May 8, 2024: Today we're covering the fight songs of crabs, the "infinite monkey theorem," and more clarity on the risks of infectious indoor air as well as those of a noisier world. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | Our loud world is making us sick, damaging our health in ways that go well beyond our ears and hearing, reports Joanne Silberner. High noise levels can cause stress and disturb sleep, which can have harmful effects on the heart, blood vessels, endocrine system function and the ability to think and learn. A 2013 study on people in Denmark found an 8 percent increase in type 2 diabetes risk for every 10-decibel (dB) increase in exposure to road traffic noise. Ten years later, a nonprofit group called Quiet Communities sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not publishing or enforcing rules and regulations set in 1974 to limit loud sounds, well before the full extent of negative health effects were known. Earlier this year, the legal dispute between the agency and Quiet Communities persisted. An agreement between the parties could come this year, Silberner writes.
Why it matters: In 2018 in the European Union, 1.6 million years of healthy life were lost due to traffic noise, according to the World Health Organization.
What the experts say: Maps made by various organizations show quiet and noisy places around the U.S. Some smartphone apps can indicate harmful noise levels too. Experts themselves tend to use earbuds and headphones to reduce noise exposure. | | | MSJONESNYC; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (reference) | | | A series of vibrations and pulses that male fiddler crabs make by drumming on the ground can function as a crustacean love song to attract a mate or as a fight song to threaten a foe. Our brains perceive vibrations or pressure waves traveling through air and water as voices or sounds. Other animals, like fiddler crabs, can detect sound traveling through solids or even the vibrations of sand particles. When courting, the crabs produced a slow, long series of vibrations to lure mates to burrows, as described in a recent study. But when fighting, the crabs drummed out shorter spurts of quick pulses, reports science journalist Kiley Price. Helicopters flying overhead disrupted the researchers' efforts to record the fiddler crabs' drumming at the study site, on South Korea's Yeongjong Island. The study raises concerns that human activities can disturb species that depend on ground vibrations.
How they did it: The team placed highly sensitive accelerometers and decoy female crabs made of clay in the mudflats near the crustaceans' burrows. This setup prompted the male crabs' songs and enabled their detection.
What the experts say: "It's only recently that we really started to appreciate just how many animals communicate acoustically, particularly ones that don't communicate using airborne vibrations in the way that humans detect them," says Damian Elias, an animal behavior researcher who was not involved in the new study. |  | Fiddler crab near its burrow. Minju Kim | | | • After a four-year public-health dispute, the World Health Organization finally has proclaimed that viruses, including the one that causes COVID, can be spread through the air. "Through the air" is plain language that anyone can understand, and it sidesteps the confusing "airborne" and "aerosol" jargon that distracted researchers and baffled members of the public during the peak years of the COVID pandemic. "In the battle over what 'aerosol' and 'airborne' meant, public health officials lost sight of what was right in front of them: people were catching COVID by breathing contaminated air," writes journalist Maggie Fox. The hope is that the WHO statement will provide a better explanation of the unhealthy effects of infectious indoor air. | 6 min read | | | • "I'm a blue whale. I'm here": researchers listen with delight to songs that hint at Antarctic resurgence. | The Guardian | • In medicine, the morally unthinkable too often comes to seem normal. | The New York Times | • Extreme heat shuts schools for millions, widening learning gaps worldwide. | Reuters | • Magazines aren't dying. Just ask these indie publishers. | Fast Company | | | I came of age in the waning years of the Space Age, pasting furniture with free Skylab space-station stickers clawed out of cereal boxes. And my earlier years as a science writer were focused on astronomy and space exploration. All that was before the devastating impact of our global climate emergency was well documented and widely accepted. So this recent personal essay by Seven Rasmussen, an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy, held my close attention as it weighed the costs of addressing climate change with the costs of great space observatories and other important physics and space exploration efforts. Rasmussen writes: "Those of us born after 1977 have never seen a cooler-than-average year." Those earlier decades were hardly a fair and perfect era in U.S. and global history, but it's important that we talk about a time of fewer disastrous weather events and examine our relative governmental investments in big-ticket research projects, climate action and climate-disaster recovery.
| —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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