Science

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Five people infected as bird flu appears to go from cows to chickens to humans

avian influenza, bird flu, CDC, Chickens, Colorado, cows, dairy, H5N1, health, infectious diseases, influenza, milk, outbreak, poultry, Science, USDA / /

Cows and chickens and humans, oh my! —

High temperatures made it hard for workers to use protective gear during culling.

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Five people infected as bird flu appears to go from cows to chickens to humans

The highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus that spilled from wild birds into US dairy cows late last year may have recently seeped from a dairy farm in Colorado to a nearby poultry farm, where it then infected five workers tasked with culling the infected chickens

In a press briefing Tuesday, federal officials reported that four of the avian influenza cases have been confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while the fifth remains a presumptive positive awaiting CDC confirmation.

All five people have shown mild illnesses, though they experienced variable symptoms. Some of the cases involved conjunctivitis, as was seen in other human cases linked to the H5N1 outbreak in dairy cows. Others in the cluster of five had respiratory and typical flu-like symptoms, including fever, chills, sore throat, runny nose, and cough. None of the five cases required hospitalization.

The virus infecting the five people is closely related to the virus infecting the chickens on the poultry farm, which, in turn, is closely related to virus seen in infected dairy herds and in other human cases that have been linked to the dairy outbreak. The affected poultry farm is in Colorado’s northern county of Weld, which has also reported about two dozen outbreaks of avian influenza in dairy herds.

Dairy to poultry hypothesis

In one fell swoop, Colorado’s poultry farm outbreak has more than doubled the number of human avian influenza cases linked to the dairy cow spillover, bringing the previous tally of four cases to nine. While officials have previously noted instances where it appeared that H5N1 on dairy farms had moved to nearby poultry farms, this appears to be the first time such spread has led to documented human infections.

The link between the poultry farm cases and neighboring dairy farms is still just a hypothesis, however, Nirav Shah, the principal deputy director at the CDC, emphasized to reporters Tuesday. “It is a hypothesis that needs and requires a full investigation. But that is a hypothesis at this point,” he said of the link between the dairy farms and the poultry farm. So far, there is no direct evidence of a specific source of the poultry farm’s infection, and the route of infection is also unclear.

Throughout the outbreak of H5N1 on dairy farms, officials have noted that the primary way the virus appears to spread to new farms is via the movement of cows, people, and machinery between those facilities. There remains no evidence of human-to-human transmission. But milk from infected cows has been found to be brimming with high levels of infectious virus, and milk-contaminated equipment is a prime suspect in the spread.

In the press briefing Tuesday, Eric Deeble, acting senior advisor for H5N1 response with the US Department of Agriculture, noted the poultry are very susceptible to avian influenza and are easily infected. “It does not take much to introduce this into a flock,” Deeble said. The USDA is now working on a “trace-back” investigation on how the Colorado poultry farm was infected.

Searing spread

As for how the farm workers specifically became infected with the virus, health officials pointed to high temperatures that prevented workers from donning protective gear. The poultry farm is a commercial egg layer operation with around 1.8 million birds. Given the presence of bird flu on the premises, all 1.8 million birds need to be culled, aka “depopulated.” This is being carried out using mobile carts with carbon dioxide gas chambers, a common culling method. Workers are tasked with placing the birds in the chambers, which only hold a few dozen birds at a time. In all, the method requires workers to have a high degree of contact with the infected birds, going from bird to bird and batch to batch with the carts.

Amid this grim task, temperatures in the area reached over 100° Fahrenheit, and massive industrial fans were turned on in the facility to try to cool things down. Between the heat and the fans, the approximately 160 people involved in the culling struggled to use personal protective equipment (PPE). The required PPE for the depopulation involves a full Tyvek suit, boots, gloves, goggles, and an N95 respirator.

“The difficulty with wearing all that gear in that kind of heat, you can imagine,” said Julie Gauthier, executive director for field operations at the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). The industrial fans blowing large amounts of air made it yet more difficult for workers to keep goggles and respirators on their faces, she said.

The CDC and the USDA are both involved in further investigations of the poultry farm outbreak. CDC’s Shah noted that the team the agency deployed to Colorado included an industrial hygienist, who can work on strategies to prevent further transmission.

To date, at least 161 herds in 13 states have tested positive for avian influenza since the dairy outbreak was confirmed in March. Since January 2022, when US birds first tested positive for the H5N1 virus, 99 million birds in the US have been affected in 48 states, which involved 1,165 individual outbreaks.

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Elon Musk says SpaceX and X will relocate their headquarters to Texas

California, elon musk, Gavin Newsom, Science, Space, spacex, texas, X / /

Home base at Starbase —

The billionaire blamed a California gender identity law for moving SpaceX and X headquarters.

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A pedestrian walks past a flown Falcon 9 booster at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Tuesday, the same day Elon Musk said he will relocate the headquarters to Texas.

Enlarge / A pedestrian walks past a flown Falcon 9 booster at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Tuesday, the same day Elon Musk said he will relocate the headquarters to Texas.

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he will move the headquarters of SpaceX and his social media company X from California to Texas in response to a new gender identity law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Musk’s announcement, made via a post on X, follows his decision in 2021 to move the headquarters of the electric car company Tesla from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns in the Bay Area the year before. Now, two of Musk’s other major holdings are making symbolic moves out of California: SpaceX to the company’s Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, and X to Austin.

The new gender identity law, signed by Governor Newsom, a Democrat, on Monday, bars school districts in California from requiring teachers to disclose a change in a student’s gender identification or sexual orientation to their parents without the child’s permission. Musk wrote on X that the law was the “final straw” prompting the relocation to Texas, where the billionaire executive and his companies could take advantage of lower taxes and light-touch regulations.

Earlier this year, SpaceX transferred its incorporation from Delaware to Texas after a Delaware judge invalidated his pay package at Tesla.

“Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote Tuesday on X.

The first-in-the-nation law in California is a flashpoint in the struggle between conservative school boards concerned about parental rights and proponents for the privacy rights of LGBTQ people.

“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” wrote Musk, who on Saturday endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election.

In a statement, Newsom’s office said the law “does not allow a student’s name or gender identity to be changed on an official school record without parental consent” and “does not take away or undermine parents’ rights.”

What does this mean for SpaceX?

Musk’s comments on X didn’t mention details about the implications of his companies’ moves to Texas. However, while Tesla’s corporate headquarters relocated to Texas in 2021, the company still produces cars in California and announced a new engineering hub in Palo Alto last year. The situation with SpaceX is likely to be similar.

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he renamed it X, rewrote the network’s policies on content moderation, and laid off most of the company’s staff, reducing its workforce to around 1,500 employees. With vast manufacturing capacities, SpaceX currently has more than 13,000 employees, so a relocation for Musk’s space company would affect more people and potentially be more disruptive than one at X.

SpaceX’s current headquarters in Hawthorne, California, serves as a factory, engineering design center, and mission control for the company’s rockets and spacecraft. Relocating these facilities wouldn’t be easy, but SpaceX may not need to.

Elon Musk says SpaceX and X will relocate their headquarters to Texas Read More »

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Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers

Ann Burgess, behavioral sciences, criminal psychology, culture, documentaries, fbi, forensic science, Hulu, Mindhunter, Science, serial killers, streaming television, true crime documentary / /
Dr. Ann Burgess helps the FBI catch serial killers in Hulu's <em>Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer.</em>” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mastermind5-800×535.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / Dr. Ann Burgess helps the FBI catch serial killers in Hulu’s Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer.

YouTube/Hulu

Fans of the Netflix series Mindhunter might recall the character of Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), a psychologist who joins forces with FBI criminal profilers to study the unique psychology of serial killers in hopes of more effectively catching them. But they might not know about the inspiration for the character: Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, whose long distinguished career finally gets the attention it deserves in a new documentary from Hulu, Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer.

Burgess herself thought it was “fun” to see a fictional character based on her but noted that Hollywood did take some liberties. “They got it wrong,” she told Ars. “They made me a psychologist. I’m a nurse”—specifically, a forensic and psychiatric nurse who pioneered research on sex crimes, victimology, and criminal psychology.

Mastermind should go a long way toward setting things right. Hulu brought on Abby Fuller to direct, best known for her work on the Chef’s Table series for Netflix. Fuller might seem like a surprising choice for making a true crime documentary, but the streamer thought she would bring a fresh take to a well-worn genre. “I love the true crime aspects, but I thought we could do something more elevated and cinematic and really make this a character-driven piece about [Ann], with true crime elements,” Fuller told Ars.

There’s no doubt that the public has a rather morbid fascination with serial killers, and Burgess certainly has had concerns about the way media coverage and Hollywood films have turned murderers into celebrities. “Despite how obviously horrible these killers were, despite their utter brutality and the pain they inflicted upon their victims, they’d somehow become romanticized,” Burgess wrote in her memoir, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. “All the inconvenient details that interfered with this narrative—the loss of life, issues of mental health, and the victims themselves—were simply ignored.”

Mastermind.” height=”429″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mastermind6-640×429.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / A re-creation of Dr. Ann Burgess listening to taped interviews of serial killers in Mastermind.

YouTube/Hulu

That said, it’s not like anyone who finds the twisted psychology of serial killers, or true crime in general, fascinating is a sociopath or murderer in the making. “I think we all grapple with light and dark and how we see it in the world,” said Fuller. “There’s an inherent fascination with what makes someone who they are, with human behavior. And if you’re interested in human behavior, a serial killer exhibits some of the more fascinating behavior that exists. Trying to grasp the darkest of the dark and understand it is a way to ensure we never become it.”

“I think it’s a human factor,” Burgess said. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. There is a fascination to try to understand why people commit these horrifying crimes. How can people do these things? But I also think people like to play detective a little bit. I think that’s normal. You don’t want to be fooled; you don’t want to become a victim. So what can you learn to avoid it?”

For Burgess, it has always been about the victims. She co-founded one of the first crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital in the 1970s with Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom. The duo conducted research on the emotional and traumatic effects of sexual violence, interviewing nearly 150 rape victims in the process. They were the first to realize that rape was about power and control rather than sex, and coined the term “rape trauma syndrome” to describe the psychological after-effects.

(WARNING: Some graphic details about violent crimes below.)

Dr. Ann Burgess research helped legitimize the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit.

Enlarge / Dr. Ann Burgess research helped legitimize the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit.

Hulu

Their work caught the attention of Roy Hazelwood of the FBI, who invited Burgess to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to give lectures to agents in the fledgling Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) on victimology and violent sex crimes. Thus began a decades-long collaboration that established criminal profiling as a legitimate practice in law enforcement.

Meet the woman whose research helped the FBI catch notorious serial killers Read More »

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Seismic data shows Mars is often pummeled by planet-shaking meteorites

astronomy, Impacts, Mars, meteorites, planetary science, Science, seismology / /

Brace for impact —

Seismic information now allows us to make a planet-wide estimate of impact rates.

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One of the craters identified seismically, then confirmed through orbital images.

Enlarge / One of the craters identified seismically, then confirmed through orbital images.

Mars trembles with marsquakes, but not all of them are driven by phenomena that occur beneath the surface—many are the aftermath of meteorite strikes.

Meteorites crash down to Mars every day. After analyzing data from NASA’s InSight lander, an international team of researchers noticed that its seismometer, SEIS, detected six nearby seismic events. These were linked to the same acoustic atmospheric signal that meteorites generate when whizzing through the atmosphere of Mars. Further investigation identified all six as part of an entirely new class of quakes known as VF (very high frequency) events.

The collisions that generate VF marsquakes occur in fractions of a second, much less time than the few seconds it takes tectonic processes to cause quakes similar in size. This is some of the key seismological data that has helped us understand the occurrence of earthquakes caused by meteoric impacts on Mars. This is also the first time seismic data was used to determine how frequently impact craters are formed.

“Although a non-impact origin cannot be definitively excluded for each VF event, we show that the VF class as a whole is plausibly caused by meteorite impacts,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature.

Seismic shift

Scientists had typically determined the approximate meteorite impact rate on Mars by comparing the frequency of craters on its surface to the expected rate of impacts calculated using counts of lunar craters that were left behind by meteorites. Models of the lunar cratering rate were then adjusted to fit Martian conditions.

Looking to the Moon as a basis for comparison was not ideal, as Mars is especially prone to being hit by meteorites. The red planet is not only a more massive body that has greater gravitational pull, but it is located near the asteroid belt.

Another issue is that lunar craters are often better preserved than Martian craters because there is no place in the Solar System dustier than Mars. Craters in orbital images are often partly obscured by dust, which makes them difficult to identify. Sandstorms can complicate matters by covering craters in more dust and debris (something that cannot occur on the Moon due to the absence of wind).

InSight deployed its SEIS instrument after it landed in the Elysium Planitia region of Mars. In addition to detecting tectonic activity, the seismometer can potentially determine the impact rate through seismic data. When meteorites strike Mars, they produce seismic waves just like tectonic marsquakes do, and the waves can be detected by seismometers when they travel through the mantle and crust. An immense quake picked up by SEIS was linked to a crater 150 meters (492 feet) wide. SEIS would later detect five more marsquakes that were all associated with an acoustic signal (detected by a different sensor on InSight) that is a telltale sign of a falling meteorite.

A huge impact

Something else stood out about the six impact-driven marsquakes detected with seismic data. Because of the velocity of meteorites (over 3,000 meters or 9,842 feet per second), these events happened faster than any other type of marsquake, even faster than quakes in the high frequency (HF) class. That’s how they earned their own classification: very high frequency, or VF, quakes. When the InSight team used the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) Context Camera (CTX) to image the locations of the events picked up by SEIS, there were new craters present in the images.

There are additional seismic events that haven’t been assigned to craters yet. They are thought to be small craters formed by meteorites about the size of basketballs, which are extremely difficult to see in orbital images from MRO.

The researchers were able to use SEIS data to estimate the diameters of craters based on distance from InSight (according to how long it took seismic waves to reach the spacecraft) and the magnitude of the VF marsquakes associated with them. They were also able to derive the frequency of quakes picked up by SEIS. Once a frequency estimate based on the data was applied to the entire surface area of Mars, they estimated that around 280 to 360 VF quakes occur each year.

“The case is strong that the unique VF marsquake class is consistent with impacts,” they said in the same study. “It is, therefore, worthwhile considering the implications of attributing all VF events to meteoroid impacts.”

Their detection has added to the estimated number of impact craters on Mars since many could not be seen from space before. What can VF impacts tell us? The impact rate on a planet or moon is important for determining the age of that object’s surface. Using impacts has helped us determine that the surface of Venus is constantly being renewed by volcanic activity, while most of the surface of Mars has not been covered in lava for billions of years.

Figuring out the rate of meteorite impacts can also help protect spacecraft and, someday, maybe Martian astronauts, from potential hazards. The study suggests that there are periods where impacts are more or less frequent, so it might be possible to predict when the sky is a bit more likely to be clear of falling space rocks—and when it isn’t. Meteorites are not much of a danger to Earth since most of them burn up in the atmosphere. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere that more can make it through, and there is no umbrella for a meteor shower.

Nature Astronomy, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02301-z

Seismic data shows Mars is often pummeled by planet-shaking meteorites Read More »

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The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America’s heartland

earthquakes, New Madrid fault, Science, seismology, syndication / /
Top: A view of the downtown Memphis skyline, including the Hernando De Soto bridge which has been retrofitted for earthquakes. Memphis is located around 40 miles from a fault line in the quake-prone New Madrid system.

Enlarge / Top: A view of the downtown Memphis skyline, including the Hernando De Soto bridge which has been retrofitted for earthquakes. Memphis is located around 40 miles from a fault line in the quake-prone New Madrid system.

iStock via Getty Images

The first earthquake struck while the town was still asleep. Around 2: 00 am on Dec. 16, 1811, New Madrid—a small frontier settlement of 400 people on land now located in Missouri—was jolted awake. Panicked townsfolk fled their homes as buildings collapsed and the smell of sulfur filled the air.

The episode didn’t last long. But the worst was yet to come. Nearly two months later, after dozens of aftershocks and another massive quake, the fault line running directly under the town ruptured. Thirty-one-year-old resident Eliza Bryan watched in horror as the Mississippi River receded and swept away boats full of people. In nearby fields, geysers of sand erupted, and a rumble filled the air.

In the end, the town had dropped at least 15 feet. Bryan and others spent a year and a half living in makeshift camps while they waited for the aftershocks to end. Four years later, the shocks had become less common. At last, the rattled townspeople began “to hope that ere long they will entirely cease,” Bryan wrote in a letter.

Whether Bryan’s hope will stand the test of time is an open question.

The US Geological Survey released a report in December 2023 detailing the risk of dangerous earthquakes around the country. As expected on the hazard map, deep red risk lines run through California and Alaska. But the map also sports a big bull’s eye in the middle of the country—right over New Madrid.

The USGS estimates that the region has a 25 to 40 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0 or higher earthquake in the next 50 years, and as much as a 10 percent chance of a repeat of the 1811-1812 sequence. While the risk is much lower compared to, say, California, experts say that when it comes to earthquake resistance, the New Madrid region suffers from inadequate building codes and infrastructure.

Caught in this seismic splash zone are millions of people living across five states—mostly in Tennessee and Missouri, as well as Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas—including two major cities, Memphis and St. Louis. Mississippi, Alabama, and Indiana have also been noted as places of concern.

In response to the potential for calamity, geologists have learned a lot about this odd earthquake hotspot over the last few decades. Yet one mystery has persisted: why earthquakes even happen here in the first place.

This is a problem, experts say. Without a clear mechanism for why New Madrid experiences earthquakes, scientists are still struggling to answer some of the most basic questions, like when—or even if—another large earthquake will strike the region. In Missouri today, earthquakes are “not as front of mind” as other natural disasters, said Jeff Briggs, earthquake program manager for the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency.

But when the next big shake comes, “it’s going to be the biggest natural disaster this state has ever experienced.”

The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America’s heartland Read More »

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Will space-based solar power ever make sense?

Energy, renewable energy, Science, solar power, space-based solar / /
Artist's depiction of an astronaut servicing solar panels against the black background of space.

Is space-based solar power a costly, risky pipe dream? Or is it a viable way to combat climate change? Although beaming solar power from space to Earth could ultimately involve transmitting gigawatts, the process could be made surprisingly safe and cost-effective, according to experts from Space Solar, the European Space Agency, and the University of Glasgow.

But we’re going to need to move well beyond demonstration hardware and solve a number of engineering challenges if we want to develop that potential.

Designing space-based solar

Beaming solar energy from space is not new; telecommunications satellites have been sending microwave signals generated by solar power back to Earth since the 1960s. But sending useful amounts of power is a different matter entirely.

“The idea [has] been around for just over a century,” said Nicol Caplin, deep space exploration scientist at the ESA, on a Physics World podcast. “The original concepts were indeed sci-fi. It’s sort of rooted in science fiction, but then, since then, there’s been a trend of interest coming and going.”

Researchers are scoping out multiple designs for space-based solar power. Matteo Ceriotti, senior lecturer in space systems engineering at the University of Glasgow, wrote in The Conversation that many designs have been proposed.

The Solaris initiative is exploring two possible technologies, according to Sanjay Vijendran, lead for the Solaris initiative at the ESA: one that involves beaming microwaves from a station in geostationary orbit down to a receiver on Earth and another that involves using immense mirrors in a lower orbit to reflect sunlight down onto solar farms. He said he thinks that both of these solutions are potentially valuable. Microwave technology has drawn wider interest and was the main focus of these interviews. It has enormous potential, although high-frequency radio waves can also be used.

“You really have a source of 24/7 clean power from space,” Vijendran said. The power can be transmitted regardless of weather conditions because of the frequency of the microwaves.

“A 1-gigawatt power plant in space would be comparable to the top five solar farms on earth. A power plant with a capacity of 1 gigawatt could power around 875,000 households for one year,” said Andrew Glester, host of the Physics World podcast.

But we’re not ready to deploy anything like this. “It will be a big engineering challenge,” Caplin said. There are a number of physical hurdles involved in successfully building a solar power station in space.

Using microwave technology, the solar array for an orbiting power station that generates a gigawatt of power would have to be over 1 square kilometer in size, according to a Nature article by senior reporter Elizabeth Gibney. “That’s more than 100 times the size of the International Space Station, which took a decade to build.” It would also need to be assembled robotically, since the orbiting facility would be uncrewed.

The solar cells would need to be resilient to space radiation and debris. They would also need to be efficient and lightweight, with a power-to-weight ratio 50 times more than the typical silicon solar cell, Gibney wrote. Keeping the cost of these cells down is another factor that engineers have to take into consideration. Reducing the losses during power transmission is another challenge, Gibney wrote. The energy conversion rate needs to be improved to 10–15 percent, according to the ESA. This would require technical advances.

Space Solar is working on a satellite design called CASSIOPeiA, which Physics World describes as looking “like a spiral staircase, with the photovoltaic panels being the ‘treads’ and the microwave transmitters—rod-shaped dipoles—being the ‘risers.’” It has a helical shape with no moving parts.

“Our system’s comprised of hundreds of thousands of the same dinner-plate-sized power modules. Each module has the PV which converts the sun’s energy into DC electricity,” said Sam Adlen, CEO of Space Solar.

“That DC power then drives electronics to transmit the power… down toward Earth from dipole antennas. That power up in space is converted to [microwaves] and beamed down in a coherent beam down to the Earth where it’s received by a rectifying antenna, reconverted into electricity, and input to the grid.”

Adlen said that robotics technologies for space applications, such as in-orbit assembly, are advancing rapidly.

Ceriotti wrote that SPS-ALPHA, another design, has a large solar-collector structure that includes many heliostats, which are modular small reflectors that can be moved individually. These concentrate sunlight onto separate power-generating modules, after which it’s transmitted back to Earth by yet another module.

Will space-based solar power ever make sense? Read More »

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Animals use physics? Let us count the ways

biological physics, Science, syndication / /
kitten latches on to a pole with its two front paws

Isaac Newton would never have discovered the laws of motion had he studied only cats.

Suppose you hold a cat, stomach up, and drop it from a second-story window. If a cat is simply a mechanical system that obeys Newton’s rules of matter in motion, it should land on its back. (OK, there are some technicalities—like this should be done in a vacuum, but ignore that for now.) Instead, most cats usually avoid injury by twisting themselves on the way down to land on their feet.

Most people are not mystified by this trick—everybody has seen videos attesting to cats’ acrobatic prowess. But for more than a century, scientists have wondered about the physics of how cats do it. Clearly, the mathematical theorem analyzing the falling cat as a mechanical system fails for live cats, as Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek points out in a recent paper.

“This theorem is not relevant to real biological cats,” writes Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT. They are not closed mechanical systems, and can “consume stored energy … empowering mechanical motion.”

Nevertheless, the laws of physics do apply to cats—as well as every other kind of animal, from insects to elephants. Biology does not avoid physics; it embraces it. From friction on microscopic scales to fluid dynamics in water and air, animals exploit physical laws to run or swim or fly. Every other aspect of animal behavior, from breathing to building shelters, depends in some way on the restrictions imposed, and opportunities permitted, by physics.

“Living organisms are … systems whose actions are constrained by physics across multiple length scales and timescales,” Jennifer Rieser and coauthors write in the current issue of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics.

While the field of animal behavior physics is still in its infancy, substantial progress has been made in explaining individual behaviors, along with how those behaviors are shaped via interactions with other individuals and the environment. Apart from discovering more about how animals perform their diverse repertoire of skills, such research may also lead to new physics knowledge gained by scrutinizing animal abilities that scientists don’t yet understand.

Critters in motion

Physics applies to animals in action over a wide range of spatial scales. At the smallest end of the range, attractive forces between nearby atoms facilitate the ability of geckos and some insects to climb up walls or even walk on ceilings. On a slightly larger scale, textures and structures provide adhesion for other biological gymnastics. In bird feathers, for instance, tiny hooks and barbs act like Velcro, holding feathers in position to enhance lift when flying, Rieser and colleagues report.

Biological textures also aid movement by facilitating friction between animal parts and surfaces. Scales on California king snakes possess textures that allow rapid forward sliding, but increase friction to retard backward or sideways motion. Some sidewinding snakes have apparently evolved different textures that reduce friction in the direction of motion, recent research suggests.

Small-scale structures are also important for animals’ interaction with water. For many animals, microstructures make the body “superhydrophobic”—capable of blocking the penetration of water. “In wet climates, water droplet shedding can be essential in animals, like flying birds and insects, where weight and stability are crucially important,” note Rieser, of Emory University, and coauthors Chantal Nguyen, Orit Peleg and Calvin Riiska.

Water-blocking surfaces also help animals keep their skins clean. “This self-cleansing mechanism … can be important to help protect the animal from dangers like skin-borne parasites and other infections,” the Annual Review authors explain. And in some cases, removing foreign material from an animal’s surface may be necessary to preserve the surface properties that enhance camouflage.

Animals use physics? Let us count the ways Read More »

in-the-south,-sea-level-rise-accelerates-at-some-of-the-most-extreme-rates-on-earth

In the South, sea level rise accelerates at some of the most extreme rates on Earth

climate change, coastal flooding, Florida, rising sea level, Science, syndication / /

migrating inland —

The surge is startling scientists, amplifying impacts such as hurricane storm surges.

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Older man points to the rising tide while standing on a dock.

Enlarge / Steve Salem is a 50-year boat captain who lives on a tributary of the St. Johns River. The rising tides in Jacksonville are testing his intuition.

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

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—For most of his life, Steve Salem has led an existence closely linked with the rise and fall of the tides.

Salem is a 50-year boat captain who designed and built his 65-foot vessel by hand.

“Me and Noah, we’re related somewhere,” said Salem, 75, whose silver beard evokes Ernest Hemingway.

Salem is familiar with how the sun and moon influence the tides and feels an innate sense for their ebb and flow, although the tides here are beginning to test even his intuition.

He and his wife live in a rust-colored ranch-style house along a tributary of the St. Johns River, Florida’s longest. Before they moved in the house had flooded, in 2017, as Hurricane Irma swirled by. The house flooded again in 2022, when Hurricane Nicole defied his expectations. But Salem believes the house is sturdy and that he can manage the tides, as he always has.

“I’m a water dog to begin with. I’ve always been on the water,” said Salem, who prefers to go by Captain Steve. “I worry about things that I have to do something about. If I can’t do anything about it, then worrying about it is going to do what?”

Across the American South, tides are rising at accelerating rates that are among the most extreme on Earth, constituting a surge that has startled scientists such as Jeff Chanton, professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University.

“It’s pretty shocking,” he said. “You would think it would increase gradually, it would be a gradual thing. But this is like a major shift.”

Worldwide sea levels have climbed since 1900 by some 1.5 millimeters a year, a pace that is unprecedented in at least 3,000 years and generally attributable to melting ice sheets and glaciers and also the expansion of the oceans as their temperatures warm. Since the middle of the 20th century the rate has gained speed, exceeding 3 millimeters a year since 1992.

In the South the pace has quickened further, jumping from about 1.7 millimeters a year at the turn of the 20th century to at least 8.4 millimeters by 2021, according to a 2023 study published in Nature Communications based on tidal gauge records from throughout the region. In Pensacola, a beachy community on the western side of the Florida Panhandle, the rate soared to roughly 11 millimeters a year by the end of 2021.

“I think people just really have no idea what is coming, because we have no way of visualizing that through our own personal experiences, or that of the last 250 years,” said Randall Parkinson, a coastal geologist at Florida International University. “It’s not something where you go, ‘I know what that might look like because I’ve seen that.’ Because we haven’t.

“It’s the same everywhere, from North Carolina all the way down to the Florida Keys and all the way up into Alabama,” he said. “All of these areas are extremely vulnerable.”

The acceleration is poised to amplify impacts such as hurricane storm surges, nuisance flooding and land loss. In recent years the rising tides have coincided with record-breaking hurricane seasons, pushing storm surges higher and farther inland. In 2022 Hurricane Ian, which came ashore in southwest Florida, was the costliest hurricane in state history and third-costliest to date in the United States, after Katrina in 2005 and Harvey in 2017.

“It doesn’t even take a major storm event anymore. You just get these compounding effects,” said Rachel Cleetus, a policy director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “All of a sudden you have a much more impactful flooding event, and a lot of the infrastructure, frankly, like the stormwater infrastructure, it’s just not built for this.”

In the South, sea level rise accelerates at some of the most extreme rates on Earth Read More »

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NATO allies pledge $1 billion to promote sharing of space-based intel

military space, Nato, nato summit, Science, Space / /

Breaking barriers —

Agreement marks the largest investment in space-based capabilities in NATO’s history.

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Heads of state pose for a group photo at an event Tuesday celebrating the 75th anniversary of NATO.

Enlarge / Heads of state pose for a group photo at an event Tuesday celebrating the 75th anniversary of NATO.

During their summit in Washington, DC, this week, NATO member states committed more than $1 billion to improve the sharing of intelligence from national and commercial reconnaissance satellites.

The agreement is a further step toward integrating space assets into NATO military commands. It follows the bloc’s adoption of an official space policy in 2019, which recognized space as a fifth war-fighting domain alongside air, land, maritime, and cyberspace. The next step was the formation of the NATO Space Operations Center in 2020 to oversee space support for NATO military operations.

On June 25, NATO announced the establishment of a “space branch” in its Allied Command Transformation, which identifies trends and incorporates emerging capabilities into the alliance’s security strategy.

Breaking down barriers

The new intelligence-sharing agreement was signed on July 9 by representatives from 17 NATO nations, including the United States, to support the Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) program. In a statement, NATO called the agreement “the largest multinational investment in space-based capabilities in NATO’s history.”

The agreement for open sharing of intelligence data comes against the backdrop of NATO’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Space-based capabilities, including battlefield surveillance and communications, have proven crucial to both sides in the war.

“The ongoing war in Ukraine has further underscored intelligence’s growing dependence on space-based data and assets,” NATO said.

The program will improve NATO’s ability to monitor activities on the ground and at sea with unprecedented accuracy and timeliness, the alliance said in a statement. The 17 parties to the agreement pledged more than $1 billion transition the program into an implementation phase over the next five years. Six of the 17 signatories currently operate or plan to launch their own national reconnaissance satellites, while several more nations are home to companies operating commercial space-based surveillance satellites.

The APSS program won’t involve the development and launch of any NATO spy satellites. Instead, each nation will make efforts to share observations from their own government and commercial satellites.

Luxembourg, one of the smallest NATO member states, set up the APSS program with an initial investment of roughly $18 million (16.5 million euros) in 2023. At the time, NATO called the program a “data-centric initiative” aimed at bringing together intelligence information for easier dissemination among allies and breaking down barriers of secrecy and bureaucracy.

“APSS is not about creating NATO-owned and operated space assets,” officials wrote in the program’s fact sheet. “It will make use of existing and future space assets in allied countries, and connect them together in a NATO virtual constellation called ‘Aquila.'”

Another element of the program involves processing and sharing intelligence information through cloud solutions and technologies. NATO said AI analytical tools will also better manage growing amounts of surveillance data from space, and ensure decision-makers get faster access to time-sensitive observations.

“The APSS initiative may be regarded as a game changer for NATO’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It will largely contribute to build NATO’s readiness and reduce its dependency on other intelligence and surveillance capabilities,” said Ludwig Decamps, general manager of the NATO Communications and Information Agency.

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500 million-year-old fossil is the earliest branch of the spider’s lineage

arthropods, Biology, evolution, paleontology, Science, spiders / /

Creepy, but no longer crawly —

A local fossil collector in Morocco found the specimen decades ago.

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Image of a brown fossil with a large head and many body segments, embedded in a grey-green rock.

In the early 2000s, local fossil collector Mohamed ‘Ou Said’ Ben Moula discovered numerous fossils at Fezouata Shale, a site in Morocco known for its well-preserved fossils from the Early Ordovician period, roughly 480 million years ago. Recently, a team of researchers at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) studied 100 of these fossils and identified one of them as the earliest ancestor of modern-day chelicerates, a group that includes spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs.

The fossil preserves the species Setapedites abundantis, a tiny animal that crawled and swam near the bottom of a 100–200-meter-deep ocean near the South Pole 478 million years ago. It was 5 to 10 millimeters long and fed on organic matter in the seafloor sediments. “Fossils of what is now known as S. abundantis have been found early on—one specimen mentioned in the 2010 paper that recognized the importance of this biota. However, this creature wasn’t studied in detail before simply because scientists focused on other taxa first,” Pierre Gueriau, one of the researchers and a junior lecturer at UNIL, told Ars Technica.

The study from Gueriau and his team is the first to describe S. abundantis and its connection to modern-day chelicerates (also called euchelicerates). It holds great significance, because “the origin of chelicerates has been one of the most tangled knots in the arthropod tree of life, as there has been a lack of fossils between 503 to 430 million years ago,” Gueriau added.

An ancestor of spiders

The study authors used X-ray scanners to reconstruct the anatomy of 100 fossils from the Fezouata Shale in 3D. When they compared the anatomical features of these ancient animals with those of chelicerates, they noticed several similarities between S. abundantis and various ancient and modern-day arthropods, including horseshoe crabs, scorpions, and spiders.

For instance, the nature and arrangement of the head appendages or ‘legs’ in S. abundantis were homologous with those of present-day horseshoe crabs and Cambrian arthropods that existed between 540 to 480 million years ago. Moreover, like spiders and scorpions, the organism exhibited body tagmosis, where the body is organized into different functional sections.

“Setapedites abundantis contributes to our understandings of the origin and early evolution of two key euchelicerate characters: the transition from biramous to uniramous prosomal appendages, and body tagmosis,” the study authors note.

Currently, two Cambrian-era arthropods, Mollisonia plenovenatrix and Habelia optata are generally considered the earliest ancestors of chelicerates (not all scientists accept this idea). Both lived around 500 million years ago. When we asked how these two differ from S. abundantis, Gueriau replied, “Habelia and Mollisonia represent at best early-branching lineages in the phylogenetic tree. While S. abundantis is found to represent, together with a couple of other fossils, the earliest branching lineage within chelicerates.”

This means Habelia and Mollisonia are relatives of the ancestors of modern-day chelicerates. On the other side, S. abundantis represents the first group that split after the chelicerate clade was established, making it the earliest member of the lineage. “These findings bring us closer to untangling the origin story of arthropods, as they allow us to fill the anatomical gap between Cambrian arthropods and early-branching chelicerates,” Gueriau told Ars Technica.

S. abundantis connects other fossils

The researchers faced many challenges during their study. For instance, the small size of the fossils made observations and interpretation complicated. They overcame this limitation by examining a large number of specimens—fortunately, S. abundantis fossils were abundant in the samples they studied. However, these fossils have yet to reveal all their secrets.

“Some of S. abundantis’ anatomical features allow for a deeper understanding of the early evolution of the chelicerate group and may even link other fossil forms, whose relationships are still highly debated, to this group,” Gueriau said. For instance, the study authors noticed a ventral protrusion at the rear of the organism. Such a feature is observed for the first time in chelicerates but is known in other primitive arthropods.

“This trait could thus bring together many other fossils with chelicerates and further resolve the early branches of the arthropod tree. So the next step for this research is to investigate deeper this feature on a wide range of fossils and its phylogenetic implications,” Gueriau added.

Nature Communications, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48013-w  (About DOIs)

Rupendra Brahambhatt is an experienced journalist and filmmaker. He covers science and culture news, and for the last five years, he has been actively working with some of the most innovative news agencies, magazines, and media brands operating in different parts of the globe.

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Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken.

Features, Science / /
Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt was the most difficult book I’ve ever written. I’m a cosmologist—I study the origins, structure, and evolution of the Universe. I love science. I live and breathe science. If science were a breakfast cereal, I’d eat it every morning. And at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched in alarm as public trust in science disintegrated.

But I don’t know how to change people’s minds. I don’t know how to convince someone to trust science again. So as I started writing my book, I flipped the question around: is there anything we can do to make the institution of science more worthy of trust?

The short answer is yes. The long answer takes an entire book. In the book, I explore several different sources of mistrust—the disincentives scientists face when they try to communicate with the public, the lack of long-term careers, the complicitness of scientists when their work is politicized, and much more—and offer proactive steps we can take to address these issues to rebuild trust.

The section below is taken from a chapter discussing the relentless pressure to publish that scientists face, and the corresponding explosion in fraud that this pressure creates. Fraud can take many forms, from the “hard fraud” of outright fabrication of data, to many kinds of “soft fraud” that include plagiarism, manipulation of data, and careful selection of methods to achieve a desired result. The more that fraud thrives, the more that the public loses trust in science. Addressing this requires a fundamental shift in the incentive and reward structures that scientists work in. A difficult task to be sure, but not an impossible one—and one that I firmly believe will be worth the effort.

Modern science is hard, complex, and built from many layers and many years of hard work. And modern science, almost everywhere, is based on computation. Save for a few (and I mean very few) die-hard theorists who insist on writing things down with pen and paper, there is almost an absolute guarantee that with any paper in any field of science that you could possibly read, a computer was involved in some step of the process.

Whether it’s studying bird droppings or the collisions of galaxies, modern-day science owes its very existence—and continued persistence—to the computer. From the laptop sitting on an unkempt desk to a giant machine that fills up a room, “S. Transistor” should be the coauthor on basically all three million journal articles published every year.

The sheer complexity of modern science, and its reliance on customized software, renders one of the frontline defenses against soft and hard fraud useless. That defense is peer review.

The practice of peer review was developed in a different era, when the arguments and analysis that led to a paper’s conclusion could be succinctly summarized within the paper itself. Want to know how the author arrived at that conclusion? The derivation would be right there. It was relatively easy to judge the “wrongness” of an article because you could follow the document from beginning to end, from start to finish, and have all the information you needed to evaluate it right there at your fingerprints.

That’s now largely impossible with the modern scientific enterprise so reliant on computers.

To makes matters worse, many of the software codes used in science are not publicly available. I’ll say this again because it’s kind of wild to even contemplate: there are millions of papers published every year that rely on computer software to make the results happen, and that software is not available for other scientists to scrutinize to see if it’s legit or not. We simply have to trust it, but the word “trust” is very near the bottom of the scientist’s priority list.

Why don’t scientists make their code available? It boils down to the same reason that scientists don’t do many things that would improve the process of science: there’s no incentive. In this case, you don’t get any h-index points for releasing your code on a website. You only get them for publishing papers.

This infinitely agitates me when I peer-review papers. How am I supposed to judge the correctness of an article if I can’t see the entire process? What’s the point of searching for fraud when the computer code that’s sitting behind the published result can be shaped and molded to give any result you want, and nobody will be the wiser?

I’m not even talking about intentional computer-based fraud here; this is even a problem for detecting basic mistakes. If you make a mistake in a paper, a referee or an editor can spot it. And science is better off for it. If you make a mistake in your code… who checks it? As long as the results look correct, you’ll go ahead and publish it and the peer reviewer will go ahead and accept it. And science is worse off for it.

Science is getting more complex over time and is becoming increasingly reliant on software code to keep the engine going. This makes fraud of both the hard and soft varieties easier to accomplish. From mistakes that you pass over because you’re going too fast, to using sophisticated tools that you barely understand but use to get the result that you wanted, to just totally faking it, science is becoming increasingly wrong.

Peer review is essential for science. Unfortunately, it’s broken. Read More »

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Rocket Report: Chinese firm suffers another failure; Ariane 6 soars in debut

rocket report, Science, Space / /
The Ariane 6 rocket takes flight for the first time on July 9, 2024.

Enlarge / The Ariane 6 rocket takes flight for the first time on July 9, 2024.

ESA – S. Corvaja

Welcome to Edition 7.02 of the Rocket Report! The highlight of this week was the hugely successful debut of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. They will address the upper stage issue, I am sure. Given Europe’s commitment to zero debris, stranding the second stage is not great. But for a debut launch of a large new vehicle, this was really promising.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Chinese launch company suffers another setback. Chinese commercial rocket firm iSpace suffered a launch failure late Wednesday in a fresh setback for the company, Space News reports. The four-stage Hyperbola-1 solid rocket lifted off from Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert at 7: 40 pm ET (23: 40 UTC) on Wednesday. Beijing-based iSpace later issued a release stating that the rocket’s fourth stage suffered an anomaly. The statement did not reveal the name nor nature of the payloads lost on the flight.

Early troubles are perhaps to be expected … Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Ltd., or iSpace, made history in 2019 as the first privately funded Chinese company to reach orbit, with the solid-fueled Hyperbola-1. However the rocket suffered three consecutive failures following that feat. The company recovered with two successful flights in 2023 before the latest failure. The loss could add to reliability concerns over China’s commercial launch industry as it follows Space Pioneer’s recent catastrophic static-fire explosion. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Feds backtrack on former Firefly investor. A long, messy affair between US regulators and a Ukrainian businessman named Max Polyakov seems to have finally been resolved, Ars reports. On Tuesday, Polyakov’s venture capital firm Noosphere Venture Partners announced that the US government has released him and his related companies from all conditions imposed upon them in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This decision comes more than two years after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the US Air Force forced Polyakov to sell his majority stake in the Texas-based launch company Firefly.

Not a spy … This rocket company was founded in 2014 by an engineer named Tom Markusic, who ran into financial difficulty as he sought to develop the Alpha rocket. Markusic had to briefly halt Firefly’s operations before Polyakov, a colorful and controversial Ukrainian businessman, swooped in and provided a substantial infusion of cash into the company. “The US government quite happily allowed Polyakov to pump $200 million into Firefly only to decide he was a potential spy just as the company’s first rocket was ready to launch,” Ashlee Vance, a US journalist who chronicled Polyakov’s rise, told Ars. It turns out, Polyakov wasn’t a spy.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

Pentagon ICBM costs soar. The price tag for the Pentagon’s next-generation nuclear-tipped Sentinel ICBMs has ballooned by 81 percent in less than four years, The Register reports. This triggered a mandatory congressional review. On Monday, the Department of Defense released the results of this review, with Under-secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante saying the Sentinel missile program met established criteria for being allowed to continue after his “comprehensive, unbiased review of the program.”

Trust us, the military says … The Sentinel project is the DoD’s attempt to replace its aging fleet of ground-based nuclear-armed Minuteman III missiles (first deployed in 1970) with new hardware. When it passed its Milestone B decision (authorization to enter the engineering and manufacturing phase) in September 2020, the cost was a fraction of the $141 billion the Pentagon now estimates Sentinel will cost, LaPlante said. To give that some perspective, the proposed annual budget for the Department of Defense for its fiscal 2025 is nearly $850 billion. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Rocket Report: Chinese firm suffers another failure; Ariane 6 soars in debut Read More »