Author: Kate Horowitz

A sunny yellow edible mushroom has just joined the noble ranks of new species named for the Windy City. Writing in the journal Mycologia, fungus researchers say the Chicago chanterelle had been under our noses all along.

There’s a reason we missed it: fungus is kind of tricky. “Plants are there almost all the time,” lead researcher and Field Museum mycologist Patrick Leacock told mental_floss. Fungi are far more ephemeral. Some species pop up only once every five years, others once a year. They appear overnight and are gone just a few days later. “You have to be in the right place at the right time” to see them, Leacock said. To date, he and his colleagues have cataloged more than 1000 different fungi species across the Chicago area.

Leacock and his co-authors had seen yellow chanterelles there, too, but they had no reason to believe the mushrooms were special. There are chanterelles all over the place. Then researchers in other parts of the country began taking a closer look at the chanterelles in their backyards. They sequenced the fungi’s genomes and discovered that what had appeared to be one standard North American variety was actually a number of distinct species. One 2014 paper suggested that there might be as many as 100 unidentified types of chanterelles still out there.

The Chicago team decided to test their own wild specimens. During the summers from 2000 to 2014, they collected yellow chanterelles in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, noting the location in which each mushroom was found. They extracted DNA from 21 of their fresh specimens, 20 dried mushrooms, and one preserved piece, and sequenced each sample.

 
Sure enough, the golden mushrooms nestled at the base of Illinois oak trees were a species all their own. Cantharellus chicagoensis looks a lot like its nearby cousins, but its flavor is more delicate and its aroma milder.

Want to find your own? You’ll likely have to wait until next summer, as C. chicagoensis is a summer variety. Head out of the city center and into the nearby forest preserves. Look for oak trees and check at the base.

Because this is Chicago we’re talking about, we had to ask: How would this new species fare on a slice of deep-dish pizza?

So-so, Leacock said: “It’s not the best use of it.” He recommends a nice omelet instead.

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Physician, educator, and philanthropist Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have announced a wildly ambitious $3 billion plan to “eliminate, cure, or prevent disease” by the end of this century.

The couple intend to spend their money on basic science research—that is, the study of the fundamental concepts and phenomena that make up our world. Basic research is essential to scientific and medical advancement, yet it’s often overlooked and underfunded in favor of drug research and other studies with more immediate potential to change human lives. The initiative will also support education, health research, and internet connectivity, which many consider a public health issue in its own right.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has already signed on and consulted with a number of scientific heavy hitters, including Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, a prominent cancer researcher.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the initiative aims to create networks of thinkers. “Building tools requires bringing scientists and engineers together in large numbers for large periods of time, and that’s not something most science funding is set up to do,” Zuckerberg told Nature. “That emerged to us as a big opening where we could help grow this movement among other scientific funders.”

The initiative’s “challenge networks” will bring together teams of scientists from different backgrounds, specialties, and institutions to tackle large-scale medical issues like neurodegenerative disease.

Superstar neuroscientist Cornelia Bargmann will be the initiative’s “president of science.” Speaking to Nature, Bargmann expressed excitement about the initiative’s focus on collaboration, which she says may reduce redundancy and introduce new ways of thinking.

“In my lab, everyone now writes code; that’s a bit like everyone making their own soap,” she said. “We should be finding ways of doing this that are general and powerful, that allow us to interact and share our knowledge.”

[h/t Nature]

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A new study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found “shocking” levels of harmful chemicals in common household dust collected across the United States.

Products we use never really stay put: Particles from our hairspray and oven cleaner drift through the air and accumulate in the specks of dust hiding under the bed and on the windowsills. When we inhale, we take some of that dust, and thus some of those chemicals, into our body. Consequently, determining just how common those chemicals are is a pretty important question. Yet until now, most studies on the subject have looked at small samples or considered only a handful of chemicals.

So a team of public health researchers from five institutions (George Washington University, the Silent Spring Institute, the National Resource Defense Council, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the University of California, San Francisco) decided to take a look at the bigger picture. They compared the results of 27 studies on household dust collected in 14 U.S. states.

The news was not good. The team’s meta-analysis of vacuumed-up dust revealed 45 different potentially harmful chemicals, all of which came from consumer products like vinyl flooring, toiletries, cleaning products, building materials, and furniture. Ten of the chemicals, including a carcinogenic flame retardant, were present in 90 percent of all samples.

Some classes of chemicals were more prevalent than others. Compounds called phthalates, which are commonly added to perfume, lotion, nail polish, shower curtains, plastic wrap, and vinyl siding, were found in significantly higher concentrations than any other chemicals. The phthalates DEP, DEHP, DNBP, and DIBP are all known health hazards and can interfere with the body’s hormones and respiratory system.

“The number and levels of toxic and untested chemicals that are likely in every one of our living rooms was shocking to me,” co-author Veena Singla, a staff scientist at the National Resource Defense Council, said in a press statement. “Harmful chemicals used in everyday products and building materials result in widespread contamination of our homes.”

Still, let’s not freak out. While the chemicals were certainly varied and present, nobody is saying that your dust bunnies are trying to kill you. We are not in imminent danger of dropping dead from dust. And we’re not completely helpless. There are a number of things you can do to reduce your exposure. For starters, keep your house as dust-free as possible, and use a vacuum with a HEPA filter. Wash your hands. And we know it’s not easy, but try to steer clear of products containing phthalates [PDF].

“Consumers have the power to make healthier choices and protect themselves from harmful chemicals in everyday products,” Robin Dodson, co-author and an environmental exposure scientist at the Silent Spring Institute, said in the statement. “These things can make a real difference not only in their health but also in shifting the market toward safer products.”

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Climate change has been shaping human existence for a long time. Researchers, who published their findings today, September 21, in the journal Nature, say our prehistoric ancestors dispersed across the globe in waves, inspired by dramatic changes in the world’s climate.

Exactly how and why our distant ancestors found their way through and out of Africa is the subject of much speculation and research. Earlier studies have concluded that Earth’s orbit caused natural and widespread climate changes in the Late Pleistocene epoch 126,000 to 11,000 years ago, and that these changes might have driven Homo sapiens to scatter and spread across the shifting continents.

To test this theory, researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa decided to look for clues in the planet’s climate. They created a computer simulation that tracked changes in life—sustaining elements like vegetation, glacier melt, sea level, and temperature—that could have forced humans to get up and go. 

Their results suggest that early humans did indeed spread in waves. In fact, there were distinct cycles of human exit from Africa, the most significant of which happened around 60,000 years ago, according to the data.

Study co-author Tobias Friedrich created this video depicting human dispersal and density from Africa throughout the world from 125,000 years to 1000 years ago. 

There was one unexpected finding: According to this model, around 80,000 years ago there was a small but rapid human migration into Europe. Unlike the rest of the model’s conclusions, this time estimate conflicts pretty significantly with the archaeological record, which puts the first modern people in Europe no earlier than 45,000 years ago.

William Harcourt-Smith is a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. He was not affiliated with the current study. “This sort of modelling, trying to think about the dispersal of modern humans across the globe in a truly biogeographical sense, is to be applauded,” he told mental_floss.

But Harcourt-Smith is not convinced by the new paper’s pushing back of the first human arrival in Europe by some 35,000 years. The evidence for the first entry occurring about 45,000 years ago is sound, he says: “We know this from the fossil record (modern humans look very different from late Pleistocene Neanderthals) and the distinct archaeological markers found only at modern human sites.”

While fascinating, he says, the new paper is “very, very speculative at best” and should be considered a jumping-off point for further research.

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Score another one for planet Earth: The president has signed off on the very first Marine National Monument in the Atlantic Ocean. New England’s new Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument will protect chubby octopuses, ancient sharks, and underwater chasms deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Unlike its cerulean cousin the Pacific, the Atlantic Ocean is not known for its beauty or colorful wildlife. But the new monument’s 4913-square-mile area is home to astonishing biological and geological diversity, including three submerged canyons (Oceanographer, Gilbert, and Lydonia) and four extinct underwater volcanoes (Mytilus, Bear, Physalia, and Retriever). Scientific expeditions through the area have spotted creatures great and small, from sperm whales to tiny crabs and jellies.

 
The area’s protections will extend above the surface to include seabirds like Atlantic puffins. It’s a region of immense natural beauty and value, but it—like the rest of our oceans—is in very real danger.

 
This is why a coalition of 49 different ocean conservation organizations and aquaria wrote a letter this June [PDF] urging the president and his staff to put protections in place for the canyons and seamounts area. “While the area is largely untouched and wild today,” they wrote, “it is highly vulnerable to disturbance and should be protected now from the push to fish, drill, and mine in ever deeper and more remote places. As climate change and ocean acidification continue to affect ocean life, it also becomes more and more urgent to establish blue parks in important and relatively pristine ocean habitats such as this one.”

This week, their wish came true. Speaking at the 2016 Our Ocean Conference in Washington, D.C. on September 15, President Obama announced the monument’s official designation. “One of the reasons I ran for president was to make sure that America does our part to protect our planet for future generations,” he said. The president reminisced about his childhood in Hawaii, where he learned of the ocean’s “magic” and how “if the waves are a little too big and you’ve gone a little too far out, how it inspires fear and a healthy respect.”

President Obama spoke of the future, of our responsibility to keep our planet safe for future generations. “The notion that the ocean I grew up with is not something that I can pass on to my kids and my grandkids is unacceptable,” he said. “So the investment that all of us together make here today is vital for our economy. It’s vital for our foreign policy. It’s vital for our national security. But it’s also vital for our spirit. It’s vital to who we are.”

Lee Crockett oversees ocean conservation for the Pew Charitable Trust. “For everyone who recognizes the value of this unique ecosystem and cherishes a healthy, productive ocean, this monument designation is a huge win,” he said in a press statement.

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Can we really protect ourselves from germs by snapping up our fallen snacks within five seconds? Two scientists at Rutgers have tested the rule and say the answer is a resounding “…sort of.” They published their findings in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

The five-second rule, for those of you not familiar (what, did you skip elementary school?), states that food dropped on the floor is still safe to eat as long as you pick it up within five seconds. The origins of the rule are murky, but study co-author Donald W. Schaffner attributes it to Genghis Khan. Speaking to the New York Times, Schaffner said the legendary warlord once claimed that food was safe to eat for a full five hours after it had fallen to the ground. As centuries passed and we learned about germs, that five-hour estimate became a lot more conservative.

Five hours, five seconds—does timing really matter? Schaffner and his co-author Robyn C. Miranda decided to find out. They dropped four foods (watermelon, bread, bread with butter, and strawberry gummies) on four different surfaces (stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood, and indoor/outdoor carpet) for four different periods of time (less than one, five, 30, and 300 seconds) and measured the amount of bacteria each sample collected. They were looking specifically at the bacterium Enterobacter aerogenes, which causes all kinds of nasty infections.

They found that there might be something to that five-second rule after all, or at least the idea of retrieving downed morsels as soon as possible. The longer the food samples sat on the ground, the more bacteria they attracted. But bacteria did manage to find them all, even the one- and five-second samples. Even the speediest hand couldn’t snatch a gummy from the jaws of instantaneous bacterial invasion.

Interestingly, the authors say, time may be the least important part of the equation. Two other components had a huge impact on a sample’s vulnerability.

The first variable is the type of food, specifically its moisture content. It’s biology 101: Bacteria love water. It’s why your dish sponge starts to reek if you don’t regularly squeeze it out. It’s also why bacteria swarmed the wet watermelon while paying little attention to the gummy strawberries.

The other thing that made a difference was the surface onto which the food had fallen. Tile and stainless steel were the grossest, while carpet was relatively clean, but each sample’s bacterial content was ultimately determined by interactions between all three factors (time, food, and surface).

Now, for the five-second question: Does any of this matter? Should we give up on every Dorito we ever drop again? That’s really up to you. Honestly, there’s already bacteria all over everything you will ever touch (not to mention the teeming bacterial ecosystem that lives in your mouth), and most of it is completely harmless.

“I’ve eaten food off the floor,” Schaffner told the Times. Still, he recommends considering the water content of your lost bite. “If I were to drop a piece of watermelon on my relatively clean kitchen floor, I’m telling you, man, it’s going in the compost.”

[h/t The New York Times]

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We all like to think we know what other animals are saying. “Leave my acorn alone!” screams the squirrel on the sidewalk. “I’m so glad you’re home!” cheers your dog when you walk in the door. But the truth is that we don’t actually know. Animal communication researchers have made enormous advances in the last few decades, but there is still plenty to learn. So when one scientist said he’d found evidence of human-like dialogue in dolphins, experts raised an eyebrow.

Dolphins are incredibly smart animals, although they don’t always use their considerable intellect for good. They’re also very social, which means that communication is vital to their survival. Their clicks and whistles have a range of uses, from calling pod members to signaling an attack on some hapless shark. Each dolphin has its own signature whistle, which acts like its name, and some recent research suggests that female dolphins start teaching their calves their own names before they’re even born.

Author Vyacheslav Ryabov, of the T. I. Vyazemsky Karadag Scientific Station in Ukraine, was interested in the casual dolphin-to-dolphin discussions of Yana and Yasha, two of the station’s captive bottlenose dolphins. He used underwater microphones to record the dolphins’ chatter as they floated near the edge of their pool, then analyzed the rhythms and frequencies of each dolphin’s noises.

Ryabov concluded that Yana and Yasha were carrying on a sophisticated, human-like conversation, in which each dolphin waited for the other to finish its “sentence” before starting to speak.

“Dolphins have possessed brains that are somewhat larger and more complex than human ones for more than 25 million years,” he writes. “Due to this, for further research in this direction, humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of using languages and in the way of communications between dolphins and people.”

Dolphin translator technology isn’t quite as far-fetched as it sounds; researchers at the Wild Dolphin Project have been fine-tuning one such device for years. And the idea that dolphins don’t interrupt each other is not new. Still, Ryabov took it to the next level, veering into somewhat zany and hyperbolic territory, and other researchers are pretty turned off by both his utopian vision of dolphin-human brotherhood and his somewhat primitive research methods.

“It is complete bull,” marine biologist Richard Connor told Jason Bittel at National Geographic. Other experts, like Wild Dolphin Project research director Denise Herzing, were slightly more diplomatic in their language.

“This article does not present adequate data to make conclusions about dolphin sound structure or language,” she said in a statement to mental_floss. “Although we applaud the author for exploring dolphin vocalizations with some new methods, we urge caution regarding these conclusions and look forward to the day when we put the question of nonhuman animal language to the test.”

And then there’s the paper’s suspiciously short review period. The journal that published it, the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics, notes that the article was submitted August 16 and published a mere five days later, which suggests the journal eschewed any peer review process.

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We often think of space as something that happens Way Out There, but our planet is in and of the cosmos—and vice versa. The Moon, for one, was once a part of the rock we call home, and chunks of interstellar metal stud the globe. Now scientists in Argentina may have found one of the biggest chunks yet: a 34-ton meteorite fragment nicknamed “Gancedo.”

About 4000 to 5000 years ago, a meteor shower peppered the soil in the region that would become South America. Most of the action happened over a region northwest of Buenos Aires called Campo del Cielo (“Field of Sky”). The field was left pockmarked with craters, which have yielded more than 100 tons of space debris (some of which has a tendency to walk away). The largest lump ever found in the field is a whopper named El Chaco, which was said to weigh in at more than 40 tons when it was first discovered in 1980. Newer estimates have slimmed El Chaco down substantially, putting it at just under 35 tons.

Its challenger, the 34-ton Gancedo, was discovered on the border of the Chaco province. Scientists knew they’d found something good, but had no idea just how big Gancedo would be until it had been completely dug out.

Mario Vesconi is president of the Astronomy Association of Chaco. “While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 [metric] tons,” he told Argentinian newspaper Clarín. “The size and weight surprised us.”

Immense as both Argentinean fragments may be, they’re still vying for a silver medal. The title of Largest Meteorite rests comfortably with a 66-ton Namibian giant called Hoba, discovered in 1920.

Gancedo’s journey into posterity is just beginning. “We will weigh it again,” Vesconi told Télam. “Apart from wanting the added confidence of a double-check of the initial readings we took, the fact that its weight is such a surprise to us makes us want to recalibrate.”

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