Best Citation Awards

Peltocephalus maturin was one of the biggest turtles ever, but unlike similarly sized prehistoric freshwater turtles, it lived thousands of years ago. from Science News https://ift.tt/KIO0ZSR via

New research used the game Overcooked to show how offline reinforcement learning algorithms could teach bots to collaborate with — or manipulate — us. from Science News https://ift.tt/xFX9VQw via

A patient with an unusual variation of the condition helped researchers visualize the demonic distortions he sees when looking at human faces. from Science News https://ift.tt/MAJlF26 via

The acoustic qualities of instruments may have influenced variations in musical scales and preferred harmonies. from Science News https://ift.tt/GAQaeNp via

Nordic countries topped the 2024 world happiness rankings. But culture dictates how people respond to surveys of happiness, a researcher argues. from Science News https://ift.tt/NobLEOw via

Superconducting temperatures have risen by about 250 degrees since the 1970s, but are still too cold to enable practical technologies. from Science News https://ift.tt/cbVHa6t via

MRI scans of long COVID patients with brain fog suggest that the blood brain barrier may be leaky. from Science News https://ift.tt/k8DUCg7 via

Despite its two-eyed appearance, Phalangium opilio has six peepers. The four optical remnants shed light on the arachnids’ evolutionary history. from Science News https://ift.tt/WZX4lSx via

Saturn’s largest moon could have gotten its sands from an ancient reshuffling of the solar system. If true, that would solve a long-standing mystery. from Science News https://ift.tt/7VvQboJ via

The reflective wax, which cools males on sunny courtship flights, may also armor them against the effects of climate change. from Science News https://ift.tt/sFYw6gk via

In a study of over 400 mammal species, less than half have males that are, on average, heavier than females, undermining a long-standing assumption. from Science News https://ift.tt/89W1htu via

Iloprost has been shown to prevent the need to amputate frozen fingers and toes. It’s now approved for use to treat severe frostbite in the U.S. from Science News https://ift.tt/oyex0HL via

In 1965, renowned bee biologist Charles Michener described a new species of masked bee from “an entirely unexpected region,” the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. Michener named the bee Hylaeus tuamotuensis and noted that its nearest relatives live in New Zealand — some 3,000 miles away across the Pacific Ocean. How did a small bee make such a big journey? It turns out that the answer was buzzing above scientists’ heads all along. By swinging insect nets high up in the trees, researchers discovered eight species of Hylaeus bees that had never been described before, including six that live in Fiji. The island nation lies between French Polynesia and Australia, where Hylaeus diversity is highest, so the scientists suspect that the ancestors of H. tuamotuensis reached their remote home by island-hopping across the Pacific . As individual bees moved from island to island, they steadily evolved into separate species, researchers report February 26 in Frontiers in Ecology and Ev

March 11 marks the fourth anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration that the COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic. COVID-19 hasn’t gone away, but there have been plenty of actions that suggest otherwise. In May 2023, WHO announced COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency ( SN: 5/5/23 ). The United States shortly followed suit, which meant testing and treatments were no longer free ( SN: 5/4/23 ). And on March 1 of this year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosened their isolation guidelines for people with COVID-19. Now the CDC says infected people can be around others as soon as a day after a fever subsides and symptoms are improving, even though someone is contagious during an infection for six to eight days, on average ( SN: 7/25/22 ). These outward signs of leaving the pandemic chapter behind neglect to acknowledge how many people cannot ( SN: 10/27/21 ). Nearly 1.2 million people have died in the United States from COVID-19. Close t

Get low (cholesterol’s version) An experimental genetic treatment called VERVE-101 can deactivate a cholesterol-raising gene in people with hypercholesterolemia, Meghan Rosen reported in “ Base editing can lower cholesterol ” ( SN: 1/27/24, p. 8 ). Rosen wrote that researchers are testing to see what dosage of VERVE-101 is most effective. Given that the treatment edits a gene, reader Linda Ferrazzara wondered why the dose matters. Too low a dose may mean that not enough VERVE-101 makes it to the liver, where it turns off the gene, Rosen says. If too few cells have the gene switched off, patients will not experience the drug’s cholesterol-lowering effects. If cholesterol levels remain high after an initial treatment, a second infusion of the drug may help, Rosen says. But the developers prefer for the treatment to be one dose. Reader Jack Miller asked whether VERVE-101 affects germ cells, which give rise to sperm and egg cells. In mice, scientists have found that most of t

NASA engineers must quantify everything. But no matter how many equations they use to calculate launch windows, estimate exposure to cosmic radiation or create flight trajectories, there’s one thing they can’t quantify: the mental health of astronauts. And for a while, NASA could get away with it. Early astronauts certainly faced mental challenges — worries over mission failures, the fear of the unknown. But it wasn’t until the arrival of space stations that astronauts began spending months away from home. In 1994, with the building of the International Space Station under way, NASA formed a psychological unit. Now, NASA astronauts may soon embark on even longer trips into deep space. Long-distance relationships are hard enough on Earth. On a three-year, round trip trek to Mars , navigating the unparalleled separation from home could be one of the biggest challenges to a successful mission ( SN: 11/14/14 ). Space: The Longest Goodbye , a documentary directed by Ido Mizrahy, follows

Air pollution may blunt the signature scents of some night-blooming flowers, jeopardizing pollination. When the aroma of a pale evening primrose encounters certain pollutants in the night air, the pollutants destroy key scent molecules , lab and field tests show. As a result, moths and other nocturnal pollinators may find it difficult to detect the fragrance and navigate to the flower, researchers report in the Feb. 9 Science . The finding highlights how air pollution can affect more than human health. “It’s really going deeper … affecting ecosystems and food security,” says Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Pollination is so important for agriculture.” Increasing industrialization has pumped ozone, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants into the air. During the day, sunlight typically breaks down ozone. But at night, the pollutant accumulates and reacts with nitrogen dioxide to produce nitrate radicals. These reactive molecules can a

Frog entrails, lizard scales and mouse tails, oh my. These creatures are among more than 13,000 museum specimens that had their innards CT scanned as part of a six-year mission to create 3-D digital reconstructions. The effort, called openVertebrate, or oVert, aims to make vertebrate specimens freely available online. Such specimens typically have been kept in storage until put on display for the public or pulled for examination by a specialist, researchers report March 6 in BioScience . Online replicas not only make museum collections accessible to more folks but also give people a peek inside animals without the need for scalpels or other dissection equipment.  “The best part of that is the weird, wonderful things that you weren’t expecting to see that jump out,” says evolutionary biologist Edward Stanley of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Those things include parasitic infections, last meals and new insights into animal anatomy.

Countdown Sarah Scoles Bold Type Books, $30 The United States is on a mission to modernize its aging nuclear weapons stockpile. And physicists have feelings about it — and the future of nuclear weapons more broadly. In Countdown , science writer Sarah Scoles dredges up all the feels in interviews with physicists at the national laboratories dedicated to maintaining the U.S. nuclear stockpile and with researchers, activists and others who orbit that lab system. The researchers grapple with the legacy of their field’s most infamous invention and their roles as stewards of the planet’s most destructive weapons ( SN: 8/6/20 ). To work on nuclear weapons, Scoles’ conversations reveal, is to embrace seemingly contradictory ideas. The weapons promote peace by deterring countries from attacking each other, but the weapons also make possible the destruction of civilization. The researchers see their work — on a variety of topics, from computer simulations of nuclear weapons to nonproli

When I talk to immunologist Paul Morgan, he’s on the hunt for potentially life-altering drugs.  He’s got a call with a pharmaceutical company planned in the next half hour. His goal: persuade the company to supply his lab with a drug that might — maybe, hopefully, someday — ease some of the unrelenting symptoms of long COVID.  Morgan’s lab at Cardiff University in Wales has been studying people with the disease, including the first waves of patients, some of whom have been  living with long COVID for more than two years  ( SN: 8/21/23 ). The “very long haulers,” he calls them. Their symptoms can include brain fog, fatigue, breathlessness and joint and muscle pain.  Morgan and his colleagues have pinpointed an immune system anomaly in the blood of some of these long haulers. A drug that targets that quirk might be one way to treat their disease. He’s quick to tell me that this research is in its early days. First, his team needs to get its hands on a drug. Then they need to do a clin

Urinary tract infections are painful, inconvenient and incredibly common. For decades, doctors haven’t had any leads on why, even after several rounds of antibiotics, UTI pain can linger. Now they do. Nerve growth from immune responses to the infection might be to blame , researchers report March 1 in Science Immunology. Understanding immune and nerve responses to persistent UTIs, the team says, could possibly lead to new, antibiotic-free forms of treatment.  Over half of women will have a UTI in their life, and around a quarter of infections come back within six months . The pain from these infections can be quite difficult to treat, says Marcus Drake, a neurological urologist at Imperial College London. “It’s a ‘ heartsink situation ’ for the patients, and it’s a heartsink situation for the doctors, because there isn’t much that you can do.” Puzzled by why pain persisted after UTI-related bacteria were wiped out, immunologist Soman Abraham of Duke University and colleagues colle

After trudging upslope for weeks, a giant tortoise slows its hundreds of cumbersome kilograms to a stop. Dense woods defended by barbed wire–like blackberry bushes block its path. After a brief foray into the painful prickles, the tortoise backs out and plods on, searching for a way out of the woods. These blackberry-lined forests of Spanish cedar trees ( Cedrela odorata ) are invasive in the tortoise’s island home in the Galápagos. If they can, these titanic turtles stay clear of the new, troublesome habitats on their seasonal uphill treks to find food, researchers report in the February Ecology and Evolution . If the Cedrela forests one day manage to block the shelled reptile’s migration altogether, the consequences for the tortoises and the surrounding island ecosystem could be dire, researchers say.  Wildlife biologist Stephen Blake and his colleagues have been studying the movements of Western Santa Cruz tortoises ( Chelonoidis niger porteri ) since 2009. Tracking the reptiles

It’s no secret that global obesity rates have been rising over the past few decades. But a new analysis quantifies the upsurge. More than 1 billion people worldwide were living with obesity as of 2022, researchers report February 29 in the Lancet . That’s about one-eighth of the global population ( SN: 11/15/22 ). For comparison, nearly 800 million people had obesity in 2016 , according to the World Health Organization, or WHO. Obesity is “defined by the presence of excess body fat that impairs health,” says obesity expert Arya Sharma of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who was not involved in the study. The chronic disease can raise the risk for conditions like heart disease and type 2 diabetes, vulnerability to diseases like COVID-19 , and can also limit mobility and negatively affect mental health ( SN: 4/22/20 ). Global health researcher Majid Ezzati and colleagues examined more than 3,600 population-based studies published over the last several decades encompas