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Magazine
In the Sept. 15 SN: The plant microbiome revolution, Parker probe’s stellar tech, the first RNAi drug approved, video fakery, a puzzling lemur fossil, how elephants dodge cancer, supersmooth desalination, really old cheese and more.
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News in Brief
Here’s how many U.S. kids are vaping marijuana
09/17/2018 - 11:00 HealthMore than 2 million U.S. middle and high school students — or nearly 1 in 11 — have vaped marijuana, a new study suggests.
Based on reports of teens’ e-cigarette use in 2016, researchers estimate that nearly 1 in 3 high school students, or roughly 1.7 million, have used pot in the devices. Nearly 1 in 4 middle school students, or 425,000, have done the same, the team reports online...
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News in Brief
Sound waves can make bubbles in levitated drops of liquid
09/11/2018 - 11:00 PhysicsSave your breath: A new way to make bubbles requires only sound waves.
Scientists made the bubbles in levitated drops of liquid, held aloft with sound waves. Tweaking the sound waves caused the hovering drop to balloon into a bubble.
The team formed the bubbles using a variety of liquids, including water. Increasing the intensity of the sound made the liquid first buckle into a...
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Feature
How plant microbes could feed the world and save endangered species
09/06/2018 - 11:00 Agriculture, Plants, MicrobesOne fine Hawaiian day in 2015, Geoff Zahn and Anthony Amend set off on an eight-hour hike. They climbed a jungle mountain on the island of Oahu, swatting mosquitoes and skirting wallows of wild pigs. The two headed to the site where a patch of critically endangered Phyllostegia kaalaensis had been planted a few months earlier. What they found was dispiriting.
“All the plants were gone,”...
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News
As temperatures rise, so do insects’ appetites for corn, rice and wheat
08/31/2018 - 12:24 Climate, Agriculture, AnimalsWith temperatures creeping up as the climate warms, those very hungry caterpillars could get even hungrier, and more abundant. Crop losses to pests may grow.
Insects will be “eating more of our lunch,” says Curtis Deutsch of the University of Washington in Seattle. Based on how heat revs up insect metabolism and reproduction, he and his colleagues estimate that each degree Celsius of...
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News
Beaked whales may frequent a seabed spot marked for mining
08/21/2018 - 19:05 Oceans, EarthWhales may have made their mark on the seafloor in a part of the Pacific Ocean designated for future deep-sea mining.
Thousands of grooves found carved into the seabed could be the first evidence that large marine mammals visit this little-explored region, researchers report August 22 in Royal Society Open Science. If deep-diving whales are indeed using the region for foraging or other...
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News
A fossil mistaken for a bat may shake up lemurs’ evolutionary history
08/21/2018 - 11:00 Anthropology, AnimalsIn one published swoop, an ancient fossil fruit bat has turned into a lemur. If that transformation holds, it suggests that lemur ancestors made two tricky sea crossings from Africa to Madagascar, not one as researchers have often assumed.
A new fossil analysis finds that the ancient species Propotto leakeyi, which lived in East Africa between 23 million and 16 million years ago, was not...
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Feature
More than 2 billion people lack safe drinking water. That number will only grow.
08/16/2018 - 07:00 Conservation, Climate, EarthFreshwater is crucial for drinking, washing, growing food, producing energy and just about every other aspect of modern life. Yet more than 2 billion of Earth’s 7.6 billion inhabitants lack clean drinking water at home, available on demand.
A major United Nations report, released in June, shows that the world is not on track to meet a U.N. goal: to bring safe water and sanitation to...
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Feature
As waters rise, coastal megacities like Mumbai face catastrophe
08/15/2018 - 09:30 Climate, Oceans, SustainabilityEach year when the monsoon rain sheets down and the tides swell over coastal Mumbai, Saif shutters his soda shop on Juhu Beach and takes shelter up in the rafters. Still, the water invades through the roof and over the concrete floors, sometimes reaching as high as the freezers full of ice cream.
For 36-year-old Saif, the coastal megacity’s chronic flooding is stressful. “What would...
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News
In the animal kingdom, what does it mean to be promiscuous?
08/13/2018 - 07:00 Animals, EcologyMILWAUKEE — When it comes to the sex lives of animals, scientists have a slate of explicit terms to describe the proclivities of species. But researchers may be playing a little fast and loose with one of those words. Just what sort of activity qualifies an animal as promiscuous?
A review of almost 350 studies published in scientific journals in 2015 and 2016 found that the label was...
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News
The first gene-silencing drug wins FDA approval
08/10/2018 - 15:52 Biomedicine, Clinical Trials, Health, GeneticsA Nobel Prize–winning discovery — that small double-stranded RNA molecules can silence genes by interrupting the translation of DNA’s instructions into proteins — is finally delivering on its medical promise.
The first drug that takes advantage of this natural biological process, called RNA interference, was approved August 10 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It targets a rare...