Best Citation Awards

Once a hurricane makes landfall, it’s usually the beginning of the end for the storm. But a tropical cyclone passing over warm, waterlogged ground can get a jolt of energy that refuels its fury, researchers reported in January at the American Meteorological Society’s meeting in Baltimore. This phenomenon, called the brown ocean effect, mimics how the ocean fuels tropical cyclones by giving the storms a ready supply of water and heat. Understanding this effect, researchers say, could help forecasters warn residents that an inland hurricane might counterintuitively strengthen. Using satellite measurements of wind speeds, rainfall and soil moisture, geologist Dev Niyogi and colleagues examined how this effect was at play for Hurricane Florence, a relatively weak storm when it made landfall in the Carolinas in September 2018 ( SN: 9/13/18 ). The data revealed a powerful feedback mechanism: As Florence passed over already-soaking soil, its rains intensified, ultimately leading to record...

Odysseus has exceeded engineers’ expectations during its odyssey on the moon. NASA confirmed that the spindly solar-powered robotic lander, built and operated by the Houston-based private U.S. company Intuitive Machines, has been alive and collecting data since it touched down, and toppled over, on the lunar surface on February 22. “What a magnificent job that lander did,” said Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus during a NASA news briefing on February 28. “So much data and information and science. It’s just an incredible testament to how robust that little spacecraft is, so we’re really happy with that.” On February 27, Odysseus’ narrow-field-of-view camera took this image of the lander on the lunar surface. The lander is slightly tipped over. Official Intuitive Machines Photos ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED ) The spacecraft, which carried payloads from universities, industry and NASA, was the first American spacecraft to perform a soft landing on the moon in more than 50 years (...

A genetic parasite may have robbed humans and other apes of their tails. Around 25 million years ago, this parasite, a small stretch of repetitive DNA called an Alu element, ended up in a gene important for tail development , researchers report in the Feb. 29 Nature . The single insertion altered the gene Tbxt in a way that seems to have sparked one of the defining differences between monkeys and apes: Monkeys have tails, apes don’t. “It was like lightning struck once,” says Jef Boeke, a geneticist at New York University Langone Health, and ape behinds ultimately became bare. The genetic tweak may also give insight into why some babies are born with spinal cord defects such as spina bifida , when the tube that holds the cord doesn’t close all the way ( SN: 12/6/16 ).  Alu elements are part of a group of genetic parasites known as transposons or jumping genes that can hop across genetic instruction books, inserting themselves into their hosts’ DNA ( SN: 5/16/17) . Sometimes, w...

Apart from the northward advance of killer bees in the 1980s, nothing has struck as much fear into the hearts of headline writers as the ascent of artificial intelligence. Ever since the computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, humans have faced the prospect that their supremacy over machines is merely temporary. Back then, though, it was easy to show that AI failed miserably in many realms of human expertise, from diagnosing disease to transcribing speech. But then about a decade ago or so, computer brains — known as neural networks — received an IQ boost from a new approach called deep learning . Suddenly computers approached human ability at identifying images, reading signs and enhancing photographs — not to mention converting speech to text as well as most typists. Those abilities had their limits. For one thing, even apparently successful deep learning neural networks were easy to trick. A few small stickers strategically placed on a stop si...

A Brazilian flea toad’s head is too tiny to bear its many crowns. Scientists have bestowed the frog — which is native to Brazil but is neither a flea nor a toad — with two titles: The world’s smallest known amphibian and smallest known vertebrate . From snout to rump, one Brachycephalus pulex measures just under 6.5 millimeters, herpetologist Mirco Solé and colleagues report February 7 in Zoologica Scripta . That’s roughly half a millimeter shorter than the previous record holder and small enough to sit comfortably on a pinkie fingernail. Solé, of the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz in Ilhéus, Brazil, and colleagues discovered the diminutive male amphibian among 46 adult Brazilian flea toads — 24 males and 22 females. On average, males measure about 7 millimeters long and females measure about 8 millimeters, the team reports. Their predecessor, male Paedophryne amauensis frogs from Papua New Guinea, averages about 8 millimeters long. Frogs this minuscule have big changes to th...

The antivenom for a black mamba’s bite could one day work for a slew of other snakes.  Scientists have developed an antibody that shuts down paralyzing toxins in the venom of black mambas, king cobras and dozens of other sharp-toothed serpents. The antibody — a single protein manufactured in the lab —  protected mice from otherwise lethal doses of venom , protein engineer Joseph Jardine and colleagues report in the Feb. 21  Science Translational Medicine . That antibody “will be a critical component of an eventual antivenom,” says Jardine, of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Venomous snakes generally rely on just a handful of toxin families. If scientists could mix together antibodies targeting each of those types, Jardine says, they could potentially create “one vial of antivenom that works against any snake in the world.” Such a universal antivenom might still be many years away, he says. But “theoretically, this is possible.” Scientists have t...

Consider this sequence of numbers: 5, 7, 9. Can you spot the pattern? Here’s another with the same pattern: 15, 19, 23. One more: 232, 235, 238.   “Three equally spaced things,” says Raghu Meka, a computer scientist at UCLA. “That’s probably the simplest pattern you can imagine.”   Yet for almost a century, mathematicians in the field of combinatorics have been puzzling out how to know whether an endless list of numbers contains such a sequence, called an arithmetic progression. In other words, is there a way to be mathematically certain that a set contains a sequence of three or more evenly spaced numbers, even if you don’t know much about how the numbers in the set were selected or what the progression might be?  Progress on the question has been slow, even plodding. But last year, Meka and Zander Kelley, a Ph.D. computer science student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, surprised mathematicians by making an exponential leap . The researchers ...

Cancer drugs by computer — Science News , February 23, 1974 Chemists often need to sort a large number of compounds according to whether or not they possess a given property.… [Researchers] have been working on a technique of getting computers to teach themselves how to solve such problems. The most recent experiments indicate that the technique [based on pattern recognition] may be useful in finding cancer drugs. Update Modern computers can do more than sift through known compounds. With advanced artificial intelligence, computers are helping scientists design novel molecules and predict how those compounds will react with proteins in the body, possibly leading to new cancer treatments ( SN: 10/18/18 ). The technology is promising but still in its early days . Ultimately, most drug candidates will still falter in people, some scientists caution. In 2021, the international biotech company Exscientia launched the first trial of an AI-developed cancer drug . But the company shelv...

Once on the path to eliminating syphilis, the United States has reversed course, with cases of the infectious disease surging. From a low of under 32,000 cases in 2000 , the number of people with syphilis has rocketed to more than 207,000 in 2022 , the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in January. That’s 62 cases per 100,000 people . The crisis is hitting pregnant people and babies especially hard. The maternal rate for syphilis during pregnancy rose from 87 per 100,000 births in 2016 to 280 per 100,000 births in 2022 , the CDC reported on February 13. Without treatment, pregnant people can pass a syphilis infection to the fetus. That can cause congenital syphilis and lead to miscarriage, stillbirth, premature birth, severe health problems after birth or the infant’s death. More than 3,700 babies were born with syphilis in 2022, roughly ten times the number in 2012. More information: The stages, testing and treatment of syphilis Testing is a crucial step i...

Ask physicist Sekazi Mtingwa how he ended up where he is today, and he’ll start with his grandmother’s deeply religious home. Growing up there in Atlanta, young Mtingwa somehow got the idea that he was the second coming of Christ. “I believed that for years,” Mtingwa recalls with a laugh. That only changed after a Sunday school lesson as a schoolboy. It was about Jesus sacrificing himself for murderers and thieves. “I looked around the room, and all these bad boys in my class, I couldn’t give my life for any of them — let alone murderers,” he says. That was it for the Jesus plan, Mtingwa says. But his desire to serve humankind never waned. Today, says Mtingwa, who remains religious, “I like to think of myself as an apostle of science.” Apostle of science gets close to the essence of Mtingwa’s career. Over the decades, he’s had many professional titles. As an accelerator and particle physicist, Mtingwa is nationally recognized for his work building accelerators and for developing...