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July 31, 2025—Ticks are booming this year. Plus, the longest lightning strike ever, and oxygen emerging from the darkest depths of the ocean. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Utah-based Photographer Ryan Houston | | Jason Jaacks/Scientific American | | On July 22, 2024, a team of researchers released a shocking discovery: Millions of deep-sea rocks, called nodules, appeared to be producing oxygen in the blackness of the ocean's abyss, without photosynthesis. Mining companies are now targeting these rocks as a source of rare metals to use in electronics and batteries. But extracting these rocks would disturb an unexplored ecosystem and destroy data that scientists might examine for clues of how life began on Earth. Watch the full video here. | | The number of ticks and tick-borne diseases has skyrocketed this year. Some areas are recording about 20 to 30 percent more ticks than in 2024. The underlying reason is more complex than we think—more than 100 different things could be behind the surge, says vector ecologist Thomas Daniels. One factor might be a boom acorn year, which feeds the white-footed mice that are the main hosts of tick larvae. Extended warm seasons and invasive species may also be at work. Some years are just hot tick years, he says, "and we don't have good reasons for that." Why this matters: Ticks harbor a number of human diseases. About one in three deer ticks carry the bacteria that causes Lyme disease in the Northeastern United States, which can cause serious health problems if treatment is delayed. At least five dangerous pathogens circulate in this tick species alone. It's a public health concern that's hard for medical providers to keep up with. What the experts say: "Are ticks doing anything differently? Probably not," says Daniels. "They have been around for 100 million years—they know how to find a host and feed and go undetected." —Andrea Tamayo, newsletter writer | | The world has witnessed several very large earthquakes in the past couple of years, including a magnitude 8.8 off the coast of eastern Russia just yesterday. But other recent big ones include a magnitude 7.7 quake in Myanmar in March 2025 and a magnitude 7.4 temblor on Taiwan's eastern coast in April 2024.
How we measure them: The Richter scale is logarithmic, meaning the seismic waves in a magnitude 8.0 quake are 10 times greater in amplitude than those in a magnitude 7.0 one—and have roughly 32 times more power. The seismic waves generated by a 7.0 magnitude quake, in turn, are 10 times greater in amplitude and 32 times more powerful than those of a 6.0 quake.
Visualized: In the diagram below, a magnitude 4.0 earthquake, which tends to be widely felt but cause minimal damage, is used as a baseline to show how larger magnitudes translate to increases in seismic wave amplitude: Each whole number increase in magnitude corresponds to a 10-fold increase in amplitude (the scale of seismic waves recorded by a seismometer).
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- Yesterday, Republicans in Texas presented a redrawn voting map that would give Republicans a chance to gain five U.S. House seats, including in Houston, Dallas and along the U.S.-Mexican border. Gerrymandering, by definition, is the practice of deliberately designing voting districts to give a political party, racial group or both an advantage at the polls, Matthew R. Francis, a theoretical physicist and science writer, wrote last year. Math and science could be applied to fix gerrymandering, he says, but the real problem is a difference in basic values in politicians: "We need values that eliminate gerrymandering—racial, partisan, and carceral—and actively punish political actors who reject those values." | 5 min read
| | Geomicrobiologist James Bradley has been studying microbial life on the Norwegian island of Svalbard for more than a decade. "With everything that we've discovered about ice microbes, we began to wonder whether an active microbial community could flourish in a similarly cold and nutrient-scarce environment: the atmosphere," he says. "If we do find that the atmosphere hosts microbes that can live and grow there, without any connection to the ground, this would constitute the discovery of a new ecosystem—one that could be considered, by area, to be the largest on Earth." Nature | 3 min read
Content courtesy of Nature Briefing | | Many years ago, on a nighttime car-ride somewhere between Chicago and the middle of Wisconsin, I watched from the backseat as an enormous lightning storm crackled in the western clouds overhead. This intra-cloud lightning was shooting veins of electricity across the sky by the second. But for all its ferocity, it was silent. The thunder was too far away to hear. Lighting strikes somewhere on Earth about 6,000 times per minute, so by statistics alone it seems commonplace. But, at least for me, it jolts the system every time. | | What are your lightning stories? Send these and any other feedback to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow! —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor
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