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Clues to COVID-19 Brain Fog | The Milky Way’s Chaotic Heart
MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE s FEBRUARY 26, 2022
THE DIGITAL
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VOL. 201 | NO. 4
Features
The Future of Computing
16
COVER STORY Computers have now connected
most of the people on the planet. How much better
can the machines get and what are the ethical
challenges going forward? By Matthew Hutson
Look to the Outliers
24
By harnessing the wisdom of those who have
succeeded against the odds — the “positive
deviants” — researchers hope to help people and
communities around the world make changes for
24
the better. By Sujata Gupta
News
6 Frogs can regrow working AI points to prime places 12 In a first, orcas were
legs with the help of a new in Antarctica to search spotted killing and eating
chemical treatment for meteorites an adult blue whale
7 A faulty immune 9 Satellites have located Male elephant seals risk
response may explain many of the world’s death to eat and grow as
persistent brain fog after “ultra-emitters” of large as possible. After all,
a COVID-19 infection methane only the biggest will mate 4
8 By studying social 10 The James Webb Space 13 Vinegar eels wiggle and
interactions, AI can pick Telescope has reached swarm in sync Departments
GES PLUS omuotb pileeo pphleo inne a dnaotnaysemtiszed iNtso fwin walh daets?tination. 14 Upircbkainng w uipld gliufet mmiacyro bbee s 2 EDITOR’S NOTE
A
M 4 NOTEBOOK
Y I from people
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AJA the arrival of farming 28 REVIEWS & PREVIEWS
22; From Data to Quanta
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DS 2 15 News in Brief corrects misconceptions
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RE 30 FEEDBACK
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YSI 32 SCIENCE VISUALIZED
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F
www.sciencenews.org | February 26, 2022 1
EDITOR’S NOTE
Computing has changed PUBLISHER Maya Ajmera
EDITOR IN CHIEF Nancy Shute
EDITORIAL
everything. What next? EDITOR, SPECIAL PROJECTS Elizabeth Quill
NEWS DIRECTOR Macon Morehouse
FEATURES EDITOR Cori Vanchieri
MANAGING EDITOR, MAGAZINE Erin Wayman
As I write this, my laptop has way too many open tabs. A DEPUTY NEWS EDITOR Emily DeMarco
Zoom meeting is about to start, and I’m getting pinged in AASsShOleCyI AYTeEa gNeErWS EDITORS Christopher Crockett,
the magazine production channel on Slack. The managing AASSSSOOCCIIAATTEE DEDIGITITOARL CEaDsITsiOeR M Haerlteinn Thompson
editor is asking if I can do a final approval on a news page. AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Mike Denison
CIVIC SCIENCE FELLOW Martina G. Efeyini
When done, I’ll either mark it as “clean” on a Google Sheet ASTRONOMY Lisa Grossman
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES Bruce Bower
or dive into InCopy to generate a corrected pdf and save it to Dropbox. BIOMEDICAL Aimee Cunningham
EARTH AND CLIMATE Carolyn Gramling
While the paragraph above makes perfect sense to Present Day Me, the me LIFE SCIENCES Susan Milius
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, SENIOR WRITER Tina Hesman Saey
of the past would have no idea what’s going on. Laptop? Is that some sort of NEUROSCIENCE, SENIOR WRITER Laura Sanders
PHYSICS, SENIOR WRITER Emily Conover
clipboard? SOCIAL SCIENCES Sujata Gupta
STAFF WRITERS Erin Garcia de Jesús, Nikk Ogasa
In this issue, as part of our ongoing Century of Science project, we dig deep EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Aina Abell
SCIENCE WRITER INTERN Anna Gibbs
into how the extraordinary advances in computing over the last 100 years have CONTRIBUTING CORRESPONDENTS
Laura Beil, Tom Siegfried, Alexandra Witze
transformed our lives, and we ponder implications for the future (Page 16).
DESIGN
Who gets to decide how much control algorithms have over our lives? Will arti- CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER Stephen Egts
ficial intelligence learn how to really think like humans? What would ethical AI ADRESTI GDNIR DECIRTEOCRT OTrRa Ecerien T Oibtbwiettlls
look like? And can we keep the robots from killing us? ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR Chang Won Chang
SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS
That last question may sound hypothetical, but it’s not. As freelance sci- EDITOR Janet Raloff
ence and technology writer Matthew Hutson reports, lethal autonomous AMSASNISATGAINNTG E EDDIITTOORR M Saarraiah T Zeimelminisnkgi
drones able to attack without human intervention already exist. And though WEB PRODUCER Lillian Steenblik Hwang
SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE
killer drones may be the most dystopian vision of a future controlled by AI, PRESIDENT AND CEO Maya Ajmera
software is already making decisions about our lives every day, from the CHIEF OF STAFF Rachel Goldman Alper
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Kathlene Collins
advertisements we see on Facebook to influencing who gets denied parole CHIEF PROGRAM OFFICER Michele Glidden
CHIEF, EVENTS AND OPERATIONS Cait Goldberg
from prison. CCHHIIEEFF CAODMVAMNUCNEIMCEANTITO ONFSF OICFEFRIC BErRu Gcea yBl.e M Kaaknosuasg or
Even something as basic to human life as our social interactions can be CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER James C. Moore
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Dan Reznikov
used by AI to identify individuals within supposedly anonymized data, as BOARD OF TRUSTEES
staff writer Nikk Ogasa reports on Page 8. Researchers taught an artificial CHAIR Mary Sue Coleman
VICE CHAIR Martin Chalfie TREASURER Hayley Bay Barna
neural network to identify patterns in the date, time, direction and duration SECRETARY Christine Burton AT LARGE Thomas F. Rosenbaum
MEMBERS Craig R. Barrett, Adam Bly, Lance R. Collins,
of weekly mobile phone calls and texts in a large anonymized dataset. The AI Mariette DiChristina, Tessa M. Hill, Charles McCabe,
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NOTEBOOK
Biologist Kristine Bohmann tests a vacuum’s ability
to trap airborne DNA, near a sloth in captivity. The
method could help track species in the wild.
Excerpt from the
February 26, 1972
issue of Science News
50 YEARS AGO
The uncertainty
of banking sperm
Many men c ontemplating
vasectomies have been
THE SCIENCE LIFE
depositing a quantity of
Scientists vacuum animal DNA out of thin air
their semen with sperm
banks where, for a fee, it is On a dreary day in December 2020, tube attached to the machine. Her
frozen and stored.… There Elizabeth Clare, an ecologist at York m ission: Suck animal DNA out of the air.
is wide disagreement on U niversity in Toronto, strolled through the The ability to sniff out animals’ air-
the length of time that Hamerton Zoo Park in England wielding borne genetic material has been on
sperm may be frozen and a small vacuum pump. She paused outside s cientists’ wish list for over a decade.
then thawed and used suc- animal enclosures, holding aloft a f lexible DNA collected from water has been
cessfully to impregnate
a woman, with estimates
ranging from only 16 months HOW BIZARRE
to as much as 10 years. ‘Everlasting’ bubbles can linger for a long time
UPDATE: The ability to freeze If you hate having your bubble burst, you’ll love these “everlasting” bubbles. While
sperm has helped make parent- soap bubbles are known for their fragile constitutions, the new bubbles can stick
hood possible for millions of around for over a year before they pop, physicist Michael Baudoin of the University
people, including infertile or of Lille in France and colleagues report January 18 in Physical Review Fluids.
same-sex couples and people The bubbles are made with water, plastic microparticles and glycerol. That trio of
who have undergone cancer ingredients staves off factors that nor-
treatment (SN: 6/19/21, p. 16). mally hasten a soap bubble’s death.
Sperm-freezing methods have In soap bubbles, gravity pulls liquid
improved since the 1970s, to the bottom, leaving a thin film on the 22
0
and studies have shown that top that can easily rupture (SN: 1/21/17, DS 2
frozen sperm can remain p. 32). Evaporation also saps soap bub- W FLUI
viable for many years, even bles’ stamina. In everlasting bubbles, VIE
decades. The rate of live births plastic specks cling to water, maintain- AL RE
C
from sperm frozen for up to ing the film’s thickness. Meanwhile, YSI
H
15 years at a sperm bank in glycerol absorbs moisture from the air, ALP/
China was similar to rates from counteracting evaporation. ET X
U
sperm stored for much shorter When the bubbles didn’t rupture O
R
periods, scientists reported in after days, “we were really astonished,” X; A.
DI
2019. In 2013, U.S. researchers Baudoin says. So his team waited to N
E
B
reported the birth of healthy see how long the bubbles would last. AN
TI
twins who were conceived us- Researchers created an “everlasting” bubble One bubble persisted 465 days before RIS
ing sperm that had been frozen (Tshheo wbunb) bthlea,t w lahsitcehd hfoadr 4a6 r5a ddiauyss o bfe afbooreu tp opping. bursting. It turned green just before its OP: CH
for about 40 years. 3.7 millimeters, got its stamina from glycerol demise, hinting that microbes set up M T
and plastic particles. shop, causing it to pop. — Emily Conover RO
F
4 SCIENCE NEWS | February 26, 2022
used to track aquatic critters such as mammals and birds from surrounding
salmon and sharks. Scientists knew exhibits, as well as fish used as food.
they could use environmental DNA, At the Hamerton Zoo, Clare’s team
or eDNA, in the air to monitor land- identified 25 species, including tar-
based species — if only they could trap geted zoo residents and unexpected
it. Now, researchers have done just that ones. In the dingo enclosure, the team
by using vacuums, two groups report in detected DNA from meerkats (Suricata
the Feb. 7 Current Biology. suricatta) that live 245 meters away.
At the zoo, Clare and colleagues ran Zoo outsiders also turned up in each
the vacuum for half-hour sessions in team’s results. Clare’s team detected
and around animal enclosures, collect- the European hedgehog (Erinaceus
ing 72 samples from 20 sites. Once back europaeus) while Bohmann’s group
Dingoes inspect the thin tube of a vacuum that
at the lab, the team analyzed material ecologist Elizabeth Clare uses to trap eDNA. picked up mice and domesticated dogs.
caught in the vacuum’s filter. Both teams caught whiffs of human
Meanwhile, a team at the University zoos, the teams could cross-reference DNA too.
of Copenhagen was chasing the same the captured eDNA with animals listed Sucking eDNA from the air could
idea. Biologist Kristine Bohmann and in exhibits. That allowed the scientists be a noninvasive way to identify
colleagues sought to trap airborne to confirm sources of the eDNA and see where endangered species have been,
eDNA at the Copenhagen Zoo using a how far it traveled between enclosures. B ohmann says. But this technology has
vacuum, as well as small fans similar to Bohmann’s team identified 49 species yet to be tested in the wild.
the ones that cool computers. in the Copenhagen Zoo, including ani- Just as aquatic eDNA has progressed
Both teams used a zoo for its roster of mals living in the sampled enclosures, over the last decade, so too will airborne
animals because they were still testing such as okapis (Okapia johnstoni) and eDNA, Clare says. “I’m really looking
the technique. Air in the wild could host a Dumeril’s ground boa (A crantophis forward to seeing other people go out
eDNA from unpredictable places, but at dumerili). The team also picked up on and use the technique.” — Jude Coleman
SCIENCE STATS Gold and silver
tubes that are
Drug resistance is a prolific killer
more than
5,000 years old
Bacterial infections that don’t respond to treatment are a were probably
major cause of death around the world. used to drink
f lavored beer
In 2019, antimicrobial resistance caused an estimated
from a com-
1.27 million deaths, researchers report January 19 in the munal vessel,
Lancet. Globally, that translates to a rate of 16.4 deaths as shown in
this illustration,
per 100,000 people. More than twice as many people died
scientists say.
from untreatable bacterial infections that year than from
malaria, the fifth leading cause of death worldwide.
The estimate is based on an analysis of hospital, sur- THE –EST
veillance and other sources of data from 204 countries Oldest known straws siphoned beer
and territories by an international group of research-
ers called the Antimicrobial R esistance C ollaborators. Eight silver and gold tubes held in a Russian museum are
Resistance to two classes of antibiotics, beta-lactams the oldest surviving drinking straws, researchers say. People
(which include penicillins) and f luoroquinolones, was used the straws to drink beer from a communal vessel more
behind more than 70 percent of resistance-caused deaths. than 5,000 years ago, conclude archaeologist Viktor Trifonov
Those drugs are the first-line option for many bacterial of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and
ON infections. 1.27 colleagues. Excavations in Russia uncovered the tubes in a
WILS Among the bacteria burial mound containing three individuals from the Maikop
N
VI responsible were pathogens culture, which dates to between about 5,700 and 4,900 years
EL
E; K that commonly strike in ago (SN: 6/7/30, p. 367). Residue from the inside of one tube
R
A health care settings, such as contains remnants of barley, cereal and pollen from a lime
CL million
OP: E. E. coli and Staphylococcus The estimated number of deaths tree — potential ingredients of a flavored beer — the team
T aureus (SN: 10/29/16, p. 4). reports in the February Antiquity. Further work needs to
M caused by antibiotic-resistant
RO — Aimee Cunningham infections in 2019 confirm that the barley had been fermented. — Bruce Bower
F
www.sciencenews.org | February 26, 2022 5
News
how to convince them to do it again.” Murugan says. But frogs that received
Levin’s team amputated the right back the drugs grew longer legs with thicker
legs of 115 adult African clawed frogs bones than the frogs that had only the
(Xenopus laevis) at the knee. Roughly BioDome. These frogs also had more
one-third of those frogs received blood vessels and nerves. And com-
GENES & CELLS “BioDomes,” silicone sleeves that cover pared with the BioDome-only group,
Frogs regrow the wound. Another third of the frogs got frogs that got the drug mix showed
BioDomes that held a silk-based gel con- greater sensitivity to touch when their
amputated limbs taining five chemicals, including a growth limbs were lightly prodded. Frogs in
hormone, a nerve growth promoter and the control group grew spiky flaps —
One multidrug drug therapy
an anti-inflammatory substance. The basically stumps with no function — at
spurred growth of legs researchers removed the BioDomes the wound site.
after 24 hours. The remaining one-third “It’s actually remarkable that just a
BY CAROLYN WILKE of frogs acted as a control group and single treatment on one day can cause
The cells of adult frogs seem to remember didn’t receive any treatment before being all this change,” Murugan says.
how to regrow lost legs, and a new chemi- placed back in their tanks. This first attempt at using a chemical
cal kick starter helps the cells hop to it. In animals that received the drug cocktail to coax limb regrowth is “a great
Scientists have been seeking ways to cocktail, “around the four-month mark, start,” says John Barker, an orthopedic
spur the body to regrow limbs to help we started to see a slight difference researcher who recently retired from
people who have undergone an ampu- in the leg shape,” says team member Goethe University Frankfurt and was
tation (SN: 7/13/13, p. 14). Like adult Nirosha Murugan, a cancer biologist now not part of the work. With this approach,
humans, fully grown frogs have a lim- at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, he says, “there’s no end to what you
ited ability to replace lost body parts. Canada. “With time, that bud … started could try.”
But a new treatment — a sleeve that to take shape into a whole leg.” The team has moved on to similar
delivers a drug cocktail — jump-starts After 18 months, the frogs that received work in mice, using the same cocktail
and improves limb regeneration after the chemicals had regrown the limbs and new ones. Levin’s research also
amputation in frogs, researchers report and had nubs where toes would typically points to electricity’s role in shaping the
in the Jan. 28 Science Advances. grow. These amputees kicked, stood and growth of body parts, so the researchers
“The cells of the frog already know pushed off the walls of their tanks using are adding compounds to the cocktail
how to make frog legs,” having done their regrown legs, Levin says. that alter the electrical state of cells
so when the animal was a developing The BioDome alone promoted some (SN: 12/31/11, p. 5).
embryo, says Michael Levin, a develop- regeneration: The stiffness and pres- Scientists want to be able regrow
mental biologist at Tufts University in sure at the wound site seemed to create human limbs and organs someday.
Medford, Mass. “Our goal is to figure out conditions that spur some tissue growth, As with the frog legs, human bodies
know how to make hands, for example,
New legs Over 18 months, frogs grew new limbs after an amputation (amputation site is Barker says. Children under the age of
marked with dashed lines, left column). Some frogs received no treatment (one shown in top row) 10 or so can even regrow lost fingertips.
while other frogs got either a silicone sleeve called a BioDome that covered the injury for 24 hours
If such treatments could be developed
(middle row) or got both the BioDome and a drug cocktail for 24 hours (bottom row). Frogs in the
last group grew the longest limbs with the greatest bone density. They also developed legs with a for health care, Barker says, “instead of
paddlelike shape (yellow arrow) and toelike buds (blue arrow), unlike the other frogs (pink arrows). treating symptoms, you could literally
Regeneration period (months) cure a disease.” For instance, regener-
2.5 4 6 9 11 14 18 ated heart tissue could replace damaged
tissue to improve heart function.
Limbs, however, are more compli-
Control
cated because several types of tissue
2
2
must coordinate. And researchers lack 20
fundamental information on how bodies NCES
VA
form their parts. D
A
BioDome “We don’t understand how collec- NCE
tions of cells solve problems” to decide ALSCIE/
what to build and when to stop, Levin ET N
BioDome + drugs says. “Cracking regenerative medicine UGA
is going to require us to do much better UR
M
about understanding that.” s N.J.
6 SCIENCE NEWS | February 26, 2022
BODY & BRAIN
Clues to COVID-19 brain fog emerge
Lingering neurological effects blamed on faulty immune response
BY LAURA SANDERS 13 people who had lasting symptoms
A tussle with COVID-19 can leave peo- had abnormalities in their fluid, some of
ple’s brains fuzzy. SARS-CoV-2, the virus which point to immune system reactions.
behind COVID-19, doesn’t usually travel So far, the analyses can’t pinpoint the
into the brain directly. But the immune precise changes that may be important.
system’s response to even a mild case can Possible suspects are antibodies that can
affect the brain, new preliminary stud- mistakenly attack key proteins in the
ies suggest. These reverberating effects brain, the researchers say.
may lead to fatigue, trouble thinking, The results, published January 19
Immune cells in the brain called microglia
difficulty remembering and even pain in Annals of Clinical and Translational
(one illustrated) seem to be involved in
months after the infection is gone. Neurology, raise many questions but cognitive troubles that can appear after
It’s not a new idea. Immune systems show that there’s a true difference in the a viral infection.
gone awry have been implicated in cog- cerebrospinal fluid, Hellmuth says. “This
nitive problems that come with other is a very small study, but the data suggest fluid. One protein in particular, called
viral infections such as HIV and influ- that there’s a real biological basis in these CCL11, has been tied to cognitive trou-
enza; with disorders such as myalgic COVID-related cognitive changes,” she ble in people that comes with age and to
encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue says. “These are not just people who are certain psychiatric conditions. People
syndrome, or ME/CFS; and even with stressed out.” with lingering neurological symptoms of
chemotherapy. More hints to what’s causing the brain COVID-19 also had more CCL11 in their
What’s different with COVID-19 is the troubles come from studies of mice and blood plasma than people who didn’t have
scope of the problem. Millions of people people. Those results, which have not those symptoms, the researchers found.
have been infected during this pandemic yet been peer-reviewed, were posted All of these results come with caveats,
with a new viral foe, says neurologist January 10 at bioRxiv.org. By analyzing says Svetlana Blitshteyn, a neurologist at
Avindra Nath of the National Institutes human tissue and mice infected with the University at Buffalo Jacobs School
of Health in Bethesda, Md. “We are now SARS-CoV-2, researchers showed that of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
faced with a public health crisis,” he says. immune cells called microglia are over- in New York. “They’re small studies,
To figure out ways to treat people for active in the brain. When microglia shift and obviously they are not definitive,”
lingering symptoms, scientists are racing into high gear, they can damage tissue. she says, “but the preliminary evidence
to determine what’s causing them (SN: Toxic chemotherapy can cause the speaks for itself.” It’s becoming clearer
6/5/21, p. 10). Having studied the effects same kind of microglia overactivity, now that the brain fog that comes after
of HIV on the brain, cognitive neurolo- says study coauthor Michelle Monje, an infection may be “rooted in neuro-
gist Joanna Hellmuth of the University a neurologist at Stanford University. inflammation,” she says.
of California, San Francisco had a head “When the reports started coming out Identifying the cause of the neurological
start. She quickly noted similarities in the about the frequency of persistent cog- problems may reveal a treatment. Labo-
neurological symptoms of HIV and nitive symptoms associated with long ratory studies have pointed to potential
COVID-19. The infections paint “the COVID, I noted striking similarities therapies that can interrupt this immune
same exact clinical picture,” she says. between ’chemo fog’ and ‘COVID fog,’ system overreaction, particularly for
GES HIV-related cognitive problems have and decided we needed to study this.” brain inflammation caused by chemo,
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Y I been linked to immune activation. Microglia were more active in the Monje says. She and colleagues are study-
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ET “Maybe the same thing is happening in brains of mice infected with SARS-CoV-2 ing whether those same treatments might
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RY/ COVID,” Hellmuth says. than in uninfected mice. Researchers saw help with COVID-19.
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O LIB She and colleagues looked for differ- a similar pattern in postmortem brain Tragic as the pandemic is, it may lead to
OT ences in the fluid that surrounds the tissue from nine people who died with something good, says Nath, who is setting
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E P brain and spinal cord in 13 people who COVID-19. It’s not clear how well these up a small clinical trial to study possible
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EN had lingering cognitive symptoms from samples represent the majority of people long COVID treatments. Syndromes such
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R/S COVID-19 and four people who had no who have experienced mild COVID-19 as ME/CFS that researchers struggle to
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RT cognitive symptoms. The four people and are living with the aftereffects. understand “might benefit from what we
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GA without cognitive symptoms had nor- Infected mice also had higher levels of learn here from long COVID,” he says. “We
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UA mal cerebrospinal fluid. But 10 of the immune proteins in their cerebrospinal might be able to develop treatments.” s
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www.sciencenews.org | February 26, 2022 7
NEWS
MATH & TECHNOLOGY who initiated the communication.
AI picks people out of anonymous data Before training, each user’s interac-
tion data had been organized into webs
Weekly mobile phone interactions form unique signatures consisting of nodes representing the user
and their contacts. Connecting each pair
BY NIKK OGASA Under some government regulations, of nodes were strings that contained all
How you interact with a crowd may help companies that collect information about available information about the calls and
you stick out from it, at least to artificial people’s daily interactions can share texts between the two individuals. Once
intelligence. or sell this data without user consent. trained to recognize similarly structured
When fed details about an individual’s The catch is that the data must be anon- webs, the AI was shown the web of a
mobile phone interactions, plus contacts’ ymized. The new study shows that this known person and set loose to search a
interactions, AI picked the target out of standard can’t be met by simply giving fresh week of anonymized data for the
more than 40,000 anonymous mobile users pseudonyms, says Yves-Alexandre web that bore the closest resemblance.
phone service subscribers more than half de Montjoye, a computational privacy The AI tied 14.7 percent of individuals
the time. The finding, reported January 25 researcher at Imperial College London. to their anonymized selves when shown
in Nature Communications, suggests De Montjoye and colleagues taught webs that had info about a target’s phone
humans socialize in ways that can be used an artificial neural network — an AI that interactions that occurred one week after
to ID people in anonymized datasets. attempts to mimic the neural circuitry of the latest records in the anonymized
It’s no surprise that people tend to a brain — to recognize patterns in people’s dataset. But the AI identified 52.4 per-
remain within established social circles weekly calls and texts. The team trained cent of people when given info about
and that these interactions form a sta- the AI with data from an unidentified both the target’s interactions and those
ble pattern, says Jaideep Srivastava, a mobile phone service that detailed 43,606 of contacts. When armed with such data
computer scientist at the University of subscribers’ interactions over 14 weeks. collected 20 weeks after the anonymized
Minnesota in Minneapolis. “But the fact The data included each interaction’s date, dataset, the AI still ID’d users 24.3 percent
that you can use that pattern to identify time, duration, type (call or text), the of the time, suggesting social behavior
the individual, that part is surprising.” pseudonyms of the involved parties and remains identifiable over long periods. s
ATOM & COSMOS Stranding zones can form under the right combination of
Computers hunt for meteorites geographical and climatological conditions. When a creeping
ice sheet gets bent upward by a hidden mountain or rise, me-
The search for meteorites has some new leads. A machine- teorites embedded in the ice are carried toward the surface.
learning algorithm has identified over 600 potential hot spots So far, stranding zones have been found by luck. Satellites
in Antarctica that may be home to a bounty of the space help, but poring through their images is time-consuming, and D
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rocks, researchers report in the Jan. 28 Science Advances. field reconnaissance is costly. So Tollenaar and colleagues E FI
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Antarctica is the best place to find meteorites, says glaciol- turned to computers to find these zones more quickly. The N I
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ogist Veronica Tollenaar of the Université libre de Bruxelles in team trained a machine-learning algorithm with data on the NS
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Belgium. Not only are the dark specks starkly visible against ice’s velocity and thickness, surface temperatures, the shape E
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the white ice, but quirks of the ice sheet’s flow can also con- of the bedrock and known stranding zones. The algorithm N
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centrate meteorites in “stranding zones” (below, researchers identified 613 probable meteorite hot spots. The team plans O
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find a meteorite during a 2019–2020 expedition). to test this map in Antarctica next year. — Carolyn Gramling DI
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8 SCIENCE NEWS | February 26, 2022 Explore a map of potential meteorite hot spots in Antarctica at bit.ly/SN_MeteoriteMap