Science
Longest lightning bolt record: 477 miles over 3 US states
A bolt of lightning that stretched nearly 500 miles across three U.S. states is the new world record holder for longest flash.
The single flash extended 477.2 miles (768 kilometers) across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in April 2020, the World Meteorological Organization said Monday. That beat the old record set in 2018 in Brazil of 440.6 miles (709 kilometers).
Also in 2020, a single lightning flash over Uruguay and northern Argentina lasted 17.1 seconds, nipping the old time record of 16.7 seconds.
Also read: 2,800 lost lives in lightning strikes in 10 years: Dr Enamur
Normally lightning doesn’t stretch farther than 10 miles and lasts less than a second, said Arizona State University’s Randall Cerveny, who is the chief of records confirmation for the meteorological organization.
“These two lightning flash records are absolutely extraordinary,” Cerveny said in an email.
Both were cloud-to-cloud, several thousand feet above the ground, so no one was in danger, he said.
Also read: Solar eclipse on the longest day of the year
These records, which are not linked to climate change, were spotted and confirmed thanks to new satellite tracking technology. Both regions are two of the few places in the world prone to the type of intense storms that can produce what are called “megaflashes, ” Cerveny said.
Meet the man who won a trip to space and gave it to a friend
He told his family and a few friends. He dropped hints to a couple of colleagues. So hardly anyone knew that the airline pilot could have — should have — been on board when SpaceX launched its first tourists into orbit last year.
Meet Kyle Hippchen, the real winner of a first-of-its-kind sweepstakes, who gave his seat to his college roommate.
Though Hippchen’s secret is finally out, that doesn’t make it any easier knowing he missed his chance to orbit Earth because he exceeded the weight limit. He still hasn’t watched the Netflix series on the three-day flight purchased by a tech entrepreneur for himself and three guests last September.
“It hurts too much,” he said. “I’m insanely disappointed. But it is what it is.”
Hippchen, 43, a Florida-based captain for Delta’s regional carrier Endeavor Air, recently shared his story with The Associated Press during his first visit to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center since his lost rocket ride.
Also read: New space telescope reaches final stop million miles out
He opened up about his out-of-the-blue, dream-come-true windfall, the letdown when he realized he topped SpaceX’s weight restrictions of 250 pounds (113 kilograms) and his offer to the one person he knew would treasure the flight as much as himself. Four months later, he figures probably fewer than 50 people know he was the actual winner.
“It was their show, and I didn’t want to be distracting too much from what they were doing,” said Hippchen, who watched the launch from a VIP balcony.
His seat went to Chris Sembroski, 42, a data engineer in Everett, Washington. The pair roomed together starting in the late 1990s while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. They’d pile into cars with other student space geeks and make the hourlong drive south for NASA’s shuttles launches. They also belonged to a space advocacy group, going to Washington to push commercial space travel.
Despite living on opposite coasts, Hippchen and Sembroski continued to swap space news and champion the cause. Neither could resist when Shift4 Payments founder and CEO Jared Isaacman raffled off a seat on the flight he purchased from SpaceX’s Elon Musk. The beneficiary was St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Hippchen snapped up $600 worth of entries. Sembroski, about to start a new job at Lockheed Martin, shelled out $50. With 72,000 entries in the random drawing last February, neither figured he’d win and didn’t bother telling the other.
By early March, Hippchen started receiving vague emails seeking details about himself. That’s when he read the contest’s small print: The winner had to be under 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds (2 meters and 113 kilograms).
Hippchen was 5-foot-10 and 330 pounds (1.8 meters and 150 kilograms).
He told organizers he was pulling out, figuring he was only one of many finalists. In the flurry of emails and calls that followed, Hippchen was stunned to learn he’d won.
With a September launch planned, the timeline was tight. Still new at flying people, SpaceX needed to start measuring its first private passengers for their custom-fitted flight suits and capsule seats. As an aerospace engineer and pilot, Hippchen knew the weight limit was a safety issue involving the seats, and could not be exceeded.
Also read: Japanese space tourists safely return to Earth
“I was trying to figure how I could drop 80 pounds in six months, which, I mean, it’s possible, but it’s not the most healthy thing in the world to do,” Hippchen said.
Isaacman, the spaceflight’s sponsor, allowed Hippchen to pick a stand-in.
“Kyle’s willingness to gift his seat to Chris was an incredible act of generosity,” he said in an email this week.
Isaacman introduced his passengers at the end of March: a St. Jude physician assistant who beat cancer there as a child; a community college educator who was Shift4 Payments’ winning business client; and Sembroski.
Hippchen joined them in April to watch SpaceX launch astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, the company’s last crew flight before their own.
In gratitude, Sembroski offered to take personal items into space for Hippchen. He gathered his high school and college rings, airline captain epaulets, a great-uncle’s World War I Purple Heart and odds and ends from his best friends from high school, warning, “Don’t ask any details.”
By launch day on Sept. 15, word had gotten around. As friends and families gathered for the liftoff, Hippchen said the conversation went like this: “My name’s Kyle. Are you The Kyle? Yeah, I’m The Kyle.”
Before climbing into SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, Sembroski followed tradition and used the phone atop the launch tower to make his one allotted call. He called Hippchen and thanked him one more time.
“I’m forever grateful,” Sembroski said.
And while Hippchen didn’t get to see Earth from orbit, he did get to experience about 10 minutes of weightlessness. During Sembroski’s flight, he joined friends and family of the crew on a special zero-gravity plane.
“It was a blast.”
New space telescope reaches final stop million miles out
The world’s biggest, most powerful space telescope arrived at its observation post 1 million miles from Earth on Monday, a month after it lifted off on a quest to behold the dawn of the universe.
On command, the James Webb Space Telescope fired its rocket thrusters for nearly five minutes to go into orbit around the sun at its designated location, and NASA confirmed the operation went as planned.
The mirrors on the $10 billion observatory still must be meticulously aligned, the infrared detectors sufficiently chilled and the scientific instruments calibrated before observations can begin in June.
Also read: Space telescope launched on daring quest to behold 1st stars
But flight controllers in Baltimore were euphoric after chalking up another success.
“We’re one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. And I can’t wait to see Webb’s first new views of the universe this summer!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
The telescope will enable astronomers to peer back further in time than ever before, all the way back to when the first stars and galaxies were forming 13.7 billion years ago. That’s a mere 100 million years from the Big Bang, when the universe was created.
Besides making stellar observations, Webb will scan the atmospheres of alien worlds for possible signs of life.
Also read: Four station astronauts catch ride with SpaceX back home
Rare, pristine coral reef found off Tahiti coast
Deep in the South Pacific, scientists have explored a rare stretch of pristine corals shaped like roses off the coast of Tahiti. The reef is thought to be one of the largest found at such depths and seems untouched by climate change or human activities.
Laetitia Hédouin said she first saw the corals during a recreational dive with a local diving club months earlier.
“When I went there for the first time, I thought, ‘Wow — we need to study that reef. There’s something special about that reef,” said Hédouin, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Moorea, French Polynesia.
Read:The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record
What struck Hédouin was that the corals looked healthy and weren't affected by a bleaching event in 2019. Corals are tiny animals that grow and form reefs in oceans around the world.
Globally, coral reefs have been depleted from overfishing and pollution. Climate change is also harming delicate corals — including those in areas neighboring the newly discovered reef — with severe bleaching caused by warmer waters. Between 2009 and 2018, 14% of the world's corals were killed, according to a 2020 report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Project.
The newfound reef, stretching 2 miles (3 kilometers), was studied late last year during a dive expedition supported by UNESCO. Unlike most of the world’s mapped corals, which are found in relatively shallow waters, this one was deeper — between 115 feet (35 meters) to 230 feet (70 meters).
Exploring such depths posed a challenge: the deeper a diver goes underwater, the shorter amount of time can be safely spent at each depth. The team was equipped with special tanks and did 200 hours of diving to study the reef, including taking photographs, measurements and samples of the coral.
The reef is in a spot where many researchers haven't spent a lot of time in, said former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oceanographer Mark Eakin.
“We’ll be seeing more of these discoveries as the technology is applied to these locations,” said Eakin. “We may find some bigger ones somewhere, but I think this is always going to be an unusual reef.”
Read:Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
The recent volcanic eruption in Tonga that triggered tsunami waves across the Pacific has not affected the reef off Tahiti, said Hédouin.
Hédouin hopes the research can help experts understand how the reef has been resilient to climate change and human pressures, and what role these deeper corals might play in the ocean ecosystem. More dives are planned in the coming months.
“We know very little about the ocean, and there’s still so much that needs to be recorded, needs to be measured,” said Julian Barbière, the head of UNESCO’s marine policy and regional coordination.
Successful transplant of pig's heart into a human body for the first time
With the development of science and technology, now everybody is getting used to the issue of organ transplantation between animals and humans. Earlier, pig kidneys were transplanted into the human body through genetic engineering. And this time the pig heart transplantation took place in a human body. Physicians at the University of Maryland Medical School in the United States have finally done this revolutionary surgery. Let's get to know the details of this groundbreaking addition to the medical sciences.
Transplantation of pig heart in the human body
The organ transplants between different species (called xenotransplantation in medical science) began in the 18th century. Preliminary research was focused on primates. But all such attempts have repeatedly failed because the organs of those animals are incompatible with the internal structure of the human body. The incident of baby Fae can be the nearest example. In 1984, the baby survived for 21 days with a baboon's heart.
Then at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, the surgery by Bertley Griffith and his team based set a pathbreaking example in Maryland. It took about eight hours to transplant the pig's heart into the chest of 57-year-old David Bennett. Not to mention, Friday, January 7, 2022, was a very breath-taking day for Bennett's family as well as his doctors.
Read Jute Sanitary Napkins: Bangladeshi scientist Farhana Sultana got awarded for eco-friendly innovation
Six human genes were inserted into the genome to work on a total of 10 unique genes. This genetic engineering was performed in September 2021 by the biotech firm Revivicor of Virginia. They temporarily attached a pig's kidney to a brain-dead human body and it started working.
And the Maryland transplant took that test to the next level. They used the heart of a pig that was undergoing genetic engineering to remove sugar from its cells. These pigs are made as ideal donors due to their size, rapid growth, and rapid breeding characteristics.
This heart was provided by the biotech firm Revivicor. The organ was preserved in a special machine to keep it healthy until surgery. It also uses an experimental new anti-rejection drug developed by Kinixa Pharmaceuticals.
Read Top 10 Health and Medicine Breakthroughs of 2021
The most difficult part of this experimental surgery was to tell the patient the whole story. And Dr. Bertley Griffith, the chief physician of this surgery, has done this very wisely. Since the first treatment, the whole matter from beginning to end was full of uncertainty. Earlier, Dr. Grifith transplanted pig hearts into about 50 baboons in five years.
American David Bennett: First human to get pig heart transplantation
Throughout his life, David Bennett has been involved in a variety of activities, including pool repair, car maintenance, and painting. About a decade ago he fitted a pig's valve.
He went on a rampage several times looking for a heart donor, and he was devastated after failing a few heart transplant tests. Physical condition, heart failure, and irregular heartbeat made him ineligible for an artificial heart pump. In this way, even trying for two months to save his heart did not work.
Read Top 10 Greatest Science Breakthroughs of 2021
After thinking about all this, Dr. Bennett decided to go with Griffith's proposal.
The patient's current condition after complex surgery
The first 48 hours after the surgery was spent without any serious incident. The situation has improved considerably since last Monday. Bennett was still attached to the heart-lung bypass machine and was able to breathe on his own. However, this is not uncommon in patients with new heart transplants.
Yet the response of every part of his body is being closely monitored. Although the risk is low, the risk of infection with the pig virus or porcine retrovirus is still being monitored.
Also read: Chinese doctors complete lung transplant for COVID-19 patient
However, more time is needed to explore whether such early-stage replacement can work in the end. Even then, Bennett hopes it will work out eventually and that he will be able to have a human heart into his chest later.
Wrap up
Today, many patients are dying around the world of the unavailability of matched organs. The successful transplantation of a pig's heart into a human body is a futuristic invention. This initiative's ultimate practical success will raise the hopes of millions of other physically challenged patients, including those with congenital disabilities. We can hope that, in the future, the supply of organs will surmount the number of patients. The pig's heart, which was placed on Bennett's chest, contained life-saving properties as a by-product dut to genetic engineering. Therefore, revolutionary changes in heart transplantation can be expected in near future.
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The heat stays on: Earth hits 6th warmest year on record
Earth simmered to the sixth hottest year on record in 2021, according to several newly released temperature measurements.
And scientists say the exceptionally hot year is part of a long-term warming trend that shows hints of accelerating.
Two U.S. science agencies — NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and a private measuring group released their calculations for last year’s global temperature on Thursday, and all said it wasn’t far behind ultra-hot 2016 and 2020.
Six different calculations found 2021 was between the fifth and seventh hottest year since the late 1800s. NASA said 2021 tied with 2018 for sixth warmest, while NOAA puts last year in sixth place by itself.
Scientists say a La Nina — natural cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns globally and brings chilly deep ocean water to the surface — dampened global temperatures just as its flip side, El Nino, boosted them in 2016.
Still, they said 2021 was the hottest La Nina year on record and that the year did not represent a cooling off of human-caused climate change but provided more of the same heat.
Also read: Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
“So it’s not quite as headline-dominating as being the warmest on record, but give it another few years and we’ll see another one of those” records, said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Berkeley Earth monitoring group that also ranked 2021 the sixth hottest. “It’s the long-term trend, and it’s an indomitable march upward.”
Gavin Schmidt, the climate scientist who heads NASA’s temperature team, said “the long-term trend is very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record, NASA and NOAA data agree. Global temperatures, averaged over a 10-year period to take out natural variability, are nearly 2 degrees (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than 140 years ago, their data shows.
The other 2021 measurements came from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and satellite measurements by Copernicus Climate Change Service i n Europe and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
There was such a distinctive jump in temperatures about eight to 10 years ago that scientists have started looking at whether the rise in temperatures is speeding up. Both Schmidt and Hausfather said early signs point to that but it’s hard to know for sure.
“If you just look at the last the last 10 years, how many of them are way above the trend line from the previous 10 years? Almost all of them,” Schmidt said in an interview.
There’s a 99% chance that 2022 will be among the 10 warmest years on record and a 10% chance it will be the hottest on record, said NOAA climate analysis chief Russell Vose in a Thursday press conference.
Vose said chances are 50-50 that at least one year in the 2020s will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times — the level of warming nations agreed to try to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
While that threshold is important, extreme weather from climate change is hurting people now in their daily lives with about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming, Vose and Schmidt said.
Also read: Darwin in a lab: Coral evolution tweaked for global warming
The global average temperature last year was 58.5 degrees (14.7 Celsius), according to NOAA. In 1988, NASA’s then-chief climate scientist James Hansen grabbed headlines when he testified to Congress about global warming in a year that was the hottest on record at the time. Now, the 57.7 degrees (14.3 Celsius) of 1988 ranks as the 28th hottest year on record.
Last year, 1.8 billion people in 25 Asian, African and Middle Eastern nations had their hottest years on record, including China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iran, Myanmar and South Korea, according to Berkeley Earth.
The deep ocean, where most heat is stored in the seas, also set a record for warmth in 2021, according to a separate new study.
“Ocean warming, aside from causing coral bleaching and threatening sea life and fish populations, ... is destabilizing Antarctic ice shelves and threatens massive ... sea level rise if we don’t act,” said study co-author Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist.
The last time Earth had a cooler than normal year by NOAA or NASA calculations was 1976. That means 69% of the people on the planet — more than 5 billion people under age 45 — have never experienced such a year, based on United Nations data.
North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, 39, who wasn’t part of the new reports but said they make sense, said, “I’ve only lived in a warming world and I wish that the younger generations did not have to say the same. It didn’t have to be this way.”
Scientists explore Thwaites, Antarctica's 'doomsday' glacier
A team of scientists are sailing to “the place in the world that’s the hardest to get to” so they can better figure out how much and how fast seas will rise because of global warming eating away at Antarctica’s ice.
Thirty-two scientists on Thursday are starting a more than two-month mission aboard an American research ship to investigate the crucial area where the massive but melting Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea and may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of warm water. The Florida-sized glacier has gotten the nickname the “doomsday glacier” because of how much ice it has and how much seas could rise if it all melts — more than two feet (65 centimeters) over hundreds of years.
Because of its importance, the United States and the United Kingdom are in the midst of a joint $50 million mission to study Thwaites, the widest glacier in the world by land and sea. Not near any of the continent's research stations, Thwaites is on Antarctica's western half, east of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula, which used to be the area scientists worried most about.
Read:Footprints show some two-legged dinosaurs were agile
“Thwaites is the main reason I would say that we have so large an uncertainty in the projections of future sea level rise and that is because it’s a very remote area, difficult to reach,” Anna Wahlin, an oceanographer from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said Wednesday in an interview from the Research Vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer, which was scheduled to leave its port in Chile hours later. “It is configured in a way so that it’s potentially unstable. And that is why we are worried about this.”
Thwaites is putting about 50 billion tons of ice into the water a year. The British Antarctic Survey says the glacier is responsible for 4% of global sea rise, and the conditions leading to it to lose more ice are accelerating, University of Colorado ice scientist Ted Scambos said from the McMurdo land station last month.
Oregon State University ice scientist Erin Pettit said Thwaites appears to be collapsing in three ways:
— Melting from below by ocean water.
— The land part of the glacier “is losing its grip” to the place it attaches to the seabed, so a large chunk can come off into the ocean and later melt.
— The glacier’s ice shelf is breaking into hundreds of fractures like a damaged car windshield. This is what Pettit said she fears will be the most troublesome with six-mile (10-kilometer) long cracks forming in just a year.
No one has stepped foot before on the key ice-water interface at Thwaites before. In 2019, Wahlin was on a team that explored the area from a ship using a robotic ship but never went ashore.
Read:Darwin in a lab: Coral evolution tweaked for global warming
Wahlin’s team will use two robot ships — her own large one called Ran which she used in 2019 and the more agile Boaty McBoatface, the crowdsource named drone that could go further under the area of Thwaites that protrudes over the ocean — to get under Thwaites.
The ship-bound scientists will be measuring water temperature, the sea floor and ice thickness. They'll look at cracks in the ice, how the ice is structured and tag seals on islands off the glacier.
Thwaites “looks different from other ice shelves,” Wahlin said. “It almost looks like a jumble of icebergs that have been pressed together. So it’s increasingly clear that this is not a solid piece of ice like the other ice shelves are, nice smooth solid ice. This was much more jagged and scarred.”
Footprints show some two-legged dinosaurs were agile
Not all two-legged dinosaurs were like the lumbering Tyrannosaurus rex.
An analysis of dinosaur tracks from 120 million years ago unearthed in Spain adds to growing evidence that these meat-eating prehistoric beasts belonging to the same group as T.rex could be highly agile.
The findings, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, reveal one of the fastest known sets of fossilized dinosaur footprints.
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These tracks join the ranks of other speedy sets found in Utah and Texas, one of which shows dinosaurs running at speeds over 30 mph. The Spanish footprints showed speeds of nearly 28 mph.
To calculate the running speed, scientists measured the length of the footprint and took into account the dinosaur's hip height and stride length — the distance between two consecutive footprints of the same foot.
All of the fastest known sets of prints come from a family of dinosaurs called theropods. These carnivorous dinosaurs stood on two legs and could not fly, like the famed velociraptor. The animals that created the most recent impressions were probably 5 to 6 1/2 feet tall and 13 to 16 feet long from mouth to tail, the researchers estimated.
Scientists think there may be other faster dinosaurs, but the tracks of theropods have been easier to track down.
“Behavior is something very difficult to study in dinosaurs,” said lead author Pablo Navarro-Lorbés of the University of La Rioja. “These kind of findings are very important, I think, for improving that kind of knowledge.”
Also read: Dinosaur footprints found in ancient Chinese imperial resort
Scientists typically predict dinosaur behavior through computer modeling of the creatures' movement. Physical examination of fossilized footprints confirm the results.
These are “clearly active, agile animals," said Smithsonian paleontologist Hans Sues, who had no role in the study.
Darwin in a lab: Coral evolution tweaked for global warming
On a moonless summer night in Hawaii, krill, fish and crabs swirl through a beam of light as two researchers peer into the water above a vibrant reef.
Minutes later, like clockwork, they see eggs and sperm from spawning coral drifting past their boat. They scoop up the fishy-smelling blobs and put them in test tubes.
In this Darwinian experiment, the scientists are trying to speed up coral’s evolutionary clock to breed “super corals” that can better withstand the impacts of global warming.
For the past five years, the researchers have been conducting experiments to prove their theories would work. Now, they're getting ready to plant laboratory-raised corals in the ocean to see how they survive in Nature.
“Assisted evolution started out as this kind of crazy idea that you could actually help something change and allow that to survive better because it is changing,” said Kira Hughes, a University of Hawaii researcher and the project's manager.
SPEEDING UP NATURE
Researchers tested three methods of making corals more resilient:
— Selective breeding that carries on desirable traits from parents.
— Acclimation that conditions corals to tolerate heat by exposing them to increasing temperatures.
— And modifying the algae that give corals essential nutrients.
Hughes said the methods all have proven successful in the lab.
And while some other scientists worried this is meddling with Nature, Hughes said the rapidly warming planet leaves no other options. “We have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future,” she said.
When ocean temperatures rise, coral releases its symbiotic algae that supply nutrients and impart its vibrant colors. The coral turns white — a process called bleaching — and can quickly become sick and die.
Read:In California, some buy machines that make water out of air
For more than a decade, scientists have been observing corals that have survived bleaching, even when others have died on the same reef.
So, researchers are focusing on those hardy survivors, hoping to enhance their heat tolerance. And they found selective breeding held the most promise for Hawaii's reefs.
“Corals are threatened worldwide by a lot of stressors, but increasing temperatures are probably the most severe,” said Crawford Drury, chief scientist at Hawaii’s Coral Resilience Lab. “And so that’s what our focus is on, working with parents that are really thermally tolerant.”
A NOVEL IDEA
In 2015, Ruth Gates, who launched the resilience lab, and Madeleine van Oppen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science published a paper on assisted evolution during one of the world's worst bleaching events.
The scientists proposed bringing corals into a lab to help them evolve into more heat-tolerant animals. And the idea attracted Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who funded the first phase of research and whose foundation still supports the program.
“We’ve given (coral) experiences that we think are going to raise their ability to survive,” Gates told The Associated Press in a 2015 interview.
Gates, who died of brain cancer in 2018, also said she wanted people to know how “intimately reef health is intertwined with human health.”
Coral reefs, often called the rainforests of the sea, provide food for humans and marine animals, shoreline protection for coastal communities, jobs for tourist economies and even medicine to treat illnesses such as cancer, arthritis and Alzheimers disease.
A recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other research organizations concluded bleaching events are the biggest threat to the world's coral reefs. Scientists found that between 2009 and 2018, the world lost about 14% of its coral.
Assisted evolution was not widely accepted when first proposed.
Van Oppen said there were concerns about losing genetic diversity and critics who said the scientists were “playing gods” by tampering with the reef.
“Well, you know, (humans) have already intervened with the reef for very long periods of time,” van Oppen said. “All we’re trying to do is to repair the damage.”
Rather than editing genes or creating anything unnatural, researchers are just nudging what could already happen in the ocean, she said. “We are really focusing first on as local a scale as possible to try and maintain and enhance what is already there."
Read:Oldest human footprints in North America found in New Mexico
MILLIONS OF YEARS IN THE MAKING
Still, there are lingering questions.
“We have discovered lots of reasons why corals don’t bleach," said Steve Palumbi, a marine biologist and professor at Stanford University. “Just because you find a coral that isn’t bleaching in the field or in the lab doesn’t mean it’s permanently heat tolerant.”
Corals have been on Earth for about 250 million years and their genetic code is not fully understood.
“This is not the first time any coral on the entire planet has ever been exposed to heat,” Palumbi said. “So the fact that all corals are not heat resistant tells you ... that there’s some disadvantage to it. And if there weren’t a disadvantage, they’d all be heat resistant.”
But Palumbi thinks the assisted evolution work has a valuable place in coral management plans because “reefs all over the world are in desperate, desperate, desperate trouble.”
The project has gained broad support and spurred research around the world. Scientists in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany and elsewhere are doing their own coral resilience work. The U.S. government also backs the effort.
Assisted evolution "is really impressive and very consistent with a study that we conducted with the National Academies of Sciences,” said Jennifer Koss, the director of NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program.
“We asked them to gather all the most recent cutting-edge science that was really centered on innovative interventions in coral reef management,” Koss said. “And certainly, this assisted gene flow fits right in.”
MAJOR HURDLES
There are still serious challenges.
Scalability is one. Getting lab-bred corals out into the ocean and having them survive will be hard, especially since reintroduction has to happen on a local level to avoid bringing detrimental biological material from one region to another.
James Guest, a coral ecologist in the United Kingdom, leads a project to show selectively bred corals not only survive longer in warmer water, but can also be successfully reintroduced on a large scale.
“It’s great if we can do all this stuff in the lab, but we have to show that we can get very large numbers of them out onto the reef in a cost-effective way,” Guest said.
Scientists are testing delivery methods, such as using ships to pump young corals into the ocean and deploying small underwater robots to plant coral.
No one is proposing assisted evolution alone will save the world’s reefs. The idea is part of a suite of measures – with proposals ranging from creating shades for coral to pumping cooler deep-ocean water onto reefs that get too warm.
The advantage of planting stronger corals is that after a generation or two, they should spread their traits naturally, without much human intervention.
Over the next several years, the Hawaii scientists will place selectively bred coral back into Kaneohe Bay and observe their behavior. Van Oppen and her colleagues have already put some corals with modified symbiotic algae back on the Great Barrier Reef.
With the world's oceans continuing to warm, scientists say they are up against the clock to save reefs.
“All the work we are going to do here,” said Hawaii's Drury, “is not going to make a difference if we don’t wind up addressing climate change on a global, systematic scale.
“So really, what we’re trying to do is buy time.”
Jute Sanitary Napkins: Bangladeshi scientist Farhana Sultana got awarded for eco-friendly innovation
Farhana Sultana, an assistant scientist at icddr,b, has received the grand award for her suggested innovation, which involves building a machine to create jute cellulose-based disposable sanitary pads for long-term menstrual health. For women and girls in Bangladesh, it offers an alternate solution for menstrual health and hygiene. Ms Sultana designed and piloted the jute cellulose-based disposable pad in partnership with Dr Mubarak Ahmed Khan, scientific advisor at Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation, according to an icddr,b announcement on its official Facebook page.
Jute-Based Sanitary Pad made in Bangladesh
Farhana Sultana has been the primary researcher for a number of menstruation management programs. The Islamic Development Bank gave her a $100,000 (Tk 8.4 million) grant to create jute napkins, minimizing the usage of plastics. For a long time, Farhana Sultana and her colleagues have been focusing on menstruation management. The researches have led them to finally propose the idea of jute cellulose-based sanitary pads for women and girls.
Read 'Golden fibre' no longer holds glitter for Khulna jute farmers
Tishan Mahfuz, a team intern researcher, said they put biometric devices in four schools in Dhaka and Manikganj to find out why female students were missing classes. According to Tishan, the percentage of absences decreased when plans were made to provide sanitary napkins in the school.
Who is Farhana Sultana?
Bangladeshi scientist Farhana Sultana is currently involved with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene research group at International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). Her mission is to reduce the burden of communicable illnesses in Bangladesh by designing, testing, and implementing low-cost and long-term interventions in the water, sanitation, and hygiene sectors among low-income and high-risk individuals.
Read BUILD explores producing paper pulp from whole jute plant