Squirrels could be the key to getting us into deep space
By Lauren Leffer
Certain species of ground squirrels hibernate underground without any food or water for up to eight months of the year. It's a super-extreme survival strategy, enabled by a complicated cascade of physiological processes, some of which we understand and many of which scientists are still trying to figure out. Helping them along is funding and interest from heavy hitters in the research world like NASA, the European Space agency, and private aerospace companies, because–since the 1960's–those with their eyes on the stars have wondered if human hibernation could enable us to travel farther and more safely in space.Hibernation isn't just a long nap. It's closer to death than sleep. While in hibernation torpor, ground squirrels' endure up to a 95 percent reduction in their metabolic rate. Their heart and respiration rates drop to a few beats and breaths per minute. Their brain waves go flat. Their body temperatures plummet to near freezing for some species (or even below freezing for Arctic ground squirrels).
Yet amid all of this, the squirrels stay pretty healthy: maintaining muscle mass, reversing pre-hibernation diabetes, experiencing organ regeneration, stalling aging, and undergoing physiological shifts that can ward off things like radiation damage. For these reasons and more, scientists have been studying if we can harness the power of squirrel hibernation for ourselves. It could help propel us to outer reaches of the galaxy. Even if it doesn't, it's poised to fuel some big Earth-bound biomedical advances. Listen to learn more about squirrel-sicles, the challenges of long-distance space travel, and the ultimate in restorative rest. Or read all about it in this Popular Science feature article.
By John Green
Tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s, yet it remains the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.5 million people each year. That's largely due to our failure to get treatment to those who need it. I talk all about how tuberculosis shaped the world—and how humanity has allowed it to thrive thanks to injustice and inequity—in my new book 'Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection.' On this week's episode of Weirdest Thing, I share the story of a man who became consumed with finding a cure for consumption.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, TB thrived in the crowded living and working conditions of industrializing cities, yet people believed it was an inherited disease, even romanticizing it as a mark of beauty and artistic sensitivity. James Watt, famed for his contributions to the steam engine, dedicated years to trying to cure TB after his children became ill with the disease. His failed contraption, which treated TB by pushing carbon dioxide into the lungs to reduce the amount of air there, was closer to viable than you might think: the bacteria that causes TB is highly aerobic, meaning it needs lots of oxygen to survive. Sometimes doctors actually collapse one lung to help patients recover from TB. That was much more common in the early 20th century, but it's a technique still employed for some treatment-resistant cases of TB today.
Today, despite being curable, TB still kills millions. And recent funding cuts threaten to worsen the spread of drug-resistant TB, raising the specter of a world where the disease regains its early 20th-century deadliness. If you want to learn more, you can find 'Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection' anywhere books are sold.
By Rachel Feltman
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it buried thousands of people in ash, preserving eerie casts of their final moments. But one unfortunate resident may have been preserved in an even more extreme way—by having his brain turn to glass. Researchers recently confirmed that glassy black fragments found in a skull from the eruption are vitrified brain tissue, marking the only known case of an animal's tissue undergoing this process. It took a perfect storm of extreme heat and rapid cooling to make this happen, and it's unlikely to have ever happened before—or to ever happen again. Tune into this week's episode to learn how it all went down!
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Washington Post
3 hours ago
- Washington Post
Arctic melting slowed in the past two decades. Is that a good sign?
The melting of Arctic ice has been one of the most profound ripple effects from climate change, an impact often depicted with images of a lone polar bear stranded on a dwindling piece of sea ice. Now, a new study has found that ice has been melting slower over the past two decades across all seasons — even under a record hot atmosphere. From 2005 to 2024, scientists say Arctic sea ice has been declining at its slowest rate for any 20-year period since satellite measurements began in 1979. Using two different datasets, the team found that the melt rate over the past 20 years has been at least twice as slow as the longer-term rate. The slowdown is temporary, models show. It may continue for another 5 to 10 years, and afterward, sea ice may melt faster than the long-term average — offsetting any short reprieve that we may have had. 'Even though there is increased emissions [and] increased global temperatures, you can still get periods where you have very minimal loss of Arctic sea ice for sustained periods,' said Mark England, lead author of the study published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters. Here's what to know about variations in how ice declines in the Arctic. Let's boil the factors influencing Earth's climate down to a simple equation: humans and the planet's natural cycles. The most common driver in Earth's natural cycles is the difference in how much energy is exchanged between the ocean and atmosphere, said Alex Crawford, an assistant professor of environment and geography at University of Manitoba in Canada who was not involved in the study. 'There's always energy going back and forth between the atmosphere and ocean,' Crawford said. 'For various reasons, the oceans can store much, much more energy than the atmosphere.' In some years, he said the world's oceans take in a little more energy than normal, which will make the global atmosphere cooler than normal. If the oceans take in a little less energy than normal, then the global atmosphere will be warmer than normal. 'The most famous example of this is El Niño and La Niña, but there's also longer-term variability that can take place over several decades and either amplify (e.g., the 2010s) or weaken (e.g., the 2000s) the global warming trend,' Crawford said. 'This is all normal.' Over the past two decades, England said the planet's natural cycles perhaps helped create cooler waters around the Arctic that favored sea ice growth. Still, added heat from human activities has counteracted this growth and led to an overall deficit. For perspective, without climate change, these natural variations may have even caused the sea ice to grow in these past two decades, England said. Even under high greenhouse gas emissions, scientists have found that periodic slowdowns do occur. In the study, the team analyzed past climate models that showed these slower ice losses over the past two decades. They found these slowdowns occurred about 20 percent of the time in simulations. 'This isn't some infrequent rare event. This is something which should be expected as a part of the way that the climate system evolves,' said England, who conducted the study as a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter and is now an assistant professor at UC Irvine. In addition, the team found the current slowdown has a 50 percent chance of lasting for five more years and a 25 percent chance of lasting another 10 years. Polar scientist Alexandra Jahn, who was not involved in the research, said her own work showed slower Arctic sea ice melt occurred commonly across 10-year periods — even in the presence of human-caused warming. After this slowdown episode ends, Jahn said 'eventually we'll see a decline again.' Multiple factors make clear that climate change is not slowing down. Carbon dioxide concentrations are still at their highest levels in human history, growing at its fastest rate in our observed records. Earth's hottest years have all occurred in just the past decade, with multiple record years in the Arctic. 'If you look at global temperatures, they are definitely not slowing down,' England said. 'The debate now is whether they are speeding up.' Additionally, climate models showed these slowdowns are possible even under a continued warming world. Similar to the past two decades, Earth's natural cycles may favor more ice growth and slow down melting. Think of the Arctic sea ice trend like a ball rolling down a hill, explained climate scientist Ed Hawkins. The ball may hit some bumps that slow it down, but it will be heading toward the bottom as greenhouse gas emissions continue. Even though the rate of Arctic ice melt has slowed, ice is still declining in large quantities. Using two different datasets, study authors found the melt rate over the past 20 years has been around 0.35 and 0.29 million square kilometers per decade (depending the dataset). Since 2010, the team found the volume of ice loss amounted to about 0.4 million cubic kilometers cubed each decade. Overall, sea ice conditions at the end of the summer are at least 33 percent lower now than they were 45 years ago. Although the Arctic is low, England said it's better than the area being completely ice free. But he expects an accelerated loss once this period subsides. On average, he said sea ice loss has amounted to around 0.8 million square kilometers per decade over the long term. The subsequent ice melt could be 0.6 million square kilometers per decade faster than the broader long-term decline, the study found. 'This temporary period can't go on forever,' England said. 'It's bit like a kind of sugar rush. It feels good … and at some point it will kind of crash.'
National Geographic
6 hours ago
- National Geographic
Goodbye hard drives, hello DNA: How the double helix could transform data storage
A scientist examines a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) profile on a screen. Photograph by Tek Image, Science Photo Library Illustration and animation by Diana Marques Video research by Patricia Healy Shakespeare's entire catalog of sonnets and eight of his tragedies, all of Wikipedia's English-language pages, and one of the first movies ever made: scientists have been able to fit the contents of all these works in a space smaller than a tiny test tube. They didn't somehow miniaturize them, though. Instead, they used DNA—the building block of all life—to encode the information in these creative works and store it at a microscopic scale. As humans adopt advanced tools like artificial intelligence, tomorrow's currency will be data. Already, tech giants like Microsoft are raising billions of dollars to construct data centers for AI. And there's a very real 'Storage Wars' scramble underway right now to figure out how to preserve and safeguard exponentially increasing amounts of data. Football field-size, gigawatt energy-sucking data centers are one option. Or DNA storage could be an energy-efficient, compact solution. (Ancient DNA, from Neanderthals to the Black Plague, is transforming archaeology) Step 1 Computers store each letter or pixel of digital data in combinations of ones and zeros. We typically think of DNA as a blueprint or instruction booklet—its sequences of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs tell molecular machines how to build the fabric of our very beings. DNA storage flips this paradigm on its head. Computer data make up the inputs, and DNA is the end product. A handful of start-ups are working to perfect the conversion of binary computer code into physical DNA strands, and in doing so, take a shot at disrupting the multibillion-dollar storage industry. Here's how they plan to move the industry away from microfilm, microfiche, disks, and servers. Traditional data storage relies on constant migration to prevent old data from degrading or the technology it's stored in from becoming obsolete. Varun Mehta, CEO of Atlas Data Storage, compares long-term data storage to painting the Golden Gate bridge—by the time you've gone from one end to the other, the first end is rusting and you have to start all over again. 'The same thing happens with long-term data storage,' he says. 'You're always moving from your old tape to your new tape.' He predicts that 'people who want to get off that treadmill will be the first to move to DNA.' Step 2: Encoding digital data in DNA Step 2 To store digital information on DNA, algorithms convert digital codes into combinations of the four letters that represent DNA's chemical bases—T, G, A, and C. In practice, DNA storage involves several steps: deciding on a code, making the DNA using a process called synthesis, and storing the resulting DNA strands. DNA storage methods also include ways to categorize the stored strands and convert nucleotide sequences back into information that may be compatible with computers or accessible in some other way. Though industry members formed the DNA Data Storage Alliance in 2020 in part to set standards, companies in the DNA storage space still approach each of these steps in slightly different ways. (This archaeologist hunts DNA from prehistoric diseases) First, to store information as DNA, scientists have to determine how the data will be translated. DNA is a base 4 system; in contrast, computers store and process information in binary. Instead of assigning a '1' or a '0' to each DNA nucleotide—an A, C, T, or G—you could instead assign a particular combination of two digits to each base—so an A might stand in for '00,' C '01,' T '10,' and G '11.' Theoretically, this means every DNA nucleotide can encode up to 2 unique bits. In practice, the system isn't as efficient as that (there are certain combinations of DNA nucleotides that are less stable or otherwise undesirable, and different chemistry protocols exist for turning bits into DNA bases). Catalog, one DNA storage company, announced in 2022 that it had encoded eight of William Shakespeare's tragedies into a single test tube. To do this, scientists had to translate about 207,000 words into strings of nucleotides using a class of enzymes called recombinases. They claimed their DNA-building machine, Shannon, encoded the plays into millions of nucleotides in a matter of minutes. 'To each of those words, you associate a random bit vector. A bit vector is just a sequences of ones and zeroes of a fixed length,' explains Catalog's head of DNA Computing, Swapnil Bhatia, in a video for the company. The word 'rose' might have a random bit vector stretching 1,000 numbers long, and different companies will have different ciphers for translating words into 1s, 0s, and nucleotides. Step 3: Synthesis Step 3 These letters are one part of the nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. Today, scientists are using them to build DNA strands that can store digital data instead of genetic information. DNA synthesis—the step of actually creating custom DNA strands—is another place where companies diverge in their methods. Catalog uses the principles of inkjet printing to exude tiny droplets containing premade DNA fragments. In each droplet, hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions take place per second to elongate the DNA strands. Atlas Data Storage, meanwhile, relies on semiconductor chips and silicon wafers as the environment for assembling strands of synthetic DNA. 'Once those strands are assembled, we harvest them from our chip,' Mehta says. 'These DNA strands really are like corn stalks growing in a field on this chip and once they've gotten to the height that we want—to the number of bases—then we harvest them.' (Dog DNA tests are on the rise. But are they reliable?) Step 4: Storing the DNA Step 4 The strands are archived in material like sealed vials or other materials. Storing and preserving these synthetic strands presents another set of hurdles. Catalog and Atlas store DNA samples inside metal capsules, where the strands are not exposed to the elements and degraded. To convert DNA back into bit form, one can sequence it—using the same technology that powers genetic testing like 23andMe. This method can't be done indefinitely; eventually, the sample will need to be copied over again to restore it. To create longer-lasting, accessible storage, some groups are working on fluorescent tags. Shining a light on the samples can tell researchers information about a given sample at a glance, the same way metadata can help us organize computer files without having to open them. If companies are able to surmount these challenges, a DNA storage system would take up a fraction of the space of traditional storage methods. 'The theoretical limit is astounding,' Mehta says. 'You could fill 50 petabytes worth of data in in a Tylenol-sized capsule'—or roughly 50,000 times as much data as an iPhone can store. Step 5 When it's time to retrieve digital data from DNA, an algorithm converts the archived information back to ones and zeros– and then back into pixels and letters that we can read. Storing information in such a small physical package raises philosophical questions about the purpose of storage. Could a storage device itself serve a purpose? Scientists have theorized and created proofs-of-concept of fabrics and everyday items like glasses that contain DNA-stored information. The company Catalog has a branch dedicated to 'DNA computing' to search and analyze synthetic DNA without first converting the information encoded in it back into bits. There could be some advantages to working with data in DNA form—rather than moving from one end to another, like a computer processor does, working with the data can occur in many places at once in parallel. DNA's status as the basic building block of life may someday make it one of our most durable technologies, Mehta says, because it means it isn't going anywhere. 'One thousand years from now, there probably will not be any DVD players. In fact, it's hard to find a VHS tape player anymore. But that's never going to happen with DNA, because we need it for our own health,' he says. 'We'll always have that technology available.' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Geek Tyrant
19 hours ago
- Geek Tyrant
Quick Teaser for Vince Gilligan's New Apple TV+ Sci-Fi Series PLURIBUS Starring Rhea Seehorn — GeekTyrant
Apple TV+ has released a very quick trailer for the upcoming series Pluribus , from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan. The series stars Better Call Saul actress Rhea Seehorn, with Carlos Manuel Vesga, Karolina Wydra, Miriam Shor, and Samba Schutte. Gilligan created the show, and acts as showrunner and director, with Byron Howard also at the helm. Episodes are written by Gordon Smith, Alison Tatlock, Vera Blasi, Jenn Carroll, Jonny Gomez, and Ariel Levine. The short synopsis for the sci-fi series states: 'The most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness. The series is set in a present-day Albuquerque, New Mexico that faced an abrupt change away from the world as it is known.' This looks intriguing, and with Vince Gilligan at the helm, you know it's going to be good. Check out the trailer below, and watch the series when it debuts on Apple on November 7th. The nine episode first season will run through December.
