Discover: The Science that Matters (January 2020)

Q A &JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 49Talking to a Twin TravelerBY JAKE PARKSiEvery grade-school scientist knows a good experiment needs a control — a test subject you leave alone to have a baseline for comparison. So when NASA researchers set out to learn exactly how weightlessness and other space hazards like radiation might change the human body, they needed someone to stay behind on Earth as a counterpart. The ideal con-trol would be someone very similar to the space traveler, so NASA chose an actual clone — or, as they’re more commonly known, an identical twin.Thus was born NASA’s Twins Study. From 2015 to 2016, astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year aboard the International Space Station. Meanwhile, retired astro-naut Mark Kelly — Scott’s twin brother — stayed on Earth. The results, published in April in Science, show spaceflight indeed triggers changes in the human body, such as damaging DNA, thickening artery walls, modifying the microbiome and altering gene expression. But the vast majority of these changes disappear within a few months of returning to Earth. Through the Twins Study, researchers now have a better understanding of the hazards of spaceflight and can work on how to deal with them. The results may eventually help us venture to the moon, Mars and beyond. We spoke with Scott Kelly about the findings, the possibilities for long-term space voyages and exactly what space smells like.Q: What do you think will be the most challenging hurdle for future astronauts embarking on a long-duration trip to Mars?A: I think the biggest risk is radiation. We need to know how to protect the crew from it. We need to know the implications of radiation on our physiology. There are other challenges, too. We had issues with our vision [in space]. We had issues with deconditioning after being in space for a long time. I think for longer-term spaceflight — like if we go to the outer planets of the solar system, where you’ll have people in space for years — then artificial gravity is a requirement.Q: So we should be optimistic about long space trips in the future?A: I think what NASA’s advertised as the big [takeaway of the Twins Study so far] is that we got a lot of data. There are areas we need to investigate further, like a lot of genetic stuff. This is the first time we have ever done any kind of genetic-based research in space on humans. There are things with gene expression that I think they want to dig into further. But overall, the findings were: “Hey, there are no show-stoppers in going to Mars.” Q: What about another aspect of being cooped up in one place for so long — the smell?A: You know, every place has its smells. Generally, I describe the space station’s smell as a cross between an antiseptic smell, garbage and BO. Not completely objectionable, but it often depends on where you are. If you’re next to the wettrash that’s been sitting on the station for a few months, it smells more like garbage. If you’re by the cans that we put the solid waste in, it might smell a little bit like that. If you’re by an area that was just at vacuum [exposed to space] — like after a spacewalk — it smells kind of like burnt metal to me, like maybe a sparkler on the Fourth of July. But it does have a unique smell. One time I was getting a tour of the Harris County jail — not because I did anything wrong, just a tour — and I walk into this room with a bunch of prisoners in there. I had this déjà vu. I was like, [sniffs], “Almost smells like the space station.” Q: The Twins Study looked at the physiological impact that long-term spaceflight has on the human body. But how did your year in space affect your mental well-being?A: I would say the most challenging thing is you’re isolated. You’re in the same place every day. You have the same people. Even though they’re good people that you enjoy being with, there are a lot of other people on Earth that are important to you, so you miss them. You miss going outside. You miss the weather, the sun, the rain, the wind. When you go to sleep, you’re at work. When you wake up, you’re at work. Even though you like being there, you also like being home. One of the cosmonauts, Gennady Padalka, says, “You know, as astronauts or cosmonauts, when we’re on Earth, we dream of space. But when we’re in space, we dream of Earth.”Left: Astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year aboard the International Space Station while his identical twin stayed Earth-side, allowing researchers to study how spaceflight affects the body. Above: Kelly (right) faces off with his twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly.

50DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMiWhere are America’s volcanoes? Hawaii, Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and Yellowstone National Park might spring to mind, but there are more than 150 potentially active volcanoes across the U.S. and its territories, including in Arizona, Utah and Colorado — and many have erupted in the geologically recent past.In 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) identified 57 volca-noes it considers “Very High” or “High” threats based on factors such as the likelihood of future eruptions and their proximity to population hubs. For example, Washington state’s Mount Rainier is less than 60 miles from Seattle. Some of these higher-risk volca-noes pose very real dangers to large numbers of people. Others, such as those in the sparsely populated Aleutian Islands, which arc between Alaska and Russia, could pose a significant aircraft hazard. (In 2010, ash particles from the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull disrupted international air traffic for weeks.)To better prepare for such threats, the National Volcano Early Warning System (NVEWS) became law in March. NVEWS estab-lishes the first integrated system for monitoring the country’s potentially restless volcanoes. The effort includes placing much-needed instruments on many volcanoes to watch for activities such as earthquakes, ground uplift and gas emissions, all signs that an eruption might be in the works. NVEWS will integrate monitoring data, USGS analysis and communication with local governments and other entities responsible for getting people out of harm’s way the next time a potentially dangerous volcano starts to rumble somewhere in the U.S.Volcano Early Warning System Rumbles to LifeBY ERIK KLEMETTI

VJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 51iA scrap of skull collected in 1978 and stored for decades in an Athens museum may rewrite the timeline of when Homo sapiens left our ancestral African homeland.In July, a new analysis of the Apidima 1 fossil, named for the Greek cave where it was found more than 40 years ago, suggested it’s at least 210,000 years old — the oldest evidence of our species outside Africa.The conclusion comes just a year after a separate team announced that a partial jaw from Misliya, Israel, was 177,000 to 194,000 years old. Along with 120,000-year-old fossils from China, these recent finds challenge the long-held notion that our species did not leave Africa until about 60,000 years ago.Unfortunately, all of these convention-busting fossils are fragmentary. Apidima 1, for example, only consists of part of the back of a skull. However, the piece is telling. We have a uniquely rounded shape to the back of our heads — and so does Apidima 1.The feature, along with more subtle anatomical traits, led researchers to classify Apidima 1 as H. sapiensdespite the incomplete nature of the find.Researchers also took a second look at Apidima 2, another, more complete skull found nearby back in the 1970s. They determined that it belonged to a Neanderthal and is younger than Apidima 1 by about 40,000 years.Previous research on the skull fragments had focused on the better-preserved specimen, Apidima 2. Since the two fossils were found just a foot apart, those same studies generally assumed that the skull scraps belonged to the same species and were of the same age.According to coauthor Rainer Grün, speaking at a press conference in July ahead of the paper’s publication in Nature, that earlier research failed to take into account the location of the fossils: in a jumbled pile of debris, deposited over millennia, as material washed through the cave system.Said Grün: “It’s a fantastic coincidence that you have two skulls together, 30 centimeters apart.”Skull Is Oldest Human Fossil Outside AfricaBY GEMMA TARLACH23 The U.S. is one of Earth’s most volcanically active countries.In the last 40 years, there have been 120 eruptions and 52 episodes of unrest at 44 U.S. volcanoes.What makes a volcano dangerous?Current threat levels ofU.S. volcanoes18 Very high39 High49 Moderate34 Low21 Very lowHazardsash, lava, seismic events and other potential volcanic phenomenaThreatqualitative risk posed by a volcano based on exposure to potential hazardsExposurepeople, property and infrastructure, including aviation, in harm’s wayVolcanoes by location in U.S. and its territories86 Alaska19 Guam14 Oregon12 California7Washington state5 Hawaii4 Idaho4 New Mexico3 American Samoa2 Arizona2 Utah1 Colorado1 Nevada1 WyomingSource: USGSAbove: Digital models (left and center) of the skull fragment, which is still partly encased in rock (right).Misliya, Israel177,000-194,000 years oldApidima, Greece210,000 years oldEarliestHomo SapiensSites Outside Africa

IDCHP352DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMFiUsually, getting to another planet is supposed to be the hardest part of the mission. Not so for NASA’s InSight lander. The probe touched down on the Red Planet in November 2018, and immediately started taking weather measurements and photographing its new permanent home. Unlike its more famous sibling missions like Opportunity and Curiosity, InSight is no rover, and will instead perform its whole mission from one location in the broad plain of Elysium Planitia near Mars’ equator. But in 2019, that mission had a major hiccup. A part of InSight’s Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) — an instrument meant to burrow about 16 feet underground to measure how heat travels through martian soil — got stuck on Feb. 28, shortly after it began drilling. It had burrowed down only about 1 foot. NASA engineers spent a long spring and summer testing ways to fix “the mole,” as the drilling tool is nicknamed, including testing possible solutions with models on Earth.In June, the engineers decided to use InSight’s robotic arm to lift the mole’s support structure out of the way, allowing them a look at what was blocking the device. But the arm wasn’t designed for such a delicate operation. It wasn’t clear if it could even perform such a procedure — and if they accidentally pulled the mole out with the structure, they would have no way to reset it. HP3 would be instantly kaput.Some welcome news arrived in October, however. The researchers determined Mars’ unexpectedly hard soil had caused the stoppage: The mole was simply bouncing in place rather than digging deeper. Moving InSight’s robotic arm to press against the mole, a technique called pinning, allowed the instrument to drill almost an inch in just a week. Progress remains slow — but it’s still advancing. The rest of InSight’s instruments, which measure marsquakes and monitor the weather, are still performing admirably. On April 6, for example, the seismometer felt its first quake. By Earth standards, it was small, but for the quieter Red Planet it was a momentous occasion. Researchers aren’t sure yet of the exact cause, but it is the first shaking that seems to have come from within the planet. By continuing to listen and learn, InSight’s unique instruments will provide even more lessons as the project enters its second and final planned year.InSight’s Frustrating First Year on MarsBY KOREY HAYNES InSight arrived on Mars in late 2018. Weeks later, a burrowing tool, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP ), got stuck.3

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54DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMF26iQuantum weirdness struck again in 2019. An experiment described in Nature in June settled a passionate debate that’s divided physicists for over a century, while also raising new questions. Researchers announced they’d tracked a quantum leap in unprecedented detail, show-ing that it’s possible not only to predict when a particle might jump, but also — bizarrely — reverse it mid-hop.“There’s more to the story of quantum physics than we thought,” says physicist Zlatko Minev, a research scientist at IBM who led the experiment while at Yale University. The notion of a quantum jump originated in 1913, when Danish physicist Niels Bohr introduced the revolutionary idea that electrons only circle the nucleus of atoms in discrete orbits, or energy levels. Electrons jump from one level to another, Bohr hypothesized, by absorbing or emitting a packet of energy, called a quantum. The particles can exist on one level or another, but never in between. According to this idea, quantum leaps are instantaneous and random. Other physicists have railed against the idea that a particle jumps so abruptly. “How does an [electron] transition without ever having been in the middle?” asks Minev. To probe the mid-jump mysteries, Minev and his collaborators used an “artificial atom,” an experimental setup that can effectively mimic electron behaviors, including a quantum jump. Quantum states change when measured directly, so to avoid that pitfall Minev and his team instead observed a proxy: the level of photons reflected or absorbed as the system changed states and energy levels. They collected and analyzed data on the scale of microseconds, which allowed them to look for behaviors not visible at longer time intervals. Yale physicist and co-senior author Michel Devoret compares it to watching a movie in slow motion. “Like in cinema, you can see things you cannot see at fast speed.”At such fine scales, the quantum jump appeared less like an abrupt jerk and more like a smooth, continuous transition from one energy state to another. The researchers also noted that the system sent out a subtle signal before a leap, and that with a carefully calibrated pulse of light, they could reverse jumps already in progress. Manipulating quantum states in this way, says Minev, may be useful in error-correction for quantum computers. The experiment confirms that during a quantum jump, the particle really does exist in two states at once. “In a typical quantum fashion, Bohr was right and wrong at the same time,” says Minev.A Quantum Jump Caught in Slo-MoBY STEPHEN ORNES25

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 55New Form of Dementia Strikes the ‘Oldest Old’BY LINDA MARSAiSo many older people experience the telltale symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, like forgetful-ness and muddled thinking. Yet postmortem autopsies often find none of the amyloid plaques or tau tangles that are hallmarks of the mind-robbing illness. Now, scientists may have solved this perplex-ing mystery: These patients are probably affected by a newly identified degenerative disorder that mim-ics Alzheimer’s and may be just as prevalent among older adults. Called LATE (limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy), it mainly affects the “oldest old” — generally people older than 85. It also seems to be associated with deposits of an errant version of a protein called TDP-43, which collect in brain regions governing memory, like the hippocampus and middle frontal gyrus, as well as areas that regulate emotions and survival instincts, like the amygdala. Roughly 1 in 4 people older than 85 have a buildup of this protein in these sections of the brain, suggesting the disorder may be as much of a public health threat in this age group as is Alzheimer’s. Over the past decade, scientists noticed about a third of neuroimaging scans and cerebrospinal fluid analyses on living patients with memory problems came back negative for Alzheimer’s. Instead of the expected tau or amyloid deposits, “we’d look under the microscope and there was some other protein that was accumulating,” says Julie Schneider, asso-ciate director of Rush University Medical Center’s Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago. Slowly, the puzzle pieces started falling into place. This appeared to be a different illness. “We all had clues and noticed different bits and pieces, but no one had a complete picture,” says Peter Nelson, a neuro-pathologist specializing in dementia-related research, including Alzheimer’s, at the University of Kentucky.Finally, in a paper published in the journal Brain in April, scientists from numerous disciplines gathered everything they knew about this disorder to create a resource that could be used as a foundation for further research. They agreed upon the name LATE, and described its symptoms and the affected brain regions. They also identified the probable culprit — the errant TDP-43. In addition, they suggested diagnostic tools and strategies for targeted therapies that could thwart the abnormal protein. “The more we understand,” says Nina Silverberg, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers Program at the National Institute on Aging, “the better hope we have of finding a treatment.”Neuropathologist Peter Nelson (above) analyzed dementia patients’ brains postmortem (below).

56DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMKiIn February, an international traveler carrying the measles virus passed through Boston’s busy South Station bus terminal. Once discovered, the Boston Public Health Commission urged anyone in the person’s path who was unvaccinated — other travelers, local residents, bus drivers, station employees — to see their doctors. “Measles is the most contagious virus we know about,” says H. Cody Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. “Hundreds of people could have been exposed.” A cough or sneeze from an infected individual can spray particles of the virus — each one only about 5 microns, barely smaller than a human red blood cell — that can remain infectious and airborne for up to two hours. Measles easily infects around 9 in 10 unvaccinated people who breathe contaminated air or touch an infected surface. “The germs that cause these diseases … are plentiful — they’re just waiting until they find someone who is not immune,” says Meissner.The Boston incident happened in the midst of the largest measles out-break in the U.S. since 1992. Successful vaccination campaigns had led to the domestic elimination of the disease by 2000. But in 2019, roughly 1,250 cases had been confirmed in 31 states by October — over three times the number of cases reported in 2018 (372). The outbreaks have been mostly concentrated in New York, New Jersey, Washington state and California, with the majority of cases, more than 700, occurring in New York City. Over 400 more occurred elsewhere in the state, primarily in cloistered Orthodox Jewish communities. “It’s really a bunch of small outbreaks,” says Tom Clark, deputy director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Viral Diseases. “Most of them are under control after a handful of cases.” That’s because most people are vaccinated, says Clark. “[But] sometimes, close-knit com-munities are under-vaccinated by choice, often because of parents’ con-cerns about the safety of vaccines or a lack of concern about the seriousness of the diseases vaccines protect against,” says Clark.While most people fully recover, roughly 1 in 5 cases leads to serious complications that can include miscar-riages, severe diarrhea, ear infections, pneumonia and encephalitis, an infec-tion triggering brain swelling that can result in a vegetative state or even death. A small but growing number of people Measles ReturnsBY LINDA MARSA

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 57who seem to recover may have the virus silently lurking in their brain, and up to a decade later can develop SSPE (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis), a very rare but fatal disease of the central nervous system.Doctors say that roughly 95 percent of people need to be vaccinated to prevent measles outbreaks in a given commu-nity. This provides what’s called herd immunity, meaning enough people are vaccinated to prevent the spread of the disease. Although the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination rate is about 94 percent nationwide, there are large pockets with low immunization rates across the country — due mainly to poverty, lack of access to insurance and doctors, and an increasing num-ber of parents who willingly opt out of vaccinating their kids. Right now, many reported cases have been linked to travelers who brought the virus back to the U.S. from countries with ongoing outbreaks. And globally, there’s been an explosive resurgence of measles, with nearly three times as many reported cases through July 2019 as by the same point in 2018. As of Oct. 10, the countries most affected were Madagascar (127,500), Ukraine (56,400), India (53,000), the Philippines (39,700) and Nigeria (27,000). In 2017, there were 110,000 measles deaths globally, mostly among children under the age of 5. While various factors contributed to this rise, including civil unrest, low awareness of the need to vaccinate, skepticism about vaccines and lack of availability, the common denominator is a lowered rate of vaccine coverage. “There were over 83,000 cases of measles in just Europe alone, in a region with access and education,” says Heidi Larson, a former UNICEF official and director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “It is shocking.” But there are global and domestic campaigns to strengthen confidence in vaccines, tighten up religious exemptions and focus on getting kids vaccinated. In July, an international group of public health leaders, including members of the World Health Organization, released the Salzburg Statement on Vaccination Acceptance. The statement called for search engines and social media organiza-tions to prevent the spread of inaccurate information on childhood vaccinations, and urged governments to do more to support mandatory immunization programs. “Our institutions are not prepared or organized in a way to counter the new net-works of disinformation on health,” says Scott Ratzan, a statement coauthor and a founder of the International Working Group on Vaccination and Public Health Solutions. “How do we get health pro-fessionals and other policy[makers] to understand the fundamental nature of vaccines so we don’t go backwards, rather than forward, in health progress?”Timeline of the 2019 U.S. Outbreak:September 2018 An international traveler arrives in Rockland County, a suburban county north of New York City, with a suspected case of measles.October 2018Measles cases are reported in Brooklyn and Queens, two boroughs of New York City, an outbreak suspected to have started when an unvaccinated child became infected while visiting Israel.January 2019 The World Health Organization lists vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to public health in 2019. On the 25th, Washington state officials declare a state of emergency after measles cases are reported in Clark County.April 2019New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declares a public health emergency, and the city’s health commissioner orders every adult and child who lives or works in affected areas to be vaccinated. On the other side of the country, nearly 700 students and staff at UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles, are quarantined after exposure to measles.May 2019A subsequent outbreak occurs in three counties surrounding Puget Sound, believed to have been triggered by a traveler at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport in April. That same month, Maine eliminates religious exemptions for vaccine requirements for schoolchildren.June 2019New York enacts a law similar to Maine’s.July 2019Salzburg Statement on Vaccination Acceptance released.Measles Cases per Million People: Last 12 Months Q50 or more (43 countries)Q10-50 (41 countries)Q5-10 (17 countries)Q1-5 (35 countries)QLess than 1 (51 countries)QNo dataQNot availableUpdated Oct. 14, 2019W

58DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMKCircuit Sensitivity Is All in the (Mathematical) FamilyBY STEPHEN ORNES28iOn July 1, Emory University mathe-matician Hao Huang quietly proved a theorem — and the mathematics and computer science worlds roared. In an elegant argument, laid out over six pages, Huang unequivocally proved the sensitivity conjecture, a thorn in the side of computer scientists for decades. The proof ignited the mathosphere. “Amazingly short and beautiful,” blogged Gil Kalai, a mathematician at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It “shows that people can still find simple proofs of deep, open questions,” says Cristopher Moore, a computer scientist and mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute. A long line of thinkers over nearly 30 years has tangled with the problem. But until Huang came along, it remained a mathematical itch that no one could scratch. The conjecture relates to mathemati-cal structures called Boolean functions, which convert multiple binary inputs — 0s and 1s, for example, or “trues” and “falses” — into a single binary output. You might flip a coin 10 times and define a Boolean function to output a 1 if you get at least one head, and a 0 otherwise. Boolean ideas are essential for today’s technological landscape, because they make it possible for computers to com-pute. Transistors are basically on/off switches with only one of two values. But computer scientists wanted to know more about the complexity of these functions. For example: At a given step in the func-tion, how many inputs would you have to flip to change the output? The numerical answer to this question — that is then extended to the entire function, roughly speaking — is called the sensitivity. Mathematician Hao Huang

NJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 59iYou never forget your first, they say, but it appeared for a long time as if the universe had forgotten its first molecule. Known as a helium hydride ion (HeH+), this conglomeration of Big Bang leftovers is just a helium atom and a hydrogen nucleus, aka a proton. Scientists had expected to find it throughout the cosmos, but for decades they couldn’t spot it anywhere. (Researchers managed to create some in 1925, so they knew at least it could exist.)Finally, in Nature this April, an international team of astronomers described how they used the flying observatory SOFIA to detect HeH+ molecules within a gas cloud known as planetary nebula NGC 7027, about 2,900 light-years from Earth. “The chemistry of the universe began with this ion,” the study’s authors wrote. “The unambiguous detection reported here brings a decades-long search to a happy ending at last.”Our Universe’s Forgotten First MoleculeBY BILL ANDREWS 29 Sensitivity is special. Other ways to gauge complexity of Boolean func-tions exist, but they’re all known to be related to each other mathematically. Sensitivity, though, has always been an outlier. The sensitivity conjecture, basically, describes how this measure could fit into the mathematical family. It made sense that it should be included, but actually proving how it belonged was a trickier matter.Huang says the problem’s deceptive simplicity first piqued his interest in 2012. “Every time I decided to pick it up again, I would spend three or four days and go nowhere,” he says. “That’s my approach to a lot of problems.” He thinks he spent hundreds of hours on it over the years. Huang’s breakthrough came last June on a warm night in Madrid, where he was holed up in a hotel room with a noisy air conditioner. He should have been finishing a tortuous grant application, but instead, he found himself think-ing again about sensitivity. Like other mathematicians before him, he thought the most natural way to work with the binary inputs of Boolean functions was to treat them as coordinate points, the corners of an imaginary kind of high-dimensional cube. Twenty-seven years ago, a mathematician and a computer scientist showed that if you take a set of at least half of these points and could find connections between them, you could then prove the sensitivity conjecture.And that’s what Huang did: He used tools from the field of linear algebra to prove that 1992 statement. Afterward, he wrote up his work, posted it online, and experts marveled equally at his proof’s unequivocal argument and its compact, elegant structure.Huang isn’t surprised it took a math-ematician to crack the computer science problem. “Theoretical computer scienceis abstract mathematics,” he says, and this problem shows the connection. “Computer scientists often need problems to have applications, but for us math-ematicians, we care about elegance, and whether the problem can be stated nicely.”

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IJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 61iA middle-aged woman arrives for her annual checkup toting her 50-page DNA profile, downloaded from the web. The document warns that she has gene variants that might increase her risks for Alzheimer’s disease and breast cancer — a shock, she says, since no one in her family has had either. You’re her doctor. You’ve got 12 minutes for this appointment. What should you do? Or, more precisely, what are you legally obligated to do?Though hypothetical, this scenario parallels very real challenges to healthcare professionals as direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing becomes increasingly popular. Since 2007, when 23andMe began providing online DNA tests to anyone with a credit card, at least 90 competitors have entered the business; some 26 million people in the U.S. alone have sent in saliva samples.DTC companies don’t conduct clinical testing, so their labs don’t have to meet the same strict federal standards as medical facilities. The companies typically post disclaimers stating that their products are not for medical use. Yet more and more patients are asking physicians for advice based on DTC test results, leading doctors into largely uncharted territory.“There are false negatives, which could be catastrophic if you actually have something that you ought to act on,” says Ellen Wright Clayton, a professor of law and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. “There are also false positives, which could drive people to interventions that are not only costly but potentially harmful.”Even if a test is accurate, the likelihood of developing a condition based on a single gene variant can be unclear. Many conditions, from certain cancers to mental health disorders, are the result of complex interactions between an individual’s DNA, lifestyle and environment. Meanwhile, DTC tests may overlook some genetic red flags, for instance, checking for the most common variants of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes associated with increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer, but ignoring hundreds of others. And the liability issues surrounding such tests are muddier still.In April, a team led by Clayton and University of Minnesota researchers completed a groundbreaking attempt to develop a roadmap for navigating this and other new genomic terrain. The three-year project, known as LawSeq, analyzed current U.S. federal and state law around genetic data; the goal was to provide guidance on what the law should be, and how to address legal concerns in clinical practice.Even ahead of LawSeq’s paper on DTC testing liability, which is expected in the coming months, concern about legal land-mines in the general field of genomics is growing. For example, also in April, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) published guidelines on researchers’ responsibility to inform study participants when results of their DNA tests show previ-ously unsuspected dangers. Geneticists often use anonymized data — collected from medical labs or from DTC company databases and stripped of identifying information — to investigate inherited conditions. If a mutation once thought to be benign is found, years later, to create a serious disease risk, are researchers obligated to track down the DNA donors who carry it? The ASHG suggests they should try.But no guidelines currently exist for doctors who are face-to-face with patients clutching printouts of their DTC test results.Which brings us back to our theoretical physician. Refusing to look at the woman’s DNA profile could leave the doctor liable if she later develops cancer, notes Arizona State University law professor Gary Marchant, a LawSeq team member. The ideal solution is to have her results validated in a clinical lab — but insurance companies typically won’t pay for that, and many patients can’t afford it. If the physician encourages the woman to have a preventive mastectomy based on an iffy DTC test, however, the patient could sue for malpractice if the test results were later shown to be wrong and the procedure unnecessary. “These tests put doctors in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation,” Marchant says.The tests could raise perplexing questions for juries as well. So far, case law on DTC testing is virtually nonexistent; Marchant says not a single lawsuit has made it through the courts. (If any have been filed, they’ve likely been settled before trial, their details guarded by nondisclosure agreements.) Litigation based on medical DNA testing has been increasing, however, with more than 200 cases since the 1970s. Suits related to online services are sure to follow. “If someone starts to win some cases,” Marchant predicts, “you’ll see a swarm of lawyers jumping on the bandwagon.”Navigating the Murky Waters of DNA TestingBY KENNETH MILLERESSAY

62DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMA Paradigm Shift for Depression TreatmentBY LINDA MARSAiThe tens of millions of people who have severe depression have had few treatment options — until now. In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved esketamine (Spravato), a fast-acting nasal spray derived from ketamine that is the first genuine advance in treating depression in more than 30 years. First synthesized in the 1960s and still used globally as an anes-thetic on battlefields and in surgery, ketamine became popular as an illicit club drug known as Special K in the 1980s and ’90s because it triggered trippy dissociative side effects. But nearly two decades ago, researchers noticed it banished depression even in people who are suicidal or resistant to treatment. Another plus: Their response was swift and profound. Traditional antidepressants, such as selective serotonin reup-take inhibitors (SSRIs), can take months to work, and about 30 percent of people who are prescribed them don’t get much benefit. With ketamine, though, relief is almost instantaneous — usually within a few hours — and the effects can last for a week or more. “Initially, we were shocked, but it was also extremely exciting,” says John Krystal, one of the pioneers in ketamine research and chief of psychiatry at Yale Medicine, of his early work in the ’90s on establishing the drug as a potential treatment. While SSRIs activate serotonin, a chemical messenger impor-tant in the function of brain circuitry, ketamine triggers a gush of the neurotransmitter glutamate, which activates the brain’s main information highway. “Ketamine rapidly awakens dormant neural machinery and enhances neural connections,” says Carlos Zarate Jr., chief of mood disorders research at the National Institute of Mental Health.The drug’s approval will not only help millions but also deepen our understanding of depression’s underlying mechanisms, paving the way for even more effective therapies. (Pilot studies suggest ket-amine may also combat bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.) It may be “a transformative treatment,” says Krystal. “Patients feel ketamine gave them their life back.”S31

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A Bee Plus in MathBY SARAH WHITE iHoneybees caused quite a buzz this year when three separate studies showed they possess some of the same mathematical abilities as humans, despite much tinier brains. In February, research in Science Advances indicated honeybees could learn to add and subtract. To teach the bees arithmetic, cognitive scientists set up a Y-shaped box for the bees to fly through. When a bee entered the box at the bottom of the Y, it saw blue or yellow shapes. If the shapes were blue, the bees were trained to fly down an arm of the Y toward a picture with one additional shape to receive a sucrose reward; the other arm had a bitter drink instead. If the shapes were yellow, bees were rewarded for choosing the picture with one fewer shape. In June, two other studies using mostly black-and-white pictures in similar Y-shaped boxes showed that bees understood numerical symbols and could consistently choose specific quantities, not just relatively greater or lesser amounts. How bees use their arithmetic skills remains unclear, though many animals make use of concepts like more, less and zero to find areas with the most food and fewest predators. Bees’ skills could benefit us, too, since understanding how they count and compute — despite having around 1/100,000 the neurons of human brains — could help researchers design better computers.Researchers used experimental setups like this one to test bees’ mathematical abilities.1-2-3, Easy as A-Bee-SeeF32➊Bee enters chamber after learning to link a sign (“N”) with a certain number of symbols (2, for example).➋If bee selects incorrect number of symbols, it gets access to a bitter drink.➌Selecting correct number leads bee to a sweet reward.64DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

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AB66DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMA Microscope That Sees DNABY KAREN WEINTRAUBiJoshua Weinstein spent hours in graduate school pulverizing zebrafish in a blender. That was a normal first step toward sequencing the fish’s genes, but it had a high “ick” factor — and he felt like it wasn’t very good science. Although his results would tell him about the fish’s overall genetic activity, they couldn’t reveal which genes were present and active in different places: like inside the fish’s immune tissue or its nerves, or within a cancerous tumor. And he wanted to know.So Weinstein co-developed, and this year unveiled, what he calls a DNA microscope. It’s actually not a physical piece of lab equip-ment, but a technique that allows research-ers to examine precisely what genetic activity is happening where. Although some colleagues quibble with calling the devel-opment a microscope, several agree that it could offer profound new insights into how cells function.Je Lee, an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York’s Long Island, compares traditional gene sequencing techniques to looking at the ground from a satellite. You can see a lot of detail, but you can’t see what’s going on inside a shopping mall. Metaphorically, the DNA microscope can, Lee says.The “coolest thing” about the new technique is that it allows scientists to see gene activity deep within cells because it doesn’t depend on the bright lights of a traditional microscope, says Justin Crocker, a synthetic developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. “This is the first group to pull it off in a way that seems like it actually worked.”Theoretically, the approach could be used to understand exactly what’s going on inside a tumor — such as how many cells are cancerous and how many more are likely to turn dangerous. “That’s a real strength of the technique,” Crocker says.The technique works by assigning a unique tag to every copy of a given active gene across a tissue sample. These tagged segments of DNA, keeping their spatial ori-entation in the sample, are multiplied — doubling every minute. The molecules become so numerous that they spill out from their origin points and bump into the tagged bits of DNA overflowing from neighboring cells. The tags grab onto one another, so the DNA molecules pair up — creating a record of which genes originated near each other. Researchers then process this informa-tion using a combination of DNA sequenc-ing and artificial intelligence to generate 3D maps of which genes were active in the sample, and where. This view could reveal previously unseen spatial relationships between genes across cells.CWith the new technology, researchers can see gene activity across a tissue sample at a much higher resolution (B) than was possible with old, optical techniques (A).Joshua WeinsteinDNA microscopy allows scientists to look inside a tissue sample and map active genes, color-coded and in 3D.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 67iSouthern California is no stranger to earthquakes, but research published last summer shows it’s home to far more than previously thought.Seismologists at Caltech and Los Alamos National Laboratory identified 1.81 million tiny tremors hidden in data from 2008 to 2017 — roughly one every three minutes. This newly detected seismic activity has already helped scientists take steps toward fully understanding how earthquakes start.In the May study, published in Science, researchers unearthed these rumblings in a new catalog of local earthquakes. They used a technique called template matching, which requires supercomputers to comb through the shake-induced background noise of helicopters, construction and Los Angeles traffic. From that sea of squiggles, the machines can pluck out vibrations with the same shape as larger quakes.This comprehensive compilation helps resolve a seeming discrepancy between laboratory models and what actually happens in Earth’s crust. During small-scale simulations with miniature rocks, the primary earthquake, or mainshock, always follows smaller shakes, called foreshocks. In real life, previous evidence from seismographs showed foreshocks precede mainshocks only 10 to 50 percent of the time.But in a July Geophysical Research Letters paper, researchers using this earthquake catalog found faint foreshocks before 72 percent of the actual mainshocks they examined. This catalog, and the subsequent foreshock information, won’t let researchers predict the next massive earthquake, but it will help additional analyses further clarify their causes. Detecting regional ramping-up patterns gives clues about what’s happening miles below Earth’s surface, beyond the reach of current tools.And the more we understand what’s happening down there, the better we can predict what might happen on the surface.Unearthing QuakesBY SARAH WHITE34 Weinstein says he hopes his technique, published in June in the journal Cell, will become part of a wave of new approaches that move away from averaging genetic activity across whole organisms — like in those blenderized fish — and toward a more cell-specific view. “A lot of the stuff we need to pay attention to, to truly understand these systems,” he says, “needs to be learned by new methods — new ways of probing the inner workings of cells.”One of the advantages of the DNA micro-scope, Weinstein says, is that it only requires lab pipettes and a standard DNA sequencer to yield results. But Lee and Crocker say it may not be as cheap and easy as Weinstein thinks. So far, Weinstein and his coauthors have only shown that their idea is theoretically possible. Applying it to larger-scale projects may prove more challenging, Lee says. “Their paper cap-tures the imagination. It’s a completely new way of doing microscopy,” Lee says. “It’s up to the scientists to decide whether it’s practical.” And while it might be relatively inex-pensive for Weinstein to sequence DNA at the major research institutions where he’s worked, Crocker says, “the computational firepower you need would be pretty exten-sive,” and not easily available, for example, at hospitals that wanted information on patients’ tumors.This fall, Weinstein launched his own lab at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he worked at the Broad Institute and MIT in the labs of Aviv Regev, who is leading an effort to map all the types of cells in the body, and of Feng Zhang, who was among the discoverers of the CRISPR gene editing tool. Regev and Zhang are the other two authors on the DNA microscope paper.Despite making advances in the field of biology, Weinstein’s background is in physics. He still tries to understand the world by boil-ing it down to its simplest parts, as a physicist would. Biology, he says, can’t be broken down as easily or understood as intuitively — but that’s part of its appeal. “It’s such a great mag-net for physicists who like being puzzled,” he says. “[It’s] kind of the perfect kindling for crazy ideas.”S

68DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMGenes Bring Clarity to AnorexiaBY JEANNE ERDMANNiAnorexia nervosa ravages bodies. The well-known eating disorder tricks people into thinking they’re overweight — to the point that they starve themselves, sometimes to death. “It’s a mammoth effort to be able to do that,” says Cynthia Bulik, a psychiatric researcher at the University of North Carolina. “Most bodies rebel against it.” Bulik co-led a genome-wide analysis that revealed genetic links between anorexia and other psychiatric disorders. Anorexia was long seen as an affliction of vanity that mostly affected white, upper-middle class teenage girls. But although more women than men are diagnosed with the condition, it can affect anyone.Worldwide, anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disease: Only 30 percent of sufferers fully recover. People with the disease can push themselves to a body mass index in the single digits — normal BMI falls between 18 and 24. Such dramatic caloric restriction brings gastrointestinal problems and other health issues. There’s no medicine that helps anorexia, and treatment usu-ally consists of psychotherapy and feeding hospitalized patients. But a new study could explain how the disease strikes, including why the bodies of patients allow them to lose so much weight and resist regaining it.The Anorexia Nervosa Genetics Initiative and the eating disorders workgroup of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium used GWAS, a genome-wide association study, to look for connections between anorexia and specific genes. The team analyzed almost 17,000 anorexia patients of European ancestry and compared them with over 55,000 individuals of similar background without the condition. The team identified eight spots on the genome, called risk loci, that were associated with the disease. Some of these loci had known connections to anxiety disorders and depression. The strongest association for anorexia was the genetic overlap with obsessive compulsive disorder, according to the study published in Nature Genetics in July.The researchers also found links to genes related to metabo-lism, including those that decrease the risk for Type 2 diabetes and high BMI, says Bulik.These metabolic connections could explain some of anorexia’s more puzzling symptoms. For instance, people with the disor-der tend to be extremely active, a symptom associated with their ability to push their damaged bodies to exercise. Their metabo-lism can also shoot into overdrive during treatment: Sometimes hospitalized patients need 6,000 calories — over three times the normal recommended daily allowance — per day to restore a healthy BMI, and the minute they are discharged, says Bulik, their weight starts dropping again. Bulik says the research is revealing not only the genet-ics underpinning anorexia, but how it may be connected to other disorders — and how complex a disease it really is. “For so long,” she says, “parents and patients have been say-ing there is more to this than meets the eye, that it’s not just about eating.”P35

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70DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMUnique Ancient Bird Preserved in AmberBY GEMMA TARLACHiSmaller than a sparrow, a 99-million-year-old bird preserved in amber made some very big news in July.“I’ve never seen anything like this, or even close,” says paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor of Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. O’Connor is a co-first author on the Current Biology paper that introduced the world to Elektorornis chenguangi, a new species of Cretaceous bird known from a single partial specimen.Frozen in time in a piece of Burmese amber, the single hindlimb of Elektorornis has traits not seen in any other bird, living or extinct. The animal’s third toe is extremely elongated — longer than the entire lower leg bone. And on this bizarre supertoe are strange filaments so unique they’re hard to describe, even for researchers studying them: “Imagine a scale on a chicken foot in which the distal end tapers into a very fine, almost hairlike bristle,” says O’Connor.These hairlike, yet also scalelike, structures are at the base of the bird's unique toe. Which brings us to the big question: How did Elektorornis use that digit?Without any similar bird to compare it with, O’Connor and colleagues looked to the only living animal with a single elongated digit: the aye-aye, a species of lemur that uses its long third finger to probe for insects in rotting wood. However, the mammal also has a mouth made for gnawing, so the parallels with a toothless bird only go so far. And so, for now, the true purpose of Elektorornis’ bristled supertoe will remain a mystery — and a source of scientific delight.“I love that new discoveries still reveal animals so outside our expectations,” says O’Connor. “Our imaginations are so limited compared to the bizarre forms natural selection can produce.”F36An artist’s rendering suggests Elektorornis chenguangi used its long third toe to find food (left). But researchers don’t really know why the bird, preserved in amber (above), evolved the unique digit, which is longer than its entire lower leg bone (top).

Name_________________________________________________________Address_______________________________________________________City__________________________________State_____Zip____________Email (optional) ___________________________________________________Signature______________________________________________________T YES! Please reserve the “Apollo 11 Limited-Edition Figurine” for me as described in this announcement.(Please print clearly.)SEND NO MONEY NOW!09-08775-001-E01401MAIL TO:9204 Center For Th e Arts Drive, Niles, Illinois 60714-1300*Add a total of $13.00 for shipping and service, and sales tax; see HamiltonCollection.com. All orders are subject to product availability and credit approval. Allow 8 to 10 weeks aft er initial payment for shipment. 09-08775-001-BI1©2019 HC. All Rights Reserved. “That’s one small step for man,a giant leap for mankind.”In 1969, man walked on the moon for the very fi rst time. Now, 50 years later, Hamilton honors this historic event with a FIRST-EVER fi gurine.Posed on a pedestal base graced with archival photos and quotes, your issue is craft ed and painted by hand, and features a real cloth American fl ag on a sturdy metal pole. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!Send no money now. Limited to 95 casting days, the “Apollo 11 Limited-Edition Figurine” arrives hand-numbered with a Certifi cate of Authenticity. Reserve yours for just three installments of $33.33*; with only the fi rst due prior to shipment. Our 365-Day Guarantee assures your satisfaction or your money back. Blast off today!Limited Edtion Apollo 11 fi gurine commemorates the 50th Anniversary of man’s fi rst moon landingSTANDS 11” TALL This proud, eye-catching tribute stands tall to pay tribute to and celebrate brave American astronauts, the fi rst humans to walk on the moon. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”Four-sided marble-look pedestal base features archival-quality photographs and historic mission quotes:“Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Come In Peace For All Mankind”“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”“That’s one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.”LIKE US ONFastest way to order:HamiltonCollection.com/Apollo11Limited

72DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMFReading Minds, AloudBY JONATHON KEATS38iMars, it now seems, was once a very wet world.A new global study of ancient riverbeds on the Red Planet shows they’re wider than Earth rivers, on average, and once carried large volumes of water across the planet. Scientists were surprised to find they also flowed recently, perhaps within the past billion years. That’s well after astronomers think Mars began losing its atmosphere to space, causing the world to dry out. It’s not clear how a planet with minimal sunlight and a slight atmosphere stayed warm enough to host even a little surface water — let alone fast-flowing rivers. The findings appeared in March in the journal Science Advances.Lead author Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago says that if the data are correct, something else in our comprehension of the planet must be wrong. Maybe the rivers are older than researchers think. Or perhaps Mars dried out much faster than current theories suggest. Or, Kite says, some unknown process also may have kept Mars warm long enough for large rivers to flow, even after most of its atmosphere had disappeared.“All three options are uncomfortable,” Kite says. “All three of these solutions would require significant revision of our current understanding.”The Mystery of Mars’ Raging RiversBY KOREY HAYNES37In this false-color image of an ancient martian riverbed, blue indicates lower elevation and yellow indicates higher elevation.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 73iThe average human speaks at a rate of up to 150 words per minute, making spoken conversation one of the most effective ways to communicate. “We take for granted how effortless it is to convey so much information in such a short amount of time,” says Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. “That is, until you lose this ability from an injury.” Brain injuries such as stroke and neurological disorders like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can destroy vocal communication, socially isolating patients or requiring them to use prostheses. The best of these prostheses are essentially brain-controlled typewriters: A person moves a computer cursor with brain signals detected by a neural implant, painstakingly selecting one letter at a time. Eight words per minute is fast. (Perhaps the most famous speech prosthetic belonged to the late physicist Stephen Hawking, who, with muscle twitches, typed each word for a speech synthesizer to read.)To emulate speech at a more natural speed, some researchers have tried going a step further, literally reading people’s minds by measuring neural activity in the brain’s speech center to drive an artificial voice synthesizer. But success has been lim-ited to monosyllabic utterances. Turns out the brain is pretty complicated.Chang wondered whether an indirect approach would be better. Observing that fluid speech depends on fine motor coordination of the vocal tract (including the lips, tongue, jaw and larynx), he reasoned that the neural activity commanding these muscle movements could control the articulations of a synthesizer. “Patterns of activity in the brain’s speaking centers are specifically geared to precisely coordinate the movements of the vocal tract,” he explains. “We figured out how neural activity there directly controls the precise movements when we speak.”To test his idea, Chang enlisted five people undergoing treat-ment for epilepsy, whose therapy already included surgical inser-tion of electrodes under the scalp. He monitored their brain activity while they spoke hundreds of sentences aloud, and used the data to train artificial intelligence software. The AI learned to decode the brain signals into whole sentences, which continued to work when volunteers simply mimed speaking them. When the brain-AI-speech system was tested, the machines understood with 70 percent accuracy. In addition, as Chang reported in April in Nature, the patients’ desired intonation was preserved. “Intonation allows us to stress spe-cific words, express emotion or even change a statement into a question,” Chang says. His group discovered that the crucial pitch changes are achieved by adjusting tension in the vocal folds of the larynx, and that the cor-responding brain signals could be monitored precisely enough for the synthesizer to impart the emotional subtext of patients’ speech.Chang cautions that his technology will not address all condi-tions — such as injuries to brain areas responsible for controlling the larynx and lips — and he’s only now starting clinical trials on people with stroke and ALS. These patients can’t train the AI with spoken sentences as the subjects of his study did, since their ability to speak aloud is already gone. However, Chang found that speech-related brain activity was very similar in all five of his study volunteers, so individual training may not be necessary. In the future, the gift of gab may be plug-and-play.Neurosurgeon Edward Chang figured out how to use electrodes (inset) and artificial intelligence to read brain activity — and translate it into speech.

74DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMFAn Old Tooth and a New View of Evolution BY GEMMA TARLACHiA really old rhino tooth has opened a new path toward understanding the tree of life — including, poten-tially, our own branch.In September, researchers detailed in Nature how, using the tooth of a 1.77-million-year-old rhino from the Republic of Georgia, they were able to revise its family tree. The team’s success has implications far beyond rhino ances-try: It’s proof of concept that it’s possible to map out evolutionary relationships between species, with confidence and on a molecular level, without DNA.Instead, the team extracted and sequenced proteins preserved in the rhino’s tooth enamel.“Protein sequences are the best proxy [for DNA],” says University of Copenhagen’s Enrico Cappellini, lead author of the study. Cappellini is a special-ist in paleoproteomics, the study of ancient proteins preserved in fossils. “In a way, you can read [proteins] like a text. If you retrieve only a few words, you can’t read the story. If you retrieve more words, you start to understand. And if you have the ancient and the modern text side by side, you can see the differences between them.”Each protein is a unique chain of amino acids arranged in a specific order. Like DNA, over time these complex chains accumulate small changes that can pro-vide clues to the evolution of a species. Unlike fragile DNA, ancient proteins can last for millions of years in fossilized tis-sues, including bones and teeth.For years, researchers have been able Stephanorhinuscalled southwestern Asia home nearly 2 million years ago (top). The skull of one of the ancient rhinos (above) included a tooth (left) with preserved enamel proteins that researchers could read like DNA.

NJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 75iWill 2020 be the year humans start walking around with computers in their heads? Elon Musk thinks so. Neuralink, Musk’s secretive biohacking company, launched in 2016 with the promise of implementing cutting-edge technology directly into people’s brains. At a press conference in July, the Neuralink team announced plans for a chip, dubbed the N1, that would physically attach to a user’s brain through a “neural lace” — a network of tiny threads. Each thread would send and receive electrical pulses in the brain. The company claims the tech could be helpful in the medical field, possibly giving paraplegic patients the ability to walk and people with vision loss the ability to see. But the team also wants to go beyond medical uses and potentially implant the N1 into the brain to allow for telepathic communication. To top it off, Musk wants it all to work wirelessly, controlled through a phone app. It might sound like science fiction, but the company contends it has already tested the chip in animals, including a monkey — with “very positive” results, according to Musk. And assuming the FDA allows it, Neuralink officials say they want to start human trials this year. We’ll see if 2020 brings this brain-hacking fantasy to life. Elon Musk Wants to Read Your Mind BY JENNIFER WALTER 40 to extract and broadly identify these ancient proteins. More recently, however, they have been able to read the protein sequences on a much finer scale, finding subtle differences on an amino acid level. It’s similar to the way geneticists work with DNA, only instead of genomes, they’re reconstructing ancient proteomes.Previous paleoproteomic work focused on the protein collagen, extracted from ancient bones rather than tooth enamel. Collagen, however, doesn’t change much between species, and it’s only a single pro-tein. The tooth enamel proteome provides information on multiple proteins, and, as Cappellini puts it, “better chances to find a text we can read.”And although the approach is destruc-tive — tiny chips of enamel are pulverized and fed into a mass spectrometer — teeth are among the most common finds in the fossil record.Paleoproteomics does have limitations. For example, proteomes are much smaller than genomes, so they provide fewer data points, and the extraction and sequencing of ancient proteins is difficult work. Still, the rhino tooth study shows that it’s pos-sible to study organisms on a molecular level well beyond ancient DNA’s expira-tion date — theoretically including early members of our own family tree.“I’m always fascinated to see some-thing invisible become visible,” says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.While he stressed that he admires the careful, thoughtful work of Cappellini and his colleagues, Hawks cautions that their success may have unintended consequences.“The reality is that there is a bone rush,” Hawks says. “Copycats will come around to [museum collection curators] and say, ‘I’ll give you a paper in Nature … just give me some teeth to grind up.’ ”For now, Cappellini is focused on refining the method to obtain more detailed proteomes, from potentially even older fossils. “We don’t know how far back we can go,” says Cappellini. “I’m looking forward to finding out.”Elon Musk brainchild Neuralink announced plans in July for an implantable chip that would send and receive signals in the brain (right). The chip, called the N1, would be implanted by machine (above) into people’s heads with extreme precision.

76DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMFLong Live the KilogramBY JONATHON KEATS41iIn 1791, several prominent scholars from the French Academy of Sciences began working to create a universal system of measurement. They wanted it to be accessible to everyone on the planet, so they decided it would be based on nature. The meter was defined as a specific fraction of Earth’s circumference, and other units were derived from it. For instance, the kilogram was defined as the weight of a liter — one cubic decimeter — of water. Because these measurements were difficult to replicate reliably, the scholars ended up crafting physical objects out of platinum to use as the official standards, which defined the values. These were stashed in a vault in Paris. Scientists have been striving ever since to ditch these artifacts, which are subject to wear-and-tear, and live up to the 1791 ideals by specifying metric units in terms of natural constants.Redefining the meter was relatively easy. In 1983, it was tied to the speed of light (as the distance traveled by a laser beam in a given fraction of a second). But the kilogram stubbornly remained a lump of metal — until recently, when representatives from many of the world’s governments voted unanimously to redefine it in terms of an unchanging physical value, based on the energy of a photon, called Planck’s constant. The resolution went into effect on May 20, and also grounded several other metric units in nature. “It’s a landmark in science and human endeavor,” says Terry Quinn, director emeritus of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, a key figure in the effort. Quinn believes the 18th-century scientists would be proud, even though Planck's constant wasn’t quite in their lexicon yet. After 228 years, the whole International System of Units is finally free of physical constraints.In May, the kilogram was redefined using the energy of a photon, as measured by a device known as the NIST-4 watt balance (left). The new standard replaces its platinum-based predecessor (above), in use for centuries.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 77A New Tool Turns Up Surprise Slash Across Saturn’s Largest MoonBY BILL ANDREWSiAstronomers found an entirely unexpected feature on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, this year: a ribbon of exposed bedrock ice that wraps nearly halfway around the satellite. This unique feature came into view thanks to a recently developed analysis technique never before used on Titan.Researchers had previously spotted surprisingly diverse landscapes on the moon, from broad plains to sandy dunes and even rivers and lakes. Since the world is so cold, these features are made up of liquid methane and other organic compounds that slosh over a bedrock of solid, rock-hard ice. But it’s tough to get good observations of the surface, because the moon’s atmosphere is so dense and hazy.So instead of examining individual pixels from images and scouring them for details and data, the researchers used a technique called principal components analysis (PCA). This lets them look at all the pixels in a given area, helping to spot larger trends in the landscape while bypassing the atmosphere’s obscuring effects.The result: a hi-def imaging of water ice on Titan that formed a noticeable pattern. “Our PCA study indicates that water ice is unevenly, but not randomly, exposed across Titan’s tropical surface. Most of the exposed ice-rich material follows a long, nearly linear, corridor that stretches 6,300 kilometers,” or nearly 4,000 miles, the team wrote in their study, published in April in Nature Astronomy. That’s about 40 percent of Titan’s entire circumference. (For reference, the continental U.S. stretches less than 3,000 miles from coast to coast.)The find is, in a word, weird. The team says it’s pos-sible that the icy corridor formed sometime in the past billion years when Titan was still geologically active. And they specifically wonder if a sudden eruption of this ice onto the surface was tied to a “major cryovolcanic event” — a kind of icy volcanism — that astronomers had already speculated was happening during that time. While the answers remain unknown, future PCA work may help astronomers learn even more about the mysterious moon.Saturn looms large behind Titan, the biggest of the ringed planet’s satellites. In April, researchers announced the discovery of an unexpected slash (below, in blue) stretching across the moon’s surface for thousands of miles.

78DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMFiIn 2019, Americans saw rain, rain and more rain: The 12-month period ending in June took the crown as the wettest ever recorded in the contiguous U.S. But that was the fourth time the record had been broken in 2019 — the previous 12-month precipitation record had been set in May, which had broken the record set in April, which had broken the record set in February. As climate change continues, scientists fear these record-breaking wet years could become more common. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the sky over America poured almost 38 inches of water between July 2018 and June 2019 — almost 8 inches above average, according to the past 125 years of national precipitation data.Nearly the entire country experienced above-average precipitation during the first half of 2019. The excessive rainfall meant trouble for farmers across the Midwest, who had to delay planting schedules while waiting for the ground to dry out. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, some of the largest corn-producing states, like Indiana and Michigan, had only about two-thirds of their crops planted in early June. In contrast, nearly all corn crops were in the ground by the same time the year before.“It’s just been very wet across the whole country,” says Laura Read, a hydrologist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “I just wonder, will this be — I don’t want to call it new normal, but — the way things move? Will we look back and see this as the start of some period of time where we have more of these events coming through? I don’t know.”Rain, Rain, Here to Stay?BY DANIEL BASTARDO BLANCO43BelowaverageNearaverageAbove averageMuchabove averageRecord wettestMuch below averageThe contiguous U.S. saw record-breaking precipitation in the 12 months from July 2018 to June 2019.

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80DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMiThe fungus among us is a key player in the ecosystem, breaking down organic matter to provide nutrients to other organisms. Now we know that fungi were getting down to business up to a billion years ago. Newly classified Ourasphaira giraldae from the Canadian Arctic is 900 million to 1 billion years old, pushing back the fossil record for these organisms by about 500 million years. The fungi fossils change our backstory, too. The oldest animals in the current fossil record only go back about 560 million years. (And if you’re wondering what the oldest fossil of any organism is, well, that’s hotly contested, but some researchers believe impres-sions on rock more than 4 billion years old represent the earliest recorded life on the planet.)“Fungi are, in the ‘tree of life,’ the closest relatives to animals,” says University of Liège paleobiologist Corentin Loron, lead author of the Nature paper published in May that analyzed Ourasphaira in detail for the first time. “If fungi are already present around [a billion years ago], so should animals be … Therefore, this distant past, although very different from today, may have been much more ‘modern’ than we thought.”Despite their big significance, the Ourasphaira microfossils are tiny: The branching filaments, attached to bulbous structures, are, at most, a mere tenth of a millimeter long. Loron’s team also identified fibrous chitin in their cell walls. It’s the oldest evidence of the material, which exists today in the cell walls of living fungi, insect and crustacean exoskeletons, squid beaks and fish scales.Ourasphaira suggests an early start for complex life on Earth, but its discovery may ultimately have a significance that’s out of this world.“The study of Precambrian microfossils (older than 542 million years) is a relatively recent science,” says Loron. “As we move forward, more and more things are discovered, allowing us to better understand how life evolved and thrived on our planet. The bigger picture is also to find keys for understanding if, and how, life could have appeared elsewhere in our universe.”44Oldest Fossil Fungi Hints at Early ‘Modern’ LifeBY GEMMA TARLACH

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 81i There are some things that life never prepares you for — like the phone call that a loved one is in a coma, and you’re responsible for making their end-of-life decisions if they don’t wake up. These decisions are further complicated by the fact that there’s no true test for consciousness, and it’s difficult for doctors to predict who will emerge from a coma and who won’t. But in June, a team of researchers at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center said they’d found an effective tool for spotting signs of “hidden consciousness” in comatose patients. And it’s already readily available in nearly all hospitals around the world: electroencephalogram (EEG) machines that detect electrical activity in the brain.The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that subtle patterns in brain activity could signal that a person is aware, but physically unable to show it. The researchers discovered hints of hidden consciousness in 1 in 7 people just days after sustaining a serious brain injury. A year later, the people who initially showed signs of hidden consciousness were more likely to have recovered. The EEG work came after a similar study on hidden consciousness from earlier in the year. In February, a different research team found that functional MRI (fMRI), which detects brain activity based on blood flow, could also spot brain patterns that signal consciousness. However, use of fMRI comes with a high cost, and it’s challenging to perform these tests on someone with a brain injury and who might not be clinically stable. Patients would have to leave the safety of the intensive care unit, and potentially the hospital altogether, to be transported to an MRI machine.This logistical challenge is particularly unfortunate because conscious states can fluctuate in a patient, says Jan Claassen, head of neurocritical care at Irving Medical Center, who led the new study.“That is a disadvantage,” says Claassen. “[With fMRI], you have just a snapshot in time, whereas with EEG you can do it at the bedside — you can potentially repeat it again.”When someone is unresponsive for days or weeks, doctors use a variety of tests to determine the likelihood of the person pulling through. But predictions tend to be inaccurate, which makes these new results encouraging. Of course, the researchers say more work is needed to better understand how EEG can be used to predict recovery across a range of different types of brain injury.EEGs Eke Out Buried Brain ActivityBY MEGAN SCHMIDT45 FIt’s hard to know what’s happening in the mind of a comatose patient. But new research suggests EEGs (above) can reveal hidden consciousness, more easily, cheaply and effectively than MRIs (below).Arctic Canada’s Grassy Bay Formation (top) is home to the earliest fungi in the fossil record. More than 900 million years old, the microfossils are about a tenth of a millimeter long and consist of branching filaments attached to bulbous structures (above).

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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 83Early Start for Our First Continents BY ERIK KLEMETTIESSAY iWe’re all here thanks to continents.Among rocky planets in the solar sys-tem, only ours has masses of less-dense rock that rise above surrounding crust. Yet our planet wasn’t born with them.We know that these land masses are a direct consequence of plate tectonics, when slabs of crust, continental and oceanic, interact as they move across the planet’s melted mantle. But we don’t know when or how quickly the continents formed — it’s one of the most challenging ques-tions about Earth’s early history. Some geologists believe most of the continents popped up in the last billion years. Others think they have been forming slowly and steadily since the planet took shape some 4.6 billion years ago. Still other schools of thought suggest the land masses formed in fits and starts as pieces of them collided and then broke apart.The evidence needed to solve this mystery is hard to find. Geologists typically analyze samples of Earth’s oldest-known crust — dating to the Archean Eon, from 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago — to try to determine when the first continents formed. But little of that material has survived.Some researchers consider 4.4-billion-year-old Australian zircon crystals — the oldest preserved building blocks of rocks — as evidence of very early continental crust, but theirs is a controversial conclusion.Derrick Hasterok of the University of Adelaide and his colleagues took a new approach to solving this mystery. They collected a huge amount of geo-chemical data from almost 25,000 samples to map out how much heat has been produced by rocks in Earth’s crust in the last 4 billion years. The conti-nents are made of granite, which is enriched with radioactive elements like potassium, uranium and thorium. As these elements decay, they produce heat at known rates.In July, the team reported in the journal Precambrian Research that they’d identified a “heat deficit” in the models of our planet’s early history that could only be solved by more granite existing in the past than previously thought.The team’s results suggest that continental crust might have formed half a billion years earlier than most current models suggest. These early con-tinents would have been unstable, due to more abundant radioactive elements present at the time. The elements could have produced four times the heat than levels seen later in the geological record, making the first continents prone to melting and reworking — and thus less likely to be preserved. Much more than the ages of rocks is at stake. If the new model is correct, and the first continents emerged earlier than thought, it means plate tectonics was already in motion at the time. The tectonic engine has been a driving force on the planet, creating carbon dioxide-belching volca-noes and influencing ocean and wind currents, for example. Without that influence on climate, Earth may have remained a lifeless planet. And, if the dynamic process began much earlier than we thought, it’s possible that so did the story of life.SGeologists have long debated when continents first formed. A new model suggests they took shape half a billion years earlier than thought, during our planet’s turbulent childhood — which could mean life started earlier, too.

84DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMFiWhat’s brown, slimy and washing up on beaches from Mexico to Africa? Sargassum — a smelly seaweed that’s been traversing the Atlantic Ocean in massive clumps over the last few years. On satellites, it looks like a single, monstrous mass, but it appears on beaches in stinky, sticky clusters.The great Atlantic Sargassum belt, as scientists have dubbed it, was identified in a paper published in July in the journal Science. Researchers first spotted it via European Space Agency satellites in 2011, when the brown algae was observed growing in massive quantities. Almost every year since, the seaweed has bloomed in the summer, deposited seeds in the winter and repeated the cycle when temperatures started to rise again. Though summer 2018 saw the largest stretch of seaweed on record — roughly 5,500 miles long — this year’s mass wasn’t much smaller. And research suggests the bloom isn’t going to die down anytime soon. What caused this stretch of seaweed to get so big in the first place? Clues point to fertilizer runoff from the Amazon River and an upwelling of nutrients from deep waters off the coast of West Africa. Fluctuating ocean temperatures, salinity and nutrient contents also may have played a role. But the Science study ultimately left open the question of cause, and its authors will continue analyzing the seaweed in 2020.While no simple answer can explain the growth, scientists are calling the sizable recent blooms the “new normal.” As for your summer vacation, plan for the possibility of lots and lots of Sargassum when you’re sunbathing on the coast.Smells Like SargassumBY JENNIFER WALTERJuly 2019The stinky seaweed Sargassum has been forming a massive mat across the Atlantic — and washing up on shores (top) — each summer since at least 2011. Researchers published their first full report on the brown algae in July 2019, when the belt was still going strong (above).

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4886DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMPiA healthy heart needs healthy vessels to pump oxygen to the rest of the body. Cardiovascular diseases can damage these vessels, and current treatments — like grafting vessels from elsewhere in a person’s body or from synthetic sources — come with serious risks. But in March, a team of research-ers announced in Science Translational Medicine that they had made vessels in the lab that, once transplanted into people, can turn into functionally living tissue. Researchers at Duke University, Yale University and biotech company Humacyte collected cells from cadavers — specifically, cells from muscles that make up blood vessels and that form vessels’ inner lining. They seeded these cells onto a biodegradable mesh scaffold, where the cells created proteins to surround the structure. Then, once the structure was built, the scientists removed the cadaver cells, leaving behind the new human acellular vessel (HAV), which mim-ics a real artery or vein.“The removal of the cells is important so that the vessels can be manufactured in large batches and stored on the shelf in operating rooms for implanta-tion into any patient,” explains Heather Prichard, chief operating officer at Humacyte, who led the research. The trials were con-ducted in end-stage kidney failure patients. The researchers found that HAVs removed from patients during routine operations revealed the patients’ own cells had set up shop on the faux vessel. And, they found implanted HAVs that had been damaged by dialysis needles were repaired by the patient’s cells, suggesting the engineered vessels are capable of self-healing.If HAVs continue to perform well in clinical trials, they could make blood vessel repair safer and more effective in the future.Abra-Cadaver! Blood Vessels Come to LifeBY RONI DENGLERNew research suggests a lab-grown vessel, once implanted, is accepted by the body as its own — even healing after damage, as occurs during repeated puncturing from dialysis needles.Scientists form vessel-shaped biodegradable mesh scaffolds in the lab.They seed the scaffold with human vascular cells, harvested from cadaver donors.The cells replicate and produce the protein collagen, making a fully formed blood vessel.Researchers remove the cells and the mesh dissolves, leaving behind a generic vessel that can be implanted into anyone.

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88DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMCA Museum’s Monster FindBY GEMMA TARLACH49i It was the size of a polar bear, with a mouth full of slash-ing blades. Some 22 million years ago, in what’s now Kenya, the mega-carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika ruled.Then it disappeared.The last of Simbakubwa’s lineage, carnivores known as hyaenodonts, went extinct more than 10 million years ago. Mostly fragmentary fossils of dozens of species have been found around the world, some smaller than house cats. Other species were much larger, but researchers had few clues about when these giants evolved.A dig in southwestern Kenya in the late 1970s turned up a massive lower jaw-bone — about twice the size of a modern lion’s — and a few related teeth and other bones. But that expedition focused on Miocene primate fossils, and the team didn’t pay much attention to the frag-mentary mega-carnivore remains. The bones ended up in a Nairobi museum drawer, unstudied for years.Decades later, two paleontologists realized the jawbone belonged to a new species, the oldest member of a giant hyaenodont lineage known as the hyainailourines, suggesting this mysteri-ous group originated in Africa.Simbakubwa finally got a name, and the recognition it deserves. Announced to the world in April in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the animal reveals not only the origins of these XXL carnivores, but also how they adapted to a world of colliding continents.We asked paleontologists and study authors Nancy Stevens of Ohio University and Matt Borths, now at Duke University, to share Simbakubwa’s story.Paleontologist Matt Borths holds the jaw of mega-carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. In life, the animal would have been about the size of a polar bear, with a mouth full of shearing, bladelike teeth.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 89Q: What was your first impression of the forgotten fossil?Stevens: [I remember] opening the museum drawer that held the specimen and being awestruck imagining this enormous meat-eating animal on the early Miocene African landscape.Borths: I was shocked when I first saw it. Of course, collections staff at the museum were aware of the specimen, but it was too large to fit in the drawers with its close relatives, so it had received relatively little attention from researchers since its discovery decades ago. I could see that it was one of the most complete giant hyaenodonts ever found in Africa.Q: What was Simbakubwa like in life?Borths: Its body resembled a muscular, giant lion with bearlike, flat feet and a long, wolflike snout. Its head would have seemed a bit too large for its body. Its back teeth are simple shearing blades. ... Some modern carnivores, like bears, dogs and wolverines, have back teeth that can shear and crush so those animals can be a little more omnivorous. Simbakubwa didn’t have crushing portions on its back teeth. Just blades.Q: What would be the closest modern animal to compare with Simbakubwa?Borths: We know from the teeth of Simbakubwa that it was a meat-eating specialist, a true hypercarnivore like a lion or hyena, but there are no hypercarnivores as large as Simbakubwa today.Q: Impressive size aside, what’s the most significant thing about Simbakubwa?Borths:Simbakubwa lived at the beginning of a time of intense environmental upheaval in Africa. It’s the oldest of these giant African carnivores, and its fossils show us how meat-eaters were adapting to the changing world. After millions of years as an island continent, Africa connected to Eurasia through the Arabian Peninsula. This new superhighway let animals from the north — like hyenas and rhinos — hike into Africa, and animals from Africa — like elephant relatives and the descendants of Simbakubwa — hike into Eurasia. On top of this ecological mixing, the connection between the continents rearranged ocean currents, and changed rainfall patterns and habitats across Africa. Simbakubwa is part of this ecological experiment that took place millions of years ago and set the modern African ecosystem in motion.Q: What does Simbakubwa’s road to recognition tell us about the untapped value of fossils sitting unstudied in museum back rooms?Stevens: Collections like the National Museums of Kenya have long been instrumental in recognizing and identifying new species to science. None of this would be possible without the tireless efforts of museum staff to preserve and protect specimen collections.Increased public interest in paleonto-logical finds is driven by a strong desire to understand changes on our planet over time. This has only intensified in recent years with the recognition that we are presently witnessing a mass extinction event with tremendous impact upon the future of our own species. Museums allow us to peer into the past to explore how organisms respond to changing climates and habitats, a data set we need to understand, now more than ever.Q A &Simbakubwa kutokaafrika22 million years agoNancy Stevens

90DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMiBetween a rock and a hard place? That’s just where Lithoredolikes it.Researchers found the new-to-science shipworm, a kind of clam, in the Abatan River on the Philippines’ Bohol Island. It was a stunning sight.“It is unlike any other shipworm, both in its appearance and its unusual habits, and this was apparent from the very first moment I laid eyes on it,” says marine biologist Dan Distel, executive director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern University. He’s also the senior author of the June paper describing the animal in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Shipworms got their name because they bore through wood that’s in contact with water, eating the material. They leave behind tunnels lined with the calcium carbonate that they secrete, similar to the way their clam kin build shells. Shipworms have been a maritime plague for millennia, destroying boats and piers. But Lithoredo abatanica nibbled its way down a different evolutionary path. This shipworm eats rock.Distel’s field colleagues, acting on a tip from an earlier French expedition about shipworms apparently boring into the Abatan River’s bedrock, had to strap on snorkeling gear to search for the animals.“[We] picked up these rocks, swam them over to the bank and proceeded to crack [them] open with a hammer and chisel,” says Reuben Shipway, the paper’s lead author and a marine biologist at the University of Portsmouth. “Splitting the rock open to reveal several shipworms inside was just so bizarre.”Specimens of Lithoredo range from less than an inch to more than a foot long. Perhaps not surprisingly, given its unique diet, the animal lacks the sharp, wood-chewing pseudo-teeth of all its relatives and instead has broad, spatula-like chompers.Finding the rock-eating shipworm raises a broader issue. Because the shell-like burrow linings of shipworms can survive in the fossil record long after the wood around them is gone, these tubelike structures have been used by researchers as a proxy for the presence of woody material in ancient environments.Lithoredo’s dining preference for limestone means that scientists can no longer make such an assumption. The animals who left the linings behind might have just been rocking out.“I think people tend to assume that nearly everything is known about the diversity of life on our planet, but nothing could be further from the truth,” says Distel. “The world is full of amazing creatures that have yet to be discovered, creatures that are stranger than fiction.”Rock-Eating Shipworm ShockerBY GEMMA TARLACHFor more fantastic beasts(and one cool tree), see 20 Things You Didn’t Know About New Species, page 98.MAbatan RiverUnlike any other shipworm known to science, Lithoredo abatanica chews through rock, leaving behind twisted tunnels (top left). Individuals such as this 4-inch-long specimen (top right) secrete calcium carbonate that hardens into a burrow lining.

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92DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMImages of the Year In 2019, more than a black hole caught our eye. BY GEMMA TARLACHFACE TO FACE AT LASTAnnounced in August, this 3.8 million-year-old fossil is the first skull of Australopithecus anamensis to be found. Its discovery in Ethiopia is revising what we know about this distant human relative.— IMAGE BY DALE OMORI, COURTESY OF THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 93SEARED LUNGSMore than 30,000 fires burned across wide swaths of the Amazon Basin in August, a nine-year high. Often called the “lungs of the planet,” the dense forest is under threat from human activities: Most of the fires appear to have been intentionally set by farmers looking to clear land.— IMAGE BY UESLEI MARCELINO/REUTERSCAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?Photographed in May in Dongguan, China, an engineer stands beneath a 5G base station antenna that’s part of a state-of-the-art testing facility for controversial telecom giant Huawei.— IMAGE BY JASON LEE/REUTERS

94DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMTHIS IS ONLY A DRILLStaff members from South Sudan’s Health Ministry pose during an Ebola preparedness drill in August. The second-largest-ever outbreak of the disease was raging just over the border in Congo, claiming more than 2,000 lives. — IMAGE BY PATRICK MEINHARDT/AFP/GETTY IMAGESHISTORY BE DAMMEDAmong the cities and towns to be flooded as a mega dam on the Tigris River comes online: the ancient Turkish city of Hasankeyf, which has been inhabited for up to 12,000 years. When the reservoir reaches full capacity, everything below the newly built retaining wall will be submerged. — IMAGE BY DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 95LOOK INTO THE ABYSSCitizen scientists processed raw data collected on May 29 by NASA’s Juno spacecraft to create this color-enhanced close-up of Jupiter. Sunlight kisses bright high-altitude clouds around a vortex with an ominously dark center.— ENHANCED IMAGE BY GERALD EICHSTÄDT AND SEÁN DORAN (CC BY-NC-SA), BASED ON IMAGES PROVIDED COURTESY OF NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SWRI/MSSS



STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION (ALL PERIODICALS PUBLICATIONS EXCEPT REQUESTER PUBLICATIONS) 1. Publication Title: Discover 2. Publication Number: 555-190 3. Filing Date: Oct. 10, 2019 4. Issue Frequency: 10x per year 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: 10 6. Annual Subscription Price: $29.95 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Contact Person: Liz Runyon, 262-798-6607 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor Publisher: Steve George, 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 Editor: Becky Lang, 21027 Crossroads Circle, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612 10. Owner: Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Stockholders owning or holding one percent (1%) or more of the total amount of outstanding stock are: Deborah H.D. Bercot, 22012 Indian Springs Trail, Amberson, PA 17210; Gerald and Patricia Boettcher Trust, 8041 Warren Ave., Wauwatosa, WI 53213; Alexander & Sally Darragh, 145 Prospect Ave., Waterloo, IA 50703; Melanie J. Duval Trust, 9705 Royston Ct., Granite Bay, CA 95746; Harold Edmonson, 6021 N. Marmora Ave., Chicago, IL 60646-3903; Laura & Gregory Felzer, 3328 S. Honey Creek Dr., Milwaukee, WI 53219; Susan E. Fisher Trust, 3430 E. Sunrise Dr., Ste. 200, Tucson, AZ 85718; Bruce H. Grunden, 7202 Wild Violet Dr., Humble, TX 77436; Linda H. Hanson Trust, P.O. Box 19, Arcadia, MI 49613; George F. Hirschmann Trusts, P.O. Box 19, Arcadia, MI 49613; James & Carol Ingles, 1907 Sunnyside Dr., Waukesha, WI 53186; Charles & Lois Kalmbach, 7435 N. Braeburn Ln., Glendale, WI 53209; Kalmbach Profit Sharing/401K Savings Plan & Trust, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612; James J. King Trust, U.S. Bank, P.O. Box 1449, Minneapolis, MN 55480; Mahnke Family Trust, 4756 Marlborough Way, Carmichael, CA 95608; Milwaukee Art Museum, Inc., 700 N. Art Museum Dr., Milwaukee, WI 53202; Thomas & Kathleen Murphy, 3469 Meadow Sound Dr., De Pere, WI 54114; Lois E. Stuart Trust, 1320 Pantops Cottage Ct. #1, Charlottesville, VA 22911-4663; David M. Thornburgh Trust, 8877 Collins Ave., Unit 307, Surfside, FL 33154. 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None. 12. Tax Status: Has not changed during preceding 12 months 13. Publication Title: Discover 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data: September 2019 15. Extent and nature of circulationAverage No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 MonthsNo. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Datea. Total Number of Copies412,102391,050b. Paid Circulation (By Mail and Outside the Mail)(1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541233,300227,021(2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541 00(3) Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside the USPS®30,78420,006(4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail )®00c. Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4))264,084247,027d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail)(1) Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County Copies Included on PS Form 354100(2) Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included on PS Form 354100(3) Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other Classes Through the USPS (e.g., First-Class Mail)254266(4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means)00e. Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), (3), and (4))254266f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e)264,358247,293g. Copies Not Distributed147,744143,757h. Total (Sum of 15f and g)412,102391,050i. Percent Paid (15c divided by 15f times 100)99.9%99.89% 16. Electronic Copy CirculationAverage No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 MonthsNo. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Datea. Paid Electronic Copies14,00312,350b. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a)278,086259,377c. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a)278,361259,643d. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100)99.90%99.90% 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: If the publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is required. Will be printed in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of this publication. 18. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner: Stephen C. George, Vice President of Content, General Manager. Date: 10/10/19JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020 DISCOVER. 97

20THINGSYOUDIDN’T KNOW ABOUT...98DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COMresearch techniques.  Rainbow-colored 11C. wakanda is a flashy fish, but in Australia, another new species stands out by staying subdued. Described in June in Evolutionary Systematics, an unusual spider sticks to a black-and-white color scheme, unlike the far more flamboyant members of its genus.  Inspired by its clas-12sic fashion sense, researchers named the tiny arachnid — less than a quarter-inch long — after the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, whose signature look included a white shirt and black gloves.  Lagerfeld also was rarely seen 13without large black sunglasses, though shades would be of little value to his namesake, Jotus karllagerfeldi. Like other jumping spiders, it relies on excellent vision to hunt prey.  A very different two-toned icon inspired 14the name of a new wasp: Sathon oreo’s brown-and-white striped antennae apparently reminded a researcher of the famously dunkable cookie. 15 Described in February in Zootaxa, S. oreo lives in southeastern Australia, as does another parasitic wasp described in the same study: Choeras zygon. Named after Dr. Whovillains, C. zygon deposits its eggs in living caterpillars, which become a movable feast for developing larvae. 16 In Florida, sea slug Olea hensoni slurps up eggs for supper. And, well, that’s weird. O. hensoni, which is about the size of a grain of rice, is a sacoglossan, a type of sea slug known for its seaweed-eating ways.  Of the 17300 or so species of sacoglossa sea slugs, 297 are vegans. Three species — now including O. hensoni — evolved to pierce gelatinous clumps of eggs deposited by other slugs and snails, and then suck up the nutritious food source within.  Though it’s just across the pond, so to 18speak, from the Mediterranean egg-slurping sacoglos-san, O. hensoni is more closely related to the third egg-eater, which lives in the northeastern Pacific.  You’d 19have to suck a lot of eggs to make a meal out of the young of three new frog species from Madagascar. Described in March in Plos One, the tiny trio could sit together on your thumbnail. 20 Like many researchers who turned up new species in 2019, the team had some fun naming the nano-frogs, which comprise the new genus Mini:Mini scule, Mini ature and Mini mum.DGemma Tarlach is senior editor at Discover.1 Biological discoveries can be downright shocking. In September in Nature Communications, biologists identified two new electric eels, the first additions to the Electrophorus genus in 250 years.  Of course, we 2use the term eel loosely. True eels spawn in saltwater; electric eels are actually freshwater fish that never leave their environment.  One of the slippery new species, 3E. voltai, discharges a zap of 860 volts, significantly more than the previous electric eel record holder of 650 volts. The power-packed electro-punch makes E. voltai the world’s greatest bioelectricity gen-erator.  Researchers believe 4E. voltaimay have evolved its super-shocking skills because it makes its home in exceptionally clear water, which has lower conductivity than murkier flows. 5 All three known electric eel species live in the greater Amazon region, which faces an existential threat because of logging, slash-and-burn agriculture, toxic runoff from mining operations and other human activities.  We’re also the biggest threat to the sur-6vival of a new species of flying squirrel in southern China, reported in July. The mountain woodlands where Biswamoyopterus gaoligongensis lives are at risk of agricultural development.  Forest loss puts 7new and old animal species in danger — but some-times, the forest is the new species. That’s the case for Mischogyne iddii, a new species of tree identified in June; it’s restricted to an area of about 3 square miles in Tanzania.  8M. iddii grows to an impressive height of more than 65 feet, but it’s surprising that it grows in East Africa at all: All other members of its genus take root on the continent’s western coast or interior. 9 Just offshore from M. iddii ’s neighborhood, a new species of fairy wrasse earned instant superhero status when researchers described it in the journal ZooKeys. The small fish, Cirrhilabrus wakanda, is named for the legendary African homeland of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther.  10C. wakanda ’sreal home is just as intriguing: It dwells in the little-studied mesophotic reef world. These low-light ecosystems, ranging in depth from about 100 to 500 feet, are mostly beyond the range of conventional scuba divers but too shallow for deep-sea DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published eight times per year (January/February, March/April, May, June, July/August, September/October, November and December). Vol. 41, no. 1. Published by Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 8520, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Media Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Printed in the U.S.A.FBY GEMMA TARLACHNew SpeciesFrom top: Jumping spider Jotus karllagerfeldi strikes a pose; Sathon oreo’s two-toned antennae apparently made one researcher hungry; Tanzanian tall tree Mischogyne iddiifeatures delicate blooms; flashy fish Cirrhilabrus wakandalives up to its Marvel-ous name.