Best Citation Awards

Before Pangaea — What? — Science News , September 30, 1972 The continents as we know them resulted when the proto­continent Pangaea broke apart and its fragments made the long slow journey to their present positions. The process took about 200 m­illion years. But the Earth’s crust is an estimated 4.5 billion years old.… [Scientists are exploring] the perplexing p­roblem of what went on during the billions of years before Pangaea went to pieces. Update The continents have an on-again, off-again relationship that has existed since well before Pangaea, fossil and rock evidence shows. Most scientists agree that the earliest known supercontinent, called Nuna, formed around 1.5 billion years ago. It broke apart and reunited as the supercontinent Rodinia about 1 billion years ago. A third supercontinent called Pannotia may have formed roughly 600 million years ago near the South Pole, but its existence is debated . Today, scientists are predicting how continents will merge i...

If you look at parts of the circulatory system of whales and dolphins, you might think that you are looking at a Jackson Pollock painting, not blood vessels. These cetaceans have especially dense, complex networks of blood vessels mainly associated with the brain and spine, but scientists didn’t know why. A new analysis suggests that the networks protect cetaceans’ brains from the pulses of blood pressure that the animals endure while diving deep in the ocean, researchers report in the Sept. 23 Science . Whales and dolphins “have gone through these really amazing vascular adaptations to support their brain,” says Ashley Blawas, a marine scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C., who was not involved with the research. Called retia mirabilia, which means “wonderful nets,” the blood vessel networks are present in some other animals besides cetaceans, including giraffes and horses. But the networks aren’t found in other aquatic vertebrates that move differently from...

For one tiny Australian spider, somersaulting is the secret to taking on ants twice its size. Ants — armed with powerful jaws and sometimes chemical weapons — are so dangerous to spiders that fewer than 1 percent of arachnids attempt to hunt the insects ( SN: 9/8/21 ). High-speed footage now reveals that the Australian ant-slayer spider ( Euryopis umbilicata ) can tackle this risky prey by leaping over and lassoing its victims with silk. The hunting maneuver hasn’t been found in any other spider species , researchers report September 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . “This acrobatic behavior is just fascinating. I’ve personally never seen this kind of hunting,” says Paula Cushing, an evolutionary biologist and curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who was not involved in the study. Alfonso Aceves-Aparicio, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Plank Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, stumbled across the so...

In many oil and gas producing regions, flames light the sky. The flares burn off 98 percent of the escaping natural gas, oil and gas companies claim. But observations of three U.S. oil and gas fields show efficiency is only around 91 percent , scientists report in the Sept. 30 Science . Making up the difference would be the equivalent of taking nearly 3 million cars off the road.  The natural gas escaping is primarily methane. This greenhouse gas lingers for only nine to 10 years in the atmosphere, but its warming potential is 80 times that of carbon dioxide. So oil and gas companies light flares — burning the methane to produce less-potent carbon dioxide and water. The industry and the U.S. government assumed those flares worked at 98 percent efficiency. But previous studies said that might be too optimistic , says Genevieve Plant, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor ( SN: 4/22/20 ). Plant and her colleagues sent planes to sample air over more tha...

It’s a frustration many parents know all too well: You’ve finally lulled your crying baby to sleep, so you put them down in their crib … and the wailing begins again. Science may have a trick for you. Carrying a crying infant for about five minutes, then sitting for at least another five to eight minutes can calm and lull the baby to sleep long enough to allow a parent to put the child down without waking them , researchers report September 13 in Current Biology . Some of those same researchers previously showed that carrying a crying baby soothes the child and calms a racing heart rate ( SN: 4/18/13 ). For the new study, the team looked at what it takes to get that crying baby to nod off and stay asleep. The researchers put heart rate monitors on 21 crying babies, ranging in age from newborns to 7 months old. The team also took videos of the infants, monitoring their moods as their mothers carried them around a room, sat holding them and laid them in a crib. That allowed the team ...

Josep Cornella doesn’t deal in absolutes. While chemists typically draw rigid lines between organic and inorganic chemistry, Cornella, a researcher at Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, believes in just the opposite. “You have to be open to cross boundaries,” he says, “and learn from it.” The fringes are “where the rich new things are.” Cornella is an organic chemist by industry standards; he synthesizes molecules that contain carbon. But he’s put together a team from a wide range of backgrounds: inorganic chemists, physical organic chemists, computational chemists. Together, the team brainstorms novel approaches to designing new catalysts, so that chemical reactions essential to pharmaceuticals and agriculture can be made more efficient and friendly for the environment. Along the way, Cornella has unlocked mysteries that stumped chemists for years. “He has told us about catalysts … that we didn’t have before, and which were just pipe dreams,...

A mucus-wicking robotic pill may offer a new way to deliver meds. The multivitamin-sized device houses a motor and a cargo hold for drugs, including ones that are typically given via injections or intravenously, such as insulin and some antibiotics. If people could take such drugs orally, they could potentially avoid daily shots or a hospital stay, which would be “a huge game changer,” says MIT biomedical engineer Shriya Srinivasan. But drugs that enter the body via the mouth face a tough journey. They encounter churning stomach acid, raging digestive enzymes and sticky slicks of mucus in the gut. Intestinal mucus “sort of acts like Jell-O,” Srinivasan says. The goo can trap drug particles, preventing them from entering the bloodstream. The new device, dubbed RoboCap, whisks away this problem. The pill uses surface grooves, studs and torpedo-inspired fins to scrub away intestinal mucus like a miniature brush whirling inside a bottle. In experiments in pigs, RoboCap tunneled through ...

The psychological development of young adults may have taken a hit, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. In typical times, people tend to become more conscientious and agreeable and less neurotic with age, a process known as psychological maturation. But in the United States, the pandemic seems to have reversed that personality trajectory , especially among adults under 30, researchers report September 28 in PLOS ONE . If those patterns persist, that could spell long-term trouble for this cohort, the researchers say. “You get better as you go through life at being responsible, at coping with emotions and getting along with others,” says personality psychologist Rodica Damian of the University of Houston, who was not involved with this study. “The fact that in these young adults you see the opposite pattern does show stunted development.” Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research Personalities shape how people think, feel and behave. Researchers often asse...

My, what small teeth they had. A newfound treasure trove of ancient fish fossils unearthed in southern China is opening a window into the earliest history of jawed vertebrates — a group that encompasses 99 percent of all living vertebrates on Earth, including humans. The fossil site, dated from 439 million to 436 million years ago, includes a revealing variety of never-before-seen small, toothy, bony fish species. The diversity of the fossils at this one site not only fills a glaring gap in the fossil record, but also highlights the strangeness that such a gap exists, researchers report September 29 in Nature . Genetic analyses had previously pointed to this time period, known as the early Silurian Period, as an era of rapid diversification of jawed vertebrates. But the toothy fishes seemed to have left few traces in the fossil record. Instead, as far as the fossil record was concerned, jawless fishes appeared to rule the waves at the time. And what jawed fishes have been preserved...

Prosthetic teeth could make great hearing aids. Vibrations applied to replacements for lost teeth travel well through jawbones to the inner ear , researchers report in the September Journal of the Acoustical Society of America . The finding could lead to discreet alternatives to conventional hearing aids and cochlear implants that people with hearing impairments often use ( SN: 7/7/16 ). Previous tooth-based hearing aids designs clipped onto molars and received sound wirelessly from a microphone placed behind the ear. Dental researcher Jianxiang Tao and colleagues want to take the concept a step further, turning tooth implants into hearing aids. The electronics that impart sound vibrations would be built into the portion of a false tooth anchored into the jawbone, says Tao, of Tongji University in Shanghai. But first, the team had to determine how well dental implants transmit sound compared with natural teeth and the mastoid bone behind the ear, which other types of hearing aids r...

Fen, Bog & Swamp Annie Proulx Simon & Schuster, $26.99 A recent TV ad features three guys lost in the woods, debating whether they should’ve taken a turn at a pond, which one guy argues is a marsh. “Let’s not pretend you know what a marsh is,” the other snaps. “Could be a bog,” offers the third. It’s an exchange that probably wouldn’t surprise novelist Annie Proulx. While the various types of peatlands — wetlands rich in partially decayed material called peat — do blend together, I can’t help but think, after reading her latest book, that a historical distaste and underappreciation of wetlands in Western society has led to the average person’s confusion over basic peatland vocabulary. In Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis , Proulx seeks to fill the gaps. She details three types of peatland: fens, which are fed by streams and rivers; bogs, fed by rainwater; and swamps, distinguishable by their trees and shrubs...

The coral reef, once bustling with more than 5,000 long-spined sea urchins, became a ghost town in a matter of days. White skeletons with dangling spines dotted the reef near the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba, the water cloudy from the disintegrating corpses. In just a week last April, half of the urchins, Diadema antillarum , in a section of reef called “Diadema City” had died. In June, only 100 remained. The mysterious die-off started sweeping across the Caribbean in February. It’s eerily similar to a mass mortality event in 1983 that wiped out as much as 99 percent of the Caribbean Diadema population — a huge blow to not only the urchins, which have not fully recovered four decades later, but also the reefs. Without urchins grazing, algae can overwhelm a reef, damaging adult coral and leaving nowhere for new coral to settle. Before the die-off, Saba’s coral cover — the part of a reef that consists of live hard coral rather than sponges, algae or other organisms — hovered around ...

Mission control rooms rarely celebrate crash landings. But the collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft with an asteroid was a smashing success. At about 7:15 p.m. EDT on September 26, the spacecraft hurtled into Dimorphos, an asteroid moonlet orbiting a larger space rock named Didymos. The mission’s goal was to bump Dimorphos slightly closer to its parent asteroid, shortening its 12-hour orbit around Didymos by several minutes. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test , or DART, is the world’s first attempt to change an asteroid’s motion by ramming a space probe into it ( SN: 6/30/20 ). Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos poses a threat to Earth. But seeing how well DART’s maneuver worked will reveal how easy it is to tamper with an asteroid’s trajectory — a strategy that could protect the planet if a large asteroid is ever discovered on a collision course with Earth. “We don’t know of any large asteroids that would be considered a threat to Earth that are coming any time in the next century,” sa...

In ancient Maya civilization, cacao wasn’t just for the elites. Traces of the sacred plant show up in ceramics from all types of neighborhoods and dwellings in and around a former Maya city, researchers report September 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The finding suggests that, contrary to previous thinking, cacao was consumed at every social level of Maya society. “Now we know that the rituals the elite depict with cacao were likely played out, like Thanksgiving, like any other ritual, by everyone,” says Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cacao — which chocolate is made from — was sacred to the ancient Maya, consumed in rituals and used as a currency. The cacao tree ( Theobroma cacao ) itself was linked to Hun Hunahpu, the maize god. Previous research found cacao in ceremonial vessels and elite burials, suggesting that its use was restricted to those at the top. To explore the extent to which cacao was used in...

The glossy leaves and branching roots of mangroves are downright eye-catching, and now a study finds that the moon plays a special role in the vigor of these trees. Long-term tidal cycles set in motion by the moon drive, in large part, the expansion and contraction of mangrove forests in Australia, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science Advances . This discovery is key to predicting when stands of mangroves, which are good at sequestering carbon and could help fight climate change , are most likely to proliferate ( SN: 11/18/21 ). Such knowledge could inform efforts to protect and restore the forests. Mangroves are coastal trees that provide habitat for fish and buffer against erosion ( SN: 9/14/22 ). But in some places, the forests face a range of threats, including coastal development, pollution and land clearing for agriculture. To get a bird’s-eye view of these forests, Neil Saintilan, an environmental scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney, and his colleagues turned t...

Cocooned within the bowels of the Earth, one mineral’s metamorphosis into another may trigger some of the deepest earthquakes ever detected. These cryptic tremors — known as deep-focus earthquakes — are a seismic conundrum. They violently rupture at depths greater than 300 kilometers, where intense temperatures and pressures are thought to force rocks to flow smoothly. Now, experiments suggest that those same hellish conditions might also sometimes transform olivine — the primary mineral in Earth’s mantle — into the mineral wadsleyite. This mineral switch-up can destabilize the surrounding rock , enabling earthquakes at otherwise impossible depths, mineral physicist Tomohiro Ohuchi and colleagues report September 15 in Nature Communications. “It’s been a real puzzle for many scientists because earthquakes shouldn’t occur deeper than 300 kilometers,” says Ohuchi, of Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan. Deep-focus earthquakes usually occur at subduction zones where tectonic plates m...

One of my great joys in life is one of the simplest: looking at the world around me. I often walk along the C&O Canal, a defunct marvel of 19th century transportation engineering that reaches west from Washington, D.C. As I walk, I look. And even though I have strolled the towpath so many times before, I always see something new. Last Saturday, I saw a native persimmon tree with fruit the size of Ping-Pong balls just starting to turn color. I spied two beaver dams spanning the canal, marvels of rodent engineering. And I saw how the September sunlight was softening into fall, giving everything a glow that an Impressionist painter might envy. So much of science is looking and seeing. On September 1, the astronomy world went bonkers when news broke that the James Webb Space Telescope had taken its first direct image of a planet outside our solar system . Scientists’ Twitter feeds erupted in exclamation points and comments like “thrilled” and “amazing.” Taking pictures of very distan...