In pictures from high above, the island of Gardi Sugdub resembles a container shipyard — small, brightly colored dwellings are jammed together cheek to jowl. At ground level, the island, one of more than 350 in the San Blas archipelago off the northern coast of Panama, is hot, flat and crowded. More than 1,000 people occupy the narrow dwellings that cover virtually every bit of the 150-by-400-meter island, which is slowly being swallowed by rising seas driven by climate change.

This year, about 300 families from Gardi Sugdub are expected to begin moving to a new community on the mainland. The resettlement plan was initiated by the residents there more than a decade ago when they could no longer deny that the island couldn’t accommodate the growing population. Rising seas and intense storms are only making the predicament more dire.
Many of the older adults will opt to stay put. Some still don’t believe climate change poses a threat, but 70-year-old Pedro Lopez is not among them. Lopez, whose cousin interpreted for him during our Zoom interview, currently shares a small house with 16 family members and the family dog. He doesn’t plan to move. He knows Gardi Sugdub, translated as Crab Island, along with many others in the archipelago, is going underwater, but he believes it won’t happen within his lifetime.

The Indigenous Guna people have occupied these Caribbean islands since around the mid-1800s, when they abandoned the coastal jungle area near what is now the Panama-Colombia border to establish better trade and escape disease-carrying pests. Now, they are among the estimated hundreds of millions of people worldwide who by the end of the century may be forced to flee their land because of rising sea levels (SN: 5/9/20 & 5/23/20, p. 22).

In the Caribbean, sea level rise currently averages around 3 to 4 millimeters per year. As global temperatures continue to rise, it is expected to hit 1 centimeter per year or more by century’s end.

All of the islands of the San Blas archipelago will eventually be underwater and uninhabitable, says Steven Paton, who directs the Physical Monitoring Program at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “Some may need to be abandoned very soon while others not for many decades,” he adds.
Anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith of the University of Florida in Gainesville has studied people who are forced from their homes by disasters for more than 50 years. Around the world, he says, climate change has become a major driver of displacement, with people who have limited resources facing the worst of it.

The impacts of climate change — flooding, rising seas and erosion — are threatening the Tuvaluans in the South Pacific, the Mi’Kmaq of Prince Edward Island in Canada and the Shinnecock Indian Nation of New York. Half of some 1,600 remaining tribe members there still occupy a more than 300-hectare territorial homeland on Long Island surrounded by multimillion-dollar Southampton mansions.

The Guna relocation is being closely watched as a possible template for other threatened communities. What sets the Guna apart from many others is that they have a place to go.

Rising sea levels in Guna Yala
More than 30,000 Indigenous Guna inhabit the province now called Guna Yala, which includes the archipelago once known as San Blas and a strip of mainland. Most live on the islands, traveling back to the mainland to get water from the mouth of the river there, and in some cases to tend crops. Some of the islands sit several meters above average sea level, but the vast majority are uninhabited spits of land with palm trees, many only a meter or less above sea level.

So far, only the residents of Gardi Sugdub are included in the relocation plan.
The Guna people of the islands are sustained by the biodiversity there. The sea, mangroves and nearby mainland forests provide food, medicine and building materials. The men hunt and fish to provide seafood to the best restaurants in Panama City, and agriculture remains part of the economy. Guna communities elect traditional authorities known as sailas (“chiefs” in Guna) and argars (“chief’s spokesmen”), and they hold regular meetings to address community issues.

In recent decades, the Guna have moved toward an economy based on tourism and providing services to outsiders. They earn money supplying food, souvenirs and cultural artifacts to tourists but allow visitors to the islands only with prior approval from the sailas. Outsiders are not permitted to own property or operate businesses.

Carlos Arenas is an international human rights lawyer and an adviser on social and climate justice issues. When he visited Gardi Sugdub in 2014 as a consultant for Displacement Solutions, a nonprofit initiative focused on housing, land and property rights, he was tasked to assess the nascent relocation plans and provide recommendations. He was shocked to see the visible threat posed by the rising sea. “You cannot see much elevation,” Arenas says. “The level of exposure was extremely high, but they don’t see it necessarily that way. They have been living there for more than 170 years.”

Heliodora Murphy grew up on Gardi Sugdub and has watched the ocean rise higher each year. The 52-year-old grandmother doesn’t understand those who dismiss climate change in light of the growing physical evidence all around. Murphy, also speaking through an interpreter, recalls her father bringing rocks and sand from a river on the mainland to shore up pathways and keep their home dry.
Arenas says that some families face a daily struggle against the ocean. They build barriers that are immediately destroyed and have to be built again.

Some of the stopgap measures have been counterproductive, like filling in coral reefs to expand the land area. Reefs are a natural buffer against wave action, storm surges, flooding and erosion. Destroying them has only added to the peril.

Today, Murphy says, storm surges carry water into her small, ground-level home. “It’s very different than in the past,” she says. “The waves are so much higher now.” About two years ago, she decided she’d move with her family. “We can’t stay here.”

A history of autonomy
Historically, the Guna have had a level of autonomy rare among Indigenous people. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is now Colombia and Panama, the Guna lived primarily near the Gulf of Urabá on the northern coast of Colombia. The two groups clashed violently, prompting the Guna to abandon the coastal border area and move north into the jungle of Panama near the Caribbean. By the mid-1800s, entire villages had relocated again, this time to the San Blas archipelago.

Panama declared its independence from Spain in 1821 and became a part of Gran Colombia. Throughout the 19th century, the Guna lived independently according to their customs. That changed in 1903 when Panama broke from Colombia. The new nation attempted to assimilate the people living on the archipelago.

But having escaped Spanish rule centuries earlier and avoided Colombian authority as well, the Guna resisted Panama’s acculturation efforts. When the Guna couldn’t achieve détente through other means, they launched an armed attack against the Panamanians in February 1925.

The United States, having occupied the Panama Canal Zone since 1903, had geopolitical interests in the region and threw its support behind the Guna. That support forced the Panamanian government into a negotiated peace that allowed the Guna to continue their way of life. In 1938, the Guna islands and adjacent coastline were recognized as a semiautonomous Indigenous territory, Guna Yala. The Guna have maintained control of that territory since.

The Guna find a new home
The Gardi Sugdub residents first broached the idea of relocation in 2010. “They basically ran out of room,” Oliver-Smith says.

He describes the Guna as the Indigenous people in Latin America who have been perhaps most successful in defending their cultural heritage, language and territory. They initiated the plans for resettlement and made arrangements among themselves to set aside 17 hectares of property on the mainland for these purposes. The land, within the Guna Yala territory, is near a school and health center being built by the Panamanian government.
When Guna leaders approached the government, the Ministry of Housing initially promised to build 50 houses on the parcel. But it remained just that — a promise — until around 2014, when the Guna began to speak publicly about their situation. News of their predicament caught the attention of Indigenous rights organizations and eventually Displacement Solutions, which turned to Arenas and Oliver-Smith to evaluate the situation and offer recommendations about the best way forward.

Following Displacement Solutions’ first report in 2014, Panama’s Ministry of Housing agreed to build 300 houses, along with the hospital and school. But Arenas, who until the COVID-19 pandemic started had visited Guna Yala every year or so, says progress remained slow, causing the Guna to question Panama’s commitment to the relocation. The Guna leveraged support from international groups and members of the Panamanian government to get the project moving. “They were the originators of the idea of resettlement,” Oliver-Smith says. “And they kept it alive.”

Arenas estimates that roughly 200 of the 300 houses in the new community are complete. The cost for the houses, which are being paid for by the Panamanian government, exceeds $10 million, and the Inter-American Development Bank has invested $800,000 in technical assistance. The new homes will have cement floors, bamboo walls, zinc roofs, running water and full electrification.

Before plans to relocate began, many Guna had already moved to cities including Panama City and Colón for school, work or simply to have more room. Arenas expects that many more people already living in mainland Panama will likely join their families in the new community. People on other Guna Yala islands will likely have to move eventually too.

Murphy has already picked out her two-bedroom home for her small nuclear family of seven. Two daughters moved to Panama City years ago, and she hopes to see them more. But at around 40 square meters, the homes may not accommodate the typical multigenerational, double-digit Guna families. Lopez plans to stay on the island, letting the younger generations live in the family’s new home on the mainland.
To ensure that the ethnic and cultural identities they fought to preserve are not lost in the move, the Guna plan to develop programs to teach traditions and culture to the resettled generations. But even on Gardi Sugdub, younger generations seem less inclined to practice the traditional customs — like making and wearing wini (vibrantly colored beads worn around the arms and legs) and molas (intricately designed fabric dresses that have become a symbol of Guna life and resistance to colonialism). Murphy began learning the craft when she was 6 years old. She spends two months constructing each ensemble, which she sells to tourists for $80.

Oliver-Smith is optimistic about the relocation plan but worries that the Panamanian government has repeated some mistakes that have doomed projects elsewhere by treating resettlement solely as a housing issue. “You don’t just pick people up and move them from point A to point B. It is a reconfiguring of a life of a people,” Oliver-Smith says. “It has political, social, economic, environmental, spiritual and cultural dimensions.”

As is often the case when Indigenous and rural communities relocate, Arenas says, the government failed to make the Guna equal participants in the design concept. “The Panamanian government is trying to build a Panama City neighborhood in the middle of a tropical forest,” he says. “They have not tried to save a single tree of this beautiful landscape…. They removed everything. They tried to flatten the land because it’s cheaper…. It’s also extremely hot there, and the building materials are hot.” This increases the risk of failure, he says, because the houses don’t match the environment.

But Murphy hopes everything will be better. The new village promises dry land and more space. And perhaps returning to the mainland the Guna occupied nearly 150 years ago will lead to a stronger connection to Guna historical culture and traditions.

Oliver-Smith says the Guna are facing the challenge of resettlement with an intact culture and language that he hopes will be a basis for maintaining cultural continuity. His time spent with the Guna has convinced him that, as disruptive and devastating as resettlement can be, the Guna relocating as a cohesive group are perhaps best equipped to emerge intact even if not unscathed.

“Carlos [Arenas] and I asked an old, retired saila if he thought resettlement would change the Guna,” he says. “He said, ‘No. Individuals may change out of choice, but our culture is eternal. It will never die.’ ”

Babies exposed to a Zika infection while in the womb are not out of the woods even if they look healthy at birth.

Nearly 1 in 10 of 1,450 babies examined developed neurological or developmental problems, such as seizures, hearing loss, impaired vision or difficulty crawling, a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds. It’s the first tally of the health of children at least 1 year old who were born in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories and exposed to Zika in utero.
Overall, 14 percent of children exposed to Zika in the womb — about 1 in 7 — were harmed in some way by the virus, the researchers report online August 7 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. These babies were either born with a birth defect such as microcephaly — a condition in which a baby’s head is significantly smaller than it should be — or developed neurological symptoms that may be related to Zika, or both.

“Congenital Zika virus infection is quite serious, even beyond just the microcephaly,” says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who was not involved in the report. “We’re still getting our arms around the full neurologic spectrum of illness” that is related to Zika.

The report also found that 6 percent of babies in the study had at least one birth defect caused by the virus, such as defects of the eye or brain or microcephaly (SN: 10/29/16, p. 14).

That’s fairly consistent with what’s seen in other countries hit by the Zika virus, Margaret Honein, director of CDC’s Division of Congenital and Developmental Disorders, said at a news conference. While a 2016 study suggested higher rates of birth defects in Brazil, “we think there isn’t a geographic difference” but more of a difference in how Zika-related birth defects are defined, she said.
The data come from the U.S. Zika Pregnancy and Infant Registry, set up to monitor pregnant women with Zika virus infection and the health of their babies. The study focuses on those pregnancies reported from Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. The children, all at least a year old, had received some follow-up medical care, such as brain imaging, hearing tests, eye exams or developmental screening. A report on pregnancies from the mainland United States is expected later this year.

Zika ravaged Brazil, Colombia and other countries of the Americas in 2015 and 2016. By 2017, the spread of the virus had slowed to a crawl (SN: 11/11/17, p. 12). But experts expect to see future outbreaks (SN: 12/23/17, p. 30).

“What makes this report unique is that we’re looking at the health of these babies beyond what was observed at birth,” Honein said. “This is really providing us with the first clues about how common some of these neurodevelopmental disabilities might be.”

Researchers suspect that health issues will continue to emerge for children exposed to Zika in the womb as they grow older. “This is why it is so absolutely critical that these babies receive care to identify issues as soon as possible,” Honein said, and that children continue to be monitored over time.

Conventional wisdom states that viruses work as lone soldiers. Scientists now report that some viruses also clump together in vesicles, or membrane-bound sacs, before an invasion. Compared with solo viruses, these viral “Trojan horses” caused more severe infections in mice, researchers report August 8 in Cell Host & Microbe.

Cell biologist Nihal Altan-Bonnet had been involved in discovering in 2015 that polioviruses can cluster together to invade cells in a petri dish. In the new study, Altan-Bonnet and a different group of colleagues find that transmission via virus clumps also occurs naturally with both rotavirus and norovirus, which can cause gastrointestinal illness.
The scientists first identified norovirus cluster vesicles in patients’ stool samples, which was “eye-opening,” says Altan-Bonnet, who works at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “We can see these vesicles everywhere.”

Altan-Bonnet and her team infected live mice with either vesicle-packaged rotavirus or equal amounts of single virus particles. Vesicles were not only more successful in causing infections, they also caused infections that were more severe, the researchers found. In the mice, it took five times the amount of single virus particles to cause the same severity of infection as caused by the clustered viruses. It also took the mice two to four days longer to fight off the cluster-caused infections.
While the mice were sick, the researchers found viral clumps in their feces, showing that the vesicles were able to survive the harsh environment of the GI system unscathed. It’s still unclear, however, if the viruses remain inside the vesicles to invade cells, and if so, how.
The clusters act like a Trojan horse, Altan-Bonnet suggests. “The wooden horse would be the vesicle, and inside it you have all the soldiers.” She has several hypotheses for why viruses behave this way. Vesicles may help the viruses evade the immune system or replicate faster inside cells. “We really have to rethink the way we think about viruses,” she says.

Norovirus and rotavirus, which can be dangerous for children and the elderly, kill a combined total of about 265,000 children each year worldwide, mostly in developing countries (SN: 8/8/15, p. 5). The researchers hope the discovery of vesicle transmission will lead to better prevention methods and treatments, for example, by targeting the membranes containing the virus clusters.

Because the long-standing “dogma in the field” suggested viruses were transmitted individually, it’s not surprising that these vesicles were missed in earlier virus research, says Craig Wilen, a physician at the Yale School of Medicine who recently discovered what cells norovirus targets in mice (SN: 5/12/18, p. 14). “It’s probably been seen and just dismissed.”

Wilen says that there are still questions about viral clusters that need to be answered. For example, he says, “how does the virus escape the vesicle?” Other questions that remain include how the vesicle latches on to a cell’s surface, and what advantage the viruses actually get from packaging themselves together.

Peer pressure can be tough for kids to resist, even if it comes from robots.

School-aged children tend to echo the incorrect but unanimous responses of a group of robots to a simple visual task, a new study finds. In contrast, adults who often go along with the errant judgments of human peers resist such social pressure applied by robots, researchers report August 15 in Science Robotics.

“Rather than seeing a robot as a machine, children may see it as a social character,” says psychologist Anna-Lisa Vollmer of Bielefeld University, Germany. “This might explain why they succumb to peer pressure [applied] by robots.”
Little is known about how either adults or children respond to the behavior of lifelike robots designed to interact with people, for example, as museum tour guides, child-care assistants and teaching aids.

In a preliminary examination of the influence of social robots, Vollmer’s group adapted a 1950s social psychology experiment in which most adults agreed with groups of peers who had been coached to say that lines of different lengths were in fact the same length (SN Online: 5/15/18).

Vollmer’s team observed comparable social conformity in a study of 60 British adults, ages 18 to 69, who judged line lengths after hearing the opinions of three peers who were working with the researchers. Participants usually endorsed peers’ unanimous, inaccurate judgments. Conformity vanished, however, when volunteers performed the task while sitting with three robots that, on some trials, agreed on an incorrect answer.
Each robot was programmed to make periodic movements, such as blinking its eyes and briefly gazing at others. Robots spoke with distinctive, individualized voice pitches when making line judgments.
When children sat with the robots, though, the kids frequently went all-in. The study’s 43 participating British grade-schoolers, aged 7 to 9, agreed with three-quarters of the robots’ unanimous, inaccurate answers. The kids did not participate in conformity experiments with trios of same-age human peers, given the difficulty of getting youngsters to act convincingly according to researchers’ directions.

Still, larger samples of volunteers are needed to confirm that kids usually cave to social pressure from robots. Cultural factors, such as being raised in a society that emphasizes individualism or group values, also may influence how people of all ages perceive and react to social robots.

Three unresolved issues in particular stand out, says psychologist and child development researcher Paul Harris of Harvard University. First, it’s unclear whether some robot behaviors, but not others, triggered conformity in children. A bot’s periodic head turns toward a child, for example, might sway that youngster’s choice more than the same robot’s eye blinks or finger movements. It’s also unclear why adults who bent to human peer pressure reversed course with robots.

Finally, Harris asks, “Would fine-tuning of the robots’ repertoire [of movements and vocalizations] eventually elicit deference even from adults?”

Experimental anticancer drugs may help protect against liver damage caused by acetaminophen overdoses.

In mice poisoned with the common painkiller, the drugs prevented liver cells from entering a sort of pre-death state known as senescence. The drugs also widened the treatment window: Mice need to get the drug doctors currently use to counteract an overdose within four hours or they will die, but the experimental drugs worked even 12 hours later, researchers report August 15 in Science Translational Medicine.
If the liver-rescuing results are verified in clinical trials, this therapy may buy time for people who accidentally or intentionally overdose on Tylenol or other medications containing the painkiller acetaminophen. In the United States, such overdoses occur more than 100,000 times a year and are the leading cause of acute liver failure. Many people get treatment on time or recover on their own, but some require emergency liver transplants. And 150 people on average die of acetaminophen poisoning each year.

Currently, doctors treat such overdoses with N-acetylcysteine, an antidote that must be given within eight hours of ingesting a potentially fatal dose. Some people don’t make it to a doctor in time, and will die or need transplants.

In the study, untreated mice died within 18 hours. But mice given the new drugs survived at least a week until researchers sacrificed the rodents to examine their livers.

The anticancer drugs work by blocking a signal from a tumor growth-stimulating protein called TGF-beta, which is activated by inflammation provoked by the overdose. When unchecked, TGF-beta sends a stress signal that puts liver cells in senescence, liver specialist Thomas Bird of Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow and colleagues report.

Freshwater is crucial for drinking, washing, growing food, producing energy and just about every other aspect of modern life. Yet more than 2 billion of Earth’s 7.6 billion inhabitants lack clean drinking water at home, available on demand.

A major United Nations report, released in June, shows that the world is not on track to meet a U.N. goal: to bring safe water and sanitation to everyone by 2030. And by 2050, half the world’s population may no longer have safe water.

Will people have enough water to live?

Two main factors are pushing the planet toward a thirstier future: population growth and climate change. For the first, the question is how to balance more people against the finite amount of water available.
India has improved water access in rural areas, but remains at the top of the list for sheer number of people (163 million) lacking water services. Ethiopia, second on the list with 61 million people lacking clean water, has improved substantially since the last measurement in 2000, but still has a high percentage of total residents without access.

Short of any major but unlikely breakthroughs, such as new techniques to desalinate immense amounts of seawater (SN: 8/20/16, p. 22), humankind will have to make do with whatever freshwater already exists.

Most of the world’s freshwater goes to agriculture, mainly to irrigating crops but also to raising livestock and farming aquatic organisms, such as fish and plants. As the global population rises, agricultural production rises to meet demand for more varied diets. In recent decades, the increase in water withdrawal from the ground or lakes and rivers has slowed, whether for agriculture, industries or municipalities, but it still outpaced the rate of population growth since 1940.
That means every drop is increasingly precious — and tough choices must be made. Plant your fields with sugarcane to make ethanol for fuel, and you can’t raise crops to feed your family. Dam a river to produce electricity, and people downstream can no longer fish. Pump groundwater out for yourself, and your neighbor might just want to fight over it. Researchers call this the food-water-energy nexus and say it is one of the biggest challenges facing our increasingly industrialized, globalized and thirsty world.

“There just isn’t enough water to meet all our needs,” says Paolo D’Odorico, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley whose team analyzed the food-water-energy nexus in a paper published online April 20 in Reviews of Geophysics.

Overall, the energy sector is expected to consume more and more water in decades to come. And sometimes what sounds like a good idea — such as switching to renewable energy sources to reduce carbon emissions — might help in one area but hurt in another. For example, it can take more water to grow biofuel crops than to consume fossil fuels.
** Water consumption is defined as water that is used and not returned to its source. These projections are based on nations’ stated commitments to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Source: World Energy Outlook 2016 Special Report: Water-Energy Nexus/IEA

Then there’s climate change. As greenhouse gases build up in Earth’s atmosphere, trapping heat and altering the planet’s weather and climate, water will become more precious. Rising global temperatures alter weather patterns and change how water cycles between the ground and the atmosphere. Freshwater stores can shrink. Extreme events, such as flooding and drought, are becoming more common on our warming planet (SN: 1/20/18, p. 6). That means more water in places where people don’t need it, and less water where they do.

The map below shows how water stress — the ratio of water use to water supply — is expected to look by the year 2040. It assumes a “business-as-usual” scenario in which carbon emissions rise steadily. The highest stress is expected in areas where water supply is vulnerable because of already arid climates and growing populations.
Cities will bear the brunt of future water shortages. Early this year, it looked as if the more than 4 million people living in Cape Town, South Africa, were going to run out of water. Officials calculated a “Day Zero” in April when the taps would run dry. Only through belated and desperate conservation measures, such as slashing the amount of water for irrigating crops, did city residents eke through until the rainy season began in May. That Cape Town crisis is almost certainly the first of many.

By 2050, some 3.5 billion to 4.4 billion people around the world will live with limited access to water, more than 1 billion of them in cities. Among 482 cities, more than a quarter will face demands that outpace supply, according to a study that analyzed water sources and demands. In general, urban growth is the main driver of cities’ future water deficits. Los Angeles tops the list because its population is expected to boom even as climate change dries up its water sources. Cities will be worse off if other sectors get priority for water access.
In the face of such inexorable changes, it’s easy to despair. But science offers hope, in the form of alternative paths forward. Computer modelers at MIT, for example, find that policies to fight climate change, such as the 2015 Paris agreement that the United States announced its intention to pull out of last year (SN Online: 6/1/17), can reduce the severity of future water shortages. If nations follow commitments similar to those in the agreement, 60 million people across Asia could avoid dire water scarcity by 2050, the team wrote in June in Environmental Research Letters.

But the Paris agreement is not enough. As research increasingly makes clear, there are trade-offs and decisions to be made. Cape Town’s experience shows how governments need to better prepare for the competing demands on water supplies. Municipalities may need to raise the cost of water to the point where people value it enough to conserve it.

“We can address the problem by thinking about technological solutions, but we also have to think about changing our behavior,” says Martina Flörke, a hydrologist and environmental scientist at the University of Kassel in Germany. “If we can make clear … that water has value, that it’s an ecosystem service that we use and have to take care of — then we are really thinking about how to adapt.”

Here’s good news for anyone who’s had to sweep up pasta shards after snapping dry spaghetti and thought, “there’s got to be a better way.”

There is.

Simply bending a stick of spaghetti in half typically shatters it into three or more fragments. That’s because when the stick breaks, vibrations wrack the remaining halves, causing smaller pieces to splinter off (SN: 11/12/05, p. 315). To avoid this problem, give the spaghetti stick a twist before bending it, researchers report online August 13 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Vishal Patil, a mathematician at MIT, and colleagues discovered this technique by breaking hundreds of pieces of pasta with a custom-made spaghetti-snapping device. These observations, along with computer simulations of the system, reveal that when a spaghetti stick is twisted, it doesn’t bend as far before breaking. As a result, the vibrations that rattle the spaghetti halves post-snap aren’t strong enough to cause further fracturing.

The exact amount of twist required to give pasta a clean break depends on the length of the rod, but for a typical stick 24 centimeters long to crack neatly in two, it’s at least 250 degrees.

This strategy may not be much practical help in the kitchen; Patil and colleagues aren’t selling their spaghetti snapper for $19.95 — and even if they were, meticulously twisting and bending pieces of pasta one-by-one is hardly efficient meal prep. Still, the discovery of the bend-and-twist technique may lend new insight into controlling the breakage of all kinds of brittle rods, from pole vault sticks to nanotubes.

Half a century ago, if you asked any teenage science fan to name the best popular science writers, you’d get two names: Isaac Asimov and George Gamow.

Asimov was prominent not only for his nonfiction science books, but also for his science fiction. Gamow was known not only for writing popular science, but was also a prominent scientist who had made important contributions both to physics and biology.

Fifty years ago this month, Gamow’s career ended when he died at the age of 64. His books and scientific papers survive him, leaving plenty of science and science writing worth celebrating. Nuclear physics, astrophysics, modern cosmology and molecular biology all benefited from Gamow’s fertile intellect.
Like Asimov, Gamow was born in Russia (Odessa). But while Asimov came to the United States as a child, Gamow grew up in Russia, went to college first in Odessa (studying math) and then to the university in Petrograd (soon to become Leningrad), where he became a physicist. At Leningrad he attended lectures by the mathematician Alexander Friedmann. Friedmann was the first to fully realize that Einstein’s new general theory of relativity implied a dynamic universe — one that would expand or contract — rather than the static never-changing cosmos that most experts (including Einstein) believed in at the time.

Gamow planned to pursue a career in relativity under Friedmann’s direction. But Friedmann died young, in 1925. So Gamow fell in with a group of students more interested in quantum physics than relativity. “We spent all our time following the new [quantum] publications and trying to understand them,” Gamow wrote in his autobiography.

While a visitor at one of Europe’s top centers for quantum theory — the University of Göttingen in Germany — he solved a mystery about radioactive decay by identifying one of the quantum world’s most important phenomena: tunneling. In one form of radioactive decay, an atomic nucleus emits alpha particles that are moving too slowly to have overcome an energy “barrier” supposedly preventing their escape. (The analogy is a hill too steep for a slow-moving ball to reach the top without rolling back down.) Gamow showed that the wave mechanics version of quantum physics permitted the alpha particle to “tunnel” through the energy-barrier hill. Quantum tunneling turned out to be important for many other features of nature, such as how the sun shines, how many chemical reactions proceed and maybe even how the universe began.
His work on tunneling impressed Niels Bohr, the leading quantum physicist in the world, earning Gamow a fellowship for study at Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. During time there and at Cambridge University, Gamow became one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear physics theory. He also became well-known for his humor and irreverence, including a “relentless mockery of science’s solemnity,” as one biographical account put it.
Returning to the Soviet Union in 1929, Gamow found the political atmosphere for continuing his work unfavorable. He eventually managed to emigrate to the United States, where he obtained a position at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1934. There he studied the evolution and energy production of stars, producing fruitful insights into the stellar explosions known as supernovas. Later, he turned his attention to the universe at large, developing early versions of what became the Big Bang theory (Gamow didn’t like the name) of the origin and evolution of the universe. In 1942, the historian Helge Kragh wrote, “Gamow clearly endorsed a big-bang picture and suggested that the gross material of the present world is the result of what happened some two billion years ago in a highly compressed primeval state.” Gamow’s timing was off (it was nearly 14 billion years ago), but his basic idea was right.
After World War II, Gamow found new fun with the “physics of biology.” He wondered, for instance, about the physical processes allowing cells to make proteins. Inspired by Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper on the structure of DNA — the molecule that makes genes — Gamow speculated that some sort of code could be translated from DNA to build the long chains of amino acids that constituted proteins. Nature provided merely 20 such amino acids for constructing thousands of distinct proteins.

Gamow realized that DNA’s four subcomponent “bases” could be thought of as numbers that could be translated into “words” specifying a chain of amino acids, linked in a specific order, chosen from their 20-letter “alphabet.” He saw that if you chose three DNA bases at a time, there were about 20 possible combinations, indicating that each three-base “triplet” might correspond to an amino acid. He couldn’t crack the code for which base combinations went with which amino acids, though, even with help from some U.S. Navy cryptologists. But Gamow had more or less the right idea, although he didn’t recognize at first that an intermediate molecule, RNA, had to “read” the DNA code first before transferring the information to the cell’s protein-making apparatus.

Throughout his career, Gamow desired to share his enthusiasm for the science he investigated, not only with fellow scientists but with people in general. Today, it is fairly common for prominent scientists to write popular books. But it was not that way in the 1930s, when Gamow first tried to explain relativity and quantum physics through the eyes of his fictional character, Mr. Tompkins. Mr. Tompkins lived in worlds where the speed of light was small or Planck’s constant was large, allowing Gamow to illustrate the strangeness of the new physics in an entertaining and intuitively accessible way. To learn about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for instance, Mr. Tompkins visited a billiard parlor where a professor placed a ball inside a wooden triangle. The ball began to move rapidly at varying speeds within the triangle, because restricting its position to the triangular space increased the uncertainty about its velocity. (And then the ball escaped the triangle, not by jumping over its wooden wall, but by “leaking” through it. Tunneling.)

After many rejections, Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland appeared in 1940, followed by Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom in 1944. Later Gamow produced other more straightforward accounts of the frontiers of physics, and science more generally, in such books as One Two Three … Infinity and Matter Earth and Sky.

Gamow moved to the University of Colorado in 1956, focusing on his popular books as his prominence in science diminished. His nonconformity and irreverent attitude, along with his emphasis on popularization, did not play well with many of his peers. And he was a heavy drinker, impairing his ability to engage with other physicists and possibly contributing to his death.

Still, his science was substantial. And even if it hadn’t been, his writing contributed to the scientific enterprise via another important avenue — by opening the wonders of the world of science to a great many teenagers who are scientists, or science writers, today.

A scientific takedown of a famous finding known as the 30-million-word gap may upend popular notions of how kids learn vocabulary.

Research conducted more than 20 years ago concluded that by age 4, poor children hear an average of 30 million fewer words than their well-off peers. Since then, many researchers have accepted the reported word gap as a driver of later reading and writing problems among low-income youngsters. A Providence, R.I., program inspired by the study, for example, now teaches poor parents how to talk more with their kids.
But here’s the rap on the word gap: It doesn’t exist, says a team led by psychologist Douglas Sperry of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana. In a redo of the original study, virtually no class differences appeared in the number of words addressed to young children by a primary caregiver, Sperry and colleagues report in a study to be published in Child Development.

What’s more, after including speech spoken directly to children by various caretakers as well as family members’ conversations that the youngsters could easily overhear, kids in some poor and working-class communities heard more words on average than middle-class youngsters, the scientists say. Within each of those communities, some children heard many more words than others did despite belonging to the same social class, Sperry’s team adds.

“It’s time to turn a skeptical eye to the word-gap claim,” Sperry says.

Researchers usually treat word learning as a product of one or both parents regularly talking to a child. But different, equally effective ways exist for children to learn vocabulary, Sperry contends. Depending on culture and community, word learning depends to varying extents on a main caretaker talking to a child, many caretakers talking to a child and youngsters overhearing family members talking, he says (SN: 2/17/18, p. 22).
The original word-gap study included 42 children in Kansas from either of four communities — poor, working class, middle class or wealthy professional. Sperry’s group analyzed data on word use collected during home observations of 42 children in five communities — poor whites in South Baltimore, poor blacks in Alabama, working-class (largely blue-collar) whites in Indiana and Chicago, and middle-class (largely white-collar) whites in Chicago.
Videotaped home observations began when children were 18 to 30 months old. Intermittent observations continued until kids reached ages 32 to 48 months. Most primary caregivers were children’s mothers.

Primary caregivers in poor, black Alabama families directed an average of 1,838 words per hour to their children, close to the corresponding figure of 2,153 words per hour for high-income, white caregivers in Kansas in the original word-gap study. The earlier study reported that primary caregivers on welfare in Kansas spoke an average of 616 words per hour to their children, about one-third the total spoken to poor, black children in the new study. Primary caregivers from working-class and middle-class families in the new study uttered an average of 1,048 to 1,491 words per hour to youngsters.

Taking multiple caregivers into account, average hourly words spoken to children in each community increased by 17 percent or more. An increase of 58 percent occurred in Alabama’s poor, black households. In addition, kids in poor families overheard an average of 3,203 words per hour. Eavesdropping figures reached no higher than about 2,500 words per hour in the other households. Greater numbers of older siblings in the poor, black families contributed to that disparity, the researchers suspect.

The new study convincingly rejects claims of a word-gap for poor children, says cultural anthropologist Jennifer Keys Adair of the University of Texas at Austin.

White, middle-class parents and many educators wrongly assume that vocabulary learning always proceeds best via one-on-one interactions of parents with children, or teachers with grade-school students, Adair says. That assumption may not apply to kids from other cultural backgrounds. Adair has found, for instance, that first-graders from Latin American immigrant families — who were allowed to devise classroom projects, collaborate with one another and ask questions without raising their hands — did especially well three years later on state English assessments.

But some child researchers say the new study falls short of showing that poor kids are generally exposed to as much language as better-off peers.

Sperry’s group, for example, did not study children in upper-class, professional households, as researchers did in the 1990s. And other studies of early word learning point to a need for programs that help low-income parents engage their children in language-boosting conversations, conclude psychologist Roberta Golinkoff of the University of Delaware in Newark and colleagues in comment that will appear in the same journal.

“Overhearing language about death and taxes — topics of interest to adults — can never be as effective for language learning as participating in conversations about what matters to children,” Golinkoff and her colleagues write in their comment.

Kids frequently eavesdrop, Sperry responds. Ongoing research shows that “young children are very interested in talk that occurs around them, particularly when parents or siblings are talking about the child.”

While that may be so, little is known about the role of overheard speech and social context in language learning. Sperry and his colleagues plan to take a closer look at the difficult-to-study issue of how eavesdropping on family members influences later reading and writing skills.

Late-night comedians skewered Vice President Mike Pence in August when he announced preliminary plans for a new branch of the U.S. military dubbed the “Space Force.” Jimmy Kimmel likened the idea to a Michael Bay action movie, while Jimmy Fallon quipped that the Space Force’s chain of command would go “E.T., Yoda, then Groot.”

But, as a new book by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and researcher-writer Avis Lang demonstrates, the militarization of space is no joke.
In Accessory to War, Tyson and Lang chronicle how war-makers have long wielded knowledge of outer space as a weapon. This bloody history features Christopher Columbus exploiting his awareness of an upcoming lunar eclipse to threaten natives on the island of Hispaniola with divine retribution, as well as the United States using satellite intelligence to fight the Gulf War.

“As for America’s forthcoming wars,” Tyson and Lang predict, “they will be waged with even more formidable space assets.”

But just as militaries have long used space science and space-based technology to their advantage, astronomers and astrophysicists have reaped the rewards of military investment. James Cook, a captain in the British Navy, for example, established an observatory in Tahiti. Observations of Venus passing across the face of the sun in 1769 from that observatory helped astronomers pin down the distance between Earth and the sun. During the Cold War, U.S. military satellites designed to watch for nuclear detonations discovered gamma-ray bursts, some of the most spectacular explosions in the universe (SN: 1/10/15, p. 15).
Tyson and Lang’s millennia-long world history is sprawling. The book is exhaustively researched, almost to the point of information overload. It’s easy to get bogged down in parenthetical asides about minor characters or paragraph-long lists. The book is the antithesis of Tyson’s starry-eyed, bite-sized Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and may end up on the shelves of more history buffs than astro nerds.

Still, Accessory to War lives up to much of the promise of a Neil deGrasse Tyson read: Written from Tyson’s perspective, the narration is rich with wry humor and vivid descriptions of cosmic goings-on. For anyone who is, like Tyson, “smitten by the cosmos,” the book is a stark reminder that astrophysics has been both a benefactor and beneficiary of human conflict — and that the final frontier will likely be the battleground of many future skirmishes.

Buy Accessory to War from Amazon.com. Science News is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Please see our FAQ for more details.