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.
A majority of football players whose brains were donated for research suffered a degenerative brain disease during their lives, according to the largest sample of players ever studied. The finding provides more evidence that the repetitive injuries to the brain sustained while playing American football are associated with the disease, researchers say.
Of 202 deceased former football players, 177 were diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which can cause a host of mood and behavioral issues as well as thinking and reasoning problems. Among 111 men who had played in the National Football League, 110 — a whopping 99 percent — had developed the disease, researchers report July 25 in JAMA. Three of 14 high school players also showed signs of the brain disease, as well as 48 of 53 college players. Researchers relied on brain autopsies of the players to make the diagnoses and interviewed family members and friends about the symptoms players had experienced. This doesn’t necessarily mean all football players experience chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Many of the families who donated the brains for research could have been motivated to do so because their loved ones had noticeable symptoms, so the sample is not necessarily representative of the general football population. The results are still worrisome, though, researchers say. “The fact that chronic traumatic encephalopathy was so common adds to our concern about the safety of playing football and the risk of developing neurologic symptoms later in life,” says neurologist Gil Rabinovici of the University of California, San Francisco, who wrote an editorial accompanying the article. This “hovers like a dark cloud over the game at all levels, even if the study cannot address how frequent the disease is, or who is at risk.”
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, shows up in athletes and others who’ve had repetitive injuries to the head, such as concussions. The only way to diagnose the disease is with an autopsy. In brains with the condition, a protein called tau goes “bad” and forms clumps in nerve cells and other brain cells. Although tau buildup is found in other brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s, in CTE, the protein congregates in brain cells around small blood vessels. In 2008, a research team set up a brain bank to study the impact of head blows resulting from contact sports or military service. Behavioral neurologist Jesse Mez of Boston University School of Medicine and his colleagues classified players as having mild or severe CTE, depending on how widespread the tau clumps were in the players’ brains. The severity of disease seemed to track with the number of years spent playing football, says Mez. Among NFL players, 95 of the 110 diagnosed cases were severe. All three of the high school players’ cases were mild, while just over half of the college players’ cases were severe.
Yet the players’ reported symptoms while alive were similar, regardless of the severity seen in the brain. Behavioral and mood problems, such as impulsivity, anxiety and depression, were commonly reported in both severe and mild cases of the disease. Cognitive symptoms, including memory loss, were also typical for both groups. One major difference, Mez notes, was that dementia was more common in severe cases of CTE than in mild cases.
As for why players reportedly experienced similar symptoms no matter the severity, “the question is, is there something else going on,” such as inflammation, Mez says. “Or are there regions of the brain that we’re not looking carefully enough at?”
There still isn’t a way to diagnose CTE during life, and that’s “the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” says neurologist David Brody of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Detecting the disease in patients will be crucial for understanding how common CTE is in the NFL, “let alone in the millions of people who participated in college, high school and youth football,” says Rabinovici. “In the meantime, we need to focus on prevention of concussions and other head impacts at all levels of contact sports.”
A round belly, stubby feet and a tapering tail made one armored reptile a lousy swimmer. Despite earlier reports, Eusaurosphargis dalsassoi might not have swum at all, scientists now say.
E. dalsassoi was first identified in 2003. Fossils were found near Monte San Giorgio at the Swiss-Italian border alongside the remains of marine reptiles and fish that lived roughly 240 million years ago. That association led scientists to conclude the creature was aquatic. But a complete skeleton of E. dalsassoi unearthed in 2002 in the Swiss Alps and recently assembled contradicts that idea. At just under 20 centimeters long, the fossil, probably of a youngster, shows that E. dalsassoi widened at the stomach and slithered forward with stiff elbow and knee joints and spadelike claws. That’s not a swimmer’s build, paleontologist Torsten Scheyer of the University of Zurich and colleagues report June 30 in Scientific Reports.
Armed with rows of small spikes along its back and spear-shaped plates framing its head, sides and tail, the animal resembled today’s girdled lizards. The researchers speculate that this particular E. dalsassoi died on a beach and then got washed into the ocean.
Scientists have traced the sensation of itch to a place you can’t scratch.
The discomfort of a mosquito bite or an allergic reaction activates itch-sensitive nerve cells in the spinal cord. Those neurons talk to a structure near the base of the brain called the parabrachial nucleus, researchers report in the Aug. 18 Science. It’s a region that’s known to receive information about other sensations, such as pain and taste.
The discovery gets researchers one step closer to finding out where itch signals ultimately end up. “The parabrachial nucleus is just the first relay center for [itch signals] going into the brain,” says study coauthor Yan-Gang Sun, a neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. Understanding the way these signals are processed by the brain could someday provide relief for people with chronic itch, Sun says. While the temporary itchiness of a bug bite is annoying, longer term, “uncontrollable scratching behavior can cause serious skin damage.”
Previous studies have looked at the way an itch registers on the skin or how neurons convey those sensations to the spinal cord. But how those signals travel to the brain has been a trickier question, and this research is a “major step” toward answering it, says Zhou-Feng Chen, director of the Center for the Study of Itch at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
A network of neurons in the spinal cord wrangles itch signals, previous research suggests. In particular, spinal neurons that make a protein called gastrin-releasing peptide receptor have been shown to be important in itch signaling. But those neurons didn’t link up directly to the parabrachial nucleus, or PBN, Sun’s team found; instead, they talked to other neurons that send messages to the PBN.
When mice were given injections of a drug that induces allergic itching, the rodents showed greater activity in those neurons connecting the spinal cord to the PBN, Sun and colleagues found. In another experiment, the researchers made neurons going to the PBN light-sensitive, and then used light to stop those neurons from sending messages. When those nerve cells were blocked, mice given an itch-triggering drug scratched less.
It’s too soon to say whether itch signals in humans follow the same route — or whether all kinds of itches take the same path. An allergic itch is different from the sort of itch that comes from a light touch, and the two might be handled differently by the brain (SN: 11/22/08, p. 16). And mice, unlike humans, can’t actually describe how itchy they’re feeling. So scientists have to rely on clues like scratching, a reaction to an itch, not a direct measurement of the sensation itself. Which raises the question: If you don’t feel an urge to scratch an itch, is the itch really there at all?
