MINNEAPOLIS — Pesticides that kill insects can also have short-term effects on seed-eating birds. Ingesting even small amounts of imidacloprid, a common neonicotinoid pesticide, can disorient migratory white-crowned sparrows, researchers report.
Neonicotinoid pesticides were designed to be safer than traditional pesticides: toxic to insects, but comparatively harmless to other animals. But the new findings add to evidence suggesting that the widely used pesticides, which are chemically similar to nicotine, might be sending ecological ripples beyond the intended targets. In lab studies, researchers captured wild white-crowned sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys, that were migrating north and fed them small doses of imidacloprid for three days — the amount that birds would get from eating a few pesticide-coated wheat seeds. The birds that ate the pesticides lost weight, study coauthor Margaret Eng reported November 15 at the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry North America.
And when placed in a large, inverted funnel used to study birds’ migratory orientations, the neonic-fed birds tried to fly in directions other than north. Birds that consumed sunflower oil instead showed no ill effects.
For the birds that ate pesticides, the damage was temporary — after two weeks, the birds regained normal function and body weight, Eng, a toxicologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and her colleagues also reported November 9 in Scientific Reports.
The fact that the effects reverse after a period of time is “good news,” says Thomas Bean, a toxicologist at the University of Maryland in College Park who wasn’t part of the study. The short-term malaise might incentivize birds to avoid that food in the future. Bean has found that Japanese quail, Coturnix japonica, also show similar temporary behavioral effects in response to neonicotinoids. Preliminary results from field studies also appear to confirm the published lab findings. Eng’s team outfitted white-crowned sparrows in the wild with tiny tracking tags. The scientists gave the birds small amounts of pesticides, held the birds for six hours, and then released them.
When released, the birds still had traces of the chemicals in their blood plasma, the researchers reported at the November meeting. On average, there wasn’t a difference between groups in how long the birds hung around before resuming migration, but all of the birds that waited an abnormally long time had eaten neonics. Those animals’ flight paths also appeared to be slightly skewed from the route favored by the control birds.
Those analyses are preliminary, cautions Eng, and a closer look at the data could change the story.
Wikipedia: The settler of dinnertime disputes and the savior of those who cheat on trivia night. Quick, what country has the Nile’s headwaters? What year did Gershwin write “Rhapsody in Blue”? Wikipedia has the answer to all your burning trivia questions — including ones about science.
With hundreds of thousands of scientific entries, Wikipedia offers a quick reference for the molecular formula of Zoloft, who the inventor of the 3-D printer is and the fact that the theory of plate tectonics is only about 100 years old. The website is a gold mine for science fans, science bloggers and scientists alike. But even though scientists use Wikipedia, they don’t tend to admit it. The site rarely ends up in a paper’s citations as the source of, say, the history of the gut-brain axis or the chemical formula for polyvinyl chloride. But scientists are browsing Wikipedia just like everyone else. A recent analysis found that Wikipedia stays up-to-date on the latest research — and vocabulary from those Wikipedia articles finds its way into scientific papers. The results don’t just reveal the Wiki-habits of the ivory tower. They also show that the free, widely available information source is playing a role in research progress, especially in poorer countries.
Teachers in middle school, high school and college drill it in to their students: Wikipedia is not a citable source. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and articles can change from day to day — sometimes by as little as a comma, other times being completely rewritten overnight. “[Wikipedia] has a reputation for being untrustworthy,” says Thomas Shafee, a biochemist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
But those same teachers — even the college professors — who warn students away from Wikipedia are using the site themselves. “Academics use Wikipedia all the time because we’re human. It’s something everyone is doing,” says Doug Hanley, a macroeconomist at the University of Pittsburgh.
And the site’s unreliable reputation may be unwarranted. Wikipedia is not any less consistent than Encyclopedia Britannica, a 2005 Nature study showed (a conclusion that the encyclopedia itself vehemently objected to). Citing it as a source, however, is still a bridge too far. “It’s not respected like academic resources,” Shafee notes. Academic science may not respect Wikipedia, but Wikipedia certainly loves science. Of the roughly 5.5 million articles, half a million to a million of them touch on scientific topics. And constant additions from hundreds of thousands of editors mean that entries can be very up to date on the latest scientific literature.
How recently published findings affect Wikipedia is easy to track. They’re cited on Wikipedia, after all. But does the relationship go the other way? Do scientific posts on Wikipedia worm their way into the academic literature, even though they are never cited? Hanley and his colleague Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, decided to approach the question on two fronts.
First, they determined the 1.1 million most common scientific words in published articles from the scientific publishing giant Elsevier. Then, Hanley and Thompson examined how often those same words were added to or deleted from Wikipedia over time, and cited in the research literature. The researchers focused on two fields, chemistry and econometrics — a new area that develops statistical tests for economics.
There was a clear connection between the language in scientific papers and the language on Wikipedia. “Some new topic comes up and it gets exciting, it will generate a new Wikipedia page,” Thompson notes. The language on that new page was then connected to later scientific work. After a new entry was published, Hanley and Thompson showed, later scientific papers contained more language similar to the Wikipedia article than to papers in the field published before the new Wikipedia entry. There was a definite association between the language in the Wikipedia article and future scientific papers.
But was Wikipedia itself the source of that language? This part of the study can’t answer that. It only observes words increasing together in two different spaces. It can’t prove that scientists were reading Wikipedia and using it in their work.
So the researchers created new Wikipedia articles from scratch to find out if the language in them affected the scientific literature in return. Hanley and Thompson had graduate students in chemistry and in econometrics write up new Wikipedia articles on topics that weren’t yet on the site. The students wrote 43 chemistry articles and 45 econometrics articles. Then, half of the articles in each set got published to Wikipedia in January 2015, and the other half were held back as controls. The researchers gave the articles three months to percolate through the internet. Then they examined the next six months’ worth of published scientific papers in those fields for specific language used in the published Wikipedia entries, and compared it to the language in the entries that never got published.
In chemistry, at least, the new topics proved popular. Both the published and control Wikipedia page entries had been selected from graduate level topics in chemistry that weren’t yet covered on Wikipedia. They included entries such as the synthesis of hydrastine (the precursor to a drug that stops bleeding). People were interested enough to view the new articles on average 4,400 times per month.
The articles’ words trickled into to the scientific literature. In the six months after publishing, the entries influenced about 1 in 300 words in the newly published papers in that chemical discipline. And scientific papers on a topic covered in Wikipedia became slightly more like the Wikipedia article over time. For example, if chemists wrote about the synthesis of hydrastine — one of the new Wikipedia articles — published scientific papers more often used phrases like “Passarini reaction,” a term used in the Wikipedia entry. But if an article never went on to Wikipedia, the scientific papers published on the topic didn’t become any more similar to the never-published article (which could have happened if the topics were merely getting more popular). Hanley and Thompson published a preprint of their work to the Social Science Research Network on September 26.
Unfortunately, there was no number of Wikipedia articles that could make econometrics happen. “We wanted something on the edge of a discipline,” Thompson says. But it was a little too edgy. The new Wikipedia entries in that field got one-thirtieth of the views that chemistry articles did. Thompson and Hanley couldn’t get enough data from the articles to make any conclusions at all. Better luck next time, econometrics.
The relationship between Wikipedia entries and the scientific literature wasn’t the same in all regions. When Hanley and Thompson broke the published scientific papers down by the gross domestic product of their countries of origin, they found that Wikipedia articles had a stronger effect on the vocabulary in scientific papers published by scientists in countries with weaker economies. “If you think about it, if you’re a relatively rich country, you have access at your institution to a whole list of journals and the underlying scientific literature,” Hanley notes. Institutions in poorer countries, however, may not be able to afford expensive journal subscriptions, so scientists in those countries may rely more heavily on publicly available sources like Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia study is “excellent research design and very solid analysis,” says Heather Ford, who studies digital politics at the University of Leeds in England. “As far as I know, this is the first paper that attributes a strong link between what is on Wikipedia and the development of science.” But, she says, this is only within chemistry. The influence may be different in different fields.
“It’s addressing a question long in people’s minds but difficult to pin down and prove,” says Shafee. It’s a link, but tracking language, he explains, isn’t the same as finding out how ideas and concepts were moving from Wikipedia into the ivory tower. “It’s a real cliché to say more research is needed, but I think in this case it’s probably true.”
Hanley and Thompson would be the first to agree. “I think about this as a first step,” Hanley says. “It’s showing that Wikipedia is not just a passive resource, it also has an effect on the frontiers of knowledge.”
It’s a good reason for scientists get in and edit entries within their expertise, Thompson notes. “This is a big resource for science and I think we need to recognize that,” Thompson says. “There’s value in making sure the science on Wikipedia is as good and complete as possible.” Good scientific entries might not just settle arguments. They might also help science advance. After all, scientists are watching, even if they won’t admit it.
A new type of battery can stand being left out in the cold.
This rechargeable battery churns out charge even at –70° Celsius, a temperature where the typical lithium-ion batteries that power many of today’s cell phones, electric cars and other devices don’t work. Batteries that withstand such frigid conditions could help build electronics that function in some of the coldest places on Earth or on space rovers that cruise around other planets.
Inside lithium-ion batteries, ions flow between positive and negative electrodes, where the ions are embedded and then released to travel back through a substance called an electrolyte to the other end. As the temperature drops, the ions move sluggishly through the electrolyte. The cold also makes it harder for ions to shed the electrolyte material that gloms onto them as they cross the battery. Ions must slough off the matter to fit into the electrode material, explains study coauthor Xiaoli Dong, a battery researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai. Such cold conditions make conventional lithium-ion batteries less effective. At –40° C, these batteries deliver about 12 percent of the charge they do at room temperature; at –70° C, they don’t work at all.
The new battery, described online February 28 in Joule, contains a special kind of electrolyte that allows ions to flow easily between electrodes even in the bitter cold. The researchers also fitted their battery with electrodes made of organic compounds, rather than the typical transition-metal-rich materials. Ions can lodge themselves in this organic material without having to strip off the electrolyte material stuck to them. So these organic electrodes catch and release ions more easily than electrodes in normal batteries, even at low temps, Dong says.
Because the ions flow better and connect more readily with the electrodes at lower temperatures, the battery retains about 70 percent of its room-temperature charging capacity even at –70° C. Still, battery cells in the new design pack less energy per gram than standard lithium-ion batteries, says Shirley Meng, a materials scientist at the University of California, San Diego, not involved in the work. She would like to see whether a more energy-dense version of the battery can be built.
LOS ANGELES — Insights into a black hole paradox may come from a down-to-Earth source.
Superconductors, materials through which electrons can move freely without resistance, may share some of the physics of black holes, physicist Sreenath Kizhakkumpurath Manikandan of the University of Rochester in New York reported March 7 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. The analogy between the two objects could help scientists understand what happens to information that gets swallowed up in a black hole’s abyss. When a black hole gobbles up particles, information about the particles’ properties is seemingly trapped inside. According to quantum mechanics, such information cannot be destroyed. Physicist Stephen Hawking determined in 1974 that black holes slowly evaporate over time, emitting what’s known as Hawking radiation before eventually disappearing. That fact implies a conundrum known as the black hole information paradox (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16): When the black hole evaporates, where does the information go?
One possible solution, proposed in 2007 by physicists Patrick Hayden of Stanford University and John Preskill of Caltech, is that the black hole could act like a mirror, with information about infalling particles being reflected outward, imprinted in the Hawking radiation. Now, Manikandan and physicist Andrew Jordan, also of the University of Rochester, report that a process that occurs at the interface between a metal and a superconductor is analogous to the proposed black hole mirror.
The effect, known as Andreev reflection, occurs when electrons traveling through a metal meet a superconductor. The incoming electron carries a quantum property known as spin, similar to the spinning of a top. The direction of that spin is a kind of quantum information. When the incoming electron meets the superconductor, it pairs up with another electron in the material to form a duo known as a Cooper pair. Those pairings allow electrons to glide easily through the material, facilitating its superconductivity. As the original electron picks up its partner, it also leaves behind a sort of electron alter ego reflecting its information back into the metal. That reflected entity is referred to as a “hole,” a disturbance in a material that occurs when an electron is missing. That hole moves through the metal as if it were a particle, carrying the information contained in the original particle’s spin.
Likewise, if black holes act like information mirrors, as Hayden and Preskill suggested, a particle falling into a black hole would be followed by an antiparticle coming out — a partner with the opposite electric charge — which would carry the information contained in the spin of the original particle. Manikandan and Jordan showed that the two processes were mathematically equivalent. It’s still not clear whether the black hole mirror is the correct solution to the paradox, but the analogy suggests experiments with superconductors could clarify what happens to the information, Jordan says. “That’s something you can’t ever do with black holes: You can’t do those detailed experiments because they’re off in the middle of some galaxy somewhere.”
The theory is “intriguing,” says physicist Justin Dressel of Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Such comparisons are useful in allowing scientists to take insights from one area and apply them elsewhere. But additional work is necessary to determine how strong an analogy this is, Dressel says. “You may find with further inspection the details are different.”
The first known pedestrian fatality involving a fully autonomous self-driving car will most likely raise questions about the vehicles’ safety.
But “until we know what happened, we can’t really know what this incident means” for the future of self-driving vehicles, says Philip Koopman, a robotics safety expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Only when we know more about the crash, including details on the actions of the pedestrian as well as data logs from the car, can we make judgments, he says. The incident took place late Sunday night when a self-driving car operated by Uber hit and, ultimately, killed a woman crossing the street in Tempe, Ariz. Early reports indicate that a human safety driver was at the wheel, and the car was in autonomous mode. In response, Uber has suspended testing of its fleet of self-driving cars in Tempe and other cities across the nation. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating, the New York Times reports.
The NTSB has previously conducted an investigation into the 2016 death of a man who was driving a partly autonomous Tesla, concluding that the driver ignored multiple safety warnings.
Self-driving cars already face high levels of mistrust from other motorists and potential passengers. In a AAA survey in 2017, 85 percent of baby boomers and 73 percent of millennials reported being afraid to ride in self-driving cars (SN Online: 11/21/17).
It is widely accepted by experts such as Koopman that autonomous cars will eventually be safer drivers than the average person, because the vehicles don’t get distracted, among other things. But proving that safety may be time-consuming. A 2016 study by Nidhi Kalra, an information scientist at the RAND Corporation in San Francisco, found that self-driving cars might have to drive on roads for decades to statistically prove their superior safety. When — or if — self-driving cars are proven safer than human drivers, the vehicles will still have to contend with other questions, such as whether to take steps to protect passengers or pedestrians in a collision (SN: 12/24/16, p. 34).
Making day-to-day activities more vigorous for a few minutes — such as briefly stepping up the pace of a walk — could offer people who don’t exercise some of the health benefits that exercisers enjoy.
That’s according to a new study of roughly 25,000 adults who reported no exercise in their free time. Those who incorporated three one- to two-minute bursts of intense activity per day saw a nearly a 40 percent drop in the risk of death from any cause compared with those whose days didn’t include such activity. The risk of death from cancer also fell by nearly 40 percent, and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease dropped almost 50 percent, researchers report online December 8 in Nature Medicine.
In a comparison with around 62,000 people who exercised regularly, including runners, gym-goers and recreational cyclists, the mortality risk reduction was similar.
“This study adds to other literature showing that even short amounts of activity are beneficial,” says Lisa Cadmus-Bertram, a physical activity epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in the research. “So many people are daunted by feeling that they don’t have the time, money, motivation, transportation, etc. to go to a gym regularly or work out for long periods of time,” she says. “The message we can take is that it is absolutely worth doing what you can.”
Emmanuel Stamatakis, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, and his colleagues analyzed a subset of records from the UK Biobank, a biomedical database containing health information on half a million people in the United Kingdom. The study’s non-exercising participants — more than half of whom were women and were 62 years old on average — had worn movement-tracking devices for a week.
Over an average seven years of follow-up, for those whose days included three to four bursts of activity, the mortality rate was 4.2 deaths from any cause per 1,000 people for one year. For those with no activity bursts, it was 10.4 deaths per 1,000 people for one year.
The researchers were looking for bursts of vigorous activity that met a definition determined in a laboratory study, including reaching at least 77 percent of maximum heart rate and at least 64 percent of maximum oxygen consumption. In real life, the signs that someone has reached the needed intensity level are “an increase in heart rate and feeling out of breath” in the first 15 to 30 seconds of an activity, Stamatakis says.
Regular daily activities offer several opportunities for these vigorous bursts, he says. “The simplest one is maximizing walking pace for a minute or two during any regular walk.” Other options, he says, include carrying grocery bags to the car or taking the stairs. “The largest population health gains will be realized by finding ways to get the least physically active people to move a little more.”
Look closely at a snowflake, and you’ll observe a one-of-a-kind gossamer lattice, its growth influenced by ambient conditions like temperature and humidity. Turns out, this sort of intricate self-assemblage can also occur in metals, researchers report in the Dec. 9 Science.
In pools of molten gallium, physicist Nicola Gaston and colleagues grew zinc nanostructures with symmetrical, hexagonal crystal frameworks. Such metal snowflakes could be useful for catalyzing chemical reactions and constructing electronics, says Gaston, of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
“Self-assembly is the way nature makes nanostructures,” she says. “We’re trying to learn to do the same things.” Figuring out how to craft tiny, complex metal shapes in fewer steps and with less energy could be a boon for manufacturers.
The researchers chose gallium as a growth medium, due to its relatively low melting point, ability to dissolve many other metals and the tendency for its atoms to loosely organize while in a liquid state.
After mixing zinc into the gallium, the team subjected the alloy to elevated temperatures and different pressures, and then let the mixture cool to room temperature. The loose ordering of gallium atoms appeared to coax the crystallizing zinc to bloom into symmetrical, hexagonal structures resembling natural snowflakes and other shapes, the team found. It’s somewhat like how a fruit tray imparts order on the fruits stacked within, Gaston says.
The future may be bright for research into applications of gallium and other low-temperature liquid metals. “Not to take that snowflake metaphor too far, but [this work] really hints at new branches for scientific discovery,” Gaston says.
Meet the metric system’s newest prefixes: ronna-, quetta-, ronto- and quecto-.
Adopted November 18 at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France, ronna- and quetta- describe exceedingly large numbers while ronto- and quecto- describe the exceedingly small. This is the first time that the International System of Units, or SI, has expanded since 1991, when the prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto and yocto- were added (SN: 1/16/93).
Numerically, ronna- is 1027 (that’s a digit followed by 27 zeroes) and quetta- is 1030 (30 zeroes). Their tiny counterparts ronto- and quecto- also refer to 27 and 30 zeroes, but those come after a decimal point. Until now, yotta- and yocto- (24 zeros) capped off the metric system’s range.
Science News spoke with Richard Brown, head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, about what the latest SI expansion means for science. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
SN: Why do we need the new prefixes?
Brown: The quantity of data in the world is increasing exponentially. And we expect that to continue to increase and probably accelerate because of quantum computing, digitalization and things like that. At the same time, this quantity of data is starting to get close to the top range of the prefixes we currently use. People start to ask what comes next?
SN: Where do the prefix names come from?
Brown: About five years ago, I heard a BBC podcast about these new names for quantities of data. And the two that they mentioned were brontobyte and hellabyte. Brontobyte, I think comes from brontosaurus being a big dinosaur and hellabyte comes from “‘hell of a big number.”
The problem with those from a metrology point of view, or measurement point of view, is they start with letters B and H, which already are in use for other units and prefixes. So we can’t have those as names. [It was clear] that we had to do something official because people were starting to need these prefixes. R and Q are not used for anything else, really, in terms of units or SI prefixes. [The prefix names themselves are] very, very loosely based on the Greek and Latin names for nine and 10. SN: How will the prefixes be used?
Brown: The whole point of the International System of Units is it’s an accepted global system, which if you use, you will be understood.
When you use a prefix with a unit, it means that the number associated with the unit changes. And people like small numbers that they can understand. So you can express the mass of the Earth in terms of ronnagrams; it’s six ronnagrams. And equally the mass of Jupiter is two quettagrams. Some good examples of [small numbers] are that the mass of an electron is about one rontogram, and the mass of one bit of data as stored on a mobile phone is around one quectogram.
I think the use of a suitable prefix makes things more understandable. And I think we shouldn’t forget that even if there’s not always a direct scientific usage immediately, they will gain traction over time.
Tyrannosaurus rex isn’t just a king to paleontologists — the dinosaur increasingly reigns over the world of art auctions. A nearly complete skeleton known as Stan the T. rex smashed records in October 2020 when a bidding war drove its price to $31.8 million, the highest ever paid for any fossil. Before that, Sue the T. rex held the top spot; it went for $8.3 million in 1997.
That kind of publicity — and cachet — means that T. rex’s value is sky-high, and the dinosaur continues to have its teeth firmly sunk into the auction world in 2022. In December, Maximus, a T. rex skull, will be the centerpiece of a Sotheby’s auction in New York City. It’s expected to sell for about $15 million.
Another T. rex fossil named Shen was anticipated to sell for between $15 million and $25 million at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong in late November. However, the auction house pulled it over concerns about the number of replica bones used in the fossil. “These are astronomical sums of money, really surprising sums of money,” says Donna Yates, a criminologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands who studies high-value collectibles.
Stan’s final price “was completely unexpected,” Yates says. The fossil was originally appraised at about $6 million — still a very large sum, though nothing like the final tally, which was the result of a three-way bidding war.
But the staggering amounts of money T. rex fossils now fetch at auction can mean a big loss for science. At those prices, the public institutions that might try to claim these glimpses into the deep past are unable to compete with deep-pocketed private buyers, researchers say.
One reason for the sky-high prices may be that T. rex fossils are increasingly being treated more like rare works of art than bits of scientific evidence, Yates says. The bones might once have been bought and sold at dusty “cowboy fossil” dealerships. But nowadays these fossils are on display in shiny gallery spaces and are being appraised and marketed as rare objets d’art. That’s appealing to collectors, she adds: “If you’re a high-value buyer, you’re a person who wants the finest things.”
But fossils’ true value is the information they hold, says Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis. “They are our only means of understanding the biology and evolution of extinct animals.”
Keeping fossils of T. rex and other dinosaurs and animals in public repositories, such as museums, ensures that scientists have consistent access to study the objects, including being able to replicate or reevaluate previous findings. But a fossil sold into private or commercial hands is subject to the whim of its owner — which means anything could happen to it at any time, Carr says. “It doesn’t matter if [a T. rex fossil] is bought by some oligarch in Russia who says scientists can come and study it,” he says. “You might as well take a sledgehammer to it and destroy it.”
A desire for one’s own T. rex There are only about 120 known specimens of T. rex in the world. At least half of them are owned privately and aren’t available to the public. That loss is “wreaking havoc on our dataset. If we don’t have a good sample size, we can’t claim to know anything about [T. rex],” Carr says.
For example, to be able to tell all the ways that T. rex males differed from females, researchers need between 70 and 100 good specimens for statistically significant analyses, an amount scientists don’t currently have.
Similarly, scientists know little about how T. rex grew, and studying fossils of youngsters could help (SN: 1/6/20). But only a handful of juvenile T. rex specimens are publicly available to researchers. That number would double if private specimens were included.
Museums and academic institutions typically don’t have the kind of money it takes to compete with private bidders in auctions or any such competitive sales. That’s why, in the month before Stan went up for auction in 2020, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, or SVP, wrote a letter to Christie’s asking the auction house to consider restricting bidding to public institutions. The hope was that this would give scientists a fighting chance to obtain the specimens.
But the request was ignored — and unfortunately may have only increased publicity for the sale, says Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist at California State University in San Bernardino and SVP’s current vice president. That’s why SVP didn’t issue a public statement this time ahead of the auctions for Shen and Maximus, Sumida says, though the organization continues to strongly condemn fossil sales — whether of large, dramatic specimens or less well-known creatures. “All fossils are data. Our position is that selling fossils is not scientific and it damages science.”
Sumida is particularly appalled at statements made by auction houses that suggest the skeletons “have already been studied,” an attempt to reassure researchers that the data contained in that fossil won’t be lost, regardless of who purchases it. That’s deeply misleading, he says, because of the need for reproducibility, as well as the always-improving development of new analysis techniques. “When they make public statements like that, they are undermining not only paleontology, but the scientific process as well.”
And the high prices earned by Stan and Sue are helping to drive the market skyward, not only for other T. rex fossils but also for less famous species. “It creates this ripple effect that is incredibly damaging to science in general,” Sumida says. Sotheby’s, for example, auctioned off a Gorgosaurus, a T. rex relative, in July for $6.1 million. In May, a Deinonychus antirrhopus — the inspiration for Jurassic Park’s velociraptor — was sold by Christie’s for $12.4 million.
Protecting T. rex from collectors Compounding the problem is the fact that the United States has no protections in place for fossils unearthed from the backyards or dusty fields of private landowners. The U.S. is home to just about every T. rex skeleton ever found. Stan, Sue and Maximus hail from the Black Hills of South Dakota. Shen was found in Montana.
As of 2009, U.S. law prohibits collecting scientifically valuable fossils, particularly fossils of vertebrate species like T. rex, from public lands without permits. But fossils found on private lands are still considered the landowner’s personal property. And landowners can grant digging access to whomever they wish. Before the discovery of Sue the T. rex (SN: 9/6/14), private owners often gave scientific institutions free access to hunt for fossils on their land, says Bridget Roddy, currently a researcher at the legal news company Bloomberg Law in Washington, D.C. But in the wake of Sue’s sale in 1997, researchers began to have to compete for digging access with commercial fossil hunters.
These hunters can afford to pay landowners large sums for the right to dig, or even a share of the profits from fossil sales. And many of these commercial dealers sell their finds at auction houses, where the fossils can earn far more than most museums are able to pay.
Lack of federal protections for paleontological resources found on private land — combined with the large available supply of fossils — is a situation unique to the United States, Roddy says. Fossil-rich countries such as China, Canada, Italy and France consider any such finds to be under government protection, part of a national legacy.
In the United States, seizing such materials from private landowners — under an eminent domain argument — would require the government to pay “just compensation” to the landowners. But using eminent domain to generally protect such fossils wouldn’t be financially sustainable for the government, Roddy says, not least because most fossils dug up aren’t of great scientific value anyway.
There may be other, more grassroots ways to at least better regulate fossil sales, she says. While still a law student at DePaul University in Chicago, Roddy outlined some of those ideas in an article published in Texas A&M Journal of Property Law in May.
One option, she suggests, is for states to create a selective sales tax attached to fossil purchases, specifically for buyers who intend to keep their purchases in private collections that are not readily available to the public. It’s “similar to if you want to buy a pack of cigarettes, which is meant to offset the harm that buying cigarettes does to society in general,” Roddy says. That strategy could be particularly effective in states with large auction houses, like New York.
Another possibility is to model any new, expanded fossil preservation laws on existing U.S. antiquities laws, intended to preserve cultural heritage. After all, Roddy says, fossils aren’t just bones, but they’re also part of the human story. “Fossils have influenced our folklore; they’re a unifier of humanity and culture rather than a separate thing.”
Though fossils from private lands aren’t protected, many states do impose restrictions on searches for archaeological and cultural artifacts, by requiring those looking for antiquities to restore excavated land or by fining the excavation of certain antiquities without state permission. Expanding those restrictions to fossil hunting, perhaps by requiring state approval through permits, could also give states the opportunity to purchase any significant finds before they’re lost to private buyers.
Preserving fossils for science and the public Such protections could be a huge boon to paleontologists, who may not even know what’s being lost. “The problem is, we’ll never know” all the fossils that are being sold, Sumida says. “They’re shutting scientists out of the conversation.”
And when it comes to dinosaurs, “so many of the species we know about are represented by a single fossil,” says Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. “If that fossil was never found, or disappeared into the vault of a collector, then we wouldn’t know about that dinosaur.”
Or, he says, sometimes a particularly complete or beautifully preserved dinosaur skeleton is found, and without it, “we wouldn’t be able to study what that dinosaur looked like, how it moved, what it ate, how it sensed its world, how it grew.”
The point isn’t to put restrictions on collecting fossils so much as making sure they remain in public view, Brusatte adds. “There’s nothing as magical as finding your own fossils, being the first person ever to see something that lived millions of years ago.” But, he says, unique and scientifically invaluable fossils such as dinosaur skeletons should be placed in museums “where they can be conserved and studied and inspire the public, rather than in the basements or yachts of the oligarch class.”
After its record-breaking sale, Stan vanished for a year and a half, its new owners a mystery. Then in March 2022, news surfaced that the fossil had been bought by the United Arab Emirates, which stated it intends to place Stan in a new natural history museum.
Sue, too, is on public view. The fossil is housed at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, thanks to the pooled financial resources of the Walt Disney Corporation, the McDonald Corporation, the California State University System and others. That’s the kind of money it took to get the highest bid on a T. rex 25 years ago.
And those prices only seem to be going up. Researchers got lucky with Sue, and possibly Stan.
As for Shen, the fossil’s fate remains in limbo: It was pulled from auction not due to outcry from paleontologists, but over concerns about intellectual property rights. The fossil, at 54 percent complete, may have been supplemented with a polyurethane cast of bones from Stan, according to representatives of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in Hill City, S.D. That organization, which discovered Stan, retains a copyright over the skeleton.
In response to those concerns, Christie’s pulled the lot, and now says that it intends to loan the fossil to a museum. But this move doesn’t reassure paleontologists. “A lot of people are pleased that the sale didn’t go through,” Sumida says. “But it sort of just kicks the can down the road.… It doesn’t mean they’re not going to try and sell it in another form, somewhere down the road.”
Ultimately, scientists simply can’t count on every important fossil finding its way to the public, Carr says. “Those fossils belong in a museum; it’s right out of Indiana Jones,” he says. “It’s not like they’re made in a factory somewhere. Fossils are nonrenewable resources. Once Shen is gone, it’s gone.”
The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years.
An animation from the simulation shows our universe changing from a smooth, cold gas cloud to the lumpy scattering of galaxies and stars that we see today. It’s the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the universe’s evolution yet produced, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’s past is the result of CoDaIII, the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which traces the history of the universe, beginning with the “cosmic dark ages” about 10 million years after the Big Bang. At that point, hot gas produced at the very beginning of time, about 13.8 billion years ago, had cooled to a featureless cloud devoid of light, says astronomer Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin. Roughly 100 million years later, tiny ripples in the gas left over from the Big Bang caused the gases to clump together (SN: 2/19/15). This led to long, threadlike strands that formed a web of matter where galaxies and stars were born.
As radiation from the early galaxies illuminated the universe, it ripped electrons from atoms in the once-cold gas clouds during a period called the epoch of reionization, which continued until about 700 million years after the Big Bang (SN: 2/6/17).
CoDaIII is the first simulation to fully account for the complicated interaction between radiation and the flow of matter in the universe, Shapiro says. It spans the time from the cosmic dark ages and through the next several billion years as the distribution of matter in the modern universe formed.
The animation from the simulation, Shapiro says, graphically shows how the structure of the early universe is “imprinted on the galaxies today, which remember their youth, or their birth or their ancestors from the epoch of reionization.”
