The world of larval plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) may look alien, but it could be as close as the cobbles beneath your feet, if you walk a rocky stretch of shore on much of the North American West Coast. Adults of this species swim each spring from ocean depths—up to 366 meters (1,200 feet) beneath the surface—to the intertidal zone to spawn in the shallows, where males excavate nests beneath large rocks. There, they set about trying to attract females and, if successful, rear young.
Perhaps because this species of toadfish is “grotesque in appearance,” as one 1948 description put it, with muddy coloring and vampiric fangs, most males rely on their voices to summon potential mates. They regularly croon at night, rapidly contracting muscles along their swimbladders to produce a monotonous tone resembling the low notes of a trombone. On occasion, they will make this call for more than an hour at a stretch. Multiple males singing at once creates a drone that’s audible through the bottom of a boat, and reportedly loud enough to disrupt conversation or wake someone who is fast asleep. And no wonder, since at least one observer compared the sound to “a huge hive of bees or a group of motorboats.”
Female midshipmen find it irresistible, however. Those drawn to a particular male’s croon will collectively lay hundreds of eggs on the stone ceiling of his watery nest, where he can fertilize them. Unless someone else does, that is. Smaller “sneaker” males often lurk nearby and sometimes inseminate eggs before the guarding male can fend them off. Sneakers don’t sing or build nests, but what they lack in vocal skills and architectural acumen they make up for in cunning—and in testes, which can be as much as seven times larger relative to their body size than those of the crooning “guarder” males.
When this courtship chaos is over, so too are the parts played by the sneaker males and the brood’s moms. Thus abandoned, the singing male braves up to four months of high and low tides to tend those eggs, even though many of them may not hold his offspring. And yet, plainfin midshipman—so named because the pattern of bioluminescent photophores on their bodies resemble the buttons on a naval uniform—are stalwart attendants. They rely on special physiological adaptations to stay put through wild temperature swings and occasional exposure to air. All the while, they ward away predators and use their fins to clean debris from and oxygenate the developing larvae.
This is hungry, even starving, work. With so many hundreds of eggs and babies available in each nest, researchers have shown that some 69 percent of guarding males snack on them, even when other food is available. Recent research suggests that this practice is largely aimed at making way for newer additions to the brood in which paternity may be more certain, since it generally occurs at the start of the egg-guarding season, rather than the end. Fortunately, there are enough babies in each brood to ensure that most survive this dubious aspect of their guardians’ tending. They eventually outgrow the golden yolks anchoring them to their nest rocks, thrashing free, and returning to the deep, where they will begin this bizarre and fascinating cycle all over again.
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Adult plainfin midshipman (Porichthys notatus) in a Puget Sound tide pool. Cavan Images/Alamy Stock Photo
The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1, and forecasters are predicting an exceptionally active season.
If the National Hurricane Center’s early forecast, released May 23, is right, the North Atlantic could see 17 to 25 named storms, eight to 13 hurricanes, and four to seven major hurricanes by the end of November. That’s the highest number of named storms in any NOAA preseason forecast.
Other forecasts for the season have been just as intense. Colorado State University’s early outlook, released in April, predicted an average of 23 named storms, 11 hurricanes, and five major hurricanes. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts anticipates 21 named storms.
Colorado State also forecasts a whopping 210 accumulated cyclone energy units for 2024, and NOAA forecasts the second-highest ACE on record. Accumulated cyclone energy is a score for how active a given season is by combining intensity and duration of all storms occurring within a given season. Anything over 103 is considered above normal.
These outlooks place the 2024 season in league with 2020, when so many tropical cyclones formed in the Atlantic that they exhausted the usual list of storm names: A record 30 named storms, 13 hurricanes, and six major hurricanes formed that year, combining for 245 accumulated cyclone energy units.
So, what makes for a highly active Atlantic hurricane season?
I am a climate scientist who has worked on seasonal hurricane outlooks and examined how climate change affects our ability to predict hurricanes. Forecasters and climatologists look for two main clues when assessing the risks from upcoming Atlantic hurricane seasons: a warm tropical Atlantic Ocean and a cool tropical eastern Pacific Ocean.
Warm Atlantic water can fuel hurricanes
During the summer, the Atlantic Ocean warms up, resulting in generally favorable conditions for hurricanes to form.
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In this satellite image captured by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst from aboard the International Space Station, Hurricane Florence churns through the Atlantic Ocean toward the U.S. East Coast on September 12, 2018. ESA/NASA via Getty Images
When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools.
Gore points to West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who have contributed to various political action committees that have poured millions into legislative candidates who have promoted vouchers. The men also fund or serve on the boards of a host of public policy and advocacy organizations that have led the fight for vouchers in Texas.
In recent years, the largesse from Dunn and the Wilks brothers has reached local communities across Texas, including Granbury, near Fort Worth, where fights over library books, curriculum, and vouchers have dominated the community conversation.
Gore said that she believes school board candidates are being recruited, at times without their full knowledge, in an effort “to cause as much disruption and chaos as possible” and weaken community faith in local school districts.
In 2021, two local men — former state representative Mike Lang and political consultant Nate Criswell — asked Gore to run for school board. At the time, the three were co-hosts of a web-based talk show that targeted local officials they believed were insufficiently conservative and were straying from GOP platform positions. They took frequent aim at the Granbury school district, which they alleged was allowing explicit sexual content into school libraries and teaching divisive ideas about race.
Gore broke from the group shortly after taking office in January 2022, when she concluded that the materials she had warned about on the campaign trail were not present in Granbury schools. She claims the men and other leaders of the far-right faction in Hood County, home to Granbury, dismissed her findings. They continued to pummel the district over books and curriculum, supported school board candidates who sought to remove a growing number of titles from library shelves, and worked to derail three bond elections that would have funded new and renovated buildings for the overcrowded district.
That’s when Gore said she began to piece together connections that hadn’t been previously apparent to her.
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Courtney Gore, vice president of the Granbury Independent School District Board of Trustees, listens to public comments during a February meeting.Credit: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and Texas Tribune
In new research, scientists have shared data from a special observatory, and it’s lead them to theorize that dark energy may be weakening. This data all comes from the first year of observation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), an array of 5,000 robots that have worked together to map the cosmos in more detail than ever before.
While we don’t yet fully understand dark energy, a shift in our core understanding of the concept—from thinking of it as constant to thinking of it as weakening—could affect all of physics, and influence how our universe eventually ends.
When talking about the history of the universe today, scientists use a paradigm called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model—a mathematical equation that works out in harmony with our current understanding of the Big Bang origin of the universe. And an essential part of it is the cosmological constant, lambda, which dates back to Albert Einstein but has evolved over time in its purpose. Lambda’s constancy is essential to our understanding of the ΛCDM model, and the constant is closely linked with dark energy, which was also suggested to be constant.
After a year of observation at DESI in Arizona, however, dark energy is not behaving exactly as expected. “We’re seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving over time,” director Michael Levi said on the DESI blog.
Talking about this revelation last week, Popular Mechanic’s Darren Orf laid out what a big deal this discovery is for scientists, especially considering that this should be just the beginning what DESI will uncover. It’s important to note that this data represents just one year out of DESI’s planned project life of five years total, and that the observations may change or fit into a different conclusion as more data is collected.
A person in Texas has tested positive for the highly pathogenic avian influenza A virus (H5N1), also known as bird flu, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed. This individual, who was exposed to cattle that were believed to be infected with the virus, reported eye redness—a sign of conjunctivitis—but no other symptoms. The patient is being treated with antiviral medication and is recovering.
Avian flu has been ripping through farmed poultry and wild bird populations around the world in recent years. It has also infected mammalian species ranging from foxes, bears, and seals to cats and dogs. And in recent weeks, infections have been found in cattle in six U.S. states: Kansas, Texas, Michigan, New Mexico, Idaho, and Ohio.* There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission so far, and the CDC says the risk to the public remains low.
The new human case is the second known to occur in the U.S. The first was in 2022, when a person in Colorado tested positive for the virus via a nasal swab after having direct contact with infected poultry. That patient reported mild fatigue and later recovered. Previous cases of avian flu in humans were deadly, but they involved a different form of the virus than the one that is currently circulating.
Scientific American talked to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, about the latest human case and the risk to human health more broadly.
How worried should we be about the human bird flu case in Texas?
First of all, there’s some clarification here. Neither of these two cases [in the U.S.] has been an actual influenza infection, as you think of a respiratory infection. They both have been basically either a nasal swab detection, for the previous one, or in the case of this one, a conjunctivitis—an eye infection. So this isn’t classic influenza at all.
The first one was just someone who was tested routinely. They were working in a barn, depopulating the birds that were dying from flu, and they had some mild symptoms, and they just got tested. They don’t know if the symptoms were related to it, and it could have been that the virus was just picked up in the nose because of just inhaling it in. The second case is a case of conjunctivitis. So that’s not, again, unexpected in that there are receptor sites in the eye for influenza viruses.
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Avian flu has recently been detected in cattle in several U.S. states, and a person was recently infected after having contact with potentially infected animals. tianyu wu/Getty Images
People have long been fascinated with how the Egyptian pyramids were built, floating theories from the construction of expansive causeways to extraterrestrial assistance.
Now scientists have evidence to support another theory, centered around the discovery of a long-lost branch of the Nile that would have run alongside 31 ancient pyramids built between the 27th and 18th centuries BC.
Though the pyramids today sit on a sandy, desert plateau near the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, a newly published study maintains the region was once home to a bustling river branch that was likely a vital means of transportation.
Researchers named the 64-kilometre river branch Ahramat (the Arabic word for “pyramids”) and said it was likely used to float large stone blocks for the construction of the pyramids. Many of the stones originated from hundreds of kilometers south of where the pyramids stand today, with some weighing more than a ton.
The river likely also transported other equipment and people.
Geomorphologist Eman Ghoneim, the study’s lead researcher, told National Geographic she and her team from the University of North Carolina Wilmington believe the lost river “was a superhighway for ancient Egypt.”
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Scientists have discovered a lost river branch of the Nile, now named Ahramat, that they believe may have been used to transport building materials and massive stone blocks to pyramid construction sites in ancient Egypt. EWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images
The rock group Counting Crows were onto something when they chose their band name. Crows can indeed count, according to research published this week in Science.
The results show that crows have counting capacities near those of human toddlers who are beginning to develop a knack for numbers, says lead study author Diana Liao, a postdoctoral researcher in neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “We think this is the first time this has been shown for any animal species,” she adds.
Crows do not appear to be capable of symbolic counting, in which numbers are associated with a particular symbol that serves as an exact representation. This skill is still thought to be unique to humans. Instead, the birds are able to count by controlling the number of vocalizations they produce to correspond to associated cues—just like young children who have yet to master symbolic counting often do, Liao says. For example, a toddler who is asked how many apples are on a tree may answer, “One, one, one” or “One, two, three”—producing the number of speech sounds that correspond to the number of objects they see rather than just saying, “Three.”
Scientists have long suspected that some nonhuman species might also have the ability to count by controlling the number of their vocalizations, but they have lacked the smoking gun evidence to prove it. In a study of Black-capped Chickadees, for example, researchers reported that the number of “dee” notes at the ends of the birds’ alarm calls was inversely correlated with the size of the predator they were issuing warnings about. (The small predators in that study posed a higher risk to the chickadees than large ones did.) “They seemed to be conveying the magnitude of the threat,” Liao says.
Yet, this finding on its own did not prove that chickadees were intentionally conveying information about the predator through numbered calls. The behavior could also be driven by the level of fear the birds were experiencing, Liao says, with more dangerous predators triggering higher states of arousal and thus more calls.
Europe’s upcoming Mars mission will use a pioneering nuclear-powered device that harnesses the radioactive decay of americium to keep its components warm — a first for spacecraft.
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced the plans on 16 May, alongside details of an agreement with NASA that crystallized the US agency’s contribution to the long-delayed ExoMars mission, which will deliver Europe’s first Mars rover, called Rosalind Franklin. ESA was originally working with the Russian space agency Roscosmos on the mission, but canceled the partnership in 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Radioisotope heater units (RHUs) harness the heat produced by the decay of radioactive elements to keep spacecraft warm enough to operate when it is not possible to use electricity generated by solar panels. ESA has historically relied on US or Russian partners to provide RHUs that use plutonium-238 for missions, but since 2009 has been working on its own program to create RHUs, as well as batteries that provide electricity.
The European RHUs will heat components of the mission’s landing platform, which deploys the rover onto the Martian surface. The lander powers the rover before it exits the platform and opens its solar panels. Heating the lander will extend its life, so it can provide backup in case there are issues when the rover is deployed, says Orson Sutherland, ESA’s group leader for Mars Exploration, who is based at the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
Americium decay
ESA’s heater units will not only be a first for Europe, but the first anywhere to use americium-241, a by-product of plutonium decay that packs less power per gram than does its precursor. But americium-241 is more abundant and cheaper — meaning that, even if the RHUs require more of the isotope, they might be less expensive overall. “Developing and launching a European RHU will be a first for ESA and a major achievement,” says Sutherland.
The Rosalind Franklin rover is uniquely equipped to search for traces of ancient life on Mars: it has a 2-meter drill that will allow it to burrow deep beneath the Martian surface. But the mission was originally slated for launch in 2018 and had already been delayed by technical issues and the COVID-19 pandemic, even before tensions escalated with Russia.
ESA had to radically rethink the mission to proceed without the involvement of Roscosmos, which was meant to build the lander. That led ESA to create a new European-designed lander and rely on NASA to fill the remaining holes in the mission plan. According to the agreement, NASA will provide capacity to launch ExoMars in 2028, as well as braking engines for the lander. NASA will also supply RHUs, for the rover.
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An artist’s impression of ESA’s ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Now scientists have evidence to support another theory, centered around the discovery of a long-lost branch of the Nile that would have run alongside 31 ancient pyramids built between the 27th and 18th centuries BC.
An artist’s impression of ESA’s ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
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