Emperor penguins swimming. Photo by Polar Cruises

Penguins seem a bit out of place on land, with their stand-out black jackets and clumsy waddling. But once you see their grace in the water, you know that’s where they’re meant to be–they are well-adapted to life in the ocean.

April 25 of each year is World Penguin Day, and to celebrate here are 14 facts about these charismatic seabirds.

1. Depending on which scientist you ask, there are 17–20 species of penguins alive today, all of which live in the southern half of the globe. The most northerly penguins are Galapagos penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus), which occasionally poke their heads north of the equator.

2. While they can’t fly through the air with their flippers, many penguin species take to the air when they leap from the water onto the ice. Just before taking flight, they release air bubbles from their feathers. This cuts the drag on their bodies, allowing them to double or triple their swimming speed quickly and launch into the air.

3. Most penguins swim underwater at around four to seven miles per hour (mph), but the fastest penguin—the gentoo (Pygoscelis papua)—can reach top speeds of 22 mph!

Gentoo penguins “porpoise” by jumping out of the water. They can move faster through air than water, so will often porpoise to escape from a predator. Photo: Gilad Rom (Flickr)

4. Penguins don’t wear tuxedos to make a fashion statement: it helps them be camouflaged while swimming. From above, their black backs blend into the dark ocean water and, from below, their white bellies match the bright surface lit by sunlight. This helps them avoid predators, such as leopard seals, and hunt for fish unseen.

5. The earliest known penguin fossil was found in 61.6 million-year old Antarctic rock, about 4-5 million years after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. Waimanu manneringi stood upright and waddled like modern day penguins, but was likely more awkward in the water. Some fossil penguins were much larger than any penguin living today, reaching 4.5 feet tall!

6. Like other birds, penguins don’t have teeth. Instead, they have backward-facing fleshy spines that line the inside of their mouths. These help them guide their fishy meals down their throat.

An endangered African penguin brays with its mouth open, showing off the bristly inside of its mouth. Photo by Dimi P (Flickr), with permission

7. Penguins are carnivores: they feed on fish, squid, crabs, krill and other seafood they catch while swimming. During the summer, an active, medium-sized penguin will eat about 2 pounds of food each day, but in the winter they’ll eat just a third of that.

8. Eating so much seafood means drinking a lot of saltwater, but penguins have a way to remove it. The supraorbital gland, located just above their eye, filters salt from their bloodstream, which is then excreted through the bill—or by sneezing! But this doesn’t mean they chug seawater to quench their thirst: penguins drink meltwater from pools and streams and eat snow for their hydration fix.

9. Another adaptive gland—the oil (also called preen) gland—produces waterproofing oil. Penguins spread this across their feathers to insulate their bodies and reduce friction when they glide through the water.

10. Once a year, penguins experience a catastrophic molt. (Yes, that’s the official term.) Most birds molt (lose feathers and regrow them) a few at a time throughout the year, but penguins lose them all at once. They can’t swim and fish without feathers, so they fatten themselves up beforehand to survive the 2–3 weeks it takes to replace them.

An emperor penguin loses its old feathers (the fluffy ones) as new ones grow in underneath. Photo by Carlie Reum, National Science Foundation

11. Feathers are quite important to penguins living around Antarctica during the winter. Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) have the highest feather density of any bird, at 100 feathers per square inch. In fact, the surface feathers can get even colder than the surrounding air, helping to keep the penguin’s body stays warm.

12. All but two penguin species breed in large colonies for protection, ranging from 200 to hundreds of thousands of birds. (There’s safety in numbers!) But living in such tight living quarters leads to an abundance of penguin poop—so much that it stains the ice! The upside is that scientists can locate colonies from space just by looking for dark ice patches.

13. Climate change will likely affect different penguin species differently—but in the Antarctic, it appears that the loss of krill, a primary food source, is the main problem. In some areas with sea ice melt, krill density has decreased 80 percent since the 1970s, indirectly harming penguin populations. However, some colonies of Adelie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) have grown as the melting ice exposes more rocky nesting areas.

14. Of the 17 penguin species, the most endangered is New Zealand’s yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes): only around 4,000 birds survive in the wild today. But other species are in trouble, including the erect-crested penguin (Eudyptes sclateri) of New Zealand, which has lost approximately 70 percent of its population over the past 20 years, and the Galapagos penguin, which has lost more than 50 percent since the 1970s.

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

Who’s in the suit? Increasingly, it’s our digital selves. Photo from NASA/STS-104

Ever since the collective “YOU” became Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2006, campaigns to get our attention have increasingly sought out our digital selves. You can name a Budweiser Clydesdale. You can pick Lays’ new potato chip flavor. And it’s not just retail that wants your online opinions: You can vote for who will win photography contests. You can play the futures market on who will win elected offices. And with enough signatures, you can get the White House to read your petitions.

Many science endeavors rely on such crowdsourcing. With a simple app, you can let researchers know the exact date that your lilacs or dogwoods bloom, helping them to track how seasonal cycles are shifting as a result of climate change. You can join the search for ever-larger prime numbers. You can even help scientists scan radio waves in space to search for intelligent life outside of Earth. These more traditional crowdsourcing efforts allow users to brainstorm ideas and process data from computers at home.

But now, a few projects are allowing us to put our virtual selves beyond Earth’s atmosphere through recently launched space missions. Who said that rovers, space probes, a handful of astronauts and pigs were the only ones in space? No longer are we just bystanders watching spacecraft launch and cooing over images returned of other planets and stars. Now, we can direct cameras, help run experiments, even send our avatars–of sorts–to inhabit nearby planetary bodies or return to us in a time capsule.

Here are a few examples:

Asteroid Chimney Rock: On April 10 (tomorrow), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will open up a campaign that allows visitors to their site the opportunity of sending their names and brief messages to the near-Earth asteroid (162173) 1999 JU₃.  Called the “Let’s meet with Le Petit Prince! Million Campaign 2,” the effort aims to get people’s names onto the Hayabusa2 mission, which will likely launch in 2014 to study the asteroid. When Hayabusa 2 lands on the asteroid, the names submitted–embedded in a plaque of sorts on the spacecraft–will stand as a testament to the idea that humans (or at least their robotic representatives) were there.

The Hayabusa2 mission, scheduled for launch in 2014, will attempt to return an asteroid sample back to Earth in 2020. Artist’s rendition by Akihiro Ikeshita/JAXA

The campaign is reminiscent of how NASA got more than 1.2 million people to submit their names and signatures, which were then etched on two dime-sized microchips and affixed to the Mars Curiosity rover. Sure, it’s a bit gimmicky–what useful function is brought by having people’s names out in space? But the idea of “tagging” a planet or an asteroid–preserving a bit of yourself on what will over decades become space junk–has powerful pull. It is why Chimney Rock, with its etchings from early explorers and pioneers, is the historical marker it is today, and why gladiators scored their names into the Colosseum before they fought to the death. For mission leaders hoping to get the public enthusiastic about space, nothing’s more exciting than a bit of digital graffiti.

Interplanetary time capsules: A key goal of Hayabusa2 is to return return a sample from the asteroid in 2020. Mission creators saw this as a perfect way to get the public to fill a time capsule. Those seeking to participate are encouraged to send to mission coordinators their thoughts and dreams for the future along with their hopes and expectations for recovery from natural disasters, the latter likely a way to get people to express their feelings on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s east coast. Names, messages, and illustrations will loaded onto a microchip that will not only touch down on the asteroid’s surface, but will also be a part of the probe sent back to Earth with asteroid dust.

But why stop at a mere 6-year time capsule? The European Space Agency, UNESCO, and other partners are blending crowd sourcing with space technology to create the KEO mission–so named because the letters represent common sounds across all of Earth’s languages–which will bundle thoughts and images of anyone who seeks to participate and will launch this bundle in a probe that will only return to Earth in 50,000 years.

Project operators write on KEO’s website: “Each one of us have 4 uncensored pages at our disposal: an identical space of equality and freedom of expression where we can voice our aspirations and our revolts, where we can reveal our deepest fears and our strongest beliefs, where we can relate our lives to our faraway great grandchildren, thus allowing them to witness our times.” That’s 4 pages for every person who chooses to participate.

On board will be photographs detailing Earth’s cultural richness, human blood encased in a diamond, and a durable DVD of humanity’s crowdsourced thoughts. The idea is to launch the time capsule from an Ariane 5 rocket into an orbit more than 2,000 kilometers above Earth, hopefully sometime in 2014. “50,000 years ago, Man created art thus showing his capacity for symbolic abstraction.” the website notes. And in another 50,000 years, “Will Earth still give life? Will human beings still be recognizable as such?”Another logical question: Will whatever’s left on Earth know what’s coming back to them and will be able to retrieve it?

Hayabusa2 and KEO will join capsules already launched into space on Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. But the contents of these earlier capsules were picked by a handful of people; here, we get to choose what represents us in space, and will get to reflect (in theory) on the thoughts bound in time upon their return.

You, the mission controller and scientist: Short of going to Mars yourself, you can do the next best thing–tell an instrument currently observing Mars where to look. On NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a camera designed to image Mars in great detail. Dubbed “the people’s camera,” HiRISE allows you–yes, you!– to pick its next targets by filling out a form specifying your “HiWishes.”

A recently launched nanosatellite is allowing the crowdsourced winners of a crowdsourced screaming contest the chance to test whether screams can be heard in space. Launched in February, the nanosatellite’s smartphone-powered brain will broadcast the screams–no word yet on results. But you may find just listening to the yelling therapeutic! This guy’s roar got the most votes:

Cordell Grant assembles the BRITE telescope, a nanosatellite. Image via the University of Toronto

Picture a telescope orbiting in space, and your mind probably flies to the Hubble Space Telescope. At roughly 43 feet long and weighing 25,000 pounds, its footprint is the size of a small house and it’s just a little shy of the weight of a subway car. But not all satellite telescopes are behemoths–one launched yesterday from India, designed and developed by the Space Flight Laboratory of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, is roughly the size of a cooler you’d bring to a picnic.

The telescope is part of the Bright Target Explorer (BRITE) mission, an effort designed to observe stars and record changes in their brightness over time. Launched into orbit above the masking effects of our atmosphere, the telescope and its simultaneously launched twin will focus on the brightest stars–such as those in well-known constellations like Orion and the Big Dipper–looking for pulsations and reverberations in brightness that indicate spots on a star, a planet or another celestial object crossing its orbit, or flickering energy intensities within the star itself. These flickers, called “starquakes,” give clues to the composition and internal structure of stars.

BRITE ‘s telescopes are nanosatellites, meaning that they weigh less than ten kilograms. At seven kilograms–about as heavy as a large bowling ball–and measuring 20 centimeters on each side, they are the smallest telescopes in orbit. The cubic satellites did not require a dedicated rocket to get there–these hitched a ride on India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Future launches of similar twin nanosatellites will help BRITE to become a satellite constellation that scans the sky for different wavelengths of light pulsing from stars.

Nanosatellites, part of a recent trend to conduct space-based science at low cost and with fast results, “can be developed quickly, by a small team and at a cost that is within reach of many universities, small companies and other organizations,” said Cordell Grant, manager of satellite systems for the Space Flight Laboratory, in a statement. “A nano-satellite can take anywhere from six months to a few years to develop and test,” he added. In contrast, Hubble took more than 12 years to design and construct before it launched with space shuttle Discovery in 1990.

But nanosatellites aren’t the only kind of small satellites out there. Here are some other tiny orbiters:

Sprites:

Sprites, a femtosatellite, are about the size of a postage stamp. Image via Cornell University

First launched on the last flight of Endeavour, sprites–also called femtosatellites–look about the size of a postage stamp. Developed by Cornell University scientists, these satellites are in interplanetary space collecting data about chemistry, radiation and particle impacts. Lead engineer Mason Peck, now a chief technologist at NASA, told the Cornell University Chronicle that “Their small size allows them to travel like space dust.” He added, “Blown by solar winds, they can ‘sail’ to distant locations without fuel.”

CubeSats:

The grapefruit-sized CubeSat, a type of picosatellite, measures 10 centimeters on each side. “I got a 4-inch beanie baby box and tacked on some solar cells to see how many would fit on the surface,” Bob Twiggs, the satellite’s lead designer, told Space.com. “I had enough voltage for what I needed so I decided that would be the size.” Developed in 1999 with the help of Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University, along with students at Stanford University while Twigg was a professor there, CubeSats are now the go-to small satellite. They appeal to universities–at roughly $65,ooo to $80,000 a pop, they can fit within research budgets, allowing students the opportunity to design and build a research satellite.

Some, like GeneSat-1 provides life support for bacterium and are aimed at helping scientists learn more about how spaceflight affects the human body. Another–SwissCube-1–examines nightglow in Earth’s atmosphere. Launched alongside BRITE, the STRaND-1–a string of 3 CubeSats stacked together–is the first smartphone-powered satellite ever launched into space. The Android phone that serves as the device’s brain will run apps that will photograph its orbit, monitor the Earth’s magnetic field, and–perhaps most exciting–will allow people to upload videos of themselves screaming to test whether sounds broadcasted in space can be heard by the satellite playing them.  Other CubeSats in development will assist researchers understand space weather, phenomena that could short out the other satellites that orbit Earth.

It’s interesting to remember that the first satellite–Sputnik-1, launched in 1957–was a 23-inch diameter sphere. These nano-, pico-, and femto-satellites harken back to those roots. But their size, cost, and ability to be developed quickly may make them the most useful satellites of the future. Hopefully they won’t lead to oodles more space junk!

A cockroach diligently cleans his antenna. Photo by Ayako Wada-Katsumata

When encountering a two-inch American cockroach, most people quickly skedaddle the other way or raise a foot to stomp the little creeper out of existence. For those curious few who stick around to quietly observe the roach, however, the insect will inevitably fall into a certain diligent, repetitive motion. First, it reaches its spiny little roach feet up towards its head, then grips the base of one of its antennae and finally, as if it were spinning yarn at triple speed, threads the length of its antennae through its furiously working mouthparts.

Insects such as cockroaches, house flies and carpenter ants often engage in such antennae-grooming behavior. Like many animals, scientists know that insects frequently clean themselves, but few researchers have investigated just why bugs bother. Antennae serve not only to feel out the environment but also to sense odors, so researchers have long suspected that grooming keeps the antennae in top shape. But what, specifically, are they scrubbing from their bodies? Do roaches self-clean to remove bacteria or bits of gunk from their last meal?

To figure out just why roaches groom, lead author Katalin Böröczky and colleagues from North Carolina State University along with researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences observed antennae-cleaning behaviors in a couple dozen adult male American cockroaches, describing their experiment today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers used an array of methods to restrain the roaches from self-grooming so that they could compare groomed and ungroomed antennae. In some cases, the scientists used a small plastic clip to tether one antenna at the base of the roaches’ heads. The frustrated insects repeatedly attempted to grab hold of their lassoed antenna but could not get a grip on it in order to clean it. Some roaches also had their mouthparts glued together while others were kept in a box too small to allow for self-grooming.

Here, you can see one of the roaches stymied by the plastic antennae blockers:

Over a period of 24 hours, the tethered antenna began to appear shinier than the other non-tethered one. Examining the shiny antenna with a scanning electron microscope revealed an unidentified substance blocking the roaches’ sensory pores and coating their antennae. The unclean antennae built up three to four times more of the stuff than the clean ones over the day.

To figure out what the unknown build-up was, the researchers took samples of it and analyzed it with gas chromatography, a technique that separates different components of a chemical compound. They found that the natural secretions that the cockroach gives off accounted for most of the substance–mostly fatty molecules that help regulate water loss in insects. Despite the seemingly sterile environment, other external contaminants were stuck on the antennae as well, including stearic acid from surfaces in the roaches’ container and geranyl acetate from the air.

The researchers guessed that this build up might impair the roaches’ ability to sniff out olfactory signals with their antennae. To test this hypothesis, they exposed roaches with groomed and ungroomed antennae to sex pheromones and other odors. Just as they suspected, roaches with clean antennae were more receptive to the odors around them than those with unclean ones. “We conclude that the disruption of grooming interferes with general olfaction,” the authors write in their paper.

Finally, to see if these findings extended to other insects, the researchers repeated their experiment in flies, ants and German cockroaches, all of which exhibited the same build up and loss of antennae function when prevented from self-grooming. They conclude that “our observations with four phylogenetically diverse species indicate that this hitherto unknown role for grooming is common to a wide diversity of insects.”

Just as humans scrub off to remove dead skin cells, sweat and dirt from the day, insects busy themselves to keep clean. While we may share this commonality with earth’s most abundant group of species, however, it may not be quite enough to inspire empathy for the next cockroach that finds its way into a closet or kitchen drawer.

You may have never seen a zebrafish in person. But take a look at the zebrafish in the short video above and you’ll get to see something previously unknown to science: a visual representation of a thought moving through a living creature’s brain.

A group of scientists from Japan’s National Institute of Genetics announced the mind-boggling achievement in a paper published today in Current Biology. By inserting a gene into a zebrafish larvae—often used in research because its entire body is transparent—and using probe that detects florescence, they were able to capture the fish’s mental reaction to a swimming paramecium in real time.

The key to the technology is a special gene known as GCaMP that reacts to the presence of calcium ions by increasing in florescence. Since neuron activity in the brain involves rapid increases in concentrations of calcium ions, insertion of the gene causes the particular areas in a zebrafish’s brain that are activated to glow brightly. By using a probe sensitive to florescence, the scientists were able to monitor the locations of the fish’s brain that were activated ay any given moment—and thus, capture the fish’s thought as it “swam” around the brain.

Zebrafish embryos and larvae are often used in research because they are largely translucent. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Adam Amsterdam

The particular thought captured in the video above occurred after a paramecium (a single-celled organism that the fish considers a food source) was released into the fish’s environment. The scientists know that the thought is the fish’s direct response to the moving paramecium because, as an initial part of the experiment, they identified the particular neurons in the fish’s brain that respond to movement and direction.

They mapped out the individual neurons responsible for this task by inducing the fish to visually follow a dot move across a screen and tracking which neurons were activated. Later, when they did the same for the fish as it watched the swimming paramecium, the same areas of the brain lit up, and the activity moved across these areas in the same way predicted by the mental maps as a result of the paramecium’s directional movement. For example, when the paramecium moved from right to left, the neuron activity moved from left to right, because of the way the brain’s visual map is reversed when compared to the field of vision.

This isn’t the first time that GCaMP has been inserted into a zebrafish for imaging purposes, but it is the first time that the images have been captured as a real-time video, rather than a static image after the fact. The researchers accomplished this by developing an improved version of GCaMP that is more sensitive to changes in calcium ion concentration and gives off greater levels of florescence.

The accomplishment is obviously a marvel in itself, but the scientists involved see it leading to a range of practical applications. If, for example, scientists had the ability to quickly map the parts of the brain affected by a chemical under consideration as a drug, new and effective psychiatric medications could be more easily developed.

They also envision it opening the door to a variety of even more amazing—and perhaps a bit troubling (who, after all, really wants their mind read?)—thought-detecting applications. “In the future, we can interpret an animal’s behavior, including learning and memory, fear, joy, or anger, based on the activity of particular combinations of neurons,” said Koichi Kawakami, one of the paper’s co-authors.

It’s clearly some time away, but this research shows that the concept of reading an animal’s thoughts by analyzing its mental activity might move beyond science fiction to enter the realm of real world science applications.

A subject uses a helmet and gloves in the real world to enter a virtual world. Photo via Flickr user caseorganic

Action-centric video games have gotten a bad rap for their often violent content. Previous research says the brutal material can leak into real-world behavior, producing more aggression and triggering physiological changes in children’s brains. But what about virtual reality situations that put players in rescue-mode without the gore and pillaging?

What happens in these types of fantasy worlds also translates into real-life behavior, but in a different way: People who are given superpowers meant to save someone in virtual reality are more helpful outside of it.

This finding, reached Robin Rosenberg and colleagues from Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and published yesterday in a PLOS ONE study, relies on the illusion that what happens in virtual reality is real. Participants viewed the world through a head-mounted display, a helmet that provides three-dimensional stereoscopic views of a high-resolution rendered environment. An orientation sensor on the helmet tracked participants’ physical head movements and updated their rendered first-person perspective. To enhance the seeming reality of the the experience, virtual sound was added to match the movement of objects and the vibration associated with action.

In the study, each participant was placed separately in a virtual environment and either given the power of flight, a la Superman, or was a passenger in a helicopter. They were then assigned to one of two tasks. The first involved searching through a virtual city for a young, lost diabetic child in need of life-saving insulin, which they were told they held in a vial in their pocket. After three minutes of searching either via  human flight or by helicopter, the child appeared, and an end sequence commenced showing its life had been saved. The second involved touring the virtual city, which was designed to be foggy and devoid of cars and people. The city in both circumstances had been evacuated due to an earthquake, participants were told.

After the virtual experience, the experimenter assisting participants “accidentally” knocked over a cup of pens, allowing the participants the opportunity to help pick them up. The researchers found that regardless of the task, those who used superpowers to fly through the fantasy world were quicker to help pick up the pens compared to those who rode in the virtual helicopter. These participants also picked up more pens than their helicopter-riding counterparts. Six participants out of 60 (30 males and 30 females) didn’t help at all–all six had cruised through the fantasy world in a helicopter.

Credit: Flickr user Xurble

How can a simulation trigger such prosocial behavior? The researchers suggest that embodying a superhuman quality in virtual reality primes people to think like superheros, such as Superman. Researchers made no mention of the word “superhero” or the prefix “super” at any point during the experiment. But by simply possessing a superhuman ability, participants seemed to tap into what they know about the characters that have them—that they use their power for the greater good rather than personal gain. Researchers believe cognitive channels linking “super” activity and its related stereotypes to heroism and helping behavior may have opened up, influencing participants’ decision to help.

And it doesn’t seem difficult for people to internalize what they see happening to their avatars (their computer-rendered, 3D selves) in virtual reality. For instance, people walking on top of a virtual log to cross a rendered chasm exhibit increased levels of stress measured by skin conductance. They know they’re not actually balancing atop a pit, about to fall, yet they experience multiple psychological symptoms associated with that fear.

Virtual reality’s penchant for inducing behavioral changes has been studied before, and the resulting good behavior moves beyond just picking up pens. A 2011 study found participants in a weight-loss program involving traditional gym sessions lost similar amounts of weight and body fat as those whose workouts were delivered online in a 3D virtual world.

In another study published in 2011, also conducted by the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, researchers found that virtual behavior affected people’s feelings about helping the environment. Participants were forced to saw down virtual trees using a joystick called a haptic device, which vibrated in their hands to simulate the real feeling of cutting through wood. Following the task, participants believed more strongly that they could personally improve environmental conditions than those who simply read a detailed description of deforestation. They also used less paper when cleaning up an “accidental” water spill in the physical world.

Researchers in the recent study suggest there may be more to the resulting prosocial effects than just priming effects. Pretending to possess a superpower may shift a person’s self-concept so he or she sees himself or herself as “someone who helps,” an identify change that could have lasting effects on behavior.

A new study shows the tiny insects orient themselves by the stars. Image via Current Biology, Dacke et. al.

Science has shown us that a number of organisms use the stars for navigation: songbirds, harbor seals and, of course, humans. But a new study by a team of Swedish and South African researchers published today in the journal Current Biology indicates that a rather unexpected creature can be added to this list—the lowly dung beetle.

The beetles are known for creating small balls made of animal feces (i.e. dung) and rolling them in straight lines over long distances. They do this because the dung is their main food source—and other beetles often try to steal the dung once it’s been rolled into a ball. The surest way of retaining the valuable dung once it’s been packed into a ball is to move it away from the original dung pile as quickly as possible:

Researchers, though, have long been mystified by the tiny beetles’ ability to roll the dung balls in straight lines at night. “Even on clear, moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths,” said lead author Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden. “This led us to suspect that the beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation—a feat that had, to our knowledge, never before been demonstrated in an insect.”

To test the hypothesis, the scientists set up a circular ring with a radius of about 4 feet outside and placed a dung pile at the center. They tested how long it took the beetles to reach the ring from the center—a measure of how straight their paths were—and found that their navigational abilities were relatively similar with either a full moon in the sky or at least a clear view of the stars. When they placed tiny blinders on the beetles’ eyes or subjected them to overcast conditions, though, their paths became much more windy.

Next, they placed a number of beetles in a planetarium and performed a similar test. Their paths were straightest with all the stars turned on, but were almost as true with just the Milky Way—indicating that they are particularly dependent on the Milky Way’s streak of light for navigation.

Image via Current Biology, Dacke et. al.

When the researchers turned on a large number of dim stars—many of which lie in the band of the Milky Way—the beetles’ navigation speed still remained similar. It was only when they left on just 18 of the brightest stars that their pathways became significantly windier.

The authors say that this proves that the beetles don’t rely on one particular star or celestial object for navigation, but rather take in the totality of the Milky Way—which appears as a startlingly bright band of light in many rural areas—to orient themselves on the ground.

Gold’s been used for thousands of years to treat disease. Credit: Flickr user covilha

Over thousands of years, gold has been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, inner ear infections, facial nerve paralysis, fevers and syphilis. Now, preliminary findings suggest a new application for tiny grains of gold—destroying cancer cells.

Gold-carrying nanoparticles are capable of killing a common type of cancer that attacks antibody-making B cells in the blood, according to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This cancer, B-cell lymphoma, originates in the lymph glands and is the most common type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Last year, it resulted in nearly 19,000 deaths.

Developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the nanoparticle mimics the size, shape and surface chemistry of high-density lipoprotein—natural HDL—the preferred meal of these cancer cells. HDL is the “good” cholesterol that cruises through the bloodstream, removing dangerous buildups of LDL, the harmful, “bad” cholesterol.

The bits of gold tucked inside these particles are tiny—just five nanometers wide. A billionth of a meter, a nanometer is a measurement used to size bacteria, X-rays and DNA. The width of a double helix is about two nanometers.

Despite its microscopic size, the synthetic particle packs a big punch—more accurately, two of them. Recent research has shown that B-cell lymphoma is dependent on the uptake of natural HDL, from which it derives fat content, to spur cell proliferation. The nanoparticle cuts off its supply. Masquerading as natural HDL, the nanoparticle latched on to cholesterol receptors on deadly lymphoma cells. First, the nanoparticle’s spongy surface sucked out the cell’s cholesterol. Then, it plugged up the cancer cell, preventing it from absorbing natural HDL particles in the future. Deprived of this essential nutrient, the cell eventually died.

Natural HDL alone didn’t kill the cells or inhibit tumor growth in the study. The blinged-out particle was key to starving the lymphoma cell—and it did so without the help of cancer drugs.

It also didn’t appear to be toxic to other human cells normally targeted by HDL particles, to normal lymphocytes (a type of white blood cells) or to mice, in which the particle actually inhibited tumor growth. Developing a drug therapy using this nanoparticle depends on further extensive testing, but it could take chemotherapy off the table for the thousands of patients diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma.

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!

The gooseneck barnacle (with a relaxed penis at arrow) is capable of a method of sex previously unobserved in barnacles, upending 150 years of theory. Image via Barazandeh, et al. Proc. R. Soc. B.

Barnacles are renowned for the size of their penises. The strange-looking creatures, which live inside shells glued to rocks or boat hulls, have outsized members that are among the longest in the animal kingdom relative to their size—their penises can stretch up to eight times their body length. Barnacles can even change the size and shape of their penis depending on the amount of wave action in their ocean real estate.

Perhaps this is why the sex lives of barnacles have long been of interest to scientists—luminaries such as Darwin, among others, closely studied the subject. Until recently, though, scientists recognized just two methods of reproduction in the species, and both left unanswered questions.

Pseudo-copulation, in which the penis enters a neighboring barnacle’s shell and deposits sperm, has been observed, but this method restricts them to reproducing only with others in their vicinity. Scientists have also observed that individual barnacles with no neighbors can reproduce, and they assumed this was accomplished through self-fertilization, because most barnacles are hermaphrodites.

Gooseneck barnacles (Pollicipes polymerus) taken at Limekiln Point on San Juan Island. Photo: Biriwilg, Wikimedia Commons

Now, though, researchers at the University of Alberta, Edmonton and Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre in British Columbia seem to have discovered a new reproduction method while studying the gooseneck barnacle (Pollicipes polymerus), upending more than 150 years of theory. Previously, the researchers had noticed that in other studies of the gooseneck barnacle, self-fertilization was never observed. They also saw sperm leaking from the barnacles in the field, which made them consider the possibility that barnacles could pick up sperm from the water.

In the study, the scientists collected gooseneck barnacles—both isolated and in pairs—along with their fertilized eggs from Barkley Sound in British Columbia to take back to the lab so they could genetically analyze the paternal combinations. The DNA of the fertilized eggs revealed that none of the isolated barnacles had produced embryos through self-fertilization—so one hundred percent of these eggs must have been fertilized by capturing sperm from the water.

Surprisingly, though, even some of the barnacles that resided in pairs had embryos that had been fertilized with sperm from a non-neighbor. This left one possibility: that the barnacles release their sperm into the ocean and let the water carry it to distant neighbors. This type of fertilization has been observed in other marine animals that can’t or don’t move, but it was always assumed that barnacles can’t reproduce in this way.

The authors point out that this mode of reproduction may be unusually common in this particular barnacle species because of the small size of their penis—but the fact that this phenomenon occurs at all opens the door to re-thinking the biology of these creatures. Other barnacle species might also have more mating options, with fathers coming from farther afield than previously thought.

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

As part of a new study, shore crabs that were given a mild electrical shock responded in a way indicating they felt pain. Credit: Queen’s University Belfast

Can crabs feel pain? New research on the clawed crustaceans suggests the answer is yes.

A group of UK researchers came to this conclusion by examining the reactions of common shore crabs to mild electric shocks in a study released today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The key to their finding is the distinction between the nervous system activity known as nociception and pain, which is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. For years, many researchers assumed crustaceans such as crabs experienced the former, but not the latter.

Nociception—which differs from pain in that it isn’t subjective—is produced by the peripheral and central nervous systems in reaction to potentially tissue-damaging stimuli. All animals experience this reflex, including humans—for example, the nerve endings (called nociceptors) under our skin transmit a signal along our spinal cord to the brain when we touch a too-hot plate, and we automatically jerk our hands back.

For crabs, nociception provides immediate protection following a small electric shock, but it shouldn’t trigger any changes in its later behavior. That’s a job for pain—it helps organisms learn to avoid the harmful source in the future.

In this study, the crabs appeared to do just that. Ninety crabs were placed in a tank with two areas without a light source, one crab at a time. After the crabs scuttled toward the dark area they liked best, they were removed from the tank and exposed to a mild electric shock.

Following a rest period, each of the crabs was returned to the tank. Most of the crustaceans returned to the shelter they’d picked the first time. Those who had received a shock in the first round were zapped again, and when they were introduced into the tank for the third time, the majority moved to the other, presumably shock-free safe area. Crabs who hadn’t been shocked returned once again to their first-choice area.

Shore crabs chose on which side of the tank to seek shelter. Credit: Queen’s University Belfast

Dark hideaways, like under rocks along waterbeds, are important to these creatures because they offer protection from predators. After receiving the electric shocks, the decapods chose to trade in safety to avoid the unpleasant experience in the future.

“Having experienced two rounds of shocks, the crabs learned to avoid the shelter where they received the shock,” said study co-author Bob Elwood, an animal behavior professor at the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast, in a statement. “They were willing to give up their hideaway in order to avoid the source of their probable pain.”

So did the crabs remember the pain? The researchers say it’s possible, and previous work by Elwood and others supports the idea.

In a 2009 study with hermit crabs, wires attached to the creatures’ shells delivered small shocks to their abdomens, which they typically protect by crawling into empty mollusk shells. The only crabs to abandon their shells in search of others had previously incurred electric shocks, which researchers say means the crabs found the experience unpleasant—and perhaps ouch-worthy.

A new shell was then offered, and those crabs that had been shocked but remained in their original homes moved quickly toward the new option, investigated it for a shorter time and were more likely to make the switch than those who hadn’t been shocked. Experiencing shocks changed the hermit crabs’ motivation, much like the way we choose not to touch that hot plate again.

Such behavioral changes were also the subject by a 2007 paper by Elwood, with a different crustacean, the prawn. Various noxious stimuli introduced to prawns’ antennae elicited a reflexive tail flick. But after that, the prawns groomed their antennae and rubbed them against the side of their tanks, prolonged activities that, researchers say, signal the experience of pain.

While it’s impossible to explicitly demonstrate that crustaceans like crabs, prawns and lobsters feel pain, researchers hope these findings spur investigation of how the marine animals are handled in aquaculture and in the kitchen, where chefs often declaw or boil crabs alive.

Comet ISON, still just a faint glimmer at the crosshairs of this telescope image, could be the brightest comet in a generation next November. Image via E. Guido/G. Sostero/N. Howes

Over the past year, we’ve seen a ton of scientific milestones and discoveries of historic importance, from the discovery of the Higgs Boson to the landing of a mobile laboratory on Mars. Science, though, is defined by its relentless march forward: No matter how much we learn, there are always more questions to answer. So, after our roundup of 2012′s most surprising (and significant) scientific events, we bring you the most exciting studies, projects and science developments we’ll be watching for in 2013.

1. Comet Ison: Back in September, a pair of Russian astronomers discovered a new comet heading in our direction. At the time, it was just a faint blip detectable only with the most sophisticated telescopes, and it was unclear how visible it would become during its approach. Now, though, astronomers are predicting that when it passes by us and closely orbits the sun in November and December of 2013, it could be the astronomical sight of our lifetimes. “Comet Ison could draw millions out into the dark to witness what could be the brightest comet seen in many generations—brighter even than the full Moon,” astronomer David Whitehouse writes in The Independent. One thing’s for sure: we’ll be watching.

Russian scientists plan to drill the last few meters into the subglacial Lake Vostok in January and February in an attempt to collect water and sediment samples that have been isolated for millions of years. Image via National Science Foundation

2. Lake Vostok: For more than a decade, a team of Russian scientists has worked to drill nearly 12,000 feet down into Antarctica’s icy depths with a single purpose: to obtain samples from the ultra-deep isolated subglacial lake known as Lake Vostok. After barely reaching the water’s surface last Antarctic summer, they now plan to return at the end of 2013 to drill fully into the lake and use a robot to collect water and sediment samples. The lake may have been isolated for as long as 15 to 25 million years—providing the tantalizing potential for long-term isolated evolution that could yield utterly strange lifeforms. The lake could even serve as a model for the theoretical ice-covered oceans on Jupiter’s moon Europa, helping us better understand how evolution might occur elsewhere in the solar system.

Rival American and British teams were also racing to probe the depths of other subglacial lakes in search of life—the American team’s efforts to reach subglacial Lake Whillans is expected to meet with success this January or February, while the British have been forced to cease their drilling efforts into subglacial Lake Ellsworth due to technical difficulties.

Experts predict that algae-based biofuels, now on sale at a handful of spots in California, could take off in 2013. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Honeywell

3. Algae Fuel: Experts predict that 2013 will be the year when vehicle fuels derived from algae finally take off. A handful of biofuel stations in the San Francisco area started selling algae-based biodiesel commercially for the first time last month, and after the product met state fuel standards, the pilot program is expected to be expanded shortly. Because algae use less space, grow more quickly and can be more efficiently converted into oil than conventional crops used for biofuels, advocates are excited about the possibility that algae-based fuels could wean us off petroleum without using up precious food crops.

New findings about the cosmic microwave background, the energy resulting from the Big Bang that still radiates through the universe (imaged above), could help us better understand how space originally formed. Image via ESA/ LFI & HFI Consortia

4. Cosmic Microwave Background: Energy left over from the Big Bang still radiates through the universe—and the European Space Agency’s plans to use the Planck satellite to measure this energy more precisely than ever before could help us better understand the formation of the universe. The 1965 measurement of this microwave energy first supported the concept of the Big Bang, and subsequent examination of variations in the radiation has led to more sophisticated theories about our universe’s earliest days. The Planck satellite, launched in 2009, has already collected a wide range of valuable astronomical data and images, but plans to release all this info in early 2013 has the cosmology world all atwitter.

IBM’s Watson supercomputer could start helping doctors diagnosis illnesses in 2013. Image via IBM

5. Supercomputers to the Rescue: A number of supercomputers around the world could have a remarkable impact at solving problems in health, the environment and other fields over the next year. Yellowstone, a 1.5 petaflops cluster computer in Wyoming, was installed this past summer and will spend 2013 crunching numbers (1.5 quadrillion calculations per second, to be exact) to refine climate models and help us better understand how storms and wildfires move across the planet. Meanwhile, Watson, IBM’s world-famous Jeopardy-winning supercomputer, is currently being trained by doctors to recognize medical symptoms and serve as a diagnostic tool, providing treatment options based on case histories and clinical knowledge. So far, the computer has been trained to recognize breast, lung and prostate cancers.

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.

It might seem disgusting, but a new study indicates that insects like mealworms might be the climate-friendly protein alternative of the future. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Pengo

The year is 2051. Given the realities of climate change and regulations on carbon emissions, beef and pork–protiens with high carbon footprints–have become too expensive for all but the most special of occasions. Luckily, scientists have developed an environmentally-friendly meat solution. Sitting down for dinner, you grab your fork and look down at a delicious plate of….mealworms.

That, anyway, is one possibility for sustainable meat examined by Dennis Oonincx and Imke de Boer, a pair of scientists from the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, in a study published today in the online journal PLOS ONE.

In their analysis, cultivating beetle larvae (also known as mealworms) for food allowed the production of much more sustainable protein, using less land and less energy per unit of protein than conventional meats, such as pork or beef. In a 2010 study, they found that five different insect species were also much more climate-friendly than conventional meats—a pound of mealworm protein, in particular, had a greenhouse gas footprint 1% as large as a pound of beef.

“Since the population of our planet keeps growing, and the amount of land on this earth is limited, a more efficient, and more sustainable system of food production is needed,” Oonincx said in a statement. “Now, for the first time it has been shown that mealworms, and possibly other edible insects, can aid in achieving such a system.”

This prospect might seem absurd—and, for some, revolting—but the problem of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from meat production is quite serious. The UN estimates that livestock production accounts for roughly 18% of all emissions worldwide, caused by everything from the fuel burned to grow and truck animal feed to the methane emitted by ruminants such as cows as they digest grass. Of most concern, since world populations are increasing and growing more wealthy, is that the demand for animal protein is expected to grow by 70-80% by 2050.

Pound for pound, mealworm protein (green) produces much lower amounts of greenhouse gas emissions than both the high (red) and low (blue) estimates for conventional protein sources. Image via Oonincx

Insects like mealworms, the researchers suggest, can help to solve this problem. Since they aren’t warm-blooded (like mammals) they expend far less energy per pound as part of their metabolism, so they needn’t eat as much to survive. As a result, less energy goes into cultivating them as a food source, and less carbon dioxide gets emitted into the atmosphere.

The researchers came to this conclusion by conducting an environmental impact assessment for a commercial mealworm producer in the Netherlands (mealworms are often cultivated as a food for reptile and amphibian pets). They analyzed every input used in the process of rearing the worms, including the energy used to heat the incubators, the grain used as feed and the cardboard used for rearing cartons. Even including all these inputs, the worms were much more climate-friendly than conventional protein sources.

In Thailand and other Asian countries, insects have long been considered a viable food source. Image via Flickr user Chrissy Olson

Sure, you might be pretty reluctant to sit down to a bowl of mealworm macaroni, but in a number of places around the world—especially in Asia—they’re considered a perfectly normal food. Even some people here in the U.S. agree: A quick search reveals mealworm recipes you can cook up at home, like mealworm french fries and stir-fried mealworms with egg, while Mosto, a trendy restaurant in San Francisco, serves crispy mealworms over ice cream.

Better yet, mealworms are more healthy than conventional meats, too. According to PBS, a pound of mealworms has more protein and half as much fat as a pound of pork.

Still, there is one inescapable obstacle to widespread mealworm consumption: the “yuck” factor. For those of us who don’t typically eat insects, a forkful of mealworms triggers a profound feeling of disgust. Even this blogger—fully convinced of the wisdom of eating insects—can acknowledge from personal experience (an encounter with a bag of fried mealworms in Thailand) that knowing the worms are okay to eat and actually eating them are entirely separate matters.

Without cutting emissions by 2020, avoiding catastrophic levels of global warming, including ice melt and sea level rise, will be extremely unlikely. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Christof Berger

For years, most of us have envisioned climate change as a long-term problem that requires a long-term solution. But as the years pass—and with the calendar soon to flip over to 2013—without any substantial attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, this impression needs to change in a hurry.

According to a new paper published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, there’s a startlingly small number we need to keep in mind when dealing with climate change: 8. That’s as in 8 more years until 2020, a crucial deadline for reducing global carbon emissions if we intend to limit warming to 2°C, according to a team of researchers from a trio of research institutions—the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, along with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado—who authored the paper.

They came to the finding by looking at a range of different scenarios for emissions levels in 2020 and projecting outward how much warming each one would cause for the planet as a whole by the year 2100. They found that in order to have a good chance at holding long-term warming to an average of 2°C worldwide—a figure often cited as the maximum we can tolerate without catastrophic impacts—annual emissions of carbon dioxide (or equivalent greenhouse gas) in 2020 can be no higher than 41 to 47 gigatons worldwide.

That’s a problem when you consider the fact that we’re currently emitting 50 gigatons annually; if present trends continue, that number will rise to 55 gigatons by 2020. In other words, unless we want catastrophic levels of warming, we need to do something, quickly.

The researchers also weighed a number of technological approaches that could help us bring this figure down by 2020: mass conversion to nuclear power generation, rapid adoption of energy-efficient appliances and buildings, electric vehicle usage and other means of reducing fossil fuel use. “We wanted to know what needs to be done by 2020 in order to be able to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius for the entire twenty-first century,” said Joeri Rogelj, the lead author of the paper, in a statement.

It turns out that some combination of all of these methods will be necessary. But lowering global energy demand—in large part, by increasing efficiency—is by far the easiest route to making a dent in emissions soon enough to hit the goal by 2020.

If the reduction target isn’t reached by 2020, avoiding catastrophic warming could theoretically still be possible, the researchers note, but the cost of doing so would only increase, and our options would narrow. If we start cutting emissions now, for example, we might be able to hit the goal without increasing nuclear power generation, but wait too long and it becomes a necessity.

Waiting past 2020 would also require more costly changes. In that case, “you would need to shut down a coal power plant each week for ten years if you still wanted to reach the two-degree Celsius target,” said Keywan Riahi, one of the co-authors. Waiting would also make us more reliant on as-yet unproven technologies, such as carbon capture and storage and the efficient conversion of crops into biofuels.

“Fundamentally, it’s a question of how much society is willing to risk,” said David McCollum, another co-author. “It’s certainly easier for us to push the climate problem off for a little while longer, but…continuing to pump high levels of emissions into the atmosphere over the next decade only increases the risk that we will overshoot the two-degree target.”

Given the continuing failures of negotiators to come to any sort of international climate agreement—most recently highlighted by the lack of progress at the COP 18 Conference in Doha—this “risk” seems to more closely resemble a certainty. 2020 might seem a long way off, but if we spend the next 7 years stalling like we have over the past 18 years of climate negotiations, it’ll get here faster than we can imagine.