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Mars rover to stash rocks for Earth delivery
NASA’s Perseverance rover will drop ten Martian rock samples that could be fetched and returned to Earth by another spacecraft. The test-tube-sized rock cores include sediments from an ancient river delta, which have the best chance of preserving evidence of past life on Mars. The cache is only a back-up — Perseverance will keep duplicate samples on board, so the retrieval mission can collect them directly from the rover in about ten years.
China’s COVID wave could kill one million
One million people in China could die from COVID-19 within the next few months as the country reduces its strict health protections, a preprint study predicts. However, a fourth vaccine dose, antiviral drugs for those at risk, mask mandates and temporary, targeted restrictions could reduce that number by up to 35%.
Reference: medRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
Features & opinion
Energy crisis: big questions for 2023
How will global energy supplies change following the market turmoil created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? And how will the energy crisis affect climate action? These are some of the questions researchers must help to answer in 2023, say Andreas Goldthau and Simone Tagliapietra. They lay out five areas in which scientists can make a difference, including assessing routes to decarbonization in the face of the sky-high energy prices, informing heavy industries’ business models, and shedding light on how energy poverty and inflation threaten political stability.
Track post-conference COVID infections
Conference organizers should start doing post-event COVID-19 surveys and disclose infection rates to attendees, argues environmental scientist James Kirchner. After he got a post-conference infection, he ran his own anonymous online survey of attendees. More than 80% responded, and 28% of them had COVID-19. “We had no idea that the risks were so high,” he writes. “The organizers could have made changes to better protect attendees, if they had known they had a problem in the first place. And they could have been aware of this issue simply by surveying recent attendees, as I did.” Event organizers say that they follow COVID-19 guidelines and that data-protection concerns hamper surveys.
Video: ant milk helps colony to thrive
Ant pupae aren’t the useless, immobile sacks scientists thought they were. The juveniles produce ‘milk’, a nutritious fluid that the adult ants drink and feed to the larvae. Without it, they remain stunted and die sooner, explains social-evolution and behaviour researcher Orli Snir. She thinks this discovery will help people to see ant colonies as interdependent networks rather than being led by only the adults.
Where I work
Conservationist Eileen Maher protects tidelands with giant, holey concrete spheres. Her team sank 360 of these reef balls in the San Diego Bay in 2021. The spheres contain sand and oyster shells, which encourages living oysters to settle on them. It creates an artificial reef that protects the shoreline from being eroded during storms and combats climate change by sequestering carbon dioxide. (Nature | 3 min read)