Ancient North Americans hunted with spear points crafted to absorb shock.

Clovis people, who crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America around 13,500 years ago, fashioned stone weapons that slightly crumpled at the base rather than breaking at the tip when thrust into prey, say civil engineer Kaitlyn Thomas of Southern Methodist University in Dallas and colleagues. The Clovis crumple rested on a toolmaking technique called fluting, in which a thin groove was chipped off both sides of a stone point’s base, the researchers report in the May Journal of Archaeological Science.
Computer models and pressure testing of replicas of fluted and unfluted Clovis points support the idea that fluted bases worked like shock absorbers, preventing tip breakage, the scientists conclude. Slight compression and folding of stone at the base of fluted points after an impact did not cause enough damage to prevent the points from being reused, they say.

“Fluted Clovis points have a shock-absorbing property that increases their durability, which fit a population that needed reliable weapons on a new, unknown continent,” says archaeologist and study coauthor Metin Eren of Kent State University in Ohio. While Clovis people weren’t the first New World settlers (SN: 6/11/16, p. 8), they roamed throughout much of North America. Individuals traveled great distances to find food and move among seasonal camps, Eren says.

Computer models run by Thomas, Eren and colleagues indicated that unlike unfluted points, fluted points increasingly divert pressure away from the tip and toward the base as physical stress on the weapon grows. Computerized, 3-D versions of fluted Clovis points exposed to high-impact pressure crumpled at the base, leaving the tip intact. Unfluted replicas, however, frequently broke at the tip.
Comparable results emerged when the researchers tested 60 fluted and unfluted stone replicas of Clovis points in a viselike machine that applied precise pressures. Each replica was the same size and represented the average outline shape of 241 previously excavated Clovis points. Standardized replicas enabled researchers to focus solely on whether fluting affected how Clovis points react to physical stress.
Fluted Clovis points may have been attached to handles or long shafts in ways that also enhanced the resilience of a weapon’s business end, Eren says. But no such handles, or even materials used to bind Clovis points to handles, have been discovered.

The fluted points would have taken patience and experience to produce, says Eren, himself a crafter of the stone tools. Previous finds suggest that as many as one out of five Clovis points broke as fluted sections were prepared. If all goes well for an experienced toolmaker, it takes 40 to 50 minutes to produce a fluted Clovis point, he estimates.

Fluting techniques became increasingly elaborate until the practice was abandoned around 9,500 years ago. At that time, familiarity with North America’s landscapes and stone sources triggered a shift to making unfluted spear points designed to kill more effectively, but not necessarily to last, Eren suspects. Some of those stone points may have been intended to shatter on impact, creating shrapnel-like wounds, he says.

Searching for signs of crumpling and crushing on the bottoms of early and later fluted Clovis points could help researchers see if the tools always worked as shock absorbers, says archaeologist Ashley Smallwood of the University of West Georgia in Carrollton.

Researchers have previously proposed that fluting represented a stylistic twist with no practical impact, or that it was a way for toolmakers to advertise their skills and suitability as mates, or was part of prehunt rituals. The new results provide an intriguing practical explanation for the technique’s popularity that deserves further study, says archaeologist Daniel Amick of Loyola University Chicago. Aside from their durability, fluted points may have held symbolic meaning for Clovis people, he adds. For instance, if ancient Americans didn’t fully grasp how fluting strengthens stone points, they could have incorporated the technique into supernatural explanations for the success of hunts, Amick suggests.

President Donald Trump announced on June 1 that the United States will pull out of the Paris climate accord.

In signing the 2015 Paris agreement, the United States, along with 194 other countries, pledged to curb greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. But Trump — who has called climate change a “hoax” despite scientific evidence to the contrary — promised during his campaign that he would withdraw from the Paris accord.

“The agreement is a massive redistribution of the United States’ wealth to other countries,” Trump said. “As of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens [it] imposes on our country.” This includes making further payments to the Green Climate Fund, set up to help developing countries battle and cope with climate change. The United States has already paid $1 billion of the $3 billion it pledged to the fund.

Trump did leave the door open to reentering the Paris accord under revised terms or signing an entirely new climate agreement.

Most of a volcano’s magma probably isn’t the oozing, red-hot molten goo often imagined.

Analyses of zircon crystals, spewed from a volcanic eruption in New Zealand, show that the crystals spent the vast majority of their time underground in solid, not liquid, magma, researchers report in the June 16 Science. The results suggest the magma melted shortly before the volcano erupted.

This finding helps confirm geologists’ emerging picture of magma reservoirs as mostly solid masses, says geologist John Pallister of the U.S. Geological Survey in Vancouver, Wash., who was not involved in the study. And it could help scientists more accurately forecast when volcanoes are poised to erupt.
Studying magma reservoirs directly is difficult because they’re buried kilometers underground. Heat and pressure would destroy any instruments sent down there. So Kari Cooper, a geochemist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues probed magma by scrutinizing seven zircon crystals from New Zealand’s Taupo Volcanic Zone. These crystals formed between a few thousand and a few hundred thousand years ago, when molten magma from deeper in Earth’s crust crept up to the Taupo reservoir, cooled and crystallized into zircon and other minerals. Some of these other minerals eventually melted back into liquid magma and carried the zircon up and out during an eruption 700 years ago.
By examining the distribution of lithium in the zircon crystals, the researchers discerned how long the zircon had existed at temperatures hot enough to melt its mineral neighbors — that is, how long the magma had stayed molten. Lithium, which the crystals would have picked up from surrounding magma, spreads through zircon faster when it’s hotter, Cooper explains.

The diffusion of lithium indicated that the crystals spent, at most, about 1,200 years exposed to a temperature range of 650° to 750° Celsius. At those temperatures, solid magma melts into a state that’s a little like a snow cone — mostly crystalline, with a bit of liquid seeping through. And for just 40 years, the crystals were exposed to temperatures above 750° — hot enough for magma to completely melt. Since the magma spent the overwhelming majority of its lifetime in the reservoir as a mostly solid mass, scientists surmise it melted briefly only before eruption.

“The other cool thing that we found is that most of the crystals are more than 50,000 years old,” Cooper says. In the last 50,000 years, this volcanic system underwent many eruptions before belching up the studied zircon crystals 700 years ago. The relatively short time these crystals experienced high heat suggests that they weren’t affected much by the magma in those previous eruptions. “Everything has to be much more compartmentalized down there than we originally thought,” Cooper says.

The study’s findings raise questions about how mostly solid magma melts and mobilizes before an eruption, says George Bergantz, an earth scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the research. Cooper suspects that molten material from even deeper underground seeps up and melts solid magma. But, she says, “it’s still very much an open question.”

More than a million wildebeests migrate each year from Tanzania to Kenya and back again, following the rains and abundant grass that springs up afterward. Their path takes them across the Mara River, and some of the crossings are so dangerous that hundreds or thousands of wildebeests drown as they try to traverse the waterway.

Those animals provide a brief, free buffet for crocodiles and vultures. And, a new study finds, they’re feeding an aquatic ecosystem for years.

Ecologist Amanda Subalusky of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., had been studying water quality in the Mara River when she and her colleagues noticed something odd. Commonly used indicators of water quality, such as dissolved oxygen and turbidity, were sometimes poorest where the river flowed through a protected area. They quickly realized that it was because of the animals that flourished there. Hippos, which eat grass at night and defecate in the water during the day, were one contributor. And dead wildebeests were another.

“Wildebeest are especially good at following the rains, and they’re willing to cross barriers to follow it,” says Subalusky. The animals tend to cross at the same spots year after year, and some are more dangerous than others. “Once they’ve started using a site, they continue, even if it’s bad,” she notes. And on average, more than 6,000 wildebeests drown each year. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s only about 0.5 percent of the herd.) Their carcasses add the equivalent of the mass of 10 blue whales into the river annually.

Subalusky and her colleagues set out to see how all that meat and bone affected the river ecosystem. When they heard about drownings, they would go to the river to count carcasses. They retrieved dead wildebeests from the water to test what happened to the various parts over time. And they measured nutrients up and downstream from river crossings to see what the wildebeest carcasses added to the water.

“There are some interesting challenges working in this system,” Subalusky says. For instance, in one experiment, she and her colleagues put pieces of wildebeest carcass into mesh bags that went into the river. The plan was that they would retrieve the bags over time and see how quickly or slowly the pieces decomposed. “We spent a couple of days putting the whole thing together and we came back the next day to collect our first set of samples,” she recalls. “At least half the bags with wildebeest meat were just gone. Crocodiles and Nile monitors had plucked them off the chain.”
The researchers determined that the wildebeests’ soft tissue decomposes in about two to 10 weeks. This provides a pulse of nutrients — carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus — to the aquatic food web as well as the nearby terrestrial system. Subalusky and her colleagues are still working out the succession of scavengers that feast on the wildebeests, but vultures, marabou storks, egg-laying bugs and things that eat bugs are all on the list.
Once the soft tissue is gone, the bones remain, sometimes piling up in bends in the river or other spots downstream. “They take years to decompose,” Subalusky says, slowly leaching out most of the phosphorus that had been in the animal. The bones can also become covered in a biofilm of algae, fungi and bacteria that provides food for fish.

What initially looks like a short-lived event actually provides resources for seven years or more, Subalusky and her colleagues report June 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The wildebeest migration is the largest terrestrial migration on the planet, and others of its kind have largely disappeared as humans have killed off animals or cut off their migration routes.

Only a few hundred years ago, for instance, millions of bison roamed the western United States. There are accounts in which thousands of bison drowned in rivers, similar to what happens with wildebeests. Those rivers may have fundamentally changed after bison were nearly wiped out, Subalusky and her colleagues contend.

We’ll never know if that was the case, but there are still some places where scientists may be able to study the effects of mass drownings on rivers. A large herd of caribou reportedly drowned in Canada in the 1980s, and there are still some huge migrations of animals, such as reindeer. Like the wildebeests, these animals might be feeding an underwater food web that no one has ever noticed.

On September 9 of last year, in the middle of the morning, seismometers began lighting up around East Asia. From South Korea to Russia to Japan, geophysical instruments recorded squiggles as seismic waves passed through and shook the ground. It looked as if an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.2 had just happened. But the ground shaking had originated at North Korea’s nuclear weapons test site.

It was the fifth confirmed nuclear test in North Korea, and it opened the latest chapter in a long-running geologic detective story. Like a police examiner scrutinizing skid marks to figure out who was at fault in a car crash, researchers analyze seismic waves to determine if they come from a natural earthquake or an artificial explosion. If the latter, then scientists can also tease out details such as whether the blast was nuclear and how big it was. Test after test, seismologists are improving their understanding of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
The work feeds into international efforts to monitor the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which since 1996 has banned nuclear weapons testing. More than 180 countries have signed the treaty. But 44 countries that hold nuclear technology must both sign and ratify the treaty for it to have the force of law. Eight, including the United States and North Korea, have not.

To track potential violations, the treaty calls for a four-pronged international monitoring system, which is currently about 90 percent complete. Hydroacoustic stations can detect sound waves from underwater explosions. Infrasound stations listen for low-frequency sound waves rumbling through the atmosphere. Radio­nuclide stations sniff the air for the radioactive by-products of an atmospheric test. And seismic stations pick up the ground shaking, which is usually the fastest and most reliable method for confirming an underground explosion.

Seismic waves offer extra information about an explosion, new studies show. One research group is exploring how local topography, like the rugged mountain where the North Korean government conducts its tests, puts its imprint on the seismic signals. Knowing that, scientists can better pinpoint where the explosions are happening within the mountain — thus improving understanding of how deep and powerful the blasts are. A deep explosion is more likely to mask the power of the bomb.
Separately, physicists have conducted an unprecedented set of six explosions at the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada. The aim was to mimic the physics of a nuclear explosion by detonating chemical explosives and watching how the seismic waves radiate outward. It’s like a miniature, nonnuclear version of a nuclear weapons test. Already, the scientists have made some key discoveries, such as understanding how a deeply buried blast shows up in the seismic detectors.
The more researchers can learn about the seismic calling card of each blast, the more they can understand international developments. That’s particularly true for North Korea, where leaders have been ramping up the pace of military testing since the first nuclear detonation in 2006. On July 4, the country launched its first confirmed ballistic missile — with no nuclear payload — that could reach as far as Alaska.

“There’s this building of knowledge that helps you understand the capabilities of a country like North Korea,” says Delaine Reiter, a geophysicist with Weston Geophysical Corp. in Lexington, Mass. “They’re not shy about broadcasting their testing, but they claim things Western scientists aren’t sure about. Was it as big as they claimed? We’re really interested in understanding that.”

Natural or not
Seismometers detect ground shaking from all sorts of events. In a typical year, anywhere from 1,200 to 2,200 earthquakes of magnitude 5 and greater set off the machines worldwide. On top of that is the unnatural shaking: from quarry blasts, mine collapses and other causes. The art of using seismic waves to tell one type of event from the others is known as forensic seismology.

Forensic seismologists work to distinguish a natural earthquake from what could be a clandestine nuclear test. In March 2003, for instance, seismometers detected a disturbance coming from near Lop Nor, a dried-up lake in western China that the Chinese government, which signed but hasn’t ratified the test ban treaty, has used for nuclear tests. Seismologists needed to figure out immediately what had happened.

One test for telling the difference between an earthquake and an explosion is how deep it is. Anything deeper than about 10 kilometers is almost certain to be natural. In the case of Lop Nor, the source of the waves seemed to be located about six kilometers down — difficult to tunnel to, but not impossible. Researchers also used a second test, which compares the amplitudes of two different kinds of seismic waves.

Earthquakes and explosions generate several types of seismic waves, starting with P, or primary, waves. These waves are the first to arrive at a distant station. Next come S, or secondary, waves, which travel through the ground in a shearing motion, taking longer to arrive. Finally come waves that ripple across the surface, including those called Rayleigh waves.
In an explosion as compared with an earthquake, the amplitudes of Rayleigh waves are smaller than those of the P waves. By looking at those two types of waves, scientists determined the Lop Nor incident was a natural earthquake, not a secretive explosion. (Seismology cannot reveal the entire picture. Had the Lop Nor event actually been an explosion, researchers would have needed data from the radionuclide monitoring network to confirm the blast came from nuclear and not chemical explosives.)

For North Korea, the question is not so much whether the government is setting off nuclear tests, but how powerful and destructive those blasts might be. In 2003, the country withdrew from the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international agreement distinct from the testing ban that aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and related technology. Three years later, North Korea announced it had conducted an underground nuclear test in Mount Mantap at a site called Punggye-ri, in the northeastern part of the country. It was the first nuclear weapons test since India and Pakistan each set one off in 1998.

By analyzing seismic wave data from monitoring stations around the region, seismologists concluded the North Korean blast had come from shallow depths, no more than a few kilometers within the mountain. That supported the North Korean government’s claim of an intentional test. Two weeks later, a radionuclide monitoring station in Yellowknife, Canada, detected increases in radioactive xenon, which presumably had leaked out of the underground test site and drifted eastward. The blast was nuclear.

But the 2006 test raised fresh questions for seismologists. The ratio of amplitudes of the Rayleigh and P waves was not as distinctive as it usually is for an explosion. And other aspects of the seismic signature were also not as clear-cut as scientists had expected.

Researchers got some answers as North Korea’s testing continued. In 2009, 2013 and twice in 2016, the government set off more underground nuclear explosions at Punggye-ri. Each time, researchers outside the country compared the seismic data with the record of past nuclear blasts. Automated computer programs “compare the wiggles you see on the screen ripple for ripple,” says Steven Gibbons, a seismologist with the NORSAR monitoring organization in Kjeller, Norway. When the patterns match, scientists know it is another test. “A seismic signal generated by an explosion is like a fingerprint for that particular region,” he says.

With each test, researchers learned more about North Korea’s capabilities. By analyzing the magnitude of the ground shaking, experts could roughly calculate the power of each test. The 2006 explosion was relatively small, releasing energy equivalent to about 1,000 tons of TNT — a fraction of the 15-kiloton bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. But the yield of North Korea’s nuclear tests crept up each time, and the most recent test, in September 2016, may have exceeded the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
Digging deep
For an event of a particular seismic magnitude, the deeper the explosion, the more energetic the blast. A shallow, less energetic test can look a lot like a deeply buried, powerful blast. Scientists need to figure out precisely where each explosion occurred.

Mount Mantap is a rugged granite mountain with geology that complicates the physics of how seismic waves spread. Western experts do not know exactly how the nuclear bombs are placed inside the mountain before being detonated. But satellite imagery shows activity that looks like tunnels being dug into the mountainside. The tunnels could be dug two ways: straight into the granite or spiraled around in a fishhook pattern to collapse and seal the site after a test, Frank Pabian, a nonproliferation expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in April in Denver at a meeting of the Seismological Society of America.

Researchers have been trying to figure out the relative locations of each of the five tests. By comparing the amplitudes of the P, S and Rayleigh waves, and calculating how long each would have taken to travel through the ground, researchers can plot the likely sites of the five blasts. That allows them to better tie the explosions to the infrastructure on the surface, like the tunnels spotted in satellite imagery.

One big puzzle arose after the 2009 test. Analyzing the times that seismic waves arrived at various measuring stations, one group calculated that the test occurred 2.2 kilometers west of the first blast. Another scientist found it only 1.8 kilometers away. The difference may not sound like a lot, Gibbons says, but it “is huge if you’re trying to place these relative locations within the terrain.” Move a couple of hundred meters to the east or west, and the explosion could have happened beneath a valley as opposed to a ridge — radically changing the depth estimates, along with estimates of the blast’s power.

Gibbons and colleagues think they may be able to reconcile these different location estimates. The answer lies in which station the seismic data come from. Studies that rely on data from stations within about 1,500 kilometers of Punggye-ri — as in eastern China — tend to estimate bigger distances between the locations of the five tests when compared with studies that use data from more distant seismic stations in Europe and elsewhere. Seismic waves must be leaving the test site in a more complicated way than scientists had thought, or else all the measurements would agree.
When Gibbons’ team corrected for the varying distances of the seismic data, the scientists came up with a distance of 1.9 kilometers between the 2006 and 2009 blasts. The team also pinpointed the other explosions as well. The September 2016 test turned out to be almost directly beneath the 2,205-meter summit of Mount Mantap, the group reported in January in Geophysical Journal International. That means the blast was, indeed, deeply buried and hence probably at least as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb for it to register as a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.

Other seismologists have been squeezing information out of the seismic data in a different way — not in how far the signals are from the test blast, but what they traveled through before being detected. Reiter and Seung-Hoon Yoo, also of Weston Geophysical, recently analyzed data from two seismic stations, one 370 kilometers to the north in China and the other 306 kilometers to the south in South Korea.

The scientists scrutinized the moments when the seismic waves arrived at the stations, in the first second of the initial P waves, and found slight differences between the wiggles recorded in China and South Korea, Reiter reported at the Denver conference. Those in the north showed a more energetic pulse rising from the wiggles in the first second; the southern seismic records did not. Reiter and Yoo think this pattern represents an imprint of the topography at Mount Mantap.

“One side of the mountain is much steeper,” Reiter explains. “The station in China was sampling the signal coming through the steep side of the mountain, while the southern station was seeing the more shallowly dipping face.” This difference may also help explain why data from seismic stations spanning the breadth of Japan show a slight difference from north to south. Those differences may reflect the changing topography as the seismic waves exited Mount Mantap during the test.

Learning from simulations
But there is only so much scientists can do to understand explosions they can’t get near. That’s where the test blasts in Nevada come in.

The tests were part of phase one of the Source Physics Experiment, a $40-million project run by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The goal was to set off a series of chemical explosions of different sizes and at different depths in the same borehole and then record the seismic signals on a battery of instruments. The detonations took place at the nuclear test site in southern Nevada, where between 1951 and 1992 the U.S. government set off 828 underground nuclear tests and 100 atmospheric ones, whose mushroom clouds were seen from Las Vegas, 100 kilometers away.

For the Source Physics Experiment, six chemical explosions were set off between 2011 and 2016, ranging up to 5,000 kilograms of TNT equivalent and down to 87 meters deep. The biggest required high-energy–density explosives packed into a cylinder nearly a meter across and 6.7 meters long, says Beth Dzenitis, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who oversaw part of the field campaign. Yet for all that firepower, the detonation barely registered on anything other than the instruments peppering the ground. “I wish I could tell you all these cool fireworks go off, but you don’t even know it’s happening,” she says.

The explosives were set inside granite rock, a material very similar to the granite at Mount Mantap. So the seismic waves racing outward behaved very much as they might at the North Korean nuclear test site, says William Walter, head of geophysical monitoring at Livermore. The underlying physics, describing how seismic energy travels through the ground, is virtually the same for both chemical and nuclear blasts.
The results revealed flaws in the models that researchers have been using for decades to describe how seismic waves travel outward from explosions. These models were developed to describe how the P waves compress rock as they propagate from large nuclear blasts like those set off starting in the 1950s by the United States and the Soviet Union. “That worked very well in the days when the tests were large,” Walter says. But for much smaller blasts, like those North Korea has been detonating, “the models didn’t work that well at all.”
Walter and Livermore colleague Sean Ford have started to develop new models that better capture the physics involved in small explosions. Those models should be able to describe the depth and energy release of North Korea’s tests more accurately, Walter reported at the Denver meeting.

A second phase of the Source Physics Experiment is set to begin next year at the test site, in a much more rubbly type of rock called alluvium. Scientists will use that series of tests to see how seismic waves are affected when they travel through fragmented rock as opposed to more coherent granite. That information could be useful if North Korea begins testing in another location, or if another country detonates an atomic bomb in fragmented rock.

For now, the world’s seismologists continue to watch and wait, to see what the North Korean government might do next. Some experts think the next nuclear test will come at a different location within Mount Mantap, to the south of the most recent tests. If so, that will provide a fresh challenge to the researchers waiting to unravel the story the seismic waves will tell.

“It’s a little creepy what we do,” Reiter admits. “We wait for these explosions to happen, and then we race each other to find the location, see how big it was, that kind of thing. But it has really given us a good look as to how [North Korea’s] nuclear program is progressing.” Useful information as the world’s nations decide what to do about North Korea’s rogue testing.

A new study hints that neutrinos might behave differently than their antimatter counterparts. The result amplifies scientists’ suspicions that the lightweight elementary particles could help explain why the universe has much more matter than antimatter.

In the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts. To tip that balance to the universe’s current, matter-dominated state, matter and antimatter must behave differently, a concept known as CP, or “charge parity,” violation.

In neutrinos, which come in three types — electron, muon and tau — CP violation can be measured by observing how neutrinos oscillate, or change from one type to another. Researchers with the T2K experiment found that muon neutrinos morphed into electron neutrinos more often than expected, while muon antineutrinos became electron antineutrinos less often. That suggests that the neutrinos were violating CP, the researchers concluded August 4 at a colloquium at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan.

T2K scientists had previously presented a weaker hint of CP violation. The new result is based on about twice as much data, but the evidence is still not definitive. In physicist parlance, it is a “two sigma” measurement, an indicator of how statistically strong the evidence is. Physicists usually require five sigma to claim a discovery.

Even three sigma is still far away — T2K could reach that milestone by 2026. A future experiment, DUNE, now under construction at the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in Lead, S.D., may reach five sigma. It is worth being patient, says physicist Chang Kee Jung of Stony Brook University in New York, who is a member of the T2K collaboration. “We are dealing with really profound problems.”

A new testing method can distinguish between early Lyme disease and a similar tick-borne illness, researchers report. The approach may one day lead to a reliable diagnostic test for Lyme, an illness that can be challenging to identify.

Using patient blood serum samples, the test accurately discerned early Lyme disease from the similar southern tick‒associated rash illness, or STARI, up to 98 times out of 100. When the comparison also included samples from healthy people, the method accurately identified early Lyme disease up to 85 times out of 100, beating a commonly used Lyme test’s rate of 44 of 100, researchers report online August 16 in Science Translational Medicine. The test relies on clues found in the rise and fall of the abundance of molecules that play a role in the body’s immune response.
“From a diagnostic perspective, this may be very helpful, eventually,” says Mark Soloski, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine who was not involved with the study. “That’s a really big deal,” he says, especially in areas such as the mid-Atlantic where Lyme and STARI overlap.

In the United States, Lyme disease is primarily caused by an infection with the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, which is spread by the bite of a black-legged tick. An estimated 300,000 cases of Lyme occur nationally each year. Patients usually develop a rash and fever, chills, fatigue and aches. Black-legged ticks live in the northeastern, mid-Atlantic and north-central United States, and the western black-legged tick resides along the Pacific coast.

An accurate diagnosis can be difficult early in the disease, says immunologist Paul Arnaboldi of New York Medical College in Valhalla, who was not involved in the study. Lyme disease is diagnosed based on the rash, symptoms and tick exposure. But other illnesses have similar symptoms, and the rash can be missed. A test for antibodies to the Lyme pathogen can aid diagnosis, but it works only after a patient has developed an immune response to the disease.

STARI, spread by the lone star tick, can begin with a rash and similar, though typically milder, symptoms. The pathogen responsible for STARI is still unknown, though B. burgdorferi has been ruled out. So far STARI has not been tied to arthritis or other chronic symptoms linked to Lyme, though the lone star tick has been connected to a serious allergy to red meat (SN: 8/19/17, p. 16). Parts of both ticks’ ranges overlap, adding to diagnosis difficulties.

John Belisle, a microbiologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and his colleagues had previously shown that a testing method based on small molecules related to metabolism could distinguish between early Lyme disease and healthy serum samples. “Think of it as a fingerprint,” he says. The method takes note of differences in the abundancy of metabolites, such as sugars, lipids and amino acids, involved in inflammation.
In the new work, Belisle and colleagues measured differences in the levels of metabolites in serum samples from Lyme and STARI patients. The researchers then developed a “fingerprint” based on 261 small molecules to differentiate between the two illnesses. To determine the accuracy, they tested another set of samples from patients with Lyme and STARI as well as those from healthy people. “We were able to distinguish all three groups,” says Belisle.

As a diagnostic test, “I think the approach has promise,” says Arnaboldi. But more work will be necessary to see if the method can sort out early Lyme disease, STARI and other tick-borne diseases in patients with unknown illnesses.

Having information about the metabolites abundant in STARI may also help researchers learn more about this disease, says Soloski. “This is going to spur lots of future studies.”