News and notes about science
GOING TO THE MOON? REMEMBER TO BRING YOUR SKATES ALONG
There is almost certainly ice water on the surface of the moon, hiding in the cold, dark places near the north and south poles, a new study shows.
Scientists had already thought there was water up there, but now we have some of the most definitive proof to date. It appears that this ice — very muddy ice, mixed with a lot of lunar dust — exists inside craters where direct sunlight does not reach it.
But we still do not know how deep it goes, or how exactly it got there.
The authors of the study, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say the findings are exciting because they call for further exploration of our rocky satellite. The ice could even be a resource for human visitors — perhaps to be used for drinking water, or even to make rocket fuel.
Shuai Li, the lead author and a planetary scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said that despite decades of lunar research, scientists have had trouble exploring the polar regions, in part because the craters are so dark.
“So there aren’t too many measurements,” he said. “But a lot of things are going on there.”
Researchers estimate that the exposed ice covers only 3.5 percent of the craters’ shadowy areas. They don’t know whether the water runs deep, like the tips of buried icebergs, or is as thin as a layer of frost.
The data used by Li and his team was not new. It had been collected by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, which hitched a ride on Chandrayaan 1, India’s first lunar probe, in 2008 and 2009.
The instrument was able to map most of the moon’s surface, but data from the permanent shadows — inside some of the craters near the poles — was a little bit patchy, and hard for researchers to work with.
So Li and his team peered into dark craters using traces of sunlight that had bounced off crater walls. They analyzed the spectral data to find places where three specific wavelengths of near-infrared light were absorbed, indicating ice water. They performed rigorous statistical analysis to make sure their results were uncorrupted by coincidental anomalies or instrument errors. Jacey Fortin
FOR PREGNANT DADS WHO STRAY, PLENTY OF OTHER PIPEFISH IN THE SEA
Pipefish, along with their cousins sea horses and sea dragons, defy convention in love and fertility. In a striking role reversal, fathers give birth instead of mothers.
During courtship, females pursue males with flashy ornaments or elaborate dances, and males tend to be choosy about which females’ eggs they’ll accept. Once pregnant, these gender-bending fathers invest heavily in their young, supplying embryos with nutrients and oxygen through a setup similar to the mammalian placenta.
But this investment may also be cruelly conditional, according to a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Studying pipefish, scientists found evidence that pregnant fathers spontaneously abort or divert fewer resources to their embryos when faced with the prospects of a superior mate — in this case, an exceptionally large female.
The researchers named their finding the “woman in red” effect, after the eponymous 1984 Gene Wilder film about a married man’s obsession with a woman in a red dress.
The reported effect is an interesting instance of sexual conflict, which is ubiquitous among animals, said Sarah Flanagan, a pipefish expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
Previous research had found that pipefish fathers invest less in pregnancies from small females if they have bred with larger females before.
At the risk of anthropomorphizing, Flanagan said, it’s as if male pipefish are thinking, “I’ve done better in the past.”
In their study, Monteiro and his collaborators bred male blackstriped pipefish with large females, then kept each father-to-be in a tank partitioned from a new female of equal size, a new female much larger in size, or its original mate.
Males in the “woman in red” group — exposed to the new, “sexier” female — had the highest rates of abortion and shortest pregnancies. They also birthed smaller offspring, some of which had abnormalities.
It seems that these fathers stopped investing in existing offspring to save up for a better brood, said Jacinta Beehner, an associate professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Michigan who studies reproductive strategies in primates. Steph Yin
GREEN ORBS THAT FLOAT BY DAY AND SINK BY NIGHT
Moss balls, lake balls, Cladophora balls, marimo: Whatever you call them, they’re strange — and they’re beautiful.
These mysterious green orbs occupy cool lakes in the Northern Hemisphere in places like Scotland, Iceland and Ukraine. In Japan, they are a protected species and official national treasure.
Under certain conditions, marimo form when a type of algae bind together and roll in the currents in the bottom of shallow lakes, collecting in large colonies. Sometimes the orbs — which can grow to nearly 1 foot in diameter — rise to the surface during the day, and then sink back down at night.
Marimo contain many mysteries. But now, at least one has been solved. In a paper published recently in Current Biology, biologists at the University of Bristol in England described how this fuzzy freshwater friend floats and sinks. The algae regulate photosynthesis with a biological clock, and in the process, release oxygen bubbles that carry them toward the sun.
Carl Linnaeus first collected samples of these weird spheres in Sweden in 1753. But they weren’t called “marimo” until Takuya Kawakami, another botanist, found them along Lake Akan in Hokkaido, Japan, more than a century later. Now they are a pro-
tected national treasure.
Collecting them from Lake Akan is otherwise prohibited, but some keep marimo, man-made or collected elsewhere, as aquarium pets — which is how they captured the attention of Dora Cano-Ramirez, the lead author of the paper.
After purchasing her own marimo, she noticed that bubbles covered them at some times of day and not others. And during the day, a few moved to the top of her tank. Because she studied how biological clocks control photosynthesis in land plants, she wondered if the same kinds of processes might be at play in her lightharvesting algae balls. She took her idea to Antony Dodd, a biologist and head of her lab.
If land plants use biological clocks, and some aquatic creatures that live symbiotically with sun-loving algae try to maximize light exposure, Dodd said it’s possible that floating may allow marimo to capture more light. Sinking may also protect them from cold surface water or ice, he said. JoAnna Klein
BEFORE FLUSHING CONTACT LENSES, CONSIDER WHERE THEY’RE GOING
If you throw out your contact lenses every day or so, you’re not alone — more than 45 million people in the United States wear contacts, and many of them use disposable versions of them.
But if they are not tossed out correctly, contact lenses may have a dark side.
Research presented recently at the American Chemical Society’s meeting in Boston showed that 20 percent of more than 400 contact wearers who were randomly recruited in an online survey flushed used contacts down the toilet or washed them down the sink, rather than putting them in the garbage.
When the lenses make their way to a wastewater treatment facility, they do not biodegrade easily, the researchers report, and they may fragment and make their way into surface water. There, they can cause environmental damage and may add to the growing problem of microplastic pollution. A 2015 study found that there were 93,000 to 236,000 metric tons of microplastic swirling in the ocean.
Filters keep some nonbiological waste out of wastewater treatment plants, said Rolf Halden, director of the Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University, and Charles Rolsky, a graduate student and the study’s lead author. But contacts are so flexible that they can fold up and make their way through. The researchers interviewed workers at such facilities, who confirmed that they had spotted lenses in the waste.
Next, the team submerged contacts in chambers where bacteria are used to break down biological waste at a treatment plant. They found that even after seven days of exposure, the lenses appeared intact, though lab analysis detected small changes in the material.
Then, going through about 9 pounds of treated waste, Rolsky and a colleague found two fragments of contact lens, implying that while microorganisms might not make much of a mark, physical processing might break them into pieces.
After processing, treated waste is often spread on fields. If fragments of contacts are in the mixture, they or the substances they’ve picked up may be washed by rain into surface water, the researchers conjecture. Veronique Greenwood
GIRAFFE PARTS SALES ARE BOOMING IN THE U.S., AND IT’S LEGAL
At a time when the giraffe population is plummeting in the wild, the sale of products made with giraffe skin and bone is booming.
According to the Humane Society of the United States and its international affiliate, more than 40,000 giraffe parts were imported to the United States from 2006 to 2015 to be made into expensive pillows, boots, knife handles, bible covers and other trinkets.
The sale of these products is legal, but the organization argues that restrictions are needed. Along with other advocacy groups, it has petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to provide that protection by listing giraffes as an endangered species.
They are issuing a report now “to ramp up the pressure and show the public the true nature of the giraffe trade in the U.S., and show the administration that the public loves giraffes and really wants their government to take action to protect this animal,” said Adam Peyman, manager of wildlife programs and operations for the Humane Society International.
In 2016, a study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources determined that the worldwide giraffe population had plummeted from 150,000 to 100,000 since 1985. Giraffes face two main threats, the report found: habitat loss and poaching by locals in search of bushmeat.
Trophy hunting seems to be the primary source of the animals arriving in the United States, but isn’t driving the animals to extinction, Peyman said. But any market for giraffe products puts more pressure on the species.
The market for giraffe products, Peyman said, may have inadvertently been increased by a ban on importing some elephant products, which was upheld by the Trump administration late last year.
An investigator with the society’s U.S. organization went undercover to 21 locations to track giraffe sales and talk to sellers.
The investigator found a taxidermied body of a juvenile giraffe, selling for $7,500, according to the Humane Society, and a pillow made with an animal head, intact down to its eyelashes.
On bible covers selling for $400 and equally expensive boots, the hair is removed from the hide — so it’s not even evident that the source is a giraffe. Karen Weintraub