Books about the pandemic. Books about the ancient past. Books about outer space. These were a few of Science News staff’s favorite reads. If your favorite didn’t make this year’s cut, let us know what we missed at feedback@sciencenews.org.
For centuries, scientists (mostly males) have ignored female biology, and women’s health has suffered. But researchers are finally paying attention, as Gross explains in this fascinating tour of what little is known about female anatomy ( SN: 4/9/22, p. 29 ).
Patient stories and conversations with scientific luminaries enliven this tale of cell biology’s past, present and future , and how advances in the field have reshaped medicine ( SN: 11/5/22, p. 28 ).
In this portrait of the coronavirus and the scientists who study it, Quammen investigates some of the most pressing questions about the pandemic , including whether or not the coronavirus could have accidentally escaped from a lab ( SN: 9/24/22, p. 28 ).
Virology Joseph Osmundson W.W. Norton & Co. $16.95
This absorbing “autobiography,” written from the perspective of the Milky Way (a very sassy Milky Way), draws on mythology and astronomy to persuade readers that our home galaxy deserves respect and admiration ( SN: 9/10/22, p. 28 ).
So much of the world is beyond the grasp of human perception, but this safari through animal senses helps readers imagine what we’re missing ( SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 36 ).
By drawing parallels between their own life and the stories of bobbit worms, octopuses, sperm whales and other deep-sea dwellers, Imbler muses on such weighty themes as adaptation, survival and sexuality.
The basic story of the downfall of nonbird dinosaurs is familiar: They were killed off by an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago. Using the most up-to-date science, Black fleshes out this tale, painting a vivid portrait of life before and after this apocalypse ( SN: 4/23/22, p. 28 ).
The perfect follow-up to Black’s book on how the Age of Dinosaurs ended is this sweeping history of how the Age of Mammals began . Brusatte traces the origins of the evolutionary innovations that have made mammals so successful ( SN: 6/18/22, p. 28 ).
Exactly how and when humans first came to the Americas is still unsettled science. But Raff gathers archaeological and genetic evidence to piece together a convincing scenario. She also points out past mistreatment of Indigenous communities by geneticists and calls on researchers to do better and foster more collaborations ( SN: 2/12/22, p. 29 ).
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Tanklike armored dinosaurs probably pummeled each other — not just predators — with huge, bony knobs attached to the ends of their tails. Thanks to new fossil findings, researchers are getting a clearer understanding of how these rugged plant eaters may have used their wicked weaponry.
Many dinosaurs known as ankylosaurids sported a heavy, potentially microwave-sized tail club. This natural sledgehammer has long been considered by both scientists and artists as a defensive weapon against predators, says Victoria Arbour, a paleontologist at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada.
Fossil evidence for tail clubs’ targets was largely lacking, until Arbour and her colleagues chipped more rock away from the same skeleton they used to describe a new armored dinosaur, Zuul crurivastator , in 2017 (SN: 6/12/17 ).
The dinosaur had five broken spikes on its sides. The team’s statistical analyses showed the damaged spikes clustered in specific regions of the body. If a large carnivorous dinosaur made these injuries, says Arbour, they’d likely be more randomly distributed and include bite and scratch marks.
Armored dinosaurs’ tail clubs start out either absent or too tiny to mount a major defense, and they get proportionally larger with age. Similar growth patterns occur in some modern animal weaponry like antlers. It’s possible that tanklike dinosaurs sparred with each other for mates, food or territory much like male deer and giraffes do today.
And that tail could also be useful in a pinch. “Having a tail club you can swing around at the ankles of a two-legged predator is a pretty effective weapon,” says Arbour.
“Ankylosaurs are often portrayed as stupid, loner dinosaurs,” she adds. The findings “show that they probably had much more complex behaviors than we give them credit for.”
Jake Buehler is a freelance science writer, covering natural history, wildlife conservation and Earth’s splendid biodiversity, from salamanders to sequoias. He has a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
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).
Breweries in Germany shifted from producing ale to producing lager in the 1500s, thanks to the rise of a hybrid yeast called Saccharomyces pastorianus , whose ancestor has now been found in Europe.
In 1516, the duchy of Bavaria in Germany imposed a law on its beer brewers meant to reserve ingredients like wheat and rye for the baking of bread. The decree restricted brewers to using only barley, hops, water and yeast to make their libations, and set the prices for beer depending on the time of year. The law inadvertently limited brewing to the winter, which favored a cold-tolerant yeast called Saccharomyces pastorianus , which brews lager, over the more common S. cerevisiae, which brews ale .
S. pastorianus is a hybrid, produced from the mating of S. cerevisiae with another yeast called S. eubayanus . Despite lager’s European origins, S. eubayanus hadn’t actually been found there and was only first discovered in 2011, in the Patagonia region of South America ( SN: 8/23/11 ). Now, thanks to a research project carried out by undergraduate students, S. eubayanus has been found living in European soil — fittingly, in the beer-loving nation of Ireland.
“Since the discovery of S. eubayanus [more than] 10 years ago, it’s been a fun puzzle putting together where the species is actually found,” says Quinn Langdon, a biologist at Stanford University, who was not involved with the study.
A leading theory is that S. eubayanus originated in Patagonia and then spread around the world, eventually mating with S. cerevisiae in European breweries to make S. pastorianus .
Geraldine Butler, a geneticist at University College Dublin and leader of the project, always thought that teaching genome-sequencing techniques by having students scour soils for yeast could turn up S. eubayanus . Still, she says, she couldn’t contain her excitement when she saw the first hint of the microbe. “I was sitting by the sequencer waiting for the results to come out,” she says.
One of Butler’s students, Stephen Allen, found two local strains of S. eubayanus hiding in plain sight on the Belfield campus of University College Dublin. The team has since gone back and found the yeast again, Butler says, suggesting that there is a stable population of the yeast living in the Irish soil.
The new discovery was published December 7 in FEMS Yeast Research .
Butler hopes this discovery will brew interest elsewhere in Europe to search for S. eubayanus , including in Bavaria, where lager brewing is thought to have first started. She is also looking for commercial partners to try making beer with the Irish strains.
Langdon isn’t confident that the new microbes will lead to tasty brews because there are other S. eubayanus strains that don’t grow well on maltose, the sugar that needs to be digested by yeasts during the brewing process. Still, Langdon says, “it’d be fun to brew with them.”
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Whether the newly discovered Irish strains of S. pastorianus ’ missing parent taste good or not, there’s no denying that their discovery helps solve a little piece of the puzzle of lager brewing’s origins. That 16th century shift from S. cerevisiae to S. pastorianus led to a global shift that continues to this day — more than 90 percent of beer sold worldwide today is lager.
Fungi are the “forgotten kingdom,” Langdon says, not getting as much attention as plants or animals, despite playing an outsize role in human history. “Yeasts are just single cells living in the soil, and they’re doing really important things.”
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).
The Cosmic Cliffs are part of a star-forming region called the Carina Nebula, which is about 7,600 light-years from Earth. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are seeing many of the nebula’s baby stars for the first time.
This year marked the end of a decades-long wait for astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is finally in action.
The telescope, which launched in December 2021, released its first science data in July ( SN: 8/13/22, p. 30 ) and immediately began surpassing astronomers’ expectations.
“We’ve realized that James Webb is 10 times more sensitive than we predicted” for some kinds of observations, says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in England. His team released in September the telescope’s first direct image of an exoplanet ( SN: 9/24/22, p. 6 ). He credits “the people who worked so hard to get this right, to launch something the size of a tennis court into space on a rocket and get this sensitive machinery to work perfectly. And I feel incredibly lucky to be the beneficiary of this.”
The telescope, also known as JWST, was designed to see further back into the history of the cosmos than ever before ( SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. 26 ). It’s bigger and more sensitive than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. And because it looks in much longer wavelengths of light, JWST can observe distant and veiled objects that were previously hidden.
JWST spent its first several months collecting “early-release” science data, observations that test the different ways the telescope can see. “It is a very, very new instrument,” says Lamiya Mowla, an astronomer at the University of Toronto. “It will take some time before we can characterize all the different observation modes of all four instruments that are on board.”
That need for testing plus the excitement has led to some confusion for astronomers in these heady early days. Data from the telescope had been in such high demand that the operators hadn’t yet calibrated all the detectors before releasing data. The JWST team is providing calibration information so researchers can properly analyze the data. “We knew calibration issues were going to happen,” Mowla says.
The raw numbers that scientists have pulled out of some of the initial images may end up being revised slightly. But the pictures themselves are real and reliable, even though it takes some artistry to translate the telescope’s infrared data into colorful visible light ( SN: 3/17/18, p. 4 ).
The stunning photos that follow are a few of the early greatest hits from the shiny new observatory.
JWST has captured the deepest views yet of the universe (above). Galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 (bluer galaxies) is 4.6 billion light-years from Earth. It acts as a giant cosmic lens, letting JWST zoom in on thousands of even more distant galaxies that shone 13 billion years ago (the redder, more stretched galaxies). The far-off galaxies look different in the mid-infrared light (above left) captured by the telescope’s MIRI instrument than they do in the near-infrared light (above right) captured by NIRCam. The first tracks dust; the second, starlight. Early galaxies have stars but very little dust.
JWST was built to peer over vast cosmic distances, but it also provides new glimpses at our solar system neighbors. This pic of Neptune was the first close look at its delicate-looking rings in over 30 years ( SN: 11/5/22, p. 5 ).
The rings in this astonishing image are not an optical illusion. They’re made of dust, and a new ring is added every eight years when the two stars in the center of the image come close to each other. One of the stars is a Wolf-Rayet star, which is in the final stages of its life and puffing out dust. The cyclical dusty eruptions allowed scientists to directly measure for the first time how pressure from starlight pushes dust around ( SN: 11/19/22, p. 6 ).
With JWST’s unprecedented sensitivity, astronomers plan to compare the earliest galaxies with more modern galaxies to figure out how galaxies grow and evolve. This galactic smashup, whose main remnant is known as the Cartwheel galaxy , shows a step in that epic process ( SN Online: 8/3/22 ). The large central galaxy (right in the above composite) has been pierced through the middle by a smaller one that fled the scene (not in view). The Hubble Space Telescope previously snapped a visible light image of the scene (top half). But with its infrared eyes, JWST has revealed much more structure and complexity in the galaxy’s interior (bottom half).
The gas giant HIP 65426b was the first exoplanet to have its portrait taken by JWST (each inset shows the planet in a different wavelength of light; the star symbol shows the location of the planet’s parent star). This image, released by astronomer Sasha Hinkley and colleagues, doesn’t look like much compared with some of the other spectacular space vistas from JWST. But it will give clues to what the planet’s atmosphere is made of and shows the telescope’s potential for doing more of this sort of work on even smaller, rocky exoplanets ( SN: 9/24/22, p. 6 ).
Another classic Hubble image updated by JWST is the Pillars of Creation. When Hubble viewed this star-forming region in visible light, it was shrouded by dust (above left). JWST’s infrared vision reveals sparkling newborn stars (above right).
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).
One possible origin for GRB 211211A, shown in this illustration, is a pair of compact stars merging (bright dots in the center) and emitting jets of radiation (green and purple beams). Heavy elements forming in the clouds of matter surrounding the stars emit light that is known as a kilonova.
Astronomers have spotted a bright gamma-ray burst that upends previous theories of how these energetic cosmic eruptions occur.
For decades, astronomers thought that GRBs came in two flavors, long and short — that is, lasting longer than two seconds or winking out more quickly. Each type has been linked to different cosmic events. But about a year ago, two NASA space telescopes caught a short GRB in long GRB’s clothing: It lasted a long time but originated from a short GRB source.
“We had this black-and-white vision of the universe,” says astrophysicist Eleonora Troja of the Tor Vergata University of Rome. “This is the red flag that tells us, nope, it’s not. Surprise!”
This burst, called GRB 211211A, is the first that unambiguously breaks the binary, Troja and others report December 7 in five papers in Nature and Nature Astronomy .
Prior to the discovery of this burst, astronomers mostly thought that there were just two ways to produce a GRB. The collapse of a massive star just before it explodes in a supernova could make a long gamma-ray burst, lasting more than two seconds ( SN: 10/28/22 ). Or a pair of dense stellar corpses called neutron stars could collide, merge and form a new black hole, releasing a short gamma-ray burst of two seconds or less.
But there had been some outliers. A surprisingly short GRB in 2020 seemed to come from a massive star’s implosion ( SN: 8/2/21 ). And some long-duration GRBs dating back to 2006 lacked a supernova after the fact, raising questions about their origins.
“We always knew there was an overlap,” says astrophysicist Chryssa Kouveliotou of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who wrote the 1993 paper that introduced the two GRB categories , but was not involved in the new work. “There were some outliers which we did not know how to interpret.”
There’s no such mystery about GRB 211211A: The burst lasted more than 50 seconds and was clearly accompanied by a kilonova, the characteristic glow of new elements being forged after a neutron star smashup.
“Although we suspected it was possible that extended emission GRBs were mergers … this is the first confirmation,” says astrophysicist Benjamin Gompertz of the University of Birmingham in England, who describes observations of the burst in Nature Astronomy . “It has the kilonova, which is the smoking gun.”
NASA’s Swift and Fermi space telescopes detected the explosion on December 11, 2021, in a galaxy about 1.1 billion light-years away. “We thought it was a run-of-the-mill long gamma-ray burst,” says astrophysicist Wen-fai Fong of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
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It was relatively close by, as GRBs go. So that allowed Fong’s and Troja’s research groups to independently continue closely observing the burst in great detail using telescopes on the ground, the teams report in Nature .
As the weeks wore on and no supernova appeared, the researchers grew confused. Their observations revealed that whatever had made the GRB had also emitted much more optical and infrared light than is typical for the source of a long GRB.
In retrospect, it feels obvious that it was a kilonova, Troja says. But in the moment, it felt as impossible as seeing a lion in the Arctic. “It looks like a lion, it roars like a lion, but it shouldn’t be here, so it cannot be,” she says. “That’s exactly what we felt.”
Now the question is, what happened? Typically, merging neutron stars collapse into a black hole almost immediately. The gamma rays come from material that is superheated as it falls into the black hole, but the material is scant, and the black hole gobbles it up within two seconds. So how did GRB 211211A keep its light going for almost a minute?
It’s possible that the neutron stars first merged into a single, larger neutron star, which briefly resisted the pressure to collapse into a black hole. That has implications for the fundamental physics that describes how difficult it is to crush neutrons into a black hole, Gompertz says.
Another possibility is that a neutron star collided with a small black hole, about five times the mass of the sun, instead of another neutron star. And the process of the black hole eating the neutron star took longer.
Or it could have been something else entirely: a neutron star merging with a white dwarf , astrophysicist Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and colleagues suggest in Nature . “We suggest a third type of progenitor, something very different from the previous two types,” he says.
White dwarfs are the remnants of smaller stars like the sun, and are not as dense or compact as neutron stars. A collision between a white dwarf and a neutron star could still produce a kilonova if the white dwarf is very heavy.
The resulting object could be a highly magnetized neutron star called a magnetar ( SN: 12/1/20 ). The magnetar could have continued pumping energy into gamma rays and other wavelengths of light, extending the life of the burst, Zhang says.
Whatever its origins, GRB 211211A is a big deal for physics. “It is important because we wanted to understand, what on Earth are these events?” Kouveliotou says.
Figuring out what caused it could illuminate how heavy elements in the universe form. And some previously seen long GRBs that scientists thought were from supernovas might actually be actually from mergers.
To learn more, scientists need to find more of these binary-busting GRBs, plus observations of gravitational waves at the same time. Trejo thinks they’ll be able to get that when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, comes back online in 2023.
“I hope that LIGO will produce some evidence,” Kouveliotou says. “Nature might be graceful and give us a couple of these events with gravitational wave counterparts, and maybe [help us] understand what’s going on.”
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).
The rate of alcohol-induced deaths, which increased overall by 26 percent from 2019 to 2020, was highest for those ages 55 to 64 for both men and women.
The death rate from alcohol use rose sharply in the United States in the first year of the pandemic. From 2019 to 2020, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths climbed 26 percent , from 10.4 per 100,000 people to 13.1 per 100,000, researchers report in a National Center for Health Statistics data brief published November 4.
The rate of alcohol-induced deaths has generally increased yearly for the last two decades, but the annual uptick tended to be 7 percent or less.
Deaths from alcoholic liver disease, which includes hepatitis and cirrhosis, were the most common driver of the increased rate. Deaths from mental and behavioral disorders due to alcohol use — mortality from dependence syndrome or withdrawal, for example — were the second most frequent contributor.
The death rate from alcohol use jumped 26 percent overall from 2019 to 2020, a marked increase from previous years.
There is also evidence of an increase in cases of alcoholic liver disease. A study at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore reported that 2.3 times as many patients with severe alcoholic liver disease and with recent unhealthy drinking were referred to their liver transplant center from July to December of 2020 compared with those months in 2019.
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The jump in the alcohol-induced death rate isn’t surprising, considering how much data “had been pointing in this direction,” says transplant hepatologist Victor Chen of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The liver can regenerate, but only up to a point, Chen says. Once the liver is permanently damaged with scar tissue, the recommendation is to stop drinking alcohol to prevent more harm. The combination of underlying liver disease and more drinking can “cause liver symptoms, and ultimately death, if you don’t get a transplant early enough.”
Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
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).
