NEW ORLEANS — Rodeo riders’ recent scientific reputation, as the best modern examples of a Neandertal pattern of excess head knocks, has taken a tumble. Taking their place: People who like to be dragged behind powerboats on big inner tubes, among others.

An exhaustive comparison of Neandertals’ injuries to those of people today finds that water tubing and mishaps involving tables, not rodeo riding, result in top-heavy fracture patterns most similar to those observed on Neandertal fossils. This analysis illustrates just how little modern evidence reveals about ways in which our evolutionary relatives ended up so battered, said anthropologist Libby Cowgill of the University of Missouri in Columbia. She presented data highlighting the mystery of Neandertals’ many preserved bone fractures on April 22 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Her study, conducted with Missouri anthropologist James Bain, was inspired by an influential 1995 report that Neandertals, like modern rodeo riders, suffered lots of head and above-the-waist injuries and little hip and leg damage. Authors of the 1995 study explained their finding by suggesting that, unlike rodeo riders who get catapulted off bucking broncos, Neandertals’ hard knocks came during violent, up-close clashes with large prey.

A coauthor of the 1995 paper, anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis, later questioned those conclusions in the December 2012 Journal of Archaeological Science. Trinkaus pointed out, for instance, that up-close clashes with members of their own species or with Homo sapiens also could have inflicted a lot of upper-body damage. Neandertals immobilized by lower-body injuries may have been left to die before reaching rock-shelters where most fossils have been found, he added. In that case, the limited sample of Neandertal fossils misleadingly portrays these Stone Age hominids as prone to upper-body fractures.

Trinkaus’ doubts were well placed. Neandertals’ pattern of bone fractures differs from that produced by a wide variety of present-day activities, including rodeo riding, Cowgill reported. Activities that cause injuries most resembling the Neandertal pattern have no apparent relation to Stone Age behavior, Cowgill said. No one can accuse Neandertals of having practiced reckless water tubing or having suffered what Cowgill described as “unfortunate run-ins with tables.”

About 30 percent of Neandertals’ injuries affected the face and head, a rate far greater than that for nearly all modern activities, Cowgill said. Only diving board accidents produce a slightly higher proportion of face and head injuries than seen on Neandertal fossils.
In a U.S. sample of modern-day injuries, Cowgill and Bain looked specifically at bone fractures, not at a broader range of skeletal injuries, including signs of degenerative bone disease, considered in the 1995 study. That may help to explain why the rodeo-rider comparison doesn’t hold up anymore: The new study found fewer skull injuries and substantially more hand wounds among rodeo riders than reported for them in the original paper.

Fracture data came from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which compiles information from a national sample of hospitals on injuries from consumer products and sports activities. Of 84 activities that resulted in bone fractures to 61,851 patients between January 2009 and December 2014, only 16 activities showed any statistical similarities to Neandertals’ injury patterns. Along with water tubing and table run-ins, accidents involving golf, lawn chairs and Frisbee and boomerang games produced somewhat Neandertal-like injury patterns.

The lesson here is that there are so many ways to hurt one’s noggin that it’s meaningless to compare injury patterns today with those of Neandertals or Stone Age humans, Trinkaus said. Neandertal injuries may not even reflect particular behaviors. Fractures that occurred during fossilization, as well as greater susceptibility of the braincase — relative to other body parts — to minor dents and dings, could have contributed to Neandertals’ head wounds, Trinkaus suggested.

“The rodeo-rider idea was a great one 20-plus years ago, but we have moved beyond it,” Trinkaus said.

COLD SPRING HARBOR, N.Y. — When breast cancer spreads, it moves in gangs of ready-to-rumble tumor cells, a small genetic study suggests. Most of the mutations that drive recurrent tumors when they pop up elsewhere in the body were present in the original tumor, geneticist Elaine Mardis reported May 9 at the Biology of Genomes meeting.

For many types of cancer, it is the spread, or metastasis, of tumor cells that kills people. Because cancer that comes back and spreads after initial treatment is often deadlier than the original tumors, researchers thought most of the mutations in recurrent tumors happened after they spread. But the new findings contradict this assumption and may indicate ways to stop metastasis.
Mardis, of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and colleagues collected recurrent breast tumors from 16 women who died after their cancer had spread to other parts of the body. Comparing the metastasized tumors with the original breast tumors, the researchers were surprised to learn that multiple, slightly genetically different cells from the original site had broken away together and established the new tumors.

Researchers used to think cancer spread when single cells slipped away and set up shop elsewhere. But recent research in mice suggested cancer cells migrate in groups (SN: 1/10/15, p. 9). The new study doesn’t provide direct evidence of this group migration in human cancer. But genetic similarities between metastasized and original tumors suggest that multiple cells move together to remote sites.

Only two women in the study had cancer-driving mutations — both in an estrogen receptor gene called ESR1 — in their recurrent tumors not seen in the original. All of the tumors that metastasized contained mutations in the TP53 gene. Such mutations could be a warning sign that a breast cancer is prone to spread, Mardis said.

The supermoms of the mammal world are big, shy redheads. Studying growth layers in orangutan teeth shows that mothers can nurse their youngsters for eight-plus years, a record for wild mammals.

Teeth from a museum specimen of a young Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) don’t show signs of weaning until 8.1 years of age. And a Sumatran orangutan (P. abelii) was still nursing during the few months before it was killed at 8.8 years, researchers report May 17 in Science Advances.

Tests also show that youngsters periodically start to taper off their dependence on their mother’s milk and then, perhaps if solid food grows scarce, go back to what looks like an all-mom diet. Such on-again, off-again nursing cycles aren’t known in other wild mammals, says study coauthor Tanya Smith, an evolutionary anthropologist at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia.
Before this work, weaning information for orangutans was sparse. Field biologists’ best efforts to track weaning in Bornean orangutans with known birthdays had pegged 7.5 years as the longest probable nursing time, Smith says. The only other weaning report in the wild for a Bornean youngster of known age was 5.75 years. Smith knows of no such reports for Sumatra’s orangutans.

Orangutans in their native forests don’t make weaning easy to detect, says Serge Wich of Liverpool John Moores University in England, who was not involved in the new study. He started watching the apes in 1993, and points out that “lactating happens very high up in trees, so we are always under a bit of an awkward angle to observe. Also, they’re quite furry.” Determining whether an infant is suckling or just cuddling is not an exact science.

For more accurate dating, Smith and colleagues turned to information preserved in teeth. Primate teeth grow with a circadian rhythm, laying down a microscopic layer every day, starting before birth. Babies grow bones and teeth using milk calcium, which their moms pull from their own skeletons. A similar element, barium, hitchhikes along and ends up in bones and teeth, too. “Mothers dissolve parts of themselves to feed their children,” as Smith puts it. Greater concentrations of barium in a tooth layer mark a time when the tooth was being built up with a greater proportion of mother’s milk.

To read the history of mother’s milk, Smith used a method to track barium concentrations that was developed with colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. The researchers sampled sets of molars from four immature specimens, two of each orangutan species, which were preserved in museum collections. The teeth came from decades ago when collectors “went around randomly shooting endangered species,” Smith says.

Now, both Bornean and Sumatran orangutans rank as critically endangered. A fever of logging and oil palm planting is eating away their scraps of forest, and the pet trade rewards hunters who shoot a mom to bag a cute baby to sell. Neither species had lush resources to begin with, as the animals evolved in forests with booms and long busts in food supplies. Prolonged nursing of young may be part of their slow-lane accommodation to continuing uncertainty and scarcity in their environment.

Researchers debate whether some similar uncertainty shaped human evolution. Among apes, the human species has evolved a “stretched-out” childhood, though with different pacing from that of orangutans, Smith says. “Studying our cousins puts our own history in context.”

When astronomers in February announced the discovery of seven planets orbiting a supercool star, details about the outermost planet were sketchy. No more. The seventh planet is chilly and definitely no place for life, the international team reports May 22 in Nature Astronomy.

The seven-planet system, TRAPPIST-1, is 39 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Follow-up observations of the system reveal that TRAPPIST-1h is about three-quarters the size of Earth and orbits its star in just under 19 days. The planet sits about 9.6 million kilometers from its star, which has only 8 percent of the mass of the sun. As a result, TRAPPIST-1h gets about as much starlight as the icy dwarf planet Ceres, in the asteroid belt, gets from the sun.

Such limited light makes the planet too cold (‒100° Celsius) to harbor liquid water and therefore life as we know it, the researchers report.

Tornadoes in the southeast, Earth’s magnetic field and obesity might not seem to have much in common. Well, now they do.

Under President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget proposal, federal research spending into all three areas — and many others — would decline abruptly. The president delivered his budget request to Congress on May 23, presenting the sharpest picture yet of his administration’s priorities for federal science spending. Some science and technology programs within agencies would see their funds increase, but the administration recommends extensive cuts to basic research overall. The request greatly expands on the “skinny budget” the administration released in March (SN: 4/15/17, p. 15).

Total federal research spending would be slashed by about 17 percent, Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a conference call with reporters. “If the White House budget plan were to become law, it would devastate America’s science and technology enterprise.”

For many science agencies and programs, the outlook appears stark. Some examples:

The National Science Foundation, which funds research in all fields of science and engineering, would face an 11 percent cut.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s budget would be cut by 15 percent.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, where research includes cybersecurity and nanotechnology, would face a 23 percent cut.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s primary research arm, which investigates weather, climate and ocean resources, would be cut 32 percent.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Science & Technology would be cut by 37 percent.
The budget proposes a 16 percent cut for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would take a 17 percent cut.
Food and Drug Administration funding (not including revenue from user fees) would be cut by 30 percent.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service would fall 22 percent.
And, as expected, the National Institutes of Health’s budget would be slashed 22 percent.
Those numbers don’t mean much just yet — they are just a starting point for a long and winding route through the political process. But the details do provide more information about what programs and areas of research could be in trouble.
NSF’s grant programs, for example, would lose $776 million, dropping the overall budget from $7.5 billion to $6.65 billion. As a result, the agency estimates that in fiscal year 2018, the proposed funds would support about 8,000 new research grant awards, about 800 fewer than in 2016. Among the NSF-funded programs facing potentially severe reductions are clean energy research and development and the Ocean Observatories Initiative, an array of marine and seismic sensors scattered across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that is expected to provide some of the most detailed ocean measurements to date (SN: 10/19/13, p. 22). The project would see its NSF funding slashed by 44 percent.

A bright spot: The request leaves funding flat for LIGO, which discovered gravitational waves in 2016 (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). Planned, continued upgrades to the project’s laser interferometer systems are still on, NSF director France Córdova said May 23 at a budget presentation at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Va. NSF has invested about $1.1 billion in the project. “It was the biggest investment NSF has made to date, and it was a big risk,” Córdova said.

Many in the scientific community say the proposed cuts would significantly undermine the nation’s global leadership role in advancing science. And they doubt the administration’s argument that the private sector would make the necessary investments in basic science research.

“Candidly, shareholders are not interested in funding research, which tends to be costly, very long-term and very risky,” said retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine during the AAAS conference call. “Research is a public good.… The rewards tend to go to the public as a whole, and therefore research really warrants government support.”

Funding for DOE’s energy programs, including research into efficiency and renewable energy, would fall about 60 percent. One of those programs, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, would be eliminated. The administration defends phasing out the roughly $300 million ARPA-E, which funds research on risky but promising energy technologies, by saying the private sector is “better positioned” to finance such research.

Within the DOE Office of Science, the biological and environmental research program, which studies climate modeling among other things, faces the steepest cut — 43 percent, a drop from $612 million to $349 million. High-energy physics research would see an 18 percent reduction, but the program for advanced scientific computing would get an 11 percent bump.

Environmental research would suffer at NOAA, with the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research facing sweeping cuts. Funding for climate research would drop 19 percent, weather and air chemistry research 25 percent and ocean, coastal and Great Lakes research by 49 percent. Programs potentially shuttered include:

Air Resources Laboratory, which researches air chemistry, mercury deposition and the movement of harmful materials through the atmosphere.
VORTEX-Southeast, a tornado detection and warning program for the southeastern United States.
The Marine Mammal Commission, an independent agency formed in 1972 to help protect marine animals and their habitats.
At USGS, the roughly $1.9 million geomagnetism program would be zeroed out. It monitors changes in Earth’s magnetic field, providing data that help NOAA and the U.S. Air Force track magnetic storms due to solar activity. Such storms can disrupt radio communication, GPS systems and, if severe enough, the electric power grid. The agency’s Climate and Land Use Change program, renamed the Land Resources program, would see a 24 percent cut. Most of the funding for a carbon sequestration research program, about $8 million, would be eliminated, with the rest, about $1.5 million, being redirected to the energy and minerals program. That division would see about a 2 percent increase overall.

Health programs and biomedical research would face big challenges under Trump’s budget. At CDC, $1.2 billion would be slashed from the agency’s overall budget. The request proposes cutting $163 million from the agency’s chronic disease prevention programs, which aim to reduce incidence of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity. Prevention programs for domestic HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis face a $183 million decrease in funding.

NIH’s overall budget would fall from the enacted 2017 level of $34.6 billion to $26.9 billion. Some of the most striking cuts:

National Cancer Institute — $1.2 billion
National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute — $672 million.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — $1.1 billion.
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases — $421 million.
Congress, however, recently boosted NIH funding — at least for fiscal year 2017 — providing an additional $2 billion over the next five months.

That’s an important reminder that many of the programs facing extensive reductions or elimination have allies on Capitol Hill, a potentially comforting thought for those alarmed by the president’s request. “We’re counting on Congress to, once again, say no to these recommendations,” Mary Woolley, president of the health and medical research advocacy group Research!America, said in the AAAS conference call.

Not all science agencies or programs are threatened. For instance, NASA’s planetary science division would see a funding bump. The final 2017 spending agreement, which Congress recently passed, had already increased the division’s budget from $1.63 billion to $1.85 billion. In Trump’s proposal, that number is nudged even higher, to $1.93 billion. As expected, the administration supports a flyby mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The president has requested $425 million for the project, a 55 percent increase from the 2017 enacted level of $275 million.

“We’re pleased by our top-line number of $19.1 billion, which reflects the president’s confidence in our direction and the importance of everything we’ve been achieving,” said NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot.

But the agency would lose about 9 percent of its earth science budget, slightly more than expected. Grants for earth science research would be cut, and NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, which Congress directed the space agency to form in 2010, would be axed. Five space-based earth science projects would also be eliminated. Those projects are meant, in part, to provide data to help understand various aspects of Earth’s climate and how it is changing.

Trump’s budget proposal will not get passed by Congress unchanged. Still, the administration’s lack of support for basic federal research overall has alarmed many scientists and their supporters.

“Science research has been the source of improvements in public health, in our energy, in our quality of life, in our agriculture and ability to feed ourselves and the world,” said Holt. “What we see is not just a reduction in government programs. What we see is a failure to invest in America.”

Hurricane season has officially begun in the North Atlantic, and it’s not just coastal communities that have to worry. A population of sooty terns off the southwest tip of Florida might want to worry, too. Depending on when and where storms hit, the terns could be in for a tough time. Their migratory route overlaps with the general path of hurricanes traveling from the waters off Africa up to the United States, a new study finds.

Sooty terns can be found all over the world. But the ones that nest in the Dry Tortugas National Park, west of Key West, are among the best known. The birds have been the subject of a long-term study that started back in 1959, and of other studies that stretch back into the early 20th century. Those studies revealed much about the birds’ growth and behavior, but not much about the terns’ migration.

In 2011, Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University, and colleagues attached geolocators to 25 sooty terns. A geolocator is “a remarkably stupid device,” Pimm says. It simply records how bright it is every 12 minutes. From that information, researchers can determine sunrise and sunset from day to day — and therefore approximate the birds’ location. But they have to retrieve the devices to get the data. That meant finding those 25 birds in a population of 80,000.

The researchers managed to find two.

But those two birds had some remarkable data. The geolocators recorded that the birds had experienced a 12-hour day in December, offset by five hours from Florida. That meant that they had been flying somewhere around the equator and were headed toward Africa.

But perhaps those two birds were outliers. So in 2014, Pimm’s group got some more sophisticated technology that could transmit a bird’s location. The new tech was also a lot more expensive, so the scientists were able to track only five birds. But the researchers also didn’t have to wait a year to get the data — or search for the birds among a population of thousands. “I would get up every day and check on where the birds were,” Pimm recalls.

At least some of the terns were flying south through the Caribbean, southeast along the coast of South America and then to the middle of the Atlantic, where they spent the winter, the team reports May 10 in PeerJ.
It’s a path that takes the birds straight up hurricane alley the long way, Pimm notes.

The researchers then took advantage of all those decades of banding birds. They matched historical reports from 1960 to 1980 of wrecked (that is, dead) sooty terns with tropical storms and hurricanes. Some years the birds were fine, but, Pimm says, “some years they get absolutely slaughtered.” If a storm hits at the wrong place and the wrong time, the birds are out of luck. Even if they manage to survive the high winds and heavy rains, they can be blown far off course. Hurricane Camille, for instance, took one poor sooty tern to the Great Lakes in 1969.

In some years, hurricanes may take out a small portion of the sooty tern population, but it doesn’t appear to be enough to cause big declines. Pimm worries, though, about what might happen in the future. It is not yet clear how climate change might change the severity or frequency of hurricanes — and thus affect the terns — but it is something to keep an eye on, Pimm says.

Zuul is back. But don’t bother calling the Ghostbusters. Zuul crurivastator is a dino, not a demon. A 75-million-year-old skeleton unearthed in Montana in 2014 reveals a tanklike dinosaur with a spiked club tail and a face that probably looked a lot like its cinematic namesake.

The find is the most complete fossil of an ankylosaur, a type of armored dinosaur, found in North America, researchers report May 10 in Royal Society Open Science. It includes a complete skull and tail club, plus some preserved soft tissue, says study co-author Victoria Arbour, a paleobiologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. “It really gives us a good idea of what these animals looked like.”
The bones reveal that Z. crurivastator had spikes running all the way down its tail, not just on the club itself. That arrangement means the weaponry was more than just a “massive sledgehammer,” Arbour says. The club was a formidable weapon. The term crurivastator comes from the Latin for “shin destroyer.”
Arbour previously created mathematical models to calculate the force with which similar ankylosaurs might have swung their tails. These appendages provided a winning combination: good at absorbing impacts and able to smack an opponent hard enough to hurt, she says. Despite their armor and fearsome tail, ankylosaurs were plant eaters. So they probably used their tails to smack predators or compete with other ankylosaurs.

Arbour and museum colleague David Evans plan to investigate the thin sheet of fingernail-like material covering the bony plates on the tail, along with other details of the fossil that are typically lost in such old specimens. The rare, preserved soft tissue might even let scientists extract ancient proteins, Arbour says, providing insight into how these building blocks of life have changed since the days of dinos.

Having all this material in hand, she says, “kind of pushes the envelope about what we can identify in the fossil record.”

Once every 53 days, Jupiter pulls Juno close. Locked in orbit since July 2016, the spacecraft has made five close flybys of the planet so far. More than 1,300 Earths could fit inside Jupiter, but Juno takes only two hours to zip from pole to pole. That mad, north-to-south trek is shown below in a sequence of 14 enhanced-color images taken May 19.

Each image’s width corresponds to the width of the field of view of JunoCam, Juno’s visible light camera. As the spacecraft zooms closer, to about 3,400 kilometers above the cloud tops, less total area of Jupiter can be seen, but more details emerge. Turbulent clouds, for example, signal massive tempests along the equator. New data from the mission reveal that near the equator, ammonia rises from unexpectedly deep in the Jovian atmosphere (SN Online: 5/25/17). Such upwelling might fuel storms like these, but it’s too early for scientists to tell. And what look like pinpricks of light across the entire south tropical zone are actually 50-kilometer-wide cloud towers. Found high in Jupiter’s atmosphere, these clouds are probably made of ice crystals.
“It’s snowing on Jupiter, and we’re seeing how it works,” said Juno mission leader Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio in a May 25 news conference. Or “it could be hail,” he added. Either way, it’s not snow or hail as we know it. The precipitation is probably mostly ammonia ice, but there may be water ice, too.

Juno doesn’t have eyes only for Jupiter. Sometimes the spacecraft stargazes, too. On its initial science flyby last August, Juno captured the first image of Jupiter’s main ring seen from the inside looking out. In the background of the newly released image, Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, peeks above the gauzy band, and the three stars of Orion’s belt glint from the bottom right. Taken with Juno’s star-tracking navigation camera, the shot reveals that “heaven looks the same to us from Jupiter,” said Heidi Becker, leader of Juno’s radiation monitoring team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

People with weakened immune systems might help scientists get a jump on the flu virus.

Some flu virus mutations popped up again and again in cancer patients with long-term infections, researchers report June 27 in eLife. And some of those mutations were the same as ones found in flu viruses circulating around the world a few years later, evolutionary virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and colleagues discovered. The findings may eventually help vaccine developers predict flu strain evolution.
“You can’t predict what’s going to happen next year,” — at least not yet, Bloom says. But monitoring infections in many people may indicate which parts of the virus are most likely to change in the future.

Most people who catch the flu get over it in about a week. Previous studies have suggested that the virus doesn’t change much within one person. It must pass through tens to hundreds of people to build up enough mutations to give it an advantage over other flu viruses, Bloom says. That makes predicting flu evolution tricky.

A coffee shop conversation alerted Bloom to a potential treasure: multiple nasal wash samples from four cancer patients who had had the flu for months in 2006 and 2007. Part of their cancer treatments had weakened all four people’s immune systems, making it hard for them to fight off the infections.

Evolutionary biologist Katherine Xue in Bloom’s lab and colleagues examined genetic material from the nasal washes, identifying mutations present in at least 5 percent of flu viruses in each person. The team tracked competition between virus variants within each person over time and compared virus evolution patterns among the patients.

Nine flu mutations popped up in at least two separate patients. Of those, five were in the virus’s hemagglutinin gene. That gene encodes a sugar-studded protein on the virus’s outer surface that helps the virus stick to and invade human cells. The immune system commonly makes antibodies against hemagglutinin that foil the strain’s ability to infect the host again. As a result, the virus has to mutate so that the protein will be different enough to evade the immune system.
Four amino acids of the hemagglutinin protein were frequently changed by mutations in the cancer patients’ viruses and popped up years later in flu strains worldwide, too. Those amino acids are the 138th, 193rd, 223rd and 225th links in the chain of amino acids that make up the hemagglutinin protein.

In some cases, the mutations produced the same amino acid change in both the cancer patients’ and the global virus strains circulating after 2010. For instance, the amino acid valine was altered to isoleucine at position 223. That happened in two cancer patients in 2006 and 2007. After about 2012, nearly all viruses circulating worldwide had the same change.

In another case, those same two cancer patients’ viruses had tyrosine at position 193, but globally circulating viruses had either phenylalanine or serine at that position, the researchers found. Those results indicate that at some spots in the protein, particular changes are important, but other positions are more malleable.

Within patients, viruses carrying different amino acids seemed to directly compete against each other; as one became more frequent, the other was reduced in abundance. That’s the same sort of pattern researchers observe at the global level. Knowing which mutations commonly win competitions in immune-compromised patients may give a preview of winners in the global flu fight.

Not all of the flu mutations that arose in the cancer patients were later found in the general population, says infectious disease biologist Katia Koelle of Duke University. For instance, a mutation called L427F (changing leucine at position 427 to phenylalanine) was found in more than 75 percent of flu viruses in three of the cancer patients, but it was never seen in flu viruses circulating globally. That mutation might give flu viruses some advantage within a person, but might not be efficient at spreading from person-to-person, Koelle says. Studies that compare flu alterations in multiple people won’t immediately tell researchers how to design vaccines, she says, but could point to parts of the virus for further investigation.

Xue and Bloom say they would like to repeat the study, perhaps this time in very young children and elderly people — two groups that also have weaker immune systems than most adults.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is ready for its close-up. On July 10, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will fly directly over it, providing the first intimate views of Jupiter’s most famous feature.

The Great Red Spot is a 16,000-kilometer-wide storm that’s been raging for centuries. Juno will soar just 9,000 kilometers above the Red Spot’s swirling clouds, collecting data with its eight scientific instruments and snapping pictures with its JunoCam imager.

Since Juno started orbiting Jupiter last July, it’s revealed many new, sometimes surprising insights into the planet’s structure, atmosphere, and magnetic field. The forthcoming Red Spot observations are expected to help scientists understand what drives Jupiter’s iconic storm.