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.

What’s the matter?
The proposed Windchime experiment plans to use only gravity to detect some types of dark matter. Ultrasensitive sensors would be jostled by the gravitational forces of a dark matter “wind” passing by Earth, James R. Riordon reported in “Gravity could aid dark matter search” (SN: 9/10/22, p. 14).

Since dark matter is affected by gravity, reader David Goldberg asked if dark matter orbits the Milky Way’s center just like our solar system does. If the two move together, how would there be a dark matter wind to detect?

It’s possible that dark matter circles the Milky Way’s center at least a little, though it’s hard to say for sure because no one has been able to measure the elusive stuff yet, Riordon says. But to search for dark matter using the Windchime method, it doesn’t really matter whether the mysterious substance moves with the galaxy, he says. That’s because as the sun circles the Milky Way’s center, Earth is also orbiting the sun. Even if the sun happens to move with the same velocity as nearby dark matter, the direction of Earth’s velocity changes over the course of a year, Riordon says. So we should sense the pull of a dark matter wind that shifts with Earth’s seasons.

What’s more, as the planet spins on its axis, the direction of the surface’s movement relative to the galaxy changes throughout the day. “It’s a little like a fish swimming in the ocean,” Riordon says. “Even though the water in general moves with Earth, as a fish swims in various directions, the creature will experience a flow of water relative to its own motion.”

Reader Jack Ryan wondered why, despite its gravitational attraction, dark matter doesn’t form stars, planets and other celestial bodies.

“Because no one knows what dark matter is, we can’t say for certain that it can or cannot form globs or come in very massive particles,” Riordon says. “It’s something that researchers like those on the Windchime team are looking out for.”

For normal matter to create asteroids or planets, it must experience some force beyond gravity, Riordon says. For instance, if two rocks collide in space, electromagnetic forces would prevent them from simply passing through each other. This would then allow gravity to hold the two rocks together. And if the concentration of matter continues to build up, then an asteroid or a planet could eventually form.

Some physicists hope that dark matter experiences other forces, but gravity is currently the only one known to affect it. “If a dark matter particle that only experiences gravity approaches a rock, a planet or another dark matter particle, it would glide right through because there is no force that can stop it,” Riordon says. “Gravity can pull dark matter into a halo, but on its own, it probably can’t stick dark matter together.”
Correction
A line dropped from our feature “Island lessons” (SN: 9/24/22, p. 22). At the end of Page 26, the full sentence should have read: Saban native Dahlia Hassell-Knijff got a degree in biology in Mississippi, then returned to the island, where she oversees projects at the regional Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance.

In the fall of 2020, the world was staggering under the attack of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In the United States, more than 4 million cases were reported in November, more than double the number in October. Hospitals were overwhelmed. On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, 1,962 people died.

Now, despite more than 1 million deaths in the United States and more than 6 million worldwide, it’s almost easy to forget that the pandemic’s assault continues. That is, until you hear Belinda Hankins’ story.

Hankins has been diagnosed with long COVID, a collection of symptoms that can include crushing fatigue, brain fog, pain and dizziness and that may affect 1 in 5 people infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to one conservative estimate. She talked with Science News staff writer Meghan Rosen during her appointment at the long COVID clinic at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.

“For months we’ve heard estimates about how many people have long COVID,” Rosen told me. “I was interested in going beyond the stats to find out what it’s like for the patients and doctors living with this.”

That effort involved talking with doctors who are trying to figure out how to treat the symptoms of long COVID when the cause is still unknown. And talking with Hankins. “I thought it was extraordinary that [she] let me into her appointment,” Rosen said. “It’s just so generous and so brave.”

I share Rosen’s gratitude. Asking someone in the midst of a life-altering illness to talk with a journalist is a big request. I always worry that people might feel pressure to participate, and I want to be sure that they’ve had time to think through the implications of going public with personal information. Hankins was clear about why she said yes. “She wanted to share her story because a lot of people in her life don’t know what long COVID is and why she’s still so sick,” Rosen said.

In reporting, Rosen brings both her empathy and her serious science chops. She has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology and is a graduate of the science journalism program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She explored careers in biotech but decided that wasn’t the right fit. She wanted to write about health and medicine.

This is actually Rosen’s third stint at Science News: first as an intern, then as a reporter, and now back on the beat after five years of doing communications work for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We’re glad she’s back. Not only is she tackling complex issues surrounding COVID-19, including how U.S. public health guidelines affect kids in school (SN Online: 8/19/22), she’s also been sharing her delight in science. That includes stories on genetic variants linked to uncombable hair in children (SN: 10/8/22 & 10/22/22, p. 5); an unusual “snough” call that zoo gorillas appear to have invented to get zookeepers’ attention (SN Online: 8/10/22); and a new robotic pill designed to deliver drugs by scrubbing away mucus in the intestines.

Yes, science is serious and important, but it’s also crazy fun. I don’t think I’m ready to sign up for the robotic intestinal scrub brush, but I sure do enjoy finding out about it.