Getting your goose is not a good thing for airplanes and congested skies
Q. It was called the “Miracle on the Hudson”: In January 2009, just two minutes after taking off from La Guardia Airport, US Airways 1549 was forced to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River after both of its jet engines lost power. What caused the aborted flight, and how unusual was that? A. The plane had struck a flock of migrating Canada geese and its two engines ingested at least two 4-kilogram birds, damaging them so they could not maintain necessary thrust, says Lee Langston in “American Scientist” magazine. Birdstrike events are not unusual, occurring about once every 2,000 flights; those reported to the FAA have increased 7.5-fold from 1,847 in 1990 to 13,795 in 2015. The main reason is increased air traffic, with quieter turbofan jet engines reducing warning time for the birds to avoid collisions. Also, the Canada geese population has increased in North America, partly due to increased pesticide regulations and expanded wildlife refuges.
Currently, FAA certification of any new commercial transport jet engine requires that it be able to survive a strike from one large bird (2-4 kilograms) or from multiple medium-size flocking birds (0.7-1.3 kilograms), as well as meet certain thrust and safety standards. Making an engine even more resistant to bird strikes will involve significant effort and cost for a manufacturer.
Concludes Langston: “With increasingly congested flight routes and crowded wildlife, the need for solutions will only continue to grow.” Q. Can you connect the strands for “snarge,” a forensic ornithologist, and the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.? A. First, you might need to know that “snarge” is the name for “bird remains.” In the 1960s, the late Roxie Laybourne founded the Feather Identification Laboratory at the Smithsonian to associate a bird type with the snarge of birds that have collided with aircraft and been sent there, says Lee Langston in “American Scientist” magazine. Thanks to her pioneering methods, the lab can also identify the bird’s gender, age and migratory status. As one biologist put it, nothing competes with feathers for sheer diversity of form and function and for durability.
As a systematic datagathering center accessible to the FAA and to the U.S. Air Force, for example, the Feather ID Lab “provides guidance regarding the size, behavior and ecology of the bird in question and is key to tracking species trends as well as focusing preventive measures.”
Currently, the lab processes about 9,000 bird-strike cases annually, 30 times higher than in Laybourne’s day — and the number continues to grow. Q. Autism and Williams syndrome are disorders which influence social interactions. But they are in many ways opposites. Children with Williams syndrome are friendly and trusting — even with strangers — and have an irresistible desire to communicate. They do well with face recognition, reading emotions and gauging intentions, and typically possess strong language skills. Yet, genetically speaking, autism and Williams syndrome are two sides of the same coin. How so? A. Autism is strongly genetic: If one identical twin has the disorder, 90 per cent of the time so will the other, says neuroscientist Eric Kandel in his book “The Disordered Mind: What unusual brains tell us about ourselves.” Many different genetic configurations are known to contribute to autism. One is a small structural variation on chromosome 7 called a copy number variation, where a short segment of DNA gets duplicated. But if instead of being duplicated, this segment is deleted, Williams syndrome results.
Notes Kandel, “The fact that this single segment, containing about twenty-five of the twenty-one thousand or so genes in our genome, could have such a profound influence on complex social behavior is astonishing. This kind of discovery gives scientists something very specific to pursue and should open important new avenues in developing treatments.”