Unplugging asthmatic airways
By Nicola Jones Hundreds of these cannabis-related chemicals now exist, both natural and synthetic, inspiring researchers in search of medical breakthroughs — and fueling a dangerous trend in recreational use Read more
Small wonders: The antibodies from camels and sharks that could change medicine
By Christina Szalinski A handful of animals make a pared-down version of these pathogen-fighting proteins of our immune system. Scientists hope to harness them as treatments for ills from cancer to Covid, for tracking cells in the body, and more. Read more
From the archives
Years of studies have suggested that the hormone oxytocin plays a major role in the bonding that happens between animals — much of the research has focused on the prairie vole, a snuggly, monogamous rodent. But this love story isn’t so clear-cut, Katherine J. Wu writes for the Atlantic. Using CRISPR gene-editing techniques, scientists generated a lineage of voles without functional oxytocin receptors — and yet, the creatures’ snuggly ways persevered. Learn more about the “hug hormone” and the complex role it may play in social behavior with our story.
Oxytocin’s effects aren’t just about love
By Bob Holmes At last, neuroscientists are learning how the hormone shapes social behaviors such as pair-bonding and parental care. It’s more complicated than they thought. Read more
What we are reading
Exaltation of bytes
A new supercomputer called Frontier now ranks as the world’s fastest: The first in a new generation of “exacomputers,” it is capable of a quintillion calculations per second. The unprecedented power of examachines could help solve puzzles in fields from meteorology to medicine to nuclear weaponry, writes Sarah Scoles for Scientific American. Frontier has already slashed from a week to a day the time it takes to analyze how every genetic mutation of the Covid-19 virus affects its contagiousness. But ask a scientist whether these new machines are finally good enough, writes Scoles, and “you’ll never get a yes.”
The sad truths
Defining depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is a major oversimplification — one that researchers are trying to address. For Science News, Laura Sanders reports on the tricky business of measuring, understanding and treating this complicated condition. Diagnostic criteria vary widely: Only one symptom, “sad mood,” appears in all seven of the most common depression measurement scales. And the illness differs across gender, race and culture. As one scientist notes, the way forward for depression research “requires grappling with nuances, complexity and imperfect data.”
The past looks bright
Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope came online, it captured some galaxies that seemed far too big and bright for their very old age (“So stupidly bright,” said one MIT astronomer). The discovery shook up the field, writes Rebecca Boyle in Quanta Magazine: “Finding such big, bright, early galaxies seems akin to finding a fossilized rabbit in Precambrian strata.” But despite some claims to the contrary, the size and brilliance of the galaxies did not break the standard model of cosmology — they are, however, forcing a rethink of how galaxies formed when the universe was very young.
Art & science
CREDIT: ©UPY2023 / MASAYUKI AGAWA
Thar she blows
The warm, salty waters of the Kuroshio Current that skim the Japanese coast are deceptively clear. Fairly few microorganisms, the foundation of the marine food chain, cloud the surface — yet numerous species of fish use the current for their spawning grounds. Researchers call this contradiction between life and sustenance “the Kuroshio paradox.” You can see this phenomenon in action here as a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks snakes through the current.
In recent years, the current has brought the sharks through the same location, which makes for a reliable photography opportunity, says Masayuki Agawa, who snapped this shot during an annual visit to Mikomoto Island. The recurrence is so dependable that research teams have traveled to the same island to tag and track passing scalloped hammerheads, monitoring that could help the species that’s threatened by the shark fin trade and bycatch entanglement.
You can read more about Agawa’s photo, which was recognized by judges of the 2023 Underwater Photographer of the Year, and see dozens of other snapshots of oceanic life.
