The Top Science News

Plus: you’re more of a climate skeptic than you think; the case against cooking with gas; and more. [View in browser](| [Join Nautilus]( Newsletter brought to you by: Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here.]( This Tuesday, your FREE member newsletter includes the week’s top science news, plus one full story, below, from The Porthole, our section for short sharp looks at science. Enjoy! DISCOVERIES The Top Science News This Week [How Working Remotely Can Help Mitigate Climate Change]( Switching from working onsite to working from home can reduce up to 58 percent of work’s carbon footprint. [PNAS→]( [North African Humid Periods Over the Past 800,000 Years]( How the world’s largest desert goes from wet to dry and back again. [Nature Communcations→]( [Positive Effects of Tree Diversity on Tropical Forest Restoration in a Field-Scale Experiment]( Why having a rich variety of forest trees matters for ecosystem health. [Science Advances→]( [Meaning from Movement and Stillness: Signatures of Coordination Dynamics Reveal Infant Agency]( Scientists capture a baby’s eureka moment. [PNAS→]( [The Ideal Gases to Look for as Signatures of Technological Alien Civilization]( Why life on Earth—and perhaps life elsewhere—avoids using these molecule compounds. [Scientific Reports→]( [Depression as a Disorder of Consciousness]( When depressed, people move from an ordinary wakeful consciousness and enter a state more akin to dreaming, or a psychedelic sort of state. [Forthcoming in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science→]( [No More Astronomy Photobombs? SpaceX Shows Off Starlink Satellite “Mirror Film”]( Newer versions of SpaceX’s internet satellites are much larger yet also much fainter. [PC Magazine→]( [Wiping Out the Dinosaurs Let Countless Flowers Bloom]( Just as mammals took advantage of the impact 66 million years ago, so did flowering plants. [The New York Times→]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [JOIN TODAY]( From The Porthole—short sharp looks at science ENVIRONMENT Bees Can’t Find Food in Dirty Air That means humans could go hungry, too. BY LINA ZELDOVICH When foraging for flowers, bees search for the familiar scents that blooms puff out into the air to attract them. Scientists call these little fragrant air pockets “odor plumes.” Once bees detect an odor plume, they start following it, flying from side to side to navigate to wherever the odor is strongest—scientists call this “casting”—until they land on a flower. “If you think of a flower, it’s basically acting as a message beacon,” says Ben Langford, an atmospheric scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, based in the United Kingdom, whose team studies how insects pollinate plants. “It’s sending out a signal to attract these pollinators.” But human pollution—in particular ground-level ozone—is messing with the odor plumes bees love, new research published in the journal Environmental Pollution shows. Ground-level ozone, which is different from ozone found in the stratosphere, is generally produced by photochemical reactions between two classes of air pollutants: nitrogen oxide gases (emitted by cars, factories, industrial furnaces, and boilers) and volatile organic compounds (released by chemical plants, gasoline pumps, oil-based paints, autobody shops, and print shops). Ozone pollution makes it much harder for bees to forage. The intricate relationship between flowering plants and their pollinators, including bees, has evolved over millennia, and is vital not only to all ecosystems, but also to human agriculture and crop production. An [estimated]( 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants and some 35 percent of the food crops humans grow depend on pollinators to produce harvests. Although bees aren’t the only pollinators, more than 3,500 species of bees help ensure humans have food on their plates. The odor plumes flowers emit are usually strong but short lived—and for a reason. A strong odor, which results from a high concentration of fragrant compounds, sends a powerful message to the bees. But as the plume drifts away from the flower, there’s no reason to send this signal anymore, as it would route the bees into the wrong direction. So the fragrant molecules quickly react with other compounds in the air and fall apart. “This is why plants generally tend to have more reactive compounds that make up their scent,” Langford says. “If they don’t react away, that background concentration of those chemicals will just build up and then the bees won’t be able to distinguish the plume from the background.” But in the presence of ozone, the plumes degrade much faster than they normally would. Langford’s team wanted to understand how much faster they degrade, and what impact that has on the bees’ ability to follow a scent. [Like the story? Join Nautilus today]( For their study, researchers trained the bees to recognize the odor blend of several aromatic compounds. After being exposed to the smell, the bees received a sugary reward, so they learned to associate that scent with food. Then researchers investigated how the presence of ozone affected their ability to follow that scent. Because ozone itself is damaging to bees, researchers couldn’t expose the insects to it directly. Instead, they first used a wind tunnel—a tube about 100 feet long—to learn how ozone changed the size and shape of odor plumes; they found that plumes degraded much faster on the edges than in the middle. Then they recreated the plumes in the corresponding concentrations in the lab (but without ozone) and watched how the bees fared following the scent they had memorized. “We wanted to separate the effect of degradation of the odor plume from any direct toxic effect,” says Langford. The research showed that ozone pollution makes it much harder for bees to forage. In fact, bees living in highly polluted areas could likely starve, exacerbating their other woes, such as Colony Collapse Disorder. First recognized in the early 2000s, Colony Collapse Disorder is a phenomenon in which the adult honeybees disappear from the hives, almost all at the same time, which leads to a population collapse. The only way to address the issue of contaminated odor plumes, Langford notes, is to reduce the amount of ozone in the air. It’s not just a matter of helping bees find food. It’s a matter of helping bees make food for us, too. Lead image: Apinan / Shutterstock More from The Porthole: • [You’re more of a climate skeptic than you think]( • [The case against cooking with gas]( P.S. NASA announced in a [new report]( that it found no evidence that Unidentified Aerial Phenomena have an extraterrestrial origin. But perhaps within a decade or so, researchers will find data suggesting ET exists. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, wrote that if ET exists, [we’ll have evidence confirming it by 2035.]( Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher [Back to school discount image]( BECOME A MEMBER Back to School Discount Nautilus tells the stories that connect the classroom to the broader worlds of art, science, and philosophy. Our unique brand of science journalism explores the bigger questions. The type of questions that inform late-night dorm room musings and faculty lounge debates. In anticipation of your return to the school, we’re offering you a 25% discount on an annual membership. Join Nautilus and read the stories that, we hope, inspire the conversations and connections you remember long after the classroom lectures have faded away. [JOIN NOW]( Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us?subject=&body=) your thoughts on today’s note. 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