Best Citation Awards

In 2021, an analysis of plant and animal DNA from sediment samples from the Arctic, spanning about the last 50,000 years, suggested that mammoths survived in north-central Siberia as late as about 3,900 years ago ( SN: 1/11/22 ). That’s much later than when the youngest mammoth fossil found in continental Eurasia suggests the animals died out; it dates to about 10,700 years ago. Only on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia and the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea were mammoths known to have survived later. The finding was one of several in recent years using ancient DNA found in sediment and other material to suggest new insights into animal extinctions. Genetic evidence from woolly rhinos in Eurasia and horses in Alaska have also indicated that these animals remained thousands of years longer in some areas than was thought. But thousands of years is also how long the animals’ large bones can linger on the ground in the frigid north, slowly weathering and shedding tiny bits of ...

“The way that divers describe it,” says fluid mechanics researcher Elizabeth Gregorio of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., “is that they want to pull the splash in with them.” The goal is a nearly splashless rip entry that Gregorio says makes a sound resembling tearing paper. To study the move, Gregorio duplicated it with hinged models that bend in the middle, much as a diver bends at the hips. She plunged the models into water to simulate divers in action. Angles cut into the model re-created the shape of a diver’s head and arms. The shape meant the model folded in the middle, just as the angle of a diver’s arms and head after entering the water helps the athlete bend at the hips to execute a submerged turn. The folded model pulled air behind it to create a large, air-filled cavity under the water. It’s the same thing that happens when a diver turns underwater following a dive. A hinged model plunged into water drags air into a cavity surrounding it (as seen in th...

A get-sober pill? — Science News , November 18, 1972 Researchers at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital have been able to reduce intoxication time in rats by administrating harmless chemicals…. Injections of vitamin B3, and vitamin B5 with cystine, were successful… Glyceraldehyde, however, was effective when ingested and sodium acetate (still untested orally) is expected to be even more effective. Update Inebriation and the dreaded hangover that follows still don’t have cures — but scientists haven’t stopped searching. A compound in the seeds of Japanese raisin trees appeared to fend off drunkenness in rats and sober them up ( SN: 1/4/12 ), but follow-up research found no effect . Remedies that have worked in rodents have not yet led to treatments for people. In July, an antihangover supplement became available in the United Kingdom and may soon appear in U.S. stores. The Swedish company that makes this probiotic pill, Myrkle (pronounced “miracle”), claims that it can...

But this better living has come at a cost that is getting new attention. These chemicals — dubbed forever chemicals for their ability to last in the environment — are proving to have a lasting impact on human health. A growing body of research links the group of chemicals broadly known as PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, to conditions from unhealthy blood lipid levels to pregnancy complications to cancer. Alarm about the health impacts of these chemicals has sparked a recent flurry of action from U.S. public health and regulatory officials. Warning that PFAS pose a greater health risk than previously thought, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in June dramatically lowered its recommended safe levels of the chemicals in drinking water. “The updated advisory levels are based on new science, including more than 400 recent studies which indicate that negative health effects may occur at extremely low levels, much lower than previously understood,” Radhika Fox, ...

Dry cat and dog food tends to be better for the environment than wet food, veterinary nutritionist Vivian Pedrinelli of the University of São Paulo in Brazil and colleagues report. Their analysis of more than 900 hundred pet diets shows that nearly 90 percent of calories in wet chow comes from animal sources. That’s roughly double the share of calories from animal ingredients in dry food. The team factored in the cost of different pet food ingredients across several environmental measures. The findings, described November 17 in Scientific Reports , suggest that wet food production uses more land and water and emits more greenhouse gases than dry food.   Scientists already knew that meat-heavy human diets drive greenhouse gas emissions (SN: 5/5/22) . But when it comes to environmental sustainability, “we shouldn’t ignore pet food,” says Peter Alexander, an economist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the work. Just how much various pet foods impact the envir...

Some data gaps originated early in the pandemic. For instance, in spring 2020, people who lacked a travel history to China or didn’t have typical flulike symptoms were unable to get a PCR test to confirm they were infected. So when some of those people later developed long COVID, their initial illness had not been logged in medical records — making it difficult for them to get care and keeping them off most researchers’ radar. Other data gaps reveal long-standing problems in how the medical system treats complex, chronic diseases. Doctors weren’t looking out for long-term symptoms, despite warnings from experts in other postviral diseases. And some of the most common long COVID symptoms, such as a dramatic worsening of health after exertion, lack a standard code for documentation in medical charts, making them hard to track. Filling in those gaps is becoming increasingly crucial. Studies suggest that between 10 and 30 percent of people with COVID-19 may experience long-term symptoms,...

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Shock waves propagating along the jet of one such blazar contort magnetic fields that accelerate escaping particles to nearly the speed of light, astronomers report November 23 in Nature . Studying such extreme acceleration can help probe fundamental physics questions that can’t be studied any other way. Blazars are active black holes that shoot jets of high-energy particles toward Earth , making them appear as bright spots from millions or even billions of light-years away ( SN: 7/14/15 ). Astronomers knew that the jets’ extreme speeds and tight columnated beams had something to do with the shape of magnetic fields around black holes, but the details were fuzzy. Enter the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, an orbiting telescope launched in December 2021. Its mission is to measure X-ray polarization, or how X-ray light is oriented as it travels through space. While previous blazar observations of polarized radio waves and optical light probed parts of jets days to years a...

For instance, parrots do it, too. And now rats have been observed bopping their heads in time with the music of Mozart, Lady Gaga, Queen and others, researchers report on November 11 in Science Advances . What’s more, the animals seem to respond to the same tempos that get humans’ feet tapping. The study could help reveal the evolutionary foundations of humans’ sense of rhythm. “Some of us believe that music is very special to human culture. But I believe that its origin is somehow inherited from our progenitors,” says Hirokazu Takahashi, a mechanical engineer at the University of Tokyo, who studies how the brain works. The ability to recognize the beat of a song and synchronize the movements of one’s body to it is known as beat synchronization. It’s a mystery why some species, like humans and parrots , have the innate ability and others do not ( SN: 4/30/09 ). For rats in the lab, Takahashi and his colleagues put on Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major” (K. 448). The team s...

The remains of a 1,700-year-old monkey found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan outside modern-day Mexico City suggest the primate was a diplomatic gift from the Maya. The find is the earliest evidence of a primate held in captivity in the Americas , researchers report November 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .  Unearthed in 2018 at the base of a pyramid in Teotihuacan, the monkey’s skeleton lay beside the corpses of other animals — including an eagle and several rattlesnakes — in an area of the city where visiting Maya elites may have resided. Evidence of animal sacrifices, including of predators like jaguars, have been found in the city before. But “up to that point, we did not have any instances of sacrificed primates in Teotihuacan,” says Nawa Sugiyama, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of California, Riverside. Chemical analysis of the spider monkey’s bones and teeth showed that the female had likely been captured in a humid environmen...

Generally considered loners, the pouched animals have a wide diversity of social relationships that have gone unrecognized, a new analysis published October 26 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests. The findings could have implications for how scientists think about the lifestyles of early mammals. “These findings are helpful to move us away from a linear thinking that used to exist in some parts of evolutionary theory, that species develop from supposedly simple into more complex forms,” says Dieter Lukas, an evolutionary ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved with the study. Mammals run the gamut of social organization systems, ranging from loose, ephemeral interactions like aggregations of jaguars in the South American wetlands to the antlike subterranean societies of naked mole-rats ( SN: 10/13/21 ; SN: 10/20/20 ).  But marsupials — a subgroup of mammals that give birth to relatively underdev...