| Welcome to the Sciworthy summer newsletter! July in the northern hemisphere means long summer days, fireworks, barbecues, and insects. This year it also features a natural light show in the form of the Delta Aquariids meteor shower in the southern hemisphere and southern US. In this issue we explain this stunning celestial event and summarize recent summer-themed science articles on the health benefits of vitamin D, improving ice cream with nanoparticles, and more. |
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Fire in the Sky As the Earth moves along its orbit around the Sun we once again collide with a debris cloud, forming a brilliant display of lights in the night sky.
by Ben Pauley |
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Meteor showers are striking astronomical phenomena. Visible to the naked eye, they are often what people think of when they imagine stargazing: beautiful blue and white streaks seemingly falling away from the rest of the stars. From July 18 to August 21, the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower will be visible in the night sky from the southern hemisphere up to the southern United States.
Meteor showers are different from passing comets, though they share some similarities. Made of ice, dust, and rock, comets are either material left over from when the planets formed or objects captured from outside the solar system. While planets and many asteroids orbit the Sun in almost perfect circles, some comets briefly pass close to the Sun and then spend decades or centuries at the edges of the solar system before returning, in an elliptical orbit. Other comets pass near the Sun only once before sling-shotting out into deep space forever, in a hyperbolic orbit. Sunlight vaporizes chunks of comets as they approach, forming brightly-colored tails.
Meteor showers are what’s left of passing comets. They form when previously vaporized or dislodged bits of comets coalesce, creating pockets of space debris that Earth passes through at regular intervals. If these chunks are big enough when they collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they again vaporize, producing a light display with the characteristic streaking tail pattern.
To see the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower, look to the constellation Aquarius from sunset until 2 a.m. The best time to see it is on nights when the Moon is faint or absent during the shower's predicted peak, roughly July 30 through August 7. |
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 | | Vitamin D helps your immune system fight cancer. Scientists have shown that vitamin D, also known as the “sunshine vitamin,” helps our bodies absorb calcium and phosphorus for strong bones, and supports our immune system as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant. Recent researchers have found it might also help our bodies fight cancer. Researchers from the UK showed that mice given extra vitamin D resisted some types of cancer and responded better to immunotherapy treatments than mice without it. They found that vitamin D enhanced the mice's immune response by altering their microbiomes to include more of a specific type of bacteria. They showed that humans with higher levels of vitamin D-induced genes were also more resistant to cancer. They suggested future scientists test whether the vitamin D-based immune response in humans is similarly linked to the microbiome. |
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 | Ice cream gets a boost from nanotechnology. Researchers are increasingly using nanomaterials in industries spanning healthcare to environmental protection. Nanomaterials are tiny particles about the size of a single strand of human DNA. They have unique physical and chemical characteristics due to their small size and high surface-to-volume ratio. Food scientists at the University of Tehran recently reviewed how nanoparticles can be incorporated into dairy products like ice cream. They suggested that nano-sized dairy particles can make ice cream tastier, creamier and more nutritious. Antimicrobial nanoparticles could even increase its shelf life. They concluded nanotechnology is a promising approach for improving ice cream, but cautioned that more research on safety and quality is needed to unlock its full potential. |
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 | | Beaches are feeling the squeeze. Sandy shores and other coastal ecosystems are increasingly squeezed between rising sea levels and human development. Researchers from the Netherlands analyzed the distance between coastlines and natural and man-made barriers in transects spanning more than 200,000 beaches worldwide. They estimated that up to 30% of structure-free coastal zones could be lost by 2100 due to rising sea levels. But they also found that incorporating nature reserves along shorelines could relieve this squeeze by up to 7 times. |
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 | Tracking insects with AI. Global biodiversity is on the decline, but biologists need more effective ways of monitoring species to determine by how much. Insect populations are notoriously difficult to monitor because they’re so abundant and diverse. For this reason, most insect biodiversity data comes from groups that are easy to study, like butterflies and bees. To expand this dataset, an international team of scientists developed a new automated camera system to monitor nocturnal insects. Their system attracts moths with a light, photographs them with a camera, and uses AI to analyse the images and classify the species. It's also solar-powered, so they estimated it would work for up to 10 years at a time. They suggested researchers prioritize long-term, fully automated systems like this to determine how insect populations are responding to climate change, pollution, and other habitat threats. |
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