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Ford Motor Company had a better idea, as it once advertised, producing such iconic cars as the Mustang, Bronco, Thunderbird, and Model T. But it also built the ill-fated Edsel. Ford wasn't alone, either; many inventors and engineers have produced cars that seemed like a good idea until they actually acted on it. Here are a few examples.

1899 Horsey Horseless

Kellogg's cereal wasn't the only product to emanate from Battle Creek, Michigan. The Horsey Horseless also came from there, although it's unknown whether this vehicle was ever actually built. Still, it was a solution to a common problem in the early days of motoring, when automobiles were still uncommon and scared horses. Uriah Smith thought that sticking a horse head on the front of a horseless carriage would prevent horses from getting upset upon seeing one.

 

"It would have all the appearance of a horse and carriage and hence raise no fears in any skittish animal," he wrote. "Before he could discover his error and see that he had been fooled, the strange carriage would be passed, and then it would be too late to grow frantic and fractious."

 

He also recommended making the horse head hollow so it could also serve as a fuel tank.

 

A patent drawing of the Horsey Horseless.

Public Domain

 

It also made one hell of a hood ornament.

1902 Stanley Steamer

When the car was first invented, it was powered by gasoline. But gasoline-powered cars were noisy and smelly, and they had to be hand-cranked to be started, which frequently caused injuries or even death. Then there were electric cars, which had limited range due to their lead acid batteries. Steam was familiar, having powered American industry for the better part of the 19th century.

 

Cars built with steam power proved popular, but they were complex, as they had three tanks. One contained water for the boiler, another held kerosene or home heating oil to heat the water, and a third usually held gasoline to keep the pilot light burning. Finally, an acetylene torch was needed to light the pilot light.

 

And you had to wait for the water to boil and create steam before you could drive anywhere. Also, these were not intuitive machines, as they had copper tubes and pipes, boilers, condensers, valves, and gauges. And if they backfired, they could seriously scald the driver. Finally, the Stanley Steamer's water tank had to be refilled every 30–50 miles (48–80 km), but the company felt drivers could refill their water tanks at any brook, pond, or horse trough.

 

Ultimately, it was the electric starter that doomed steam cars. First seen on the 1912 Cadillac Model 30, it allowed drivers to take off without waiting anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to get started. It was also far cheaper to run.

 

But the company survived until 1927. The last steam car was built in 1931.

1907 Carter Two-Engine

When the engine in the car that Howard O. Carter was driving developed mechanical problems many miles from home, Carter did what anybody in his situation would do in the early days of the automobile: He built his own car, albeit with a spare four-cylinder engine.

 

Dubbed the Carter Two Engine, it also had two radiators, two ignitions, and two exhaust systems. The engines were mounted side-by-side and were connected, according to a contemporary account in the Smithsonian Magazine, "through cone clutches in the flywheels and by Morse silent chains, to a single three-speed transmission placed in the center of the car."

 

Once started, one four-cylinder engine was used until the driver needed more power. The driver then engaged the second engine's clutch, which started the second powerplant, thereby doubling the vehicle's horsepower to 40 ponies, allowing the car to power onward without having to downshift.

 

But the second engine wasn't merely there to add power; it was also an insurance policy in case the first engine broke down.

 

The car was priced at $2,250, or $70,185 adjusted for inflation, and Carter trumpeted the vehicle's introduction as "the birth of an epoch of transportation unparalleled in the history of the world." Few customers agreed. Within a year, the company's factory in Hyattsville, Maryland, was building a car called the Washington, which proved somewhat more successful. It lasted until 1912, albeit with one engine rather than two.

1907 Cartercar

Byron Carter—no relation to Howard—developed the friction drive transmission, an early rendition of what's known today as the continuously variable transmission, or CVT.

 

Public Domain

 

A friction drive transmission consists of a giant disc at the end of the driveshaft. A second disc is applied at a right angle to the first disc, which transfers power to the axle by converting longitudinal rotation to lateral. Moving the second disc in or out from the center alters the transmission's ratio while varying the pressure of one disc against another allows slip, similar to a clutch. For those who had never driven a car before, it proved far easier to master than a manual transmission.

 

But the second disc's slip increased with load, while the friction material on its surface wasn't durable and had to be replaced. And the transmission's performance deteriorated if mud or some kind of liquid ended up coating its surface. Despite its limitations, it was a transmission used by other automakers, including Brush, Metz, and Lambert.

 

When Byron Carter died unexpectedly at the age of 44 in 1909, William Crapo Durant, CEO of General Motors, bought the company. But by 1915, GM ended production due to slow sales as the Ford Model T, with its easy-to-use planetary transmission, displaced friction drive as the easy-to-use transmission of choice.

 

"How was anyone to know that Cartercar wasn't the thing?" Durant later lamented.

1911 Reeves Octoauto

In an era when Americans were still as dependent on horses for transportation, roads were filled with horse excrement. Consider New York City, where horses produced 2.5 million pounds (1.1 million kg) of manure and 60,000 gallons (227,000 L) of urine every day. Even worse, except for in major cities, most roads were unpaved and filled with ruts and carriage tracks. Given the primitive suspension of early automobiles and the early paths they traversed, automakers were always looking for a smoother ride.

 

Enter Milton Reeves, a minor on-and-off manufacturer of automobiles over the years, who had invented and patented the automotive muffler in 1897.

 

When it came to building cars, Reeves thought he had the solution to the uncomfortable ride typically experienced by early motorists. Reeves welded two additional axles to a 1910 Overland, endowing it with eight wheels. Reeves believed that the added wheels would bestow his 1911 Reeves Octoauto with a better ride. Then again, the car's size might have had something to do with it, as it had a 180-inch wheelbase and 248-inch overall length.

 

Displaying the ginormous car at the inaugural Indianapolis 500 elicited snickers but no orders. Of course, the lack of interest could have been due to its $3,200 price—nearly $100,000, adjusted for inflation.

 

Reeves returned the following year with the six-wheeled, $5,000 Sextauto using a Stutz chassis, but again, it found no buyers.

1938 Citroën Berline 11 Gazogene

If you think pollution is bad now, imagine if cars were fueled by coal. That's actually not so hard to imagine, as the French did build them during World War II when gasoline was expensive, if it could even be found.

 

So cars were modified in France to run on coal gas.

 

Coal was placed in one of the two tanks on the front fenders and burnt. The resulting methane gas was condensed, filtered, and supplied to a unique carburetor. The driving distance was a mere 30 miles, with a top speed of 45 mph. Much like with a steam car, one had to wait 30 minutes from ignition before the car could be started. Nevertheless, an estimated 65,000 of these alternative fuel systems were sold during the war by various companies.

 

You can check out the Berline at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville. It's

one of Cars Technica's favorite places.

Lane Motor Museum

 

Of course, odd ideas never go out of fashion, and in 1981, General Motors experimented with a coal-powered turbine engine fueled by coal powder ground to three microns. One advantage was that 95 percent of the coal's energy was used by the engine, as opposed to 55 percent for gasoline. GM's experimental car had a tank under the hood to hold the powdered coal, which was hit by compressed air to move the powder into the turbine combustion chamber, where it was ignited. But being coal, it caused air pollution due to its higher levels of sulfur and other impurities, so it was never put into production.

1957 Waterman Aerobile

An airplane that doubles as a legal road-worthy automobile has long grabbed the imaginations of inventors, one of whom was Waldo Waterman. His design for the 1934 Waterman Arrowplane was one of two designs acknowledged in a Bureau of Air Commerce aircraft competition for a light, easy-to-fly aircraft. But it would take further development for Waterman to reach a design that worked reliably. That arrived in 1957 as the Aerobile, a two-person, high-wing plane with a transmission that drove the rear wheels while on the ground and the propeller when in the air.

 

Before hitting the road, the single-piece wing had to be removed. In an effort to help the vehicle maintain the appearance of a car, it was built with common Studebaker, Ford, Austin, and Willys parts (which also kept the costs down). It was given experimental FAA certification in 1957, but a market never developed.

 

Public Domain

Today, it resides in the Smithsonian.

 

Of course, the idea of a plane you could drive down the highway has long been a dream of many, including Glenn Curtiss, whose 1917 Curtiss Autoplane is considered the first roadable aircraft, even though it never achieved a full flight. Then there was William Stout's 1931 Skycar, which promised to offer an affordable airplane to the American consumer. But the Great Depression ensured it would never be marketed. There's also the 1950 Airphibian, which never reached the market due to financial difficulties and design compromises.

 

But the dream remains alive, as a number of companies are planning to introduce flying automobiles sometime in the near future, including the Pal V Liberty, Samson Switchblade, Aska A5, and the Klein Vision AirCar.

1961 Amphicar

One of the world's only amphibious cars, the Amphicar was the creation of German engineer Hans Trippel, who had long had a thing for amphibious cars, having designed the 1934 SG6, and later the 1939 Schwimmwagen, for Adolf Hitler.

 

After World War II, Trippel looked to develop his amphibious cars into something appropriate for the consumer market. For his new car's engine, he chose one from the Triumph Herald, a lightweight, tough 39 hp (29 kW) 1.1 L engine. Debuting as the 1961 Amphicar 770 and selling for 10,000 Deutsche Marks, or $2,479, it wasn't exactly a hit. After all, how many people needed a car that could do double duty as a boat?

 

Of course, its tailfins were already dated, and its sloping front underside was awkward, while its generous ground clearance lent it an ungainly look. Then there was its performance, which was decidedly leisurely on land, taking the best part of 43 seconds to reach 60 mph (98 km/h). It was no quicker on the water, with a top speed of 7 knots.

 

Worst of all, it wasn't watertight. In fact, whether it sank or swam depended on the ability of the Amphicar's bilge pump to expel the water that leaked into the car.

 

Trippel had planned to build 20,000 Amphicars annually. By 1968, when production ended, the total numbered 3,878, with 90 percent sold in America.

1981 Cadillac Fleetwood V-8-6-4

It seemed like a great idea, one dreamt up during the second OPEC oil embargo in 1979.

 

Cadillac designers were downsizing the Fleetwood's V-8 engine to 6.0 L from 7.0 L, but it wasn't fuel-efficient enough. Then inspiration struck. During certain instances, such as cruising on the Interstate using cruise control, the Fleetwood didn't require all eight cylinders to sustain speed. So why not shut down the ones that aren't needed?

 

The new engine, dubbed the L62, was developed with automotive supplier Eaton Corporation. The system informed the Computer Command Module whether to deactivate two or four cylinders by disengaging the appropriate rocker arms and closing the intake and exhaust valves on two or four cylinders, depending on engine speed, EGR position, intake manifold air pressure, coolant temperature, exhaust, and air pump operation. By reducing the engine's power and fuel consumption to that of a 4.5 L V6 or a 3.0 L V4, fuel economy improved by as much as 30 percent.

 

But the reality proved to be much different from the theory as microprocessors activated, deactivated, and reactivated cylinders as driving conditions rapidly changed, causing the car to hesitate, buck, and stall. GM issued 13 updates, but none worked. So dealers disabled the system on customer cars, leaving them permanently in V8 mode. GM pulled the L62 engine after a single year.

 

This is one idea that didn't fade away, though.

 

With far better technology at its disposal, GM reintroduced cylinder deactivation as Active Fuel Management on its 2005 mid-sized SUVs, a technology now used by automakers across the industry. At first, this feature would shut down an entire bank of a V8 engine, but more modern cylinder deactivation can control individual cylinders within an engine.

 

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Finally ready to go

For Altemus and Intuitive Machines, it has been a long four years working through the financing issues of growing a small space company, the technical challenges, including exploding propellant tanks, and more. But now the lander is complete.

 

"It's been a real challenge, but we've finally got it ready to go," he said of the lander. "It's ready to get buttoned up and ship."

 

Intuitive Machines has a tentative launch date of November 16, when a six-day window opens for its spacecraft to reach the Moon. However, there are concerns about whether a Falcon 9 rocket will be available at that time. The mission will lift off from SpaceX's Launch Complex 39A pad, and there are a handful of missions ahead of it, including the Psyche asteroid mission, a cargo supply mission for NASA, and potentially the USSF-52 mission.

 

"We're in line with a whole bunch of others," Altemus said. "Our strategy is being there and being ready to go."

 

The company has another six-day window that opens in December, and an additional one in early January. It will take five to seven days to reach the Moon, and then after arriving there, the spacecraft will spend a day lining up with the plane at the landing site at 80 degrees south, near the pole, before making a landing attempt.

A lunar space race

Although officially it's not a race, Intuitive Machines is racing against Astrobotic and its Peregrine lander. That company has also completed its lander and is awaiting a launch vehicle. However, Astrobotic will space on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, which is making its debut flight. Nominally, that rocket could fly in December, but it will require a lot of things to go right.

All told, NASA has awarded nine CLPS missions to several different providers as it seeks to ramp up the scientific exploration of the Moon. Intuitive Machines has won three of these contracts, and its second mission will carry a drill combined with a mass spectrometer that will attempt to harvest ice from below the surface of the south pole.

 

Through the preliminary investigations of the CLPS missions, NASA hopes to establish a good lay of the land before sending astronauts to the south pole during the second half of this decade. It may have been 51 years since NASA sent something to the Moon, but it now appears set to make up for lost time, with at least a dozen missions planned for the remainder of the 2020s.

 

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It didn't take long for Mario Zechner to prove the government wrong. In May, the independent software developer was listening to a radio interview with Austria’s labor minister, Martin Kocher, who said the government would build a new database that will help people find the cheapest milk, eggs, and other supermarket products to help fight soaring food prices. However, the planned system would take months to build and cover only a handful of food types. Zechner decided to take action.

Two hours after hearing the interview, Zechner had built the first prototype of a comparison system, pulling the cost of 22,000 items from the websites of Austria’s biggest two supermarket chains. “I decided to just sit down in the afternoon and see how hard it really can be,” Zechner says. The result was Heisse Preise (which translates as “Hot Prices”), with Zechner open-sourcing the project on GitHub. “From then on, it kind of escalated,” he says.

Months later, Heisse Preise has grown enormously, demonstrating the power of citizen-developed tools and what can be achieved when data is opened up to everyone. The comparison site now lists prices from 10 Austrian supermarket chains, plus four in neighboring Germany and Slovenia. Heisse Preise includes more than 177,000 items. Thanks to data provided by an anonymous contributor and local press, item pricing history goes back to 2017. Zechner’s creation of the tool came as Europe’s food retailers and governments have clashed over rising prices and the cost of living.

Perhaps most significantly, Zechner’s tool has shone a light on the opaque world of price changes by supermarkets, allowing price increases and decreases to be tracked. The transparency, Zechner and others say, shows there can be little difference in prices at some major supermarkets, and within days of an item changing price, competitors can mirror the change.

Data gathered by Heisse Preise and other newly-emerged DIY comparison sites has fed into the investigations of Bundeswettbewerbsbehörde, the Austrian Federal Competition Authority, which has been probing the food industry since October 2022. The authority, which is due to present its full findings later this month, has already suggested the government should introduce new laws to make shops publish their price data. The authority also says it “can be assumed” that supermarkets themselves crawl the websites of competitors and use that information to set their own prices.

“This data is enormously useful for anyone interested in serious competition policies,” says Leonhard Dobusch, the academic director at the Momentum Institute, an Austrian progressive think tank. “It really allows a peek into pricing strategies [and] price coordination tactics.”

Rising Prices

A combination of high inflation, energy prices, and Russia’s war in Ukraine have led to food prices rapidly rising across Europe. Austria is not exempt from this. The country’s food market is dominated by three main supermarkets: Spar, Billa, and Hofer. For the past few years, their prices have been on the up. Since February 2021, the cost of eggs in Austria has risen by 21 percent, milk is up 26 percent, and onions cost 47 percent more than they did before. Beer is up by almost a third, according to recent analysis from the country’s media.

As prices raced skyward, politicians and economists across Europe have been grappling with ways to address the issues, ordering retailers to make pricing clearer, scrutinizing the profits of manufacturers, highlighting “shrinkflation,” and demanding more data on competition. Austrian politicians proposed the price transparency database as one measure in a wider range of suggestions.

Multiple food price comparison websites have appeared in Austria in recent months, including Preismonitor, Supermarkt, Teuerungsportal, and Preisrunter. However, Dobusch from the Momentum Institute says, Heise Preisse has more advanced analytical capabilities. The way Heise Preisse works is relatively simple, Zechner says. The stores he has data for have some public APIs, which allows him to pull in pricing information every day. This includes the name of a product, its size, and its cost. “The search functionality in their online store uses a very basic REST API,” he says.

Each supermarket brand assigns its own ID to each product, Zechner says, and their APIs don’t include the universal EAN identifier for each product. A can of Coca-Cola may be named slightly differently on one store website to the next. This makes it harder to compare exact products. “However, we can still match based on name, packaging size, and price,” Zechner says. Heise Preisse has been running unmaintained for the past three months.

One section of Heise Preisse allows you to search by product, see its price, and add it to a chart showing the same product from other stores. With the historical data, prices can be tracked over time. For instance, a 330-ml can of Coca-Cola Zero can be seen gradually increasing in cost by some retailers. Zechner says he quickly realized that the shops often price items similarly, and the comparison tool may not be that useful for individuals trying to save money on their weekly shopping.

Conducting what he calls “layperson” analysis, he looked at chains’ own-brand, low-cost goods. “If one store changes the price, up or down, the other store will follow within a week or less,” he says. Prices for some goods in Germany were significantly lower than in Austria. Zechner sent data to the competition authority.

Dobusch says the data appears to show that the biggest chains are closely monitoring each other and are adapting to price changes, which could be a competition-law issue. “There are hardly any price differences in a lot of commodity products and others across the three dominant chains,” he says.

“With the rise of grocery retail digitalization, supermarkets are becoming tech companies,” says Catalina Goanta, an associate professor of private law and technology at Utrecht University. Increasingly, shops are collecting customer behavioral data, personalizing offers, implementing dynamic pricing, selling data to advertising networks, and automating certain services. This can all lead to less understanding about the things we buy. Goanta highlights how the website Inside Airbnb uses its data to scrutinize how the rental firm has disrupted cities, and says in 2020, Romanian officials launched a price monitor that included foods.

“I don’t think this has become a standard process for Romanian consumers: ‘Let’s go to this website and check it before we buy food items,’” Goanta says. “Of course, this website can also send an important signal to supermarkets. We are watching you, and our inspectors are not just doing mystery shopping, but we also have access to your APIs.”

Spokespeople for the retailers Billa and Hofer declined WIRED’s request to comment. Nicole Berkmann, a spokesperson for Spar, says the grocery store has supported the Austrian competition regulator with “detailed information” about its prices. However, Berkmann says that “price comparison is a tricky thing” and claims that there are mistakes in “nearly every single price comparison” because there are “thousands of products with different shapes, packages, fillings, qualities, mixtures, and so on.”

“We do not see the usefulness of such a price comparison,” Berkmann says. “Because Austria is a very small country with the highest density of supermarkets in Europe. So as a customer, I just have to walk over the street to find the cheaper retailer. Do the authorities really think that customers spend hours to compare where [products] are cheaper?”

More Transparency

Price transparency and comparison tools are not new. Comparison websites for banking services, shoes, clothing, car insurance, and almost any consumer item have existed for years. Markus Nigl, the CEO of commercial comparison site Geizhals, which has a network operating in Austria, Germany, the UK, and Poland, says that while demand for price comparisons is growing, it isn’t necessarily popular with all retailers.

“Food retailers have not been interested in subjecting their products to a price comparison,” he says. “A price transparency and orientation aid that is helpful for the consumer has, therefore, hardly been possible. Providing meaningful and comparable data in the food sector on a voluntary basis would be very desirable.”

“The fact that individuals were able to build such tools in days, when state regulators take months to investigate, demonstrates the urgent need to make the public administration fit for the digital age,” says Hannes Stummer, a communications manager at Austrian digital rights group Epicenter.works. “We believe that big food retailers should be obliged to make their price information easily accessible in the form of open data. Everybody, including price comparison sites, should be free to use this information."

Austria’s competition regulator has been paying attention. During the Federal Competition Authority’s ongoing broad investigation, it has questioned 2,200 companies and suppliers, says Abanoub Tadros, a case handler at the authority. While its full report is due later this month, it has already called for more transparency around pricing and said that data should be published by supermarkets.

Tadros says comparison site providers currently face “legal uncertainty” when crawling websites for prices and potential issues around copyright law. “A further problem is that product descriptions are not consistent in the various web shops, and determining price data is also difficult since not all supermarkets provide the necessary technical interfaces (APIs),” Tadros says. “Transparency is a key tool in order to amplify competition among retailers.” However, it is the government’s responsibility to introduce any new measures.

Wolfgang Schneider, the director of economy press and public affairs at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy, says the government has assessed multiple options around price transparency and has decided not to create a “state comparison tool” after all, due to the emergence of the homegrown efforts. “But it seems to be helpful to provide a general legal framework for the operation of the private tools,” Schneider says. The new “framework” would require supermarkets above a certain size to “make a selection of basic food products’ sales prices available,” Schneider adds, and that “further details will be regulated, as the tool should not merely allow a price comparison, but also give information on quality … to ensure comparability of prices.”

It is unlikely that such a framework would go as far as the number of products already listed by the DIY comparison websites. Zechner, who, along with other comparison site creators, has met with politicians, is rewriting the website’s code but says he doesn’t have any specific plans for it. He will help others who want to use his open source code to build their own comparison systems for other countries, he says.

In recent days, as an indication of how useful the data is to broader society, the Austrian National Library has told Zechner it plans to archive Heisse Preise and its data. “It allows startups to potentially exploit the data commercially,” Zechner says of the website. “It allows scientific institutions to perform macro- and microeconomic studies that hadn’t been possible before, because the data was simply not available. And it would increase competition between grocery stores, as there’s more transparency in terms of price change strategies.”

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Fall has arrived, flu shots are rolling out in pharmacies, and pediatricians are watching for an uptick in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In other words, it’s virus season. Covid deaths and hospitalizations also began rising at the end of July, and wastewater surveillance that looks for the virus has been on a slow upward trend.

So do we have a “Covid season” now? It’s an important question, because knowing when cases will surge could help public health officials and health care administrators plan for vaccines, treatments, and hospital staffing—and might prompt everyone else to be a little more self-protective.

But experts on the front lines and doing data analysis say it’s too soon to declare that Covid has achieved seasonality. Looking back over the previous three years, they do see patterns: a spike at some point in the summer, such as the arrival of the Delta variant in 2021, and a spike sometime in the late fall or winter, such as the Thanksgiving surge of Omicron later that year. But those spikes haven’t occurred at the exact same time from year to year, and it’s possible they didn’t all arise for the same reasons.

“You might look at that data and think, maybe this is just a biannual virus, compared to flu and RSV, which have single seasonal peaks,” says Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease physician and professor at the Duke University School of Medicine. “But that gets much harder to say when you factor in that as a society we behave very differently, seasonally. And that we've behaved differently in different years of the pandemic, according to how restricted we were in terms of our movements, how much mitigation we were actually performing, and how immune we were, either by vaccine or native infection.”

In other words, what looks like a season might be an artifact created by our behavior, not the virus’s. The way our bodies react to SARS-CoV-2 might also be playing a role in pushing it around the calendar.

“As we get more used to seeing this virus, our immunity builds up a little more and a little more—so the time between the winter surge and the summer surge gets longer and longer,” says David Dowdy, a physician and professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “What may eventually happen is that it gets longer and longer, until it's every winter. It may be very interesting this year to see if we have the same winter surge of Covid, because we had such a late summer surge. There's going to be a fair amount of immunity still in the population.”

In fact, the latest data may reflect that. Epidemic curves posted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a steady upward trend for two months have begun turning down; between September 10 and 16, hospitalizations shrank 4.3 percent (though deaths increased, by 2.7 percent). That downturn can’t have been created by the newest Covid boosters, because they were only released September 13.

But the degree to which people accept the new shots might control whether and when a winter surge arrives. “We know from this virus, year over year, people's immune response to each vaccine or boost starts waning at that six- to eight-month time point,” says Mark Cameron, an associate professor of population and quantitative health sciences at Case Western University.

Ashish Jha, a physician who is the dean of the Brown School of Public Health and served for 14 months as the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said at a media briefing last week, “My expectation is we're going see a further decline for probably the next month or two, and then we're going to see the virus starting to rise again, as we get into the holidays and beyond.”

To say that a virus is seasonal seems self-evident: at a particular point in the year, cases begin; at some further point, they subside. But “seasonality” conceals mysteries, even for the flu. Environmental changes—in ambient temperature, humidity, or the duration of UV light—might combine to create optimal conditions for the flu’s return. So might anatomical responses to those changes, such as the effect of colder or drier air on mucous membranes and the epithelium of the respiratory tract. Equally, so might behavioral shifts: crowding indoors to escape the colder weather, and sharing spaces that offer less air circulation than the summertime outdoors.

If the complex effects of all those influences aren’t well-understood for influenza, one of the most-studied viruses, imagine the knowledge gaps that exist for Covid. They include not just the conditions that influence the flu and winter colds (caused by an array of pathogens including other coronaviruses), but also the evolutionary behavior of SARS-CoV-2 itself. It is still a mystery why the Delta variant emerged when it did, and why the much more divergent Omicron variant took over from it. It is even more mysterious why the Omicron variant has remained so dominant nearly two years later.

“The question is: Why has it settled on that and not made another major seismic move to a brand-new variant?” asks Robert Bednarczyk, an infectious disease epidemiologist and associate professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “If we can understand where that stability is coming from, it will be very helpful to plan moving forward.”

If Covid were stable and seasonal—or at least gained predictable periodicity in arrival and mutation—planners could follow the decades-old model built for the flu. A large, global, durable infrastructure—led by the World Health Organization but assisted by national governments and academic researchers—detects, analyzes, and forecasts the evolution of influenza viruses early enough to formulate vaccines for the following season. That infrastructure can only operate because of the predictability of the flu's annual return.

A similar infrastructure could be built to prepare for Covid, too. Predicting the virus’s likely arrival could ensure that fresh boosters are developed and shipped well in advance of a surge, and get to where they are needed. Trustworthy predictions of Covid’s future behavior could also exert more subtle effects, allowing drug manufacturers to envision demand and hospitals to stress-proof capacity.

“Paxlovid and other antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, whatever we're using to treat Covid—we’d want to start ramping up production of those drugs in the late summer, so we have them around in the winter, within their shelf life,” says Jacob Simmering, a health economist and assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine, and coauthor of a March analysis that found reliable seasonal spikes in cases in the United States and Europe. “That should influence production decisions. And it also has implications for the healthcare system: making sure we have resources, staff availability, beds.”

That’s not to say such planning doesn’t happen now—but those plans are made with incomplete information about a virus that hasn’t settled into predictability. We might never be able to stop Covid from coming back. But if it became seasonal, we could be ready to meet it.

Emily Mullin contributed to this reporting.

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Consider the possibility of alien plants. After all, plenty of exoplanets likely have conditions friendly to the development of plants, even if evolution there never makes it as far as complex organisms and animals. But if moss, algae, and lichen envelop lush exoplanets in the faraway realms of the Milky Way, those worlds and the stars they circle could be completely different than our own. Extraterrestrial flora could be nothing like we’ve ever seen before.

Most of the rocky exoplanets discovered so far orbit red dwarf stars, the most abundant type of star in the galaxy. They give off fainter, redder light than the sun. “It’s natural to ask, if photosynthesis happens in a range of visible light— 400 to 700 nanometers—and you take a star that’s fainter, cooler, and redder, is there enough light to support photosynthesis?” says Thomas Haworth, a physicist at the Queen Mary University of London. His tentative answer to that question, recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is a “yes, sometimes.” His team’s conclusion, that conditions around red dwarf stars aren’t a deal breaker for life, is encouraging. But life might have adapted very differently to the light of redder suns. 

Most plants on Earth, including leafy vegetation, mosses, and cyanobacteria, use photosynthesis to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy and oxygen. Plants use chlorophyll pigments to transform that solar energy into chemical energy. Chlorophyll gives plants their green colour, and it’s tuned to absorb sunlight in the part of the spectrum that goes from violet-blue to orange-red. But astrobiologists have noted that there’s a “red edge” for vegetation, meaning that chlorophyll doesn’t absorb many photons at longer, redder wavelengths beyond 700 nanometers. Those are precisely the wavelengths at which these small red dwarf stars give off most of their light. That seems to pose a problem for photosynthetic species. 

So along with his colleague, biologist Christopher Duffy, Haworth tried to envision how extraterrestrial photosynthesis might work, even under unusual conditions. “We wanted to develop a general model of photosynthesis that wasn’t tied to any particular species,” Duffy says. In particular, they modeled light-harvesting antennae—pigment-protein complexes that all photosynthetic organisms have—which collect photons and channel the light energy down to a reaction center that carries out the photochemistry needed to turn it into chemical energy.

They concluded that organisms with extremely efficient antennae could indeed absorb dim light redder than 700 nm, but that oxygenic photosynthesis might be a struggle. In that scenario, organisms would have to invest lots of their energy just to keep the photosynthetic machinery running. Evolutionarily, this might limit them to remaining, say, pond-dwelling green-blue bacteria, not structures that could colonize land. 

And although green plants, with their reliance on chlorophyll and sunlight, dominate the Earth, neither biology nor physics requires it to work that way. We already know of species on our own planet that follow different rules. There are subterranean microbes that make “dark oxygen” in the absence of light. And there are purple bacteria and green sulfur bacteria that conduct photosynthesis without oxygen, using different pigments and gases, especially sulfur. They rely on infrared light for energy, between 800 to 1,000 nanometers. That’s well within the range of red dwarfs’ starlight.

Duffy and Haworth speculate that on remote planets, communities of purple bacteria could swell in black sulfurous oceans, or spread in films around local sources of hydrogen sulfide. If they evolved into plants that could survive on land, like Earth plants they would still angle their light-absorbing surfaces toward their star, but they might be purple, red, or orange, depending on the wavelengths of light they are attuned to. They’d still have clumps of cells that coax nutrients from the ground, but they would be seeking different nutrients. (For plants on Earth, nitrates and phosphates are critical.)

If these scientists are correct that botanical life could arise in red dwarf systems, astronomers then need to figure out where to point their telescopes to find it. To start, scientists typically focus on the habitable zone around each star, also sometimes called a “Goldilocks” region because it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water on a planet’s surface. (Too hot and water will evaporate away. Too cold and it will permanently turn to ice.) Since water is likely necessary for most kinds of life, it’s an exciting development when astronomers find a rocky world in this zone—or in the case of the TRAPPIST-1 system, multiple worlds.

But University of Georgia astrophysicist Cassandra Hall says perhaps it’s time to rethink the habitable zone in a way that emphasizes not just water but also light. In a study earlier this year, Hall’s group focused on factors like starlight intensity, the planet’s surface temperature, the density of its atmosphere, and how much energy organisms would need to expend for mere survival, rather than growth. Considering these together, they estimated a “photosynthetic habitable zone” that lies a bit closer to a planet’s star than the traditional habitable zone for water. Think of an orbit more like Earth’s and less like Mars’.

Hall highlights five promising worlds that have already been discovered: Kepler-452 b, Kepler-1638 b, Kepler-1544 b, Kepler-62 e and Kepler-62 f. They’re rocky planets in the Milky Way, mostly a bit larger than Earth but not gas giants like “mini-Neptunes,” and they spend a significant fraction of their orbits, if not the entire orbit, within their star’s photosynthetic habitable zone. (Astronomers found them all within the past decade using NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.) 

Of course, the hard part is trying to spot clear signs of life from more than 1,000 light-years away. Astrobiologists look for particular chemical signatures lurking in exoplanets’ atmospheres. “Generally, you’re looking for signs of chemical disequilibrium, large amounts of gases that are incompatible with each other because they react with each other to form different things,” Hall says. These could indicate life processes like respiration or decay. 

A combination of carbon dioxide and methane would be a prime example, since both can be given off by life forms, and methane doesn’t last long unless it’s constantly being produced, such as from the decomposition of plant matter by bacteria. But that’s no smoking gun: Carbon and methane could just as well be produced by a lifeless, volcanically active world. 

Other signatures could include oxygen, or its spin-off, ozone, which is generated when stellar radiation splits oxygen molecules. Or perhaps sulfide gases could indicate the presence of photosynthesis without the presence of oxygen. Yet all of these can come from abiotic sources, such as ozone from water vapor in the atmosphere, or sulfides from volcanoes.

While Earth is a natural reference point, scientists shouldn’t limit their perspective to only life as we know it, argues Nathalie Cabrol, an astrobiologist and director of the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center. Seeking just the right conditions for oxygenic photosynthesis could mean narrowing the search too much. It’s possible life isn’t that rare in the universe. “Right now, we have no clue if we have the only biochemistry,” she says.

If alien plants can survive or even thrive without oxygenic photosynthesis, that ultimately could mean expanding, rather than tapering, the habitable zone, Cabrol says. “We need to keep our minds open.”

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"The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times," the Swedish award-giving body said in the latest accolade for the pair.

The prize, among the most prestigious in the scientific world, was selected by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute medical university and comes with 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million) to share between them.

Kariko, a former senior vice president and head of RNA protein replacement at German biotech firm BioNTech, is a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

In an interview after the award, she said her late mother had long speculated that she might win the Nobel - to which she would remind her there was a time when she could not even get a grant for her research.

"She (my mother) said, 'but you work so hard'. And I told her that many, many scientists work very, very hard," added Kariko, who was sleeping when she received the call from Stockholm and initially thought it was a joke.

Co-winner Weissman, a professor in vaccine research also at Pennsylvania, said it was a "lifetime dream" to win and recalled working intensely with Kariko - including middle-of-the-night emails as they both suffered disturbed sleep.

"For the 20 years that we worked together, before anybody knew what RNA is or cared, it was the two of us, literally, side by side at a bench working together, talking and discussing new data," he said in a recording on the Nobel website.

The two laureates in 2005 jointly developed so-called nucleoside base modifications, which stop the immune system from launching an inflammatory attack against lab-made mRNA, previously seen as a major hurdle against any therapeutic use of the technology.

MASS USE

BioNTech said in June that about 1.5 billion people across the world had received its mRNA shot, co-developed with Pfizer (PFE.N). It was the most widely-used shot in the West.

BioNTech, whose Germany-traded shares were up 3.8%, praised Kariko and Weissman for their passion and persistence.

Having grown up in a village in a house without running water or a refrigerator, Kariko got a biochemistry doctorate in Szeged before she and her husband sold their Soviet-made Lada car, sewed the money into their daughter’s teddy bear and went to the U.S. on a one-way ticket.

The daughter, Susan Francia, became a U.S. national rower and Olympic gold winner.

At the University of Pennsylvania, Kariko tried to turn mRNA into a treatment tool throughout the 1990s but struggled to win grants because work on DNA and gene therapy captured most of the scientific community’s attention at the time.

Kariko has said she endured ridicule from university colleagues for her dogged pursuit, and her failure to secure research grants led to her demotion in the 1990s.

Weissman received his doctorate from Boston University in 1987 and joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.

The two have said they met in 1998 while waiting for rationed photocopying machine time. The ensuing chat piqued immunologist Weissman’s interest in Kariko’s RNA work.

"It is absolutely right that the ground-breaking work on RNA led by Kariko and Weissman should be recognised by a Nobel Prize,” said Sir Andrew Pollard, an immunology professor at Oxford University, who pursued a different technology when co-developing the lesser-used COVID vaccine by AstraZeneca (AZN.L).

The award comes even as Germany’s CureVac (5CV.DE), which failed to bring a COVID shot to market, as well as rival Moderna, are separately suing BioNTech and Pfizer for alleged mRNA patent infringements.

Source : https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/kariko-weissman-win-medicine-nobel-covid-19-vaccine-work-2023-10-02/

People in parts of the U.S., Mexico, and Central and South America are in for a rare celestial treat in October: an annular eclipse of the sun.

An annular eclipse is similar to a total solar eclipse, in which the moon completely covers the sun’s face, except at the former’s peak, the moon is too small in the sky to fully blot out our home star. This creates a bright ring of sunlight around a dark lunar silhouette—thus the name “annular,” which means “ring-shaped.” (Some people prefer to simply call an annular eclipse a “ring of fire” instead.)

Solar eclipses happen when the moon passes directly in front of the sun—essentially, our natural satellite’s shadow sweeps across the surface of Earth. If the moon orbited in the same plane as Earth orbits the sun, we’d get a solar eclipse every 29 days—the length of time it takes the moon to move around our planet, relative to the sun. But the moon’s orbit is actually tipped, inclined by about five degrees to that of Earth.

Like two Hula-Hoops, one inside the other and tipped, the path the sun appears to take around the sky once per year and the moon’s monthly orbit intersect at two points, called nodes. We only get a solar eclipse when both the sun and moon are at a node at the same time; otherwise the moon “misses” the sun in the sky, passing it above or below. Most of the time the two don’t line up perfectly, resulting in a partial solar eclipse, in which the moon blocks only a fraction of the sun’s face.

If they line up just right, the entirety of the sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere is blocked, and we get the glory of a total solar eclipse. The sky gets dark, and the sun’s ethereal outer atmosphere, called its corona, pops into prominence. I was in Wyoming for the 2017 total solar eclipse, and it was, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful and moving events I have ever witnessed. The U.S. will be treated to another one of these incredible phenomena on April 8, 2024.

But sooner than that—on October 14, to be specific—yet another factor will come into play: the moon’s distance from Earth.

By an amazing coincidence, on average, the sun is 400 times farther away from Earth and 400 times physically bigger than the moon. These two effects cancel out, so the sun and moon are the same apparent size in the sky: about half a degree, or half the width of your extended pinky seen at arm’s length.

The moon doesn’t orbit Earth in a circle, however, but in an ellipse. At its closest, the point in its orbit called perigee, the moon is roughly 355,000 kilometers from the surface of Earth. At its farthest—apogee—it’s about 397,000 km. That change of about 10 percent in distance means that the moon’s apparent size in the sky changes by 10 percent over the course of half an orbit. So at its apogee, the moon can appear to be smaller than the sun.

The moon reaches apogee on October 9, just five days before this upcoming eclipse. It will be about 391,000 km from Earth—more or less. The exact figure depends on other factors, such as the latitude and longitude of the observer, the time of day, and so on. At that distance, it will appear to be 0.51 degree across. At the same time, Earth and the sun will be at almost exactly their average separation, 149 million km, so the sun will appear as a disk about 0.54 degree in size.

And that makes all the difference in the worlds. The moon will be too small to completely cover the sun. Instead it will leave a ring—an annulus—around it as it passes, creating this annular eclipse. At most, 91 percent of the sun’s surface will be covered by the moon, so technically this will be a partial eclipse—but a very special, perfectly centered one.

The eclipse will have three main stages: first contact, annularity and last contact. First contact will be when the moon’s edge first appear to touch the edge of the sun. Over time, as the moon moves, it will appear to eat more and more of our star’s disk. About 70 to 90 minutes after first contact, depending on your location, the annularity will occur. It will last from one to five minutes, also depending on location. Then the moon will start to leave the sun’s face. Our natural satellite will take another 70 to 90 minutes to completely move off the star (last contact).

That’s how the eclipse will work. So how can you see it?

First, there is no safe time to watch this with your naked eye! Throughout the eclipse’s duration, the sun will be visible, so you will need adequate eye protection. (Do not just use sunglasses, exposed film or welder’s glasses.) A lot of companies sell “eclipse glasses”—usually a paper frame with heavily filtered plastic film to look through—but not all of these are safe. The American Astronomical Society has a list of trusted vendors that have glasses that are compliant with the ISO 12312-2, the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO’s) safety standard for directly viewing the sun. I’ll add that Astronomy for Equity sells them in bulk, and the money they organization makes from those sales goes toward excellent causes.

A fun way to observe this event is with a pinhole projector. A small hole poked into a piece of cardboard will allow sunlight through as parallel rays—that is, as focused light suitable for imaging. You can then hold it up and project the resulting rays onto a sheet of white paper, a sidewalk or even the bare ground. You’ll see a lovely perfect little image of the sun as the moon eats away at it. Foliage can produce a similar effect as well (overlapping leaves make lots of little holes), so you can see dozens or even hundreds of images of the sun on the ground below most trees.

On the morning of October 14, the path of the moon’s shadow will start over the Pacific Ocean. The exact time it will reach any given spot will depend on the location and the time zone. For example, Eugene, Ore., the first big city to see annularity, will get the first contact at 8:06 A.M. PDT, the annularity for four minutes starting at 9:16 A.M. and then the last contact at 10:39 A.M. The moon’s shadow will move southeast, passing over extremely northeastern California, Nevada, Utah, extremely northeastern Arizona, New Mexico and then Texas. After that it will pass over the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, followed by southern Central America and then northern South America before moving off onto the Atlantic Ocean.

Astronomer and long-time umbraphile (literally, “shadow lover”) Fred Espenak has created an interactive map for the eclipse path. Just zoom in and click anywhere to get detailed information on timing.

I’ll add that the entire continental U.S. will see at least a partial eclipse, but only those along the narrow shadow path will be able to view the ring of fire. NASA has an excellent website with loads of information about the eclipse. SciStarter, a terrific program that promotes “citizen science” projects, has a list of scientific projects you can participate in as well—excellent prep for next year’s total solar eclipse. The American Astronomical Society also has an app (available for iOS and Android devices) called Totality 3.0, which has a ton of information about this eclipse and next year’s total one, too.

I’ve never seen an annular eclipse, and from my location in Virginia, only be about one third of the sun will be covered. But if you’re in the path of annularity, and you’re able to do so, go out and take a look (safely, please)! Although it’s perhaps not as grand as a total solar eclipse, it’s still a fascinating and rare astronomical phenomenon and one well worth your time to observe.

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Background

The human gastrointestinal (GI) microbiome is comprised of trillions of microorganisms. Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes are the most abundant bacterial species in the GI tract, followed by Proteobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Fusobacteria, and Actinobacteria.

The gut microbiome composition typically remains stable throughout adulthood. However, the microbiota can be affected by various factors ranging from age, dietary habits, and physical exercise to body mass index (BMI) and genetics.

Diet is one of the most significant factors influencing the composition of the gut microbiota. Previous studies have reported that while the Western-style diet reduces the proliferation of beneficial bacterial populations within the gut, the Mediterranean diet differs significantly in its effects on the gut microbiome, as it maintains the balance between beneficial and harmful bacterial populations.

Fasting is also an important factor that can considerably influence the gut microbiota composition. Fasting is defined as voluntary food deprivation for therapeutic, cultural, or political reasons. Ramadan intermittent fasting is a time-restricted feeding pattern in which food and liquid consumption is restricted from dawn to sunset during the entire month of Ramadan, which occurs during the ninth month of the Muslim calendar.

Previous studies investigating dietary patterns indicate that intermittent fasting can alter gut microbiota composition, increase short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) production in the GI tract, and reduce an individual’s risk of certain cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

Study design

In the current study, scientists investigate the effects of Ramadan intermittent fasting on the gut microbiota composition in the Turkish Muslim population.

The current study included 12 healthy adults who practiced 15 hours of fasting every day for 29 consecutive days during Ramadan. All study participants were asked to follow their routine diets and avoid exercise during the study period.

Anthropometric measurements, including body weight and height, three-day dietary records, and fecal samples, were collected from the participants the day before Ramadan fasting initiation, denoted as the baseline time point, as well as after the completion of Ramadan fasting.

Three-day dietary record data were used to assess food intake during the study period. Fecal samples were analyzed by 16S ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA) gene sequencing and bioinformatics to determine any potential changes in the gut microbiota composition.

Altered gut composition after fasting

The analysis of the gut microbiota composition revealed that Ramadan intermittent fasting significantly enhanced the alpha and beta diversity of gut microbiota at the phylum level. However, at the genus level, fasting-induced changes were more heterogeneous among participants.

At the phylum level, a reduction in Firmicutes and induction in Proteobacteria were observed at the end of fasting as compared to baseline levels. Induction in the Bacteroidetes/Firmicutes ratio was also observed among participants at the end of Ramadan fasting.

At the genus level, reduced levels of seven bacterial genera, including Blautia, Coprococcus, Dorea, Faecalicatena, Fusicatenibacter, Lachnoclostridium, and Mediterraneibacter were observed at the end of the fasting period. Comparatively, increased levels of two bacterial genera of Escherichia and Shigella were observed at this same time point in fasting individuals.

Impact of dietary intake

The correlation analysis between dietary composition and gut microbiota diversity revealed that carbohydrate-enriched diets were associated with reduced genera diversity. Comparatively, high-fat diets were associated with more diverse genus composition.

Further analysis between the dietary intake and relative abundance of bacteria at the genus level revealed negative correlations between protein consumption and Ihubacter, vegetable consumption and Fusicatenibacter, and nut consumption and Intestinibacter. In fact, nut consumption was found to affect six out of the 13 detected genera.

Study significance

Intermittent fasting during Ramadan is associated with rich and diverse gut microbiota. Importantly, significant differences in food consumption habits were observed among study participants; however, the duration of fasting was similar.

The observed changes in the gut microbiota are likely due to the differences in consumed foods. Thus, future studies that include people who follow similar dietary practices during Ramadan are needed to determine the effect of intermittent fasting on the composition of the gut microbiota more precisely.

Journal reference:

Saglam, D., Colak, G. A., Shain, E., et al. (2023). Effects of Ramadan intermittent fasting on gut microbiome: is the diet key? Frontiers in Microbiology.

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2023.1203205

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When contemplating the emissions from road vehicles, our first thought is often about the various gases coming out of the tailpipe. However, new research shows that we should be more concerned with the harmful particles that are shed from tires and brakes.

Scientists have a good understanding of engine emissions, which typically consist of unburnt fuel, oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and particulate matter related to combustion. However, new research shared by Yale Environment 360 indicates that there may be a whole host of toxic chemicals being shed from tires and brakes that have been largely ignored until now. Even worse, these emissions may be so significant that they actually exceed those from a typical car's exhaust output.

A research paper published in 2020 highlighted the impact of tire pollution by examining the plight of coho salmon in West Coast streams. Scientists eventually identified a chemical called 6PPD, typically used in tire manufacturing to slow cracking and degradation. When exposed to ozone in the atmosphere, the chemical transforms into multiple other species, including 6PPD-quinone—which was found to be highly toxic to multiple fish, including coho salmon. The same chemical has since been detected in human urine, though any potential health impacts remain unknown.

The discovery of 6PPD-q and its impact has brought new scrutiny to the pollution generated by particles shedding from tires and brakes. In particular, tire rubber is made up of over 400 different chemical compounds, many of which are known to have negative effects on human health.

Particulate emissions from tires—and, to a lesser extent, brakes—are becoming a new focus for researchers looking into automobile pollution.

New research efforts are only just beginning to reveal the impact of near-invisible tire and brake dust. A report from the Pew Charitable Trust found that 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber. These toxic particles often end up ingested by marine animals, where they can cause neurological effects, behavioral changes, and abnormal growth.

Meanwhile, British firm Emissions Analytics spent three years studying tires. The group found that a single car's four tires collectively release 1 trillion "ultrafine" particles for every single kilometer (0.6 miles) driven. These particles, under 100 nanometers in size, are so tiny that they can pass directly through the lungs and into the blood. They can even cross the body's blood-brain barrier. The Imperial College London has also studied the issue, noting that "There is emerging evidence that tire wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes.”

It's an emissions problem that won't go away with the transition to EVs, either. According to data from Emissions Analytics, EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.

Indeed, the scale of these emissions is significant. Particulate emissions from tires and brakes, particularly in the PM2.5 and PM10 size ranges, are believed to exceed the mass of tailpipe emissions from modern vehicle fleets, as per a study published in Science of the Total Environment this year.

This issue has largely flown under the radar until recently. Tailpipe emissions are easy to study, simply requiring the capture or sensing of gases directly at the engine's exhaust. Capturing the fine particulates emitted from tires and brakes is altogether more difficult. Doing so in a way that accurately reflects the quantity of those emissions is yet harder. Such pollution is perhaps unlikely to have a direct impact on issues like climate change, but the potential toxicity for humans, animals, and the broader environment is a prime concern.

Regulators are already scrambling to tackle this issue, heretofore largely ignored by governments around the world. In the EU, the Euro 7 standards will regulate tire and brake emissions from 2025. In the U.S., the California EPA will require tire manufacturers to find an alternative chemical to 6PPD by 2024, to help reduce 6PPD-q entering the environment going forward. In turn, manufacturers are exploring everything from alternate tire compositions to special electrostatic methods to capture particulate output.

Expect this issue to gain greater prominence in coming years as regulators have more accurate data to act upon. There is great scope to slash this form of pollution if we properly understand the impacts of our cars in full.

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On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches of the eggs they lay hang from long stalks on the underside of leaves and sway like fairy lights in the wind.

The dangling ensembles of eggs are beautiful but also practical: They keep the hatching larvae from immediately eating their unhatched siblings. With sickle-like jaws that pierce their prey and suck them dry, lacewing larvae are “vicious,” said James Truman, a professor emeritus of development, cell and molecular biology at the University of Washington. “It’s like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one animal.”

This Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy is made possible by metamorphosis, the phenomenon best known for transforming caterpillars into butterflies. In its most extreme version, complete metamorphosis, the juvenile and adult forms look and act like totally different species. Metamorphosis is not an exception in the animal kingdom; it’s almost a rule. More than 80 percent of the known animal species today, mainly insects, amphibians and marine invertebrates, undergo some form of metamorphosis or have complex, multistage life cycles.

The process of metamorphosis presents many mysteries, but some of the most deeply puzzling ones center on the nervous system. At the center of this phenomenon is the brain, which must code for not one but multiple different identities. After all, the life of a flying, mate-seeking insect is very different from the life of a hungry caterpillar. For the past half-century, researchers have probed the question of how a network of neurons that encodes one identity—that of a hungry caterpillar or a murderous lacewing larva—shifts to encode an adult identity that encompasses a completely different set of behaviors and needs.

Truman and his team have now learned how much metamorphosis reshuffles parts of the brain. In a recent study published in the journal eLife, they traced dozens of neurons in the brains of fruit flies going through metamorphosis. They found that, unlike the tormented protagonist of Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis,” who awakes one day as a monstrous insect, adult insects likely can’t remember much of their larval life. Although many of the larval neurons in the study endured, the part of the insect brain that Truman’s group examined was dramatically rewired. That overhaul of neural connections mirrored a similarly dramatic shift in the behavior of the insects as they changed from crawling, hungry larvae to flying, mate-seeking adults.

Their findings are “the most detailed example to date” of what happens to the brain of an insect undergoing metamorphosis, said Deniz Erezyilmaz, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Oxford’s Center for Neural Circuits and Behavior who used to work in Truman’s lab but wasn’t involved in this work. The results may apply to many other species on Earth, she added.

Beyond detailing how a larval brain matures to an adult brain, the new study provides clues to how evolution made the development of these insects take such a wild detour. “It’s a monumental piece,” said Bertram Gerber, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology who was not involved in the study but coauthored a related commentary for eLife. “It’s really the climax of 40 years of research in the field.”

“I call this ‘The Paper’ in capitals,” said Darren Williams, a researcher in developmental neurobiology at King’s College London who was not involved in the study but is a longtime collaborator of Truman’s. “It’s going to be fundamentally important … for lots of questions.”

A Detour on the Way to Adulthood

The earliest insects 480 million years ago emerged from eggs looking much like smaller versions of their adult selves, or else they continued their “direct development” to get steadily closer to their adult form, just as grasshoppers, crickets, and some other insects do today. Complete metamorphosis seems to have arisen in insects only around 350 million years ago, before the dinosaurs.

Most researchers now believe that metamorphosis evolved to lessen the competition for resources between adults and their offspring: Shunting larvae into a very different form allowed them to eat very different foods than the adults did. “It was a great strategy,” Truman said. Insects that started to undergo complete metamorphosis, like beetles, flies, butterflies, bees, wasps and ants, exploded in number.

The researcher James Truman of the University of Washington has spent his decades-long

career trying to understand how and why metamorphosis evolved.

Photograph: Lynn Riddiford

When Truman was a child, he spent hours watching insects go through the process. With the lacewings in particular, “I was intrigued by the ferocity of the larva versus the delicate nature of the adult,” he said.

His childhood passion eventually turned into a career and a family. After he married his doctoral adviser, Lynn Riddiford, who is also a professor emerita at the University of Washington, they traveled the world, collecting insects that metamorphose and others that don’t, to compare their developmental paths.

While Riddiford focused her work on the effect of hormones on metamorphosis, Truman was most interested in the brain. In 1974, he published the first paper on what happens to the brain during metamorphosis, for which he tracked the number of motor neurons in hornworm larvae and adults. Since then, numerous studies have detailed different neurons and parts of the brains of larvae and adults, but they are either anecdotal or focused on very small aspects of the process. “We didn’t have much of a big picture,” Truman said.

Truman knew that to really understand what’s happening to the brain, he had to be able to trace individual cells and circuits through the process. The nervous system of a fruit fly offered a practical opportunity to do that: Although most of the fruit fly larva’s body cells die as it transforms into an adult, many of the neurons in its brain don’t.

“The nervous system has never been able to change the way it makes neurons,” Truman said. That’s partly because the nervous system in all insects arises from an array of stem cells called neuroblasts that mature into neurons. That process is older than metamorphosis itself and not easily modified after a certain stage of development. So even as nearly all the other cells in the fruit fly’s larval body are eliminated, most of the original neurons are recycled to function anew in the adult.

The Remodeled Mind

Many people imagine that during metamorphosis, as the larval cells begin to die or rearrange themselves, the body of the insect inside its cocoon or exoskeletal casing turns into something like a soup, with all the remaining cells fluidly sliding around together. But that’s not quite right, Truman explained. “Everything has a position … but it’s really delicate, and if you open the animal up, everything just bursts,” he said.

To map the brain changes in that gelatinous mass, Truman and his colleagues scrutinized genetically engineered fruit fly larvae that had specific neurons that shone a fluorescent green under the microscope. They found that this fluorescence often faded during metamorphosis, so they used a genetic technique they had developed in 2015 to turn on a red fluorescence in the same neurons by giving the insects a particular drug.

It’s a “pretty cool method,” said Andreas Thum, a neuroscientist at Leipzig University and coauthor of the commentary with Gerber. It allows you to look at not just one, two, or three neurons but an entire network of cells.

The researchers zoned in on the mushroom body, a region of the brain critical for learning and memory in fruit fly larvae and adults. The region consists of a bunch of neurons with long axonal tails that lie in parallel lines like the strings of a guitar. These neurons communicate with the rest of the brain through input and output neurons that weave in and out of the strings, creating a network of connections that allow the insect to associate odors with good or bad experiences. These networks are arranged in distinct computational compartments, like the spaces between the frets on the guitar. Each compartment has a task, such as guiding a fly toward or away from something.

Truman and his team found that when the larvae undergo metamorphosis, only seven of their 10 neural compartments are incorporated into the adult mushroom body. Within those seven, some neurons die, and some are remodeled to perform new adult functions. All the connections between the neurons in the mushroom body and their input and output neurons are dissolved. At this transformation stage, “it’s kind of this ultimate Buddhistic situation where you have no inputs, you have no outputs,” Gerber said. “It’s just me, myself, and I.”

The input and output neurons in the three larval compartments that don’t get incorporated into the adult mushroom body completely shed their old identities. They leave the mushroom body and integrate into new brain circuits elsewhere in the adult brain. “You wouldn’t know that they were the same neurons, except that we’ve been able to both genetically and anatomically follow them through,” Truman said.

The researchers suggest that these relocating neurons are only temporary guests in the larval mushroom body, taking on necessary larval functions for a while but then returning to their ancestral tasks in the adult brain. That’s in keeping with the idea that the adult brain is the older, ancestral form within the lineage and the simpler larval brain is a derived form that came much later.

Illustration: Merrill Sherman/Quanta

In addition to the remodeled larval neurons, many new neurons are born as the larva grows. These neurons are not used by the larva, but at metamorphosis they mature to become input and output neurons for nine new computational compartments that are adult-specific.

The mushroom body in the larva looks very similar to the adult version, Thum said, but “the rewiring is really intense.” It’s as if the inputs and outputs of a computational machine all got disrupted but still somehow maintained their wireless functionality, Gerber said. “It’s almost as if you would deliberately unplug and replug” the machine.

As a result, the adult brain’s mushroom body is “fundamentally … a completely new structure,” said K. VijayRaghavan, an emeritus professor and former director of India’s National Center for Biological Sciences who was the main editor of the paper and was not involved in the study. There is no anatomical indication that memories could have survived, he added.

The Fragility of Memory

Researchers have been excited by this question of whether a larva’s memories can carry through to the adult insect, Williams said, but the answer hasn’t been clear-cut.

The types of memories that live in the mushroom body of a fruit fly are associative memories, the kind that links two different things together—the type of memory that left Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, for example. For the fruit fly, associative memories typically involve smells, and they guide the fly toward or away from something.

However, their conclusion that associative memories can’t survive may not hold true for all species. Butterfly and beetle larvae, for example, hatch with more complex nervous systems and more neurons than fruit fly larvae have. Because their nervous systems start out more complicated, they may not have to be remolded as much.

Fruit flies undergo one of the most extreme forms of complete metamorphosis. Aside from certain neurons,

almost all of their larval cells are replaced with new ones when they become adults.

Photograph: DR. JEREMY BURGESS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Previous studies have found evidence that other types of memories can persist in some species. For example, Gerber explained, observations and experiments suggest that many species of insects show a preference for reproducing on the same types of plants where they matured: Larvae born and raised on apple trees later tend to lay eggs on apple trees as adults. “So one wonders how these two types of observations relate,” he said. How do these preferences carry over if memories don’t? One possibility is that associative memories don’t carry over, but other types of memories housed in other parts of the brain do, he said.

The data offers opportunities to compare the development of nervous systems in animals that metamorphose and those that don’t. The nervous system of insects has been conserved enough during evolution that researchers can pinpoint equivalent neurons in direct-developing species such as crickets and grasshoppers. Comparisons between them can answer questions such as how individual cells changed from having single to multiple identities. It’s “an incredibly powerful comparative tool,” Williams said.

Thum thinks it would be interesting to see whether insect species living in different environments might vary in the ways their brains get rearranged, and whether memories can survive in any of them. Gerber is curious to see whether the cellular mechanisms in insect metamorphosis are the same in other animals that undergo variations of the process, like tadpoles that become frogs or immobile hydra-like creatures that become jellyfish. “You may even be crazy enough to wonder whether we should be looking at puberty as a sort of metamorphosis,” he said.

Truman and his team are now hoping to dive down to the molecular level to see which genes affect the maturation and evolution of the nervous system. In 1971, researchers hypothesized in a theoretical paper that a trio of genes directs the process of insect metamorphosis, an idea that Riddiford and Truman further confirmed in a 2022 paper. But the mechanisms behind how these genes work to remodel the body and the brain remain unclear.

Truman’s ultimate goal is to coax a neuron to take on its adult form in the larval brain. Successfully hacking the process might mean that we truly understand how these insects create multiple identities through time.

It’s unknown what the patterns of reorganization would be like elsewhere in the brain. But it’s likely that some aspects of the fruit fly’s mental capacities and responses to the world, conscious or not, are shaped by its larval life, Truman said. “The challenge is in trying to find out the nature and extent of these effects.”

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Underneath the thick forest canopy on a remote island in the South Pacific, a New Caledonian Crow peers from its perch, dark eyes glittering. The bird carefully removes a branch, strips off unwanted leaves with its bill and fashions a hook from the wood. The crow is a perfectionist: if it makes an error, it will scrap the whole thing and start over. When it's satisfied, the bird pokes the finished utensil into a crevice in the tree and fishes out a wriggling grub.

The New Caledonian Crow is one of the only birds known to manufacture tools, a skill once thought to be unique to humans. Christian Rutz, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, has spent much of his career studying the crow's capabilities. The remarkable ingenuity Rutz observed changed his understanding of what birds can do. He started wondering if there might be other overlooked animal capacities. The crows live in complex social groups and may pass toolmaking techniques on to their offspring. Experiments have also shown that different crow groups around the island have distinct vocalizations. Rutz wanted to know whether these dialects could help explain cultural differences in toolmaking among the groups.

New technology powered by artificial intelligence is poised to provide exactly these kinds of insights. Whether animals communicate with one another in terms we might be able to understand is a question of enduring fascination. Although people in many Indigenous cultures have long believed that animals can intentionally communicate, Western scientists traditionally have shied away from research that blurs the lines between humans and other animals for fear of being accused of anthropomorphism. But with recent breakthroughs in AI, “people realize that we are on the brink of fairly major advances in regard to understanding animals' communicative behavior,” Rutz says.

Beyond creating chatbots that woo people and producing art that wins fine-arts competitions, machine learning may soon make it possible to decipher things like crow calls, says Aza Raskin, one of the founders of the nonprofit Earth Species Project. Its team of artificial-intelligence scientists, biologists and conservation experts is collecting a wide range of data from a variety of species and building machine-learning models to analyze them. Other groups such as the Project Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) are focusing on trying to understand a particular species, in this case the sperm whale.

Decoding animal vocalizations could aid conservation and welfare efforts. It could also have a startling impact on us. Raskin compares the coming revolution to the invention of the telescope. “We looked out at the universe and discovered that Earth was not the center,” he says. The power of AI to reshape our understanding of animals, he thinks, will have a similar effect. “These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything.”

When Shane Gero got off his research vessel in Dominica after a recent day of fieldwork, he was excited. The sperm whales that he studies have complex social groups, and on this day one familiar young male had returned to his family, providing Gero and his colleagues with an opportunity to record the group's vocalizations as they reunited.

For nearly 20 years Gero, a scientist in residence at Carleton University in Ottawa, kept detailed records of two clans of sperm whales in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, capturing their clicking vocalizations and what the animals were doing when they made them. He found that the whales seemed to use specific patterns of sound, called codas, to identify one another. They learn these codas much the way toddlers learn words and names, by repeating sounds the adults around them make.

Having decoded a few of these codas manually, Gero and his colleagues began to wonder whether they could use AI to speed up the translation. As a proof of concept, the team fed some of Gero's recordings to a neural network, an algorithm that learns skills by analyzing data. It was able to correctly identify a small subset of individual whales from the codas 99 percent of the time. Next the team set an ambitious new goal: listen to large swathes of the ocean in the hopes of training a computer to learn to speak whale. Project CETI, for which Gero serves as lead biologist, plans to deploy an underwater microphone attached to a buoy to record the vocalizations of Dominica's resident whales around the clock.

As sensors have gotten cheaper and technologies such as hydrophones, biologgers and drones have improved, the amount of animal data has exploded. There's suddenly far too much for biologists to sift through efficiently by hand. AI thrives on vast quantities of information, though. Large language models such as ChatGPT must ingest massive amounts of text to learn how to respond to prompts: ChatGPT-3 was trained on around 45 terabytes of text data, a good chunk of the entire Library of Congress. Early models required humans to classify much of those data with labels. In other words, people had to teach the machines what was important. But the next generation of models learned how to “self-supervise,” automatically learning what's essential and independently creating an algorithm of how to predict what words come next in a sequence.

In 2017 two research groups discovered a way to translate between human languages without the need for a Rosetta stone. The discovery hinged on turning the semantic relations between words into geometric ones. Machine-learning models are now able to translate between unknown human languages by aligning their shapes—using the frequency with which words such as “mother” and “daughter” appear near each other, for example, to accurately predict what comes next. “There's this hidden underlying structure that seems to unite us all,” Raskin says. “The door has been opened to using machine learning to decode languages that we don't already know how to decode.”

The field hit another milestone in 2020, when natural-language processing began to be able to “treat everything as a language,” Raskin explains.

Take, for example, DALL-E 2, one of the AI systems that can generate realistic images based on verbal descriptions. It maps the shapes that represent text to the shapes that represent images with remarkable accuracy—exactly the kind of “multimodal” analysis the translation of animal communication will probably require.

Many animals use different modes of communication simultaneously, just as humans use body language and gestures while talking. Any actions made immediately before, during, or after uttering sounds could provide important context for understanding what an animal is trying to convey. Traditionally, researchers have cataloged these behaviors in a list known as an ethogram. With the right training, machine-learning models could help parse these behaviors and perhaps discover novel patterns in the data. Scientists writing in the journal Nature Communications last year, for example, reported that a model found previously unrecognized differences in Zebra Finch songs that females pay attention to when choosing mates. Females prefer partners that sing like the birds the females grew up with.

You can already use one kind of AI-powered analysis with Merlin, a free app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that identifies bird species. To identify a bird by sound, Merlin takes a user's recording and converts it into a spectrogram—a visualization of the volume, pitch and length of the bird's call. The model is trained on Cornell's audio library, against which it compares the user's recording to predict the species identification. It then compares this guess to eBird, Cornell's global database of observations, to make sure it's a species that one would expect to find in the user's location. Merlin can identify calls from more than 1,000 bird species with remarkable accuracy.

But the world is loud, and singling out the tune of one bird or whale from the cacophony is difficult. The challenge of isolating and recognizing individual speakers, known as the cocktail party problem, has long plagued efforts to process animal vocalizations. In 2021 the Earth Species Project built a neural network that can separate overlapping animal sounds into individual tracks and filter background noise, such as car honks—and it released the open-source code for free. It works by creating a visual representation of the sound, which the neural network uses to determine which pixel is produced by which speaker. In addition, the Earth Species Project recently developed a so-called foundational model that can automatically detect and classify patterns in datasets.

New Caledonian Crows, which are famous for their toolmaking abilities, have regionally distinctive vocalizations that could one day be deciphered using AI. Credit: Jean-Paul Ferrero/Auscape International Pty Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Not only are these tools transforming research, but they also have practical value. If scientists can translate animal sounds, they may be able to help imperiled species. The Hawaiian Crow, known locally as the ‘Alalā, went extinct in the wild in the early 2000s. The last birds were brought into captivity to start a conservation breeding program. Expanding on his work with the New Caledonian Crow, Rutz is now collaborating with the Earth Species Project to study the Hawaiian Crow's vocabulary. “This species has been removed from its natural environment for a very long time,” he says. He is developing an inventory of all the calls the captive birds currently use. He'll compare that to historical recordings of the last wild Hawaiian Crows to determine whether their repertoire has changed in captivity. He wants to know whether they may have lost important calls, such as those pertaining to predators or courtship, which could help explain why reintroducing the crow to the wild has proved so difficult.

Machine-learning models could someday help us figure out our pets, too. For a long time animal behaviorists didn't pay much attention to domestic pets, says Con Slobodchikoff, author of Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals. When he began his career studying prairie dogs, he quickly gained an appreciation for their sophisticated calls, which can describe the size and shape of predators. That experience helped to inform his later work as a behavioral consultant for misbehaving dogs. He found that many of his clients completely misunderstood what their dog was trying to convey. When our pets try to communicate with us, they often use multimodal signals, such as a bark combined with a body posture. Yet “we are so fixated on sound being the only valid element of communication, that we miss many of the other cues,” he says.

Now Slobodchikoff is developing an AI model aimed at translating a dog's facial expressions and barks for its owner. He has no doubt that as researchers expand their studies to domestic animals, machine-learning advances will reveal surprising capabilities in pets. “Animals have thoughts, hopes, maybe dreams of their own,” he says.

Farmed animals could also benefit from such depth of understanding. Elodie F. Briefer, an associate professor in animal behavior at the University of Copenhagen, has shown that it's possible to assess animals' emotional states based on their vocalizations. She recently created an algorithm trained on thousands of pig sounds that uses machine learning to predict whether the animals were experiencing a positive or negative emotion. Briefer says a better grasp of how animals experience feelings could spur efforts to improve their welfare.

But as good as language models are at finding patterns, they aren't actually deciphering meaning—and they definitely aren't always right. Even AI experts often don't understand how algorithms arrive at their conclusions, making them harder to validate. Benjamin Hoffman, who helped to develop the Merlin app before joining the Earth Species Project, says that one of the biggest challenges scientists now face is figuring out how to learn from what these models discover.

“The choices made on the machine-learning side affect what kinds of scientific questions we can ask,” Hoffman says. Merlin Sound ID, he explains, can help detect which birds are present, which is useful for ecological research. It can't, however, help answer questions about behavior, such as what types of calls an individual bird makes when it interacts with a potential mate. In trying to interpret different kinds of animal communication, Hoffman says researchers must also “understand what the computer is doing when it's learning how to do that.”

Daniela Rus, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, leans back in an armchair in her office, surrounded by books and stacks of papers. She is eager to explore the new possibilities for studying animal communication that machine learning has opened up. Rus previously designed remote-controlled robots to collect data for whale-behavior research in collaboration with biologist Roger Payne, whose recordings of humpback whale songs in the 1970s helped to popularize the Save the Whales movement. Now Rus is bringing her programming experience to Project CETI. Sensors for underwater monitoring have rapidly advanced, providing the equipment necessary to capture animal sounds and behavior. And AI models capable of analyzing those data have improved dramatically. But until recently, the two disciplines hadn't been joined.

At Project CETI, Rus's first task was to isolate sperm whale clicks from the background noise of the ocean realm. Sperm whales' vocalizations were long compared to binary code in the way that they represent information. But they are more sophisticated than that. After she developed accurate acoustic measurements, Rus used machine learning to analyze how these clicks combine into codas, looking for patterns and sequences. “Once you have this basic ability,” she says, “then we can start studying what are some of the foundational components of the language.” The team will tackle that question directly, Rus says, “analyzing whether the [sperm whale] lexicon has the properties of language or not.”

But grasping the structure of a language is not a prerequisite to speaking it—not anymore, anyway. It's now possible for AI to take three seconds of human speech and then hold forth at length with its same patterns and intonations in an exact mimicry. In the next year or two, Raskin predicts, “we'll be able to build this for animal communication.” The Earth Species Project is already developing AI models that emulate a variety of species, with the aim of having “conversations” with animals. He says two-way communication will make it that much easier for researchers to infer the meaning of animal vocalizations.

In collaboration with outside biologists, the Earth Species Project plans to test playback experiments, playing an artificially generated call to Zebra Finches in a laboratory setting and then observing how the birds respond. Soon “we'll be able to pass the finch, crow or whale Turing test,” Raskin asserts, referring to the point at which the animals won't be able to tell they are conversing with a machine rather than one of their own. “The plot twist is that we will be able to communicate before we understand.”

The prospect of this achievement raises ethical concerns. Karen Bakker, a digital innovations researcher and author of The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, explains that there may be unintended ramifications. Commercial industries could use AI for precision fishing by listening for schools of target species or their predators; poachers could deploy these techniques to locate endangered animals and impersonate their calls to lure them closer. For animals such as humpback whales, whose mysterious songs can spread across oceans with remarkable speed, the creation of a synthetic song could, Bakker says, “inject a viral meme into the world's population” with unknown social consequences.

So far the organizations at the leading edge of this animal-communication work are nonprofits like the Earth Species Project that are committed to open-source sharing of data and models and staffed by enthusiastic scientists driven by their passion for the animals they study. But the field might not stay that way—profit-driven players could misuse this technology. In a recent article in Science, Rutz and his co-authors noted that “best-practice guidelines and appropriate legislative frameworks” are urgently needed. “It's not enough to make the technology,” Raskin warns. “Every time you invent a technology, you also invent a responsibility.”

Designing a “whale chatbot,” as Project CETI aspires to do, isn't as simple as figuring out how to replicate sperm whales' clicks and whistles; it also demands that we imagine an animal's experience. Despite major physical differences, humans actually share many basic forms of communication with other animals. Consider the interactions between parents and offspring. The cries of mammalian infants, for example, can be incredibly similar, to the point that white-tailed deer will respond to whimpers whether they're made by marmots, humans or seals. Vocal expression in different species can develop similarly, too. Like human babies, harbor seal pups learn to change their pitch to target a parent's eardrums. And both baby songbirds and human toddlers engage in babbling—a “complex sequence of syllables learned from a tutor,” explains Johnathan Fritz, a research scientist at the University of Maryland's Brain and Behavior Initiative.

Whether animal utterances are comparable to human language in terms of what they convey remains a matter of profound disagreement, however.

“Some would assert that language is essentially defined in terms that make humans the only animal capable of language,” Bakker says, with rules for grammar and syntax. Skeptics worry that treating animal communication as language, or attempting to translate it, may distort its meaning.

Raskin shrugs off these concerns. He doubts animals are saying “pass me the banana,” but he suspects we will discover some basis for communication in common experiences. “It wouldn't surprise me if we discovered [expressions for] ‘grief’ or ‘mother’ or ‘hungry’ across species,” he says. After all, the fossil record shows that creatures such as whales have been vocalizing for tens of millions of years. “For something to survive a long time, it has to encode something very deep and very true.”

Ultimately real translation may require not just new tools but the ability to see past our own biases and expectations. Last year, as the crusts of snow retreated behind my house, a pair of Sandhill Cranes began to stalk the brambles. A courtship progressed, the male solicitous and preening. Soon every morning one bird flapped off alone to forage while the other stayed behind to tend their eggs. We fell into a routine, the birds and I: as the sun crested the hill, I kept one eye toward the windows, counting the days as I imagined cells dividing, new wings forming in the warm, amniotic dark.

Then one morning it ended. Somewhere behind the house the birds began to wail, twining their voices into a piercing cry until suddenly I saw them both running down the hill into the stutter start of flight. They circled once and then disappeared. I waited for days, but I never saw them again.

Wondering if they were mourning a failed nest or whether I was reading too much into their behavior, I reached out to George Happ and Christy Yuncker, retired scientists who for two decades shared their pond in Alaska with a pair of wild Sandhill Cranes they nicknamed Millie and Roy. They assured me that they, too, had seen the birds react to death. After one of Millie and Roy's colts died, Roy began picking up blades of grass and dropping them near his offspring's body. That evening, as the sun slipped toward the horizon, the family began to dance. The surviving colt joined its parents as they wheeled and jumped, throwing their long necks back to the sky.

Happ knows critics might disapprove of their explaining the birds' behaviors as grief, considering that “we cannot precisely specify the underlying physiological correlates.” But based on the researchers' close observations of the crane couple over a decade, he writes, interpreting these striking reactions as devoid of emotion “flies in the face of the evidence.”

Everyone can eventually relate to the pain of losing a loved one. It's a moment ripe for translation.

Perhaps the true value of any language is that it helps us relate to others and in so doing frees us from the confines of our own minds. Every spring, as the light swept back over Yuncker and Happ's home, they waited for Millie and Roy to return. In 2017 they waited in vain. Other cranes vied for the territory. The two scientists missed watching the colts hatch and grow. But last summer a new crane pair built a nest. Before long, their colts peeped through the tall grass, begging for food and learning to dance. Life began a new cycle. “We're always looking at nature,” Yuncker says, “when really, we're part of it.”

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The Aditya-L1 mission, which started its four-month journey towards the center of the solar system on September 2, carries instruments to observe the sun's outermost layers.

"The spacecraft has escaped the sphere of Earth's influence," the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said in a statement late Saturday.

Aditya, named after the Hindu sun deity, has traveled 920,000 kilometers (570,000 miles), just over half the journey's total distance.

At that point, the gravitational forces of both astronomical bodies cancel out, allowing the mission to remain in a stable halo orbit around our nearest star.

"This is the second time in succession that ISRO could send a spacecraft outside the sphere of influence of the Earth, the first time being the Mars Orbiter Mission", the agency added.

In August, India became the first country to land a craft near the largely unexplored lunar south pole, and just the fourth nation to land on the moon.

Rover Pragyan surveyed the vicinity of its landing site but was powered down before the start of lunar night, which lasts roughly two weeks on Earth.

India had hoped to prolong the mission by reactivating the solar-powered vehicle once daylight returned to the lunar surface, but so far has been greeted by radio silence.

"It is OK if it does not wake up because the rover has done what it was expected to do," ISRO chief S. Somanath said Wednesday.

In 2014, India became the first Asian nation to put a craft into orbit around Mars, and it is slated to launch a three-day crewed mission into Earth orbit by next year.

The United States and the European Space Agency have sent numerous probes to the center of the solar system, beginning with NASA's Pioneer program in the 1960s.

Japan and China have both launched their own solar observatory missions into Earth orbit.

But if successful, ISRO's latest mission will be the first by any Asian nation to be placed in orbit around the sun.

© 2023 AFP

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Rare earth elements have a number of useful properties that make them highly sought after by the tech and energy industries. This collection of 17 metals includes the 15 metallic elements found at the bottom of the periodic table, as well as the elements yttrium and scandium.

The most valuable of these are neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium, which act as superstrong miniaturized magnets, a vital component of electronics, including smartphones, electric car batteries and wind turbines. However, their limited global supply is a big worry for governments and corporations that need these metals to continue manufacturing all sorts of modern essentials.

But why are the rare earth elements so rare?

It turns out, they're not really that rare. A U.S. Geological Survey study on the "crystal abundance" of different elements — meaning how much is available if you average out Earth's crust — found that most of the rare earths "are in the same order of magnitude as common metals like copper and zinc," Aaron Noble, a professor and head of the Mining and Mineral Engineering Department at Virginia Tech, told Live Science. "They're certainly not as rare as metals like silver, gold and platinum."

The locations and relative abundances of minable rare earth elements around the world. Data from USGS in 2020. (Image credit: VISUAL CAPITALIST/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)

Although the elements are fairly common, they're very difficult to extract from their natural sources.

"The 'troublesome earths' would have been a better name," Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute, told Live Science. "The problem is, they're just not that concentrated in one place. There are around 300 milligrams per kilogram [0.005 ounces per pound] of rare earths across all shale in the United States. That's about what you'd get if you dug a hole in your backyard."

Typically, metals concentrate within Earth's crust due to different geological processes, such as lava flow, hydrothermal activity and mountain formation. However, the unusual chemistry of the rare earth elements means that these metals don't generally collect together under these extraordinary conditions. Consequently, traces of these elements are spread across the planet, making mining for these materials particularly inefficient.

Occasionally, extremely acidic conditions underground can slightly increase the amount of rare earth elements present in certain areas. But finding these elusive enriched sites is only the first challenge.

In nature, metals exist as compounds called ores, which contain metal particles linked to other nonmetal substances (called counterions) by strong ionic bonding. To obtain the pure metal, these bonds must be broken and the counterions must be removed — but the difficulty of this separation depends on the metal and the counterion in question.

Ores can exist for all kinds of metals, not just rare earth elements. For instance, copper and iron can also form ores.

"Copper ore usually occurs as a sulfide. You heat the ore up to the point where it drives off the sulfides as a gas and the pure copper drops out the bottom of your reaction vessel. That's quite an easy extraction," Ziemkiewicz explained. "Others, like iron oxides, need an additive to make them release the metal. But rare earths are much more complicated to separate."

The rare earth metals naturally have three positive charges and form incredibly strong ionic bonds with phosphate counterions, each possessing three negative charges. The extraction process must therefore overcome the very strong attraction between the positive metal and the negative phosphate — no small task.

"It's a very long and complicated supply chain to the pure metal," Noble said. "The rare earth ores are very chemically stable minerals — you have to put a lot of energy and chemical intensity into them to break them down. Oftentimes, that process uses a very low pH, very aggressive conditions and very high temperatures, because those bonds holding the ores together are so strong."

It's this difficulty of extracting the pure element that gives the rare earth elements their name. Some researchers are working on new methods to recycle and extract these valuable metals from old electronics and industrial wastes to reduce the pressure on current supplies; others are trying to reproduce the unusual magnetic and electronic properties in new compounds to provide an alternative to these elusive metals and which could shepherd in more accessible and human-made compounds that behave like rare earth elements.

For the time being, though, there's no substitute for the troublesome rare earths, even as demand skyrockets.

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The bacteria may have entered her flesh along with shrapnel from the bomb detonated in Brussels Airport in 2016. Or perhaps the microbes hitched a ride on the surgical instruments used to treat her wounds. Either way, the "superbug" refused to be vanquished, despite years of antibiotic treatment.

The woman had survived a terrorist attack but was held hostage by drug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bacterial strain often picked up by surgery patients in hospitals. Only by combining antibiotics with a new, experimental treatment did doctors finally rid her of the superbug.

Devastating drug-resistant bacterial infections like this one are all too common, and they represent an ever-growing threat to global health. In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed roughly 1.27 million people worldwide and contributed to an additional 3.68 million deaths. In the U.S. alone, drug-resistant bacteria and fungi together cause an estimated 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths each year.

And the problem is getting worse: Seven of the 18 concerning bacteria tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are becoming more resistant to common antibiotics considered essential for maintaining public health. Meanwhile, drug companies have been slow to make new antibiotics capable of beating the microbes. Fewer than 30 antibiotics currently in the development pipeline target "priority" bacteria, as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), and most of those drugs are still vulnerable to resistance, just like their predecessors.

This table of select antibiotic-resistant bacteria demonstrates how rapidly important types of resistance developed after the approval and release of new antibiotics. (Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adapted by Live Science from the CDC's "Select Germs Showing Resistance Over Time" Fact Sheet.)

So some scientists are looking beyond traditional antibiotics for new weapons that won't fuel the rise of superbugs. Their emerging arsenal features viruses that kill bacteria; CRISPR; and microbe-slaying molecules. They hope that these experimental treatments, some of which have been tested in patients, will kill superbugs without promoting resistance.

"The vision, for me, is that we move beyond antibiotics and really just see a much broader palate of options," Chase Beisel, leader of the RNA synthetic biology research group at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research in Germany, told Live Science.

But until these new therapeutics are ready for prime time, the world needs to curtail its overuse and misuse of antibiotics, which experts say is speeding up the rate at which these lifesaving drugs become obsolete.

How antibiotic resistance emerges and spreads

Antibiotics either directly kill bacteria or slow their growth, leaving the immune system to finish the job. The drugs work in several ways — by preventing bacteria from building sturdy walls or making copies of their DNA, for instance. Growth-slowing antibiotics usually disrupt ribosomes, the factories in which bacterial cells make proteins.

Many antibiotics shoot for the exact same molecular targets, and so-called broad-spectrum antibiotics' mechanisms are so universal that they work on both major classes of bacteria: gram-positive and gram-negative, which are distinguished by the makeup and thickness of their cell walls. Broad-spectrum antibiotics, in particular, pressure both harmful and helpful bacteria in the body to evolve defensive strategies that eject or disable the drugs, or else alter their targets.

Drug-resistant bacteria can transfer their resistance to additional bacteria in several ways. (Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adapted by Live Science from the CDC's "How Resistance Moves Directly Germ to Germ" Fact Sheet.)

Bacteria can pick up such defenses through random DNA mutations, or by swapping "resistance genes" with other bacteria via a process called horizontal gene transfer. By making these gene transfers, bacteria can quickly spread such mutations to additional bacterial populations in the body and in the environment.

The misuse of antibiotics in health care, as well as in agriculture, has given bacteria endless opportunities to develop resistance, raising the chance that once-treatable infections will become life-threatening.

Harnessing viruses to fight bacteria

One of the proposed alternatives to antibiotics was first conceived more than a century ago, before the 1928 discovery of penicillin. Called phage therapy, it uses bacteria-infecting viruses called  bacteriophages, or simply "phages," which typically kill the germs by invading their cells and splitting them open from the inside.

Phages can also pressure bacteria into giving up key tools in their drug resistance tool kits. For example, a phage called U136B can have this effect on E. coli. To infiltrate E. coli, the phage uses an efflux pump, a protein E. coli normally uses to pump antibiotics out of the cell. If the E. coli tries to change this pump to escape the phage, it reduces the bacterium's ability to pump out antibiotics.

And unlike with antibiotics, bacteria are unlikely to gain widespread resistance to phage therapy, said Paul Turner, director of the Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale University.

Turner and other experts have concluded that, "if phage therapy were used at a global scale, that it would not lead to the same problem of widespread resistance to it, the way that antibiotic use has led to that problem," he told Live Science.

Here's why: Antibiotic resistance has been dramatically accelerated by the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, especially broad-spectrum antibiotics that work on a variety of bacteria. Phages, by contrast, can have much narrower targets than even narrow-spectrum antibiotics — for instance, targeting a protein found in only one or a few strains within one bacterial species.

The target bacterium can still evolve resistance to an individual phage — but by picking the right combination of phages, scientists can make it so that the bacterium's evolution comes at a cost, Turner said. This cost might be a decrease in virulence or an increased vulnerability to antibiotics.

(Image credit: Graphic made by Olha Pohrebniak via Getty Images. Adapted by Live Science.)

To date, phage therapy has mostly been tested through a regulatory framework known as "compassionate use" in patients like the Brussels Airport bombing victim, whose infections had no other treatment options. Phage therapy has shown success in these settings, and in a recent observational study of 100 patients who received phages alongside antibiotics.

So far in clinical trials, though, phage therapy generally hasn't worked better than standard antibiotics or a placebo. Topline results from two recent trials hint at the treatment's effectiveness in specific lung and foot infections, but the full results have yet to be released.

Success in future trials will be key to getting phages into the clinic, Turner said. Those trials will have to show the therapy works for multiple types of infections, determine dosage and confirm phage therapies don't hurt helpful bacteria in the body, he added.

Turning bacteria's defenses against them

The CRISPR-Cas system can be used to snip DNA at precise locations. Here, a Cas enzyme (dark pink) is preparing to cut through a target DNA strand (blue) and is being told where to cut by an RNA strand (yellow). (Image credit: Meletios Verras via Getty Images)

Although made famous as a powerful gene-editing tool, CRISPR technology was actually adapted from an immune system found in many bacteria: CRISPR-Cas.

The key components of this immune system include molecular scissors, known as Cas proteins, and a memory bank of DNA snippets that a bacterium has collected from phages that once infected it. By tapping its memory bank, CRISPR-Cas can guide its lethal scissors to a precise point in an invading phage's DNA and snip it like a piece of ribbon.

On occasion, though, rather than attacking phages, CRISPR-Cas can accidentally go after the bacterial cell's own DNA, triggering a lethal autoimmune reaction. This phenomenon inspired Beisel and his colleagues to explore using CRISPR-Cas to shred bacterial cells' DNA.

"The real draw of it is that it is a sequence-specific tool," meaning it targets only the DNA you tell it to, and not sequences present in other bacteria, Beisel told Live Science. So, once administered to a patient, "the CRISPR machinery gets into a set of cells, but only those that have the sequence or sequences you picked will be attacked and killed."

How do you get CRISPR-Cas into the right bacteria? Various research groups are testing different delivery methods, but at present, the best strategy seems to be loading CRISPR machinery into a phage that infects the target bacterium, Beisel said.

Beisel is a co-founder and scientific adviser of Locus Biosciences, a biotech company that's currently testing a CRISPR-enhanced phage therapy in a midstage, roughly 800-person trial. This approach couples the bacteria-killing prowess of phages with the ability of CRISPR-Cas to destroy essential bacterial genes. As with CRISPR-less phage therapies, clinical trials are needed to determine the treatment's safety profile and appropriate dosing.

"I can see these [treatments] coming about in the five- to 10-year time frame," Beisel said.

Designer molecules to kill bacteria

Beyond phages and CRISPR, scientists are developing antibiotic alternatives that harness bacteria-slaying peptides — short chains of protein building blocks— and enzymes, specialized proteins that jump-start chemical reactions. These molecules differ from antibiotics because they can kill a very narrow range of bacteria by targeting bacterial proteins that cannot easily gain resistance to their attacks.

Lab-made molecules called peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) are some of the most promising candidates. These engineered molecules can be designed to block bacterial cells from building essential proteins that are crucial to their survival. PNAs do this by latching onto specific mRNA, genetic molecules that carry the instructions for building proteins from the cell's control center to its protein construction sites. PNAs cannot enter bacterial cells on their own, though, so they're typically attached to other peptides that easily pass through the bacterial cell wall.

By targeting proteins that cells cannot change without harming themselves, PNAs can avoid triggering drug resistance, Beisel explained. The engineered molecules could also be made to target proteins that directly contribute to antibiotic resistance, for example, the efflux pumps used to push antibiotics out of cells or the enzymes capable of disabling the drugs. By emptying a germ's drug resistance tool kit, PNAs can then make it vulnerable to standard treatments.

One approach for killing bacteria is to use lysins, or enzymes that tear open bacterial cell membranes and cause the microbes' contents to spill out. (Image credit: KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)

Antibacterial PNAs are still being tested in lab dishes and animals and have not yet moved into human trials. And, scientists need to make sure PNA-based treatments don't inadvertently mess with human cells or helpful bacteria.

In addition to peptides like PNAs, enzymes called lysins are another promising treatment option. Lysins are used in nature by phages to split bacteria open from the inside. They act like tiny swords that slice through the outer wall of a bacterial cell, spilling its guts. The molecular sabers are unlikely to promote resistance because bacteria cannot easily change the essential cell-wall components that lysins target.

Lysins slaughter bacteria quickly upon contact, and they can be very specific, killing some types of bacteria while sparing others. Furthermore, lysins can be tweaked in the lab to change which bacteria they target, boost their potency and improve their durability in the body.

Some lysins have entered mid- and late-stage human trials with hundreds of participants, in which they've been tested as supplementary treatments to antibiotics but garnered mixed results.

Antibiotic stewardship can save lives, in the meantime

Until these next-gen bacteria slayers make it to market, immediate measures must be taken to stall the rise of superbugs, by preventing the misuse of antibiotics that pressures bacteria to evolve resistance in the first place.

For example, doctors can be more diligent about confirming that bacteria, not viruses, are behind a patient's infection before prescribing antibiotics, said Dr. Shruti Gohil, a lead investigator of four INSPIRE-ASP Trials, federally funded research aimed at improving hospitals' antibiotic use. Other safeguards can include auditing doctors' prescriptions to see if narrower-spectrum drugs could be used instead of broad ones, or requiring special clearance for the broadest-spectrum drugs. These steps are essential not only in hospitals but everywhere antibiotics are prescribed, from primary care to dentistry, Gohil said.

Each interaction between a doctor and their patient matters.

Gohil stressed that "by reducing individual risk, you anticipate that you will drop the overall population-level risk," and eventually slash the prevalence of multidrug-resistant bugs.

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So in June, when the results of a head-to-head experimental contest between two rival theories were announced at the 26th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in New York City, they were met with some fanfare.

The results were inconclusive, with some favoring "integrated information theory" and others lending weight to the "global workspace theory". The outcome was covered in both Science and Nature, as well as larger outlets including the New York Times and The Economist.

And that might have been that, with researchers continuing to investigate these and other theories of how our brains generate experience. But on September 16, apparently driven by media coverage of the June results, a group of 124 consciousness scientists and philosophers – many of them leading figures in the field – published an open letter attacking integrated information theory as "pseudoscience".

The letter has generated an uproar. The science of consciousness has its factions and quarrels but this development is unprecedented, and threatens to do lasting damage.

What is integrated information theory?

Italian neuroscientist Giulio Tononi first proposed integrated information theory in 2004, and it is now on "version 4.0". It is not easily summarized.

At its core is the idea that consciousness is identical to the amount of "integrated information" a system contains. Roughly, this means the information the system as a whole has over and above the information had by its parts.

Many theories start by looking for correlations between events in our minds and events in our brains. Instead, integrated information theory begins with "phenomenological axioms", supposedly self-evident claims about the nature of consciousness.

Notoriously, the theory implies consciousness is extremely widespread in nature, and that even very simple systems, such as an inactive grid of computer circuitry, have some degree of consciousness.

Three criticisms

This open letter makes three main claims against integrated information theory.

First, it argues this is not a "leading theory of consciousness" and has received more media attention than it deserves.

Second, it expresses concerns about its implications:

If [integrated information theory] is either proven or perceived by the public as such, it will not only have a direct impact on clinical practice concerning coma patients, but also a wide array of ethical issues ranging from current debates on AI sentience and its regulation, to stem cell research, animal and organoid testing, and abortion.

The third claim has provoked the most outcry: integrated information theory is "pseudoscience".

Is integrated information theory a leading theory?

Whether you agree with integrated information theory or not – and I myself have criticized it – there is little doubt it is a "leading theory of consciousness".

A survey of consciousness scientists conducted in 2018 and 2019 found almost 50% of respondents said the theory was either probably or definitely "promising". It was one of four theories featured in a keynote debate at the 2022 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and was one of four theories featured in a review of the state of consciousness science that Anil Seth and I published last year.

By one account, integrated information theory is the third-most discussed theory of consciousness in the scientific literature, out-stripped only by global workspace theory and recurrent processing theory. Like it or not, integrated information theory has significant support in the scientific community.

Is it more problematic than other theories?

What about the potential implications of integrated information theory – its impact on clinical practice, the regulation of AI, and attitudes to stem cell research, animal and organoid testing, and abortion?

Consider the question of fetal consciousness. According to the letter, integrated information theory says "human fetuses at very early stages of development" are likely conscious.

The details matter here. I was the co-author of the paper cited in support of this claim, which in fact argues that no major theory of consciousness – integrated information theory included – posits the emergence of consciousness before 26 weeks gestation.

And while we should be mindful of the legal and ethical implications of integrated information theory, we should also be mindful of the implications of all theories of consciousness.

Are the implications of integrated information theory more problematic than those of other leading theories? That's far from obvious, and there are certainly versions of other theories whose implications would be every bit as radical as those of integrated information theory.

Is it pseudoscience?

And so, finally, to the charge of pseudoscience. The letter provides no definition of "pseudoscience", but suggests the theory is pseudoscientific because "the theory as a whole" is not empirically testable. It also claims integrated information theory wasn't "meaningfully tested" by the head-to-head contest earlier this year.

It's true the theory's core tenets are very difficult to test, but so too are the core tenets of any theory of consciousness. To put a theory to the test one needs to assume a host of bridging principles, and the status of those principles will often be disputed.

But none of this justifies treating integrated information theory – or indeed any other theory of consciousness – as pseudoscience. All it takes for a theory to be genuinely scientific is that it generates testable predictions. And whatever its faults, the theory has certainly done that.

The charge of pseudoscience is not only inaccurate, it is also pernicious. In effect, it's an attempt to "deplatform" or silence integrated information theory – to deny it deserves serious attention.

That's not only unfair to integrated information theory and the scientific community at large, it also manifests a fundamental lack of faith in science. If the theory is indeed bankrupt, then the ordinary mechanisms of science will demonstrate as much.

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