Just a stab in the dark, but you’ve probably heard: There is a total solar eclipse today, August 21.

For the first time since 1979, the moon’s shadow will zip across the continental United States. The shadow will travel from Oregon to South Carolina in a swift 92 minutes. For those in the path of totality, total darkness will last only a couple of minutes. There and elsewhere in most of the United States, the moon will partially block the sun for around three hours.
If you don’t already have plans to travel to the 115-kilometer-or-so-wide path of totality, well, you’re probably too late. But here are some links to help you experience the eclipse, whether or not you’re able to see it in person.

The eclipse will be visible in all of North America — as well as in Central America and a small part of South America. Wondering what you’ll see where you live? Check out this interactive map from NASA or this cool tool from Vox.

Still need eclipse glasses? While many retailers have been sold out for days, some organizations are handing out free glasses at eclipse-watching events. Check your local TV/newspaper/radio stations’ newsfeeds for the latest. Make sure your glasses are safe.

No eclipse glasses? Never fear! You can still see the moon eclipsing the sun by making a pinhole projector or a box projector. Or just let sunlight shine through something that has holes, like a colander or Ritz Cracker (look at the ground to see the shape of the shadow the holes cast).

Watching with kids? Check out Growth Curve blogger Laura Sanders’ tips for protecting little ones’ eyes during the eclipse.
Which reminds me: Whatever you do, don’t look directly at the sun. Permanent damage to your eyes may result. If you’re in the path of totality, officials say it’s OK to look directly at the sun once the moon completely blocks it. But that’s very brief, so be prepared to quickly look away or shield your eyes once the moon slips out of total alignment.

Want to do more with your eclipse experience? It’s not too late to participate in a citizen science project.

Stuck indoors, or out of totality? Watch the livestream. NASA’s programming begins at noon Eastern on NASA TV, which you can watch at this link or right here:
Want some tunes to go along with it? The NASA interns made an eclipse playlist. There are also several Spotify playlists around, like this one from WXPN, this from the Washington Post and this one from the Boston Globe.

If all this excitement has you fancying a future in eclipse chasing, check out our interactive map of the next 15 total solar eclipses.

And let’s not forget that there will be a ton of science going on during the eclipse. Here are the big questions physicists and astronomers will seek to answer today.

Still want more? Follow us on Facebook and on Twitter for eclipse updates and RT’s of our correspondents in totality. Watch as the Science News team takes over the Society for Science & the Public’s Snapchat (Society4Science). And come back to Science News later today for a report from our astronomy writer, Lisa Grossman, who is spending the day in Casper, Wyo., with a research team that’s studying the sun’s wispy atmosphere, the corona.

Molecules are seriously chilling out. Scientists report the first cooling of molecules below a previously impassable milestone. The result, in which scientists cooled molecules down to tens of millionths of a degree, is a step toward reaching the ultracold temperatures already achievable with atoms, researchers report August 28 in Nature Physics.

Scientists regularly chill atoms to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero (‒273.15° Celsius), even reaching temperatures as low as 50 trillionths of a degree (SN: 5/16/15, p. 4). But molecules are more difficult to cool down, as they can spin and vibrate in a variety of ways, and that motion is a form of heat.
Previously, physicists have made ultracold molecules by convincing prechilled atoms to link up (SN: 12/20/08, p. 22), but the technique works for only a few kinds of molecules. Putting the freeze on already assembled molecules has allowed scientists to chill additional types but, until now, down to only a few hundreds of millionths of degrees.

Using lasers and magnetic fields, the scientists corralled and cooled molecules inside a device called a magneto-optical trap. In the trap, molecules of calcium monofluoride are slowed — and therefore cooled — when they absorb photons from a laser. But only so much cooling is possible with this method. To go beyond what’s called the Doppler limit, the researchers adapted a method used for cooling atoms, known as Sisyphus cooling. Two lasers pointed at one another create an electromagnetic field that acts like an endless hill the molecule must climb, thereby sapping its energy and heat. With these two techniques, the molecules reached a frigid 50 millionths of a degree above absolute zero.
As the art of laser cooling advanced in recent decades, ultracold atoms rapidly became a popular research topic. Now, predicts study coauthor Michael Tarbutt, a physicist at Imperial College London, cold molecule research is “going to explode in exactly the same way that it did for cold atoms.”
Cold molecules could be useful for a variety of scientific purposes: studying how chemical reactions occur, looking for hints of new fundamental particles or simulating complex quantum materials in which many particles interact at once.

“It’s a really exciting result,” says physicist David DeMille of Yale University, who was not involved with the research. “It turns out it’s harder in almost every way to apply laser cooling and trapping to molecules, but there are many, many motivations for doing that.”

Immune cells can turn certain invaders on themselves, forcing them to prematurely self-destruct, researchers have discovered.

In mice, when white blood cells in the lungs engulf spores of a common airborne fungus, these immune cells release an enzyme that sends the fungal cells into programmed cell death. That prevents the spores from setting up shop in the lungs and sparking a potentially deadly lung infection, the researchers report in the Sept. 8 Science.

Found naturally in soil and decaying organic matter, the fungus, Aspergillus fumigatus, releases airborne spores that are found in small doses in the air people breathe every day. The finding may help explain why most people can regularly inhale the spores and not get sick. In people with weakened immune systems, though, this natural defense system doesn’t work. This research could eventually lead to better treatments for these patients.
Programmed cell death is a natural part of a cell’s life cycle — a way for organisms to break down old cells and make way for new ones. “Research in the last couple of decades has shown that microbes can exploit [cell death] pathways to cause disease,” says study coauthor Tobias Hohl, an infectious disease researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. But this study shows that the tables can be turned. “Not only can microbes exploit this in hosts, but host cells can exploit these pathways to instruct certain microbes to kill themselves.”

“The idea that the host triggers the mechanism of [programmed cell death] as a way of defending against infection is very cool,” says Borna Mehrad, a pulmonologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville who wasn’t part of the study.

Hohl and colleagues identified a gene in A. fumigatus that puts the brakes on programmed cell death. The gene, AfBIR1, shares an ancestor with the human gene survivin, which also regulates cell death.

When the researchers amped up the activity of AfBIR1 in a strain of the fungus, half the mice infected with the spores died during the eight-day study period. (Mice infected with unmodified spores were fine.) Cues that would normally send fungal cells to their death didn’t register, so the fungus was able to grow in the mice’s lungs.

In another experiment, the scientists gave mice a drug called S12, which took away AfBIR1’s brake effect. As a result, the mice were able to fight off the infection. “Those two findings suggested to us that this fungal [cell death] pathway really is critical,” Hohl says.
Hohl did this research with a special variety of A. fumigatus that changes color when its suicide instructions kick in. That advance allowed the researchers to make observations that weren’t possible before, Mehrad says.

For instance, Hohl and his colleagues noticed that fungal cells being engulfed by neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, appeared to be undergoing programmed cell death. That suggested that neutrophil activity might set off fungal programmed cell death.

Neutrophils release an enzyme called NADPH oxidase, and mice deficient in the enzyme weren’t as good at fending off the fungus, Hohl found. That makes sense with clinical data in humans too. People with a genetic mutation that causes a deficiency in NADPH oxidase are particularly at risk for developing an Aspergillus infection, Hohl says. People who have fewer neutrophils, due to chemotherapy or HIV infection, for instance, also make less of the enzyme and are less able to resist a fungal infection.

Survival rates vary, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 41 percent of organ transplant recipients who contract aspergillosis die within a year. Seventy-five percent of stem cell transplant recipients with the infection die in that same time frame. Someday, a version of S12 that’s modified to work in humans might be able to boost these patients’ defenses against A. fumigatus infections, Hohl suggests.

In the future, he wants to see whether the same mechanisms extend to other fungal species too.

Subtle cosmic vibrations kicked up by swirling black holes have captured the public imagination — and the minds of the physics Nobel Prize committee members, too.

Three scientists who laid the groundwork for the first direct detection of gravitational waves have won the Nobel Prize in physics. Rainer Weiss of MIT, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of Caltech, will share the 9-million-Swedish-kronor (about $1.1 million) prize, with half going to Weiss and the remainder split between Thorne and Barish.
Though researchers often wait decades for Nobel recognition, the observation of gravitational waves was so monumental that the scientists were honored less than two years after the discovery’s announcement.

“These detections were so compelling and earth shattering…. Why wait?” says Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not directly involved with the discovery. “It’s fabulous. Absolutely fabulous.”

Weiss, Thorne and Barish are pioneers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO. On February 11, 2016, LIGO scientists announced they had spotted gravitational waves produced by a pair of merging black holes. This first-ever detection generated a frenzy of excitement among physicists and garnered front-page headlines around the world.

LIGO’s observation of gravitational waves directly confirmed a 100-year-old prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — that rapidly accelerating massive objects stretch and squeeze spacetime, producing ripples that travel outward from the source (SN: 3/5/16, p. 22).
“If Einstein was still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery. He would be very pleased, I’m sure of it,” Weiss said during a news conference at MIT a few hours after he got word of the win. “But then to tell him what the discovery was, that it was a black hole, he would have been absolutely flabbergasted because he didn’t believe in them.”

As enthusiastic team members clad in LIGO-themed T-shirts celebrated the discovery, Weiss stressed that the discovery was a group effort. “I’m a symbol of that. It’s not all on my shoulders, this thing,” he said, citing the large collaboration of scientists whose work led up to LIGO’s detection.

Physicists anticipate that LIGO will spark an entirely new field of astronomy, in which scientists survey the universe by feeling for its tremors. “It will allow us to see the parts of the universe that were not revealed to us before,” says LIGO team member Carlos Lousto of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.

LIGO’s first incarnation, which officially began collecting data in 2002 and ran intermittently until 2010, yielded no hints of gravitational waves. After years of upgrades, the souped-up detectors, known as Advanced LIGO, began searching for spacetime ripples in 2015. Almost as soon as the detectors were turned on — even before scientific data-taking had formally begun — scientists detected the minuscule undulations of their first black hole collision. Those ripples, spotted on September 14, 2015, journeyed to Earth from 1.3 billion light-years away, where they were produced by two colossal black holes that spiraled inward and merged into one (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6).

Quivers from those converging black holes, when converted into an audio signal, made a tell-tale sound called a “chirp,” reminiscent of a bird’s cry. The particulars of that signature reveal details of the collision. “The beauty of the symphony is in what you can extract from the tiny wiggles, or the wiggles on tops of wiggles, in that signal,” Thorne said at an Oct. 3 news conference at Caltech.
Since that first detection, scientists have observed three more black hole collisions. And additional gravitational ripples may already be in the bag: It’s rumored that LIGO scientists have also detected a smashup of neutron stars (SN Online: 8/25/17). In fact, Weiss teased an announcement to come on October 16.

An astounding feat of engineering, LIGO consists of two enormous L-shaped detectors that stretch across the wooded landscape of Livingston, La., and the desert of Hanford, Wash. Each detector boasts two 4-kilometer-long arms through which laser light bounces back and forth between mirrors.

Gravitational waves passing through a detector stretch one arm while shortening the other. LIGO compares the arms’ sizes using the laser light to measure length differences a tiny fraction of the size of a proton. Gravitational waves should produce signals in the two distant detectors nearly simultaneously, helping scientists to rule out spurious signals that can be caused by events as mundane as a truck bouncing along nearby.

“LIGO is probably one of the best and most amazing instruments ever built by mankind,” Barish said at the Caltech news conference. But building it was a risky endeavor: No one had previously attempted anything like it, and no one could say for sure whether the effort would succeed. “What’s fundamental is you have to be willing to take risks to do great things,” Barish said.

In August, LIGO’s two detectors teamed up with the similarly designed Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy (SN Online: 8/1/17). The latest gravitational wave sighting, made on August 14, showed up in all three detectors almost simultaneously, which allowed scientists to pinpoint the region of space in which the black holes resided more precisely than ever before (SN Online: 9/27/17).

Weiss spent decades on the project, beginning with nascent scribbles on scraps of paper and early prototypes. In the 1960s, Weiss came up with the idea for a laser gravitational wave detector while teaching a class on general relativity. (Other researchers had independently proposed the technique as well.) He refined that idea and built a small, prototype detector, establishing the basic blueprint that would eventually evolve into LIGO.
Inspired by a conversation with Weiss, Thorne, who had been studying theoretical aspects of gravitational waves, assembled a team to work on the technique at Caltech in the ’70s. (Thorne was a 1958 semifinalist in the Science Talent Search, a program of the Society for Science & the Public, which publishes Science News.)

Another LIGO founder, Ronald Drever, died in March. Drever, who had been working on gravitational wave detectors at the University of Glasgow, joined Thorne at Caltech in 1979. Weiss and Drever each worked individually on prototypes, before Weiss officially teamed up with Thorne and Drever in 1984 to create LIGO (SN: 3/5/16, p. 24). Drever did live to hear of the first detection, Will says, but “it’s sad that he didn’t live to see it all.”

Barish joined the project later, becoming director of LIGO in 1994. He stayed in that role for more than 10 years, elevating LIGO from scientists’ daydreams into reality. Barish oversaw construction and commissioning of the detectors, as well as initial gravitational wave searches. “He entered the experiment in a crucial moment, when it was necessary to bring the experiment to a different level, make it a big collaboration,” says Alessandra Buonanno of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany.

Speculation that LIGO would nab a Nobel began as soon as the discovery was announced. So the collaboration was not surprised by the honor. “We were certainly expecting this to happen,” says LIGO team member Manuela Campanelli of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Still, the lack of surprise didn’t dampen the mood of festivity. “I feel in a dream,” says Buonanno.

LIGO and Virgo are currently in a shutdown period while scientists tinker with the detectors to improve their sensitivity. The gravitational wave hunt will resume next year. Besides black hole mergers and neutron star smashups, in the future, scientists might also spot waves from an exploding star, known as a supernova. Upcoming detectors might sense trembles generated in the Big Bang, providing a glimpse of the universe’s beginnings.

And scientists may even find new phenomena that they haven’t predicted. “I await expectantly some huge surprises in the coming years,” Thorne said.

Some scientific anniversaries celebrate events so momentous that they capture the attention of many nonscientists as well — or even the entire world.

One such anniversary is upon us. December 2 marks the semisesquicentennial (75th anniversary) of the first controlled and sustained nuclear fission chain reaction. Only four years after German scientists discovered nuclear fission, scientists in America took the first step toward harnessing it. Many of those scientists were not Americans, though, but immigrants appalled by Hitler and horrified at the prospect that he might acquire a nuclear fission weapon.

Among the immigrants who initiated the American fission effort was Albert Einstein. His letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, composed at the request and with the aid of immigrant Leo Szilard from Hungary, warned of nuclear fission’s explosive potential. Presented with Einstein’s letter in October 1939, Roosevelt launched what soon became the Manhattan Project, which eventually produced the atomic bomb. It was another immigrant, Enrico Fermi from Italy, who led the initial efforts to show that building an atomic bomb was possible.

Fermi had arrived in the United States in January 1939, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on creating artificial elements heavier than uranium. Except that he hadn’t actually done so — his “new elements” were actually familiar elements produced by the splitting of the uranium nucleus. But nobody knew that fission was possible, so Fermi had misinterpreted his results. Chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, working in Germany, conducted experiments in 1938 that produced the element barium by bombarding uranium with neutrons. So Hahn and Strassmann got the credit for discovering fission, although they didn’t really know what they had done either. It was Lise Meitner, a former collaborator of Hahn’s who had recently left Germany to avoid Nazi anti-Semitism, who figured out that they had split the uranium nucleus.
Meitner’s nephew Otto Frisch revealed her insight to Niels Bohr, the world’s leading atomic physicist, just as he stepped aboard a ship for a visit to America. Upon arriving in the United States, Bohr informed Fermi and Princeton University physicist John Archibald Wheeler of Hahn’s experiment and Meitner’s explanation. Fermi immediately began further experimental work at Columbia University to investigate fission, as did Szilard, also at Columbia (and others in Europe); Bohr and Wheeler tackled the issue from the theoretical side.

Fermi and Szilard quickly succeeded in showing that a fission “chain reaction” was in principle possible: Neutrons emitted from fissioning uranium nuclei could induce more fission. By September, Bohr and Wheeler had produced a thorough theoretical analysis, explaining the physics underlying the fission process and identifying which isotope of uranium fissioned most readily. It was clear that the initial speculations about fission’s potential power had not been exaggerated.

“Almost immediately it occurred to many people around the world that this could be used to make power and that it could be used for nuclear explosives,” another immigrant who worked on the Manhattan Project, the German physicist Hans Bethe, told me during an interview in 1997. “Lots of people verified that indeed when uranium is bombarded by neutrons, slow neutrons in particular, a process occurs which releases tremendous amounts of energy.”
Bethe, working at Cornell University, did not immediately join the fission project — he thought building a bomb would take too long to matter for World War II. “I thought this had nothing to do with the war,” he said. “So I instead went into radar.”

Fermi, despite being an immigrant, was put in charge of constructing an “atomic pile” (nowadays nuclear reactor) to verify the chain reaction theory. He was, after all, widely acknowledged as the world’s leading nuclear experimentalist (and was no slouch as a theorist either); colleagues referred to him as “The Pope” because of his supposed infallibility. Construction of the pile began on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago’s football stadium. The goal was to demonstrate the ability to generate a chain reaction, in which any one fissioning nucleus would emit enough neutrons to trigger even more nuclei to fission.

“It became clear to Fermi almost immediately that in order to do this with natural uranium you had to slow down the neutrons,” Bethe said.

Fermi decided that the best material for slowing neutrons was graphite, the form of carbon commonly used as pencil lead. But in preliminary tests the graphite did not do the job as Fermi had anticipated. He reasoned that the graphite contained too many impurities to work effectively. So Szilard began searching for a company that could produce ultrapure graphite. He found one, Bethe recalled, that happily agreed to meet Fermi’s purity requirements — for double the usual graphite price.
Ultimately Fermi’s atomic pile succeeded, producing a sustained chain reaction on December 2, 1942. That success led to the establishment of the secret laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., where physicists built the bombs that brought World War II to an end in 1945.

By then, Bethe had been persuaded to join the project. He arrived at Los Alamos in April 1943 and witnessed the first nuclear explosion, at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945.

“I was among the people who looked at it from a 20-mile distance,” he said. “It was impressive.”

Historians frequently cite the report of J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos project, who said that the explosion reminded him of a line from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Bethe recalled a different response, from one of the military officials on the scene.

“One of the officers at the explosion said, ‘My god. Those longhairs have let it get away from them.’”

PHILADELPHIA — Protein-manufacturing factories within cells are picky about which widgets they construct, new research suggests. These ribosomes may not build all kinds of proteins, instead opting to craft only specialty products.

Some of that specialization may influence the course of embryo development, developmental biologist and geneticist Maria Barna of Stanford University School of Medicine and colleagues discovered. Barna reported the findings December 5 at the joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and European Molecular Biology Organization.
Ribosomes, which are themselves made up of many proteins and RNAs, read genetic instructions copied from DNA into messenger RNAs. The ribosomes then translate those instructions into other proteins that build cells and carry out cellular functions. A typical mammalian cell may carry 10 million ribosomes. “The textbook view of ribosomes is that they are all the same,” Barna said. Even many cell biologists have paid little attention to the structures, viewing them as “backstage players in controlling the genetic code.”

But that view may soon change. Ribosomes actually come in many varieties, incorporating different proteins, Barna and colleagues found. Each variety of ribosome may be responsible for reading a subset of messenger RNAs, recent studies suggest. For instance, ribosomes containing the ribosomal protein RPS25 build all of the proteins involved in processing vitamin B12, Barna and colleagues reported July 6 in Molecular Cell. Vitamin B12 helps red blood cells and nerves work properly, among other functions. Perhaps other biological processes are also controlled, in part, by having specific types of ribosomes build particular proteins, Barna said.

In unpublished work presented at the meeting, Barna and colleagues also found that certain ribosome varieties may be important at different stages of embryonic development. The researchers coaxed embryonic stem cells growing in lab dishes to develop into many types of cells. The team then examined the ribosomal proteins found in each type of cell. Of the 80 ribosomal proteins examined, 31 changed protein levels in at least one cell type, Barna said. The finding may indicate that specialized ribosomes help set a cell’s identity.

Although Barna’s idea of diverse ribosomes goes against the classical textbook view, “the concept is not heretical at all,” says Vassie Ware, a molecular cell biologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., not involved in the work.
These findings may help explain why some people with mutations in certain ribosomal protein genes develop conditions such as Diamond-Blackfan anemia — a blood disorder in which the bone marrow doesn’t make enough red blood cells — but don’t have problems in other body tissues, Ware says.

That disease is caused by mutations in the RPL5 and RPL11 genes, which encode ribosomal building blocks. If all ribosomes were alike, people with mutations in ribosomal components should have malfunctions all over their bodies, or might not ever be born. RPL5 and RPL11 proteins may be part of specialized ribosomes that are important in the bone marrow but not elsewhere in the body.

Despite their name, pelican spiders aren’t massive, fish-eating monstrosities. In fact, the shy spiders in the family Archaeidae are as long as a grain of rice and are a threat only to other spiders.

Discovering a new species of these tiny Madagascar spiders is tough, but Hannah Wood has done just that — 18 times over.

Wood, an arachnologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., analyzed the genes and anatomy of live and museum pelican spider specimens to find these new species. She describes them in a paper published online January 11 in ZooKeys.
Like other pelican spiders, the new species have an elongated “neck” and beaklike pincers, or chelicerae. The way they use those long chelicerae to strike from a distance, earned them another name: assassin spiders. Once impaled, the helpless prey dangles from these meat hooks until the venom does its work (SN: 3/22/14, p. 4).

Probing the spiders’ tiny anatomy under a microscope, Wood looked for hints to distinguish one species from another. Arachnologists often look to spiders’ genitals: Males and females from the same species typically evolved specially shaped organs to mate. If the “lock” doesn’t fit the “key,” the spiders are likely of a different species.

Thanks to Wood, 18 more species of pelican spiders — some of which were previously misclassified — now have names. Eriauchenius rafohy honors an ancient Madagascar queen, and E. wunderlichi, an eminent arachanologist. Wood, one of the foremost experts on pelican spiders, says she expects there are still more species to find. Perhaps an E. woodi?

A teenage girl climbed into an underground cave around 13,000 years ago. Edging through the ink-dark chamber, she accidentally plunged to her death at the bottom of a deep pit.

Rising seas eventually inundated the cave, located on Central America’s Yucatán Peninsula. But that didn’t stop scuba divers from finding and retrieving much of the girl’s skeleton in 2007.

“First Face of America,” a new NOVA documentary airing February 7 on PBS, provides a closeup look at two dangerous underwater expeditions that resulted in the discovery and salvaging of bones from one of the earliest known New World residents, dubbed Naia.
The program describes how studies of Naia’s bones (SN: 6/14/14, p. 6) and of genes from an 11,500-year-old infant recently excavated in Alaska have generated fresh insights into how people populated the Americas. Viewers watch anthropologist and forensic consultant James Chatters, who directed scientific studies of Naia’s remains, as he reconstructs the ancient teen’s face and charts the lower-body injuries that testify to what must have been a rough life.
In one suspenseful scene, cameras record Chatters talking with scuba divers shortly before the divers descend into the submerged cave to collect Naia’s bones. The scientist describes how thousands of years of soaking in seawater have rendered the precious remains fragile. He uses a plaster cast of a human jaw to demonstrate for scuba diver Susan Bird how to handle Naia’s skull so that it stays intact while being placed in a padded box. Bird’s worried expression speaks volumes.

“On the day of the dive, there was so much tension, so many people on the verge of freaking out,” Bird recalls in the show. When the divers return from their successful mission, collective joy breaks out.
The scene then shifts to a lab where Chatters painstakingly re-creates what Naia looked like. Asian-looking facial features raise questions about how the ancient youth ended up in Central America. That’s where University of Alaska Fairbanks anthropologist Ben Potter enters the story. In 2013, Potter and colleagues excavated the remains of two infant girls at an Alaskan site dating nearly to Naia’s time. Analysis of DNA recovered from one of the infants , described in the Jan. 11 Nature , supports a scenario in which a single founding Native American population reached a land bridge that connected northeast Asia to North America around 35,000 years ago. As early as 20,000 years ago, those people had moved into their new continent, North America. Naia’s face reflects her ancestors’ Asian roots.
In tracing back how people ended up in the Americas, NOVA presents an outdated model of ancient humans moving out of Africa along a single path through the Middle East around 80,000 years ago. Evidence increasingly indicates that people started leaving Africa 100,000 years ago or more via multiple paths (SN: 12/24/16, p. 25). That’s a topic for another show, though. In this one, Naia reveals secrets about the peopling of the Americas with a lot of help from intrepid scuba divers and state-of-the-art analyses. It’s fitting that a slight smile creases her reconstructed face.

Bedbugs leave a lasting legacy.

Their poop contains a chemical called histamine, part of the suite of pheromones that the insects excrete to attract others of their kind. Human exposure to histamine can trigger allergy symptoms like itchiness and asthma. (Our bodies also naturally release histamine when confronted with an allergen.) Histamine stays behind long after the bedbugs disappear, scientists report February 12 in PLOS ONE.

Researchers from North Carolina State University in Raleigh collected dust from apartments in a building with a chronic bedbug infestation. After a pest control company treated the apartments by raising the temperature to a toasty 50° Celsius, the researchers sampled the dust again. They compared those two sample groups with a third, from area homes that hadn’t had bedbugs for at least three years.

Dust from the infested apartments had levels of histamine chemical that were 22 times as much as the low amount found in bedbug-free houses, the researchers found. And while the heat treatment got rid of the tiny bloodsuckers, it didn’t lower the histamine levels.

Future pest control treatments might need to account for bedbugs’ long-term effects.

AUSTIN, Texas — An analysis of the metals in dozens of Picasso’s bronze sculptures has traced the birthplace of a handful of the works of art to the outskirts of German-occupied Paris during World War II.

This is the first time that the raw materials of Picasso’s sculptures have been scrutinized in detail, conservation scientist Francesca Casadio of the Art Institute of Chicago said February 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And the elemental “fingerprints” help solve a mystery surrounding the sculptures’ origins.
“In collaboration with curators, we can write a richer history of art that is enriched by scientific findings,” Casadio said.

Casadio and colleagues from the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., studied 39 bronzes in the collection of the Picasso Museum in Paris. The team used a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to record the amount of copper, tin, zinc and lead at several points on each sculpture.
Based on the percentage of tin versus zinc in the bronze, “we found that there are compositional groups that relate to a specific foundry,” Casadio said. Seventeen sculptures had a foundry mark on them, so the researchers could relate metal mixes to specific foundries.
But seven sculptures lack foundry marks. Based on their composition, researchers pegged five to a specific foundry — that of Émile Robecchi, a craftsman whose workshop sat in the southern outskirts of Paris. Original invoices from the foundry surfaced two years ago and revealed when some of the pieces were cast. For instance, the description, weight and size written on one invoice confirmed that the bronze of Tête de femme de profil (Marie­Thérèse) — a portrait of one of Picasso’s mistresses originally sculpted in plaster in 1931 — was cast at the foundry in February 1941.
At that time, the war had been under way for years and the Germans had just occupied Paris. Picasso worried that his fragile plaster sculptures could be easily destroyed and sought to have them cast in bronze.

The team’s analysis also found two distinct mixtures of bronze that came out of the Robbechi foundry. That difference makes sense in the context of 1940s occupied Paris, when the Germans instituted laws requiring that people turn in certain metals to go toward war efforts, Casadio said.

“A lot of [foundries’] archives are incomplete or nonexistent,” Casadio said. The new analysis “reinforces why it’s really important to collaborate and how science adds the missing piece of the puzzle.”