"We are truly grateful for the policy of the Party, which encourages farmers to develop forestry to alleviate poverty and become prosperous," said Huang Chuanrong, a farmer in Ningde, East China's Fujian Province, who succeeded in escaping poverty through planting.

Ningde is a city located in the northeast part of Fujian Province, with a land area of 13,400 square kilometers. It used to be one of the 18 concentrated and contiguous poverty-stricken areas in the country, making it the dream of the people in the region to overcome poverty and live a comfortable life.

The land of eastern Fujian has undergone great changes and has become a model of poverty alleviation with Chinese characteristics. For decades, the Ningde model of precise poverty alleviation has been formed through unremitting efforts from the grassroots officials and masses.

Enduring efforts

Houyang village is located in Zhouning county in Ningde. The family forest farm initiated by the elderly Huang Zhenfang has not only created a unique path to prosperity through forestry but has also made outstanding contributions to regional afforestation.

"Before the policy of reform and opening-up, our family was very poor. My elderly father was a thin and weak farmer. Since I was 13 years old, I have been helping my father in the fields, hoping to lighten the burden on our family," Huang Chuanrong, Huang Zhenfang's son, told the Global Times.

According to Huang, at that time, there were hardly any trees in the village, and soil erosion was very severe, with heavy rain often causing landslides.

"We really appreciate the Party's policy," Huang sincerely told the reporter, expressing that the opportunity to establish a family forest farm originated from the Party's guiding policy for the benefit of the people.

In 1983, Huang Zhenfang led his whole family to embark on the path of afforestation and land reclamation under the guidance of "No.1 central document." It took three years for the afforestation area to expand from the original 50 mu (3.3 hectares) to 1,207 mu.

"We received recognition from the county Party committee and government, and the villagers saw the positive results coming from the policy of the Party and joined us one after another," Huang Chuanrong said.

However, the development of forestry has the problem of long growth cycles and slow returns.

"To solve the problem of funding shortages, my resourceful grandfather started trying intercropping potatoes, corn, konjac, and tea in the forest, using the short-term growing crops to support the long-term development of the trees. This not only increased the family income but also effectively utilized land resources, improving our family's life as well," Huang Chuanrong's daughter Huang Juanjuan told the Global Times.

At the same time, the quality of the soil improved due to the use of fertilizers for crop cultivation. "It was truly a remarkable idea," she said.

Currently, the Huang family's household forest farm still regards agricultural production as its main business. They cultivate over 100 mu of medicinal herbs such as Huangjing, raise 200 beehives, and grow crops like sweet potatoes.

Their annual income exceeds 300,000 yuan ($42,000), and they have helped more than 50 villagers to become prosperous.

The story of Huang Zhenfang's forest farm has deeply influenced the descendants of the Huang family. Huang Yubin, the grandson of the resourceful elderly man, has helped promote the agricultural and forestry products of Zhouning to a broader market through the development of e-commerce, further consolidating the poverty alleviation achievements of the village.

According to Huang Yubin, he returned to his hometown to start a business in 2021 and established a company focusing on e-commerce in January 2023, listing more than 20 agricultural, forestry, and cultural products. Huang is currently connecting with relevant companies in Fujian Province, trying to use livestreaming to promote sales.

"I used to be a designer, so I thought of creating cultural and creative products, such as turning the herbal medicines into sachets and selling them online," he told the Global Times, expressing his pride in using his expertise to contribute to the revitalization of his hometown.

More rural revitalization channels

There are more cases in Ningde city to promote rural revitalization. Gutian county is the largest edible fungi production base in the country. Since 2012, the county Party committee and government have made efforts to promote the transformation and upgrading of the edible fungi industry.

Among them, one important aspect is to improve the cultivation conditions of edible fungi, aiming to solve the safety hazards and high labor intensity of grass mushroom shed.

After in-depth research on farmers and combining various biological characteristics of edible fungi with current production technologies at home and abroad, a series of edible fungi mushroom shed types have been designed for farmers to choose from.

Constructing photovoltaic mushroom sheds is an important path to explore the combination of the edible mushroom industry and the new photovoltaic industry. It is also an important measure to reduce the cost of standardized mushroom shed transformation for mushroom farmers.

According to Zheng Kuidong, deputy secretary of the county Party committee, since May 2021, a total of nine photovoltaic mushroom shed projects have been implemented in the county. After the completion of the projects, it is estimated that 37,058.4 tons of water can be saved and 23,761.9 tons of carbon dioxide emission can be reduced annually.

"Photovoltaic mushroom sheds can effectively achieve the generation of green electricity and the cultivation of high-quality mushrooms," Zheng told the Global Times.

"Traditional mushroom sheds are made of wooden boards. The conditions of photovoltaic mushroom sheds have improved significantly because they are not affected by typhoons and can maintain a stable temperature range suitable for mushroom growth," Yu Xinkao, a local mushroom farmer, told the Global Times.

He added that the improved conditions of the sheds have significantly increased mushroom production. Yu also mentioned that when encountering technical difficulties, there are designated government workers who can be contacted to provide on-site assistance.

According to Zheng, the county promotes rural revitalization through various channels such as increasing income for mushroom farmers, operating and managing cooperatives led by Party branches, and connecting production and sales through large-scale commercial supermarkets of leading enterprises. "I have great confidence in the continued development of photovoltaic mushroom sheds in the future," Yu said.

The Austrian Cultural Center in Beijing recently invited artists Honey and Bunny to organize the performance art exhibition "Diets, resources, and aesthetics" at the Markor Cave Museum. This exciting event was organized to commemorate the International Day of Food Loss and Waste Awareness. 

Food waste, environmental protection, food distribution, and sustainable use of resources are global issues that have attracted the attention of all sectors of society, and can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, including ethics, science, and art. This theme was deeply explored through "eating" art performances and food design, which were rich, revelatory experiences for audiences.

Since the establishment of diplomatic relationships between China and Austria in 1971, cultural exchanges between the two countries have been very active, and this performance art exhibition is a witness to the friendly exchanges between the two peoples.

A series of photographic artworks created by the artists Honey and Bunny on the subject of food are on display at the exhibition, complimenting wonderful performances through conversation sessions and performance art pieces, inspiring a deep understanding among audience and their reflections on "Diets, resources, and aesthetics." This exhibition is not only a friendly international art and culture exchange feast, but also deepens cultural cooperation between China and Europe.

BOSTON — A decades-long debate over who once occupied a settlement located near the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found has taken a chaste turn.

Analyses of 33 newly excavated skeletons of people buried at the West Bank site, Qumran, supports a view that the community consisted of a religious sect of celibate men. Anthropologist Yossi Nagar of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem presented the findings November 16 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Preliminary radiocarbon dating of one of the Qumran bones indicates that the interred bodies are around 2,200 years old — close to the same age as the ancient texts, which are estimated to have been written between around 150 B.C. and A.D. 70.
Plus, reexamination of 53 previously unearthed human skeletons from Qumran’s cemetery, now housed in France, found that six of seven individuals formerly tagged as women were actually men, Nagar said. A small number of children have also been excavated at Qumran.

Israel Antiquities Authority anthropologists Hanania Hizmi and Yevgeny Aharonovich directed the latest excavations at Qumran in 2016. The researchers called in Nagar to study the skeletons. He identified 30 of the newly excavated individuals as definitely or probably males, based on factors that include pelvic shape and body sizes. (There was not enough evidence to assign a sex to the remaining three.) At the time of their deaths, the men ranged in age from around 20 to 50 or more, Nagar estimated.
“I don’t know if these were the people who produced the Qumran region’s Dead Sea Scrolls,” Nagar said. “But the high concentration of adult males of various ages buried at Qumran is similar to what has been found at cemeteries connected to Byzantine monasteries.” The Byzantine Empire, founded in A.D. 330, was an extension of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean.
Earlier investigations of Qumran suggested it was founded more than 2,700 years ago. Warfare led to its abandonment before it was settled again for about 200 years, up to around the year A.D. 68.
Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include parts of the Hebrew Bible, in 11 nearby caves between 1947 and 1956 stimulated intense interest in who had occupied Qumran. In February of 2017, researchers revealed they had found another cave in the same area that possibly held scrolls or pieces of papyrus and leather intended to be written on.

An influential early theory held that members of an ancient, celibate Jewish sect, the Essenes, lived at Qumran and either wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls or were caretakers of these religious, legal and philosophical documents. But over the past 30 years, other possible inhabitants of Qumran have been proposed, including Bedouin herders, craftsmen and Roman soldiers.

Qumran individuals show no signs of war-related injuries and are not predominantly young adult men, as would be expected of a cemetery for soldiers, Nagar said. The Qumran skeletons can’t be confirmed as Essenes, but their identity as part of a community of celibate men appears probable, he added.

Extraction and analysis of DNA from the Qumran skeletons would help confirm that they are all, or almost all, men, said Jonathan Rosenbaum, a professor of Jewish Studies at Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pa.

Researchers removed small samples of bone from some of the newly excavated Qumran skeletons before reburying the finds in their original resting places. Nagar wasn’t sure if any attempts to retrieve DNA from bone samples would be launched.

With each new year, science offers a fresh list of historical occasions ideally suited for a Top 10 list.

Science’s rich history guarantees a never-ending supply of noteworthy anniversaries. Centennials of births, deaths or discoveries by prominent scientists (or popular centennial fractions or multiples) offer reminders of past achievements and context for appreciating science of the present day. To keep the holiday spirit pleasant, we’ll omit the plagues and natural disasters (so no mention of the centennial of the Spanish flu pandemic or the tricentennial of the Gansu earthquake in the Qing Empire). But that leaves plenty of math, medicine, astronomy and quantum stuff. Such as:

10. Quantum teleportation (25th anniversary)
    At a physics meeting in Seattle in March 1993, Charles Bennett of IBM thrilled science fiction fans everywhere by revealing the theory of quantum teleportation. (A few days later, a paper by Bennett and his teleportation collaborators appeared in Physical Review Letters.) Bennett described how quantum experimentalists Alice and Bob could use quantum entanglement to erase the identity of a quantum particle at one location and restore it at a remote location — just like Captain Kirk disappearing in the Enterprise transporter and reappearing on some dangerous alien planet. It’s not magic, though. Alice and Bob must each possess one of a pair of entangled quantum particles. If Alice wants to teleport a quantum particle to Bob, she must let it interact with her entangled particle and send the result to Bob by e-mail (or text, or phone call, or snail mail). That interaction destroys Alice’s copy of the particle to be teleported, but Bob can reconstruct it using his entangled particle after Alice e-mails him. In 1993, it was just an idea, but a few years later it was successfully demonstrated in the lab.
11. Arnold Sommerfeld (150th birthday)
    Born in Königsberg, Prussia, (now part of Russia) on December 5, 1868, Arnold Sommerfeld played a major role in advancing early quantum theory in the years after Niels Bohr introduced the quantum version of the hydrogen atom. Sommerfeld showed how to extend quantum ideas from circular to elliptical electron orbits, making him kind of like a Kepler to Bohr’s Copernicus. Earlier Sommerfeld had been one of the first strong supporters of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Sommerfeld also mentored an all-star cast of 20th century physicists, his students including Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe.
12. Jean Fourier (250th birthday)
    Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, born March 21, 1768, survived multiple arrests during the French Revolution and ended up working for Napoleon, who made him a baron. With Napoleon’s demise, Fourier struggled to regain political favor and acceptance in the academic world, and eventually succeeded, but his political and diplomatic embroilments consumed much of his time when he should have been doing math. Nevertheless he did important work on the mathematics of heat diffusion and developed useful techniques for solving equations. His most famous achievement, Fourier’s theorem, allows complex periodic processes to be broken down into a series of simpler wave motions. It has wide application in many realms of physics and engineering.
13. James Joule (200th birthday)
    James Joule was born into a family of brewers on December 24, 1818. The brewery provided a laboratory where he developed exceptional experimental skills. Despite no formal scientific training and no academic job, he still became one of England’s leading scientists. His experimental skill led him to precisely establish the amount of work needed to produce a quantity of heat and the relationship between heat and electricity.

Most famously, he demonstrated the law of conservation of energy. Whether mechanical, electrical or chemical, energy’s quantitative relationship to heat remained the same, regardless of the substances used in conducting the measurements, Joule showed. In other words, energy is conserved — a truth now known as the First Law of Thermodynamics. There were no Nobel Prizes in those days, so Joule’s main reward was the designation of the standard unit of energy as the joule.

6. Henrietta Swan Leavitt (150th birthday)
   Born in Massachusetts on July 4, 1868, Henrietta Swan Leavitt attended Oberlin College in Ohio and then Radcliffe College, where she studied astronomy. Her excellent academic record impressed Edward Pickering, the director of the Harvard Observatory, where she volunteered to be a research assistant and soon earned a permanent job. She worked on mapping stars with the latest photographic and spectroscopic methods, eventually measuring the brightnesses of thousands of stars. Some of those stars varied in brightness over time (one of them, Delta Cephei, gave such stars the name Cepheid variables). Leavitt analyzed these Cepheids more thoroughly than her predecessors and noticed that the stars’ brightness varied on a regular schedule that depended on their intrinsic brightness. Leavitt worked out the “period-luminosity relationship” in 1908, giving astronomers a powerful tool for measuring the distance to stars and other astronomical objects.

Distance to a Cepheid nearby could be determined by parallax, enabling the determination of its intrinsic brightness based on its brightening-dimming schedule. Then, using nearby Cepheids’ intrinsic brightness, the bright-dim period for a more distant Cepheid could be used to infer its intrinsic brightness. That made it possible to calculate the star’s distance. Leavitt’s work made much of the 20th century’s dramatic revision of humankind’s conception of the cosmos possible. “Her discovery of the period-luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars is absolutely fundamental in transforming people’s ideas about first, our own galactic system and second, providing the means to demonstrate that galaxies do in fact exist,” historian Robert Smith said in a talk last January.

5. Spontaneous Generation, Not (350th anniversary)
   Casual observations of nature had led the ancients to believe that life sometimes spontaneously generated itself from decaying organic matter — think maggots appearing in rotten meat. Francesco Redi, an expert on the effects of snake venom, thought otherwise. Born in Italy, educated at the University of Pisa and then medical school in Florence, Redi conducted various experiments on the effects of snakebites, realizing that the danger stemmed from venom entering the bloodstream. In his masterwork Experiments on the Generation of Insects, published in 1668, he described clever experiments that showed maggots could appear only if flies had access to the meat to lay their eggs. He didn’t close the case on all claims of spontaneous generation, but his work was a major first step toward eliminating received dogma in biology and replacing it with experiment and reason.
6. Discovery of helium (150th anniversary)
   On August 18, 1868, French astronomer Jules Janssen witnessed a total eclipse of the sun in Guntur, India, and recorded the colors in the spectrum of solar prominences. He realized that he could record the colors even without an eclipse, and in the following days he observed a curious bright yellow line. He wrote a paper and sent it off to the French Academy of Sciences. Later that year, English astronomer Joseph Lockyer observed the same spectral line, wrote a paper and also sent it to the French Academy of Sciences. Legend (apparently true) has it that the papers arrived within minutes of each other, so Janssen and Lockyer shared in the discovery of the yellow line, whatever it was.

Lockyer soon argued that it was the signature of a new chemical element, unknown on Earth. He called it helium, for Helios, the Greek god of the sun. Some experts doubted that the line signified a new element or insisted that such an element must exist only on the sun and would never have any usefulness on Earth. But their balloon burst in 1895 when William Ramsay in London found helium gas within a uranium-containing mineral. (Others working in Sweden found the gas at about the same time.) Uranium emits alpha particles, the nuclei of helium atoms, so all those alpha particles need to do is find some stray electrons buzzing around to become helium atoms. But nobody understood that at the time because radioactivity hadn’t been discovered yet.

3. Ignaz Semmelweis (200th birthday)
   Born on July 1, 1818, in Hungary, Ignaz Semmelweis almost single-handedly (or maybe dual-handedly) showed how to bring public health out of the dark ages and into modernity by identifying the importance of washing your hands. After attending medical school in Vienna, he practiced midwifery for a while and then studied surgery and statistics. He then joined the staff at a teaching hospital, where he noticed a large (statistically suspicious) difference between two clinics in deaths of mothers or their babies from puerperal fever. He eventually realized that in one of the clinics doctors conducted autopsies and apparently carried cadaver contamination to the birthing room. Semmelweis concocted a solution for cleansing hands after autopsies; the puerperal fever death rate then dropped dramatically. But his insight was widely resisted by the medical establishment. It was only much later, after Louis Pasteur established the importance of germs in transmitting disease, that Semmelweis’ method could be successfully explained and then adopted.
4. Richard Feynman (100th birthday)
   One of the most nonconformist of theoretical physicists, Richard Feynman (born May 11, 1918) gained public notoriety late in life as a member of the Presidential Commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger explosion. He was also skilled at playing bongo drums. Among physicists, he was most highly regarded for his original approach to quantum mechanics and formulation of quantum field theory (work earning a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics). Later he was an early leading advocate of research into quantum computing. Hans Bethe, another physics Nobel laureate, considered Feynman to be a most unusual kind of genius. “He was a magician,” Bethe once said. “Feynman certainly was the most original physicist I have seen in my life.”
5. Noether’s theorem (centennial)
   On any list of history’s great mathematicians who were ignored or underappreciated simply because they were women, you’ll find the name of Emmy Noether. Despite the barricades erected by 19th century antediluvian attitudes, she managed to establish herself as one of Germany’s premier mathematicians. She made significant contributions to various math specialties, including advanced forms of algebra. And in 1918, she published a theorem that provided the foundation for 20th century physicists’ understanding of reality. She showed that symmetries in nature implied the conservation laws that physicists had discovered without really understanding.

Joule’s conservation of energy, it turns out, is a requirement of time symmetry — the fact that no point in time differs from any other. Similarly, conservation of momentum is required if space is symmetric, that is, moving to a different point in space changes nothing about anything else. And if all directions in space are similarly equivalent — rotational symmetry — then the law of conservation of angular momentum is assured and figure skating remains a legitimate Olympic sport. Decades after she died in 1935, physicists are still attempting to exploit Noether’s insight to gain a deeper understanding of the symmetries underlying the laws of the cosmos. On any decent list of history’s great mathematicians, regardless of sex or anything else, you’ll find the name of Emmy Noether.

Who needs curtains? One day, you could block out afternoon glare and heat with changeable windows that absorb sunshine to charge your electronics.

A high-tech prototype panel described online January 22 in Nature Materials, switches between transparent pane and dark-tinted solar cell. The layer in the panel that’s responsible for soaking up sun has atoms that only arrange themselves into a light-absorbing crystal structure at high temperatures. When heated, these atoms form a dark-tinted crystal known as a perovskite, a new darling of the solar cell industry (SN: 8/5/17, p. 22).
Letian Dou, a chemical engineer at Purdue University, and colleagues were only able to form these light-harvesting crystals in their solar cells by cranking the heat to 105° Celsius, much hotter than your average sun-blasted window. The team is working to lower that threshold to below 70° C so that sunshine alone would trigger the switch.

Currently, the perovskite’s atoms stay locked in crystal configuration until exposed to moisture, which jumbles up the atoms and turns the material transparent again. The researchers still need to find a way to deactivate the solar cell mode without needing a spray bottle of water on hand.

The technology could someday be used for windshields that recharge electric vehicles and keep a parked car’s interior cool while the sun bakes outside.

As mice plumped up on a high-fat diet, some of their taste buds vanished. This disappearing act could explain why some people with obesity seem to have a weakened sense of taste, which may compel them to eat more.

Compared with siblings that were fed normal mouse chow, mice given high-fat meals lost about 25 percent of their taste buds over eight weeks. Buds went missing because mature taste bud cells died off more quickly, and fewer new cells developed to take their place. Chronic, low-level inflammation associated with obesity appears to be behind the loss, researchers report March 20 in PLOS Biology.
Taste buds, each a collection of 50 to 100 cells, sense whether a food is sweet, sour, bitter, salty or umami (savory). These cells help identify safe and nourishing food, and stimulate reward centers in the brain. The tongue’s taste bud population is renewed regularly; each bud lasts about 10 days. Special cells called progenitor cells give rise to new taste bud cells that replace old ones.

Some studies have suggested that taste becomes duller in people with obesity, although why that is has remained unclear. But if taste becomes less intense, “then maybe you don’t get the positive feeling that you should,” which could give way to more overeating, says study coauthor Robin Dando, who studies the biology of taste at Cornell University. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults have obesity, determined by a person’s body mass index, a ratio of weight to height. The condition is linked to a number of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

The study’s finding that obesity-induced inflammation impacts the presence of taste buds “provides a possible link between obesity and taste,” says Kathryn Medler, a taste physiologist at the University at Buffalo in New York, who was not involved with the research.

Obesity triggers low-level, ongoing inflammation in the body, which can harm cells. The taste tissues of the obese mice had a higher amount of a type of protein called a cytokine, which regulates inflammation, than their normal-weight kin, the researchers found.
This particular cytokine, called tumor necrosis factor alpha, seems to be damaging to taste buds, the researchers found. In a test with mice that couldn’t make the cytokine, the obese mice didn’t have missing taste buds. Another experiment showed that mice engineered not to gain excess weight on the high-fat diet — and that therefore didn’t have obesity-related inflammation — also had the regular amount of taste buds.

Along with learning more about how taste buds are damaged by inflammation, Dando is interested in working toward new treatments for obesity, perhaps by countering the dulled sense of taste. “These mice lose taste buds,” he says. “Can we bring them back?”

When you’re stressed and anxious, you might feel your heart race. Is your heart racing because you’re afraid? Or does your speeding heart itself contribute to your anxiety? Both could be true, a new study in mice suggests.

By artificially increasing the heart rates of mice, scientists were able to increase anxiety-like behaviors — ones that the team then calmed by turning off a particular part of the brain. The study, published in the March 9 Nature, shows that in high-risk contexts, a racing heart could go to your head and increase anxiety. The findings could offer a new angle for studying and, potentially, treating anxiety disorders.
The idea that body sensations might contribute to emotions in the brain goes back at least to one of the founders of psychology, William James, says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In James’ 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, he put forward the idea that emotion follows what the body experiences. “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” James wrote.

The brain certainly can sense internal body signals, a phenomenon called interoception. But whether those sensations — like a racing heart — can contribute to emotion is difficult to prove, says Anna Beyeler, a neuroscientist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux. She studies brain circuitry related to emotion and wrote a commentary on the new study but was not involved in the research. “I’m sure a lot of people have thought of doing these experiments, but no one really had the tools,” she says.

Deisseroth has spent his career developing those tools. He is one of the scientists who developed optogenetics — a technique that uses viruses to modify the genes of specific cells to respond to bursts of light (SN: 6/18/21; SN: 1/15/10). Scientists can use the flip of a light switch to activate or suppress the activity of those cells.
In the new study, Deisseroth and his colleagues used a light attached to a tiny vest over a mouse’s genetically engineered heart to change the animal’s heart rate. When the light was off, a mouse’s heart pumped at about 600 beats per minute. But when the team turned on a light that flashed at 900 beats per minutes, the mouse’s heartbeat followed suit. “It’s a nice reasonable acceleration, [one a mouse] would encounter in a time of stress or fear,” Deisseroth explains.

When the mice felt their hearts racing, they showed anxiety-like behavior. In risky scenarios — like open areas where a little mouse might be someone’s lunch — the rodents slunk along the walls and lurked in darker corners. When pressing a lever for water that could sometimes be coupled with a mild shock, mice with normal heart rates still pressed without hesitation. But mice with racing hearts decided they’d rather go thirsty.

“Everybody was expecting that, but it’s the first time that it has been clearly demonstrated,” Beyeler says.
The researchers also scanned the animals’ brains to find areas that might be processing the increased heart rate. One of the biggest signals, Deisseroth says, came from the posterior insula (SN: 4/25/16). “The insula was interesting because it’s highly connected with interoceptive circuitry,” he explains. “When we saw that signal, [our] interest was definitely piqued.”

Using more optogenetics, the team reduced activity in the posterior insula, which decreased the mice’s anxiety-like behaviors. The animals’ hearts still raced, but they behaved more normally, spending some time in open areas of mazes and pressing levers for water without fear.
A lot of people are very excited about the work, says Wen Chen, the branch chief of basic medicine research for complementary and integrative health at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in Bethesda, Md. “No matter what kind of meetings I go into, in the last two days, everybody brought up this paper,” says Chen, who wasn’t involved in the research.

The next step, Deisseroth says, is to look at other parts of the body that might affect anxiety. “We can feel it in our gut sometimes, or we can feel it in our neck or shoulders,” he says. Using optogenetics to tense a mouse’s muscles, or give them tummy butterflies, might reveal other pathways that produce fearful or anxiety-like behaviors.

Understanding the link between heart and head could eventually factor into how doctors treat panic and anxiety, Beyeler says. But the path between the lab and the clinic, she notes, is much more convoluted than that of the heart to the head.

An experimental treatment for endometriosis, a painful gynecological disease that affects some 190 million people worldwide, may one day offer new hope for easing symptoms.

Monthly antibody injections reversed telltale signs of endometriosis in monkeys, researchers report February 22 in Science Translational Medicine. The antibody targets IL-8, a molecule that whips up inflammation inside the scattered, sometimes bleeding lesions that mark the disease. After neutralizing IL-8, those hallmark lesions shrink, the team found.

The new treatment is “pretty potent,” says Philippa Saunders, a reproductive scientist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved with work. The study’s authors haven’t reported a cure, she points out, but their antibody does seem to have an impact. “I think it’s really very promising,” she says.

Many scientists think endometriosis occurs when bits of the uterine lining — the endometrium — slough off during menstruation. Instead of exiting via the vagina, they voyage in the other direction: up through the fallopian tubes. Those bits of tissue then trespass through the body, sprouting lesions where they land. They’ll glom onto the ovaries, fallopian tubes, bladder and other spots outside of the uterus and take on a life of their own, Saunders says.
The lesions can grow nerve cells, form tough nubs of tissue and even bleed during menstrual cycles. They can also kick off chronic bouts of pelvic pain. If you have endometriosis, you can experience “pain when you urinate, pain when you defecate, pain when you have sex, pain when you move around,” Saunders says. People with the disease can also struggle with infertility and depression, she adds. “It’s really nasty.”
Once diagnosed, patients face a dearth of treatment options — there’s no cure, only therapies to alleviate symptoms. Surgery to remove lesions can help, but symptoms often come back.

The disease affects at least 10 percent of girls, women and transgender men in their reproductive years, Saunders says. And people typically suffer for years — about eight on average — before a diagnosis. “Doctors consider menstrual pelvic pain a very common thing,” says Ayako Nishimoto-Kakiuchi, a pharmacologist at Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. in Tokyo. Endometriosis “is underestimated in the clinic,” she says. “I strongly believe that this disease has been understudied.”

Hormonal drugs that stop ovulation and menstruation can also offer relief, says Serdar Bulun, a reproductive endocrinologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago not involved with the new study. But those drugs come with side effects and aren’t ideal for people trying to become pregnant. “I see these patients day in and day out,” he says. “I see how much they suffer, and I feel like we are not doing enough.”

Nishimoto-Kakiuchi’s team engineered an antibody that grabs onto the inflammatory factor IL-8, a protein that scientists have previously fingered as one potential culprit in the disease. The antibody acts like a garbage collector, Nishimoto-Kakiuchi says. It grabs IL-8, delivers it to the cell’s waste disposal machinery, and then heads out to snare more IL-8.

The team tested the antibody in cynomolgus monkeys that were surgically modified to have the disease. (Endometriosis rarely shows up spontaneously in these monkeys, the scientists discovered previously after screening more than 600 females.) The team treated 11 monkeys with the antibody injection once a month for six months. In these animals, lesions shriveled and the adhesive tissue that glues them to the body thinned out, too. Before this study, Nishimoto-Kakiuchi says, the team didn’t think such signs of endometriosis were reversible.
Her company has now started a Phase I clinical trial to test the safety of therapy in humans. The treatment is one of several endometriosis therapies scientists are testing (SN: 7/19/19) . Other trials will test new hormonal drugs, robot-assisted surgery and behavioral interventions.

Doctors need new options to help people with the disease, Saunders says. “There’s a huge unmet clinical need.”

SpaceX’s rapidly growing fleet of Starlink internet satellites now make up half of all active satellites in Earth orbit.

On February 27, the aerospace company launched 21 new satellites to join its broadband internet Starlink fleet. That brought the total number of active Starlink satellites to 3,660, or about 50 percent of the nearly 7,300 active satellites in orbit, according to analysis by astronomer Jonathan McDowell using data from SpaceX and the U.S. Space Force.
“These big low-orbit internet constellations have come from nowhere in 2019, to dominating the space environment in 2023,” says McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “It really is a massive shift and a massive industrialization of low orbit.”

SpaceX has been launching Starlink satellites since 2019 with the goal of bringing broadband internet to remote parts of the globe. And for just as long, astronomers have been warning that the bright satellites could mess up their view of the cosmos by leaving streaks on telescope images as they glide past (SN: 3/12/20).

Even the Hubble Space Telescope, which orbits more than 500 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, is vulnerable to these satellite streaks, as well as those from other satellite constellations. From 2002 to 2021, the percentage of Hubble images affected by light from low-orbit satellites increased by about 50 percent, astronomer Sandor Kruk of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, and colleagues report March 2 in Nature Astronomy.

The number of images partially blocked by satellites is still small, the team found, rising from nearly 3 percent of images taken between 2002 and 2005 to just over 4 percent between 2018 and 2021 for one of Hubble’s cameras. But there are already thousands more Starlink satellites now than there were in 2021.

“The fraction of [Hubble] images crossed by satellites is currently small with a negligible impact on science,” Kruk and colleagues write. “However, the number of satellites and space debris will only increase in the future.” The team predicts that by the 2030s, the probability of a satellite crossing Hubble’s field of view any time it takes an image will be between 20 and 50 percent.
The sudden jump in Starlink satellites also poses a problem for space traffic, says astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada. Starlink satellites all orbit at a similar distance from Earth, just above 500 kilometers.

“Starlink is the densest patch of space that has ever existed,” Lawler says. The satellites are constantly navigating out of each other’s way to avoid collisions (SN: 2/12/09). And it’s a popular orbital altitude — Hubble is there, and so is the International Space Station and the Chinese space station.
“If there is some kind of collision [between Starlinks], some kind of mishap, it could immediately affect human lives,” Lawler says.

SpaceX launches Starlink satellites roughly once per week — it launched 51 more on March 3. And they’re not the only company launching constellations of internet satellites. By the 2030s, there could be 100,000 satellites crowding low Earth orbit.

So far, there are no international regulations to curb the number of satellites a private company can launch or to limit which orbits they can occupy.

“The speed of commercial development is much faster than the speed of regulation change,” McDowell says. “There needs to be an overhaul of space traffic management and space regulation generally to cope with these massive commercial projects.”

The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years.

The insects — from a pollen-eating genus named Tillyardembia first described in 1937 — were typically about 1.5 centimeters long, says Alexander Khramov, a paleoentomologist at the Borissiak Paleontological Institute in Moscow. Flimsy wings probably kept the creatures mostly on the forest floor, he says, leaving them to climb trees to find and consume their pollen.

Recently, Khramov and his colleagues scrutinized 425 fossils of Tillyardembia in the institute’s collection. Six had clumps of pollen grains trapped on their heads, legs, thoraxes or abdomens, the team reports February 28 in Biology Letters. A proportion that small isn’t surprising, Khramov says, because the fossils were preserved in what started out as fine-grained sediments. The early stages of fossilization in such material would tend to wash away pollen from the insects’ remains.
The pollen-laden insects had only a couple of types of pollen trapped on them, the team found, suggesting that the critters were very selective in the tree species they visited. “That sort of specialization is in line with potential pollinators,” says Michael Engel, a paleoentomologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the study. “There’s probably vast amounts of such specialization that occurred even before Tillyardembia, we just don’t have evidence of it yet.”

Further study of these fossils might reveal if Tillyardembia had evolved special pollen-trapping hairs or other such structures on their bodies or heads, says Conrad Labandeira, a paleoecologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., also not part of the study. It would also be interesting, he says, to see if something about the pollen helped it stick to the insects. If the pollen grains had structures that enabled them to clump more readily, for example, then those same features may have helped them grab Velcro-like onto any hairlike structures on the insects’ bodies.