In a golden chunk of 99-million-year-old amber, paleontologists have spotted something extraordinary: a tiny dinosaur tail with pristinely preserved feathers.

At a shade under 37 millimeters, about the length of a matchstick, the tail curves through the amber, eight full sections of vertebrae with mummified skin shrink-wrapped to bone. A full-bodied bush of long filaments sprouts along the tail’s length, researchers report December 8 in Current Biology.

It’s “an astonishing fossil,” writes study coauthor Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences in Beijing and colleagues. Researchers have found Cretaceous feathers trapped in amber before, but the new find is the first with clearly identifiable bits of dinosaur included. The tail bones of the new fossil gave Xing’s team a clue to the dinosaur’s identity. It may have been a young coelurosaur that looked something like a miniature Tyrannosaurus rex.
Unlike dinosaur feathers pressed flat into rock, feathers in amber can offer more information about structure, the authors suggest. In amber, “the finest details of feathers are visible in three dimensions,” Xing and colleagues write.

The little dinosaur’s feathers lack a well-developed rachis, the narrow shaft that runs down the middle of some feathers, including those used by modern birds for flight. Instead, the dino’s feathers may have been ornamental, the authors say. Microscopy images suggest that the feathers were chestnut brown on top, and nearly white underneath.

Six hours before I gave birth to my son, our labor and delivery nurse started choking.

The cause, we later discovered, was a jar of peanuts that my unsuspecting husband had cracked open for a snack. Our fast-acting (and highly allergic) nurse rushed out of the room and made it to her EpiPen in time. She was OK, to our immense relief, and we managed to not endanger anyone else’s life that night.

But, the scary incident made me want to keep my baby away from peanuts forever.

Don’t do that.

Instead, parents should feed (most) babies peanut-containing foods early and often, new guidelines from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recommend.

“We’re saying that if you introduce peanuts early, you’re going to have a very good chance of preventing peanut allergy,” says Alkis Togias, an allergist at NIAID in Bethesda, Md.

The guidelines, published January 5 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and five other journals, include pages of detailed advice and group kids by different risk factors.

All in all, it’s a lot to process. But in the history of official advice on how to feed your kids, peanuts have always been confusing. Two weeks ago, parents Googling “peanut allergies” might have found guidelines from 2010, which basically said there’s no good reason to avoid peanuts in the first year of life. Or a 2008 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which didn’t give a strong statement either way. Or the AAP’s 2000 recommendations, which had some kids avoiding peanuts until age 3.
Last week’s headlines hit upon the apparent contradictions, but the science has actually been steadily marching in one direction — towards peanuts — for years, Togias says.

In 2008, researchers noticed that Jewish kids from the United Kingdom were much more likely to have peanut allergies than Jewish kids from Israel. The reason seemed to be diet-based. Israeli babies usually begin eating peanut-containing foods around 7 months of age. U.K. babies typically wait until after their first birthday.

The results bucked conventional wisdom to delay feeding kids peanuts, and inspired a 2015 trial known as LEAP, for Learning Early about Peanut Allergy. In the trial, 640 babies between 4 and 11 months old with severe eczema and/or egg allergy were divvied up into two groups. One group ate peanut-containing foods. The other avoided them.

It was the first randomized, controlled trial to address the should-I-feed-my-baby-peanuts question. What researchers saw was remarkable: In peanut-fed kids, the incidence of peanut allergy dropped by roughly 70 to 80 percent.

“The results were so impressive that we felt it would be unethical to not come out with these guidelines,” Togias says.

The new guidelines offer different advice depending on certain conditions. For babies without eczema or egg allergies, the guidelines suggest that parents introduce peanut-containing foods around the same time as other solid foods. “There’s really no restriction,” Togias says.
The advice gets tricky for kids with eczema, a skin rash that’s been linked to allergies.

Parents of babies with mild to moderate eczema can stick to the above plan, but peanut-containing foods should be introduced after other solid foods, around 6 months of age. (The allergists I talked to stress that babies should never eat whole peanuts, or even globs of peanut butter — both are major choking hazards.)

Babies with severe eczema and/or an egg allergy should be tested to rule out peanut allergy. If the test is negative, peanut-containing foods get a tentative green light. A doctor can help parents decide if the baby should be fed in the office, or at home with some instructions.

Repeat peanut-feedings is key, says pediatric allergist J. Andrew Bird of UT Southwestern and Children’s Health in Dallas. “Once peanuts are in the diet, they need to stay in the diet,” he says.

It’s unlikely that the United States will see the same drop in peanut allergy reported in the LEAP trial. But even a 50 percent reduction would be huge, Togias says. By his back-of-the-envelope calculation, the U.S. sees roughly 80,000 new cases of peanut allergy every year. “If we cut that in half, we’re saving 40,000 kids right away,” he says.

Still, allergist Katie Allen says the guidelines’ nuanced instructions risk complicating the message that peanuts are OK.

“There’s a lot of merit to these guidelines, but I’m a little worried that the general population will read this and say ‘I’m scared my child has a peanut allergy so I’m going to get him tested,’” says Allen, of Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Victoria, Australia.

The skin prick test used for screening is not that reliable, she says. And a false-positive result could turn people away from peanuts unnecessarily.

Australia’s guidelines are more straightforward, Allen points out. They recommend that all infants be fed allergenic foods, including peanut butter, within the first year of life (around 6 months, but not before 4 months).

For me, that’s an easier message to digest. Already, Bird has picked up on confusion about the U.S. guidelines. “I saw a mom who said, ‘OK, now this is telling me that my peanut-allergic kid should be eating peanuts every day?’”

That answer to that is a big “no.” These guidelines aim to prevent peanut allergies, not treat them, Bird says.

If the core advice does get out there — to pediatricians, and allergists and parents — it may well keep (at least some) kids from having to grab an EpiPen after getting a whiff of peanut. And that’s something any parent could get behind.

Chimps with little social status influence their comrades’ behavior to a surprising extent, a new study suggests.

In groups of captive chimps, a method for snagging food from a box spread among many individuals who saw a low-ranking female peer demonstrate the technique, say primatologist Stuart Watson of the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and colleagues. But in other groups where an alpha male introduced the same box-opening technique, relatively few chimps copied the behavior, the researchers report online February 7 in the American Journal of Primatology.
“I suspect that even wild chimpanzees are motivated to copy obviously rewarding behaviors of low-ranking individuals, but the limited spread of rewarding behaviors demonstrated by alpha males was quite surprising,” Watson says. Previous research has found that chimps in captivity more often copy rewarding behaviors of dominant versus lower-ranking group mates. The researchers don’t understand why in this case the high-ranking individuals weren’t copied as much.

The spread of new behaviors in groups of monkeys and apes depends on a variety of factors — including an innovator’s social status, age and sex — that can interact in unpredictable ways. “That’s why social learning in groups is so interesting to study,” says Elizabeth Lonsdorf, a primatologist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., who did not participate in the research.

In the new investigation, perhaps animals were monitoring potential threats from the alpha males more than their box-opening skills. “Alpha male chimps are large, powerful and prone to temper tantrums, so it makes sense to be vigilant for signs of what they’ll do next,” Watson says.

It’s also possible that lower-ranking chimps are sometimes unwilling to copy rewarding behaviors in the presence of a dominant chimp, suggests Lonsdorf. Researchers have reported this form of social deference in capuchin monkeys and rhesus macaques.

Watson’s team studied 38 chimps housed at a research facility in Texas. A low-ranking female from each of two groups and a dominant male from each of two other groups were trained to open a box and remove a piece of fruit. They then performed this feat in front of their home groups during two 20-minute sessions on consecutive days. Trained chimps moved a sliding door on the box up or down until it locked to reveal one of two chambers containing the food. Following each demonstration, group members had eight hours to manipulate the box however they liked.
Individuals who watched low-ranking chimps open the box, but not those who observed dominant chimps do the same, used the demonstrated technique as their first choice more often than expected by chance.

Some, but not all, chimps could have figured out how to open the box on their own, Watson suspects. Of 15 chimps from nonexperimental groups — each given 20 minutes to manipulate the fruit box — five failed to open it.

Unexpectedly, two low-ranking female chimps from different groups discovered a way to game the experimental box after watching dominant males open it. These animals realized that the contraption held two pieces of fruit, one in an upper chamber exposed by sliding the door down until it locked and another in a lower chamber revealed by sliding the door up to lock. Each chimp managed to slide the door up and down just enough, without locking it, to snatch both snacks.

In one group, the alpha male, who had originally demonstrated the locking technique to his group, started copying the low-ranking female’s superior approach. In the other group, two high-ranking females adopted the innovative box-opening method after seeing it performed by their social inferior.

Watson doesn’t know if low-ranking chimps are particularly apt to devise clever behaviors that others copy. It wouldn’t be surprising, he says, since chimps low on the social totem pole typically get less food than others and need to supplement their diets in creative ways.

In wild chimp communities, it’s unclear why certain novel behaviors catch on, Lonsdorf says. For example, young females move to new groups at sexual maturity, so they may bring useful knowledge from one community to another. In one reported case, chimps apparently learned how to use branches and other probes to collect and eat ants after observing the behavior in a recently arrived young female (SN: 2/9/13, p. 20).

A vaccine against meningitis has an unexpected side effect: It appears to target gonorrhea, too. If confirmed, the results represent the first instance of a vaccine reducing gonorrhea infections.

After receiving a vaccine aimed at a type of meningitis, people were less likely to contract gonorrhea, scientists report online June 10 in the Lancet. That’s a big deal because worldwide each year, an estimated 78 million people contract gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease that can cause pelvic inflammation, infertility and throat infections. Gonorrhea’s bacterial culprit, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, has developed resistance to many antibiotics, making treatment much more difficult. Some strains of gonorrhea can now resist all known antibiotics, the Word Health Organization announced July 7.
“We are in desperate need for new therapies,” says Christine Johnston, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Attempts to make a gonorrhea vaccine have failed so far. The new results are “the first to show that vaccination against gonorrhea could be possible,” Johnston says.

Finding the link between the two diseases was partly “a story of serendipity,” says study coauthor Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She and others had noted curious declines in gonorrhea cases in New Zealand, Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Norway after people had been vaccinated against a group B meningococcal bacterium, a pathogen that can cause meningitis and blood infections.

Bacteria that cause meningitis and gonorrhea are actually close kin, sharing 80 to 90 percent of their DNA. “There was certainly biological plausibility, but we needed some proof” that the vaccine really did curb gonorrhea, Petousis-Harris says.

She and colleagues looked at data from the New Zealand national vaccine registry to see who received a meningococcal vaccine that was available from 2004 to 2008, called MeNZB. That vaccination information was combined with data on over 14,000 15- to 30-year-olds who had either gonorrhea, chlamydia or both in New Zealand between 2004 and 2016.

Compared with unvaccinated people, those who had received the vaccine were about a third less likely to contract gonorrhea, the researchers found. The researchers had no information about people’s exposure to gonorrhea, only whether people were treated for the infection at a clinic. No such link was found between the vaccine and chlamydia.
MeNZB is a type of vaccine called an outer membrane vesicle vaccine. By mimicking bacterial bits released as the bugs proliferate, the vaccine trains the immune system to recognize and attack the bacteria. That exact vaccine is no longer in use, but similar vaccines exist, including Bexsero, which was used to treat a meningitis B outbreak at Princeton University in 2013.

The researchers don’t yet know what part of the MeNZB vaccine may be protective against gonorrhea. “We need to understand what was magical about this vaccine,” Petousis-Harris says. That knowledge could help researchers design a more targeted gonorrhea vaccine. Other meningitis vaccines ought to be scrutinized, too, Petousis-Harris says. “It might be that we’ve got a vaccine out there that could make a significant difference.”

Novartis, the health care company that developed Bexsero, provided funds for the study, but had no input on the design or results, Petousis-Harris says. A different company, GlaxoSmithKline, has since bought Novartis’ vaccine division.

Any new treatment for gonorrhea will eventually spur the bacteria to develop resistance, says Teodora Wi, a medical officer at WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research in Geneva. But a vaccine couldn’t be evaded so easily. The current result “provides a very important breakthrough in the development of gonorrhea vaccines,” she says.

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.”

SEATTLE — Earth weakened by previous landslides and soils behaving like water were responsible for the unusual size of a deadly 2014 landslide, two scientists reported October 24 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. Understanding why this landslide was so mobile could help geologists better map the hazards that could lead to others like it and prevent future loss of life.

In March 2014, following more than a month of heavy rainfall, a wall of mud suddenly rushed down a hillside near Oso, Wash., engulfing houses and trees before spilling into the Stillaguamish River valley (SN: 4/19/14, p. 32). The debris flow killed 43 people and destroyed dozens of homes. The valley had seen landslides before, most recently in 2006. But the “run-out” — the size of the debris flow — of the Oso landslide was uncommonly large, spreading a fan of mud and debris across 1.4 kilometers.

To unravel the sequence of events leading to the landslide, Brian Collins and Mark Reid, both with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., first mapped the debris that made up the landslide, including large still-intact blocks of hillside called hummocks, glacial sediments and fallen trees. The researchers then used those maps to track where the different parts of the debris had originated and where they ended up. From that, the duo determined that sediments weakened and previously mobilized by the 2006 landslide failed first, followed by sediments that had failed in a prehistoric landslide and finally by intact sediments.

Once it began to flow, the landslide didn’t sweep smoothly down the hill, the researchers determined. Instead, segments collided into one another and then stretched apart — extending and contracting earthwormlike — as more and more of the slope fell and transferred its momentum to the landslide. The sudden piling-on of mass also caused the soils beneath the hummocks and larger debris to weaken and become “liquefied,” or behave like water. And those liquefied soils then helped raft the hummocks and trees much farther out into the valley.