This is the first picture of an exoplanet from the James Webb Space Telescope.

“We’re actually measuring photons from the atmosphere of the planet itself,” says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in England. Seeing those particles of light, “to me, that’s very exciting.”

The planet is about seven times the mass of Jupiter and lies more than 100 times farther from its star than Earth sits from the sun, direct observations of exoplanet HIP 65426 b show. It’s also young, about 10 million or 20 million years old, compared with the more than 4-billion-year-old Earth, Hinkley and colleagues report in a study submitted August 31 at arXiv.org.
Those three features — size, distance and youth — made HIP 65426 b relatively easy to see, and so a good planet to test JWST’s observing abilities. And the telescope has once again surpassed astronomers’ expectations (SN: 7/11/22).

“We’ve demonstrated really how powerful JWST is as an instrument for the direct imaging of exoplanets,” says exoplanet astronomer and coauthor Aarynn Carter of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Astronomers have found more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars (SN: 3/22/22). But almost all of those planets were detected indirectly, either by the planets tugging on the stars with their gravity or blocking starlight as they cross between the star and a telescope’s view.

To see a planet directly, astronomers have to block out the light from its star and let the planet’s own light shine, a tricky process. It’s been done before, but for only about 20 planets total (SN: 11/13/08; SN: 3/14/13; SN: 7/22/20).

“In every area of exoplanet discovery, nature has been very generous,” says MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, who was not involved in the JWST discovery. “This is the one area where nature didn’t really come through.”

In 2017, astronomers discovered HIP 65426 b and took a direct image of it using an instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. But because that telescope is on the ground, it can’t see all the light coming from the exoplanet. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of the planet’s infrared wavelengths — exactly the wavelengths JWST excels at observing. The space telescope observed the planet on July 17 and July 30, capturing its glow in four different infrared wavelengths.

“These are wavelengths of light that we’ve never ever seen exoplanets in before,” Hinkley says. “I’ve literally been waiting for this day for six years. It feels amazing.”

Pictures in these wavelengths will help reveal how planets formed and what their atmospheres are made of.

“Direct imaging is our future,” Seager says. “It’s amazing to see the Webb performing so well.”

While the team has not yet studied the atmosphere of HIP 65426 b in detail, it did report the first spectrum — a measurement of light in a range of wavelengths — of an object orbiting a different star. The spectrum allows a deeper look into the object’s chemistry and atmosphere, astronomer Brittany Miles of UC Santa Cruz and colleagues reported September 1 at arXiv.org.

That object is called VHS 1256 b. It’s as heavy as 20 Jupiters, so it may be more like a transition object between a planet and a star, called a brown dwarf, than a giant planet. JWST found evidence that the amounts of carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere of the orb are out of equilibrium. That means the atmosphere is getting mixed up, with winds or currents pulling molecules from lower depths to its top and vice versa. The telescope also saw signs of sand clouds, a common feature in brown dwarf atmospheres (SN: 7/8/22).

“This is probably a violent and turbulent atmosphere that is filled with clouds,” Hinkley says.

HIP 65426 b and VHS 1256 b are unlike anything we see in our solar system. They’re more than three times the distance of Uranus from their stars, which suggests they formed in a totally different way from more familiar planets. In future work, astronomers hope to use JWST to image smaller planets that sit closer to their stars.

“What we’d like to do is get down to study Earths, wouldn’t we? We’d really like to get that first image of an Earth orbiting another star,” Hinkley says. That’s probably out of JWST’s reach — Earth-sized planets are still too small see. But a Saturn? That may be something JWST could focus its sights on. Those three features — size, distance and youth — made HIP 65426 b relatively easy to see, and so a good planet to test JWST’s observing abilities. And the telescope has once again surpassed astronomers’ expectations (SN: 7/11/22).

“We’ve demonstrated really how powerful JWST is as an instrument for the direct imaging of exoplanets,” says exoplanet astronomer and coauthor Aarynn Carter of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Astronomers have found more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars (SN: 3/22/22). But almost all of those planets were detected indirectly, either by the planets tugging on the stars with their gravity or blocking starlight as they cross between the star and a telescope’s view.

To see a planet directly, astronomers have to block out the light from its star and let the planet’s own light shine, a tricky process. It’s been done before, but for only about 20 planets total (SN: 11/13/08; SN: 3/14/13; SN: 7/22/20).

“In every area of exoplanet discovery, nature has been very generous,” says MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, who was not involved in the JWST discovery. “This is the one area where nature didn’t really come through.”

In 2017, astronomers discovered HIP 65426 b and took a direct image of it using an instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. But because that telescope is on the ground, it can’t see all the light coming from the exoplanet. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of the planet’s infrared wavelengths — exactly the wavelengths JWST excels at observing. The space telescope observed the planet on July 17 and July 30, capturing its glow in four different infrared wavelengths.

“These are wavelengths of light that we’ve never ever seen exoplanets in before,” Hinkley says. “I’ve literally been waiting for this day for six years. It feels amazing.”

Pictures in these wavelengths will help reveal how planets formed and what their atmospheres are made of.

“Direct imaging is our future,” Seager says. “It’s amazing to see the Webb performing so well.”

While the team has not yet studied the atmosphere of HIP 65426 b in detail, it did report the first spectrum — a measurement of light in a range of wavelengths — of an object orbiting a different star. The spectrum allows a deeper look into the object’s chemistry and atmosphere, astronomer Brittany Miles of UC Santa Cruz and colleagues reported September 1 at arXiv.org.

That object is called VHS 1256 b. It’s as heavy as 20 Jupiters, so it may be more like a transition object between a planet and a star, called a brown dwarf, than a giant planet. JWST found evidence that the amounts of carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere of the orb are out of equilibrium. That means the atmosphere is getting mixed up, with winds or currents pulling molecules from lower depths to its top and vice versa. The telescope also saw signs of sand clouds, a common feature in brown dwarf atmospheres (SN: 7/8/22).

“This is probably a violent and turbulent atmosphere that is filled with clouds,” Hinkley says.

HIP 65426 b and VHS 1256 b are unlike anything we see in our solar system. They’re more than three times the distance of Uranus from their stars, which suggests they formed in a totally different way from more familiar planets. In future work, astronomers hope to use JWST to image smaller planets that sit closer to their stars.

“What we’d like to do is get down to study Earths, wouldn’t we? We’d really like to get that first image of an Earth orbiting another star,” Hinkley says. That’s probably out of JWST’s reach — Earth-sized planets are still too small see. But a Saturn? That may be something JWST could focus its sights on.

For some ant queens, the secret to long life might be a self-produced insulin blocker.

Ant queens are famously long-lived, even though they shouldn’t be. Generally, animals that put lots of energy into reproduction sacrifice some time off their life. But ant queens produce millions of eggs and live an extraordinarily long time compared with worker ants that don’t reproduce.

Now, researchers have shown how one ant species pulls off this anti-aging feat. When queens and wannabe queens of the species Harpegnathos saltator gear up to reproduce, a part of what’s called the insulin signaling pathway gets blocked, slowing aging, the researchers report in the Sept. 2 Science. That molecular pathway has long been implicated in aging in mammals, including humans.
“There’s been a need to understand why queens, or reproductives, in social insects can live for so amazingly long,” says Marc Tatar, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who was not involved with the study. Some ant species have queens that survive 30 times as long as their workers. Other social insects such as bees and termites also have long-lived queens.

In a rare behavior for ants, when a queen H. saltator dies, some female workers begin competing in duels for the chance to replace her (SN: 1/17/14). These hopeful royals develop ovaries, start laying eggs and transition into queenlike forms called gamergates. When a worker transitions to a gamergate, her life span becomes five times as long as it was. But if she doesn’t end up becoming queen and reverts back to a worker, her life span shortens again.

The researchers exploited this behavior to investigate the molecular underpinnings of anti-aging in these ants. H. saltator gamergates, it turns out, extend their life spans by taking advantage of a split in the insulin signaling pathway, the chain of chemical reactions that drive insulin’s effects on the body. One branch of this pathway is involved with reproduction, while the other is implicated in aging.

“Insulin comes with our life — [after] we eat, we have high insulin,” says Hua Yan, a biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “But a constant high level of insulin is bad for longevity.”

Examining patterns of gene activity, Yan and colleagues found that gamergates have more active insulin genes than regular worker ants and, as a result, have increased metabolic activity and ovary development. But the secret sauce protecting the ants from the insulin’s aging effects appears to be a molecule called Imp-L2, which blocks the branch of the insulin pathway linked to aging, experiments showed. The branch involved in reproduction, however, remains active.

“What we don’t understand is how Imp-L2 can act on one aspect of the pathway and not on the other,” says study coauthor Claude Desplan, a developmental biologist at New York University.

These results represent a leap forward in our understanding of extreme social insect longevity, the researchers say, while also showcasing an anti-aging evolutionary adaptation that hasn’t been seen in the wild before.

For some ant queens, the secret to long life might be a self-produced insulin blocker.

Ant queens are famously long-lived, even though they shouldn’t be. Generally, animals that put lots of energy into reproduction sacrifice some time off their life. But ant queens produce millions of eggs and live an extraordinarily long time compared with worker ants that don’t reproduce.

Now, researchers have shown how one ant species pulls off this anti-aging feat. When queens and wannabe queens of the species Harpegnathos saltator gear up to reproduce, a part of what’s called the insulin signaling pathway gets blocked, slowing aging, the researchers report in the Sept. 2 Science. That molecular pathway has long been implicated in aging in mammals, including humans.
“There’s been a need to understand why queens, or reproductives, in social insects can live for so amazingly long,” says Marc Tatar, a biologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who was not involved with the study. Some ant species have queens that survive 30 times as long as their workers. Other social insects such as bees and termites also have long-lived queens.

In a rare behavior for ants, when a queen H. saltator dies, some female workers begin competing in duels for the chance to replace her (SN: 1/17/14). These hopeful royals develop ovaries, start laying eggs and transition into queenlike forms called gamergates. When a worker transitions to a gamergate, her life span becomes five times as long as it was. But if she doesn’t end up becoming queen and reverts back to a worker, her life span shortens again.

The researchers exploited this behavior to investigate the molecular underpinnings of anti-aging in these ants. H. saltator gamergates, it turns out, extend their life spans by taking advantage of a split in the insulin signaling pathway, the chain of chemical reactions that drive insulin’s effects on the body. One branch of this pathway is involved with reproduction, while the other is implicated in aging.

“Insulin comes with our life — [after] we eat, we have high insulin,” says Hua Yan, a biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “But a constant high level of insulin is bad for longevity.”

Examining patterns of gene activity, Yan and colleagues found that gamergates have more active insulin genes than regular worker ants and, as a result, have increased metabolic activity and ovary development. But the secret sauce protecting the ants from the insulin’s aging effects appears to be a molecule called Imp-L2, which blocks the branch of the insulin pathway linked to aging, experiments showed. The branch involved in reproduction, however, remains active.

“What we don’t understand is how Imp-L2 can act on one aspect of the pathway and not on the other,” says study coauthor Claude Desplan, a developmental biologist at New York University.

These results represent a leap forward in our understanding of extreme social insect longevity, the researchers say, while also showcasing an anti-aging evolutionary adaptation that hasn’t been seen in the wild before.

Meet the Milky Way in its own words.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy takes a tour of our home in the cosmos from an unexpected perspective. Astrophysicist and folklorist Moiya McTier presents herself not as the author, but as the lucky human vessel through which the Milky Way has chosen to tell its story. Then she lets the galaxy take it away, with humor, heart and a huge dose of snark.

The book alternates chapters between science and mythology, reflecting McTier’s dual specialties (her bio says she was the first student in Harvard University’s history to study both). “Many of you don’t realize this, but myths were some of your species’ first attempt at scientific inquiry,” the Milky Way tells us.

The Milky Way is telling its story now because it’s sick of being ignored. Once upon a time, humans looked to the glittering smudge of stars in the sky for insight into when to plant crops or avoid floods. We told stories about the Milky Way’s importance in the origin and fate of the world.

Our galaxy ate it up: For an entity that spends most of its time ripping up smaller galaxies and watching its own stars die, “your stories made me feel loved and needed and, perhaps for the first time in my long existence, more helpful than I was ruinous.” But in the last few centuries, technology and light pollution have pulled humankind away. “At first, I thought it was just a phase,” the Milky Way says. “Then I remembered … that several hundred years is actually a long time for humans.”
So the Milky Way decided to remind us why it’s so important. Its autobiography covers big-picture scientific questions about galaxies, like where they come from (“When a gas cloud loves itself very much,” the Milky Way explains, “it hugs itself extra tight, and after a few hundred million years, a baby galaxy is born. Leave the storks out of it, please.”). It also gets into what galaxies are made of, how they interact with other galaxies, and how they live and die. The book then zooms out to cover the origins and possible ends of the universe, mysteries like dark matter and dark energy, and even humankind’s search for other intelligent life (SN: 8/4/20).

The author takes pains to explain scientific jargon and the technical tools that astronomers use to study the sky. A lot of popular astronomy writing glosses over how astronomers think about cosmic distance or exactly what a spectrum is, but not this book. If you’ve ever been curious about these insider details, The Milky Way has you covered.

McTier’s version of our home galaxy is heavily anthropomorphized. The Milky Way is brash, vain and arrogant in a way that may hide a secret insecurity. Its central black hole is characterized as the physical embodiment of the galaxy’s shame and regrets, a source of deep existential angst. And its relationship with the Andromeda galaxy is like a long-term, long-distance romance, with each galaxy sending stars back and forth as love notes until the two can eventually merge (SN: 3/05/21).

This could have felt gimmicky. But McTier’s efforts to make the metaphors work while keeping the science accurate and up-to-date made the premise endearing and entertaining.

I laughed twice on Page 1. I learned a new word on Page 2. I dog-eared the endnotes early on because it became instantly clear I would want to read every one. I read this book while traveling in rural upstate New York, where the sky is much clearer than at my home outside of Boston. The Milky Way reminded me to look up and appreciate my home in the universe, just like its narrator wanted.

For millions of people, COVID-19 doesn’t end with a negative test. Weeks or months after traces of the virus disappear from noses and throats, symptoms can persist or come back. New ones might pop up and stick around for months. People suffering from long COVID are unwillingly in it for the long haul — and it’s still unclear who’s at the highest risk for the condition.

Researchers don’t yet have an official definition for long COVID, and its symptoms are wide-ranging (SN: 7/29/22). Some people struggle with extreme fatigue that interferes with their daily lives. Others can’t concentrate or struggle with memory amid thick brain fog. Still others have organ damage or a persistent cough and difficulty breathing.
“There are a variety of different kinds of ways that people can have long COVID. It’s not just the one thing,” says Leora Horwitz, an internal medicine physician at New York University Langone Health. “That’s what makes it so hard to study.”

This spectrum of symptoms makes pinning down who’s at high risk for long-term health problems from the disease especially hard. Some post-COVID conditions may stem from virus-induced damage or from the stress of being hospitalized with severe disease. In other cases, the body’s own immune response to the virus could drive the damage. Or the virus may be hiding somewhere in the body, possibly the gut, helping symptoms to persist (SN: 11/24/20). Different causes may have different risk groups, says Hannah Davis, cofounder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a research and advocacy group studying long COVID.

There are some broad hints about who’s at risk. Studies suggest that women are more likely than men to have lingering symptoms. COVID-19 patients with more than five symptoms in the first week of infection or preexisting health conditions such as asthma may be more likely to develop long COVID. Age also appears to be a risk factor, though results are mixed regarding whether the burden falls on older people or middle-aged people. Populations that were disproportionally hit by COVID-19 overall — including Black and Hispanic people — may similarly face disparities for long COVID. And while vaccination seems to protect people from developing long COVID, Horwitz says, it’s still unclear by how much.

Age is a risk factor for severe COVID-19, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists more than 30 health problems, including cancer and lung disease, that also raise the risk. “So many researchers assume that those [risk factors] will be the same for long COVID and there’s no scientific basis for that,” Davis says. There are many more that researchers could be missing when it comes to long COVID.

Using health records and exams, and knowledge of ailments with symptoms similar to long COVID, experts are on the hunt for those risk factors.

Examining health
When it comes to getting a better handle on who’s at risk for long COVID — which also goes by the wonky alias Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection — electronic health records may hold important clues.

Horwitz is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER initiative that aims to understand the long-term impacts of COVID-19. One arm of the study involves mining millions of electronic health records to find potential patterns.

Studying millions of these records should pinpoint potential risk factors that are rare in the population overall but perhaps more common for people with long COVID, Horwitz says. “That’s hard even in a cohort study of thousands.”

But health records aren’t perfect: They depend on physicians logging that patients are having trouble sleeping or focusing, or that they’re exhausted. “The things people are complaining about, we’re really bad at writing down those diagnoses on the record,” Horwitz says. “So we miss that.”
To account for health records’ deficiencies, Horwitz and colleagues are also directly studying thousands of people. Participants answer a questionnaire every three months so that the team can identify what kinds of symptoms people have and whether they’re getting better or worse.

Then blood, urine, stool and saliva samples can reveal what’s happening in the body. Tests on those samples can uncover if the coronavirus is still around and causing trouble, or if the immune system has learned to attack the body itself. Participants with abnormal test results will undergo additional, targeted testing.

“Unlike electronic health records where it’s hit or miss, like somebody might have had a CAT scan or might not, here we say, ‘OK, you have trouble breathing. We will take a look at your lungs,’” Horwitz says.

The study includes a range of participants: adults and kids, pregnant people, those currently with COVID-19 and people who died after having the disease.

Some of the potential risk factors that the team is looking for include autoimmune diseases and other viral infections. The list may grow as more people join the study. “We’re trying to balance the fishing versus making sure that we’re at least fishing for things that could be in the water,” Horwitz says.

Among short supply, though, are people who never caught the virus — important “controls” to highlight what’s different about people who got COVID-19.

So far, more than 7,000 people have signed up, and the group plans to recruit around 10,000 more. It’s a lot of data, but early results may soon start coming in.

“We’ll probably try to do an interim peek at those data this fall,” Horwitz says. “It’s tricky because we deliberately wanted to enroll 18,000 people so we would have enough power to really look at the things we care about. I don’t want to cheat and look too early, but we also know that there’s a lot of interest.”

Striking similarities
Some long COVID symptoms — brain fog, fatigue and trouble sleeping — mirror another illness: myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. Other long COVID symptoms, such as rapid heartbeat and dizziness, fall in the category of nervous system disorders called dysautonomia. Similar symptoms could belie similar risk factors.

Yet potential risk factors for those conditions are largely missing from long COVID research, says Davis, who has had long COVID since March 2020. Among the possibilities that scientists are considering are things like Epstein-Barr virus, migraines and some autoimmune diseases.

Epstein-Barr virus could be a big one, Davis says. Infections last a lifetime because the virus can go into hiding in the body and possibly reemerge. That virus has been linked to ME/CFS for decades, though its role in the disease remains unclear, Davis says.
Some early hints of a link between Epstein-Barr virus and long COVID already exist. Multiple studies have found evidence in blood samples from some long COVID patients that the immune system recently battled with Epstein-Barr virus, which can cause infectious mononucleosis, a disease characterized by extreme fatigue. Other studies have found signs of the virus itself. And in 2021, Davis and colleagues found that 40 out of 580 people with symptoms of long COVID who responded to an online survey reported having a current or recent Epstein-Barr virus infection.

With ME/CFS, it’s possible that another illness caused by a different virus triggers the Epstein-Barr virus, which then causes the fatigue syndrome. Given the parallels between that condition and long COVID, some scientists are wondering if the two are actually the same disease, with the coronavirus now known as one trigger.

Examining health conditions that raise the chances of long COVID could provide answers for both diseases, says Nancy Klimas, an immunologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. That’s in part because researchers can more easily identify people who developed lingering symptoms after a bout of COVID-19 compared with unknown infections that may precede ME/CFS.

Also, “there’s a huge difference in these two fields and it’s money,” Klimas says. She now has funding from the CDC to compare long COVID patients with people who have ME/CFS. The team hopes that physical exams and specialized tests will reveal whether the two diseases are indeed the same and be a step toward understanding the mechanisms behind the lingering symptoms.

Still, since long COVID as a whole encompasses such a wide range of symptoms, it will take time to uncover who is at risk of what.

If COVID-19 were just one disease impacting the lungs, heart or brain, the research might be easier, Horwitz says. “But we have to test everything.”

The one-of-a-kind pattern of ridges and valleys in a fingerprint may not only betray who was present at a crime scene. It may also tattle about what outlawed drugs a suspect handled.

With advanced spectroscopy, researchers can detect and measure tiny flecks of cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin — in some cases as little as trillionths of a gram — on a lone fingerprint. The study, led by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., appears May 7 in Analytical Chemistry.
Using an ink-jet–printed array of known quantities of drugs, researchers calibrated their spectroscopy techniques to measure specks of the chemicals. Then, using a 3-D printed plastic finger and a synthetic version of finger oil, researchers created drug-tainted fingerprints pressed onto paper or silicon.

On paper, the researchers detected as little as 1 nanogram of cocaine and amounts above 50 nanograms of methamphetamine and heroin. On silicon, the method picked up as little as 8 picograms of cocaine and heroin and around 1 nanogram of methamphetamine.

Researchers could also point to the location of the drugs on the fingerprint— at the peaks or dips of the pattern, for instance. Such information, the authors say, could help investigators finger what chemicals a suspect handled first and help corroborate a timeline of events in a crime.

In the animal world, just like the human one, sometimes it’s not easy being mom. Fellow blogger Laura Sanders will tell you all about the trials and tribulations of being a mother to Homo sapiens. But some moms of the animal kingdom make sacrifices that go far beyond carrying a baby for nine months or paying for college.

Binge-eating sea otters
Adult female sea otters spend six months out of every year nursing at least one pup, sometimes two. Feeding herself isn’t easy — she’s got to eat the equivalent of 20 to 25 percent of her body mass every day to survive. But that amount has to increase while she’s nursing. By the time a pup is weaned at six months old, mom has to nearly double her food intake, researchers reported last year in the Journal of Experimental Biology. And to make matters worse, sometimes her kid will steal her food.
Single, starving mom
About two months before giving birth, a polar bear will enter her maternity den, remaining there for four to eight months. She stays holed up for that entire time, never eating, never drinking. Her cubs, only about half a kilogram at birth, grow quickly feeding on mom’s rich milk. And once they’re big enough to venture out, mama bear leads her babies straight to the sea so she can finally catch herself a meal.

Walled in by poo
Various species of Asian hornbills all share a similar nesting strategy: To protect her eggs from predators, mom walls herself up in a tree with a combination of mud, feces and regurgitated fruit. She leaves one tiny hole, through which dad feeds her for up to four months when mother and children are finally ready to emerge.

Endless sleepless nights
Human babies are known for their ability to rouse mom with their cries and prevent her from getting much sleep. But orca and dolphin moms don’t sleep at all for a month or more after they give birth. Unlike human babies that need a lot of sleep, tiny orcas and dolphins don’t sleep in the weeks after they’re born. That means no sleep for mom.

It’s mom for dinner
There’s a hint in the name of a limbless amphibian called Microcaecilia dermatophaga — young caecilians eat the skin of their mother, researchers reported in 2013 in PLOS ONE. But in a recent issue of Science News, Susan Milius highlighted an even more disgusting case of mom serving herself up for her kids: A female Stegodyphus lineatus spider feeds her young on a regurgitated slurry made up of the last meals she’ll ever eat — and her own guts. Milius writes:

“As liquid wells out on mom’s face, spiderlings jostle for position, swarming over her head like a face mask of caramel-colored beads. This will be her sole brood of hatchlings, and she regurgitates 41 percent of her body mass to feed her spiderlings.”

The next time your mom talks about how much she sacrificed for you, say thanks, but remember, at least you didn’t eat her stomach.

Mother’s Day is on my mind, and I’ve been thinking about the ways I’m connected to my mom and my two little daughters. Every so often I see flickers of my mom in my girls — they share the lines around their smiles and a mutual adoration of wildflowers. Of course, I’m biased. I know that I’m seeing what I’m looking for. But biologically speaking, mothers and their children are connected in a way that may surprise you.

Way back when you and your mom shared a body, your cells mingled. Her cells slipped into your body and your cells circled back into her. This process, called fetal-maternal microchimerism, turns both mother and child into chimeras harboring little pieces of each other.

Cells from my daughters are knitted into my body and bones and brain. I also carry cells from my mom, and quite possibly from my grandma. I may even harbor cells from my older brother, who may have given some cells to my mom, who then gave them to me. It means my younger brother just might have cells from all of us, poor guy. This boundary blurring invites some serious existential wonder, not least of which might involve you wondering if this means your family members really are in your head.

These cellular threads tie families together in ways that scientists are just starting to discover. Here are a few of my favorite instances of how cells from a child have woven themselves into a mother’s body:
Fetal cells are probably sprinkled throughout a mother’s brain. A study of women who had died in their 70s found that over half of the women had male DNA (a snippet from the Y chromosome) in their brains, presumably from when their sons were in the womb. Scientists often look for male DNA in women because it’s easier than distinguishing a daughter’s DNA from her mother’s. If DNA from daughters were included, the number of women with children’s cells in their brains would probably be even higher.

When the heart is injured, fetal cells seem to flock to the site of injury and turn into several different types of specialized heart cells. Some of these cells may even start beating, a mouse study found. So technically, those icky-sweet Mother’s Day cards may be right: A mother really does hold her children in her heart.

Fetal cells circulate in a mother’s blood. Male DNA turned up in blood samples from women who were potential stem cell donors. That result may have implications for stem cell transplants. This cell swapping may make parents better donor candidates for their children than strangers, for instance.
Other studies have found fetal cells in a mother’s bones, liver, lungs and other organs, suggesting that these cells have made homes for themselves throughout a mother’s body. Maybe this is a way for a child to give back to the mother, in a sense. Growing fetuses slurp nutrients and energy out of a mother’s body during pregnancy (not to mention the morning sickness, heartburn and body aches). In return, fetuses offer up these young, potentially helpful cells. Perhaps these fetal cells, which may possess the ability to turn into lots of different kinds of cells, can help repair a damaged heart, liver or thyroid, as some studies have hinted.

Before I get carried away, a caveat: these cells may also make mischief. They may have a role in autoimmune disorders, for instance.

Microchimerism also has implications here for women who have lost pregnancies, an extremely common situation hidden by the taboo of talking about miscarriages. Fetal cells seem to migrate early in pregnancy, meaning that even brief pregnancies may leave a cellular mark on a woman.

Scientists are just starting to discover how this cellular heritage works, and how it might influence health. The scientist in me can’t wait to see how this story unfolds. But for now, I’m content to marvel at the mother and daughters in me.

A zap to the head can stretch the time between intention and action, a new study finds. The results help illuminate how intentions arise in the brain.

The study, published in the May 6 Journal of Neuroscience, “provides fascinating new clues” about the process of internal decision making, says neuroscientist Gabriel Kreiman of Harvard University. These sorts of studies are bringing scientists closer to “probing some of the fundamental questions about who we are and why we do what we do,” he says.
Figuring out how the brain generates a sense of control may also have implications for people who lack those feelings. People with alien hand syndrome, psychogenic movement disorders and schizophrenia can experience a troubling disconnect between intention and action, says study coauthor Biyu Jade He of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

In the study, the researchers manipulated people’s intentions without changing their actions. The researchers told participants to click a mouse whenever the urge struck. Participants estimated when their intention to click first arose by monitoring a dot’s position on a clockface.

Intention to click usually preceded the action by 188 milliseconds on average, the team found. But a session of transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, moved the realization of intention even earlier, stretching time out between awareness of intention and the action. tDCS electrodes delivered a mild electrical zap to participants’ heads, dialing up the activity of carefully targeted nerve cells. After stimulation, intentions arrived about 60 to 70 milliseconds sooner than usual. tDCS seemed to change certain kinds of brain activity that may have influenced the time shift, EEG recordings suggested.

The results highlight how thoughts and intentions can be separated from the action itself, a situation that appears to raise thorny questions about free will. But these tDCS zaps didn’t change the action outcome or participants’ feelings of control, only the reported timing of a person’s conscious intention.

MONTREAL — For the first time, scientists have precisely captured a map of the boisterous bang radiating from a lightning strike. The work could reveal the energies involved in powering some of nature’s flashiest light shows.

As electric current rapidly flows from a negatively charged cloud to the ground below, the lightning rapidly heats and expands the surrounding air, generating sonic shock waves. While scientists have a basic understanding of thunder’s origins, they lack a detailed picture of the physics powering the crashes and rumbles.
Heliophysicist Maher Dayeh of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and colleagues sparked their own lightning by firing a long, Kevlar-coated copper wire into an electrically charged cloud using a small rocket. The resulting lightning followed the conductive wire to the ground. Using 15 sensitive microphones laid out 95 meters from the strike zone, Dayeh said he and his colleagues precisely recorded the incoming sound waves. Because sound waves from higher elevations took longer to reach the microphones, the scientists could create an acoustic map of the lightning strike with “surprising detail,” Dayeh said. He presented the results May 5 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union and other organizations.

The loudness of a thunderclap depends on the peak electric current flowing through the lightning, the researchers found. This discovery could one day allow scientists to use thunder to sound out the amount of energy powering a lightning strike, Dayeh said.
SHOCK AND AWE Scientists shot a long copper wire into a lightning-prone cloud using a small rocket. The generated lightning followed the wire down to the ground, allowing the researchers to record the sound waves of the resulting thunder. The green flashes are caused by the intense heating of the copper wire. Credit: Univ. of Florida, Florida Institute of Technology, SRI

A new high-tech glove totally sucks — and that’s a good thing.

Each fingertip is outfitted with a sucker inspired by those on octopus arms. These suckers allow people to grab slippery, underwater objects without squeezing too tightly, researchers report July 13 in Science Advances.

“Being able to grasp things underwater could be good for search and rescue, it could be good for archaeology, [and] could be good for marine biology,” says mechanical engineer Michael Bartlett of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Each sucker on the glove is a raspberry-sized rubber cone capped with a thin, stretchy rubber sheet. Vacuuming the air out of a sucker pulls its cap into a concave shape that sticks to surfaces like a suction cup. Pumping air back into the sucker inflates its cap, causing it to pop off surfaces. Each finger is also equipped with a Tic Tac–sized sensor that detects nearby surfaces. When the sensor comes within some preset distance of any object, it switches the sucker on that finger to sticky mode.

Bartlett and colleagues used the glove to pick up objects underwater, including a toy car, plastic spoon and metal bowl. Each sucker could lift about one kilogram in open air — and could lift more underwater, with the help of buoyancy, Bartlett says. Adding more suckers could give the glove an even stronger grip.
The octopus-inspired glove barely brushes the surface of what octopuses and other cephalopods can do. Octopuses can individually control thousands of suckers across their eight arms to feel around the seafloor and snatch prey. The suckers do this using not only tactile sensors, but also chemical-detecting cells that “taste” their surroundings (SN: 10/29/20).

The new glove is far from turning fingers into extra tongues. But Bartlett is intrigued by the possibility of adding chemical sensors so that the suckers stick to only certain materials.