An oblique view of a massive rift in the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf is shown in this November 10, 2016 photo taken by scientists on NASA’s IceBridge mission in Antarctica. Photo by John Sonntag/NASA/Handout via REUTERS

After months of expectation, a gigantic piece of the Larsen C ice shelf broke off Antarctica sometime between Monday and Wednesday, scientists at the Swansea University-led Midas project announced Wednesday. The final split was detected by NASA’s Aqua satellite and freed a trillion ton iceberg into the waters of the Weddell Sea.

“The iceberg is one of the largest recorded and its future progress is difficult to predict. It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments,” Adrian Luckman, lead investigator of the MIDAS project, said in a statement. “Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters.”

The crack in the Larsen C ice shelf has been growing for years. From 2011 to 2015, it expanded by more than 18 miles, and then last year, increased by another 13 miles. Last month, scientists at the Midas project said the iceberg was “hanging by a thread.”

A map showing the rift in the Larsen C ice shelf that led to the calving of an iceberg on the Antarctic Peninsula. Illustration by Reuters

Because the ice shelf was already floating in the ocean, its resulting iceberg will not change sea levels if it melts. However, the iceberg does pose a threat to mariners sailing through the South Atlantic, which is where sea currents will likely carry the floating behemoth.

Another main concern revolves around the ice left behind. If the remaining ice shelf completely shatters, the event would allow glaciers on the land to flow into the ocean, which would raise sea levels. For now the ice shelf will naturally regrow, but Luckman said that computer models suggest the ice shelf “will be less stable.” Plus, any future collapse remains years or decades away, he said.

Robert Kunzig, National Geographic’s senior environment editor, joins Hari Sreenivasan, to discuss the Larsen C Ice Shelf.

Approximately the size of Delaware, almost 2,200 square miles, Larsen C is the third gigantic ice shelf to collapse from this section of Antarctica since 1995. On average, the Larsen C iceberg will be 625 feet thick across its immense expanse, but up to 695 feet of its ice may be hidden below the water’s surface. Break out the sleds, because that’s big enough to cover all 50 states in 4.6 inches of ice.

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Farewell shot of Uranus’ crescent as Voyager 2 departed the icy giant on January 25, 1986. Photo by NASA

Voyager 2, NASA’s legendary interstellar probe, continues to deliver.

Thirty-one years after the spacecraft cruised past Uranus, researchers have capitalized on the spacecraft’s recordings to take a fresh look at the icy giant’s magnetosphere.

Typically, a planet’s magnetic field stays sturdy — a stalwart shield against the sun’s radiation. But Uranus’ magnetosphere swivels, switching its invisible armor on-and-off, according to new work from the Georgia Institute of Technology. While “quirky” barely begins to describe these magnetic forces, Uranus’ situation may signify the norm across the cosmos and be key to refining our search for habitable worlds.

“The scientific community wants to go back to Uranus, in light of all these exoplanet discoveries,” Carol Paty, a Georgia Tech planetary scientist who led the project, told NewsHour. “A large fraction of these exoplanets are Uranus, Neptune in size.”

That’s fascinating because of Uranus’ many contrasts with Earth. Our planet spins like a top, as it goes around the sun, much like the other planets in the solar system. Uranus rotates on its side like a paddle boat wheel, meaning one of its two poles face the sun for much of the year.

Stand on Uranus’ northern hemisphere on a summer solstice, and the sun wouldn’t set. It’d circle overhead like an orb on a crib mobile. Day by day during the summer — which lasts 21 years — the sun would drop until you experienced what seemed like an Earth day, with an equal amount of daytime and nighttime, on the autumn equinox. Push forward in time, and suddenly the tilt is against you. Everyday, you see fainter and fainter hints of sun rays on the horizon, until the winter solstice, when your day and night are completely black.

The seasons of Uranus. Image by Arizona State University

In 1986, Voyager 2 took a snapshot of Uranus’ magnetosphere. It, too, defied expectations.

On Earth, the magnetosphere emanates, like from any magnet with two poles, invisible and shaped like butterfly wings. This alignment keeps the solar wind out of our atmosphere, except at the poles, where pass through the field’s cusp and mingle with the atmosphere to create auroras.

Schematic illustration of the invisible magnetic field lines generated by the Earth, represented as a dipole magnet field. In actuality, our magnetic shield is squeezed in closer to Earth on the Sun-facing side and extremely elongated on the night-side due to the solar wind. Illustration by Peter Reid, The University of Edinburgh. Caption by NASA

But, Voyager 2 found Uranus’ magnetic fields were lopsided — its “wings” twisted off-center by 60 degrees.

Paty wondered what this off-kilter arrangement might mean for the planet’s ability to buffer solar wind, as the planet orbits the sun and rotates through its 17-hour day. So, she and her graduate student Xin Cao built a computer simulation, based primarily on Voyager 2’s snapshot of Uranus’ magnetosphere.

“They used a supercomputing approach, rather than a pen-and-paper approach,” said Krista Soderlund, a planetary fluid dynamicist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics who wasn’t involved in the project. Soderlund said by doing so, the model painted a high-resolution picture of the chemical ions in Uranus atmosphere, which were detected when Voyager 2 came within 50,600 miles the planet’s clouds.

Paty and Cao’s model predicted that Uranus’ magnetosphere tumbles “very fast, like a child cartwheeling down a hill head over heels.” As a consequence, the magnetosphere is sometimes in position to protect the planet from solar wind. At other times, it can’t. Its buffering ability switches on and off.

This bizarre setup excites geophysicists like Soderlund because of what it might reveal about Uranus’ insides. Earth’s magnetosphere is thought to be generated by liquid metal coursing around the planet’s solid inner core. This fluid movement, called convection, is partially dictated by the Earth’s rotation and causes the metal to conduct electricity, like a dynamo. The result is a giant electromagnet and the magnetosphere.

Uranus’ weird magnetosphere suggests its liquid dynamo is thin and relatively close to the planet’s surface, Soderlund said. In 2013, her team argued the chemical composition of the liquid layer may also play a part, especially given Uranus’ dynamo may be composed of charged water rather than liquid metal.

“We put out this idea that Uranus and Neptune would have a much more vigorous convection going on, that’ll be less influenced by the planet’s rotation,” Soderlund said. “You’ll have more messy convection happening in the interior, which leads to a messier magnetic field structure.”

An infrared composite image of the two hemispheres of Uranus, obtained with Keck Telescope, showing the planet’s rings and 99 degree tilt. Photo by Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison/W.W. Keck Observatory

Soderlund and others plan to use Paty’s model to refine their assessments about Uranus.

“It’s good timing to have this scientific study published about Uranus, at the same time NASA is looking into possibly proposing a mission to go back,” said University of Iowa space physicist George Hospodarsky, who wasn’t involved in Paty’s project. Two weeks ago, NASA and the European Space Agency completed a study about future missions to Uranus and Neptune, with an eye toward possibly sending an orbiter to the ice giants.

Theses mission could prove whether or not Paty’s model is accurate, Hospodarsky said, but also answer a bigger question about the cosmos. He said astrophysicists have been slowly building a unified model of magnetospheres, based on data from missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and Earth.

“That’s actually one of the reasons they do these models for some of the outer planets,” Hospodarsky said. “If you have a model, and the model is good, it should really work for Earth, Jupiter, Saturn — whatever planet you apply it to.”

Such a model could explain why Earth’s magnetosphere is so ideal for supporting life — without it, we’d be charred to death by solar wind — or why Mars lacks one.

That can come in handy for predicting if an exoplanet has a suitable magnetosphere for habitation, in case we ever develop the technology to visit one.

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New research shows that everyone is prone to sharing misinformation on social media, when dealing with a neverending stream of updates. Photo by via Adobe

Echo chambers, confirmation bias and ignorance. When explaining why fake news spreads on social media, we can be quick to blame the personal qualities of other people. But don’t be so hasty to point the finger at others for the popularity of false information on Facebook and Twitter. New research shows that everyone is prone to sharing less-than-truthful news when dealing with a never-ending stream of updates.

The scientists found that when the news cycle is packed to the brim, people will struggle to discriminate between fact-based stories and fake news on social media. This consequence is inherently built into how social media platforms work, according to the study published Monday in Nature Human Behavior, and may also explain popularity bias in modern journalism.

“It’s not so much that individuals lose their ability distinguish low-quality information from high-quality information,” said Filippo Menczer, the project’s leader and director of Indiana University’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. “The system as a whole is incapable of making that discrimination.”

Menczer’s team has spent the last seven years looking into the internet’s surge of fake news, namely by picking apart why things go viral in the first place. His team has investigated everything from the rise of political Twitter bots to why friends love echo chambers.

Their newest study began with one of their earliest findings: Some things become viral on the internet even when you remove the notion of quality. The originality of a meme, the beauty of picture or the truthfulness of a statement did not fully dictate its popularity. Other researchers made similar observations, for instance, if you find out your friends like a song, you’ll be more likely to like it, too. So, sometimes in a social world, people occasionally follow the masses.

Menczer’s latest exercise explored the opposite scenario. They built a mathematical model to describe a social media landscape where quality not only exists in every post, but is valued. “We make the assumption that people would prefer to share things that are truthful or accurate over things that are fake or false or misleading,” Menczer said.

Their model predicted that people can discriminate truthful from false information, but only when the volume of information flowing through a social media feed is low. Their prediction was subsequently backed by data that showed how often people shared verified news versus fake news on Facebook. In other words, normal people become too distracted by a large deluge of information to take the time to fact check or find the most accurate stories.

When you see 10 stories in your Facebook feed, you can still tell when five are crap and five are good. But when you’re flooded with posts, such as after a mass shooting or political hearing, and both your feed and your brain can only hold so many stories at one time, “there are a hundred more stories you’re not seeing that are much better than those five that you thought were good,” Menczer said, according to their model. So, irrespective of echo chambers and confirmation bias, people are not sharing the most verified stories in part because they never even read them.

This quality is problematic for social media right now because of an enormous amount of content is generated by people who are trying to manipulate the platforms, especially through bots that automatically “like” or “share” stories.

Everyone, including journalists, celebrities and politicians, are vulnerable to being misinformed through these bots or click farms, Menczer said, because they create false trends in popularity, and by association, the news cycle.

“If you think that something is going viral on Twitter or on Facebook, you’re going to pay attention to it,” Menczer said. “Bots are retweeting links from or mentioning influential people to induce them to pay attention.”

The solution, Menczer said, would be limiting how much misinformation lands on a social media platform in the first place. This particular problem with information overload outlined by this study cannot be solved by more fact checking by individuals.

“Platforms need to figure out how to detect these abuse efforts,” Menczer said. “If there is less junk around, then people would be able to focus on actual information shared by actual people.”

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Cats first attempted to coexist with humans 9,000 years ago in the Near East Photo by dimazel/via Adobe

Cats are so nice, they conquered the world twice. That’s the takeaway from a new genetics-based analysis of how cats became domesticated and spread across ancient communities. Cats first attempted to coexist with humans 9,000 years ago in the Near East, based on the results published Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution, but did not gain a solid foothold until thousands of years later, when a second wave stormed out of Africa. The study also reveals where tabby cats and their blotched fur originated, though researchers argue ancient peoples started the practice of keeping felines for practical reasons — hunting vermin — rather than aesthetic ones.

What they studied

• A European team of geneticists and archaeologists collected and examined DNA from the bones and dental remains of 209 ancient and modern cats.
• Specimens came from archaeological sites across Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
• The remains spanned 9,000 years, from Mesolithic period to the 20th century, and covered the five known species of wildcats: Near Eastern wildcat, central Asian wildcat, European wildcat, southern African wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Of these five, only the Near Eastern wildcat was ultimately tamed by humans.
• The team analyzed DNA from mitochondria, a structure known as the cell’s powerhouse, which contains its own separate genetic code. Mitochondrial DNA in most species is inherited through mothers and not fathers. It’s a popular tool for studying how populations migrate over time.

What they found

• The DNA analysis showed that domesticated cats started in 8,000 B.C. in Anatolia — modern-day Turkey — with Near Eastern wildcats, which had been suggested by a study published in 2007. The adoption of cats happened many millennia after canines, with earliest evidence of dog domestication dating to 33,000 years ago.
• Cats likely became friends with humans due to the rise of agriculture in this region. Farmers stored grain. Grain attracted mice. Mice drew in the cats, and then farmer began keeping cats for pest control.
• But then, cats sort of got stuck. Domesticated cats did not spread outside of Anatolia and into eastern Europe, particularly Bulgaria and Romania, for another 3,600 years.
• A second wave of domestication pushed Near Eastern wildcats as far north as Viking territory several thousand years later. These cats dispersed from Egypt, from 8th century B.C. to 5th century A.D, into Europe. This lineage also moved to East, as far as Iran, during this time.
• The cats moved along the Mediterranean trade routes during Classical antiquity. One of the oldest records of cats mingling with humans comes from an early farming village on Cyprus from 7,500 B.C., where humans and cats were buried together.
• Domesticated cats continued to conquer Europe, spreading into the Viking trading port of Ralswiek in present-day Germany on the Baltic Sea by 7th century A.D.
• The emergence of tabby cats supports the idea that the cats were not domesticated for their pleasurable looks. The team’s DNA analysis revealed the blotched fur of tabbys first arose in western Turkey in the Middle Ages, around the 14th century. This fur pattern spread across Europe by the 19th century, thanks to cat breeding.

Why it matters

• First, if the internet is any indicator, humans love cats.
• Second, we likely reshaped global biodiversity by migrating cats across the world, given cats have been linked to 63 extinctions just in modern history. By tracking the history of cat migrations, scientists can elucidate where, when and to what extent human behavior applied pressure to the evolution of biodiversity.

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Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter today, convicted for urging her boyfriend to kill himself over a series of text messages.

Michelle Carter, a woman who urged her boyfriend to kill himself through a series of text messages, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter Friday in a Massachusetts juvenile court.

Carter could face up to 20 years in prison for urging Conrad Roy III to take his own life. After exchanging intimate text messages about death for weeks, Roy intentionally filled his truck with carbon monoxide in a parking lot in July 2014.

The landmark decision sets forth the rare legal principle that a person’s words can compel another person’s suicide.

Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz handed the verdict to Carter after describing how she contributed to the circumstances of Roy’s death. The judge said that the 18-year-old Roy grew fearful as the truck filled with lethal gas, told Carter he was scared and attempted to exit, according to the Associated Press . Carter, who was 17 at the time, replied “get back in,” according to a friend to testified in the trial.

Amid the other text messages scrutinized for the criminal case, Carter also wrote, “You’re finally going to be happy in heaven. No more pain. It’s okay to be scared and it’s normal. I mean, you’re about to die.”

Roy was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in a store parking lot in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

Carter, now 20, will appear in court for sentencing in early August.

“There are no winners here today,” Assistant District Attorney Katie Rayburn told reporters after the verdict’s announcement. “Two families have been torn apart and will be affected by this for years to come.”

Last year, the case reached the state’s Supreme Court, which ruled that Carter could stand trial for her involvement in Roy’s death.

Rayburn acknowledged that this was a “unique case that dealt with a lot of important issues in our society today, but in the end, the case was really about one young man and one young woman brought together by tragic circumstances.”

Roy had struggled with depression and previously attempted to kill himself in 2013. Prosecutors had argued that Carter’s text messages compelled Roy to take his own life and helped him plan his suicide. The judge also agreed that Carter had convinced Roy that his suicide wouldn’t afflict his parents.

“I think your parents know you’re in a really bad place,” one of Carter’s text messages to Roy read. “I’m not saying they want you to do it but I honestly feel like they can accept it,” the text continued.

Defense attorney Joseph Cataldo argued that Roy’s talk of suicide “overwhelmed” Carter, while she dealt with her own “baggage.”

“It’s sad, it’s tragic,” he said, adding, “It’s just not a homicide.”

Martin Healy, of the Massachusetts Bar Association, said in a statement that the jury’s verdict will have “national implications and is a clarion call that seemingly remote and distant communications will not insulate individuals from heinous acts that could rise to the level of criminal culpability,” according to the Boston Herald.

“The defendant’s fate was sealed through the use of her own words,” Healy continued. “The communications illustrated a deeply troubled defendant whose actions rose to the level of wanton and reckless disregard for the life of the victim,” he added.

CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos, however, said the verdict is not surprising, but concerning in how it “reflects a judicial willingness to expand legal liability for another person’s suicide, an act which by definition is a completely independent choice.”

“Historically, suicide has been considered a superseding act which breaks the chain of legal causation,” he added.

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Anne Madden bends creatures to her will, with the deftness of a shepherd. But Madden is a microbe wrangler — her critters cover petri dishes. Rather than merely observe bacteria and fungi, Madden sees a community ready for work. If not for fungi, bacteria-fighting penicillin or heart-saving statins would not exist. If not for bacteria, the world would not have pickles. PICKLES!

“We have to find it. We have to bring it into the lab, and then we have to convince it to do something,” Madden told the NewsHour inside a lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she works as an environmental microbiologist.

These days, her experiments are buzzing, as she takes microbes — yeast — from bees and convinces them to brew beer.

But don’t fret. It’s less gross than it sounds. No “mass bug-icide” was committed, and no insect body parts feature in the final suds.

Rather, the discovery of bumblebeer yeast recalls a serendipitous science at the heart of beer history — and may also represent the first new yeast in 600 years capable of making traditional beer.

Bumblebeer bubbles to the surface

Bumblebeer began in 2014, as an academic science fair project.

Rob Dunn, an applied ecologist at North Carolina State University, had joined forces with the campus research brewer John Sheppard to develop a science-themed exhibit for the World Beer Festival — due to be held the next year in Raleigh.

Dunn was recruited because of his reputation for revealing the unseen organisms in our everyday lives. Over the years, his lab has conducted a series of bug censuses and found all sorts of freeloaders.

The survey revealed that an ordinary home contains up to 200 types of bugs…

One project had citizen scientists in Raleigh swab for dust around their houses, in search of trace DNA left behind by critters. The survey revealed that an ordinary home contains up to 200 types of bugs, a thriving ecosystem of carpet beetles, aphids, cockroaches, paper wasps, spiders and silverfish.

That’s not even the strangest part.

“So far, we’ve found that wealthy people have more kinds of insects in their houses, which some people loved, other people didn’t like that so much,” Dunn joked in his office covered with antique maps and glass cases full of bees, flies and butterflies.

When the team expanded the survey to more than 700 homes nationwide, they discovered dust mites — whose feces and corpses trigger allergic reactions and asthma — are most abundant on the East Coast. Need respiratory relief? Head West.

Invasive allergies. As part of a bug census, Rob Dunn’s lab surveyed the geographical distributions of insects that cause allergies (dust mites) and indoor pests (ladybugs). Photo by Madden AA et al., Molecular Ecology, 2016.

Another census revealed that giant Japanese camel crickets, an invasive species, have “moved basement to basement across North America totally unnoticed,” Dunn said. “People don’t like them because they jump at you out of the dark.”

The team estimated that 700 million of these thumb-sized crickets might exist across the eastern United States alone — which may ultimately work in our favor. They found new kinds of bacteria from the guts of these crickets can break down a waste product of the paper industry and turn it into energy.

Few labs are equipped to find such microbes and bugs in such random environs, so if anyone could find a beer-making germ in the wild, it was Dunn’s team.

But where to start?

Dang, this yeast smells good

Beer, wine and other booze is made with yeast — single-celled microorganisms from the fungus kingdom. More than 1,500 yeast species are known around the world, and yet humans have essentially relied on only two types of alcohol-producing yeast — ale yeast and lager yeast — since the earliest days of brewing 9,000 years ago.

That’s because our partnership with beer-making yeast likely began by accident and evolved through happenstance. Scientists didn’t even realize yeast were living organisms until the 1830s, and it took Louis Pasteur another 20 years to discover how the microbes take sugars and chemically transform — ferment — them into alcohol.

Yeast microbiologists believe the earliest brewers were flying blind, driven by the sweet smells made when yeast ferment a wet pile of sugar-rich grains or a piece of fruit rotting in an orchard.

“It’s easy to imagine people thinking this smells just right to make a good bread. It smells just right to make a good beer, I’m going to save it,” Dunn said. And from that came bread, sourdough and beer recipes, passed down through generations.

Yeast feast. Aside from beer, other foods made with yeast include cottage cheese, ketchup, sauerkraut, soy sauce, vinegar and yogurt. Photo by Getty Images

Those smells arise from an ancient relationship between yeast and insect pollinators, Madden said.

Yeast live in flower nectar, where the microbes feast on boatloads of sugar. The yeast produce alcohol, along with those sweet aromas that tickle our noses, which in turn attract the buzzing bugs. Bees sometimes get drunk off this fermented nectar.

But flowers and fruits wilt in the cold of winter, which would kill the yeast too, meaning the microbes need a place to escape.

“So the question remains, where are yeasts in the winter, where are yeasts hiding in the world?,” Madden asked. “Yeasts are particularly bad at moving themselves from place to place. They don’t have a lot of the skillsets that other microbes or other larger organisms have.”

So the yeasts hitch rides on the insect pollinators, as they move from flower to flower. She said researchers had found winery yeasts in the winter on the bodies of hibernating wasps, which visit these sugar sources during the summer.

“We actually think, based on some work from colleagues in Italy, it’s very likely that those first beers and breads were relying on yeasts from insects too,” Dunn said. Madden and Dunn began with a plan: to intercept yeast as they rode on bees or wasps, in hopes of finding one to make alcohol.

But wild animals are filthy, covered or filled with thousands of microbes. You can’t just drop a bee into juice and hope for fermentation. Madden would need to combine her senses and modern microbiology.

Forest of microbes. A petri dish covered with the many microbes from a wasp’s body. Photo by Matt Ehrichs

She started in North Carolina fields, where she caught a single paper wasp — a bug known to harbor large communities of yeast. She then transferred every microbe from its body to a petri dish. A couple days later, a forest of microbes appear on the dish.

First, she looked to separate the yeast from other fungi or bacteria on the plate. “It’s about understanding when something glistens in a certain way,” Madden said. “It has got a different color than others. It’s slightly less slimy.” Next, she picked a handful of yeast candidates, grew them on a new dish and followed her nose. Fermenting yeast smell pleasant due to compounds called “organoleptics” that they make from sugar. The fruity and biscuity notes define the final taste of the beer.

Her third task was running the DNA from these candidates through a National Institutes of Health database to ensure her picks weren’t related to pathogens. The final stage is a color-coded chemical test because to make beer, the yeast must be able to process maltose — a sugar found in malted barley. If the yeast can’t use those sugars, they are not going to produce alcohol.

If the test tube turns bright yellow, then the yeast is a winner and ready for the brewhouse.

Wild yeast, banished

So far, Madden has found two yeasts, one from a single wasp and one from a single bee, capable of making beer.

“To make all of the different bumblebeers that we’ve made, we’ve killed two bugs. You’ve likely killed more bugs on your way to a bar to get beer.”

“People tend to ask us how many insects died to make beer, and the answer is very few. Once the yeast is separated, we can use the yeast for eternity without going back to those insects” Madden said. “To make all of the different bumblebeers that we’ve made, we’ve killed two bugs. You’ve likely killed more bugs on your way to a bar to get beer.”

Her picks landed with John Sheppard, the North Carolina State research brewer, who found that bumblebeer yeast sits on unique pedestal in brewing. Many wild yeasts are considered contamination in the domestic beer industry because they produce a lot of off flavors, Sheppard said.

But once upon a time, wild yeast were unavoidable in alcohol production. It’s pretty easy to contaminate your food when you don’t know microorganisms cover every inch of your body…and pretty much everything else.

The first brewers recognized that the top portion of a beer barrel could be saved and reused to brew a consistent product. Little did they know it also contained a microbial stew made primarily of ale yeast (species: Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Sure, every now and again, their batches might get skunked by the other microbes in the stew — hello, sour beer! But the practice worked well in warmer regions where civilizations began.

The tactic became less viable as folks moved into the colder climates of Germany and northern Europe, where the Big Bang of brewing ultimately happened.

Tale of two yeast. Only two species of yeast — ale yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae; pictured above) and lager yeast — have been used for traditional beer brewing for the last 600 years. A lab in North Carolina may have found a third in the strangest place: On bees. Photo by Mogana Das Murtey and Patchamuthu Ramasamy/via Wikimedia

In the early- and mid-1400s, Bavarian brewers stumbled upon lager yeast, which was technically the crud left behind in the bottom of the barrel.

“All of a sudden, they could now brew at colder temperatures and get crisper cleaner flavors,” said Chris Todd Hittinger, a University of Wisconsin geneticist who isn’t involved with the bumblebeer project.

Cold brewing made beer less likely to spoil, and sparked the domestic age of beermaking. In April 1516, Bavaria issued Reinheitsgebot — a “purity order” — that limited beer’s ingredients to barley malt, water, hops and bottom fermenters (lager yeast).

Add the steam engine and colonialism, and lager-style beers eventually spread across the world. Today, cold-adapted lager yeast account for 90 percent of global beer markets, Hittinger said, such as for big brands like Miller, Budweiser, Heineken, Stella Artois and Corona. Ale yeast became reserved for the speciality menu: pale ales, India pale ales, stouts, porters and wheat beers.

Paper carrier. Madden started her search in North Carolina fields, where she caught a single paper wasp — a bug known to harbor large communities of yeast. Photo by Lauren Nichols

Ale yeast and lager yeast became the standard bearers, because they make significant quantities of alcohol without adding natural flavors, Sheppard said.

They’re basic Beckys — bland and easily influenced, with more in common than early brewers could have guessed.

Thirty years ago, modern genetics revealed lager yeast to be a “living descendent” of ale yeast — created when the latter mated with a yeast strain identified as Saccharomyces eubayanus in 2011 by Hittinger and Argentine biologist Diego Libkind. Moreover, domestication pushed these strains through a genetic bottleneck, forcing them to produce more and more alcohol while simultaneously losing their traits needed for survival in the wild.

And wild yeast? To brewers, wild yeast became the smelly friend you forget to invite to parties — banished by everyone except for imbibers of sour beers, where a funky taste is sought.

Wild yeast, rising

Enter bumblebeer yeast. It’s wild, yet can make traditional lager-style beer without stank flavors. But using bumblebeer yeast, Sheppard can also tweak the fermenting conditions, so a honey flavor emerges without adding honey. Tweak them again, and he can brew a light tangy sour beer.

“The adaptable nature to these wild yeast means if you change the conditions, they’re going to give you quite different flavor profiles in the beer,” Sheppard said.

The bumblebeer team is particularly interested in sour beers, which are usually difficult to concoct.

“It’s true. The traditional sour beer process is much more complicated, because you have this community of organisms that starts the fermentation,” Hittinger said.

People nab these unconventional organisms from inconceivable places. (One brewer in Oregon made a sour beer from wild yeast pulled from his beard.) But as a result of their unpredictability, a typical sour beer takes months or years to make.

Bumblebeer does the same job in a couple of weeks. Dunn, Madden and Sheppard have patented and licensed these strains, which are Lachancea yeast — a group that diverged from ale and lager yeast 100 million years ago. Other researchers have tested Lachancea strains for beer production, but the bumblebeer strains are the first slated for commercialization. That’s partially because bumblebeer yeast, under the right conditions, pumps out 10 times more acid than these other strains, which is what creates the tangy taste of sour beer.

Bee(r) on display. A visitor checks out the bumblebeer exhibit at the 2015 World Beer Festival in Raleigh. Photo by Lauren Nichols

“There are more traits that differ as relate to mouth feel, flavor and aroma and industrial performance,” Madden said.

They have also laid foundation needed to repeat the feat of discovering beer-producing strains in the wild.

“[Bumblebeer] might be a new type of beer that’s somewhere between a sour beer and an ale beer,” Hittinger said.

North Carolina’s Deep River Brewing rolled out the first suds made from bumblebeer yeast earlier this year.

“So we’ve worked recently with one species of camel cricket, one bumblebee, one wasp — and we’ve found three things useful to society,” Dunn said. “Two are new yeasts for making beers, one is a new kind of bacteria for breaking down waste.”

Now just imagine what might be hiding in the millions of unknown insects across globe, Dunn continued.

“Who knows what we could discover there? It could be new compounds for medicine. It could be even more new yeasts for beer. It could be new bacteria that help us make energy.” Dunn said.

“And we’ve barely started to look.”

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Oakland Police Department officer Huy Nguyen mounts a Portable Digital Recording Device, a body camera designed to record both audio and video in the field, at the police headquarters in Oakland, California April 14, 2015. OPD was one of the first large organizations in the country to utilize the device, which documents officers’ actions and community interactions with police, according to the department. Photo by Robert Galbraith/REUTERS

Police show more respect to whites than blacks during traffic stops, according to a computer analysis of conversations recorded by police body cameras in Oakland, California.

Videotape footage of police exchanges with people of color has quickly become a mainstay of public — and often viral — stories about law enforcement practices in the U.S. But it remains unclear if these videos represent isolated incidents or a general pattern of racial bias.

By relying on computers, this new study from Stanford University provides an impartial take on policing during traffic stops as well as a new automated method for assessing the behavior of cops based on the language they use.

What they studied

• Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt led a team of linguists and computer scientists who examined police body camera footage from one month — April 2014 — of routine traffic stops in the racially diverse city of Oakland, California.
• They examined 981 stops, involving 682 black and 299 white drivers. These numbers mirror that national trend. Of the 26 million traffic stops recorded each year, a higher percentage are black drivers.
• The stops involved 245 different officers of varying races (102 white, 39 black, 36 Asian, 57 Hispanic and 11 marked as “other.”) A large majority — 224 of the officers — were male.
• Researchers reviewed 183 hours — 7.5 days — worth of body camera footage, from which they examined the language used in 36,000 exchanges between drivers and cops.
• “We don’t know of any other department right now taking this kind of approach to the footage,” Eberhardt said of her study published Monday in PNAS. By leveraging body camera footage for a better understanding of police-community relations, “we can learn a lot more about the millions of interactions happening during these routine stops than we can from the popularized isolated cases.”

The Oakland police department’s history of misconduct has made it the subject of federal oversight for 14 years. In 2016, special correspondent Jackie Judd interviewed Jennifer Eberhardt about a two-year-long study into the department, confirming that Oakland officers exhibit significant racial biases in their day-to-day work.

• To measure officer treatment, the researchers conducted three experiments.
• The first took a subset of the officer statements (312 directed at blacks, 102 at whites) and then had an independent panel of 70 people rank — on a four-point scale — how respectful, polite, friendly, formal and impartial the officer was in each exchange. The panel members did not know the racial makeup of the drivers, though they did see what the drivers said right before the cops responded.

• The second replaced the human panel with computers armed with linguistic algorithms. These programs recorded when the officers used language that drive perceptions of respect — such as giving agency, softening of commands, saying thanks, apologizing or using formal titles versus informal addresses like dude, bro, boss, man, brotha, sista or chief. This experiment aimed to ascertain if computers could gauge respectful language to the same degree as humans in the first experiment.


Sample sentences with automatically generated Respect scores. Features in blue were ranked positively in the computer model and connote respect, such as offering reassurance (“no problem”) or mentioning community member well-being (“drive safe”). Features in red ranked negatively in the model and connote disrespect, like informal titles (“my man”), or disfluencies (“that- that’s”). Photo by Voigt et al., PNAS, 2017

• The third experiment set loose the computer algorithms to sift through the full set of 36,000 exchanges by police officers.

What they found

• The human panel judged that officer behavior varied most widely when it came to being respectful, with white members of the community receiving more respect than blacks. “Even though the people who were reading the statements had no idea about the driver’s race, we found they judged the officer language directed at black motorists to be less respectful than language directed at white motorists,” Eberhardt said.
• Other aspects of police behavior — such as formality toward drivers — did not change based on the driver’s identity.
• The race of the police officers did not alter these patterns, neither did the severity of the traffic offense, nor the location of the stop in the city.
• The computer algorithms identified almost exactly the same trends, agreeing with the human assessment of respectful behavior at nearly the same rate.
• The computer analysis could also quantify the scale of a problem. White community members were 57 percent more likely to have an exchange filled with a highest degree of respectful language, whereas black drivers were 61 percent more likely to experience an exchange that fell into the category of least respectful.
• Moreover, over the course of an entire traffic stop, the use of respectful language increased more quickly for whites than blacks. The trend means “even when the community member hasn’t had much time to say very much at all, there’s already a race gap in respect,” Eberhardt said.

Why it matters

• Despite the social cues and psychological biases that define much of human interactions, computers could pull consistent and meaningful disparities in how officers behaved toward drivers from language alone.
• “That’s what we want to do. We want to automate this to a point where it’s not laborious to go through the footage,” Eberhardt said.
• Community members want body cameras, because the devices provide accountability and transparency, she said. Law enforcement show mixed support for the use of body cameras in surveys, though their power to adjudicate disputes over the series of events of an incident is accepted by ordinary citizens and police. Eberhardt wants a study like hers to take matters a step further and identify what contributes to police-community relations — both positive and negative experiences — in the first place.

What happens next

• Her team wants to explore if motorists provoke this race disparity in respectful behavior from police officers — though two aspects of this current study suggest drivers may play less of a role.
• First, the human panel saw what the drivers said right before the officers responded, which provided context for the exchange.
• Second, Eberhardt’s study also found that, on average, over the course of a single traffic stop, the use of respectful language increased more quickly for whites than blacks. The trend means “even when the community member hasn’t had much time to say very much at all, there’s already a race gap in respect.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to clarify the study’s findings about the motorists’ contributions to the police exchanges.

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The Guardian LF1, a prototype robot that stuns and collects invasive lionfish. Photo by Robots in Service of the Environment

The America’s Cup sailing race kicked off this week in Bermuda, but a month ago, a different type of competition was held in the island’s lucid waters. It was a contest that pitted chef against chef and robot against beast.

Last August, NewsHour reported on a robot being developed to stop lionfish, an invasive species that has decimated Atlantic coral reef ecosystems due to their insatiable appetites for other fish. This spring, the prototype — called the Guardian LF1 and conceived by the foundation for Robots in Service of the Environment — launched into the open ocean for the first time, as part of a sustainability promotion event for the America’s Cup.

Piloted by a Playstation controller — yes, a videogame controller! — the final prototype cruised through a Bermudian shallows, according to videos of the event, where it zapped and then vacuumed up lionfish. The robot can capture about 10 lionfish before resurfacing.

“I got to tell you, the moment when we caught the first fish in the wild was just so jubilant,” John Rizzi, a retired entrepreneur, Navy veteran and RSE’s executive director, told NewsHour. “The whole team just like exploded in joy.”

WATCH: How do you stop invasive lionfish? Maybe with a robotic zapper

When we first met the RSE team in Bermuda, the prototype wasn’t much more than blueprints and components being individually tested on the island and at the foundation’s headquarters near Boston. A year prior, RSE had formed when Colin Angle, the CEO for iRobot and the maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum, visited friends and marine biologists on Bermuda and they explained how lionfish quickly became king of the Atlantic’s coral reefs.

To suck in a lionfish, a single high-powered thruster sits inside the tube’s back end. Photo by Robots in Service of the Environment

As fierce predators and constant feeders, lionfish escalated in the Atlantic food chain by preying on the naivety of native fish, which don’t recognize lionfish as a threat. On the flip side, lionfish aren’t easily spooked because they have few of their own predators in Atlantic. While on a submersible ride to the bottom of the ocean, we sailed straight up to a lionfish, without it fleeing. RSE’s team planned to capitalize on this boldness by sneaking up behind lionfish and zapping them.

Here’s how they took the idea from paper to practice. After our visit, RSE’s all-volunteer team headed back to Boston, where they began to assemble the components in their engineering lab — also known as Rizzi’s garage.

“The challenge in New England, of course, is everything freezes in the winter time, so we lost access to outdoor pools,” Rizzi said. “In the winter, we put a 300 gallon tank in my garage.” One of the engineers — Rosario Robert — is also a fish aquarium hobbyist, so she helped with the installation, but also cared for and raised lionfish at her house for future testing.

The Guardian LF1, a lionfish zapping robot, approaches the invasive predator, which reacts by opening its mouth and flashing its poisonous barbs — its typical response when threatened. The robot maneuvers its metal electrodes around the lionfish to stun but not kill the animal. A thruster positioned in the main tube sucks up the animal into a vacuum chamber, where it can then be carried to the sea surface. Also, notice how the robot does not shock nearby fish. Video courtesy of Robots in Service of the Environment

One of the first challenges came with the electrocution device — two electrode plates at the front of the robot. Did the team want to stun or outright kill the lionfish? They ultimately opted for the former, because it requires less power, is easier on the electronics and is more humane. The duration of the shock is now less than one second.

At first, the electric current was choosing the path of least resistance and passing around the fish. So RSE recruited an engineer from an electrofishing company in Washington, who tweaked the configuration of the plates and the electricity current waveform so it could strike the fish.

A camera mounted on the robot allows the pilot to view what the robot sees via a laptop screen, and most can figure out the Playstation piloting system within 30 seconds. Photo by Robots in Service of the Environment

Next, came the vacuum. The robot features a central tube — the vacuum chamber — that doubles as the device’s chassis. Small propellers and a motor hang off the sides of this chamber, providing thrust and maneuverability. To suck in a lionfish, a single high-powered thruster sits inside the tube’s back end.

“It was brilliant work by our software guys. [The main tube] thruster sucks in so hard that it actually pushes the whole ROV forward, but you don’t want it to crash into the coral,” Rizzi said. “So other thrusters, that normally drive the ROV forward and backward, counteract the suction.”

In the end, RSE’s team of 20 engineers — along with a set of marine biologists, web developers and marketing gurus — worked together to create a lionfish-hunting device that can run off a 12-volt battery found on most boats. A camera mounted on the robot allows the pilot to view what the robot sees via a laptop screen, and most can figure out the Playstation piloting system within 30 seconds, Rizzi said.

The Guardian LF1 prototype debuted publicly during #EatLionfish Chefs’ Throwdown in mid-April, an event hosted by 11th Hour Racing in Bermuda to raise awareness about the invasive species. Photo by 11th Hour Racing

RSE hopes to market the robot to commercial fisherman who want to sell lionfish to restaurants, as well as recreational fishers and sailors.

“Most sailors care about the environment. The environment is their playground,” said Todd McGuire, program director of sustainability organization 11th Hour Racing, which hosted the #EatLionfish Chefs’ Throwdown in Bermuda where the Guardian LF1 debuted publicly in mid-April.

The event invited celebrity chefs from across globe — Gael Orieux from France, Taichi Kitamura from Seattle, Annabel Langbein from New Zealand — to raise awareness about lionfish through the sport of sailing. RSE receives grants from the Schmidt Marine Technology Partners, a program of The Schmidt Family Foundation, which also includes 11th Hour Racing in their portfolio and is how the two learned about each other.

“We try to promote sustainability at all of the stops along the America’s Cup world series and raise awareness about local problems,” McGuire said. “It gives the local organizations who are working on these sustainability problems a bigger platform.” Average daily attendance for the America’s Cup in Bermuda hovers around 65,000 people.

With the initial launch complete, RSE will now turn its attention to fundraising, so they can begin work on a commercial-sized model that can hold 40 to 50 fish at a time and conduct more field testing with the Guardian LF1. The current equipment is built to withstand depths of 300 feet, though the team has not tested this limit yet. They aim to do so this summer off the coast of Boston.

“We’re building and moving now toward production,” Rizzi said.

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What would really happen if we pull out of this deal? What would the Earth look like in 10, in 20, in 50 years without U.S. involvement in the Paris accord. We asked a field of experts. Photo by Chris Aluka Berry/REUTERS

After weeks of speculation, the White House is expected to renege on America’s commitment to the Paris climate agreement, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

It’s been less than a year since the U.S. formally endorsed the Paris accord, which has been ratified by 146 other nations since it was agreed upon in December 2015. The agreement calls on countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

Though the globe appears off-track to hit this target, many scientists view the deal as an essential step in preventing global catastrophes wrought by drought, devastating storms, coastal erosion and the decimation of aquatic ecosystems like coral reefs due to warming and ocean acidification. The Paris accord also establishes an international bargaining table for the energy industry, given the intimate ties between fossil fuel power plants and greenhouse gas emissions.

What would really happen if we pull out of this deal? What would the Earth look like in 10, in 20, in 50 years without U.S. involvement in the Paris accord? We asked a field of experts.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University geoscientist and coordinating lead author of fifth United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report

U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, have been decreasing since about 2006. This is due fundamentally to changes in energy prices, which has favored natural gas over coal, and more recently, renewable energy like solar and wind over coal. It’s due to increasingly stringent regulations with the purpose of controlling air pollutants, which are dangerous to human health, to continual pressure on coal from a variety of other sources and to regulations of greenhouse gases implemented during the Obama administration.

Global emissions in fact may have peaked last year. They haven’t really changed much in the last three years, which is the first time that we’ve had such a flattening of emissions during the period of global economic growth. Even before the Paris agreement started to have much effect, there were trends in the world, which are starting to slowly bend the curve of greenhouse gas emissions.

Now the question is, can the Trump administration, by pulling out of the Paris agreement, throw sand into the gears, and either slow down or reverse the progress?

If the Trump administration withdraws from Paris, then during the first few years, there wouldn’t be very much difference in U.S. emissions, because, again, U.S. emissions aren’t so much driven by regulations yet, but by a whole other constellation of factors.

However, it is unlikely that all countries in the Paris agreement will continue to move aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the second biggest emitter, the U.S., pulls out — particularly countries that are just starting to come to grips with the need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions like India.

I think China will be annoyed, because the plan [the U.S.] submitted at Paris is what we developed in anticipation of a meeting with China in November 2014, where China also put an aggressive plan on the table. China seems to be ahead in implementing its plan. China was enthusiastic about dealing with climate change, because it’s a huge risk for it’s own country, but also as leverage to get Chinese provinces to start cutting their emissions, which are causing choking air pollution throughout the country. So, you don’t make friends internationally by pulling out of agreements that both parties previously agreed to.

If the U.S. leaves, my bottom line is, it becomes exceedingly likely that the world fails to avoid the two degree warming. The biggest effect is probably an accelerated sea level rise, but also warming and drying in regions where agriculture is marginal anyway, undercutting food supplies in much of the developing world including the tropical regions, where countries already struggle to get enough food for their people, and certainly great harm to many ecosystems around the world. So we’ll see a gradual deterioration of the situation, first for the poor countries, then inevitably for the U.S and other rich countries as well. I don’t think the U.S. gains anything if we leave.

Lynn Scarlett, global managing director for public policy at The Nature Conservancy

If the U.S. leaves the Paris accord, the world will carry on without us. That is, there is a global commitment to addressing climate change. That will continue. China has signaled it will continue its leadership. India is getting into the mix and driving for renewables. The good news is that the United States, regardless of its national leadership, will continue to have market-driven actions toward clean energy.

You now have hundreds of companies that have committed to significantly reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Some companies, Google and others, have committed to going 100 percent renewable, and they’re going that direction.

Certainly we’ve seen a lot of shift out of coal and into natural gas because natural gas is now kind of better, cheaper, greener, so you know that momentum is going to carry on. Now that does not mean that we can be simply comfortable about pulling out of the agreement, because the agreement provides a continual nudge to amp up those ambitions further.

Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council

More likely, we’ll be the big loser. We’re going to see some $7 trillion in global clean energy investment over just the next couple of decades. We want American workers to be the winners in that global sweepstakes, and winning our share globally begins here at home.

The Paris agreement sends a signal to investors about priorities, about certainty, about the direction of change. Pulling out sends a garbled message to the markets of the world and to our children. It says the administration doesn’t take climate change seriously or recognize the economic play of our lifetime. It raises questions about U.S. partnerships. And it makes a mockery of U.S. climate and clean energy leadership worldwide.

Smoke plumes from wildfires are shown in the Great Smokey Mountains near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Photo taken Nov. 28, 2016. Photo courtesy of National Park Services/Handout via Reuters

Staying with the agreement would preserve the promise of Paris: that every nation will take real action to leave our children a livable world. It charts a clear path forward toward squaring action at home with diplomacy abroad. And it positions the United States to power American prosperity, protect future generations and create millions of good-paying clean energy jobs.

Leaving would make us a global pariah, short-change an American workforce fighting to compete for its fair share of the global clean energy sweepstakes and handicap our efforts to protect future generations from the growing dangers of climate change.

David Sandalow, fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and a former senior official at the Department of Energy

I think that the rest of the world will remain determined to fight this challenge, and if the American people remain determined to fight this challenge, then at most, this would be a minor setback. And I think the momentum toward clean energy is unstoppable. The transition to cheap renewables, the falling cost of renewables is rapid, and renewables are going to occupy a steadily growing percentage of the global energy base for the years ahead, so that’s going to be an important element in the future of global warming. But we still need to do much, much more. And that’s where the world needs to come together in determination, no matter what setbacks are put in front of it.

Merryl Alber, University of Georgia marine scientist

It’s really disappointing. I mean this is the world’s first comprehensive climate agreement, and it seems important for the United States to continue as a leader or at least an equal partner at the table, so it would be very distressing to see us pull out.

It’s not whether or not we sign on. It’s really whether or not as a world we take actions to slow down warming. There are specific places like corals and fisheries that are at risk. The oceans play a major role in climate, and so understanding those interactions is important. One of the important roles for coastal systems and coastal wetlands is as a sink for greenhouse gases.

Cypress trees near the mouth of the Altamaha river in Georgia are dying due to saltwater intrusion caused by sea-level rise. Photo by Mike Fritz

There was a recent paper in Nature Climate Change on the implications of the Paris agreement for the ocean. They did a relative risk assessment, looking at coastal marine organisms and ecosystems and identifying which ones had the largest risk of impacts. They think about corals as being potentially at risk, and then in low latitudes they talk about fin fisheries, sea grasses and then bivalves and then in high latitudes, things like krill.

Again it’s not necessarily whether we stay but whether it’s happening. We need to really be thinking about adaptations in vulnerable areas, so low-lying areas are places that we really need to think about whether it makes sense to have people pull back and move inland.

Samuel Thernstrom, executive director of the Energy Innovation Reform Project, which supports an innovation-first approach to climate

It’s not what I would have recommended to the president if someone was asking me. It’s not the decision I favor. I don’t think it’s the end of the world. I would have recommended that he stay in.

The accord itself was symbolic. It was well understood all along that it was not enacted with consent of the Senate as treaties have to be. This was not a treaty. It was an executive action of the previous administration, so people shouldn’t overstate its significance. This is not the rejection of a treaty. It’s recognizing that the executive action of a previous president doesn’t control the current one. But it’s not the course of action that I would have recommended or preferred.

READ MORE: U.S. withdrawal from Paris climate deal would be a ‘disaster,’ Sen. Franken says

One key question: What is the mechanism for withdrawing from Paris? There is this mechanism to withdraw from the Paris accord, but it’s a four-year clock on the withdrawal process. So some people have suggested that the way to shortcut that clock would be to just withdraw from the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is kind of the overarching body. [It] was adopted following the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which actually is a treaty that the U.S. Senate ratified. I think it would be very unfortunate to withdraw from the framework convention.

This president is sharply opposed to all the climate policies of his predecessor, but if he is not in favor of any alternative approach to dealing with the issue, then it sort of leaves the field open for the next president to come along and reset on the previous policy path. I would advocate that this administration should take a proactive approach on this question that is distinctly different from its predecessors, and if they won’t do that then they are empowering their successor to settle this issue.

Critics of the Paris accord have always questioned how serious nations like China and India are about acting. They note that the accord does not provide an enforcement mechanism or anything that guarantees any particular actions from any party, and so it’s hard to say how much effort those nations will make because of Paris, and it’s hard to say whether they would pull back from those commitments all that much.

Benjamin Zycher, an energy and environmental policy scholar at American Enterprise Institute

Pulling out of the agreement itself is quite favorable, and even better would be pulling out of the entire U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change. Fuels over the long run will become cheaper as technological advances are made, new discoveries are made. So I think there’s a real sense in which energy policy will become less and less important over time.

I don’t think [the agreement] has much of an effect on the fossil fuel industry. The Paris emissions pledges are unenforceable, and there’s no enforcement mechanism. And even if the promises were implemented and maintained for the rest of the century, the accord would have a trivial effect on temperatures in the year 2100.

David Biello, science writer and author of The Unnatural World

Leaving the Paris accord is a mistake, as several members of Trump’s own administration have pointed out. The U.S. is on track to meet its short-term goal and has much to gain from meeting its long-term goal, especially in terms of jobs and economic competitiveness. We have already fallen behind in the global race to build the energy system of the future.

The U.S. will be a poorer and dirtier place, as well as a more isolated one diplomatically, if we pull out of the accord. The world will be a more polluted place if we go, rather than stay. The climate that much hotter, the weather that much weirder.

Staying in the accord unleashes the potential for the U.S. to export clean technologies to the rest of the world, ranging from fracking to free natural gas (the cleanest fossil fuel) to new nuclear and better batteries. By staying in the accord, Trump ensures that we don’t fall yet further behind in the economy of the future. Paired with the efforts of our allies and other nations, staying in the accord makes for a better Anthropocene.

Mark Scialla contributed to reporting this story.

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In a move seemingly set to inspire heavy metal songs for years to come, NASA wants to send a probe directly into our sun’s atmosphere.

The U.S. space agency announced the details of humanity’s first mission to a star on Wednesday at the University of Chicago’s William Eckhardt Research Center Auditorium. The probe also received a new name: What was commissioned as “Solar Probe Plus” in 2015 is now the Parker Solar Probe — in honor of Eugene Parker, a University of Chicago astrophysicist who discovered the phenomenon known as solar wind.

“This is the first time NASA has named a spacecraft for a living individual,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said at the press briefing in Chicago. “It’s a testament to the importance of his body of work, founding a new field of science that also inspired my own research and many important science questions NASA continues to study and further understand every day.”

The Parker Solar Probe will orbit within four million miles of the sun’s blazing surface in order to answer longstanding questions about the inner workings of stars. Such observations can improve space weather forecasts and prepare Earth for drastic events like solar flares, which can cripple our electronics.

Engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, prepare the developing Parker Solar Probe spacecraft for thermal vacuum tests that simulate conditions in space. Photo by NASA/JHUAPL

NASA plans to launch the Parker Solar Probe during a 30-day window that opens July 31, 2018. The Ulysses probe — a joint operation between NASA and the European Space Agency — was the last probe to orbit the sun. It was deactivated in 2009.

The post NASA reveals first mission to ‘touch the sun’ appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Habitat restoration work continues along the Buffalo River, a project expected to be complete by 2019. Photo Courtesy of Buffalo Niagara Riverkeeper

The White House’s full budget request for 2018, sent to Congress on Tuesday, seeks sharp cuts to cancer research, climate science and children’s health insurance. It would halve the EPA’s research funding and end NASA’s education office.

While President Trump’s budget proposal echoes many points made in the abbreviated — “skinny” — budget released in early March, this week’s full budget request covers a wider scope and more detail into the Trump administration’s fiscal views on the nation’s science and research infrastructure. The skinny budget, for example, omitted key departments and centers charged with science and health programs — such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation. The full budget must be approved by Congress. But here’s a look at how the proposal would affect science, health and tech.

Environmental Protection Agency: 31 percent cut

2017: $8.2 billion
Skinny: $5.7 billion
Full: $5.7 billion

North Philadelphia Junkyard Stacked With Cars For Scrap Metal, August 1973. Picture was taken as part of the EPA’s DOCUMERICA Project. Photo by Dick Swanson/via Flickr

The full budget restates the earlier proposal to cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent, creating deep cuts across the board. The EPA’s enforcement budget would drop by 24 percent ($548 to $419 million), while cleaning up hazardous Superfund sites would dip by 30 percent ($1.1 billion to $762 million). The agency’s research budget would be halved ($483 million to $249 million), with most of the remaining funds going to projects conducted in-house.

READ MORE: Trump’s proposed budget would gut Great Lakes cleanup, a ‘game-changer’ for the region

Geographic programs, such as the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and Chesapeake Bay Program, lose the entirety of their $427 million funding. The Energy Star program, which sets efficiency standards for consumer appliances and other products, is also eliminated. The budget argues these standards can be implemented by the private sector.

READ MORE: As hundreds of toxic sites await cleanup, questions over Superfund program’s future

Categorical grants, which are issued to states and Native American tribes for the purposes of developing environmental protection programs, get slashed 45 percent — dropping from $1.07 billion to $597 million. Such grants support projects to clean water, air, waste, pesticide and toxic substances from the environment. The White House issued a separate document on major saving and reforms, which justified this move by stating “many states have been delegated authority to implement and enforce Federal environmental laws including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act.”

The budget calls for the elimination of the Indian Community Development Block Grant Housing and Urban Development, which is provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and funds similar environmental programs for Native American tribes. Since many Native American communities do not collect taxes, these federal funds often represent the sole source of money for public projects.

National Science Foundation: 11 percent cut

2017: $6.9 billion
Skinny: Not mentioned
Full: $6.1 billion

NSF-supported researchers at Penn State demonstrate the “Brain in Action,” showing live recordings of an individual’s brain and demonstrating how people can train their brains using language and thinking games at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington D.C. in April 2016. Photo by Rob Margetta/National Science Foundation/via Flickr

The National Science Foundation — the funding organization credited for bar codes, the American Sign Language dictionary, gravitational waves and the early spine of the internet — would receive an 11 percent reduction in funding under Trump’s proposal. The NSF issues about 11,000 new grants per year for research and education projects, while backing a quarter of all non-medical — “basic” — research at America’s colleges and universities. The proposal calls for cuts to several programs expanded by the Obama administration, including “funding for Clean Energy R&D, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, and Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Services to focus on NSF’s core research programs.”

Department of Health and Human Services: 16 percent cut

2017: $78 billion
Skinny: $69 billion
Full: $65.3 billion

A view of the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, California. Trump’s budget proposal calls for cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covered nearly 9 million children in FY 2016. Photo by REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson.

In Trump’s final budget, the Department of Health and Human Services would shrink to $65.3 billion, down nearly 20 percent from the previous year. The budget calls for cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covered nearly 9 million children in FY 2016, that would amount to $616 billion in cuts over a decade, if enacted.

The budget also kills $714 million in the department’s community services block grants, which are designed and distributed to “alleviate the causes and conditions of poverty in communities,” including people who are homeless, migrants or elderly. According to the budget, these grants “are not directly tied to performance, which limits incentives for innovation,” and support “services that are duplicative of services that are funded through other Federal programs.” And the budget eliminated the $3.4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program “to reduce the size and scope of the Federal Government and better target resources.” The program covers heating and cooling bills for low-income homes and funds weatherization.

The Food and Drug Administration would be slashed by nearly a third, or $854 million, with the largest cuts in actual dollars to Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The budget also slashed training for health professions and nursing by 80 percent.

National Institutes of Health: 19 percent cut

2017: $31.7 billion
Skinny: $25.9 billion
Full: $26 billion

Researcher looking through a microscope at a National Eye Institute laboratory. Photo by Rhoda Baer/via NIH Flickr

Trump’s budget reduces the National Institutes of Health by nearly one-fifth to $26 billion. The Trump administration wants to slash the National Cancer Institute’s budget by 19 percent, down to $4.47 billion, at a time when cancer is on the brink of becoming the most prevalent cause of U.S. deaths.

READ MORE: How cancer could emerge as the leading cause of death in the U.S.

The budget also eliminates the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a standalone agency that conducts evidence-based research about health care safety, and merges it with NIH. According to the final budget proposal, NIH will “conduct a review of health services research across NIH, identify gaps, and propose a more coordinated strategy for ensuring that the highest priority health services research is conducted and then made available to improve the quality of health care services.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: 9 percent cut

2017: $7.2 billion
Skinny: Not mentioned, except for $500 million for Zika outbreak response
Full: $6.3 billion

A general view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta in 2014. Photo by Tami Chappell/File Photo/Reuters

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lead the nation’s public health efforts. But under the Trump administration’s proposal, the agency’s budget sinks to $6 billion, down 17 percent from $7.2 billion the previous year. It would be the deepest cut in more than two decades. CDC Director Tom Frieden said the $1.2 billion in cuts are “unsafe at any level of enactment.” The president’s budget would “increase illness, death, risks to Americans, and health care costs,” he said on Twitter late Monday.

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U.S Department of Agriculture: 21 percent cut

2017: $22.6 billion
Skinny: $17.9 billion
Full: $17.9 billion

The Trump administration calls for reducing the budget for the Department of Agriculture by $20 billion by 2022. Photo by Ryan/Beyer/via Getty Images

The Trump administration aims to reduce the budget for the Department of Agriculture by $20 billion by 2022, though this plan would hinge on comprehensive changes to the U.S. Farm Bill. The White House plans to do this largely by reducing farm subsidies, namely for those farmers making more than $500,000 per year, as well as insurance payouts for lost crops in general. The Office of Management and Budget claims the result would be $267 million in savings for 2018 and $3.3 billion in savings by 2019.

As we reported in March, wastewater infrastructure grants and the $201 million McGovern-Dole International Food for Education fund are eliminated under the proposed budget. The latter feeds three million children and families overseas, but the OMB states “school feeding programs in developing countries are usually high-cost investments with little to no returns, and are usually ineffective in achieving their goal to improve nutrition and learning outcomes.”

OMB is right. While international school feeding programs boost nutritional status, food security, school enrollment, attendance and gender parity, there are fewer concrete examples of improvements in academic achievement.

Overall, the budget proposal would cut more than 5,000 jobs from the department.

Department of Energy: 6 percent cut

2017: $29.7 billion
Skinny: $28.0 billion
Full: $28.0 billion

While they might look like drops of water or soap bubbles, these colorful figures are actually photomultiplier tubes that line the walls of the Daya Bay neutrino detector. Neutrinos and antineutrinos are neutral particles produced in nuclear beta decay when neutrons turn into protons. Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt/Lawrence Berkeley and Brookhaven National Labs/Department of Energy

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry praised Trump’s fiscal request for 2018, which removes just more than $1.5 billion from the department charged with funding energy projects and securing the nation’s nuclear stockpiles.

“This budget delivers on the promise to reprioritize spending in order to carry out DOE’s core functions efficiently and effectively while also being fiscally responsible and respectful to the American taxpayer,” Perry said in a statement.

The DOE’s budget cuts focus primarily on the department’s non-defense programs. A DOE arm responsible for pursuing high-impact breakthroughs in energy research — the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) — is essentially kaput; its proposed budget shrinks from $290 million to $20 million in the next year. ThinkProgress reports already approved grants for ARPA-E have been denied or delayed since the skinny budget’s release in March. Grants for research and development in four areas– energy efficiency and renewable energy, fossil energy, nuclear energy and electricity delivery and energy reliability — lose 60 percent of their funding in the proposal. Under this plan, the Weatherization Assistance Program, which promotes energy efficiency developments for low-income families, is eliminated.

Trump’s budget also boosts the National Nuclear Security Administration’s budget by $1.4 billion. The department recovers some savings — $70 million — by terminating the construction of the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility, a multibillion-dollar, over-budget project in South Carolina slated to dispose of at least 34 metric tons of surplus U.S. weapon-grade plutonium, part of a disarmament deal made with Russia.

Within the next two years, the DOE would also look to sell assets in government-owned electric utilities, which include the Southwestern Power Administration (SWPA), Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) and Bonneville Power Administration. These utilities provide low-cost energy from federal dams to western states. Meanwhile, DOE would also sell half of its strategic petroleum reserve, the world’s largest supply of emergency crude oil.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Less than 1 percent

2017: $1.5 billion
Skinny: Not mentioned
Full: $1.3 billion

Giant clam at the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument and National Wildlife Refuge. Photo by Jim Maragos/US Fish and Wildlife Service/via Flickr

While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife faces a slim trim, the cuts are almost entirely concentrated on conservation efforts.

The National Wildlife Refuge System, the world’s largest conservation network, would lose $90 million — meaning its funding would be off-track to keep up pace with inflation. Resources for the protection of endangered species drop from $20.5 million to $17.1 million — a 17 percent reduction under the Trump budget request. The Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund, which provides grants to states and landowners to implement conservation projects, would decline by 64 percent ($53.4 million to $19.3 million.) The $13 million National Wildlife Refuge Fund, which reimburses communities for tax losses created when the government acquires land for refuges, would be eliminated.

Funds for scientific research into conservation planning and cooperative landscape management remain flat. The ecological services program, which recommends animals and plants to the endangered species list, remains mostly intact.

The Department of the Interior also plans to open up lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a bid to raise $1.8 billion by 2027.

U.S. Geological Survey: 13 percent cut

2017: $1.1 billion
Skinny: Not mentioned
Full: $922 million

Not that we want to make a geologist on​ an o​utcrop of Nanushuk Formation, Tuktu Bluff​, Alaska in the summer of 2004.​ ​Photo by Dave Houseknech​t/USGS/via Flickr

The Department of the Interior budget request reduces the U.S. Geological Survey’s resources for scientific research, environmental protection and natural hazards management, but increases funds for fossil fuel extraction programs.

The agency’s ecosystems programs — which “support fish and wildlife management, water filtration and pollution control, healthy soils, pollination, and reduction of the effects of wildfires and other natural disasters” — would lose $27.8 million. Science projects geared toward adaptation to critical issues such as drought, flooding, and wildfires would see a cut of $26.9 million.

While the DOI pledged to maintain the nation’s network of streamgages and earthquake sensors, the USGS would slash $20.6 million from its natural hazards programs, which “respond to hazards such as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and landslides with a goal of reducing potential fatalities, injuries, property damage, and other social and economic effects,” according to budget documents. Science support grants and core science missions would lose $34.4 million combined.

The Energy and Mineral Resources programs would see a $1.5 million increase for the purpose of developing carbon capture technology for fossil fuel recovery. The coal-fired Petra Nova plant in Houston uses such technology to collect carbon dioxide and then inject it into the ground to free oil from depleted wells. Along these lines, the DOI’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulate the safe exploration and development of America’s offshore energy, would receive $5 million (4 percent increase) and $36 million (44 percent increase), respectively. (Note: The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement would cut its oil spill research program by $2.2 million.)

The Landsat satellite programs would also retain their fiscal support.

National Park Service: 10 percent cut

2017: $2.9 billion
Skinny: Not mentioned
Full: $2.6 million

Stacked cannonballs form the backdrop for a family portrait at Shiloh National Military Park, July 1959. Photo by Jack E. Boucher/ National Park Service/via Flickr

Approximately 1,200 employees — 7 percent of the full-time workforce — would be cut from the National Park Service. Funding would be removed for historic preservation, land acquisition for public parks, park operations and local community efforts to preserve natural and cultural resources. Construction projects to update NPS facilities would earn $34 million.

NASA: 1 percent cut

2017: $19.2 billion
Skinny: $19.1 billion
Full: $19.1 billion

NASA’s Juno planetary probe, enclosed in its payload fairing, launches atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Photo by NASA/Kenny Allen

NASA would eliminate five Earth science missions: the Radiation Budget Instrument for tracking Earth’s thermal radiation, the PACE mission for monitoring aerosols and ocean color, the OCO-3 satellite that measure carbon dioxide levels, DSCOVR Earth-viewing instruments for space weather recordings and the International Space Station’s CLARREO Pathfinder for measuring Earth reflectance.

Meanwhile, voyages beyond our atmosphere would get a 4.5 percent boost, including $425 million for a flyby mission to Europa, a Jupiter moon that may be capable of sustaining life.

NASA’s education office would be terminated, a move the budget says will save $78 million in fiscal year 2018.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: 1 percent cut

2017: $5.8 billion
Skinny: $5.6 billion
Full: $5.6 billion

Giant tube worms are one species that lives around hydrothermal vents on Earth. Photo by NOAA

Sticking to its word, the White House plans to cut $262 million worth of funding for NOAA grants and education programs, including the Sea Grant, the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, Coastal Zone Management Grants, the Office of Education and the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund.

Chemical Safety Board: 100 percent cut

2017: $12.4 million
Skinny: $0
Full: $9 million
As part of its overarching goal of removing regulations, the White House proposed in its skinny budget the elimination of the Chemical Safety Board, an independent agency responsible for investigating chemical spills and accidents at industrial facilities. The first step in this process would be a $2 million reduction in funding for the Chemical Safety Board for 2018.

Corps of Engineers: 16 percent

2017: $6.0 billion
Skinny: $5.0 billion
Full: $5.0 billion

The OMB justifies a $1 billion cut to the Army Corps of Engineers by calling on the group to prioritize the maintenance of existing infrastructure over the construction of new projects. Meanwhile, the nation’s capital loses a federal investment in the Washington Aqueduct; the Trump proposal argues that local government or private ownership of the water supply would be more appropriate and mitigate risk for taxpayers.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include budget proposals for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service.

The post What Trump’s budget proposal means for science, health and tech appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Henderson Island in the South Pacific is covered with the highest density of plastic debris ever recorded in the world for a beach. Photo by Jennifer Lavers

The beaches of Henderson Island are littered with plastic razor blades, toothbrushes and scoops from containers of baby formula, coffee and laundry powder. Turtles get tangled in fishing wire. Land crabs make their homes in toxic plastic.

Despite sitting 3,100 miles from the nearest factory or human settlement, this South Pacific island is covered with the highest density of plastic debris ever recorded in the world for a beach, according to a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team estimates 37.7 million pieces of plastic debris litter Henderson Island, exposing the extent to which the Earth’s nooks and crannies have become sinks for the 311 million tons of plastic waste created annually by humans.

“The human footprint is everywhere, and it runs deeper than most of us imagine,” Jennifer Lavers, a University of Tasmania marine scientist who led the study, told NewsHour via email. “[Henderson Island] is a remarkably beautiful and unique place that is suffering immensely at the hands of humans that have never set foot on the island, never even heard its name.”

One of many hundreds of crabs that now make their homes out of plastic debris washed up on Henderson Island, this particular item is an Avon cosmetics jar. Photo by Jennifer Lavers

Throughout her career, Lavers has traveled to some of the world’s most remote islands, but her examination of Henderson Island began on Google Maps. One day, she was looking at Google footage of Henderson Island and noticed significant quantities of trash on the island’s beaches.

The location of Henderson Island, which is part of the the Pitcairn Islands Exclusive Economic Area (boundary for latter shown in light blue). Arrows indicate the direction of major oceanic currents and the South Pacific Gyre. Photo by Lavers J.L. and Bond A.L., PNAS, 2017.

So in May 2015, she and her expedition team ventured to Henderson Island, which has an area of 14 square miles. (By comparison, Manhattan is 22 square miles in size.) Henderson island sits in the path of the South Pacific Gyre, a major oceanic current. Such currents are known to accumulate plastic, reaching densities 2.3 million pieces per square mile.

The team spent four months calculating how much plastic filled Henderson Island’s beaches. They walked along the high tide line, splitting up the beach into transects — 32-foot by 22-foot rectangles where they counted the number of plastic, glass, wood and metal items. In certain places, the researchers dug 2 to 4 inches to measure how much plastic was buried as sand washed on shore. They also surveyed debris among forested areas adjacent to the beaches.

On the worst beach, Laver’s group found an average of 22 plastic items per square foot of beach, and up to 62 piece per square foot in spots. These rates were 200 to 2,000 times higher than what was previously recorded on South Pacific islands in 1991 — the last time such a study in this area was conducted. Overall, the researchers estimated the island was covered with 17.6 tons of plastic debris.

“Single use” plastics on East Beach, Henderson Island in 2015. Photo by Jennifer Lavers

Approximately 3,600 items arrive on the island each day, the report stated. The most common items were plastic bottles, caps and lids, but Lavers spotted a trend of single-use “disposable” items – such as those objects referenced earlier: plastic razor blades, cutlery, toothbrushes and scoops found in in coffee and laundry detergent.

“Hundreds of land crabs now make their homes out of broken, toxic plastic debris washed up on Henderson Island,” Lavers said.

Bite marks, likely from a parrotfish or small turtle (species unknown), on a beach-washed bottle. Photo by Jennifer Lavers

And those ramifications are just the visible ones. Heat and sunlight can break apart items like bags or bottles into microplastics, which are easily consumed by wildlife. Prior research has found more than 200 species are threatened by the ingestion of plastics. Plus, most of the plastics — 68 percent or up to 416 pieces per square foot — were buried in and concealed by the sand.

Most of the plastic pieces on Henderson Island trace to Japan, China, Chile and Peru — which may be due to how plastic flows along Pacific gyres as well as the island’s proximity to South America. But some items originated in the U.S. and Europe too.

Lavers argued the best way to keep rubbish from washing up on beaches is to reduce our dependence on plastics, especially single-use items, and to use alternative materials where possible.

“Documenting the extent of the problem on one of the most pristine islands left in the world presented an especially unique opportunity to highlight the seriousness and global nature of the plastic pollution issue,” Lavers said. “Henderson Island is not unique – plastic is, quite literally, everywhere.”

PBS Digital Studios’ Joe Hanson explains what you can do to make the oceans plastic-free.

The post This tiny island with no humans is getting buried in plastic trash appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Love candy? Well then, your liver may make relatively less of a hormone called FGF21, according to a new study. Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images

Believe it or not, some people don’t like candy. (Writer raises hand.) These people have been known to balk when friends offer jellybeans or leave the room as co-workers paw at the annual bowl of Halloween candy corn. If you’re one of these candy deniers, you may want to blame your hormones — or at least, a hormone made by the liver called FGF21.

This hormone controls your sweet tooth, according to a study published May 2 in the journal Cell Metabolism, making some folks much more likely to snack on candy and sweets, such as gum drops, ice cream, milk chocolate, Sweet Tarts and Skittles.

“It’s really specific to sweet tooth,” said Matthew Gillum, a metabolism researcher at the University of Copenhagen’s Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research who co-led the study. “We don’t see an effect on intake of complex carbs,” namely their preferences for fatty-sweets (cakes and pastries) and salty treats are just like everyone else’s.

While the neuroscience behind what drives overall hunger is well-understood, surprisingly little is known about why our brains and bodies gravitate toward specific foods. Parents pass along food preferences for fruits and veggies or meat, to their kids. But scientists like Gillum want to know why people make those decisions.

FGF21 had cropped up in the scientific world of sugar consumption in the past. Boosting FGF21 hormone levels in lab rodents or non-human primates triggers an aversion to sugar and artificial sweeteners, but not to proteins, fats or overall food intake.

Meanwhile, genome-wide association studies — which look at human mutations and how they correlate with health behaviors — pinpointed two genetic tweaks in the FGF21 gene that associated with increased carbohydrate consumption. But these prior studies did not quantify how much extra sugar was consumed by these individuals.

So to explore how these FGF21 mutations influence the day-to-day diets of humans, Gillum and his colleagues examined the genetic profiles of subjects from the Inter99 study — a huge survey in Denmark that tracked the cardiovascular health of 13,000 random adults between the ages of 30 and 60. From 1999 to 2006, subjects filled out questionnaires about their daily diets, while doctors collected blood samples to track things like cholesterol and insulin levels. A subset of 6,500 individuals volunteered their blood samples for future genetic analysis, such as by teams like Gillum’s.

Gillum and company found people from the Inter99 study who had one of the two FGF21 mutations were 20 percent more likely to consume candy and sweets on a day-to-day basis.

“It’s a small change in behavior — about 3 grams in added sugar consumption per day,” Gillum said. “It doesn’t seem to do anything to your bodyweight. The effect on BMI [body mass index] is not large.”

“Liking sweets is a somewhat addictive behavior,” said Terry Maratos-Flier, a professor of medicine at Harvard University who studies how diet alters the programming of our minds and bodies. Photo by Sarah Lawrence/via Getty Images

Going further, the team recruited a separate group of 100 college students and asked if they liked or disliked sweets. Those with the strongest preferences for sweets had 50 percent less FGF21 circulating in their blood.

Stated otherwise, FGF21 hormone acts like a brake. If you have lower levels of it or if your version is mutated, then you tend to consume more sugar.

Though FGF21 levels did not correlate with obesity in this random selection, it may still influence weight gain through its ability to temper cravings.

“Liking sweets is a somewhat addictive behavior,” said Terry Maratos-Flier, a professor of medicine at Harvard University who studies how diet alters the programming of our minds and bodies. “It’s a motivation behavior. You get a lot of pleasure out of it.”

Maratos-Flier, who wasn’t involved with Gillum’s research, found it interesting that people with FGF21 mutations who liked sweets were more likely to drink alcohol and smoke. Prior work has shown genetics tweaks to FGF21 pathways increase alcohol intake in mice and humans.

“It suggests that FGF21 might fit into these highly motivated behaviors,” Maratos-Flier said, adding that the hormone may push multiple hedonic behaviors. Gillum’s group plans to dig into the alcohol question in the immediate future.

Meanwhile, a clinical trial conducted by Pfizer found a drug that mimics FGF21 can reduce body weight in Type 2 diabetes patients by lowering their food intake. But many metabolic pathways influence diet choices, and likely sugar consumption too, so both Gillum and Maratos-Flier said more research is needed to clarify how FGF21 factors into disorders like obesity.

“The surprising takeaway is that appetite might be regulated by the liver, which isn’t thought to be a hormonal regulator of feeding behavior,” Gillum said. But right now, “we think these natural rewards may just be going through the same craving pathway that sugar does.”

The post Can’t resist candy? You may have this mutation appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A new study found children who spent more time with hand-held screens were more likely to exhibit a delay in expressive speech. Photo by triloks/via Getty Images

Hand-held screens might delay a child’s ability to form words, based on new research being presented this week at the annual Pediatric Academic Societies Meeting in San Francisco. This preliminary study is the first to show how mobile devices impact speech development in children, raising a question that fills the minds of many parents: How much time should my child spend with a mobile device?

But for parents who see mobile devices as an education tool, don’t immediately lock away your smartphone or tablet. Here’s what you should know about the risk.

Express yourself

Studies on media usage and child development are notoriously difficult to conduct. Doctors can’t exactly split up a bunch of babies and say, “you kids spend a lot of time with your iPads, while the rest of you don’t. Let’s see what happens.”

So Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, relied on well-child visits, regular checkups that assess a child’s growth, health and development. From 2011 to 2015, she asked the parents of to estimate how much time their children spent each day with hand-held screens, like smartphones, tablets and electronic games. Meanwhile, Birken and her team assessed each child with the Infant Toddler Checklist — a screening tool that looks for signs of delayed communication development.

“It isn’t a definitive diagnosis,” Birken said, but it does assess whether a child is at-risk and needs to be referred for further evaluation. In total, Birken’s team recruited and examined nearly 900 toddlers, aged 6 to 24 months, for the study.

By the time they reached their 18-month checkups, 20 percent of the children used mobile devices for 28 minutes on average each day. They found children who spent more time with hand-held screens were more likely to exhibit signs of a delay in expressive speech — how children use their sounds and words, and how they put their words together to communicate.

“Parents should be wary of educational apps marketed for children 24 months or younger,” pediatrician Jenny Radesky said, because “the science on this says quite clearly that [these] children just don’t symbolically understand what they’re seeing on a two-dimensional screen.” Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images

Each additional 30 minutes of hand-held screen time was linked to a 49 percent increased risk in expressive speech delay. Other forms of communication — gestures, emotions, social eye-gazing — were unaffected.

Birken emphasized that the findings, at this stage, don’t prove cause and effect. That would require a clinical trial where children are randomly selected and tracked throughout childhood.

But this study highlights what could be a life-altering trend for children exposed to too much hand-held screen time because of the value of expressive speech.

“When kids can’t express themselves they get really frustrated,” said Jenny Radesky, a University of Michigan developmental pediatrician who wasn’t involved in the study. “They are more likely to act out more or to use their bodies to try to communicate or use attention-seeking behaviors.”

In the short term, an expressive speech delay can influence a child’s ability to conceptualize words or define their emotions. Though some children who are behind at 18 months or 24 months can eventually catch up, over time, these language delays can impede literacy skills in grade school.

“Early language delays have been linked with later academic problems or not finishing high school,” Radesky said.

Hold the phone — and interact with it too

Last autumn, Radesky’s lab reported that families fret over hand-held screen time for conflicting reasons. They worry their children will miss out on educational opportunities or lack digital literacy without the devices, but wonder if fast-moving technology stifles creativity or displaces family time.

But Radesky, who co-authored the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent guidelines for children’s media use, said the problem lies less with mobile devices, and more with how we use them.

“Kids can start to learn language from media, if they’re watching with a parent who then uses the media as a teaching tool,” Radesky said. “Help the child apply it to the rest of the world around them — the way parents often do with a book.”

If parents are introducing young children to mobile technology, they should try and do it in a way that teaches the child to use the device as a tool rather than purely for entertainment. Photo by Tang Ming Tung

Radesky said that’s tricky because media designers sometimes forget to build content that’s interactive for both a parent and a child. She offered Daniel’s Tiger as a counterexample that hits the mark for teaching social, emotional and language skills with parent-child interactions.

Also, parents should be wary of educational apps marketed for children 24 months or younger, she said, because “the science on this says quite clearly that [these] children just don’t symbolically understand what they’re seeing on a two-dimensional screen.”

Birken’s study didn’t distinguish between whether educational or entertainment media influences the risk of expressive delay, but the trend did hold regardless of income level and maternal education. Her future studies could also look into how parents’ mental health, literacy legacy within a family and access to other caretakers like grandparents factor into the hand-held device usage and language development.

“One of the challenges is the pace of technology is outstripping the pace of research,” Birken said. “It’s a big challenge.”

But Radesky recognizes the allure of passing back a smartphone in a car to placate a child, but if they’re introducing young children to the technology, they should try and do it in a way that teaches the child to use the device as a tool rather than purely for entertainment. Kids can become tech savvy by learning how to find whether their grandma is online on Skype or by taking and sharing funny pictures.

“If they really want to promote some sort of language learning or developmental stimulation, that is always still done best through interpersonal interaction,” Radesky said.

The post Toddlers’ screen time linked to slower speech development, study finds appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

San Diego Natural History Museum Paleontologist Don Swanson pointing at rock fragment near a large horizontal mastodon tusk fragment. Photo by San Diego Natural History Museum

Twenty-four years ago, construction workers building a new highway near San Diego stumbled upon a skeleton that may rewrite the entire history of the Americas.

Researchers found signs of human manipulation on the 130,000-year-old remains of a mastodon — an ancient and extinct relative of the elephant — at what’s now called the Cerutti Mastodon site, they said in a study published Wednesday in Nature. Here’s the rub. Almost all previous evidence points to humans arriving in the Americas approximately 20,000 years ago. This discovery could change that.

A view of two mastodon femur balls, one faced up and once faced down. Neural spine of a vertebra exposed (lower right) and a broken rib (lower left). Photo by San Diego Natural History Museum

Needless to say, this report has sparked controversy, like “paleontologists-all-over-America-pulling-out-their-hair” controversy. Here’s what you need to know.

What they found:

• Starting in the winter of 1992, Richard A. Cerutti and other paleontologists from the San Diego Natural History Museum began excavating the Cerutti Mastodon site.
• The team discovered bones from a young adult male mastodon — tusks, molars, vertebrae, ribs, paw bones and more than 300 fragments — centered around a large cobble stone. The researchers also found wear-and-tear patterns on other stones that suggest they were used as hammers In the last five years, researchers used uranium dating to determine the bones were 130,000 years old. They couldn’t use traditional carbon dating because the mastodon’s collagen had eroded.
• “It makes ours the oldest archaeological site in the Americas — older by a factor of 10,” San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist and study coauthor Thomas Deméré at a press briefing Tuesday. “Currently the oldest widely accepted date of human presence in the new world is 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.”

Why you should believe this finding:

• Spiral-fracture patterns on the mastodon bones suggest they were broken soon after the mastodon died
• Only long bones like femurs showed fractures, whereas more fragile bones like the ribs were intact. If more recent, wholesale disturbances — like cars or large construction machinery trundling over the buried archaeological site — had broken the bones, then the ribs would likely have fractures, too.
• Study co-author Steven Holen of the Center for American Paleolithic Research in Hot Springs, South Dakota said there was also no evidence of other natural processes, like:
  • Geologic disruption: Surrounding sediments were relatively light, so wouldn’t have caused bone breakage. Also the sediments exhibited “low-energy deposition,” meaning water hadn’t tossed around the bones and led to these breaks.
  • Animals trampling on the bone: Trampling tends to produce different breaks, and past studies suggest trampling doesn’t normally occur near elephant death sites
  • Carnivore chewing: Carnivores gnaw on the ends of bones, while these mastodon bones were broken in the middle.)
• The mastodon bone fractures mirror those seen when elephant bones are shattered with large hammers, rock hammers and rock anvils, as in previous archaeological finds in Africa and recreation experiments conducted by the team. People in Africa have been breaking up elephant limb bones with this pattern for 1.5 million years, Holden said.
• “What’s truly remarkable about this site is you can identify a particular hammer that was smacked on a particular anvil,” said University of Wollongong archaeologist Richard Fullagar, a coauthor on the study who specializes in stone artifacts. “The fragments of those hammers and anvils can then be refitted to the stones.”

A boulder discovered at the Cerutti Mastodon site thought to have been used by early humans as a hammerstone. Photo by Tom Deméré, San Diego Natural History Museum

Why you should be skeptical:

• Genetic analysis of human remains, collected outside the current study, have long suggested that Native American populations are linked to early humans who crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia and settled in the Americas about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
• No human remains were found at the Cerutti Mastodon site. That isn’t too surprising, given human remains in extremely old geologic deposits are rare. Researchers, for instance, have only found two examples of human remains for the Clovis culture, which existed about 13,000 years ago in the Americas.
• Due to warmer temperatures and sea level rise, the Bering land bridge should have been underwater 130,000 year ago. So these humans either crossed earlier, or made some portion of the journey by boat. Elsewhere in the world during this time period, early humans had popped up on the islands of Crete and Sulawesi. So, the use of watercrafts isn’t beyond the realm possibility. Also, neanderthals lived in
• John McNabb, a Palaeolithic archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, told Nature News that it’s curious the site “yielded no other traces of human presence,” such as those related to animal butchery.

If the study holds up, what happened to these “Cerutti” Americans?

• It’s entirely possible that these early Americans became extinct, Holen said. Present-day Amazonian Native Americans also carry a set of genetic markers that are unlike those found in Central and Northern populations. These markers hail from Asian islanders, suggesting there were two founding populations for the Americas, but it’s unclear when the second group arrived.
• This latest Cerutti Mastodon site is hardly the first to try rewrite early American history, wrote Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist Erella Hovers, who penned an op-ed also published Wednesday by Nature:

The best-known and controversial archaeological claims for early human entry into the Americas are from the Calico Hills in California (originally thought to be 80,000–50,000 years old or even older), Pedra Furada in Brazil (40,000−20,000 years old) and Old Crow in the Yukon Territory of Canada.

However, the interpretations of site context, the nature of the stone items, and the human ‘signature’ on fossil faunas offered in support of these claims have been criticized.

In these cases, the findings could be explained as the outcome of geological or biological processes that superficially mimic human-made items, or the associations of the dated sediments with the artefacts are questionable.

***Time will tell whether this evidence will bring a paradigm change in our understanding of processes of hominin dispersal and colonization throughout the world (including in what now seems to be a not-so-new New World).

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