Two quotes from recent science stories are emblematic of 2020.
“I would really like to be wrong, but I fear mink are just the tip of the iceberg of what could be coming. If the virus keeps spilling over into wild animals, it could circulate in parallel and keep reseeding outbreaks among humans.”
”SARS-CoV-2 did not just disrupt the world. It shattered the fragile mirror we thought of as reality. Without it, we will be defenseless in the next crisis.”
This year everyone should have grown more aware of scientists’ importance to our daily existence. We had the unique opportunity for a public display of how science functions, step by step, starting from the basics with a totally new pathogen affecting the whole world. Scientists worked independently and collaboratively to refine approaches as understandings increased, with some becoming more robustly validated. But in the U.S., instead of constant coverage of scientists problem solving and communicating essential information, we were bombarded with nonsense from politicians and other influencers, and told to distrust scientists. Instead of observing science in action, a large portion of society embraced conspiracies and lies while sneering at scientists.
Given all the valid horrors and invalid rubbish creating instability, it’s no wonder the mink situation isn’t receiving the attention it deserves. Over a month ago, COVID-19 was found in European farmed minks, then a week later also found on U.S. farms. I’ve been concerned about the potential for COVID-19 spread among wildlife ever since.
Not all minks stay on the farms, some always escape and they could carry the disease to other wildlife. If COVID-19 spreads among wildlife populations, humans couldn’t contain it. COVID-19 “could become an entrenched and uncontrolled animal disease.” The virus already has mutated in farmed mink and been transmitted back to humans, but so far the mutated strain isn’t a worse problem than the common strains. And now an infected wild mink has been found in Utah.
Not all of these week’s science news is so dire. I begin with the two stories that, for me, encapsulate where we are at the end of 2020, but scientists also are finding fascinating new information about kangaroos, wetlands, and the origins of Caribbean first people. Research into the fungal disease decimating cacao trees offers the hope we can develop disease-resistant strains. And the discovery of an intact wolf pup mummy from 57,000 years ago provides insights into modern wolves. Thus, 2020 also ends on some high notes, with intriguing possibilities for solving problems and a call to not only save the parasites, but praise them. Any year that ends with a plea for the unglamorous, not charismatic, species still has wisdom and heart.
The Atlantic
(T)he global mink situation has significantly worsened. To date, COVID-19 has been found on mink farms in a total of nine countries, including Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, Greece, and—just two weeks ago—Canada.
For nearly a year, the coronavirus has spread with little check through the places where humans live and work, but the growth of the pandemic among mink poses additional threats. It gives the virus a chance to pass from an environment humans ostensibly control to one that they don’t. And as it spreads among mink, and between minks and humans, and between humans and humans, it can mutate; it already has. One mink-associated variant bears the same mutation as the coronavirus variant now spreading rapidly in the United Kingdom; each time such changes happen, there is a risk the virus changes in a way that could make it more dangerous and prolong the pandemic. [...]
Mink are extremely vulnerable to respiratory disease. Like people, they get seasonal respiratory issues. They’re also prone to pneumonia. Respiratory viruses replicate so readily in minks and their mustelid relatives (ferrets, most notably) that the animals are often used to study human illnesses.[...]
As of December 3, a total of 644 people associated with mink farms had contracted COVID-19 since June, along with another 338 people who work in mink pelting, according to a World Health Organization report that came out before the news of Canada’s outbreak, where an additional eight people on a mink farm have been sickened. In mid-November, a virologist at the Danish health authority told Nature that COVID-19 mutations believed to have originated in mink had shown up about 300 times in people in Denmark. [...]
On December 13, the world took another step toward [uncontrolled spread in wildlife]: The USDA announced the first known case of a non-captive wild animal with the coronavirus. A wild mink, trapped just outside a mink farm in Utah where there was a COVID-19 outbreak, tested positive. The strain was “indistinguishable” from that of the farm outbreak. The spillover had happened. The question now is whether the virus will become established in the wild population.
Science
...for science's relations with the wider world, this year marked a breakdown: in communication, in trust, in the sense of a shared reality … We live in an ecosystem that allows viruses to cross from wildlife to humans more often and spread farther and faster than ever before—that gave us SARS-CoV-2. But the virus emerged in an information ecosystem that helps misinformation and lies spread faster than scientific evidence, weakening our ability to respond to new threats. That made the pandemic far worse.
(F)or those willing to learn, this year presented an unprecedented opportunity to see science at work—to hear experts explain viruses and vaccines, see them critique each other's papers on Twitter, and understand how in science, uncertainty and self-correction are strengths rather than flaws. The process of science was rarely as visible as this year. It was like watching open-heart surgery live on TV: messy but vital and riveting.
But when it came to countering the other plague, that of disinformation and deception, the toolbox was empty. Just as videoconferencing and online shopping found massive new markets as stores, schools, and offices closed, so polarization, politicization, and a media ecosystem that elevates simple lies over complex truths were ready to take advantage of an unsettled public struggling with uncertainty. Even as hundreds of thousands died, many people downplayed the problem or refused to acknowledge its existence, no matter what the experts said. “It's a little like watching a zombie movie in which half of the people can't see the zombies and keep demanding to know what the fuss is about,” says epidemiologist William Hanage of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
WaPo
The October edition of the journal Biological Conservation heralded the arrival of a groundbreaking “global parasite conservation plan,” in which a dozen scientists from around the planet — people with not just deep knowledge of tiny worms living on snail faces but also 90-foot tapeworms lurking inside sperm whales — warn of the consequence to humankind should parasites go extinct.
“Found throughout the tree of life and in every ecosystem, parasites are some of the most diverse, ecologically important animals on Earth — but in almost all cases, the least protected by wildlife or ecosystem conservation efforts,” the plan opens, before laying out crucial steps we must take in the next decade to preserve parasites. These include ensuring legal protections for endangered louses and nematodes, building parasitism into the K-12 curriculum, and getting the public not just mildly curious but “enthusiastic” about parasites.
“They are regulators of population, they constitute a lot of the links in food webs, and they make up a lot of the biomass in ecosystems,” says Colin Carlson, an author of the plan and a global-change biologist at Georgetown University. “They’re sort of like dark matter — moving through ecosystems, connecting to things and having impacts, and we never see them.”
Science Daily
Animals that have never been domesticated, such as kangaroos, can intentionally communicate with humans, challenging the notion that this behaviour is usually restricted to domesticated animals like dogs, horses or goats, a first of its kind study from the University of Roehampton and the University of Sydney has found.
The research which involved kangaroos, marsupials that were never domesticated, at three locations across Australia*, revealed that kangaroos gazed at a human when trying to access food which had been put in a closed box. The kangaroos used gazes to communicate with the human instead of attempting to open the box themselves, a behaviour that is usually expected for domesticated animals.
"Our research shows that the potential for referential intentional communication towards humans by animals has been underestimated, which signals an exciting development in this area. Kangaroos are the first marsupials to be studied in this manner and the positive results should lead to more cognitive research beyond the usual domestic species."
Mammals with big brains tend to be less abundant in local areas than those with smaller brains, new research has shown.
The University of Reading led an international team of scientists in considering the effect of brain size for the first time in studying why populations densities of land mammals like mice, monkeys, kangaroos and foxes vary so widely in local areas, even among similar creatures.
Using statistical models to test different scenarios for hundreds of species, they found an overall trend of mammals with larger brains occurring at lower densities. Where different species had similar diets and body masses, brain size was found to be the deciding factor. [...]
"Although they are associated with being smarter, we found that bigger brains may actually hold mammals back from becoming the most abundant organisms in an area. This may be because bigger brains require more food and other resources, and therefore more space, to sustain them.”
While water blasting at a wall of frozen mud in Yukon, Canada, a gold miner made an extraordinary discovery: a perfectly preserved wolf pup that had been locked in permafrost for 57,000 years. The remarkable condition of the pup, named Zhùr by the local Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in people, gave researchers a wealth of insights about her age, lifestyle, and relationship to modern wolves. The findings appear December 21 in the journal Current Biology.
"She's the most complete wolf mummy that's ever been found. She's basically 100% intact -- all that's missing are her eyes," says first author Julie Meachen, an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines University. "And the fact that she's so complete allowed us to do so many lines of inquiry on her to basically reconstruct her life." [...]
Analyzing Zhùr's genome also confirmed that she is descended from ancient wolves from Russia, Siberia, and Alaska, who are the ancestors of modern wolves as well. Although analyzing Zhùr gave the researchers many answers about wolves of the past, there remain some outstanding questions about Zhùr and her family.
Phys.org
The history of the Caribbean's original islanders comes into sharper focus in a new Nature study that combines decades of archaeological work with advancements in genetic technology … The genetics trace two major migratory waves in the Caribbean by two distinct groups, thousands of years apart, revealing an archipelago settled by highly mobile people, with distant relatives often living on different islands.
Reich's lab also developed a new genetic technique for estimating past population size, showing the number of people living in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived was far smaller than previously thought—likely in the tens of thousands, rather than the million or more reported by Columbus and his successors. [...]
The team, which includes Caribbean-based scholars, received permission to carry out the genetic analysis from local governments and cultural institutions that acted as caretakers for the human remains. The authors also engaged representatives of Caribbean Indigenous communities in a discussion of their findings.
Face masks reduce the risk of spreading large COVID-linked droplets when speaking or coughing by up to 99.9 percent, according to a lab experiment with mechanical mannequins and human subjects, researchers said Wednesday.
A woman standing two meters (yards) from a coughing man without a mask will be exposed to 10,000 times more such droplets than if he were wearing one, even if he is only 50 centimeters away, they reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science. [...]
"If you wear a mask, you are mitigating the virus transmission by an order of magnitude—10 times less," Maria Viola said.
"In our study, for the larger droplets we measure, we're talking about 99.9 percent less."
Electricity is a key ingredient in living bodies. We know that voltage differences are important in biological systems; they drive the beating of the heart and allow neurons to communicate with one another. But for decades, it wasn't possible to measure voltage differences between organelles—the membrane-wrapped structures inside the cell—and the rest of the cell.
A pioneering technology created by UChicago scientists, however, allows researchers to peer into cells to see how many different organelles use voltages to carry out functions.
"Scientists had noticed for a long time that charged dyes used for staining cells would get stuck in the mitochondria," explained graduate student Anand Saminathan, the first author for the paper, which was published in Nature Nanotechnology. "But little work has been done to investigate the membrane potential of other organelles in live cells."
Chicago has more lead water pipes than any other American city, yet federal regulations unveiled this week by the Trump administration likely won't require anything new to prevent homeowners and renters from ingesting the brain-damaging metal.
Physicians and scientists say that unless water drawn from household faucets is properly filtered, the only way to keep the lead out in older cities like Chicago is by replacing pipes connecting homes and small apartment buildings to municipal water supplies.
Trump appointees rejected the expert advice, choosing instead to tinker with regulations adopted three decades ago that are widely seen as inadequate.
Science News
California water managers found unsafe levels of benzene and other volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs Fire in 2017, and in Paradise after the Camp Fire in 2018.
Scientists suspected that, among other possibilities, plastic drinking water pipes exposed to extreme heat released the chemicals (SN: 11/13/20). Now, lab experiments show that’s possible.
Andrew Whelton, an environmental engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., and colleagues subjected commonly available pipes to temperatures from 200° Celsius to 400° C. Those temperatures, hot enough to damage but not destroy pipes, can occur as heat radiates from nearby flames, Whelton says.
When the researchers then submerged the pipes in water and cooled them, varying amounts of benzene and VOCs — more than 100 chemicals in some tests — leached from 10 of the 11 types of pipe into the water….
Eureka Alert
The finding of relatively high levels of the antimicrobial compound clovamide in the leaves of a disease-resistant strain of cacao has significant implications for breeding trees that can tolerate black pod rot, according to Penn State researchers who conducted a novel study.
The discovery is significant because this fungal disease is a serious problem in all areas of the world where cacao is grown … Black pod rot, caused by the fungus Phytophthora, causes pod losses of up to 30% and kills as many as 10% of the trees annually.
"This is the first time that clovamide has been implicated in cacao resistance to pathogens, and the innovative method we used to measure the compound in the leaves could have a major impact in the quest to develop highly productive, disease-resistant varieties of cacao," Guiltinan said. "But these results may have consequences for advancing disease resistance in other plant species, as well."
he threshold for dangerous global warming will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042 - a much narrower window than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate of between now and 2052. In a study published in Climate Dynamics, researchers from McGill University introduce a new and more precise way to project the Earth's temperature. Based on historical data, it considerably reduces uncertainties compared to previous approaches. [...]
"Our new approach to projecting the Earth's temperature is based on historical climate data, rather than the theoretical relationships that are imperfectly captured by the GCMs. Our approach allows climate sensitivity and its uncertainty to be estimated from direct observations with few assumptions," says co-author Raphael Hebert, a former graduate researcher at McGill University, now working at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Potsdam, Germany.
In a study for Climate Dynamics, the researchers introduced the new Scaling Climate Response Function (SCRF) model to project the Earth's temperature to 2100. Grounded on historical data, it reduces prediction uncertainties by about half, compared to the approach currently used by the IPCC. In analyzing the results, the researchers found that the threshold for dangerous warming (+1.5C) will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042.
Nature
The beneficial effects of wetlands on water quality are well documented, and wetlands are widely used both in urban and rural settings to remove pollution arising from human activities4. The biogeochemical conditions in wetlands particularly favour the removal of nitrate, which is often the dominant form of nitrogen pollution in water. However, the global area of wetlands has reduced drastically over the past two centuries5,6, and losses continue despite greater protections being established.
The need for wetland restoration is clear, but it is difficult to calculate the potential contributions that restorations could make to nitrate removal for large water catchment areas by scaling up the effects of individual wetlands. This is because water-quality outcomes are highly sensitive to the geographical distribution of wetlands relative to that of nitrogen sources7–9.
Cheng et al. tackle this problem by combining an inventory of US wetland distribution with models of nitrogen transport. Their analysis affirms — with much greater precision than was possible in past studies — that remnant and restored wetlands in agricultural areas have a disproportionately large role in mitigating river nitrogen pollution. Without these wetlands, the negative impacts of nitrogen pollution on coastal zones and on many inland waters would be much worse.
Ars Technica
Microbiomes are all the scientific rage, even in art conservation, where studying the microbial species that congregate on works of art may lead to new ways to slow down the deterioration of priceless aging artwork, as well as potentially unmask counterfeits. For instance, scientists have analyzed the microbes found on seven of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. And back in March, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy, and published their findings in the journal Microbial Ecology.
JCVI geneticists took swabs of microbes from Renaissance-style pieces and confirmed the presence of so-called "oxidase positive" microbes on painted wood and canvas surfaces. These microbes munch on the compounds found in paint, glue, and cellulose (found in paper, canvas, and wood), in turn producing water or hydrogen peroxide as byproducts.
"Such byproducts are likely to influence the presence of mold and the overall rate of deterioration," the authors noted in their paper. "Though prior studies have attempted to characterize the microbial composition associated with artwork decay, our results summarize the first large-scale genomics-based study to understand the microbial communities associated with aging artwork."
In 2020, scientists settled “one of the longest standing mysteries in the evolution of insects.”
The University of Bristol study, published in the journal Palaeoentomology, drew on the largest insect molecular dataset available. The dataset was analysed using new statistical methods, including more sophisticated algorithms, to test all historically proposed hypotheses about the placement of fleas on the insect tree of life and search for new potential relationships.
The findings overturn previously held theories about fleas, the unusual anatomy of which has meant that they eluded classification in evolutionary terms. According to the authors of the study, contrary to popular belief, fleas are technically scorpionflies, which evolved when they started feeding on the blood of vertebrates sometime between the Permian and Jurassic, between 290 and 165 million years ago.
Ending with beauty
Black Sun: Amorphous Flocks of Starlings Swell Above the Danish Marshlands from Colossal on Vimeo.