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Mars dust up

Predicting dust storms on Mars will help keep rovers and future astronauts safe on the planet’s surface, Lisa Grossman reported in “How upcoming missions to Mars will help predict its wild dust storms” (SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20, p. 24).

The story reported that scientists struggle to understand how dust gets lifted into the air. “Have they considered static electricity? A static charge on the dust particles would create repulsion between separate particles and between particles and the ground, levitating them enough to be moved by the winds,” reader Bruce M­erchant wrote.

Yes, electric fields formed by colliding dust grains can help increase the amount of dust in the atmosphere. Though electric forces alone are not enough to explain dust lift on Mars, the forces “are critical in the dust-­lifting process and should be taken into account,” says Germán Martínez of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Electric forces also loft dust into Earth’s atmosphere, Grossman notes. Studies in the Moroccan desert have suggested that electric fields can increase the amount of dust injected into the atmosphere by a factor of 10.

Merchant thought static electricity could have contributed to the demise of NASA’s P­hoenix Mars Lander and Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. “Do any current or planned missions to Mars include sensors that could detect and measure static electrical activity?” he asked.

Electric fields associated with dust lifting could affect the performance and lifetime of hardware on Mars, Grossman says, “although I don’t think it was the critical factor for P­hoenix or Opportunity.” No past mission has measured electric fields, nor will any of the three missions launched in 2020. The European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander was supposed to take such measurements, but the lander crashed into the Red Planet in 2016. The ExoMars mission lander slated to launch in 2022 will measure electric fields. “That’ll be a precious piece of information,” Martínez says.

Red Planet preppers

Future Mars explorers will need protections from microgravity and radiation, Maria Temming reported in “What will astronauts need to survive the dangerous journey to Mars?” (SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20 p. 18).

Reader Henry Jones wondered if a protective magnetic field could be created to surround a Mars-bound spaceship.

NASA is investigating whether it’s possible to build a device that would generate a magnetic field to repel radiation, as Earth’s magnetic field does. The idea “is in its infancy,” says J­ennifer Fogarty, chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We’re all rooting for it.… It would be amazing for something like that to arrive. I can’t depend on it, though.”

Gassy with a chance of bubbles

Scientists spotted visible light emanating from gas blobs, called Fermi bubbles, that sandwich the plane of the Milky Way g­alaxy, Emily Conover reported in “The Milky Way’s giant gas bubbles were seen in visible light for the first time” (SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20, p. 5).

“Has there been a survey of Fermi bubbles around other galaxies?” reader Eric Anderson asked.

Yes, researchers have looked for Fermi bubbles around nearby galaxies, Conover says, but the bubbles are not easy to spot. “There is some evidence for bubbles around the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, about 2.5 million light-years away,” she says.

What’s in a name?

Astronomers identified two unusual bursts of light, one known as CSS161010 and the other nicknamed the Koala, Emily Conover reported in “A weird cosmic flare called the ‘Cow’ now has company” (SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20, p. 12).

“A ‘cute’ nickname for CSS161010 would be Tenten, for the obvious reason, but also because (thanks to a Google search) it is the name of a female character in [the] Japanese manga series … Naruto,” reader Oliver Del Signore wrote. “If Tenten or some other nickname is eventually assigned, I hope Science News will include a short update in a future issue.”

Never mind that they’re not viruses. Catching the trend of cocktails called quarantinis and registered racehorse names like Wearamask, two fungal species now have pandemic-inspired monikers. In a nod to the new normal of science, both names grew out of the frustrations of trying to keep research alive in an upside-down world (SN: 5/23/01).

In the first case, tiny, fungal leopard spots on saw palmetto leaves turned out to be new to science. Despite looks, they belong to the same family (Xylariaceae) as the black stubs that rise from the ground called dead man’s fingers.

The leopard spots are not just a new species but represent a whole new genus, mycologist Pedro Crous and colleagues announced in the July 2020 Persoonia. As the pandemic raced across Europe, Crous — working mostly from home instead of in his lab at Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands — named the genus “Diabolocovidia,“ or “devilish COVID.”

Finding the new species wasn’t that hard, says forest pathologist Jason Smith. He’d had some spotty leaves lying around his lab at the University of Florida in Gainesville when another coauthor visited in search of novelties. “This speaks to something a little broader,” Smith says. Even everyday places hold new fungal species because, unlike birds and mammals, most fungi are unnamed.

In the second case, Purdue University biologist Danny Haelewaters was supposed to be on six-nation field trip from Panama to eastern Russia.  Instead, he was grounded in West Lafayette, Ind., socially distant from his coauthor André De Kesel, a mycologist at Belgium’s Miese Botanic Garden.

Many unknowns don’t get the love they deserve because they’re parasites, Haelewaters laments. Yet “parasites are so incredibly diverse” and influence a host species so much they can essentially “run ecosystems,” he says.

In hopes of raising interest in these overlooked wonders, he chose the epithet quarantenae for a new species of microscopic Laboulbenia fungus described July 30 in MycoKeys. Found twice so far in the botanic garden on a kind of ground beetle, the L. quarantenae fungi look like tiny, warped bananas with antlers. The new species reproduces only via sex, which is weirdly simple for a fungal lifestyle.

Hurricane Maria and Heat Wave Henrietta?

For decades, meteorologists have named hurricanes and ranked them according to severity. Naming and categorizing heat waves too could increase public awareness of the extreme weather events and their dangers, contends a newly formed group that includes public health and climate experts. Developing such a system is one of the first priorities of the international coalition, called the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance.

Hurricanes get attention because they cause obvious physical damage, says Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at Yale University who is not involved in the alliance. Heat waves, however, have less visible effects, since the primary damage is to human health.

Heat waves kill more people in the United States than any other weather-related disaster (SN: 4/3/18). Data from the National Weather Service show that from 1986 to 2019, there were 4,257 deaths as a result of heat. By comparison, there were fewer deaths by floods (2,907), tornadoes (2,203) or hurricanes (1,405) over the same period.

What’s more, climate change is amplifying the dangers of heat waves by increasing the likelihood of high temperature events worldwide. Heat waves linked to climate change include the powerful event that scorched Europe during June 2019 (SN: 7/2/19) and sweltering heat in Siberia during the first half of 2020 (SN: 7/15/20).

Some populations are particularly vulnerable to health problems as a result of high heat, including people over 65 and those with chronic medical conditions, such as neurodegenerative diseases and diabetes. Historical racial discrimination also places minority communities at disproportionately higher risk, says Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the new alliance. Due to housing policies, communities of color are more likely to live in urban areas, heat islands which lack the green spaces that help cool down neighborhoods (SN: 3/27/09).

Part of the naming and ranking process will involve defining exactly what a heat wave is. No single definition currently exists. The National Weather Service issues an excessive heat warning when the maximum heat index — which reflects how hot it feels by taking humidity into account — is forecasted to exceed about 41° Celsius (105° Fahrenheit) for at least two days and nighttime air temperatures stay above roughly 24° C (75° F). The World Meteorological Organization and World Health Organization more broadly describe heat waves as periods of excessively hot weather that cause health problems.

Without a universally accepted definition of a heat wave, “we don’t have a common understanding of the threat we face,” Bernstein says. He has been studying the health effects of global environmental changes for nearly 20 years and is interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Defined categories for heat waves could help local officials better prepare to address potential health problems in the face of rising temperatures. And naming and categorizing heat waves could increase public awareness of the health risks posed by these silent killers.

“Naming [heat waves] will make something invisible more visible,” says climate communicator Susan Joy Hassol of Climate Communication, a project of the Aspen Global Change Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Colorado that’s not part of the new alliance. “It also makes it more real and concrete, rather than abstract.”

The alliance is in ongoing conversations with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the World Meteorological Organization and other institutions to develop a standard naming and ranking practice.

“People know when a hurricane’s coming,” Hassol says. “It’s been named and it’s been categorized, and they’re taking steps to prepare. And that’s what we need people to do with heat waves.”