A crowd gathers to watch a fisher released into Washington state’s Mount Rainier National Park in December 2016. About 280 of these tree-climbing animals have been translocated from Canada since 2008 to help fisher populations rebound.
Holding an antenna above his head, Jeff Lewis crept through an evergreen forest in the Cascade mountains, southeast of Seattle. As he navigated fallen fir logs and dripping ferns, he heard it: a faint “beep” from a radio transmitter implanted in an animal code-named F023.
F023 is a fisher ( Pekania pennanti ), an elusive member of the weasel family that Lewis fondly describes as a “tree wolverine.” Resembling a cross between a cat and an otter, these sleek carnivores hunt in forests in Canada and parts of the northern United States. But fur trapping and habitat loss had wiped out Washington’s population by the mid-1900s.
Back in 2017 when Lewis was keeping tabs on F023, he tracked her radio signal from a plane two or three times a month, along with dozens of other recently released fishers. Come spring, he noticed that F023’s behavior was different from the others.
Her locations had been clustered close together for a few weeks, a sign that she might be “busy with babies,” says Lewis, a conservation biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. He and colleagues trekked into the woods to see if she had indeed given birth. If so, it would be the first wild-born fisher documented in the Cascades in at least half a century.
As the faint beeps grew louder, the biologists found a clump of fur snagged on a branch, scratch marks in the bark and — the best clue of all — fisher scat. The team rigged motion-detecting cameras to surrounding trees. A few days later, after sifting through hundreds of images of squirrels and deer, the team hit the jackpot: a grainy photo of F023 ferrying a kit down from her den high in a hemlock tree. The scientists were ecstatic.
“We’re all a bunch of little kids when it comes to getting photos like that,” Lewis says.
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This notable birth came during the second phase of a 14-year fisher reintroduction effort. After 90 fishers were released in Olympic National Park from 2008 to 2010, the project turned its focus east of Seattle, relocating 81 fishers in the South Cascades (home to Mount Rainier National Park) from 2015 to 2020, and then 89 fishers in the North Cascades from 2018 to 2020. The animals were brought in from British Columbia and Alberta. The project concluded last year, when researchers let loose the final batch of fishers.
Washington’s fisher recovery efforts relocated the animals to three regions of the state: the Olympic Peninsula west of Seattle and the North and South Cascades, a mountain range separated by Interstate 90.
Baby animals are the key measure of success for a wildlife reintroduction project. As part of Washington’s Fisher Recovery Plan, biologists set out to document newborn kits as an indicator of how fishers were faring in the three relocation regions.
Before F023’s kit was caught on camera in May 2017, biologists had already confirmed births by seven relocated females on the Olympic Peninsula, where the whole project began. Two of the seven females had four kits, “the largest litter size ever documented on the West Coast,” says Patti Happe, wildlife branch chief at Olympic National Park. Most females have one to three kits.
Lewis is often asked, why put all of this effort into restoring a critter many people have never heard of? His answer: A full array of carnivores makes the ecosystem more resilient.
Happe admits to another motive: “They’re freaking adorable — that’s partly why we’re saving them.”
Contrary to their name, fishers don’t hunt fish, though they’ll happily munch on a dead one if it’s handy. They mainly prey on small mammals, but they also eat reptiles, amphibians, insects, fruit and carrion. About a meter long, males weigh up to six kilograms, about twice as much as females. Fun facts: Females raise young high above the forest floor in hollowed-out spaces in tree trunks. Fishers can travel face-first down tree trunks by turning their hind feet 180 degrees. They have wickedly sharp teeth and partially retractable claws. And they’re incredibly agile, leaping up to two meters between branches and traveling as much as 30 kilometers in a day.
Fishers’ stubby legs and unique climbing skills make them a threat to tree-climbing porcupines. It isn’t pretty: A fisher will force the quill-covered animal down a tree and attack its face until it dies from blood loss or shock. Then the fisher neatly skins the prickly prey, eating most everything except the quills and bones.
But these fearsome predators were no match for humans. In the 1800s, trappers began targeting fishers for their fur. Soft and luxuriant, the glossy brown-gold pelts were coveted fashion accessories, selling for as much as $345 each in the 1920s. This demand meant fishers disappeared not only from Washington, but from more than a dozen states across the northern United States. Once fisher populations plummeted, porcupines ran rampant across the Great Lakes region and New England. This wreaked havoc on forests because the porcupines gobbled up tree seedlings.
Hoping to keep porcupine populations in check, private timber companies partnered with state agencies to bring fishers back to several states in the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to these efforts and stricter trapping regulations, fishers are once again abundant in Michigan, Wisconsin, New York and Massachusetts.
But in Washington, like most of the West, fisher numbers were still slim. By the turn of the 21st century, no fisher had been sighted in the state for over three decades.
As in the Midwest and New England, private timber companies in Washington supported bringing back fishers. Although porcupines are uncommon in Washington, mountain beavers — a large, primitive rodent endemic to the Pacific Northwest — fill a similar role in Washington’s evergreen forests: They eat tree seedlings. And fishers eat them.
By 2006, the state hatched a plan to bring the animals in from Canada. “It was a big opportunity to restore a species,” Lewis says. “We can fix this.”
Like the other Canadian fishers moved to Washington, F023’s relocation story began when she walked into a box trap in British Columbia, lured by a tasty morsel of meat. The bait had been set by local trappers hired by Conservation Northwest, a nonprofit that is one of the recovery project’s three main partners, along with Washington Fish and Wildlife and the National Park Service. After veterinarians checked her health and administered vaccines and antiparasitics to help her survive in her new home, F023 received a surgically implanted radio transmitter and was driven across the border.
She was met by members of the fisher recovery team, who released her just south of Mount Rainier National Park. The forest’s towering Douglas fir, western red cedar and western hemlock trees were full of cubby holes and cavities to hide in, and the undergrowth held plenty of small mammals to eat. At the release, upward of 150 people gathered around F023’s box, part of the team’s effort to engage the public in championing fisher recovery. Everyone cheered as a child opened the door and the furry female bounded into the snowy woods, out of sight in a flash.
The team monitored each relocated fisher for up to two years to see if the project met key benchmarks of success in each of the three regions: more than 50 percent of the fishers surviving their first year, at least half establishing a home range near the release site, and a confirmed kit born to at least one female.
“We met those marks,” says Dave Werntz, science and conservation director at Conservation Northwest.
The effort may have been aided by a series of bypasses built over and under a roughly 25-kilometer stretch of Interstate 90 east of Seattle. One of these structures is the largest wildlife bridge in North America, an overpass “paved” with forest. In 2020, a remote camera caught an image of what looks like a fisher moving through one of the underpasses.
“Male fishers go on these huge walkabouts to find females,” Werntz says. While biologists assumed fishers would cross the freeway to search for mates, having photographic proof “is pretty wonderful,” he says.
Happe and others hope to also see wildlife crossings along Interstate 5 one day. The freeway, which runs north-south near the coast, is the main obstacle keeping the Olympic and Cascade populations apart, she says. “We’re all working on wildlife travel corridors and connectivity in hopes the two populations hook up.”
The majority of the initial 90 fishers relocated to the Olympic Peninsula settled nicely into their new homes, according to radio tracking. In the year following release in that location, the fisher survival rate averaged 73 percent , but varied based on the year and season they were released, as well as sex and age of the fishers.
Males fared better than females: Seventy-four percent of recorded deaths were of females, partly because they are smaller and more vulnerable to predators, such as bobcats and coyotes. Of 24 recovered carcasses where cause of death could be determined , 14 were killed by predators, seven were struck by vehicles, two drowned and one died in a leg-hold trap, Lewis, Happe and colleagues reported in the April 2022 Journal of Wildlife Management .
Because the first fishers relocated to the Olympic Peninsula were released in several locations, the animals had trouble finding mates. As a result, only a few parents sired the subsequent generations.
The researchers became concerned when they looked at the genetic diversity of fishers on the Olympic Peninsula six years post-relocation. Happe and colleagues set up 788 remote cameras and hair-snare stations: triangular cubbies open on either end with a chicken leg as bait in the middle and wire brushes protruding from either side to grab strands of fur. DNA analysis of the fur raised red flags about inbreeding , Happe and Lewis say.
“Models showed we were going to lose up to 50 percent of genetic diversity, and the population would wink out in something like 100 years,” Happe says. To expand the gene pool, the team brought 20 more fishers to the Olympic Peninsula in 2021. These animals came from Alberta whereas the founding population had hailed from British Columbia.
As the reintroduction effort moved into the Cascades, the team adapted, based on lessons learned from the Olympic Peninsula. For instance, to increase the likelihood of fishers finding each other more quickly, the animals were released at fewer sites that were closer together. The team also released the animals before January, giving females ample time to settle into a home range before the spring mating and birthing season.
As the experiment went on, more unanticipated findings popped up. Fishers released in the southern part of the Cascades were more likely to survive the first year (76 percent) than those relocated north of I-90 (40 percent), according to the final project report, released in June. Remote-camera data suggest that’s because there are less prey and slightly more predators in the North Cascades, says Tanner Humphries, community wildlife monitoring program lead for Conservation Northwest.
And in both the Cascades and the Olympic Peninsula, fishers are using different types of habitat than biologists had predicted, Happe says. The mammals — once assumed to be old-growth specialists — are using a mosaic of young and old forests. Fishers require large, old trees with cavities for denning and resting. But in younger managed forests where trees are thinned or cut, prey may be easier to come by.
Live traps in the South Cascades support that idea. Fishers’ preferred prey — snowshoe hares and mountain beavers — were most abundant in young regenerating forests. In older forests, traps detected mainly mice, voles and chipmunks , which are not substantial meals for fishers, Mitchell Parsons, a wildlife ecologist at Utah State University in Logan, reported with Lewis, Werntz and others in 2020 in Forest Ecology and Management .
After F023’s baby was caught on camera five years ago, the mother’s tracking chip degraded as designed — the hardware lasts less than two years. Since then, many more fisher kits have been born in Washington.
In fact, these furry carnivores are one of the most successfully translocated mammals in North America. According to Lewis, 41 different translocation efforts across the continent have helped fisher populations blossom. The animals now occupy 68 percent of their historical range, up from 43 percent in the mid-1900s.
With the last batch of fishers delivered to Washington in 2021, the relocation phase of the project has ended. Lewis, Happe and their partners plan to continue monitoring how these sleek tree-climbing carnivores are faring — and how the ecosystem is responding. For instance, fishers are indeed feasting on seedling-eating mountain beavers , according to research reported by Happe, Lewis and others in 2021 in Northwestern Naturalist .
Given climate change, species loss and ecosystem degradation, animals worldwide face difficult challenges. The fact that fishers are thriving once again in Washington offers hope, Lewis says.
“It’s a hard time, it’s a hard world, and this feels like something we’re doing right,” he says. “Instead of losing something, we’re getting it back.”
Brianna Randall is a freelance writer based in Missoula, Montana.
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).
When he got sacked on September 29, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa (teal uniform, No. 1) sustained a head-rattling concussion. His injuries have reignited discussions of brain safety for professional football players.
In a football game on September 25, Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa got the pass off but he got knocked down. Fans watched him shake his head and stumble to the ground as he tried to jog it off. After a medical check, he went back into the game against the Buffalo Bills with what his coach later said was a back injury.
Four days later, in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tagovailoa, 24, got hit again. This time, he left the field on a stretcher with what was later diagnosed as a concussion.
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Many observers suspect that the first hit — given Tagovailoa’s subsequent headshaking and wobbliness — left the athlete with a concussion, also called a mild traumatic brain injury. If those were indeed signs of a head injury, that first hit may have lined him up for an even worse brain injury just days later.
“The science tells us that yes, a person who is still recovering from a concussion is at an elevated risk for sustaining another concussion,” says Kristen Dams-O’Connor, a neuropsychologist and director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. As one example, a concussion roughly doubled the chance of a second one among young Swedish men, researchers reported in 2013 in the British Medical Journal .
“This, I think, was avoidable,” Dams-O’Connor says of Tagovailoa’s brain injury in the game against the Bengals.
After a hit to the head, when the soft brain hits the unyielding skull, the injury kicks off a cascade of changes. Some nerve cells become overactive, inflammation sets in, and blood flow is altered. These downstream events in the brain — and how they relate to concussion symptoms — can happen over hours and days, and are not easy to quickly measure, Dams-O’Connor says.
That makes diagnosing a concussion tricky. Clinicians often have to rely on patients saying they feel off or fuzzy. Professional athletes might not be eager to share those symptoms if it means they’ll be sidelined. “These are elite athletes who are conditioned to suck it up,” Dams-O’Connor says.
Other signs can indicate a concussion, such as a person’s gait or pupil dilation. “As clinicians, we are often triangulating multiple sources of information to make that call — was this or was this not a concussion?” Dams-O’Connor says. The scientific uncertainty in that call should lead clinicians to err on the side of caution, she says.
After a traumatic brain injury, recuperation is crucial. “It’s much worse when an individual isn’t given the proper time to rest and recover and gets a second impact in a close period of time,” says Daniel Daneshvar, a brain injury medicine doctor and neuroscientist at Mass General Brigham in Boston and Harvard Medical School. Looking at the brains of mice after two close-together hits, researchers have seen signs of worse damage and a longer recovery ( SN: 2/5/16 ).
For athletes, that vulnerability comes in part from concussion symptoms themselves. Slowed reaction times, dizziness and double vision confound a quick-moving quarterback who needs to dodge tackles and see opponents coming from the side. Those symptoms can lead to further injury to the head — and to the rest of the body. A concussion increases the risks of lower extremity injuries, according to a recent analysis of National Football League players published in August in Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation .
What’s more, a healing brain is more susceptible to jarring. While the brain is still recovering in the weeks after an injury, “your threshold for getting a concussion is lower,” Daneshvar says. A lighter hit, researchers suspect, can do more damage. A rare condition called second impact syndrome illustrates an extreme outcome of successive brain injuries. This catastrophic, often fatal brain swelling happens when a still-healing brain is hit again.
That’s not what happened to Tagovailoa. But two concussions close together can delay recovery, Dams-O’Connor emphasizes. “I think people minimize how life-altering that can be.”
In a statement, the NFL and the NFL Players Association announced that they are jointly investigating whether their concussion protocols were followed in this case. Tagovailoa may have been allowed back into that first game because his stumbling was attributed — correctly or not — to a back injury, not a brain injury. The NFL and NFLPA are considering changing the protocol to keep a player out of a game for any obvious motor instability, regardless of cause.
For now, Tagovailoa is moving through the stages of recovery outlined in the concussion protocol. In a social media post on September 30, Tagovailoa thanked his team, friends and family and everyone who has reached out in support. “I’m feeling much better and focused on recovering so I can get back out on the field with my teammates,” he wrote.
Laura Sanders is the neuroscience writer. She holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Southern California.
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).
Among mammals, “we’re the only weirdos that are naked except for our head,” says biological anthropologist Tina Lasisi, who is studying the variation in human hair and how it evolved.
Though humans’ nearly hairless bodies stick out like a cowlick among other primates, our nakedness isn’t unique in the world of mammals. Dolphins and whales are naked, says biological anthropologist Tina Lasisi of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. There are naked mole-rats. “Elephants, depending on how you look at them, are kind of naked,” she says. “But we’re the only weirdos that are naked except for our head.”
Our species traded off much of our body hair for more sweat glands, an evolutionary adaptation that helps us regulate body heat more efficiently. But what about another uniquely human feature? We’re the only animals known to express tightly curled hair, like that seen in many people of African descent. Lasisi wants to know why and how it came to be.
For decades, traits that have been associated with racial categories, such as skin pigmentation and hair texture, have gone understudied or ignored among anthropologists, Lasisi says. Much of the study of human biological variation was deserted after the post–World War II backlash against eugenics, a racist field birthed from the idea that humankind could be improved if those deemed to have desirable traits were selectively allowed to reproduce. Since then, research on human variation has largely focused instead on traits that are not overtly racialized, such as lactose intolerance and adaptations to high altitudes.
But studying all forms of human variation is crucial to understanding our species’s evolution, Lasisi says. Studying variation in a way that normalizes rather than dampens or paints differences in a bad light is key not only to righting anthropology’s harmful legacy, but also ethical, socially responsible and sound science, she says.
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Lasisi discovered biological anthropology as an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge. As a Black person who spent many of her formative years among white people in the Netherlands, she was always aware of skin color. She vividly remembers learning that human skin pigmentation evolved as an adaptation to ultraviolet radiation — research pioneered by anthropologist Nina Jablonski of Penn State, who would later become Lasisi’s primary adviser. “It’s like a lightbulb went off in my head,” Lasisi says, and it made her wonder, “What else out there can be explained by evolution?”
Her interest in the origins of curly hair grew in part as an effort to understand her own locks. “Research is me-search,” Lasisi says. But when she first began, there wasn’t much science to comb through, and methodologies for measuring hair texture were either unreliable or inefficient.
As part of her Ph.D. research, Lasisi worked with a team of anthropologists, thermal engineers and physiologists to study how curly hair might have given our bipedal ancestors a leg up in the hot and dry African savanna.
The team placed a variety of wigs made of human hair onto heat-sensing models and measured heat transfer in different environments. In dry settings, curly hair, especially tightly curled hair, protected the scalp from solar radiation while releasing more heat from the head than straight hair. Lasisi speculates that the larger amount of air space within curly hair is what does the trick.
Measuring these characteristics on a continuous spectrum (much like we do height, for instance), she argues, is a better way of studying hair texture than the long-standing practice of classifying hair into discrete categories, such as straight, wavy or curly. Such discrete categories are not standardized among experts and can become subjective, she says. They also obscure the immense variation that exists, even on a single person’s head, and especially among curly hair.
Hair with similar curvatures can be perceived as straight, wavy or curly, as seen in this figure that compares the self-reported hair texture of 140 people of European and African ancestry with the actual curvature of their hair samples.
Lasisi is doing highly technical work that hasn’t been part of the conversation, says Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “Before Tina, very few people were working on hair texture in the same way.”
Lasisi will bring this experience to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as an assistant professor in 2023, where she’ll continue her studies on human variation.
Lasisi wants everyone to be included in conversations about what makes humans human. She has appeared on the podcast Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness (of Queer Eye fame). She also hosts a PBS digital show on human evolutionary biology called Why Am I Like This? , which she helps conceptualize and write.
What’s more, Lasisi has cultivated a community of curious science seekers on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Through short-form videos marked by her signature wit and humor, such as her “Melanin March” series or “Darwin’s greatest hits against white supremacy,” Lasisi educates thousands of followers on human variation, how to talk about race and ethnicity from an anthropological perspective, and much more. She even gives prospective anthropologists career tips and behind-the-scenes glimpses of life in academia. Two-way discussions let her learn from her audience, which she calls her “little focus groups.”
Lasisi hopes her research and outreach will inspire and provide a helpful framework for more nuanced discussions about race, ethnicity, ancestry and human diversity — and that her visibility as a Black anthropologist will encourage other people of color to ask questions that are important to them. “I want to put enough information out there in the world, and [have] enough people out there in the world who have a grasp of that information,” she says, “so that we can see human variation for the beautiful, magnificent, complex thing that it is.”
Want to nominate someone for the next SN 10 list? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org .
Aina Abell is the editorial assistant at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Southern California.
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).
Jacky Austermann (left) and William D’Andrea (right) stand on 125,000-year-old rock on the Bahamas’ Crooked Island in 2019. They surveyed the island for clues, such as ancient water ripples and air bubbles, to sea levels during the last interglacial period.
It’s no revelation that sea levels are rising. Rising temperatures brought on by human-caused climate change are melting ice sheets and expanding ocean water. What’s happening inside Earth will also shape future shorelines. Jacky Austermann is trying to understand those inner dynamics.
A geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Austermann didn’t always know she would end up studying climate. Her fascination with math from a young age coupled with her love of nature and the outdoors — she grew up hiking in the Alps — led her to study physics as an undergraduate, and later geophysics.
As Austermann dug deeper into Earth’s geosystems, she learned just how much the movement of hot rock in the mantle influences life on the surface. “I got really interested in this entire interplay of the solid earth and the oceans and the climate,” she says.
Much of Austermann’s work focuses on how that interplay influences changes in sea level. The global average sea level has risen more than 20 centimeters since 1880, and the yearly rise is increasing. But shifts in local sea level can vary, with those levels rising or falling along different shorelines, Austermann says, and the solid earth plays a role.
“We think about sea level change generally as ‘ice is melting, so sea level is rising.’ But there’s a lot more nuance to it,” she says. “A lot of sea level change is driven by land motion.”
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Understanding that nuance could lead to more accurate climate models for predicting sea level rise in the future. Such work should help inform practical solutions for communities in at-risk coastal areas.
So Austermann is building computer models that reconstruct sea level changes over the last few million years. Her models incorporate data on how the creeping churning of the mantle and other geologic phenomena have altered land and sea elevation, particularly during interglacial periods when Earth’s temperatures were a few degrees higher than they are today.
Previous studies had suggested that this churning, known as mantle convection, sculpted Earth’s surface millions of years ago. “It pushes the surface up where hot material wells up,” Austermann says. “And it also drags [the surface] down where cold material sinks back into the mantle.”
In 2015, Austermann and colleagues were the first to show that mantle-induced topographic changes influenced the melting of Antarctic ice over the last 3 million years. Near the ice sheet’s edges, ice retreated more quickly in areas where the land surface was lower due to convection.
What’s more, mantle convection is affecting land surfaces even on relatively short time scales. Since the last interglacial period, around 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, mantle convection has warped ancient shorelines by as much as several meters, her team reported in Science Advances in 2017.
The growing and melting of ice sheets can deform the solid earth too , Austermann says. As land sinks under the weight of accumulating ice, local sea levels rise. And as land uplifts where the ice melts, water falls. This effect, as well as how the ice sheet tugs on the water around it, is shifting local sea levels around the globe today, she says, making it very relevant to coastal areas planning their defenses in the current climate crisis.
Understanding these geologic processes can help improve models of past sea level rise. Austermann’s team is gathering more data from the field, scouring the coasts of Caribbean islands for clues to what areas were once near or below sea level. Such clues include fossilized corals and water ripples etched in stone, as well as tiny chutes in rocks that indicate air bubbles once rose through sand on ancient beaches. The work is “really fun,” Austermann says. “It’s essentially like a scavenger hunt.”
Her efforts put the solid earth at the forefront of the study of sea level changes, says Douglas Wiens, a seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Before, “a lot of those factors were kind of ignored.” What’s most remarkable is her ability “to span what we normally consider to be several different disciplines and bring them together to solve the sea level problem,” he says.
Austermann says the most enjoyable part of her job is working with her students and postdocs. More than writing the next big paper, she wants to cultivate a happy, healthy and motivated research group. “It’s really rewarding to see them grow academically, scientifically, come up with their own ideas … and also help each other out.”
Roger Creel, a Ph.D. student in Austermann’s group and the first to join her lab, treasures Austermann’s mentorship. She offers realistic, clear and fluid expectations, gives prompt and thoughtful feedback and meets for regular check-ins, he says. “Sometimes I think of it like water-skiing, and Jacky’s the boat.”
For Oana Dumitru, a postdoc in the group, one aspect of that valued mentorship came in the form of a gentle push to write and submit a grant proposal on her own. “I thought I was not ready for it, but she was like, you’ve got to try,” Dumitru says.
Austermann prioritizes her group’s well-being, which fosters collaboration, Creel and Dumitru say. That sense of inclusion, support and community “is the groundwork for having an environment where great ideas can blossom,” Austermann says.
Want to nominate someone for the next SN 10 list? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org .
Aina Abell is the editorial assistant at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Southern California.
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).
If you saw Carlos Argüelles-Delgado’s childhood bedroom — the whiteboard for working out problems, the math textbooks they asked for as birthday gifts — you’d likely not be surprised that this kid would grow up to push the boundaries of modern physics.
For years, physicists have known that the most successful theory to describe what the universe is made of, called the standard model, is broken . By prying at one of the biggest cracks in the framework — neutrinos — Argüelles aims to discover what’s next for the field.
Neutrinos are mysterious even for subatomic particles. They’re hard to study because they barely interact with matter, and what scientists do know about them is baffling — like the fact that neutrinos have mass when the standard model predicts they shouldn’t . “That’s why I like neutrinos,” Argüelles says. “They misbehave.”
Many scientists think this confusing behavior is a sign that neutrinos are affected by undiscovered particles. In that case, demystifying neutrinos could open a new window on the universe. The question is: Who are these hidden partners, and how can scientists find them?
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To search for answers, Argüelles often relies on data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. IceCube’s thousands of buried detectors spot neutrinos from the faint flashes of light they leave after interacting with ice .
For their Ph.D., Argüelles combed through these signals to look for “sterile” neutrinos. If this breed of neutrinos exists, they would interact with matter even less than normal neutrinos do. Sterile neutrinos could explain several troubling problems with the standard model, like why neutrinos have mass and why antimatter is rarer than matter . Sterile neutrinos are also a candidate for dark matter , the unidentified substance that outweighs normal matter in the universe.
The search made for a huge project, but Argüelles finished it in about half of the time typical for U.S. Ph.D.s in the physical sciences. And though they found no signs of the would-be particle, Argüelles ruled out some ideas about what it could be like.
“It was an amazing performance,” says neutrino physicist Francis Halzen, who advised Argüelles’ Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is IceCube’s head scientist. “It was a piece of art.”
Argüelles also looks for other possible hidden particles, like WIMPs, a hypothetical particle that could be a form of dark matter. And Argüelles isn’t afraid to pursue research farther from their specialty. Though no expert in quantum computers, for example, Argüelles was the first to use a quantum computer to simulate how neutrinos can change from one type to another. That could one day help scientists better understand neutrino-rich events like supernova explosions.
“I just hate when people tell me I cannot do something,” Argüelles says.
Halzen describes Argüelles as fearless, the kind of scientist who is never afraid to ask questions. “I don’t think they have any regard for their reputation, ever,” he says.
Argüelles’ attitude toward research is, in part, forged by past struggles to overcome hardship and discrimination.
“There are worse things in life than not being able to solve a problem,” they say.
Growing up in Peru meant building a life on shifting ground. The economy was unstable, and at times Argüelles’ family struggled to make ends meet.
Though Argüelles’ parents were supportive and saw knowledge as a safe investment, they at first rejected Argüelles’ desire to study physics. Argüelles, wiping a tear from their eye, recalls their father saying, “You’re just going to die of hunger.” Soon Argüelles’ parents did embrace the career choice.
Argüelles says Peru, when they were growing up, was also an “extremely negative environment” for LGBTQ+ people. “I’m a gay man,” they say, “and it was very, very, very difficult.”
Same-sex marriages are not recognized in Peru. Hate crimes and discrimination based on sexual orientation were only prohibited in 2017, by a presidential decree that the country’s Congress tried but failed to overturn.
When Argüelles left Peru in 2012 to pursue their Ph.D., they found that studying physics in the United States wasn’t without obstacles. Almost nobody high up in the field looked like them. They struggled under the weight of expectations and felt that voicing their anxieties would get them branded as weak. But with help from mentors, Argüelles persevered.
Now, as an assistant professor at Harvard, Argüelles sees their students — particularly women and Hispanics — facing the same challenges. Argüelles is passionate about supporting them.
“It’s about not giving up, right?” Argüelles says. “I still go through some of these things myself. But I’ll survive it.”
Want to nominate someone for the next SN 10 list? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org .
Asa Stahl was the 2022 AAAS Mass Media fellow with Science News . He is a 5th year Astrophysics Ph.D. student at Rice University, where his research focuses on detecting and characterizing young stars and planets.
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’s a frustration many parents know all too well: You’ve finally lulled your crying baby to sleep, so you put them down in their crib … and the wailing begins again. Science may have a trick for you.
Carrying a crying infant for about five minutes, then sitting for at least another five to eight minutes can calm and lull the baby to sleep long enough to allow a parent to put the child down without waking them , researchers report September 13 in Current Biology .
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The researchers put heart rate monitors on 21 crying babies, ranging in age from newborns to 7 months old. The team also took videos of the infants, monitoring their moods as their mothers carried them around a room, sat holding them and laid them in a crib. That allowed the team to observe how the babies responded to different environments, whether they were crying, fussy, alert or drowsy, heartbeat by heartbeat.
“We tested the physiology behind these things that tend to be kind of common knowledge, though it’s not really well understood why they work,” says Gianluca Esposito, a developmental psychologist at the University of Trento in Italy.
The babies’ heart rates slowed and they stopped crying when their mothers picked them up and carried them around for five minutes. Some infants even fell asleep. But the researchers also noticed that the babies tended to respond to the movement of the parent, whether they were in deep sleep or not. For instance, a baby’s heart rate quickened if a parent turned quickly while walking or tried to put the baby down.
Sitting seems to smooth that transition from walking to bed, the team observed. Babies cradled in mom’s lap for at least five minutes tended to settle into a slower heart rate and stayed asleep once they were put in their crib. In contrast, the heart rates of six babies whose moms sat with them for less than five minutes accelerated once they were laid down and they woke up soon after.
There’s a lot of research about the relationship between infants and mothers, “but I had not seen work showing that infants were responding to mothers’ behaviors while infants were sleeping,” says Sarah Berger, a developmental psychologist at the College of Staten Island in New York who was not a part of the study.
Both Berger and Esposito caution this method isn’t a magic wand for all babies. It doesn’t rule out sleepless nights, but still, it’s something that parents can try, Esposito says. And while this study was done with mothers, anyone that an infant is comfortable with can do it. “Especially for very, very young kids … as long as these caregivers are familiar with the kid, it’s going to work,” he says.
Deborah Balthazar is the Fall 2022 science writing intern at Science News . She holds a B.A. in biology with minors in English and chemistry from Caldwell University and is currently pursuing 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).
