For the first time, researchers have harnessed the body’s own chemistry to “grow” electrodes inside the tissues of living fish, blurring the boundary between biology and machines.

The technique uses the body’s sugars to turn an injected gel into a flexible electrode without damaging tissues, experiments show. Zebrafish with these electrodes grown in their brains, hearts and tail fins showed no signs of ill effects, and ones tested in leeches successfully stimulated a nerve, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science.
Someday, these electrodes could be useful for applications ranging from studying how biological systems work to improving human-machine interfaces. They also could be used in “bioelectronic medicine,” such as brain stimulation therapies for depression, Parkinson’s disease and other conditions (SN: 2/10/19).

Soft electronics aim to bridge the gap between soft, curvy biology and electronic hardware. But these electronics typically still must carry certain parts that can be prone to cracks and other issues, and inserting these devices inevitably causes damage to tissues.

“All the devices we have made, even though we have made them flexible, to make them more soft, when we introduce them, there will still be a scar. It’s like sticking a knife into the organ,” says Magnus Berggren, a materials scientist at Linköping University in Sweden. That scarring and inflammation can degrade electrode performance over time.

Previous efforts to grow soft electronics inside tissues have drawbacks. One approach uses electrical or chemical signals to power the transformation from chemical soup to conducting electrodes, but these zaps also cause damage. A 2020 study got around this problem by genetically modifying cells in worms to produce an engineered enzyme that does the job, but the new method achieves its results without genetic alterations.

Berggren and colleagues’ electrodes instead exploit a natural energy source already present in the body: sugars. The gel cocktail contains molecules called oxidases that react with the sugars — glucose or lactate — to produce hydrogen peroxide. That then activates another ingredient in the cocktail, an enzyme called hydrogen peroxidase, which is the catalyst needed to transform the gel into a conducting electrode.

“The approach leverages elegant chemistry to overcome many of the technical challenges,” says biomedical engineer Christopher Bettinger of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study.

To test the technique, the researchers injected the cocktail into the brains, hearts and tail fins of transparent zebrafish. The gel turns blue when it becomes conductive, giving a visual readout of its success.
“The beautiful thing is you can see it: The zebrafishes’ tail changes color, and we know that blue indicates a conducting polymer,” says materials scientist Xenofon Strakosas, also of Linköping University. “The first time I saw it, I thought ‘Wow, it’s really working!’”

The fish appeared to suffer no ill effects, and the researchers saw no evidence of tissue damage. In partially dissected leeches, the team showed that delivering a current to a nerve via a soft electrode could induce muscle contractions. Ultimately, devices like this could be paired with various wireless technologies in development.

Long-term implant performance remains to be determined, however. “The demonstrations are impressive,” Bettinger says. “What remains to be seen is the stability of the electrode.” Over time, substances in the body could react with the electrode materials, degrading it or even producing toxic substances.

The team still needs to refine how precisely the electrodes can stimulate nerves, says chemical engineer Zhenan Bao of Stanford University, who was not involved in the work. She and colleagues developed the way to “grow” electrical components using genetic modifications. Ensuring stimulation is concentrated where it’s needed for a treatment, while preventing the leakage of current to unwanted regions will be important, she says.

In the new study, the relative abundance of different sugars in different tissues determines exactly where electrodes form. But in the future, a component of the main ingredient could be swapped out for elements that attach to specific bits of biology to make targeting much more precise, Berggren says. “We’re conducting experiments right now where we’re trying to bind these materials directly on individual cells.” Notes Strakosas: “There are some applications where precision is really important; that’s where we have to invest effort.”

The best shot we have at minimizing the future impacts of climate change is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Since the Industrial Revolution began, humankind has already raised the average global temperature by about 1.1 degrees. If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at the current rate, the world will probably surpass the 1.5-degree threshold by the end of the decade.

That sobering fact makes clear that climate change isn’t just a problem to solve someday soon; it’s an emergency to respond to now. And yet, most people don’t act like we’re in the midst of the greatest crisis humans have ever faced — not politicians, not the media, not your neighbor, not myself, if I’m honest. That’s what I realized after finishing The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg.

The urgency to act now, to kick the addiction to fossil fuels, practically jumps off the page to punch you in the gut. So while not a pleasant read — it’s quite stressful — it’s a book I can’t recommend enough. The book’s aim is not to convince skeptics that climate change is real. We’re well past that. Instead, it’s a wake-up call for anyone concerned about the future.

A collection of bite-size essays, The Climate Book provides an encyclopedic overview of all aspects of the climate crisis, including the basic science, the history of denialism and inaction, and what to do next. Thunberg, who became the face of climate activism after starting the Fridays For Future protests as a teenager (SN: 12/16/19), assembles an all-star roster of experts to write the essays.

The first two sections of the book lay out how a small amount of warming can have major, far-reaching effects. For some readers, this will be familiar territory. But as each essay builds on the next, it becomes clear just how delicate Earth’s climate system is. What also becomes clear is the significance of 1.5 degrees (SN: 12/17/18). Beyond this point, scientists fear, various aspects of the natural world might reach tipping points that usher in irreversible changes, even if greenhouse gas emissions are later brought under control. Ice sheets could melt, raise sea levels and drown coastal areas. The Amazon rainforest could become a dry grassland.

The cumulative effect would be a complete transformation of the climate. Our health and the livelihood of other species and entire ecosystems would be in danger, the book shows. Not surprisingly, essay after essay ends with the same message: We must cut greenhouse gas emissions, now and quickly.

Repetition is found elsewhere in the book. Numerous essays offer overlapping scientific explanations, stats about emissions, historical notes and thoughts about the future. Rather than being tedious, the repetition reinforces the message that we know what the climate change threat is, we know how to tackle it and we’ve known for a long time.
Thunberg’s anger and frustration over the decades of inaction, false starts and broken pledges are palpable in her own essays that run throughout the book. The world has known about human-caused climate change for decades, yet about half of all human-related carbon dioxide emissions ever released have occurred since 1990. That’s the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its first report and just two years before world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to sign the first international treaty to curb emissions (SN: 6/23/90).

Perversely, the people who will bear the brunt of the extreme storms, heat waves, rising seas and other impacts of climate change are those who are least culpable. The richest 10 percent of the world’s population accounts for half of all carbon dioxide emissions while the top 1 percent emits more than twice as much as the bottom half. But because of a lack of resources, poorer populations are the least equipped to deal with the fallout. “Humankind has not created this crisis,” Thunberg writes, “it was created by those in power.”

That injustice must be confronted and accounted for as the world addresses climate change, perhaps even through reparations, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a philosopher at Georgetown University, argues in one essay.

So what is the path forward? Thunberg and many of her coauthors are generally skeptical that new tech alone will be our savior. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, for example, has been heralded as one way to curb emissions. But less than a third of the roughly 150 planned CCS projects that were supposed to be operational by 2020 are up and running.

Progress has been impeded by expenses and technology fails, science writer Ketan Joshi explains. An alternative might be “rewilding,” restoring damaged mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and other ecosystems that naturally suck CO2 out of the air (SN: 9/14/22), suggest environmental activists George Monbiot and Rebecca Wrigley.

Fixing the climate problem will not only require transforming our energy and transportation systems, which often get the most attention, but also our economies (endless growth is not sustainable), political systems and connection to nature and with each other, the book’s authors argue.

The last fifth of the book lays out how we could meet this daunting challenge. What’s needed is a critical mass of individuals who are willing to make lifestyle changes and be heard. This could trigger a social movement strong enough to force politicians to listen and create systemic and structural change. In other words, it’s time to start acting like we’re in a crisis. Thunberg doesn’t end the book by offering hope. Instead, she argues we each have to make our own hope.

“To me, hope is not something that is given to you, it is something you have to earn, to create,” she writes. “It cannot be gained passively, through standing by and waiting for someone else to do something. Hope is taking action.”

Modern birds evolved from dinosaurs, but it’s not clear how well birds’ ancient dino ancestors could fly (SN: 10/28/16). Now, a look at the fossilized feet of one nonavian dinosaur suggests that it may have hunted on the wing, like some hawks today.

The crow-sized Microraptor had toe pads very similar to those of modern raptors that can hunt in the air, researchers report December 20 in Nature Communications. That means the feathered, four-winged dinosaur probably used its feet to catch flying prey too, paleobiologist Michael Pittman of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and colleagues say (SN: 7/16/20).
Other researchers caution that toe pads alone aren’t enough to declare Microraptor an aerial hunter. But if the claim holds up, such a hunting style would reinforce a debated hypothesis that powered flight evolved multiple times among dinosaurs, a feat once attributed solely to birds.

Toe pads are bundles of scale-covered flesh on the undersides of dinosaur feet, similar to “toe beans” on dogs and cats. Because the pads are points where the living animal interacted with surfaces, toe pads give paleontologists a “sense of where the rubber meets the road,” says Alexander Dececchi, a paleontologist at Mount Marty University in Yankton, S.D., who was not involved in the new study.

These contact points can paint a clearer picture of an animal’s behavior by providing “details that the skeleton itself wouldn’t show,” says Thomas Holtz Jr., a dinosaur paleobiologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who was also not involved in the study.

To investigate dinosaur toe pads, Pittman and colleagues turned to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature in Linyi, China. It “has arguably the largest collection of feathered dinosaurs in the world, and, importantly, they haven’t been prepared extensively,” Pittman says. Many of these dinosaur skeletons are still surrounded by rock, which is where soft tissues can be preserved. Such a specimen “gives us the best chance of finding this wonderful soft tissue information,” he says.
Using special lasers that cause the otherwise nearly invisible soft tissue in the fossils to fluoresce, the team found 12 specimens with exceptionally well-preserved toe pads among the thousands examined (SN: 3/20/17).

The team compared the fossil toe pads with those of 36 types of modern birds, whose toe pads vary with their lifestyle. Predatory birds, for example, have protruding toe pads with spiky scales for grasping prey, while ground birds that spend their time walking and running have flatter toe pads. The analysis showed that Microraptor’s toe pads and other aspects of the feet, like the shape of the toe joints and claws, are most like those of modern hawks. That similarity suggests that the dinosaur could hunt prey midair and on the ground like hawks do, the team says.

Other dinosaurs, like the feathered Anchiornis, had flatter toe pads and straighter claws, suggesting a terrestrial lifestyle. That’s in line with ideas about this dinosaur being a poor flier, Pittman says.
The idea that Microraptor hunted like a hawk is consistent with other fossil evidence. One Microraptor fossil has been found with a bird in its stomach, and Microraptor‘s skeletal and soft tissue anatomy suggest some powered flight capability.

There’s still more work to do to figure out how well the dinosaur may have flown. “Microraptor is not a bird, but a close relative. Just because it has feet like a predatory bird doesn’t necessarily mean it must be catching prey in the exact same way,” Pittman says. But Microraptor’s hawklike lifestyle “is a strong possibility,” he adds.
Flight could have been useful to Microraptor when hunting, even if it couldn’t stack up to today’s fliers. Dececchi speculates that Microraptor’s anatomy probably prevented it from outflying birds, but may have helped it surprise otherwise out-of-reach prey, including flying and gliding animals.

“You only have to be fast or aerobatic enough to catch other things in your environment,” Holtz says. “So, it’s not improbable that [Microraptor was] catching things in the air on occasion.”

Other paleontologists are more skeptical that Microraptor hunted on the wing. “It would be a bit of a stretch to me to suggest that Microraptor was pursuing prey in an aerial context,” says Albert Chen, a paleobiologist at the University of Cambridge. The new findings inform only “what the foot was used for.”

Alternative hypotheses, such as a completely or partially terrestrial hunting style, could fit the data too, Holtz says, but the “feet are definitely playing a major role in their prey capture,” whether on the ground or in the air.

For now, the picture of Microraptor’s ecology remains fuzzy, but as lasers continue to increase the picture’s resolution, our understanding of dinosaur flight may reach new heights.

Tanklike armored dinosaurs probably pummeled each other — not just predators — with huge, bony knobs attached to the ends of their tails. Thanks to new fossil findings, researchers are getting a clearer understanding of how these rugged plant eaters may have used their wicked weaponry.

Many dinosaurs known as ankylosaurids sported a heavy, potentially microwave-sized tail club. This natural sledgehammer has long been considered by both scientists and artists as a defensive weapon against predators, says Victoria Arbour, a paleontologist at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada.

Fossil evidence for tail clubs’ targets was largely lacking, until Arbour and her colleagues chipped more rock away from the same skeleton they used to describe a new armored dinosaur, Zuul crurivastator, in 2017 (SN: 6/12/17).

The dinosaur had five broken spikes on its sides. The team’s statistical analyses showed the damaged spikes clustered in specific regions of the body. If a large carnivorous dinosaur made these injuries, says Arbour, they’d likely be more randomly distributed and include bite and scratch marks.
Instead, the injuries are more consistent with clubbing, the researchers report December 7 in Biology Letters.

Armored dinosaurs’ tail clubs start out either absent or too tiny to mount a major defense, and they get proportionally larger with age. Similar growth patterns occur in some modern animal weaponry like antlers. It’s possible that tanklike dinosaurs sparred with each other for mates, food or territory much like male deer and giraffes do today.

And that tail could also be useful in a pinch. “Having a tail club you can swing around at the ankles of a two-legged predator is a pretty effective weapon,” says Arbour.

“Ankylosaurs are often portrayed as stupid, loner dinosaurs,” she adds. The findings “show that they probably had much more complex behaviors than we give them credit for.”

Books about the pandemic. Books about the ancient past. Books about outer space. These were a few of Science News staff’s favorite reads. If your favorite didn’t make this year’s cut, let us know what we missed at feedback@sciencenews.org.

Vagina Obscura
Rachel E. Gross
W.W. Norton & Co.
$30

For centuries, scientists (mostly males) have ignored female biology, and women’s health has suffered. But researchers are finally paying attention, as Gross explains in this fascinating tour of what little is known about female anatomy (SN: 4/9/22, p. 29).

The Song of the Cell
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner
$32.50

Patient stories and conversations with scientific luminaries enliven this tale of cell biology’s past, present and future, and how advances in the field have reshaped medicine (SN: 11/5/22, p. 28).

Breathless
David Quammen
Simon & Schuster
$29.99

In this portrait of the coronavirus and the scientists who study it, Quammen investigates some of the most pressing questions about the pandemic, including whether or not the coronavirus could have accidentally escaped from a lab (SN: 9/24/22, p. 28).

Virology
Joseph Osmundson
W.W. Norton & Co.
$16.95

This wide-ranging collection of essays is a meditation on society’s complicated relationship with viruses. In pondering SARS-CoV-2, HIV and more, Osmundson calls for more equitable access to medical care (SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 36).

The Milky Way
Moiya McTier
Grand Central Publishing
$27

This absorbing “autobiography,” written from the perspective of the Milky Way (a very sassy Milky Way), draws on mythology and astronomy to persuade readers that our home galaxy deserves respect and admiration (SN: 9/10/22, p. 28).

A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman
Lindy Elkins-Tanton
William Morrow
$29.99

In this moving memoir, Elkins-Tanton recounts her journey to becoming a planetary scientist and leader of a NASA asteroid mission. Her struggles with childhood trauma and sexism in her career lay bare the barriers that many women in science still face (SN: 8/13/22, p. 26).

An Immense World
Ed Yong
Random House
$30

So much of the world is beyond the grasp of human perception, but this safari through animal senses helps readers imagine what we’re missing (SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 36).

How Far the Light Reaches
Sabrina Imbler
Little, Brown, & Co.
$27

By drawing parallels between their own life and the stories of bobbit worms, octopuses, sperm whales and other deep-sea dwellers, Imbler muses on such weighty themes as adaptation, survival and sexuality.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs
Riley Black
St. Martin’s Press
$28.99

The basic story of the downfall of nonbird dinosaurs is familiar: They were killed off by an asteroid that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago. Using the most up-to-date science, Black fleshes out this tale, painting a vivid portrait of life before and after this apocalypse (SN: 4/23/22, p. 28).

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals
Steve Brusatte
Mariner Books
$29.99

The perfect follow-up to Black’s book on how the Age of Dinosaurs ended is this sweeping history of how the Age of Mammals began. Brusatte traces the origins of the evolutionary innovations that have made mammals so successful (SN: 6/18/22, p. 28).

Origin
Jennifer Raff
Twelve
$30

Exactly how and when humans first came to the Americas is still unsettled science. But Raff gathers archaeological and genetic evidence to piece together a convincing scenario. She also points out past mistreatment of Indigenous communities by geneticists and calls on researchers to do better and foster more collaborations (SN: 2/12/22, p. 29).

Pests
Bethany Brookshire
Ecco
$28.99

So-called pests are a human invention, argues Brookshire, a former staff writer for Science News for Students (now Science News Explores). In coming face to face with rats, feral cats, pythons and even elephants, Brookshire teases out the various social factors that cause people to deem certain animals a nuisance (SN: 12/3/22, p. 26).

A parasite might be driving some wolves to lead or go solo.

Wolves in Yellowstone National Park infected with Toxoplasma gondii make more daring decisions than their uninfected counterparts, researchers report November 24 in Communications Biology. The wolves’ enhanced risk-taking means they are more likely to leave their pack, or become leaders of their own.

“Those are two decisions that can really benefit wolves, or could cause wolves to die,” says Connor Meyer, a field biologist at the University of Montana in Missoula. The findings reveal a parasite’s potent ability to influence a wolf’s social fate.

Disease is often considered important for wildlife, mostly in the context of killing its host, Meyer says. “We have evidence now that just being infected with a certain parasite — Toxoplasma — can have pretty major implications for wolf behavior.”
Single-celled T. gondii has a track record of altering animal behavior. Its most important hosts are cats, which provide a breeding ground for the parasite in their small intestine. The parasite offspring hitch a ride on feline feces. Other animals then ingest the parasite, which then manipulates its new hosts’ behavior by tweaking certain hormones, making the hosts bolder or more aggressive. Infected mice, for example, can fatally lose their fear of cats, allowing the parasite to infect more hosts once the mice are consumed (SN: 1/14/20).

In Yellowstone National Park, many wolves are also infected with T. gondii, recent research has shown. So Meyer and colleagues wondered if gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the park showed any parasite mind-bending of their own.
Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995. Ongoing study of the park’s packs meant that the researchers had access to about 26 years’ worth of blood samples, behavioral observations and movement data for 229 of the park’s wolves.

The team screened the wolf blood for antibodies against T. gondii parasites, which reveal an infection. The researchers also noted which wolves left their pack — usually a family unit consisting of a breeding pair and their offspring — or became a pack leader.

Both are high-stakes moves for a wolf, Meyer says.

Infected wolves were 11 times as likely as noninfected wolves to disperse from their pack, the team found, and about 46 times as likely to eventually become leaders. The findings fit in with T. gondii’s apparent ability to boost boldness across a wide range of warm-blooded life.
The study fills a crucial gap in the Toxoplasma pool of knowledge, says Ajai Vyas, a neurobiologist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who was not involved with the study.

“Most of the earlier work has been done in the lab,” Vyas says. But there are limitations to that approach, especially for re-creating how animals experience the effects of the parasite in their natural environment. Such research has “become almost like studying whale swimming behavior in backyard pools; [it] does not work very well.”

Wolves’ enhanced boldness may even form a feedback loop, the team proposes. The researchers found that not only do cougars (Puma concolor) in the park carry the parasite, but wolves’ infection rates were highest when the animals’ ranges overlapped with the park’s densest aggregations of cougars. Infected wolf leaders may be more likely to bring pack members into riskier situations, including approaching cougar territories, making additional infections more likely.

The feedback-loop idea is “very fascinating,” but more research is needed to confirm it, says Greg Milne, an epidemiologist at the Royal Veterinary College in London, who was not involved with the study. Such research may involve determining if infected wolves are more likely to migrate into an area with more cougars.

“I think people are just starting to really appreciate that personality differences in animals are a major consideration in behavior,” says study coauthor Kira Cassidy, a wildlife biologist at the Yellowstone Wolf Project in Bozeman, Mont. “Now we add a parasite-impacting behavior to the list.”

Next, the team is interested in examining the long-term consequences of a T. gondii infection, and whether infected wolves make better leaders or dispersers than uninfected wolves.

It’s also not known how infection impacts survival and reproduction rates, Cassidy says. “Infection may very well be detrimental in some ways and advantageous in others.”

As we head into our third pandemic winter, most people are all too familiar with the signs of COVID-19. The disease wears many different faces and can show up as chills, cough, difficulty breathing or other troublesome jumbles of symptoms. But sometimes, this illness can look positively peculiar.

On rare occasions, SARS-CoV-2 rears its head in body parts not typically touched by respiratory viruses. From head to COVID toe, doctors have seen a bevy of bizarre cases. Patchy tongues, puffy digits, hair loss — such issues can be worrisome for patients, says Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

But the outlook doesn’t have to be. That’s because such symptoms can end up going away on their own, says Chin-Hong, who has treated hundreds of people with COVID-19.

No one knows exactly how often COVID tongue, COVID toe, COVID eye or other rare conditions occur — and it’s not always clear that COVID-19 is the actual culprit. Still, the sheer scale of coronavirus infections means that SARS-CoV-2 has had many chances to show its stuff (SN: 9/8/22). The United States is now closing in on 98 million confirmed cases. Such a staggering case count means that “statistically speaking, you’re going to find people with more and more weird things,” Chin-Hong says.
Doctors rely on medical case reports for leads on potential treatments and hints about how long symptoms may last. Even just knowing that someone else has had splotchy mouth sores or tender toes can be helpful, Chin-Hong says. That lets him tell his patients, “You’re not the only one,” he says. “That means a lot to a lot of people.”

Internal medicine doctor Saira Chaughtai published one such study in October in the Journal of Medical Case Reports after one of her primary care patients came in with a symptom Chaughtai had never seen. Ten days after testing positive for COVID-19, the patient’s tongue began to swell, eventually erupting in white-ringed lesions.

Certain spots looked “denuded,” says Chaughtai, of Hackensack Meridian Health in Neptune, N.J. It was as if some of the tongue’s surface bumps had been sandpapered away. The patient wasn’t someone doctors would typically consider vulnerable, either. She was 30 years old, fit and healthy.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, COVID can do anything,’” Chaughtai remembers thinking.
Oral sores can look different among patients. Chin-Hong has seen people with tongues coated white, as if they’d chewed a mouthful of tortilla chips. For Chaughtai’s patient, COVID tongue felt sensitive and irritated, with flare-ups that burned. Chaughtai wasn’t sure how to treat it.

She searched the scientific literature and prescribed an assortment of mouthwashes, which helped. But six months in, the patient’s tongue hadn’t fully healed. So Chaughtai got creative. She teamed up with a sports medicine doctor, who beamed low-level laser light at the patient’s tongue. He had previously used this photobiomodulation therapy to treat muscle injuries.

Laser light therapy makes blood vessels dilate, enhancing blood flow to treated areas, which could promote healing, Chaughtai says. It seemed to work for her patient. The tongue lesions began to heal and flare-ups subsided. The woman still occasionally feels some tongue sensitivity when stressed, but never as bad as her initial outbreak.

The effects of COVID toe
About 1,300 kilometers west, a podiatrist in Crown Point, Ind., also dilated a patient’s blood vessels to treat a curious coronavirus condition: COVID toe. After infection with SARS-CoV-2, patients’ fingers and toes can plump up, sometimes painfully, and turn pink or reddish purple.

“We were seeing cases of these lesions that look like chilblains, which is something you get when you’re exposed to cold weather,” says Michael Nirenberg of Friendly Foot Care. But his patients hadn’t been in the cold — they’d been exposed to the coronavirus.

Nirenberg has seen as many as 40 people with the symptom, which he’s found tends to clear up in a month or two. But one of his patients, a 59-year-old man, just couldn’t kick COVID toe. It ultimately lingered for nearly 670 days — the longest documented case Nirenberg has seen. “The term we used was long COVID toe,” he says. Nirenberg and colleagues reported the case this spring in the Journal of Cutaneous Pathology.
Nirenberg prescribed daily application of a nitroglycerin ointment to boost blood flow to the toes. That may have helped, Nirenberg says, “but I don’t know if time also did the trick.” After 22 months, the condition may have finally resolved on its own.

The number of COVID toes Nirenberg encounters these days has gone down, but he’s still seeing people come in with the condition. And though Chaughtai has not treated another case of COVID tongue, a man recently e-mailed her saying that he had suffered from a similar affliction for two years.

UCSF’s Chin-Hong says he thinks it’s important for people to know that COVID-19 can cause such a variety of symptoms (SN: 11/11/22). “We can’t really predict who’s going to get what,” he says. But in his experience, strange symptoms have tended to crop up more often in people who haven’t been vaccinated.

Such symptoms may not be as serious as COVID-affected hearts or lungs, but they can certainly look scary, Chin-Hong says. “If this is a reason why some people might get vaccinated,” he says, “I think that would be great.”

If you saw Carlos Argüelles-Delgado’s childhood bedroom — the whiteboard for working out problems, the math textbooks they asked for as birthday gifts — you’d likely not be surprised that this kid would grow up to push the boundaries of modern physics.

For years, physicists have known that the most successful theory to describe what the universe is made of, called the standard model, is broken. By prying at one of the biggest cracks in the framework — neutrinos — Argüelles aims to discover what’s next for the field.

Neutrinos are mysterious even for subatomic particles. They’re hard to study because they barely interact with matter, and what scientists do know about them is baffling — like the fact that neutrinos have mass when the standard model predicts they shouldn’t. “That’s why I like neutrinos,” Argüelles says. “They misbehave.”

Many scientists think this confusing behavior is a sign that neutrinos are affected by undiscovered particles. In that case, demystifying neutrinos could open a new window on the universe. The question is: Who are these hidden partners, and how can scientists find them?
Standout research
To search for answers, Argüelles often relies on data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. IceCube’s thousands of buried detectors spot neutrinos from the faint flashes of light they leave after interacting with ice.

For their Ph.D., Argüelles combed through these signals to look for “sterile” neutrinos. If this breed of neutrinos exists, they would interact with matter even less than normal neutrinos do. Sterile neutrinos could explain several troubling problems with the standard model, like why neutrinos have mass and why antimatter is rarer than matter. Sterile neutrinos are also a candidate for dark matter, the unidentified substance that outweighs normal matter in the universe.

The search made for a huge project, but Argüelles finished it in about half of the time typical for U.S. Ph.D.s in the physical sciences. And though they found no signs of the would-be particle, Argüelles ruled out some ideas about what it could be like.
“It was an amazing performance,” says neutrino physicist Francis Halzen, who advised Argüelles’ Ph.D. work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is IceCube’s head scientist. “It was a piece of art.”

Argüelles also looks for other possible hidden particles, like WIMPs, a hypothetical particle that could be a form of dark matter. And Argüelles isn’t afraid to pursue research farther from their specialty. Though no expert in quantum computers, for example, Argüelles was the first to use a quantum computer to simulate how neutrinos can change from one type to another. That could one day help scientists better understand neutrino-rich events like supernova explosions.

“I just hate when people tell me I cannot do something,” Argüelles says.

Halzen describes Argüelles as fearless, the kind of scientist who is never afraid to ask questions. “I don’t think they have any regard for their reputation, ever,” he says.
Backstory
Argüelles’ attitude toward research is, in part, forged by past struggles to overcome hardship and discrimination.

“There are worse things in life than not being able to solve a problem,” they say.

Growing up in Peru meant building a life on shifting ground. The economy was unstable, and at times Argüelles’ family struggled to make ends meet.

Though Argüelles’ parents were supportive and saw knowledge as a safe investment, they at first rejected Argüelles’ desire to study physics. Argüelles, wiping a tear from their eye, recalls their father saying, “You’re just going to die of hunger.” Soon Argüelles’ parents did embrace the career choice.

Argüelles says Peru, when they were growing up, was also an “extremely negative environment” for LGBTQ+ people. “I’m a gay man,” they say, “and it was very, very, very difficult.”

Same-sex marriages are not recognized in Peru. Hate crimes and discrimination based on sexual orientation were only prohibited in 2017, by a presidential decree that the country’s Congress tried but failed to overturn.

When Argüelles left Peru in 2012 to pursue their Ph.D., they found that studying physics in the United States wasn’t without obstacles. Almost nobody high up in the field looked like them. They struggled under the weight of expectations and felt that voicing their anxieties would get them branded as weak. But with help from mentors, Argüelles persevered.

Now, as an assistant professor at Harvard, Argüelles sees their students — particularly women and Hispanics — facing the same challenges. Argüelles is passionate about supporting them.

“It’s about not giving up, right?” Argüelles says. “I still go through some of these things myself. But I’ll survive it.”

Belinda Hankins first grappled with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. She had a fever, chills and trouble breathing, but the real clincher was her loss of smell. Hankins remembers opening a canister of Tony Chachere’s creole seasoning, lowering her nose to take a whiff, and not smelling a thing. “That stuff usually clears the kitchen,” she says.

Her second infection, two years later, was worse. After 12 long weeks of endless fatigue and aching joints, her doctor suggested she seek treatment for long COVID. The lingering, sometimes full-body condition can plague people for months or years after a COVID-19 infection (SN Online: 7/29/22).

In late August, I joined Hankins, age 64, in a small exam room for her first in-person consultation at the Johns Hopkins Post-Acute COVID-19 Team clinic. Wearing a navy dress and a blue surgical mask, Hankins is sitting in a chair across from physician Alba Azola. As they discuss Hankins’ symptoms, doctor and patient face each other, Azola occasionally swiveling her stool to tap notes into a computer.

Hankins’ symptoms are extensive. Brain fog, fatigue and pain top the list. She’s depressed. Sleep doesn’t feel restful. She has trouble focusing, is often light-headed and regularly loses her balance. Even walking to the clinic from the parking lot left her winded and in pain. “I’m extremely exhausted,” she says. “I have not felt good in a long time.” Hankins, pauses, wiping away a tear. “I wasn’t like this before.”
Hankins, a retired digital media consultant, used to be an avid skier and a cyclist. She loved to travel and dance and was planning to learn how to play golf. She’s not sure what the future holds, though she tells me she still has faith she can be active again.

Treating people with long COVID can be complicated – especially for Hankins and those who have other medical conditions. She has pulmonary hypertension, fibromyalgia and the connective tissue disease scleroderma. It’s tricky to tease out which symptoms come from the viral infection. Azola’s approach is to listen, ask questions and listen some more. Then, she’ll zero in on a patient’s most pressing concerns. Her goal: manage their symptoms. “How can we make their quality of life better?” she asks.
System overload
On the afternoon of Hankins’ visit, it’s a warm summer day in Baltimore, blue skies laden with fleecy clouds. Inside the labyrinthine halls of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, the vibe is not quite as sunny: bright lights, shiny floors, people in line and people in scrubs. Everyone I see is masked.

Azola meets me in the waiting area, walking briskly and wearing bright red glasses. Before the pandemic, Azola, a rehabilitation physician, treated patients recovering from strokes, spinal cord injuries and other disorders. Most mornings, she still works with these patients. But for the past two years, her afternoons have been booked with people laid low by COVID-19.

She’s squeezed me in to talk about the Johns Hopkins PACT clinic, which opened in April 2020, around the time when the world hit one million confirmed cases. “To be honest, we didn’t know what to expect,” Azola says. Back then, most of the clinic’s patients were recovering from COVID-19 after a stay in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Now, at least half of their patients never got sick enough with COVID-19 to be hospitalized – yet still had symptoms they couldn’t shake. In a single week, Azola and her colleagues may get 30 referrals. “It’s constant,” she says, “more than we can provide service to.”

As those referrals pile up, patient wait times can stretch. The PACT clinic expanded last summer, and now has more than a dozen people on staff, including therapists, physicians and other specialists. They try to keep the wait to around two months, Azola says, but sometimes it takes up to four months for a patient to be seen.
The demand here and at clinics across the country isn’t likely to let up. As of mid-November, the United States has reported nearly 97.9 million cases of COVID-19. Though long COVID numbers can be hard to pin down, nearly half of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 hadn’t fully recovered six to 18 months after their infection, according to a large Scottish study published in Nature Communications on October 12. A more conservative estimate from the United States suggests that more than 18 million U.S. adults could have long COVID.

“We are in the middle of a mass disabling event,” says Talya Fleming, a physician at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J.

Scattershot solutions
In the United States, some 400 clinics have popped up from coast-to-coast to care for the growing wave of long COVID patients.

Although the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation has published some guidance, no gold-standard therapies exist and there are no formal criteria for long COVID clinic performance. The Academy brought together more than 40 post-COVID clinics, including the Hopkins PACT clinic, to share experiences and discuss best practices for long COVID treatment. “We’re kind of guiding each other,” Azola says. Other clinics in the United States are more-or-less forging their own paths.

Today, Azola and colleagues are focusing on their patients’ symptoms, a strategy other long COVID doctors and clinics are using too. “There is no one, singular long COVID experience,” says pulmonologist Lekshmi Santhosh. So doctors really need to take a “customized, symptom-directed approach.”

Santhosh founded the OPTIMAL clinic at the University of California, San Francisco to provide follow-up care for people who had COVID-19. Since 2020, she’s seen hundreds of patients, who can wait weeks to months for an appointment, like they do at Hopkins. One main question Santhosh hears from patients is: “When am I going to get better?” That’s hard to answer, she admits.
Scientists can’t yet predict how or when a patient will recover, and they don’t know why long COVID strikes some people and spares others. Right now, there are no obvious rules. “If you are young, you can get long COVID. If you have no pre-existing health conditions, you can get long COVID. If you’ve had COVID before, you still can get long COVID,” Fleming says. The list goes on.

At UCSF, Santhosh says she’s seen it all. Long COVID can affect a 75-year-old patient who was hospitalized for COVID-19, or a 35-year-old marathoner whose stubborn symptoms developed after just a mild infection. One patient can be hit with a hailstorm of health conditions, another patient, just a few.

“I’ve heard some weird things,” Azola says. She remembers one patient who felt as if a phone were vibrating deep inside their bones. Another described a sensation of heaviness, like their legs were made of lead.

Long COVID’s scattershot symptoms currently require a smorgasbord of solutions. For headaches, a doctor might prescribe a combo of pain relievers. For shortness of breath, an inhaler to open the airways could help. For brain fog, patients might visit a therapist who can help them with word-finding issues. Such symptom management is necessary, Azola says, because “we don’t have strong, randomized controlled trials to support the use of specific medications or treatments,” she says.

Developing effective therapies has been “frustratingly slow,” Santhosh says. Scientists are still trying to understand what’s happening in the body that spurs long COVID and lets symptoms simmer away unchecked. “The underlying biology is unclear,” she says. That makes it “unclear exactly what treatments might work.”

Long COVID’s biological underpinnings are a hot topic among researchers today, says Mike VanElzakker, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and part of the Long COVID Research Initiative, a group working to study and treat the condition. Scientists have scads of hypotheses for what causes long COVID symptoms, including lungs scarred by SARS-CoV-2 or the reawakening of some other, long-slumbering virus. One idea posits that COVID-19 might sabotage the immune system, inviting other microbes to do harm. Another idea pins long COVID on caches of coronavirus hiding within the body’s tissues.

“It really does matter what’s causing these problems,” VanElzakker says. If doctors knew what’s driving a patient’s symptoms, they might be able to offer personalized treatments aimed at the illness’s root.

Filling the void
On Facebook pages and websites around the internet, purported long COVID treatment options abound.

Vitamins, supplements, alternative medicines: general internist Aileen Chang in Washington, D.C. used to hear all the time from long COVID patients about therapies they’ve tried. In the fall of 2020, Chang and colleagues started the George Washington Medical Faculty Associates COVID-19 Recovery Clinic, which later closed its doors due to a staffing shortage. She recalls patients who flew to different countries to have their blood filtered and others who took “every sort of supplement you can imagine,” she says. “They’re looking for solutions.”

Without clear data on what long COVID treatments work, opportunists have stepped in to fill the void. Some unproven treatments may be scams with serious side effects; they can also drain patients financially. “They’re spending all this money on things they think will make them better,” Chang says, “but the truth is… we don’t know.”

What scientists do know is that potential long COVID treatments are still in their early days. There’s some evidence that getting a COVID-19 vaccine can improve long COVID patients’ symptoms, though this idea is still controversial, researchers reported in November in eClinicalMedicine. And repeated sessions of breathing 100 percent oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber might relieve fatigue and brain fog, small studies of patients have suggested.
Last year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health launched a massive research project on the long-term effects of COVID-19. Called the RECOVER Initiative, the project aims to uncover why some people get long COVID and to identify underlying causes. As of November 11, RECOVER has enrolled 10,645 of an estimated 17,680 adults needed.

It’s a great initiative, Santhosh says, but it got rolling relatively late – well after long COVID had already upended many people’s lives. “We need… a lot more funding and a lot more therapeutic trials,” she says. Santhosh is hopeful that, in the coming months and years, doctors will have solid answers on what treatments actually work. “There are a lot of tantalizing biological leads,” she says. Though she knows that this timeframe can feel agonizingly long to patients and clinicians.
Real life
In the meantime, Santhosh, Azola and other physicians are borrowing strategies that help for other disorders – like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Many of the symptoms of that still-mysterious illness overlap with those of long COVID, a symmetry that could bring answers for both disorders, scientists suggest September 8 in Science.

One common approach isn’t a treatment like pills or surgery, it’s more of a shift in behavior: Don’t overdo it, Santhosh says. “We talk to our long COVID patients about this all the time, about the need to rest, to pace yourself and how to gently bring back your aerobic fitness.”

Long COVID patients with fatigue can be tempted to try and push through, to keep speeding through life as they had before their diagnosis. But that doesn’t seem to work for people with chronic fatigue, and “for some long COVID patients, it can actually make things worse,” she’s found.

Azola has similar advice for Hankins. About a half hour into the appointment, Azola slides away from the computer desk, and turns toward her patient. “This is the part where people want to punch me in the face,” she tells Hankins, pushing her glasses up onto her head. “We don’t have a magic wand that makes [you] feel better.”

Instead, Hankins will need to check her body’s battery every day, conserve energy where she can, and build in opportunities to recover. Little tricks, like sitting in a chair while showering or prepping food, can help patients save enough juice to make it through the day. Azola hopes to get Hankins off the “corona coaster,” where patients can feel relatively good one day, and the next day, crash. Having energy levels constantly crater can erode a patient’s ability to live their lives, she says.
For the next 20 minutes, doctor and patient talk about how Hankins’ life has changed and what her next steps will be. In a week, she’ll meet with a neuropsychologist who will help her cope with her new reality; Azola also refers Hankins to a pain specialist.

The two women have spent about an hour together – a near-eternity for a medical appointment. For Azola, it’s time well spent. “The most important thing is to listen to patients and keep an open mind,” she says.

When I speak with Hankins nearly three weeks later, she’s still feeling hopeful. She’s met with the neuropsychologist, and will continue to receive follow-up care. For Hankins, a care plan that factors in all of her conditions, including long COVID, may one day let her feel like herself again.

For now, she’s hoping that sharing her story will help others struggling with the illness. When she tells people she has long COVID, she says, “some of them don’t even think it’s real.”

Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern England. The rock blazed in a dazzling, eight-second-long streak of light, split into fragments and sped toward the Earth. The largest piece went splat in the driveway of Rob and Cathryn Wilcock in the small, historic town of Winchcombe.

An analysis of those fragments now shows that the meteorite came from the outer solar system, and contains water that is chemically similar to Earth’s, scientists report November 16 in Science Advances. How Earth got its water remains one of science’s enduring mysteries. The new results support the idea that asteroids brought water to the young planet (SN: 5/6/15).

The Wilcocks were not the only ones who found pieces of the rock that fell that night. But they were the first. Bits of the Winchcombe meteorite were collected within 12 hours after they hit the ground, meaning they are relatively uncontaminated with earthly stuff, says planetary scientist Ashley King of London’s Natural History Museum.
Other meteorites have been recovered after being tracked from space to the ground, but never so quickly (SN: 12/20/12).

“It’s as pristine as we’re going to get from a meteorite,” King says. “Other than it landing in the museum on my desk, or other than sending a spacecraft up there, we can’t really get them any quicker or more pristine.”

After collecting about 530 grams of meteorite from Winchcombe and other sites, including a sheep field in Scotland, King and colleagues threw a kitchen sink of lab techniques at the samples. The researchers polished the material, heated it and bombarded it with electrons, X-rays and lasers to figure out what elements and minerals it contained.

The team also analyzed video of the fireball from the UK Fireball Alliance, a collaboration of 16 meteor-watching cameras around the world, plus many more videos from doorbell and dashboard cameras. The films helped to determine the meteorite’s trajectory and where it originated.

The meteorite is a type of rare, carbon-rich rock called a carbonaceous chondrite, the team found. It came from an asteroid near the orbit of Jupiter, and got its start toward Earth around 300,000 years ago, a relatively short time for a trip through space, the researchers calculate.

Chemical analyses also revealed that the meteorite is about 11 percent water by weight, with the water locked in hydrated minerals. Some of the hydrogen in that water is actually deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, and the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in the meteorite is similar to that of the Earth’s atmosphere. “It’s a good indication that water [on Earth] was coming from water-rich asteroids,” King says.

Researchers also found amino acids and other organic material in the meteorite pieces. “These are the building blocks for things like DNA,” King says. The pieces “don’t contain life, but they have the starting point for life locked up in them.” Further studies can help determine how those molecules formed in the asteroid that the meteorite came from, and how similar organic material could have been delivered to the early Earth.

“It’s always exciting to have access to material that can provide a new window into an early time and place in our solar system,” says planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa of Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved in the study.

She hopes future studies will compare the samples of the Winchcombe meteorite to samples of asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, which were collected by spacecraft and sent back to Earth (SN: 1/15/19). Those asteroids are both closer to Earth than the main asteroid belt, where the Winchcombe meteorite came from. Comparing and contrasting all three samples will build a more complete picture of the early solar system’s makeup, and how it evolved into what we see today.