SPONSORED BY  | | | | May 24, 2024: Grizzlies are coming back to Washington State, we've finally seen matter fall into a black hole, and how bird flu slipped past Texas dairy farmers. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | An artist's impression of ESA's ExoMars rover, Rosalind Franklin. ESA/ATG medialab | | | • Crows can count just as well as human toddlers. (How cool is that, Mr. Jones?) | 3 min read | | | • How bird flu slipped past high-tech Texas dairy farmers. | 8 min read | | | The last official sighting of a grizzly bear in Washington State was in 1996. After more than a hundred years of being hunted for fur and pushed out by development, the bears disappeared. And now, federal authorities are trying to push forward with a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the U.S. portion of the North Cascades Ecosystem. The first phase will relocate an initial group of 25 bears over a five- to 10-year span from other regions in the U.S. and British Columbia. The hope is to establish a new population of 200 grizzlies in the North Cascades within 60 to 100 years.
The pros: Humans and bears coexisted in the region for thousands of years, and the animals hold a strong cultural significance for the Indigenous people, such as the Upper Skagit Indians. Bears also play a strong role in the health of wilderness ecosystems: Bear scat disperses seeds across the landscape (often spreading important, threatened plant species). Their giant claws turn up and aerate soil when they dig for roots and rodents.
| | | The cons: Local residents worry that the bears will prey on their livestock and pets, or make forests unsafe to hike in. Members of the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians have voiced concerns that bears will endanger salmon populations, on which the Stillaguamish people rely for economic prosperity. Relocating bears is also tumultuous for the animals–they're pulled away from their established territories, and some will not survive the transition.
What the experts say: There's something about being in a wild ecosystem "that resonates differently with our well-being as a culture," says Jason Ransom, a senior wildlife biologist with the National Park Service. "When you have big pieces missing, [our well-being] is degraded." The grizzlies, he explains, "were lost because people killed them. It wasn't some rogue disease. It wasn't habitat loss." | | | In 2018, NASA telescopes detected an outburst of light coming from matter circling a black hole in our galaxy (as many as 100 million black holes may lurk in the Milky Way). The burst contained more light than existing black hole models could explain—so what were physicists missing? Now, researchers have shown that this extra light was our first-ever glimpse at the mysterious "plunging region," where matter stops orbiting and begins to plummet into the hole at nearly the speed of light.
Why this matters: In his theory of general relativity, Einstein theorized that this final plunge must happen once matter gets close enough to a black hole. But most models since then ignored the region, because the light it gave off was typically too faint to be detected by our telescopes. "The first time you see it, it's just nice to know it's there at all," says Andrew Mummery, study co-author and physicist at the University of Oxford. But now, "there's a lot of things we can, in principle, learn using it."
What the experts say: The plunging region can reveal the spin of a black hole, a fundamental but puzzling property related to how the hole was formed. "Spin is something that you only feel when you're really, really close to the black hole," says Amelia Hankla, a theoretical and computational astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who was not involved in the new study. "What's exciting about the plunging region is that the imprint of spacetime actually rotating is [visible] in the emission." --Allison Parshall, associate news editor | | | SPONSORED CONTENT BY WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | World Science Festival LIVE in NYC | Join the World Science Festival LIVE for thoroughly mind-expanding programs with a stellar roster of internationally acclaimed scientists, artists, and innovators that delve into the frontiers of understanding, from consciousness and AI to black holes and the cosmos. Learn more. | | | • The debate surrounding so-called Havana Syndrome centers around two possible explanations--that patients were somehow all brain damaged, or they are suffering from mass psychogenic illness. But there's another possibility, that these individuals could be experiencing persistent postural perceptual dizziness (PPPD) from exposure to microwaves, write Jon Stone and Kenneth R. Foster, professors of neurology and bioengineering, respectively. "Pathophysiological events, including pulsed energy attacks, could trigger genuine illnesses involving a disturbance of brain function, like PPPD, even where there is no brain damage," they say. |4 min read | | | MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK | | | • America's Hottest City Is Having a Surge of Deaths | 8 min read | | | • The Great Solar Storm of 2024 May Have Made the Strongest Auroras in Centuries | 3 min read | | | • Indiana chemist Harvey Washington Wiley and a small group of colleagues were known as the "poison squad" in the late 1800s. They ran the first food safety tests (many unethical by modern standards) and advocated for unprecedented food regulation in the U.S. | 9 min read | | | • The birth of a cloned black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann, and her two new sisters, has sparked a pilot program to create a DNA bank of hundreds of endangered species, "just in case." | 6 min read | | | Black-footed ferret clone Noreen. Kika Tuff/Revive & Restore (CC BY 4.0) | | | Perhaps the most important point of the above article on grizzly bear reintroductions is that bears most certainly want to be left alone. They are solitary creatures, other than in family groups or mother bears with their cubs. If you hike in Alaska, or other bear-dense regions, yes, you carry bear spray to protect yourself. But you also talk loudly in the forest (or sing or play a small radio) to alert bears of your presence to give them a chance to vacate the area and avoid you. Coexistence with the most formidable creatures is possible. | Thank you for being part of our circle of science-curious readers. Email me anytime: newsletters@sciam.com. See you back here on Tuesday after the long weekend! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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