A new robotic arm made of DNA moves 100,000 times faster than previous DNA machinery.

The DNA nanobot is shaped like a gearshift, with an extendible arm that ranges from 25 to more than 400 nanometers long that’s attached to a 55-by-55-nanometer platform. Researchers remotely control this DNA device, described in the Jan. 19 Science, with electric fields that tug on charged molecules in its arm. Those electric fields help the nanomachine’s arm move much more quickly than previous DNA robots, which relied on chemical interactions between DNA molecules to move (SN: 9/11/10, p. 18).

Friedrich Simmel, a biophysicist at the Technical University of Munich, and his colleagues could swivel their DNA robotic arm 360 degrees in a matter of milliseconds. To lock the arm down in particular positions, the team built latches made of short, single-stranded DNA into the platform.

Such quick, efficient DNA nanobots could someday help move tiny cargo, such as molecules or nanoparticles, in a nanofactory that manufactures new types of materials.

"It's the worst possible news on the eve of the tournament," said England midfielder Izzy Christiansen to BBC Sport. Spanish football journalist David Menayo called it "a jug of cold water" thrown over his nation.

They were referring to the loss of Alexia Putellas, who suffered a torn ACL on the eve of this the women's Euro 2022 tournament, leaving Spain without their reigning Ballon d'Or winner. The loss of such a superstar was evident, as Spain, a pre-tournament favorite, looked tame in bowing out to England in the quarterfinals.

Just a week later, young France star Marie-Antoinette Katoto suffered a similar fate in the Euro group stage, and a toothless Les Bleus attack fell short in the semifinals to Germany.

Bright young USWNT star Cat Macario, who lit up the Champions League for Lyon en route to winning the title over Putellas's Barcelona, tore her ACL in the early stages of a meaningless Ligue 1 match in early June. Two weeks later, legendary American striker Christen Press tore her ACL during NWSL play with expansion club Angel City FC. Just a month prior, Macario's Lyon teammate Dzsenifer Marozsan suffered the same fate, ruling the German star out of the Champions League final and leaving her sidelined for the Euros.

It doesn't stop there. USWNT defender Tierna Davidson went down in March of 2022 with an ACL injury during a shortened NWSL preseason. The Australian national team lost three players to ACL tears in a year's span, including young superstar Ellie Carpenter, who has already collected a massive 57 caps at just 22 years old, but went down in late May. A similar rising star for the German national team, Giulia Gwinn, suffered the injury in early October of 2021, her second ACL tear at just 23 years old.

As time progresses, the list just continues to grow — NWSL finalists Kansas City Current saw midfield fixture Claire Lavogez fall victim in the 2022 playoff quarterfinals. In the run-up to the 2023 Women's World Cup, stars Beth Mead and Vivianne Miedema both suffered ACL tears that ruled them out of the game's biggest event.

"The amount of ACL injuries in professional women's soccer in the last two years has just been shocking," Christen Press told ESPN in May of 2023. "If this happened on the men's side, we would have immediately seen a reaction of 'how are we going to solve this and figure this out, and make sure that these players are going to be available at the biggest moments of their career?'"

This is not just limited to the top of the game; clubs and college programs across the United States are noticing an increase in serious knee injuries. The Wake Forest women's team, a top ACC Division I program, has suffered six ACL tears in the past year, an increasingly common struggle for NCAA women's soccer coaches to navigate.

ACL tears have always been a danger in both men's and women's football, but as top players across the women's global game began dropping like flies, The Sporting News began asking questions. It turns out, there are scientific reasons to explain the wave of ACL tears that strike women's soccer.

Women soccer players more prone to ACL tears than men?
Over recent years it has become mainstream knowledge that women are, quite simply, more prone to serious knee injuries than men.

Slight anatomical differences between men's and women's bodies, largely concerning variations in hip structures, leave women at a higher risk of ACL tears or other serious knee damage. "These are trends that we've seen in the sports medicine world for years now," said Dr. Howard Luks, Chief of Sports Medicine and Arthroscopy at New York Medical College and a 20-year orthopedic sports surgeon with over a thousand ACL surgeries under his belt.

"Women in general are at higher risk. They have various differences compared to male athletic counterparts."

Research published by the Yale School of Medicine shows that women are two to eight times more likely to suffer ACL tears than men. Due to a wider hip structure, the knees of females are angled slightly differently, putting more pressure on the ACL. The differences are incredibly slight, but the effects can be witnessed over long periods of time.

"The ACL sits within a narrow notch on the inside of the knee joint," Dr. Luks noted. "That notch has more narrow confines in females, which can increase the risk of injuries."

While anatomical differences between sexes are a large contributing factor, there's another significant difference from males to females. There's medical evidence to support that women are significantly more prone to injury during their menstrual cycle. Given the private and personal nature of this information, research has not permeated the athletic community.

"Our ligament tissue changes based on the influence of hormones," Dr. Luks explains. "The best example of this is a woman's pelvis expands significantly due to the influence of hormones, but pelvis ligaments are not the only ones to change during the various cycles that occur."

Even with all the above, an individual's sex is not the only contributing factor in the ACL tears that occur with greater frequency in women's sports. Playing multiple sports, especially at a young age, can help.

"We've seen an increase in ACL tears due to single-sports participation," says Dr. Luks, explaining that repeated pressure in the exact same manner without variation over time can increase the risk of injury.

"The same stress on the same limbs in the same joints on the same ligaments month after month without any rest has an impact."

ACL injury prevention in women's sports
In recent years, women's soccer and other women's sports have sought to acknowledge the differences in injury risk, and to take steps to try and develop methods of prevention to counter the potential causes.

FIFA 11+ program

While there's no silver bullet when it comes to injury prevention, there's one program that stands out from the rest. The FIFA 11+ program was cited by multiple interview subjects for this report, and often without any prompting.

The FIFA 11+ program focuses on forcing athletes to build muscle memory for one key part of athletics, particularly soccer, that athletes often overlook: landing. The program is designed to be implemented as a short 10-minute warm-up performed before training and/or matches to positively reinforce proper landing techniques.

"They look at the way women jump and land on a surface, and what happens in their knees and ankles," says Brian Maddox, head athletic trainer for NWSL club North Carolina Courage. "They find that [women] move with more motion in their knees and hips when they land."

Dr. Luks, a proponent of the FIFA 11+ program, pointed to a superstar of the men's game for inspiration. "Watch Ronaldo when he lands on a header in the box. He lands on a flexed knee, the leg is as straight as possible, and when he lands he cushions the blow by going into a single-legged or a double-legged squat. These are all techniques that are taught [in the program] to diminish ACL ruptures.

"It's drilled into their heads," Dr. Luks explains. The idea being that such a simple action becomes healthy muscle memory. "Let's say you break your ankle, I put you in a cast, I take the cast off — your muscles are all atrophied. Half of that weakness is loss of muscle strength, but the other half of it is the lack of neuromuscular connections — your brain is no longer connected to those muscle fibers."

Dr. Luks' hypothetical metaphor is meant to show that building neuromuscular connections can create what we know as "muscle memory."

Wake Forest women's soccer senior defender Lyndon Wood, who serves as president of the school's Student Athlete Advisory Committee and is conducting her own research on ACL injuries in women's sports, said she brought the FIFA 11+ program to the Demon Deacons. It was quickly given approval by longtime head coach Tony da Luz.

"I felt like something needed to be done; anything we can do to keep one more girl on the field longer we should do," she said. "I brought it to [Wake Forest Sports Medicine program director] Dr. [John] Hubbard and Tony, and they were like 'Yeah, let's do it.'"

U.S. Soccer medical staff confirmed to The Sporting News that FIFA 11+ and other similar models are employed in training programs at all national team levels, although they would not dive into specifics of the programs at the different levels.

The FIFA 11+ program, however, still has yet to catch on everywhere. When Dr. Luks, whose three kids all play youth soccer, brought the FIFA 11+ program to the directors of their youth soccer programs and volunteered his time, they didn't jump at the opportunity.

"We went out to the schools assuming they would love it…no. Nobody wanted it. I can't explain it, and I was never given a good reason."

Special training regimens
The topic of a woman's menstrual cycle and how it affects injury risk in athletics is a sensitive one, and as a result, action has been slow in taking shape.

An assistant coach at a NCAA Division I women's lacrosse program in a Power 5 conference confirmed to the Sporting News that their program has just this season begun to track their athletes' cycles with the backing and participation from the players themselves.

With this information, women experiencing their menstrual cycle conduct separate, lower intensity training to minimize the risk of injury. It's not yet a practice that's widely adopted, and the same coach indicated that the women's soccer team at his school has yet to implement this same practice.

That's not surprising, says Maddox, the head trainer with the NWSL's Courage. "To my knowledge, it is not widely done in the U.S. because it can be a sensitive subject for some." Maddox says that he is aware of one top European club that does track their athletes' cycles, although he's not sure if they have yet to offer separate training based on the information.

It was widely covered following their 2019 Women's World Cup victory that U.S. women's national team players tracked their menstrual cycle throughout the four years leading into the tournament, and national team players publicly stated that there were several off-field programs implemented to complement this with regards to sleep and mental health. However, U.S. Soccer did not confirm whether these methods currently impact training intensity and injury prevention practices.

This may be the next step in the evolution of injury prevention in women's soccer if the USWNT's experience and that of other college programs yields positive results.

An assistant coach at another NCAA Division 1 women's lacrosse program confirmed to the Sporting News that their program suffered five ACL tears in the past year, and all five women were on their period at the time they were injured.

Mental health and injuries
In recent years mental health has gained increased attention throughout the athletics community, and its importance in injury prevention and recovery is being recognized as part of that push.

"Taking care of the athlete holistically…mentally and nutritionally, those resources are available to athletes these days when maybe they weren't as dialed in 15 or 20 years ago," says Maddox, who has prior athletic training experience in the NHL and minor league baseball.

"You can't disregard the mental aspect of it, this day and age every professional team across sports has those resources available to the athletes because it's useful."

When asked what she's learned through the recovery process, USWNT defender Tierna Davidson told The Sporting News, "Just to be patient with myself. It feels cheesy and simple, but I think as athletes we are impatient because we want results and we want to be 100 percent as quick as possible.

"But I think that through this process I have learned how to celebrate where I'm at in each stage, and not getting down on the fact that I suck at heading at the moment or I'm not as fast at the moment, or whatever it is."

A long way still to go
While more information is being gathered, some programs across the globe have been slow to implement change due to social and societal boundaries that are still difficult to breach.

"[ACL injury research] became a really hot topic in the late '90s and early 2000s," says Maddox. "That's when a lot of the research was conducted, specifically with regards to why women tear their ACLs more than men."

Maddox explains that strength training is a key part of injury prevention, but that the culture around women's sports doesn't lend itself to nearly the amount of strength training that is prevalent in men's sports.

"The way women are training from the youth on up…the emphasis in men's sports and boys sports is that you're not an athlete unless you lift weights. That culture is slowly hitting women's athletics, but it's behind the men."

When asked what they've learned in recent years regarding ACL tear prevention, the U.S. Soccer Federation didn't share any specific details or data points, except to confirm that it's top of mind with their programs.

"U.S. Soccer continuously builds loading programs for players. We work diligently with their clubs and/or universities in monitoring the players and develop individualized plans based on multiple factors in building out ACL prevention, but also soft tissue injuries as well. This has been a long-standing pillar for U.S. Soccer’s care of its players."

Why have so many women's soccer stars torn their ACLs?
The ability to pinpoint specific causes of injuries is ultimately an inexact science. When it comes to the human body, there are so many factors and variables that can affect an athlete's propensity or resistance to injury.

U.S. women's national team star Alex Morgan, who tore her ACL way back in high school, told The Sporting News during a USWNT press conference in the fall of 2022 that she thinks it's possible a shortened preseason and extended competition at the domestic level in the United States could be to blame for injuries in her part of the world.

"We look at the [NWSL] Challenge Cup, it was a great preseason tournament to have," Morgan said in early September in reference to the kickoff tournament of the U.S. women's professional season. "But having that bonus set for players to win, having it be a little more competitive than I think players were really ready for, having players playing 90 minutes week-in and week-out…is that the best for players in the first five weeks of the preseason? Probably not."

Dr. Luks says a quick ramp-up to competitive matches early in the season potentially increases the risk for injury. He explained how a proper and full preseason is critically important to avoiding injury during the year. Essentially, nerves that direct muscle movements connect to those muscles via "motor end plates" which degrade over time. Preseason, which features a slow increase in repetitive activity, is required to rebuild those connections.

"If you don't have connections to all the muscle fibers, I don't care how many weights you put on the rack, it's irrelevant, you're only exercising a third of the muscle fibers, because the other two-thirds don't have a connection to your brain, so they're not firing," Dr. Luks explains. "So that's such a critical component of a preseason program."

The Chicago Red Stars' Davidson, who suffered her ACL tear in preseason training in March 2022 before the Challenge Cup, was less convinced there was a common link in the rash of injuries that afflicted the stars of the women's game in 2022, but she acknowledged that an accumulation of minutes could potentially be responsible for her injury.

"I definitely think you can point to the volume and load that a lot of international players take through their club and country, so I'm sure that a bit of fatigue has to do with it. Sometimes it could just be coincidence, I don't know everybody else's schedule, but I do think there could have been some overuse of players."

A look at the numbers does support Davidson's suspicions. From January to November of 2021, the 24-year-old played 3,224 minutes across both club and international duty, including 1,780 minutes after the start of August. Add in three February 2022 national team appearances in the SheBelieves Cup, and with the short preseason ramp-up, she suffered her tear in March.

Many of the top international players injured this spring had similarly heavy loads. The chart below illustrate the range of matches and minutes played by some of the stars who suffered the ACL injuries (statistics via FBref.com).

Work load for soccer stars prior to ACL injury
(Note: Players listed below in alphabetical order.)

Player Date Range Games Minutes
Tierna Davidson Jan 22, 2021 — Nov 30, 2021 41 3,224
Giulia Gwynn Aug 29, 2021 — Oct 2, 2022 43 3,305
Marie-Antoinette Katoto Aug 5, 2020 — Jun 25, 2022 66 5,145
Catarina Macario Jul 1, 2021 — Jun 1, 2022 45 3,021
Dzsenifer Marozsan Jan 15, 2021 — Apr 12, 2022 70 4,893
Christen Press Oct 4, 2020 — Jun 11, 2022 36 2,686
Alexia Putellas Sep 19, 2020 — Jun 25, 2022 36 2,846
The table above shows 30-year-old Marozsan played close to 5,000 minutes across a 15-month period. So did 24-year-old Katoto, who logged 5,145 minutes over two years. Christen Press's numbers don't quite jump off the page, but what stands out is that she had little activity between mid-July 2021 before the Challenge Cup in March 2022.

The schedule congestion is not unique to these players specifically, but many top players across the globe are juggling busy club and international schedules that are increasing in load as the women's game explodes in popularity.

Alex Morgan, who's been a professional since 2011, ultimately labeled the rash of star knee injuries in 2022 an "unlucky run." But what is clear is that there are more variables that impact a women's soccer player's injury chances than in the case of a male player. And there's more research and information sharing that still can be done to investigate each of those factors.

Was it an unlucky run? We'll find out soon enough in the lead-up to the expanded Women's World Cup with 32 teams in July 2023. Given the names forced to sit out due to injury in the summer of 2022, a similar rash of injuries would not go unnoticed ahead of the biggest tournament in the sport.

Though they be but little, they are fierce.

Airborne particles smaller than 50 nanometers across can intensify storms, particularly over relatively pristine regions such as the Amazon rainforest or the oceans, new research suggests. In a simulation, a plume of these tiny particles increased a storm’s intensity by as much as 50 percent.

Called ultrafine aerosols, the particles are found in everything from auto emissions to wildfire smoke to printer toner. These aerosols were thought to be too small to affect cloud formation. But the new work suggests they can play a role in the water cycle of the Amazon Basin — which, in turn, has a profound effect on the planet’s hydrologic cycle, researchers report in the Jan. 26 Science.
“I have studied aerosol interactions with storms for a decade,” says Jiwen Fan, an atmospheric scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., who led the new study. “This is the first time I’ve seen such a huge impact” from these minute aerosols.

Larger aerosol particles greater than 100 nanometers, such as soot or black carbon, are known to help seed clouds. Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses onto these particles, called cloud condensation nuclei, and forms tiny droplets. But water vapor doesn’t condense easily around the tinier particles. For that to be possible, the air must contain even more water vapor than is usually required to form clouds, reaching a very high state of supersaturation.

Such a state is rare — larger aerosols are usually also present to form water droplets, removing that extra water from the atmosphere, Fan says. But in humid places with relatively low background air pollution levels, such as over the Amazon, supersaturation is common, she says.
From 2014 to 2015, Brazilian and U.S. research agencies collaborated on a field experiment to collect data on weather and pollution conditions in the Amazon Basin. As part of the experiment, several observation sites tracked plumes of air pollution traveling from the city of Manaus out across the rainforest. During the warm, wet season, there is little difference day to day in most meteorological conditions over the rainforest, such as temperature, humidity and wind direction, Fan says. So a passing pollution plume represents a distinct, detectable perturbation to the system.

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The international team examined vertical wind motion, or updrafts, and aerosol concentration data from one of these stations from March to May 2014. When a large plume of aerosols with an abundance of ultrafine particles passed by an observation station, the researchers observed a corresponding, more powerful vertical wind motion and heavier rain. Such updrafts intensify storms, helping to drive stronger circulation.

Next, the researchers conducted simulations of an actual storm that occurred on March 17, 2014, matching its temperature, wind and water vapor conditions, as well as a low level of background aerosols in the atmosphere. Then, the team introduced several pollution scenarios to interact with the storm, including no plume and a typical plume from the Manaus metropolis. The results suggested that the ultrafine aerosol particles, in particular, were not only acting as cloud condensation nuclei over the Amazon Basin, but also that the water droplets the aerosols created significantly strengthened the gathering storm.

If the conditions are right, the sheer abundance of the ultrafine particles in such a plume would rapidly create a very large number of cloud droplets. The formation of those droplets would also suddenly release a lot of latent heat — released from a substance as it changes from a vapor to a liquid — into the atmosphere. The heat would rise, creating updrafts and quickly strengthening the storm.

Aside from the Amazon, Fan notes that such pristine, humid conditions can also exist over large swaths of the oceans. One recent study in Geophysical Research Letters that she points to found a link between well-traveled shipping lanes, which would contain abundant exhaust including ultrafine aerosols, and an increase in lightning strikes. “This mechanism may have been at play there,” she says.

Atmospheric scientist Joel Thornton of the University of Washington in Seattle, who led the study on the shipping exhaust, says it’s possible that ultrafine particles play a role in that scenario. “What this paper does is raise the stakes in needing to develop a deeper, more accurate understanding of the sources and fates of atmospheric ultrafine particles,” Thornton says.

Meteorologist Johannes Quaas of the University of Leipzig in Germany, who was not involved in either study, agrees. “It’s a very interesting hypothesis.”

But the observations described in the new study don’t definitively demonstrate that ultrafine aerosols alone drive updrafts, Quaas adds. The weather conditions may appear highly consistent from day to day, but such systems are still highly chaotic. Everything from wind to temperature to how the land surface interacts with incoming solar radiation may be variable, he notes. “In reality, it’s not just the aerosols that change.”

California’s crops are creating some noxious air.

The Golden State is at the vanguard in the United States in reducing auto emissions of nitrogen oxide gases, which help produce toxic smog and acid rain. But the NOx pollution problem isn’t limited to auto exhaust. California’s vast agricultural lands — particularly soils heavily treated with nitrogen fertilizers — are now responsible for as much as 51 percent of total NOx emissions across the state, researchers report January 31 in Science Advances.
The catchall term “NOx gases” generally refers to two pollution-promoting gases: nitric oxide, or NO, and nitrogen dioxide, or NO2. Those gases react with incoming sunlight to produce ozone in the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere. At high levels, tropospheric ozone can cause respiratory problems from asthma to emphysema.

Between 2005 and 2008, regulations issued by the California Air Resources Board on transportation exhaust reduced NOx levels in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento by 9 percent per year. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has increasingly recognized nitrogen fertilizer use as a significant source of NOx gases to the atmosphere.

NOx gases are produced in oxygen-poor soils when microbes break apart nitrogen compounds in the fertilizer, a process called denitrification. The release of those gases from fertilized soils increases at high temperatures due to increased microbial activity, says Darrel Jenerette, an ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the new study.

Jenerette and others have studied local NOx emissions from soils in California, but no statewide assessment existed. So Maya Almaraz, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues designed a study to examine the question — both from above and below.
Using a plane equipped with scientific instruments including a chemiluminescence analyzer to detect NOx gases in the atmosphere, the researchers measured the concentrations of the gases above the San Joaquin Valley, an area of California’s fertile Central Valley, over six days at the end of July and beginning of August. The team also simulated NOx emissions from soils across the state, using the San Joaquin Valley data to ensure that the simulations gave accurate results. Finally, the researchers compared those data with nitrogen fertilizer inputs, as estimated by crop type and U.S. Department of Agriculture fertilizer consumption data.

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Croplands are contributing 20 to 51 percent of the total NOx in California’s air, Almaraz’s team reports. In the simulations, those soil emissions were particularly sensitive to two factors: climate, especially temperature, and rates of nitrogen input. That findings suggests that regions with greater inputs of nitrogen fertilizer will also see greater soil emissions — and that the emission of NOx gases from the soils will also increase as temperatures rise in the region due to climate change.

Although food demands — and the need for fertilizer for crops — are likely to increase in the future, there are numerous possible ways to limit unwanted nitrogen fertilizer spillover, the researchers note. For example, farmers can use more efficient fertilization strategies such as adjusting how much fertilizer is used depending on specific growing stages, or planting what are called cover crops along with the target crops that enrich soils and consume the excess nitrogen.

Almaraz’s team has produced an important finding, Jenerette says. “The combination of bottom-up soil emission measurements and top-down airborne measurements provide strong evidence for their emission assessments,” he says. The finding that NOx emission rates will increase with warming temperatures also highlights the urgency of taking steps to better manage nitrogen fertilizer use in a warming world, he says.

Female polar bears prowling springtime sea ice have extreme weight swings, some losing more than 10 percent of their body mass in just over a week. And the beginnings of bear video blogging help explain why.

An ambitious study of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in Alaska has found that their overall metabolic rate is 1.6 times greater than thought, says wildlife biologist Anthony Pagano of the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage. With bodies that burn energy fast, polar bears need to eat a blubbery adult ringed seal (or 19 newborn seals) every 10 to 12 days just to maintain weight, Pagano and his colleagues report in the Feb. 2 Science. Camera-collar vlogs, a bear’s-eye view of the carnivores’ diet and lifestyle secrets, show just how well individual bears are doing.
The study puts the firmest numbers yet on basic needs of polar bears, whose lives are tied to the annual spread and shrinkage of Arctic sea ice, Pagano says. As the climate has warmed, the annual ice minimum has grown skimpier by some 14 percent per decade (SN Online: 9/19/16), raising worries about polar bear populations. These bears hunt the fat-rich seals that feed and breed around ice, and as seal habitat shrinks, so do the bears’ prospects.
Pagano and colleagues used helicopters to search for polar bears on ice about off the Alaska coast in the Beaufort Sea. It’s “a lot of grueling hours looking out the window watching tracks and looking at whiteness,” he says.
After tracking down female bears without cubs, the researchers fitted the animals with a camera collar. A full day’s doings of bears on the sea ice have been mostly a matter of speculation, Pagano says. Collar videos showed that 90 percent of seal hunts are ambushes, often by a bear lurking near a hole in the ice until a seal bursts up for a gulp of air. Videos also caught early glimpses of the breeding season and what passes for courtship among polar bears. Males, Pagano says, “pretty much harass the female until she’ll submit.”

The researchers also injected each bear with a dose of water with extra neutrons in both the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Eight to 11 days later, the team caught the same bear to check what was left of the altered atoms. Lower traces of the special form of oxygen indicated that the bear’s body chemistry had been very active, and that the bear had exhaled lots of carbon dioxide. (The unusual form of hydrogen let scientists correct results for oxygen atoms lost in H2O, for instance when the bear urinated.)

Using CO₂ data from nine females, Pagano and his colleagues calculated the field metabolic rates for polar bears going about their springtime lives. The team found that female bears need to eat a bit more than 12,000 kilocalories (or what human dieters call calories) a day just to stay even. That estimate adds some 4,600 kilocalories a day to the old estimate. But merely maintaining weight isn’t enough for a polar lifestyle. To survive lean times, polar bears typically pack on extra weight in spring.

To get a broader view of the bears’ energy needs, similar metabolic measurements for other seasons would be useful, says physiological ecologist John Whiteman of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. That could help resolve whether and how much bear metabolism drops when there’s little food, a response that might protect bears during hard times. Using temperature loggers to estimate metabolic rates, he has seen only a gradual decline in metabolic rates in summer as food gets tougher to find. Winter metabolic rates remain a mystery.

Hunting success and bear activity are only part of the picture of polar bear health, says ecotoxicologist Sabrina Tartu, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, which is based in Tromsø. Tartu coauthored a 2017 paper showing that toxic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, can build up in bear fat. Such “pollutants could, by direct or indirect pathways, disrupt metabolic rates,” she says. So changing the climate is far from the only way humankind could affect polar bear energy and hunting dynamics.

Ultrasounds during pregnancy can be lots of fun, offering peeks at the baby-to-be. But ultrasounds aren’t just a way to get Facebook fodder. They are medical procedures that involve sound waves, technology that could, in theory, affect a growing fetus.

With that concern in mind, some researchers have wondered if the rising rates of autism diagnoses could have anything to do with the increasing number of ultrasound scans that women receive during pregnancy.

The answer is no, suggests a study published online February 12 in JAMA Pediatrics. On average, children with autism were exposed to fewer ultrasounds during pregnancy, scientists found. The results should be “very reassuring” to parents, says study coauthor Jodi Abbott, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine.
To back up: Autism rates have risen sharply over the last several decades (though are possibly plateauing). Against this backdrop, researchers are searching for the causes of autism — and there are probably many. Autism is known to run in families, and scientists have found some of the particular genetic hot spots that may contribute. Other factors, such as older parents and maternal obesity, can also increase the risk of autism.

Scientists suspect that in many cases, autism is caused by many factors, all working together. Could prenatal ultrasounds, which have become more routine and more powerful, be one of those factors? These scans use sound waves that penetrate mothers’ bodies, and then collect the waves that bounce back, forming a picture of fetal tissues. During this process, the waves may be able to heat up the tissue they travel through.

Work on animals has suggested that ultrasounds can in fact interfere with fetal brain development, derailing the normal movements of cells that populate the brain. Mice exposed to 30 or more minutes of ultrasound in utero had abnormal brain development, for instance. But it’s not at all clear whether a similar thing might happen in humans, and if so, whether such effects might contribute to autism.
The new study compared ultrasound exposure among three groups: 107 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, 104 children diagnosed with a developmental delay, and 209 typically developing children. On average, the children with autism were exposed to 5.9 ultrasound scans over the course of pregnancy. Children with developmental delays were exposed to 6.1 scans, and typically developing children were exposed to 6.3 scans, the researchers found. (For all groups, these numbers are way above the one to two scans per low-risk pregnancy recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.)

For all three groups, the duration of the scans was similar. So was the thermal index, an indication of how much warming might have happened. “In almost every parameter we looked at, ultrasound seemed perfectly safe,” says study coauthor N. Paul Rosman, a pediatric neurologist at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine.

One measure was different, the researchers found: During the first trimester, mothers who had children with autism had slightly deeper ultrasounds than women who had typically developing children and children with developmental delays. Ultrasound depth measures the distance from the transducer paddle that emits the waves to the spot that’s being imaged. The measure “has a lot to do with the size of the mother and the distance between her skin, where the ultrasound transducer is, and where the baby is,” Abbott says.

Lots of questions remain about whether — and how — ultrasound depth, or other aspects of the technology, might affect fetuses. “The study certainly wasn’t perfect,” Rosman says. It combed back through medical records of women instead of following women from the beginning. And it didn’t control for certain traits that may influence autism, such as smoking.

The results suggest that on their own, ultrasounds don’t cause autism spectrum disorder, says Sara Jane Webb of Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, who cowrote a JAMA Pediatrics companion piece. “At this time, there is no evidence that ultrasound is a primary contributor to poor developmental outcomes when delivered within medical guidelines,” she says.

While there’s more science to sort out here, the news is reassuring for women who might be worried about getting scanned. Women should follow their doctors’ guidance on ultrasounds, Rosman says. “We don’t think there’s anything in this study to recommend otherwise.”

“Pop” goes the knuckle — but why?

Scientists disagree over why cracking your knuckles makes noise. Now, a new mathematical explanation suggests the sound results from the partial collapse of tiny gas bubbles in the joints’ fluid.

Most explanations of knuckle noise involve bubbles, which form under the low pressures induced by finger manipulations that separate the joint. While some studies pinpoint a bubble’s implosion as the sound’s source, a paper in 2015 showed that the bubbles don’t fully implode. Instead, they persist in the joints up to 20 minutes after cracking, suggesting it’s not the bubble’s collapse that creates noise, but its formation (SN: 5/16/15, p. 16).
But it wasn’t clear how a bubble’s debut could make sounds that are audible across a room. So two engineers from Stanford University and École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, took another crack at solving the mystery.

The sound may come from bubbles that collapse only partway, the two researchers report March 29 in Scientific Reports. A mathematical simulation of a partial bubble collapse explained both the dominant frequency of the sound and its volume. That finding would also explain why bubbles have been observed sticking around in the fluid.

Shimmering, gelatinous comb jellies wouldn’t appear to have much to hide. But their mostly see-through bodies cloak a nervous system unlike that of any other known animal, researchers report in the April 21 Science.

In the nervous systems of everything from anemones to aardvarks, electrical impulses pass between nerve cells, allowing for signals to move from one cell to the next. But the ctenophores’ cobweb of neurons, called a nerve net, is missing these distinct connection spots, or synapses. Instead, the nerve net is fused together, with long, stringy neurons sharing a cell membrane, a new 3-D map of its structure shows.
While the nerve net has been described before, no one had generated a high-resolution, detailed picture of it.

It’s possible the bizarre tissue represents a second, independent evolutionary origin of a nervous system, say Pawel Burkhardt, a comparative neurobiologist at the University of Bergen in Norway, and colleagues.

Superficially similar to jellyfish, ctenophores are often called comb jellies because they swim using rows of beating, hairlike combs. The enigmatic phylum is considered one of the earliest to branch off the animal tree of life. So ctenophores’ possession of a simple nervous system has been of particular interest to scientists interested in how such systems evolved.

Previous genetics research had hinted at the strangeness of the ctenophore nervous system. For instance, a 2018 study couldn’t find a cell type in ctenophores with a genetic signature that corresponded to recognizable neurons, Burkhardt says.

Burkhardt, along with neurobiologist Maike Kittelmann of Oxford Brookes University in England and colleagues, examined young sea walnuts (Mnemiopsis leidyi) using electron microscopes, compiling many images to reconstruct the entire net structure. Their 3-D map of a 1-day-old sea walnut revealed the funky synapse-free fusion between the five sprawling neurons that made up the tiny ctenophore’s net.
The conventional view is that neurons and the rest of the nervous system evolved once in animal evolutionary history. But given this “unique architecture” and ctenophores’ ancient position in the animal kingdom, it raises the possibility that nerve cells actually evolved twice, Burkhardt says. “I think that’s exciting.”

But he adds that further work — especially on the development of these neurons — is needed to help verify their evolutionary origin.

The origins of the animal nervous system is a murky area of research. Sponges — the traditional competitors for the title of most ancient animal — don’t have a nervous system, or muscles or fundamental vision proteins called opsins, for that matter. But there’s been mounting evidence to suggest that ctenophores are actually the most ancient animal group, older even than sponges (SN: 12/12/13).

If ctenophores arose first, it “implies that either sponges have lost a massive number of features, or that the ctenophores effectively evolved them all independently,” says Graham Budd, a paleobiologist at Uppsala University in Sweden who was not involved in the research.

If sponges emerged first, it’s still possible that ctenophores evolved their nerve net independently rather than inheriting it from a neuron-bearing ancestor, Burkhardt says. Ctenophores have other neurons outside the nerve net, such as mesogleal neurons embedded in a ctenophore’s gelatinous body layer and sensory cells, the latter of which may communicate with the nerve net to adjust the beating of the combs. So, it’s possible they’re a mosaic of two nervous systems of differing evolutionary origins.

But Joseph Ryan, a bioinformatician at the University of Florida in Gainesville, doesn’t think the results necessarily point to the parallel evolution of a nervous system. Given how long ctenophores have been around — especially if they are older than sponges — the ancestral nervous system may have had plenty of time to evolve into something weird and highly-specialized, says Ryan, who was not part of the study. “We’re dealing with close to a billion years of evolution. We’re going to expect strange things to happen.”

The findings are “one more bit of the jigsaw puzzle,” Budd says. “There’s a whole bunch we don’t know about these rather common and rather well-known animals.”

For instance, it’s unclear how the nerve net works. Our neurons use rapid changes in voltage across their cell membranes to send signals, but the nerve net might work quite differently, Burkhardt says.

There are reports of potentially similar systems in other animals, such as by-the-wind-sailor jellies (Velella velella). Studying them in detail, along with nerve nets in other ctenophore species, could determine just how unusual this synapse-less nervous system is.

Northern elephant seals are the true masters of the power nap.

On long trips out to sea, the seals snooze less than 20 minutes at a time, researchers report in the April 21 Science. The animals average just two hours of shut-eye per day while swimming offshore for months — rivaling African elephants for the least sleep measured among mammals (SN: 3/1/17).

“It’s important to map these extremes of [sleep behavior] across the animal kingdom to get a better sense of the evolution and the function of sleep for all mammals, including humans,” says Jessica Kendall-Bar, an ecophysiologist at the University of California, San Diego. Knowing how seals catch their z’s could also guide conservation efforts to protect places where they sleep.
Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) spend most of the year out in the Pacific Ocean. On these odysseys, the animals forage around the clock for fish, squid and other food to sustain their enormous bodies, which can be as hefty as a car (SN: 2/4/22). Because northern elephant seals are most vulnerable to sharks and killer whales at the surface, they come up for air only a couple minutes at a time between 10- to 30-minute deep dives (SN: 9/28/02).

“People had known that these seals dive almost all the time when they’re out in the ocean, but it wasn’t known if and how they sleep,” says Niels Rattenborg, a neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Seewiesen, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

To find out if the seals sleep while diving, Kendall-Bar and her colleagues developed a watertight EEG cap for the animals. Using the cap and other sensors, the team tracked the brain waves, heart rates and 3-D motion of 13 young female seals, including five at a lab and six hanging out at coastal Año Nuevo State Park north of Santa Cruz, Calif. EEG data recorded while seals were slumbering revealed what the animals’ naptime brain waves looked like.

Kendall-Bar’s team also took two sensor-strapped seals from Año Nuevo and released them at another beach about 60 kilometers south. To swim home, the seals had to cross the deep Monterey Canyon — a locale similar to the deep, predator-fraught waters frequented by seals on months-long foraging trips. Matching the seals’ EEG readings to their diving motions on this journey showed how northern elephant seals sleep on long voyages.

The animals first swim 60 to 100 meters below the surface, then relax into a glide, Kendall-Bar says. As they nod off into slow-wave sleep, the animals keep holding themselves upright for several minutes. But as REM sleep sets in, so does sleep paralysis. The animals flip upside-down and drift in gentle spirals toward the seafloor. Seals can descend hundreds of meters deep during these naps — far below where their predators normally prowl. When the seals wake after five to 10 minutes of sleep, they swim up to the surface. The whole routine takes about 20 minutes.

Looking for that distinct sleep dive motion, the researchers could pick out naps in the dive records of 334 adult seals that had been outfitted with tracking tags from 2004 to 2019. Those sleep patterns revealed that northern elephant seals conk out, on average, around two hours per day while on months-long foraging missions. But the seals sleep nearly 11 hours per day while on land to mate and molt, where they can indulge in long, beachside siestas without worrying about predators.
“What the seals are doing might be something like what we do when we sleep in on the weekend, but it’s on a much longer timescale,” Rattenborg says. He and his colleagues have found a similar feast-and-famine style of sleep in great frigate birds, which fly over the ocean (SN: 6/30/16). “Although they can sleep while they’re flying,” he says, “they sleep less than an hour a day for up to a week at a time, and once back on land, they sleep over 12 hours a day.”

Curiously, northern elephant seals’ sleep habits are quite different from how other marine mammals have been seen sleeping in labs. “Many of them … sleep in just half of their brain at a time,” Kendall-Bar says. That half-awake state allows dolphins, fur seals and sea lions to practice constant vigilance, literally sleeping with one eye open.

“I think it’s pretty cool that elephant seals are doing this without [one-sided] sleep,” Kendall-Bar says. “They’re shutting off both halves of their brain completely and leaving themselves vulnerable.” It seems the key to enjoying such deep sleep is sleeping deep in the sea.

MINNEAPOLIS — Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, new observations suggest. An excess of positrons zipping past Earth suggests that the bubbles are the result of a burp from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole after a meal millions of years ago.

For over a decade, scientists have known about bubbles of gas, or Fermi bubbles, extending above and below the Milky Way’s center (SN: 11/9/10). Other observations have since spotted the bubbles in microwave radiation and X-rays (SN: 12/9/20). But astronomers still aren’t quite sure how they formed.
A jet of high-energy electrons and positrons, emitted by the supermassive black hole in one big burst, could explain the bubbles’ multi-wavelength light, physicist Ilias Cholis reported April 18 at the American Physical Society meeting.

In the initial burst, most of the particles would have been launched along jets aimed perpendicular to the galaxy’s disk. As the particles interacted with other galactic matter, they would lose energy and cause the emission of different wavelengths of light.

Those jets would have been aimed away from Earth, so those particles can never be detected. But some of the particles could have escaped along the galactic disk, perpendicular to the bubbles, and end up passing Earth. “It could be that just now, some of those positrons are hitting us,” says Cholis, of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.

So Cholis and Iason Krommydas of Rice University in Houston analyzed positrons detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station. The pair found an excess of positrons whose present-day energies could correspond to a burst of activity from the galactic center between 3 million and 10 million years ago, right around when the Fermi bubbles are thought to have formed, Cholis said at the meeting.

The result, Cholis said, supports the idea that the Fermi bubbles came from a time when the galaxy’s central black hole was busier than it is today.