“Church’s woolly mammoth research is just one of several de-extinction projects—there are about ten underway now—that aim to use genetics to restore lost species. In her book “The Re-Origin of Species,” the Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt travels the world meeting the scientists and conservationists involved in this movement. In California, she talks with Ben Novak, a scientist obsessed with bringing back the passenger pigeon—a bird that once travelled in flocks that were so giant and dense, Novak tells her, that they “swept through the landscape, with the same effect as forest fires.” In upstate New York, a researcher is working toward restoring the American chestnut, which was decimated by blight in the late eighteen-hundreds. Until then, chestnuts were so prevalent in the eastern half of the United States that, when their white blossoms fell in the spring, the hillsides looked like they were covered in snow; in the fall, their sweet, starchy nuts served as a free, abundant harvest. At Australia’s Sea Simulator aquarium, resurrection scientists are working on coral, which faces an existential threat from the rapid warming and acidifying of ocean waters.

Read the full story: The New Yorker: The Woolly Mammoth Lumbers Back Into View

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

January is shaping up to be an exciting month for the moon.

Nearly 50 years after the Apollo 11 mission put people on our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time, China’s Chang’e-4 mission marked another lunar milestone Thursday: visiting the far side of the moon.

So far, all lunar missions have landed on the moon’s near-side. According to Chinese state media, Chang’e-4 (the latest in a series of Chinese lunar missions) targeted the side that’s always out of Earth view due tidal locking.

What the far side of the moon looks like wasn’t known to us until it was photographed by the Soviet Luna 3 mission in 1959.

China’s latest mission (which includes a lander and a rover) is slated to do some interesting research. According to The New York Times:

“The instruments will probe the structure of the rocks beneath the spacecraft and study the effects of the solar wind striking the lunar surface. Chang’e-4 will also test the ability of making radio astronomy observations from the far side of the moon, without the effects of noise and interference from Earth.

“According to the Xinhua news agency, Chang’e-4 is also carrying an intriguing biology experiment to see if plant seeds will germinate and silkworm eggs will hatch in the moon’s low gravity.”

Both Israel and India are planning additional lunar missions in 2019. And China is readying another Chang’e mission, which ultimately could return lunar samples from the moon’s surface back to Earth.

Read the full story: Rocket Launches, Trips to the Moon and More Space and Astronomy Events in 2019

China’s Moon Landing: ‘New Chapter in Humanity’s Exploration of the Moon’

Note: This post was updated at 8:00 AM ET.

(Image Credit: NASA/NOAA)

A powerful purple protein (pictured above) that could help cure certain types of blindness has made its way from a tiny Connecticut laboratory all the way up to the International Space Station.

That protein is a light-activated molecule with a fancy name: bacteriorhodopsin. And Nicole Wagner and Jordan Greco, with the Farmington-based company LambdaVision, use it a lot.

The pair said bacteriorhodopsin is so light-sensitive their hope is to, one day, implant it into human eyeballs. The thought is the protein could be used to replace cells that die because of diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

“We’ve, sort of, re-created those cells that have died,” Wagner said, citing research on bacteriorhodopsin by UConn Professor Emeritus Robert Birge, the company’s founder.

To recreate the cells, LambdaVision builds its organic implants by layering the protein onto a film and dipping it over and over into a series of solutions.

It’s a process that works best when those solutions are uniform, but gravity can mess that up.

“The solutions can sediment,” Wagner said. “You can think of this as, almost, a lake. You’re going to see a lot of sand and particles at the bottom of the lake … in microgravity, you get a much more homogeneous solution.”

To test that, LambdaVision secured a spot for their experiment aboard the International Space Station, using funding from the ISS National Lab and Boeing.

(Above: Retinal implants are built layer-by-layer in a lab. The hope is that implants built in low-Earth orbit will be more effective and easier to produce.)

They also partnered with Space Tango, a research manufacturing firm, which built a small cube to automate and house the experiment, which the ISS astronauts will run.

It launched in December and retinal implants are now being built in orbit.

The hope is “to have the ability to generate retinal implants that are higher quality. That are more stable and have better performance,” Greco said. “And [to] have a better understanding of what the effects of gravity [are] on our manufacturing process.”

(Above: Jordan Greco, left, and Nicole Wagner at LambdaVision’s lab in Farmington. The pair now have an experiment in orbit on the International Space Station.)

The pair say the samples should make their way back to Connecticut after returning to Earth mid-January.

“These, in particular, will stay here in Farmington. We’ll run a series of tests,” Greco said. “To understand the quality and the homogeneity of those films and compare those to what we can manufacture in our labs.”

Greco and Wagner say their research is still very early-stage. They hope to be in clinical trials in the next two years.

But for now, the hope is an experiment cast among the stars could, eventually, help some of us down here on Earth see those stars a little better.

(Image Credit: Patrick Skahill, Connecticut Public Radio)

Virgin Galactic successfully flew into suborbital space on Thursday, Dec. 13, bringing billionaire Richard Branson’s dream of creating a space tourism industry one step closer.

As The Washington Post reports:

Though it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch of a spacecraft from United States soil with humans on board to reach the edge of space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. And it gave Virgin Galactic an edge in the race for human spaceflight, as a number of companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, work to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans.

The flight carried two pilots more than 50 miles in the air Thursday morning.

Read the full story: Washington Post, “Virgin Galactic reaches space and is one step closer to space tourism”

(Image Credit/Caption: Virgin Galactic / VSS Unity takes to the skies for her Third Powered Test Flight on July 26)

Researchers in Puerto Rico say hurricanes Irma and María made long-lasting and ongoing impacts to forest and coastal ecosystems.

For decades, researchers have been studying the rainforest of Puerto Rico’s Luquillo Mountains.  

Post Irma and María, researchers took a closer look at what’s flowing through the waters there, taking stream chemistry readings every fifteen minutes. The goal was to understand how the storms changed what’s pouring into the water and how that’s impacting the forest and the coast.

“We have a complete switch in the behavior of nitrate after these major hurricanes pass through our study site,” said Bill McDowell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, who works on the project.

McDowell said a lot of those nitrates, which are essential for plant growth, came from downed leaves and branches. That helped lead to more nitrate in the water and less in the forest.

“We can think of it as a fundamental change in the way materials are moving through the system. And the control mechanisms that kept nitrate concentration relatively stable in the past, have been disrupted or destroyed by the hurricanes,” McDowell said.

McDowell said the next step is to monitor how those nitrogen losses impact forest recovery and whether more nitrogen flowing into coastal waters will cause die-offs of coral and other sea life.

The research was presented at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

(Image Credit: Ryan Caron King, Connecticut Public Radio)

The latest national climate assessment says forests play a key role in keeping our air clean.

According to the report, America’s forests stored the equivalent of 11 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions over a 25 year period.

That’s because when trees breathe they suck up carbon dioxide, release oxygen, and store that leftover carbon in their trunks.

But how scientists determine the amount of carbon stored in a tree is a question open for debate.

When Bob Marra (pictured above) goes into the woods, he takes a tool with him. It’s a hammer – his magic sonic hammer.

“It’s called a sonic hammer. But I call it the ‘magic’ sonic hammer, just because it looks kind of cool,” Marra said.

Marra is a biologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. While the hammer isn’t magical, it did do something pretty cool: help us look inside a tree.

To do that, Marra hammered nails into the trunk of a sugar maple in northwest Connecticut, girdling the tree with sensors. Then, he circled and tapped on each nail. Each tap was recorded by a computer.

(Pictured above: The “magic” sonic hammer. Marra uses it to measure how fast sound waves travel through the tree’s trunk.)

Marra’s recording sound waves. Measuring how fast sound travels from the nail he hits, to all the other nails around the tree.

It’s called “sonic tomography.” Think of it like a CAT scan for trees. A way to peer inside a trunk without drilling to see if a tree is rotting – or solid wood.

“The denser the wood, the faster the sound waves,” Marra said.

Dense wood is really good at storing carbon. But if a tree is less dense inside, that could indicate decay. And also, that the tree might not be as good at storing carbon as we think.

Using a grant from the National Science Foundation, Marra tested his tomography idea — scanning around 70 trees in northwest Connecticut.

He found dozens were rotting inside, even ones that on the outside, looked good.

“What’s going on inside of these trees, is kind of hidden to us, for the most part,” Marra said. “Trees that, otherwise, look to be perfectly fine and you would have no reason to think otherwise, can have internal decay taking place.”

Marra said that’s an important consideration – especially when it comes to carbon storage or “sequestration.”

“If we’re going to look to forests as a way to sequester carbon, we should develop much more accurate estimates of how much carbon is actually sequestered.”

(In addition to sonic tomographs, Marra also did electrical resistance tomography (pictured above), measuring how well electricity moves through the tree. Electricity moves well through moisture, indicating possible internal decay.)

That’s because there are whole markets based on this.

Take, for example, California. Its aggressive pollution regulations have fostered an expansive cap-and-trade program. California polluters can offset emissions by buying up carbon credits. And landowners across America can profit by “proving” their forest is really good at storing atmospheric carbon.

Rajinder Sahota is with the California Air Resources Board, which oversees the program. She explained the process.

“What you do, is you have a measurement at the beginning of that time period that says, ‘here’s how much is in my forest,’” Sahota said.

Then, through audits, landowners prove their land, over time, can store carbon in a way that’s better than business as usual.

“Here’s how my forest looks relative to what is the common amount of stored carbon,” Sahota said. “And here’s how much, if I undertake some activities, I can increase that carbon storage in my forest.”

But measuring all that? Well, here’s where it gets tricky.

(Marra, pictured above, and his team, performed tomographs on trees in northwest Connecticut.)

“You look at any tree. Especially a hardwood tree. You look at its shape. That’s really complex,” said Christopher Woodall, a researcher with the U.S Forest Service.

Woodall’s equations are used by California to calculate stored carbon.

“You estimate the volume. And then you got to figure out the biomass within that volume,” Woodall said. “And then, turn that into an estimate of carbon.”

To do that, foresters don’t go out and look at every tree. Instead, they sample. Measuring a variety of trees and plugging those numbers into a complex model.

But forestry science is evolving. Woodall has since published work saying the equations need to be improved. In part, because new technologies are making biomass estimates more efficient and precise.

“I think we’re not too far away from not necessarily sampling trees in the U.S., but actually having a true census. Eventually, with a combination of satellites … and with drones and laser scanning, we’re headed to the point where we might be able to know something about every tree in the U.S.,” Woodall said.

He said that could happen soon or in 50 years. But for now, scientists are taking baby steps, trying to assess the role of forests in climate change. Because, as Woodall said, it’s too important to ignore.

(Image/Text Credit: Patrick Skahill, Connecticut Public Radio)

Nearly 60 percent of Connecticut is forest. But the state is also one of the most densely-populated in the country. And now, a new report says that provides unique opportunities for animals and people to co-exist.

Whether you live, work, or play in a city, increasingly, you’re likely to see some really cool birds.

“For example, peregrine falcon used to be wiped out from this area. And it used to be a huge deal to see a peregrine falcon,” said Patrick Comins, executive director for the Connecticut Audubon Society.

Comins’ group just issued its annual “State of the Birds” report.

“I remember when I was growing up - it was almost this mythical beast. They’re the fastest animal on earth.,” Comins said. “Today, peregrine falcons are found nesting in Hartford, New Haven, Waterbury and Bridgeport.”

Bald eagles are returning to Connecticut in record numbers. And ospreys, once almost eliminated from Connecticut, have returned to cities and urban harbors.

For these trends to continue, Comins said cities and the federal government need to step up.

His organization’s report urges Congress pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a $1.3 billion proposal, which has languished over the years.

If approved, it would inject millions into state wildlife efforts through fees that are already collected from energy suppliers drilling in federal waters.

In 2016, Connecticut received around $482,000 from the federal government for implementation of its state wildlife plan, according to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

If the Act were passed, the state would receive more than $12 million annually. “It would be a total game changer,” Comins said.

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Julian Hough, Connecticut Audubon)

“He [Jiankui] stunned the scientists just as they were gathering for the historic meeting with his claim, which he outlined in a series of YouTube videos, bypassing scientific norms of first subjecting his experiment to scientific scrutiny by other scientists.

“’First, I must apologize that this result was leaked unexpectedly,’ He told some 700 attendees. ‘This study has been submitted to a scientific journal for review.’

“He faced a skeptical, incensed audience at the Second International Summit On Human Genome Editing, which was organized to try to reach a global consensus on whether, how and when it might be permissible to create children from genetically altered human embryos.

“In yet another unsettling revelation, He acknowledged ‘there is another potential pregnancy’ involving a gene-edited embryo, but that it is still at an early stage.”

Read the full story NPR: “Facing Backlash, Chinese Scientist Defends Gene-Editing Research On Babies”

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / “Lulu and Nana” / Text Credit: NPR)

newyorker:

Here’s what’s supposed to happen when you fall asleep. Your body temperature falls, even as your feet and hands warm up—the temperature changes likely help the circadian clocks throughout your body to synchronize. Melatonin courses through your system—that tells your brain it’s time to quiet down. Your blood pressure falls and your heart rate slows. Your breathing evens out. You drift off to sleep.

That, at least, is the ideal. But going to sleep isn’t always a simple process, and it seems to have grown more problematic in recent years, as I learned through a series of conversations with some of the world’s leading sleep experts.

Read the full story, “Why Can’t We Fall Asleep?” here.

“NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five year search, during which every available detail of more than 60 candidate locations on the Red Planet was scrutinized and debated by the mission team and the planetary science community.

“The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA’s next step in exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions – and past microbial life – but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet’s surface. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.”

Read the full news release: “NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover”

(Image Credits: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/Brown University /  Text Credit: NASA)

Dunbar said over the years, scientists have developed computer programs, cataloguing lots of echolocation calls. Think of it like a dictionary for “bat speak.”    

“It’s a library of sorts. And so we can plug in our recordings of an echolocation call. And the software will match that with the known and try to match the species together,” Dunbar said.

From that, you can learn a lot about bats.

“Based on the types of calls, we can figure out what exactly are they doing in those areas?” Dunbar said. “How are they using that habitat?”

Read the full story: WNPR, “What Secrets Are Hidden Inside The Call Of A Bat?”

(Image Credit: Ann Froschauer/USFWS)

“Researchers say they have identified the two genes primarily responsible for antler regeneration in one species, fallow deer. The study, reported Tuesday in the Journal of Stem Cell Research and Therapy, notes that these genes are also found in humans, potentially opening new avenues of research into bone trauma and diseases. Researchers say they have identified the two genes primarily responsible for antler regeneration in one species, fallow deer. The study, reported Tuesday in the Journal of Stem Cell Research and Therapy, notes that these genes are also found in humans, potentially opening new avenues of research into bone trauma and diseases.”

Read the full story: New York Times, “Deer Antlers Couldn’t Grow So Fast Without These Genes”

(Image Caption/Credit: The red deer (Cervus elaphus), Wikimedia Commons)

“No fungi means no life. The fate of the Earth’s climate literally hangs by threads produced by fungi. These ultra-fine filaments of cells help forests store climate-changing carbon in the ground. The complex process is not well understood by scientists, who estimate there are as many as 3.8 million species of fungi, but so far they’ve identified just 120,000.

“’Six lifetimes wouldn’t be enough to explore the kingdom of fungi because there are so many species of fungi and so few people studying them,’ Price says.”

Read the full story: WBUR , Lowly In Stature, Fungi Play A Big Role In Regulating The Climate

(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Text Credit: Bruce Gellerman, WBUR)

A federal judge in Connecticut has dismissed a lawsuit challenging a legislative raid of money set aside to make homes and businesses in the state more energy efficient. It’s a decision viewed as a setback for environmentalists and energy contractors in the state. 

In a decision released Thursday, a federal judge said the state is not limited in how it spends the energy efficiency money, just how it collects it.

The judge also ruled any “implied” understanding for how the money should be spent only goes so far as the legislature deems fit, under current law.

Read the full story: Connecticut Public Radio: Federal Judge Tosses Out Lawsuit Challenging Last-Minute Efficiency Fund Cuts 

(Image Credit: sagesolar, Creative Commons)

Old mattresses are bulky and hard to move. They can also be a pain to throw out. But a program aimed at recycling those old mattresses and boxsprings appears to be filling a much-needed void in the state.

The Mattress Recycling Council, the group running the state’s recycling program, said in its latest annual report that it collected more than 180,000 mattresses last year.

“That equates to nearly 3,000 tons of material,” said Amanda Wall, who runs the MRC’s marketing and communications. “We are above … what we’ve done in previous years.”

Average numbers are up to about 15,000 mattresses recycled per month, according to the report.

The recycling program is funded through a small surcharge when you buy a mattress or box spring.

Since its beginning in Connecticut about four years ago, the Mattress Recycling Program has diverted almost half a million mattresses from the state’s trash, Wall said.

To find a spot to recycle an old mattress or boxspring, visit ByeByeMattress.com.

(Image Credit: Creative Commons / Dean Hochman)