What's the good news on cancer? Should we colonise Mars? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of January 7-13 2018 #SciSeekPicks #SciComm

This week's best science posts include more bad news for our oceans, a rethink of how we look at genetics, and a way to rewire our brains. But there are other important topics touched on in ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

Tsunami aftermath in Aceh, Indonesia, December 2004.
Credit Wikipedia/AusAID CC BY 2.0.AUSAID

• US Cancer Death Rate Continues to Decline by Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine
• It’s the End of the Gene As We Know It by Ken Richardson at Nautilus
• Podcast of the week: Should We Colonize Mars? Michael Robinson talks to Lucianne Walkowicz at Time to Eat the Dogs
• Mainland China Was Struck By Large Tsunami A Thousand Years Ago by David Bressan at Forbes
• Ocean warming projected to accelerate more than four-fold over next 60 years: Study  by Mike Gaworecki at Mongabay
• Endangered bluefin tuna sold for record fee in Tokyo market by Harry Baker at Marine Madness
• Guest post: Alice shows magic tricks and explains refraction of light in water by Alice Langhans at Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching
• Shredded Star Leads to Important Black Hole Discovery at Chandra X-ray Observatory
• All Sand on Earth Could Be Made of Star Stuff by Shannon Hall at Scientific American
• From toxin to tonic: improving cone snail toxin stability for medical use by Andy Brunning at Compound Interest
• When Recycling Pays the Bills ... and When It Doesn't by Jessica Placzek at KQED News 
• Is there space for nature in man-made jungle? by Anna Filyushkina at Envirobites
• Observant Crows Make Weighty Decisions by Mary Bates at Psychology Today
• Researchers Tried To Explore Why “Stereotype Threat” Harms Performance, But Found It Didn’t Harm Performance At All by Jesse Singal at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Neuroscientists Uncover Way to Restore Cortical Plasticity in Mature Brain at Sci-News.com
• How fixing particle colliders’ discarded data problem could bring us a better internet by Greg Fish at World of Weird Things
• Top 10 Most Embarrassing Data Breaches by Jack Foster at Innovation and Technology Today
• New year, new trends: What to watch for in healthcare in 2019 (Part 2) by Atif Kukaswadia at Public Health Perspectives
• Nature’s first article: Huxley on Goethe by Brigitte Nehrlich at Making Science Public
• For minority students, the pipeline to an M.D. is leaky. Here’s how I managed to make it through by Paula Magee at STAT
• Trump falsely claims ‘drug prices declined in 2018’ by Casey M. Ross at STAT 

Check back next week for more great picks!

What destroyed the world's first empire? How do dogs recognise humans? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the fortnight of December 24-January 6 2018 #SciSeekPicks #SciComm

Happy new year! This week's #SciSeekPicks cover the fact that 2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table, debunk the idea that all inanimate objects can be conscious, and the difficulties of diagnosing psychiatric disorders. But there are other important topics touched on in ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

2018 saw many exciting scientific developments

• How climate change caused the world's first ever empire to collapse by Vasile Ersek at The Conversation
• Worst mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused by global warming analogous tocurrent climate crisis by Mike Gaworecki at Mongabay 
• Symbols of science: 150 years of the Periodic Table of Elements by Mikael Angelo Francisco at Flip Science
• Podcast: Water on Mars, lab-grown lungs and more: The biggest science stories of 2018 by Bob McDonald at CBC Radio
• 2018 in review: Compound Interest's Top 5 graphics by Andy Brunning at Compound Interest
• 2018 in limericks: The highs and lows from the life sciences by Meghana Keshavan at STAT News
• Back by popular demand . . . The Greatest Seminar Speaker contest! by Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
• Gardens with too many nonnative plants threaten populations of insect-eating birds, study finds by Hannah Hagemann at Mongabay
• Penguins Love Jelly by Elizabeth Preston at Hakai Magazine
• The EPA, Mercury, and Air Toxics, Oh My! by Kathleen Rest at Union of Concerned Scientists
• Is there lightning on Mars? by Jillian Scudder at Astroquizzical
• Ultima Thule: Preliminary Science Results from New Horizons at Sci-News.com
• What Was It Like When The Milky Way Took Shape? by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang
• Electrons don’t think by Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction
• Measuring the Strength of a Person's Gaze by Karen Hopkin at Scientific American
• Researchers have identified an area of the dog brain dedicated to processing human faces by Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• It's Not All In Your Head: Sometimes It’s In Your Legs by Lauri Nummenmaa at Reliawire
• Making Up Symptoms by Huw Green at Imperfect Cognition
• ‘Neglected diseases’ are anything but neglected by the billion-plus people living with them by Jerome H. Kim at STAT News
• Cellular Antivirus: How Foreign DNA is hushed by Stephanie DeMarco at EpiBeat
• Bad news for all haters of Staphylococcus aureus disease by Scott Fridkin at Controversies in Hospital Infection Prevention 
• The hottest reflections from 2018 by Jon Otter at Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control
• Machine learning can offer new tools, fresh insights for the humanities by Jennifer Ouellete at Ars Technica

Check back next week for more great picks!

Should you eat raw cookie dough? What will be 2019's biggest breakthrough? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of December 17-23 2018 #SciSeekPicks #SciComm

The new film Aquaman is giving ocean scientists plenty to talk about, and we're gradually probing the mysteries of space. But there are other important topics touched on in ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

Tasty! But can you eat it raw?
Image credit: cwPhotography
Used via Flickr CC BY 2.0 Licence

• It's Probably OK to Eat Raw Cookie Dough — As Long As You're Smart About It by Brian Zikmund-Fisher at The Crux
• The Science of Aquaman: The Complete Anthology by Andrew David Thaler at Southern Fried Science
• 2019’s Science Breakthrough Of The Year Will Show Us A Black Hole’s Event Horizon by Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang!
• Supermassive black holes still dark and mysterious by Jens Wilkinson at It Ain't Magic
• Planets probably lurk in the gaps of these stellar disks. But how did they form so fast?  by Dan Clery at Science
• BioSignatures by Damond Benningfield at StarDate
• The physiological stress response is larger in the morning than evening by Emma Young at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• We Have Given People Amyloid Disease by Derek Lowe at In The Pipeline

Check back next week for more great picks!

How can you discover new worlds? Why would you want a snail to crawl on your face? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of December 10-16 2018 #SciSeekPicks #SciComm

This week's best science posts include the benefits of knowing a second language, and of teens starting school later, and the love story between humans and neanderthals. But there are many other topics touched on in ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

Junk food: Do we like it, or 'need' it 

without even really liking it? 

• How I discovered new worlds (and how you can, too) by Arvin Joseff Tan at FlipScience 
• How your smartphone is eliminating the checkout line by Greg A. Fish at World of Weird Things 
• Podcast of the week: "The Good Bad Food" by Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry at BBC Radio 4
• How a second language can boost the brain by Ramin Skibba at Knowable Magazine
• Humans and Neanderthals were frequent lovers, genetics reveals by Dyani Lewis at Cosmos Magazine
• How the brain’s face code might unlock the mysteries of perception by Alison Abbott at Nature
• How A Later School Start Time Pays Off For Teens by Patti Neighmond at KQED/Mindshift
• History of the Conservation of Energy: Booms, Blood, and Beer (Part 1) by Greg J. Gbur at Skulls in the Stars 
• Does snail slime in skincare really work??  by Trina Espinoza at Ms. Beautyphile

Snail slime - there's chemistry in this weird cosmetic fad,
but that doesn't make it scientific. 

• You Can't Save a Species If It Doesn't Have a Name by John R. Platt at Extinction Countdown
• COP24: Nations complicit in ignoring bioenergy climate bomb, experts say by Justin Catanoso at Mongabay 
• Dutch banks’ customers ‘unknowingly’ profit from palm oil companies by Thessa Lageman at Mongabay.com
• ​Organic food worse for the climate at mynewsdesk
• Can Hypothermia Save Gunshot Victims? by Nicola Twilley at The New Yorker
• Gender Imbalance in Cancer Research Grants by Suze Kundu at Digital Science

Check back next week for more great picks!

Space: the final frontier-of-the-year quiz

by Ananya Sen

The year 2018 saw several unusual discoveries that were made in our solar system and beyond. The findings ranged from explaining historical artifacts to confirming predictions that were made by science fiction enthusiasts. If you consider yourself a space trivia enthusiast or you want a summary of the exciting discoveries that have been made this year, this quiz is exactly what you’re looking for.

A note on how the quiz works: You choose the answer you prefer, and then carry on reading through the questions and check the answers at the end against your choices. There's no automated scoring, but we hope you enjoy the quiz! Please share how well you did!

1. Images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Pluto showed the presence of dunes on Pluto’s surface. This discovery was surprising because there is not much of an atmosphere on Pluto’s surface. What were the dunes made of?

 Frozen methane
 Ice
 Sand

2. This year scientists were carrying out studies on the black hole that is at the center of our universe. What serendipitous discovery did they make?

 The collapse of a planet into the black hole
 Visual images of the black hole that show light bending away from it on all sides
 Bright flares from a superheated gas racing around the black hole

3. The Dark Energy Survey, an international research effort is a five-year project that ended in 2018. In August 2016 they detected something interesting as seen in the animation below. What does it show?

 The birth of a new star
 A supernova
 A distant planet that resembles Earth

4. Astronomers have discovered a planet revolving around 40 Eridani A, an orange dwarf star 16 light years from Earth. Which fictitious planet was predicted to be associated with this star?

 Tatooine
 Krypton
 Vulcan

5. Scientists believe they have finally discovered

 Hydrogen sulfide (farts)
 Methane (marshy land)
 Methanethiol (rotting vegetables)

6. How many new moons were discovered around Jupiter in 2018?

 5
 10
 15

7. In 1922 Howard Carter, a British archeologist, discovered King Tut’s tomb. Inside the tomb he found a breast plate which contained a winged scarab, made from a yellow, translucent gemstone. How was this gemstone formed?

 A comet exploded over the Libyan Desert and the resultant heat melted the sand glass forming bits of the gemstone
 It was formed when hot magma was expelled from deep inside the earth’s crust and cooled rapidly in the desert
 The gemstones were formed deep inside the earth and were encased in rocks. These rocks then made their way to the surface and the weathering process released the underlying gemstone

8. For the past three years two radio telescopes in Tasmania and continental Australia have been arranged to track the Vela pulsar, a neutron star associated with the constellation of Vela. What were the telescopes trying to detect?

 Radio emissions
 A glitch in its normal behavior
 Magnetic fields

9.Which satellite was launched in 2018 to detect rocky planets around nearby stars?

 TESS
 Horizons-3e
 Skylab

10. Where on Mars did NASA’s Curiosity rover find organic material in 2018? 

 In the debris of the Hellas Planitia crater
 The soil on the Olympus Mons volcano
 Mudstones on the slopes of Mount Sharp

The answers:

Question 1: Pluto's sand dunes are made of frozen methane.

Question 2: The scientists discovered bright flares from a superheated gas racing around the black hole.
Question 3: The Dark Energy Survey observed a supernova in 2016.
Question 4: Vulcan was predicted to be associated with 40 Eridani A.
Question 5: Uranus smells of hydrogen sulfide (farts).

Question 6: 10 new moons were discovered around Jupiter in 2018. 

Question 7: A comet exploded over the Libyan Desert and the resultant heat melted the sand glass forming bits of the gemstone.

Question 8: The telescopes were trying to detect a glitch in the Vela pulsar. 

Question 9: TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) was launched in 2018

Question 10: The Curiosity rover discovered organic matter in the mudstones on the slopes of Mount Sharp.

Ananya Sen is a grad student in microbiology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She spends 80% of her time working on oxidative stress in the Imlay lab and the remaining 20% of her time blogging about science, exploring food, taking care of her dog.

How can you prevent holiday weight gain? How many genes do you share with your siblings? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of December 3-9 2018 #SciSeekPicks #SciComm

This week's best science posts include more awesome gravitational waves detected in space, a way to ensure all breast cancer cells are removed in surgery, and a more realistic humanoid robot. But there are many other topics touched on in ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

You can dissolve gold with aqua regia.
Image credit: Shor International.

• The science of holiday weight gain (and tips to prevent it) by Mikael Angelo Francisco at Flip Science 
• A new review looks into the optimum exercise intensity, type and duration for boosting mood By Christian Jarrett at British Psychological Society Research Digest
• Not Your Mom’s Genes: Mitochondrial DNA Can Come from Dad by Katherine J. Wu at PBS Nova
• Are You Genetically Closer to Your Parents or Siblings? by Chelsea Weidman Burke at Chemically Inquisitive
• Podcast of the week: Chemistry in its element: Aqua Regia by Tabitha Watson at Chemistry World 
• Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? We’ll Have To, a New Study Finds by Brad Plumer at New York Times
• A Robot in Human Skin by Shuin Park at Signal to Noise Magazine
• Physicists Detect Four New Gravitational Waves at Sci-News.com
• Three Ways Quantum Physics Affects Your Daily Life by Chad Orzel at Forbes
• Tumor detection during breast cancer surgery by Jens Wilkinson at It Ain't Magic
• Autistic children may mute perspective to grasp others' by Bahar Gholipour at Spectrum 
• Compulsive YouTube Use by Jane Klobas, Tanya McGill, Sedigheh Moghavvemi and Tanuosha Paramanathan at Science Trends
• How Does Social Enrichment Produce Health Benefits?  by Takefumi Kikusui at Reliawire.

• Geologists are measuring bullet damage to ancient Middle Eastern settlements by Sarah Wild at Nature
• Wild meat for today and tomorrow by Gloria Pallares at Forests News
• The Riddle of the Roaming Plastics by Matthew Halliday at Hakai Magazine
• Tiny bits of ocean plastic threaten the survival of sea turtle hatchlings by Katie Brown at Mongabay
• Why we should care about the language we use in science by Brigitte Nerlich and Carmen McLeod at Making Science Public

Check back next week for more great picks!

Global warming is not a distant nightmare anymore

by Ananya Sen

Climate change has been hotly debated in the past couple of decades, and while the evidence is clear that it’s a big problem, sometimes it’s hard to picture that in your head. But the visual evidence that scientists have gathered can be even more compelling than the climate change projections – take a look for yourself. Click on and move the big circle to slide the line dividing these two overlaid pictures of a glacier in 1909 and 2018, and compare and contrast:

Image credit: Eduard Spelterini/Kieran Baxter/University of Dundee

In October 2018 a team of photographers recreated a 1909 expedition that took stunning pictures of the Mer de Glace glacier in the French Alps. Eduard Spelterini, a Swiss aviation pioneer, took the original pictures during his voyage in a gas-filled balloon. The 2018 team embarked on the same trip to document the changes the past century has brought. What used to be an impressive glacier has now largely been replaced by an empty valley and debris.

That illustrates what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in its report on climate change and its predictions for the next few decades in October 2018. The report is sobering to say the least. Several land and ocean ecosystems have already changed due to global warming. For example, for an increase in 1.5 °C 6% of insects, 8% of plants, and 4% of vertebrates are projected to lose over half of the area they identify as home. A direr situation awaits coral reefs, which are projected to die out almost completely for the same temperature change. ScienceSeeker’s picks for 2018 include many articles that highlight such consequences of climate change.

Climate change has obviously changed marine ecosystems. Some reef fish have evolved to depend on coral reefs for food and protection. These fish are smaller and have less defensive spines, enabling them to live among the corals instead of the sea bed. Many reef-dwelling fish have vanished with the decline in reef ecosystems. Sea turtles represent another group of animals that have been adversely affected due to climate change. Although their ancestors survived the extinction event that wiped out dinosaurs, the modern descendants are among the most threatened groups of vertebrates in the world. Currently 61% of the population is threatened or extinct, which can have ominous consequences for their diverse ecosystems. 

Even land inhabitants that have been flourished for centuries are now struggling. For example, more than half of Africa’s giant baobabs, some of which are 1,500-2,000 years old, have died between 2006 and 2017. Other organisms have displayed the effects of climate change in a different way. Birds sing to attract mates and establish territories. The timing of the bird songs depends on the breeding season. Recent recordings by scientists have shown that the timing has been moving up four days per decade. This can result in a mismatch for migratory birds whose breeding and feeding patterns might become out of sync with their surroundings, leading to a population loss.

The effects of climate change will also have adverse effects on humans. It has been predicted that global warming will increase the number and intensity of tropical storms. For example, in New York City the return period will be reduced from 25 years today to five years in the next three decades. Analysis of the tropical cyclone data from 1980 to 2016 has shown a significant global increase in the number of storms with maximum speeds of 175 km/h. More troubling is the observation that the number of storms with speeds of 200 km/h has doubled, and of those of 250 km/h has tripled. Climate change is also shifting the location of the storms and expanding the affected areas. Regions near the poles that have been historically less threatened by these storms are going to be at risk.

Although the outlook is grim, all is not lost. The Paris agreement has made countries aware of the steps that need to be taken to reduce global warming, prompting efforts to reduce carbon emissions. To that end, California is seeking to create a blueprint for others to follow. In September 2018 the California Governor issued an executive order calling for the California economy to become carbon neutral by 2045. The measures include transitioning to clean energy, using electric cars for transportation, increasing carbon sequestration by farming, and changing livestock feeds to reduce methane emissions from cattle.

The most important step for all of us is to recognize that the reality of climate change is going to affect our generation. It is easy to feel resignation and remain idle but we need to take active measures, no matter how small. It has been estimated that only 100 companies are responsible for 75% of the global emissions. Together we can pressure these companies into making environmentally conscious decisions. We can also aim to reduce our own carbon footprints and adjust our living standards. It has been said that necessity is the mother of all invention. By reminding ourselves that the fate of the Earth and its future rests on our shoulders, humans can drive the changes required to bring our planet back from the brink of collapse.

Ananya Sen is a grad student in microbiology at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She spends 80% of her time working on oxidative stress in the Imlay lab and the remaining 20% of her time blogging about science, exploring food, taking care of her dog.