November 21, 2024: Birds may show signs of having culture, a bizarre rule of numbers, and the first look at rocks from the far side of the moon. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Researchers retrieve lunar samples from the Chang'e-6 return capsule. Xinhua/Jin Liwang/Alamy Stock Photo | | | • Countries should not depend on forests to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a group of experts says in a new report. | 3 min read | | | • SpaceX's Starship completed its sixth test flight this week but it ended in a fiery splashdown rather than another booster catch. | 5 min read | | | • The volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula, in Iceland, started erupting late last night for the seventh time in a year. Over the course of several eruptions, correspondents for Scientific American traveled to meet the scientists in Iceland who are tracking volcanic activity and trying to anticipate what might happen next. Watch the full video here. | | | Are you enjoying this newsletter? If you want to dive deeper into the articles I link to, consider a subscription to Scientific American. We have special discounts for Today in Science readers! | | | Of all the numbers that appear in the world, from the number of connections you have on social media, to the populations of countries, river lengths, mountain heights, death rates, stock prices, even the diverse collection of numbers found in a typical issue of Scientific American, a disproportionate amount start with a lower digit, like 1 or 2. This bizarre phenomenon is called Benford's law.
How it works: In an uncanny number of real-world data sets, an astonishing 30 percent of the entries begin with a 1, while 17.6 percent begin with a 2, and so on. Several data sets do not comply with the law (say, human heights, or winning roulette numbers), but the pattern is exceedingly common in the natural world.
Applications: Auditors have used Benford's law to detect that Greece manipulated its macroeconomic data in its application to join the eurozone, and in the possibility of vote-rigging in Iran's 2009 presidential election. | | | White-browed Sparrow-Weaver nests and roosts. Wolfgang Kaehler/Alamy Stock Photo | | | Researchers analyzed more than 400 structures built by 43 different groups of White-browed Sparrow-Weavers in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. They discovered that different groupings of birds build very different nest structures. For example, some groups build nests with long tube-like entrances. If a bird ever relocates to live with a new group of its kind, it adapts and starts building nests like the those of the new group. Why this is interesting: When the scientists went looking for reasons for the different nests, they found that neither weather conditions, tree height, individuals' body sizes, or even genetic relatedness could explain it. The scientists proposed that bird culture was behind the nest architecture.
What the experts say: The researchers compared the genes of a sampling of birds from the various groupings. But to fully rule out a genetic component behind the nest building, the researchers would have to examine the genes of every individual in each group, says Christina Riehl, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University. "I think there's a lot left to be done, and I think this paper will inspire future research in a really good way." | | | • How people get their news is changing rapidly. Rather than the traditional daily newspaper, or even nightly television news, more and more Americans get their current events from other sources like social media apps or podcasts. Combined with a lack of coverage by media outlets of policy and clear information on the issues, the voters in U.S. elections--on both sides of the political spectrum--are uninformed, says Duncan Watts, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "People don't actually respond to facts anyway. What people respond to are stories, narratives. And I think this election, like most elections, was won and lost on narratives." | 5 min read | | | In order to get one of the final sets of footage for the volcano video above, director and producer Micah Garen flew a small drone several hundred feet over the lava flowing from the volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula. As he filmed, "I noticed the camera wasn't functioning properly, it was getting blurry," he said. The scorching heat rising off the lava flow had started to melt the bottom of the drone. Luckily Garen was able to call the device back and land it. Another minute and it would have incinerated entirely. | Stay clear of molten lava and send any comments or questions to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow! | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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