Particles raining down from space offer 3-D views inside swirling tropical storms.
Muons created from cosmic rays that smash into Earth’s upper atmosphere have revealed the inner workings of cyclones over Japan, researchers report October 6 in Scientific Reports . The new imaging approach could lead to a better understanding of storms, the researchers say, and offer another tool to help meteorologists forecast the weather.
“Cosmic rays are sustainable natural resources that can be used everywhere on this planet for 24 hours [a day],” says geophysicist Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo, so it’s just a matter of taking advantage of them.
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Muons offer a glimpse inside storms because variations in air pressure and density change the number of particles that make it through a tempest. By counting how many muons arrived at a detector on the ground in Kagoshima, Japan as cyclones moved past, Tanaka and colleagues produced rough 3-D maps of the density of air inside the storms. The approach gave the team an inside look at the low-pressure regions at the centers rotating storm systems.
Muons, which are similar to electrons but roughly 200 times as massive, can scatter off molecules in the air. They’re also unstable, which means they break down into electrons and other particles called neutrinos given enough time. As air pressure increases, so does its density. That, in turn, increases the chances that a muon born from a cosmic ray will be bumped off its path on the way toward a detector or get slowed enough that it breaks down before it makes it all the way through the atmosphere.
For every 1 percent increase in air pressure, Tanaka and colleagues say, the number of muons that survive passage from the upper atmosphere to the ground decreases by about 2 percent.
Tanaka has previously used muons from cosmic rays to look inside volcanoes , and he suspects that others have used the particles to study weather ( SN: 4/22/22 ). But, he says, this appears to be the first time that anyone has made 3-D muon scans of the insides of a storm.
“It is an interesting approach,” says meteorologist Frank Marks of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, who wasn’t involved in the research.
He doesn’t expect muon imaging to replace conventional meteorological measurements, but it’s another tool that scientists could use. “[It] would be complementary to our existing techniques to provide 3-D mapping of the storms with our other traditional observing systems, like satellites and radar.”
James Riordon is a freelance science writer who covers physics, math, astronomy and occasional lifestyle stories.
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 new kind of “gold standard” could soon permeate the whiskey industry.
Whiskey distillers typically age spirits in charred, wooden casks for years, allowing the liquor to gradually absorb flavorful chemicals released from the wood ( SN: 10/31/19 ). Now, researchers have demonstrated that swirling gold ions into a whiskey can reveal how much flavor the liquor has taken in — a quality called agedness. The method could provide master blenders with a quick and inexpensive test for whiskey agedness , researchers report October 6 in ACS Applied Nano Materials .
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“A tiny amount of gold gives you this really bright, strong, red or blue or purple color,” says William Peveler, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. The stronger the color, and the quicker that color arises, the more aged the whiskey, he says.
Master blenders sometimes conduct tasting sessions to gauge agedness, but this process can be labor intensive. Alternatively, laboratory assays can measure agedness by checking whiskeys for flavorful chemicals called congeners, absorbed from wood casks, but such analyses can be expensive.
Past research has shown that various chemicals, from neurotransmitters to poor-tasting compounds in maple syrup , could trigger gold ions in a solution to coalesce into ultra-tiny gold nuggets, or nanoparticles. So Peveler and colleagues mixed solutions containing less than a penny’s worth of gold ions into different whiskey blends and a vodka. While no nanoparticles formed in the vodka, the ions reacted with whiskey congeners to form nanoparticles in minutes. The size and shape of the nanoparticles varied between whiskeys, causing the spirits to flourish with different colors.
The researchers plan to further investigate how gold nanoparticles grow alongside alcohols and sugars in whiskeys to develop an even more comprehensive test for agedness.
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 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).
For people haunted by recurring nightmares, untroubled sleep would be a dream come true. Now in a small experiment, neuroscientists have demonstrated a technique that, for some, may chase the bad dreams away.
Enhancing the standard treatment for nightmare disorder with a memory-boosting technique cut down average weekly nightmares among a few dozen people from three to near zero , researchers report online October 27 in Current Biology .
“The fact that they could actually make a big difference in the frequency of those nightmares is huge,” says Gina Poe, a neuroscientist at UCLA who wasn’t involved in the study.
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People with nightmare disorder fear the night not for the monsters under the bed, but the monsters in their dreams. Frequent, terrifying dreams disturb sleep and even affect well-being in waking life. The go-to nightmare disorder treatment is imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT. In this treatment, patients reimagine nightmares with a positive spin, mentally rehearsing the new story line while awake. It reduces nightmares for most but fails for nearly a third of people.
To boost IRT’s power, neuroscientist Sophie Schwartz of the University of Geneva and her colleagues leveraged a learning technique called targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. In this technique, a person focuses on learning something while a sound plays, and that same cue plays again during sleep. Experiencing the cue during sleep, which is important for memory storage , may reactivate and strengthen the associated memory ( SN: 10/3/19 ).
In the new study, the researchers gave 36 people with nightmare disorder training in IRT, randomly assigning half of them to rehearse their revised nightmares in silence. The other half rehearsed while a short piano chord, the TMR cue, played every 10 seconds for five minutes.
For two weeks, participants practiced IRT daily and kept a dream diary. While they slept, a headband outfitted with sensors recorded their brains’ electrical activity and tracked their sleep stages. The piano chord served as a dream soundtrack, with the headband sounding off every 10 seconds during rapid eye movement, the sleep stage associated with dreaming. The headband played the sound for all participants, but only half had come to associate the sound with their new scenario during the IRT training.
For those trained on the chord, TMR nearly vanquished the nightmares, bringing the weekly average down from three to 0.2, and even encouraged happier dreams. The group that received only IRT improved too, but still averaged one weekly nightmare.
The TMR-IRT combination also had more staying power after three months, with that group’s average rising only slightly from about 0.2 to 0.3 nightmares a week, while the IRT-only group’s jumped to 1.5.
Larger studies will need to test how generalizable this treatment combination is. This study featured a small number of people, all young adults ages 20 to 35 who had nightmare disorder and no other psychiatric conditions. The study also didn’t compare IRT and TMR to no treatment, although the researchers write that previous studies have already shown how effective IRT can be.
If a TMR-IRT combo proves as strong in future research, it still has a way to go before it’s widely accessible. Commercially available sleep trackers in watches and rings have yet to distinguish between sleep stages as accurately as brain-monitoring tools.
Even with these caveats, the results are encouraging, Poe says. She suggests that future studies could test whether the TMR-IRT combination can help people with post-traumatic stress disorder , or PTSD, where nightmares rehash traumatic events ( SN 9/12/14) .
That’s something Schwartz wants to try. “I’m not sure we’ll succeed with these particular patients,” she says. “But if we do, this would be a really important addition to the methods we have for treating PTSD.”
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).
An afterglow of X-rays (pictured) following a brilliant burst of gamma rays was spotted by the Swift space telescope about an hour after the burst was detected. The rings are from X-rays scattering off dust in the Milky Way.
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded recently lit up a distant galaxy — and astronomers have nicknamed it the BOAT, for Brightest of All Time.
“We use the boat emoji a lot when we’re talking about it” on the messaging app Slack, says astronomer Jillian Rastinejad of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Gamma-ray bursts are energetic explosions that go off when a massive star dies and leaves behind a black hole or neutron star ( SN: 11/20/19; SN: 8/2/21 ). The collapse sets off jets of gamma rays zipping away from the poles of the former star. If those jets happen to be pointed right at Earth, astronomers can see them as a gamma-ray burst.
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This new burst , officially named GRB 221009A, was probably triggered by a supernova giving birth to a black hole in a galaxy about 2 billion light-years from Earth, researchers announced October 13. Astronomers think it released as much energy as roughly three suns converting all of their mass to pure energy.
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray telescope in space, automatically detected the blast October 9 around 10:15 a.m. EDT, and promptly alerted astronomers that something strange was happening .
“At the time, when it went off, it looked kind of weird to us,” says Penn State astrophysicist Jamie Kennea, who is the head of science operations for Swift. The blast’s position in the sky seemed to line up with the plane of the Milky Way. So at first Kennea and colleagues thought it was within our own galaxy, and so unlikely to be something as dramatically energetic as a gamma-ray burst. If a burst like this went off inside the Milky Way, it would be visible to the naked eye, which wasn’t the case.
But soon Kennea learned that NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope had also seen the flash — and it was one of the brightest things the telescope had ever seen. A fresh look at the Swift data convinced Kennea and colleagues that the flash was the brightest gamma-ray burst seen in the 50 years of observing these rare explosions.
“It’s quite exceptional,” Kennea says. “It stands head and shoulders above the rest.”
After confirmation of the burst’s BOAT bonafides — a term coined by Rastinejad’s adviser, Northwestern astronomer Wen-fai Fong — other astronomers rushed to get a look. Within days, scientists around the world got a glimpse of the blast with telescopes in space and on the ground, in nearly every type of light. Even some radio telescopes typically used as lightning detectors saw a sudden disturbance associated with GRB 221009A , suggesting that the burst stripped electrons from atoms in Earth’s atmosphere.
In the hours and days after the initial explosion, the burst subsided and gave way to a still relatively bright afterglow. Eventually, astronomers expect to see it fade even more, replaced by glowing ripples of material in the supernova remnant.
The extreme brightness was probably at least partially due to GRB 221009A’s relative proximity, Kennea says. A couple billion light-years might seem far, but the average gamma-ray burst is more like 10 billion light-years away. It probably was also just intrinsically bright, though there hasn’t been time to figure out why.
Studying the blast as it changes is “probably going to challenge some of our assumptions of how gamma-ray bursts work,” Kennea says. “I think people who are gamma-ray burst theorists are going to be inundated with so much data that this is going to change theories that they thought were pretty solid.”
GRB 221009A will move behind the sun from Earth’s perspective starting in late November, shielding it temporarily from view. But because its glow is still so bright now, astronomers are hopeful that they’ll still be able to see it when it becomes visible again in February.
“I’m so excited for a few months from now when we have all the beautiful data,” Rastinejad says.
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 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 mountain lion wearing a tracking collar leads her cubs through the brush. Collars on cats like these allow scientists to track where the animals go when wildfires ravage their territories.
Mountain lions have no interest in people, or the built-up areas we enjoy. But after a 2018 wildfire in California, local lions took more risks, crossing roads more often and moving around more in the daytime , scientists report October 20 in Current Biology . It’s another way the effects of human development could be putting pressure on vulnerable wildlife — in this case, potentially pushing them toward our bumpers.
The Woolsey Fire began near Los Angeles on November 8, 2018, and burned more than 36,000 hectares in the Santa Monica Mountains. Nearly 300,000 people evacuated, and three people died. Animals fled the fire too, including the local mountain lions ( Puma concolor ). The fire was a tragedy, but also a scientific opportunity, says Rachel Blakey, a global change biologist at UCLA. Many of the lions wore tracking collars, allowing scientists to study how the fire changed their behavior.
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Of the 11 collared cougars in the area at the time, nine made it to safety during the fire itself. “They have really large home ranges, so it’s nothing to them to be able to cover many kilometers in a day,” Blakey says.
No matter how much they moved, the mountain lions avoided people. One collared cat, P-64, initially fled the fire — until he got close to a developed area. Given the choice between fire and people, the lion retreated back into the burning area. “That’s where his movements stopped,” Blakey says. The park service later found P-64’s remains. He’d burned his paws, and it’s possible that he was unable to hunt and starved to death.
Using data from the nine lions that survived the fire and others collared after, the scientists showed that the cats generally avoided the severely burned areas of their territories. With vegetation gone, the cats had little cover for stalking and ambushing prey.
Instead, the cougars stuck to unburned areas, and continued to avoid people. But they took more risks around human infrastructure, increasing their road crossings from an average of about three times per month to five.
These weren’t all two-lane country highways. The first collared lion to successfully cross Interstate 405, which has 10 lanes in places, did it after the Woolsey Fire. And the big cats crossed U.S. Route 101 once every four months, whereas before the fire, they’d crossed only once every two years. Their territories also overlapped more often, increasing the potential for deadly encounters between the solitary cats. And the generally nocturnal animals increased activity during daytime hours from 10 percent to 16 percent of their active time — boosting a lion’s chances of potentially bump into a human.
Road crossing is what Blakey calls a “risk mismatch.” Lions in areas with lots of people appear to weigh the risk of encountering humans as more dangerous. But “running across a freeway is a lot more likely to be fatal,” she says. That risk, combined with the risk of running into other cats, can be deadly. One young, collared male ended up dead on a freeway in the months after the fire. He was fleeing a fight with an older, uncollared male.
Intense burns like the Woolsey Fire highlight the resilience of mountain lions, says Winston Vickers, a wildlife research veterinarian at the University of California, Davis who was not involved in the study. “They have amazing mobility, they mostly can get away from the immediate fire, they mostly survive,” he notes. The changes in risk-taking, he says, could reflect how confined the population is, hemmed into the mountains by human development.
Wildlife crossings , such as the new Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101, will hopefully give the mountain lions a safer option for roaming, though the main goal is to promote gene flow between lion populations, Blakey says ( SN: 5/31/16 ). In a landscape where fire, humans and highways combine, it’s good to have somewhere to run.
Bethany was previously the staff writer at Science News for Students . She has a Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology from Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
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).
Wind turbines like these near a power plant near Bergheim, Germany, can pull CO 2 into their wakes in order to send it to machines that capture the greenhouse gas in the battle against climate change, simulations and a scaled-down wind tunnel test suggest.
Wind turbines could offer a double whammy in the fight against climate change.
Besides harnessing wind to generate clean energy , turbines may help to funnel carbon dioxide to systems that pull the greenhouse gas out of the air ( SN: 8/10/21 ). Researchers say their simulations show that wind turbines can drag dirty air from above a city or a smokestack into the turbines’ wakes. That boosts the amount of CO 2 that makes it to machines that can remove it from the atmosphere. The researchers plan to describe their simulations and a wind tunnel test of a scaled-down system at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in Indianapolis on November 21.
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Addressing climate change will require dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide that humans put into the air — but that alone won’t be enough ( SN: 3/10/22 ). One part of the solution could be direct air capture systems that remove some CO 2 from the atmosphere ( SN: 9/9/22 ).
But the large amounts of CO 2 produced by factories, power plants and cities are often concentrated at heights that put it out of reach of machinery on the ground that can remove it. “We’re looking into the fluid dynamics benefits of utilizing the wake of the wind turbine to redirect higher concentrations” down to carbon capture systems, says mechanical engineer Clarice Nelson of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
As large, power-generating wind turbines rotate, they cause turbulence that pulls air down into the wakes behind them, says mechanical engineer Luciano Castillo, also of Purdue. It’s an effect that can concentrate carbon dioxide enough to make capture feasible, particularly near large cities like Chicago.
“The beauty is that [around Chicago], you have one of the best wind resources in the region, so you can use the wind turbine to take some of the dirty air in the city and capture it,” Castillo says. Wind turbines don’t require the cooling that nuclear and fossil fuel plants need. “So not only are you producing clean energy,” he says, “you are not using water.”
Running the capture systems from energy produced by the wind turbines can also address the financial burden that often goes along with removing CO 2 from the air. “Even with tax credits and potentially selling the CO 2 , there’s a huge gap between the value that you can get from capturing it and the actual cost” that comes with powering capture with energy that comes from other sources, Nelson says. “Our method would be a no-cost added benefit” to wind turbine farms.
There are probably lots of factors that will impact CO 2 transport by real-world turbines, including the interactions the turbine wakes have with water, plants and the ground, says Nicholas Hamilton, a mechanical engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., who was not involved with the new studies. “I’m interested to see how this group scaled their experiment for wind tunnel investigation.”
James Riordon is a freelance science writer who covers physics, math, astronomy and occasional lifestyle stories.
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).
