May 17, 2024: Climate change is impacting water around the world, Eurasian Jays have episodic memory, and are your allergies bothering you? You're not alone. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | The impact of Earth's warming climate is perhaps most noticeable in water. As sea levels rise, coastal erosion washes away beaches and homes, and floods inland to contaminate drinking water with saltwater intrusion. More carbon in the atmosphere means more carbon absorbed by the oceans, acidifying the sea, which kills vital fisheries and coral reefs. Warmer seas also kill reefs and shift animal migration patterns. Storm surge can cause sewage to overflow and prompt skin and respiratory infections in humans. In her new book, Entropy, photographer Diane Tuft captures images of how climate changes are impacting waterways, coasts, lakes and other bodies of water. | | | Balls of sand made by sand bubbler crabs on Kolatoli Beach in Bangladesh. Diane Tuft | The bubbles in the sand above are formed by bubbler crabs on Kolatoli Beach in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. When water surges over the beach during high tide, the crabs stay hidden underground. When the tide retreats, the crustaceans emerge, eating bits of plankton and spitting up "bubbles" of sandy leftovers. But as sea levels rise and Kolatoli is more frequently submerged, catching the crabs in action is becoming a rarity. | Spiral Jetty depicts the Great Salt Lake in June 2005 (left) and August 2022 (right). Diane Tuft | The Great Salt Lake supports a diverse mix of cyanobacteria- and cyanotoxin-containing dust. As the lake depletes, parts of it become really dry. The wind blows the cyanobacteria in the dust into populated areas, where millions of people breathe it in. | What the photographer says: "I just hope that when people pick [the book] up and flip through the pretty pictures, they start to wonder what it is they're actually looking at," says Tuft. "In the end, I believe this is the most accessible form of climate change communication, and I hope that people just enjoy and think about it." | | | Researchers trained Eurasian Jays to remember which of four identical cups in a lineup contained food. During repeated training sessions, the cup's position was the only important detail. Once the birds had gotten eight out of 10 trials correct, the researchers started using differently-patterned cups AND shuffling the positions when the birds weren't looking. The birds still picked the correct cup 70 percent of the time, indicating they were remembering visual details that were irrelevant at the beginning of the test.
Why this is interesting: The ability to mentally reconstruct past events (called episodic memory) was once thought to be an exclusively human skill. But that idea has been proved wrong: great apes, cuttlefish and rats all have episodic memory. The new research in Eurasian Jays adds corvids to the list, expanding our understanding of intelligence in animals and providing clues for how this ability might have evolved.
What the experts say: Corvids are very intelligent animals. Rachael Shaw, a biologist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, who has also studied the mental abilities of Eurasian Jays, says she wouldn't be surprised if all birds in the corvid family have something like episodic memory. "I think all of the evidence is pointing that way," she says. "Is it exactly like ours? I don't think we'll ever know." --Allison Parshall | | | • AI developers want to harness the cultural power of science-fiction novels to help make AI technologies better. | 5 min read | | | • Folk music from around the world shares some common traits, and could help scientists understand how music evolved. | 4 min read | | | • Earth is shifting into a La Ni├▒a period, which could ramp up this year's North Atlantic hurricane season. | 4 min read | | | An illustration of the black hole Cygnus X-1, the first ever glimpsed by astronomers. The stellar-mass black hole (right) siphons gas from its companion, a blue supergiant star (left). This material forms a whirling, glowing accretion disk around the black hole, revealing the dark object's presence. NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA/Hubble) (CC BY 4.0) | | | • In the near future a digital twin of patients feeding real-time data into computer simulations, could "help drug developers design, test and monitor, and aid doctors in applying, the safest and most effective treatments or therapies that are specific and tailored to our genetics or biochemistry," writes Reinhard C. Laubenbacher, Dean's Professor of systems medicine at the University of Florida. The time to develop this technology is now, he says: "the health care industry is increasingly relying on data-driven approaches that apply artificial intelligence to analysis of patient data, calculations of disease risk, and medical decision-making." | 5 min read | | | OUR MOST POPULAR STORIES OF THE WEEK | | | A Brand-New Spacecraft Will Visit the International Space Station Soon | 6 min read | The Strongest Solar Storm in 20 Years Did Little Damage, but Worse Space Weather Is Coming | 7 min read | | | From 2011 to 2021, 90 percent of counties in the U.S. experienced a climate-related disaster. What comes to mind is usually extreme weather--hurricanes, flooding, drought--but those obvious events have insidious and often surprising downstream effects, in the short- and long-term, from nationwide food price hikes to mental health crises and chronic conditions that burden the health care system. Our day-to-day livelihoods, health and safety are intricately connected to Earth's atmosphere. | Thank you for reading Today in Science. Reach out anytime with suggestions and feedback: newsletters@sciam.com. We'll be back on Monday! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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