The vital crosstalk between breath and brain
By Greg Miller The rhythm of respiration influences a wide range of behaviors, as well as cognition and emotion. Neuroscientists are piecing together how it all works. Read more
How green are biofuels? Scientists are at loggerheads
By Dan Charles Replacing gasoline with ethanol has changed landscapes across the globe as grasslands and forests give way to cornfields. Researchers are deeply divided over what this means for the planet. Here's the science behind the conflict. Read more
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Event: Rethinking cities in the face of extreme heat
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 | 9am Pacific | 12pm Eastern | 4pm GMT
Cities have recently experienced extreme heat waves, causing preventable illness and death. How can we protect people from dangerous heat while also reducing carbon emissions?
From the archives
This year’s Nobel Prizes honored work investigating the very old, the very practical and the very weird. The prize in physiology or medicine went to Svante Pääbo for pioneering methods to extract and analyze DNA from ancient bones. For a quick take on the prize, see Nature’s coverage and for a deep dive, explore Pääbo’s 2004 papers in the Annual Review of Genetics and Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. The research opened the door to a flood of investigations, some of which we’ve explored: Read our stories on pathogens of the past, horse domestication, baby teeth and museum treasures.
The prize in physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for showing that the weirdness implied by quantum entanglement is real and for applications sprung from that reality. Read coverage of the prize at Science News and explore more with our story on a quantum origin for spacetime.
Chemistry’s Nobel went to Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless. Sharpless and Meldel independently figured out a clever, quick way to snap two molecules together, like Legos (AKA “click chemistry”). Bertozzi took it a step further, developing a way to use click chemistry that wouldn’t harm living cells; such chemical reactions are now used in cancer drug development. Read more about the chemistry Nobel at Quanta and go to Chemistry World for a recent interview where Bertozzi dishes on the meditative nature of shooting hoops and playing music. Some of her early research can be explored in the 2002 Annual Review of Biochemistry and the 2001 Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology.
What we’re reading
Good dog
There’s no global organization that approves methods for how to train a dog, but a growing number of veterinary organizations, researchers and canine experts want that to change. The push to standardize, however, has shown that not everyone is on the same page about how punishment — like shock collars — should factor into behavioral lessons. For Undark Magazine, Ula Chrobak explores the existing research and the pros and cons of herding different viewpoints into a cohesive policy.
Sow the seeds
In the 1920s, Soviet scientist Nikolai Vavilov began an ambitious project: amassing the world’s first seed bank. Aiming to prevent famine through preserving plant biodiversity, he traveled to 64 countries, collecting some 380,000 specimens that he brought back to the Soviet Union’s Bureau of Applied Botany. But his efforts ended in tragedy: the anti-genetics tenor of the time landed Vavilov in the Gulag, where he died of starvation, Sam Kean writes for Distillations. The political venom and scientific myopia of Vavilov’s era has worrisome parallels today, Kean notes, as do threats to botanical biodiversity.
Core concepts
Here’s a mystery: The Earth’s core — the giant ball of iron found at the center of our planet — is about 8 percent too light. Too light to be pure iron, anyway. So what else is mixed in? Nickel, oxygen, sulfur and silicon are among the contenders — uranium also gets a vote. Figuring out the answer could help us understand more about how the Earth formed and even why we have a life-shielding magnetic field on our planet. For Chemical & Engineering News, Katherine Bourzac reveals how chemists — unable to travel to the core themselves — are using modern-day tools like high-pressure chambers and lasers to try to crack the question.
Art & science
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI
Ring in the new
Many of us think of Neptune as a deep blue-green planet, while Saturn is the one with rings. NASA has now unveiled dazzling new images of Neptune captured by the James Webb Space Telescope that reveal the Neptunian system in near-infrared light. The planet farthest from the Sun resembles a ghostly, translucent jewel of frosted crystal, and along with its glittery rings, seven of its 14 known moons are visible. Neptune’s encircling arcs of dust and ice were last detected in 1989 during a Voyager 2 flyby, writes Christopher Crockett at Science News. As for Neptune’s usual blues and greens? Sharp-eyed as the Webb is, it’s not designed to detect those colors, which are what remains after the massive planet’s atmospheric gas absorbs longer wavelengths like red.
