Some discovery processes are serendipitous, others laborious, many begin when our curiosity is piqued. In the first story, the process began with a poster on the wall in “nerdy writer type’s” son’s bedroom, then meandered through a science writer, an artist, and astronomers. While the astronomers had made The Big Discovery, an entirely new category of space thing, the nerdy writer also had a discovery—a “profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe.” His retelling of this discovery draws attention to the marvelous weirdness of space.
Scientists taking a closer look also found these surprises:
- a tiny frog the size of a fingernail,
- an ideological gap between Gen X men and women that also applies to other Gens,
- a “new” species discovered in bat poop,
- the true origin of atmospheric dust, and
- “a tiny invader [who] reconfigured predator-prey dynamics among iconic species.”
Other science news this week includes measuring the effectiveness of plastic bag bans, emergence of two cicada broods this summer for the first time in 221 years, and increased attention on scrapping scientific names that honor humans, especially troublesome humans.
First up is the nerdy writer and Zoozve
“Then I googled “Zoozve” and got no results, literally zero results in English. Only results were in Czech and they were about zoos. Not what I was looking for. I called a friend (@lizlandau) who has worked with NASA for a decade and she confirmed: Venus is completely moonless. And she had definitely never heard of Zoozve.
This started to bug me: why make up a moon on a kids’ poster? And why call it Zoozve?! (Best guess: it was a prank and Zoozve was the illustrator’s dog’s name.) So I called the illustrator, a Brit named Alex Foster. (He does have a dog, but it’s named Winnie.) He didn’t know much about astronomy but he swore he didn’t make it up. He said he found it on a big list of all the moons online. I believed him, but couldn’t find the list.”
“2002-VE68 (its technical designation) is a giant rock. Imagine a gray pockmarked potato the size of the Eiffel Tower. (We don’t have pics of it, but this one is similar.) But the weirder and harder question: is Zoozve (gonna just keep calling it Zoozve) a moon of Venus or not?
So I tracked down the person who discovered it: Brian Skiff at Lowell Observatory in Arizona. He has actually discovered so many asteroids that when I talked to him, he had no idea what I was talking about, genuinely didn’t remember this one.
He said that he found it as part of the LONEOS project, an industrial-scale asteroid scavenger hunt that Congress funded during the 90s/00s when everyone was obsessed with what would happen if one hit earth. Sometimes they discovered hundreds of asteroids in a single night.
Once Skiff realized Zoozve wasn’t a threat, he stopped tracking it. BUT I found 2 astronomers who kept looking: Seppo Mikkola in Finland & Paul Wiegert in Canada. They told me that Zoozve is NOT a moon of Venus. But it’s also NOT NOT a moon of Venus. It’s both and neither. WTH?”
“Zoozve orbits one thing: the sun. It spends all day every day doing that. BUT Venus also has a teeny gravitational toehold on it such that it ALSO ORBITS VENUS AT THE SAME TIME.
It’s a whole new category of thing. Something that orbits a star and a planet at once. Something that is not a moon, but also not not a moon. They call it … a quasi-moon.”
“And by the way, Earth even has at least seven different quasi moons dancing around us right now!!! The most recent one was discovered in 2023!! Also, quasi-moons can switch planets! We (Earth) were probably the ones who - 7,000 yrs ago - flung Zoozve over to Venus in the first place. Zoozve is going to leave Venus a few millennia from now, but no one knows where it will go next.
Anyway, I think this is so cool because everything else on the solar system map is so regular and orderly, but not quasi-moons! It's like we discovered a bunch of new weirdos who seem to be dancing to the beat of their own drum.”
I remember the park rangers saying: “Why are you going up there? There is no water on the top, and you’re not going to find any frogs.” I said: “Well I’m going to check it out.”
The Espinhaço mountain range in the east of Brazil is a very special place, and it’s mostly unknown. My house looks on to the mountain in Pico do Itambé state park, so I have my breakfast looking at it each morning. You’re surrounded by thunderstorms and strong winds, and the humidity is high. I waited for heavy rains and went to climb to the top.
What had caught my eye were the bromeliad plants, which look like the top of a giant pineapple. Each plant can hold up to 2 litres of water, and inside there is so much happening. Larvae, beetles, all kinds of invertebrate live in there – it’s a whole ecosystem in a tiny space. The central cup holds loads of rainwater, and I thought there could be some frogs using them.
Sure enough I was right. And this led me to discover a new species of frog, which I have committed my life to protecting.
Surveys of Gen Z opinions have show wide fluctuations—on some issues they show up as progressive, while surprisingly conservative on others. A closer look, however, reveals the difference: Young men are becoming more conservative, while young women are more progressive.
The author continues, noting that “In country after country, surveys show a very similar pattern: Historically the views of men and women in the same generations have been very similar. This is still true for older age-groups, but a gap has opened between today’s young men and women.”
South Korea, for example
And in South Korea this division is having significant impacts, explains Annie Louie Sussman in The Atlantic: The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies—Gender, rather than race or age or immigration status, has become the country’s sharpest social fault line. (paywall.)
U.S.A. shows a similar divide, but wait! look closer! there’s more!
Germany, too
Poland
Burn-Murdoch goes on to offer some explanations.
“What’s causing all of this? One theory is negative polarisation.In the wake of the #MeToo movement, young women have both become more progressive and more vocal about their views.Many young men feel threatened and have reacted by taking the opposite position.
This could explain how the divide on gender issues bleeds into other spaces. If some young men think "young women are woke, I am not" (I know it’s an annoying word), then they will instinctively take non-woke (sorry) positions on other topics.
A complementary theory is that these trends are explained by young men and women increasingly inhabiting different spaces. So much of daily life now plays out online, and young men and women are in different parts of the internet. Algorithmically walled gardens of TikTok.
Later in the thread, he adds specifics and some thoughts about how to bridge the gaps, concluding with this white male wimp out.
I think it’s true that bridging the gap will have to come more from men than women, but I think diagnoses of "toxic masculinity" only exacerbate the problem, causing further negative polarisation. Young men need better role models, but it’s not their fault they don’t have them.
Forests throughout the western U.S., including the Southwest, are the target of aggressive thinning programs to reduce fire hazards. While thinning some forest types to reduce chances of uncharacteristic wildfire may be justified, science clearly demonstrates heavy thinning — particularly if it results in the loss of forest canopy — can cause significant negative impacts to birds and other wildlife. So, what can we do to moderate wildfire behavior and ensure sensitive wildlife is protected? Science is leading us to a solution: lighter thinning that targets only smaller trees.
Researchers in Colombia discovered a previously unknown pseudoscorpion — a type of scorpion-like arachnid — in bat excrement. The brown-colored creature, with a body length of about 2 millimeters, or about .08 inches, long, sports two claws and eight legs with a “scale-like appearance,” according to a study published on Nov. 22 in the journal ZooKeys.
The little arachnid belongs to an entirely new genus, and was given the name Paciwithius chimbilacus after the word “chimbilaco,” a common name for regional bats.
For decades, scientists have assumed the majority of global dust emissions came from windswept deserts in North Africa. But new analyses are upending that assumption. [...]
Existing models are out of date and bear little relation to the reality on the ground, according to the international team of researchers behind the studies.
“When dust emission models were developed, there were few continuously varying global data sets available and simplifying assumptions were made for their implementation,” they write in the JGR Atmospheres paper. Those simplifications included assuming that Earth’s surface has no vegetation, that the majority of dust was emitted by North Africa and the Middle East, and that there was an infinite amount of dry, loose sediment on the surface. [...]
The new analysis in Science of the Total Environment also discovered that Earth’s main dust sources shift over the course of the year between deserts in East Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Australian and North American shrub lands — variations hidden by the current model.
The little guys, the ones we often overlook, who make things function don’t get enough credit.
Mutualisms often define ecosystems, but they are susceptible to human activities. Combining experiments, animal tracking, and mortality investigations, we show that the invasive big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala) makes lions (Panthera leo) less effective at killing their primary prey, plains zebra (Equus quagga). Big-headed ants disrupted the mutualism between native ants (Crematogaster spp.) and the dominant whistling-thorn tree (Vachellia drepanolobium), rendering trees vulnerable to elephant (Loxodonta africana) browsing and resulting in landscapes with higher visibility.
Although zebra kills were significantly less likely to occur in higher-visibility, invaded areas, lion numbers did not decline since the onset of the invasion, likely because of prey-switching to African buffalo (Syncerus caffer). We show that by controlling biophysical structure across landscapes, a tiny invader reconfigured predator-prey dynamics among iconic species.
Billions of cicadas from two different broods will emerge this spring in a rare, buzzy natural phenomenon that hasn’t happened since 1803.
The insects belong to two distinct populations of periodical cicadas: one that surfaces from underground every 13 years and another that emerges every 17 years. The last time these specific groups—called Brood XIII and Brood XIX, respectively—lined up their cycles and appeared at the same time, Thomas Jefferson was president, reports NBC News’ Denise Chow.
The report—copublished by three nonprofits, Environment America, US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Frontier Group—draws on industry and government data to suggest that plastic bag bans can eliminate nearly 300 single-use plastic bags per person per year.
The report looked at plastic bag bans nationwide but focused on five representative policies in New Jersey; Vermont; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; and Santa Barbara, California. New Jersey’s, enacted in 2022, has had the greatest impact, eliminating more than 5.5 billion plastic bags annually. Policies in the other jurisdictions eliminated between about 45 million and 200 million plastic bags per year, depending on population size. The researchers arrived at their estimates using data collected by municipal agencies, academics, and plastics and grocery industry groups.
In total, there are more than 500 citywide ordinances banning plastic bags in the US, as well as 12 statewide bans — in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. New bills could soon add Georgia and Massachusetts to that list.
A few years ago, Tim Hammer realized suddenly that his research was haunted by a very unpleasant ghost. Hammer is a botanist. He was just beginning a postdoctoral position at the University of Adelaide, working on the taxonomy of Hibbertia, a genus of plants commonly known as guinea flowers. Hammer found that the genus was even more diverse than scientists had previously understood, and soon he was working on descriptions of dozens of new species.
Hammer began to wonder about the genus’s namesake, an Englishman named George Hibbert. Botanical texts described him as a “patron of botany.” But he was more than that, Hammer learned. Hibbert, who died in 1837, was a slave owner and, as a member of the British Parliament, a leading opponent of abolition. Hammer thought it was unseemly that an enslaver’s name would still be displayed where so many people — or botanists, at least — would encounter it. He thought the plants deserved better. “We have a great genus,” he says, “that just happens to be named after a really despicable person.” He wanted to perform a kind of exorcism, to rid the plant of Hibbert’s name.