A face mask you can eat with; the BA.2 variant; a spotlight on psychedelic microdosing; time for Betelgeuse; does snow smell differently now?
| Wednesday, February 9, 2022 | |
| In today’s newsletter, we examine a face mask you can eat with, the BA.2 variant, a spotlight on psychedelic microdosing, time for Betelgeuse … and does snow smell differently now? | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY DIETER BEVANS | | By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE Executive Editor
The history of science is littered with happy accidents. Leave a sample out while you’re on vacation, come back to discover penicillin. Clumsily drop your experiment on a hot stove, create weatherproofed rubber. Shatter a computer chip, invent “smart dust” for environmental monitoring. Now ocean explorers can add their own tale of serendipity to the ledger: Implode your deep-sea recording device, make one of the most precise measurements yet of the deepest point in the ocean.
David Barclay, then a grad student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, did not set out to redraw any atlases. He was working on a pair of recording devices that scientists could use to capture marine soundscapes, helping them better understand what’s happening under the sea. In 2014 he had the chance to toss his work overboard into the Mariana Trench—specifically the spot known as Challenger Deep that marks the deepest known point in the ocean (shown below). But as Maya Wei-Haas reports, only one of his creations (pictured above) made it back unscathed. The glass housing around the device called Deep Sound Mark III imploded under the crushing weight of the water; its companion, Deep Sound Mark II, captured audio confirming the catastrophic demise.
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 | CHRISTINE FELLENZ, NG STAFF
SOURCE: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ATLAS OF THE WORLD, 11TH EDITION | | Six years later, fellow oceanographer Scott Loranger was stuck in his lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, unable to do field work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He dug up the recording hoping to find something useful, and he left the tape running while he typed. That’s when he heard it: the faint ping of sound waves from the implosion bouncing between the ocean’s surface and its dark, hidden depths. Just like a bat using its echolocation to navigate, Loranger and Barclay were then able to use the bouncing sound to measure the distance down to Challenger Deep with stunning precision, yielding a new measurement of 36,033 feet (or 10,983 meters, plus or minus six meters).
The result adds a crucial data point to previous answers pulled from the various methods used to measure the ocean’s depths. It’s not definitive, but the new measurement is fortuitous because it helps expand the limits of human knowledge, Loranger says: “At its most basic, that’s what every scientist is trying to do.”
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY STEFANO MACCHETTA | | Playing favorites: See this image above of a blooming Alpine flower? An analysis of 280 studies about Alpine regional flowers says researchers play favorites by color. Blue blooms get more attention than green or brown, and tall flowers get more researchers’ time (perhaps because they don’t have to stoop?). That’s from a roundup of scientific breakthroughs in the March issue of National Geographic.
Another breakthrough: How humans started counting
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| The Enigma: That’s the name of a huge black diamond that just sold for $4.3 million to an anonymous buyer. Little is known about the history of the 555-karat diamond, which was estimated to be more than 800 karats when it was sold in the 1990s. It is more than 2.6 billion years old, Nat Geo reports.
The latest variant: Should you be worried? Experts are concerned about the spread of the “stealth” Omicron subvariant, officially known as BA.2. It has even higher transmission potential and possibly a greater ability to evade the immune response, perhaps prolonging the pandemic, Sanjay Mishra writes. Worldwide, more than 5.7 million people have been recorded as dying from COVID-19.
Face masks made for eating: Tired of moving your mask up and down while eating? In South Korea, an anti-virus mask that covers only the nose is for sale online, the Guardian reports. The “kosk,” a combination of ko, the Korean word for “nose,” and mask, is attracting lots of attention—and criticism—for its removable parts. Some studies have suggested that the nose is the easiest way for COVID to enter the body, so perhaps a face bra isn’t as bad as it looks.
Does snow smell different? The aroma of snow is getting stronger. Blame climate change, the Washington Post reports. As the ground and air get warmer, so does the circulation and intensity of odor molecules trapped in the blankets of fallen snow.
Hope for paralysis: Swiss researchers have been working on a groundbreaking treatment to reverse paralysis in people with spinal cord injuries. Now, an electrode device implanted on the spinal cord has given three paralyzed men the ability to walk, swim, and move within hours. “I am free,” Michel Roccati from Italy told CNN. “I can walk wherever I want to.”
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| Just before dawn: The entire sky appears in this fish-eye view of the Milky Way in the early morning twilight. Photographer Babak Tafreshi took this image from an altitude of 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) on Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes. The bright central core of the galaxy, in the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius, is in the middle, exactly overhead at zenith. In the Northern Hemisphere the galactic core is closer to the horizon and not as spectacular as in the southern sky. On the lower left, in the morning light, is planet Venus, which has its own mysteries.
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS | | Time for Betelgeuse: Tonight look for the bright moon to be wedged in between two amazing cosmic treasures in the evening sky. On one side is bright orange Aldebaran, which marks the eye of Taurus, the bull constellation. On the other side you’ll find a fuzzy cluster of stars known as the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. On Thursday night the moon will have moved, sitting between the Auriga constellation’s bright yellow star Capella, and Orion’s stellar orange monster Betelgeuse. Before dawn on Saturday, Venus will reach its greatest brilliance in Earth’s morning skies, brighter than any other planet or star in our skies. This celestial beacon will form a triangle with much fainter Mars and Mercury. On Sunday evening look for the waxing gibbous moon parked in the constellation Gemini near its twin stars Castor and Pollux.
Related: Why astronomers worried about Betelgeuse
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 | | I want to make sure that girls in particular, young women, those from other marginalized communities know that STEM, science, and engineering are for them [and] that anyone who wants to study the universe in any capacity has the opportunity. | | | Jedidah Isler
| | Award-winning astrophysicist, Nat Geo Explorer | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER BROWN | | Breakthrough therapy? Psychedelic drugs have moved from the shadows to gain some acceptance in mainstream society as a mental health treatment. Taking tiny doses of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca is rising in popularity, but more research remains to be done on their effectiveness, researchers told Nat Geo. (Pictured above, the hillbilly mushroom, whose psychedelic effects can kick in as quickly as 15 to 30 minutes after a microdose, and disappear after about six hours.)
Question of the day: After reading our story, what’s your view on microdosing for mainstream health treatment? Let us know here.
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This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, and Monica Williams. Have an idea or a link? We'd love to hear from you at david.beard@natgeo.com. | |
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