Even Amelia Earhart couldn’t compete with the great frigate bird. She flew nonstop across the United States for 19 hours in 1932; the frigate bird can stay aloft up to two months without landing, a new study finds. The seabird saves energy on transoceanic treks by capitalizing on the large-scale movement patterns of the atmosphere, researchers report in the July 1 Science. By hitching a ride on favorable winds, the bird can spend more time soaring and less time flapping its wings.
“Frigate birds are really an anomaly,” says Scott Shaffer, an ecologist at San Jose State University in California who wasn’t involved in the study. The large seabird spends much of its life over the open ocean. Both juvenile and adult birds undertake nonstop flights lasting weeks or months, the scientists found. Frigate birds can’t land in the water to catch a meal or take a break because their feathers aren’t waterproof, so scientists weren’t sure how the birds made such extreme journeys.
Researchers attached tiny accelerometers, GPS trackers and heart rate monitors to great frigate birds flying from a tiny island near Madagascar. By pooling data collected over several years, the team re-created what the birds were doing minute-by-minute over long flights — everything from how often the birds flapped their wings to when they dived for food. The birds fly more than 400 kilometers, about equivalent to the distance from Boston to Philadelphia, every day. They don’t even stop to refuel, instead scooping up fish while still in flight.
And when frigate birds do take a break, it’s a quick stopover.
“When they land on a small island, you’d expect they’d stay there for several days. But in fact, they just stay there for a couple hours,” says Henri Weimerskirch, a biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Villiers-en-Bois who led the study. “Even the young birds stay in flight almost continually for more than a year.”
Frigate birds need to be energy Scrooges to fly that far. To minimize wing-flapping time, they seek out routes upward-moving air currents that help them glide and soar over the water. For instance, the birds skirt the edge of the doldrums, a windless region near the equator. On either side of the region, consistent winds make for favorable flying conditions. Frigate birds ride a thermal roller coaster underneath the bank of fluffy cumulus clouds frequently found there, soaring up to altitudes of 600 meters.
Airplanes tend to avoid flying through cumulus clouds because they cause turbulence. So the researchers were surprised to find that frigate birds sometimes use the rising air inside the clouds to get an extra elevation boost — up to nearly 4,000 meters. The extra height means the birds have more time to gradually glide downward before finding a new updraft. That’s an advantage if the clouds (and the helpful air movement patterns they create) are scarce.
It’s not yet clear how frigate birds manage to sleep while on the wing. Weimerskirch suggests they might nap in several-minute bursts while ascending on thermals.
“To me, the most fascinating thing was how incredibly far these frigate birds go in a single flight, and how closely tied those flight patterns are to the long-term average atmospheric condition,” says Curtis Deutsch, an oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle. As these atmospheric patterns shift with climate change, frigate birds might change their path, too.
Aging happens to each of us, everywhere, all the time. It is so ever-present and slow that we tend to take little notice of it. Until we do. Those small losses in function and health eventually accumulate into life-changers.
Despite its constancy in our lives, aging remains mysterious on a fundamental level. Scientists still struggle to fully explain its root causes and its myriad effects. Even as discoveries pile up (SN: 12/26/15, p. 20), a clear picture has yet to emerge. Debates continue about whether individual life spans and the problems associated with aging are programmed into our bodies, like ticking time bombs we carry from birth. Others see the process as a buildup of tiny failures, a chaotic and runaway deterioration that steals vim and vigor, if not health and life itself. There is no unified theory of aging. That means that there is no one way to stop it. As longtime aging researcher Caleb Finch put it in an interview with Science News: Aging is still a black box. The issue is an urgent one. The globe’s population has never been older. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 An Aging World report, by 2020 the number of people 65 and older worldwide will outnumber children 5 and under for the first time in history. Seniors will make up 22.1 percent of the U.S. population in 2050, and nearly 17 percent globally (a whopping 1.6 billion people), the demographers predict. Worldwide, the 80-and-above crowd will grow from 126 million to 447 million. It’s a population sea change that will have ripple effects on culture, economics, medicine and society.
Scientists working at the frontiers of the field do agree that there are probably many ways to slow aging, Tina Hesman Saey reports in this special issue. Saey sums up current thinking on the actors of aging, as well as a number of intriguing approaches that might well tame aging’s effects. The goal, most agree, is not to find a fountain of youth but the keys to prolonging health.
It turns out that healthy aging in people does occur naturally. It is, however, in the words of Ali Torkamani, “an extremely rare phenotype.” Torkamani leads a genetic study of people 80 and older who are living free of chronic disease, described by Saey in her story. He and his team failed to find a single set of genes that protect these “wellderly.” Instead, the people studied carry a plethora of different genetic variants. They do share a lower risk of heart disease and Alzheimer’s. And, he says, the data hint that gene variants linked to key cognitive areas may be at play, leading him to ask: “Is cognitive health just one of the components of healthy aging? Or is there something about having a healthy brain that protects against other signs of aging?”
Exactly what happens in the brain as we age is a question Laura Sanders takes up in “The mature mind.” An intriguing idea is that the brain begins to lose the specialization that makes it so efficient in its prime, she reports. Further afield, Susan Milius considers a hydra and a weed, examining what these outliers of aging can tell us about how aging evolved and how flexible it truly is. Her answer: Very. The sheer diversity in life cycles and declines gives credence to arguments that while death may come for all of us, a robust old age could well be in the cards for more of us.
That’s the takeaway of a new study of snail fever, or schistosomiasis, a tropical disease that affects more than 250 million people worldwide. It’s caused by a water-borne parasite that reproduces inside some snails. Parasite larvae burrow through people’s skin and can cause infertility, cognitive problems and even cancer. Today, most countries manage the disease with a drug that kills the parasite in human hosts. Some nations also control snail populations to hamstring the parasite’s life cycle, but that’s a less popular approach.
But snail control turns out to be more effective than drugs for curbing snail fever, researchers report July 21 in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The scientists compared a range of disease management strategies in 83 countries in the last century that included killing snails, using drugs or changing infrastructure (such as sanitation services). Projects using snail control cut disease by over 90 percent; those without it, by less than 40 percent.
The researchers suggest a blend of drug therapy and snail management to eradicate disease in the future.
Blue whirl Bloo werl n. A swirling flame that appears in fuel floating on the surface of water and glows blue.
An unfortunate mix of electricity and bourbon has led to a new discovery. After lightning hit a Jim Beam warehouse in 2003, a nearby lake was set ablaze when the distilled spirit spilled into the water and ignited. Spiraling tornadoes of fire leapt from the surface. In a laboratory experiment inspired by the conflagration, a team of researchers produced a new, efficiently burning fire tornado, which they named a blue whirl. To re-create the bourbon-fire conditions, the researchers, led by Elaine Oran of the University of Maryland in College Park, ignited liquid fuel floating on a bath of water. They surrounded the blaze with a cylindrical structure that funneled air into the flame to create a vortex with a height of about 60 centimeters. Eventually, the chaotic fire whirl calmed into a blue, cone-shaped flame just a few centimeters tall, the scientists report online August 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Firenadoes” are known to appear in wildfires, when swirling winds and flames combine to form a hellacious, rotating inferno. They burn more efficiently than typical fires, as the whipping winds mix in extra oxygen, which feeds the fire. But the blue whirl is even more efficient; its azure glow indicates complete combustion, which releases little soot, or uncombusted carbon, to the air.
The soot-free blue whirls could be a way of burning off oil spills on water without adding much pollution to the air, the researchers say, if they can find a way to control them in the wild.
Editor’s note: When reporting results from the functional MRI scans of dogs’ brains, left and right were accidentally reversed in all images, the researchers report in a correction posted April 7 in Science. While dogs and most humans use different hemispheres of the brain to process meaning and intonation — instead of the same hemispheres, as was suggested — lead author Attila Andics says the more important finding still stands: Dogs’ brains process different aspects of human speech in different hemispheres. Dogs process speech much like people do, a new study finds. Meaningful words like “good boy” activate the left side of a dog’s brain regardless of tone of voice, while a region on the right side of the brain responds to intonation, scientists report in the Sept. 2 Science.
Similarly, humans process the meanings of words in the left hemisphere of the brain, and interpret intonation in the right hemisphere. That lets people sort out words that convey meaning from random sounds that don’t. But it has been unclear whether language abilities were a prerequisite for that division of brain labor, says neuroscientist Attila Andics of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
Dogs make ideal test subjects for understanding speech processing because of their close connection to humans. “Humans use words towards dogs in their everyday, normal communication, and dogs pay attention to this speech in a way that cats and hamsters don’t,” says Andics. “When we want to understand how an animal processes speech, it’s important that speech be relevant.” Andics and his colleagues trained dogs to lie still for functional MRI scans, which reveal when and where the brain is responding to certain cues. Then the scientists played the dogs recordings of a trainer saying either meaningful praise words like “good boy,” or neutral words like “however,” either in an enthusiastic tone of voice or a neutral one. The dogs showed increased activity in the left sides of their brains in response to the meaningful words, but not the neutral ones. An area on the right side of the brain reacted to the intonation of those words, separating out enthusiasm from indifference.
When the dogs heard praising words in an enthusiastic tone of voice, neural circuits associated with reward became more active. The dogs had the same neurological response to an excited “Good dog!” as they might to being petted or receiving a tasty treat. Praise words or enthusiastic intonation alone didn’t have the same effect.
Humans stand out from other animals in their ability to use language — that is, to manipulate sequences of sounds to convey different meanings. But the new findings suggest that the ability to hear these arbitrary sequences of sound and link them to meaning isn’t a uniquely human ability.
“I love these results, as they point to how well domestication has shaped dogs to use and track the very same cues that we use to make sense of what other people are saying,” says Laurie Santos, a cognitive psychologist at Yale University.
While domestication made dogs more attentive to human speech, humans have been close companions with dogs for only 30,000 years. That’s too quickly for a trait like lateralized speech processing to evolve, Andics thinks. He suspects that some older underlying neural mechanism for processing meaningful sounds is present in other animals, too.
It’s just hard to test in other species, he says — in part because cats don’t take as kindly to being put inside MRI scanners and asked to hold still.
A beautiful but unproved theory of particle physics is withering in the harsh light of data.
For decades, many particle physicists have devoted themselves to the beloved theory, known as supersymmetry. But it’s beginning to seem that the zoo of new particles that the theory predicts —the heavier cousins of known particles — may live only in physicists’ imaginations. Or if such particles, known as superpartners, do exist, they’re not what physicists expected.
New data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider, now operating at higher energies than ever before — show no traces of superpartners. And so the theory’s most fervent supporters have begun to pay for their overconfidence — in the form of expensive bottles of brandy. On August 22, a group of physicists who wagered that the LHC would quickly confirm the theory settled a 16-year-old bet. In a session at a physics meeting in Copenhagen, theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed ponied up, presenting a bottle of cognac to physicists who bet that the new particles would be slow to materialize, or might not exist at all. Whether their pet theories are right or wrong, many theoretical physicists are simply excited that the new LHC data can finally anchor their ideas to reality. “Of course, in the end, nature is going to tell us what’s true,” says theoretical physicist Yonit Hochberg of Cornell University, who spoke on a panel at the meeting.
Supersymmetry is not ruled out by the new data, but if the new particles exist, they must be heavier than scientists expected. “Right now, nature is telling us that if supersymmetry is the right theory, then it doesn’t look exactly like we thought it would,” Hochberg says. Since June 2015, the LHC, at the European particle physics lab CERN near Geneva, has been smashing protons together at higher energies than ever before: 13 trillion electron volts. Physicists had been eager to see if new particles would pop out at these energies. But the results have agreed overwhelmingly with the standard model, the established theory that describes the known particles and their interactions.
It’s a triumph for the standard model, but a letdown for physicists who hope to expose cracks in that theory. “There is a low-level panic,” says theoretical physicist Matthew Buckley of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “We had a long time without data, and during that time many theorists thought up very compelling ideas. And those ideas have turned out to be wrong.”
Physicists know that the standard model must break down somewhere. It doesn’t explain why the universe contains more matter than antimatter, and it fails to pinpoint the origins of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the matter and energy in the cosmos.
Even the crowning achievement of the LHC, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 (SN: 7/28/2012, p. 5), hints at the sickness within the standard model. The mass of the Higgs boson, at 125 billion electron volts, is vastly smaller than theory naïvely predicts. That mass, physicists worry, is not “natural” — the factors that contribute to the Higgs mass must be finely tuned to cancel each other out and keep the mass small (SN Online: 10/22/13).
Among the many theories that attempt to fix the standard model’s woes, supersymmetry is the most celebrated. “Supersymmetry was this dominant paradigm for 30 years because it was so beautiful, and it was so perfect,” says theoretical physicist Nathaniel Craig of the University of California, Santa Barbara. But supersymmetry is becoming less appealing as the LHC collects more collisions with no signs of superpartners.
Supersymmetry solves three major problems in physics: It explains why the Higgs is so light; it provides a particle that serves as dark matter; and it implies that the three forces of the standard model (electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces) unite into one at high energies.
If a simple version of supersymmetry is correct, the LHC probably should have detected superpartners already. As the LHC rules out such particles at ever-higher masses, retaining the appealing properties of supersymmetry requires increasingly convoluted theoretical contortions, stripping the idea of some of the elegance that first persuaded scientists to embrace it. “If supersymmetry exists, it is not my parents’ supersymmetry,” says Buckley. “That kind of means it can’t be the most compelling version.”
Still, many physicists are adopting an attitude of “keep calm and carry on.” They aren’t giving up hope that evidence for the theory — or other new particle physics phenomena — will show up soon. “I am not yet particularly worried,” says theoretical physicist Carlos Wagner of the University of Chicago. “I think it’s too early. We just started this process.” The LHC has delivered only 1 percent of the data it will collect over its lifetime. Hopes of quickly finding new phenomena were too optimistic, Wagner says. Experimental physicists, too, maintain that there is plenty of room for new discoveries. But it could take years to uncover them. “I would be very, very happy if we were able to find some new phenomena, some new state of matter, within the first two or three years” of running the LHC at its boosted energy, Tiziano Camporesi of the LHC’s CMS experiment said during a news conference at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Chicago in August. “That would mean that nature has been kind to us.”
But other LHC scientists admit they had expected new discoveries by now. “The fact that we haven’t seen something, I think, is in general quite surprising to the community,” said Guy Wilkinson, spokesperson for the LHCb experiment. “This isn’t a failure — this is perhaps telling us something.” The lack of new particles forces theoretical physicists to consider new explanations for the mass of the Higgs. To be consistent with data, those explanations can’t create new particles the LHC should already have seen.
Some physicists — particularly those of the younger generations — are ready to move on to new ideas. “I’m personally not attached to supersymmetry,” says David Kaplan of Johns Hopkins University. Kaplan and colleagues recently proposed the “relaxion” hypothesis, which allows the Higgs mass to change — or relax — as the universe evolves. Under this theory, the Higgs mass gets stuck at a small value, never reaching the high mass otherwise predicted.
Another idea, which Craig favors, is a family of theories by the name of “neutral naturalness.” Like supersymmetry, this idea proposes symmetries of nature that solve the problem of the Higgs mass, but it doesn’t predict new particles that should have been seen at the LHC. “The theories, they’re not as beautiful as just simple supersymmetry, but they’re motivated by data,” Craig says.
One particularly controversial idea is the multiverse hypothesis. There may be innumerable other universes, with different Higgs masses in each. Perhaps humans observe such a light Higgs because a small mass is necessary for heavy elements like carbon to be produced in stars. People might live in a universe with a small Higgs because it’s the only type of universe life can exist in.
It’s possible that physicists’ fears will be realized — the LHC could deliver the Higgs boson and nothing else. Such a result would leave theoretical physicists with few clues to work with. Still, says Hochberg, “if that’s the case, we’ll still be learning something very deep about nature.”
This issue marks the second year that Science News has reached out to science notables and asked: Which up-and-coming scientist is making a splash? Whose work impresses you? Tell us about early- to mid-career scientists who have the potential to change their fields and the direction of science more generally.
This year, we expanded the pool of people we asked. We reached out to Nobel laureates again and added recently elected members of the National Academy of Sciences. That allowed us to consider shining lights from a much broader array of fields, from oceanography and astronomy to cognitive psychology. Another difference this year: We spent time face-to-face with many of those selected, to get a better sense of them both as scientists and as people. The result is the SN 10, a collection of stories not only about science, but also about making a life in science. They are stories of people succeeding because they have found what they love, be it working in the lab on new ways to probe molecular structures or staring up to the stars in search of glimmers of the early universe. In my interviews with chemist Phil Baran, I was struck by his drive to do things in new ways, whether devising chemical reactions or developing ideas about how to fund research. (If you can, he says, go private.) Laura Sanders, who met with neuroscientist Jeremy Freeman, was intrigued by his way of seeing a problem (siloed data that can’t be easily shared or analyzed) and figuring out solutions, even if those solutions were outside his area of expertise.
Of course, there are many ways to identify noteworthy scientists — and there’s plenty more fodder out there for future years. Our approach was to seek standouts, asking who deserved recognition for the skill of their methods, the insights of their thinking, the impacts of their research. Not all of the SN 10’s work has made headlines, but they all share something more important: They are participants in building the science of the future.
Notably, many of them do basic research. I think that’s because it’s the type of work that other scientists notice, even if it’s not always on the radar of the general public. But that’s where fundamental advances are often made, as scientists explore the unknown.
That edge of what’s known is where Science News likes to explore, too. Such as the bet-ending, head-scratching results from the Large Hadron Collider, which have failed to reveal the particles that the equations of supersymmetry predict. As Emily Conover reports in “Supersymmetry’s absence at LHC puzzles physicists,” that means that either the theory must be more complicated than originally thought, or not true, letting down those who looked to supersymmetry to help explain a few enduring mysteries, from the nature of dark matter to the mass of the Higgs boson.
Other mysteries may be closer to a solution, as Sanders reports in “New Alzheimer’s drug shows promise in small trial.” A new potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease reduced amyloid-beta plaques in patients. It also showed hints of improving cognition. That’s standout news, a result built on decades of basic research by many, many bright young scientists.
In smart homes of the future, computers may identify inhabitants and cater to their needs using a tool already at hand: Wi-Fi. Human bodies partially block the radio waves that carry the wireless signal between router and computer. Differences in shape, size and even gait among household members yield different patterns in the received Wi-Fi signals. A computer can analyze the signals to distinguish dad from mom, according to a report posted online August 11 at arXiv.org.
Scientists built an algorithm that was nearly 95 percent accurate when attempting to discern two adults walking between a wireless router and a computer. For six people, accuracy fell to about 89 percent. Scientists tested the setup on men and women of various sizes, but it should work with children as well, says study coauthor Bin Guo of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an, China.
In a home rigged with Wi-Fi and a receiver, the system could eventually identify family members and tailor heating and lighting to their preferences — maybe even cue up a favorite playlist.
Two trillion galaxies. That’s the latest estimate for the number of galaxies that live — or have lived — in the observable universe, researchers report online October 10 at arXiv.org. This updated headcount is roughly 10 times greater than previous estimates and suggests that there are a lot more galaxies out there for future telescopes to explore.
Hordes of relatively tiny galaxies, weighing as little as 1 million suns, are responsible for most of this tweak to the cosmic census. Astronomers haven’t directly seen these galaxies yet. Christopher Conselice, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in England, and colleagues combined data from many ground- and space-based telescopes to look at how the number of galaxies in a typical volume of the universe has changed over much of cosmic history. They then calculated how many galaxies have come and gone in the universe.
The galactic population has dwindled over time, as most of those 2 trillion galaxies collided and merged to build larger galaxies such as the Milky Way, the researchers suggest. That’s in line with prevailing ideas about how massive galaxies have been assembled. Seeing many of these remote runts, however, is beyond the ability of even the next generation of telescopes. “We will have to wait at least several decades before even the majority of galaxies have basic imaging,” the researchers write.
Crucial immune system proteins that make it harder for viruses to replicate might also help the attackers avoid detection, three new studies suggest. When faced with certain viruses, the proteins can set off a cascade of cell-to-cell messages that destroy antibody-producing immune cells. With those virus-fighting cells depleted, it’s easier for the invader to persist inside the host’s body.
The finding begins to explain a longstanding conundrum: how certain chronic viral infections can dodge the immune system’s antibody response, says David Brooks, an immunologist at the University of Toronto not involved in the research. The new studies, all published October 21 in Science Immunology, pin the blame on the same set of proteins: type 1 interferons. Normally, type 1 interferons protect the body from viral siege. They snap into action when a virus infects cells, helping to activate other parts of the immune system. And they make cells less hospitable to viruses so that the foreign invaders can’t replicate as easily.
But in three separate studies, scientists tracked mice’s immune response when infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, or LCMV. In each case, type 1 interferon proteins masterminded the loss of B cells, which produce antibodies specific to the virus that is being fought. Normally, those antibodies latch on to the target virus, flagging it for destruction by other immune cells called T cells. With fewer B cells, the virus can evade capture for longer.
The proteins’ response “is driving the immune system to do something bad to itself,” says Dorian McGavern, an immunologist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., who led one of the studies.
The interferon proteins didn’t directly destroy the B cells; they worked through middlemen instead. These intermediaries differed depending on factors including the site of infection and how much of the virus the mice received. T cells were one intermediary. McGavern and his colleagues filmed T cells actively destroying their B cell compatriots under the direction of the interferon proteins. When the scientists deleted those T cells, the B cells didn’t die off even though the interferons were still hanging around. Another study found that the interferons were sending messages not just through T cells, but via a cadre of other immune cells, too. Those messages told B cells to morph into cells that rapidly produce antibodies for the virus. But those cells die off within a few days instead of mounting a longer-term defense.
That strategy could be helpful for a short-term infection, but less successful against a chronic one, says Daniel Pinschewer, a virologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland who led that study. Throwing the entire defense arsenal at the virus all at once leaves the immune system shorthanded later on.
But interferon activity could prolong even short-term viral infections, a third study showed. There, scientists injected lower doses of LCMV into mice’s footpads and used high-powered microscopes to watch the infection play out in the lymph nodes. In this case, the interferon stifled B cells by working through inflammatory monocytes, white blood cells that rush to infection sites.
“The net effect is beneficial for the virus,” says Matteo Iannacone, an immunologist at San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan who led the third study. Sticking around even a few days longer gives the virus more time to spread to new hosts.
Since all three studies looked at the same virus, it’s not yet clear whether the mechanism extends to other viral infections. That’s a target for future research, Iannacone says. But Brooks thinks it’s likely that other viruses that dampen antibody response (like HIV and hepatitis C) could also be exploiting type 1 interferons.
