Turning the clocks back after daylight saving time means more people drive in the dark — and are more likely to run into deer. Scientists estimate keeping daylight saving time could save dozens of human lives.
People pay deerly for the switch from daylight saving time.
The change to standard time in autumn corresponds with an average 16 percent increase in deer-vehicle collisions in the United States, scientists report November 2 in Current Biology . The researchers estimate that eliminating the switch could save nearly 37,000 deer — and 33 human lives.
In a typical year, there are more than 2 million deer-vehicle collisions — about 7 percent of total vehicle crashes. To see how much the biannual time change impacts those numbers, wildlife biologist Laura Prugh and colleagues compiled data from 23 states that tracked whether a crash involved an animal and what time the crash occurred. The team compared those numbers to traffic volumes for each state between 2013 and 2019, focusing on the weeks before and after the switches to daylight saving time in springtime and back to standard time come fall.
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Springing forward had little effect, but almost 10 percent of yearly deer collisions on average took place around the autumn fallback — when the bulk of human traffic shifted to after dark. The problem was especially acute on the East Coast. “You see [a] really steep spike in the fall,” says Prugh, of the University of Washington in Seattle. “In the western states, you also see an increase, but it’s not nearly as sharp.” On the East Coast, the autumn switch falls in the middle of mating season for white-tailed deer. Not only are more drivers active after dark, more deer are too. “The timing could not be worse.”
Eliminating the clock change wouldn’t completely wipe out the spike in crashes — mating season plays a big role, regardless of what time sunset happens. But the scientists estimate that keeping daylight saving time year-round would decrease total deer-human collisions by about 2 percent — saving dozens of people, thousands of human injuries and tens of thousands of deer. It’s another reason for us all to move toward the light ( SN: 3/31/14 ).
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).
For the millions of people in the United States with long COVID, getting help comes down to where they live. Long COVID clinics have been popping up, but their accessibility and the kind of care they offer vary wildly.
The COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, a patient support group, compiled a crowdsourced list of more than 400 long COVID clinics. The list, which the group did not vet for quality, ranges from rehabilitation or physical therapy practices to comprehensive medical centers with multiple specialists working together. Science News used their list plus two other patient-compiled lists, and added the 53 NIH RECOVER research sites that are studying long COVID in adults, confirming that all were active as of early October.
Physical therapy or rehabilitation-focused care can often help COVID-19 patients facing lingering symptoms or weakness after a long hospital stay. But people with long COVID should be wary of rehab or physical therapy practices that encourage exercise, which can lead to “crashes” rather than recovery, says Karyn Bishof, a long COVID patient and founder of the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project. Yet, in some states — Alaska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Wyoming — rehabilitation centers are patients’ only option. Overall, almost half of the clinics included on this map are physical therapy or rehabilitation centers.
It’s no surprise that people living in big cities have the most clinics to choose from. Out of 37 clinics in New York state, all but three are in the New York City metropolitan area. California’s 29 clinics are concentrated in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego. Fourteen U.S. clinics focus on children with long COVID.
The two maps here, noting long COVID clinic locations and long COVID prevalence by state, reveal a mismatch between need and availability of relevant medical care. In mid-September, about 1 in 5 adults in Idaho, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming who had had COVID-19 reported experiencing long COVID, defined as symptoms lasting 3 months or more for a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . North Dakota and Wyoming each have just one long COVID clinic. Idaho has three. Oklahoma has six.
Traveling to a faraway clinic can be hard on long COVID patients, particularly those with no partner or caregivers to help with transportation and coordinate overnight stays. Bishof recently had to drive herself to an appointment that took almost two hours of travel each way, she says. By the time she got home, she “blacked out from extreme fatigue.”
Many of the RECOVER sites, funded by the National Institutes of Health to study long COVID, also treat adults with long COVID. But most RECOVER sites are clustered in urban areas: Out of 53 locations serving adult patients, six are in the city of Boston.
“It would be great if we could get medical schools to begin teaching these diseases,” says Jaime Seltzer, referring to long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. Seltzer is director of scientific and medical outreach at #MEAction, an ME/CFS advocacy group that also works with long COVID patients. The doctors most qualified to treat long COVID are those with expertise in ME/CFS and other postviral conditions that overlap with long COVID, Seltzer says. “Several studies have now shown that approximately half of people with long COVID meet the diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS.” However, there are very few of these specialists due to limited funding and attention before long COVID became the tidal wave that it is today.
For Seltzer, clinics should offer comprehensive care from doctors in a variety of specialties who are familiar with the intense fatigue, pain, breathing problems and brain fog that can occur with postviral conditions.
With expanded education for physicians, long COVID patients might one day be able to receive care from their primary care doctors rather than waiting months for specialists. Bishof and other advocates are also pushing for the federal government to fund long COVID centers of excellence, which would provide comprehensive care while working directly with patient groups to develop standards.
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Betsy Ladyzhets is a freelance science writer and data journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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 relatively young fracture cuts through hills and craters in Mars’ heavily faulted Cerberus Fossae region, seen in this 2018 image taken by the Mars Express orbiter.
Mars might be, geologically speaking, not quite dead.
Researchers have analyzed a slew of recent temblors on the Red Planet and shown that these Marsquakes are probably caused by magma moving deep under the Martian surface . That’s evidence that Mars is still volcanically active, the researchers report October 27 in Nature Astronomy .
Since touching down on Mars four years ago , NASA’s InSight lander has detected more than 1,000 Marsquakes ( SN: 11/26/18 ). Its seismometer records seismic waves, which reveal information about a temblor’s size and location.
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Previous studies have determined that several Marsquakes originated from a swath of Martian terrain known as Cerberus Fossae ( SN: 5/13/22 ). This region, which is particularly riddled with faults, is more than 1,000 kilometers from the InSight lander.
But most of the Marsquakes linked to Cerberus Fossae so far have been pretty familiar, scientifically speaking, says Anna Mittelholz, a planetary scientist at Harvard University. Their seismic waves, which are low frequency, “are ones that look much more like what we see for an earthquake,” she says.
Mittelholz and her colleagues have now analyzed a large sample of Marsquakes, including more than 1,000 high-frequency temblors, which look nothing like their earthly brethren. To better understand the origin of the high-frequency quakes, the researchers added together their relatively weak signals. In that stack of seismic waves, the researchers saw a peak in the amount of seismic energy coming from the direction of Cerberus Fossae. That was an impressive undertaking, says Hrvoje Tkalčić, a geophysicist at the Australian National University in Canberra who was not involved with the research. “No study before this one attempted to locate the high-frequency quakes.”
The fact that different types of Marsquakes are all concentrated in one region is a surprise. Previous research has suggested that Marsquakes might be due to Mars’ surface cooling and shrinking over time. That process, which occurs on the moon , would produce temblors evenly spread over the planet, Mittelholz says ( SN: 5/13/19 ). “The expectation was that Marsquakes would originate from all over the place.”
And by comparing the seismic waves that InSight measured with the seismic waves produced in different regions on our own planet, the researchers further showed that the low-frequency Marsquakes are probably produced by magma moving several tens of kilometers below Mars’ surface. “Our results are much more consistent with data from volcanic regions on Earth,” Mittelholz says.
Rather than being a geologically dead planet, as some have suggested, Mars might be a surprisingly dynamic place, the researchers conclude. This finding rewrites our understanding of Mars, Mittelholz says, and there’s still so much more to learn about our celestial neighbor. “We’re only scratching the surface.”
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).
Data collected with cell phones moving across the Golden Gate Bridge rivaled the information that dedicated instruments could provide about the bridge’s structural integrity.
Your cell phone could reveal the health status of bridges just by being in your pocket as you go about your daily travels.
Accelerometers and GPS sensors that are standard components in smartphones collect information that can show how bridges flex and vibrate as vehicles travel across, researchers report November 3 in Communications Engineering .
Apps that gather the measurements could keep travelers safe by alerting engineers that a bridge needs repair. The tools could also warn of, or help prevent, catastrophic failures like the tragic footbridge collapse in the western Indian state of Gujarat on October 30, or the bridge span that crumbled in Pittsburgh in January ( SN: 11/16/07 ).
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“This is really applicable to any type of bridge,” says civil engineer Thomas Matarazzo of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York. All you need, he says, is a way to get a smartphone on there — whether by car, in the pocket of a pedestrian or mounted to a scooter — and some way of monitoring the device ( SN: 11/10/17 ).
Bridge failures, Matarazzo says, often come down to uncertainties about structural properties. “The only way to reduce those uncertainties is to monitor more frequently.” Crowdsourcing data from cell phones may be the best, and possibly only, way to get lots of data on bridges around the globe.
More than 600,000 bridges exist in the United States alone. Dedicated sensors that check for structural problems are expensive, Matarazzo says, so most bridges are inspected by eye, typically every other year.
Keeping up on bridge conditions using simple cell phone apps could make maintenance more efficient than is possible with human inspectors alone — and much cheaper than is possible with specialized sensors. The resulting improvement in care would extend the lifetimes of older bridges by a few years, Matarazzo and his colleagues estimate, but newer bridges could last nearly 15 years longer than if they weren’t monitored in this way before needing to be rebuilt or replaced.
To test how well cell phones could monitor bridges, Matarazzo drove over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco 102 times with cell phones in his car. He and his research team also collected data from Uber drivers during 72 trips over the suspension bridge. To check the approach on bridges more typical of the overpasses that are common on roadways, the researchers arranged for drivers to record data during 280 passes over a nearly 30-meter-long concrete bridge in Ciampino, Italy.
For both bridges, the cell phone sensors detected vibrations in the structures that were within a few percent of the measurements that dedicated instruments attached to the bridges could provide.
A single pass with a cell phone gathers as much information about a bridge as a hundred or more stationary sensors, Matarazzo says. That’s because phones can take data continuously as they cross, rather than offering data from specific locations along a bridge.
If the researchers manage to get transportation companies, government vehicle operators or the public to collaborate, the team could rack up much more information, leading to extremely precise measurements. Because most phones already have accelerometers and GPS, information could be collected essentially for free.
Cell phones could help monitor bridges that lack installed sensors, says Huili Wang, a civil engineer at the Dalian University of Technology in China who was not involved with the study. But he has doubts about the ultimate accuracy that smartphones can provide. Still, “it is a better approach for a rough estimate without [adding] more sensors,” he says.
Crowdsourced data probably won’t entirely replace dedicated sensors for monitoring bridges, Matarazzo agrees. But cell phones are unbeatable in a few ways, he says. “The advantage is in the convenience and the scale…. It’s a mobile-sensing system that’s already in place.”
Bridges are key parts of the transportation infrastructure. It’s crucial to look at changes in them that can occur in days and weeks, Matarazzo says, rather than checking on bridges every few years. “This technology enables us to do that.”
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).
The decisions made during young adulthood, such as what to study in college or whom to marry, have lifelong repercussions. When crises, such as a pandemic, hit during this vulnerable age, they can profoundly alter the course of one’s life.
Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision/Getty Images
Ninna Ragasa was 24 years old when doctors discovered a mass on the left hemisphere of her brain. Further imaging revealed that Ragasa had an arteriovenous malformation, a tangle of blood vessels that disrupt the flow of oxygen to the brain.
Doctors suggested removing the mass to avoid the possibility of it rupturing, a potentially fatal outcome. Ragasa, a graduate student in interior design at the Pratt Institute in New York City, worried that the brain surgery would hurt her mobility and her career aspirations.
“Being a designer came easily to me,” says Ragasa, who is a friend of mine.
But the procedure went smoothly, and Ragasa returned to her life at Pratt. Then a year or so after the surgery, Ragasa started falling. At first, she blamed her hard-work, hard-party lifestyle and cut back on drinks. But she kept falling. So she switched from spike heels to chunky boots and then to flip flops. Nothing helped. One day Ragasa fell getting off the subway and had to crawl to her mother’s house.
Scans revealed that Ragasa’s brain had swelled after the procedure, causing her to gradually lose mobility along the right side of her body. Ragasa could no longer handle the physical demands of being an art student, such as building models and drawing. So she dropped out of school and found a job that came with medical insurance to pay for her physical therapy treatments. She felt, she says, totally lost.
Many of us get derailed at some point in our lives. We may get sick like Ragasa, divorced, laid off or lose a loved one. Our age when calamity strikes can profoundly influence our response to the event, research suggests, with young adults particularly vulnerable to getting thrown off course. That’s partially because when the rites of passage that mark the transition from childhood to adulthood are delayed or lost, young adults can feel unmoored and increasingly uncertain about the future — a point driven home by this cohort’s plummeting well-being during the ongoing pandemic.
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Researchers have not always treated young adulthood as markedly different from other adult years. But it’s now well established that the human brain matures well into one’s 20s ( SN : 5/22/19). And social and economic changes in recent generations mean that the once linear path from living in one’s parents’ home to moving out and starting one’s own family has elongated and become considerably more jagged. And for years, climate change has added mounting uncertainty to the already fraught mix ( SN: 8/18/21). The pandemic, in other words, did not cause the mental health crisis among young adults, but merely accelerated existing trends.
Ages 18 to 25 constitute an intense time of exploration in love, work and worldview. This age band should be treated as a unique developmental period , distinct from either being a child or a full-fledged adult, psychologist Jeffrey Arnett of Clark University in Worcester, Ma., wrote in a seminal 2000 paper in American Psychologist. “Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course.”
The pandemic has forced us to ask: What happens when that “scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities” gets stalled or even curtailed?
The evidence so far suggests that the fallout for young adults could be dire. Instead of maturing, this group’s personalities have become more juvenile , I reported last month ( SN: 9/28/22). In general, those under age 30 have become less conscientious, less agreeable and more neurotic. Compared with older adults, young adults have also reported higher levels of anxiety, depression and feelings of loneliness during the pandemic.
A survey of roughly 2,600 U.S. adults taken in January 2022, showed that members of this group have distorted the U-curve. This somewhat controversial theory holds that well-being, including happiness and health, are high in early and later life but low in middle age. In this view, despair , once reserved for middle age, has, it seems, become the badge of youth.
“The left part of the ‘U’ has essentially completely flattened,” wrote study coauthor and Harvard University epidemiologist Tyler VanderWeele in Psychology Today. “Young people … report being less happy and less healthy; having less meaning, greater struggles with character, and poor relationships; and [being] less financially stable compared to their older counterparts.”
Decisions made during young adulthood can also have profound knock-on effects. Temporarily delaying going to college at the pandemic’s onset, for instance, could become a permanent decision, thereby radically shifting the trajectory of one’s life.
Some young adults will recover from this event without much trouble, but others may struggle, says personality psychologist Rodica Damian of the University of Houston. “Sometimes when something happens during a critical development period, there is a snowball effect.”
Damian’s comment reminded me of a conversation I had more than a year ago with developmental psychologist Anthony Burrow of Cornell University. Rather presciently, shortly before the pandemic hit, Burrow had begun characterizing a phenomenon he referred to as “derailment.” Derailment, Burrow told me, refers to people’s feeling that their life has been thrown off course. That feeling can lead people to lose their sense of identity, to struggle to answer the question: Who am I?
“Derailment is a subjective sense that who you were cannot be reconciled with who you are,” Burrow says. “That train was heading in one direction on those tracks, but can no longer advance on that track.”
One way to gauge derailment during the pandemic is to ask ourselves: “Am I still the same person as I was pre-pandemic?” Burrow says. “It’s a basic question with profound implications.”
People in the United States who feel derailed struggle with anxiety, depression and reduced feelings of well-being, Burrow and his team reported in 2020 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Moreover, those feelings of derailment are associated with depressive symptoms a year or more down the road.
But Burrow’s work also points to ways to get our metaphorical trains back on track. In that same study, he found that journaling — having people write a narrative that stitches together their past and present selves — can help them regain that sense of continuity and reestablish goals for the future.
Other research suggests that adopting a more flexible East Asian mindset could help people cope with a life that veers off course. Derailed Japanese individuals, that is, do not show the same drop in well-being observed as Westerners, researchers reported in 2021 in the Journal of Happiness Studies. The researchers suspect that the difference lies in thinking styles. While Westerners tend to believe life should follow a linear course, Japanese people tend to believe life is dialectic, or full of contradictions and in constant flux. Derailments, as such, are to be expected.
Ragasa, who moved to the United States from the Philippines as a child, understands that flux. But losing her identity in her 20s, at a time when she felt physically and emotionally invincible, left her reeling. She eventually moved to Vermont and had a son.
Still, she took years to accept that the old art track she was on was gone forever. “I had to mourn it and let it go,” she says. Now, she says, she has begun the arduous process of finding a new track. “I still feel lost,” she says. “I have to figure out who I am now.”
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.
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).
Shells of dust form when winds from these two stars (center) in the Cygnus constellation collide, as seen in this image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The shells are then blown outward by the pressure of light from those stars.
A pair of stars in our galaxy is revealing how light pushes around matter. It’s the first time anyone has directly seen how the pressure of light from stars changes the flow of dust in space.
Such radiation pressure influences how dust clears from the regions near young stars and guides the formation of gas clouds around dying stars ( SN: 9/22/20 ). The dust pattern surrounding a stellar pair 5,600 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation is providing a rare laboratory to observe the effect in action , astronomer Yinuo Han and colleagues report in the Oct. 13 Nature .
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Astronomers have long known that the dust emerging from the star WR 140 and its companion is formed by gas from these two stars colliding and condensing into soot. But images of the pair taken over the course of 16 years show that the dust is accelerating as it travels away from the stars.
Dust initially departs the stars at about 6.5 million kilometers per hour, the researchers report, and over the course of a year accelerates to nearly 10 million km/h. At that speed, the dust could make the trip from our sun to Earth in a mere 15 hours.
The revelation came from comparing the positions of concentric dust shells year to year and deducing a speed. The researchers’ calculations show that the force accelerating the dust is the pressure exerted by light radiated from the stars, says Han, of the University of Cambridge. “Radiation pressure [becomes apparent] only when we put all the images next to each other.”
Not only are those layers of dust feeling light’s push, they also extend out farther than any telescope could see — until this year. Images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, depict more of the dusty layers around WR 140 and its companion than ever seen before, Han and another team report October 12 in Nature Astronomy .
At first glance, the intricate patterns surrounding the stars resemble a gigantic spider web. But the researchers’ analysis reveals that they are actually enormous, expanding, cone-shaped dust shells. They’re nested inside each other, with a new one forming every eight years as the stars complete another journey around their orbits. In the new images, the shells look like sections of rings because we observe them from the side, Han says.
The patterns don’t completely surround the stars because the distance between the stars changes as they orbit one another. When the stars are far apart, the density of the colliding gas is too low to condense to dust — an effect the researchers expected.
What surprised them is that the gas doesn’t condense well when the stars are closest together either. That suggests there’s a “Goldilocks zone” for dust formation: Dust forms only when the separation between the stars is just right, creating a series of concentric dust shells rippling away from the duo.
“Their Goldilocks zone is a new idea,” says astrophysicist Andy Pollock of the University of Sheffield in England, who was not part of either study. “A similar sort of thing happens in my field of X-rays.”
In his work, Pollock has observed that WR 140 and its partner emit more X-rays as the stars approach each other, but then fewer as they get very close together, suggesting there’s a Goldilocks zone for X-rays coming from the stars as well. “It would be interesting to see if there’s any connection” between the two types of Goldilocks zones, he says. “All of this must somehow fit together.”
This story was updated on October 18 to correct the time it would take for dust accelerated by starlight to traverse some distance in the solar system.
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).
