Discover May 2014

I don’t have a lot in common with Franklin Chang Díaz — physicist, onetime astronaut and designer of the prototype rocket that could take humankind to Mars (and beyond). Compared to this man, I feel like something of an underachiever. But in reading our cover story (“Rocket Man,” page 36) for the frst time, I did feel a moment of brotherhood when I learned that Chang Díaz’s fascination with space began in childhood, after the launch of the frst Sputnik satellite in 1957. Sputnik was a little before my time, but I felt a similar childhood obsession with space exploration, sparked by seeing the frst pictures from Mars during the 1976 Viking mission. I remember those images clearly — although I have no recollection of other results reported from Mars…

Mars: Worth the Risk? The top story of 2013 in our Year in Science issue, Curiosity’s search for evidence of life on Mars, discussed the drawbacks of manned spaceflight to the Red Planet. You say that the yearlong round trip to Mars will increase an astronaut’s lifetime cancer risk as much as 3 percent. Remember the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they have to jump off the ledge into the river far below? Sundance says he can’t swim, and Butch replies, “Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill you!” Let’s work on ameliorating the real risks involved in getting to Mars frst and worry about the picayune ones later. By the way, where do I sign up? I’m ready to leave tomorrow. I’ve been ready…

This baleen whale was one of dozens stranded belly-up 6 million to 9 million years ago in a desert in modernday Chile. A road construction crew uncovered the boneyard in 2010. Paleontologists had two months to dig and digitize fossils with 3-D scanners before Cerro Ballena, or Whale Hill, was buried beneath a new northbound lane. This year, scientists deduced the mammals’ likely cause of death: ingesting or inhaling toxic algae. — ERNIE MASTROIANNI;…

Valley fever, a potentially fatal dust-borne infection caused by a soil-dwelling fungus, has lurked in the deserts of the Southwest United States for hundreds of years, if not longer. But in the past decade, the disease has seen an uptick in cases, leading to a “silent epidemic,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because of increasing development in arid climates where the fungus lives, as well as better testing and diagnosis, the infection’s incidence has skyrocketed, reaching 22,500 cases in 2011, up from 2,265 in 1998. But with many cases going unreported, experts believe as many as 150,000 people may be sickened annually. Medically known as coccidioidomycosis, or cocci for short, the lung infection is caused by a fungus in the mushroom family that begins life as…

The cocci fungus flourishes in southwestern regions with dry weather and sandy soils, such as Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, parts of Texas and California’s San Joaquin Valley, which gave valley fever its name after a major outbreak there in 1930. Any disturbance in the soil — construction, oil exploration, archaeological digs, earthquakes or high winds — can stir up a cloud of spores. However, no one is sure which environments the fungus favors. A site may become more or less hospitable to the spores as temperatures, moisture levels and soil ecology change. Hoping to pinpoint the areas with fungus-friendly soils so residents can take extra precautions, physicists and geologists at California State University, Bakersfield, led by physicist Jorge Talamantes Rivera, are using satellite images to match features between sites where…

It’s not easy to hide if you live in the open ocean. To avoid predators, some fsh sport pale bellies and dark backs to blend in with the sky and the deep. Others are transparent. But evolutionary biologists at the University of Texas have discovered a true undersea camoufage expert: a fsh that manipulates polarized light. Humans generally can’t perceive light polarization, the parallel alignment of light waves, but many fsh can. So can their predators. Curious if prey species have evolved ways to exploit that ability, the researchers caught some lookdowns — a silvery game fsh often found in public aquariums — in the Gulf of Mexico. Placing the fsh in a tank, they shined artifcial sunlight onto the water at different angles to represent the light at various…