A get-sober pill? — Science News , November 18, 1972
Researchers at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital have been able to reduce intoxication time in rats by administrating harmless chemicals…. Injections of vitamin B3, and vitamin B5 with cystine, were successful… Glyceraldehyde, however, was effective when ingested and sodium acetate (still untested orally) is expected to be even more effective.
Inebriation and the dreaded hangover that follows still don’t have cures — but scientists haven’t stopped searching. A compound in the seeds of Japanese raisin trees appeared to fend off drunkenness in rats and sober them up ( SN: 1/4/12 ), but follow-up research found no effect . Remedies that have worked in rodents have not yet led to treatments for people.
In July, an antihangover supplement became available in the United Kingdom and may soon appear in U.S. stores. The Swedish company that makes this probiotic pill, Myrkle (pronounced “miracle”), claims that it can break down 70 percent of the alcohol in a person’s system in one hour. But the claim is based on a single study conducted by the company.
Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News . She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News produces award-winning journalism, and Society for Science, our parent organization, provides programs to make sure that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Make a gift today to support all we do, including our outreach and equity STEM Programs and world-class science research competitions.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Olympic divers slice into a pool with a quick turn underwater that minimizes splash. But not for the reasons many athletes think it does , according to research reported November 20 at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in Indianapolis.
“The way that divers describe it,” says fluid mechanics researcher Elizabeth Gregorio of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., “is that they want to pull the splash in with them.” The goal is a nearly splashless rip entry that Gregorio says makes a sound resembling tearing paper.
To study the move, Gregorio duplicated it with hinged models that bend in the middle, much as a diver bends at the hips. She plunged the models into water to simulate divers in action.
Angles cut into the model re-created the shape of a diver’s head and arms. The shape meant the model folded in the middle, just as the angle of a diver’s arms and head after entering the water helps the athlete bend at the hips to execute a submerged turn.
The folded model pulled air behind it to create a large, air-filled cavity under the water. It’s the same thing that happens when a diver turns underwater following a dive.
The effect, Gregorio says, “reduces the jets that would come up after you enter the water,” leading to a score-boosting rip entry. Instead of “pulling the splash in,” the air-filled cavity prevents the splash from forming in the first place.
The research isn’t all about divers’ technique. Gregorio wonders if rip entries reduce the forces divers experience on impact. If so, the studies could help with splashdowns for returning space missions. She also imagines stealthy drones that slip into water without leaving attention-grabbing splashes behind.
James Riordon is a freelance science writer who covers physics, math, astronomy and occasional lifestyle stories.
Science News produces award-winning journalism, and Society for Science, our parent organization, provides programs to make sure that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Make a gift today to support all we do, including our outreach and equity STEM Programs and world-class science research competitions.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
According to DNA evidence, woolly mammoths survived in north-central Siberia for thousands of years longer than could be established from fossil finds. A new study argues that long-lasting preservation of remains in frigid environments can skew the results by thousands of years.
Some ancient DNA may be leading paleontologists astray in attempts to date when woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos went extinct.
In 2021, an analysis of plant and animal DNA from sediment samples from the Arctic, spanning about the last 50,000 years, suggested that mammoths survived in north-central Siberia as late as about 3,900 years ago ( SN: 1/11/22 ). That’s much later than when the youngest mammoth fossil found in continental Eurasia suggests the animals died out; it dates to about 10,700 years ago. Only on Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia and the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea were mammoths known to have survived later.
The finding was one of several in recent years using ancient DNA found in sediment and other environmental material to suggest new insights into animal extinctions. Genetic evidence from woolly rhinos in Eurasia and horses in Alaska have also indicated that these animals remained thousands of years longer in some areas than was thought.
But thousands of years is also how long the animals’ large bones can linger on the ground in the frigid north, slowly weathering and shedding tiny bits of DNA, two researchers write November 30 in Nature .
That means that the youngest ancient DNA in sediment samples may have come from such bones, not living mammoths, woolly rhinos and other megafauna. Studies that rely on this genetic evidence could skew estimates of when these animals went extinct by thousands of years toward the present, say paleontologists Joshua Miller of the University of Cincinnati and Carl Simpson of the University of Colorado Boulder.
When, and why, mammoths and some other Ice Age creatures died out is a lingering mystery. Dating when these animals went extinct could help reveal what drove them to their demise — humans, a warming climate , some combination of the two or something else entirely ( SN: 11/13/18; SN: 8/13/20 ).
But getting a good sense of when a species disappeared from its range, or from the planet, is not straightforward. For long-gone animals, fossils can help, but it would be a huge coincidence if the youngest fossil ever found of an extinct species was also the last individual to live.
Where fossils give out, DNA has started to take over. For the last two decades, environmental DNA, or eDNA, has become a go-to technique to find out what organisms are living , or used to live, in a certain place ( SN: 1/18/22 ).
Paleontologists generally focus on a variant of eDNA that gloms onto minerals and other material and gets buried over time. That “sedimentary ancient DNA,” or sedaDNA, is what evolutionary geneticist Yucheng Wang of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues analyzed in the 2021 study on mammoths .
“The DNA can come from a living animal, but it can also come from poop, from bones,” Miller says. “In our case, we’re focusing on bones.”
In warmer climates, a bone lasts long enough to spread DNA for at most a few decades, which usually is not important for getting a general date of extinction, he says. “But up in these cold settings, you would expect a much, much larger, even millennial-scale gap.”
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Miller and Simpson base their estimates of how long the bones of dead mammoths can shed DNA into the environment on radiocarbon dating of the bones of large animals found on the Earth’s surface in cold places today. Caribou antlers as old as 2,000 years have been found on the islands of Svalbard in Norway and Ellesmere Island in Canada, and 5,000-year-old remains of elephant seals near the coastline of Antarctica.
Wang and his colleagues disagree that the mammoth eDNA in their sample could be partly from cold, old bones weathering down. In a reply in the same issue of Nature, they point out, for instance, that the very youngest mammoth eDNA they found shows low genetic diversity , precisely what you’d expect if the DNA actually came from a declining population at the end of the mammoth’s time on Earth, instead of from a thriving population earlier on.
“I think Miller and Simpson bring up a valid point for further testing and analysis,” says evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, a pioneer of eDNA research who wasn’t involved in the 2021 mammoth study. “But I don’t think that their analysis is nearly sufficient to combat the multiple avenues of evidence which suggest late persisting megafauna,” says Poinar, of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He points out, for example, that in Wang’s study the DNA evidence tracks the plants of the time period. This suggests woolly mammoths in north-central Siberia could persist thanks to the steppe-tundra, which was their natural habitat, holding on there.
For Miller, the time span between the youngest known mammoth skeletal remains from north-central Siberia and the youngest mammoth eDNA reported by Wang and his colleagues is just too suspicious.
“That paper gives us scientific permission to really expect bones to be out there that are much younger than we have seen. There should be dozens, or hundreds of [such relatively recent] dead mammoths somewhere,” he says. “People have been looking for them…. And you just don’t find anything younger.”
Science News produces award-winning journalism, and Society for Science, our parent organization, provides programs to make sure that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Make a gift today to support all we do, including our outreach and equity STEM Programs and world-class science research competitions.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Mauna Loa, Earth’s largest active volcano, abruptly woke up on November 27 after an almost 40-year nap. The volcano shot fountains of lava as high as 50 meters into the air, while rivers of molten rock streamed down the volcano’s flanks toward Saddle Road, the main highway on Hawaii’s Big Island.
Mauna Loa stands shoulder to shoulder with four other volcanoes, including explosively dramatic Kilauea ( SN: 7/16/18 ) and quietly grumbling Mauna Kea ( SN: 5/14/20 ). Kilauea has grabbed headlines in recent years with its pyrotechnics while Mauna Loa has slumbered. But the sleeping giant hasn’t been so quiet in the past, says Ingrid Johanson, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in Hilo.
Historically, she says, Mauna Loa would awaken every seven years or so on average. This last stretch between eruptions “is quite a big gap.”
Science News talked with Johanson about how Mauna Loa tends to wake up, what’s in the path of the lava and what sort of neighbors Kilauea and Mauna Loa are.
“It depends on what you mean by warning,” Johanson says. “In a manner of speaking, we’ve known that Mauna Loa was showing signs of unrest since 2015.” At that time, she says, there was an uptick in the rate of local earthquakes, as well as in GPS observations of land deformation — a bulging upward of the land surface that indicates magma is on the move below ground.
Those signs tapered off a bit and then increased again over the last six months, suggesting “that the situation was evolving,” Johanson says. But when the volcano would actually erupt wasn’t possible to determine. “Fundamentally, we had about an hour and a half of warning,” she says. That was the time span between when researchers noted a sudden swarm of earthquakes pointing to an imminent eruption and the emergence of lava.
That short notice is “true to form” for Mauna Loa, she adds. Its “other eruptions have evolved very quickly in the same way.”
“One of the big differences between 1984 and now is the technology,” Johanson says.
“We can see more earthquakes [and] detect a wider range of frequencies in the seismic waves. And we have GPS and electronic tiltmeters to measure deformation continuously.” That technology allowed scientists to detect not only that there was land deformation recently, but also how it was changing over time, giving just a bit of extra warning time.
That wasn’t possible 40 years ago. Back then, researchers measured deformation by hand, hiking up to the volcano’s summit every few weeks or so. “There was a technique called EDM, for electronic distance measuring, which was essentially shining a laser into a reflector, so you could get very precise distance measurements,” Johanson says. Subtle shifts in the reflector’s location, installed on the volcano, helped reveal the deformation.
“It’s a little early to tell — it’s not yet clear how much volume we can expect out of this eruption,” Johanson says. “I don’t think it’s a given that this will be a more momentous eruption than past ones, but there is a sense of maybe coming back to business as usual for the volcano.”
The good news is that the lava flows don’t currently pose a threat to communities on the Big Island. However, Saddle Road connects the island’s eastern and western sides, Johanson notes. “If the lava were to cross the highway, it would really impact the island.”
But the eruption has interrupted data collection for one of climate science’s most iconic charts: the Keeling Curve, a nearly unbroken 60-year record of atmospheric carbon dioxide that shows a steady rise in levels of the gas.
The carbon dioxide data are collected from instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory. The eruption cut off power to the observatory on November 28. As of November 30, the power had not yet been restored, and lava flows had cut off access to the site. For now, it’s unclear if the interruption will have a lasting impact on data collection.
They are two separate volcanoes with geochemically distinct lavas, suggesting their plumbing systems — the networks of tunnels and channels through which magma moves — are separate. That plumbing separation probably occurs below the crust and in the mantle, Johanson says, though ultimately the volcanoes tap into the same mantle hot spot ( SN: 1/6/22 ).
That said, Kilauea and Mauna Loa are uneasy neighbors, communicating through changes in pressure and stress underground, she says. Pressure changes in the plumbing beneath one volcano can subtly affect the other, for example, altering how easy it is for one volcano to expand, making way for more magma to move in. “They do kind of elbow each other a little bit.”
Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Science News produces award-winning journalism, and Society for Science, our parent organization, provides programs to make sure that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Make a gift today to support all we do, including our outreach and equity STEM Programs and world-class science research competitions.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
When astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped from the moon’s surface into his spacecraft in December 1972, he was aware it was the end of an era. His mission, Apollo 17, was the last of the Apollos.
“Take your final look at the valley of Taurus-Littrow, except from orbit,” Cernan said of the view before the craft lifted off. “We’re on our way, Houston!”
And with that, the last person to walk on the moon returned to Earth. No other boots have touched lunar soil in the 50 years since then.
Now, NASA is preparing to go back, and China is on its way too. On November 16, the U.S. Artemis I mission launched to bring the first crew-ready space capsule to the vicinity of the moon since Cernan and his two crewmates left half a century ago.
That spacecraft isn’t carrying any astronauts; the mission was designed to check technology and other systems that will eventually take people to the moon, on Artemis III, no sooner than 2025. This time, NASA says, the intention is to stay longer, to learn how to live on the moon and eventually send people to Mars.
The obvious next question is, who gets to go?
Thanks to social, political and scientific changes over the last 50 years, today’s astronauts are not like the astronauts of the past. They are more diverse in sex, race and field of expertise. The next set of people to walk on the moon will face different challenges and require different skills, temperaments and support systems than the Apollo crews.
And some groups are thinking about how to include people with disabilities in the spacefaring future. Preparing for a more permanent human presence in space will require rethinking the right stuff. Future lunar crews may reflect our lives on Earth more faithfully, making space for everyone.
NASA has declared that upcoming missions to the moon will include a woman and a person of color, setting two firsts for lunar astronauts.
The next visitors to the moon haven’t been selected yet. But there are only about 50 people to choose from. The 43 active astronauts and 10 astronaut candidates, who are still in training, come from a variety of backgrounds. The list includes medical doctors, military pilots, geologists, microbiologists, engineers and others. Of NASA’s active astronauts, about 37 percent are women.
“The astronaut corps is, of course, NASA’s most visible workforce,” says Lori Garver, who was NASA’s deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013. “Because of that, NASA has, I think, a responsibility to have an astronaut corps that reflects the nation.”
Modern astronauts are already different from those of Apollo. For its first class of astronauts in 1959, NASA recruited military fighter pilots shorter than 5 feet, 11 inches (because of the tight space in the Mercury space capsule). At the time, all military test pilots were white men, so all astronauts were too.
NASA recruited its first class of “scientist-astronauts” in 1964. The move drew criticism from pilots. In an interview, Cernan — who shared his spot on Apollo 17 with the only geologist to walk on the moon, Harrison Schmitt — called science “a parasite” on the moon program. “Science is not the reason we learned to fly,” he griped. Cernan later referred to Schmitt as “Dr. Rock” and worried that he wouldn’t be able to get out of a tough spot on his own.
But according to NASA’s mission report, Apollo 17 was “the most productive and trouble-free manned mission.” It “demonstrated the practicality of training scientists to become qualified astronauts.”
Today, 42 percent of NASA’s active astronauts have a research science or medicine background, in fields ranging from oceanography to physics.
Counterintuitively, though, NASA’s definition of “astronaut” doesn’t require going to space. Once you’ve made it through the strenuous and selective application and training process, you’re a member of the astronaut corps, whether you leave Earth or not.
The first step in applying to be an astronaut is “unnervingly underwhelming,” says geobiologist Zena Cardman, who joined the astronaut corps in 2017 but has not yet been to space. “You submit a very short resume to USAJobs.gov, and then you wait for a long time,” she says. (Full disclosure: I applied to the astronaut program myself in 2012. I kept the rejection postcard for years.)
The minimum requirements for applying are being a U.S. citizen, having a master’s degree in engineering, biological science, physical science or math, and two years of professional experience, including teaching or graduate school. Pilots can substitute the two years of experience with 1,000 hours of jet-flying experience. Candidates who make it through that first round travel to Houston for a two-round interview process.
“What we’re looking for in these first few Artemis missions … first and foremost, is technical expertise,” astronaut Reid Wiseman, chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office, said in a news briefing on August 5. A lot of those desired skills revolve around acquiring resources to support long stays.
Artemis III plans to send people to the lunar south pole, which could be a reasonable place to put a long-term base. It has regions that will be in sunlight for the entire 6.5-day mission. The light will help generate energy from solar power. And it has regions in permanent shadow that host pockets of water ice, which could be used for water and fuel for human settlements.
The possibility of finding and using resources on the moon is part of why science backgrounds, especially in geology, are now more important for astronauts. But in the astronaut corps, everyone does everything, Cardman says. Her background is in geology and microbiology. She’s done fieldwork in Antarctica, the Arctic, underground caves and on ocean research vessels. Space “seemed like the ultimate fieldwork endeavor,” she says.
To round out her skills, she’s getting trained in engineering and aviation, and her test pilot colleagues are learning geoscience. “We will have roles, but we won’t be siloed,” she says.
A science background is considered a necessity for today’s 43 active astronauts (top). Many are in the military, but also have degrees in medicine, geoscience or physics. The original Apollo astronauts (bottom) were mostly military pilots, some with engineering backgrounds.
Beyond technical skill, the next most important characteristic NASA looks for is: “Are you a team player?” Wiseman says. Working together was important on the Apollo missions. But those missions lasted 12 days at most, with three days tops on the lunar surface. Astronauts on a weeks-long Artemis mission to the moon or a years-long mission to Mars will need to survive in stressful, challenging, isolated environments ( SN: 11/29/14, p. 22 ). Getting along becomes crucial to staying alive.
That explains why the interview process includes teamwork exercises and group dynamic activities to simulate the kinds of situations astronauts would find themselves in, Cardman says.
The interview also involves medical screening. The details are not public, but “they really go quite in depth,” Cardman says. There’s no official requirement for any particular body type or standards for physical fitness, like running a mile in a certain time or doing a certain number of pull-ups. “It’s more functional,” she says. As long as you can meet the mental and physical demands of a spacewalk, it doesn’t matter how you get in shape. Cardman’s exercise of choice is powerlifting.
Ultimately, there are thousands more applicants than there are openings for astronaut jobs. “The final selection is somewhat subjective,” Garver says. “So I think it’s absolutely appropriate that you look at the demographic along with the qualifications.”
There’s one other medical requirement for the next people to walk on the moon: They can’t have already spent too much time in space.
Over time, exposure to the harmful charged particles that zip around space can increase a person’s risk of developing cancer. For astronauts’ safety , NASA limits the amount of radiation an astronaut can absorb over their career. ( SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20, p. 18 ).
From 1995 until 2021, those bounds were dependent on an astronaut’s age and sex. The limit was the amount of radiation that correlates with a 3 percent risk of dying from cancer caused by radiation exposure. But because women were considered to have higher risks of dying from radiation-related cancers, that limit grounded female astronauts earlier than males.
Effectively, women were allowed about 150 millisieverts of radiation in their careers, while men were allowed closer to 800 millisieverts, says emergency medicine physician and aerospace engineer Erik Antonsen of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
“It was a consequence of the way we were calculating risk that women were being limited much earlier in their career and could not fly as much as men,” Antonsen says. “We had to dive deep into that stuff, come back up for air and say, hey man, there’s not justification for this stuff. And it’s causing discrimination against females.”
Antonsen notes that no openly transgender astronauts have flown, but he can’t think of any medical issues that would hold them back.
In 2021, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report urging NASA to change the limit to 600 millisieverts of radiation over a career for everyone, regardless of sex or age. That amounts to about 400 days in orbit around the moon or 680 days on the lunar surface, some of the time in a habitat, for an astronaut with no other spaceflight exposures.
NASA, the German Aerospace Center and the Israel Space Agency are flying a pair of dummies on Artemis I to test a radiation protection vest for female astronauts, which might help reduce radiation risks further if worn on future missions.
That could all be good news for Cardman. She and her cohort, who are beginning to fly missions to the International Space Station, are likely candidates for Artemis III. Cardman herself could be the first woman on the moon.
She’s modest about it. “I would be thrilled to go to the moon, of course,” she says. “Depending on the timeline, who knows. But it’s pretty exciting to know I work with the people who will be the first ones setting foot on the moon in half a century.”
Even though there are no official astronaut health standards, NASA does end up selecting “the healthiest damn people to fly,” Antonsen says.
Commercial spaceflight is expanding the pool of people who get to go to space. Companies like SpaceX, which is building the moon lander for Artemis III, and Blue Origin are already sending paying customers on space joyrides. These companies have different goals, incentives and risk tolerances than NASA does.
“The beautiful thing about this is, the goal is eventually to send just people,” Antonsen says. “It’s changing. And it should change.”
SpaceX would not comment on how it chooses who it sends to space. But Antonsen speculates that some companies’ only criteria for their customers will be “making sure they can walk up the stairs to get to the vehicle.”
And even that might not be the final barrier for long. Some organizations are investigating how disabled people can live and work in space.
“Disability inclusion affects how we design our spacecraft,” says AJ Link, communications director of the nonprofit advocacy group AstroAccess. “If we can make space accessible, we can make any space accessible.”
By organizing flights for disabled people on zero gravity aircraft, AstroAccess aims to show that disabled people have strengths that could be useful in space. In October 2021, 12 people with various disabilities took a parabolic flight, in which the plane took a repeating upward and downward trajectory to give the passengers inside a few minutes of weightlessness.
“My personal, emotional conclusion was, it was wicked fun,” says Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Wells-Jensen, who is blind, was one of the people on that flight. She plans to try it again in December, on the anniversary of Apollo 17’s departure from the moon, despite describing herself as a “big chicken.”
“I’m not a thrill seeker. I don’t even like roller coasters,” she says. But in zero g, she was “surprised by how not terrified” she was.
She was also surprised at how useless her normal instincts were. In simulated lunar gravity, a tiny hop sent her flying to conk her head on the ceiling. The plane was so noisy that her normal ways of orienting by sound didn’t work. She felt like there was no up or down. “I’m damn well oriented on Earth, but boy, there were several moments there where I had nothing,” she says.
Learning how disabled people behave on spaceflights will help all astronauts in the future, regardless of disability, Wells-Jensen says.
“Space is a profoundly disabling environment. It’s always trying to kill you,” Wells-Jensen says. What happens if an astronaut loses their vision, whether temporarily or permanently, on the way to Mars? Or if the spacecraft lights go off, or smoke makes it hard to see? Designing a spacecraft to be used by blind people, she says, will help all astronauts navigate those situations.
Similarly, if an astronaut loses use of their legs, knowing how people with amputations or limb deficiencies navigate a spacecraft will give them options. “For able-bodied people who acquire a disability in space, we’re not just going to send them home,” Wells-Jensen says. “How do we make sure they’re safe and can still do their jobs?”
Wells-Jensen hopes that sending disabled people on zero-g flights will raise awareness of how capable they are as well. “A disabled person could take a suborbital flight tomorrow,” she says. “I think at this point, the limiting factor is cultural, rather than technological.”
The European Space Agency is also recruiting disabled astronauts, with physical characteristics such as limb deficiencies or short stature that would normally disqualify them. These “parastronauts” will help study the kinds of adaptations needed for disabled people to fly in space. In November, ESA named its first parastronaut : John McFall, a British paralympic sprinter and orthopedist, whose right leg was amputated after a motorcycle accident when he was 19.
Both ESA and AstroAccess argue that now is the time to consider accessibility in space, before the spacefaring vehicles of the future are finalized.
“Retrofitting is hard,” Wells-Jensen says. “Building things the way you want them is much easier.”
That could be especially important for private companies like SpaceX that are designing moon vehicles. The Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees commercial space transportation , has a legal moratorium on setting regulations about the safety of participants in private spaceflights until October 2023 to give the industry time to get established and collect data. AstroAccess, for one, wants to help guide those regulations.
“We want to fundamentally change the way humanity goes to space,” Wells-Jensen says. “We can’t become a spacefaring species if only some of us can go.”
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Science News produces award-winning journalism, and Society for Science, our parent organization, provides programs to make sure that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Make a gift today to support all we do, including our outreach and equity STEM Programs and world-class science research competitions.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
A dinosaur unearthed in Mongolia is making a splash among paleontologists, as its sleek physique adds potential evidence to the idea that some dinos were suited for life in the water.
Natovenator polydontus may be the first known nonbird dinosaur to have possessed a streamlined body comparable to that of modern diving birds , researchers report December 1 in Communications Biology . Natovenator and other closely related dinosaurs may have been swimming predators, the researchers say, challenging the popular notion that all dinos were landlubbers.
Natovenator was small like a duck and probably used its forelimbs when swimming, says Yuong-Nam Lee, a vertebrate paleontologist at Seoul National University in South Korea. “We think that Natovenator lived in shallow water and ate small fish,” he says.
This isn’t the first time that researchers have suspected a nonbird dinosaur of having an aquatic lifestyle. For years, paleontologists have debated whether spinosaurs were aquatic predators ( SN: 3/23/22 ). And in 2017, researchers reported that Halszkaraptor —a close relative of Natovenator — had features analogous to those of aquatic birds and reptiles , though the scientists were unable to infer a body shape.
In the new study, Lee and colleagues analyzed a well-preserved skeleton from the Hermiin Tsav fossil formation in Mongolia, found in rocks from the Upper Cretaceous, which dates to about 100 million to 66 million years ago. The skull, teeth, neck and limbs of Natovenator are akin to those of Halszkaraptor , the team reports, suggesting the two probably had comparable lives.
What’s more, the orientation of Natovenator ’s ribs indicates that it had a streamlined body like that of modern waterfowl, with a compressed and flattened rib cage akin to aquatic reptiles, the researchers say.
The close resemblance between Natovenator and a duck or cormorant is almost certainly an example of what’s known as convergent evolution, says Thomas Holtz Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who was not involved in the study. “Similar body plans evolve because of similar lifestyles.”
It remains unclear just how strong a swimmer Natovenator may have been. The dinosaur’s forelimbs appear short, and its hind limbs seem to lack attributes of kick-propelled swimmers like loons, Holtz says. But semiaquatic mammals like minks and some other successful modern swimming predators have skeletons that aren’t highly specialized for life in the water either, he says. “So Natovenator might be intermediate in swimming ability, between something like a mink and a loon.”
Nikk Ogasa is a staff writer who focuses on the physical sciences for Science News . He has a master’s degree in geology from McGill University, and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News produces award-winning journalism, and Society for Science, our parent organization, provides programs to make sure that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Make a gift today to support all we do, including our outreach and equity STEM Programs and world-class science research competitions.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
