Tabla de contenidos para November 2020 en Discover

BARELY 10 YEARS AGO, the plight of the northern white-cheeked gibbon looked dire. The gibbon’s territory had once spanned old-growth rainforests across China, Laos and Vietnam, but decades of habitat loss and hunting had left only a few dozen isolated communities. By 2013, the gibbon was declared effectively extinct in China — and today, no one knows how many are left in Laos. A few secluded reserves in Vietnam now appear to be the gibbon’s holdout. Just 127 animals remained in 2011 in one of the country’s last strongholds for the species — Xuan Lien Nature Reserve and the adjacent forests — according to La Quang Trung, a primate expert with the Center for Nature Conservation and Development in Hanoi. But things might be turning around for the gibbon. Since…

ALTHOUGH HUMANS evolved to eat meat, it’s not essential to the human diet, says Ginger Hultin, a Seattle-based registered dietitian nutritionist and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. The only vitamin in the human diet that must come from animal sources is B12 — but this requirement can be met with a supplement. And, in case you’re wondering, protein deficiencies are uncommon in America, even among vegetarians, says Hultin. Undeniably, many people cannot imagine Thanksgiving without turkey. And a healthy diet can certainly include animal protein. But current surveys show we’re leaving little room for much else on our plates. Annual red meat and poultry consumption in America has reached over 200 pounds per person on average — an amount that has increased dramatically since the 1960s. Only…

Reggie, a 30-year-old pharmaceutical salesman, appeared in my office one afternoon to follow up on his cholesterol levels and other routine bloodwork. While the tests were all normal, I noticed he seemed to be in a bit of a funk, for lack of a more scientific term. Ordinarily an upbeat and positive person, he seemed to be down in the dumps. When I asked if anything was going on at home or at work, he said everything was fine. Still, he couldn’t deny that he did not feel like himself. “It’s hard to describe,” he told me. “Everything is fine, and I should feel fine, but I don’t. My marriage is fine, my kids are doing well in school, and I have money in the bank.” Nonetheless, Reggie told me…

A peregrine falcon hurtles at over 100 mph toward rows of grapes. It banks at the last moment, passing within inches of professional falconer Kalen Pearson’s smiling face. The high-velocity interspecies dance causes a flock of European starlings to scatter — along with any other nearby birds that have any sense. Rows of plump organic grapes are safe for now, and so are the invasive starlings. In falconry-based bird abatement, the game isn’t the catch; it’s the chase. Farmers have been chasing superior and safer methods of crop preservation for millennia. This quest to build better mousetraps and scarecrows has daunted agricultural workers since the Neolithic era, and the modern age still hasn’t mastered the art of deterring hungry field pests, which eat crops and can spread pathogens through feces.…

Spurts of hot gas (seen in bright yellow, above) highlight the sun’s active areas — basically, the parts with particularly strong magnetic fields. Photographed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, these areas of magnetic activity are involved in the emission of solar wind, streams of charged particles flowing from the sun, as well as more extreme plasma bursts called coronal mass ejections. When these particles, sent into space at speeds up to 1,800 miles per second, collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they can manifest as the dazzling aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights.…

Call it the quantum Garden of Eden. Fifty or so miles east of New York City, on the campus of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Eden Figueroa is one of the world’s pioneering gardeners planting the seeds of a quantum internet. Capable of sending enormous amounts of data over vast distances, it would work not just faster than the current internet but faster than the speed of light — instantaneously, in fact, like the teleportation of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Sitting in Brookhaven’s light-filled cafeteria, his shoulder-length black hair fighting to free itself from the clutches of a ponytail, Figueroa — a Mexico native who is an associate professor at Stony Brook University — tries to explain how it will work. He grabs hold of two plastic coffee…

“It was just awful watching your child go through this,” she says, explaining that when she enrolled her autistic son in the Arizona State study, her “only goal was to fix his gut.” Remarkably, Ethan’s agony began to disappear just a few weeks into the trial. But that was not the most dramatic difference. Before the transplant, Ethan’s speech was drawn out and slow, his language skills rudimentary. He seemed to live in his own bubble. He had frequent outbursts. For as long as Dana could remember, her mornings with Ethan had been marked by arguing, fighting, pushing and anger. But then one morning, something shocking happened. “He woke me up one morning with his face right in my face with this big smile and he said, ‘Morning, Mom!’” she…

As for the impact on mental health, larger human trials will help determine their effectiveness. Meanwhile, a decade-plus of experimental study has helped researchers assemble a firststring lineup of promising bacterial strains. But those interested should proceed with caution. The probiotic supplement industry in the U.S. is “not FDA-regulated, so there could still be a risk,” says Lauren Bylsma, a University of Pittsburgh clinical research psychologist. Common treatments include: Fermented foods: Foods like sauerkraut, yogurt and kefir — a type of fermented milk — naturally contain bacterial strains tied to anti-depressive effects, such as Lactobacillus helveticus or Lactobacillus acidophilus. That might explain the mood lift some people report from eating them. L. helveticus and Bifidobacterium longum: This bacterial duo — a common combo in products marketed as mood probiotics —…

The parasite Toxoplasma gondii infects many warm-blooded animals, including humans — and feral chickens. Eben Gering, biologist at Nova Southeastern University, is interested in how we could study the parasite in chickens to learn about its distribution across the globe. Recently, he’s taken his work beyond the fowl. You may know T. gondii better from its effects — both real and imagined — on humans. It’s the reason pregnant women shouldn’t scoop their cat’s litter box. But it’s also been blamed for what some refer to as “crazy cat lady syndrome.” Though evidence on whether the parasite can cause schizophrenia and psychosis is currently mixed, there’s no evidence that it ramps up a person’s affection toward cats. Brief flulike symptoms are more likely. In nature, when T. gondii infects an…

MAN VS. MANGROVES These trees love beachfront views. Mangroves live in the salty shallow waters between land and sea across thousands of miles of the world’s coastlines — at least, for now. High carbon emissions are causing sea levels to rise, and soon mangroves won’t be able to stay above water. Earlier this year, researchers estimated that once the annual rate of sea level rise reaches just a quarter of an inch, mangroves will begin to drown. Without changes to emissions, these forests of the ocean will be in grave danger by 2050. And if they lose their homes, they may not be the only ones. The tropical trees protect coastal land and the people who live there from natural disasters like tsunamis, by reducing storm surges and flooding.…

EVERY 50,000 years or so, a nomadic star passes near our solar system. Most brush by without incident. But, every once in a while, one comes a bit closer to home. The most famous of these stellar interlopers is called Scholz’s Star. This small binary star system (two stars in orbit together) was first spotted in 2013. Its orbital path indicates that, about 70,000 years ago, it passed through the Oort Cloud, the extended sphere of icy bodies that surrounds our solar system. We now know that these kinds of encounters happen far more often than once expected, thanks to a European Space Agency spacecraft called Gaia. Gaia was built to map the precise locations and movements of over a billion stars, and has alerted astronomers to hundreds of close…

AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER (ASD) LEVEL 1 Needs support Patient’s social and communication skills and repetitive behaviors are only noticeable without support. LEVEL 2 Needs substantial support Patient’s social and communication skills and repetitive behaviors are obvious to the casual observer, even with support in place. LEVEL 3 Needs very substantial support Patient’s social and communication skills and repetitive behaviors severely impair daily life.…

Q: There are so many animals in the world; how did you end up focusing on chickens? A: From a practical perspective, they’re easy to watch. They don’t fly great distances, and they’ll perform all kinds of interesting behaviors right in front of you. So, we’re able to get data on chickens that would be much harder to get if we were studying other kinds of organisms. We’re even able to use geo-referenced photographs of chickens that people post on their social media while on vacation to track things like when the hens have chicks and the prevalence of genetic traits like yellow legs. Q: And why feral chickens? A: In biology right now, we have some really interesting research on evolution that’s done under really artificial conditions, like people…

In the 1983 techno-thriller WarGames, David Lightman, played by a fresh-faced Matthew Broderick, sits in his bedroom, plunking away on a boxy computer using an 8-bit Intel processor. As text flashes across the screen, David’s face lights up; he believes he’s hacking into a video game company, but the unwitting teenager is actually facing off against a military supercomputer. “Shall we play a game?” the computer asks ominously. In the film, the subsequent showdown triggers a countdown to World War III. The same year the film was released, a group of teenagers and young adults from Milwaukee were playing a game of their own. Much like Broderick’s character, these suburban tech savants — who dubbed themselves the 414s — hacked into large, networked computer systems used by high-profile organizations, looking…