Treatment for two rather than one may help prevent another bout of a common and unpleasant vaginal syndrome.For many women who develop bacterial vaginosis, the syndrome returns weeks or months after treatment. A clinical trial of women in monogamous relationships with male partners found that treating both partners significantly reduced the likelihood of recurrence, researchers report in the March 5 New England Journal of Medicine. When both partners were treated, 35 percent of the women developed bacterial vaginosis again, while in the women-only treatment group, it was 63 percent.The treatment approach builds on past research finding that sexual transmission may account for some repeat episodes of bacterial vaginosis. In the new trial, women received the standard treatment: either an oral antibiotic or an intravaginal antibiotic cream or gel. In the group in which both partners were treated, the male partner took the oral antibiotic and applied an antibiotic cream to the skin of the penis for seven days. In the women-only treatment group, 43 out of 68 developed bacterial vaginosis again within 12 weeks, while only 24 out of 69 did when both partners received treatment.Bacterial vaginosis affects roughly 30 percent of reproductive-aged women worldwide. The syndrome stems from an imbalance in the vaginas microbiota. In a healthy vagina, Lactobacillus bacteria dominate. In bacterial vaginosis, theres a decline in Lactobacillus and an overgrowth of certain pathogenic bacteria. The cause of the imbalance isnt known.One challenge in treating bacterial vaginosis is that its not the same thing in all people, says Caroline Mitchell, director of the Vulvovaginal Disorders Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. There may be a predominant abundance of a particular pathogenic bacteria or a mix of pathogenic bacteria without a dominant type, she says.Women with bacterial vaginosis can be asymptomatic. Those with symptoms have discharge and vaginal odor. Some women experience irritation, too. Bacterial vaginosis also increases the risk of several gynecological and pregnancy complications, including sexually transmitted infections, pelvic inflammatory disease and preterm birth.Its a big deal, says Mitchell, who was not involved in the trial. People think about this as a nuisance condition it is more than that. It is very disruptive for people.A survey of 62 women whove had recurrent bacterial vaginosis found that the conditionnegatively impacted sexual health for 70 percent, physical health for 68 percent and mental health for 75 percent, researchers reported in 2023 in BMC Womens Health.The syndrome is considered recurrent if it happens three or more times within a year. Its not known why it can be hard to cure bacterial vaginosis. Antibiotic resistance or the development of treatment-hindering biofilms by the pathogenic bacteria are possible explanations. Sexual transmission is another potential contributor. The pathogenic bacteria can reside on the skin of the penis and in the urethra. Past research has found that women with a regular sexual partner were twice as likely to experience recurrence compared with those without.We have so few tools to treat bacterial vaginosis the two classes of antibiotics recommended for treatment have remained the same since 1982, Mitchell says. She sees this new approach as another tool, and while its not relevant for all recurrent cases, I think for some people its going to be a great tool.

For centuries, mathematicians and floor designers alike have been fascinated by the shapes that can tile a plane in particular, those that do so without repetition.Now, a team of chemists has described a molecule that naturally assembles into these irregular patterns, laying the groundwork for engineering materials that behave differently from regular solids.When these things seem to arise spontaneously in nature, I think its absolutely fascinating, says Craig Kaplan, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada who was not involved in the study. It feels like you found a glitch in the matrix.In 2018, chemist Karl-Heinz Ernst and colleagues were spraying a special hydrocarbon molecule onto a silver substrate and watching it form patterns through a microscope.We saw something that was quite surprising and amazing, says Ernst, of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Dbendorf. The deposited molecules formed three-armed spirals, which grouped together into triangles of slightly different sizes. In each of around 100 experiments, the researchers found new triangular sequences that never seemed to repeat. They sat on these images for years trying to make sense of them.A close-up simulation shows the two mirror versions of the molecule tris(tetrahelicenebenzene), which is made of carbon (blue) and hydrogen (white) atoms.EmpaThen, in 2023, Kaplan and collaborators stunned the mathematics world when they found the elusive einstein tile a single shape that can fill a floor only with a never-repeating pattern, meaning its aperiodic. The mathematical discovery helped Ernst and colleagues put the pieces together: It seemed as though theyd stumbled upon a sort of molecular einstein.Kaplan cautions that the patterns in this material arent aperiodic in the same sense as the einstein tile. The pieces dont fit together precisely, and its unlikely if not impossible that they can tile only with nonrepeating patterns. But even without achieving true aperiodicity, the novel patterning may be sufficient to grant the material some seemingly magical properties, Kaplan says.Physicists have known for decades that electrons behave differently in quasicrystals, materials whose atomic structure exhibits some large-scale order but lacks repeated patterns. Last year, physicist Felix Flicker at the University of Bristol in England helped build a computer simulation of a quasicrystal based on Kaplans einstein tile, which predicted it would act like a tricked-out sheet of graphene.How quasicrystals form in nature remains a big mystery, Flicker says. The spirals Ernst grew may provide some clues.The key to this molecules irregular behavior, reported in January 2025 in Nature Communications, may be the entropy of its constellations.Entropyis a measure of how disordered a material is, or alternatively, how statistically probable its atomic arrangement is. The molecule has two tricks that make it abnormally versatile: It can easily convert between two distinct mirror-image shapes, and it forms very weak intermolecular bonds, allowing it to switch between large-scale configurations relatively easily. These two properties together mean that there are many possible ways for the molecules to arrange without repeating, Ernst says. The molecules thus flock to higher-entropy, nonrepeating patterns ordering in the most disorderly way possible.Flicker says the new study provides a really nice example of this order by disorder theory of quasicrystal formation. Understanding the general principles of irregular ordering could point scientists toward better ways to engineer quasicrystals on demand. Flicker believes that uncovering new patterns that lie between regularity and randomness is bound to yield exciting connections in unexpected places.Sponsor MessageErnst is humbled by the fact that the molecules found these patterns all on their own. This is nature doing math, he says.

Ancient human relatives crafted sharp-edged tools out of animal bones around 1.5 million years ago, researchers say.Discoveries at Tanzanias Olduvai Gorge, a famous East African fossil location, represent the oldest known evidence of systematic bone tool production by hominids, according to archaeologist Ignacio de la Torre of CSIC-Spanish National Research Council in Madrid and colleagues.Excavations conducted from 2015 through 2022 unearthed 27 bone tools in sediment that had already been dated, the scientists report March 5 in Nature. Either of two fossil hominids known to have lived at Olduvai Gorge around 1.5 million years ago a possible direct human ancestor called Homo erectus or a side-branch species dubbed Paranthropus boisei could have created the bone artifacts, they say.While stone toolmaking emerged as early as 3.3 million years ago, bone tools generally date to no earlier than around 500,000 years ago. Much older origins of bone toolmaking were suggested by the identification of a 1.4-million-year-old hippos leg bone fashioned into a cutting or sawing tool, which had gone unexamined since its discovery at an Ethiopian site in 1994.An ancient bone tool kit unearthed in Tanzania exhibits a range of sizes and modifications.CSICEven older artifacts recovered at Olduvai Gorge come from a bone tool kit, the scientists say. Implements of varying sizes and shapes were identified as pieces of leg bones, mostly from elephants and hippos. Pounding marks appear where hominids sharpened the edges of bones. The largest tools, made from elephant bones, reached up to 38 centimeters long. Thats roughly the distance, on average, from an adults elbow to fingertips.Six bone tools featured a carved notch on one end, which perhaps served as a grip, and a sharp point at the other end. Several other bone tools resemble pear-shaped stone hand axes.Archaeologists consider stone hand axes the main innovation of the Acheulean industry, a tool tradition that emerged roughly 1.7 million years ago. We believe that the Olduvai bone tools represent a technological transfer [by hominids] from stone to bone, de la Torre says.His group excavated many hippo bones bearing butchery marks, suggesting that Olduvai hominids exploited hippo carcasses for food as well as bones suited for toolmaking. But few elephant remains turned up. Elephant-bone tools were brought to the site from elsewhere, the investigators suspect.

The black hole at the Milky Ways heart neither slumbers nor sleeps. Instead, the ring of plasma surrounding it flickers constantly, punctuated by superbright flares, observations show.Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe Sgr A* and its disk for hours at a time over the course of a year, from April 2023 through April 2024. These were the longest continuous observations yet of our galaxys central supermassive black hole.The telescope revealed a constant bubbling in the disks light that changed every few seconds or minutes, says astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. A few times a day, and seemingly at random, the disk would emit a blindingly bright flare, Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues report in the Feb. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters.The supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* for short, is about 4 million times as heavy as the sun and lies about 26,000 light-years from our solar system. The black hole is fairly quiet most of the time, only occasionally gobbling up material in its vicinity and letting out bursts of light and energy.But that doesnt mean its just lying there. Earlier observations, including the first image of the black hole, had suggested that the white-hot disk of plasma that accretes around it is constantly flickering. Computer simulations of how material flows in the accretion disk predicted that the disks brightness should vary from minutes to years. The new observations not only confirm those ideas, but also shed light on how the flickering happens.JWST has some advantages over other telescopes that allowed it to catch the disks variability in action. Because the telescope is not in Earths orbit, Earth never gets in its way, letting the telescope take longer continuous looks. It can also observe objects in two different wavelengths of light simultaneously.We can see things in color, rather than black-and-white, Yusef-Zadeh says.The researchers think there are two processes at work, Yusef-Zadeh says. Turbulence in the disk itself causes the bubbling. Meanwhile, the process behind the big flares could be analogous to magnetic reconnection events, in which two lines of magnetic field collide and release bursts of energy. These events also happen during solar flares.The team has requested a full 24 hours of continuous observation time with JWST to find out more.

Hawaiis male crickets cant hide from their buzzing boogeymen for long.In just a handful of years, cricket-killing parasitic flies have evolved hearing thats more sensitive to their preys new, covert love songs, researchers report February 20 in Current Biology.The nocturnal fly Ormia ochracea lays its eggs on crickets, which hatch into larvae that eventually make a meal of their host. Native to continental North America, the flies were introduced to Hawaii around 1989 and began targeting the islands Pacific field crickets (Teleogryllus oceanicus), eavesdropping on their chirps to find them.Soon after the flies were introduced, the wing shape of some male Pacific field crickets rapidly evolved, giving the insects an unusual purring or rattling call. That may have allowed males to sing to females without alerting the flies. But researchers wondered if the flies would push back.Is there going to be a response from the fly or is this really going to turn out to be a system where they evolve sort of a private mode of communication that the eavesdropping [fly] isnt ever going to be able to find? says Robin Tinghitella, an evolutionary and behavioral ecologist at the University of Denver.In the lab, Tinghitella and colleagues compared O. ochracea flies from Hawaii and Florida. The team measured how flies hearing neurons responded to specific sound frequencies, and how the flies reacted to the different cricket songs.Hawaiian flies were more sensitive to frequencies at around 5 and 10 kilohertz, two frequencies that dominate normal and purring cricket songs, than their Floridian counterparts. Hawaiian flies were also more likely to move in response to cricket purrs.In Hawaii, the team lured flies into traps with recordings of cricket songs. Nearly 20 percent of the flies were caught using purring or rattling songs, suggesting the crickets freshly released tracks not even a decade old are already detectable by many of the flies.The findings point to adaptation and coadaptation, Tinghitella says, which may eventually develop into a game of evolutionary cat and mouse between cricket and fly.More data on the flies hearing could provide a starting point for understanding how the crickets might respond, says study coauthor Norman Lee, a neuroethologist at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.From there, researchers may be able to make some predictions about how an innovation race between crickets and flies is likely to play out.

In January in Monterrey, Mexico, Ivn Venzor was one of only a dozen people in the world to glimpse a potential Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of a distant star.It happened too fast to see by eye just a seconds-long flicker of light but Venzors backyard telescope recorded the data, allowing him to verify the event with researchers. Im having dinner with my family, and Im trying to discover a new kind of planet from a few meters outside, says Venzor, a hobby astronomer. Its effortless.Venzors telescope is part of a growing, global network enabling enthusiasts such as himself to contribute to astronomical research. Made up of over 15,000 small, Wi-Fienabled telescopes produced by the French company Unistellar, the network spans six continents and has helped discover hundreds of asteroids, comets and exoplanets. The discoveries rely on occultation when a sizable object such as an asteroid or planet briefly blocks the light of a star. By measuring the duration of these blockages from multiple locations, astronomers can determine the objects size, shape and trajectory.The network is the coolest citizen science project Ive ever seen, says Jon Vandegriff, a space physics data scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.It has allowed researchers to refine predictions for the orbits of asteroids, contribute to exoplanet studies and even observe major space missions. In 2022, when NASA intentionally redirected an asteroid by crashing a spacecraft into it, the network helped track the debris from the collision.But the telescopes can cost up to $4,000 dollars each, making them inaccessible to many people. So Unistellar and nonprofits including Astronomers Without Borders have gifted telescopes to universities and astronomy clubs around the world to expand the networks reach.For those communities, the ability to contribute to space science is transformative.Marcelo Souza, an astrophysicist at Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense Darcy Ribeiro in Rio de Janeiro, received a free telescope for his astronomy club last year. When we received it, everything changed, Souza says. The instrument has become a key tool for teaching, research and astronomy outreach.In Armenia, an astronomy club run by space engineer Vachik Khachatryan and his brother, Mher, has used its partially-donated telescope at events for over 2,000 children. Vachik even brought it out at his wedding.Marcelo Souza uses his telescope at outreach events for children in the Brazilian city of Campos dos Goytacazes. While children and parents wait in line, he projects the telescopes view onto screens.Louis Cruls Astronomy ClubFor those interested in contributing to research, Unistellar distributes a list of transitory cosmic objects that can be seen in different locations each month. Once an observer selects their object of interest, they can press a button that directs an app to point the telescope at the target location and record a video of the passing object. Observers can also use the telescope to take still photos of their favorite nebulae and galaxies.At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, Unistellars Chief Scientific Officer Frank Marchis and collaborators reported that the network successfully detected 136 asteroids. A forthcoming paper will detail the discovery of a rare binary asteroid two space rocks orbiting each other. Meanwhile, a partnership with NASA is helping to refine the orbits of around 20 exoplanets.Sponsor MessageThe teams next frontier is using machine learning to minimize false observations caused by clouds or satellites. And in April, 50 observers will receive hardware prototypes that will allow researchers to remotely operate the telescopes, eliminating user error during important transits.Marchis, who is also a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., wants to scale up the network by expanding participation in underrepresented regions such as Africa, central Asia and South America. That would be a boon for researchers and hobbyists alike.On your own, you can do only so much in astronomy, Venzor says. By working together, you are feeling part of something greater.

A round of applause, please: Scientists have finally figured out whats behind the sound of clapping.The research pinpoints a mechanism called a Helmholtz resonator the same acoustic concept that underlies the sound made when you blow across the top of an empty bottle. Experiments using baby powder to map the flow of air, alongside pressure measurements and high-speed video,confirm that explanation, researchers report in a paper accepted inPhysical Review Research.A Helmholtz resonator consists of an enclosed cavity of air like the inside of a glass bottle, or the space between clapping hands with an opening connected to the cavity by a neck. Air vibrates back and forth within the neck, creating sound waves of a frequency that depends on the volume of the cavity and the dimensions of the neck and opening.When a person claps their hands, a jet of air streams out of a gap where the hands meet, between the thumb and forefinger. This jet of air carries energy, and thats the initial start of the sound, says mechanical engineer Yicong Fu of Cornell University. The jet kicks off vibrations of the air. Fu and colleagues saw a similar effect using cup-shaped silicone models designed to mimic palms slapping together.When a person claps, an air pocket is formed within the palms. A jet of air streams out of a gap left between the thumb and forefinger, kicking off vibrations in the surrounding air. Researchers saw a similar effect using cup-shaped silicone models designed to mimic palms slapping together.The researchers studied clapping in different configurations: cupped hands, flat hands with palms clapped together and fingers hitting a palm. The frequencies of sound the team recorded matched the predictions of the Helmholtz resonator theory. For example, cupping the hands when clapping produced a larger cavity and a lower-pitched sound than clapping with flat hands.Understanding the physics of hand clapping, Fu says, could help develop methods to identify people by their claps for example, allowing users to log into a device based on their unique clap. Or it could help musicians fine-tune songs with the perfect hand-smacking beat.

The female body has often been overlooked in science, and the vagina remains the most taboo part of it.This reproductive organ houses billions of bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses in a complex community crucial for overall health. But theres a dearth of data on vaginal microbiota the microbes and their functions, says microbiologist Sarah Lebeer of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Citizen science can help build data on what constitutes healthy vaginal microbiota, giving researchers the tools needed to identify when things go awry, she and her colleagues propose February 6 in Trends in Microbiology.If we better understand when a vaginal microbiome is disrupted and how it can cause disease, then we can have better diagnostic tools and can think of new therapies, Lebeer says.A 2011 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified five categories of vaginal bacterial communities in North American women who showed no signs of illness. That list eventually expanded to more than 20 categories, Lebeer says.But her own recent study, which included more than 3,000 women in Belgium, found that more than 10 percent of participants had a microbial composition that sat in between previously defined categories, and could not easily be sorted.To understand the full spectrum of healthy vaginal microbiota, Lebeer and colleagues are calling upon citizen science. The Belgian study relied on citizen scientists mailing in their own samples and filling out surveys through the Isala project, named after the first woman doctor in Belgium. Scientists in around 10 more countries are now starting their own regional projects as part of the Isala Sisterhood consortium.Internationally, vaginal microbiota are even more diverse, Lebeer says. Thanks to this diversity and advanced computing power, she says researchers should consider the whole composition of the vaginal microbiota and go beyond categorizing microbial community types.Easier identification of healthy microbiota could be useful for physicians on the lookout for microbial communities that are out of balance. For instance, a lack of Lactobacillus bacterial species and an overgrowth of others a condition called bacterial vaginosis has been associated with myriad issues, including preterm birth, urinary tract infections, reduced HIV drug efficacy and an inflamed uterine lining, known as endometritis.Many factors can influence the vaginas microbial makeup. Diet, hormone levels, experiences with childbirth, hygiene practices and more can alter microbe diversity, Lebeer notes. These factors should take precedence over associations with race or ethnicity, which many studies have attributed differences to, she says. If you look at the vaginal microbiome, which is inside the human body, race or skin color doesnt seem to have a direct impact.Genomicist Jacques Ravel, who led the 2011 PNAS study and wasnt involved in the new report, agrees. Race is a stand-in for a groups collective experiences, says Ravel, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Those experiences include stress, disparities, discrimination and passed-down cultural norms, such as vaginal douching, known by scientists not to be great for health, he says. Previous research suggests the practice increases the risk for pelvic inflammatory disease by nearly 75 percent.While Ravel applauds Lebeer and colleagues overarching argument for more research, hes not convinced that additional surveys are currently needed. Instead, he wants to know how various microbes can help or harm health. This kind of research will mostly require participants to come into a lab or clinic for health workers to collect samples that will be analyzed right away, Ravel adds.That mechanistic work could help find better prevention and treatment methods for health issues like HIV, pelvic inflammatory disease and bacterial vaginosis. The latter has been primarily treated with two antibiotics for decades, Ravel says. We have had zero innovation in this field, in treating a [condition] that is responsible for a huge amount of disparities around the world. Among reproductive-age women, the global prevalence of bacterial vaginosis is about 26 percent, but its more common in areas with fewer resources and limited access to health care, according to the World Health Organization.Sponsor MessageA better understanding of well-balanced vaginal microbiota could help combat these conditions, too, Lebeer says. For instance, scientists have recently started studying vaginal transplants of Lactobacillus bacteria as a potential treatment, she says.Citizen science can also drive research in new directions. One of Lebeers current projects on how menstrual hygiene products affect vaginal microbes was proposed by people working on and around the Isala project. If you do citizen science, Lebeer says, you have more experts around the table.

About 18 years ago, a 4-year-old girl with a rare nerve cell cancer received an infusion of immune cells that were genetically engineered to fight the disease. Since then, she has remained cancer-free, possibly making her the longest-surviving patient with cancer who received this tailored treatment, researchers report February 17 in Nature Medicine.As part of a clinical trial, the girl received CAR-T cell therapy, a treatment that requires removing some of a patients immune cells and programming them to target and kill cancer cells before returning them. Since 2017, seven CAR-T cell therapies have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a few blood cancers. But solid tumors, like the girls neuroblastoma, have been harder to treat with this technology.This is because solid tumors, which account for approximately 90 percent of all cancers, are tougher to penetrate and are equipped with molecules that can hinder the engineered cells, says Helen Heslop, a physician-scientist at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Childrens Hospital in Houston.Neuroblastoma is the first solid tumor where there looks like there could be curative effects with CAR-T cells, says cancer immunotherapist Carl June, who was not involved in the study. Its really exciting, I think, to see this happen.Heslops team recruited 19 children with neuroblastoma 11 with actively growing cancer and eight who were at high risk of relapsing. From 2004 to 2009, all 19 were infused with CAR-T cells. Within seven years of treatment, 12 patients relapsed and died. Of the seven survivors, five were at risk of relapse when treated and were disease-free 10 to 15 years later. The other two had actively growing cancer at the time they were infused with the treatment. One was still in remission eight years later, but stopped participating in the study at that point; the other is the 18-year survivor.I think now we need to know why some people progressed and some people didnt, says June, who works at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Perhaps in patients who didnt continue to benefit, either the engineered cells didnt stick around long enough, or the tumor lost the protein the cells were targeting.Since this study was done, Heslop says, she and other investigators have added special molecules to CAR-T cells to make them last longer and track down tumors better. In 2023, researchers at Bambino Ges Childrens Hospital in Italy published a study in which nine of 27 patients with neuroblastoma had no signs of cancer six weeks after receiving next-generation CAR-T cells. Five of those patients were cancer-free about one to two years later. Longer-term results should be out soon.Hopefully those patients, too, will have sustained benefit and survive long-term, says Heslop. While a great deal more research would be needed, she says this is a glimmer of hope that neuroblastoma, and perhaps other solid tumors, could be treatable with CAR-T.

BOSTON Droplets of Venus clouds may someday come to Earth. Researchers are testing a device that can gather mist from our planetary neighbors atmosphere and deliver it to scientists so they can test the samples for signs of life.Venus is not an obvious place to look for life. Its globe-spanning cloud decks are made of sulfuric acid, a feature that was long believed to be sterile for any organic chemistry, said MIT planetary scientist Iaroslav Iakubivskyi in a Feb. 15 talk at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.But in the last few years, lab experiments by Iakubivskyi and colleagues have suggested that sulfuric acid can support the organic chemistry that gives rise to stable nucleic and amino acids the building blocks of DNA and proteins. Together, the data suggest that rather than being a disruptive force, sulfuric acid might actually serve as a potential solvent for life-essential molecules, he said. Still, we have to go to Venus to test it.A future mission to Venus could include floating a cloud-catching device from a giant balloon in the planets sulfuric acid atmosphere, as shown in this illustration.W. BuchananIakubivskyis team is working with the private spaceflight company Rocket Lab on a series of Venus probes called the Morning Star Missions. The first, a probe that will fall through Venus atmosphere and measure the sizes of sulfuric acid droplets, is slated to launch in 2026. A later mission would use a two-ton rocket to launch samples into Venus orbit to be picked up by a spacecraft returning to Earth. If successful, Morning Star would be the first private mission to another planet.Inspired by fog-catching plants in the Atacama desert, the team built a prototype cloud catcher from four layers of wire mesh. The wires can be charged to ionize atmospheric droplets and attract them to the mesh.The researchers tested the device by collecting sulfuric acid mist in controlled laboratory conditions, atmospheric particles carried by high winds on Mount Washington in New Hampshire and steam and gas emitted from volcanic vents on Kilauea in Hawaii.Overall, all of these results demonstrated the viability of collecting clouds from Venus and bringing us closer to understanding chemistry and potential for life there, Iakubivskyi said.The mission would be the first to directly measure Venus clouds since 1985, when the Soviet Unions VEGA mission deployed balloons into the planets atmosphere on its way to rendezvous with Halleys Comet.Morning Star isnt alone in its aspirations. NASA and the European Space Agency both plan to send spacecraft to Venus within the next decade.Were now entering a new era of Venus exploration, Iakubivskyi said.

The first generation of stars in the universe could have produced significant amounts of water upon their deaths, just 100 million to 200 million years after the Big Bang.Signatures of water have previously been observed some 780 million years after the Big Bang. But now, computer simulations suggest that this essential condition for life existed far earlier than astronomers thought, researchers report March 3 in Nature Astronomy.The surprise was that the ingredients for life were all in place in dense cloud cores [leftover after stellar deaths] so early after the Big Bang, says astrophysicist Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth in England.Water may be common today. But in the beginning, roughly 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was essentially just hydrogen, helium and a little bit of lithium. It took stars to make the rest. Some midweight elements, such as carbon and oxygen, are fused inside of stars as they age. Others are forged in stellar deaths, such as explosive supernovas or the violent mergers of neutron stars. However, for more complex molecules to form in significant quantities, relatively dense and cool conditions, ideally less than a few thousand degrees Celsius, are needed.Water is a pretty fragile molecule, says astronomer Volker Bromm of the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved with the new research. So the catch is, do we have conditions that can form it [very early in the universe]?To see if there could have been water in the infant universe, Whalen and his colleagues ran computer simulations of the lives and deaths of two first-generation stars. Because astronomers think early stars were much larger and had shorter lifespans than modern stars, the team simulated one star with 13 times the mass of the sun and another 200 times the suns mass. At the end of their short lives, these behemoths exploded as supernovas and flung out a shower of elements, including oxygen and hydrogen.The simulations showed that as the supernovas ejected matter expanded and cooled, oxygen reacted with hydrogen and dihydrogen, or two joined hydrogen atoms, to make water vapor in the growing debris halos.This chemical process proceeded slowly, since the density of atoms in the outer regions of the expanding supernova blasts was low. This low density means it was unlikely two elements would meet and hook up on short timescales.But after a few million years or tens of million years in the case of the smaller star the dusty central cores of the supernova remnants had cooled enough for water to form. Water began amassing rapidly there since the densities were high enough for atoms to meet.[The waters] concentration in dense structures, that to me is the game changer, Whalen says. The total overall mass of water being formed, its not that much. But it becomes really concentrated in the dense cores, and the dense cores are the most interesting structures in the remnant, because thats where new stars and planets can form.At the end of the simulations, the smaller supernova produced a mass of water equivalent to a third of Earths total mass while the larger one created enough water to equal 330 Earths. In principle, Whalen says, if a planet were to form in a core leftover from the larger supernova, it could be a water world like our own.There seems to be an indication that the universe as a whole may have been habitable, if you like, already quite early on, Bromm says. But water doesnt get you all the way to life, he adds. Then you start asking the question, [how early] can you combine carbon with hydrogen to get the molecules of life?

After brain surgery, Jon Nelson and other volunteers are tasked with rehabbing their brain. This job is harder than it might seem, as people re-learn how to navigate the world with a range of emotions that they havent felt in a long time. Well hear from a psychologist who describes the shift from day-to-day survival toward longer-term thinking, planning and dreaming about whats next. Well also hear Jons perspective on whether DBS gives him artificial happiness. Spoiler alert: It does not.TranscriptLaura Sanders: This episode deals with mental illness, depression and suicide. Please listen with care. Previously on The Deep End.Emily: Yeah, so I laid low for a period of time. It was pretty smooth. And I just noticed that kind of feeling of like almost itchiness and restlessness.Amanda: And then by Wednesday, the fifth day after the surgery, thats when it got completely better. And it stayed that way ever since. But the actual relief, like, the relief, I cant even describe the relief. Ive never felt relief so profound in my life. It was like, I dont know, you just get used to living in pain and then when the pain is all of a sudden gone, youre like, What is this?Jon: Overnight, I was healed. I have been in remission from depression since the moment they have turned that on.Sanders: On this podcast, weve heard about some big transformations. People who have had brain surgery and for the first time in decades are able to live their lives without depression. But their relief comes with tradeoffs. Today were going to get into what its like to live with electrodes in your brain, wires in your neck, and battery packs in your chest. Forever. Welcome to the Deep End. Im Laura Sanders.Patient 001: The only thing Ill slightly complain about, and its very vain, I only wish the batteries on your chest didnt show up so much.Sanders: Thats Patient 001. Again, youre hearing his words, but not his voice. He now lives in a hot place near the ocean. And because he has two sets of implanted electrodes, he has two implanted battery packs, one on each side of his upper chest. Theyre each about the size of a deck of cards.Patient 001: It just sucks I cant take my shirt off at the beach and not be self-conscious about that.Sanders: The devices in his chest can also feel alien to him, like theyre not part of his body. Thats especially true as hes falling asleep.Patient 001: At first its alien to you, right? I sleep face-down so like I have, I dont know why, I was just putting my hand on it to, like, just be comfortable.Sanders: Amanda has a strained relationship with the device too. It feels like it doesnt quite belong.Amanda: I dont like the idea of it. I dont like how it feels. Like, every time I accidentally touch the wire in my neck, Im like, Ew, ew, I dont like it. And its getting better, but sometimes I can still feel the thing in my chest just like sitting there. Its unpleasant to have a foreign object in you.Sponsor MessageSanders: And then theres the charging. Its annoyingly low-tech. Its done with a wireless charger draped around the neck, and it takes about 40 minutes. Amandas charger shows only 10 percent increments and the screen is on for only a minute before it locks up without indicating that the charging is done. And one of the worst parts? The scientists are monitoring it all.Amanda: They like know every single thing about me. Like, the data scientist was showing me a graph of when I charge my battery and how full I keep it. Hes like, Youre the most consistent person in the study, and we really appreciate it. That was his point. I was like, Darn, you guys know everything.Sanders: Are you monitoring my batteries?Amanda: They are.Sanders: The researchers very close attention to batteries and charging makes sense. Imagine if your mental health depended on a full charge, or if you had to worry every time a storm was predicted or the power grid got stretched too thin. Jons wife Barbara thinks about this.Barbara: I always worry, like, what if theres an apocalypse and like we dont have electricity anymore? Whats that gonna look like? But I guess well be dealing with the apocalypse, so itll be fine.Sanders: In addition to concerns and annoyances about charging, there are lots of other time-consuming tasks that these volunteers complete as part of the research. Surveys, mood ratings, video journals. Twice a day, Amanda clicks what looks like a TV remote at home to collect brain data, and that goes to her home computer. She then uploads it to the hospital server. When I visited her at her apartment, she showed me how it all works.Amanda: Yeah, so you have this little remote. I actually have it sitting right here. It looks like a TV remote. You pair it with your device and then you also pair it with your computer. So it sort of acts as the go-between between your device and your computer. So youre like, Im Bluetooth-enabled.Sanders: But the tradeoffs are worth it to Patient 001.Patient 001: If you ask anybody thats been through a real severe depressive episode, if you tell them, Listen, if I flip a switch and youre good and youre yourself again, you dont want to die, right, like, every day of your life? And you take pleasure in the things that you used to take pleasure in, yeah? But you have this, like, plastic thing on your, on your chest. Would you take that trade? Nine out of, probably 10 out of 10 will say, Yeah, its a no-brainer.Sanders: DBS doesnt always work. And it can come with risks, both from the surgery and the brain stimulation. Today, more than 260,000 people have been implanted with DBS devices. But like any medical procedure, the technique can go sideways. Electrode leads in the brain can break, the chest controller can fail, batteries can die, infections in both the head and the chest are a risk, as is wire-tethering. Thats a painful condition, also called bowstringing, where scar tissue grows around the wire in the neck.The risks are a lot to ask of someone volunteering for an experiment. And thats what this is, an experiment. And because its an experiment, scientists are tracking everything, which meant that these volunteers had to make lots of trips to the lab and handle lots of checking in. Jon takes the train from his house just outside of Philadelphia to the lab in New York City a lot. Its routine now. He goes so often that he knows exactly which crack in the sidewalk to stand by as he waits for his train at the New Jersey Transit Station. On one of his visits, a researcher had put a mess of electrode wires on his scalp to eavesdrop on his brain. The scientists doing the measurement casually mentioned that his implanted leads were zipping 130 pulses of electricity into each side of his brain every second.Jon: So then I come home, this is the fun part with my daughter, I said, Alright lets do some math, you know. Lets figure this out. And so what it comes down to is, I have 22 and a half million electrical pulses per day to my brain, and it keeps me alive.Sanders: After Jons surgery, when the electricity started flowing, he was given a new task, rehabbing his brain. Jon was initially dismissive of the new job. He felt fantastic, cocky almost, and he wasnt convinced that he needed to work hard on rehab.Jon: I was like, What are you talking about? I was like, Dude, Im not sick anymore. Like, Im not diseased. Im great, you know. I got this.Sanders: But about six weeks after his surgery, everything fell apart.Jon: So I started not feeling good. And so the entire time after surgery, when Im feeling good, Im like, is this real? Like, is this too good to be true? Is this adrenaline? Is this, like, what is this? And like even my wife, like, shes like, Dude, this is amazing. But you know, shes scared. Like, this is literally traumatic. Like, going through major depressive disorder at this level is trauma. Its horrific. We both have PTSD for sure. And immediately I start feeling bad. And Im like, Oh my God. Im like, I feel it. Like when I feel the depression, like I feel it in my body, like any physical sensation that I have, even if its positive, it triggers me, right? Because when I feel anything, Im like, Oh my God. So I start, I start feeling bad. I start immediately overeating, immediately oversleeping, immediately hiding behavior. My wife, Ill never forget it, was like, Hey, we got an appointment at the school for my son at 10 oclock. I was like, Cant do it. I was like, I got something going on. I didnt have anything going on. But that immediate behavior overnight happened.Sanders: Jon knew that as part of the study protocol, around the sixth month, researchers would turn off his stimulation. This looming shutdown had him intensely worried.Jon: I was freaked that they were turning it off because I knew that was part of the trial. I was very anxious about that because clearly I dont want to feel like dying, right? Its pretty amazing not to feel like dying, you know. Its a simple thing. I say to my friends, Im like, Major depressive disorder, one star, dont recommend, not fun. And I was like, Guys, like, oh my God, like Im so anxious about it being turned off.Sanders: His recent shift into overeating, apathy and general malaise alarmed him so much that on the night of October 6th, about seven weeks after his surgery, he sent an email to a Mount Sinai psychiatrist asking if his stimulation had been turned off earlier than planned.Jon: Immediately I sent an email to the lead psychiatrist of this trial and I said, Did you guys turn it off? Like is it working? Like, give me a heads up. You just start completely freaking out.Sanders: He read me the email. Its polite, but there are definite undertones of low-key panic.Jon: A quick question for you. My behavior has been alarming to me since Sunday. My depressive behavior, not depression, but the behavior I usually do when Im depressed, is at max mode right now. I dont feel the depression or suicidal thoughts, but since Sunday, all of these have been an overdrive. I know the pacemaker device gets turned off around the six-month mark for the sham portion of the test. Is there an earlier part of the program where it gets shut off too, such as now, and that is also part of the experiment? Even if it was shut off, could you even tell me that? I understand that there are ups and downs during this phase, but this is a major down, mood-wise, and its putting me in low spirits and not knowing what to expect, especially as I am about to enter my going back to work phase and I am regressing. I really appreciate your perspective. Jon.Sanders: An hour and a half later, the email back was clear. Your device is absolutely on. This sounds like a typical post-DBS recovery phase where you may be relearning to deal with stress and normal negative emotions. Jons psychologist would address it with him at their next appointment. The message was definitely, Dont panic, but that message didnt really sink in for Jon. Jons worry about a relapse was legit. People being treated with DBS for depression have experienced relapses when their devices accidentally stop working. A battery fails or a wire breaks, and their relief is gone. I talked with psychologist Shannon ONeill who works with Jon and other people treated with DBS at Mount Sinai. And she says worries over spiraling dark moods definitely come up.ONeill: We often talk significantly about the difference for them of how they can distinguish between depression and also just normal everyday sadness. Thats been something thats so significant. Individuals well see post-operatively, especially with depression, is they appreciate natural negative emotions that can come upon them without it equating to, This is another depressive episode.Sanders: This is the hard work, she says. People who have lived with severe depression for years need to relearn how to recognize and tolerate garden variety emotions that include sorrow. Its called distress tolerance, and its hard.Jon: So what I learned through this rehab phase of mine that I didnt understand is how to learn to live with being sad. I didnt know how to do that because it was so traumatic for me. This disease has caused trauma in me for sure. Its caused trauma in my wife, my family, all of us. And so feeling that first twinge of sadness was the first time where I was like, ah, thats what they mean.Sanders: ONeill has seen regular life stressors send a person down this path before.ONeill: They might get COVID or they might have the flu that mimics depression and they fear relapsing.Sanders: Yeah, so the idea is that its not permanent, that you can, this is a blip, you know.ONeill: Its a blip. Its, negative emotions come and go, just like positive emotions come and go. It can be passing and not ever present.Sanders: Her description reminds me of the weather. We can spend mornings under heavy cloud cover. I live in Oregon and I often do just that. But then sometimes we luck out with a full-blast sunny afternoon. Its all temporary. Understanding that feelings are transitory, that ups and downs happen, is something people with severe depression havent practiced. They couldnt have practiced. Theyve been perpetually stuck under heavy cloud cover. Emerging into an emotional landscape with those ups and downs can be unsettling. Emily Hollenbeck, whose DBS surgery was in 2021, says her recovery took time.Emily: Yeah, my brain is becoming more able to trust. Like, Ill have a bad day or even something really traumatic may happen, but there isnt that same sense of foreboding, like, Oh no, how will how will I cope? Im learning to trust that that sense of, Ill be okay.Sanders: But its a process.Emily: Id say the biggest thing is like being able to see myself in a positive light and to kind of have a relationship with myself. I know that sounds very like ooey gooey in a way, but realistically, you know, growing up, I never had that with my family environment. And now that Im relearning it and intentionally, like this book under my computer that says Fierce self compassion, like, I have the time and energy now to pursue that kind of healing.Sanders: Its almost like shes watching herself from outside of her life. Thats something she couldnt do before.Emily: And I guess part of it, too, is just understanding, you know, that when really stressful, negative things happen, like, the self-awareness and the ability to think, like, Okay, this feels really terrible. Like, somehow, with depression in my deepest states, you cant really have that sense of metacognition or distance, because it really feels like the world is crumbling down around you. And now I can think, like, Okay, it feels like the world is crumbling down around me. And thats a legitimate feeling. But I can contextualize it in a way, with depression, depression, its like you cant escape the snow globe. And this is much more, I can have a compassionate, but more almost, like, critical-thinking perspective about what Im feeling.Sanders: Amanda had a similar challenge. One of her pictures drawn after DBS shows a cartoon Amanda wearing a rainbow shirt. Shes standing high on a ledge of bright green grass, blue sky overhead, but shes looking over the edge to the darkness below.Amanda: And the second picture was about being afraid, like feeling, feeling like I had been pulled out of this giant pit, and I was worried I was gonna fall back in it again.Sanders: But she hasnt fallen back in.Amanda: I struggle a little bit with thinking about the future. I, because I always wanted to die. I always, there never was a future. I didnt want the future. I didnt want any parts of it. And now there is one. And now its like, I almost dont know how to fill that future. Like, I dont know how to project forward what it might be like. I drew this picture, actually. Its an open book and Cartoon Amanda is sitting on one side. And the next page says, Next chapter. And in the first drawing, theres a tombstone, because the next chapter was death. But in the second drawing, Cartoon Amandas sitting there and shes got a pencil in her hand, because the next chapter is blank, and shes thinking about what to do with it.Sanders: Her experience mirrors some experimental data. The studies that have been done suggest that when people with DBS recover from depression, they generally stay well. Neurologist Helen Mayberg and her colleagues found that about 60 percent of patients had sustained improvements. Those lasted between three and six years after surgery. In a longer-term study, most of a group of 28 people who had DBS for major depression or for a type of bipolar disorder, saw benefits for more than eight years. Everyones path is different, but ONeill says there are some common trajectories. Once the day-to-day recovery kicks in, patients get to be a bit more broad in their hopes.ONeill: When I see individuals starting to shift towards more constant, confident recovery, their future timeline really starts to expand in their vocabulary with me. Its less about the day-to-day behavioral activation, and lets chip away at doing exercise, brushing your teeth, doing all of the fundamental rehab towards, whats next in life? What do I actually value? What do I want more of? And they get to be, greedy is the wrong word, they get to be excited and open their minds and their hearts to other things outside of just pure survival.Sanders: Jon is out of the pure survival mode, but hes still figuring out what comes next.Jon: I mean, its come along to the fact that I called them the other day, you get worried, right? Like I probably had another twinge of sadness. Im still working on that distress tolerance. And I still send a quick email like, Yo, did this thing turn off? Are we in a good spot? They can look at it all remotely. Its all controlled by Bluetooth. So then they literally can look at my, they can look at the device, basically say its working fine, and they can analyze my brain waves. They have the ability to determine and know kind of what state Im going into, like, am I going into a depressive state or not? Like, the science is surreal.Sanders: Im going to shift here to a somewhat unsettling idea. The idea of a machine forcing happiness on us or taking away sorrow. That kind of mind control is creepy. We want to believe that our feelings originate inside of ourselves, that we are the ones in charge here. So the idea that artificial happiness can be created by a computer that controls electrodes in our brain hooked to wires that snake down our necks, no thank you. But what I hope is clear by now is that these implants do not do that. They dont make a person feel artificial joy. Instead, they open the door for a range of emotions. Heres ONeill.ONeill: And DBS is not going to give you happiness. Its not going to just be a device that turns on happiness 24/7. Its to get you out of the hole and be on solid ground. And so we have a baseline where you have the opportunity to have the range of happiness but also the same range of sadness too, with it being safe.Sanders: The capacity for emotions, thats what this treatment seems to restore. Its not some sort of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind movie scenarios where all the bad and hard stuff gets erased.Jon: So has the device made me happy? The device has made me disease-free. Thats all that I needed it to do. It has not taken away the typical emotions in life that Im going to have forever. And those are happiness, sadness, anger, Im going to have those. And Im going to have to learn how to live with having those. Im learning to get better, that, Im not there. I dont know if I ever will be there. I will, itll be something that I have to deal with for the rest of my life. But it, you know, its, in the other aspect of it, too, is did it make me happy? The procedure made me happy because Im now disease-free, but it did not take away the emotions, and thats what I have to learn to deal with and live with.Sanders: His emotions, all of them, including sorrow and including happiness, are, as he would say, present. Overcoming misconceptions about what this technology can and cant do is yet another burden for Jon and others. The patients I spoke with were incredibly candid about their experiences. They graciously tolerated my questions, all my emails, but being open about their medical condition can exact a steep price.Coming up on the next episode, were going to get into the stigma that comes with both mental health disorders and the treatments people turn to.Jon: The amount of times that I have had people say to me, Snap out of it. Dude, you got a great life. Youre a succeeding professional. You got great kids. Your wifes awesome. Like what do you have to be depressed about? What do you have to be depressed for?Sanders: If you or someone you know is facing a suicidal crisis or emotional distress, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. This is the Deep End. Im Laura Sanders. If you liked this podcast, tell your friends, or leave us a review. It helps the show a lot. Send us your questions and comments at podcasts at sciencenews.org. The Deep End is a production of Science News. Its based on original reporting by me, Laura Sanders. This episode was produced by Helen Thompson and mixed by Ella Rowen. Our project manager is Ashley Yeager. Nancy Shute is our editor in chief. Our music is by Blue Dot Sessions. The podcast is made possible in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John S. James L. Knight Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, with support from PRX.Episode creditsHost, reporter and writer: Laura SandersProducer: Helen ThompsonMixer: Ella RowenSound design: Helen Thompson and Ella RowenProject manager: Ashley YeagerShow art: Neil WebbMusic: Blue Dot SessionsSound effects: Epidemic Sound, Freesound.org, Mayfield Brain & SpineAdditional audio: Luke GroskinVoice of Patient 001: Nikk OgasaThis podcast was produced with support from PRX, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

Location, locationScientists launched a rocket from Svalbard, Norway, that measured Earths ambipolar electric field for the first time. The weak field may control the shape and evolution of the upper atmosphere and may contribute to Earths habitability, astronomy writer Lisa Grossman reported in At long last, scientists detect Earths hidden electric field.Reader Jayant Bhalerao, a college physics instructor, found the story useful in class: We will share it with our students, so that they can appreciate how things they are learning in the textbook have real-life applications.Bhalerao also wondered why scientists chose Svalbard as the rockets launchpad. Is there perhaps a scientific reason, or is it just infrastructure?To measure the ambipolar electric field, the rocket needed to measure the escape of Earths atmosphere at the poles, where some of the planets magnetic field lines are open, Grossman says.Earths magnetic field is kind of like a bar magnet, with field lines running from the North Pole to the South Pole in big closed loops. In these loops, charged particles are kept contained to Earths vicinity, Grossman says. But at the poles, some field lines shoot out into space, allowing charged particles to escape. The only launchpad thats far enough north to reach that open magnetic region is the one in Svalbard, she says.Measuring mergersScientists are becoming increasingly optimistic about the possibility of detecting primordial black holes. If they exist, these ancient black holes born just after the Big Bang may shed light on the mysteries of dark matter, freelance writer Elizabeth Quill reported in Black Hole Dawn.Cosmologists hope to spot signs of primordial black holes by studying black hole mergers, especially those with bizarre features, such as unexpected masses and spins.Reader Michael Cross asked how scientists determine those black hole properties.Scientists can observe black hole mergers through gravitational waves, which provide all sorts of information about the colliding bodies, says senior physics writer Emily Conover. As black holes spiral inward and merge with each other, scientists can detect the patterns of waves, how strong the waves are and how frequently they oscillate. They also look at how those patterns compare between multiple detectors, Conover says. Black holes with different masses or spins will give different patterns of waves.Tip of the hatReader Philip Korb shared a note of appreciation for the January issue.Sponsor MessageYour new expanded and glossy magazine is dazzling. Beautiful and with even more in-depth reporting. The AI in Medicine article was comprehensive, the human navigation article confirmed what using GPS has demonstrated, and the role of guano in creating the American empire fascinating, Korb wrote. Science News is an invaluable contributor to American life.Korbs wife, Sandra Wolf, M.D., started reading Science News as a child, back during its newsletter years. Wolf has maintained the subscription for decades, sharing it with Korb when they married.

When the first fire sparked in Los Angeles on January 7, people knew it could be bad. The city hadnt felt rain in months, and Santa Ana winds were predicted to blow from the east at near-hurricane strength. They just didnt know how bad it would get. It was a devil wind, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone told 60 Minutes. The conditions that night were unbearable.The resulting infernos killed at least 29 people and burned more than 200 square kilometers, wiping entire neighborhoods away. It would be reassuring to think that the blazes were a bizarre anomaly. But theyre not. In January, 2,128 fires burned across the country, from California to Virginia. Its the highest number for January in the last 10 years.With the LA fires finally receding, new threats are emerging. In this issue, we focus on the challenges that increasing numbers of people worldwide face after a wildfire. For one, staff writer Nikk Ogasa reports, deadly debris flows present an immediate threat. When rain finally arrives, it can cause scorched slopes to peel away, bulldozing neighborhoods. Even while the flames were still raging in LA, scientists were hard at work identifying areas most at risk so that people could be warned to stay clear.Heavy metals and toxic chemicals also threaten the health of anyone working or living in the city, senior writer Tina Hesman Saey reports. Theyre in the air, the water, even coating the insides of houses that didnt burn. By every estimate, cleaning up and rebuilding will take years.But the toughest challenge may be helping people regain their equilibrium. Mental health problems can persist for years after a natural disaster, social sciences writer Sujata Gupta reports, and people who didnt suffer the loss of a house or loved ones are still vulnerable to long-term distress. Well continue to cover the aftermath of the LA fires and other natural disasters fueled by a warming world.In this our third issue of the redesigned magazine, I want to thank all the readers who took the time to share their thoughts about our new look. SN just jumped about 50 points to me, one caller said. It is a nearly perfect magazine. Please keep your thoughts coming. We value your opinion, and we will continue to refine and improve the magazine to make it the best possible reading experience.

Even as Texas grapples with a measles outbreak that has already left one child dead, the childhood vaccination schedule is coming under new scrutiny by the Trump administration. The recommended list of immunizations starting at birth protects kids against more than a dozen deadly diseases from measles to whooping cough.U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known vaccine skeptic,included vaccines on his list of things to investigate to see if they have contributed to chronic diseases. And the future of the federal system for weighing the risks and benefits of vaccines in order to make recommendations is in limbo.Yet health experts overwhelmingly credit vaccines for measles and other preventable diseases as huge public health successes. For instance, before a measles vaccine became available in 1963, nearly all children got the highly contagious disease by the time they turned 15 and about 400 to 500 people in the United States died each year from the disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Vaccines have eradicated smallpox and have eliminated polio and other diseases from the United States and many other parts of the world.The turmoil currently surrounding vaccines and the diseases they are designed to tackle has left many people confused. Science News sat down with two experts to discuss some of the most frequently voiced concerns and questions.Meet the vaccines expertsAditya Gaur is a pediatric infectious diseases doctor and a clinical researcher at St. Judes Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis. Before coming to the United States in 1996, Gaur worked as a pediatrician in India before vaccines were routinely available. He and colleagues repeatedly treated cases of measles, he says, along with many other vaccine-preventable ailments.I saw tetanus in children and how uncomfortable it was for children, sometimes leading to death, he says. I saw diphtheria and how the throat looks and how difficult it can get to breathe. I saw those with pneumonia and air leaks in the lungs, and then the children that died. Ive seen polio in terms of paralysis. Thanks to vaccines, he hasnt seen a single case of any of those diseases since coming to the United States, he says.Iron lungs, such as this one used in 1938, became a symbol of polio, a viral disease that can paralyze people and leave them unable to breathe without assistance. Now, wild polio circulates only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but falling vaccination rates threaten to undo decades of work to eradicate the disease.Keystone/Getty ImagesKawsar Talaat, an infectious diseases doctor and vaccine safety researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, recalls how her father had polio as a child. He was born before the vaccine was available, she says. He was paralyzed as a child. Hes always had a limp, and then as he got older, he got weaker and weaker and weaker, and now hes in wheelchair Its a lifelong debilitating illness, even if you survive it.She has also treated vaccine-preventable diseases. When I was a resident, we would get waves of children in with dehydration due to rotavirus, and we would dread rotavirus season, she says. Now the waves are more like ripples.How do vaccines work?Vaccines train the immune system to fight off diseases. When a baby is born, they get some antibodies from their mothers that may give them some protection against certain illnesses for a few months, Gaur says. Thats why a new vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus is given during pregnancy to protect newborns.As the child grows, the immune system learns to combat illness either by getting infected or through immunization. Vaccines may consist of whole weakened or killed pathogens or parts of those organisms, called antigens. The vaccine doesnt cause disease, but it does teach the immune system what invaders to look out for, Gaur says.Although measles was declared eliminated from the United States in 2000, outbreaks still happen, mostly when infected travelers bring the virus back with them and spread it among unvaccinated people.As of February 28, at least 146 people in Texas had caught measles in an ongoing outbreak that started in late January. Twenty people have been hospitalized with the highly contagious and dangerous disease, and an unvaccinated school-age child has died. The disease also has been reported in eight other states this year.From 2002 through 2016, measles hospitalized 1,018 people in the United States. Of those, 34 died; some others had serious complications including kidney failure, brain swelling, pneumonia, blood clots and eye problems, researchers reported in PLOS One in 2020.In contrast, the side effects from measles vaccines usually consist of a sore arm and sometimes a fever or mild rash. Yes, a child can see natural measles and, if they survive, they have good immunity. But there is no upfront way of saying what will be the outcome, Gaur says. With vaccines, you are controlling that exposure and teaching the immune system how to fight off an infection.Even more benign infections may have serious consequences that vaccines can prevent, Talaat says. For most people, chicken pox is mild, but not for everybody. I have seen kids in the hospital with really severe life-threatening bacterial infections that occurred because their skin was disrupted by chicken pox, she says. Kids have lost so much skin, its as if they were severely burned. Its happened in childrens groins, and so their future fertility and sexual function have been affected.Vaccines not only protect children but also keep them from spreading disease to people in the community at high risk of complications, Talaat says. And even if the disease is mild, it still means that that child will miss a week or more of school, and that their parent will miss a week or more of work.Most of the cases in the Texas outbreak are children who are unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status. That mirrors previous U.S. outbreaks: Of 285 reported cases in 2024, nearly 90 percent of those sickened were not vaccinated, CDC data show.Losing herd immunityIn the 20092010 school year, at least 20 states reported that 95 percent or more of their kindergartners were vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, according to the CDC. That is the threshold that helps protect people in the community who cant be vaccinated because of weakened immune systems or other medical issues. It essentially erects a wall of vaccinated people between the vulnerable and the measles virus. By the 20232024 school year, just 11 states had vaccination rates among kindergartners at or above the 95 percent threshold. Click the arrows to see how MMR vaccination rates among kindergartners has changed between those two school years.MMR vaccine coverage for U.S. kindergartners by school year C. Chang C. Chang Across the United States, vaccination rates have been falling for measles, as well as other childhood diseases. When more than 95 percent of people are vaccinated against measles, there is community or herd immunity that can protect people with weakened immune systems who cant be vaccinated. But measles vaccination rates among kindergartners has fallen from 95.2 percent in the 20192020 school year to 92.7 percent in 20232024. That left about 280,000 kindergartners vulnerable to measles during the last school year, according to the CDC.How many deaths and illnesses are prevented by vaccines?Worldwide, vaccination against 14 pathogens saved 154 million lives over the last half century, researchers reported in 2024 in the Lancet. In the United States, routine childhood vaccinations prevented more than 24 million cases of disease in 2019, including about 1,000 cases of tetanus and more than 4.2 million chicken pox cases, researchers reported in Pediatrics in 2022.Childhood vaccines cover diseases including polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), measles, mumps, rubella, rotavirus, hepatitis, chicken pox and meningitis. They also cover infections caused by bacteria, including Haemophilus influenzae and Pneumococcal bacteria. All those diseases may cause severe infections that land people in the hospital and can be deadly. Some may have lifelong consequences.Those are all long-lasting vaccines, some even conveying lifetime protection. In addition, yearly vaccines for flu and COVID-19 are also recommended. About 1.2 million influenza cases in the United States were averted in 2019, an estimated 17 percent reduction from what it would have been without vaccination. COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have saved at least 14 million lives globally in the first year after they were rolled out, researchers reported in 2022 in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health. Immunizations against human papilloma virus to prevent cervical, head, throat and other cancers are recommended for older children. Cervical cancer rates have plummeted for young women vaccinated against HPV.Downward trendVaccination rates for kindergartners in the United States have fallen in recent years. During the 20232024 school year, just 92.3 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) and 92.7 percent were protected from measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). Varicella (chicken pox), polio and hepatitis B vaccination rates have also dropped in recent years.The ability to add new vaccines or update existing ones, such as the flu and COVID vaccines has been jeopardized by the Trump administrations withdrawal from the World Health Organization and cancellation of important meetings of committees that advise the CDC and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about vaccines. Among other considerations, nixing those meetings may threaten the United States ability to get updated flu vaccines for the next flu season.This decision and other federal efforts to underminewell-establishedscience aboutvaccine safety puts everyone at risk, especially when we are currently experiencingthe worst U.S. flu season in more than a decade, Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said in a statement.The CDC estimates that at least 33 million people have gotten the flu so far this season. An estimated 430,000 people have been hospitalized and 19,000 have died, making this the first high severity flu season since the 20172018 season.How did the childhood vaccine schedule come about?It happened very gradually over time, Talaat says. Advisers for the CDC and FDA carefully weigh the benefits and risks of each vaccine against the harms caused by infections and recommend whether to add a shot to the schedule and when to give it.Once we started making vaccines, children were a natural target because they were the most susceptible to a lot of these infections, Talaat says. For instance, rotavirus infections produce diarrhea that can easily dehydrate young children and land them in the hospital, she says. That vaccine is given when babies are 2 months old.Pertussis vaccines are also among the earliest given because the younger the baby, the more susceptible they are to [whooping cough], Talaat says. Their airways are so small that theyre more likely to die from it.With measles vaccines, Talaat says, theres a sweet spot when you want to get the vaccine into kids to protect them, but you dont want to give it too early, because antibodies passed from the mother to the baby can interfere with the vaccine. So the measles, mumps and rubella shot is typically first given when infants are 12- to 15-months old.Vaccines that protect against HPV and meningococcal disease arent given until kids are preteens or teenagers because they are at higher risk of infection during the teen or young adult years.Is it safe for children to get many vaccines at once?Yes. Many childhood vaccines protect against multiple diseases in a single shot, such as one that combines polio, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzaetype b. Another guards against up to 20 strains of Pneumococcal bacteria. So a 2-month-old might get a couple of shots with protection against more than two dozen pathogens, along with a drink containing the rotavirus vaccine.A baby gets inoculated with the rotavirus vaccine, which is given as a liquid instead of a shot. Thats one of 14 diseases that U.S. children are commonly immunized against.chameleonseye/iStock/Getty Images PlusWe have done studies that show that giving these vaccines together is safe and that the immune responses to the vaccines arent damaged, Talaat says.We are exposed to lots of things every day in our environment. Our bodies and our immune systems are built to handle that, she says. And when we get multiple vaccines and multiple antigens at the same time our bodies can handle that, too.She adds that the reason we give kids a bunch of vaccines all at once is to make sure that they get them. Its hard on families to keep bringing their children back to the doctor to get their shots, she says.What are the side effects or possible harms from vaccines?Sore arms are common since most vaccines are given as shots. Anything which is injectable may cause an immediate owie, and then may cause some swelling and tenderness, Gaur says. Depending on the vaccine, mild side effects might also include short-lived fever, fatigue, muscle or joint pain and maybe a rash.Some people develop rare severe side effects such as allergic reactions. Certain groups have a higher risk of that. For instance, adolescent and young adult males are more likely than other people to develop myocarditis and pericarditis inflammation of the heart or the sac around the heart after a COVID-19 vaccine. But getting a COVID-19 infection is more likely to cause those heart problems than the vaccine, and the vaccine can prevent severe disease and hospitalization, so regulators calculate that benefits of vaccination outweigh the low risks.How are vaccines tested?Vaccines go through many years of development in lab and animal tests before they are tested in people. Clinical trials in people happen in multiple phases.First, vaccines like any treatment are tested in small numbers of people for safety. Usually this involves giving some people in the trial the vaccine while others get a placebo. Thats necessary, Gaur says, because things happen to humans, as in, we may get headaches, we may get fevers. The placebo helps sort out which symptoms come from the vaccines.Additional phases of clinical trials test vaccines in increasingly larger groups of people to look for rare side effects and to determine how well the vaccines prevent disease. New vaccines are tested against placebos in those stages as well. But if there is an existing vaccine, it would not be ethical to leave people unprotected by giving them a placebo, Gaur and Talaat say. Instead, potential vaccines would go head-to-head with existing ones to show that they work at least as well if not better than what is already available.Unlike medications and therapies, which are usually given to sick people to keep them from getting sicker, vaccines are given to healthy people. That means that side effects associated with other treatments would never be tolerated for vaccines. Says Talaat: Vaccines pass a higher bar than most treatments.

Imagine seeing cake in a virtual world, then tasting it. Researchers have taken a step toward that reality with a device that delivers virtual tastes by squirting chemicals onto the tongue.The system, called e-Taste, can detect chemicals in foodstuffs and wirelessly transmit this information to a device that delivers the same or equivalent chemicals to a users tongue. By combining different chemicals, the device can mimic flavors ranging from cake to coffee, researchers report February 28 in Science Advances.This is a step towards the next generation of human-machine interfaces and virtual reality, says materials engineer Yizhen Jia of Ohio State University.The system uses five edible chemicals: glucose for sweet, citric acid for sour, sodium chloride for salty, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for savory umami. These chemicals are infused into gels inside the device, which get mixed in tiny channels. An electromagnetic pump delivers the mixture to the tongue via a flexible, ribbonlike conduit inserted into the mouth.To evaluate e-Taste, Jia and colleagues first had 10 participants distinguish between five intensities of sourness produced by the device. The researchers then created five complex tastes lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup and coffee based on their chemical compositions. Six participants were trained to recognize these flavors, achieving an overall accuracy of nearly 87 percent. Some tastes, such as lemonade and cake, were easier to identify than others, such as fried egg.Previous efforts have attempted to simulate taste through electrical stimulation of the tongue, but this method remains poorly understood. We dont have a hundred percent understanding of how the tongue and taste perception works, says Nimesha Ranasinghe, a computer scientist at the University of Maine in Orono who was not involved in the study. Taste and smell, being chemical sensors, are very challenging. Chemicals, for now, can reproduce a wider range of tastes than electrical stimulation.However, taste alone is not enough. Real coffee comes with the smells and feeling of coffee, Jia says. Only putting chemicals on your tongue isnt going to be comparable.To help bridge that gap, Jia and his colleagues are working to incorporate smell using gas sensors and machine learning. The team envisions applications in immersive gaming and even sensory rehabilitation, such as for individuals who lost their sense of taste due to COVID. Perhaps the biggest unknown is how willing people will be to wear a device that squirts chemicals onto their tongue. We are very reserved when it comes to putting anything inside our mouth, Ranasinghe says. The look, feel and comfort are really important. Its a major aspect of this people have to look into in future.

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, is probably shedding comets and asteroids into our solar system and even producing a few meteors in our sky.Located just 4.3 light-years from Earth, Alpha Centauri consists of three stars that revolve around one another. If Alpha Centauri has an Oort cloud of distant comets as the sun does, about a million of these objects larger than a football field are now in our solar system, astronomers Cole Gregg and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, estimate in work submitted February 5 to arXiv.org.Most of [the objects] would be in the far reaches of the solar system, Gregg says. That puts them well beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they are mingling with the native objects in the suns own Oort cloud of cometary bodies.Astronomers have only ever detected one interstellar asteroid and one interstellar comet in our solar system. But neither came from Alpha Centauri.Just as Jupiters gravity catapulted the two Voyager spacecraft onto interstellar trajectories, so the stars of Alpha Centauri and their planets should do the same to some of the comets and asteroids that swing around them. A small percentage of the ejected objects 0.03 percent pass through our solar system, Gregg and Wiegert say, but none of the large bodies is close enough for telescopes to see.Still, small particles from Alpha Centauri probably reach Earths atmosphere, where they burn up. Gregg and Wiegert estimate that up to 10 meteors worldwide come from Alpha Centauri each year.We expect these numbers to go up by about a factor of 10 when Alpha Centauri is closest, Gregg says. Alpha Centauri is racing toward us at 0.007 light-years per century (80,000 kilometers per hour) and will be closest 28,000 years from now, when it will be 3.2 light-years from Earth.But 10 or even 100 meteors a year is a pittance compared with Earths annual total of 7 trillion meteors. Furthermore, because Alpha Centauri lies far to the south, its meteors appear only in the far southern sky, out of sight of most people on Earth, Gregg and Wiegert say. Their calculations are right, but the problem hides basically in the assumptions, says Simon Portegies Zwart, an astronomer at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. We dont know the rate at which Alpha Centauri ejects material, he says, which means the actual number of interstellar objects coming from our near neighbor could be much greater or smaller than the study calculates. Nevertheless, the work demonstrates that our solar system is not an isolated object in space, he says. We are connected to other objects like Alpha Centauri, like other stars in the neighborhood.

In the TV series Doctor Who, treeborgs supply fresh air to spaceship passengers. Part tree, part robot, these devices convert starlight into oxygen. In Nnedi Okorafors fantasy novel Zahrah the Windseeker, children receive their own flora computers made of leaves and vines, grown from CPU seeds and shaped into useful tech. Although these devices are fictional, flower-powered machines are getting real as a new generation of biohybrid technology blooms.Engineers have long strived to make lifelike robots. But re-creating the complex functions of, say, a hand or leaf is impossible with synthetic materials, says Anand Mishra, an engineer at Cornell University. There is a point where technology limits us.Using life-forms to build machines can overcome some of these limits. Living tissue, for example, has evolved all sorts of ways to scope out the environment seeing light, feeling warmth, smelling and tasting food. To make robots that are similarly sensitive to their surroundings, Mishra has turned to fungal tissue.Fungi arent plants, but Mishra is interested in one of fungis most plantlike features, mycelia. These rootlike structures tunnel through soil for nutrients and can detect environmental cues such as light, heat and chemicals.Mishras team grew mycelia directly into electrodes attached to two robots. The fungi communicated with the robots through electrical signals called action potentials. These zaps are similar to those produced by heart and nerve cells.Mycelia produce spontaneous action potentials, which triggered the biobots to walk and roll around. When flashed with ultraviolet light, the mycelia produced stronger zaps, which changed the robots gait and showed that the bots could respond to the environment, Mishras team reported in 2024 in Science Robotics.Using fungi in biohybrid robots is still pretty new, Mishra says. His team now hopes to test how such tech responds to other cues, such as gases. One way their robots sensory superpowers might help in the real world is in agriculture. Future shroom bots could walk through crop fields, testing soil health and other conditions as they go.While fungi may help robots better interact with the world, plant powers could help devices better survive it. Many artificial [technologies] have a shelf life, says materials scientist Fabian Meder of the SantAnna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Electronics start to break down in a few years. Yet the oldest trees can stand tall for thousands of years. And while broken electronics require repairs, plants can recover from damage and adapt to new environments.Meder has designed artificial leaves that tap an unlikely energy source: static electricity created by wind.He places artificial leaves on plants. The fake leaves include a layer of rubber a material good at building up static charge. When wind rustles one of these bionic plants, the artificial leaves bump into real leaves. This creates static charges that pass into the inner tissue of the real leaf, producing a current. This energy can be harvested through electrodes placed in the leaf. Meders studies have shown that such devices can light up LEDs.Working with living materials poses design challenges, such as keeping the living parts alive. Like fungi, plants need certain resources to stay healthy. Photosynthesis is a big part of that, Meder says. So engineers might need to use transparent materials to make parts that would otherwise block out sunlight.Meder is excited about this new way to tap a potential energy source: Its always about harvesting [these] crumbs of energy which we otherwise would just lose.Sponsor MessageAlmost like those Doctor Who treeborgs surviving on the light of faraway stars.

With air filters and weekly wipe-downs and vacuuming, NASA goes to great lengths to keep the International Space Station clean so that astronauts stay healthy. But astronauts still often experience health problems like immune dysfunction, skin rashes and other inflammatory conditions. One reason may be because the ISS might be too clean, a new study suggests.Microbes, tiny living organisms like bacteria and viruses, play an important role in human health. But samples of surfaces in the ISS reflect a striking lack of microbial diversity, Rodolfo Salido Bentez, a bioengineer at University of California, San Diego, and colleagues report February 27 in Cell.Astronauts swabbed surfaces in the kitchen, bathroom, dining space and other areas on the ISS. They then sent the 803 samples to Benitez and colleagues for analysis.The ISS has lower microbial diversity than most buildings on Earth. And nearly all of those microbes come from humans and building materials, while less than 0.3 percent are from natural environmental sources like soil and water. Like most indoor environments on Earth, the vast majority of microbes originate from human skin.Inside and outside the body, microbes compete for resources and space, so maintaining a diverse set keeps any one of them from taking over and causing an health problems. Low microbial diversity in hospitals, for example, leads to a higher risk of infection. Even the microbes in your house can affect your health. One study found that Amish communities have a lower risk of asthma than other communities with similar lifestyles because their household dust contains microbes from farm animals.A bag full of custom-made sampling devices used to collect surface swabs throughout the International Space Station floats in the cupola, an observing area for activities outside the station. NASAIf were outside, were generally exposed to a lot more microbial diversity from touching animals or soil, says Sean Gibbons, a microbiome researcher at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. When were inside, these walls, these surfaces are acting like mirrors. Theyre essentially reflecting back upon us our own microbial diversity.Maintaining a healthy diversity of microbes in confined spaces will be a growing concern as astronauts spend more time in space and new missions begin. Scientists will need to test new ways of adding more good germs to the mix, like bringing animals aboard or stocking the ISS pantry with fermented foods, says Pieter Dorrestein, a chemical biologist at UC San Diego.The reality is that were going to inhabit space at some point, so this work will give us the first insight in terms of the things that we need to add and remove, Dorrestein says. The most important message that we can pass on is how important is to not only look at whats present, but also whats absent.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 is perhaps most famous for entombing the Roman city of Pompeii. But in nearby Herculaneum, also buried in the eruption, the preserved skeleton of a young man lying in bed contained a surprising find: glass remnants of his brain.When researchers studied the shiny samples, they saw what appeared to be nerve cells. A new study now uncovers more details into how the glass may have formed, the team reports February 27 in Scientific Reports.Glass forms when a liquid usually molten sand is quickly cooled. Thats how manufacturers make windows and cups. The process can also occur naturally, like when lighting strikes a sandy desert, forming lumps of glass called fulgurites. Before the young Romans brain remnants were discovered, however, glassy biological soft tissues had not been found in nature, the researchers say.When we realized that there was really a glassy brain, the scientific question was: how is it possible? says Guido Giordano, a geologist and volcanologist at Roma Tre University.Giordano and colleagues used a technique called differential scanning calorimetry, which involved heating the already glassy brain shards, to determine the temperature at which the glass had formed. The shards underwent structural changes at temperatures over 510 Celsius (950 Fahrenheit), suggesting thats the temperature the brain tissue hit originally to turn to glass.The researchers reasoned that the swift onslaught of hot volcanic ash, rock and gas that entombed Herculaneum could not have been responsible for turning the brain chunks to glass. Similar pyroclastic flows have been found to max out at 465 C and would not have cooled fast enough to turn brain to glass. Instead, a much hotter ash cloud probably hit the young man and dissipated fast, allowing for the necessary cooling. Only later were the remains buried in the thick volcanic debris, the team says.So why didnt the young mans brain completely disintegrate in the extreme heat? His skull may have had something to do with it, the researchers suggest. The bones may have protected against direct contact with the ash cloud.

Historically, married women in the United States have done the lions share of their households laundry, cooking and cleaning. But that gendered norm appears to be shifting, with the gap between the time married women and men spent on such chores shrinking by 40 percent over the last two decades, researchers report February 6 in Socius.By the numbers, from 2003 to 2005, married women spent, on average, 4.2 hours per week on traditionally feminine tasks, such as meal prep and tidying up, for every 1 hour married men spent on those same tasks, according to the American Time Use Survey, a nationally representative survey that shows how, where and with whom Americans spend their time. By the 2022 to 2023 survey, the gender gap had shrunk to married women spending 2.5 hours on those sorts of chores for every 1 hour by married men.Men are doing quote, unquote womens work, says Melissa Milkie, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. There is a hopeful story here.Milkies findings add to a longstanding debate among gender scholars over whether or not the gender revolution marked by increasing parity between mens and womens employment and division of household tasks has stalled over the past two decades. That is, in the 1960s married women did seven times more housework than their husbands. By the mid-1990s, those numbers had plummeted, with married women doing roughly twice as much housework than their husbands.Since then, progress has dropped off. In 2003, for instance, women devoted 18.5 hours per week, on average, to all housework including traditionally feminine tasks, such as cleaning, cooking and laundry, as well as childcare, shopping, outdoor chores and gardening compared with married mens 10.1 hours per week. Twenty years later, women were spending 17.7 hours on such tasks compared with married mens 11.2 hours per week: Even in the 2020s, married women still do roughly 1.6 times more housework than married men.But looking at hours spent on all forms of housework in aggregate masks real progress, Milkie argues. Besides a shrinking gap in time spent on traditionally feminine chores, the hours married men and women spend shopping for groceries and other household needs is nearing parity. The gender gap in childcare hours remains large, with married women spending almost twice as many hours caring for their children than married men. But the persistence of that gap is partially explained by the fact that both married men and women have increased the time they spend with their children since 2003.A limitation of the study is that it cannot tease out the time single parents spend on such tasks or account for time spent on other caregiving responsibilities, such as elder care, that typically fall to women, the team notes.Moreover, demographic shifts over the past two decades can explain the decreasing amount of time women devote to household tasks, the team found. For example, younger, college-educated married women are doing less housework than older, less educated married women. Yet similar demographic shifts cannot explain why men are spending more time on housework. Instead, the researchers suspect that shifting beliefs around what constitutes womens work might underpin mens change in behavior.Trends that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic are telling, Milkie says. While everyone significantly increased time spent on chores and childcare in 2020, by 2023, the hours women spent on such tasks had largely returned to the pre-pandemic baseline. But men have remained more equal contributors. In other words, Milkie says, men developed new household habits and, to some extent, those habits have persisted.Its easy to look at the small drop in womens overall housework between 2003 and 2023 and lament the glacial pace of change, says sociologist and demographer Mila Kolpashnikova of The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who was not involved with this work. But breaking down chore types to look at those deemed feminine shows that meaningful cultural shifts may be afoot. You can look at [these changes] as a glass-half-empty type of change. But you can also look at it as a glass-half-full type of change, as this paper shows, she says.

The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans has a brain just about the width of a human hair. Yet this animals itty-bitty organ coordinates and computes complex movements as the worm forages for food. When I look at [C. elegans] and consider its brain, Im really struck by the profound elegance and efficiency, says Daniela Rus, a computer scientist at MIT. Rus is so enamored with the worms brain that she cofounded a company, Liquid AI, to build a new type of artificial intelligence inspired by it.Rus is part of a wave of researchers who think that making traditional AI more brainlike could create leaner, nimbler and perhaps smarter technology. To improve AI truly, we need toincorporate insights from neuroscience, says Kanaka Rajan, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard University.Such neuromorphic technology probably wont completely replace regular computers or traditional AI models, says Mike Davies, who directs the Neuromorphic Computing Lab at Intel in Santa Clara, Calif. Rather, he sees a future in which many types of systems coexist.The tiny worm C. elegans is inspiration for a new type of artificial intelligence.Hakan Kvarnstrom/Science SourceImitating brains isnt a new idea. In the 1950s, neurobiologist Frank Rosenblatt devised the perceptron. The machine was a highly simplified model of the way a brains nerve cells communicate, with a single layer of interconnected artificial neurons, each performing a single mathematical function.Decades later, the perceptrons basic design helped inspire deep learning, a computing technique that recognizes complex patterns in data using layer upon layer of nested artificial neurons. These neurons pass input data along, manipulating it to produce an output. But, this approach cant match a brains ability to adapt nimbly to new situations or learn from a single experience. Instead, most of todays AI models devour massive amounts of data and energy to learn to perform impressive tasks, such as guiding a self-driving car.Its just bigger, bigger, bigger, says Subutai Ahmad, chief technology officer of Numenta, a company looking to human brain networks for efficiency. Traditional AI models are so brute force and inefficient.In January, the Trump administration announced Stargate, a plan to funnel $500 billion into new data centers to support energy-hungry AI models. But a model released by the Chinese company DeepSeek is bucking that trend, duplicating chatbots capabilities with less data and energy. Whether brute force or efficiency will win out is unclear.Meanwhile, neuromorphic computing experts have been making hardware, architecture and algorithms ever more brainlike. People are bringing out new concepts and new hardware implementations all the time, says computer scientist Catherine Schuman of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. These advances mainly help with biological brain research and sensor development and havent been a part of mainstream AI. At least, not yet.Here are four neuromorphic systems that hold potential for improving AI.Making artificial neurons more lifelikeReal neurons are complex living cells with many parts. They are constantly receiving signals from the environment, with their electric charge fluctuating until it crosses a specific threshold and fires. This activity sends an electrical impulse across the cell and to neighboring neurons. Neuromorphic computing engineers have managed to mimic this pattern in artificial neurons. These neurons, part of spiking neural networks, simulate the signals of an actual brain, creating discrete spikes that carry information through the network. Such a network may be modeled in software or built in hardware.Spikes are not modeled in traditional AIs deep learning networks. Instead, in those models, each artificial neuron is a little ball with one type of information processing, says Mihai Petrovici, a neuromorphic computing researcher at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Each of these little balls links to the others through connections called parameters. Usually, every input into the network triggers every parameter to activate at once, which is inefficient. DeepSeek divides traditional AIs deep learning network into smaller sections that can activate separately, which is more efficient.But real brain and artificial spiking networks achieve efficiency a bit differently. Each neuron is not connected to every other one. Also, only if electrical signals reach a specific threshold does a neuron fire and send information to its connections. The network activates sparsely rather than all at once.Comparing networksTypical deep learning networks are dense, with interconnections among all their identical neurons. Brain networks are sparse, and their neurons can take on different roles. Neuroscientists are still working out how complex brain networks are actually organized.J.D. Monaco, K. Rajan and G.M. HwangJ.D. Monaco, K. Rajan and G.M. HwangImportantly, brains and spiking networks combine memory and processing. The connections that represent the memory are also the elements that do the computation, Petrovici says. Mainstream computer hardware which runs most AI separates memory and processing. AI processing usually happens in a graphical processing unit, or GPU. A different hardware component, such as random access memory, or RAM, handles storage. This makes for simpler computer architecture. But zipping data back and forth among these components eats up energy and slows down computation.The neuromorphic computer chip BrainScaleS-2 combines these efficient features. It contains sparsely connected spiking neurons physically built into hardware, and the neural connections store memories and perform computation.BrainScaleS-2 was developed as part of the Human Brain Project, a 10-year effort to understand the human brain by modeling it in a computer. But some researchers looked at how the tech developed from the project might make AI more efficient. For example, Petrovici trained different AIs to play the video game Pong. A spiking network running on the BrainScaleS-2 hardware used a thousandth of the energy as a simulation of the same network running on a CPU. But the real test was to compare the neuromorphic setup with a deep learning network running on a GPU. Training the spiking system to recognize handwriting used a hundredth the energy of the typical system, the team found.For spiking neural network hardware to be a real player in the AI realm, it has to be scaled up and distributed. Then, it could be useful to computation more broadly, Schuman says.Connecting billions of spiking neuronsThe academic teams working on BrainScaleS-2 currently have no plans to scale up the chip, but some of the worlds biggest tech companies, like Intel and IBM, do.In 2023, IBM introduced its NorthPole neuromorphic chip, which combines memory and processing to save energy. And in 2024, Intel announced the launch of Hala Point, the largest neuromorphic system in the world right now, says computer scientist Craig Vineyard of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.Despite that impressive superlative, theres nothing about the system that visually stands out, Vineyard says. Hala Point fits into a luggage-sized box. Yet it contains 1,152 of Intels Loihi 2 neuromorphic chips for a record-setting total of 1.15 billion electronic neurons roughly the same number of neurons as in an owl brain.Like BrainScaleS-2, each Loihi 2 chip contains a hardware version of a spiking neural network. The physical spiking network also uses sparsity and combines memory and processing. This neuromorphic computer has fundamentally different computational characteristics than a regular digital machine, Schuman says.This BrainScaleS-2 computer chip was built to work like a brain. It contains 512 simulated neurons connected with up to 212,000 synapses. Heidelberg Univ.These features improve Hala Points efficiency compared with that of typical computer hardware. The realized efficiency we get is definitely significantly beyond what you can achieve with GPU technology, Davies says.In 2024, Davies and a team of researchers showed that the Loihi 2 hardware can save energy even while running typical deep learning algorithms. The researchers took several audio and video processing tasks and modified their deep learning algorithms so they could run on the new spiking hardware. This process introduces sparsity in the activity of the network, Davies says.A deep learning network running on a regular digital computer processes every single frame of audio or video as something completely new. But spiking hardware maintains some knowledge of what it saw before, Davies says. When part of the audio or video stream stays the same from one frame to the next, the system doesnt have to start over from scratch. It can keep the network idle as much as possible when nothing interesting is changing. On one video task the team tested, a Loihi 2 chip running a sparsified version of a deep learning algorithm used 1/150th the energy of a GPU running the regular version of the algorithm.The audio and video test showed that one type of architecture can do a good job running a deep learning algorithm. But developers can reconfigure the spiking neural networks within Loihi 2 and BrainScaleS-2 in numerous ways, coming up with new architectures that use the hardware differently. They can also implement different kinds of algorithms using these architectures.Its not yet clear what algorithms and architectures would make the best use of this hardware or offer the highest energy savings. But researchers are making headway. A January 2025 paper introduced a new way to model neurons in a spiking network, including both the shape of a spike and its timing. This approach makes it possible for an energy-efficient spiking system to use one of the learning techniques that has made mainstream AI so successful.Neuromorphic hardware may be best suited to algorithms that havent even been invented yet. Thats actually the most exciting thing, says neuroscientist James Aimone, also of Sandia National Labs. The technology has a lot of potential, he says. It could make the future of computing energy efficient and more capable.Designing an adaptable brainNeuroscientists agree that one of the most important features of a living brain is the ability to learn on the go. And it doesnt take a large brain to do this. C. elegans, one of the first animals to have its brain completely mapped, has 302 neurons and around 7,000 synapses that allow it to learn continuously and efficiently as it explores its world.Ramin Hasani studied how C. elegans learns as part of his graduate work in 2017 and was working to model what scientists knew about the worms brains in computer software. Rus found out about this work while out for a run with Hasanis adviser at an academic conference. At the time, she was training AI models with hundreds of thousands of artificial neurons and half a million parameters to operate self-driving cars.A C. elegans brain (its neurons are colored by type in this reconstruction) learns constantly and is a model for building more efficient AI.D. Witvliet et al/bioRxiv.org 2020If a worm doesnt need a huge network to learn, Rus realized, maybe AI models could make do with smaller ones, too.She invited Hasani and one of his colleagues to move to MIT. Together, the researchers worked on a series of projects to give self- driving cars and drones more wormlike brains ones that are small and adaptable. The end result was an AI algorithm that the team calls a liquid neural network.You can think of this like a new flavor of AI, says Rajan, the Harvard neuroscientist.Standard deep learning networks, despite their impressive size, learn only during a training phase of development. When training is complete, the networks parameters cant change. The model stays frozen, Rus says. Liquid neural networks, as the name suggests, are more fluid. Though they incorporate many of the same techniques as standard deep learning, these new networks can shift and change their parameters over time. Rus says that they learn and adapt based on the inputs they see, much like biological systems.To design this new algorithm, Hasani and his team wrote mathematical equations that mimic how a worms neurons activate in response to information that changes over time. These equations govern the liquid neural networks behavior.Such equations are notoriously difficult to solve, but the team found a way to approximate a solution, making it possible to run the network in real time. This solution is remarkable, Rajan says.In 2023, Rus, Hasani and their colleagues showed that liquid neural networks could adapt to new situations better than much larger typical AI models. The team trained two types of liquid neural networks and four types of typical deep learning networks to pilot a drone toward different objects in the woods. When training was complete, they put one of the training objects a red chair into completely different environments, including a patio and a lawn beside a building. The smallest liquid network, containing just 34 artificial neurons and around 12,000 parameters, outperformed the largest standard AI network they tested, which contained around 250,000 parameters.The team started the company Liquid AI around the same time and has worked with the U.S. militarys Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to test their model flyingan actual aircraft.The company has also scaled up its models to compete directly with regular deep learning. In January, it announced LFM-7B, a 7-billion-parameter liquid neural network that generates answers to prompts. The team reports that the network outperforms typical language models of the same size.Im excited about Liquid AI because I believe it could transform the future of AI and computing, Rus says.This approach wont necessarily use less energy than mainstream AI. Its constant adaptation makes it computationally intensive, Rajan says. But the approach represents a significant step towards more realistic AI that more closely mimics the brain.Matt ChinworthBuilding on human brain structureWhile Rus is working off the blueprint of the worm brain, others are taking inspiration from a very specific region of the human brain the neocortex, a wrinkly sheet of tissue that covers the brains surface.The neocortex is the brains powerhouse for higher-order thinking, Rajan says. Its where sensory information, decision-making and abstract reasoning converge.This part of the brain contains six thin horizontal layers of cells, organized into tens of thousands of vertical structures called cortical columns. Each column contains around 50,000 to 100,000 neurons arranged in several hundred vertical minicolumns.These minicolumns are the primary drivers of intelligence, neuroscientist and computer scientist Jeff Hawkins argues. In other parts of the brain, grid and place cells help an animal sense its position in space. Hawkins theorizes that these cells exist in minicolumns where they track and model all our sensations and ideas. For example, as a fingertip moves, he says, these columns make a model of what its touching. Its the same with our eyes and what we see, Hawkins explains in his 2021 book A Thousand Brains.Its a bold idea, Rajan says. Current neuroscience holds that intelligence involves the interaction of many different brain systems, not just these mapping cells, she says.Though Hawkins theory hasnt reached widespread acceptance in the neuroscience community, its generating a lot of interest, she says. That includes excitement about its potential uses for neuromorphic computing.Hawkins developed his theory at Numenta, a company he cofounded in 2005. The companys Thousand Brains Project, announced in 2024, is a plan for pairing computing architecture with new algorithms.In some early testing for the project a few years ago, the team described an architecture that included seven cortical columns, hundreds of minicolumns but spanned just three layers rather than six in the human neocortex. The team also developed a new AI algorithm that uses the column structure to analyze input data. Simulations showed that each column could learn to recognize hundreds of complex objects.The practical effectiveness of this system still needs to be tested. But the idea is that it will be capable of learning about the world in real time, similar to the algorithms of Liquid AI.For now, Numenta, based in Redwood, Calif., is using regular digital computer hardware to test these ideas. But in the future, custom hardware could implement physical versions of spiking neurons organized into cortical columns, Ahmad says.Using hardware designed for this architecture could make the whole system more efficient and effective. How the hardware works is going to influence how your algorithm works, Schuman says. It requires this codesign process.A new idea in computing can take off only with the right combination of algorithm, architecture and hardware. For example, DeepSeeks engineers noted that they achieved their gains in efficiency by codesigning algorithms, frameworks and hardware.When one of these isnt ready or isnt available, a good idea could languish, notes Sara Hooker, a computer scientist at the research lab Cohere in San Francisco and author of an influential 2021 paper titled The Hardware Lottery. This already happened with deep learning the algorithms to do it were developed back in the 1980s, but the technology didnt find success until computer scientists began using GPU hardware for AI processing in the early 2010s.Too often success depends on luck, Hooker said in a 2021 Association for Computing Machinery video. But if researchers spend more time considering new combinations of neuromorphic hardware, architectures and algorithms, they could open up new and intriguing possibilities for both AI and computing.

Humans lived under the leafy canopy of a West African rainforest by at least 150,000 years ago.Previously, the oldest secure evidence for humans living in African rainforests dated to about 18,000 years ago. The earliest human rainforest presence in the world had been placed at about 70,000 years ago in Southeast Asia.Now, new sediment analyses at Bt I, a site in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, indicate that people occupied wet tropical forests tens of thousands of years earlier, researchers report February 26 in Nature. The date and site location may help to explain how Homo sapiens evolved.A researcher holds one of the stone tools found at a site in the African nation of Ivory Coast that helped to uncover the oldest known human rainforest occupation.Jimbob Blinkhorn, MPGBt I was discovered in the early 1980s. Stone artifacts unearthed there from 1982 to 1993 include large implements suited for cutting fibrous plants and other tropical forest resources. In 2020, archaeologist and geochronologist Ben Arous and colleagues, including one of the sites original excavators, Francois Yod Gud, relocated the site.Their new investigation completed shortly before quarrying destroyed Bt I used two sediment dating methods to obtain an age estimate for the sites stone tools. Sediment samples contained pollen, plant remains and chemical remnants of plants waxy coating typical of humid, West African rainforests today. Dense woods resulted in low levels of grass pollen at the ancient site, the researchers report.Ancient rainforest pioneers served as ancestors of later Stone Age populations in Ivory Coasts rainforests and in coastal mangrove forests farther north in whats now Senegal, suspects Eleanor Scerri, Arous colleague at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.The new findings also strengthen an argument that H. sapiens evolved roughly 300,000 years ago via mating among populations based in different African regions and habitats, including West Africas rainforests. Even around 150,000 years ago, when these groups coalesced, their exchanges shaped the course of our evolution and likely contributed to the success of our species, Scerri says.

Sugar is a siren song to many people. But some friendly gut bacteria might help you resist its lure. At least thats what ads for some probiotics claim.For years consumers have been bombarded with supposed health benefits of taking probiotics: improve gut health, get more energy and feel lighter. Some also claim to reduce sugar cravings.But can a daily dose of bacteria really calm cravings for candy and cookies?The idea is not totally out there. Studies with mice have found that missing some bacteria, Lactobacillus salivarius, L. gasseri, L. johnsonii and Muribaculaceae, can send the animals on sugar benders. And its not just sweets; mice missing L. johnsonii and Muribaculaceae will also gorge on high-fat foods. Anything thats pleasurable, the mice will eat more if theyre missing these organisms, says microbiologist Sarkis Mazmanian of Caltech. Returning the microbes to mice reduces bingeing.In a recent study in Nature Microbiology, researchers in China discovered how the gut bacterium Bacteroides vulgatus and a molecule it produces pantothenate, aka vitamin B5 can reduce rodents preference for sugar.The researchers studied mice genetically engineered to lack FFAR4, a sensor for some fatty acids, in their guts. For unknown reasons, lacking this sensor causes levels of B. vulgatus and pantothenate to go down, and these mice gorge on sugar. Giving the bacteria and vitamin to these mice lowered sugar consumption all thanks to a chain reaction involving GLP-1, a protein that has become famous because semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic mimic its action in controlling blood sugar and weight.Pantothenate stimulates GLP-1 production. In turn, GLP-1 spurs production of a protein called FGF21. That protein does something scientists arent yet sure what in the hypothalamus, an appetite-control center in the brain, to reduce the desire for sugar.B. vulgatus reduced sugar cravings only in mice lacking FFAR4. That suggests the bacterium or vitamin B5 may do nothing to stop sugar cravings in most people because they have intact FFAR4, Mazmanian says.And in some cases, it may even be harmful. Theres some evidence that B. vulgatus has a dark side, he says. The organism can cause intestinal inflammation in rats with certain genetic alterations. While most people dont share the rats mutations, an excess of B. vulgatus could cause tummy troubles for some.Even if the animal data are suggestive, the reality is, no one knows whether any bacteria that reduce sugar cravings in mice will do the same for people. It just hasnt been tested yet in people, and what works in lab mice sometimes fails to hold up in human studies.Companies arent even required to test probiotics in people or prove that they work, says Pieter Cohen, an internal medicine doctor at Harvard Medical School who studies supplement safety. Because probiotics are sold as dietary supplements, they arent subject to regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.As long as they dont claim to treat diseases, Cohen says, companies can market their products as they choose, though they do need some evidence to back up their claims. That evidence? Mostly animal data.It is disconnected from any actual evidence in humans that they work, Cohen says.Even Mazmanian, who studies beneficial bacteria, has reservations about commercial probiotics. In 2025, Im still skeptical of these claims, he says. Products that claim to reduce sugar cravings dont even contain the organisms that seem to satisfy mices sweet tooth. Sponsor MessageEven if a benefit were found in humans, each persons unique biology, genetics and microbiomes could cause individual results to vary widely, he says. Any biology that we discover is not going to apply to everybody.

Air-BorneCarl ZimmerDutton, $32On March 10, 2020, 61 choir members rehearsed in a church hall in Skagit County, Wash. As they sang, a microscopic germ wafted through the air. Before the months end, 58 members were infected and five fell gravely ill. Across the United States, the virus wreaked havoc. Within weeks, thousands of people died, schools and businesses shuttered and 700,000 people lost their jobs.Many scientists determined in 2020 that the coronavirus spread through the air, but it would take public health agencies months longer to acknowledge that. The Skagit County superspreader event helped the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to consider the airborne transmission of COVID-19. But to this day, some scientists believe the delay in calling the virus airborne was a mistake one that stalled vital public health measures and allowed the disease to spread faster. In his new book, Air-Borne, science journalist Carl Zimmer roots the mistake in the past of a historically neglected field: aerobiology, or the science of airborne life.Zimmer begins his chronicle in the 19th century with Louis Pasteurs summit up a towering glacier in the French Alps. As part of a grand experiment, the microbiologist tipped a glass chamber to the sky, snared life and proved that microscopic germs floated in the air. Pasteurs discovery inspired generations of scientists to look for airborne life themselves, including pathologist Fred Meier, who stuck Petri dishes out of various aircraft and ultimately named the field.Through the stories of Pasteur, Meier and dozens of other scientists, Zimmer seamlessly weaves together centuries of aerobiology science. He richly humanizes the characters with honesty and complexity, simultaneously highlighting the publicly revered and the unsung. His pithy, punchy and accessible language gives life to glamorous experiments, like those conducted from hot-air balloons, as well as unassuming ones run in university basements.But aerobiology is more than science-laden joyrides through the sky. The field was mired in humankinds darkest moments, which Zimmer brings out of the shadows and into the light. Aerobiologists were central to debates on how life-threatening diseases like the Black Death, cholera and tuberculosis spread. And while some scientists worked to fight airborne infections, others committed to creating them, Zimmer writes. During World War II, the United States was one of several countries to create biological weapons. Some U.S. researchers helped build an arsenal of deadly germs and spores to potentially use against the nations enemies. For years after the war, aerobiology remained shrouded in secrecy and was largely ignored by public health officials. It wasnt until COVID-19 that this began to change.Readers will end the book with a better understanding of just how high life can fly and how far public knowledge of aerobiology has come. Its a reminder that the current decisions humans make regarding airborne life is informed by a deep history. Zimmer concludes his chronicle with a vision of harmonious coexistence with the life that teems in the atmosphere: As long as there is life on Earth, it will fly, and as long as we are here, we will breathe.BuyAir-Bornefrom Bookshop.org.Science Newsis a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.

Frigid water helped paint Mars red and may have shaped a vast coastline, two new studies into the planets history reveal.Scientists have detected a possible ancient beach in Mars northern hemisphere and identified a water-containing mineral responsible for the planets rosy hue. The findings reveal details about conditions on Mars when the planet last contained large volumes of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago.Early Mars has historically been thought of as either cold and dry or warm and wet, says Alberto Fairn, an astrobiologist at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid and at Cornell University who was not involved in the new work. The two new studies, together, resolve the second part of the equation: Early Mars was wet; it was never dry.Mars northern lowlands lie at a lower elevation than the rest of the planet, leading some scientists to suspect that the area had once been the site of a vast ocean. Zhurong, a Chinese rover that landed on the edge of this region in 2021, used ground-penetrating radar to probe for signs of a past shoreline buried deep beneath the surface.The rover detected a kilometer-long sloping region buried 10 to 35 meters underground that closely matches the slope of beaches on Earth, planetary scientist Michael Manga and colleagues report February 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Radar data suggest that the slope is made of pebble- to sand-sized sediments.The researchers considered the idea that the sandy slope is a buried dune, like those found elsewhere on the Martian surface. But the detected features dont match the expected shape of windblown sand dunes, nor are they likely to be caused by rivers or lava flows, the researchers say. Instead, the sediment deposits resemble deposits on Earths coastlines.The findings dont yet confirm that Mars hosted full-sized oceans. But if the area does represent an ancient shoreline, it could help scientists understand more about the planets past potential to host life. The interface between water, rock and air is a nice environment in which for life to exist, says Manga, of the University of California, Berkeley. Some of the earliest life on Earth formed in those kinds of environments, in shallow water, along shorelines.Another study could hint at the state of Mars liquid water just before it disappeared. The planets red color comes from a water-containing mineral called ferrihydrite, which probably required cold surface waters to form, researchers report February 25 in Nature Communications.Mars may have once hosted a liquid water ocean in its northern lowlands, according to a new study. This illustration shows what Mars may have looked like 3.6 billion years ago, if such an ocean covered the lowlands. The location of the Chinese rover Zhurong, which detected a possible ancient coastline, is marked with a star.Robert CitronWe basically were asking this long-standing question of why Mars is red, and many people probably understand that its due to rust, says Adam Valantinas, a planetary scientist at Brown University. But there are many types of rust on Earth, many different mineralogies of these rusts, and each specific flavor of this rust can tell you about the environmental conditions of when the rust formed.For years, scientists suspected that Mars got its red color from hematite, a form of iron oxide, or rust, that contains no water and therefore must have formed after the planet lost its liquid surface water. But hematite doesnt absorb and reflect light quite the same way as Martian dust, and discoveries of other water-containing minerals on the planets surface led Valantinas and his colleagues to question whether hematite was truly responsible for the red hue.The team measured the wavelengths of light that different laboratory samples of minerals absorb and reflect and compared those with similar measurements of Mars dust collected by orbiting and ground-based spacecraft. The researchers found that a mixture of one part ferrihydrite to two parts basalt, a volcanic rock, best matched the color of the Martian surface.Ferrihydrite, a form of iron oxide that contains water, would probably have required cold, wet conditions to form on Mars, Valantinas says. On Earth, the mineral is somewhat unstable and will gradually transform into a more stable form of iron oxide, like hematite. But cold temperatures and an acidic environment could slow that transition, stabilizing the ferrihydrite until the planets liquid water disappeared.Sponsor MessageCombining the two studies, we can imagine an early Mars with abundant liquid water on the surface, to the point of forming seas or oceans, in a generally cold to very cold climate, similar in some sense to the beaches of the Arctic Ocean, Fairn says.

In the fossil-rich sands of the Faiyum Oasis in Egypt, archaeologists have uncovered one of the most complete skulls ever found from a formidable family of predators that roamed the Earth roughly 30 million years ago.The fossil, complete with an upper set of teeth, revealed the animal to be a newly discovered species of extinct hyena-sized mammals known as hyaenodonts, researchers report February 17 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. This species, Bastetodon syrtos, appears to have fewer teeth than its relatives, a catlike adaptation that would have given it a more efficient bite. The new discovery also redraws the family history of this ancient group of predators.The skull dates back to the Paleogene Period, a time that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs and saw the rapid diversification of many life forms, including mammals. Hyaenodonts were the main meat-eating mammal at the time across what is now Africa and Arabia, and would have hunted through the rich, dense forests which covered the region. These apex predators had large, elongated skulls that housed a lot of teeth. They likely preyed on early elephants, hyraxes and other animals, including our primate ancestors.Scientists discovered the skull of Bastetodon in the sands of Egypts Faiyum Oasis, with its top row of teeth still intact.Shorouq Al-AshqarIn the lab, the researchers scanned the new fossil and re-created it as a 3-D model. The animals long, bladelike back teeth suggested it ate mostly meat, and evidence of strong jaw muscles point to a hefty bite. Yet this hyaenodont had one fewer premolar and molar than its known relatives, an adaptation that would have made its face more compact and its jaw more efficient at closing. Modern cats tooth count has also reduced over time, which is why they have shorter faces than dogs. So the team took inspiration from Bastet, the ancient leonine Egyptian goddess of pleasure, protection and good health, to come up with a new genus for the predator. Bastetodon literally means teeth like the cat-headed goddess.The shortened face reflects what Matthew Borths, a paleontologist at Duke University, calls the pitbullification of hyaenodonts. Compared with other hyaenodonts, its got this short little muzzle that gave it a strong bite, he says.Through comparison with other fossils, Borths and colleagues placed B. syrtos in its family tree and reevaluated the origins of other hyaenodont fossils found at the same site in 1906. Although previously thought to come from Europe, this group including the new hyaenodont all descended from a lineage that arose in Africa. This and other finds suggest that their ancestors left Africa in several waves, eventually spreading through Asia, Europe and as far as North America.

With flashy feathers and fancy moves, birds of paradise are already known for extravagant looks. But a trick that boosts that zing has been overlooked by science, until now. In the right light, natural biofluorescence can intensify the birds colors an insight that, believe it or not, comes from a trio of fish biologists.Thirty-seven of the 45 known species of the bird family Paradisaeidae naturally fluoresce, the researchers report February 12 in Royal Society Open Science. Its the first survey of biofluorescence for these showy birds, say Rene Martin of the University of NebraskaLincoln and colleagues.The males of these species have wowed female birds as well as human bird watchers with various long plumes, improbably flexible wrists, pink fluff, ultrablack contrast zones, pop-up blue-on-black smiley faces and other finery. The bling enhances males courtship performance in their native range: Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia and eastern Australia. So the possibility of intensifying color through biofluorescence fits right in.Photographed in a special set-up to reveal biofluorescence, parts of the back (left) and the plumage (right) of a preserved museum specimen of an emperors bird-of-paradise absorbs blue light and emits more of a yellow.Rene MartinFluorescence is a sleight-of-hand trick with colors, the absorption of one wavelength of light and the readmission at longer wavelengths, as ichthyologist Emily Carr of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City puts it. For instance, intense blue in; then greenish yellow out. Seahorses and pipefish fluoresce bright red. A few sharks and rays fluoresce bright green.John Sparks had already searched through the museums fish collection for fluorescence. As an ichthyological evolutionary biologist at the museum, he suspected that fluorescence often evolves as animals flirt, threaten or otherwise exchange info with their own kind. So would results from other animal groups be similar to the fishes? Would birds of paradise, which go all-out Vegas in courtship, have evolved fluorescence? The AMNH has such a good bird collection, he says.Working through museum cabinets as a first step, we basically went through drawers and just shined our blue lights and saw what fluoresced. And birds of paradise did. Martin and Carr eventually set up a special blue-light photo booth for bird specimens fluorescent portraits.In the pitch dark, feet fluoresced in a variety of species. Sometimes so did long feather streamers, eye-rings, mouth linings and beaks. More common were washes of fluorescence down the head, neck and chest, or, for birds on different branchlets in the family tree, the chest and belly. Often the sexes differed.Despite variety in body parts, the fluorescence appeared generally green or greenish yellow (with wavelength peaks around 520 or 560 nanometers). Thats within the 380- to 750-nanometer range of human vision, Spark says.Seeing one of these birds in normal daylight, should you be so lucky, wont necessarily tip you off that fluorescence contributes to their vibrancy. But in the forests where many of the birds of paradise live, the researchers argue, high-energy blue and ultraviolet can dominate light filtering through dense tree canopy. Like museum scans with blue light, youre getting ideal wavelengths that could excite fluorescence, Sparks says. Its like deep water. You can have a red red-looking fish where theres no more red light penetrating the ocean. Fluorescence brings back colors, he proposes.A sunset tinge is how Papua New Guinea ethnobiologist Challis Pulotu describes the red on a live, really beautiful raggiana bird of paradise (Paradisaea raggiana) he once had a chance to see in their mutual home country. The species, PNGs national bird, is among the ones whose feathers fluoresced in the study.Now at Macquarie University in Sydney, Pulotu is studying traditional knowledge of the bird among PNGs Koiari people. Despite the raggianas bold looks, catching sight of one is rare for human neighbors. Hearing the birds though is part of the regions soundscape: Theyre not just communicating through their colorful dance and costume but sounding off at sunrise and sunset.

The third episode of The Deep End finds Jon in the operating room as he gets electrodes implanted in his brain. Youll hear how Jon and other volunteers feel in the hours, days and weeks after their surgery, including an itch to go to the library, an urge to walk around the block and a newfound appreciation for scented candles. Along the way, well talk about the brain science that could help explain some of these changes.TRANSCRIPTLaura Sanders: Previously on The Deep End.Helen Mayberg: And all of a sudden, patient goes, Oh, thats interesting. The void is gone.Amanda: When we first walked into the OR, that was the first time I got scared. That was the first and only time I got scared. It just, I saw the machine there, and I saw the big operating room, and I was like, Oh, this is real. This is gonna happen.Jon Nelson: Getting prepared for the surgery was no stress for me, at all. It was like I was going to get my teeth cleaned.Barbara Nelson: What if it, what if he dies on the operating room table? What if it doesnt work? What if, I dont, what if it does work?Sanders: In this episode, were picking up our story early on a Monday morning in August 2022. Jon is about to have electrodes implanted in his brain as a last-ditch effort to ease his severe, unrelenting depression. And hes not worried about it at all. On this episode, were going to hear how the surgery went, and what it felt like in the days afterward, once the electricity started flowing. Im Laura Sanders. Welcome to The Deep End. Jons wife Barbara remembers that morning at the hospital.Barbara: And it was crazy being in like the corral wherever they have, you know, the patients who are getting lined up for surgery because there was like so much buzz around his surgery, and like so many doctors like flying in and out.Sanders: In the middle of all that buzzing, Jons medical team told him that neurologist Helen Mayberg would come in and check on him before his surgery.Jon: And she came in and, you know, gave me the pep talk of all I need you to do is be present. I need you to not care about anybody else or anything and focus on being present. And like, its very hard for me. Im a middle child. I like to take care of everybody. Im, like, the dude who, I wouldnt say Im a control freak in a bad way. Im like, Im like, I just take care of stuff, right? So she was, like, really adamant about that.Sanders: During the surgery, the medical team woke Jon up from anesthesia for some tests. It was a hazy time, but Jon remembers that strange moment pretty well for a guy who was sitting there in the middle of active brain surgery.Jon: But like youre so awake, and like Im so, I was so myself that I, like, Dr. Maybergs right in your face right away, and shes like, Jon, its Dr. Mayberg and Dr. Figee. And, and youre like, Hey, Doc, you know. And I said, Doc, I need to tell you something. And shes, like, so concerned. Shes like, Yes, yes, yes. Im like, Im present. And I was just like busting her chops, you know? Shes sitting there laughing. Shes like, What a character this dude is, right?Sponsor MessageSanders: Jon then went back under anesthesia. Everything with the surgery went smoothly. When he woke up the next morning, he felt like he had a bad hangover, but he had to push through, because now the real work was beginning. Scientists took him to a testing room and began sending electricity through his new brain implants. They were searching for the right settings, the right pattern of electricity that would override his brains own electrical signals. It was a strange situation, very much trial and error at this point.Jon sat with Mayberg and another scientist as they began to turn on and off electrodes. While this was happening, Barbara and other family members and researchers watched on a video feed from another room.Jon: So theres those people in the lab, and then theres an overflow room where everybodys on Zoom, so all the clinical researchers and everybody, my mom, my wife and my dad, and theyre all watching this in the other room.Sanders: Barbara remembers what it felt like to be in that room watching on a screen as her husbands brain got prodded with electricity.Barbara: We got to meet all the brilliant scientists and sit in a conference room while, and watch the whole thing that they do with the questions and the testing. And that was fascinating, and, like, I felt, like, very privileged to get to see. And its like, when you think about people like really devote their whole life and theyre helping so many people. Its so moving.Sanders: The researchers method of identifying which setting might be good involved asking Jon two simple questions: Do you want to walk your dog? And do you want to have friends over to sit around your fire pit? They sound random, but theyre not. They both were designed to gauge his desire to fight the inertia of his depression, to get up and to do something.Jon: When we moved to where I live now, I built this dope fire pit, right, and like we used it all the time. I havent had a fire in two years. And so I just, I cant do anything. And so she was like, Are you interested in having your friends over and having a fire? And so literally after every electrode is turned on, those were the questions I would answer.Sanders: Barbara remembers thinking about a different question.Barbara: And I would joke to my father, like, ask him if he feels like doing dishes. Like, thats the, thats the setting we want.Sanders: The questioning went on a long time, hours. It got tedious. By the end of it, Barbara could see on the video screen that Jon was fading.Barbara: And at one point he was getting very, like, tired and hungry. And so I remember like being like, Can you stop? Can I go get him a soda or something? You know. So I was happy to be able to, like, take care of him in that way.Sanders: The research team settled on a pattern of electricity, the strength, the spots, that seemed right.Barbara: And then we left and we drove home.Sanders: Back at home, the change was obvious.Jon: The next day that I got home, bandaged up in my head, I not only took the dog on a walk, I asked my son and my wife to come with me. I enjoyed the walk. I enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed coming back home. I sat outside and had coffee. The, literally, the next day, I was walking with a friend. I, I havent, I, its just, its surreal. Like I, I feel like I tell them I feel like Im on like a 60 Minutes episode. I mean, it doesnt make any sense to me.Sanders: Jon and I first talked about six months after his surgery, and he has no doubt, not one, that it cured him.Jon: Overnight I was healed. I have been in remission from depression since the moment they have turned that on. I have not had a single suicidal thought.Sanders: Barbara could barely believe it. In fact, she held on to her skepticism for a while.Barbara: And we have a picture of the two of us, but he has got bandages on his head. And we walked, you know, around the corner and back, but that was a pretty big deal. But of course, I was like, well, you know, its placebo effect. Like, Im not gonna get too excited about that. And he just started to feel better so quickly. And he said, Can you email Dr. Mayberg and tell her what youre seeing? And I didnt do it. And hes like, Why? And I waited like a week, or 10 days, and then I finally did write to her. And he said, Why did you take so long? I was like, Because I wasnt really quite sold on this as being like the reason, right?Sanders: Barbara never did feel what Jon was feeling, that poison running through his veins, but she saw his shift from the outside.Barbara: Hes definitely back. Like, his energy level is back, and we always joke, were like, Do they have like a, like, can we turn it down a little? Like, is there, like, a setting that we can like dial it back? Because hes, hes a lot of personality. Hes very bubbly and vivacious. He kind of like walks in the room and starts talking. Give me a second here, so he, thats back for sure. Where its like, he, hes doing a speaking engagement, and hes gonna get paid 500 dollars. And I was like, Ill pay him 500 dollars to not talk for an hour.So he, thats definitely back. And that is the Jon I remember from 22 years ago, for sure. The Jon in between was a little bit quieter, a little bit more irritable, less present, less interested in, you know, hanging out with friends. And so, its, its nice to see him back.Sanders: Jon puts it plainly.Jon: So clearly, Im immediately healthy after the surgery and they turned it on. I am proof that major depressive disorder is a brain disease. I have an alternator in my car that is not working, and the mechanics fix that alternator, and my car works again. Its literally that simple.Sanders: The beginning of recovery looked a little different for Amanda, the artist and web designer in New York City. She didnt have that same obvious change, at least not right away. Her surgery was a few months after Jons. She remembers leaving the hospital feeling something.Amanda: I definitely didnt walk out feeling better, but I did walk out feeling hopeful. Because I sort of noticed something.Sanders: She struggled to put a name to it.Amanda: I left the hospital on a Friday. By Sunday, I could tell it was working.Sanders: Really?Amanda: I could tell things were getting better. Yeah.Amanda: And then by Wednesday, the fifth day after the, after the surgery, thats when it got completely better. And it stayed that way ever since.Sanders: Amanda thinks in pictures. And so when she tells me about the days and the weeks after her surgery, a lot of her descriptions are of the art that shes made.Amanda: Cause at first, I was felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, like, I sort of, Im a very visual person, so I was drawing pictures to sort of help myself think about it. So my first picture was this, like this giant weight at the bottom of the ocean. And I had just broken free from it, and I was on the surface, and I had little floaties on my arms. I was excited that I wasnt drowning anymore. That was the first picture. But the actual relief, I cant even describe the relief. Ive never felt relief so profound in my life. Like, it was like, you just like get used to living in pain, and the pain is all of a sudden gone. Youre like, What is this?Sanders: She started having what she calls weird experiences. These are experiences that are not weird at all to most of us.Amanda: The weirdest one that got me was smells. Like, I never enjoyed a smell before, and now I have like, I have these candles, one sitting here, and they smell so good. Like, candles never smelled good before.Sanders: I heard a similar thing from Emily Hollenbeck, who also lives in New York City and had DBS surgery in 2021, about a year and a half before I spoke with her. She describes her depression in terms of absence.Emily: That sensory anticipation isnt there, so I cant start, you know, my mouth wont water. I wont really think about, so with depression for me, and like, any sort of excitement or anticipatory fun is just shut down.Sanders: But with DBS, a funny thing happened. When a certain pattern of brain stimulation was turned on during her surgery, Emily started to think about bacon.Emily: I was tasting the bacon in my mind. And I could taste the salt and the fat and the crispiness, and I started to feel that sense of hunger.Sanders: Thats something she couldnt really do when she was depressed.Emily: So to have that in contrast and be like, Wow, I really want bacon, was just so immediate and so strong, and thats why it really struck me.Sanders: In the days after the surgery, she rested.Emily: So I remember, you know, getting these instructions to lay low and, you know, watching reality TV, you know, and eating, you know, what my, what my lovely friends are bringing me to eat. But Im also, like, I wanna go to the library. And I just noticed that kind of feeling of, like, almost itchiness and restlessness. Like, I have these impulses to move, to do things, to enjoy things.Sanders: Mayberg wasnt surprised at these desires for everyday activities.Mayberg: So one guy, we hit the switch. He kind of feels different. Hes having trouble describing it, and all of a sudden he goes, You know, Doc, I know its a pretty ridiculous thing cause Im bolted into the contraption in this operating room, but if I was home right now, I would clean my garage. And we all start cracking up. And then we had another patient whose comment was, I think if I was home right now, Id mow my lawn. No one ever said, I want to go to Disneyland. I wanna go dancing. Everything was, Thank you. I have an activity of daily life I want to do. One person said, I need to deal with the garden. I have dishes that are piled up in the sink. Here in this moment, the simple things is what came back into focus.Sanders: That motivation, that itch to do something normal, makes sense based on the part of the brain that was getting this extra electricity. Jon, Amanda, and Emily have constant brain stimulation targeted to a brain area called the subcallosal cingulate, or SCC. The SCC, and the signals it sends to other brain areas, seems to have a role in generating negative emotions, immobility, cognitive sluggishness, and heavy physical feelings. That shows up when Jon describes his feeling of being stuck, especially when it came to his own treatments and things he knew that would be good for him to do, but he just couldnt.Jon: I know that Im supposed to meditate. I know that Im supposed to get exercise. I know that Im supposed to eat well. I know that Im supposed to do these 800 million things that Ive been taught in every therapeutic setting in every environment that I can to get better. I cant do them.Sanders: Stimulating in the SCC can overwhelm those nerve cells that are telling Jon that he just cant do those things. The stimulation tires them out. It makes all of these I cant do it cells hush. And in this quiet, energy and motivation can begin to flow. This part of the SCCs job may explain why Jon went for a walk in the hospital halls and then later at home with his family, why Amanda felt a spark of energy and why Emily had an itch to get up and go to the library. The SCC used to be known as Area 25, and its the same spot that was targeted in the Broaden clinical trial. Thats the one that we talked about in the last episode, the one that was stopped because of poor results. So whats different now? Since Broaden, brain imaging techniques have gotten a lot better. So scientists can actually see this part of the brain and see how it connects to other parts. Its almost like a giant train station. It holds a confluence of tracts, inbound and outbound signaling paths. These are all called white matter tracts and they speed information across the brain.So in the Broaden trial, researchers could direct electricity to the SCC, to the right train station, essentially. But they were not able to hit the specific tracks every time. It turns out that the people who got better in that trial, they lucked out. Their electrodes happened to be hitting the key white matter tracts. If this research sounds like a work in progress, thats because it definitely is.In fact, the SCC isnt the only spot in the brain people are studying. Ill tell you about another promising target. This ones called the ventral capsule/ventral striatum, or VC/VS, and its involved in feelings of reward. To use Jons car metaphor, if the SCC is the brake, then the VC/VS is more like the gas pedal.In my reporting, I talked with a man who was in a different clinical trial, one that involved him getting stimulation to both spots, the SCC and the VC/VS. Scientists wanted to know where in the brain might be best and how other brain areas respond to this stimulation.It was essentially a massive eavesdropping situation. The man was the first to undergo this surgery. As such, he became patient 001 on his medical forms. And thats a name he actually grew fond of, he told me. For this story, he wants to stay anonymous, so Im gonna call him patient 001. The voice you hear isnt his, but the words are.Patient 001: Im going through this very non-emotional, but it was horrific. At this stage, Im on the other side of it, so I can explain it rationally. The only way I can describe it, and most of the time, this is to my family because I obviously dont talk to most people about this. My first depressive episode, Id say, Look, mom, this is something I wouldnt wish on my worst enemy. No human being ever, even the worst person in the world, should have to go through this. Its torment. Its torment. I dont have the words to describe it.Sanders: He traveled to Houston from New York City where he was living at the time, and was scheduled for surgery on March 9, 2020. His surgery squeaked through just days before all non-emergency surgeries were canceled because of the growing COVID pandemic. Jon, Amanda, and Emily each had two wires implanted in their brain. During surgery at Baylor Saint Lukes Medical Center in Houston, patient 001 was implanted with four. There were two in the SCC and two in the VC/VS. He got 10 extra electrodes too. These were temporary, put in to monitor other parts of his brain that were connected to the SCC and VC/VS regions. If you look at a picture of his brain while he was in the hospital, its full of hardware. It was a lot.Patient 001: Im not gonna say the 10 days stay in the hospital was a walk in the park, because it wasnt. But when you have nothing to lose and youre in hell, youll do anything.Sanders: Like Jon, patient 001 went through a similar testing phase with his electrodes. At one point, he felt something big.Patient 001: I said, I dont know what you did, but it feels like Im online again. Im online. If you think of your brain as a computer, it felt like I had a virus, and then my hard drive crashed, and all of a sudden, boom. They control all the leads and they reboot you, and youre OK again. I remember the doctor and the people in the OR literally laughing, like, Thats a new one. We laugh about it, but it came out of my heart. Its how I felt.Sanders: The stories youve just heard from Jon, Amanda, Emily, and the Houston volunteer all sound remarkable, almost one of a kind, and in all sorts of ways they are. These four people were pulled out of deep suffering and restored to themselves. But the story doesnt end here. Theres not a happily-ever-after stopping point. Things start to move from here in a more complicated way, and that makes sense because when it comes to people, and when it comes to the brain, nothing is simple.After their surgeries, Jon and the others found relief. But now they had to learn to live with a full emotional rangethe good, and also, the bad. And it turns out thats a lot easier said than done.On the next episode, youll hear about a crisis that Jon faces and what that crisis tells us about human emotions.Jon: Immediately I sent an email to the lead psychiatrist of this trial and I said, Did you guys turn it off? Like, is it working? Like, give me a heads up. You just start completely freaking out.Sanders: If you or someone you know is facing a suicidal crisis or emotional distress, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.This is The Deep End. Im Laura Sanders. If you liked this podcast, tell your friends or leave us a review. It helps the show a lot. Send us your questions and comments at podcasts@sciencenews.org.The Deep End is a production of Science News. Its based on original reporting by me, Laura Sanders. This episode was produced by Helen Thompson and mixed by Ella Rowan. Our project manager is Ashley Yeager. Nancy Shute is our editor in chief. Our music is by Blue Dot Sessions. The podcast is made possible in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John S. James L. Knight Foundation, and the Burroughs Welcome Fund, with support from PRX.Episode 3 creditsHost, reporter and writer: Laura SandersProducer: Helen ThompsonMixer: Ella RowenSound design: Helen Thompson and Ella RowenProject manager: Ashley YeagerShow art: Neil WebbMusic: Blue Dot Sessions,Morning by Edvard Grieg/Czech National Symphony Orchestra/MusopenSound effects: Epidemic SoundAdditional audio: Luke Groskin, Nikk OgasaThis podcast was produced with support from PRX, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.If you have questions, comments, or feedback about this episode, you can email us at podcasts@sciencenews.org.

A small, rocky island off Iceland is home to the worlds largest breeding colony of Atlantic puffins.When breeding season is in full swing, around 1.5 million adults pair up and nestle into burrows on the grassy seaside slopes above Heimaey islands rocky cliffs.Once chicks hatch, puffin moms and dads devote about six weeks to caring for their babies, bringing meals of small fish and fending off predators such as seagulls. By late August or early September, the pufflings are mature enough to live on their own. Over four to five weeks, throngs of young birds head off to sea. Their instinct is to head for the open ocean, where they will spend most of their lives. They leave in the dark of night to hide from predators, guided by the moon.Puffin parents care for immature pufflings until they can fly on their own. The downy fluff around the neck of this puffling (right) indicates its not yet ready to fledge.Rachel Bennett/iStock/Getty Images PlusBut sometimes fledglings lose their way. Heimaeys only town got electricity about a century ago. Ever since, dazzled by night lights or swept along in stiff sea breezes, some young puffins have taken a wrong turn toward town.Light pollution affects wildlife in perilous ways, disrupting crucial activities from pollination to mating. Some creatures, like these Atlantic puffins (Fratercula arctica), lose their orientation and cant find their way to the ocean. Some could be attacked by predators; others might starve. Fortunately for these pufflings, the residents of Heimaey have taken a hands-on approach to addressing the problem.The community-based Puffling Patrol searches for and rescues birds that have gone astray. These chicks and colony adults are helping scientists study puffins largely mysterious lives at sea.The Puffling Patrol rescues lost birdsEquipped with flashlights, cardboard boxes and gloves, folks head out after dark searching for lost chicks. They scour backyards, parking lots and rooftops wherever the bright glow of town competes with moonlight.On any given night during puffling season, a dozen or more small groups and individuals may be patrolling the town. Rescuing stranded birds is a long-standing tradition on the island, though the catchy Puffling Patrol name has been around for only a decade or so. Typically teens or younger kids scour the night alongside parents or grandparents who pass down the tradition. (For the little ones, its a great excuse to stay up late.)Puffins dive from the sea surface to nab food. They zip through the water as if theyre flying. But adaptations that enhance swimming, such as a stubby wingspan, come at the expense of take-off ability, which leaves them vulnerable to cats and other predators on land.On the upside: The birds are easy to catch. Usually it takes just a short chase to grab one. The bird is put in a cardboard box and taken home. People are asked to weigh their rescued pufflings and log them on the Puffling Patrol website. (The only thing to watch out for are the pufflings tiny, kitten-like claws.)On the Icelandic island of Heimaey, nesting puffins raise chicks in burrows on the grassy slopes of cliffs. J. Krumrine Pufflings leave their nests under the cover of night and head to the sea, but artificial lighting can disorient them. Heimaeys Puffling Patrol looks for lost birds in town, such as at this gas station. J. Krumrine When members of the Puffling Patrol discover a wayward bird, they put it in a cardboard box to bring home. J. Krumrine Baby birds brought home are weighed and logged on the Puffling Patrol website. J. Krumrine To help monitor the puffin population, research assistant Lucas Canas Hernandez puts an ID ring on a rescued pufflings leg. J. Krumrine Healthy rescued birds are brought back to the seaside cliffs and released. Kim Cupples, a staff member at the Puffin Rescue Centre, gives one puffling a boost toward the sea. J. Krumrine The patrol often takes healthy rescues those large enough to live at sea to the cliffs. From this height, the birds can catch some air. Theyll fly as far as theyre able before landing in the water, perhaps 50 meters or more, the farther the better. Some pufflings need a helpful boost a push off the clifftop, while others take the initiative on their own.Some rescues, however, need extra care. While wandering around town, pufflings sometimes fall into the harbor and end up slick with oil from the local passenger ferry, cargo ships and fishing boats. Dirtied feathers must be cleaned to become waterproof again. Otherwise, the birds would not survive in the frigid North Atlantic. Other pufflings may be injured or underfed. And some may have left home too early, before growing their adult plumage.These birds are taken to the Puffin Rescue Centre in Heimaey, run by the global nonprofit Sea Life Trust. Theres even a drop box for after-hours arrivals, where pufflings will remain safe through the night.Sponsor MessageDuring the 2024 season, the Puffling Patrol rescued more than 4,200 pufflings thats approximately one bird for every human on Heimaey.Studying puffins at sea is trickyFor about 420 of the rescued birds, scientists put a ring on the puffins legs. Its an ID band, allowing researchers to document a birds location each time its sighted and to monitor their population.Adult puffins develop a brightly colored striped beak and orange feet. This adult appearance does not change much, aside from the beak color getting brighter during breeding season. So the only way to know a puffins exact age by sight is if its been tagged. With the rings, scientists have learned puffins can live at least 40 years.The birds spend most of their lives in the open ocean. Observing birds at sea is nearly impossible, so much about puffins remains a mystery. Ecologists like Erpur Snr Hansen, who leads a team at the South Iceland Nature Research Centre, are curious to know how far puffins roam and where they go.Each June, Hansen and colleagues briefly capture adults at their burrows while also checking on eggs and fit them with battery-operated global location sensors. These geolocators detect changes in daylight, which can be analyzed to pinpoint a birds location within about 180 kilometers.On Heimaey, only adult birds are currently tagged with these GLS devices, but other researchers in Scandinavia have begun tracking juveniles as well to learn about their movements after fledging.The range of Atlantic puffins spans the North Atlantic from the coasts of Canada and the northeastern United States to Greenland and Russia. borchee/E+/Getty Images PlusFor about a decade, Hansen and other researchers have contributed GLS data to SEATRACK, a project that tracks seabirds. The data are revealing what seabirds do offshore, why there are fewer and fewer of them and what humans can do to help them survive.In Europe, where more than 90 percent of Atlantic puffins reside, the species is listed as endangered. The European population of about 7.8 million birds is projected to decrease by 50 to 79 percent between 2000 and 2065, within three puffin generations.Puffins face a variety of threats. One of their main food sources is sand eels, a group of slender fish with an eel-like appearance. Sand eel populations are shrinking due to climate change and industrial-scale overfishing. Puffins must compete with other sea life and trawlers for dwindling numbers of these and other forage fish. When sand eels become scarce, puffins must work harder to find them. Puffins stressed this way often produce fewer chicks. Another threat is pollution, including mercury, plastics and contaminants from shipping.Bird migration studies using SEATRACK data have identified sites in the North Atlantic where restricting human activity and prioritizing pollution cleanup efforts could have a big impact.For instance, theres a vital feeding ground for about 5 million seabirds, including puffins and 20 other species, in the middle of the Atlantic. Species from at least 56 colonies spanning 16 countries and regions come to this area during the vulnerable molting period, when birds shed worn-out feathers. In 2021, a European consortium called the OSPAR Convention declared this spot a marine protected area: the North Atlantic Current and Evlanov Seamount. Its the first such area identified by tracking data.Waiting for a homecomingOnce puffling season ends and burrows empty out, Heimaeys seaside cliffs go quiet. Members of the Puffling Patrol catch up on lost sleep and share their favorite pics.At the end of the 2024 puffling season, three rescues couldnt be released and now live in an enclosure at the Puffin Rescue Centre, where visitors can watch their antics.Meanwhile, Icelands puffin researchers wait patiently for the birds summer return. Adult puffins return to the same colony even the same burrow year after year. With the data collected from these birds, Hansen and other scientists will weave together the story of each wanderers ocean journey.