Timmins, Ontario, has a long history as a mining town. Photo: Michael Jacobs

In the small city of Timmins, Ontario, a town nestled half way between Michigan and Hudson Bay, there is a mine. Actually, there are many mines—it’s a mining town. But this story is about just one, a mile and a half deep, where there is water bubbling up from below that has been cut off from the rest of the world for at least a billion years—maybe as much as 2.6 billion years.

The longer end of that timeline, Ivan Semeniuk points out in the Globe and Mail, is about half the age of the Earth. This water hasn’t been in contact with the rest of the planet since before the rise of multicellular life.

But like the water trapped in frozen lakes below Antarctica’s massive ice sheets, researchers suspect there might be life in these flows.

“It’s been called the Galapagos of the subsurface,” says Barbara Sherwood Lollar to New Scientist. The water, “is packed with hydrogen and methane – chemicals that microbes love to eat.”

“What we have here,” says Sherwood Lollar, a microbiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, “is a plate of jelly donuts.” While she has yet to confirm whether the water is inhabited, she says the conditions are perfect for life.

The scientists don’t know whether there is any life in the ancient, isolated water. But they’re working on it. The water is young enough that it would have been locked away after life arose on Earth. But it’s been trapped for so long that any life that does exist would likely be unique—a relic of an ancient world. The CBC:

Some Canadian members of the team are currently testing the water to see if it contains microbial life — if they exist, those microbes may have been isolated from the sun and the Earth’s surface for billions of years and may reveal how microbes evolve in isolation.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Balrog: “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world. Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear.”

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Photo: Ron Lute

Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

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An artist’s rendition of Acrotholus audeti. Photo: Julius Csotonyi

What’s 90 pounds, six feet long and has an adorable little bone-cased bump for a head? No, not Cubone. It’s this newly discovered dinosaur, Acrotholus audeti, which was dug up recently in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Like the dinosaur havens of the mountainous west, from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Arizona, Alberta is practically stuffed with dinosaur fossils. But by digging around in the the Milk River Formation in southern Alberta—a region traditionally not known for loads of fossils—researchers found something new: the dome-headed skull of Acrotholus audeti. Dated to 85 million years ago, this is the oldest-known North American member (and maybe the oldest in the world) of the big family of bone-headed dinosaurs.

The little dinosaur was an herbivore and, other than the occasional headbutt, might have been pretty cool to hang around. But more than just being a neat little dinosaur, says Discover, the finding is a hint that little dinosaurs may have been way more common than we think.

Most dinosaur finds are of the bigger brethren: big bones are less likely to get picked over and crushed by scavengers or destroyed by time. But, with their big-boned heads strong enough to survive the trials of millions of years, dinosaurs like Acrotholus audeti are helping paleontologists flesh out the record of little dinosaurs. The new find, says the Canadian Press, “ touched off further investigation that suggested the world’s dinosaur population was more diverse than once believed.”

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A funnel cloud in Texas. Photo: Charleen Mullenweg

For two years the majority of the continental U.S. has been plagued by drought, a confluence of natural cycles that have worked together to drive up temperatures and dry up the land. But for all the damage that has been done by the long-running drought, there’s been an upside as well. The lack of water in the atmosphere has also sent the U.S. toward a record low for tornadoes, says Climate Central‘s Andrew Freedman.

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Okla., estimates that, between May 2012 and April 2013, there were just 197 tornadoes ranked EF-1 or stronger on the Enhanced Fujita scale. That beats the previous 12-month low, which was 247 tornadoes from June 1991 and May 1992.

That’s the lowest recorded tornado activity since 1954, when scientists first really started keeping track. The number of deaths connected to tornadoes went down, too:

The U.S. did set a record for the longest streak of days without a tornado-related fatality — at 220 days — between June 24, 2012 and Jan. 26, 2013. And July 2012, which was the hottest month on record in the U.S., saw the fewest tornadoes on record for any July.

But the tornadoes didn’t just up and disappear, says Freedman in an August story. Rather, some of them just moved to Canada.

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Photo: Marcos F. Marx

If you’re a kid and an optometrist diagnoses you with a lazy eye, you get to run around with an eye patch and pretend you’re a pirate for a little while. If you’re an adult, you’re faced with a future where your brain decides to ignore your weaker eye, potentially leaving you without three-dimensional vision and a reduced ability to detect motion or contrast. Easily fixed in kids, a lazy eye (amblyopia) is pretty much untreatable in adults.

But a promising new bout of research from McGill University’s Robert Hess and colleagues, says the CBC, found that playing Tetris “significantly improves the vision in the weaker eye of someone with lazy eye.” Just playing the game alone isn’t quite enough. The researchers designed a special set of goggles that split the game in two: one eye watched the blocks fall, the other saw the blocks at the bottom of the game board.

After playing Tetris that way for an hour a day for two weeks, nine adults with lazy eye showed a big improvement in the vision of the weaker eye and in their 3D depth perception.

Just getting people to play Tetris with their weak eye alone didn’t illicit the same improvements. It took both eyes working together to stack the blocks to get the desired effect.

“What we have to do is to get the two eyes working together so one eye doesn’t suppress the other eye,” Hess said. He added that there’s nothing special about the Tetris game, and any other visually intensive game or activity that forces the use of both eyes should also be effective.

The Tetris-based approach could also potentially be used in place of giving kids eye patches. Possibly kids should be given a choice—play a video game or get to look like a pirate. Yarr.

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Live music is a performance art: an artist’s display can matter just as much as his musical skill. (Remember the early 80s?) But new research by perception researcher Michael Schutz reaffirms the idea that a musician’s on-stage gestures don’t just make for a good show but can actually control the sounds you hear.

“Using the marimba as a test case,” says McMaster University, “researchers found that notes may sound “longer” when accompanied by an extended swing of the arm, or “shorter” when the movement is subtle– even if the note itself is exactly the same.”

During a live musical performance, it’s important to note the difference between “sound” and our “perception of sound,” he explains. Our internal perception of the external world is the final arbiter of the musical experience. So even if the entire audience receives the same auditory information, they will experience it in different ways.

“Ultimately, the literal acoustic information is less important than how it is perceived,” adds Schutz.

Schutz’ work—which adds to a growing body of research on the topic—could also help explain why live music is just that much better: a musician who can harness this sense for performance flare can take an already amazing bit of music and turn it into something more.

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Enjoy, for a moment, the soothing tones and the sound of beating wings in National Geographic‘s quirky mashup of indie rockers Temper Trap and some beautiful footage of one of the world’s greatest mass animal voyages, the annual migration of the monarch butterfly. Each year, says the World Wildlife Fund, monarch butterflies “embark on a marvelous migratory phenomenon.”

They travel between 1,200 and 2,800 miles or more from the United States and Canada to central Mexican forests. There the butterflies hibernate in the mountain forests, where a less extreme climate provides them a better chance to survive.

Relaxed and enthralled with the brilliance of the natural world? Good. Try to hold on that feeling as long as you can, because as the New York Times reports, the spectacle of the monarch migration is crashing: “The number of monarch butterflies that completed an annual migration to their winter home in a Mexican forest sank this year to its lowest level in at least two decades.” In just the past two years, the area of Mexican forest taken up by the monarchs shrank from 7.14 acres to 2.94 acres, both down from an earlier peak of 50 acres. The Associated Press:

It was the third straight year of declines for the orange-and-black butterflies that migrate from the United States and Canada to spend the winter sheltering in mountaintop fir forests in central Mexico. Six of the last seven years have shown drops, and there are now only one-fifteenth as many butterflies as there were in 1997.

The decline in the Monarch population now marks a statistical long-term trend and can no longer be seen as a combination of yearly or seasonal events, the experts said.

The blame for the drop, says the AP and the Times, is being spread around everything from logging to pesticides to habitat destruction to changes in climate. The Times:

Mr. Taylor said a further decline could cross a tipping point at which the insects will be unusually vulnerable to outside events like a Mexican cold snap or more extreme heat that could put them in peril.

“Normally, there’s a surplus of butterflies and even if they take a big hit, they recover,” he said. But if their current 2.94-acre wintering ground drops below 2.5 acres, bouncing back could be difficult.

“This is one of the world’s great migrations,” he said. “It would be a shame to lose it.”

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A map showing increasing (blue) and decreasing (red) plant growth over the past 30 years. Photo: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

The further you get from the equator, the greater difference there is between summer and winter temperatures. It’s not just the cold or the heat that makes the most extreme environments so hostile, but this “seasonality” in the temperature—the range of conditions to which plants and animals living in these areas can be subjected. A thick layer of fat and a heavy coat of fur can keep you warm in winter, but the same insulation can be dangerous if the summer heat is too high.

But, with global climate change, says a new study, that temperature seasonality is going down. And satellite records and other observations from the past 30 years, says NASA, show that this change in temperature seasonality is already affecting plant growth in higher latitudes. Higher temperatures and longer growing season mean that large portions of the Arctic, subarctic and temperate ecosystems are seeing more plant growth than they did in the past.

In practice, that means the Arctic is turning green. NASA:

The Arctic’s greenness is visible on the ground as an increasing abundance of tall shrubs and trees in locations all over the circumpolar Arctic. Greening in the adjacent boreal areas is more pronounced in Eurasia than in North America.

So far, the effect has been only a small shift in vegetation patterns, with plant growth in one location mimicking how it was 30 years ago in a location five degrees latitude to the south. By the end of the century, however, scientists think that the changes will be equivalent to a 20 degree shift. Think Alaska’s capital Juneau, at 58 °North, acting more like Louisville, Kentucky, at 38 °North.

However, rising temperatures aren’t the only thing to take into account, and the other effects of climate change could actually hurt the increasingly lush Arctic.

Researchers note that plant growth in the north may not continue on its current trajectory. The ramifications of an amplified greenhouse effect, such as frequent forest fires, outbreak of pest infestations and summertime droughts, may slow plant growth.

And, if a nice green Arctic sounds like a pleasant consequence of climate change, just try to imagine what a 20 degree shift in climate would do to somewhere further south.

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The Canadian high Arctic, it seems, was once home to a massive, “presumably shaggy” species of camel. Now known as desert specialists, the ancient relatives of modern camels first grew up not in parched sand but in frigid snow. Camels’ ancestors have been traced back to North America some 45 million years ago, and a new fossil find by the the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Natalia Rybczynski and colleagues adds to this case with the nearly one-ton Arctic edition of the humped mammal.

According to Rybczynski in the video above, these humped mammals moved over to Asia on a land bridge across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Russia.

“The fossils, dug up by Rybczynski and her colleagues in recent field seasons, came from a gravel-rich layer of sediments laid down more than 3.4 million years ago,” says Sid Perkins for Science.

The 30 or so bits of bone, none more than 7 centimeters long, have suffered much since they were entombed.

… Considering the proportions of the bone fragments, the camel was a giant, probably about 2.7 meters tall at the shoulder—almost 30% larger than its modern relatives are. The moose-sized mammal likely tipped the scales at 900 kilograms at the end of the summer browsing season but then slimmed down as it drew on fat reserves in its hump to sustain itself through the harsh Arctic winter.

At the time when the camels were stomping around, said Rybczynski, the planet would have been, on average, a few degrees warmer than it is now. But polar amplification, just like today, meant that the Arctic regions would have been 25 to 33 F warmer. That being said, it’s still the Arctic, and it still would have been very cold and very dark.

Based on other fossils found nearby, the camels would have lived in a forest alongside more expected Canadian fauna, including bears and deer and beavers.

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Food tray on the shuttle. Image: NASA

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield has been described as “the International Space Station’s ambassador to the internet.” He’s made videos about nail clipping, hand washing, and adapting to weightlessness. Now, he’s showing you how to make a sandwich.

The Canadian Space Agency describes some of the solutions to the challenges presented by eating in space:

Astronauts consume mostly wet and sticky foods such as oatmeal, scrambled eggs, puddings and stews because they stick to an eating utensil long enough for the astronaut to put into their mouth. Foods like bread are rejected because they produce crumbs that can float around; tortillas, on the other hand, are perfect for eating in freefall. Salt and pepper are also consumed, but the salt must be dissolved into water and the pepper suspended in oil.

The CSA also had a contest for Canadian foods to go into space, bringing along things like Les Canardises Duck Rillettes, SeaChange Candied Wild Smoked Salmon, L.B. Maple Treat Maple Syrup Cream Cookies and Turkey Hill Sugarbush Maple Syrup.

In the United States, NASA has a food lab that researchers foods for space consumption. They test things like how many calories astronauts need, and how to actually package and store them. Last year, they tested some new foods for space missions.

But remember, in space, no one can hear you scream for ice cream.

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Image: David

The United States and Russia really don’t agree on a lot of things. But in a rare moment of partnership, the U.S. and Russia are trying to do something about polar bears’ plight. The New York Times writes:

Russia and the United States, two of the five countries where polar bears live, are now the main allies pushing for greater protection for the bears under a global treaty on endangered species, which is being reviewed this week at a conference in Bangkok.

“It really seems that both countries were willing to put aside their differences in order to work together to help save the polar bear,” said Jeffrey Flocken, North American regional director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

And the polar bear needs some serious helping. There are about 25,000 of them left in the wild, and their habitat is slowly melting away. The proposal that the two countries are working on involves protecting the polar bears from hunting and banning the trade of skin, fur and whatever else can be made from the bears.

While the U.S. and Russia have come together on this, other countries aren’t so fond of the plan. Canada and Denmark oppose the ban, and Norway hasn’t announced a decision yet. Canada is the only country that allows the trade of bear bits to overseas consumers. Other places have kept the trade internal, and regulated use of the bears by native communities.

It’s unclear whether this rare burst of camaraderie between Russia and the United States will amount to help for the bear as it slips towards extinction. And it probably won’t do anything for the two countries who are at odds with what to do about Syria, missiles and adoption.

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In the NHL, players’ birthdays fall into a strange pattern: the best players seem to all be born in the earlier months of the year. This pattern was extremely clear from youth hockey all the way up to the pros. In Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell explained one possible cause of this weird birthday trend. Here’s New York’s summary:

Gladwell explains what academics call the relative-age effect, by which an initial advantage attributable to age gets turned into a more profound advantage over time. Because Canada’s eligibility cutoff for junior hockey is January 1, Gladwell writes, “a boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn 10 until the end of the year.” You can guess at that age, when the differences in physical maturity are so great, which one of those kids is going to make the league all-star team. Once on that all-star team, the January 2 kid starts practicing more, getting better coaching, and playing against tougher competition—so much so that by the time he’s, say, 14, he’s not just older than the kid with the December 30 birthday, he’s better.

Coaches seem to draft based on this idea that older players—players born in the first three months—will have the advantage and be better. A new paper, published in PLoS ONE, looked at those numbers:

Compared to those born in the first quarter (i.e., January–March), those born in the third and fourth quarters were drafted more than 40 slots later than their productivity warranted, and they were roughly twice as likely to reach career benchmarks, such as 400 games played or 200 points scored.

But, actually, this is a daft way to put a team together. The birthday effect that Gladwell describes hasn’t held up to scrutiny, and, in fact, when you look at the Canadian Olympic hockey team, it’s not at all full of “older” players. The NHL doesn’t seem to follow that pattern either, according to SB Nation:

According to nhl.com, at the 2010 Olympic break there were 499 Canadians on NHL rosters. That’s about 55% of the players in the entire league. If you broke their birthdates down by quarters of the year you get the following:

Canadians Non-Canadians (as of the end of the 09-10 season)

Jan-Mar: 25.7% 34.2%

Apr-June: 28.5% 23%

July-Sept: 25.5% 21.3%

Oct-Dec: 20.3% 21.5%

As you can see, if there’s a country with an “old” hockey workforce, it’s not Canada. There were actually more Canadian NHL players born in September (43) than January (41), and June was the most populous month (50). True, there are more players born in the first half of the year, but the notion that Canada is only producing successful players from a small portion of the calendar seems to be, at best, somewhat of an overstatement.

Robert Deaner, the researcher behind the new study, wanted to show people that this birthday effect simply doesn’t hold up. He told the press office at Grand Valley State University:

“There’s no doubt that drafting professional athletes is an inexact science. Plenty of sure-fire first-round picks fizzle while some late-round picks unexpectedly become stars. But our results show that, at least since 1980, NHL teams have been consistently fooled by players’ birthdays or something associated with them. They greatly underestimate the promise of players born in the second half of the year, the ones who have always been relatively younger than their peers. For any given draft slot, relatively younger players are about twice as likely to be successful. So if teams really wanted to win, they should have drafted more of the relatively younger players.”

Take note, coaches: stop listening to Malcolm Gladwell, and start listening to science.

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Carbon capture and storage equipment in Germany. Photo: Vattenfall

If the pace of greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t slow, and even start to reverse, in the next few decades, then stopping the rising seas and climbing temperatures will become much, much harder. Aside from stemming emissions, one possible technological fix to balance the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is carbon capture and storage—deliberately pulling carbon dioxide either from power plant exhaust or from the air and storing it in rocky formations underground.

You’d think governments around the world would be investing heavily in this technology, but instead, the Canadian government is shutting down a successful group that is working on carbon capture and storage. A pioneering Canadian research team who in November laid out the first guidelines for how to safely carry out carbon capture and storage is about to be shut down as its funding runs dry, says the CBC. Storing carbon underground is a tricky business, with worries being raised that the technique could cause earthquakes or that the carbon dioxide could leak back into the atmosphere. Though the team did provide a first set of guidelines, it’s fair to assume that our understanding of how to best carry out carbon capture and storage will evolve as research continues. The government of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, who helped fund the project, seems to disagree.

The Canadian Press:

Premier Brad Wall says the International Performance Assessment Centre for Geologic Storage of CO2 did some great work on setting standards.

But Wall says the work has been completed and he doesn’t think there’s a need to continue.

The Canadian team is not the only team working on carbon capture and storage. But, according to recent research set to be published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, carbon capture and storage may be one of our few remaining options to stave off the worst of global warming.

The changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration as envisioned by the IPCC’s different emissions scenarios, or representative concentration pathways. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Led by Simon Fraser University’s Kirsten Zickfeld, this new research says that keeping global warming below 3.6 Fahrenheit—the goal of scientists and world leaders—is going to be pretty much impossible, unless we give it our all to switch to renewable energy sources and wean off fossil fuels. And our window for hitting that goal is running out—fast.

Of all the future emissions scenarios envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, only the most aggressive one, where atmospheric carbon dioxide peaks in 2040 and then starts to drop off, can keep the planet from heating up more than 3.6 F, according to the new research. For any other imagined scenario, the scientists say, we’re not just looking at a bit more warming. Rather, missing this target will bring with it a “climate commitment” where we will have trouble getting temperatures to substantially go back down for another 1,000 years or so.

Even if we completely cut off carbon emissions by the year 2300, we’ll still be dealing with the bulk of the warming we caused by the year 3000, they say:

At year 3000 atmospheric CO2 is still at more than half the year-2300 level in all EMICs for RCPs 4.5—8.5, with the fraction increasing with RCP scenario. Surface air temperature remains nearly constant or decreases slightly in all EMICs, with 85—99% of the maximum warming still persisting in the year 3000 for RCPs 4.5—8.5.

According to the scientists, one of the most important things we could do is to start deliberately pulling carbon dioxide out of the air.

[R]estoring temperature to lower levels in a time frame meaningful to human societies can only be accomplished with “negative emissions” i.e. net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Such negative emissions can be achieved, for instance, by biomass energy in combination with capture and geological storage of the emitted CO2, or by CO2 “scrubbers” which remove the CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

Zickfeld and colleagues write that they’re unsure whether “capture technology is feasible at the necessary scale” to help reverse global warming, suggesting that the work in figuring out carbon capture and storage really isn’t done—despite what the Canadian government says.

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In their trials, the researchers removed three-spined stickleback, among other predators, from experimental waterways, and tracked the effects on the exchange of carbon dioxide. Photo: Jack Wolf

Scientists are well aware of the ways in which predator loss can affect animal communities. Cutting down the size of top predator populations—think lions, bears, sharks—gives a burst of life to the animals they normally eat. The booming prey populations, in turn, eat more of their food, and so on down the chain.

A new study, led by University of British Columbia graduate student Trisha Atwood, found that the loss of predators can affect far more than just the local food web, however. Researchers looked at predator-prey dynamics in experimental freshwater habitats in Canada and Costa Rica and found that, when predators were removed from their experimental waterways, the changes down the web actually culminated in a shift in how much carbon dioxide was being emitted or absorbed by the ecosystem.

Warming temperatures and shifting weather patterns—changes fueled by an amplified greenhouse effect spurred by rising carbon dioxide levels—are expected to threaten the continued existence of “one quarter or more of all species on land by the year 2050.” Marine life, with ocean acidification added to the mix, is also at risk. Through climate change, habitat destruction, hunting and other factors, the web of life in many ecosystems is slowly starting to unravel. Particularly hard-hit in some cases are the top predators.

When the predators were removed, says New Scientist, “carbon dioxide emissions typically increased more than tenfold.”

Atwood’s study of freshwater ecosystems showed how changes to species at the bottom of the food chain, such as photosynthesising algae, following the removal of a top predator dramatically increased the flow of CO2 from the ecosystem to the atmosphere.

The effect will not always be to increase CO2 emissions, however – sometimes the loss of top predators could decrease emissions, she says. “But we show that something so seemingly unrelated, like fishing all the trout from a pond or removing sharks from the ocean, could have big consequences for greenhouse-gas dynamics.”

The research hints at yet more feedback loops that could be lurking behind the mechanisms of climate change. In this case, a warming world could cut down predator populations, altering ecosystems and, in turn, perpetuating the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

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Science savvy female teens in Asia, east and south Europe and the Middle East represent their gender well. These ladies, on average, outperform their male counterparts on science tests for comprehension. In the United States, however, women still lag behind men in science achievement. Only Colombia and Liechtenstein exhibit a higher gap between the genders than the U.S., where boys performed 2.7 percent higher than girls, the New York Times shows (with an interactive plot).

Sixty-five developed countries took part in the test, which was given to 15-year-old students. In the majority of countries, girls dominated. The U.S., plus a handful of countries mostly in west north Europe and the Americas, showed the opposite trend.

The Times writes that the tests point to cultural differences in the incentives offered for learning math and science. Andreas Schleicher, the project leader behind the test, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that boys in the U.S. are more likely to see science as something relevant to their lives than girls.

The Scientist continues:

Christianne Corbett, a senior researcher at the American Association of University Women, agreed, saying, “we see that very early in childhood—around age 4—gender roles in occupations appear to be formed. Women are less likely to go into science careers, although they are clearly capable of succeeding.”

In contrast, Schleicher said, “for girls in some Arab countries”—such as Jordan, where girls outscored boys by an impressive 8 percent—“education is the only way to move up the social structure. It is one way to earn social mobility.”

Like soccer is for young men in some African and Latino countries, science may be the new ticket to financial and societal freedom for women around the world. Women in the U.S., Canada, Britain and other European nations might not have the same incentive to break free of cultural discouragement, but if they could overcome that barrier, the scientific playing field would only become a more diverse and fruitful arena.

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