The creamy sticks of color seen here are just the latest in a long history of lipsticks—historical records suggest that humans have been artificially coloring their lips since 4,000 B.C. Photo by Flickr user ookikioo

Lipstick has seen a fair share of funky ingredients in its long history of more than 6,000 years, from seaweed and beetles to modern synthetic chemicals and deer fat. In recent years, traces of lead have been found in numerous brands of the popular handbag staple, prompting some manufacturers to go the organic route. This week, more dangerous substances joined the roster.

Researchers at Berkeley’s School of Public Health at the University of California tested 32 different types of lipstick and lip gloss commonly found in the brightly lit aisles of grocery and convenience stores. They detected traces of cadmium, chromium, aluminum, manganese and other metals, which are usually found in industrial workplaces, including make-up factories. The report, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, indicated that some of these metals reached potentially health-hazardous levels.

Lipstick is usually ingested little by little as wearers lick or bite their lips throughout the day. On average, the study found, lipstick-clad women consume 24 milligrams of the stuff a day. Those who reapply several times a day take in 87 milligrams.

The researchers estimated risk by comparing consumers’ daily intake of these metals through lip makeup with health guidelines. They report that an average use of some lipsticks and lip glosses results in “excessive exposure” to chromium, and frequent use can lead to overexposure to aluminum, cadmium and manganese.

Minor exposure to cadmium, which is used in batteries, can result in flu-like symptoms such as fever, chills and achy muscles. In the worst cases, the metal is linked to cancer, attacking the cardiovascular, respiratory and other systems in the body. Chromium is a carcinogen linked to stomach ulcers and lung cancer, and aluminum can be toxic to the lungs. Long-term exposure to manganese in high doses is associated with problems in the nervous system. There are no safe levels of chromium, and federal labor regulations require industrial workers to limit exposure to the metal in the workplace. We naturally inhale tiny levels of aluminum present in the air, and many FDA-approved antacids contain the metal in safe levels.

Despite the presence of these metals in lipstick, there’s no need to start abandoning lipstick altogether—rather, the authors call for more oversight when it comes to cosmetics, for which there are no industry standards regulating their metal content if produced in the United States. 

After all, cadmium and other metals aren’t an intended ingredient in lipstick—they’re considered a contaminant. They seep into lipstick when the machinery or dyes used to create the product contain the metals themselves. This means trace amounts are not listed on the tiny stickers on lipstick tubes, so there’s no way to know which brands might be contaminated.

Concern about metals in cosmetics came to the forefront of American media in 2007, when an analysis of 33 popular brands of lipstick by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics showed that 61 percent of them contained lead. The report eventually led the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which doesn’t regulate cosmetics, to look into the issue, and what it found wasn’t any better: it found lead in all of the samples tested, with levels four times higher than the earlier study, ranging from 0.09 parts per million to 3.06 parts per million. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no safe level of lead for humans.

So we’ve got cadmium, chromium, aluminum, manganese and lead in our lipstick. What else? Today, most lipstick is made with beeswax, which creates a base for pigments, and castor oil, which gives it a shiny, waxy quality. Beeswax has been the base for lipstick for at least 400 years–England’s Queen Elizabeth I popularized a deep lip rouge derived from beeswax and plants.

Lipstick as we know it appeared in 1884 in Paris, wrapped in silk paper and made from beeswax, castor oil and deer tallow, the solid rendered fat of the animal. At the time, lipstick was often colored using carmine dye. The dye combined aluminum and carminic acid, a chemical produced by cochineals–tiny cacti-dwelling insects–to ward off other insect predators.

That early lipstick wasn’t the first attempt at using insects or to stain women’s mouths. Cleopatra’s recipe for homemade lipstick called for red pigments drawn out from mashed-up beetles and ants.

But really, any natural substance with color was fair game for cosmetics, regardless of its health effects: Historians believe women first starting coloring their lips in ancient Mesopotamia, dotting them with dust from crushed semi-precious jewels—these lovely ancients were eating tiny bits of rocks whenever they licked their lips. Ancient Egyptians used lip color too, mixing seaweed, iodine and bromine mannite, a highly toxic plant-derived chemical that sickened its users.

From mannite to heavy metals, humanity’s quest for painted beauty doesn’t seem to have progressed far from toxic roots. The sacrifices we make for fashion!

Natalie Portman was among the most often-mentioned names of the 2000s, according to a new study, reflecting the fact that true celebrity lasts longer than 15 minutes. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Real TV Films

In 1968, Andy Warhol—already famous in his own right—further added to his celebrity by creating a lasting cliché: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Prescient as Warhol might have been, it seems we haven’t reached that future quite yet, at least according to science. A new study, published today in the American Sociological Review, finds that true fame lasts a good deal longer than 15 minutes. In an analysis of the celebrity journalism nationwide, researchers found that the most famous (and most often-mentioned) celebrities stick around for decades.

To come to the finding, a number of sociologists each spent a multi-year sabbatical meticulously combing the “Stars: They’re Just Like Us” feature of UsMagazine. Several reportedly declined to return to the field of academia, apparently taking their talents to the analytical departments of the glossy magazine industry full-time.

Just kidding! In all seriousness, the sociologists, led by Eran Shor of McGill University and Arnout van de Rijt of Stony Brook University, used an automated search took a random sample of roughly 100,000 names that appeared in the entertainment sections of 2,200 daily American newspapers published between 2004 and 2009. Their sample didn’t include every single name published, but rather a random selection of names published at all different frequencies—so it wouldn’t be useful for telling you who was the most often-mentioned celebrity overall, but would be illustrative of the sorts of trends that famous (and not-so-famous) names go through over time.

The ten most frequently-mentioned names in their sample: Jamie Foxx, Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Tommy Lee Jones, Naomi Watts, Howard Hughes, Phil Spector, John Malkovich, Adrien Brody and Steve Buscemi. All celebrities, they note, were relatively famous before the year 2000, in some cases decades earlier (Howard Hughes rose to fame in the 1920s). All ten names, additionally, are still fairly well-known today.

Overall, 96 percent of the most famous names in the sample (those mentioned more than 100 times over the course of a given year) had already been frequently featured in the news three years earlier, further dispelling the 15 minutes cliché. Furthermore, if a name was mentioned extremely often in its first year of appearing, it stood a greater chance of sticking around for an extended period of time.

There is, however, some truth to 15-minutes idea: Names of lesser fame (those less frequently mentioned to start) exhibit significantly higher amounts of turnover from year to year. The researchers say these names mostly fall into the category of people involved in newsworthy events—such as natural disasters and crimes—rather than people who readers find newsworthy in their own right. As an example, Van de Rijt mentions Chelsey Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who briefly achieved celebrity after successfully executing an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2011, but is now scarcely frequently mentioned in the press.

The list of the most famous names, though, stays relatively similar every year. “The vast majority of coverage goes to names that have already been in the news for several years, and new names rarely penetrate the higher strata of fame,” the researchers write in the study. The bottom of the fame hierarchy is filled with new names annually, but at the top, they write, is “a reshuffling of already familiar names and not rapid replacement of an outgoing cohort by an incoming cohort.”

Apart from the newspaper data, the team also looked at a much smaller sample of celebrity mentions on blogs and TV, and found a similar trend. New media, it seems, follow roughly the same pattern as old outlets—which is why you don’t see much about figures like the “balloon boy” across the web nowadays either.

Frivolous as the work may seem, the researchers say it bears important conclusions about our society. Upward mobility in the celebrity world is extremely scarce. Becoming famous requires some combination of talent and luck that allows a person to break into the elite class of being mentioned over and over by the press. But what is that combination–what makes a person famous? Or is it that the press has created a cycle that allows a person to remain famous, in some cases after his or her career has peaked, or even after his or her death?”

No word yet on whether scientists will someday be able to create a multivariable model to quantify celebrity “fierceness” over time as well.

Dead locusts litter Israel’s Negev desert after being sprayed with pesticide on Wednesday. Photo: Rachel Nuwer

Locusts have plagued farmers for millennia. According to the Book of Exodus, around 1400 B.C. the Egyptians experienced an exceptionally unfortunate encounter with these ravenous pests when they struck as the eighth Biblical plague. As Exodus describes, “They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.”

Locusts attacks still occur today, as farmers in Sudan and Egypt well know. Now, farmers in Israel can also join this unfortunate group. Earlier today, a swarm of locusts arrived in Israel from Egypt, just in time for the Jewish Passover holiday which commemorates Jews’ escape from Egyptian slavery following the ten Biblical plagues. “The correlation with the Bible is interesting in terms of timing, since the eighth plague happened sometime before the Exodus,” said Hendrik Bruins, a researcher in the Department of Man in the Desert at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. “Now we need to wait for the plague of darkness,” he joked.

With the help of the Lord, Moses delivers a plague of locusts upon the Egyptians, seen in the photo of a Bible page above. Photo via New York Public Library, Renaissance and medieval manuscripts collection

While the timing is uncanny, researchers point out that–at least in this case–locust plagues are a normal ecological phenomenon rather than a form of divine punishment. “Hate to break it to you, but I don’t think there’s any religious significance at all to insects in the desert, even a lot of them, and even if it seems reminiscent of a certain Biblically described incident,” said Jeremy Benstein, deputy director of the Heschel Center for Sustainability in Tel Aviv.

In this region of the world, locusts swarm every 10 to 15 years. No one knows why they stick to that particular cycle, and predicting the phenomena remains challenging for researchers. In this case, an unusually rainy winter led to excessive vegetation, supporting a boom in locust populations along the Egyptian-Sudanese border. As in past swarms, once the insect population devours all of the local vegetation, the hungry herbivores take flight in search of new feeding grounds. Locusts–which is just a term for the 10 to 15 species of grasshoppers that swarm–can travel over 90 miles in a single day, carried by the wind. In the plagues of 1987 and 1988 (PDF)–a notoriously bad period for locusts–some of the befuddled insects even managed to wash up on Caribbean shores after an epic flight from West Africa.

When grasshoppers switch from a sedentary, solo lifestyle to a swarming lifestyle, they undergo a series of physical, behavioral and neurological changes. According to Amir Ayali, chair of the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, this shift is one of the most extreme cases of behavioral plasticity found in nature. Before swarming, locusts morph from their normal tan or green coloring to a bright black, yellow or red exoskeleton. Females begin laying eggs in unison  which then hatch in synch and fuel the swarm. In this way, a collection of 1 million insects can increase by orders of magnitude to 1 billion in a matter of months.

From there, they take flight, though the exact trigger remains unknown. Labs in Israel and beyond are working on understanding the mathematics of locust swarming and the neurological shifts behind the behaviors that make swarming possible. ”If we could identify some key factors that are responsible for this change, we could maybe find an antidote or something that could prevent the factors that transform innocent grasshoppers from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll,” Ayali said. “We’re revealing the secrets one by one, but there’s still so much more to find out.”

A swarm of locusts will consume any green vegetation in its path–even toxic plants–and can decimate a farmer’s field almost as soon as it descends. In one day, the mass of insects can munch its way through the equivalent amount of food as 15 million people consume in the same time period, with billions of insects covering an area up to the size of Cairo, Africa’s largest city. As such, at their worst locust swarms can impact some 20 percent of the planet’s human population through both direct and indirect damages they cause. In North Africa, the last so-called mega-swarm invaded in 2004, while this current swarm consists of a measly 30 to 120 million insects. 

Estimating the costs exacted by locusts swarms remains a challenge. While locust swarms reportedly cause more monetary damage than any other pest, it’s hard to put an exact figure on the problem. Totaling the true crost depends on the size of the swarm and where the winds carry it. To be as accurate as possible, costs of pesticides, food provided to local populations in lieu of wrecked crops, monitoring costs and other indirect effects must be taken into account. No one has yet estimated the cost of this current swarm, though the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) allots $10 million per year solely to maintain and expand current monitoring operations.

Locusts covering a bush during the 2004 swarm near the Red Sea cost in Israel. Photo: Amir Ayali

This morning, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture sprayed pesticides on an area of around 1,000 hectares near the Egyptian border. To quell a plague of locusts, pest managers have to hit the insects while they’re still settled on the ground for the night and before they take flight at dawn. So far, pesticide spraying is the only option for defeating the bugs, but this exacts environmental tolls. Other invertebrates, some of them beneficial, will also shrivel under the pesticide’s deadly effects, and there’s a chance that birds and other insectivores may eat the poisoned insect corpses and become ill themselves. Researchers are working on ways to develop fungus or viruses that specifically attack locusts, but many of those efforts are still in initial investigative stages. However, the company Green Muscle developed a commercially available fungus that affects only locusts.

Even better, however, would be a way to stop a swarm from taking flight from the very beginning. But this requires constant monitoring of locust-prone areas in remote corners of the desert, which is not always possible. And since the insects typically originate from Egypt or Sudan, politics sometimes get in the way of quashing the swarm before it takes flight. “We really want to find them before they swarm, as wingless nymphs on the ground,” Ayali said. “Once you miss that window, your chances of combating them are poor and you’re obliged to spray around like crazy and hope you catch them on the ground.”

In this case, Egypt and Israel reportedly did not manage to coordinate locust-fighting efforts to the best of their abilities. “If you ask me, this is a trans-boundary story,” said Alon Tal, a professor of public policy at Ben-Gurion University. “This is not a significant enemy–with an arial approach you can nip locusts in the bud–but the Egyptian government didn’t take advantage of the fact that they have quite a sophisticated air force and scientific community just to the north.”

Ayali agrees that the situation could have been handled better. He also sees locusts as a chance to foster regional collaboration. Birders and ornithologists from Israel, Jordan and Palestine often cooperate in monitoring migratory avian species, for example, so theoretically locusts could likewise foster efforts. “Maybe scientists should work to bridge the gaps in the region,” Ayali said. “We could take the chance of this little locust plague and together make sure we’re better prepared for the next.”

For now, the Israelis have smote the swarm, but Keith Cressman, a senior locust forecasting office at the FAO’s office in Rome warns that there is still a moderate risk that a few more small populations of young adults may be hiding out in the desert. This means new swarms could potentially form later this week in northeast Egypt and Israel’s Negev region. His organization warned Israel, Egypt and Jordan this morning of the threat, and Jordan mobilized its own locust team, just in case.

For those who do come across the insects (but only the non-pesticide covered ones!), Israeli chefs suggest trying them out for taste. Locusts, it turns out, are the only insects that are kosher to eat. According to the news organization Haaretz, they taste like “tiny chicken wings,” though they make an equally mean stew. “You could actually run out very early before they started spraying and collect your breakfast,” Ayali said. “I’m told they’re very tasty fried in a skillet, but I’ve never tried them myself.”

A swarm of locusts descends upon Israel. Photo by Amir Ayali

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Footage from Brazil’s “spider rain.” Photo: TV45000

The Northeast may be prone to blizzards this time of year, but in Brazil it’s raining spiders. In a video that’s covered the Internet like an immense web, a local photographer captures images of thousands of spiders shimmying up and down silk threads attached to telephone pole wires. The footage gives the distinct impression of a shower–or perhaps light snow–of spiders sprinkling down on the shocked residents below.

Erick Reis, a 20-year-old web designer in Santo Antonio da Platina, a town about 250 miles west of Sao Paulo, captured the striking video that has since accumulated more than 2 million YouTube views over the course of the week.  “I was shooting an engagement party for some friends of mine and I saw the spiders when I was leaving, now in the late afternoon,” he explained to TV450000, which posted the video. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

According to biologist Marta Fischer of the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana, however, the phenomenon is not so strange. ”This type of spider is known to be quite social,” she said. “They are usually in trees during the day and in the late afternoon and early evening construct sort of giant sheets of webs, in order to trap insects.”

Scientists have described around 40,000 species of spiders around the world, but only a handful of them are social. These 23 species are scattered around the world and sometimes swarm, like ants or bees. Females often outnumber males 10 to 1 in colonies that can exceed 50,000 individuals.

Around Sao Paulo and its neighboring cities, she said, it’s not an unusual site to see a sky speckled by spiders. The species, Anelosimus eximius, can be found from Panama to Argentina and lives in colonies sometimes comprised of thousands of individuals. Each spider is around the size of a pencil eraser. As Examiner reports, the species’ webs can stretch from the ground up to tree canopies or human constructions 65 feet high.

If strong winds come along, the web may detach from its anchors, carrying the spiders and their ruined home to new sites where they appear to “rain down.” Catching rides on the wind–en mass–was likely what happened in Santo Antonio da Platina. While the humans gawked below, the flustered spiders were simply trying to pull themselves together after an unexpected journey from some forest or park.

Before North American readers breathe a sigh of relief that this isn’t happening a bit closer to home, however, it’s worth noting that similar colonies live in Texas. In Lake Tawakoni State Park, just east of Dallas, Guatemalan long-jawed spiders construct enormous webs covering up to 600 foot stretches. The spiders build the huge webs in less than two weeks. Researchers think the spiders achieve such sudden engineering feats thanks to their “remarkable reproductive capabilities and ability to disperse by ballooning,” according to A Field Guide of Scorpions and Spiders of Texas.

So far, Dallas residents haven’t reported massive sheets of webs and their arachnid residents “ballooning” into backyards. But, as witnessed by residents of Santo Antonio da Platina,  stranger things have happened. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Next time you’re reading about a scientific finding and feeling a bit skeptical, you may want to take a look at the study’s authors. One simple trick could give you a hint on whether the work is fraudulent or not: check whether those authors are male or female.

According to a study published yesterday in mBio, men are significantly more likely to commit scientific misconduct—whether fabrication, falsification or plagiarism—than women. Using data from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, this study’s authors (a group that includes two men and one women but we’re still trusting, for now) found that out of 215 life science researchers who’ve been caught misbehaving since 1994, 65 percent were male, a fraction that outweighs their overall presence in the field.

“A variety of biological, social and cultural explanations have been proposed for these differences,” said lead author Ferric Fang of the University of Washington. “But we can’t really say which of these apply to the specific problem of research misconduct.”

Fang first became interested in the topic of misconduct in 2010, when he discovered that a single researcher had published six fraudulent studies in Infection and Immunity, the journal of which he is editor-in-chief. Afterward, he teamed up with Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to begin systematically studying the issue of fraud. They’ve since found that the majority of retracted papers are due to fraud and have argued that the intensely competitive nature of academic researcher engenders abuses.

For this study, they worked with Joan Bennett of Rutgers to break down fraud in terms of gender, as well as the time in a scientist’s career when fraud is most likely. They found that men are not only more likely to lie about their findings but are disproportionately more likely to lie (as compared to women) as they ascend from student to post-doctoral researcher to senior faculty.

While the percentage of those who engage in misconduct is disproportionately male at all levels, the trend is even more extreme at the senior faculty level. Image via Fang et. al.

Of the 215 scientists found guilty, 32 percent were in faculty positions, compared to just 16 percent who were students and 25 perecent who were post-doctoral fellows. It’s often assumed that young trainees are most likely to lie, given the difficulty of climbing the academic pyramid, but this idea doesn’t jive with the actual data.

“Those numbers are very lopsided when you look at faculty. You can imagine people would take these risks when people are going up the ladder,” said Casadevall, “but once they’ve made it to the rank of ‘faculty,’ presumably the incentive to get ahead would be outweighed by the risk of losing status and employment.”

Apparently, though, rising to the status of faculty only increases the pressure to produce useful research and the temptation to engage in fraud. Another (unwelcome) possibility is that those who commit fraud are more likely to reach senior faculty positions in the first place, and many of them just get exposed later on in their careers.

Whichever the explanation, it’s clear that men do commit fraud more often than women—a finding that shouldn’t really be so surprising, since men are more likely to indulge in all sorts of wrongdoing. This trend also makes the fact that women face a systemic bias in breaking into science all the more frustrating.

Jupiter, which is now close to the Moon in the night sky, will be less than a finger’s width from the Moon tonight.

Over the weekend, the Sun moved into the constellation Aquarius, blocking it from view in the night sky. Although the “Age of Aquarius” of popular culture is far off, tonight some Western Hemisphere observers will get a little bit of astronomical free love as the Jupiter–the second brightest planet in the night sky (the brightest being Venus)–kisses the Moon.

To sky watchers in most of North America, the planet and the Moon will flirt: Jupiter will be less than a finger’s width from the waxing Gibbous Moon. The time of their closest approach varies by location–observers on the East coast will see it at around 11:30 p.m. Central time stargazers should look up at around 10:00 p.m., while those in Mountain time will see Jupiter’s nearest approach to the Moon at about 8:30 p.m. Pacific time observers will catch their best view early in the evening, at roughly 7:00 p.m.  The close approach can be best seen with a wide-field telescope at low magnifications (40x or lower) or binoculars, but can even be viewed with the naked eye.

From much of South America, the planet will appear touch the Moon; in some regions, the Moon will completely hide Jupiter from view. This game of hide-and-go-seek, termed occultation, will cause Jupiter to disappear and reappear from the skies over much of central South America. However, when viewed from much of the east coast of Brazil and Uruguay, the Moon will set before Jupiter reemerges.

In some parts of South America, shaded above, the Moon will hide Jupiter from view. Observers in the oval region will see Jupiter disappear, but will not see its reappearance, as the Moon will set before the planet reemerges.

For the past few days, Jupiter has been close to the Moon at sunset, but today, careful observers may even be able to spot Jupiter in the late afternoon, before the Sun sets.  “First locate the Moon medium-high in the east; then look a few Moon-widths left or lower left of the Moon for Jupiter,” explained Tony Flanders,  associate editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. “It should be easy to spot with binoculars if the air is clear,” he said in a statement.

Those with telescopes can even see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot between 9:00 p.m. and 10:40 p.m. EST today. In addition, Jupiter’s moon Europa will pass in front of Jupiter between 8:13 and 10:37 p.m. EST, although the moon’s shadow–which crosses Jupiter from 10:22 p.m. to 12:46 a.m. will be easier to spot. Have fun planet-watching!

Invented by N. Joseph Woodand, the barcode revolutionized global commerce. Woodand died December 9. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Today as the year ends, several scientists, innovators and scientific advocates pass into memory. From the inventor of the barcode to the first human to perform an organ transplant, their lives and their work helped to shape our culture, modern way of life and place in human history.

Space Sciences: 2012 saw the passing of a few key figureheads of space exploration, as mentioned in a previous post. In addition, Bernard Lovell, a physicist and astronomer who founded Britain’s Jodrell Bank Observatory of radio telescopes, died August 6. The telescopes he helped build were the first to identify quasars, and one was the only telescope in the western hemisphere capable of tracking Sputnik–the first artificial satellite–after it was launched by the Soviets in 1957. In 1960, his telescope became the first to transmit a command to a deep space probe–Pioneer V–22 million miles away, directing it to separate from its carrier rocket.

Earth and Environmental Sciences: F. Sherwood Rowland, winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1995, died March 10. Sherwood and colleagues warned in a landmark 1974 Nature paper that chlorofluorocarbons–CFCs, a chemical found in refrigerants and aerosol spray cans–were destroying the ozone layer at alarming rates. The ozone layer protects life from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays which damage tissues and cause skin cancer in humans; without this layer, life couldn’t exist. His discovery and his efforts to draw public attention to the ozone layer’s destruction  helped pave the way for the Montreal Protocol, which in 1987 was adopted by the world community to phase out CFC production.

Barry Commoner, labeled as the “Paul Revere of ecology’ by Time magazine in 1970, passed away September 30. Commoner, a biologist, helped to make saving the planet a political cause by showing that the post-World-War-II technological boom had environmental consequences–he documented the global effects of radioactive fallout and spoke against pollutants released by the petrochemical and nuclear power industries–and he argued that the public had a right to know about the use and extent of industrial pollutants.

Medicine: On July 24, Robert Ledley, a radiologist who invented the CT scanner–technology that produces cross sectional images of the human body–died from Alzheimer’s disease. The technology revolutionized how physicians treat cancer–before this invention, health professionals used exploratory surgery to search for cancerous masses. Joseph E. Murray, the doctor who performed the first successful human organ transplant in 1954 (PDF) when he removed a kidney from one twin and placed it in the other ailing twin, died on June 28. He won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1990. Also dead this year is William House, who invented the cochlear implant–a device that helps restore hearing to the profoundly deaf. He died on December 7.

On Feburary 20, Renalto Pulbecco died; Pulbecco shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 1975 for his work on how certain viruses altered DNA and caused cancer cells to spread at accelerated rates. This finding provided the first concrete evidence that cancer growth is tied to genetic mutations. Another Nobel prize winner to pass away this year was Andrew Huxley, who helped to unravel the mechanism behind how nerve impulses control muscle action. Huxley died on May 30. Joining the list of deceased Nobel laureates is William S. Knowles, who died June 13. Knowles helped devise a mechanism that allowed researchers to separate medicinal compounds from their toxic mirror images (same composition, different chemical orientations); his work won him the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2001.

Technology: Stanford R. Ovchinsky, who died on October 17, invented the rechargeable nickel-metal hydride battery. He also played a role in the development of solar panels, rewritable CDs, and flat panel displays. December 9 saw the death of N. Joseph Woodand, the co-inventor of the barcode now ubiquitous in global commerce. Woodand drew inspiration for the think and thin lines of his product identifiers from Morse code, which he learned as a Boy Scout.

Paleoanthropology: For upwards of 50 years, Phillip Tobias led excavations in South Africa that helped identify extinct species of human ancestors. Tobias, who discovered more than a third of the world’s early hominid fossils, died on June 7. One of his benchmark finds was an extraordinarily complete 2.2-million-year-old fossil skeleton, nicknamed “Little Foot,” uncovered in 1995.

However you celebrate the New Year, may these late greats be in your thoughts!

A new study indicates that marijuana isn’t a painkiller, but a pain distracter: Under the influence of THC, the same levels of pain are simply less bothersome. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Cannabis Training University

One of the chief arguments for the legalization of medicinal marijuana is its usefulness as a pain reliever. For many cancer and AIDS patients across the 19 states where medicinal use of the drug has been legalized, it has proven to be a valuable tool in managing chronic pain—in some cases working for patients for which conventional painkillers are ineffective.

To determine exactly how cannabis relieves pain, a group of Oxford researchers used healthy volunteers, an MRI machine and doses of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Their findings, published today in the journal Pain, suggest something counterintuitive: that the drug doesn’t so much reduce pain as make the same level of pain more bearable.

“Cannabis does not seem to act like a conventional pain medicine,” Michael Lee, an Oxford neuroscientist and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “Brain imaging shows little reduction in the brain regions that code for the sensation of pain, which is what we tend to see with drugs like opiates. Instead, cannabis appears to mainly affect the emotional reaction to pain in a highly variable way.”

As part of the study, Lee and colleagues recruited 12 healthy volunteers who said they’d never used marijuana before and gave each one either a THC tablet or a placebo. Then, to trigger a consistent level of pain, they rubbed a cream on the volunteers’ legs that included 1% capsaicin, the compound found that makes chili peppers spicy; in this case, it caused a burning sensation on the skin.

When the researchers asked each person to report both the intensity and the unpleasantness of the pain—in other words, how much it physically burned and how much this level of burning bothered them—they came to the surprising finding. “We found that with THC, on average people didn’t report any change in the burn, but the pain bothered them less,” Lee said.

This indicates that marijuana doesn’t function as a pain killer as much as a pain distracter: Objectively, levels of pain remain the same for someone under the influence of THC, but it simply bothers the person less. It’s difficult to draw especially broad conclusions from a study with a sample size of just 12 participants, but the results were still surprising.

Each of the participants was also put in an MRI machine—so the researchers could try to pinpoint which areas of the brain seemed to be involved in THC’s pain relieving processes—and the results backed up the theory. Changes in brain activity due to THC involved areas such as the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, believed to be involved in the emotional aspects of pain, rather than other areas implicated in the direct physical perception of it.

Additionally, the researchers found that THC’s effectiveness in reducing the unpleasantness of pain varied greatly between individuals—another characteristic that sets it apart from typical painkillers. For some participants, it made the capsaicin cream much less bothersome, while for others, it had little effect.

The MRI scans supported this observation, too: Those more affected by the THC demonstrated more brain activity connecting their right amydala and a part of the cortex known as the primary sensorimotor area. The researchers say that this finding could perhaps be used as a diagnostic tool, indicating for which patients THC could be most effective as a pain treatment medicine.

2012 was a big year for squid science. Photo Credit: © Brian Skerry, www.brianskerry.com

Despite covering 70 percent of the earth’s surface, the ocean doesn’t often make it into the news. But when it does, it makes quite a splash (so to speak). Here are the top ten ocean stories we couldn’t stop talking about this year, in no particular order. Add your own in the comments!

2012: The Year of the Squid From the giant squid’s giant eyes (the better to see predatory sperm whales, my dear), to the vampire squid’s eerie diet of remains and feces, the strange adaptations and behavior of these cephalopods amazed us all year. Scientists found a deep-sea squid that dismembers its own glowing arm to distract predators and make a daring escape. But fascinating findings weren’t relegated to the deep: at the surface, some squids will rocket themselves above the waves to fly long distances at top speeds.

James Cameron Explores the Deep Sea Filmmaker James Cameron has never shied away from marine movie plots (See: Titanic, The Abyss), but this year he showed he was truly fearless, becoming the first person to hit the deepest point on the seafloor (35,804 feet) in a solo submarine. While he only managed to bring up a single mud sample from the deepest region, he found thriving biodiversity in the other deep-sea areas his expedition explored, including giant versions of organisms found in shallow water.

Small fish, such as these schooling sardines, received well-deserved attention for being an important part of the food chain in 2012. Photo Credit: © Erwin Poliakoff, Flickr

Small Fish Make a Big Impact Forage fish—small, schooling fish that are gulped down by predators—should be left in the ocean for larger fish, marine mammals and birds to eat, according to an April report from the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force. These tiny fish, including anchovies, menhaden, herring and sardines, make up 37% of the world’s catch, but only 10% are consumed by people, with the rest processed into food for farmed fish and livestock. With the evidence mounting that forage fish are worth more as wild fish food, state governments and regional fishery management councils are making moves to protect them from overfishing.

Marine Debris and Plastic Get Around In June, a dock encrusted with barnacles, sea stars, crabs and other sea life washed ashore on the coast of Oregon. It had floated across the Pacific from a Japanese port more than 5,000 miles away—a small piece of the estimated 1.5 million tons of marine debris set afloat by the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. But that’s not the only trash in the sea. Researchers found ten times as much plastic in the “pristine” Antarctic oceans than they expected. Some species are even learning to adapt to the ubiquitous ocean plastic.

These tropical tangs and their coral reef habitat are protected at Hawaii’s Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Photo Credit: Claire Fackler, CINMS, NOAA, Flickr

Taking Measure of Coral Reef Health Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, so large it can be seen from space, is not doing well. An October study found that since 1986, half of the living coral has died because of warming water, predation and storm damage. And it’s not just Australia: the December Healthy Reefs report gave most Mesoamerican reefs a “poor” rating. It’s hard to escape that gloom, but there were glimmers of hope. Some coral species proved able to adapt to warmer water, and changing circulation caused by the warming ocean may create refuges for coral reef habitat.

Shark Finning Slowing Down? The fishing practice of shark finning—slicing off a shark’s fins before tossing it back in the ocean to slowly sink and suffocate—began its own slow death in 2012. A steady stream of U.S. states have banned the sale of shark finsning; the European Union will now require fisherman to land sharks with their fins on; four shark sanctuaries were created in American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Kosrae and French Polynesia; and, in July, China announced that official banquets would be prohibited from serving shark fin soup (although the ban may take up to three years to go into effect).

Arctic ice reached an all-time low in 2012. Photo Credit: NASA/Kathryn Hansen

Arctic Sea Ice Hits All-Time Low On September 16, sea ice extent reached a record low in the Arctic, stretching 3.41 million square kilometers—that’s 49% lower than the 1979-2000 average minimum of 6.7 million square kilometers. What’s more, its melt rate is increasing: 2012 had the largest summer ice loss by more than one million square kilometers. This change is expected to affect ecosystems—from polar bears to phytoplankton—and accelerate warming in the area, eventually melting Greenland’s ice sheet and raising sea level dramatically.

Hurricane Sandy Elevates Awareness of Sea-Level Rise This year certainly opened our eyes to the severity of climate change and sea-level rise. The east coast of the U.S., where scientists project sea-level will rise three to four times faster than the global average, got a glimpse of its effects when Hurricane Sandy caused $65 billion in damage, took at least 253 lives, and flooded Manhattan’s subways in October. The disaster inspired The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek and other major news sources to take a closer look at climate change and what it means for us all.

Using satellite photos, researchers counted twice as many emperor penguins living in Antarctica than they thought existed. Photo Credit: Martha de Jong-Lantink, Flickr

Counting Ocean Animals from Space Scientists took advantage of satellite technology this year to learn more about ocean wildlife. The first satellite-driven census of an animal population discovered that there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica as previously thought, including seven new colonies of the large flightless birds. A second study tracked the travels of sea turtles by satellite, which could help researchers get a better idea of where they might interact with fisheries and accidentally end up caught in a net.

The Ocean Gets a Grade The first tool to comprehensively assess ocean health was announced in August 2012—and the ocean as a whole received a score of 60 out of a possible 100. This tool, the Ocean Health Index, is novel in that it considered ten ways the ocean supports people, including economies, biodiversity, and recreation. The U.S. scored a 63, ranking 26th globally, while the uninhabited Jarvis Island took home an 86, the top grade of the 171 rated countries.

–Hannah Waters, Emily Frost and Amanda Feuerstein co-wrote this post

  Learn more about the ocean from the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal.

A graphic data readout of the a collision of two protons, briefly producing a Higgs Boson, from the Large Hadron Collider. Image via CERN

The year 2012 was a major one for science. We saw scientists develop a new type of drug to combat HIV, figure out how to store digital data in DNA—fitting an astonishing 700 terabytes of information into a single gram of it—and even invent a coating for the inside of condiment bottles that could eliminate our stuck-ketchup-headaches once and for all (though, admittedly, this one is a little less groundbreaking than the others). Yet a few milestones in particular—discoveries, technological feats, realizations, and inventions—stand out:

1. The Higgs Boson: The landmark discovery by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) of the once-mythical particle might be the most significant scientific discovery of our lifetimes, but it’s also one of the most surprising. Stephen Hawking, the Einstein of our time, famously bet Michigan physicist Gordon Kane $100 that it would never be found.

In an interview with The Atlantic, physicist Lawrence Krauss explained why so many experts had agreed with Hawking, arguing that the existence of the Higgs—a particle (and associated field) that makes certain types of elementary particles behave as though they had mass—was just too convenient, as it was originally posited simply to explain away an apparent difficulty in an otherwise appealing theory in theoretical physics.

The theory seeks to unite all physical forces under the same set of rules. But how can electromagnetic forces–governed by massless photons–fit under the same theoretical umbrella as the weak force, which is governed by bosons with discernible mass that control radioactive decay? Efforts to answer this conundrum gave birth to  the Higgs boson. Krauss noted,”It seemed too easy…It seemed to me that introducing an invisible field to explain stuff is more like religion than science…Great, I invented invisible hobgoblins to make things right.”

Incredibly, in this case, it turned out the hobgoblins were real.

An artist’s rendering of the theorized Earth-like planet, potentially capable of containing liquid water. Image via University of Hertfordshire/J. Pinfield

2. Earth-Like Planets: 2012 featured a ton of exoplanet discoveries, but the sighting of HD 40307g was without a doubt the most unexpected and exciting.  The planet, bigger than earth but not so large as to be a gas giant, seems to orbit in its sun’s “goldilocks zone” (not too hot and not too cold), making it potentially capable of hosting liquid water, considered a prerequisite for life as we know it.

Even better, it’s just 42 light-years away: distant by human standards, but fairly close by compared many of the astronomical objects, making future projects to observe the planet much more feasible.

A composite image of self-portraits taken by Curiosity on Mars. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

3. Curiosity Reaches Mars: Okay, the mission itself wasn’t too surprising—it’s been in the works since 2004—but what was so astonishing was the sudden surge of public interest in the rover and in space exploration as a whole. For decades following the manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s, general enthusiasm for space science had slowly ebbed. After Curiosity’s successful landing, though, it surged. Among other things, video of NASA engineers celebrating the feat went viral and the official Curiosity twitter account garnered some 1.2 million followers.

People are so interested in Curiosity‘s exploits, in fact, that even an engineer’s throwaway line about “a discovery for the history books” pumped up expectations so much that we were bound to be disappointed by the actual finding: that early Martian soil samples seem to be representative of what we know of the planet as a whole, and that its chemistry is complex enough to have potentially once supported life. Bigger news might come over the next few years, but as project scientist John Grotzinger said, “Curiosity’s middle name is patience.”

For many Americans, Superstorm Sandy drove home the idea that climate change is real. Image via NASA

4. Climate Change Is Even Worse Than We Thought: After decades of warnings from scientists that our greenhouse gas emissions will soon wreak havoc with the climate, we’re now starting to see the consequences—and they sure aren’t pretty. As a whole, experts are saying that the even the most frightening climate scenarios have proved to be too conservative in their analysis of how rising carbon dioxide concentrations will alter precipitation patterns, drive ocean acidification, lead to more powerful storms and, in general, make most parts of the planet grow warmer.

One silver lining might be that the public is now starting to acknowledge climate change as a present-day problem, rather than a hypothetical trend that could take effect in the future. Sadly, this has come only after record-breaking heat waves, droughts and the tragic impacts of Hurricane Sandy. Although the most recent international climate talks in Doha accomplished little, there are hopes that this shift in opinion could lead to a long-awaited change in policy sometime soon.

A digital rendering at the atomic level of a new type of water desalinization method developed at MIT, which uses a one-atom-thick sheet of graphene (blue) to filter impurities (green and purple ) from water molecules (red and white). Image via David Cohen-Tanugi

5. A New Way to Desalinate Seawater: With world populations expected to keep growing and potable water projected to grow more scarce over the coming century, a practical and cheap means of desalinating sea water is one of materials science’s holy grails. In July, MIT researchers announced the development of a new method of desalinization using one-atom-thick sheets of graphene, a pure carbon substance. Their method could be far cheaper and less energy-intensive than existing systems—potentially providing a way to solve many of the world’s water problems once and for all.

After decades of uncertainty, a new study confirms that both polar ice sheets are melting. Image via Ian Joughlin

Over the past few years, one of the most difficult pieces of evidence to fit into the climate change puzzle has been ice melt. Although the amount of ice covering the Arctic has clearly decreased over time, climate change skeptics have pointed to inconsistent findings on Antarctic ice as proof that the atmosphere isn’t really warming.

Today, with the United Nation’s COP 18 climate negotiations underway in Qatar, a comprehensive study published in Science provides a timely confirmation: The ice sheets covering both Greenland and Antarctica are steadily shrinking, losing roughly 344 billion tons per year in total. Using data from 10 different satellite missions, an international team of 47 scientists has generated a new estimate for ice loss that is more than twice as accurate as previous models, and indicates that the last 20 years of melting at the poles has caused sea level to increase by 11.1 millimeters worldwide since 1992.

“Our new estimates of ice sheet losses are the most reliable to date, and they do provide the clearest evidence yet of polar ice sheet losses,” Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds, the study’s lead author, said in a press call. “They also end 20 years of uncertainty concerning changes in the mass of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and they’re intended to become the benchmark dataset for climate scientists to use from now on.”

Melting glacial ice drains through vertical crevasses called moulins, eventually flowing beneath the ice sheet and reaching the ocean. Image via Ian Joughlin

Those 20 years of uncertainty are the result of several difficulties inherent in measuring ice melt. Relative to the overall size of the ice sheets, the potential change scientists have been attempting to measure is tiny—on the order of 1 part in 100,000—so sampling errors have led to numbers that vary widely. Gains and losses of ice can also vary from year to year, and from place to place within the same ice sheet. Additionally, the natural seasonal cycle in which sheets add ice during the winter and shed it during the summer makes it even harder to pinpoint the net change over time.

To resolve these difficulties, the researchers assimilated data produced using several different satellite techniques. In one, a satellite in orbit is used to point a laser at glacial ice; the time it takes for the light to bounce back to the satellite indicates the glacier’s precise height, allowing scientists to determine its volume. As part of another technique, a pair of satellites passing over the poles measure the subtle tug of gravity caused by the ice sheets’ mass, and chart the change in the force of this gravity over time.

This data was combined with information collected by regional field surveys and existing climate models that estimate changes in ice cover based on measured precipitation rates and temperature. Despite the variation between years and particular locations, the researchers found that the satellite data fit well with the models’ predictions, and confirmed the hypothesis that as a whole, both ice caps are melting.

The new estimates are that, from 2005 to 2010, Greenland lost roughly 263 billion tons of ice per year, while Antarctica lost 81 billion tons annually. Each year, all this melting causes about 0.6 millimeters of sea level rise. Most alarmingly, both of these ice sheets are melting three times faster than they were in the 1990s.

The melting of the ice caps is troubling as an indicator of the planet’s overall warming, but it could also be problematic in itself, in ways that are both obvious and counterintuitive. For one, sea level rise is a direct threat to both human populations and natural ecosystems along the coasts, as starkly illustrated by Hurricane Sandy and other storms over the past year.

Less obvious is that, according to a study published last month, melting Greenlandic ice could change the salinity of the North Atlantic enough to alter weather patterns in North America and affect aquatic wildlife. By reducing water circulation overall, it could even lead to less carbon dioxide being absorbed into the oceans from the atmosphere, ultimately serving as a positive feedback loop that accelerates climate change.

Of course, finding evidence that the climate is changing has been far easier than coming to international agreements about how to stop it. Scientists can refute the arguments used by climate change skeptics, but if the COP 18 negotiations accomplish as little as most expect, all the data in the world won’t change the fact that it’s uncontrollably warming.

An artist’s rendering of CFBDSIR2149, as viewed through an infrared filter. Image via L. Calçada, P. Delorme, Nick Risinger, R. Saito, European Southern Observatory/VVV Consortium

The astronomy world is abuzz over the discovery of an exoplanet in a nearly unprecedented situation: It’s the first observed to be hurtling through space on its own, rather than orbiting a star. The find, reported by researchers from the University of Montreal in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, is roughly 100 light-years away and has been labelled CFBDSIR2149.

“Although theorists had established the existence of this type of very cold and young planet, one had never been observed until today,” Étienne Artigau, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal, said in a statement. Over the past decade, astronomers have spotted several candidate objects that could potentially qualify as drifting planets, but the line between what is called a “planet” and what is called a “star” is fuzzy, especially when observing from a distance. Through a telescope, it’s hard to differentiate whether a small solitary object is a “homeless” planet (as the researchers have termed this one) or a brown dwarf, the smallest type of star. The researchers concluded that this is a planet, and one that is 50 to 120 million years old and about 400 degrees Celsius in temperature.

Because this object appears to be traveling through space along with a diffuse group of roughly 30 associated stars called the AB Doradus Moving Group (but does not orbit any of them), the astronomers were able to work out several more pieces of information about it, such as its age, mass and temperature, based on the assumption that the planet likely shares an origin with the rest of the stars in the group. Objects must be less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter to be considered a planet, rather than a brown dwarf, and this object appears to have a mass between four and seven times that of Jupiter, making it an unqualified, starless planet, the first of its kind.

Scientists have speculated that this type of object could result from a normal planet being flung out of its solar system, or could form alone in its present state. Theories of planet and star formation imply that there might be an extremely high number of such solitary planets—they might be as common as normal stars.

For astronomers, the problem is seeing them. Unlike stars, these objects don’t emit a large amount of light. This planet was detected using data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, located on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, with further details worked out using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. Using infrared images from both telescopes, the research team was able to pick out the slight amount of light emanating from the planet, even though it is clearly outshined by the brighter stars:

The pale blue dot at the exact center of this infrared telescope image is the newly discovered “homeless” planet. Image via P. Delorme, European Southern Observatory

This image might seem extremely faint, but compared to most exoplanets—which are typically spotted only when they cross in front of the star they orbit or known from how they make their star wobble—astronomers can see this planet much more clearly because there is no competing starlight in the immediate vicinity. “Looking for planets around their stars is akin to studying a firefly sitting one centimeter away from a distant, powerful car headlight,” Philippe Delorme, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “This nearby free-floating object offered the opportunity to study the firefly in detail without the dazzling lights of the car messing everything up.”

The researchers say that free-floating planets like this one are scientifically significant beyond their apparent uniqueness. “These objects are important, as they can either help us understand more about how planets may be ejected from planetary systems, or how very light objects can arise from the star formation process,” Delorme said. “If this little object is a planet that has been ejected from its native system, it conjures up the striking image of orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space.”

Research shows that the FDA’s proposed graphic warning labels would be more effective than the current text-only ones. Image via FDA.

More than 40 countries around the world force cigarette companies to print graphic images of things like decaying teeth, open-heart surgeries and cancer patients on their packs, in an effort to discourage smoking by directly linking cigarettes with their most gruesome effects. The United States, however, is not one of these countries: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration unveiled graphic designs in November 2010, but repeated lawsuits by the tobacco industry have delayed implementation of the new warnings.

If and when the labels do hit, the images could go a long way towards continuing the decline in smoking rates across the country. That’s because, as new research demonstrates, seeing these images every time a person reaches for a pack is a more effective deterrent than a text-only warning. The research also indicates that the graphic warnings are especially powerful in discouraging low-health literacy populations from smoking—the one group in which smoking rates have remained stubbornly high over the past few decades.

The study, published yesterday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine [PDF], was conducted by James Thrasher of the University of South Carolina and colleagues. A control group of 207 smokers saw text-only warning labels, while 774 smokers evaluated nine different graphic labels, both images proposed by the FDA and a selection of others currently used in foreign countries.

The smokers were asked to judge each label on a scale of one to ten for credibility, relevance and effectiveness. The results were unequivocal: The text-only warnings’ average ratings were mostly in the fives and sixes, while simpler text messages combined with striking graphics scored in the sevens and eights across the board.

These differences were especially large for the group the researchers called low-health literacy smokers–people with less education who are less likely to be knowledgeable about the risks of smoking. This group gave much higher ratings for credibility, in particular, to the labels that showed them the health problems that arise from smoking, rather than text labels that merely told them. “The present study provided the first direct test of the hypothesis that pictorial health warning labels work better than text-only labels among people with low health literacy,” Thrasher said in a statement.

The study also found that graphic types of labels (left) were more effective than those depicting human suffering (middle) or those that were merely symbolic (right). Image via American Journal of Preventive Medicine

Among the labels with images, the study compared three different types: graphic (those that directly showed body parts damaged by smoking), human suffering (those that showed someone in a hospital bed, for example) and symbolic (more abstract images, such as a gravestone). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first category was consistently rated as the most effective in discouraging smoking. It seems nothing so powerfully scares someone away from taking another puff than a picture of what their teeth, lungs or throat will look like after a lifetime of doing so.

Thrasher feels that these types of findings should be taken into account when agencies such as the FDA design cigarette warning labels, to be sure they reach all demographics. “The FDA should consider implementing warning labels with more graphic imagery in order to maximize the impact of warnings across different populations of adult smokers, including more disadvantaged smokers,” Thrasher said.

An artist’s rendering of the theorized Earth-like planet, potentially capable of containing liquid water. Image via University of Hertfordshire/J. Pinfield

The latest in a long string of recent exoplanet discoveries could be the most exciting one yet: A planet called HD 40307g, roughly 44 light years away, appears to be the most likely candidate to harbor life of any exoplanet we’ve discovered to date. Larger than Earth, but smaller than a gas giant, the planet seems to be in the “goldilocks” zone of its star system, the region with the right balance of heat and cold to potentially allow for liquid water.

To be clear, the discovery (described in a paper published yesterday in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics), like nearly all other exoplanet discoveries, is indirect and theoretical. Rather than observing the planet with a telescope, a team of astronomers led by Mikko Tuomi of the UK’s University of Hertfordshire analyzed existing public data produced by the European Southern Observatory and realized it contained hints of something rather interesting. While scientists had previously looked at the star HD 40307 and found it was orbited by three planets, these astronomers used more sophisticated detection techniques to discover that it’s actually orbited by at least six.

One of these, HD 40307g, is the one that seems capable of potentially harboring life (exoplanets are named for their host star, along with lowercase letters starting with b and moving outwards—although some have argued that we really ought to be giving these distant planets more interesting names). The planet is roughly 7 times the mass of Earth, so is categorized as a Super-Earth, and orbits its star at a distance of 55.8 million miles, much closer than our distance from the sun, roughly 93 million miles.

This increased proximity is actually a good thing, though, because HD 40307 is slightly dimmer and colder than the sun, so the planet’s closer orbit lands it smack in the middle of its system’s habitable “goldilocks” zone, where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. This distance also means that the planet likely rotates on its axis, rather than having one side always facing inward, allowing for a day-and-night cycle that some scientists say increases the chance of life evolving. Additionally, it orbits its star once every 197.8 days, potentially even allowing for a seasonal climate like we have on Earth.

Image via Space.com

The astronomers relied upon the subtle effects of the planet’s gravity on its star to indirectly calculate its existence. ”The gravity of the star causes the planet to orbit it, but the planet has gravity too. As it circles the star, the star makes a littler circle too,” Phil Plait writes at Discovery‘s Bad Astronomy blog. “As the star makes its circle, half the time it’s approaching us and half the time it’s receding. This means its light is Doppler shifted, the same effect that makes a motorcycle engine drop in pitch as it passes you.” By precisely measuring a star’s Doppler shift, astronomers are able to indirectly tell if it is orbited by planets.

While this type of technique had previously been applied to HD 40307, Tuomi’s team used new methods of digitally canceling out visual background noise (such as the star’s solar flares and sunspots) to allow for the more sensitive detection of exoplanets that rotated out a little bit further. This led them to detect the presence of three more exoplanets in the system.

This indirect method allows us to determine the mass, distance and orbital period of each planet, but that’s about it. We don’t know the diameter of the planet, so it could have an Earth-like density with a much larger size, or it could have an Earth-like diameter with a super high density. The system is close enough to us, some speculate, that next generation telescopes might be able to see it directly.

Scientists have long sought to find planets in their systems’ “goldilocks zones” because of the longstanding belief that liquid water is necessary (but not sufficient) for the evolution of life as we know it. So far, most planets that we had found in habitable zones turned out to be gas giants, or have other characteristics that seemed to disqualify the presence of life. So even if HD 40307g turns out to not harbor life, the fact that we’ve finally found a seemingly habitable planet in such an area is a clue that Earth-like planets might not be as terribly rare as some have assumed.

New research reveals that corals send out chemical signals to recruit the help of Goby fish in removing toxic seaweed. Image courtesy of Danielle Dixson

Corals are constantly under attack. Sea stars and other predators would love to take a bite, coral diseases lie waiting to take them out and many human-caused stresses persist in the water they inhabit, such as pollution, warming temperatures and rising acidity.

One of the first signs of a sick reef is the takeover of seaweeds, which continually threaten even healthy corals. However, corals aren’t alone in the fight against greenery, according to new research published in Science. When attacked, some corals send out chemical signals to their bodyguards—small goby fish—who scrape off or eat the coral-choking seaweeds.

Turtle weed (Chlorodesmis fastigiata) threatens corals because, upon contact, it releases a noxious chemical that disrupts their food source, the photosynthetic algae (zooxanthellae) that live inside their cells, ultimately leading to coral bleaching. Although most fish don’t have a palate for such toxic seaweed, authors Mark Hay and Danielle Dixson from the Georgia Institute of Technology observed coral gobies—small fish that spend their lives living in a single coral colony—eating it, and they wondered if there was more to this behavior than taste.

Hay and Dixson placed turtle weed on small staghorn coral (Acropora nasuta), a common reef-building coral found in the Pacific and Indian oceans, while in the presence of two goby species. The gobies cleaned up quickly: Within three days, 30% of the turtle weed was gone, and coral bleaching dropped by 70-80% compared to a goby-less seaweed invasion.

Without the protection of goby fish, corals are much more likely to become overgrown with seaweed. Image via Ocean Portal/Wolcott Henry

“These little fish would come out and mow the seaweed off so it didn’t touch the coral,” said Hay in a press release. “This takes place very rapidly, which means it must be very important to both the coral and the fish.”

In a series of experiments, the researchers worked out how the coral contacts the gobies to let them know that they need their hedges trimmed. Once the coral gets hit with chemicals from the invading turtle weed, it releases its own chemical signal—an emergency call to gobies—within 15 minutes. And, within another 15 minutes or less, gobies receive the message and swoop in to nibble away at the encroaching foliage.

What are the gobies getting out of this arrangement? The broad-barred goby (Gobiodon histrio) got a boost in its own defenses. It produces its own poisonous mucus to deter predators and, after eating the noxious turtle weed, this mucus impaired their predators’ swimming ability more than twice as fast, the researchers found. But the other goby species—the redhead goby (Paragobiodon echinocephalus)—doesn’t eat the seaweed, simply shearing it off the coral. What is its benefit?

“The fish are getting protection in a safe place to live and food from the coral,” Hay said. “The coral gets a bodyguard in exchange for a small amount of food. It’s kind of like paying taxes in exchange for police protection.”

Goby fish spend their entire lifetimes with the same coral. Image courtesy of Georgia Tech/Joao Paulo Krajewski

This kind of chemical signaling system is the first observed in coral reef organisms—but it surely isn’t the only one. Many coral reef organisms are interdependent, relying on one or two other species for food or habitat, which means that the loss of just a few species can accelerate the disappearance of many others. For example, if these coral-cleaning gobies were overfished, say for the aquarium trade, the reef would be threatened by seaweed takeover, which could then degrade the entire community.

“Who would have thought that such a small, seemingly insignificant fish might play such a large role in keeping corals from being killed by seaweeds?” said coral reef biologist Nancy Knowlton from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who did not participate in the research. “It’s a compelling example of why maintaining biodiversity is so important.”

It’s also possible that such subtle chemical signals could be disrupted by ocean acidification. Clownfish and damselfish raised in seawater with the acidity scientists predict we’ll see in the year 2050 have trouble identifying scents in seawater to find their homes or avoid predators. If these gobies have similar problems, the impacts of acidification on reef communities could be greater than expected.

Learn more about coral reefs from the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal.