A long-sought “holy grail” in cryptography is poised to change the way we protect sensitive information.

Today’s standard encryption schemes take an all-or-nothing approach. Once scrambled, your data become inaccessible to anyone without the secret key.

This has allowed for secure e-mail communication, the proliferation of online transactions and digital signatures. It allows tax and medical records with sensitive personal information to be passed more safely across the internet. But if you give someone the secret key to access any of the data, all of the data become vulnerable.

What if instead you could assign specific people access to do very specific things with your data? Someone could get the information they need (the info you want them to have) without unlocking all of the original data. Bank details, credit card numbers, account passwords – all would remain hidden. That wholly different approach could also allow Netflix to make show recommendations without seeing your full viewing history, for example. Google could sort your e-mails without knowing what’s in them. And medical researchers could analyze data to identify risk factors for a disease without accessing any individual’s health information.

This and other cryptographic wonders now appear possible through a master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation.

“It’s a new tool – a very powerful tool,” says cryptographer Huijia (Rachel) Lin of the University of Washington in Seattle who showed with colleagues in 2020 how to construct the tool. “Once you have this superstrong power, then a lot of the other tasks are either special cases of it, or you can easily use this to realize [those tasks].”

Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a computer scientist at MIT who has worked with Lin on previous research, compares indistinguishability obfuscation, or iO, to a grand theory in physics that would unite gravity and quantum mechanics. “iO gives you a way to do a grand unification of cryptography in the sense that you can explain much of what cryptography does in a very simple way.”
Standout research
Indistinguishability obfuscation is a form of program obfuscation, an approach that seeks to hide the inner workings of a computer program, not just the message or data itself. Though proposed in 1976 in a paper that set the foundation for modern cryptography, program obfuscation proved difficult to achieve. For many years, people thought it might not be possible.

And in 2001, researchers showed that complete program obfuscation — called black-box obfuscation, in which input and output data are known but nothing else about a program can be discovered — is impossible. Yet indistinguishability obfuscation, proposed at the same time and shown to be incredibly powerful, doesn’t demand that everything about a program remain hidden. It instead deals with two programs that perform the same function. If the inner workings of those two programs can be hidden enough that the two can’t be distinguished from each other, indistinguishability obfuscation has been achieved. By hiding the secret key within the program itself, iO enables the delegation of specific data and data tasks to specific people.

Still, proposal after proposal for making iO work proved breakable. Researchers couldn’t figure out how to keep it safe from an adversary’s attacks. Lin says the approaches being used didn’t appeal to her. Researchers were leaning on what appeared to be “good enough” ways of getting at the problem that weren’t backed by rigorous mathematical proofs.

Lin instead wanted to break the problem down so she could understand each component and how they worked together. She wanted to approach the problem like a clock, with gears and nuts and bolts, instead of tangled like “a bowl of spaghetti.”

Through this strategy, Lin, along with Amit Sahai of UCLA and Aayush Jain, a Ph.D. student at UCLA at the time, demonstrated that iO is achievable. It would be secure based on standard assumptions in the field, the team proved, renewing hope in the tool.

“Of course, [Huijia] is brilliant,” Vaikuntanathan says, adding that her persistence is what really sets her apart. “It takes some guts to continue with an approach when essentially all the rest of the world thinks that it is not going to work.”

Backstory
Lin says she didn’t grow up with computers or fall in love with computer programming at an early age. As a student, she was interested in physics and strived to be good at everything. She started with computer science in college; a class in cryptography as a Ph.D. student at Cornell University “was really mind-opening,” she says. Her introduction to what are known as zero-knowledge proofs stands out in her memory.

A zero-knowledge proof says that a person can convince someone else that they know a secret without revealing the secret or any details about it. Say, for example, you knew that a number was the product of two prime numbers. Can you convince someone that fact is true without revealing what the primes are? How to prove that such a task is possible fascinated Lin.
Cryptography includes a lot of these seeming paradoxes that prove to be possible. Indistinguishability obfuscation is yet another example – and Lin works on others, including secure multiparty computation, which allows a computer task to run across multiple people’s data without any person having to reveal their data to anyone in the group, or to a third party.

“I’m very attracted to these magical concepts,” Lin says. “The fun of it is to make this concept come to realization.”

Indistinguishability obfuscation is still far from real-world implementation. But Vaikuntanathan says it’s not unusual for first constructions of what will become important approaches to be impractical at first. “Wait for a decade,” he says.

Environmental engineer Smruthi Karthikeyan had spent just a couple of days working in her new lab at the University of California, San Diego when the state instituted its first coronavirus lockdown in March 2020.

She’d been brought on as a postdoc by biologist Rob Knight to develop new techniques for studying how microbes in complex ecosystems shape human health and vice versa. The COVID-19 pandemic quickly put a new spin on that mission.

Soon, the lab pivoted to support the coronavirus response. Infections were outpacing testing capacity in San Diego County, Karthikeyan says. Meanwhile, the university wanted to keep the campus open for its 10,000 students still living on campus and 25,000 workers. There had to be a way to monitor infections without requiring thousands of people to get tested all the time, Karthikeyan and colleagues thought.

Public health researchers had previously tested wastewater for pathogens as a way to spy on the movements of infectious agents in communities. Viruses, bacteria and parasites can show up in stool before people exhibit symptoms, giving clues to a coming outbreak. But no one had implemented such a system to track a respiratory virus before, and never at a scale of tens of thousands of people.

Karthikeyan was up for the challenge.

Bold idea
The wastewater monitoring system that Karthikeyan and colleagues developed and implemented at UC San Diego, reported July 7 in Nature, processes upward of 200 samples per day. Previous methods could process a maximum of eight samples, she says. What’s more, the system has identified newly spreading coronavirus variants up to two weeks earlier than clinical testing and accurately forecasted the mix of variants infecting students and staff.

That has given school officials more time to take action to keep infection rates low. During the study period from November 2020 to September 2021, the proportion of clinical tests that were positive was less than one percent, Karthikeyan says, dramatically lower than rates in the surrounding area and many other college campuses at the time.
Among the key players in the team’s monitoring system are 131 robots that collect wastewater samples throughout each day from 360 university buildings. Back at the lab, the samples are screened for viral RNA and results are fed into a publicly available online dashboard created as part of the project.

Karthikeyan’s team isn’t the only one using human waste to get a jump on COVID-19. But the scale of the monitoring “is a bit unprecedented,” says Ameet Pinto, an environmental engineer at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. During the study period, Karthikeyan and colleagues processed a total of nearly 20,000 samples. “That’s amazing,” he says.

A positive result triggers a campus-wide notification via smartphone app. For dorms, anyone who lives in the building is mandated to get tested for COVID-19, while anyone who may have recently been in the building is strongly encouraged to get tested.

To increase access to tests, the team swapped candy in vending machines for at-home test kits and installed test drop boxes in the buildings. Karthikeyan’s team processes the tests and sends results within a day.

Anyone testing positive for the coronavirus is moved to a designated isolation dorm or instructed to isolate at home if they live off campus. If the coronavirus shows up in the next day’s wastewater test, the building’s remaining occupants will receive a notification to test again.

To figure out which variants are causing infections at the university, Karthikeyan’s team built a freely available computational tool called Freyja. It uses a library of genetic markers to identify the relative abundances of well-known and emerging variants in the wastewater. Freyja detected the emerging delta variant on campus 14 days before clinical tests did, Karthikeyan and colleagues report.

Growing the effort
Based on success at the university, San Diego County officials asked the researchers to test a modified version of the system at the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant, which serves more than 2.2 million residents, and at 17 public schools. Elementary school students got to name the robots, dubbing the machines Sir-Poops-a-Lot, Harry Botter and the Rancid Water, and other silly monikers, Karthikeyan said with a chuckle.

On the county level, the system detected the emergence of the omicron variant 11 days before clinical testing, the team reports in the same study in Nature. A detailed analysis of the public school data hasn’t yet been published.

Karthikeyan and colleagues’ methods have been adapted by researchers at the state, national and international levels. For instance, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration use Freyja to track variants in wastewater across the country.

The system is now being used to monitor monkeypox, and the team is working on how it can detect other pathogens that may be spreading unnoticed. That work has the potential to have a huge impact on wastewater epidemiology, Pinto says.

Karthikeyan will launch her own lab at Caltech in 2023, where she plans to adapt these tools for monitoring groundwater. Communities of microbes that live there can serve as sentinels, flagging disturbances from pollution, climate change and more, she says. “My whole thing is to look at a much larger system from a very tiny lens.”

Some of the earliest stars yet seen are now coming to light in one of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Formed roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang, the stars live in dense groups called globular clusters and surround a distant galaxy dubbed the Sparkler, astronomers report in the Oct. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters. Globular clusters often host some of the oldest stars in contemporary galaxies such as our own, but it’s hard to tell their exact age. The new finding could help researchers pinpoint when such clusters began to form.

Compared to a galaxy, globular clusters are tiny, which makes them hard to see from across the universe. But this time, a gargantuan natural lens in space helped. The Sparkler is one of thousands of galaxies that lie far behind a massive, much closer galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, which was the subject of the first publicly released science image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST (SN: 7/11/22). The cluster distorts spacetime such that the light from the more distant galaxies behind it is magnified.

For all those remote galaxies, that extra magnification brings out details that have never been seen before. One elongated galaxy surrounded by yellowish blobs got the attention of astronomer Lamiya Mowla and her colleagues.

“When we first saw it, we noticed all those little dots around it that we called ‘the sparkles,’” says Mowla, of the University of Toronto. The team wondered if the sparkles could be globular clusters, close-knit families of stars that are thought to have been born together and stay close to each other throughout their lives (SN: 10/15/20).

“The outstanding question that there still is, is how were the globular clusters themselves born?” Mowla says. Were they born at “cosmic noon,” 10 billion years ago, when star formation throughout the universe peaked? Or did they form 13 billion years ago at “cosmic dawn,” when stars were first able to form at all (SN: 3/4/22)?

Light from the Sparkler takes about 9 billion years to reach Earth, so if the sparkles are globular clusters that shone that long ago, they might help astronomers answer that question.
Mowla and her colleagues used data from JWST to analyze the wavelengths of light coming from the sparkles. Some of them appear to be forming stars at the time when their light left the clusters. But some had formed all their stars long before.

“When we see them, the stars are already about 4 billion years old,” says astrophysicist Kartheik Iyer, also of the University of Toronto.

That means the oldest stars in the sparkles could have formed roughly 13 billion years ago. Since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, “there’s only a short amount of time after the Big Bang when these could have formed,” he says.

In other words, these clusters were born at dawn, not at noon.

Studying more globular clusters around ancient galaxies could help determine if such clusters are common or rare early on in the universe’s history. They could also help unravel galaxies’ formation histories, say Mowla and Iyer. Their team has proposed observations to be made in JWST’s first year that could do just that.

Being able to pick out tiny structures like globular clusters from so far away was almost impossible before JWST, says astronomer Adélaïde Claeyssens of Stockholm University. She was not involved in the new work but led a similar study earlier this year of multiple galaxies magnified by the SMACS 0723 cluster.

“It’s the first time we showed that, with James Webb, we will observe a lot of these type of galaxies with really tiny structures,” Claeyssens says. “James Webb will be a game changer for this field.”

It worked! Humanity has, for the first time, purposely moved a celestial object.

As a test of a potential asteroid-deflection scheme, NASA’s DART spacecraft shortened the orbit of asteroid Dimorphos by 32 minutes — a far greater change than astronomers expected.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, rammed into the tiny asteroid at about 22,500 kilometers per hour on September 26 (SN: 9/26/22). The goal was to move Dimorphos slightly closer to the larger asteroid it orbits, Didymos.

Neither Dimorphos nor Didymos pose any threat to Earth. DART’s mission was to help scientists figure out if a similar impact could nudge a potentially hazardous asteroid out of harm’s way before it hits our planet.

The experiment was a smashing success. Before the impact, Dimorphos orbited Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. After, the orbit was 11 hours and 23 minutes, NASA announced October 11 in a news briefing.
“For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body,” said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze.

Four telescopes in Chile and South Africa observed the asteroids every night after the impact. The telescopes can’t see the asteroids separately, but they can detect periodic changes in brightness as the asteroids eclipse each other. All four telescopes saw eclipses consistent with an 11-hour, 23-minute orbit. The result was confirmed by two planetary radar facilities, which bounced radio waves off the asteroids to measure their orbits directly, said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

The minimum change for the DART team to declare success was 73 seconds — a hurdle the mission overshot by more than 30 minutes. The team thinks the spectacular plume of debris that the impactor kicked up gave the mission extra oomph. The impact itself gave some momentum to the asteroid, but the debris flying off in the other direction pushed it even more — like a temporary rocket engine.

“This is a very exciting and promising result for planetary defense,” Chabot said. But the change in orbital period was just 4 percent. “It just gave it a small nudge,” she said. So knowing an asteroid is coming is crucial to future success. For something similar to work on an asteroid headed for Earth, “you’d want to do it years in advance,” Chabot said. An upcoming space telescope called Near-Earth Object Surveyor is one of many projects intended to give that early warning.

A genetic variant that appears to have boosted medieval Europeans’ ability to survive the Black Death centuries ago may contribute — albeit in a small way — to an inflammatory disease afflicting people today.

Researchers used DNA collected from centuries-old remains to discern the fingerprints that bubonic plague during the Black Death left on Europeans’ immune systems. This devastating wave of disease tended to spare those who possessed a variant of a gene known as ERAP2, causing it to become more common, researchers report October 19 in Nature. That variant is already known to scientists for slightly increasing the odds of developing Crohn’s disease, in which errant inflammation harms the digestive system.

The results show “how these studies on ancient DNA can help actually understand diseases even now,” says Mihai Netea, an infectious diseases specialist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, who was not involved with the study. “And the trade-off is also very clear.”

Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, bubonic plague once killed 60 percent of those infected (SN: 6/15/22). In the ancient world, it caused successive waves of misery, the most devastating of which was the Black Death, often dated from 1346 to 1350, an episode thought to have wiped out at least 25 million people — about a third or more of the European population.

By sparing individuals whose immune systems bear certain traits, pathogens such as Y. pestis have shaped the evolution of the human immune system. Studies are teasing out the ways the massive winnowing of the plague altered Europeans’ immune-related genetics.

In this most recent study, population geneticist Luis Barreiro of the University of Chicago and colleagues collected samples containing DNA from the remains of 516 people in London and Denmark who died between 1000 and 1800, including those buried during the Black Death. The researchers examined stretches of DNA for immune-related genes and areas associated with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
Within those regions, the researchers identified four locations on chromosomes where they saw strong evidence of genetic changes that appeared to have been driven by the Black Death. In follow-up work, one change stood out: an increase in the frequency of a variant of ERAP2. When infected with Y. pestis, immune cells from people with this version of ERAP2 more effectively killed the bacteria than cells lacking the variant. Studies of modern populations have linked that same variant to Crohn’s disease.

While the researchers calculate that the ERAP2 variant improved the odds of surviving the Black Death by as much as 40 percent, it only slightly increases the risk for Crohn’s disease. For complex disorders like Crohn’s, “you require probably hundreds, sometimes thousands of genetic variants to actually increase your risk in a significant manner,” Barreiro says.

For some time now, researchers in the field have theorized that adaptations that helped our ancestors fortify their immune systems against infectious diseases can contribute to excessive, damaging immune activity. Earlier studies of plague offer support for this idea. A genetic analysis seeking traces of historical disease in modern Europeans and a study of DNA from the remains of 16th century German plague victims both turned up what appear to be protective changes against the plague that, like the ERAP2 variant, are linked with inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.

Likewise, this latest discovery suggests that genetic changes that have amped up the human immune response in the past, empowering it to better fight off ancient infections, can come at a cost. “If you turn the heat too much, that leads to disease,” Barreiro says.

U.S. rivers are getting into hot water. The frequency of river and stream heat waves is on the rise, a new analysis shows.

Like marine heat waves, riverine heat waves occur when water temperatures creep above their typical range for five or more days (SN: 2/1/22). Using 26 years of United States Geological Survey data, researchers compiled daily temperatures for 70 sites in rivers and streams across the United States, and then calculated how many days each site experienced a heat wave per year. From 1996 to 2021, the annual average number of heat wave days per river climbed from 11 to 25, the team reports October 3 in Limnology and Oceanography Letters.

The study is the first assessment of heat waves in rivers across the country, says Spencer Tassone, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He and his colleagues tallied nearly 4,000 heat wave events — jumping from 82 in 1996 to 198 in 2021 — and amounting to over 35,000 heat wave days. The researchers found that the frequency of extreme heat increased at sites above reservoirs and in free-flowing conditions but not below reservoirs — possibly because dams release cooler water downstream.

Most heat waves with temperatures the highest above typical ranges occurred outside of summer months between December and April, pointing to warmer wintertime conditions, Tassone says.

Human-caused global warming plays a role in riverine heat waves, with heat waves partially tracking air temperatures — but other factors are probably also driving the trend. For example, less precipitation and lower water volume in rivers mean waterways warm up easier, the study says.

“These very short, extreme changes in water temperature can quickly push organisms past their thermal tolerance,” Tassone says. Compared with a gradual increase in temperature, sudden heat waves can have a greater impact on river-dwelling plants and animals, he says. Fish like salmon and trout are particularly sensitive to heat waves because the animals rely on cold water to get enough oxygen, regulate their body temperature and spawn correctly.

There are chemical consequences to the heat as well, says hydrologist Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved with the study. Higher temperatures can speed up chemical reactions that contaminate water, in some cases contributing to toxic algal blooms (SN: 2/7/18).

The research can be used as a springboard to help mitigate heat waves in the future, Kaushal says, such as by increasing shade cover from trees or managing stormwater. In some rivers, beaver dams show promise for reducing water temperatures (SN: 8/9/22). “You can actually do something about this.”

Protons might be stretchier than they should be.

The subatomic particles are built of smaller particles called quarks, which are bound together by a powerful interaction known as the strong force. New experiments seem to show that the quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them, physicist Nikolaos Sparveris and colleagues report October 19 in Nature. The result suggests that the strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts.

It’s a finding at odds with the standard model of particle physics, which describes the particles and forces that combine to make up us and everything around us. The result has some physicists stumped about how to explain it — or whether to even try.
“It is certainly puzzling for the physics of the strong interaction, if this thing persists,” says Sparveris, of Temple University in Philadelphia.

Such stretchiness has turned up in other labs’ experiments, but wasn’t as convincing, Sparveris says. The stretchiness that he and his colleagues measured was less extreme than in previous experiments, but also came with less experimental uncertainty. That increases the researchers’ confidence that protons are indeed stretchier than theory says they should be.

At the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va., the team probed protons by firing electrons at a target of ultracold liquid hydrogen. Electrons scattering off protons in the hydrogen revealed how the protons’ quarks respond to electric fields (SN: 9/13/22). The higher the electron energy, the deeper the researchers could see into the protons, and the more the electrons revealed about how the strong force works inside protons.

For the most part, the quarks moved as expected when electric interactions pulled the particles in opposite directions. But at one point, as the electron energy was ramped up, the quarks appeared to respond more strongly to an electric field than theory predicted they would.

But it only happened for a small range of electron energies, leading to a bump in a plot of the proton’s stretch.

“Usually, behaviors of these things are quite, let’s say, smooth and there are no bumps,” says physicist Vladimir Pascalutsa of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany.

Pascalutsa says he’s often eager to dive into puzzling problems, but the odd stretchiness of protons is too sketchy for him to put pencil to paper at this time. “You need to be very, very inventive to come up with a whole framework which somehow finds you a new effect” to explain the bump, he says. “I don’t want to kill the buzz, but yeah, I’m quite skeptical as a theorist that this thing is going to stay.”

It will take more experiments to get theorists like him excited about unusually stretchy protons, Pascalutsa says. He could get his wish if Sparveris’ hopes are fulfilled to try the experiment again with positrons, the antimatter version of electrons, scattered from protons instead.

A different type of experiment altogether might make stretchy protons more compelling, Pascalutsa says. A forthcoming study from the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, could do the trick. It will use hydrogen atoms that have muons in place of the electrons that usually orbit atoms’ nuclei. Muons are about 200 times as heavy as electrons, and orbit much closer to the nucleus of an atom than do electrons — offering a closer look at the proton inside (SN: 10/5/17). The experiment would involve stimulating the “muonic hydrogen” with lasers rather than scattering other electrons or positrons from them.

“The precision in the muonic hydrogen experiments will be much higher than whatever can be achieved in scattering experiments,” Pascalutsa says. If the stretchiness turns up there as well, “then I would start to look at this right away.”

You may have heard the big long COVID news that came out recently: A Scottish study reported that about half of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have not fully recovered six to 18 months after infection. That result echoes what many doctors and patients have been saying for months. Long COVID is a serious problem and a huge number of people are dealing with it.

But it’s tough to find treatments for a disease that is still so ill-defined (SN: 7/29/22). One major research effort in the United States hopes to change that. And one of my colleagues, Science News’ News Director Macon Morehouse, got a peek into the process.
In the last two months, Morehouse has donated 15 vials of blood, two urine specimens and a sample of saliva. Technicians have measured her blood pressure, oxygen level, height, weight and waist circumference and counted how many times she could rise from sitting to standing in 30 seconds. Morehouse is not sick, nor is she collecting data for her health. She’s doing it for science.

Morehouse is participating in a long COVID study at Howard University in Washington D.C. It’s part of a many-armed giant of a project with an eye on one thing: the long-term health effects of COVID-19. Launched last year by the National Institutes of Health, the RECOVER Initiative aims to enroll roughly 60,000 adults and children. At the Howard site, Morehouse is volunteer No. 182.

She’s somewhat of a unicorn among study participants: As far as she knows, Morehouse has never had COVID-19. Ultimately, some 10 percent of participants will include people who have avoided the virus, says Stuart Katz, a cardiologist and a RECOVER study leader at NYU Langone Health in New York City. Scientists continue to sign up volunteers, but “omicron made it harder to find uninfected people,” he says.

RECOVER scientists need participants like Morehouse so the researchers can compare them with people who developed long COVID. That might reveal what the disease is — and who it tends to strike. “Our goals are to define long COVID and to understand what’s your risk of getting [it] after COVID infection,” Katz says. Their results could be a first step toward developing treatments.

Tight timeline
Within the pandemic’s first year, doctors noticed that some COVID-19 patients developed long-term symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue and chronic cough. In December 2020, Katz and other physicians and scientists convened to discuss what was known. The answer, it turned out, was not much. “This is a novel virus,” he says. “Nobody knew what it could do.” Around the same time, Congress OK’d $1.15 billion for the NIH to study COVID-19’s long-term health consequences.

Fast forward five months, and the agency had awarded nearly $470 million to NYU Langone Health to serve as the hub for its long COVID studies. “The whole thing was on a very, very compressed timeline,” Katz says. NYU then hustled to come up with a study plan focused on three main groups: adults, children/families and finally, tissue samples from people who died after having COVID-19. It wasn’t your typical research project, Katz says. “We were charged with studying a disease that didn’t have a definition.”

Today, RECOVER has enrolled just over half of a target 17,680 adults. Katz hopes to cross this finish line by spring 2023. The child-focused part of the project has further to go. The goal is to enroll nearly 20,000 children; so far, they’ve got around 1,200, says Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and a member of RECOVER’s executive committee.
Some scientists and patients have criticized RECOVER for moving too slowly. As someone who has recovered from long COVID himself, Katz says he gets it. “We started a year and a half ago, and we don’t yet have definitive answers,” he says. “For people that have been suffering, I can understand how it’s disappointing.”

But for RECOVER — with more than 400 doctors, scientists and other experts involved, roughly 180 sites across the country enrolling participants and a grant timeline that scuttled the usual order of events — the old saying about building the plane while flying it fits, Katz says. “We are working very, very hard to move as quickly as we can.”

Looking for answers
Recently, other facets of the initiative have started to shine. An analysis of electronic health records found that among people under 21, kids younger than 5, kids with certain medical conditions and those who had had severe COVID-19 infections may be most at risk for long COVID, scientists reported in JAMA Pediatrics in August. And a different health records study suggests that vaccinated adults have some protection against long COVID, even if they had a breakthrough infection. Scientists posted that finding this month at medRxiv.org in a study that has yet to be peer-reviewed.

These studies tap data that have already been collected. The bulk of the RECOVER studies will take longer, because scientists will follow patients for years, analyzing data along the way. “These are observational, longitudinal studies,” Katz says. “There’s no intervention; we’re basically just trying to understand what long COVID is.”

Still, Katz expects to see early results later this fall. By then, scientists should have an official, if rough, definition of long COVID, which could help doctors struggling to diagnose the disease. By the end of the year, Katz says RECOVER might also have answers about viral persistence — whether coronavirus relics left behind in the body somehow reboot symptoms.

The project has also recently sprouted a clinical trials arm, which may launch this winter, says Kanecia Zimmerman, a pediatric critical care specialist who is leading this effort at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in North Carolina. One of the first trials planned will test whether an antiviral therapy that clears SARS-CoV-2 from the body helps patients with persistent symptoms.

Though RECOVER is a major effort to understand long COVID, progress will require research — and ideas — from a broad group of scientists, says Diane Griffin, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and member of the Long COVID Research Initiative, who is not involved in the project. “Just because we’ve invested in this one big study, that’s not going to give us all the answers,” she says.

But information from study participants like Morehouse and the nearly 10,000 other adults who’ve already enrolled in RECOVER will help. In the meantime, continued support for long COVID research is crucial, Griffin says. “That’s the only way we’re going to eventually figure this out.”

In the summer of 1960, doctors extracted “crimson sludge” from 6-year-old Barbara Lowry’s bones and gave it to her twin.

That surgery, one of the first successful bone marrow transplants, belied the difficulty of the procedure. In the early years of transplantation, scores of patients died as doctors struggled to figure out how to use one person’s cells to treat another. “Cell therapy for blood diseases had a terrifying birth,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in his new book, The Song of the Cell.

The transplant story is one of many Mukherjee uses to put human faces and experiences at the heart of medical progress. But what radiates off the pages is the author himself. An oncologist, researcher and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Mukherjee’s curiosity and wisdom add pep to what, in less dexterous hands, might be dry material. He finds wonder in every facet of cell biology, inspiration in the people working in this field and “spine-tingling awe” in their discoveries.
It’s no surprise that Mukherjee is so seduced by science. This is a man who built a microscope from scratch during the pandemic and has spent years probing biology and its history with luminaries in the field. The Song of the Cell lets readers eavesdrop on these conversations, which can be intimate and enlightening.

On a car ride across the Netherlands, Mukherjee chats with geneticist Paul Nurse, who tells him about the cell division work that ultimately netted Nurse a Nobel Prize (SN: 3/27/21, p. 28). On a walk at Rockefeller University in New York

City, Mukherjee discusses his depression with another Nobel Prize–winning researcher, neuroscientist Paul Greengard. Mukherjee’s vivid imagery lends heft to his feelings. He tells Greengard about experiencing a “soupy fog of grief” after his father’s death and describes “drowning in a tide of sadness.”

In these memories, which Mukherjee uses to segue into the science of depression, and elsewhere in the book, hints of poetry shimmer among the prose. A cell observed under a microscope is “refulgent, glimmering, alive.” A white blood cell’s slow creep is like the “ectoplasmic movement of an alien.” Mukherjee weaves his experiences into the story of cell biology, guiding readers through the lives and discoveries of key figures in the field. We meet the “father of microbiology,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a 17th century cloth merchant who ground globules of Venetian glass into microscope lenses and spied a “marvelous cosmos of a living world” within a raindrop. Mukherjee also teleports us to the present to introduce He Jiankui, the disgraced biophysicist behind the world’s first gene-edited babies (SN: 12/22/18 & 1/5/19, p. 20). Along the way, we also meet Frances Kelsey, the Food and Drug Administration medical officer who refused to approve thalidomide, a drug now known to cause birth defects, for use in the United States, and Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who argued that mitochondria and other organelles were once free-living bacteria (SN: 8/8/15, p. 22).

Mukherjee traverses a vast landscape of cell biology, and he’s not afraid to pull over and go exploring in the weeds. He describes in detail the flux of ions in nerve cells and introduces a considerable cast of immune system characters. For an even deeper dive, readers can check the footnotes; they are abundant.

What stands out most, though, are Mukherjee’s stories about people: scientists, doctors, patients and himself. As a researcher and a physician, he steps deftly between the scientific and clinical worlds, and, like the microscope he assembled, offers a glimpse into a universe we might not otherwise see.

Mountain lions have no interest in people, or the built-up areas we enjoy. But after a 2018 wildfire in California, local lions took more risks, crossing roads more often and moving around more in the daytime, scientists report October 20 in Current Biology. It’s another way the effects of human development could be putting pressure on vulnerable wildlife — in this case, potentially pushing them toward our bumpers.

The Woolsey Fire began near Los Angeles on November 8, 2018, and burned more than 36,000 hectares in the Santa Monica Mountains. Nearly 300,000 people evacuated, and three people died. Animals fled the fire too, including the local mountain lions (Puma concolor). The fire was a tragedy, but also a scientific opportunity, says Rachel Blakey, a global change biologist at UCLA. Many of the lions wore tracking collars, allowing scientists to study how the fire changed their behavior.
Of the 11 collared cougars in the area at the time, nine made it to safety during the fire itself. “They have really large home ranges, so it’s nothing to them to be able to cover many kilometers in a day,” Blakey says.

No matter how much they moved, the mountain lions avoided people. One collared cat, P-64, initially fled the fire — until he got close to a developed area. Given the choice between fire and people, the lion retreated back into the burning area. “That’s where his movements stopped,” Blakey says. The park service later found P-64’s remains. He’d burned his paws, and it’s possible that he was unable to hunt and starved to death.

Using data from the nine lions that survived the fire and others collared after, the scientists showed that the cats generally avoided the severely burned areas of their territories. With vegetation gone, the cats had little cover for stalking and ambushing prey.

Instead, the cougars stuck to unburned areas, and continued to avoid people. But they took more risks around human infrastructure, increasing their road crossings from an average of about three times per month to five.
These weren’t all two-lane country highways. The first collared lion to successfully cross Interstate 405, which has 10 lanes in places, did it after the Woolsey Fire. And the big cats crossed U.S. Route 101 once every four months, whereas before the fire, they’d crossed only once every two years. Their territories also overlapped more often, increasing the potential for deadly encounters between the solitary cats. And the generally nocturnal animals increased activity during daytime hours from 10 percent to 16 percent of their active time — boosting a lion’s chances of potentially bump into a human.

Road crossing is what Blakey calls a “risk mismatch.” Lions in areas with lots of people appear to weigh the risk of encountering humans as more dangerous. But “running across a freeway is a lot more likely to be fatal,” she says. That risk, combined with the risk of running into other cats, can be deadly. One young, collared male ended up dead on a freeway in the months after the fire. He was fleeing a fight with an older, uncollared male.

Intense burns like the Woolsey Fire highlight the resilience of mountain lions, says Winston Vickers, a wildlife research veterinarian at the University of California, Davis who was not involved in the study. “They have amazing mobility, they mostly can get away from the immediate fire, they mostly survive,” he notes. The changes in risk-taking, he says, could reflect how confined the population is, hemmed into the mountains by human development.

Wildlife crossings, such as the new Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101, will hopefully give the mountain lions a safer option for roaming, though the main goal is to promote gene flow between lion populations, Blakey says (SN: 5/31/16). In a landscape where fire, humans and highways combine, it’s good to have somewhere to run.