Best Citation Awards

In the year before the omicron variant began to spread in the United States, an estimated one-third of 18- to 45-year-olds had gotten sick with COVID-19. Just three months later, that figure doubled, and I was among the people who caught the coronavirus for the first time. I was in the first wave of people who got omicron in December 2021, as I was finishing my fall semester at Cornell University. On the day I received my positive test result, I knew it was coming. I had a sore throat, cough and my whole body ached. For the next several days, I was so tired that I had to sleep for more than half the day while trying to finish my final exams and help report on the outbreak for my college daily newspaper. Days later, after taking every vitamin, supplement and over-the-counter medicine I could get, I tried to get back to my normal routine, starting with a workout on Zoom. I found myself needing to stop every couple of minutes to catch my breath.  Sign up for e-mail updates on the l...

The small motorboat anchors in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. Shrieks of wintering birds assault the vessel’s five crew members, all clad in bright orange flotation suits. One of the crew slowly pulls a rope out of the water to retrieve a plastic tube, about the length of a person’s arm and filled with mud from the bottom of the bay. As the tube is hauled on board, the stench of rotten eggs fills the air. “Chesapeake Bay mud is stinky,” says Sairah Malkin, a biogeochemist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge who is aboard the boat. The smell comes from sulfuric chemicals called sulfides within the mud. They’re quite toxic, Malkin explains. Malkin and her team venture out onto the bay every couple of months to sample the foul muck and track the abundance of squiggling mud dwellers called cable bacteria. The microbes are living wires: Their threadlike bodies — thinner than a human hair — can channel electricity. Sairah Malkin, of the Univers...

Astronauts might one day dine on salad grown in asteroid soil. Romaine lettuce, chili pepper and pink radish plants all grew in mixtures of peat moss and faux asteroid soil , researchers report in the July Planetary Science Journal .   Scientists have previously grown crops in lunar dirt ( SN: 5/23/22 ). But the new study focuses on “carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, known to be rich in volatile sources — water especially,” says astroecologist Sherry Fieber-Beyer of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. These meteorites, and their parent asteroids, are also rich in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus — key agricultural nutrients. Pulverizing these types of asteroids, perhaps as part of space mining efforts, could potentially provide a ready supply of farming material in space. Fieber-Beyer purchased a material that mimics the space rocks’ composition and gave it to her graduate student Steven Russell. “I said, ‘All right, grow me some plants.’” Russell, now an astrobi...

When it comes to reproduction, one type of red algae gets by with a little help from its friends: small sea crustaceans that transport sex cells between male and female algae, like pollen-laden bees buzzing between flowers.  The discovery is the first known example of animal-driven “pollination” in algae , researchers report in the July 29 Science . Both the red algae and crustaceans belong to far more ancient groups than land plants do, raising the possibility that a form of pollination first evolved in the ocean, hundreds of millions earlier than originally thought.  Pollination typically describes the transfer of male sex cells — pollen — to a female flower, usually on land. Then in 2016, researchers discovered that various marine invertebrates “pollinate” seagrass flowers by feeding on and moving between the gelatinous pollen masses of seagrasses, which are descended from land plants. But nothing similar had yet been documented in algae. Like other red algae, Gracilari...

Picture a smartwatch that doesn’t just show your heart rate, but a real-time image of your heart as it beats in your chest. Researchers may have taken the first step down that road by creating a wearable ultrasound patch — think of a Band-Aid with sonar — that provides a flexible way to see deep inside the body.  Ultrasound, which maps tissues and fluids by recording how sound waves bounce off them, can help doctors examine organs for damage, diagnose cancer or even track bacteria ( SN: 1/3/18 ). But most ultrasound machines aren’t portable, and the wearable ones either struggle to spot details or can be used for only short periods.  The new patch can work for up to 48 hours straight — even while the user is doing something active, like exercising. And the miniature device sees just as well as a more unwieldy hospital machine, researchers report in the July 29 Science .  “This is just the beginning,” says Xuanhe Zhao, a mechanical engineer at MIT. His team plans...

What happens when two different kinds of auroras get together? One spills the other’s secrets. Amateur astronomers have captured a strange combination of red and green auroras on camera, and physicists — who had never seen such a thing before — have now used these images to learn what may trigger the more mysterious part of the lightshow. Photographer Alan Dyer was in his backyard in Strathmore, Canada, when he saw the lights dancing overhead and started filming. “I knew I had something interesting,” says Dyer, who also writes about astronomy. What he didn’t know was that he had just made the most complete recording of this rare phenomenon. At a glance, Dyer’s video looks like a celestial watermelon. The rind, a rippling green aurora, is well understood: It appears when the solar wind energizes protons trapped within Earth’s magnetic field, which then rain down and knock electrons and atoms around (SN: 12/10/03) .   The swath of fruity magenta is more mysterious: Though scient...

  Quantum entanglement makes quantum communication even more secure Quantum devices don’t have to be perfectly understood to be snoop-proof, three studies show Quantum entanglement, a type of ethereal link between particles, improves the security of quantum communication, as demonstrated in three experiments (the one pictured, by researchers in France, Switzerland and England, used strontium ions in its test).                            DAVID NADLINGER/UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.                                                                                                                                ...

How to make jet fuel from sunlight, air and water vapor Solar kerosene could one day provide aviation with a carbon-neutral fuel An array of 169 reflectors focus sunlight on a solar reactor at the top of this tower. The light reacts with carbon dioxide and water vapor, forming a mixture that can be turned into kerosene and diesel fuel. IMDEA ENERGY Share this:   By  Nikk Ogasa 20 HOURS AGO Jet fuel can now be siphoned from the air. Or at least that’s the case in Móstoles, Spain, where researchers demonstrated that an outdoor system could  produce kerosene , used as jet fuel, with three simple ingredients: sunlight, carbon dioxide and water vapor. Solar kerosene could replace petroleum-derived jet fuel in aviation and help stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers report in the July 20  Joule . Burning solar-derived kerosene releases carbon dioxide, but only as much as is used to make it, says Aldo Steinfeld, an engineer at ETH Zurich. “That make...

  Computer Science Proof Unveils Unexpected Form of Entanglement Three computer scientists have posted a proof of the NLTS conjecture, showing that systems of entangled particles can rema in difficult to analyze even away from extremes. striking new proof in quantum computational complexity might best be understood with a playful thought experiment. Run a bath, then dump a bunch of floating bar magnets into the water. Each magnet will flip its orientation back and forth, trying to align with its neighbors. It will push and pull on the other magnets and get pushed and pulled in return. Now try to answer this: What will be the system’s final arrangement? This problem and others like it, it turns out, are impossibly complicated. With anything more than a few hundred magnets, computer simulations would take a preposterous amount of time to spit out the answer. Now make those magnets quantum — individual atoms subject to the byzantine rules of the quantum world. As you might guess, the ...