Anuary/February 2021. Vol. 42, Issue 1 Discover

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• SPECIAL ISSUE! •

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SCIENCE

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021

THAT MATTERS

THE STATE OF

SCIENCE 2021

COVID-19 CRISIS HANDBOOK WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW p.22

PLUS RACISM & SCIENCE: AN INSIDE LOOK p.36 FIXING FOOD ALLERGIES p.47 MURDER HORNET MAYHEM p.62 TRUTH ABOUT 5G NETWORKS p.68 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

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CONTENTS January/February 2021 VOL. 42, ISSUE 1

THE STATE OF

SCIENCE 2021

20

The past year unfolded like a dark satire: natural disasters, racial violence and the virus that would not quit. To set the stage for 2021, we turned to experts. Here’s their mile-high view of coronavirus and the biggest science stories it eclipsed in 2020. COVID

22 All Eyes on COVID ANNA FUNK

27 The Social Symptoms of COVID-19 ALEX ORLANDO

EXPEDITION COVER: CORONA BOREALIS/ADOBE STOCK. THIS PAGE: VER0NICKA/SHUTTERSTOCK

30 Did COVID Heal

47 New Hope in Fighting

Nature?

Space Travel

Food Allergies

KATE GOLEMBIEWSKI

ERIC BETZ

KENNETH MILLER

34 The Virus That

36

38 One Giant Leap for

41 The World’s Biggest

48 Dawn of the Stem

Changed Science

Polar Expedition

Cell Revolution?

ALLISON WHITTEN

TOM YULSMAN

KENNETH MILLER

RACISM: AN INSIDE LOOK Black in Academia

44 Strange Space Signals STEPHEN ORNES

50 Editing the Mitochondria NATHANIEL SCHARPING

CYDNEY H. DUPREE

46

THE BODY CRISPR Gets Under the Skin NATHANIEL SCHARPING

UNEARTHED

52 A Water-Dwelling Dino, Lost and Found RILEY BLACK

JAN UAR Y/ FEB RUAR Y 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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CONTENTS

p.52

p.59 p.53

63 Anyons Join the

Evolutionary Clues

Particle Party

BRIDGET ALEX

STEPHEN ORNES

54 Nope, This Skull Was

66

56 Forest Islands Amid a

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HOT SCIENCE Take a dive into the mystery of dark matter, venemous snakebites, a sanctuary for seahorses and much more.

67 The Supernova That Wasn’t ERIC BETZ

Cosmos

INBOX Readers reflect on the past 40 years of Discover, Euclid’s Fifth Postulate and a lot of homemade volcanoes.

STEPHEN ORNES

BRIDGET ALEX

WATER & AIR

6 Big Excitement Over Tiny Fluctuations

Grassland Sea

58 New Oceans in the

EDITOR’S NOTE Hindsight is a powerful tool, especially in 2020.

ERIK KLEMETTI

BRIDGET ALEX

RILEY BLACK

5

64 A Rocky Start

No Baboon

55 A Tale of Two Lizards

DEPARTMENTS

TECH

68 Meet the Xenobots JONATHON KEATS

ERIC BETZ

68 With 5G, It’s All 59 A Glimmer of Hope for Global Emissions

About Speed JONATHON KEATS

TOM YULSMAN

69 Satellite 60 Killer Pollution NANCY AVERETT

Constellations Go on Trial ERIC BETZ

62

FORCES Murder Hornets on the Run KATE GOLEMBIEWSKI

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PHOTO GALLERY

70 Year in Photos JENNIFER WALTER

74

#SCIENCEIRL A Portland neighborhood’s fight to save a local sequoia tree.

FROM LEFT: HERSCHEL HOFFMEYER/SHUTTERSTOCK; REUTERS/ALAMY; LDPHOTORO/SHUTTERSTOCK

53 Chipped Teeth Offer

EDITOR’S NOTE ®

BY STEPHEN C. GEORGE

M AG A ZINE

STEPHEN C. GEORGE Editorial Director ELIZABETH M. WEBER Design Director

Hindsight Is 2020

EDITORIAL TIMOTHY MEINCH Features Editor ELISA R. NECKAR Production Editor ANNA FUNK Associate Editor ALEX ORLANDO Assistant Editor JENNIFER WALTER Assistant Editor HAILEY MCLAUGHLIN Editorial Assistant

U

nprecedented. It’s a word I’ve heard so often this year that it very nearly lost all meaning for me (maybe for you, too). But it certainly is apt when I look back on 2020 and try to describe the past 12 months in one word. (Actually, I have many other individual words to describe the year, but they’re all unprintable.) So, when it came time to begin work on our biggest issue of the year, our traditional round-up of the top science stories, we made the equally unprecedented decision to devote the lion’s share of space to one topic. We begin our coverage with a kind of handbook to the year of COVID-19 (page 22). How could we not? The virus has dominated virtually every aspect of our lives; science stories don’t come any bigger. Indeed, some of you may wonder why we didn’t simply devote the entire issue to COVID-19. We certainly could have. But here’s the thing: Pandemics don’t stop science in other areas. It’s an encouraging thought, and one that we’ve tried to illustrate in this issue. While so many of us were hunkered down to ride out the coronavirus storm, scientists actively engaged in developing new advances in gene editing, scouting the Arctic, studying the skies, keeping an eye on those murder hornets, uncovering new information about our oldest ancestors and so much more. As you read through this issue, I hope you find stories about science and research that you didn’t even know were occurring. Sharing that joy of discovery is one of the things I love most about working at Discover, especially this year, when we could all stand to be distracted by news of great scientific endeavors. By something inspiring and amazing. And yes, by something unprecedented. Aside from COVID, what was the biggest science story of the year for you? Email me at [email protected] and let me know. Have a great New Year!

Contributing Editors BRIDGET ALEX, TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS, LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER, STEVE NADIS, JULIE REHMEYER, DARLENE CAVALIER (special projects)

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM MEGAN SCHMIDT Digital Editor

Contributors BRIDGET ALEX, ERIC BETZ, ERIK KLEMETTI, JUSTIN MULLINS, LESLIE NEMO, NEUROSKEPTIC, COREY S. POWELL, SCISTARTER, TOM YULSMAN

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INBOX

of hyperbolic geometry to the mind. Historically, however, one should note that a century before Gauss, Lobachevsky and Bolyai, an Italian Jesuit, Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (1667–1733) published the book Euclid Freed of Every Flaw, in which he attempted to establish Euclid’s Fifth Postulate by ruling out the possibilities that the sum of the angles of a triangle was either greater or less than 180 degrees. After ruling out the case for greater than 180 degrees, he studied the case when the sum was less than 180 degrees, and went on to prove many theorems that are now

SPECIAL 4OTH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE

®

SCIENCE

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020

THAT MATTERS

OUR ROBOTIC FUTURE HOW MACHINES ARE REDEFINING RESEARCH p.48 SUPER BOTS WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE p.40

The architecture of healing p.56 Electric cars make some noise p.66

BEFORE BOLYAI (“Your Hyperbolic Mind,” July/August 2020)

As a general relativist who is used to working in curved spaces, I found the article by Stephen Ornes quite fascinating, as I had no idea of the applications

You again?

theorems of hyperbolic geometry. Unfortunately, he rejected this non-Euclidean geometry as absolutely false, and his work was largely neglected until it was resurrected by Eugenio Beltrami. Frank R. Tangherlini San Diego, Calif.

ANNIVERSARY WISHES (September/October 2020)

I just received the 40thanniversary edition of Discover. Has it been that long? I may be a charter subscriber. I’m 83 and still curious. Thank you for a lot of years of good reading. Molly Harlich, Port Townsend, Wash.

ERUPTION EFFECTS (“Lessons From the Mountain”/ ”After the Blast,” September/October 2020)

Your anniversary special highlighting the May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens takes me back to that time, when I served as director of the science fair at my daughter’s elementary school. When check-in day finally arrived, they just kept coming: Volcanoes made of rocks, sand, garden soil, mud, paper, wood, papier-mâché, construction paper, fabric, glue, paint and more! Mary Talbot Sunnyvale, Calif.

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Also available in 1 MONTH SUPPLY. Contains COMPREHENSIVE FORMULATION of herbs, vitamins, amino acids & zinc *These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

HOT SCIENCE T H E L ATE ST N E WS AN D N OTE S DARK MATTER • SNAKEBITE STORY • SEAHORSE SANCTUARY • GAMES TO PLAY BOOK & PODCAST REVIEWS • ANCIENT CITIES • FICTION READERS

MISSION: MARS SUPPORT NASA pilots Troy Asher and Stu Broce are masked up and mission ready as they step up to their next flight. Normally, they fly planes such as a modified Gulfstream jet, brimming with data-collection instruments for the agency’s airborne science research. But when COVID-19 grounded those missions, pilots like Asher and Broce got new orders: Shuttle personnel from California’s Armstrong Flight Research Center (above) to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, so they could ready the newest Mars rover, Perseverance, for launch. Those efforts paid off when the robotic explorer set out on its sevenmonth voyage to the Red Planet on July 30. — ALEX ORLANDO; IMAGE BY NASA/LAUREN HUGHES JAN UAR Y/ FEB RUAR Y 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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HOT SCIENCE

HEAD-TO-HEAD

This blurry cloud is actually a galaxy, and yes, it’s weird that you can see through it to the galaxies beyond. Some astronomers think galaxy DF2 is see-through because it’s missing dark matter. Others aren’t convinced.

Do All Galaxies Have Dark Matter? SOME 60 MILLION light-

years from Earth — by the estimate of one team of researchers, anyway — a pair of strange galaxies is causing a cosmic stir. The bizarre galaxies, named NGC 1052-DF2 and NGC 1052-DF4 (or DF2 and DF4, for short), are the first known galaxies born without any significant amount of dark matter. If confirmed, their existence would throw a wrench into our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve. But, as

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Carl Sagan liked to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And, according to some researchers, the evidence for these dark-matterdeficient galaxies doesn’t hold up. THE CLAIM:

NOTHING TO SEE HERE Astrophysicist Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University was certainly surprised when he first spotted DF2. After data from the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the

Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Telescope were analyzed, the implications were clear: DF2 isn’t full of dark matter like other galaxies. “This thing is astonishing,” says van Dokkum, “a gigantic blob that you can look through. It’s so sparse that you see all of the galaxies behind it. It is literally a see-through galaxy.” The astronomers looked to the speed of DF2’s globular clusters (large groups of old stars) to estimate how much mass the galaxy holds. When they compared

NASA, ESA AND P. VAN DOKKUM/YALE UNIVERSITY

THE DISCOVERY OF TWO GHOSTLY GALAXIES CREATED A HULLABALOO IN THE ASTRONOMICAL COMMUNITY. BUT THE JURY’S STILL OUT ON WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON.

their mass estimate to how much matter was visible, the two were a close match, suggesting the galaxy is only composed of visible matter. This calculation depends on an accurate assessment of the distance to the galaxy, however. Addressing criticisms about their estimate, van Dokkum’s group updated their DF2 distance to about 61 million light-years — slightly closer to Earth, but still within the range where it would have negligible dark matter. The group went on to find a second, similar galaxy, DF4, which likewise has an apparent dearth of dark matter. “I think this is definitive,” says van Dokkum. “The [data] cannot be argued with: It is caused by well-understood stellar physics, and [is] as direct as distance indicators get.” THE COUNTERPOINT:

FROM TOP: MILLENNIUM-II SIMULATION; ROEN KELLY/DISCOVER

YOU’VE GOT IT ALL WRONG Ignacio Trujillo of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias agrees that if DF2 were 60 million to 65 million lightyears away, as van Dokkum suspects, then it would be a strong candidate for the first example of a galaxy born without dark matter. But if DF2 is closer, the galaxy’s observed properties would fall in line with your typical dark-matter-dominated galaxy. Trujillo and his team set out to independently determine the distance to DF2. They repeated van Dokkum’s group’s measurements and added an analysis of the luminosities of red giant stars within it. Taking that data together, the team concluded DF2 is likely only about 42 million lightyears away, while DF4 is only about 46 million light-years away. This means the two galaxies harbor as much dark matter as you would expect from average, run-of-the-mill galaxies. “All in all,” Trujillo’s team concluded in their response paper, “the proposition that both NGC 1052-DF2 and NGC 1052-DF4 are ‘missing dark matter’ is still far from being placed on sure footing.” — JAKE PARKS

A computer simulation shows the evolution of dark matter in the universe. But is it part of every galaxy?

DARK MATTER’S EFFECTS ON STAR CLUSTERS In diffuse galaxies, groups of old stars called globular clusters typically don’t move in circular paths like they do in spiral galaxies. Instead, they move every which way. But their speed depends on how much mass, overall, the galaxy holds, because of the way gravitational forces tug on the globulars — more mass leads to more speed.

Dark matter (in red)

Globular cluster Longer arrows denote faster velocities

Longer arrows denote faster velocities

LEFT: GALAXIES WITH DARK MATTER. In normal diffuse galaxies, which have dark matter, the globulars within should be moving relatively fast, as seen above. RIGHT: GALAXIES WITHOUT DARK MATTER. In diffuse galaxies without dark matter, the lack of mass means the globular clusters move much more slowly. In the case of DF2 and DF4, some researchers concluded this slowness, in tandem with other factors, means the galaxies must not have dark matter.

JAN UAR Y/FEB RUAR Y 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

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HOT SCIENCE

Once Bitten

PERSONAL

AFTER SUFFERING A VENOMOUS SNAKEBITE, HERPETOLOGIST GERRY MARTIN WAS STRANDED FOR DAYS IN AN INDIAN VILLAGE.

Gerry Martin is no stranger to snake wrangling; here, he captures a king cobra in Karnataka, India.

GERRY MARTIN is one of India’s most well-known herpetologists. In 2011, he traveled to a remote area in Arunachal Pradesh, considered India’s wildest frontier, to collect venom. During a nighttime outing, he came across a small, lime-green snake called Trimeresurus medoensis, commonly known as the Medo pit viper. The snake can be found in hilly areas of China, India and Myanmar. But key traits, like population size and venom toxicity, remain little understood. Martin grabbed the snake by the tail for collection, and quickly learned more than he ever hoped to know.

The Medo pit viper (top) is still little understood by scientists. When Martin was bitten, his finger swelled “like a plum” (bottom).

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While I was readying the collection bag, the viper bit my pinky. My colleague made a sling out of his jacket and we walked over a kilometer back to the village. The finger began throbbing and swelling; it was excruciating. Because of the rain and the bad roads, we were stuck in a bamboo longhouse a day’s drive from a hospital. And we didn’t know much about this viper’s venom. But most species from its group are not fatal. We kept checking my pulse and doing blood-clotting tests. My finger looked like a plum. When the swelling pressure increased, a little more of the skin would tear open — those were the most painful parts. A villager came in and said the same kind of snake had bitten his brother’s finger a while ago. When I asked what happened to his finger, he said nonchalantly, “After a couple of weeks, he broke it off.”  The next day, my colleague used the village’s only phone to learn what medication

I should take. Someone drove four hours to get it. Once my blood started clotting, we decided it was fine to wait. It was still raining and the road had caved in so we couldn’t go anywhere anyways. It took five days for the road to be repaired. When the rain paused, I was taken to a hospital. I had resigned myself to losing the finger. But when I came to after the anesthesia, I still had it. Before then, the symptomatology of this species’ bite had not been recorded by science; we are currently working on a paper about the Medo pit viper that will include this information. On a personal level, I learned about the dark side of India’s snakebite epidemic. [India has around 58,000 snakebite deaths annually.] There are places where primary health centers have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t know how to properly treat bites or have the proper equipment. That’s one thing all of us got to see. — AS TOLD TO BRENT CRANE 

FROM TOP: GERRY MARTIN; REALITYIMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; GERRY MARTIN

IN HIS OWN WORDS:

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HOT SCIENCE

Sweetings Pond is a diverse ecosystem with all kinds of wildlife besides seahorses, including an unusual concentration of the Caribbean reef octopus (above). One seahorse researcher says efforts to protect Sweetings “would not only benefit species like seahorses, but it would also conserve the whole ecosystem of the pond.”

ON SITE

Seahorse Paradise THE FIRST TIME biologist

Heather Masonjones heard about the seahorses on Eleuthera Island, she had trouble believing in a place where seahorses were as common as other fish. After 29 years studying the animals, the University of Tampa seahorse expert had never seen more than a handful together underwater in her whole career. But once she was immersed in the emerald waters of the mile-long Sweetings Pond, which sits on a narrow crescent of an island in the Bahamas, she started to believe the hype. “It was an absolutely magical moment,” she says, adding that she saw

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16 of the animals in several dives during the first weekend in the water there — an enormous amount, given she had only ever seen three or four in a single dive or snorkel trip. “Until you see it, it’s hard to believe that people aren’t exaggerating.” While they may be well known in popular imagination, seahorses are actually an unusual sight in the ocean, even for researchers whose job is to observe them. Further research by Masonjones and her colleagues has since revealed that Sweetings Pond has one of the most concentrated populations of seahorses

in the world — at times, over 10 times denser than the global average. The pond has been relatively protected from fishing, which may be one of the reasons seahorses are so abundant. Xiong Zhang, a seahorse researcher at the University of British Columbia not involved in Masonjones’ research, says bottom trawling in particular is one of the major threats to seahorses worldwide, because the nets can capture seahorses and destroy the substrate features they need to clasp onto. The concentration of seahorses in

While they may be well known in popular imagination, seahorses are actually an unusual sight in the ocean.

SHANE GROSS (2)

RESEARCHERS ARE RUSHING TO SAVE A BAHAMIAN POND CRITICAL TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF SEAHORSE ECOLOGY — AS WELL AS THEIR EVOLUTION.

The pond (left) is 45 feet deep in some places, and is landlocked. Some locals even believe a sea monster lives there, earning the pond the nickname “the Loch Ness of the Bahamas.” Monster aside, the unique and sheltered ecosystem has the same salinity as the nearby ocean, but is devoid of many of the major predators that prey on seahorses. Masonjones (above right) and Elson’s research also revealed that the lined seahorses at Sweetings Pond differ from their cousins in oceans around the island, with smaller bodies and differently shaped heads. While these differences are not enough to warrant calling them a separate species, Masonjones says the isolated nature of the population means these seahorses are slowly drifting away, in a genetic sense.

FROM TOP: SHANE GROSS; HEATHER MASONJONES; SHANE GROSS

Part of the reason seahorses are so rare outside of Sweetings Pond has to do with their ecology and habits. For starters, the fish need something solid on the substrate to clutch onto with their tails, as they aren’t particularly good swimmers (right). Sweetings Pond provides them with lots to cling to: vegetation, coral and bivalves, including Atlantic pearl oysters.

Sweetings Pond represents a unique opportunity for researchers to better understand the fish in general. “We have the perfect controlled system,” says Jessica Elson, who worked with Masonjones on seahorse research while she was a University of Tampa biology undergraduate. “We have a unique opportunity because there are so many of them.” But the clock may be ticking on this seahorse paradise. A few years back, a popular tourism website mentioned that the area was a great place to snorkel with seahorses, sparking fears among researchers that incoming visitors could destroy parts of the bony fish’s habitats. Masonjones and her colleagues began working with partners in the Bahamas National Trust to protect the pond. She hopes the protection of the park brings sustainable tourism that will educate people about seahorses and contribute to improving their conservation worldwide. — JOSHUA RAPP LEARN

Ongoing research by Masonjones, Elson and their colleagues has revealed that the seahorses of Sweetings Pond behave a lot differently at night. During the day, they hang out upside-down at the pond’s bottom, so researchers had assumed this was what they always did. But it turns out that at night, they move to the tops of vegetation and stay upright. The researchers aren’t yet sure why they take on these postures, or whether one is a sleeping position. What’s more, the team found that the seahorses were much easier to find after dark due to their upright posture, and they were congregated in much denser groups — up to three times as dense in some cases. Their new study, the first to examine seahorse behavior at night, shows that seahorses may be more common in some areas than biologists previously believed — researchers just aren’t looking at the right times, Elson says.

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HOT SCIENCE

REVIEWS

WHAT WE’RE READING The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women — and Women to Medicine By Janice P. Nimura

T

he most important people in history aren’t always pictureperfect, f lawless heroes. Take Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, for example — the first women in the U.S. to receive medical degrees. They wrote descriptively about their squeamishness and disgust of sick people. Or, consider the fact that neither sister thought of themselves as radical, despite becoming pioneers for women’s equality in a time when such a topic was still taboo. Nonetheless, sometimes these imperfect people laid the groundwork for monumental societal change. The Blackwell Nimura sisters, who in 1857 opened the shocks and first women-run enthralls hospital in New with her York City, set forth blunt, vivid a precedent for storytelling. health care that would transform a traditionally male-focused practice. Nimura shocks and enthralls with her blunt, vivid storytelling. She draws on the writings of Elizabeth and Emily in an intimate way that makes it feel like she knew the sisters personally. Alongside glaring descriptions of culturally ingrained sexism and discrimination, the biography also touches on how our standards of medicine have changed over the decades, showing how even the most scientific of professions are subject to major culture shifts. — JENNIFER WALTER

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More Pages to Turn Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear By Carl L. Hart I grew up in the suburban world of D.A.R.E. programs and alarmist anti-drug PSAs, so I approached this book with knee-jerk skepticism. Won’t illicit drugs, save for marijuana, almost always lead to addiction? Aren’t most controlled substances inherently dangerous? But Hart, a neuroscientist who specializes in drugs and addiction, met my ignorance with a series of thought-provoking arguments that led me to better understand why I feel so averse to drug use. Through his own experiences and research, he makes a compelling case for revising our mindsets about taboo substances, and the people who use them.

Blood, Powder, and Residue: How Crime Labs Translate Evidence Into Proof By Beth A. Bechky Before forensic evidence lands in a courtroom, scientists working behind the scenes have an important job to do: Determine the facts, based on the raw evidence coming from a crime scene. Whether it’s DNA analysis, firearms examination or toxicology, the work is often mundane, highly technical and misunderstood by the public. Through her personal experiences over 18 months observing forensic scientists in a metropolitan crime lab, sociologist Bechky introduces readers to the intricacies of a high-stakes job that can change the outcome of some of the most important court cases. — J.W.

TUNE IN How to Save a Planet By Gimlet Media and Spotify I know what you’re thinking: Another podcast about how climate change will destroy the Earth? But instead of doom and gloom, hosts Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Blumberg take a solutions-based approach to the monolithic threat of a warming planet. Launched in August, the pod highlights a problem area or industry in each episode, zooming in on the people already working on climate issues. The hosts’ in-depth research peels back the mask on climate change and makes you curious — and, on good days, hopeful for the future. — J.W.

We’re Bringing Flexy Back The Stauer Flex gives you vintage style with a throwback price of only $79.

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ust like a good wristwatch movement, fashion is cyclical. And there’s a certain wristwatch trend that was huge in the 1960s and then again in the 1980s, and is ready for its third time in the spotlight. We’re talking, of course, about the flexible stretch watch band. To purchase a vintage 60s or 80s classic flex watch would stretch anyone’s budget, but you can get ahead of the crowd and secure a brand new version for a much lower price. We’re rolling back the years AND the numbers by pricing the Stauer Flex like this, so you can put some bend in your band without making a dent in your wallet. The Stauer Flex combines 1960s vintage cool with 1980s boardroom style. The stainless steel flex band ensures minimal fuss and the sleek midnight blue face keeps you on track with date and day subdials. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Experience the Stauer Flex for 30 days. If you’re not convinced you got excellence for less, send it back for a refund of the item price. Your satisfaction is our top priority. Time is running out. As our top selling watch, we can’t guarantee the Flex will stick around long. Don’t overpay to be êêêêê underwhelmed. “The quality of their watches Flex your is equal to many that can go right to put for ten times the price or more.” a precision — Jeff from McKinney, TX timepiece on your wrist for just $79. Call today!

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HOT SCIENCE

BOARD GAME REVIEWS

More Games to Play Endangered By Joe Hopkins 1–5 players, 60 minutes

WHAT WE’RE PLAYING

Saving an endangered species requires work from people with different skills, and that’s exactly what this cooperative game is about. Play as one of five characters: a TV wildlife host, environmental lawyer, zoologist, lobbyist or philanthropist. Your mission: As a team, woo United Nations ambassadors into voting to save either endangered sea otters or tigers before they become extinct. The game is exceptionally easy to learn yet still challenging, and is a great option for those looking for a break from competitive games.

Wingspan Terraforming Mars

By Elizabeth Hargrave 1–5 players, 40–70 minutes

W

ingspan made waves when it launched in 2019, winning the impressive Kennerspiel des Jahres award for excellence in game design despite being produced by a team of largely first-timers. When you open the box, you’re smacked with robust game pieces and top-notch artwork reminiscent of field guide books. Each of the 170 North American bird cards shares interesting tidbits of information along the bottom. The game also offers an expansion pack of 81 European bird cards, if you’re really trying to up your game. The objective of this game is to earn the most points by foraging for just the right types of food, releasing birds in different habitats, and hatching eggs to grow even more birds. Each time you play, the game outlines different long- and short-term goals to gain points, and this — along with the impressive collection of bird cards — keeps the game fresh each time. Lest your friends aren’t interested, or you’re stuck at home alone, Wingspan even comes with instructions for an artificial player called “Automa” that you can test your mettle against in solo mode. And although bird nerds will be the most thrilled with this game, you don’t need to know any bird facts to enjoy it. In fact, if you’re not already among the binocular-toters, it might even spur a new ornithological interest in you and your friends. — LINDSAY VANSOMEREN

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By Jacob Fryxelius 1–5 players, 120 minutes What would we need to do to make Mars a habitable place? A Swedish science teacher designed this game to probe for answers. It’s the year 2315 and you’re a corporation hired to get Mars ready for humans. Your goal is to raise the temperature and oxygen levels high enough so that oceans can form and humans can breathe without clunky spacesuits. This fun, competitive game just might make you appreciate life on Earth a little more.

Neanderthal By Phil Eklund 1–3 players, 60–120 minutes Three human species — Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons and Homo heidelbergensis — existed together in Europe and launched a cultural revolution 45,000 years ago. This game seeks to recreate how it happened, with each player controlling one of the species and vying to become the most culturally advanced. Full of interesting footnotes about the history and science that inspired the rules, this is a very complex game. But those who persist earn a great reward: You can take your characters and their adaptations straight into the next game, Greenland, and continue the sequence of cultural evolution. — L.V.

ON FR E FO E S UR HI OR PPI M NG OR E

Actual size is 38.1 mm

Why Are Dealers Hoarding These 100-Year-Old U.S. Silver Dollars?

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hen it comes to collecting, few coins are as coveted as the first and last of a series. And when big anniversaries for those “firsts” and “lasts” come around, these coins become even more coveted. Take, for example, the 1921 Morgan Silver Dollars. These 90% pure silver coins were the last of their kind, a special one-year-only resurrection of the classic Wild West Silver Dollar. Three years prior, the Pittman Act authorized the melting of more than 270 million Morgan Silver Dollars so their silver could be sold to our allies in the United Kingdom. Facing our own Silver Dollar shortage, the world’s favorite vintage U.S. Silver Dollar was brought back for one year only while the U.S. Mint worked on its successor, the Peace Silver Dollar.

Dealers Begin Stockpiling Last-Year Morgans

Don’t Wait—Secure Your 1921 Morgan Silver Dollars NOW!

Knowing what we’ve told you about special anniversaries, dealers around the country are preparing for a surge in demand. 2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar—the last-yearof-issue for the most popular vintage U.S. Silver Dollar ever minted. But slow-moving collectors may be disappointed in what they find when they seek out these coins.

With this special offer, you can secure a lastyear 1921 Morgan Silver Dollar ahead of the rush in About Uncirculated (AU) condition for just $39.95! Mint marks vary.

Since the days of the Pittman Act, millions more U.S. Silver Dollars have been melted or worn down in commerce. It’s been estimated that as few as 15% of all the Morgan Dollars ever minted have survived to the present day. That number grows smaller each year, with private hoards now accounting for virtually all the surviving Morgan Silver Dollars. And that was before silver values started to rise...

Interest in Silver Is on the Rise

19 19 19 19 19 19 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 LY G T T V C N B R R Y E LY G JU AU SEP OC NO DE JA FE MA AP MA JUN JU AU

Silver Trend Chart: Prices based on monthly averages. ©2020, AMS

As you can see from the chart on the left, in 2020, we’ve seen daily silver prices close as low as $12.01 per ounce and as high as $28.33 per ounce. That rise in value has led to a sharp increase in buyers’ interest in silver. We’re already seeing a surge of interest from collectors wanting to add vintage Morgan Silver Dollars to their collections. But at what price?

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GovMint.com • 14101 Southcross Dr. W., Suite 175, Dept. MCD234-01, Burnsville, MN 55337 GovMint.com® is a retail distributor of coin and currency issues and is not affiliated with the U.S. government. The collectible coin market is unregulated, highly speculative and involves risk. GovMint.com reserves the right to decline to consummate any sale, within its discretion, including due to pricing errors. Prices, facts, figures and populations deemed accurate as of the date of publication but may change significantly over time. All purchases are expressly conditioned upon your acceptance of GovMint.com’s Terms and Conditions (www.govmint.com/terms-conditions or call 1-800-721-0320); to decline, return your purchase pursuant to GovMint.com’s Return Policy. © 2020 GovMint.com. All rights reserved.

THE TOP STORIES FROM DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

HOT SCIENCE

Signs of ancient cities abound worldwide today. For instance, here in Jerusalem at the Citadel, also known as the Tower of David, some of the oldest archaeological finds are 2,500 years old.

WEB REPORT

WHICH ANCIENT CITY IS CONSIDERED THE OLDEST IN THE WORLD? TODAY, ABOUT 4 billion people — more than half the world’s population — reside in urban settings. But urban life began some 6,000 years ago, when tens of thousands of people first crammed together in one place. Which ancient city rose first? Cities began popping up in the Indus Valley of present-day Pakistan and India more than 4,000 years ago, in China over 3,000 years back, and in Central America in the centuries straddling 1 B.C. and A.D. 1. But the earliest were in the Middle East. About 10,000 years ago, soon after farming began in ancient Mesopotamia, the site of Jericho in the present-day West Bank featured massive stone walls,

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enclosing a settlement of an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 residents. By 9,000 years ago, Çatalhöyük, located in present-day Turkey, likely held several thousand people in houses made of mud brick and plaster. With no ground-level streets, people moved about on rooftops and entered homes via ladders through holes in the ceilings. Although these settlements were exceptionally large for their time, they apparently lacked other city traits, like reliance on surrounding lands for resources, so many archaeologists classify them as towns. The first true cities seem to have appeared in Mesopotamia a few millennia later, after 4,000 B.C., during the Bronze Age. Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq,

the site of Uruk emerged as the political, cultural and religious center for its 50,000-some residents, as well as people in the surrounding lands. To the north in Syria, Tell Brak may have developed even earlier. It featured secular and religious monuments, industrial workshops and the manufacturing of prestige goods. Today, both of these vanguard cities lie in ruins — great, dusty mounds that archaeologists continue to excavate and investigate. Other Mesopotamian cities appeared soon after Uruk and Tell Brak, including some continuously occupied to this day, like Damascus and Jerusalem. Which raises another question: Should the title of “oldest city” go to the first ever, or the one that has lasted the longest? — BRIDGET ALEX

SEAN PAVONE/SHUTTERSTOCK

ARCHAEOLOGISTS STILL DEBATE WHICH CITY CAME FIRST — LET ALONE HOW TO DEFINE ONE IN THE FIRST PLACE. BUT A FEW SETTLEMENTS OFFER ILLUMINATING VIEWS OF EARLY URBAN LIFE.

Thanks to BetterWOMAN, I’m winning the battle for THE EMPATHETIC READER MAYBE A FICTION LOVER REALLY DOES “LIVE A THOUSAND LIVES BEFORE HE DIES.” WOULD THE WORLD be a better place if people read more fiction? Words on a page can introduce us to what it’s like to lose a child, get swept up in a war, be born into poverty or leave home and immigrate to a new country. A growing body of research has found that people who read fiction tend to better understand and share in the feelings of others — even those who are different from themselves. The results hold up even when comparing fiction to non-fiction readers. In 2006, researchers found that the more names of fiction authors that participants knew — and the more fiction they presumably read — the higher they scored on empathy tests. Since then, exploring the intersection between empathy and fiction has caught on in psychology. There’s even evidence to show that reading itself is what promotes a change in individuals, rather than people who are naturally more empathetic gravitating toward fiction. But what people do with that extra empathy isn’t as well understood, says Sara Konrath, a scientist at Indiana University. “There is less research on the effects of reading on prosocial behaviors like giving, volunteering and helping,” says Konrath. “But since empathy is one of the main motivations of such kind behaviors, I do think that reading books can help to promote more kindness overall.” — MEGAN SCHMIDT

Bladder Control. Frequent nighttime trips to the bathroom, embarrassing leaks and the inconvenience of constantly searching for rest rooms in public– for years, I struggled with bladder control problems. After trying expensive medications with horrible side effects, ineffective exercises and uncomfortable liners and pads, I was ready to resign myself to a life of bladder leaks, isolation and depression. But then I tried BetterWOMAN ®. When I first saw the ad for BetterWOMAN, I was skeptical. So many products claim they can set you free from leaks, frequency and worry, only to deliver disappointment. When I finally tried BetterWOMAN, I found that it actually works! It changed my life. Even my friends have noticed that I’m a new person. And because it’s all natural, I can enjoy the results without the worry of dangerous side effects. Thanks to BetterWOMAN, I finally fought bladder control problems and I won!

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THE

STATE

OF

SCIEN COVID-19 • RACISM: AN INSIDE LOOK • EXPEDITION • THE BODY •

SPECIAL SECTION

The past year unfolded like a dark satire: natural disasters, racial violence and the virus that would not quit. To set the stage for 2021, we turned to experts. Here’s their milehigh view of coronavirus and the biggest science stories it eclipsed in 2020.

NCE 2021

UNEARTHED • WATER & AIR • FORCES • TECH • YEAR IN PHOTOS FROM LEFT: MICHAEL GUTSCHE; REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; NASA/ESA/E. WHEATLEY (STSCI); LDPHOTORO/SHUTTERSTOCK

COVID-19 In January, one tiny virus became the story of 2020, forever changing our planet.

ALL EYES ON

COVID 22

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WHO officials determine there is “at least some” person-to-person spread happening in Wuhan.

Jan. 21, 2020

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports the first case outside of China, in Thailand.

Jan. 20, 2020

After ruling that the outbreak was caused by a novel coronavirus, China publicly shares the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2.

Jan. 13, 2020

China reports a cluster of atypical pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.

Jan. 12, 2020

Dec. 31, 2019

COVID -19 TIMELINE North America reports its first confirmed case of COVID-19 — a U.S. patient who had recently returned to Washington state from Wuhan.

In 2020, the world looked to science as a new virus spread across the globe, leaving a permanent mark on human health, behavior and nature — and on science itself. Regardless of the politics and people around the world shaping the extent of COVID-19’s impact, we can confidently say: Science had a busy year. “It’s very disorienting to have been a virologist that nobody pays attention to,” says Sara Sawyer, of the University of Colorado Boulder. “Then, all of a sudden, everybody on the entire planet is scrutinizing your literature and your field. ... It’s overwhelming.” It’s not just virologists in the spotlight. Physicists and medical researchers alike have been analyzing how far virus-laden respiratory droplets travel through the air — like the ones we spew when sneezing, coughing, talking or just breathing. Experiments have tested different types of fabric masks. Much of the work confirmed that close indoor contact is a danger, and proper mask-wearing can diminish the risk.

Daily new cases of COVID-19 outside of China surpass those within the country.

Mar. 11, 2020

Egypt reports a case, the first recorded in Africa.

Feb. 25, 2020

Australia announces the continent’s first case, after a traveler from Wuhan tests positive.

NOTHING TURNS the public eye to science quite like a global health crisis. By the time the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March, people across the world were looking to experts for answers. Where did the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 come from? How can we stop the spread and save the lives of those infected? In many places, people listened — taking up 20-second handwashing, mask-wearing, 6-foot physical distancing and staying home whenever possible. Some of these communities “flattened the curve” of the virus’ spread so much that entire nations were flirting with normalcy by late summer. A resurgence hit numerous places in the fall, while many areas that resisted public health guidelines never saw a break in steady cases.

Feb. 14, 2020

Three cases are reported in France, all from people who recently traveled to Wuhan. These are the first cases recorded in Europe.

Jan. 25, 2020

Jan. 24, 2020

VER0NICKA/SHUTTERSTOCK

BY ANNA FUNK

The WHO officially declares COVID-19 a pandemic.

JAN UAR Y/ FEB RUAR Y 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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The U.S. surpasses China and Italy with the largest number of cases in a single country.

Apr. 2, 2020

Europe becomes the epicenter of the pandemic, with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined, excluding China.

Mar. 25, 2020

Mar. 13, 2020

COVID -19 TIMELINE

WHO reports that transmission of the virus can happen in people who are pre-symptomatic.

Remdesivir receives emergency FDA authorization for use on severely ill COVID-19 patients. The drug receives FDA approval in October, even as scientists continue to question its effectiveness.

COVID-19

The National Institutes of Health announces a clinical trial for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

B.ZHOU/SHUTTERSTOCK

In the early days of COVID-19’s spread, news broke that medical professionals were facing a shortage of protective gear, especially N95 masks. Public health officials, including the U.S. surgeon general, even discouraged the public from buying masks. But by early April, new research flipped the recommendation completely in support of widespread mask-wearing. “Data emerged that people without symptoms could also spread the virus, and CDC expanded its recommendation for face masks to the general community,” explains Redfield. Prior to that, the CDC had focused its mask recommendations on people with symptoms to reduce the spread of respiratory droplets. Another lesson learned on the fly was the drawbacks of using ventilators on COVID-19 patients. Early on, medical clinics scrambled to acquire the devices — multiple auto factories even began manufacturing them en masse. But as the year went on, we learned of risks they pose to health workers (including exposure to viral particles) and patient health, such as lung damage caused by the ventilators, and demand slowed. Most of us hadn’t heard the term asymptomatic carrier before 2020,

May 14, 2020

MASK OFF, MASK ON

increased, testing extended to people with known exposure but no symptoms. “To this day, I still think we don’t have enough in the way of tests,” Walensky said in late summer, as COVID-19 hot spots continued to flare up across the U.S. Although we’ve expanded diagnostic testing — that is, determining whether a sick person has COVID-19 — widespread surveillance testing will play a key role in stopping the though the concept isn’t new. During spread of the disease. “That’s really where the typhoid fever outbreak in the early we need to intervene in order to deal 1900s, an asymptomatic cook famously with the asymptomatic spread,” she says. infected between roughly 50 and 120 The first real surveillance testing — people. That woman, Mary Mallon — testing everyone in a group, regardless aka Typhoid Mary — could have been of whether they have symptoms — any of us this year. Researchers estimated appeared in the fall, as many universities in July that up to 63 percent of SARSattempted to host tens of thousands of CoV-2 transmission likely comes from students on campus. Researchers are pre-symptomatic carriers (those infected still scrambling to refine existing viral but not yet showing symptoms), plus at detection methods to make them as least 3.5 percent from people who are cost effective and fast as possible — asymptomatic (cases that for instance, using saliva never show symptoms). instead of a nasal swab As Americans ramped to improve detection up mask-wearing, or using sewage from medical professionals dorms to find traces of ramped up their testing the virus from asymp“ALL OF A capabilities. At first, only tomatic students. SUDDEN, people with symptoms “The new salivaEVERYBODY were tested because based tests that they’re ON THE ENTIRE “we simply didn’t have doing are great, and PLANET IS enough tests,” explains it’s an incremental step SCRUTINIZING Rochelle Walensky, forward,” says Walensky, YOUR FIELD. IT’S chief of the Division of “but they’re not a game OVERWHELMING.” Infectious Diseases at changer because we still — virologist Massachusetts General need to process them in Sara Sawyer Hospital. As supplies a lab.” The game changer

May 1, 2020

“We are not defenseless against COVID-19,” says Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Face masks, social distancing, handwashing and being smart about crowds are powerful weapons against COVID-19.”

A BRIEF GUIDE TO VACCINE T YPES

T

The U.S. hits 100,000 deaths due to COVID-19.

The prime minister of New Zealand declares the country free of COVID-19 after the last-known patient recovers. A week later, two more cases are brought in by travelers from the U.K.

Jul. 3, 2020

Jun. 8, 2020

WHO temporarily suspends a clinical trial of the hydroxychloroquine drug treatment, citing safety concerns. In June, the trial is ended permanently after data shows the drug is not effective for COVID-19.

May 27, 2020

AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford launch phase II/III (out of IV) human trials for a vaccine that might protect people from the coronavirus.

May 25, 2020

May 22, 2020

NUMSTOCKER/SHUTTERSTOCK

he COVID-19 pandemic likely plunged you into a world — specifically, the world of vaccine development — that you didn’t know much about before. Maybe you’ve learned that vaccines typically take years to produce. Or maybe you’ve found yourself wondering how the roughly 200 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development are supposed to work. Essentially, a vaccine needs to trick your immune system into thinking there’s an infection. That way, you’ll develop an arsenal of tactics to kill off the pathogen, should it ever show up in your body. Live vaccines release a somewhat nonfunctional version of the virus into the body. If researchers tamper with it just right, the modified virus can still provoke your immune system without getting you sick. One way to sap a virus of some of its power is to grow it in another species, the way researchers used chick embryo cells to create the measles vaccine. Developers can also neutralize the virus by exposing it to heat or chemicals like formaldehyde, creating what’s known as an inactivated vaccine. There are also vaccines that make your own cells produce the crucial proteins that help fight a virus. Two of these are called DNA vaccines and RNA vaccines. DNA varieties can push the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein gene into your cells. Once it’s there, the DNA is treated like your own genetic information. Your bodies make RNA — temporary copies of the gene — and from that template build the viral proteins. RNA vaccines, on the other hand, cut out a few steps in the production process: These vaccines provide the RNA pattern as is, and cells assemble proteins from there. For an RNA or DNA vaccine to successfully work, it’s crucial that the genetic material gets inside your cells to the protein-generating machinery that will properly proliferate the viral protein. Sometimes, vaccine developers make sure this happens by tucking the DNA or RNA into the genome of another virus, using that pathogen as a kind of shipping container. These are called viral vector vaccines. Don’t worry, you don’t get sick from the delivery — researchers disable the virus to prevent that from happening. It’s also possible to create a vaccine that does not force cells to make viral proteins, but instead delivers the proteins directly. Some companies are working on these kinds of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, a category generally called protein-based vaccines. On the whole, vaccine developers spend a lot of time at the drawing board. The complexity of the immune system makes it a tough beast to wrangle. When it comes to SARS-CoV-2, any of these vaccine types could emerge from the pack — and ultimately help keep COVID-19 at bay. — LESLIE NEMO

Sinovac Biotech, a private pharmaceutical company in China, launches phase III trials for a vaccine called CoronaVac, made from an inactive form of SARS-CoV-2.

JAN UAR Y/ FEB RUAR Y 2 02 1 . D IS C OVER

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Moderna starts phase III vaccine trials. The same day, German company BioNTech, in partnership with Pfizer, launches phase II/III vaccine trials, as well.

Aug. 11, 2020

China’s state-run pharmaceutical company Sinopharm starts phase III trials in the UAE for one of their vaccine candidates.

Jul. 27, 2020

Jul. 17, 2020

COVID-19 TIMELINE

Russia becomes the first country to approve a vaccine, dubbed Sputnik V, for use against COVID-19.

THE SOCIAL Isolation, loneliness and resistance to health guidelines: Scientists are evaluating the psychological impact of the COVID pandemic. BY ALEX ORLANDO

Johns Hopkins University reports 25 million COVID-19 cases worldwide. The U.S. leads in total infections, with over 2 million more cases than second-highest Brazil.

Sep. 4, 2020

Much of what scientists have been working on this year has involved repurposing existing ideas and methods to fight the virus. These relate to tracking the source, testing to identify the infected and caring for the sick. Even the technique of using convalescent plasma therapy — in which so-called survivor’s serum containing COVID-19 antibodies is injected into the sick — has been around for 100 years. While SARS-CoV-2 is a novel strain, coronaviruses themselves are nothing new. A virus closely related to the one dominating 2020’s psyche has lived in horseshoe bats for decades. But that doesn’t mean a person contracted SARS-CoV-2 directly from a bat. Because the virus has a few genes that aren’t quite batty, researchers think the virus also spent time in an intermediate host before jumping to humans. The top contenders, as of the fall, were pangolins, a scaly, anteater-like mammal found across parts of Asia and Africa, though no specific source animals had been identified. The most groundbreaking work is happening in vaccine research, particularly considering the Moderna vaccine. “If it works, it will be a first of its class,” Sawyer says. “It’s very different. It’s actually injecting people with an mRNA.”

Are social bubbles changing the human psyche?

DISOBEYART/SHUTTERSTOCK

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE

Even if this specific vaccine (out of dozens in development) fails to change the course of this pandemic, it is advancing scientific understanding. With traditional vaccines, including many aimed at COVID-19, the active ingredient is an inactivated or weakened virus, or part of one. The Moderna vaccine instead injects mRNA, a type of genetic information, in a transport vessel that will get it all the way into a few cells. Once the mRNA is there, our body’s cells read the instructions from the mRNA and create coronavirus surface proteins. The proteins are transported to the cell surface, where it triggers the immune response needed to provide continuing protection. “It’s really important to highlight that there are some reasons to be excited about this approach, and there are also some reasons to be wary,” Sawyer says. “This is a vaccine where it’s actually designed to fuse with our cells and to enter some number of our cells in order for it to work.” Tired as we may be of hearing the term unprecedented applied to the past year, medical research truly leaped at the many challenges of 2020. Researchers adapted and learned and expanded with unprecedented speed. Between the time the first copy of this issue rolls off the press in early November and meets your eyes in early December, countless new developments are likely to have occurred — for better or worse. No matter what happens, one thing is certain: The world needs science to deliver. D

Aug. 30, 2020

Walensky wants? A test that people can do on their own, at home. (By the time you read this, perhaps such a test will be commonplace.)

Researchers from Russia publish a study in The Lancet claiming Sputnik V does elicit an immune response. However, researchers outside the country later cast doubt on the study data’s validity.

SYMPTOMS OF COVID-19

Johnson & Johnson begins large-scale clinical trial of their singleshot vaccine.

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Deaths from COVID-19 pass 1 million people worldwide — more than this year’s deaths from malaria, influenza, cholera and measles combined.

Oct. 2, 2020

evolving. But by midsummer of 2020, call counts had spiked up to 10 times more than pre-pandemic levels at the Disaster Distress Helpline, a federal hotline for mental-health crisis, according to the American Psychological Association. For decades, social and behavioral scientists have been examining the toll of long-term loneliness, the difficulty of behavior change and the human capacity for resilience. Their insights can help gauge the pandemic’s lasting consequences — and better equip us to stem the virus’ spread.

Sep. 28, 2020

The U.S. surpasses 200,000 deaths from COVID-19.

Sep. 23, 2020

The OxfordAstraZeneca vaccine trials are put on hold due to safety concerns. In October, AstraZeneca says the drug prompts an immune response in young and old adults.

Sep. 22, 2020

Sep. 9, 2020

IT ALL HAPPENED SO QUICKLY. In a matter of weeks, our world was upended when a far-flung outbreak spiraled into a genuine pandemic. With vaccines and pharmaceutical interventions still a speck on the horizon, human behavior has become a key factor in battling the disease. The crisis has also pummeled both individuals and society itself with a plethora of mental health burdens, from stress and anxiety to social isolation. Research on COVID-19’s psychological impact is still

U.S. President Donald Trump tests positive for COVID-19 after months of downplaying the pandemic, becoming the latest of several world leaders who have contracted the virus.

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ISOLATION STATION It’s no secret that human beings are inherently social creatures; for millennia, our bonds have kept us alive. Then 2020 happened. Millions of people found themselves trapped in their homes, either completely alone or interacting with only a few others. Throughout human history, we’ve evolved to rely on our peers for survival, says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University. “The brain has adapted to expect the proximity of others,” she says. “So when we lack [that], it creates a sense of needing to be more alert to challenges in our environment that need to be dealt with on our own.” This heightened alertness has a direct effect on our bodies, too. It can cause increases in blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones and inflammation levels — all of which threaten our life expectancy. In a 2010 study co-authored by Holt-Lunstad, researchers found that a lack of social connections is comparable to, and often more harmful than, obesity, physical inactivity and other well-known mortality risks. For example, the health effects of loneliness have been likened to the consequences of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness was already a serious public health concern in the U.S. before the pandemic. But some experts fear that efforts to limit the novel coronavirus’ spread, from stay-at-home orders to social distancing, may amplify our loneliness problem. In April, around a third of 1,288 people surveyed by social-advice company SocialPro said they felt lonelier because of the coronavirus.

However, another study, from researchers at Florida State University College of Medicine, tracked loneliness both before and during the outbreak and did not find a significant uptick. Even when we’re physically apart, the scientists suggest, a sense of support and solidarity might help stave off feelings of loneliness. Regardless, the importance of human connections coupled with the necessity to social distance creates a paradox — particularly for those, like older adults, who are more vulnerable to both isolation and COVID-19. “It’s challenging,” Holt-Lunstad says. “We have decades of research that shows that being socially connected is protective, and most of that is based on in-person contact.” With that in mind, nurturing safe, in-person interactions — from quality time with housemates to chats with neighbors across the street — may prove vital. As a safe alternative, technology has helped to fill the gap. “That’s where giving people a call, sending someone a text or telling them that you’re grateful [can help],” Holt-Lunstad adds. “Expressing gratitude, in research, has been shown to reduce loneliness. That’s another way to do that.”

RESISTING CHANGE Despite being up against the worst public health crisis in a century, many people remain resistant to changing their ways. “There are a lot of barriers to people doing things that are outside of their routine,” says Katy Milkman, a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

TOP COUNTRIES: TOTAL CASE COUNT 8M

4M

2M

0 Mar 2020

Apr 2020 India France

May 2020

Jun 2020

Jul 2020

Aug 2020

United Kingdom Russia

US Mexico

Sep 2020 Brazil Argentina

Source: Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center

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Oct 2020 Spain

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Number of Cases

6M

PICTURESQUE JAPAN/SHUTTERSTOCK

“Habit is very strong, [as is] the path of least resistance. What REMAINING RESILIENT It’s hard to overstate the disastrous nature of the SARS-CoV-2 I did yesterday is what I’m likely to do today,” she says. And outbreak. By October, the virus had already infected tens of with a glut of scientific research now showing that wearing face millions of people — and killed 1 million — worldwide. The masks — combined with social-distancing and frequent handpandemic is also leaving varied psychological debris in its washing — can curb transmission of the virus, resisting the wake: Parental exhaustion with kids home from school, general inertia of habit and convenience is more important than ever. paranoia about any symptoms of illness and major stressors for Still, information alone isn’t enough to shift someone’s behavpeople forced indoors with abusive partners and guardians. ior, even when those tweaks could mean the difference between “The thing about this crisis that can’t be denied is that it’s life and death. “Think of all the Americans who are overweight,” not the same for everyone,” says George A. Bonanno, a clinical says Gretchen Chapman, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon psychology professor at Columbia University. “The stressors University. “Is just telling them how calorie burning works [and] the costs vary tremendously; there’s people who have enough to get them to quickly lose weight? It’s much harder lost their jobs, or lost loved ones, or they themselves have been than that.” Other research suggests that some behaviors may be seriously ill.” a way of affirming our identity. Look at how quickly the act of Yet a body of research points to one brighter possible mask-wearing became politicized, says Chapman; it became a outcome of the pandemic — resilience. In psychology, the term way of signaling to others who we are. “That happened so fast,” refers to a stable course for mental health despite stressful or she says. “Our behaviors got locked onto different sides.” traumatic events. “[When] there’s a major stressor, a resilient But that doesn’t mean change is impossible. In fact, scientists person looks the same afterwards as before,” says Bonanno. have identified specific techniques for encouraging healthy “There may be a little bump, but they’re basically continuing to and prosocial behavior, like mask-wearing. Milkman notes a function.” And resilience may be more common than we think. 2016 study that shows making a potentially unpleasant activity A 2004 study by Bonanno found that around twomore fun can act as an incentive. “I think we thirds of individuals are likely to show resilience made a mistake, initially, with masks,” she says. after an aversive event passes. Some scientists “A way that we could have made them more contend that percentages of resilience may even appealing is to think about them as fashion be underestimated because of a lack of data. items, which people are starting to do now.” THE HEALTH There are some factors that tend to be linked When it comes to more mundane reasons EFFECTS OF to resilience, like the ability to stay flexible. But that we resist behavior change, like forgetting LONELINESS Bonanno cautions there is no magic bullet for to grab your mask on the way out the door, HAVE BEEN remaining resilient in the face of the COVID-19 Milkman suggests making a concrete plan LIKENED TO THE crisis. “It’s a very active process,” he says. “We of action. That could be as simple as keeping CONSEQUENCES have to actually adapt to each event differently. a spare in your car or purse. “Getting people OF SMOKING We have to ask ourselves, ‘What’s happening to to think that through in advance helps,” 15 CIGARETTES me, and how do I deal with it?’ ” D she adds.

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When humans stayed in, animals came out, according to many anecdotal accounts during the pandemic lockdowns in the spring. Studies are still evaluating the potential impact.

A global shutdown seemed to turn over city streets (and, supposedly, canals) to wildlife. Ecologists saw something deeper. BY K ATE GOLEMBIEWSKI

THE WELSH VILLAGE of Llandudno went quiet in March as stay-at-home orders began. Then the goats descended from the mountain. A wild herd of Kashmiri goats has lived near Llandudno for almost two centuries, and they sometimes come down from the Great Orme Mountain during inclement weather. But this spring, while the human world hit pause, they settled into town for a few days, munching on hedges and trotting down the empty streets.

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The goats joined a host of animal celebrities flooding the internet after they supposedly reclaimed urban areas: dolphins frolicking in Venice’s clean canals, elephants drunk on corn wine in a tea garden in China’s Yunnan province. Tweets announcing these events proclaimed that nature was recovering from years of abuse by humans, thanks to COVID-19 shutdowns. While the goats really did come to Llandudno, many of the other reports were false or exaggerated. The “Venetian” dolphins were actually in Sardinia,

A goat roams the streets of Llandudno in Wales while COVID-19 shut down the mountain village.

hundreds of miles from Venice. It’s not clear where and when those elephant photos were taken, but they don’t seem to be linked to COVID shutdowns (nor pachyderm debauchery). It all begs the question: Did COVID really heal nature? “It’s much more complicated than that,” says Seth Magle, ecologist and director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. “This pandemic seems very long to us in the span of our lives, but from an evolutionary, ecological standpoint, it’s really the blink of an eye.” Sparrows in San Francisco did, in fact, change their song during lockdown,

COVID-19

DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

DID COVID HEAL NATURE?

CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

according to a September study in Science. But it could be months or years before we have extensive data about the overall effects of the pandemic on wildlife, says Chris Schell, an urban ecologist at the University of Washington Tacoma. “We’re sort of living through the experiment.” So far, Magle says, there’s some anecdotal evidence of changes in animal behavior. Raccoons are naturally active at dawn and dusk, but when people are around, they sometimes shift to night hours. Magle heard reports that with fewer people out during quarantine, raccoons moved away from the graveyard

shift and started coming out at twilight. He also suspects that some animals might have ventured into urban areas not to reclaim their historical territory, but because more humans ventured into animal habitat to combat cabin fever. “I actually think some of our natural spaces are maybe being more used by humans, which may push animals more into urban landscapes,” says Magle. While the scientific jury is still out, stories and social media can convince us that animals were bolder during lockdown. Perhaps bird numbers in your yard seemed extraordinary. But, Magle cautions, it might just have been that

we were watching. “Maybe that cardinal always comes to your house at 11 a.m. You are just home now, so you see it,” he says. Animal behavior isn’t the only change people noticed. In some cities, the reduction of traffic made the air cleaner. This spring saw a 17 percent dip in CO2 emissions as people stayed home and didn’t drive. The problem is that one spring is barely a drop in the bucket in terms of affecting the planet’s climate in the long run, says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia who published a paper on the

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“You need behavior change, and you need people to accept new technology and encourage them to embrace it.” That, she adds, means “tackling climate change needs to be led by governments.” Schell views this moment like going to the hospital for a minor injury and finding out that you have a serious underlying heart condition. Noticing how the air is cleaner and the animals are bolder when people stay home reveals the bigger structural changes we need to make. That includes social changes, too.

“COVID wasn’t necessarily the elixir that healed or is healing nature,” Schell says. But it did draw our attention to the ways humans affect the environment: “What happens in society feeds back into ecology.” Similarly, inequity and systemic racism for many years have created “environmental mosaics of inequality”— pockets of greater ecological harm in poorer and more marginalized communities. “If we’re going to see sustained healing, like legitimate healing, it’s not going to be right away,” he says. The spring of 2020 gave us a valuable glimpse of what life could be like if we made systemic changes to help the environment long term. “I hope that’s something that we really will carry forward after this pandemic is behind us,” says Magle. “This idea that yes, we need animals in our neighborhoods. It makes us feel good to watch them and it gives us this sense that we live in places that are kind of wild and kind of unexpected and that can surprise us in a really positive way.” D When traffic noise plummeted this spring in San Francisco, some birds began singing more softly and hitting lower notes, according to a fall study in Science.

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THIS PAGE FROM TOP: JJFARQ/SHUTTERSTOCK; YHELFMAN/SHUTTERSTOCK. RIGHT: GETCOULSON/SHUTTERSTOCK

phenomenon in Nature. “Although this is a really steep decrease in emissions, never seen before, as far as we can tell,” she says, “this drop in emissions does nothing to slow down climate change.” That’s because humans have pumped billions of tons of CO2 into our atmosphere for decades. A few months of reduced driving aren’t enough to fix that. Substantial change would require long-term shifts in policy and industry. (See page 59 for more.) “You can’t tackle climate change with behavior change alone,” Le Quéré says.

Times Square became eerily quiet and desolate as the first wave of coronavirus cases spiked in March and April in New York.

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THE VIRUS THAT CHANGED SCIENCE COVID-19 uprooted much of human life — including how we do research. The pandemic could bring permanent changes to the field. BY ALLISON WHIT TEN

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FASTER. The technology of the 21st century has allowed science to move forward virtually — and rapidly. The latest COVID-19 findings are shared online at warp speed, and media reports are delivered straight to smartphones in the palm of our hands. While this barrage of research fosters speedy discoveries, some scientists are concerned about the consequences of too much haste. In May, Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist at McGill University, co-authored a commentary in Science highlighting the need to maintain scientific rigor in the mad rush to research during a

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crisis. The solution, says Kimmelman, is exceptional coordination among research teams to consolidate their efforts. Some groups conducting clinical trials are achieving this. The RECOVERY Trial at the University of Oxford collaborates with hospitals across the U.K., while the Solidarity Trial at the World Health Organization has recruited patients in more than 20 countries. Both trials are playing a critical role in assessing the efficacy of COVID-19 treatments like dexamethasone. Yet, these efforts are so far the exception in COVID-19 science. The norm remains small-scale studies that regularly result in low-quality evidence.

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MORE ACCESSIBLE. In pre-pandemic science, the newest knowledge within a specific field was shared at annual conferences, often at a convention center in a large city. This practice often created barriers for international, early-career or low-income scientists who lacked funding to pay for travel, lodging or registration fees, as well as

COVID-19

JONATHAN LENZ/SHUTTERSTOCK

IN MARCH, LABS around the world went dark. Experiments stopped, specimens were frozen and research timelines shifted into the unknown. By the time labs began reopening, a new mode of science had emerged. It only took a microscopic virus to bring macro-level changes — some good, some bad and many with no signs of turning back.

FROM LEFT: GRETCHEN GOLDMAN, UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS (@GRETCHENTG ON TWITTER); SAMANTHA K. MILLARD; AKEEM OLALEYE; MARÍA DEL PILAR VELASCO AMO

Across disciplines, researchers found ways to make their work happen. Scientists called in to CNN interviews from their living rooms (far left). Some got used to having new labmates around (right center), while others still masked up and carried on (left center and far right).

barriers for scientists with disabilities or young children. In 2020, COVID-19 forced conferences to go virtual; as a result, they suddenly became much more accessible to scientists around the world. In April, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) became one of the first conferences to try out the virtual format. In total, 62,000 people registered from 140 different countries — more than double the amount of their in-person meetings. To improve accessibility long-term, AACR and other organizations are considering hybrid conferences after the pandemic, mixing in-person and virtual formats.

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MORE DIRECT. In a time of massive uncertainty, social media allowed the public to hear from and interact with scientists directly. In February, Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida who studies infectious diseases, started writing long Twitter threads explaining key emerging concepts related to COVID-19 models and spread. Before the pandemic, Dean says she only had about 200 followers, but quickly ballooned to over 85,000 throughout the year. As to why she stepped up to plate, Dean says she wanted to make the science more accessible for the general public, while also providing a critical lens. “It’s difficult for the public to sort out what is good versus bad information,” Dean says. She recalls thinking, “I want to help,” and adds, “It’s linked to the urgency of the situation.”

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MORE UNIFIED. Researchers all over the globe have united to advance knowledge on the novel coronavirus and ultimately protect humanity. Many scientists temporarily pivoted away from their original research, joining forces with immunologists and epidemiologists to offer outside-the-box perspectives. Antoni Ribas, an oncologist and cancer researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that his lab and many others applied their cancer research to COVID-19 because of the parallels between the two diseases. Ribas explains that the body’s responses to SARS-CoV-2 and cancer both involve inflammatory processes that need to be decreased, plus other immune responses that need to be increased. As a result, Ribas says, many cancer researchers are repurposing cancer drugs to study their efficacy against COVID-19.

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LESS DIVERSE. Before the pandemic, science already had a distressing diversity problem. A National Science Foundation report found that science, engineering and health faculty consisted of less than 40 percent women and 9 percent minorities in 2017. COVID-19’s closure of labs and schools overburdened scientists with greater childcare responsibilities, especially women. One study published in eLife in June found that there were 19 percent fewer papers on COVID-19 with female first authors than there were papers published in the same journals in 2019. “If research productivity is going down for minoritized groups in science … we are looking at losing a lot of our diversity in science,” says Jessica Malisch, a physiologist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Malisch is the lead author on an opinion piece published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences aimed at promoting solutions for gender equity in science during COVID-19 and beyond. One of the authors’ main suggestions was to create committees of diverse faculty members at each institution to assess the impact of the pandemic on scientific productivity, and enforce policies that protect against gender bias in hiring and promotion decisions. She says that some universities are already adopting this approach, a silver lining in the pandemic that could lead to long-lasting initiatives to support diversity in science. “Sometimes big things have to happen [to enact] change,” she says.

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HUMANIZED. COVID-19’s biggest impact may have been its sobering reminder that science is a human endeavor, done by human scientists living human lives. When researchers are overly stressed by a lack of childcare or worried about the health of elderly family members, the science suffers. When there are barriers to women and minorities advancing, science misses out on crucial insights and perspectives. When science is too speedy and takes shortcuts, it may not lead to actual viable treatments. But above all, that human aspect means that when we need to create cutting-edge knowledge and suddenly solve unforeseen problems, the nature of the human spirit ensures that science will eventually prevail. D

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RACISM: AN INSIDE LOOK

Black in Academia BY CYDNEY H. DUPREE

TRINIGUY1868/SHUTTERSTOCK

IN MAY, the killing of George Floyd brought a harsh reality to the forefront of conversations worldwide: Racism permeates every aspect of society. And science, as part of society and my own profession, is not immune. Social media movements in 2020 such as #BlackInTheIvory and #BlackBirdersWeek urged the scientific community to take a hard look at the racism that lies within its walls, as revealed by its own community members. Thousands of Black scientists took to Twitter, Facebook and beyond to share personal stories of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination faced throughout their careers. These experiences have had devastating consequences for their mental health, professional success and, ultimately, willingness to stay in their fields. Racism in science is nothing new. For centuries, science has been a foremost tool used to build, defend and maintain racial inequality. As the transatlantic slave trade reached its peak, the 18th century saw the emergence of “race sciences.” European scientists and philosophers debated the number and characteristics of human races, typically depicting Black people as predisposed to unintelligence, laziness and criminality. This work continued in the 19th century with the American eugenics movement, as scientists argued for the genetic superiority of those classified as white. Even as science began to understand race as socially constructed rather than biologically determined, several scholars began to advance notions of Black Americans’ cultural inferiority. A NEW ERA? Recent decades brought little change. In the 1990s, social scientists continued to argue that genetic unintelligence or a “culture of poverty” keeps Black Americans from success, blaming academic and family shortcomings while overlooking the roles of history and discrimination. Today, scholars across the sciences uncover racial disparities in all areas of life — often without explaining the myriad social factors that drive such differences. One example lies in the well-publicized finding that, as of Aug. 18, Black people are over twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as white people are. There is less talk, however, of the structural factors that cause such disparities (and even less of how to fix them). Throughout 2020, scientific institutions (including my alma mater, Princeton University) began to change the names of graduate schools, research journals and awards that used offensive terminology or honored figures who held racist views. Statues came down on some campuses. And several published papers — some in renowned journals — were retracted for flaws that promote harmful stereotypes or downplay racial inequalities. Broader research, however, suggests racial problems run much deeper than monikers and symbols.

How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go? RACISM IN THE FIELD As a social psychologist, I study how racial inequalities manifest in social interactions. In a 2019 paper, I compared how white people speak when interacting with Black people. Somewhat counterintuitively, I found that white liberals — including Democratic presidential candidates — engage in what I call a competence downshift: They use fewer words highlighting their own competence (like assertive or competitive) when talking to a Black person or a mostly minority audience. White conservatives — who, research suggests, are generally less interested in getting along with racial minorities — showed no such shift. This likely well-meaning, if ultimately patronizing, phenomenon may be one of many that makes scientists of color in mostly white, outwardly progressive scientific communities feel unwelcome. This competence downshift is likely rooted in the very stereotypes that science has propagated for centuries — those depicting Black people as lower in status and ability. These ideas are alive and well: In another study, my team and I found that white and Black adults nationwide associate white and Black people with high- versus low-status jobs, respectively. For instance, participants guessed that a white person might be a doctor or lawyer, while a Black person might be a maintenance worker. These race-status associations significantly predicted bias, hiring discrimination and opposition to policies for racial equality. The stereotypes also play out in day-to-day interactions for scientists — such as when a Black professor is talked down to or mistaken for the janitor — leaving them feeling unsure of themselves and unwelcome. All of this can deter Black people from entering or staying in the sciences. In our rapidly diversifying world, the lack of scientists of color becomes increasingly harmful to humanity. Researchers of color are less subject to racial ignorance, allowing them to conduct research that is meaningful to more communities. Journal editors of color are often more likely to spot harmful implications that research might have for vulnerable communities, while participants of color allow scientific breakthroughs that apply to many rather than a few. As Black Lives Matter protests surged this past summer, organizations scrambled to release statements of solidarity. Conversations about reforming criminal justice, education, housing and the economy came to the forefront. The substance of such reforms will hinge on science — the tool the world turns to for addressing its most pressing problems. To be effective and inclusive, science, too, needs sweeping reforms: increasing the number of scientists of color, improving their sense of belonging within their chosen fields, and rebuilding eroded trust between academia and communities of color. As the world grapples with racism, one can only hope that, this time, science rises to the challenge. D Cydney H. Dupree is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale University.

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SpaceX’s Crew Dragon launches from Kennedy Space Center on May 30.

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EXPEDITION

ONE GIANT LEAP FOR SPACE TRAVEL SpaceX launches the first privately owned capsule carrying NASA astronauts to the space station and back.

LEFT: NASA/BILL INGALLS. RIGHT FROM TOP: NASA; NASA/BILL INGALLS

BY ERIC BETZ

BEFORE GMAIL, YouTube or Facebook, a starry-eyed rocket startup company announced a fantastical vision: a new age, where private companies send humans into space. And in May 2020, some 18 years after its founding, SpaceX and its CEO, Elon Musk, finally made good on that pledge. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and brought them back to Earth safely. It was the first time a private spacecraft had carried humans into orbit. The milestone came just as a host of private space companies were beginning to take off. Around the world, other rocket enterprises have followed suit, launching constellations of tiny satellites that will change the way we communicate and observe Earth (read more on page 69). Industry experts say private spaceflight has now pushed into a new era, similar to how America’s railways opened the West to urban development some 150 years ago. The year was also a pivotal one for NASA. Crew Dragon’s passengers, Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken, became the first U.S. astronauts to launch into orbit from American soil since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. Without a ride of its own, NASA had been paying Russia $90 million per seat to ferry astronauts to the ISS. A trip on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 will cost about half that price, thanks to the company’s emphasis on reusable rockets. That backdrop set the stage for the publicity and feat of engineering this summer. Some 10 million viewers, cooped up at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, watched what NASA dubbed “Launch America.” Crew Dragon was built as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which began under an Obama administration policy. The initiative taps the private sector for transport

to and from low-Earth orbit, while NASA focuses its efforts on exploring the solar system. But delays and controversies have long stalled the program, even as NASA has expanded on the concept. The Trump administration, for example, turned to private companies for its Artemis program to put humans back on the moon by 2024. Astronomers say Crew Dragon helped validate the concept of relying on private companies instead of large government programs. “Low-Earth orbit is no longer the frontier. The frontier has moved farther out,” says Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “NASA, whose job is to push at the frontier, doesn’t really need to be doing low-Earth orbit launches anymore.”

A BUMPY START SpaceX wasn’t the only company hitching its future in orbit to the Commercial Crew Program. Boeing also was awarded a contract to help put NASA astronauts on the space station. For years, questions have lingered about whether either company could deliver. In March 2019, after many delays and cancellations, SpaceX finally launched an uncrewed spacecraft to the ISS. The mission went flawlessly, but the capsule exploded months later during a routine test back on Earth. Numerous delays followed. Then, in December 2019, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft suffered a number of embarrassing software failures during its first uncrewed launch and failed to even reach the space station. A NASA investigation turned up dozens of corrective actions the company must take. Boeing said it planned to try again in late 2020. Astronauts float onboard the ISS (top). Doug Hurley, right, and Robert Behnken safely return to Earth on Aug. 2 (bottom).

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After 64 days in space, the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft, with Behnken and Hurley inside, splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Florida.

Today, with the successful Crew Dragon flight behind him, Musk has already shifted to the next task. His engineers are pioneering an enormous new spacecraft, called Starship, with a promise to carry passengers to “Earth orbit, the moon, Mars and beyond.” NASA put a modicum of faith in the project in the spring by investing $135 million into Starship’s development as a potential lunar lander in its Artemis mission. Then, in August and September, SpaceX accomplished the first true suborbital flights and landings of Starship’s second rocket stage, the part that will carry cargo and crew. “It’s still not clear whether this thing will work,” McDowell says. “The critical milestone is: ‘Can this thing get into orbit — and ideally back?’ If they can do that, then it changes the future enormously.”

AN INDUSTRIAL ENDEAVOR In addition to passenger ships, the past year also saw many startup companies successfully launch small rockets carrying cubesats, an emerging class of small, technologically advanced satellites. While they’ve been launched from the ISS for years, Earth-based launches are an industry first. Jeffrey Manber, a pioneer in commercial spaceflight and the CEO of NanoRacks — the largest private user of the ISS — says an industry is starting to emerge around the station and the means to get there. Again like the railroad industry of the 1850s, even the billionaire-backed companies are still dependent on government funding. “This is not a mature commercial marketplace yet,” Manber says. He predicts that in the next decade, more private passengers will travel to space. “You are going to see the first private destinations start to pop up. They may mark 2020 as the start of that in the [American] public consciousness.” D

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Scientists from 20 countries teamed up to spend a full year drifting with the Arctic ice on the MOSAiC research vessel.

TOP LEFT: NASA/BILL INGALLS. TOP RIGHT: STEFAN HENDRICKS. BOTTOM: TORSTEN SACHS

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST POLAR EXPEDITION How thin ice and historically warm Arctic summers complicated MOSAiC’s $150-million hunt for climate data. BY TOM YULSMAN

MOST OF THE crew aboard the RV Polarstern icebreaker was asleep when the Arctic Ocean ice they were frozen into fully dissolved in late July. Researchers had called the ship home for 10 months — and this was not part of the plan. The team of pilots,

climatologists, oceanographers and others had deliberately frozen the ship into the ice floe north of Siberia in October 2019. Their mission: Drift for more than 365 days with the floe and surrounding sea ice to study the Arctic climate. With roughly 600 experts from around the globe, and a cost

EXPEDITION

topping $150 million, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) is the biggest, most elaborate Arctic expedition ever. “Our mission is to observe and understand the climate processes of the Arctic so we can represent them better in our climate

models,” says Markus Rex, expedition leader and a scientist with Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute. The Arctic is warming three times faster than the global average, causing sea ice to shrivel and ultimately driving shifts in interactions between the ocean, ice and atmosphere. “At the same time, it’s the region

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where we have the largest gaps in understanding of the climate system, and where uncertainties in climate projections are largest,” Rex says. Filling those gaps is important, because what happens in the Arctic doesn’t necessarily stay in the Arctic. Many experts say rapid change there also influences weather and climate throughout the Northern Hemisphere. MOSAiC set out to drift across a vast swath of the central Arctic. “We wanted

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to track the influences on the ice throughout an entire year to help us understand how it grows and shrinks, how it moves and breaks,” says Matthew Shupe, expedition co-coordinator and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Although their floe broke up before the 12-month goal, Rex says the expedition has been a great success. More than 100 climate parameters were tracked and analyzed for nearly a full year, with so

much data collected it could take years to fully analyze.

FALLING THROUGH THE ICE For Shupe, the magnitude of ice cracking was most surprising. “Our camp had to be reorganized many times due to large fractures and then shearing movements,” he says. These ice dynamics were particularly strong at the onset of spring 2020. Shupe’s early interpretation is that during the summer of 2019 — the warmest

Arctic summer on record at that point — the sea ice was so thin that ponds forming on the surface melted through to the ocean below. In winter, those holes froze over, along with other cracks in the ice. That made the ice weaker and prone to breaking when the team tried to conduct research out in the elements. “People would break through into the ocean, but we were all wearing flotation and could get out quickly,” Shupe says. “For those that did, they

ESTHER HORVATH

A team handled polar bear watch, to keep researchers safe while on the ice.

The crew faced windchill temps as low as -70 degrees Fahrenheit, sunless winter days and dangerously thin ice during field work near the North Pole.

FROM TOP: ESTHER HORVATH; STEFAN HENDRICKS; MICHAEL GUTSCHE

typically had a hole named after them.”

CHANGE OF COURSE The original plan was for the Polarstern to be carried naturally past the North Pole during early spring, then near the southern edge of the Arctic’s sea ice cover in September. Instead, it reached the far edge by July, quickly spanning 1,050 miles due to unusual wind patterns and thin, faster-flowing ice. Upon the ship’s arrival, warm temperatures and swells

from the open ocean began threatening the researchers’ floe and encampments on the ice. With fractures cutting through camp, the crew began moving everything aboard the ship on July 29. “We walked across cracked areas and hopped between different chunks of ice,” Shupe says. When they went to bed on July 30, the floe was still somewhat intact. “By the next morning, all we could see was broken pieces of ice,” floating in open water, Shupe says. Aboard the ship, the crew promptly migrated north in search of new ice. Finding less than expected, they headed straight for the North Pole itself. In just six days, on August 19, they arrived. It was a notable moment: an icebreaker finding relatively scant ice at the North Pole. The Polarstern eventually attached itself to a new floe to observe the autumn freeze-up. By mid-September, news came that Arctic sea ice had reached its second lowest level on record, and 2020 ranked the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. “It’s all part of the new Arctic we find ourselves in today,” says crew member Julienne Stroeve, a climatologist with the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. One aspect of the rapidly transforming climate revealed itself in February, when a seal popped its head through a hole in the ice not far from the North Pole: “I didn’t think they would live that far north, and especially in the dead of winter,” Stroeve says. D

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Strange Space Signals Odd detections at the South Pole defied explanation, inviting theories beyond conventional physics.

The balloon-based Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) floats over Antarctica.

LAST SPRING, a report from the world’s largest neutrino telescope — a sprawling grid of detectors woven into Antarctica’s ice — coincided with a blaze of hyperbolic headlines. They teased the possibility of an anti-universe where, from our point of view, time runs backward and the Big Bang represents an end, not a beginning. While it’s too soon to start searching for our reverse-aging, other-handed doppelgängers, physicists are still wrestling with strange signals coming in from space that, to date, have defied easy explanation. The signals were flagged by a NASAfunded collection of horn radio antennas held aloft over Antarctica by a giant balloon. The device, called the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), picks up radio signals produced when high-energy particles coming from deep space encounter our atmosphere. Some waves skim the Earth before they hit

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ANITA, and others bounce off the ice. ANITA can tell the difference. During its first float in 2006 and again in 2014, the device picked up anomalous signals that resembled the kind that skim the Earth — but strangely, they seemed to be coming from the surface. “That means they had to pass through a huge chunk of the Earth,” says physicist Stephanie Wissel of Penn State, who works on the ANITA experiment. At the heart of this mystery are neutrinos: ghostly, high-energy particles that can stream through almost any material unscathed but can produce the telltale radio pulses that ANITA catches. To further investigate the unusual signals, physicists turned to IceCube, a neutrino telescope made up of long strings of detectors buried near the South Pole. A neutrino passing through the ice may produce other particles that emit tiny flashes of light that IceCube’s sensors can detect.

Scientists reasoned that ANITA’s anomalies should also have produced signals in IceCube, and those signals could reveal the deep-space source of the particles. But after eight years’ worth of data was searched, the mystery remained: The exhaustive analysis turned up no matches. “If the ANITA signal was astrophysical, then we should be able to detect it in IceCube — and we did not,” says physicist Justin Vandenbroucke of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who works on the neutrino observatory. The new findings, published March in The Astrophysical Journal, mean scientists have to continue looking for less obvious explanations. Some have proposed that the anomalies arose from radio waves bouncing through caverns or buried lakes in the ice. Other theorists proposed more exotic ideas, such as that the heavy, highenergy particles in line with ANITA’s data may describe one candidate for dark matter — the mysterious stuff that’s believed to make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe but has never been detected. Still others hypothesize that the exotic particles fit an existing theoretical model of a parallel universe — one that is symmetric to ours, but populated with antimatter and running backward. Wissel and her colleagues are preparing a more sensitive upgrade to ANITA that, they hope, will find more of these strange signals. As an experimentalist, she says she’s beholden to data, but appreciates the ideas about where the signals originated. New questions and tests can then confirm — or refute — theories about these deep-space particles and how the universe began. “They’re trying to do with our data exactly what we want people to do with our data,” says Wissel. “We want ANITA to push observations of ultra-high energy neutrinos into a new regime. We think that there is interesting new physics to be done.” D

EXPEDITION

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THE BODY

CRISPR Gets Under the Skin Gene editing leaps to the next level with the injection of a CRISPR complex directly into a patient’s eye to combat a form of hereditary blindness. BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

FOR THE FIRST TIME, scientists have injected the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool into a human patient as part of a clinical trial. It marks another milestone for human gene editing, and a step toward bringing gene therapies to wider patient populations. The pharmaceutical companies Allergan and Editas Medicine partnered with Oregon Health & Science University for the trial, named BRILLIANCE,

which aims to treat a form of congenital eye disease known as LCA10. In the trial, scientists are injecting instructions for the CRISPR gene editor, encapsulated in the shell of a deactivated virus, into patients’ eyes. There, if all goes well, the tool will cut out a problematic gene and restore their vision. Though CRISPR has been used in the past to treat patients, those trials involved taking cells out of the body, editing them in the lab and then putting them back into people. This new work is the

first time CRISPR-Cas9 has been injected directly into the patient. Still, it’s not the first time a gene editor has been put to work inside a human — that distinction goes to another gene-editing tool called a zinc finger nuclease, which was tested in 2017 in a man with Hunter syndrome, an inherited genetic disorder. But this 2020 clinical trial is a landmark for CRISPRCas9, which has revolutionized gene-editing research since its discovery in 2012. “We really feel that this is

a technology that can make a huge difference in the world and in many patients,” says Mark Pennesi, an associate professor of ophthalmology at OHSU’s Casey Eye Institute and a principal investigator for the study. The trial is sure to draw close scrutiny from the pharmaceutical industry, government regulators and other scientists. But Pennesi hopes, if successful, it could pave the way for future studies using CRISPR in the body to treat a wide range of diseases. There are many rare

HOW IT WORKS YES, SCIENTISTS ACTUALLY INJECT DNA that contains the instructions for the CRISPR complex into a human eyeball. This DNA is packaged inside deactivated viruses that shuttle them straight into the cells of the retina. Once inside, the cells read the genetic code and create the CRISPR editor, which, in turn, edits the mutated gene that was preventing CEP290 production.

CEP290 protein

Cones Optic nerve

Cornea Iris Instructions for CRISPR

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Deactivated virus

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Pupil

Lens

THE RETINA IS LOCATED AT THE BACK OF THE EYEBALL.

Rods

YOUR RETINA IS MADE OF PHOTORECEPTOR CELLS, RODS AND CONES, THAT DETECT LIGHT.

A PROTEIN CALLED CEP290 IS CRITICAL FOR THESE CELLS TO FUNCTION. A MUTATION IN A SINGLE GENE THAT MAKES THIS PROTEIN CAUSES BLINDNESS.

JAY SMITH

Retina

NEW HOPE IN FIGHTING FOOD ALLERGIES

FROM LEFT: BUSINESS WIRE; BENT CHANG/SHUTTERSTOCK

FDA’s OK of first drug signals more treatments to come. diseases, like LCA10, that are caused by a mutation to a single gene. Gene editors are prime options for curing these diseases, which range from sickle cell anemia to Huntington’s disease and hundreds of other severe conditions. In the case of LCA10, mutations to a gene known as CEP290 act as a kind of stop sign, halting production of a protein necessary for photoreceptors in the eye to function. The result is that patients with the disease are often legally blind by the time they reach adulthood. The CRISPR treatment will cut out the mutated stop sign gene and allow the body to begin making the crucial photoreceptor protein. Whether this process works to repair the damage LCA10 causes is one facet of the trial; another is whether the procedure will be safe. CRISPR gene editors carry the risk of what are called off-target effects, which occur when the tool mistakenly cuts a gene it’s not supposed to. New and better versions of the tool have reduced the rate of such mistakes, but they remain a concern. Still, says David Segal, a geneticist at the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, who is not involved with the research, preliminary results from the trial are promising, and he thinks the treatment could hold real benefits for patients. “It’s really exciting to see things get to this level,” Segal says. D

BY KENNETH MILLER AN ESTIMATED 32 million Americans have food allergies — nearly 10 percent of the population, and 10 times the prevalence reported just three decades ago. Among children, emergency room visits for the severe, potentially life-threatening reaction known as anaphylaxis are skyrocketing. But new hope arose in January, when the Food and Drug Administration approved Palforzia, the first drug designed to desensitize patients to an allergenic foodstuff — specifically, peanuts. The medication, approved for kids aged 4 to 17, consists of a standardized dose of powdered peanut protein, which can be mixed into snacks like pudding or applesauce. Over time, patients receive increasing amounts until they can tolerate the equivalent of two peanuts without serious symptoms. Palforzia isn’t perfect. It’s expensive (list price: $890 a month), it must be taken indefinitely, boosts in dosage must be administered in a medical setting and some children react too strongly to continue the therapy. But clinical trials found it worked for about two-thirds of patients. Plus, it could provide a model for drugs aimed at allergies to other foods. Meanwhile, research that could lead to better food allergy treatments is making major strides. Over the past five years or so, scientists have found growing evidence that food allergies result from imbalances in the gut microbiome, probably tied to a mix of environmental, lifestyle, dietary and genetic influences. Repairing these underlying biochemical glitches could be more effective than desensitizing patients to individual allergens.

In February, the non-profit End Allergies Together (EAT) announced the winners of the Grand Challenge to End Anaphylaxis, a new $1 million contest to fund promising approaches. The purse was split between two projects. The first, led by Boston Children’s Hospital immunologist Talal Chatila, is investigating a molecular target in the gut that could block allergic reactions before they start. The second project — involving teams at Vedanta Biosciences and Massachusetts General Hospital — is testing a therapy meant to restore microbial balance in the food-allergic intestine. “For people who just want protection from a single allergen that may show up in their food, something like Palforzia is a big step forward,” says EAT president Elise Bates. Yet for patients such as her teenage daughter — who, like most fellow sufferers, has multiple food allergies — it’s not enough. “We’re trying to understand the basic mechanisms of these disorders, so that we can target therapies more precisely,” Bates adds. “That’s the only way we can stop living in fear.” D

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YWZZQQSF

STEP FOUR STEP THREE MRI imaging directs injection.

Reprogrammed cells are injected into the brain.

STEP ONE Patient’s own cells are collected with a skin biopsy.

STEP TWO Harvested skin cells are reprogrammed into stem cells, which are then “guided” to act like neurons.

DAWN OF THE STEM CELL REVOLUTION? Researchers test more therapies with novel techniques for a range of diseases.

CHAD EDWARDS

BY KENNETH MILLER

FOR MORE THAN TWO decades, experts have prophesied that stem cells will someday revolutionize medicine. While adult stem cells have long been used to treat a handful of blood and immune disorders, the excitement has centered on two more versatile varieties: embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), both of which can be transformed into any cell type in the body. Google “the promise of stem cells,” and you’ll get at least 200,000 hits, involving ailments ranging from diabetes to neurodegenerative disorders. So far, however, no one has managed to translate that potential into a practical therapy. In 2020, a string of breakthroughs suggested that the revolution may finally be near. The most dramatic news came in May, when the New England Journal of Medicine published the first case report from a study using customgrown stem cells to treat Parkinson’s disease in humans. The debilitating condition, which affects 10 million people worldwide, primarily results from the loss of neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. Existing treatments have had limited success. Stem cell researchers aim to replace dying neurons with healthy ones grown in the lab — and the NEJM paper was the clearest sign yet that such efforts could pay off. The authors — led by neurosurgeon Jeffrey Schweitzer at Massachusetts General Hospital and neurobiologist Kwang-Soo Kim at McLean Hospital — used what are known as autologous iPSCs. These are stem cells generated

from the recipient’s own mature cells, only a beginning. Much more research, which greatly reduces the likelihood including full-scale, carefully controlled that immunosuppressants will be clinical trials, will be needed to establish needed to prevent rejection. The team the safety and efficacy of his team’s techcollected skin cells from a 69-year-old nique. “Nonetheless,” he adds, “I believe man and reprogrammed them into this study is extremely encouraging and iPSCs. They then guided the stem informative.” He and his colleagues plan cells to take on the characteristics of to launch such a trial by the end of 2022. dopaminergic neurons, which they Meanwhile, other human studies using implanted into the patient’s putamen, a iPSCs or ESCs are planned or underway brain region implicated in Parkinson’s. at a handful of medical centers around Over a 24-month period, PET scans the globe. showed evidence that the new cells were A “BRIDGE” TO A NEW LIVER functional. The man’s motor symptoms Stem cells also demonstrated lifesaving and quality-of-life scores improved, powers for a 6-day-old baby in Japan while his daily medication requirement who received the world’s first successful decreased. He experienced no side transplant of custom-grown liver cells. effects or complications. The child (whose sex has not been “This represents a milestone in made public) was born with a urea cycle ‘personalized medicine’ for Parkinson’s,” disorder, a genetic condition in which Kim wrote in a statement. It also the liver is missing an enzyme that helps represented a milestone for the patient break down nitrogen into urea. Without — George “Doc” Lopez, a physicianit, ammonia builds up in the bloodturned-medical equipment entreprestream with potentially fatal results. A neur, whose financial contributions to liver transplant is usually needed, but Kim’s research helped make the surgery it can’t be performed until the child is possible. several months old — which may be too Once a record-breaking free-diver, late. Liver cells called hepatocytes can Lopez had severe tremors and rigidity sometimes be transplanted as a “bridge before the implant; he could barely rise treatment,” but supplies are from a chair. Afterward, scarce in Japan due to low he was able to return to rates of organ donorship. swimming and diving, Doctors at the and to perform such National Center for mundane tasks as tying Child Health and his shoes. “Parkinson’s STEM CELL Development used had me under a death RESEARCHERS ESCs to grow hepasentence,” he says. “[The AIM TO REPLACE tocytes, then injected therapy] has not only DYING NEURONS 190 million of them changed my life, it has WITH HEALTHY into the baby’s liver. In literally saved my life.” ONES GROWN May, the team reported Kim cautions that IN THE LAB. that the transplanted a single case study is

THE BODY

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EDITING THE MITOCHONDRIA There’s a mini second genome inside your cells, but no one could figure out how to edit it — until now.

Doctors used embryonic stem cells, or ESCs, (left) to grow custom-made liver cells. Dopaminergic neurons (right), can be derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs.

cells had kept blood ammonia levels normal for six months, until the child received a liver transplant from its father.

FIXING FAILING HEARTS Some of this year’s news was more controversial. In January, a team led by Osaka University surgeon Yoshiki Sawa reported having carried out the first successful transplant of iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes — heart muscle cells — in a human patient. The recipient, who had cardiac-muscle damage from a blocked artery, was implanted with a biodegradable sheet holding 100 million of the cells as part of a small clinical trial. The researchers, who used allogenic iPSCs derived from a donor’s cells, planned to monitor the patient over the next year and eventually try the procedure on nine more participants. In May, however, a Chinese surgeon disputed that Sawa was first to perform such a transplant. Wang Dongjin of Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital told the journal Nature that his team had implanted two

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men with cardiomyocytes derived from allogenic iPSCs a full year earlier. One patient, a 55-year-old electrician, said that before the surgery, he was constantly tired and out of breath; now, he could take a walk, use stairs and sleep for an entire night.  Aside from which team won the race, both experiments leave big question marks. Although animal studies have shown promising results for iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, Sawa doesn’t think implanted cells integrate with a recipient’s heart tissue. Instead, he speculates, they may stimulate healing by releasing growth factors. If that’s the case, Sawa’s critics say, it would be safer to identify those regenerative proteins and administer them in a less risky way, like injection. Wang’s experiment was muddied by the fact that both patients received heart bypass surgery along with their new cells. As University of Washington pathologist Charles Murry noted in Nature, “If you do two things to somebody and they get better, you can’t say which one caused it.” D

A NEW TECHNIQUE has finally opened up one of the final frontiers of gene editing: the mitochondria. These are the miniorgans that power our cells and have a little bit of genetic information of their own. Until now, the gene-editing tool CRISPR didn’t work inside this part of the cell; CRISPR uses guide RNA to find its target, but RNA can’t get inside the mitochondria. Other gene-editing methods have relied on simply chopping apart mtDNA — the mitochondria’s DNA — rather than editing it. With this new tool, chemical biologist David Liu of the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute has found a way to actually change the mitochondrial genome. The new editing tool begins with a bacterial toxin known as DddA, discovered by microbiologist Marcos de Moraes at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The toxin kicks off a reaction that turns one nucleotide — the building blocks of DNA — into another. When done randomly, the change can be deadly for a cell. But the researchers were able to harness this ability to make targeted gene edits. The end result is “quite a Rube Goldberg-like protein,” Liu says. The gene editor has many protein parts, including one that delivers the editor inside the mitochondria, one that indicates which gene to target and one that helps increase the efficiency of the edits. And there’s the toxin itself, which edits the nucleotide. Key to the process was finding a way to deactivate the toxin while it passes through the cell, to make sure it doesn’t do any unintended harm. The team achieved this by splitting the toxin in half; once inside the mitochondria, the two parts reform at the site of the intended gene edit in a process pioneered by Beverly Mok, a graduate student in Liu’s lab. The gene editor currently has a few limitations. For example, it only works on specific nucleotides. Liu says his lab is studying other toxins that might expand the editor’s capabilities. He also hopes to improve the efficiency rate of the edits, which is about 50 percent at best. Current limitations aside, the tool’s precise edits will allow scientists to study mitochondrial diseases in the lab like never before — and perhaps one day even cure them. D

FROM LEFT: NISSIM BENVENISTY/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; THE BUCK INSTITUTE

BY NATHANIEL SCHARPING

MT DNA

CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS EDITOR

1

Inside almost every cell in our bodies, there are tiny organelles called mitochondria.

Inner membrane

DNA

Outer membrane Nucleus

1

2

Mitochondria

2

The cell’s powerhouse, mitochondria create the molecules our bodies use for energy. They also have their own DNA, separate from the rest of the genome that resides in a cell’s nucleus. Scientists think they were once bacteria that established a symbiotic relationship with our cells. Over time, they lost the ability to live separately and became forever entwined with our bodies.

3 4 mtDNA

5

JAY SMITH

3

Unlike the rest of our DNA, the mitochondrial genome forms a loop. It’s also small, containing just 37 genes. Mutations to this mtDNA are responsible for a number of rare, dangerous genetic conditions. Like the other DNA in our cells, mtDNA is made of nucleotide pairs. Just four molecules make up all of our genes: Adenine (A), which can only pair with thymine (T), and cytosine (C), which can only pair with guanine (G). Another nucleotide, uracil (U), is functionally equivalent to thymine, though it’s typically used in other types of molecules in the cell, not

6

DddA editor

7

DNA. The specific order of these nucleotide pairs is what spells out our genes.

4

The lab’s creation relies on a special bacterial toxin called DddA, which teams up with a few other bits of molecular machinery to help get the editor inside the mitochondria and to the right stretch of DNA. Changing just a single A, T, C or G in a DNA strand can completely change one gene into another. The DddA first locates a specific

THE BODY

C (green)-G (yellow) pair in the mtDNA.

5

The DddA toxin then gets to work by first changing a C (green) to the non-DNA nucleotide, U (pink).

6

The new U (pink) is now sitting across from a G (yellow), but these two can’t make a pair. The cell detects this error and makes an edit. Sometimes the cell will put back the C, returning the gene to its original state. Sometimes

the cell will swap out the G for an A (blue), leaving a U-A pair — and now a new gene.

7

And sometimes the cell cleans up even more, swapping the U (which isn’t normally found in DNA) for the functionally equivalent, DNA-appropriate T (pink). In the end, the goal is to end with a U-A or T-A nucleotide pair where there was once a C-G — and thereby a different gene.

— ANNA FUNK

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The discovery of a paddlelike tail gives more evidence of Spinosaurus’ affinity for water.

UNEARTHED

A WATER-DWELLING DINO, LOST AND FOUND More than a century after its discovery, one of the strangest dinosaurs of all time is swimming into focus. SPINOSAURUS AEGYPTICUS is a fan favorite, its sail-backed shape appearing everywhere from museums to a starring role in the Jurassic Park franchise. In April, paleontologists announced a fossil that further solidified its image: The discovery of a long, paddlelike tail marked Spinosaurus as the first known semi-aquatic dinosaur. The current model of Spinosaurus took over a century to assemble. In 1915, German paleontologist Ernst Stromer named Spinosaurus, a carnivorous dinosaur that

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stalked Cretaceous Egypt and bore a tall sail on its back. But, not long after the dinosaur’s description, the only known fossils were destroyed during a 1944 Allied bombing raid

of Munich. Spinosaurus was lost to science. Bits and pieces turned up over the following decades. Scraps bobbed out of the strata of Egypt and turned up

in Morocco’s fossil market. Finds of related animals started to change the image of Spinosaurus, too — shifting it from a Tyrannosaurus-like chomper to a crocodilesnouted fish-eater with huge claws. Yet paleontologists were still lacking a complete specimen to validate their expectations. That all changed in the late 2000s, when pieces of a partial Spinosaurus skeleton surfaced from a fossil collector, and later at a museum in Milan. Traced back to their Parts of a Spinosaurus skeleton drawn by German paleontologist Ernst Stromer in 1915.

FROM TOP: HERSCHEL HOFFMEYER/SHUTTERSTOCK; ERNST STROMER/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

BY RILEY BLACK

REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

source among the Kem Kem beds of Morocco, the fossil turned out to be the first reasonably complete Spinosaurus found in a century. The finds revealed that Spinosaurus had a long snout full of conical teeth and comically stubby back legs. What’s more, the dense structure of the dinosaur’s bones hinted that its skeleton had naturally steadied the animal as it swam about Cretaceous waterways. But the reconstruction spurred controversy. The new specimen was still missing pieces, and experts disagreed on whether all the bones belonged to the same animal or even the same species. To solve the debate, paleontologists went back to the source. “It wasn’t clear that any more of the animal was preserved in the hillside,” says Harvard University paleontologist Stephanie Pierce. “The excavation team put [in] a lot of hard work … and crossed their fingers there were more bones to find.” The expedition was a success. A search of the quarry that had yielded the latest specimen also turned up something new: a tail. Described early in 2020, the tail of Spinosaurus was long, thick and eel-like — no other known dinosaur had one like this. “Although the tail was so unique, it [fit] so perfectly with the idea that Spinosaurus was aquatic,” Pierce says. “Spinosaurus had a tail fin.” University of Edinburgh paleontologist Stephen Brusatte, who was not involved in the research, is also convinced that Spinosaurus spent a lot of time in and near the water. Still, he notes, how the dinosaur used its tail and how much time it spent swimming is up for debate. “The new tail is a neat find,” Brusatte says, but “what’s needed now are more biomechanical models of the entire animal to test how good of a swimmer it was.” D

Chipped Teeth Offer Evolutionary Clues Researchers salvage ancient proteins to learn more about human ancestors. BY BRIDGET ALEX

THE INDIVIDUALS never mingled because they lived nearly 3,000 miles and 1 million years apart. But a chipped tooth from each met the same end — dissolved in acid at the University of Copenhagen. These human ancestors, who roamed different patches of Eurasia roughly 1.77 million and 800,000 years ago, respectively, share a claim to fame: Their fossilized teeth harbored the oldest surviving proteins from extinct human species — molecules more than twice as old as human DNA. The strings of protein code, reported last April in Nature, provide long-sought details about a patchy chapter of our evolution. Anthropologists know a good deal about hominins — humans and our fossil relatives — who evolved in Africa before 2 million years ago. Then hominin groups began spreading to A bit of tooth excavated from Gran Dolina, one of many artifact- and fossil-rich Eurasia. Some of these early pioneers deposits in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains, went extinct, while others led to later met an unusual fate after 800,000 years. species like Neanderthals. Researchers have struggled to fit scientists in the University of these ancient Eurasians into our evoluCopenhagen paleoproteomics lab tionary tree based on the look of their showed that proteins can persist more bones. DNA could settle the matter, than four times longer, when they salbut the molecules usually deteriorate vaged some from a 1.77-million-yearwithin 10,000 years old rhinoceros cousin in warm climates. In and 1.9-million-yearone case of optimal old great ape. The key, conditions — a cold, they discovered, was in refrigerator-like the dense enamel that HUMAN DNA cave — a human DNA coats teeth. “Anything CAN LAST UP TO sequence survived that’s trapped in there, 430,000 YEARS. 430,000 years. These organically speaking, BUT NEW FINDS new findings show can’t get out,” says SHOW PROTEINS that proteins can last molecular anthropoloCAN LAST A LOT a lot longer. gist Frido Welker, LONGER. In studies in 2019, a researcher at the

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This fragment of a Homo erectus cranium was almost overlooked by researchers.

NOPE, THIS SKULL WAS NO BABOON A fossil that sat exposed at a cave site for eight years upends human family tree. BY BRIDGET ALEX FOR EIGHT YEARS, a crunched cranium protruded from an excavation pit in South Africa’s Drimolen Cave. Archaeologists ignored the fossil, assuming it to be a baboon, until they swept up pieces that had crumbled free in 2015. Early on, the remains looked more human than monkey. Jesse Martin and Angeline Leece, researchers at Australia’s La Trobe University, jigsaw-puzzled together more than 150 bone bits, each no bigger than a quarter. Some were so fine that light shone through. Analysis confirmed the fossil wasn’t baboon. Then, in 2018, another skull surfaced at the Drimolen site, and chronometric dating placed both craniums around 2 million years old. The researchers published their big news in Science this April: Based on skull shape, the second cranium belonged to Paranthropus robustus, a Lucy-like relative with jumbo molars. The first came from Homo erectus — a species thought to have originated 200,000 years later in East Africa. According to textbooks, “we’ve got the wrong fossil in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Martin, a study co-author. He says the story needs to be updated. A contemporaneous site 6 miles away yielded another cousin, Australopithecus sediba, in 2010 — meaning at least three lineages of the human family tree occupied South Africa about 2 million years ago. Also in April, a Nature paper announced another set of relatives potentially crossed paths. Researchers from Griffith University in Australia redated a fossil discovered in 1921 in Zambia. Originally thought to be about 500,000 years old, the skull may belong to the species Homo heidelbergensis, ancestors with brains a half-cup smaller than today’s average. But the revised age shows this creature lived as recently as 300,000 years ago, suggesting H. heidelbergensis coexisted with our own species. Both studies leave researchers wondering about close encounters between distinct human relatives: Did the evolutionary cousins clash or coexist? D

ANDY HERRIES, JESSE MARTIN AND RENAUD JOANNES-BOYAU

University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute who worked on the project. As they do with DNA, scientists can compare chains of protein building blocks to determine how closely related two creatures were. (As you may recall — or forget — from biology class, three DNA letters encode one amino acid, which string together to form proteins.) Encouraged by the animal results, Welker and colleagues tried hominins in this latest work. One specimen came from 1.77 millionyear-old Homo erectus remains that are the oldest hominin fossils ever found outside of Africa — discovered at the same site as the rhino relative, in Central Asia’s Dmanisi, Georgia, in the 1990s. Although the scientists recovered proteins, the sequences weren’t quite long or distinct enough to place this H. erectus pioneer on an evolutionary tree. They succeeded with the other specimen, a breath-mint-sized dental chip from Spain’s Gran Dolina, a 92-foot-deep mountain crevice loaded with fossils. The tooth surfaced in 2004 alongside more than 830 stone artifacts and 170 fossils, dated to 800,000 years old, and was classified as a new species, Homo antecessor. Based on appearance of the bones, “paleoanthropologists have incredibly rich understanding of how Homo antecessor looked, how it behaved,” says Welker. Evidently those behaviors included cannibalism; about half the human fossils bear butchery cuts or other signs of consumption. But visual inspection could not resolve where H. antecessor fit in the hominin lineup. The latest research revealed that the enigmatic species split from our lineage soon before the shared ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. A sex-specific enamel protein also showed the individual was male. This added bonus of proteomics will prove useful at sites from all periods, as researchers struggle to assign sex by the look of bones. D

A TALE OF TWO LIZARDS What was to be a record-breaking specimen turned out too good to be true, fueling an ongoing ethical controversy.

FROM TOP: LI GANG; LIDA XING

BY RILEY BLACK

THE FOSSIL was heralded as the smallest dinosaur ever found. Named Oculudentavis and known from a skull encased in 99-million-year-old amber, the living animal would have been about the size of the smallest modern hummingbirds. Strange, then, that such a tiny fossil stirred the largest paleontological controversy of the year. From the time of the fossil’s March publication in Nature, outside experts were skeptical of the animal’s identity. The initial analysis by paleontologist Lida Xing and colleagues couldn’t pin down where Oculudentavis fit in relation to other dinosaurs; if anything, the fossil had characteristics that were both primitive and advanced for a dinosaur of its age. Rumors began to spread that there was a second specimen of the same animal that confirmed the creature’s identity as a lizard. Then, on July 22, the Nature paper was retracted. Paleontologists and dinosaur enthusiasts alike puzzled over what the change meant for the validity of the name if the paper describing Oculudentavis technically no longer existed, and what all the fuss might have to do with the rumored second specimen. Experts got partial answers from a pre-print publication posted online in August by a separate research team. It described another Oculudentavis specimen from the same amber quarries. The fossils had inadvertently passed each other like ships in the night. “We started working on the lizard material in July of 2019 and had already highlighted our specimen as an unusual lizard that we should prioritize,” says University of Bristol paleontologist Arnau Bolet. Along with his colleagues, Bolet became

aware of the second specimen at a workshop in December later that year. When they completed their analysis a few months later and determined where Oculudentavis fell on the evolutionary tree, they notified the authors of the Nature paper, who originally had described the fossil as a bird. Both specimens were Oculudentavis, and both actually seemed to be lizards. While messy, “this is precisely how science works,” says Bolet’s colleague Susan E. Evans of University College London. New fossil species are named at a rapid pace, and each description presents a hypothesis that will be tested against further finds and analysis. Oculudentavis is far from the first prehistoric animal to be revised after additional discoveries and research. The famed dinosaur Brontosaurus, for example, was relabeled as Apatosaurus in 1903 because of similarities between fossils of both specimens. Then, in 2015, another group of researchers proposed that Brontosaurus really was a distinct animal and the name should be revived. The changing nature

The name Oculudentavis includes the Latin words for “eye” and “tooth,” and a CT scan of the skull showcases those features.

of Oculudentavis is just another example of how paleontology self-corrects. However, the tale goes deeper from there. Both specimens of Oculudentavis came from the same mine in Myanmar. The mine, as well as others in the area, has yielded swaths of fossils — everything from baby birds to new species of insects and even, somehow, marine species like coil-shelled ammonites. The amber-enclosed fossils from these quarries are so prized that an individual specimen can cost as much as a luxury car. But the ethics of buying Burmese

Both Oculudentavis fossils were found encased in amber. Pictured here is the sample described in the Nature report.

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An aerial shot of the Llanos de Moxos region in South America shows the strange isolated mounds of trees that grow among expansive grasslands. Scientists’ explanation for these islands: Ancient humans planted and cultivated crops, making them some of the oldest domesticated plants in history.

Forest Islands Amid a Grassland Sea Trees are evidence of early crop cultivation by ancient humans in Amazonia. BY BRIDGET ALEX

EVERY SPRING, rains and snowmelt swamp vast grasslands that stretch between the Andes Mountains and Amazon rainforest in northern Bolivia. But thousands of tree-covered mounds stand solid, several feet above the flooded grasses. “They are like islands in a sea of savannah,” says Umberto Lombardo of the University of Bern, Switzerland. In 2006, Lombardo first stepped onto a forest island in this Llanos de Moxos region, puzzling over how such features could form naturally. “As a geographer, I had absolutely no explanation for them,” he recalls.

One theory suggested that over the past few centuries, ranchers had carved away lush rainforest to create pastures, but left scattered groves of about 300 trees each. Yet that didn’t explain why the trees grew on higher ground. It turns out the forest islands were made by people, and are much older than suspected. Lombardo and colleagues pieced together the history, published in May in Nature: Roughly 10,800 years ago, humans cultivated crops in the Llanos de Moxos — which puts them close in age to the oldest known domesticated plants, cultivated in the Middle East about 12,000 years ago. This confirms

UNEARTHED

UMBERTO LOMBARDO

amber, as it’s known, has been a topic of discussion in the paleontology community in recent years. Most of Myanmar’s amber mines are in the country’s Kachin state, where conflicts are ongoing between local minority groups and the government. In 2017, Myanmar’s military began a campaign to seize the area containing the amber mines, torturing and murdering civilians in the process. The conflict came to a head in January 2018 when soldiers killed three people and trapped thousands in the conflict zone. That same year, the U.N. declared the military’s violent actions genocide and a crime against humanity. The amber that is extracted from the disputed mines isn’t sold in Myanmar itself. Piece by piece, the fossils are smuggled to China and sold there, often sans information about where they were excavated or who benefits from the sale. What might look like a well-preserved bird or insect to a scientist may be amber that only keeps the cycle of violence going, part of a market that, by one estimate, can bring in more than $725 million each year. Some researchers protest that seeing the amber-enclosed fossils disappear into private collections would be a huge loss to science. Others argue that many amber pieces are not kept in reputable or recognized museums, anyway, and that the possibility of a fossil sale fueling deadly conflict is reprehensible. The second Oculudentavis fossil, the specimen identified as a lizard, was found in 2017, reportedly prior to the conflict in the area, and brought to the attention of study co-author Adolf Peretti. The fossil was loaned to the researchers for testing and then legally purchased and exported to a museum in Switzerland. But the amber markets are still open, and paleontology has yet to fully reckon with the ethics of a commercial market that buys, sells and even steals fossils from places all over the world. “As with any fossil material,” says Bolet’s colleague Juan D. Daza, “researchers should be careful and transparent.” D

Amazonia as one of the first places on Earth where people domesticated wild species. Their gardens piled up fertile compost, which allowed trees to root above the seasonal flood line. Rather than wrecking the environment, the artificial forest islands enhanced biodiversity, providing habitat for rare species to this day. Lombardo “is a real hero in this … really pushing research,” says José M. Capriles, study co-author and archaeologist at Penn State. In 2012, he and Lombardo launched excavations, which confirmed that three mounds were made by ancient people, based on burned clay, food scraps and human burials found at the sites. For the new study, Lombardo used Google Earth to map 6,643 forest islands in a region about the size of Illinois.

“It was like a Zen activity just surfnearly 7,000-year-old corn — a plant ing and clicking on all these points,” domesticated about 2,000 years he says. earlier in Mexico. It seems people The researchers probed some and passed seeds from one commufound archaeological debris similar nity to the next, spanning over to the fully excavated sites in 64 out 2,000 miles from Central to South of 82 of the tested mounds between America. 2,300 and 10,850 years old. From The new data also suggests an that ratio, they estimated humans 8,000-year gap between the start erected at least 4,700 of the 6,643 of garden-scale cultivation and forest islands visible full-blown agriculture on Google Earth. with canals, fields In the probes, the and dependence team also identified on domesticated microscopic plant species. Elsewhere THIS CONFIRMS remains from the in the world, this AMAZONIA AS oldest-known squash shift happened ONE OF THE in Amazonia and over approximately FIRST PLACES the oldest-known 1,000 years. Next on ON EARTH crops of the tuber Lombardo’s research WHERE PEOPLE cassava (also known agenda: understandDOMESTICATED as manioc or yuca) in ing why it took so WILD SPECIES. the world, as well as long in Amazonia. D

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION (ALL PERIODICALS PUBLICATIONS EXCEPT REQUESTER PUBLICATIONS) 1. Publication Title: Discover 2. Publication Number: 555-190 3. Filing Date: Oct. 1, 2020 4. Issue Frequency: 8x per year 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: 8 6. Annual Subscription Price: $37.95 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Contact Person: Liz Runyon, 262-798-6607 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 9. Publisher: Brian Schmidt, 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Editor: Steve George, 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 10. Owner: Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Stockholders owning or holding one percent (1%) or more of the total amount of outstanding stock are: Deborah H.D. Bercot, 22012 Indian Springs Trail, Amberson, PA 17210; Gerald and Patricia Boettcher Trust, 8041 Warren Ave., Wauwatosa, WI 53213; Alexander & Sally Darragh, 145 Prospect Ave., Waterloo, IA 50703; Melanie J. Duval Trust, 9705 Royston Ct., Granite Bay, CA 95746; Harold Edmonson, 6021 N. Marmora Ave., Chicago, IL 60646-3903; Laura & Gregory Felzer, 3328 S. Honey Creek Dr., Milwaukee, WI 53219; Susan E. Fisher Trust, 3430 E. Sunrise Dr., Ste. 200, Tucson, AZ 85718; Bruce H. Grunden, 7202 Wild Violet Dr., Humble, TX 77436; Linda H. Hanson Trust, P.O. Box 19, Arcadia, MI 49613; George F. Hirschmann Trusts, P.O. Box 19, Arcadia, MI 49613; James & Carol Ingles, 1907 Sunnyside Dr., Waukesha, WI 53186; Charles & Lois Kalmbach, 7435 N. Braeburn Ln., Glendale, WI 53209; Kalmbach Profit Sharing/401K Savings Plan & Trust, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612; Elizabeth King Trust, U.S. Bank, 777 E. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53202; William J. King Estate, 4816 Washburn Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55410; Mahnke Family Trust, 4756 Marlborough Way, Carmichael, CA 95608; Milwaukee Art Museum, Inc., 700 N. Art Museum Dr., Milwaukee, WI 53202; Cynthia Darragh Oatman, 1708 Roxborough Rd., Unit E, Charlotte, NC 28211; Mary K. Szalanski, 3355 S. Ann Louise Dr., New Berlin, WI 53146; Lois E. Stuart Trust, 1320 Pantops Cottage Ct. #1, Charlottesville, VA 22911-4663; David M. Thornburgh Trust, 8877 Collins Ave., Unit 307, Surfside, FL 33154. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. 12. Tax Status: Has not changed during preceding 12 months 13. Publication Title: Discover 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data: Sept/Oct 2020 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation: Average no. No. copies copies each issue of single issue during preceding published nearest 12 months to filing date a. Total number of copies (net press run) 366,103 325,662 b. Paid circulation (by mail and outside the mail) 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions 217,537 206,294 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions -0-03. Paid distribution outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid distribution outside USPS 19,733 13,005 4. Paid distribution by other classes of mail through the USPS -0-0c. Total paid distribution [sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)] 237,270 219,299 d. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside the mail) 1. Outside-county -0-02. In-county -0-03. Other classes mailed through the USPS 275 268 4. Outside the mail -0-0e. Total free or nominal rate distribution [sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4)] 275 268 f. Total distribution (sum of 15c and 15e) 237,544 219,567 g. Copies not distributed 128,588 106,095 h. Total (sum of 15f and g) 366,103 325,662 i. Percent paid (15c divided by 15f times 100) 99.88% 99.88% 16. Electronic copy circulation: a. Paid electronic copies 13,137 13,394 b. Total paid print copies (15c) plus paid electronic copies (16a) 250,406 232,693 c. Total print distribution (15f) plus paid electronic copies (16a) 250,681 232,961 d. Percent paid, both print and electronic (16b divided by 16e times 100) 99.89% 99.88% 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: If the publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is required. Will be printed in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of this publication. 18. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: Nicole McGuire, Senior Vice President, Consumer Marketing, 9/25/2020

INCREASE AFFECTION Created by Winnifred Cutler, Ph.D. in biology from U. of Penn, post-doc Stanford. Codiscovered human pheromones in 1986 (Time 12/1/86; and Newsweek 1/12/87)

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NEW OCEANS IN THE COSMOS Watery worlds like Ceres hint that our solar system is wetter than we thought. BY ERIC BETZ

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The icy dwarf planet Ceres appears to hold a subsurface sea. This discovery fuels the hunt for life beyond Earth.

science in the Space Age,” says astronomer Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, who also heads NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Ceres boasts more water than any world in the inner solar system other than Earth. That was a major reason why NASA sent the Dawn probe to Ceres, where it entered orbit in 2015. But many expected that even if it once had an ocean, any liquid would now be frozen into its thick and icy crust. Yet, as Dawn approached, the spacecraft’s cameras revealed a number of strange white spots, most prominently inside the

57-mile-wide Occator Crater. That find proved key to explaining Ceres’ history. In a series of seven papers published in Nature last August, NASA scientists say the best evidence suggests that a space rock struck that world’s surface some

“[IT’S] ONE OF THE MOST PROFOUND DISCOVERIES IN PLANETARY SCIENCE IN THE SPACE AGE.” — astronomer Alan Stern

20 million years ago, where it punched a hole into its icerich crust. The impact tapped into a deeper reservoir of salty water. As a result, icy chemicals have erupted through fractures in the ice from a subsurface pocket of ocean that resembles Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Meanwhile, a new analysis of data from NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, combined with fresh modeling of the world’s formation, suggests that the dwarf planet developed early on in our solar system’s history, with a liquid ocean. But how could such a small world keep a liquid ocean from freezing? Previously, astronomers

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

CROUCHED IN the rocky confines of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, an icy sphere the size of Texas has been hiding a secret. This dwarf planet, called Ceres, is actually an ocean world, astronomers revealed in 2020. And it’s far from the only one: Scientists have found the best evidence yet that Pluto (also located in a distant part of the solar system strewn with small space rocks) has an active underground ocean, as well. The search for alien life is really a search for water, and half a century ago, Earth’s oceans seemed unique. But in recent decades, evidence of liquid water oceans has emerged in dribs and drabs at places like Europa and Enceladus, the icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Astronomers say they’re piecing together a surprising view of a wet solar system with many hidden potential abodes for life. That finding is “one of the most profound discoveries in planetary

LDPHOTORO/SHUTTERSTOCK

had suspected Pluto formed from cold bits of rock and ice that slowly clumped together and heated until they melted the water, which eventually refroze over billions of years. But a new study, published in June in Nature Geoscience, takes a different approach. The team behind the study says they found no evidence of compression features on Pluto’s surface, such as cracks, which would indicate a cold start. Instead, the dwarf planet’s surface features make more sense if it was shaped hot and fast, forming in less than 30,000 years from an onslaught of impacts. Those impacts would leave Pluto hot, with a liquid ocean still warmed by radioactivity today. It’s not just Pluto, either. There are several other potential dwarf planets in the outer solar system that should have formed the same way. Beyond changing astronomers’ minds, the findings could help build momentum for follow-up missions to these previously overlooked small worlds. Stern and members of the New Horizons team are now trying to sell NASA on a Pluto orbiter mission. And, on the same day the Dawn team presented its latest results, scientists submitted a NASA-funded study looking at the feasibility of sending a $1 billion spacecraft to land on Ceres and search for signs of water, or even life. “Ceres is a lot closer and it’s a lot easier to get to than these moons in the outer solar system,” says Carol Raymond, principal investigator of NASA’s Dawn mission. “It is a very enticing target.” D

Global data is beginning to reflect a shift toward renewable energy.

A GLIMMER OF HOPE FOR GLOBAL EMISSIONS Annual CO2 emission rates appear to be leveling off. Now they need to rapidly decline. BY TOM YULSMAN AS THE ARC of coronavirus misery rose in 2020, a hopeful development on another dangerous curve may have escaped your attention. The curve tracking the rise of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use went totally flat in 2019, according to a report released in February by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Another international report found very slight growth in global emissions during the same time span, compared with prior years. Either way, this flattening happened before COVID-19 temporarily hampered economic activity and carbon output. So, the promising CO2 trend stems from other factors: plunging use of coal in many economies and gains in renewable energy, according to the IEA report. “We’re flattening the curve, which is the first step toward bending it downward,” says Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State. Pending final numbers, we’ll likely see actual reductions in CO2 emissions in 2020, “partly but not entirely due to the pandemic,” Mann says. “Perhaps even more significantly, we know that the flattening of carbon emissions is tied to the transition away from fossil fuel burning and toward renewable energy.” That’s a structural change, and the shift has been accelerating. Mann predicts the final emissions report for 2020 will show

a drop of about 5 percent. But that won’t thwart dangerous climate impacts in our future. “The problem is that we need further reductions by the same amount, year after year, for the next decade and beyond,” he says. The goal is to prevent Earth from warming an average of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which is projected to cause deadly heat waves, debilitating droughts and stronger storms. In fact, 2020 was on track to be one of the hottest years on record, according to Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Also, despite this emissions curve flattening in 2019, and likely decreasing in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere still reached a new high in 2020, and will continue to rise. Like a bathtub overflowing until the tap is shut off completely, CO2 levels will not stop rising until emissions are driven down to zero — either that, or until emissions are drastically slowed while CO2 is actually removed from the atmosphere. Pieter Tans, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says he now sees “a golden opportunity to provide much-needed jobs by working on the energy transition.” To seize that opportunity, he says we must embrace this idea: “We humans are really in charge of, and responsible for, our own future, which includes the health of our planet.” D

A big-data approach finds the most robust evidence to date that particulate matter kills.

Killer Pollution BY NANCY AVERET T

EXHAUST PIPES and power plants spew tiny particles 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller into the air we breathe. Thousands of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. And recent studies show that long-term exposure to this fine-particle pollution at levels far below what current EPA standards allow is associated with premature death. Yet some researchers, including the current chair of the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, declined to revise the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) in April. They argued that because the researchers conducting the studies used traditional statistical approaches that rely on assumptions, they failed to show causality. Harvard University scientists responded by publishing a June Science Advances study that comes as close to showing causality as air pollution researchers can without conducting a randomized controlled trial. Francesca Dominici, senior author and biostatistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and her colleagues gathered what is likely the largest air pollution cohort to date, with well over 550 million records. They used more than 20 different government health and pollution databases — including census data, EPA air-monitoring data and claims from 68.5 million Medicare enrollees — to compare heath records with pollution levels over time. They juxtaposed people who were extremely alike in demographics but different in their exposure to pollution across the U.S. Their work showed that tightening annual EPA air quality standards for fine-particulate matter by about 17 percent — from 12 micrograms to 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air

— would save 143,257 lives in one decade. The data overwhelmingly confirm that NAAQS standards for this pollutant are too loose, says Dominici: “I feel pretty strongly that, if the EPA would rely on science, they would have acted very differently.” Another 2020 study found that a 25 percent decrease of dust particulate matter in West Africa would decrease infant mortality rates in the region by 18 percent. The investigators combined birth data from sub-Saharan African nations with data on dust pollution blowing off the Bodélé Depression in Chad, a giant ancient lakebed that’s now dry and one of the largest sources of natural particulate pollution in the world. If climate change were to cause a 25 percent decrease in rainfall during the region’s dusty season, as some models predict, the authors estimate a resulting 12 percent increase in infant mortality by mid-century due to increased dust. As a preventative measure, solar-powered irrigation used to dampen Bodélé’s dust could avert 37,000 infant deaths annually, according to the researchers. The idea comes from a similar endeavor at California’s Owens Lake, a dried-up lakebed that the city of Los Angeles waters regularly to reduce its incessant dust. “We looked all around the world for examples of where people have lowered natural sources of pollution leading to better health outcomes,” says Sam Heft-Neal, study author and a Stanford University researcher. “Owens Lake was really the best example that we could find.” These studies — looking at both human-caused and natural sources of particle pollution — are part of the growing body of evidence that air pollution is widespread and can affect people’s health even at low levels. D

Average fine-particulate matter (PM2.5) in 2000

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Average fine-particulate matter (PM2.5) in 2016

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FORCES

An Asian giant hornet queen can grow up to 2 inches long.

MURDER HORNETS ON THE RUN You likely heard about them last spring. Then they disappeared. Or did they? IT WAS A GRISLY scene: a hive of decapitated honeybees, their heads chewed off. And it signaled to scientists that thumb-sized “murder hornets” native to Asia had invaded the Pacific Northwest. The finding in the fall of 2019 suggested that a new generation would emerge come spring. By May 2020, the hornets swarmed into the public consciousness via viral news stories and ensuing internet memes that disappeared nearly as quickly as they emerged. The hornets themselves weren’t gone, though — they were lurking underground. Only a handful of Asian giant hornets were spotted

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in the spring: These were new queens, awake from hibernation and looking for spots to build underground nests. Once they set up shop, they stayed in, laying eggs. Those hatched worker hornets, which emerged in the summer. The June lull in hornet sightings was right on schedule, as was a mid-July reappearance. In October, researchers found an active nest in northern Washington. “We fully expected that there would be basically nothing going on for several months,” says Chris Looney, an entomologist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. He’s been on the Asian giant hornets’ trail since decimated honeybee hives were reported in 2019.

The hornets likely made their way to the U.S. via shipping containers from East Asia. There they live mostly in harmony with people and the ecosystem, only occasionally destroying a hive and feeding the bee carcasses to their larvae. And while the hornets don’t pose a lethal threat to

ONCE THEY SET UP SHOP IN THE U.S., THEY STAYED IN, LAYING EGGS THAT HATCHED INTO WORKER HORNETS, WHICH EMERGED BY THE SUMMER.

most people, their sting is no joke. “Everybody says it’s one of the worst experiences they’ve ever had,” says Looney. “It’s been likened to having hot nails driven into your skin.” To stop the hornets from gaining a foothold in North America, Looney says it’s critical to get rid of them within the next few years, or at least stop their spread. Their weakness? “A really gross mimosa in a bottle,” Looney says. This spring and summer, he and fellow entomologists, along with volunteers from the community, placed concoctions of orange juice and rice wine across northwest Washington’s Whatcom County. Every week, each trap attracts a softball-sized

YASUNORI KOIDE/CREATIVE COMMONS

BY K ATE GOLEMBIEWSKI

Physicists give us an early view of a third kingdom of quasiparticles that only arise in two dimensions.

Anyons Join the Particle Party

WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

BY STEPHEN ORNES

clump of insects. When the researchers are lucky, one of those insects is an Asian giant hornet — and that means a nest must be nearby. They can try to find it using tools like radio trackers (on a captured hornet) and heat-sensing cameras to pick up the thermal energy of the hornets’ burrow. Then it’s a matter of destroying the nest with insecticides, carbon dioxide or vacuuming up the hornets. Looney says that there’s minimal risk of the hornets overtaking the entire U.S. “There’s not really an easy mechanism for them to traverse the Midwest. The one thing that makes me worry,” he says, “is our train traffic. We’ll see.” Before you conjure up images of murder hornets stowing away and building nests in train cars, rest assured: If anything, it would be a hibernating queen accidentally transported along with her underground nest. That would only happen “if somebody tries to take their compost heap from Washington to New York or something like that,” Looney says. So, if you’re planning a cross-continental move, bid your compost adieu before making the trip. D

AFTER DECADES of exploration in nature’s smallest domains, physicists have finally found evidence that anyons exist. First predicted by theorists in the early 1980s, these particle-like objects only arise in realms confined to two dimensions, and then only under certain circumstances — like at temperatures near absolute zero and in the presence of a strong magnetic field. Physicists are excited about anyons not only because their discovery confirms decades of theoretical work, but also for practical reasons. For example: Anyons are at the heart of an effort by Microsoft to build a working quantum computer. This year brought two solid confirmations of the quasiparticles. The first arrived in April, in a paper featured on the cover of Science, from a group of researchers at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Using an approach proposed four years ago, physicists sent an electron gas through a teeny-tiny particle collider to tease out weird behaviors — especially fractional electric charges — that only arise if anyons are around. The second confirmation came in July, when a group at Purdue University in Indiana used an experimental setup on an etched chip that screened out interactions that might obscure the anyon behavior.

MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who predicted and named anyons in the early 1980s, credits the first paper as the discovery but says the second lets the quasiparticles shine. “It’s gorgeous work that makes the field blossom,” he says. Anyons aren’t like ordinary elementary particles; scientists will never be able to isolate one from the system where it forms. They’re quasiparticles, which means they have measurable properties like a particle — such as a location, maybe even a mass — but they’re only observable as a result of the collective behavior of other, conventional particles. (Think of the intricate geometric shapes made by group behavior in nature, such as flocks of birds flying in formation or schools of fish swimming as one.) The known universe contains only two varieties of elementary particles. One is the family of fermions, which includes electrons, as well as protons, neutrons, and the quarks that form them. Fermions keep to themselves: No two can exist in the same quantum state at the same time. If these particles didn’t have this property, all matter could simply collapse to a single point. It’s because of fermions that solid matter exists. The rest of the particles in the universe are bosons, a group that includes particles like photons (the messengers of light and radiation) and gluons (which “glue” quarks together). Unlike fermions, two

BOSONS

FERMIONS

ANYONS

• Photons (carriers of light) • Gluons (hold quarks

• Protons • Neutrons • Electrons • Quarks (building blocks

Theory predicts there should be many different types.

together in neutrons and protons) • Gravitons (if they exist)

of protons and neutrons)

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Harvard University geologist Roger Fu poses on a rock outcrop in the Pilbara Craton, an exposed portion of the Earth’s crust in western Australia.

A ROCKY START Two new studies reveal that plate tectonics may have kicked off earlier than we thought. BY ERIK KLEMET TI TO MANY, Earth feels like a static place. The rock beneath our feet seems solid and unchanging. Yet, over billions of years, the surface of the Earth has actually changed dramatically and its interior composition altered, all thanks to plate tectonics. Shifting plates of crust move on thick layers of flowing — but still solid — rock called the mantle. This constant shifting not only moves continents, but also recycles material from the surface back towards the planet’s deep interior. Scientists are continually investigating exactly how long the

plates have been active. Did they start shortly, geologically speaking, after our planet’s formation, or billions of years later? If that movement started early, was it anything like what we see today? Scientists have proposed strange theories like drip tectonics, where plates sag into the mantle like dripping fat, and plume tectonics, where superheated jets of solid mantle rise up, to explain Earth’s early history. Two new studies bring us closer to understanding what might have happened in those first billion or so years. They tackle the question with

FROM LEFT: ALEC BRENNER/HARVARD UNIVERSITY; CAROLINE MCNIEL/NATIONAL HIGH MAGNETIC FIELD LABORATORY

or more bosons can exist in the same state as the same time. They tend to clump together. It’s because of this clumping that we have lasers, which are streams of photons all occupying the same quantum state. Anyons don’t fit into either group. What makes anyons especially exciting for physicists is they exhibit something analogous to particle memory. If a fermion orbits another fermion, its quantum state remains unchanged. Same goes for a boson. Anyons are different. If one moves around another, their collective quantum state shifts. It might require three or even five or more revolutions before the anyons return to their original state. This slight shift in the wave acts like a kind of memory of the trip. This property makes them appealing objects for quantum computers, which depend on quantum states that are notoriously fragile and prone to errors. Anyons suggest a more robust way to store data. Wilczek points out that anyons represent a whole “kingdom” containing many varieties with exotic behaviors that can be explored and harnessed in the future. He began thinking about them about 40 years ago in graduate school, when he became frustrated with proofs that only established the existence of two kinds of particles. He envisioned something else, and when asked about their other properties or where to find these strange in-betweeners, half-jokingly said, “anything goes” — giving rise to the name. Now, he says, the new studies are just the beginning. Looking forward, he sees anyons as a tool for finding exotic states of matter that, for now, remain wild ideas in physicists’ theories. D

different approaches: one chemical, one magnetic. The former uses lava that erupted along mid-ocean ridges to measure how much of the ocean’s crust has been recycled over Earth’s history. This study, by National High Magnetic Field Laboratory geochemist Shuying Yang and her colleagues, was published in June in Science Advances. When an ocean plate collides with a continent, the edge of the ocean plate can be driven back into Earth’s rocky but deformable mantle, which stretches from tens of miles beneath our feet to over 1,800 miles down. This is called subduction. A modern example is the Cascadia Trench, which runs from California to British Columbia, where the Juan de Fuca Plate is shoved underneath North America. As this ocean crust gets worked back into the mantle, it results in

a unique composition of magma and sediment. This blended mantle carries the chemical signature of that recycled crust — and when it eventually travels back up and emerges as lava, researchers can use that signature to calculate the fraction of recycled crust present in the hardened mantle before it erupted. “That quantity turns out to have major implications for understanding how long recycling has been going on for,” says geochemist Munir Humayun, a co-author of the study. “We have [helped] put a handle on the history of plate tectonics.” Using data collected from rocks around the globe, the researchers estimate that 4 to 6 percent of the Earth’s mantle is recycled ocean crust. Based on rates of subduction, plate tectonics would need to have been active for 4 billion years to account for that amount of recycling — at least a billion years earlier than prior research has suggested. The findings tell us about composition of the Earth’s crust, but can’t tell us exactly where it has gone over time. Understanding the motion of the crust is another clue to plate tectonics’ origins. A second study, led by Harvard University geologist Alec Brenner and others, and published in April in Science Advances, tries to fill that gap.

FORCES

Brenner and his colleagues looked at magnetic minerals in rocks to map where that rock has been relative to the Earth’s magnetic poles. Minerals like magnetite will align with Earth’s magnetic field when rock crystallizes, so by dating the rock and examining the alignment of these minerals, they can determine its past location. The researchers measured the alignment of magnetic minerals in basalt lava that erupted over 3.1 billion years ago in western Australia. They found that when you compare the past location of one lava formation, revealed by its magnetic minerals, with that of nearby rocks that are around 170 million years older, the chunk of land needed to move, on average, at least 1 inch every year during that 170-million-year period. “[This] shows that plate tectonics were shuffling the crust around 3.2 billion years ago, at least 400 million years older than previously known,” says Brenner. Together, both of these studies push back the boundaries of plate tectonics. “[This] suggests that our earliest ancestors took advantage of the same geological environments that we can access on the modern Earth,” says Brenner. In other words, our planet’s first single-celled organisms may have arisen on an Earth more geologically similar to today’s than we once thought. D

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BY STEPHEN ORNES

In a first, scientists detect quantumlevel movements using an ultra-still mirror.

action at a distance.”) Because this “popcorn” is everywhere, it can affect the measurements needed to find big things like gravitational waves. Mavalvala’s group set out to measure and control these quantum effects as a way to improve gravitational-wave detection. Advanced LIGO, housed in tunnels in Louisiana and Washington state, works by measuring how long it takes lasers to travel to a distant mirror. Gravitational waves — from neutron star collisions, or when black holes devour ordinary stars — can change the speed of the lasers’ trip. LIGO, which began observing in 2007, was upgraded to Advanced LIGO in 2015 and almost immediately thereafter found its first gravitational waves. But Advanced LIGO is so sensitive that its measurements can be clouded by quantum fluctuations. So by controlling these ultra-subtle movements, Yu says, scienEach of Advanced LIGO’s two detectors has a super-still 90-pound mirror at the end of a 2.5-mile-long tunnel. Here, a LIGO optics technician checks one of the mirrors. tists can eliminate more of this noise and detect gravitational waves better. The MIT group used a tool called THE ADVANCED Laser quantum “squeezers” to reduce the noise. gravitational wave detectors and other Interferometer GravitationalUsing the squeezers — in the absence of a instruments that are influenced by gravitational wave — the physicists reported wave Observatory (LIGO) quantum noise. that they were able to measure quantum can measure giant ripples in According to quantum mechanics, fluctuations to remarkable precision: The space-time that race across the the subatomic realm is replete with mirror only moved by about cosmos. But in 2019, physicists used it particles popping in and out 10^-20 meters, which for something else: to measure fluctuaof existence, a phenomis close to 1/100,000th tions at the quantum scale that jiggle the enon that gives rise the diameter of a detector’s super-sensitive mirrors. They to these fluctuations. proton. That matches published their report in Nature in July. Physicist and MIT School PHYSICIST AND theoretical predicTheorists have long predicted this of Science Dean Nergis MIT SCHOOL tions, but is the first behavior at the interface of light and Mavalvala, who also OF SCIENCE measurement of its kind. matter, but this study is the “first to worked on the new DEAN NERGIS In future runs, the experimentally prove it” at such large experiment, calls these MAVALVALA researchers say, quantum scales and at room temperature, says fluctuations the “spooky CALLS THESE squeezers can help physicist Haocun Yu of the MIT Kavli popcorn of the universe.” FLUCTUATIONS Advanced LIGO sense Institute, who worked on the project. It’s (Spooky harks back to THE “SPOOKY space-time ripples also the first time that scientists have Albert Einstein, who POPCORN OF from ever-more-distant quantified these quantum effects. These once called quantum THE UNIVERSE.” cosmic sources. D measurements, they say, will improve entanglement “spooky

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MATT HEINTZE/CALTECH/MIT/LIGO LAB

Big Excitement Over Tiny Fluctuations

The trajectory of Betelgeuse’s stellar “sneeze” in late 2019 and early 2020: First, the supergiant star spewed hot gas into its atmosphere, which then cooled, forming a dark cloud. The last panel, as seen from Earth, shows the cloud blocking the star’s light.

THE SUPERNOVA THAT WASN’T One of the brightest stars in our sky darkened, and soon there was talk of a supernova.

NASA, ESA, AND E. WHEATLEY (STSCI)

BY ERIC BETZ

FOR A WHILE in 2020, the constellation Orion the Hunter looked like it was about to get a supernova shot in the arm. In January, Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in our sky — which forms Orion’s right shoulder — dimmed to levels unseen since modern observations began 150 years ago. Speculation about an imminent supernova followed the star’s every twinkle. The Milky Way hasn’t had a supernova that’s visible from Earth since 1604, just a few years before Galileo turned his first telescope to the heavens. But was there really cause for all the excitement earlier this year? Apparently not: In April, the dying red supergiant star let skygazers down by returning to its former glory. Meanwhile, all the attention meant observatories were keeping a close eye. According to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal, as Betelgeuse began to dim in late 2019, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted hot, dense gas spewing through the star’s atmosphere at 200,000 mph. Then, the following month, ground-based telescopes noticed something blocking the light from the star’s

southern half. So, as the gas cooled, it could’ve created the dark cloud that blocked the starlight. Astronomers called it a stellar “sneeze.” However, as Betelgeuse and Orion slipped into Earth’s daytime sky for the summer, they hid another surprise. A NASA sun-orbiting telescope called STEREO caught Betelgeuse dimming again between May and August, when it wasn’t visible from Earth. The variable star usually cycles from dim to bright over some 420 days, so astronomers say there’s still more to the mystery. There’s little chance Betelgeuse will explode soon — and we’d likely get an advanced warning from neutrinos and gravitational waves if it did, astronomers say — but simulations suggest the sight would be awesome. The star is too far away to endanger Earth, but its supernova would shine in our daytime sky for up to a year and be bright at night for several times longer. “Imagine a good fraction of the world staying up and staring at Betelgeuse, waiting for the light show to start, and a cheer going up around the planet when it does,” says astronomer Andy Howell of Las Cumbres Observatory in California. D

FORCES

JAN UAR Y/FEB RUAR Y 2 02 1 . D IS C OV ER

67

TECH

MEET THE XENOBOTS Scientists reassemble a frog’s living cells into robotic devices — with no electronics required. BY JONATHON KEATS

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WITH 5G, IT’S ALL ABOUT SPEED Wireless providers promise the fastest networks ever. But industries and infrastructure, not smartphone users, will likely get the biggest boost. BY JONATHON KEATS

THE MARINE CORPS Air Station Miramar, near the sunny coast of Southern California, is partially solar powered. Distributed across 24,000 acres, the solar grid is selfcontained and secure, but energy production can drop precipitously when storms roll in — with no way to ramp the panels’ electricity production up or down in sync with the weather. But earlier this year, the Marines enlisted a technology more commonly associated with a brand-new Samsung Galaxy than a military compound: The station contracted Verizon to build a private 5G cellular network. The fifth-generation standard for cellular communications, 5G has generated buzz since it was codified in 2017, beguiling consumers with visions of seamless videoconferencing and video-game streaming. Each of the five generations of cellular has changed society in different ways, with distinct technical improvements generating new levels of digital access. The advent of 2G in 1991 brought cellphones — once a gadget of the rich — into popular use by switching from analog to higher-efficiency digital

transmission. Next, 3G facilitated onthe-go video, making the phone into an entertainment system. Then 4G, the standard since 2009, made high-speed web access feasible, the final stage in fitting the world into every pocket. The promise of 5G is likewise connected to its technical characteristics: 5G most dramatically parts from 4G in terms of the frequencies used to relay information. In addition to the existing channels, 5G will employ higher frequencies previously used only for short-range devices such as cordless phones. The addition of a new frequency range increases the amount of information users can access, and how fast. For instance, many sensors on an energy grid could relay data to a control system almost instantaneously, eliminating the need for costly underground fiber optics. However, there’s a reason these higher frequencies used in 5G networks were mostly consigned to cordless phones in the past. The signal won’t travel very far, and pretty much everything blocks it. Providing 5G cellphone coverage therefore requires carriers to place transmitters everywhere, augmented by specialized antennas and reflectors.

FROM TOP: METAMORWORKS/SHUTTERSTOCK; BRIAN GRATWICKE/FLICKR VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

THE AFRICAN CLAWED FROG, Xenopus laevis, typically lives in the streams and ponds of sub-Saharan Africa, scavenging for food that it rips apart with its feet. In January, researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University published a report that gave the amphibian a different lot in life. They harvested its embryonic skin and heart cells and reassembled the living matter into robotic devices — transforming Xenopus into xenobot. Xenobots are the first robots made completely of living materials. They’re designed on a supercomputer running software that emulates natural selection: Algorithms determine possible effective tissue configurations for a xenobot to perform a specified task, such as moving through fluids or carrying a payload. The most promising designs are sculpted with tiny forceps and cauterizing irons, then set free in petri dishes, where the specks of amphibian flesh live for about a week before decomposing. There are no electronics involved. Behaviors are programmed entirely through the structural arrangement of the pulsating heart cells held in a matrix of rigid skin cells. Although xenobots can’t yet do much more than crawl or swim, the researchers see great potential for them to aid in fields like medicine and environmental remediation. In the future, xenobots could be engineered to deliver drugs through the human body or to gather up microplastics in oceans, politely biodegrading when the job is done. D

EGON FILTER/NASA

That’s an expensive proposition, even in cities, which may not be justified by the ability to create faster streaming speeds for couples looking to stream Netflix on date night. By contrast, many other technologies would benefit from 5G connectivity, and those aren’t on-the-go like the average smartphone customer. Take factory robots. Before 5G, manufacturers shunned wireless connections because their machines required constant instantaneous feedback. Cutting the cord with 5G gives factories new flexibility to reconfigure assembly lines with changing customer demands. For instance, the telecommunications company Ericsson has recently begun production in its new Texas-based smart factory, using 5G-connected robotics to manufacture 5G antennas. Matthias Lidén, Ericsson’s head of group supply for the Americas, says the company is working now to make their new 5G system secure and reliable. The new facility allows them to refine the technology while also showcasing the abilities of a smart manufacturing system “in an entirely new way,” he says. Urban infrastructure can also be improved by 5G, as Las Vegas is already demonstrating, by networking traffic lights with roadside cameras to improve rush-hour efficiency. The system could ultimately bolster safety — and even foster a driverless revolution — by keeping all vehicles and road technology in constant real-time communication. Michael Sherwood, the city’s chief innovation officer, notes that at least 80 intersections are currently outfitted with networks suitable for swapping information about traffic conditions with autonomous cars. At the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, the future of transportation will also be explored with the same 5G network that will enable control over the flow of solar energy: A fleet of uncrewed ground vehicles and drones will move materials and, eventually, soldiers. We’ll have to wait and see if they’ll be equipped with the ability to stream Netflix. D

Satellite Constellations Go on Trial Clutter in the night sky? It’s more likely than you’d think. BY ERIC BETZ

IMAGINE GAZING up at a dark sky on a clear summer night and seeing more satellites crawling across the heavens than stars. That could soon be a reality: A small group of companies is working to launch so-called satellite mega-constellations to provide global high-speed internet that will leave current satellites in the dust. Amazon got approval in July to launch its satellites; others, including SpaceX and the U.K.-based OneWeb, have already started. “We’re seeing the beginnings of a new industrial revolution in space,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who published one of the first studies of the impact of these satellites. “This is a phase change. We’re going from hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit to potentially tens of thousands.” In 2020, SpaceX turned heads by launching more than 700 Starlink satellites into space. The company also began tests of its high-speed internet with customers in parts of North America. OneWeb was the first to start launching its satellite constellation in

early 2019, but was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2020 before being bought out and resuming operations. And in July, Amazon’s $10 billion Project Kuiper received formal approval from the Federal Communications Commission to begin launching 3,236 satellites — rivaling the total number of current active satellites. Meanwhile, astronomers released the first studies of how the night sky will change. The results, so far, are troubling. Based on current plans, a major observatory in Chile, for example, would see roughly 1,000 satellites in the sky at twilight and 400 in the middle of the night — 50 to 100 times more than what is seen now. Over the summer, hundreds of astronomers submitted a report to the National Science Foundation detailing the community’s concerns. Among the hardest hit areas of astronomy are those teams that scan for near-Earth asteroids, which are visible at twilight in the direction of the sun. “This report shows it’s a very serious problem for astronomy and fatal for many kinds of science,” McDowell says. D

Astronomers are concerned that a swath of new satellites will litter the sky.

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D I S C OV ER M A G A Z I N E .C O M

BY JENNIFER WALTER

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: NOAH BERGER/AP IMAGES; DANIEL ACKER/GETTY IMAGES; DIEU NALIO CHERY/AP IMAGES

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A WARMING WORLD, AND A STRANGER ONE: Natural disasters are a normal part of life on Earth, but 2020 layered historic levels of devastation on top of the COVID-19 pandemic. In North America, massive wildfires seared parts of the western U.S. from late summer into fall, forcing more than half a million people to evacuate in the midst of the health crisis. A derecho — an intense windstorm sometimes referred to as an inland hurricane — pummeled parts of the Midwest in August with 100 mph winds. Hurricanes slammed the Caribbean and southern U.S. starting in June, causing flooding and extensive damage. Meanwhile, the pandemic made disaster relief an even more precarious process. Scientists say many of the increasingly severe and compounding events are no fluke of a cursed year but rather part of a distressing trend: As the world warms, natural disasters will likely continue to grow in force and frequency.

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lava or melted gold? Nope, you’re looking at the most detailed shot of the sun to date, taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope and released in January. The surface of our closest star is made of plasma, which churns in a cell-like pattern as heat emerges from the sun’s center. ◀ NOT QUITE TWINS:

Variations between these two squid appear subtle, but the biggest difference is invisible: The one on the right was edited with CRISPR. In July, scientists described the first successfully gene-edited squid, paving the way for future research on organisms with complex brains. ▶ NEOWISE LIGHTS UP

THE SKY: Nearly 7,000 years had passed since NEOWISE last zipped past Earth. This summer, stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere caught a glimpse of the dazzling comet’s return.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NSO/AURA/NSF; DAVID HAJNAL/SHUTTERSTOCK; KAREN CRAWFORD

▲ UP CLOSE: Molten

▲ SMILE FOR THE

TOP: RUNE MIDTGAARD/SENCKENBERG; SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE

CAMERA: Though scientists had believed the matamata turtles of South America were all one species, DNA analysis published in April proved otherwise. There are, in fact, two genetically distinct lineages: The previously established species is concentrated in the Amazon River basin, while the newto-science species lives in the Orinoco River basin of Colombia and Venezuela. ▶ A LONG SHOT: What

might look like a floating shoestring is actually the longest animal in the world — depending on your definition of an animal. With the outer ring alone estimated at 154 feet, this siphonophore, discovered off the coast of Australia in March, may be as long as 390 feet in total. But the creature is actually a chain made up of much smaller individual clones called zooids, making it more of a colony than a singular animal.

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PLANET EARTH #ScienceIRL BY TIMOTHY MEINCH

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE RALLIED TO SAVE THIS GIANT IN A PORTLAND NEIGHBORHOOD.

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SCIENCE IN REAL LIFE We want to see your awe-inspiring photos. Tag #ScienceIRL and @Discover.Magazine on Instagram to share encounters with science in your cities, nature, the arts and beyond. Claire Bollinger (left) and Shayan Rohani.

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COREY ARNOLD (2)

DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published eight times per year (January/ February, March/April, May, June, July/August, September/October, November and December). Vol. 42, no. 1. Published by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 8520, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 531871612. Printed in the U.S.A.

equoia trees are big — as in, the biggest trees in the world. The current titleholder, General Sherman, towers 275 feet above Sequoia National Park in California. (That’s nine-tenths as tall as the Statue of Liberty.) In a residential neighborhood, even an adolescent sequoia, such as this one in Shayan Rohani and Claire Bollinger’s backyard, can look gargantuan. At roughly 100 feet tall, it rises above the sparse canopy in the Sabin neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. In 2020, thousands of people around the world signed a petition to save the sequoia after the city ordered its removal in the spring because the tree’s vast root system is destroying the foundation of a house next door. The tree draws daily visitors. A sign in Rohani and Bollinger’s yard asks advocates to contact government officials. And the tree’s fate now awaits an appeal in county court. For removal, the chainsaw work alone is estimated to cost $20,000, not including a crane rental, dropping powerlines and several semi-truck loads to haul away the 100-ton giant. Meanwhile, back in 2017 the city declared the house next door a “dangerous structure” in need of demolition or repair. “Unfortunately, property rights protect things that people build, not things that we grow,” Rohani says. “The value this tree could provide to the neighborhood and city could last for 1,000 years or more.” Indeed, some sequoias surpass 3,000 years of age. That means this tree, estimated around 115 years old, could be entering adulthood within a few decades — if it is preserved. D

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