Wildlife conservationists sounded the alarm Wednesday as an annual count of monarch butterflies revealed a sharp decline in the number of the iconic insects hibernating in Mexican forests, stoking renewed fears of their extinction.
The annual survey—led by Mexico's National Commission of Natural Protected Areas and the Mexican branch of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF)—showed a 22% drop in the hibernating monarch population amid accelerating habitat loss driven primarily by deforestation.
"Despite heroic efforts to save monarchs by planting milkweed, we could still lose these extraordinary butterflies by not taking bolder action," Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in a statement.
"Monarchs were once incredibly common," she added. "Now they're the face of the extinction crisis as U.S. populations crash amid habitat loss and the climate meltdown."
Renowned for its epic annual migrations from the northern U.S. and southern Canada to Florida, California, and Mexico, monarchs have suffered a precipitous plunge in population in North America this century.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the number of eastern monarchs fell from around 384 million in 1996 to 60 million in 2019, and in the West their numbers declined from 1.2 million in 1997 to fewer than 30,000 last year.
As CBD noted:
At the end of summer, eastern monarchs migrate from the northern United States and southern Canada to high-elevation fir forests in central Mexico. Scientists estimate the population size by measuring the area of trees turned orange by the clustering butterflies...The eastern population has been perilously low since 2008.
Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature formally listed the monarch butterfly as endangered, citing critical threats posed by the climate emergency, deforestation, pesticides, and logging.
(Graphic: Center for Biological Diversity)
In the United States, the Trump administration in 2020 placed monarchs on the wait list for consideration for Endangered Species Act protection. FWS has until next year to make a final listing determination.
"It is not just about conserving a species, it's also about conserving a unique migratory phenomenon in nature," said WWF Mexico general director Jorge Rickards. "Monarchs contribute to healthy and diverse terrestrial ecosystems across North America as they carry pollen from one plant to another."
"With 80% of agricultural food production depending on pollinators like monarchs, when people help the species, we are also helping ourselves," he added.
The world's first 3D-printed rocket launched successfully on Wednesday, marking a step forward for the California company behind the innovative spacecraft, though it failed to reach orbit.
Billed as less costly to produce and fly, the unmanned Terran 1 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11:25 pm (0325 GMT Thursday) but suffered an "anomaly" during second-stage separation as it streamed towards low Earth orbit, according to a livestream broadcast by aerospace startup Relativity Space.
The company did not immediately give further details.
While it failed to reach orbit, Wednesday's launch proved that the rocket -- whose mass is 85 percent 3D-printed -- could withstand the rigors of lift-off.
The successful launch came on the third attempt. It had originally been scheduled to launch on March 8 but was postponed at the last minute because of propellant temperature issues.
A second attempt on March 11 was scrubbed due to fuel pressure problems.
Had Terran 1 reached low Earth orbit, it would have been the first privately funded vehicle using methane fuel to do so on its first try, according to Relativity.
Terran 1 was not carrying a payload for its first flight, but the rocket will eventually be capable of putting up to 2,755 pounds (1,250 kilograms) into low Earth orbit.
The rocket is 110 feet (33.5 meters) tall with a diameter of 7.5 feet (2.2 meters).
Eighty-five percent of its mass is 3D-printed with metal alloys, including the nine Aeon 1 engines used in its first stage and the one Aeon Vacuum engine employed in the second.
It is the largest ever 3D-printed object and was made using the world's largest 3D metal printers, according to the Long Beach-based company.
Built in 60 days
Relativity's goal is to produce a rocket that is 95 percent 3D-printed.
Terran 1 is powered by engines using liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas -- the "propellants of the future," capable of eventually fueling a voyage to Mars, Relativity says.
SpaceX's Starship and Vulcan rockets being developed by United Launch Alliance use the same fuel.
Relativity is also building a larger rocket, the Terran R, capable of putting a payload of 44,000 pounds (20,000 kg) into low Earth orbit.
The first launch of a Terran R, which is designed to be fully reusable, is scheduled for next year.
A satellite operator can wait for years for a spot on an Arianespace or SpaceX rocket, and Relativity Space hopes to accelerate the timeline with its 3D-printed rockets.
Relativity said its 3D-printed versions use 100 times fewer parts than traditional rockets and can be built from raw materials in just 60 days.
Relativity has signed commercial launch contracts worth $1.65 billion, mostly for the Terran R, according to CEO Tim Ellis, who co-founded the company in 2015.
More than half the solar system’s planets will align Monday in a rarely seen spectacle, arcing across a corner of the night sky. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus will parade across the sky, accompanied by the moon and a possible star cluster. While the scenario will be visible to the naked eye, astronomers recommend breaking out the binoculars or a telescope for a more detailed view. The planets will be arrayed across the western horizon in an arc about 20 to 25 minutes after Monday’s sunset, according to Space.com, starting with Mercury and Jupiter. However, twilight’s brightness coul...
Ludwig van Beethoven died in Vienna nearly 200 years ago after a lifetime of composing some of the most influential works in classical music.
Ever since, biographers have sought to explain the causes of the German composer's death at the age of 56, his progressive hearing loss and his struggles with chronic illness.
An international team of researchers who sequenced Beethoven's genome using authenticated locks of his hair may now have some answers.
Liver failure, or cirrhosis, was the likely cause of Beethoven's death brought about by a number of factors, including his alcohol consumption, they said.
"We looked at possible genetic causes of his three main symptom complexes -- the progressive hearing loss, the gastrointestinal symptoms and the liver disease ultimately leading to his death due to liver failure," said Markus Nothen of the Institute of Human Genetics at the University Hospital of Bonn, one of the co-authors.
Beethoven, Nothen said, had "a strong genetic disposition to liver disease" and sequences of the hepatitis B virus were detected in his hair.
"We believe the disease arose from an interplay of genetic disposition, well documented chronic alcohol consumption and hepatitis B infection," Nothen said.
Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said hepatitis B "was probably quite common at that time in the early 19th century."
"At least in the last few months before his death he was infected with hepatitis B virus," Krause said.
The authors of the study, published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on Wednesday, were unable to determine any genetic causes for the progressive hearing loss that eventually left Beethoven completely deaf by 1818.
The researchers analyzed eight locks of hair said to be from Beethoven and determined that five of them were "almost certainly authentic," said Tristan Begg, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the study.
"Because we reconstructed the genome from ultra-short DNA fragments, we only confidently mapped about two-thirds of it," he said.
One of the most-famous strands of hair, known as the "Hiller Lock," which has been the subject of previous research and found to contain high levels of lead, was revealed not to be from Beethoven at all but from a woman.
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in 1827, battled gastrointestinal problems at various times of his life as well as jaundice.
"There were periods of acute illness where he was unable to work, for example, his month-long period of acute illness in the spring of 1825," Begg said.
The researchers, by studying Beethoven's DNA data and archival documents, also uncovered a discrepancy in his legal and biological genealogy.
They found an "extra-pair paternity event" -- a child resulting from an extramarital relationship -- in Beethoven's direct paternal line, said Toomas Kivisild of the Institute of Genomics at the University of Tartu.
Kivisild said it occurred some time within seven generations that separate a common ancestor, Aert van Beethoven, at the end of the 16th century and Beethoven's birth in 1770.
Begg said it was no surprise it was not recorded.
"You wouldn't necessarily expect an extra-pair paternity event to be documented," he said, it being "probably clandestine in nature."
"You cannot rule out that Beethoven himself may have been illegitimate," Begg said.
"I'm not advocating that," he stressed. "I'm simply saying that's a possibility and you have to consider it."
Beethoven had asked in an 1802 letter to his brothers that his health problems, particularly his hearing loss, be described after his death.
"He had the wish to be studied post-mortem," Krause said.
"And it is kind of, basically, his wish that we are fulfilling to some degree with this project."
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell expressed the fear artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems would take control of humankind if voting machines are not destroyed.
During an interview on Wednesday, Lindell and War Room host Steve Bannon discussed why A.I. could be the "Antichrist."
"Mike Lindell, you've got some thoughts on artificial [intelligence] and, look, I'm telling people, hey, this is the Antichrist," Bannon prompted. "I hate to be so blunt about it, right? It's not going to be a human."
For his part, Lindell linked the danger of A.I. to voting machines.
"We're at this apex in history now," the pillow executive opined. "If we don't get rid of these electronic voting machines, if we don't get rid of the machines and get back to having elections and not selections, we have to elect the people that are going to regulate this artificial intelligence."
"We're going have artificial intelligence regardless," he continued. "But you better have the right people regulating it. You could frame people for anything. You could do anything with that, and we're going to just be controlled."
"And you're right!" Lindell agreed. "It's like the Antichrist, but that's why it's so important what we're doing right now to get elections back instead of selections because the people you're going to be regulating something that's so powerful that something man has never seen."
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin was one of the first to notice something interesting about domesticated animals: different species often developed similar changes when compared to their ancient wild ancestors.
But why would a host of seemingly unrelated features repeatedly occur together in different domesticated animals?
In a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we argue that currently popular explanations aren’t quite right – and propose a new explanation focused on big changes in the way domesticated animals live. Along the way, our theory also offers insights into the unexpected story of how we humans domesticated ourselves.
Shared changes under domestication
The most commonly shared change is tamer behavior. All domesticated animals are calmer than their wild ancestors naturally were.
That’s probably not very surprising. Ancient humans would’ve preferred docile animals, and likely selected breeding stock for tameness.
But other common changes don’t seem at all useful to humans – or to the animals themselves. Like shorter faces, smaller teeth, more fragile skeletons, smaller brains, and different colors in skin, fur, and feathers.
But each change occurs in more than one domesticated species.
Wild self-domestication
Surprisingly, very similar changes sometimes also appear in wild animals, leading some scientists to think they “self-domesticated” in some way.
The bonobo (a great ape closely related to the chimpanzee) is one famous example of an animal that has undergone these changes without human intervention. Urban foxes are another.
Bonobos are a species who are believed to have ‘self-domesticated’. Shutterstock
Wild self-domestication is most common in isolated sub-populations, like on islands, and may overlap with a similar phenomenon known as the “island effect”.
Perhaps more surprisingly, modern humans also show features of domestication syndrome, when compared to our ancient ancestors. This suggests we also self-domesticated.
Some scientists argue these changes made us more sociable, helping us to develop complex languages and culture.
So a clearer understanding of domestication syndrome in animals might improve our knowledge of human evolution too.
What causes domestication syndrome?
In recent years, two main possible explanations for domestication syndrome have dominated scientific discussion.
The first suggests it was caused when ancient humans selected animals for tamer behavior, which somehow triggered all of the other traits too.
This idea is supported by a famous long-running Russian fox-breeding experiment which began in 1959, in which caged foxes were selected only for tameness but developed the other “unselected” features as well.
The second hypothesis complements this first one. It suggests selection for tameness causes the other features because they’re all linked by genes controlling “neural crest cells”. These cells, found in embryos, form many animal features – so changing them could cause several differences at once.
More than selection for tameness
However, our new research suggests these two ideas oversimplify and obscure the complex evolutionary effects at play.
For one thing, there are problems with the famous Russian fox experiment. As other authors have noted, the experiment didn’t begin by taming wild foxes, but used foxes from a farm in Canada. And these pre-farmed foxes already had features of domestication syndrome.
What’s more, the experimenters didn’t only select for tameness. They bred other foxes for aggression, but the aggressive foxes also developed domestication syndrome features.
And in a similar experiment conducted in the 1930s, caged rats developed the same common changes, including tamer behavior, despite no deliberate selection for tameness, or aggression.
So, it seems domestication syndrome might not be caused by humans selecting animals for tameness. Instead, it might be caused by unintended shared effects from the new domestic environment.
A new hypothesis for domestication syndrome
Crucially, it’s not just new forces of selection, such as a human preference for tameness, that matters. The removal of pre-existing selection is just as important, because that’s what naturally shaped the wild ancestors in the first place.
For example, domesticated animals are often protected from predators, so wild traits for avoiding them might be lost. Competition for mating partners is also often reduced, so wild reproductive features and behaviors could decline, or disappear.
Domesticated animals are also usually reliably fed. This might alter certain features, but would certainly change natural metabolism and growth.
Caged rats have also been seen to develop signs of domestication syndrome. Oxana Golubets / Unsplash
In effect, we argue there are multiple selective changes at work on domesticated animals, not just “selection for tameness”, and that shared shifts in evolutionary selection would often cause shared changes in features. Even across different species.
Our new hypothesis highlights four ways that selection shaping wild animals is often disrupted by domestication. These are:
less fighting between males
fewer males for females to choose between
more reliable food and fewer predators, and
elevated maternal stress, which initially reduces the health and survival of offspring.
Several of these might resemble “selection for tameness”, but using this one term to describe them all is misleadingly vague, and obscures other changes in selection.
So how did we domesticate ourselves?
Well, one current theory is that sociable “beta males” began cooperating to kill alpha bullies. This changed how competition worked among males, leading to fewer big and aggressive males.
But our hypothesis suggests other effects also played a role. For example, our early ancestors evolved the capacity for shared infant care. In our chimpanzee relatives today, sharing care of an infant would likely trigger extreme stress for the mother – but our ancestors adapted to this increased stress and gained an effective survival strategy.
Adapting to the increased maternal stress that accompanies separation from infants (either for shared care or domestication) may be one of the drivers of ‘domestication syndrome’. Shutterstock
More reliable food access due to group foraging and sharing, plus collective defense against predators, might also have made us more sociable, more cooperative, and more complex, while promoting other changes commonly seen in non-human domesticated animals.
Whatever the specific drivers in each species, recognizing multiple selective pathways better explains the domestication syndrome, and reaffirms the complexity of evolutionary effects shaping all life on Earth.
People have used poisons throughout history for a variety of purposes: to hunt animals for food, to treat diseases and to achieve nefarious ends like murder and assassination.
But what is a poison? Do all poisons act in the same way? Does the amount of the poison matter in terms of its toxicity?
I am a toxicologist who studies how chemicals affect human health, particularly when they cause harmful effects. As a fan of mystery and detective stories, which often feature the use of poisons, I’ve noticed a few poisons that turn up repeatedly in books, television and movies. How they really work is as fascinating as how they’re deployed toward evil ends in fiction.
What is a poison?
The 16th-century physician–alchemist Paracelsus, considered to be the father of toxicology, once wrote: “What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.” By this adage, any substance can be a poison with the appropriate amount.
Many people intentionally expose themselves to chemicals like ethanol through alcoholic beverages, nicotine through tobacco products and botulinum toxin through botox treatments at relatively low doses and suffer minimal adverse effects. However, at sufficiently high doses, these chemicals can be lethal. The body’s response often depends on how the chemical interacts with receptors within or on the surface of cells, or how it binds to enzymes used for biological processes. Frequently, higher concentrations of the substance lead to stronger responses.
Despite Paracelsus’ dictum, in popular culture the term “poison” is often reserved for chemical compounds that are not normally encountered in daily life and can lead to detrimental health effects even in relatively small amounts.
Novel writers and television and movie screenwriters have exploited numerous poisons in their works, including those that are chemical elements, such as arsenic and polonium, and those derived from animals, such as snake venom and blowfish poison. Many poisons derived from plants have also been used for villainous purposes in fiction.
In the AMC TV series “Breaking Bad,” high school chemistry teacher Walter White uses a compound called ricin to murder the business executive Lydia Rodarte-Quayle. Ricin is a very potent poison derived from the castor bean Ricinus communis and can be especially lethal if inhaled. Once this compound gets inside a cell, it damages a structure called a ribosome that’s responsible for synthesizing proteins essential to the cell’s function. Ingesting ricin could result in intestinal bleeding, organ damage and death.
It wasn’t Stevia that Lydia sweetened her tea with in ‘Breaking Bad’.
Sometimes, particular organs are much more susceptible to the effects of a poison. Physicians use digitalis medicines like digoxin, which are derived from members of the foxglove family of plants, to treat congestive heart failure and heart rhythm problems. When administered in sufficiently high doses, however, they can lead to heart failure and death. By interfering with a protein in heart cells called the sodium-potassium pump, they can decrease the rate of electrical impulses in the heart and increase the strength of its contractions. This can result in a dangerous type of irregular heartbeat called ventricular fibrillation and lead to death.
The villain of the James Bond film “Casino Royale,” Le Chiffre, has his girlfriend attempt to kill Bond by poisoning his martini with digitalis. At high doses, digitalis drugs can alter the activity of the autonomic nervous system, which controls unconscious bodily functions like heart pumping.
Poison is one way to win a poker game.
TV characters are not immune to the dangers of poisonous mushrooms. One particularly potent fungus, Amanita verna, is known as the “destroying angel.” In the ITV TV series “Midsomer Murders,” puppet show owner and presumed upstanding citizen Evelyn Pope uses this mushroom to fatally poison chef Tristan Goodfellow as part of her murder spree of the inheritors of an estate. This mushroom contains various chemicals called amatoxins that are thought to inhibit the activity of a specific enzyme critical for the production of messenger RNA, or mRNA, a molecule essential to protein synthesis in cells. Because ingested amatoxins mainly target the liver, these poisons can severely disrupt the liver’s ability to repair itself, leading to loss of function that will prove fatal without liver transplantation.
They don’t call it the “destroying angel” for nothing.
Another highly popular poison in detective and mystery stories is strychnine. In the Agatha Christie story “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” Alfred Inglethorp and his lover Evelyn Howard use this poison to kill Inglethorp’s wife and wealthy country manor owner, Emily Inglethorp.
Strychnine, which comes from seeds of the Strychnos nux-vomica tree, affects the nervous system by blocking a neurotransmitter called glycine in the spinal cord and brainstem. Normally, glycine slows down the activity of neurons and prevents muscle contractions. By blocking glycine, strychnine ingestion can result in excessive activation of neurons and muscles, leading to a series of full-body muscle spasms that can become so intense that they cause respiratory arrest and death.
Many more poisons exist in nature than described here. Aside from potentially enhancing the enjoyment of detective and mystery stories, understanding the mechanisms of how these poisons work can provide an added appreciation for the complexity of the effects foreign chemicals have on the human body.
French scientist Etienne-Emile Baulieu, known as the father of the abortion pill, said it was "scandalous" and "a setback for women's freedom" that the US state of Wyoming has banned the drug.
Baulieu, who at the age of 96 is still working on treatments for depression and Alzheimer's, did not mince his words about the ban.
"It is a setback for women's freedom, particularly for those in the most precarious position who do not have the means to go to another state" to get an abortion, he told AFP in an interview.
Last week Wyoming became the first US state to outlaw the use of the abortion pill.
It was the latest point marked for conservative anti-abortion activists in the United States after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure last year, leaving the policy to individual states.
Baulieu said he had dedicated a large part of his life to "increasing the freedom of women," and the ban was a step in the opposite direction.
Born in Strasbourg in 1926 to Jewish parents, Baulieu was raised by his feminist mother after his father, a doctor, died when he was a boy. At the age of 15, Baulieu joined the French resistance against Nazi occupation.
He went on to become a self-described "doctor who does science," specializing in the field of steroid hormones.
Invited to work in the United States, Baulieu was noticed in 1961 by Gregory Pincus, known as the father of the contraceptive pill, who convinced him to focus on sex hormones.
Back in France, Baulieu designed a way to block the effect of the hormone progesterone, which is essential for the egg to implant in the uterus after fertilization.
"I wanted to make a contragestive," which stops gestation, he told AFP.
Partnering with the French Roussel-Uclaf laboratory, the oral drug RU-486, also known as mifepristone, was developed in 1982, providing a safe and inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion.
But there was a long battle for the drug to become authorized in the United States, where anti-abortion activists dubbed it the "death pill".
'Fanaticism and ignorance'
In early March, French President Emmanuel Macron praised Baulieu's resilience when he presented the scientist with the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'Honneur, the top rank in France's honors system.
"You, a Jew and a resistance fighter, you were overwhelmed with the most atrocious insults and even compared to Nazi scientists," Macron said.
"But you held on, for the love of freedom and science."
Baulieu's wife Simone Harari Baulieu, a media producer in France, said "adversity slides off him like water off a duck's back".
She added that the recent "step backwards" in the United States was propelled by "fanaticism and ignorance".
Even at age 96, Baulieu heads into his office at the Kremlin-Bicetre University Hospital in the southern suburbs of Paris three times a week.
Stacks of photos, diplomas and binders contain "the work of a lifetime," the scientist said, adding that he still wants to "be useful".
His latest award is pinned to his blue suit, but Baulieu said he "never seriously hoped to receive such honors".
"It was a pleasure, but what interests me is improving people's health."
'Driving force'
The team in his lab are continuing research he began years ago aiming to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as treatment for severe depression, for which clinical trials begin in the coming months.
Baulieu said "there is no reason we cannot find treatments" for both illnesses, which have stubbornly evaded many previous attempts.
Julien Giustiniani, the team leader at the Baulieu Institute, which was created to finance research into dementia, said Baulieu was "always enthusiastic".
"He is a driving force for us," Giustiniani said.
Though Baulieu now uses a cane to walk, he exudes a tireless energy.
He partly credits using DHEA, a natural hormone produced by the adrenal gland, which Baulieu first described in the 1960s and has been touted as an anti-ageing supplement.
The causes that have dominated his life were "women, brain health and longevity," Baulieu said.
"I would be bored if I did not work anymore," he added.
New surveys of seagrass on Florida’s Gulf Coast shows the vital marine plant is continuing to lose ground at a rapid pace in Tampa and Sarasota Bay. Since 2016, the Southwest Florida Water Management District has documented losses of almost 30% of Tampa Bay’s seagrass and around 26% in Sarasota Bay. The decline comes after local waters were swamped with pollution from the Piney Point industrial site and severe red tides over the past several years. But the seagrass losses also have increased despite many areas meeting state water quality targets, which environmentalists say need changing. Scie...
For years now, if a commuter were to glance to the north side of the San Mateo Bridge, they might see a lonely barge, painted with the words “Lind Marine,” floating a few hundred yards from the shoreline. A stray vessel in the San Francisco Bay is not an uncommon sight. But this particular barge is the last sign of one of California’s oldest mining industries, which trades in what might be the Bay Area’s most unusual non-renewable natural resource. Not gold. Not oil. Oyster shells. For thousands of years, the San Francisco Bay was home to hundreds of millions of Olympia oysters. Native to the ...
Astronomers on Monday warned that the light pollution created by the soaring number of satellites orbiting Earth poses an "unprecedented global threat to nature."
The number of satellites in low Earth orbit have more than doubled since 2019, when US company SpaceX launched the first "mega-constellation," which comprise thousands of satellites.
An armada of new internet constellations are planned to launch soon, adding thousands more satellites to the already congested area fewer than 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) above Earth.
Each new satellite increases the risk that it will smash into another object orbiting Earth, creating yet more debris.
This can create a chain reaction in which cascading collisions create ever smaller fragments of debris, further adding to the cloud of "space junk" reflecting light back to Earth.
In a series of papers published in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers warned that this increasing light pollution threatens the future of their profession.
In one paper, researchers said that for the first time they had measured how much a brighter night sky would financially and scientifically affect the work of a major observatory.
Modeling suggested that for the Vera Rubin Observatory, a giant telescope currently under construction in Chile, the darkest part of the night sky will become 7.5 percent brighter over the next decade.
That would reduce the number of stars the observatory is able to see by around 7.5 percent, study co-author John Barentine told AFP.
That would add nearly a year to the observatory's survey, costing around $21.8 million, said Barentine of Dark Sky Consulting, a firm based in the US state of Arizona.
He added that there is another cost of a brighter sky that impossible to calculate: the celestial events that humanity will never get to observe.
And the increase in light pollution could be even worse than thought.
Another Nature study used extensive modeling to suggest that current measurements of light pollution are significantly underestimating the phenomenon.
- 'Stop this attack' -
The brightening of the night sky will not just affect professional astronomers and major observatories, the researchers warned.
Aparna Venkatesan, an astronomer at the University of San Francisco, said it also threatened "our ancient relationship with the night sky".
"Space is our shared heritage and ancestor -- connecting us through science, storytelling, art, origin stories and cultural traditions -- and it is now at risk," she said in a Nature comment piece.
A group of astronomers from Spain, Portugal and Italy called for scientists to "stop this attack" on the natural night.
"The loss of the natural aspect of a pristine night sky for all the world, even on the summit of K2 or on the shore of Lake Titicaca or on Easter Island is an unprecedented global threat to nature and cultural heritage," the astronomers said in a Nature comment piece.
"If not stopped, this craziness will become worse and worse."
The astronomers called for drastically limiting mega-constellations, adding that "we must not reject the possibility of banning them.""
They said that it was "naive to hope that the skyrocketing space economy will limit itself, if not forced to do so," given the economic interests at stake.
There are few places on Earth as isolated as Trindade island, a volcanic outcrop a three- to four-day boat trip off the coast of Brazil.
So geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos was startled to find an unsettling sign of human impact on the otherwise untouched landscape: rocks formed from the glut of plastic pollution floating in the ocean.
Santos first found the plastic rocks in 2019, when she traveled to the island to research her doctoral thesis on a completely different topic -- landslides, erosion and other "geological risks."
She was working near a protected nature reserve known as Turtle Beach, the world's largest breeding ground for the endangered green turtle, when she came across a large outcrop of the peculiar-looking blue-green rocks.
Intrigued, she took some back to her lab after her two-month expedition.
Analyzing them, she and her team identified the specimens as a new kind of geological formation, merging the materials and processes the Earth has used to form rocks for billions of years with a new ingredient: plastic trash.
"We concluded that human beings are now acting as a geological agent, influencing processes that were previously completely natural, like rock formation," she told AFP.
"It fits in with the idea of the Anthropocene, which scientists are talking about a lot these days: the geological era of human beings influencing the planet's natural processes. This type of rock-like plastic will be preserved in the geological record and mark the Anthropocene."
Island paradise
The finding left her "disturbed" and "upset," said Santos, a professor at the Federal University of Parana, in southern Brazil.
She describes Trindade as "like paradise": a beautiful tropical island whose remoteness has made it a refuge for all sorts of species -- sea birds, fish found only there, nearly extinct crabs, the green turtle.
The only human presence on the South Atlantic island is a small Brazilian military base and a scientific research center.
"It's marvelous," she said.
"So it was all the more horrifying to find something like this -- and on one of the most ecologically important beaches."
She returned to the island late last year to collect more specimens and dig deeper into the phenomenon.
Continuing her research, she found similar rock-like plastic formations had previously been reported in places including Hawaii, Britain, Italy and Japan since 2014.
But Trindade island is the remotest place on the planet they have been found so far, she said.
She fears that as the rocks erode, they will leach microplastics into the environment and further contaminate the island's food chain.
'Paradigm shift'
She and her team's study, published in September in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, classified the new kind of "rocks" found worldwide into several types: "plastiglomerates," similar to sedimentary rocks; "pyroplastics," similar to clastic rocks; and a previously unidentified type, "plastistones," similar to igneous rocks formed by lava flow.
"Marine pollution is provoking a paradigm shift for concepts of rock and sedimentary deposit formations," her team wrote.
"Human interventions are now so pervasive that one has to question what is truly natural."
The main ingredient in the rocks Santos discovered was remnants of fishing nets, they found.
But ocean currents have also swept an abundance of bottles, household waste and other plastic trash from around the world to the island, she said.
Santos said she plans to make the topic her main research focus.
Trindade "is the most pristine place I've ever seen," she said.
"Seeing how vulnerable it is to the trash contaminating our oceans shows how pervasive the problem is worldwide."
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Monday that cases of Candida auris, or C. auris — a potentially deadly and drug-resistant fungal infection — are on the rise at U.S. health-care facilities. New CDC data published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine showed that the number of infections has grown since it was first detected in the U.S. in 2013. The rate has increased rapidly in recent years, however. There were 756 reported cases in 2020 and 1,471 reported cases in 2021 — a 95% increase. According to preliminary CDC data, from January to December 2022, the U.S. r...
(Graphic: Center for Biological Diversity)
