There’s a lot more to the story of the Higgs boson than just one man named Higgs.
Despite the appeal of the “lone genius” narrative, it’s rare that a discovery can be attributed solely to the work of one scientist. At first, Elusive, a biography of Peter Higgs written by physicist and author Frank Close, seems to play into that misleading narrative: The book is subtitled “How Peter Higgs solved the mystery of mass.”
But the book quickly — and rightfully — veers from that path as it delves into the theoretical twists and turns that kicked off a decades-long quest for the particle known as the Higgs boson, culminating with its discovery in 2012 (SN: 7/28/12, p. 5). That detection verified the mechanism by which particles gain mass. Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, played a crucial role in establishing mass’s origins, but he was one of many contributors.
The habitually modest and attention-averse Higgs makes the case against himself as the one whiz behind the discovery, the book notes: According to Higgs, “my actual contribution was only a key insight right at the end of the story.”
The Higgs boson itself doesn’t bestow fundamental particles with mass. Instead, its discovery confirmed the correctness of a theory cooked up by Higgs and others. According to that theory, elementary particles gain mass by interacting with a field, now known as the Higgs field, that pervades all of space.
A paper from Higgs in 1964 was not the first to propose this process. Physicists Robert Brout and François Englert just barely beat him to it. And another team of researchers published the same idea just after Higgs (SN: 11/2/13, p. 4). Crucial groundwork had already been laid by yet other scientists, and still others followed up on Higgs’ work. Higgs, however, was the one to make the pivotal point that the mass mechanism implied the existence of a new, massive particle, which could confirm the theory. Despite this complicated history, scientists slapped his name on not just the particle, the Higgs boson, but also the process behind it, traditionally called the Higgs mechanism, but more recently and accurately termed the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. (Higgs has reportedly proposed calling it the “ABEGHHK’tH mechanism,” using the first letter of the last names of the parade of physicists who contributed to it, Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble and ’t Hooft.) The postmortem of how Higgs’ name attained outsize importance is one of the most interesting sections of Elusive, revealing much about the scientific sausage-making process and how it sometimes goes awry. Equally fascinating is the account of how the media embraced Higgs as a titan of physics based on his association with the boson, lofting him to a level of fame that, for Higgs, felt unwelcome and unwarranted.
The book admirably tackles the complexities of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism and how particles gain mass, covering details that are usually glossed over in most popular explanations. Close doesn’t shy away from nitty-gritty physics terms like “perturbation theory,” “renormalization” and “gauge invariance.” The thorniest bits are most appropriate for amateur physics aficionados who desire a deeper understanding, and those bits may require a reread before sinking in.
Higgs is famously not a fan of the limelight — he disappeared for several hours on the day he won a Nobel Prize for his work on mass. The physicist sometimes seems to fade into the background of this biography as well, with multiple pages passing with no appearance or contribution from Higgs. Once the scientific community got wind of the possibility of a new particle, the idea took on a life of its own, with experimental physicists leading the charge. Higgs didn’t make many contributions to the subject beyond his initial insight, which he calls “the only really original idea I’ve ever had.”
Thus, the book sometimes feels like a biography of a particle named Higgs, with the person playing a backup role. Higgs is so reserved and so private that you get the sense that Close still hasn’t quite cracked him. While interesting details of Higgs’ life and passions are revealed — for example, his fervent objection to nuclear weapons — deeper insights are missing. In the end, Higgs is, just like the particle named after him, elusive.
Javier Duarte kicked off his scientific career by witnessing the biggest particle physics event in decades. On July 4, 2012, scientists at the laboratory CERN near Geneva announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought subatomic particle that reveals the origins of mass. Duarte was an eager graduate student who’d just arrived at CERN.
“I was physically there maybe a week before the announcement,” Duarte says. As buzzing throngs of physicists crowded together to watch the announcement at CERN, Duarte didn’t make it to the main auditorium. That space was for VIPs — and those determined enough to wait in line all night to snag a seat. Instead, he says, he found himself in the basement, in an overflow room of an overflow room.
But the enthusiasm was still palpable. “It was a very exciting time to be getting immersed into that world,” he says. Since then, he and thousands of other physicists from around the world working on CERN experiments have gone all out exploring the particle’s properties.
Scientists predicted the existence of the Higgs boson back in 1964, as a hallmark of the process that gives elementary particles mass. But finding the particle had to wait for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. In 2010, the LHC began smashing protons together at extremely high energies, while two large experiments, ATLAS and CMS, used massive detectors to look through the debris. The particle’s discovery filled in the missing keystone of the standard model of particle physics. That theory explains the known elementary particles and their interactions. Those particles and interactions are behind just about everything we know. The particles serve as building blocks of atoms and transmit crucial forces of nature, such as electromagnetism. And the mass of those particles is key to their behavior. If electrons were massless, for example, atoms wouldn’t form. Without the Higgs boson, then, one of scientists’ most successful theories would collapse.
The Higgs boson discovery dominated headlines around the globe. About half a million people tuned in to watch the livestreamed announcement, and footage from the event appeared on more than 5,000 news programs. Even oddball minutiae made it into the press, with a few articles analyzing the physicists’ use of the often-scorned font Comic Sans in their presentation. Little more than a year later, the discovery garnered a Nobel Prize for two of the scientists who developed the theory behind the Higgs boson, François Englert and Peter Higgs — for whom the particle is named. Now, as the discovery turns 10 years old, that initial excitement persists for Duarte and many other particle physicists. As a professor at the University of California, San Diego and member of the CMS experiment, Duarte’s research still revolves around the all-important particle. Progress in understanding the Higgs has been “stunning,” he says. “We’ve come so much farther than we expected to.”
Physicists have been working through a checklist of things they want to know about the Higgs boson. They spent the last decade cataloging its properties, including how it interacts with several other particles. Though measurements have so far been in line with the predictions made by the standard model, if a discrepancy turns up in the future, it may mean there are unknown particles yet to be discovered.
And there’s still more on the agenda. An especially important item is the Higgs boson’s interaction with itself. To help pin down this and other Higgs properties, scientists are looking forward to collecting more data. Scientists turned on an upgraded LHC for a new round of work in April. At the time of the Higgs discovery, collisions at the LHC reached an energy of 8 trillion electron volts. Collisions are expected to roll in at a record 13.6 trillion electron volts starting July 5, and data-taking will continue until 2026. These higher energies offer opportunities to spot heavier particles. And the High-Luminosity LHC, a more powerful iteration of the LHC, is expected to start up in 2029.
“Finding a particle, it sounds like the end of something, but it’s really only the beginning,” says experimental particle physicist María Cepeda of CIEMAT in Madrid, a member of the CMS collaboration. Coupling up Studying the Higgs boson is like geocaching, says theoretical particle physicist Gudrun Heinrich of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Much like hobbyists use a GPS device to uncover a hidden stash of fun trinkets, physicists are using their wits to uncover the treasure trove of the Higgs boson. In 2012, scientists merely located the cache; the next 10 years were devoted to revealing its contents. And that investigation continues. “The hope is that the contents will contain something like a map that is guiding us towards an even bigger treasure,” Heinrich says.
Detailed study of the Higgs boson could help scientists solve mysteries that the standard model fails to explain. “We know that the theory has limitations,” says theoretical particle physicist Laura Reina of Florida State University in Tallahassee. For instance, the standard model has no explanation for dark matter, a shadowy substance that throws its weight around the cosmos, exerting a gravitational pull necessary to explain a variety of astronomical observations. And the theory can’t explain other quandaries, like why the universe is composed mostly of matter rather than its alter ego, antimatter. Many proposed solutions to the standard model’s shortcomings require new particles that would alter how the Higgs interacts with known particles.
The Higgs boson itself isn’t responsible for mass. Instead, that’s the job of the Higgs field. According to quantum physics, all particles are actually blips in invisible fields, like ripples atop a pond. Higgs bosons are swells in the Higgs field, which pervades the entire cosmos. When elementary particles interact with the Higgs field, they gain mass. The more massive the particle, the more strongly it interacts with the Higgs field, and with the Higgs boson. Massless particles, like photons, don’t directly interact with the Higgs field at all.
One of the best ways to hunt for Higgs-related treasure is to measure those interactions, known as “couplings.” The Higgs couplings describe what particles the Higgs boson decays into, what particles can fuse to produce Higgs bosons and how often those processes occur. Scientists gauge these couplings by sifting through and analyzing the showers of particles produced when Higgs bosons pop up in the debris of proton smashups.
Even if unknown particles are too heavy to show up at the LHC, the Higgs couplings could reveal their existence. “Any of these couplings not being what you expect them to be is a very clear sign of incredibly interesting new physics behind it,” says particle physicist Marumi Kado of Sapienza University of Rome and CERN, who is the deputy spokesperson for the ATLAS collaboration. Physicists have already checked the couplings to several elementary particles. These include both major classes of particles in physics: bosons (particles that carry forces) and fermions (particles that make up matter, such as electrons). Scientists have measured the Higgs’ interactions with a heavy relative of the electron called a tau lepton (a fermion) and with the W and Z bosons, particles that transmit the weak force, which is responsible for some types of radioactive decay. Researchers also pegged the Higgs’ couplings to the top quark and bottom quark. Those are two of the six types of quarks, which glom together into larger particles such as protons and neutrons. (The Higgs is responsible for the mass of elementary particles, but the mass of composite particles, including protons and neutrons, instead comes mostly from the energy of the particles jangling around within.)
The couplings measured so far involve the standard model’s heavier elementary particles. The top quark, for example, is about as heavy as an entire gold atom. Since the Higgs couples more strongly to heavy particles, those interactions tend to be easier to measure. Next up, scientists want to observe the lighter particles’ couplings. ATLAS and CMS have used their giant detectors to see hints of the Higgs decaying to muons, the middleweight sibling in the electron family, lighter than the tau but heavier than the electron. The teams have also begun checking the coupling to charm quarks, which are less massive than top and bottom quarks.
So far, the Higgs has conformed to the standard model. “The big thing we discovered is it looks pretty much like we expected it to. There have been no big surprises,” says theoretical particle physicist Sally Dawson of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.
But there might be discrepancies that just haven’t been detected yet. The standard model predictions agree with measured couplings within error bars of around 10 percent or more. But no one knows if they agree to within 5 percent, or 1 percent. The more precisely scientists can measure these couplings, the better they can test for any funny business. One of a kind Before the LHC turned on, scientists had a clear favorite for a physics theory that could solve some of the standard model’s woes: supersymmetry, a class of theories in which every known particle has an undiscovered partner particle. Physicists had hoped such particles would turn up at the LHC. But none have been found yet. Though supersymmetry isn’t fully ruled out, the possibilities for the theory are far more limited.
With no consensus candidate among many other theories for what could be beyond the standard model, a lot of focus rests on the Higgs. Physicists hope studies of the Higgs will reveal something that might point in the right direction to untangle some of the standard model’s snarls. “Measuring [the Higgs boson’s] properties is going to tell us much more about what is beyond the standard model … than anything before,” Reina says.
One question that scientists are investigating in LHC smashups is whether the Higgs is truly unique. All the other known elementary particles have a quantum form of angular momentum, known as spin. But the Higgs has a spin of zero, what’s known as a “scalar.” Other types of particles tend to come in families, so it’s not outlandish to imagine that the Higgs boson could have scalar relatives. “It could be there’s a huge scalar sector somewhere hiding and we just saw the first particle of it,” Heinrich says. Supersymmetry predicts multiple Higgs bosons, but there are plenty of other ideas that envision Higgs accomplices.
It’s also possible that the Higgs is not actually elementary. Combinations of particles, such as quarks, are known to make up larger particles with spins of zero. Perhaps the Higgs, like those other scalars, is made up of yet unknown smaller stuff.
While hunting for these answers, physicists will be watching closely for any connection between the Higgs’ behavior and other recent puzzling results. In 2021, the Muon g−2 experiment at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., reported hints that muons have magnetic properties that don’t agree with predictions of the standard model. And in April, scientists with the CDF experiment — which studied particle collisions at Fermilab until 2011 — found that the W boson’s mass is heavier than the standard model predicts.
The Higgs boson’s relative newness makes it ripe for discoveries that could help sort out these quandaries. “The Higgs boson is the least explored elementary particle, and it could be a door to the other mysteries we still have to uncover or to shed light on,” Heinrich says. Self-talk To work out thorny puzzles, physicists sometimes talk to themselves. Fittingly, another puzzle atop scientists’ Higgs to-do list is whether the particle, likewise, talks to itself.
This “self-coupling,” how Higgs bosons interact with one another, has never been measured before. But “it turns out to be really just an incredible barometer of new physics,” says theoretical particle physicist Nathaniel Craig of the University of California, Santa Barbara. For example, measuring the Higgs self-coupling could suss out hidden particles that interact only with the Higgs, oblivious to any of the other standard model particles.
The Higgs self-coupling is closely related to the Higgs potential, an undulating, sombrero-shaped surface that describes the energy of the universe-pervading Higgs field. In the early universe, that potential determined how the fundamental particles gained mass, when the Higgs field first turned on.
How, exactly, that transition from massless to massive happened has some big implications for the cosmos. It could help explain how matter gained the upper hand over antimatter in the early universe. If the Higgs field did play that role in the universe’s beginnings, Craig says, “it’s going to leave some fingerprints on the Higgs potential that we measure today.”
Depending on the full shape of the Higgs potential’s sombrero, at some point in the exceedingly distant future, the Higgs field could shift again, as it did in the early universe. Such a jump would change the masses of fundamental particles, creating a universe in which familiar features, including life, are probably obliterated.
To better understand the Higgs potential, scientists will attempt to measure the self-coupling. They’ll do it by looking for Higgs bosons produced in pairs, a sign of the Higgs interacting with itself. That’s thought to happen at less than a thousandth the rate that individual Higgs bosons are produced in the LHC, making it extremely difficult to measure.
Even with the planned High-Luminosity LHC, which will eventually collect about 10 times as much data as the LHC, scientists predict that the self-coupling will be measured with large error bars of about 50 percent, assuming the standard model is correct. That’s not enough to settle the matter.
If scientists just do what they’re on track to do, “we’re going to fall short,” Duarte says. But new techniques could allow physicists to better identify double-Higgs events. Duarte is studying collisions in which two particularly high-energy Higgs bosons each decay into a bottom quark and a bottom antiquark. Using a specialized machine learning technique, Duarte and colleagues put together one of the most sensitive analyses yet of this type of decay.
By improving this technique, and combining results with those from other researchers looking at different types of decays, “we have a good hope that we’ll be able to observe [the self-coupling] definitively,” Duarte says. Waiting game Despite all his passion for the Higgs, Duarte notes that there have been disappointments. After that first rush of the Higgs announcement, “I was hoping for a Higgs-level discovery every year.” That didn’t happen. But he hasn’t lost his optimism. “We expect there to be another twist and turn coming up,” he says. “We’re still hoping it’s around the corner.”
The wait for new physics is no shock to veterans of earlier particle hunts. Meenakshi Narain, a particle physicist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and a member of the CMS experiment, was an undergraduate student around the time the bottom quark was discovered in the 1970s. After that discovery, Narain joined the search for the top quark. Even though physicists were convinced of the particle’s existence, that hunt still took nearly 20 years, she says. And it took nearly 50 years to uncover the Higgs boson after it was postulated.
The standard model’s flaws make physicists confident that there must be more treasures to unearth. Because of her past experiences with the long-haul process of discovery, Narain says, “I have a lot of faith.”
Whenever paleontologist Dana Ehret gives talks about the 15-meter-long prehistoric sharks known as megalodons, he likes to make a joke: “What did megalodon eat?” asks Ehret, Assistant Curator of Natural History at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. “Well,” he says, “whatever it wanted.”
Now, there might be evidence that’s literally true. Some megalodons (Otodus megalodon) may have been “hyper apex predators,” higher up the food chain than any ocean animal ever known, researchers report in the June 22 Science Advances. Using chemical measurements of fossilized teeth, scientists compared the diets of marine animals — from polar bears to ancient great white sharks — and found that megalodons and their direct ancestors were often predators on a level never seen before. The finding contradicts another recent study, which found megalodons were at a similar level in the food chain as great white sharks (SN: 5/31/22). If true, the new results might change how researchers think about what drove megalodons to extinction around 3.5 million years ago.
In the latest study, researchers examined dozens of fossilized teeth for varieties of nitrogen, called isotopes, that have different numbers of neutrons. In animals, one specific nitrogen isotope tends to be more common than another. A predator absorbs both when it eats prey, so the imbalance between the isotopes grows further up the food chain.
For years, scientists have used this trend to learn about modern creatures’ diets. But researchers were almost never able to apply it to fossils millions of years old because the nitrogen levels were too low. In the new study, scientists get around this by feeding their samples to bacteria that digest the nitrogen into a chemical the team can more easily measure.
The result: Megalodon and its direct ancestors, known collectively as megatooth sharks, showed nitrogen isotope excesses sometimes greater than any known marine animal. They were on average probably two levels higher on the food chain than today’s great white sharks, which is like saying that some megalodons would have eaten a beast that ate great whites.
“I definitely thought that I’d just messed up in the lab,” says Emma Kast, a biogeochemist at the University of Cambridge. Yet on closer inspection, the data held up.
The result is “eyebrow-raising,” says Robert Boessenecker, a paleontologist at the College of Charleston in South Carolina who was not involved in the study. “Even if megalodon was eating nothing but killer whales, it would still need to be getting some of this excess nitrogen from something else,” he says, “and there’s just nothing else in the ocean today that has nitrogen isotopes that are that concentrated.”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says.
There are possibilities. Megalodons may have eaten predatory sperm whales, though those went extinct before the megatooth sharks. Or megalodons could have been cannibals (SN: 10/5/20).
Another complication comes from the earlier, contradictory study. Those researchers examined the same food chain — in some cases, even the same shark teeth — using a zinc isotope instead of nitrogen. They drew the opposite conclusion, finding megalodons were on a similar level as other apex predators.
The zinc method is not as established as the nitrogen method, though nitrogen isotopes have also rarely been used this way before. “It could be that we don’t have a total understanding and grasp of this technique,” says Sora Kim, a paleoecologist at the University of California, Merced who was involved in both studies. “But if [the newer study] is right, that’s crazy.”
Confirming the results would be a step toward understanding why megalodons died off. If great whites had a similar diet, it could mean that they outcompeted megalodons for food, says Ehret, who was not involved in the study. The new findings suggest that’s unlikely, but leave room for the possibility that great whites competed with — or simply ate — juvenile megalodons (SN: 1/12/21).
Measuring more shark teeth with both techniques could solve the mystery and reconcile the studies. At the same time, Kast says, there’s plenty to explore with their method for measuring nitrogen isotopes in fossils. “There’s so many animals and so many different ecosystems and time periods,” she says.
Boessenecker agrees. When it comes to the ancient oceans, he says, “I guarantee we’re going to find out some really weird stuff.”
For all the coronavirus variants that have thrown pandemic curve balls — including alpha, beta, gamma and delta — COVID-19 vaccines have stayed the same. That could change this fall.
On June 28, an advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration met to discuss whether vaccine developers should update their jabs to include a portion of the omicron variant — the version of the coronavirus that currently dominates the globe. The verdict: The omicron variant is different enough that it’s time to change the vaccines. Those shots should be a dual mix that includes both a piece of the nearly identical omicron subvariants BA.4/BA.5 and the virus from the original vaccines, the FDA announced June 30.
“This doesn’t mean that we are saying that there will be boosters recommended for everyone in the fall,” Amanda Cohn, chief medical officer for vaccine policy at the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the meeting. “But my belief is that this gives us the right vaccine for preparation for boosters in the fall.” The decision to update COVID-19 vaccines didn’t come out of nowhere. In the two-plus years that the coronavirus has been spreading around the world, it has had a few “updates” of its own — mutating some of its proteins that allow the virus to more effectively infect our cells or hide from our immune systems.
Vaccine developers had previously crafted vaccines to tackle the beta variant that was first identified in South Africa in late 2020. Those were scrapped after studies showed that current vaccines remained effective.
The current vaccines gave our immune systems the tools to recognize variants such as beta and alpha, which each had a handful of changes from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus that sparked the pandemic. But the omicron variant is a slipperier foe. Lots more viral mutations combined with our own waning immunity mean that once omicron can gain a foothold in the body, vaccine protection isn’t as good as it once was at fending off COVID-19 symptoms (SN: 6/27/22).
The shots still largely protect people from developing severe symptoms, but there has been an uptick in hospitalizations, especially among older people, Heather Scobie, deputy team lead of the CDC’s Surveillance and Analytics Epidemiology Task Force said at the meeting. Deaths among older age groups are also beginning to increase. And while it’s impossible to predict the future, we could be in for another tough fall and winter, epidemiologist Justin Lessler of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said at the meeting. From March 2022 to March 2023, simulations project that deaths from COVID-19 in the United States might number in the tens to hundreds of thousands.
A switch to omicron-containing jabs may give people an extra layer of protection for the upcoming winter. Pfizer-BioNTech presented data at the meeting showing that updated versions of its mRNA shot gave clinical trial participants a boost of antibodies that recognize omicron. One version included omicron alone, while the other is a twofer, or bivalent, jab that mixes the original formulation with omicron. Moderna’s bivalent shot boosted antibodies too. Novavax, which developed a protein-based vaccine that the FDA is still mulling whether to authorize for emergency use, doesn’t have an omicron-based vaccine yet, though the company said its original shot gives people broad protection, generating antibodies that probably will recognize omicron.
Pfizer and Moderna both updated their vaccines using a version of omicron called BA.1, which was the dominant variant in the United States in December and January. But BA.1 has siblings and has already been outcompeted by some of them. Since omicron first appeared late last year, “we’ve seen a relatively troubling, rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said at the advisory meeting.
Now, omicron subvariants BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 are the dominant versions in the United States and other countries. The CDC estimates that roughly half of new U.S. infections the week ending June 25 were caused by either BA.4 or BA.5. By the time the fall rolls around, yet another new version of omicron — or a different variant entirely — may join their ranks. The big question is which of these subvariants to include in the vaccines to give people the best protection possible.
BA.1, the version already in the updated vaccines, may be the right choice, virologist Kanta Subbarao said at the FDA advisory meeting. An advisory committee to the World Health Organization, which Subbarao chairs, recommended on June 17 that vaccines may need to be tweaked to include omicron, likely BA.1. “We’re not trying to match [what variants] may circulate,” Subbarao said. Instead, the goal is to make sure that the immune system is as prepared as possible to recognize a wide variety of variants, not just specific ones. The hope is that the broader the immune response, the better our bodies will be at fighting the virus off even as it evolves.
The variant that is farthest removed from the original virus is probably the best candidate to accomplish that goal, said Subbarao, who is director of the WHO’s Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Computational analyses of how antibodies recognize different versions of the coronavirus suggest that BA.1 is probably the original coronavirus variant’s most distant sibling, she said.
Some members of the FDA advisory committee disagreed with choosing BA.1, instead saying that they’d prefer vaccines that include a portion of BA.4 or BA.5. With BA.1 largely gone, it may be better to follow the proverbial hockey puck where it’s going rather than where it’s been, said Bruce Gellin, chief of Global Public Health Strategy with the Rockefeller Foundation in Washington, D.C. Plus, BA.4 and BA.5 are also vastly different from the original variant. Both have identical spike proteins, which the virus uses to break into cells and the vaccines use to teach our bodies to recognize an infection. So when it comes to making vaccines, the two are somewhat interchangeable. There are some real-world data suggesting that current vaccines offer the least amount of protection from BA.4 and BA.5 compared with other omicron subvariants, Marks said. Pfizer also presented data showing results from a test in mice of a bivalent jab with the original coronavirus strain plus BA.4/BA.5. The shot sparked a broad immune response that boosted antibodies against four omicron subvariants. It’s unclear what that means for people.
Not everyone on the FDA advisory committee agreed that an update now is necessary — two members voted against it. Pediatrician Henry Bernstein of Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Uniondale, N.Y., noted that the current vaccines are still effective against severe disease and that there aren’t enough data to show that any changes would boost vaccine effectiveness. Pediatric infectious disease specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said that he agrees that vaccines should help people broaden their immune responses, but he’s not yet convinced omicron is the right variant for it.
Plenty of other open questions remain too. The FDA could have authorized either a vaccine that contains omicron alone or a bivalent shot. Some data presented at the meeting hinted that a bivalent dose might spark immunity that could be more durable, but that’s still unknown. Pfizer and Moderna tested their updated shots in adults. It’s unclear what the results mean for kids. Also unknown is whether people who have never been vaccinated against COVID-19 could eventually start with such an omicron-based vaccine instead of the original two doses.
Maybe researchers will get some answers before boosters start in the fall. But health agencies needed to make decisions now, so vaccine developers have a chance to make the shots in the first place. Unfortunately, we’re always lagging behind the virus, said pediatrician Hayley Gans of Stanford University. “We can’t always wait for the data to catch up.”
You might want to bring your dumbbells on that next spaceflight.
During space missions lasting six months or longer, astronauts can experience bone loss equivalent to two decades of aging. A year of recovery in Earth’s gravity rebuilds about half of that lost bone strength, researchers report June 30 in Scientific Reports.
Bones “are a living organ,” says Leigh Gabel, an exercise scientist at the University of Calgary in Canada. “They’re alive and active, and they’re constantly remodeling.” But without gravity, bones lose strength. Gabel and her colleagues tracked 17 astronauts, 14 men and three women with the average age of 47, who spent from four to seven months in space. The team used high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography, or HR-pQCT, which can measure 3-D bone microarchitecture on scales of 61 microns, finer than the thickness of human hair, to image the bone structure of the tibia in the lower leg and the radius in the lower arm. The team took these images at four points in time — before spaceflight, when the astronauts returned from space, and then six months and one year later — and used them to calculate bone strength and density.
Astronauts in space for less than six months were able to regain their preflight bone strength after a year back in Earth’s gravity. But those in space longer had permanent bone loss in their shinbones, or tibias, equivalent to a decade of aging. Their lower-arm bones, or radii, showed almost no loss, likely because these aren’t weight-bearing bones, says Gabel.
Increasing weight lifting exercises in space could help alleviate bone loss, says Steven Boyd, also a Calgary exercise scientist. “A whole bunch of struts and beams all held together give your bone its overall strength,” says Boyd. “Those struts or beams are what we lose in spaceflight.” Once these microscopic tissues called trabeculae are gone, you can’t rebuild them, but you can strengthen the remaining ones, he says. The researchers found the remaining bone thickened upon return to Earth’s gravity. “With longer spaceflight, we can expect bigger bone loss and probably a bigger problem with recovery,” says physiologist Laurence Vico of the University of Saint-Étienne in France, who was not part of the study. That’s especially concerning given that a crewed future mission to, say, Mars would last at least two years (SN: 7/15/20). She adds that space agencies should also consider other bone health measures, such as nutrition, to reduce bone absorption and increase bone formation (SN: 3/8/05). “It’s probably a cocktail of countermeasure that we will have to find,” Vico says.
Gabel, Boyd and their colleagues hope to gain insight on how spending more than seven months in space affects bones. They are part of a planned NASA project to study the effects of a year in space on more than a dozen body systems. “We really hope that people hit a plateau, that they stop losing bone after a while,” says Boyd.
A flexible electronic implant could one day make pain management a lot more chill.
Created from materials that dissolve in the body, the device encircles nerves with an evaporative cooler. Implanted in rats, the cooler blocked pain signals from zipping up to the brain, bioengineer John Rogers and colleagues report in the July 1 Science.
Though far from ready for human use, a future version could potentially let “patients dial up or down the pain relief they need at any given moment,” says Rogers, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Scientists already knew that low temperatures can numb nerves in the body. Think of frozen fingers in the winter, Rogers says. But mimicking this phenomenon with an electronic implant isn’t easy. Nerves are fragile, so scientists need something that gently hugs the tissues. And an ideal implant would be absorbed by the body, so doctors wouldn’t have to remove it.
Made from water-soluble materials, the team’s device features a soft cuff that wraps around a nerve like toilet paper on a roll. Tiny channels snake down its rubbery length. When liquid coolant that’s pumped through the channels evaporates, the process draws heat from the underlying nerve. A temperature sensor helps scientists hit the sweet spot — cold enough to block pain but not too cold to damage the nerve.
The researchers wrapped the implant around a nerve in rats and tested how they responded to having a paw poked. With the nerve cooler switched on, scientists could apply about seven times as much pressure as usual before the animals pulled their paws away. That’s a sign that the rats’ senses had grown sluggish, Rogers says.
He envisions the device being used to treat pain after surgery, rather than chronic pain. The cooler connects to an outside power source and would be tethered to patients like an IV line. They could control the level of pain relief by adjusting the coolant’s flow rate. Such a system might offer targeted relief without the downsides of addictive pain medications like opioids, Rogers suggests (SN: 8/27/19).
Now the researchers want to explore how long they can apply the cooling effect without damaging tissues, Rogers says. In experiments, the longest that they cooled rats’ nerves was for about 15 minutes.
“If treating pain, cooling would have to go on for a much longer period of time,” says Seward Rutkove, a nerve physiologist at Harvard Medical School who wasn’t involved in the study. Still, he adds, the device is “an interesting proof of concept and should definitely be pursued.”
