Even though it’s only even odds that 2022 will turn out to be less of a disaster than 2021 (or 2020), at least 2022 is the best recent year for compiling a Top 10 list of science anniversaries.

Curiously, many of those anniversaries are of deaths: the astronomer William Herschel for instance, who died in 1822; Hermann Rorschach, Alexander Graham Bell and the mathematician Sophie Bryant (all in 1922); and Louis Leakey (1972).

But there are also some notable firsts (the original slide rule, for instance) and births, including the scientist who illuminated how science could save society from devastating infectious diseases. Honorable mentions go to the birthdays of physicists Rudolf Clausius (200th), Leon Lederman (100th) and C.N. Yang (100th). They just missed edging out the oldest anniversary, a death from an earlier millennium:

10. Al-Nayrīzī, 1,100th anniversary of death

Abū’l-‘Abbās al-Faḍl ibn Ḥātim al-Nayrīzī was a Persian mathematician and astronomer, probably born around A.D. 865 in the town of Nayriz (in present-day Iran), which is why he became known as al-Nayrīzī. He died in 922 or thereabouts (close enough for Top 10 purposes). He got a job in Baghdad with the caliph al-Mu‘taḍid, writing treatises on math and weather, among other topics.

Unfortunately, many of al-Nayrīzī’s writings were long ago lost. But other writers mention his works and report that he was a master of astronomy and geometry. Among his surviving works is a translation and commentary on Euclid’s Elements. Al-Nayrīzī also attempted a proof of Euclid’s famous postulate about parallel lines never meeting. One of Al-Nayrīzī’s treatises for the caliph discussed how to determine the distance to upright objects. Had golf been invented yet, the caliph would have used such knowledge to calculate the distance to the flagstick without need of a GPS app.

9. Invention of mathematical weather forecasting, 100th anniversary

Lewis Fry Richardson, a mathematician who later turned to psychology, worked early in his career at England’s National Peat Industries. He was given the task of calculating optimal designs of drainage systems for peat moss subjected to different amounts of rain. He worked out the equations and then realized they could be applied to other problems, such as predicting the weather.

In the years leading up to World War I, he worked on a book, to be titled Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. He showed how values for temperature, humidity, air pressure and other weather data from one day could be processed by his equations to make a forecast for the next day. He took a break to be an ambulance driver during the war and then finished his book, published in 1922.

As Science News-Letter reported that year, one U.S. Weather Bureau scientist believed the book to show “that meteorology has become an exact science.” Unfortunately, to make the next day’s forecast from one day’s data took Richardson six weeks of calculation time. Only decades later did modern electronic computers make the mathematics of weather forecasting practical, and sometimes useful.

8. Invention of slide rule, 400th anniversary

William Oughtred, born in England in 1575, became a priest and part-time mathematician and tutor. In 1631 he wrote a book summarizing arithmetic and algebra, which became widely popular, later earning lavish praise from Isaac Newton.

Nine years before his book, Oughtred had designed the first slide rule. In 1614 John Napier had invented logarithms, showing how multiplication could be accomplished by addition. Six years later the astronomer Edmund Gunter had the bright idea of marking numbers on a straightedge proportional to their logarithms. Multiplication could then be performed by using a compass (the caliper kind, not for finding north) to find the answer by measuring the distances between the numbers to be multiplied.

In 1622, Oughtred had the even brighter idea of placing two such rulers next to each other. Sliding one along the other to properly position the numbers of interest allowed him to read the product of a multiplication right off one of the rulers. Oughtred later designed a circular slide rule, but one of his students claimed to have had that idea first, initiating a nasty priority dispute.

Further advances in slide rule design, incorporating things like cubes and trigonometric functions, made slide rules the premier computing devices of the 19th and 20th centuries — UNTIL electronic calculators came along, sadly depriving slide rules the opportunity to make it to age 400. But some people alive today once used slide rules, and probably still have one in a box somewhere.

7. Maria Goeppert Mayer, 50th anniversary of death

Maria Goeppert was born in what is now Poland in 1906. Encouraged by her father, a university professor, to pursue higher education, Maria chose mathematics. But in the mid-1920s her fascination with a newfangled idea called quantum mechanics induced her to shift to physics. After earning her Ph.D., she married a chemist (Joseph Mayer) and moved to the United States. She was allowed to teach classes where her husband was on the faculty (first at Johns Hopkins, later at Columbia and then Chicago) but not offered a job of her own. She was free to pursue research projects, though, often in collaboration with her husband or other scientists, and she produced important work on many topics at the interface of quantum physics and chemistry.

She was a master of the math needed to understand spectroscopy; her studies of the light emitted by the newly discovered transuranic elements in the 1940s showed that they belonged in a chemical family related to the rare-earth elements — an essential clue to the proper positioning of the transuranics in the periodic table. After World War II, she began studying nuclear physics and soon deduced the existence of a shell-like structure for the arrangement of nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the atomic nucleus. Her findings complemented similar work by Hans Jensen, with whom she later collaborated in writing a book on the nuclear shell model. Jensen and Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel in physics for that work.

Her shell model research was aided by a suggestion from Enrico Fermi, the physicist famous for his work on the secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. That was only fair, as when Fermi disappeared from Columbia University in 1941 to work on the bomb, Goeppert Mayer was hurriedly recruited to teach his class. In 1960, Goeppert Mayer finally was awarded a full-time primetime job of her own at the University of California, San Diego, but shortly thereafter she suffered a stroke, limiting her ability to do research in the years before her death in 1972.

6. Aage Bohr, 100th birthday

Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, the same year as the birth of his son Aage. Aage grew up surrounded by physicists (who came from around the world to study with his father) and so naturally became a physicist himself. During World War II, Aage accompanied his father to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, afterwards returning to his native Denmark to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen. During that time Aage turned his attention to a problem with the atomic nucleus.

His father’s theory that a nucleus behaves much like a drop of liquid had been applied successfully in explaining nuclear fission. But more recent work by Maria Goeppert Mayer (remember her?) showed that nuclei had an inner shell-like structure, suggesting ordered arrangements of individual particles, not collective, liquidlike behavior. Aage developed a new theoretical view, showing that his father’s view could be reconciled with Goeppert Mayer’s shell model. He then worked on experiments that corroborated it and shared the 1975 physics Nobel “for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection.”

5. Gregor Mendel, 200th birthday

Born July 22, 1822 to a family of farmers in what is now the Czech Republic, Johann Mendel preferred  higher education to farming, enrolling in a philosophy program properly complemented with math and physics. When the time came to return home and take charge of the family farm, he opted instead to enter a monastery (where he adopted the monastic name Gregor). He did not particularly enjoy his priestly duties, though, so he got a job as a teacher, which required him to enter the University of Vienna for advanced science education. There, in addition to more math and physics, he encountered botany. Later he returned to the monastery, where he applied his botanical skills to investigating patterns in the physical features of successive generations of pea plants.

In 1866 he published results implying the existence of “differentiating characters” (now known as genes) that combined in different ways when transmitted by parents to offspring. Apparently nobody very astute read his paper, not even Charles Darwin, who would have been intrigued by Mendel’s mention that his work was relevant to “the history of the evolution of organic forms.” Only at the dawn of the 20th century was Mendel’s work translated into English and then recognized for its importance to heredity, evolution and biology in general.

4. Pioneer 10, 50th anniversary of launch

Of all the robotic spacecraft launched from Earth into space, Pioneer 10 was truly the pioneer. It was the first craft to fly beyond the orbit of Mars and the first to exceed the distance of the solar system’s outermost planet, Neptune. Launched March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10’s mission was to visit Jupiter to take some cool snapshots of the giant planet and a few of its moons. Pioneer’s escape velocity from Earth surpassed 51,000 kilometers per hour (about 32,000 miles per hour), at the time a solar system speed record for any flying machine or bird. After dodging asteroids (most of them anyway) on its journey, Pioneer 10 reached the solar system’s largest planet in late 1973, passing within 131,000 kilometers (about 81,000 miles) on December 4.

Pioneer continued transmitting signals back to Earth until 1997, when budget cuts forced NASA to stop listening except for an occasional check-in. The very last signal came on January 23, 2003, from 7.6 billion miles away. By now Pioneer 10 is roughly 12 billion miles away, headed in the direction of the star Aldebaran. It will arrive in a mere 2 million years or so. If any Aldebaranians encountering it can decipher the sketches of a man and woman and the map revealing the point of origin, perhaps they will refuel it and send it back.

3. Insulin treats diabetes, 100th anniversary

In a century of medical miracles, one of the earliest and most dramatic was the discovery of insulin for treating diabetes. Diabetes had been recognized as a serious disease in ancient times. By the 20th century, scientists suspected that the pancreas produced a substance that helped metabolize carbohydrates; a malfunctioning pancreas meant a person could not extract energy from carbohydrates in food, resulting in dangerously high blood sugar levels while depriving the body of needed energy. It was nearly always fatal in children, and adults diagnosed with diabetes could hope for only a few more years of life.

As Science News-Letter reported in 1922, diabetes ranked “with cancer in fatality and incurability.” But in that year, a young doctor reported success in treating diabetes with a substance secreted by the pancreas. That doctor, Frederick Banting, had tried the idea with dogs the year before and gave the first insulin injection to a human, a 14-year-old boy, in January 1922. Banting originally used insulin purified from animals; in the decades since, researchers have engineered more sophisticated forms for human use. But even with the animal insulin, success was so dramatic that Banting and his lab director John Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1923.

2. Science News, 100th birthday

In its first year of providing news of science to the world, the organization then known as Science Service transmitted a weekly package of mimeographed pages (labeled Science News Bulletin) to newspapers and other media around the country. But soon other groups (such as libraries) as well as individuals began to request the package, and so Science Service initiated a new strategy with issue No. 50. On March 13, 1922, Science News-Letter was born, with a new masthead offering subscriptions for $5 per year, postpaid. Its first article: an account of a U.S. Department of Commerce report on the allocation of radio wavelengths. The report assured everybody that “widespread use of radio for the broadcasting of public information and other matters of general interest” would be forthcoming. In 1966 the magazine dropped “Letter” and became Science News, providing an excuse for another centennial celebration in 2066.

1. Louis Pasteur, 200th birthday

Born in France in December 1822, Louis Pasteur was not a precocious youth. His interests tended toward art, but later some inspiring lectures shifted his attention to chemistry, and he became one of the greatest chemists of all time. Also one of the greatest biologists. And although he received no medical education, he provided the foundation for modern medicine’s ability to fight disease.

Pasteur’s understanding of microorganisms led to the recognition of their capacity to damage human health. His tenacity in conducting rigorous experiments and his pugnacious public promotion of his findings established the germ theory of disease and encouraged new methods of hygiene. Time after time he was called on to devise solutions for perplexing problems facing various industries. He saved the silk industry. He showed how to prevent wine from going sour, and how to make milk safe to drink. He devised vaccines for various diseases, including one to cure rabies. No one person in history is more responsible than Pasteur for preserving human health and preventing unnecessary deaths. He is lucky he was born 200 years ago, though. If he were around today, he’d be getting death threats.

Marijuana commission finds usage high — Science News, January 29, 1972

Approximately 24 million Americans have used marijuana at least one time. A national survey reports that more than 8 million are still using the drug.… Usage figures are 33 percent higher than the [National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse] had expected, but … after age 25 pot smoking falls off rapidly.

Update

Americans’ interest in marijuana has grown over the last 50 years. Since 1972, the number of people age 12 and older in the United States who, in their lifetimes, have inhaled or ingested the drug has increased more than fivefold, to 126.5 million as of 2020, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The gain in users happened as the perceived danger of marijuana dropped over time (SN: 6/14/14, p. 16). And unlike in the 1970s, older adults are getting in on the action, though prevalence has risen among adults of all ages. Of the 49.6 million people who reported using pot in 2020, about 47 percent were ages 26 to 49, and about 24 percent were 50 or older.

A 1920s science headline, “Ice cream from crude oil,” may best capture the era’s unbridled enthusiasm for chemistry. “Edible fats, the same as those in vegetable and animal foods … and equally nutritious … can be obtained by breaking up the molecules of mineral oil and rearranging the atoms,” exclaimed Science News Letter, the predecessor to Science News, in 1926. Synthetic ice cream was just one of the wonders that could lie around the corner.

Petroleum would become increasingly valuable, the article continued, “as a source of substances for which man has hither-to been dependent upon the chance bounty of nature.” A rash of potential products included aromatics, flavorings, nitroglycerin for dynamite, plastics, drugs and more.

Petroleum-based ice creams never became the new big thing, yet the last century has witnessed a dramatic leap in humans’ ability to synthesize matter. From our homes and cities to our electronics and clothing, much of what we interact with every day is made possible through the manipulation, recombination and reimagination of the basic substances nature has provided.

To celebrate our 100^th anniversary, we’re highlighting some of the biggest advances in science over the last century. To see an expanded version of this story and more from the series, visit Century of Science.

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“The world is unrecognizable from 100 years ago,” says Anna Ploszajski, a materials scientist and author of the 2021 book Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning Through Making. And that, she says, is “simply because of the materials that we have around, let alone all of the new ways we use them.”

At the turn of the 20th century, organic chemists learned how to turn coal into a variety of industrial chemicals, including dyes and perfumes. Later, motivated by wartime demand, chemists honed their craft with poison gas, explosives and propellants, as well as disinfectants and antiseptics. As a result, World War I was often called “the chemist’s war.” And at a fundamental level, the new century also ushered in greater understanding of chemical bonds and the atom, its constituents and its behavior.

In the decades that followed, approaches in chemistry and physics combined with engineering to give rise to a new field, now called materials science. An extensive survey of the field, put together by the National Academy of Sciences in the 1970s and titled “Materials and Man’s Needs,” described the pace of research: “The transitions from, say, stone to bronze and from bronze to iron were revolutionary in impact, but they were relatively slow in terms of the time scale. The changes in materials innovation and application within the last half century occur in a time span which is revolutionary rather than evolutionary.”

Alongside this new science came new and improved scientific tools. Scientists can now see materials at a much finer scale, with the electron microscope making individual atoms visible. X-ray crystallography unveils atomic arrangements, allowing for a better understanding of materials’ structure. With equipment such as chromatographs and mass spectrometers, today’s scientists can untangle mixtures of chemicals and identify the compounds within. Francis Aston first took advantage of a mass spectrometer in his study of isotopes in 1919, but for a long time the tool was seen by some chemists as, according to a description by mass spectrometrist Michael Grayson, “an unexplainable, voodoo, black magic kind of a tool.”

Many new materials were birthed from basic curiosity and serendipity. But new techniques also made way for targeted innovation. Today, materials can be designed from scratch to solve specific problems. And explorations of the properties of solid substances — for instance, how matter interacts with heat, light, electricity or magnetism — along with iterations of design have further contributed to the stuff that surrounds us, giving way to transistors, eyeglass lenses that darken in sunlight, touch screens and hard disk drives. Explorations into how matter interacts with biological tissues have yielded coronary stents, artificial skin and hip replacements that include metal mélanges that are tough and nonreactive when they sit against bone.

The outputs of such efforts are all around us. Take air travel, and the global interconnectivity it introduced. It’s possible thanks to alloys that are lightweight and robust. And today’s personal connectivity — via smartphones and computers — came with transistors made of silicon. Their small size and low power requirements brought computing to our office desks, and then into our homes and pockets. An abundance of plastic housewares and comfy athleisure clothing options are made possible via improvements in polymers.

Yet innovation hasn’t come without consequences. For each tale of progress, there are stories of the marks people have left on this planet. While enabling humans to flourish, many new substances have become pollutants, from PCBs to plastics. However people go about addressing these environmental problems, other new materials will likely be part of the solutions.

Going places

It was the summer of 1940, the early days of the Battle of Britain. Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, began a months-long attack on the British Isles that eventually included the nightly bombing raids known as the Blitz. Going into the battle, the Luftwaffe believed it had the upper hand; in battles in France, the Germans had dominated in the air. Little did they know the Allies had a secret weapon — in their fuel tanks.

As Germans began flying over England, they were surprised to find the tables had turned. The British Spitfires and Hurricanes that the Germans had outmaneuvered in France could now climb higher and fly faster thanks to fuel made with a newly developed process called catalytic cracking.

Catalysts boost chemical reactions by reducing the energy needed to get them going. French mechanical engineer Eugene Houdry had developed a catalytic process in the 1930s to make high-octane fuel, which can withstand higher compression and allows engines to deliver more power. Simply increasing the octane rating of aviation fuel from 87 to 100 gave the Allies a crucial edge.

Houdry wasn’t the first to attempt using catalysts to bust the big molecules of heavy fuels into smaller ones to improve performance. But as an avid road racer, he had a special interest in high-quality gasoline. He studied hundreds of catalysts until he landed on aluminum- and silicon-based materials that could do the busting more efficiently than an existing process that relied on heat. When he tested his gasoline in his Bugatti racer, he reached speeds of 90 miles per hour.

In the following decades, catalytic cracking and improvements to the process Houdry pioneered would contribute to the reign of automobiles. Catalytic cracking still produces much of the gas that cars guzzle today.

But all that driving soon took a toll on the environment. When the hydrocarbon molecules in gasoline burn, the engine exhaust contains small amounts of harmful gases: poisonous carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide that can cause smog and acid rain, as well as unburned hydrocarbons. Los Angeles and other car-packed cities choked on smog in the 1940s and ’50s.

Houdry looked again to catalysts to deal with the pollution that internal combustion engines caused. He designed a catalytic converter.

“When first considered, the problem seems simple,” Houdry wrote in a 1954 patent application. “A great number of catalysts can be used for the reaction. By simply placing one of these catalysts in the exhaust line under controlled conditions, the exhaust fumes can be cleaned.” The catalysts, precious metals such as platinum or palladium, provide docking sites for the harmful gases to hang onto; there, reactions involving oxygen convert them to less harmful forms.

In the 1950s, Houdry outlined a series of reactions, materials and conditions necessary for a working catalytic converter. But he was ahead of his time. For years, the adoption of catalytic converters in automobiles was stymied by leaded gasoline, which gummed up the catalysts’ surfaces. Finally, with the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which led to requirements for catalytic converters and lead-free fuel, the air in cities began to clear.

For air travel to serve the masses, a different dilemma needed solving: lightening the load. The earliest airplanes gained lift at the turn of the 20th century on wings of fabric and wood, but to really soar, airplanes needed light but strong materials. The first aircraft designed for passengers — the Ford Trimotor, nicknamed the Tin Goose — took to the air in 1926 with help from aluminum alloys.

Alloys have existed since ancient times. Bronze Age artisans combined copper with arsenic or tin in crucibles to make tools, jewelry and more. From there, advances coincided with the ability to melt metals at higher and higher temperatures, eventually leading to steel. Scientists since have studied how materials’ structures and properties — including desirable features like strength, bendability and resistance to corrosion — vary with composition, temperature and processing.

The fuselage of the Tin Goose contained a newly developed alloy named duralumin, a contraction of “Dürener” (for the company that originally made it) and “aluminum.”

In 1926, Science News Letter described the promise of materials such as duralumin for safer dirigibles, which would carry large numbers of passengers into the air: “Of these sound materials, strong and light girders must be built. So light that a man can carry one of them in his hand and yet so strong that they will carry loads of thousands of pounds.”

Dirigibles and duralumin were just the beginning. The 20th century saw an explosion in the types of alloys and their applications, from stainless steel cutlery to the titanium alloys used in prostheses and pacemakers to crucial components of vehicles. Today’s jet engines are built of superalloys, which can withstand infernal temperatures.

Plastics and composites have also helped planes shed weight. Composites combine materials with very different properties — such as glass and plastic — by suspending one in the other or sandwiching them together, for instance. Because they can be tuned to be light and strong, composites have made their way into parts all over planes, from the engine to the wings. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, which debuted in 2007, is made up of 50 percent composites by weight.

Making connections

For a testament to the power of materials to connect us, just look at an iPhone. “The iPhone contains about 75 elements from the periodic table — a huge proportion of all the atoms that we know about in the universe are in an iPhone,” says Ploszajski, the materials scientist.

Some of those are rare-earth elements, a set of 17 metallic elements mostly on the outskirts of the periodic table. Though they are difficult to mine and process, rare earths are sought after because they lend unusual magnetic, fluorescent and electrical properties to materials made from them. Neodymium, for example, mixed with other metals makes the strongest magnets known. These magnets make your cell phone vibrate and its speakers produce sound.

Despite the hazards associated with mining them, these elements show up in a lot of other 20th century applications too. Rare earths are in color televisions, camera lenses, fiber-optic cables, nuclear reactors, nickel-metal hydride batteries, aircraft engines, PET scanners and much more.

The iPhone contains about 75 elements from the periodic table — a huge proportion of all the atoms that we know about in the universe are in an iPhone.

Anna Ploszajski

A more familiar element — silicon — is the reason cell phones and laptops are available in such a widespread way.

As a semiconductor, silicon conducts electricity better than ceramics and glass do, but not as well as metals. This in-between status makes it possible to control how electrons zip around a semiconductor, a control that’s ideal for creating electrical switches for circuits in radios, televisions or computers. In the 1930s and ’40s, these and other electronic devices relied on bulky, breakable glass vacuum tubes to control electric current flow. Decades of semiconductor research pointed to a more reliable, slimmer way.

The first semiconductor switch, dubbed the transistor, was made of germanium and invented at Bell Laboratories in 1947. But teams at Texas Instruments and Bell Labs were both eyeing silicon, which holds up under higher temperatures. Silicon is also less likely than germanium to leak current when a switch is off. Though the two teams independently developed silicon transistors, Texas Instruments’ Gordon Teal gets the credit as his announcement came first, in May 1954.

At a conference in Dayton, Ohio, toward the end of the day’s talks, Teal matter-of-factly revealed his company’s success. “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors,” he said, “I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” His announcement, which followed other talks suggesting that the devices were years away, jolted the audience, which stampeded to the back of the room for copies of Teal’s talk, and out to the telephone booth to share the news.

Our attention-sucking phones are right in front of our faces. But out of sight are the fiber optics that relay messages around the world in a flash.

All the glass strung out in the world’s optical cables could tether Earth to Uranus and then some, stretching some 4 billion kilometers. These cables ferry messages across countries and continents and across the seafloor. Optical fiber “really has strung the world together in a new way,” says Ainissa Ramirez, a materials scientist and author of the 2020 book The Alchemy of Us (SN: 4/25/20, p. 28). Messages from across the Atlantic used to come by boat, she says, then came copper cables to relay telegraph dispatches in the 1840s. The first live telephone traffic sent through fiber-optic cables was in 1977 in Long Beach, Calif. Now e-mails from abroad arrive nearly instantaneously thanks to thin-as-hair optical fibers.

The list of materials that helped put oceans of information at our fingertips goes on and on. All of these developments, including today’s lithium-ion batteries and more, led to today’s abundance of electronic devices (SN: 1/21/17, p. 22). But ever more improvements, and our constant urge to upgrade, creates a new problem: “How do we unmake this stuff and recycle those substances safely?” Ploszajski asks.

A plethora of plastic

In a quest to really grasp the omnipresence of plastics, Susan Freinkel, author of the 2011 book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, pledged to go a day without touching any. Glimpsing her plastic toilet seat, Freinkel gave up the experiment mere moments after it began. Instead, she spent the day cataloging all the plastic stuff she encountered.

Plastics covered her body — in yoga pants, sneakers and eyeglasses. Plastic made up the entire interior of her minivan and parts of kitchen appliances. Plastic packaging protected her food, and after eating, she dumped her trash in a plastic bin. Even the walls around her contained plastics, from the paint to the synthetic insulation.

Today, we’re awash in plastics. Yet at the beginning of the 20th century, only a handful of plastics had made their way into homes.

The story of commercial plastics began in the 1860s, when John Wesley Hyatt, seeking a substitute for the ivory popularly used in billiard balls, landed on a material later called celluloid. At the heart of celluloid, however, was the natural substance cellulose.

The first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, arrived in 1907. It was a fluke discovery by Belgian-born chemist Leo Baekeland, who was seeking an alternative to the natural shellac that insulated electrical cables. Celluloid was a suitable substitute for ivory and tortoiseshell, but sleek, shiny Bakelite gleamed with modernity. It quickly made its way into a host of products, including the casings for radios, jewelry and telephones. A new era of innovating on nature’s materials, rather than merely mimicking them, was born, Freinkel writes.

Yet it wasn’t until the 1920s that researchers started to understand plastics’ chemical nature. Plastics are made of polymers, large molecules made of repeating units. At the time, what gave natural polymers like cellulose, shellac and rubber their properties remained unknown. So inventors seeking new human-made substitutes relied on trial and error to make something similar. Credit for changing all that goes to the German organic chemist Hermann Staudinger.

From experiments on natural rubber, Staudinger showed that large, heavy molecules could be formed by linking many smaller molecules into chains. As Science News Letter put it in 1953, when Staudinger was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry: “The way the molecules regiment themselves determines the differences between springy rubber, hard plastic and tough fiber.” It might sound obvious today, but Staudinger’s finding was controversial. Chemists at the time thought that what we now call macromolecules were simply aggregates of smaller molecules.

Staudinger’s ideas gradually gained acceptance and formed a basis for new research on polymers. In the following decade, industrial chemists worked to figure out the chemical reactions needed to create new polymers, plastics among them. One early success story was nylon, a carbon-based polymer patented in 1938 as a substitute for silk. American women were introduced to nylon stockings in 1940. Within a year, nylons grabbed 30 percent of the hosiery market.

But it was World War II that drastically increased demand for plastics. The military turned to the new industry to make substitutes for strategic materials such as glass, brass or steel, Freinkel says. Nylon was needed for military uses, so women offered up their stockings to be recycled.

“Great piles of stockings retired after faithful and intimate service are awaiting resurrection — thousands of pounds of them,” reported Science News Letter in 1943.

Though small at the start of the war, the plastics industry got better at making its wares and boosted production. Processes such as injection molding, which spurts melted plastic into a mold “sort of like a Play-Doh Fun Factory,” Freinkel says, made it possible to mass-produce plastic. A technique called blow molding, invented in the 1930s and based on the same principle as glass blowing, offered a quick way to form plastic bottles.

As wartime demand dried up, the plastics industry began to bring its products to the people. “You start to get this flood of plastic into everyday life,” Freinkel says.

The promise of plastic was on display in 1946. Held in New York City, the first National Plastics Exhibition featured wares made of the wonder material. “Thousands of people lined up to go to this trade show and walk through this conference hall and gawk at stuff that had an almost magical quality,” Freinkel says. Visitors saw durable nylon fishing line and window screens in a riot of colors. Mass-produced plastic offered “a new way to have the good life on the cheap.”

We’ve come a long way from the days of celluloid and Bakelite. Tens of thousands of plastic compounds exist today. The world now produces in excess of 380 million metric tons of plastic a year — that’s more than a hundred pounds of what’s typically very lightweight stuff for every person on the planet every year.

Consequences

By the mid-1960s, researchers started noticing plastic pieces in the ocean, Freinkel says. Today, plastic pollution is found virtually everywhere, in bits wafting in the winds, high in Mount Everest’s snow and as trash piling up on the seafloor.

Plastics are the quintessential example of the journey from material marvel to environmental nuisance. But they’re not the only problem.

The organic chemistry advances of the early 1900s made new and exciting materials possible, but also allowed people to make more and more materials that weren’t recyclable, says Thomas Le Roux, a historian at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and co-author of the 2020 book The Contamination of the Earth. By the 1970s, new disposable products, from pens to razors to packaging, signaled an ease of life. “It was modern to throw away what we buy,” he says.

The consequences of this easy-come, easy-go relationship with our stuff soon appeared in the environment. Our unabated demand for fossil fuels, used not only as fuel but as raw materials for making plastics, releases emissions that contribute to Earth’s changing climate.

Many of our modern substances were created to solve problems, says Mark Jones, a chemist and member of the National Historic Chemical Landmarks committee of the American Chemical Society. For instance, before the 1930s, air conditioning and refrigeration relied on ammonia, which is flammable and toxic. That changed with the introduction of Freon and other chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs for short, which were created by chemists in the 1920s. These molecules appeared to have little effect on living things. “They were presumed to be incredibly safe,” says Jones, who recently retired from Dow Chemical.

But Freon and its CFC cousins had unforeseen consequences on the atmosphere when they escaped air conditioning and refrigeration systems. In the 1980s, scientists discovered a hole in Earth’s ozone layer that forms when CFCs rise to the stratosphere, break down and react with ozone, destroying it. In solving one problem, humankind found itself with another.

CFCs’ creation 

In 1985, scientists discovered a hole in the ozone layer, created by chlorofluorocarbons in the stratosphere. The Montreal Protocol turned things around: 2019 saw the smallest ozone hole ever recorded (compared below with 1987).

The history of science offers up abundant examples of solutions begetting new problems. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, useful insulators in electronics, can cause serious health problems, including cancer, when they enter the environment. The compounds that allow food to slide out of kitchen pans without sticking belong to a family that has earned the title “forever chemicals” for the tendency not to degrade. Lithium mining, which has increased with demand for lithium-ion batteries, guzzles water and can release harmful chemicals that contaminate ecosystems and poison drinking wells. Other battery ingredients, such as cobalt, are mined unethically — sometimes using child labor.

Perhaps the largest unintended consequence that humankind faces today is climate change. Human activities — factories, mining, growing food, traveling, using air conditioning and heating to keep indoor climates comfortable — have released greenhouse gas emissions that have heated the world by around 1.25 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times. The world is already experiencing extreme weather events linked to climate change.

Clearly chemists and materials scientists have contributed to these problems. But they will inevitably be part of finding solutions as well. There’s a cyclical nature to the promise and perils of new molecules and materials. “The entire history of chemistry is, ‘Hey, look what I can do! Darn, I wish I hadn’t done it that way! But I have another way I can do it.’ And that keeps us kind of moving forward,” Jones says.

Chemists are now creating plastics that will break down after use and can be recycled more easily (SN: 1/30/21, p. 20). Materials scientists are developing better membrane materials to filter pollutants out of water (SN: 11/24/18, p. 18). Engineers are deploying new materials to capture carbon dioxide at smokestacks.

New iron-based catalysts could someday convert captured carbon dioxide into jet fuel, potentially cutting greenhouse gas emissions from air travel (SN: 1/30/21, p. 5). And researchers continue to innovate to turn more and more of the solar spectrum into energy, and so cut our reliance on fossil fuels (SN: 8/5/17, p. 22).

Chemistry and materials innovation can’t solve all our problems. People’s choices also matter. Weighing the risks and rewards that come with new materials will require recognition of the potential problems, regulations to combat them, willpower, collaboration and collective action. History holds plenty of lessons, but it’s not yet clear whether we’ll learn from them.

Gut microbes give some squirrels a helping hand to stay strong during hibernation. The microorganisms appear to help the squirrels recycle nutrients to keep the rodents’ muscles taut, researchers report in the Jan. 28 Science.

Understanding how squirrels keep their muscle over the winter could offer a small clue to figuring out how to stave off muscle loss for people who are malnourished or have muscle-wasting diseases, the scientists say.  

“After long bed rest, humans are just not jumping up and down and climbing mountains,” says study coauthor Hannah Carey, a hibernation physiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But that’s what these [squirrels] have to do.”  

Muscle breakdown from inactivity or starvation releases compounds made of nitrogen — a crucial element found in muscle building blocks called amino acids. Too much nitrogen can be toxic, so the body normally eliminates the excess through urine in a compound called urea.

Previous work has shown that arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) can recycle nitrogen for muscle preservation on their own, without gut microbes’ help (SN: 12/16/20). In the new study, Carey and colleagues tracked where nitrogen went in the bodies of thirteen-lined ground squirrels (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus) using an isotope, a form of the element with a different mass, as a tracer. In hibernating squirrels, nitrogen that had been processed by microbes ended up in skeletal muscle. But animals treated with antibiotics to clear out gut-inhabiting bacteria incorporated less nitrogen into muscle, a sign that the microbes were responsible.

Some gut microbes salvage nitrogen from urea and use it to make amino acids. Hibernating squirrels can then use those amino acids to preserve muscle, the findings suggest.

It seems that to help the creatures stay strong, Carey says, microbes and squirrels come together.

Animals moving into the big city could be getting more than they bargained for. Gut microorganisms from humans in cities may be spilling over into urban wildlife, potentially putting the animals’ health at risk.

Fecal samples from humans and animals around the world show that urban critters harbor microbial communities that have much more in common with those in urban humans than in rural people and wildlife, researchers report in a preliminary study posted January 6 at bioRxiv.org. While previous research has found captive animals can acquire human microbes — some linked with gastrointestinal disorders, immune deficiencies and even stunted growth — this is the first time a humanizing effect on wildlife has been found in cities, and between humans and reptiles.

Many of the microbes that show up more often in industrialized human populations are appearing in urban wildlife populations, but they’re completely missing from the rural populations, says Andrew Moeller, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University.    

Many animals harbor symbiotic communities of microbes, products of evolutionary history that play an important role in immunity and fitness (SN: 6/24/19). To see how the microbe communities in urban animals compared with those in humans, Moeller and his team analyzed 492 fecal samples taken from humans, coyotes and lizards in urban and rural locations as varied as Edmonton, Canada, and Amazonian villages in Venezuela. The team used genomic analysis to find the abundance of microbial DNA in each sample and then compared the microbial profiles between urban and rural hosts.

Urban lizards and coyotes had gut microbiome communities more similar to urban humans than rural humans or wildlife, the researchers found. Most notably, they discovered 18 lineages of bacteria in urban wildlife that did not appear in their rural counterparts.

The parallel changes in microorganisms seen in diverse animals from different locations are convincing patterns of urban-specific microbial changes, says Taichi Suzuki, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, who was not involved in the study. “A big question is the mechanism driving this pattern, which needs further investigation,” he says.

Research has found the human gut to be a source of the new bacteria lineages found in the urban wildlife, so they probably picked them up from people somehow, Moeller says. Humans shed bacteria from our personal microbial clouds, as we go about daily life (SN: 9/30/15). “The simplest explanation would be that the animals are just cohabiting in that same space, and therefore picking up microbes in their environment,” says Moeller. It could also be a product of an urban gastronomical lifestyle, eating humans’ leftovers: some bacteria are associated with high-fat, high-protein diets typically eaten in cities.  

The research is a nice primer but could benefit from taking account of local diets and pathologies, says Mark van der Giezen, a microbiologist at the University of Stavanger in Norway also not involved with this study. “Urbanization is a social phenomenon of very complex nature,” he says.

There may be a reason we see a man, rather than a maiden, in the moon. When people spot facelike patterns in inanimate objects, those faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female, researchers report in the Feb. 1 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In experiments with over 3,800 U.S. adults recruited online, participants reviewed about 250 photos of illusory faces — in objects from potatoes to suitcases — and labeled each one as male, female or neutral. Faces were deemed male about four times as often as they were female. Both male and female participants showed that bias, with about 80 percent of participants labeling more images male than female. Only 3 percent judged more to be female than male. The remaining 17 percent of respondents were fairly evenhanded in their labels.

In follow-up experiments, participants did not show the same bias toward images of the same kinds of objects without illusory faces. That finding helped rule out the possibility that participants viewed something about the underlying objects as masculine or feminine. Computer models that scoured the illusory face photos for stereotypically masculine or feminine elements — such as more angular or curved features (SN: 6/29/01) — couldn’t explain the bias, either.

“There’s this asymmetry in our perception,” says study author Susan Wardle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Given the most basic pattern of a face, as is seen in illusory faces, “we’re more likely to see it as male, and it requires additional features to see it as female,” Wardle says. She points to the fact that female emojis and Lego characters are often distinguished from their male counterparts by the addition of bigger lips, longer lashes or other feminizing features.

It’s not yet clear why people perceive the basic structure of a face as male by default, Wardle says. But in a more recent study, she and her colleagues found the same gender bias in grade school kids as young as about 5 — suggesting it arises early in life.

“I was not surprised that people would assign gender to illusory faces,” says Sheng He, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who was not involved in the research. He was, however, surprised by the strength of the gender bias that Wardle’s team discovered and wonders whether people living in matriarchal societies would show the same — or perhaps the opposite — bias in their reading of faces.

The hunt for meteorites may have just gotten some new leads. A powerful new machine learning algorithm has identified over 600 hot spots in Antarctica where scientists are likely to find a bounty of the fallen alien rocks, researchers report January 26 in Science Advances.  

Antarctica isn’t necessarily the No. 1 landing spot for meteorites, bits of extraterrestrial rock that offer a window into the birth and evolution of the solar system. Previous estimates suggest more meteorites probably land closer to the equator (SN: 5/29/20). But the southern continent is still the best place to find them, says Veronica Tollenaar, a glaciologist at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. Not only are the dark specks at the surface starkly visible against the white background, but quirks of the ice sheet’s flow can also concentrate meteorites in “stranding zones.”

The trouble is that so far, meteorite stranding zones have been found by luck. Satellites help, but poring through the images is time-consuming, and field reconnaissance is costly. So Tollenaar and her colleagues trained computers to find these zones more quickly.

Space rocks’ road

This diagram shows what happens when a slowly creeping ice sheet, with meteorites (black dots) embedded in deeper layers, encounters a topographic rise such as a mountain. That obstacle bends the ice sheet’s layers upward, concentrating the space rocks embedded in them into a meteorite stranding zone. In regions where snow turns into water vapor (red arrows) faster than it accumulates, called blue ice areas, these stranding zones are particularly visible.

How meteorite hot spots form

Such stranding zones form when the slow creep of the ice sheet over the land encounters a mountain or hidden rise in the ground. That barrier shifts the flow upward, carrying any embedded space rocks toward the surface.

Combining a machine learning algorithm with data on the ice’s velocity and thickness, surface temperatures, the shape of the bedrock and known stranding zones, Tollenaar and colleagues created a map of 613 probable meteorite hot spots, including some near existing Antarctic research stations.

To date, about 45,000 meteorites have been plucked from the ice. But that’s a fraction of the 300,000 bits of space rock estimated to lie somewhere on the continent’s surface.

The team has yet to test the map on the ground; a COVID-19 outbreak at the Belgian station in December halted plans to try it during the 2021–2022 field season. It will try again next year. Meanwhile, the team is making these data freely accessible to other researchers, hoping they’ll take up the hunt as well.

Marking the spots

Using a machine learning algorithm, researchers trained computers to identify the likeliest locations of meteorite stranding zones across Antarctica. Many of these zones (in red) are located near existing research stations (small tents). The team also created an interactive map to help researchers find these alien rocks.

‘Treasure map’ to find meteorites in Antarctica

Arctic hares can go the distance. A member of Lepus arcticus in northern Canada has traveled farther than anyone knew possible.

BBYY, as the adult female was known, made a wild dash of more than 388 kilometers in 49 days — the longest distance ever recorded among hares, rabbits or any other relatives — researchers report online December 22 in Ecology.

“To think that such a small animal living under such extreme conditions averaged about eight kilometers per day across seven weeks is truly astounding,” says Joel Berger, an ecologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bronx, N.Y., who was not involved in the study.

Arctic hares — which weigh roughly the same as house cats, about four kilograms — are desirable prey for foxes and wolves on the tundra. Given the hares’ important role in the Arctic food web, mammalian ecologist Dominque Berteaux of the Université du Québec à Rimouski wanted to know how the animals move across the arid landscape.

In 2019, Berteaux and colleagues affixed satellite tracking collars on 25 hares captured near the northern tip of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada. As the hares swiftly hopped away, the researchers had no idea the creatures were beginning a mind-blowing expedition across the tundra, Berteaux says. That’s because hares and their relatives, called lagomorphs (SN: 3/8/58), typically spend their lives within a single, familiar territory where food is plentiful and easy to find.

The Arctic hares thumped that trend, with most traveling anywhere between 113 and 310 kilometers. None came close to BBYY, who died of unknown causes about a month after reaching her final destination.

For a hare to endure such a perilous journey, it must balance the need to find food without becoming food, says Dennis Murray, a terrestrial ecologist at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, who wasn’t involved in the work. That makes BBYY’s excursion even more impressive, he says.

Berteaux and colleagues hope data from BBYY and the other hares can help inform conservation strategies for the polar desert ecosystem. But even at this early stage, it’s exciting to find “something unsuspected in an animal that we thought we knew quite well,” Berteaux says.

On yellow poster board, blue letters spell BELIEVE, a nod to the Emmy-winning TV show Ted Lasso. The sign hangs above psychologist Tommy Minkler’s office door at West Virginia University, a reminder to trust in the work he’s doing to help elite athletes.

In the show, Lasso, an American football coach, is recruited to head an English football team. His experience coaching American football, an utterly different game than soccer, leaves him lacking overseas, so he relies on his positive attitude and folksy charm to bond with his players. On his first day coaching, Lasso posts the BELIEVE sign above his office door. The team often rallies around the sign just before hitting the field.

But belief alone can’t get athletes to the goal when they run into the psychological speed bumps or full-on roadblocks that can arise during training and competition. When Lasso’s striker Dani Rojas faced the yips — suddenly unable to nail his usually flawless penalty kicks — a therapist was called in. In real life, when the twisties hit U.S. gymnast Simone Biles at last summer’s Olympics in Tokyo, she withdrew from five of six event finals. Biles’ mental block was petrifying; one wrong move on the uneven bars or a failed flip on the balance beam could cause a devastating injury, or even death. Her decision to withdraw from competition after years of intense training shocked the world, from commentators to armchair athletes.

Elite athletes are expected to be unflappable. Admitting vulnerability is “so fundamentally at odds with being a competitor,” retired U.S. figure skater Sasha Cohen, who won a silver medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics, explained in the 2020 HBO documentary The Weight of Gold. Sport is war. Competing at the elite level requires strategy and posturing. “You need to show the world you are strong. You need to show your competitors you are strong,” Cohen said. “If you were to say, ‘Oh, I have mental health issues,’ that just cracks the facade.”

In society, those cracks are often seen as weakness, a faulty perception that prevents athletes from talking about their problems. That stigma is, in fact, the strongest barrier to athletes seeking help, says psychiatrist João Mauricio Castaldelli-Maia of the University of São Paulo. He and colleagues reviewed 52 studies on mental health and elite athletes in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2019.

Reactions to Biles’ decision made clear that the stigma still exists. She faced backlash after withdrawing from several Olympics events, as did Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka, who pulled out of the 2021 French Open to focus on her mental health. But amid the vitriol, Biles and Osaka had supporters, including fellow athletes who were inspired by these choices. “I didn’t even know that was an option,” U.S. figure skater Nathan Chen, a medal favorite at the upcoming Winter Olympics, said of Biles’ decision, at an October news briefing.

The International Olympic Committee, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and other sports organizations have begun to acknowledge the importance of mental health. Just because elite athletes are at peak physical fitness, their mental fitness is not guaranteed. Since 2018, sports-governing agencies, including the IOC, and health organizations have released a rash of position statements on the mental health symptoms, such as anxiety, depression and eating disorders, that are common among elite athletes, the factors contributing to those symptoms and the psychological tools that might help competitors on and off the field.

There’s also been an explosion of research into elite athletes’ mental health in the last few years, says sports and clinical psychologist Carolina Lundqvist of Linköping University in Sweden, citing a 2020 analysis in International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology. The research points to two promising psychological tools.

One is mindfulness — paying attention to, or staying in, the present moment without judgment. Another is acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. In conjunction with mindfulness, the therapy trains a person to accept difficult thoughts or feelings rather than actively work to get rid of them. Studies have shown that these tools can improve athletic performance — and, importantly, lead to a richer life off the ice or the court.

Athletes “are human beings first,” says Minkler, the Ted Lasso enthusiast. Their life is not all about winning medals or championships. Mindfulness and ACT help athletes “learn more about themselves and engage differently with their thoughts and emotions,” he says. It teaches them to be better people.

Team tests

On the women’s lacrosse field at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., players toss the ball with an intense focus on their grip of the lacrosse stick, the snap of their wrists and the weight of the ball as they catch it and pass it on. To an outsider, the drills might seem routine, but the women were paying extra attention to the task. The focused attention is a result of experiments that Minkler (a former lacrosse coach), Washington, D.C.–based psychologist Tim Pineau and colleagues have run with the team in the last few years.

The researchers wanted to know if mindfulness training could improve player performance and overall well-being. With buy-in from the school’s athletic director and lacrosse coach, Pineau led the players through six weeks of mindfulness training during preseason, then monthly follow-ups over several seasons.

The mindfulness sessions started with stationary meditations focusing on breathing and self-compassion, then progressed to mindful yoga and walking, and finally to throwing and catching exercises. Along with the meditative work, the players talked about what they’d learned in group discussions, describing how they used the training to let go of mistakes. The coach reported that the players were more focused on the second-to-second decisions of the game, rather than dwelling on something that had gone wrong.

In post-training surveys, players reported feeling that they could slip into that state of being totally immersed in the game, what is often called a flow state or being in the zone, much more easily after the mindfulness training. And they said they were less anxious about playing lacrosse. Before training, the team had four wins and 15 losses. In the season after the training, the team won more games than it lost and qualified for the regional conference championship. The next season, the team won the regional conference championship, the researchers reported in 2019 in the Journal of Sport Psychology in Action.

The findings reinforce results from a mindfulness study with the University of Miami football team, the Hurricanes. Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist at the university, teamed with Hurricanes head coach, Al Golden, and his players to track how well they paid attention during preseason training. Jha and her colleagues measured the players’ focus in the lab by having them hit the space bar on a keyboard when they saw certain numbers on a computer screen, such as 2 or 4. Players were told not to hit the bar when they saw other numbers, like 3. The stronger their attention, the better players were at not hitting the space bar when the number 3 flashed across the screen.

After measuring baseline attention of the players, the researchers divided the players into two groups: one worked through a four-week training with mindfulness meditations, while the other received four weeks of relaxation exercises. Mindfulness exercises focused on bringing attention back to the present moment whenever the mind strayed; relaxation exercises focused on relieving tension, without focusing cues.

In previous experiments with emergency medical and military professionals, Jha had found that high stress, poor mood and perceived threats can disrupt focus. In this study, she had the Miami players complete their mindfulness or relaxation work during preseason training, the grueling physical workouts that help coaches decide who gets cut from the team.

When given the computer attention test after preseason training ended, the players didn’t focus as well as before. And they reported being more anxious, more depressed and less happy overall, a result of being stressed from the physicality of football training, Jha says.

Although their focus declined in the high-stress setting, the attention of players who regularly practiced mindfulness exercises dropped less drastically than those who regularly practiced relaxation exercises, Jha and colleagues reported in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement in 2017.

“Attention is the fuel for our ability to not just think and do cognitively demanding tasks, but to regulate our emotion and connect” with other people, Jha says. Protecting the ability to pay attention can protect mental health, she explains in her 2021 book Peak Mind, which explains how to build mental “muscles” in as little as 12 minutes a day.

Practice boost 

The longer the University of Miami Hurricanes practiced mindfulness, the less their ability to pay attention dropped during a period of intense physical training.

Association of mindfulness practice time with attention in college football players

Source: J.D. Rooks et al/J. Cognitive Enhancement 2017

Learned discipline

Meditative trainings are like a push-up for the mind. It takes practice, Minkler says. “You can’t meditate once for 10 minutes and say, ‘I’m mindful and in the present,’ just like you wouldn’t go in the weight room and do five push-ups and say, “That’s it, that’s all I need to do,’ ” he says. “You have to work at it. You have to be disciplined.”

Graham Mertz, quarterback for the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has said he’s seen results with mindfulness training. After what he felt was a disappointing season in 2020, Mertz began working with the Wisconsin Badgers’ director of meditation training, Chad McGehee. That training helped Mertz figure out how to reset himself mentally between a game’s offensive plays, he told the Wisconsin State Journal. There’s roughly 40 seconds between plays, and Mertz says he spent a lot of time identifying “anchors” to bring his attention back to the moment and leave the play that just happened in the past.

The best approach he found was to take a deep breath, close his eyes and rub his fingertips together. The Badgers finished the 2021 season with eight wins and four losses, plus a win in December’s Las Vegas Bowl.

Mertz’s story, while just one person’s experience, supports Minkler’s and Jha’s findings, which suggest mindfulness could be an essential tool that athletes should pack in their bags for game day. But the work comes with caveats. Analyses have shown that mindfulness researchers tend to overreport positive findings. And for some people, studies suggest, focused breathing and other mindfulness exercises can bring up past trauma, causing distress, Minkler says. Having clinical psychologists on hand to work with athletes who have this reaction to mindfulness training is important.

No judgments

Acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, is another technique counselors are using to help athletes improve not only their performance but their overall mental health. The goal of ACT is to teach athletes to separate their competitor identity from their personal one.

ACT does not attempt to change negative thoughts, such as “I suck today,” but to acknowledge the thought as something completely independent of who or how talented the athlete is. By accepting the negative thought, rather than getting stuck in a downward spiral of trying to combat it with counterarguments, an athlete can bring her focus back to the race or game at hand.

For a triathlete, who can spend up to 17 hours swimming, biking and running in a race, letting go of the detrimental self-talk can be extremely important when a competitor moves in front, or when the race is long and an athlete wants to give up, says Eugene Koh Boon Yau, a psychiatrist at the University of Putra Malaysia in Seri Kembangan. In the last few years, Yau worked with three triathletes competing to represent Malaysia at international competitions. All three struggled with self-doubt.

Over six weeks, he walked each athlete through a mental training on mindfulness so each learned to notice and label their thoughts and emotions, especially negative ones, and then accept those thoughts without judgment. Then each athlete identified his values and what he wanted to be remembered for, should his career end the next day. Yau and each athlete then discussed how to use mindfulness and thought acceptance during a race to stay focused on performance without getting wrapped up in what competitors were doing.

The training “does help me with reducing anxiety and overthinking,” says triathlete Edwin Thiang, who worked with Yau. Thiang says he’s still surprised by how vital the training is, especially in high-stakes races. It calms him down and helps him stay focused.

The other athletes who worked with Yau agree. One triathlete said he found it easier to accept thoughts of self-doubt when a competitor overtook him. Before the mental training, the athlete would slow down in such situations, giving up hope of finishing high in the rankings. After the training, he identified his self-doubt as an emotion, not a reality. By shifting his attention back to the mechanics of either swimming, biking or running, he could keep the pace he set for himself during the race. Another of the triathletes reported that the training helped him stay committed to physical training, Yau and colleagues reported in the May 2021 Journal of Sport Psychology in Action.

Those results align with a study that pitted mindfulness and elements of ACT against some of the traditional, performance-focused psychological tools athletes have been taught for decades, such as visualization, relaxation (similar to what was used in Jha’s study) and positive self-talk. In that experiment, 18 women’s basketball players at a Division III university in New Jersey were divided into two groups. One worked through relaxation and stress management exercises developed by psychologist Richard Suinn and described in the 1986 book Seven Steps to Peak Performance. The other group worked through exercises for mindfulness and acceptance of thoughts described in the 2007 book The Psychology of Enhancing Human Performance: The Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) Approach by psychologists Frank Gardner and Zella Moore.

A month after the study ended, MAC-trained players had dips in anxiety, substance use, eating issues and overall psychological distress, along with gains in emotional regulation. Players trained in traditional psychological skills had less improvement in those areas, Princeton University psychologist Mike Gross and colleagues reported in 2018 in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

On the court, mindfulness paired with elements of ACT can quickly keep players moving and help them stay in the game, especially if they make a mistake, Gross says. “There’s less … of those mental gymnastics or the tug-of-war in the mind” that can mess up a player even more. In fact, the MAC-trained players, he says, were less likely to get extremely upset or sad and were better able to cope with changes and try creative approaches to tasks than the players trained with traditional sports psychology tools.

Drop in distress 

One month after training, the mindfulness-acceptance-commitment approach, or MAC, eased behavioral difficulties and emotional distress more than traditional psychological training, PST, among a group of female collegiate basketball players.

Influence of MAC versus PST on psychological distress in female college basketball players

Source: M. Gross et al/Intl. J. Sport Exerc. Psychol. 2018

Extending that idea further, Minkler argues that performance problems rarely have anything to do with technical skills. Mental hang-ups in training and competition are often related to interpersonal issues, like relationships with teammates, coaches or loved ones. Mindfulness and ACT can help athletes work through those issues to bring their focus back to their sport, he says.

Mertz, the Wisconsin quarterback, would agree. He said he began to realize during his mindfulness training that he was focused so intently on football, he was neglecting the other parts of his life. He learned to pay attention to what he needed to do for his mental health, whether it was focus a bit more on prepping for the season or just taking some time to have fun. His overall mental health improved as a result, he said.

Researchers using these techniques say they’ve seen similar off-the-field benefits for their student ­athletes, including improved focus on readings for class and better communication with friends and family. With those results in mind, Jha say she’d like to test how mindfulness and ACT training might work for Olympic teams.

She has, in fact, had several briefings with U.S. and Australian Olympic team representatives about her mindfulness training. Ideally, she says, she would train Olympic coaches to work with their athletes, and then track the competitors’ performance and psychological health and attention. That kind of study is even more relevant after last year’s very public experiences of athletes such as Biles and Osaka, she says.

“These people we see as pillars of excellence [are experiencing] extremely dysfunctional mental states,” Jha says. “How do we have the mental fitness match the physical excellence?” Studies on mindfulness and ACT hint that a match-up is achievable, and the training might benefit not only elite athletes but every one of us.

“Athletes at the elite level are aspirational,” Jha says. They show us that physical training is necessary for physical health, and they’ve reminded us more recently that the mind, like the body, “needs training to stay fit,” she says, “and we can train it.”

How you interact with a crowd may help you stick out from it, at least to artificial intelligence.

When fed information about a target individual’s mobile phone interactions, as well as their contacts’ interactions, AI can correctly pick the target out of more than 40,000 anonymous mobile phone service subscribers more than half the time, researchers report January 25 in Nature Communications. The findings suggest humans socialize in ways that could be used to pick them out of datasets that are supposedly anonymized.

It’s no surprise that people tend to remain within established social circles and that these regular interactions form a stable pattern over time, says Jaideep Srivastava, a computer scientist from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis who was not involved in the study. “But the fact that you can use that pattern to identify the individual, that part is surprising.”

According to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act, companies that collect information about people’s daily interactions can share or sell this data without users’ consent. The catch is that the data must be anonymized. Many organizations assume that they can meet this standard by giving users pseudonyms, says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a computational privacy researcher at Imperial College London. “Our results are showing that this is not true.”

de Montjoye and his colleagues hypothesized that people’s social behavior could be used to pick them out of datasets containing information on anonymous users’ interactions. To test their hypothesis, the researchers taught an artificial neural network — an AI that simulates the neural circuitry of a biological brain — to recognize patterns in users’ weekly social interactions.

For one test, the researchers trained the neural network with data from an unidentified mobile phone service that detailed 43,606 subscribers’ interactions over 14 weeks. This data included each interaction’s date, time, duration, type (call or text), the pseudonyms of the involved parties and who initiated the communication.

Each user’s interaction data were organized into web-shaped data structures consisting of nodes representing the user and their contacts. Strings threaded with interaction data connected the nodes. The AI was shown the interaction web of a known person and then set loose to search the anonymized data for the web that bore the closest resemblance.

The neural network linked just 14.7 percent of individuals to their anonymized selves when it was shown interaction webs containing information about a target’s phone interactions that occurred one week after the latest records in the anonymous dataset. But it identified 52.4 percent of people when given not just information about the target’s interactions but also those of their contacts. When the researchers provided the AI with the target and contacts’ interaction data collected 20 weeks after the anonymous dataset, the AI still correctly identified users 24.3 percent of the time, suggesting social behavior remains identifiable for long periods of time.

To see whether the AI could profile social behavior elsewhere, the researchers tested it on a dataset consisting of four weeks of close-proximity data from the mobile phones of 587 anonymous university students, collected by researchers in Copenhagen. This included interaction data consisting of students’ pseudonyms, encounter times and the strength of the received signal, which was indicative of proximity to other students. These metrics are often collected by COVID-19 contact tracing applications. Given a target and their contacts’ interaction data, the AI correctly identified students in the dataset 26.4 percent of the time.

The findings, the researchers note, probably don’t apply to the contact tracing protocols of Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification system, which protects users’ privacy by encrypting all Bluetooth metadata and banning the collection of location data.

de Montjoye says he hopes the research will help policy makers improve strategies to protect users’ identities. Data protection laws allow the sharing of anonymized data to support useful research, he says. “However, what’s essential for this to work is to make sure anonymization actually protects the privacy of individuals.”

For many of us, it’s the height of winter, with harsh weather and the pandemic keeping us inside. If you’re looking for a new way to pass the time, why not help science?

Researchers from a range of disciplines rely on the power of crowdsourcing to collect and analyze data. From transcribing weather logs dating back to the Victorian era to classifying African animals caught by camera traps, here are just a few ways to put your free time to good use.

Solar Jet Hunter

AIM: Build a database of solar jets

HOW TO HELP: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, has been monitoring the sun’s activity for more than a decade. Studying the sun’s outbursts, including the narrow jets of plasma that erupt from the surface, will help scientists better understand space weather and crack solar mysteries (SN: 12/15/21). But first, researchers need to find those jets. That’s where you and other armchair astronomers come in. Just go online, review sequences of SDO images, determine if solar jets are visible and document details about the events. In addition to helping scientists study the sun, the dataset could help create a computer program that could speed up future solar jet identifications.

Weather Rescue At Sea

AIM: Extend the climate record further back in time

HOW TO HELP: To put today’s climate change into perspective, scientists need a long-running record of global temperatures. That record is pretty good for the 20th century, but becomes spottier in the 19th century. To fill in the gaps, researchers are digitizing weather logbooks from ships that sailed in the mid-1800s. Anyone with an internet connection (and willing to read old-timey cursive handwriting) can help transcribe the wealth of data locked away in these books.

Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network

AIM: Improve the quality of precipitation data

HOW TO HELP: Because rain and snowfall are so variable over even short distances, the best way to accurately assess precipitation is to get as many on-the-ground measurements as possible. That’s the aim of this network of volunteers across the United States, Canada and the Bahamas who make daily precipitation measurements in their backyards. With a project-approved rain gauge and some online training, you can collect data that’s useful to everyone from farmers and city managers to the National Weather Service.

Frog Find

AIM: Monitor threatened frogs

HOW TO HELP: To keep tabs on frog species vulnerable to extinction, scientists in Australia have deployed acoustic monitoring devices in several of the country’s national parks. Researchers are seeking volunteers to listen in on hours of recordings. Just hop online, review a field guide of frog calls and start identifying amphibians in audio clips.

Prickly Pear Project Kenya

AIM: Assess the impacts of an invasive plant

HOW TO HELP: Invasive prickly pear cacti are spreading throughout East Africa. To learn how the plants may be altering the behavior of native wildlife, ecologists set up camera traps in Kenya. Citizen scientists can help document what’s present in more than 100,000 photos. After taking an online tutorial, you can catalog everything from the aardvarks to the zebras that you see.

Finding Rico

AIM: Identify genius dogs

HOW TO HELP: In 2004, researchers introduced the world to Rico, a border collie that recognized about 200 spoken words (SN: 6/9/04). Now, scientists are looking for more high-vocabulary dogs to study canine intelligence and language skills. If your pooch seems to know at least 20 objects by name, the team wants to hear from you.

When the famously enigmatic fishing cat hunts in deep water, it keeps calm and stays still. At least, most of the time.  

Asia’s Prionailurus viverrinus prowls swamps and marshes at night, searching for fish that could make for a nutritious meal. Depending on how deep the water is, the wild feline switches its hunting strategy to maximize its energy gain, scientists report December 24 in Mammalia.

The report offers “the first detailed look at how the fishing cat hunts,” says coauthor Tiasa Adhya, a Kolkata-based biologist. One of the foremost experts on the species, Adhya in 2010 cofounded The Fishing Cat Project — the longest-running fishing cat research and conservation project in the world.

Just over a decade ago, the fishing cat was among the least-studied wild felines in the world. To raise awareness among local communities and gather data on the medium-sized cat, the project launched the Know Thy Neighbor initiative in 2016. More than 20 people living near three prime fishing cat habitats on India’s east coast — including Chilika, the largest brackish water lagoon in Asia — were trained to install camera traps in their respective neighborhoods.

One of the volunteers, Subas Behera, is a fisherman who lives near Chilika in Bhusandapur village. Each evening, Behera would place a camera trap at a predetermined location and remove it the next morning to avoid theft or damage. He has, with great affection, named the female fishing cat recorded by his camera trap ‘Choti,’ meaning small, after her one short, back leg.

“A fishing cat thinks just like a fisherman,” Behera says. “We’re both constantly thinking about where the fish are.”

Divyajyoti Ganguly, a wildlife biology master’s student at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore and coauthor of the study, analyzed 197 videos collected by the camera traps from 2016 to 2018.

In deep water — where much of the cats’ bodies are submerged — the felines tend to wait patiently for the perfect opportunity to strike. They stayed still nearly 52 percent of the time and jumped after prey just 3.9 percent of the time, the videos showed.

This ‘sit and wait’ approach helps fishing cats conserve energy while also increasing the chances of successfully ambushing prey. The fishing cat “thinks hard before jumping in,” Adhya says. “It has to optimize its [energy] gain.”

When hunting in shallow water, fishing cats were more active, patrolling about 96 percent of the time and occasionally pawing the water to flush out fish, Ganguly and Adhya found.

The insight “expands and elaborates on our understanding of the fishing cat’s semiaquatic nature,” says wildlife ecologist Jim Sanderson, founder and director of the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation in Corrales, N.M., who was not involved in the study.

Jaguars in Brazil have been spotted fishing (SN: 10/13/21). But fishing cats have actual physical adaptations to a semiaquatic lifestyle. Their partially retractable claws let the felines hook and hold fish, while their double-layered coats help them stay dry, previous work has shown. The fishing cat is one of only two wild cats in the world with adaptations to be semiaquatic, the other being the flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) of southeast Asia.

Still, there is more to learn about fishing cats, including just how many there are in the world. To date, there have been no national counts in any of the 10 countries in which the feline is known to exist. The cats do face increasing threats from habitat loss and degradation, as well as human-animal conflict, leading the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to classify the species as vulnerable.

“Living off fish inevitably brings fishing cats into conflict with people doing the same thing,” Sanderson says. “That’s why fishing cat conservation means working with the local people.”

The James Webb Space Telescope has finally arrived at its new home. After a Christmas launch and a month of unfolding and assembling itself in space, the new space observatory reached its final destination, a spot known as L2, on January 24.

But the telescope can’t start doing science yet. There are still several months’ worth of tasks on Webb’s to-do list before the telescope is ready to peep at the earliest light in the universe or spy on exoplanets’ alien atmospheres (SN: 10/6/21).

“That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong,” says astronomer Scott Friedman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is managing this next phase of Webb’s journey. “Everything could go perfectly, and it would still take six months” from launch for the telescope’s science instruments to be ready for action, he says.

Here’s what to expect next.

Life at L2

L2, technically known as the second Earth-sun Lagrange point, is a spot about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction of Mars, where the sun and Earth’s gravity are of equal strength. Pairs of massive objects in space have five such Lagrange points, where the gravitational pushes and pulls from these celestial bodies essentially cancel each other out. That lets objects at Lagrange points stay put without much effort.

The telescope, also known as JWST, isn’t just sitting tight, though. It’s orbiting L2, even as L2 orbits the sun. That’s because L2 is not precisely stable, Friedman says. It’s like trying to stay balanced directly on top of a basketball. If you nudged an object sitting exactly at that point, it would be easy to make it wander off. Circling L2 as L2 circles the sun in a “halo orbit” is much more stable — it’s harder to fall off the basketball when in constant motion. But it takes some effort to stay there.

“JWST and other astronomical satellites, which are said to be at L2 but are really in halo orbits, need propulsion to maintain their positions,” Friedman says. “For JWST, we will execute what we call station keeping maneuvers every 21 days. We fire our thrusters to correct our position, thus maintaining our halo orbit.”

The amount of fuel needed to maintain Webb’s home in space will set the lifetime of the mission. Once the telescope runs out of fuel, the mission is over. Luckily, the spacecraft had a near-perfect launch and didn’t use much fuel in transit to L2. As a result, it might be able to last more than 10 years, team members say, longer than the original five- to 10-year estimate.

Webb has one more feature that helps it stay stable. The telescope’s gigantic kitelike sunshield, which protects the delicate instruments from the heat and light of the sun, Earth and the moon, could pick up momentum from the stream of charged particles that constantly flows from the sun, like a solar sail. If so, that could push Webb off course. To prevent this, the telescope has a flap that acts as a rudder, said Webb sunshield manager Jim Flynn of Northrup Grumman in a January 4 news conference.

Cooling down

Webb sees in infrared light, wavelengths longer than what the human eye can see. But humans do experience infrared radiation as heat. “We’re essentially looking at the universe in heat vision,” says astrophysicist Erin Smith of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a project scientist on Webb.

That means that the parts of the telescope that observe the sky have to be at about 40 kelvins (–233° Celsius), which nearly matches the cold of space. That way, Webb avoids emitting more heat than the distant sources in the universe that the telescope will be observing, preventing it from obscuring them from view.

Most of Webb has been cooling down ever since the telescope’s sunshield unfurled on January 4. The observatory’s five-layer sunshield blocks and deflects heat and light, letting the telescope’s mirrors and scientific instruments cool off from their temperature at launch. The sunshield layer closest to the sun will warm to about 85° Celsius, but the cold side will be about –233° Celsius, said Webb’s commissioning manager Keith Parrish in a January 4 webcast.

“You could boil water on the front side of us, and on the back side of us, you’re almost down to absolute zero,” Parrish said.

One of the instruments, MIRI, the Mid-Infrared Instrument, has extra coolant to bring it down to 6.7 kelvins (–266° Celsius) to enable it to see even dimmer and cooler objects than the rest of the telescope. For MIRI, “space isn’t cold enough,” Smith says.

Aligning the mirrors

Webb finished unfolding its 6.5-meter-wide golden mirror on January 8, turning the spacecraft into a true telescope. But it’s not done yet. That mirror, which collects and focuses light from the distant universe, is made up of 18 hexagonal segments. And each of those segments has to line up with a precision of about 10 or 20 nanometers so that the whole apparatus mimics a single, wide mirror.

Starting on January 12, 126 tiny motors on the back of the 18 segments started moving and reshaping them to make sure they all match up. Another six motors went to work on the secondary mirror, which is supported on a boom in front of the primary mirror.

This alignment process will take until at least April to finish. In part, that’s because the movements are happening while the mirror is cooling. The changing temperature changes the shape of the mirrors, so they can’t be put in their final alignment until after the telescope’s suite of scientific instruments are fully chilled.

Once the alignment is done, light from distant space will first bounce off the primary mirror, then the secondary mirror and finally reach the instruments that will analyze the cosmic signals.

Calibrating the science instruments

While the mirrors are aligning, Webb’s science instruments will turn on. Technically, this is when Webb will take its first pictures, says astronomer Klaus Pontoppidan, also of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “But they’re not going to be pretty,” Pontoppidan says. The telescope will first test its focus on a single bright star, bringing 18 separate bright dots into one by tilting the mirrors.

After a few final adjustments, the telescope will be “performing as we want it to and presenting beautiful images of the sky to all the instruments,” Friedman says. “Then they can start doing their work.”

These instruments include NIRCam, the primary near-infrared camera that will cover the range of wavelengths from 0.6 to 5 micrometers. NIRCam will be able to image the earliest stars and galaxies as they were when they formed at least 12 billion years ago, as well as young stars in the Milky Way. The camera will also be able to see objects in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of the solar system and is equipped with a coronagraph, which can block light from a star to reveal details of dimmer exoplanets orbiting it.

Next up is NIRSpec, the near-infrared spectrograph, which will cover the same range of light wavelengths as NIRCam. But instead of collecting light and turning it into an image, NIRSpec will split the light into a spectrum to figure out an object’s properties, such as temperature, mass and composition. The spectrograph is designed to observe 100 objects at the same time.

MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument, is kept the coldest to observe in the longest wavelengths, from 5 to 28 micrometers. MIRI has both a camera and a spectrograph that, like NIRCam and NIRSpec, will still be sensitive to distant galaxies and newborn stars, but it will also be able to spot planets, comets and asteroids.

And the fourth instrument, called the FGS/NIRISS, is a two-parter. FGS is a camera that will help the telescope point precisely. And NIRISS, which stands for near-infrared imager and slitless spectrograph, will be specifically used to detect and characterize exoplanets.

First science targets

It will take at least another five months after arriving at L2 to finish calibrating all of those science instruments, Pontoppidan says. When that’s all done, the Webb science team has a top secret plan for the first full color images to be released.

“These are images that are meant to demonstrate to the world that the observatory is working and ready for science,” Pontoppidan says. “Exactly what will be in that package, that’s a secret.”

Partly the secrecy is because there’s still some uncertainty in what the telescope will be able to look at when the time comes. If setting up the instruments takes longer than expected, Webb will be in a different part of its orbit and certain parts of the sky will be out of view for a while. The team doesn’t want to promise something specific and then be wrong, Pontoppidan says.

But also, “it’s meant to be a surprise,” he says. “We don’t want to spoil that surprise.”

Webb’s first science projects, however, are not under wraps. In the first five months of observations, Webb will begin a series of Early Release Science projects. These will use every feature of every instrument to look at a broad range of space targets, including everything from Jupiter to distant galaxies and from star formation to black holes and exoplanets.

Still, even the scientists are eager for the pretty pictures.

“I’m just very excited to get to see those first images, just because they will be spectacular,” Smith says. “As much as I love the science, it’s also fun to ooh and ahh.”   

Bacterial infections that don’t respond to treatment are a leading cause of death around the world.

In 2019, antimicrobial resistance caused an estimated 1.27 million deaths, researchers report January 19 in the Lancet. More people died from untreatable bacterial infections that year than from HIV or malaria.

Overall, bacterial antimicrobial resistance played a role in an estimated 4.95 million deaths globally, including the 1.27 million directly caused by resistant infections, the study found. The estimates are based on an analysis of hospital, surveillance and other sources of data covering 204 countries and territories by an international group of researchers called the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators.

Resistance to two classes of antibiotics, beta-lactams (which include penicillin) and fluoroquinolones, was behind more than 70 percent of resistance-caused deaths. Those drugs are the first-line options for many bacterial infections (SN: 4/30/14).

Among the bacteria responsible for fatal drug-resistant infections, the top three were Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, the researchers found. These pathogens can cause dangerous infections in health care settings in people with weakened immune systems.

Worldwide, 64 deaths per 100,000 people were associated with treatment-resistant bacterial infections and 16.4 deaths per 100,000 people were caused by such infections, the group found. Notably, western sub-Saharan Africa had the highest mortality rates: 114.8 deaths per 100,000 people were associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance and 27.3 deaths per 100,000 people were due to resistance.

Overall, the mortality rate from bacterial antimicrobial resistance was higher in places with fewer health care resources. This illustrates that solutions need to consider regional differences, the research group says. Limits on antibiotic use to deter resistance is key in many places. But in western sub-Saharan Africa, for example, increasing access to antibiotics may lessen the mortality burden from resistance, since second-line antibiotics needed after first-line drugs fail aren’t readily available.

If you hate having your bubble burst, you’ll love these “everlasting” bubbles.

While soap bubbles are known for their fragile constitutions, the new bubbles can stick around for more than a year before they pop, scientists report January 18 in Physical Review Fluids.

Instead of soap and water, the bubbles are made with water, microparticles of plastic and a clear, viscous liquid called glycerol. That trio of ingredients staves off factors that normally hasten a bubble’s death.

In a standard soap bubble, gravity pulls liquid to the bottom of the bubble, leaving a thin film on the top that can easily rupture (SN: 1/12/17). Evaporation of the liquid film also saps bubbles’ stamina. In the everlasting bubbles, plastic particles cling to the water, maintaining the film’s thickness. Meanwhile, glycerol absorbs moisture from the air, counteracting evaporation.

“When we discovered that the bubble didn’t rupture after days we were really astonished,” says physicist Michael Baudoin of Université de Lille in France. So he and colleagues waited to see how long the bubbles would last. And waited, and waited. One bubble persisted 465 days before it burst, making it the longest-lived bubble ever produced under normal atmospheric conditions. That bubble turned slightly green before its demise, a potential hint at what caused it to finally pop. Microbes probably took up residence, weakening the bubble’s structure, the team suspects.

On January 15, an underwater volcano in the island nation of Tonga erupted with the explosive force of a nuclear bomb, and it may not be done just yet.

The eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano in the South Pacific launched a towering, mushroom-shaped cloud of ash and dust at least 20 kilometers into the atmosphere — and possibly as high as 39 kilometers by one estimate. The blast sent shock waves that are still rippling through the atmosphere a week later.

Images show ash caked on Tonga islands, coating buildings, clinging to crops and probably contaminating water supplies. The power of the explosion also triggered a rare volcanic tsunami that raced across the ocean, inundating the densely populated island of Tongatapu 65 kilometers away from the eruption, sending residents fleeing to higher ground. At least three people have died due to the eruption and tsunami.

The volcano may now return to a period of dormancy after releasing its fury. But it also might not. Researchers who have studied Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai’s eruptive history, recorded in layers of hardened ash and fragments of volcanic pumice, say that this volcano has tended to erupt explosively every thousand years or so — and not just once, but in multiple pulses.

Whether that will happen this time, and if so, when, is very difficult to say at this point, says Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has been working with colleagues to gather information on the volcano to help with relief efforts and predict what might come next.

“Time will tell, and the next few days may tell us a lot,” he says.

Tonga has no active seismometers — and communications from the island nation remain largely incapacitated by ashfall and flooding. But with the help of satellite images, Cronin and others are keeping close watch over the region, hunting for changes to the volcano’s shape or height or other indicators that may signal that magma might be on the move again.

For now, the volcano’s violent past may offer some clues to its future. Even before the recent eruption, most of the volcano, including the caldera, or central crater, was submerged; now it’s sunk even farther. But at the crater’s fringe lie two small, uninhabited islands — Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai. They once rose a hundred meters or so above the water. That’s where, after a small 2014–2015 eruption, a new volcanic cone appeared, essentially bridging the two islands. That provided a landing spot for Cronin and his colleagues, who journeyed there in 2015 and discovered Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai‘s hidden history.

Cronin talked with Science News about the recent eruption, why its tsunami was so unusual and his and his colleagues’ efforts to piece together the volcano’s history. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

SN: What’s happening in the eruption’s aftermath? Satellite images show a cloud of sulfur dioxide from the volcano over the Pacific.

Cronin: Yes, the plume is stretched out really long now to the northwest. It’s quite high in the atmosphere, over 25 kilometers in elevation. So it will stay there for a little while, not long enough to make a long-term climate impact but certainly enough to generate some acid rain [in the region].

SN: What are some of the ashfall hazards?

Cronin: [Satellite photos suggest many Tonga] islands are gray and covered in ash. It’s very hard to tell from the air, but it looks in the range of a few centimeters thick. That means the risk of buildings collapsing is low. The biggest problem is crops, because the ash sticks to the plants and they may die.

A secondary problem is drinking water: The ash has salts in it that dissolve in water and turn it acidic. Around 50 percent of Tongans have their water from roof-fed rainwater supplies. The taste and odor are unpleasant, and it could cause stomach upsets, but it’s not poisonous in that it doesn’t have high concentrations of heavy metals.

SN: A lot of the land you mapped in 2015 is now submerged. What’s it like to know that this place is just gone?

Cronin: It’s a bit sad. It’s remarkable how changeable these volcanic landscapes are. This one hasn’t maybe sunk in yet because I’ve been so busy in the aftermath of it. We’re still looking at all of the photos coming through of the changes. It seems that the whole top of the volcano actually just dropped vertically, by at least 10 meters; just the tips of [Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai] islands are now above sea level.

SN: Was there a large magma chamber under the caldera that emptied and collapsed, dropping everything down?

Cronin: That would be my interpretation. Some other volcanologists are saying there’s no evidence yet, and that the [observed volume of erupted magma] was quite small. But the explosion originated maybe 250 meters below sea level. You have material exploding upward, but also a lot that probably went sideways.

SN: When did you realize the volcano might be bigger and more explosive than suggested by the 2014-2015 eruption?

Cronin:  Well, we knew that there was a bigger volcano [than just the cone] there, we just didn’t know what the shape of it was. We took with us a multibeam seafloor mapping system, thinking we’d try to map the submarine shape of the new cone.

As we were driving [offshore] with the multibeam, we started seeing a whole lot of other little submarine volcanic cones. It was like, “Wow, look at that!” And then we realized that they were all within a deep basin, about 150 meters deep. The little cones were actually all inside one large submerged caldera, about 6 kilometers across.

[Meanwhile] I spent a lot of time looking at a series of [volcanic] deposits on Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai. It was clear they were produced by much more violent processes [than what had formed the new cone. These deposits] were ignimbrite: They were hot, welded together and contained charcoal, which we used to get the year of the event: 1100. Then, below a layer of soil, there was another series of very similar deposits [dating to about the year 200].  

SN: So basically you realized that every thousand years or so, there was a series of powerful eruptions?

Cronin: Yes. And probably there were two or three more sets of deposits underneath that array.

SN: Ocean island volcanoes like Kilauea aren’t usually very explosive (SN: 5/16/18); their basalt magma tends to be less thick and gassy. So what happened here?

Cronin: We don’t know the composition of this eruption, because we don’t have any sample material yet. But everything else we’ve sampled from this volcano is actually quite boring — it’s all basalt, more or less the same compositions during the little magma leaks as during the major explosive events.

The main difference in the major explosive events is that the magma maybe had a little bit more residence time [within the magma chamber], allowing it to accumulate more gas. [As magma rises toward the surface and the pressure decreases, gases in it expand, giving magma its potentially explosive power.]

When there’s plenty of water around and the gassy magma blasts quickly into the ocean, you can also have some explosive blasts. You’ve got the interaction of fragmenting hot magma with cold seawater, and you flash the seawater into steam, adding a lot of energy to the explosion. We call that a phreatomagmatic eruption.

SN: It’s pretty unusual for a volcano to produce a tsunami, too, isn’t it?

Cronin: Yes, there’s been a lot of discussion about how the tsunami was so energetic. It’s hard to create enough energy with volcanoes [because they don’t tend to be big enough and shift enough water to create a powerful tsunami, unlike earthquakes].

Even if you consider the whole 6-kilometer diameter of the underwater crater, and the whole thing dropping by 10 or even 100 meters, that’s still a very small area. It’s a relatively small volume of water that gets displaced to generate a tsunami.

I’ve been thinking about this the last few days, to try to explain the energy transfer from volcano to waves. During an explosive eruption, you have processes that blast material upward, producing the main eruption column. But when we are close to sea level, or maybe even submarine, you also end up generating very dense eruption columns underwater that can collapse and travel out laterally.

So you can end up with these laterally directed currents made up of a mix of hot rock particles, air and water droplets flowing down the flanks of the volcano. And we’ll never see them because they’re underneath the waves. [These flows] are potentially a mechanism for a lot more extra volume, and for a lot of lateral energy, that could create tsunami events. They’re very unusual tsunamis in that respect.

SN: The volcano had a few smaller eruptions on December 30 and January 13. Were you bracing for more?

Cronin: I was watching it like a hawk, for sure. After the 30th of December event, we scrambled around to get images to try and figure out what was happening.

The 2014–2015 eruption had some small surges at the [volcano’s] base, some jets, spectacular to look at but mainly locally important. The December 30 and January 13 events were more vertical, quite decent plumes, a step up in terms of explosive energy, and obviously the pressure was rising, and by the 15th, that pent-up, gas-rich magma was ready to erupt.

SN: So the big question: What can we expect next?

Cronin: We don’t have a lot to go on. There are no seismographs anywhere near this volcano, or in Tonga, which is a real problem. All the observations up to now were taken from a boat, or these aerial images. It’s hard to do any prediction.

So [volcanologists] have come up with three possible scenarios, small, medium and large, based on the geologic background. The large scenario is that there’s this pent-up, gas-charged magma that has erupted, and it caused a very large explosion, and has changed the shape of the upper part of the volcano. So, if new magma rapidly arrives to take its place and comes into that really unstable edifice, it may start to create further explosive eruptions, but also potential flank collapses [possibly causing more tsunamis].

The medium scenario is that there’s new magma, but [any] new cracks in the volcano’s flanks mean the magma could degas [becoming less likely to explode] before it erupts. There will still be magma-water interaction, though, and chances of a small eruption plume and maybe a small tsunami.

The small scenario is that there’s a little bit of residual activity, some small water-magma events, and then everything quiets down. Right now, we aren’t seeing a great deal of disturbance or discoloration in the water from aerial images, which seems to indicate that things are quieting down.

Time will tell now, and we’ll be watching.

A brilliant blast from a galaxy 2 billion light-years away is the brightest cosmic “Cow” found yet. It’s the fifth known object in this new class of exploding stars and their long-glowing remnants, and it’s giving astronomers even more hints of what powers these mysterious blasts.

These Cow-like events, named for the first such object discovered in 2018 — which had the unique identifier name of AT2018cow — are a subclass of supernova explosions, making up only 0.1 percent of such cosmic blasts (SN: 6/21/19). They brighten quickly, glow brilliantly in ultraviolet and blue light and continue to show up for months in higher-energy X-rays and lower-energy radio waves.

X-rays from the newest discovery, dubbed AT2020mrf, glowed 20 times as bright as the original Cow a month after the blast, Caltech astronomer Yuhan Yao reported January 10 at a virtual news conference held by the American Astronomical Society. And even one year after this new object’s discovery, its X-rays were 200 times as bright as those from the original Cow. Yao and colleagues also reported the results in a paper submitted December 1 at arXiv.org.

Unraveling all that took a bit of time. The Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego, Calif., initially noted a bright new burst of light June 12, 2020, but astronomers didn’t realize what it was at the time.

Then in April 2021, researchers with the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) space telescope, which studies X-ray light, alerted Yao and her colleagues to an interesting signal in SRG data from July 21–24, 2020, at the same spot in the sky. “I almost immediately realized that this might be another Cow-like event,” says Yao. The astronomers sprang to action and looked at that location with multiple other observatories in different kinds of light.

Bright spot

The brightest Cow-like supernova blast yet seen, AT2020mrf, was not visible (empty circle) in January 2020 in X-rays captured by the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma space telescope. But in July, it was hard to miss.

X-ray evidence of the newfound cosmic ‘Cow’

One of those observatories was the space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope. In June 2021, a year after the original supernova blast, it captured X-rays from the same location. The source’s signal “was 10 times brighter than what I expected,” says Yao, and 200 times as bright as the original Cow was a year post-explosion.

Even more exciting was that the strengths of both the Chandra X-ray detection and the original SRG X-ray observations also changed within hours to days. That flaring characteristic, it turns out, can tell astronomers a lot.

“X-rays give us information of what’s happening at the heart of these events,” says MIT astrophysicist DJ Pasham, who has studied the original Cow but was not part of this new study. “The duration of the flare gives you a sense of how compact or how big the object is.”  

A compact object like an actively eating black hole or a rapidly spinning and highly magnetic neutron star would create the strong and variable X-ray signals Yao’s team saw, she says. These were the two most probable leftover remnants of the original cosmic Cow as well, but the AT2020mrf observations provide even greater certainty (SN: 12/13/21).

Further observations and catching these objects earlier in the act with multiple types of light will help researchers learn more about this new class of supernovas and what type of star eventually explodes as a Cow.

Extremes in rainfall — whether intense drought or flash floods — can catastrophically slow the global economy, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Nature. And those impacts are most felt by wealthy, industrialized nations, the researchers found.

A global analysis showed that episodes of intense drought led to the biggest shocks to economic productivity. But days with intense deluges — such as occurred in July 2021 in Europe — also produced strong shocks to the economic system (SN: 8/23/21). Most surprising, though, was that agricultural economies appeared to be relatively resilient against these types of shocks, says Maximilian Kotz, an environmental economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Instead, two other business sectors — manufacturing and services — were the most hard-hit.

As a result, the nations most affected by rainfall extremes weren’t those that tended to be poorer, with agriculture-dependent societies, but the wealthiest nations, whose economies are tied more heavily to manufacturing and services, such as banking, health care and entertainment.

It’s well established that rising temperatures can take a toll on economic productivity, for example by contributing to days lost at work or doctors’ visits (SN: 11/28/18). Extreme heat also has clear impacts on human behavior (SN: 8/18/21). But what effect climate change–caused shifts in rainfall might have on the global economy hasn’t been so straightforward.

That’s in part because previous studies looking at a possible connection between rainfall and productivity have focused on changes in yearly precipitation, a timeframe that “is just too coarse to really describe what’s actually happening [in] the economy,” Kotz says. Such studies showed that more rain in a given year was basically beneficial, which makes sense in that having more water available is good for agriculture and other human activities, he adds. “But these findings were mainly focused on agriculturally dependent economies and poorer economies.”

In the new study, Kotz and his colleagues looked at three timescales — annual, monthly and daily rainfall — and examined what happened to economic output for time periods in which the rainfall deviated from average historical values. In particular, Kotz says, they introduced two new measures not considered in previous studies: the amount of rainy days that a region gets in a year and extreme daily rainfall. The team then examined these factors across 1,554 regions around the world — which included many subregions within 77 countries — from 1979 to 2019.

The disparity over which regions are hit hardest is “at odds with the conventional wisdom” — and with some previous studies — that agriculture is vulnerable to extreme rainfall, writes Xin-Zhong Liang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, in a commentary in the same issue of Nature. Researchers may need to incorporate other factors in future assessments, such as growth stages of crops, land drainage or irrigation, in order to really understand how these extremes affect agriculture, Liang writes.

“That was definitely surprising for us as well,” Kotz says. Although the study doesn’t specifically try to answer why manufacturing and services were so affected, it makes intuitive sense, he says. Flooding, for example, can damage infrastructure and disrupt transportation, effects that can then propagate along supply chains. “It’s feasible that these things might be most important in manufacturing, where infrastructure is very important, or in the services sectors, where the human experience is very much dictated by these daily aspects of weather and rainfall.”

Including daily and monthly rainfall extremes in this type of analysis was “an important innovation” because it revealed new economic vulnerabilities, says Tamma Carleton, an environmental economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new work. However, Carleton says, “the findings in the paper are not yet conclusive on who is most vulnerable and why, and instead raise many important questions for future research to unpack.”

Extreme rainfall events, including both drought and deluge, will occur more frequently as global temperatures rise, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in August (SN: 8/9/21). The study’s findings, Kotz says, offer yet another stark warning to the industrialized, wealthy world: Human-caused climate change will have “large economic consequences.”

Young children are always watching. That includes when people swap spit through actions like sharing food — helping the tots work out who is in close relationships with one another, a study suggests.

Typically, people are more likely to share things that can lead to an exchange of saliva, such as kisses or an ice cream cone, with family members or close friends than with an acquaintance or colleague. As a result, intimate actions that share saliva can be markers of a “thick relationship,” or people who have enduring attachments to each other, such as parents, siblings, extended family or best friends, says Ashley Thomas, a developmental psychologist at MIT.

Young children often pick up on social cues from the people around them (SN: 1/30/14). So to see if kids, including babies and toddlers, might use saliva sharing as a cue for intimate bonds, Thomas and colleagues turned to experiments of people engaging with puppets.

When shown a puppet seemingly crying in a video, children as young as about 8 months old were more likely to look at an adult who had previously shared saliva with the puppet — either directly or by sharing food — rather than another adult who hadn’t, the team reports in the Jan. 21 Science.

Researchers, of course, can’t know exactly what babies are thinking. But tracking where they look is one way to get a hint. The idea is not that young children might be expecting an adult to comfort the puppet, Thomas says. Instead, the researchers expected that the young children would look toward the person that they expect to move first when the puppet expresses distress, and that would be the person who has a closer relationship with the toy, she says.

For some of the experiments, the team showed 8- to 10-month-old babies or 16- to 18-month-old toddlers videos of a woman sharing an orange slice with a puppet. A second video depicted another woman and the puppet playing with a ball. During a final video that showed the puppet seemingly crying while seated between the two women, the kids’ eyes were drawn to the woman who had shared the orange slice — a sign the tots may have been expecting her to react.

The team saw similar results when one woman interacted with two puppets. The woman stuck her finger in her mouth and then one puppet’s mouth to share her saliva. For the other, she touched only her forehead and then the puppet’s forehead. Infants and toddlers spent more time looking at the puppet that had swapped saliva after the woman showed distress.

Older children ages 5 to 7 years also picked up on saliva sharing as a mark of close relationships. Kids in that age group predicted that people sharing utensils or bites of food might be family while those sharing toys or divvying up food could be either friends or family.

It’s unclear how the findings relate to the daily lives of young children. Future experiments could switch out actresses in the study for family members or teachers to better understand the role saliva may play in how infants and toddlers distinguish different types of relationships. Other cues, such as hugging, may also play a role, Thomas says.

The study also focused only on children living in the United States, and didn’t compare across cultures. Still, the findings are exciting, says Darby Saxbe, a clinical developmental psychologist and co-director of the University of Southern California Center for the Changing Family in Los Angeles. It would be interesting, she says, to figure out whether kids from groups of people that have different hygiene or eating traditions react differently in the same situations.

Some of the world’s largest whales feed by lunging through the water with mouths wide open. Scientists have long wondered how the animals withstand the tremendous pressure of water rushing into their throats without choking and drowning.

A plug made of muscle and fat found at the back of fin whales’ mouths might offer a clue. The plug blocks the channel between a fin whale’s mouth and its pharynx, the entrance to the respiratory and digestive tracts. The plug appears to prevent water from rushing into the whale’s lungs and stomach while it lunges and could explain how all lunge-feeding whale eat without choking, researchers report January 20 in Current Biology.

“Think of [the plug] as a trapdoor,” says Kelsey Gil, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “It’s always closed unless muscular activity pulls it out of the way.”

Gil and her team identified the plug after examining the pharynx of 19 fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) recovered from an Icelandic whaling station. Because fin whales are prodigious eaters and can weigh up to 100 metric tons, the size of a midsized passenger plane, it was easier to work with just the pharynx (SN: 11/3/21).

“Even then we had to use a forklift to move the pharynx to the lab. It can weigh a few hundred pounds,” says Gil.

Once the samples were in the lab, she and her team manipulated different structures in the pharynx to see how they could move and looked at which direction muscle fibers ran within the whales’ throat to understand how the muscles behave when they contract.

When a whale gulps water, the pressure leads to the plug creating a tight seal over the whale’s pharynx. Then, with a mouth full of water and prey, a fin whale pushes the water out through its baleen plates before it swallows. The swallow reflex probably activates the muscle that pulls the plug up to the top of its throat, blocking the upper airways and letting prey slide into its digestive tract. The plug, which appears to be unique among mammals, may explain how other lunge-feeders eat without choking on water, the scientists say.

“The discovery of the ‘oral plug’ answers a long-standing question about how whales can simultaneously protect their respiratory tract while opening their mouths wide to engulf prey-laden water,” says Sarah Fortune, an expert in large whales at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who was not involved in the study. It also helps us better understand the adaptations that permitted once terrestrial mammals to evolve back into sea-dwelling creatures, she says.