February 26, 2025: Salt-loving plants could be the future of food. Plus, ranking the strongest knots, and the future of private space stations. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | An illustration of the planned Starlab space station. Image courtesy of Starlab | | | • Several companies have contracts with NASA to design private space habitats to replace the International Space Station once it's gone. But can they deliver? | 9 min read | | | • Western states are scrambling to prepare for wildfire season after the Trump administration cut 10 percent of Forest Service personnel. | 6 min read | | | • Saying farewell to the Gaia mission, which for 11 years gathered images to create the most accurate map of the Milky Way yet. | 17 min listen | | | Salicornia, a tasty halophyte, grows wild along the North Sea; farmers are also cultivating it to feed people. Peter Eckert/500px/Getty Images | | | Salt has been an enemy of agriculture for millennia. High levels can kill plants by prohibiting how plant move water through their tissues. But some plants thrive in salty environments (and are called halophytes: halo for salt, phyte for plant). And researchers are investigating whether scaling up halophyte production might shore up food security. Of the 7,000 known edible halophytes in the world (quinoa is one example), new research has revealed that most are full of nutrients crucial for human health: many are rich in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds, and various species have anticarcinogenic and antimicrobial properties. Some may help lower blood glucose and blood lipids, including cholesterol.
Why this matters: Sea levels are rising. As that happens, salt water pushes inland into coastal farmland. Farmers in places from the U.S. Atlantic seaboard to Bangladesh are abandoning their farmland because of salt, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Agricultural irrigation also drives up soil salinity on all farms around the world. Irrigation water contains naturally occurring elements—sodium, magnesium, calcium and potassium—that form salts and accumulate in soil over time as the water evaporates again and again.
What the experts say: "Halophytes are going to be the future for sure," says Giulia Mozzo, a junior research fellow at the University of Florence in Italy. "Most people don't realize how big the problem is." | | | Take a look at the four knots below. Can you rank them in terms of strength? Brain researchers recently asked people to examine these knots and give a ranking. The study participants consistently misjudged each knot's strength by a wide margin. This led the researchers to conclude that humans are relatively poor judges of knot strength, which is surprising considering that we encounter knots regularly in our everyday lives. One element of each knot is particularly important when it comes to overall strength. Click through to read more and see if you ranked them correctly. | | | Jen Christiansen; Source: "Tangled Physics: Knots Strain Intuitive Physical Reasoning," by Sholei Croom and Chaz Firestone, in Open Mind, Vol. 8; September 2024 (reference) | | | • In a February 19 statement, the Department of Defense's acting deputy secretary Robert Salesses called for a $50 billion cut to the U.S. military, pointing to "so-called 'climate change' and other woke programs," as savings targets. By pretending climate change isn't real, the DOD is pennywise and pound foolish, writes Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor at Scientific American. A 2018 hurricane leveled buildings and F-35 hangars at Tyndall Air Force Base, costing $3.7 billion to rebuild. Flash flooding at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2023 cost $200 million to repair. "Service members face a litany of threats from higher temperatures, extreme weather and disasters," he says. "The statement's sloppy language—what even is 'woke' climate change?—points to a dangerous politicization of Pentagon thinking." | 5 min read | | | • After the start of a pilot program to restore salmon runs in northern California, Chinook salmon were spotted in the North Yuba River for the first time in nearly a century. | SFGATE | • Texas banned abortion, and the rate of sepsis shot up more than 50 percent for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, an investigation finds. | ProPublica | • See the stunning photographs of snowflakes by Wilson Bentley, the late-19th and early-20th-century microphotographer. | The New Yorker | | | I've been on the quinoa band wagon for years. It's an easy alternative to rice AND a sub-in for animal meat since it's a complete protein (meaning it contains all nine essential amino acids that the human body cannot produce and must obtain from food). It's just one of many hearty ancient grains that have become popular again in recent years (but have been harvested for thousands). I recommend checking out farro, bulgur and chia. What are your favorite grains and seeds? | Thanks for reading Today in Science. Send questions and comments 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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