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<p>The feces contain the oldest example of parasite DNA ever recorded.</p>

In 17,000-year-old puma poop, a glimpse of Ice Age parasites

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<p>The virus simmered quietly in Cuba for about a year before infecting thousands.</p>

Researchers use viral genomes to uncover a Zika outbreak in Cuba

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<p>The threat of mercury in seafood was curbed with regulations, but climate change could drive levels back up.</p>

Climate change could mean more mercury in seafood

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<p>NOVA Next is NOVA’s award-winning digital publication that provides answers from the cutting edge of science and technology.</p>

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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Roughly 7 million years ago, something at the heart of our galaxy exploded.</p><p>The cataclysmic event was so violent that it punched a pair of holes in interstellar space, carving out two colossal bubbles tethered together in an hourglass some 1,400 light-years across. Out from the structure gushed a torrent of radio waves, emanating like SOS signals throughout the cosmos—and in the spring of 2018, a team of astronomers picked them up.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>It’s still unclear what exactly happened all those years ago, the researchers <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1532-5">report</a> this week in the journal <i>Nature.</i> But study author Ian Heywood, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, is confident that it was “something extraordinary,” <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/radio-wave-bubbles-milky-way-black-hole">reports Emily Conover at <i>Science News</i></a>.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>The team’s observation was made possible by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope, which first began collecting data in the spring of 2018. Last year, Heywood and his colleagues pointed MeerKAT at the region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, revealing a gargantuan gush of radio activity. These signals, the team reports, are signatures of fast-moving charged particles—the effective shrapnel lingering in the wake of a mysterious, age-old eruption.</p><p>The nature of this violent affair remains mysterious, but the team thinks there are a couple possible explanations. In one, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole rapidly devoured an enormous buffet of matter, spewing some of the excess outward into space.</p><p>Another possibility is that the radio waves were produced by a “starburst,” the near-simultaneous birth of about 100 short-lived stars that then exploded as supernovae after just a few million years. The combined power of this live fast, die young event—which has been hinted at by other observations—could have been enough to blast gassy bubbles into the galactic center.</p><p>Either war way, the cataclysm flung an enormous amount of matter into the space around it, forging two bubbles inflated with hot gas—and it seems they’ve been expanding ever since.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="210906.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="628" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/210906.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>A radio image of the central portions of the Milky Way galaxy. The radio bubbles discovered by MeerKAT extend vertically above and below the plane of the galaxy. Image Credit: Oxford, SARAO</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Will the pair eventually pop? Not exactly. “Within a few more million years, [the bubbles will] likely dissipate to the point where they’ll be indistinguishable from the background radio emission from the central regions of the galaxy,” study author Fernando Camilo <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/giant-radio-bubble-milky-way-black-hole-1458729">told Hannah Osborne at <i>Newsweek</i></a>.</p><p>By catching the bubbles in their current form, though, researchers may be on their way to solving another mystery that’s plagued astronomers since the 1980s. More than three decades ago, scientists detected a set of long, narrow, radio-emitting streaks in the same region—but their cause eluded explanation. Now, the proximity of the two structures suggests they share an origin story.</p><p>As Jun-Hui Zhao, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the study, told Conover, this new observation, helps piece together the “mosaic” at the center of the Milky Way.</p></div>
  

  
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<p>The gargantuan structures hint at a massive explosion in our galaxy’s past.</p>

Astronomers discover two giant, high-energy ‘bubbles’ at the center of the Milky Way





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>The skies are growing increasingly silent. For the past several decades, bird populations around the globe <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016788091730525X">have been</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/23/one-in-eight-birds-is-threatened-with-extinction-global-study-finds">plummeting</a>—and it appears one of the world’s most popular pesticides may be partly to blame.</p><p>A team of researchers has found that a widely used insecticide called imidacloprid causes sparrows to lose drastic amounts of weight and delay their migratory schedules, potentially stripping the birds of their best shot at a successful breeding season. The <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aaw9419">study</a>, published today in the journal <i>Science,</i> is the first to track the fates of wild birds exposed to pesticides. It also adds to a growing body of evidence that shows the toxic chemicals that abound in agriculture harm far more than the species they’re intended for—often in subtle and insidious ways.</p><p>“The coolest thing about this paper...is that it shows that the effects of [pesticides] aren’t always obvious,” says <a href="https://jhua13.wixsite.com/jhua">Jessica Hua</a>, an environmental toxicologist at Binghamton University who was not involved in the study. “This isn’t direct mortality—the effects are more subtle. And no one would have seen that without tracking these birds.”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>The fact that pesticides hurt more than pests isn’t news. In particular, neonicotinoids (neonics for short)—the class of insecticides that includes imidacloprid, and act by overstimulating and destroying nerve cells—have long been under fire for the bevy of off-target effects it has on local ecosystems, including <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1395">declines in bee populations</a> <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1393">in several countries</a>.</p><p>In recent years, it’s become clear that upticks in neonics are also linked to downswings in certain bird species—a trend that some researchers have attributed to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13531.epdf">insect-eating species</a> suddenly finding themselves without a consistent supply of food.</p><p>But a few years ago, <a href="http://margareteng.ca/">Margaret Eng</a>, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, began to wonder if the birds were suffering more directly from neonics’ effects.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="eng3HR.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/eng3HR.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Cereal grain seeds coated with pesticides. Image Credit: Margaret Eng, University of Saskatchewan</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Neonics are the most commonly used insecticide in the world, and can be found slathered on the seeds of many commercial crops, including corn, canola, and soybeans. When the seeds sprout, a fraction of the water-soluble drug gets ferried into growing tissues, turning the entire plant toxic to any insect feeding on it.</p><p>That’s bad enough news for bugs. But these chemicals could also take a toll on animals that access the pesticide where it’s most concentrated: on treated seeds themselves, spilled during the planting process, or lurking near the soil surface.</p><p>Two years ago, a team led by Eng found that to be <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15446-x">exactly the case</a>. After being fed a neonic called imidacloprid, captive white-crowned sparrows (<i>Zonotrichia leucophrys</i>) stopped eating, dropping up to a quarter of their body weight within three days. They also temporarily lost their ability to orient northward in a lab-based experiment—a handicap that could prove disastrous for migrating birds.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Eng was struck by the birds’ rapid deterioration—but it remained unclear whether the results would hold true in the real world. So she and her colleagues repeated their experiment in the field, capturing a new cohort of sparrows making a pitstop in Ontario en route to their spring breeding grounds. As with their captive study, the researchers mimicked natural exposure by carefully dosing the birds with one of two small quantities of imidacloprid dissolved in sunflower oil. Each dose comprised less than the amount of pesticide that can be found on a single corn seed, or less than 1.5 percent of a sparrow’s daily diet, based on current application rates as defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, as well as an analogous organization in Canada.</p><p>After monitoring the sparrows for several hours, the team found that, even in tiny doses, imidacloprid was a powerful appetite suppressant, confirming the results of their previous experiment. In the six hours after they ingested the pesticide, sparrows on the higher dose ate 70 percent less than those that had been fed only sunflower oil, and lost 6 percent of their body mass.</p><p>Shortly after this period of surveillance, the researchers attached lightweight trackers to the sparrows and sent them on their way.</p><p>Unlike before, the sparrows didn’t seem to have trouble staying on course—once they left, that is. While untreated birds hung around the stopover site for about half a day to rest and refuel before resuming their journey, the intoxicated sparrows lingered for an extra two or three days before taking flight. Eng thinks the birds may have delayed their departure to give themselves time to regain their appetites and recover from the pesticide’s discombobulating effects, like those observed in the team’s previous study.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="iStock-173946954.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="574" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/iStock-173946954.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>The white-crowned sparrow is one of many migratory species that&#x27;s vulnerable to pesticides at stopover sites. Image Credit: BirdImages, iStock</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>A prolonged pitstop might seem like no big deal. But for a bird on the go, timing is everything: A prompt arrival at spring breeding grounds boosts its chances of claiming a good nesting site, hooking up with a choice mate, and producing healthy offspring. That leaves little time for dilly-dallying along the way—and even brief delays in this strict schedule can prove disastrous, says study author <a href="http://christymorrissey.driftchamber.com/">Christy Morrissey</a>, who supervises Eng’s work.</p><p>The researchers didn’t follow the sparrows’ fates throughout the rest of the breeding season. But it’s not a stretch to imagine how bouts of extreme weight loss or nausea could waylay a bird on a harrowing odyssey, Morrissey says. “These minuscule doses [are] enough to disrupt the birds’ whole migration timeline,” she says. “This has clear knock-on effects for population stability.”</p><p>Ironically, when neonics first came onto the scene in the 1980s, they were billed as “safer” alternative to an older generation of more toxic pesticides. On a cell-by-cell basis, the chemical exerts less potent effects in vertebrates like birds and mammals than in insects. But “less potent” doesn’t mean “harmless.”</p><p>“This is a pesticide that’s been considered safe because it’s fine-tuned to target specific species,” says <a href="https://hoodnaturalist635144784.wordpress.com/">Corina Newsome</a>, a wildlife biologist and avian conservationist at Georgia Southern University who was not involved in the study. “This study helps blow the lid off [that idea].”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="eng4HR.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/eng4HR.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Cereal grain seeds coated with pesticides, strewn in the soil. Image Credit: Margaret Eng, University of Saskatchewan</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>And there are more than bird lives at stake. After they’re applied, the chemicals also tend to linger in soil, where they can then get flushed into streams and rivers, potentially affecting the residents of more distant habitats, including <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174171">amphibians and aquatic invertebrates</a>. Even <a href="https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0048-9697(19)32021-2">mammals</a> like deer, raccoons, and rabbits have been spotted dipping into contaminated seed stocks.</p><p>“These [pesticides] exist throughout the whole agricultural landscape,” Eng says. “They’ve become ubiquitous.”</p><p>Utz Klages, a spokesperson for <a href="https://www.cropscience.bayer.com/en">Bayer</a>, a major manufacturer of imidacloprid, disputes the study’s connection between the use of neonics and declines in songbird health, arguing that real-world exposure levels are far below those that disrupt migratory behavior. “Bayer remains convinced that evidence shows that neonicotinoids are safe when applied responsibly and properly in accordance with the label instructions,” he says in an email.</p><p>Morrissey, however, stresses that the study’s doses are realistic. The time when pesticides are applied to seeds coincides perfectly with spring migrations, she says, and previous research has shown that several bird species will <a href="https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0048-9697(19)32021-2">snack on seeds</a> <a href="https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0048-9697(19)32021-2">spilled during planting</a>.</p><p>Last year, the European Union banned three neonics, including imidacloprid, for all outdoor uses, citing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agrees-total-ban-on-bee-harming-pesticides">damages to bees</a> as the primary motivation. But Eng and Morrissey don’t think single chemical bans will be a panacea for biodiversity around agricultural areas. Where one pesticide disappears, another will quickly take its place, Morrissey says. And many of the new ones being rolled out by companies have toxic properties similar to their predecessors, she adds.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="eng1HR.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/eng1HR.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>A receiving station in the Motus Wildlife Tracking System, an automated radiotelemetry network that tracks the movements of tagged animals, like the study&#x27;s white-crowned sparrows. Image Credit: Margaret Eng, University of Saskatchewan</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Getting farmers “off the pesticide treadmill,” she says, won’t be easy. Where possible, non-chemical alternatives for pest control could be considered. One possibility, she says, involves investing in <a href="https://regenerationinternational.org/2017/02/24/what-is-regenerative-agriculture/">regenerative agriculture</a>—a practice that leverages the natural resilience that comes with more ecologically diverse plots of land.</p><p>These transformations won’t happen overnight. But Newsome and Hua both advocate for further research to identify the critical stopover sites that support the most species of migrating birds. Here, Newsome says, researchers and farmers can cooperate to minimize the impacts of agriculture on wildlife, or provide safe havens to shelter weary travelers.</p><p>In the meantime, pesticides could stand to be used more judiciously, Hua says. It’s also worth considering the ways in which their design and manufacture could be modified to avoid these negative consequences in the first place.</p><p>“Is it possible for our society to be proactive instead of reactive, and prevent something harmful from getting out to the market?” she says. “It’s something to think about.”</p></div>
  

  
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<p>Delays during migration can imperil birds’ chances of a successful breeding season.</p>

Popular pesticide throws off birds’ feeding and migration schedules





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>This week, astronomers announced new hope for extraterrestrial habitability: an exoplanet some 110 light-years away from Earth that harbors water in its atmosphere.</p><p>The discovery, published in two independent papers published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0878-9"><i>Nature Astronomy</i></a> and on the pre-print server <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04642">arXiv.org</a>, marks the first time researchers have detected an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star that supports liquid water—a crucial ingredient for life as humans understand it.</p><p>But don’t pack your bags just yet. While it’s offered up some tantalizing tidbits, the planet, called K2-18b, likely harbors many foreign features, and is 2.5 times larger and eight times more massive than Earth. Such <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/tess-toi-270/">intermediate sized planets</a> don’t always look like Earth, and may actually more closely resemble Neptune—the icy planet that’s one size up in our own solar system.</p><p>“K2-18b is not ‘Earth 2.0,’” Angelos Tsiaras, an astronomer at University College London and author of the <i>Nature Astronomy</i> paper, <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2019-09/ucl-fwd091019.php">said in a statement</a>. “However, [this] brings us closer to answering the fundamental question: Is the Earth unique?”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>NASA’s Kepler space telescope first spotted K2-18b in 2015. The planet closely orbits a dim red dwarf star that’s about half the size of our solar system’s sun. Its orbital path is much tighter than the one Earth follows around our sun (out there, a year would be just 33 Earth days)—but this intimate distance means the planet is still within the red dwarf star’s habitable zone, the life-friendly region where temperatures are conducive to liquid water.</p><p>This isn’t the first time water’s been detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, but previous candidates have had extremely hostile environments—like a Saturn-like behemoth with <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/nasa-finds-a-large-amount-of-water-in-an-exoplanets-atmosphere/">scorching surface temperatures</a>, <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/first-water-found-in-habitable-exoplanets-atmosphere-hubble-kepler-k2-18b/">reports <i>National Geographic</i>’s Michael Greshko</a>.</p><p>So far, K2-18b seems considerably more hospitable—and that’s big. In the arXiv.org <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.04642">paper</a>, a team led by University of Montreal astronomer Björn Benneke used the Hubble Space Telescope to pinpoint evidence of a watery atmosphere, noting how it absorbed certain wavelengths of light.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>After Benneke’s group posted their data to a public archive, an independent team led by Tsiaras re-analyzed it with their own software, arriving at similar conclusions. Their <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0878-9">study</a>, which appears in <i>Nature Astronomy</i>, also suggests that K2-18b’s atmosphere contains hydrogen and helium.</p><p>As Tsiaras said during a press conference, researchers consider K2-18b “the best candidate for habitability” outside our solar system.</p><p>Both studies, however, raise many new questions. For instance, it’s unclear just how much K2-18b’s atmosphere holds. In their paper, Tsiaras’ team laid out three models, each of which contained a very different estimate, spanning between 0.01 and 50 percent of the total atmosphere.</p><p>When Benneke’s team modeled K2-18b’s climate, they discovered that the planet has clouds, as well as conditions might allow for the formation of liquid water droplets. Taken together, these two pieces of data hint that water could condense out of the planet’s clouds to create rain. If that’s true, K2-18b would be the first known exoplanet with clouds of water vapor, Greshko reports.</p><p>“It’s quite likely that this planet has liquid rain on it,” Benneke <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-known-exoplanet-rain-clouds-water-droplets">told Lisa Grossman at <i>Science News</i></a>. “This is actually one of the most exciting findings from this data.”</p><p>However, Sara Seager, an astronomer at MIT who was not involved in either study, cautioned to Grossman that the presence of rain remains speculation until further observations are made, perhaps with the more NASA’s more powerful James Webb Space Telescope.</p><p>Depending on what future observations yield, K2-18b could turn out to be a planet with a dense, rocky core swaddled by a thick atmosphere, like Neptune—not exactly the most life-friendly of places. There’s still a chance it could be bathed in a huge ocean, though, which would be more suitable for life, Abel Mendez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico, who was not involved in either study, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-find-water-vapor-on-the-most-habitable-exoplanet-yet/">told Daniel Oberhaus at <i>WIRED</i></a>.</p><p>Either way, this exoplanet remains a first. K2-18b may not be an exact replica of Earth, but in several ways, it comes much closer than previously known water-vapor-containing exoplanets, Nikole Lewis, an astronomer at Cornell University who was not involved in either study, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomers-find-water-on-an-exoplanet-twice-the-size-of-earth/">told Lee Billings at <i>Scientific American</i></a>. Getting to know K2-18b a bit better, she said, “will be important for understanding the potential habitability of smaller ‘Earth-sized’ planets.”</p></div>
  

  
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<p>Scientists say the planet, called K2-18b, is “the best candidate for habitability” beyond our solar system.</p>

Water vapor found on an ‘Earth-sized’ exoplanet 110 light-years from home





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Tom Yendell and Peter Longstaff are good at thinking on their feet. They have to be: Both were born without arms. But both still became painters, thanks to the extraordinary dexterity of their toes.</p><p>And that’s not all their feet can do. From an early age, both men have used their lower extremities to master everyday tasks typically performed with hands, including eating, writing, and typing—actions that appear to have prompted reorganizations in their brains.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>While non-disabled individuals typically have well-defined “hand maps” in their brains, with each finger holding dominion over a defined region, Yendell and Longstaff have “toe maps” that appear to be just as powerful and precise, according to new research. The <a href="https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)31061-7">study</a>, published today in the journal <i>Cell Reports,</i> showcases the flexibility of the human brain—potentially providing insights into how mind and body communicate across the spectrum of ability.</p><p>“Sometimes, having the unusual case—even the very rare one—might give you important insight into how things work,” neuroscientist Denis Schluppeck of the University of Nottingham in England, who was not involved in the study, <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/artists-paint-feet-toe-maps-brain">told Laura Sanders at <i>Science News</i></a>.</p><p>Yendell and Longstaff are two of only three foot artists in the United Kingdom. Both were born to mothers who were treated during pregnancy with the drug thalidomide, which was later discovered to cause birth defects.</p><p>“These guys have spent their lives gaining expertise with using their feet,” study author Tamar Makin, a neuroscientist at University College London, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/science/brain-artist-thalidomide-feet-disability.html">told Francie Diep at <i>The New York Times</i></a>.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Makin and her colleagues suspected that this unique developmental trajectory likely had lasting impacts on the brain, which possesses a sensory “map” of different body parts, allocating space proportionally to sensitivity (fingers and lips, for instance, usually occupy larger regions of the brain than areas like the back).</p><p>To spot discrepancies, the researchers performed brain scans on Yendell and Longstaff, along with nine volunteers who had arms and typical toe dexterity.</p><p>As expected, these latter nine individuals had a typical brain “footprint”: a solid region with no delineations representing individual toes. Yendell and Longstaff’s brains, however, were far more finely tuned, with clear-cut toe regions arranged in order. And when each of their toes was touched, the corresponding region of the brain lit up in an fMRI.</p><p>“We’re talking here about a whole map that doesn’t usually exist in adults,” Ella Striem-Amit, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University who was not involved in the study, told Diep.</p><p>Makin thinks that continued research in this area may someday aid training programs for individuals who don’t have full use of existing limbs, such as those with cerebral palsy, Diep reports. It’s also possible that the findings could help people who have suffered injuries as adults, like stroke victims, but that’s not a guarantee. Yendell and Longstaff both began training their feet at a very young age, and it’s likely there’s a limited window of time in which such drastic brain map rearrangements are possible—one that closes before adulthood, study author Daan Wesselink, also of University College London, <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-09/cp-tto090519.php">said in a statement</a>.</p><p>Yendell doesn’t consider his life to be any different from those of his non-disabled peers, Diep reports. The skills he’s acquired with his feet, he said, give him the same opportunities as people with arms. “How did you figure out how to do things with your hands?” he said. “You don’t need to be shown how to do it. You just do it naturally.”</p></div>
  

  
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<p>Two men born without arms showcase the brain’s extraordinary flexibility.</p>

Intricate ‘toe maps’ exist in the brains of artists who paint with their feet





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>The electric eel is the closest thing nature’s got to a living, breathing battery.</p><p>Running up to eight feet in length, these serpentine swimmers (which actually aren’t true eels, but <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/e/electric-eel/">a type of knifefish</a>) are packed with thousands of cells that can generate their own electricity. Some of their homemade jolts are low-voltage, radar-like pulses that help the fish navigate. When prompted, however, electric eels can also serve up shocks powerful enough to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/science/electric-eels-shock.html">incapacitate a horse</a>.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Beneath this electrifying exterior, things get even funkier. Unlike most other fish, electric eels don’t rely on their gills to breathe, instead periodically peeking above water to <a href="https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/electric-eel">suck air into their lung-like mouths</a>. During the dry season, females will lay thousands of eggs into nests forged out of their mates’ saliva. And—because DIY electricity just isn’t enough—when they’re f(eel)ing threatened, these suckers can <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6214/1231.abstract"><i>launch themselves</i> at attackers</a> to deliver targeted parcels of pain.</p><p>There’s a lot that makes the electric eel unique. And for centuries, scientists thought they all comprised a single species—<i>Electrophorus electricus—</i>occupying its own lonely branch on the knifefish family tree. But it turns out electric eels harbor quite the shocking secret: These fish are so nice, they speciated twice.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="2A - Carlos David de Santana - Electrophorus voltai Xingu River_4 Picture by L. Sousa.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="520" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/2A_-_Carlos_David_de_Santana_-_Electrophorus_v.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Electric eels like <i>Electrophorus voltai</i> are especially fond of slow, shallow waters. “That’s prime real estate,” says Kory Evans, a fish biologist at Brown University. Image Credit: L. Sousa</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>An international team of scientists has found that at least three species of electric eel slither the rivers of South America. One of them, <i>Electrophorus voltai</i>, packs an unexpectedly powerful punch, discharging shocks up to 860 volts. That’s a 30 percent uptick over the previous record—and a stat that earns <i>E. voltai</i> the title of the strongest known living source of electricity.</p><p>“That’s bonkers,” says <a href="https://koryevans.weebly.com/about.html">Kory Evans</a>, an evolutionary biologist who studies electric fish at Brown University, but was not involved in the study. “The fact that there’s a living organism that has the ability to generate this kind of violent electricity is really shocking, no pun intended.”</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>The <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11690-z">study</a>, published today in the journal <i>Nature Communications</i>, triples the membership of the genus <i>Electrophorus</i>, which now includes the OG <i>E. electricus</i>, as well as newcomers <i>E. voltai</i> and <i>E. varii.</i> (Does this make electric eels less special? Maybe it boosts their appeal by a factor of three.)</p><p>In truth, though, the discovery has been a long time coming. Since their discovery in 1766 by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus, electric eels have been found all over Greater Amazonia, lurking wherever the water’s fresh, calm, and chock full of invertebrate snacks.</p><p>That’s an enormous range for a single species—essentially the top half of a continent, Evans says. Animals that spread into such diverse geographical regions tend to split off into separate species, especially if disparate groups lose contact with one another along the way. That <i>should</i> have been the case for electric eels, which, with their penchant for shallow, slow-moving waters, aren’t exactly the most cosmopolitan of fish.</p><p>Researchers have been trying to “break up” <i>E. electricus</i> for years, says Evans, who praised the new paper. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, they finally did it!’”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="4A - Carlos David de Santana - Aerial view_typical electric eel Upland habitat_Coppename River_Suriname Picture by de Santana.jpeg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/4A_-_Carlos_David_de_Santana_-_Aerial_view_typ.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>The highland regions of Greater Amazonia, the stomping grounds of <i>Electrophorus electricus</i> and<i> Electrophorus voltai.</i> Image Credit: C. David de Santana</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>There’s a few reasons it took 250 years to get to this point, says study author <a href="https://electriceel2013.wixsite.com/electric-fishes">David de Santana</a>, a zoologist and fish biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. For one, the trio of species his team teased apart all look remarkably similar, save for a few subtle discrepancies, like the shapes of their skulls. Even now, with three clear-cut bins to sort them into, picking apart their physical differences takes an exacting eye. According to de Santana, who studies fish morphology for a living, “this was my hardest work yet.”</p><p>The crux of the matter came down to a combination of intensive field work and modern genetic sequencing. De Santana and his colleagues spent the better part of four years traipsing through the river basins of Greater Amazonia, wrangling fish out of muddy streams, swamps, and plains throughout Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname.</p><p>Back in the lab, DNA extracted from 107 specimens revealed three distinct groups of animals. While the trio appear to share a common ancestor, they ultimately split from each other in two bouts: once about 7.1 million years ago, when <i>E. varii</i> branched off, and again 3.6 million years ago, when <i>E. electricus</i> and <i>E. voltai</i> went their separate ways.</p><p>Nowadays, the three species don’t have much to do with one another. While <i>E. electricus</i> was once thought to dominate the entire Amazonian region, de Santana’s team has narrowed its range to the Guiana Shield, a northerly geological formation home to highlands with rapids and waterfalls. South of this is a similar region called the Brazilian Shield, which appears to be the main stomping grounds of <i>E. voltai.</i> De Santana thinks the fast-flowing waters may have helped shape the two closely-related species’ relatively flat heads.</p><p>The geographic outlier of the bunch, then, is <i>E. varii,</i> a more bulb-headed fish that lurks in the lowlands of the Amazon Basin, where the waters are murky and sluggish.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="4B - Carlos David de Santana - typical electric eel Lowland habitat Picture by D. Bastos.png" class="richtext-image full-width" height="529" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/4B_-_Carlos_David_de_Santana_-_typical_electri.width-800.png"/><figcaption><p>The lowland regions of Greater Amazonia, where <i>Electrophorus varii</i> is known to lurk. Image Credit: D. Bastos</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Not to be outdone, <i>E. voltai</i> managed to distinguish itself in its own way. When the researchers hooked electrodes up to some of the fish to suss out their shock factor, one <i>E. voltai</i> specimen managed to pump out a whopping 860 volts of electricity.</p><p>The team only hooked six fish up to their oscilloscope, and de Santana suspects researchers have yet to crown the world’s most electrifying eel. (De Santana, who’s received his fair share of shocks, adds that the jolts are brief, and “not so bad.” That said, you would <i>not</i> want to get cornered by a dozen or so pissed off electric eels at once—a real concern, considering the team believes the fish sometimes hunt in packs.)</p><p>It’s still not totally clear what originally drove the three <i>Electrophorus</i> species apart, de Santana says. But his team is now hard at work disentangling more of the differences that exist between them—and it’s very possible that a few more species have yet to be uncovered.</p><p>Evans suspects the new species designations won’t slither down smoothly for everyone. “Usually when you split up species...it gets controversial,” he says. “But genetically, [these electric eels] sort out nicely, and it’s hard to argue with that.”</p><p><a href="https://kmallenneuro.com/">Kate Allen</a>, a neuroscientist and fish biologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study, agrees, pointing out that at least 250 species of electric fish exist in South America (though <i>Electrophorus</i> are the only ones that weaponize their zap). “It’s kind of weird that there would only be one species of electric eel given the diversity in the rest of their group,” she says.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="3A - Carlos David de Santana - Electrophorus varii Rio Negro 2 Picture by D. Bastos.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="228" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/3A_-_Carlos_David_de_Santana_-_Electrophorus_v.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>The newly described electric eel species <i>Electrophorus varii</i> swims through murky, slow-flowing lowland waters. Image Credit: D. Bastos</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Regardless of where species lines are drawn, though, simply having a more comprehensive catalog of these funky fish could be a boon for scientists in a variety of fields, de Santana says. Electric eels inspired Italian physicist Alessandro Volta to design the first battery in 1799; centuries later, researchers are still studying them to develop <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26766594">more efficient</a> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29239354">power sources</a>. Other <i>Electrophorus</i> aficionados are exploring applications in the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cmdc.201500104">treatment of neurodegenerative disease</a>, or <a href="https://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/13/2501">designing robots</a> modeled on the fish’s elongated anal fin, which allows it to swim backward or forward, or simply hover in place.</p><p>For these reasons and more, de Santana stresses the importance of preserving biodiversity in the Amazon, where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/23/amazon-fires-what-is-happening-anything-we-can-do">thousands of fires</a> currently rage amidst widespread deforestation. The electric eels’ species surprise, he says, is just the latest piece of evidence that many of the region’s biological riches remain unexplored.</p><p>After all, there’s nothing more conspicuous than an 8-foot-long electric eel leaping out of the water to shock you, Allen adds. If we’re still finding diversity “in such a big, charismatic species,” she says, “that means there’s a lot out there we don’t yet know about.”</p></div>
  

  
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<p>That earns this fish, <i>Electrophorus voltai</i>, the title of the strongest known living source of electricity.</p>

Newly described species of electric eel serves up shocks of 860 volts





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>With the help of a chemical treatment that keeps organs from freezing at subzero centigrade temperatures, a team of researchers has tripled the typical shelf life of donated livers from nine to 27 hours.</p><p>By extending the amount of time tissue remains viable outside the body, the new “supercooling” method could someday reduce the number of donor organs that expire—and must be discarded—before they make it to a recipient. That could be a boon for the many patients on transplant waiting lists, including more than <a href="https://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/data/">110,000 people</a> in the United States alone.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>After donor organs are removed from a body, they’re typically stored on ice at around 4 degrees Celsius (39 degrees Fahrenheit)—a temperature that keeps them viable for just a few hours. In the case of livers, doctors have somewhere between nine and 12 hours to transport the organ to its recipient, making every transplant “a race against the clock,” study author Reinier de Vries of Harvard Medical School <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2215643-transplant-organs-can-be-supercooled-to-below-zero-for-longer-storage/">told Clare Wilson at <i>New Scientist</i></a>.</p><p>That timeline could be extended if organs could be stored at temperatures below freezing—that is, 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit)—but as ice crystals form (and then later melt), they can damage organs and even render them unusable. The method devised by de Vries’ team, described in a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0223-y">study</a> published today in the journal <i>Nature Biotechnology,</i> is the first to develop a workaround to this problem.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>In the study, the researchers acquired human livers that had gone up for transplant, but weren’t claimed. They then used a machine to perfuse each organ with a cocktail of chemicals, including two compounds called trehalose and glycerol, that acted like a gentle antifreeze. Because ice tends to form where liquid contacts gas, the storage bag containing the mixture was also purged of air. (The sugars are later flushed out with a similar perfusion procedure.)</p><p>None of the preserved livers ultimately made it into bodies. But when the researched pumped three of them up with blood at body temperature to simulate a transplant, they found the livers had survived the ordeal unscathed, and could still take up oxygen, produce bile, and perform other normal liver functions—even after 27 hours outside a human body.</p><p>“That is impressive,” Ina Jochmans, a researcher and transplant surgeon at KU Leuven who was not involved in the study, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/when-human-liver-supercooled/597637/">wrote in an email to Sarah Zhang at <i>The Atlantic</i></a><i>.</i></p><p>The researchers didn’t check for viability past this point, but de Vries thinks they haven’t yet hit their limit, Wilson reports. Further down the road, the team wants to see how the supercooled organs fare in large animals like pigs, study author Shannon Tessier, a biomedical engineer also at Harvard and Mass General, <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supercooling-chemicals-tripled-shelf-life-donor-organs">told Maria Temming at <i>Science News</i></a>. “We actually want to show that the animals survive transplantation,” she said. “Then, hopefully we can think about clinical trials.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Full text_ 41587_2019_223_OnlinePDF copy.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="519" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Full_text__41587_2019_223_OnlinePDF_copy.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Top left: The machine perfusion system. Top right: A liver recovering from perfusion. Bottom left: A liver in the supercooling process. Bottom right: A liver being perfused with blood at the end of the procedure. Image Credit: de Vries et al., Nature Biotechnology, 2019</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>Malcolm MacConmara, a transplant surgeon at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas who was not involved in the study, praised the new study for its elegance, Temming reports. Although the researchers used only livers in their trial, other organs, such as hearts—which can begin to deteriorate after just four hours—stand to benefit from the technology as well. (Notably, lungs, which are full of air, could pose a challenge.)</p><p>If that’s the case, the number of donated organs that end up going to waste could decrease in the future, Jedediah Lewis of the nonprofit Organ Preservation Alliance, who was not involved in the study, told Zhang. The tight timelines of current protocols restrict organs to certain geographical areas, reducing the number of potential patient matches. If doctors don’t find a good candidate within the few hours they have, the organ never finds a home.</p><p>A brief (and protected) plunge below freezing, however, means organs can—quite literally—go further. As James Shapiro, a transplant surgeon at the University of Alberta in Canada who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Temming, that “could really open up the possibility of saving more lives.”</p></div>
  

  
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<p>The breakthrough could mean that fewer organs go to waste before they make it into a transplant recipient.</p>

Supercooling preserves donor livers for more than a day





  
      <div class="rich-text"><p>Last spring, Hawai‘i’s Kīlauea volcano commenced a monthslong eruption, choking the air with ash and belching out rivers of fast-flowing lava. The cataclysmic event—wrought by the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-are-united-states-18-most-dangerous-volcanoes-180970650/">most hazardous volcano in the United States</a>—prompted the evacuation of thousands of residents and destroyed more than 700 homes.</p><p>But even as Kīlauea wreaked havoc on land, it was quietly seeding new life at sea.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>Within weeks of the eruption, the ocean began to teem with a massive, blue-green whorl of <a href="https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/phyto.html">phytoplankton</a>—a type of algae that forms the foundation of many marine food chains—in a bloom so big it was visible from outer space. Now, a team of scientists has uncovered the unexpected trigger behind these microorganisms’ explosive growth: the same lava sowing chaos ashore. As the molten rock plunged into the sea, it warmed deep, nutrient-rich ocean waters, buoying them up to hungry cells at the surface.</p><p>The lava’s revitalizing churn, described in a <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aax4767">paper</a> published today in the journal <i>Science,</i> reveals a new way volcanic eruptions can reshape local ecosystems. It also hints at the myriad ways in which life can thrive, under even the strangest—and perhaps most devastating—of circumstances.</p><p>“Kīlauea has a destructive nature,” says study author <a href="https://www.samtwilson.com/">Sam Wilson</a>, a microbial oceanographer at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. “But it also gave us the opportunity to witness how land and ocean interact to create life.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="United States Coast Guard, Honolulu Office.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/United_States_Coast_Guard_Honolulu_Office_VBAA.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>An aerial photo of Hawai‘i’s coastline, taken on June 28, 2018. Lava entering the ocean is visible in the upper lefthand corner, creating water discoloration in the foreground. Image Credit: United States Coast Guard, Honolulu Office</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>In the weeks following the collapse of Kīlauea’s Pu‘u ‘O‘o crater, 200 billion gallons of lava—enough to fill <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6425/367">320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools</a>—gushed from the many fissures that opened on the volcano’s flanks.</p><p>Eventually, some of the lava reached the coastline, sending opaque plumes of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/laze-vog-and-other-volcano-vocabulary-inspired-by-kilauea">laze</a>—a noxious blend of steam, hydrochloric acid, and shards of volcanic glass—billowing over the spots where molten rock met ocean. But as the volcano’s innards continued to surge to the sea, a team of oceanographers had their sights set on something taking shape a bit further offshore: a greenish swirl of chlorophyll, blooming miles off the Big Island’s coast.</p></div>
  

  
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      <div class="rich-text"><p>In the ocean, chlorophyll—the same green pigment found in plants—is the calling card of phytoplankton: tiny, light-dependent creatures found in the upper sun-soaked layers of Earth’s seas. Most phytoplankton are microscopic, but when they accumulate in high enough numbers, they can collectively warp the color of large swaths of seawater in a burst of growth called a bloom.</p><p>That’s not something that happens every day in this part of the Pacific, says study author <a href="https://earth.usc.edu/chemicaloceanography/students.php">Nick Hawco</a>, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Southern California. Visible blooms of phytoplankton tend to occur in places where deep, nutrient-rich layers of the ocean do a lot of mixing with the resource-poor waters at the surface—a process called <a href="https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/upwelling.html">upwelling</a>. In Hawai‘i’s neck of the woods, however, the surface of the sea is especially warm, creating a buoyant layer that thwarts the ascent of life-sustaining water from below.</p><p>But in the wake of a natural disaster, all bets are off—and it seemed something about the way Kīlauea had blown its top had prompted phytoplankton to forge their own eruption at sea.</p><p>So when a group of scientists led by <a href="http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/lab/dkarl.html">David Karl</a>, a microbial oceanographer at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, first noticed the blue-green bloom in a series of satellite images, they leapt at the chance to study the rare event in real time. A month after the waters first turned turquoise, the researchers began collecting samples of the bloom in hopes of pinpointing its cause.</p><p>A handful of previous studies had already hinted at a tantalizing culprit: nutrients like iron and phosphate from the lava itself, nourishing the phytoplankton like fertilizer. But as data from the team’s analysis started to trickle in, it quickly became clear that the original hypothesis wasn’t going to pan out.</p><p>While the seawater did contain some extra iron and phosphate, the big surprise was actually another life-sustaining compound: nitrate, present at concentrations hundreds of times higher than normal—enough to sustain the majority of the recent algal growth spurt. But unlike iron and phosphate, nitrate isn’t a major ingredient in lava. And the most abundant phytoplankton in the bloom, a group called <i>Skeletonema</i>, weren’t capable of synthesizing it themselves.</p><p>The question, then, became: Where was the nitrate coming from?</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="16086543972_e498268a68_o.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="712" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/16086543972_e498268a68_o.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>A specimen of <i>Skeletonema, </i>a chain-forming phytoplankton. <i>Skeletonema</i> is especially common in marine environments that experience a lot of upwelling, a process in which deep, nutrient-rich waters mix with sunlit waters at the surface. Image Credit: Dr. Yaqin &quot;Judy&quot; Li, Milford Laboratory/NEFSC, NMFS/NOAA, flickr</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>By this point, the bloom had swollen into a whiplike tendril stretching some 100 miles offshore. That’s a <i>lot</i> of nitrate to account for, Wilson says. “Oceanographers know enough about the oceans to make predictions. But we don’t know enough that our predictions are always correct.”</p><p>Thus began months of detective work back in the lab. While nitrate is normally rare in sunlit parts of the ocean, groundwater can occasionally ferry the compound from septic tank to sea. But the chemical fingerprint of the bloom’s nitrate didn’t match the one normally found in sewage, Hawco says.</p><p>Another possibility involved lava converting pure nitrogen into nitrate at extremely high temperatures. But when Wilson sent a sample of Kīlauea’s molten rock into a kiln in the University of Hawai‘i’s art department, he didn’t get much out apart from very, very hot lava. And once again, the chemical signature was a miss.</p><p>What the nitrates’ chemical composition <i>did</i> resemble, however, was that of nitrates from deep ocean water, Hawco says—a final option that had, ironically, been under the team’s nose the entire time. “When we sat down and looked at the data, a lot of us were confused,” he says. “In this environment, we didn’t think deep waters ever reached the surface.”</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="USGS_Kīlauea_multimediaFile-2329_(2018-06-27).jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/USGS_Kilauea_multimediaFile-2329_2018-06-27_dP.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Lava entering the sea along the southern Kapoho coastline of Hawai‘i in 2018. Image Credit: United States Geological Survey, Wikimedia Commons</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>In the end, though, the pieces fit together, Wilson says. Between June and August, lava regularly cascaded off Hawai‘i’s coast at 25,000 gallons per second. At these speeds, the molten rock probably had no trouble reaching depths below 1,000 feet, where the sea is cool and full of nutrients. Warmed by the impact, deep waters would have risen to the surface, bringing compounds like nitrate along with them. It was, in a sense, old school upwelling—with an extremely explosive twist.</p><p>“I think they’ve pieced together a very convincing argument,” says <a href="https://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/people/heather-bouman/">Heather Bouman</a>, a biogeochemist and phytoplankton researcher at the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved in the study. “This is a completely new mechanism by which volcanic eruptions can lead to ocean fertilization.”</p><p>Kīlauea’s eruptive fervor eventually subsided—and as the lava flows slowed to a trickle, the bloom ebbed and eventually disappeared. But the phytoplankton may still have left their mark on the local ecosystem, Hawco says. Given how critical these tiny creatures are to ocean biodiversity, their brief boom may have boosted other marine populations farther up the food chain.</p>
            <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="KarinBjorkman3_UH.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
            src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/KarinBjorkman3_UH_uJIKdfr.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption><p>Lava entering the ocean off the southeast coast of Hawai‘i, generating plumes of laze—a noxious combination of steam, hydrochloric acid, and shards of volcanic glass. Image Credit: Karin Bjorkman</p><div class="credit"><p></p></div></figcaption>
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            <p>It’s also possible that the bloom offset an appreciable chunk of the Kīlauea’s recent carbon emissions, says <a href="https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/user/tplank">Terry Plank</a>, a volcanologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who co-authored a <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aay8088">commentary</a> on the study. Phytoplankton naturally take up carbon, dragging it down into the sea’s depths when they die. According to the <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.aay8088">calculations</a> of Plank and marine biogeochemist <a href="https://eesc.columbia.edu/faculty/hugh-ducklow">Hugh Ducklow</a>, also of Lamont-Doherty, these little organisms could play a bigger role in mediating the global warming effects of volcanic eruptions than once thought. (Notably, volcanoes <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits-more-carbon-dioxide-volcanoes-or-human-activities">don’t have a huge carbon footprint</a> to begin with, and can also have their own <a href="https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vhp/gas_climate.html">cooling effects</a> on the planet.)</p><p>So perhaps it’s good news that lava-driven upwelling might be pretty common. Some especially tantalizing candidates for further study, Wilson says, are the <a href="https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-thousands-of-undersea-volanoes-revealed-in-new-ocean-map-20141003-story.html">thousands</a> of underwater volcanoes constantly stirring things up on the seafloor.</p><p>If this process is as widespread as the researchers think, the new findings may have the potential to improve prediction models spanning fields from climatology to oceanography, says <a href="http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/users/megumich/index.html">Megumi Chikamoto</a>, a paleoclimatologist at The University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study.</p><p>For now, though, “it’s so cool to see lava driving such a broad biological response,” Plank says. “Lava [may not seem] conducive to life...but it can cause the biosphere to thrive. Despite their bad rap, there’s good that comes from volcanic eruptions.”</p></div>
  

  
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<p>Lava descending into Hawai‘i’s ocean drove an upward surge of deep sea nutrients, cultivating life at the surface.</p>

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