A 3-D visualization of the Cat’s Eye nebula (left) reveals partial gas rings (yellow) as well knots and whorls on either side of the central gas bubble (blue), all of which were probably sculpted by jets erupting from the nebula’s core. The visualization is based in part on an image (right) from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Visualization: R. Clairmont; Image: NASA, ESA, HEIC and The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA
Roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth sits one of the most complex and least understood nebulae, a whirling landscape of gas and dust left in the wake of a star’s death throes. A new computer visualization reveals the 3-D structure of the Cat’s Eye nebula and hints at how not one, but a pair of dying stars sculpted its complexity.
The digital reconstruction, based on images from the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals two symmetric rings around the nebula’s edges. The rings were probably formed by a spinning jet of charged gas that was launched from two stars in the nebula’s center, Ryan Clairmont and colleagues report in the October Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
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“I realized there hasn’t been a comprehensive study of the structure of the nebula since the early ’90s,” says Clairmont, an undergraduate at Stanford University. Last year, while a high school student in San Diego, he reached out to a couple of astrophysicists at a scientific imaging company called Ilumbra who had written software to reconstruct the 3-D structure of astronomical objects.
The team combined Hubble images with ground-based observations of light in several wavelengths, which revealed the motions of the nebula’s gas. Figuring out which parts were moving toward and away from Earth helped reveal its 3-D structure.
The team identified two partial rings to either side of the nebula’s center. The rings’ symmetry and unfinished nature suggest they are the remains of a plasma jet launched from the heart of the nebula, then snuffed out before it could complete a full circle. Such jets are usually formed through an interaction between two stars orbiting one another, says Ilumbra partner Wolfgang Steffen, who is based in Kaiserslautern, Germany.
“I said that’s impossible! Not even Ph.D. students or anybody has tried that before,” Steffen says. “He did it brilliantly. He pulled it all off and more than we expected.”
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).
Oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster floats atop the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Chemical dispersants, which have been a staple in oil spill clean-up efforts since they came on the scene 50 years ago, were used to break down some of the oil. Certain microbes and setting fire to the oil helped too.
David L. Valentine/University of California, Santa Barbara
[In the late 1960s], about the best means of cleaning up oil was to put straw on it, then scoop up the oily straw by hand or with pitchforks. Now industry … has devised an arsenal of oil cleanup chemicals. Thin-layer chemicals can be used to herd oil together and to thicken it…. Chemicals are available as absorbents too. Still other chemicals … disperse oil throughout the water. Other chemicals show promise as oil-burning agents.
Chemicals are the norm today, but the future of oil-cleanup technology may well be microbial. In recent years, researchers have shown that soil microbes broke down some of the oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico ( SN Online: 6/26/15 ). And electrical bacteria, which channel electricity through their threadlike bodies, could help by turning oil munchers’ waste into fuel for the microbes , scientists reported ( SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 24 ). Microbial mops aren’t yet ready for prime time, so chemical dispersants, fire and spongelike sorbents remain key tools in cleanup kits.
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).
As we head into our third pandemic winter, researchers are keeping an eye on a swarm of omicron variants that have donned sneaky disguises to get around our immune systems.
Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images
Fall and winter have not been kind to us over the last couple of years.
In 2020, cases of COVID-19 began to climb in October. And at this time last year, we were in the calm before the storm, so to speak, with delta-driven case counts slowly dipping before the omicron variant began its road to global domination at the end of November ( SN: 12/1/21 ). What will happen in our third pandemic winter, as omicron continues to evolve and many people ditch their masks?
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Only time will tell. But already there are some warning signs that we could be faced with yet another wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. For one, cases and hospitalizations are increasing in some European countries , including the United Kingdom.
What happens across the pond usually portends what will happen in the United States. At the national level and in most states, cases are still going down. But experts worry that may not hold true for long, as temperatures drop and more people gather indoors where the coronavirus is more likely to spread. Some Northeastern states, for instance, have seen a sharp increase in coronavirus levels in wastewater, suggesting there has been an uptick in transmission even if it’s not yet reflected in official case counts ( SN: 4/22/22 ).
There’s also a wild card this year, complicating matters. New versions of omicron abound. How might they shift the pandemic’s near future?
It’s a hard question to answer. On one hand, we’re in a very different place than we were two years ago, or even last year, with more treatments on hand and an omicron-specific booster ( SN: 5/11/22; SN: 9/2/22). But the coronavirus has been known to throw us a few curveballs. Experts expect that winter will usher in yet another wave, but what it will look like and how high it will crest is unclear.
“Although we can feel good that we are going in the right direction, we can’t let our guard down,” said National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci at an October 4 webinar held by the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism in Los Angeles.
There is some good(ish) news: Most people have been exposed to the virus, whether through vaccination or — the less-desirable route — an infection, or both. That means our immune systems have the virus’s mug shot on hand. Our antibodies and T cells are trained to kick into high gear if the coronavirus trips any alarm bells as it enters our noses, throats or lungs.
These immune barriers can dampen the virus’s ability to spread among people, as well as protect many from becoming seriously ill. As a result, fewer people may end up in the hospital or dying compared with previous years.
But then there’s the bad news: Over the last year, the omicron variant has adopted a few disguises in the form of mutations that help the virus hide from our immune systems. Over the summer, a version called BA.5 rose to dominance, pushing out its relatives BA.2 and BA.2.12.1. Now, researchers are keeping tabs on a new alphanumeric motley crew of omicron versions.
It is possible that a new worrisome variant could suddenly appear and outcompete all its relatives, as the delta and omicron variants did in 2021. The next name on the list would be “pi.”
But another — perhaps more likely — possibility is that over the next few months, our attention won’t be focused on a single lineage that sweeps the world but on a swarm of new variants. That’s thanks in part to the arms race between our immune systems and the virus.
Now that so many people have some kind of protection, compared with in 2020 or early 2021, the coronavirus must constantly change in ways that poke holes in those defenses in order to spread. Some variants circulating now have independently acquired the same mutations, imparting similar abilities to dodge antibodies in lab tests, researchers report in a preliminary study posted October 4 at bioRxiv.org. With multiple variants using the same tactics to get around people’s immune systems, it can be tough for a single variant to come out on top.
Officials have already taken some steps to tackle this ever-changing virus. This fall, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna released tweaked versions of their mRNA vaccines that tackle both the original version of the coronavirus and omicron to give immune systems a refresher course. But few of these updated shots are making it into arms. Half of U.S. adults say they have heard little to nothing about COVID-19 boosters, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released September 30. And so far, only around 4 percent of people age 12 or older have gotten the new jabs. (On October 12, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed off on bivalent boosters for 5- to 11-year-olds.)
What’s more, omicron’s continued evolution means that vulnerable people are fast losing COVID-19 treatment options. The October 4 study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, also found that the last stronghold of antibody drugs that are used to treat or protect high-risk patients — therapies called bebtelovimab and Evusheld — didn’t recognize some of the new variants when tested in lab dishes. And on October 3, the FDA warned that Evusheld, which is used as a preexposure treatment to protect immunocompromised people, doesn’t work for all variants . The drug still offers protection against many of the currently circulating variants, the FDA said, as does the antiviral Paxlovid.
Another unknown that we’re facing this winter is how much other respiratory infections might add on to an already COVID-heavy burden. Flu season in Australia, usually a bellwether for those of us north of the equator, was back after a two-year hiatus and got an earlier than usual start. Experts are once again warning about a possible “twindemic” in the Northern Hemisphere, with both influenza and the coronavirus making people ill ( SN: 9/18/20 ). Not to mention, there are myriad other infections that most people haven’t been exposed to over the last couple of years thanks to masking and social distancing.
That’s not to say everyone needs to prepare for yet another lonely winter. But it’s a sobering reminder that taking extra precautions such as testing before social gatherings and masking — especially around vulnerable people — would be wise, even as we get on with our lives. And that reminds me: I need to order more masks.
Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News . She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News 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).
Some seabirds don’t just survive storms. They ride them.
Streaked shearwaters nesting on islands off Japan sometimes head straight toward passing typhoons , where they fly near the eye of the storm for hours at a time, researchers report in the Oct. 11 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . This strange behavior — not reported in any other bird species — might help streaked shearwaters ( Calonectris leucomelas ) survive strong storms.
Birds and other animals living in areas with hurricanes and typhoons have adopted strategies to weather these deadly storms ( SN: 10/2/15 ). In recent years, a few studies using GPS trackers have revealed that some ocean-dwelling birds — such as the frigatebird ( Fregata minor ) — will take massive detours to avoid cyclones .
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This is an understandable strategy for birds that spend most of their time at sea where “there is literally nowhere to hide,” says Emily Shepard, a behavior ecologist at Swansea University in Wales. To find out whether shearwaters also avoid storms, she and her colleagues used 11 years of tracking data from GPS locators attached to the wings of 75 birds nesting on Awashima Island in Japan.
By combining this information with data on wind speeds during typhoons, the researchers discovered that shearwaters that were caught out in the open ocean when a storm blew in would ride tailwinds around the edges of the storm. However, others that found themselves sandwiched between land and the eye of a strong cyclone would sometimes veer off their usual flight patterns and head toward the center of the storm.
As Typhoon Cimaron moved across the Sea of Japan (black track) in August 2018, GPS trackers monitored the movements of 32 streaked shearwaters ( Calonectris leucomelas ) just off the coast of Japan. The tracking data show three birds (seen here in red and teal) flew toward the eye of the storm through some of the highest winds. Two other birds (light green) began heading toward the eye as the storm swept past.
Of the 75 monitored shearwaters, 13 flew to within 60 kilometers of the eye — an area Shepherd calls the “eye socket,” where the winds were strongest — for up to eight hours, tracking the cyclone as it headed northward. “It was one of those moments where we couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” Shepard says. “We had a few predictions for how they might behave, but this was not one of them.”
The shearwaters were more likely to head for the eye during stronger storms, soaring on winds as swift as 75 kilometers per hour. This suggest that the birds might be following the eye to avoid being blown inland, where they risk crashing onto land or being hit by flying debris, Shepard says.
While this is the first time this behavior has been spotted in any bird species, flying with the winds could be a common tactic for preserving energy during cyclones, says Andrew Farnsworth, an ornithologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study. “It might seem counterintuitive,” he says. “But from the perspective of bird behavior, it makes a lot of sense.”
Freda Kreier was a fall 2021 intern at Science News . She holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Colorado College and a master’s 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).
This honeybee is being trained to recognize the concept of the number three by drinking sugar water from a micropipette placed in the middle of a panel with three black squares.
Like many humans, honeybees seem to prefer their numbers ordered from left to right.
Honeybees trained to recognize a specific number tend to fly left when given two side-by-side options of a smaller number and right when the options represent a larger number, a new study claims. The finding suggests that honeybees have a “mental number line” and that this association has biological roots, researchers report October 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
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While some scientists agree that the study makes a compelling case for a mental number line in honeybees, others argue that the new work is an oversimplification of complex human behavior.
Many humans have a mental number line that often puts smaller numbers on the left and bigger numbers on the right — if asked to organize several bunches of grapes by size, you’d likely line them up by increasing number of grapes from left to right. Whether this association is present at birth or learned later in life has long been a subject of debate.
Previous work has shown that honeybees can count , and that they even understand the concept of zero ( SN: 6/7/18 ). “When you realize all these facts, an obvious question [is whether honeybees have] the so-called mental number line,” says Martin Giurfa, a biologist at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France. Working from home during COVID-19 lockdowns, Giurfa tested 134 honeybees ( Apis mellifera ) on their number-ordering abilities using a design developed with researchers who had done similar experiments with chicks and human babies ( SN: 1/29/15 ).
First, Giurfa had to teach his bee pupils to recognize numbers. Using sugar water, he lured honeybees into a testing chamber built from a repurposed wine box. For each bee, he hung a panel on the back of the box with a certain number of symbols on it — one, three or five — and fed them the sugar water so they’d learn to associate the number with food. By varying what the symbols looked like between visits, he ensured the bees were learning the number itself and not certain shapes or arrangements.
After 30 trips to the box, it was time for a test: Giurfa removed the training panel and set up two, mirror-image panels, one on the left wall of the box and one on the right. These new panels either had the same number of symbols as the training panel, fewer symbols or more.
Which panel did the bees fly to — left or right? “It depends on your reference number,” Giurfa says. Of the bees trained on “one,” 72 percent flew to the “three” panel to the right, but of the bees trained on “five,” 73 percent went to the “three” panel to the left. “That’s exactly the concept of the mental number line,” Giurfa says. “You align numbers based on your reference.” If the test number was the same as the training number, the bees showed no preference for left or right.
These experiments “make a very compelling case” for a mental number line in honeybees, says Felicity Muth, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved with the study. “They have a number of controls that really rule out any of the alternative explanations I can think of.”
Giurfa believes these results show that mental number lines, or at least some component of them, are present across the animal kingdom. However, not everyone is convinced.
“The oversimplification of complex human concepts, such as that of ‘number line,’ must be avoided, since they severely distort the reality of the phenomena that make them possible,” says Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.
This study stops short of explaining why the brains of bees, chicks and babies have all converged on the same left-to-right number ordering but does offer a possible answer — their asymmetrical brains. All three have brains that process information differently on the left and right sides. “It might be an inherent property to these lateralized brain systems,” Giurfa says.
A shared system for organizing numbers, if truly widespread, would highlight how surprisingly similar animal minds can be to our own. Though some cognitive powers seem to be uniquely human, Giurfa thinks there is danger in dismissing the abilities of animals. “We are different from animals in some aspects,” he says, “but we are very similar in others. Denying this similarity is not what will help us understand what we are.”
P. Skorupski et al . Counting insects . Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B . Vol. 373, February 19, 2018, 20160513. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0513.
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).
Evidence grows that there might not be an underground lake surrounded by shallow pools near Mars’ south polar ice cap (shown in this 2015 image from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter).
“Follow the water” has long been the mantra of scientists searching for life beyond Earth. After all, the only known cradle of life in the cosmos is the watery planet we call home. But now there’s more evidence suggesting that a potential discovery of liquid water on Mars might not be so watertight , researchers report September 26 in Nature Astronomy .
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But researchers have since proposed that those discoveries might not hold up to scrutiny. In 2021, one group suggested that clay minerals and frozen brines , rather than liquid water, might be responsible for the strong radar signals that researchers observed ( SN: 7/16/21 ). Spacecraft orbiting Mars beam radio waves toward the Red Planet and measure the timing and intensity of the reflected waves to infer what’s beneath the Martian surface.
And now another team has shown that ordinary layers of rock and ice can produce many of the same radar signals previously attributed to water. Planetary scientist Dan Lalich of Cornell University and his colleagues calculated how flat layers of bedrock, water ice and carbon dioxide ice — all known to be plentiful on Mars — reflect radio waves. “It was a pretty simple analysis,” Lalich says.
The researchers found that they could reproduce some of the anomalously strong radar signals thought to be due to liquid water. Individual radar signals from different layers of rock and ice add together when the layers are a certain thickness, Lalich says. That produces a stronger signal, which is then picked up by a spacecraft’s instruments. But those instruments can’t always tell the difference between a radio wave coming from one layer and one that’s the result of multiple layers, he says. “They look like one reflection to the radar.”
These results don’t rule out liquid water on Mars, Lalich and his colleagues acknowledge. “This is just saying that there are other options,” he says.
The new finding is “a plausible scenario,” says Aditya Khuller, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not involved in the research. But until scientists get a lot more data from the Red Planet, it’ll be difficult to know whether liquid water truly exists on Mars, Khuller says. “It’s important to be open-minded at this point.”
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).
