Author: Lois Parshley

When doctors determine the best medication for a person with depression, they generally rely upon little more than guesswork and patient self-reports, due to insufficient medical evidence. Research out of UT Southwestern Medical Center (UTSMC) previously suggested that such practices were insufficient, and a new study, published in Psychoneuroendocrinology, provides additional diagnostic information that may change the way depression is treated.

The research team drew upon a large body of research that links low levels of inflammation in the body with depression. They say a blood test for an inflammatory biomarker, known as C-reactive protein (CRP), can significantly improve the success rate of two common antidepressants for depressed patients.

Lead author Madhukar Trivedi, a professor of psychiatry at UTSMC and director of the Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care, says doctors typically pick an antidepressant for their patients in one of three ways: personal experience; matching the perceived benefits of one drug with a certain type of patient’s needs; or having the patient pick a drug by ruling out the unwanted side effects of other drugs. “There isn’t a strong evidence base to support one way [of choosing an antidepressant] over another,” he tells mental_floss.

Trivedi says that because many doctors are pressed for time and overloaded with patients, they don’t thoroughly address a depressed patient’s needs. “If you have diabetes, the doctor spends a lot of time explaining that it’s a serious illness—there are consequences for ignoring it, and there are treatments you need to do. In depression, that does not happen as much. Patient engagement is not that strong,” he says.

Trivedi led a landmark study more than a decade ago that revealed how serious the medication problem is: Up to one-third of depressed patients don’t see an improvement in their first month of medication, and approximately 40 percent of people who take antidepressants quit within the first three months.

This failure rate is exacerbated by the lingering social stigma accompanying the illness. “It is not fashionable to say, ‘I have depression,’ so people around you may put in their uninformed advice … ‘Just go for a walk,’ or ‘Why are you depressed?’” says Trivedi.

The CRP blood test is traditionally used as a measure of inflammation for such diseases as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis, among others, where doctors are looking for high levels of C-reactive protein—approximately 3 to 5 milligrams per blood liter. In the new study, which Trivedi refers to as a “secondary analysis” of a study he led in 2011 (the Co-MED trial), he says, “Our hypothesis was that for depression there may be stress related inflammation in lower levels.”

Trivedi’s lab measured depression remission rates of 106 patients, culled from 440 patients involved in the 2011 study, each of whom had given blood samples. Fifty-one of them had been prescribed only escitalopram (Lexapro), while 55 of them had been prescribed escitalopram plus bupriopion (Wellbutrin), both commonly prescribed SSRI antidepressant drugs.

After analyzing blood samples, the researchers found that for patients whose CRP levels were less than 1 milligram per liter of blood, escitalopram alone was more effective—patients experienced a 57 percent remission rate of their depression versus 30 percent on the other drug. For patients with higher CRP levels, escitalopram plus bupropion was more effective. These patients experienced a 51 percent remission rate, compared to 33 percent on only escitalopram.

Not only do these SSRI antidepressant drugs promote higher levels of retention of the “feel good” neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, they trigger an immune response that blocks inflammatory molecules called cytokines.

“The magnitude of the effect was really thrilling,” Trivedi says. “The bottom line in depression is we have not had objective tests that help us with any component of diagnosis or treatment matching—and this is a very solid first step.”

His next step will be to do a clinical trial in which researchers will go to primary care practices and randomize patients, so that half of the participants will get “the best care the provider is willing to do,” he says, and the other half will do the blood test and then get matched with one of the two drug approaches. “We want to show that if you have the treatment matching based on the blood tests, that group of patients will have significantly better outcomes than those who do usual care.”

He hopes that other studies will use the CRP test with other antidepressant drugs, as well. “It’s not a perfect solution for 100 percent of patients, but it helps.”

On the very first Earth Day in 1970, Denis Hayes stood on a stage in Central Park, stunned by the number of people who’d come to honor the planet. Now 76 years old, Hayes remembers it was like looking at the ocean—“you couldn’t see where the sea of people ended.” Crowd estimates reached more than a million people.

For Hayes, who is now board chair of the international Earth Day Network, it was the culmination of a year’s worth of work. As an urban ecology graduate student at Harvard University, he’d volunteered to help organize a small initiative by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson. Nelson was horrified by the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California, and wanted to raise awareness about environmental issues by holding teaching events similar to those being held by civil rights and anti-war activists.

Senator Nelson saw a growing disconnect between the concept of progress and the idea of American well-being, Hayes tells mental_floss. “There was a sense that America was prosperous and getting better, but at the same time, the air in the country was similar to the air today in China, Mexico City, or New Delhi,” Hayes says. “Rivers were catching on fire. Lakes were unswimmable.”

Nelson’s plan for these environmental teach-ins was for speakers to educate college students about environmental issues. But he had no one to organize them. So Hayes, Nelson’s sole volunteer, took control on a national level, organizing teach-ins at Harvard first and then across the U.S. Initially, the response was tepid at best. “Rather rapidly it became clear that this wasn’t a hot issue at colleges and universities in 1969,” Hayes says. “We had a war raging, and civil rights were getting very emotional after the Nixon election.”

Still, both Hayes and Nelson noticed an influx of mail to the senator’s office from women with young families worried about the environment. So instead of focusing on colleges, the two decided to take a different tactic, creating events with community-based organizations across the country, Hayes says. They also decided that rather than a series of teach-ins, they’d hold a single, nationwide teach-in on the same day. They called it Earth Day, and set a date: April 22.

Hayes now had a team of young adults working for the cause, and he himself had dropped out of school to tackle it full time. Long before social media, the project began to spread virally. “It just resonated,” he says. Women and smaller environmental-advocacy groups really hooked onto the idea, and word spread by mouth and by information passing between members of the groups.

With the cooperation and participation of grassroots groups and volunteers across the country, and a few lawmakers who supported the initiative, Hayes’ efforts culminated in the event on April 22, 1970.

Hayes started the day in Washington, D.C., where he and the staff were based. There was a rally and protest on the National Mall, though by that point Hayes had flown to New York, where Mayor John Lindsay provided a stage in Central Park. Parts of Fifth Avenue were shut down for the events, which included Earth-oriented celebrations, protests, and speeches by celebrities. Some of those attending the event even attacked nearby cars for causing pollution. After the rally, Hayes flew to Chicago for a smaller event.

“We had a sense that it was going to be big, but when the day actually dawned, the crowds were so much bigger than anyone had experienced before,” Hayes said. The event drew grassroots activists working on a variety of issues—Agent Orange, lead paint in poor urban neighborhoods, saving the whales—and fostered a sense of unity among them.

“There were people worrying about these [environmental] issues before Earth Day, but they didn’t think they had anything in common with one another,” Hayes says. “We took all those individual strands and wove them together into the fabric of modern environmentalism.”

Hayes and his team spent the summer getting tear-gassed at protests against the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Nixon authorized just six days after Earth Day. But by fall, the team refocused on environmental issues—and elections. They targeted a “dirty dozen” members of Congress up for re-election who had terrible environmental records, and campaigned for candidates who championed environmental causes to run against them. They defeated seven out of 12.

“It was a very poorly funded but high-energy campaign,” Hayes says. “That sent the message to Congress that it wasn’t just a bunch of people out frolicking in the sunshine planting daisies and picking up litter. This actually had political chops.”

The early ’70s became a golden age for environmental issues; momentum from the Earth Day movement spawned the creation of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Environmental Education Act (which was initially passed in 1970 and revived in 1990), and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“We completely changed the framework within which America does business, more than any other period in history with the possible exception of the New Deal,” Hayes says. “But our little revolution was brought entirely from the grassroots up.”

In 1990, Hayes was at it again. He organized the first international Earth Day, with about 200 million participants across more than 140 countries. Since then it’s become a global phenomenon.

Despite its popularity, though, we still have a long way to go, even if the improvements Hayes fought for have made these issues feel more remote. Hayes noted that everything they were fighting in the ’70s was something tangible—something you could see, taste, smell, or touch. Climate change can seem much less real—and harder to combat—to the average person who isn’t yet faced with its effects.

Hayes also notes that people have become more skeptical of science. “Historically, that has not been a problem in the United States. But today science is under attack.”

He warns, “This [anti-science sentiment] is something that could impoverish the next 50 generations and create really long-term devastation—that harms not only American health, but also American business, American labor, and American prospects.”

Look up tonight and you’ll see a waning crescent Moon, and, every few minutes, shooting stars falling from the sky. The Lyrids meteor shower peaks on April 21, and if light pollution is low in your area, you can expect to see around 10 meteors per hour—maybe more if you escape to the countryside.

WHAT IS GOING ON UP THERE?

The Lyrids—named for the constellation Lyra from which they seem to originate—are the happy result of the Earth slamming into the debris of the comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher (named after its discoverer, not the former British prime minister). But don’t worry: Thatcher isn’t a danger! As it flies about its four-century-long orbit around the Sun, particles fall away. It’s perfectly normal shedding, resulting in an annual evening-time spectacular.

Thatcher is a long-period comet; such comets have orbits longer than 200 years. At aphelion—that is, its farthest point from the Sun—Thatcher is at a distance of 110 astronomical units (AU). To put this in perspective, the distance from the Sun to the Earth is 1 AU. The distance from the Sun to Pluto is about 40 AU. The very farthest-known natural, observable object in the solar system, V774104, is presently 103 AU. So Thatcher has put in a lot of work to make tonight’s light show happen. I hope you appreciate it. This meteor shower is 415 years and 21,225,138,770 miles in the making. If that’s not good enough for you, nothing is.

HOW DO I SEE THE LYRIDS?

Sometimes, the Lyrids deliver a mind-blowing show. Its first reported occurrence was reportedly so bright and busy that it drowned out the stars. In 1982, it reached 90 meteors an hour. Ordinarily, however, the meteor shower produces five to 20 meteors every hour. Don’t miss this chance to see them, because when it comes to dust-sized cometary particles vaporizing in Earth’s atmosphere at 30,000 miles per hour, you just never know how good the show will be.

The best time to see the Lyrids will be after midnight until just before dawn. While you wait, check out Jupiter, bright and unblinking in the south. If you have a telescope handy, or even a reasonably powered set of binoculars, you’ll easily see four of its moons: Europa, Ganymede, Io, and Callisto. You can also see Saturn to the southeast (though this isn’t the best time for viewing it). As dawn approaches, look east and you’ll see Venus up there, as bright as ever. (It reaches greatest brilliancy on April 30.)

To enjoy the Lyrids meteor shower, you won’t need binoculars or a telescope or anything, really, but a blanket and patience. Since it’s a Friday night, bring a bottle of wine. You’re not going to live forever. Because the Moon will be but a sliver, it won’t wash out the sky with moonlight. So Thatcher and the Moon are doing the heavy lifting here. All you have to do is show up and wait.

When David Kring of the University of Arizona gave a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in 1991, he didn’t expect a packed crowd for his talk on the petrology of the Chicxulub Structure in the Yucatan, Mexico. Normally, Kring knew, impact-cratering sessions were presented in the smallest room—the miserable Room D, a shoebox on the second floor. But the magnitude of his announcement attracted scientists across fields and disciplines, so he was bumped up to the main room.

Kring had been investigating a place called the Yucatán-6 borehole, and he and his team had discovered shock quartz and impact melt fragments in two thumb-sized bits of rock that were over half a mile beneath the surface of the Earth. This was evidence that the hole, thought for a very long time to be a volcanic center, was actually an impact structure. And not just any “impact structure,” and not just any crater―but the crater of all craters on Earth. The one behind the death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Last year, Kring was part of an expedition in which scientists drilled into Chicxulub to investigate how the disastrous collision of fireball and Earth that killed the dinosaurs also created the conditions for life to begin anew. Last month, Kring and his colleagues returned to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to present their findings from the new core samples they took on that expedition. The results provide new clues about how life may have begun on Earth about 4 billion years ago—and point us towards how and where we can look for life across the universe.

THE SMOKING CANNON

Back in the early 1990s, Kring knew what he was looking for—a crater of the size and magnitude that would provide evidence of catastrophic extinction—but he didn’t know where to look. “It was a race to find the impact site,” Kring tells mental_floss, “and we had made a discovery of this very thick impact ejecta deposit in Haiti, which pointed us to [the Yucatan].”

Impact ejecta is what’s blasted from the Earth or other body when a meteor crashes into it. In this case, a giant chunk of the Earth was blown a thousand miles away. Until the Haiti discovery, people were looking all over the planet for the crater. But now they had a target region. Meanwhile, Petroleos Mexicanos, an oil company, had drilled down into what they thought was a “geophysical anomaly” in the Yucatan―a salt dome, maybe, where there might be oil. That’s when Kring and his colleagues re-examined samples collected from the site and realized there were features consistent with an impact.

That the Yucatan site was still intact to be found wasn’t a given. In the last 65 million years, half of the seafloor has been subducted, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another—which would have prevented scientists from discovering samples. When Kring and his team looked at the samples they were able to take, there was shock quartz in one of the layers. “The minute you see shock quartz, that is absolutely, categorically diagnostic of impact,” says Kring. “You know that’s not a buried volcano. It’s an impact crater, and that’s your eureka moment.”

When Kring found the Chicxulub Crater, it finally provided scientific evidence for the Impact Mass Extinction Hypothesis. Developed by physicist Luis Alvarez, the theory proposes that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a catastrophic asteroid impact with the Earth. The theory made a lot of sense. An impact of such magnitude would certainly leave a mark, after all. The dominant alternative hypothesis was that overdrive volcanic activity caused catastrophic climate change, leaving the dinosaurs in a bad spot. Finding an impact crater of this magnitude, scientist Gene Shoemaker would later tell Time magazine, was “the smoking cannon.”

The discovery that impact cratering is not only a geological process but a biological one caused a major shift in scientific thinking during the 20th century. The idea that you could have catastrophic events completely change the evolutionary path of the planet was staggering in its implication. Impact Mass Extinction Hypothesis, and the subsequent discovery of Chicxulub Crater, were argued by some as fundamentally more important, and bigger shifts in the tenets of geology, than learning about continental drift.

THE ORIGIN OF LIFE ON EARTH

When a fireball hit the Earth 66 million years ago, the Mesozoic Era (the Age of Reptiles) ended and the Cenozoic―the Age of Mammals―began. One second before the strike, in the part of the sea that must have had a dark shadow pooling rapidly outward as the asteroid approached, 50-foot sea monsters called mosasaurs swarmed and devoured fish and mollusks. One second after the asteroid hit, those mosasaurs were gone, and chunks of the planet were blown thousands of miles in every direction. Every continent on Earth was devastated in the blink of a geologic eye. A 300-foot tsunami washed across North and South America. The Sun was blotted out. Plants relying on photosynthesis declined or went extinct. If you were a dinosaur who couldn’t fly, you were done for. Seventy-five percent of all species of life were obliterated.

But bad as that sounds, approximately 4 billion years ago, an impact likely larger even than Chicxulub would have vaporized the sea and created a rock vapor atmosphere for thousands of years. The impacts would have produced vast subsurface hydrothermal (hot water) systems that were perfect crucibles for prebiotic chemistry. The new core samples taken from deep in Chicxulub provide physical evidence of this theory. The samples are fractured and permeable—perfect for the circulation of hot fluid. Moreover, they also have signatures of hot fluids and altered rock and hydrothermal minerals.

The hydrothermal systems caused by an asteroid collision may have lasted for as long as 2.3 million years. This is critical, because life needs time to establish itself and evolve. Those systems would have evolved into perfect habitats for the evolution of life.

Kring’s Chicxulub research suggests that these are the types of places life evolved in early Earth history. Further research will look at the analysis of rock samples for radiometric signatures, to try to determine how long that system persisted. It’s also given rise to a new theory: the Impact Origin of Life Hypothesis.

This impact origin of life theory is not necessarily limited to Earth, as research from Susanne Schwenzer, Oleg Abramov, and others suggest. “It is generically translatable,” says Kring. “Impact cratering, as it turns out, is an important heat engine for planetary bodies. Impact events on icy satellites can melt icy shells and produce seeds. You need liquid water for life. That may have had a role of life in our outer system.” This also applies to extrasolar planetary systems.

Whether life originated anywhere beyond Earth is still to be determined, but this is a big step toward understanding what conditions to look for. You can be sure when it’s announced, that scientist will certainly play to a standing-room-only crowd yet again.

 
Storms make for attention-grabbing headlines, and almost every disaster has a meteorological term that makes a hazardous situation sound 10 times as terrifying. A derecho tore through the Mid-Atlantic back in 2012 and had such a profound psychological impact on the affected residents that you could cause mass hysteria by just mentioning the term. Then came the dreaded polar vortex, an ever-present large-scale wind pattern that encircles the North Pole and occasionally gets wavy and injects bitterly cold air into southern Canada and the United States. It was nothing new—but it sounded scary, so the name took off.

The recent deluges in California highlighted the latest captivating weather-y buzzword: an “atmospheric river.” Like its counterparts, this scary-sounding phenomenon is not as uncommon as it seems. It’s responsible for almost all of the rain on the West Coast this winter.

 
So what is it? An atmospheric river is a long, narrow band of deep tropical moisture that can span thousands of miles in length. They occur from the tropics to the mid-latitudes. Atmospheric rivers aren’t actual rivers, of course, but it’s a pretty good description of a feature that resembles a river on satellite imagery and can bring torrents of water to the unlucky communities caught beneath one as the system comes ashore.

These ribbons of tropical moisture are the result of sprawling low-pressure systems that form just far enough south that their counter-clockwise circulation scoops up water vapor from the tropics and transports it northward. The storms that cause atmospheric rivers to form in the first place are usually able to generate enough upward lift to create precipitation. Mountains can play a role—they’re very effective at wringing moisture out of the atmosphere as wind travels up the side of their terrain. Whether it’s rain or snow, any precipitation that forms within that band of elevated moisture levels can be quite heavy, producing steep rainfall totals and many feet of snow in extreme cases.

NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission captured three weeks of heavy rainfall slamming into the West Coast between February 1 and February 20, 2017. Watch it happen in the video below.

California has a reputation for calm, sunny weather, but the state never really has it easy when it comes to dealing with nature’s temper tantrums. For the past couple of years, the state has been mired in a devastating drought, a cycle of dryness that was finally broken this winter as one storm after another roared in from the Pacific and drenched the state with unmanageable amounts of heavy rain. The driving force that gave each storm its bulk was an atmospheric river. Without it, there wouldn’t have been much moisture for the storm systems to work with.

An atmospheric river that affects the West Coast—and California in particular—is usually nicknamed the “Pineapple Express” since the source of the tropical moisture is the area around Hawaii. Though they go without a popular nickname, these features are also common over the eastern half of the United States during the warm season. Many of the major flash floods that occur in the eastern U.S. during the summer months are the result of intense thunderstorms tapping into the bountiful moisture present in an atmospheric river flowing over the region.

All weather is the result of nature trying to balance out inequality, and atmospheric rivers, just like every other weather condition, serve this purpose. Wind blows from areas of high air pressure to areas of lower pressure in an attempt to erase the inequality of more air molecules over one spot than another. The jet stream is the direct result of sharp temperature differences between the tropics and the poles. Hurricanes exist to transport heat from the tropics to the poles. Atmospheric rivers exist to take moisture out of the tropics and spread it around the world. Though they can seem difficult to enjoy, we’d be in some pretty big trouble without them. In 1998, a study by MIT scientists reported that 90 percent of all the moisture transfer between the tropics and the rest of the world each year occurs within these narrow bands of evaporated paradise.

We tend to think of our brains as one big organ inside our skulls, but it’s actually comprised of many, small structures that make it possible for us to walk, talk, think, and feel. Of these, one of the more well-known structures, the amygdala, has been found to play a hugely important role in many social and emotional processes—influencing everything from health to addiction.

Mental_floss spoke to ;Rahul Jandial, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist at City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles, California, and Brandon Brock, a staff clinician at the Cerebrum Health Centers Brain Initiative Group in Texas, about this fascinating part of the brain.

1. IT’S NOT REALLY ONE STRUCTURE …

One of the more well-known structures, the amygdala is located within the depths of the anterior-inferior temporal lobe. The almond-shaped region is part of the limbic system and is actually a paired structure, with parts in each temporal lobe, according to Jandial.

He says you can survive with only one of the two: “How do I know? I can surgically remove one as part of a brain surgery called selective amygdalohippocampectomy.” In fact, in studies where rats, monkeys, or rabbits have their amygdala removed, the animals live normal lives except for one notable new development: They don’t feel fear.

2. … BECAUSE THE AMYGDALA IS YOUR BRAIN’S FEAR FACTORY.

Your fear of snakes and scary movies is in large part due to the function of your amygdala, which “responds before frontal lobes weigh in,” Jandial says. It’s part of your instinctive brain and serves as your “emotional thermostat.” He adds, “It’s not in charge of just fear, but all deep and visceral emotions—one of those ancient brain regions that can defy the frontal lobe request.”

According to a 2007 study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, “amygdala activity may represent the generation of emotional experience itself, and/or it may reflect sundry aspects of emotional information processing correlated with emotional experience.”

3. THE AMYGDALA ALSO HAS A TRUE MIND-BODY CONNECTION.

And yet the amygdala has purposes beyond fear. It has been shown to assist in emotional learning, “whereby cues acquire significance through association with rewarding or aversive events,” according to a paper in Current Opinion Neurobiology. More recent research, the authors write, suggest that the amygdala regulates additional cognitive processes, such as memory or attention.

With its ability to interpret sensory stimuli in the world and translate them into physical reactions, the amygdala, as a research paper in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience suggests, “may thus represent embodied attention—the crucial link between central (mental) and peripheral (bodily) resources.”

4. DAMAGE TO THE AMYGDALA CAN LEAVE YOU HORNY AND HUNGRY.

An injured amygdala can leave a person “super hungry, sexually aroused, and fixated with putting things in their mouth,” says Jandial. In other cases, it can lead to a reduced fear of risks, and thus an increase in risky behavior. Researchers found that adult monkeys who were given amygdalectomies “showed more pro-social cues and less avoidance behaviors toward other (healthy) monkeys.” In one extreme case, damage to the amygdala shut down one woman’s ability to feel fear altogether.

5. IT ALSO PLAYS A ROLE IN PAIN.

Fibromyalgia is a disease characterized by “widespread musculoskeletal pain with diffuse tenderness at multiple tender points,” as a study in Clinical Neuroscience describes. Brock says that changes in the amygdala’s volume and function play a role in both fibromyalgia and chronic pain syndromes. This appears to be a consequence of the amygdala becoming hypervigilant and oversensitized to internal sensations of pain or trauma, according to a study in Explore. “This results in exhaustion of the neuro-endocrine and immune systems and chronic physical and mental exhaustion, as well as many secondary symptoms and ongoing complications.”

6. THE AMYGDALA IS KEY TO UNDERSTANDING ADDICTION.

Addiction is considered a brain disease by the medical community rather than a lack of willpower or a character defect. According to a study in Brain Research, a common addiction cycle comprises three stages—“preoccupation/anticipation, binge/intoxication, and withdrawal/negative affect—in which impulsivity often dominates at the early stages and compulsivity dominates at terminal stages.” The amygdala becomes recruited in the final withdrawal stage, where it sends stress signals to the body, driving a person to crave more of their substance.

7. DESPITE ADVANCES IN BRAIN-IMAGING TECHNOLOGY, IT’S STILL DIFFICULT TO STUDY.

Though we know much more about the amygdala since it was first discovered in the 1930s in monkeys, there’s still much to learn. Because of the amygdala’s deep brain location and its entanglement with other neighboring brain structures, it’s difficult to find “exact ways to monitor its function, output and all regions that it has a synaptic influence on. Time and further scientific research will hopefully unveil that,” Brock explains.

One of the most devastating weather disasters in the past decade wasn’t a tornado tearing through the Plains or a hurricane swirling ashore, but rather the slow-motion dehydration of the most populous state in the United States. California has spent the past five years mired in its worst drought in centuries, which devastated crops and water supplies across the state. While the adverse effects of the drought will take much longer to wear off, the state recently got some good news about its improving liquid fortunes.

The latest issue of the United States Drought Monitor (USDM) shows that just over half of California is still in a drought. More than half of an enormous state steeped in drought sounds pretty bad, but conditions have actually improved tremendously over the past couple of months.

At the end of January 2016, 95 percent of California was in some level of drought, and 40 percent of that area was in that scale-topping “exceptional drought” category. Today, one-fifth of the state is still in a severe drought, and a tiny portion—just under 2 percent—is in an extreme drought. No part of California is experiencing an exceptional drought anymore, the most urgent level on the five-point scale used to determine drought status.

The USDM is a weekly analysis drawn by scientists who look at precipitation, groundwater, and soil data to determine how dry the ground is across the entire country. The lowest categories—abnormally dry and moderate drought—are usually transient and can come and go with unusual dry spells. But in the case of California’s water troubles, extreme and exceptional drought conditions have become commonplace over the past few years.

The worst drought in the modern history of California began at the beginning of 2012 and steadily worsened over the next five years. The intensely dry weather came to a head in 2014, leading some scientists to declare the presence of a “megadrought”—a lack of rain in the western United States so extreme and long-lasting that such conditions haven’t occurred in this region since the 12th century. But then conditions improved somewhat during the winters of 2015 and 2016, culminating with this winter’s drought-busting deluge.

 
The solution to drought is always a prolonged period of steady, soaking rainfall and, in the case of mountainous regions, decent storms with accumulating snow. Weather patterns began to shift early this winter into a configuration that let ample moisture flow over drought-stricken areas of the West Coast. A steady flow of tropical moisture, a phenomenon known as an “atmospheric river,” helped storm systems wring out as much precipitation as possible over areas that needed it the most.

The recent period of much-looked-for rain in California started in earnest around the middle of December 2016 and continued through the end of January. After just above average precipitation in December in San Francisco, the Bay Area saw nearly twice its normal January rainfall by the end of January. It’s a similar story across the rest of California.

There’s even better news in the mountains, where springtime runoff contributes significantly to reservoirs and groundwater in lower-lying areas of the state. The storms that brought rain to the rest of California brought even greater amounts of snow to the mountains. Some mountainous towns have snow depths taller than most houses. A ski resort near Lake Tahoe saw so much snow in one January snowstorm that their chair lifts were buried.

But the latest forecast from the Climate Prediction Center calls for a general trend of below-average rainfall during the month of February and equal chances for below- or above-average precipitation through the early spring months. It’s worth noting that another long period of dry weather could erase the gains California has seen over the past month or two. More often than not, drought begets drought, and it can be a tough cycle to break once it begins. Still, the recent rainfall is a welcome sign nonetheless, and one that will hopefully continue in rainy seasons to come.

Who doesn’t love a Grumpy Cat video or sneezing kittens? But offline, domestic cats represent a threat to the natural world—and a much more serious one than you might think. Here’s a look at some of the environmental risks cats pose that might encourage you to keep Kitty inside.

1. ISLANDS ARE VULNERABLE TO FELINES …

Thanks to their isolation, islands generally boast high levels of biodiversity and endemic species found nowhere else. Island species evolve based on a very specific set of circumstances; on islands without large predators, for example, some birds lose the ability to fly because they simply don’t need it. This makes the cat problem particularly acute on islands, where free-ranging cats have caused or contributed to 33 of the modern bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions recorded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.

2. … BUT SO ARE CONTINENTS.

Felines down under have become a major pain: A recent study in Biological Conservation finds that feral cats roam 99.8 percent of Australia. This means that at any given time, there are somewhere between 2.1 to 6.3 million cats ranging around the continent, ignoring any and all posted signs about environmentally protected areas. Since Australia is the only continent other than Antarctica where wildlife evolved without wild cat species, its wild creatures are particularly vulnerable. John Woinarski of Charles Darwin University, the deputy director of the National Environmental Science Programme’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub and the study’s co-author, tells mental_floss, “Australia has the worst record of extinctions of native mammal species over the last two centuries.” Approximately 30 species have gone extinct. “Introduced cats were a significant factor in most of these extinctions, and feral cats continue to be one of the most serious threats to many of Australia’s threatened animal species,” he says.

In fact, some of Australia’s endangered species survive only within specialized cat-proof exclosures or on cat-free islands. According to a 2012 government plan, species at risk include the endangered woylie, night parrot, bridled nail-tail and black-footed rock wallabys, and the vulnerable greater bilby. To combat the feline threat, the country’s Threatened Species Commission recently launched an ambitious plan to cull feral cats using baits, traps, and even trained cat-finding dogs.

2. THEY’VE TAKEN OVER NEW ZEALAND.

New Zealand has a number of rare endemic species, including the iconic flightless kiwi. The island also has an estimated 2.5 million feral cats. It’s a problematic equation. Cats have already contributed to the extinction of nine native bird species and have affected 33 endangered bird species. The National Cat Management Strategy Group (NCMSG), which includes the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Local Government New Zealand and the Morgan Foundation, set a goal of eliminating feral cats by 2025. Government officials have been quick to point out that no one is limiting cat ownership and the former Prime Minister, John Key, has a pet cat.

 “We all agree on what we are trying to achieve,” Geoff Simmons, spokesperson for Morgan Foundation, an NCMSG partner, told Radio New Zealand, “which is making sure all cats are loved pets and are looked after well, and that we minimize the stray and feral population and ensure that the cats that we do own have the least possible impact on our environment.”

The government also plans to eliminate all invasive vertebrate predators, including rats and brushtail possums, by 2050. Worldwide, more than 1,000 islands have been cleared of invasive species, including more than 100 around New Zealand. But the largest island ever successfully cleared, Australia’s Macquarie Island, is only about 49 square miles; in contrast, New Zealand is 103,483 square miles. To accomplish this daunting task, the government will turn to new methods, including drones and genetic biocontrol.

4. THE U.S. HAS A CAT PROBLEM TOO.

In the United States, an estimated 60 to 100 million cats range free, and the number of domestic cats has tripled during the past 40 years. Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that domesticated cats—both free-roaming pets and feral—kill as many as 4 billion birds and 22 billion small mammals in the U.S. each year. This makes them “likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals,” according to the Smithsonian. While controlling feral cats poses a daunting problem, simply keeping pet cats indoors at least reduces the slaughter. The Humane Society of the United States has developed tips to help indoor cats stay happy, and suggest that you always neuter even indoor animals, because…

5. CATS REPRODUCE LIKE RABBITS (IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING).

Female cats can reproduce as young as four months old, and on average have two to three litters per year of four to six kittens each. One cat can produce as many as 100 kittens in her lifetime, and one pair of cats and their kittens can account for 420,000+ kittens in just seven years (it’s an exponential thing).

6. THEY CARRY DISEASES.

Peter Marra, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and co-author of Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, tells mental_floss that cats are known to carry plague, rabies, and the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. All are zoonotic diseases, carried by animals and capable of jumping to people. Toxoplasma gondii only reproduces in cats, Marra said, producing virtually indestructible oocysts—cysts containing a zygote formed from an egg and sperm. “They persist for years, in frozen soil, in saltwater environments. In the U.S., about 20 percent of the human population is infected, and globally, about a third of the population.” There is no cure.

While most infected people seem to have no symptoms, recent research links the parasite with behavioral changes, including depression and bipolar disorder, Marra reports. For example, one recent study showed infection causes disruption of a major neurotransmitter in the brain. Infections in pregnant women can cause death or serious health issues in the fetus; the parasite damages the eyes of some 3000 infants in the U.S. each year. Toxoplasmosis can cause fever, fatigue, headaches, blindness, and, in people with compromised immune systems, death. Like a ticking time bomb, the parasite can hide in brain tissue, putting an infected person at risk if the immune system later becomes compromised.

Toxoplasmosis also affects wildlife, representing a serious threat to highly endangered Hawaiian monk seals and to sea otters.

7. CAT OWNERS ARE IN SERIOUS DENIAL.

Despite the evidence lined up against cats, pet owners have a hard time accepting that their felines may causing problems. In the UK, which has more than 10 million domestic cats, a recent study found that cat owners did not recognize the risk their pets pose to wildlife. “Cat owners failed to perceive the magnitude of their cats’ impacts on wildlife and were not influenced by ecological information,” the study’s authors concluded.

Solving the problem of cat predation on wildlife obviously will require cooperation of pet owners. So it’s important to note: While one individual cat’s predation may not be an issue, the sheer number of cats equals a big problem. This is especially true since predation by cats is often not a normal ecosystem interaction (in other words, domestic cats are not part of a healthy natural ecosystem).

8. IF YOU’RE FEELING DEFENSIVE, REMEMBER THE CASE OF THE MISSING WREN.

In Cat Wars, Marra tells the story of Stephens Island, off the south island of New Zealand, where cats drove an endemic, flightless wren to extinction in—wait for it—roughly one year. A lighthouse keeper named David Lyall arrived on the island in January 1894. A pregnant female cat arrived about the same time, likely the island’s first feline. An amateur ornithologist, Lyall studied the dead birds that this free-roaming cat brought to the lighthouse. Based on his prepared specimens, noted ornithologist Walter Rothschild described a new species, the Stephens Island Wren. Unfortunately, by that time the bird had disappeared. Subsequent lighthouse keepers began killing feral cats and had the island once again cat-free by 1925—but it was too late for the endemic wren. 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center recently released a stunning image by the Hubble Space Telescope of a megamaser—a galaxy that is basically one giant laser in space.

Iras 16399-0937, as the galaxy is called, does not blast visible light. It’s a little longer on the electromagnetic spectrum, in the microwave range. And there’s a lot going on out there. Unlike our own Milky Way galaxy, which has one core at its center, Iras has two, and they are merging slowly. The southern core, as one of the pair is called, is a star factory. The northern core, meanwhile, hosts a black hole that’s 100,000,000 times the mass of our Sun. The interaction of the two, and consequent galactic turmoil, gives the galaxy its beautiful shape.

The image was captured using two instruments on Hubble: the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (which was superseded by the more capable Wide Field Camera 3 in 2009) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was installed on Hubble in 2002 and is still in use.

SET MASERS ON STUN

Maser is actually an acronym: Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. So was laser, at least initially: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. That’s the difference between the two: microwave versus light. They’re both coherent energy beams, but a maser emits microwave radiation, while a laser emits visible light. Einstein proposed the basic principle in 1917. Masers are used in everything from atomic clocks to NASA’s Deep Space Network. In the case of the latter, giant dishes receive weak signals from spacecraft as far from Earth as the interstellar medium. Cryogenically cooled ruby masers cleanly amplify the signals and allow data to be extracted.

You might not have heard of masers—only lasers—but there was a time when the opposite was true for many. “Phasers” on Star Trek are a shortened form of “photon maser.” Lasers had only been invented a few years before the debut of the television series. To the extent they were known, they certainly weren’t thought to be as powerful as the mighty maser, which was first built in 1953. (Gene Roddenberry worried during filming of the second pilot that people would say, “Oh, come on, lasers can’t do that.”) Even shortly after the laser was invented, theoretical work on masers led to a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964.

GOING GALACTIC

Sometimes stimulated emissions of radiation occur naturally. Vaporized molecules in comets can mase, as can protostars in stellar nurseries. Sometimes masers go big time. A megamaser like Iras is 100 million times brighter than the dinky masers of the Milky Way. With that kind of power, the host galaxy itself is basically a cosmic maser beaming microwave emissions across the universe. There are also gigamasers, which are a billion times brighter than our masers, but that’s just showing off.

Extragalactic masers are useful to astronomers for, among other things, the independent calculation of the galaxy’s distance. Iras, for example, is 370 million light-years from Earth. For comparison, the closest star to our own—Proxima Centauri, of the Alpha Centauri star system—is 4.4 light-years away. Because of how nicely light-years scale, if the Earth were one inch from the Sun, Iras would be 370 million miles away. While we won’t be visiting anytime soon, we can still enjoy its natural, tempestuous beauty.

Look at the sky just after sunset tonight, January 12, and you’re guaranteed to know immediately which star is Venus. Hint: It will be the astonishingly bright one. Now get your telescope. As the planet arrives at its greatest angular distance to the east of the Sun, you won’t be able to see surface features, as you sometimes can when looking at Mars, or identify stunning cloud swirls as you might see when viewing Jupiter, because Venus’s thick and unforgiving clouds conceal the planet’s mountains below. But with the help of a telescope, you’ll be able to see that Venus doesn’t appear to be a full circle.

Here’s why: it’s at greatest eastern elongation tonight. What’s that? Elongation is the angle between the planet and the Sun from Earth. To understand elongation, point at the Sun as it sets. With your other hand, point at Venus. Simply put, the angle that your arms make is the elongation. Because planets are ever in motion and orbiting at speeds different from one another, that angle is ever in flux. Repeat this process in March and you’ll notice a big difference in the directions of your arms.

The largest this angle will ever get in an orbit is its greatest elongation. When greatest elongation occurs at sunset, it’s said to be at greatest eastern elongation. That’s what we have tonight. When it occurs at sunrise, it is at greatest western elongation. For Venus, that will occur this year in June.

Elongation was crucial to Copernicus when he was trying to construct a heliocentric model of the solar system. He determined the order and size of the orbits of the planets he could see by measuring their respective elongations. Venus will never have an elongation greater than 47.1 degrees. But what about Mars? The angle between the Sun and Mars when seen from Earth can reach all the way to 180 degrees. The same goes for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and so-called Planet X, though the latter four weren’t known in Copernicus’s time.

If a planet can be on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun, its orbital path around the Sun is, by definition, outside of Earth’s orbit. Located inside Earth’s orbit, Venus and Mercury are called “inferior planets.” Located outside, Mars and the rest are called “superior planets.” When a superior planet is 180 degrees from the Sun from the vantage point of Earth, it is said to be at opposition. That is, a straight line is formed—Sun, Earth, planet—and that planet is in full sunlight. This is also the best time to observe such a planet.

 
Take a look at the illustration above. At greatest elongation, a line drawn from Earth to an inferior planet will be tangent to the planet’s orbital path around the Sun. (The line will touch the orbital path, but not cross it.) Because we’re staring at this dead-on, half the planet is in full sunlight, and half is in total darkness. That’s why tonight Venus appears half-lit, and seemingly not a full circle.

So enjoy this special phase of Venus, and keep an eye on the evening sky this month for another Venus-related event—on January 31, Venus, Mars, and the sliver of a new moon will appear clustered together, forming a stunning triangle.