Glance

FOREST ECOLOGY U.S. boosts tally of old forests Last year, President Joe Biden surprised forest scientists when he ordered an inventory of the government’s holdings of mature and old-growth forests by this Earth Day. It triggered a scramble by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to create a formal definition of what constitutes “mature” and “old-growth” forests and to apply those definitions across millions of hectares. Meeting the 22 April…

The At a Glance widget in the Google Pixel launcher is great at keeping you updated on certain events. As useful as it is, Google is still adding functionality to it. According to a new report from 9To5Google, the At a Glance widget may soon get loud sound alerts.The At a Glance widget is a very useful part of the Google Pixel experience. As the name suggests, you can get important information just At a Glance. It will show you which Bluetooth device you just connected to, the current weather, serious weather alerts,…

PLANETARY SCIENCE Mars’s moon may be its kin Researchers have long believed that Mars’s two moons, Deimos and Phobos, are captured asteroids. But the first close-up images of Deimos, taken by the United Arab Emirates’s $200 million Hope spacecraft, suggest the 12-kilometer-wide body instead formed from the same material as Mars, researchers revealed this week at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union. The imagery, taken during a 10 March flyby,…

BIOMEDICINE Early test for Parkinson’s disease A large study has shown that a test can indicate a person has Parkinson’s disease before they start having symptoms. The chronic degenerative disease currently lacks a definitive biochemical test. A research team recruited 1123 participants, some of whom had symptoms of Parkinson’s, and used spinal taps to measure their levels of a protein called alpha-synuclein, which clumps and damages brain cells in people with…

MATERIALS SCIENCE Storied accelerator to test chips The world’s first superconducting cyclotron will receive a new lease on life testing next-generation microchips, Michigan State University’s Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) announced last week. From 1982 to 2020, the K-500 cyclotron produced beams of atomic nuclei ranging from hydrogen to uranium for experiments in nuclear physics, relying on superconducting magnets to confine the particles. Last year,…

COVID-19 Chinese team posts key DNA from market After intense pressure and criticism from many scientists, Chinese researchers last week released a trove of new genetic data that may offer fresh clues about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some scientists say the new evidence gives more credibility to the thesis that SARS-CoV-2 could have jumped into humans from raccoon dogs or other mammals illegally sold at a Wuhan market. Researchers mainly affiliated with…

PARTICLE PHYSICS Particle mass dispels hint of new physics A fleeting, weighty elementary particle called the W boson has just the mass predicted by theory, physicists working with Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reported this week at a conference in Italy. The finding comes from ATLAS, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, and it contradicts the eyebrow-raising measurement reported last year in Science that suggested the W was heavier than…

PUBLIC HEALTH Next-gen bed nets get go-ahead A new type of malaria-fighting bed net received a major endorsement from the World Health Organization (WHO) last week. The net combines two chemicals to more effectively kill the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite behind malaria, a disease that killed an estimated 619,000 people in 2022, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Insecticide-treated bed nets have helped drive malaria rates down…

METEOROLOGY Intensity scale for atmospheric rivers reveals global hot spots Atmospheric rivers like those pummeling the West Coast now have a five-level intensity scale, which has enabled researchers to chart the global prevalence of these sinuous bands of storms. The scale, first developed in 2019 for the U.S. West Coast, classifies the events based on how long they last and how much moisture they transport from the tropics to higher latitudes, much as the…

ASTRONOMY Satellite swarms spoil Hubble’s view Images from the iconic Hubble Space Telescope are increasingly marred by the tracks of passing satellites in higher orbits, a threat that could balloon as companies vie to build “megaconstellations” for global internet services. The rocket company SpaceX has launched more than 3500 of its Starlink satellites out of a planned 12,000; Amazon and the Chinese government have similar plans. Ground-based observatories are…