The University of Illinois graduate student and his colleagues intentionally released mice onto New Zealand’s Saddle Island so they could study, in intricate detail, how invasions take place. To see how mice might overcome the Allee effect, MacKay’s team released the radio-collared mice onto Saddle Island, one pair at a time, over the course of a year. By comparing the introduced rodents’ behaviors to those of the island’s pre-eradication population, as well as those in the mainland population, the researchers were looking to discern whether mouse behavior is flexible enough to overcome the Allee effect.

It has been more than 65 years since James Watson and Francis Crick, working with Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins discovered that DNA – the basic chemical information code of all life forms – has a double helical structure that played an important role in its function. In a monumental achievement on this journey, scientists funded by NASA and led by the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in the US have synthesized a new stable version of DNA with eight base molecules, compared to the form containing four found on earth. This study is remarkable to me because it has proved that there is nothing particularly unique about the DNA found on Earth, and that there could be other stable forms in the universe that have different combinations of other molecules.

About eight to ten people were there now, hands flitting in the shadows, chatting away in Kata Kolok, the local sign language: Where is the next ceremony? A graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at the time, De Vos had come to Bengkala to be the first linguist to map Kata Kolok’s grammar and list all of its signs. So De Vos was sitting on her hands — deliberately not using signs from other languages — when she was in Bengkala.

A female Lone Star tick, or Amblyomma americanum.Image: Amanda Loftis, William Nicholson, Will Reeves, Chris Paddock (CDC)
One of the strangest side-effects of a tick bite—a new allergy to red meat—could be even easier to get than previously thought. So far, the tick most associated with red meat allergy in the U.S. has been the Lone Star tick. It’s almost certain, Commins said, that the odds of any single tick bite from a Lone Star or other tick causing the allergy are pretty low.

Scientists believe these blobs play a role in many of the processes of the deep Earth, including plate tectonics and volcanism. “It was very clear in those models from the get-go that at the bottom of Earth’s mantle, nearly halfway to the center, there were these huge zones where the waves traveled more slowly,” said Ed Garnero, professor of Earth and space exploration at Arizona State University. A group of researchers led by Linguo Yuan at Academia Sinica in Taiwan analyzed measurements from GPS stations across the globe over 16 years and found that the Earth tide wasn’t what they expected: It seemed to be off-kilter just above where the blobs were located.

Today, Collins is a critical puzzle piece in an ongoing study of how the human brain can change. “We’re looking at the entire remapping of the function of one hemisphere onto the other,” says Marlene Behrmann, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has been examining Collins’ brain for more than five years. They suggest that conducting brain surgeries in kids suffering seizures shouldn’t be viewed as the last available option, as it was for Collins.

In research announced on Wednesday by the University of California at Berkeley, a team of synthetic biologists modified brewer’s yeast to produce a range of cannabinoids, which are compounds in cannabis that affect the brain and body. To brew cannabinoids—the most famous of which are tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol, or THC and CBD—the operation looks much like a traditional brewery, says Jay Keasling, the Berkeley professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering who led the research. “Essentially what we’ve done is taken yeast, which would normally produce ethanol for beer or wine, and we put in it the gene for producing cannabinoids,” he says.

But in recent years, Strominger has clarified what supertranslations are, and his picture could have profound implications for our understanding of the vacuum and of black holes. Gravitation theorist Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University, in State College, whose work in the 1980s laid the groundwork for this new understanding of gravity’s long-range effects, calls Strominger’s connection between the physics of empty spacetime and the soft theorems of particle physics “seminal.” But in 2016, working with Hawking and Cambridge theorist Malcolm Perry, Strominger suggested that the vacuum of general relativity may provide a memory matrix that preserves this information in the universe, beyond the black hole’s demise.

Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on Macquarie Island, which lie halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.Photo: Keith Springer
Only a couple pilots have the expertise for this work, including Garden, who has done 27 bait drops since conservationists first attempted the strategy a few decades ago. Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on Macquarie Island, which lie halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.Photo: Keith Springer
The other mission threat is the weather. Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on Macquarie Island, which lie halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.Photo: Keith Springer
While he knows the job wouldn’t appeal to everyone, Garden has loved every mission he’s been on.

SAD lamps work — if you use them the right way

Light therapy, or phototherapy, was prevalent long before seasonal affective disorder was considered an actual affliction. Light boxes, or light therapy lamps, have become increasingly popular in recent years, especially in the US, and even among people who haven’t been officially diagnosed with SAD. Sharkey, the Brown University psychiatrist, said light therapy can be a very effective treatment for patients who have been diagnosed with SAD, adding that Hattar’s and Sanes’s respective studies were a huge breakthrough in understanding how SAD works.