Are you looking forward to starting or changing something in 2021? Whatever your New Year's resolutions, there's an evidence-based way to make them stick for longer - and it's all in the phrasing.
Rather than telling yourself you'll stop or avoid doing something, tell yourself you're going to start doing something instead. For example: a resolution to stop sitting around so much becomes a resolution to attend a regular workout class.
Follow-ups with 1,066 participants over 12 months found that 58.9 percent of those with "approach-orientated" goals considered themselves successful a year after making their resolutions, compared with 47.1 percent of those with "avoidance-oriented" goals.
"For example, if your goal is to stop eating sweets in order to lose weight, you will most likely be more successful if you say 'I will eat fruit several times a day' instead," says psychologist Per Carlbring, from Stockholm University in Sweden.
"You then replace sweets with something healthier, which probably means you will lose weight and also keep your resolution."
The volunteers got split up into three separate groups at the beginning: those with no support, those with some support, and those with extra support. In this study, support came in the form of asking a friend or relative for help, and getting advice and helpful materials from the researchers.
It was the people in the second group – the "some support" group – that had the highest level of success in sticking to their resolutions, even more so than those in the third group, who had the most support.
The success rate difference between groups two and three wasn't huge though. The researchers suggest there might be a saturation point as far as support goes, or perhaps differences in the way the third group assessed their level of success.
"It was found that the support given to the participants did not make much of a difference when it came down to how well participants kept their resolutions throughout the year," says Carlbring. "What surprised us were the results on how to phrase your resolution."
The researchers think theirs might well be the biggest, most comprehensive study ever done on New Year's resolutions, and it's something a lot of us will be considering for 2021: almost half the people in the US are likely to make a resolution of some sort for the 12 months that lie ahead.
The new study found that the top resolutions among the participants were around physical health (33 percent), weight loss (20 percent), eating habits (13 percent), personal growth (9 percent) and mental health and sleep (5 percent).
Whether those match your own ideas or you have others, frame them as something to do rather than something to avoid – a strategy that matches up with other research on setting goals. It also helps to use a gradual approach and reward yourself along the way.
"You cannot erase a behaviour, but you can replace it with something else," says Carlbring.
Scientists are edging closer to making a super-secure, super-fast quantum internet possible: they've now been able to 'teleport' high-fidelity quantum information over a total distance of 44 kilometres (27 miles).
Both data fidelity and transfer distance are crucial when it comes to building a real, working quantum internet, and making progress in either of these areas is cause for celebration for those building our next-generation communications network.
In this case the team achieved a greater than 90 percent fidelity (data accuracy) level with its quantum information, as well as sending it across extensive fibre optic networks similar to those that form the backbone of our existing internet.
"We're thrilled by these results," says physicist Panagiotis Spentzouris, from the Fermilab particle physics and accelerator laboratory based at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
"This is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication."
Quantum internet technology uses qubits; unmeasured particles that remain suspended in a mix of possible states like spinning dice yet to settle.
Qubits that are introduced to one another have their identities 'entangled' in ways that become obvious once they're finally measured. Imagine these entangled qubits as a pair of dice - while each can land on any number, they are both guaranteed to add to seven no matter how far apart they are. Data in one location instantly reflects data in another.
By clever arrangement of entangling three qubits, it's possible to force the state of one particle to adopt the 'dice roll' of another via their mutually entangled partner. In quantum land, this is as good as turning one particle into another, teleporting its identity across a distance in a blink.
The entanglement still needs to be established in the beginning though, and then maintained as the qubits are sent to their eventual destination through optical fibres (or satellites).
The unstable, delicate nature of quantum information makes it tricky to beam entangled photons over long distances without interference, however. Longer optical fibres simply mean more opportunity for noise to interfere with the entangled states.
In total, the lengths of fibre used to channel each cubit added to 44 kilometres, setting a new limit to how far we can send entangled qubits and still successfully use them to teleport quantum information.
It's never before been demonstrated to work over such a long distance with such accuracy, and it brings a city-sized quantum network closer to reality – even though there are still years of work ahead to make that possible.
"With this demonstration we're beginning to lay the foundation for the construction of a Chicago-area metropolitan quantum network," says Spentzouris.
Quantum entanglement and data teleportation is a complex science, and not even the experts fully understand how it might ultimately be used in a quantum network. Each proof of concept like this that we get puts us a little closer to making such a network happen though.
As well as promising huge boosts in speed and computational power, a quantum internet would be ultra-secure – any hacking attempt would be as good as destroying the lock being picked. For now at least, scientists think quantum internet networks will act as specialist extensions to the classical internet, rather than a complete replacement.
Researchers are tackling quantum internet problems from all different angles, which is why you'll see a variety of distances mentioned in studies – they're not all measuring the same technology, using the same equipment, to test the same standards.
What makes this study special is the accuracy and the distance of the quantum entanglement teleportation, as well as the 'off the shelf' equipment used – it should theoretically be relatively easy to scale up this technology using the hardware we're already got in place.
"We are very proud to have achieved this milestone on sustainable, high-performing and scalable quantum teleportation systems," says physicist Maria Spiropulu, from Caltech.
"The results will be further improved with system upgrades we are expecting to complete by the second quarter of 2021."
Prior to the pandemic, the 650,000 commuters who passed through Penn Station every day were more likely to encounter dark, claustrophobic tunnels and rats scampering across subway tracks than world-class art. When travelers return to the New York City transit hub, however, they’ll find not only artistic masterpieces, but soaring skylights and a sleek, spacious waiting area reminiscent of the station’s demolished predecessor.
“Is it grand? Yes. Is it bold? Yes, because that is the spirit of New York and that is the statement we want to make to our visitors, to our children and to future generations,” says Governor Andrew Cuomo, who unveiled the space Wednesday, in a statement. “As dark as 2020 has been, this new hall will bring the light, literally and figuratively, for everyone who visits this great city.”
Speaking with the New York Times’ Dionne Searcey, Wiley, who is perhaps best known for his presidential portrait of Barack Obama, describes the inspiration behind his contribution to the hall: Go, a hand-painted, stained-glass ceiling triptych that depicts young, black New Yorkers break dancing.
“So much of what goes on in ceiling frescoes are people expressing a type of levity and religious devotion and ascendancy,” the artist tells the Times. “For me the movement and space made so much more sense thinking about ways bodies twirl in break dancing.”
Another artwork installed in the space, The Hive by Elmgreen and Dragset, mounts 91 upside-down buildings “on the ceiling like glowing, [nine]-foot-tall stalactites,” as Shaye Weaver writes for Time Out. Featuring 72,000 LED lights and six color-changing segments, the sculpture’s title reflects the collaborative nature of city life.
“It’s about a huge collaboration in order to make everyone survive,” Dragset explains to the Times.
The hall’s third public art installation, Douglas’ Penn Station’s Half Century, consists of nine oversized photographic panels documenting overlooked but significant moments in the transit hub’s history. To capture these scenes, the Canadian artist combined photos of contemporary actors posing in period costumes with digital renderings of the now-defunct station’s interior.
“With a cinematic quality, each scene revives history in uncanny detail, revealing this architectural landmark as a grand theater for the millions of human dramas that animate civic spaces and endow them with meaning,” says the Public Art Fund, which oversaw the three installations, on its website.
The Moynihan Train Hall’s opening marks the culmination of a decades-long push to convert the Farley building into an extension of Penn Station, reports Christina Goldbaum in a separate article for the Times. Proponents of the plan cited the need to expand the station, which serves three times as many riders as its architects anticipated, and a desire to atone for the original building’s much-criticized demolition in the 1960s. But critics argued that the proposal ignored the needs of subway riders, as the post office is located a sizable walking distance from the station’s subway lines.
A grand structure outfitted with quarried travertine and a 138-foot-high ceiling, the original Penn Station opened in 1910. Locals lauded it as an architectural marvel, but after the Great Depression, the building fell into a state of disrepair. Railroad executives eventually decided to sell the rights to the property and move a downsized version of the station underground.
The building’s untimely demise had unexpected consequences: As Michael Kimmelman wrote for the Timesin 2019, “The historic preservation movement, which rose from the vandalized station’s ashes, was born of a new pessimism.”
Like the razed Penn Station, the nearby Farley building’s 1912 Beaux-Arts edifice was designed by architecture firm McKim Mead & White. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan first introduced plans to transform the space into an extension of the station in the early 1990s; as Jim Dwyer reported for the Timesin 2016, the then-president of the New York City Transit Authority responded to Moynihan’s proposal by arguing that resources should be allocated to more pressing concerns, like repairing 80-year-old track switches.
In 2016, after decades of delays, Cuomo announced plans to renovate the station and expand into the Farley building. Though the newly completed revamp won’t solve many of the city’s transit problems—including track congestion and decrepit train tunnels—officials say it will help improve overcrowding and pave the way for future infrastructure projects.
“[The hall] speaks to the brighter days ahead when we will be able to congregate, to pass one another and to share the same space free of fear,” Cuomo tells the Times’ Searcey. “It promises renewal and rebirth of civic life in New York, and points to the opportunity ahead.”
On December 26, Great Britain reached a new, green milestone when wind turbines generated more than half of its total electricity. The country has been making massive strides to produce more wind energy, and when Storm Bella swept through the region last week, its 100-mile-per-hour gusts kicked turbines into high gear. The boost helped set a record for the highest share of power ever generated by windfarms in the country, report Rob Davies and Jillian Ambrose for the Guardian.
The U.K. has been inching away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power, after setting a goal in 2019 to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, reports JP Casey for Power Technology. The U.K. has become a pioneer in wind energy, with the infrastructure to produce 10 gigawatts of electricity by the renewable source. The United States can only generate about 0.3 percent of what the U.K. can, reports Brian Kahn for Gizmodo.
The clean energy produced on Boxing Day is the latest renewable record for the U.K. Earlier in December, windfarms in Great Britain generated the most energy by turbines in one day—a smaller percentage than what the country recently experienced on Boxing Day. And earlier this year, the U.K. went two entire months—from April to June 2020—without using coal at all, reports Gizmodo.
This trend in declining fossil fuel energy use is partly a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has reduced the demand for electricity from 32.58 gigawatts in 2019 to 30.6 in 2020. As overall energy use has gone down, wind and solar power have been able to contribute a greater share, reports the Guardian.
“We saw the highest ever level of solar generation in April, the longest period of coal-free operation between April and June, and the greenest ever month in May," Rob Rome, the head of national control of the National Grid’s electricity system operator (NGEO), tells the Guardian.
Even with the promising news, experts warn that renewable energy sources like wind and solar power depend on the weather, reports Tony McDonough for Liverpool Business News. Without strong winds, the turbines don't spin enough; without ample sunlight, solar panels don't receive enough light to convert into electricity—a relevant issue given the U.K.'s rainy, cloudy climate.
Steve Jennings, a partner at the consulting firm PwC, tells the Guardian that the key challenge to achieving a net-zero goal is finding alternatives for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. He says the U.K. will retain nuclear and gas-fired power plants equipped with carbon capture technology, which will serve as back-ups as the country continues to embrace renewable energy.
"We expect to see many more records set in the years ahead, as the government has made wind energy one of the most important pillars of its energy strategy for reaching net-zero emissions as fast and as cheaply as possible," Melanie Onn, the deputy chief executive of Renewable UK, told Ambrose for the Guardian earlier in December.
The best present this holiday season came in a small package, parachuted into the Australian desert from far within our Solar System on 5 December 2020.
Inside, astronomers were delighted to unwrap the first significant samples of a rocky asteroid which is currently 9 million kilometres (5.6 million miles) away, and returned to Earth in "perfect" shape.
Photographs of the pristine pebbles have finally been released, and while the tiny, black-coloured grains inside may resemble nothing more than dirty coal, this galactic gift is hardly a rebuke. It's the culmination of a five-year-long journey, requiring careful planning and execution.
The samples were originally collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 mission, which was sent to circle and sample the diamond-shaped asteroid called Ryugu, following the success of its first mission.
The samples from asteroid Ryugu in the re-entry capsule weigh about 5.4g! This greatly exceeds the the target yield of 0.1g (the amount required for the initial scientific analysis) set during the design of Hayabusa2. (Article in Japanese: https://t.co/IZFGinhuFc)
The initial Hayabusa spacecraft returned from the asteroid Itokawa in 2010 with the first direct sample of a near-Earth object. Altogether, the surface material weighed less than a milligram, and yet that was still enough to yield crucial information about the asteroid's age and geologic history.
The new samples from Ryugu - scooped up last year - date back even further and contain more material than astronomers dared hope for, amounting to roughly 5.4 grams.
The name Ryugu refers to a magical underwater "dragon palace" in Japanese folklore, in which a fisherman finds himself being presented with a mysterious box to return home with - rather like Hayabusa's sealed capsules.
The treasure in this case is thought to be over 4.5 billion years old - a relic of our early Solar System, containing potentially ancient material that once formed our Sun and its orbiting planets.
Opening the carefully sealed chambers, astronomers have found many particles larger than a millimetre. Those in chamber C were slightly bigger than the rest and were collected from the mission's second touchdown.
Sample catcher chamber A, captured by an optical microscope. (JAXA)
Because this landing took place a little to the north of a crater intentionally created earlier in the mission, researchers expected the sample to contain chunks of subsurface material. That would be quite the achievement, since all other asteroid samples collected in space merely come from the surface.
Before these direct samples, most of our knowledge on the topic of asteroids came from meteorites, which are asteroids or comets that find themselves smashing into Earth's surface.
Unfortunately, without the protection of a human-made capsule, much of that material is destroyed or contaminated by our planet's atmosphere upon entry, not to mention all the weathering that occurs once these rocks come to rest on the ground.
Ryugu is a C-type asteroid which means its rock is highly porous and contains a lot of carbon and water. Astronomers suspect this particular pile of dark rubble was formed billions of years ago, when it broke off another large body of rock somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Because Ryugu's surface appears unusually dry and shows red colouration, some experts think it once flew closer to the Sun.
Still, not all the material collected in these containers is quite so primordial. One of the capsules does contain an obvious anachronism (pictured below).
Sample catcher chamber C, captured by an optical microscope. (JAZA)
"Artificial material seems to be present in chamber C," reads a press release from the Hayabusa2 project.
"The origin is under investigation, but a probable source is aluminium scraped off the spacecraft sampler horn as the projectile was fired to stir up material during touchdown."
Later, an update from Twitter said the object was still unconfirmed, but that it might have separated from the sampler horn used during collection.
The curation work for the Ryugu sample is steadily progressing. On December 21, sample catcher chambers B & C were opened and then the contents of chambers A & C were moved to the collection containers in the photo. The largest particles in chamber C are about 1 cm! pic.twitter.com/yWO15cKhG9
Despite several cliff-scaling efforts to locate another of its kind, so far this native Hawaiian flower appears to be unique.
Found on one of the steep forested slopes of Helu that loom over Lahaina in West Maui, Hawaii, Cyanea heluensis was first discovered back in 2010 but it has only just been formally described.
Botanist Hank Oppenheimer and biologist Jennifer Higashino located it in a remote and deeply shady spot. Oppenheimer since used a specially developed paste to encourage new growth, from which they took a cutting in the hopes of propagating it at Olinda Rare Plant Facility.
After many attempts they managed to germinate a single seed from a fruit collected from the plant last year.
(Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources/Facebook)
C. heluensis belongs to a group of plants called Cyanea, the most species-rich genus in Hawaii, that originated from a single introduction 8-10 million years ago. It has since diversified into 80 different species - some of which are found only on a single volcano.
"Dozens of native plants like this one are now only kept alive in nurseries," said Matthew Keir, Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources Botanist on Facebook. "Just one natural disaster, like a hurricane, hitting a nursery could cause the extinction of many rare plants."
Oppenheimer recognised the leaves of C. heluensis were different to others of its genus when they first spied it from a distance through binoculars, and confirmed its uniqueness on closer inspection.
From mid-summer to October this tropical plant produces several hands' worth of finger-like white flowers, followed by fruits that start green and then mature into orange berries.
(Oppenheimer, Phytokeys, 2020)
"Cyanea heluensis easily falls into the critically endangered category, which designates species facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild," Oppenheimer explains in his paper.
Plants like this one are also facing "probable loss and decline of most or all of its avian pollinators and dispersal agents, threats such as landslides and treefall, herbivory by alien slugs and rats, and competition with alien plants."
Conservation groups have been working hard to control some of the threats to this very lonely species, including weeding of invasive South American grass Cortaderia jubata, trapping rats and trying to control the goats and feral pigs that are encroaching on the area.
"Conservation of our ecosystems and the species that depend on them is vital to mankind's survival too," said botanist Steve Perlman from Plant Extinction Prevention Program.
"So few people study and know the flora and fauna well enough to recognize when a new species of plant, insect or bird lies in front of them... The age of discovery is not over!"
After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, scientists noticed bottlenose dolphins had developed ulcers and lesions all over their bodies after being caught in a brackish lake. Since Hurricane Katrina, reports of these gruesome sores on dolphins have increased in the United States, Australia and South America—and puzzled scientists have been working to identify the disease, Elle Hunt reports for the Guardian.
Fifteen years later, they finally have an answer. In a study published in Scientific Reportsin December, the team of scientists named climate change as the root cause of this painful skin condition, reports the Miami Herald's Katie Camero.
Reports of the disease have increased in tandem with more frequent extreme weather events, like hurricanes and cyclones, study co-author Nahiid Stephens, a veterinary pathologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, tells the Guardian. In extreme weather, storms dump freshwater into the ocean, decreasing the salinity and changing its chemistry. Dolphins can tolerate freshwater for short periods of time, but they developed painful lesions after the storms as a result of prolonged exposure to freshwater, which can last for months on end, reports the Miami Herald. In some cases, the team found that the lesions covered more than 70 percent of a dolphin's skin.
With open wounds, ions and proteins can ooze out of their skin as freshwater rushes in. Ultimately, the lesions cause electrolyte disruptions in the blood stream, leading to organ failure, Stephens tells Peter Dockrill for Science Alert. Plus, the open lesions provide an entryway for fungus, bacteria and algae to cause a further infection. The lesions are so devastating that they're on par with third-degree burns on humans, reports the Guardian.
"Their skin is just as sensitive as ours, and possibly even more so—it would be incredibly painful," Stephens tells the Guardian. "We couldn’t believe that such a severe, rapidly developing disease could be anything other than infectious … but ultimately, it is an environmentally caused disease."
Each region the scientists studied has experienced dips in ocean salinity as a result of more frequent and powerful storms. And as climate change continues to fuel more intense storms, the scientists expect prevalence of the disease to boom, too, reports the Miami Herald.
"We can only say there’s a pattern, a trend—but it’s gathering strength," Stephens tells the Guardian.
"This year was a record hurricane season, and who knows about next year," Pádraig Duignan, the chief pathologist at the Marine Mammal Center in California, tells Tiffany Duong for EcoWatch. "More Katrinas and more Harveys might be on their way, and each time, this will be happening to the dolphins. I think it will get worse."
Despite the grim news, the scientists are "pleased to finally define the problem," Pádraig says in a press release. The team can't cure climate change, but the findings will allow scientists and veterinarians to diagnose and treat the lesions now that they know what it is and how it's caused.
Sometimes, the Universe provides just the perfect method for expressing our feelings.
A space cloud 7,500 light-years away has given us the most appropriate farewell we can think of for this whole dumpster fire of a year, 2020.
This small clump of material is part of a much larger cloud complex called the Carina Nebula, and under normal circumstances would not be given a nickname of its own. But its distinctive shape has led scientists to nickname it the Defiant Finger.
And that's exactly what it looks like - the age-old obscene gesture of "go do ghastly things to yourself", and "go away, but in much ruder words".
(NASA, ESA, N. Smith/UC Berkeley, and The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA)
Actually, the Defiant Finger is what is known as a Bok Globule. These are small, dark, dense knots of dust and gas that are often the birthplaces of stars. As denser regions of the cloud condense further, they can collapse down under their own gravity, and start spinning into a star.
The Defiant Finger, comprising 6 solar masses worth of material, may have stars forming within it; because it's so dense, it's hard to see inside. The glow it appears to have is from external sources - the light of bright stars nearby.
(NASA, ESA, N. Smith/UC Berkeley, and The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA)
Because young stars are typically bright and hot, they blast their surroundings with radiation. The exterior of the Defiant Finger globule is likely being lit and ionised by either the Wolf-Rayet star WR 25, a very short-lived, massive star at the end of its lifespan; Tr16-244, a hot young supergiant; or a combination of both.
But while they illuminate, these stars also destroy: slowly but surely, they are evaporating the Defiant Finger. At the current estimated rate of mass loss, the cloud of dust has a projected lifespan of just 200,000 to 1 million years.
That's not very long in cosmic terms, not very long at all. But it's long enough to make a poetic statement: a scream into the void, a defiant gesture in the face of inevitability. And a really appropriate way to close the door on 2020.
Just when we thought octopuses couldn't be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.
In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.
This is weird because that's really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA.
Those genetic changes are then translated into action by DNA's molecular sidekick, RNA. You can think of DNA instructions as a recipe, while RNA is the chef that orchestrates the cooking in the kitchen of each cell, producing necessary proteins that keep the whole organism going.
But RNA doesn't just blindly execute instructions - occasionally it improvises with some of the ingredients, changing which proteins are produced in the cell in a rare process called RNA editing.
When such an edit happens, it can change how the proteins work, allowing the organism to fine-tune its genetic information without actually undergoing any genetic mutations. But most organisms don't really bother with this method, as it's messy and causes problems more often that solving them.
"The consensus among folks who study such things is Mother Nature gave RNA editing a try, found it wanting, and largely abandoned it," Anna Vlasits reported for Wired.
But it looks like cephalopods didn't get the memo.
In 2015, researchers discovered that the common squid has edited more than 60 percent of RNA in its nervous system. Those edits essentially changed its brain physiology, presumably to adapt to various temperature conditions in the ocean.
The team returned in 2017 with an even more startling finding - at least two species of octopus and one cuttlefish do the same thing on a regular basis. To draw evolutionary comparisons, they also looked at a nautilus and a gastropod slug, and found their RNA-editing prowess to be lacking.
"This shows that high levels of RNA editing is not generally a molluscan thing; it's an invention of the coleoid cephalopods," said co-lead researcher, Joshua Rosenthal of the US Marine Biological Laboratory.
The researchers analysed hundreds of thousands of RNA recording sites in these animals, who belong to the coleoid subclass of cephalopods. They found that clever RNA editing was especially common in the coleoid nervous system.
"I wonder if it has to do with their extremely developed brains," geneticist Kazuko Nishikura from the US Wistar Institute, who wasn't involved in the study, told Ed Yong at The Atlantic.
So it's certainly a compelling hypothesis that octopus smarts might come from their unconventionally high reliance on RNA edits to keep the brain going.
"There is something fundamentally different going on in these cephalopods," said Rosenthal.
But it's not just that these animals are adept at fixing up their RNA as needed - the team found that this ability came with a distinct evolutionary tradeoff, which sets them apart from the rest of the animal world.
In terms of run-of-the-mill genomic evolution (the one that uses genetic mutations, as mentioned above), coleoids have been evolving really, really slowly. The researchers claimed that this has been a necessary sacrifice - if you find a mechanism that helps you survive, just keep using it.
"The conclusion here is that in order to maintain this flexibility to edit RNA, the coleoids have had to give up the ability to evolve in the surrounding regions - a lot," said Rosenthal.
As the next step, the team will be developing genetic models of cephalopods so they can trace how and when this RNA editing kicks in.
"It could be something as simple as temperature changes or as complicated as experience, a form of memory," said Rosenthal.
Of course, Latin is no longer the default language for European learning and diplomacy, as it was from the Roman Empire through the early modern period. Since the implementation of Vatican II in the early 1960s, even many priests don't speak the language in a meaningful way. Still, despite Latin's decline in political and ecclesiastical circles, hundreds of folks around the globe continue to speak it as a living language—and no teacher is more responsible for the world's remaining crop of latineloquentes (“Latin speakers”) as Friar Reginald Foster, the Carmelite monk who served as Latin secretary to four popes from 1969 until 2009, translating diplomatic papers and papal encyclicals into Latin, which remains the official language of the Holy See. Foster died on Christmas Day, at the age of 81.
In 2007, Foster himself lamented to the BBC that he thought the language was on its way out altogether. He worried that a modern world, illiterate in Latin, would lose contact with crucial portions of history, and half-jokingly recommended that then-Pope Benedict XVI replace Italy's traditional siesta with a two-hour daily Latin reading.
The Pope never took up Foster's suggestion, but the irony is that Foster had already managed, almost single-handedly, to reverse some of the trends that so troubled him. His deepest passion was teaching Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, starting in 1977, and running his famous spoken Latin course nearly every summer, beginning in 1985. Through these courses, Foster launched multiple generations of classicists who have used his techniques to bring their students into closer contact with a past that, until recently, had seemed to be vanishing.
Foster is well remembered for his boisterous, generous presence in the classroom and on field trips. He was beloved among students, and distrusted by Vatican grandees, for his eccentric habits, which included dressing in a blue plumber's suit and issuing caustic statements about church hypocrisy. When he was teaching—in Rome until 2009, thereafter in Wisconsin—he often nursed a glass of wine. Known by the Latin sobriquet "Reginaldus" to his legions of pupils, who in turn refer to themselves as "Reginaldians," Foster was a hero and a jester, a pug-nosed provocateur with a satirical streak who would have fit right into a comic epistle by Horace or Erasmus. "Like Socrates, his default mode in public was ironic," says Michael Fontaine, an administrator and professor of Classics at Cornell University.
A portrait of Foster by artist Lucy Plowe
(Courtesy of Michael Fontaine)
Fontaine, who first met Foster in the spring of 1997, makes no bones about the extent of Foster's legacy.
"Reginald Foster succeeded in reversing the decline in living Latin. He actually, really, genuinely did it. Reggie's success is total: There is a burgeoning movement and critical mass of young people who have now learned Latin [as a spoken language]. Reggie taught some, his students taught some, those people are teaching some, and on and on. Some of the best Latinists in the world are in their 20s or early 30s"—a remarkable development that Fontaine credits squarely to Foster’s peerless influence.
Leah Whittington, an English professor at Harvard University, who first met Foster during a summer Latin course in 1997 when she was 17, recalls the friar's "phenomenal, ebullient energy." "He never sat down, never seemed to need rest or eat or sleep," Whittington says. "It was as though he was fueled from within by love for Latin, love for his work, love for his students. I had never been pushed so hard by a teacher."
Like all of Foster's students who spoke with Smithsonian, Whittington recalls his visionary dedication to preserving Latin by keeping it alive in everyday conversation.
"For most classicists trained in the United States or in Great Britain, Latin was a learned, non-spoken language; it was not a language that one could converse in, like French or Spanish. But for Reginald, Latin was an everyday functional language that he used with his friends, his teachers, his colleagues, with himself and even in his dreams."
Foster went to extraordinary lengths to make sure he was keeping his students as engaged as possible with their work outside the classroom, which the friar referred to not as homework but as ludi domestici—"games to play at home." This playful approach often proved a revelation to students used to more staid ways of teaching a language they'd been told was dead. "It's so rare to have an immersion experience in Latin that it couldn't fail to improve and deepen your knowledge of the language and history,” says Scott Ettinger, a Latin and Greek teacher in the Bronx, who attended Foster's summer course in 1996.
Daniel Gallagher, who in 2009 succeeded Foster in the Latin section of the Vatican Secretariat and today teaches the language at Cornell University, still marvels at Foster's "extreme dedication to his students."
"He told us, 'Call me at 2 in the morning if you're stuck,'" says Gallagher, who began studying with Foster in October 1995. "He said, 'I'll even come to your house to teach you Latin.' And I learned that he wasn't kidding—he really would come to my house."
Foster launched multiple generations of classicists who have used his techniques to bring their students into closer contact with a past that, until recently, had seemed to be vanishing.
(Courtesy of Michael Fontaine)
Classicist Jason Pedicone recalls his first course with Foster in 2004: "He made me feel like learning Latin was a key that would unlock endless beauty and wisdom of history, art and literature."
"Studying Greek and Latin with Reginald was spiritually enriching,” he says. “I don't mean that in a doctrinal way; it was just really life-affirming and made me stand in awe of humanity and civilization." In 2010, Pedicone co-founded the Paideia Institute with Eric Hewett, another of Foster's students; the organization offers immersive courses in Latin and Greek.
Tales of Foster have long been common among anglophone classicists. Even those who never visited him in Rome had often heard something about this eccentric priest who gave free, immersive Latin lessons.
"I had heard for some time that there was a priest in Rome who spoke Latin and gave free summer courses where you actually spoke Latin," says Alice Rubinstein, a now-retired Latin teacher living in Virginia. "I remember some woman telling me he was like a priestly version of Don Rickles.”
"[Foster] reminds me of the humanists I study in the 15th century, especially Lorenzo Valla," says classicist Chris Celenza, a dean at Johns Hopkins University who took courses with Foster in 1993 and marvels at the friar's unerring ability to bring the past into the present, to make old texts new. "Foster could almost ventriloquize the authors we were studying. He was a living anachronism, and I think he knew it and kind of delighted in that."
In his obituary for Foster, John Byron Kuhner, who is writing a biography of the friar, sounded a similar note about Reginaldus' uncanny ability to make ancient writers seem intimate and accessible—a closeness that he fostered in his students: "The writers and artists of the past seemed to be equally [Foster's] friends. He loved them in a way we could see, the way we love our living friends who happen to be far away."
Foster's famous summer Latin course was full of day trips. Traditional jaunts included the site in Formia where Cicero was assassinated by Mark Antony's men in 43 B.C. ("Reginald would weep while reciting Cicero's epitaph," Whittington recalls); the gardens at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer residence, where students sang Latin songs to "papal bulls"—that is, cows grazing outside the Pope's house; to the port town of Ostia; Pompeii and Naples; the spot at Largo Argentina in Rome where Julius Caesar was assassinated; the castle in Latium where Thomas Aquinas was born.
"Walking with Reggie through these Italian sites made Rome come alive in a way that it couldn't have without someone of his encyclopedic knowledge of Latin," says Alexander Stille, a journalism professor at Columbia University, who profiled Foster for the American Scholar in 1994.
"Foster used to tell us that 'Reading Augustine in translation is like listening to Mozart on a jukebox,'" Stille says, "and that being in Rome without access to Latin was to see an impoverished version of it. He made the city come alive."
Foster is well remembered for his boisterous, generous presence in the classroom and on field trips.
(Courtesy of Michael Fontaine)
There are many classicists (I am one of them) who never met Foster but who benefited from his teachings by studying under his protégés, many of whom use techniques pioneered by Foster.
"When I led student trips to Italy, I modeled them on the field trips Foster used to take with us," says Helen Schultz, now a Latin teacher at a private school in New Hampshire. "On one memorable occasion, he joined me and a group of my students to talk about their studies and his work at the Vatican. He didn't just love Latin; he also loved and cared deeply about every one of the students who learned from him and were inspired by him to do our best to keep his legacy alive."
Like many of Foster's students, Ada Palmer, a European history professor at the University of Chicago, says the friar opened up a whole world of post-Classical Latin literature for his charges. Rather than falling back on the typical, and almost entirely ancient, canon taught in most classrooms, he introduced scholars to the Latin of St. Jerome's autobiography, or medieval bestiaries, or Renaissance books of magic, or rollicking pub songs from the 17th and 18th centuries, Palmer says, and thereby widened the possibilities for Latin studies across the world.
"Reggie's enthusiasm was for all Latin equally," Palmer says, "and he encouraged us to explore the whole vast, tangled and beautiful garden of Latin, and not just the few showpiece roses at its center. He trained scholars who have revolutionized many fields of history and literary studies."
Celenza agrees, referring to the millions of pages of Latin from the Renaissance onward as "a lost continent" that Foster played a central role in rediscovering.
Foster was famous for many of his one-liners, perhaps none more so than his frequent reminder to students that "Every bum and prostitute in ancient Rome spoke Latin." (In one variant on this line, "dog-catcher" takes the place of "bum.") His point was that one needn't be an elite to appreciate the riches of a language that began, after all, as a vernacular. But Foster's interest in bums and prostitutes was not merely rhetorical. "He did a lot of good for the prostitutes of Rome," Ettinger says. Foster was known for giving what little money he had to the city's downtrodden, even though, by keeping his classes free, he ensured that he had practically no income. (He was also known sometimes to pay a student's rent in Rome for a semester.)
"In one's life, if you're lucky, you'll meet a certain number of people who are genuinely extraordinary and who try to change your life in some way. Reggie was one of those people in my life," Stille says. "There were few people on the planet who have the relationship to Latin that he did."
In his final weeks, Foster's friends say, he was as boisterous as ever, even after testing positive for Covid-19: He continued working with Daniel P. McCarthy—a Benedictine monk who began studying with Foster in the fall of 1999—on their book series codifying Foster's teaching methods. And he maintained lively conversations with protégés, often in Latin, via phone and video calls.
Today, classicists, philologists and anyone else who wishes they had taken a Latin immersion course with Foster can console themselves with several options offered by his former students. Each summer, you will find Ettinger helping organize the annual Conventiculum aestivum ("summer convention") in Lexington, Kentucky, an 8- to 12-day immersive program that welcomes 40 to 80 attendees a year. Other Foster protégés, including Whittington, Gallagher, Fontaine and Palmer, have taught immersive classes through the Paideia Institute. Foster may be gone, but his dedication to Latin as a living language, one that puts us in direct conversation with our past, continues to thrive against all odds.
In Florida, scientists are trying to determine if Burmese pythons—an invasive snake species wreaking havoc on the Everglades—are safe to eat. If so, they could soon end up on dinner plates across the state, reports Alaa Elassar for CNN.
Researchers with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the state's department of health are in the process of testing mercury levels in the snakes' tissue to determine if they are safe to eat, reports Jared Leone for Cox Media Group. The researchers have their fingers crossed that the snakes are safe to eat, which could alleviate the struggle to eradicate the species from the Everglades.
"Mercury bioaccumulates in the environment and you will find high levels of mercury at the top of the food chain where pythons have unfortunately positioned themselves," Mike Kirkland, the manager of the Python Elimination Program, tells CNN. "We expect the results are going to discourage the public from consuming pythons, but if we can determine that they are safe to eat, that would be very helpful to control their population."
Burmese pythons blend right into the Everglades' tall grasses and muddy marshes, but they certainly do not belong there. Exotic pet dealers once imported the pythons from Southeast Asia to Miami, a major hub in the pet trade, and sold them as pets. At some point, owners started releasing their giant pet snakes into the wild, and the first one was caught in the Everglades in 1979, according to The Nature Conservancy. Now, tens of thousands slither through the marshes, devouring small native mammals like marsh rabbits, opossums and raccoons.
Scientists estimate the snakes are responsible for decimating 90 to 99 percent of the small mammal population, Ian Frazier reported for Smithsonian magazine in 2019. They're also known to strangle deer, alligators and birds.
The Python Elimination Program was launched by the South Florida Water Management District in 2017 to save the Everglades' collapsing ecosystem, and it enlists contractors to capture the invasive snakes. More than 6,000 snakes have been removed so far, and if they are labeled safe to eat, the captured snakes could soon end up on dinner plates across the state.
Donna Kalil, who hunts pythons for the Python Elimination Program, tells Lauren Edmonds for Insider that when the pythons are cooked properly, they can be quite delicious. She has a home kit to test a snake's mercury levels, and if it's safe to eat, she'll whip up some sliders, jerky or pasta.
"It's a great source of protein, so if we can find a safe way to use the whole animal and not just the skin, it might encourage more people to get involved in saving the Everglades," she tells Adriana Brasileiro for the Miami Herald.
This idea of turning invasive species into scrumptious meals isn't new, and innovative restaurants across the American South have pioneered the "invasivore" movement, reports Eve Conant for National Geographic. Chefs have turned invasive species like feral hogs, swamp rats, lionfish and Asian carp into delectable meals. It's a win-win for environmentalists and biologists. The animals are caught in the wild instead of being raised in factory farms and harvesting them also helps restore native ecosystems. And if Burmese pythons are cleared to eat, chefs in Florida may soon join the invasivore movement, too.
The Washington Post reported Dec. 30 that a district court judge in Texas ruled that NSTXL acted fraudulently in a dispute against a former business partner.
WASHINGTON — The recent selection of NSTXL to manage space technology projects for the U.S. Space Force is being reexamined following revelations that a Texas court ruled the company acted fraudulently in a dispute with a business partner.
The Nov. 24 ruling against NSTXL by a district court judge in Harris County, Texas, was first reported by the Washington Post Dec. 30. NSTXL, based in Arlington, Virginia, is short for National Security Technology Accelerator.
The Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles had planned to officially award a contract to NSTXL on Dec. 31 to manage the Space Enterprise Consortium. But that is now on hold, said Capt. Kaitlin Toner, a spokesperson for the Space and Missile Systems Center. “SMC intends to delay the award in order to further evaluate this litigation,” Toner said in a statement to SpaceNews.
Toner said a review will be performed by SMC contracting officers and it’s not clear how long it will take. “The Space Enterprise Consortium is the premier tool for industry engagement and rapid prototype development in the space defense arena, so we are intent on doing our due diligence in thoroughly assessing this matter,” she said.
SMC announced earlier this month that NSTXL — a nonprofit corporation that connects commercial businesses with government buyers — was selected to manage the Space Enterprise Consortium known as SpEC. The consortium awards contracts to companies for the development of technology prototypes under agreements known as Other Transaction Authority, or OTAs, which move faster than traditional government contracts.
The current manager of the SpEC is Charleston, South Carolina-based Advanced Technology International. The company was awarded a five-year agreement in 2017 to oversee up to $100 million worth of projects. Because of the growth in the demand for space technology prototyping, the Space and Missile Systems Center decided to increase authorized funding for SpEC to $12 billion worth of projects over the next 10 years. A solicitation for bids for the consortium management contract was issued in March and the evaluation process was completed in November.
Toner said the current SpEC contract with ATI “has reached its total ceiling value and can no longer be utilized to award new prototype projects” so it has to be re-competed. ATI will continue to manage the projects already awarded.
The U.S. Air Force created the SpEC to help attract startups and commercial companies from the space industry to bid on military projects.The consortium currently has 457 members, many of which are startups, small businesses and academic institutions.
NSTXL said it is appealing the judge’s ruling in the case against former business partner TechConnect. In a statement Dec. 30, NSTLX said the Washington Post story “highlighted an ongoing civil matter regarding a contract dispute with a former events and conference vendor that was terminated nearly three years ago and that has no relationship whatsoever with our ongoing work with the Department of Defense.”
The selection of the SpEC contractor and other large-value OTA contracts are subject to 30-day congressional and DoD reviews. In this case that 30 day period would have been up Dec. 31. According to The Washington Post, the Space and Missile Systems Center was not aware of the Texas lawsuit against NSTXL until a reporter inquired about it. NSTXL in the statement said it “did inform its existing government customers of the ongoing contract dispute.”
Congress authorized OTA contracts
The SpEC consortium is one of many Other Transaction Authority contracts employed by defense agencies for research-and-development projects. Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 included language to encourage DoD to use “Other Transactions for Prototype Projects” to speed up innovation.
Department of the Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek said OTA contracts help to speed up technology developments and receive proper oversight.
“Leveraging innovative technology is critical to the Department’s ability to increase the pace at which it delivers innovation to the warfighter,” Stefanek said in a statement to SpaceNews. “We use every contracting tool and authority available while ensuring significant guidance and controls are applied to ensure proper oversight and maintain the integrity of the process.”
Although we humans generally have control of our skeletal musculature, there's at least one we don't always have a handle on. In the middle ear sits the tensor tympani, and it seems most people are unable to contract it voluntarily.
Those that can contract their tensor tympani - a small muscle located above the auditory tube - are privy to a special skill: the action produces a low, thunder-like rumbling in their ears.
This is not a new discovery. Sound being produced by the voluntary contraction of this muscle was discussed on page 1,263 of physiologist Johannes Müller's 1842 text Elements of Physiology Volume 2.
But oftentimes, an experience that may seem normal to you is utterly bizarre to another person, and vice versa. There is, after all, much variation in the category encompassed by the word "human".
In 2020, a tweet from Italian engineer Massimo's science Twitter account had the internet rumbling once again, dividing people into the haves and have-nots - most of whom were previously unaware that the other side even existed.
A part of the human population can voluntarily control the tensor tympani, a muscle within the ear. Contracting this muscle produces vibration and sound. The sound is usually described as a rumbling sound https://t.co/FjD36qFACUpic.twitter.com/ianKb60EK8
The tensor tympani actually has some important roles in our hearing. When you hear a sound, your eardrum vibrates. This sound is transferred to a series of bones - the malleus, incus and stapes - that transmit sound waves to the inner ear.
The malleus is the closest to the eardrum; it transmits the membrane's vibrations to the incus. And the tensor tympani is connected to the malleus. When it contracts, it pulls the malleus away from the eardrum, which tenses the eardrum membrane (or tympanic membrane, hence the muscle's name), limiting its ability to vibrate and thus dampening the vibrations transmitted through to the inner ear.
But the muscle is thought to have two additional roles as well. It can mask low-frequency sounds, which better enables us to hear high-frequency sounds. And it also contracts slightly in response to self-generated sounds, like chewing, coughing, speaking and yawning, probably to prevent us from being deafened by our own bodies.
When the tensor timpani contracts, what you're hearing is literally the sound of your own muscle; if you can contract it at will, the noise-muffling effect is sort of like putting your hands over your ears, but without your hands!
It can also be alarming if you don't know what's happening. A 2013 case report describes a 27-year-old man who went to his doctor "complaining of voluntarily evoked bilateral tinnitus", only to find he was able to voluntarily contract both tensor tympani muscles, and the roaring noise was nothing to be concerned about.
For those of us who can't make their ears rumble on command, there is a way to find out what it sounds like. Have a big old yawn. Hear a rumbly rushing noise? That's your tensor tympani muscles contracting. Pretty neat, huh?
A visible satellite image of a low-pressure system approaching the Bering Sea on December 30, 2020.
NOAA
2021 will begin with a roar in the northern Pacific as a growing low-pressure system reaches incredible intensity over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The system could bottom-out on Friday with a minimum central pressure below 930 mb. Even though this storm will have a minimum pressure that rivals the strongest hurricanes, the two types of storms couldn’t be more different. The process that goes into creating such a powerful system is as fascinating as the storm itself.
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The National Weather Service in Anchorage says a storm hasn’t grown this strong in the Bering Sea since 2014. The latest forecast from the Ocean Prediction Center shows the immense low-pressure system achieving its peak intensity on Friday morning with a minimum central pressure of about 927 mb.
The NOAA Ocean Prediction Center's surface forecast for the northern Pacific Ocean for the morning ... [+] of January 1, 2021.
NOAA/OPC
That’s an impressive intensity for any low-pressure system. For some perspective, a minimum pressure below 930 mb is about what you would expect from a scale-topping hurricane. Hurricane Laura made landfall in Louisiana this past August with maximum sustained winds of 150 MPH and a minimum central pressure of 938 mb. Hurricane Iota, the Atlantic season’s only category five storm, reached a minimum pressure of 917 mb at its peak.
Even though the Alaskan low is slated to grow as strong as some of the most powerful hurricanes this season, extratropical cyclones and tropical cyclones are more like cousins than identical twins.
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An extratropical cyclone is our everyday low-pressure system that features frontal boundaries rotating around the center of the storm. Think of a dynamic winter storm rolling across the country—you can see heavy snow to the north, clear and frigid skies to the west, and severe thunderstorms embedded in warm and humid air to the south.
A tropical cyclone, on the other hand, is a low-pressure system that features warm and humid air throughout the entire storm. Tropical cyclones have a tight core of powerful winds surrounding its eye, the strength of which gradually tapers off with distance from the center of the storm.
The key difference between the two types of low-pressure systems is how they draw their energy.
Tropical cyclones develop from clusters of persistent thunderstorms. The updrafts feeding these thunderstorms draw air up and away from the surface. A center of low pressure will form at the surface if the process continues undisturbed. Stronger storms lead to stronger lows, which in turn will trigger stronger thunderstorms to continue the feedback loop. The only limitation to the strength of a storm is the strength and persistence of the thunderstorms around the eye of the storm.
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A weather model graphic showing the jet stream over the northern Pacific Ocean on December 31, 2020.
TropicalTidbits.com
While a tropical cyclone essentially powers itself, an extratropical cyclone is almost entirely reliant on upper-level winds for development. Strong winds in the upper levels of the atmosphere converge and diverge with the twists and turns of the jet stream. Divergence, or winds fanning out and spreading apart, leaves less air in the upper atmosphere, forcing air from the surface to rush upward to fill the growing void. Stronger jet streams can result in stronger divergence, which can generate stronger low-pressure systems at the surface.
That’s what we’re going to see in the northern Pacific Ocean later this week. The west-to-east oriented jet stream will grow incredibly strong on Thursday and Friday, packing winds stronger than 200 MPH at its greatest extent. This will lead to intense divergence that will power the low-pressure system over the Aleutian Islands to an intensity rarely seen in this part of the world.
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While the Bering low will have a minimum pressure similar to what we see in the strongest hurricanes, it won’t have winds nearly as strong as one of those scale-topping storms. The energy in an extratropical cyclone is diffused across the storm, leading to a widespread area of strong winds rather than a tight core of dangerous winds like we would see in a hurricane.
This storm will bring rough conditions to the Aleutian Islands and shipping lanes in the Bering Sea. Sustained winds stronger than 60 MPH are likely across a large area surrounding the storm, potentially generating 50-foot seas and wind damage to communities on the Aleutian Islands.
Back in 2017, researchers were recording the chatter of Omura’s whales off the coast of Madagascar when they picked up the powerful song of another species: the blue whale, the largest animal to ever live on the planet and one of the loudest.
In some ways, this wasn’t surprising. Blue whales had previously been documented in this area of the western Indian Ocean and they are known to be talkative creatures, with each population emitting unique songs. But the vocalizations recorded nearly four years ago had never been heard before, leading scientists to conclude that they had discovered an entirely new population of blue whales.
Stretching up to 110 feet and weighing up to 150 tons, blue whales swim through all of the world’s major oceans, with the exception of the Arctic. These mammoth creatures produce intense, low frequency vocalizations that can travel more than 600 miles underwater, allowing them to communicate across vast distances. And yet—in spite of their gargantuan size, wide distribution and loquaciousness—blue whales are elusive animals. They spend little time at the surface of the water, for one, and their numbers have been severely depleted by past decades of whaling. While blue whale songs have been “extensively studied,” only around a dozen distinct ditties have ever been documented, according to Katherine J. Wu of the New York Times.
So when scientists were able to pick up a novel blue whale tune, it was "quite remarkable," says Salvatore Cerchio, director of the African Aquatic Conservation Fund's Cetacean Program and co-author of a new study in the journal Endangered Species Research. Experts had previously identified “two or three” blue whale subspecies in the Indian Ocean, structured into four distinct populations, according to the study authors. Now, a new cohort had entered the picture. It is possible that this group had been conflated with another population, but it may have gone entirely undetected until Cerchio and his fellow researchers recorded its signature song.
In the wake of this discovery, the new song was detected again by Cerchio’s colleagues, who were recording humpback whales off the coast of Oman, in the Arabian Sea. The calls were, in fact, more prevalent in this area than in the western Indian Ocean—a particularly significant find because no acoustic data had previously been collected from blue whales in the Arabian Sea. Researchers had speculated that blue whales there belonged to another population observed off the coast of Sri Lanka, but now they were able to give this group a unique identification.
In 2018, the researchers reported their finds to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission, which prompted another team of researchers to realize that they too had recorded the new song, this time off the Chagos Archipelago in the central Indian Ocean. A pattern of the whales’ movement started to emerge, with the animals possibly favoring the northern Indian Ocean, the study authors write.
The team does not have genetic data to support its findings, but because blue whale melodies are unique to specific populations, these cetacean songs have been used to identify different groups.
“It’s like hearing different songs within a genre—Stevie Ray Vaughan versus B. B. King,” Cerchio tells the Times. “It’s all blues, but you know the different styles.”
As Earther’s Dharna Noor points out, the discovery of a new blue whale population comes as good news for the species, which was once aggressively hunted for its oil and remains endangered today. According to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), more than 300,000 blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere and another 20,000 in the North Atlantic and North Pacific were slaughtered during the first half of the 20th century. Blue whales have been protected by the IWC since 1966 and some populations are recovering. The species continues to be put at risk by ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, habitat degradation and other threats.
Given that it went unnoticed for so long, the new whale population is probably small and “in critical need of status assessment and conservation action,” according to the study authors. The group’s identification also highlights how much of ocean life—even when it comes to the largest sea creatures—has yet to be discovered.
"With all that work on blue whale songs, to think there was a population out there that no one knew about until 2017,” says Cerchio, “well, it kind of blows your mind."
Our most popular story of 2020 underscored the value of skillful art restoration, presenting a welcome counter to the many botched conservation attemptsreported in recent years. As the National Museum of Scotland announced this December, experts used a carved porcupine quill—a tool “sharp enough to remove … dirt yet soft enough not to damage the metalwork,” according to a statement—to clean an Anglo-Saxon cross for the first time in more than a millennium. The painstaking process revealed the silver artifact’s gold leaf adornments, as well as its intricate depictions of the four Gospel writers: Saint Matthew as a human, Saint Mark as a lion, Saint Luke as a calf and Saint John as an eagle. Per writer Nora McGreevy, the cross is one of around 100 objects included in the Galloway Hoard, a trove of Viking-era artifacts found by amateur treasure hunters in 2014.
Curators used an improvised tool made of porcupine quill to gently clean the cross, which features engravings of the four Gospel writers.
(National Museums Scotland)
While most of England was on lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, archaeologist Matt Champion unwittingly unearthed more than 2,000 artifacts beneath the attic floorboards of Tudor-era Oxburgh Hall. Highlights of the trove included a 600-year-old parchment fragment still adorned with gold leaf and blue lettering, scraps of Tudor and Georgian silks, and pages torn from a 1568 copy of Catholic martyr John Fisher’s The Kynge’s Psalmes. Detailing the find in an August article, McGreevy noted that British nobleman Sir Edmund Bedingfeld commissioned the manor’s construction in 1482; his devoutly Catholic descendants may have used the religious objects found in the attic during secret masses held at a time when such services were outlawed.
In March, when the world was just beginning to understand the novel coronavirus, researchers learned that the SARS-CoV-2 virus—the pathogen that causes Covid-19—survives for days on glass and stainless steel but dies in a matter of hours if it lands on copper. (In later months, scientists would find that airborne transmission of the virus carries the greatest risk of infection, rather than touching contaminated surfaces.) The metal’s antimicrobial powers of copper are nothing new: As Michael G. Schmidt, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, told writer Jim Morrison this spring, “Copper is truly a gift from Mother Nature in that the human race has been using it for over eight millennia.” Crucially, copper doesn’t simply dispatch unwanted pathogens at an incredibly fast rate. Its bacteria-combating abilities also endure for long stretches of time. When Bill Keevil and his University of Southampton microbiology research team tested old railings at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal several years ago, for instance, they found that the copper worked “just like it did the day it was put in over 100 years ago.”
The Asian giant hornet, the world's largest hornet, was sighted in North America for the first time.
(Washington State Dept. of Agriculture)
Another unwelcome surprise of 2020 was the rise of the Asian giant hornet, more infamously known as the “murder hornet” due to its ability to massacre entire hives of bees within hours. The first confirmed sightings of the insects in North America occurred in late 2019, but as Floyd Shockley, entomology collections manager at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, pointed out in May, observers need not panic, as the hornets don’t realistically pose a threat to human health. Honey bees are more susceptible to the predators, but as Shockley said, “[I]s it going to be global devastation? No.” Still, it’s worth noting that officials in Washington state have since found and eradicated a nest thought to contain about 200 queens. Left unchecked, each of these hornets could have flown off and started a colony of its own. Efforts to contain the invasive species are ongoing.
In October, an engineering feat saved Venice from flooding not once, but twice. The barrier system of 78 giant, inflatable yellow floodgates—known as Mose—can currently be deployed to protect the Italian city from tides measuring up to three-and-a-half feet high. Upon its completion next year, Mose will be able to protect against tides of up to four feet. The floodgates’ installation follows the declaration of a state of emergency in Venice. Last year, the city experienced its worst floods in 50 years, sustaining more than $1 billion in damages and leaving parts of the metropolis under six feet of water. Built on muddy lagoons, Venice battles both a sinking foundation and rising sea levels. Despite the floodgates’ current success, some environmentalists argue that the barriers aren’t a sustainable solution, as they seal off the lagoon entirely, depleting the water’s oxygen and preventing pollution from flowing out.
While Hegra is being promoted to tourists for the first time, the story that still seems to get lost is that of the ancient empire responsible for its existence.
(Royal Commission for AlUla)
Desert-dwelling nomads turned master merchants, the Nabataeans controlled a broad swath of land between the Euphrates River and the Red Sea for some 500 years. But in the millennia following the civilization’s fall in the first century A.D., its culture was almost “lost entirely,” wrote Lauren Keith in November. Today, little written documentation of the Nabataeans survives; instead, archaeologists must draw on clues hidden within the empire’s ruins: namely, two monumental cities carved out of rock. One of these twin settlements—the “Rose City” of Petra in southern Jordan—attracts nearly one million visitors each year. But its sister city of Hegra remains relatively obscure—a fact that Saudi Arabia hopes to change as it shifts focus from oil to tourism. As several scholars told Keith, the Middle Eastern nation’s renewed marketing push represents a chance to learn more about the enigmatic culture. “[Visiting] should evoke in any good tourist with any kind of intellectual curiosity,” said David Graf, a Nabataean specialist, archeologist and professor at the University of Miami. “[W]ho produced these tombs? Who are the people who created Hegra? Where did they come from? How long were they here? To have the context of Hegra is very important.”
The May killing of George Floyd spurred nationwide protests against systemic injustice, acting as a call to action for the reformation of the U.S.’ treatment of black people. As Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch wrote in a short essay published in June, Floyd’s death in police custody forced the country to “confront the reality that, despite gains made in the past 50 years, we are still a nation riven by inequality and racial division.” To reflect this pivotal moment, Smithsonian magazine compiled a collection of resources “designed to foster an equal society, encourage commitment to unbiased choices and promote antiracism in all aspects of life,” according to assistant digital editor Meilan Solly. The resources are organized into six categories: historical context, systemic inequality, anti-black violence, protest, intersectionality, and allyship and education.
Human relationships can be difficult, but at least they don’t involve copulating until your inner organs fail. Yes, you read that correctly—death is the unfortunate fate for the male antechinus, a pint-sized marsupial that literally fornicates until it drops dead. Take similar comfort in the fact that humans don’t need to drink urine to start a relationship, as is the case with giraffes, nor inseminate each other via open wounds, as bed bugs do.
Today, stories of Catherine the Great’s salacious, equine love affairs dominate her legacy. But the reality of the Russian czarina’s life was far more nuanced. Ahead of the release of Hulu’s “The Great,” we explored Catherine’s 30-year reign, from her usurpation of power to her championing of Enlightenment ideals, early support of vaccination and myriad accomplishments in the cultural sphere. As Meilan Solly wrote in May, “Catherine was a woman of contradictions whose brazen exploits have long overshadowed the accomplishments that won her ‘the Great’ moniker in the first place.
For the first time in the 174-year history of the Smithsonian Institution, the organization released 2.8 million images from across all 19 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo into the public domain. This initial release represents just two percent of the Smithsonian’s total collection, which boasts 155 million items and counting. It was part of an ongoing effort to digitize—and democratize—the Institution’s collections.
• A time-capsule story from the end of March about how and when we thought the pandemic might end. We were too optimistic about how long Americans would need to “flatten the curve,” and unmentioned in the story was how soon a vaccine would be developed.
• Another entry in our “True History of” series that looked at Tom Hanks’ World War II film from earlier this year, Greyhound
• An exploration of new research that rewrites the demise of Doggerland, a prehistoric land bridge between Britain and Europe
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