| 6 March 2025 | | Today’s Future News examines the ecological intel gained from facing animal-mounted cameras backwards. But first, catch up on the latest science news, including whiffs of the Earth’s ancient atmosphere captured in rocks and a potential oral vaccine for the virus that causes ‘stomach flu.’ | |
|
|
| Neuroscience | Science Advances | | Using your math and reading skills can keep you from losing them | Despite the idea that people get wiser with age, many studies suggest that cognitive skills start to drop off relatively early in our adult lives. So many, in fact, that you might think we’re all destined to lose our smarts when we get older. But according to new research, regular use of math and reading skills can help us stay sharp.
The idea that age-related cognitive decline is inevitable comes from previous studies, which relied on cross-sectional data from different groups of adults. For this new study, scientists followed a group of people over time instead, analyzing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which collected data on language and math skills in more than 5000 German people aged 16 to 65, retesting a large number of them 3.5 years later. Participants were also asked how frequently they performed activities such as reading emails or calculating budgets. They determined that, on average, math and reading skills tended to increase into a person’s forties before eventually dropping—with math skills declining more sharply for women compared with men. People who used these skills more regularly at work or home, however, didn’t appear to lose them as they aged. For white-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average skill usage, skill levels actually increased consistently beyond their forties before starting to plateau.
“Overall,” the researchers write, “our results are not consistent with a view that a natural law dictates an inevitable decline in these skills with age.” They add that, if people want to stay sharp as they age, then they need to keep flexing those cognitive muscles—emphasizing the importance of “lifelong learning.” | | |
|
|
| Earth Science | News from Science | | Rare rocks capture Earth’s ancient atmosphere |  | | Tiny inclusions of gas and fluid in agate minerals capture ancient atmosphere. Fanny Cattani | The air above has always reflected the planet below, its composition capturing bouts of gassy release spurred by grinding continents, volcanic eruptions, and microbial release. But the atmosphere is an ephemeral thing; direct samples preserved in ice go back only 6 million years—less than 0.2% of the Earth’s history. For all the time before, gauging the air relied on proxies from metals and minerals trapped in ancient rock.
But researchers are now refining ways to directly sample ancient gases trapped as microscopic inclusions in salts, veins of quartz, and crystallized magma. From samples that stretch back more than 3 billion years, they’re extracting direct records of noble gases, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.
Much of this work is still preliminary, but it is already verifying some assumptions about atmospheric history—and upending others. One group, for example, has recently found direct evidence that oxygen levels were high enough to support animal respiration long before the first animals appeared. Others are using noble gases extracted from impact craters to track gaps in Earth history, identifying when plate tectonics slowed down.
All in all, there’s a lot to learn from a bit of salt, as one researcher said. “I don’t think anybody expected to get pristine samples of air from these reservoirs.” | | |
|
|
| Drug development | Science Translational MEdicine | | A pill to prevent stomach flu passes initial clinical test | No one wants to catch norovirus. The notorious ‘stomach bug’ is the leading cause of foodborne illness worldwide, sickening some 685 million people every year; it can even be life-threatening, especially to children and the elderly. Unfortunately, if it’s around, it’s almost impossible to avoid. The virus is incredibly contagious and can hang around on surfaces for up to two weeks. Because of this, researchers have long sought a norovirus vaccine. Now, a clinical trial raises hope that an easy-to-take pill could protect the people most at risk from the stomach-turning disease.
In a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in people 55 to 80 years old, an oral vaccine called VXA-G1.1-NN induced a robust anti-norovirus immune response—as measured by antibody production in the nose, mouth, and gut—for up to 210 days. It’s particularly notable that the vaccine coaxed the immune systems of the oldest participants to respond well, the researchers note, as immune responses tend to decline with age. For comparison, the nasal annual flu vaccine is 70-90% effective in kids and young adults, but only 30-50% effective in people over 65.
Just as importantly, there were no red flags in terms of safety. This finding, plus the encouraging antibody levels seen in the participants—and the fact that the vaccine itself is shelf-stable and easy for most people to take—“underscores its potential for widespread use and rapid deployment during norovirus outbreaks,” the team writes. Though further tests are needed, they add, “these clinical results are an important step forward in the development of a mucosal norovirus vaccine.” | | |
|
|
 | | | In vivo biology of single cells from complex tissues | | This Science Webinar explores how formaldehyde fixation and CRISPR screening enables high-resolution single-cell RNA sequencing while maintaining cellular integrity, allowing researchers to investigate the effects of gene perturbations across entire organs. | |
|
|
|
| | | Future News |  | | This shearwater excretes like clockwork—while flying! © 林孫鋒 (Lin Sun Fong) via INATURALIST | CC BY-SA | | When you guano know what birds do at sea | In recent years, animal-mounted cameras have provided all kinds of insights into the secret lives of animals and their habitats. Cameras mounted on cats, for instance, documented their surprising affection for their human caretakers. PenguCams revealed what penguins actually eat and allowed researchers to calculate the animals’ estimated energetic intake. Cameras on sea lions even let scientists better map the seabed.
One thing all these cameras have in common is they are mounted and positioned to give people an animal’s eye view. But researchers interested in the behavior of seabirds took a different tack. They turned the cameras around to film behind the animals. So instead of capturing their meals on the way in, they caught them on the way out.
“Excretion is a fundamental behavior of marine predators that occurs anywhere in the ocean, but its importance has remained largely overlooked ,” the team writes in a preprint currently under review. For seabirds in particular, understanding when and where they drop their guano can inform not only our understanding of their behavior but also their impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems. After all, bird guano is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, so its placement can have important implications for the availability of these nutrients. And with increasing concerns about avian flu, mapping seabird excretion could inform surveillance and epidemiological modeling efforts.
Intriguingly, when the researchers filmed the rear ends of streaked shearwaters, they discovered that the birds almost always went on the go—194 of 195 excretion events were mid-flight. Furthermore, they occurred with surprising regularity. Although individual birds had their own frequencies, their excretions occurred at precise intervals regardless of when they ate. One bird, for example, went every 40 minutes almost exactly to the minute. Based on calculations from the footage, the team estimates the animals dump about 5% of their body weight every hour through their guano (which contains both their liquid and solid waste)
Taken together, the team says those details suggest that “excretion plays a critical role in maintaining a lighter body mass during flight,” helping the birds conserve their energy overall. Though, it’s possible that expelling waste while flying has other advantages, such as maintaining better hygiene (no one wants to wallow in their own excrement). Also, the team points out, guano expelled while resting on the sea surface could act as a chemical signal to underwater predators.
More broadly, the research demonstrates the potential utility of animal-mounted cameras for understanding all sorts of behaviors, they write—even when the views they capture aren’t so pretty. | |
| |
|
| Creeps lose citations | | Scholars accused of sexual misconduct see a drop in their citations in the years after public allegations. Interestingly, those accused of scientific misconduct do not see the same penalty—even though researchers say they’d be more likely to withhold citations from this group than those facing harassment allegations. | | PLOS ONE Paper | Read more at News from Science | |
|
|
| Old bones | | Some 1.5 million years ago, human ancestors made tools out of bone, demonstrating that they had the ability to apply what they knew about stonework to a new material. “The most exciting aspect is that [these early hominins] systematically produced standardized bone tools long before it was previously thought,” one archaeologist said. | | Nature Paper | Read more at News from Science | |
|
|
| In their courts | | A U.S. judge has blocked NIH’s plan to restrict overhead costs to 15%, saying that the agency likely violated federal law in abruptly withdrawing the funding. Separately, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling requiring the government to release nearly $2 billion in foreign aid. | | Read about the court actions on Overhead Payments and the Foreign Aid Freeze | |
|
|
| Let Trump teach us a lesson … This whole attitude of begging, crying, and throwing hands up needs to stop.
—Christian Happi, Redeemer’s University | | ScienceInsider | 4 March 2025 | Abdullahi Tsanni | | African researchers are seeing the halting of U.S. foreign aid as a “wake-up call” for self-reliance. | |
| |
|
|
|
Comments
Post a Comment
Welcome to "Hawaii Science Journal". Here you'll find the latest stories from science, technology, medicine, and the environment.