Scientists shined X-rays on the bums of bombardier beetles to determine how they make noxious butt sprays for defense. Illustration by DEA picture library/Getty Images.

Scientists are pointing X-rays at the butts of bombardier beetles. Why, you ask?

A closer look into the bug’s behind is revealing how the insect conducts chemical warfare on its enemies, according to a new video by the American Chemical Society.

As producer Matt Davenport describes in this 3-minute explainer, when the beetle is threatened, it tightens muscles in its abodmen, causing droplets of its arsenal — harsh chemicals like hydrogen peroxide and p-hydroquinones — to leak from its “reservoir chamber.” Only 5 nanoliters of liquid — or 17 millionths of an ounce — squeezes free each time.

The compounds drip into a second “room” closer to the tail — a water-filled “reaction chamber” — where they brew into a deadly mixture of compounds called p-benzoquinones. Meanwhile, the muscle contraction increases the pressure in the reaction chamber, which consequently elevates temperature and vaporizes the water. When pressure reaches the tipping point, the beetle’s bum sprays its unexpecting victim

“Some beetles spray up to 700 times a second,” says Davenport.

Bombardier beetles aren’t the only chemical wizards. Armyworms create a defensive poison by eating corn, while “rasberry crazy ants” (actual name) make spit out of chemical neutralize venom from fire ant bites.

The post Video: Bugs wage chemical warfare with butts and guts appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Next, we explore questions about how scientific findings are published and verified, and whether allegations of fraud involving a top science journal are damaging credibility with the wider public.

Yesterday, “Science” magazine retracted a study published in December that found people’s attitudes toward same-sex marriage were more likely to be changed by face-to-face conversations with gay canvassers over straight ones. It was a study that got quite a bit of pickup in the media. Now that it’s been retracted by a leading journal, it poses questions for the scientific establishment.

Again to Hari, who has more on the story.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The study’s lead author asked for the retraction after the original findings could not be duplicated, and his co-author, a graduate student, was accused of misrepresenting how the work was done.

This is the latest retraction in a major journal. In recent years, there have been others involving cloning and stem cell research.

Ivan Oransky is a journalist, as well as a medical doctor, who broke this story. He is co-founder of the blog Retraction Watch and global editorial director of MedPage Today, an online medical news service for physicians and other medical professions.

So, first of all, this particular case, how did we get here? What went wrong?

IVAN ORANSKY, Co-Founder, Retraction Watch: So, what seems to have gone wrong is that only some of this study — or at least we can only see that some of this study actually happened.

Lots of pressure on researchers. We don’t exactly know what happened here in the sort of early days, but part of the study, which was that gay people went to people’s houses and tried to convince them that gay marriage was a good thing, that they should agree with it, that part seems to have happened.

What’s a little unclear is whether surveying them afterwards to tell whether you actually changed their minds, which in this case was a pretty important part of the study, whether that actually happened. And so you fast-forward a little bit. The paper gets published in a really big journal, as you said, in “Science,” a major medical — excuse me — a major science journal.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes.

IVAN ORANSKY: And that happens in December, and then a couple of month later, some grad students at Berkeley, they decide, oh, we want to do the next set of experiments. We think this is pretty cool.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And this is science works.

IVAN ORANSKY: That’s supposed to be how science works.

So, they start looking at it and something doesn’t look right to them. They start asking a lot of questions, which, again, is supposed to be the way science works, ask the lead author, hey, what’s actually happening here? And no one can find the data.

Some admissions were made about what had happened and what hadn’t happened and how it had been misrepresented. And very quickly, which is I think an important point here, very quickly, the author said — one of the authors said, we should retract this. The journal said, we’re going to put a big stamp on this saying expression of concern.

Within a week, and that just happened this week, the paper’s gone from the record. It’s retracted.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Yes, but people are going to look at this and say but there is supposed to be a system of checks and balances before it gets to the journal, at the journal, the peer review process. We have esteemed colleagues. There’s lots of smart people that could have poked a hole in this before you got to it.

IVAN ORANSKY: There are lots of smart people who can poke a hole in it if they sort of take the opportunity.

Scientists are under a lot of pressure. You and I, as journalists, we’re under a lot of pressure. We know what this is like. And, quite frankly, peer review, it’s something you do, I wouldn’t say exactly spare time, but you’re not paid for it. And so in order to have found what was wrong here, you really would have had to have seen, actually had to have looked at the original data.

And what most people don’t realize is that this sort of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that journalists would like you to think peer review, this vaunted peer review system is, it’s not really Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. There are a lot of holes. You have got to look at the original data.

And that speaks to how science is supposed to work, because you shouldn’t take any particular study, in this case a study that actually showed something that was really very surprising and new and different from what other studies had shown. You shouldn’t take it, even if it turns out to be true, as the answer.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So there are different causes for why certain studies over the years have fallen through the cracks. Right? Sometimes, it’s malicious intent, someone actively trying to doctor the data. Other times, it’s careless error, et cetera.

Are these fabrications more common now or are we in this Internet era able to detect them faster?

IVAN ORANSKY: It’s very clear that we’re able to detect these, sort of whether they’re fraud or just sloppiness or honest error, much more quickly.

Here we are, we’re able to look at all these papers online. We have plagiarism detection software. Plagiarism is a big reason for retraction as well in science, as well in journalism. And so about two-thirds of the time, they’re due to fraud, something that would be considered misconduct.

But it’s very clear that in the last like 15 years, the number of retractions has gone up by 10. So there are 10 times as many retractions — there were times as many retractions in 2010 as in 2001. And, again, it’s because we’re better at finding it.

Whether there’s also more pressure on scientists and more — therefore more fraud, it is a bit of an open question. But it’s also important to keep in mind these 400 — and maybe now it’s 500 or 600 retractions a year — that’s out of like two million or three million papers. So let’s not sort of say, oh, well, everything is fraudulent just because this is on the rise.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Right. This is something that scientists have to now become more vigilant about.

But also who gets hurt by this? In this specific study, it’s kind of a social science experiment. But there are some ethical lines that have been crossed.

IVAN ORANSKY: So, in this particular case, I think one sort of person — it’s not a person, but a group that might take a hit is science itself.

Here we are talking about this study, what went wrong, why did this get into such a major journal. My understanding is that some of the findings here, the sort of — at least the idea, was used as part of the sort of canvassing on the referendum in Ireland that just happened.

So this actually had some real-life ramifications. Maybe it was not a cancer trial or something like that. But, often, some of these studies actually do involve real people who are having terrible diseases like cancer. And they all are — I shouldn’t say all, but many of them involve federal funding.

So you and I are paying for these studies, and then they turn out to be fraudulent. Well, that’s not a great thing.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Ivan Oransky, editor of Retraction Watch, thanks so much for joining us.

IVAN ORANSKY: Thanks for having me.

The post How did a fake study make it into Science magazine? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A juvenile smalltooth sawfish in the Charlotte Harbor estuarine system, Florida. A new study finds that female sawfish can reproduce asexually in the wild. Photo by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Who needs Tinder when you can reproduce on your own? Not female smalltooth sawfish. These shark-like creatures can make babies asexually, according to a new study in Current Biology. The find marks the first observation of a free-living vertebrate animal that successfully switched from sexual to asexual breeding — a phenomenon known as facultative parthenogenesis — and yielded viable offspring in the wild.

Smalltooth sawfish, a species of ray, join a surprising collection of vertebrates that have made the switch. The earliest accounts of the facultative parthenogenesis involved birds: farmed chickens in 1872, pet pigeons in 1924 and domesticated turkeys in the 1954. “Self-loving” female sharks produced viable offspring at zoos in Omaha, Nebraska and Detroit in the last decade. Female Komodo dragons prefer coitus in the wild, but put them in a pen, and they’ll get down asexually.

“I think that facultative parthenogenesis is a more common occurrence than people would ever expect, said evolutionary biologist Warren Booth of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma who wasn’t involved in the study. “In the last 5 years, a whole suite of studies have come out documenting the phenomenon with animals in captivity.”

Smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata) are named for their sawlike beaks. The beaks act as hunting tools that track weak electric fields emitted by fish prey and then serve as the perfect weapon for slashing their meal into oblivion (see video).

This movie shows four different feeding behaviors of sawfish. Video by Wueringer BE et al 2012.

But due to overfishing and habitat loss, smalltooth sawfish are critically endangered, with estimates suggesting that the global species lost between 95 to 99 percent of its members over the last century. One of their final homesteads exists along Florida’s southern tip, where scientists keep constant watch on a population that has shown indications of stability in recent years.

“We do regular monitoring of their genetics to see how the sawfish in Florida are coping with things like global warming and ocean acidification,” said study co-author and ecologist Andrew Fields of Stony Brook University in New York. Their broad census consisted of tissue samples from 190 sawfish that were caught and released between 2004 and 2011. But when romantic partners become scarce, fish sometimes resort to mating with siblings, so part of the team’s objective also involved scanning the DNA samples for signs of inbreeding.

That’s when the team happened across seven peculiar females. They were using a computer program named STORM to decode the gene sequences and calculate their “internal relatedness” (IR) — a numeric value that determines whether an individual’s parents were each other’s siblings. An IR reading near zero means both parents came from different families, while a readout between 25 to 50 percent indicates that an organism was conceived by half or full siblings, respectively.

The “sensational seven,” as these sawfish came to be known, had IR values ranging from 84 to 100 percent, suggesting that they were birthed via facultative parthenogenesis — where a formerly sexual creature becomes asexual.

Such observations among free-living organisms have evaded scientists because spotting an act of asexuality in the wild is tricky. Booth’s team came closest in 2012 when they collected two pit vipers from the wild, which subsequently birthed asexually in his lab. As demonstrated in that case, you typically need the DNA of both the parents and the kids to prove parthenogenesis, but this new study on sawfish shows that scientists can accomplish the task with a genetic survey of a large population.

“We now have the genetic tools to easily and inexpensively address these questions on a wide scale,” Booth said. “It’s a really valuable study — not just for the field of parthenogenesis but for shark biology and ray biology.”

For instance, the genetic analysis argues that the sawfish performed a brand of parthenogenesis called automixis: wherein an unfertilized egg fuses with a sister cell called a polar body. The result is a highly inbred offspring with half the genetic diversity of the mother. This process differs from “obligate” asexuality seen with some frogs, salamanders, fish and lizards, which creates an exact clone of the mother. Humans and other mammals can’t reproduce asexually thanks to a failsafe system — called genomic imprinting — that won’t let an egg develop into an embryo without both male and female input.

It remains unknown if parthenogenesis is ultimately good or bad for the smalltooth sawfish. Sure, asexual breeding allows females to continue the species during a time when males might be scarce, but it isn’t the most ideal solution in the long term.

“It will skew the sex ratio because their offspring will always be female, so you’d never have sexual reproduction again, once all the males died off,” Fields said. “Plus their offspring live with reduced genetic diversity, meaning they may not be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions around them, such as global warming or mutating bacteria.”

Editor’s note: The headline of this post was updated to change the word “man” to “male.”

The post These female sawfish prove they don’t need a male to procreate appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Reconstruction of the Cretaceous fossil bird from the Araripe Basin, Brazil. Illustration by Deverson Pepi

Paleontologists have stumbled upon a bird fossil that is so well preserved its long tail feathers have possibly retained their original color and spots. It’s a first-of-a-kind discovery for South America, and the oldest known bird ever found in Brazil.

The discovery was made in the Araripe Basin in Northeastern Brazil, where a former lakebed holds thousands of fossils from the Cretaceous period — 145 to 66 million years. At the time, Brazil and the rest of South America were in the process of separating from Gondwana — an ancient supercontinent that comprised Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula.

Location map of the discovery (red star) of the 115 million years old Brazilian fossil bird. Picture by Ismar Carvalho

115 million year old Cretaceous rocks where the oldest complete bird from Gondwana was found. Photo by Ismar Carvalho.

On the very rare occasions that scientists uncover Cretaceous birds fossils, the specimens tend to be well-preserved. However until now, the best specimens have primarily been found in China and in the form of 2-D slabs.

This newly discovered, 115-million-year-old fossil retains its 3D shape, revealing a hummingbird-sized animal with long ribbon-like tail feathers. The tail feather are 30 percent longer than the length of the main skeleton and boast a row of five spots — possible remnants of its original plumage — at the base of the bird’s backside.

The oldest bird from Brazil, found in rocks of 115 million years old. Photo by Ismar Carvalho.

Ismar Carvalho of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and colleagues made the discovery, which was reported today in Nature Communications

Ismar Carvalho and Fernando Novas describe the fossil discoveries in the Araripe Basin in eastern Brazil.

A video in Spanish illustrates the fossil find.

The post Video: First 3-D bird fossil of South America discovered in Brazil appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

In a recent study, researchers at Harvard and Yale brought out chimpanzees’s inner Julia Child. Photo by Alexandra Rosati

Watch out Tom Colicchio. A chimpanzee might be gunning for your job as judge on “Top Chef.”

A new study shows that our closest primate relatives possess some of the mental skills required to cook and appreciate prepared dishes. The report was published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Cooking involves more than just cracking an egg into a frying pan and holding it over a flame. It requires the premeditation of gathering ingredients and the subsequent patience of tailoring a meal rather than immediately consuming those raw elements.

Plus roasting, stewing and baking increases the energy content within food. An early primeval understanding of these benefits may have fueled the human development of large brains and frames. However, some evolutionary biologists argue that humans originally learned how to master fire for heat and lighting and that cooking came later as a side-effect.

“Thus, understanding when and how this dietary shift occurred is a pressing problem in biology,” says the report from psychologists Felix Warneken of Harvard University and Alexandra Rosati of Yale University. “If the cognitive abilities necessary to engage in cooking are also present in chimpanzees, it would support models in which control of fire rapidly led to cooking.”

So using a batch of nine challenges, Warneken and Rosati tested chimpanzees’ cognitive capacities toward cooking, namely motivation, patience, causal understanding of prepared food and planning. We highlight a subset of the tests below. Each video runs for approximately 20 to 30 seconds:

1. “We’ll have the roasted potatoes.”

Chimps prefer cooked food. Twenty-nine chimps were given the choice between a roasted sweet potato and a raw one, they chose the cooked version 88 percent of the time. The researchers allowed the chimps to taste each option before choosing, which was the case for all of the following tests.

No surprises here, given prior research had shown the same, but this experiment served as the foundation for the more nuanced trials below.

2. “This chef is taking forever…”

This test showed that 16 chimps opted for a cooked sweet potato over a raw one, even if the chimps had to wait a minute to receive the treat.

3. “Let’s cook tonight.”

Next, the chimps learned about the process of cooking via a shell game. The scientists started by presenting raw sweet potatoes to the chimp before tossing the food into a bowl with a false bottom. The researchers shook the bowl and then opened the secret compartment that contained the cooked food. The team performed this switcheroo eight times with a chimp, so it could pair the idea of food preparation — shaking the bowl — with receiving a roasted snack.

The researchers then allowed 23 chimps to choose between food prepared with and without “cooking.” The apes preferred the latter 87 percent of the time.

The real question revolved around whether the primates would cook a meal on their own. This decision would require holding a raw piece of food and then resisting the urge to immediately devour it. That’s a tough choice for chimps, as previous studies show that the apes don’t enjoy giving up their food.

Next, the chimps were given the option of cooking themselves, which they did 85 percent of the time. Additional experiments showed that chimps did the same with raw carrots, but they wouldn’t cook inedible wood chips.

4. “Let’s take a walk over to the kitchen.”

Finally, the researcher tested if 13 chimps had the patience to carry a piece of food across their pen in order to cook it. Four out of five times, the chimps would wait.

The chimps would also store food for up to three minutes in preparation of cooking.

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that apes can plan for the future by saving food for future transformation,” the authors write. “Together, these results indicate that chimpanzees and humans share several of the essential psychological capacities needed to cook food.”

So why don’t chimps cook in the wild? Well, they can’t control flames, so the authors conclude that “the earliest adoption of fire may have led rapidly to the development of cooking, supporting claims that cooking originated early in human evolution.”

The post “No more raw bananas!” Study finds chimps would actually prefer flambé appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A team of scientists scrambles to better understand a gigantic cloud of methane looming over the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest. This single cloud is believed to comprise nearly 10 percent of all methane emissions derived from natural gas in the United States. But its origins remain a mystery.

LEAKING METHANE — An image from a thermal camera as seen on a laptop screen shows a storage tank spewing a significant amount of methane gas next to a natural gas facility near Aztec, New Mexico. The camera is operated by Andrew Thorpe of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo by Shaun Stanley

The Four Corners region of the southwest United States is a magnificent, otherworldly place, marked by red rock vistas, ancient cliff dwellings and sweeping blue sky. The names alone paint a picture of the landscape: The Painted Desert. The Petrified Forest. Monument Valley.

This image shows methane hotspot, highlighted in red, in the Four Corners area. This map shows how much methane emissions varied from average background concentrations from 2003-2009 (dark colors are lower than average; lighter colors are higher. (AP Photo/NASA, JPL-Caltech, University of Michigan)

But billowing above the rust-colored earth is the country’s largest concentration of methane, according to satellite data. That’s because this spot where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet is also home to one of the nation’s most productive natural gas fields and coalbed methane basins. About 10 percent of the country’s estimated methane emissions from natural gas is found in this region, according to recent scientific research and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Methane is odorless, colorless and invisible to the naked eye. Following carbon dioxide, methane ranks as the second most prevalent greenhouse gas emitted by human activity in the United States. But in the short term, atmospheric methane is more than 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide at holding the sun’s heat, according to Colm Sweeney, the lead scientist for the NOAA Earth System Research Lab Aircraft Program.

“It’s a very strong greenhouse gas and traps heat really effectively,” he said. “It’s like putting an inch of insulation in your attic versus putting 100 inches of insulation in your attic with the same amount of CO2.”

TRACKING METHANE — A plane that contains equipment to detect methane levels flies above natural gas production facilities in the San Juan Basin area of New Mexico. Photo by Shaun Stanley

Scientists first realized methane was flooding the Four Corners after a satellite in 2003 detected higher-than normal amounts of the gas. A year earlier, the European Space Agency had launched Envisat, an eight-ton, sun-powered satellite the size of a school bus. While orbiting the planet, its mission was to track ocean temperature and ozone depletion, improving environmental studies.

Onboard was SCIAMACHY, an image spectrometer that monitored gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, including methane, and created novel data maps. For years, the satellite captured images of sunlight reflecting off the Earth’s surface. Absorptions of methane in the data revealed its distribution around the globe.

But one day in April 2012, for reasons still unclear, ESA ground control crews lost all contact with Envisat and its instruments.

The satellite had disappeared, but the data remained.

A startling red spot of methane hovered over the U.S. Southwest, burning brighter than any other hotspot in the United States.

In that data, Christian Frankenberg, a scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, found what he initially thought might be an error. A startling red spot of methane hovered over the U.S. Southwest, burning brighter, he said, than any other hotspot in the United States.

Atmospheric scientist Eric Kort of the University of Michigan plumbed the data further, using satellite images produced between 2003 and 2009. The team collected air samples, conducted on-the-ground observations, performed simulations and analyzed readings before concluding that the methane floating above the Four Corners represented the country’s largest concentration of the gas. In findings they published in October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists also suggested that the EPA was underestimating methane emissions nationwide, including in the Four Corners.

Still, they puzzled over the source of the hotspot.

HOW METHANE KILLED THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE

The Four Corners is part of the San Juan Basin, a region that covers 7,500 square miles and is “the most productive coalbed methane basin in North America,” according to the EPA. For years, oil and gas companies have tapped into this massive energy stash in the middle of the desert. About 60,000 wells are scattered across the area.

Seth Chazanoff of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory conducts final checks on a Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer mounted within an aircraft used to study methane gas emissions in the Four Corners area. Photo by Shaun Stanley

But scientists don’t understand how such massive amounts of methane are getting released into the air. Is it coming from natural sources, like the exposed coal seam jutting above the earth’s surface in parts of the San Juan Basin? Is it coming from open mine shafts or leaking equipment that belongs oil and gas companies? Is it a combination of these factors, or none of these factors?

“The interesting part of the Four Corners is that there’s a lot of stuff coming out of these coal beds. I’m not going to say natural because we’re not sure how much that is going into production is influencing how much seepage is coming up,” Sweeney said.

Methane is generally harmless, but it can be problematic when it exists in extremely dense quantities or confined areas. Under sustained conditions for a long period of time, studies have found that people may have trouble breathing or even lose consciousness.

In cramped spaces like a coal mine, methane is dangerous and can ignite easily. That’s where the term “canary in a coal mine” came from. If a caged canary in a mineshaft stopped singing and died, that signaled that there was too little oxygen and too much methane, carbon monoxide and other gases, and miners needed to get out, stat.

That’s also why coal mines typically pump fresh air into the shaft and use ventilation systems to dilute the gas.

Often when industrial sources emit methane, they also release volatile organic compounds into the air, said Mary Uhl, an environmental protection specialist with the federal Bureau of Land Management. These compounds trigger chemical reactions that create ozone, which can harm people with asthma or respiratory conditions. Ozone levels in the Four Corners hover at 0.071 parts per million, which means they just barely meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s national air quality standards of 0.075 parts per million. And if federal standards drop to 0.065 to 0.070 parts per million, as proposed, the Four Corners would no longer meet the legal rate.

That’s a problem normally seen in urban areas with far more people and cars than what you would find in the Four Corners, Uhl said. “Rural areas of the country haven’t typically bumped up against the federal air quality standard for ozone,” she said.

A reduction in methane emissions would likely reduce volatile organic compounds along with ozone levels, Uhl said.

Data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Graphic by Megan Hickey

In April, a team of scientists traveled to the Four Corners to study methane in this region. They flew five aircraft with equipment designed to detect the gas and drove two research vehicles roughly 3,000 miles — the distance between Los Angeles and Portland, Maine. Ultimately, they collected hundreds of air samples of methane that will be analyzed for 55 different trace gases and two methane isotopes.

Now the scientists are sifting through terabytes of data, searching for answers. Air samples must be analyzed, and maps studied further to identify the origins of the gas.

“This is where the detective work comes in, and where the fun of it comes in,” Sweeney with NOAA said.

It will take months, but Frankenberg said he hopes that the team can produce findings by the end of the year.

“It’s really rare that we get to observe an anomaly like this, but at the same time have measurements on the ground that confirm it,” he said.

NASA CAMERA — Andrew Thorpe of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory powers up a thermal camera imaging system next to a storage tank believed to be leaking methane at a natural gas facility near Aztec, New Mexico. Photo by Shaun Stanley

THE HEALTH FALLOUT

Meanwhile, people who live in the Four Corners have mobilized to address the issue. Residents in the region have long reported respiratory problems. High ozone days when ground-level ozone blankets parts of the region are not uncommon, and lead to frequent emergency room visits.

Community and government leaders have formed the Four Corners Air Quality Group, which meets periodically to figure out how to mitigate the effects of methane and the ozone that its presence aggravates.

San Juan County, which is in the affected area, got a C grade for ozone-related air quality, according to the American Lung Association’s 2015 State of the Air report. But the link between ozone and respiratory problems extends beyond the Four Corners region. Studies have shown that visits to the emergency room for asthma are more frequent on high-ozone days, according to the EPA. Those with asthma may be more sensitive to ozone, this online report states, and “the injury, inflammation, and increased airway reactivity induced by ozone exposure may result in a worsening of a person’s underlying asthma status, increasing the probability of an asthma exacerbation or a requirement for more treatment.”

About 200 people attended a public forum in San Juan County’s city of Farmington in April. Participants included members of the oil and gas industry, the local scientific community, nearby tribal communities and the general public.

Julia Madrid, 31, a baker in Durango, Colorado, was among them. She suffers from lupus and said she has wondered if the region’s air has aggravated her illness. Her mother alerted her to a map of the region’s methane hotspot in the local newspaper. Madrid’s father mined coal, and her brother drilled for oil and gas.

THE TEAM — Personnel from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NOAA, University of Michigan, University of Colorado, Scientific Aviation and Twin Otter International assemble on the tarmac of the Durango-La Plata County Airport prior to their study of methane levels in the Four Corners region. Photo by Shaun Stanley

“If you look at the map, it’s a trip. Just out of nowhere, there’s this giant red spot,” Madrid said. “The data show such high levels of methane. Is that naturally occurring, or is it something we’re doing to the environment?”

Frankenberg still speaks with nostalgia about the lost satellite and the promise it held. A Japanese satellite tracks methane from space, but doesn’t produce the same type of images like the old satellite did. Meanwhile, Europe is scheduled to launch a new satellite instrument in 2016 that will measure methane, ozone and other gases in the atmosphere with more precision. He hopes the new data will pick up where SCIAMACHY left off.

“With satellites, you have global coverage,” Kort said. “There’s a real power in that. You can look in places you didn’t know you needed to look.”

The post Why is there a huge methane hotspot in the American Southwest? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Cinematographer Cameron Hickey films James Koninga performing a field necropsy of a Mastomys Natalensis rat near Kenema Sierra Leone. Miles O’Brien and team traveled to Sierra Leone to report on the science, medicine and human spirit behind the efforts to stop the disease. Photo by Miles O’Brien

Ebola has taken the lives of 11,000 people and sickened another 26,000. But scientists know less than you might think about the origins of the virus or how it made its leap to humans.

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For this week’s Shortwave podcast, we interview PBS NewsHour Science correspondent Miles O’Brien about his trip to the heart of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. He discusses the scientists who study and track the disease and the critical role that social media can play in containing an outbreak. On next week’s Shortwave, we’ll talk about the human stories from his reporting.

“These things are coming to our doorsteps,” Miles says of Ebola and Lassa fever. “Whether we like it or not.”

Miles O’Brien’s four-part series on Ebola will begin on tomorrow’s NewsHour. Watch a preview here:

The post What scientists still don’t know about Ebola might surprise you appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: The Pentagon today gave new information about that scare over live anthrax samples. Officials said 51 labs in 17 states, plus Washington, D.C., and three foreign countries received the suspected live spores. That’s a larger number than what was previously disclosed.

At a news conference today, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work sought to reassure the public.

ROBERT WORK, Deputy Secretary of Defense: We continue to work with the CDC to ensure that all possible safeguards are taken to prevent exposure at the labs in question and that any worker that might have had risk of exposure, even to these low-concentrated samples, they are closely monitored.

We know of no risk to the general public from these samples. To provide context, the concentration of these samples are too low to infect the average healthy individual. Everyone in the Department of Defense takes this issue very seriously, because it is a matter of public health and also the health of all of the members of our department.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Joining me now to tell us more about what happened and the response is Nancy Youssef. She’s the senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast.

Nancy, welcome back to the program.

So, many more samples of anthrax were sent out to these labs than was known before. Why is this coming out in bits and pieces like this?

NANCY YOUSSEF, The Daily Beast: Well, part of it is that it takes several days to determine which samples were sent out that were positive and which were negative.

This is out of 400 lots, and from each lot comes several scores of samples that are sent to various labs, and so they’re going through lot by lot and doing testing. The number that we’re giving is only out of four lots, 1 percent. And in 100 percent of the cases that have tested so far, it has come back positive for anthrax.

And so it portends of a lot more laboratories and states coming up as recipients of live anthrax.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So there could be more coming out, is what you’re saying?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Yes, that’s right. The briefing that you showed today, they said it repeatedly to anticipate more.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, tell us, what is it — they said today that so far no one has been infected. Are they certain of that and what are they saying about the danger to the public?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, they’re saying no one has been infected, but they’re also giving antibiotics to 31 personnel, nine of them here, 22 overseas, as a precautionary measure.

And so there is some concern on that point. But to the public, it doesn’t appear that there was any danger because these are samples that are sent to laboratories, laboratories often that — whose technicians are vaccinated, whose facilities are well protected for such measures.

And so the danger is not so much to the public in terms of getting anthrax through those shipments, but the idea of live anthrax being sent out to an untold number of laboratories, states and workers.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So why is it being shipped out to so many places?

NANCY YOUSSEF: So, what happened after the anthrax letter scare of 2001, in which powdered anthrax was sent to Senator Daschle and a number of news agencies, is there was a real uptick in funding for research on anthrax and detection methods, because there was a fear that this was going to be an external threat, a form of bioterrorism.

As it turns out, it was an internal threat. And so the DOD keeps these spores, if you will, provides them to these laboratories for the purpose of doing detection research, other kinds of research to ensure that places can prevent anthrax from being brought in.

For example, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency was one of the ones to receive live anthrax, and they use that to detect — to make sure that those coming to the Pentagon are not bringing in live anthrax with them.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And just quickly, finally, Nancy, are they any closer to understanding why this happened, what was the lapse?

NANCY YOUSSEF: No.

And, in fact, today’s press conference suggested that we’re further away from answers. They said that they had methods in place to make sure that live anthrax didn’t go out. And yet, because there is no standard practice, that everybody sort of has their own way of determining what’s accepted, and the fact that 100 percent of the cases they have tested so far showed up positive, it suggests that at the minimum there was a fundamental flaw in their prevention methods.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Nancy Youssef with The Daily Beast, thank you for following this for us.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Thank you.

The post Number of labs mistakenly shipped live anthrax by the military grows appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A volunteer receives an Ebola vaccine in Sierra Leone. Thousands of these voluntary immunizations have been tested so far in the West African nation. Photo by Cameron Hickey.

The quest for an Ebola vaccine has been a journey filled with excruciating delays and mad dashes. The latest outbreak in West Africa caused governments and drug companies to jumpstart research that had languished back when the threat of Ebola wasn’t big enough to sustain a commercial market. (Prior to 2013, the virus had sickened fewer than 2,300 people in known history). Human safety trials of two vaccines began last summer — each being given to a small group of healthy volunteers. When no major side effects were apparent, health officials scrambled to launch larger tests in the countries that were most affected by Ebola.

By the medical world’s standards, these trials are happening at blinding speed, but the success of the containment effort in the winter and spring has made it virtually impossible to prove whether or not the vaccine works. If no one is getting sick, how can you test if the vaccine protects them?

Even so, health officials say the trials will provide some crucial answers. Here’s a breakdown:

What Vaccines Are Being Tested?

Two vaccines are being given to human volunteers in large-scale clinical trials. Both are recombinant vector vaccines, meaning they use a harmless, inactivated virus as a vehicle to deliver a single protein from the outer coating of the Ebola virus. In effect, the vaccines “teach” the immune system to recognize this protein and respond to the real Ebola virus in the future.

One vaccine was developed by the U.S. Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease. It is produced by the GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical company and uses an inactive adenovirus to deliver the Ebola surface protein. The adenovirus typically circulates in chimpanzees, causing mild illness like the common cold. The vaccine goes by the name of cAD3-EBOZ. C is for chimp.

The second vaccine has the equally catchy name of VSV-ZEBOV. It was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It is now licensed by Merck and NewLink Genetics, a biotech company based in Ames, Iowa. In this case, the Ebola protein is hitched to a live vesicular stomatitis virus, which normally circulates in cattle.

Other vaccines are in development, including ones that in theory might protect against multiple strains of Ebola and even the related Marburg virus, which causes an equally serious illness. The cAD3-EBOZ and VSV-ZEBOV vaccines are both designed to protect against the Zaire strain of Ebola, responsible for the current outbreak. It’s not clear how well they might protect against other strains.

Where Are the Trials?

Launched in February, the Partnership for Research on Ebola Vaccines in Liberia (PREVAIL) trial is testing both candidate vaccines. Fifteen-hundred volunteers in Monrovia have received either one of the two vaccines, or an inactive saline solution as a placebo. Participants return at regular intervals for testing to see if their bodies are producing antibodies to Ebola — a telltale sign of immunity. Once officials finish analyzing the results, they plan to expand the trial to include tens of thousands of people. The trial is being run jointly by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the Liberian Ministry of Health (NIAID), although NIAID officials say they are negotiating to expand the trial into Guinea, which is seeing more Ebola cases.

The Sierra Leone Trial to Introduce a Vaccine against Ebola (STRIVE) trial began in April and is giving the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine to volunteers in Sierra Leone. All participants are health workers, including sanitation and burial workers, all of whom are at particularly high risk of infection. Unlike the PREVAIL trial, no one receives a placebo. Instead, some participants receive the vaccine immediately, while others are monitored but don’t get a shot until six months later. The rate of infection in the first group will be compared with those who wait. This trial is run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health and the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences in Freetown. As of this week, they’re about halfway to the goal of vaccinating 6,000 people.

A third trial began in Guinea, in March, using what’s called a “ring” strategy. Health workers give the VSV-ZEBOV vaccine to the contacts of people who fall sick with Ebola, and to close contacts of those contacts. So far more than 2,600 people have been vaccinated — some immediately and a comparison group three weeks later. A ring strategy was used to eradicate smallpox, but it has never been used in a clinical trial for a vaccine.

Health worker prep the Ebola vaccine in Guinea’s capital, Conakry. Here, the outbreak continues with two new cases of Ebola being reported last week in the nation’s largest city. Photo by World Health Organization.

Wait – Why No Placebo in Guinea and Sierra Leone?

A classic experiment randomly gives some participants the treatment – in this case, a vaccine – and others an inactive placebo. “You’ll never really be able to completely prove that it works unless you compare getting it to not getting it,” says Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease. “Even more importantly, if you examine the data periodically, you’ll be able to see that the vaccine might actually be doing more harm than good.”

However, in Guinea and Sierra Leone health officials decided that it wasn’t fair or ethical to ask people at high risk of infection to forgo a vaccine that might protect them. They say they’ll still get valuable answers by giving the vaccine to participants at different times.

Are There Important Differences Between the Vaccines?
Generally speaking, a live-virus vaccine like VSV-ZEBOV will tend to produce a stronger immune response, and will be more likely to induce side effects. However, until the studies are complete, we won’t know whether that’s true of the two Ebola vaccines.

One clear difference is that VSV-ZEBOV, like most live-virus vaccines, is easier to produce in large quantity. That probably makes it better suited for use in an emergency situation where vaccine stocks need to be produced rapidly.

What Do the Results Show So Far?

It’s too soon to draw conclusions, but an early analysis suggests that the vaccine does induce a good immune response, which in theory should protect people against Ebola. An early analysis from the PREVAIL trial, of the first 600 participants, found no significant dangerous side effects. The CDC and the the World Health Organization say the trials in Sierra Leone and Guinea have not detected any serious adverse events, either, although some participants have reported joint pain, mild fever and other flu-like symptoms.

Editor’s Note: NewLink Genetics is based in Ames, Iowa, and not Australia as originally stated. The PBS NewsHour regrets the error.

The post How close is the Ebola vaccine? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

An artist’s rendition of the LightSail sun-propelled mini-satellite floating through space. Photo by The Planetary Society

It’s a bird…it’s a plane…No! It’s a sun-propelled cubesat!

Born in 1999, cubesats are the generation Y of satellites. They’re miniaturized and inexpensive, while doing the stuff of regular satellites — tracking stars and beaming telecommunications. But like any space device, they need fuel to venture through space.

So Bill Nye, the legendary science guy, and a few other star lovers teamed up to make LightSail – the first cubesat pushed by sunbeams. Just as a sail boat harnesses the wind to move, LightSail uses energy from the sun to propel through the sky.

“You could pick almost any destination in the solar system if you have time because you never run out of fuel – the sun shines all the time,” Bill Nye said at a news conference on Wednesday. These satellites hold the possibility of traveling farther distances faster.

Scientists have dreamed about advances in solar sailing technology for decades and are excited by the implications of LightSail. Currently, aerospace researchers are limited by time and money. It is much easier to fund the launch of many small satellites that don’t rely on chemical fuel than to fund a larger, more expensive satellite with a single destination.

LightSail’s canvass is the size of a boxing ring, but prior to the mission’s May 20 launch, scientists packed its massive wings into a container the size of a bread box. Then off it went, hitching a ride from Cape Canaveral into earth’s atmosphere on the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket. To avoid scrambling LightSail’s signals with other cubesats on the trip, its sails remained stowed for the first four weeks in the sky. While the LightSail waited for its debut, it beamed down its geographical position to researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

A camera aboard LightSail, captures a shot of the sun and its own solar wings on June 8, 2015. Photo by The Planetary Society

This past Sunday the sails unfurled after finally bypassing a few early glitches. The researchers tried twice before to deploy the sails without success. A solar-powered-battery motor deploys the sails, but as a precaution, the batteries are designed to shut-down if they get over- or undercharged. During the first two attempts to start the motor, the batteries were offline.

The sails are made of a reflective material called mylar that is barely thicker than a spider web. The sun radiates energy via massless photons. When the sun’s energy, or light, reflects off the mylar sails, the small satellite is pushed forward. At first, the cubesat creeps at an incredibly tiny rate. In 2010, Japan’s first solar spacecraft IKAROS reported a push from the sun of 1/4,000th of a pound of force. But unlike the bursts that normally propel satellites using chemical fuel forward, the momentum from solar radiation is continuous and can accumulate. In other words, this technology may allow small satellites to travel even faster than they are traveling now.

Thomas H. Zurbuchen, an aerospace scientist at the University of Michigan, imagines that the “satellite could fly toward the sun,” much like a boat can sail into the wind. He said that by bending the sails to catch the sun’s energy at different angles, researchers can actually control the satellite’s direction.

Video by The Planetary Society

This recent test launch placed LightSail in Earth’s lower orbit, roughly 400 miles high in the sky. There, it faces “rocky solarwinds,” Zurbuchen explained. “The atmosphere doesn’t stop abruptly,” he said. Instead, atmospheric particles keep hitting the surface of the sails, drawing energy out.

The next launch, in summer of 2016, will likely set sail farther out in space where Earth’s atmospheric particles will have less force and allow for much smoother sailing. LightSail was funded by private citizens via a Kickstarter campaign, but the Planetary Society invites you to be even more involved in the next launch by sending your selfie to space.

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File photo of a marijuana plant outside a clandestine laboratory for drug processing in Zacoalco de Torres, Mexico, on May 24, 2011. The laboratory was used to make synthetic drugs before police raided it. Photo by Alejandro Acosta/Reuters

Synthetic marijuana caused a spike in suspected poisonings earlier this year, according to a new report from the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Poison control hotlines across 48 states documented a 229 percent increase in calls related to synthetic marijuana use between January to May of 2015 compared to the same months in 2014.

Synthetic marijuana or cannabis does not contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient found in naturally growing marijuana leaf, so it isn’t considered an illegal substance. Instead, synthetic marijuana contains chemicals made in a lab that mimic THC’s effect on the brain. These chemicals get sprayed onto a plant, which then gets packaged for sale. Some gas stations and convenience stores sell synthetic marijuana products under street names such as “crazy town” or “Keisha Kole.”

“If you have these products you should throw them away,” said Royal Law of the CDC. “They are marketed as safe, but they are certainly not safe.”

Of the 3,572 calls received between January and May, 15 resulted in death. Other severe symptoms reported include tachycardia — a faster than normal heart rate, drowsiness and vomiting. Less than one-fifth of the callers reported using additional substances, such as alcohol, benzodiazepines and naturally grown marijuana, and only one of the 15 reported deaths involved other drugs.

The states with the biggest increase in adverse effects related to synthetic marijuana use were New York, Alabama, New Jersey, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and Arizona. In April, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a health alert after hospitals reported seeing over 160 patients in nine days who showed adverse effects related to synthetic marijuana use. In April, the number of calls jumped 330 percent from January.

Consistent with studies showing that males are more likely to use illicit substances, men accounted for four out of five poison calls involving synthetic weed. Men also were more likely to have a more severe outcome. Though the victims’ ages ranged from newborns to those in their 70s, the largest percent of suspected poisonings were between 20-29 years old.

Synthetic marijuana chemists are constantly changing their chemical formula to evade specific drug bans. If there is no legislation regarding the sale of these new chemicals, then drug makers can sell their products over the counter without ramifications until the law catches up.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to our special series on stopping Ebola.

The worst of the epidemic has passed, but, recently, there has been a small uptick in cases in West Africa. More than 11,000 people died since the outbreak began; 27,000 were infected over the past year. At its height, experts warned the death toll could climb much higher if certain actions were not taken.

How experts went about doing that is the focus of our piece from science correspondent Miles O’Brien, part of his series Cracking Ebola’s Code, showcasing research and innovation to help treat Ebola or prevent its spread.

MILES O’BRIEN: Ever since Ebola came to Sierra Leone, the traditional Sunday morning run near the beach in Freetown has moved to an urgent cadence.

But the double-time march to end the Ebola crisis is not over. The virus, and the finish line, remain moving targets. And an army of public health workers in command centers here and all around the globe are employing sophisticated modeling technology in new ways to track the trajectory of the epidemic.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: We still have a long, hard road to get to zero. Getting to zero means finding every case of Ebola, every contact, and making sure people are rapidly isolated.

MILES O’BRIEN: Tom Frieden is the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says they would be nowhere near zero if it wasn’t for the power of sophisticated predictions.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: Getting a rapid, robust response in West Africa was incredibly important. The model projected what would happen if we didn’t do that, and providing that information was quite important in galvanizing the energy and progress that we have seen.

MILES O’BRIEN: At an Ebola treatment center run by the International Medical Corps in Kambia, Sierra Leone, it’s time for the shift change briefing.

WOMAN: The patient is in critical condition. He needs a close monitoring when you enter. He has the redness of the eyes, and there’s bleeding from the nose.

MILES O’BRIEN: There are eight patients here, most at death’s doorstep.

Dr. Kashif Islam Siddiqui is one of the physicians taking great risks to treat Ebola patients while they are most contagious.

DR. KASHIF ISLAM SIDDIQUI, International Medical Corps: Although all of them are at the stage where the symptoms are maximum, but still we are hopeful that most of them will make it.

MILES O’BRIEN: It may be the endgame, but it is no time to relax.

DR. PAUL ARMSTRONG, World Health Organization: In the tail end of the epidemic curve, we have had a very bumpy time. So, sometimes, we have several cases per week, and other times we might have one or, in some districts, quite a few districts, it’s zero.

MILES O’BRIEN: Dr. Paul Armstrong is a field coordinator for the World Health Organization. His job here is made more complex by geography.

We are only three miles from the Guinean border. On the other side, there’s a duplicate team making their own plans in a different language. And while there are checkpoints with infrared cameras at the main roads, the border is completely porous most everywhere else.

DR. PAUL ARMSTRONG: So, whenever we have a case, we must work out who are the close contacts of that person who also might be harboring the infection? And if they cross the border, then we must tell our counterparts over there. And because they speak French and we speak English, that adds quite a complexity to it.

MILES O’BRIEN: Meanwhile, 4,800 miles away, at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, they are watching it all unfold, monitoring globally, but acting locally.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: This is the nerve center where we track what’s happening, both the epidemic, the response to the epidemic.

MILES O’BRIEN: But who and what to send, and where? And what is job one? Frieden admits he had a hard time answering those questions. There was no playbook for this.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: One of the tremendous challenges with the Ebola epidemic from August and September was that it was a fog of war situation. We didn’t have a clear sense of what was really happening with the epidemic.

MARTIN MELTZER, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Particularly, as you know, we’re now going to face even more questions about those lines that go up.

MILES O’BRIEN: So, he turned to this man. Martin Meltzer is a senior health economist who heads the modeling team at the CDC.

MARTIN MELTZER: We don’t make up the answer that will make all the decisions for them. We produce some numbers that help them come to a decision.

MILES O’BRIEN: They formulated a model designed to predict how bad things might get. They factored in things like how many cases there are, how long people stay sick, how likely they are to survive, how many will seek care, and how many are accurately diagnosed.

Although there’s a lot of complicated mathematics beneath what you see on the screen, the result is a simple spreadsheet that is shared publicly. Meltzer believes in transparency.

MARTIN MELTZER: These people here, in the red, are where you don’t want your patients to be. They are at home. They’re not isolated. There are still connection and contact with the family and the rest of the community, and there is no safe burial.

MILES O’BRIEN: When Meltzer and his team first ran the numbers, the results took their breath away. The line quickly went off the charts, an exponential train wreck, 1.4 million confirmed Ebola cases predicted in a few months if assistance wasn’t mobilized immediately.

MARTIN MELTZER: Every month of delay more than doubled the number of cases that might occur because of that delay. So, the model ultimately showed, not only the problem, but the need to solve it by going big and going fast.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: And you double and you double and you double. And if you don’t break the back of exponential growth, you get into a situation that’s even more horrific than what we saw.

MILES O’BRIEN: Other disease modelers were equally alarmed. At Northeastern University, Alessandro Vespignani also created an Ebola epidemic model at his Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems. It predicted that, if nothing was done, Ebola would spread way beyond West Africa.

ALESSANDRO VESPIGNANI, Northeastern University: And you will see that, by February, already, you get Africa that is in a very bad situation, but then you start to have places which have serious outbreaks in various places in Europe.

MILES O’BRIEN: Paris, London and New York would have all been coping with serious Ebola outbreaks.

ALESSANDRO VESPIGNANI: This is something that would be really a worst-case scenario. So that would be something that you don’t even want to think about it.

MILES O’BRIEN: Wow. That’s many millions of people afflicted, right?

ALESSANDRO VESPIGNANI: That would be obviously something that of — well, unthinkable.

MILES O’BRIEN: But the CDC makes no apology for sharing the worst-case scenario.

MARTIN MELTZER: I don’t think of terms of scaring or not scaring people. I look at the numbers. I look at them and say, is this a fair representation of what we know at that time?

MILES O’BRIEN: The trickier part was how to respond. The models made it frighteningly clear there was no earthly way to build Ebola treatment centers fast enough to answer the crushing need for isolation care.

So the only way to stop the epidemic was to change human behavior. Public health professionals had to educate people to routinely wash their hands, stop embracing each other, and, most important, refrain from the ritual washing of the dead. If all of this could happen, the model yielded some good news.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: If you got to 70 percent safe burial, safe treatment, you got to a tipping point. And that was really important. That gave us a goal. And then, surprisingly, it showed that, if you did that, it would also come down exponentially as well.

MILES O’BRIEN: In Freetown, Sierra Leone, public health officials, already under siege, were stunned by the grim outlook.

Dr. Mohamed Samai is provost of the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences.

DR. MOHAMED SAMAI, College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences. Well, initially, the first thing is denial. You may — you may just say, it’s impossible. But then, looking at the cultural beliefs of our people, then you will be tempted to believe that that projection will definitely come to pass.

MILES O’BRIEN: In the isolated villages of West Africa, many believe in witchcraft and home remedies. Some are convinced Ebola is a plot by white people, if it exists at all.

Vandy Kamara does outreach for the International Medical Corps.

VANDY KAMARA, International Medical Corps: A lot of the chiefdoms, a lot of the people that we meet in the chiefdoms simply have been challenging us, that Ebola is not real, that it’s just something that was made up, and, yes, they are still in denial.

MILES O’BRIEN: But the grim reality of the epidemic, coupled with an intense public outreach effort, eventually turn the tide. Safe burial practices became common, and people in the densely populated cities of West Africa changed the way they interacted with each other. The predictions of millions of Ebola cases didn’t pan out.

ALESSANDRO VESPIGNANI: We don’t want to be right. I don’t want to have millions of people dying. What we want to say is, look, this is going to happen if we don’t do something.

MILES O’BRIEN: Today, there are hundreds of surplus isolation beds in temporary structures like these all throughout West Africa. Built by the U.S. and other Western nations, they were too late. Fortunately, they are too much, for now. But when modelers run the numbers on the people and the diseases that intersect in this part of the world, they are certain another exponential threat lies ahead.

Miles O’Brien, the PBS NewsHour, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The post Using the power of prediction to halt Ebola in its tracks appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Miles O’Brien reporting in Sierra Leone for the NewsHour’s four-part series, Cracking Ebola’s code. Photo by Caleb Hellerman

Some disasters are more transparent than others. As we departed JFK airport on our way to Brussels and ultimately Freetown, Sierra Leone, we flew right over the Rockaways and Broad Channel, NY. Photojournalist Cameron Hickey was sitting right beside me. The two of us had spent a lot of time there in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, shooting a film for the PBS science series NOVA on how a city like New York can guard itself against rising sea level and worsening storms.

Cinematographer Cameron Hickey shoots in the Kroo Bay slum of Freetown, Sierra Leone for Miles O’Brien’s four-part series, Cracking Ebola’s code. Photo by Miles O’Brien

These days, hurricanes don’t sneak up on us, and the damage they create could not be more obvious. The Ebola epidemic is just the opposite. It began very quietly – probably beneath a bat-infested tree in Guinea in December 2013. It spread for months with little notice from the rest of the world. When exponential growth finally took it to a new level of awareness, it still took its toll in a more insidious way.

When I was driving the bustling streets of Kenema, Sierra Leone with Tulane University researcher Lina Moses, I asked her what it was like being in that very spot in the very worst days of the epidemic. She said it looked no different. “It’s not like a hurricane,” said this cyclone-savvy resident of New Orleans. An epidemic takes a human toll but leaves the buildings standing. I guess it’s sort of like a neutron bomb — designed to kill people but spare the structures.

That said, there are many clues to the horror here in West Africa. It starts the moment you get off the plane. A big cooler filled with chlorine-spiked water greeted us as we walked across the ramp from our Brussels Airlines Airbus A330. It was the first of dozens of hand washings that we would log in our ten day journey to Sierra Leone and Liberia. No one enters a building without thoroughly dousing his or her hands with chlorine and water.

A handwashing station outside the airport in Sierra Leone. Photo by Miles O’Brien

Hand washing is like clapping; it takes two to tango, and as an arm amputee, neither are my strongest suit. As I approached the jug of chlorine at the airport, I was greeted by a fellow traveler, a Sierra Leonian returning home, who offered me his cleaned hand as an assist. We washed my hand together as he welcomed me to his country with a smile.

As we made our way in through immigration, there were more signs of what has transpired here — all kinds of warnings about what the disease looks like and how to avoid getting it. And then we encountered the first of dozens of infrared temperature takings. Every time I washed my hand, I got a reading. The temperature taker customarily tells you what your number is, so throughout the next 10 days, I knew exactly how hot I was.

Getting around Sierra Leone was easier in ways I didn’t expect — there’s actually a pretty good network of roads outside of Freetown that connect the major cities. But it was difficult in ways I didn’t expect either. There is no bridge across Tagrin Bay, which separates the airport from the capital city, so a drive from the airport to the center of Freetown takes more than three hours. The only practical way to get to town is to hop on a ferry. It’s about a 30-minute ride, which we would end up taking four times. We began our journey on the good ship Jonathan Good Luck. I was hoping it was an omen, as I knew we would need a lot of “Jonathan” on this trip.

The NewsHour team took this boat from the airport to the capital city. Photo by Miles O’Brien

It turns out our good luck was named Umaru. Umaru Fofana, Esquire to be precise. Our Fixer. We didn’t know it at the time, but we soon discovered he is the most famous journalist in Sierra Leone, and perhaps West Africa. He works as a stringer for BBC and Reuters, and he is an extraordinarily courageous journalist — with scars from a gunshot wound to prove it. He is a rock star.

Umaru Fofana, Esquire, one of the most famous journalists in West Africa, was the team’s fixer for the trip. Photo by Caleb Hellerman

Wherever we went with Umaru, doors and gates opened, stern guards with AK-47s turned to gushy, smiling, fan-boys, and roadblocks became little more than speed bumps. He, along with his driver Mustapha, produced plenty of good luck for us. The honest-to-goodness truth is, on a reporting trip like this, your fixer will make or break you. Umaru made it possible for us to be great.

We said we were interested in shooting some footage of bats — the suspected reservoir species of the Ebola virus. Umaru took us to Victoria Park; a stone’s throw, or perhaps more importantly, a short drone flight, from the Presidential Palace. We were there to get some aerial footage of fruit bats in flight with our trusty unmanned aerial vehicle. The footage we shot in the air and on the ground is fantastic, but in the midst of it, Cameron forgot to keep his mouth shut as he looked toward the sky. I am certain guano does not taste like chicken, but you would have to ask Cameron for the real scoop on that. Given the nature of the story, this little episode seemed a little more serious than the grist for ribbing and humor that it would normally be.

[Watch Video]
A drone operated by cinematographer Cameron Hickey flies through Freetown, Sierra Leone, accompanied by a swarm of bats. Video by Caleb Hellerman

We flew the drone numerous times, and it never ceased to entertain an exponentially growing crowd. In the Kroo Bay slum of Freetown, the word spread like wildfire that a drone would soon be taking flight. Several times, I became worried that a spinning propeller might injure some of the hundreds of curious children who gathered all around us. Fortunately, when we told them to back away, they listened. [Of course, we had the Great Umaru there to assist!] But at the end of each flight, when Cameron would bring the drone down for a safe landing, he would have to grab the craft quickly and hold it above his head while he was mobbed like Charles Lindbergh at Le Bourget in 1927.

Children gather as cinematographer Cameron Hickey flies a drone in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Photo by Miles O’Brien

A crowd gathers as cinematographer Cameron Hickey flies a drone to capture video for the broadcast report. Image by Miles O’Brien

When we decided to fly the drone at a border checkpoint between Sierra Leone and Guinea, Umaru was able to convince the respective heads of immigration on either side of the line to allow the flight. They insisted on meeting me, and the picture I took of them is proof drones can bring people together so long as they’re used with peaceful intent!

Miles captured this photo at the border of Guinea and Sierra Leone with the heads of immigration for both countries. Photo by Miles O’Brien

It is hard for we Americans to understand the depth of poverty in this part of the world. The real killers here are not the virus, but rather the lack of running water, electricity, good housing and opportunity. Ebola can be beaten back with money. We have proven it time and again here in the US. And yet, in the midst of the overwhelming poverty here, I found much happiness and hope.

[Watch Video]
Young men jog down the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone, chanting Ebola 4 Go. Video by Miles O’Brien

When we were on our way to shoot the bat-filled tree in the center of town on our last Sunday in Sierra Leone, we happened upon a large group of young men running in cadence near the beach; chanting “Ebola 4 Go … Ebola 4 Go.” That’s essentially Creole for “Ebola be gone.” I could not help but smile. It filled my heart with joy, despite all I had seen and learned in the hard days before.

The post The real killer in the Ebola epidemic appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Now the last in our series on Ebola in West Africa — tonight, a look at new research to help stop or slow the next outbreak. The best hope may ultimately come from a new vaccine.

Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports, part of his series on Cracking Ebola’s Code.

MILES O’BRIEN: It’s dark and early in Freetown, Sierra Leone. A team of pharmacists is in a nondescript government building preparing the day’s supply of an experimental vaccine against Ebola.

The clock starts running when they take the vaccine out of a very deep freeze. This is likely the coldest spot in the whole country. The vaccine can only be thawed out right before it is injected, or it will lose its potency, and all of this will be a waste of time, money and hope.

So, right now, timing and temperature are absolutely critical. And then it happens.

WOMAN: The power went out.

MILES O’BRIEN: Another reminder of how hard it is to conduct a high-tech vaccine trial in one of the poorest countries on the planet. But they are ready. They have got two backup generators for the building, solar-charged batteries, and, if all else fails, a special container that maintains about 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit for five days without power.

Pharmacist Morrison Jusu is delivering the vaccine three-and-a-half miles across Freetown. After a seemingly endless national nightmare, he carries a cooler full of expectations. He knows much is riding with him.

MORRISON JUSU, STRIVE Trial Research Team: Some people lost family members. And some families were essentially wiped out as a result of this thing. And if this vaccine proves out to be something that prevents such in the future, then it’s — it’s — words cannot describe how much relief that would be to this community.

MILES O’BRIEN: While Jusu and the vaccine are wending their way, a line is growing outside their destination, Freetown’s Connaught Hospital.

The volunteers start showing up before dawn. They are health care workers. This trial is limited to them because they are, by far, the most at risk of contracting Ebola virus disease. Even though there is no evidence the vaccine poses any real danger, they must weigh the rumors and the uncertainties.

MOHAMED SAMBOLA, Vaccine Trial Volunteer (through interpreter): Life is all about risks. But I believe it will be of help in the job that I do.

RUGIATU CONTEH, Vaccine Trial Volunteer (through interpreter): It is a high risk for me. I believe this can protect me from Ebola, and that’s why I came here for this vaccine.

MILES O’BRIEN: It wasn’t always this way. The trial got off to a slow start when it began in April. People were too afraid.

Dr. Mohamed Samai is one of the principal investigators.

DR. MOHAMED SAMAI, College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences: People said the vaccine was the Ebola virus, so, once you get it, you become infected. So, a lot of people were not willing to come forward there in the first week to take the vaccine, because they thought they should wait and see what happens.

MILES O’BRIEN: The vaccine does contain a piece of the Ebola virus, a protein. It’s enough to trick the body into triggering its natural defenses, but won’t give the recipient Ebola virus disease.

On the wall in the lobby of the hospital, a spontaneous memorial to some of the doctors and nurses who died here during the epidemic, a grim reminder of what motivates volunteers like Richard Kanu.

RICHARD KANU, Vaccine Trial Volunteer (through interpreter): I became aware of it through my friends who got the shot three days ago. Since they’re not having any side effects, I decided to come and have a go at it myself, because I feel it will protect me.

MILES O’BRIEN: Kanu works on a team that buries the highly contagious dead. He has been shunned by friends, even forced out of his own home.

RICHARD KANU (through interpreter): I will go back and tell them that I have had the vaccine and they should rest assured that I won’t have the virus. I will probably encourage them to step forward as well.

MILES O’BRIEN: Bad traffic delays Jusu’s ride to the hospital, but, when he arrives, the vaccine isn’t spoiled, and the volunteers are ready. The nursing team doesn’t waste any time prepping for the jabs.

Aruna Thorlie is a chlorine sprayer who disinfects Ebola treatment units.

Have you felt anything different? Did it hurt, anything?

ARUNA THORLIE, Vaccine Trial Volunteer (through interpreter): I feel the same as I did before. I hope and pray that it works.

MILES O’BRIEN: The vaccine is made by Merck. The trial is a partnership between the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the medical college in Freetown.

DR. MOHAMED SAMAI: Once we can document the effectiveness of the vaccine, and we are now sure that it can really protect them, we can move to another stage, where we will look at the community and the population at large.

MILES O’BRIEN: Across the border in Liberia, a separate trial is testing the same vaccine, along with another one made by GlaxoSmithKline. It is open to all and based at this hospital in Monrovia.

In the darkest days of the crisis here in Liberia, a senior doctor and nurse here at Redemption Hospital contracted Ebola virus disease, and they subsequently died. Many of the health care workers here became afraid to come to work and the hospital had to close for a time. In all, 13 members of the hospital staff died here.

DR. MARK KIEH, Redemption Hospital: It was scary. It was confusing

MILES O’BRIEN: DR. Mark Kieh is the site physician for the trial.

So far, there are 1, 500 volunteers. He is carefully watching them for side effects. So far, so good.

DR. MARK KIEH: Those we have seen are expected side effects of fever, muscle pain, pain at the injection sites, some joint pain, some — few people with rashes that resolve over time.

MILES O’BRIEN: The trial is run by Liberia’s Ministry of Health and the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

Its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has intense, intimate understanding of the ravages of Ebola.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: At least in the most recent patient that we took care of, that that’s about as sick as you can get without dying.

MILES O’BRIEN: On March 14, 2015, he suited up to treat a U.S. health care worker who became infected in Sierra Leone, and was airlifted to the NIH hospital outside Washington, where he received the highest level of intensive care possible. It kept him alive while his body mounted its own defense.

It was touch and go for a week, but he survived.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI: All of the people who have recovered from Ebola, even those who have been very ill, it was their immune system that ultimately suppressed and eliminated the virus.

MILES O’BRIEN: This is why Fauci and others are optimistic they have a found a way to stop Ebola its tracks. The human body can create the antibodies to fight off Ebola, but usually not fast enough.

An effective vaccine creates an army of Ebola antibodies that can stop the virus before it stampedes through the body. But here is the ironic rub.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: If we are successful in controlling Ebola, we won’t be successful in determining whether the vaccines are effective at preventing Ebola.

MILES O’BRIEN: Dr. Tom Frieden is director of the CDC. Ebola cases in Liberia are now at zero, and Sierra Leone is close behind.

If no one is getting Ebola, you can’t tell for sure if the vaccine is protective, so they have to rely on other evidence.

DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN: So, the trials under way now will at least tell us whether they’re safe, and they will tell us whether they lead to an immune reaction.

We wish we were further along with the vaccine, but it’s very difficult to do research in the middle of an epidemic.

MILES O’BRIEN: In Freetown, pharmacist Morrison Jusu is among those who scrambled to get this trial under way at all. He is anxious to know if the hard work will pay off.

MORRISON JUSU: We are really looking forward to it being successful, so that someday in the future, we will be able to say, yes, I was a part of that team and I contributed. So, it will be a great feeling then.

MILES O’BRIEN: The answer will have to wait, but no one doubts the vaccine will meet its viral foe someday.

Miles O’Brien, the PBS NewsHour, Freetown, Sierra Leone.

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Incredible news! My lander Philae is awake! http://t.co/VtzAQHx4zT pic.twitter.com/SZqnsnNpUZ

— ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta) June 14, 2015

On Saturday, Philae, the European Space Agency’s comet lander communicated with its team on Earth for the first time since going into hibernation in November of last year.

Philae’s team at the ESA believes that the lander may have been awake for a period of time before it was able to make contact.

Following its seven-month sleep, the lander spoke with its mothership, Rosetta, for 85 seconds, prompting an exchange on Twitter that quickly went viral.

Hello @Philae2014! You’ve had a long sleep, about 7 months!

— ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta) June 14, 2015

.@Philae2014 Need to check you’re fit, healthy and warm enough first @philae2014! Take it easy for now :)

— ESA Rosetta Mission (@ESA_Rosetta) June 14, 2015

Philae is the product of an 11-year space project. Philae’s launcher Rosetta, an unmanned space probe, left Earth in 2004.

Rosetta transmitted its first images from space back to Earth in 2010, and then went into hibernation for nearly three years, according to the Associated Press.

According to CNN, Philae’s anchoring mechanism failed during landing. When Philae settled in a shady spot atop the comet, the comet lander fell asleep after 60 hours of operation drained its solar batteries.

Rosetta had been looking for it ever since.

Philae’s project manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec said Sunday in a press release that the team has been able to assess that Philae is in good condition.

“Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available. The lander is ready for operations,” Ulamec said.

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SASKIA DE MELKER: High on the slopes of the Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii, six people — three men and three women — have been living inside this dome, completely isolated, for the last eight months.

NASA and the University of Hawaii are funding and leading the project known as the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation or HI-SEAS for short. The ultimate goal? To study social interaction among crew on long term space missions, like the one to Mars that NASA hopes to launch in the 2030’s.

SASKIA DE MELKER: And driving up to the site on Mauna Loa, it’s easy to see why they chose this location.

KIM BINSTED: The site is very geologically similar to a young Mars. There’s no signs of human life, there’s no signs of animal life, very little plant or insect life.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Kim Binsted is the principal investigator for the HI-SEAS study. We caught up with her via Skype from her home on the Big Island of Hawaii.

KIM BINSTED: NASA certainly has a lot of technical concerns to consider, but also there’s problems to do with the human side of the equation and that’s what we’re trying to address. So, things like how do you pick a crew so that they’ll continue to work together well over the 2.5 to 3 years of a Mars mission. And how do you support them so that, to be honest, they don’t want to end up wanting to kill each other.

JOCELYN DUNN: You don’t have a lot of privacy and personal time and we all have so much going on.

SASKIA DE MELKER: To test their individual and team behavior, the crew completed numerous daily surveys, tasks, and computer games. They also wore devices called socio-meters that measure the distance between them and the volume of their voices.

KIM BINSTED: If two people are standing very close to each other, the volume of their voices is very high, you might assume they’re having a fight. And similarly if two people have never come near each other, then maybe they’re avoiding each other. Those might be warning signs for a problem that is developing amongst the crew.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Their communication with the outside world was limited and on a 20-minute time delay. But the crew did make and share periodic video diaries of their experiences.

SOPHIE MILAM: So, one disadvantage would be the food.

SASKIA DE MELKER: They were faced with a number of conditions similar to those that astronauts encounter on space missions.

JOCELYN DUNN: So, here for example is the green and red bell pepper and then we just put hot water and soak them for a while to rehydrate.

SASKIA DE MELKER: They could only eat freeze dried and shelf stable foods.

JOCELYN DUNN: On this side we have one of each of our meats. So we have sausage, beef, chicken, turkey.

ZAK WILSON: Here we have our electrical system for the hab.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Life in the dome is powered by solar panels, and resources, including water, were restricted.

JOCELYN DUNN: So, we have a timer here that helps us keep track of how many seconds and minutes we spend in the shower.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Each person was allowed just 8 minutes of shower time a week.

ZAK WILSON: Mission support this is HI-SEAS engineer Zak and I’m requesting assistance.

SASKIA DE MELKER: On the rare occasions when they went outside, crew members had to first request approval from ‘Ground Control’ and wear spacesuits while exploring the volcano’s Mars-like landscape.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Most of the time though they were confined to the 1000-feet-square feet dome.

PARTICIPANT: Here you have the only window of the habitat.

MARTHA LENIO: We’re doing a type of composting that’s called Bokashi.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Each person had their own individual project to keep them busy.

NEIL SCHEIBELHUT: I do all my testing in here in the lab and Martha’s actually got her garden here.

SASKIA DE MELKER: From research on microbiology and hydroponics to work on robotics and 3D printing. And then there were daily group routines, including exercising together.

ALLEN MIRKADYROV: Besides dinners we also make excellent desserts.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Cooking together — perhaps the biggest challenge for crew members wasn’t being separated from the rest of the world, but the inability to separate from each other.

ALLEN MIRKADYROV: There’s really no place in the hab where you can stand and not be heard.

ALLEN MIRKADYROV: Zak, how’s my coffee coming?

ZAK WILSON: It’s not quite ready yet, but do you want cream or sugar?

ALLEN MIRKADYROV: Both please.

SASKIA DE MELKER: Yesterday, the simulation came to an end. To celebrate the crew took a jump back to earth. And, they’re all still smiling.

KIM BINSTED: Even when you choose very low drama people and we’re not a reality show, problems will arise. So what we’re looking for is not a way to eliminate all problems from happening but a way to choose people and to train people so that they know how to respond to conflict and can do that in a really resilient way.

SASKIA DE MELKER: It will take some time before all  the observations and data collected during the study will be synthesized. But another HI-SEAS experiment will be starting soon. In August, a new crew of six will enter the dome. This time for an entire year.

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A collection of confiscated cat rugs held by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at their repository in Commerce City, Colorado. Photo by Rick Wilking/Reuters

The Internet offers access to an elephant’s trumpet, a tiger’s roar and a rhino’s grumbling squeal, and now it is helping to save these animals from a treacherous network of illegal poachers and traders.
 
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used data from around the world to identify the key perpetrators in wildlife trafficking. They found that illegal poaching in just six countries could account for 89 to 98 percent of the global trade of elephants, tigers and rhinos. By tracking these networks, the scientists spot the countries that need stronger public awareness and law enforcement against illegal trafficking.
 
The study relied on HealthMap: Wildlife Trade, an online repository where conservation organizations and local news sites report the illegal trafficking of animals. Researchers analyzed the illegal shipments of 232 elephants, 165 rhinos and 108 tigers that happened from August 2010 to December 2013.
 
Nikkita Patel, the project’s manager, got the idea from other areas of research that have used online resources to find the best routes to uncover terrorist networks and trace drug trafficking.
 

Countries serving as exporters, importers or intermediaries vary for each animal, according to the June 15 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Poachers take indirect routes to sneak past security checkpoints, increasing the number of countries involved in trafficking. China plays the biggest role in the trafficking for all three animals.
 
Patel laments this may be due to the high demand for wildlife products – such as ivory – in Asian cultures. The United States also made the list as a dominant player for elephant trafficking, suggesting a need for tighter regulation on ivory trade at American shores.
 
Culture drives a lot of the demand for wildlife products. Tigers get turned into rugs or wine in Guilin, China. Elephants throughout Africa are slaughtered to make ivory jewelry, and South African rhinos are butchered for their mythical ‘cancer curing’ horns.
 
“Some people don’t realize the animal has to be killed for ivory to be extracted and that they are causing harm to elephants. They may think the tusks just fall out,” Patel said. “More education about what is actually happening and the backstory of these animals would decrease these demands [for illegal products].”
 
Current attempts to disrupt wildlife trafficking include security checkpoints with sniffer dogs and educational campaigns. China and many other countries sponsor ivory crushing demonstrations to raise awareness of the issue. For instance, the US Fish and Wildlife Service will crush one ton of ivory in Time Square on June 19. Patel’s research provides a tool to help pinpoint where enforcement and education are most needed. But she also feels confident that future technology will fortify checkpoints and monitor populations of endangered species. Drones are already scanning fields for poachers and keeping tabs on the numbers of endangered black footed ferret in Montana.
 
“If trafficking continues at this rate we aren’t going to have wildlife for future generations,” Patel said.

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Powered by bacteria and evaporation, artificial muscles — called HYDRAs — lift a small pole. Photo by Xi Chen

Water, plastic and bacterial spores might become the power source of the future. The spores soak up moisture and release vapor, and researchers at Columbia University have built a device to tap the energy released by this evaporation.

“Evaporation is a big source of power in nature, and it’s been neglected because there isn’t a clear demonstration of how to use it yet,” said Columbia University biologist Ozgur Sahin, who led the study published June 16 in Nature Communications.

When a bacterial spore takes on water, it swells, which is known as hygroscopy. But upon entering a drier climate, the spore dehydrates and shrinks back to its original size. The switch from bloated to shriveled can happen within a fraction of a second.

Sahin and colleagues placed these sponge-like spores onto long pieces of kapton tape, which are commonly used by engineers. When the tape gets exposed to water or humidity, the spores expand and the tape stretches. As the spores dry, the tape scrunches together. In the end, this stretching and contracting process resembles a muscle — hence the name “hygroscopy driven artificial muscle” or HYDRA.

Depending on what the tape is attached to, the spores can pack a punch. These microbes can turn a rotor to drive a slow car. The evaporation engines can also pull on shudders or lift a pole weighing three thousandths of an ounce.

Generating power from steam isn’t new. The steam engine was invented in 1698, and the evaporation-powered dippy the bird stole the hearts of children in 1945. But the steam engine needs coal, and good ole’ dippy needs fancy chemicals to get moving. Sahin’s new technology only needs an open water source, making it a great option for off-the-grid applications. It cost Sahin’s lab roughly $5 to make each of their initial fuel-free prototypes.

Sahin acknowledges the technology isn’t quite there yet. The team paired the spore engine with a generator, the same device that turns the mechanical energy of a windmill into electricity. But the sweaty microbes only generate electricity on the scale of microwatts — about enough to run a flashing LED light. Bacterial spores could also be difficult to kill if left uncontrolled and free to multiply in the environment. But with the right design, evaporation driven engines could charge a battery or power a robot, the team reports.

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Aspartame has a bad rap. It has been suspected of causing cancer and depression. However, a new video from the American Chemical Society pulls together the latest research on the food additive, and it’s not as bad as you might think.

This four-minute clip, which mentions several peer-reviewed studies, is part of the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Reactions science video series. The American Chemical Society is a congressionally chartered, independent organization of chemists that publishes about 50 academic journals.

Questions about aspartame relate to its metabolites – the chemical products created when our bodies digest the sugar substitute. Critics have raised concerns about the metabolites methanol and phenylalanine.

Over time, methanol can produce the known carcinogen formaldehyde. While this might seem scary, the video claims that the body actually produces and uses 1,000 times more formaldehyde than you could consume through aspartame. After helping to make important proteins, formaldehyde gets turned into formic acid and exits the body through urine.

Some studies have shown that aspartame-made phenylalanine isn’t seeping into our brains and causing depression. Milk contains eight times more phenylalanine than aspartame, meaning your morning bowl of Fiber One cereal — which carries the chemical too — isn’t likely bringing you down. Aside from milk and cereals, aspartame is also found in some types of chewing gums, nutritional bars, yogurts and other foods.

Moreover, the video says recent studies debunk the idea that some people are hypersensitive to aspartame or that it causes cognitive impairments.

It is unlikely that a person could come close to reaching the aspartame levels deemed unacceptable by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. To do so, you’d have to consume 97 aspartame sugar packets or more than 17 cans of diet soda in less than 24 hours.

What this video doesn’t address is the emerging but limited research raising questions about how artificial sweeteners affect gut bacteria and glucose intolerance.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify the role the American Chemical Society plays in the scientific community and to highlight recent studies about other artificial sweeteners, namely saccharin. The headline has been updated to reflect the specific studies on aspartame discussed in the video.

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After Hurricane Sandy hit Assateague Island National Seashore in 2012, parts of the park’s Bayside Picnic Area and nearby parking were swept out to sea with the rising waters and storm surge. A new study issued by climate specialists with the National Park Service projects how rising temperatures fed by climate change could affect the park system’s visitorship for years to come. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service/Flickr

A new study in the journal PLOS ONE explores how climate change and warming temperatures could alter how many people visit U.S. national parks.

Roughly 80 percent of parks already are experiencing extremely warm conditions, says Nicholas Fisichelli, an ecologist for the National Parks Service’s climate adaptation team and the study’s lead author. These warming conditions often translate to extended seasons for the national parks. That means more people may want to see the parks, but it also could mean that the park trails, infrastructure and natural resources could face more wear and tear from increased visitor traffic.

For this study, Fisichelli and other researchers compiled 10 years of available visitation data from 340 national parks. That included at least 8,000 annual visits from 1979 to 2013.

After comparing these historical visitor rates with average monthly temperatures, the researchers then projected the number of potential future visits between 2041 and 2060 to see how projected rising temperatures might influence future attendance.

Some parks would likely see an increase in visitorship with rising temperatures — those locations lie primarily in the northern reaches of the United States, such as Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, Acadia National Park in Maine and the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

But hotter weather in places that already are naturally warm, such as Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, would actually become so uncomfortable that visitorship would decrease, Fisichelli said. According to this study, the tipping point is when the average monthly temperature reaches about 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

The idea for the study surfaced last spring, after the researchers corresponded with park managers to discuss how climate change was impacting the parks and how best to respond.

“You may not be able to achieve your [attendance] goals the way you could in the old days with a changing climate,” said Gregor Schuurman, an ecologist on the NPS Climate Change Response program and one of the study’s authors. “If you’re going to have a productive visitors season, you can’t ignore a melting glacier or flooding access road.”

Combined, America’s national parks offer significant value, especially for neighboring towns. In 2013 alone, they attracted 273 million visits, sustained 238,000 jobs and brought $14.6 billion in tourist dollars to local communities, the study said.

Several parks already are trying out new infrastructure and staffing strategies in order to adapt to the demands of climate change.

Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland is one of them. Sitting at current sea level and with predictions of rising ocean waters and more powerful storm surges for years to come as a result of climate change, the park has little choice, says Bill Hulsander, the park’s chief of resources management.

“It’s something that’s in the forefront of our minds at Assateague almost on a daily basis,” Hulsander said.

After Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern U.S. coastline in October 2012, parking lot spaces on Assateague Island were swept into the ocean while four feet of sand buried other parts of the park, he said.

This fall, the park plans to launch mobile infrastructure, such as bathrooms and changing stations, as well as using crushed clamshells to create new parking space. That way, in the event of a hurricane, park staff can transport these items to the mainland, and don’t have to worry about parking lot asphalt drifting into the waters off Assateague Island.

“We need less of a place-based approach for infrastructure,” Huslander said. “We’re trying to allow this island to move as it wants to move or needs to move to keep pace with rising sea level.”

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