The moon’s origin story does not add up. Most scientists think that the moon formed in the earliest days of the solar system, around 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia whacked into the young Earth. The collision sent debris from both worlds hurling into orbit, where the rubble eventually mingled and combined to form the moon.

If that happened, scientists expect that Theia’s contribution would give the moon a different composition from Earth’s. Yet studies of lunar rocks show that Earth and its moon are compositionally identical. That fact throws a wrench into the planet-on-planet impact narrative.
Researchers have been exploring other scenarios. Maybe the Theia impact never happened (there’s no direct evidence that the budding planet ever existed). Instead of a single colossal collision, scientists have proposed that a string of impacts created miniature moons largely from terrestrial material. Those mini moons merged over time to form one big moon.

“Multiple impacts just make more sense,” says planetary scientist Raluca Rufu of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. “You don’t need this one special impactor to form the moon.”

But Theia shouldn’t be left on the cutting room floor just yet. Earth and Theia were built largely from the same kind of material, new research suggests, and so had similar compositions. There is no sign of “other” material on the moon, this perspective holds, because nothing about Theia was different.

“I’m absolutely on the fence between these two opposing ideas,” says UCLA cosmochemist Edward Young. Determining which story is correct is going to take more research. But the answer will offer profound insights into the evolution of the early solar system, Young says.
The moon is an oddball. Most of the solar system’s moons are way out among the gas giant planets. The only other terrestrial planet with orbiting satellites is Mars. Its moons, Phobos and Deimos, are small, and the prevailing explanation says they were probably asteroids captured by the Red Planet’s gravity. Earth’s moon is too big for that scenario. If the moon had come in from elsewhere, asteroid-like, it would probably have crashed into Earth or pulled off into space. An alternate explanation dating from the 1800s suggested that moon-forming material flew off of a fast-spinning young Earth like children tossed from an out-of-control merry-go-round. That idea fell out of favor, though, when scientists calculated that the spin speeds required were impossibly fast.
In the mid-1970s, planetary scientists proposed the giant-impact hypothesis and the mysterious planet-sized impactor (named Theia in 2000 for the Greek deity who was mother of the moon goddess Selene). The notion made sense given that the early solar system was like a game of cosmic billiards, with giant space rocks frequently colliding.

A 2001 study of lunar rocks collected during the Apollo missions cast doubt on the giant-impact hypothesis. The research showed that the Earth and moon had surprising similarities. To determine a rock’s origin, scientists measure the relative abundance of oxygen isotopes, which act something like finger-prints at a crime scene. Rocks from Earth and its moon, the scientists found, had seemingly identical mixes of oxygen isotopes. That didn’t make sense if much of the moon’s material came from Theia, not Earth. Using impact simulations, Rufu and colleagues recently estimated that the chance of a Theia collision yielding an Earthlike lunar composition is very slim.

Studies of other elements in Apollo rocks, such as titanium and zirconium, also suggest that the Earth and moon originated from the same material. Young and colleagues recently repeated the oxygen isotope measurements with the latest techniques, hunting for even the slightest difference between Earth and the moon. In January 2016, the team published the results in Science. “We measured the oxygen to the highest precision available,” Young says, “and, gosh, the Earth and moon still look identical.”
Some scientists have built simulations of a giant Theia impact that fashion a moon made mostly from terrestrial material. But the scenarios struggle to match the modern positions and movements of the Earth-moon system.

It’s time to think outside the giant-impact box, some scientists argue. Not one but many impacts contributed to the moon’s formation, Rufu and colleagues proposed January 9 in Nature Geoscience. The moon, they say, has an Earthlike composition because most of the material flung into orbit from these impacts came from Earth.

Mini-moon merger
The multi-impact hypothesis was first put forward in 1989, though scientists at the time didn’t have the computer power to run the simulations that could support it. Rufu and colleagues recently revisited the proposal with computer simulations of multiple impactors, each about a hundredth to a tenth of Earth’s mass, smacking into the early Earth.

Any impactors that were direct hits would have transferred lots of energy into the Earth, excavating terrestrial material into space. Debris from each impact combined over centuries to form a small moon, the simulations show. As more impacts rocked Earth over tens of millions of years, more moons formed. Gravity pulled the moons together, combining them. Over roughly 100 million years, according to this scenario, around 20 mini moons ultimately merged to form one mighty moon (SN Online: 1/9/17).
The multimoon explanation yields the right lunar mix in simulations roughly 20 percent of the time, better than the 1 to 2 percent for the giant-impact hypothesis, the researchers note. “The biggest takeaway is that you cannot explain everything with one shot,” Rufu says.

Planetary scientist Robin Canup finds the scenario convincing. “To me, this appears to be a real contender alongside the one big impactor hypothesis,” says Canup, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Don’t discount Theia
But the Theia hypothesis has recently found fresh support. The odds of Theia resembling Earth’s composition enough to yield an Earthlike moon may be a lot higher than originally thought, new chemical analyses suggest. Most of the material that makes up Earth came from the same source as a type of meteorite called enstatite chondrites, planetary scientist Nicolas Dauphas of the University of Chicago reported January 26 in Nature.

Just as with oxygen, the isotopic mix of various other elements in Earth’s rocks serves as a fingerprint of the rocks’ origins. Some of these elements are iron-lovers, such as ruthenium, which quickly sink toward Earth’s iron-rich core (SN: 8/6/16, p. 22). Any ruthenium found close to Earth’s surface, in the mantle, probably arrived late in Earth’s development. Iron-indifferent elements like calcium and titanium don’t sink to the core; they stay in the mantle. Their isotopes record what went into Earth’s assembly over a much longer period of time. By looking at the iron-lovers and iron-indifferent elements together, Dauphas created a timeline of what types of space rocks added to Earth’s mass and when.
A mix of different rocks, including some resembling enstatite chondrite meteorites, supplied the first 60 percent of Earth’s mass, Dauphas says. The remaining balance came almost exclusively from the meteorites’ precursors. In total, around three-quarters of Earth’s mass came from the same material as enstatite chondrites, Dauphas estimates. If Theia formed at around the same distance from the sun as Earth, then it primarily formed from the same material, and consequently had a similar isotopic composition. So if the moon formed largely from Theia, it makes sense that lunar rocks would have a similar composition to Earth, too.
“Most of the problem is solved, in my opinion, if you admit that the great impactor’s material was no different than that of the [early] Earth,” says cosmochemist Marc Javoy at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris. “It’s the simplest hypothesis” and would mean that the material gobbled up by budding planets in the inner solar system was fairly uniform in composition, offering insight into the arrangement of material that built the solar system.

The notion that Earth is made from the same material as enstatite chondrites “doesn’t make many people happy,” says geochemist Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. The isotopes in Earth’s mantle and the meteorites may match, but the relative abundance of the elements themselves do not, Carlson wrote in a commentary in the Jan. 26 Nature. An additional step in the process is needed to explain this compositional mismatch, he says, such as some of the element silicon getting stashed away in Earth’s core.

“What we have now are a lot of new ideas, and now we need to test them,” says Sarah Stewart, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Davis.

One recently proposed test for the moon’s formation is based on temperature, though it seems to be consistent with both origin stories. A new study comparing the moon’s chemistry with glass forged by a nuclear blast suggests that temperatures during or just after the moon’s inception reached a sizzling 1400° Celsius. That means any plausible moon-forming scenario must involve such high temperatures, researchers reported February 8 in Science Advances.
High heat causes rocks to leach light isotopes of zinc. The green-tinged glass forged in the heat of the 1945 Trinity nuclear test in New Mexico lack light isotopes of zinc, says study coauthor and geologist James Day of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. The same goes for lunar rocks. Such high temperatures during or just after the moon’s formation fit with the giant-impact hypothesis, he says. But Rufu calculates that her multi-impact hypothesis also yields high enough temperatures.
So maybe temperature can’t resolve the debate, but probing the composition of Earth and the moon’s deep interiors could prove the mini-moon explanation right, says Rufu. Without a single giant collision, the interiors of the two worlds may not have been well mixed, she predicts. Dauphas says that measuring the compositions of other planets could lend credence to his Earthlike Theia proposal. Mercury and Venus would also have formed largely from the same kind of material as Earth and therefore also have Earthlike compositions, he says. Future studies of the solar system’s inhabitants could confirm or rule out these predictions, but that will require a new chapter of exploration.

WASHINGTON — A second cancer later in life is common for childhood cancer survivors, and scientists now have a sense of the role genes play when this happens. A project that mined the genetic data of a group of survivors finds that 11.5 percent carry mutations that increase the risk of a subsequent cancer.

“We’ve always known that among survivors, a certain population will experience adverse outcomes directly related to therapy,” says epidemiologist and team member Leslie Robison of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. The project sought “to find out what contribution genetics may play.” The team presented their work at the American Association of Cancer Research meeting April 3.
“This is a nice first step,” says David Malkin, a pediatric oncologist at the University of Toronto. “The results validate the thoughts of those of us who believe there is a genetic risk that increases the risk of second malignancies.”

Five-year survival rates for kids with cancer have grown to more than 80 percent. But “there are long-term consequences for having been diagnosed and treated for cancer as a child,” notes Robison. Some survivors develop a later, second cancer due to the radiation or chemotherapy that treated the first cancer (SN: 3/10/07, p. 157).

The researchers examined 3,007 survivors of pediatric cancer who routinely undergo medical evaluation at St. Jude. About a third had leukemia as children. By age 45, 29 percent of this group had developed new tumors, often in the skin, breast or thyroid.

The team cataloged each survivor’s DNA, and looked closely at 156 genes known as cancer predisposition genes. Of the survivors, 11.5 percent carried a problematic mutation in one of the 156 genes. Some genes on the list convey a higher risk than others, so the team looked further at a subset of 60 genes in which only one mutated copy in each cell is enough to cause disease. These 60 genes also have high penetrance, meaning that a mutated copy is highly likely to lead to a cancer. Nearly 6 percent of the survivors had a problematic mutation in one of these 60 genes.

The research team also separated the survivors based on whether or not they had received radiation therapy as children. Close to 17 percent of survivors not exposed to radiation therapy had a problematic mutation in the subset of 60 genes. These survivors had an increased risk for any second cancer. Those with both a mutation in one of the 60 genes and radiation in their treatment history had a higher risk for specific kinds of second cancers: breast, thyroid or sarcomas, tumors in connective tissues.
Based on the new estimates of genetic risk, the team suggests that survivors not given radiation therapy undergo genetic counseling if a second cancer develops. Counseling is also recommended “for survivors who develop a secondary breast cancer, thyroid cancer or sarcoma in a site that received prior radiation therapy,” says St. Jude epidemiologist and project team member Carmen Wilson. Counseling can provide guidance on health practices going forward, reproductive choices and the implications for immediate family members who may have inherited the mutation, notes Robison.

The extensive amount of medical and genomic information collected for the survivors could help with cancer prevention efforts in the future, Robison says. The team would like to create prediction models that consider treatment, genetics and other clinical information, in order to place survivors into different risk groups. “It’s eventually going to have clear implications for how these patients are clinically managed, and how we either prevent or ameliorate the adverse effects,” Robison says.

Malkin notes that not only “what you got for treatment, but when you got it” is another factor influencing a survivor’s risk profile for second cancers, as treatments and doses have changed over time. He also thinks the percentage of survivors at risk reported by Robison’s team is lower than expected. “Expanding the pool of genes to look at will be very informative,” he says.

A new device the size of a coffee mug can generate drinkable water from desert air using nothing but sunlight.

With this kind of device, “you can harvest the equivalent of a Coke can’s worth of water in an hour,” says cocreator Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “That’s about how much water a person needs to survive in the desert.”

Though that may not sound like much, its designers say the current device is just a prototype. But the technology could be scaled up to supply fresh water to some of the most parched and remote regions of the globe, such as the Middle East and North Africa, they say.
Previous attempts at low-energy water collection struggled to function below 50 percent relative humidity (roughly the average afternoon humidity of Augusta, Ga.). Thanks to a special material, the new device pulled water from air with as low as 20 percent relative humidity, Yaghi and colleagues report online April 13 in Science. That’s like conjuring water in Las Vegas, where the average afternoon relative humidity is 21 percent.

Drinking water supplies can’t keep up with the rising demands of a growing human population, and shifts in rainfall caused by climate change are expected to exacerbate the problem. Already, two-thirds of the world’s population is experiencing water shortages (SN: 8/20/16, p. 22). One largely untapped water source is the atmosphere, which contains more than 5 billion Olympic-sized pools’ worth of moisture in the form of vapor and droplets.

Getting that moisture out is easy when the air is saturated with water. But humid regions aren’t where the water-shortage problem is, and drawing water from the drier air in parched areas is a greater challenge. Spongy materials such as silica gels can extract moisture from the air even at low relative humidity. Those materials, however, either amass water too slowly or require lots of energy to extract the collected water from the material.

The new device uses a material that avoids both problems. MIT mechanical engineer Evelyn Wang, Yaghi and colleagues repurposed an existing material composed of electrically charged metal atoms linked by organic molecules. This metal-organic framework, christened MOF-801, creates a network of microscopic, spongelike pores that can trap such gases as water vapor. At room temperature, water vapor collects in the pores. As temperatures rise, the water escapes.

The team’s prototype includes a layer of MOF-801 mixed with copper foam. Left in the shade, this layer collects water vapor from the air. When moved into direct sunlight, the layer heats up and the water vapor escapes into an underlying chamber. A condenser in the chamber cools the vapor, converting it into a potable liquid. This entire process takes around two hours.
Laboratory tests of the device harvested 2.8 liters of water per day for every kilogram of MOF-801 used. As it is now, the device could be used as a personal water source in dry regions without water-producing infrastructure, Yaghi says, or the system could be scaled up to produce enough water for a whole community.

The device’s ability to produce water at low relative humidity is a breakthrough, says Krista Walton, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. “No one else is using MOFs like this today,” she says.

As for the cost of scaling up, the ingredients used in the device’s metal-organic framework “aren’t exotic,” Walton says. Producing large amounts of the material “would definitely be possible if the demand were there.”

A recent upsurge in planet-warming methane may not be caused by increasing emissions, as previously thought, but by methane lingering longer in the atmosphere.

That’s the conclusion of two independent studies that indirectly tracked concentrations of hydroxyl, a highly reactive chemical that rips methane molecules apart. Hydroxyl levels in the atmosphere decreased roughly 7 or 8 percent starting in the early 2000s, the studies estimate.

The two teams propose that the hydroxyl decline slowed the breakdown of atmospheric methane, boosting levels of the greenhouse gas. Concentrations in the atmosphere have crept up since 2007, but during the same period, methane emissions from human activities and natural sources have remained stable or even fallen slightly, both studies suggest. The research groups report their findings online April 17 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“If hydroxyl were to decline long-term, then it would be bad news,” says Matt Rigby, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Bristol in England who coauthored one of the studies. Less methane would be removed from the atmosphere, he says, so the gas would hang around longer and cause more warming.

The stability of methane emissions might also vindicate previous studies that found no rise in emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has reported that U.S. emissions remained largely unchanged from 2004 to 2014 (SN Online: 4/14/16).

Methane enters the atmosphere from a range of sources, from decomposing biological material in wetlands to leaks in natural gas pipelines. Ton for ton, that methane causes 28 to 36 times as much warming as carbon dioxide over a century.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric methane concentrations have more than doubled. By the early 2000s, though, levels of the greenhouse gas inexplicably flatlined. In 2007, methane levels just as mysteriously began rising again. The lull and subsequent upswing puzzled scientists, with explanations ranging from the abundance of methane-producing microbes to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Those proposals didn’t account for what happens once methane enters the atmosphere. Most methane molecules in the air last around a decade before being broken apart during chemical reactions with hydroxyl. Monitoring methane-destroying hydroxyl is tricky, though, because the molecules are so reactive that they survive for less than a second after formation before undergoing a chemical reaction.
Neither study can show conclusively that hydroxyl levels changed, notes Stefan Schwietzke, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. The papers nevertheless add a new twist in explaining the mysterious methane rise, he says. “Basically these studies are opening a new can of worms, and there was no shortage of worms.”

Despite being conducted by two separate teams — one headed by Rigby and the other by atmospheric scientist Alex Turner of Harvard University — the new studies used the same roundabout approach to tracking hydroxyl concentrations over time.

Both teams followed methyl chloroform, an ozone-depleting substance used as a solvent before being banned by the Montreal Protocol. Like methane, methyl chloroform also breaks apart in reactions with hydroxyl. Unlike methane, though, emission rates of methyl chloroform are fairly easy to track because the chemical is entirely human-made.

Examining methyl chloroform measurements gathered since the 1980s revealed that hydroxyl concentrations have probably wobbled over time, contributing to the odd pause and rise in atmospheric methane concentrations. But to know for sure whether hydroxyl levels varied or remained steady, scientists will need to take a more detailed look at regional emissions of methane and methyl chloroform, Rigby says.

Why hydroxyl levels might have fallen also remains unclear. Turner and colleagues note that the ban on ozone-depleting substances like methyl chloroform might be the cause. The now-recovering ozone layer (SN: 12/24/16, p. 28) blocks some ultraviolet light, an important ingredient in the formation of hydroxyl. Identifying the cause of the hydroxyl changes could help climate scientists better predict how methane levels will behave in the future.

NEW ORLEANS — A relatively small brain can pack a big evolutionary punch. Consider Homo naledi, a famously puzzling fossil species in the human genus. Despite having a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee’s, H. naledi displays key humanlike neural features, two anthropologists reported April 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Those brain characteristics include a region corresponding to Broca’s area, which spans parts of the right and left sides of the brain in present-day people. The left side is typically involved in speech and language.
“It looks like Homo naledi’s brain evolved a huge amount of shape change that supported social emotions and advanced communication of some type,” said Shawn Hurst of Indiana University Bloomington, who presented the new findings. “We can’t say for sure whether that included language.” Frontal brain locations near Broca’s area contribute to social emotions such as empathy, pride and shame. As interactions within groups became more complex in ancient Homo species, neural capacities for experiencing social emotions and communicating verbally blossomed, Hurst suspects.

Scientists don’t know how long ago H. naledi inhabited Africa’s southern tip. If H. naledi lived 2 million or even 900,000 years ago, as some researchers have suggested (SN: 8/6/16, p. 12), humanlike brains with a language-related area would be shocking. A capacity for language is thought to have emerged in Homo over the last few hundred thousand years at most.

Discoverers of H. naledi, led by anthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, will announce an estimated age for the species and describe new fossil finds within the next few weeks, Hurst said.

Hurst and Ralph Holloway of Columbia University led a team that laser scanned the inside surfaces of several partial H. naledi skulls to create virtual casts, or endocasts, of brain surfaces. An endocast reproduces the shape and, with varying success, details of the surface of the brain that were imprinted on the walls of the braincase while an individual was alive. Such brain impressions are not always clear, which has sparked debate over how to interpret them.

Two grooves identified on an endocast from a partial H. naledi skull frame the language-related section of Broca’s area in humans today, Hurst said. H. naledi’s brain also possessed folds of tissue that largely covered a surface section where the grooves converged. Similar folds of tissue typically cover the surface of Broca’s area in modern human brains.
The general shape of that part of the frontal brain in humans differs greatly from that of living apes and fossil hominids dating to at least 700,000 to 1 million years years ago, Hurst added.

H. naledi also displays a humanlike pattern of surface features at the back of the brain, although to a lesser extent than at the brain’s front, Holloway said. Endocasts for this analysis came from two other partial H. naledi skulls.

Specific protrusions and other features at the back of H. naledi’s brain are more pronounced on the left side, Holloway said. In people today, the same left-sided bias in brain organization is associated with right-handedness.

In the past, Holloway and anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee have sharply disagreed over how to identify neural features on fossil endocasts, including a key groove in tissue at the back of the brain. After hearing Hurst and Holloway’s presentations, Falk expressed doubt that H. naledi’s brain was as humanlike as they concluded.

Shortly after the presentations, Hurst and Falk hashed out their differences head-to-head as they jointly studied a solid cast of the partial H. naledi brain surface displaying proposed signs of Broca’s area. They agreed on much about the fossil species’ neural setup, with one major exception. “I’m skeptical that two frontal [grooves] frame an area that corresponds to Broca’s area,” Falk said. If she’s right, then H. naledi communicated much less like present-day people than proposed by Hurst. Falk plans to study the new endocasts more closely and compare them with endocasts of other fossil hominids.

Immune cells in the lungs provide a rapid counterattack to bloodstream infections, a new study in mice finds. This surprising discovery pegs the lungs as a major pillar in the body’s defense during these dangerous infections, the researchers say.

“No one would have guessed the lung would provide such an immediate and strong host defense system,” says Bryan Yipp, an immunologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. Yipp and his colleagues report their findings online April 28 in Science Immunology.
The work may offer ways to target and adjust our own immune defense system for infections, says Yipp. “Currently, we only try to kill the bacteria, but we are running out of antibiotics because of resistance.”

The research uncovers some of the mechanisms that drive the rapid activation of neutrophils, says immunologist Andrew Gelman of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “This is critical in removing bacteria from sequestered spaces in the lung,” he says.

Generally, clearing bacteria out of the bloodstream falls to macrophages that reside in the liver and the spleen. But macrophages aren’t found in vessels of the lungs. So the lungs’ blood vessel network gives pathogens a place to hide and escape the body’s usual removal efforts.

In mammals, neutrophils hang out in the lungs’ bloodstream more than in blood vessels that wind through other tissue. Past research has indicated that a dearth of neutrophils puts an individual at risk for a bloodstream infection. It wasn’t clear, though, how they were providing a defensive role in the blood, says Yipp.
Yipp and his team used confocal pulmonary intravital microscopy to view how cells and pathogens behave in living mouse lungs. The researchers found that about a third of the neutrophils seen in the mouse lung sample were crawling about three to four cell lengths along the walls of the capillaries, the smallest blood vessels in the lungs. When the researchers added LPS, a molecule found in the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria like Escherichia coli, almost all of the neutrophils began crawling, and they traveled more than twice as far as before.
One of the proteins needed for neutrophil crawling, CD11b, allows the immune cells to move along as though on a tank tread, says Yipp. After LPS was added, the neutrophils in a mouse lung deficient in CD11b crawled about a third of the distance as the neutrophils in a normal mouse lung.

In another experiment, the researchers injected fluorescent E. coli into a mouse. Within 10 minutes of the bacteria reaching the lungs, the neutrophils started to crawl toward the bacteria and gobble them up, a process called phagocytosis. The neutrophils captured the majority of the bacteria within an hour of injection, says Yipp.

Gelman says it’s now clear that neutrophils are good at removing bacteria from the lungs’ capillaries. The next step is to “show the actual biological impact” — how this system controls a bacterial infection and improves survival, he says.

For patients with depressed immune systems, the finding may eventually provide a way to battle bloodstream infections, Yipp says. But, he notes, “with all infections, part of the concern is that the inflammatory response can become too exuberant, which leads to tissue damage, as in septic shock,” and lung failure. In those cases, learning how to dampen the lungs’ immune response could help, Yipp says.

Seabirds called common murres appear to use preening as a way to negotiate whose turn it is to watch their chick and who must find food. And when one parent is feeling foul, irregularities in this grooming ritual may send the other a signal that all is not well, researchers report in the July issue of The Auk: Ornithological Advances.

“The fascinating part of this study is the inference that communication between mates allows murres to negotiate the level of effort that each member of the pair puts into the breeding effort,” says John Piatt, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage, Alaska. “Reproductive success of this species requires a high degree of cooperation by each mate as they switch duties.”
Common murres (Uria aalge) lay only one egg each breeding season. Parental roles aren’t determined by gender for the birds; mothers and fathers take turns watching over their chick and foraging for fish. When one parent returns with a fish for the chick, the couple preen each other and switch roles. This swapping ceremony typically happens three to four times a day.

But study coauthor Carolyn Walsh noticed that switches don’t always go smoothly. Video of 16 pairs of murres, documenting a total of 198 role swaps, showed that sometimes both birds appeared indecisive. Each parent would hop on and off the chick several times before the birds preened each other and one left to fish. “It’s as if they’re resisting leaving the colony; neither bird actually wants to go,” says Walsh, an animal behavior researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada.
For about a fifth of all switching ceremonies, the brooding parent was slow to preen its mate and then refused to switch, forcing the parent that had just returned with a fish to go back out and fish some more.
Irregular behavior also occurred when the parent on fishing duty returned without food, which happened about 10 percent of the time. The empty-beaked bird would quickly start preening its mate, but the mate would be slow to preen back, or might not preen at all. “The brooder is basically communicating, ‘The chick still needs a fish, you better go get one,’” Walsh says.
The ceremony could be a way for the seabirds to communicate their well-being, Walsh says. By withholding preening and delaying the switching ceremony, a murre in poor condition may be trying to negotiate with its partner to have the easier job of brooding. Staying in the nest may allow the bird to rest and recover its strength.

Flying out to sea to fish is energetically costly for murres because they aren’t very aerodynamic. The seabirds are “absolutely ridiculous looking” when they fly, Walsh says. “Their wings are really meant for swimming in the water.”

In physical tests, Walsh and colleagues found a correlation between body condition and ceremony irregularities. Her team captured birds, weighed them and sampled their blood for beta-hydroxybutyrate, a metabolite associated with continual weight loss.

Switching ceremonies lasted about two minutes longer for the lightest birds, around 900 grams, compared with the heaviest birds weighing in at about 1,000 grams. Birds with lower mass and higher metabolite levels also were more likely to preen irregularly, Walsh says.

The longer ceremonies may also be a sign that there’s unrest in the nest. Murres usually mate for life, but pairs can “divorce.” A previous study by Walsh found that mates heading for a split take more time to switch roles.

After a recent flurry of news that fang blennies mix an opioid in their venom, a question lingers: What do they need with fangs anyway? Most eat wimpy stuff that hardly justifies whopper canines.

Not that fang blennies are meek fishes.

“When they bite, they bite savagely,” says Bryan Fry of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. “If these little jobbies were 3 meters long, we’d be having to cage dive with them.” Real-world blennies, however, grow to only about the size of a cocktail sausage.
These little beasts probably got their big teeth before evolving venom, says Nicholas Casewell of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England. That’s jusssst backward, snakes might say, as they evolved their venom first. Yet when Casewell, Fry and colleagues put together an evolutionary family tree for the blennies, the one genus with both fangs and venom branched off amid four genera that are all fang and no toxins, Casewell, Fry and colleagues report in the April 24 Current Biology.

Those with venom aren’t that scary to humans. Fish venoms tend to cause excruciating pain, says Fry, who adds from personal experience that “sting” sounds deceptively benign for what a stingray delivers (SN: 4/29/17, p. 28). A venomous fang blenny has yet to nail him, but he hears that others have felt little more than a toothy nip.
“There’s no real reason for most of these fish to have fangs to help them feed,” Casewell says. Many prey on small invertebrates or even floating plankton, which is about as hard to subdue as chicken soup.
The fangs, however, are useful for fending off predators, Casewell suggests. Blennies have no spiky fins or spines, the more usual defensive weapons in fish. Male-versus-male competition may have been another force for fang evolution; males stab each other during breeding season.

When fangs evolved, whatever the reason, they became a useful conduit for venom, Casewell and Fry propose. Once some blennies evolved venom, “all these crazy selection pressures started coming in,” Fry says. Forces of natural selection nudged nonvenomous fang blennies toward colors and stripes similar enough to those of their venomous cousins to discourage attacks from an educated predator.

The mimics take advantage, often brazenly swimming up to bigger fish to bite off some scales and mucus for a snack. “These fish are little jerks,” Fry says. “They should be called jerk blennies.”

The benefits of statins for people older than 75 remain unclear, a new analysis finds. Statins did not reduce heart attacks or coronary heart disease deaths, nor did they reduce deaths from any cause, compared with people not taking statins, researchers report online May 22 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Recently published guidelines cited insufficient data to recommend statins for people older than age 75 who don’t have a history of cardiovascular disease. The new analysis considered a subset of older adults enrolled in a study of heart attack prevention and mortality conducted from 1994 to 2002. The sample included 2,867 adults ages 65 and older who had hypertension, 1,467 of whom took a statin.

There was no meaningful difference in the frequency of heart attacks or coronary heart disease deaths between those who took statins and those who did not. There was also no significant difference in deaths from any cause, both overall and among participants ages 65 to 74 or those 75 and older.

Statin use may be associated with muscle damage and fatigue, which could especially impact older adults and put them at higher risk for physical decline, the authors say.

For a third time, scientists have detected the infinitesimal reverberations of spacetime: gravitational waves.

Two black holes stirred up the spacetime wiggles, orbiting one another and spiraling inward until they fused into one jumbo black hole with a mass about 49 times that of the sun. Ripples from that union, which took place about 3 billion light-years from Earth, zoomed across the cosmos at the speed of light, eventually reaching the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, which detected them on January 4.
“These are the most powerful astronomical events witnessed by human beings,” Michael Landry, head of LIGO’s Hanford, Wash., observatory, said during a news conference May 31 announcing the discovery. As the black holes merged, they converted about two suns’ worth of mass into energy, radiated as gravitational waves.
LIGO’s two detectors, located in Hanford and Livingston, La., each consist of a pair of 4-kilometer-long arms. They act as outrageously oversized rulers to measure the stretching of spacetime caused by gravitational waves. According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, massive objects bend the fabric of space and create ripples when they accelerate — for example, when two objects orbit one another. Gravitational ripples are tiny: LIGO is tuned to detect waves that stretch and squeeze the arms by a thousandth of the diameter of a proton. Black hole collisions are one of the few events in the universe that are catastrophic enough to produce spacetime gyrations big enough to detect.
The two black holes that spawned the latest waves were particularly hefty, with masses about 31 and 19 times that of the sun, scientists report June 1 in Physical Review Letters. LIGO’s first detection, announced in February 2016, came from an even bigger duo: 36 and 29 times the mass of the sun (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). Astrophysicists don’t fully understand how such big black holes could have formed. But now, “it seems that these are not so uncommon, so clearly there’s a way to produce these massive black holes,” says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville. LIGO’s second detection featured two smaller black holes, 14 and eight times the mass of the sun (SN: 7/9/16, p. 8).
Weighty black holes are difficult to explain, because the stars that collapsed to form them must have been even more massive. Typically, stellar winds steadily blow away mass as a star ages, leading to a smaller black hole. But under certain conditions, those winds might be weak — for example, if the stars contain few elements heavier than helium or have intense magnetic fields (SN Online: 12/12/16). The large masses of LIGO’s black holes suggest that they formed in such environments.

Scientists also disagree about how black holes partner up. One theory is that two neighboring stars each explode and produce two black holes, which then spiral inward. Another is that black holes find one another within a dense cluster of stars, as massive black holes sink to the center of the clump (SN Online: 6/19/16).

The new detection provides some support for the star cluster theory: The pattern of gravitational waves LIGO observed hints that one of the black holes might be spinning in the opposite direction from its orbit. Like a cosmic do-si-do, each black hole in a pair twirls on its own axis as it spirals inward. Black holes that pair up as stars are likely to have their spins aligned with their orbits. But if the black holes instead find one another in the chaos of a star cluster, they could spin any which way. The potentially misaligned black hole LIGO observed somewhat favors the star cluster scenario. The measurement is “suggestive, but it’s not definite,” says astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University.

Scientists will need more data to sort out how the black hole duos form, says physicist Emanuele Berti of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “Probably the truth is somewhere in between.” Various processes could contribute to the formation of black hole pairs, Berti says.

As with previous detections of gravitational waves, the scientists used their measurements to test general relativity. For example, while general relativity predicts that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, some alternative theories of gravity predict that gravitational waves of different energies travel at different speeds. LIGO scientists found no evidence of such an effect, vindicating Einstein once again.

Now, with three black hole mergers under their belts, scientists are looking forward to a future in which gravitational wave detections become routine. The more gravitational waves scientists detect, the better they can test their theories. “There are already surprises that make people stop and revisit some old ideas,” Will says. “To me that’s very exciting.”