James' World 2

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From the sunlit top 200 meters of the sea, plankton carcasses, excrement, and molt particles constantly drift toward the depths. As this so-called marine snow sinks, the bits can clump together or break apart, gain speed or sink more slowly, or get eaten up by bacteria. They descend through darker, colder, and denser waters, carrying carbon with them and settling on the bottom as biomass.

The oceans absorb billions of tons of carbon every year, a process crucial to account for in climate models. But researchers have long been stumped by how much carbon actually reaches the seafloor—and stays there. To find out, oceanographers are investigating how carbon is eaten, expelled, and otherwise influenced as it drifts through what some scientists think of as the ocean’s “digestive system.”

Measuring the rate of carbon storage means scrutinizing the composition of what sinks, how particles stick together and thus drop faster or slower, the decelerating effects of mucus-producing phytoplankton—and even, for a new study published in Science, specific microbes’ dietary preferences.

“We currently do not have a very good way to connect the processes at the surface with what’s arriving at the seafloor,” says Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute oceanographer Colleen Durkin. “We know they’re linked, but it’s been very difficult to observe the mechanisms that drive that connection.”

Recent advances in sensor development, imaging, and DNA sequencing are now giving researchers a closer look at the particular organisms and processes at work. By isolating and testing bacterial populations in marine snow, the study’s co-author Benjamin Van Mooy, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and his colleagues found that specific microbe populations prefer to eat phytoplankton that contain specific kinds of fatty acid biomolecules called lipids.

Lipids constitute up to 30 percent of the particulate organic matter at the ocean’s surface, so bacterial dietary preferences in a given region could significantly alter how much carbon-containing biomass reaches the seafloor. “If we can start to understand what [microbes] can do, then we can imagine a future where we can start to predict, potentially, the fate of carbon based on the organisms that are present,” says Van Mooy, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024 for his work.

Scientists are also working to document what falls through particular locations over various time frames. Sediment traps reveal a snapshot of certain areas’ marine snow, and Durkin and others are deploying sensors with autonomous cameras to observe sinking particles over a longer period. Seeing the complexity of marine snow distribution, says Rutgers University microbial oceanographer Kay Bidle, “reveals how we can’t necessarily model and understand carbon flux by the very simple constructs and equations and laws that we had before.”

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The temperature is dropping, and rates of a whole host of respiratory illnesses are doing the opposite. Among them is so-called walking pneumonia, a relatively mild form of pneumonia that has been unusually common in young children this year.

Pneumonia can be caused by dozens of different pathogens, but walking pneumonia is most commonly caused by a bacterium called Mycoplasma pneumonia. Traditional pneumonia can require hospitalization. Walking pneumonia, however, can feel like a bad cold and is sometimes not even serious enough to force people to rest at home. This year experts are particularly concerned about the infection because it appears more prevalent than usual in young children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this past October, about 7 percent of children and adolescents between two and 17 years old who had pneumonia-related emergency room visits were diagnosed with a M. pneumoniae infection. The proportion of M. pneumoniae cases increased between March and October, and the increase was higher in children between two and four years old than it was in older children. That is especially striking because, traditionally, infections have been highest among children between age five and 17.

Scientific American spoke with Eberechi Nwaobasi-Iwuh, a pediatric hospitalist

at Atlantic Health System’s Morristown and Overlook Medical Centers in New Jersey, about walking pneumonia trends and what parents should know.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

What is walking pneumonia?

The reason it’s referred to as walking pneumonia is that you can be infected with Mycoplasma and develop pneumonia from it, and even though you have pneumonia, you won’t have the typical symptoms. You may have some fatigue and fever and cough, but it doesn’t make you typically as ill as one would expect from pneumonia. That said, recently we’re seeing some kids who are coming in who are fairly sick with it.

How would you characterize walking pneumonia rates this year compared with previous years?

Usually, it’s more common in school-aged kids, adolescents, and young adults, but this year we’re seeing it in very young children and even infants. Sometimes they may be symptomatic, or sometimes we’re just catching it when we’re swabbing them for microbes with other presentations. We’re just seeing it distributed more widely across more age groups than we typically do.

Are there also more cases this year than usual, or is it just that unusual age pattern?

Oh, definitely more cases. In my experience, we’ve probably seen a two- to threefold increase in the number of cases you ordinarily see for this time of year.

Are there any theories about what’s driving the age shift, with more young kids getting sick?

Since COVID, all the regular seasonal variations with viruses and bacteria really don’t follow the same patterns they used to. Some degree of decrease in immunity may have occurred, or the cause may be a more virulent strain that’s just a little bit more transmissible than usual. But I think it’s kind of hard to say what exactly is spurring the age shift.

Some viruses have episodic increases, so every five to seven years, you’ll see an increase in cases. Mycoplasma bacteria also follow that pattern sometimes, so this may just be the typical increase that we would have expected overall, historically.

How seasonal is walking pneumonia in general?

Usually, it’s more common during the fall and winter months, but even in August we started seeing somewhat increased cases, and that’s continued. Even during the early summer and late spring, we were seeing some Mycoplasma, but it was manifesting differently.

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Cecilia Erlich

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No family quarrels!

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In the weeks before and after the U.S. presidential election, many of us are asking about the role of empathy in American politics. Does it matter whether candidates express care for their constituents, and what does a person’s vote says about their ability or willingness to empathize with others?

Empathy is important to democracy—but it’s complicated to understand, as scientists and philosophers have long tried to study in practice. I am one of those scientists. As we use it in our day-to-day lives, we often mean sharing others’ emotions, such as feeling someone else’s sorrow or joy, but can also mean showing compassion or concern for their suffering or understanding and believing their hurt or joy.

In terms of the November election, how much did empathy matter? And in a challenging, exhausting, and polarized political environment, how do we remain empathetic? Do we even need to? Here, I argue that we need to remember our responsibility to choose and control the expanse of our empathy—and we can do so by reflecting on why we care and engage, whether that be to uphold our values, feel good, or better know the world. As research in my lab and in my field has shown, callousness is a decision—we are the authors of our empathy, and numbness isn’t a foregone conclusion.

I believe that showing empathy is a choice. We must be mindful of social pressures that might steer these choices in particular directions if we don’t take the effort to manage our empathy ourselves. Extending empathy across political divides can be important, but so too can sustaining motivations to empathize with the most marginalized, particularly if they are targeted by other political groups. Common ground may risk minimizing such harms.

To me, empathy is a strength, not weakness—a way to attend to the people we value most. If we let ourselves become callous to others’ needs, we risk losing sight of democracy and the importance of treating each other with dignity. Especially in the current climate, we should double down on desires to empathize, and remember that the willingness to empathize may be just as important as the ability to do so. The effort matters.

Exit polls tell us that having empathetic leaders may not be as important to many voters. Of four qualities ascribed to candidates in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, only 18 percent ranked empathy (“cares about people like me”) as most important. Though perhaps surprising, this is consistent with findings that people value leaders who care impartially, and who exhibit schadenfreude and relish pain in political opponents. Of that 18 percent that prioritized empathy, only one quarter supported Trump. Yet the pressing question may not be for whom empathy mattered most, as our research has shown that voters can overestimate partisan differences in concern.

What matters more is how we sustain willingness to empathize, as a value and social norm. How do we avoid numbness, as in the New Yorker cartoon about isolation as self-care?

Before politics enters the picture, we know that people find empathy to be exhausting and effortful. My team has found that people typically choose to avoid empathizing with strangers, finding it taxing. If empathy is like complex math, then people might take the easy road and avoid the problem set. But it matters who these feelings are about, as people choose empathy and compassion more for close others. When adding in political dynamics—such as what political opponents or peers think of our empathizing—it may make the calculus of empathy even more challenging.

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A shared meal, a kiss on the cheek: these social acts bring people together — and bring their microbiomes together, too. The more people interact, the more similar the make-up of their gut microorganisms is, even if individuals don’t live in the same household, a study shows.

The study also found that a person’s microbiome is shaped not only by their social contacts but also by the social contacts’ connections. The work is one of several studies that raise the possibility that health conditions can be shaped by the transmission of the microbiome between individuals, not just by diet and other environmental factors that affect gut flora.

In the quest to understand what shapes a person’s microbiome, social interactions are “definitely a piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing until recently”, says microbiologist Catherine Robinson at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who was not involved in the work.

The research was published in Nature on 20 November.

What’s mine is yours

The study has its roots in research published almost 20 years ago that investigated how obesity spreads in social networks. Certain viruses and bacteria found in the gut microbiome are known to change a person’s risk of obesity, and social scientist Nicholas Christakis wondered whether friends pass these microbes to each other in addition to influencing each other’s eating habits. “This was a kernel of an idea that I just couldn’t let go,” says Christakis, who is based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since then, several publications have suggested that social interactions shape the gut microbiome. Christakis and his colleagues travelled to the jungles of Honduras to add to this emerging literature. There, they mapped the social relationships and analysed microbiomes of people living in 18 isolated villages, where interactions are mainly face to face and people have minimal exposure to processed foods and antibiotics, which can alter the composition of the microbiome.

“This was an enormous undertaking,” Christakis says, because the team had to set up shop in a remote location, then get the samples back to the United States for processing.

Spouses and individuals living in the same house share up to 13.9% of the microbial strains in their guts, but even people who don’t share a roof but habitually spend free time together share 10%, the researchers found. By contrast, people who live in the same village but who don’t tend to spend time together share only 4%. There is also evidence of transmission chains — friends of friends share more strains than would be expected by chance.

The results add depth to scientists’ understanding of what shapes the microbiome, partly because the team looked at subspecies of the gut microbes, says microbiologist Mireia Valles-Colomer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the work. Social contacts might share the same microbial species by chance, but they’re much less likely to share the same strains unless they’ve passed them to each other.

Rethinking transmissibility

Research like this “is changing completely the way we think”, because it suggests that risk factors for conditions with links to the microbiome, such as hypertension and depression, could spread from person to person through their microbiomes, says computational biologist Nicola Segata at the University of Trento in Italy. Segata was not involved in the current work, but he has worked with Valles-Colomer and members of Christakis’s team in the past on similar research.

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An exciting and unique find from over 5,000 years ago was uncovered during the construction of a railroad.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a stone-paved cellar dating back to the Stone Age on the Danish island of Falster, according to a new paper in the journal Radiocarbon.

The presence of a cellar during this period would represent advanced technology, as no cellars have been discovered in this culture before.

“Stone paved sunken floors are so far not known from Neolithic Denmark so that the presented feature represents one-of-a-kind,” the researchers wrote.

The site where this potential cellar was discovered is Nygårdsvej 3. During excavations, archaeologists discovered two ancient houses—one of which was home to the cellar—belonging to the Funnel Beaker Culture.

The Funnel Beaker Culture was a prehistoric culture in Northern Europe that existed between approximately 4300 and 2800 BC, around present-day Denmark, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands. It is named after the distinctive pottery vessels found in archaeological sites with funnel-shaped necks.

This culture is one of the first Neolithic cultures in northern Europe to fully adopt agriculture. Evidence from other archaeological sites shows that they grew wheat, barley, and rye and domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep. This shift to farming represented a significant change from the hunting and gathering lifestyle that preceded it.

In the houses discovered at the Nygårdsvej 3 site, the archaeologists found a large number of post holes, suggesting architectural planning during their construction, as well as loamy flooring made of sand and clay, which would have been an advanced flooring technique for the time.

One of the houses was found to have a stone-paved sunken feature dating to between 3080 and 2780 BC. Due to how carefully the stones appear to have been placed, the researchers suggest it is a cellar. The archaeologists also uncovered over 1,000 artifacts inside the cellar, including shards of pottery, flint tools, and two fossilized sea urchins.

While stone paving is not unusual for this culture, it is usually associated with graves or ritual sites. However, the researchers discount this feature being used for ritual purposes.

“The archaeological results from Nygårdsvej 3 show an important insight into the constructions and features of Neolithic Denmark. The fact that a subterranean construction has been present at the site underlines how each site can extend our knowledge about the Stone Age,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

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