Best Citation Awards

The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years. The insects — from a pollen-eating genus named Tillyardembia first described in 1937 — were typically about 1.5 centimeters long, says Alexander Khramov, a paleoentomologist at the Borissiak Paleontological Institute in Moscow. Flimsy wings probably kept the creatures mostly on the forest floor, he says, leaving them to climb trees to find and consume their pollen. Recently, Khramov and his colleagues scrutinized 425 fossils of Tillyardembia in the institute’s collection. Six had clumps of pollen grains trapped on their heads, legs, thoraxes or abdomens , the team reports February 28 in Biology Letters . A proportion that small isn’t surprising, Khramo...

Full-grown snapping shrimp were already known to have some of the fastest claws under the waves. But it turns out they’re nothing compared with their kids.  Juvenile snapping shrimp produce the highest known underwater accelerations of any reusable body part, researchers report February 28 in the Journal of Experimental Biology . While the claws’ top speed isn’t terribly impressive, they go from zero to full throttle in record time. To deter predators or competitors, snapping shrimp create shock waves with their powerful claws. The shrimp store energy in the flexing exoskeleton of their claw as it opens, latching it in place much like a bow-and-arrow mechanism, says Jacob Harrison, a biologist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Firing the claw and releasing this elastic energy produces a speeding jet of water. Bubbles form behind it and promptly implode, liberating a huge amount of energy, momentarily flashing as hot as the sun and creating a deafening crack ( SN: 10/3/01 )....

A form of lightning with a knack for sparking wildfires may surge under climate change. An analysis of satellite data suggests “hot lightning” — strikes that channel electrical charge for an extended period — may be more likely to set landscapes ablaze than more ephemeral flashes, researchers report February 10 in Nature Communications. Each 1 degree Celsius of warming could spur a 10 percent increase in the most incendiary of these Promethean bolts , boosting their flash rate to about four times per second by 2090 — up from nearly three times per second in 2011. That’s dangerous, warns physicist Francisco Javier Pérez-Invernón of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain. “There will be more risk of lightning-ignited wildfires.” Among all the forces of nature, lightning sets off the most blazes. Flashes that touch down amid minimal or no rainfall — known as dry lightning — are especially effective fire starters . These bolts have initiated some of the most destr...

            Professor Zhang Jianhua has been named on the list of "Highly Cited Researchers 2022" by Clarivate. Professor Zhang Jianhua, , Associate Vice-President (Global Research Collaboration) and Chair Professor of the Department of Biology, has been named on the list of "Highly Cited Researchers 2022" by Clarivate Analytics. This is the second consecutive year that Professor Zhang has received the honour, and it recognises that his academic publications are highly cited by fellow academics in the Web of Science, the world's eminent citation database. The other researchers on the list are highly influential figures in academia and their research fields.                                      Professor Zhang is a renowned expert in plant stress physiology and the water-saving cultivation of field crops. His publications have been extensively cited more than 28,00...

An eye drop a day could keep myopia at bay — at least temporarily. Using nightly eye drops with 0.05 percent atropine, a medication that relaxes the eye muscle responsible for focusing vision, may delay myopia onset in children , researchers report February 14 in JAMA . Myopia, also called nearsightedness, is an irreversible condition in which the eyeball grows too long front to back, causing blurred distant vision. It typically begins in childhood, and the earlier it starts, the worse eye health can become later in life. Elongated eyes increase the risk for ocular complications including cataracts, glaucoma and macular degeneration. The prevalence of myopia has risen rapidly over the last few decades. About one-fourth of the global population currently has the condition. It is expected to affect half of people worldwide by 2050. Genetics plays a large role in the condition. A 2020 study found that myopia risk is more than 10 times as high in children of two highly myopic parents a...

Pregnancy shrinks parts of the brain. That sounds bad. Throw in the forgetfulness and fogginess, or “momnesia,” that many moms report, and what’s left is the notion that for the brain, the transition to motherhood is a net loss. “I see it on social media all the time,” says neuroscientist and therapist Jodi Pawluski of the University of Rennes in France. “Your brain shrunk. This is why [you] forget everything.” But that’s just not true, Pawluski says. The perception that the maternal brain is dysfunctional has gone on long enough: It’s time to “ start giving the maternal brain the credit it deserves ,” Pawluski and her colleagues write February 6 in in JAMA Neurology. Pregnancy does kick-start structural changes in the brain, including a loss of gray matter. But the loss isn’t automatically a bad thing — reductions can reflect a fine-tuning process that makes the brain more efficient ( SN: 3/18/22 ). During the transition to motherhood, the brain reorganizes its connections, stren...

  Chief Justice of India, Mr. Chandrachud intends to introduce the neutral citation system. Madras, Delhim, and Kerala High Courts have already welcomed the neutral citation system. What is this system? Let’s know today. On February 23, 2023, Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud stated that the apex court will welcome a “neutral citation system” for its judgments. Additionally, the Chief Justice of India also hopes the High Courts to follow the same citation system for its judgments. Therefore, the Kerala, Madras, and Delhi HCs have already accepted the neutral citation system. Let’s understand citation and the neutral citation system, one by one. What is meant by citation?  What do you call your friend? How do you tell the location of your house to the food delivery apps? And how do you refer a book to your classmate/ colleague? You use some names or numbers to refer to these things, right? Well, similarly a case citation is basically an identification tag for a court...

The 19th century landscape paintings hanging in London’s Tate Britain museum looked awfully familiar to climate physicist Anna Lea Albright. Artist Joseph Mallord William Turner’s signature way of shrouding his vistas in fog and smoke reminded Albright of her own research tracking air pollution. “I started wondering if there was a connection,” says Albright, who had been visiting the museum on a day off from the Laboratory for Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. After all, Turner — a forerunner of the impressionist movement — was painting as Britain’s industrial revolution gathered steam, and a growing number of belching manufacturing plants earned London the nickname “The Big Smoke.” Turner’s early works, such as his 1814 painting “Apullia in Search of Appullus,” were rendered in sharp details. Later works, like his celebrated 1844 painting “Rain, Steam and Speed — the Great Western Railway,” embraced a dreamier, fuzzier aesthetic. Perhaps, Albright thought, this burgeoning painting s...

Fungi Q&A Three types of fungi — Histoplasma , Coccidioides and Blastomyces — that cause serious lung infections were thought to be confined to certain regions of the United States. But now they are widespread in the country, Tina Hesman Saey reported in “ Where fungal lung infections have spread ” ( SN: 1/14/23, p. 32 ). The story prompted so many questions from readers about the symptoms, treatments and testing for these fungal infections that Saey answered them in a follow-up article online . An abridged version appears below. How do you get infected? People generally get infected by inhaling fungal spores. Human activities such as farming, gardening and construction can disturb the soil where these fungi live, stirring up spores. Bird droppings and bat guano can also be sources of Histoplasma . Sweeping dried droppings increases the risk that spores will get kicked into the air and inhaled. When cleaning up bird and bat droppings, it’s best to first wet them with a...

What field of science could be more solid than geology? Rocks are visible, tangible. You can bang on them with a hammer, drill them, compress them, zap them with X-rays, ultraviolet light and radar, analyze their chemistry, extract their secrets. The study of human behavior, by contrast, is the story of science’s struggle to identify the ineffable. Researchers have taken wildly different approaches to trying to figure out how people think and behave, from Sigmund Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex to making behavioral science more “scientific” through efforts such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and fMRI brain scans. Human life is messy, and no hammer tap will reveal the brain’s workings. This issue of Science News articulates that duality in two features. Our cover story reports on the geology and chemistry of Mars, with NASA’s Perseverance rover scouting the Red Planet for rocks that could reveal signs of past life . In “Broken timelines,” social s...

  New research suggests that lung function development can improve in children if air pollution is reduced. The reduction in pollution will also bring down the number of young people who suffer from pulmonary impairments. In recent years, the impact of air pollution on health has remained a topic of concern with the research reflecting that every organ of the body can be affected by pollution. A new study shows that developing organs and nervous systems of children become more susceptible to long-term damage because of air pollution.  The issue came into the spotlight in 2020 after the death of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah in the UK who became the first person on whose death certificate air pollution was listed as the reason for death.  Ella’s mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah has now become a leading campaigner for clean air and is advocating for legislation which can make access to clean air a human right.  Previously, researchers had found ...

Trish Tran narrates her life in staccato notes. “I remember carrying my little sister on my back because she’s too tired and walking through the huge sunflower fields … and me feeling so tired I didn’t think I could walk another step.” “I remember being in a taxi with my mother, coming back to the man who had been violently abusive to all of us…. Her words to me were, ‘Just trust me, Trish. Just trust me.’ ” “I’m waiting at a train station … to meet my mother who I haven’t seen in many years…. Hours pass and eventually I try to call her … and she says to me, ‘I’m sorry, Trish. My neighbor was upset, and I needed to stay back with them.’ And her voice was slurring quite a lot, so I knew she had been drinking.” Tran, who lives in Perth, Australia, is dispassionate as she describes a difficult childhood. Her account lacks what are generally considered classic signs of trauma: She makes no mention of flashbacks, appears to have a generally positive outlook and speaks with relative ease...