Table of contents for January - February 2017 in Discover

LONG AGO in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, two black holes collided. Each was dozens of times heavier than the sun, and they orbited each other 100 times a second. As the behemoths merged, they also shed a tremendous amount of energy, the equivalent of three times our sun’s mass. That energy radiated away as a gravitational ripple in space and time, which swept across the cosmos until it reached Earth. See an exclusive LIGO gallery and more at DiscoverMagazine.com/LIGO The wave first hit the Laser Interferometer Gravitationalwave Observatory (LIGO) in Hanford, Wash., in September 2015. Then, traveling at the speed of light, it hit the twin LIGO facility in Livingston, La., less than 10 milliseconds later. At both observatories, extremely sensitive laser measurements inside miles-long tunnels caught the…

EVERY PERSON’S DNA contains part of the human story: how our ancestors — lanky, tool-using apes — spread across the planet, colonizing environments as varied as the Himalayas, Arctic and Amazon Basin. Millions of people have had at least part of their DNA studied, but because they’re mostly urban Westerners and East Asians, the samples repeat the same details of that story. From this data, we’ve known for three decades that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago. To answer when and how humans migrated out of Africa, researchers needed DNA from a wider pool of people. Three research groups sequenced high-quality genomes of 787 people from over 270 populations. Their findings were published concurrently in Nature in September. Two of the studies drew samples from isolated groups…

REMEMBER THE FREAKISH animalhuman hybrids in The Island of Dr. Moreau? The science fiction fantasy might return, approaching science fact. In August, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed lifting a funding ban on research that uses human stem cells to create animal embryos. The move would free U.S. scientists to create, under carefully monitored conditions, the genetic equivalent of an animal-human hybrid. These “chimeras,” named for a beast in ancient Greek mythology, are possible due to advances in stem-cell science and gene-editing technology. Chimeras can provide better ways to test the efficacy of drugs and vaccines than existing methods, says Carrie Wolinetz, an NIH policy official. “Scientists are excited because this technology allows us to make animal models that we weren’t able to see before — for brain diseases,…

PHILISTINE HISTORY was written by their rivals, and unfortunately for them, that text became a bestseller: the Bible. According to the Old Testament, Philistines were a constant threat, producing infamous villains like the temptress Delilah and giant Goliath. Their bad reputation persists even today: Their name is shorthand for anyone averse to culture and learning. “But the archaeology has shown them to be more than that,” says Harvard archaeologist Adam Aja, assistant director of excavations at Tel Ashkelon, a major Philistine port city in southern Israel. Philistines left no written records, but over the years archaeologists have unearthed buildings and artifacts that show Philistines were cosmopolitan. Scholars believe they migrated from the Aegean around 1200 B.C. to the Levant where, for centuries, their mercantile culture thrived — until their cities…

ELIZABETH HOLMES’ BIO was catnip to the tech sector’s reverence for the lone, clever pioneer. At 19, Holmes quit Stanford University and started a company that promised to revolutionize medicine. Using no needles and just a few drops of blood, Theranos claimed it could conduct hundreds of tests — for herpes, high cholesterol, hepatitis and even cancer. Consumers could be tested without a doctor’s visit or a lab appointment, and often for less than $10. By the time Holmes turned 31, Forbes valued her net worth at $4.5 billion. The only caveat, usually glossed over in media accounts, was that her “disruptive technology” had never been submitted for scientific peer review. Holmes said she was protecting trade secrets, and the Theranos train kept rolling — right off the rails. An…

IT’S THE SOLAR SYSTEM EQUIVALENT of leaving a soda can in the freezer too long: Pluto may be cracking apart as its watery insides slowly freeze. Ever since the New Horizons probe buzzed Pluto in July 2015, scientists have been poring over the slow trickle of high-resolution images and data to mine the dwarf planet’s secrets. Pluto is more active than scientists dreamed, with mountain chains, roving glaciers and even ice volcanoes. Fissures hundreds of miles long and more than a mile deep hint that something is ripping apart Pluto’s outer shell. And as icy as Pluto’s surface is, researchers suspect the cause is a freezing ocean underneath. Noah Hammond, a graduate student at Brown University, spearheaded a study, published in July in Geophysical Research Letters, on Pluto’s potential watery…

THOSE THREE BLIND MICE from the nursery rhyme might have a chance to see the farmer’s wife coming after all. For the first time, vision has been partially restored in blinded mice. The feat raises hopes that similar techniques might restore nerve-cell function not only in the human eye, but also in the spine and brain. The study coupled gene therapy that excited visual neurons in the eyes with stimulation — a swirling black-andwhite grid placed in front of the mice. The combination prompted the regrowth of axons — the “telephone wires” that help neurons communicate — projecting from retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). These cells line the eye’s inner surface, sending visual information to the brain. Some RGC axons grew all the way back to the brain’s visual-processing areas. And…

QUANTUM DEVICES remain the ultimate in computing prowess, but after 35 years of development, only elite research labs have even rudimentary examples of them. In May, however, IBM made news with a researchoriented quantum machine, called the IBM Quantum Experience, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Scientists, students and enthusiasts can use it to advance business technology, industrial materials or medical research. The machine could be an essential step toward widespread deployment and use of quantum computers. The potential of quantum devices is the stuff of legend. Scientists yearn to simulate chemical processes and design highly effective pharmaceuticals, while engineers see great potential for quantum algorithms to bolster machine learning and process big data. The machines could easily perform a massive number of calculations that would take a classical…

THEY START HEARING VOICES. They see thingsthat aren’t there. They think someone planted ideas in their heads. To schizophrenics, it’s like a switch has flipped in their brains. In February, scientists reported in Nature that they’ve found what helps flip that switch. A team led by geneticist Steven McCarroll of the Broad Institute, based in Cambridge, Mass., combed through genetic information from about 29,000 schizophrenia cases, 36,000 controls and 700 brain samples from deceased patients. McCarroll found that patients who had certain variations of a gene called C4 were more likely to inherit the disease. In healthy brains, the gene helps prune unnecessary connections between cells. But when it runs amok, as it does in schizophrenia, the process destroys healthy brain tissue. C4’s involvement might also explain why schizophrenia arises…

FOR THE FIRST TIME, researchers have discovered a molecule in interstellar space that exhibits chirality: It can exist in two forms that are composed of the same atoms, but are mirror images of each other. Think of chiral molecules as being like a pair of gloves. Each glove has five fingers and are made of the same material, but you could never slide a left-handed glove over your right hand. The amino acids and sugars that make up our bodies are chiral. In particular, amino acids must all be of the left-handed form, while sugars are righthanded. Change the orientation of the same molecule, and it could prove fatal. In this discovery, reported by Caltech researchers in June, radio telescopes picked up faint traces of the organic compound propylene oxide…

IN HER LAB at the University of Southern California, Ph.D. student Gauri Khanolkar carefully placed a sample of a new material called SAM2X5-630 in front of the barrel of a propellant gun. Created by her collaborators, the sample was shiny, about the diameter of a quarter and appeared to be metallic. But inside, its atoms were disorganized, the way they are in glass. Khanolkar left the room; even from outside, she could still hear the “pop!” of a bullet slamming into the sample. When she ran the numbers, she found something strange: The sample had withstood a force nearly double what the researchers had anticipated. As they described in Scientific Reports in March, despite its glass-like structure, this material, part of a class called bulk metallic glasses, is stronger than…

CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS back in the politically turbulent 1970s managed to pass sweeping laws to ensure clean air and water, protect endangered species and keep toxic substances out of everyday household products. That last law, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, got an overhaul in 2016 in a bit of throwback bipartisanship. The original law gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to ban dangerous ingredients. But some 55,000 chemicals were grandfathered in, and even many new chemicals were never studied. The law eventually irked scientists and industry alike. The EPA was unable to control known carcinogens like asbestos, which the agency banned before a federal court overturned the rule. In response, state governments passed a businessstifling patchwork of regulations.  The 2016 law reduces states’ power, but also makes…

RESEARCHERS FROM JAPAN’S RIKEN institute announced in April that they have grown skin from mouse stem cells in a process that one day may help skin graft recipients. Unlike earlier lab-grown skin, the new version, highlighted in green, has not just one but all three layers of skin, complete with hair follicles and oil-producing glands. Researchers used furry mice to help the stem cells grow to maturity before transplanting them to naked mice, where hair soon took root.…

CONSIDER LIFE ON EARTH 440 million years ago: a grayish landscape of rocks, sand and dust, inhospitable to most lifeforms. One tiny fungus helped transform that arid ground into the rich soils we see on our planet today. And now, experts have finally figured out how. Scientists had known about the fungus Tortotubus protuberans from fossils collected over the past three decades. But after examining new samples, paleontologist Martin Smith of England’s Durham University was able to reconstruct how this fungus grew, revealing its special skill. It’s all about the mycelial networks. All modern fungi have these threadlike roots, but Tortotubus appears to have been the first to develop them. Shorter than the width of a human hair, the roots absorbed lichen, bacteria and algae blowing about in the sand.…

EVEN SEASONED meteorite hunter Birger Schmitz got excited when he saw the 3-inch “mysterious object” in 2011. Schmitz, a Lund University geologist, had spent two decades inspecting a Swedish quarry for space rocks. The mysterious object — called Österplana 065 (Öst 65) after the quarry site — was found in the same limestone as more typical meteorites, suggesting it hit Earth at the same time, roughly 470 million years ago. But Öst 65’s chemical fingerprint was different from any meteorite found on Earth. This led Schmitz and colleagues to announce in June that Öst 65 may be the first known “extinct” meteorite, meaning others like it no longer float in space, having been totally obliterated by collisions. Scientists have speculated about extinct meteorites, but “not until you can hold it…

SINCE THE DAWN of the Space Age, science fiction enthusiasts have fantasized about reusable rockets. Over the past year, Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, made those visions a reality. Now, the tech mogul has his sights set on a bigger, redder prize. SpaceX has tried four times in the past two years to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets at sea; each exploded. But in April, a Falcon 9 successfully touched down on a drone ship in the Atlantic — a first — after ferrying cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). Months earlier, in December 2015, SpaceX pulled off its first land touchdown, at Cape Canaveral. The company was planning to relaunch one of those successfully landed Falcon 9s for the first time in late 2016 or…

DWARF PLANET CERES,found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sports a weirdly tall and lonely mountain: Ahuna Mons. After comparing it with domes on Earth, scientists now believe Ahuna Mons formed when a slushy mix of internal ice and natural antifreeze reached the surface along a duct — just as magma builds volcanoes on our planet. Once on Ceres’ surface, the Slurpee-like material couldn’t flow far, and it slowly built up a 3-mile-high ice volcano. Discovering Ahuna Mons’ icy identity, as reported in Science in September, adds to an emerging picture of Ceres as a geologically active and watery world. This dwarf planet should be pockmarked with craters up to 500 miles across, but scientists haven’t measured one even half that size. They think some geological process is…

PRIME NUMBERS — those that are divisible only by 1 and themselves — aren’t quite as random as mathematicians thought. In particular, they seem to have definite preferences about the final digits of the primes that follow them. Primes especially dislike following primes with the same final digit as their own. Among the first billion primes, for example, primes ending in 9 follow a prime also ending in 9 only 60 percent as often as they follow a prime ending in 1. In a paper submitted in March, Kannan Soundararajan of Stanford University and Robert Lemke Oliver of Tufts University showed that the pattern holds among the first 400 billion primes and offered a possible explanation for it. The tendency diminishes as primes get bigger, but only very slowly. The…

A SHORT PROTEIN FRAGMENT, OR PEPTIDE, may lead the way to healing traumatic brain injuries, a primary cause of death and disability among youth. Currently, drugs to treat such injuries are injected directly into the brain — an invasive technique — or into the bloodstream, which allows the medication to spread throughout the brain, causing harmful side effects. Attaching drugs to the new peptide, called CAQK, would avoid these problems. The peptide, just four amino acids long, binds to a protein complex that’s more abundant in injured areas and can therefore carry the therapy through the blood straight to the damaged sites. To find the chemical courier, a team led by Erkki Ruoslahti of Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in California tested 1 billion random combinations of amino acids…

IN HIGH SCHOOL, American students encounter a kind of wormhole connecting geometry and algebra: Geometric objects like circles and ellipses are linked to algebraic equations like x2 + y2 = 1. Students can visualize all the solutions to the equation as points in the circle — that is, each point in the curve represents a solution. Make the equations slightly more complex, and instead of circles you get swooping loops and lines called elliptic curves. These curves have proven useful in creating cryptographic codes — and they have beguiled mathematicians with their complexity and beauty. Each of those more complicated, curvy equations, however, has many solutions, and they can be wickedly hard to find. Mathematicians developed trick for this: If they know a certain number of an equation’s solutions, they…

FULL MOONS AND NEW MOONS have long been omens of strange happenings and ill fortunes. While humans are probably still to blame for our own eccentricities, it turns out that some earthquakes might indeed be a response to the moon’s pull. Researchers led by Satoshi Ide of the University of Tokyo discovered that larger earthquakes — like Chile’s 2010 disaster, or Japan’s 2011 quake that spawned a devastating tsunami — are more likely to occur when the moon is near full or new. That’s because Earth is under additional stress when the sun and moon are aligned and tugging in gravitational unison, as happens during those lunar phases. The team, whose research appearedin Nature Geoscience in September, also found that the biggest fault lines are most vulnerable, and more likely…

PHEIDOLE DROGON AND PHEIDOLE VISERION The ants named after the dragons on Game of Thrones — even their defensive spines have muscles! RATTUS DETENTUS A rodent of unusual size! Yes, they do exist — and they’re bigger than a New York subway rat! SPHENOPUS EXILIS The lone wolf of the sea: This rebel bucks the colony for a solitary life! FRANKIXALUS JERDONII Frankie the Frog, the comeback king, returns more than a century after being declared dead! APHONOPELMA JOHNNYCASHI Named for the Man in Black, this tarantula can be found near Folsom Prison and probably would shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die! VIPERA WALSER The alpine viper hiding in plain sight — with a mysterious Eastern connection CHILABOTHRUS ARGENTUM The silver ghost that slithered across the…

FOR POTENTIAL PARENTS struggling with fertility, bright eggs might be good eggs. Scientists at Northwestern University announced in April that they had recorded flashes of light from human eggs that may be an indicator of egg quality. Fertility clinics can identify healthy human sperm based on their movement and structure,but evaluating eggs has always been much less straightforward. Now, thanks to these flashes, that task could get a lot easier. The sparks are associated with eggs expelling the mineral zinc after they’re injected with spermlike enzymes. (Federal law prohibits researchers from fertilizing eggs with actual sperm.) The flashes, which appear as a halo around each egg, happen a few minutes after fertilization. Previous mouse experiments demonstrated that these flashes were more intense for higherquality fertilized eggs. If these “fertility fireworks”…

VIRUSES ARE WILY predators that can kill their hosts and cause lethal human diseases. They can also hijack CRISPR DNA to help their host, though not without an ulterior motive. In recent years, CRISPR, a sequence of DNA, has become best known for its use in gene editing, when scientists alter or delete DNA in living organisms. It's a technique that may soon revolutionize therapeutics. In nature, bacteria use DNA snippets from viruses to form CRISPR sequences to fight viral infections. The DNA enables bacteria to recognize the viruses and destroy them if they attack again, thereby avoiding infection. In a study published in June, Canadian scientists explained how the viral strain Cyanophage N-1 similarly sought the upper hand, stealing a CRISPR array of DNA from bacteria that contains DNA…

RESEARCHERS HAVE UNEARTHED the most primitive primate yet discovered, a tree-dwelling creature that could nestle in the palm of your hand, according to an October paper in the Journal of Human Evolution. They found 25 bones from the creatures among 54.5 million-year-old fossils discovered in Gujarat, India. Though the species resembled today’s gray mouse lemurs, its limbs were unfit for acrobatic leaping between trees and branches or for slow climbing, says lead author Rachel Dunn of Des Moines University. Although other primate fossils are technically older, some by at least 500,000 years, the latest examples are the most primitive in terms of evolutionary development, and likely approximate our oldest primate ancestors. The discovery sheds light on the dawn of primates, which eventually led to monkeys, apes and humans. “These fossils…

RESEARCHERS IN Sweden and the U.K. landed in the news over the summer, seeming to claim nearly 40,000 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies could be invalid. The problem? The most popular statistical analysis software packages could indicate significant brain activity where there wasn’t any, more than half the time. FMRI is becoming a more common imaging technique in neuroscience largely because it maps brain activity over time. (Unlike MRI, which maps brain structure, fMRI reveals blood flow, a proxy for activity.) Once the MRI machine cranks out images, statistical analysis software pinpoints which brain areas were significantly more active and when. The team claims the software packages they examined weren’t calibrated with real data, just simulated data. So they used fMRI scans from 499 healthy people in a resting…

IN JUNE, RESEARCHERS working in Iceland announced they had turned carbon dioxide into stone. The team captured carbon dioxide emitted by a geothermal plant and injected it, along with water, into basalt rock. The gas mineralized into calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone. This transformation from gas to solid avoids the pitfalls of other sequestration projects, where carbon dioxide can leak into the atmosphere or groundwater. The project, called CarbFix, won’t act as a global warming panacea because it uses more water than some industrial sites can offer. But its success is noteworthy amid some problematic efforts to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Going one step further, another team was expected to announce in late 2016 that it had found a way to mineralize carbon dioxide — without…

SEVEN FOSSILIZED MONKEY TEETH discovered in the recent Panama Canal expansion pushed back the North American arrival date of the animals by nearly 18 million years. Researchers have long thought that some 30 million years ago, monkeys migrated by land bridge or a raft of debris from Africa to South America — and stayed there. They headed north only after the Isthmus of Panama was fully formed, about 3.5 million years ago. But the fossilized teeth, which belong to the newly described monkey species Panamacebus transitus, predate the Panamanian land bridge by millions of years, according to the team that published the find online in Nature in April. The 21 million-yearold teeth were found on part of the isthmus that was a peninsula at the time. They suggest a population…

DESPITE THE PROMISE of gene editing for treating disease, altering genes can be risky and pose ethical challenges. So researchers from the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley instead focused on using the editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9 to manipulate the product of those genes. Back to freshman biology: As you may remember, double-stranded DNA makes single-stranded RNA, which makes proteins. Edit DNA and the proteins are altered forever. But edit the RNA and the genetic machinery stays the same while the proteins can be manipulated, so the levels of gene expression are dialed up or down. Theoretically, RNA editing is reversible, and since it doesn’t change the genome, it won’t be passed down to descendants. Gene Yeo, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UCSD, led the…

LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: Dinosaurs did not roar. Their anatomy just wasn’t built for it. But these beloved beasts of the Mesozoic weren’t mute, either. A June study in Evolution looked at the anatomy and sound repertoire of birds and crocodilians, the nearest living relatives of extinct dinosaurs. Verdict: Dinosaurs probably made mostly closed-mouth vocalizations, like crocodilians today. Think that’s not as impressive? Take it from study co-author Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who recalled a heart-pounding experience years ago when she visited a Chinese alligator breeding project at the Bronx Zoo in New York. A door in the facility slammed shut, says Clarke, and “the room exploded in deep thumps. THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. Every male alligator was making that noise.” Now consider…

AN UNPRECEDENTED SEARCH for the roots of canine aggression and fear has identified genetic variants that predispose a dog toward such behaviors. And the researchers hope that knowledge could eventually help treat humans with anxiety. The research, published in August in BMC Genomics, compared owner reports of a pet’s behavior and genetic data from 30 purebred lines to discover the 16 genome regions. The team also found that two clusters of these genes control different kinds of aggression: one directed at strangers and strange dogs, and the other directed at the owner and other dogs in the household. Dachshunds are particularly prone to a genetic variant that study co-author Carlos Alvarez of Nationwide Children’s Hospital calls “freak biology.” That low-riding wiener dog body comes with an increased likelihood of snarls…

GOOD NEWS for people susceptible to rashes from poison ivy, oak and sumac: Scientists have identified the specific molecule in the skin that plays a role in the inflammation, which could be the scratch that eventually resolves the itch. For decades, researchers have suspected that when the immune system molecule CD1a comes in contact with the plants’ oily resin, called urushiol, it triggers inflammation. Researchers confirmed the connection this fall through tests on mice engineered to carry CD1a, according to Florian Winau, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School who was part of the study published in August in Nature Immunology. Now that the molecule has been identified, Winau says his lab is working with a pharmaceutical company to develop an anti-CD1a antibody. Besides treating inflammation spurred by plant contact, Winau…

A SHALLOW AQUIFER beneath the Colorado River floodplain doesn’t spring to mind as a hotspot for new forms of life. But it turns out that the area, near the town of Rifle, Colorado, is prime real estate for bacteria. Nobody expected to see such a lively community until University of California, Berkeley, geomicrobiologist Jillian Banfield visited the site to sample the water for genetic material. Given the unexpected biodiversity she and her colleagues uncovered there — and at other inhospitable sites, from Yellowstone hot springs to Chile’s Atacama Desert — Banfield created a new Tree of Life. Mapping the genetic relationship between species, the tree shows that scientists have been oblivious to nearly a third of life — mostly bacterial — on Earth. That’s because approximately half the world’s bacteria…

USING A PARTICLE ACCELERATOR, researchers in Australia uncovered a second woman’s face hiding beneath the 19th-century painting “Portrait of a Woman,” by French impressionist Edgar Degas. The researchers bombarded the painting with high-energy X-rays, causing the elements that make up the hidden pigments to fluoresce, or light up. Matching the wavelengths to pigments from the period revealed a mystery woman, believed to be Emma Dobigny, a model popular with painters of the time.…

IN FEBRUARY, the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global health emergency confirmed what doctors in Brazil had suspected for months: The mosquitoborne Zika virus had exploded in the South American country. Since 2015, physicians had seen an unprecedented spike in babies born with abnormally small skulls and severe neurological deficits. Babies born with microcephaly may not develop normally, leaving them severely disabled. Microcephaly is rare — occurring in 6 out of 10,000 live births in the U.S. — but suddenly there were reports of thousands of women in Brazil giving birth to babies with the birth defect, other severe fetal abnormalities or Guillain-Barre syndrome, a nervous system disorder. And even babies who appeared to be healthy developed serious deficits later. Zika has been around for decades. The virus was…

DIAGNOSING ALZHEIMER’S disease before irreversible damage is done is one of medicine’s major goals. Now, a Canadian team has uncovered a technique that may detect the mindrobbing disorder at its earliest stages. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal examined more than 7,700 brain images from 1,171 people in various stages of Alzheimer’s progression, according to the study published in Nature Communications in June. They analyzed blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples, plus study participants’ cognitive skills. In 78 brain regions, they factored in the pattern of amyloid concentration, glucose metabolism, cerebral blood flow, functional activity and brain atrophy. Then, the team devised an algorithm to re-create a 30-year trajectory for each of these biological factors. Scientists have long considered clumps of amyloid plaques — sticky, barnaclelike protein bundles — to be…

A NEW CHAPTER in the tale of Indonesia’s “hobbit” fills in details of its backstory and provides a bittersweet legacy for the little hominin’s greatest champion. First described in 2004 from fossils discovered at Liang Bua, a cave on the island of Flores, the meter-tall Homo floresiensis was instantly nicknamed after J.R.R. Tolkien’s diminutive characters. However, researchers have argued about whether it was a distinct species or an isolated population of deformed or diseased modern humans. (Dating analysis has established the fossils are more than 50,000 years old.) For two years, Indonesian authorities had denied researchers access to Liang Bua. That forced the hobbit’s discoverer, Australian archaeologist Michael Morwood, and team members, including paleontologist Gert van den Bergh, to continue their research elsewhere on the island. In Nature in June,…

PHYSICISTS HAVE FOUND a new state of matter. That’s both over- and understating it: The solid-liquid-gas trifecta still holds strong. What’s important about this new type of matter happens at the quantum scale — magnetically, the electrons behave as though they are split in two. Researchers detected the behavior in a crystal of ruthenium trichloride at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They used a huge particle accelerator to shoot neutrons at the sample and observed the patterns that formed when those neutrons bounced off and splattered on a detector. Electrons in the crystal acted together to produce so-called quasiparticles — the electrons act like they’ve broken apart, though they haven’t literally. The quasiparticles produced here, called Majorana fermions, are their own antimatter. They suggest the presence of an…

ACCORDING TO ANCIENT Chinese texts that mix historical events with legend, about 4,000 years ago a hero named Yu tamed a flood and went on to become China’s first emperor. The story may be largely myth, but geologic evidence reported in Science this August suggests that at least the Great Flood was real — and really Great. “It’s sort of the equivalent of if we found evidence of Noah’s flood from the Bible,” says Taiwan University archaeologist David Cohen, co-author of the study. About 800 miles west of Beijing, along a 30-mile stretch of the Yellow River, researchers found a variety of sediments, indicating a landslide, a lake and a violent flood in the distant past. Based on the extent of these deposits, they were able to reconstruct the catastrophic…

DEPRESSION AFFECTS SOME 350 million people worldwide, costing billions in health care expenses and decreased work productivity, yet the illness is poorly understood on a biological level. But we’re getting closer. Scientists have pinpointed 15 regions in DNA associated with depression. The study, published in August in Nature Genetics, analyzed the genetic variations of 75,607 individuals who reported having depression, and 231,747 healthy controls. It found that genes associated with depression are involved in brain cell development, and that there was overlap between these genetic regions and those linked to schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. The study is also significant because it was crowdsourced: The data came via personal genomics company 23andMe, from people who consented to participate anonymously. The study involved participants of European descent exclusively, but co-author Roy…

A NEW LOOK AT DATA from NASA’s Kepler space telescope added 1,284 worlds to the exoplanet zoo in 2016, bringing the instrument’s total confirmed number to 2,591. Those planets range from the tiny to true behemoths, but most exciting is that more Earth-sized and other smallish worlds are emerging, providing new hope for life in the cosmos. SUPER-EARTH (1.2 to 1.9 RE) NEW: 409 TOTAL: 728 “Earth” looks increasingly like a misnomer for these behemoth worlds. Observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope published in March showed 55 Cancri e, a relatively nearby super-Earth, likely has flowing lava on its permanently sun-facing side, along with temperatures 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the night side. EARTH(0.7 to 1.2 RE) NEW: 130 TOTAL: 219 Our nearest neighbor — Proxima Centauri b — snagged…

A TREATMENT for Parkinson’s has lasted more than two decades, a medical first, according to researchers from Lund University in Sweden. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, researchers took neural cells from human fetuses and inserted them into the brains of 10 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative condition. They hoped the healthy fetal cells would restore diminished brain function. The patients were monitored until death. Then tissue samples were collected from brain areas where healthy neurons had been introduced. In a June paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Lund team described the brain of a patient who’d received a unilateral transplant — where only one side of the brain received the treatment — 24 years earlier. After all that time, nearly 90 percent of…

IN FEBRUARY, PHYSICISTS revealed evidence of an atom made only of neutrons — something many thought impossible. Because matter is classified by how many protons it has, this is “element zero,” jokes Tomohiro Uesaka, who led the work at the Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory in Japan. Since the ’60s, scientists have debated whether such a strange atom might exist. To find out, physicists produced helium atoms (normally two protons and two neutrons strong) with four extra neutrons, and fired a beam of the atoms at a target of liquid helium. They measured what came flying out the other side and calculated that groups of four neutrons had clustered together for a fraction of a second. Currently, Uesaka’s team is designing experiments to solidify these strange atoms’ existence and better understand…

FRANCIS TULLY found his fossilized monster in discarded rocks at an Illinois coal pit in 1958. And it’s puzzled scientists ever since. Work at Chicago’s Field Museum eventually revealed the creature, known as the Tully Monster, was a bizarre 300 million-year-old animal that fed through a toothy proboscis. But was it a swimming snail? An arthropod? Scientists finally moved past “problematica” —creatures defying boundaries — in March. Yale graduate student Victoria McCoy and her team cataloged the monster’s features and compared them with modern and ancient animals, finding Tully was a vertebrate and likely lamprey relative. Understanding the relationship between the animals shows the jawless lamprey are themselves “just remnants of a very diverse, ancient clade,” McCoy says.…

SOME 3.5 BILLION YEARS ago, a meteor splashed into an ocean on northern Mars, creating a wall of water 400 feet high. The tsunami crashed down — in seemingly slow motion, due to the low gravity — and then rushed across hundreds of thousands of square miles of plains and up into highlands. It happened again a few million years later, except with a noticeably icier ocean. In a Scientific Reports paper published online in May, scientists said they had found evidence of the two events. The team, led by Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, looked at snapshots taken from three Mars orbiters. The researchers focused on the planet’s northern lowlands, where they observed the telltale signs of destruction: a washed-out coastline, rocks strewn across valleys…

THINK TWICE BEFORE blowing your nose — bacteria living there could save your life someday. According to a July paper in Nature, researchers found a new antibiotic produced by nose-dwelling bacteria that kill drug-resistant superbugs, including MRSA. As such bacteria evolve defenses against our current drugs, finding new antibiotics is increasingly important. “Far from being an apocalyptic fantasy,” warned a 2014 World Health Organization report, a world without antibiotics is “a very real possibility for the 21st century.” Microbiologists at the University of Tübingen in Germany swabbed noses, looking for bacteria to test against pathogens, and they scored with Staphylococcus lugdunensis. The bacterium produced an antibiotic, dubbed lugdunin, which killed a slew of superbugs in cell cultures and mice with no signs yet of growing resistance. Lugdunin also shows that…

IMAGINE A CAR that runs minus not only an engine, but without most parts under the hood. A team of Czech Republic and Canadian scientists identified the cellular equivalent in Monocercomonoides, a protozoan they isolated from a chinchilla’s gut. This is the first eukaryote — organisms, like plants and animals, whose cells contain distinct nuclei — found without the machinery of mitochondria. These cellular powerhouses can perform many jobs. Mitochondria produce energy, and they glom onto iron and sulfur to help proteins make needed chemicals. A few related pathogens have simpler mitochondria that only perform the iron-clustering duty. When the team analyzed the Monocercomonoides genome, genes associated with all mitochondrial functions were missing. So how does the organism survive? “It stole or borrowed clustering systems from bacteria,” says Anna Karnkowska,…

AN OBSCURE RAT-SIZED RODENT made headlines in June as the first mammal killed off by human-induced climate change. In the 1970s, several hundred Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) scurried about their only known habitat, an island smaller than a shopping mall in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The animals were last spotted in 2009; subsequent searches, including an extended survey in 2014, found no trace of them. Researchers declared the species extinct due to global warming: Over the past decade, rising seas have destroyed 97 percent of the island’s herbaceous vegetation, which once provided the rodents food and shelter.…

IAN BURKHART WAS 19 WHEN HE BROKE HIS NECK, leaving him a quadriplegic, paralyzed and unable to move his upper body from the elbows down. Now, six years later, he can control his fingers enough to play the video game Guitar Hero. And it’s all thanks to a so-called neural bypass. Burkhart is the first person to undergo this procedure, reported by Battelle Memorial Institute and Ohio State University researchers in May in Nature. Ninety-six electrodes were implanted in his brain, and his arm was wrapped in an electrode-studded cuff. Following hours of practice, a computer learned to identify brain signals associated with different wrist and finger movements. And unlike in other techniques, which send these signals to a prosthetic limb, the computer routed the signals directly to Burkhart’s actual…

FOR THE FIRST TIME, astronomers have captured in visible light an exploding star’s “shock breakout” — an extremely brief window into what triggers one type of supernova. When a massive star runs out of fuel at the end of its life, it collapses and triggers a violent explosion known as a supernova. The entire process can take weeks to reach peak brightness. When the collapsing core reaches the star’s surface, it releases a burst of light, called a shock breakout, that lasts 20 minutes. An international team announced the discovery in March after studying light from some 50 trillion stars captured by the planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. The shock breakout occurred within the star KSN2011d, 1.2 billion light-years away and roughly 500 times the size of our sun. The observation of…

MICROBIOLOGISTS OFTEN SEEK LIFE in the planet’s extremes — from below ice sheets to within geysers. But Appalachian Basin scientists found hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, also provides its own inhabited extremes in their backyard. The process mixes water with sand and chemicals, then uses the pressurized concoction to rip open rocks underground and liberate natural gas. And that’s where the never-before-seen bacterium Candidatus Frackibacter thrives — 1.5 miles deep in the salty leftovers. For nearly a year, researchers sampled and grew bacteria from the wastewater of two wells hundreds of miles apart in different rock formations, according to their September Nature Microbiology paper. Surprisingly, the wells had nearly identical ecosystems, and C. Frackibacter lived in both. The team also found 30 already known organisms, which likely were injected into the…

HUMANITY HAS ETCHED its existence into the rock layers beneath our feet. And now, scientists look to Earth’s bedrock and see enough evidence to officially usher us into the Anthropocene — a time period sometimes defined as the “human epoch.” The term Anthropocene first gained popularity in 2000, but it wasn’t formally recognized as a part of the geologic timescale. This year, members of the Anthropocene Working Group, a subset of the International Union of Geological Sciences (the body that oversees the geologic timescale), sought to change that. They recommended that we officially mark the end of the Holocene, the current epoch, and enter the Anthropocene. If the larger body ratifies their proposal, we will be living in the age of humans. Next, the researchers need to find a “golden…

IT’S A TYPICAL urban planning dilemma: Subways are costly to build, but buses get stuck in traffic. In the Chinese port city of Qinhuangdao, a new form of transit is being tested. Combining the mobility of subways with the cost effectiveness of buses, this elevated vehicle straddles the road so that car traffic can travel unimpeded underneath. Supported by roadside rails, the electricpowered Transit Elevated Bus can hold 300 passengers, transporting them 6.5 feet above two lanes of rush-hour gridlock at a steady 37 mph. But critics worry about safety, such as minimal headroom for road traffic, and infrastructure demands. If tests are successful, the elevated bus might one day help congested Chinese cities become navigable again.…

2016 MAY BE REMEMBERED as the year when the stars suddenly got a whole lot closer. On April 12, Russian-born entrepreneur Yuri Milner unveiled a bold program, Breakthrough Starshot. Its mission: to send a squadron of robotic space probes to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, more than 25 trillion miles away. The probes would launch within 20 years and take another 20 years to reach their destination. The subsequent discovery of a roughly Earth-sized planet orbiting one of Centauri’s stars has given the mission an extra sense of purpose. “Today is the day that space explorers have dreamed about,” said Starshot Executive Director Pete Worden, the former head of the NASA Ames Research Center. “The stars are finally within our reach.” The spacecraft for this venture would be tiny,…