Birds that dive underwater — such as penguins, loons and grebes — may be more likely to go extinct than their nondiving kin, a new study finds.
Many water birds have evolved highly specialized bodies and behaviors that facilitate diving. Now, an analysis of the evolutionary history of more than 700 water bird species shows that once a bird group gains the ability to dive, the change is irreversible. That inflexibility could help explain why diving birds have an elevated extinction rate compared with nondiving birds, researchers report in the Dec. 21 Proceedings of the Royal Society B .
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“There are substantial morphological adaptations for diving,” says Catherine Sheard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved with the study. For instance, birds that plunge into the water from the air, such as gannets and some pelicans, may have tweaks to the neck muscles and the bones in the chest.
It’s possible that some diving birds are evolving under an evolutionary “ratchet,” where adaptations to exploit a certain food source or habitat unlock some new opportunities, but also encourage ever more specialized evolutionary tailoring. These birds may become trapped in their ways, increasing their risk of extinction. That’s especially true if their habitat rapidly changes in some negative way, possibly because of human-caused climate change ( SN: 1/16/20 ).
Evolutionary biologists Josh Tyler and Jane Younger investigated the evolution of diving in Aequorlitornithes, a collection of 727 water bird species across 11 bird groups. The team divided species into either nondiving birds, or one of three diving types: foot-propelled pursuit (such as loons and grebes), wing-propelled pursuit (like penguins and auks) and the plunge divers.
Diving has evolved at least 14 separate times in the water birds, but there were no instances where diving birds reverted to a nondiving form, the researchers found.
The scientists also explored the link between diving and the development of new species, or their demise, in various bird lineages. Among 236 diving bird species, 75, or 32 percent, were part of lineages that are experiencing 0.02 more species extinctions per million years than the generation of new species. This elevated extinction rate was more common in the wing-propelled and foot-propelled pursuit divers compared with plunge divers. Bird lineages that don’t dive, on the other hand, generated 0.1 more new species per million years than the rate of species dying out.
“The more specialized you become, the more reliant you are on a particular diet, foraging strategy or environment,” says Tyler, of the University of Bath in England. “The range of environments available for foraging is much larger for the nondiving birds than for the specialist divers, and this may play into their ability to adapt and thrive.”
Within diving bird groups, the less specialized, the better. Take penguins, a group that has become the subject of a fair share of conservation concern ( SN : 8/1/18 ). The researchers point out that gentoo penguins ( Pygoscelis papua ) — which have a broad diet — have larger population sizes than related chinstrap penguins ( P. antarcticus ) that eat mostly krill, and may actually be as many as four very recently diverged species.
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The International Union for the Conservation of Nature considers both penguin species to be of “least concern” in terms of imminent extinction risk. But chinstrap numbers are declining in some areas, while gentoo population numbers remain generally stable.
If some diving birds are being trapped in their environments by their own adaptations, that doesn’t bode well for their long-term survival, say Tyler and Younger, who is at the University of Tasmania in Hobart.
According to the IUCN, 156 species, or about one-fifth, of the 727 species of water birds are considered vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. The researchers calculate that of the 75 diving bird species from lineages with heightened extinction rates, 24 species, or nearly one-third, are already listed as threatened.
Jake Buehler is a freelance science writer, covering natural history, wildlife conservation and Earth’s splendid biodiversity, from salamanders to sequoias. He has a master’s degree in zoology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
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Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez saw the future of energy on a broiling-hot day last September.
An email alert hit her inbox from the San Diego Gas & Electric Company. “Extreme heat straining the grid,” read the message, which was also pinged as a text to 27 million people. “Save energy to help avoid power interruptions.”
It worked. People cut their energy use. Demand plunged, blackouts were avoided and California successfully weathered a crisis exacerbated by climate change. “It was very exciting to see,” says Hidalgo-Gonzalez, an electrical engineer at the University of California, San Diego who studies renewable energy and the power grid.
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This kind of collective societal response, in which we reshape how we interact with the systems that provide us energy, will be crucial as we figure out how to live on a changing planet.
Earth has warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, when the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels began belching heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Scientists agree that only drastic action to cut emissions can keep the planet from blasting past 1.5 degrees of warming — a threshold beyond which the consequences become even more catastrophic than the rising sea levels, extreme weather and other impacts the world is already experiencing.
The goal is to achieve what’s known as net-zero emissions, where any greenhouse gases still entering the atmosphere are balanced by those being removed — and to do it as soon as we can.
Scientists say it is possible to swiftly transform the ways we produce and consume energy. To show the way forward, researchers have set out paths toward a world where human activities generate little to no carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — a decarbonized economy.
The key to a decarbonized future lies in producing vast amounts of new electricity from sources that emit little to none of the gases, such as wind, solar and hydropower, and then transforming as much of our lives and our industries as possible to run off those sources. Clean electricity needs to power not only the planet’s current energy use but also the increased demands of a growing global population.
Once humankind has switched nearly entirely to clean electricity, we will also have to counterbalance the carbon dioxide we still emit — yes, we will still emit some — by pulling an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it somewhere permanently.
Achieving net-zero emissions won’t be easy. Getting to effective and meaningful action on climate change requires overcoming decades of inertia and denial about the scope and magnitude of the problem. Nations are falling well short of existing pledges to reduce emissions, and global warming remains on track to charge past 1.5 degrees perhaps even by the end of this decade.
Yet there is hope. The rate of growth in CO 2 emissions is slowing globally — down from 3 percent annual growth in the 2000s to half a percent annual growth in the last decade, according to the Global Carbon Project , which quantifies greenhouse gas emissions.
There are signs annual emissions could start shrinking. And over the last two years, the United States, by far the biggest cumulative contributor to global warming, has passed several pieces of federal legislation that include financial incentives to accelerate the transition to clean energy. “We’ve never seen anything at this scale,” says Erin Mayfield, an energy researcher at Dartmouth College.
Though the energy transition will require many new technologies, such as innovative ways to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, many of the solutions, such as wind and solar power, are in hand — “stuff we already have,” Mayfield says.
In a 2021 report, the International Energy Agency described the steps necessary to ensure that by 2050 the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere globally balances the amount being taken out. This chart shows how carbon dioxide emissions would have to drop across sectors to bring planetwide emissions from roughly 34 billion metric tons annually to net-zero.
Of all the emissions that need to be slashed, the most important is carbon dioxide, which comes from many sources such as cars and trucks and coal-burning power plants. The gas accounted for 79 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. The next most significant greenhouse gas, at 11 percent of emissions in the United States, is methane, which comes from oil and gas operations as well as livestock, landfills and other land uses.
The amount of methane may seem small, but it is mighty — over the short term, methane is more than 80 times as efficient at trapping heat as carbon dioxide is, and methane’s atmospheric levels have nearly tripled in the last two centuries. Other greenhouse gases include nitrous oxides, which come from sources such as applying fertilizer to crops or burning fuels and account for 7 percent of U.S. emissions, and human-made fluorinated gases such as hydrofluorocarbons that account for 3 percent.
Globally, emissions are dominated by large nations that produce lots of energy. The United States alone emits around 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. It is responsible for most of the greenhouse gas emissions throughout history and ceded the spot for top annual emitter to China only in the mid-2000s. India ranks third.
Because of the United States’ role in producing most of the carbon pollution to date, many researchers and advocates argue that it has the moral responsibility to take the global lead on cutting emissions. And the United States has the most ambitious goals of the major emitters, at least on paper. President Joe Biden has said the country is aiming to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Leaders in China and India have set net-zero goals of 2060 and 2070, respectively.
Under the auspices of a 2015 international climate change treaty known as the Paris agreement, 193 nations plus the European Union have pledged to reduce their emissions. The agreement aims to keep global warming well below 2 degrees, and ideally to 1.5 degrees, above preindustrial levels. But it is insufficient. Even if all countries cut their emissions as much as they have promised under the Paris agreement, the world would likely blow past 2 degrees of warming before the end of this century.
Every nation continues to find its own path forward. “At the end of the day, all the solutions are going to be country-specific,” says Sha Yu, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Maryland’s Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md. “There’s not a universal fix.”
But there are some common themes for how to accomplish this energy transition — ways to focus our efforts on the things that will matter most. These are efforts that go beyond individual consumer choices such as whether to fly less or eat less meat. They instead penetrate every aspect of how society produces and consumes energy.
Such massive changes will need to overcome a lot of resistance, including from companies that make money off old forms of energy as well as politicians and lobbyists. But if society can make these changes, it will rank as one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. We will have tackled a problem of our own making and conquered it.
Here’s a look at what we’ll need to do.
To meet the need for energy without putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, countries would need to dramatically scale up the amount of clean energy they produce. Fortunately, most of that energy would be generated by technologies we already have — renewable sources of energy including wind and solar power.
The Princeton report envisions wind and solar power production roughly quadrupling by 2030 to get the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050. That would mean building many new solar and wind farms, so many that in the most ambitious scenario, wind turbines would cover an area the size of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma combined.
Achieving net-zero would require a dramatic increase in solar and wind power in the United States. These maps show the footprint of existing solar and wind infrastructure in the contiguous United States (as of 2020) and a possible footprint for a midrange scenario for 2050. Gray shows population density of 100 people per square kilometer or greater.
Such a scale-up is only possible because prices to produce renewable energy have plunged. The cost of wind power has dropped nearly 70 percent, and solar power nearly 90 percent, over the last decade in the United States. “That was a game changer that I don’t know if some people were expecting,” Hidalgo-Gonzalez says.
Globally the price drop in renewables has allowed growth to surge; China, for instance, installed a record 55 gigawatts of solar power capacity in 2021, for a total of 306 gigawatts or nearly 13 percent of the nation’s installed capacity to generate electricity. China is almost certain to have had another record year for solar power installations in 2022.
Challenges include figuring out ways to store and transmit all that extra electricity, and finding locations to build wind and solar power installations that are acceptable to local communities. Other types of low-carbon power, such as hydropower and nuclear power, which comes with its own public resistance, will also likely play a role going forward.
Renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and hydropower, account for a larger share of global electricity generation today than they did in 2015. The International Energy Agency expects that trend to continue, projecting that renewables will top 38 percent in 2027.
The drive toward net-zero emissions also requires boosting energy efficiency across industries and electrifying as many aspects of modern life as possible, such as transportation and home heating.
Some industries are already shifting to more efficient methods of production, such as steelmaking in China that incorporates hydrogen-based furnaces that are much cleaner than coal-fired ones, Yu says. In India, simply closing down the most inefficient coal-burning power plants provides the most bang for the buck, says Shayak Sengupta, an energy and policy expert at the Observer Research Foundation America think tank in Washington, D.C. “The list has been made up,” he says, of the plants that should close first, “and that’s been happening.”
To achieve net-zero, the United States would need to increase its share of electric heat pumps, which heat houses much more cleanly than gas- or oil-fired appliances, from around 10 percent in 2020 to as much as 80 percent by 2050, according to the Princeton report. Federal subsidies for these sorts of appliances are rolling out in 2023 as part of the new Inflation Reduction Act , legislation that contains a number of climate-related provisions.
Shifting cars and other vehicles away from burning gasoline to running off of electricity would also lead to significant emissions cuts. In a major 2021 report , the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said that one of the most important moves in decarbonizing the U.S. economy would be having electric vehicles account for half of all new vehicle sales by 2030. That’s not impossible; electric car sales accounted for nearly 6 percent of new sales in the United States in 2022, which is still a low number but nearly double the previous year .
Some industries such as manufacturing and transportation can’t be fully electrified using current technologies — battery powered airplanes, for instance, will probably never be feasible for long-duration flights. Technologies that still require liquid fuels will need to switch from gas, oil and other fossil fuels to low-carbon or zero-carbon fuels.
One major player will be fuels extracted from plants and other biomass, which take up carbon dioxide as they grow and emit it when they die, making them essentially carbon neutral over their lifetime. To create biofuels, farmers grow crops, and others process the harvest in conversion facilities into fuels such as hydrogen. Hydrogen, in turn, can be substituted for more carbon-intensive substances in various industrial processes such as making plastics and fertilizers — and maybe even as fuel for airplanes someday.
In one of the Princeton team’s scenarios, the U.S. Midwest and Southeast would become peppered with biomass conversion plants by 2050, so that fuels can be processed close to where crops are grown. Many of the biomass feedstocks could potentially grow alongside food crops or replace other, nonfood crops.
The amount of electricity generated from wind and solar power in the United States has surged in the last decade. The boost was made possible in large part by drops in the costs of producing that energy.
Greenhouse gas emissions other than carbon dioxide will also need to be slashed. In the United States, the majority of methane emissions come from livestock, landfills and other agricultural sources, as well as scattered sources such as forest fires and wetlands. But about one-third of U.S. methane emissions come from oil, gas and coal operations. These may be some of the first places that regulators can target for cleanup, especially “super emitters” that can be pinpointed using satellites and other types of remote sensing .
In 2021, the United States and the European Union unveiled what became a global methane pledge endorsed by 150 countries to reduce emissions. There is, however, no enforcement of it yet. And China, the world’s largest methane emitter, has not signed on.
Nitrous oxides could be reduced by improving soil management techniques, and fluorinated gases by finding alternatives and improving production and recycling efforts.
Once emissions have been cut as much as possible, reaching net-zero will mean removing and storing an equivalent amount of carbon to what society still emits.
One solution already in use is to capture carbon dioxide produced at power plants and other industrial facilities and store it permanently somewhere, such as deep underground. Globally there are around 35 such operations, which collectively draw down around 45 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. About 200 new plants are on the drawing board to be operating by the end of this decade, according to the International Energy Agency.
The Princeton report envisions carbon capture being added to almost every kind of U.S. industrial plant, from cement production to biomass conversion. Much of the carbon dioxide would be liquefied and piped along more than 100,000 kilometers of new pipelines to deep geologic storage, primarily along the Texas Gulf Coast, where underground reservoirs can be used to trap it permanently. This would be a massive infrastructure effort. Building this pipeline network could cost up to $230 billion, including $13 billion for early buy-in from local communities and permitting alone.
Another way to sop up carbon is to get forests and soils to take up more. That could be accomplished by converting crops that are relatively carbon-intensive, such as corn to be used in ethanol, to energy-rich grasses that can be used for more efficient biofuels, or by turning some cropland or pastures back into forest. It’s even possible to sprinkle crushed rock onto croplands, which accelerates natural weathering processes that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Another way to increase the amount of carbon stored in the land is to reduce the amount of the Amazon rainforest that is cut down each year. “For a few countries like Brazil, preventing deforestation will be the first thing you can do,” Yu says.
The Princeton team estimates that the United States would need to invest at least an additional $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years for the country to have a shot at achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Congress has begun ramping up funding with two large pieces of federal legislation it passed in 2021 and 2022. Those steer more than $1 trillion toward modernizing major parts of the nation’s economy over a decade — including investing in the energy transition to help fight climate change.
Between now and 2030, solar and wind power, plus increasing energy efficiency, can deliver about half of the emissions reductions needed for this decade, the International Energy Agency estimates. After that, the primary drivers would need to be increasing electrification, carbon capture and storage, and clean fuels such as hydrogen.
The trick is to do all of this without making people’s lives worse. Developing nations need to be able to supply energy for their economies to develop. Communities whose jobs relied on fossil fuels need to have new economic opportunities.
Julia Haggerty, a geographer at Montana State University in Bozeman who studies communities that are dependent on natural resources, says that those who have money and other resources to support the transition will weather the change better than those who are under-resourced now. “At the landscape of states and regions, it just remains incredibly uneven,” she says.
The ongoing energy transition also faces unanticipated shocks such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent energy prices soaring in Europe, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which initially slashed global emissions but later saw them rebound.
But the technologies exist for us to wean our lives off fossil fuels. And we have the inventiveness to develop more as needed. Transforming how we produce and use energy, as rapidly as possible, is a tremendous challenge — but one that we can meet head-on. For Mayfield, getting to net-zero by 2050 is a realistic goal for the United States. “I think it’s possible,” she says. “But it doesn’t mean there’s not a lot more work to be done.”
Alexandra Witze is a contributing correspondent for Science News . Based in Boulder, Colo., Witze specializes in earth, planetary and astronomical sciences.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
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).
Analyses of patterns in ancient cave markings suggest that the four dots on this animal’s torso indicate that aurochs (similar to modern cattle) mated in the fourth month after the spring snowmelt.
As far back as roughly 25,000 years ago, Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have jotted down markings to communicate information about the behavior of their prey, a new study finds.
These markings include dots, lines and the symbol “Y,” and often accompany images of animals. Over the last 150 years, the mysterious depictions, some dating back nearly 40,000 years, have been found in hundreds of caves across Europe.
Some archaeologists have speculated that the markings might relate to keeping track of time , but the specific purpose has remained elusive ( SN: 7/9/19) . Now, a statistical analysis, published January 5 in Cambridge Archeological Journal , presents evidence that past people may have been recording the mating and birthing schedule of local fauna .
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By comparing the marks to the animals’ life cycles, researchers showed that the number of dots or lines in a given image strongly correlates to the month of mating across all the analyzed examples, which included aurochs (an extinct species of wild cattle), bison, horses, mammoth and fish. What’s more, the position of the symbol “Y” in a sequence was predictive of birth month, suggesting that “Y” signifies “to give birth.”
The finding is one of the earliest records of a coherent notational system, the researchers say. It indicates that people at the time were able to interpret the meaning of an item’s position in a sequence and plan ahead for the distant future using a calendar of sorts — reinforcing the suggestion that they were capable of complex cognition.
“This is a really big deal cognitively,” says Ben Bacon, an independent researcher based in London. “We’re dealing with a system that has intense organization, intense logic to it.”
A furniture conservator by day, Bacon spent years poring through scientific articles to compile over 800 instances of these cave markings. From his research and reading the literature, he reasoned that the dots corresponded to the 13 lunar cycles in a year. But he thought that the hunter-gatherers would’ve been more concerned with seasonal changes than the moon.
In the new paper, he and colleagues argue that rather than pinning a calendar to astronomical events like the equinox, the hunter-gatherers started their calendar year with the snowmelt in the spring. Not only would the snowmelt be a clear point of origin, but the meteorological calendar would also account for differences in timing across locations.
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For example, though snowmelt would start on different dates in different latitudes, bison would always mate approximately four lunar cycles — or months — after that region’s snowmelt, as indicated by four dots or lines.
“This is why it’s such a clever system, because it’s based on the universal,” Bacon says. “Which means if you migrate from the Pyrenees to Belgium, you can just use the same calendar.”
He needed data to prove his idea. After compiling the markings, he worked with academic researchers to identify the timing of migration, mating and birth for common Ice Age animals targeted by hunter-gatherers by using archaeological data or comparing with similar modern animals. Next, the researchers determined if the marks aligned significantly with important life events based on this calendar. When the team ran the statistical analysis, the results strongly supported Bacon’s theory.
When explaining the markings, “we’ve argued for notational systems before, but it’s always been fairly speculative as to what the people were counting and why they were counting,” says Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, who peer-reviewed the paper. “This adds a lot more depth and specificity to why people were keeping calendars and how they were using them.”
Linguistic experts argue that, given the lack of conventional syntax and grammar, the marks wouldn’t be considered writing. But that doesn’t make the finding inherently less exciting, says paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar in Portugal, who wasn’t involved in the study. Writing systems are often mistakenly considered a pinnacle of achievement, when in fact writing would be developed only in cultural contexts where it’s useful, she says. Instead, it’s significant that the marks provide a way to keep records outside of the mind.
“In a way, that was the huge cognitive leap,” she says. “Suddenly, we have the ability to preserve [information] beyond the moment. We have the ability to transmit it across space and time. Everything starts to change.”
The debate over these marks’ meanings continues. Archaeologist April Nowell doesn’t buy many of the team’s assumptions. “It boggles my mind why one would need a calendar … to predict that animals were going to have offspring in the spring,” says Nowell, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. “The amount of information that this calendar is providing, if it really is a calendar, is quite minimal.”
Hayden adds that, while the basic pattern would still hold, some of the cave marks had “wiggle room for interpretation.” The next step, he says, will be to review and verify the interpretations of the marks.
Anna Gibbs was the spring 2022 science writing intern at Science News . She holds a B.A. in English from Harvard College.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you.
Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
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).
Prairie voles ( Microtus ochrogaster ) form male-female pair-bonds and stick with their partner for life. The molecule oxytocin has long been thought to be important in this process.
Prairie voles have long been heralded as models of monogamy. Now, a study suggests that the “love hormone” once thought essential for their bonding — oxytocin — might not be so necessary after all.
Interest in the romantic lives of prairie voles ( Microtus ochrogaster ) was first sparked more than 40 years ago, says Devanand Manoli, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Biologists trying to capture voles to study would frequently catch two at a time, because “what they were finding were these male-female pairs,” he says. Unlike many other rodents with their myriad partners, prairie voles, it turned out, mate for life ( SN: 10/5/15 ).
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Pair-bonded prairie voles prefer each other’s company over a stranger’s and like to huddle together both in the wild and the lab. Because other vole species don’t have social behaviors as complex as prairie voles do, they have been a popular animal system for studying how social behavior evolves.
Research over the last few decades has implicated a few hormones in the brain as vital for proper vole manners, most notably oxytocin, which is also important for social behavior in humans and other animals.
Manoli and colleagues thought the oxytocin receptor, the protein that detects and reacts to oxytocin, would be the perfect test target for a new genetic engineering method based on CRISPR technology, which uses molecules from bacteria to selectively turn off genes. The researchers used the technique on vole embryos to create animals born without functioning oxytocin receptors. The team figured that the rodents wouldn’t be able to form pair-bonds — just like voles in past experiments whose oxytocin activity was blocked with drugs.
“I was very surprised by their results,” says Larry Young, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved with the study but has studied oxytocin in prairie voles for decades.
A key difference between the new study and past studies that used drugs to block oxytocin is the timing of exactly when the hormone’s activity is turned off. With drugs, the voles are adults and have had exposure to oxytocin in their brains before the shutoff. With CRISPR, “these animals are born never experiencing oxytocin signaling in the brain,” says Young, whose research group has recently replicated Manoli’s experiment and found the same result.
It may be, Young says, that pair-bonding is controlled by a brain circuit that typically becomes dependent on oxytocin through exposure to it during development, like a symphony trained by a conductor. Suddenly remove that conductor and the symphony will sound discordant, whereas a jazz band that’s never practiced with a conductor fares just fine without one.
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Manoli agrees that the technique’s timing matters. A secondary reason for the disparity, he says, could be that drugs often have off-target effects, such that the chemicals meant to block oxytocin could have been doing other things in the voles’ brains to affect pair-bonding. But Young disagrees. “I don’t believe that,” he says. “The [drug] that people use is very selective,” not even binding to the receptor of oxytocin’s closest molecular relative, vasopressin.
Does this result mean that decades of past work on pair-bonding has been upended? Not quite.
“It shows us that this is a much more complicated question,” Manoli says. “The pharmacologic manipulations … suggested that [oxytocin] plays a critical role. The question is, what is that role?”
The new seemingly startling result makes sense if you look at the big picture, Manoli says. The ability for voles to pair-bond is “so critical for the survival of the species,” he says. “From a genetics perspective, it may make sense that there isn’t a single point of failure.”
The group now hopes to look at how other hormones, like vasopressin, influence pair-bonding using this relatively new genetic technique. They are also looking more closely at the voles’ behavior to be sure that the CRISPR gene editing didn’t alter it in a way they haven’t noticed yet.
In the game of vole “love,” it looks like we’re still trying to understand all the players.
Our mission is to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. That mission has never been more important than it is today.
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Your support enables us to keep our content free and accessible to the next generation of scientists and engineers. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today.
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).
Today is my fourth day doing PEMF Therapy. I’ve gone 4 out of 4 days. This is a good time to talk about the benefits of getting better sleep. My sleep the past 3 nights has been amazing. Also, during the session today, even though the machine was turned up higher than usual, it put my to sleep again.
PEMF Therapy has helped a lot with reduction tension, stress, and pain, which ultimately has lead to really great sleeps. I’m working through roughly 9 years of ergonomic or repetitive stress injuries. I’ve tried yoga, massages, and everything under the moon but nothing has been as helpful as this NASA approved health device.
Now, let’s dive into a benefit of PEMF Therapy that I’m seeing most and 5 use cases.
Pulsed Electro-Magnetic Field (PEMF) therapy is a non-invasive treatment that uses low-frequency electromagnetic waves to stimulate cells in the body. One of the lesser-known benefits of PEMF therapy is its ability to improve sleep quality. Sleep is an essential part of overall health and well-being, and PEMF therapy can aid this process by reducing stress, promoting relaxation, and improving circulation.
Here are five use cases where PEMF therapy has been shown to improve sleep quality:
Insomnia: PEMF therapy has been shown to be effective in treating insomnia, a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. Studies have found that PEMF therapy can help to reduce stress, promote relaxation, and improve circulation, which can lead to better sleep.
Sleep Apnea: PEMF therapy has been found to be effective in improving sleep quality in patients with sleep apnea, a sleep disorder characterized by interrupted breathing. Studies have found that PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation, improve circulation, and increase cellular activity, which can lead to better sleep.
Stress-related sleep disturbances: PEMF therapy can help in reducing stress levels, and promoting relaxation, which can lead to better sleep.
Jet lag: PEMF therapy can help in reducing jet lag symptoms, which can cause sleep disturbances. PEMF therapy helps to regulate the body’s internal clock, which can lead to better sleep.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): PEMF therapy can help in reducing PTSD symptoms, which can cause sleep disturbances. PEMF therapy helps to reduce stress levels and promote relaxation, which can lead to better sleep.
In conclusion, PEMF therapy is a non-invasive treatment that has been shown to be effective in improving sleep quality in a number of conditions such as Insomnia, Sleep Apnea, Stress-related sleep disturbances, Jet lag and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PEMF therapy can help to reduce stress, promote relaxation, and improve circulation, which can lead to better sleep. While more research is needed to fully understand the benefits of PEMF therapy for sleep quality, the current evidence suggests that it may be a promising treatment option for those looking for a natural alternative to improve their sleep quality.
Learn more about my previous days doing PEMF Therapy below;
Pulsed Electro-Magnetic Field (PEMF) therapy is a non-invasive treatment that uses low-frequency electromagnetic waves to stimulate cells in the body. One of the lesser-known benefits of PEMF therapy is its ability to improve immune function. A strong immune system is essential for overall health and well-being, and PEMF therapy can aid this process by reducing inflammation, promoting cellular repair, and increasing circulation.
Here are five use cases where PEMF therapy has been shown to improve immune function:
Chronic Inflammation: PEMF therapy can help to reduce chronic inflammation, which has been linked to a number of health problems, including a weakened immune system. PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation by promoting cellular repair and reducing oxidative stress.
Autoimmune Diseases: PEMF therapy can help to improve immune function in patients with autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Studies have found that PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation, promote cellular repair, and increase circulation, which can lead to better immune function.
Cancer: PEMF therapy has been found to be effective in improving immune function in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation, promote cellular repair, and increase circulation, which can lead to better immune function.
Aging: PEMF therapy can help to improve immune function in older adults, whose immune systems tend to weaken with age. PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation, promote cellular repair, and increase circulation, which can lead to better immune function.
Infections: PEMF therapy can help to improve immune function in individuals who are susceptible to infections, such as those with compromised immune systems. PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation, promote cellular repair, and increase circulation, which can lead to better immune function.
In conclusion, PEMF therapy is a non-invasive treatment that has been shown to be effective in improving immune function in a number of conditions such as Chronic Inflammation, Autoimmune Diseases, Cancer, Aging and Infections. PEMF therapy can help to reduce inflammation, promote cellular repair, and increase circulation, which can lead to better immune function. While more research is needed to fully understand the benefits of PEMF therapy for immune function, the current evidence suggests that it may be a promising treatment option for those looking for a natural alternative to improve their immune function.
Learn more about my previous days doing PEMF Therapy below;
