Best Citation Awards

Some of a green frog’s heat tolerance might come from its microbiome. Put a wood frog tadpole and a green frog tadpole in water and turn up the heat. The two species live in similar environments, but green frog tadpoles just keep swimming in water that’s up to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer. But when scientists transferred the gut microbiome of a green frog ( Lithobates clamitans ) to the eggs of a wood frog ( L. sylvaticus ), the wood frog larvae could handle short stints at higher water temperatures , Jason Dallas and colleagues report September 7 on bioRxiv.org. The study reveals one reason some species might be more, or less, sensitive to climate change. Green frogs and wood frogs are closely related but lead different lives. Wood frogs go from egg to adult in only three months in the spring. Green frog larvae can remain as tadpoles through the whole summer, swimming in higher water temperatures as a result. Dallas, a herpetologist at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesbor...

The greatest puzzle in cosmology just got even more puzzling. Images from the James Webb Space Telescope have confirmed that the universe appears to be expanding significantly faster than it should be, researchers report in a study accepted in the Astrophysical Journal . The observation is in conflict with an esteemed theory, the standard model of cosmology, that describes how the universe has evolved since the first moments after the Big Bang. The conflict comes down to calculations of the Hubble constant, a number that describes how fast everything in the universe is flying apart. One calculation, based on Planck satellite observations of the oldest light in the universe in conjunction with the standard model of cosmology, suggests the Hubble constant is 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec (a megaparsec is about 3 million light-years). Hubble Space Telescope images of stars at various distances from us provide a fundamentally incompatible value — 73 kilometers per second per...

It’s big. It’s beautiful. It looks a bit like a sparkly, starry, slightly smooshed Eye of Sauron. It’s the galaxy NGC 4632, and new radio telescope images suggest that it sports a rare “polar ring” — a halo of mostly hydrogen gas tilted about 90 degrees from the plane of the galaxy’s disk. These spectacular structures, which can also contain dust and stars, are thought to encircle only about 1 in 1,000 galaxies. But now it seems that many more — possibly 30 times as many — could be hiding in plain sight, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . “The implication would be that there are tons of these things out there, masquerading as normal galaxies,” says astronomer Ronald Buta of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, who wasn’t involved in the new study. Astronomers are still puzzling out how any galaxies have polar rings at all. But they’re thought to form as galaxies grow, either by colliding with other galaxies or by gobbling up ...

There were drones, there were boats. There were spotters on land and a hydrophone listening for suspicious sounds underwater. In what may have been the biggest search of its kind in 50 years, crowds of people gathered this summer in Scotland to hunt for any sign of a legendary creature: the Loch Ness Monster. Nearly 6,000 kilometers away, data scientist Floe Foxon emailed the event’s organizers and wished them good luck. “I’m sure it’s going to be a fun weekend,” he said. Foxon wasn’t joining them, but from his home office in Pittsburgh, he has examined Nessie’s lore in his own way — with statistics.  In July, Foxon published a study on the probability of finding a giant eel in the loch , one of many hypotheses for sightings of the storied sea monster. The answer: Essentially zero. Even the chances of finding a 1-meter-long eel are low, about 1 in 50,000, Foxon reported in JMIRx Bio . But once you get much longer than that — into monster-sized eel territory — the probability plum...

The virus that causes COVID-19 spreads through the air. But just how much virus people breathe out over the course of infection isn’t well-defined. To pin the numbers down, olfactory researcher Gregory Lane and colleagues analyzed over 300 breath samples from 43 people with COVID-19, following them for nearly three weeks. Levels varied between and within individuals, but some people shed a lot, releasing over 800 copies of viral RNA per minute at times. On average, participants breathed out 80 copies per minute for a full eight days after symptoms began, the team reports September 8 in a preprint posted at medRxiv.org. Only after that point did the viral particles drop to nearly undetectable levels. Lane, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and colleagues still need to confirm what percentage of that exhaled viral RNA comes from viruses that can still replicate in another person’s body. And scientists don’t yet know how much virus is required for infe...

Machine vision, also known as computer vision, is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science that focuses on enabling computers to interpret and analyze visual information from the world, similar to how humans perceive and understand the visual world. It involves the development of algorithms, models, and systems that can process and make sense of images or videos. Here are key components and concepts associated with machine vision: Image Acquisition: This involves capturing images or videos using cameras, sensors, or other imaging devices. The quality and type of the image acquisition greatly influence subsequent processing and analysis. Preprocessing: Raw images may need preprocessing to enhance features or remove noise. This can include tasks like image filtering, color correction, resizing, and denoising. Feature Extraction: Identifying relevant features from the preprocessed images is crucial. These features can be edges, corners, shapes, textures, or any other c...

Our Fragile Moment Michael Mann PublicAffairs, $30 Over four millennia ago, in the final days of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, a drought swept over the region, afflicting lands as far away as Greece and what’s now Pakistan. Probably driven by the eruption of a distant volcano, the drying climate devastated local agriculture. A contemporary text, The Curse of Akkad , noted that “the large arable tracts yielded no grain … the irrigated orchards yielded no syrup or wine, thick clouds did not rain.” As once-prosperous farmlands collapsed in the northern part of the empire, people fled to the south. The southern Akkadians’ response? Build a more than 150-kilometer-long wall between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, barring entry to any migrants. Soon after, history’s first empire crumbled, dying of thirst in the cradle of civilization. Climate systems and civilizations are stable only up to a point. In Our Fragile Moment , climate scientist Michael Mann reminds us that today we...

Seven years is a long time to wait for your carrier service to deliver a package. That’s how long it’s been since NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft set off to gather rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu. But the package is now nearly out for delivery. On September 24, the spacecraft will fly near Earth and drop off a capsule containing material collected from Bennu in October 2020 — if all goes well ( SN: 10/21/20 ). This is the third mission to retrieve bits of an asteroid, and the first for NASA and the United States. The amount of asteroid material onboard this time far exceeds the micrograms that Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft returned in 2005 , from the asteroid Itokawa, and the five grams that Hayabusa2 collected in 2018 from Ryugu ( SN: 6/14/10; SN: 12/7/20 ). The Bennu sample is scheduled to arrive with a timing and precision that would make most terrestrial delivery services jealous. After a three-year journey back from the asteroid, the capsule should enter the atmosphere at ...

Maybe TikTok showed you people putting a little tape on their lips. Or maybe Instagram served you ads for sticky mouth strips. On social media and beyond, a trend called mouth taping is keeping people’s mouths shut at night — helping them breathe through their nose. Zack Ford, age 38, first tried the trend last month, after recovering from surgery for a deviated septum. Surgery improved his nasal breathing, but at night, he was still sucking air through his lips. In the mornings, Ford says, he’d wake up with a dry mouth and a scratchy throat. Ford brought up mouth taping during an appointment with his doctor, who didn’t think there was harm in trying. That evening, Ford placed a small square of surgical tape over the middle of his lips and settled into bed. It was the best night’s sleep he’s had in recent memory, he says. “When I woke up, I was like, ‘Holy shit this works!’” Mouth taping’s benefits have been touted for everything from the dental to the somnial. People may seal their...

Meteorites offer tantalizing clues about what the early solar system was like. But finding them is far from rocket science. Often, researchers simply fan out across a landscape and walk for hours while staring at the ground. Now, some scientists are turning to drones and machine learning to help spot freshly fallen meteorites much more efficiently. A team of six people on a meteorite-hunting expedition can search about 200,000 square meters per day, says Seamus Anderson, a planetary scientist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. But since the area over which a cluster of meteorites falls typically can’t be pinpointed to better than a few million square meters, searching can take a while, he says. “It’s quite slow.” Seamus Anderson (pictured) and his colleagues used a drone to find a meteorite in Western Australia in 2021. The Desert Fireball Network Around 2016, Anderson began toying with the concept of using drones to take pictures of the ground to look for meteorites. That ...

Searching for superheavies — Science News , September 8, 1973 Physicists and chemists have been actively searching for superheavy elements, substances with atomic weights and numbers greater than the 105 [elements] now known. Results of two searches are reported … none were found…. Future searches will have to involve direct fusion of heavy nuclei by driving one against another in heavy-ion accelerators. Update Particle accelerators have been crucial for creating superheavies beyond elements 104 and 105. Just a year later, element 106, seaborgium , emerged from collisions of oxygen ions and californium atoms — though its discovery wasn’t officially confirmed until two decades later ( SN: 3/19/94, p. 180 ). Elements 107 through 118 have since made their debut, with several joining the periodic table as recently as 2016. Scientists are now trying to create elements 119 and 120 ( SN: 3/2/19, p. 16 ). Forming heavier elements and pushing known superheavyweights to their limits cou...

Ask Clara Sousa-Silva about her research and she’ll be absolutely clear: Yes, she is looking for aliens. But she is not hunting them. “The idea that I’m hunting anything, I find very distasteful,” she says. “I have spent my life … trying to let go of the notion that I have to go somewhere to know it, that I have to touch it to know it’s real.” Sousa-Silva is a quantum astrochemist at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and an expert in knowing things from afar. Her research team studies how molecules in space interact with light, essential groundwork for scientists figuring out what the astronomical objects glimpsed through telescopes are made of. One day, she hopes her work will help identify traces of life in the atmospheres of worlds beyond Earth, including exoplanets — faraway worlds that humankind will almost certainly never visit. “Molecules behave on a quantum level, and they interact with light on a quantum level,” Sousa-Silva says. “I’m using quantum behavior of ...

A Costa Rican pirate spider lives up to the family name: It tricks closely related orb weaver spiders into “walking the plank,” right to their doom.  The world’s many pirate spiders exploit a very particular food source — other spiders. But while most pirate spiders invade the webs of other arachnids, Gelanor siquirres dupes potential prey into building a web right into a trap , researchers report in an upcoming Animal Behaviour . Like any respectable pirate, pirate spiders have an extensive bag of tricks. Some species delicately strum the threads of other spiders’ webs to convince the arachnids they’ve caught an insect, only to strike when the web owner comes to collect its prey. Others mimic on a web the signature rhythms of a different spider’s courtship dance, luring would-be suitors to their deaths.   On a trip several years ago to a biological reserve in Costa Rica, researchers were the first to witness a hunt by a little-known species called G. siquirres . It c...

The Deepest Map Laura Trethewey Harper Wave, $32 In 2019, the multimillionaire and explorer Victor Vescovo made headlines when he became the first person to visit the deepest parts of all five of Earth’s oceans. But arguably the real star of the expedition was marine geologist Cassie Bongiovanni, the lead ocean mapper who ensured Vescovo piloted his submersible to the actual deepest depths. Today, only 25 percent of the seafloor is well mapped. When Vescovo set out to score his record, the exact deepest location in each ocean was unknown. Bongiovanni, Vescovo and their crew had to chart these regions in detail before each dive. “Traditionally, captains never cared about the seafloor as long as it stayed far enough away from the hulls of their ships,” journalist Laura Trethewey writes in The Deepest Map . The book explores humankind’s quest to map the seafloor, framed around Bongiovanni’s adventures. Seafloor topography has been a big concern for militaries patrolling Neptunian...

The woman’s mysterious symptoms started in her stomach. Weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhea led to night sweats and a dry cough. Then, doctors found lesions on her lungs, liver and spleen. An infection, perhaps. But tests for bacteria, fungi, a human parasite and even autoimmune disease all came up negative. Three weeks later, the woman was in the hospital with a fever and cough. CT scans revealed a clue that was telling, in retrospect: Some of her lung lesions appeared to be migrating. A second clue came months later, when the woman became forgetful and depressed. “She had a very astute GP who thought, ‘Something’s not right here, I better do an MRI of the brain,’” says Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease physician at the Australian National University and the Canberra Hospital. That brain scan turned up a ghostly glow in her frontal lobe. It could have been cancer, an abscess or another affliction, Senanayake says. “No one thought it was going to be a worm.” An MRI of th...

Hulking hunters like Burmese pythons may be famous for scarfing up deer, alligators and other enormous prey ( SN: 11/25/15 ). But one unassuming little African snake may take the title for most outsized meals. The nonvenomous, nearly toothless Dasypeltis gansi can open its mouth wider than any other snake of its size , biologist Bruce Jayne reports August 8 in the Journal of Zoology . D. gansi , sometimes called the Gans’ egg-eater, swallows bird eggs whole, cracks them with its spine and ingests the contents before spitting out the shells. At the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, Jayne inspected 15 egg-eaters ranging from about 20 to about 90 centimeters long. After euthanizing the animals, he slid increasingly wide 3-D printed cylinders into their gaping maws to determine the biggest thing they could swallow. The biggest Gans’ egg-eater that biologist Bruce Jayne inspected (left) was about 94 centimeters long and could wrap its mouth around a cylinder 5 centimeters wide. The sm...