News at a glance: A Mars rover’s trek, a collider’s restart, and a funder’s apology
Rover reaches Mars river delta
NASA’s Perseverance rover last week reached the primary target of its mission, an ancient river delta, a fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediments, frozen in time billions of years ago, that spills from the rim of Jezero crater to its floor. Operators plan to comb the fossilized delta sediments for rocks that could contain organic molecules indicative of past martian life. The $2.7 billion rover landed on Mars in February 2021, studying volcanic rocks on the crater floor for a year before trundling to the delta, which ends in a cliff face at the crater’s rim. The rover’s team plans to drill and collect approximately 30 rock samples, which are expected to be returned to Earth in future missions that NASA and the European Space Agency plan to launch in 2028.
Atom smasher powers up again
The world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, started up last week after more than 3 years of upgrades. The 27-kilometer-long accelerator famously blasted out the long-sought Higgs boson in 2012, and it last took data in December 2018. Since then, technicians have improved the accelerators that feed protons into countercirculating beams and the four large detectors that study the resulting proton collisions. For the next few months, researchers will work out the bugs and slowly increase the beams’ energy. Data recording—and the search for new and unexpected particles—should begin this summer. In 2025, the LHC will shut down for an even more extensive upgrade to greatly increase the intensity of its beams, which would increase the rate of proton collisions.
The reality is that there is a loss of momentum.
- Isaac Adewole
- a physician and consultant for the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, in The New York Times, on data showing the world is falling far short of a goal of vaccinating 70% of adults against COVID-19. Developing countries are more likely to have low rates.
Biden resets environmental rules
Reversing decisions made by former President Donald Trump, the administration of President Joe Biden last week released new guidelines expanding the technical issues that must be assessed in environmental reviews of a wide range of federally funded activities, including major construction projects. Trump had narrowed the scope of the reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). For example, federal agencies were directed to consider only the direct, near-term effects of an activity, meaning they could ignore longer term issues, such as a project’s impact on future climate change. The Biden administration says it plans to release a second set of NEPA guideline revisions that will address other controversial alterations made by Trump, including tight time limits on reviews.
Restore degraded land, U.N. urges
Reversing global land degradation can help alleviate three big problems—the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity, a U.N. report says. The Global Land Outlook 2, released on 27 April by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, quantifies the toll taken by development, deforestation, agriculture, and other human activities on soil health. If current trends continue, the area of degraded land will equal the size of South America and global crop and ecosystem productivity will drop as much as 14% by 2050. Sub-Saharan Africa will fare the worst. But through steps such as planting trees and stabilizing erosion on 5 billion hectares, countries can slow this decline, increase crop yields, and lock up more atmospheric carbon in soils. Already more than 100 nations have pledged to restore 1 billion hectares by 2030. Redirecting money spent on fossil fuel and farming subsidies can help pay for restoration, the report says. It says restoration means not just creating protected wildlands, but also taking active steps to enable land to support farming, tree plantations, and grazing.
Fermilab neutrino source gets green light for construction
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) last week won final approval to build a new superconducting linear accelerator that will generate an intense beam of protons with an energy of 800 million electron volts. Researchers will use that beam to create elusive particles called neutrinos and shoot them 1300 kilometers through Earth at a planned underground detector in South Dakota for high-priority experiments. The new accelerator, the Proton Improvement Plan-II, replaces an older one with half the energy. Workers had already begun to construct buildings for the new machine; last week’s go-ahead from the U.S. Department of Energy lets the lab build the actual accelerator. All told, the project will cost $978 million, not including equipment contributions from other countries totaling roughly $330 million. Completion is expected in 2032.
Asteroid explorer gets 2nd target
Next year, after swinging past Earth and dropping off a cargo of rocks it collected from the asteroid Bennu, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will embark on a new mission to the asteroid Apophis, the agency said this week. In 2029, the 300-meter-wide Apophis will zip past Earth in the closest flyby of a large asteroid in modern records; at one-tenth the distance to the Moon, it will be visible to the naked eye. Afterward, the renamed OSIRIS-Apex mission will visit and collect data from the asteroid for 18 months. Although the spacecraft cannot collect any more rocks, it will gauge how Apophis’s orbit was perturbed by Earth’s gravity and conduct an approach maneuver to scorch off the asteroid’s surface layer, exposing hidden layers below.
Most in U.S. show signs of infection
Nearly three in five U.S. residents had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by February, a sign of the speed with which the highly contagious Omicron variant surged, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week. Starting in September 2021, researchers analyzed tens of thousands of blood samples collected each month, measuring antibodies that are generated by exposure to the virus but not by the vaccines available in the United States. From December 2021 to February, as Omicron took off, the portion of samples with the antibodies rose from 34% to 58% across all age groups. In children and adolescents, the least vaccinated age groups, the proportion rose from 45% to 75%, the researchers reported on 26 April in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Other studies have shown that COVID-19 vaccines protect most recipients against severe illness, but effectiveness against infection, especially by Omicron, wanes.
Vikings sold ivory in Ukraine
Vikings shipped walrus ivory from Greenland far away to Kyiv, according to new analyses of ancient walrus skulls and ivory figurines discovered in the Ukrainian capital. The 4000-kilometer trade route is much longer than was thought based on previous studies, which suggested eastern users of the coveted material sourced it only from walruses caught in the Russian arctic. After discovering finished ivory artifacts and discarded walrus skull fragments in a Kyiv layer dating to the 1100s C.E., an international team used DNA and chemical analyses to link the material to a genetic group of walruses found only in the western Atlantic Ocean. Vikings appear to have overhunted the Greenlandic walruses, and the authors say consumer demand in Eastern Europe may have been responsible, according to the study, published this month in the Proceedings of Royal Society B. A decline in harvest could also help explain why Norse settlers abandoned Greenland in the 1300s.
Avoidable COVID-19 deaths tallied
About 234,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19 since June 2021 could have been prevented if all eligible adults had received the primary series of vaccinations, an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated. The toll represents 60% of all adult COVID-19 deaths since then and one-quarter of the nearly 1 million U.S. deaths from COVID-19 since 2020.
Shelled, shot, bombed
This partial list of Ukrainian researchers killed, based on Science reporting, shows the war’s toll on civilians.
| NAME | SPECIALTY | CAUSE OF DEATH |
|---|---|---|
| Oleksandr Korsun | Chemistry | Shelling |
| Oleg Amosov | Economics | Shelling |
| Yulia Zdanovska | Math | Shelling |
| Yevhen Khrykov | Education research | Shot |
| Vasyl Kladko | Physics | Shot |
| Andriy Kravchenko | Chemistry | Land mine |
Ukraine’s fallen include scientists
As the war in Ukraine grinds into a third month, deaths are mounting—and scholars young and old are among the casualties. Russian soldiers have gunned down scientists in cold blood, including Vasyl Kladko, an x-ray crystallographer at the V.E. Lashkaryov Institute of Semiconductor Physics, slain last month in a Kyiv suburb. In Kharkiv, scientists have died in rocket attacks. And in early April, Andriy Kravchenko, a chemist at the Chuiko Institute of Surface Chemistry, died when a land mine shredded his car near Kyiv. A few days earlier, his team delivered to a hospital the first batch of something he’d spent years developing for battlefield use: a topical coagulant that stanches bleeding until a doctor can reach an injured soldier. “He dreamed it would appear in the first-aid kit of every Ukrainian soldier,” says Chuiko colleague Mariia Galaburda. “Such a heavy and painful loss.”
Pandemic cut kids’ vax rates
COVID-19 drove down the rate at which U.S. kindergartners received three routine vaccinations during the 2020–21 school year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week. In 47 states, percentages of those receiving the diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis vaccine; the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine; and the varicella (chickenpox) vaccine fell to about 94%, just below the 95% mark considered necessary to maintain populationwide immunity. The agency blamed missed checkups because of the pandemic.
U.K. funder regrets IDing critics
The funding agency UK Research and Innovation last week apologized for encouraging a UKRI-linked analytics firm to report critical comments made by academics—a move researchers said was a threat to their academic freedom. Scholars had tweeted criticisms about the Researchfish software platform, which collects data for UKRI on the impact of its research grants; the platform then told them it had shared its concerns about the tweet with the researchers’ funders. In its apology statement, UKRI said Researchfish had flagged six tweets over 4 years. The agency called its approach “wrong” and promised to stop it. “At no point was this ever intended, or used, to affect current or future grants from UKRI.”
Many reptile species face risk of extinction
Half of turtle and crocodile species are in danger, says an extensive global review of reptiles. Experts evaluated data for 10,196 species in 10 major taxonomic groups of reptiles and assessed their conservation status. Hunting and fishing contributed to the high figure for turtle species, the research team reports this week in Nature. Overall, 18% of reptile species are threatened; the figure rose to 21% when the scientists extrapolated to include data-deficient species. Reptiles are less at risk than amphibians (41%) and mammals (25%) but worse off than birds (14%).
Grim reckoning
In some orders of reptiles, more than 50% of species were deemed threatened, grouped in one of three categories of risk used by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. (Some orders are not shown.)
Swedish pandemic leader stays put
Anders Tegnell, former chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency who drew controversy over his country’s subdued response to COVID-19, will remain with the agency after a reported new position consulting for the World Health Organization on pandemic vaccinations didn’t materialize. “An agreement could not be reached,” the Swedish agency said last week, adding that Tegnell will now work on international issues.
Prenatal tests get FDA warning
Screening evaluations that analyze blood from pregnant people to look for abnormalities in fetal DNA can be unreliable, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned last week. The tests, marketed in the United States by several companies, are less invasive than diagnostic tests that use amniotic fluid or placenta samples, which in rare cases cause miscarriage. But the blood tests have often incorrectly indicated rare genetic conditions, such as those caused by small missing pieces of chromosomes, FDA said on 19 April. It noted, for example, that follow-up tests fail to confirm seven of 10 positive results for a rare genetic condition called DiGeorge syndrome. Nevertheless, some parents have chosen to end pregnancies based on these results alone, it said. FDA doesn’t regulate the tests, and most makers of microdeletion tests don’t publicize usage, The New York Times reported in January. FDA recommends patients consult a health care provider before deciding to take prenatal blood tests and to confirm any positive result with further tests.
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