This is what our universe looks like to x-ray eyes


MPE/IKI


By Daniel Clery Jun. 19, 2020

A telescope designed to study the universe’s mysterious dark energy released its first all-sky image today (pictured), showing what we would see if we had x-ray eyes. After half a year of observing, the scope—known as eROSITA (extended Roentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array)—has already logged more than 1 million objects that shine in the x-ray spectrum, including black holes gobbling matter, compact burned-out stars like white dwarfs and neutron stars, and gas between stars so hot that it gives off an x-ray glow. The eROSITA team says this first image identifies twice as many x-ray sources as have previously been detected in 60 years of x-ray astronomy, and stretches four times farther out than the previous x-ray survey 3 decades ago. Most of the dots in the image—and eROSITA’s primary targets—are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies gorging on gas that, in the process, gets so hot that its glow can be seen across the universe. The project’s 4-year goal is to map the positions of millions of such galaxies to understand how gravity gloms them together in 1000-strong clusters. The mission also hopes to help explain how the mysterious force known as dark energy acts counter to gravity, pushing matter apart and accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Posted in:  Space

doi:10.1126/science.abd4217

Daniel Clery is Science’s senior correspondent in the United Kingdom, covering astronomy, physics, and energy stories 

European physicists boldly take small step toward

 100-kilometer-long atom smasher

RIGHT UNDER GENEVA WHAT COULD GO WRONG

Dig, if you will, a tunnel. A mammoth new collider would dwarf an existing machine at the CERN physics laboratory in Europe. © CERN

By Adrian Cho Jun. 19, 2020 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a physics laboratory with a world-leading scientific facility must have a plan for an even better machine to succeed it. So it is with the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, which is home to the world’s biggest atom smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Today, CERN’s governing council announced it will launch a technical and financial feasibility study to build an even bigger collider 80 to 100 kilometers long (actually two of them in succession) that could ultimately reach an energy seven times higher than the LHC. The first machine wouldn’t be built before 2040.

There is “some pride of the member states of CERN [that it is] the leading particle physics laboratory, and I think there is interest in CERN staying there,” says Ursula Bassler, a physicist and president of the CERN council, the panel of representatives from the 23 nations that support the lab. However, CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti emphasizes that no commitment has been made to build a new mammoth collider, which could cost $20 billion. “There is no recommendation for the implementation of any project,” she says. “This is coming in a few years.”

Physicists have been debating what collider to build next since well before the LHC started to take data in 2010. In the early 2000s, discussions centered on a 30-kilometer-long, straight-shot, linear collider that would smash electrons into positrons. Such a machine would complement the circular LHC, which smashes countercirculating beams of protons. The two types of machines have different strengths. A proton collider can generally reach higher energies and discover heavier new particles. But protons are made of other particles called quarks, so they make messy collisions. In contrast, electrons and positrons are indivisible fundamental particles, so they make cleaner collisions. Historically, physicists often have found new particles at proton colliders and studied them in detail at electron-positron colliders.

That’s the game particle physicists around the world are trying to play today. In 2012, the proton-smashing LHC blasted out the Higgs boson, the last particle predicted by physicists’ standard model and the linchpin to their explanation how all other fundamental particles get their mass. Many would now like to build an electron-positron collider and run it as a Higgs factory, to make the particle in large numbers and see whether it has exactly the predicted properties. Any deviation from the predictions would be signs of new physics beyond the 40-year-old standard model, something particle physicists are desperate to find. Physicists in Japan would like to host such a linear collider.

A few years ago, however, some physicists proposed another approach, building an 80- to 100-kilometer-long circular electron-positron collider to study the Higgs. That machine would have a major drawback: As light-weight electrons go around in circles, they radiate copious x-rays and lose energy, so such a machine is inefficient and limited in its energy reach. But it has a big practical upside: The tunnel it needs could also later be used to house a higher energy proton collider. This is exactly what CERN did with the LHC, which was built in an existing tunnel dug for the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which ran from 1989 to 2000. (It studied in detail particles called the W and Z bosons that had been discovered previously with a proton-antiproton collider at CERN.)

Now, CERN physicists envision a future in which, around 2040, they build a huge circular electron-positron collider to study the Higgs. Then, they would follow up with a more powerful proton collider to reach a new high-energy frontier. Today, the CERN council took a step in that direction, announcing an update to its long-range strategy, the first since 2013.

Just how much CERN’s plans have changed remains murky, however. Some physicists there have long been working on CERN’s own design for a linear collider. And it appears the new long-range strategy does not completely sideline that idea. “We also recommend continued accelerator R&D to ensure that we do not miss an opportunity to improve our accelerator technology,” said Halina Abramowicz, a physicist at Tel Aviv University who led the planning exercise, during an online question-and-answer session. “I think it’s important to convey this message very clearly.”

The feasibility study for the big new machine should be done by 2026 or 2027, when CERN will next update its long-term strategy. CERN may also have competition in the presumed collider arms race, as physicists in China have similar plans to build big circular colliders. Of course, all may depend on whether the LHC, which is now undergoing an upgrade and should run until the mid 2030s, finds anything beyond the Higgs boson to study. If it doesn’t, convincing the governments of Europe to spend $20 billion to study just the Higgs may prove a daunting political challenge.

Posted in:
Physics
Scientific Community

doi:10.1126/science.abd4212

HEY HEY USA 

HOW MANY FOLKS HAVE YOU KILLED TODAY

CORONAVIRUSA 

COVID TRUMP

 (FORMERLY TYPHOID MARY)

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION

Fighting fish synchronize their moves—and their genes

Male Siamese fighting fish must be kept separate or they get into long fights. 

VALLORIE FRANCIS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

I HAVE BEEN RAISING (SAVING) BETA'S FROM STUPID SMALL JARS AND GLASSES FOR DECADES NOW, ONE AT A TIME. THEY GET A TEN GALLON TANK TO THEMSELVES, WELL WITH HALF DOZEN NEON TETRA'S AND A COUPLE OF ALBINO CATFISH. ALL VERY SOCIAL FISH. THEY LIVE TWO YEARS ON AVERAGE, OUR LAST ONE LIVED THREE ALMOST FOUR, THE LAST YEAR WAS SLOW DEATH.

By Elizabeth Pennisi Jun. 17, 2020

When Muhammad Ali duked it out with Joe Frazier in the boxing ring, it’s unlikely anyone thought about what was happening to the genes inside their heads. But a new study in fighting fish has demonstrated that as the fish spar, genes in their brains begin to turn on and off in a coordinated way. It’s still unclear what those genes are doing or how they influence the skirmish, but similar changes may be happening in humans.

The work is “a really cool example of the way that social interactions can get under the skin,” says Alison Bell, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved with the study.

The molecular basis of how animals, humans included, coordinate behaviors is a mystery. Whether it be mating or fighting, “animals need to be really good at this, but we don’t particularly know how they do it,” says Hans Hofmann, an evolutionary social neuroscientist at the University of Texas, Austin.

When molecular biologist Norihiro Okada at Kitasato University in Japan first saw Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens) on TV, he realized the animals could help solve this mystery. Native to Thailand, these goldfish-size swimmers have been bred to have very large, vibrantly colored fins and tails. Aquarium owners tend to keep their pets, or “bettas” as they are often called, separate. The fish are territorial and can get into fights that last more than 1 hour, with strikes, bites, and chases (as seen in the video below). They will even lock jaws in a fish version of an arm wrestle.

Okada and colleagues videotaped more than a dozen hours of fights between 17 pairs of fish and then analyzed what happened—and when—in each fight. The longer the fight, the more the fish synchronize their behavior, timing their circling, striking, and biting more than anyone had ever realized, the researchers report today in PLOS Genetics.

The team also determined that fights are highly choreographed. Battles last about 80 minutes, for example, with seemingly “agreed on” breaks between each move. Bouts escalate every 5 to 10 minutes, when fish lock onto each other’s jaws and hold on, a tactic that prevents breathing—and is thus a test of who can hold on the longest. The bettas then break apart to breathe, and the cycle begins anew.
This coordinated behavior happens at a molecular level, too, the researchers found.

After 20 minutes of battle, five pairs of fish were sacrificed, and the researchers compared which genes were turned on in fish brains pre- and postbattle. They did the same for another five pairs after 60 minutes.

At 20 minutes, some of the same genes—“intermediate early genes” that turn on other genes—were active in each fish, the team found. At 60 minutes, hundreds more genes had coordinated expression. The timing of when particular genes turn on is specific to each pair of fish, suggesting the pair’s interactions are coordinating the cascade of changes. “They see a remarkable degree of synchronization,” Hofmann says.

Okada doesn’t know exactly what these genes are doing or how they affect the course of the fight. The weaker fighter needs to be able to assess his opponent’s strength and quit before getting hurt, and the genes may play a role in that, he suggests. But Hofmann and Bell suspect these genes have more influence on how the fish will respond to future fights with other fish.

Last year, two teams reported in Cell that interacting mammals synchronize brain activity. One studied bats flying around a dark room and avoiding collisions, and the other tested dominance in mice in a small arena. In both studies, the longer the animals interacted, the more synchronized their brain activity became.

This latest research “adds a new dimension,” to that work, as it now seems that genes as well as nerve activity get synchronized, says one of the Cell paper’s authors, neuroscientist Weizhe Hong of the University of California, Los Angeles. “Their findings definitely raise many exciting questions for future studies.”

And what we see in fish may apply to humans as well, Bell says. A study from the 1980s, for example, showed the facial features of married couples who had lived together a long time tended to look more and more alike. That, too, Okada says, may also signal a convergence of gene activity.

Posted in:
Plants & Animals

doi:10.1126/science.abd3837

Elizabeth Pennisi
Liz is a senior correspondent covering many aspects of biology for Science.

AMERIKA

A new study suggests stricter gun access and use laws could reduce firearm-related deaths up to 11% annually. 
KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Three types of laws could reduce gun deaths by more than 10%

By Michael PriceJun. 15, 2020 , 3:05 PM

Nearly 40,000 people were killed by firearms in the United States in 2018, but curbing these numbers has been a statistically tricky—and politically fraught—problem. Now, a study that tracked individual gun laws over time suggests states can reduce gun deaths significantly by doing three things: limiting children’s access to guns, restricting concealed-carry permits, and restricting “stand your ground” policies.

The study isn’t without its flaws, but the basic findings make sense to Elinore Kaufman, a surgeon and public health policy analyst at the University of Pennsylvania. “Stand your ground laws encourage individuals to try to solve problems with bullets,” she says, as do right-to-carry laws. But laws that limit access to guns for children, she says, could help prevent firearm suicides by making it harder for everyone—not just children—to access guns in the first place.

U.S. gun laws vary considerably by state. Some, like Kansas, allow citizens to carry firearms in public and make it legal for gun owners to shoot an assailant in self-defense in some situations (known as the stand your ground doctrine). Others, like California, are more restrictive, limiting not only who is allowed to carry guns in public, but also access to firearms in the home by requiring safety devices such as trigger locks or gun safes.

This patchwork—combined with limited funding for research—has made it hard for scientists to predict the effects of gun laws on gun deaths, says Terry Schell, a senior behavioral scientist at the nonprofit RAND Corporation, which aims to improve public policy through research and analysis.

To limit these problems, Schell and colleagues focused on just three kinds of laws and one outcome: gun deaths per capita. To understand how laws affect death rates, they screened hundreds of existing and novel statistical approaches, finally zeroing in on a model that reduces statistical noise by paying special attention to how different variables affect deaths year by year, rather than averaged over long periods of time.

The researchers counted the number of gun deaths from all 50 states for each year from 1980 to 2016. They then examined each instance of a new law limiting or allowing right to carry, stand your ground, or child access, state by state, through 2013. Finally, they compared that with mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the next 6 years.

On average, establishing right-to-carry and stand your ground laws resulted in a slight uptick in annual gun deaths—about 3% for each law, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Conversely, creating laws aimed at making it harder to for children to get their hands on guns—say, by requiring parents to keep guns in safes—reduced gun deaths by an average of 6%. States that enacted strict child access laws, make it illegal to carry a gun in public without a permit, and don’t have a stand your ground law could expect to see an 11% reduction in annual gun deaths, according to the new model.

Eight states presently have that constellation of laws—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island—and six of those states are in the bottom 10 for per capita gun deaths, according to CDC’s state-by-state firearm mortality data.
However, because the study looked at a relatively small subset of gun laws, more research is needed to adequately understand how different laws such as background checks and waiting periods impact gun deaths, Kaufman says. And she suggests future studies could examine how these laws and their enforcement in different communities might also affect the impact that such laws have in different places.

Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who studies gun policy, adds that it will also be important for such models to look at nonfatal gunshot injuries to better understand the impact of guns on communities and public health.

For now, Schell hopes providing more statistically valid data about the effects of different types of gun laws will help policymakers take action on this issue. Kaufman agrees. “Scientific evidence alone is not going to be enough to convince lawmakers who are opposed to any restriction on firearms,” she says, “but I still believe that building the evidence base can slowly change the minds [that are open to change]

Posted in:
Science and Policy

doi:10.1126/science.abd3395

Michael Price is a science journalist in San Diego, California.

DNA from ancient Irish tomb reveals incest and an elite class that ruled early farmers


Early Irish royalty may have been buried in Newgrange tomb, 

shown at dawn on the winter solstice.   

KEN WILLIAMS/SHADOWSANDSTONE.COM

By Andrew Curry Jun. 17, 2020

Twenty-five kilometers north of Dublin, a masterpiece of Stone Age engineering rises from the hills: a circular structure 12 meters high, almost the area of a U.S. football field, and made up of more than 200,000 tons of earth and stone. Some of the first farmers to arrive in Ireland erected this monument, called Newgrange, nearly 1000 years before Stonehenge or Egypt’s first pyramids were built. Archaeologists have assumed it was a ceremonial site and communal tomb—an expression of an egalitarian society.

Now, DNA from a middle-aged man buried in 3200 B.C.E. at the center of this mighty mound suggests otherwise. His genes indicate he had parents so closely related they must have been brother and sister or parent and child.

Across cultures, incest is almost always taboo—except in inbred royal families. Its genetic traces at Newgrange suggest social hierarchy took hold in Ireland earlier than thought, according to a new study. “Maybe we’ve been arguing too far that [these people were] egalitarian,” says Jessica Smyth, an archaeologist at University College Dublin who was not part of the team.

The newly sequenced genomes from Newgrange and other Irish tombs are part of a wider re-evaluation of the Neolithic era, which is marked by the advent of agriculture. Over the past decade, researchers have used ancient DNA to track a slow-motion, 5000-year expansion of ancient farmers from Anatolia across Europe. The Neolithic settlers who arrived in Ireland around 3700 B.C.E. were the westernmost limit of that expansion.

Most Irish Neolithic settlements are small scale, with houses of roughly equal size. As seen in Neolithic graves across Europe, their burials show little sign of hierarchy. Even in major monuments like Newgrange, human remains were jumbled together, as if in a communal tomb. “Archaeologists [have] argued for a long time for a more egalitarian Neolithic,” says co-author Thomas Kador, an archaeologist at University College London.

Newgrange is pierced by a passage that leads to a central chamber; its entrance is oriented so a ray of sunlight illuminates the chamber at dawn on the shortest day of the year. “It’s clearly a place of public ritual and must have taken a lot of manpower to construct,” says geneticist Lara Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin. Hundreds of such passage tomb monuments are found across Ireland.

Most of the bodies in those tombs were cremated. But at the heart of Newgrange, excavators in the 1970s found the unburnt bones of one man, labeled NG10, in a niche decorated with elaborately carved stones. Cassidy and her co-authors were able to extract DNA from NG10’s petrous bone, a dense part of the inner ear.

Comparing NG10’s DNA and that of other Neolithic burials with DNA from people living on the island centuries earlier shows Neolithic farmers arrived in Ireland as part of a mass migration, and soon swamped or eliminated the genetic legacy of earlier hunter-gatherers, says geneticist Daniel Bradley, a co-author also at Trinity College Dublin.

NG10’s DNA also reveals his unusual parentage. In a paper published today in Nature, Cassidy and her co-authors draw on parallels in the historical record to argue that the son of an incestuous union buried in such a prominent tomb points to a hereditary ruling class. “Matings like that are taboo pretty much universally, with very few exceptions,” she says.

Those exceptions include Egyptian pharaohs, who were considered deities who needed to marry each other. Royal siblings in Hawaii and the Incan empire were also known to marry, concentrating power in one family. “I believe we’re seeing a similar social dynamic at play among colonists of Neolithic Ireland,” Cassidy says.

Additional DNA from more than 40 people buried at other Neolithic sites, including three passage tombs, supports the existence of a close-knit elite. People buried in passage tomb sites were more closely related to each other than to people buried in other types of tombs, even though the passage tombs were separated by hundreds of kilometers and spanned more than 500 years. Some individuals in the far-flung passage tombs could have been second or third cousins or great-great-great-great-grandparent and child.

Chemical isotopes in their bones show the people in the passage tomb burials ate more meat and animal products than their contemporaries. The burials also include women and children, suggesting social status was inherited rather than won in a single lifetime, for example in battle. “We’re not talking about strong men, we’re talking about something that could be inherited and maintained over several generations,” Kador says. “A small [related] elite called the shots, like in Egypt.”

But other archaeologists are cautious. “To go from [NG10] to saying these are proto-state societies where you have a godlike elite is pushing it a bit far,” says University of Manchester archaeologist Julian Thomas. “It’s one guy.” He notes Newgrange was a burial place for almost 1000 years, too long to make generalizations from a single burial.

Monuments like Newgrange may have been used communally at certain times and co-opted as personal tombs for brief periods, says Alasdair Whittle, an archaeologist at Cardiff University. “It’s a really stunning discovery,” he says of NG10 parentage. But “social difference in the Neolithic, when it occurs, was often relatively short lived.”

He suggests that in the years before NG10 was born, an elite may have emerged temporarily in response to crisis. A climate downturn in the middle of the fourth millennium B.C.E., around the time the passage tombs reach their peak, could have led to famine, prompting dramatic but temporary change in the way society was organized.

One way to settle the debate is to look at similar passage tombs built on the Orkney Islands and in Wales and France. “The question is whether this arose in Ireland or whether they were importing existing social structures into the island,” Cassidy says. “It’s going to be very exciting to see if this is a pattern we see in other areas.”

Posted in:
Archaeology

doi:10.1126/science.abd3676Andrew Curry is a journalist in Berlin.

A controversial Russian theory claims forests don’t just make rain—they make wind

By Fred Pearce Jun. 18, 2020

Every summer, as the days get long, Anastassia Makarieva leaves her lab in St. Petersburg for a vacation in the vast forests of northern Russia. The nuclear physicist camps on the shores of the White Sea, amid spruce and pine, and kayaks along the region’s wide rivers, taking notes on nature and the weather. “The forests are a big part of my inner life,” she says. In the 25 years she has made her annual pilgrimage north, they have become a big part of her professional life, too.

For more than a decade, Makarieva has championed a theory, developed with Victor Gorshkov, her mentor and colleague at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), on how Russia’s boreal forests, the largest expanse of trees on Earth, regulate the climate of northern Asia. It is simple physics with far-reaching consequences, describing how water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China’s northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth.

With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Makarieva and Gorshkov, who died last year, say they are its beating heart, too. “Forests are complex self-sustaining rainmaking systems, and the major driver of atmospheric circulation on Earth,” Makarieva says. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea—forests as rainmakers—originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial.

The theoretical foundation of the work has been published, albeit in lesser known journals, and Makarieva has received support from a small coterie of colleagues. But the biotic pump has faced a head wind of criticism, especially from climate modelers, some of whom say its effects are negligible and dismiss the idea completely. The dispute has made Makarieva an outsider: a theoretical physicist in a world of modelers, a Russian in a field led by Western scientists, and a woman in a field dominated by men.

Yet, if correct, the idea could help explain why, despite their distance from the oceans, the remote interiors of forested continents receive as much rain as the coasts—and why the interiors of unforested continents tend to be arid. It also implies that forests from the Russian taiga to the Amazon rainforest don’t just grow where the weather is right. They also make the weather. “All I have learned so far suggests to me that the biotic pump is correct,” says Douglas Sheil, a forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. With the future of the world’s forests in doubt, “Even if we thought the theory had only a small chance of being true, it would be profoundly important to know one way or the other.”

Many meteorology textbooks still teach a caricature of the water cycle, with ocean evaporation responsible for most of the atmospheric moisture that condenses in clouds and falls as rain. The picture ignores the role of vegetation and, in particular, trees, which act like giant water fountains. Their roots capture water from the soil for photosynthesis, and microscopic pores in leaves release unused water as vapor into the air. The process, the arboreal equivalent of sweating, is known as transpiration. In this way, a single mature tree can release hundreds of liters of water a day. With its foliage offering abundant surface area for the exchange, a forest can often deliver more moisture to the air than evaporation from a water body of the same size.

The importance of this recycled moisture for nourishing rains was largely disregarded until 1979, when Brazilian meteorologist Eneas Salati reported studies of the isotopic composition of rainwater sampled from the Amazon Basin. Water recycled by transpiration contains more molecules with the heavy oxygen-18 isotope than water evaporated from the ocean. Salati used this fact to show that half of the rainfall over the Amazon came from the transpiration of the forest itself.

By this time, meteorologists were tracking an atmospheric jet above the forest, at a height of about 1.5 kilometers. Known as the South American Low-Level Jet, the winds blow east to west across the Amazon, about as fast as a racing bike, before the Andes Mountains divert them south. Salati and others surmised the jet carried much of the transpired moisture, and dubbed it a “flying river.” The Amazon flying river is now reckoned to carry as much water as the giant terrestrial river below it, says Antonio Nobre, a climate researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

For some years, flying rivers were thought to be limited to the Amazon. In the 1990s, Hubert Savenije, a hydrologist at the Delft University of Technology, began to study moisture recycling in West Africa. Using a hydrological model based on weather data, he found that, as one moved inland from the coast, the proportion of the rainfall that came from forests grew, reaching 90% in the interior. The finding helped explain why the interior Sahel region became dryer as coastal forests disappeared over the past half-century.

One of Savenije’s students, Ruud van der Ent, took the idea further, creating a global model of airborne moisture flow. He combined observational data on rainfall, humidity, wind speed, and temperature with theoretical estimates of evaporation and transpiration to create the first model of moisture flow at scales larger than river basins.

In 2010, van der Ent and his colleagues reported the model’s conclusion: Globally, 40% of all precipitation comes from the land rather than the ocean. Often it is more. The Amazon’s flying river provides 70% of the rain falling in the Río de la Plata Basin, which stretches across southeastern South America. Van der Ent was most surprised to find that China gets 80% of its water from the west, mostly Atlantic moisture recycled by the boreal forests of Scandinavia and Russia. The journey involves several stages—cycles of transpiration followed by downwind rain and subsequent transpiration—and takes 6 months or more. “It contradicted previous knowledge that you learn in high school,” he says. “China is next to an ocean, the Pacific, yet most of its rainfall is moisture recycled from land far to the west.”

IF MAKARIEVA IS CORRECT, the forests supply not just the moisture, but the winds that carry it.

For a quarter-century, she worked with Gorshkov, initially as his pupil, at PNPI—part of Russia’s foremost civil and military nuclear research agency, the Kurchatov Institute. They were mavericks from the start, studying ecology in a place full of physicists who use neutron beams from nuclear reactors to study materials. As theorists, she says, they had “exceptional freedom of research and thought,” pursuing atmospheric physics wherever it took them. “Victor taught me: Do not be afraid of anything,” she says.

In 2007, in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, they first outlined their vision for the biotic pump. It was provocative from the outset because it contradicted a longstanding tenet of meteorology: that winds are driven largely by the differential heating of the atmosphere. When warm air rises, it lowers the air pressure below it, in effect creating space at the surface into which air moves. In summer, for example, land surfaces tend to heat faster and draw in moist breezes from the cooler ocean.


Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov developed the biotic pump theory at a nuclear physics institute. ANASTASSIA MAKARIEVA

Makarieva and Gorshkov argued that a second process can sometimes dominate. When water vapor from forests condenses into clouds, a gas becomes a liquid that occupies less volume. That reduces air pressure, and draws in air horizontally from areas with less condensation. In practice, it means condensation above coastal forests turbocharges sea breezes, sucking moist air inland where it will eventually condense and fall as rain. If the forests continue inland, the cycle can continue, maintaining moist winds for thousands of kilometers.

The theory inverts traditional thinking: It is not atmospheric circulation that drives the hydrological cycle, but the hydrological cycle that drives the mass circulation of air.

Sheil, who became a supporter of the theory more than a decade ago, thinks of it as an embellishment of the flying river idea. “They are not mutually exclusive,” he says. “The pump offers an explanation of the power of the rivers.” He says the biotic pump could explain the “cold Amazon paradox.” From January to June, when the Amazon Basin is colder than the ocean, strong winds blow from the Atlantic to the Amazon—the opposite of what would be expected if they resulted from differential heating. Nobre, another early acolyte, enthuses: “They don’t start with data, they start with first principles.”

Even those who doubt the theory agree that forest loss can have far-reaching climatic consequences. Many scientists have argued that deforestation thousands of years ago was to blame for desertification in the Australian Outback and West Africa. The fear is that future deforestation could dry up other regions, for example, tipping parts of the Amazon rainforest to savanna. Agricultural regions of China, the African Sahel, and the Argentine Pampas are also at risk, says Patrick Keys, an atmospheric chemist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.

In 2018, Keys and his colleagues used a model, similar to van der Ent’s, to track the sources of rainfall for 29 global megacities. He found that 19 were highly dependent on distant forests for much of their water supply, including Karachi, Pakistan; Wuhan and Shanghai, China; and New Delhi and Kolkata, India. “Even small changes in precipitation arising from upwind land-use change could have big impacts on the fragility of urban water supplies,” he says.

Some modeling even suggests that by removing a moisture source, deforestation could alter weather patterns beyond the paths of flying rivers. Just as El Niño, a shift in currents and winds in the tropical Pacific Ocean, is known to influence weather in faraway places through “teleconnections,” so, too, could Amazon deforestation diminish rainfall in the U.S. Midwest and snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, says Roni Avissar, a climatologist at the University of Miami who has modeled such teleconnections. Far-fetched? “Not at all,” he says. “We know El Niño can do this, because unlike deforestation, it recurs and we can see the pattern. Both are caused by small changes in temperature and moisture that project into the atmosphere.”

Lan Wang-Erlandsson, who researches interactions between land, water, and climate at Stockholm University, says it’s time for water resource managers to shift their focus from water and land use within a river basin to land-use changes occurring outside it. “We need new international hydrological agreements to maintain the forests of source regions,” she says.


We need new international hydrological agreements to maintain the forests of source regions.Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Stockholm University

Two years ago, at a meeting of the United Nations Forum on Forests, a high-level policy group on which all governments sit, David Ellison, a land researcher at the University of Bern, presented a case in point: a study showing that as much as 40% of the total rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands, the main source of the Nile, is provided by moisture recycled from the forests of the Congo Basin. Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia are negotiating a long-overdue deal on sharing the waters of the Nile. But such an agreement would be worthless if deforestation in the Congo Basin, far from those three nations, dries up the moisture source, Ellison suggested. “Interactions between forests and water have been almost entirely ignored in the management of global freshwater resources.”

The biotic pump would raise the stakes even further, with its suggestion that forest loss alters not just moisture sources, but also wind patterns. The theory, if correct, would have “crucial implications for planetary air circulation patterns,” Ellison warns, especially those that take moist air inland to continental interiors.

THE THEORY’S SUPPORTERS are a minority. In 2010, Makarieva, Gorshkov, Sheil, Nobre, and Bai-Lian Li, an ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, submitted what was meant to be a landmark description of the biotic pump to Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, a major journal with open peer review. Titled “Where Do Winds Come From?” the paper faced a barrage of criticism online, and it took the journal many months to find two scientists willing to review it. Isaac Held, a meteorologist at Princeton University’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, finally volunteered—and recommended rejection. “This is not a mysterious effect,” he says. “It is small and included in some atmospheric models.” Critics said the expansion of air from heat released when water vapor condenses counteracts the space-creating effect of condensation. But Makarieva says the two effects are spatially separate, with the warming effect happening aloft, and the pressure drop of condensation occurring closer to the surface, where it generates the biotic wind.

The other reviewer was Judith Curry, then an atmospheric physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who has long had concerns about the atmospheric dynamics at the core of climate models. She felt it was important to publish the paper and says the standoff was “very bad for climate science, which badly needs an infusion from hard-core physicists.” After 3 years of debate, the journal’s editor overruled Held’s recommendation and published the paper, saying it was published “not as an endorsement” but “to promote continuation of the scientific dialogue on the controversial theory [that] may lead to disproof or validation.”

Since then, there has been neither validation nor disproof, but largely a standoff. Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at Columbia University, says, “It’s simply nonsense.” The authors’ responses to criticisms were “really just mathematics that gave no one any confidence that there was any point in continuing the dialogue.” Jose Marengo, a meteorologist in Brazil and head of the National Centre for Monitoring and Warning of Natural Disasters, says: “I think the pump exists, but it’s very theoretical right now. The climate model community hasn’t embraced it, but the Russians are the best theoreticians in the world, so we need proper field experiments to test it.” Yet no one, including Makarieva, has yet proposed clearly what such a test might look like.

For her part, Makarieva is building on the theory, arguing in a series of recent papers that the same mechanism can affect tropical cyclones, which are driven by the heat released when moisture condenses over the ocean. In a 2017 paper in Atmospheric Research, she and her colleagues proposed that biotic pumps set up by the forests on land draw moisture-rich air away from the cyclone nurseries. This, she says, might explain why cyclones rarely form in the South Atlantic Ocean: The Amazon and Congo rainforests between them draw so much moisture away that there is too little left to fuel hurricanes.

Kerry Emanuel, a leading hurricane researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the proposed effects “while not negligible are very small.” He prefers other explanations for the lack of South Atlantic hurricanes, such as the region’s cool waters, which send less moisture into the air, and its strong shearing winds, which disrupt cyclone formation. Makarieva is equally dismissive of the traditionalists, saying some of the existing theories for hurricane intensity “conflict with the laws of thermodynamics.” She has another paper on the topic under peer review at the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. “We are concerned that, despite the editor’s encouragement, our work will get rejected once again,” she says.

Even if Makarieva’s ideas are fringy in the West, they are taking root in Russia. Last year, the government began a public dialogue to revise its forestry laws. Aside from strictly protected areas, Russian forests are open to commercial exploitation, but the government and the Federal Forestry Agency are considering a new designation of “climate protection forests.” “Some representatives of our forest department got impressed by the biotic pump and want to introduce a new category,” she says. The idea has the backing of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Being part of a consensus rather than the perennial outsider marks a change, Makarieva says.

This summer, the coronavirus lockdown put the kibosh on her annual trip to the northern forests. Back in St. Petersburg, she has settled down to respond to yet another round of objections to her work from anonymous peer reviewers. She insists the pump theory will ultimately prevail. “There is a natural inertia in science,” she says. With a dark Russian humor, she invokes the words of the legendary German physicist Max Planck, who is said to have once remarked that science “advances one funeral at a time.”

doi:10.1126/science.abd3856

Fred Pearce is a journalist in London.

Researchers say they’ve solved the mystery of the missing dinosaur eggs


A Protoceratops nest with embryos curled up inside soft-shelled eggs

 M. ELLISON/© AMNH

By Colin Barras Jun. 17, 2020

Fifteen years ago, Mark Norell came across a clutch of dinosaur eggs in southern Mongolia. Frozen in place were at least a dozen embryos of the Triceratops relative Protoceratops. But “something weird” was going on, says the paleontologist, who works at the American Museum of Natural History. It was as if the tiny dinosaurs were curled up inside invisible eggs. In the rock immediately surrounding each miniskeleton was an enigmatic white halo. Now, more than 10 years later, he and colleagues say they have solved the mystery: The dinosaurs had laid soft-shelled eggs.

Their new study of the Protoceratops clutch helps explain why dinosaur eggs are relatively rare—many laid soft-shelled eggs that were unlikely to fossilize. Their work may also have implications for how dinosaurs grew and tended their young. And a second study in Nature suggests large marine predators called mosasaurs went soft at breeding time, too.

The Protoceratops paper is convincing, says Ricardo Araújo, a paleontologist at the Technical Univesity of Lisbon’s Institute of Plasma and Nuclear Fusion. It emphasizes “how little we know about the incredible diversity of dinosaur reproduction strategies.”
Norell and molecular paleobiologist Jasmina Wiemann at Yale University analyzed two clutches of fossil dinosaur eggs—that of the 75-million-year-old Protoceratops from Mongolia, and a clutch laid about 215 million years ago by Mussaurus, a relative of long-necked giants like Diplodocus.




A crumpled soft-shelled egg that may have been laid by a mosasaur LEGENDRE ET AL. (2020)

They used a new technique that bathes the samples in laser light and records how the light changes as it interacts with the sample’s surface, offering clues to the chemical composition of the eggshells. The molecular fingerprint of modern soft eggshells differs from that of hard eggshells. The halos around the Protoceratops and Mussaurus eggs both showed a fossilized version of this “soft eggshell” fingerprint.

Mussaurus lived early in the age of the dinosaurs, so Norrell and Wiemann say it’s likely that the first dinosaurs laid soft-shelled eggs. But the Protoceratops nest shows some species were still laying soft eggs toward the end of the age of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, even as others evolved to lay hard-shelled eggs.

Dinosaurs laying soft eggs may have buried them, given that a several-ton adult dinosaur that attempted to sit on such a fragile clutch would probably end up with scrambled eggs. Burying soft-shelled eggs also keeps them from drying out, says ecologist Ricky-John Spencer at Western Sydney University.

If dino moms did bury their eggs, the clutches might experience lower temperatures and develop more slowly—leading to “a more advanced hatchling,” that may have required less parental care, suggests Charles Deeming, a biologist at the University of Lincoln. There’s some evidence for that already in pterosaurs, winged reptiles related to dinosaurs that also laid soft-shelled eggs. Last year, Deeming and his colleague, David Unwin at the University of Leicester, argued that baby pterosaurs were so well-developed that they could fly immediately after hatching.

The second Nature study suggests some ancient marine giants laid soft-shelled eggs that may have hatched just minutes after they were laid. In 68-million-year-old rocks in Antarctica that formed on the sea floor, paleontologist Julia Clarke at the University of Texas, Austin, and colleagues discovered a 30-centimeter-long object that has the size and appearance of a deflated football. Under a microscope, the flimsy and crumpled walls of the object have the layered structure of a reptile egg—which is what Clarke thinks the object is.

It is the second largest fossil egg ever found and may have belonged to a mosasaur, a 10-meter-long marine predator. Some snakes and lizards, living mosasaur relatives, lay eggs with thin shells that hatch almost as soon as they are laid. The new find suggests mosasaurs may have, too.

Posted in: Paleontology

doi:10.1126/science.abd3828

Drug recently shown to reduce coronavirus death risk could run out, experts warn

Injectable dexamethasone is more difficult to manufacture than tablets, because production needs to take place under sterile conditions. SOUMYABRATA ROY/NURPHOTO VIA AP

By Eli Cahan Jun. 21, 2020
Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

This week’s report that dexamethasone, a commonly used corticosteroid, reduces death rates of COVID-19 by up to one-third was greeted with enthusiasm around the globe.#

It also raised a question: Will there be enough of the medication? So far, doctors are not reporting problems getting dexamethasone for their patients. And as many news stories have pointed out, dexamethasone is off-patent, cheap, and relatively abundant.

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But that doesn’t mean there won’t be shortages, says Stephen Schondelmeyer, director of the Pharmaceutical Research in Management and Economics Institute at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “Even though this is an old drug that’s been around a long time, I think people saying that it’s commonly available … spoke too soon, without looking at the data,” he says. Since the trial findings came out, there has been “a degree of irrational exuberance,” about dexamethasone, Schondelmeyer says. “We are already seeing hoarding behaviors and lack of availability of the product because of it,” he adds.

“Hoarding and speculative procurement appear to have already started,” confirms Emer Cooke, head of regulation of medicines and other health technologies at the World Health Organization (WHO). But she says it’s “probably too early to say if there will be a global shortage.”

The situation could become especially dire for the injectable version of the drug, which some physicians say is the preferred formulation and is more complicated to produce than oral dexamethasone. One major Indian manufacturer of intravenous dexamethasone, Cadila Healthcare, has repeatedly gotten in trouble with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for serious problems in its production process. According to a letter from the agency, the company said in October 2019 that it would stop producing injectable drugs for the United States.

The trial that identified dexamethasone’s potential benefit, named Recovery, included more than 6400 patients in the United Kingdom, 2104 of whom received the medication. Its outcome “offers miraculous hope that a dose of a commonplace medication might do what we all want it to do: Help people survive,” says Lewis Kaplan, a surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM). WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised the findings as a “lifesaving scientific breakthrough.” The U.K. National Health Service has already incorporated the drug into its standard of care for COVID-19 and the country issued restrictions on exports of dexamethasone. Demand appears to be surging worldwide.
How the drug is given makes a difference

But dexamethasone can be administered in several ways. According to the trial’s protocol, patients received the medication either orally or by intravenous injection. In many cases, the distinction may be trivial. But for the sickest patients, administering oral medications is “rolling the dice to some degree,” says Clifford Deutschman, an intensivist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and former SCCM president. Gastrointestinal problems in these patients can cause “inconsistencies in uptake of the medication,” leading to blood levels that are too low or too high, Deutschman says. And for patients on ventilators, administering the medication orally means grinding the pills up by hand and delivering them through fluids or a feeding tube. Both for safety and effectiveness, “Hands down, if you’ve got the intravenous stuff, you give the intravenous stuff,” he says.

The sickest patients are the ones most likely to benefit from the drug. In the study, dexamethasone reduced the death risk for patients on a ventilator by one-third, and for those requiring oxygen by one-fifth. Patients with milder disease did not benefit.

Intravenous dexamethasone was already in short supply in the United States before the Recovery results came out, according to an independent shortage tracking tool run by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. FDA lists the drug as “in shortage” as well. Dexamethasone is not in the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile.


Hoarding and speculative procurement appear to have already started.Emer Cooke, World Health Organization

The question is whether production of the intravenous form of dexamethasone can be ramped up quickly. Whereas oral dexamethasone is “relatively straightforward to make,” the intravenous form is harder to manufacture, says former FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan, because it needs to be done under sterile conditions to prevent microbes from reducing efficacy or sickening patients. (In 2012, a fungal meningitis outbreak linked to contaminated steroid injectables killed more than 100 people.)
Issues with quality control up the supply chain

Most of the drug is produced by two Indian companies, Wockhardt and Cadila Healthcare. Wockhardt has a “very limited” supply presently available for export, but has “enormous capacity” to produce both oral and intravenous dexamethasone and is able to ramp up further, its CEO said in a 17 June news report.

But Schondelmeyer, whose center recently launched a partnership with the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the Department of Homeland Security to enhance the resilience of the United States’s pharmaceutical supply chain, is skeptical. “There aren’t a lot of [unused] plants that can make sterile injectables of anything, let alone dexamethasone, so I’m not sure how much capacity they really have,” he says. Ramping up supply “takes a lot of time, even if the world was normal and sane, let alone during COVID.”

FDA has turned away Cadila’s products at the U.S. border 83 times since 2004 because of quality concerns. Since 2015, the agency has sent the company three warning letters related to its production process. FDA inspectors found myriad inadequacies at Cadila’s facilities, including noncompliance with sterile procedures, evidence of Pseudomonas bacteria in the water system, and “several plastic bags filled with paperwork in the scrapyard“ including “a torn notebook of deficiencies.”

In the most recent of the three letters, dated 29 October 2019, FDA writes that Cadila Healthcare has informed the agency that it will “permanently cease production of injectable drug products for the United States.” This history “makes me very nervous, as to whether they can ramp up in the first place, and if they can, if that’s a product anyone should use,” Schondelmeyer says. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.)

Cooke stresses the importance of buying dexamethasone from quality-assured suppliers. There’s a “high risk that rogue manufacturers will offer substandard or falsified options,” she says. Trusted producers should be able to meet the rising demand, Cooke adds, but if hoarding and speculative procurement continue, “it will create chaotic demand signals and put scale up plans at risk. This is especially true for injectable products,” whose production is harder to scale up.

Potential for shortages at the bedside

McClellan does not see major problems ahead. “If there’s a reasonable response to this news, with clinicians using the drug appropriately and no disruptions related to stockpiling … I think this is a manageable development,” he says. Based on the study, the drug should only be used in severe cases, a small subset of the total number of COVID-19 patients. And physicians could use other corticosteroids—such as methylprednisolone, hydrocortisone, or prednisone—that may work as well.

Kaplan isn’t so sure: Dexamethasone has “unique properties” in the ways it interacts with the cells and proteins that produce the body’s immune response, he says. And demand may increase because doctors will prescribe the drug for less severe cases as well, Deutschman says. He is “worried” this might accelerate shortages.

“When you’re standing at the bedside watching somebody die as the family stands outside, asking yourself, is there anything else I could have done, it’s difficult to be rational,” Deutschman says. “There’s always a temptation to take the results of a trial and overextend them.”

*Correction, 22 June, 3:15 p.m.: An error in the description of FDA’s October 2019 warning letter to Cadila Healthcare has been corrected.

*Correction, 24 June, 8:05 a.m.: An incorrect statement about back orders of injectable dexamethasone at U.S. drug suppliers has been removed from this story.
Posted in:
Health
Coronavirus

doi:10.1126/science.abd4447

Eli Cahan
Eli is an intern on the News staff of Science. He is pursuing a master’s degree in health policy as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar at the Stanford School of Medicine and his MD at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. Twitter

A cheap steroid is the first drug shown to reduce death in COVID-19 patients


The steroid dexamethasone may quickly be added to the global standard of care for severe COVID-19 patients. REUTERS/YVES HERMAN

By Kai Kupferschmidt Jun. 16, 2020
Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
After months of dire news about the spread of the novel coronavirus and a mounting global death toll, a glimmer of hope arrived today: Researchers announced that dexamethasone, a cheap, widely available corticosteroid, significantly reduced deaths of severely sick COVID-19 patients in a major clinical trial. Although full trial data have not yet been released, several outside commentators hailed the result as a “breakthrough.”

“These are really surprising, but really very convincing results,” says Martin Landray of the University of Oxford, one of the principal investigators of the Recovery trial in the United Kingdom that evaluated the steroid. If they hold up, adds Devi Sridhar, an expert on global public health at the University of Edinburgh, they could be a game-changer for critical patients, as the drugs are accessible even in lower-income countries.
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The Recovery trial, one of the biggest efforts to evaluate whether existing drugs can treat COVID-19, included 2104 patients given a relatively low dose of 6 milligrams of dexamethasone for 10 days. When their outcomes were compared with those of 4321 patients receiving standard care, the steroid reduced deaths by one-third in patients already on ventilators and by one-fifth in patients receiving supplemental oxygen in other ways, Recovery researchers announced in a press release. They did not find any benefit in patients not receiving respiratory support.

Dexamethasone’s effect is seemingly much stronger than that of remdesivir, the only other drug so far shown to help COVID-19 patients in a randomized clinical trial. That antiviral reduced the number of days critical patients were hospitalized, but it did not clearly reduce deaths.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), hailed the dexamethasone results as “great news” given it’s the first COVID-19 drug that has clearly proved to reduce mortality. “The results are pretty remarkable for severely ill patients,” adds Nahid Bhadelia, a physician at Boston Medical Center. “I can see ICU [intensive care unit] physicians being more likely to provide steroids in the critically ill who are mechanically ventilated and who are not improving from other interventions based on these results.”

But she and others expressed disappointment that the Recovery team did not release additional information. “More detailed data would help us identify which subset of COVID-19 patients would benefit from steroids,” Bhadelia says.

Landray acknowledges the criticism. “I fully understand why scientists want to see the details. I’m a scientist, I want to see the details.” But with thousands of people dying of COVID-19 every day, it was important to get the basic message out first, he says. “There is this tension between having the final details and the final decimal points nailed down, and having what is actually a clear-cut and practical message in the public domain.”

Recovery is evaluating several experimental COVID-19 therapies, including the HIV drug combination Kaletra, convalescent plasma, and the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. When researchers found 2 weeks ago that hydroxychloroquine did not improve patient outcomes, they stopped that arm of the trial. In the other arms, Landray says, they stuck to their plan to wait until 2000 patients had received a treatment and 4000 patients had enrolled in a control arm, because that would provide a 90% chance of picking up a reduction in deaths of about 18%. Dexamethasone was the first drug to reach the milestone, so the researchers stopped its arm on 8 June and began to look at the data.

“The decimal points might change a bit when we tidy things up, but we’ve got to a point where the message will not change,” Landray says, adding that Recovery hopes to make public the full data within about 10 days. If the findings hold up under scrutiny, it would mean that treating eight ventilated patients with dexamethasone would save one life. “That is a big effect,” says Ashish Jha, a global health expert at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health who is eager to see the data.

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service has already announced its standard care for COVID-19 patients will now include dexamethasone. “It’s very, very rare that you announce results at lunchtime, and it becomes policy and practice by tea time, and probably starts to save lives by the weekend,” Landray says.

Although much of the early hope for COVID-19 treatment focused on drugs that might directly attack the virus (like remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine), there has also been considerable debate about medicines that dampen the immune system, like dexamethasone. In its fight against the virus, the body’s defenses can overreact, eventually breaking down the thin barrier between the insides of the lungs and the surrounding tissue. That causes the lungs to fill up with liquid and triggers acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in which patients can end up essentially drowning in their own liquid.

But reducing the immune response through steroids could also hobble the body’s fight against the new coronavirus or secondary infections, Bhadelia says. For this reason, the guidelines of WHO and the U.S. National Institutes of Health have so far recommended against using steroids in COVID-19 patients, she points out.

Doctors have used steroids to treat viral pneumonias in the past, including those caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus or H1N1 influenza, says Wei Shen Lim, a respiratory physician at Nottingham University Hospital. But there were no randomized clinical trials with those viruses and available data were hard to interpret.

A Cochrane review looking at the data from H1N1 patients, co-written by Lim, found that patients treated with corticosteroids had a higher risk of dying. But that might be explained by the fact that sicker patients were more likely to receive steroids, Lim says. “Before the Recovery trial, I was neither an advocate for or an opponent of steroids,” he says. “You couldn’t be sure.” To get a clearer answer, Lim designed a trial to evaluate steroids in viral pneumonias in the case of another pandemic. When COVID-19 emerged, that was integrated into the Recovery trial as one arm, using dexamethasone.

In places like Spain, dexamethasone has already been widely used against COVID-19. Carlos Ferrando, an anesthesiologist at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, was one of the authors on a paper published in Lancet Respiratory Medicine on 7 February that showed the steroid reduced mortality in non–COVID-19 patients with ARDS. When COVID-19 patients started to show up in Spanish hospitals, Ferrando started a randomized clinical trial to test dexamethasone, but recruitment into the placebo group was slow because most patients were given the steroid, he says. Ferrando is now analyzing data from thousands of patients in Spanish ICUs, about 80% of whom received steroids, he says. “It seems like we have a signal that those corticoids decrease mortality, but we need to finalize the analysis.”

Sridhar says the positive result of the Recovery trial also holds an important lesson for the debate about how best to initially respond to a pandemic like this: that delaying the spread of a pathogen, through temporary stay at home orders or other measures, can give people infected later in a pandemic a better chance of surviving. “It shows the value of buying time for science to deliver, and indicates that with time, more and more findings will come to light that help doctors manage COVID-19 patients with better clinical outcomes.”

But even if steroids reduce mortality, they do not solve the problem of COVID-19 patients potentially overwhelming a health care system, Sridhar cautions. That’s because the drug can help treat patients who are already sick, but not prevent the illness in the first place. “The real game-changer will be a drug that prevents people going from mild symptoms to a severe state, and a vaccine.”
Posted in:
Health
Coronavirus

doi:10.1126/science.abd3683

Kai Kupferschmidt
Kai is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine based in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of a book about the color blue, published in 2019.Twitter

Researchers around the world prepared to #ShutDownSTEM and ‘Strike For Black Lives’

WWW.SHUTDOWNSTEM.COM; WWW.PARTICLESFORJUSTICE.ORG

By Sophia Chen Jun. 9, 2020

Thousands of researchers around the world have pledged to pause their work on Wednesday to support the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and efforts against racism in the scientific community and society at large.

Responding to calls from an array of organizers operating under banners including the Strike For Black Lives, #ShutDownSTEM, and #ShutDownAcademia, numerous university laboratories, scientific societies, technical journals, and others have pledged to spend 10 June focused on issues of racial equality and inclusiveness.

“In the wake of the most recent murders of Black people in the U.S., it is clear that white and other non-Black people have to step up and do the work to eradicate anti-Black racism. As members of the global academic and STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] communities, we have an enormous ethical obligation to stop doing ‘business as usual,’” the organizers of #ShutDownSTEM state on its website.

Those who participate should “stop all usual academic work for the day, including teaching, research, and service responsibilities,” the organizers of Strike For Black Lives write on their website. Black strikers should spend the day doing “whatever nourishes their hearts,” it states, whereas non-Black strikers should “take actions that center Black lives and agitate for change in our communities.”

Organizers are urging scientists to participate in local protests and learn about the history of anti-Black violence and racism; various groups have amassed online resources for participants to use.

Astrophysicist Brian Nord of Fermilab, an organizer of both the Strike For Black Lives and #ShutDownStem, who is black, is urging all strikers to emerge from tomorrow’s activities with plans for making real change at institutions involved in science. “I don’t want more diversity and inclusion seminars,” Nord says. “Those activities are used to provide a shield to institutions so that they can do the bare minimum.”

The movement began with two different groups: a network of mostly particle physicists organizing under the hashtag #Strike4BlackLives; and a multidisciplinary group of largely astronomers and biologists operating under #ShutDownSTEM. (One #ShutDownSTEM organizer, Casey Newlin, works in the music industry. Newlin, who is white, contributed what she learned from participating in that industry’s Blackout Tuesday on 2 June.) The groups coordinated with a third entity, #VanguardSTEM, an online platform that promotes women of color working in STEM, to announce their plans in unison on 5 June.

Brittany Kamai, a physicist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz, who started #ShutDownSTEM, says the idea originated, in part, from thinking about how scientists who are stuck at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic could make an attention-getting statement like those made by protesters who block a busy road. “This was my way of answering the question: ‘How do we shut down our digital streets of academia?’” says Kamai, who is Native Hawaiian.

The strike has gotten extensive support. Senior scientists have taken to social media to announce they are backing the effort, as have science facilities, organizations, and journals (including AAAS, which publishes Science). At many academic laboratories, “people have committed to stop group meetings,” Kamai says. Her own research group, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is participating in the strike by canceling a planned leadership meeting and postponing a test of its public alert system.

Elsewhere, researchers are planning an array of actions—or inactions.

At the online preprint repository arXiv—the backbone of physicists’ information highway—staff say they will participate in the strike by not announcing new submissions on Tuesday night. Many journals, such as the American Physical Society’s Physical Review Letters, have also pledged not to release papers tomorrow.

At UC Irvine, physics department chair Timothy Tait, who helped organize #Strike4BlackLives, says his department will hold a virtual educational event with an invited speaker and a town hall–style meeting with hired moderators. One goal of the events is “to inform ourselves what the black experience in academia is like,” says Tait, who is white.

At the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, Karsten Pohl, a white physicist who signed the strike pledge and chairs the physics department, plans to hold a free-form discussion for his department on Zoom. Pohl especially wants feedback from undergraduate students and staff “who we usually don’t hear from,” he says.

At the University of Chicago and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, scientists plan to march on their campuses.

Nord emphasizes that his group is specifically asking nonblack academics to step up tomorrow, to make up for what it sees as years of inaction. By giving black scientists the option to abstain from doing racial justice work for one day, the group says, nonblack strikers can acknowledge the disproportionate effort to improve diversity and mentor students from underrepresented groups that black scientists are often asked to perform without compensation.

For example, UNH physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an organizer of the Strike For Black Lives who is black, says that because she frequently speaks out about racism in science, many students from underrepresented backgrounds—and sometimes even their parents—contact her for advice about race-related conflicts in their education. Black students have told her of assailants throwing objects at them on campus, or people threatening to call the police on them when they are leaving the lab. Providing such advice “is a lot of work,” she says. “I also believe it has to be done, and I also believe it is unfair that it has to be done.” (Prescod-Weinstein has spent so much time supporting students of color, she says, that she asked for that work to be explicitly put in her job description when she was hired as a tenure-track professor at her university.)

Nord hopes tomorrow will help catalyze change. “I imagine a future where there is representation, retention, and recruitment of black physicists in academia,” he says. “Representation means there are lots of us around. I’m not just talking about black men. I’m talking about genderqueer, trans, women—all of us, we’re there. I imagine a future where we stay there, and we also work in leadership levels.”

Posted in:
Scientific Community

doi:10.1126/science.abd2504