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The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday that it would funnel $3.46 billion toward upgrading the country’s aging electric grid—marking its largest-ever investment in that part of the United States’ energy network.

The funding, which comes from the bipartisan infrastructure law that President Joe Biden signed in 2021, is intended to prepare the grid for more renewable energy capacity as the U.S. transitions away from fossil fuels, and to prevent blackouts caused by increasingly severe climate disasters.

Between 2011 and 2021, the country experienced a 78 percent increase in weather-related power outages compared to the previous decade. Twenty percent of these outages were caused by hurricanes, extreme heat, and wildfires.

“Extreme weather events fueled by climate change will continue to strain the nation’s aging transmission systems,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. She added that the new funding would “harden systems” and “improve energy reliability and affordability.”

The new funding targets 58 projects across 44 states that, cumulatively, are expected to leverage $8 billion in federal and private investments in grid expansion and resiliency. Many of these projects involve building new microgrids, groups of dispersed but interconnected energy-generating units that can provide electricity even when the larger grid is down. For example, a solar microgrid involves lots of rooftop solar panels all feeding into a common pool of electricity—usually stored in a battery that serves as a source of backup power during an outage.

The funding will also support the development of several large-scale transmission lines, including five new lines across seven Midwestern states. These lines help carry electricity from place to place, allowing clean energy to be generated in rural areas, where land tends to be more plentiful, and delivered to population centers. 

Other projects involve more general upgrades to accommodate greater loads of electricity or improve emergency monitoring systems. Altogether, the DOE says the projects will help bring 35 gigawatts of renewable energy online, equivalent to roughly half of the U.S.’s utility-scale solar capacity in 2022. This will contribute to President Biden’s goal of moving the country’s electricity generation away from fossil fuels by 2035. As of 2021, the power sector accounted for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The Energy Department highlighted the selected projects’ commitments under Justice40, a Biden administration initiative that promises to direct at least 40 percent of the benefits of federal investment in infrastructure, clean energy, and other climate-related projects to disadvantaged communities, often defined as those that are low-income or that have been disproportionately exposed to pollution. According to the Energy Department, 86 percent of the projects contain labor union contracts or will involve collective bargaining agreements, and the agency says they will help “maintain and create good-paying union jobs.” 

Many of the projects also have a specific focus on improving grid reliability for rural or low-income households. For example, one project in Oregon aims to upgrade transmission capacity and bring carbon-free solar power to remote customers on the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs Reservation. Another project in Louisiana will create a backup battery system that could reduce energy bills for disadvantaged communities.

Wednesday’s announcement allocates just some of the funds included in the Energy Department’s broader, $10.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program, which is expected to fund more grid resiliency projects in the future. 

Meanwhile, experts say funding to upgrade power grids needs to double globally by 2030 in order to facilitate the transition from fossil fuels to technologies powered by electricity—electric vehicles instead of gas cars, for example, or heat pumps instead of furnaces. Otherwise, a report released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency warns that aging electric grids could become a “bottleneck for efforts to accelerate clean energy transitions and secure electricity security.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/the-us-electric-grid-is-getting-a-3-5-billion-upgrade/

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post Aging US energy grid will get a largest-ever $3.5 billion boost appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder		SEE IT	The Bird Buddy offers stylish design, quality images, and a fun app with real-time notifications.
Best for hummingbirds		BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera		SEE IT	The nectar attachment of this feeder can be swapped out to hold seed as well.
Best budget		WYZE Cam v3		SEE IT	This budget option lets you see the birds without any extras.

Bird feeder cameras make documenting our feathered friends fun and easy, but they aren’t created equally. Some are best for bird-watching in your own backyard, while others are better suited to remote locations. More expensive models have features like solar panels, video options, and smart bird identification, while basic, budget models make feeder photography accessible for just about everyone. No matter what you are looking for, the best bird feeder cameras will allow you to capture quality images of the birds who call your area home. 

• Best overall: Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder
• Best trail camera: TECHNAXX Full HD Birdcam TX-165
• Best for bird boxes: Hawk Eye HD Nature Cam
• Best for hummingbirds: BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera
• Best for bird identification: Netvue Birdfy Pro
• Best budget: WYZE Cam v3

How we chose the best bird feeder cameras

There are dozens of bird feeder cameras on the market. Though many of them have the same basic features, they don’t all offer the same level of important features like durability, battery life, and accuracy of species detection. 

To arrive at our top picks, we relied on our own assessment of each device, including hands-on experience with multiple models. Because bird feeder cameras must be durable, weatherproof, and offer long-lasting performance, we also leaned heavily on user experiences and favored well-reviewed products. 

Features like accurate bird identification, solar panel availability, and useful accessories also helped push some models into the limelight. Other options like real-time notification and color night vision were nice to have but not essentials. Still, they didn’t tend to figure into our final decision simply because of their somewhat limited value for bird photography. 

The best bird feeder cameras: Reviews & Recommendations

Choosing a bird feeder camera can be tough. There are dozens of available models, and the prices can range from less than $50 all the way up to $400 or more. The key to finding the right bird feeder camera is not necessarily shopping by price but knowing which features are must-haves and which are not. Not everyone will benefit from AI, for example. You may even prefer to use your own knowledge to identify the birds in your photographs. Below are our favorite options, suitable for a range of situations and users. 

Best overall: Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder

SEE IT

Specs

• AI: Yes, identifies more than 1,000 bird species 
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: 5-megapixel photos, 720p video
• Battery: 4000 mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery, optional solar panel

Pros

• Sharp images with a 120-degree field of view
• Weatherproof from -5°F to 120°F
• The smartphone app allows you to see feeders all over the world
• Compatible with an optional solar panel and lots of accessories
• Three mounting options

Cons

• No local storage, so it can’t be used without Wi-Fi
• Video resolution is lower than some competitors

The Bird Buddy bird feeder camera is relatively new, but it has much to offer, so it earns our top spot. The bird feeder is attractively designed, so it will look nice in your yard or on your deck with some solar lights, which is an important feature for many. It’s available in blue or vibrant yellow, so you can choose an option that fits your style best. I really enjoy the look of the blue Bird Buddy on the side of my porch, which is a big plus. 

The camera module is removable, which is important when it comes time to clean the feeder. It can take five-megapixel photos or offers 720p live-streamed video. The image quality won’t be that of your dedicated mirrorless or DSLR camera, but it is nicely detailed and properly exposed even in backlit situations. And being able to tune in to watch live as a bird chows down is pretty neat. 

The camera’s 120-degree field of view is wide enough to capture birds hanging out on the feeder’s side. You can also buy multiple accessories through Bird Buddy to extend the perch or feed different species. With the solar roof (the model we thoroughly tested and reviewed), you’ll never need to think about charging the camera. Without the solar roof, you’ll need to charge the camera every 5 to 15 days.

The Bird Buddy relies on AI to automatically recognize over 1,000 species of birds. The Bird Buddy app notifies you when you have new visitors to your feeder, which is always exciting. You can even browse other Bird Buddy devices all over the world to see species that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Plus, the images from your device contribute to migration information for conservation databases. You’ll be helping science progress while getting fun images of your feathered friends. 

Best trail camera: TECHNAXX Full HD Birdcam TX-165 

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Specs

• AI: None
• App compatibility: N/A, no app available
• Resolution: 8-megapixel photos, full HD 1080p video
• Battery: 4 AA batteries give it a working time of up to 6 months

Pros

• Sturdy trail-cam style feeder
• 6-month battery life
• Removable water basin means it can be a feeder or a birdbath
• Captures slow-motion video

Cons

• No smartphone app or bird identification features
• Memory card storage is less convenient than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth

This hybrid bird feeder camera is as tough as any trail camera. However, unlike most trail cameras, it can focus as close as 2 to 6 inches and offers a 100-degree field of view. This means you’ll get much better images of visiting birds than you would with a typical trail cam. The TX-165 takes standard AA batteries but has a working time of up to 6 months. You can leave it in a secure, remote location for a long time without worrying about the battery going flat.

The TX-165 also has a few features you won’t find on other bird feeder cameras. You can fill it with birdseed or fill the removable basin with water and turn it into a birdbath camera. It also takes impressive eight-megapixel images and full HD 1080p video. It’s also capable of 25 frames per second for slow-motion videos. 

Best for bird boxes: Hawk Eye HD Nature Cam

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Specs

• AI: None
• App compatibility: N/A, no app available
• Resolution: 700 tvl (television lines)
• Battery: None (includes a 75-foot power cable)

Pros

• Compact, so you can hide it almost anywhere
• Night vision lets you capture clear images in poor light 
• Durable and temperature-tolerant to between 35°F and 105°F

Cons

• Only shoots video 
• Not waterproof
• Needs to be plugged into a power supply

Birds do a lot more than just eat birdseed, so at some point, you might want to step up to a birdhouse camera. Because the Hawk Eye Nature Cam isn’t built into a feeder, it’s much more flexible than most bird cams. Its small size means you can put it anywhere—on treetops, fence posts, or even in animal burrows (though please exercise caution when putting it down a snake hole). Or it can be wired discreetly into a bird box for a 24/7 look at growing bird families, from egg to fledgling. 

The Hawk Eye Nature Cam is meant for live-streaming to your television set. The video resolution is clear and sharp, with 700 tvl (television lines) and 10 infrared diodes. This lets you view clear video even in the darkened environment of a typical bird box. Note, however, that you will need an RCA to USB adapter if you have a modern TV. 

The Hawk Eye does have a few drawbacks. It has no battery, so you’ll have to mess with a long extension cord to get it set up. It also isn’t waterproof. If you want to attach it to an unsheltered location, you’ll have to build waterproof housing or limit your use to dry weather. Finally, you can connect the camera to your PC and use additional software to grab photos and video segments from the live stream, but it’s not designed to capture high-resolution stills.

Best for hummingbirds: BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera

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Specs

• AI: Yes, identifies species and alerts you when birds approach 
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: 2-megapixel photos, full HD 1080p video
• Battery: 6400 mAh rechargeable batteries provide 20 to 30 days of operating time 

Pros

• AI can recognize around 5,000 different species, including hummingbirds
• Rechargeable batteries provide 20 to 30 days of use
• Hummingbird attachment is removable

Con:

• Still photos are much lower resolution than those shot by similar feeders 
• The app is clunky and difficult to use

The BirdDock is a flexible bird feeder camera that isn’t limited to just capturing photos of seed-eaters. It also offers a removable hummingbird attachment featuring five flower-shaped feeding ports with 0.16-inch holes to keep bees and other insects out.  When you want to switch to photographing songbirds, you can remove the hummingbird feeder and fill the device with seeds. 

Like other AI feeders, the BirdDock will identify species and alert you when one is approaching the feeder. It has night vision, too, which could help you identify other critters that visit your feeder overnight. This bird feeder camera features a 160-degree field of view and can be used with or without an SD memory card. It provides an impressive battery life of up to 30 days. You can also purchase a separate solar panel to keep the device charged in sunny weather.

The BirdDock has two primary drawbacks: It captures still photos at a relatively low resolution of only two megapixels (though it does also capture full HD 1080p video). It also doesn’t have an especially user-friendly app. Some users complain that the bird identification feature isn’t accurate and that the app frequently disconnects from the camera.

Best for bird identification: Netvue Birdfy Pro

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Specs

• AI: Yes, identifies more than 6,000 different species 
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: Full HD 1080p video
• Battery: 5000 mAh rechargeable batteries 

Pros

• Can identify more than 6,000 different species 
• Long battery life (the manufacturer claims up to six months of use)
• Extra features like squirrel recognition and color night vision

Cons

• The bird identification service costs extra
• Storing photos on the cloud requires a subscription

The Netvue Birdfy rivals the Bird Buddy with features like ease of use, durability, and photo quality. It has an impressive array of extra features like color night vision. The AI can recognize squirrels, and the built-in microphone lets you yell at them when they’re caught robbing the feeder. You can also upgrade your feeder with add-ons like a solar panel, hummingbird feeder, and perch extension.

The Birdfy has the same features as most other feeders, including automatic capture/motion detection and real-time notification. It takes clear video at close range, provides a 135-degree field of view, and even offers 8x magnification if you want to study the fine details.

Birdfy has an impressive database of 6,000 species, though reviewers note that it isn’t always accurate. When it does misidentify a bird, you have the option to submit a report via the app. This is evidence that Netvue is constantly working to improve its software. 

The primary drawback of the Netvue bird feeder camera is you may have to pay for various subscriptions depending on what features you want access to. For example, if you want to take advantage of the bird identification feature, you must pay for a subscription. Likewise, a subscription is required if you want to store photos on the Netvue Cloud for longer than 30 days. 

Best budget: WYZE Cam v3

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Specs

• AI: No species identification
• App compatibility: Android and iOS
• Resolution: 1080p full HD video
• Battery: No battery

Pros

• Affordable
• Weatherproof 
• Compact for easy mounting

Cons

• Minimum focus distance is around 12 inches
• No battery; needs to be plugged into a power supply

Bird feeder cameras with all the bells and whistles can be expensive. A $200 feeder might be outside your budget, or you may not need all the features that expensive bird feeder cameras offer. The WYZE Cam v3 is essentially an outdoor security camera. You won’t be able to fill it with birdseed or attach a hummingbird accessory. But you can mount this sturdy little camera next to any commercial bird feeder or install it close to a high-traffic part of your backyard. 

The WYZE Cam v3 offers all the basic features you need in a bird cam. It’s weatherproof with an IP65 rating. It takes photos when it senses motion, and it has an app so you can see what’s happening outside in real-time. 

The WYZE Cam does have a few drawbacks. One of these is the focus distance. While most dedicated bird cams can focus on subjects as close as a few inches, the WYZE Cam isn’t designed for closeups. You’ll have to mount it at least a foot away from your feeder, meaning you won’t see a lot of detail in your photos. 

The WYZE Cam is also wired. It comes with a weatherproof six-foot USB cable, so you’ll have to install it close to your home. On the plus side, once installed, you won’t have to worry about changing or recharging the battery or losing your video stream on a cloudy day.

Things to consider before buying a bird feeder camera

If you love bird watching but don’t want to sit waiting with your binoculars, a bird feeder camera will allow you to capture photos and videos of birds even when you aren’t around.

A bird feeder camera is meant for permanent outdoor use. This means it needs features you probably don’t consider when shopping for other photography gear. Here are some of the most important things you’ll want to think about when shopping for a bird feeder camera.

Durability

Bird feeder cameras can be subject to some serious abuse. The sun’s UV rays and hot temperatures can degrade plastic casings over time. These devices must also withstand storms and sprinklers, remaining waterproof from season to season. Of course, they should also be tough enough to handle the beaks and claws of visiting critters—not just the birds they’re intended for but other potential visitors like squirrels and mice.

Image quality

The image quality of bird feeder cameras is dependent on a few things. Resolution is the first thing most think of, and indeed, it is important with these devices. If you want clear, sharp images, look for bird feeder cameras with higher resolution. These compact cameras won’t offer numbers you may be used to in smartphones or mirrorless cameras, though. Five to eight megapixels for stills and 1080p for video tend to be the highest available at the moment.  However, if you aren’t concerned with high levels of detail, you could save some money and opt for a device with a less impressive resolution. 

The second factor of image quality is close focusing distance. The majority of shots taken by a bird feeder camera will be up-close. As a result, look for a device capable of getting clear photos at a very short distance. Even as close as a few inches is ideal.  Finally, birds don’t tend to sit still for long. Because of this, the camera should be able to freeze action, even in low light conditions like early morning or cloudy days. 

WiFi connectivity

WiFi isn’t necessarily a critical feature, but it’s something to consider if you’re going to keep your feeder close to your house. Most people don’t want to trek outside daily to download photos or swap out a memory card. A WiFi connection will let you see what your camera captured at any time of day in any weather. Treating it like a smart-home device will save you from having to venture into the cold, heat, or rain unless you need to change the battery or add birdseed.

Pay attention to the range of the device, too. Shy birds won’t approach your device if it is too close to your home. If it’s too far away, you won’t be able to view your photos without exiting your home.

Mounting options

Each bird feeder camera will have somewhat different requirements for how you install them. Some require a pole, some can be mounted to a fence post, and others can be hung. Depending on where you want the feeder and what tools you have available for installation, some of these options may be better than others for your particular needs.

Battery life

Some bird feeder cameras take basic replaceable AA batteries; others rely on solar panels to power internal rechargeable batteries. Either way, you’ll want to pick a camera that isn’t power-hungry. A good battery will ensure you aren’t constantly changing batteries or missing photos because your camera goes dark on a cloudy day. 

Choosing a camera with motion detection is a good place to start. These cameras only activate when there’s something to take a photo of, which helps the battery last longer.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best bird feeder cameras

• Best overall: Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder
• Best trail camera: TECHNAXX Full HD Birdcam TX-165
• Best for bird boxes: Hawk Eye HD Nature Cam
• Best for hummingbirds: BirdDock Hummingbird Feeder Camera
• Best for bird identification: Netvue Birdfy Pro
• Best budget: WYZE Cam v3

Once limited to nature photographers with long telephoto lenses and lots of patience, bird feeder cameras have made bird photography nearly effortless and available to almost anyone. That doesn’t necessarily mean any camera will do, though. Thinking about what you want to get out of your investment is an important first step in choosing a feeder. If you’re hoping to get up-close, detailed shots, pay attention to the example shots provided by the manufacturer and uploaded by users. Consider how important good battery life is to you, and ask yourself if you really need a camera that will identify already familiar local birds.

Why trust us

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

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

The post The best bird feeder cameras in 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Bird watching seems like one of those rites of passage as you get older. You reach a certain age and boom—you suddenly like studying our avian amigos. I have, apparently, reached that age. But I don’t always have time to tromp through fields with binoculars to catch fleeting feathers. Luckily, bird watching these days is extremely easy thanks to the arrival of bird feeder cameras. These devices are built with compact, weather-resistant cameras that typically detect motion to snap photos and videos when a bird comes to feast. They provide close-up views of the snacking species that wouldn’t be possible any other way.

One of the more popular bird feeder cameras—Bird Buddy—was launched as a Kickstarter and has taken the world of bird feeder cameras by storm. It offers an attractive yet practical design and pairs with an easy- and fun-to-use app. The Bird Buddy camera allows you to capture high-quality photos and videos of birds that visit your feeder, and AI even identifies them for you. I’ve had one up for a few months to put it through its paces and have been impressed with the device.

SEE IT

Overview

• The Bird Buddy is a modern-looking bird feeder with a removable camera that automatically snaps photos and videos of birds that come to snack. 
• The easy-to-use app notifies you when you have a visitor and automatically identifies over 1,000 species of birds.
• The feeder holds 3.5 cups of birdseed and comes with a scoop.
• It comes with a few different ways to mount the feeder. Additional accessories are available for purchase separately.
• A Bird Buddy Pro membership unlocks certain app features and higher video quality and costs $2.50 monthly for an annual membership or $2.99 for a monthly plan. 
• The base-level Bird Buddy costs $239, but we suggest upgrading to the version with a solar roof for unlimited battery life for $299.

Pros

• Attractive, modern design
• Very little assembly required
• Lots of accessories available
• App is easy and fun to use
• AI features automatically identify birds and other critters
• Livestream is available
• Records quality, highly-detailed photos and videos
• Holds plenty of birdseed
• Camera is removable for easy washing
• Optional solar roof does away with charging the battery
• Bird Buddy provides frequent updates

Cons

• Requires a WiFi connection
• Water pools in the bird feeder, resulting in moldy birdseed
• Some features are locked behind a subscription paywall

Verdict

The Bird Buddy is one of the best bird feeder cameras available thanks to its excellent app usability, advanced AI, and high-quality images and videos. The sleek design is easy to install, clean, and fill, and the removable camera is a nice addition. The reliance on WiFi won’t work for everyone, but smart-home devices are increasingly common, and it allows for immediate access to your camera’s feed.

Bird Buddy setup

Setting up the Bird Buddy involves two parts: Connecting to a WiFi router along with the app and physically installing the bird feeder. The Bird Buddy doesn’t offer any onboard storage, so you’ll need access to a WiFi connection to use the camera and AI features. It uses an 802.11 b/g/n connection at 2.4 GHz plus Bluetooth for connection to the app. You’ll want to install the Bird Buddy app and pair your camera to the app before installing the bird feeder in your yard. 

I had substantial issues pairing my Bird Buddy to my WiFi and connecting it to the app, and had to call customer support for assistance. Luckily, the customer support team was incredibly helpful and patient in working through the troubleshooting, and we eventually got it all set up. It is worth noting that I had an early model, so Bird Buddy has likely solved some of those issues to make the pairing process smoother.

Physical installation is simple, depending on how and where you place your bird feeder. You can hang it, mount it to a one-inch pole with the included bottom mount, or purchase a separate wall mount for attaching to fences or walls. The camera slots right into the designated slot, and it’s easy to plug it into the solar roof (if you opt for that). 

Bird Buddy design & build quality

The Bird Buddy bird feeder features a sleek, modern design with smooth curves. Though looks are subjective, I think it looks much more polished than other bird feeder cameras. It’s available in blue or vibrant yellow. Bird Buddy says it features a “bird-friendly design,” though it doesn’t specify what exactly that means. The perch features a raised bird footprint pattern, providing some grip for talons. 

The birdseed compartment—which holds 3.8 cups—is enclosed by clear plastic on both sides, allowing you and the birds to see the seed level inside. A back door at the top opens to fill the bird feeder up, though it requires careful maneuvering to get the seed inside and not spill it everywhere since it is a rather small opening. The entire back also comes off for easier cleaning. 

Bird feeders and bird feeder cameras are, naturally, outdoor items. As a result, they need to be durable, rugged, and built to withstand the elements. The Bird Buddy ticks those marks nicely. It is made of new and recycled BPA-free plastic and feels solid and sturdy. I have had it up for a handful of months, and after a quick cleaning, it looks brand new. That’s even despite the intense Florida sun constantly beating down on it.

Water issues

My main frustration with the design of the Bird Buddy is regarding keeping rain out. There are holes in the bottom that drain water in the event of rain, but they are extremely tiny. Of course, that keeps the small seeds from falling out. Butt hose same seeds can clog the holes, preventing thorough draining. Also, the protective roof helps keep some rain out but doesn’t extend beyond the feeder very much. If there is any wind blowing the rain, it will end up in the feeder. As a result, I had issues with water saturating the birdseed and mold forming. 

Granted, this may be a function of where I reside in Florida—a state where strong thunderstorms are a near-daily occurrence in the summer and humidity levels are intense. I had to change the birdseed every week because of the molding. Birds do not like moldy seeds, so I don’t get as many visitors. That’s especially true if I don’t stay on top of cleaning things out. It also means that I’m dumping out seed regularly and cleaning the feeder frequently. Neither of these is ideal and keeps birds away for longer. It may be less of an issue with different birdseed mixes or locations, but it has severely limited the number of birds I attract. 

Camera module details

The Bird Buddy’s camera is housed inside a plastic case. It is weather-resistant, though Bird Buddy doesn’t provide an IP rating. It does say that it can operate in temperatures between -5°F and 120°F. As a result, it will work in most locations throughout the year. The camera module measures 5.1 x 2 x 1.5 inches and fits securely in the bird feeder with the help of a magnet in the back.

The camera takes five-megapixel photos and 720p HD live-streamed video. It is capable of 1080p video clips, though you’ll need to pay for a Bird Buddy Pro membership ($2.50 per month for an annual membership or $2.99 per month for a monthly plan). The 120-degree field of view is wide enough to capture birds hanging out on the side of the feeder. There’s also a built-in microphone for recording bird songs as well, which is a fun addition.

Motion detection

Bird Buddy also built a laser motion detector into the camera. This senses movement on the perch and triggers the camera to take photos or videos when a visitor is present (much like a wireless security camera). I don’t have my bird feeder in a location where I can easily keep watch to test how well the motion detection works. But every time I heard a bird making noise, I received a “postcard” (Bird Buddy’s way of telling you a bird was at your feeder), so it seemed just sensitive enough.

You can switch to Power Saver Mode in the app settings if you want fewer notifications or conserve battery. Or turn on Frenzy Mode to see anything and everything, though you’ll have to pay for a Pro membership. 

Power

For power, the Bird Buddy camera utilizes a 4000 mAh rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Bird Buddy says it will last between five and 15 days. Of course, that depends on how many photos it takes, how much you stream live video, and the weather. When it needs a charge, it uses a USB-C cable. I was using the solar roof, which results in infinite battery life. If you want to save some money and don’t opt for the solar roof, the camera is fully removable. That means you won’t need to bring the entire bird feeder (along with any tiny creatures or germs) inside for charging.

Bird Buddy app

I’ve been very impressed with the Bird Buddy app during my testing. It is well-designed in design and usability, with many playful components. It is intuitive to use and easy to find what you need very quickly, even as you are getting used to it. It’s clean and minimal, without too many extra things going on.

The app uses AI to automatically identify over 1,000 species, which includes squirrels and rare birds. Unfortunately, I have only had Red-Winged Blackbirds at my feeder, so I haven’t been able to test how accurate the AI identification is beyond that single species. But it always got the Red-Winged Blackbird right, so there’s that. 

When a bird visits your feeder, the app notifies you with a “postcard.” These postcards are then saved to your gallery so you can pull them back up anytime. They can even show multiple photos or videos of the same bird if they stick around for a bit. Should there be photos in a set that aren’t worth saving, you can discard them to keep your gallery from getting too cluttered.

Your gallery is sorted by bird type. Tapping on each lets you open all photos and videos the camera has captured over time of that particular species. The page for each bird species will also provide information on that bird so that you can learn more. That includes personality type, what they eat, where they are typically found, how big they are, and what they sound like. For example, the Red-Winged Blackbird page tells me that they are brawlers, open lovebirds, and social butterflies who like to eat insects and seeds and are as big as a slice of pizza.

Community features

Beyond content from your feeder, you can see photos and videos from feeders worldwide in a few different ways. First, you can add some to your list of feeders and receive postcards from them like it is your own feeder. However, if you want to add more than one feeder for more than 72 hours, you’ll need a Pro membership.

If you don’t want to add a feeder, you can still scroll through photos and videos from the community. It’s like social media just for bird content. Birdbuddy TV is a video feed of publicly shared videos from Bird Buddy users. Or you can scroll through photos from the community, applauding people’s results. You can even help identify species by tapping the Wingbuddy link at the top of the Community page. 

Image & video quality

A bird feeder camera doesn’t do much good if the photos aren’t clear enough so you can actually see your avian visitors. The five-megapixel resolution may not seem very impressive, especially compared to smartphones and dedicated cameras. While you won’t be able to print these images to poster size by any means, the camera does offer plenty of quality for viewing on your phone. 

The images are clear and sharp, especially when the bird hangs out on the perch. The camera can’t focus much closer than that, though. My main visitor liked to sit right in the birdseed, so it was frequently out of focus, but even still, I could see good amounts of detail with vibrant colors. The auto exposure overall does great, even in extremely high-contrast lighting situations. There were times that the bird was blurry from moving during the exposure, but that wasn’t the norm. 

The Bird Buddy video quality is also really good. The footage is clear and well-exposed. If you want higher-quality video, you can upgrade to a Bird Buddy Pro membership, though I have not tested it, so I can’t comment on how much better that video looks. 

So, who should buy the Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder? 

Bird feeder cameras are becoming more and more popular, with new options seeming to pop up regularly. Spending $299 (for the solar roof version) may seem pricey for a bird feeder camera. But the Bird Buddy is priced similarly to other devices, including its closest competitor, the Netvue Birdfy Pro. So, what makes the Bird Buddy stand out? 

The Bird Buddy includes a durable yet attractive build, an integrated solar panel for infinite battery life, multiple mounting options, and an easy-to-clean design with a removable camera, which gives it the edge for most users. It’s also remarkably easy to install, with essentially no assembly beyond popping the camera into the feeder. Add to that the easy-to-use and fun app with minimal features behind a paywall, and it takes a clear lead. It’s a connected device that makes you feel a bit more connected with the natural world. If you are interested in keeping an eye on the bird species in your area, it’s hard to beat Bird Buddy. 

The post Bird Buddy Smart Bird Feeder review: A camera that’s not just for the birds appeared first on Popular Science.

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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. 

The post Prehistoric shark called Kentucky home 337 million years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

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For most Americans, eggs matter a lot. In a year, an average American is estimated to eat almost 300 eggs (that’s either in the form of eggs by themselves or in egg-utilizing products like baked goods). We truly are living in what some researchers have called the Age of the Chicken—at least geologically, the humble poultry will be one of our civilization’s most notable leftovers.

Food systems in the US are fairly centralized. That means small disruptions can ratchet up to become large disturbances. Just take the exorbitant egg prices from earlier this year as one example. 

To push back against supply chain issues, some households have taken the idea of farm to table a step further. Demand for backyard chickens rose both during the pandemic, and at the start of the year in response to inflation. But raising a flock can come with many unseen challenges and hassles. A new startup, Coop, is hatching at exactly the right time. 

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

Coop was founded by AJ Forsythe and Jordan Barnes in 2021, and it packages all of the software essentials of a smart home into a backyard chicken coop. 

Barnes says that she can’t resist an opportunity to use a chicken pun; it’s peppered into the copy on their website, as well as the name for their products, and is even baked into her title at the company (CMO, she notes, stands for chief marketing officer, but also chicken marketing officer). She and co-founder Forsythe invited Popular Science to a rooftop patio on the Upper East side to see a fully set up Coop and have a “chick-chat” about the company’s tech. 

In addition to spending the time to get to know the chickens, they’ve spent 10,000 plus hours on the design of the Coop. Fred Bould, who had previously worked on Google’s Nest products, helped them conceptualize the Coop of the future. 

The company’s headquarters in Austin has around 30 chickens, and both Barnes and Forsythe keep chickens at home, too. In the time that they’ve spent with the birds, they’ve learned a lot about them, and have both become “chicken people.” 

An average chicken will lay about five eggs a week, based on weather conditions and their ranking in the pecking order. The top of the pecking order gets more food, so they tend to lay more eggs. “They won’t break rank on anything. Pecking order is set,” says Barnes. 

Besides laying eggs, chickens can be used for composting dinner scraps. “Our chickens eat like queens. They’re having sushi, Thai food, gourmet pizza,” Barnes adds.  

For the first generation smart Coop, which comes with a chicken house, a wire fence, lights that can be controlled remotely, and a set of cameras, all a potential owner needs to get things running on the ground are Wifi and about 100 square feet of grass. “Chickens tend to stick together. You want them to roam around and graze a little bit, but they don’t need sprawling plains to have amazing lives,” says Barnes. “We put a lot of thought into the hardware design and the ethos of the design. But it’s all infused with a very high level of chicken knowledge—the circumference of the roosting bars, the height of everything, the ventilation, how air flows through it.” 

[Related: Artificial intelligence is helping scientists decode animal languages]

They spent four weeks designing a compostable, custom-fit poop tray because they learned through market research that cleaning the coop was one of the big barriers for people who wanted chickens but decided against getting them. And right before the Coop was supposed to go into production a few months ago, they halted it because they realized that the lower level bars on the wire cage were wide enough for a desperate raccoon to sneak their tiny paws through. They redesigned the bars with a much closer spacing. 

The goal of the company is to create a tech ecosystem that makes raising chickens easy for the beginners and the “chicken-curious.” And currently, 56 percent of their customers have never raised chickens before, they say.

Key to the offering of Coop is its brain: an AI software named Albert Eggstein that can detect both the chickens and any potential predators that might be lurking around. “This is what makes the company valuable,” says Barnes. Not only can the camera pick up that there’s four chickens in the frame, but it can tell the chickens apart from one another. It uses these learnings to provide insights through an accompanying app, almost like what Amazon’s Ring does. 

[Related: Do all geese look the same to you? Not to this facial recognition software.]

As seasoned chicken owners will tell newbies, being aware of predators is the name of the game. And Coop’s software can categorize nearby predators from muskrats to hawks to dogs with a 98-percent accuracy. 

“We developed a ton of software on the cameras, we’re doing a bunch of computer vision work and machine learning on remote health monitoring and predator detection,” Forsythe says. “We can say, hey, raccoons detected outside, the automatic door is closed, all four chickens are safe.”

The system runs off of two cameras, one stationed outside in the run, and one stationed inside the roost. In the morning, the door to the roost is raised automatically 20 minutes after sunrise, and at night, a feature called nest mode can tell owners if all their chickens have come home to roost. The computer vision software is trained through a database of about 7 million images. There is also a sound detection software, which can infer chicken moods and behaviors through the pitch and pattern of their clucks, chirps, and alerts.

[Related: This startup wants to farm shrimp in computer-controlled cargo containers]

It can also condense the activity into weekly summary sheets, sending a note to chicken owners telling them that a raccoon has been a frequent visitor for the past three nights, for example. It can also alert owners to social events, like when eggs are ready to be collected.  

A feature that the team created called “Cluck talk,” can measure the decibels of chicken sounds to make a general assessment about whether they are hungry, happy, broody (which is when they just want to sit on their eggs), or in danger. 

There’s a lot of chicken-specific behaviors that they can build models around. “Probably in about 6 to 12 months we’re going to roll out remote health monitoring. So it’ll say, chicken Henrietta hasn’t drank water in the last six hours and is a little lethargic,” Forsythe explains. That will be part of a plan to develop and flesh out a telehealth offering that could connect owners with vets that they can communicate and share videos with. 

The company started full-scale production of their first generation Coops last week. They’re manufacturing the structures in Ohio through a specialized process called rotomolding, which is similar to how Yeti coolers are made. They have 50 beta customers who have signed up to get Coops, and are offering an early-bird pricing of $1,995. Like Peloton and Nest, customers will also have to pay a monthly subscription fee of $19.95 for the app features like the AI tools. In addition to the Coops, the company also offers services like chicken-sitting (aptly named chicken Tenders). 

For the second generation Coops, Forsythe and Barnes have been toying with new ideas. They’re definitely considering making a bigger version (the one right now can hold four to six chickens), or maybe one that comes with a water gun for deterring looming hawks. The chickens are sold separately.

The post Finally, a smart home for chickens appeared first on Popular Science.

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Back in 2015, the US Department of Energy estimated wind farms could supply over a third of the nation’s electricity by 2050. Since then, numerous wind turbine projects have been green-lit offshore and across the country. However, when it comes to building, it can get tricky, like in the case of a planned wind farm 15 miles off the southeast coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Danish wind farm company Ørsted recently promised to cut New Jersey a $100 million check if the company’s massive Ocean Wind 1 offshore turbines weren’t up and running by the end of 2025. Less than a week after the wager, however, officials in the state’s southernmost county have filed a US District Court lawsuit to nix the 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines, alleging regulatory sidesteps and ecological concerns.

[Related: The NY Bight could write the book on how we build offshore wind farms.]

According to the Associated Press, Cape May County government’s October 16 lawsuit also names the Clean Ocean Action environmental group alongside multiple seafood and fishing organizations as plaintiffs. The filing against both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management claims that the Ocean Wind 1 project sidestepped a dozen federal legal requirements, as well as failed to adequately investigate offshore wind farms’ potential environmental and ecological harms. However, earlier this year, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released its over 2,300 page Final Environmental Impact Statement on Ocean Wind 1, which concluded the project is responsibly designed and adequately protects the region’s ecological health.

An Ørsted spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit for PopSci, but related the company “remains committed to collaboration with local communities, and will continue working to support New Jersey’s clean energy targets and economic development goals by bringing good-paying jobs and local investment to the Garden State.”

[Related: A wind turbine just smashed a global energy record—and it’s recyclable.]

Wind turbine farm companies, Ørsted included, have faced numerous issues in recent years thanks to supply chain bottleneck issues, soaring construction costs, and legal challenges such as the latest from Cape May County. Earlier this year, Ørsted announced its US-based projects are now worth less than half of their initial economic estimates.

Other clean energy advocates reiterated their support for the New Jersey wind farm. In an email to PopSci, Moira Cyphers, Director of Eastern Region State Affairs for the American Clean Power Association, described the lawsuit as “meritless.”

“Offshore wind is one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation and is critical for meeting New Jersey’s clean energy and environmental goals,” Cyphers continued. “Shore towns can’t wait for years and years for these projects to be constructed. The time to move forward is now.”

The post Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains appeared first on Popular Science.

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There is about a month and a half left in the 2023 Atlantic Hurricane season, and it’s a season that has seen some rapidly intensifying storms. In less than 24 hours, Hurricane Idalia went from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 4 with winds near 130 MPH. The storm made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a high Category 3. Weeks later, Hurricane Lee grew from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 in only 24 hours.

[Related: The future of hurricanes is full of floods—a lot of them.]

According to a study published October 19 in the journal Scientific Reports, Atlantic hurricanes may be more than twice as likely to strengthen from a Category 1 storm to a major Category 3 hurricane or higher in a 24-hour period than they were between 1970 and 1990. They also are more likely to strengthen more rapidly along the east coast of the United States.

As ocean temperatures continue to reach record highs due to human-caused climate change, the trend is worrying. Tropical weather systems like hurricanes and tropical storms gain strength over unusually warm sea surface temperatures. Warm ocean water is like carbohydrates for hurricanes and gives the storms more energy. Faster storm intensification has already been linked to climate change, but the changes in the intensification rates of storms across the 41 million square mile wide Atlantic Ocean Basin have been less clear. 

“Our oceans have absorbed about 90 percent of the excess warming that has occurred in recent decades due to human-caused climate change,” study co-author and Rowan University climate scientist Andra Garner tells PopSci. “I wanted to see what kinds of changes might already have occurred to the overall rates at which Atlantic hurricanes have been strengthening.”

In the study, Garner looked at every Atlantic hurricane between 1970 and 2020 and analyzed how the wind speed changed over each hurricanes’ lifespan. The storms were split into three time periods–a historical era (1970 to 1990), an intermediate era (1986 to 2005), and a modern era (2001 to 2020). To establish the maximum intensification rate, Garner calculated the greatest increase in wind speed over any 24-hour period within the hurricane’s lifespan. 

She found that the chance of a hurricane’s maximum intensification rate being 23 miles per hour or more had increased from 42.3 percent in the historical era to 56.7 percent today. The probability of a weak hurricane strengthening to become a major hurricane in 24 hours also increased from 3.23 percent to 8.12 percent. 

“The storms we’ve seen this year, like Hurricane Idalia and Hurricane Lee, align with what my research findings would tell us to expect,” Garner says. “Hurricane Idalia and Hurricane Lee both occurred over exceptionally warm ocean waters, and strengthened quickly as a result of those warm ocean waters (and other favorable conditions). I think that this lines up very well with a trend that my research indicates that we could expect to continue if ocean waters continue to warm.”

[Related: Florida’s aquatic animals prepare early for storms like Hurricane Idalia.]

The locations within the Atlantic Basin where hurricanes were most likely to see their maximum intensification rate has also changed between these eras. Hurricanes were more likely to strengthen most quickly off the Atlantic coast of the US and in the Caribbean Sea, and less likely to strengthen most quickly in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Better understanding these locations and intensification rates could help create better action plans for communities at risk. Three of the five of the most economically damaging Atlantic hurricanes have all occurred since 2017 and these storms all had rapid growth. According to Garner, this is an “urgent warning for humanity,” and it should continue without major changes to our behavior and quickly transitioning away from fossil fuels. However, there is still time to act. 

“It’s really important to remember that there is absolutely still hope. We know that we are the cause of this problem, which means we can also be the solution—and we already have the tools at our disposal (green energy, etc.) to actually be the solution,” says Garner. “So there’s hope that we could secure a more sustainable future.”

The post Atlantic hurricanes are getting stronger faster than they did 40 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best for large rooms		Mila Smart Air Purifier		SEE IT	This all-purpose smart air purifier adapts to room size and comes with a carbon monoxide detector and sleep and white noise modes.
Best HEPA		Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier		SEE IT	This HEPA model features four layers of filtration in a stylish design.
Best for allergies		InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier		SEE IT	Certified to keep you safe from dangerous levels of ozone gas.

Air purifiers suck in pollen, dust, smoke, other allergens, and even viruses—pummeling them and then circulating clean, filtered air. It sounds simple enough, but not all purifiers are created equal, and there isn’t one that’s right for every person. Your particular environment and the size of your home are huge factors in choosing the best option for you. Is allergy season wreaking havoc on your sinuses? Do you live in a smoggy city? Has wildfire smoke been wafting through, blanketing everything in an unnatural haze? In short, even the finest filters aren’t guaranteed to fix all that ails you and your home. But if you’re wondering whether air purifiers are really worth it … we think so. They can help distribute cleaner air, and that’s always a good thing, considering the link between air quality and health. So, read on as we clear the air on what we think are the best air purifiers.

• Best overall: Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde
• Best for large rooms: Mila Smart Air Purifier
• Best for small rooms: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home Bedroom
• Best for quiet: Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max
• Best HEPA: Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier
• Best with UV light: Germ Guardian True HEPA Filter Air Purifier
• Best for allergies: InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier
• Best for smoke: Alen BreatheSmart 75i
• Best portable: WYND Smart Plus Personal Portable Air Purifier
• Best budget: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home, Core 300

How we chose the best air purifiers

As pet owners and parents, we’ve experienced our fair share of smells and toxins—and that’s just from inside the house. To create this list of the best air purifiers, we relied on peer recommendations, critical reviews, online research, user impressions, and plentiful personal testing. We also examined what each air purifier claims to eliminate from the air, HEPA square footage, and MERV ratings.

The best air purifiers: Reviews & Recommendations

Pollen, pet dander, smells, smoke, germs, and other airborne goblins are no match for the best air purifiers. This list includes quiet air purifiers, ones that double as humidifiers, and even ones that claim they can help with a majority of airborne pathogens.

Best overall: Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde

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Why it made the cut: This three-in-one smart device automatically adapts to changes in air quality and humidity.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 400 square feet
• Dimensions: 36.66 x 11.02 x 12.23 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 59.8 dB

Pros

• Connectivity with Siri and Alexa
• Three products in one
• Air quality reporting

Cons

• Expensive

Between its TikTok- and Insta-famous Airwrap multistyler to its line of powerful vacuums, Dyson has made a name for itself in sucking—which we don’t mean negatively. The Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde proves yet again that Sir James Dyson really knows what he’s doing when it comes to pushing air out and in. This air purifier uses an intelligent sensing system and Air Multiplier technology to purify, humidify, and cool the air. You don’t even need to touch the stylish, distinctive unit—it automatically senses and reacts to changes in air quality and humidity (we’ve watched one enthusiastically spring to life time and time again after a particularly aggressive sauté session in the kitchen). It even features a solid-state sensor to detect and destroy formaldehyde emitted by household items—a boon if you’re in a newly renovated/refurbished space, as fresh carpet and new mattresses are emitting odd things.

You don’t have to worry about airborne baddies getting re-released into the air since the entire purifier-humidifier is fully sealed to the HEPA H13 standard. If you love numbers, neat tech, and data, this machine will tickle your brain when it reports your air quality in real time on the LCD screen and DysonLink app (which you can use to tweak/schedule usage). The filters are low-maintenance and easy to replace, and the machine features a deep-clean cycle to get rid of mineral build-up and bacteria that may be lurking in the water system. Although it’s almost $1,000, you’re getting three devices for the cost of one. Talk about smart.

Best for large rooms: Mila Smart Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: This mold- and carbon monoxide-detecting air purifier comes in different filter configurations for custom air purification.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 1,000 square feet 
• Dimensions: 12 x 12 x 15 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 62 dB but lowers to 24 dB while in room

Pros

• Stylist
• Small
• Carbon monoxide, mold detection, and white noise machine built-in

Cons

• Reviews note excessive air quality notifications

This classy, app-controllable large room air purifier adapts to the size of whatever room it’s placed in. It also looks great in any room it’s placed in. The filter has 45 square feet of HEPA, and with 447 CADR, it’s effective in rooms up to 1,000 square feet. Additional features include a sleep mode and white noise so that it won’t interfere with your sleeping habits. The device also features a carbon monoxide detector. It will monitor your room’s humidity and let you know if it detects any mold. If you’re not a fan of notifications, disable them if you go with the Mila—reviewers note that the Mila app sends lots of alerts.

Best for small rooms: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home Bedroom

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Why it made the cut: Take this lightweight, compact air purifier from room to room to experience dual-filter, three-stage filtration in your entire home.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 161 square feet
• Dimensions: 6.69 x 6.69 x 10.43 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 52 dB

Pros

• Aromatherapy
• Dual-filter, three-stage filtration
• Specifically targets hay fever

Cons

• Not for large homes

The Levoit promises to help relieve allergies, congestion, and sneezing and is our pick for the best small air purifier. Although we can’t vouch for the unit’s specific efficacy against rhinitis, we can vouch for the fact that it has three filters (one more than most other units): HEPA for dust, pollen, and dander; carbon for odors; and polyester for lint and hair. One fun additional feature is that this one has an aromatherapy option if you’d like a little lavender to help lull you to sleep at night.

Best for quiet: Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max

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Why it made the cut: Particles down to .1 microns are no match for this quiet-but-powerful air purifier.

Specs

• Recommended room size: Up to 929 square feet
• Dimensions: 19 x 12.5 x 12.5 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 50 dB

Pros

• Removes particles down to .1 micron
• Stylish
• App connectivity

Cons

• Reviews note occasional problems with auto-sensing

Blueair makes svelte cylinders with Scandinavian style packed with highly effective electrostatic and mechanical filtration. The Blue Pure 311i Max is HEPASilent but deadly … against microbes in the air. This stylish, small air purifier features five fan speeds and a one-touch auto mode with a fine particles (PM 2.5) sensor to monitor concentration and adjust speed according. This air purifier can clean a 387-square-foot room in 12.5 minutes and a 929-square-foot space in 30 minutes (there are both larger and smaller models, so something for every home). And, it snags all those particles (99.97% of them down to 0.1 micron) all nearly undetected, clocking in at 23 dB on low/night mode—louder than a quiet natural area with no wind but softer than a whisper. And it never runs above 50dB, which makes it QuietMark certified and perfect for a bedroom, TV room, any room … plus it’s only 8 pounds, so it’s easy to move around while you decide between your study and your yoga studio (or realize it’s easiest to buy two).

Is it working? We barely hear it. But we also don’t hear ourselves sneezing and wheezing and complaining about our watery eyes, so we’re going with yes. If we need more confirmation, we can look at a five-color LED that changes according to Air Quality Index (AQI), or we can reference an app that gives insight into indoor vs. outdoor pollution and lets you control mode, tweak LED Brightness, set a schedule, and more (assuming the 311i Max and your phone are connected to WiFi). And if we don’t want it to be working, Google Assistant and Alexa compatibility let us turn it off with voice commands if our phone isn’t convenient. While some reviews note that the auto-sensing feature is not as accurate as they hoped, we’ve observed the Blue Pure 311i Max react firsthand thanks to a low smoke-point cooking oil incident or two. It was lively even from across a loft apartment—and helped with the post-coming odors. And the washable pre-filter fabric cover (shown above in “Stockholm Fog” color, quietly complementing some audio-video gear) meshed effortlessly with the decor to boot.

Best HEPA: Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: Stylish-meets-powerful with this True HEPA air purifier that features four levels of filtration.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 330 square feet
• Dimensions: 10.5 × 32.7 × 10.7 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 52 dB

Pros

• Real-time air sensing
• Washable pre-filter
• Air quality indicator

Cons

• Noisier compared to other air purifiers

Multiple fan speeds, a timer, an air-quality assessor, and a filter-replacement indicator light make this the best HEPA air purifier—not just quiet and effective, but user-friendly. At just under $200, it’s neither cheap nor exorbitant for an air purifier, and it’s also aesthetically pleasing. Reviewers note that this air purifier is noisier than most.

Best with UV light: Germ Guardian True HEPA Filter Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: This quiet air purifier uses CARB-compliant UVC light and titanium dioxide to reduce airborne bacteria, viruses, and mold spores.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 153 square feet
• Dimensions: 10.25 x 6.75 x 21.5 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 61.2 dB

Pros

• Quiet
• Reduces odors
• Pre-filter traps allergens

Cons

• UV light can be bad for the environment

UVC light (the most destructive of all the UVs) in an air purifier works as a UVGI—ultraviolet germicidal irradiation—disinfection method by attacking the DNA of cells floating through the air, like mold spores, viruses, and bacteria. (This means, like all other filters, it cannot do anything for particles that have settled into fabric). An activated charcoal filter reduces odors. The 22-inch purifier filters air four times per hour at maximum speed in rooms up to 153 square feet. The four fan speeds, whisper-quiet operation, and CARB compliance make this air purifier an especially good pick for allergy sufferers. California Air Resources Board (CARB) compliance means you can rest easy about its environmental footprint.

Best for allergies: InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: CARB compliance plus four levels of air purification equals an exorcism for your sneezes.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 319 square feet
• Dimensions: 12.34 x 6.25 x 17.75 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 55 dB

Pros

• Four fan speeds
• Quiet
• CARB compliant

Cons

• No auto-sensing

The four fan speeds, whisper-quiet operation, and CARB compliance make this air purifier an especially good pick for allergy sufferers. The California Air Resources Board requires purifiers to produce .050 parts per million of ozone or less, so any device with this certification keeps you safe from unsafe gas levels.

Best for smoke: Alen BreatheSmart 75i

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Why it made the cut: Detailed air quality indicators, a B7-Pure filter, and a CADR of 347 mean that this air purifier will stop smoke in its tracks.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 1300 square feet
• Dimensions: 12 x 19 x 27 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 51 dB

Pros

• 8 colorways
• Quickly cleans large rooms
• Auto-adjusts based on air quality

Cons

• Expensive
• Little warranty

This is an easy pick for the best air purifier for smoke, thanks to its CADR of 347 (out of 450). Thanks to automatic air-quality detection, when any type of smoke is present, the unit will kick up to turbo. When no irritants are present, the device goes into energy-saving mode. Five air quality colors give you a more detailed visual indicator of air quality—other air purifiers only include three color indicators.

Best portable: WYND Smart Plus Personal Portable Air Purifier

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Why it made the cut: Take clean air onto the airplane or into the office with this water bottle-sized air purifier developed by NASA and MIT engineers.

Specs

• Recommended room size: N/A
• Dimensions: 9.57 x 8.62 x 4.33 inches
• App connectivity: Yes
• Max decibels (dB): 55 dB

Pros

• Small
• iOS/Android app
• Medical-grade filter

Cons

• Expensive for size

This small-but-mighty air purifier designed by NASA and MIT engineers fits in a cup holder and can purify the air in a car in under 15 minutes—that’s eight liters of air per second. And that comes in handy in a world of wildfires and other pollutants you might encounter as you travel—something we know from experience, as one accompanied three passengers in a Honda CR-V through the smoke-heavy American West during fall 2021. And, if you like numbers, the WYND air purifier connects to an iOS/Android app to track real-time hyperlocalized data on dust and other particulates. It also enables you to switch between different purifier presets, like auto and night, control other WYND devices, and alerts you when encountering poor air quality. The included desktop kickstand accessory lets you position the air purifier to direct a clean bubble toward your face (as shown above), giving your nose and lungs instant access to medical-grade filtered air in an office or elsewhere.

Best budget: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home, Core 300

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This compact air purifier tackles smoke, dust, pollen, bacteria, and viruses without hurting your wallet.

Specs

• Recommended room size: 219 square feet
• Dimensions: 8.7 x 8.7 x 16.25 inches
• App connectivity: No
• Max decibels (dB): 50 dB

Pros

• Filter life indicator
• Timer
• Quiet

Cons

• Louder than other air purifiers

This cheap air purifier targets smoke, dust, and pollen, along with some bacteria and viruses. Four specialty replacement filters include a pet-allergy option and a toxin absorber for particularly smoky or smoggy areas. Like higher-end air purifiers that are more expensive, this Levoit air purifier features timer settings and a sleep mode. And the display lights can be turned off to ensure a pitch-black room when sleeping. Although the air purifier is louder than some competitors, it resembles a whooshing fan at its highest setting—if you can deal with that, this air purifier is for you.

What to consider when buying the best air purifiers

The best air purifier for you might not be the one your best friend or neighbor loves. You want a HEPA filter with a high MERV rating that’s designed to cover the amount of space you have in your particular room or dwelling. Beyond that, consider whether you want other features like pathogen-killing UV light, smart controls, and/or odor elimination. Do you need the best air purifier for pets or perhaps something portable? Air purifiers for mold or models to get rid of smoke? Air filters work only on airborne particles. To get at anything that’s settled into upholstery or rugs, you’ll need a handy vacuum, a helpful robot, or something else that offers deep-clean suction.

Size of space

There’s an alphabet soup to make sense of when choosing the best air purifier for your home. ACH (air changes per hour) correlates to the airflow of your device. It’s calculated based on the volume of your space, ceiling height, and how many cubic feet per minute the device can cover. It’s independent of other factors, e.g., the filter’s efficacy—to calculate that you need the CADR (clean air delivery rate) rating; because a HEPA filter is more efficient, its CADR rating may be lower, which is deceptive.

The most important thing to note is that an air purifier’s efficacy cannot be calculated based on square footage alone. You can find handy calculators online to determine the proper purifier for your needs, but here’s what to consider with any device: Will it successfully rid your home of odors with carbon or other comparable filters? Is it a good choice for pet owners? Does it feature UV light? Read the fine print.

HEPA

You’ve likely heard of high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters. They are a type of pleated air filter that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “can theoretically remove at least 99.97% of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria, and any airborne particles with a size of .3 microns.” The smaller the particle, the more penetrating and nefarious it can be. So when you’re shopping for air purifiers, check out their filters’ MERV (minimum efficiency reporting values) rating. The higher the MERV rating, the better it is at trapping the tiniest particles.

Suppose it’s the coronavirus that has you shopping for purifiers. In that case, it should be said that though a HEPA filter should be able to catch a virus of that size, there’s no conclusive proof that an air purifier can kill airborne COVID-19-carrying air droplets. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated that any room housing a coronavirus patient “should be exhausted directly to the outside, or be filtered through a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter directly before recirculation.”

If your main concern about your indoor air quality is lingering food or cigarette smoke odors, make sure the model you’re considering specifically targets fumes and other volatile organic compounds. HEPA filters aren’t good at eliminating odors on their own.

The HEPA filter was initially designed to capture radioactive particles when the atomic bomb was being developed because it can capture 99.97 percent of particles as small as .3 microns, which can evade other types of filters. (This is sometimes referred to as “true HEPA,” as European HEPA standards are required to trap only 85 percent of particles.) It works by ensnaring, sieving, and rerouting irritating particles.

A HEPA air purifier is considered the gold standard, but it does have limitations. Any particle smaller than .3 microns—for example, some viruses and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) like aerosols, ammonia, and other toxins—will slip right through. Changing your filter often enough is key. A HEPA filter does a great job of capturing mold. If you don’t change the filter, the purifier can redistribute that mold back into the air.

Allergies

The best air purifiers for allergies depend on what your particular triggers are because different filters work on different-sized particles. Pet hair and pollen are large particles, dust is medium-sized, and smoke is small. A combination HEPA-carbon filter is your best bet for filtering the maximum number of irritants to help reduce your allergies.

The addition of an ionizer and UV light, if you’re comfortable with it, adds a belt to your proverbial suspenders. Because UV light does create ozone particles, we recommend choosing an air purifier with UV light that’s approved for sale in California.

Smoke

Pollutants—like smoke and soot—can aggravate asthma, irritate your eyes, and stress your lungs and heart. An intuitive HEPA purifier with multiple fan speeds, maximum air circulation, and zero ozone output is the best one for allergy sufferers and people who are sensitive to smoke. The best air purifiers for smoke have a higher CADR rating. This means your device will be better at eliminating smoke and its odor, whether you’re talking about cigarettes, cannabis, or wildfires.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best air purifiers

• Best overall: Dyson Purifier Humidify+Cool Formaldehyde
• Best for large rooms: Mila Smart Air Purifier
• Best for small rooms: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home Bedroom
• Best for quiet: Blueair Blue Pure 311i Max
• Best HEPA: Coway Tower True HEPA Air Purifier
• Best with UV light: Germ Guardian True HEPA Filter Air Purifier
• Best for allergies: InvisiClean Aura II Air Purifier
• Best for smoke: Alen BreatheSmart 75i
• Best portable: WYND Smart Plus Personal Portable Air Purifier
• Best budget: LEVOIT Air Purifier for Home, Core 300

In almost every category, the best air purifiers have a true HEPA filter and a carbon filter. Together, they get you the most coverage regarding the breadth of pollutants the purifier will attack. Beyond that, the most important qualities are energy efficiency and picking the right model for the size of your room. Everything else—design, whether the device is app-enabled, UV lighting—is just gravy.

Why trust us

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

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

The post The best air purifiers for 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

On July 1, 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish fish lined with vertical black stripes. He texted photos of his catch to colleagues, who confirmed his fears: The fish were smallmouth bass, voracious predators that have invaded waters around the West. Worse, they were juveniles. Smallmouth weren’t just living below the dam—they’d likely begun to breed. 

It was a grim discovery. Smallmouth bass, whose native range encompasses rivers and lakes in much of the Eastern United States and Great Lakes, have long plagued the Colorado River. State agencies and anglers probably began stocking them in the watershed in the mid-1900s, and they’ve since conquered much of the basin, including Lake Powell, the reservoir that sloshes above Glen Canyon Dam. Downriver from the dam, however, lies the Grand Canyon, whose sandstone depths have historically provided a bass-free haven for native fish—most of all, the humpback chub, a federally threatened species endowed with an odd dorsal bulge. Now, biologists realized, neither the canyon nor its chub were safe.

Scientists have long dreaded this development. As Lake Powell has shrunk over the past two decades, drained by overallocation and chronic drought, its diminishment has created prime conditions for bass to infiltrate the Grand Canyon. But Brian Healy, a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey and Grand Canyon National Park’s former fish biologist, said that even though he and his colleagues expected the species to eventually become a problem, “we didn’t realize it would be an issue so quickly.”

Preventing a bass takeover won’t be simple, biologically or politically. The Colorado’s users expect it to simultaneously serve as a pipeline for water conveyance, a source of cheap electrons, a recreational playground, and, not least, suitable habitat for native fish. For decades, the river’s human managers have uneasily balanced these often contradictory purposes—and now they must also work to exclude smallmouth bass, an immense challenge that may well compete with the river’s many other functions. “The best way to think about this is that everything in the Colorado River is connected to everything else,” said Jack Schmidt, a watershed scientist and emeritus professor at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. “Everything has a ramification.” 

FORTY MILLION PEOPLE rely on the Colorado River’s largesse, from Wyoming ranchers to the residents of sprawling Arizona subdivisions to the lettuce farmers in California’s Imperial Valley. Less visibly, the river is also a lifeline for 14 native species of fish. They are rarely seen by humans—the river they inhabit is as turbid as coffee and they’re rarely fished for sport—yet they require a healthy Colorado as much as any Angeleno or Tucsonan. 

Today, however, four of those fish—the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow, the razorback sucker and the bonytail—are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Lake Powell commandeered the Colorado’s payloads of silt and stymied natural floods, erasing channels and backwaters where chubs and suckers once spawned and reared. And smallmouth bass and other invasive species devastated native fish in tributaries like the Yampa River. (“Smallmouth” is a misnomer: Bass have maws so cavernous they can gulp down prey more than half their own size.) Bass arrived in Lake Powell in 1982, courtesy of a hatchery manager who, on a lark, dumped 500 spare smallmouth into the reservoir. The bass, he crowed decades later, “performed magnificently,” adding, “Anglers have caught millions of smallmouth bass over the past 30 years.”

Through it all, the Grand Canyon remained a bass-less sanctuary—thanks, paradoxically, to Glen Canyon Dam. Although smallmouth teemed in Lake Powell, they stayed in the reservoir’s warm, sunlit upper strata, well above Glen Canyon Dam’s penstocks, the massive tubes that convey water through its hydropower turbines and thence downriver. Bass never reached the Grand Canyon because they never swam deep enough to pass through the dam.

As Lake Powell withered, however, so did the Grand Canyon’s defenses. By the spring of 2022, two decades of climate change-fueled drought had lowered the lake’s surface by more than 150 feet, drawing its tepid, bass-filled top layer ever closer to the penstocks. At the same time, the warmer water flowing through the dam and downstream made the Grand Canyon more hospitable to bass. “The temperature was ideal for them,” said Charles Yackulic, a research statistician at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Last summer, after bass swam through Glen Canyon Dam’s penstocks, slipped past its whirling turbines, and apparently reproduced, managers hastened to control the incipient invasion, netting off the slough where Arnold discovered the juveniles as though it were a crime scene. The Park Service also doused the backwater with a fish-killing poison. When biologists electroshocked the river that fall and the following spring, though, they found hundreds more juveniles. The slough wasn’t an isolated beachhead; it was merely a battleground in a broader invasion.

If there is a saving grace, it is that the bass remain concentrated above the cold, clear stretch of river known as Lees Ferry. Humpback chub, by contrast, have their stronghold deep in the Grand Canyon, some 75 miles downriver from the dam, where bass haven’t shown up—at least not yet. “The worry is that you got them in Lees Ferry and they’re reproducing,” Yackulic said. “And then suddenly, you’ve just got all these babies dispersing downstream.”

THE COLORADO RIVER is at once in a state of crisis and rebirth. The decline of Lake Powell has revealed Glen Canyon, the gorgeous red-rock labyrinth that the reservoir drowned in the 1960s. Ironically, the forces behind this restoration are also imperiling native fish. “Last year was the closest we’ve had to a natural thermal regime in more than 50 years,” Yackulic noted. But for the humpback chub, it was a catastrophe.

River managers thus face a conundrum: How do you preserve native species in a broken ecosystem? In February 2023, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that controls Glen Canyon Dam, released a draft environmental assessment evaluating four options for manipulating river flows to deter smallmouth bass. The plans are variations on a theme: When the Colorado gets dangerously warm, the agency  releases cold water to lower its temperature below the threshold where bass spawn. Two options—favored by conservation groups like the Center for Biological Diversity—include high-intensity “flow spikes” designed to freeze bass out of sloughs and backwaters. “We need flows that are cold enough for long enough that it prevents smallmouth bass from spawning,” said Taylor McKinnon, the center’s Southwest director. “Not disrupt reproduction—prevent reproduction.”

Managing the Colorado River to thwart bass, however, could conflict with Reclamation’s other goals. For one thing, all four options would release water through Glen Canyon Dam’s “bypass tubes,” outlets closer to Lake Powell’s frigid bottom. But the bypass tubes, as their name suggests, don’t pump water through the dam’s hydroelectric turbines — which, as the agency acknowledges, could lead to “a reduction in the revenue generated from power proceeds.” That possibility doesn’t thrill the Colorado River Energy Distributors Association, which represents electric utilities and co-ops and has warned of “measurable financial impacts” to ratepayers.

Some environmentalists may find themselves at odds with bass deterrence, too. For years, the Glen Canyon Institute has called on river managers to “Fill Mead First,” letting Lake Powell shrivel while sending Colorado’s water downstream to Lake Mead, the river’s other massive reservoir. As scientists pointed out in a 2020 paper, however, this strategy could “lead to warmer water temperatures throughout Grand Canyon” and render invasive fish control “especially problematic.” Indeed, if your sole goal were to protect humpback chub in the immediate term, Lake Powell—whose deep, chilly waters staved off bass for 40 years—might be the first reservoir you’d fill. “The decisions of where you store water in the system are going to determine the fate of native fish,” said Utah State’s Schmidt.

Although last winter’s strong snowpack should ultimately raise Lake Powell’s surface by around 70 feet, the invasion continues. Scientists have so far pulled 667 bass from the slough this year, along with thousands of carp and sunfish, two other warm-water nonnatives. The Park Service poisoned the slough again in late August, but that fix is clearly neither complete nor lasting. In February 2023, a group of researchers convened to study the bass problem by the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Geological Survey recommended outfitting Glen Canyon Dam with “fish exclusionary devices”—basically fancy nets—to keep bass from swimming through the penstocks. That’s hardly a new idea—biologists first recommended that the Bureau “pursue means” of preventing invasive fish from passing through the dam in 2016 —but, at an August meeting of federal managers and researchers, one Reclamation official claimed that an effective screen design is still at least five years away.

Ultimately, staving off the bass crisis may call for even more ambitious fixes. In one paper, Schmidt and his colleagues raised the idea of drilling colossal diversion tunnels that would funnel water and sediment around Glen Canyon Dam and thus restore the silty, flood-prone conditions that favor native fish. Re-engineering the Colorado would be neither simple nor cheap, but, in recent comments to the Bureau, McKinnon and other conservationists claimed that the “climate-inevitable obsolescence” of Glen Canyon Dam calls for drastic measures. If bass take over an ever-warmer river, McKinnon said, “it’s game over.”

Ben Goldfarb is a High Country News correspondent and the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. His next book, on the science of road ecology, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2023.

The post It’s not too late to stop a bass invasion in the Colorado River appeared first on Popular Science.

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Airborne lead levels in the US have declined an impressive 99 percent since 1980 thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, but leaded gas isn’t gone completely. While large jet aircraft do not use leaded fuel, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 220,000 smaller, piston-engine aircraft capable of carrying between two and 10 people still run on leaded aviation gasoline, or “avgas.” 

Today, the EPA took its first step towards attempting to finally phase out air transportation’s lingering lead holdouts with a new endangerment finding announcement highlighting the adverse effects of even minuscule levels of airborne lead. With the new findings, the EPA argues that leaded avgas endangers public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act—and because of this, the US could finally see its first-ever avgas lead limitations.

“The science is clear: Exposure to lead can cause irreversible and life-long health effects in children,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan via the agency’s October 18 announcement. “Aircraft that use leaded fuel are the dominant source of lead emissions in our air.”

[Related: The US can’t get away from lead’s toxic legacy.]

The federal level determination earned support from legislators including House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). “[The] EPA’s conclusion confirms what constituents in my district and Americans across the country know all too well—emissions from leaded aviation fuel contribute to dangerous lead air pollution,” Lofgren said via the announcement. She also cited the disproportionate exposure to leaded avgas in many poorer and minority communities near general aviation airports.

Lead’s neurotoxic effects have long been understood, especially its dangers to younger children, as it  negatively affects cognitive abilities and slows physical growth. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control announced a redefinition of “lead poisoning,” lowering the threshold for toxic exposure from 5 micrograms per deciliter of a child’s blood down to just 3.5 mgs per deciliter. Even with the added stringency, however, the EPA reiterated in its October 18 announcement that there is no evidence of any threshold to fully reduce lead exposure’s harmful effects.

[Related: Leaded gas may have lowered the IQ of 170 million US adults.]

The new avgas endangerment finding does not carry any regulatory or legal weight itself. Instead, it opens the door to a future phaseout of avgas for small aircraft. Last year, the FAA and industry leaders announced their “Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions” (EAGLE) program aiming to “achieve a lead-free aviation system” by 2030. The FAA has already approved usage of a 100 octane unleaded fuel capable of being used by piston-engine aircraft, although the EPA notes it is not yet commercially available. A lower octane fuel is also available at an estimated 35 US airports, with plans to “expand and streamline the process for eligible aircraft to use this fuel.”

As The Washington Post notes, however, the EPA’s and FAA’s attempts to phase out avgas come as Congress considers a long-term reauthorization of the FAA that would all but require smaller airports to continue offering leaded avgas.

“While today’s announcement is a step forward, we cannot be complacent,” Lofgren added on Wednesday. “We must finish the job and protect our nation’s children from all sources of lead.”

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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 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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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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Despite decades of innovation, solar powered cars remain comparatively expensive and difficult to mass produce—but that doesn’t mean they aren’t starting to pack a serious punch. At least one prototype reportedly handled an off-road sojourn across the world’s largest non-polar desert at speeds as fast as 90 mph.

Designed by a team of 21-to-25-year-old  college students at the Netherland’s Eindhoven University of Technology, their Stella Terra recently completed a 620 mile (1,000 km) test drive that began in Morocco before speeding through portions of Tangier and the Sahara. While miles ahead of what is currently available to consumers, the army green two-seater could be a preview of rides to come.

[Related: Sweden is testing a semi-truck trailer covered in 100 square meters of solar panels.]

As highlighted by The Guardian on Monday, the aerodynamic, comparatively lightweight (1,200 kg) Stella Terra can travel at least 440 miles on a clear, sunny day without recharging. This is thanks to the car’s solar converter designed in-house by the students, which turns 97 percent of its absorbed sunlight into an electrical charge. For cloudier situations, however, the vehicle also includes a lithium-ion battery capable of powering shorter excursions. For comparison, the most efficient panels available today only sustain roughly 45 percent efficiency, while the vast majority measure somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. According to The Guardian’s rundown, Stella Terra’s panels actually proved a third more efficient than designers expected.

In a September project update, Wisse Bos, Solar Team Eindhoven’s team manager, estimated Stella Terra’s designs are between 5 and 10 years ahead of anything available on the current market. But Bos also stressed their ride is meant to inspire similar experimentation and creativity within the automotive industry.

[Related: Swiss students just slashed the world record for EV acceleration.]

“With Stella Terra, we want to demonstrate that the transition to a sustainable future offers reasons for optimism and encourages individuals and companies to accelerate the energy transition,” Bos said at the time.

While the innovative, army green off-roadster is unlikely to hit American highways anytime soon, the students believe larger auto manufacturers’ could look to Stella Terra to help guide their own plans for more sustainable transportation options. Speaking with CNN on Monday, the team’s event manager, Thieme Bosman, hopes companies such as Ford and Chrysler will take notice of such a vehicle’s feasibility. “It’s up to the market now, who have the resources and the power to make this change and the switch to more sustainable vehicles,” Bosman said.

And if off-roading isn’t your thing, don’t worry: Solar Team Eindhoven’s previous teams have also designed luxury vehicles, self-driving cars, and even mobile tiny homes powered by the sun.

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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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On October 13, President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced plans to develop seven regional clean hydrogen hubs across the US. The hubs will receive $7 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to accelerate the domestic market for low-cost, clean hydrogen.

These new hubs aim to produce more than three million metric tons of clean hydrogen annually. They are estimated to help eliminate 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or roughly the combined annual emissions of over 5.5 million gasoline-powered cars. 

According to the White House, advancing clean hydrogen is essential to achieving President Biden’s “vision of a strong clean energy economy that strengthens energy security, bolsters domestic manufacturing, creates healthier communities, and delivers new jobs and economic opportunities across the nation.” 

Why hydrogen?

Hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element on Earth. However, it rarely exists on its own in nature and instead is usually found in compound form like in water (H₂0). Elemental hydrogen is also an energy carrier, meaning it can transport energy in a usable form from one place to another. However, hydrogen must be produced from another substance in order to do this.

Hydrogen fuel is made by separating water molecules, sometimes using a device called an electrolyzer. Fuel from hydrogen can also be produced from natural gas during a process called steam methane reforming that combines methane with steam. 

While a clean fuel itself, the current processes used to make it is anything but clean. Large quantities of fossil fuels are used, which emit greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane. Energy companies are working to advance cleaner versions of making emission-free hydrogen fuel and California, Texas, and Colorado are already working to become clean hydrogen centers.  

[Related: This liquid hydrogen-powered plane successfully completed its first test flights.]

These newly announced hubs will be focused on the goal of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from hydrogen production. This huge undertaking will require large amounts of renewable energy to power the manufacturing process. It could also require additional nuclear power and a large network of carbon storage facilities that will grab and bury emissions in the regions where natural gas is still used to make hydrogen.

Cleanly manufacturing hydrogen could help decarbonize multiple industries in the US, as hydrogen is used to make fertilizer and is important in the chemical and petrochemical industry. 

“This has potential to be transformative,” Oleksiy Tatarenko, who focuses on hydrogen at RMI, a clean energy advocacy group, told The Washington Post. “But we need to get it right from day one. We need to ensure this hydrogen can demonstrate climate benefits.”

How long will this take?

Granholm tells PopSci that the initiative provides the US with the opportunity for,  “creating an entirely new economy around hydrogen and putting thousands and thousands of people to work, particularly people who have powered our nation for the last century.” 

The hubs will be an asset in bringing hydrogen production up to scale, to reduce the currently high costs of hydrogen production. It also incorporates multiple industries from construction to operations to design. 

“For the seven hydrogen hubs, it’s about a one-to six-investment, meaning for every dollar the federal government puts in, six dollars come from the private sector, so it’s government enabled, but private sector led,” says Granholm. “These projects are not just one year projects, these are projects that last several years to be able to plan and design, build, and operate.”

Where will the ‘hydrogen hubs’ be located?

The seven new hydrogen hubs will stretch across 16 states and are organized by geographic region.

“These states that were selected are not awardees yet. There’s a negotiation period that will occur between selection and award. So there is a period of time there for states to make sure that they’ve got an environment that will make these hubs of success, “ explains Granholm.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to the ‘hydrogen rainbow.’]

The Mid-Atlantic hub in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey will repurpose old oil infrastructure and use renewable and nuclear electricity from both established and innovative electrolyzer technologies.

The Appalachian hub will be located across West Virginia, Southeastern Ohio, and Southwestern Pennsylvania. This hub is slated to be among the largest in terms of production and will use the region’s methane gas to derive hydrogen. 

The California hub will span the entire Golden State and encompass the busy ports Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Oakland to produce hydrogen exclusively from renewable energy and biomass.

A Gulf Coast hub will be based in Houston, Texas, and could potentially expand into Louisiana. Houston is the traditional energy capital of the US and the plans for this hub include large-scale hydrogen production through both natural gas with carbon capture and renewables-powered electrolysis.

The Heartland Hydrogen hub spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota will use wind energy to derive hydrogen in an effort to decarbonize the region’s critical agricultural sector. 

The Midwest hub in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan will further decarbonize industrial sectors by using hydrogen in steel and glass production, power generation, refining, heavy-duty transportation, and sustainable aviation fuel.

The Pacific Northwest hub in parts of Eastern Washington State, Oregon, and parts of Montana plans to produce clean hydrogen exclusively from renewable sources.

“The hub design in itself is important because it creates clusters of supply and demand that are close to one another, minimizing the need to tackle challenges that would come with moving hydrogen long distances,” Adria Wilson, the hydrogen policy lead at Breakthrough Energy, told CNBC.

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Niobium can be found in steel, particle accelerators, MRI machines, and rockets, but sourcing it is largely limited to a handful of countries including Brazil and Canada. Earlier this month, however, Chinese news outlets announced the discovery of a never-before-seen type of ore deposit in Inner Mongolia containing potentially vast amounts of the superconductive rare earth element. According to Antonio Castro Neto, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore speaking with the South China Morning Post, the new resource trove could even be so large that it would make China self-sufficient in its own niobium needs.

The ore found in Inner Mongolia—dubbed niobobaotite—also contains large quantities of barium, titanium, iron, and chlorine, according to a statement from China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) earlier this month.

Discovered in 1801, niobium is named after Tantalus’ daughter Niobe in Greek mythology due to its chemical relationship to tantalum. Almost 85-to-90 percent of all mined niobium in the world goes towards iron and steel processing production. Adding just 0.03-0.05 percent to steel, for example, can boost its strength by as much as 30 percent while adding virtually no extra weight. That prized performance enhancement is comparatively difficult to obtain, however. The element only occurs within the Earth’s crust at a proportion of roughly 20-parts-per-million.

[Related: New factory retrofit could reduce a steel plant’s carbon emissions by 90 percent.]

In addition to its many current uses, niobium is of particular interest to researchers hoping to further the development of niobium-graphene and niobium-lithium batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are currently the most widespread rechargeable power sources, but remain restricted in terms of charge times and lifespans, as well as safety concerns. Earlier this year, researchers working on improving niobium-graphene batteries estimated future iterations of the alternative could fully charge in less than 10 minutes alongside a 30 year lifespan—approximately 10 times longer than current lithium-ion options.

As promising as the discovery may be for China, labor concerns will almost undoubtedly be an issue for outside observers. The nation has a long and troubling history of exploitation within the mining industry. Rare earth mineral mining also generates a wide array of pollution issues.

Brazil is by far the world’s largest exporter of niobium, with Canada trailing far behind in second place. China currently needs to import about 95 percent of its niobium supplies, but the newfound deposits could dramatically shift their sourcing to almost complete independence. Meanwhile, the US is currently working towards opening the Elk Creek Critical Minerals Project in southern Nebraska, which when opened will be the country’s first niobium mining and processing facility.

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The endangered Texas ocelot is in serious trouble due to a combination of over-hunting, habitat loss, inbreeding, and getting hit by cars. Only two populations of these bobcat sized spotted and striped carnivores remain in Texas and they’re isolated from a larger population living in northwestern Mexico by highways and buildings. 

[Related: Watch bobcats, bears, and even birds use fallen logs as bridges.]

One conservation measure to help endangered ocelots and other animals near busy roads are special wildlife exits. A study published October 13 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that 10 mammal species use these special structures, which could help prevent more collisions with traffic.

Chain-link fencing along Texas highways has been used to reduce wildlife mortality from colliding with cars and trucks. However, this fencing can trap animals that get on the highway if they jump over or burrow under the fencing. In 2018, the Texas Department of Transportation built 10 exits for the endangered ocelots in an effort to keep the animals from getting trapped. The openings in the fencing are about 18 inches across and 23 inches wide and are funnel shaped to encourage the ocelots to move away from the highway and into the surrounding habitat. 

This new study tested if these wildlife exits are used by medium-sized carnivores in Texas. Two automatic cameras were installed at each of the 10 wildlife exits along a 7.3-mile stretch of State Highway 100 between Los Fresnos and Laguna Vista. The cameras were inspected every month between February 2019 and November 2020 and a team of scientists downloaded the images and sorted them into species. 

They found that the wildlife exits were used by 10 mammal species to get off the highway. The species ranged from the smaller black-tailed jackrabbits and Virginia opossums up to bobcats and coyotes. For the coyotes and bobcats, their activity peaked around 10 PM and then again between midnight and dawn.

“Here we show that a range of species, including middle-sized carnivores such as bobcats and coyotes, successfully use wildlife exits, a new type of mitigation structure specifically designed for the US endangered ocelot,” study co-author and former University of Texas Rio Grande Valley graduate student said in a statement. 

While the ocelots themselves were not photographed using the exits due to their small numbers, other automatic cameras near the highway saw them. About 43 percent of bobcats, a surrogate species for the ocelot, used the exits. According to the team, observing bobcats and coyotes using the exits implies that the endangered ocelots are likely to do so as well. 

[Related: Grizzlies are getting killed by roads, but the risks are bigger than roadkill.]

“We anticipated that the extreme rarity of ocelots would limit the amount of data collected on that species,” study co-author and conservation biologist  at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Kevin Ryer said in a statement. “For this reason, we also focused on more common bobcats and coyotes, as they have similar habitats, diets, body sizes, and behaviors as ocelots, with overlapping home ranges between them.”

The largest local species including white-tailed deer, nilgai, and javelina, could not use the narrow wildlife exits. Tunnels and crossing girds are the best methods for helping these bigger animals avoid traffic collisions. 

While the exits appear to function as designed, additional research could create improvements that prevent wildlife from going in the wrong direction. These wildlife exits also have the potential to be a valuable conservation measure on Texas highways.

“Wildlife collision mitigation is less expensive to implement during the construction phase of highways than retrofitting mitigation after construction,” study co-author and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley biologist Richard Kline said in a statement. “Although the entire wildlife community near the highway should be considered when planning mitigation, endangered species should be the focus.”

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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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Being a proud pet owner means going above and beyond to ensure your furry friend is happy and healthy, and a dog nail grinder is part of that equation. You take them for walks, fill up their water dish, give them belly rubs, and so much more. Granted, some things are easier said than done when caring for your dog, like keeping their paws properly maintained. Whether you’re between trips to the local pet spa or ready to fly solo when it comes to trims, the best dog nail grinder will make an at-home manicure quick and easy.

• Best overall: Dremel 7350-PET
• Best for large dogs: Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder
• Best with safety guard: Oster Gentle Paws Premium Nail Grinder
• Best with a guide light: Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder with 2 LED Light
• Best nail clipper-and-grinder set: Boschel Dog Nail Clippers and Grinder

How we chose the best dog nail grinders

There are a few things you should think about before buying a new dog nail grinder. First, ensure you understand when and how you should use this helpful tool for dog grooming. Understanding the ins and outs of caring for your pup’s nails will help you narrow down the right dog nail trimmer for you. You’ll also want to consider your dog’s age, temperament, and nail type as you consider one of these dog essentials. These are just some factors we considered when researching the best options for giving your best friend an at-home spa treatment. We combined this research with critical recommendations and user reviews to narrow down our selection.

The best dog nail grinders: Reviews & Recommendations

One of the most important things to be aware of is their individual grooming needs, including nail length. That’s why a dog nail grinder is one of the essential dog products you’ll need if you want to take care of grooming yourself.

Best overall: Dremel 7350-PET

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Made by a trusted name in tools, this nail grinder is cordless and comes with a 60-grit sanding drum and two rotation speeds for easier trimming.

Specs

• Power: Nickel-cadmium battery
• Speeds: One
• Good for: All dogs

Pros

• Made by a well-known tool company
• Designed with two rotation speeds 
• Cordless and battery-powered

Cons

• May run out of power
• Will need to buy replacement discs

The Dremel 7350-PET is one of the best dog nail grinders on the market. A 60-grit sanding drum and one rotation speed (12,000 rotations per minute) bring enough power to file down tough nails on large dogs or gently sand down your tiny dog’s talons. The rechargeable battery can last about an hour and a half, and each unit comes with a charging stand equipped with an LED indicator light. It also comes with five sanding disks, so you’ll start your journey stocked up on replacements.

Best for large dogs: Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This nail grinder is designed with three settings to customize grooming for large dogs and small dogs.

Specs

• Power: Rechargeable AAA batteries
• Speeds: Two
• Good for: Multiple breeds

Pros

• Works for range of dogs
• Quiet
• Comes with diamond-built grinder for thick nails

Cons

• Slower speeds

The Casfuy nail grinder promises a gentle yet powerful grind with minimal vibration and noise to keep your pup calm during upkeep. The built-in battery is USB rechargeable and lasts up to two hours. This trimmer has two speed settings and three ports. The first port, a notch in the included protective sleeve, is designed for small pets, the second port for medium-sized dogs, and the unprotected diamond-bit nail grinder is perfect for big dogs with thick nails.

Best with safety guard: Oster Gentle Paws Premium Nail Grinder

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: The grinder comes with a safety guard and is designed for small to medium-sized dogs and cats. 

Specs

• Power: Rechargeable AA battery
• Speeds: Two
• Good for: Small to medium dogs, some cats

Pros

• Comes with safety guard
• Collects nail filings
• Quiet

Cons

• Not the best for large dogs

The Oster Gentle Paws nail grinder has a two-speed design and includes one fine and two coarse sanding bands. An adjustable safety guard will help you feel confident and protect your pet from any accidental nicks. Best of all, the removable safety guard will collect the nail filings, so all you need to do is remove the cap over the trash, and clean-up is complete. This nail grinder is best for small to medium-sized dogs, and Oster says it can even be used on some very patient cats.

Best with a guide light: Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder with 2 LED Light

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: For skittish pups, this nail grinder comes with a guide light and has three rotation speeds for better customization.

Specs

• Power: Rechargeable lithium-ion battery (USB)
• Speeds: Three
• Good for: Small, medium, and large dogs

Pros

• LED light helps you see what you’re doing
• Diamond bit allows for more powerful grinding
• Quiet

Cons

• Grinding process can take a while

This dog nail grinder from GHG features a diamond bit, a rechargeable battery, and a quiet motor that produces under 40 decibels of sound. It has three rotation speed settings and three grinding ports to suit your pet’s size and nail thickness. A LED light located under the grinder shines directly on your pet’s paw, brightly illuminating the quick, so you know where to cut. Turn the light on and off at will, depending on which pup you’re trimming or the natural light in the room.

Best nail clipper-and-grinder set: Boshel Dog Nail Clippers and Grinder  

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This set comes with a grinder and clippers, a diamond bit for tough nails, and a nail file for rough edges.

Specs

• Power: Rechargeable battery (USB)
• Speeds: Two
• Good for: Dogs and cats of all sizes

Pros

• Comprehensive kit
• Features three ports for range of dog sizes
• Comes with nail file

Cons

• Just two speeds

While grinding your dog’s nail can be safer than clipping, sometimes it’s helpful to keep both tools on hand. This Boshel set is suitable for cats and dogs, with sharp blades and a safety stop on the clippers. The diamond bit grinder has a two-speed motor with a rechargeable battery and three ports suitable for any size dog. This pet nail grinder set also includes a mini nail file to round out any sharp or uneven edges when you’re trimming dog claws.

What to consider when searching for the best dog nail grinders

Why is it important to cut my dog’s nails?

A domesticated dog needs assistance when it comes to taking care of health and hygiene. Just like we need to bathe, cut our hair, and trim our nails to keep up not just our appearance but maintain our overall well-being, dogs rely on the same routine for the exact same reasons. While frequent walks on pavement or concrete can help naturally file down a dog’s nail, dedicated filing or clipping is critical. If your dog’s nails get too long, that can start to affect their gait and stress their joints. Beyond that, if their nails continue to grow, they can puncture their footpads or injure themselves when scratching. While the best thing you can do is regularly take your dog to a professional groomer, an at-home nail grinder means you can keep them in tip-top shape, even if the pet spa is all booked up. 

How do I even use a nail grinder?

A nail grinder uses a high-speed rotating head with a textured bit, much like sandpaper, to gently file down canine nails. While they take longer to complete the task than trimmers, a doggie nail file can be a safer alternative, especially for sensitive dogs. All you need to do is hold the grinder up to your dog’s nails and gently move the tool back and forth. Your nail grinder should be light, easy to grip, and either come with a power cord or long-lasting batteries that are rechargeable or replaceable, so you don’t need to stop mid-trim. It’s a good idea to acclimate your pup to the sound of the grinder before taking it to their nails, and it’s never a bad idea to prepare treats for them post-pedicure.

A grinder results in smooth nail ends, eliminates cracking, and gives ample time to assess how close you are to the quick. The quick is the pink part of the nail that delivers blood. While you want to ensure you don’t grind this area down, regular nail trimming will naturally cause it to recede, which is beneficial! If you’re feeling particularly nervous about over-trimming, look for a grinder that comes with a guard, which will put a physical barrier between you and a sensitive part of the nail.

What size dog do you have?

Generally, the size of your dog will tell you about their nail thickness. Small dogs typically have thinner nails that don’t need a super coarse grinding bit or multiple speeds. Larger dogs have thicker nails that need a little more power behind the grind. Multiple grinding speeds can help whittle down tough areas, and a diamond or stainless-steel sanding drum will increase efficiency. A really powerful grinder has the potential to heat nails to an uncomfortable degree, so it’s a good idea to work in quick bursts and pay attention to any intense heat coming off of their nails. Age and breed can also impact your dog’s nail density. Before purchasing, we recommend palming your dog’s paws and scoping out the tool’s specs to double-check the grinding gear can handle the trim.

Does your dog have dark fur and/or dark nails?

Trimming your dog’s nails on your own can be anxiety-provoking, especially if you have difficulty distinguishing the nail from the fur. If Fido is rocking a dark nail-dark fur combination, consider investing in a nail grinder equipped with an automatic LED light. This guiding light will illuminate everything you need to see to protect your puppy from any inaccuracies. 

Related: Give your pet a treat after the trimming with the best dog puzzles

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best dog nail grinders

• Best overall: Dremel 7350-PET
• Best for large dogs: Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder
• Best with safety guard: Oster Gentle Paws Premium Nail Grinder
• Best with a guide light: Casfuy Dog Nail Grinder with 2 LED Light
• Best nail clipper-and-grinder set: Boschel Dog Nail Clippers and Grinder

Just like us, dogs need a certain amount of upkeep to ensure they are looking and feeling their best. The best dog nail grinder will make it easy to take care of your pup from the comfort of your home. A particularly useful tool for older dogs, you can ensure their happiness and safety in between trips to the groomer. Just make sure you grab a grinder suitable for your dog’s size and temperament before setting up a spa day and pampering your pooch. We’re sure your furry friend will thank you later in the form of slobbery kisses and tail wags.

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.

Related: Learn more about your canine’s genetics with the best dog DNA test

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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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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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One e-toy for every person on Earth—that’s the staggering amount of electric trains, drones, talking dolls, R/C cars, and other children’s gadgets tossed into landfills every year. Some of what most consumers consider to be e-waste—like electronics such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and speaker systems—are usual suspects. Others, like power tools, vapes, LED accessories, USB cables, anything involving rechargeable lithium batteries and countless other similar, “nontraditional” e-waste materials, are less obviously in need of special disposal. In all, people across the world throw out roughly 9 billion kilograms (19.8 billion pounds) of e-waste commonly not recognized as such by consumers.

This “invisible e-waste” is the focal point of the sixth annual International E-Waste Day on October 14, organized by Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum. In anticipation of the event, the organization recently commissioned the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to delve into just how much unconventional e-waste is discarded every year—and global population numbers are just some of the ways to visualize the issue.

[Related: People will throw away about 5.3 billion phones this year.]

According to UNITAR’s findings, for example, the total weight of all e-cig vapes thrown away every year roughly equals 6 Eiffel Towers. Meanwhile, the total weight of all invisible e-waste tallies up to “almost half a million 40 [metric ton] trucks,” enough to create a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching approximately 3,504 miles–the distance between Rome and Nairobi. From a purely economic standpoint, nearly $10 billion in essential raw materials is literally thrown into the garbage every year.

“People tend to recognise household electrical products as those they plug in and use regularly. But many people are confused about the waste category into which ancillary, peripheral, specialist, hobby, and leisure products fit and how to have them recycled,” Pascal Leroy, Director-General of the WEEE Forum, said in a statement ahead of International E-Waste Day. The WEEE Forum asks that instead of trashing the e-waste, consumers bring it to “the appropriate municipal collection facility” in their area.

Leroy’s organization states e-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream, and to deal with it properly, many more people need to recognize these “invisible” examples.

“A significant amount of electronic waste is hidden in plain sight,” says WEEE Forum member, Magdalena Charytanowicz, via the announcement. “Sadly, invisible e-waste often falls under the recycling radar of those disposing of them because they are not seen as e-waste. We need to change that and raising awareness is a large part of the answer.”

Charytanowicz cites past informational campaigns that successfully raised awareness about the many issues surrounding plastic pollution, and points to the UN’s treaty on plastics due next year. “We hope the same will occur in the e-waste field,” she adds.

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Artificial intelligence programs’ impressive (albeit often problematic) abilities come at a cost—all that computing power requires, well, power. And as the world races to adopt sustainable energy practices, the rapid rise of AI integration into everyday lives could complicate matters. New expert analysis now offers estimates of just how energy hungry the AI industry could become in the near future, and the numbers are potentially concerning.

According to a commentary published October 10 in Joule, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Business and Economics PhD candidate Alex de Vries argues that global AI-related electricity consumption could top 134 TWh annually by 2027. That’s roughly comparable to the annual consumption of nations like Argentina, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

[Related: NASA wants to use AI to study unidentified aerial phenomenon.]

Although de Vries notes data center electricity usage between 2010-2018 (excluding resource-guzzling cryptocurrency mining) has only increased by roughly 6 percent, “[t]here is increasing apprehension that the computation resources necessary to develop and maintain AI models and applications could cause a surge in data centers’ contribution to global electricity consumption.” Given countless industries’ embrace of AI over the last year, it’s not hard to imagine such a hypothetical surge becoming reality. For example, if Google—already a major AI adopter—integrated technology akin to ChatGPT into its 9 billion-per-day Google searches, the company could annually burn through 29.2 TWh of power, or as much electricity as all of Ireland.

de Vries, who also founded the digital trend watchdog research company Digiconomist, believes such an extreme scenario is somewhat unlikely, mainly due to AI server costs alongside supply chain bottlenecks. But the AI industry’s energy needs will undoubtedly continue to grow as the technologies become more prevalent, and that alone necessitates a careful review of where and when to use such products.

This year, for example, NVIDIA is expected to deliver 100,000 AI servers to customers. Operating at full capacity, the servers’ combined power demand would measure between 650 and 1,020 MW, annually amounting to 5.7-8.9 TWh of electricity consumption. Compared to annual consumption rates of data centers, this is “almost negligible.” 

By 2027, however, NVIDIA could be (and currently is) on track to ship 1.5 million AI servers per year. Estimates using similar electricity consumption rates put their combined demand between 85-134 TWh annually. “At this stage, these servers could represent a significant contribution to worldwide data center electricity consumption,” writes de Vries.

As de Vries’ own site argues, AI is not a “miracle cure for everything,” still must deal with privacy concerns, discriminatory biases, and hallucinations. “Environmental sustainability now represents another addition to this list of concerns.”

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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.

The post Female frogs appear to play dead to avoid mating appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

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Traffic lights are the worst—not only do they put stops in your journey, but all those stopped cars pollute the local environment. According to one paper, pollution can be 29 times worse at city intersections than on open roads, with half the emissions coming from cars accelerating after having to stop. Many companies are developing tech that can make intersections “smarter” or help drivers navigate around jams. Google, though, has an AI-powered system-level plan to fix things.

Called Project Green Light, Google Research is using Google Maps data and AI to make recommendations to city planners on how specific traffic light controlled intersections can be optimized for better traffic flow—and reduced emissions. 

Green Light relies on Google Maps driving trends data, which Google claims is “one of the strongest understandings of global road networks.” Apparently, the information it has gathered from its years of mapping cities around the world allows it to infer data about specific traffic light controlled junctions, including “cycle length, transition time, green split (i.e. right-of-way time and order), coordination and sensor operation (actuation).”

From that, Google is able to create a virtual model of how traffic flows through a given city’s intersections. This allows it to understand the normal traffic patterns, like how much cars have to stop and start, the average wait time at each set of lights, how coordinated nearby intersections are, and how things change throughout the day. Crucially, the model also allows Google to use AI to identify potential adjustments to traffic light timing at specific junctions that could improve traffic flow. 

[Related: Google’s new pollen mapping tool aims to reduce allergy season suffering]

And this isn’t just some theoretical research project. According to Google, Green Light is now operating in 70 intersections across 12 cities around the world. City planners are provided with a dashboard where they can see Green Light’s recommendation, and accept or reject them. (Though they have to implement any changes with their existing traffic control systems, which Google claims takes “as little as five minutes.”) 

Once the changes are implemented, Green Light analyzes the new data to see if they had the intended impact on traffic flow. All the info is displayed in the city planner’s dashboard, so they can see how things are paying off. 

A big part of Green Light is that it doesn’t require much extra effort or expense from cities. While city planners have always attempted to optimize traffic patterns, developing models of traffic flow has typically required manual surveys or dedicated hardware, like cameras or car sensors. With Green Light, city planners don’t need to install anything—Google is gathering the data from its Maps users.

Although Google hasn’t published official numbers, it claims that the early results in its 12 test cities “indicate a potential for up to 30 percent reduction in stops and 10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” across 30 million car journeys per month. 

And city planners seem happy too, at least according to Google’s announcement. David Atkin from Transport for Greater Manchester in the UK is quoted as saying, “Green Light identified opportunities where we previously had no visibility and directed engineers to where there were potential benefits in changing signal timings.”

Similarly, Rupesh Kumar, Kolkata’s Joint Commissioner of Police, says, “Green Light has become an essential component of Kolkata Traffic Police. It serves several valuable purposes which contribute to safer, more efficient, and organized traffic flow and has helped us to reduce gridlock at busy intersections.”

Right now, Green Light is still in its testing phase. If you’re in Seattle, USA; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Manchester, UK; Hamburg, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; Haifa, Israel; Abu Dhabi, UAE; Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata, India; and Bali and Jakarta, Indonesia, there’s a chance you’ve already driven through a Green Light optimized junction.

However, if you’re a member of a city government, traffic engineer, or city planner and want to sign your metropolis up for Green Light, you can join the waiting list. Just fill out this Google Form.

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Officials from the US Coast Guard confirmed on Tuesday that a salvage mission successfully recovered the remaining debris from the OceanGate Titan submersible. The 22-foot-long vessel suffered an implosion en route to the Titanic almost four months ago. Five passengers died during the privately funded, $250,000-per-seat voyage intended to glimpse the historic tragedy’s remains, including OceanGate’s CEO and Titan pilot, Stockton Rush.

According to the Coast Guard’s October 10 press release, salvage efforts were underway via an agreement with the US Navy Supervisor of Salvage & Diving following initial recovery missions approximately 1,600-feet away from the Titanic wreckage. Searchers discovered and raised the remaining debris on October 4, then transferred them to an unnamed US port for further analysis and cataloging. The US Coast Guard also confirmed “additional presumed human remains” were “carefully recovered” from inside the debris, and have been sent for medical professional analysis.

[Related: OceanGate confirms missing Titan submersible passengers ‘have sadly been lost’.]

OceanGate’s surface vessel lost contact with the Titan submersible approximately 105 minutes into its nearly 2.5 mile descent to the Titanic on June 18. Frantic, internationally coordinated search and rescue efforts scoured over 10,000 square surface miles of the Atlantic Ocean as well as the North Atlantic ocean floor. On June 22, OceanGate and US Coast Guard representatives confirmed its teams located remains indicative of a “catastrophic implosion” not far from the voyage’s intended destination.

Submersible experts had warned of such “catastrophic” issues within Titan’s design for years, and repeatedly raised concerns about OceanGate’s disregard of standard certification processes. In a March 2018 open letter to the company obtained by The New York Times, over three dozen industry experts, oceanographers, and explorers “expressed unanimous concern” about the submersible’s “experimental” approach they believed “could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

“Your [safety standard] representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold,” reads a portion of the 2018 letter.

Although salvage efforts have concluded, the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) plans to continue conducting evidence analysis alongside witness interviews “ahead of a public hearing regarding this tragedy.” A date for the hearing has not yet been announced, although as The Washington Post notes, the Coast Guard could recommend new deep-sea submersible regulations, as well as criminal charges to pursue.

OceanGate announced it suspended “all commercial and expedition operations” on July 6.

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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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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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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.

Sponges. Is there anything they can’t do? For millennia, humans have used dried natural sponges to clean up, to paint, and as vessels to consume fluids like water or honey; we’ve even used them as contraceptive devices. Whether synthetic or natural, sponges are great at ensnaring tiny particles in their many pores. And as scientists around the world are beginning to show, sponges’ cavity-filled forms mean they could provide a solution to one of our era’s biggest scourges: microplastic pollution.

In August, researchers in China published a study describing their development of a synthetic sponge that makes short work of microscopic plastic debris. In tests, the researchers show that when a specially prepared plastic-filled solution is pushed through one of their sponges, the sponge can remove both microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics from the liquid. These particles typically become trapped in the sponge’s many pores. Though the sponges’ effectiveness varied in experiments, in part depending on the concentration of plastic and the acidity and saltiness of the liquid, optimal conditions allowed the researchers to remove as much as 90 percent of the microplastics. They tried it in everything from tap water and seawater to—why not—soup from a local takeaway.

The plastic-gobbling sponges are made mostly from starch and gelatin. Looking a bit like large white marshmallows, the biodegradable sponges are so light that balancing one atop a flower leaves the plant’s petals upright and unyielding, which the researchers suggest ought to make them cheap and easy to transport. Inside, the sponges’ structure appears less like lots of tiny bubble-like cavities and more like a jagged surface.

According to Guoqing Wang, a materials chemist at Ocean University of China and coauthor on the paper, the sponge formula is adjustable. By tweaking the temperature when the two compounds are mixed, he says, the sponges can be made more or less porous. This affects the size of particles collected—highly porous sponges have lots of very small pores, which is good for catching very tiny particles.

The sponges, if ever produced at an industrial scale, Wang says, could be used in wastewater treatment plants to filter microplastics out of the water or in food production facilities to decontaminate water.

It would also be possible to use microplastic-trapping sponges like this in washing machines, suggests Christian Adlhart, a chemist at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland who has also experimented with creating sponge filters for collecting microplastics. Some microplastics enter waterways after being shed by synthetic fabrics when they are swirled around in the wash. “You could place such a sponge inside the drum,” says Adlhart. “I think it would absorb a large fraction of the fibers.”

Sponges like this work thanks to a duo of mechanisms, he adds. If water is actively driven through one, for example as it is squeezed and released, microplastic particles get trapped inside the sponge’s pores like collecting marbles in buckets. But even when the sponge is simply floating in still water, electrostatic interactions mean that some plastic particles will cling to it.

There are hiccups to the sponge’s potential adoption, though. One, says Adlhart, is that starch and gelatin are important to the food industry, meaning that there could be competition for the key ingredients in the future. However, similar sponges can be made with different materials. The version that Adlhart and his colleagues developed, for instance, uses chitosan—a sugar derived from the shells of crustaceans—to provide the sponge’s structure. Chitosan isn’t widely used commercially, says Adlhart, so it wouldn’t face the same competition.

Adlhart says his sponge design, which involves spinning together a matrix of chitosan nanofibers, was inspired by the filter-feeding activity of oysters, which trap particles in their gills as they pump seawater through them.

Chitosan, starch, and gelatin are all biodegradable. However, the process developed by Wang and his colleagues to make their sponge uses formaldehyde, a highly toxic compound, and there were traces of this in the sponges themselves. Wang says they’re working to come up with an alternative so that they can make a completely environmentally friendly sponge.

Anett Georgi, a chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany who wasn’t involved in the research, says that when it comes to cleaning up microplastic pollution in the ocean, the key is to stem the flow. We should start, she says, by targeting wastewater treatment plants that don’t yet employ technologies that already exist—such as filters made with sand or activated carbon—to remove plastic.

That’s something that could be realized quickly, says Georgi: “We don’t have to wait for crazy material.” But for smaller-scale applications, such as removing microplastics from household water supplies, the new sponge filters could be useful, Georgi suggests.

What’s still lacking, says Alice Horton at the United Kingdom’s National Oceanography Centre, is proof that any of these newer sponge-based technologies can be cost effective and successful in removing microplastics from water at a large scale. But one thing she is confident about is that efforts to remove microplastics after they have already reached the ocean are probably doomed to fail.

“I don’t think there is anything we can do on a large enough scale that will have any impact,” she says of that. “We have to stop it getting there in the first place.”

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

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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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Trees are magicians with carbon, pulling it out of the air at remarkable rates to store it in their bodies. They are so good at removing this greenhouse gas that “planting trees” is often synonymous with doing environmental good. 

And lots of people are planting trees. The number of tree-planting organizations has grown by almost 300 percent in the past 30 years, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Biological Conservation. Those groups have planted nearly 1.4 billion trees across 74 countries since 1961. But while tree planting can capture a great amount of carbon, it is hardly a silver bullet for the climate crisis—experts estimate that even if we maximized our available lands for trees, this alone would not be enough to counteract anthropogenic carbon emissions. Plus, many plantations grow the same few species in monocultures, which can hurt local biodiversity. 

A planted tree will suck up carbon regardless of species or its planters’ motivation. But it’s difficult to make blanket statements about the efficacy of carbon capture forestry: Tree plantations are found all over the world, surrounded by different ecosystems with their own native species and local populations who live and rely on these lands—there will be no “one tree fits all” solution.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to selecting, planting, and protecting a new tree]

The minority of tree plantations are set up with carbon capture solely, or even primarily in mind, says Jacob Bukoski, a forestry scientist at Oregon State University. Most trees are planted with the goal of harvesting timber or wood pulp for paper. Tree-planting organizations are more likely to create plantations for agroforestry or commercial reasons, the authors of the 2021 paper also note, rather than for biodiversity or carbon capture. 

These groves sometimes support voluntary carbon markets, also known as carbon offset markets, where corporations pay for activities like planting trees as a way to offset their total emissions. People tend to like using carbon credits for tree plantation over other options because the goal is clear, Bukoski says. You can tangibly understand that your carbon offsets will result in planted trees that are ideally managed and monitored afterward. But only a small minority of trees are planted for these carbon markets, he says. 

In forestry, there’s a saying that you have to plant “the right tree in the right place, for the right reason.” But when many tree plantations are established for commercial purposes, the tree that is planted is often not the “right” tree, says Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, an ecologist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. 

In a paper published recently in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Aguirre-Gutiérrez and colleagues argue that focusing on the goal of carbon sequestration causes organizations to ignore the importance of restoring balanced ecosystems. Globally, tree plantations tend to plant the same species such as teak, eucalyptus, mahogany, and a few others valued by the timber, paper, and other industries, Aguirre-Gutiérrez says. The result is a swath of trees that do not support local organisms or promote biodiversity in the way native plant species would have. 

[Related: We need billions more baby trees to regrow US forests]

These problems are present in plantations all over the world, but Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his colleagues are particularly concerned about the tropics. Land there is vast, and conditions such as stable temperatures and high humidity promote tree growth—“that’s why there’s been a boom in plantations in these locations,” he says. At the same time, the tropics are host to an incredible variety of plants and animals found nowhere else. Ignoring them while planting trees is damaging. When plantations increased the woody cover of the Brazilian savannah by 40 percent, this “resulted in an about 30 percent reduction in the diversity of plants and ants,” Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his co-authors write in the new paper.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez doesn’t want to discourage people from growing more trees, he says. Rather, we need a better way to protect the natural ecosystems and species there, like encouraging the restoration of native forest tree species. Local plants will be “better adapted to the conditions” in these environments, he says, which means they, and nearby species, are more likely to thrive. “If we go in that direction, that will bring us the added value of capturing carbon, but also this sustainability.”

When assessing the utility or good of a tree plantation, “there’s a lot of nuance,” says Bukoski, and often cases need to be evaluated individually. For example, a plantation where the trees will be harvested for timber won’t provide long-term carbon capture benefits—does that make it not worthwhile? That’s not a conclusion you can necessarily draw without more information, he says.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez says we need more research quantifying the impacts tree plantations are having on their local ecologies, and the populations of people living in those areas, beyond carbon. “Because at the end of the day, the impacts of these plantations are going to be first felt by these local communities.”

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If you’ve been wondering what climate change means for your neighborhood, you’re in luck. The most detailed interactive map yet of the United States’ vulnerability to dangers such as fire, flooding, and pollution was released on Monday by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University.

The fine-grained analysis spans more than 70,000 census tracts, which roughly resemble neighborhoods, mapping out environmental risks alongside factors that make it harder for people to deal with hazards. Clicking on a report for a census tract yields details on heat, wildfire smoke, and drought, in addition to what drives vulnerability to extreme weather, such as income levels and access to health care and transportation.

The “Climate Vulnerability Index” tool is intended to help communities secure funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law President Joe Biden signed last summer. An executive order from Biden’s early months in office promised that “disadvantaged communities” would receive at least 40 percent of the federal investments in climate and clean energy programs. As a result of the infrastructure law signed in 2021, more than $1 billion has gone toward replacing lead pipes and more than $2 billion has been spent on updating the electric grid to be more reliable.

“The Biden Administration has made a historic level of funding available to build toward climate justice and equity, but the right investments need to flow to the right places for the biggest impact,” Grace Tee Lewis, a health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.

According to the data, all 10 of the country’s most vulnerable counties are in the South, many along the Gulf Coast, where there are high rates of poverty and health problems. Half are in Louisiana, which faces dangers from flooding, hurricanes, and industrial pollution. St. John the Baptist Parish, just up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, ranks as the most vulnerable county, a result of costly floods, poor child and maternal health, a list of toxic air pollutants, and the highest rate of disaster-related deaths in Louisiana.

“We know that our community is not prepared at all for emergencies, the federal government is not prepared, the local parish is not prepared,” Jo Banner, a community activist in St. John the Baptist, told Capital B News.

Even in cities where climate risk is comparatively low, like Seattle, the data shows a sharp divide. North Seattle is relatively insulated from environmental dangers, whereas South Seattle — home to a more racially diverse population, the result of a history of housing covenants that excluded people on the basis of race or ethnicity — suffers from air pollution, flood risk, and poorer infrastructure.

Similar maps of local climate impacts have been released before, including by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, but the new tool is considered the most comprehensive assessment to date. While it includes Alaska and Hawai‘i, it doesn’t cover U.S. territories like Puerto Rico or Guam. The map is available here, and tutorials on how to use the tool, for general interest or for community advocates, are here.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/new-map-climate-change-risks-neighborhood-vulnerability-index/. 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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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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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.

Eight years ago, I first met with researchers from the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program (STDP) in Tasmania, Australia, to learn about their work to protect the endangered marsupials. Since then, I’ve continued to follow this story, including tracking how the Forestier Peninsula devils—the focus of my original article published in late 2015—fared in their “new life.”

Contagious cancers like devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) are virtually unheard of in vertebrates, yet understanding how they’re transmitted and how they evade immune systems has implications for both conservation and oncology. For that research to take place, there needs to be a healthy population of Tasmanian devils. That’s why in late 2015 and early 2016, the STDP released 49 devils bred in captivity on the isolated Forestier Peninsula, to join the estimated 30 wild devils already living on the adjacent Tasman Peninsula. Establishing a new, managed, disease-free population of devils (with another already existing on Maria Island, located just off the east coast of Tasmania) would buy researchers more time to develop a vaccine.

Their release should have been a moment of hope for the endangered species, but it was marred by a discovery some 50 kilometers west, across the sea, on another Tasmanian peninsula. A local spotted a devil with a large facial tumor: the calling card of DFTD.

Routine tests returned an unsettling result—it was a new cancer.

Called DFT2, the new disease is genetically distinct from DFT1 (the original cancer). Its method of transmission and symptoms are the same, and it poses a severe additional threat to the species.

The discovery of DFT2, however, provides a critical clue to the cancer’s puzzle. Devils, it turns out, aren’t victims of bad luck—they are particularly prone to DFTD. There are three known wild infectious cancers in vertebrates in the world, and Tasmanian devils have two of them.

“It was a big surprise. We thought that transmissible cancers were really rare—like lightning striking—and that devils were just a very unfortunate species,” says Elizabeth Murchison, who researches genetic and transmissible cancers at the University of Cambridge in England. It’s likely that DFT1 and DFT2 weren’t the first cancers to emerge in devils and are unlikely to be the last.

The habit the devils have of biting each other helps spread the disease, and their low genetic diversity creates ideal conditions for the cancers to evade the marsupial’s immune system. Another factor in the devils’ inability to fight the infections could be an issue with their peripheral nervous systems, where both DFT1 and DFT2 seem to originate. What’s likely not to blame, however, is environmental pollutants as suggested in my original article. According to Murchison, the imprint mutations left on devil DNA indicate the two cancers are natural occurrences. “There’s nothing to suggest any external exposure to a chemical or radiation or anything like that,” she says.

Fortunately, the discovery of the second cancer hasn’t slowed vaccine development. Andrew Flies—a senior research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research—says the cancers have similarities that will make it easier for his team to develop a vaccine for both. In 2024, tests on an experimental DFT1 vaccine will begin, with the development of a vaccine that targets both cancers already underway. To reach devils, officials will distribute bait drops containing the vaccine through Tasmania’s vast wilderness.

Rollout is still several years away, but devils no longer appear to be at imminent risk of extinction. Exact numbers are unknown, but thanks in part to pilot projects to improve genetic diversity through the release of healthy devils, their population is holding strong in many areas—at least for now.

“Disease doesn’t really make a species go extinct. Diseases push the species to the very edge, and then everything else just comes along and takes them out,” says Carolyn Hogg, a researcher at the University of Sydney, who has been working with threatened species in Australia, including Tasmanian devils, for over 25 years.

For devils, “everything else” includes low genetic diversity, loss of habitat, and road fatalities. The nocturnal scavengers can’t resist the lure of rotting roadside carcasses, easy pickings in the roadkill capital of the world. In 2021, motorists killed more than 100 devils on just one 25-kilometer stretch of road in northwest Tasmania.

“If you’ve only got five breeding females in a small population and two get hit by cars on the road, you’ve lost 40 percent of your breeding population in one event,” says Hogg.

That’s exactly what happened to the Forestier Peninsula devils I wrote about in my original article. Drivers killed 16 of the 49 individuals within six weeks of their release. Through subsequent tracking, Hogg and her team discovered that devils raised in captive facilities for generations were more likely to use roadways than wild devils.

“You can’t release them anywhere near any major road systems, because behaviorally they’re used to the sound of vehicles,” says Hogg.

Since then, the STDP has done 11 more releases of healthy Tasmanian devils throughout the state to improve genetic diversity of existing wild populations. What’s changed is that instead of releasing devils bred in captivity, it now relies on the wild offspring of the disease-free population on Maria Island. A national park where there are no cars (save for those used by park rangers), Maria Island has wild devils that aren’t habituated to the sound of traffic and are more likely to survive.

Relying on Maria Island’s wild devils is the best option for building up a population of wild devils until a vaccine is developed. But the introduction of the marsupials to the island—which was devil-free until 2012—still has critics, much as it did back in 2015. In 2021, BirdLife Tasmania reported that over a decade, the introduced devils wiped out the island’s 3,000 breeding pairs of little penguins. Little penguins are found in abundance in the wild: Tasmania has hundreds of offshore islands, with an estimated 110,000 to 190,000 breeding pairs.

“We knew that was going to happen,” says Hogg. A risk assessment, she says, determined that the benefits of having a place to breed wild devils disease-free and improve their genetic diversity was “greater than the loss of the birds.”

The news, however, is not all bad. Researchers believe that introducing the carnivore has allowed Maria’s population of eastern barred bandicoots—listed as an endangered species on the mainland—to thrive, by pushing predatory possums up into trees. Cape Barren geese—which dropped in numbers following the marsupial’s introduction—have also learned to coexist with devils. As for the population of little penguins? The Maria Island population began to decline around the same time as one on a neighboring island, suggesting additional environmental factors were likely at play.

Yet, the conservation of endemic species and how to best manage them—from little penguins to Tasmanian devils—remains both a controversial and emotional topic in Australia. It’s rumored that conservation “vigilantes” are covertly rewilding Australia’s mainland with devils smuggled from Tasmania. But Hogg says any mainland devils are just as likely to develop a new cancer, given how susceptible they are to the disease. And without the protection of natural barriers that isolate populations of devils—like the narrow isthmuses on the Forestier and Tasman Peninsulas or the waters around Maria Island—preventing the cancer from spreading is impossible.

For now—until a vaccine is deployed—Maria Island’s disease-free population will be what stands between the devils and extinction.

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

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Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, is getting a new supercomputer, Aurora, which its scientists will use to study optimal nuclear reactor designs. As of now, the lab is using a system called Polaris, a 44-petaflops machine that can perform about 44 quadrillion calculations per second. 

Aurora, which is currently being installed, will have more than 2 exaflops of computing power, giving it the capacity to do 2 quintillion calculations per second—almost 50 times as many as the old system. Once the unprecedented machine comes online, it’s expected to lead the TOP500 list that ranks the most powerful computers in the world. It was expected to start running earlier, but has had delays due to manufacturing issues. 

A more powerful supercomputer means that nuclear scientists can simulate the fundamental physics underlying the reactions with as much detail as possible, which will allow them to make better assessments of overall safety and efficiency of new reactor designs. Reactors are the heart of a nuclear power plant. Here, a process called fission happens, leading to a series of nuclear chain reactions that produce incredible levels of heat, which is used to turn water into steam to spin a turbine that then creates electricity.

“Anyone out there that’s actively designing a reactor is going to use what we call ‘faster running tools’ that will look at things on a system-level scale and make approximations for the reactor core itself,” Dillon Shaver, principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, tells Popsci. “[At Argonne] we are doing as close to the fundamental physical calculations as possible, which requires a huge amount of resolution and a huge amount of unknowns. It translates into a huge amount of computation power.”

Shaver’s job, in a nutshell, is to do the math that prevents reactors from melting down. That involves a deep understanding of how different types of coolant liquids behave, how fluid flows around the different reactor components, and what kind of heat transfer occurs. 

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

According to the Department of Energy, “all commercial nuclear reactors in the US are light-water reactors. This means they use normal water as both a coolant and neutron moderator.” And most active light-water reactors have a fuel pin geometry design, where large arrays of fuel pins (large tubes that contain the fuel, usually uranium, needed for fission reactions) are arranged in a rectangular lattice.

The next generation of reactor designs that Shaver and his team are investigating include wire-wrapped liquid metal fast reactors. The reactors are placed in a triangular lattice instead of a rectangular one, and are also layered with a thin wire that forms a kind of helix around the fuel pin. “This leads to some really complicated flow behavior because the [liquid metals like sodium] has to move around that wire and usually causes a spiral pattern to develop. That has some interesting implications on heat transfer,” Shaver explains. “A lot of time it enhances it, which is a very desirable thing” because it’s able to get more power out of a limited amount of fuel.  

However, with the advanced designs like the wire wrap, “it’s a little bit more complicated to pump the fluid around these wires compared to just an open model,” he adds, which means that it could take more input energy too.  

Another popular option is called a pebble bed reactor, which involves a series of graphite pebbles about the size of a tennis ball being embedded with the nuclear fuel. “You just randomly pat them into an open container and let fluid flow around them,” Shaver says. “That is a very different scenario compared to what we’re used to with light-water reactors because now all of the fluid can move through these random spaces between the pebbles.” Such a system has many benefits for low-energy cooling. 

With the newly proposed designs, the goal is to ultimately generate more power while putting less in. “You’re trying to enhance the heat transfer you get from it, and the price you pay is how much energy it takes to pump it,” says Shaver. “There’s an interesting cost-benefit there.” Some of the tradeoffs can be significant, and these supercomputer simulations promise to give more accurate numbers than ever, allowing upcoming nuclear power plants to work with reactors that are as efficient and safe as possible. 

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The threat of avian influenza (H5N1) continues to be a serious health and economic issue. As of September, almost 60 million birds have been affected in the United States since the latest outbreak began in January 2022. There are currently 839 known H5N1 outbreaks around the world.

[Related: Thriving baby California condor is a ray of hope for the unique species.]

Earlier this month, France began Europe’s only mass-vaccination campaign against avian influenza. The country plans to vaccinate roughly 64 million ducks at 2,700 farms over the next year as an effort to end mass culls. Drastic actions like the culls cost the poultry industry millions of dollars every year. 

“Vaccination should mean we only face individual cases, avoiding the tidal waves sweeping through farms,” poultry chief at the SNGTV farm vets’ association Jocelyn Marguerie told DW News. 

To reduce the risk of more Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) spreading in the US, the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has barred poultry imports from France and its European Union trading partners including Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. The ban covers live ducks, duck eggs, and unmitigated/untreated duck products in addition to poultry products and is due to their recent vaccination campaign. 

According to a press release, the agency is concerned that the vaccines may mask that the virus is already circulating in poultry, as the vaccinated birds may not show any signs of infection and could lead to the contaminated animals being brought into the US. 

In France, the vaccine will be given in two doses and is obligatory for ducklings as young as 10 days old being raised on farms that have more than 250 birds. It will cost close to 100 million euros ($105 million) and 85 percent of the cost will reportedly be financed by the French government.

“Typically, animal vaccines in the US take approximately 3 years to develop and get FDA approval. Even though vaccination reduces mortality significantly, there is still concern that vaccinated birds can become infected and shed the virus,” Michelle Hawkins, an ABVP certified veterinarian at the University of California, Davis and the director of the California Raptor Center tells PopSci. “This is the main concern regarding France authorizing a vaccine. Ducks often carry avian influenza viruses without showing any clinical signs when infected.”

Hawkins also cited a concern about how quickly HPAI can mutate which could potentially reduce the vaccine’s efficacy.

[Related: One way to fight off bird flu: extra-CRISPRed chicken.]

Recently, commercial flocks have been culled in South Africa to stop the spread and the virus which has been detected in at least 67 countries. It has also been found in domestic cats in Poland and has even jumped from wild birds into seals on the East and West Coasts of the US. 

While vaccination is not enough to completely stop the disease yet, the jabs are a tool in fighting it. The Department of Agriculture began evaluating four HPAI vaccine candidates for animals and began some trials in April 2023. Other countries including Egypt, China, Mexico, and Vietnam have been vaccinating flocks for years. 

Currently, the risk of avian flu to humans is low, with only one reported human case of this virus in the US. There are trials underway of vaccines for humans if the virus mutates to become more of a threat to people. Researchers in the United Kingdom have also isolated a gene called BTN3A3 that could keep the virus from infecting humans. 

In the meantime, vigilance from bird owners and other protective measures including avoiding contact with wild birds and reporting dead birds to the proper authorities remain crucial. 

“It is critical that bird owners look at what they can do immediately to protect their flocks– now,” says Hawkins. 

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Lions are often incorrectly called the “king of the jungle,” and not just because most live in plains and grasslands or because lionesses do most of the hunting. These days, the giant cats are not feared as much as another “super predator”—the animals living in an ecological park in South Africa now fear humans more than lions, according to a study published October 5 in the journal Current Biology. Roughly 95 percent of the mammals living among lions are more afraid of human voices than the big cats or hunting sounds. 

[Related: The rare case of a lioness with a mane.]

The study focused on Greater Kruger National Park in South Africa. It’s a protected area of about 1,328 square miles and is home to one of the world’s largest remaining roaming lion populations. African lions have been considered endangered since 2015, but lions are still among the biggest group-hunting land predators on Earth. However, humans are battling their supremacy, as multiple studies have shown that humans kill prey at higher rates than lions do. This new research compares the fear animals have of humans versus lions to see which species causes more fear.

In the study, a team of biologists observed how 19 mammal species reacted to a series of recordings. The sounds included human voices, lion vocalizations to signal the presence of a top non-human predator, and barking dogs and gunshots associated with hunting. The clips of human voices were played at a more conversational volume, came from radio or TV recordings, and included four of the most commonly used languages in the region (Tsonga, Northern Sotho, English, and Afrikaans). 

“The key thing is that the lion vocalizations are of them snarling and growling, in ‘conversation’ as it were, not roaring at each other,” Western University conservation biologist Michael Clinchy said in a statement. “That way the lion vocalizations are directly comparable to those of the humans speaking conversationally.”

The team used a waterproof camera system that had enough battery life to record day and night over the course of several months and captured 15,000 videos. The observations were also taken during the dry season and the team put the systems at waterholes to get recordings of all the animals coming by to drink. 

“One night, the lion recording made this elephant so angry that it charged and just smashed the whole thing,” study co- author and Western University conservation biologist Liana Y. Zanette said in a statement. 

When the animals heard human sounds, they were twice as likely to run and ditch the waterhole than they were when lions or hunting noises were played. About 95 percent of species, including giraffes, leopards, hyenas, warthog, impala, elephants, and rhinoceroses, ran more often or abandoned waterholes more quickly in response to human sounds than lions.  

“There’s this idea that the animals are going to habituate to humans if they’re not hunted. But we’ve shown that this isn’t the case,” said Clinchy. “The fear of humans is ingrained and pervasive, so this is something that we need to start thinking about seriously for conservation purposes.”

[Related: How a 19-year-old lion fathered 35 cubs in 18 months.]

The team is now looking into whether their sound systems could be used to steer endangered species like the Southern white rhino away from poaching areas in South Africa. Efforts to keep rhinos away from certain areas through the use of human voices have seen success in some early studies.

“I think the pervasiveness of the fear throughout the savannah mammal community is a real testament to the environmental impact that humans have,” says Zanette. “Not just through habitat loss and climate change and species extinction, which is all important stuff. But just having us out there on that landscape is enough of a danger signal that they respond really strongly. They are scared to death of humans, way more than any other predator.”

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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.

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Even though we can’t tell a flock of birds apart without examining them closely, the birds in the group know who’s who. And that’s because they have certain physical marks that help distinguish them. 

Just like how individual humans might have distinct moles, or other unique physical characteristics, Greylag geese have unique grooves on their beaks. To prove that Greylag geese do indeed have distinctive facial features, a team of scientists from Flinders University in Australia and University of Vienna in Austria developed facial recognition software that can assign a goose face to a goose ID within a database with around 97 percent accuracy. 

“Results from the facial recognition software showed that identification of individual geese using images of their bill was possible and validated the idea that geese are visually unique,” the researchers wrote in a paper they published last month in the Journal of Ornithology.

[Related: What’s life like for a fruit fly? AI offers a peek.]

But of course a computer accuracy test can only prove so much. To test if geese can recognize each other by their faces (and not by some other feature such as smell or sound), scientists took photos of individuals within a group of Greylag geese and tested how other members of the flock reacted to the 2D-printed images. 

As part of their experiment, the researchers blew up these photos into life-size portrayals that they then put in front of the real geese. When presented with a photo of themselves, their partner, and a flock mate, these geese gravitated towards the photos of their partner, and actually hissed at photos of themselves. (Because geese don’t own mirrors, they don’t know what they look like, and therefore when they see themselves for the first time, they register it as an unfamiliar goose.) 

[Related: Artificial intelligence is helping scientists decode animal languages]

Facial recognition is a complicated technology in the human world. It doesn’t help that it’s getting more commonplace. While it can be more convenient than typing in a passcode on your phone, or keeping track of a key, mistakes happen, privacy problems arise, and the technology itself is still fairly unreliable.

But in the animal world, it has the potential to help. Petco, for example, is using facial recognition for pets as the backbone of its lost pets database. Owners can upload photos, and the software will scan for image matches at nearby shelters. 

For natural scientists and conservationists, this type of software can help them keep track of individual animals by seeing who’s passing by what trail cams or camera traps. Different animals have different tells. For tigers, the differentiator is their stripes. For other animals like bears or pumas, researchers may have to rely more on body markings. And for farm animals like sheep, cows, and pigs, scientists want to use the technology to monitor their daily behaviors and overall well-being. But in that case, questions remain on who the data is really for: the animals or the humans?

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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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New quadrupedal robots, based on years of research alongside some amphibian inspiration, could one day crawl and shimmy their way into search-and-rescue operations. As detailed in a new paper recently published in Nature Communications, the robotic trio developed by a team at Colorado State University can swim, walk, and crawl depending on their environments’ obstacles—thanks in large part to lightweight artificial muscles that don’t require heavy onboard power sources.

[Related: Four-legged dog robots could one day explore the moon.]

The new systems, which have been in development since 2017, were designed by a team led by CSU Department of Mechanical Engineering professor Jianguo Zhao, and rely on materials that change rigidity depending on temperature.

“Our embedded morphing scheme uses a lightweight artificial muscle similar to a human muscle, and it contracts when electricity is applied,” Zhao explained in the project’s October 2 announcement. “By embedding these artificial muscles in the spine of the robot or in its skin, we can achieve a variety of shape-types. Altogether, this approach offers a promising path towards developing robots that can navigate and work in difficult environments.”

Aside from the electrical properties, the robots owe their movements in large part to frogs—or, rather, frogs’ multiple life stages. “They start as tadpoles with tails for swimming before developing legs that let them jump, crawl or swim,” Zhao continued. “We take inspiration from those transformations, but achieving animal-like embedded shape morphing in robots remains challenging and is something we hope this work will continue to address.”

Judging from the video montage, it’s easy to see the frog analogy. Depending on its surroundings and terrain, the robots can curve their limbs to “swim,” then adjust them accordingly to scale a rocky hurdle that mimics a shoreline. On dry land, Zhao’s robots can “hop” along by repeatedly rotating their limbs 360 degrees to push forward. A third version of the robot can flatten itself to skitter through small openings, as well as hang onto a ledge to help transition across gaps.

For now, however, the robots require remote control, but future iterations could rely on sensor- and camera-based analysis of their environments for navigation, and even morph as needed to handle their surroundings.

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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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Stories about solar-powered robotic wolves first surfaced back in 2017 after Japanese researchers began testing prototypes to combat wild boars’ devastating encroachment into farmlands. Since then, a company called Wolf Kamuy expanded sales of its sentry products featuring menacing fangs, fur, flashing red LED “eyes,” and a head capable of shaking side-to-side while emitting a 90 decibel howl. But boars aren’t the only problem plaguing rural Japanese communities. According to recent reports, Wolf Kamuy is now offering many of its faux-wolves as bear deterrence.

[Related: How to watch Alaska’s fat bears.]

It turns out the “Super Monster Wolf” isn’t just effective at protecting farmers’ crops—it’s also pretty good at protecting the farmers themselves. As reported October 1 via the BBC, bears are an increasingly difficult, sometimes even deadly nuisance in many areas of Japan thanks to a combination of serious factors, including climate change, deforestation,and urban expansion. What’s more, bear populations in regions such as Hokkaido appear to be actually increasing as Japan faces an aging population and declining birth rates. According to the BBC, some researchers estimate a total of over 22,000 bears located around Hokkaido. Because of all this, the region recorded at least 150 bear attacks over the past six decades—with four fatalities in 2021 alone. Meanwhile, bears continue to wander into more crowded towns and cities bordering wildlife areas.

Enter: the Super Monster Wolf. By installing the guard bots in urban locales, experts hope to deter bears from wandering into populated areas to potentially harm both humans and themselves. Researchers previously estimated that a robo-wolf’s howls effectively deterred bears from encroaching within approximately 1-square-km (about 0.38 square mi) of its installation—arguably better than many electric fence perimeters. With strategic placement, Super Monster Wolves could help elderly communities, and protect the bears.

Of course, humanity cannot solely rely on an army of robot wolves to protect us from bear attacks. Bears (not to mention countless other species) face immense existential threats in the face of ongoing climate change calamities, and it’s not the bears’ fault they are increasingly desperate to find food sources. The best remedy, therefore, is to continue focusing on climate solutions like conservation, renewable energy, and sustainable urban planning, rather than stopgaps like the (admittedly rad) Super Monster Wolf.

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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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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

This investigation was co-produced with New Lines Magazine and supported in part by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. 

Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. 

Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.

In April 2017, the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat here: the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known unofficially as the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB. 

Before the airstrike, Qudrat Wali and other residents of Asad Khel followed as Afghan soldiers and U.S. special forces were evacuated from the area. Eight months after the massive explosion, they were finally allowed to return to their homes. Soon after, Wali says, many of the residents began to notice strange ailments and skin rashes.

“All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped,” says Wali, a 27-year-old farmer, pulling up the leg of his shalwar kameez to show me the red bumps stretched across his calves. “I have it all over my body.” He says he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found that their land did not produce crops like it had before. It was devastated, he says, by the bomb’s blast radius, that reached as far as the settlement of Shaddle Bazar over a mile and a half away.

“We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick, and so are we.” 

The bomb residue plaguing the village is but one example of the war’s toxic environmental legacy. For two decades, Afghans raised children, went to work and gave birth next to America’s vast military bases and burn pits, and the long-term effects of this exposure remain unclear. Dealing with the consequences of the contamination will take generations.

“Devastated by toxic exposures”

America’s 20-year military occupation devastated Afghanistan’s environment in ways that may never be fully investigated or addressed. American and allied military forces, mostly from NATO countries, repeatedly used munitions that can leave a toxic footprint. These weapons introduced known carcinogens, teratogens and genotoxins—toxic substances that can cause congenital defects in a fetus and damage DNA—into the environment without accountability. 

Local residents have long reported U.S. military bases dumping vast quantities of sewage, chemical waste and toxic substances from their bases onto land and into waterways, contaminating farmland and groundwater for entire communities living nearby. They also burned garbage and other waste in open-air burn pits—some reported to be the size of three football fields—inundating villages with noxious clouds of smoke.

Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Left behind today are layers upon layers of medical, biological and chemical waste that may never be cleaned up.

From its first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001 through its chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is designated as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases—and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them—say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies and multiple types of cancer.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden was unequivocal about such causality, but only as it related to U.S. veterans. He described “toxic smoke, thick with poisons, spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops.” He called on Congress to pass a law to “make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and the comprehensive health care they deserve.”

A few months later, Congress passed a bill known as the Pact Act, adding 23 toxic burn pit and exposure-related health conditions for which veterans could receive benefits, including bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and nine newly eligible types of respiratory cancers, at a cost of more than $270 billion over the next decade. The law represented the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in generations. 

But neither Biden nor Congress said anything, or promised any assistance, to the Afghans who lived near those U.S. military bases or worked on them and still suffer from many of the same illnesses and cancers. 

Under Section 120 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the Department of Defense is required—for U.S. sites on home turf—to take responsibility for all remedial action necessary to protect human health and the environment caused by its activities in the past. However, a DOD regulation prohibits environmental cleanups at overseas military bases that are no longer in use, unless required by a binding international agreement or a cleanup plan negotiated with the host country before the transfer. 

In 2011, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan reached a peak of about 110,000 personnel—NATO forces contributed an additional 20,000—generating roughly 900,000 pounds of waste each day, the bulk of which was burned without any pollution controls, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, a U.S. watchdog agency. Afghan laws forbidding burn pits were not applicable to U.S. and other international forces, and according to soldiers and residents, the U.S. military persisted in its use of burn pits until its withdrawal in August 2021, despite efforts to limit their use that began in 2009 and a 2018 prohibition on burn pits “except in circumstances in which no alternative disposal method is feasible.”

What America left behind 

My father came from Nangarhar, and I have wanted to tell this story for years. Although I was adopted and grew up overseas, when I returned to the country as a journalist, in 2019, I began to understand the true scale of the damage that America’s military inflicted on Afghanistan. Some bases were like small cities, belching round-the-clock smoke that tainted the skyline while processions of waste-filled trucks flooded out of them. 

When I learned about the millions of pounds of hazardous waste that the bases produced, I filed a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to SIGAR to obtain photographs of active burn pits. Using GPS coordinates embedded in the photo’s metadata, I mapped and measured the sizes of the burn pits at bases across the country. I saw the rusting hulks of Soviet-era planes and American military vehicles piled up on the bases. A 2011 photograph of the scrap in Shindand base in the western province of Herat looks exactly the same on satellite today. According to satellite imagery designed to monitor active fires and thermal anomalies, several burn pit locations at Bagram were last active in mid-June of 2021.

In the summer of 2022, I visited the sites of three of the largest former U.S bases in Afghanistan—in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kandahar and Parwan—to document what was left on the ground by America.

A year earlier, I spent months traveling across Iraq to report on the effects of pollution and military contamination on Iraqis and the environment. I knew that the American military’s effect on Afghanistan and its people mirrored problems in Iraq but was far less documented. 

It was only after the Taliban moved back into power, ending the American war in August 2021, that I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the issue. On my fourth journey back to the country since the takeover, I landed on the airstrip at Kabul airport and spotted a stub of cement “T-wall” with “Clean up your fucking trash” graffitied in English, presumably by a member of the international forces during their chaotic evacuation. But the Americans had left more than just garbage: They had filled the air with toxic pollutants and dumped their raw sewage in fields and waterways across Afghanistan.

No longer facing the same threat, the enormous former U.S. bases still hold an array of poisonous detritus and sit silently against the majestic landscape, with one or two Taliban guards lazing in watchtowers on their phones. 

The skies, too, have changed since the Taliban takeover. The burn pits’ noxious black plumes, the surveillance blimps and the buzz of helicopters are all but a memory now. New faces occupied the driver’s seats of the police and military vehicles. And for many, particularly in rural areas of the country, the end of the airstrikes and night raids was long overdue and a welcome relief. There were, however, new problems to contend with under the Taliban government, including an extreme clampdown on women’s rights and a severely weakened economy. 

Over the course of six months, I traveled across the country and spoke with 26 medical practitioners and 52 Afghan residents living near those bases about their health problems, which they believe are a direct result of waste from the bases.

Farmers told me that they witnessed U.S. military contractors dump sewage and waste into their fields. Residents described how, for years, they had bathed in sewage-clogged streams that flowed from inside the base walls and breathed in the billowing clouds of poisonous pollutants from the open-air burn pits. I saw young children making a living scavenging scrap metal from the bases who are now suffering from eye infections and persistent skin diseases, according to the doctors treating them. 

I also spoke with Afghan and American soldiers who believe their health problems and diseases are directly related to their work on the American military bases in Afghanistan. One former Afghan soldier I spoke with, who didn’t give his name for fear of repercussions from the Taliban, trained new recruits at the Kandahar airfield for 13 years. He said he was close to the burn pits for the entirety of his service and had respiratory problems as a result. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Medical professionals with years of experience treating those affected, including military doctors who worked on U.S. bases caring for both Afghan and U.S. soldiers, told me that there was, categorically, no way that the burning and dumping of waste did not affect the health of everyone in the surrounding areas—and still does.

The “mother of all bombs”

In Achin in Nangarhar, Wali hides his rash and leans over the counter in the small shop where he sells snacks and drinks, on a bridge near Momand Dara village. Below him, a stream burbles quietly. 

“I know my skin disease is from the bomb because there were no such diseases before it,” he says pointedly. 

He looks out at the silent Mohmand Valley ahead of him. Fields thick with shrubs and trees fill the valley floor. As it narrows, the hills on either side merge into mountains. In the distance, the magnificent Spin Ghar, or White Mountains, mark the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nearby is the Tora Bora cave complex, built with CIA assistance for the mujahedeen, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, it became an al-Qaida stronghold. It was also the site of the U.S. government’s failed attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at the start of America’s war in Afghanistan. 

The MOAB was dropped about 550 yards from Wali’s home—a seven-minute walk from his shop, he says, as he hops from stone to stone across a narrow brook leading the way. 

Containing nearly 19,000 pounds of Composition H6, a powerful mix of TNT, RDX, aluminum, and nitrocellulose explosives, the MOAB’s destructive force is roughly equivalent to the smallest of the Cold War-era tactical nuclear devices in the American arsenal. It was pushed from the rear of an MC-130 cargo plane and dropped on a cave complex used by Islamic State militants, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said at the time. President Donald Trump, who had promised during his 2016 campaign to go after the Islamic State and “bomb the shit out of ’em,” called the strike “another very, very successful mission.” Afghan defense officials claimed that 36 Islamic State fighters were killed in the attack.

When Wali returned home months later, the bomb’s destruction was hard to see. There was no obvious massive crater; only some scorched stones and a few burned trees marked the site of the bombing. 

His home still stands, though not all dwellings in Asad Khel survived, the rubble now inhabited by straying goats. Ten families are living in the village in rebuilt homes, Wali says. His neighbors have the same itchy red rash.

“All but two or three people in each home have the skin rash,” he says, “and everyone thinks that their skin diseases are from the bomb.”

His mother, Wali Jana, 60; his wife, Nafisa, 20; and their two children, Mir Hatam, 3, and Qasim, 2, all have the same skin condition. 

“Whatever medicine the doctors are giving us is not making us better,” Wali says. 

The rashes don’t heal. They itch constantly and continue to leak a pus-like liquid, he tells me. After dozens of trips to the doctor and many tests, he has yet to find any relief or explanation for the rash. 

“All we can do is try to take measures to stay away from this disease,” he says. “I wash twice a day and change my clothes daily.”

This was not the first bomb to hit this area, he says. “But this one was different.”

In Nangarhar, “everything is poisoned” 

The Jalalabad airfield sits southeast of the city. For 20 years, it was home to Afghan and U.S. soldiers. Its eastern and southern walls are surrounded by agricultural land and mechanic and scrap metal shops packed with everything from gas masks to tools with the American flag printed on them, medical equipment, treadmills and a framed poster of the film “The Terminator.” Just down the road, there are warehouses with busted Humvees waiting to be dismantled into parts for sale. To the north is the Jalalabad-Torkham highway leading to the Pakistani border. The streams that run out of the base and under the highway flood through a cluster of villages whose residents use the water to drink from and wash in.

“The water was very clean before the Americans came,” says 36-year-old Mohammed Ajmal, pointing to a milky gray stream flowing from a hole in the high wall surrounding the base. Casting a broad shadow over the murky water, he adds, “Some people in this area have kidney problems. Others have breathing problems and skin diseases. I am not sure if these diseases came from the chemicals in the missiles from the base or from the polluted waste they put in the stream.”

“Everything is poisoned,” he says. 

Dr. Mohammad Nasim Shinwari, who has worked from his small clinic near the base for the past 17 years, says that pollution from the base is responsible for the most common health problems he sees. Only a small dried-up field separates his clinic from the burn pits that were blazing at least once a week, he says. “Now imagine breathing that for your whole life.” 

Residents filed complaints that U.S.-hired contractors from the base were unloading the tankers of waste in front of their houses and in their fields, Sadullah Kakar, a former employee of the Ministry of Border and Tribal Affairs, told me weeks earlier. Shinwari says that up until the Americans’ exit from the base, the contractors were dumping waste “secretly” in some locations. “Other times, they were just dumping it in the fields right here, by the base. No one could stop them.”

As patients crouch on the curb outside the two-room clinic, grasping plastic folders of medical documents in their hands, Shinwari scribbles down the location where tanker trucks from the base would dump raw sewage in farmers’ fields. 

Like Ajmal, Shinwari also attributes many of the illnesses he has seen to the chemicals from the bombs, missiles and other munitions that fell on fields and villages. The doctor described how, in his home district of Shinwar and neighboring Achin, few plants have grown on the land in the five years since the MOAB was dropped. 

“People thought that the Americans had sprayed chemicals in the air or added something to the source of water,” Shinwari says. “But it was the MOAB bomb.”

For Ajmal, the polluted waterway flowing from the base is a lingering reminder of America’s longest war. 

“The wells in our homes are also contaminated,” he says, his brow furrowed. “Every week they would bring the sewage tankers from the base and empty them in the stream and in the land around. The water would get very dark and would have a very bad smell. Many people here have kidney problems, and if you look at the trees growing in the river, they are also damaged,” he says, pointing to a row of trees along the bank, half-submerged in the murky water. 

Then there were the missiles and rockets, Ajmal says, pointing toward the heavily fortified concrete walls of the Jalalabad airfield, looming over the low-rise homes. 

“You could smell the chemicals. We were breathing them.” He wipes the tip of his nose at the memory. The U.S. military deployed its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, and Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, both guided surface-to-surface weapons, in Afghanistan. 

A wide range of rockets and missiles contain propellants with hazardous components, including perchlorate, the main ingredient of rocket and missile fuel, which can affect thyroid function, may cause cancer and persists indefinitely in the environment. U.S. forces have also been accused of using potentially toxic depleted uranium munitions in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, although they have denied the claim. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says exposure to DU from friendly fire has had no effect on the kidneys of American soldiers but that there is a possible link to lower bone density. 

One of the weapons misfired and struck a relative’s home next to his, Ajmal tells me, destroying both homes. His wife was pregnant with their son, Mohammed Taha, at the time. The boy, now 10, has been ill since birth and has a rash on his scalp that leaves bald itchy patches. 

Ajmal, his three brothers and their families live just 160 yards from the airfield, in an area called Qala-e-Guljan. Nine members of Ajmal’s extended family have serious health issues. His two sons have suffered from heart problems since birth—medical records show that one has a hole in his heart. His 15-year-old daughter, Soma, also has a chronic skin rash that stretches across her back, chest and thighs. 

Similar accounts of rampant, unusual health issues afflicting entire families are commonplace in the villages around the base. 

Wali Ur Rahman, 26, takes a rest from the sweltering 108 degrees Fahrenheit June heat under a concrete gazebo in the center of his field, which sits next to Ajmal’s home. Rahman and his father, brother, sister-in-law, uncle and nephew, have lived here for the past 22 years. All have kidney problems, according to doctors’ reports that I reviewed, from kidney calcification and kidney stones to renal failure. His son and his nephew also have respiratory problems. 

Doctors told Rahman that without treatment he will need a kidney transplant, which he cannot afford. 

The family eats the food they grow in their field, which is irrigated by the stream—there are no other options. He suspected that the sewage-infested stream by their home was the cause of his family’s health problems, so he dug a well inside their home for drinking water. Now, he thinks the well is supplying dirty water; shortly after his young nieces and nephews began using it, they also became sick.

Groundwater wells are the main source of drinking water in Afghanistan. A report from 2017 in the scientific journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment mapped water quality for half of the country, finding a range of potentially toxic substances, including boron, as well as high levels of arsenic and fluoride in several areas. Although some of these substances can be naturally occurring, they are also associated with industrial use. Other water quality studies conducted at select locations in Afghanistan found nickel, mercury, chromium, uranium and lead—heavy metals that can cause serious harm to the body, from impairing children’s mental and physical development to kidney damage. 

Dumped in Jalalabad’s fields, “Tankers full of American toilet waste”

A few minutes’ drive from Rahman’s field is a wide dirt road that runs parallel to the Jalalabad-Torkham highway. On the other side are open fields. Here, I meet Khan Mohammad as he navigates his way through a carefully landscaped field in District 9 of Jalalabad, about 100 yards from the base. Mohammad stops under the shade of a small almond tree and sits down, folding his legs beneath him. He has been working in these fields for 20 years and remembers how the contractors’ trucks from the base would carry two types of waste and dump them where he was planting crops.

“One was colored green-blue, which would destroy the plants. The other was a white-gray milky substance, which had a very bad smell, like acid. Sometimes they would dump a mix of both,” he tells me. 

A group of six farmers from neighboring fields joined us under the tree. “These were tankers full of American toilet waste. At one time, the tankers were dumping twice a day, in the morning and evening,” says 30-year-old Omar Hiaran, recalling how this continued until the Americans left the base in 2021. “It was white soapy water and had toilet paper in it.” 

Hiaran’s father, also a farmer, has had health problems for the past nine years. 

“After he became ill, he told me to wear gloves when I was working in the field so that I didn’t touch the sewage like he had,” Hiaran says.

While waste from local residents is also dumped into the city’s canals and smaller landfills along the roads, it cannot compete with the sheer amount of hazardous waste that came from the airfield. 

The blue liquid Mohammad saw was a dye used in the portable toilets at the base. The chemicals used in these toilets can be toxic to human health in high doses. According to an article by Matthew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who advised on environmental cleanups, the washroom facilities at the American bases generated both gray and black water. The gray wastewater came from sinks and showers, carrying soap residue that contains phosphates and other chemicals. Black water pollution came from the toilets. While the American military has to adhere to strict rules regarding the disposal of toilet waste on home turf, he said that it faced no restrictions in Afghanistan.

When Mohammad and other villagers confronted the contractors driving the tankers, they were told that the sewage would “benefit the crops and would bring a good harvest, and they reminded us that using the sewage was cheaper than buying fertilizer and was good to use as water also,” he says.

A 2021 report by the Sierra Club and Ecology Center found that even the sewage sludge found in American fertilizers can contain a harmful array of chemicals, including dioxins, microplastics, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alarming levels of toxic PFAS—also known as “forever chemicals”—that can take decades or even centuries to break down naturally. PFAS are also present in several substances that were used by the U.S. military, including foams used to combat petroleum-based fires. 

By mid-2022, the U.S. military had reportedly still not begun cleanups at any of the hundreds of DOD sites across the United States identified as highly contaminated with PFAS.

Studies have linked higher levels of PFAS exposure to an array of health problems, including liver damage, cardiovascular diseases, increased risk of kidney cancer, increased risk of thyroid disease and immune system dysfunction. A federal study published in July established, for the first time, a direct link between PFAS and testicular cancer in thousands of U.S. service members. Pregnant women exposed to PFAS have an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Babies in the womb and infants are also vulnerable, as studies have found that PFAS can affect placental function and be present in breast milk. PFAS exposure has also been linked to decreased infant birth weight, developmental dysfunction among infants and increased disease risk later in life.

Even if such sewage goes through a treatment process, research has shown that PFAS and other toxic chemicals cannot be removed. 

In 2017, Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, or NEPA, said that 70 percent of the underground water in Kabul was contaminated with harmful bacteria, microbes and chemicals and was not safe for human consumption. Other major cities, including Jalalabad, faced the same problem, the agency said. 

Afghanistan’s capital had one public facility for sewage treatment, the Makroyan Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processed at least 21,000 gallons of raw sewage each month from portable toilets at the U.S. Embassy and 12,000 gallons from those used by U.S. and coalition troops. All of this was piped into the Kabul River, according to Afghan officials and Malika and Refa Environmental Solutions, the company that serviced the NATO headquarters in Kabul and at Bagram airfield. The plant stopped working in 2018, and the untreated wastewater was dumped into the river before flowing into the city drains, endangering the health of thousands of residents.

The U.S. Geological Survey notes that pollutants found in wastewater include phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, which promote excessive plant growth—something that Mohammad and the other farmers saw in their fields. The sewage dumped in the fields around Jalalabad airfield did not go through treatment processes on the base, according to an Afghan engineer named Faridun (he gave only his first name) who had worked on the base for 12 years. 

“They have infected every part of Afghanistan”

At his home on the edge of the field he farms, Mohammad explains that his two youngest sons are suffering from serious kidney issues. “But we do not know about the exact cause of their diseases, whether it’s pollution or something else,” he says. He suspects the sewage dumping.

His eldest son Farooq, who has issues with his bladder, emerges from the home with a thick stack of papers and folders cradled in his slim arms. Mohammad combs through the mountain of documents—there are 44 doctor reports alone for his 7-year-old son, Umar, who sits crouched at his feet. 

Umar has had kidney problems since he was 1 year old, Mohammad says. I look through the reports: Doctors in Afghanistan and Pakistan had diagnosed him with a pleural effusion (fluid around the lungs), moderate ascites (fluid in the abdomen) and chronic kidney and liver disease. His 5-year-old brother, Ameen, has kidney damage, and his blood tests show he is also anemic. Both boys help their father work the land every day along with Mohammad’s mother, Bibi Haro, 60, who shows me her skin condition, which she has had for eight years. At first, it was red and leaking pus, but it has now settled into a permanent itch. 

Umar has been going to the doctor for four years, his grandmother says. “He is still in pain now. Every day he is suffering. Last year he went to a kidney center hospital in Pakistan. And just a week ago, we returned to the doctor with him,” she says. 

His cousins Bibi Ameena and Hamidullah, who also work the fields by the home, have both had kidney problems for the past five years.

Mohammad looks down at Umar, nestled under his arm. “When he coughs, there is blood,” he says. “The only thing I owned was a tractor, and I sold it for his treatment. Now, the doctors in Peshawar say they need 5 million Pakistani rupees [about $16,000] to replace his kidneys, but I don’t have that much money.”

As tears of anger stream down her face, Bibi Haro tells me how her brother is deaf as a result of an American drone crash in the field by the home. “They would fly low every night and scare us while we slept,” she says. “They bombed Nangarhar for years, and their smoke filled our sky. They have infected every part of Afghanistan.” 

Jalalabad doctors: Diagnosing the contaminants of war 

Doctors at the public hospital in Jalalabad attribute many of the health problems their patients face to water, air and soil pollution from the American base. I meet one of them, Dr. Latif Zeer, in a deserted restaurant in the city center. As soon as we sit down at a long table, the power cuts out. The ornate gold fans above us slow to a stop, letting the hum of the city outside flood into the room.

He explains how heavy metal poisoning in “all the water” may be related to contamination from chemicals used on military installations or chemical residue from weapons and ammunition. In his view, this has led to the hospital’s many cases of kidney problems and gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract including the stomach and intestine, usually caused by viruses, bacteria or other microbes. Gastroenteritis can also be caused by food or water contaminated by chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury or cadmium. “Anywhere they dropped bombs or the airstrikes were conducted, definitely, the water would be contaminated,” he adds. 

Over the years, the DOD has faced a string of lawsuits over contaminated water on its bases at home and abroad, including claims of contamination from jet fuel and depleted uranium. In response to my emailed questions, the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM denied that the U.S. military had dumped wastewater, black or gray, in waterways in Afghanistan, saying that specially designed “lagoons/settling ponds and leach fields” were used instead that “did not directly discharge onto the land.” Wastewater was “gathered and hauled off” by contractors to a host nation’s treatment and disposal facility, it added. 

CENTCOM also said it last operated an open-air burn pit in Afghanistan on December 28, 2020, refuting what dozens of residents told me.

Zeer, who has spent two decades at the hospital in Jalalabad, tells me the gastroenteritis cases he saw were unusual. At one point, the national Ministry of Public Health sent a team from Kabul to observe patients and test the water, he says. The infectious disease specialists could only explain the cause as “chemical substances.” 

Patients usually got better after a few days or with antibiotics, he says, “but we were seeing patients with AGE [acute gastroenteritis] symptoms and respiratory problems [who were] dying, and so I thought this was some kind of chemical poisoning of the water caused by chemicals used in the fighting.” 

But it is difficult to definitively diagnose chemical poisoning as the cause of gastroenteritis, he says. Doctors in Afghanistan lack the resources and equipment to deduce the primary causes of many of the illnesses they see daily. Adding to their woes is a record-keeping system that is largely analog and often does not include basic details, such as home district and age. 

“People don’t know their family medical history, and we often cannot do follow-ups with patients because they are moving due to fighting or they cannot afford to come back,” Shinwari told me. 

In the last four years of the war, Zeer treated a flood of patients from Nangarhar and neighboring Kunar, mostly suffering from acute gastroenteritis. Most of these cases came from districts that had seen prolonged fighting over the years, including Achin, Khogyani and Shirzad in Nangarhar.

The head of the Jalalabad hospital’s pulmonary department for 14 years, Dr. Sabahuddin Saba, cites multiple causes for an array of respiratory illnesses suffered across the region. He says that the air pollution can come from working with materials like silicon or coal, for example: “Some farmers have what we call ‘farmer’s lung’ because they work in the dust.”

But he also notes that Afghanistan has been devastated by bombs and airstrikes that “left chemicals that would spread to the surrounding areas and would be breathed by people all around.”

“We see many patients with chronic coughs, and when we took chest CT scans, we found lung cancer,” Saba says. “Many other patients have bronchial asthma, COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], bronchiolitis and emphysema.” 

He believes that some of these patients were exposed to “irritating or chemical dust”  residue from the bombs. In 2018, patients traveling from Kunar arrived at his hospital in Jalalabad suffering from shortness of breath and coughing up blood. Some died. The hospital had no comprehensive system for managing patients’ records or advanced toxicology equipment that would have enabled doctors to identify what chemicals were responsible for the apparent poisoning; they only had drug test kits provided by the United Nations Population Fund. Other patients, Saba says, arrived at the hospital with mysterious eye infections and nosebleeds, both of which he believes were caused by a chemical substance. 

An Afghan oncologist who has worked in Nangarhar for more than 20 years tells me that he and other doctors in the province see many cancer cases, mostly lung and pancreatic, followed by breast cancer. He says that the majority of patients go to Pakistan and India for treatment because Afghanistan does not have chemotherapy and other medicines readily available. The patients mostly have stage 3 or 4 cancer “because they are not getting regular checkups, we do not catch the cancer sooner. I have treated many soldiers who have lung cancer,” he says.

“If we have good facilities and a good system in place, we would do lots of research but we don’t have technical people here now,” he adds. “This is Afghanistan, if people die from cancer, who will record it? There is no one counting how many have died. This is the first time that someone came here and asked such things.”

In Kandahar, “deadly” burn pits and contaminated water

A badly beaten 300-mile stretch of road links Kabul with Kandahar, passing south through the provinces of Maidan Wardak, Ghazni and Zabul. Post-apocalyptic dust storms blur the pockmarked road ahead. The drive takes 12 hours, and the route is choked with overloaded trucks trudging along with little attempt to avoid the potholes. Strewn along the sides of the highway are bullet-riddled police cars and Humvees, the remnants of the Taliban’s triumphant storm across the country toward the capital in 2021. 

At the regional NEPA office in Kandahar city, staff member Matiullah Zahen describes his struggles with waste burning and sewage dumping by contractors at the giant 3,633-acre Kandahar airfield used by American and Afghan forces. 

“One and a half years ago, we went to the base and told them what they can and can’t burn and where—that it had to be a specific place, not just dumping and burning everywhere,” he says. 

But waste disposal was not high on the list of priorities for the commanders at the base, he says, and nothing changed. 

“The kind of thinking of the base commanders was: ‘It’s the contractor’s job to handle the waste, I don’t care how he does it, just get it out of my face. I got other problems, I’m fighting a war,’” Zahen says. 

Zahen accompanies me to the airfield and we drive out, my letters of permission from several ministries and the governor in hand. We wait for the base commander to show us where one of the burn pits was, behind a now-padlocked gate that leads to the international side of the airfield. Two hours later, we are told to leave. 

After we leave the maze of high blast walls winding out of the base, we turn off the main road into the Khoshab area, just to its west, home to about 15,000 people who earn a living from the surrounding agricultural land. Khoshab is the closest village to the airfield.

Here, I find 22-year-old Laal Mohammed working his land in the shadow of the airfield’s walls. Despite the brutal hazy midday heat, he doesn’t break a sweat. His wheat and vegetable fields are less than 100 yards from the base’s perimeter. 

His family’s home is surrounded by a carefully kept garden with rows of vegetables and a burst of blossoming flowers. Inside is a 60-foot-deep well dug 15 years ago where they get their drinking water. They moved here eight years ago from neighboring Zabul province. 

Five years ago, both he and his sister Nazaka, 21, started having kidney problems. “The doctors found kidney stones many times,” he tells me. “The doctors we went to see told us to stop drinking the water here,” he says, adding that they can’t use their neighbors’ water as they have the same wells. “And we cannot afford to buy bottled water.” 

He takes me to a site across from the base that locals call Qazi Qarez, where he says the tankers used to dump sewage and trash once or twice a week. From 2014 until the Americans left, they would burn the waste in five locations here, he says, pointing to the spots. Today, it’s an open, empty stretch of land, but just a year and a half ago, he says, plumes of thin smoke could be seen trailing upward to the sky.

“Indefensible” burn pits

Although U.S. military waste management guidance from as far back as 1978 specifies that solid waste should not be burned in an open pit if an alternative is available, burn pits persisted in Afghanistan. DOD officials stated that the management of solid waste is not always a high priority during wartime, according to the Government Accountability Office. 

CENTCOM regulations specified that when an installation exceeds 100 U.S. personnel for 90 days, it must develop a plan for installing alternatives to open-air burn pits for waste disposal. CENTCOM officials told SIGAR that “no U.S. installation in Afghanistan has ever complied with the regulations.”

The U.S. military used open-air burn pits almost exclusively to dispose of its solid waste during its first four years in Afghanistan. Only in 2004 did the DOD begin introducing new disposal methods, including landfills and incineration, a year after soldiers returning from deployment complained of shortness of breath and asthma. 

And while CENTCOM attempted to limit the use of burn pits beginning in 2009, reliance on them continued: In April 2010, the Pentagon reported to Congress that open-air burning was the safest, most effective and expedient manner of solid waste reduction during military operations until research and development efforts could produce better alternatives. Shortly afterward, CENTCOM estimated that there were 251 active burn pits in Afghanistan, a 36.4 percent increase from just four months earlier. That same year, health studies raised concerns that the burn pits’ smoke, contaminated with lead, mercury and dioxins, could harm the adrenal glands, lungs, liver and stomach. In 2011, guidance finally stated that burn pits should be placed far away from areas near troops. 

The DOD hired contractors such as KBR Inc., formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, to manage the burn pits. Over the years, KBR has faced numerous lawsuits related to the burn pits and the water treatment plants it operated in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The waste burned in the open-air pits, according to multiple reports, including one in 2010 by Nasuti, the former U.S. Air Force captain, included petroleum and lubricants; paints, asbestos, solvents, grease, cleaning solutions and building materials that contain formaldehyde, copper, arsenic and hydrogen cyanide; hydraulic fluids, aircraft de-icing fluids, antifreeze, munitions and other unexploded ordnance; metal containers, furniture and rubber, Humvee parts and tires; and discarded food, plastics, Styrofoam, wood, lithium-ion batteries, electrical equipment, paint, chemicals, uniforms, pesticides and medical and human waste. Animal and human carcasses, including body parts, were also thrown in. 

Though CENTCOM regulation prohibits a host of materials and hazardous chemicals from being burned, these and other discarded items were set on fire using JP-8 jet fuel, which released benzene, a known carcinogen. Plumes of the burnt waste hovered over the base and seeped into soldiers’ sleeping, working and dining quarters, often less than a mile away. The smoke included heavy metals, dioxins, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons and hydrochloric acid, among numerous other toxic substances. 

Kandahar airfield generated more than 100 tons of solid waste per day in 2012 and more than 5 million gallons of sewage water from 30,000 portable toilets. The DOD first brought 23 incinerators to Kandahar that year at a cost of almost $82 million, but the machines proved extremely unreliable and costly to operate. One incinerator was delivered two years late and required $1 million of repairs before it could even be turned on. An inspection by SIGAR from 2012 to 2014 found serious mechanical problems and a reliance on burn pits instead. In 2015, SIGAR’s inspector general called the use of open-air burn pits “indefensible.” 

A few weeks before I headed to Kandahar, I spoke with an American official familiar with burn pits who had witnessed all manner of toxic waste being burned in the massive pits on U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

The official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, told me that the trash at the base in Kandahar “was all over the place” and that no one was paying attention to the specifications on what could be burned in the pit and when. The contractors “would just burn everything,” the official said. “I expected to see a big pile of ash, but all you saw was things that were blackened. It didn’t effectively burn everything down to nothing. I was like, why bother?”

They said the enormous burn pits would be dug deep enough to be used many times and “when it got to a level where they couldn’t burn anymore, they would just shovel dirt over it and dig another one in another spot. They smelled horrible.” 

Most of the incinerators did not work properly or at all and wouldn’t be fixed, the official told me. At other times, personnel weren’t trained properly on how to use them, “so what all the bases did was go back to what they did before,” which was to either use burn pits or dump waste. 

The military doctors

Abdul Sami, 32, and Zabiullah Amarkhil, 31, Afghan doctors, know well the damage from the burn pits. The pair studied medicine together before working as trauma surgeons in military hospitals inside bases in Kunduz, Nangarhar, Kabul and Balkh as well as Kandahar, where they still work today. 

“I have seen patients with skin problems and eye infections. Others had kidney problems because of the contaminated water, American soldiers also. We also had patients with acute gastroenteritis,” says Amarkhil as we bundle into the back of a beat-up taxi. I had collected the doctors from the airfield after they finished their shift.

On all the bases, they treated soldiers and civilians with the same array of pulmonary and respiratory problems witnessed by the doctors in Jalalabad. Most of their patients were those who were working close to the burn pit, they say.

In Jalalabad, Sami recalls at one point registering up to 200 patients a day with respiratory isssues, skin diseases and stomach problems. 

“Most of these patients were from the military base,” he says. The military quarters, he adds, were just 650 yards west from one of the pits.

Amarkhil says the waste at Kandahar airfield was dumped and burned both inside and outside the base. He drew a map marking the base’s biggest burn pit, between the American and Afghan sides of the airfield, and another location where trash and other refuse were dumped in a landfill. Up until 2016, he said, “they were doing burn pits once a week, always on Wednesday. The flames were about 4 meters high.”

The burn pit was very close to the military training center that housed new trainee soldiers, who were not used to the heavy air pollution, Amarkhil tells me. In 2016, he would see as many as 10 trainee soldiers a day with respiratory problems. An additional 10 to 15 had skin issues, he says. He adds that waste from Forward Operating Base Gamberi, in Laghman province near Jalalabad, was dumped at the Darunta Dam to the west of the city, where it polluted the water. But in Kandahar everything would go to the burn pits, Amarkhil says, including a specific container used for medical waste and equipment. 

“When it was full, the container would be burnt also,” he says.

Momand Khosti, a military doctor, called the burn pits “deadly.” Khosti worked in senior positions in both the Afghan and American hospitals at Kandahar airfield and five other airfields since 2007, and as the deputy director for health affairs in the Ministry of Defense until the Taliban takeover. 

When we met weeks earlier in Kabul, sitting in the back corner of a restaurant, he marked the location of a Kandahar burn pit on a napkin, about a mile from the hospital on the Afghan side of the base. 

“We also burned medical waste and equipment in a smaller burn pit, 100 meters from the hospital,” he says.

The last time he saw active burn pits was in June 2021, he says.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of the respiratory problems, cancers, skin conditions and kidney problems that patients at Kandahar airfield were suffering, Khosti believes that “many” of the cases were directly linked to military activities and the bases themselves. 

“One night, 30 soldiers came into the hospital with diarrhea and vomiting,” he says. “In the days following, more came in.” Staff members at the hospital then found that the water on the base had been contaminated.

Khosti, who specializes in cancers of the liver, gallbladder and bile duct, described how a soldier with late-stage lung cancer had come to see him just two days earlier. “I asked him about his lifestyle and work background. He told me he worked on the bases or on the battlefield. He was coughing up a black-colored mucus. Because he worked as a soldier for so many years, I believe his cancer is because of the pollution from the burn pits.” 

U.S. service members exposed to burn pit pollution in Afghanistan also coughed up black mucus they called “plume crud” or “black goop,” studies later revealed. They reported suffering from severe chronic respiratory disease, including constrictive bronchiolitis, a rare and often fatal lung disorder for which there is no cure. Other symptoms included unexplained diarrhea, severe headaches, weeping lesions, chronic skin infections and rashes, severe abdominal pain, leukemia, lung cancer, nosebleeds, severe heart conditions, sleep apnea, anemia, ulcers, unexpected weight loss and vomiting.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) insisted until 2021 that there was conflicting and insufficient research to show that long-term health problems have resulted from burn pit exposure, and denied most benefit claims related to toxic exposure. The VA estimates that more than 3.5 million veterans and service members were exposed to the toxic fumes from burn pits during overseas deployments since 1990, according to a 2015 VA report.

The Khoshab clinic

In Kandahar, Afghan doctors allege that toxic substances from the burn pits harmed the development of fetuses. At a small clinic in Khoshab about 100 yards from the Kandahar airfield, Dr. Suhela Muhammadi, 40, bustles through a crowd of mothers and children in the clinic’s small waiting room. She tells me about heart anomalies, genetic disorders and other birth defects in babies whose mothers lived near the base, saying these were not seen at such high levels 20 years ago. 

“I think that most of them were caused by the war, when their mothers were pregnant,” she says.

The number of congenital birth defects in Afghanistan per 1,000 people is more than twice as high as that in the U.S., according to 2017 research published by the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. The paper also notes that increased maternal exposure to certain chemicals may affect development of the fetus and contribute to congenital anomalies. Increased risk of congenital anomalies was reported in Afghan women working in agriculture sectors and those living near hazardous waste sites. 

While the environmental toxicologist Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani was working at the University of Michigan, she published several studies on Iraq, where birth defects have been better studied than in Afghanistan. She found infants and children had been exposed to potentially toxic metals such as tungsten, titanium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, thorium and uranium that are heavily used in weaponry and military hardware. 

“The most common resulting anomalies are heart defects and neural tube defects,” she told me.

Abdul Wali Abid, the Khoshab clinic’s manager for more than a decade, tells me that in the weeks before the Americans left the base, the staff saw smoke billowing from burn pits every week. An engineer working inside the Kandahar airfield for the past eight years said that right before the U.S. military left the base, they burned a lot of things, “even cars.” There was a river at the back side of the base coming out the wall “where they were dumping sewage until the end.” 

As I leave the clinic, I meet 35-year-old Abdul Raziq, a clinic guard who has lived in the area all his life. He knows the “river” that the engineer had told me about, he says, leading me out of the clinic to show me the three places where the water was coming out of the airfield walls. 

We head out and drive around the southern side of the base, bumping over dry agricultural land. A metal grate covered the outflow to one of the pipes, which emptied into a 26-foot-wide trench carved out in front of it. Not long ago, water would flow out of the base, flooding into smaller streams, which fed nearby agricultural lands, Raziq tells me. 

“It was dirty, soapy water, with rubbish in it,” he says. “But when the Americans left the base, it stopped.” 

Kandahar airfield’s scrap metal collectors

Along the road on the northeast side of the base is a string of makeshift shops stuffed with a random assortment of scrap, from Humvee seats to car engines and ammunition boxes. I had seen the same in Nangarhar, where shop owners had once built a bustling economy on the waste from the base. 

Here, I find Fida Mohammad, 17, and Esanullah, 15, hiding from the midday sun inside their ramshackle hut, surrounded by piles of metal. They are originally from Ghazni province, but after their father died of a heart attack seven years ago, they moved to Kandahar with their mother and three younger brothers, hoping to make a living from scrap metal trading. 

When the U.S. soldiers were still at the base, the boys could earn as much as 15,000 to 20,000 afghanis ($185 to $250) a month from collecting scrap that came from the base, they say. 

“Some things were burned by the people at the base, like TVs, radios, computers, mobile phones and all sorts of electronics, but we would go through it and collect the metal that survived the fire,” Fida Mohammad tells me. 

For the past five years, Esanullah has suffered from breathing problems, and his hands are riddled with a rash that started two years ago. 

“Our younger brother got sick also. He was small, so my mother told me to bring him with us to our work. He was playing with all the things and then he got the same skin problems as Esanullah,” says Fida Mohammad.

Two years ago, Esanullah traveled to Quetta in Pakistan to see a doctor with his mother. “I couldn’t talk properly or stand,” he says. “The real problem was my chest. I was there for two and a half months. But even now, I have problems with my breathing.”

The doctors in Pakistan didn’t give a diagnosis for the cause, but the boys believe that the source of Esanullah’s health problems is the airfield. 

The two would collect everything from plastic bottles to vehicle engines to “the bad things” like live grenades, as well as ammunition and shell casings, says Fida Mohammad. 

He leads me outside and points to these deadly remnants of the American occupation: unexploded artillery shells and a box filled with 40 mm grenades.

Khosti had told me that around Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province, people suffered from eye infections. There were even cases of children, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, developing eye tumors, he said. “They were collecting scrap metal from the base, and areas around where the U.S. military was conducting weapons testing, and sometimes they would take the explosive materials, so I believe their eye tumors were related to this.”

Bagram, “Everyone is sick here” 

Anyone who lives near Bagram airfield knew the burn pits by the smell of the raging barbecue of trash, usually overseen by Afghan employees, few of whom bothered to wear masks to protect themselves from the smoke and ash spewing from the pits.

“When you are doing this kind of work for 10 years, 15 … there is nothing that can keep you safe,” one of the former base employees tells me. 

The enormous U.S. stronghold, about 15 miles north of Kabul, was home to 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors at its peak, with airplanes and helicopters taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night. There were underground bars, a private airstrip, a Burger King and other fast-food joints, an Oakley sunglasses store and, until 2014, a secret detention facility. A giant diesel generator farm powered the base 24 hours a day, emitting a constant stream of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and sulfur. 

A 13-building waste management complex built in 2014 to house the base’s new incinerators seemingly had little effect on the discharges. Until the U.S. exit in the middle of a July night two years ago, a haze of aerosolized garbage would emerge every week from what the American soldiers called “the shit pit” and mix with the already dust-clogged air in Parwan province, residents told me.

A half-hour drive away from Bagram, southeast of the provincial capital of Charikar, a graveyard of rusting trucks, tanks and helicopter engines used by the Soviet Union lay baking in the summer sun, the vehicles’ corroding residue leaching into the soil and water. Lining the road below were trucks belonging to scrap dealers, waiting to take the debris on to Pakistan. A few weeks later, it was all gone.

While I had permission letters from the relevant Taliban ministries, I needed the authorization of Obaidullah Aminzada, Parwan’s new governor, to visit the sprawling base. As a member of the Taliban, Aminzada had been a prisoner at Bagram for four years while it was under the control of the U.S. military. Now, he was effectively in charge of what had been the Pentagon’s largest military base in Afghanistan. 

“When the blasts started, we knew it was a Friday,” the governor tells me coolly in his office, surrounded by his assistants, in the heart of Charikar. While he was a detainee, he was kept in darkness but knew from the sound “and that smell” that the military was conducting controlled detonations of military equipment and ordnance at Bagram. “We knew what day of week it was by the detonations,” he laughs, turning to one of his assistants, who nods in agreement.

Aminzada invites me to lunch with the governor of Bagram district. I had been promised access to the sprawling base and I’m eager to see inside, post-American control. So I accept the invitation despite my reservations. The lunch involves me, the only woman, sitting alone in one room for an hour and a half, with the men in another, their rollicking laughter floating across the courtyard. Finally, we say our goodbyes and head out to the base. We make it to the gates, but no further. The commander, from whom I need permission, was not at the base, I was told — the same thing that had happened to me at the bases in Nangarhar and Kandahar.

I watch as the gates to the base open to let a Ford Ranger roll in. Children carrying sacks larger than themselves stuffed with an array of scrap try to sneak in, only to get chased away by a Taliban guard perched atop a rundown Humvee decorated with plastic flowers. 

Almost all of the waste “was still going to the burn pit”

The moment is a far cry from the scene that greeted the bioenvironmental engineer and U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel Kyle Blasch when he arrived at Bagram in the summer of 2011. The commander of the security forces at Bagram had contacted his team about researching the base’s burn pit. Blasch’s team conducted the only occupational sampling study on U.S. personnel near the military’s burn pits in Afghanistan. 

At the peak of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Bagram was burning between 2,300 and 4,000 cubic yards of refuse per day—enough to fill 175 to 300 dump trucks. Smoke from the burn pits, mixed with dust and other pollution, choked the guards as they worked 12-hour shifts at the base’s checkpoints and 10-yard-high guard tower. 

New rules from the DOD had come in prohibiting the burning of specific materials, but it didn’t matter, as the researchers found that 81 percent of waste was still going to the burn pit, including prohibited items such as plastic bags, packaging materials, broken construction materials and aerosol cans.

The purpose of the study was to see what the soldiers were actually breathing. Blasch’s team outfitted members of the security forces with personal sampling monitors. He was able to outfit the study subjects with four monitors each, which included pumps, filters and breathing tubes. Blasch said they were eager to help. 

The results were unequivocal. The levels of airborne pollutants registered by the monitors worn by each soldier exceeded the short-term military exposure guideline level. Those near the burn pit and waste disposal complex exceeded the U.S. EPA’s air quality thresholds by a factor of more than 50. 

“Right now, we have a lot of question marks,” said Blasch, who is now associate regional director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northwest-Pacific Islands.

In 2011, an Army memo stated that the high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram airfield were likely to affect veterans’ health for the rest of their lives. The memo noted that the amount of pollutants in Bagram’s air far exceeded the levels permitted under U.S. government guidelines.

 “Everyone breathed the same air” 

The day after I was denied access to Bagram by the Taliban authorities, Noor Mohammad Ahmadi, 41, a village head, leads me down a narrow maze of walkways to his home, just outside the base. 

He lives in the village of Gulai Kali, where streams meander through tightly packed homes and the roads that encircle the base. Driving around the perimeter, I count 16 locations where water flowed into or out of the base from small culverts in the high walls. Families use the doors of shipping containers as gates to their compounds and shops. Above them, the white Taliban flag flutters in the wind. 

The neighborhood is abuzz with activity. A pair of girls carrying their baby sisters walk alongside a stream, deep in chatter. Men stride across nearby wheat fields, hands clasped behind their backs, as children run past, their heads cocked to the pink sky, eyes locked on their kites above.

In 2011, Ahmadi and 17 other village leaders from the area wrote an application to the Parwan governor, Abdul Basir Salangi, saying that the Bagram base was destroying their drinking water, he tells me. 

His ancestors had lived in Gulai Kali for years, but when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, the villagers left. “When the new government came in, we came back, so we have been here now for 20 years,” he says.

“We sent two applications to the governor. One was about our property; the Americans took our lands and expanded the base here. And the second was about our water problem,” he says. The base had stopped the Panjshir River from reaching their fields for agriculture, he says. “They were also dumping lavatory water into our waterways and fields.” 

He pulls out a stack of carefully organized papers in plastic sleeves. “I have all the letters.” 

Streams from the Panjshir River enter the base from the north and depart from it in the south and east. The airfield was diverting the water, he says. “Nine hundred families are living here in Gulai Kali village, and they were without water.”

The governor promised to talk to the military and send a team to examine the water. Two weeks later, a team made up of the district’s representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water, a representative from the Ministry of Public Health, an Afghan translator and “two international military people from the base” came to the villages and took samples from the wells, Ahmadi says.

“After this, the governor called a big meeting at his office with the international military people, a representative from each village, an Afghan commander named Safiullah Safi and the team who took the samples,” he says. “They told us the water is clean and there were no problems with it, but they did not show us any results in documents or reports.” 

The governor instructed the airfield personnel to dig a well 100 yards deep for the villagers, but it never happened, he says. 

Three men from the village join us in Ahmadi’s home. One man, Ajab Gul, says he has respiratory problems and has had multiple surgeries to remove recurrent kidney stones. “In our area, we do not have clean water,” he says. “Maybe this is the cause.” 

“Everyone is sick here,” Mohammad Salim, a farmer, speaks up. “When the international community came to Afghanistan, my problems started.” He says he has had issues with his lungs for the past 17 years. The base was burning waste at least three times a week, he says, and the winds would blow it over his village and the lands he farms, about 50 yards from the base.

“When we saw the smoke, we took our children inside the home and still had to cover our mouths and noses because of the bad smell,” Salim adds. “It was a big problem for us.”

Salim traveled to see a doctor in Pakistan three times between 2012 and 2019. 

“The doctors took my blood, did a lot of tests and gave me medicine, but I am still not well. If there is any smoke, I can’t breathe again, and I cannot control my coughing. My eyes cry when I cough. I’m coughing a mucus that stings my throat.”

“Lots of farmers from this area are sick,” Salim says. They call it ‘Bagram Lung.’ Just knock on any door and you will find it. … The Americans who were on the base are sick, but so are we. Everyone breathed the same air.” Over the years, the international aid workers, journalists and diplomats stationed in Kabul came up with their own name, “Kabul cough,” to describe the chronic hacking, bronchitis and sinus infections. The symptoms were particularly persistent in the winter months, when the smog from coal and oil burning heaters enveloped the Kabul basin. 

 While the cause of Salim’s problem has not been determined, his description of “Bagram Lung” brought to mind tests performed in the U.S. on soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division. 

While they all tested normal on conventional pulmonary function, a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center performed surgical lung biopsies on more than 50 and found that nearly all of them had constrictive bronchiolitis, a narrowing of the smallest and deepest airways in the lungs—an irreversible and chronic condition. Other medical studies have found a host of other toxic substances, including partially combusted jet fuel, in the lungs of veterans serving near burn pits.

Then there was the sewage dumping. In Gulai Kali, everyone says the water is as dirty as the sky. Every day, American contractors from the base “were bringing seven to 10 tankers carrying the lavatory water and dumping it in the canals [and we still] cannot even wash there,” says Salim, the farmer.

“I have kidney and bladder problems and I feel very weak,” says Zia ul Haq, a villager sitting next to Salim. For days at a time, he was too tired to stand, he says.

He has lived next to Bagram for the past 15 years and has been unwell for seven of them. “I worked inside the base for two years in the big refrigerator where food and energy drinks were stored,” he says. “I have a big pain in my kidneys and I cannot control my bladder. The doctor told me I have not been drinking clean water, but we are using water from our well.”

Every other house outside Bagram’s walls has a water pump well because the river no longer flows to the village. 

“The people don’t drink the canal water now; it’s too dirty,” he says. 

The people in Gulai Kali heard explosions, loud and frequent, coming from the base in June 2021, not realizing that the Americans were getting ready to depart once and for all  and were destroying ordnance, weapons and military vehicles so the Taliban couldn’t make use of them. 

Even Zainul Abiden Abid, head of NEPA, was kept away. “Our staff were not allowed inside the base that month,” but “we could see the clouds of smoke rising,” he told me.

As the Americans in Kabul frantically packed up in late August 2021, an Afghan worker at the U.S. Embassy took a video of a burn pit being used by embassy staffers right in the heart of Kabul. “We were told to take everything out of the office and go to this designated area and throw everything in there where it was set alight,” he told me. “On the top of the burn pit was a picture of John Sopko”—the American inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Using EPA-approved sampling equipment provided by the U.S.-based Eurofins Environment Testing, the journalist Kern Hendricks and an Afghan scientist specializing in water sampling collected water, soil and blood samples from villages around the Jalalabad, Bagram and Kandahar airfields where the journalist Lynzy Billing conducted interviews and obtained medical records from residents.

The sampling equipment traveled from the United States to Afghanistan via the United Kingdom and Turkey. The coolers containing the samples are now on their way back to Eurofins Environment Testing in the U.S. for lab analysis, via Pakistan.

We plan to test these samples for the presence of PFAS, which were present in materials used by the U.S. military and do not naturally occur in the environment.

The post America’s war in Afghanistan devastated the country’s environment in ways that may never be cleaned up appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		BLACK+DECKER Bug Zapper		SEE IT	The BLACK+DECKER is large, sturdy, and powerful.
Best budget		Ninonly Bug Zapper Light Bulb		SEE IT	Ninonly provides one of the best bug-zapping light bulbs that you can find.
Best handheld		Anne Diary Electric Bug Zapper Racket		SEE IT	With the ability to swivel the killing racket head, you can effectively cover the target insect on any surface.

When you’re ready to head outside, the last thing you want to do is get bitten or swarmed by insects, so having an outdoor bug zapper is a good idea. They make your insect-fearing companions feel more at ease and can give your uncovered food and drink a standing chance against buzzing bugs. But there are many styles to choose from that, and it can be hard to pick out which bug zapper best suits your needs. To do our part, we compiled this list of the best outdoor bug zappers.

• Best overall: BLACK+DECKER Bug Zapper
• Best cordless: BURLAN Solar Bug Zapper
• Best for mosquitoes: Elechome Bug Zapper
• Best for patio: Endbug Bug Zapper
• Best handheld: Anne Diary Electric Bug Zapper Racket
• Best indoor/outdoor: PRODCA Bug Zapper
• Best budget: Ninonly Bug Zapper Light Bulb

How we selected the best outdoor bug zappers

Bugs aren’t just pesky; they can sometimes be dangerous. When it comes to outdoor bug zappers, you want something that works, but you also want ingenuity. The location of the zapper, its shape, and its functional style all matter. And, despite being weapons of death against our exoskeleton-having foes, the best outdoor bug zappers don’t look like death themselves. As a result, the following list of the best outdoor bug zappers represents a variety of styles and forms of zappers that also happen to be attractive to the eye.

The best outdoor bug zappers: Reviews & Recommendations

Purchasing one of the following outdoor bug zappers should make your yard less insect-friendly. As most have lights, these insect repellents should also improve the visibility of your porch or patio a bit. However, we still recommend these solar deck lights for a brighter, more sustainable option for that purpose. Be sure to check over the whole list to find a style that suits your needs.

Best overall: BLACK+DECKER Bug Zapper

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Why it made the cut: With a large size and tough exterior, this will get the job done easily.

Specs

• Form: Lantern
• Size: 32 x 12 x 32 inches
• Target species: Fly, moth, mosquito, gnat, wasp

Pros

• Can choose between hanging or putting on table
• Cleaning-free option
• Tough, waterproof exterior

Cons

• Dead bugs sometimes stick to zapping element

For a quick-killing machine with a hard, weather-resistant exterior, the BLACK+DECKER is a great choice. It can hang on your patio or sit on a table. This choice is important, too, because it’ll change how you choose to use the zapper. While on a table, you’ll want the collection tray placed in. However, if you hang the BLACK+DECKER over grass, you can leave the bottom collection tray off so bugs will fall to the ground directly, reducing cleaning. However, this is a powerful zapper, so sometimes a bug will burn directly on the element, meaning you’ll have to do a little cleaning (with the supplied brush) periodically.

Best cordless: BURLAN Solar Bug Zapper

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Why it made the cut: You’ll never need a cord if you let the sun do most of the work.

Specs

• Form: Lantern
• Size: 9.4 x 5.1 x 5.1 inches
• Target species: Fly, mosquito

Pros

• Charges via solar power or USB plug-in
• Bright lamp on top adds to the ambiance
• Quiet, 25dB zaps
• IP66 water and dustproof

Cons

• Needs consistent sun exposure

If plugging something in and dealing with cords bothers you, turn to the power of the sun. This is the best outdoor bug zapper with a solar charging panel that we could find. On a full charge—which can be achieved in 12 hours of direct sunlight—the top lantern, lighting, and mosquito killer can work for between 4 and 12 hours, depending on mode of operation.

Best for mosquitoes: Elechome Bug Zapper

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Why it made the cut: This machine puts out a ton of special mosquito-attracting light.

Specs

• Form: Lantern
• Size: 5.35 x 5.35 x 11.6 inches
• Target species: Mosquito, gnat, fly, moth, wasp, spider

Pros

• Scientifically designed for mosquito attraction
• Large killing area
• IP66 dust and water resistant

Cons

• Must USB-C charge

According to Pfizer, mosquitos kill more than 700,000 people each year. While we’re waiting for advanced mosquito control to deactivate their reproductive process, there are other things to try. While some are washing up with a soap mosquito repellent, others are turning to special wavelengths that attract mosquitos, which the Elechome Bug Zapper puts out in extreme degree. It’s also got a larger killing area than most lantern types, with its top exposed, allowing for more bug killing.

Best for patio: Endbug Bug Zapper

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Why it made the cut: The bottom-facing light on this zapper is a plus for any patio.

Specs

• Form: Lantern
• Size: 5.7 x 5.7 x 10.6 inches
• Target species: Mosquito, gnat, fly, moth, wasp, etc.

Pros

• Includes a bright light on the bottom to light your patio
• Is IPX6 waterproof to ward off rain issues
• Excellent bug attraction ability

Cons

• Loud

The Endbug Bug Zapper is the best outdoor bug zapper for your porch or patio, as it provides excellent lighting for you and powerful killing for bugs. It’s a powerful 4,200V, so it kills quite effectively but is rather loud. Our advice is to hang it up high near the middle of your porch or patio area so you can get the maximum benefit from the provided light. However, if you do choose to put it closer to the edges, it’ll still be safe in the rain as it has IPX6 water resistance.

Best handheld: Anne Diary Electric Bug Zapper Racket

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Why it made the cut: The racket head swivels, letting you cover the scariest bugs safely.

Specs

• Form: Racket
• Size: 17.5 x 9.7 x 1.5 inches
• Target species: Wasp, bee, fly, mosquito

Pros

• Long handle keeps you away from dangerous pests
• Auto zap mode while in stand
• Swivel head provides maximum safety
• Simple USB-C charging

Cons

• Auto zap mode depletes battery in 5 hours

If you have really scary insects like bees, wasps, or hornets, you’ll want to be more proactive in your killing. Waiting for the bug to mosey into a light just won’t cut it. That’s why you should try out the best bug-zapping racket, this one from Anne Diary. You can swivel the zapping head to be parallel with the surface the offending insect has lit on, then cover it. This method keeps you safe and gives the insect no escape. When not in active use, you can turn on a passive zapping mode as well, but we only recommend this if the Anne Diary is plugged in, as the power drains after about five hours.

Best indoor/outdoor: PRODCA Bug Zapper

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Why it made the cut: The small size of this bug zapper makes it great to tuck into a kitchen or bedroom corner, too.

Specs

• Form: Lantern
• Size: 3.8 x 3.8 x 5.5
• Target species: Mosquito, fly, gnat, bee, moth, etc.

Pros

• Small size fits anywhere
• Can be made to be discreet
• Lamp light for better outdoor vision
• IP66 water- and dust-resistant

Cons

• Not great for all indoor pests (such as fruit flies)

Though a lot of the best outdoor bug zappers could technically be used indoors, you wouldn’t necessarily want them to be there. They’re big, can’t be placed just anywhere, and scream to others that you have an insect problem. As a result, we like the more discreet nature and size of the PRODCA, which can do great work on the porch, but also be tucked away in a kitchen corner when you want it to be.

Best budget: Ninonly Bug Zapper Light Bulb

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Why it made the cut: This is the best bug-zapping light bulb you can get.

Specs

• Form: Light bulb
• Size: 3.14 x 3.14 x 6.3 inches
• Target species: Fly, mosquito

Pros

• Small, convenient form
• Sloping trap stays clean
• Multiple modes
• Long lifespan

Cons

• Must be put into a lamp

Most of the best outdoor bug zappers cost between $35 and $60 apiece, depending on current deals available. That can be frustrating if you want many of them or aren’t ready to spend a lot on bug zapping. Light bulb-style bug zappers, then, are a great option, though they tend to have worse functionality. The Ninonly has high-quality zapping, multiple lighting modes, and a sloping inside that helps bugs fall out after death. As a result, it is one of the best cheap outdoor bug zappers… if you have a lamp available.

What to consider before buying outdoor bug zappers

Outdoor bug zappers might seem relatively straightforward, and they are, but there are still some things to consider before buying one. The most important thing to consider is the form of the zapper.

• Lantern styles are the most popular as they can be hung or placed on tables, add light and ambiance to the area, and are good passive killers that work well on porches and while camping.
• Handheld “electric fly swatters” are another style, great for targeted killing, but suffer in that they typically are made for consistent pest removal.
• Finally, light-bulb bug zappers are cheaper and simple to install, but these mini zappers typically don’t have as much killing power as the other styles.

You should also consider how easy the zapper will be to clean. The best outdoor bug zappers typically have at least one mode or feature that allows bugs to fall out of the zapping area, reducing cleaning. Powerful bug zappers may also burn insects directly to the zapping element, requiring you to clean it directly. It is highly recommended to review real customer experiences with cleaning if this is a concern for you.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best outdoor bug zappers

• Best overall: BLACK+DECKER Bug Zapper
• Best cordless: BURLAN Solar Bug Zapper
• Best for mosquitoes: Elechome Bug Zapper
• Best for patio: Endbug Bug Zapper
• Best handheld: Anne Diary Electric Bug Zapper Racket
• Best indoor/outdoor: PRODCA Bug Zapper
• Best budget: Ninonly Bug Zapper Light Bulb

The best outdoor bug zappers all have one thing in common; they will remove pests from your environment eventually. Whether you go for a powerful light source that attracts insects quickly or a handheld racket that lets you seek them out, you should feel more secure in your outdoor environment with one of the above products.

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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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.

Hiking through dense vegetation in Brazil’s Parnaíba Delta, Flávia Miranda stops suddenly and plucks a wheat-colored ball of fur from the tangle of mangrove branches. Startled from its slumber, the tennis ball–sized silky anteater raises its forepaws defensively like a boxer. Miranda, a researcher in conservation medicine at the State University of Santa Cruz in Brazil, carefully takes samples of blood and fur, then releases the elusive animal back into the forest.

Silky anteaters are the smallest anteaters and were the first to evolve, between 30 and 40 million years ago. Largely solitary and nocturnal, these fluffy little canopy dwellers inhabit low-altitude rainforests and mangroves from southern Mexico to northern Bolivia. When they’re not gorging on ants and termites, they spend much of their two-year life span sleeping.

Until recently, scientists believed that all silky anteaters belonged to the same species. But in 2017, Miranda published an analysis of silky anteater DNA from across the Americas, revealing seven distinct species.

“I always had this feeling that there was more than one species,” says Miranda, who has studied Brazil’s sloths, anteaters, and armadillos for 30 years. “I’d noticed differences in the fur color of populations in different regions.”

Now, Miranda is investigating the possibility that the sleepy animal she sampled in the Parnaíba Delta, roughly 280 kilometers east of São Luís, is a member of an eighth species.

The delta’s silky anteaters are isolated, living thousands of kilometers from their nearest known kin in the Amazon Basin, to the northwest, and a swath of tropical rainforest to the southeast, along Brazil’s Atlantic coast. This population, Miranda says, may be a relic left over from 11,000 years ago, when the Amazon rainforest stretched to the Parnaíba Delta.

So far, Miranda’s genetic analysis indicates that the delta population has been diverging from other silky anteater species for roughly two million years. However, the DNA tests need to be corroborated with physical characteristics to confirm that the delta’s anteaters form a new species. That’s why Miranda and her field assistant Alexandre Martins are continuing to collect blood samples and take measurements of animals that they find in the mangroves. “At the very least, we’re certain that this population is evolutionarily distinct and in the process of becoming [a separate species],” she says.

Mariella Superina, who chairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s group of anteater experts, describes Miranda’s research as groundbreaking. “Silky anteaters are the most understudied of all the [sloths, anteaters, and armadillos],” she says.

The Parnaíba Delta’s dense mangroves make it almost impossible for Miranda and her colleagues to count how many delta anteaters there might be. But since Miranda first visited in 2009, it has become clear that the delta is not a safe refuge for anteaters. Local people harvest the mangroves for fencing, housing, and boats. Farmers also let their cows and pigs range freely in the delta, where the livestock overgraze and trample young trees.

In 2011, Miranda began recruiting the community to reforest the mangroves. Locals started growing propagules, or mangrove seedlings, in a nursery for replanting in the delta and fenced these areas off from livestock. Quickly, the forest began to grow back. Although residents are mostly focused on protecting mangroves, their ongoing efforts are also benefitting the silky anteater and other wildlife.

“Our community’s survival is threatened by climate change, rising sea levels, and storms,” says Paulinho Morro do Meio, a fisherman, tour guide, and one of Miranda’s collaborators. “[The mangroves] are our best defense, and we work hard to restore them.”

For Miranda, though, the delta has sparked a bigger interest in yet-undiscovered silky anteaters, perhaps occupying the dry forests between the Parnaíba Delta and the distant rainforests. “I’ve got a feeling there are more ‘missing link’ populations,” she says.

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

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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.

The post ‘Dark’ archaeologists scour melting ice for ancient artifacts appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

The post Why are these orcas harassing porpoises? Scientists have 3 theories. appeared first on Popular Science.

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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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Best lightweight		Dyson V11 Torque Drive Cordless Vacuum Cleaner		SEE IT	Despite being only eight pounds, this pick still has intelligent tech that adjusts settings as you move across surfaces.
Best with HEPA filter		Hoover MAXLife Pro Pet Swivel HEPA Media Vacuum Cleaner		SEE IT	This high-efficiency filter captures 99 percent of dust and allergens for a truly complete clean.
Best robot		iRobot Roomba i4+ EVO (4552) Self Emptying Robot Vacuum		SEE IT	This robotic vacuum cleans thoroughly and in straight lines to keep it effective and unintrusive.

Pet hair is one of the only downsides to owning a pet. Whether it’s dust bunnies on hard surfaces, stray hairs on soft furnishings, or a layer of fluff on pretty much everything you own, there are very few dogs and cats that don’t shed hair at all. And while there are various solutions—from restricting the areas of the house that they’re allowed in, to using a damp cloth on fabrics to de-fuzz them, the quickest and easiest solution is a vacuum cleaner. But not just any vacuum cleaner. It’s tempting to think that a super-powerful vacuum is the solution. And while power is definitely important, the best vacuum for pet hair won’t rely on power alone. You also need to bear in mind other factors, such as the filter, the brush roll, the weight of the machine, and whether you need a vacuum that can double as a mop and be used wet as well as dry.

Vacuums can be expensive purchases, so to help you avoid making costly mistakes, here’s our guide to a few things you might want to consider when choosing the best pet vacuum.

• Best overall: Bissel ICONpet Turbo Edge vacuum
• Best suction power: Kenmore Elite 31140 Pet Friendly Lightweight Bagged Upright Beltless Vacuum
• Best lightweight: Dyson V11 Torque Drive Cordless Vacuum Cleaner
• Best with tangle-free brush roll: BISSELL ICONpet Turbo Vacuum
• Best with HEPA filter: Hoover MAXLife Pro Pet Swivel HEPA Media Vacuum Cleaner
• Best robot: iRobot Roomba i4+ Evo
• Best budget: BISSELL 2252 CleanView

The best vacuums for pet hair: Reviews & Recommendations

From the floofiest of doggos to the silkiest of cats, one of our picks should help annihilate the pet hair in your home.

Best overall: Bissel ICONpet Turbo Edge vacuum

SEE IT

Specs

• Power source: Battery
• Weight: 8 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: Carpet, hardwood, drapes, pretty much anything

Pros

• Relatively light considering its power
• Fast charging
• Powerful rotating brush
• Versatile modular design
• Wall-mounted charging station included

Cons

• Dirt storage chamber could be bigger

This 8-pound vacuum boasts a surprisingly powerful electric motor that gets up to 50 minutes of runtime off of a single battery charge. It conveniently mounts to the wall during charging so it’s out of the way, but its wheels also lock in place if you want to simply lean it somewhere without worrying about it tipping over.

Engaging Turbo Boost mode reduces overall battery performance, but considerably increases suction power, which is important if you’re trying to pull pet hair out of a serious carpet. The head has a powerful rotating brush to pick up the hair, and it’s not prone to getting jammed up during our testing. Dirt and hair end up in an easy-to-remove chamber that could be a little bigger. Still, emptying the vacuum is easy, even if you have to do it frequently.

The modular attachment system allows it to work as a stick vacuum, as we as a smaller handheld sucker. The high-reach attachment could also be useful to you if you have vents, alcoves, ceiling fans, or other spots that are particularly hard to clean. Considering the price and the performance, we found this to be the best option for people with pets at the moment.

Best suction power: Kenmore Elite Pet Friendly Lightweight Bagged Upright Beltless Vacuum

SEE IT

Specs

• Power source: Cord
• Weight: 19 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: Carpet, hard floor, hardwoods, ceramic tile, laminate, bare floor, carpet, hard floor, hardwoods, ceramic tile, laminate

Pros

• Powerful suction
• Corded performance means you don’t have to worry about dead batteries
• Roomy dust bin
• Air-driven turbine pulls pet hair off of surfaces and out of materials
• Three included attachments for versatility

Cons

• Loud
• Heavy

Two motors in the nozzle and a double-walled design join together for effective suction. Designed to be used on multiple floor surfaces, this Kenmore pet hair vacuum includes a handheld head specially designed for hair and dander, plus a flexible hose and extension wand to get to hard-to-reach areas.

Best lightweight: Dyson V11 Torque Drive Cordless Vacuum Cleaner

SEE IT

Specs

• Power source: Battery
• Weight: 6.7 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: All floor, Carpet, Hard Floor, Upholstery

Pros

• Light
• Powerful
• Quick to charge
• Up to 60 minutes of runtime on a charge
• Most advanced filtration on the list

Cons

• Expensive, even on-sale

At about $600, the price might be a sticking point—but you get a lot of bang for your buck in this Dyson vacuum that weighs less than 8 pounds. According to the manufacturers, it still boasts twice the suction of any cordless vacuum. Intelligent sensors adjust power as you move across different surfaces and it comes with a mini motorized tool for removing pet hair from upholstery.

Best with tangle-free brush roll: BISSELL ICONpet Turbo Vacuum

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Specs

• Power source: Battery
• Weight: 7 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: Carpet, hard floor

Pros

• Powerful suction
• Sturdy spinning brush
• Converts into a high-reach or hand vac
• Pleasing aesthetics

Cons

• Loud

This lightweight, cordless BISSELL vacuum can be converted to a hand-held for easy access to more areas. Plus, it comes with a motorized brush specifically for pet hair. Although it packs less power (and a lower price) than the Dyson, the large brush roll has specially engineered bristles and powerful suction to ensure pet hair stays off the brush roll and goes straight into the tank.

Best with HEPA filter: Hoover MAXLife Pro Pet Swivel HEPA Media Vacuum Cleaner

SEE IT

Specs

• Power source: Cord
• Weight: 17 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: Hard Floor, upholstery, all floors, carpet

Pros

• Powerful suction
• Several attachments
• Corded power means no dead batteries
• Pleasant to look at

Cons

• You’ll have to plug it in

With a powered brush especially for pet hair and dander, you can be sure you’re picking up as much as you can. The sealed allergen system and HEPA filter trap 99% of dust and allergens inside this Hoover vacuum, so once you’ve vacuumed it up, it’s not going anywhere. A crevice tool also lets you reach behind the couch and up against the baseboards.

Best robot: iRobot Roomba i4+ Evo

SEE IT

Specs

• Power source: Battery
• Weight: 8 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: Carpet, hard floor

Pros

• Smart mapping makes for efficient cleaning
• Large battery lets it clean more than other Roombas on one charge
• Self emptying design only needs you to clean the bin once every two months or so
• Three-stage cleaning process pulls up tough pet hair
• Cleans in straight lines rather than random patterns

Cons

• Your dog is going to hate the robot itself

If you’d rather spend time sitting on the couch with your pet than cleaning up dust bunnies, the Roomba i4+ Evo is the pick for you. Smart mapping makes for more efficient cleaning, meaning no more standoffs with ledges and area runs, and its large battery covers more area on one charge. A self-emptying design means you only need to clean the bin once a month, and a three-stage cleaning process wrangles all the dust bunnies. However, your pet might hate the noise and presence of a robot vacuum. But then again, they already hate the one you’re using now.

Best budget: BISSELL 2252 CleanView

SEE IT

Specs

• Power source: Cord
• Weight: 12.5 pounds
• Compatible surfaces: Hard floor, upholstery, carpet

Pros

• Light compared to similar models
• Swivel steering makes it easy to maneuver
• Advanced brush roller for pulling up hair
• Brush goes close to the edges of the head so there are no uncleaned gaps

Cons

• Needs to be plugged in

This lightweight vacuum is made to save your back and your budget. Swivel steering lets you clean easily around furniture and other obstacles, and a triple-action brush roll gets even the deepest pet hair embedded in the carpet. It includes specialized pet tools like a Pet TurboEraser to clean stairs and upholstery. An easy-empty tank makes for mess-free dirt disposal. You’ll have to unplug and replug it as you clean around your home. If that’s not a dealbreaker, you’ll love all the savings and power you’ll get from this cheap pet vacuum.

Things to consider when shopping for the best vacuums for pet hair

Not all pets—and not all homes—are the same, so the best vacuum for pet hair for you will depend on you, your pets, and your living situation. We’re going to examine some of the vacuum features that should play a role in your decision-making process, from power and versatility to filter and brush roll, but ultimately how much weight (oh yep, that’s another consideration!) you give each will depend entirely on your specific needs.

How much suction power will you need?

When we’re talking about power in vacuum cleaners, it’s all too easy to look at the wattage— how much electrical power the vacuum cleaner needs to function. But that doesn’t really tell the whole story. The power you really care about in a vacuum cleaner, especially when you’re talking about the ability to pick up pet hair, is suction power. You’ll get the most suction power from your vacuum cleaner when the distance between the dirt and the machine is minimized (once you start adding long hoses and attachments, you’ll find that the suction drops). And, if you’ve got a high-grade filter on your vacuum, that will take more power to move the air through it than a basic filter so that can impact the suction too.

At the moment, while there are various ways in which suction can be measured, there is no agreed standard across the industry so, for example, you’ll find some pet vacuums boasting 2000Pa (or Pascals, which is a unit of pressure), while others will talk about how many RPM the motor does or their wattage. Annoyingly there’s no easy way to measure one against the other, so your best bet is to scour consumer reviews or rely on a site that’s done the hard work for you.

How lightweight do you need it to be?

Does the weight of your vacuum cleaner matter to you? If the answer is no, you’re probably able-bodied and live on a single-story with no stairs to clean, in which case, you can roll any old tank of a vacuum cleaner right out of the cleaning closet and get to work without a second thought. However, if you have stairs, like to use your vacuum cleaner to clean your car, or don’t want to enter any weightlifting competitions, then the weight of your device is going to be a consideration, especially if you’ve got a pet, and need to be constantly cleaning up after it.

So how do you choose a pet vacuum cleaner that’s handy and easy to use? The answer is to switch out your upright for a cordless vacuum cleaner that has a wall-mounted charging station so it’s always close at hand. Look for a model that can be used as a handheld device too.

The challenge with cordless vacuums—especially when it comes to pet hair—is getting enough battery power into them so that they can maintain the level of suction that they need to clean the whole house without requiring a recharge. And that’s a bit of a balancing act. Batteries can be heavy so you need to strike a happy medium between battery power and weight.

What brush roll is best?

If you’ve ever spent what feels like days of your life trying to untangle or snip off snakes of hair from a vacuum roller that’s ground to a halt after being slowly strangled by a build-up of fibers, you won’t need any convincing of the benefits of a tangle-free brush roll.

The problem is that most vacuums have a roller with bristles on it that are important for helping dislodge the hair from the carpet, but if you’re not careful, once dislodged, the hair can become caught in the bristles and wrapped around the roller, eventually causing it to clog and even stop turning. A vacuum with good suction is going to be less prone to this, but manufacturers have developed other tricks that work alongside suction to prevent this from happening.

Different brands have different names for the technology: Shark calls their version of it Zero-M and uses a bristle guard to separate hair from the brush roll until an integrated comb can actively remove the hair from the bristles. Dyson has a tangle-free turbine tool that has counter-rotating brushes rather than a roller, while Bissel’s tangle-free brush roll uses specially engineered bristles and powerful suction to ensure hair stays off the brush roll and goes straight into the tank.

What is the best vacuum for pet hair if you have allergies?

While there are some pets that are ideal if you suffer from allergies (remember Bo, the Obamas’ hypoallergenic Portuguese Water Dog?), you’ll still want to minimize the likelihood of triggering an attack by making sure that your vacuum cleaner can really blitz your home free of dander, dust, and pet hair. While most vacuum cleaners will suction up pretty much everything that’s in their path, it doesn’t necessarily follow that once it’s been sucked up it stays in the tank of the vacuum.

In fact, with a lot of vacuum cleaners, very small particles are actually recirculated into the air, so you’ll get the fur balls and crumbs in the tank, but minute fibers may just end up in the air, waiting to be breathed in and cause a reaction. The best vacuum for pet hair will have a HEPA (or high-efficiency particulate air) filter. This very high-spec filter can trap these tiny particles. HEPA filters are so effective that they can filter out 99.97 percent of particles that are 0.3 micron (a human hair is around 100 microns in diameter, so that’s pretty small!). And, the good news is that many types of HEPA filters can be washed (consult the manual of your device).

Need a constant cleaning companion?

For those who feel that they’re constantly vacuuming and mopping up after their pets, a robot vacuum could be a far less stressful solution than constantly getting your vacuum cleaner and bucket out—and far less costly than employing a housekeeper!

So how do they work? You’ve probably come across robot vacuums in the past. The early iterations weren’t particularly sophisticated; they basically ambled around a room turning around when they bumped into something, and accidentally falling down steps. But technology has moved on and the newest ones not only work with household assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, but also have sensors to help them map out a room so that they don’t clean the same area twice. They also “know” when their battery is getting low and can get themselves back to the charging station to juice up before starting again where they left off. Some also come with an app that you can use to instruct them to clean a particular area of a room, so if there’s a spillage, you don’t even have to get off the sofa to clear it up. The best part: They can continually pick up pet hair each time they run, so you don’t have to worry about doing a marathon cleaning session.

The dream? Well, kind of. A robot won’t do the stairs for you, so if you have staircases, they’ll need manual attention, they’re pricey, and while some do come with a mop function, most don’t allow you to use much more than water, so it’s pretty perfunctory.

FAQs

A final word on the best vacuums for pet hair

• Best overall: Bissel ICONpet Turbo Edge vacuum
• Best suction power: Kenmore Elite 31140 Pet Friendly Lightweight Bagged Upright Beltless Vacuum
• Best lightweight: Dyson V11 Torque Drive Cordless Vacuum Cleaner
• Best with tangle-free brush roll: BISSELL ICONpet Turbo Vacuum
• Best with HEPA filter: Hoover MAXLife Pro Pet Swivel HEPA Media Vacuum Cleaner
• Best robot: iRobot Roomba i4+ Evo
• Best budget: BISSELL 2252 CleanView

In an ideal world, you’d be able to get a featherlight cordless vacuum cleaner that had as much power as a corded model and could go for days on a single charge, but you might have to wait a few more years until one of those is invented. Until then, if you want the best vacuum for pet hair, powerful suction is a must, ideally combined with a special attachment for soft furnishings and a roller that won’t get in a tangle. When it comes to the nice-to-have extras, like a cordless, lightweight model with a high-quality filtration system, focus on your personal circumstances and needs to decide what’s best.

Why trust us

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

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

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The Environmental Protection Agency is releasing guidelines to more clearly define what is considered a truly “zero-emission” building. Unveiled on September 28 at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the nation’s largest annual gathering for sustainable architecture, the EPA’s new outline is reportedly based on a “three pillar” approach. These pillars include no on-site emissions, the use of 100 percent renewable energy, and adherence to strict energy efficiency guidelines.

The news, first revealed via White House National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi speaking to The Washington Post on Thursday morning, arrives as the Biden administration attempts to standardize concepts for an industry that generates nearly a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.

“Getting to zero emissions does not need to be a premium product. We know how to do this,” Ali Zaidi said during the interview. “It just has to get to scale, which I think a common definition will facilitate.”

[Related: Power plants may face emission limits for the first time if EPA rules pass.]

A truly “zero-emission” building is actually harder to define than it may first appear. Currently, the global green standard is generally considered Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Developed by the US Green Building Council, an environmental nonprofit, and currently in its fifth iteration, LEED certification provides a comprehensive, tiered rating system for neighborhood developments, homes, and cities. However, it lacks the authority that could be granted by a major US federal department such as the EPA.

Lacking concise federal regulations, the US currently includes countless state and local benchmarks to meet their own ideas of eco-friendly urban planning—from California’s “zero net energy” standard for all new constructions by 2030, to reduced emission targets for 2030 and 2050 in New York. For California, a zero net energy project is defined as an “energy-efficient building where, on a source energy basis, the actual annual consumed energy is less than or equal to the on-site renewable generated energy.” Meanwhile, New York’s Local 97 law from 2019 sets carbon emission caps based on building sizes, along with multiple avenues to offset such emissions.

Although the EPA’s new definitional framework is not legally binding, the standardization could still prove incredibly attractive for real estate developers involved in projects across multiple states seeking a streamlined process.

“​​A workable, usable federal definition of zero-emission buildings can bring some desperately needed uniformity and consistency to a chaotic regulatory landscape,” Duane Desiderio, senior vice president and counsel for the Real Estate Roundtable, explained via WaPo’s rundown of the reveal.

Multiple projects in recent years have attempted to improve upon sustainable building practices in order to meet climate change’s steepest challenges. One such promising avenue is creatively incorporating recycled materials, such as diaper materials, to actually strengthen concrete mixtures for low-cost housing alternatives.

Meanwhile, termite mounds—the world’s tallest biological structures—are beginning to inspire eco-friendly cooling and heating systems, while fungi growth is providing the architectural underpinnings for a new generation of durable and sustainable building materials.

The post The EPA wants to tighten up their ‘zero-emission’ building definition appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

The post A boiling hot supercontinent could kill all mammals in 250 million years appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.”

The post How many ancient humans does it take to fight off a giant hyena? appeared first on Popular Science.

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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. 

The post Two fault lines near Seattle could rupture in one giant earthquake appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

In a sunny meadow just beyond Portland, Oregon’s western sprawl, mounds of white lupine buzzed in the late June heat. From bloom to bloom, bumblebees moved up and around the stalks of fading petals. A yellow-faced bumblebee—Bombus vosnesenskii, or “voz” for short—hugged the edges of one slipper-shaped bloom and bumped pollen dust onto its belly. On a nearby stalk, a giant B. nevadensis did the same. The B-52 bomber of bumbles—its yellow and black body half the size of a human thumb—rose and dropped on the breeze. 

Kevin Schafer swung at the bomber, tenting his insect net over the lupine. On his bucket hat and vest pocket, two enamel bumblebee pins glinted in the sun. In his net, two real bees crawled upward. He looked closely at the hint of a rust-colored patch on one, and said, excited, “I think it’s a brown-belted!” It would be the only Bombus griseocollis he’d caught all morning; they’re not common in this area. He nudged each bee and a lupine bloom into a plastic tube, and dropped them, buzzing, into his pocket. “Let’s ask the maestro.”

For six summers, Schafer—a retired photographer—and hundreds of volunteers like him have wandered through meadows and mountains across the Northwest, documenting wild bumblebees and the plants they’re foraging for the Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas. A quarter of North America’s almost 50 bumblebee species are at risk of extinction due to human-caused habitat loss and climate change, and most of them live in the Northwest. Unlike honeybees, they buzz when they pollinate plants — a pollen-releasing method that some plants require, making it essential for whole ecosystems to function. Beyond that, scientists know very little about them.

“The data that we had prior to this project, it’s basically just a bunch of collectors that have gone out and collected insects, killed them, and put them on pins,” said Rich Hatfield, Schafer’s bee “maestro” and the biologist who started the Atlas program at the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Dead specimens reveal few of the details that matter for conservation: What do they eat? Where do queens spend the winter? Why is this meadow full of voz and nevadensis, and yet the once-ubiquitous Western bumblebee—Bombus occidentalis—hasn’t been seen here in two decades? There aren’t enough scientists to capture the data, Hatfield said. Volunteers like Schafer help fill the gaps.

This year, the Atlas program hit a milestone: Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife used its data to adopt a conservation strategy covering eight at-risk species in the state, including occidentalis, which many expect the federal government will add to the U.S. endangered species list next year. Washington is one of the few states that can prioritize wild bees: Unlike most, the state’s laws allow officials to manage insects as wildlife, not just as pests.

“We collectively saw (those species) as a shared priority and wanted to identify things we could do,” said Taylor Cotten, who manages conservation assessments for the state wildlife department and partnered with the Xerces Society and federal agencies to develop the strategy. The resulting document outlines regions of high priority for conservation—a horseshoe around the Columbia Plateau; the swath of lowlands from Portland to Puget Sound. It also outlines protective measures, like timing mowing and prescribed burns around nesting periods and planting the specific flowers that bees need.

Julie Combs, a state wildlife employee whose job is to prevent pollinator extinction, called the new conservation plan foundational. “I can’t emphasize enough how many questions I get about: OK, now we know where the bees are, we know they’re in decline, but what do we do?”

This year, when state officials sit down to hash out plans for burning and planting vegetation at any of their conservation sites, she’ll come armed with more than 200 pages of best practices to help bees.

“OK, now we know where the bees are, we know they’re in decline, but what do we do?”

At the edge of the meadow, Hatfield unzipped a cooler half full of ice. He and Schafer pulled tubes from every bulging pocket, then pushed each into the ice to daze the bees, waiting until they were still enough to handle. Then, one by one, Hatfield gently prodded and photographed each motionless bee, examining its fur pattern and jaw length to confirm its ID while Schafer scratched tally marks and plant names onto a worksheet.

Voz on spirea, nevadensis on lupine, voz on wild rose: Between the two men, they’d netted 31 bees, including, Hatfield confirmed, Schafer’s single griseocollis. Carefully placed on the table beside petal fragments and other dazed bees, the griseocollis slowly shivered back to life. For Hatfield, this program is about more than just the data. “We’re building a community of people that now see these animals in a totally different way,” he said: As beautiful, important, fragile.

The bee bobbed its rust-belted abdomen up and down, up and down, then stretched its wings, rubbed its pollen-laden legs against its body, and flew away.

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Best for senior dogs		Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior Dry Dog Food		SEE IT	Formulated with glucosamine, chondroitin, and essential proteins to support joints and mobility for your senior pooch.
Best for puppies		Taste of the Wild High Prairie Puppy Recipe		SEE IT	This pick is nutrient-rich and high protein to support bones, joints, and muscles. Real meat is also the first ingredient, so you can be sure your pup is getting only the best.
Best for sensitive stomachs		Canidae PURE Grain Free		SEE IT	For pups with sensitive stomachs, this hypoallergenic, grain-free option made with real meat and whole ingredients prevents any discomfort.

Dry dog food really runs the gamut from nutritious chunks to true garbage. Not only must dogs get exercise and grooming, but as beloved family members, they deserve the best nutrition available. The best dry dog foods contain all the nutrients a dog needs for his age, size, and health conditions. Dogs are carnivores, so the number one ingredient in any dry dog food should be a natural protein source. They also need a mix of fats and fiber to keep their coat, eyes, and joints healthy and happy. Dry dog foods are often the most economical choice. Plus, they store well and are easy to transport. We’ve created a list of some of the best dog food on the market, including formulas balanced for optimum nutrition, from puppy to senior recipes.

• Best for small dogs: Hill’s Science Diet Adult Small Paws
• Best for senior dogs: Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior Dry Dog Food
• Best for sensitive stomachs: Canidae PURE Grain Free
• Best for puppies: Taste of the Wild High Prairie Puppy Recipe
• Best budget: Wag Dry Dog/Puppy Food

The best dry dog foods: Our picks

You’ll notice that there isn’t one “best overall” pick in this list because it doesn’t really apply here. Every breed is different and each pooch has their own problems and personalities. All of that should factor into your dry food choice so peruse the entire list before you buy your furry pal a big sack of kibble.

Best for small dogs: Hill’s Science Diet Adult Small Paws

SEE IT

Specs

• Flavors: Chicken Meal & Rice, and Lamb Meal & Brown Rice
• Price: $3.35 per pound

Pros

• Easy for small dogs to eat
• Formulated with the proper nutrition for little animals
• No strong smell
• Affordable
• Pleasant flavors

Cons

• No large bag options

Hill’s Science Diet Adult Small Paws starts with high-quality chicken as the main protein source. With 24.9-percent crude protein, it’s heavy on the nutrients small dogs need. Kibble size and calorie density target the higher metabolism of small breeds. Hill’s Science Diet includes a special antioxidant blend designed specifically for the challenges of being a petite pup. This best dry dog food for small dogs is also rich in omega-6 fatty acids and vitamin E to support skin and coat health. 

Best for senior dogs: Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior Dry Dog Food 

SEE IT

Specs

• Flavors: Chicken and Brown Rice
• Price: $2.15 per pound

Pros

• High in protein for supporting muscles
• Easy-to-chew chunks
• Additional compounds for joint support like glucosamine
• Omega fatty acids

Cons

• May take some time to transition from regular food

Blue Buffalo’s Life Protection Formula Natural Senior Dry Dog Food contains the 18-percent protein senior dogs need, along with a whole lot more. The recipe includes extra glucosamine, a compound found in the body’s connective tissues, and chondroitin sulfate, which maintains and rebuilds joint cartilage. Add to that natural sources of omega fatty acids and DHA to support the brain and eyes. The extra nutrients address areas that begin to decline in a dog’s later years. 

Best for sensitive stomachs: Canidae PURE Grain Free

SEE IT

Specs

• Flavors: Duck & Sweet Potato, Lamb & Pea, Salmon & Sweet Potato
• Price: $2.88 per pound

Pros

• Familiar, natural ingredients
• Easy to transition to from typical food
• Omega fatty acids
• Allergy friendly
• Mild smell

Cons

• Expensive

Canidae PURE Grain Free comes in many flavors, each with a single protein source, including familiar options like chicken or duck and the less common wild boar or salmon. A greater variety of options helps those trying to narrow down a dog’s source of allergies or the reason for an upset stomach. Canidae also lists the very short ingredient list, eight in total, on the front of the package. It’s simple yet contains essential nutrients, such as the omega fatty acids needed for optimum skin and coat health. 

Best for puppies: Taste of the Wild High Prairie Puppy Recipe 

SEE IT

Specs

• Flavors: Bison & Venison
• Price: $2.14 per pound

Pros

• Extremely high protein content
• High meat content
• Easy to chew
• Relatively affordable
• Probiotics for digestion

Cons

• Strong smell

Taste of the Wild High Prairie Puppy Recipe gives puppies nutrients they need like DHA for their developing brain and eyes. Small kibble is easier for pint-sized mouths to chew, yet it’s crunchy to keep puppy teeth clean. The addition of probiotics in the best puppy food promotes digestive health by balancing the gut biome. The top two ingredients—water buffalo and lamb—are protein sources rich in essential amino acids for healthy growth and development. This recipe leaves out grains because they are a common source of allergies, but always check with a veterinarian to be sure grain-free is right for your junior dog.

Best budget: Wag Dry Dog/Puppy Food

SEE IT

Specs

• Flavors: Beef & Sweet Potato, Chicken & Sweet Potato, Salmon & Sweet Potato
• Price: $2.50 per pound

Pros

• Available on subscribe and save for an extra discount
• High protein content
• DHA for brain development
• Several flavors
• Easy to chew

Cons

• Not as affordable as you might expect from an Amazon brand

Wag Dry Dog/Puppy Food contains nutrients for adults and puppies in a single recipe. A high 35-percent protein content brings high levels of omega fatty acids and essential amino acids. Because it’s designed for puppies, it also contains DHA to feed brain and eye development and health. Wag comes in five flavors, each with a protein as the first and most plentiful ingredient on the list. Medium-sized kibble works for adults and isn’t too big for puppies.

What to consider when shopping for the best dry dog foods

Dog foods aren’t created with equal nutritive value. The ingredients’ quality, nutrient content, and kibble size all play a role in which one is right for your dog. Breeds of different sizes also have different nutritional needs. A food that’s tailored to your dog’s individual traits and circumstances will ensure he has the energy for all of your adventures together.

Dog age and food requirements

Like humans, a dog’s nutritional needs change throughout his life. Dogs need calorie-dense food with omega fatty acids and DHA for brain and vision development during the puppy years. They also need foods with a balanced calcium to phosphorus ratio for adequate bone development. Additionally, puppy foods often have smaller or softer kibble for little jaws that don’t function at full strength. 

Depending on the breed, dogs l mature from puppyhood between one and two years old. In their adult years, they don’t need the extra calories found in puppy chow. Adult dogs who eat puppy food may gain too much weight. A high-quality dry dog food designed for adult dogs works well during this stage of life. 

Dogs enter their senior years around age seven, but that can vary by breed. For example, small breeds tend to live longer than large breeds, while a large breed may begin showing signs of aging around five years old. 

Senior dogs need the same nutrients as younger adult dogs. However, they tend to slow down and live a more sedentary lifestyle. Consequently, many senior dog foods have fewer calories or may be labeled as diet food. Some senior foods include extra vitamin E, beta-carotene, glucosamine, or other nutrients that support the immune system or joint health. Plus, many diets are even supplemented with specific dog vitamins.

Dog size and type of kibble

Size matters. Large dog breeds have slower metabolisms, burning only about 20 calories per pound. Small breeds burn around 40 calories per pound. The best dry dog food for small dogs usually has a higher caloric density than a recipe designed for larger dogs. Additionally, small dogs, especially toy breeds, may not have the jaw strength to eat the large kibble found in regular dry dog food.

Dog medical history and diet

Dogs can suffer from many of the same medical conditions found among humans, like food allergies, diabetes, and obesity. And as with people, a dog’s diet can help control some common health issues. For example, LID foods are usually made with a single (possibly two) protein source and a limited list of ingredients. They’re also made of less common protein sources like venison or buffalo instead of chicken or beef, to which more dogs are allergic. If your dog has stomach or digestive problems, the veterinarian may recommend an LID (Limited Ingredient Diet) food to help identify the specific allergy. Many manufacturers also make a grain-free version of their adult dog foods to accommodate canines with sensitive stomachs or allergies. 

Find high-quality sources of protein, healthy fats, and digestible carbohydrates in dog food

As carnivores, dogs have different nutritional needs than humans. They require a dry dog food made of at least 18-percent protein, no less than 5-percent fat, and around 5-percent fiber. Many dry dog foods have a label with a breakdown of the protein, fiber, fat, and carbohydrate percentages and content. 

Check for high-quality ingredients like natural sources of protein and whole vegetables and fruits. Ingredients are listed with the most abundant ingredient first. The first ingredient on the list should be an animal protein source like fish, chicken, or beef because they naturally contain the right balance of essential amino acids that dogs need. Some of the less expensive dog foods will contain meat by-products, which aren’t as high quality, nor do they contain everything your dog needs. They shouldn’t be the only protein source in the food. 

Related: Best dog treats of 2023

FAQs

Related: Best wet dog foods of 2023

The final word on shopping for the best dry dog foods

• Best for small dogs: Hill’s Science Diet Adult Small Paws
• Best for senior dogs: Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula Natural Senior Dry Dog Food
• Best for sensitive stomachs: Canidae PURE Grain Free
• Best for puppies: Taste of the Wild High Prairie Puppy Recipe
• Best budget: Wag Dry Dog/Puppy Food

Your dog deserves the best dry dog food for his age, size, and medical needs. Many dry dog foods are budget-friendly and nutritionally sound. Whether your dog’s in need of the best puppy food, the best senior dog food, or somewhere in between, dry dog food can keep him fueled, healthy, and ready to live life with his favorite person (you). 

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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.”

The post A fossilized trilobite stomach can show us clues to Cambrian cuisine appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

The post Mysterious ‘fairy circles’ may appear on three different continents appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best overall		Zuke’s Mini Naturals		SEE IT	The variety of flavors is great for picky pups and the small size allows you to train without worrying about overfeeding.
Best organic		Full Moon Organic Training Treats		SEE IT	The treats are 100% human-grade—savory, soft, and delicious.
Best for puppies		Pet Botanics Training Reward		SEE IT	You can choose between mini or regular-sized treats, so you can find the best size for you and your pup.

The pet store can overwhelm well-intentioned dog owners as they peruse the packed aisles searching for dog training treats. You may find yourself standing in an aisle wondering if you should stick with the traditional peanut butter flavor or something more exotic like duck or salmon. Treats play a pivotal role in developing an effective line of communication with your four-legged friend. Training is one of the most important steps in bringing home a new puppy or teaching your beloved dog a new trick. With solid leadership and training, you can communicate effectively with your pup, making life easier and happier for both of you. The best dog training treats provide a delicious reward that will reinforce good behavior while providing solid nutrition that won’t turn your pooch into a couch potato.

• Best overall: Zuke’s Mini Naturals
• Best organic: Full Moon Organic Training Treats
• Best for puppies: Pet Botanics Training Reward
• Best for protein: Redbarn Protein Puffs
• Best for large dogs: Old Mother Hubbard Dog Treats
• Best budget: Buddy Biscuits Training Bites

How we chose the best dog training treats

We wish we could say that we sampled them all for the benefit of the dogs. However, we left it to the dogs themselves to choose their favorites. After decades of personal experience with dogs, talking with dog trainers, and combing through dog owner reviews, Zuke’s Mini Naturals stood out among the competition as the best overall dog training treat among our sample group. Not only is Zuke’s based in the U.S., but the company originated from a dog owner wanting to provide his best friend with the very best product. However, dogs may have individual preferences, and your vet may provide some valuable insight about what to use, so consult a professional with any questions and explore various categories and dog products until you find the one that matches your pet.

The best dog training treats: Reviews & Recommendations

As you look through our picks for the best dog training treats, remember that every dog will be different, so adjust and modify your dog’s treats as you learn more about what they like. If your dog ends up hating the treats you bought, you may be able to give them away on a local marketplace site. Or, if they’re unopened, animal shelters will often take them. Don’t let them go to waste.

Best overall: Zuke’s Mini Naturals

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Delicious, soft, and small, making it ideal for teaching basic commands or more challenging tasks.

Specs

• Number of treats: 330 in a 6 oz. bag
• Calories per treat: 3 calories per treat
• Special diet: No corn, no wheat, no soy

Pros

• Great for all breeds and life stages
• Behavior training
• Six flavors to choose from

Cons

• Not recommended for humans

With all-natural ingredients and flavors such as salmon, duck, rabbit, and peanut butter, you’ll likely find something your dog likes, even if they’re particularly picky. Zuke’s Mini Naturals’ best feature is built right into the product’s name. The small size allows you to train with your puppy or dog without worrying about overfeeding. 

Try cutting them in half if you are training a tiny puppy and want to conserve your training treat supply. While the treats may have a robust, savory smell that may be off-putting to owners, your dog will enthusiastically love the tasty treats. In addition, the mini treats are the ideal size to put in your jacket pocket or training pouch while you head outdoors for continued training. 

Best organic: Full Moon Organic Training Treats

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Why it made the cut: Quality, all-natural ingredients with 100% human-grade chicken and duck flavors. 

Specs

• Number of treats: 175 treats per bag
• Calorie per treat: 3 calories each
• Special diet: No glycerin, grains, corn, wheat, and soy

Pros

• Suitable for all breed sizes
• 100% human-grade
• Additional organic jerky treat options

Cons

• 5-ounce bag
• Minimal flavor options

Full Moon is proud to offer soft and organic dog treats. In addition, the treats are 100% human-grade. So, while you can chow down on a snack with your pup, you probably won’t want to.

Full Moon dog treats are excellent for any breed or size. Despite the 5-ounce bag size, the treats are savory, soft, and delicious. They eschew glycerin, grains, corn, wheat, and soy; the organic training treats are great for supplemental treats throughout the day. 

A single 6-ounce bag contains about 175 treats. Some sites offer them on a subscription basis, which helps bring the price down.

Best for puppies: Pet Botanics Training Reward

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Why it made the cut: The high quantity of treats per bag is the best value for the initial stages of puppy training. 

Specs

• Number of treats: 500 treats
• Calorie per treat: 3 calories each
• Special diet: No BHA, BHT, corn, soy, or artificial flavors and colors

Pros

• Three options: Mini, Regular, Grain-Free
• Suitable for all breed sizes
• Easy to carry in your pocket

Cons

• Small convenient size can lead to overfeeding

With over 500 treats per bag, you won’t have to keep resupplying your dog treat stash. The Pet Botanics Training Reward treats are great for all breeds and sizes. The small round shape allows you to have complete control of the treat while waiting for your boisterous pup to perform the requested task. In addition, the soft texture is ideal for young and developing puppy mouths. With multiple delicious flavors to offer your puppy, your dog will stay engaged longer and learn new tricks in no time. 

The benefit of Pet Botanics is that you can choose between mini or regular-sized treats. So whether you have a small Bichon or a large Bernese Mountain Dog, you can find the best size for you and your pup. 

Best for protein: Redbarn Protein Puffs

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Why it made the cut: These tiny puffs have the shortest possible ingredient list and that’s a good thing when it comes to dog treats. 

Specs

• Number of treats: 275
• Calorie per treat: 0.5 calories per treat
• Special diet: No artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives

Pros

• High protein content
• Less than one calorie per treat
• Crunchy
• Subscription available

Cons

• Only two flavor choices

Typical reward treats check in at around three calories per treat. These savory puffs come in under one calorie, which makes them a great option for high-volume training or for use with dogs that are overweight. 

Each puff contains roughly 75% protein from an ingredient called caseinate common in supplements and food products intended for human consumption. Despite their relatively low calorie count, the puffed treats provide a solid crunch that will appeal to dogs of all sizes. They’re only available in cheese and peanut butter flavors, but Redbarn also sells a version intended for cats if you have a variety of pets in your house. 

Once you’re done training, the puffs can also act as a food topper for adding extra protein to a dog’s diet. 

Best for large dogs: Old Mother Hubbard Dog Treats

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Why it made the cut: The various-sized appetizing oven-baked dog treats are perfect for larger breeds.

Specs

• Number of treats: 150
• Calories per treat: 3 calories per treat
• Special diet: No artificial preservatives, natural ingredients

Pros

• All-natural ingredients
• Suitable for all breed sizes and life stages
• A healthy supplemental snack for diet

Cons

• Intended for intermittent training

With nearly 100 years of experience, Old Mother Hubbard is a staple in the dog treat world. All dogs have different flavor or texture preferences, and for those larger dogs that love a crunchy, oven-baked treat, this is a clear choice. The variety of all-natural ingredients and flavors—such as p-nuttier, savory mix, or bac’n’cheez—will leave your dog wanting more. 

While Old Mother Hubbard treats may not be ideal for extended or repetitive training due to their caloric content, they are perfect for reinforcing positive behavior and overall basic commands. For example, keep a bag by the door to greet strangers or reward basic commands such as shaking, sitting, down, or staying.

Best budget: Buddy Biscuits Training Bites

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Why it made the cut: Compact, low-calorie treats that include 500 treats per bag, so dog training doesn’t cost a fortune.

Specs

• Number of treats: 500 treats per bag
• Calories per treat: 1.5 calories per treat
• Special diet: No corn, soy, or artificial flavors or colors

Pros

• Great for repetitive training or dog puzzles
• Suitable for positive reinforcement training
• Only 1.5 calories per treats

Cons

• Only two flavors to choose from

While Buddy Biscuits are limited to either chicken or bacon flavors, they offer 500 small treats per bag. That makes them economical in both a budgetary and calorie sense. Buddy Biscuits Training Bites are great for positive reinforcement and obedience training if you have a brand-new puppy and are in the thick of training. With small bite-sized chewy pieces that resemble the size of a pencil eraser, you can reward your dog with proper timing and consistency. 

Even though they’re small, big dogs may still react positively to the small treats, which is good if you have a dog that’s on the hefty side, which can be the case with rescues or other adopted pooches. 

Things to consider before buying the best dog training treats

Before stocking up on multiple training treats for your new puppy or dog, you’ll want to test a few flavors and textures beforehand. Some dogs may have taste preferences, sensitive stomachs, or simply are not food-driven. Start by finding a similar flavor to their everyday kibble and expand and build taste profiles. From there, keep in mind the following things:

Size & texture

When it comes to training treats, size matters. It is not only more convenient to have multiple small treats in your hand, but it leads to better overall timing and consistency when training. In addition, if you’re training for an extended period, those treat calories add up. So tiny, bite-sized treats are more effective at reinforcing positive behavior than stumbling to find a sizeable bone-shaped treat in your pocket.

Flavor

Fortunately, with the growing popularity of healthy savory treats, you don’t have to settle for traditional peanut butter or bacon flavors anymore. Instead, add a little variety to your dog’s diet and introduce duck, chicken, salmon, or rabbit flavors into their lives. In addition, there are organic or all-natural ingredient options to choose from, so you can give your dog the very best. And just because you have a bigger dog doesn’t necessarily mean you need larger treats.

Cost

Training a new puppy can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months. If you are training regularly, it can become quite costly. While ensuring you pick healthy treats, you should also know the overall cost. During initial training steps, try to find treat bags with a large quantity per bag. Average prices for dog treats range from $5 to $15, depending on the quality and ingredients. Finding the best dog delivery service may be handy as you research costs and treat varieties. Having a regular supply of dog food and treats at your fingertips will come in handy.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best dog training treats

• Best overall: Zuke’s Mini Naturals
• Best organic: Full Moon Organic Training Treats
• Best for puppies: Pet Botanics Training Reward
• Best for protein: Redbarn Protein Puffs
• Best for large dogs: Old Mother Hubbard Dog Treats
• Best budget: Buddy Biscuits Training Bites

Training takes time and a whole lot of patience. Some dogs will catch on right away, while others might need a little bit more support. Regardless of your dog’s age or size, training is a great way to build a relationship with your dog and reinforce positive behavior. Our best overall pick to start building trust and a relationship with your dog is using Zuke’s Mini Naturals treats.

Why trust us

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

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

The post The best dog training treats of 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Bill Gates is a staunch advocate for nuclear energy, and although he no longer oversees day-to-day operations at Microsoft, its business strategy still mirrors the sentiment. According to a new job listing first spotted on Tuesday by The Verge, the tech company is currently seeking a “principal program manager” for nuclear technology tasked with “maturing and implementing a global Small Modular Reactor (SMR) and microreactor energy strategy.” Once established, the nuclear energy infrastructure overseen by the new hire will help power Microsoft’s expansive plans for both cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Among the many, many, (many) concerns behind AI technology’s rapid proliferation is the amount of energy required to power such costly endeavors—a worry exacerbated by ongoing fears pertaining to climate collapse. Microsoft believes nuclear power is key to curtailing the massive amounts of greenhouse emissions generated by fossil fuel industries, and has made that belief extremely known in recent months.

[Related: Microsoft thinks this startup can deliver on nuclear fusion by 2028.]

Unlike traditional nuclear reactor designs, an SMR is meant to be far more cost-effective, easier to construct, and smaller, all the while still capable of generating massive amounts of energy. Earlier this year, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a first-of-its-kind SMR; judging from Microsoft’s job listing, it anticipates many more are to come. Among the position’s many responsibilities is the expectation that the principal program manager will “[l]aise with engineering and design teams to ensure technical feasibility and optimal integration of SMR and microreactor systems.”

But as The Verge explains, making those nuclear ambitions a reality faces a host of challenges. First off, SMRs demand HALEU, a more highly enriched uranium than traditional reactors need. For years, the world’s largest HALEU supplier has been Russia, whose ongoing invasion of Ukraine is straining the supply chain. Meanwhile, nuclear waste storage is a perpetual concern for the industry, as well as the specter of disastrous, unintended consequences.

Microsoft is obviously well aware of such issues—which could factor into why it is also investing in moonshot energy solutions such as nuclear fusion. Not to be confused with current reactors’ fission capabilities, nuclear fusion involves forcing atoms together at extremely high temperatures, thus producing a new, smaller atom alongside massive amounts of energy. Back in May, Microsoft announced an energy purchasing partnership with the nuclear fusion startup called Helion, which touts an extremely ambitious goal of bringing its first generator online in 2028.

Fission or fusion, Microsoft’s nuclear aims require at least one new job position—one with a starting salary of $133,600.

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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.

The post Meet the first electric blue tarantula known to science appeared first on Popular Science.

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Best retractable		TUG 360° Heavy-Duty Retractable Dog Leash		SEE IT
Best hands-free		Fable Running Leash		SEE IT
Best for two dogs		iYoShop Dual Dog Leash		SEE IT

The right dog leash can mean the difference between a calm adventure with your pup and a total catastrophe. Leashes in different lengths, materials and even colors affect how they function, and many pet parents need more than one. A reflective leash for evening walks, a long leash for training or a hands-free leash for runs could easily make life with your dog easier. 

Leashes also come in various designs, like double leashes and slip leads that function as a collar and leash. If you live where it’s wet or your dog loves water, you may need a waterproof leash, while those with a dog that pulls may need a model with a cushioned handle. The dog’s age, breed, and size will factor into the decision, too. For example, small breeds don’t need a thick, heavy leash, and puppies may need the leash training help offered by a long dog leash. The best dog leash has the durability, length, and extra features that you need to maintain control and keep your dog safe. 

• Best overall: TUG 360° Heavy-Duty Retractable Dog Leash 
• Best for two dogs: iYoShop Dual Dog Leash
• Best hands-free: Fable Running Leash
• Best reflective: Bark Reflective Leash
• Best budget: BAAPET 4/5/6 FT Strong Dog Leash
• Best leather: Fairwin Leather Dog Leash

Use the best dog leashes to maintain control and enjoy walks with your dog

Leashes are an absolute necessity for most dog owners to safely exercise their dog, take the pup to the vet, and maintain control in public places. The best dog leash for you and your dog depends on the activities you do together and the dog’s personality and size. Designs vary from embossable leather models to retractable leashes that provide extra freedom for dogs to sniff and explore. 

The dog’s size affects the best leash thickness and length. Large breeds may need a heavy, long option for added durability. However, small toy breeds could get weighed down by a 10 -foot-long, heavy leash. Nylon is the most common material for leashes because it’s inexpensive, durable, and comes in various colors. They’re made in flat or round/rope designs. However, depending on the nylon’s quality, it might not be strong enough for heavy pullers or chewers. Dogs who can’t help but chew probably need a leather one. Leather stands up to the wear and tear of a rambunctious dog who chews or pulls better than nylon, but you’ll pay a little extra. 

Some leashes have extra handles and extra clips for extra configuration options or to help you keep control when crossing the street. Options with extra D-rings or clips also offer a means to connect storage for other dog supplies like poop bags or treats. 

Related: Best dog collar for every pup

The best dog leashes: Reviews & Recommendations

Best overall: TUG 360° Heavy-Duty Retractable Dog Leash  

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The TUG 360° Heavy Duty Retractable Dog Leash comes in four sizes and six colors. The different sizes work for dogs under 26 pounds and up to 110 pounds. Dogs get 16 feet to explore, while owners get a comfortable hand grip with an easy sliding push-button lock/unlock thumb control. A specially designed opening on the housing prevents the leash from tangling and gives 360 degrees of control. 

Best for two dogs: iYoShop Dual Dog Leash

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The iYoShop Dual Dog Leash takes the double dog leash into heavy-duty territory. The padded handle keeps the grip comfortable, while the double ones attach with a 360-degree swivel and are made of bungee cord to offer some tension and pressure relief for active dogs. This 35-inch leash comes in two sizes and six colors. 

Best hands-free: Fable Running Leash 

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The Fable Running Leash’s versatile design includes adjustable length with clips and stoppers that transform it from a traditional leash to a hands-free option that attaches to the waist or wrist. Depending on the configuration and which of the two sizes are used, this leash reaches 40 to 80 inches and comes in six colors. 

Best reflective: Bark Reflective Leash 

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The Bark Reflective Leash features a durable, flat nylon surface with reflective material on both sides of the leash. It’s bright and visible, but the locking hook and neoprene handle offer extra security for the dog and comfort for the owner. Both of the two sizes are 60 inches long and include a D-ring on the handle to hold dog supplies like poop bags or a dog-treat pouch. 

Best budget: BAAPET Strong Dog Leash 

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The BAAPET Strong Dog Leash comes in nine colors and three sizes, with nylon rope widths ranging from ⅓ to ½ inch and lengths of 4, 5, or 6 feet. With reflective threads weaved into the rope, it’s visible and durable. For the owner’s comfort, a cushy foam covers the handle. 

Best leather: Fairwin Leather Dog Leash

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The Fairwin Leather Dog Leash comes in four widths—½ inch, 5/8 inch, ¾ inch, and 1 inch—to accommodate dogs of different sizes and strengths. The leather thickness varies from ⅙ of an inch to ⅕-inch thick. A high-tensile copper clasp and heavy-duty buckle keep the dog secure. This leather option also includes a 60-day unconditional return policy. 

Things to consider when buying the best dog leashes

Give your dog extra freedom to explore with a retractable dog leash

Retractable leashes offer adjustable lengths that range from 5 to 30 feet. They have plastic housings with an ergonomic handgrip that protects the retracted nylon leash. Your thumb usually controls a locking mechanism that releases or stops retraction, putting easy control within your hands.  

However, retractable models tend to be a polarizing topic among dog owners—either you love them or you hate them. For some pet parents, they’re the perfect solution to balance the dog’s need to explore with the owner’s need to keep their pet safe. 

Retractable leashes are a great choice if you walk your dog in an area where he’s not likely to run into traffic or other dangerous obstacles. It’s also a good solution for dogs who like to explore. The dog’s personality matters with a retractable leash. A dog who will pull no matter the leash length might be too out of control for a retractable model. However, if your dog gets frustrated because he wants to sniff off of the walking trail where you’d prefer to stay, a retractable leash becomes a compromise that keeps you both happy.

Double the trouble, double the fun with two dogs on one double dog leash

The more dogs you have, the more leashes you have to untangle. A double leash offers a simple solution for well-behaved dogs. These leashes feature a single handle connected to two leashes. Sometimes the handle has a single cord that extends 2 or 3 feet, then splits or has a D-ring that connects to two short leads, so you can walk two pups with one leash. 

If you’re walking two dogs with separate leads, they inevitably get tangled. Double leashes can prevent a tangle of feet, fur, and leash. However, like other designs, you have to know your dogs. If they wrestle and nip each other when they’re in close proximity, a double leash might not be the best choice. They work well for leash-trained pups who are relatively calm and get along with one another.  

Walk, run, or skip with your dog on a hands-free leash

Hands-free picks grant you extra freedom while your dog stays close by. These leashes have extra length, clips, and connectors that allow you to wear them as a belt, on your wrist, or as a traditional leash. When you’re hands-free, you’re not managing a leash while scooping poop, holding hands with young children, or balancing your way up a mountain trail.

They’re an excellent choice for active pet owners who want to take their dogs on outdoor adventures. You may need your hands-on steep trails to drink water or stay balanced when you’re pushing your own physical limits. It also can make simple evening walks more pleasant for you. If you’re going hands-free, however, the dog should be well trained. A dog that chases squirrels or becomes distracted by every passerby can pull you off your feet. However, if your pet stays by your side and loves to be with you, one of these types will give you freedom and safety to enjoy a wide range of activities together. 

Now you see it, now you…still see it with a reflective dog leash

Many models have some reflective properties built into the design, like a reflective thread woven through the nylon or tapes on the handle. Visibility is an important safety issue for walking dogs at dawn and dusk. Drivers, bikers, and other pedestrians may see you and not the dog or vice versa. Reflective leashes increase visibility for both of you. Volume matters when it comes to visibility. The more reflective material on the leash, the easier it is to see. However, these leashes need regular cleaning. Dirt and mud can cover the reflective material, reducing visibility. 

Ready to save some cash on your dog products?

Budget leashes are usually made of nylon but lower-quality nylon than more expensive models. The hardware on these leashes may be plastic or low-grade stainless steel. Cheap leashes are a great option when you’re on a tight budget or for an extra leash in the car. They’ll last longer with dogs who are well-leashed trained, don’t pull, and don’t chew. These leashes will also last longer in a dry climate, where water exposure stays to a minimum. Inexpensive leashes may be flat or round/rope designs. Thicker ropes tend to last longer, whether they’re used with a small or large breed. 

Also consider …

Dogs who chew or pull excessively can go through fabric leashes in a matter of weeks if not days. Leather options offer better, tougher durability for dogs that are hard on leashes. That doesn’t mean leather won’t get worn out with chewing and pulling, but it will last longer. And leather leashes don’t cost that much more than a high-quality fabric one but will last longer with pups who love to test their limits. 

FAQs

Related: Best dog DNA kits

The final word on the best dog leashes

• Best retractable: TUG 360° Heavy-Duty Retractable Dog Leash 
• Best for two dogs: iYoShop Dual Dog Leash
• Best hands-free: Fable Running Leash
• Best reflective: Bark Reflective Leash
• Best budget: BAAPET 4/5/6 FT Strong Dog Leash
• Best leather: Fairwin Leather Dog Leash

Different dogs and owners will find that different options work better for them than others. As you’re choosing the best for your pup, whether it’s a long leash or a hands-free leash, consider how and where you want to use the leash and the dog’s size and temperament. If you’re willing to pay a little extra for a leash with aluminum or high-quality stainless steel hardware and thick nylon, chances are it will last longer and provide a better bang for your buck.