A group of paleontologists, park rangers, and geologists have discovered a new species of ancient shark in the rock layers of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. It was uncovered in a large fossil deposit that includes at least 40 different species of shark and their relatives, and even well-preserved skeletal cartilage. 

[Related: Megalodons were likely warm-blooded, despite being stone-cold killers.]

The new species is named Strigilodus tollesonae and is a petalodont shark. These extinct  sharks had petal-shaped teeth and lived about 337 million years ago. According to the National Park Service, it is more closely related to present day ratfish than sharks or rays and it was identified from teeth found in the cave’s walls. Strigilodus tollesonae likely had teeth that included one rounded cusp used for clipping and a long, ridge inert side that crushed prey the way molars do. Paleontologists believe that it likely lived like modern day skates and fed on worms, bivalves, and small fish. 

Strigilodus tollesonae translates to “Tolleson’s Scraper Tooth” and it is named after Mammoth Cave National park guide Kelli Tolleson for her work in the paleontological study that uncovered the new species. 

The limestone caves that make up the 400-mile long Mammoth Cave System were formed about 325-million-years ago during the Late Paleozoic. Geologists call this time period the Mississippian Period, when shallow seas covered much of North America including where Mammoth Cave is today. 

In 2019, the park began a major paleontological resources inventory to identify the numerous types of fossils associated with the rock layers. Mammoth Cave park staff reported a few fossil shark teeth that were exposed in the cave walls of Ste. Genevieve Limestone in several locations. Shark fossils can be difficult to come by, since shark skeletons are made of cartilage instead of bone. Cartilage is not as tough as bone, so it is generally not well-preserved in the fossil record. 

The team then brought in shark fossil specialist John-Paul Hodnett of the Maryland-National Capital Parks and Planning Commission to help identify the shark fossils. Hodnett and park rangers discovered and identified multiple different species of primitive sharks from the shark teeth and fine spine specimens in the rocks lining the cave passages.

“I am absolutely amazed at the diversity of sharks we see while exploring the passages that make up Mammoth Cave,” Hodnett said in a statement. “We can hardly move more than a couple of feet as another tooth or spine is spotted in the cave ceiling or wall. We are seeing a range of different species of chondrichthyans [cartilaginous fish] that fill a variety of ecological niches, from large predators to tiny little sharks that lived amongst the crinoid [sea lily] forest on the seafloor that was their habitat.”

[Related: This whale fossil could reveal evidence of a 15-million-year-old megalodon attack.]

In addition to Strigilodus tollesonae, the team have identified more than 40 different species of sharks and their relatives from Mammoth Cave specimens in the past 10 months. There appear to be at least six fossil shark species that are new to science. According to the team, those species will be described and named in an upcoming scientific publication.

The majority of the shark fossils have been discovered in areas of the park that are inaccessible to the public, so photographs, illustrations, and three-dimensional models have been made to display the discovery. The park also plans to celebrate the new shark fossils with multiple presentations and exhibits on Monday October 23. 

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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, 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, one of the best telescopes for under $1,000, or one of our top picks under $500.

Best overall: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ

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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

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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 

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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

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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, so kindle a fascination with the stars through a star projector and then fan it with a telescope. 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. Find more options for the best telescopes for kids here. (And/or go the opposite direction with a microscope for kids—a love of science begets more science.)

Best budget: Popular Science by Celestron Travel Scope 70 Portable Telescope

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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 camping in the wilderness or driving 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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Of all the pyrotechnics that blast through the cosmos, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the most powerful—and mysterious. While our radio telescopes have picked up hundreds of known FRBs, radio astronomers recently detected one of the most fascinating bursts yet. Not only does it come from a greater distance than any FRB observed before, it’s the most energetic, too.

A superlative FRB like this defies our already murky understanding of the bursts’ origins. FRBs are sudden surges of radio waves that typically last less than a second, if not mere milliseconds. And they are very, very high-energy: They can deliver as much energy in milliseconds as the sun emits in three days. Despite all that, we don’t know for certain how they form.

The new event, what astronomers lovingly call FRB 20220610A, first appeared as a blip in the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, an arrangement of antennae in the desert about 360 miles north of Perth. When astronomers measured the burst’s redshift, they calculated that it left its source about 8 billion years ago, as they described in a paper published today in Science. 

After pinpointing the burst’s origin in the sky and following up with visible light and infrared telescopes, the authors managed to develop a blurry image of merging galaxies.

[Related: Two bizarre stars might have beamed a unique radio signal to Earth]

“The further you go out in the universe, of course, the fainter the galaxies are, because they’re farther away. It’s quite difficult to identify the host galaxy, and that’s what they’ve done,” Sarah Burke Spolaor, an astronomer who studies FRBs at West Virginia University, who was not an author of the study.

FRBs aren’t exciting just because they’re loud. To reach us, a burst from outside the Milky Way must traverse millions or billions of light-years of the near-empty space between galaxies. In the process, they’ll encounter an extremely sparse smattering of ionized particles. This is the stuff that prevents the bulk of the cosmos from being completely empty—what astronomers call the intergalactic medium, which might make up as much as half of the universe’s “normal” matter.

“We don’t know much about it, because it’s so tenuous that it’s difficult to detect,” says Daniele Michilli, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also wasn’t a study author.

As an FRB crosses the intergalactic medium on its long voyage, the particles cause its radio waves to scatter, which leaves fingerprints that astronomers can pick apart. In this way, scientists can use FRBs to investigate the intergalactic medium. More faraway bursts like FRB 20220610A could allow astronomers to study the medium across wide swathes of the universe.

[Related: How astronomers traced a puzzling detection to a lunchtime mistake]

“It’s very exciting, definitely one of the great applications of fast radio bursts,” says Ziggy Pleunis, an astronomer who studies FRBs at the University of Toronto, who was also not part of the authors’ group. “Fast radio bursts currently are really the only thing that we know that interacts with the intergalactic medium in a meaningful enough way that we can measure properties.”

In the future, astronomers might even be able to use FRBs to study how the universe expands. To unweave that mystery, however, astronomers will need to detect FRBs from even deeper into the cosmic past than FRB 20220610A. “For a lot of applications, it’s still not quite far away enough,” Pleunis says. “But it certainly bodes well.” 

There’s a balancing act involved: Over a sufficiently long distance, the particles in the intergalactic medium will peel an FRB apart until it disperses into background noise. To survive, an FRB must be brighter and more energetic; in turn, by taking stock of how much a burst has dispersed, astronomers can estimate its original energy. 

By computing the numbers for FRB 20220610A, they found that it was the most energetic burst Earth has seen so far. (Another recently observed burst, FRB 20201124A, comes within the same order of magnitude, but FRB 20220610A is the record-holder.) A burst with this much energy throws something of a wrench into astronomers’ understanding, such as it is, of what creates FRBs in the first place.

We, again, don’t have a definitive answer to that question. Complicating the question, some FRBs are one-off flashes, while others repeat, hinting that the two types of FRBs may have two different origins. (To wit, FRB 20220610A seems to have been a one-off. But that other high-energy FRB, FRB 20201124A, seems to repeat.)

Nevertheless, astronomers have simulated a few scenarios, largely involving neutron stars. Perhaps FRBs burst from near a neutron star’s surface, or perhaps FRBs erupt from shockwaves through the material that neutron stars throw up.

But when this paper’s authors ran the numbers with their new FRB, they found that neither of those two scenarios could easily create an burst with this much energy—suggesting that theoretical astronomers have even more work to do before they can satisfactorily explain these events.

“What always strikes me about fast radio bursts is, every time we observe a new one, it breaks the mold of previous ones,” Spolaor says.

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Jupiter and its dynamic atmosphere are ready for another closeup in a new image taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Using the telescope’s data, scientists have discovered a new and never-before-captured high-speed jet stream. The jet stream sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks, barrels at speeds twice as high as a Category 5 hurricane, and spans more than 3,000 miles. The findings were described in a study published October 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

[Related: This hot Jupiter exoplanet unexpectedly hangs out with a super-Earth.]

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and its atmosphere has some very visible features, including the infamous Great Red Spot, which is large enough to swallow the Earth. The planet is ever-changing and there are still mysteries in this gas giant that scientists are trying to unravel. According to NASA, the new discovery of the jet stream is helping them decipher how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other. Now, JWST is helping scientists look further into the planet and see some of the lower and deeper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere where gigantic storms and ammonia ice clouds reside. 

“This is something that totally surprised us,” study co-author Ricardo Hueso said in a statement.  “What we have always seen as blurred hazes in Jupiter’s atmosphere now appear as crisp features that we can track along with the planet’s fast rotation.” Hueso is an astrophysicist at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

The research team analyzed data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that was obtained in July 2022. The Early Release Science program was designed to take images of Jupiter 10 hours apart (one Jupiter day) in four different filters. Each filter detected different types of changes in the small features located at various altitudes of Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The resulting image shows Jupiter’s atmosphere in infrared light. The jet stream is located over the equator, or center, of the planet. There are multiple bright white spots and streaks that are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Jupiter’s northern and southern poles are dotted by auroras that appear red and extend to the higher altitudes of the planet. 

“Even though various ground-based telescopes, spacecraft like NASA’s Juno and Cassini, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have observed the Jovian system’s changing weather patterns, Webb has already provided new findings on Jupiter’s rings, satellites, and its atmosphere,” study co-author and University of California, Berkeley astronomer Imke de Pater said in a statement.  

The newly discovered jet stream travels at roughly 320 miles per hour and is located close to 25 miles above the clouds, in Jupiter’s lower stratosphere. The team compared the winds observed by JWST at higher altitudes with the winds observed at deeper layers by the Hubble Space Telescope. This enabled them to measure how fast the winds change with altitude and generate wind shears.

[Related: Jupiter formed dinky little rings, and there’s a convincing explanation why.]

The team hopes to use additional observations of Jupiter to determine if the jet’s speed and altitude change over time. 

“Jupiter has a complicated but repeatable pattern of winds and temperatures in its equatorial stratosphere, high above the winds in the clouds and hazes measured at these wavelengths,” Leigh Fletcher, a study co-author and planetary scientists at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “If the strength of this new jet is connected to this oscillating stratospheric pattern, we might expect the jet to vary considerably over the next 2 to 4 years–it’ll be really exciting to test this theory in the years to come.”

The post Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists appeared first on Popular Science.

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Is human society becoming more violent? It’s hard to imagine a point in time containing an event as destructive as an atomic bombing. Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the organized assaults countries have executed in the last century alone. Ongoing wars and human right violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history. But the evidence, according to archaeologists who study historical violence, says there is no black-and-white answer.

To conclude that humans are more violent than ever, you’d need a timeline of all the aggressive actions in human history. Archaeologists have found some artifacts that weave a story of humanity’s violent past from a skeleton that could have been the first murder victim about 430,000 years ago to the ancient Mesopotamian death pits that likely held war casualties or human sacrifices. These pieces of history, though, are still not enough to paint a complete picture. 

The further we go back in time, the harder it is to assess violence and killings, explains Linda Fibiger, an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who researches conflict in early human history. 

Remains alone don’t tell complete stories. Finding enough evidence to know whether humans at a certain time period were violent, or if someone’s violent death was an isolated event, is tricky. Even if an autopsy of an ancient human implies a brutal death, it can’t reveal a killer’s motive. Some ceremonial acts, for example, were interlaced with violence as people were sacrificed as tributes to the gods.

[Related: Grisly medieval murders detailed in new interactive maps]

“I don’t think prehistory was in an eternal state of warfare and conflict. But with the skeletal evidence and the percentage of individuals with violent trauma, I’m sure most people would have been aware of violence or known somebody who encountered it,” says Fibiger. She also notes whether people in the past considered an act a crime could change the perception of whether they were living in a violent time.

If perception is a factor, it’s possible we could be living in the most peaceful era to date. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker theorized that small hunter-gatherer groups were the most violent, back in the day, with the highest percentage of people dying from warfare. As communities settled into more organized states, they were better able to become more “civilized” and develop skills of empathy, reasoning, and self-control.

“We would like to believe that we’re so much more smart, reasonable, and more civilized”, says Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist from Florida State University. “But I don’t think everything’s peachy now.” Falk, in her previous analysis of the evidence Pinker presented, found that he failed to consider the population sizes of the different communities in his calculations. This could have inflated the rate of war deaths in hunter-gatherer communities when comparing them to state-based societies. And although a larger percentage of a small society may have died in a conflict, Falk argues that says more about the attacks they suffered than their own violent behavior.

When Falk included the absolute number of deaths (the number of deaths for a given population scaled to their size) into the calculations, she found it was the population size, not the type of civilization structure, that determined whether a society lost their residents to warfare. And while the percentage of annual war deaths was lower among state societies, Falk says the number of annual war deaths has gone up in bigger populations. “This might have to do with big brains and having technology to invent more effective weapons to kill each other.”

There’s also no rule that states we’re on a linear path toward a more or less violent society. New research published this month in the journal Nature Human Behaviour suggests human violence has waxed and waned throughout history. Giacomo Benati, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain and coauthor of the new study says analyzing violent trends across history often falls victim to bias, focusing on historical battle records or polarized narratives of the ancient world. 

[Related: A group of humpback whales is choosing violence]

His new work, one of the largest archaeological studies on early human violence, tries to avoid that prejudice, by examining  a large set of bones. Benati and his team analyzed any sign of cranial trauma or weapon-related wounds in 3,539 skeletons belonging to people who lived in seven Middle Eastern countries between 12,000 to 400 BCE. 

This study was particularly interesting because it tries to contextualize what’s happening, says Fibiger, who was not involved in the research. The large dataset of human skeletal remains allowed them to link traumatic deaths to ongoing conflicts, economics, and the unequal distribution of resources and wealth caused by climate. “Bringing these things together gives a better concept of people’s lives,” Fibiger says, “and what might have escalated conflict and broken down relationships.”

Interpersonal violence—murder, torture, slavery, and other cruel punishments—peaked around 4,500 to 3,300 BCE during the Chalocolithic period, Benati and his co-authors concluded. The high rates of violence could have to do with the formation of political units vying for control, which may have escalated local quarrels to larger and more organized conflicts.

Benati says the most surprising finding was the steady drop in violence across the Early and Middle Bronze period, which he suspects has to do with better living standards. “After going through thousands of photos of excavated skeletons, life before modern medicine [did] not look pretty,” he says. “It was short, and they had to live with constant ailments and pains.”

Violence rates appeared to pick up again through the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. People may have become more violent due to a drier climate. The Iron Age ushered in a 300-year drought which contributed to crop shortages and widespread famine. This lack of water would have stressed out communities, leading to competition over resources. This possessiveness for limited resources—whether land or food—are universal motivators for violence that is still seen today, Fibiger points out. Additionally, given the worsening climate situation right now, Benati says how people reacted to extreme climate events in the past could tell us how people will react to instability in the future. Climate change, for example, may once again herald a longer period of violence. 

Given our bloody record for handling conflict, archaeologists remain divided on whether humans will ever live in a violent-free society. Fibiger believes people are not inherently violent, but may be pushed into situations where they are required to defend themselves or their livelihood. By learning from violence in the past, she believes humans can do better. Falk is less optimistic. She says it’s possible we will wipe out our species, seeing that we are just as capable of violence as our ancient ancestors. The only difference now is our access to more lethal weapons and more organized warfare. “For proof of that, just turn on your TV to the evening news.”

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Honeybees are a model of teamwork in nature, with their complex society and hives that generate enough energy to create an electrical charge. They also appear to be some of the rare animals that display a unique trait of altruism, which is genetically inherited. The findings were described in a study published September 25 in the journal Molecular Ecology.

[Related: Bee brains could teach robots to make split-second decisions.]

Giving it all for the queen bee

According to the American Psychological Association, humans display altruism through behaviors that benefit another individual at a cost to oneself. Some psychologists consider it a uniquely human trait and studying it in animals requires a different framework for understanding. Animals experience a different level of cognition, so what drives humans to be altruistic might be different than what influences animals like honeybees to act in ways that appear to be altruistic.

In this new study, the researchers first looked at the genetics behind retinue behavior in worker honeybees. Retinue behavior is the actions of worker bees taking care of the queen, like feeding or grooming her. It’s believed to be triggered by specific pheromones and worker bees are always female. 

After the worker bees are exposed to the queen’s mandibular pheromone (QMP), they deactivate their own ovaries. They then help spread the QMP around to the other worker bees and they only take care of the eggs that the queen bee produces. Entomologists consider this behavior ‘altruistic’ because it benefits the queen’s ability to produce offspring, while the worker bees remain sterile. 

The queen is also typically the mother of all or mostly all of the honeybees in the hive. The genes that make worker bees more receptive to the queen’s pheromone and retinue behavior can be passed down from either female or male parent. However, the genes only result in altruistic behavior when they are passed down from the female bee parent.

“People often think about different phenotypes being the result of differences in gene sequences or the environment. But what this study shows is it’s not just differences in the gene itself—it’s which parent the gene is inherited from,” study co-author and Penn State University doctoral candidate Sean Bresnahan said in a statement. “By the very nature of the insect getting the gene from its mom, regardless of what the gene sequence is, it’s possibly going to behave differently than the copy of the gene from the dad.”

A battle of genetics 

The study supports a theory called the Kinship Theory of Intragenomic Conflict. It suggests that a mothers’ and fathers’ genes are in a conflict over what behaviors to support and not support. Previous studies have shown that genes from males can support selfish behavior in mammals, plants, and honeybees. This new study is the first known research that shows females can pass altruistic behavior onto their offspring in their genes. 

[Really: What busy bees’ brains can teach us about human evolution.]

Worker bees generally have the same mother but different fathers, since the queen mates with multiple male bees. This means that the worker bees share more of their mother’s genes with each other. 

“This is why the Kinship Theory of Intragenomic Conflict predicts that genes inherited from the mother will support altruistic behavior in honeybees,” Breshnahan said. “A worker bee benefits more from helping, rather than competing with, her mother and sisters—who carry more copies of the worker’s genes than she could ever reproduce on her own. In contrast, in species where the female mates only once, it is instead the father’s genes that are predicted to support altruistic behavior.”

Pinpointing conflict networks

To look closer, the team crossbred six different lineages of honeybees. Bresnahan says that this is relatively easy to do in mammals or plants, but more difficult in insects. They used honeybee breeding expertise from co-author Juliana Rangel from Texas A&M University and Robyn Underwood at Penn State Extension to create these populations.

Once the bee populations were successfully crossed and the offspring were old enough, the team assessed the worker bees’ responsiveness to the pheromone that triggers the retinue behavior. 

“So, we could develop personalized genomes for the parents, and then map back the workers’ gene expression to each parent and find out which parent’s copy of that gene is being expressed,” Bresnahan said.

The team identified the gene regulatory networks that have this intragenomic conflict, finding that more genes that have a parental bias were expressed. These networks consisted of genes that previous research showed were related to the retinue behavior.

“Observing intragenomic conflict is very difficult, and so there are very few studies examining the role it plays in creating variation in behavior and other traits,” study co-author and Penn State entomologist Christina Grozinger said in a statement. “The fact that this is the third behavior where we have found evidence that intragenomic conflict contributes to variation in honeybees suggests that intragenomic conflict might shape many types of traits in bees and other species.”

The team hopes that this research will help provide a blueprint for more studies into intragenomic conflict in other animals and plants.

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The recent “ring of fire” solar eclipse looked stunning across portions of North and South America and we now have a new view of the stellar event. The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite created the image of the eclipse on Saturday October 14, depicting the mostly blue Earth against the darkness of space, with one large patch of the planet in the shadow of the moon. 

[Related: Why NASA will launch rockets to study the eclipse.]

Launched in 2015, DSCOVR is a joint NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Air Force satellite. It offers a unique perspective since it is close to 1 million miles away from Earth and sits in a gravitationally stable point between the Earth and the sun called Lagrange Point 1. DSCOVR’s primary job is to monitor the solar wind in an effort to improve space weather forecasts. 

A special device aboard the satellite called the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) imager took this view of the eclipse from space. According to NASA, the sensor gives scientists frequent views of the Earth. The moon’s shadow, or umbra, is falling across the southeastern coast of Texas, near Corpus Christi.

An annular solar eclipse occurs when the moon moves between Earth and the sun. The sun does not vanish completely in this kind of eclipse. Instead, the moon is positioned far enough from Earth to keep the bright edges of the sun visible. This is what causes the “ring of fire,” as if the moon has been outlined with bright paint.

While this year’s event could be seen to some degree across the continental United States, the 125-mile-wide path of annularity began in Oregon around 9:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. The moon’s shadow then moved southeast across Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, before passing over Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. It continued south towards Mexico’s Yucatan, Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil

Unlike the colorful Aurora Borealis, eclipses are much easier to predict. Scientists can say when annular and solar eclipses will happen down to the second centuries in advance. The precise positions of the moon and the sun and how they shift over time is already known, so scientists can see how the moon’s shadow will fall onto Earth’s globe. Advances in computer technology have also enabled scientists to even chart eclipse paths down to a range of a few feet.

[Related: We can predict solar eclipses to the second. Here’s how.]

The next annular solar eclipse will be at least partially visible from South America on October 2,2024. One of these ‘ring of fire’ eclipses will not be visible in the United States until June 21, 2039. However, a total solar eclipse will darken the sky from Maine to Texas on April 8, 2024. There is still plenty of time to get eclipse glasses or make a pinhole camera to safely watch the next big celestial event. 

The post What the ‘Ring of Fire’ eclipse looked like to a satellite nearly 1 million miles from Earth appeared first on Popular Science.

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A giant seismic event on Mars—a “marsquake”—that shook the Red Planet last year had an unexpected source, surprising astrophysicists from around the world. They suspected a meteorite strike. Instead, enormous tectonic forces within Mars’s crust, which caused vibrations that lasted for six hours, caused the quake and not a meteorite strike. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake.]

NASA’s InSight lander recorded the magnitude 4.7 marsquake on May 4, 2022, which scientists named S1222a. Its seismic signal was similar to those of previous quakes that were caused by meteorite impacts, so the team began to search for an impact crater. 

In the new study, a team from the University of Oxford worked with the European Space Agency, Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency to scour more than 55 million square miles on Mars. Each group examined the data coming from its own satellites to look for a crater, dust cloud, or other signature of a meteorite impact. Because the search came up empty, they now believe that S1222a was caused by the release of huge tectonic forces from within the Martian interior. 

That doesn’t mean Mars’s tectonic plates are moving the way they do during an earthquake. The best available evidence suggests the planet is remaining still. “We still think that Mars doesn’t have any active plate tectonics today, so this event was likely caused by the release of stress within Mars’ crust,” study co-author and University of Oxford planetary geophysicist Benjamin Fernando said in a statement. “These stresses are the result of billions of years of evolution; including the cooling and shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates.”

While Fernando explains that scientists do not fully understand why some parts of Mars seem to have more stress than others, these results can help them investigate further. “One day, this information may help us to understand where it would be safe for humans to live on Mars and where you might want to avoid!” he said.

S1222a was one of the last events recorded by NASA’s InSight mission before its end. The InSight lander launched in May 2018 and survived “seven minutes of terror” to touch down on Mars, where it studied the planet’s interior and seismology for years. The last of the spacecraft’s data was returned in December 2022, after increasing dust accumulation on its solar panels caused InSight to lose power. 

[Related: InSight says goodbye with what may be its last wistful image of Mars.]

In its four years and 19 days of service, InSight recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes. At least eight of these events were from a meteorite impact; the largest two formed craters that were almost 500 feet in diameter. If the S1222a event was formed by an impact, the team estimates that the crater to be would have been at least 984 feet in diameter.

The team is applying knowledge from this study to other work, including future missions to our moon and the tectonics that are similar to California’s famed San Andreas fault located on one of Saturn’s moons named Titan. They also hope that it encourages additional major international collaborations to study the Red Planet and beyond. 

“This has been a great opportunity for me to collaborate with the InSight team, as well as with individuals from other major missions dedicated to the study of Mars,” study co-author and New York University Abu Dhabi astrophysicist Dimitra Atri said in a statement. “This really is the golden age of Mars exploration!”

The post Giant quake that shook Mars for hours had a surprising source appeared first on Popular Science.

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The Guinness World Records officially dubbed Pepper X the world’s hottest chili pepper earlier this year, going public with the announcement on October 9. Pepper X has a rating of an average of 2.69 million Scoville Heat Units (SHU). On the SHU scale, zero is considered bland, while a regular jalapeño pepper registers at about 5,000 SHU. For a non-food comparison, pepper spray used in self-defense is about 1.6 million SHUs and bear spray is about 2.2 million.

[Related: Spiciness isn’t a taste, and more burning facts about the mysterious sensation.]

Winthrop University in South Carolina calculated this off-the-charts Scobille score with specimens collected over the past four years. Pepper X has a greenish-yellow color with grooves and ridges. According to the five brave souls who have eaten it, Pepper X has an earthy flavor once the heat begins to subside.  

It dethroned the 10-year reign of the 1.64 million SHU Carolina Reaper, but both peppers were created by the same chili pepper expert to be extra spicy. Ed Currie is the founder of Puckerbutt Pepper Company and he has been working on Pepper X since the bright red Carolina Reaper first took the title in 2013.

When creating a new breed of pepper, it can take several years for the desired traits to emerge through selective breeding. It takes about 10 generations for hybrid peppers to stabilize with predictable traits and consistent fruit.

Pepper X was a crossbreed with Carolina Reaper and a mystery pepper that Currie did not disclose. His goal was to create an extremely hot pepper that also had some sweetness. The spice of Pepper X even made an expert like Currie wince in pain.

“I was feeling the heat for three-and-a-half hours. Then the cramps came,” Currie told the Associated Press. “Those cramps are horrible. I was laid out flat on a marble wall for approximately an hour in the rain, groaning in pain.”

A chemical in peppers called capsaicin is what causes the burning sensation when eating a spicy pepper like the Carolina Reaper or Pepper X. Humans and other mammals will perceive capsaicin as a threat when eaten, which sends the strong burning signal throughout the body. 

According to University of Tennessee epidemiologist Paul D. Terry, the short-term effects of eating extremely spicy foods range from enjoying the sensation of heat to a more unpleasant burning sensation on the lips, tongue, and mouth. Spicy foods can also cause various forms of digestive tract discomfort, headaches, and vomiting, so it is best to avoid eating them if you experience these effects. 

[Related: Leftovers of a 2,000-year-old curry discovered on stone cooking tools.]

Capsaicin is harmful except when eaten in large quantities and is likely not harmful over a long period of time. Some experts generally agree that spicy food does not cause stomach ulcers, but the association with stomach cancer isn’t as clear.

The burning sensation also releases endorphins and dopamine. Currie began growing peppers after overcoming addiction to drug and alcohol and says that kick is a natural high for him. He shares the peppers he creates with medical researchers, in hopes that they can be used to explore new cures for disease or help those with chronic pain or discomfort.

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Last Friday, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft toward an asteroid of the same name. Psyche is blazing a trail as the first mission to a metal asteroid, and it’s also about to blaze a literal blue trail. The source of its bright wake—the probe’s remarkable propulsive system—will switch on within the first 100 days of the mission.

A mechanism known as a Hall thruster will propel the Psyche through space. This thruster glows blue as it ionizes xenon, a noble gas also used in headlights and plasma televisions, to move the spacecraft forward. This is the first time this tech, which has only been available for NASA spaceflight since 2015, has been used to travel beyond the moon—but what makes it so special, and why is Psyche using it?

When planning a space mission, engineers are focused on efficiency. Carrying chemical fuel along for the massive interplanetary journey would be like trying to drive around the entire world while having to keep all the gasoline you need in the trunk, because there are no rest stops along the way—it’s just not feasible. To get to its destination, Psyche would need thousands and thousands of pounds of chemical propellant.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly]

To get around this problem, engineers turned to electric thrusters. These come in many flavors: “There are many different types of electric thrusters, almost as many as there are different makers of cars,” explained NASA’s Psyche chief engineer Dan Goebel in a blog post. But space travel uses two kinds in particular, known as ion thrusters and Hall thrusters. “They can probably be considered the Tesla versions of space propulsion,” Goebel wrote. Rather than burning fuel, electric thrusters rip off the electrons from the propellant’s atoms in a process known as ionization. Then they chuck those ions out at some 80,000 miles per hour. This generates a higher specific impulse—which Goebel says is “equivalent to miles per gallon in your car,” but for spacecraft—than chemical fuels, enabling a thruster-powered spacecraft to go farther on less propellant.

Ion thrusters use high electric voltages to make a plasma (the fourth state of matter) and spew ions into space. NASA’s Dawn mission used these to get to dwarf planet Ceres, but they’re not the fastest—according to NASA, it would take the spacecraft four days to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour. Definitely not race car material! 

[Related: Want to learn about something in space? Crash into it.]

Hall thrusters, on the other hand, use a magnetic field to swirl electrons in a circle, producing a beam of ions. They don’t get quite as good “mileage” as ion thrusters, but they pack a bigger punch. The Psyche team picked this system because it allowed them to make a smaller, and therefore more cost-efficient, spacecraft. 

For the thrusters to work, the spacecraft needs power—which it gets from the sun, via solar panels—and something to ionize. For Psyche, that’s xenon gas. “Xenon is the propellant of choice because it’s inert (it doesn’t react with the rest of the spacecraft) and is easy to ionize,” explained Goebel. It also gives the thrusters their remarkable blue shine. Psyche carries about 150 gallons of the stuff, and gets about 10 million miles per gallon. 

Now that the mission has launched, the team will spend the next 100 days checking out all the spacecraft’s systems to ensure they’re ready for the journey. At some point in this period, those glimmering blue thrusters will turn on.

If Psyche proves to be a success, Hall thrusters will be likely to make an appearance on future space missions. They offer “the right mix of cost savings, efficiency, and power, and could play an important role in supporting future science missions to Mars and beyond,” said Steven Scott, program manager for the Psyche mission at the company Maxar, which built the thrusters, in a press release. Thanks to these propulsive devices, Psyche should reach its destination in the asteroid belt in just 3.5 years—and we can’t wait to see what lies at the end of its electric blue trail.

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The ocean’s diverse seaweeds are full of nutrients and can be very tasty. While seaweed is common in many Asian dishes, it is not as popular in many traditionally European cuisines. However, this was not always the case. New archaeological evidence also shows that early Europeans ate seaweeds and freshwater plants 8,000 years ago. The findings are described in a study published October 17 in the journal Nature Communications and anchor the plants in the past.

[Related: Why seaweed is a natural fit for replacing certain plastics.]

In the study, researchers examined biomarkers that were taken from the calcified dental plaque of 74 individuals found at 28 archaeological sites from northern Scotland to southern Spain. The plaques revealed “direct evidence for widespread consumption of seaweed and submerged aquatic and freshwater plants.”

The samples where biomolecular evidence survived showed signs that red, green, or brown seaweed and freshwater aquatic plants were eaten. One sample from Scotland’s Orkney archipelago also had evidence of a type of sea kale. The researchers also found that seaweeds and freshwater plants were continually eaten in Europe into the Early Middle Ages. 

“Not only does this new evidence show that seaweed was being consumed in Europe during the Mesolithic Period around 8,000 years ago when marine resources were known to have been exploited, but that it continued into the Neolithic when it is usually assumed that the introduction of farming led to the abandonment of marine dietary resources,” study co-author and University of York bioarchaeologist Stephen Buckley said in a statement.

The nutritional benefits from eating seaweed were likely very well understood by ancient European populations. Some historical accounts report laws related to collection of seaweed in Iceland, France, and Ireland dating back to the 10th Century. Sea kale is also mentioned by Roman naturalist and writer Pliny as an anti-scurvy remedy for sailors on long sea voyages. Through the 18th century, seaweed was considered a famine food and is featured in a popular Irish-language folk song. 

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

Currently, there are roughly 10,000 different species of seaweeds around the world, but only 145 species are regularly consumed. Depending on the type of seaweed, the plants are a great source of fiber, iron, and potassium among other vitamins and minerals. Cultivating seaweed can also be very environmentally friendly, as the seaweed produces oxygen while absorbing excess nitrogen in the water.

“Our study also highlights the potential for rediscovery of alternative, local, sustainable food resources that may contribute to addressing the negative health and environmental effects of over-dependence on a small number of mass-produced agricultural products that is a dominant feature of much of today’s western diet, and indeed the global long-distance food supply more generally,”  study co-author and University of Glasgow archaeologist Karen Hardy said in a statement. “It is very exciting to be able to show definitively that seaweeds and other local freshwater plants were eaten across a long period in our European past.”

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For nearly half a century, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition has celebrated the beauty captured by extreme magnification. This year, the photomicrography contest was stacked: a panel of journalists and scientists selected winners from 1,900 entries submitted by researchers and photographers in 72 countries. Subjects as diverse as mutant fish, chemical reactions, and a speck of space rock became works of art when seen really, really up close.

Above, in first place, is a rodent’s optic nerve head. Blood vessels, each only 110 microns in diameter, radiate outward like the fizzing arms of a firework. The yellow star-like shapes surrounding the vessels are astrocytes, cellular helpers that maintain neuronal systems. Vision researchers at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia—Hassanain Qambari, assisted by Jayden Dickson—imaged the optic disc at 20x magnification as part of a study of diabetic retinopathy; this condition can cause blindness in people with diabetes.

“The visual system is a complex and highly specialized organ, with even relatively minor perturbations to the retinal circulation able to cause devastating vision loss,” Qambari said in a news release. “I entered the competition as a way to showcase the complexity of retinal microcirculation.” Below are other top photos, and you can see even more at Nikon’s Small World site.

[Related: 15 remarkable JWST images that reveal the wonders of our vast universe]

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Best overall		AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit		SEE IT	An excellent kit filled with tools to help kids explore the world close-up.
Best for older kids		OMAX-MD82ES10		SEE IT	A high-quality microscope that will let kids feel like full-fledged researchers.
Best for young kids		Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope		SEE IT	A great option for curious toddlers that want to get up close and personal with household objects.

When most people think of microscopes, they think of labs, schools, and serious research facilities—they don’t think about kids. But there are plenty of great options when it comes to fostering an interest in science at home. If you have a curious kid looking for a fun activity that revolves around exploration and learning, a microscope is a great option for an exciting gift. However, before you inspire your little scientist to get up close and personal, it’s important to understand which make and model will be right for their interests and maturity level. We’ll walk you through some of the features to look out for and recommend some of the best microscopes for kids on the market.

• Best overall: AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit
• Best for older kids: OMAX-MD8 2ES10
• Best for young kids: Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope
• Best portable: Carson MicroBrite Plus Pocket Microscope
• Best kit: Omano JuniorScope Science Kit 
• Best budget: National Geographic STEM Kit

How we chose the best microscopes for kids

We paid particular attention to each model’s durability and magnification power to select the best microscopes for kids of all ages. Children under seven won’t be able to use the features a more advanced microscope will offer, and older children might be disappointed by more rudimentary features made for younger kids, so we looked at light sources, stereo/compound power, and other technical specs to ensure a range of options to suit the spectrum of budding biologists. Finally, we searched for products with special features or science kits so your kids could start a scientific adventure the minute they open the box. We compiled our personal research and experience with online user impressions and critical consensus to select the best microscopes for kids.

The best microscopes for kids: Reviews & Recommendations

There are a lot of ’scopes to scope, so here are the ones whose profiles we choose to magnify.

Best overall: AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: With a 52-piece set that kids can use right out of the box, this microscope is a great introduction to full-scale STEM research.

Specs

• Magnification: 120x-1200x
• Age Range: 8+
• Dimensions: 15.75 x 14.57 x 5.12 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Accessory kit 
• Adjustable magnification
• Carrying case included

Cons 

• Not suitable for younger kids

This beginner kit from AmScope includes a power monocular compound microscope with a color filter wheel, magnification ranging from 120x-1200x, LED light illumination, and a stain-resistant metal frame. Inside the ABS carrying case, you’ll also find a pair of tweezers, collecting vials, a Petri dish, prepared slides, Eosin dye, and more. You’ll even find a shrimp hatchery with Brine Shrimp eggs, so your kid can start their first science project immediately. If you’re looking for even more fun, grab AmScope’s World of the Microscope book, which includes additional projects and activities. This kit is recommended to be used under adult supervision and is unsuitable for preschool-aged kids. 

Best for 10-year-olds: OMAX-MD82ES10

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Why it made the cut: A professional digital microscope that will give older kids the confidence and training to go further in their STEM journey. 

Specs

• Magnification: 40x-2000x
• Age Range: 10+
• Dimensions: 9.06 x 7.09 x 12.99 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Professional quality 
• Built-in 1.3MP Camera 
• Swiveling binocular head 
• Impressive Magnification

Cons 

• Pricey
• Not suitable for younger kids

If you’re looking for one of the best digital microscopes for kids or the classroom, this option from OMAX is more advanced lab equipment than a lot of starter kits. It features eight levels of magnification: 40x, 80x, 100x, 200x, 400x, 800x, 1000x, and 2000x, making it the most powerful microscope on our list. It’s strong enough to show your budding biologist protozoa, cell walls, bacteria, and more. This digital compound microscope can connect via USB to Mac and Windows computers, and the built-in camera can take pictures and record videos of your findings so your kid can share their discoveries at the next family gathering. 

If you’re not ready to spend that multifunctional model money but want a digital microscope, consider this wireless model from Skybasic with 50x-1000x magnification and WiFi connectivity. 

Best for young kids: Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope 

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Why it made the cut: The GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope is a great way to introduce science and discovery to young children; it’s constructed with small hands in mind, encouraging independent learning without sacrificing functionality. 

Specs

• Magnification: 2.5x-8x
• Age Range: 3-6
• Dimensions: 1.12 x 8.1 x 10 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Inexpensive 
• Binocular eyepieces suitable for kids 
• Comes with 12 prepared slides 
• Large viewing area

Cons 

• Won’t be as fun for older siblings 

This microscope from GeoSafari Jr. is an incredible way to introduce your kids to a wonderful new world full of zoomed-in discoveries. It’s designed explicitly with preschool-aged children in mind and features a large focus knob to help kids get used to magnification, starting with 2.5x and expanding to 8x. Two large eyepieces are comfortable and easy to use, eliminating the need to coordinate closing one eye. A push-button LED light and large viewing plate make this microscope easy to use; kids can independently place household objects and outdoor finds within view, plus, you can help them use the 12 included slide plates for a more advanced experience. One of the best for 5-year-olds, My First Microscope comes in two bright colorways, is made from lightweight yet durable plastic, and is battery operated so you can take it outdoors on a nice day. 

Best portable: Carson MicroBrite Plus Pocket Microscope

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Why it made the cut: Weighing only 0.15 pounds, this pocket microscope is a great way for kids to get closer to nature during hikes, camping trips, and other outdoor adventures. 

Specs

• Magnification: 60x-120x
• Age Range: 6+
• Dimensions: 3.5 x 0.79 x 1.97 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Affordable
• Lightweight
• Magnification power 

Cons 

• Works best on flat object 
• Can be hard to use for little kids

This compact pocket microscope is an excellent way to explore the outdoors with your kids. While a little trickier to operate than some models made specifically for kids, it’s a great option for looking at leaves, insects, flowers, and more. An aspheric lens forces light rays to converge at a single focal point, allowing for more precise imaging aided by a bright LED light. With a magnification power range between 60x-120x, you’ll see some incredible detail, though it’s recommended that your kids start at the lowest magnification and work their way up. Using the MicroBrite to look at relatively flat objects resting on a flat surface is best, especially for kids still working on keeping a steady hand.  

Best kit: Omano JuniorScope Science Kit

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Why it made the cut: A microscope is a great gift, but the JuniorScope Science Kit comes with five fun experiment cards that will keep your kids entertained after they inspect what they find around the house.

Specs

• Magnification: 40x-400x
• Age Range: 6+
• Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 14 inches 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Comes with experiments 
• Good value 
• Suitable for a wide age range

Cons 

• Larger objects can be challenging to view 

This microscope kit from JuniorScope comes with three magnification levels, a glass lens, dimmable LED lighting, and a large EZ focus knob allows kids to operate the magnification levels independently. The full kit includes five fun experiment cards that will walk your kids through different ways to inspect various specimens, including insects, human bodies, plants, and crime scenes. Alongside the cards, this kit includes forceps, a Petri dish, dropper, test tube, blank slides, prepared slides, lens paper, and more. Look no further if you want a complete kit to guide a scientifically-minded kid. 

Best budget: National Geographic STEM Kit

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Why it made the cut: A full microscope kit for under $40 that includes mineral chips, prepared plates, a lab guide, and more.

Specs

• Magnification: 40x-400x
• Age Range: 6+
• Dimensions: 12.05 x 11.05 x 6.81 
• Light Source: LED

Pros 

• Inexpensive
• Comes with tools and activities 
• Soft eyepiece 

Cons 

• Build feels a little cheap

This kit from National Geographic is an affordable way to gift a microscope, equipment, and built-in experiments. The microscope itself features a soft eyepiece, large focus knob, and fixed lens, while the full kit comes with six plant slides, six blank slides, slide case, lab guide, pipette, tweezers, specimen dish, and more. It also comes with six mineral chips, including Pyrite, Amethyst, Rose Quartz, Blue Clacite, Geode, and Green Fluorite. We can confirm that adults and children alike will enjoy getting close to these sparkly rocks. The National Geographic STEM kit delivers a full gift set without breaking the bank. 

What to consider when buying the best microscopes for kids

Just because kids can use these microscopes, that doesn’t mean their construction is completely different from lab-level models. They are still tools that come with technical specifications, and it’s important to understand how they work so you can confidently choose the right one for your young scientist. 

Magnification and eyepiece

Microscopes are designed to zoom in on organisms and other matter, but the magnification power will differ across various models. Generally speaking, the younger the child, the lower the magnification power should be because powerful optics can be more difficult to operate. Microscopes with a 5X to 400X magnification power will be great for younger kids. Higher magnification, above 400x, should typically be reserved for kids over eight. These optics are also directly related to eyepiece type. A monocular eyepiece is used by one eye and can magnify up to 1000X. A binocular microscope supports more powerful magnification and uses both eyes, reducing eye strain. 

Traditional or digital 

You’ll likely see the words “traditional” and “digital” used to describe two different microscope types. A traditional model is probably best if you’re looking for an at-home microscope. A digital unit looks at the plate using a camera, projecting the image onto a screen—helpful for classroom settings or larger families with lots of young kids reluctant to take turns, but not the typical kitchen table use case. 

Stereo or compound

Stereo and compound, also known as high or low power, describe the materials the microscope is designed to inspect. Stereo microscopes are considered low power and are great for exploring small surfaces in more three-dimensional detail: think coins, seashells, and rocks. Compound, high-power microscopes will give you a better look at living organisms, like plant matter, and rely on super small sections of the material to be put on a plate for closer inspection. 

Longevity and durability  

Traditionally, microscopes use small halogen or fluorescent bulbs to illuminate their subjects. If finding replacement bulbs fills you with dread, consider LED options, which are powerful, bright, and last for years. 

Of course, the light source won’t matter if your microscope is made from fragile material and placed in the hands of a well-intentioned yet clumsy kid. Look for strong metals or thick, durable plastics. For kids under 5, grab a model with special safety features—like rubberized grips, padding around the eyepiece, rounded edges, and other features designed to be operated by small, inexperienced fingers. Of course, you can worry less about child-friendly design and more about magnification for older kids. 

Accessories and kits 

Ensure your microscope has all the tools necessary for full functionality; appropriate accessories might include plates, Petri dishes, pipettes, tweezers, etc. If you are gifting a microscope but are unsure how to use it in a fun, engaging way, go for a microscope kit with additional accessories. These kits typically include a variety of experiments or guides to get your scientific explorer started. As they grow, you can get them a telescope under $500 to look at the larger aspects of our universe.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best microscopes for kids

• Best overall: AmScope Beginner Microscope STEM Kit
• Best for older kids: OMAX-MD8 2ES10
• Best for young kids: Educational Insights GeoSafari Jr. Kids Microscope
• Best portable: Carson MicroBrite Plus Pocket Microscope
• Best kit: Omano JuniorScope Science Kit 
• Best budget: National Geographic STEM Kit

Shopping for the best microscope for kids shouldn’t be a process of trial and error, especially if you know what will suit the age of your little STEM explorer. As long as you don’t buy anything too advanced for smaller kids or too rudimentary for late-elementary to middle school students, you’re on track to deliver an amazing gift that will provide entertainment and learning. Consider the technical specs, pay particular attention to magnification, and think about any extra accessories that could go a long way. You’ll be conducting scientific research experiments with your future doctor/environmental scientist/zoologist/biologist/botanist in no time. 

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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A team of scientists from Spain and the United States reconstructed the skull of an extinct great ape species from a set of well-preserved, but damaged skeletal remains. The bones belonged to Pierolapithecus catalaunicus who lived roughly 12 million years ago. Studying its facial features could help us better understand human and ape evolution and the findings are described in a study published October 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

[Related: This 7th-century teen was buried with serious bling—and we now know what she may have looked like.]

First described in 2004, Pierolapithecus was a member of a diverse group of extinct ape species that lived during the Miocene Epoch (about 15 to 7 million years ago) in Europe. During this time, horses were beginning to evolve in North America and the first dogs and bears also began to appear. The Miocene was also a critical time period for primate evolution.

In the study, the team used CT scans to virtually reconstruct Pierolapithecus’ cranium. They then used a process called principal components analysis and compared their digital reconstruction of the face with other primate species. They then modeled the changes occurring to some key features of ape facial structure. They found that Pierolapithecus shares similarities in its overall face shape and size with fossilized and living great apes. 

However, it also has distinct facial features that have not been found in other apes from the Middle Miocene. According to the authors, these results are consistent with the idea that Pierolapithecus represents one of the earliest members of the great ape and human family. 

“An interesting output of the evolutionary modeling in the study is that the cranium of Pierolapithecus is closer in shape and size to the ancestor from which living great apes and humans evolved,” study co-author and AMNH paleoanthropologist Sergio Almécija said in a statement. “On the other hand, gibbons and siamangs (the ‘lesser apes’) seem to be secondarily derived in relation to size reduction.”

Studying the physiology of extinct animals like Pierolapithecus can help us understand how other species evolved. This particular primate species is important because the team used a cranium and partial skeleton that belonged to the same individual ape, which is a rarity in the fossil record. 

[Related: Our tree-climbing ancestors evolved our abilities to throw far and reach high.]

“Features of the skull and teeth are extremely important in resolving the evolutionary relationships of fossil species, and when we find this material in association with bones of the rest of the skeleton, it gives us the opportunity to not only accurately place the species on the hominid family tree, but also to learn more about the biology of the animal in terms of, for example, how it was moving around its environment,” study co-author Kelsey Pugh said in a statement. Pugh is a primate palaeontologist with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York and Brooklyn College.

Earlier studies on Pierolapithecus suggest that it could have stood upright and had multiple adaptations that allowed these hominids to hang from tree branches and move throughout them. However, Pierolapithecus’ evolutionary position is still debated, partially due to the damage to the specimen’s cranium.  

“One of the persistent issues in studies of ape and human evolution is that the fossil record is fragmentary, and many specimens are incompletely preserved and distorted,” study-coauthor and AMNH biological anthropologist Ashley Hammond said in a statement. “This makes it difficult to reach a consensus on the evolutionary relationships of key fossil apes that are essential to understanding ape and human evolution.”

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We had a great time checking out the Oct. 14 solar eclipse, but the next one that’s visible here in the U.S. won’t be until April 2024. Lots of interesting things will be happening in the sky between then and now, and you’ll need a good telescope to check them out. Right now, Amazon has substantial discounts on Celestron x PopSci telescopes that were already a solid value. There are three different options currently available depending on your star-gazing needs. Then, when the next eclipse rolls around, you can buy a dedicated solar eclipse filter and get a better look than all those jealous people with their (still pretty cool) pinhole cameras.

Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 5” Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope $498 (was $599)

SEE IT

This is the biggest and most powerful scope in the Celestron x PopSci lineup, and it’s just over $100 off right now. Its five-inch aperture and high-end coatings provide a clear, low-aberration image of the night sky. More importantly, it’s compatible with the Celestron app, which can help you find cool things going on in the sky above you and then help you locate them with your scope so you don’t have to go blindly hunting around the heavens. That’s especially important with a scope this powerful.

Popular Science StarSense Explorer DX 100AZ Smartphone App-Enabled Telescope $269 (was $349)

SEE IT

This 100mm refractor provides a very solid field of view for astrophotography. It’s light and easy to move around, and it’s compatible again with Celestron’s app to guide you around the night sky. Plus, the integrated hood helps combat errant light from hitting the front element of the scope and causing image-ruining glare.

Popular Science AstroMaster 80mm – Portable Refractor Telescope $151 (was $239)

SEE IT

This model is meant specifically for beginners, and the price makes it very appealing with this discount. The short tub provides a relatively loose view of celestial objects, so beginners won’t get frustrated trying to find specific areas. Plus, the short tube design keeps it small and light, so this is a great scope to keep as a backup for quick jaunts out into dark sky country without lots of gear.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Popular Science has teamed up with Celestron on a line of products. We do earn a commission on its sales—all of which helps power Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the late 19th century, whalers, settlers, and pirates changed the ecology of the Galapagos Islands by poaching some native species—like Galapagos giant tortoises—and introducing others, like goats and rats. The latter species became pests and severely destabilized the island ecosystems. Goats overgrazed the fruits and plants the tortoises ate while rats preyed on their eggs. Over time, the tortoise population plummeted. On Española, an island in the southeast of the archipelago, the tortoise count fell from over 10,000 to just 14. Along the way, with goats eating all the plants they could, Española—once akin to a savanna—turned barren.

A century later, conservationists set out to restore the Galapagos giant tortoise on Española—and the island ecosystem. They began eradicating the introduced species and capturing Española’s remaining tortoises and breeding them in captivity. With the goats wiped out and the tortoises in cages, the ecosystem transformed once again. This time, the overgrazed terrain became overgrown with densely packed trees and woody bushes. Española’s full recovery to its savanna-like state would have to wait for the tortoises’ return.

From the time those 14 tortoises were taken into captivity between 1963 and 1974 until they were finally released in 2020, conservationists with the NGO Galápagos Conservancy and the Galapagos National Park Directorate reintroduced nearly 2,000 captive-bred Galapagos giant tortoises to Española. Since then, the tortoises have continued to breed in the wild, causing the population to blossom to an estimated 3,000. They’ve also seen the ecology of Española transform once more as the tortoises are reducing the extent of woody plants, expanding the grasslands, and spreading the seeds of a key species.

Not only that, but the tortoises’ return has also helped the critically endangered waved albatross—a species that breeds exclusively on Española. During the island’s woody era, Maud Quinzin, a conservation geneticist who has previously worked with Galapagos tortoises, says that people had to repeatedly clear the areas the seabirds use as runways to take off and land. Now, if the landing strips are getting overgrown, they’ll move tortoises into the area to take care of it for them.

The secret to this success is that—much like beavers, brown bears, and elephants—giant tortoises are ecological architects. As they browse, poop, and plod about, they alter the landscape. They trample young trees and bushes before they can grow big enough to block the albatrosses’ way. The giant tortoises likewise have a potent impact on the giant species of prickly pear cactuses that call Española home—one of the tortoises’ favorite foods and an essential resource for the island’s other inhabitants.

When the tortoises graze the cactus’s fallen leaves, they prevent the paddle-shaped pads from taking root and competing with their parents. And, after they eat the cactus’s fruit, they drop the seeds across the island in balls of dung that offer a protective shell of fertilizer.

The extent of these and other ecological effects of the tortoise are documented in a new study by James Gibbs, a conservation scientist and the president of the Galápagos Conservancy, and Washington Tapia Aguilera, the director of the giant tortoise restoration program at the Galápagos Conservancy.

To study these impacts up close, they fenced off some of the island’s cactuses, which gave them a way to assess how the landscapes evolve when they’re either exposed to or free from the tortoises’ influences. They also studied satellite imagery of the island captured between 2006 and 2020 and found that while parts of the island are still seeing an increase in the density of bushes and trees, places where the tortoises have rebounded are more open and savanna-like.

As few as one or two tortoises per hectare, the scientists write, is enough to trigger a shift in the landscape.

Dennis Hansen, a conservation ecologist who has worked with the tortoises native to the Aldabra atoll in the Indian Ocean, says that while the findings line up with what conservationists expected, it was nice to have their suspicions confirmed. The results bode well for other rewilding projects that include giant tortoise restoration as a keystone of their efforts, he says, such as those underway on other islands in the Galapagos archipelago and on the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean.

But on Española itself, though the tortoises have been busy stomping shoots and spreading seeds, they have more work to do. In 2020, 78 percent of Española was still dominated by woody vegetation. Gibbs says it may take another couple of centuries for Española’s giant tortoises to reestablish something like the ratio of grasses, trees, and bushes that existed before Europeans landed in the archipelago. But that long transformation is at least underway.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

Back at the turn of the 21st century, Valley fever was an obscure fungal disease in the United States, with fewer than 3,000 reported cases per year, mostly in California and Arizona. Two decades later, cases of Valley fever are exploding, increasing more than sevenfold and expanding to other states.

And Valley fever isn’t alone. Fungal diseases in general are appearing in places they have never been seen before, and previously harmless or mildly harmful fungi are turning deadly for people. One likely reason for this worsening fungal situation, scientists say, is climate change. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns are expanding where disease-causing fungi occur; climate-triggered calamities can help fungi disperse and reach more people; and warmer temperatures create opportunities for fungi to evolve into more dangerous agents of disease.

For a long time, fungi have been a neglected group of pathogens. By the early 2000s, researchers were already warning that climate change would make bacterial, viral and parasite-caused infectious diseases like cholera, dengue and malaria more widespread. “But people were not focused at all on the fungi,” says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s because, until recently, fungi haven’t troubled humans much.

Our high body temperature helps explain why. Many fungi grow best at around 12 to 30 degrees Celsius (roughly 54 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit). So, while they find it easy to infect trees, crops, amphibians, fish, reptiles and insects — organisms that do not maintain consistently high internal body temperatures — fungi usually don’t thrive inside the warm bodies of mammals, Casadevall wrote in an overview of immunity to invasive fungal diseases in the 2022 Annual Review of Immunology. Among the few fungi that do infect humans, some dangerous ones, such as species of Cryptococcus, Penicillium and Aspergillus, have historically been reported more in tropical and subtropical regions than in cooler ones. This, too, suggests that climate may limit their reach.

Fungi on the move

Today, however, the planet’s warming climate may be helping some fungal pathogens spread to new areas. Take Valley fever, for instance. The disease can cause flu-like symptoms in people who breathe in the microscopic spores of the fungus Coccidioides. The climatic conditions favoring Valley fever may occur in 217 counties of 12 US states today, according to a recent study by Morgan Gorris, an Earth system scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

But when Gorris modeled where the fungi could live in the future, the results were sobering. By 2100, in a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, rising temperatures would allow Coccidioides to spread northward to 476 counties in 17 states. What was once thought to be a disease mostly restricted to the southwestern US could expand as far as the US-Canadian border in response to climate change, Gorris says. That was a real “wow moment,” she adds, because that would put millions more people at risk.

Some other fungal diseases of humans are also on the move, such as histoplasmosis and blastomycosis. Both, like Valley fever, are increasingly seen outside what was thought to be their historical range.

Such range extensions have also appeared in fungal pathogens of other species. The chytrid fungus that has contributed to declines in hundreds of amphibian species, for example, grows well at environmental temperatures between 17 and 25 degrees Celsius (63 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit). But the fungus is becoming an increasing problem at higher altitudes and latitudes, likely because rising temperatures are making previously cold regions more welcoming for the chytrid. Similarly, white pine blister rust, a fungus that has devastated some species of white pines across Europe and North America, is expanding to higher elevations where conditions were previously unfavorable. This has put more pine forests at risk. Changing climatic conditions are also helping drive fungal pathogens of crops, like those infecting bananas, potatoes and wheat, to new areas.

A warming climate also changes cycles of droughts and intense rains, which can increase the risk of fungal diseases in humans. One study of more than 81,000 cases of Valley fever in California between 2000 and 2020 found that infections tended to surge in the two years immediately following prolonged droughts. Scientists don’t yet fully understand why this happens. But one hypothesis suggests that Coccidioides survives better than its microbial competitors during long droughts, then grows quickly once rains return and releases spores into the air when the soil begins to dry again. “So climate is not only going to affect where it is, but how many cases we have from year to year,” says Gorris.

By triggering more intense and frequent storms and fires, climate change can also help fungal spores spread over longer distances. Doctors have observed unusually large outbreaks of Valley fever just after dust storms or other events that kick up clouds of dust. Similarly, researchers have found a surge in Valley fever infections in California hospitals after large wildfires as far as 200 miles away. Scientists have seen this phenomenon in other species too: Dust storms originating in Africa have been implicated in moving a coral-killing soil fungus to the Caribbean.

Researchers are now sampling the air in dust storms and wildfires to see if these events can actually carry viable, disease-causing fungi for long distances and bring them to people, causing infections. Understanding such dispersal is key to figuring out how diseases spread, says Bala Chaudhary, a fungal ecologist at Dartmouth College who coauthored an overview of fungal dispersal in the 2022 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. But there’s a long road ahead: Scientists still don’t have answers to several basic questions, such as where various pathogenic fungi live in the environment or the exact triggers that liberate fungal spores out of soil and transport them over long distances to become established in new places.

Evolving heat tolerance

Helping existing fungal diseases reach newer places isn’t the only effect of climate change. Warming temperatures can also help previously innocuous fungi evolve tolerance for heat and become deadlier. Researchers have long known that fungi are capable of this. In 2009, for example, researchers showed that a fungus — in this case a pathogen that infects hundreds of insect pests — could evolve to grow at 37 degrees Celsius, five degrees higher than its previous upper thermal limit, after just four months. More recently, researchers grew a dangerous human pathogen, Cryptococcus deneoformans, at both 37 degrees Celsius (similar to human body temperature) and 30 degrees Celsius in the lab. The higher temperature triggered a fivefold rise in mutations in the fungus’s DNA compared to the lower temperature. Rising global temperatures, the researchers speculate, could thus help some fungi rapidly adapt, increasing their ability to infect people.

There are examples from the real world too. Before 2000, the stripe rust fungus, which devastates wheat crops, was restricted to cool, wet parts of the world. But since 2000, certain strains of the fungus have become better adapted to higher temperatures. These sturdier strains have been replacing the older strains and spreading to new regions.

This is worrying, says Casadevall, especially with hotter days and heatwaves becoming more frequent and intense. “Microbes really have two choices: adapt or die,” he says. “Most of them have some capacity to adapt.” As climate change increases the number of hot days, evolution will select more strongly for heat-resistant fungi.

And as fungi in the environment adapt to tolerate heat, some might even become capable of breaching the human temperature barrier.

This may have happened already. In 2009, doctors in Japan isolated an unknown fungus from the ear discharge of a 70-year-old woman. This new-to-medicine fungus, which was given the name Candida auris, soon spread to hospitals around the world, causing life-threatening bloodstream infections in already sick patients. The World Health Organization now lists Candida auris among its most dangerous group of fungal pathogens, partly because the fungus is showing increasing resistance to common antifungal drugs.

“In the case of India, it’s really a nightmare,” says Arunaloke Chakrabarti, a medical mycologist at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. When C. auris was first reported in India more than a decade ago, it was low on the list of Candida species threatening patients, Chakrabarti says, but now, it’s the leading cause of Candida infections. In the US, cases rose sharply from 63 between 2013 and 2016 to more than 2,300 in 2022.

Where did C. auris come from so suddenly? The fungus appeared simultaneously across three different continents. Each continent’s version of the fungus was genetically distinct, suggesting that it emerged independently on each continent. “It’s not like somebody took a plane and carried them,” says Casadevall. “The isolates are not related.”

Since all continents are exposed to the effects of climate change, Casadevall and his colleagues think that human-induced global warming may have played a role. C. auris may always have existed somewhere in the environment — potentially in wetlands, where researchers have recovered other pathogenic species of Candida. Climate change, they argued in 2019, may have exposed the fungus to hotter conditions over and over again, allowing some strains to become heat-tolerant enough to infect people.

Subsequently, scientists from India and Canada found C. auris in nature for the first time, in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. This “wild” version of C. auris grew much slower at human body temperature than did the hospital versions. “What that suggests to me is that this stuff is all over the environment and some of the isolates are adapting faster than others,” says Casadevall.

Like other explanations for C. auris’s origin, Casadevall’s is only a hypothesis, says Chakrabarti, and still needs to be proved.

One way to establish the climate change link, Casadevall says, would be to review old soil samples and see if they have C. auris in them. If the older versions of the fungus don’t grow well at higher temperatures, but over time they start to, that would be good evidence that they’re adapting to heat.

In any case, the possibility of warmer temperatures bringing new fungal pathogens to humans needs to be taken seriously, says Casadevall — especially if drug-resistant fungi that currently infect species of insects and plants become capable of growing at human body temperature. “Then we find ourselves with organisms that we never knew before, like Candida auris.”

Doctors are already encountering novel fungal infections in people, such as five new-to-medicine species of Emergomyces that have appeared mostly in HIV-infected patients across four continents, and the first record of Chondrostereum purpureum — a fungus that infects some plants of the rose family — infecting a plant mycologist in India. Even though these emerging diseases haven’t been directly linked to climate change, they highlight the threat fungal diseases pose. For Casadevall, the message is clear: It’s time to pay more attention.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on September 27, 2023, to correct a mischaracterization of malaria. It is caused by a parasite, not a virus or a bacterium as was originally stated.

10.1146/knowable-092623-2

Shreya Dasgupta is an independent science journalist based in Bangalore, India.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE is one of the most dramatic natural disasters in recorded history, yet so many of the actual records from that moment in time are inaccessible. Papyrus scrolls located in nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, for example, were almost instantly scorched by the volcanic blast, then promptly buried under pumice and ash. In 1752, excavators uncovered around 800 such carbonized scrolls, but researchers have since largely been unable to read any of them due to their fragile conditions.

On October 12, however, organizers behind the Vesuvius Challenge—an ongoing machine learning project to decode the physically inaccessible library—offered a major announcement: an AI program uncovered the first word in one of the relics after analyzing and identifying its incredibly tiny residual ink elements. That word? Πορφύραc, or porphyras… or “purple,” for those who can’t speak Greek.

[Related: A fresco discovered in Pompeii looks like ancient pizza—but it’s likely focaccia.]

Identifying the word for an everyday color may not sound groundbreaking, but the uncovery of “purple” already has experts intrigued. Speaking to The Guardian on Thursday, University of Kentucky computer scientist and Vesuvius Challenge co-founder Brent Seales explained that the particular word isn’t terribly common to find in such documents.

“This word is our first dive into an unopened ancient book, evocative of royalty, wealth, and even mockery,” said Seales. “Pliny the Elder explores ‘purple’ in his ‘natural history’ as a production process for Tyrian purple from shellfish. The Gospel of Mark describes how Jesus was mocked as he was clothed in purple robes before crucifixion. What this particular scroll is discussing is still unknown, but I believe it will soon be revealed. An old, new story that starts for us with ‘purple’ is an incredible place to be.”

The visualization of porphyras is thanks in large part to a 21-year-old computer student named Luke Farritor, who subsequently won $40,000 as part of the Vesuvius Challenge after identifying an additional 10 letters on the same scroll. Meanwhile, Seales believes that the entire scroll should be recoverable, even though scans indicate certain areas may be missing words due to its nearly 2,000 year interment.

As The New York Times notes, the AI-assisted analysis could also soon be applied to the hundreds of remaining carbonized scrolls. Given that these scrolls appear to have been part of a larger library amassed by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher, it stands to reason that a wealth of new information may emerge alongside long-lost titles, such as the poems of Sappho.

“Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine,” one papyrus expert told The New York Times. “The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”

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There’s no better indicator of the health of the oceans than the amount of phytoplankton that resides in them. That’s not only because this microalgae produces at least 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe, but also because it’s the start of the marine food chain, determining what other creatures live and thrive in any given area.

The changing seasons and the climate crisis may play a big role in the presence of phytoplankton over time, so it’s of the utmost importance for researchers to know what levels look like in oceans around the world. Sailors, boaters, and interested sea-faring travelers can help track and study this microorganism by using one simple tool: the Secchi disk. You can contribute to important citizen science by building one and taking it with you the next time you head to the ocean.

What is a Secchi disk?

A Secchi disk is an impressively low-tech piece of scientific equipment invented in 1865 by Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi to measure water transparency and turbidity. In deep-water ocean environments, these factors are determined by biological material like phytoplankton, explains Verena Meraldi, chief scientist for HX Hurtigruten Expeditions, a cruise line that invites passengers to participate in scientific data collection.

The tool itself is usually a round piece of white plastic with a diameter of 30 centimeters (about 12 inches), that is attached to the end of a tape measure or line marked at 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) and 1-meter intervals (a little more than 1 yard). 

We’ll explain in more detail below, but using a Secchi disk is easy: just lower the disk on a line into the water and record the depth at which you lose sight of the contraption. This measurement is called Secchi depth. Deeper measurements mean there’s less phytoplankton in the water, whereas shallow measurements indicate an abundance of the microalgae and therefore, a healthier environment.

Once you have a reading, you can log your findings in the Secchi app (available for iPhone and Android). The platform is part of the Secchi Disk Study citizen science program launched in 2013 by marine biologist Richard Kirby after a controversial 2010 report published in Nature that claimed phytoplankton levels had declined 40 percent between 1950 and 2008. Kirby’s initiative collects data to track the presence of this crucial microalgae worldwide.

Researchers have long collected data on phytoplankton by measuring ocean surface color using satellites. But this information is not enough, so this is where citizen scientists come in.  

“You need some means of determining in situ measurements, and the simplest way to do that is to measure the clarity of the water with a Secchi disk,” Kirby explains.

How to make a Secchi disk

There are two kinds of Secchi disks: the ones made to measure clarity in freshwater are painted in black and white, and are smaller than the white-only Secchi disks designed for the ocean. To participate in Kirby’s study, you’ll need the latter.

You can order a Secchi disk online, but you can also make your own, as they are easy to make and much cheaper, too.

[Related: How to become a citizen scientist]

Please note that some of the measurements in this project are in metric units. This is important because the Secchi Disk Study measures depth in centimeters, so the data you provide must be measured accordingly.   

Stats

• Time: 30 to 60 minutes
• Cost: about $8
• Difficulty: easy 

Materials

• 12-by-12-inch piece of wood, plastic, or styrofoam board, ⅛-inch or ¼-inch thick
• 50 meters (165 feet) of sturdy light-colored cord
• 2-pound fishing weight (or anything heavy enough to pull the disk down)
• (Optional) 4-inch eyebolt
• (Optional) 2 washers
• (Optional) 2 hex nuts
• (Optional) 50-meter (165-foot) fiberglass surveyors tape
• (Optional) White matte paint
• (Optional) Carabiner

Tools

• Heavy-duty scissors, box cutter, or saw
• Measuring tape
• 2 permanent markers of contrasting colors
• Drill
• Ruler

1. Cut a disk with a 30-centimeter diameter. You can craft your Secchi disk from just about any material, including metal or wood, though plastic is most common as it’s often easier to cut to size. A trimmed 5-gallon paint bucket lid, a thick signboard, or even a cutting board will work well. Just make sure that whatever material you choose won’t break easily and end up polluting the waters you’re trying to study and protect. 

2. (Optional) Paint your disk matte white. If the material you chose is already matte white, you can skip this step. If it’s not, paint your disk with matte-finish white paint and let it completely dry. You can use whatever you have at hand—just keep in mind that you may need more than one coat to get the required opacity.

3. Drill a small hole in the center of the disk. Use a ruler to find the center and drill a hole that’s just a bit bigger than the width of your cord.

5. Securely attach the weight to the bottom side of the disk. The weight can be a 2-pound fishing weight, repurposed link of mooring chain, or anything else that will help the disk sink. 

• Pro tip: “Be creative—you just need a lump of heavy metal,” Kirby says.

6. Mark your line. Once everything is knotted securely, use a permanent marker to draw lines on the cord at 20-centimeter intervals. Use the contrasting color to make marks at 1-meter intervals.

How to use a Secchi disk

Once you have your disk, head for the ocean. Make sure it’s at least partly sunny and that you embark ideally between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., as the angle of the sun will affect light penetration. Don’t set sail unless you’re accustomed to being on a boat, wearing proper safety equipment (like a life jacket), and know how to swim.

If you’re not comfortable on the water or don’t have a way to leave shore, no data is uninteresting, Kirby says. That means you can still join in and if you can only take readings once from a jetty or pier near shore where you live, you can still join in. Although the instructions below require a boat, you should be able to adapt them to wherever you are.

To pick a good reading location, Kirby says to find a spot at least 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) from shore where you can’t see the ocean floor, so around 25 meters deep (82 feet) deep. This depth and distance from shore will help reduce the amount of tannins and sediment obscuring visibility that could alter the measurement. 

Take off your sunglasses if you’re wearing them, and drop your clean disk into the water on the shady side of your boat. Keeping a firm grip on your measuring tape or rope, slowly let out the line. If you think it might slip from your fingers, tie it off to a secure surface for extra peace of mind. Watch carefully as your disk descends, and make sure it sinks vertically. If it doesn’t, the sinking weight might be off-balance or the current may be too strong, in which case you may have to make some adjustments and try again later.

Stop when you can no longer make out the disk beneath the surface. Raise and lower the disk a few times to pinpoint exactly the point where you lose sight of it. This will help you get the most accurate reading and make sure your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. When you’re ready, record your Secchi depth by looking at your measuring tape at the point where it touches the water, or counting the submerged interval markers. You’ll need the average measurement when you use the app. Finish by opening the Secchi app at the drop site—follow the prompts and instructions to record your GPS location and enter your data.

You can repeat this procedure anytime you’re on the ocean. In fact, if you visit far-flung destinations or regularly return to the same spot, all the better: repeated readings from various times of the day, different seasons, and from hard-to-reach locales are extremely valuable for helping scientists understand how phytoplankton levels change over time and around the world.

The Secchi Disk Study has published two research papers on phytoplankton, with more in the works. That’s thanks to citizen science contributions: cruise passengers, avid sailors, recreational kayakers, and anyone who even occasionally takes to open water and wants to contribute to important and quantifiable environmental science. You can add yourself to that list now too.

The post You can help measure the ocean’s health with this homemade gadget appeared first on Popular Science.

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Sam Kreigman and his colleagues made headlines a few years back with their “xenobots”— synthetic robots designed by AI and built from biological tissue samples. While experts continue to debate how to best classify such a creation, Kriegman’s team at Northwestern University has been hard at work on a similarly mind-bending project meshing artificial intelligence, evolutionary design, and robotics.

[Related: Meet xenobots, tiny machines made out of living parts.]

As detailed in a new paper published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Journal of Science, researchers recently tasked an AI model with a seemingly straightforward prompt: Design a robot capable of walking across a flat surface. Although the program delivered original, working examples within literal seconds, the new robots “[look] nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth,” Kriegman said in Northwestern’s October 3 writeup.

And judging from video footage of the purple multi-“legged” blob-bots, it’s hard to disagree:

After offering their prompt to the AI program, the researchers simply watched it analyze and iterate upon a total of nine designs. Within just 26 seconds, the artificial intelligence managed to fast forward past billions of years of natural evolutionary biology to determine legged movement as the most effective method of mobility. From there, Kriegman’s team imported the final schematics into a 3D printer, which then molded a jiggly, soap bar-sized block of silicon imbued with pneumatically actuated musculature and three “legs.” Repeatedly pumping air in and out of the musculature caused the robots’ limbs to expand and contract, causing movement. During testing, the robot could walk half its body length per second—roughly half as fast as the average human stride.

“It’s interesting because we didn’t tell the AI that a robot should have legs,” Kriegman said. “It rediscovered that legs are a good way to move around on land. Legged locomotion is, in fact, the most efficient form of terrestrial movement.”

[Related: Disney’s new bipedal robot could have waddled out of a cartoon.]

If all this weren’t impressive enough, the process—dubbed “instant evolution” by Kriegman and colleagues—all took place on a “lightweight personal computer,” not a massive, energy-intensive supercomputer requiring huge datasets. According to Kreigman, previous AI-generated evolutionary bot designs could take weeks of trial and error using high-powered computing systems. 

“If combined with automated fabrication and scaled up to more challenging tasks, this advance promises near-instantaneous design, manufacture, and deployment of unique and useful machines for medical, environmental, vehicular, and space-based tasks,” Kriegman and co-authors wrote in their abstract.

“When people look at this robot, they might see a useless gadget,” Kriegman said. “I see the birth of a brand-new organism.”

The post AI design for a ‘walking’ robot is a squishy purple glob appeared first on Popular Science.

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Neanderthals cooked crab and created art, but they also could have haunted cave lions and used their skins. Some 48,000 year-old puncture wounds on a cave lion’s ribcage suggest that the big cat was killed by a Neanderthal’s wooden spear. The findings are described in a study published October 12 in the journal Scientific Reports and may be the earliest known example of lion hunting and butchering by these extinct humans.

[Related: Sensitive to pain? It could be your Neanderthal gene variants.]

For about 20,000 years, cave lions were the most dangerous animals in Eurasia, with a shoulder height of about 4.2 feet high. They lived in multiple environments and hunted large herbivores including mammoth, bison, hose, and cave bear. They get the name cave lions due to the fact that most of their bones have been found in Ice Age caves. The fearsome creatures went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, but live on through their bones and the 34,000 rock art panels at Grotte Chauvet in France. 

In 1985, an almost complete cave lion skeleton was uncovered in Siegsdorf, Germany. The bones are believed to be from an old, medium-sized cave lion. There are cut marks across bones including two ribs, some vertebrae, and the left femur, which lead scientists to believe that ancient humans butchered the big cat after it died.  

However, the authors in this new study took another look at the remains. They describe a partial puncture wound located on the inside of the lion’s third rib. The wound appears to match the impact mark left by a wooden-tipped spear. The puncture is angled, which suggests that the spear entered the left of the lion’s abdomen and penetrated its vital organs before impacting the third rib on its right side. 

“The rib lesion clearly differs from bite marks of carnivores and shows the typical breakage pattern of a lesion caused by a hunting weapon,” Gabriele Russo, a study co-author and zooarchaeology PhD student at Universität Tübingen in Germany, said in a statement. 

The characteristics of the puncture wound also resemble the wounds found on deer vertebrae which are known to have been made by Neanderthal spears. The new findings could represent the earliest evidence of Neanderthals purposely hunting cave lions.

“The lion was probably killed by a spear that was thrust into the lion’s abdomen when it was already lying on the ground.” study co-author and University of Reading paleolithic archaeologist Annemieke Milks said in a statement. 

[Related: How many ancient humans does it take to fight off a giant hyena?]

The team also analyzed the findings from a 2019 excavation at the Unicorn Cave–or Einhornhöhle–in the Harz Mountains in Germany. The remains of several animals dating back to the last Ice Age or about 55,000 to 45,000 years ago were found, including some cave lion bones. They looked at bones from the toes and lower limbs of three cave lion specimens. These bones also had cut marks that are consistent with the markings generated when an animal is skinned.

The cut marks suggest that great care was taken while skinning the lion to ensure that the claws remained preserved within the fur. This finding could be the earliest evidence of Neanderthals using a lion pelt, potentially for cultural purposes.

“The interest of humans to gain respect and power from a lion trophy is rooted in Neanderthal behavior and until modern times the lion is a powerful symbol of rulers!” Thomas Terberger, a study co-author and archaeologist at the Universität Göttingen in Germany said in a statement. 

Future studies of cave lion bones could reveal more details of more complex Neanderthal behaviors and how the animal may have laid the basis for cultural development by our own species—Homo sapiens. 

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Hello gourd-geous! Travis Gienger from Anoka, Minnesota won the 50th World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off with a pumpkin weighing a whopping 2,749 pounds. This year’s victorious, lumpy veggie is named Michael Jordan and it could be baked into almost 700 pies. 

[Related: How do you breed a 2,624-pound pumpkin?]

According to Guinness World Records, the previous world record holder for heaviest pumpkin was a 2,702 pound squash grown in Italy in 2021.

Gienger is a horticulture teacher at Anoka Technical College who has been growing pumpkins for almost three decades, currently nurturing the behemoths in a patch in his backyard. This year, he decided to give the plants some extra care by watering them up to 12 times per day, in addition to extra fertilizing and feeding.  

He is a second generation great pumpkin grower, who first competed at the annual weigh-off in Half Moon Bay, California in 2020. Since then, he has won three of the city’s last four giant pumpkin contests. His 2,350 pound pumpkin named Tiger King won in 2020. The somehow even bigger pumpkin Maverick won in 2022 at 2,560 pounds.

He also shares the world record for the largest jack-’o-lantern by circumference. He won this prestigious honor in October 2022 for a pumpkin carved to look like an eagle with a circumference of 242 inches.

“I put in the work so that I can put a smile on people’s faces and it’s just so nice coming out here to see everyone in this town,” Gienger told The Associated Press.

Gienger won a $30,000 prize, most of which he plans to put into his daughter’s college fund and the rest will be used to “reinvest in the hobby.”

The annual Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival draws thousands of visitors every fall for multiple pumpkin-themed activities. The coastal city is known for large pumpkin patches, making it an ideal spot for this festival. 

Growing these giant gourds first took off during the 1970s, but it was not until 1996 that the first 1,000 pounder hit the pumpkin scene. Growers use special seeds that are annually swapped to create giant gourds. A pumpkin’s growing season can last over 100 days, giving them significantly more time to reach these titanic proportions than other crops. They also have a thick and woody rind that protects them better than other vegetables that have a high concentration of water.

[Related: These fungi demand more pumpkin in their pumpkin spice lattes.]

Most record-breaking pumpkins are a variety called Dill’s Atlantic Giant. They have been bred to produce increasingly large offspring. Some prize winners could have some innate advantages, including larger vascular tissue or a natural ability to grow faster, resist pests, or take in more nutrients from the soil. 

When not artificially flavoring lattes, getting carved up for decoration, or being the center of competitions, pumpkins are an excellent food to eat. They are chock full of nutrients that support the immune system, are heart-healthy, and their versatility makes them easy to fit into different types of dishes. 

The post This year’s heaviest pumpkin could be baked into 700 pies appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Sega Toys Homestar Flux		SEE IT	Get a scientifically accurate recreation of the night sky at home.
Best for adults		BlissLights Sky Lite 2.0		SEE IT	Skip the kid stuff without breaking the bank.
Best budget		Infmetry Star Projector		SEE IT	This star light is designed ofor gaming rooms, home theaters,

Beyond a few bright celestial objects, the rise of light pollution has made it difficult for most people to experience a genuinely starry night sky—and that’s where star projectors come in. If artificial lights have obscured your view of the Milky Way, these compact devices provide a fun and comfortable way to observe the cosmos. All you need is a dark room with a power outlet and you’re ready to bask in the wonders of the universe. Many also function as night lights or pattern projectors that can spruce up a room without the celestial theme. While nothing can replace the awe-inspiring feeling of seeing millions of stars in person, the best star projectors can still leave you transfixed.

• Best scientifically accurate: Sega Toys Homestar Flux
• Best portable: NEWSEE Northern Lights Star Projector
• Best for adults: BlissLights Sky Lite
• Best for kids: Gdnzduts Galaxy Projector
• Best budget: Infmetry Star Projector

How we chose the best star projectors

I’ve been fortunate to visit areas less affected by light pollution, so I know what it’s like to gaze upon the grandeur of our galaxy. As an editor at TechnoBuffalo, I visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., to learn about the Mars rover. I also took a guided tour of the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, where I saw enormous satellites used to communicate with faraway spacecraft. Over the last 10 years, I’ve written about gadgets and space for outlets like CNN Underscored, TechnoBuffalo, and Popular Science, and this guide, in a way, allows me to write about both. If you’re searching for a projector for movie night, you’re in the wrong place (though we do have a guide for the best projectors for indoors and outdoors). But if you enjoy the stars of the sky as much as you do the stars of the screen, read on.

The best star projectors: Reviews & Recommendations

Whether you’re looking to liven up your space with colorful lights or follow in the footsteps of Carl Sagan, a star projector is a novel way to explore the cosmos. When making our picks, we found a balance between fantastical projectors, options for kids and adults, and a more scientifically accurate model that’s great for those who love astronomy.

Best overall: Sega Toys Homestar Flux

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Sega’s Homestar Flux features the most scientifically accurate images out of all the star projectors we picked.

Specs 

• Dimensions: 6.3 x 6.3 x 5.9 inches (LWH)
• Weight: 1.36 pounds
• Power: USB

Pros 

• Supports multiple discs
• Projects up to 60,000 stars at once
• Great educational tool

Cons 

• Expensive

Sega’s Homestar Flux is the closest thing to a planetarium if you’re a fan of astronomy and intend to use your star projector as an educational tool. It can project up to 60,000 stars at once and covers a circle with a 106-inch diameter. Unlike the other star projectors on this list, Sega’s model supports interchangeable discs, allowing owners to explore different parts of the universe in incredible detail. The Homestar Flux comes with two discs, the Northern Hemisphere and the Northern Hemisphere with constellation lines; it also supports additional discs that feature the Andromeda Galaxy, the southern hemisphere, and more. 

These discs contain data from different missions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the United States Naval Observatory (USNO). While Sega’s projector is pricey, it features the most scientifically accurate experience and is a must-have for would-be astronomers.

Best portable: NEWSEE Northern Lights Star Projector

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: NEWSEE’s Northern Lights Star Projector lets you take the magic of the stars with you everywhere.

Specs 

• Dimensions: 4.7 x 4.7 x 4.8 inches (LWH)
• Weight: 1.15 pounds
• Power: USB-C

Pros 

• Battery powered
• 360-degree projection
• White noise mode
• Bluetooth streaming

Cons 

• Don’t expect high-fidelity audio

NEWSEE’s Northern Lights Star Projector is the only model we’re recommending that can be taken anywhere. The battery-powered projector can run for a couple of hours before needing to be recharged—though because it has a USB-C port, you can plug it into a portable charger to extend its life. The projector sits on a stand and can be rotated so that you can find the best angle for your room. This flexibility comes in handy because you may be using the projector in multiple rooms because of its portability.

You can program NEWSEE’s projector to display one of four different star patterns, and play five different white noises. This star projector can even be used as a Bluetooth speaker for playing any music from your digital library. However, you shouldn’t get your hopes up where audio fidelity is concerned—consider this a fun bonus feature. If you want to take a star projector to a friend’s place or on vacation, this is the one to grab.

Best for adults: BlissLights Sky Lite

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The Sky Lite from BlissLights will help you set the mood with the right lighting.

Specs 

• Dimensions: 5.95 x 2.91 x 5.95 (LWH)
• Weight: 1.68
• Power: AC adapter

Pros 

• Adjustable brightness
• Tilting base
• App controlled

Cons 

• Projector design is easy to tip over

The Sky Lite from BlissLights is an excellent option for adults because it offers brightness controls, and several lighting effects, making it easy to set the proper mood. While star projectors generally become the center of attention in whatever room they’re in, the Sky Lite is excellent as complementary lighting, casting colorful auroras during dinner, movie nights, and parties. Additionally, the Sky lite 2.0 supports a rotation feature and a shutoff timer so that you can have your magical night under the stars before nodding off to bed. 

Best for kids: Gdnzduts Galaxy Projector

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This galaxy projector features brightness controls and a shutoff timer, plus it doubles as a colorful night light.

Specs 

• Dimensions: 6.45 x 6.45 x 4.92 (LWH)
• Weight: 0.61 pounds
• Power: USB

Pros 

• Built-in speaker
• Shutoff timer
• Brightness controls

Cons 

• Doesn’t show constellations

This simple galaxy projector features 21 lighting effects, a shutoff timer, brightness controls, and doubles as a night light. That way, you can find the right effect you like, adjust the brightness, and set a timer before bed. You can also toggle the lasers on and off, turning off the stars and letting the nebula-like effect lull you to sleep. The Galaxy Projector also comes with a remote, making it easy for kids to operate. Whether you want to inspire your kid’s imagination or keep them feeling safe with a night light, the Galaxy Projector is an excellent choice.

Best budget: Infmetry Star Projector

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Infmetry’s Star Projector offers an array of features at an affordable price.

Specs 

• Dimensions: 7.1 x 7.1 x 7.5 inches (LWH)
• Weight: 1.37 pounds
• Power: USB

Pros 

• Affordable
• Five brightness modes
• Shutoff timer

Cons

• No nebula or aurora features

Infantry’s Star Projector casts 360 degrees of light through a precut dome, creating a night sky-like effect. This model also supports five brightness modes, a breathing mode, and four colors (white, yellow, blue, and green). There’s also a shutoff timer, so you can fall asleep with the projector on and wake up with it off. It’s not nearly as captivating as the other options on this list, but for the price, it’s a fun way to introduce someone to the wonders of the universe.

What to consider when buying the best star projectors

Generally, cheap star projectors are novelties that emit a mix of colorful swirling LED lights and class 2 lasers, which are low-power visible lasers—the same type used in laser pointers. While most models aren’t scientifically accurate, they provide a fanciful escape and can offer a calming experience. However, if you’re serious about astronomy and willing to spend more, you can find a star projector that can turn your room into a personal planetarium.

Most models we researched offer features like brightness and color controls, image rotation, and an automatic shut-off timer. We found picking the right star projector is more about finding the experience that matches your mood. Are you looking for the cosmic color of nebulae? What about scientifically accurate constellations? Whatever you’re after, there’s a star projector for everyone.

Projection type

You’d think that a star projector only projects, well, stars. But many of them can cover the broad cosmic spectrum and mimic everything from nebulae to auroras to constellations. As we mentioned, picking the right one is about capturing your interest and imagination. A projector that can cast a nebula or aurora is an excellent choice if you want to create a calming environment before going to sleep. A star projector with more scientifically accurate images is ideal for studying and educational use.

Brightness control

A good star projector uses an LED bulb and offers multiple brightness settings. While star projectors are most effective in a dark room, the models that project nebula and aurora make for great complementary lighting, such as during a party or movie night. They also make for good night lights and can help create a calming environment that encourages rest.

Color settings

In addition to adjusting brightness, most star projectors offer different color settings, similar to smart light bulbs. Users can create a scene that fits their mood through advanced color settings and change it with the press of a button. A green aurora may be suitable for calm and tranquility, while yellow may be ideal for happiness and optimism. Most star projectors allow color adjustments through a controller or smartphone app and support millions of color options.

Still vs. rotating

Star projectors generally offer different viewing modes: still and rotating. A projector that operates in still mode will cast light onto a surface and remain static. A projector with a rotating feature will put on a more dynamic light show by slowly rotating the lights. Many of the models we looked at are capable of switching between still and rotating modes.

Extra features

Beyond simply projecting lights onto a wall, some star projectors include extra features like white noise, app support, and shutoff timers. Some models can even be synced with your music so that you can put on a cosmic light show. While these features aren’t necessary, they make specific models more appealing, especially if you intend to use a star projector in a child’s room, because it can act as a night light and white noise machine and then shut off after a few hours.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best star projectors

• Best scientifically accurate: Sega Toys Homestar Flux
• Best portable: NEWSEE Northern Lights Star Projector
• Best for adults: BlissLights Sky Lite
• Best for kids: Gdnzduts Galaxy Projector
• Best budget: Infmetry Star Projector

Star projectors are a fun and affordable way to add bright, colorful lights to your bedroom. That said, most are nothing more than novelties and put on light shows that vaguely resemble nebulae and auroras. If you’re searching for something with more scientifically accurate imagery, you can find some excellent options if you don’t mind spending more money. Better yet, we recommend traveling to a place unaffected by light pollution and experiencing the feeling of seeing millions of stars in person.

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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We’re closer than ever to mapping the entire brain to the microscopic level. Hundreds of neuroscientists across the world recently characterized more than 3,000 human brain cell types as part of the National Institute of Health’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, publishing almost two dozen papers in four Science journals today. This super-focused attention to detail could unlock many mysteries surrounding that complex organ, such as what happened in our brains to distinguish us from other primates. 

“This is the first large-scale, detailed description of all the different kinds of cells present in the human brain,” says Rebecca Hodge, an assistant investigator at the Allen Institute in Seattle who co-authored multiple studies in the paper package. Her hope is that this brain atlas provides a community resource for scientists to explore how the wide variety of brain cells contribute to health and disease.

Mark Mapstone, a professor of neurology at University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, who wasn’t involved with these studies, likened the new data about the brain to a tourist’s guide. “Imagine navigating an unfamiliar city with a roughly drawn street map containing only the major streets of the downtown compared to navigating the same city with a detailed map extending beyond the downtown to the suburbs and including all highways, two-way and one-way streets, alleyways, sidewalks, location of street signs and traffic signals, speed limits, and location of coffee shops and restaurants,” he says. “Cleary, the latter would make navigation and understanding the city much easier.” This first suite of studies shows three main ways the brain map can be used for biology and medicine.

An evolving brain

A human brain atlas can teach us about our evolutionary history. One study published today in Science used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to measure the gene expression of individual brain cells in humans and five other primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas. In this method, scientists pull out individual cells from a piece of tissue, break them open to expose the genetic messengers inside, then use tags akin to tiny barcodes to identify that material. “This is the main technology used in some of these papers that are coming out and it’s a technique that’s only been around for the past 10 years,” Hodge says. Getting this genetic profile allows researchers to group clusters of cells into specific types. 

[Related: Psychedelics and anesthetics cause unexpected chemical reactions in the brain]

Our cells’ composition and organization is similar to those of our close relatives. However, the biggest differences seemed to occur in a brain region called the middle temporal gyrus, which is involved in processing semantic memory and language. Humans had higher numbers of projecting neurons in this area compared to other species. What’s more, the researchers highlighted a difference in gene expression that promoted synaptic plasticity, which is the ability of neurons to strengthen brain connections. This feature is an important component for learning and memory, and it might explain how humans developed complex cognitive skills.

There was some variation within humans, too. Another study found the most differences across humans in immune cells called microglia as well as deep-layer excitatory neurons, which are involved in the communication between distant brain regions. Researchers are not quite sure why—one theory is that deep-layer excitatory neurons develop earlier and are more exposed to environmental factors that could diversify their gene patterns. “Everyone’s brain is largely similar. Even though we have the same building blocks, it’s the small number of differences that matter,” says Jeremy Miller, a senior scientist at the Allen Institute, and co-author of the study. “We’re now starting to understand how important these changes are and figuring out what makes us uniquely human.”

Animal models

Because human brains share many features with other mammals, neurologists frequently use the small brains of mice to study diseases. The one problem, Miller says, is that mice don’t naturally develop neurodegenerative diseases common in humans. Scientists who want to study Alzheimer’s disease, for example, would need to manipulate multiple mouse genes to cause the kind of brain pathology seen in older people. This requires a comprehensive understanding of how cell types in the brain work together and how they change in the context of disease. 

[Related: How your brain conjures dreams]

Much brain research in mice focuses on the neocortex, responsible for higher cognitive function. It might seem reasonable to assume that much of the brain’s cellular complexity appears here. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. In one of the first studies to create a cell map of the entire adult brain, neuroscientists have found high levels of diversity in older evolutionary structures such as the midbrain, which is involved in movement, vision, and hearing, and the hindbrain, which governs vital bodily functions such as breathing and heart rate. In subcortical areas, there also appears to be a supercluster of cells called splatter neurons that control innate behaviors and physiological functions. Replicating the complexity of these particular brain regions in animal models could help better identify the cellular origins of human diseases. 

Personalized medicine

Imagine a future where treatments are tailored to someone’s specific needs. To do that, scientists would use a person’s genetic profile, rather than characteristics such as weight or age, to inform any medical decisions. Clinicians could also use this genetic information to identify the risks of potential diseases and provide early preventative measures. 

“A detailed brain atlas can help us understand what successful brain function looks like so we can maximize brain cells and circuits that promote brain heath,” Mapstone says. “Addressing brain disease and promoting brain health can be more easily accomplished if we know how these cells are organized. “

Doctors are already using people’s genetic information to assess whether patients would be good candidates for a particular cancer treatment or to find the proper dose of a drug. This may soon include testing for neurological conditions. One study, which analyzed 1.1 million cells in 42 brain regions of neurotypical adults, identified specific neuronal cell types—mainly in the basal ganglia, a region involved in addictive behaviors—that were linked to 19 neuropsychiatric disorders and traits. Those conditions included schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as well as alcohol and tobacco use disorder.

This project is a step in the right direction for advancing research in personalized medicine, says Miller, though he warns this is only one of many to make this a reality for everyone. 

Miller and Hodge are optimistic there will be other versions of the human brain atlas completed in the next five years, as other groups wrap up similar projects. 

But there’s a possibility that we’ll never get the full picture. While Miller finds a half-decade timeframe reasonable, he says there’s always a chance science develops a new technology that could unearth something unexpected about the brain. “We can always do more,” he says.

This post has been updated.

The post New human brain atlas is the most detailed one we’ve seen yet appeared first on Popular Science.

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To avoid the amphibian pile-up that often comes with mating, some female frogs take drastic measures. According to research published October 11 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, female European common frogs will lay completely still and play dead to fend off potential mates. 

[Related: Check out some of the weirdest warty frogs in North America.]

In the study, a team from the Natural History Museum of Berlin in Germany placed a male frog in a box with one large female and one small female and recorded the mating behavior. They observed 54 instances of female frogs being clutched by the males and 83 percent of females tried rotating their body when gripped. About 48 percent of clasped females emitted “release calls” like squeaks and grunts and all of these vocal frogs rotated their bodies. 

Thirty-three percent of the frogs clasped by male expressed tonic immobility. This is when a frog stiffens its outstretched arms and legs to appear dead. The immobility tended to occur alongside both rotating and calling. Smaller females more frequently used all three tactics together than the bigger frogs. 

Interestingly, this unusual behavior had actually been seen centuries before. “I found a book written in 1758 by Rösel von Rosenhoff describing this behavior, which was never mentioned again,” study co-author Carolin Dittrich told The Guardian. “It was previously thought that females were unable to choose or defend themselves against this male coercion. Females in these dense breeding aggregations are not passive as previously thought.”

The team acknowledges that this behavior could also be a way to test a male’s strength and endurance, as those traits could boost their survival chances. They also point out that a larger sample size is needed to see if smaller females are more successful at escaping. 

This playing tactic is also used by other animals as a way to avoid being eaten.

The phrase “playing possum”  refers to a tactic deployed by the North American opossum found in the United States and Canada. When this marsupial is threatened by a predator, it will throw itself onto its back, bare its teeth, drool, and excrete a very bad smelling liquid out of its anal glands to get out of danger. 

North American wood ducks and colorful mallard ducks can immediately collapse when confronted with predators. In a 1975 experiment, 29 out of 50 different wild ducks played dead when they were exposed to captive red foxes. The ducks would also stay still long enough to be brought back to the fox’s den and wait until later to escape. The veteran foxes quickly learned that they needed to quickly deal a fatal injury to ducks that appeared dead.

[Related: Why some tiny frogs have tarantulas as bodyguards.]

Despite being apex predators, multiple species of sharks and rays also exhibit tonic immobility. Lemon sharks will turn onto their back and exhibit labored breathing and an occasional tremor when facing danger. Zebra sharks will also do this and will even stay immobile when being transported. 

Male nuptial gift-giving spiders will display a different death feigning behavior called thanatosis. It’s part of a courtship ritual that begins before mating with potentially cannibalistic female spiders. In a 2006 experiment, the males would “drop dead” when a female approached with interest. When entering thanatosis, the males would collapse and remain completely still, while retaining a gift of prey the male has already caught and wrapped in silk The male only cautiously begins to move when the female ate the gifts and initiated copulation.

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Adjusting to prosthetic limbs isn’t as simple as merely finding one that fits your particular body type and needs. Physical control and accuracy are major issues despite proper attachment, and sometimes patients’ bodies reject even the most high-end options available. Such was repeatedly the case for a Swedish patient after losing her right arm in a farming accident over two decades ago. For years, the woman suffered from severe pain and stress issues, likening the sensation to “constantly [having] my hand in a meat grinder.”

Phantom pain is an unfortunately common affliction for amputees, and is believed to originate from nervous system signal confusions between the spinal cord and brain. Although a body part is amputated, the peripheral nerve endings remain connected to the brain, and can thus misread that information as pain.

[Related: We’re surprisingly good at surviving amputations.]

With a new, major breakthrough in prosthetics, however, her severe phantom pains are dramatically alleviated thanks to an artificial arm built on titanium-fused bone tissue alongside rearranged nerves and muscles. As detailed in a new study published via Science Robotics, the remarkable advancements could provide a potential blueprint for many other amputees to adopt such technology in the coming years.

The patient’s procedure started in 2018 when she volunteered to test a new kind of bionic arm designed by a multidisciplinary team of engineers and surgeons led by Max Ortiz Catalan, head of neural prosthetics research at Australia’s Bionics Institute and founder of the Center for Bionics and Pain Research. Using osseointegration, a process infusing titanium into bone tissue to provide a strong mechanical connection, the team was able to attach their prototype to the remaining portion of her right limb.

Accomplishing even this step proved especially difficult because of the need to precisely align the volunteer’s radius and ulna. The team also needed to account for the small amount of space available to house the system’s components. Meanwhile, the limb’s nerves and muscles needed rearrangement to better direct the patient’s neurological motor control information into the prosthetic attachment.

“By combining osseointegration with reconstructive surgery, implanted electrodes, and AI, we can restore human function in an unprecedented way,” Rickard Brånemark, an MIT research affiliate and associate professor at Gothenburg University who oversaw the surgery, said via an update from the Bionics Institute. “The below elbow amputation level has particular challenges, and the level of functionality achieved marks an important milestone for the field of advanced extremity reconstructions as a whole.”

The patient said her breakthrough prosthetic can be comfortably worn all day, is highly integrated with her body, and has even relieved her chronic pain. According to Catalan, this reduction can be attributed to the team’s “integrated surgical and engineering approach” that allows [her] to use “somewhat the same neural resources” as she once did for her biological hand.

“I have better control over my prosthesis, but above all, my pain has decreased,” the patient explained. “Today, I need much less medication.” 

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How well do you know your pets? Pet Psychic takes some of the musings you’ve had about your BFFs (beast friends forever) and connects them to hard research and results from modern science.

WHAT DOES THE PHRASE cat communication make you think of? Probably a meow—or a hiss, if you’ve ever crossed a kitty’s boundaries. Yet much of what cats “say” to each other and to humans isn’t expressed out loud. Rather, it’s conveyed by their tails.

There’s the side-to-side swish when they’re agitated; the straight-down, puffed-out position of fright; the horizontal line for neutrality; and many more back-end gestures shared among the feline family. But one movement is largely confined to adult domestic cats: tail-up, whereby the articulate appendage is held perpendicular to the cat’s back, with the tip pointed forward at an approaching individual.

“You look at all the other wild cats in the world and they all have very similar mannerisms and behaviors. [The tail-up signal] is specific to domestic cats and to lions,” says Sarah Brown, a cat behavior specialist and author of The Hidden Language of Cats. “I think that’s just amazing.”

In the early 1990s, Brown tracked the behaviors and relationships of a free-living cat colony in Southampton, England. She observed that the tail-up position preceded amicable interactions, with cats often affectionately rubbing heads and sometimes sitting together afterward. Subsequent studies by researchers elsewhere bore those observations out. In tests where cats were presented with images of felines whose tails pointed up or down, the tail-up pictures elicited friendlier responses.

It’s also been demonstrated that cats use the tail-up cue in a similar manner with their humans—attentive kitty keepers may have already come to this conclusion. But it’s less evident where the expression came from. How did our lap-loving, couch-climbing companions end up sharing a behavior with the so-called king of the jungle? 

Even Felis lybica, the African wildcat from whom domestic cats evolved, makes the tail-up gesture in kittenhood. That’s a telltale sign of an origin in their domestic history, which is thought to have started about 10,000 years ago as wild cats congregated to hunt rodents around the fields and storehouses of Mesopotamian farmers. There they lived in closer proximity to one another than ever before.

Suddenly, cats had a pressing need to negotiate social interactions. Having an easy-to-read pose that quickly conveyed approachability and ease would help them avoid unnecessary conflict. Natural selection would “favor this behavior because it improves the cohesion of that social group,” says Eugenia Natoli, an evolutionary biologist who has studied the behaviors of free-living cats in Rome. “The reproductive success of individuals who cooperate would be higher than the success of individuals who don’t cooperate. It would then move on to the next generation, and so on.”

Some scientists have even suggested that tail-up evolved in captive-bred colonies of ancient Egypt, where cats were sacred and also sacrificed in mind-boggling numbers—an estimated 385,000 feline mummies were buried in a single temple. These large-scale rearing facilities would likely have been a crucible for new adaptations to communal living.

Whether this body language started on farms or in cat mills, we may never know, but both possibilities dovetail with its presence in lions, who typically live in prides with up to several dozen individuals. Other cat species are mostly solitary: They may have consistent relationships—mountain lions, for example, belong to complex hierarchical societies—but they’re not spending much time together.

Only domestic cats and lions share that life history. However, if sociality can explain the evolution of the tail-up signal, here’s a question: How did cats settle on that rather than some other behavior to convey good vibes?

There are three possible answers so far, summarized by Brown in her book. According to one, tail-up was a riff off the crouching, haunches-raised sexual displays of female cats. The second idea is that it originated from the tail position that cats use when spraying urine to mark their territory or send a message to neighbors. The last hypothesis suggests that it comes from the movements kittens reflexively make when approaching their mothers.

“As soon as they become mobile and Mum’s coming toward them, that little tail goes up,” says Brown. “They all do it.” Precisely why is another mystery. Natoli thinks it’s a biologically hard-wired way of helping mothers identify kittens by smell—cats have scent glands on their flanks and tails, and by lifting their tails, they make these easier to sniff. But both she and Brown think the third explanation for the tail-up origin is most likely.

“Perhaps [solitary wild cats] didn’t meet many other cats once they left their mother. They got out of the habit of putting their tail up. But [domestic] cats today are so constantly surrounded by other cats or people, they just carry on doing it,” says Brown.

That would make tail-up a neotenic behavior—one that is performed early in life and continues during adulthood. Kneading—when nursing kittens and snuggling mature cats flex their paws—is another neotenic behavior. (This one may be shared across felines.) Tail-up has positive emotional associations for a little one who’s happy to see Mom, and it could retain those associations for grown-ups.

At some point, cats took the small leap to pointing their tails at their favorite humans. Over a 10,000-year history, we became members of their group. They chose to befriend us—and they remind us of that every time that tail forms a furry thumbs-up.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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On Saturday, October 14, you’ll be able to watch an annular “ring of fire” eclipse as the moon passes in front of the sun at a distance where it’s unable to cover all of Earth’s nearest star. But only an exclusive crowd will be able to witness the event in its fully blazing glory—unless you know where to look.

Although it may be too late to travel to one of the best locations to watch this year’s final solar eclipse, nearly everyone in all 50 US states will have a chance to catch at least a glimpse (sorry western Alaska and western Hawaii). The 125-mile-wide path of annularity, however, will stretch from Oregon to Texas and cross just nine states before continuing on to Central and South America. You’ll only be able to see the sun form a fiery halo around the moon along that route. If you’re outside its range, you can simply load up one of several official livestreams to see what you’re missing.

How to watch the October 14, 2023 eclipse in person

The path of annularity will enter the US in Oregon at 12:13 p.m. Eastern Time (9:13 a.m. Pacific Time) and leave Texas at 1:30 p.m. ET (12:03 p.m. Central Time). The “ring of fire,” will pass over 29 national park sites and dozens of other pieces of public land. Worldwide, about 33 million people will be able to see it firsthand, while everyone else will have to settle for a less dramatic experience.

No matter where you are, make sure you’re wearing protective glasses to avoid damaging your eyes if you plan to look directly at the eclipse, or make a pinhole camera to project the event onto a sheet of paper. And of course, weather conditions may make it hard or impossible to see anything, so take note of the forecast.

If you want to know exactly what to expect where you are, astronomy website Time and Date has an interactive map that will help you set your eclipse-viewing plans. Once you’ve opened the map, click the magnifying glass icon on the left to open the search menu. Type the name of any city or town into the search bar and select it from the list that populates underneath. A pin will appear on the map and a box full of eclipse data will show up under the search bar.

That data will show you how much of the moon will cover the sun at that location, when the eclipse will begin and end there, when maximum coverage will occur, and the weather forecast for that spot on the globe. If you click the play icon next to the duration, you’ll go to another page where you can watch a simulation of what the eclipse will look like at that exact spot.

How to watch the annular “ring of fire” eclipse online

Just because you aren’t part of the 0.41 percent of people in the world who will be able to physically bear witness to the celestial spectacle doesn’t mean you’re stuck with whatever’s happening in the sky above you. All you have to do is turn your eyes away from the wonders of the natural world and look at a screen—there are four livestreams we think will offer an exquisite show.

The Exploratorium’s livestreams

The San Francisco-based Exploratorium will be broadcasting two livestreams starting at 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET), one from their telescopes in Valley of the Gods, Utah, and another from their telescopes in Ely, Nevada. They will also broadcast Spanish-language coverage of the event starting at 9 a.m. PT (12 p.m. ET) on YouTube.

According to Time and Date, annularity—the “ring of fire”— will last 4 minutes and 46 seconds at the Valley of the Gods. There are morning clouds in the forecast, though, so the view might be obscured, but this has the potential to be the most scenic livestream on our list. 

• Eclipse start: 9:10 a.m. Mountain Time (11:10 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 10:29 a.m. MT (12:29 p.m. ET)

In Ely, meanwhile, annularity will last for 3 minutes and 38 seconds. The weather is expected to be partly cloudy, so the eclipse could be hard to see.

• Eclipse start: 8:07 a.m. PT (11:07 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 9:24 a.m. PT (12:24 p.m. ET)

Time and Date’s livestream

Time and Date’s eclipse chasers will be broadcasting a livestream from Roswell, New Mexico. There, according to the website’s own interactive map, the annularity will last for 4 minutes and 41 seconds. It’s expected to be sunny there, so the view should be clear.

• Eclipse start: 9:15 a.m. MT (11:15 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 10:38 a.m. MT (12:38 p.m. ET)

NASA’s livestreams

NASA, of course, will also be livestreaming the eclipse, with feeds from Kerrville, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, starting at 11:30 a.m. ET. Annularity will last 4 minutes and 14 seconds at Kerrville, according to Time and Date.

• Eclipse start: 10:22 a.m. CT (11:22 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 11:50 a.m. CT (12:50 p.m. ET)

At Albuquerque, which is supposed to have sunny skies during the eclipse, annularity will last 4 minutes and 48 seconds.

• Eclipse start: 9:13 a.m. MT (11:13 a.m. ET)
• “Ring of fire” start: 10:34 a.m. MT (12:34 p.m. ET)

The space agency will also be broadcasting a live feed of three rocket launches that are part of its Atmospheric Perturbations around the Eclipse Path (APEP) mission to study how Earth’s ionosphere responds to a sudden drop in sunlight. You might want to cue that one up in a different browser window alongside the eclipse, or set up picture-in-picture on your device.

Whatever you do, just know that your scheduling calculations and technological machinations are probably way less complicated than all the math scientists do to predict the paths of future eclipses.

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The powdery material that NASA officials unveiled on Wednesday looked like asphalt or charcoal, but was easily worth more than its weight in diamonds. The fragments were from a world all their own—pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected and returned to Earth for analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission. The samples hold chemical clues to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life-supporting water on our planet.

The clay and minerals from the 4.5 billion-year-old rock had been preserved in space’s deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system. Last month, after a seven-year-long space mission, they parachuted to a desert in Utah, where they were whisked away by helicopter. 

And now those pristine materials sit in an airtight vessel in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where researchers like University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta are getting their first chance to study the sample up close. 

“The electron microscopes were fired up and ready” by September 27, Lauretta said in a news conference. “And boy did we really nail it.” (Lauretta, the principal investigator, gave the mission its name, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.) The preliminary investigation of a tiny fraction of the sample revealed it is rich in water, carbon, and organic compounds.

Carbon is essential for all living things on Earth, forming chemical bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements necessary to build proteins and enzymes. “We’re looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played essential roles in the origin of life on Earth,” Lauretta said. 

The Bennu sample contained about 4.7 percent carbon, as measured by the Carnegie Institution for Science, according to Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This is “the highest abundance of carbon” the Carnegie team has measured in an extraterrestrial sample, Glavin said. “There were scientists on the team going ‘Wow, oh my God!’ And when a scientist says that ‘Wow;’ that’s a big deal.”

[Related: This speedy space rock is the fastest asteroid in our solar system]

The Bennu sample is also flush with organic compounds, too, which glowed like tiny stars within the dark sample when exposed to a black light. “We picked the right asteroid—and not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”

Asteroids like Bennu were most likely responsible for all of Earth’s wet features—the water in oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain probably arrived when space rocks landed on our young planet some 4 billion years ago. Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which according to Lauretta, was the key material that ferried H₂O to Earth.

Under magnification, the clay has a sinuous shape. “We call this serpentine because they look like serpents or snakes inside the sample, and they have water locked inside their crystal structure,” he said. “That is how we think water got to the Earth.”

This is only the start. The OSIRIS-REx science team, as they catalog the sample, have months of more detailed work ahead. After six months, they will publish the catalog; scientists from around the world will be able to propose studies using the materials—though more than half the sample will be kept in reserve for research to take place years or even decades in the future. 

[Related: NASA’s mission to a weird metal asteroid will blast off … soon]

They have more than a half-pound of material to work with. OSIRIS-REx recovered an estimated 250 grams of Bennu material, more than four times the 60 grams the mission had targeted. And as the science team began dissembling the sample return capsule at Johnson Space Center, they discovered what NASA is calling bonus material: bits of Bennu adhering to the collector head and lid of the sealed canister that brought the bulk of the sample home. 

”The first thing we noticed was that there was black dust and particles all around the outer edge,” Lauretta said. “Already this is scientific treasure.”

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The world of mummified poop, or coprolites, offers a fascinating look into the parasites and snacks that pass through people and animals’s digestive systems. Seeing what foods were around can give archeologists an idea of the landscape hundreds of years ago. A new DNA analysis of mummified poop from two pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures reveals that they ate a wide variety of plants, tobacco, and even cotton. The findings are described in a study published October 11 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

The study looked at the coprolites from two pre-Columbian cultures called the Huecoid and Saladoid. An earlier study of centuries old fecal matter supports a hypothesis that the Huecoid likely originated in the Andes Mountains in present-day Bolivia and Peru before migrating among different islands in the Caribbean around the third century CE. The Saladoid people likely originated in modern day Venezuela and traveled to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by the sixth century CE.

“Archeologists at the University of Puerto Rico dedicated over 30 years to digs on the Island of Vieques, finding the coprolites along with many other priceless artifacts,” Gary A. Toranzos, study co-author and environmental microbiologist/paleo microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, tells PopSci. “One would consider finding coprolites easy [since] they are deposited every day. However, most people will not recognize them and the conditions for coprolite formation need to be very specific.”

Coprolites need dryness to preserve the DNA and it was believed that this preservation was impossible due to the Carribbean’s humid climate.  

“Narganes and Chanlate proved them wrong,” Toranzos says. 

In the study, Toranzos and microbiologist Jelissa Reynoso-García carefully extracted and analyzed plant DNA from ten coprolite samples from the La Hueca archaeological site in Puerto Rico. They then compared the extracted plant DNA against a database of diverse coprolite samples and contemporary plant DNA sequences.

They found that the Huecoid and Saladoid peoples enjoyed a diverse and sophisticated food system, including sweet potato, wild and domesticated peanut, chili peppers, a domesticated strain of tomatoes, papaya, and maize. Their analysis also detected tobacco, potentially due to chewing tobacco, pulverized tobacco inhalation, or tobacco as a food additive for medicinal and/or hallucinogenic purposes. 

[Related: What prehistoric poop reveals about extinct giant animals.]

Surprisingly, cotton was also detected in the samples. This could have been from ground cotton seeds used in oil or because women wet the cotton strands with their saliva leaving strands in the mouth while weaving. 

Additionally, they did not not find evidence of cassava consumption. Cassava is a root vegetable also called yucca and manioc. The authors were surprised that there weren’t any traces of it in these samples, as this plant was often reported as a staple food in the pre-Columbian Caribbean in sources from the time. 

“Cassava DNA was not found, likely because of the extensive preparation of the cassava powder to get rid of toxins in the plant,” says Toranzos.

Different food preparation techniques means that each coprolite sample is only a snapshot of what one specific person had been recently eating. The authors were only able to identify plants that are in current DNA sequence databases and plants that are now-extinct, rare, and in non-commercial crops were not detected. While it’s likely that the Huecoid and Saladoid people ate other plants or fungi than the study notes. The authors hope this analysis gives further insight into the lives of pre-Columbian people of the Americas.

“Even poop is a great resource for agriculture, and many other things,” Toranzos says. “Now we see they are a great way of obtaining information from those who lived thousands of years before us.”

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The 2018 winner of PopSci’s annual Best of What’s New continues to impress. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still edging closer to the sun than any other spacecraft has ever achieved, and it’s setting new speed records in the process. According to a recent status update from the space agency, the Parker Solar Probe has broken its own record (again) for the fastest thing ever made by human hands—at an astounding clip of 394,736 mph.

The newest milestone comes thanks to a previous gravity-assist flyby from Venus, and occurred on September 27 at the midway point of the probe’s 17th “solar encounter” that lasted until October 3. As ScienceAlert also noted on October 9, the Parker Solar Probe’s speed would hypothetically allow an airplane to circumnavigate Earth about 15 times per hour, or skip between New York City and Los Angeles in barely 20 seconds. Not that any passengers could survive such a journey, but it remains impressive.

[Related: The fastest human-made object vaporizes space dust on contact.]

The latest pass-by also set its newest record for proximity, at just 4.51 million miles from the sun’s plasma “surface.” In order not to vaporize from temperatures as high as nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield to protect its sensitive instruments. These tools are measuring and imaging the sun’s surface to further researchers’ understanding of solar winds’ origins and evolution, as well as helping to forecast environmental changes in space that could affect life back on Earth. Last month, for example, the probe raced through one of the most intense coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever observed. In doing so, the craft helped prove a two-decade-old theory that CMEs interact with interplanetary dust, which will improve experts’ abilities in space weather forecasting.

Despite its punishing journey, NASA reports the Parker Solar Probe remains in good health with “all systems operating normally.” Despite its numerous records, the probe is far from finished with its mission; there are still seven more solar pass-bys scheduled through 2024. At that point (well within Mercury’s orbit), the Parker Solar Probe will finally succumb to the sun’s extreme effects and vaporize into the solar winds— “sort of a poetic ending,” as one mission researcher told PopSci in 2021.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is showing off its imaging prowess again, this time with a stellar image of NGC 346. This is the brightest and biggest star-making region in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way called the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is about 21,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Tucana. 

[Related: JWST takes a jab at the mystery of the universe’s expansion rate.]

The image that looks like Edgar Allan Poe’s ominous raven in some angles was taken using Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The blue wisps of light show emissions from molecules like silicates and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The red fragments highlight dust that is warmed by the largest and brightest stars in the center.

An arc at the center left might be a reflection of light from the star near the center of the arc, and similar curves appear to be associated with strats at the lower left and upper right. The bright patches and filaments denote areas with large numbers of protostars. While looking for the reddest stars, the research team found 1,001 pinpoint sources of light. Most of these are young stars still snuggled up in their dusty cocoons.

This SMC is more primeval than the Milky Way since it possesses fewer heavy elements. According to NASA, these elements are forged in stars through nuclear fusion and supernova explosions, compared to our own galaxy.

“Since cosmic dust is formed from heavy elements like silicon and oxygen, scientists expected the SMC to lack significant amounts of dust,” NASA wrote in a press release. “However the new MIRI image, as well as a previous image of NGC 346 from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera released in January, show ample dust within this region.”

Astronomers can combine JWST’s data in both the near-infrared and mid-infrared data to take a fuller census of the stars and protostars within this very dynamic region of space. This could help us better understand the galaxies that have existed billions of years ago, during an era known as Cosmic Noon. During Cosmic Noon, star formation was at its peak. Heavy element concentrations were lower, which we can see when we study the SMC.

[Related: The Whirlpool Galaxy’s buff, spiral arms grab JWST’s attention.]

This raven-like image is not the first JWST image that is picture perfect for spooky season. In September 2022, it released chilling new images of 30 Doradus aka the Tarantula Nebula. The nebula’s arachnid inspired nickname comes from its similar appearance to a burrowing tarantula’s silk-lined home. The Tarantula Nebula is about 161,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, which is home to some of the hottest and biggest stars known to astronomers.

JWST has also imaged the “bones” of  IC 5332, a spiral galaxy over 29 million light years away from the Earth in the constellation Sculptor. The uniquely shaped galaxy has a diameter of roughly 66,000 light years, making it slightly larger than our Milky Way galaxy. The MIRI aboard the new telescope observes the furthest reaches of the universe and can see infrared light, so it’s able to peer through the galaxy’s clouds of dust and into the “skeleton” of stars and gas underneath its signature arms. MIRI basically was able to take an x-ray of a galaxy, revealing IC 5332’s bones and a world that looks different, yet somewhat the same.

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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: Leprosy is back. So where did it come from?

By Rachel Feltman

In early August, a case report in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal sounded the alarm on, you guessed it, an emerging infectious disease. But instead of a new strain of bird flu or some exotic new mosquito-borne parasite, the researchers were warning the medical community about the return of a real throwback: leprosy. Cases in the southeast have doubled over the last decade. Central Florida has such a disproportionate share of reported cases—81% of the 159 cases in 2020, to be exact—that the researchers suggest leprosy might now be endemic there, which means there’s a consistent, ongoing presence of the disease, as opposed to occasional outbreaks when someone brings it in from somewhere else. 

Like news reports on cases of the plague, which yes, people still get, this one set off a lot of frantic headlines about “biblical diseases” being back on the rise. Leprosy, which is officially called Hansen’s disease these days, is probably the most commonly referenced and least understood infectious disease in history. So let’s talk about how it got that way. 

First, the facts: Yes, Hansen’s disease, which is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and M. lepromatosis, is contagious. But it’s extremely hard to catch. We aren’t even exactly sure how it’s transmitted, because we know casual contact, like sitting next to someone on public transportation or shaking hands with them, isn’t enough. Leprosy has been called a “wimp of a pathogen,” because it dies pretty much instantly once it’s outside of the body. It’s possible that the bacteria spreads through droplets from coughs and sneezes, but in any case, it seems like you only run the risk of catching it from someone if you have really prolonged close contact. 

Side note: You can also catch leprosy from touching or eating an infected armadillo. The nine-banded armadillo is known to carry the disease. Humans are thought to have transmitted it to them about 500 years ago. Red squirrels were recently found to carry it too, and the trade of their fur in medieval Europe may have fueled an epidemic at that time. 

Even if you’re in close contact with a person (or armadillo) with Hansen’s disease, you’re extremely unlikely to contract it. Only five percent of people who are exposed actually become infected, because most people’s immune systems are able to brush these bacteria off. Certain genetic variations are thought to play a role in determining susceptibility. Even then, the bacteria grows so slowly that it can take years or decades for you to develop symptoms. 

The first noticeable sign of leprosy is often the development of pale or pink coloured patches of skin that may be insensitive to temperature or pain. The loss of fingers and toes often associated with untreated Hansen’s disease isn’t because leprosy makes tissue fall off; it’s because it can cause nerve damage, and without pain receptors in fingers and toes, it’s very common to injure them without realizing and get infections, similar to what happens in people with severe and untreated diabetes. 

Luckily the disease is easily treated with antibiotics, and you stop being contagious within days of starting treatment.

So how did we get our overblown idea of what leprosy is? 

Our oldest physical evidence of Hansen’s disease dates back to 4,000 years ago. A skeleton was found in India that showed signs of the bone lesions that can occur if the disease is left untreated. While there are lots of earlier historical references to leprosy, it’s likely that these descriptions referred to all sorts of conditions that affected the skin, including syphilis, which actually is highly contagious. 

So: Conflation of many diseases, lack of certainty about how and when someone might contract Hansen’s disease, plus the very real issue of serious disease in a few folks led to an outsized fear of the relatively benign ailment. 

This stigma peaked in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, when people with Hansen’s disease were said to literally be doing their time in purgatory while still alive, and were banished to the edge of town to beg for alms. 

But this ridiculous stigma also has a pretty recent history. In 1865, Hawaii introduced laws allowing the arrest and removal of people with leprosy, and began housing them in isolation on the island of Molokai. Those laws weren’t lifted until 1969. As of 2015, there were still 16 former patients living there. 

If you live in an area where leprosy is on the rise, keep an eye out for symptoms and see your doctor about any mysterious rashes. But don’t be weird about it! Hansen’s disease is no reason to treat humans (or armadillos) with fear or disgust. 

FACT: Ancient people made high-tech tools out of space rocks

By Sara Kiley Watson

The Bronze Age, which lasted from around 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE was a step up, at least engineering wise, from the Stone Age. Humans essentially graduated from rock tools to metal tools—namely, duh, bronze. Bronze was made from melting tin and copper together, and could be made to use some pretty neat stuff, especially when it comes to weaponry.

As we know today, there are even stronger materials than bronze, and one of those is iron. And we still use a whole lot of iron in the modern world. The problem here is that to turn iron ore, which is relatively common throughout the world into usable iron, you need to know what you’re doing. So how did iron end up in a rare selection of Bronze Age tools, long before the art of smelting was commonplace? Meteors. Yep, some of the biggest and baddest characters of the ancient era, King Tut included, had superstrong tools made from space rocks long before humans really got the hang of iron.

FACT: Ancient tweezers made people scream so loud, people wrote noise complaints

By Laura Baisas

If you think waxing is bad, try plucking your armpit hair. That was par for the course in Roman Britain. A recent archaeological dig in the UK uncovered more than 50 tweezers dating back to the Roman occupation that were used to tweeze armpit hair. 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.” Learn more about this agonizing fact in today’s episode.

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Bear enthusiasts of the world have spoken—128 Grazer was just crowned the winner of Fat Bear Week 2023. This is Grazer’s first time wearing the crown, and she beat out runner up 32 Chunk in the fierce Fat Bear Tuesday final by over 85,000 votes.

[Related: It’s Fat Bear season again! This is the best feed to keep up with these hairy giants.]

According to the National Park Service, Grazer is a large adult female, boasting a long straight muzzle, light brown summer fur, and blond ears. During late summer and fall, she is often one of the fattest bears to feed on the plentiful salmon in the Brooks River in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.

She is also a particularly defensive mother bear who has raised two litters of cubs. Grazer is known for preemptively confronting and attacking much larger bears—even the large and dominant adult males—to keep her cubs safe. One of Katmai’s adult males named 151 Walker even avoids her, even though she did not have any cubs to protect this season. 

Grazer is the third female bear, or sow, to win the tournament. In 2019, 435 Holly was dubbed fattest bear and 409 Beadnose wore the prestigious crown in 2018. Beadnose is believed to have died in the five years since. 

“The girls did really well this year,” media ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve Naomi Boak told The Washington Post. “It was the year of the sow.”

Like any competition, this year’s voting was packed with twists and turns. Four-time Fat Bear Week Champion 480 Otis was ousted on Friday October 6. Otis is the oldest and among the park’s most famous bears. This year, he arrived at Brooks River very skinny, but transformed into a thick bear. Otis was beaten by bear 901, a new mom and the 2022 runner up. 

On Saturday October 7, the 2022 winner bear 747 was defeated by Grazer, who went on to beat 901, Holly, and Chunk in the Final Four. 

[Related: How scientists try to weigh some of the fattest bears on Earth.]

First launched by the National Park Service in 2014 as Fat Bear Tuesday, Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament-style bracket competition where the public votes for their favorite chubby bear. Its goal is to celebrate the Brooks River brown bears at Katmai in southern Alaska and its remarkable ecosystem. It was expanded Fat Bear Week in 2015, following the first year’s success. In 2022, over one million votes were cast all around the world. 

At Katmai, bears are drawn to the large number of salmon readily available from late June through September. Salmon have long since been the lifeblood of the area, supporting Katmai’s people, bears and other animals. Fat bears exemplify the richness of this area, a wild region that is home to more brown bears than people along with the largest, healthiest runs of sockeye salmon left on the planet. The daily lives of the Brooks River bears can be followed via eight live-streaming cameras on explore.org from June through October. 

The winners, and all the bears, now get six months of restful solitude as winter approaches. 

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Centenarians, once considered rare, have become commonplace. Indeed, they are the fastest-growing demographic group of the world’s population, with numbers roughly doubling every ten years since the 1970s.

How long humans can live, and what determines a long and healthy life, have been of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.

The pursuit of understanding the secrets behind exceptional longevity isn’t easy, however. It involves unravelling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person’s life. Now our recent study, published in GeroScience,, has unveiled some common biomarkers, including levels of cholesterol and glucose, in people who live past 90.

Nonagenarians and centenarians have long been of intense interest to scientists as they may help us understand how to live longer, and perhaps also how to age in better health. So far, studies of centenarians have often been small scale and focused on a selected group, for example, excluding centenarians who live in care homes.

Huge dataset

Ours is the largest study comparing biomarker profiles measured throughout life among exceptionally long-lived people and their shorter-lived peers to date.

We compared the biomarker profiles of people who went on to live past the age of 100, and their shorter-lived peers, and investigated the link between the profiles and the chance of becoming a centenarian.

Our research included data from 44,000 Swedes who underwent health assessments at ages 64-99—they were a sample of the so-called Amoris cohort. These participants were then followed through Swedish register data for up to 35 years. Of these people, 1,224, or 2.7 percent, lived to be 100 years old. The vast majority (85 percent) of the centenarians were female.

Twelve blood-based biomarkers related to inflammation, metabolism, liver and kidney function, as well as potential malnutrition and anaemia, were included. All of these have been associated with ageing or mortality in previous studies.

The biomarker related to inflammation was uric acid—a waste product in the body caused by the digestion of certain foods. We also looked at markers linked to metabolic status and function including total cholesterol and glucose, and ones related to liver function, such as alanine aminotransferase (Alat), aspartate aminotransferase (Asat), albumin, gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), alkaline phosphatase (Alp) and lactate dehydrogenase (LD).

We also looked at creatinine, which is linked to kidney function, and iron and total iron-binding capacity (TIBC), which is linked to anaemia. Finally, we also investigated albumin, a biomarker associated with nutrition.

Findings

We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards. Although the median values didn’t differ significantly between centenarians and non-centenarians for most biomarkers, centenarians seldom displayed extremely high or low values.

For example, very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125.

For many of the biomarkers, both centenarians and non-centenarians had values outside of the range considered normal in clinical guidelines. This is probably because these guidelines are set based on a younger and healthier population.

When exploring which biomarkers were linked to the likelihood of reaching 100, we found that all but two (alat and albumin) of the 12 biomarkers showed a connection to the likelihood of turning 100. This was even after accounting for age, sex and disease burden.

The people in the lowest out of five groups for levels of total cholesterol and iron had a lower chance of reaching 100 years as compared to those with higher levels. Meanwhile, people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers for liver function also decreased the chance of becoming a centenarian.

In absolute terms, the differences were rather small for some of the biomarkers, while for others the differences were somewhat more substantial.

For uric acid, for instance, the absolute difference was 2.5 percentage points. This means that people in the group with the lowest uric acid had a 4 percent chance of turning 100 while in the group with the highest uric acid levels only 1.5 percent made it to age 100.

Even if the differences we discovered were overall rather small, they suggest a potential link between metabolic health, nutrition and exceptional longevity.

The study, however, does not allow any conclusions about which lifestyle factors or genes are responsible for the biomarker values. However, it is reasonable to think that factors such as nutrition and alcohol intake play a role. Keeping track of your kidney and liver values, as well as glucose and uric acid as you get older, is probably not a bad idea.

That said, chance probably plays a role at some point in reaching an exceptional age. But the fact that differences in biomarkers could be observed a long time before death suggests that genes and lifestyle may also play a role.

Karin Modig is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet.

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

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On October 10, the European Space Agency (ESA) published some interim data from its nearly a decade-long Gaia mission. The data includes half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and the position of over 150,000 asteroids within the solar system. 

[Related: See the stars from the Milky Way mapped as a dazzling rainbow.]

Launched in December 2013, Gaia is an astronomical observatory spacecraft with a mission to generate an accurate stellar census, thus mapping our galaxy and beyond. A more detailed picture of Earth’s place in the universe could help us better understand the diverse objects that make up the known universe. 

500,000 new stars and cluster cores

In 2022, Gaia’s third data release (DR3) contained data on over 1.8 billion stars, which built a rather complete view of the Milky Way and beyond. Even with all that data, there were still gaps in the ESA’s mapping. Gaia still hadn’t fully explored areas of the sky that were particularly densely packed with stars, overlooking the stars that shine a little less brightly than their neighbors. 

A key example of this is in globular clusters. These are some of the oldest objects in the known universe and are especially valuable for looking back into our cosmic past. However, their bright cores can sometimes overwhelm telescopes trying to get a clear view. 

Gaia selected Omega Centauri to help fill in the gaps in the stellar map. Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster that can be seen from Earth and is a good example of one of the galaxy’s more ‘typical’ clusters. Gaia enabled a special mode to truly map a wider patch of sky that is surrounding the cluster’s core whenever the cluster came into view.

“In Omega Centauri, we discovered over half a million new stars Gaia hadn’t seen before – from just one cluster!” study co-author and astrophysicist from the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) Katja Weingrill said in a statement. “We didn’t expect to ever use it for science, which makes this result even more exciting.”

The data also allowed the team to detect new stars that are too close together to be properly measured.

“With the new data we can study the cluster’s structure, how the constituent stars are distributed, how they’re moving, and more, creating a complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri. It’s using Gaia to its full potential—we’ve deployed this amazing cosmic tool at maximum power,” study co-author and AIP astrophysicist Alexey Mints said in a statement. 

The half million new stars showed that Omega Centauri is one of the most crowded regions that Gaia has explored so far. 

Currently, Gaia is exploring eight more regions using these same techniques. The scoop from those exploration will be included in Gaia Data Release 4. It should help astronomers truly understand what is happening within these cosmic building blocks and more accurately confirm the age of our galaxy.

Spotting gravitational lenses 

Gravitational lensing happens when the image of a faraway object in space becomes warped by a disturbing mass, such as a galaxy or star, sitting between the observer and the object. The mass in the middle acts like a giant lens that can magnify the brightness of light and cast multiple images of the faraway source onto the sky. 

[Related: Gravitational Lens Splits Supernova’s Light 4 Different Ways.]

“Gaia is a real lens-seeker,” study co-author and Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux astrophysicist Christine Ducourant  said in a statement. “Thanks to Gaia, we’ve found that some of the objects we see aren’t simply stars, even though they look like them.”

Some of the objects here are not ordinary stars, but distant quasars. These quasars are extremely bright, high-energy galaxies powered by black holes. To date, Gaia has found 381 candidates for lensed quasars. This is a “goldmine” for cosmologists, says Ducourant , and the largest set of candidates ever detected at once. 

Detecting lensed quasars is challenging, since a lensed system’s constituent images can clump together on the sky in misleading ways.

“The great thing about Gaia is that it looks everywhere, so we can find lenses without needing to know where to look,” study co-author and Université Côte d’Azur astrophysicist Laurent Galluccio said in a statement. “With this data release, Gaia is the first mission to achieve an all-sky survey of gravitational lenses at high resolution.”

Asteroids and The Milky Way

One of the studies in this data release reveals more about 156,823 asteroids, pinpointing their positions over nearly double the previous timespan. In the fourth Gaia data release, the team plans to complete the set and include comets, planetary satellites, and double the number of asteroids.

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders.]

Another study maps the disc of the Milky Way by tracing the weak signals seen in starlight, faint imprints of the gas and dust that floats between the stars. The Gaia team stacked six million spectra to study these signals and the data will hopefully allow scientists to finally narrow down the source of these signals.

“This data release further demonstrates Gaia’s broad and fundamental value—even on topics it wasn’t initially designed to address,” study co-author and ESA Project Scientist Timo Prusti said in a statement. “Although its key focus is as a star surveyor, Gaia is exploring everything from the rocky bodies of the solar system to multiply imaged quasars lying billions of light-years away, far beyond the edges of the Milky Way. The mission is providing a truly unique insight into the Universe and the objects within it, and we’re really making the most of its broad, all-sky perspective on the skies around us.”

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In the years since the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced, geneticists have been peering into the past to look for traces of this extinct group of humans within our genes. The presence of these ancient genes could make carriers more at risk for severe COVID-19, influence nose shape, and even make some people more sensitive to pain. 

[Related: Neanderthal genomes reveal family bonds from 54,000 years ago.]

A new study published October 10 in the journal Communications Biology found that those carrying three Neanderthal gene variants are actually more sensitive to pain from skin pricking after prior exposure to mustard oil. In this case, mustard oil acts as an agonist, or a substance that initiates a physiological response. Adding it to the skin causes a quick response by neurons called nociceptors that create a sense of pain. 

SCN9A is a key gene in the perception of pain that is located on chromosome 2. It is highly expressed nociceptors that are activated when a sharp point or something hot is applied to the body. The neurons encode proteins within the body’s sodium channel and alert the brain which leads to the perception of pain. Earlier research found three variations in the SCN9A gene–M932L, V991L, and D1908G–in sequenced Neanderthal genomes and reports of greater sensitivity to pain among the living humans who have all three of these variants. 

“It has been shown in previous studies that some rare mutations in this gene that stop the channel from working can cause insensitivity to pain,” study co-author and University of Oxford neuroscientist David Bennett tells PopSci. “We were, however, interested in these other mutations, which were shown to have an opposite effect of enhancing the activity of this channel, thus leading their carriers to be somewhat more sensitive than non-carriers.”

According to Andrés Ruiz-Linares, study co-author and University College London human geneticist, earlier studies show that the mutations are quite rare in the British populations, but they are very frequent in Latin American populations. 

“We thus realized that we had, in our hands, the perfect dataset to not only replicate their study but also go further and identify the pain modality that was at work here,” Ruiz-Linares tells PopSci. 

In the study, the team measured the pain thresholds of 1,963 individuals from Colombia in response to a range of stimuli. The D1908G variant was present in roughly 20 percent of chromosomes within this population. About 30 percent of chromosomes carrying this variant also carried the M932L and V991L variants. All three variants were associated with a lower pain threshold in response to skin pricking after the skin was exposed to mustard oil, but not in response to pressure or heat. Additionally, carrying all three of these variants was associated with greater pain sensitivity than carrying only one of them. 

[Related: Neanderthals were likely creating art 57,000 years ago.]

The team then analyzed the genomic region that houses SCN9A using genetic data from 5,971 individuals from Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. They found that the three Neanderthal variants were more common in regions where the population had a higher proportion of Native American ancestry, such as the Peruvian population.

“They [the mutations] have a rather wide range in these countries, from 2 to 42 percent,” study co-author and University College London statistical geneticist Kaustubh Adhikari tells PopSci. “Up to 18 percent of their populations could carry two copies of the mutation. These are, however, gross estimations. We also know, from the previous study, that these mutations are pretty rare in European populations.”

The team believes that the Neanderthal variants may sensitize the sensory neurons by changing the threshold at which a nerve impulse is generated. The variants could also be more common in populations with higher proportions of Native American ancestry due to random chance as well as population bottlenecks that occurred during when the Americas were first colonized by Europeans. 

“Although Neanderthal intermixing with Europeans is now well-known in popular culture, their genetic contribution to other human groups, such as Native Americans in this case, is less talked about,” study co-author and population geneticist at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment in France Pierre Faux tells PopSci. “In this study, we saw how important and relevant it is to study genetic backgrounds that are under-represented in medical cohorts.”

Since acute pain can play a role in moderating behavior and preventing further injury, the team is planning additional research to determine if carrying these variants and having greater sensitivity to pain was advantageous during human evolution. Understanding how these variants work could also help physicians understand and treat chronic pain.

“Genes are just one of many factors, including environment, past experience, and psychological factors, which influence pain,” says Bennet. 

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On October 14, the Western Hemisphere will witness an annular solar eclipse. The moon will be too small and far away in our view to totally block out the sun’s disc. Instead, it will blot out its center, leaving a ring at the edges. The best locations to view that ring of fire in the sky will be along a path that cuts through Oregon, Texas, Central America, Colombia, and finally northern Brazil. You might decide to visit Albuquerque, New Mexico, where you’ll experience exactly 4 minutes and 48 seconds of an annular eclipse.

And if you’re seeking a true total eclipse, you only have to wait another six months. On April 8, 2024, at 2:10 p.m. Eastern (12:10 p.m. local time), Mazatlan, Mexico will become the first city in North America to see most of the sun vanish in shadow. The path of totality then arcs through Dallas and Indianapolis into Montréal, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland in Canada. We know all of these precise details—and more—thanks to our knowledge of where the moon and sun are situated in the sky at any given moment.

In fact, we can predict and map eclipses farther into the future, even centuries from now. Because they know the precise positions of the moon and the sun and how they shift over time, scientists can project the moon’s shadow onto Earth’s globe. And with cutting-edge computers, it’s possible to chart eclipse paths down to a range of a few feet.

A solar eclipse needs three things. It results when the moon blocks the sun’s light from our vantage point on Earth. So to predict an eclipse, you must know where and how the sun, moon, and Earth move in relation to each other. This isn’t quite as elementary as it may seem, because the solar system isn’t flat. The moon’s orbit slants about 5 degrees in relation to the sun’s path, which astronomers call the ecliptic. While our satellite passes between Earth and the sun around once a month—which we call a new moon—the two rarely seem to cross paths.

Solar eclipses can only occur when the moon is at one of the two points where the moon’s orbit crosses the ecliptic, known as a node. If the moon is new at this crossing, the result is a solar eclipse.

In centuries past, trying to predict eclipses meant predicting minute details of finicky orbits. But as astronomers learned more about how celestial objects moved, they began tabulating what they call ephemerides: predictions of where the moon, sun, and planets will be in the sky. Ephemerides are still the key to eclipse prediction.

[Related: Make a classic pinhole camera to watch the upcoming solar eclipse]

“All you need is the ephemeris data…you don’t have to actually track the orbit,” says C. Alex Young, a solar physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

With ephemeris data, astronomers can pinpoint dates and times when the moon and sun cross paths. Once you know that date, mapping an eclipse is relatively straightforward. Ephemerides let scientists project the moon’s shadow onto Earth’s sphere; with 19th-century mathematics, they can calculate the shape and latitude of two features of that shadow, the umbra and penumbra. Then, by knowing what time it is and where Earth is angled in its rotation, it’s possible to determine the longitudes. Putting these together produces an eclipse map.

In the past, astronomers printed the ephemerides in almanacs, long tomes filled with page after page of coordinate tables. Just as all of astronomy has advanced into an era of computers, so have ephemerides. Scientists today mathematically model the paths of the moon, sun, planets, other moons, asteroids, and much more.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) regularly publishes a new compendium of celestial locations every few years. The most recent edition, 2021’s DE440, accounts for details like the moon’s core and mantle sloshing around and slowing its rotation. “Generally speaking, we know where the moon is from the Earth to about a meter, maybe a couple of meters,” says Ryan Park, an engineer at JPL. “We typically know where the sun is to maybe a couple hundred meters, maybe 300 meters.”

[Related: How to look at the eclipse without damaging your eyes]

Ephemerides serve other purposes, especially when planning spaceflight missions. But it’s largely due to more sophisticated ephemeris data that we can now reliably predict the motions of the moon for the centuries ahead. In fact, you can find detailed maps of solar eclipses nearly a millennium in the future. (If you’re lucky enough to be in Seattle on April 23, 2563 or in Amsterdam on September 7, 2974, prepare for total eclipse day.)

But these maps, like most eclipse maps, show the path of totality or annularity as a smooth line crossing Earth’s surface. That isn’t an accurate representation. “This was designed for pencil and paper calculation, so it makes a lot of simplifying assumptions that are just a tiny bit wrong,” says Ernie Wright, who makes eclipse maps for NASA Goddard, “for instance that the moon is a perfectly smooth sphere.”

Both the moon and Earth are jagged at the edge. Earth’s terrain can block some views of the sun, and the moon has its own patchwork of mountains and valleys. In fact, sunbeams passing through lunar vales create the Baily’s beads and “diamond ring” often seen at an eclipse’s edge. “We now have detailed terrain information of these mountains from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,” Young says.

Wright has helped devise a new way of mapmaking that swaps the Victorian-age mathematics out for modern computer graphics. His method turns Earth’s surface into a map of pixels, each one with different latitude, longitude, and elevation, with the sun and moon in the sky above. Then, the method calculates which pixels see which parts of the moon block which parts of the sun. 

“You then make a whole sequence of maps at, say, one-second intervals for the duration of the eclipse,” Wright says. “You end up with a frame sequence that you can put together to make a movie of the shadow.” This new technique—only possible with modern computers and ultraprecise ephemerides—may allow us to make eclipse maps that clearly show whether you can see an eclipse from, say, your house. 

“I think that’s going to provide a whole new set of maps in the future that are going to be much more accurate,” says Young. “It’s going to be pretty exciting.”

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A new marine snail that would make the late great Jimmy Buffet proud has been discovered in the Florida Keys. The lemon-colored snail is named Cayo margarita after the Spanish word for “small, low island” and the tropical drink Buffet sings about in one of his biggest hits. The new and real resident of the fictional Margaritaville is described in a study published October 9 in the journal PeerJ.

[Related: This cone snail’s deadly venom could hold the key to better pain meds.]

Marine smells are distantly related to the land-dwelling gastropods in gardens around the world. The margarita snails come from a group nicknamed worm snails, since they spend many of their lives living in one place. Worm snails also do not have a protective covering found in other snails called an operculum. This body part allows the snails to retreat further inside their shell and keep their bodies moist.

“Worm snails are just so different from pretty much any other regular snail,” study co-author Rüdiger Bieler tells PopSci. “These guys are sitting in the middle of the coral reef where everybody is out trying to eat them. And they’ve given up that protection and just advertise with their bright colors.”

Bieler is a marine biologist and curator of invertebrates at the Field Museum in Chicago who has spent 40 years studying the Western Atlantic’s invertebrates. Even after decades studying the region, these worm snails were hiding in plain sight during dive trips, largely because these snails are kind of the ultimate introverts.

Once juvenile worm snails find a spot to hunker down and they cement their shell to a hard surface never really move again. “Their shell continues to grow as an irregular tube around the snail’s body, and the animal hunts by laying out a mucus web to trap plankton and bits of detritus,” Bieler explains. 

Bieler and the rest of the international team of researchers came across the lemon-yellow snails in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and a similar lime-colored snail in Belize. Within the same species of snails, it is possible to get many different colors. There can also be color variations in a single population or even cluster of snails. Bieler believes that they may do this to confuse some of the coral reef fish that can see color so that they do not have a clear target. Some may use their hue as a warning color.  

The team initially believed that the lime-green and lemon-yellow snails were different species, but DNA sequencing revealed just how unique they are. This new yellow species belongs to the same family of marine snails as the invasive snail nicknamed the “Spider-Man” snail. This same team found these snails in 2017 on the Vandenberg shipwreck off the Florida Keys.

[Related: Invasive snails are chomping through Florida, and no one can stop them.]

The snails in this new Cayo genus also share a key trait in common with another worm snail genus called Thylacodes. The species Thylacodes bermudensis is found near Bermuda, and while only distantly related to their Floridaian and Belizean cousins, they have small colored heads and mucus that pop out of tubular shells. This might work as a deterrent to keep corals, anemones, and other reef fish from getting too close. The mucus has some nasty metabolites in it which might explain why these snails risk exposing their heads. 

The study and the new snails described in it help illuminate the stunning biodiversity of the world’s coral reefs, which are under serious threat due to climate change and the record warm ocean temperatures this summer. 

“These little snails are kind of beacons for biodiversity that need to be protected because many of them are dying out before we even get a chance to study them,” says Biler. 

It is also an important lesson in always looking right under your nose for discovery.

“I’ve been doing this for decades. We still find new species and previously unknown morphologies right under our feet,” says Biler. “This [discovery] was at snorkeling depth and in one of the most heavily touristed areas in the United States. When you look closely, there are still new things.”

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The internet has recently fallen in love with South America’s charismatic rodents called Capybaras. From catchy songs to memes, it’s hard not to see the chunky charmers in your feed these days. Here are some fun facts about these captivating creatures to inform your scrolling.

[Related: Capybara spent a month on the lam after escape from Toronto Zoo.]

Where can I see a capybara in the wild?

Capybaras are the largest rodent in the world can be found east of the Andes Mountains and the riverbanks in Central and South America from Panama to Argentina. Since they are semi-aquatic like beavers and hippos, capybaras typically live beside ponds, swamps, marshes, or wherever standing water is available. They are also called “water hogs” or “capys” and can even stay under water for more than five minutes to escape from predators like anacondas and jaguars. 

They have been known to encroach further into human territory as their habitat is dwindling. Since 2020, hundreds of capybaras have taken over Nordelta, a private and gated neighborhood outside of Buenos Aires. The rodents had always been around, but remained hidden. The lockdowns triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic enabled the furry capys to spread and flourish in the posh neighborhood’s parks. 

Multiple zoos in the United States, including the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden (also home to some famous hippos), Southwick’s Zoo in Massachusetts, and the Cape May County Park and Zoo in New Jersey, are home to a handful of adorable specimens as well. 

Do capybaras really eat their own poop?

Yes, among other things. They eat their poop for beneficial bacteria that helps their stomach break down the thick fiber from their other food sources such as reeds and grains, according to the San Diego Zoo. 

Like other rodents, capybaras have ever-growing front teeth. They use their sharp and long chompers to graze on grass and water plants. When fresh grasses and water plants dry up during the dry season, they eat squashes, melons, reeds, and grains. An adult can eat about six to eight pounds of grasses per day. 

How big are capys?

There are two known species of capybara: Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris and Hydrochoerus isthmius.  Of the two, H.hydrochaeris is the largest living rodent in the world. It can grow up to 4.3 feet long and weigh a whopping 174 pounds. H. isthmius is a bit smaller. It can grow to about 3 feet long and weigh closer to 62 pounds.

[Related: These prehistoric rodents were social butterflies.]

Can I own a capybara as a pet in the United States?

It depends what state you call home. They are currently legal with restrictions in some states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. California and New York have more stringent rules, including that the animals can only be obtained by those with an approved scientific or educational reason. While ownership may be legal at the state, it may be illegal at the city level. 

Yahoo Finance estimates that the initial cost to buy a capy on the exotic animal market is about $1,000 per animal, while other estimates place the cost at $8,000. Vet bills can easily stretch between $600 to $1,000 each year?? and owners need to keep in mind the six to eight pounds of food that they can eat per day. Capybaras are also social animals, so owners need to be prepared to take in more than one for their pet to thrive. 

What are capys all over my feed?

Basically, capybaras are kind of the new Baby Shark. The song Capybara from Russian artist Сто-Личный Она-Нас went viral on TikTok earlier this year. Listen at your own risk, as it is a textbook earworm that will be stuck in your head for days.

Popular videos include a capybara sparring with a platypus and jumping into above ground pools. They are also the stars of pop culture memes, including one celebrating the billion dollar hit movie Barbie. 

They are also known for being some of the friendliest critters in the animal kingdom. They are very social and live together in herds of 10 to 20 animals. They spend time together cuddling, playing, socializing, and grooming one another. They have even been known to try to use alligators to hitch a ride. 

It also doesn’t hurt that they are really cute. In an era of doom scrolling, sometimes it’s just nice to look at their hippo-like eyes and ears as they look above the water. 

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This article was originally published in The Conversation.

Science fiction can lead people to be more cautious about the potential consequences of innovations. It can help people think critically about the ethics of science. Researchers have also found that sci-fi serves as a positive influence on how people view science. Science fiction scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay calls this “science-fictional habits of mind.”

Scientists and engineers have reported that their childhood encounters with science fiction framed their thinking about the sciences. Thinking critically about science and technology is an important part of education in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Complicated content?

Despite the potential benefits of an early introduction to science fiction, my own research on science fiction for readers under age 12 has revealed that librarians and teachers in elementary schools treat science fiction as a genre that works best for certain cases, like reluctant readers or kids who like what they called “weird,” “freaky” or “funky” books.

Of the 59 elementary teachers and librarians whom I surveyed, almost a quarter of them identified themselves as science fiction fans, and nearly all of them expressed that science fiction is just as valuable as any other genre. Nevertheless, most of them indicated that while they recommend science fiction books to individual readers, they do not choose science fiction for activities or group readings.

The teachers and librarians explained that they saw two related problems with science fiction for their youngest readers: low availability and complicated content.

Why sci-fi books are scarce in schools

Several respondents said that there simply are not as many science fiction books available for elementary school students. To investigate further, I counted the number of science fiction books available in 10 randomly selected elementary school libraries from across the United States. Only 3 percent of the books in each library were science fiction. The rest of the books were: 49 percent nonfiction, 25 percent fantasy, 19 percent realistic fiction and 5 percent historical fiction. While historical fiction also seems to be in low supply, science fiction stands out as the smallest group.

When I spoke to a small publisher and several authors, they confirmed that science fiction for young readers is not considered a profitable genre, and so those books are rarely acquired. Due to the perception that many young readers do not like science fiction, it is not written, published and distributed as often.

With fewer books to choose from, the teachers and librarians said that they have difficulty finding options that are not too long and complicated for group readings. One explained: “I have to appeal to broad ability levels in chapter book read-aloud selections. These books typically have to be shorter, with more simple plots.” Another respondent explained that they believe “the kind of suppositions sci-fi is based on to be difficult for younger children to grasp. We do read some sci-fi in our middle grade book club.”

A question of maturity

Waiting for students to get older before introducing them to science fiction is a fairly common approach. Susan Fichtelberg – a longtime librarian – wrote a guide to teen fantasy and science fiction. In it, she recommends age 12 as the prime time to start. Other children’s literature experts have speculated whether children under 12 have sufficient knowledge to comprehend science fiction.

Reading researchers agree that comprehending complex texts is easier when the reader has more background knowledge. Yet, when I read some science fiction picture books with elementary school students, none of the children struggled to understand the stories. The most active child in my study often used his knowledge of “Star Wars” to interpret the books. While background knowledge can mean children’s knowledge of science, it also includes exposure to a genre. The more a reader is exposed to science fiction stories, the better they understand how to read them.

A matter of choice

Science fiction does not need to include detailed science or outlandish premises to offer valuable ideas. Simple picture books like “Farm Fresh Cats” by Scott Santoro rely on familiar ideas like farms and cats to help readers reconsider what is familiar and what is alien. “The Barnabus Project” by the Fan Brothers is both a simple escape adventure story and a story about the ethics of genetic experimentation on animals.

The good news is that elementary school students are choosing science fiction regardless of what adults might think they can or cannot understand. I found that the science fiction books in those 10 elementary school libraries were checked out at a higher rate per book than all of the other genres. Science fiction had 1-2 more checkouts per book, on average, than the other genres.

Using the lending data from these libraries, I built a statistical model that predicted that it is 58% more likely for one of the science fiction books to be checked out in these libraries than one of the fantasy books. The model predicted that a science fiction book is over twice as likely to be checked out than books in any of the other genres. In other words, since the children did not have nearly as many science fiction books to choose from, their readership was heavily concentrated on a few titles.

Children may discover science fiction on their own, but adults can do more to normalize the genre and provide opportunities for whole classes to become familiar with it. Encouraging children to explore science fiction may not guarantee science careers, but children deserve to learn from science fiction to help them navigate their increasingly high-tech world.

Emily Midkiff is an assistant professor of teaching, leadership, and professional practice at the University of North Dakota.

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

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After an uncharacteristic leak last week, all of this year’s Nobel laureates have officially been announced by the prize committees. Their contributions to science and the humanities range from lifesaving vaccinations to plays and novels that explore the human condition to fighting for human rights in Iran. 

[Related: All-knowing toilets and taste-testing rocks amongst 2023 Ig Nobel winners.]

Physiology or medicine

The 2023 Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, two of the scientists whose work helped pave the way for mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that have saved countless lives.

“Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the panel wrote in a press release. 

Messenger RNA (mRNA) in vaccines use a snippet of genetic code that brings instructions for making proteins. If the right virus protein is selected for the vaccine, then the body produces its own defenses against the virus. One of the major advantages of mRNA vaccines is that these vaccines can be made in extremely large quantities since their main components are made in laboratories.

Physics 

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier will jointly share the prestigious Nobel prize in physics. The trio was awarded for their work probing the world of electrons. 

“Their experiments, which have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules,” the Nobel committee wrote on Tuesday. “Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”

When perceived by humans, fast-moving events flow into each other similar to the way a flip book of still images can be perceived as continual movement. In the world of electrons, these changes occur in an attosecond, or only a millionth of a trillionth of a second. An attosecond is so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe roughly 13.8 billion years ago. 

Electrons’ movements in atoms and molecules are measured in these attoseconds. Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier have conducted experiments that demonstrate how attosecond pulses could actually be observed and measured, according to the awarding committee.

[Related: mRNA vaccine innovators win the Nobel Prize in medicine.]

Chemistry 

The chemistry prize was jointly awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and developments of quantum dots. These nanoparticles are so small that their size determines their properties. Quantum dots can now be found in computer monitors and television screens and even help biochemists and surgeons map tissues and remove tumors. 

“For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles,” Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during a news conference. “But this year’s laureates succeeded.”

Quantum dots are among the smallest components of nanotechnology. Typically, an element’s properties are governed by how many electrons it has. When that matter shrinks down  to nano-dimensions quantum phenomena arise. This means the element’s properties are now governed by the size of the matter instead of the number of electrons it has. 

Ekimov created size-dependent quantum effects in colored glass and demonstrated that the particle size affected the color of the glass via quantum effects. Later, Brus became the first scientist in the world to prove that size-dependent quantum effects in particles were floating freely in a fluid. In 1993, Bawendi revolutionized the chemical production of quantum dots. His techniques resulted in almost perfect particles, which was necessary for using the quantum dots in a wide range of applications. 

Literature 

Norwegian author Jon Fosse was awarded the literature prize, “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable,” according to the prize committee. Fosse has written about 40 plays, in addition to numerous short stories, novels, children’s books, essays, and poetry. His 2021 work A New Name: Septology VI-VII has been described as Fosse’s “magnum opus” and was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2022.

In a 2022 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fosse said, “When I manage to write well, there is a second, silent language. This silent language says what it is all about. It’s not the story, but you can hear something behind it — a silent voice speaking.”

Fosse’s cultural significance in Norway is so huge that there is even a hotel suite named after him in Oslo. 

[Related: Rosalind Franklin missed out on a Nobel, but now she’ll help look for life on Mars.]

Peace

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 2023 Peace Prize to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi,  “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.” 

Mohammadi is the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, a non-governmental organization led by 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.

In September 2022 a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jina Amini was killed under custody of the Iranian morality police. Her death sparked the largest political demonstration against Iran’s theocracy since it came into power in 1979. Thousands of Iranains took to the streets in peaceful protests under the slogan Woman – Life – Freedom. At least 20,000 protestors were jailed, thousands were injured, and 500 demonstrators were killed when the regime cracked down on the protests.

The committee said that the Woman – Life – Freedom motto suitably expresses the dedication and work of Narges Mohammadi. She is serving multiple sentences in Evin Prison in Tehran, amounting to roughly 12 years behind bars. 

Economics

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Harvard professor Claudia Goldin for providing the first comprehensive account of “women’s earnings and labour market participation through the centuries,” which includes intensive research of on the gender pay gap.

Goldin is the third woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the first one to win the award solo.

“Understanding women’s role in the labour is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” said Jakob Svensson, Chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, in a release.

The physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, economics sciences, and literature prizes will be awarded in Stockholm, Sweden on December 10. The peace prize will be awarded on the same day, but  in Oslo, Norway. December 10 is the 127th anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

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On October 5, operators of Japan’s derelict Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resumed pumping out wastewater held in the facility for the past 12 years. Over the following two-and-a-half weeks, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) plans to release around 7,800 tons of treated water into the Pacific Ocean.

This is TEPCO’s second round of discharging nuclear plant wastewater, following an initial release in September. Plans call for the process, which was approved by and is being overseen by the Japanese government, to go on intermittently for some 30 years. But the approach has been controversial: Polls suggest that around 40 percent of the Japanese public opposes it, and it has sparked backlash from ecological activists, local fishermen, South Korean citizens, and the Chinese government, who fear that radiation will harm Pacific ecosystems and contaminate seafood.

Globally, some scientists argue there is no cause for concern. “The doses [or radiation] really are incredibly low,” says Jim Smith, an environmental scientist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “It’s less than a dental X-ray, even if you’re consuming seafood from that area.”

Smith vouches for the water release’s safety in an opinion article published on October 5 in the journal Science. The International Atomic Energy Agency has endorsed TEPCO’s process and also vouched for its safety. But experts in other fields have strong reservations about continuing with the pumping.

“There are hundreds of clear examples showing that, where radioactivity levels are high, there are deleterious consequences,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina.

[Related: Nuclear war inspired peacetime ‘gamma gardens’ for growing mutant plants]

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, TEPCO started frantically shunting water into the six reactors to stop them from overheating and causing an even greater catastrophe. They stored the resulting 1.25 million tons of radioactive wastewater in tanks on-site. TEPCO and the Japanese government say that if Fukushima Daiichi is ever to be decommissioned, that water will have to go elsewhere.

In the past decade, TEPCO says it’s been able to treat the wastewater with a series of chemical reactions and cleanse most of the contaminant radioisotopes, including iodine-131, cesium-134, and cesium-137. But much of the current controversy swirls around one isotope the treatment couldn’t remove: tritium.

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that has two extra neutrons. A byproduct of nuclear fission, it is radioactive with a half-life of around 12 years. Because tritium shares many properties with hydrogen, its atoms can infiltrate water molecules and create a radioactive liquid that looks and behaves almost identically to what we drink.

This makes separating it from nuclear wastewater challenging—in fact, no existing technology can treat tritium in the sheer volume of water contained at Fukushima. Some of the plan’s opponents argue that authorities should postpone any releases until scientists develop a system that could cleanse tritium from large amounts of water.

But TEPCO argues they’re running out of room to keep the wastewater. As a result, they have chosen to heavily dilute it—100 parts “clean” water for every 1 part of tritium water—and pipe it into the Pacific.

“There is no option for Fukushima or TEPCO but to release the water,” says Awadhesh Jha, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Plymouth in the UK. “This is an area which is prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t store it—they have to deal with it.”

Smith believes the same properties that allow tritium to hide in water molecules means it doesn’t build up in marine life, citing environmental research by him and his colleagues. For decades, they’ve been studying fish and insects in lakes, pools, and ponds downstream from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. “We haven’t really found significant impacts of radiation on the ecosystem,” Smith says.

[Related: Ultra-powerful X-rays are helping physicists understand Chernobyl]

What’s more, Japanese officials testing seawater during the initial release did not find recordable levels of tritium, which Smith attributes to the wastewater’s dilution.

But the first release barely scratches the surface of Fukushima’s wastewater, and Jha warns that the scientific evidence regarding tritium’s effect in the sea is mixed. There are still a lot of questions about how potent tritium effects are on different biological systems and different parts of the food chain. Some results do suggest that the isotope can damage fish chromosomes as effectively as higher-energy X-rays or gamma rays, leading to negative health outcomes later in life.

Additionally, experts have found tritium can bind to organic matter in various ecosystems and persist there for decades. “These things have not been addressed adequately,” Jha says.

Smith argues that there’s less tritium in this release than in natural sources, like cosmic rays that strike the upper atmosphere and create tritium rain from above. Furthermore, he says that damage to fish DNA does not necessarily correlate to adverse effects for wildlife or people. “We know that radiation, even at low doses, can damage DNA, but that’s not sufficient to damage how the organism reproduces, how it lives, and how it develops,” he says.

“We don’t know that the effects of the water release will be negligible, because we don’t really know for sure how much radioactive material actually will be released in the future,” Mousseau counters. He adds that independent oversight of the process could quell some of the environmental and health concerns.

Smith and other proponents of TEPCO’s plan point out that it’s actually common practice in the nuclear industry. Power plants use water to naturally cool their reactors, leaving them with tons of tritium-laced waste to dispose. Because tritium is, again, close to impossible to remove from large quantities of H₂0 with current technology, power plants (including ones in China) dump it back into bodies of water at concentrations that exceed those in the Fukushima releases.

“That doesn’t justify that we should keep discharging,” Jha says. “We need to do more work on what it does.”

If tritium levels stay as low as TEPCO and Smith assure they will, then the seafood from the region may very well be safe to eat. But plenty of experts like Mousseau and Jha don’t think there is enough scientific evidence to say that with certainty.

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Hulu’s new sci-fi horror movie, No One Will Save You, has just two sentences of dialogue over 93 minutes of run time. But it’s not a quiet film. Floors groan, feet thud, characters shriek, and something—no spoilers as to what—chitters eerily. The unsettling background noise is complemented by composer Joseph Trapanese’s menacing music, which shivers from deep electronic pulses to ripsaw whines. It’s spooky and effective. Even prolific horror novelist Stephen King took notice, calling the film “brilliant, daring, involving, scary” on the social media platform X. 

Horror soundtracks like No One Will Save You’s have a special goal. It’s hard to find another musical genre so defined by the need to generate a single emotion: fear. To twist audio in unnerving ways, composers, musicians, and mixers use several special techniques. Some songs might have extreme variation in their dynamics, such as long silences that build into clashing notes to accompany a jump scare on the screen. Others wrap in acoustical features with human screams that, according to one study, may trigger alarm bells in our brains. 

Spooky songs also have the liberty to be more experimental because they don’t have to be pleasant. Pop tunes and gentler soundtracks typically stick to well-worn concepts like harmony. The spine-chilling stuff, though, tends to be “much more creative and break the mold of certain unwritten rules,” says Ben Ma, a musician and software engineer at the music startup Rivet. Still, nightmarish scores use a few common compositional tricks to mess with listeners’ minds. 

Uneasy on the ears

If you’ve ever thought that horror soundtracks just sound like someone screaming, you’re correct. Music cognition researcher Caitlyn Trevor has investigated parallels between song composition and vocal signals or other natural sounds. Sad tunes might remind us of someone crying, but this is often in the most abstract sense, she says, where something like a falling melodic note is reinterpreted as a sigh. “What I liked about scary music is that it seems like an area where mimicry was much more direct and much more obvious,” Trevor explains. “It really does sound a lot like a scream.”

In the study, 20 volunteers listened to recordings of people actually screaming plus excerpts from horror soundtracks, which included scream-like music as well as more neutral songs. The participants were asked to rate their emotional impressions of what they’d heard on a negative to positive scale. Human screams were the most negatively emotional, but the subjects also reacted similarly, if less intensely, to scream-like music. It’s as though horror music “piggybacks” on natural vocal signals, Trevor adds, “but they’re a little less potent because it’s in this art space.” In other words, we might hear danger in a soundtrack, but we also know it’s make-believe.

“The correlation to screams definitely makes sense to me,” says Rich Vreeland, who, as the artist Disasterpeace, composed the soundtracks for It Follows, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and other Hollywood films. His musical inspirations span cinema and real life: Bernard Hermann’s jarring score for Psycho was “one of my touchstones for how to make shrill scary sounds,” as was the “horrific sound of the Sony alarm clock that I had as a kid.” 

Out of tune

Horror soundtracks are so distinct from other soundtracks that algorithms can pick out particular traits from the genre. A team of computer scientists, including Ma, used a bespoke computer model to analyze the music of 110 box-office topping movies, as they reported in a 2021 PLOS One paper. Their goal was to take a quantitative approach to the way movie music affects audiences with the “first study that applies deep learning models on musical features to predict a film’s genre,” they wrote. 

Inharmonicity nixes those nice, round numbers. The notes played together might not even exist on a keyboard—imagine sound spewing from the space between the keys, “something that you physically couldn’t play on a piano,” Ma says. To pull this off, you need a continuous pitch instrument. The violins’ shrieking strings in the Psycho soundtrack are a prototypical example: It “really exemplifies on the atonal level” how horror music works, Ma says, producing a frequency that is extremely unsettling.

Sounds of anxiety and terror

Trevor’s most recent study of horror music, published earlier this year in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, splits the idea of fear in two. There are songs that make us anxious and songs that terrify us. Her acoustic analysis teased several different features from the soundtracks of 30 horror movies to understand how they achieved either of those psychological effects. Notably, each category had a distinct tempo, which she and her colleagues described in the paper: The anxious examples were “ponderous” or “pacing,” while the terrifying ones were “frenetic” and “throbbing” or a “wall of sound.” 

As an additional experiment, the team then had 99 people rate the anxiety, terror, tenderness, and happiness of the tunes on a seven-point scale. On average, subjects weren’t able to completely separate the music into the two fearful categories—terrifying music was rated as also conveying lots of anxiety. That might have been a product of survey bias, Trevor says. “Maybe participants were responding to how it made them feel more than what was being portrayed.” She’s currently part of a study that uses MRI brain scans to observe whether human screams and scary music activate similar neural networks in listeners. 

But there’s more to horror soundtracks than clever composition. The power of juxtaposition, for instance, is one aspect that scientific studies may not be designed to fully capture, but is super effective, Ma explains. The best scores, like the scary movies they accompany, put the audience at ease—then shatter it. “Horror soundtracks need to also have moments of beauty in them,” Ma says. “They put you in this place of calm so they can drag you out of it in the most gut-wrenching ways.”

Enjoy this scary-music playlist curated by PopSci editors, and let us know what your most feared soundtrack is.

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NASA’s Artemis III astronauts are apparently going to look incredibly fashionable walking the lunar surface. On October 4, the commercial aerospace company Axiom Space announced a new collaboration with luxury fashion house Prada to design spacesuits for the upcoming moon mission currently scheduled for 2025.

According to Wednesday’s reveal, Prada’s engineers will assist Axiom’s systems team in finalizing its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit while “developing solutions for materials and design features to protect against the unique challenge of space and the lunar environment.” Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini cited Prada’s expertise in manufacturing techniques, innovative design, and raw materials will ensure “not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

NASA first unveiled an early prototype of the AxEMU spacesuit back in March, and drew particular attention to the fit accommodating “at least 90 percent of the US male and female population.” Given the Artemis mission has long promised to land the first woman on the lunar surface, such considerations are vital for astronauts’ safety and comfort.

In Wednesday’s announcement, Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s Group Marketing Director, cited the company’s decades of technological design and engineering experience. Although most well known for luxury fashion, Prada is also behind the cutting-edge Luna Rossa racing yacht fleet.

“We are honored to be a part of this historic mission with Axiom Space,” they said. “It is a true celebration of the power of human creativity and innovation to advance civilization.”

Despite Prada’s association with high fashion, the final AxEMU design will undoubtedly emphasize safety and function over runway appeal. After all, astronauts will need protection against both solar radiation and the near-vacuum of the lunar surface, as well as ample oxygen resources and space for HD cameras meant to transmit live feeds back to Earth. According to the BBC earlier this year, each suit will also incorporate both 3D-printing and laser cutters to ensure precise measurements tailored to each astronaut.

Although NASA’s first images of the AxEMU in March showcased a largely black-and-gray color palette with blue and orange accents, Axiom Space’s newest teases hint at an off-white cover layer more reminiscent of the classic Apollo moon mission suits. It might not be much now, but you can expect more detailed looks at the spacesuits in the coming months as the Artemis Program continues its journey back to the moon.

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It’s a well-known fact that staring at the sun is… not the best idea. In the same way that the sun can burn your skin, our home star can overwhelm your peepers with UV rays and literally scorch your retina.

That is a huge bummer, especially because watching a solar eclipse (when the moon covers the sun) is an incredibly cool experience. Thankfully, there are several ways to watch an eclipse without risking your vision, and one of them is building a pinhole camera out of a box, a piece of aluminum foil, and lots of tape. This is an easy and incredibly versatile project, and you can turn it into a permanent camera obscura when you’re done watching the eclipse. 

How to make a pinhole camera

1. Light-proof your box. Leaving one side open, use duct tape or electrical tape to seal the box and prevent any light rays from sneaking in. Pay special attention to the corners and wherever two pieces of cardboard meet. The pinhole will only allow a few rays of light into your box, so the projection of the sun will be dim. That means the darker your camera, the easier it will be to see the image.

As we said, this project is versatile. You can use a wide range of box sizes to make your pinhole camera, but cereal and shoe boxes work exceptionally well. We used the 15-by7 ½-by-5 ½-inch box that carried our neighbor’s latest online shopping spurt. 

Likewise, duct tape and electrical tape are the best choices to light-proof your box, but you can use any tape that will block light—dark washi tape or masking tape will also do the trick. Just keep in mind that you may have to apply multiple layers to achieve total darkness inside your box. 

[Related: A ‘ring of fire’ eclipse and Hunter’s Moon will bring lunar drama to October’s skies]

• Pro tip: Check your work by holding your box up to a light and looking inside. If you still see some shine coming through, apply another layer of tape. 

2. Determine your pinhole’s location and cover the inside of the opposite face with white paper. Measure one of the smallest sides of the box, cut a piece of white paper to the same size, and tape or glue it to the inside of the corresponding face. It doesn’t have to be perfect—as long as most of the side is covered, you’ll be good to go. Just make sure that the paper doesn’t have any wrinkles or folds, as they may distort the image of the sun. 

3. Measure the openings for the pinhole and the viewer. On the side opposite the one you covered with white paper, use your ruler and a pencil to measure two openings. The pinhole opening will be located in the upper left corner (about half an inch from the edges) and will be 2-by-2 inches (we’ll make it smaller later). 

The viewing opening will be located in the upper right corner of the box, half an inch from the top edge and an inch from the right edge of the box. This opening will be smaller—only 1 inch square.

4. Cut the openings. Using a box cutter or scissors, cut out the openings you drew. 

• Pro tip: If the openings end up being too big, don’t sweat it—you can always adjust their size with tape. 

5. Close and seal the box. Use your newly cut openings to make sure there are no other places where light might be sneaking in. Pay special attention to the corners of the box above and below your openings. Cover all the places where pieces of cardboard meet with tape. 

6. Cover the larger opening with aluminum foil. Cut a smooth 2 ½-by-2 ½-inch piece of aluminum foil. With the dull side facing you, carefully cover the big opening with the metallic sheet and tape it in place. Make sure you secure it tightly so no light can get into the box.  

• Pro tip: To smooth out any creases, softly rub the top of any fingernail over the foil in a small, circular motion. 

7.  Use the thumbtack to poke a hole in the foil. Find the rough center of the 2-by-2-inch square under the aluminum sheet and gently push the tack through before pulling it back out—you want a clean, round hole. If you don’t have a thumbtack, you can use the tip of a toothpick or an embroidery needle. Just make sure that whatever you’re using has a point (it’ll make a neater hole) and that it’s approximately 0.2 millimeters wide. 

• Note: The width of your pinhole will determine how much light gets into the box. Too much light and the image will be blurry. If that’s the case, don’t worry—just replace the foil and try making a smaller pinhole. 

8. Put your pinhole camera to the test. Stand with your back facing the sun and look into the box through the viewport. Use your hands to block out as much light as possible and move around until you find the angle where sunlight enters through the pinhole. When this happens, you should see a small projection of the shape of the sun on the white paper you pasted inside the box. 

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

Keep in mind that the weather is crucial in determining the quality of the image you’ll see inside your pinhole camera, and whether you can see the eclipse at all. The October 14 eclipse, in particular, will be annular, so the moon will be smaller than the sun and clouds, rain, or other inclement weather will make it hard to see the event, explains Franck Marchis, a SETI Institute astronomer and the chief scientific officer of Unistellar, a company that manufactures smart telescopes.

How a pinhole camera works

Images are light. Everything we see we perceive because there’s light bouncing off of it, beaming directly through our pupils and into our eyes. All cameras, including the humble pinhole camera you just made, operate under this basic principle. The better they filter the light, the sharper the resulting image will be. 

The sun, of course, is the ultimate light source. On a sunny day, rays from the star travel to Earth and bounce off of every surface they reach. This is a lot of light coming from all directions, so if we want to see only a small portion of the sun’s rays, we have to focus those rays and filter out the rest. That’s why the pinhole in your camera is so tiny or, in more technical terms, why its aperture is so narrow—it only lets a small amount of light into the box, just enough so you can see only a dim projection of the sun when you point the pinhole directly at it. 

The dimness of the image is not ideal, but it’s the tradeoff we make for sharpness—too much light results in a blurry, out-of-focus picture. This is important during a solar eclipse, as filtering the light will allow you to see the round shape of the sun become a crescent or a ring as the moon moves in and gradually blocks the sunlight. 

When the eclipse is over, use a skewer to widen your camera’s pinhole. When you look inside, you won’t only be able to see the sun, but a slightly brighter and inverted image of your surroundings. A bigger pinhole turns your box into a camera obscura, allowing more light in and projecting an image of the objects around you.  

The post Make a classic pinhole camera to watch the upcoming solar eclipse appeared first on Popular Science.

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Meet Garumbatitan morellensis, a new species of large sauropod dinosaur. The Giganotosaurus relative called the present-day Iberian Peninsula home about 122 million years ago. The remains of this titan were discovered in Morella, Spain, and this discovery could help fill in some major evolutionary gaps. The findings were described in a study published September 28 in the journal Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

[Related: Cushy feet supported sauropods’ gigantic bodies.]

G. morellensis belongs to the sauropod group of dinosaurs, which includes some well-known favorites like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. Sauropods were four-legged Early Jurassic and Cretaceous Era dinos known for their long necks that could reach up to 49 feet long in some species and lengthy tails. G. morellensis is also a member of a subgroup of sauropods known as titanosaurs. These giants were the largest of an already big group and titanosaurs survived right up until the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs struck about 66 million years ago.

This new dinosaur’s remains were found and excavated in the Sant Antoni de la Vespa fossil-site in 2005 and 2008. This fossil deposit is home to one of the largest concentrations of sauropod dinosaur remains that date back to the Lower Cretaceous period in Europe (about 145 million to 66 million years ago). Scientists found the remains of a giant unidentified sauropod in Portugal in 2022 that could be Europe’s oldest known dinosaur fossil at 150 million-years-old. 

The team of paleontologists from Portugal and Spain found the remains of three G. morellensis individuals and one other sauropod. Their lucky find included a rare set of footprints. They also uncovered giant vertebrae, leg bones, and two near-complete sets of foot bones. 

“One of the individuals we found stands out for its large size, with vertebrae more than one meter wide [3.2 feet], and a femur that could reach two meters [6.5 feet] in length. We found two almost complete and articulated feet in this deposit, which is particularly rare in the geological record,” study co-author and University of Lisbon paleontologist Pedro Mocho said in a statement. 

G. morellensis was probably close to an average-size titanosaur and could have been near 94 feet long. Its leg shape and foot bones suggest that it was one of the more primitive sauropods from a subgroup called Somphospondyli, according to the authors. Somphospondylan fossils have been found on every present-day continent, but paleontologists are not sure where they originated. This discovery of such an early specimen in Spain points to Europe as a possible origin point for this subgroup, but more evidence is needed.  

[Related: Europe’s largest dinosaur skeleton may have been hiding in a Portuguese backyard.]

This discovery also highlights how complex the evolutionary history of sauropods in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe is. Species related to these lineages have been found in Asia, North America, and possibly Africa. This points to a potentially long period of dinosaur dispersal within continents and this fossil deposit might fill in some major gaps of evolutionary history. 

“The future restoration of all fossil materials found in this deposit will add important information to understand the initial evolution of this group of sauropods that dominated dinosaur faunas during the last million years of the Mesozoic era,” study co-author and Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid paleontologist Francisco Ortega said in a statement.

The post A newly discovered sauropod dinosaur left behind some epic footprints appeared first on Popular Science.

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About 364 miles above Earth, the crew of the Inspiration 4 private mission in 2021 drew each other’s blood and administered ultrasound scans. Yet it’s not clear whether those experiments were subject to the same ethical rules that govern human studies on the ground. And it’s unlikely to be the last time humans in orbit are asked to study each other in this way. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backer of Inspiration 4 plans to conduct more experiments on his Polaris Dawn mission scheduled for sometime in 2024. 

It’s different when the research happens on Earth. If a US citizen chooses to participate in a clinical trial or other biomedical experiment, even those run privately, ethics rules govern the scientists, doctors, and institutions in charge of the study. A physician or a university cannot penalize a person for refusing to participate, for instance, and an ethics board must approve any trials before they start. 

Those ethical rules are part of the territory when receiving federal funding. “If the federal government gives you $1 anywhere in your organization, even having nothing to do with the research, then any human subjects research you do has to follow what’s called the ‘Common Rule,’” says Paul Wolpe, a bioethicist at Emory University and the former chief of bioethics at NASA. 

The 1991 Common Rule, or more formally the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, is codified in multiple federal agencies, including the Health and Human Services Department. Its reach even extends beyond the bounds of Earth to NASA’s research, managing how the agency must treat astronauts on the International Space Station. 

But civilians have begun flying to orbit in the spacecraft of private companies. And those that don’t take federal money are not formally subject to the Common Rule. So what if SpaceX or Axiom Space, say, makes it a condition that anyone flying on private space missions must take a pharmaceutical drug at the behest of a partner company to gauge how it is metabolized in microgravity? 

[Related: Private space missions will bring more countries to the ISS]

That was the topic of a new paper published in Science by Wolpe and his colleagues. They argue that the time to begin asking questions about the ethics of human experimentation on private spacecraft is right now, before it becomes ubiquitous.

”Commercial spaceflight is revving up right now. The temptation to do human subjects experimentation is already starting,” Wolpe says, urging for a quick consensus. “It’s not like we’re saying, ‘10, 15 years from now, we may do this. We’re saying, ‘Next week we may do this.’” 

The paper’s authors argue it’s possible to extend the ethical frameworks already used to govern human scientific research on the ground—and in space for NASA astronauts—by following four principles: social responsibility, scientific excellence, proportionality, and global stewardship. 

Social responsibility recognizes that the past public investments that make spaceflight possible mean that this research should be treated “like a community resource.” It also points out that experimentation in the early years of commercial spaceflight “will be critical for ensuring the safety of future missions,” the authors write.  

Scientific excellence means thinking about how poorly designed or conducted experiments return low quality results, and “bad science is also bad for business,” the authors write. 

Proportionality refers to the importance of ensuring human research in space, like that on Earth, maximizes benefits while reducing the potential for harm as much as possible. And, guided by global stewardship, the fruits of these studies should benefit everyone, the authors argue: “Spaceflight research should therefore engage, and be conducted by, individuals and communities representative of humankind’s diversity.”

Wolpe hopes the principles can serve as a starting point for commercial space companies to think about and implement ethical guidelines, just as private companies do for human research on Earth. This paper doesn’t propose any concrete rules just yet. But coming up with a standard set of them for human experimentation in commercial spaceflight would be in corporations’ interest, too, Wolpe notes. “If everybody agrees on the rules, and we all operate under these rules, then we know what the floor and the ceiling is,” he says. Ideally, these would protect participants—and safeguard companies from lawsuits, if someone is harmed on a mission.

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

But before a new ethical framework takes root in the commercial spaceflight industry, more conversations need to happen to characterize research and its participants, according to Sara Langston, a space lawyer and professor of spaceflight operations at the Daytona Beach Florida campus of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. As to whether there is a gap in existing rules and regulations around human experiments in commercial spaceflight that needs to be filled, she adds, “we need to actually define the question more specifically in order to answer it.”

You can, for instance, make a distinction between passive and active research or experimentation, according to Langston. Active experimentation are activities such as drawing blood or consuming drugs. Passive experimentation could include passengers sharing their subjective experiences of the flight, more akin to a survey. ”I don’t know that passive research in itself needs any kind of regulatory or even ethical framework, because passive research has been done all the time for marketing purposes, such as surveys,” Langston says. 

And it will also be important to distinguish private astronauts—flight participants who bought a ticket or were invited onto the mission—and commercial ones, who are the paid employees of a space company. “This is important because the roles, rights, duties, and liabilities are going to be distinct for each of those categories,” Langston says. 

Getting a head start in discussing these issues is the point, according to Wolpe. “These things are beginning to be built into the conversations around commercial spaceflight,” he says. “They weren’t so much before.”

The post Why we need a code of ethics to study space tourists appeared first on Popular Science.

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In 2006, a cluster of mysterious dark spots on a lakebed of White Sands National Park in New Mexico caught the attention of archaeologists. The shapes stroked their curiosity until they eventually excavated the site three years later. Waiting for them was one of the rarest and soon-to-be controversial discoveries in history—a set of fossilized human footprints. 

The preserved markings were found on the shore of a lake that existed during the most recent ice age, and could be one of the earliest signs of biped migration to North America. Some experts claim they are the steps of the Clovis people, the continent’s first human inhabitants and the ancestors for most Native Americans. The Clovis are thought to have made the journey to North America 13,000 to 13,500 years ago using a land bridge that connected Asia to Alaska. From there, they continued to move as far down south as Central and South America. 

“This was groundbreaking to the archaeologic community, and it was also a tough pill to swallow,” says Kathleen Springer, a research geologist for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) who helped analyze the fossilized steps. “Having 23- to 21,000-year-old footprints is much earlier than the prevailing paradigm of Clovis or pre-Clovis that are known in this part of North America.”

The finding initially received some pushback. When the results were first revealed in 2021, concerned archaeologists wrote comments and papers challenging the results, citing the need for better evidence. More specifically, they criticized the study method and the decision to use radiocarbon dating on the seeds of an aquatic plant that was excavated from the same site. 

Part of the debate came down to an isotope that’s often used in archaeological work. Carbon-14 forms in the air and is introduced to photosynthetic plants and the animals that eat them. When flora and fauna are alive, they have the same amount of carbon-14 as the Earth’s atmosphere; when they die, it decays in their remains. Scientists can then measure how much of the isotope is left and use that metric to calculate an organism’s approximate age. But as some experts have pointed out, aquatic plants like the ones sampled at White Sands can get carbon from the water they live in, which can skew the measurements and make a specimen seem older than it really is.

“It’s called the hard water effect, and it’s a really well-known problem with radiocarbon dating,” explains Jeffrey Pigati, a USGS research geologist who co-authored both studies with Springer. He says the general argument with the first paper is that there were large hard-water effects that made them overestimate the age of the footsteps when they should have been around 15,000 or 17,000 years old.

The COVID pandemic delayed many of the follow-up experiments Pigati and Springer wanted to complete when investigating the site in 2020. Three years later, they finally did with two new methods that corroborate their original estimate of the footprints’ age: radiocarbon dating of pollen and luminescence dating.

To avoid heavy-water effects, the team extracted pollen grains from the same sediment as the White Sands footprints. According to Pigati, this is a time-consuming and laborious process because it involves breaking down rock into one cubic centimeter of material and separating pollen from other organic material before measuring carbon-14 levels. Additionally, pollen is extremely light—experts need to sample thousands of grains to meet the minimum mass requirement for a single radiocarbon measurement. In total, they successfully isolated 75,000 pollen grains. When the they compared the measurements to ones from the seeds of the aquatic plant, the ages matched.

The second technique was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating. Unlike radiocarbon dating, OSL dating is based on the buildup of luminescence properties in quartz crystals over time; in some rare cases, it can date sediments as far back as 400,000 years ago. The USGS team dated three different mineral samples from the same area where the footprint was discovered and calculated ages that were similar to the ones measured in the seeds.

Still, this does not mean we have a complete picture of our species’ migration to North America. Paulette Steeves, an archaeologist and author of The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, who was not involved in the White Sands research, says there are archaeological sites in both North and South America that date to as early as 11,000 to 200,000 years ago. While she argues it’s not the oldest sign of human habitation in the Americas and may not be proof of the first Indigenous group, “the White Sands footprints site is a great addition to the record of early people in the Western Hemisphere.”

The footprints are just one piece of the puzzle. Archaeologists still don’t know exactly how people lived in the middle of an ice age and weathered harsh climate. Future projects at White Sands could include tracking the footprints to a campsite or further scouring the area for stone tools that could give some insight into their survival. “Every day we’re working out there is amazing because you never know what is going to be discovered,” Pigati says. “This is all a part of science in action.”

The post Do the ancient human footprints at White Sands date back to the last ice age? appeared first on Popular Science.

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Wearable sensors can already monitor a variety of important health characteristics. But they are still far short when it comes to detecting hormonal levels, particularly for women. A new device designed by researchers at Caltech, however, is specifically tailored to measure one of women’s most vital and influential hormones. According to the team’s study, recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, their new wearable sensor can detect and assess users’ estradiol levels by just analyzing sweat droplets.

Estradiol, the most potent form of estrogen, is a crucial component in women’s health. Not only is it necessary in regulating reproductive cycles and ovulation, but this hormone’s levels are directly correlated to issues ranging from depression, to osteoporosis, to even heart disease. Currently, estradiol monitoring requires blood or urine samples collected either in-clinic or at-home. In contrast, Caltech’s new sensor, created by assistant professor of medical engineering Wei Gao, only needs miniscule amounts of sweat collected via extremely small automatic valves within its microfluidic system.

[Related: This organ-failure detector is thinner than a human hair.]

The sensor’s reliance on sweat to measure estradiol isn’t only impressive due to its non-invasive nature; according to Caltech’s announcement, the hormone is about 50 times less concentrated in sweat than in blood.

The wearable’s monitoring system utilizes aptamers—short, single-strand DNA capable of binding to target molecules like artificial antibodies. Gao’s team first attached aptamers to a surface imbued with inkjet-printed gold nanoparticles. The aptamers then could bind with targeted molecules—in this case, estradiol. Once binded, the molecule gets recaptured by other titanium carbide-coated gold nanoparticles known as “MXenes.” The resultant electrical signal can be wirelessly measured and correlated to estradiol levels via a simple-to-use smartphone app.

To actually collect the sweat samples, the sensor uses tiny channels controlled by automatic valves to allow only fixed amounts of fluid into the sensor. To take patients’ sweat composition differences into consideration, the device also consistently calibrates via information collected on salt levels, skin temperature, and sweat pH.

This isn’t Gao’s first sweat sensor, either—previous variants also could detect the stress hormone cortisol, COVID-19, as well as a biomarker that indicates inflammation.

“People often ask[ed] me if I could make the same kind of sweat sensor for female hormones, because we know how much those hormones impact women’s health,” Gao said via Caltech’s announcement. With further optimization, the new estradiol sensor could help users attempting to naturally or in vitro conceive children, as well as aid those necessitating hormone replacement therapies. According to Gao, the team also intends to expand the range of female hormones they can detect, including another ovulation-related variant, progesterone.

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It took eight years and the collaborative efforts of over 600 interdisciplinary undergraduate students, but Estonia’s second satellite is finally on track to launch later this week. Once in orbit thanks to a lift aboard one of the European Space Agency’s Vega VV23 rockets, the tiny  8.5 lb ESTCube-2 will test an elegant method to potentially help clear the skies’ increasingly worrisome space junk issue using a novel “plasma brake.”

Designed by Finnish Meteorological Institute physicist Pekka Janhunen, the electric sail (E-sail) technology harnesses the physics underlying Earth’s ionosphere—the atmosphere’s electrically charged outer layer. Once in orbit, Estonia’s ESTCube-2 will deploy a nearly 165-foot-long tether composed of hair-thin aluminum wires that, once charged via solar power, will repel the almost motionless plasma within the ionosphere.

[Related: The FCC just dished out their first space junk fine.]

“​​Historically, tethers have been prone to snap in space due to micrometeorites or other hazards,” Janhunen explained in an October 3 statement ahead of the mission launch. “So ESTCube-2’s net-like microtether design brings added redundancy with two parallel and two zig-zagging bonded wires.”

If successful, the drag should slow down the tiny cubesat enough to shorten its orbital decay time to just a two-year lifespan. Not only that, but it would do so without any physical propellant source, thus offering a lightweight, low-cost alternative to existing satellite decommissioning options.

“It is exciting to see if the plasma break is going to work as planned… and if the tether itself is as robust as it needs to be,” Carolin Frueh, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, tells PopSci via email. “The longer a dead or decommissioned satellite is out there, the higher the risk that it runs into other objects, which leads to fragmentation and the creation of even more debris objects.”

According to Frueh, although drag sails have been explored to help with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites’ end-of-life maneuvers in the past, “the plasma brake technology has the potential to be more robust and more easily deployable at the end of life compared to a classical large solar sail.”

After just seven decades’ worth of space travel, junk is already a huge issue for ongoing private- and government-funded missions. Literally millions of tiny trash pieces now orbit the Earth as fast as 17,500 mph, each one a potential mission-ender. Such debris could also prove fatal to unfortunate astronauts in their path. 

Although multiple international efforts are underway to help mitigate the amount of space junk, even the process of planning such operations can be difficult. Earlier this year, for example, an ESA space debris cleanup pilot project grew more complicated after its orbital trash target reportedly unexpectedly collided with other debris. On October 2, the Federal Communications Commission issued its first-ever orbital littering fine after satellite television provider Dish Network failed to properly deorbit a decommissioned, direct broadcast EchoStar-7 satellite last year.

“As satellite operations become more prevalent and the space economy accelerates, we must be certain that operators comply with their commitments,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal said at the time.

Estonia’s second-ever satellite is scheduled to launch on October 7 from the ESA’s spaceport in French Guiana.

The post A new satellite’s ‘plasma brake’ uses Earth’s atmosphere to avoid becoming space junk appeared first on Popular Science.

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The natural process of rock weathering could be emitting as much carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the air as the world’s volcanoes. A study published October 4 in the journal Nature finds that natural weathering can also act as a large source of greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding this natural source of the greenhouse gas could have important implications for modeling climate change scenarios.

[Related: The truth about carbon capture technology.]

The idea of storing excess carbon in rocks to combat climate change is hotly debated. While rocks can act like a carbon sink in some scenarios (and there has been some preliminary success with one Icelandic company sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it in rocks) it is still not a silver bullet to our carbon woes. 

The Earth’s stones contain a large amount of carbon from the remains of animals and plants that lived millions of years ago. The geological carbon cycle also helps regulate the planet’s temperature. During chemical weathering–when chemicals in rainwater change the minerals in the rock— the stones can suck up carbon dioxide when certain minerals are attacked by the weak acid found in rainwater. Chemical weathering can help counteract the continuous carbon dioxide released by the world’s volcanoes and is part of the Earth’s natural carbon cycle. 

This new study measured an additional natural process of carbon dioxide release from rocks to the atmosphere. The newly analyzed process occurs when rocks that are formed on ancient seafloors are pushed back up to Earth’s surface. This type of event happens when mountains form. The event exposes the organic carbon from the remains of long dead organisms in the rocks to oxygen in the air and water. The carbon can then react with the oxygen and release carbon dioxide. So instead of acting like a carbon sink, weathering rocks could be a source of carbon dioxide. 

To study the weathering of organic carbon in rocks, the team used a tracer element called rhenium. Rhenium is released into water when the organic carbon in rocks reacts with oxygen. 

The team first figured out how much organic carbon is present in rocks near the surface of water and then worked out where rocks were being exposed most rapidly by erosion. 

“The challenge was then how to combine these global maps with the river data, while considering uncertainties. We fed all of our data into a supercomputer at Oxford, simulating the complex interplay of physical, chemical, and hydrological processes,” study co-author and University of Oxford geoscientists Jesse Zondervan said in a statement. “By piecing together this vast planetary jigsaw, we could finally estimate the total carbon dioxide emitted as these rocks weather and exhale their ancient carbon into the air.”

They then compared how much carbon dioxide could be drawn down by natural rock weathering of silicate materials and pinpointed many large areas where weathering was a source of carbon dioxide. These hotspots of carbon dioxide release include mountain rangers with high uplift rates, such as the eastern Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, and the Andes. The global carbon dioxide release rate from rock organic carbon weathering was found to be 68 megatons of carbon per year, a bit more than the amount of carbon dioxide emitted during heating and cooling buildings in extreme weather in the US in 2022. 

[Related: Ancient rocks hold the story of Earth’s first breath of oxygen.]

“This is about 100 times less than present day human CO₂ emissions by burning fossil fuels, but it is similar to how much CO₂ is released by volcanoes around the world, meaning it is a key player in Earth’s natural carbon cycle,” study co-author and University of Oxford geochemist Robert Hilton said in a statement. 

The authors caution that these events could have fluctuated during the planet’s past, possibly during periods of mountain building when the influx of rocks to the surface could have released enough carbon dioxide to influence global climate. 

The team is now looking into how this natural release of carbon dioxide could increase over the coming century, as human-caused climate changes and erosion could increase a natural leak of carbon. 

“While the carbon dioxide release from rock weathering is small compared to present-day human emissions, the improved understanding of these natural fluxes will help us better predict our carbon budget,” said Zondervan.

The post Rocks may be able to release carbon dioxide as well as store it appeared first on Popular Science.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

IF A BUILDING COLLAPSES or a bomb goes off, there are often more people who need medical treatment than there are people who can help them. That mismatch is what defines a mass casualty incident. The military’s most famous R&D agency, DARPA, wants to figure out how to better handle those situations, so more people come out of them alive.

That’s the goal of what the agency is calling the DARPA Triage Challenge, a three-year program that kicks off November 6 and will bring together medical knowledge, autonomous vehicles, noninvasive sensors, and algorithms to prioritize and plan patient care when there are too many patients and not enough care—a process typically called triage. Teams, yet to be named, will compete to see if their systems can categorize injured people in large, complex situations and determine their need for treatment.

A sorting hat for disasters

Triage is no simple task, even for people who make it part of their profession, says Stacy Shackelford, the trauma medical director for the Defense Health Agency’s Colorado Springs region. Part of the agency’s mandate is to manage military hospitals and clinics. “Even in the trauma community, the idea of triage is somewhat of a mysterious topic,” she says. 

The word triage comes from the French, and it means, essentially, “sorting casualties.” When a host of humans get injured at the same time, first responders can’t give them all equal, simultaneous attention. So they sort them into categories: minimal, minorly injured; delayed, seriously injured but not in an immediately life-threatening way; immediate, severely injured in such a way that prompt treatment would likely be lifesaving; and expectant, dead or soon likely to be. “It really is a way to decide who needs lifesaving interventions and who can wait,” says Shackelford, “so that you can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

The question of whom to treat when and how has always been important, but it’s come to the fore for the Defense Department as the nature of global tensions changes, and as disasters that primarily affect civilians do too. “A lot of the military threat currently revolves around what would happen if we went towards China or we went to war with Russia, and there’s these types of near-peer conflicts,” says Shackelford. The frightening implication is that there would be more injuries and deaths than in other recent conflicts. “Just the sheer number of possible casualties that could occur.” Look, too, at the war in Ukraine. 

The severity, frequency, and unpredictability of some nonmilitary disasters—floods, wildfires, and more—is also shifting as the climate changes. Meanwhile, mass shootings occur far too often; a damaged nuclear power plant could pose a radioactive risk; earthquakes topple buildings; poorly maintained buildings topple themselves. Even the pandemic, says Jeffrey Freeman, director of the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University, has been a kind of slow-moving or rolling disaster. It’s not typically thought of as a mass casualty incident. But, says Freeman, “The effects are similar in some ways, in that you have large numbers of critically ill patients in need of care, but dissimilar in that those in need are not limited to a geographic area.” In either sort of scenario, he continues, “Triage is critical.”

Freeman’s organization is currently managing an assessment, mandated by Congress, of the National Medical Disaster System, which was set up in the 1980s to manage how the Department of Defense, military treatment facilities, Veterans Affairs medical centers, and civilian hospitals under the Department of Health and Human Services respond to large-scale catastrophes, including combat operations overseas. He sees the DARPA Triage Challenge as highly relevant to dealing with incidents that overwhelm the existing system—a good goal now and always. “Disasters or wars themselves are sort of unpredictable, seemingly infrequent events. They’re almost random in their occurrence,” he says. “The state of disaster or the state of catastrophe is actually consistent. There are always disasters occurring, there are always conflicts occurring.” 

He describes the global state of disaster as “continuous,” which makes the Triage Challenge, he says, “timeless.”

What’s more, the concept of triage, Shackelford says, hasn’t really evolved much in decades, which means the potential fruits of the DARPA Triage Challenge—if it pans out—could make a big difference in what the “greatest good, greatest number” approach can look like. With DARPA, though, research is always a gamble: The agency takes aim at tough scientific and technological goals, and often misses, a model called “high-risk, high-reward” research.

Jean-Paul Chretien, the Triage Challenge program manager at DARPA, does have some specific hopes for what will emerge from this risk—like the ability to identify victims who are more seriously injured than they seem. “It’s hard to tell by looking at them that they have these internal injuries,” he says. The typical biosignatures people check to determine a patient’s status are normal vital signs: pulse, blood pressure, respiration. “What we now know is that those are really lagging indicators of serious injury, because the body’s able to compensate,” Chretien says. But when it can’t anymore? “They really fall off a cliff,” he says. In other words, a patient’s pulse or blood pressure may seem OK, but a major injury may still be present, lurking beneath that seemingly good news. He hopes the Triage Challenge will uncover more timely physiological indicators of such injuries—indicators that can be detected before a patient is on the precipice.

Assessment from afar

The DARPA Triage Challenge could yield that result, as it tasks competitors—some of whom DARPA is paying to participate in the competition, and some of whom will fund themselves—with two separate goals. The first addresses the primary stage of triage (the sorting of people in the field) while the second deals with what to do once they’re in treatment. 

For the first stage, Triage Challenge competitors have to develop sensor systems that can assess victims at a distance, gathering data on physiological signatures of injury. Doing this from afar could keep responders from encountering hazards, like radioactivity or unstable buildings, during that process. The aim is to have the systems move autonomously by the end of the competition.

The signatures such systems seek may include, according to DARPA’s announcement of the project, things like “ability to move, severe hemorrhage, respiratory distress, and alertness.” Competitors could equip robots or drones with computer-vision or motion-tracking systems, instruments that use light to measure changes in blood volume, lasers that analyze breathing or heart activity, or speech recognition capabilities. Or all of the above. Algorithms the teams develop must then extract meaningful conclusions from the data collected—like who needs lifesaving treatment right now. 

The second focus of the DARPA Triage Challenge is the period after the most urgent casualties have received treatment—the secondary stage of triage. For this part, competitors will develop technology to dig deeper into patients’ statuses and watch for changes that are whispering for help. The real innovations for this stage will come from the algorithmic side: software that, for instance, parses the details of an electrocardiogram—perhaps using a noninvasive electrode in contact with the skin—looking at the whole waveform of the heart’s activity and not just the beep-beep of a beat, or software that does a similar stare into a pulse oximeter’s output to monitor the oxygen carried in red blood cells. 

For her part, Shackelford is interested in seeing teams incorporate a sense of time into triage—which sounds obvious but has been difficult in practice, in the chaos of a tragedy. Certain conditions are extremely chronologically limiting. Something fell on you and you can’t breathe? Responders have three minutes to fix that problem. Hemorrhaging? Five to 10 minutes to stop the bleeding, 30 minutes to get a blood transfusion, an hour for surgical intervention. “All of those factors really factor into what is going to help a person at any given time,” she says. And they also reveal what won’t help, and who can’t be helped anymore.

Simulating disasters

DARPA hasn’t announced the teams it plans to fund yet, and self-funded teams also haven’t revealed themselves. But whoever they are, over the coming three years, they will face a trio of competitions—one at the end of each year, each of which will address both the primary and secondary aspects of triage.

The primary triage stage competitions will be pretty active. “We’re going to mock up mass-casualty scenes,” says Chretien. There won’t be people with actual open wounds or third-degree burns, of course, but actors pretending to have been part of a disaster. Mannequins, too, will be strewn about. The teams will bring their sensor-laden drones and robots. “Those systems will have to, on their own, find the casualties,” he says. 

These competitions will feature three scenarios teams will cycle through, like a very stressful obstacle course. “We’ll score them based on how quickly they complete the test,” Chretien says, “how good they are at actually finding the casualties, and then how accurately they assess their medical status.” 

But it won’t be easy: The agency’s description of the scenarios says they might involve both tight spaces and big fields, full light and total darkness, “dust, fog, mist, smoke, talking, flashing light, hot spots, and gunshot and explosion sounds.” Victims may be buried under debris, or overlapping with each other, challenging sensors to detect and individuate them.

DARPA is also building a virtual world that mimics the on-the-ground scenarios, for a virtual version of the challenge. “This will be like a video-game-type environment but [with the] same idea,” he says. Teams that plan to do the concrete version can practice digitally, and Chretien also hopes that teams without all the hardware they need to patrol the physical world will still try their hands digitally. “It should be easier in terms of actually having the resources to participate,” he says. 

The secondary stage’s competitions will be a little less dramatic. “There’s no robotic system, no physical simulation going on there,” says Chretien. Teams will instead get real clinical trauma data, from patients hospitalized in the past, gathered from the Maryland Shock Trauma Center and the University of Pittsburgh. Their task is to use that anonymized patient data to determine each person’s status and whether and what interventions would have been called for when. 

At stake is $7 million in total prize money over three years, and for the first two years, only teams that DARPA didn’t already pay to participate are eligible to collect. 

Also at stake: a lot of lives. “What can we do, technologically, that can make us more efficient, more effective,” says Freeman, “with the limited amount of people that we have?” 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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This month, millions of Americans will have a chance to watch an annular eclipse, also known as a “ring of fire” for the scorching halo the sun forms around the moon. If you’re one of them, be careful: looking directly at a solar eclipse without eye protection can permanently damage your vision.

It doesn’t matter if our rocky satellite is blocking all or some of our nearest star—the sun is still an incredibly bright source of light. Don’t risk your eyesight for a quick glimpse or even a once-in-a-lifetime event. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to protect your eyes while watching an eclipse..

What happens if you look at a solar eclipse

We are able to see thanks to photoreceptors. These cells, also known as rods and cones, are located at the backs of our eyes, and convert the light reflected by the world around us into electrical impulses that our brain interprets as the image we see. But when strong light, like that from the sun, hits our eyes, a series of chemical reactions occur that damage and often destroy these rods and cones. This is known as solar retinopathy, and can make our eyesight blurry. Sometimes, if the damage is too great in one area, you can lose sight completely.

[Related: Every sunset ends with a green flash. Why is it so hard to see?]

On a typical sunny day, you almost never have to worry about solar retinopathy. That’s because our eyes have natural mechanisms that ensure too much light doesn’t get in. When it’s really bright outside, our pupils get super tiny, reducing the amount of sunlight that can hit your photoreceptors. But when you stare directly at the sun, your pupils’ shrinking power isn’t enough to protect your peepers.

This is where your eyes’ second defense mechanism comes into play. When we look at something bright, we tend to blink. This is known as the corneal or blink reflex, and it  prevents us from staring at anything too damagingly bright. 

Just before a solar eclipse has reached its totality, the moon is partially blocking the sun, making it a lot easier for us to look up at the star without blinking. But that doesn’t mean you should—even that tiny sliver of sunlight is too intense for our sensitive photoreceptors.

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

Unfortunately, if you practice unprotected sun-gazing, you probably won’t know the effects of your actions until the next morning, when the damage to your photoreceptors has kicked in.

And while solar retinopathy is extremely rare, it is by no means unheard of. If you search the term in medical journals, you’ll find case reports after almost every popular solar eclipse. Let’s try really hard to do better this time, eyeball-havers.

How to safely watch a solar eclipse

Watching the eclipse with your own two eyes is easy: just wear legitimate eclipse sunglasses. These are crucial, as they will block the sun’s rays enough for you to safely see the eclipse without burning your eyes out.

And if you don’t have eclipse glasses, you can still enjoy the view, albeit not directly. Try whipping up your own eclipse projector or a DIY pinhole camera so you can enjoy the view without having to book an emergency visit to the eye doctor.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2017.

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Growing up, Julian Meeks knew what a life without a sense of smell could look like. He’d watched this grandfather navigate the condition, known as anosmia, observing that he didn’t perceive flavor and only enjoyed eating very salty or meaty foods.

The experience influenced him, in part, to study chemosensation, which involves both smell and taste. Meeks, now a professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester, told Undark that neither gets much attention compared to other senses: “Often, they’re thought of as second or third in order of importance.”

The pandemic changed that, at least somewhat, after it left millions of people without a sense of smell, albeit some temporarily. In particular, more researchers started looking at a specific type of condition called acquired anosmia. Common causes include traumatic brain injury, or TBI, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, or following a viral infection like Covid-19. Due to the pandemic, “many people found it scientifically interesting to focus their research on smell,” said Valentina Parma, the assistant director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research institute in Philadelphia. By one account, NIH funding of anosmia research nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021.

But many of the research findings do not apply to those who have lacked the ability to smell since birth: congenital anosmics. And, despite the increased attention to smell loss more broadly, some researchers still face challenges in funding studies. In March 2023, for instance, Meeks received a peer review for a small grant, of less than $275,000, from the National Institutes of Health, with which he had planned to look into anosmia in the context of TBI.

For Meeks, the response was frustrating. One expert reviewer in particular “didn’t really understand why there would be any need to establish a preclinical model of anosmia with TBI,” he said, noting that the reviewer also wrote that because anosmia is not a major health problem, the value of the research was low. The comment, Meeks added, was “quite discouraging.”

In response to a request for comment on that decision, Shirley Simson, a spokesperson for NIH’s National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, or NIDCD, which funds smell and taste research, replied that “NIH does not discuss the peer review process for individual grant applications.” She noted in a separate email that “all NIH grant applications, including those submitted by investigators to NIDCD, undergo the same review process.”

THE SENSE OF SMELL IS complicated, and not fully understood. Jay Piccirillo, an otolaryngologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, likens its complexity, with its many neuronal connections, to Times Square. Compared to the nose, the eye looks relatively simple, he told Undark.

There are a few basic steps, however, on which researchers do agree. Humans smell by detecting molecules, or odorants, in the environment around them. These odorants latch on to one of 400 receptors in the nose, called olfactory receptor neurons, which then send a signal the brain. The result: a dizzying array of odors.

“We can smell and discriminate tens of thousands or maybe billions or trillions of smells,” said Hiroaki Matsunami, an olfaction researcher at Duke University who, along with colleagues, recently published a study on how one of these receptors works.

Both congenital and acquired smell loss can either entail complete loss (anosmia) or minimal loss (hyposmia). Some people also have a distorted sense of smell, a condition known as parosmia, or perceive odors that aren’t there, known as phantosmia. And because of the connection between smell and taste, sometimes smell loss is accompanied by the inability to taste, or ageusia, as it did for many Covid patients.

Any form of anosmia can have a broad effect on daily function. For one, it can be a safety hazard, since affected people may not be able to detect a fire, gas leak, or spoiled food. Smell loss is also associated with depression, and because of the close link between smell and taste, the condition can affect appetite and, by extension, nutritional health.

The cause of anosmia isn’t entirely known. For congenital anosmia, researchers suspect a genetic link or developmental abnormalities. As for acquired anosmia, an injury or illness appears to disrupt the transmission of an odorant to the brain, but the exact spot of that break isn’t clear — and it may vary, depending on the cause. When it comes to Covid, for instance, some researchers initially suspected that the virus was killing the cells that transmit the odorant signal to the brain. More recent research suggests that, instead, it could be because of inflammation or damaged supporting cells.

It’s also not entirely clear how many people have anosmia. In 2012, research analyzing the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimated that 23 percent of Americans over the age of 40 report some alteration to their sense of smell. A 2016 paper that examined results from a later version of same survey estimated that more than 12 percent of American adults had some sort of olfactory dysfunction. And Fifth Sense, a charity for smell and taste disorders, estimates that 1 in 10,000 people have congenital anosmia.

The numbers are uncertain in part because, compared to other sensory dysfunctions like vision or hearing loss, experts say there are fewer resources or people involved in smell research. And prior to the pandemic, anosmia research was typically relegated to smell and taste research centers or otolaryngologists (also known as ear, nose, and throat doctors). “It was like a niche,” said Thomas Hummel, a smell and taste disorder researcher at the University of Dresden in Germany. Studying smell loss, he added, wasn’t “in the foreground of research.”

When anosmia was reported as a symptom of Covid-19, there was a switch. Smell and taste researchers were suddenly inundated with requests. For Hummel, who works in a clinic, the phone didn’t stop ringing from patients. Others were similarly in demand. “We were flooded with emails, with calls by patients and reporters,” said Parma. “It was the time I gave the most interviews in my entire career.”

While NIH did not provide Undark with statistics detailing exactly how much the field of smell loss research grew, a search for the word “anosmia” on their online database turned up 35 distinct projects, totaling more than $14.6 million in funding for the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2021 fiscal year, that number grew to $28.5 million in funding for 63 projects.

As a result, experts say, the anosmia research community began collaborating more, wanting to use their knowledge and skills to help in whatever way they could. Many researchers, including Parma, developed smell tests that could gauge a user’s sense of smell and, by extension, to see whether they had a Covid-19 infection at a time when PCR and antigen tests were limited. Some conducted longitudinal surveys where they could track reported progression of smell loss and quality of life among Covid-19 patients. Others started exploring potential treatments of Covid-19-linked anosmia, such as olfactory training and topical steroids.

“We were flooded with emails, with calls by patients and reporters. It was the time I gave the most interviews in my entire career.”

While the effectiveness of such treatments is still unclear, more than three years later, interest in such scientific collaborations is still going strong. “Even if that’s not your primary area of research, many people are at least considering the question or reaching out to other investigators that are experts on taste and smell disorders to ask ‘What is a question I can add in my research?’ or ‘Can we collaborate?” said Paule Joseph, a researcher at NIH’s Division of Intramural Clinical and Biological Research within the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Despite the interest, some scientists, like Meeks, are still running into the same problems they had before the pandemic: It’s difficult to capture funding and attention related to smell and smell loss. When Meeks took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to lament the discouraging peer feedback on his grant proposal for traumatic brain injury and anosmia, he said, the responses were telling.

“There were several people who responded that they had received similar critiques on their own research grants or their scientific research by whoever was evaluating the research or the grant proposal,” he told Undark. “Although it was nice to know we weren’t singled out, it was a moment where I became a little bit more conscious of the need for greater communication with the broader public and with other scientists.”

Parma thinks some may be dubious to invest in research given the lack of sufficient treatments. “The biggest counterargument is: We don’t know how to treat this, so therefore it’s okay for us not to care about it,” she said. And when there are successes in the field, it’s difficult to implement them on a larger scale. Although Parma’s group has received NIH funding for their smell test, for instance, smell tests are often not covered by insurance.

But research, many scientists in the field say, is not just about developing tests or finding a cure. It’s also about informing and understanding the anosmia experience. This is especially important because not all anosmia affects the olfactory system in the same way — and it is not always treatable. A recent survey found that within a sample of nearly 30,000 Americans who were infected with Covid-19, for instance, 60 percent lost some sense of smell and taste. Among those, a quarter didn’t fully recover.

In one longitudinal survey to assess people who contracted the virus and lost their sense of smell, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University found that among 267 people, more than half reported partial recovery and 7.5 percent reported none over a two-year period. And out of 946 people who had lost their sense of smell for at least three months, more than half reported partial recovery, and more than 10 percent reported no improvement at all.

“It depends on how severe the damage is,” said Richard Costanzo, director of research at the Smell and Taste Disorders Center at VCU and an author of the study, noting that if there is damage in certain regenerative cells in the nose, there is a lower likelihood of recovery.

While recent studies that focus on Covid-19 anosmia can be applied to other forms of acquired smell loss, one group has largely been left out of research: congenital anosmia. The condition is a different, and understudied, form of anosmia.

“It’s like the community of woodworking but the whole world only knows about wooden bowls,” said Sam Lenarczak, a Seattle-based 23-year-old with the condition. And congenital anosmics, like Lenarczak, want to be understood.

“Every time I look to see if I can get involved in research, they’re recruiting very specific people,” said Charlotte Atkins, who also has congenital anosmia and lives in the U.K. Those studies, she added, are nearly always about acquired smell loss, so she’s unable to participate.

Atkins acknowledges that acquired anosmia can be treated. The culprit, especially in the case of Covid-19, can be known. But she is concerned about what treatment for those conditions could mean for congenital anosmics like her — or really anyone who hasn’t had a successful recovery. “I worry that with a cure comes no more help with living,” she said, “which is what a lot more people need.”

Some smell loss scientists are still running into the same problems they had before the pandemic: It’s difficult to capture funding and attention.

Joseph, the NIH researcher, agreed that much of anosmia research focuses on smell loss — and she sees qualitative studies of other anosmics as a next step. By understanding the lived experience, she said, researchers can develop interventions that could help people with smell loss navigate day-today life: “We need evidence to be able to develop policies, to develop guidelines, to just have a way to inform patients of what is the latest thing that could be helpful to them. We need the science.”

Still, there are some Covid-era innovations that may be repurposed. Parma is among a group of researchers pushing to implement testing more universally so that the inability to smell can be gauged earlier on, as many congenital anosmics don’t realize their condition until they start school — or even much later. In Europe, Hummel has received funding for research in olfactory dysfunction more generally, not just reserved to Covid-19 patients.

Meeks is also looking to the future, and determined to push back against the idea that smell is just a luxury and its loss pales in comparison to the loss of any other sense or bodily function. To him, it’s a “dated and narrow-minded view” that needs to be broken if the field wants to keep making progress. And despite the initial pushback from the grant reviewers, Meeks is determined to continue his research. In July, he submitted a new grant application on the topic.

“We’re not going to stop,” he said. “We’re going to keep going as long as we can.”

Hannah Docter-Loeb is a freelance writer based in Washington D.C. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, National Geographic, Scientific American, and more.

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

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AI programs can already respond to sensory stimulations like touch, sight, smell, and sound—so why not taste? Engineering researchers at Penn State hope to one day accomplish just that, in the process designing an “electronic tongue” capable of detecting gas and chemical molecules with components that are only a few atoms thick. Although not capable of “craving” a late-night snack just yet, the team is hopeful their new design could one day pair with robots to help create AI-influenced diets, curate restaurant menus, and even train people to broaden their own palates.

Unfortunately, human eating habits aren’t based solely on what we nutritionally require; they are also determined by flavor preferences. This comes in handy when our taste buds tell our brains to avoid foul-tasting, potentially poisonous foods, but it also is the reason you sometimes can’t stop yourself from grabbing that extra donut or slice of cake. This push-and-pull requires a certain amount of psychological cognition and development—something robots currently lack.

[Related: A new artificial skin could be more sensitive than the real thing]

“Human behavior is easy to observe but difficult to measure. and that makes it difficult to replicate in a robot and make it emotionally intelligent. There is no real way right now to do that,” 

Saptarshi Das, an associate professor of engineering science and mechanics, said in an October 4 statement. Das is a corresponding author of the team’s findings, which were published last month in the journal Nature Communications, and helped design the robotic system capable of “tasting” molecules.

To create their flat, square “electronic gustatory complex,” the team combined chemitransistors—graphene-based sensors that detect gas and chemical molecules—with molybdenum disulfide memtransistors capable of simulating neurons. The two components worked in tandem, capitalizing on their respective strengths to simulate the ability to “taste” molecular inputs.

“Graphene is an excellent chemical sensor, [but] it is not great for circuitry and logic, which is needed to mimic the brain circuit,” said Andrew Pannone, an engineering science and mechanics grad student and study co-author, in a press release this week. “For that reason, we used molybdenum disulfide… By combining these nanomaterials, we have taken the strengths from each of them to create the circuit that mimics the gustatory system.”

When analyzing salt, for example, the electronic tongue detected the presence of sodium ions, thereby “tasting” the sodium chloride input. The design is reportedly flexible enough to apply to all five major taste profiles: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and umami. Hypothetically, researchers could arrange similar graphene device arrays that mirror the approximately 10,000 different taste receptors located on a human tongue.

[Related: How to enhance your senses of smell and taste]

“The example I think of is people who train their tongue and become a wine taster. Perhaps in the future we can have an AI system that you can train to be an even better wine taster,” Das said in the statement.

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Over 1,500 animal species, from bonobos to sea urchins to penguins are known to engage same-sex sexual behavior. Still, scientists don’t understand exactly how it came to be or why it happens. While some say the behavior might have existed since the animal kingdom first arose more than half a billion years ago, it may have actually evolved repeatedly in mammals. A study published October 3 in the journal Nature Communications suggests that the behavior possibly plays an adaptive role in social bonding and reducing conflict, and evolved multiple times.

[Related: A massive study confirms no one ‘gay gene’ controls sexual preference.]

The behavior is particularly prevalent in nonhuman primates. It has been observed in at least 51 species from small lemurs up to bigger apes. For one population of male macaques, same-sex sexual behavior may even be a common feature of reproduction and is related to establishing dominance within groups, handling a shortage of different-sex partners, or even reducing tension following aggressive behavior. 

In this new study, the team from institutions in Spain surveyed the available scientific literature to create a database of records of same-sex sexual behavior in mammals. They traced the behavior’s evolution across mammals and tested for any evolutionary relationships with other behaviors. 

The team found that same-sex sexual behavior is widespread across mammal species, occurs in similar frequency in both males and females, and likely has multiple independent origin points. This analysis found that the behavior helps establish and maintain positive social relationships in animals including chimpanzees, bighorn sheep, lions, and wolves.

“It may contribute to establishing and maintaining positive social relationships,” study co-author José Gómez told The New York Times. “With the current data available, it seems that it has evolved multiple times.” Gómez is an evolutionary biologist at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones in Almería, Spain. 

Importantly, they caution that the study should not be used to explain the evolution of sexual orientation in humans. This research focused on same-sex sexual behavior defined as short-term courtship or mating interactions, instead of a more permanent sexual preference. 

Additionally, male same-sex sexual behavior was likely evolved in species with high rates of male adulticide–-when adult animals kill other adults. The team believes that this suggests the behavior may be an adaptation meant to mitigate the risks of violent conflict between males.

Harvard University primatologist Christine Webb, who did not participate in the study, told The Washington Post that the findings add to other research and widen the scope of what it means for a behavior to be considered adaptive.

[Related: Same-sex mounting in male macaques can help them reproduce more successfully.]

“This general question of evolutionary function—that behavior must aid in survival and reproduction—what this paper is arguing is that reaffirming social bonds, resolving conflicts, managing social tensions, to the extent that same-sex sexual behavior preserves those functions—it’s also adaptive,” Webb said. 

Webb also added that it makes sense that other animals would have sex for a variety of reasons the way that humans do.

The authors caution that these associations could also be driven by other evolutionary factors. Same-sex sexual behavior has also only been carefully studied in a minority of mammal species, so our understanding of the evolution of same-sex sexual behavior may continue to change as more mammalian species are studied.

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Earth’s amphibians are in serious trouble, but there is still time to save this unique class of animals. A study published October 4 in the journal Nature finds that two out of five amphibians are threatened with extinction and they continue to be the most threatened class of vertebrates. However, the new research also found that since 1980, the extinction risk of 63 species has been reduced due to conservation interventions.

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

“This proves that conservation works and it’s not all bad news,” Jennifer Luedtke, a study co-author and the manager of IUCN Red List Assessments at conservation organization Re:wild, said during a press conference. “We found that habitat protection alone is not sufficient. We need to mitigate the threats of disease and climate change.”

A check-up for amphibians

The findings are part of Global Amphibian Assessment II, an international series of conservation analyses based on evaluations of the 8,011 amphibian species listed on the IUCN Red List. The first Global Amphibian Assessment was published in 2004 and found that amphibians are Earth’s most threatened class of vertebrates. This second report confirms that the smooth-skinned animals are still more threatened than birds or mammals.

In the study, the team found that 118 species have been driven to extinction between 2004 and 2022. About 40 percent of the species studied are still categorized as threatened. This study also covers about 94 percent of the known amphibian species in 2022. According to Luedtke, about 155 new amphibian species are discovered every year, so there will likely be more species to add to the next Global Amphibian Assessment. 

Climate change and associated habitat loss are the primary driver of these declines. The team estimates that current and projected climate change effects are responsible for 39 percent of status deteriorations since 2004. Habitat loss has affected roughly 37 percent of species in the same period. 

Why amphibians are so vulnerable to climate change

Amphibians’ unique skin puts them in more danger in the face of a changing planet, since they use their skin to breathe. Increased frequency and intensity of storms, floods, droughts, changes in moisture levels and temperature, and sea level rise can all affect their very important breathing sites.

“They don’t have any protection in their skin like feathers, hair, or scales. They have a high tendency to lose water and heat through their skin,” Patricia Burrowes, a study co-author and herpetologist formerly with the University of Puerto Rico, said during a press conference. “The majority of frogs are nocturnal, and if it’s very hot, they will not come out because they will have lost so much water even in their retreat sites that they don’t have the energy to go out to feed. They won’t grow and won’t have energy to reproduce. And that can have demographic impacts.”

[Related: Hellbender salamanders may look scary, but the real fright is extinction.]

Extinctions have continued to increase with 37 documented in 2022. By comparison 23 species were reported extinct by 1980 and 33 in 2004. According to the report, the most recent species to go extinct were the frogs Atelopus chiriquiensis from Costa Rica and western Panama and Taudactylus acutirostris from Australia.

“Amphibians are essential parts of the ecosystem in a variety of ways, one of them being their role in the food web,” Kelsey Neam, study co-author and Re:wild’s Species Priorities and Metrics Coordinator, said during a press conference. “Amphibians are prey for many species and without amphibians, those animals lose a major source of their food and they are preying upon other animals like insects and other invertebrates. Without them to fulfill that niche, we will see a collapse of the food web.”

Amphibian pandemics

The most heavily affected amphibians were salamanders and newts, with three out of five salamander species at risk for extinction. While habitat loss is also the primary threat to salamanders, they are also particularly vulnerable to a disease called chytridiomycosis. It is caused by a fungal pathogen caused by the chytrid fungus that disrupts amphibian’s skin and physiological functions. When infected, amphibians can’t rehydrate properly, which creates an electrolyte imbalance that causes fatal heart attacks.

“Droughts exacerbate the infection intensity,” said Burrowes. “When the frogs have the potential to present some kind of defense mechanism, that defense mechanism is monitored by changes in precipitation and temperature.”

North America is home to the world’s most biodiverse community of salamanders, including a group of lungless salamanders in the Appalachian Mountains. This has conservationists concerned about what would happen if another deadly fungal disease called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or B.sal, arrives in the Americas from Asia or Europe.

‘We know what to do’

The report highlights that the time to help these critical animals is now. The authors point to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by 190+ signatory countries at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2022. The signing nations committed to halting all human induced extinctions, reversing and reducing the extinction risk of species tenfold, and to recovering populations to a healthy level.

“We know what to do. It’s time to really commit the resources to actually achieving the change that we say we want,” said Luedtke. “Amphibians will be the better for it and so will we.”

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The 2023 Nobel prize in chemistry was jointly awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and developments of quantum dots. These nanoparticles are so small that their size determines their properties. Quantum dots can be found in modern computers, televisions, and LED lights, among numerous other applications.

[Related: In photos: Journey to the center of a quantum computer.]

Bawendi is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brus is a professor emeritus at Columbia University, and Ekimov works for a company called Nanocrystals Technology in New York State.

“For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles,” Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during a news conference. “But this year’s laureates succeeded.”

Size matters in the nanoscale

Quantum dots are among the smallest components of nanotechnology. Typically, an element’s properties are governed by how many electrons it has. When that matter shrinks down  to nano-dimensions quantum phenomena arise. This means the element’s properties are now governed by the size of the matter instead of the number of electrons it has. 

Quantum dots are made of only a thousand atoms. By comparison, one quantum dot is to a soccer ball as a soccer ball is to the planet Earth.

The quantum dots that Bawendi, Brus, and Ekimov produced are particles small enough for their properties to be determined by quantum phenomena. They are among the smallest, but most important particles, nanotechnology.

“Quantum dots have many fascinating and unusual properties. Importantly, they have different [colors] depending on their size,” Åqvist said in a statement. 

The movement of electrons in quantum dots is highly constrained. This then affects how they absorb and release visible light, allowing for very bright colors. The quantum dots themselves are nanoparticles that glow red, blue, or green and the color depends on the size of the particles. Larger dots shine red and smaller dots shine blue. The change in color depends on how electrons act differently in more confined or less confined spaces. 

Big discoveries, super small particles

In 1937, physicists theorized that size-dependent quantum effects could arise in nanoparticles. However, it was almost impossible to sculpt in nano dimensions, so few believed that it was possible.

During the early 1980s, Ekimov created size-dependent quantum effects in colored glass. The color of the glass came from the nanoparticles of copper chloride. With this colorful experiment, Ekimov demonstrated that the particle size affected the color of the glass via quantum effects.

[Related: Quantum computers are starting to become more useful.]

A few years later, Brus became the first scientist in the world to prove that size-dependent quantum effects in particles were floating freely in a fluid. Brus and Ekimov were actually working independently from one another when they made their initial discoveries. 

In 1993, Bawendi revolutionized the chemical production of quantum dots. His techniques resulted in almost perfect particles, which was necessary for using the quantum dots in a wide range of applications. 

Quantum dots can now be found in computer monitors and television screens and even help biochemists and surgeons map tissues and remove tumors. 

Last year’s chemistry prize was also awarded to a trio of chemists: Carolyn R. Bertozzi for her work in bioorthogonal chemistry alongside K. Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal for laying the foundation for click chemistry. 

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Parrots are the chatterboxes of the animal kingdom. These famously social birds can learn new sounds throughout their lives and even produce calls that can be individually recognized by other members of their flock. A new study of monk parakeets found that individual birds have a unique tone of voice similar to humans called a “voice print.” The findings are described in a study published October 3 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

[Related: The next frontier in saving the world’s heaviest parrots: genome sequencing.]

“It makes sense for monk parakeets to have an underlying voice print,” Simeon Smeele, a co-author of the study and biologist studying parrot social and vocal complexity at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, said in a statement. “It’s an elegant solution for a bird that dynamically changes its calls but still needs to be known in a very noisy flock.”

In humans, our voice print leaves a unique signature in the tone of our voice across every word we say. These voice prints remain even though humans have a very complex and flexible vocal repertoire. Other social animals also use similar cues to recognize one another. Individual dolphins, bats, and birds have a “signature call” that makes them identifiable to other members of their groups. However, signature calls encode identity in only one call type, and there hasn’t been much evidence that suggests animals have unique signatures that last throughout their entire repertoire of calls. 

Parrots use their tongue and mouth to modulate calls similar to the way humans speak. According to Smeele, “their grunts and shrieks sound much more human than a songbird’s clean whistle.” 

Parrots also live in large groups with fluid membership where multiple birds vocalize at the same time. Members need a way to keep track of which individual is making what sound. The question became if the right physical anatomy coupled with the need to navigate complex social lives, helped parrots evolve a voice print. 

In the study, Smeele and his team traveled to Barcelona, Spain—home to the largest population of individually marked parrots in the wild. The parakeets are considered an invasive species and they swarm Barcelona’s parks in flocks with hundreds of members. The Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona has been marking the parakeets for 20 years and have individually identified 3,000 birds.

The team used microphones to record the calls of hundreds of individuals and collected over 5,000 vocalizations in total. They also re-recorded the same individuals over a period of two years, which revealed the stability of the calls over time.

Using a set of computer models, they detected how recognizable individual birds were within each of the five main call types given by this species (contact, tja, trrup, alarm, and growl). They found high variability in the “contact call” that birds use to broadcast their identity. According to the team, this overturned a long-held assumption that contact calls contain a stable individual signal. The new findings suggested that the parakeets are actually using something else for individual recognition.

[Related: These clever cockatoos carry around toolkits to get to food faster.]

To investigate if voice prints were at play, the team used a machine learning model widely used in human voice recognition. The model detects the identity of the speaker using the quality, or timbre, of their voice. The team trained the model to recognize calls of individual birds that were categorized as “tonal” in sound. They then tested to see if the model could detect the same individual from a separate set of calls that were classified as “growling” in sound. The model was able to identify the individual parrots three times better than expected, providing evidence that monk parakeets do actually have a recognizable, individual voice print. 

While exciting, the authors caution that this evidence is still preliminary. Future experiments and analyses could use the parrot tagging work from the team in Barcelona. The GPS devices could help determine how much individuals overlap in their roaming areas.

“This can provide insight into the species’ remarkable ability to discriminate between calls from different individuals,” study co-author and ecologist from Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona Juan Carlos Senar said in a statement.

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The Federal Communications Commission is officially doling out fines for space polluters, and the popular satellite television provider Dish Network earned the dubious honor of receiving the first ticket. On October 2, the FCC announced it slapped the telecommunications company with a $150,000 penalty after failing to properly deorbit its decommissioned, direct broadcast EchoStar-7 satellite last year. According to the FCC, the fine comes with an admission of liability, as well as an agreement to follow a “compliance plan” to help make way for the thousands of orbital projects in the works around the world.

[Related: FCC slaps voter suppression robocall scammers with a record-breaking fine.]

Space junk is already a huge concern for any industry requiring operations high above the planet, with literal millions of trash bits orbiting Earth at any given moment. In July, NASA director Bill Nelson told the BBC space junk poses a “major problem,” explaining that even something like a small paint chip striking an astronaut during a spacewalk at orbital speed (17,500 mph) “can be fatal.” Experts also worry about humans accidentally initiating a “Kessler cascade” or “Kessler syndrome.” In such situations, orbital space becomes so polluted that debris collisions are impossible to avoid, thus producing an exponentially increasing cycle of more collisions that create more debris. Were this to occur, the future of space exploration and travel could remain stymied until governments and companies begin complicated, costly cleanup efforts. 

Dish Network’s EchoStar-7 satellite launched and achieved geostationary orbit in 2002, and received FCC approval for an eventual orbital mitigation plan in 2012. According to the agreement, the telecoms company committed to eventually boost the satellite roughly 300 km above its operational arc. In February 2022, however, Dish Network revealed the satellite did not have enough remaining propellant to adhere to the original agreement’s altitude. In the end, the EchoStar-7 satellite only retired about 122 km above its geostationary arc—far lower than planned. Last year, the FCC also announced plans to finally begin tighter restrictions on satellites’ lifespans and decommissioning protocols.

[Related: Some space junk just got smacked by more space junk, complicating cleanup.]

“As satellite operations become more prevalent and the space economy accelerates, we must be certain that operators comply with their commitments,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal said via Monday’s announcement. “This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules.”

In August, a space debris cleanup pilot project overseen by the European Space Agency quickly turned into a logistical headache after its orbital trash target appeared to collide with another piece of debris. Luckily, the ESA and its partners at Swiss startup ClearSpace-1 stated at the time that their project appears able to progress as planned.

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We all know the line: For more than 150 million years, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. We imagine bloodthirsty tyrannosaurs ripping into screaming duckbills, gigantic sauropods shaking the ground with their thunderous footfalls, and spiky stegosaurs swinging their tails in a reign of reptiles so magnificent, it took the unexpected strike of a six-mile-wide asteroid to end it. The ensuing catastrophe handed the world to the mammals, our ancestors and relatives, so that 66 million years later we can claim to have taken over what the terrible lizards left behind. It’s a dramatic retelling of history that is fundamentally wrong on several counts. Let’s talk about some of the worst rumors and what really happened in the so-called “Age of Dinosaurs.”

Myth: Dinosaurs dominated the planet from their origin.

Fact: Dinosaurs started as cute pipsqueaks.

The oldest dinosaurs we know about are around 235 million years old, from the middle part of the Triassic Period. Those reptiles didn’t rule anything. From recent finds in Africa, South America, and Europe, we know that they were no bigger than a medium-sized dog and were lanky, omnivorous creatures that munched on leaves and beetles. Ancient relatives of crocodiles, by contrast, were much more abundant and diverse. Among the Triassic crocodile cousins were sharp-toothed carnivores that chased after large prey on two legs, “armadillodiles” covered in bony scutes and spikes, and beaked, almost ostrich-like creatures that gobbled up ferns.

Even as early dinosaurs began to evolve into the main lineages that would thrive during the rest of the Mesozoic, most were small and rare compared to the crocodile cousins. The first big herbivorous dinosaurs, which reached about 27 feet in length, didn’t evolve until near the end of the Triassic, around 214 million years ago. But everything changed at the end of the Triassic. Intense volcanic eruptions in the middle of Pangaea altered the global climate; the gases released into the air caused the world to swing between hot and cold phases. By then, dinosaurs had evolved warm-blooded metabolisms and insulating coats of feathers, leaving them relatively unfazed through the crisis, while many other forms of reptiles perished. Had this mass extinction not transpired, we might have had more of an “Age of Crocodiles”—or at least a very different history with a much broader cast of reptilian characters. The only reason the so-called Age of Dinosaurs came to be is because they got lucky in the face of global extinction.

Myth: Dinosaurs spanned the entire planet.

Fact: Dinosaurs never evolved to live at sea.

Of course, these ecosystems were built on a foundation of plankton. Without disc-shaped algae called coccoliths, the rest of the charismatic swimmers of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous wouldn’t have thrived. It’s the abundant, small forms of life that let charismatic creatures like marine reptiles prosper—a further reminder that the animals that impress us on land or sea wouldn’t exist without various tiny organisms that set the foundations of food webs. What we might see as dominance, in any ecosystem, is really a consequence of many relationships and interactions that often go unnoticed.

Myth: Dinosaurs suppressed the evolution of mammals.

Fact: Mammals thrived throughout the Age of Dinosaurs.

The classic example of dinosaur dominance is a twitchy little mammal chasing an insect through the Cretaceous night. Dinosaurs would gobble up any beast that got too big or was foolish enough to wander out in the daylight, the argument went, so mammals evolved to be small and nocturnal until the asteroid allowed our ancestors and relatives to emerge from the shadows. The small size and insect-hunting adaptations of some Mesozoic mammals were taken as indicators that mammals were constrained by the success of the dinosaurs, preventing them from becoming larger or opening new niches.

In the past 20 years, however, paleontologists have rewritten the classic story to show that mammals and their relatives thrived alongside the dinosaurs. Throughout the Mesozoic there were furry beasts that swam, dug, glided between the trees, and even ate little dinosaurs. Ancient equivalents of squirrels, raccoons, otters, beavers, sugar gliders, aardvarks, and more evolved through the Jurassic and Cretaceous, including early primates that scampered through the trees over the heads of T. rexes. While it’s true that all the Mesozoic mammals we presently know of were small—the largest was about the size of an American badger— researchers have realized that the way our ancient ancestors interacted with each other was much more important to shaping their evolution than the dinosaurs were. In fact, even with the dinosaurs gone, most new mammal species stuck to being small. We get so hung up on size that we’ve missed the real story, closer to the ground.

Myth: Dinosaurs dominated the planet for millions of years.

Fact: No single species can dominate a planet.

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The universe is expanding—but astronomers can’t agree how fast. And NASA’s superstar observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, just confirmed there’s a problem in our understanding of the stretching cosmos. JWST’s new measurements are the most precise of their kind, but they don’t clear up a baffling mismatch in the two methods scientists track this growth. 

In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that all the galaxies we can see are moving away from us. The relationship between the distance to a galaxy and how fast it’s moving is now known as Hubble’s law. This law uses the also-eponymous Hubble constant to describe the rate at which the universe is expanding. It also tells us the age of the universe: Astronomers can use the Hubble constant to “rewind” time to when the universe would be a single point in space—the big bang.

There are two main ways to measure this fundamental number. One is by tracing tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background from the beginning of the universe. The other is to watch flickering stars known as Cepheids. But those two methods disagree. This baffling mismatch is known as the Hubble tension, and it’s unclear if it’s a problem with our models of the universe or our measurements.

If it’s our measurements, the error might result from the way we survey Cepheid stars. Astronomers consider these objects to be a type of “standard candle,” a thing in space whose intrinsic brightness is known. We can observe how bright one of these stars looks in the sky. If it’s faint, it’s farther away. Brighter is closer. 

Researchers use the luminosity of these stars like a yardstick to measure distance. Then, with methods such as spectroscopy, they can gauge the motion of far-off galaxies. Putting those observations together tells us how fast the universe is expanding.

[Related: NASA releases Hubble images of cotton candy-colored clouds in Orion Nebula]

“When we use Cepheids like this, we need to be very, very sure we’re measuring their brightnesses correctly, otherwise our distance measurements will be off. However, Cepheids can be in crowded parts of their galaxies and if our telescopes aren’t sensitive enough, we can’t clearly distinguish a Cepheid from the stars around it,” explains astronomer Tarini Konchady, a program officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

Before JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) took the best measurements of Cepheid stars. HST couldn’t distinguish individual Cepheids where they were bunched in crowded regions, but JWST can—and it just did. JWST peered into two distant galaxies, and made measurements of the Hubble constant 2.5 times better than HST could. 

“Webb’s measurements have dramatically cut the noise in the Cepheid measurements,” said project lead Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University in a NASA press release. “This kind of improvement is the stuff astronomers dream of!”

One of JWST’s major advantages is its ability to look at the cosmos in infrared light, which helps cut through dust between our telescopes and the Cepheids. “Sharp infrared vision is one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s superpowers,” Riess said.

[Related: How old is the universe? Our answer keeps getting more precise.]

However, the new measurements matched up with those from HST, just with smaller error bars—so we can’t confidently pin the mystery on those old numbers.

The new results from Riess and team are just the beginning, though, and they still have many more galaxies to observe with JWST. “I think the jury is still out on whether the JWST has completely eliminated crowding as a solution to the Hubble tension,” says University of Chicago astronomer Abigail Lee. “Analyzing the data for the rest of the 42 galaxies [that JWST plans to observe] will illuminate whether the Hubble tension is alive and real or if there are indeed just errors in the Cepheid measurements.”

The fate of the universe, or at least the Hubble tension, doesn’t just hinge on JWST. Many other facilities will come online in the next few years, providing more evidence for this investigation. The Vera Rubin Observatory, for example, is going to scan the whole Southern sky every few nights when it opens next year, and will likely discover many more Cepheid stars.

“We’re at a point where astronomers are going to be deluged by the most sensitive and wide-reaching data yet,” says Konchady. There might not be a clear answer yet, but astronomers are surely on the case to figure out this mystery.

This post has been updated to include additional details about astronomical methods for measuring the expansion rate.

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In space, the brightness of a galaxy is typically determined by its mass. However, some new research suggests that less massive galaxies can actually glow just as brightly as larger ones. Due to irregular and brilliant bursts of star formation, some  younger galaxies appear deceptively large. The new findings are detailed in a study published October 3 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young.]

The first stellar images released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2022 came with a bit of a quandary. To some astronomers, the young galaxies appeared to be too bright, too massive, and too mature to have formed so soon after the big bang, almost as if an infant grew into an adult after only a few years. 

“The discovery of these galaxies was a big surprise because they were substantially brighter than anticipated,” study co- author and Northwestern University astrophysicist Claude-André Faucher-Giguère said in a statement. “Typically, a galaxy is bright because it’s big. But because these galaxies formed at cosmic dawn, not enough time has passed since the big bang. How could these massive galaxies assemble so quickly? Our simulations show that galaxies have no problem forming this brightness by cosmic dawn.”

The period in cosmological history called Cosmic Dawn lasted from about 100 million years to 1 billion years after the big bang and is marked by the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the universe. 

“The JWST brought us a lot of knowledge about cosmic dawn,” study co-author and Northwestern University astrophysicist Guochao Sun said in a statement. “Prior to JWST, most of our knowledge about the early universe was speculation based on data from very few sources. With the huge increase in observing power, we can see physical details about the galaxies and use that solid observational evidence to study the physics to understand what’s happening.”

The team used advanced computer simulations to model how galaxies formed just after the big bang. Part of Northwestern’s Feedback of Relativistic Environments (FIRE) project, the simulations combine astrophysical theory and advanced algorithms to model how galaxies form. These models help researchers see how galaxies grow and change shape all while considering mass, energy, momentum, and chemical elements returned from stars. 

“The key is to reproduce a sufficient amount of light in a system within a short amount of time,” Sun said. “That can happen either because the system is really massive or because it has the ability to produce a lot of light quickly. In the latter case, a system doesn’t need to be that massive. If star formation happens in bursts, it will emit flashes of light. That is why we see several very bright galaxies.”

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths.]

The simulations in the study created galaxies that were just as bright as the ones observed by JWST. They also found that the early galaxies formed at cosmic dawn likely had stars that formed in bursts. This is a concept called bursty star formation, where stars form in an alternating pattern. It begins with the formation of a bunch of stars at once, then millions of years with little to no stars, and then another burst of stars. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy followed a very different pattern of star formation at a steady rate.

According to Faucher-Giguère, bursty star formation is particularly common in low-mass galaxies. However, the details of why this happens are still the subject of other research. The team on this study believes that it happens when the initial bursts of stars explode as supernovae a few million years later. The gas is kicked out and then falls back inwards to form new stars and drives the cycle again. 

When the galaxies get massive enough, they have significantly stronger gravity. So when the  supernovae explode, they aren’t strong enough to eject gas from the star system and the gravity binds the galaxy together. The result is a more steady state.

“Most of the light in a galaxy comes from the most massive stars,” Faucher-Giguère said in a statement. “Because more massive stars burn at a higher speed, they are shorter lived. They rapidly use up their fuel in nuclear reactions. So, the brightness of a galaxy is more directly related to how many stars it has formed in the last few million years than the mass of the galaxy as a whole.”

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The 2023 Nobel prize in physics was just awarded to three physicists for their work probing the world of electrons. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier will jointly share the prestigious prize.

[Related: When light flashes for a quintillionth of a second, things get weird.]

These physicists “are being recognised for their experiments, which have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules,” the Nobel committee wrote on Tuesday. “Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”

Agostini is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. Krausz is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. L’Huillier is a professor at Lund University in Sweden and the fifth woman ever awarded the physics prize. 

Discovering the attosecond

When perceived by humans, fast-moving events flow into each other similar to the way a flip book of still images can be perceived as continual movement. To better investigate these extremely brief events, special technology is needed.

In the world of electrons, these changes occur in an attosecond, or only a millionth of a trillionth of a second. An attosecond is so short that there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe roughly 13.8 billion years ago. 

Electrons’ movements in atoms and molecules are measured in these attoseconds. Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier have conducted experiments that demonstrate how attosecond pulses could actually be observed and measured, according to the awarding committee.

Overtones of light

In 1987, L’Huillier discovered that many different overtones of light arose when she transmitted infrared laser light through a noble gas. Each individual overtone is a light wave that has a given number of cycles for each cycle in the laser light. The overtones are caused by the laser light interacting with atoms in the gas. They give some electrons an extra energy boost that is then emitted as light. In the almost four decades since, L’Huillier has continued to explore this phenomenon which laid the foundation for subsequent breakthroughs.

[Related: This record-breaking X-ray laser is ready to unlock quantum secrets.]

In 2001, Agostini produced and investigated a series of consecutive light pulses. During these experiments, each pulse lasted only 250 attoseconds. At the same time, Krausz was working with another type of experiment. His experiment made it possible to isolate a single light pulse that lasted 650 attoseconds.

This work enabled the investigation into physical processes that are so rapid that they were previously impossible to follow. 

“We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be utilizing them,” Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics Eva Olsson said in a statement.

This groundbreaking work has potential applications in electronics and medicine in the future. In electronics, understanding and controlling how electrons behave in a material is crucial. Attosecond pulses could also identify different molecules in future medical diagnostics.

“In much the same fashion that a photographer may use a flash of light to capture a hummingbird’s wing or a baseball being hit, this year’s Nobel prize winners developed revolutionary methods to generate and measure extremely fast laser pulses that can capture some of the most rapid physical effects known,” Johns Hopkins University physicist N. Peter Armitage told PopSci in an email. “Among other aspects, their work gives insight into the motion of electrons between atoms and allows movies of chemical reactions to be made. It’s remarkable fundamental science, and was done for that reason, but these discoveries may ultimately allow insight into the effects that give superconductivity at high temperatures and efficient energy harvesting from light.”

The 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to John F. Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger for their independent contributions to understanding quantum entanglement. Other past winners include Pierre and Marie (Sklodowska) Curie in 1903 and Max Planck in 1918.

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Fictional murderous barbers and real life serial killers are woven into London’s spooky history with legendary tales of their dastardly deeds. However, Sweeney Todd or Jack the Ripper may have paled in comparison to students from Oxford in the 14th century. A project mapping medieval England’s known murder cases found that Oxford’s student population was the most lethal of all social or professional groups, committing about 75 percent of all homicides.

[Related: How DNA evidence could help put the Long Island serial killer behind bars.]

First launched in 2018, Cambridge’s Medieval Murder Maps plots crime scenes based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ reports. These documents were recorded in Latinand are catalogs of sudden or suspicious deaths that were deduced by a jury of local residents. They also included names, events, locations, and even the value of murder weapons. The project recently added the cities of York and Oxford to its street plan of slayings during the 14th century. 

The team used these rolls and maps to construct the street atlas of 354 homicides across the three cities. It has also been updated to include accidents, sudden deaths, deaths in prison, and sanctuary church cases. 

They estimate that  the per capita homicide rate in Oxford was potentially 4 to 5 times higher than late medieval London or York. It also put the homicide rate at about 60 to 75 per 100,000—about 50 times higher than the murder rates in today’s English cities. The maps, however, don’t factor in the major advances in medicine, policing, and emergency response in the centuries since.

York’s murderous mayhem was likely driven by inter- knife fights among tannery workers (Tanners) to fatal violence between glove makers (Glovers) during the rare 14th century period of prosperity driven by trade and textile manufacturing as the Black Death subsided. But Oxford’s rambunctious youth made for a dangerous scene.

By the early 14th century, Oxford had a population of roughly 7,000 inhabitants, with about 1,500 students. Among perpetrators from Oxford, coroners referred to 75 percent of them as “clericus.” The term most likely refers to a student or a member of the early university. Additionally, 72 percent of all Oxford’s homicide victims also have the designation clericus in the coroner inquests.

“A medieval university city such as Oxford had a deadly mix of conditions,” lead murder map investigator and University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner said in a statement. “Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

Many of the students also belonged to regional fraternities known as “nations,” which could have added more tension within the student body.

One Thursday night in 1298, an argument among students in an Oxford High Street tavern resulted in a mass street fight complete with battle-axes and swords. According to the coroner’s report, a student named John Burel had, “a mortal wound on the crown of his head, six inches long and in depth reaching to the brain.”

Interactions with sex workers also could end tragically. One unknown scholar got away with murdering Margery de Hereford in the parish of St. Aldate in 1299. He fled the scene after stabbing her to death instead of paying what he owed. 

[Related: A lost ‘bawdy bard’ act reveals roots of naughty British comedy.]

Many of the cases in all three cities also involved intervention of bystanders, who were obligated to announce if a crime was being committed, or raise a “hue and cry.” Some of the bystanders summoned by hue ended up as victims or perpetrators.

“Before modern policing, victims or witnesses had a legal responsibility to alert the community to a crime by shouting and making noise. This was known as raising a hue and cry,” co-researchers and Cambridge crime historian Stephanie Brown said in a statement. “It was mostly women who raised hue and cry, usually reporting conflicts between men in order to keep the peace.”

Medieval street justice was also coupled with plentiful weapons in everyday life, which could  make even minor infractions lethal. London’s cases include altercations that started over littering and urination that led to homicide. 

“Knives were omnipresent in medieval society,” said Brown. “A thwytel was a small knife, often valued at one penny, and used as cutlery or for everyday tasks. Axes were commonplace in homes for cutting wood, and many men carried a staff.”

The team told The Guardian that they hope this project encourages people to reflect on the possible notices behind historic homicide and explore the parallels between these incidents and the altercations in the present. 

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NASA’s Psyche mission to a unique, metallic asteroid of the same name launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 10:20 a.m. Eastern on October 13 via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

It was, finally, a smooth exit from Earth for the probe. Psyche had been scheduled to blast off on October 5, the first day of a window that stretches through October 25. But NASA officials announced a delay on September 28, citing issues with the spacecraft’s maneuvering thrusters, which are used to point the vehicle where it needs to go. “The change allows the NASA team to complete verifications of the parameters used to control the Psyche spacecraft’s nitrogen cold gas thrusters,” NASA officials wrote in the announcement. 

That weeklong delay was small, though, compared to the mission’s earlier hold-ups. Psyche was first set to launch in October of 2022, but issues with the navigation software developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory forced the agency to delay the mission by a year. 

This mission should be well worth the wait. It could help uncover details about unusual asteroids and our planet. And the pioneering technology and operations it will demonstrate during its nearly six-year mission will influence the design of future spacecraft. 

Psyche to Psyche

The destination of Psyche (a spacecraft) is 16 Psyche (an asteroid)—an object about 140 miles in diameter in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It looks a bit like a cratered potato. 

Remote observations by astronomers have already determined 16 Psyche to be a highly metallic asteroid, rich in iron, and it is believed to be the exposed core of a small planet that never fully formed. Getting up close and personal with 16 Psyche could help scientists better understand Earth’s iron-rich core: It’s easier to send a spacecraft 280 million miles away to study an asteroid than to access Earth’s rocky center, 1,800 miles beneath our feet. Exploring the metallic object in space has implications for our planet’s geomagnetic field, which protects life from space radiation—that field is generated when our planet’s solid inner core spins within liquid metal surroundings. 

Thrusters and lasers

Psyche is one of NASA’s first spacecraft to use solar electric propulsion as its primary means of reaching an asteroid. Rather than relying on traditional chemical rockets, Psyche will use Hall effect thrusters, which use electrostatic fields to accelerate ions—charged particles—and expel them, generating thrust. (These are different machines from the nitrogen thrusters that caused the launch delay.) Such thrusters produce very low thrust—far less than a pound—but do so very efficiently, allowing Psyche to preserve its xenon gas propellant and build up speed over the vast distances it will cover. 

The electric thrusters will use solar power—though the sunlight it absorbs will shrink as Psyche approaches its destination. Still, it’s well prepared. While the spacecraft itself is the size of a large car, its twin solar panels are about the size of tennis courts. They’ll produce 21 kilowatts of energy near Earth and about two kilowatts when at asteroid Psyche. 

[Related on PopSci+: In its visit to Psyche, NASA hopes to glimpse the center of the Earth]

In addition to solar electric propulsion, Psyche will also test a new form of Earth-to-spacecraft transmission system called Deep Space Optical Communication. Deep Space Optical Communication encodes data in infrared lasers, rather than radio waves, and can potentially carry much more information to and from the Psyche spacecraft than can traditional methods. The laser communications are just a demonstration—Psyche will still stay in touch with Earth, and vice versa, using NASA’s radio-based Deep Space Network. 

Research on a metal world

When Psyche arrives at the asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029, it will set to work studying the iron asteroid’s magnetic properties. With the aid of an imager and two kinds of spectrometer, the probe will also use patterns of light absorption to determine what elements and compounds exist on this metal potato. 

But Psyche won’t simply scratch the surface. It will also study the asteroid’s internal structure by measuring the space rock’s gravity field. There’s no specific instrument to pull this off. Instead, scientists on the ground will use radio signals from Psyche to precisely measure the spacecraft’s orbit around the asteroid, measuring any slight perturbations that signal variations in the gravitational field, which in turn can tell scientists about the internal density of 16 Psyche. 

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders]

And while the Psyche mission has the unique potential to shed light on how planetary bodies are formed and function, it’s also a part of an expanding portfolio of NASA asteroid missions. NASA’s Lucy mission, which launched in 201, is currently on its way to fly by multiple asteroids near Jupiter between 2025 and 2033. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, meanwhile, just dropped pieces of the asteroid Bennu back on Earth on September 24. It’snow headed to visit the asteroid Apophis; the mission has been renamed to OSIRIS-APEX, or Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-APophis EXplorer.

Such missions have multiple goals: they help scientists better understand the formation of the early solar system and how planets like Earth, and they can also tell us about the makeup of asteroids that could one day pose a threat—and how to deflect them if necessary. 

Apophis, for instance, was at one time considered a very hazardous asteroid; though it won’t hit Earth, it will pass within 20,000 miles of our planet on April 13, 2029. 

The people of Earth don’t have to worry about any danger from 16 Psyche, though, as it will continue along in its orbit between Mars and Jupiter indefinitely, hundreds of millions of miles from our planet. 

That is, unless humans make changes to the metallic space rock. Mining asteroids is an old idea. But, as spacecraft improve, the estimated $10 quintillion worth of metal ore on Psyche and asteroids like it might begin to look pretty appetizing to companies that want to capitalize on resources in the heavens.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on October 2.

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Glaciers are melting faster than ever, and while that might spell disaster for the planet, it has opened up a new field of research called glacial archaeology. Artifacts, bodies, and viruses frozen deep in ice for millions of years are now thawing out and washing to the surface; the warmer climate is also allowing archaeologists to navigate areas that were once too dangerous to excavate.

The 1991 discovery of Ötzi—a prehistoric human who is estimated to have lived in the 4th millennium BCE—in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps currently remains the greatest discovery for glacial archaeology. But it’s not the only noteworthy find we’ve seen in the last two decades.

Treasure trove of arrows

Earlier in September, Pilø and his team were searching through the Jotunheimen mountains in eastern Norway and uncovered a wooden arrow with a quartzite arrowhead and three feathers. Ancient people used feathers to stabilize the arrow and guide it to its target. These accents usually decay over time, but the ice kept them intact. The arrow is estimated to be 3,000 years old and may have belonged to a reindeer hunter from the early Bronze Age. It’s one of several arrows that have been surfaced from Norway’s melting ice in recent years.

In 2014, Pilø and his colleagues uncovered a prehistoric ski in a melting ice patch in Norway. The ski is thought to be 1,300 years old, and had the bindings still intact. In 2021, they came across the second ski, making it one of the most well-preserved prehistoric skis to date. Because the skis were very well-preserved, Pilø says they were able to make replicas and race down slopes with iron-age skis. “That was a lot of fun.”

Prehistoric animals

In August 2010, a partially preserved carcass of a baby wooly mammoth was found in Siberia’s permafrost. Nicknamed Yuka, the frozen animal is estimated to be around 30,000 years old, which puts it back in the last ice age. Based on where the specimen was discovered, it’s likely that the mammoth wandered away from its herd in the grasslands and got stuck in mud. Given that the lower body was well-preserved in ice, it gave researchers an opportunity to analyze the extinct species in-depth and extract its frozen blood.

The melting snow in Antarctica has also led to some interesting evolutionary findings. During a 2016 research expedition, Steven Emslie uncovered the preserved remains of 800-year-old Adelie penguins, along with some less well-preserved remains of the aquatic birds estimated to be around 5,000 years old. According to a study he published in 2020, the penguins were likely moving because of changing sea-ice conditions and were covered up by increasing snowfall, which prevented their remains from decaying.

Organic artifacts

A muddy future

While the warming climate is paving the way to more discoveries of the ancient past, there are some hiccups. Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, says that though it’s easier to access places that were once inhospitable, melting snow can be a poor substrate for research. “Everything is a mudhole,” which makes it much more complicated to look for fossils, he explains.  

There is also the issue of ancient artifacts washing away: Pilø estimates 60 to 80 percent of mountain ice in Norway is in danger of melting by the end of this century. He describes it as a race against time. “If we are not ready to search for these finds, they will get lost, and so will the stories they could have told us.” 

A combination of resources from aerial photography of mountains, digital models of terrain, and satellite imagery has helped glacial archaeologists melting glaciers and any areas where  artifacts may have thawed out. However, their efforts can only go so far as ice around the poles continues to melt at unprecedented speeds. If temperatures continue to rise—July 2023, for example, was the hottest month ever recorded in human history—Pilø warns that 90 percent of mountain ice in Norway might disappear by 2100.

Still, archaeologists like Pilø are taking advantage of this fleeting opportunity to dig through the soft ice while they can. While the chances are tiny, he still holds out hope that the melting glaciers will help him find the next ice mummy.

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Chances are you have heard about this one already. The moon will pass between Earth and the sun and cast a huge shadow on our planet in the process. With the right protective eyewear, it will be a sight to behold—the phenomenon produces a “ring of fire” as if the moon is outlined with flames.  

Astronomers have calculated precisely when the best views will be where you are, so consult this list when scheduling an outing to safely check out the sky. The duration will range from little more than one minute to almost five, depending where you are located in its path. This eclipse has a 125-mile-wide path of annularity that will begin in Oregon at 12:13 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It will leave the US at about 1:03 p.m. EDT and head southeastward toward Central and South America. 

October 21 and 22 – Orionids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak

The annual Orionid meteor shower is expected to peak on October 22 in a moonless sky, but the wee hours of the morning of October 21 could also yield some meteors. According to EarthSky, under a dark sky with no moon, the Orionids can produce a maximum of about 10 to 20 meteors per hour. On October 22, the moon will be setting around midnight, which means its light shouldn’t interfere with the shower. The best time to try and spot the shower is just after midnight into the early morning hours 

October 23 – Venus at Greatest Elongation

In August, the planet Venus moved between the Earth and the sun and rose in the east. Venus will be farthest from the sunrise on October 23 and should remain visible in the morning sky until May 2024, where it will be a very bright “morning star.” 

During this month’s greatest elongation, Venus will appear higher in the sky from the Northern Hemisphere than from the Southern Hemisphere. This is because of the steep angle of the path of the sun, moon, and planets in the mornings during the autumn months. 

October 28- Full Hunter’s Moon and Partial Lunar Eclipse

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.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

IN JANUARY 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” said Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission — her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth — her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she said, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball.

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. “I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive,” she said. “That’s all I had to do.”

None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso. “My mission ended, and it’s over,” she said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering.

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement — one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet.

A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting. Sweeney, it turned out, wasn’t alone.

Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations. Such research, scientists say, can help test out medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face, including, like Sweeney’s, those that come when their “missions” are over.

Lately, a community of researchers has started to make the field more formalized: laying out standards so that results are comparable; gathering research papers into a single database so investigators can build on previous work; and bringing scientists, participants, and facility directors together to share results and insights.

With that cohesion, a formerly quiet area of research is enhancing its reputation and looking to gain more credibility with space agencies. “I think the analogs are underestimated,” said Jenni Hesterman, a retired Air Force officer who is helping spearhead this formalization. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

ANALOG ASTRONAUT FACILITIES emerged as a way to test drive space missions without the price tag of actually going to space. Scientists, for example, want to make sure tools work properly and so analog astronauts will test out equipment ranging from spacesuits to extreme-environment medical equipment.

Researchers are also interested in how astronauts fare in isolation, and so they will sometimes track characteristics like microbiome changes, stress levels, and immune responses by taking samples of spit, skin, blood, urine, and fecal matter. Analog missions “can give us insights about how a person would react or what kind of team — what kind of mix of people — can react to some challenges,” said Francesco Pagnini, a psychology professor at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Italy, who has researched human behavior and performance in collaboration with the European and Italian space agencies.

Some facilities are run by space agencies, like NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, which is located inside NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The center also houses a 3D-printed habitat called Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, where crews will simulate a year-long mission to Mars. The structure looks like an artificial intelligence created a cosmic living space using IKEA as its source material.

“My mission ended, and it’s over,” Sweeney said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Most analog spots, though, are run by private organizations and take research proposals from space agencies, university researchers, and sometimes laypeople with projects that the facilities select through an application process.

Such work has been going on for decades: NASA’s first official analog mission took place in 1997, in Death Valley, when four people spent a week pretending to be Martian geologists. In 2000, the nonprofit Mars Society, a space-exploration advocacy and research organization, built the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in Nunavut, Canada, and soon after constructed the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. (Both facilities have been used by NASA researchers, too.) But the practice was in place long before those projects, even if the terminology and permanent facilities were not: In the Apollo era, astronauts used to try out their rovers and space walks, along with scientific techniques, in Arizona and Hawaii.

Many facilities, according to Ronita Cromwell, formerly the lead scientist of NASA’s Flight Analogs Project, are located in two types of places: extreme environments or controlled ones. The former include Antarctic or Arctic research stations, which tend to be used to study topics like sleep patterns and team dynamics. The latter — sealed, simulated habitats — are primarily useful for human behavior research, like learning how cognitive ability changes over the course of a mission, or testing out equipment, like software that helps astronauts make decisions without communicating to mission control. That independence becomes necessary as crews travel farther from Earth, because the communication delays increase with distance.

During her work on NASA’s mission simulations, Cromwell saw their value. “What excited me is that we were able to create sort of spaceflight situations on the ground, to study spaceflight changes in the human body,” Cromwell said, “whether they be, you know, psychological, cognitive changes, or physiological changes.”

Psychiatry researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, recently found that members of a crew at HERA performed better on cognition tasks — like clicking on squares that randomly appear on a screen and memorizing three-dimensional objects — as their mission went on. Another recent HERA study, led by scientists at Northwestern and DePaul universities, found that over time, teams got better at executing physical tasks together, but worsened when they tried to work together creatively and intellectually, like brainstorming as many uses as possible for a given object. Those brain and behavioral changes could teach scientists about tight teams deployed in other remote, tedious, stressful situations. “I think space psychology can also speak a lot about everyday life,” said Pagnini.

On the physical side, an international team that included a NASA scientist recently used the Mars Desert Research Station to test whether analog astronauts could be quickly taught how to fix broken bones using a device that could work on Mars — or an earthly site far from medical facilities. Investigations into self-contained, sustainable living reveal how low-resource existence could work on Earth, too. For example, another crew, led by Griffith University medical researchers, performed an experiment extracting water from minerals in case of emergency.

“I think the analogs are underestimated,” said Hesterman. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

While scientific research that actually takes place in space usually gets the spotlight, the ground-testing of all systems, including human ones, is necessary, if not always glamorous or publicly lauded. “I felt like I was in charge of a deep, dark secret,” said Cromwell, jokingly, of her work on the NASA analog program.

In fact, even people who work in adjacent fields sometimes haven’t heard of the field. Purewal, an astrophysicist, only learned about analog space research in 2020. With Covid-19 restrictions in place, though, most facilities had halted new missions. “If I can’t go to an analog, maybe I can bring the analog to me,” Purewal thought.

Amid the drapey willow branches and manicured hedges of her parents’ backyard in Warwick, England, she constructed a geodesic dome out of broomstick handles and tent-like materials. Purewal sequestered inside for a week, leaving only to use the bathroom — and then only while wearing a simulated spacesuit. She communicated with those outside her dome on a synthesized 20-minute delay and ate freeze-dried foods, which she came to hate, and insect protein from mealworms and locusts, which she came to like more than she anticipated.

While Purewal admits her personal analog was “low-fidelity,” it offered a test drive for more rigorous research. By 2021, Purewal had, with SpaceX civilian astronaut Sian Proctor, co-founded the Analog Astronaut Conference that Sweeney attended, along with an associated online community of more than 1,000 people. She also participated in an analog mission in someone else’s backyard — one surrounded by Utah State Trust Lands — in November 2022. Their endeavor was sponsored by the Mars Society and involved research on mental health, geologic research tools, and sustainable food supplies, all of which would be necessary if they were going to Mars.

BUT THEY WEREN’T HEADED to Mars, they were headed to Utah. About five minutes from the small town of Hanksville — home to “Hollow Mountain,” a gas station convenience store dug out of a rock formation — sits the turnoff to the Mars Desert Research Station. Operated by the Mars Society, the facility is 3.4 miles down a dirt track called N Cow Dung Road. The landscape looks otherworldly: mushroom-shaped rock formations; sandy, granular ground; and eroded hills of red rock.

The station sits in a flat spot surrounded by those hills, with a cylindrical living space two stories tall but just 26 feet in diameter. The habitat links out via above-ground “tunnels” to a greenhouse and a geodesic dome that resembles Purewal’s initial backyard creation, and houses a control center and lab.

In November 2022, Purewal brought a team there for two weeks, with Hesterman as commander. In the habitat, an astrobiology student tried to grow edible mushrooms in the crew’s food waste. Another team member wanted to see if they could make yogurt from powdered milk and bacteria. Purewal, meanwhile, was experimenting with an AI companion robot called PARO. Shaped like a baby harp seal, PARO is typically used to relieve stress in medical situations. The crew members interacted with PARO and wore bio-monitoring straps that measured things like heart rate as they did so.

Every day on “Mars” had a set of missions: spacewalks, splinting a broken ankle on a virtual reality headset, a tabletop emergency exercise about evacuating for noxious fumes, a fake pass-out to test emergency response protocol. Their personal protocols were working well, but Purewal and Hesterman, locked in together, had begun to fret about the quality and consistency of the analog enterprise more broadly. They started to think about creating standards: for the research, for the facilities themselves. At their Utah-Mars station, for instance, a pipe broke under their sink. There were electrical issues. A propane monitor was malfunctioning.

After their mission ended, they spoke with others, and heard about issues such as expired fire extinguishers, or the lack of safety training for participants who would be using specialized technologies and life support systems. They consulted Emily Apollonio, a former aircraft accident investigator. In 2022, she traveled to Hawaii to live at HI-SEAS, a 1,200-square-foot analog station located 8,200 feet above sea level on the Mauna Loa volcano. Apollonio thought HI-SEAS had avoidable problems. For one, the bathroom had only a composting toilet, which the mission crew weren’t allowed to pee in, and a urinal, which the women had to use, too.

With a draft version released this June, they hope to improve conditions for participants — ensuring, for instance, that facilities adhere to building codes and provide adequate medical support. They also want to encourage analog participants to follow research best practices to ensure rigorous outputs. The standards suggest, for instance, that each mission have its research plan pre-validated by the principal investigator and habitat director, a timeline for research completion, and an Institutional Review Board approval in place for human experiments. While projects with federal or institutional grant funding go through these steps anyway, the formality isn’t uniform across the board.

While some analogs already have rigorous protocols in place to protect participants, the safety issues and inclusivity gaps she heard about from colleagues helped inspire Apollonio to start a training and consulting company called Interstellar Performance Labs to help prepare would-be analog astronauts before their missions. She also started to work with Purewal, Hesterman, and others on a document called “International Guidelines and Standards for Space Analogs.”

The standards also detail the creation of a research database, putting all the writeups (peer-reviewed and otherwise) of analog projects in one place. That way, people aren’t duplicating efforts — as the mushroom-grower, it turns out, was — unless they mean to test the replicability of results. They can also better link their studies to space agencies’ established needs to be more directly helpful and relevant to the real world.

“I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” Apollonio said. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.”

As part of this centralization effort, Purewal, Apollonio, Hesterman, and colleagues are also putting together what they call the World’s Biggest Analog: a simultaneous, month-long mission involving at least 10 isolated bases across the world, which together will simulate a large, cooperative future presence in space.

So far, though, attempts to give the community cohesion and coherency have yet to fully address the aspect of analog life that gives many participants trouble: the end of their mission. “Being in an analog mission was less difficult than coming out an analog mission,” said Apollonio, of her own experience.

Shortly after emerging from HI-SEAS, she walked around the streets of Waikiki with her husband. The lights, the noise — everything was too much. “I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.” After they chose a restaurant for dinner, and the server handed her a menu, she froze. “I have to choose my own food,” she realized. It was overwhelming, and that feeling didn’t abate.

Meanwhile, few other people understood the experience, said Hesterman. “You come home and you’re all excited, like, you want to tell everybody about it,” she continued. “You tell everybody about it once, and then they’re just done. On back to paying the bills and cutting the grass and stuff. You still want to talk about it.”

Purewal missed the team and the sense of shared purpose, and started to seek it outside the simulation. “I need to find this same feeling in my day-to-day life,” she said. “We all kind of need our crew.”

RESEARCH ON THE post-mission experience is scant, said Pagnini. In March 2023, he co-authored a review paper, commissioned by the European Space Agency, which aimed to lay out the state of research on human behavior and performance in space, including gaps in the science. Studying how astronauts react and cope “post-mission,” his research found, has been particularly neglected. The same is true of returning from analog space.

Pagnini says the research isn’t just relevant to analog or actual astronauts. Life in space has similarities to life on Earth — including in its difficulties. Italy’s heavily restrictive and prolonged Covid-19 lockdown, for instance, resembled going away on a mission. “When we got out of the lockdown phase, getting in touch with other people was kind of strange,” he said. Much of living a regular life on Earth was strange.

The strangeness also extends to other experiences, like military deployments and the subsequent return to domestic life. “The expectation is kind of that families will live happily ever after” once they’re reunited, said Leanne Knobloch, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, who performed a large reintegration study on military couples. “So that’s why reintegration has sometimes been overlooked, but more and more researchers are starting to recognize that it is a challenging period, and it’s not the storybook ending that people make it out to be.”

She noted that her research, like that on the psychology of space travel and the post-mission experience, can apply to other arenas. “Any kind of situation where partners are separated and they come together, this research can help understand that puzzle piece more broadly,” she said.

Knobloch’s work includes suggestions for easing the transition, such as preparing people for the issues they’re likely to experience. “If you’re ready and expect that you might experience some of these problems, it won’t be so stressful,” she said. “Because you’ll recognize that they’re normal.”

Apollonio’s Interstellar Performance Labs, for one, is already planning to include education on “aftercare,” educating people about what she calls the “deorbiting effect” of returning to regular life.

WHEN THE DAY finally came for Sweeney to depart Thwaites Glacier, the aircraft seemed to materialize right out of the sky, as though the remote outpost had transformed into a busy airport. As she was leaving, she looked down at the camp where half her team remained. “You could just see how small our little footprint was,” she said. A speck in the middle of endless white space.

Since she landed in North America, Sweeney has savored time with her family. But the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “Each day that ticks by of being back, I started feeling pulled in different directions,” she said. With numerous projects ongoing — mentoring, speaking, doing her doctoral research — she felt her sense of self splintering. In Antarctica, she had been a smooth, singular whole.

But at the Analog Astronaut Conference in May, hearing about others’ similar readjustment difficulties, Sweeney felt some sense of normalcy. Having a community of support could help with post-mission struggles. Further research — aided by the new database and standardization measures — could help uncover best coping strategies, along with the keys to successful crew dynamics, stress creators and mitigators, and tools and designs that make the practicalities of a mission easier. Maybe someone will look at the database, see this scientific gap, and try to fill it.

Such research might resonate with Sweeney and others having trouble readjusting to their daily lives. “We have to get back to work, we have to go see our families, we want to pick up the projects we were doing before,” she said. “But also, we need to make space for the magnitude of the experience that we just had. And to be able to decompress from that.”

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier in November 2022. She arrived to McMurdo Station in Antarctica in November 2022, but did not land on Thwaites Glacier until January 2023. The piece also described a scene in which Sweeney left her camp on Thwaites Glacier, and incorrectly stated that she was departing Antarctica at that time. She remained in Antarctica for several weeks after she left the glacier. Lastly, a previous version stated that storms dumped feet of snow on the landscape. To clarify that the snow was not fresh snowfall, the piece has been updated to reflect that snow blew against the tents.

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

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Despite only eating fish, the Southern Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea are known for a perplexing behavior. They harass and even kill porpoises without eating them and scientists are not really sure why. A study published September 28 in the journal Marine Mammal Science looked at over 60 years of data to try and solve this ongoing mystery.

[Related: Raising male offspring comes at a high price for orca mothers.]

While their relatives called transient killer whales eat other organisms including squid, shark, and porpoises, the Southern Resident orcas exclusively eat fish, particularly Chinook salmon. The strange porpoise-harassing behavior was first scientifically documented in 1962. The new study analyzed 78 documented incidents and found three plausible explanations.

Orcas at play

The behavior may be a form of social play for orcas. Like many intelligent species including dogs, elephants, and kangaroos, these whales sometimes engage in playful activities as a way to bond, communicate, or just simply enjoy themselves. Going after porpoises might benefit their group coordination and teamwork.

This theory may be reminiscent of the orcas who became famous for sinking boats in Spain and Portugal. While the Southern Resident killer whales and the whales from the Iberian Peninsula are two different populations with distinct cultures, their affinity for play could be something both populations share, according to the authors of the study. 

Hunting practice

Going after a larger animal like porpoises might help these whales hone their critical salmon-hunting skills. They may view porpoises as moving targets to practice their hunting techniques, even if a meal is not the end result.

Mismothering behavior

The orcas may be attempting to provide care for porpoises that they perceive as either sick or weak. This could be a behavioral manifestation of their natural inclination to help others within their pod. Female orcas have been observed carrying their deceased calves and have been observed carrying porpoises in a similar manner.  

Scientists also call mismothering behavior displaced epimeletic behavior. It could be due to their limited opportunities to care for their young, according to study co-author and science and research director at Wild Orca Deborah Giles. 

“Our research has shown that due to malnutrition, nearly 70 percent of Southern Resident killer whale pregnancies have resulted in miscarriages or calves that died right away after birth,” Giles said in a statement.

An endangered group

Southern Resident killer whales are considered an endangered population. Currently, only 75 individuals exist and their survival is essentially tied to Chinook salmon. A 2022 study found that these orcas have been in a food deficit for over 40 years and another study found that the older and fatter fish are also becoming more scarce in several populations.

“I am frequently asked, why don’t the Southern Residents just eat seals or porpoises instead?” said Giles. “It’s because fish-eating killer whales have a completely different ecology and culture from orcas that eat marine mammals—even though the two populations live in the same waters. So we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been speculation until now.”

Even with these three theories for the behavior, the team acknowledges that the exact reason behind porpoise harassment may always remain a mystery. What is clear is that porpoises are not a part of the Southern Resident killer whale diet, so eating them is highly unlikely. 

“Killer whales are incredibly complex and intelligent animals. We found that porpoise-harassing behavior has been passed on through generations and across social groupings. It’s an amazing example of killer whale culture,” Sarah Teman, a study co-author and marine mammal biologist with the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s SeaDoc Society, said in a statement. “Still, we don’t expect the Southern Resident killer whales to start eating porpoises. The culture of eating salmon is deeply ingrained in Southern Resident society. These whales need healthy salmon populations to survive.”

However, this research does underscore the importance of salmon conservation in the Salish Sea and the Southern Resident’s entire range. They generally stay near southern Vancouver Island and Washington State, but their range can extend as far as the central California coast and southeastern Alaska.  Maintaining an adequate salmon supply will be vital to their survival and well-being of the Salish Sea ecosystem as a whole.

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Sea turtles have been around for at least 110 million years, yet relatively little is known about their evolution. Two of the most common sea turtles on Earth are olive ridley and Kemp’s ridley turtles that belong to a genus called Lepidochelys that could help fill in some of the gaps of sea turtle biology and evolution. A team of paleontologists not only discovered the oldest known fossil of turtle from the Lepidochelys genus, but also found some traces of ancient turtle DNA. The findings are detailed in a study published September 28 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

[Related: 150 million-year-old turtle ‘pancake’ found in Germany.]

The DNA comes from the remains of a turtle shell first uncovered in 2015 in the Chagres Formation on Panama’s Caribbean coast. It represents the oldest known fossil evidence of Lepidochelys turtles. The turtle lived approximately 6 million years ago, curing the upper Miocene Epoch. At this time, present day Panama’s climate was getting cooler and drier, sea ice was accumulating at Earth’s poles, rainfall was decreasing, sea levels were falling.

“The fossil was not complete, but it had enough features to identify it as a member of the Lepidochelys genus,” study co-author and Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia paleontologist Edwin Cadena tells PopSci. Cadena is also a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

The team detected preserved bone cells called osteocytes. These bone cells are the most abundant cells in vertebrates and they have nucleus-like structures. The team used a solution called DAPI to test the osteocytes for genetic material.

“In some of them [the osteocytes], the nuclei were preserved and reacted to DAPI, a solution that allowed us to recognize remains of DNA. This is the first time we have documented DNA remains in a fossilized turtle millions of years old,” says Cadena.

According to the study, fossils like this one from vertebrates preserved in this part of Panama are important for our understanding of the biodiversity that was present when the Isthmus of Panama first emerged roughly 3 million years ago. This narrow strip of land divided the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean and joined North and South America. It created a land bridge that made it easier for some animals and plants to migrate between the two continents.

[Related: Hungry green sea turtles have eaten in the same seagrass meadows for about 3,000 years.]

This specimen could also have important implications for the emerging field of molecular paleontology. Scientists in this field study ancient and prehistoric biomatter including proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and DNA that can sometimes be extracted from fossils. 

Molecular paleontology aims to determine if scientists can use this type of evidence to determine more about the organisms than their physical shape, which is typically what is preserved in most fossils. Extracting this tiny material from bones was critical in sequencing the Neanderthal genome, which earned Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo the 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

“Many generations have grown up with the idea of extracting and bringing back to life extinct organisms,” says Cadena. “However, that is not the real purpose of molecular paleontology. Instead, its goal is to trace, document, and understand how complex biomolecules such as DNA and proteins can be preserved in fossils.”

This new turtle specimen could help other molecular paleontologists better understand how soft tissues can be preserved over time. It could also shift the idea that original biomolecules like proteins or DNA have a specific timeline for preservation in fossils and encourage re-examining older specimens for traces of biomolecules. 

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Sci-fi author Brian Herbert once wrote, “The only guarantee in life is death, and the only guarantee in death is its shocking unpredictability.” These words ring true to researchers who investigate what happens in a person’s final moments—and the frustration that comes with these studies. One big problem almost always gets in the way: How do you ask people what dying feels like when they’re no longer here? 

Because we haven’t yet figured out how to communicate with the dead, the best-case scenario is talking to people who have had a close brush with death. They often mention seeing bright lights, their life flashing before their eyes, or visions of deceased loved ones. Some have even reported spotting the Grim Reaper by their bedside. It’s a paradoxical situation, says Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky: A few perceptions are common—a shining light, for instance—but the near-death experience is unique to each individual.

There’s still a lot of mystery when it comes to the cause, but the field is progressing thanks to people who have allowed scientists to study their brains in these situations. People who have survived these close calls say the encounter can be life-changing. One thing is certain: medical experts say near-death experiences are not a figment of the imagination. 

And figuring out the mechanisms behind this phenomenon goes beyond general curiosity. One goal is to better understand how cardiac arrests happen. It could also potentially save lives, because doctors would have more knowledge for when to continue resuscitations after a patient’s heart stops.

“The research not only benefits our understanding of consciousness, but also in understanding the importance of the heart, lung, and brain in our everyday physiology,” says Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Unreal recall

A near-death experience can happen to anyone. In fact, 1 in 10 people have reported sharper senses, slowed time, out-of-body sensations or other features associated with near-death, despite not being in grave danger. Research shows that near-death experiences come in four types: emotional, cognitive, spiritual and religious experiences, and supernatural. Of the four, people often recall supernatural activity, particularly the feeling of detaching from a physical body.

About 76 percent of people report an out-of-body experience during a near-death experience. While some people may attribute this to a spiritual experience, this is actually a sensory deception caused by the brain, which scientists have successfully replicated in people who are asleep. Research has shown that direct electrical stimulation of a brain area normally inactive in REM sleep can provoke an out-of-body experience. “Like a flip of a switch, you can literally throw somebody out of their body and back into their body,” Nelson says.

[Related: CPR can save lives. Here’s how (and when) to do it.]

Often, though, people with cardiac arrest will recall near-death experiences. “About a quarter of people who suffer and survived cardiac arrest have memories about some aspect of near-death experience, Borjigin says. This is because people with cardiac arrest have decreasing blood pressure, she says. With the heart unable to pump properly, oxygen is unable to travel to the rest of the body, which is essential for every single cell in your body to survive. When a brain is alerted to a sudden decline in oxygen, your brain undergoes certain changes that contribute to the perceptual distortions that accompany a near-death experience. 

Electrical surges in the brain

Ten years ago, Borjigin and her team observed that rats in simulated cardiac arrest still had fully active brains even 30 seconds after their hearts stopped. What’s more, their brains increased in electrical activity. To confirm whether this happens in humans, Borjigin recently tested the brains of four people who were critically ill and removed from life support.

When these comatose patients were taken off their ventilators, they could not breathe on their own. But, using EEGs, Borjigin noticed two people showed a surge in gamma brainwaves as their bodies started shutting down. Gamma brainwaves are usually a sign of consciousness, because they are mostly active when someone is awake and alert. 

“We’ve shown the brain has a unique mechanism that deals with a lack of oxygen because oxygen is so essential for survival that even an acute loss massively activates the brain and could lead to a near-death experience,” Borjigin explains. 

The boost in gamma waves occurred in a brain area called the temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junction. This is responsible for blending information from our senses, including touch, motion, and vision, into our conscious selves. It’s impossible to know if the increased brain activity was related to any visions they may have had, because, sadly, the two patients died. But Borjigin suggests activation of this area suggests people may likely pick up sounds and understand language. “They might hear and perceive the conversation around them and form a visual image in their brain even when their eyes are closed.” 

Hidden consciousness

In one of the largest studies of near-death experiences, an international team of doctors has linked the surge in brain activity to what they called a hidden consciousness immediately following death. In the study, people who were brought back to life through CPR after cardiac arrest could recall memories and conversations while they were seemingly unconscious. 

Between May 2017 and March 2020, the team tracked 567 people who underwent a cardiac arrest. They used EEGs and cerebral oxygenation monitoring to measure electrical activity and brain oxygen levels during CPR. To study auditory and visual awareness, the team used a tablet showing one of 10 images on the screen, and five minutes after, it would play a recording of fruit names: pear, banana, and apple, for another five minutes. 

Only 53 people of the original 567 participants were successfully resuscitated. Initially, they showed no signs of brain activity and were considered dead. But during the CPR, the team noticed bursts of activity. These spikes included gamma waves and others: delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves—all electrical activity that signals consciousness. 

[Related: How your brain conjures dreams]

Twenty-eight of those 53 patients were cognitively capable of having an interview. Eleven people recalled being lucid during CPR, being aware of what was happening or showing perceptions of consciousness like an out-of-body experience. No one could recall the visual image but when asked to randomly name three fruit, one person correctly named all the fruits in the audio recording—though the authors note this could have been a random lucky guess. 

The study authors also included self-reports of 126 other survivors of cardiac arrests not involved in the study and what they remembered from almost dying. Common themes included the pain and pressure of chest compressions, hearing conversations from doctors, out-of-body experiences, and abstract dreams that had nothing to do with the medical event.

The findings debunk the idea that an oxygen-deprived brain stays alive for only five to ten minutes. They also raise the question whether doctors can save people already determined to be dead. “These patients were actually alive within, as seen in the positive waves on the EEG, but externally they were dead,” says Chinwe Ogedegbe, an emergency trauma center section chief and coauthor of the study. 

Beyond the brain’s resilience to the lack of oxygen, the authors propose an alternative “braking system” that could explain the distorted perceptions of consciousness. The brain normally filters and inhibits unneeded information when you’re awake. In this unconscious state, however, the braking system is gone, which could allow dormant brain pathways to activate and access a deeper realm of consciousness containing all of your memory, thoughts, and actions. “Instead of being hallucinatory, illusory or delusional, this appears to facilitate lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality,” the authors write in their paper.

Unfortunately, with only a small number of participants surviving their cardiac arrest, it’s unclear whether this altered consciousness is more visual or auditory. Ogedegbe is working to increase the number of participants in the next trial to 1,500. Doing so will give researchers a better idea of the type of brain activity that goes on when someone is at death’s door, and potentially provide comfort that their loved ones can sense them in their final moments.

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Despite having the critical and even miraculous ingredients to sustain life from microscopic viruses up to big blue whales, planet Earth likely has a future that spells some doom for most, if not all, species of mammals—including humans. A study published September 25 in the journal Nature Geosciences made the bold prediction that in about 250 million years, all of Earth’s major land masses will join together as one. When they do, it could make our planet one extremely hot and almost completely uninhabitable for mammals.

[Related: Mixing volcanic ash with meteorites may have jump-started life on Earth.]

“Widespread temperatures of between 40 to 50 degrees Celsius [104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit], and even greater daily extremes, compounded by high levels of humidity would ultimately seal our fate,” study co-author and University of Bristol paleoclimatologist Alexander Farnsworth said in a statement. “Humans—along with many other species—would expire due to their inability to shed this heat through sweat, cooling their bodies.”

The models in this study predict that CO₂ levels would rise to between 410 parts per million and 816 parts per million in a few million years This is roughly the same as today’s level, which is already pushing the planet into dangerously hot water, or up to twice as high.

“They do explain quite nicely that it’s a combination of both those factors, kind of a double whammy situation,” geophysicist Ross Mitchell of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study, told Science magazine. “If there’s any disagreement I have with this paper, it’s that they’re more right than they thought they were.”

This prediction aligns well with Earth’s past periods of mass extinction and the volatile history of our planet. Here are some other times that mammalian and human life on Earth was almost completely wiped out.

The Pleistocene Ancestral Bottleneck

About 800,000 to 900,000 years ago, the population of human ancestors drastically dropped. A study published in August estimates that there were only about 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene. About 98.7 percent of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of this ancestral bottleneck that lasted for roughly 117,000 years.

During this time, modern humans spread outside of the African continents and other early human species like Neanderthals began to go extinct. The Australian continent and the Americas also saw humans for the first time and the climate was generally cold. 

Some of the potential reasons behind this population drop are mostly related to extremes in climate. Temperatures changed, severe droughts persisted, and food sources may have dwindled as animals like mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths went extinct. According to the study, an estimated 65.85 percent of current genetic diversity may have been lost due to this bottleneck.

[Related: We’re one step closer to identifying the first-ever mammals.]

The Great Dying

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 66 million years ago.

According to a study published in May, saber-toothed creature called Inostrancevia filled a gap in southern Pangea’s ecosystem, when it was already devoid of top predators. Eventually, Inostrancevia also went extinct about 252 million years ago, as Earth’s species fought to gain a foothold on a changing planet. 

This example of how the past is prologue 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,” study co-author museum curator and paleontologist Christian Kammerer told PopSci in May. “[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.”

The Ultimate Mammalian Survivor

Despite Earth constantly trying to kill us, life finds a way. Some of our very early ancestors potentially even shared a brief moment with Titanosaurs and the iconic Triceratops. These distant mammalian relatives also survived the Earth’s most famous mass extinction event: the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs on a spring day about 66 million years ago.

[Related: This badger-like mammal may have died while trying to eat a dinosaur.]

A study published in June revealed that a Cretaceous origin for placental mammals, the diverse group that includes humans, dogs, and bats, briefly co-existed with dinosaurs. After an asteroid struck the Earth near Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the devastation in its wake wiped out all of the non-avian dinosaurs and many mammals, such as a Madagascan rodent-looking animal named Vintana sertichi  that weighed up to 20 pounds Scientists have long debated if placental mammals were present with the dinosaurs before the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction, or if they only evolved after the dinosaurs died out. 

This study used statistical analysis that showed groups that include primates, rabbits and hares (Lagomorpha), and dogs and cats (Carnivora) evolved just before the K-Pg mass extinction and the impact that the modern lines of today’s placental mammals started to take shape after the asteroid hit. As with other mammals, they likely began to diversify once the dinosaurs were out of the picture.

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Solar sails that leverage the sun’s photonic rays for “wind” are no longer the stuff of science fiction—in fact, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 practical demonstration was deemed a Grand Award Winner for PopSci’s Best of What’s New in 2019. And while countless projects continue to explore what solar sails could hold for the future of space travel, a new study demonstrates just how promising the technology could be for excursions to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, and beyond.

According to a paper recently submitted to the journal Acta Astronautica, detailed computer simulations show tiny, incredibly lightweight solar sails made with aerographite could travel to Mars in just 26 days—compare that to conventional rocketry time estimates of between 7-to-9 months. Meanwhile, a journey to the heliopause (the demarcation line for interstellar space where the sun’s magnetic forces cease to influence objects) could take between 4.2 and 5.3 years. For comparison, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes took a respective 35 and 41 years to reach the same boundary.

[Related: This novel solar sail could make it easier for NASA to stare into the sun.]

The key to such speedy trips is the 1 kg solar sails’ 720g of aerographite—an ultra-lightweight material with four times less density than most solar sail designs’ Mylar components. The major caveat to these simulations is that they involved an extremely miniscule payload weight, something that will most often not be the case for major interplanetary and interstellar journeys.

“Solar sail propulsion has the potential for rapid delivery of small payloads (sub-kilogram) throughout the solar system,” René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and study co-author, explained to Universe Today earlier this month. “Compared to conventional chemical propulsion, which can bring hundreds of tons of payload to low-Earth orbit and deliver a large fraction of that to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, this sounds ridiculously small. But the key value of solar sail technology is speed.”

Another issue still that still needs addressing is deceleration methods needed upon actually reaching a destination. Although aerocapture—using a planet’s atmosphere to reduce velocity—is a possible option, researchers concede more investigation will be needed to determine the best, most efficient way to actually stop at a solar sail-equipped spacecraft’s intended endpoint. Regardless, the study only adds even more wind in the sails (so to speak) for the impressive interstellar travel method.

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Most nutritionists advise people to “eat the rainbow” to balance their diet—think greens like kale, purples like eggplant, reds like tomatoes.  Consuming nutritious and naturally occuring orange foods like carrots packed with vitamin A, fiber, antioxidants, and pigments called carotenoids is a must to get a full and healthy spectrum. Carotenoids even got their name because they were first isolated from carrots.  But what is exactly behind the bright hue of some of our favorite carrots? Only three specific genes are required to give orange carrots their signature color, according to a study published September 28 in the journal Nature Plants.

[Related: Carrots were once a crucial tool in anti-Nazi propaganda.]

In the study, a team from North Carolina State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at the genetic blueprints of more than 600 varieties of carrots. Surprisingly, they found that these three required genes all need to be recessive, or turned off.

“Normally, to make some function, you need genes to be turned on,” study co-author and North Carolina State University horticultural scientist Massimo Iorizzo said in a statement.  “In the case of the orange carrot, the genes that regulate orange carotenoids—the precursor of vitamin A that have been shown to provide health benefits—need to be turned off,” Iorizzo said. 

In 2016, this team sequenced the carrot genome for the first time and also uncovered the gene involved in the pigmentation of yellow carrot. For this new study, they sequenced 630 carrot genomes as part of a continuing study on the history and domestication of the crunchy root veggie.

The team performed selective sweeps, or structural analyses among five different carrot groups. During these sweeps, they looked for areas of the genome that are heavily selected in certain groups. They found that many of the genes involved in flowering were under selection, primarily to delay the flowering process. This event causes the edible root that we eat called the taproot to turn woody and inedible. 

“We found many genes involved in flowering regulation that were selected in multiple populations in orange carrot[s], likely to adapt to different geographic regions,” said Iorizzo. 

Additionally, the study created a general timeline of carrot domestication and found more evidence that carrots were domesticated in the 9th or 10th century CE in western and central Asia. 

“Purple carrots were common in central Asia along with yellow carrots. Both were brought to Europe, but yellow carrots were more popular, likely due to their taste,” said Iorizzo.

[Related: WTF are purple carrots and where did they come from?]

In about the 15th or 16th century, orange carrots made their appearance in western Europe, potentially as the result of crossing a yellow carrot with a white one. The bright color and sweet flavor of orange carrots likely made it more popular than other varieties, so farmers continued selecting for them. In northern Europe, different types of orange carrots were developed in the 16th and 17th centuries and orange carrots of various shades can be seen in paintings from that area. They continued to grow in popularity as more understanding about the importance of alpha- and beta-carotenes and vitamin A in the diet for eye health progressed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The findings in this study shed more light on the traits that are important to improving carrots and could lead to better health benefits from the nutritious vegetable.

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One of the most enduring mysteries about our earliest ancestors and extinct human relatives is how they ate and procured enough food to sustain themselves millions of years ago. We believe that archery first arrived in Europe about 54,000 years ago and Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab about 90,000 years ago, but scavenging was likely necessary to get a truly hearty meal. A modeling study published September 28 in the journal Scientific Reports found that groups of hominins roughly 1.2 to 0.8 million years ago in southern Europe may have been able to compete with giant hyenas for carcasses of animals abandoned by larger predators like saber-toothed cats.

[Related: An ‘ancestral bottleneck’ took out nearly 99 percent of the human population 800,000 years ago.]

Earlier research has theorized that the number of carcasses abandoned by saber-toothed cats may have been enough to sustain some of southern Europe’s early hominin populations. However, it’s been unclear if competition from giant hyenas (Pachycrocuta brevirostris) would have limited hominin access to this food source. These extinct mongoose relatives were about 240 pounds–roughly the size of a lioness–and went extinct about 500,000 years ago. 

“There is a hot scientific debate about the role of scavenging as a relevant food procurement strategy for early humans,” paleontologist and study co-author Jesús Rodríguez from the National Research Center On Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain tells PopSci. “Most of the debate is based on the interpretation of the scarce and fragmentary evidence provided by the archaeological record. Without denying that the archaeological evidence should be considered the strongest argument to solve the question, our intention was to provide elements to the debate from a different perspective.”

For this study, Rodríguez and co-author Ana Mateos looked at the Iberian Peninsula in the late-early Pleistocene era. They ran computer simulations to model competition for carrion–the flesh of dead animals–between hominins and giant hyenas in what is now Spain and Portugal. They simulated whether saber-toothed cats and the European jaguar could have left enough carrion behind to support both hyena and hominin populations—and how this may have been affected by the size of scavenging groups of hominins. 

They found that when hominins scavenged in groups of five or more, these groups could have been large enough to chase away giant hyenas. The hominin populations also exceeded giant hyena populations by the end of these simulations. However, when the hominins scavenged in very small groups, they could only survive to the end of the simulation when the predator density was high, which resulted in more carcasses to scavenge.  

[Related: Mysterious skull points to a possible new branch on human family tree.]

According to their simulations, the potential optimum group size for scavenging hominins was just over 10 individuals. This size was large enough to chase away saber-toothed cats and jaguars. However, groups of more than 13 individuals would have likely required more carcasses to sustain their energy expenditure. The authors caution that their simulations couldn’t specify this exact “just right” group size, since the numbers of hominins needed to chase away hyenas, saber-toothed cats, and jaguars were pre-determined and arbitrarily assigned.

“The simulations may not determine the exact value of the optimum, but show that it exists and depends on the number of hominins necessary to chase away the hyenas and of the size of the carcasses,” says Rodríguez.

Scavenged remains may have been an important source of meat and fat for hominins, especially in winter when plant resources were scarce. This team is working on simulating the opportunities hominins had for scavenging in different ecological scenarios in an effort to change a view that scavenging is marginal and that hunting is a more “advanced” and more “human” behavior than scavenging. 

“The word for scavenger in Spanish is ‘carroñero.’ It has a negative connotation, and is frequently used as an insult. We do not share that view,” says Rodríguez. “Scavengers play a very important role in ecosystems, as evidenced by the ecological literature in the last decades. We view scavenging as a product of the behavioral flexibility and cooperative abilities of the early hominins.”

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In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between.

OUR SENSES ARE FALLIBLE. Our eyes can be fooled by everything from mirages to pictures of dresses that may or may not be blue and black (or white and gold), our ears by “endlessly rising” tones and “speaking” noise, and our sense of smell by…wait, can you come up with an olfactory illusion? If not, well, you’re not alone, because some scientists doubt that they exist at all.

Perhaps you’re thinking of “smelling” smoke when there is none in your environment. That would be a hallucination, not an illusion. The generally accepted distinction is that an illusion represents a misinterpretation of a stimulus, while a hallucination involves no stimulus at all. 

“The notion of olfactory illusions is not something that resonates with us,” Clare Batty, a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky, wrote in 2010. Her paper “What the Nose Doesn’t Know” caused quite a stir among her peers at the time for arguing that there are no olfactory illusions at all—only hallucinations. 

Batty’s paper approached the sense of smell from a philosophical point of view, exploring how one of the things that seems to distinguish smell from other senses is that it “fails to exhibit a kind of organization” because “it’s not the case that particular objects are represented. It’s really easy for me to see that phone on my desk and know I’m seeing my phone, not any old phone.” 

Scent, she argued, does not make the same distinction: “We can get that there’s something or other out there: coffee, say.” But whereas sight and hearing identify and locate that object—we see a cup of coffee in front of us over here, or hear the pot boiling on the stove over there—Batty says that smell does not offer the same clues. In fact, you would have to move around and sniff in several locations before discovering the source of the fresh-brewed aroma. 

In the paper, Batty argued that illusions arise from misidentification or misinterpretation of specific objects—and thus, “if olfactory experience doesn’t give us objects at all, then, by definition, it can’t present illusions.” It’s important to note that this argument doesn’t extend to phenomena induced by actual physical damage to the brain or olfactory organs: For example, right temporal hemorrhages can cause both olfactory illusions and olfactory hallucinations. But an uninjured brain would be tough to trick with scents. 

One of the sources for Batty’s paper was a book by veteran olfactory researcher Richard Stevenson of the University of Queensland. In 2011, Stevenson responded to Batty’s paper with one of his own, entitled “Olfactory Illusions: Where Are They?” (“He’s a big guy [in the field],” Batty laughs. “So that was scary. And an honor.”) Stevenson took a more empirical approach, presenting several examples of smell-based phenomena that he thought did qualify as illusions. One example comes from experiments involving the compound dihydromyrcenal—participants described its smell as more “woody” when combined with citrusy scents, and more citrusy when smelled with “woody” odors.

Today, both Batty and Stevenson agree that their difference is ultimately one of interpretation. Batty says, “I wouldn’t think that we would disagree about the nature of experience.” For his part, Stevenson says, “We may not be as far apart as it seems. There is clearly a difference between the experience of illusions in vision, where you can have full awareness of the fact you are experiencing an illusion, and in olfaction…[where such awareness] is rare. The critical bit with illusions is being able to know or appreciate that you are having one. This is not generally self-evident [with scent]. You have to have some knowledge of the chemical senses to appreciate this.” 

So why is our interpretation of scent so different from that of, say, vision? Stevenson explains that smell is one of the three “chemical senses.” The others are taste, which detects the sweetness, saltiness, sourness, bitterness, and savoriness of food, and the trigeminal sense, which logs sensations such as the cooling effects of menthol or the heat in a spoonful of chilli. “The stimulus,” he explains, “is very different for the chemical senses, and so this imposes limitations [and] differences relative to vision and audition. The most obvious one is that you have direct contact with the ‘thing’ (i.e., chemical) and then have to rid yourself of it. There are [also] some profound neuroanatomical differences [between chemical and non-chemical senses], and interesting psychological manifestations of these processing differences.” 

Whether the fundamental difference in nature between these types of senses influences their relationship to illusions remains unclear. This is largely because, as both Batty and Stevenson agree, smell remains relatively underexplored as a topic for research. As Batty explains, “We don’t rely on scent as much [as on the other senses], so we don’t investigate it as much, so we don’t know about it as much. … It’s self-fulfilling, to an extent.” Stevenson agrees: “It’s a dusty corner of a back room of science.”

Nevertheless, over the last three years, an oft-reported COVID symptom—the loss of smell and taste—has thrown open the curtains of that back room. “People experience a sense of disassociation…like, ‘I’m cut off from the world,’” says Batty. Has this new awareness of the importance of our sense of smell led to more resources being available for studying its mechanisms and lack of illusions? “I’d love to say it had,” Stevenson sighs, “but I don’t see any money coming my way to investigate these things.” 

For her part, Batty remains actively involved in the area—she is preparing for a conference of olfactory researchers when we speak. “I’ve never met [Stevenson],” she says, “but I think the olfactory domain is one of the places where there’s the best kind of dialogue between [philosophers and scientists].”

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Earthquakes occur along fractures, or faults, in the earth’s crust. When one of these cracks in the ground suddenly moves, it can cause a quake. And sometimes a quake at one fault can trigger activity at another, creating one large earthquake—or multiple in quick succession.

Researchers have linked two faults in the Seattle area, and they’ve discovered this geologic duo was responsible for an earth-shifting event more than a millennium ago. In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed old tree samples from Washington’s Puget Sound region. This paper is one of the few to link the Seattle fault with the Saddle Mountain fault, and the authors say that current hazard models need to be updated to include this data. While experts say residents of the Seattle area don’t need to be particularly alarmed by these findings, this paper is a reminder to be aware of the area’s earthquake risks.

Quakes can set off landslides that uproot trees or tsunamis that drown them. “If those trees are preserved, you can go back and work with them and find out exactly when they died and thus when the earthquake occurred,” says lead study author Bryan Black, a dendrochronologist at the University of Arizona. 

Radiocarbon dating showed these dead trees were more than 1,100 years old. Using dendrochronology, the science of analyzing tree rings, the team confirmed that between 923 and 924 CE two faults in the Seattle area produced either one large earthquake of magnitude 7.8, or two sequential earthquakes of slightly lower magnitude. By deciphering the tree rings, Black managed to determine that trees killed near the Seattle fault died around the same time as trees killed near the Saddle Mountain fault. “I could narrow things down and know that this was sometime during the Douglas fir dormant season of 923 to 924, in about a six-month window,” Black says.

[Related: Why most countries don’t have enough earthquake-resilient buildings]

There were two possible scenarios for how this all went down: Either this was one big earthquake that ruptured two separate faults. Or these were two separate earthquakes, with one triggering the other on different faults. “We estimated that the multi-fault earthquake, the one large earthquake scenario, is about three times as likely as the two-earthquake scenario,” says Morgan Page, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey, and a co-author of the paper. 

It’s not unusual that faults can influence each other to create larger earthquakes. In February this year, Turkey experienced two devastating earthquakes from separate faults in short succession, followed by dozens of damaging aftershocks. In 2016 New Zealand experienced a series of quakes that ruptured at least 21 different faults. 

This new finding may lead agencies to recalibrate their hazard models. (Faults are considered potential earthquake sources if they have been active within the past 1.6 million years.) When thinking about risk, it’s important to consider the upper limits for what is possible, says Corina Allen, chief hazards geologist at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. If these faults together produced a magnitude 7.8 earthquake 1,100 years ago—which is not that long ago on a geological time scale—they may want to calculate how a similar earthquake might play out today, she says. 

[Related: Earthquakes can cause serious psychological aftershocks]

It will be especially important for governments at state and local levels to update their models, but individuals should also have plans in mind in case of a large earthquake. Allen says best calculations suggest that there’s a 10 to 15 percent chance of a really big earthquake in Washington—of magnitude 9.0 or higher—within the next 50 years. If you plan for a large quake, she adds, you’ll also be prepared for the ones that are “smaller and more likely.”

While this paper’s discoveries may feel like bad news, it’s really a reminder that earthquakes pose a perennial hazard along the West Coast, Page says. Lots of urban centers are clustered around faults that are only likely to produce earthquakes of small or moderate magnitude. But because of the presence of buildings and people, those can be more devastating than larger earthquakes in remote areas, she says. Rather than focusing only on “the big one,” it’s important to think about the small or moderate earthquakes that could happen underneath you. In a quake-prone area, have food and water on hand, secure your home’s heavy objects, and know what you need to do to protect yourself.

The best thing we can all do is be aware that the risks exist and are not going away, says Allen. Even if we can’t pin down a timeline for the next quake—“geology doesn’t work like clockwork,” Allen notes—we’re always learning more. 

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The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe. On Earth, radio signals from the furthest depths of space are obscured by the atmosphere, alongside humanity’s own electronic chatter, but the lunar far side has none of these issues. Because of this, establishing an observation point there could allow for unimpeded views of some of cosmic history’s earliest moments—particularly a 400 million year stretch known as the universe’s Dark Ages when early plasma cooled enough to begin forming the  protons and electrons that eventually made hydrogen.

After years of development and testing, just such an observation station could come online as soon as 2026, in part thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

[Related: Watch a rocket engine ignite in ultra-slow motion.]

The team is currently working alongside NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the University of Minnesota on a pathfinder project called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night). The radio telescope is on track to launch atop Blue Ghost, private space company Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, as part of the company’s second moon excursion. Once in position, Blue Ghost will detach from Firefly’s Elytra space vehicle, then travel down to the furthest site ever reached on the moon’s dark side. 

“If you’re on the far side of the moon, you have a pristine, radio-quiet environment from which you can try to detect this signal from the Dark Ages,” Kaja Rotermund, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a September 26 project update. “LuSEE-Night is a mission showing whether we can make these kinds of observations from a location that we’ve never been in, and also for a frequency range that we’ve never been able to observe.”

More specifically, LuSEE-Night will be equipped with specialized antennae designed by the Berkeley Lab team to listen between 0.5 and 50 megahertz. To accomplish this, both the antennae and its Blue Ghost transport will need to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures experienced on the moon’s far side, which can span between -280 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its shielded lunar location, however, LuSEE-Night will also need to beam its findings up to an orbiting satellite that will then transfer the information back to Earth.

“The engineering to land a scientific instrument on the far side of the moon alone is a huge accomplishment,” explained Berkeley Lab’s antenna project lead, Aritoki Suzuki, in the recent update. “If we can demonstrate that this is possible—that we can get there, deploy, and survive the night—that can open up the field for the community and future experiments.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could provide data from the little known Dark Ages, which breaks up other observable eras such as some of the universe’s earliest moments, as well as more recent moments after stars began to form.

According to Berkeley Lab, the team recently completed a successful technical review, and is currently working on constructing the flight model meant for the moon. Once landed, LuSEE-Night will peer out into the Dark Age vastness for about 18 months beginning in 2026. 

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Albert Einstein didn’t know about the existence of antimatter when he came up with the theory of general relativity, which has governed our understanding of gravity ever since. More than a century later, scientists are still debating how gravity affects antimatter, the elusive mirror versions of the particles that abide within us and around us. In other words, does an antimatter droplet fall down or up? 

Common physics wisdom holds that it should fall down. A tenet of general relativity itself known as the weak equivalence principle implies that gravity shouldn’t care whether something is matter or antimatter. At the same time, a small contingent of experts argue that antimatter falling up might explain, for instance, the mystical dark energy that potentially dominates our universe.

“Everything about antimatter is challenging,” says Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and a member of the ALPHA group. “It just really sucks to have to work with it.”

Adding to the challenge, gravity is extremely weak on the microscopic scale of atoms and subatomic particles. As early as the 1960s, physicists first thought about measuring gravity’s effects on positrons, or anti-electrons, which have positive rather than negative electric charge. Alas, that same electric charge makes positrons susceptible to tiny electric fields—and electromagnetism eclipses gravity’s force.

So, to properly test gravity’s influence on antimatter, researchers needed a neutral particle. The only “one of the horizon” was the antihydrogen atom, says Joel Fajans, a physicist at UC Berkeley and another member of the ALPHA group.

Antihydrogen is the first, most fundamental element of the anti-periodic table. Just as the garden-variety hydrogen atom consists of one proton and one electron, the basic antihydrogen atom consists of one negatively charged antiproton and an orbiting positron. Physicists only created antihydrogen atoms in the 1990s; they couldn’t trap and store some until 2010.

“We had to learn how to make it, and then we had to learn how to hold onto it, and then we had to learn how to interact with it, and so on,” says Hangst.

Once they overcame those hurdles, they were finally able to study antihydrogen’s properties—such as its behavior under gravity. For the new paper, the ALPHA group designed  a vertical vacuum chamber around a vertical tube devoid of any matter to prevent the antihydrogen from annihilating prematurely. Scientists wrapped part of the tube inside a superconducting magnetic “bottle,” creating a magnetic field that locked the antihydrogen in place until they needed to use it.

Building this apparatus took years on end. “We spent hundreds of hours just studying the magnetic field without using antimatter at all to convince ourselves that we knew what we were doing,” says Hangst. To produce a magnetic field strong enough to hold the antihydrogen, they had to keep the device chilled at -452 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The ALPHA group then dialed down the magnetic field to open the top and bottom of the bottle, and let the antihydrogen atoms loose until they crashed into the tube’s wall. They measured where those atomic deaths happened: above or under the position the antimatter was held in. Some 80 percent of atoms fell a few centimeters below the trap, in line with what a cloud of regular hydrogen atoms would do in the same setup. (The other 20 percent simply popped out.)

For instance, when the authors of the Nature study computed how rapidly the antihydrogen atoms accelerated downward with gravity, they found it was 75 percent of the rate physicists would expect for regular hydrogen atoms. But they expect the discrepancy to fade when they repeat these observations to find a more precise result. “This number and these uncertainties are essentially consistent with our best expectation for what gravity would have looked like in our experiment,” says William Bertsche, a physicist at the University of Manchester and another member of the ALPHA group.

But it’s also possible that gravity influences matter and antimatter in different ways. Such an anomaly would throw the weak equivalence principle—and, by extension, general relativity as a whole—into doubt.

“Any difference that you find between hydrogen and antihydrogen would be an extremely important clue to the baryogenesis problem,” says Fajans.

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About 465 million years ago, a now extinct arthropod called a trilobite was eating its way across the present day Czech Republic. After it died, the passage of time actually preserved the plentiful contents of this specimen’s prehistoric guts. A team of paleontologists is using this full fossilized belly to learn more about the feeding habits and lifestyle of these common fossilized arthropods. The findings are detailed in a study published September 27 in the journal Nature.

[Related: Trilobites may have jousted with head ‘tridents’ to win mates.]

More than 20,000 species of trilobite lived during the early Cambrian to the end-Permian period roughly 541 to 252 million years ago. They are some of the most common fossil specimens from this time period, yet paleontologists do not know much about their feeding habits since gut contents usually disappear over time, and until recently there were no known fossil specimens with them intact.

In the study, a team from institutions in Sweden and the Czech Republic examined a fossil specimen of Bohemolichas incola first uncovered near Prague over 100 years ago. Study co-author and paleontologist Petr Kraft from Charles University in Prague had long suspected that this specimen may have a gut full of food intact, but did not have a suitable technique to look inside the trilobite’s innards. Study co-authors and paleontologists Valéria Vaskaninova and Per Ahlberg from Uppsala University in Sweden suggested using a synchrotron in one of their fossil scanning sessions. This machine is a large electron accelerator that produces powerful laser-like x-rays to take high-quality scans of the fossil

“The results were fantastic, showing all the gut contents in detail so that we could identify what the trilobite had been eating,” Ahlberg tells PopSci. “Remains of ostracods (small shell-bearing crustaceans, still around today), hyoliths (extinct cone-shaped animals of uncertain affinities) and stylophorans (extinct echinoderms that look like little armor-plated electric guitars). These are all kinds of animals that lived in the local environment.”

The team believes that Bohemolichas incola was likely an opportunistic scavenger. It also was potentially a light crusher and a chance feeder, which means that it ate both dead or living animals, which either disintegrated easily or were actually small enough to be swallowed whole. However, after this particular Bohemolichas incola died, the circle of life continued and the scavenger became the scavenged. Vertical tracks of other scavengers were found on the specimen. These unknown creatures burrowed into this trilobite’s carcass and targeted its soft tissue, but avoided its gut. Staying away from the gut implies that there were some noxious conditions inside Bohemolichas incola’s digestive system and potentially ongoing enzymatic activity.

[Related: These ancient trilobites are forever frozen in a conga line.]

“We were able to draw conclusions about the chemical environment inside the gut of the living trilobite. The shell fragments on the gut have not been etched by stomach acids, and this shows that the gut pH must have been close to neutral, similar to the condition in modern crabs and horseshoe crabs,” says Ahlberg. “This may indeed be a very ancient shared characteristic of trilobites and these modern arthropods.”

Future studies into trilobites could use similar techniques to look for more gut fills. Since this group is a very diverse group of animals, it can’t be assumed that this particular species is representative of the feeding habits for all. 

“This project shows how cutting-edge technology can come together with really old museum specimens. The trilobite was collected in 1908, and has been in a museum ever since, but it is only now that we have the technology to unlock its secrets,” says Ahlberg. “This illustrates not only the rapid technological progress of our time, but also the importance of well-maintained museum collections.”

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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: Curly hair may have evolved to keep our heads cool

By Rachel Feltman

As a certified Curly Girl, I’ve always been fascinated by the different shapes human hair can take. But for most of modern history, science has woefully neglected the study of curly and tightly-coiled hair. Thankfully that’s starting to change, due in large part to the curiosity-driven research and advocacy of Dr. Tina Lasisi. You can read more about Lasisi and her work on the morphology and evolution of human hair here, in an awesome article by PopSci alum Hannah Seo. 

On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I dig into the findings of one of Lasisi’s most intriguing studies. In 2021, she and her colleagues were able to demonstrate that curls help keep our heads cool. Humans evolved to rely on thermoregulation from sweat, which uses evaporative cooling. But our big ol’ brains are prone to overheating, so in a perfect world, we don’t want them getting hot enough to produce sweat in the first place. That’s likely why we kept the fur on our heads while losing almost all the rest of it, which makes us look pretty bizarre lined up with other mammals and even other apes. Hair can block the radiant heat of the sun, thereby preventing it from scorching up our scalps and cooking our noggins. 

Here’s the problem: While hair does physically block sunlight from hitting our heads, it also serves as insulation, trapping any heat that makes it through. 

Because tighter curls tend to correspond with areas with higher UV exposure, globally speaking, Lasisi and her colleagues decided to test whether coils and ringlets did a better job of keeping heads cool than straight hair. They tested this using a delightfully odd looking setup involving mannequins with glamorous wigs and power cords plugged into their eye sockets. 

Sure enough, they found that wavy hair kept heads cooler than straight hair, while tighter cools provided the greatest cooling effect at all. And having any kind of hair was better than being bald, in terms of the sun’s ability to sizzle the skin atop your skull. 

Lasisi and her colleagues think that curls create a sort of spongy effect, allowing air to circulate freely and keeping heat from getting trapped there. Listen to this week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week to hear more interesting facts about the evolution of curls and coils.

FACT: Turkey Vultures projectile vomit in self defense

By Liz Clayton Fuller

Turkey Vultures are one of the heroes of the bird world. Often misunderstood, these incredible birds perform a service to society by eating carrion, the decaying flesh of dead animals. Carrion can carry (see what I did there) all kinds of toxins and diseases like anthrax, tuberculosis, and even rabies. Incredibly, Turkey Vultures can ingest all of the aforementioned contaminants unharmed because their stomachs are so highly acidic! The acidity of their stomachs makes their projectile vomiting strategy particularly effective. While consuming their carrion prey they stay nice and clean by having bald heads with no feathers and huge nostrils so that no bits of carrion get stuck to them. They also engage in a practice called “urohidrosis” which is where an animal urinates on itself in order to cool down when it gets hot out, so Turkey Vultures have certainly earned their reputation for being a little nasty—but still amazing.

So Turkey Vultures perform this incredible service to humanity by cleaning up carrion, but how do they find the carrion to take care of? Turkey Vultures have the largest and most powerful olfactory system in the bird world which helps them find their (already deceased) prey. Their sense of smell can lead them to carcasses miles away and in fact many other Vultures rely on Turkey Vultures to locate carrion and then they follow them to it! As for what kind of carrion is on the menu, they prefer freshly dead meat. It is a common misconception that Turkey Vultures stalk and kill their prey, but they only arrive after their prey is deceased. Other than the common denominator of being freshly dead, Turkey Vultures aren’t picky at all. In Tennessee alone I’ve seen them on the clean up crew of Armadillos, Skunks, Cow, Deer, Groundhogs, and more. So next time you see a Turkey Vulture soaring by, tell them thank you for being nature’s clean up crew!

Fact: Renegade Zambian astronauts tried to beat Americans to the moon

By Purbita Saha

In 1964 the world was buzzing about the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. But a feature in Time magazine brought forth a new contender: Zambia, a southern African country that had recently won independence from the British. In the article, a science teacher named Edward Makuka Nkoloso shared that he was training a team of 12 astronauts to catapult his nation to the surface of the moon. No, they weren’t literally building a space catapult—they had a claustrophobic barrel-shaped rocket—but the candidates were learning to walk on their hands because that’s how Nkoloso thought they would have to navigate inhospitable lunar terrain. Ultimately, the teacher settled on a crew of a teenage girl, a missionary, two cats, and his own dog, Cyclops. But without any funding, Nkoloso’s dream to send his country folk beyond Earth’s orbit fizzled into legend. No one could ever confirm if his endeavor was genuine or an attention-grabbing stunt—a 2014 short film called The Afronauts reimagines it as pure fiction.

Maybe Nkoloso would be proud of his region’s emerging importance in astronomy today. From the MeerKAT radio array to the Africa Millimeter Telescope, multinational teams of scientists are finding never-before-seen wonders in the stars, all thanks to the clear skies of southern Africa. If nothing else, the proud Zambian who was interviewed by Time more than 60 years ago had a vision for the future.

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The natural circles that pop up on the soil in the planet’s arid regions are an enduring scientific debate and mystery. These “fairy circles” are circular patterns of bare soil surrounded by plants and vegetation. Until very recently, the unique phenomena have only been described in the vast Namib desert and the Australian outback. While their origins and distribution are hotly debated, a study with satellite imagery published on September 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates that fairy circles may be more common than once realized. They are potentially found in 15 countries across three continents and in 263 different sites. 

[Related: A new study explains the origin of mysterious ‘fairy circles’ in the desert.]

These soil shapes occur in arid areas of the Earth, where nutrients and water are generally scarce. Their signature circular pattern and hexagonal shape is believed to be the best way that the plants have found to survive in that landscape. Ecologist Ken Tinsly observed the circles in Namibia in 1971, and the story goes that he borrowed the name fairy circles from a naturally occurring ring of mushrooms that are generally found in Europe.

By 2017, Australian researchers found the debated western desert fairy circles, and proposed that the mechanisms of biological self-organization and pattern formation proposed by mathematician Alan Turing were behind them. In the same year, Aboriginal knowledge linked those fairy circles to a species of termites. This “termite theory” of fairy circle origin continues to be a focus of research—a team from the University of Hamburg in Germany published a study seeming to confirm that termites are behind these circles in July.

In this new study, a team of researchers from Spain used artificial intelligence-based models to look at the fairy circles from Australia and Namibia and directed it to look for similar patterns. The AI scoured the images for months and expanded the areas where these fairy circles could exist. These locations include the circles in Namibia, Western Australia, the western Sahara Desert, the Sahel region that separates the African savanna from the Sahara Desert, the Horn of Africa to the East, the island of Madagascar, southwestern Asia, and Central Australia.

The team then crossed-checked the results of the AI system with a different AI program trained to study the environments and ecology of arid areas to find out what factors govern the appearance of these circular patterns. 

“Our study provides evidence that fairy-circle[s] are far more common than previously thought, which has allowed us, for the first time, to globally understand the factors affecting their distribution,” study co-author and Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville soil ecologist Manuel Delgado Baquerizo said in a statement. 

[Related: The scientific explanation behind underwater ‘Fairy Circles.’]

According to the team, these circles generally appear in arid regions where the soil is mainly sandy, there is water scarcity, annual rainfall is between 4 to 12 inches, and low nutrient continent in the soil.

“Analyzing their effects on the functioning of ecosystems and discovering the environmental factors that determine their distribution is essential to better understand the causes of the formation of these vegetation patterns and their ecological importance,” study co-author and  University of Alicante data scientist Emilio Guirado said in a statement. 

More research is needed to determine the role of insects like termites in fairy circle formation, but Guirado told El País that “their global importance is low,” and that they may play an important role in local cases like those in Namibia, “but there are other factors that are even more important.”

The images are now included in a global atlas of fairy circles and a database that could help determine if these patterns demonstrate resilience to climate change. 

“We hope that the unpublished data will be useful for those interested in comparing the dynamic behavior of these patterns with others present in arid areas around the world,” said Guirado.

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In nature, patterns of chemical interactions between two different substances are believed to govern the designs our eyes see—for example, a zebra’s stripes. These stripey designs are governed by a mathematical basis that is potentially overseeing another completely unrelated thing—the wavy patterns formed by sperm’s motion. According to a study published September 27 in the journal Nature Communications, the same mathematical theory could traverse both.

[Related: Monarch butterflies’ signature color patterns could inspire better drone design.]

To understand the connection, we need to go back more than 70 years. The wavy undulations of a sperm’s tail—or flagella—make striped patterns in space-time. These patterns potentially follow the same template proposed by mathematician Alan Turing, one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. Turing is most well-known for helping crack the enigma code during World War II and ushering in a new age of computer science, but he also developed a theory informally called the reaction-diffusion theory for pattern formation. This 1952 theory predicted that recognizable patterns in nature may appear spontaneously when chemicals within the objects or organisms diffuse and then react together.

While this theory hasn’t been well proven by experimental evidence, Turing’s theory sparked more research into using reaction-diffusion mathematics as a way to understand natural patterns. These so-called Turing patterns are believed to govern leopard spots, whorls of seeds in sunflower heads, and even patterns of sand on the beach. 

In this new study, a team from the University of Bristol in England used Turing patterns as a way to look at the movement of sperm’s flagella and vibrating hair-like cells called cilia. 

“Live spontaneous motion of flagella and cilia is observed everywhere in nature, but little is known about how they are orchestrated,” study co-author and mathematician Hermes Gadêlha said in a statement. “They are critical in health and disease, reproduction, evolution, and survivorship of almost every aquatic microorganism [on] earth.”

Flagellar undulations are believed to make stripe patterns in space-time, in the form of the waves that travel along the tail to drive the sperm forward when it is in fluid. To look deeper, Gadêlha and his team used mathematical modeling, simulations, and data fitting to show that wavy flagellar movement can actually arise spontaneously without the influence of the fluid in their environment. According to the team, this is mathematically equivalent to Turing’s reaction-diffusion system that was first proposed for chemical patterns over 70 years ago.

For the swimming sperm, chemical reactions of molecular motors power its tail and the bending movement diffuses along the tail in waves. The fluid itself is playing a very minor role on how the tail moves.

[Related: The genes behind your fingerprints just got weirder.]

“We show that this mathematical ‘recipe’ is followed by two very distant species—bull sperm and Chlamydomonas (a green algae that is used as a model organism across science), suggesting that nature replicates similar solutions,” said Gadêlha. “Traveling waves emerge spontaneously even when the flagellum is uninfluenced by the surrounding fluid. This means that the flagellum has a fool-proof mechanism to enable swimming in low viscosity environments, which would otherwise be impossible for aquatic species. It is the first time that model simulations compare well with experimental data.”

The findings of this study could help understand fertility issues associated with abnormal flagellar motion, diseases caused by ineffective cilia, and be applied to robotics. Other models in nature may exist that could provide further experimental proof of Turing’s template, but more research is needed.  

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About 40 light years away, a system of seven Earth-sized planets orbit a star that is much cooler and smaller than our sun— the exoplanetary system called TRAPPIST-1. When these exoplanets were discovered in 2016, astronomers speculated that they could one day support humans. Three of those worlds are located in the star’s habitable zone, also called the “Goldilocks zone,” where the conditions for life could be “just right.” Now, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made important progress in understanding the atmosphere of one of its potentially habitable planets.

[Related: JWST’s double take of an Earth-sized exoplanet shows it has no sky.]

JWST observations ruled out the possibilities for a clear, extended atmosphere, failing to detect elements such as hydrogen. The telescope’s new detections also cut through the interference of the star at the center of this system, avoiding what astronomers call stellar contaminations. The findings are detailed in a study published September 22 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The new study specifically sheds light on the nature TRAPPIST-1 b, the exoplanet that is closest to the system’s central star. The team from institutions in the United States and Canada used the JWST’s NIRISS instrument to observe TRAPPIST-1 b during two transits, when the planet passed in front of its star. 

The team used a technique called transmission spectroscopy to look deeper into the distant world. They saw the unique fingerprint left by the molecules and atoms that were found within the exoplanet’s atmosphere. “These are the very first spectroscopic observations of any TRAPPIST-1 planet obtained by the JWST, and we’ve been waiting for them for years,” study co-author and Université de Montréal doctoral student Olivia Lim said in a statement. 

In the past, stars at the center of solar systems may have hampered our understanding of far-off atmospheres. That’s because these suns can create “ghost signals” which fool observers into thinking they are seeing a particular molecule in the exoplanet’s atmosphere. This phenomenon, stellar contamination, is the influence of a star’s own features on the measurements of an exoplanet’s atmosphere.  A sun’s dark spots and bright faculae, or bright spots on its surface, can warp the chemical fingerprints that telescopes detect.

“In addition to the contamination from stellar spots and faculae, we saw a stellar flare, an unpredictable event during which the star looks brighter for several minutes or hours,” said Lim. “This flare affected our measurement of the amount of light blocked by the planet. Such signatures of stellar activity are difficult to model but we need to account for them to ensure that we interpret the data correctly.”

The team also used the observations to explore a range of atmospheric models for TRAPPIST-1 b. They ruled out the existence of cloud-free, hydrogen-rich atmospheres, which means that TRAPPIST-1 b likely does not have a clear and extended atmosphere around it. However, the data could not confidently rule out the possibility of a thinner atmosphere, perhaps made up of pure water, carbon dioxide, or methane. 

[Related: The James Webb Space Telescope just identified its first exoplanet.]

According to the team, this result underscores the importance of taking stellar contamination into account when planning future observations of all exoplanetary systems. This consideration is especially true for systems like TRAPPIST-1, because the system is centered around a red dwarf star which can be particularly active with frequent flare events and dark spots.

More observations will be needed to determine exactly what kind of atmosphere is surrounding this exoplanet and if it could support human life. “This is just a small subset of many more observations of this unique planetary system yet to come and to be analyzed,” study co-author and Université de Montréal astronomer René Doyon said in a statement. “These first observations highlight the power of NIRISS and the JWST in general to probe the thin atmospheres around rocky planets.”

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Scientists in Thailand have discovered a new species of tarantula with a very unique blue hue. The tarantula is named Chilobrachys natanicharum and is also called the electric blue tarantula. The findings were described in a study published September 18 in the journal ZooKeys 

[Related: Before spider mites mate, one of them gets their skin removed.]

The new colorful arachnid was discovered in southern Thailand’s Phang-Nga province. It follows the identification of another new species of tarantula called Taksinus bambus, or the bamboo culm tarantula.

“In 2022, the bamboo culm tarantula was discovered, marking the first known instance of a tarantula species living inside bamboo stalks,” study co-author and Khon Kaen University entomologist Narin Chomphuphuang said in a statement. “Thanks to this discovery, we were inspired to rejoin the team for a fantastic expedition, during which we encountered a captivating new species of electric blue tarantula.”

The team that found the first not-so-blue bamboo culm tarantula included a local wildlife YouTuber named JoCho Sippawat. This year, Chomphuphuang joined up with Sippawat for a surveying expedition in the province to learn more about tarantula diversity and distribution. They identified this new species by this very distinctive coloration during the expedition.

“The first specimen we found was on a tree in the mangrove forest. These tarantulas inhabit hollow trees, and the difficulty of catching an electric-blue tarantula lies in the need to climb a tree and lure it out of a complex of hollows amid humid and slippery conditions,” Narin said. “During our expedition, we walked in the evening and at night during low tide, managing to collect only two of them.”

The color blue is very rare in nature. It can even exist in other animals that aren’t usually this color, including the blue lobsters that have recently been found in Massachusetts and France. Some animals also evolved wild colors including blues, yellows, and reds to appear poisonous to try and keep other animals from eating them.  

In order for an organism to appear blue, it must absorb very small amounts of energy while reflecting high-energy blue light. Since penetrating molecules that are capable of absorbing this energy is a complex process, the color blue is less common than other colors in the natural world. 

According to the study, the secret behind the electric blue tarantula’s wild color comes from the unique structure of their hair and not from a presence of blue pigment. Their hair incorporates nanostructures that manipulate the light shining on it to create the blue appearance. Their hair can also display a more violet hue depending on the light, which creates an iridescent effect. 

[Related: Blue-throated macaws are making a slow, but hopeful, comeback.]

This species was previously found on the commercial tarantula market, but there hadn’t been any documentation describing its natural habitat or unique features. 

“The electric blue tarantula demonstrates remarkable adaptability. These tarantulas can thrive in arboreal as well as terrestrial burrows in evergreen forests,” Narin said. “However, when it comes to mangrove forests, their habitat is restricted to residing inside tree hollows due to the influence of tides.”

To name the new species, the authors conducted an auction campaign and the scientific name of Chilobrachys natanicharum was selected. It is named after executives Natakorn and Nichada Changrew of Nichada Properties Co., Ltd., Thailand and the proceeds of the auction were donated to support the education of Indigenous Lahu children in Thailand and for cancer patients in need of money for treatment.

The authors say that this discovery points to the continued importance of taxonomy as a basic aspect of research and conservation. It also highlights the need to protect mangrove forests from continued deforestation, as the electric blue tarantula is also one of the world’s rarest tarantulas. 

“This raises a critical question: Are we unintentionally contributing to the destruction of their natural habitats, pushing these unique creatures out of their homes?” the researchers ask in their conclusion.

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Trillions of particles from distant stars and galaxies are streaming through your body every second—you just can’t feel them. These ghost-like particles are called neutrinos. Although the universe spits them out constantly, these objects barely interact with matter—they can even slip through humanity’s toughest barriers, such as steel or lead walls. 

Some neutrinos come from supernovae, the extravagant deaths of the biggest stars; they’re also produced by radioactive decay in Earth’s rocks, reactions in the sun, and even our planet’s aurorae. These hard-to-see particles are all over the place and crucial to multiple areas of science, but we’re still in need of better ways of finding them. Now, a new observatory under construction in China’s Guangdong province—the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, or JUNO—plans to hunt these elusive particles with better sensitivity than ever before. 

Like most neutrino detectors, it’s a huge vat filled with liquid for the neutrinos to interact with—the bigger the net, the more fish you’re likely to catch. “When it is completed, JUNO will be 20 times larger than the largest existing detector of the same type,” says Yufeng Li, a researcher and member of the JUNO collaboration at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing. Currently under construction and expected to start operation in 2024, this detector will not only be bigger, but also more sensitive to slight variations in neutrinos’ energies than any of its predecessors. Li adds, it’s going to be “a unique and important observatory in the community.”

[Related: The Milky Way’s ghostly neutrinos have finally been found]

The observatory’s most ambitious goal is to preemptively spot neutrinos from stars that are dying but haven’t exploded yet. That way, telescopes can catch these stars in their final destructive act. “Neutrinos are expected to reach Earth hours earlier than photons because of their weakly-interacting nature,” explains Irene Tamborra, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark not affiliated with the project. 

Astronomers still don’t know the finer details of how a star explodes, but observing the supernova as it starts might help give some clues. “The early detection of neutrinos will be crucial to point the telescopes in the direction of the supernova and catch its electromagnetic emission early on,” adds Tamborra. JUNO should be able to alert astronomers hours to days before a star is slated to explode, giving them time to prep and point their telescopes. It might even be able to measure the faint background of neutrinos coming from distant supernovae, all across the galaxy, which is of great interest to cosmologists trying to put together a picture of the whole universe. 

In addition to supernovae, the observatory will be searching for neutrinos from much closer to home: nuclear reactors. The nearby Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear power plants produce neutrinos, and physicists are hoping to get a taste of those neutrinos’ flavors with JUNO. Neutrinos come in three flavors (yes, they’re really called that!), known as the electron, tau, and muon neutrinos. They can flip between their different states in so-called oscillations. Scientists can calculate the number of neutrinos of each kind they expect from the power plant, and compare to what they actually observe with JUNO to better understand these flips.

[Related: This ghostly particle may be why dark matter keeps eluding us]

“It is also very likely that there will be surprise discoveries, as that often happens when powerful new experiments are deployed,” says Ohio State University astrophysicist John Beacom.

JUNO isn’t the only big observatory after neutrinos. The current largest liquid neutrino detector is Super-Kamiokande in Japan, and researchers there are planning a huge upgrade to make it the Hyper-Kamiokande. The United States is getting in the game too, currently using a detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab and planning its own multi-billion-dollar next-gen observatory, called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. These projects are a few years away, though, so IHEP president Yifang Wang told Science that he gives JUNO “3-to-1 odds to get there first” to figure out some fundamental properties of neutrinos.

No matter who wins the race, this observatory is opening up one of our windows to the universe a bit wider. “JUNO is a huge step forward for neutrino physics and astrophysics,” Beacom says, “and I’m very excited to see what it will do.”

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As their giant petals open, the blooming of flowers in the genus Rafflesia brings with them an overwhelming odor mimics the smell of rotting flesh. While their pungent stink might keep humans away and attract flies, a study published September 19 in the journal Plants People Planet found that 67 percent of the habitats for these notorious plants is at risk of destruction. 

[Related: Corpse flowers across the country are swapping pollen to stay stinky.]

Rafflesia are the largest flowers in the world and have been a botanical enigma for centuries. In addition to their infamous stink, corpse flowers are actually a parasite that infects vines in the tropical jungles of Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. It remains hidden from sight for the majority of its lifecycle, existing as a system of tiny thread-like filaments that invades its host. At unpredictable intervals, the parasite produces a cabbage-like bud that will break through a vine’s bark and eventually form a giant, five-lobed flower, up to 3.2 feet across. The flower produces its signature rotten meat smell to attract pollinating flies.

This elusive lifecycle and ability to remain hidden makes them very poorly understood by botanists, and new species are still being discovered by botanists. With such an elusive lifecycle, Rafflesia remains poorly understood, and new species are still being recorded. 

In the study, an international group of researchers established the first coordinated global network to assess the threats facing Rafflesia. This network found most of the 42 known species of Rafflesia are severely threatened, but only one is listed on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. This leaves many unprotected by regional or national conservation strategies. The scientists classified 25 species as Critically Endangered and 15 as Endangered, according to the IUCN’s criteria for classification. 

Chris Thorogood of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden in England co-authored the study and an upcoming book on the team’s years devoted to documenting these plants. In a statement, Thorogood said that this work, “Highlights how the global conservation efforts geared towards plants–however iconic–have lagged behind those of animals. We urgently need a joined-up, cross-regional approach to save some of the world’s most remarkable flowers, most of which are now on the brink of being lost.”

Additionally, Rafflesia species often have very restricted geographical distributions, making them particularly vulnerable to habitat destruction. Many of the remaining populations of corpse flowers have only a few individuals in unprotected areas that are at risk of being converted for agricultural use, according to the study. While these and other similarly smelly flowers famously exist in some botanical gardens, these institutions have had limited success in breeding them, making habitat conservation an urgent priority.

[Related: These parasitic plants force their victims to make them dinner.]

The four-point action plan proposed by the team for local governments, research centers, and conservation organizations  includes greater habitat protections, better understanding of the full diversity of the Rafflesia that exists to better inform policy making, developing better methods to breed them outside their native habitat, and introducing new ecotourism initiatives to engage local communities in Rafflesia conservation.

The study also highlighted some valuable success stories that may offer important insights for Rafflesia conservation elsewhere, including the Bogor Botanic Garden in West Java, Indonesia, that saw a series of successful blooming events and villagers in West Sumatra benefitting from Rafflesia ecotourism by forming “pokdarwis” or tourism awareness groups linked to social media.

“Indigenous peoples are some of the best guardians of our forests, and Rafflesia conservation programmes are far more likely to be successful if they engage local communities,” Adriane Tobias, a study co-author and forester from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, said in a statement. “Rafflesia has the potential to be a new icon for conservation in the Asian tropics.”

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Marine virologists have found a novel virus living in the incredibly deep and dark Mariana Trench, more than 29,000 feet under the ocean’s surface. The virus is the deepest known isolated bacteriophage—viruses that infect and replicate inside bacteria—ever found, according to a study published September 20 in the journal Microbiology Spectrum.

[Related: Meet the marine geologist mapping the deepest point on Earth.]

The enormous trench in the western Pacific Ocean near Guam is over 36,000 feet deep at its lowest depth and is part of the hadal zone. This zone is named for Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, for its deep trenches and high pressures. The buildup of carbon along the base of the hadal zone’s trenches may even help regulate the Earth’s climate and carbon cycle. Even in its intense pressures and extreme cold and darkness, life continues to find a way. Scientists have discovered fish, shrimp, and lots of microbes lurking there. That life includes regulators to keep the living things in check. 

“Wherever there’s life, you can bet there are regulators at work. Viruses, in this case,” study co-author and Ocean University of China marine virologist Min Wang said in a statement.

This new phage works by infecting bacteria in the phylum Halomonas, which are commonly found in sediments deep seas and the geyser-like openings on the seafloor that release streams of hot water called hydrothermal vents.

In their study, Wang and an international group of researchers describe the new virus identified as vB_HmeY_H4907. The virus was brought up in sediment from a depth of about 5.5 miles or more than 29,000 feet deep and is classified as a bacteriophage. Also called phage, they infect and replicate inside bacteria and are believed to be the most abundant life forms on Earth.

“To our best knowledge, this is the deepest known isolated phage in the global ocean,” said Wang.

According to Wang, the analysis of the viral genetic material points to the existence of a previously unknown viral family living in the deep ocean and some new insights into the evolution, genetic diversity, genomic features of deep-sea phages and how they interact with their hosts. 

Previously, this team has used metagenomic analysis to study the viruses that infect bacteria in the order Oceanospirallales. This order includes Halomonas, the phylum that this newly discovered virus infects. In this new study, the team searched for viruses in bacterial strains isolated by marine virologist Yu-Zhong Zhang, also from the Ocean University of China. 

[Reading: A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species.]

The genomic analysis of the new virus suggests that it has a similar structure to its host and is widely distributed in the ocean. It is also lysogenic, meaning it invades and replicates inside its host, but typically does not kill the bacterial cell. The virus’s genetic material is then copied and passed on as the cells divide.

The discovery points to some new questions focused on the survival strategies that viruses living in harsh and generally secluded environments like the hadal zone trenches use and how they co-evolve with their hosts. Future studies also will aim to investigate the molecular machinery driving interactions between deep-sea viruses and their hosts. 

According to Wang, discovering more new viruses in extreme places, “would contribute to broadening our comprehension of the virosphere. Extreme environments offer optimal prospects for unearthing novel viruses.”

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A little less than one-third of the universe—around 31 percent—consists of matter. A new calculation confirms that number; astrophysicists have long believed that something other than tangible stuff makes up the majority of our reality. So then, what is matter exactly?

One of the hallmarks of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity is that mass and energy are inseparable. All mass has intrinsic energy; this is the significance of Einstein’s famous E=mc² equation. When cosmologists weigh the universe, they’re measuring both mass and energy at once. And 31 percent of that amount is matter, whether it’s visible or invisible.

That difference is key: Not all matter is alike. Very little of it, in fact, forms the objects we can see or touch. The universe is replete with examples of matter that are far stranger.

What is matter?

When we think of “matter,” we might picture the objects we see or their basic building block: the atom. 

Our conception of the atom has evolved over years. Thinkers throughout history had vague ideas that existence could be divided into basic components. But something that resembles the modern idea of the atom is generally credited to British chemist John Dalton. In 1808, he proposed that indivisible particles made up matter. Different base substances—the  elements—arose from atoms with different sizes, masses, and properties. 

Dalton’s schema had 20 elements. Combining those elements created more complex chemical compounds. When the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev constructed a primitive period table in 1869, he listed 63 elements. Today we have cataloged 118. 

But if only it were that simple. Since the early 20th century, physicists have known that tinier building blocks lurk within atoms: swirling negatively charged electrons and shrouded nuclei, made from positively charged protons and neutral neutrons. We know now, too, that each element corresponds to atoms with a certain number of protons.

[Related: How does electricity work?]

And it’s still not that simple. By the middle of the century, physicists realized that protons and neutrons are actually combinations of even tinier particles, called quarks. To be precise, protons and neutrons both contain three quarks each: a configuration type that physicists call baryons. For that reason, protons, neutrons, and the matter they form—the stuff of our daily lives—are often called “baryonic matter.”

Strange matter in the sky

In our everyday world, baryonic matter typically exists in one of four states: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. 

Again, matter is not that simple. Under extreme conditions, it can take on a menagerie of more exotic forms. At high enough pressures, materials can become supercritical fluids, simultaneously liquid and gas. At low enough temperatures, multiple atoms coalesce together, creating the Bose-Einstein condensate. These atoms behave as one, acting in all sorts of odd quantum ways

Such exotic states are not limited to the laboratory. Just look at neutron stars: Their undead cores aren’t quite massive enough to collapse into black holes when they go supernova. Instead, as their cores crumple, intense forces rip apart their atomic nuclei and crush the rubble together. The result is essentially a giant ball of neutrons—and protons that absorb electrons, becoming neutrons in the process—and it’s very, very dense. A single spoonful of a neutron star would weigh a billion tons.

There are, potentially, hundreds of millions of neutron stars in the Milky Way alone. Deep in their centers, some scientists think, pressures and temperatures are high enough to rip neutrons apart too. Those neutrons may break the quarks that form them.

Physicists study neutron stars to learn about these objects—and what happened at the beginning of the universe. The matter we see around us did not always exist; it formed in the aftermath of the big bang. Before atoms formed, protons and neutrons swam alone through the universe. Even earlier, before there were protons and neutrons, everything was a superheated quark slurry.

Scientists can recreate that state, in some fashion, in particle accelerators. But that disappears in a flash that lasts a fraction of a second. It’s no comparison to the extremely long-lasting neutron stars  “You have a lab that basically exists forever,” says Fridolin Weber, a physicist at San Diego State University.

Matter in the grand scheme of the universe

Over the past several decades, astronomers have developed several ways to understand the universe’s basic parameters. They can examine its large-scale structure and identify  subtle fluctuations in the density of the matter they can see. They can watch how objects’ gravity bends passing light.

A specific way to measure matter density—the proportion of the universe made up of visible and invisible matter—is to pick apart the cosmic microwave background of the big bang. From 2009 to 2013, the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory prodded the afterglow to give scientists the best calculation of the matter density yet, 31 percent.

[Related: Does antimatter fall down or up? We now have a definitive answer.]

The most recent research used a different technique called the mass-richness relation, essentially examining clusters of galaxies, counting how many galaxies exist in each cluster, using that to calculate each group’s mass, and reverse-engineering the matter density. The technique isn’t new, but until now it was raw and unrefined.

“When we did our work, as far as I know, this is the first time that the mass-richness relation has been used to get a result that’s in very good agreement with Planck,” says Gillian Wilson, an astrophysicist at the University of California Riverside, and one of the authors of a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on September 13. 

Yet remember, it’s not that simple. Only a small fraction—thought to be around 15 percent of matter, or 3 percent of the universe—is visible. The rest, most scientists think, is dark matter. We can detect the ripples that dark matter leaves in gravity. But we can’t observe it directly.

Consequently, we aren’t certain what dark matter is. Some scientists believe it is baryonic matter, just in a form that we can’t easily see: Perhaps it is black holes that formed in the early universe, for instance. Others believe it consists of particles that must barely interact at all with our familiar matter. Some scientists believe it is a mix of these. And at least some scientists believe that dark matter does not exist at all.

If it does exist, we might see it with a new generation of telescopes, such as eROSITA, the Rubin Observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and Euclid, that can scan ever greater swathes of the universe and see a wider variety of galaxies at different times in cosmic history. “These new surveys might change our understanding of the whole universe [and its matter],” says Mohamed El Hashash, an astrophysicist at the University of California Riverside, and another of the authors. “This is what I personally expect.”

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Every year or two, the solar system lines up just right, with the moon casting a shadow over part of Earth’s surface and blocking out the sun—a solar eclipse. In 2017, people across the United States flocked to see the “Great American Total Eclipse”, which was the first one visible in the continental states since 1979. Now, eclipse chasers and citizen scientists across North America are getting ready for the next big events: an annular eclipse on October 14, 2023 and a total eclipse on April 8, 2024. This will be the last eclipse visible in the continental US until August 2045, more than two decades away. 

People love eclipses for the novelty—how cool it is to see the sun disappear in the day. But these phenomena are both showstoppers and opportunities: a group of radio astronomers and citizen scientists called Radio JOVE is aiming to capitalize on the upcoming eclipses for science, part of NASA’s “Helio Big Year.”

Radio JOVE “initially started as an education and outreach project to help students, teachers, and the general public get involved in science,” explains project co-founder Chuck Higgins, an astronomer at Middle Tennessee State University. The project has been running since the late 1990s, when it began at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We now focus on science and try to inspire people to become citizen scientists.” 

As its name suggests, Radio JOVE originally focused on the Jovian planet, Jupiter. “Serendipitously, it turns out that the same radio wavelengths we use for observing Jupiter are also useful for observing the sun,” says Thomas Ashcraft, a citizen scientist from New Mexico who has been observing with Radio JOVE since 2001. After the 2017 Great American Eclipse, its members became more involved with heliophysics, the study of the sun.

[Related: Total eclipses aren’t that rare—and you’ve probably missed a bunch of them]

As energy spews from the sun and travels to Earth, it interacts with our planet’s atmosphere; in particular, the sun’s rays create a layer of ionized particles, known as the ionosphere. Any radio waves coming from the sun have to pass through these particles above us. Communication technology takes advantage of this layer, bouncing radio waves off it to travel long distances.

The ionosphere’s plasma changes a lot between day and night. When the sun shines on this layer, particles break into ions. When the sun is absent, those ions calm down. During eclipses, when most of the sun’s light is blocked, similar changes happen in the short term change. By measuring those fluctuations precisely with a fleet of amateur observers, Radio JOVE hopes to improve our understanding of the ionosphere.

To do so, Radio JOVE is equipping citizen scientists across the country with small radio receivers and training them to observe radio waves from Earth’s ionosphere. The project offers some-assembly-required starter kits for around $200, and a whole team of experts and experienced observers are around to support new volunteers. 

[Related: The best US parks for eclipse chasers to see October’s annularity]

Right now, they’re prepping participants for a full day of observing during the October annular eclipse. Project members are already gathering data to have a baseline of the sun’s influence on a normal day, which they’ll compare to the upcoming eclipse data. And this is only a small taste before the big event: next year’s total eclipse. “The 2023 annular eclipse will be used as a training, learning, and testing experience in an effort to achieve the highest quality data for the 2024 total eclipse,” Higgins wrote in a summary for an American Geophysical Union conference.

Citizen science projects such as Radio JOVE not only collect valuable data, but they also involve a new crowd in NASA’s scientific community. Anyone interested in science can join in, and if Radio JOVE doesn’t suit your interests, NASA has a long list of other opportunities. For example, if you’re a ham radio operator, you can get involved with HamSCI, which also plans to observe the upcoming eclipse.

“NASA’s Radio JOVE Citizen Science Project allows me to further explore my lifelong interest in astronomy,” said John Cox, a Radio JOVE citizen scientist from South Carolina, in a NASA press release. “A whole new portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is now open to me.”

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This article was originally featured on Grist.

The United States is about to embark on an experiment inspired by one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. On Wednesday, the Biden administration authorized the creation of the American Climate Corps through an executive order. The program would hire 20,000 young people in its first year, putting them to work installing wind and solar projects, making homes more energy-efficient, and restoring ecosystems like coastal wetlands to protect towns from flooding.

The idea has been in the works for years. It was first announced in President Joe Biden’s early days in the White House in January 2021, tucked into a single paragraph in an executive order on tackling the climate crisis. At the time, it was called the Civilian Climate Corps—a reference to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933 to help the country survive the Great Depression, which was responsible for building hundreds of parks, including Great Smoky Mountains National Park, as well as many hiking trails and lodges you can find across the country today. Early versions of Biden’s trademark climate law that passed last year, the Inflation Reduction Act, included money for reviving the CCC. But that funding got cut during negotiations last summer with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and the program was assumed dead. 

Now it’s back, with a name change. Biden’s executive order promises that the American Climate Corps “will ensure more young people have access to the skills-based training necessary for good-paying careers” in clean energy and climate resilience efforts. There are plans to link it with AmeriCorps, the national service program, and leverage several smaller climate corps initiatives that states have launched in California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington. However, the order didn’t provide details on what kind of funding the program is getting or how much workers will get paid. The White House also launched a new website where you can sign up to get updates about joining the program.

Reviving the Civilian Conservation Corps is widely popular, with 84 percent of Americans supporting the idea in polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication last year. Mark Paul, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, said the new name that swapped “Civilian” for “American” leans into patriotism in an effort to broaden the program’s appeal even further. 

“I think that right now we are in a fight for the very soul of the nation,” Paul said. “President Biden and other Democrats are trying to brand climate [action] as not only good for the environment, but good for America. And I think that’s precisely what they are trying to convey with this name change, that climate jobs are good for the American people.”

The program could also be an attempt to appeal to young voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The administration drew criticism from climate activists when it approved the Willow oil project in northern Alaska in March after concluding that the courts wouldn’t allow them to block it. After that decision, polling from Data for Progress found that Biden’s approval ratings on climate change dropped 13 percent among voters between the ages of 18 to 29. The revival of the CCC has long been an item on progressives’ wish lists—back in 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, reportedly sold Secretary of State John Kerry on making the program part of Biden’s platform during the 2020 presidential campaign. 

“I am thrilled to say that the White House has been responsive to our generation’s demand for a climate corps and that President Biden acknowledges that this is just the beginning of building the climate workforce of the future,” Varshini Prakash, the director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, told reporters ahead of Biden’s announcement.

To be sure, the American Climate Corps could run into problems. If it’s modeled off AmeriCorps, the jobs might not exactly qualify as “good jobs”—AmeriCorps members are more like volunteers who get a small stipend, often living close to the poverty line. The White House, for its part, is selling the program as a path to good careers. The administration “will specifically be focused on making sure that folks that are coming through this program have a pathway into good-paying union jobs,” said White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi on a call with reporters on Tuesday about the announcement. “We’re very keenly focused on that.” 

The initiative could help bolster the ranks of workers like electricians, according to Zaidi, addressing the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can install low-carbon technologies like electric vehicle chargers and heat pumps. “We’re hopeful that the launch of the American Climate Corps will help accelerate training for a new generation of installers, contractors, and other tradespeople who are, at the end of the day, the ones who make these great ideas a reality,” Paul Lambert, co-founder and CEO of Quilt, a heat pump company in California, said in a statement to Grist.

With the goal of hiring 20,000 a year, the new program is much smaller than many activists had hoped: The original CCC employed 300,000 men in just its first three months (women were excluded until Eleanor Roosevelt’s “She-She-She” camps opened in 1934). Some progressives, like Ocasio-Cortez, were hoping a climate corps could employ 1.5 million people over five years. Assuming all goes well, the program could expand. Paul speculates that the Biden administration is starting small as “proof of concept to the American people to show that this program can work and that it is worthy of investment.”

If interest in the American Climate Corps is high, those 20,000 slots could fill up quickly. Among the 1,200 likely voters polled by Data for Progress two years ago, half of those under 45 said they’d consider joining, given the chance.

“I teach youth day in and day out, and one of the biggest problems we face right now is youth feeling like they don’t know what to do,” Paul said. “And now we have a program that the U.S. government is facilitating to point to and say, ‘You know, if you want to help, here’s one way that you can contribute to decarbonizing our nation.’”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/want-to-join-the-american-climate-corps-what-we-know-so-far/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

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Is Earth primarily a planet of life, a world stewarded by the animals, plants, bacteria, and everything else that lives here? Or, is it a planet dominated by human creations? Certainly, we’ve reshaped our home in many ways—from pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to literally redrawing coastlines. But by one measure, biology wins without a contest.

 In an opinion piece published in the journal Life on August 31, astronomers and astrobiologists estimated the amount of information transmitted by a massive class of organisms and technology for communication. Their results are clear: Earth’s biosphere churns out far more information than the internet has in its 30-year history. “This indicates that, for all the rapid progress achieved by humans, nature is still far more remarkable in terms of its complexity,” says Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology and one of the paper’s authors.

[Related: Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers]

But that could change in the very near future. Lingam and his colleagues say that, if the internet keeps growing at its current voracious rate, it will eclipse the data that comes out of the biosphere in less than a century. This could help us hone our search for intelligent life on other planets by telling us what type of information we should seek.

To represent information from technology, the authors focused on the amount of data transferred through the internet, which far outweighs any other form of human communication. Each second, the internet carries about 40 terabytes of information. They then compared it to the volume of information flowing through Earth’s biosphere. We might not think of the natural world as a realm of big data, but living things have their own ways of communicating. “To my way of thought, one of the reasons—although not the only one—underpinning the complexity of the biosphere is the massive amount of information flow associated with it,” Lingam says.

Bird calls, whale song, and pheromones are all forms of communication, to be sure. But Lingam and his colleagues focused on the information that individual cells transmit—often in the form of molecules that other cells pick up and respond accordingly, such as producing particular proteins. The authors specifically focused on the 100 octillion single-celled prokaryotes that make up the majority of our planet’s biomass. 

“That is fairly representative of most life on Earth,” says Andrew Rushby, an astrobiologist at Birkbeck, University of London, who was not an author of the paper. “Just a green slime clinging to the surface of the planet. With a couple of primates running around on it, occasionally.”

Now, picture the reverse. For decades, scientists and military experts have sought out signatures of extraterrestrials in whatever form it may take. Astronomers have traditionally focused on the energy that a civilization of intelligent life might use—but earlier this year, one group crunched the numbers to determine if aliens in a nearby star system could pick up the leakage from mobile phone towers. (The answer is probably not, at least with LTE networks and technology like today’s radio telescopes.)

On the flip side, we don’t totally have the observational capabilities to home in on extraterrestrial life yet. “I don’t think there’s any way that we could detect the kind of predictions and findings that [Lingam and his coauthors] have quantified here,” Rushby says. “How can we remotely determine this kind of information capacity, or this information transfer rate? We’re probably not at the stage where we could do that.”

But Rushby thinks the study is an interesting next step in a trend. Astrobiologists—certainly those searching for extraterrestrial life—are increasingly thinking about the types and volume of information that different forms of life carries. “There does seem to be this information ‘revolution,’” he says, “where we’re thinking about life in a slightly different way.” In the end, we might learn that there’s more harmony between the communication networks nature has built and computers.

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There’s a recurring mystery surrounding early human migration: Exactly when did Homo sapiens make their way from Africa into Europe and Asia? It’s possible that a period of warmer temperatures could have contributed to this flow of people into Eurasia, according to a study published September 22 in the journal Science Advances. Warmer temperatures and more humidity may have helped the forests in the region grow and expand north into present-day Siberia. The theory hinges on the presence of pollen in the region’s sediment record. The scourge of modern day spring allergy sufferers could have laid the groundwork for our very distant ancestors’ migration into Eurasia.  

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

This movement could have begun in three waves into Eurasia about 54,000 years ago. It is also likely that both warm and cold climates would have played a role in this travel. The Pleistocene Epoch is known for huge climatic shifts, including the formation of the massive ice sheets and glaciers that would eventually forge and shape many of the landforms we see on Earth today. 

To piece together what the climate could have looked like during a possible warm period about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, researchers working on the study created a record of the vegetation and pollen from the Pleistocene found around Lake Baikal in present-day Siberian region of Russia with the oldest archeological traces of Homo sapiens in the area. 

Sediment cores were used to extract data for a pollen timeline, and the study suggests that the dispersal of humans occurred during some of the highest temperatures and highest humidity of the late Pleistocene. The presence of more ancient pollen, and thus plant life, in the record shows evidence that coniferous forests and grasslands may have spread further throughout the region and could support foraging for food and hunting by humans. According to study author and University of Kansas anthropologist Ted Goebel, the environmental data combined with archeological evidence tell a new story of the area. 

“This contradicts some recent archaeological perspectives in Europe. The key factor here is accurate dating, not just of human fossils and animal bones associated with the archaeology of these people, but also of environmental records, including from pollen,” Goebel said in a statement. “What we have presented is a robust chronology of environmental changes in Lake Baikal during this time period, complemented by a well-dated archaeological record of Homo sapiens’ presence in the region.”

Goebel worked with teams from three institutions in Japan, including Masami Izuho of Tokyo Metropolitan University. During the pollen analysis, the team found some potential connections between the pollen data and the archeological record of early human migration into the region. The early modern humans of this period were making stone tools on slender blands and using bones, antlers, and even ivory to craft the tools. 

“There is one human fossil from Siberia, although not from Lake Baikal but farther west, at a place called Ust’-Ishim,” Goebel said. “Morphologically, it is human, but more importantly, it’s exceptionally well-preserved. It has been directly radiocarbon-dated and has yielded ancient DNA, confirming it as a representative of modern Homo sapiens, distinct from Neanderthals or Denisovans, or other pre-modern archaic humans.”

[Related: World’s oldest known wooden structure pre-dates our species.]

It’s possible that the earliest humans in the area likely would have lived in extended nuclear families, but it is difficult to say with certainty since so much archeological evidence has degraded over time. Ust’-Ishim in Siberia provides the earliest known evidence of fully modern humans coexisting with other extinct human species in the area, but the find was an “isolated discovery,” according to the team.

“We lack information about its archaeological context, whether it was part of a settlement or simply a solitary bone washed downstream,” said Goebel. “Consequently, linking that single individual to the archaeological sites in the Baikal region is tenuous—do they represent the same population? We think so, but definitely need more evidence.”

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Jellyfish are an undeniable evolutionary success story, surviving at least 500 million years in Earth’s oceans. They are even poised to handle climate change very well in some areas of the world, all without a centralized brain like most animals. Despite this lack of a central brain, trained Caribbean box jellyfish can potentially remember their past experiences the way that flies, mice, and humans do, and learn to spot and dodge previously encountered obstacles in a tank. The findings are reported in a study published on September 22 in the journal Current Biology.

[Related: Jellyfish may have been roaming the seas for at least 500 million years.]

This species of jellyfish is ubiquitous in the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the central Indo-Pacific Ocean, but are generally just about a half inch in diameter. Box jellyfish like these are members of a class of jellyfish that are known for being among the most poisonous animals in the world and their stings can cause paralysis and even death in extreme cases. 

To keep up their stinging and navigate their watery world, jellyfish don’t have a centralized brain like most members of the animal kingdom. They have four parallel brain-like structures with roughly 1,000 nerve cells in each. By comparison, a human brain has approximately 100 billion nerve cells. Caribbean box jellyfish are equipped with a complex visual system of 24 eyes embedded into their bell-shaped body. They use this unique vision to steer through the murky waters of mangrove swamps, looking for prey and diving under underwater tree roots. 

“It was once presumed that jellyfish can only manage the simplest forms of learning, including habituation–i.e., the ability to get used to a certain stimulation, such as a constant sound or constant touch,” study co-author and University of Copenhagen neurobiologist Anders Garm said in a statement. “Now, we see that jellyfish have a much more refined ability to learn, and that they can actually learn from their mistakes. And in doing so, modify their behavior.”

In this study, the team used a round tank outfitted with gray and white stripes to mimic the jellyfish’s natural habitat. The gray stripes were mimicking mangrove roots that would appear to be distant at the start of the experiment. For 7.5 minutes, the team observed the jellyfish in the tank. Initially, the jelly swam close to these seemingly far away stripes and bumped into them frequently. However, by the end of the experiment, the jelly increased its average distance to the wall by roughly 50 percent, quadrupled the number of successful pivots to avoid collision with the fake tree, and cut its contact with the wall by half. 

The findings suggest that jellyfish can learn from experience and could acquire the ability to avoid obstacles through a process called associative learning. In this process, organisms form mental connections between sensory stimulations and behaviors. 

“Learning is the pinnacle [of] performance for nervous systems,” Jan Bielecki, a co-author of the study and a neuroscientist at Kiel University in Germany, said in a statement.

Bielecki added that in order to teach jellyfish a new trick, “it’s best to leverage its natural behaviors, something that makes sense to the animal, so it reaches its full potential.”

[Related: Italian chefs are cooking up a solution to booming jellyfish populations.]

The team then looked into pinpointing the underlying process of jellyfish’s associative learning by isolating the animal’s visual sensory centers called rhopalia. Each rhopalia houses six eyes that control the jellyfish’s pulsing motion. This motion spikes in frequency when the jelly swerves away from an obstacle. 

They showed the stationary rhopalium moving gray bars to mimic how the jelly approaches objects and the rhopalium did not respond to light gray bars, seemingly interpreting the bars as distant. The researchers then trained the rhopalium with some weak electric stimulations that mimicked the mechanical stimuli that occur when colliding with an object. Following the electric stimulation, the rhopalium started to generate obstacle-dodging signals in response to the light gray bars as they got closer. 

The findings from this stage of the experiment showed that combining visual and mechanical stimuli is necessary for associative learning in jellyfish and that the rhopalium is likely serving as the animal’s learning center.

“For fundamental neuroscience, this is pretty big news. It provides a new perspective on what can be done with a simple nervous system,” said Garm. “This suggests that advanced learning may have been one of the most important evolutionary benefits of the nervous system from the very beginning.”

The team plans to do a deeper dive into the cellular interactions of jellyfish nervous systems to tease apart the process of memory formation and also hope to understand how the mechanical sensor in the jellyfish’s body works to paint a more complete picture of its associative learning.

“It’s surprising how fast these animals learn; it’s about the same pace as advanced animals are doing,” says Garm. “Even the simplest nervous system seems to be able to do advanced learning, and this might turn out to be an extremely fundamental cellular mechanism invented at the dawn of the evolution nervous system.”

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At first glance, everything seems solid. Then, a small rip begins to spread across the middle of the structure as its siding expands. The module suddenly bursts apart, spraying debris in every direction as engineers cheer on from the safety of their control room. The sudden destruction—and the fifth such explosion—of a module intended for the International Space Station’s successor may not sound like the desired outcome, but, scientists say, it’s all part of the plan.

In Sierra Space’s September 20 progress update, the Colorado-based company released video of the explosion. The company aims to supply habitat spaces for Orbital Reef, Blue Origin’s NASA-backed space station project. During a recent Ultimate Burst Pressure (UPB) test, the engineering team essentially amped up the pressure within a one-third-scale LIFE module prototype until it popped. Said “pop” is certainly a sight to behold:

Unlike ISS construction materials, the LIFE modules are largely composed of “softgoods” such as Vectran, an incredibly strong and durable synthetic fiber spun from liquid-crystal polymers. When inflated, the LIFE module’s softgood design becomes rigid enough to withstand the low-earth orbit’s extreme environmental stresses. According to Sierra Space, the latest results offered a 33 percent margin over a full-scale LIFE module’s certification standard, nearly 20 percent better than the previous test design.

What makes the most recent UPB test especially impressive is that it was the first module prototype to include a steel “blanking plate” that acted as a cheaper stand-in for essential design features like windows.

[Related: NASA is spending big on commercial space destinations.]

“Inclusion of the blanking plate hard structure was a game-changer because this was the first time that we infused metallics into our softgoods pressure shell technology prior to conducting a UBP test,” Shawn Buckley, Sierra Space’s Senior Director Engineering and Product Evolution, said in the company’s announcement. “With this added component, once again, we successfully demonstrated that LIFE’s current architecture at one-third scale meets the minimum 4x safety factor required for softgoods inflatables structures.”

As Space.com notes, this marks the third UPB test for the module prototypes. Sierra Space has also overseen two “creep tests” in December 2022 and February 2023, during which the LIFE designs were subjected to higher-than-usual pressures for extended periods of time. With the latest success, Sierra Space says it’s now ready to move onto the next development phase—testing on full-scale LIFE module prototypes. If all goes as planned (a big “if,” given such endeavors’ complexities), future LIFE module iterations will be some of Orbital Reef’s central structures. Orbital Reef is currently intended to start construction in 2030.

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