Best Citation Awards

Even spiders, it seems, have fallen victim to misinformation. Media reports about people’s encounters with spiders tend to be full of falsehoods with a distinctly negative spin. An analysis of a decade’s worth of newspaper stories from dozens of countries finds that nearly half of the reports contain errors , arachnologist Catherine Scott and colleagues report August 22 in Current Biology . “The vast majority of the spider content out there is about them being scary and hurting people,” says Scott, of McGill University in Montreal. In reality, they note, “spiders almost never bite people.” Of the roughly 50,000 known spider species, vanishingly few are dangerous. Instead, many spiders benefit us by eating insects like mosquitoes that are harmful to people. Even with the rare exceptions like brown recluse and black widow spiders, bites are extremely uncommon, Scott says. Some stories about bites blamed spiders that don’t occur in the area, and others reported symptoms that don’t matc...

Chicxulub, the asteroid that wiped out most dinosaurs, might have had a little sibling. Off the coast of West Africa, hundreds of meters beneath the seafloor, scientists have identified what appears to be the remains of an 8.5-kilometer-wide impact crater , which they’ve named Nadir. The team estimates that the crater formed roughly around the same time that another asteroid — Chicxulub , the dinosaur killer — slammed into modern day Mexico ( SN: 1/25/17 ). If confirmed, it could mean that nonbird dinosaurs met their demise by a one-two punch of asteroids, researchers report in the Aug. 17 Science Advances . “The idea that [Chicxulub] had help — for want of a better phrase — would have really added insult to serious injury,” says study coauthor Veronica Bray, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Nearly 200 impact craters have been discovered on Earth ( SN: 12/18/18 ), the vast majority of which are on land. That’s because impact craters at sea gradually bec...

Sea urchin skeletons may owe some of their strength to a common geometric design. Components of the skeletons of common sea urchins ( Paracentrotus lividus ) follow a similar pattern to that found in honeycombs and dragonfly wings, researchers report in the August Journal of the Royal Society Interface . Studying this recurring natural order could inspire the creation of strong yet lightweight new materials. Urchin skeletons display “an incredible diversity of structures at the microscale, varying from fully ordered to entirely chaotic,” says marine biologist and biomimetic consultant Valentina Perricone. These structures may help the animals maintain their shape when faced with predator attacks and environmental stresses. While using a scanning electron microscope to study urchin skeleton tubercules — sites where the spines attach that withstand strong mechanical forces — Perricone spotted “a curious regularity.” Tubercules seem to follow a type of common natural order called a Vo...

There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the rate of climate change may play just as large a role in speeding up evolution. The study focuses on reptile evolution across 57 million years — before, during and after the mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period ( SN: 12/6/18 ) . That extinction event, triggered by carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere and oceans through increased volcanic activity about 252 million years ago, knocked out a whopping 86 percent of Earth’s species. Yet reptiles recovered from the chaos relatively well. Their exploding diversity of species around that time has been widely regarded as a result of their slithering into newly available niches. But rapid climate fluctuations were already taking place much earlier in the Permian, and so were surges of reptile diversification, researchers say. Analyzin...

Across the United States, kids are prepping for back-to-school, or are already in classrooms, and parents are buckling up for another pandemic school year. Like me, many are trying to get a handle on what COVID-19 precautions to take. Updated guidance released last week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t exactly helped. It may have made dealing with back-to-school more confusing — and could even spur new outbreaks. Last November, my fifth grader had to quarantine at home for 10 days after a close contact tested positive. Now, the CDC has nixed the quarantine recommendation for people exposed to COVID-19. Today, our situation could look something like this: My COVID-exposed daughter would mask for 10 days, test on day five, and remain in school the whole time — only the infected child would isolate. That child would stay home for at least five days after a positive test. Then, if the child is fever-free and symptoms are improving, according to the new guidan...

The Five-Million-Year Odyssey Peter Bellwood Princeton Univ., $29.95 Archaeologist Peter Bellwood’s academic odyssey wended from England to teaching posts halfway around the world, first in New Zealand and then in Australia. For more than 50 years, he has studied how humans settled islands from Southeast Asia to Polynesia. So it’s fitting that his new book, a plain-English summary of what’s known and what’s not about the evolution of humans and our ancestors, emphasizes movement. In The Five-Million-Year Odyssey , Bellwood examines a parade of species in the human evolutionary family — he collectively refers to them as hominins, whereas some others (including Science News ) use the term hominids ( SN: 9/15/21 ) — and tracks their migrations across land and sea. He marshals evidence indicating that hominids in motion continually shifted the direction of biological and cultural evolution. Throughout his tour, Bellwood presents his own take on contested topics. But when available...

Sometimes a photo is literally a matter of life, death — and zombies. This haunting image, winner of the 2022 BMC Ecology and Evolution photography competition, certainly fits that description. It captures the fruiting bodies of a parasitic fungus, emerging from the lifeless body of an infected fly in the Peruvian rainforest. The fungus-infested fly was one of many images submitted to the contest from all over the world, aiming to showcase the beauty of the natural world and the challenges it faces. The journal revealed the winners August 18. Roberto García-Roa, a conservation photographer and evolutionary biologist at the University of Valencia in Spain, took the winning photo while visiting the Tambopata National Reserve, a protected habitat in the Amazon. The fungus erupting from the fly belongs to the genus Ophiocordyceps, a diverse collection of parasitic fungi known as “zombie fungi,” due to their ability to infect insects and control their minds ( SN: 7/17/19 ). “There ...