Best Citation Awards

The number of known mountains in Earth’s oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts , researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science . Just as mountains tower over Earth’s surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain. These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity (SN: 10/7/16 ) . That’s in part because their craggy walls — formed from volcanic activity — provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They’re like “stirring rods in the ocean,” says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. More than 24,600 seamounts have been previousl

MINNEAPOLIS — Don’t try to do a quantum experiment near a black hole — its mere presence ruins all quantum states in its vicinity, researchers say. The finding comes from a thought experiment that pits the rules of quantum mechanics and black holes against each other , physicists reported April 17 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. Any quantum experiment done near a black hole could set up a paradox, the researchers find, in which the black hole reveals information about its interior — something physics says is forbidden. The way around the paradox, the team reports, is if the black hole simply destroys any quantum states that come close. That destruction could have implications for future theories of quantum gravity. These sought-after theories aim to unite quantum mechanics, the set of rules governing subatomic particles, and general relativity, which describes how mass moves on cosmic scales. “The idea is to use properties of the [theories] that you understand, which

Fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, is killing a growing number of children and teens in the United States.   More than 1,500 kids under the age of 20 died from fentanyl in 2021, four times as many as in 2018, says epidemiologist Julie Gaither of the Yale School of Medicine, who will present the data May 1 at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Washington, D.C.  The fentanyl deaths account for nearly all of the opioid-related deaths in this age group in 2021. Fentanyl is a lab-made opioid used for pain treatment that is 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin, making it lethal at a much smaller dose. The drug is also manufactured and sold illegally and is increasingly found contaminating counterfeit prescription drugs, or entirely replacing the drug a buyer expects to get ( SN: 5/1/18 ). “That’s primarily the story of what’s happening among teenagers,” says pediatrician and addiction provider Sarah Bagley of the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine

Like tiny, wriggling Houdinis, California blackworms are master escape artists. Groups of the worms work themselves into gnarly tangles but they can undo the knots in just tens of milliseconds. Now scientists have teased out how they do it. Found in ponds and other standing water, California blackworms ( Lumbriculus variegatus ) interlace themselves into clumps to control their temperature or conserve moisture ( SN: 1/11/19 ). The worms are typically just a few centimeters long. Their clumps, which can contain anywhere from 5 to 50,000 worms, take minutes to weave. But when spooked by a potential predator, the worms are outta there in an instant. Videos and ultrasound images helped scientists unravel the worms’ behavior. The tangling and loosening results from the different types of sinuous paths the worms take , researchers report in the April 28 Science . When the worms are in tangling mode, they do loop-de-loops in the clump, swimming in circular paths that only occasionally swi

Finally, researchers may have ways to combat a deadly respiratory illness. The disease is not the flu or COVID-19, but respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. The virus was first identified in 1957 in Baltimore, but it has probably been around for millennia, says Jim Boonyaratanakornkit, a virologist and transplant immunologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle. “It’s always been a plague for the very young and the very old,” he says. In Europe, people age 60 and older may soon get some protection against the virus. An advisory committee recommended April 26 that a vaccine against RSV made by the pharmaceutical giant GSK should be approved for use. That decision will go to the European Commission for final approval. No RSV vaccine has been approved in the United States. And there are no specific antiviral medications to combat RSV, and only one preventive treatment — a monoclonal antibody — is reserved for a small number of babies at high risk of severe disease. But that

If you feel like you bonded with your pet during the pandemic, you’re not alone. Cat and dog owners in the United States gradually grew closer to their pets during the first two years of COVID-19 . But these furry friends didn’t ease their humans’ overall stress or loneliness, despite owners citing their pets’ positive influences, researchers report April 26 in PLOS ONE . “The one very clear message is that the human-animal relationship is very complicated,” says veterinary epidemiologist Hsin-Yi Weng of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. When the coronavirus outbreak began, Weng and colleagues recognized it as an unfortunate but unique opportunity to explore the dynamics of pet ownership during a large-scale, disruptive event. The team launched a survey around mid-2020 asking about people’s stress, loneliness and relationships with their pets. Participants reflected on their emotions before the pandemic (February 2020) and during lockdown (April to June 2020). Follow-up surv

Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of the structure of DNA may have been different than previously believed. Franklin wasn’t the victim of data theft at the hands of James Watson and Francis Crick, say biographers of the famous duo. Instead, she collaborated and shared data with Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins. Seventy years ago, a trio of scientific papers announcing the discovery of DNA’s double helix was published. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962 for the finding. Franklin, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer, died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded and was not eligible to be included. Many people have been outraged by accounts that Watson and Crick used Franklin’s unpublished data without her knowledge or consent in making their model of DNA’s molecular structure. What’s more, Franklin supposedly did not understand the significance of an X-ray diffraction image, taken by her graduate student, that came to be kno

Your mother tongue may modify your musical ability. Speaking a native language that requires tones appears to boost perception of melody, but at the cost of rhythm , researchers report April 26 in Current Biology . The massive global study hints at how language skills seep into other areas of cognition ( SN: 3/29/23 ). Tonal languages use pitch to distinguish words that otherwise might sound the same. In Mandarin, for instance, mă means horse whereas mā means mother. Nontonal languages like Spanish sometimes include pitch changes to suggest emotion, for example, but not to change a word’s meaning. As a Mandarin speaker and flutist, Jingxuan Liu wondered about the crossover between language and music. While studying psychology as an undergraduate at Duke University, Liu helped analyze the musical abilities of nearly half a million people from 203 countries. Her colleagues had launched an online game in which participants completed several musical tasks, including identifying matchin

As the Arctic’s icebound ground warms, it may unleash toxic substances across the region. By the end of the century, the thaw threatens to destabilize facilities at more than 2,000 industrial sites, such as mines and pipelines, and further compromise more than 5,000 already contaminated areas , researchers report March 28 in Nature Communications . Those numbers come from the first comprehensive study to pinpoint where Arctic permafrost thaw could release industrial pollutants. But there are probably even more contaminated areas that we don’t know about, says permafrost researcher Moritz Langer of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany. “We only see the tip of the iceberg.” Toxic substances released from these locations could jeopardize fish and other animals living in Arctic waterways, as well as the health of people who depend on them. Permafrost is any soil, sediment or rock that remains frozen for at least two years. Step on the ground in the Arctic and chances are t

In keeping with the grand tradition of tubby cats, a newly created quantum “cat” is particularly massive — at least for the quantum realm. Scientists put a jiggling piece of sapphire crystal in what’s known as a “cat state,” in which an object exists in two different states simultaneously. It’s a situation reminiscent of physicists’ favorite imaginary feline, Schrödinger’s cat, known for being alive and dead at the same time. The new sapphire cat is a relatively hefty 16 micrograms , physicists report in the April 21 Science . That’s close to half the mass of an eyelash, and more than 100 trillion times the mass of cat states previously created with molecules. “We’ve reached a new regime where quantum mechanics apparently does work,” says physicist Yiwen Chu of ETH Zurich. In a quantum parable dreamt up in the 1930s by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, a cat is trapped in a box and, due to quantum effects, winds up alive and dead at the same time ( SN: 5/26/16 ). This paradoxical scenar

The tissues of living trees may hold the secrets of why some can recover after drought and others die. But those tissues are challenging to assess in mature forests. After all, 90-year-old trees can’t travel to the lab to get an imaging scan. So most studies of the impacts of drought on plants are done in the lab and on younger trees — or by gouging cores out of mature trees. Barbara Beikircher, an ecophysiologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and colleagues came up with a different approach: They brought the lab to the trees. In the Kranzberg Forest outside Munich, the team outfitted stands of mature spruce and beech trees with rugged, waterproof ultrasound sensors. Some of the stands had been covered by roofs to block the summer rain, creating artificial drought conditions. Researchers outfitted stands of mature spruce and beech trees with ultrasound sensors and electrical probes to figure how the species cope with long dry spells. University of Innsbruck Five year

Mars’ heart is about the size of our moon, and almost twice as dense. Or so suggest the first observed rumblings from a Marsquake and meteorite impact to cross the Red Planet’s heart , researchers report April 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The penetrative reverberations allowed researchers to refine estimates of the core’s size, density and composition ( SN: 7/22/21 ). “Nobody’s ever seen before a seismic wave going through [Mars’] core,” says seismologist Jessica Irving from the University of Bristol in England. “We waited for more than 900 days for one quake on the farside,” she says. Then “24 days later, there was … a meteorite impact.” InSight’s clam-shaped seismometer — the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS (shown here) — detected seismic waves from Marsquakes and meteorite impacts on the Red Planet up until December 2022. JPL-Caltech/NASA Both were captured by NASA’s InSight lander, which monitored seismic activity on Mars for f

Rocky planets might have been forming since the beginning of the universe. A stellar nursery in a neighboring galaxy has the right materials for such planet formation , researchers report April 24 in Nature Astronomy . The overall chemical makeup of the tiny galaxy, called the Small Magellanic Cloud, is akin to that of the early universe. The finding suggests that rocky planets might have been able to develop in the relatively pristine chemical environment that pervaded the cosmos just a couple billion years after the Big Bang. The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbors, though it’s very different from our galaxy. The tiny galaxy has a much lower abundance of heavy metal elements — such as iron, magnesium and aluminum — which are all crucial to the formation of rocky planets. This low-metal environment also mimics that of the early universe, an epoch before stars had enough time to forge the heavy elements and blow them out into space. Because of

Imagine if a ripped leather jacket could repair itself instead of needing to be replaced. This could one day be a reality, if the jacket is fashioned from fungus , researchers report April 11 in Advanced Functional Materials . The team made a self-healing leather from mushrooms’ threadlike structures called mycelium, building on past iterations of the material to allow it to fix itself. Mycelium leather is already an emerging product, but it’s produced in a way that extinguishes fungal growth. Elise Elsacker and colleagues speculated that if the production conditions were tweaked, the mycelium could retain its ability to regrow if damaged. That novel approach could offer inspiration to other researchers trying to get into the mycelium leather market, says Valeria La Saponara, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis. Elsacker, a bioengineer now at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and her colleagues first grew mycelium in a soup rich in proteins, car

Some tattoos truly make the heart go pitter-patter. In rats, a graphene “tattoo” stuck to the heart could treat an abnormally sluggish beat. Like a futuristic pacemaker, the device delivered electrical signals that kept the heart pumping properly , scientists report online March 25 in Advanced Materials . The electronic device is currently a proof of concept, but a version for use in human hearts could be ready for testing within five years, estimates Igor Efimov, a cardiovascular engineer at Northwestern University in Chicago. Efimov and his colleagues have worked for years creating implantable devices that conform to the body. A main challenge is how to marry rigid electronics with soft, sometimes throbbing tissues. For most current pacemakers, doctors thread electrodes on long wires through a vein inside the heart. Every time the heart beats, some 100,000 times per day, the wires flex. Enough flexing, and the device eventually breaks, Efimov says. One solution is to use ultrathin

Imagine a young woman who sought to explore the oceans’ depths but was barred from going to sea. From her desk in New York City in the 1950s, she used bits of data gathered by the ships she couldn’t sail on to create maps that revolutionized our understanding of the seafloor and helped revise Earth’s history. Her name was Marie Tharp. Then imagine other scientists, many decades later. They traveled to Antarctica for mapping projects of their own. Like Tharp, the researchers faced obstacles: The river they sought lies under hundreds of meters of solid ice. So the team patched together clues, including a wrinkle on the surface of a glacier, which led to the discovery of a spectacular river-carved cavern beneath the ice that’s almost as tall as the Empire State Building. So many challenges in science revolve around exploring the invisible or inaccessible, whether the quarry is subatomic particles, distant galaxies or the genetic code of life. The desire to see, to measure, to reveal dri