Ida’s fury spares Louisiana labs, but staff face challenges
Research laboratories in Louisiana emerged largely unscathed from last week’s Hurricane Ida, despite worries that the Category 4 storm would follow in the destructive footsteps of Hurricane Katrina, which 16 years ago caused massive losses of research animals, biospecimens, and equipment. Ida, which made landfall on 29 August, didn’t bring the levee failures of Katrina, but it did trigger flooding that caused scores of deaths in the U.S. South and Northeast. New Orleans lost power, but generators at Tulane University and Louisiana State University (LSU) medical centers kept freezers and incubators running and lab animals cool. By week’s end, medical buildings had power again. A coastal science laboratory near Chauvin, operated by the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, also avoided major damage. “It’s night and day compared to Katrina,” says Steve Nelson, dean of the LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. Research operations across the region will require time to return to normal, however, because evacuated staff and students need to return. Many are also dealing with damage to their homes. As Science went to press, many areas in the state, including parts of greater New Orleans, still lacked power.
Mars rover nabs first rock
NASA’s Perseverance rover drilled its first rock core in Mars’s Jezero crater last week, likely capturing a volcanic sample. The bored boulder resembled ancient lava in its appearance, mineral signatures, and grain sizes, NASA scientists say. If the sample can be returned to Earth by a subsequent mission, scientists will date it, helping reveal when water flowed into the crater billions of years ago. During the rover team’s first drilling attempt last month, the targeted rock crumbled on contact. This time, the team was more cautious, pausing to make sure the core, not much bigger than a pencil, remained in a tube prior to storing it. The rover will spend the next few weeks confirming the boulder’s volcanic origin before moving to its next target.
Research confirms masks work
The largest randomized controlled study of wearing masks to control COVID-19 has found that a nearly 30% increase in mask wearing reduced symptomatic cases by 9.3% in 600 Bangladeshi villages. The effect was most pronounced in those over age 50, and in villages that used surgical, rather than cloth, masks. Researchers—including hundreds of observers—spent 8 weeks distributing masks and promoting their use to more than 178,000 people in half of the villages; nearly 164,000 people in the other half served as controls. The study, published as a preprint, took place from November 2020 to April, before the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 became dominant in many countries.
Studies assess Long Covid toll
Although the suite of persistent symptoms known as Long Covid remains puzzling, a preprint last week provides clues to how frequently the condition affects children. After surveying more than 50,000 children between the ages of 11 and 17 in the United Kingdom, researchers found about 14% of those previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 had three or more symptoms—such as tiredness, headaches, or shortness of breath—15 weeks after infection. Roughly half of those had five or more symptoms. Meanwhile, a study using self-reported data collected by the United Kingdom’s Zoe app found that vaccinated adults who have breakthrough infections have low risk of Long Covid. Only about 5% of those infected after vaccination still had any symptoms at 28 days, compared with 11% of unvaccinated people who were infected, the researchers reported last week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Zinc-laced mandibles keep ants sharp
Leafcutter ants (Atta cephalotes) can bite through plants and invading army ants as if they were butter. Now, scientists know why: Carefully arranged zinc atoms are responsible for their scalpel-sharp teeth. To get a close-up of arthropod “tools” such as ant mandibles, researchers mapped their atomic makeup using a microscopy technique called atom probe tomography. Their images revealed zinc atoms uniformly distributed through the ant teeth, making them sharp enough to cut through food or foe with less than 1% of the force required if they were made of the same material as human teeth, the team writes this month in Scientific Reports. The researchers suggest the molecular arrangement of the mandibles could serve as a model for medical cutting devices or other tools that need to retain their sharpness and shape over many uses.
Astro journals go open access
Stargazers will soon be able to read all papers from the Astrophysical Journal and other publications of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) for free on the day of their release—one of the first prominent scientific societies to allow this. AAS announced last week that when all its journals become “open access” in January 2022, the society will end subscriptions; it will replace that revenue with fees paid by authors, based on length, with a maximum charge of $4500. Some research funders have required grantees to publish results in open-access journals and include publication fees in their grants. Many publishers have gone “hybrid,” publishing both open and paywalled papers. AAS says it will waive or discount fees for authors unable to pay them.
Brazil museum seeks artifacts
Three years after a devastating fire, the National Museum of Brazil is calling on museums, research institutions, and collectors from all over the world for help in “revitalizing” its collections, 85% of which were destroyed. Paleontologist Alexander Kellner, the museum’s director, last week made a public plea for donations of animal and plant samples, fossils, minerals, and ethnographic and archaeological objects collected in Brazil and around the world. The museum promised in a statement to “spare no effort to safeguard the collection we still have and the [objects] we will receive.” Germany has already provided €1 million in emergency aid, and 24 German institutions have pledged to help the museum rebuild its collections. The largest of its kind in Latin America and the oldest scientific institution in Brazil, it is scheduled to reopen in 2026.
Big U.S. research boost proposed
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories are big winners in the science section of a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint unveiled last week by Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Some $13 billion of the additional $15 billion authorized for DOE over the next 5 years would be managed by its Office of Science. The National Science Foundation’s budget would grow by $11 billion over 10 years, with $7.6 billion for its research directorates and $3.4 billion for large new facilities. NASA would receive $4 billion more through 2026 to repair and modernize its network of research facilities. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would get an additional $4.2 billion over 5 years for programs aimed at understanding and adapting to climate change. This week, the House science panel was expected to approve these components in its $45.5 billion slice of the budget blueprint, a massive bill that would also expand an array of nonscience, social welfare programs; raise revenue; and cut spending in other areas. Appropriations committees would need to approve separate bills to provide the money called for in the plan.
Source: Science Mag