A proton (illustrated) contains three particles called quarks (red, green and blue blobs). In electric fields, those quarks seem to move more than theory predicts, making the proton stretchier than imagined.
The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New experiments seem to show that the quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them , physicist Nikolaos Sparveris and colleagues report October 19 in Nature . The result suggests that the strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts.
It’s a finding at odds with the standard model of particle physics, which describes the particles and forces that combine to make up us and everything around us. The result has some physicists stumped about how to explain it — or whether to even try.
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“It is certainly puzzling for the physics of the strong interaction, if this thing persists,” says Sparveris, of Temple University in Philadelphia.
Such stretchiness has turned up in other labs’ experiments, but wasn’t as convincing, Sparveris says. The stretchiness that he and his colleagues measured was less extreme than in previous experiments, but also came with less experimental uncertainty. That increases the researchers’ confidence that protons are indeed stretchier than theory says they should be.
At the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va., the team probed protons by firing electrons at a target of ultracold liquid hydrogen. Electrons scattering off protons in the hydrogen revealed how the protons’ quarks respond to electric fields ( SN: 9/13/22 ). The higher the electron energy, the deeper the researchers could see into the protons, and the more the electrons revealed about how the strong force works inside protons.
For the most part, the quarks moved as expected when electric interactions pulled the particles in opposite directions. But at one point, as the electron energy was ramped up, the quarks appeared to respond more strongly to an electric field than theory predicted they would.
But it only happened for a small range of electron energies, leading to a bump in a plot of the proton’s stretch.
“Usually, behaviors of these things are quite, let’s say, smooth and there are no bumps,” says physicist Vladimir Pascalutsa of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.
Pascalutsa says he’s often eager to dive into puzzling problems, but the odd stretchiness of protons is too sketchy for him to put pencil to paper at this time. “You need to be very, very inventive to come up with a whole framework which somehow finds you a new effect” to explain the bump, he says. “I don’t want to kill the buzz, but yeah, I’m quite skeptical as a theorist that this thing is going to stay.”
It will take more experiments to get theorists like him excited about unusually stretchy protons, Pascalutsa says. He could get his wish if Sparveris’ hopes are fulfilled to try the experiment again with positrons, the antimatter version of electrons, scattered from protons instead.
A different type of experiment altogether might make stretchy protons more compelling, Pascalutsa says. A forthcoming study from the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, could do the trick. It will use hydrogen atoms that have muons in place of the electrons that usually orbit atoms’ nuclei. Muons are about 200 times as heavy as electrons, and orbit much closer to the nucleus of an atom than do electrons — offering a closer look at the proton inside ( SN: 10/5/17 ). The experiment would involve stimulating the “muonic hydrogen” with lasers rather than scattering other electrons or positrons from them.
“The precision in the muonic hydrogen experiments will be much higher than whatever can be achieved in scattering experiments,” Pascalutsa says. If the stretchiness turns up there as well, “then I would start to look at this right away.”
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).
SARS-CoV-2 infection can saddle people with persistent symptoms. An ongoing NIH effort will examine the long-term health effects of infection.
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You may have heard the big long COVID news that came out recently: A Scottish study reported that about half of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have not fully recovered six to 18 months after infection. That result echoes what many doctors and patients have been saying for months. Long COVID is a serious problem and a huge number of people are dealing with it.
But it’s tough to find treatments for a disease that is still so ill-defined ( SN: 7/29/22 ). One major research effort in the United States hopes to change that. And one of my colleagues, Science News ’ News Director Macon Morehouse , got a peek into the process.
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In the last two months, Morehouse has donated 15 vials of blood, two urine specimens and a sample of saliva. Technicians have measured her blood pressure, oxygen level, height, weight and waist circumference and counted how many times she could rise from sitting to standing in 30 seconds. Morehouse is not sick, nor is she collecting data for her health. She’s doing it for science.
Morehouse is participating in a long COVID study at Howard University in Washington D.C. It’s part of a many-armed giant of a project with an eye on one thing: the long-term health effects of COVID-19. Launched last year by the National Institutes of Health, the RECOVER Initiative aims to enroll roughly 60,000 adults and children. At the Howard site, Morehouse is volunteer No. 182.
She’s somewhat of a unicorn among study participants: As far as she knows, Morehouse has never had COVID-19. Ultimately, some 10 percent of participants will include people who have avoided the virus, says Stuart Katz, a cardiologist and a RECOVER study leader at NYU Langone Health in New York City. Scientists continue to sign up volunteers, but “omicron made it harder to find uninfected people,” he says.
RECOVER scientists need participants like Morehouse so the researchers can compare them with people who developed long COVID. That might reveal what the disease is — and who it tends to strike. “Our goals are to define long COVID and to understand what’s your risk of getting [it] after COVID infection,” Katz says. Their results could be a first step toward developing treatments.
Within the pandemic’s first year, doctors noticed that some COVID-19 patients developed long-term symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue and chronic cough. In December 2020, Katz and other physicians and scientists convened to discuss what was known. The answer, it turned out, was not much. “This is a novel virus,” he says. “Nobody knew what it could do.” Around the same time, Congress OK’d $1.15 billion for the NIH to study COVID-19’s long-term health consequences.
Fast forward five months, and the agency had awarded nearly $470 million to NYU Langone Health to serve as the hub for its long COVID studies. “The whole thing was on a very, very compressed timeline,” Katz says. NYU then hustled to come up with a study plan focused on three main groups: adults, children/families and finally, tissue samples from people who died after having COVID-19. It wasn’t your typical research project, Katz says. “We were charged with studying a disease that didn’t have a definition.”
Today, RECOVER has enrolled just over half of a target 17,680 adults. Katz hopes to cross this finish line by spring 2023. The child-focused part of the project has further to go. The goal is to enroll nearly 20,000 children; so far, they’ve got around 1,200, says Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a member of RECOVER’s executive committee.
Some scientists and patients have criticized RECOVER for moving too slowly . As someone who has recovered from long COVID himself, Katz says he gets it. “We started a year and a half ago, and we don’t yet have definitive answers,” he says. “For people that have been suffering, I can understand how it’s disappointing.”
But for RECOVER — with more than 400 doctors, scientists and other experts involved, roughly 180 sites across the country enrolling participants and a grant timeline that scuttled the usual order of events — the old saying about building the plane while flying it fits, Katz says. “We are working very, very hard to move as quickly as we can.”
Recently, other facets of the initiative have started to shine. An analysis of electronic health records found that among people under 21, kids younger than 5, kids with certain medical conditions and those who had had severe COVID-19 infections may be most at risk for long COVID , scientists reported in JAMA Pediatrics in August. And a different health records study suggests that vaccinated adults have some protection against long COVID , even if they had a breakthrough infection. Scientists posted that finding this month at medRxiv.org in a study that has yet to be peer-reviewed.
These studies tap data that have already been collected. The bulk of the RECOVER studies will take longer, because scientists will follow patients for years, analyzing data along the way. “These are observational, longitudinal studies,” Katz says. “There’s no intervention; we’re basically just trying to understand what long COVID is.”
Still, Katz expects to see early results later this fall. By then, scientists should have an official, if rough, definition of long COVID, which could help doctors struggling to diagnose the disease. By the end of the year, Katz says RECOVER might also have answers about viral persistence — whether coronavirus relics left behind in the body somehow reboot symptoms.
The project has also recently sprouted a clinical trials arm, which may launch this winter, says Kanecia Zimmerman, a pediatric critical care specialist who is leading this effort at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in North Carolina. One of the first trials planned will test whether an antiviral therapy that clears SARS-CoV-2 from the body helps patients with persistent symptoms.
Though RECOVER is a major effort to understand long COVID, progress will require research — and ideas — from a broad group of scientists, says Diane Griffin, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and member of the Long COVID Research Initiative , who is not involved in the project. “Just because we’ve invested in this one big study, that’s not going to give us all the answers,” she says.
But information from study participants like Morehouse and the nearly 10,000 other adults who’ve already enrolled in RECOVER will help. In the meantime, continued support for long COVID research is crucial, Griffin says. “That’s the only way we’re going to eventually figure this out.”
Meghan Rosen is a staff writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News . She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with an emphasis in biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and later graduated from the science communication program at UC 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).
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book takes readers on a safari through the immune system, pointing out sights and cells like monocytes, neutrophils and macrophages (one shown here in an electron micrograph).
Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus
In the summer of 1960, doctors extracted “crimson sludge” from 6-year-old Barbara Lowry’s bones and gave it to her twin.
That surgery, one of the first successful bone marrow transplants, belied the difficulty of the procedure. In the early years of transplantation, scores of patients died as doctors struggled to figure out how to use one person’s cells to treat another. “Cell therapy for blood diseases had a terrifying birth,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his new book, The Song of the Cell .
The transplant story is one of many Mukherjee uses to put human faces and experiences at the heart of medical progress. But what radiates off the pages is the author himself. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Mukherjee’s curiosity and wisdom add pep to what, in less dexterous hands, might be dry material. He finds wonder in every facet of cell biology, inspiration in the people working in this field and “spine-tingling awe” in their discoveries.
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It’s no surprise that Mukherjee is so seduced by science. This is a man who built a microscope from scratch during the pandemic and has spent years probing biology and its history with luminaries in the field. The Song of the Cell lets readers eavesdrop on these conversations, which can be intimate and enlightening.
On a car ride across the Netherlands, Mukherjee chats with geneticist Paul Nurse , who tells him about the cell division work that ultimately netted Nurse a Nobel Prize ( SN: 3/27/21, p. 28 ). On a walk at Rockefeller University in New York
City, Mukherjee discusses his depression with another Nobel Prize–winning researcher, neuroscientist Paul Greengard. Mukherjee’s vivid imagery lends heft to his feelings. He tells Greengard about experiencing a “soupy fog of grief” after his father’s death and describes “drowning in a tide of sadness.”
In these memories, which Mukherjee uses to segue into the science of depression, and elsewhere in the book, hints of poetry shimmer among the prose. A cell observed under a microscope is “refulgent, glimmering, alive.” A white blood cell’s slow creep is like the “ectoplasmic movement of an alien.” Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the story of cell biology, guiding readers through the lives and discoveries of key figures in the field. We meet the “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th century cloth merchant who ground globules of Venetian glass into microscope lenses and spied a “marvelous cosmos of a living world” within a raindrop. Mukherjee also teleports us to the present to introduce He Jiankui, the disgraced biophysicist behind the world’s first gene-edited babies ( SN: 12/22/18 & 1/5/19, p. 20 ). Along the way, we also meet Frances Kelsey, the Food and Drug Administration medical officer who refused to approve thalidomide, a drug now known to cause birth defects, for use in the United States, and Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who argued that mitochondria and other organelles were once free-living bacteria ( SN: 8/8/15, p. 22 ).
Mukherjee traverses a vast landscape of cell biology, and he’s not afraid to pull over and go exploring in the weeds. He describes in detail the flux of ions in nerve cells and introduces a considerable cast of immune system characters. For an even deeper dive, readers can check the footnotes; they are abundant.
What stands out most, though, are Mukherjee’s stories about people: scientists, doctors, patients and himself. As a researcher and a physician, he steps deftly between the scientific and clinical worlds, and, like the microscope he assembled, offers a glimpse into a universe we might not otherwise see.
Buy The Song of the Cell from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.
Meghan Rosen is a staff writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News . She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with an emphasis in biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and later graduated from the science communication program at UC 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).
This laser-derived map of a region around U.S. Highway 191 (adjacent to the yellow line) in Montana near Yellowstone National Park reveals evidence of a large landslide sometime in the past. High elevations are colored brown and white; low elevations are green.
DENVER — A hidden landscape riddled with landslides is coming into focus in Yellowstone National Park, thanks to a laser-equipped airplane.
Scientists of yore crisscrossed Yellowstone on foot and studied aerial photographs to better understand America’s first national park. But today researchers have a massive new digital dataset at their fingertips that’s shedding new light on this nearly 1-million-hectare natural wonderland.
These observations of Yellowstone have allowed a pair of researchers to pinpoint over 1,000 landslides within and near the park , hundreds of which had not been mapped before, the duo reported October 9 at the Geological Society of America Connects 2022 meeting. Most of these landslides likely occurred thousands of years ago, but some are still moving.
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Mapping Yellowstone’s landslides is important because they can cripple infrastructure like roadways and bridges. The millions of visitors that explore the park each year access Yellowstone through just a handful of entrance roads, one of which recently closed for months following intense flooding.
In 2020, a small aircraft flew a few hundred meters above the otherworldly landscape of Yellowstone. But it wasn’t ferrying tourists eager for up close views of the park’s famous wolves or hydrothermal vents ( SN: 7/21/20, SN: 1/11/21 ). Instead, the plane carried a downward-pointing laser that fired pulses of infrared light at the ground. By measuring the timing of pulses that hit the ground and reflected back toward the aircraft, researchers reconstructed the precise topography of the landscape.
Such “light detection and ranging,” or lidar, data reveal details that often remain hidden to the eye. “We’re able to see the surface of the ground as if there’s no vegetation,” says Kyra Bornong, a geoscientist at Idaho State University in Pocatello. Similar lidar observations have been used to pinpoint pre-Columbian settlements deep within the Amazon jungle ( SN: 5/25/22 ).
The Yellowstone lidar data were collected as part of the 3D Elevation Program , an ongoing project spearheaded by the United States Geological Survey to map the entirety of the United States using lidar.
Laser-mapping of the Yellowstone area uncovered over 1,000 landslides (outlined in yellow), most within the national park. This topographical map (red denotes higher elevations; blue is lower) reveals that many of the landslides are concentrated around the edges of the park. While most are ancient, some are still active.
Bornong and geomorphologist Ben Crosby analyzed the Yellowstone data — which resolve details as small as about one meter — to home in on landslides. The team searched for places where the landscape changed from looking relatively smooth to looking jumbled, evidence that soil and rocks had once been on the move. “It’s a pattern-recognition game,” says Crosby, also of Idaho State University. “You’re looking for this contrast between the lumpy stuff and the smooth stuff.”
The researchers spotted more than 1,000 landslides across Yellowstone, most of which were clustered near the periphery of the park. That makes sense given the geography of Yellowstone’s interior, says Lyman Persico, a geomorphologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., who was not involved in the research. The park sits atop a supervolcano , whose previous eruptions blanketed much of the park in lava ( SN: 1/2/18 ). “You’re sitting in the middle of the Yellowstone caldera, where everything is flat,” says Persico.
But steep terrain also abounds in the national park, and there’s infrastructure in many of those landslide-prone areas. In several places, the team found that roads had been built over landslide debris. One example is Highway 191, which skirts the western edge of Yellowstone.
It’s worth keeping an eye on this highway since it funnels significant amounts of traffic through regions apt to experience landslides, Bornong says. “It’s one of the busiest roads in Montana.”
There’s plenty more to learn from this novel look at Yellowstone, Crosby says. Lidar data can shed light on geologic processes like volcanic and tectonic activity, both of which Yellowstone has in spades. “It’s a transformative tool,” he says.
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 Panamanian golden frog used to call the rainforests and cloud forests of its namesake country home, until a deadly fungus appeared. The loss of the frog and other amphibians may have contributed to a rise in malaria.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Costa Rica and Panama experienced spikes in malaria cases. The massive loss of amphibians in the region from a deadly fungal disease may have contributed to the uptick of this human disease.
The spread of the fungal disease chytridiomycosis was a slow-motion disaster, leading to a decades-long wave of amphibian declines globally. From the 1980s to the 2000s, the wave moved from northwest to southeast across Costa Rica and Panama, hitting different places at different times. An analysis of local ecological surveys, public health records and satellite data suggests a link between the amphibian die-offs and an increase in human malaria cases as the wave passed through, researchers report in the October Environmental Research Letters.
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Teasing out ways that biodiversity loss “ripple[s] through ecosystems and affect[s] humans” can help make a case for preventive actions in the face of other ecological threats, says Michael Springborn, an environmental economist at the University of California, Davis.
On average, each county in Costa Rica and Panama had 0.8 to 1.1 additional cases of malaria per 1,000 people per year for about six years, beginning a couple of years after the amphibian losses, Springborn and colleagues found.
Other research suggests that amphibians serve as important checks on mosquito populations. Amphibian larvae eat mosquito larvae, and the animals compete with each other for resources, such as places to live.
So the missing frogs, toads and salamanders may have led to more mosquitoes and potentially more malaria transmission. But it’s unclear whether mosquito populations actually increased during this time, Springborn says, because those data don’t exist.
Chytridiomycosis, caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd, has led to the largest recorded loss of biodiversity due to a disease . It’s caused the decline of at least 500 species globally ( SN: 3/28/19 ). Ninety of those species are presumed extinct. Frogs and toads in the Americas and Australia have suffered the greatest declines. The international trade in amphibians has spread the fungus globally.
Springborn and colleagues wondered if the impacts of the amphibian losses stretched to humans too. The researchers turned to Costa Rica and Panama, where the fungus moved through ecosystems in a somewhat uniform way along the narrow strip of land on which the two countries sit, Springborn says. This meant that the researchers could work out when the fungus arrived at a given place. The team also looked at the number of malaria cases in those places before and after the amphibian die-offs.
In the first couple of years after the animals’ decline, malaria cases started to rise. For the following six years or so, cases remained elevated, then started to go down again. The researchers aren’t sure yet what was behind the eventual drop.
Studies on the connections between biodiversity loss and human health might “help motivate conservation by highlighting the direct benefits of conservation to human well-being,” says Hillary Young, a community ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the work.
“Humans are causing wildlife to be lost at a rate similar to that of other major mass extinction events,” she says. “We are increasingly aware that these losses can have major impacts on human health and well-being — and, in particular, on risk of infectious disease.”
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).
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing — all you’ve got to do is stagger your timing.
For decades, fans of jazz music have debated why some songs have swing — the characteristic swaying feeling that compels feet to tap and heads to bop. Now, scientists may finally have an answer to Louis Armstrong’s classic song “What Is This Thing Called Swing?” and the secret lies in the timing of jazz soloists.
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After listening to original and digitally tweaked piano recordings, jazz musicians were more than seven times as likely to rate music as “swinging” when the soloist’s timing was partially delayed with respect to the rhythm section, researchers report October 6 in Communications Physics.
In jazz, musicians are trained to swing eighth notes, or extend the duration of their downbeats — every other eighth note — and shorten the beats in between to create a galloping rhythm. But the technique on its own doesn’t explain swing, says physicist Theo Geisel. Computer-generated jazz songs with swung eighth notes still lack the style’s swaying feel ( SN: 2/17/22 ).
Past research hinted that swing might arise from differences in the timing between musicians within a band ( SN: 1/2/18 ). So Geisel and colleagues tweaked only the timing of the soloists in jazz recordings on a computer and asked professional and semiprofessional jazz musicians to rate each recording’s swing.
Musicians were nearly 7.5 times as likely to judge music as more swinging when the soloists’ downbeats were minutely delayed with respect to the rhythm section, but not their offbeats.
In a new study, jazz musicians rated the “swing” of these recordings of the song “Jordu” by Clifford Brown. The first recording is an unaltered version, and the second recording has been manipulated to increase the delay of the soloist’s downbeats by a very small amount. The musicians rated the tweaked recording as having more swing than the original.
Most of the musicians couldn’t put their finger on what was causing the effect, says Geisel, of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany. “Professional jazz musicians who have played for many years apparently have learned to do this unconsciously.”
The researchers also analyzed 456 jazz performances from various artists and found almost all soloists used downbeat delays, with an average delay of 30 milliseconds. This average held across the jazz subgenres of bebop, swing and hardbop, though there was some variation, Geisel says. “For faster tempos, the delays get smaller.”
Looking ahead, Geisel intends to investigate how “laid-back playing” — a popular style of delaying both downbeats and offbeats in jazz — influences swing.
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).
