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Science
U.S. science no longer leads the world. Here’s how top advisers say the nation should respond
A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds.
That loss of hegemony raises an important question for U.S. policymakers and the country’s research community, according to NSF’s oversight body, the National Science Board (NSB). “Since across-the-board leadership in [science and engineering] is no longer a possibility, what then should our goals be?” NSB asks in a policy brief that accompanies this year’s Science and Engineering Indicators, NSF’s biennial assessment of global research, which was released this week. (NSF has converted a single gargantuan volume into nine thematic reports, summarized in The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022.)
NSB’s white paper hints at an answer by highlighting several factors it considers essential for maintaining a healthy U.S. research environment. The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices.
The Washington Post
Americans' trust in science now deeply polarized, poll shows
Republicans’ faith in science is falling as Democrats rely on it even more, with a trust gap in science and medicine widening substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, new survey data shows.
It’s the largest gap in nearly five decades of polling by the General Social Survey, a widely respected trend survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has been measuring confidence in institutions since 1972. […]
Science used to be something all Americans would get behind, Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley said.
“But we now see it falling prey to the great partisan divide,” he said. “The world of science should be a meeting house where right and left can agree on data. Instead, it’s becoming a sharp razor’s edge of conflict.”
The Atlantic
Usually, a story like this starts with a quick roundup of alarming statistics and a reminder of all the latest climate disasters: heat domes, floods, hurricanes, etc. I’m going to skip that part. Most of us get it already. We understand with our rational minds that the climate is changing, and we feel that it is changing in the deepest pit of our gut, where dread and fury live.
A poll conducted by Yale and George Mason University researchers in September found that 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change, and 47 percent describe themselves as “angry” about it. I’m in both of those groups. In my 15 years as an environmental journalist, I’ve always been able to ground myself on a bedrock optimism that humanity will get its act together. Lately, though, as the pandemic has dragged toward its third year, the West has continued to burn, drought has parched my part of the world, and climate action has stalled at the federal level even with Democrats in control, that has changed. I am burned out. For some people, this might manifest as fatigue, or disengagement. For me, it’s anger. On a near-daily basis, I can feel my blood sizzling in my veins.
Living in the era of climate change makes us feel lots of things: guilt for our own part in heating the planet, grief for what we have lost and will lose, fear about the future—and anger at selfish decisions made by the powerful people who got us to this moment. How do those who think about climate change every day keep getting up every morning? Taking care of their mind and body is a priority for all of the people I spoke with for this story, but so was something else: using their anger.
The Guardian
James Webb space telescope takes up station a million miles from Earth
The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has reached its final destination – an observation post one million miles away from Earth.
Nasa’s $10bn James Webb space telescope launched on Christmas Day last year from French Guiana on a quest to behold the dawn of the universe. Due to its sheer size, Webb had to launch folded inside the Ariane 5, a European rocket.
The mirrors on the space observatory must still be meticulously aligned and the infrared detectors sufficiently chilled before science observations can begin in June. But flight controllers in Baltimore were euphoric after chalking up another success.
Hippo talk: study sheds light on purpose of call and response
[…] Researchers studying hippopotamuses in Mozambique have revealed that the creatures not only react to the vocalisations of other hippos, but that the calls act as an identity signal. In other words, they allow hippos to tell the difference between a familiar individual and a stranger.
“Hippos are quite talkative. They have a repertoire of different calls: wheeze honks, grunts, bellows, squeals,” said Prof Nicolas Mathevon, of the University of Saint-Etienne in France, a co-author of the study. “However, the function of these calls has not been studied experimentally. Our study is the first to test experimentally the function of a hippo call.”
Writing in the journal Current Biology, Mathevon and colleagues report how they studied the loud “wheeze honk” calls of hippos – a sound not unlike a growling laugh.
Mongabay
Western monarchs make a spectacular comeback in California
After reaching a historic low, the population of monarch butterflies overwintering in California has increased a hundredfold, according to the annual Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count. More than 247,000 butterflies were counted in 2021, up from 2,000 butterflies in 2020.
“We’re ecstatic with the results and hope this trend continues,” said Emma Pelton, the western monarch lead with Xerces Society, the organization that manages the annual count.
Each year, volunteers and scientists count the orange-winged wonders in their overwintering locations, 283 sites this year. The highest number of monarchs (95,000) was reported from Santa Barbara County, including a single site on private property with 25,000 butterflies. Very few butterflies were seen in the San Francisco Bay area, with only 600 counted at overwintering sites from Mendocino to San Mateo counties.
Efforts to dim Sun and cool Earth must be blocked, say scientists
Blocking the sun’s rays with an artificial particle shield launched high into Earth’s atmosphere to curb global temperatures is a technological fix gaining traction as a last resort for containing the climate crisis — but it needs to be stopped, wrote a coalition of over 60 academics in an open letter and article released in the WIREs (Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews) Climate Change online publication on January 17.
“Some things we should just restrict at the outset,” said one of the open letter’s lead authors, Aarti Gupta, a professor of Global Environmental Governance at Wageningen University. Gupta placed solar geoengineering in the category of high-risk technologies, like human cloning and chemical weapons, that need to be off-limits. “It might be possible to do, but it’s too risky,” she told Mongabay in an interview.
The color of the sky could change. The chemical composition of the ozone layer and oceans may be permanently altered. Photosynthesis, which depends on sunlight, may slow down, possibly harming biodiversity and agriculture. And global weather patterns could change unpredictably.
Gizmodo
Physicists Spotted a Rare ‘X’ Particle From the Beginning of the Universe
Researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland recently detected a vanishingly rare particle they believe was around at the very beginning of the universe. The particle—called an X particle for now, because no one knows exactly what it is—was produced by colliding billions of heavy ions inside the famous particle accelerator.
The team with the CMS Collaboration, which collects data from the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid, smashed heavy lead atoms together at temperatures of around 5.5 trillion degrees Celsius (9.9 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). The team’s results are published in Physical Review Letters.
Physicists theorize that, in the earliest moments of the universe after the Big Bang, matter was a plasma made of subatomic quarks and gluons crammed together in a superheated soup. (Only when the plasma cooled down several microseconds after the Big Bang did the familiar protons and neutrons take shape, paving the way for much more massive forms of matter.) But before the material cooled down, some of those quarks and gluons collided, forming more enigmatic particles, which physicists call X particles.
This Elephant-Like Giant Roamed South America for 2 Million Years
Its tusks were thick and relatively straight; its ears broad and leathery. Its nimble trunk could reach over the heads of giant ground sloths and huge armored glyptodonts to pluck leaves high up in trees. Wide, column-like legs supported 6 tons of weight. But don’t call it an elephant.
While people easily recognize its northern relative, the woolly mammoth, almost no one is familiar with the not-so-hairy Notiomastodons. Yet, this ancient proboscidean—an order of mammals which tend to have a proboscis, or trunk—was ubiquitous in South America during the Pleistocene, which stretched from some 2.5 million to 11,000 years ago.
Notiomastodon platensis fossils have been uncovered at hundreds of sites throughout South America. It was so common, in fact, that Dimila Mothé, a paleontologist at the Mastozoology Lab and post-doctoral researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, was emphatic during a video interview.
Space.com
NASA's Lucy asteroid spacecraft still has a wonky solar array as it flies through space
Three months after launch, a new NASA asteroid spacecraft is still getting settled into its life beyond Earth.
NASA's Lucy mission launched Oct. 16 with a mission to explore the Trojan asteroids, which orbit the sun ahead of and behind Jupiter. No spacecraft has ever visited the Trojan asteroids, which scientists believe are "fossils" from the formation of the solar system. But soon after launch, although the rest of the spacecraft's work has gone smoothly, the mission team realized that one of the spacecraft's two large solar arrays hadn't fully deployed.
"People have been working day and night since the launch to try to figure out what's going on, and I think we understand it," Hal Levison, principal investigator of the Lucy mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said on Tuesday (Jan. 25) during a presentation to NASA's Small Bodies Advisory Group, which provides independent recommendations to the agency about studying moons, asteroids, comets and the like.
The Higgs boson could have kept our universe from collapsing
The Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that lends other particles their mass, could have kept our universe from collapsing. And its properties might be a clue that we live in a multiverse of parallel worlds, a wild new theory suggests.
That theory, in which different regions of the universe have different sets of physical laws, would suggest that only worlds in which the Higgs boson is tiny would survive.
If true, the new model would entail the creation of new particles, which in turn would explain why the strong force — which ultimately keeps atoms from collapsing — seems to obey certain symmetries. And along the way, it could help reveal the nature of dark matter — the elusive substance that makes up most matter.
The New York Times
Two Simple Tricks That Help Owls Stay in Their New Homes
As far as wild animals go, the western burrowing owl is a tolerant neighbor to humans. When new houses and roads are built next to the tunnels that they call home, these owls put up with the noise and carry on hunting the insects and rodents that they eat. But the owls are increasingly on a collision course with humanity.
Developers are always looking for more land to build on, and in places like Southern California, that means moving into the owls’ habitats. To date, most builders have displaced owls by collapsing their burrows, forcing them to find a new place to live nearby. Even so, in heavily urbanized environments, the birds often have nowhere to go, putting the species’ future at risk.
As a result, wildlife officials working with developers are increasingly collecting and transplanting the owls to distant new areas that conservationists think will meet their needs. Evidence that this technique works has been thin, though. New research published on Thursday in the journal Animal Conservation shows it can be very effective if the birds are tricked into believing there are already other burrowing owls near the places where they are transplanted.
Orcas Are Able to Kill and Eat Blue Whales, Scientists Confirm
In March 2019, scientists studying whales near Southwestern Australia stumbled upon a supersize spectacle that few had seen before — a pod of orcas viciously attacking a blue whale.
Over a dozen orcas surrounded the mighty animal. They had already bitten off its dorsal fin, and the animal was unable to evade the fast and agile predators. The water ran red with the blood of the massive creature, and chunks of its flesh were floating all around. The scientists observed one orca force its way into the blue whale’s mouth and feast on its tongue. It took an hour for the orcas to kill the blue whale, and once they did, about 50 other orcas showed up to devour the carcass. […]
The attack was the first of three such events that were witnessed from 2019 through 2021. These events, described in a paper published last week in the journal Marine Mammal Science, have put to rest a longstanding debate among scientists about whether or not orcas could make a meal out of an adult blue whale.
AP News
Study: Gas stoves worse for climate than previously thought
Gas stoves are contributing more to global warming than previously thought because of constant tiny methane leaks while they’re off, a new study found.
The same study that tested emissions around stoves in homes raised new concerns about indoor air quality and health because of levels of nitrogen oxides measured.
Even when they are not running, U.S. gas stoves are putting 2.6 million tons (2.4 million metric tons) of methane — in carbon dioxide equivalent units — into the air each year, a team of California researchers found in a study published in Thursday’s journal Environmental Science & Technology. That’s equivalent to the annual amount of greenhouse gases from 500,000 cars or what the United States puts into the air every three-and-a-half hours.
Extra cash for low-income mothers may influence baby brains
New research suggests giving extra cash to low-income mothers can change their infants’ brain development.
Brain measurements at age 1 showed faster activity in key brain regions in infants whose low-income families received $300-plus monthly for a year, compared with those who got $20 each month, U.S. researchers reported Monday.
The same type of brain activity has been linked in older children to learning skills and other development, although it’s unclear whether the differences found will persist or influence the infants’ future.
Vox
Parasites that thrive in a warming planet are killing Minnesota’s moose
[…] Moose are disappearing from northeast Minnesota, where it’s estimated they once numbered over 10,000. Since 2006, the population in the state has fallen by 64 percent.
“The moose is declining directly as a result of climate change,” said Seth Moore, a biologist who studies the animals and collaborates with … the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, on moose conservation. […]
When Moore’s team began getting tissue sample results back after their first few winters collecting data, they pinned the leading cause of moose death in northeast Minnesota on a culprit that could fit in the palm of your hand: a type of parasitic brainworm.
An odd downstream effect of climate change is that these 2- to 3-inch long critters are catching rides in from elsewhere — and are overwhelming the moose. These freeloaders have slipped into this region via white-tailed deer, a host that the worms have co-evolved with and don’t cause any harm to (even though they burrow into the deer’s brains).
A new theory helps explain the epic mystery of bird migration
[…] Birds navigate in many ways, among them sight, smell, and even the stars. Perhaps most remarkably, they seem endowed with some kind of biological compass that helps them follow Earth’s magnetic field — an invisible field produced by the planet’s rotation and liquid-metal core.
The mysteries of magnetic perception in birds have intrigued scientists for decades. Now we have some fresh clues into this astonishing ability. A new study in the journal Science suggests that Eurasian reed warblers — and likely other migratory songbirds — sense a specific aspect of Earth’s magnetic field, called the angle of inclination, to know where to roost on their journey north. It functions as a kind of magnetic address or “stop sign,” the researchers write, that tells the birds when they’ve arrived. […]
What’s remarkable is that migratory birds also seem to know where they’re going even without hints from the environment, said Atticus Pinzon-Rodriguez, a researcher at Lund University who was also not affiliated with the research.
The Conversation
Gut microbes help hibernating ground squirrels emerge strong and healthy in spring
Ground squirrels spend the end of summer gorging on food, preparing for hibernation. They need to store a lot of energy as fat, which becomes their primary fuel source underground in their hibernation burrows all winter long.
While hibernating, ground squirrels enter a state called torpor. Their metabolism drops to as low as just 1% of summer levels and their body temperature can plummet to close to freezing. Torpor greatly reduces how much energy the animal needs to stay alive until springtime.
That long fast comes with a downside: no new input of protein, which is crucial to maintain the body’s tissues and organs. This is a particular problem for muscles. In people, long periods of inactivity, like prolonged bed rest, lead to muscle wasting. But muscle wasting is minimal in hibernating animals. Despite as much as six to nine months of inactivity and no protein intake, they preserve muscle mass and performance remarkably well – a very handy adaptation that helps ensure a successful breeding season come spring. How do hibernators pull this off?
Tonga eruption was so intense, it caused the atmosphere to ring like a bell
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption reached an explosive crescendo on Jan. 15, 2022. Its rapid release of energy powered an ocean tsunami that caused damage as far away as the U.S. West Coast, but it also generated pressure waves in the atmosphere that quickly spread around the world.
The atmospheric wave pattern close to the eruption was quite complicated, but thousands of miles away it appeared as an isolated wave front traveling horizontally at over 650 miles an hour as it spread outward.
NASA’s James Garvin, chief scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, told NPR the space agency estimated the blast was around 10 megatons of TNT equivalent, about 500 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World Word II. From satellites watching with infrared sensors above, the wave looked like a ripple produced by dropping a stone in a pond.
Nature
Big dog, little dog: mutation explains range of canine sizes
From chihuahuas to great Danes, dogs differ more in size than any other mammal species on the planet. A mutation behind such variation has been traced to an unexpected source: ancient wolves.
The mutation lies near a gene called IGF1, which researchers flagged 15 years ago as having a major role in the size variation of domestic dogs. It was the first of around two dozen such genes identified. But efforts to pinpoint the gene variant responsible had come up empty.
“IGF1 has been a thorn in our side,” says Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist at the US National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the 2007 study that first identified IGF1’s role in dog size, as well as the 27 January study in Current Biology that now fulfils the quest.
Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?
The missing earthworms were a sign. As archaeologist Harvey Weiss and his colleagues excavated a site in northeast Syria, they found a buried layer of wind-blown silt so barren there was hardly any evidence of earthworms at work during that ancient era. Something drastic had happened thousands of years ago — something that choked the land with dust for decades, leaving a blanket of soil too inhospitable even for earthworms.
The drought hit in roughly 2200 BC, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 BC, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region.
The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down1. This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.
Duke Today
Modern day gold rush turns pristine rainforests into heavily polluted mercury sinks
[…] In a new study appearing Jan. 28 in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers show that illegal gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon is causing exceptionally high levels of atmospheric mercury pollution in the nearby Los Amigos Biological Station.
One stand of old-growth pristine forest was found to harbor the highest levels of mercury ever recorded, rivaling industrial areas where mercury is mined. Birds from this area have up to twelve times more mercury in their systems than birds from less polluted areas.
The spread of mercury pollution from gold mining has primarily been studied in aquatic systems. In this study, a team of researchers led by Jacqueline Gerson, who completed this research as part of her Ph.D. at Duke, and Emily Bernhardt, professor of Biology, provide the first measurements of terrestrial inputs, storage and impact of atmospheric mercury to forests and measurements of methylmercury, the most toxic form of mercury.
Phys.org
Copy or innovate? Study sheds light on chimp culture
Chimpanzees in one part of Guinea crack and eat nuts while others declined to do so even when offered tools, research published on Monday found, and the difference could shed light on their culture.
As humans, we are said to have cumulative culture: skills and technologies are transmitted and refined from generation to generation, producing behaviours more sophisticated than a single person could dream up.
Some experts believe this is unique to humans, and that traits like tool use by chimps instead develops spontaneously in individuals. Their theory argues animals can innovate certain behaviours without a model to copy.
High mountain rain has scientists rethinking river basics
Mountainous terrains have dynamic climates and can produce startling contrasts in precipitation. Increases in elevation can spell either more or less rainfall depending on atmospheric moisture content, general circulation patterns, and the specifics of the topography in question. But regardless of the directionality of the rainfall's gradient, such variability in precipitation can have large impacts on how rivers form, evolve, and shape the surrounding landscape. Although important, these influences on mountain landscape evolution are understudied.
In a new study, Leonard and Whipple model how variable precipitation in mountain landscape climates can create a complex system of changing river conditions that challenge many of the existing theories of how topography evolves over time. Previous works have analyzed how changes in rainfall influence topography, but most studies have focused on situations in which rainfall increases or decreases consistently across an area. The new study focuses on what happens when precipitation increases in a gradient-wise fashion along a river—raining more either upstream or downstream. Because many such changes in rainfall are expected to occur under climate change, the authors' study also seeks to address how past work may have misinterpreted the eventual topographical effects in regions, such as mountains, that are expected to experience uneven changes in rainfall.
NASA
Hubble Spots a Starship-Shaped Galactic Pair
The subject of this image is a group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A. They were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. The two galaxies in the upper right of the image appear to be interacting with one another. The long trails of stars and gas extending from them give the impression that they have both just been struck at great speed, thrown into disarray by the bowling-ball-shaped galaxy to the lower left of the image. In reality, interactions between galaxies happen over very long time periods, and galaxies rarely collide head-on with one another. It is also unclear whether the galaxy to the lower left is interacting with the other two, although they are so relatively close in space that it seems possible that they are. By happy coincidence, the collective interaction between these galaxies has caused the two on the upper right to form a shape, which from our solar system's perspective, resembles the starship known as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek!
Smithsonian
Two Sphinxes Depicting King Tut’s Grandfather Discovered in Egypt
Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed the remains of two large sphinxes at an ancient temple in Luxor, reports Tessa Solomon for ARTnews. The statues, each measuring 26 feet long, were found half-submerged in water at a shrine for Amenhotep III, the grandfather of King Tutankhamun and a pharaoh who ruled Egypt from 1390 B.C.E. to 1353 B.C.E.
A team of Egyptian and German researchers discovered the artifacts while restoring the ancient ruler’s funerary site, known as the “Temple of Millions of Years,” per a statement by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The team also found three black granite busts of Sekhmet, a goddess of war who took the form of a lioness, and remnants of columns and walls with engravings of ceremonial scenes.
Ars Technica
The last of Mars’ liquid waters flowed about 2 billion years ago
By now, there's plenty of evidence that Mars had a watery past, and more data is coming in all the time. But that evidence doesn't necessarily give us a complete picture of Mars' past. Was the red planet covered in watery oceans, or was most of the water trapped as ice, with erratic seasonal melting?
This week, two researchers at Caltech—Ellen Leask and Bethany Ehlmann—helped provide a clearer picture of Mars' past by figuring out the likely behavior of the last liquid water on Mars and determining when it stopped flowing. Their secret was tracing salt deposits on the Martian surface. […]
Analyzing these deposits gave the researchers a number of data points about the water that put them there.
Plant-based diets + rewilding provides “massive opportunity” to cut CO2
By shifting to more plant-rich diets, wealthy nations could cut their agricultural emissions by 61 percent—and sequester nearly 100 gigatons of CO2 equivalent if the surplus farmland is left to rewild.
The global food system is the second-biggest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs), accounting for up to a third of emissions. Over half of that number comes from meat and dairy production, despite these sources providing a meager 20 percent of the world’s calories. Wealthy nations drive most of this demand.
A recent study calculated the carbon-saving potential of having these wealthy countries shift away from meat and dairy in a way that would create what the study authors call a double dividend. “Our double dividend means if we change animal-based diets to plant-based diets, we can reduce GHG emissions (dividend one) from direct agricultural production,” explains lead author Dr. Zhongxiao Sun. “The saved agricultural land from diet change can be restored to potential natural vegetation for carbon sequestration (dividend two).”