In 1959, Lyudmila Trut rode trains through Siberia to visit fox farms. She wasn’t looking for furs. She needed a farm to host an audacious experiment dreamed up by geneticist Dmitry Belyaev: to create a domestic animal as docile as a dog from aggressive, wily silver foxes.

Evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin helps Trut recount this ongoing attempt to replay domestication in How to Tame a Fox. The mechanics of domestication are still a matter of intense scientific debate. Belyaev’s idea was that ancient humans picked wolves and other animals for docility and that this artificial selection jump-started an evolutionary path toward domestication.
Back in the 1950s, testing the idea was dangerous work, and not just because untamed foxes bite. In 1948, the Soviet Union, under the scientific leadership of Trofim Lysenko, outlawed genetics research. Lysenko had risen to power based on fabricated claims that freezing seeds in water could increase crop yields. “With Stalin as his ally, he launched a crusade to discredit work in genetics, in part, because proof of the genetic theory of evolution would expose him as a fraud,” Dugatkin and Trut write. Geneticists often lost their jobs, were jailed or even killed, as was Belyaev’s own brother. So Belyaev cloaked his domestication experiments in the guise of improving the fur-farming business.

Fox researchers started by testing the temperament of about 100 silver foxes each year. About a dozen of the foxes, slightly calmer than most, were bred annually. Within a few generations, some foxes were a bit more accepting of people than the starting population. That small difference convinced Belyaev of the experiment’s promise, and he recruited Trut to carry out a larger breeding program.
After choosing a farm, in 1960, Trut brought a dozen calm foxes from the preliminary project, including two that would let her pick them up. She also chose the calmest 10 percent of the foxes at the new farm for breeding, both to increase the number of animals and to increase genetic diversity. Eventually, she began breeding aggressive foxes as a comparison group for the tame ones.
Trut and Dugatkin lovingly recount some of the experiment’s milestones, including the first fox born with a wagging tail and the first one with droopy ears — two hallmarks of domesticated animals. Trut recalls the foxes she’s lived with and, heartbreakingly, the ones she lost, or had to sacrifice to keep the experiment going after the collapse of the Russian economy in 1998 led to funding problems. At every step, the authors skillfully weave the science of domestication into the narrative of foxes becoming ever-more doglike.
Trut has kept Belyaev’s dream alive for nearly 60 years. Now in her 80s, she still runs the experiment and has eagerly collaborated with others to squeeze every drop of knowledge from the project. The work has shown that selecting for tameness alone can also produce a whole suite of other changes (curly tails, droopy ears, spotted coats, juvenile facial features) dubbed the domestication syndrome. With the help of geneticist Anna Kukekova, Trut is searching for the genes involved in this process.

The project now sells some of the foxes as pets to raise money, although one could argue they aren’t fully domesticated. The foxes may wag their tails and flop on their backs to get their bellies rubbed, but Trut says they still don’t follow commands like dogs do. It probably took Stone Age humans hundreds or thousands of years to domesticate wolves. The silver fox experiment has replayed the process in fast-forward. It may speed scientists’ quest to understand the DNA changes that transformed a wolf into a dog.

A fossil dinosaur embryo known as “Baby Louie” has a new name. It belongs to a newly identified species of dinosaur called Beibeilong sinensis, researchers report May 9 in Nature Communications.

In the 1980s and 1990s, farmers found thousands of fossilized dinosaur eggs in the rocks of Henan Province in China and sold them overseas. It turned out that one chunk of rock, purchased by a company that sells museum-quality fossils and rock specimens, held not only eggs but also an embryonic dinosaur skeleton. It was dubbed “Baby Louie,” after a National Geographic photographer whose images of it appeared in a cover story for the magazine.
Paleontologists knew Baby Louie was some kind of oviraptorosaur, a two-legged, birdlike dinosaur. But its species was a mystery. So in 2015, Junchang Lü of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing and colleagues returned to the site in China where the eggs were excavated. They analyzed fossils there and examined Baby Louie’s remains, now housed in the Henan Geological Museum. The embryo measures 38 centimeters from its snout to the start of its tail and dates to about 90 million years ago.

Based on the structure of Baby Louie’s facial bones and other anatomical features, the team declared the dinosaur a new species. In Chinese, Beibei means “baby” and long means “dragon.”

Baby Louie’s skeleton was found with six to eight similar-looking dinosaur eggs. This type of dino egg is the largest identified to date and appears to have been abundant, leading paleontologists to think that birdlike dinosaurs like Baby Louie were common in the Late Cretaceous.

A warmer climate could put some damselflies in distress, as others get bigger and hungrier.

Because of differences in hatching time, nymphs — the immature form of the insects — vary in size. Sometimes when ponds are overcrowded, other food options are scarce or size differences are significant, bigger, older nymphs nosh on the little nymphs. While temperature doesn’t typically affect when damselflies hatch, it does affect how fast they grow.

So a team at the University of Toronto tested whether a warmer world would also be a damselfly-eat-damselfly one. Using damselfly nymphs (Lestes congener) hatched in the lab, researchers put nymphs of various sizes in two different temperature environments, one a balmy 18° Celsius and the other a toastier 24° Celsius.

Damselflies in the hotter setting displayed bigger differences in body size, higher activity levels and increased cannibalism rates. Both size extremes and more frequent foraging probably contribute to the increase in intraspecific dining tendencies, the researchers write May 16 in Biology Letters.

Mouse sperm could win awards for resilience. Sperm freeze-dried and sent into space for months of exposure to high levels of solar radiation later produced healthy babies, researchers report online May 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If humans ever embark on long-term space flights, we’ll need a way to reproduce. One potential hurdle (beyond the logistical challenges of microgravity) is the high amount of solar radiation in space — radiation exposure is 100 times as high on the International Space Station as on Earth. Those doses might cause damaging genetic mutations in banked eggs and sperm.
To test this possibility, Japanese researchers sent freeze-dried mouse sperm up to the space station, where the sperm spent nine months. When rehydrated back on Earth, the sperm showed some signs of DNA damage compared with earthly sperm.

But when the researchers used the space sperm to fertilize eggs in the lab and then injected the eggs into female mice, the mice birthed healthy pups that were able to have their own offspring. The researchers suspect that some of the initial DNA damage might have been repaired after fertilization.

If mouse sperm can survive a trip to space, perhaps human sperm can, too.

HAT-P 7b is a windy world. Stiff easterlies typically whip through the atmosphere of the distant exoplanet, but sometimes the powerful gales blow in surprisingly varied directions. Now, simulations of the planet’s magnetic field lines, illustrated here as a rainbow of scrawled marks, reveal that HAT-P 7b’s magnetic field influences the winds, even turning some into westerlies. The result, published May 15 in Nature Astronomy, could lead to a better understanding of the atmospheres of other exoplanets.
Known as a “hot Jupiter,” HAT-P 7b is a gas giant that orbits its star once every 2.2 Earth days. The exoplanet, located 1,043 light-years away, is also tidally locked: One side always faces toward its star while the other faces away. That orientation pushes temperatures to about 1,900° Celsius on the planet’s dayside compared with about 900° C on the nightside. Those extreme temperature differences tend to power strong easterly winds, according to an analysis of data from the Kepler satellite. But that analysis also revealed that over time the winds are surprisingly mercurial.

The magnetic field, which may be generated by the planet’s core, is connected to the winds because of high temperatures stripping electrons from atmospheric atoms of lithium, sodium and potassium, making them positively charged. Those particles then interact with the field, creating an electromagnetic force strong enough to disrupt the stout easterly winds, writes study author Tamara Rogers, an astrophysicist at Newcastle University in England.

In the image above, blue lines track strong magnetic field lines directed one way, while those in magenta trace powerful lines in the opposite direction. Weaker parts of the field lines are shown in green and yellow. The stronger the magnetic field, the wilder the winds — with the strongest lines completely reversing the direction the winds blow, Rogers concludes.

A monkey’s brain builds a picture of a human face somewhat like a Mr. Potato Head — piecing it together bit by bit.

The code that a monkey’s brain uses to represent faces relies not on groups of nerve cells tuned to specific faces — as has been previously proposed — but on a population of about 200 cells that code for different sets of facial characteristics. Added together, the information contributed by each nerve cell lets the brain efficiently capture any face, researchers report June 1 in Cell.
“It’s a turning point in neuroscience — a major breakthrough,” says Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a neuroscientist at the University of Leicester in England who wasn’t part of the work. “It’s a very simple mechanism to explain something as complex as recognizing faces.”

Until now, Quiroga says, the leading explanation for the way the primate brain recognizes faces proposed that individual nerve cells, or neurons, respond to certain types of faces (SN: 6/25/05, p. 406). A system like that might work for the few dozen people with whom you regularly interact. But accounting for all of the peripheral people encountered in a lifetime would require a lot of neurons.

It now seems that the brain might have a more efficient strategy, says Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at Caltech.

Tsao and coauthor Le Chang used statistical analyses to identify 50 variables that accounted for the greatest differences between 200 face photos. Those variables represented somewhat complex changes in the face — for instance, the hairline rising while the face becomes wider and the eyes becomes further-set.

The researchers turned those variables into a 50-dimensional “face space,” with each face being a point and each dimension being an axis along which a set of features varied.
Then, Tsao and Chang extracted 2,000 faces from that map, each linked to specific coordinates. While projecting the faces one at a time onto a screen in front of two macaque monkeys, the team recorded the activity in single neurons in parts of the monkey’s temporal lobe known to respond specifically to faces. All together, the recordings captured activity from 205 neurons.

Each face cell was tuned to one of the 50 axes previously identified, Tsao and Chang found. The rate at which each cell sent electrical signals was proportional to a given face’s coordinate position along an axis. But a cell didn’t respond to changes in features not captured by that axis. For instance, a cell tuned to an axis where nose width and eye size changed wouldn’t respond to changes in lip shape.
Adding together the features conveyed by each cell’s activity creates a picture of a complete face. And like a computer creating a full-color display by mixing different proportions of red, green and blue light, the coordinate system lets a brain paint any face in a spectrum.

“It was a total surprise,” Tsao says. Even when the faces were turned in profile, the same cells still responded to the same features.

Tsao and Chang were then able to re-create that process in reverse using an algorithm. When they plugged in the activity patterns of the 205 recorded neurons, the computer spat out an image that looked almost exactly like what they had shown the monkeys.

“People view neurons as black boxes,” says Ed Connor, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who wasn’t part of the study. “This is a striking demonstration that you can really understand what the brain is doing.”

Elsewhere in the brain, though, neurons don’t use this facial coordinate system. In 2005, Quiroga discovered individual neurons attuned to particular people in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory. He found, for instance, a single neuron that fired off messages in response to a photo of Jennifer Aniston or conceptually related images, like her name written out or a picture of her Friends costar Lisa Kudrow.

The new results fit well into that picture, Tsao and Quiroga agree. Tsao compares her system to a GPS for facial identity. “These cells are coding the coordinates. And you can use these coordinates for anything you want. You can build a specific lookup table that codes these into specific identities — like Barack Obama, or your mother.”

Quiroga’s hippocampal cells, just a few neural connections away, are like the output of that table — a sort of speed dial for people and concepts previously encountered.

The different coding strategies might be tied to differences in what these brain areas do. “When we remember things, we forget details but we remember concepts,” Quiroga says. But for telling faces apart, and especially for processing unfamiliar faces, “details are key.”

Take a trip to a black hole with Stephen Hawking as a guide, watch glowing bioluminescent earthworms wriggle away from predators and discover the fascinating mathematics of origami — all while cuddled up in front of a laptop. That’s the promise of the online streaming service CuriosityStream, which offers hefty doses of science for viewers who prefer fact-based documentaries over reality TV, sports and the political bickering that dominate today’s television programming.

CuriosityStream, which recently celebrated its second birthday, operates much like Netflix. With plans starting at $2.99 per month, users can browse more than 1,700 commercial-free programs covering science, technology, history and the arts. The service works on computers, mobile devices and streaming players such as Roku and Apple TV.
CuriosityStream aims to supplement the media diet of science-starved viewers. “When you look at television … there’s very little science on anymore,” says Steve Burns, CuriosityStream’s chief programming officer. Subscribers, he says, “crave the substance that they’ve been missing on TV for so long.”

Along with a slew of documentaries from the BBC and other public broadcasters, CuriosityStream offers more than 600 original programs that you won’t find anywhere else. One standout is David Attenborough’s Light on Earth, in which the naturalist takes viewers on an engaging survey of bioluminescent life, from flickering fireflies and luminous mushrooms to eerily glowing ocean creatures.

Another enjoyable original is Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, in which the famed physicist tours a black hole, exoplanet Gliese 832c, Saturn and other cosmic locales. Computer-generated imagery of the turbulent region around a black hole, for example, provides a brilliant visual background to Hawking’s explanations of relevant research. One episode is currently available, and two new ones are slated to go online later in the year.

Some shows are more engaging than others. Another original, The Hunt for Dark Matter, takes a deep dive into the technology behind the search for the invisible substance thought to pervade the universe. But the show will likely fall flat for many viewers, as its introduction lacks some of the background on the physics of dark matter that is necessary to grasp the relevance of the work.

CuriosityStream provides a wealth of options to choose from, including a variety of shorter shows, each 10 or 15 minutes long. With new programs added regularly, the service should provide enough binge-worthy fodder to keep even the most avid documentary lovers busy

Premature babies, who often develop jaundice because of an excess of bile pigment called bilirubin, can be saved from this dangerous condition by the use of fluorescent light.… The light alters the chemistry of bilirubin so it can be excreted with the bile. Exchange transfusion is the usual treatment when jaundice occurs but this drastic procedure carries a … risk of death. —Science News, June 17, 1967

Update
Preemies aren’t the only babies at risk for jaundice. About 60 percent of full-term infants also develop the condition. Severe cases can cause brain damage if untreated. But today, some researchers warn that light therapy, now widely used, may not work for babies whose bilirubin levels are very high. And studies have begun to suggest a link between the therapy and certain childhood cancers (SN Online: 1/30/15). Though the risk of developing cancer is small, doctors should be cautious about prescribing the treatment, researchers wrote in 2016 in Pediatrics.

On June 18, 4-year-old Bentley Thomas Koch fatally shot himself in the face. A few weeks earlier, Harmony Warfield, age 7, was shot and killed by her 2-year-old cousin. And teens Shadi Najjar and Artem Ziberov, both on the eve of graduating from high school, died in a hail of gunfire. Stories like these of kids dying from gunshot wounds are devastating, but, sadly, they aren’t an anomaly.

The most comprehensive look at fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries among children in the United States makes that abundantly clear. Every day, roughly 19 children die or are medically treated in an emergency department for gun-inflicted wounds, a study published June 19 in Pediatrics finds.

The statistics, based on data from 2002 to 2014, are stark:

Nearly 1,300 children, from birth to age 17, die from gunshot wounds each year on average and another 5,790 kids are wounded;
Of the deaths, 53 percent are homicides, 38 percent are suicides and 6 percent are accidents;
Boys ages 13 to 17 make up the bulk of gunshot victims;
Cause of death varies by race — African-Americans are overwhelmingly more likely to die from homicide than suicide; white kids are nearly three times as likely to die from suicide as from homicide; and for American Indian and Asian-American kids, it’s 50-50.
But this study doesn’t just lay out the numbers. It starts to dig deeper into the whys. And those whys can have important implications, laying the framework for policies that could ultimately lead to a drop in the numbers.

For the numbers, Katherine Fowler, a behavioral scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and colleagues started with data from the National Vital Statistics System and the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

For the whys, her team looked at cases described in the National Violent Death Reporting System, or NVDRS. That let the researchers fill in details like where an incident took place and whether it involved multiple victims — for instance, a homicide followed by suicide or a multiple victim homicide. The database also includes demographic information about the shooter, evidence of alcohol or drugs at the time of death, and whether the incident was gang-related or involved a boyfriend or girlfriend or parents. Clues to whether relationship, financial or school issues were part of the problem also come to light, as does evidence of depression, anxiety, any previous suicide attempt, treatment for mental health problems and physical health problems. Notes about playing with a gun or thinking the gun was a toy, as well as hunting accidents are also included.
This tally of circumstances led Fowler and colleagues to conclude that firearm homicides of younger children, up through age 12, often involve conflict between parents, intimate partners or among family. “This highlights how children can be caught in the cross fire in cases of domestic violence and points to the importance of addressing the intersection of these forms of violence,” she says.

The results also reveal something important about child suicides involving guns. “While mental health factors are important, the findings also show that firearm suicides were also frequently related to situational life stressors and relationship problems with an intimate partner, friend or family member,” Fowler notes.

It’s these kinds of details that can help researchers and lawmakers create more effective policies to prevent such tragic deaths and injuries. It’s worked in other cases. Statistics have shown that tweaks to laws regulating the times of day teens can drive lead to injury prevention. Ditto for access to free swimming lessons when it comes to stopping accidental drownings. But similar data on gun deaths and injuries and the effectiveness of policy to prevent them are harder to come by thanks to lack of funding and political support (SN: 5/14/16, p. 16).

Even so, “we know kids are killing themselves and others with guns,” says David Hemenway, a Harvard University economist and an expert in gun research. When it comes to combatting the problem, “the circumstances help narrow down the policy.”

Fowler says the findings “highlight the need for evidence-based solutions to address this public health problem.” She’s armed with a laundry list of potential policies that could have an impact on the whys of gun violence and make a dent in the stats. School counseling programs could help kids manage their emotions and develop skills to resolve problems in relationships and with peers, she says. Along with therapy, those programs could help to reduce suicidal behavior and youth violence. Street outreach programs may also reduce gang-related violence. Parents and pediatricians talking about storing guns safely — a policy touted by the American Academy of Pediatrics, but one that has met resistance in some states — is another option.

There’s another big need, too: more data.

Despite a better picture of what’s happening when kids get a hold of guns, the data are fragmentary and incomplete, says pediatrician Eliot Nelson of the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital in Burlington. For instance, information from the NVDRS was limited to 17 states, so the numbers aren’t nationally representative. Last year, the database was expanded to 42 states and could eventually be expanded to all 50, but that will take additional funding from Congress.

The way gun injury and death data are coded in databases is another issue. Many unintentional deaths, such as when a child accidentally shoots and kills a sibling or friend, are labeled homicides, Hemenway says. Such misclassifications make it more difficult to create a policy, he says. Take, for instance, encouraging parents to lock up guns in the house. Without correctly coded data to say that younger kids are more likely to be killed by a gun at home while older kids are more likely to be killed by guns at a friend’s house, it’s harder to know how to talk to parents. For parents of young kids, the message might be to lock up their own guns; for parents of older kids, it might be to inquire about guns at the homes of their children’s friends. “We don’t always know who best to target our message to,” Nelson says.

Studies such as Fowler’s are slowly filling in the gaps. But not fast enough for kids like Bentley, Harmony, Shadi and Artem. “We want to keep growing our knowledge to prevent problems,” Nelson says. But, he says, it’s hard to do when money and politics hamper research into the problem. Gun-related deaths ranks third as the leading cause of death in 1- to 17-year-olds in the United States. “Gun death in kids is such a common problem,” Nelson says. “We can’t continue to ignore it.”

BOSTON — If kelp growing in an underwater forest makes a sound, such noises could be used to keep tabs on ocean health.

Listening to how projected sound reverberates through kelp beds allows scientists to eavesdrop on environmental factors such as water temperature and photosynthetic activity, bioacoustician Jean-Pierre Hermand reported June 28 at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Kelp beds and forests, valuable ecosystems that house all sorts of marine life, may help buffer the effects of warmer and increasingly acidic waters (SN Online: 12/14/16). But such communities are also threatened by invasive species and aren’t immune to the effects of climate change, making monitoring kelp crucial, said Hermand, of the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
Hermand and colleagues set up microphones in Canoe Bay off Tasmania in Australia. There, Ecklonia radiata, a dominant kelp species in Australia’s reefs, grows thickly. For two weeks, the researchers deployed an underwater device that emitted a chirp every second. The underwater microphones — two in the kelp canopy and two above the canopy — recorded the chirps bouncing off everything in the environment from oxygen bubbles from photosynthesis burbling up from the kelp to the kelp itself to the water’s surface.

More than 20 fixed sensors in the water column, within and above the kelp canopy, collected all kinds of environmental data that might relate to ecosystem health. That data included dissolved oxygen in the water, pH, water temperature, salinity, photosynthetic activity and turbidity. Wind speed, which generates audible bubbles in the surface waters, was also logged.

Then the researchers examined the acoustic data, measured in decibels of energy, alongside the measured environmental variables. Mathematical analyses revealed consistent connections between the recorded sound and the environmental factors, suggesting that eavesdropping could be a good way to monitor the kelp beds, Hermand said.

While the research is preliminary, it could lead to a relatively inexpensive and efficient method for assessing the well-being of kelp beds and other marine ecosystems, says acoustics expert Preston Wilson of the University of Texas at Austin. Current methods, such as using satellite imagery, are expensive and don’t provide much detail, while hand-conducted surveys are time-consuming and labor-intensive, Wilson says, who does related research in kelp and seagrass communities.

Years of research went into learning how to eavesdrop on a sea forest. For example, to tease out what various sound signals might mean, the researchers had to figure out how kelp tissues respond to sound (turns out that it’s highly dependent on alginate content, a gummy cell wall component of kelp). And there’s much work ahead, Hermand said. Rather than relying on a device that chirps and then capturing that sound as it bounces around, the ultimate goal is to be able to learn about the kelp environment from listening alone. “Ambient noise — that’s my dream,” Hermand said.