Best Citation Awards

How do we adapt to climate change? Can we fight back against Alzheimer’s disease? What will it take to build a more equitable society? The researchers on this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch list are tackling slices of these and other grand challenges. For the eighth year, Science News is recognizing 10 early- and mid-career scientists who have innovative ideas and unique skill sets — and are applying their talents to shape our future and our understanding of ourselves. But they aren’t doing it alone. Each credits parents, mentors and colleagues with inspiring their success. Many emphasize the power of collaboration, the value of other perspectives and the importance of mentoring the next generation of scientists. Speaking of the future, if you know someone who belongs on the next SN 10 list, send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about their work to sn10@sciencenews.org . — Elizabeth Quill, Executive Editor Courtesy of D. Blanco-Melo Daniel Blanco-Melo Daniel B

The Great Sphinx of Giza might have been sculpted by desert winds long before it was ever touched by human hands. Mysterious desert landforms called yardangs can bear an uncanny resemblance to seated lions — so much so that some researchers think one lionlike yardang might have had the honor of later being carved into the Sphinx by ancient Egyptians. The basic ingredients for these unusual rock formations might be rather simple, researchers report in the November Physical Review Fluids. Scientists were able to reliably sculpt hand-sized, sphinx-shaped yardangs from clay globs in a water tunnel so long as two basic conditions were met: consistent prevailing winds and a starting blob containing a mix of easily eroded and more resistant bits. “This just came completely out of left field,” says geomorphologist Elena Favaro of the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, who was not involved in the study. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how yardangs start to form, but they appear in de

How do you look for an animal you don’t even know exists anymore? The last sighting of the purple-winged ground dove ( Paraclaravis geoffroyi ) — a small, bamboo-loving dove native to the South American Atlantic Forest in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay — was in 1985. But, researchers wondered, was it possible to capture the elusive bird’s sound in the wild to find out if any individuals are left? It’s not an unheard-of idea. Scientists have used bioacoustics — a subfield of ecology that relies on sound to make environmental analyses — for everything from recording dolphins’ communication patterns to studying bats from afar to avoid virus spillover from humans ( SN: 12/7/17; SN: 10/23/22 ). With artificial intelligence, it is now possible to use large audio datasets to train algorithms to spot different animal sounds within the cacophony of a natural background. But the problem is that recordings of the purple-winged ground dove singing are as rare as the bird itself. “I came acro

This summer was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year. Heat waves threatened people’s health across North America, Europe and Asia. Canada had its worst wildfire season ever, and flames devastated the city of Lahaina in Maui. Los Angeles was pounded by an unheard-of summer tropical storm while rains in Libya caused devastating floods that left thousands dead and missing. This extreme weather is a warning sign that we are living in a climate crisis, and a call to action. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main culprit behind climate change, and scientists say they must be reined in. But there’s another greenhouse gas to deal with: methane. Tackling methane may be the best bet for putting the brakes on rising temperatures in the short term, says Rob Jackson, an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project , which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. “Methane is the strongest lever we h

The tropics are teeming with life, tending to hold far more species than milder environments closer to the poles. But one group of insects, the Darwin wasps, were thought to buck that trend. Researchers who compared wasp diversity in the United Kingdom and the United States with tropical areas in the 1970s and ’80s concluded that these wasps were most diverse at mid-latitudes — say, Kentucky or England. But others thought that people just weren’t looking hard enough in the tropics. It’s easy to look for wasps in a British garden, says Peter Mayhew, but “it’s very hard to do long-term work” in a tropical rainforest. Mayhew, a biologist at the University of York in England, was up to the challenge. Now, after years of sifting through wasps collected from a single mountain in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest a decade ago, Mayhew and colleagues have identified nearly 100 Darwin wasp species . The result, published November 7 in the journal Insects , suggests that the tropics are home

An Australian mosquito species knows the best spot to drink its bloody meals: a frog’s nostril. The bloodsuckers are surprisingly selective when dining on frogs , seemingly picking no other place on the body to feast, researchers report November 21 in Ethology . Frogs’ sniffers may be an easy and productive place for the mosquitoes to pierce the thin skin and drink up. The new finding could one day help scientists better understand the transmission of some frog diseases. Behavioral biologist John Gould discovered the nostril-nibbling insects while studying frogs in ponds on Australia’s Kooragang Island. From 2020 through 2022, Gould occasionally noticed mosquitoes on the faces of the frogs he was surveying and would take photos. “It was only once I laid out all the photos together that I realized something very particular and surprising was happening,” says Gould, of the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia.  In the 12 photos that Gould took of mosquitoes on frogs, every

The spring 2014 annual reindeer festival in Yar-Sale, a rural town on the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, was a grim affair. A rainstorm followed by a deep freeze the previous November had turned the normally snow-covered tundra into an ice shield. Reindeer could not paw through the thick ice to access lichen, their primary food source. In a region where winter temperatures can plunge below –50° Celsius, that ground remained frozen months later. Tens of thousands of reindeer had already died of starvation. Thousands more were on the brink of death. A prominent reindeer herder named Vasily Serotetto approached a group of scientists. Could they predict when such an event — known as seradt in the Indigenous Nenets language — might occur, he asked. Even a few days advance notice would have enabled mobile slaughterhouse operators to come in and humanely kill the animals. And the animal meat and fur would not have gone to waste. To the scientists in attendance, the request felt like a

The “Oh-My-God” particle has a new companion. In 1991, physicists spotted a particle from space that crashed into Earth with so much energy that it warranted an “OMG!” With 320 quintillion electron volts, or exaelectron volts, it had the kinetic energy of a baseball zipping along at about 100 kilometers per hour. Now, a  new particle of comparable energy has been found , researchers report in the Nov. 24  Science . Detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment near Delta, Utah, the particle had an energy of about 240 exaelectron volts. And mysteriously, scientists are unable to pinpoint any cosmic source for the particle. “It’s a huge, huge amount of energy but in a tiny, tiny, tiny object,” says astroparticle physicist John Matthews of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, co-spokesperson of the Telescope Array collaboration. Cosmic rays consist of protons and atomic nuclei that zip through space at wide range of energies. Particles with energies over 100 exaelectron volt

As the only mammals that can fly, bats are the oddballs of the mammalian world. But serotine bats stand out for another, glaringly obvious reason — when erect, a male’s penis can swell to almost a quarter of its body length. How these bats use their humongous genitals to mate — without penetration — is a method never seen in a mammal before, researchers report in the Nov. 20 Current Biology . At more than 16 millimeters when erect, the penis of male serotine bats ( Eptesicus serotinus ) has no chance of fitting inside the female’s approximately 2-millimeter-long vagina, a discrepancy that prompted biologist Nicolas Fasel to wonder how these bats go about getting it on. Videos collected at the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center in Kharkiv from 2018 to 2021 and the attic of St. Matthias Church in Castenray, Netherlands, from 2016 to 2022 revealed the answer. With footage, taken from underneath the bats, “we could see actually what was happening,” says Fasel of the University of Lausan

A new brain-monitoring device aims to be the Goldilocks of anesthesia delivery, dispensing drugs in just the right dose.    No physician wants a patient to wake up during surgery — nor do patients. So anesthesiologists often give more drug than necessary to keep patients sedated during medical procedures or while on lifesaving machines like ventilators. But anesthetics can sometimes be harmful when given in excess, says David Mintz, an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins University. For instance, elderly people with cognitive conditions like dementia or age-related cognitive decline may be at higher risk of post-surgical confusion. Studies also hint that long periods of use in young children might cause behavioral problems. “The less we give of them, the better,” Mintz says. An automated anesthesia delivery system could help doctors find the right drug dose. The new device monitored rhesus macaques’ brain activity and supplied a common anesthetic called propofol in doses that were aut

Mouse embryos can make it to an early stage of development in space. In an experiment conducted in 2021, a few hundred frozen two-cell embryos from mice thawed and grew over four days on the International Space Station. Of the several dozen embryos that made it back to Earth, nearly a quarter formed healthy clusters of cells known as blastocysts. The finding suggests that the radiation and weightlessness of space might not pose immediate obstacles to mammalian reproduction , researchers report October 27 in iScience . The new study isolates only one part of the complicated process of reproduction and development. A blastocyst typically forms after fertilization and implants in the uterus before developing into the placenta and fetus. But the result provides a starting point for biologists, says Christiane Hahn, a space biologist at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands, who wasn’t involved in the research. Mouse embryos are the first mammal emb