embarrassingly Strangelovian episode; the airman in the bomb bay narrowly avoided his own Slim Pickens moment when the bomb dropped from its gantry and smashed the B-36’s doors open. Although its plutonium core hadn’t been inserted, the bomb’s “spark plug” of conventional explosives and radioactive material detonated on impact, creating a fireball and a massive crater. A grazing steer was the only reported casualty.

Tiffany parks the rented SUV among the mesquite, and we unload metal detectors and Geiger counters and fan out across the field. “This,” says Tiffany, smiling as she follows her son across the scrubland, “is how we spend our vacations.”

Willis says that when Taylor first contacted him, he was struck by the 12-year-old’s focus and forwardness—and by the fact that he couldn’t plumb the depth of Taylor’s knowledge with a few difficult technical questions. After checking with Kenneth, Willis sent Taylor some papers on fusion reactors. Then Taylor began acquiring pieces for his new machine.

Through his first year at Davidson, Taylor spent his afternoons in a corner of Phaneuf’s lab that the professor had cleared out for him, designing the reactor, overcoming tricky technical issues, tracking down critical parts. Phaneuf helped him find a surplus high-voltage insulator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Willis, then working at a company that builds particle accelerators, talked his boss into parting with an extremely expensive high-voltage power supply.

With Brinsmead and Phaneuf’s help, Taylor stretched himself, applying knowledge from more than 20 technical fields, including nuclear and plasma physics, chemistry, radiation metrology and electrical engineering. Slowly he began to test-assemble the reactor, troubleshooting pesky vacuum leaks, electrical problems and an intermittent plasma field.

Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor and Brinsmead loaded deuterium fuel into the machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, Taylor became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction. Yet what would set Taylor apart from the others was not the machine itself but what he decided to do with it.

While still developing his medical isotope application, Taylor came across a report about how the thousands of shipping containers entering the country daily had become the nation’s most vulnerable “soft belly,” the easiest entry point for weapons of mass destruction. Lying in bed one night, he hit on an idea: Why not use a fusion reactor to produce weapons-sniffing neutrons that could scan the contents of containers as they passed through ports? Over the next few weeks, he devised a concept for a drive-through device that would use a small reactor to bombard passing containers with neutrons. If weapons were inside, the neutrons would force the atoms into fission, emitting gamma radiation (in the case of nuclear material) or nitrogen (in the case of conventional explosives). A detector, mounted opposite, would pick up the signature and alert the operator.

He entered the reactor, and the design for his bomb-sniffing application, into the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The Super Bowl of pre-college science events, the fair attracts 1,500 of the world’s most switched-on kids from some 50 countries. When Intel CEO Paul Otellini heard the buzz that a 14-year-old had built a working nuclear-fusion reactor, he went straight for Taylor’s exhibit. After a 20-minute conversation, Otellini was seen walking away, smiling and shaking his head in what looked like disbelief. Later, I would ask him what he was thinking. “All I could think was, ‘I am so glad that kid is on our side.’ “

For the past three years, Taylor has dominated the international science fair, walking away with nine awards (including first place overall), overseas trips and more than $100,000 in prizes. After the Department of Homeland Security learned of Taylor’s design, he traveled to Washington for a meeting with the DHS’s Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which invited Taylor to submit a grant proposal to develop the detector. Taylor also met with then–Under Secretary of Energy Kristina Johnson, who says the encounter left her “stunned.”

“I would say someone like him comes along maybe once in a generation,” Johnson says. “He’s not just smart; he’s cool and articulate. I think he may be the most amazing kid I’ve ever met.”

And yet Taylor’s story began much like David Hahn’s, with a brilliant, high-flying child hatching a crazy plan to build a nuclear reactor. Why did one journey end with hazmat teams and an eventual arrest, while the other continues to produce an array of prizes, patents, television appearances, and offers from college recruiters?

The answer is, mostly, support. Hahn, determined to achieve something extraordinary but discouraged by the adults in his life, pressed on without guidance or oversight—and with nearly catastrophic results. Taylor, just as determined but socially gifted, managed to gather into his orbit people who could help him achieve his dreams: the physics professor; the older nuclear prodigy; the eccentric technician; the entrepreneur couple who, instead of retiring, founded a school to nurture genius kids. There were several more, but none so significant as Tiffany and Kenneth, the parents who overcame their reflexive—and undeniably sensible—inclinations to keep their Icarus-like son on the ground. Instead they gave him the wings he sought and encouraged him to fly up to the sun and beyond, high enough to capture a star of his own.

After about an hour of searching across the mesa, our detectors begin to beep. We find bits of charred white plastic and chunks of aluminum—one of which is slightly radioactive. They are remnants of the lost hydrogen bomb. I uncover a broken flange with screws still attached, and Taylor digs up a hunk of lead. “Got a nice shard here,” Taylor yells, finding a gnarled piece of metal. He scans it with his detector. “Unfortunately, it’s not radioactive.”

“That’s the kind I like,” Tiffany says.

Willis picks up a large chunk of the bomb’s outer casing, still painted dull green, and calls Taylor over. “Wow, look at that warp profile!” Taylor says, easing his scintillation detector up to it. The instrument roars its approval. Willis, seeing Taylor ogling the treasure, presents it to him. Taylor is ecstatic. “It’s a field of dreams!” he yells. “This place is loaded!”

Suddenly we’re finding radioactive debris under the surface every five or six feet—even though the military claimed that the site was completely cleaned up. Taylor gets down on his hands and knees, digging, laughing, calling out his discoveries. Tiffany checks her watch. “Tay, we really gotta go or we’ll miss our flight.”

“I’m not even close to being done!” he says, still digging. “This is the best day of my life!” By the time we manage to get Taylor into the car, we’re running seriously late. “Tay,” Tiffany says, “what are we going to do with all this stuff?”

“For $50, you can check it on as excess baggage,” Willis says. “You don’t label it, nobody knows what it is, and it won’t hurt anybody.” A few minutes later, we’re taping an all-too-flimsy box shut and loading it into the trunk. “Let’s see, we’ve got about 60 pounds of uranium, bomb fragments and radioactive shards,” Taylor says. “This thing would make a real good dirty bomb.”

In truth, the radiation levels are low enough that, without prolonged close-range exposure, the cargo poses little danger. Still, we stifle the jokes as we pull up to curbside check-in. “Think it will get through security?” Tiffany asks Taylor.

“There are no radiation detectors in airports,” Taylor says. “Except for one pilot project, and I can’t tell you which airport that’s at.”

As the skycap weighs the box, I scan the “prohibited items” sign. You can’t take paints, flammable materials or water on a commercial airplane. But sure enough, radioactive materials are not listed.

We land in Reno and make our way toward the baggage claim. “I hope that box held up,” Taylor says, as we approach the carousel. “And if it didn’t, I hope they give us back the radioactive goodies scattered all over the airplane.” Soon the box appears, adorned with a bright strip of tape and a note inside explaining that the package has been opened and inspected by the TSA. “They had no idea,” Taylor says, smiling, “what they were looking at.”

APART FROM THE fingerprint scanners at the door, Davidson Academy looks a lot like a typical high school. It’s only when the students open their mouths that you realize that this is an exceptional place, a sort of Hogwarts for brainiacs. As these math whizzes, musical prodigies and chess masters pass in the hallway, the banter flies in witty bursts. Inside humanities classes, discussions spin into intellectual duels.

Although everyone has some kind of advanced obsession, there’s no question that Taylor is a celebrity at the school, where the lobby walls are hung with framed newspaper clippings of his accomplishments. Taylor and I visit with the principal, the school’s founders and a few of Taylor’s friends. Then, after his calculus class, we head over to the university’s physics department, where we meet Phaneuf and Brinsmead.

Taylor’s reactor, adorned with yellow radiation-warning signs, dominates the far corner of Phaneuf’s lab. It looks elegant—a gleaming stainless-steel and glass chamber on top of a cylindrical trunk, connected to an array of sensors and feeder tubes. Peering through the small window into the reaction chamber, I can see the golf-ball-size grid of tungsten fingers that will cradle the plasma, the state of matter in which unbound electrons, ions and photons mix freely with atoms and molecules.

“OK, y’all stand back,” Taylor says. We retreat behind a wall of leaden blocks as he shakes the hair out of his eyes and flips a switch. He turns a knob to bring the voltage up and adds in some gas. “This is exactly how me and Bill did it the first time,” he says. “But now we’ve got it running even better.”

Through a video monitor, I watch the tungsten wires beginning to glow, then brightening to a vivid orange. A blue cloud of plasma appears, rising and hovering, ghostlike, in the center of the reaction chamber. “When the wires disappear,” Phaneuf says, “that’s when you know you have a lethal radiation field.”

I watch the monitor while Taylor concentrates on the controls and gauges, especially the neutron detector they’ve dubbed Snoopy. “I’ve got it up to 25,000 volts now,” Taylor says. “I’m going to out-gas it a little and push it up.”

Willis’s power supply crackles. The reactor is entering “star mode.” Rays of plasma dart between gaps in the now-invisible grid as deuterium atoms, accelerated by the tremendous voltages, begin to collide. Brinsmead keeps his eyes glued to the neutron detector. “We’re getting neutrons,” he shouts. “It’s really jamming!”

Taylor cranks it up to 40,000 volts. “Whoa, look at Snoopy now!” Phaneuf says, grinning. Taylor nudges the power up to 50,000 volts, bringing the temperature of the plasma inside the core to an incomprehensible 580 million degrees—some 40 times as hot as the core of the sun. Brinsmead lets out a whoop as the neutron gauge tops out.

“Snoopy’s pegged!” he yells, doing a little dance. On the video screen, purple sparks fly away from the plasma cloud, illuminating the wonder in the faces of Phaneuf and Brinsmead, who stand in a half-orbit around Taylor. In the glow of the boy’s creation, the men suddenly look years younger.

Taylor keeps his thin fingers on the dial as the atoms collide and fuse and throw off their energy, and the men take a step back, shaking their heads and wearing ear-to-ear grins.

“There it is,” Taylor says, his eyes locked on the machine. “The birth of a star.”

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Before being outbred by Homo sapiens, Neanderthals could have been many things: including the world’s first weavers, artists, and even crab chefs. Their contributions may even go deeper—even to modern day faces. Genetic material from this now extinct crew  influences the shape of human noses today, according to new research. 

In a study published May 8 in the journal Communications Biology, an international team of researchers found a particular gene that leads to a taller nose (top to bottom) might be the product of natural selection when sentient humans adapted to colder climates after leaving the African continent.

[Related: Humans and Neanderthals could have lived together even earlier than we thought.]

“In the last 15 years, since the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we have been able to learn that our own ancestors apparently interbred with Neanderthals, leaving us with little bits of their DNA,” Kaustubh Adhikari, a co-author and statistical geneticist at University College London, said in a statement. “Here, we find that some DNA inherited from Neanderthals influences the shape of our faces. This could have been helpful to our ancestors, as it has been passed down for thousands of generations.”

The research team used data from over 6,000 volunteers from Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru with mixed European, Native American, and African ancestry. They compared their genetic information to photographs of their faces, and examined the distances between points on the face, like the edge of the lips to the tips of the nose to see how different facial traits might be associated with different genetic markers.

“Most genetic studies of human diversity have investigated the genes of Europeans; our study’s diverse sample of Latin American participants broadens the reach of genetic study findings, helping us to better understand the genetics of all humans,” Andres Ruiz-Linares, co-author and geneticist at University College London, said in a statement.

They found 33 new genome regions that are associated with face shape, and they could replicate 26 of them in comparisons with data from other ethnicities using participants in east Asia, Europe, or Africa.

[Related: Europeans looked down on Neanderthals—until they realized they shared their DNA.]

They looked at a genome region called ATF3, and found that many of those in the study with Native American ancestry had genetic material inherited from Neanderthals that contributes to nasal height. They compared that same genome region with those of east Asian ancestry from a different cohort and saw the same genetic material.  This gene region also has signs of natural selection, suggesting that it has an advantage for those carrying the genetic material.

“It has long been speculated that the shape of our noses is determined by natural selection; as our noses can help us to regulate the temperature and humidity of the air we breathe in, different shaped noses may be better suited to different climates that our ancestors lived in,” Qing Li, a co-author and scientist at China’s Fudan University, said in a statement. “The gene we have identified here may have been inherited from Neanderthals to help humans adapt to colder climates as our ancestors moved out of Africa.”

In 2021, this same team also found that genes influencing facial shapes were inherited from another extinct human species called the Denisovans. In that study, they found 32 gene regions that influence facial features like nose, lip, jaw, and brow shape.

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At least 83 moons orbit Saturn, and experts believe its most reflective one could harbor life underneath its icy surface. To find out, NASA scientists hope to send a massive serpentine robot to scour Enceladus, both atop its frozen ground—and maybe even within a hidden ocean underneath.

As CBS News highlighted on Monday, researchers and engineers are nearing completion of their Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) prototype. The 16-foot-long, 200-pound snakelike bot is capable of traversing both ground and watery environments via “first-of-a-kind rotating propulsion units,” according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These repeating units could act as tracks, gripping mechanisms, and underwater propellers, depending on the surrounding environment’s need. The “head” of EELS also includes 3D mapping technology alongside real-time video recording and transmission capabilities to document its extraplanetary adventure.

[Related: Saturn’s rings have been slowly heating up its atmosphere.]

In theory, EELS would traverse the surface of Enceladus towards one of the moon’s many “plume vents,” which it could then enter to use as a passageway towards its oceanic source. Over 100 of these vents were discovered at Enceladus’ southern pole by the Cassini space probe during its tenure around Saturn. Scientists have since determined the fissures emitted water vapor into space that contained amino acids, which are considered pivotal in the creation of lifeforms.

To assess its maneuverability, NASA researchers have already taken EELS out for test drives in environments such as an ice skating rink in Pasadena, CA, and even an excursion to Athabasca Glacier in Canada’s Jasper National Park. Should all go as planned, the team hopes to present a finalized concept by fall 2024. But be prepared to wait a while to see it in action on Enceladus—EELS’ journey to the mysterious moon would reportedly take roughly 12 years. Even if it never makes it there, however, the robotic prototype could prove extremely useful closer to Earth, and even on it. According to the Jet Propulsion Lab, EELS could show promise exploring the polar caps of Mars, or even ice sheet crevasses here on Earth.

[Related: Saturn has a slushy core and rings that wiggle.]

Enceladus’ fascinating environment was first unveiled thanks to NASA’s historic Cassini space probe. Launched in 1997, the satellite began transmitting data and images of the planet and its moons back to Earth after arriving following a 7 year voyage. After 13 years of service, a decommissioned Cassini descended towards Saturn, where it was vaporized within the upper atmosphere’s high pressure and temperature. Although NASA could have left Cassini to cruise sans trajectory once its fuel ran out, they opted for the controlled demolition due to the slim possibility of crashing into Enceladus or Titan, which might have disrupted the potential life ecosystems scientists hope to one day discover. 

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Our asteroid belt is home to more than a million space rocks, varying in size from a dwarf planet to dust particles, which float between Jupiter and Mars. Astronomers have just discovered another such belt—but this one circles a different star, not our sun.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected this asteroid belt around the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years away. For years, scientists have studied Fomalhaut’s debris disk, a collection of rocky, icy, dusty bits from all the collisions that happen while planets are being created. This new data, published today in Nature Astronomy, shows the system in unprecedented detail, uncovering fingerprints of hidden worlds and evidence for planets smashing together.

Many telescopes have pointed to Fomalhaut over the years: the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the high desert of Chile, and even the Hubble Space Telescope. Fomalhaut, which is much younger than our sun, may be a good likeness of our solar system near birth; since astronomers can’t time travel back to our sun’s formation, they instead observe other young stars, using these still-forming planetary systems as examples of what the process of making planets can look like.

Fomalhaut is an appealing choice to astronomers because it’s nearby, meaning it’s easier for astronomers to notice fine details. “This system was definitely one of the first we wanted to observe with JWST,” says co-author Marie Ygouf, research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Before JWST, other observations revealed that Fomalhaut is surrounded by a ring of dust analogous to our own solar system’s Kuiper Belt, which contains all the little bits of ice and rock beyond Neptune. The new data from NASA’s superlative space telescope spot not only this outer ring, but also an inner ring more analogous to the asteroid belt. There’s a third feature, too—a giant clump of dust, lovingly referred to as the Great Dust Cloud. 

[Related: These 6 galaxies are so huge, they’ve been nicknamed ‘universe breakers’]

Between Fomalhaut’s outer Kuiper-Belt-like ring and its inner asteroid-belt-like ring is a gap. “The new gap that we see hints at the presence of an ice-giant mass planet, which would be an analog of what we see in the solar system,” like Neptune or Uranus, says lead author András Gáspár, astronomer at the University of Arizona. This unseen planet could be “carving out the gaps” via gravity, explains fellow Arizona astronomer and co-author Schuyler Wolff.

Fomalhaut’s asteroid belt has a curious tilt, appearing at a different angle from the outer ring, as though something knocked it off kilter. A knock, in fact, might explain the misalignment, the researchers say—a major collision could have tilted the asteroid belt, creating the massive dust cloud, too. 

All signs in Fomalhaut “point to a solar system that is alive and active, full of rocky bodies smashing into each other,” says co-author Jonathan Aguilar, staff scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute, home of JWST’s mission control.

JWST was uniquely suited to take these photos of Fomalhaut’s dust. The dust glows brightest in the mid-infrared, at long wavelengths unreachable by most other observatories. A particularly powerful telescope is necessary, too, to resolve enough details—and JWST is the only scope with both these features. The space telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) also has a coronagraph, a small dot to block out a bright star and reveal the surrounding dust.

“Mid-infrared wavelengths are so important for debris disk observations because that’s where you observe dust emission, and the distribution of dust tells you a lot about what’s going on,” says Aguilar. The new view of Fomalhaut “showcases the scientific power of JWST and MIRI even just a year into operations,” he adds.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence]

It’s certainly interesting to see what our solar system may have looked like in its infancy—but Fomalhaut isn’t an exact clone. Fomalhaut’s Kuiper Belt and asteroid belt doppelgangers are more spread out and contain more material than those features in our solar system. Although Fomalhaut has more movement and smashing than our solar system does now, our planets had a similar phase in the distant past, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Astronomers hope debris disks seen by JWST will help them figure out the details of how solar systems are born, and how they grow up to look like our own set of planets.

“We are at this frontier of unexplored territory, and I’m especially excited to see what JWST finds towards planet-forming disks,” says University of Michigan astronomer Jenny Calahan, who was not involved in the new findings. “Looking at these JWST images I was reminded of the moment that I got glasses for the first time,” adds Calahan. “It just changes your whole perspective when the world (or a debris disk) comes into focus at a level that you aren’t used to.”

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Uranus’ four largest moons could very likely be home to an ocean layer dozens of miles deep between their icy crusts and deep cores. A new analysis from NASA published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, could help determine how a future mission to Uranus might investigate the seventh planet from the sun’s moons, but also has implications that go beyond Uranus.

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years.]

At least 27 moons circle Uranus. The four largest are about two to three times smaller than  Earth’s moon, with Ariel at about 720 miles across and the largest, Titania, at 980 miles across. Titania’s size has long led scientists to believe that it is the most likely satellite to retain internal heat that is caused by radioactive decay. Uranus’ other moons were believed to be too small to retain the head that is necessary to keep an internal ocean from freezing since the heating created by Uranus’ gravitational pull is only a minor source of heat.  

This new analysis uses data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft and some new computer modeling looked at all of the planet’s five large moons: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, and Miranda. Of these large moons, Titania and Oberon orbit the farthest from Uranus, and these possible oceans could be dwelling 30 miles below the surface. Ariel and Umbriel may have oceans 19 miles deep. 

“When it comes to small bodies – dwarf planets and moons – planetary scientists previously have found evidence of oceans in several unlikely places, including the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, and Saturn’s moon Mimas,” co-author and planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Julie Castillo-Rogez said in a statement.  “So there are mechanisms at play that we don’t fully understand. This paper investigates what those could be and how they are relevant to the many bodies in the solar system that could be rich in water but have limited internal heat.”

The new study revisited the data from Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus during the 1980s and from more recent ground-based observations. The authors then built computer models using additional findings from NASA’s Galileo, Cassini, Dawn, and New Horizons missions (which all discovered ocean worlds), and insights into the chemistry and the geology of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Pluto and its moon Charon, and Ceres. These Plutonian and Saturnian moons are all icy bodies about the same size as the Uranian moons.

The team used the modeling to gauge how porous the surface of the Uranian moons are, and found that they are likely insulated enough to retain that internal heat needed to host an ocean. Additionally, the models found a potential heat source in the moons’ rocky mantles. These sources release hot liquid that would help an ocean maintain a warm environment. This warming scenario is especially likely in the moons Titania and Oberon, where the oceans could  even be warm enough to support some sort of lifeforms. 

[Related: Ice giant Uranus shows off its many rings in new JWST image.]

Investigating the composition of these oceans can help scientists learn about the materials that may be found on the icy surfaces of the moons as well, depending on whether or not the substances underneath were pushed up from below by internal geological activity. Evidence from telescopes shows that at least one of the moons (Ariel) has material on it that flowed onto its surface relatively recently, possibly from icy volcanoes. 

Miranda, the innermost and fifth largest Uranian moon, also hosts surface features that may be of recent origin, which suggests it may have held enough heat to maintain an ocean at some points. However, recent thermal modeling found that Miranda likely didn’t host that water for very long, since the moon loses heat too quickly and the ocean is probably frozen now.

Another key finding in the new study suggests that chlorides and ammonia are likely abundant in the oceans. Ammonia can act as an antifreeze, and the author’s modeling suggests that the salts that are likely present in the water would be another source of temperature regulation  that maintains the bodies’ internal oceans.

Digging down into the inner workings of a moon’s surface could help scientists and engineers choose the best instruments to survey them in future missions, but there are still many questions about Uranus’ large moons and work to be done.

“We need to develop new models for different assumptions on the origin of the moons in order to guide planning for future observations,” Castillo-Rogez said.

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If humans want to learn more about our higher brain functions and behaviors, some scientists think we should look towards insects—including everything from busy bees to social butterflies  to flies on the wall. A study published May 5 in the journal Science Advances found three diverse, specialized Kenyon cell subtypes in honey bee brains that likely evolved from one single, multi-functional Kenyon cell subtype ancestor.

[Related: Older bees teach younger bees the ‘waggle dance.’]

Kenyon cells (KCs) are a type of neural cell that are found within a part of the insect brain. These cells are  involved in learning and memory, particularly with the sense of smell called the mushroom body. They are found in insects in the large Hymenoptera order from more “primitive” sawflies up to the more sophisticated honey bee. 

“In 2017, we reported that the complexity of Kenyon cell subtypes in mushroom bodies in insect brains increases with the behavioral diversification in Hymenoptera,” co-author and University of Tokyo graduate student said in a statement. “In other words, the more KC subtypes an insect has, the more complex its brain and the behaviors it may exhibit. But we didn’t know how these different subtypes evolved. That was the stimulus for this new study.”

In this study, the team from University of Tokyo and Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) looked at two Hymenoptera species as representatives for different behaviors. The more solitary turnip sawfly has a single KC subtype, compared to the more complex and more social honey bee that has three KC subtypes.

It is believed that the sawfly’s more “primitive” brain may contain some of the ancestral properties of the honey bee brain. To find these potential evolutionary paths, the team used  transcriptome analysis to identify the genetic activity happening in the various KC subtypes and speculate their functions.

[Related: Like the first flying humans, honeybees use linear landmarks to navigate.]

“I was surprised that each of the three KC subtypes in the honey bee showed comparable similarity to the single KC type in the sawfly,” co-author and University of Tokyo biologist Hiroki Kohno said in a statement.  “Based on our initial comparative analysis of several genes, we had previously supposed that additional KC subtypes had been added one by one. However, they appear to have been separated from a multifunctional ancestral type, through functional segregation and specialization.” 

As the number of KC subtypes increased, each one almost equally inherited some distinct properties from a single ancestral KC. The subtypes were then modified in different ways, and the results are the more varied functions seen in the present-day insects.

To see a specific behavioral example of how the ancestral KC functions are present in both the honey bee and the sawfly, they trained the sawflies to partake in a behavior test commonly used in honey bees. The bees, and eventually sawflies, learned to associate an odor stimulus with a reward. Despite initial challenges, the team got the sawflies to engage in this task. 

Then, the team manipulated a gene called CaMKII in sawfly larvae. In honey bees, this gene is associated with forming long-term memory, which is a KC function. After the gene manipulation, the long-term memory was impaired in the larvae when they became adults, a sign that this gene also plays a similar role in sawflies. CaMKII was expressed across the entire single KC subtype in sawflies, but it was preferentially expressed in one KC subtype in honey bees. According to the authors, this suggests that the role of CaMKII in long-term memory was passed down to the specific KC subtype in the honey bee.

Even though insect and mammalian brains are very different in terms of size and complexity, we share some common functions and architecture in our nervous systems. By looking at how insect cells and behavior has evolved, it might provide insights into how our own brains evolved. Next, the team is interested in studying KC types acquired in parallel with social behaviors, such as the honey bee’s infamous “waggle dance.”

“We would like to clarify whether the model presented here is applicable to the evolution of other behaviors,” co-author and University of Tokyo doctoral student Takayoshi Kuwabara said in a statement. “There are many mysteries about the neural basis that controls social behavior, whether in insects, animals or humans. How it has evolved still remains largely unknown. I believe that this study is a pioneering work in this field.”

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NASA officials have talked for years about using the moon as a stepping stone to explore Mars. But now the space agency is finally reorganizing its administration to crystallize that aim in its bureaucratic structure. At the end of March, NASA established the new Moon to Mars Program Office at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. 

This office will unify an array of programs already under way: This includes the goals of NASA’s Artemis Moon mission, such as creating spacesuits for lunar astronauts as well as the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which successfully flew the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in November. These projects will be more formally linked to developing technologies and operations for future human journeys to Mars. 

“This new office will help ensure that NASA successfully establishes a long-term lunar presence needed to prepare for humanity’s next giant leap to the Red Planet,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. 

In the 2022 NASA Authorization Act, Congress mandated that NASA create the Moon to Mars Program Office to ensure that each Artemis lunar mission “demonstrates or advances a technology or operational concept that will enable human missions to Mars.” Following the successful Artemis I test flight, NASA aims to launch four astronauts on a lunar flyby mission for Artemis II in late 2024, and return humans to the moon’s surface in 2025 with Artemis III. Subsequent Artemis missions, at a pace of every other year, should allow astronauts to build a lunar habitat on the moon’s South Pole—with plans to stay for a while. 

[Related: NASA finally got comfier spacesuits, but astronauts still have to poop in them]

“We are going to the moon, we are demonstrating and executing a more sustained presence than we did back on Apollo, historically,” Lakiesha Hawkins, deputy manager of the new office, tells Popular Science. “The demonstrations that we’re doing are setting us up so that we can stay for a long duration; we can, in essence, live off the land.”

NASA astronauts will run experiments to obtain water from ice in lunar craters and to melt lunar regolith, or rocky material, to extract oxygen. They’ll also practice operations and procedures as if they are on Mars, with intentionally prolonged delays in communications to Earth and help all but unavailable. On the moon, these explorers will test the reliability of life support and other systems with an eye toward the Red Planet. “The further we go, the less and less we’ll be able to look back to any capabilities of the home planet in order to help us,” Hawkins says. 

At the moment, the Moon to Mars Program Office is still getting set up and hiring for key roles, according to Hawkins, but some changes have already begun. 

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’]

“One of the things that I think is an obvious change is, we used to have three different divisions,” she says, one division for SLS, Orion, and ground systems; another for a planned lunar space station called Gateway, a lunar lander spacecraft, spacesuits, and lunar surface technologies; and then a third division focused on Mars technologies and capabilities. Those are now merged under the Moon to Mars Program Office. Aligning these offices is “going to help set us up for future success,” Hawkins says.

And while the changes so far are largely administrative, Hawkins sees the Congressional mandate as vindication of NASA’s approach to our nearest extraterrestrial neighbors. “We seem to have a clear strategy that has survived and works. It worked its way through now multiple presidential administrations,” she says. “We are no kidding, returning to the moon.” And after that, eventually, on to Mars. 

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A team of doctors and surgeons from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital successfully performed a successful new fetal surgery. This time, they were able to treat a rare brain condition known as vein of Galen malformation. 

[Related: Scheduled childbirth might reduce preeclampsia risk by half.]

While in utero surgeries performed before birth are used for other conditions, this was among the first for this contusion. The ultrasound-guided procedure took place on March 15 and the details were published in the journal Stroke on May 4.  

Vein of Galen malformation occurs when the blood vessel that carries blood from the brain to the heart (known as the vein of Galen) does not develop correctly. The malformation or VOGM causes an enormous amount of blood stressing the vein and the heart. It can lead to multiple health problems—including heart failure or brain damage that lead to death.

During Derek and Kenyatta Coleman’s 30-week ultrasound, doctors noticed something unusual, despite what had been a normal pregnancy. The fetus’s brain and heart were enlarged and more investigation led to a VBOM diagnosis.  

The couple from Baton Rouge, Louisiana enrolled in an FDA approved clinical trial run by Brigham and Women’s and Boston Children’s despite the risks of preterm labor or brain hemorrhaging for the fetus. The team performed the surgery at 34 weeks of pregnancy to repair the malformation while the baby was still in-utero. They used ultrasound guidance, a long needle that is similar to those used for amniocentesis, and small coils that were placed directly into the abnormal blood vessels to stop blood flow.

The technique is borrowed from previously performed in utero cardiac surgeries. Once the fetus is in the optimal position, it “gets a small injection of medication so that it’s not moving and it is also getting a small injection of medication for pain relief,” Louise Wilkins-Haug, the division director of Maternal Fetal Medicine and Reproductive Genetics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital told CNN.

The doctors then inserted a needle through the abdominal wall and carefully threaded a catheter through the long needle. This enabled the metal coils to fill up the vein, slow down the blood flow, and reduce the pressure. Scans showed decreased blood pressure in key areas and the fetus showed instant signs of improvement.

Kenyatta was slowly leaking amniotic fluid and went into labor two days after the surgery. On March 17, Denver Coleman was born, weighing 4 pounds and 1 ounce. According to her doctors, Denver was very stable in the immediate newborn period and did not need any immediate treatments like placing more coils or medication to support her heart function.  

[Related: Placentas are full of secrets. These researchers want to unlock them.]

“The best part was when she was born, just seeing her in the NICU be fine and, you know, we would all sort of look at each other and pinch ourselves,” Darren Orbach, a Boston Children’s Hospital physician, told Boston CBS affiliate WBZ-TV.  “We were not sure when it was OK to celebrate because you just don’t see that with these babies. So that was really the moment that we knew that all was going to be great.”

Baby Denver continues to do well almost two months after the surgery and is not taking any heart failure, her neurological exam is normal, and there are no indications that she needs any additional medical interventions. “She’s shown us from the very beginning that she was a fighter,” Kenyatta told CNN.

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Nicknamed the “Earth’s lungs” for its dense oxygen producing forests, the Amazon can absorb 132 billion tons of the planet’s carbon. However, more than 30,000 square miles of the Amazon have been lost since the 1970s. Deforestation, clearing land for agriculture, and climate change fueled wildfires have severely taken its toll on the region, where about 10,000 acres of forest (almost the size of California) has been destroyed every day since 1988. 

However, there is still time to save it—and now scientists may have a “secret weapon” that could not only help reforest the Amazon, but other depleted forests around the world. And it comes from soil deep in the region’s past.

[Related: Brazil’s presidential election is a win for the Amazon—and the planet.]

From roughly 450 BCE and 950 CE, the people living along today’s Amazonia transformed the originally poor soil over many human generations. The soils were enriched with charcoal from low-intensity fires for cooking and burning refuse, animal bones, broken pottery, compost, and manure. The fertile result of these processes is Amazonian dark earth (ADE), or terra preta. The exceptionally fertile black soil is rich in nutrients and stable organic matter derived from charcoal. According to a study published May 5 in the journal Frontiers in Soil Science, it now may help reforest the same area where it was created. 

“Here we show that the use of ADEs can enhance the growth of pasture and trees due  to their high levels of nutrients, as well as to the presence of beneficial bacteria and archaea in the soil microbial community,” co-author Luís Felipe Zagatto, a graduate student at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture at São Paulo University in Brazil said in a statement. “This means that knowledge of the ‘ingredients’ that make ADEs so very fertile could be applied to help speed up ecological restoration projects.”

The team’s primary aim was to study how ADEs, or ultimately soils with a microbiome that has been artificially composed to imitate them, could boost reforestation. To do this, they conducted controlled experiments in a lab to mimic the ecological succession that happens in the soil when pasture in deforested areas is actively restored to its forest state. 

They sampled ADE from the Caldeirão Experimental Research Station in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The control soil in the experiments was from the Luiz de Queiróz Superior School of Agriculture in the state of São Paulo. They filled 36 pots with about 6.6 pounds of soil inside a greenhouse with an average temperature of 94ºF to anticipate global warming beyond current average temperatures in Amazonia (between 71 and 82ºF).

One third of the pots only received the control soil, while another third received a 4 to 1 mixture of the control soil and ADE, and the final third has 100 percent ADE. They planted seeds of palisade grass, a common forage for Brazilian livestock, to imitate pasture. The seedlings were allowed to grow for 60 days before the grass was cut so that only the roots remained in the soil. 

Each of the three soils were then replanted with tree seeds of either a colonizing species called Ambay pumpwood, Peltophorum dubium, or with cedro blanco.

[Related: The Amazon is on the brink of a climate change tipping point.]

The seeds were allowed to germinate and then grow for 90 days and then the team measured their height, dry mass, and extension of the roots. They also quantified the changes in the soil’s pH, microbial diversity, texture, and concentration of organic matter–potassium, calcium, magnesium, aluminum, sulfur, boron, copper, iron, and zinc–over the course of the experiment. 

At the beginning, ADEs showed greater amounts of nutrients than control soil, roughly 30 times more phosphorus and three to five times more of each of the other measured nutrients, except manganese. The ADE also had a higher pH and had more sand and silt in it, but less clay. 

Following the experiment, the control soils contained less nutrients than they had at the start, which reflects take-up by the plants. However, the 100 percent ADE soils remained richer than control soils, while nutrient levels were intermediate in the 20 percent ADE soils.

The 20 percent and 100 percent ADE soils also supported a greater biodiversity of both  bacteria and archaea than control soils.

“Microbes transform chemical soil particles into nutrients that can be taken up by plants. Our data showed that ADE contains microorganisms that are better at this transformation of soils, thus providing more resources for plant development,” co-author and University of São Paulo molecular biologist Anderson Santos de Freitas said in a statement.  “For example, ADE soils contained more beneficial taxa of the bacterial families Paenibacillaceae, Planococcaceae, Micromonosporaceae, and Hyphomicroblaceae.”

Additionally, adding ADE to soil improved the growth and development of plants. The dry mass of palisade grass was increased 3.4 times in the 20 percent ADE soil and 8.1 times in 100 percent ADE compared to in control soil. 

These results were enough to convince the team that ADE can boost plant growth, but it does come with some caution. 

“ADE has taken thousands of years to accumulate and would take an equal time to regenerate in nature if used,” co-author and  University of São Paulo molecular biologist Siu Mui Tsai said in a statement. “Our recommendations aren’t to utilize ADE itself, but rather to copy its characteristics, particularly its microorganisms, for use in future ecological restoration projects.”

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The peak of the Eta Aquarids shower, a flurry of up to 30 meteors an hour, will happen soon: The best time to catch this year’s display is between May 5 and May 6. It’s the result of Earth barging through a cloud of space debris—imagine driving on the highway behind a sloppy gravel truck—but the stuff that’s disintegrating above our heads is actually dust and flakes left behind by Halley’s Comet, aka 1/P Halley.

Halley’s Comet is named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who in 1705 used Isaac Newton’s theories of physics to calculate the its orbit. The ball of dirty ice cruises around the sun, orbiting opposite Earth’s motion to pass beyond Neptune’s path, and swings back into Earthlings’ view every 75 or so years.

[Related: The biggest comet ever found is cruising through our solar system’s far reaches]

This happens with such regularity that Mark Twain, born in 1835, wrote that he “came in with Halley’s Comet“; the author expected “to go out with it” when it returned in 1910. (Sure enough, Twain died in April of that year.) The last time humans could spy the object in the sky, unaided, was in 1986. Those of us around in mid-2061 will have the chance to see it again.

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Alongside our planet’s oxygen rich atmosphere and plentiful water, the Earth’s continents are part of what makes the planet uniquely habitable for sustaining life. Despite this, little is known about what gave rise to these massive pieces of the Earth’s crust and the properties that make them special. One prevailing hypothesis is that since continental crust is lower in iron compared to oceanic crust, the iron-poor composition in continental crust is part of why large parts of Earth’s surface stand above sea level as dryland for terrestrial life. 

[Related: Seismologists might have identified the deepest layer of Earth’s core.]

However, scientists found that the iron-depleted, oxidized chemistry in Earth’s continental crust likely didn’t come from crystallization of the mineral garnet, as proposed in 2018. Instead, the team believes that oxidized sulfur may be behind it.  They published their findings on May 4 in the journal Science

New continental crust comes from continental arc volcanoes found at subduction zones like the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. These zones are where an oceanic plate dives beneath a continental plate. 

In 2018, the explanation of why the continental crust is iron-poor and oxidized came down to the crystallization of garnet, a group of silicate minerals. According to this theory, the garnet found in the magmas beneath continental arc volcanoes is removing non-oxidized iron from the Earth’s terrestrial plates. At the same time, the molten magma is depleted of iron and is more oxidized. 

This garnet explanation for iron depletion and oxidation in continental arc magmas was pretty compelling to study co-author Elizabeth Cottrell, a research geologist and curator of rocks at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. However, one aspect of it did not sit right with her.

“You need high pressures to make garnet stable, and you find this low-iron magma at places where crust isn’t that thick and so the pressure isn’t super high,” Cottrell said in a statement.

Five years ago, Cottrell and Megan Holycross from Cornell University, along with their colleagues began to search for ways to test whether crystallization of garnet beneath arc volcanoes is actually essential for creating continental crust.

To test this, the team used piston-cylinder presses to recreate the massive pressure and heat that is found beneath continental arc volcanoes. In 13 different experiments, the team grew samples of garnet from molten rock inside the piston-cylinder press under pressures and temperatures similar to conditions inside of the Earth’s crust deep magma chambers– roughly 8,000 times more pressure than what’s inside a can of soda. The temperature in the experiment ranged from 1,742 degrees to 2,246 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt rock.

[Related: How old is Earth? It’s a surprisingly tough question to answer.]

The team then used garnets from the Smithsonian’s National Rock Collection and other collections from around the world where the concentrations of oxidized and unoxidized iron were already known.

The materials were then taken to the Advanced Photon Source at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Using high-energy X-ray beams, the team conducted X-ray absorption spectroscopy. This technique can tell scientists about the structure and composition of materials based on how they absorb X-rays. The team looked at the concentrations of oxidized and unoxidized iron to check and calibrate X-ray absorption spectroscopy measurements and compare it with the materials from earlier experiments.

They found that the garnets had not incorporated enough unoxidized iron from the rock samples to account for the levels of iron-depletion and oxidation in the magmas that build up the Earth’s continental crust.

“These results make the garnet crystallization model an extremely unlikely explanation for why magmas from continental arc volcanoes are oxidized and iron depleted,” Cottrell said. “It’s more likely that conditions in Earth’s mantle below continental crust are setting these oxidized conditions.”

The findings led to more questions, such as what oxidizing and depleting the iron actually does  in the crust, as well as what is modifying the compositions. 

The leading theory is that oxidized sulfur could be oxidizing the iron and it is currently being investigated at the Smithsonian. This research was supported by funding from the Smithsonian (part of the Our Unique Planet initiative), the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Lyda Hill Foundation.

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A dust particle can go on a great voyage. It starts on land; it continues in the air, where winds carry the particle up, up, and away. And—at least for some dust particles—that saga might end with a fall into seawater thousands of miles from where it began.

Dust intrinsically links Earth’s sands, skies, and seas. Particles that fall into water can deliver nutrients that feed life in the sea, creating great algal blooms. Scientists are learning more about the process, but there are many questions they still haven’t answered about how—and if—it works.

In a new study published today in the journal Science, scientists have answered one previous mystery. They’ve shown that more dust does, indeed, create more phytoplankton.

“Understanding how the ocean works is an underlying motivation,” says Toby Westberry, a botanist at Oregon State University, and the paper’s lead author. “It is vast and still poorly understood in many respects.”

Much of the world’s dust begins its journey in the world’s deserts. Winds blowing across the sands might carry some fine particles away. And the longer that sand sits in one place, the more dust that place generates: The world’s great dust generator lies in North Africa: the vast expanses of the Sahara. 

From there, dust particles are passengers of the world’s wind patterns. For instance, North African dust might ride the westerlies to Europe, or it might ride the trade winds from North Africa across the Atlantic. 

Inevitably, some dust falls into the world’s oceans along the way, unloading the cargo it carried from the deserts—elements like phosphorus and iron. The atmosphere is not inert, either, and adds new chemicals to airborne particles: As dust rides high through the skies of Earth’s troposphere, it collects nitrogen from the surrounding air. When dust delivers this nitrogen and other nutrients to the water, they encourage phytoplankton to bloom—tinting the oceans greenchanging the very color of the oceans.

Atmospheric dust isn’t the primary source of nutrients for sea plants; scientists think that they mainly rely on what rises as water upwells from the ocean depths. But dust can still make its mark—especially by delivering iron to parts of the ocean that are deficient in the metal.

Scientists pay close attention to dust particles because of their roles as iron couriers.  “Often, when we think of dust,” says Douglas Hamilton, an earth scientist at North Carolina State University, who was not an author on the paper, “we do link it immediately to the iron.”

There are many questions that remain unanswered about this process. What precise role does the dust play in encouraging phytoplankton? Are there different types of dust that cause phytoplankton to respond in different ways? 

Most pressingly, scientists didn’t know the process worked on a worldwide scale. Past research had shown that dust storms could cause local phytoplankton blooms; experiments had also demonstrated that literally pouring iron into seawater encouraged phytoplankton growth. “We’ve done this work, but does it actually matter?” says Hamilton. “We think it does…it’s been proved for isolated events, but it’s never been proved on the global scale.”

The paper’s authors tried to answer that question. NASA had simulated dust flows in the atmosphere between 2003 and 2016 based on observations of how surface temperatures changed with the days. Unsurprisingly, the simulations stated that more dust fell in regions around the Sahara Desert: in seas like the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.

[Related: The Sahara used to be full of fish]

With that data in hand, the authors turned to satellite measurements of the seas over that same time period: specifically, observations of ocean color, which could indicate phytoplankton. Indeed, phytoplankton grew on the days after the simulation suggested certain parts of the sea would have received a windfall of dust.

The scientists saw such responses across the globe—but the blooms weren’t always equal. In some areas, increased dust led to a boost in the quantity of phytoplankton; in others, increased dust made the phytoplankton healthier, with brighter chlorophyll. In still others, dust didn’t seem to elicit a response at all.

“Why would this be?” Westberry wonders. “Knowing something about the mineralogy of the dust—what it’s composed of and what nutrients it carries—would be helpful to this end.”

Dust isn’t the only source of food airdropped to phytoplankton. Volcanic eruptions and wildfires both spew out nutrients that enter the ocean. “Volcanic ash is not the same as dust, but conveys nutrients much the same,” Westberry says. Meanwhile, scientists have linked megafires in Australia with phytoplankton in the downwind South Pacific. On the other side of the planet, wildfires in northern forests are associated with blooms around the North Pole.

[Related: In constant darkness, Arctic krill migrate by twilight and the Northern Lights]

“This paper is great, it’s awesome,” says Hamilton. “Then the next question is: Right, now, what about all this other stuff which is also out there? What impact is that having, too?” One future area of study is human activity, which causes climate change and wildfires. We may be responsible for desertification, too, creating more sand for winds to carry away. And our industrial activity—pollution and fossil fuels, for instance—pours out particulates of its own. Scientists think these substances might feed phytoplankton, but they don’t fully know how or if it works across the globe.

Fortunately for scientists, they may see a bloom of their own field. In 2024, NASA will launch a satellite called PACE specifically to observe phytoplankton in the ocean.

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A broken molar and some sophisticated stone pointed tools suggest that Europe’s first known humans may have been living on the continent 54,000 years ago. The findings are detailed in a study published May 3 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE and suggests that the first modern humans spread across the European continent during three waves in the Paleolithic Era. 

[Related: Sex, not violence, could’ve sealed the fate of the Neanderthals.]

Homo sapiens arose in Africa over 300,000 years ago and anatomically modern humans are thought to have emerged about 195,000 years ago. Previously, it was believed that modern humans moved into Europe from Africa roughly 42,000 years ago, leaving the archaeological record of Paleolithic Europe withs many open questions about how modern humans arrived in the region and how they interacted with the resident Neanderthal populations. The 2022 discovery of a tooth in France’s Grotte Mandrin cave in the Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans were there about 54,000 years ago, about 10,000 years earlier than scientists previously believed. 

“Until 2022, it was believed that Homo sapiens had reached Europe between the 42nd and 45th millennium. The study shows that this first Sapiens migration would actually be the last of three major migratory waves to the continent, profoundly rewriting what was thought to be known about the origin of Sapiens in Europe,” study co-author Ludovic Slimak, an archeologist at and University of Toulouse in France, said in a statement. 

The newly analyzed stone tools from this study have further upended that timeline. They suggest that the three waves of migration occurred between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago. The team of researchers compared records of stone tool technology across western Eurasia to document the order of early human activity across the continents. It focused on tens of thousands of stone tools from Ksar Akil in Lebanon and France’s Grotte Mandrin (where the tooth was found) and analyzed their precise technical connections with the earliest modern technologies in the continent. 

The technology of the tools went through three similar phases in each region, Slimak said, so they may have spread from the Near East to Europe during these three distinct waves of migration. The study suggests Neanderthals only began to fade into extinction in the third wave–about 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. 

[Related: Archery may have helped humans gain leverage over Neanderthals.]

The team also looked at a group of stone artifacts that were previously found in the eastern Mediterranean region called the Levant, or what includes today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Slimak compared the tools from Grotte Mandrin to the ones from Ksar Akil in Lebanon, noting similarities between them. The artifacts from a group of stone tools known as the Châtelperronian resemble the modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. The Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago and scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.

“Châtelperronian culture, one of the first modern traditions in western Europe and since then attributed to Neanderthals, should in fact signal the second wave of Homo sapiens migration in Europe, impacting deeply our understanding of the cultural organization of the last Neanderthals,” said Slimak.

The moving of these technologies allow for a provocative new reinterpretation of human arrival into Europe and how it is related to the Levant region. Future studies of these phases of human migration will help paint a clearer picture of the sequence of events when Homo sapiens spread,   and gradually replaced Neanderthals.

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After 60 years of trial and error, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first vaccine to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) on May 3. More preventative shots for the respiratory virus are on the way.

[Related: How our pandemic toolkit fought the many viruses of 2022.]

The FDA approved Arexvy from pharmaceutical company GSK. The vaccine is designed to protect those over 60 in a single dose. A vaccine from Pfizer is currently under consideration for older adults and pregnant people as a maternal vaccination to protect newborn babies. Sanofi and AstraZeneca’s monoclonal antibody treatment for babies that offers vaccine-like protection during RSV season is also under consideration by the FDA. Additionally, a late-stage trial of an RSV vaccine that uses mRNA technology from Moderna showed promise in late-stage trials. 

The vaccine could be available as soon as this fall, pending a recommendation for its use from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which will meet in June. GSK says it has “millions of doses ready to be shipped,” according to a recent earnings presentation.

“Older adults, in particular those with underlying health conditions, such as heart or lung disease or weakened immune systems, are at high risk for severe disease caused by RSV,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, in a statement. “Today’s approval of the first RSV vaccine is an important public health achievement to prevent a disease which can be life-threatening and reflects the FDA’s continued commitment to facilitating the development of safe and effective vaccines for use in the United States.”

RSV can affect all age groups, but it is particularly worrisome in babies and older adults. It is a highly contagious virus that causes infections of the lungs and breathing passages. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), RSV leads to approximately 60,000 to 120,000 hospitalizations and 6,000 to 10,000 deaths among adults 65 years of age and older every year. It is also a common cause of lower respiratory tract disease in older adults. This disease affects the lungs and can cause life-threatening pneumonia and bronchiolitis.

The virus circulates seasonally, usually beginning in the fall and peaking in the winter. The 2022-2023 RSV season started particularly early and flooded hospitals and pediatric wards across the United States, leading pharmacies to limit the sales of children’s medicines.

According to the results of a clinical trial of close to 25,000 older adults, the GSK vaccine was 83 percent effective at preventing lower respiratory tract disease by the virus. It was 94 percent effective at preventing severe disease in seniors. In the trial, severe disease was defined as the need for supplemental oxygen or a mechanical help to breathe. The results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February. 

[Related: Fighting RSV in babies starts with a mother’s antibodies.]

The vaccine works by using a small piece of the virus called a fusion protein, or F-protein. The F-protein sticks out on the virus’ surface and helps it latch onto cells in the upper airway and infect them. The F-proteins were made in a lab with specially programmed cells. 

In 2013, researchers at the National Institutes of Health discovered how to freeze the normally wiggly and shape-shifting F-protein in the shape that it takes before it fuses onto a cell. When it’s in this shape, the body can produce antibodies against it. The GSK vaccine uses this pre-fusion form of the F-protein and an ingredient called an adjuvant that can boost immune activity.

The search for a vaccine to RSV began in the 1960s, but has been mired by tragedy. Two toddlers died after receiving an experimental shot in the 60’s after it unexpectedly caused them to contract a very serious version of the virus. Many of the safety measures currently in place during vaccine trials were put in place after the failures of the RSV vaccine.

Barney Graham, a vaccine scientist at Morehouse School of Medicine worked alongside Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and Peter Kwong, a vaccine scientist at the National Institutes of Health, to jump-start the RSV vaccine field after decades of failure.

“This is my life’s work, so it’s kind of amazing to see it come to this point,” Graham told The Washington Post.  “It’s exciting for me to see this happening because of all the other people who’ve come before me working on RSV, some of whom are no longer with us. I wish they could see this is happening. It’s been a long struggle.”

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Deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, the edge of one tectonic plate was being jammed beneath the tectonic plate that held Japan. This wasn’t news. It had been happening at a rate of three inches a year since long before humans had invented the concept of news. But that March, it became news in the biggest possible way, when a chunk of the underlying plate suddenly gave way, causing the seafloor to pop up by about 15 feet and the plate holding parts of Japan to suddenly drop by about three feet. The magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake was so big it shunted Japan eight feet to the east. It was so big it shifted the Earth six inches on its axis. It was so big it sped up the rotation of the planet
(only by 1.8 microseconds a day, but still—your days are now just a tiny bit shorter. Thanks Obama!). The earthquake and resultant tsunami also wreaked havoc on human systems—transportation systems, energy systems, water systems, telecommunication systems, and that most important of all human systems, the biological system that allows us to slobber, reproduce, and contemplate the irrationality of high baby-formula prices (usually in that order).

The tsunami killed more than twenty thousand people and caused multiple nuclear meltdowns, a disastrous toll for everyone except sellers of supplements, who pivoted to prey on the baseless fears of Americans living thousands of miles away from the radiation. Toby McAdam, still selling his RisingSun products, told the local newspaper that he doubted the radiation would drift to Montana—“but it could.” He recommended that his “Lugol’s Iodine solution” be applied to the skin daily as “an ounce of prevention.” Though public health officials said people self-treating with iodide supplements were more likely to harm than help themselves, orders spiked so sharply that Toby’s website crashed.

The multifaceted nature of the tsunami-caused chaos makes it perhaps appropriate that the event also marked the beginning of the United States’ descent into a full-blown zombie apocalypse.

The June following the earthquake, the CDC began a conversation about emergency preparedness on Twitter that led to a handful of people jokingly tweeting that they would like the CDC to weigh in on a catastrophic zombie attack.

This led to the predictable wave of lols, rofls, and laughy-face emoticons, but it also sparked an idea for Dave Daigle (a CDC communications administrator) and Dr. Ali S. Khan (a CDC expert in disaster preparedness).

With Daigle’s input, Khan wrote a piece for the CDC website explaining how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. This neatly demonstrated the humanity of the person on the other side of the icy-cold stethoscope even as it leveraged the innate appeal of zombies to teach real-life strategies to cope with actual disasters.

It turned out people were hungry for messaging about people hungry for brains. The CDC zombie apocalypse preparedness plan was an instant hit, racking up so many views that the CDC server froze up, overwhelmed by all the traffic.

This bit of fun was so successful that a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, published a congratulatory paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases urging other public health officials to follow suit. It argued that zombies were an opportunity “to capitalize on the benefits of spreading public health awareness through the use of relatable popular culture tools and scientific explanations for fictional phenomena.” They proposed that the medical establishment build o those efforts to stimulate the conversation and do better public education on a variety of health topics.

Suddenly, zombies were everywhere in public health and safety. The CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency all published in-depth zombie-related literature. Finally, public officials were seizing the initiative and taking back the cul tural space they had inadvertently ceded to promoters of One True Cures.

Also in 2011, a Harvard Medical School physician and aspiring nov elist named Steven Schlozman appeared on the radio show Coast to Coast AM, which spun tales of conspiracy and paranormal phenomena to a large and credulous national audience from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., seven days a week. Because Coast to Coast AM was the most popular late-night radio show in the country, with ten million listeners, it was a great opportunity for Schlozman, who was there to promote his latest work, The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse. In the book, Schlozman drew on his medical knowledge to describe “Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency syndrome” as the medical cause
of zombies (it was of course a fictional work of fictitious fiction). The format of the show required that Schlozman spend the opening stretch talking about the events of his novel as if they were real, before shifting to an acknowledgment that it was all pure fantasy.

Daigle, Khan, and Schlozman were helping people learn a bit of science in a fun way.

But their efforts quickly ran up against a problem: there is more than one way to view a zombie apocalypse.

One fact that the CDC and its fellow agencies failed to fully appreciate was that, in zombie properties like 2009’s feature film Zombieland and 2010’s hit television series The Walking Dead, very little
screen time is given to public health concepts like water sanitation. The action takes place after most health authorities have had their faces eaten, leaving individual survivors to run around attacking infected people with baseball bats, crossbows, and shotguns as a means of self-preservation.

That’s why other groups were quickly lining up to enlist the hot new cultural craze into their own, very different agendas. Zombies became the centerpiece in gun advertisements and were a major part of the NRA’s annual conventions, where shooting at the undead carried none of the moral baggage that came with shooting at human targets.

“Because the zombie canon focuses so squarely on the apocalypse, its spread into popular culture can erode faith in the resiliency of civilization,” wrote Daniel Drezner, the Tufts University professor and zombie expert. “The zombie narrative, as it is traditionally presented, socially constructs the very narrative that agencies like the CDC and FEMA are trying to prevent.”

Drezner documented the way that zombie references became a sort of dog whistle for gun rights—those on the outside glossed over a quirky head-scratcher while targeted audiences became fired up, even though they would clearly never need to shoot a zombie in real life.

Until some Americans began to ask, Will I need to shoot a zombie in real life?

Toby McAdam had told me about the 2012 Miami incident in which a man bit the face off a homeless man and then was himself described by authorities as slow to die after being shot. But Toby was not the only person fascinated by that attack. It let the undead cat out of the bag.

Soon after the news broke, a self-described Bitcoin evangelist and promoter of alternative-health supplements doctored a Huffington Post article about the incident so that it attributed the cause of the face eating to “LQP-79,” a virus that destroys internal organs and makes the host hungry for human flesh.

The fake article went viral, blitzing digital media feeds so thoroughly that LQP-79 was soon the third-most-searched term on the CDC website, forcing the agency to officially deny the existence of a zombie virus.

Around then, communities of zombie-themed survivalists and militias sprang up all across America. One was an offshoot of the well-established Michigan Militia, while others had names like the Kansas Anti Zombie Militia, the Anti Zombie Unified Resistance Effort (AZURE), Zombie-Fighting Rednecks, the Zombie Eradication and Survival Team, Postmortem Assault Squadron, and the US Department of Zombie Defense.

One, a loosely affiliated national group called the US Zombie Outbreak Response Team (ZORT), popularized a strange mishmash of survivalism and cosplay. Its website features pictures of preppers in tactical gear and tinted sunglasses using stickers and goofy accessories to trick out their trucks as zombie-fighting vehicles that would be equally at home in Ghostbusters or Mad Max universes. It was in some ways good fun. But they also carried real firearms. And engaged in real postapocalyptic survival exercises.

“A Zombie could be anything from a person infected by a pandemic outbreak to a crazy nut job, criminal or gangster who wants to hurt your family and steal your food and preps,” reads ZORT’s promotional material.

Though ZORT purports to be simply providing tongue-in-cheek cover for legit training that would be helpful in a natural disaster, of course the real difference between zombies and hurricane survivors is that one must be shot in the head and the other should be given a hot toddy and a shower.

Did any of these folks actually believe in zombies?

Probably not. But there was potential.

Drezner cited research showing that when considering paranormal ideas, people look less to the logical evidence and more to whether other people believe in the ideas. This means that even if no one believes in zombies, if some people believe that other people believe in zombies, then some people will believe in zombies. The gaslighting became so effective that the gaslit then gaslighted others, until fear of actual zombies took on an undead life of its own—call it masslighting.

And really, the online picture was becoming quite blurry. At the CDC, Daigle and Khan began getting inquiries about their Zombie Preparedness Plan from concerned citizens who wanted to know what sort of firearm was recommended to repel undead invaders. Meanwhile, after his Coast to Coast AM appearance, Schlozman got emails from listeners who wanted to know what medicines could stave off a zombie infection, and whether he had recommendations for how to protect one’s home. China’s state media had to formally debunk a robust rumor that Ebola victims were rising from the dead as zombies. And in 2014 in the Florida statehouse, a representative formally proposed “An Act Relating to the Zombie Apocalypse” as the name of a bill that would allow citizens to carry firearms without a permit in an emergency.

Shockingly, a 2015 survey showed that 2 percent of American adults thought the most likely apocalyptic scenario would be one caused by zombies.

And zombie references kept popping up in unexpected places. People downloaded audio fitness tracks in which joggers were kept motivated by imaginary zombie antagonists that pursued them as they ran.

A man named Vermin Supreme, who sought the 2016 Libertarian Party nomination for president, added a platform plank on “zombie apocalypse awareness.” He also advocated using zombies for renewable energy. Even Big Tech was in on it. Buried in Amazon’s user agreement for a game-development engine, clause 57.10—a gag, probably?—read that the software should not be used in life-and-death situations, such as in medical equipment, nuclear facilities, spacecraft, or military combat operations. “However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.”

With zombie stories saturating popular culture, the lore in TV and film began to expand beyond the simple trope of shambling brain eaters. There were zombie rom-coms and zombie mockumentaries. On the CW Television Network, a show called iZombie tells the story of a Seattle morgue worker infected by a zombie virus. In this world, zombies retain their personality and capacity for reason, as long as they are well fed (on brains). During the third season, which aired in 2017, a militant group of zombies releases a deadly flu virus in Seattle; local public health officials announce a mandatory flu vaccination, only to find that the zombies have tainted the vaccines with a substance that will turn the vaccinated into zombies.

Vaccines that zombified ordinary citizens?

Luckily for public health, no one would believe that in real life.

Buy If It Sounds Like a Quack by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling here.

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This article was original featured on MIT Press.This article is excerpted from Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo’s book “Tales From a Robotic World.”

In the early 2010s, a new trend in robotics began to emerge. Engineers started creating robotic versions of salamanders, dragonflies, octopuses, geckos, and clams — an ecosystem of biomimicry so diverse the Economist portrayed it as “Zoobotics.” And yet Italian biologist-turned-engineer Barbara Mazzolai raised eyebrows when she proposed looking beyond animals and building a robot inspired by a totally different biological kingdom: plants. As fluid as the definition of the word robot can be, most people would agree that a robot is a machine that moves. But movement is not what plants are famous for, and so a robotic plant might at first sound, well, boring.

But plants, it turns out, are not static and boring at all; you just have to look for action in the right place and at the right timescale. When looking at the lush vegetation of a tropical forest or marveling at the colors of an English garden, it’s easy to forget that you are actually looking at only half of the plants in front of you. The best-looking parts, maybe, but not necessarily the smartest ones. What we normally see are the reproductive and digestive systems of a plant: the flowers and fruits that spread pollen and seeds and the leaves that extract energy from sunlight. But the nervous system, so to speak, that explores the environment and makes decisions is in fact underground, in the roots.

Roots may be ugly and condemned to live in darkness, but they firmly anchor the plant and constantly collect information from the soil to decide in which direction to grow to find nutrients, avoid salty soil, and prevent interference with the roots of other plants. They may not be the fastest diggers, but they’re the most efficient ones, and they can pierce the ground using only a fraction of the energy that worms, moles, or manufactured drills require. Plant roots are, in other words, a fantastic system for underground exploration — which is what inspired Mazzolai to create a robotic version of them.

“It forced us to rethink everything, from materials to sensing and control of robots.”

Mazzolai’s intellectual path is a case study in interdisciplinarity. Born and raised in Tuscany, in the Pisa area that is one of Italy’s robotic hot spots, she was fascinated early on by the study of all things living, graduating in biology from the University of Pisa and focusing on marine biology. She then became interested in monitoring the health of ecosystems, an interest that led her to get her doctorate in microengineering and eventually to be offered by Paolo Dario, a biorobotics pioneer at Pisa’s Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the possibility of opening a new research line on robotic technologies for environmental sensing.

It was there, in Paolo Dario’s group, that the first seeds of her plant-inspired robots were planted. Mazzolai got in touch with a group at the European Space Agency (ESA) in charge of exploring innovative technologies that looked interesting but were still far away from applications, she recalls. While brainstorming with them, she realized space engineers were struggling with a problem that plants brilliantly solved several hundred million years ago.

“In real plants, roots have two functions,” says Mazzolai. “They explore the soil in search of water and nutrients, but even more important, they anchor the plant, which would otherwise collapse and die.” Anchoring happens to be an unsolved problem when designing systems that have to sample and study distant planets or asteroids. In most cases, from the moon to Mars and distant comets and asteroids, the force of gravity is weak. Unlike on Earth, the weight of the spacecraft or rover is not always enough to keep it firmly on the ground, and the only available option is to endow the spacecraft with harpoons, extruding nails, and drills. But these systems become unreliable over time if the soil creeps, provided they work in the first place. They didn’t work for Philae, for example, the robotic lander that arrived at the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet in 2014 after a 10-year trip only to fail to anchor at the end of its descent, bouncing away from the ground and collecting just a portion of the planned measurements.

In a brief feasibility study carried out between 2007 and 2008 for ESA, Mazzolai and her team let their imagination run free and described an anchoring system for spacecrafts inspired by plant roots. The research group also included Stefano Mancuso, a Florence-based botanist who would later gain fame for his idea that plants display “intelligent” behavior, although of a completely different sort from that of animals. Mazzolai and her team described an ideal system that would reproduce, and transfer to other planets, the ability of Earth plants to dig through the soil and anchor to it.

In the ESA study, Mazzolai imagined a spacecraft descending on a planet with a really hard landing: The impact would dig a small hole in the planetary surface, inserting a “seed” just deep enough in the soil, not too different from what happens to real seeds. From there, a robotic root would start to grow by pumping water into a series of modular small chambers that would expand and apply pressure on the soil. Even in the best-case scenario, such a system could only dig through loose and fine dust or soil. The root would have to be able to sense the underground environment and turn away from hard bedrock. Mazzolai suggested Mars as the most suitable place in the solar system to experiment with such a system — better than the moon or asteroids because of the Red Planet’s low gravity and atmospheric pressure at surface level (respectively, 1/3 and 1/10 of those found on Earth). Together with a mostly sandy soil, these conditions would make digging easier because the forces that keep soil particles together and compact them are weaker than on Earth.

At the time, ESA did not push forward with the idea of a plant-like planetary explorer. “It was too futuristic,” Mazzolai admits. “It required technology that was not yet there, and in fact still isn’t.” But she thought that others beyond the space sector would find the idea intriguing. After transitioning to the Italian Institute of Technology, in 2012, Mazzolai convinced the European Commission to fund a three-year study that would result in a plant-inspired robot, code-named Plantoid. “It was uncharted territory,” says Mazzolai. “It meant creating a robot without a predefined shape that could grow and move through soil — a robot made of independent units that would self-organize and make decisions collectively. It forced us to rethink everything, from materials to sensing and control of robots.”

The project had two big challenges: on the hardware side, how to create a growing robot, and on the software side, how to enable roots to collect and share information and use it to make collective decisions. Mazzolai and her team tackled hardware first and designed the robot’s roots as flexible, articulated, cylindrical structures with an actuation mechanism that can move their tip in different directions. Instead of the elongation mechanism devised for that initial ESA study, Mazzolai ended up designing an actual growth mechanism, essentially a miniature 3D printer that can continuously add material behind the root’s tip, thus pushing it into the soil.

It works like this. A plastic wire is wrapped around a reel stored in the robot’s central stem and is pulled toward the tip by an electric motor. Inside the tip, another motor forces the wire into a hole heated by a resistor, then pushes it out, heated and sticky, behind the tip, “the only part of the root that always remains itself,” Mazzolai explains. The tip, mounted on a ball bearing, rotates and tilts independent of the rest of the structure, and the filament is forced by metallic plates to coil around it, like the winding of a guitar string. At any given time, the new plastic layer pushes the older layer away from the tip and sticks to it. As it cools down, the plastic becomes solid and creates a rigid tubular structure that stays in place even when further depositions push it above the metallic plates. Imagine winding a rope around a stick and the rope becomes rigid a few seconds after you’ve wound it. You could then push the stick a bit further, wind more rope around it, and build a longer and longer tube with the same short stick as a temporary support. The tip is the only moving part of the robot; the rest of the root only extends downward, gently but relentlessly pushing the tip against the soil.

The upper trunk and branches of the plantoid robot are populated by soft, folding leaves that gently move toward light and humidity. Plantoid leaves cannot yet transform light into energy, but Michael Graetzel, a chemistry professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and one of the world’s most cited scientists, has developed transparent and foldable films filled with synthetic chlorophyll capable of converting and storing electricity from light that one day could be formed into artificial leaves powering plantoid robots. “The fact that the root only applies pressure to the soil from the tip is what makes it fundamentally different from traditional drills, which are very destructive. Roots, on the contrary, look for existing soil fractures to grow into, and only if they find none, they apply just enough pressure to create a fracture themselves,” Mazzolai explains.

This new project may one day result in robot explorators that can work in dark environments with a lot of empty space, such as caves or wells.

The plantoid project has attracted a lot of attention in the robotics community because of the intriguing challenges that it combines — growth, shape shifting, collective intelligence — and because of possible new applications. Environmental monitoring is the most obvious one: The robotic roots could measure changing concentrations of chemicals in the soil, especially toxic ones, or they could prospect for water in arid soils, as well as for oil and gas — even though, by the time this technology is mature, we’d better have lost our dependence on them as energy sources on planet Earth. They could also inspire new medical devices, such as safer endoscopes that move in the body without damaging tissue. But space applications remain on Mazzolai’s radar.

Meanwhile, Mazzolai has started another plant-inspired project, called Growbot. This time the focus is on what happens over the ground, and the inspiration comes from climbing trees. “The invasiveness of climbing plants shows how successful they are from an evolutionary point of view,” she notes. “Instead of building a solid trunk, they use the extra energy for growing and moving faster than other plants. They are very efficient at using clues from the environment to find a place to anchor. They use light, chemical signals, tactile perception. They can sense if their anchoring in the soil is strong enough to support the part of the plant that is above the ground.” Here the idea is to build another growing robot, similar to the plantoid roots, that can overcome void spaces and attach to existing structures. “Whereas plantoids must face friction, grow-bots work against gravity,” she notes. This new project may one day result in robot explorators that can work in dark environments with a lot of empty space, such as caves or wells.

But for all her robots, Mazzolai is still keeping an eye on the visionary idea that started it all: planting and letting them grow on other planets. “It was too early when we first proposed it; we barely knew how to study the problem. Now I hope to start working with space agencies again.” Plant-inspired robots, she says, could not only sample the soil but also release chemicals to make it more fertile — whether on Earth or a terraformed Mars. And in addition to anchoring, she envisions a future where roboplants could be used to grow entire infrastructure from scratch. “As they grow, the roots of plantoids and the branches of a growbot would build a hollow structure that can be filled with cables or liquids,” she explains. This ability to autonomously grow the infrastructure for a functioning site would make a difference when colonizing hostile environments such as Mars, where a forest of plant-inspired robots could analyze the soil and search for water and other chemicals, creating a stable structure complete with water pipes, electrical wiring, and communication cables: the kind of structure astronauts would like to find after a year-long trip to Mars.

Dario Floreano is Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He is the co-author, with Nicola Nosengo, of “Tales From a Robotic World: How Intelligent Machines Will Shape Our Future,” from which this article is excerpted.

Nicola Nosengo is a science writer and science communicator at EPFL. His work has appeared in Nature, the Economist, Wired, and other publications. He is the Chief Editor of Nature Italy

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A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as Shakespeare wrote, but erase just one little molecule in their flowers and you’d be lucky to catch a whiff of anything at all. In recent decades, commercial gardeners have bred roses that grow in different colors, are more insect-resistant, and have a longer vase life. But that manipulation has a trade-off: more visually appealing flowers often lose their strong aromatic fragrances. 

What do roses need to make their pleasant odors, and more importantly, how do we get them back? A new study published Monday in PNAS identified a key enzyme called farnesyl diphosphate (FPP) synthase, crucial for driving the reaction that creates a rose’s fresh and floral scent. The findings could help with finding a way to create more mesmerizing and beautiful roses. 

A chemical called geraniol is responsible for the sweet scent we associate with roses. Roses make the compound through a chemical reaction that involves FPP synthase plus several other enzymes. The process involves NUDX1 hydrolase, an enzyme found in the liquid interior of plant cells, or cytosol, that make up the rose petals. To create a strong and sweet aroma, flowers need a ton of NUDX1 hydrolase activity. This is only possible when there is enough of a binding molecule called geranyl diphosphate (GPP). GPP glues to the enzyme and propels it into action. 

[Related: 7 edible flowers and how to use them]

But in order for this process to work, the binding molecule needs to be nearby. This isn’t the case for roses. Senior author Benoît Boachon, a plant biochemist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, says most plants keep GGP and NUDX1 hydrolase in another area called the plastids. These organelles act as key sites for photosynthesis. This motivated Boachon and his colleagues to figure out where roses get the GPP to make geraniol. He hypothesizes that GPP could have some mechanism transporting it from the plasmid to the cytosol, or there’s another pathway for the flower to generate its own supply of GPP. 

To solve the plant mystery, the study authors studied the biochemical reactions that take place in a variety of pink roses called Old Blush. They isolated different plant parts and shut down chemical pathways involved with the creation or release of geraniol. If the altered roses no longer made geraniol, or the plants produced it in low amounts, that was a major clue to the scientists—they’d found a pathway that plays a role in supplying GPP. On the other hand, the team could rule out a process if geraniol continued to be made at normal levels. 

Their search led them to a particular pathway in plant cytosol–where they took interest in a second, unknown role of the FPP synthase protein. When inhibitors blocked the plant’s ability to express this enzyme, it decreased geraniol levels.  

[Related: How to preserve flowers in 4 easy ways]

The enzyme was found to create two chemical compounds. Plant scientists have known that it makes a chemical related to GPP, called farnesyl diphosphate, which contributes to a rose’s sweet smell. But the study’s biochemical analysis reveals the enzyme is capable of producing GPP as well. Natalia Dudareva, the director of the Center for Plant Biology at Purdue University and one of the coauthors of the study, says that roses must have evolved FPP synthase long ago to produce more readily available GPP. Protein sequencing of the enzyme revealed two amino acids that may have mutated to allow it to produce GPP instead of converting all the GPP to farnesyl diphosphate.

The next step was to see if the FPP synthase enzyme produced similar effects inside a plant in real time. They engineered tobacco leaves to express this enzyme and the chemical pathway used for making geraniol. As they expected, the tobacco leaves where they found the enzyme produced both GPP and farnesyl diphosphate.  

Understanding the essential players involved in fragrance-making could restore the aroma of commercially grown roses. And by isolating the enzyme, Boachon says one potential application is to metabolically reintroduce the sweet fragrance into roses that have lost their iconic smell over time.

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The pop of the cork, the fizz of the pour, and the clink of champagne flutes toasting are the ingredients for a celebration in many parts of the world. champagne itself dates back to Ancient Rome, but the biggest advances in the modern form of the beverage came from a savvy trio of women from the Champagne region of northeastern France in the 19th century. 

Now, scientists are adding another chapter to champagne’s bubbly history by discovering why the little effervescent bubbles of joy fizz upwards in a straight line.

[Related: Popping a champagne cork creates supersonic shockwaves.]

In a study published May 3 in the journal Physical Review Fluids, a team found that the stable bubble chains in champagne and other sparkling wines occur because of ingredients in it that act similar to soap-like compounds called surfactants. The surfactant-like molecules help reduce the tensions between the liquid and the gas bubbles, creating the smooth rise to the top. 

In this new study, a team conducted both numerical and physical experiments on four carbonated drinks to investigate the stability of the bubble chains. Depending on the drink, the fluid mechanics are quite different. For example, champagne and sparkling wine have gas bubbles that continuously appear to rise rapidly to the top of the glass in a single-file line like little ants—and they keep doing so for some time. In beer and soda, the bubbles veer off to the side and the bubble chains are not as stable. 

To observe the bubble chains, the team poured glasses of carbonated beverages including Pellegrino sparkling water, Tecate beer, Charles de Cazanove champagne, and a Spanish-style sparkling wine called brut.

They then filled small rectangular plexiglass containers with liquid and pumped in gas to create different kinds of bubble chains. They gradually added surfactants or increased the bubble size. They found that the larger bubbles could become stable even without the surfactants. When they kept a fixed bubble size with only added surfactants, the chains could go from unstable to stable. 

The authors found that the stability of the bubbles is actually impacted by the size of the bubbles themselves. The chains with large bubbles have a wake similar to that of bubbles with contaminants, which leads to a smooth rise and stable chains.

“The theory is that in Champagne these contaminants that act as surfactants are the good stuff,” co-author and Brown University engineer Roberto Zenit said in a statement. “These protein molecules that give flavor and uniqueness to the liquid are what makes the bubbles chains they produce stable.”

Since bubbles are always pretty small in drinks, surfactants are the key ingredient to producing the straight and stable chains we see in champagne. While beer also contains surfactant-like molecules, the bubbles can rise in straight chains or not depending on the type of beer. The bubbles in carbonated water like seltzer are always unstable because there are no contaminants helping the bubbles move smoothly through the wake of the flows.

[Related: This pretty blue fog only happens in warm champagne.]

“This wake, this velocity disturbance, causes the bubbles to be knocked out,” said Zenit. “Instead of having one line, the bubbles end up going up in more of a cone.”

The findings could add a better understanding of how fluid mechanics work, particularly the formation of clusters in bubbly flow, which has economic and societal value. The global carbonated drink market was valued at a whopping $221.6 billion in 2020. 

The technologies that use bubble-induced mixing, like aeration tanks at water treatment facilities and in wine making, could benefit greatly from better knowledge of how bubbles cluster, their origins, and how to predict their appearance. Understanding these flows may also help better explain ocean seeps, when methane and carbon dioxide emerge from the bottom of the ocean.

“This is the type of research that I’ve been working out for years,” said Zenit. “Most people have never seen an ocean seep or an aeration tank but most of them have had a soda, a beer or a glass of Champagne. By talking about Champagne and beer, our master plan is to make people understand that fluid mechanics is important in their daily lives.”

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There is truly no shortage of interesting courting and mating rituals throughout the animal kingdom. From trilobites “jousting” to win mates to the important pee sniffing rituals of giraffes, getting it on is serious business. And so is winning over a mate. 

[Related: Male California sea lions have gotten bigger and better at fighting.]

For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence that adult male woolly mammoths experienced an event called musth. Musth comes from the Hindi and Urdu word for intoxicated, and in the case of giant mammals like adult elephants, this is a testosterone-fueled event where the male sex hormone surges and aggression against rival males is heightened. 

The study, published online May 3 in the journal Nature, found evidence that testosterone levels are recorded within the growth layers of both elephant and mammoth tusks. In living male elephants, blood and urine tests recognized the elevated testosterone, but musth battles from its extinct relatives has only been inferred from to fossilized consequences of testosterone-fueled battle, such as pieces of tusk tips and skeletal injuries. 

In the study, an international team of researchers report the presence of annually recurring testosterone surges (up to 10 times higher than baseline levels) are present within a permafrost-preserved woolly mammoth tusk. 

The team sampled tusks from one adult African bull elephant from Botswana and two adult woolly mammoths: a male who roamed Siberia over 33,000 years ago and a roughly 5,597 year-old female that was discovered on Wrangel Island. This Arctic Ocean island used to be connected to northeast Siberia and is the last place where woolly mammoths survived up until about 4,000 years ago. 

“This study establishes dentin as a useful repository for some hormones and sets the stage for further advances in the developing field of paleoendocrinology,” study co-author and paleontologist at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology Michael Cherney said in a statement. “In addition to broad applications in zoology and paleontology, tooth-hormone records could support medical, forensic and archaeological studies.”

Hormones are signaling molecules that help regulate physiology and behavior. Testosterone in male vertebrates is part of the steroid group of hormones. Testosterone circulates throughout the bloodstream and accumulates in various tissues.   

[Related: How much acid should you give an elephant? These scientists learned the hard way.]

According the authors, their findings demonstrate that steroid records in teeth can provide scientists with meaningful biological information that can even persist for thousands of years.

“Tusks hold particular promise for reconstructing aspects of mammoth life history because they preserve a record of growth in layers of dentin that form throughout an individual’s life,” study co-author and U-M Museum of Paleontology curator Daniel Fisher said in a statement.  “Because musth is associated with dramatically elevated testosterone in modern elephants, it provides a starting point for assessing the feasibility of using hormones preserved in tusk growth records to investigate temporal changes in endocrine physiology.”

They team used CT scans to find the annual growth increments deep within the tusks, like tree rings. Modern elephant and ancient mammoth tusks are elongated upper incisor teeth, and only hold on to traces of testosterone and other steroid hormones. The chemical compounds are all incorporated into dentin, which is the mineralized tissue that makes up the interior portion of teeth. 

The study also required new methods to extract steroids from the tusk dentin with a mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers identify chemical substances by sorting the ions present by their mass and charge. 

“We had developed steroid mass spectrometry methods for human blood and saliva samples, and we have used them extensively for clinical research studies. But never in a million years did I imagine that we would be using these techniques to explore ‘paleoendocrinology,'” study co-author and U-M endocrinologist Rich Auchus said in a statement. 

The results and the new measuring technique will likely further new approaches to investigating reproductive endocrinology, life history, and even disease patterns in modern and prehistoric context.

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