Best Citation Awards

It’s not great when a person sucks all the oxygen out of a room. When a battery does it to a tumor, though, it could be a good thing. A tiny self-charging battery wrapped around a tumor removes oxygen from the cancer cells’ environment, boosting the power of some cancer therapies, a study in mice shows. Mice that had small batteries wrapped around their breast cancer tumors, combined with cancer therapy, showed a 90 percent decrease in tumor volume in two weeks, researchers report March 31 in Science Advances .  Solid tumors, such as those that can develop in breast cancer , often grow rapidly — so rapidly that the tumor’s growth is faster than its blood supply can support ( SN: 5/10/17 ). This means that the center of many tumors can be hypoxic, with much lower oxygen levels than surrounding tissue. “Hypoxia is a double-edged sword,” says materials scientist Yongyao Xia, who specializes in battery materials at Fudan University in Shanghai. Low oxygen levels in tumors mean tha...

Capybaras, the world’s largest rodent, naturally live in vast grasslands, wetlands and rivers throughout South America. Their name literally means grass eater in the Tupi language, which is indigenous to Brazil and other regions in South America. So scientists who study capybara diets were surprised when they found the animals seemed just as happy munching on leafy forest plants as the wavy grasses they’re used to. The new findings, which appear February 27 in the Journal of Zoology , suggest dietary flexibility has helped capybara populations balloon in cities and survive in farther-flung landscapes fragmented by roads, fields and other human-made changes over the past five decades or so. “If a species’ diet is pretty specialized, that’s going to constrain their ability to adapt to modified ecosystems,” says Maria Luisa Jorge, an ecologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who was not involved in the study. “Capybaras eat a lot of grass — we call them grazers — but they can eat...

The antiviral medication Paxlovid seems to reduce the chance of developing long COVID, researchers report. In a large study of veterans’ medical records, Paxlovid lowered a person’s chance of landing in the hospital or dying from all causes in the six months following a COVID-19 infection. And the drug reduced the risk of developing 10 of 13 long-term health problems, researchers report March 23 in JAMA Internal Medicine . On average, the drug lowered the relative risk of developing the conditions by 26 percent, says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The antiviral drug provided protection against some heart problems, blood clots, kidney damage, muscle pain, fatigue, shortness of breath and two neurological conditions. But it did not lessen the chance of developing liver disease, cough or of getting diabetes after a COVID infection ( SN: 1/4/22 ). Paxlovid, made by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, has previously been...

Indigenous knowledge and Western science have written a new tale about when horses most recently arrived in North America. Spaniards brought horses to Mexico in 1519. Indigenous peoples then took the reins, rapidly transporting offspring of those equine newcomers north along trade routes. As a result, a new study finds, many Native American populations across the Great Plains and the Rockies had incorporated horses into their ways of life by the early 1600s, decades before encountering any Europeans. This unconventional scenario of how domesticated horses originally spread throughout central and western North America bucks a previous narrative: European written accounts dating mainly to the 1700s and 1800s had contended that horses first spread into North America in large numbers after Pueblo people temporarily drove Spanish settlers out of New Mexico in 1680. But little evidence existed to confirm or deny that claim. Europeans’ historical texts didn’t ring true for molecular archae...

In movies and TV shows, Tyrannosaurus rex often sports a fleet of big, sharp teeth that are almost always on display. But the dinosaurs and their kin may have kept their pearly whites mostly tucked behind lizardlike lips. Similar to Komodo dragons today, these dinosaurs had ample soft tissue around the mouth that would have functioned as lips, an analysis of fossilized and modern reptile skulls and teeth finds. The research, described in the March 31 Science , challenges common, traditional reconstructions of how these top predators appeared in life. “This is a nice, concise answer to a question that has been asked for a long time by dinosaur paleontologists,” says Emily Lessner, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who wasn’t involved in the study.  Soft tissue is not often included in analyses of the biomechanics of feeding dinosaurs, she says. Acknowledging the potential presence of lips in these tests could change how we think some dinosa...

Listen carefully, and a plant may tell you it’s thirsty. Dry tomato and tobacco plants emit distinct ultrasonic clicks , scientists report March 30 in Cell . The noises sound something like a kid stomping on bubble wrap and also popped off when scientists snipped the plants’ stems. When evolutionary biologist Lilach Hadany gives talks about her team’s results, she says, people tell her, “‘You cut the tomato and it screams.’” But that is jumping to a conclusion her team has not yet reached. “Screaming” assumes the plant is intentionally making the noise, Hadany says. In the new study, “we’ve shown only that plants emit informative sounds.” Intentional or not, detecting those sounds could be a step forward for agriculture, potentially offering a new way to monitor water stress in plants, the study’s authors propose. If microphones in fields or greenhouses picked up certain clicks, farmers would know their crops were getting dry. Previous work had suggested that some plants produce vi...

What pollution does to you — Science News , March 31, 1973 Scientists described the results of their attempts to correlate pollution levels with various complaints of patients…. As expected, when smog increased, so did incidence of eye irritation, pulmonary disorders and nosebleeds…. Finally, for reasons not yet understood, more patients complained of animal bites on days when the air contained more suspended particulate matter. Update The harms of air pollution go beyond irritated eyes, lungs and noses. Researchers have linked exposure to dirty air with an increased risk for heart disease, diabetes, and dementia ( SN: 9/19/17 ), and have found associations with violent behavior . Air pollution appears to lead to more aggressive behavior in other animals too. For example, the risk of dogs biting people goes up on smoggy days, an analysis of nearly 70,000 U.S. cases found. More bites occurred with increasing ground-level ozone , which occurs when pollutants chemically react in ...

  The research is aimed at understanding how lightning rods work to dispel lightning discharge from the sky saving key infrastructure and human lives. An upward discharge from lightning rod atop of building captured attracting lightning bolt from sky. (Photo: Marcelo Saba and Diego Rhamon) In Short The research is aimed at understanding how lightning rods work The team used a camera that could capture 40,000 images in a second They found that the upward discharge moved in an almost straight line By India Today Science Desk : In what is one of the most stunning images ever captured, Brazilian scientists have recorded lightning in the sky being attracted to an upward discharge from a building. The discharge was beamed less than a millisecond before the lightning bolt touched the rod revealing an elusive phenomenon that has long protected humans and assets from lightning strikes. The research is aimed at understanding how lightning rods work to dispel lightning discharge from the sky,...

The language we learn growing up seems to leave a lasting, biological imprint on our brains. German and Arabic native speakers have different connection strengths in specific parts of the brain’s language circuit , researchers report February 19 in NeuroImage, hinting that the cognitive demands of our native languages physically shape the brain. The new study, based on nearly 100 brain scans, is one of the first in which scientists have identified these kinds of structural wiring differences in a large group of monolingual adults. “The specific difficulties [of each language] leave distinct traces in the brain,” says neuroscientist Alfred Anwander of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. “So we are not the same if we learn to speak one language, or if we learn another.” Every human language expresses itself using a different set of tricks. Some use rich systems of suffixes and prefixes to build enormous, dense words. Others change how ...

In a book about his travels in Africa published in 1907, British explorer Arnold Henry Savage Landor recounted witnessing an impromptu meal that his companions relished but that he found unimaginably revolting. As he coasted down a river in the Congo Basin with several local hunter-gatherers, a dead rodent floated near their canoe. Its decomposing body had bloated to the size of a small pig. Stench from the swollen corpse left Landor gasping for breath. Unable to speak, he tried to signal his companions to steer the canoe away from the fetid creature. Instead, they hauled the supersize rodent aboard and ate it. “The odour when they dug their knives into it was enough to kill the strongest of men,” Landor wrote. “When I recovered, my admiration for the digestive powers of these people was intense. They were smacking their lips and they said the [rodent] had provided most excellent eating.” Starting in the 1500s, European and then later American explorers, traders, missionaries, gove...

Art historians often wish that Renaissance painters could shell out secrets of the craft. Now, scientists may have cracked one using chemistry and physics. Around the turn of the 15th century in Italy, oil-based paints replaced egg-based tempera paints as the dominant medium. During this transition, artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli also experimented with paints made from oil and egg ( SN: 4/30/14 ). But it has been unclear how adding egg to oil paints may have affected the artwork.   “Usually, when we think about art, not everybody thinks about the science which is behind it,” says chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. In the lab, Ranquet and colleagues whipped up two oil-egg recipes to compare with plain oil paint. One mixture contained fresh egg yolk mixed into oil paint, and had a similar consistency to mayonnaise. For the other blend, the scientists ground pigment into the yolk, dried it and mixe...

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — A young, ultrabright Jupiter may have desiccated its now hellish moon Io . The planet’s bygone brilliance could have also vaporized water on Europa and Ganymede, planetary scientist Carver Bierson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. If true, the findings could help researchers narrow the search for icy exomoons by eliminating unlikely orbits. Jupiter is among the brightest specks in our night sky. But past studies have indicated that during its infancy, Jupiter was far more luminous . “About 10 thousand times more luminous,” said Bierson, of Arizona State University in Tempe. That radiance would have been inescapable for the giant planet’s moons, the largest of which are volcanic Io , ice-shelled Europa , aurora-cowled Ganymede and crater-laden Callisto ( SN: 12/22/22, SN: 4/19/22, SN: 3/12/15 ). The constitutions of these four bodies obey a trend: The more distant the moon from Jupiter, the more ice-rich its body is. Bierson and...

A neutron star pileup may have emitted two different kinds of cosmic signals: ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves and a brief blip of energy called a fast radio burst. One of the three detectors that make up the gravitational wave observatory LIGO picked up a signal from a cosmic collision on April 25, 2019. About 2.5 hours later, a fast radio burst detector picked up a signal from the same region of sky , researchers report March 27 in Nature Astronomy . If strengthened by further observations, the finding could bolster the theory that mysterious fast radio bursts have multiple origins — and neutron star mergers are one of them. “We’re 99.5 percent sure” the two signals came from the same event, says astrophysicist Alexandra Moroianu, who spotted the merger and its aftermath while at the University of Western Australia in Perth. “We want to be 99.999 percent sure.” Unfortunately, LIGO’s two other detectors didn’t catch the signal, so it’s impossible to precisely tria...