Author: Lois Parshley

Earlier this month, NASA launched a constellation of small satellites that will transform hurricane forecasting and enable new insights into storm formation and activity. Called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), eight spacecraft, each the size of a carry-on suitcase, are flying over the tropics to measure and map ocean winds. Because of their altitude, heavy rain and storm surges are no obstacles to the satellites, and when hurricanes form, the spacecraft will be able to peer through walls of water into the storm’s core and continue to collect data—something no space-based system has ever done before.

“CYGNSS is a tool that will provide us 24/7 coverage of the tropical cyclone zone. It will improve our knowledge of how hurricanes grow so that we can better prepare and protect people in the path of each hurricane as it comes,” Christine Bonniksen, CYGNSS program executive with the Science Mission Directorate’s Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters, tells mental_floss.

THE RAIN BARRIER HAS BLOCKED OUR VIEW

Over the past several decades, there has been a steady improvement in storm track forecasting—or where storms will hit—and the National Hurricane Center’s error rate is half of what it was 20 years ago. The same cannot be said for storm intensity forecasting—how strong these storms will be. “If you look at the record for their intensity forecast, there has been very, very little improvement in the last 20 years,” said Chris Ruf, the principal investigator on the CYGNSS mission and a scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. One of the primary reasons for this is that today’s satellites are unable to measure what’s going on in the inner core of hurricanes. “This has been identified for many years as a primary lacking ingredient in the numerical forecasts that are used by the National Hurricane Center. They wish they had information on the inner core of the storms and they don’t.”

Storm cores have so far been impenetrable because current wind-observing spacecraft cannot see through rain. This is because their on-board instruments emit signals at an 8-millimeter wavelength—about the same size as a large raindrop. When the signals encounter rain, they are simply scattered and absorbed. (Hurricane paths depend on environmental factors outside of the storm, which is why this rain shroud has not been an impediment to predicting where storms will hit.)

Additionally, it takes about three days for current systems to collect data to build a map of global wind speeds and precipitation. This is a big problem if you’re trying to track the rapid intensification of tropical storms and hurricanes, which can happen in a matter of hours. So until now, scientists have had to rely on so-called “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft to fly into the storm to perform wind speed reconnaissance.

THE CYGNSS SOLUTION

CYGNSS changes all of this by using GPS satellite signals, which were designed to penetrate heavy rains. GPS operates at a 19-centimeter wavelength—more than long enough to avoid rain interaction. When GPS satellite signals hit the ocean, they reflect back into space and are received by CYGNSS observatories. Think about the way the Moon reflects on a placid lake: When the lake is calm, the Moon’s image is sharp. When the wind blows, the water roughens and the image diffuses. CYGNSS relies on a similar principle, reading the clarity of the GPS signals to reveal the characteristics of the wind. It measures the strength of the GPS signal as it scatters off the ocean surface to determine wind speed.

The eight CYGNSS observatory spacecraft operate evenly in a single orbital plane around the Earth. Each satellite has a payload called a Delay Doppler Mapping Instrument, a GPS receiver capable of tracking four different GPS signals simultaneously. Two antennas look down at reflected GPS signal and take measurements of the diffuse scattering, and from those derive the wind speed and activity. Meanwhile, one antenna looks up and receives a direct GPS satellite signal for geolocation. In essence, each 65-pound satellite is doing the work of four Hurricane Hunter airplanes. Collectively, CYGNSS is like a squadron of 32 such planes flying continuously over the tropics taking simultaneous measurements.

The system gives a total refresh of the entire tropical wind distribution map every seven hours, even under heavy precipitation. In a hurricane or tropical storm—including in areas with the highest wind speeds and the most powerful surges—CYGNSS can immediately answer questions about the storm size, intensity, and the reach of its strong winds. Moreover, because the satellite constellation has such expansive coverage of the Earth, it can collect massive amounts of data on the entire storm environment. There are three different data downlink points around the world, and the data can be downloaded from the satellites within the hour—an unprecedented timeframe.

HOW THE LAUNCH WENT DOWN

CYGNSS launched on the morning of December 15, 2016 from Cape Canaveral with the help of a Pegasus rocket, an air launch system. The rocket was mounted to the bottom of an L-1011 airplane called Stargazer that took off from a runway, just like any other plane you’ve ever seen. At 39,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, the plane released the Pegasus rocket, which ignited five seconds later and powered its way into space. The fairings hatched away and the deployment vehicle separated, and the eight small satellites released themselves in pairs over 30-second intervals. Ten minutes after separation, their solar arrays deployed. They then moved into position in orbit and began operation.

By 4:12 pm ET that same day, the CYGNSS team had successfully made contact with all eight satellites. “It is an amazingly rewarding feeling to spend such an intense and focused time working on CYGNSS and then, in a matter of just a few hours, have the entire constellation suddenly come to life,” Ruf said in a brief mission update. “I am excited (and a little exhausted) and really looking forward to diving into the engineering data in the coming days, and then into the science data in the weeks to follow.”

This is NASA’s flagship Earth Venture–class mission, which is a new NASA program designed for low-cost, high-technology suborbital (think aircraft and balloons) and orbital (CYGNSS) projects. Two previous missions of this class were aircraft designed for atmospheric research and communications. This is the first spaceborne Earth Venture endeavor. Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado runs CYGNSS mission operations, and science operations are run from the University of Michigan. The primary $160 million mission will run for two years—enough time to fill in blank spots in the hurricane dataset, get a grip on how storm cores intensify, and hopefully refine the forecast models that lives depend on.  

Prescription opioid drugs have become such an epidemic in the United States they now cause more fatalities than heroin each year, leaving addiction scientists scrambling. Two of these highly addictive drugs, oxycodone and hydrocodone, are the most commonly associated with emergency department visits, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), and fatalities linked to these two drugs alone have increased four-fold between 2000 and 2014. Recently, however, researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed vaccines that decrease the risk of fatal opioid overdose with these two drugs.

If the idea of a vaccination for a drug addiction sounds odd, researcher Kim D. Janda, professor of chemistry at TSRI, who ran the recent study, tells mental_floss, “There are ways to stimulate the immune response against different molecules besides bacterial pathogens or a virus.” One way is vaccine-mediated pharmacokinetic strategy: In the treatment, a small molecule known as an “immunogenic protein conjugate” stimulates the immune system to make drug-specific antibodies. These antibodies then “bind the drug molecule so it doesn’t reach the opioid receptors,” Janda says.

Because the vaccines are drug-specific, scientists must make a unique vaccine for each drug in order for them to be effective. In the current study, published in ACS Chemical Biology, the researchers made one vaccine for hydrocodone, dubbed Hydro-TT, and one for oxycodone, Oxy-TT. They administered these vaccines to mice via injections into their abdomens two to three times over an eight-week period. “The vaccine has to build up over time,” Janda explains. “It doesn’t kick in all at once.”

Once the mice had built up their vaccine levels, researchers then administered potentially lethal doses of either hydrocodone or oxycodone, depending on which vaccine the mice had been given. They found that survival rate in the Oxy-TT vaccinated mice increased from 14.2 percent to 37.5 percent. In Hydro-TT vaccinated mice, the results were even more dramatic, with the survival rate jumping from 25 percent to 62.5 percent.

This vaccine has several advantages to current treatment, Janda and his co-authors write in their paper: “Such a vaccine could effectively suppress the addiction liability and overdose potential of the target drug over an extended time period without placing excessive compliance demands on the patient.”

The vaccines would last several months and require monthly boosters to maintain their efficacy. Janda’s research does not show any significant side effects, and he believes them to be no more taxing to the immune system than vaccines for diseases like polio and smallpox.

Of course, these trials have so far only been done in rodents and non-human primates, but Janda is hopeful they will eventually move to human trials.

Even once they prove effective in humans, unlike typical vaccines for diseases and viruses, opioid vaccines are not preventative, and Janda stresses that they are not a cure for addiction. “You’re not going to be giving these to kids or people who don’t do drugs,” he says. “This is for people who have problems getting off the drugs, [who] have issues with abstinence, which all addicts have.”

The vaccines will most likely only be given to people who have either had a previous overdose or are unsuccessfully attempting to quit. Phil Skolnick, director of the Division of Therapeutics and Medical Consequences at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded Janda’s work (as well as other similar research), believes that opioid vaccines could be especially helpful with compliance. In other words, it will hopefully help addicts do what they need to do to keep off opiates, whether that’s suboxone treatment, a drug detoxification method for opiates; the medication naltrexone, which prevents the drug from binding to the opiate receptors; or simply staying away from their drugs of choice.

“Getting [addicts] to make one good decision every day not to take opiates is a very tough thing to do,” Skolnick tells mental_floss. However, by taking a biologic vaccine targeted to the drug they’re addicted to, an addicted—and now immunized—person “would have an enduring protection. That’s one of the strongest arguments for developing biologics against drugs of abuse,” he says.

There are some downsides to the vaccines. For one thing, they block the pain-relieving effects of the opiates, so a person who was taking an opiate for pain would need to find an alternative. Likewise, because there is no global vaccine for all opiates, if a person has been abusing more than one opiate, they would need more than one vaccine.

Other vaccines are in development for drugs including heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamines. Skolnick thinks that if all goes smoothly in further trials, the first available opioid vaccines for humans could hit clinics in the next five years or so.

Meanwhile, Janda’s team views the vaccines “as a crutch to assist people who are undergoing abstinence programs and have relapse problems.” Either way, biologic vaccines offer a promising addition to drug treatment programs and a potential new way to curb fatal opioid overdoses.

 
Two days before Hanukkah and three before Christmas, the cosmos will bring you an early holiday gift—no telescope required. The Ursid meteor shower peaks in the early morning hours of December 22, after midnight through dawn. It’s not the most spectacular shower of the year, but it is the last one of 2016, and it’ll tide you over until the Quadrantids next month. (And making a big production of going outside to watch the sky is a pretty good way to drop a big hint about that telescope you want for Christmas or Hanukkah.)

Danielle Moser, a meteor scientist with the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, tells mental_floss that you can expect to see a handful of meteors if you’re patient. “Not all of the meteors you’ll see while out observing belong to the Ursid meteor shower—some are sporadic background meteors and some belong to other active showers. If you see a meteor, try to trace it backwards. If you end up near the Little Dipper, there’s a good chance you’ve seen an Ursid.”

HOW 8P/TUTTLE WAS DISCOVERED… TWICE

 
While some meteor showers have been studied for millennia, the Ursids have only been observed for a relatively short time. The shower’s parent is comet 8P/Tuttle, discovered in 1790 by Pierre Méchain. Decades later, in 1858, it was rediscovered by Horace Tuttle, and thus earned its name. (Don’t feel bad for poor Pierre, though. He discovered so many things in his lifetime that he probably wouldn’t remember this meager little comet anyway.)

Around the turn of the century, William Denning, an amateur astronomer and renowned comet hunter from England, recognized the radiant, or the seeming point of origin, of the Ursid meteor shower. The association with the Tuttle comet was immediately suspected, and later observations would confirm it.

It turns out Tuttle is a “contact binary”—a small, solar system object made of two bodies that have gravitated toward each other until they touch, like the rubber-ducky shaped 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. We know now that Tuttle’s orbit around the Sun takes just under 14 years. As it goes about its orbit, it leaves behind a trail of particles that, over the centuries, has organized. When the Earth crosses into this debris field, those particles slam into our atmosphere and burn away. That release of energy takes the appearance of “shooting stars.” A meteor shower is born.

WHEN TO WATCH

The shower appears to originate in the Little Dipper, which is how it gets its name. The formal name of the Little Dipper is Ursa Minor, which translates as Little Bear. (Of course, some will argue it looks a lot more like a spoon.)

The shower will appear highest in the sky in the hours before sunrise on December 22, so set your alarm clock accordingly. The shower can produce around 10 meteors per hour, and to see them, all you’ll need is to find a place with no light and look up.

Moser suggests that you keep a thermos of hot chocolate in your hands and your phone in your pocket. “You’ll see more meteors if you let your eyes adjust to the dark,” she says. “As soon as you look at a bright light source like your phone, you have to start the adjustment process all over again! And hot chocolate will keep you warm and awake while patiently braving the cold December weather.”

The Ursids have had some pretty spectacular showings—most notably in 1986, with spikes on the order of 100 meteors per hour. Don’t get your hopes up for a wild display in 2016, however. Rather, appreciate the Ursids for what they are: an annual tradition of rare and romantic shooting stars in a beautiful, wintry, night sky. Enjoy the last big meteor shower of the year, and if it convinces someone to gift you a telescope, get ready: There are some astounding celestial wonders waiting for us in the new year.

 
Thanks to warm waters and an assist from La Niña, this year’s hurricane season was an active one, and coastal residents have been on edge all summer. But now the winds of winter are slowly winning the battle between the Arctic and the tropics, forcing the Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane season to finally calm down. In honor of 2016’s season, here are some things you might have missed about this year’s storms.

1. THE 2016 HURRICANE SEASON WAS THE MOST ACTIVE SINCE 2012.

 
If it seemed like we had to deal with a lot of storms this year, it’s only because the past couple of years have been relatively quiet. A “normal” hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean produces 12 named storms, six of which you’d expect to strengthen into hurricanes and three of those hurricanes would reach Category 3 intensity (115 mph) or stronger.

The 2016 Atlantic Hurricane Season, which officially ran from June 1 through November 30, saw 15 named storms, seven hurricanes, and three major hurricanes. The season began with an unusual hurricane in January, an early-season storm in May, and a string of storms that formed throughout the warm summer and fall months. But Hurricane Otto, which formed toward the end of November, was likely the last storm to form in the year.

2. LA NIÑA HELPED ATLANTIC STORMS THRIVE.

 
One of the major factors that allowed one storm after another to percolate in the Atlantic was the presence of mild La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It seems odd that cooler-than-normal waters in another ocean would have an impact on the hurricane season across the continent, but everything is connected. La Niña—the presence of abnormally cool waters near the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean—keeps thunderstorm activity in this part of the world to a minimum, reducing the strong winds that flow east over the Caribbean and typically tear apart tropical cyclones before they have a chance to form. The absence of these winds allow storms to build.

The past couple of hurricane seasons were stifled by the opposite phenomenon—an El Niño—which created unusually high levels of wind shear over the Atlantic. Many of the storms that formed this year also had to battle strong wind shear, but it usually let up enough for most of them to strengthen before hitting land.

3. THE SOUTHEAST TOOK A BEATING THIS YEAR.

The United States only saw a handful of landfalls over the past couple of years, but this year was different. Five of the ten storms that made landfall somewhere around the Atlantic Ocean this year hit the United States, and all of those storms came ashore either in Florida or South Carolina. There’s no particular reason that storms kept targeting the same areas this year—each storm was different and they all took advantage of different environmental factors that allowed them to hit the same spots over and over again.

Unfortunately, none of the five landfalling storms took the right track to help alleviate the historic drought that’s plaguing interior parts of the southeast. Tropical cyclones that come ashore along the northern Gulf Coast or the southern Atlantic coast are a big source of rainfall for states like Alabama and Georgia, but this year drought-stricken areas have had to go without this plentiful supply of tropical moisture.

4. BERMUDA GOT HIT HARD, TOO.

It’s not just the southeastern United States that got it bad this year. Bermuda is a tiny island—just a little smaller than Manhattan—that sits a few hundred miles off the coast of North Carolina. They’ve had some pretty close calls in the past, but it’s hard for the center of a hurricane to hit this small speck in the middle of a vast ocean.

Hard as it is, Hurricane Nicole managed to do just that this year, with the eye of this major hurricane passing directly over the island and its 65,000 residents. The entire island experienced wind gusts of more than 100 mph while the eye passed overhead. Thankfully, Bermuda is resilient and well-prepared for bad storms, so damage from this storm was relatively minimal.

Nicole wasn’t the only storm to hit Bermuda in recent years. Hurricanes Fay and Gonzalo both made landfall on the island nation during the same week in October 2014; this back-to-back blow caused extensive damage across the island. Hurricane Joaquin in October 2015 also came perilously close to the island, causing some minor damage as it passed the west of the island.

5. HURRICANE MATTHEW WAS HISTORICALLY HORRIFIC.

 
The worst storm of the year was Hurricane Matthew, a monstrous Category 5 hurricane that exploded in the Caribbean and came within miles of causing a catastrophe in the United States. Matthew was originally forecast to remain a minimal hurricane as it entered the central Caribbean Sea at the beginning of September, but the storm took advantage of calm winds, ample moisture, and record-warm ocean waters to exceed forecasts beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

Matthew rapidly grew from a strong tropical storm with 70 mph winds to a scale-topping beast with 160 mph winds in just 24 hours, and it maintained that strength as it closed in on the Greater Antilles. The hurricane crashed into Haiti on October 5 as a strong Category 4 storm, causing unspeakable destruction to the small towns that dot the hillsides on the country’s western shores. Entire towns were leveled by Matthew’s intense winds and storm surge, and some estimates figure that more than 1000 people died as a result.

It looked like Hurricane Matthew would repeat its destruction by making landfall in Florida as a major hurricane, but the powerful core of the storm stayed just a few miles offshore as it paralleled the Florida shoreline, sparing most coastal communities from the worst effects. Matthew eventually came inland in South Carolina, where the main threat transitioned from wind to flooding. Even still, eastern parts of North Carolina were devastated by the worst flooding in recent memory after the storm dropped more than a foot of rain in some locations. The floods killed dozens of people and caused so much damage that some school districts couldn’t restart classes until nearly three weeks after the hurricane.

6. HURRICANE OTTO MADE AN UNUSUAL MOVE.

The last storm of the season was also a bit surprising in that it strengthened far beyond what forecasters initially expected. The hurricane developed from an area of disturbed weather that sat off the coast of Nicaragua for a week, then quickly spinning itself into a borderline major hurricane before making landfall near the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

Most storms dissipate when they move inland, but Otto retained its hurricane strength as it moved across Nicaragua, and its eye emerged in the eastern Pacific Ocean a day later. Hurricane Otto is only the seventh storm in recorded history to move across Central America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and only the second storm to maintain its strength as it crossed land. The most recent storm to accomplish this feat was Hurricane Cesar-Douglas, 20 years earlier in 1996. Cesar-Douglas has two names because convention at the time was to rename a storm once it crossed ocean basins—it was called Cesar in the Atlantic and renamed Douglas once it moved into the Pacific. 

The human body is an amazing thing. For each one of us, it’s the most intimate object we know. And yet most of us don’t know enough about it: its features, functions, quirks, and mysteries. Our series The Body explores human anatomy part by part. Think of it as a mini digital encyclopedia with a dose of wow.

Your toes are possibly the most underappreciated, yet hard-working parts of your body. Though you may give little thought to them until you stub one stumbling out of bed in the night, these facts about your big toe might surprise you.

1. THE BIG TOE CARRIES THE GREATEST LOAD.

Each time you take a step, your foot rolls forward, shifting your body weight onto the ball of the foot as you prepare to push off into your next step. For most people, this means your big toe bears the load of your weight as you push off. Considering how many steps you take in a day, it’s no wonder people often experience pain in this toe.

2. TOE PROSTHETICS DATE BACK TO THE EGYPTIANS.

 
Humans have been figuring out ways to work around faulty toes for centuries. Researchers at Manchester University’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology found a wood and leather prosthetic of a big toe on the mummified foot of a 50- to 60-year-old woman who had undergone a toe amputation. Dating to the first millennium BCE, it’s known as “the Cairo Toe.”

3. YOUR BIG TOE HAS ONLY TWO BONES.

Despite being the biggest toe on the foot, the big toe only consists of two phalanges (or toe bones), the distal and proximal. Your other toes have three bones, but most of your big toe is made up of flesh and muscle.

4. YOUR BIG TOE AND GENITALS ARE NEIGHBORS … IN YOUR BRAIN.

The somatosensory cortex of your brain receives sensory information from all over the body. The part of the cortex that receives input from your feet happens to adjacent to the area that receives information from your genitals.

5. THIS PROXIMITY MIGHT EXPLAIN FOOT FETISHES.

Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego theorizes that foot fetishes could possibly result from a cross-wiring in the brain between the foot and the genital sensory centers.

6. GOUT OFTEN BEGINS IN THE BIG TOE.

 
The disease, a form of arthritis where sharp uric acid crystals build up in the body, frequently appears first as pain and swelling in the big toes, though researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Though long known as the “disease of kings” because it afflicted those with access to rich food and drink, gout is increasingly common among us, er, commoners.

7. THERE’S A REASON STUBBING YOUR TOE HURTS SO &!@$# MUCH.

Toes are loaded with numerous nerve-ending receptors called nociceptors that are highly sensitive to actual and potential tissue damage. “When you stub your toe, you’re massively stimulating a bunch of these nerve fibers at the same time. Those signals integrate in your spinal cord, which in turn relays that information to your brain. “It’s just a really big input,” Allan Basbaum, chair of UCSF’s Department of Anatomy, told WIRED. “The brain reads that, and it hurts like hell.”

8. THE BIG TOE SEPARATES HUMANS FROM APES.

Recently scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa determined that the base of the big toe, known as the hallux, is what makes it possible for humans to walk and run upright. They concluded that in other living apes, “the big toe is more thumb-like in facilitating grasping capabilities,” such as tree-climbing behaviors. In other words, our big toes demonstrate that humans are uniquely adapted to standing, walking, and running upright on two legs.

9. SURGEONS CAN MAKE THUMBS OUT OF BIG TOES …

It’s much easier to live without a big toe than it is a thumb. That’s why surgeons have begun to master a procedure called a toe-to-thumb transfer in which they replace injured or severed thumbs with big toes. While it sounds gruesome, it’s a life-changing operation that can significantly improve people’s quality of life, and ability to grip things again. They sometimes use other toes as well (warning: graphic images).

10. … AND LOSING YOUR BIG TOE WON’T STOP YOU FROM GETTING AROUND.

While your gait may become uneven, losing a big toe—or even two—won’t prevent you from running, walking, or dancing. It will take some getting used to, but your feet are remarkably adaptable even without big toes.

Cattle were first domesticated from wild aurochs about 10,000 years ago, as a portable source of wealth for our ancestors, and have proliferated alongside us ever since. There are now about 1.5 billion cattle on Earth, making a lot of milk and meat for human consumption, but in the process, creating a tremendous amount of waste.

Not only do cows pollute groundwater with their excrement, they also produce a lot of gas. Headlines are fond of discussing the issue of cow farts, but in reality, the gas that scientists are concerned about—methane—comes mostly from cow burps. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with a climate change impact 25 times greater than carbon dioxide.

Earlier this year, researchers from Denmark’s Aarhus University launched a four-year study to gauge whether adding a potent type of Greek oregano to cow feed could reduce methane emissions from dairy cow belches. Earlier research led by Penn State scientists suggested that oregano could cut cows’ methane emissions up to 40 percent.

Now, Australian researchers have found even more promising results from a beach staple (or nuisance, depending on your perspective): seaweed. Scientists on the Agriculture and Food team at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) showed introducing a particular kind of seaweed, Asparagopsis taxiformis, to livestock feed can reduce the methane production in sheep by more than 80 percent. Some of those researchers also did experiments with artificial cow stomachs, which found even higher potential reductions.

“Seaweed’s been fed to cattle since farming began,” agricultural scientist Robert Kinley, part of the CSIRO team, told mental_floss. Anywhere it washed up on beaches near where cows grazed, the animals would eat it, so it’s long been a natural food source. But after a farmer on Prince Edward Island in Canada noticed in 2006 that his cows that ate seaweed were healthier than those that he kept inland, researchers—including Kinley, then at Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University—began investigating. 

“Nobody really cared about seaweed until 10 years ago, but since then there have been various seaweeds on the market because it improves animals’ reproductive success and makes for healthier, happier animals,” says Kinley. Cows that eat seaweed have more efficient digestion, with 10 to 20 percent fewer methane emissions. Methane only persists in the atmosphere for about 10 years, as opposed to carbon dioxide’s hundreds of years, so cutting how much methane cows produce could help immediately address climate change impacts.

For farmers, better cow digestion creates economic benefits by making the cost of feed more efficient. So supplementing feed with seaweed has recently become a trend, and that’s where Kinley got involved—he wanted to make sure seaweeds were safe for cows to eat regularly. As he was testing different types of seaweeds, he wondered if there was one that might cut methane even more than 20 percent. He reached out to a group at CSIRO “who already had some ideas about the unique chemistry of seaweeds,” he says. They began collaborating. “We wanted to find seaweeds that would benefit animals and reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.”

They found what they were looking for in Asparagopsis taxiformis, a red seaweed. It aids digestion as other seaweeds do, but has an additional gas-reducing function. “The big punch comes from an enzyme inhibition. The seaweed chemistry debilitates the methanogen process so the pathway to form methane can’t be completed,” says Kinley. This leads to cows producing much less methane—a reduction of 99 percent in preliminary tests on the artificial cow stomachs. However, that reduction was dependent on a constant supplementation of the seaweed to keep the methane-reducing benefits going. Once the supplementation was stopped, methane production went right back up.

Kinley and his colleagues are now working on health protocols to establish the seaweed is safe for long-term consumption; next up is a feedlot trial with cows to determine what minimum amount of seaweed supplementation is needed for methane reduction.

Kinley sees an opportunity to create jobs by cultivating seaweed farming in places where A. taxiformis grows, which is pretty much everywhere; it’s a cosmopolitan species with multiple lineages (and is considered invasive in some locations). Right now, no one’s farming it, which presents a barrier to scaling up. “The biggest barrier isn’t animals or time, it’s how much seaweed can we get?” says Kinley. “Right now, I need 25 tons of seaweed just to do a feedlot trial with 1000 animals.”

But if cultivation takes off, the seaweed could be a quadruple win—helping clean wastewater and remove runoff nutrients and carbon dioxide near reefs, growing happy cows, aiding farmers, and mitigating climate change.

The season’s first vigorous winter storm came to life over the northern Plains at the end of November and left a trail of destruction in its wake. The air pressure at the center of this photogenic low-pressure system dipped to the strength of a formidable hurricane—bottoming out at 974 millibars on Monday, November 28, 2016—allowing the storm to unleash a slew of deadly weather from the Dakotas to Alabama.

FALL’S FIRST TORNADO OUTBREAK

At least five people were killed on Tuesday, November 29, when more than two dozen tornadoes touched down in parts of the southeastern United States. The storms developed in Mississippi early in the day on Tuesday and steadily marched across Alabama and Tennessee through the night-time hours.

Three of the people who died on Tuesday were caught in a mobile home during a tornado in Rosalie, Alabama. A mobile home is just about the worst place to take shelter from a tornado. These structures are not built to withstand intense thunderstorms or tornadoes; according to the National Weather Service, it only takes winds of about 100 mph to severely damage or destroy a mobile home.

We’re used to hearing about tornadoes in the South during the spring months, the time traditionally known as tornado season, but the late fall and early winter actually marks the beginning of a secondary tornado season, due to intense storms like the one we saw at the end of November. Warm and humid air surging north from the Gulf of Mexico set the stage for intense thunderstorms to develop. Once a strong cold front helps lift the unstable air skyward, storms gather strength. On November 29, powerful winds changing speed and direction through the atmosphere gave the thunderstorms the twist they needed to spawn tornadoes, damaging winds, and hailstones as large as baseballs.

NORTH DAKOTA SNOWSTORM

On the colder side of things, the storm system dumped up to 2 feet of snow across parts of the Plains and Rocky Mountains on November 28 and 29. North Dakota caught the brunt of the winter weather, with much of the sparsely populated state picking up between one and two feet of snow. A resort in the northwestern part of the state measured two feet of snow, and the state capital of Bismarck, near the center of the state, saw 18 inches of snow by the time the skies cleared.

Residents of the northern Plains are used to snow, but not this much all at once. This was the 10th-largest snowstorm since records began in Bismarck back in 1886. It seems early for the rest of the country, but November is a busy time for snow in North Dakota—in an average year, both Bismarck and Fargo receive about half a foot of snow during the month of November. In fact, five of the 10 biggest snowfalls ever recorded in Bismarck occurred during the month of November.

Even though this storm creeped its way into the records, local news reports that it didn’t cause too many problems around the state, aside from some school, business, and road closings. That may be because North Dakota is the fourth-least populous state in the United States—though it’s also the fastest-growing state in the country due to the oil boom on the Bakken Formation in the northwestern part of the state.

TENNESSEE FIRESTORM

The ongoing drought in the southeastern United States is taking its toll on forested areas, with even the tiniest spark setting off raging infernos that can quickly spiral out of control. A massive fire burned through two popular resort towns in the eastern Tennessee mountains on November 30, killing several people and destroying hundreds of homes and businesses. Though the weather wasn’t directly responsible for the fires that tore through Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, the same storm system that caused tornadoes in the south and near-blizzard conditions in the north also helped this fire spread out of control.

A tight pressure gradient caused by the strengthening low-pressure system over the Plains caused winds to rip out of the south across the southeast on the 28th. A fire burning on Chimney Tops Mountain grew exponentially as a result of the intense winds, rapidly spreading down into the valley near Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.

The wildfire came into the towns so quickly that residents and visitors had to scramble to leave. Some didn’t make it out in time. Guests at Gatlinburg’s Park Vista hotel were trapped inside as flames lapped at the windows, their only escape route down the mountain cut off by fire. Firefighters were able to beat back the flames enough to evacuate the hotel’s guests, but not everyone in the area was so lucky. Authorities report that at least four people in Sevier County, Tennessee, died as a result of the flames, though that total could climb as rescue crews continue to search the remains of homes and businesses.

Fortunately, heavy rain followed just behind the rapid spread of the fires, moistening the dry vegetation and stopping the rapid spread of the flames, staving off potentially an even greater catastrophe.

From now until January 22, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York will take visitors underwater. Not in the literal sense—the museum will be drowning in expertly crocheted sea life as part of its Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas exhibit. The showcases the work of sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, who started the Crochet Coral Reef project in 2005 in collaboration with the Institute for Figuring, a non-profit that melds science and math with art.

The Wertheims started their fiber reef when they learned pollution and global warming may soon completely destroy the Great Barrier Reef in their home country of Australia. Over the next few years of crocheting, the replica reef took over their home. Soon, they encouraged others to join in, making it one of the largest community art projects in the world. Since its inception, the project has grown to include around 8000 participants.

Anyone can start creating a satellite reef out of anything that can be crocheted (like wire, yarn, or even strips of fabric). But to have it be an official satellite reef, interested crocheters need to contact the Institute for Figuring, which will ask for a fee based on a sliding scale to help pay for the satellite reef’s community outreach and workshops.

Each fiber reef is created according to the principles of hyperbolic crochet, a process that uses a geometric formula to create mathematically pure crocheted shapes. The beauty of hyperbolic crochet lies in its simplicity; it’s basically just repeating one process over and over again. The initial pattern for beginners is a hyperbolic plane, a series of single crochets and increases—a base chain of any number, followed by single crochets with an increase at set intervals. The finished product is a sheet of cloth with wavy edges that curl in among themselves.

 
To make other coral types, each crocheter slightly alters the pattern by changing the increase intervals, adding in other stitch types, or otherwise altering the base chain to produce an endless amount of reef-life forms—replicating the math inherent in live reefs. Reefs in the wild are often created with naturally occurring hyperbolic geometry, which packs as much surface area into a small space as possible, creating a surface similar to the human brain’s folded appearance.

“It turns out that hyperbolic structures are very common in nature, and the place where lots of people encounter them is coral reefs,” Margaret Wertheim told Guernica in an interview last year. “Sea slugs, and a lot of other organisms with frilly forms, are biological manifestations of hyperbolic geometry.” Coral pieces can be crocheted flat, in a round, or starting from a single point to create a spiraled shape. Every piece will form differently depending on the algorithm, gauge, and yarn.

In addition to shedding light on the issues facing coral reefs today and practicing applied mathematics, the Crochet Coral Reef is also breaking gender boundaries in the science world. Most of the Crochet Reefers are women, while men are generally over-represented in STEM disciplines. That said, the majority of the Crochet Coral Reef’s funding comes not from scientific foundations but from the art world. As Wertheim told Guernica, traditional science funders generally are uninterested in the project. At one point, a senior program office told her that he’d “find it hard to convince [his] board that there is any real science in a bunch of women knitting.”

But although she likes to crochet, Wertheim is also a physicist and science writer; one of her personal goals is to increase female participation in the sciences. That’s also one of her goals with the Crochet Reef Project.

“The Crochet Coral Reef project offers a kind of feminist metaphor for how we might approach the problems of global warming through collective action,” she said in the interview. “Rather than relying on a few individual geniuses inventing some technological solution, let’s try and think about this together.”

The Blue Ridge Mountains in the eastern Appalachians get their name from the bluish haze that often blankets their rolling peaks on humid afternoons. Their colorful hue adds to the beauty of the region, but the intense haze smothering the mountains this week is a reminder that not all is right with this natural wonder. Large wildfires have been burning across interior parts of the southeastern United States for much of November as the region endures a drought that grows worse with each passing day, straining local water resources and stressing nature to its breaking point.

The November 22, 2016, update of the United States Drought Monitor (USDM) paints a dire picture for millions of people from the Mississippi Delta to the mountains of the Carolinas. The USDM is produced by scientists each week using factors such as temperature and precipitation data, soil moisture information, and water measurements from streams, rivers, and reservoirs. Once a drought reaches extreme or exceptional levels for a long period of time, as we’re seeing in states like Alabama and Georgia, it can result in widespread crop losses and extensive water shortages.

 
In contrast with many areas of the world that experience pronounced rainy seasons, rainfall in the southeastern United States is fairly consistent throughout the year. You can generally expect similar amounts of rain each month, with a little more in the summer and a little less in the fall. This year, however, storms were few and far between during the winter, and the typical summer deluges were less frequent on hot summer afternoons.

After trudging through one dry month after the other, rainfall deficits quickly started to add up. The lack of water has taken a serious toll. An analysis by NOAA on November 28, 2016 (see below) showed year-to-date rainfall deficits of more than a foot across a huge region, with the greatest impacts focused on Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Some areas are nearly 2 feet behind normal so far this year.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal recently declared a “Level 2 drought” for some counties in the northern part of the state, which enforces a slew of water restrictions on residents who live in hardest-hit communities. The restrictions include a ban on luxuries like car washes, and authorizes an odd-even daily schedule for outdoor watering based on your street address and the day of the week. The restrictions could get even more stringent if there’s no liquid relief in the future. The lack of rainfall has caused the water level in Lake Lanier in northern Georgia to fall more than 9 feet since last spring, and Lake Hartwell—which straddles the border between Georgia and South Carolina—has seen a similar drop in water levels. Lakes and reservoirs could eventually reach dangerously low levels if the drought continues and further water restrictions aren’t put in place.

 
It’s not just water systems that have taken a hit due to the abnormally dry conditions. Vegetation across the affected areas is so dry that it won’t take much to start a raging wildfire. Fire crews have responded to hundreds of wildfires across the southeast over the past couple of months, including those caused by fireworks, campfires, arsonists, discarded cigarettes, and even an explosion along a gas pipeline near Birmingham, Alabama earlier this month. Some of the wildfires are so large and intense that the smoke is covering thousands of square miles around the infernos. The smoke was so dense around Atlanta during the day on November 14, 2016, that it reduced visibility to just three miles at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport for a couple of hours.

The fires have gotten worse through the month. An intense wildfire caused major damage in and around the popular resort towns of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in eastern Tennessee in the just past few days, killing three people, injuring 14 more, forcing the evacuation of thousands, and burning hundreds of homes and businesses.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s any long-term relief in the forecast for the drought-stricken areas. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says that we’re currently experiencing a La Niña in the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon where waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific are colder than normal for an extended period of time. There’s a decent chance that these conditions will persist through this winter. La Niña winters in the United States are characterized by warmer-than-normal and drier-than-normal conditions across the southern part of the country, which doesn’t bode well for areas currently in a drought. That’s not to say that the parched land won’t see any relief over the next few months—but any rain that does fall probably won’t go a long way to fixing the damage that’s been done.

 
The Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis) is one of humankind’s oldest foes. The parasite is transmitted by ingesting worm larvae in contaminated drinking water. The worms may have been the “fiery serpents” mentioned in the Bible, and evidence of the parasite has even been found in Egyptian mummies.

After ingestion, the larvae burrow through the stomach and into the abdominal cavity. There they mate, after which the females migrate toward the skin’s surface, exiting through a painful, burning eruption. Sufferers attempt to lessen the pain by cooling the infected region in a pool of water—often a common water source for the local community—which inadvertently continues the worm’s life cycle.

But soon the Guinea worm’s reign of human suffering may finally be at an end. The parasite is poised to become only the second human pathogen eradicated. (The first was smallpox, declared eradicated in 1980.) In the past 30 years, cases of Guinea worm have fallen from approximately 3.5 million infections per year to a mere 19 cases in three countries in 2016. This dramatic decline is due largely to efforts by the Carter Center, which began their efforts to control Dracunculus in 1986.

Despite all of the progress, there’s one last serious hurdle to overcome: other animals spreading Guinea worm. Recent work has shown that dogs can be infected with Guinea worm, and may be contributing to the maintenance of the worm in nature and its spread to humans in Chad, where more than half of 2016’s cases have occurred (11 cases in all, with an additional three in Ethiopia and five in South Sudan). Two new papers suggest additional animal carriers—frogs and fish—may also be adding to the problem.

Reducing Guinea worm infections has so far focused on preventing the transmission cycle by eliminating consumption of contaminated water. To do this, scientists have used a multi-pronged attack: They educate people about how Guinea worm is transmitted; instruct them not to enter bodies of water if they have a worm emerging from their body; and provide filters for drinking water to keep copepods (and thus the Guinea worm larvae) from being ingested. Teams have also provided clean water sources in some cases, such as new wells, and treated water sources with larvicide to kill any existing worm larvae.

The strategy requires close surveillance of affected areas to determine if there are new Guinea worm cases. This approach has been extremely successful but was stymied in Chad by the finding of dogs infected with Guinea worm. Infected dogs could release the worms into water sources, re-contaminating the drinking water, and starting the cycle in humans all over again. And according to Donald Hopkins, special advisor for Guinea worm eradication with the Carter Center, people may have also become infected directly by eating undercooked fish or frogs which were harboring Guinea worm larvae. The worm could then carry out its life cycle within humans, much as if they were ingested with water. These reservoirs also worsen ongoing infections in dogs, which re-establish Guinea worms in the water supplies. Dogs could also eat infected fish or frogs directly from water sources, or ingest entrails from fish discarded by fishermen after gutting.

Several interventions in Chad have been established to prevent Guinea worm transmission. Parasitologist Mark Eberhard, a co-author on the two new studies identifying Guinea worm infections in frogs and fish, tells mental_floss that teams in the country implemented new health messages recently, telling individuals “to cook your food well and to bury entrails, and not let dogs eat fish or other animal viscera. However, such attempts to change behavior are not only difficult but take some time to penetrate fully at the community level.”

 
Hopkins tells mental_floss that another step they’re taking is educating communities about dog infections. They’re working to stop that cycle by advising people to take two important steps: in addition to burying entrails to make sure dogs can’t get to them, they suggest tethering dogs that have an emergent worm so they can’t contaminate the water. Both tactics appear successful, according to Hopkins. “We can inspect a sample of communities in endemic areas to see whether or not they’re burying fish entrails,” he says. “The program has shown them to dig deep holes and put covers on them, so these dogs cannot dig these fish entrails up. That’s doing very well. Our samples have been showing now for more than a year and a half that more than 80 percent of individual samples in these communities are burying these entrails.”

Similarly, education on dog Guinea worms is improving. “We’re working with communities that, as soon as they see a worm coming out of a dog, they tether the dog. The country has also offered reward equivalent to $20 USD for reporting infected dogs to the program and tethering infected dogs,” Hopkins says. The reward covers the cost of feeding the dog other food besides the possibly infected leftover entrails. “The latest figures on dogs so far this year show that 77 percent of those dogs have been tethered.”

In previous countries where Guinea worm has been eliminated, once human infections had ceased, a three-year monitoring period was enacted to be sure the worm was truly gone. Eberhard notes that “no country certified has had reinfection.” With Chad, that waiting period will have to see not only no new infections in humans, but also in dogs. Hopkins says the program had previously seen sporadic infections in dogs “in Mali, Ghana, India, Pakistan, and a few other countries, but the infections in dogs died out once transmission in humans was stopped. In Chad, the difference is that we have more dogs than people infected.” Still, Hopkins anticipates that the interventions put into place will work to break that cycle and finally end the parasite’s presence in Chad.

The final stretch of this eradication campaign may be one of the most trying. Like polio—another infection nearing eradication, which re-emerged in Nigeria on the Chad border in 2016 after a two-year absence—careful surveillance and close contact with the affected populations are key to finding new cases. We are close to the end, but the final push will require vigilance and quick responses to stop any new infections from spreading.