On a Hawaiian mountaintop in the summer of 1992, a pair of scientists spotted a pinprick of light inching through the constellation Pisces. That unassuming object — located over a billion kilometers beyond Neptune — would rewrite our understanding of the solar system.
Rather than an expanse of emptiness, there was something, a vast collection of things in fact, lurking beyond the orbits of the known planets.
The scientists had discovered the Kuiper Belt, a doughnut-shaped swath of frozen objects left over from the formation of the solar system.
As researchers learn more about the Kuiper Belt, the origin and evolution of our solar system is coming into clearer focus. Closeup glimpses of the Kuiper Belt’s frozen worlds have shed light on how planets, including our own, might have formed in the first place. And surveys of this region, which have collectively revealed thousands of such bodies, called Kuiper Belt objects, suggest that the early solar system was home to pinballing planets.
The humble object that kick-started it all is a chunk of ice and rock roughly 250 kilometers in diameter. It was first spotted 30 years ago this month.
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In the late 1980s, planetary scientist David Jewitt and astronomer Jane Luu, both at MIT at the time, were several years into a curious quest. The duo had been using telescopes in Arizona to take images of patches of the night sky with no particular target in mind. “We were literally just staring off into space looking for something,” says Jewitt, now at UCLA.
An apparent mystery motivated the researchers: The inner solar system is relatively crowded with rocky planets, asteroids and comets, but there was seemingly not much out beyond the gas giant planets, besides small, icy Pluto. “Maybe there were things in the outer solar system,” says Luu, who now works at the University of Oslo and Boston University. “It seemed like a worthwhile thing to check out.”
Poring over glass photographic plates and digital images of the night sky, Jewitt and Luu looked for objects that moved extremely slowly, a telltale sign of their great distance from Earth. But the pair kept coming up empty. “Years went by, and we didn’t see anything,” Luu says. “There was no guarantee this was going to work out.”
The tide changed in 1992. On the night of August 30, Jewitt and Luu were using a University of Hawaii telescope on the Big Island. They were employing their usual technique for searching for distant objects: Take an image of the night sky, wait an hour or so, take another image of the same patch of sky, and repeat. An object in the outer reaches of the solar system would shift position ever so slightly from one image to the next, primarily because of the movement of Earth in its orbit. “If it’s a real object, it would move systematically at some predicted rate,” Luu says.
By 9:14 p.m. that evening, Jewitt and Luu had collected two images of the same bit of the constellation Pisces. The researchers displayed the images on the bulbous cathode-ray tube monitor of their computer, one after the other, and looked for anything that had moved. One object immediately stood out: A speck of light had shifted just a touch to the west.
But it was too early to celebrate. Spurious signals from high-energy particles zipping through space — cosmic rays — appear in images of the night sky all of the time. The real test would be whether this speck showed up in more than two images, the researchers knew.
Jewitt and Luu nervously waited until 11 p.m. for the telescope’s camera to finish taking a third image. The same object was there, and it had moved a bit farther west. A fourth image, collected just after midnight, revealed the object had shifted position yet again. This is something real, Jewitt remembers thinking. “We were just blown away.”
Based on the object’s brightness and its leisurely pace — it would take nearly a month for it to march across the width of the full moon as seen from Earth — Jewitt and Luu did some quick calculations. This thing, whatever it was, was probably about 250 kilometers in diameter. That’s sizable, about one-tenth the width of Pluto. It was orbiting far beyond Neptune. And in all likelihood, it wasn’t alone.
Although Jewitt and Luu had been diligently combing the night sky for years, they had observed only a tiny fraction of it. There were possibly thousands more objects out there like this one just waiting to be found, the two concluded.
The realization that the outer solar system was probably teeming with undiscovered bodies was mind-blowing, Jewitt says. “We expanded the known volume of the solar system enormously.” The object that Jewitt and Luu had found, 1992 QB1 ( SN: 9/26/92, p. 196 ), introduced a whole new realm.
Just a few months later, Jewitt and Luu spotted a second object also orbiting far beyond Neptune ( SN: 4/10/93, p. 231 ). The floodgates opened soon after. “We found 40 or 50 in the next few years,” Jewitt says. As the digital detectors that astronomers used to capture images grew in size and sensitivity, researchers began uncovering droves of additional objects. “So many interesting worlds with interesting stories,” says Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech who studies Kuiper Belt objects.
Finding all of these frozen worlds, some orbiting even beyond Pluto, made sense in some ways, Jewitt and Luu realized. Pluto had always been an oddball; it’s a cosmic runt (smaller than Earth’s moon) and looks nothing like its gas giant neighbors. What’s more, its orbit takes it sweeping far above and below the orbits of the other planets. Maybe Pluto belonged not to the world of the planets but to the realm of whatever lay beyond, Jewitt and Luu hypothesized. “We suddenly understood why Pluto was such a weird planet,” Jewitt says. “It’s just one object, maybe the biggest, in a set of bodies that we just stumbled across.” Pluto probably wouldn’t be a member of the planet club much longer, the two predicted. Indeed, by 2006, it was out ( SN: 9/2/06, p. 149 ).
The discovery of 1992 QB1 opened the world’s eyes to the Kuiper Belt , named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper . In a twist of history, however, Kuiper predicted that this region of space would be empty. In the 1950s, he proposed that any occupants that might have once existed there would have been banished by gravity to even more distant reaches of the solar system.
In other words, Kuiper anti-predicted the existence of the Kuiper Belt. He turned out to be wrong.
Today, researchers know that the Kuiper Belt stretches from a distance of roughly 30 astronomical units from the sun — around the orbit of Neptune — to roughly 55 astronomical units. It resembles a puffed-up disk, Jewitt says. “Superficially, it looks like a fat doughnut.”
The frozen bodies that populate the Kuiper Belt are the remnants of the swirling maelstrom of gas and dust that birthed the sun and the planets. There’s “a bunch of stuff that’s left over that didn’t quite get built up into planets,” says astronomer Meredith MacGregor of the University of Colorado Boulder. When one of those cosmic leftovers gets kicked into the inner solar system by a gravitational shove from a planet like Neptune and approaches the sun, it turns into an object we recognize as a comet ( SN: 9/12/20, p. 14 ). Comets that circle the sun once only every 200 years or more typically derive from the solar system’s even more distant repository of icy bodies known as the Oort cloud .
In scientific parlance, the Kuiper Belt is a debris disk ( SN Online: 7/28/21 ). Distant solar systems contain debris disks, too, scientists have discovered . “They’re absolutely directly analogous to our Kuiper Belt,” MacGregor says.
In 2015, scientists got their first close look at a Kuiper Belt object when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto ( SN Online: 7/15/15 ). The pictures that New Horizons returned in the following years were thousands of times more detailed than previous observations of Pluto and its moons. No longer just a few fuzzy pixels, the worlds were revealed as rich landscapes of ice-spewing volcanoes and deep, jagged canyons ( SN: 6/22/19, p. 12 ; SN Online: 7/13/18 ). “I’m just absolutely ecstatic with what we accomplished at Pluto,” says Marc Buie, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and a member of the New Horizons team. “It could not possibly have gone any better.”
But New Horizons wasn’t finished with the Kuiper Belt. On New Year’s Day of 2019, when the spacecraft was almost 1.5 billion kilometers beyond Pluto’s orbit, it flew past another Kuiper Belt object. And what a surprise it was. Arrokoth — its name refers to “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language — looks like a pair of pancakes joined at the hip ( SN: 12/21/19 & 1/4/20, p. 5 ; SN: 3/16/19, p. 15 ). Roughly 35 kilometers long from end to end, it was probably once two separate bodies that gently collided and stuck. Arrokoth’s bizarre structure sheds light on a fundamental question in astronomy: How do gas and dust clump together and grow into larger bodies?
One long-standing theory, called planetesimal accretion, says that a series of collisions is responsible. Tiny bits of material collide and stick together on repeat to build up larger and larger objects, says JJ Kavelaars, an astronomer at the University of Victoria and the National Research Council of Canada. But there’s a problem, Kavelaars says.
As objects get large enough to exert a significant gravitational pull, they accelerate as they approach one another. “They hit each other too fast, and they don’t stick together,” he says. It would be unusual for a large object like Arrokoth, particularly with its two-lobed structure, to have formed from a sequence of collisions.
More likely, Arrokoth was born from a process known as gravitational instability, researchers now believe. In that scenario, a clump of material that happens to be denser than its surroundings grows by pulling in gas and dust. This process can form planets on timescales of thousands of years, rather than the millions of years required for planetesimal accretion. “The timescale for planet formation completely changes,” Kavelaars says.
If Arrokoth formed this way, other bodies in the solar system probably did too. That may mean that parts of the solar system formed much more rapidly than previously believed, says Buie, who discovered Arrokoth in 2014. “Already Arrokoth has rewritten the textbooks on how solar system formation works.”
What they’ve seen so far makes scientists even more eager to study another Kuiper Belt object up close. New Horizons is still making its way through the Kuiper Belt, but time is running out to identify a new object and orchestrate a rendezvous. The spacecraft, which is currently 53 astronomical units from the sun , is approaching the Kuiper Belt’s outer edge. Several teams of astronomers are using telescopes around the world to search for new Kuiper Belt objects that would make a close pass to New Horizons. “We are definitely looking,” Buie says. “We would like nothing better than to fly by another object.”
Astronomers are also getting a wide-angle view of the Kuiper Belt by surveying it with some of Earth’s largest telescopes. At the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea — the same mountaintop where Jewitt and Luu spotted 1992 QB1 — astronomers recently wrapped up the Outer Solar System Origins Survey . It recorded more than 800 previously unknown Kuiper Belt objects, bringing the total number known to roughly 3,000.
This cataloging work is revealing tantalizing patterns in how these bodies move around the sun, MacGregor says. Rather than being uniformly distributed, the orbits of Kuiper Belt objects tend to be clustered in space. That’s a telltale sign that these bodies got a gravitational shove in the past, she says.
The cosmic bullies that did that shoving, most astronomers believe, were none other than the solar system’s gas giants. In the mid-2000s, scientists first proposed that planets like Neptune and Saturn probably pinballed toward and away from the sun early in the solar system’s history ( SN: 5/5/12, p. 24 ). That movement explains the strikingly similar orbits of many Kuiper Belt objects, MacGregor says. “The giant planets stirred up all of the stuff in the outer part of the solar system.”
Refining the solar system’s early history requires observations of even more Kuiper Belt objects, says Meg Schwamb, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Researchers expect that a new astronomical survey, slated to begin next year, will find roughly 40,000 more Kuiper Belt objects. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory , being built in north-central Chile, will use its 3,200-megapixel camera to repeatedly photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights for 10 years. That undertaking, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, will revolutionize our understanding of how the early solar system evolved, says Schwamb, a cochair of the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration.
It’s exciting to think about what we might learn next from the Kuiper Belt, Jewitt says. The discoveries that lay ahead will be possible, in large part, because of advances in technology, he says. “One picture with one of the modern survey cameras is roughly a thousand pictures with our setup back in 1992.”
But even as we uncover more about this distant realm of the solar system, a bit of awe should always remain, Jewitt says. “It’s the largest piece of the solar system that we’ve yet observed.”
G.P. Kuiper. In Astrophysics: A Topical Symposium , ed. J.A. Hynek. 1951, McGraw-Hill.
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.
Poor sleep contributes to ill health, research has long shown. But sleep deprivation, which is chronic in the developed world, may also make people less likely to help one another, a new study suggests.
Lack of sleep has been linked to heart disease , poor mood and loneliness ( SN: 11/15/16 ). Being tired could also make us less generous , researchers report August 23 in PLOS Biology.
The hour of sleep lost in the switch over to Daylight Savings Time every spring appears to reduce people’s tendency to help others, the researchers found in one of three experiments testing the link between sleep loss and generosity. Specifically, they showed that average donations to one U.S.-based nonprofit organization dropped by around 10 percent in the workweek after the time switch compared with four weeks before and after the change. In Arizona and Hawaii, states that do not observe Daylight Savings Time, donations remained unchanged.
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With over half of the people living in parts of the developed world reporting that they rarely get enough sleep during the workweek, the finding has implications beyond the week we spring forward, the researchers say.
“Lack of sleep shapes the social experiences we have [and] the kinds of societies we live in,” says neuroscientist Eti Ben Simon of the University of California, Berkeley.
To test the link between sleep loss and generosity, Ben Simon and her team first brought 23 young adults into the lab for two nights. The participants slept through one night and stayed awake for another night.
In the mornings, participants completed a standardized altruism questionnaire rating their likelihood of helping strangers or acquaintances in various scenarios. For instance, participants rated on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 for least likely to help and 5 for most likely, whether they would give up their seat on a bus to a stranger or offer a ride to a coworker in need. Participants never read the same scenario more than once. Roughly 80 percent of participants showed less likelihood of helping others when sleep-deprived than when rested.
The researchers then observed participants’ brain activity in a functional MRI machine, comparing each participant’s neural activity in a rested versus sleep-deprived state. That showed that sleep deprivation reduced activity in a network of brain regions linked to the ability to empathize with others.
In another experiment, the researchers recruited 136 participants online and had them keep a sleep log for four nights. Each participant then completed subsets of the altruism questionnaire before 1 p.m. the next day. The researchers found that the more time participants spent awake in bed, a measure of poor sleep, the lower their altruism scores. That drop in altruism held true both when comparing individuals to themselves and when averaging scores across the group.
In the final experiment focused on Daylight Savings Time, the researchers looked at charitable donations from 2001 to 2016 to Donors Choose, a nonprofit that raises money for school projects across the United States. When the team excluded Hawaii and Arizona, as well as outliers like very large donations, more than 3.4 million donations remained. In the workweek following the time change, total donations, which typically averaged roughly $82 per day, dropped to about $73 per day, Ben Simon says.
There’s always a possibility that some other variable besides sleep is causing this dip in generosity, says behavioral economist David Dickinson of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. But this “triple methodology approach” enabled the researchers to draw a convincing line from changes to the brain that appear during sleep deprivation to real-world behavior. “This puts a more comprehensive story on how inefficient sleep affects decisions in this domain of helping others,” he says.
Chronic sleep deprivation in the modern world is a serious problem, Ben Simon says ( SN: 3/1/19 ). But unlike many other large-scale problems — think climate change or political polarization — this one has a ready solution. “If you think about promoting sleep and letting people get the sleep they need, what an impact that could have on the societies we live in.”
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
Scientists still can’t directly see genes with electron microscopes, but combining the tool with the molecular scissors CRISPR/Cas9 has let researchers visualize genes being transcribed (illustrated) from DNA (blue) into RNA (red).
Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus
Visualizing Genes: The Possible Dream – Science News , September 2, 1972
Molecular biologists can now visualize the larger structures of the cell, such as the nucleus and chromosomes, under the powerful electron microscope. But they have not been able to obtain images of genes (DNA) on the chromosomes. Nor have they been able to see RNA … or the intricate details of cell membranes, enzymes and viruses.
Electron microscopes have become much more powerful over the last 50 years. For instance, in 1981, biophysicist Jacques Dubochet discovered that tiny biological structures supercooled with ethane could be observed in their natural state under an electron microscope. That finding paved the way for cryo-electron microscopy , which scientists use to visualize proteins, viruses and bacteria at the molecular level ( SN: 10/28/17, p. 6 ). Capturing detailed images of genes remains elusive, but scientists are inching closer. In 2021, researchers reported using an electron microscope and the molecular scissors CRISPR/Cas9 to visualize proteins transcribing DNA instructions for two genes into RNA.
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.
An analysis of 3-D models of approximately 7-million-year-old fossils — an upper leg bone seen from two angles, far left, and two forearm bones, each also shown from two angles — concludes that they come from the earliest known hominid. Opposing charges of scientific misconduct surround this study and an earlier investigation of the leg fossil.
In 2001, researchers unearthed a partial fossil leg bone and two forearm bones in the central African nation of Chad. Those fossils come from the earliest known hominid, which lived around 7 million years ago, and reveal that the creature walked upright both on the ground and in the trees, a new study proposes.
But a lively debate surrounds the fossils, concerning whether they actually belong to the hominid species, known as Sahelanthropus tchadensis , or to an ancient ape, and to what extent either species could have adopted a two-legged gait. These have become vexing questions as scientists increasingly suspect that ape and hominid species evolved a variety of ways to walk upright, some more efficient than others, around 7 million years ago.
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Since its discovery, the leg bone has also triggered competing accusations of scientific misconduct and an official investigation by the French government–funded research organization CNRS in Paris.
Previously, skull, jaw and tooth finds uncovered at the Chad site in 2001 and 2004 were classified as remnants of S. tchadensis ( SN: 4/6/05 ). The finds are the only other fossils attributed to the species, though some researchers have also since suggested that those fossils represent an ancient ape instead.
Analyses of the three limb bones show that they belong to the previously identified Sahelanthropus species, say paleontologists Guillaume Daver and Franck Guy, both of the University of Poitiers in France, and their colleagues. And internal and external features of the leg bone indicate that Sahelanthropus walked upright , the scientists report August 24 in Nature . Shapes and structures of the two forearm bones suggest that the hominid moved on two legs through trees while grasping branches with its hands, the team says.
“The Chadian species has a set of anatomical features that clearly indicate that our oldest known [hominid] representative [walked] on the ground and in the trees,” Guy says. It’s hard to tell how efficiently or how fast Sahelanthropus moved on two legs, he adds.
Guy’s team studied 3-D digital models of the fossils derived from CT scans. The leg bone was compared with fossils of ancient apes and other hominids and with modern apes and humans. Traits including thickening of the leg bone’s tough outer layer at key points and the presence of an internal bony projection near the hip joint signal an upright stance, the scientists say.
Fossils from the African site, including the three limb bones, suggest that Sahelanthropus was the earliest known hominid, agrees paleoanthropologist Kristian Carlson of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who did not participate in the new study. But exactly how it moved while upright remains unknown, he says. Sahelanthropus exhibits a mix of upper leg and forearm traits that differs from those of living apes and humans, suggesting it adopted a novel posture and limb movements while walking.
Whatever stance Sahelanthropus assumed, it probably resembled that of two other early hominids, roughly 6-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis and more than 5-million-year-old Ardipithecus kadabba , says paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University in Tempe ( SN: 9/11/04; SN: 3/3/04 ). Walking abilities of those hominids remain poorly understood due to limited fossils — a partial leg bone for O. tugenensis and a toe bone for the Ardipithecus species.
Haile-Selassie regards all three hominids as part of a single genus that evolved from around 7 million to 5 million years ago. On that issue, “the debate is open, even between members of our team,” Guy says.
Another debate concerns the upper leg’s internal bony projection that the researchers cite as crucial for standing upright. That trait sometimes appears in modern African apes and occasionally is absent in humans, paleoanthropologist Marine Cazenave of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and colleagues report in the June Journal of Human Evolution . The presence of this bony growth does not definitively show that Sahelanthropus walked upright , Cazenave says.
Other researchers contend that the leg bone most likely comes from an ancient ape — not a hominid — that may have occasionally walked upright. Shape measurements, including curvature of the fossil’s shaft, closely resemble those of modern chimps’ upper leg bones, University of Poitiers paleoanthropologist Roberto Macchiarelli and colleagues reported in December 2020 in the Journal of Human Evolution .
“There may have been ancient apes that had distinctive types of [upright movement] unlike any living apes, including humans,” says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was a coauthor of the 2020 study.
Here is where charges of scientific misconduct come into play. The 2020 study was based on measurements of the Sahelanthropus leg fossil taken in 2004 by a University of Poitiers graduate student conducting a project on how fossilization affects bones.
That student, Aude Bergeret-Medina, was given access to fossils from the Sahelanthropus site that Daver and Guy’s team had tagged as neither hominid nor, more generally, as primate. She noted that one specimen — the leg bone — looked like it belonged to a primate, possibly an ape. Macchiarelli confirmed her observation. Plans for Bergeret-Medina to cut open the bone to study its mineral content were halted.
Macchiarelli informed his university and CNRS of the fossil’s identity. He spent the next 16 years, he says, sending repeated complaints to those institutions that the Sahelanthropus discoverers were violating codes of scientific conduct by not providing information about the leg bone in scientific papers or talks.
Then, CNRS launched an investigation of possible misconduct by Macchiarelli himself when the 2020 study appeared before the Sahelanthropus team published findings on the leg bone in its possession. No ruling has been made yet.
In supplementary information published with the new study, Guy and colleagues write that they identified the forearm bones among stored fossils after Macchiarelli brought the leg bone’s identity to their attention. Further excavations in Chad were conducted before launching a detailed study of the three limb fossils in 2017, the team says.
But the Sahelanthropus team does not cite Bergeret-Medina — now the curator of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle Jacques de La Comble in Autun, France — by name for her role in the leg bone’s identification. The investigators write that “a master’s student in taphonomy” received various fossils for a research internship in early 2004 before those finds had been carefully examined by senior scientists. The student, “seeking expertise,” gave the leg fossil to Macchiarelli who identified it as a hominid, Daver and colleagues say.
That’s incorrect, Macchiarelli contends. Bergeret-Medina initially identified the fossil as a primate’s upper leg bone followed by his confirmation of her observation. No claim was made that the fossil came from a hominid, he says. But without Bergeret-Medina’s insightful fossil observation, the new study would never have happened, Macchiarelli asserts.
Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences for Science News since 1984. He writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues.
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.
A spoonful of sugar may help the mealworms go down.
Adding sugars to powdered, cooked mealworms creates a seasoning with an appetizing “meatlike” odor, researchers report August 24 at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago.
Some insects have been found to be an environmentally friendly alternative to other animal protein because they require less land and water to raise ( SN: 5/11/19 ). But many people in the United States and other Western countries, where insects aren’t eaten widely, generally find the idea of chomping down on bugs unappetizing.
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“There aren’t a lot of people ready to fry up a whole skillet of crickets and eat them fresh,” says Julie Lesnik, a biological anthropologist at Wayne State University in Detroit who wasn’t involved in the new research. Finding out how to make insect-based foods more appealing could be key to making them more mainstream.
And one successful insect-based product could have a snowball effect for similar food. “It’s really great that this research is happening, because at any point this might be the thing that people figure out and then it explodes,” says Brenden Campbell, an insect agriculturist based in Eugene, Ore. He has studied mealworms and created a company called Planet Bugs to, in part, make insect-based food products.
In a previous study, chemist In Hee Cho of Wonkwang University in South Korea and colleagues analyzed the odors given off by mealworms that were steamed, roasted or deep-fried . Steamed mealworms produced a sweet smell, like corn, while roasted and fried mealworms released chemicals more similar to meat and seafood.
In their latest work, the team then keyed in on what combinations of water, sugars and cooking time produced a particularly meaty smell, and tested these concoctions with volunteers to figure out which smelled the most appealing.
Using insects ground up or in seasonings, like Cho’s team did, could help people get past their hesitations about eating whole bugs, says Amy Wright, who has written a book on eating bugs. (She, for one, has no qualms. A literature professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., Wright used to keep mealworms in her apartment, which she would use in sandwiches and guacamole.)
“There are plenty of things that are disgusting to us, but we have engineered around it,” Lesnik says. “We’re just seeing insects being treated like any other food, and yeah, we’re talking aroma … but that’s what the engineers of Doritos are doing.”
H. Park and I.H. Cho. Comparison of aroma profiles from mealworm ( Tenebrio molitor )-based reaction flavors optimized by consumer preferences. American Chemical Society Fall 2022 hybrid meeting, Chicago, August 24, 2022.
Anil Oza is the summer 2022 science writing intern at Science News . He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in neurobiology and science communication.
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.
A levitating force sensor (shown) found no hints of a fifth force predicted by “chameleon” theories that aim to explain the dark energy that is causing the universe to expand at an increasing clip.
A chameleon-like force that shifts its nature based on its environment could explain a major physics quandary: how the mysterious substance called dark energy is compelling the cosmos to expand faster and faster. But a new experiment casts doubt on some chameleon theories, researchers report August 25 in Nature Physics .
The chameleon force would be a fifth type of force beyond the basic four: gravitational, strong, weak and electromagnetic. And like a chameleon changing its colors, the hypothetical fifth force would morph depending on the density of its surroundings. In dense environments like Earth, this fifth force would be feeble, camouflaging its effects. In the sparseness of space, the force would be stronger and long-ranged.
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This force would result from a chameleon field — an addition to the known fields in physics, such as electric, magnetic and gravitational fields. A chameleon field with these morphing properties could drive the accelerating expansion of the universe without disagreeing with measurements on Earth.
But it’s a challenge to suss out such a changeling force. On Earth, says astrophysicist Jianhua He of Nanjing University in China, “it’s very, very tiny. That’s the most difficult part.”
So He and colleagues designed a detector to search for a subtle fifth force. A wheel with plastic films attached spins past another film sitting on a magnetically levitated piece of graphite. If a chameleon force really exists, the films spinning by would cause a periodic force on the levitating plastic, pulling it up and down. (Gravity also acts this way, but thanks to the device’s design, it should be much weaker than a chameleon force.)
The team was able to rule out a category of chameleon theories. In the future, the researchers hope to improve their results by chilling their device to allow for more sensitive measurements.
Physics writer Emily Conover has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. She is a two-time winner of the D.C. Science Writers’ Association Newsbrief award.
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.
