E2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23 , 2021
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HEALTH & SCIENCESCIENCE NEWSSome 60 years ago, parts of the
River Thames were declared bio-
logically dead. But the famous
waterway that cuts through Lon-
don has been revived and is now
home to hundreds of wildlife spe-
cies such as sea horses and
sharks.
The latest State of the Thames
report, released by the Zoological
Society of London this month,
found that cleanup efforts over
recent decades have brought
down levels of chemicals such as
phosphorus and conserved salt
marshes for birds and fish, mak-
ing the river “home to myriad
wildlife as diverse as London it-
self.”
The report also highlighted
many challenges the Thames fac-
es, including rising water temper-
atures and sea levels because of
climate change.
For instance, summer temper-
atures in parts of the river have
increased an average of 0.19 de-
grees Celsius (32.34 degrees Fahr-
enheit) each year since 2007, re-
searchers found. Even slight al-
terations in seasonal heat may
upset the river’s ecosystem and
erode living habitats.
The researchers also found ele-
vated nitrate concentration that
threatens water quality. Much of
London’s drinking water comes
from the river.
The Thames hasn’t always
been a model for successful envi-
ronmental protection. It became
heavily polluted during the In-
dustrial Revolution as toxic run-
offs from tanneries and human
waste found their way to the river.
The “Great Stink” of 1858, caused
in part by human sewage flowing
into the Thames, forced the Brit-
ish Parliament to build better
wastewater disposal systems.
But even in 1959, oxygen levels
in the Thames had dropped so
low that the British Natural His-
tory Museum declared it biologi-
cally incapable of sustaining ma-rine life. At around this time,
authorities began investing in
better sewage treatment facilities
and better monitoring key envi-
ronmental indicators, sparking a
turnaround.
The Thames may be free of
much toxic waste these days, but
it has one of the higher concentra-
tions of microplastics in the
world, reportedly ahead of other
urban waterways such as the Chi-
cago River and the Danube in
Europe, according to a study from
British scientists last year.
These tiny fragments of plastic,
mostly broken off from larger
pieces of trash, could be ingested
by animals, posing “potential
physiological and toxicological
threats,” the Zoological Society
report warned.
Rivers carrying plastic waste
are the most common way for the
pollutant to enter the world’s
oceans, which puts even more
wildlife in danger.
As environmental conscious-
ness grows and people are in-
creasingly drawn again to river-
side urban living, many other
cities in recent decades have tried
to clean up their waterways. New
York’s picturesque Hudson River
was contaminated for decades by
a now-banned chemical coolant
called PCB that neighboring Gen-
eral Electric plants dumped into
its streams. It was only in the
early 21st century that the U.S.
government ordered the con-
glomerate to dredge the river.
Meanwhile, D.C.’s Anacostia
River recently received a passing
grade for the third time in the
past four years, with a local envi-
ronmental organization saying
the water is on its way to being
“swimmable and fishable.” The
city has poured money into proj-
ects such as building a $2.7 billion
tunnel network to prevent waste
from overflowing in the city’s
river system.
[email protected]Once ‘biologically dead,’ the River Thames in
London is now home to sharks, seals, sea horsesSCIENCE SCANCHRIS JACKSON/GETTY IMAGES
A seal rests on the banks of the River Thames in London. After
decades of cleanup efforts, the waterway is home to hundreds of
animal species.What happens when you crush
water between two diamonds and
heat it up with a laser?
If you didn’t think of the an-
swer — “It forms weird, hot, black
ice” — don’t worry. In recent
years, researchers have discov-
ered so many funky forms of ice —
over 18 in all — that it’s hard to
keep track. Now, they’ve hit on a
new phase of water that could
explain how icy planets form.
It’s called superionic ice, and
until recently it had only been
glimpsed for a fleeting moment.
In a study published in the jour-
nal Nature Physics, researchers
managed to create the substance
using the same high tempera-
tures and pressures that can be
found inside ice giants Uranus
and Neptune.
Ordinary ice is made of crystals
formed by the hydrogen and oxy-
gen atoms that make up water.
Hydrogen atoms connect oxygen
atoms into a solid, latticelike
structure.
In superionic ice, the hydrogen
atoms float around inside an oxy-
gen lattice instead. This leads to
ice that can conduct electricity.
The ice is less dense than ordi-
nary ice, and is black in color.
It’s tough to create this odd ice,
and earlier, researchers had man-
aged to observe it for just a few
billionths of a second. In the new
experiment, they managed to ob-
serve it for a millionth of a second
before it disintegrated. In the
experiment, the researchers heat-
ed the water to over 11,000 de-
grees Fahrenheit. Since they did
so under the same types of high
pressure that exist inside dense
planets, the study produced supe-
rionic ice instead of a puff of
steam.
Scientists say that a lot of the
universe’s water exists in this hot,
superionic form, and they’re try-ing to understand its properties,
which include the ability to gen-
erate the magnetic fields that
protect people and organisms
from the sun’s blistering radia-
tion. Since magnetic fields allow
planets to sustain life, the hunt
for superionic ice could point to
other places where life is possible.
The new phase of water joins a
long list of recently discovered
types of ice. But since the experi-
ments are so fleeting, learning
more is a challenge.
“It’s a new state of matter, so it
basically acts as a new materi-
al,” said Vitali Prakapenka, a Uni-
versity of Chicago research pro-
fessor and scientist at the Energy
Department’s Argonne National
Laboratory who co-wrote the
study, in a news release. “And it
may be different from what we
thought.”
— Erin BlakemoreELECTRICAL CONDUCTIVITY‘Weird, hot, black ice’: Discovery of new phase
of water could explain ice planets’ formation
Structure and properties of two
superionic ice phases
Nature PhysicsMILLOT, COPPARI, HAMEL, KRAUSS/LLNL
An artist’s rendering of a laser
compression experiment: High-
powered lasers focus on the
surface of a diamond,
generating a sequence of shock
waves that propagate
throughout the sample
assembly, simultaneously
compressing and heating the
initially liquid water sample,
forcing it to freeze into the
superionic water ice phase.BY JULIAN MARKWhen Vespa soror — giant hor-
nets found in parts of Asia —
attack a honeybee hive, they kill
as many bees as possible, decapi-
tating them and scouring the hive
to harvest their young.
To protect their hives from
such a catastrophe, some species
of honeybees have developed an
arsenal of defensive techniques.
They may forage for other ani-
mals’ feces and place it at their
nest’s entrance to repel predators,
a tactic called “fecal spotting.” Or,
in a technique known as “balling,”
a cluster of honeybees may engulf
a hornet, vibrate their flight mus-
cles and produce enough heat to
kill the enemy.
Now, a new study published in
Royal Society Open Science says
honeybees have another defense:
screaming.
More precisely, the bees in the
study produced a noise known as
an “antipredator pipe” — not
something that comes out of their
mouths, but rather a sound they
produce by vibrating their wings,
raising their abdomens and ex-
posing a gland used to release a
certain kind of pheromone.
To human ears, the result is a
high-pitched whine. To bees, the
frantic vibrating is likely a “rally-
ing call for collective defence”
against the hornets, the study
says.
Yet bees don’t “hear” like hu-
mans, explained Heather Mattila,
a biologist at Wellesley College
and a co-author of the study.
Except in certain circumstances,
bees transmit and receive vibra-
tions via “substrate,” meaning vi-
brations are sent through a sur-
face and picked up by sensors in
the bees’ legs.
So while the piping sound is
not technically a “scream” — a
sound produced by vocal cords —
it serves a similar function and
shares “acoustic traits with alarm
shrieks, fear screams and panic
calls of primates, birds and meer-
kats,” the study says. Plus, Mattila
acknowledged that screaming is a
useful metaphor — and it’s close
enough that she and her team
referred to the high-pitched vi-
brations as “screams” as they
Honeybees’ alarm bell: Screaming
The insects warn their hives about giant hornets by producing a noise called an “antipredator pipe”
studied the bees. “All my spread-
sheets say ‘screams,’ ” Mattila told
The Washington Post.
To Mattila, the discovery of
honeybee distress signals shows
that communicating danger maybe a universal experience for ani-
mals. “These sounds in particular
are disturbing,” she said. “And I
think it is because they have these
properties that are sort of univer-
sally alarming — they’re meant to
be alarming for anyone who’s
listening.”Giant hornets have received
much attention in the United
States after the first “murder hor-
nets” were spotted in 2019 in
Washington state. With large
mandibles capable of dismem-
bering and masticating honey-
bees en masse — and stingers that
can puncture beekeeping suits —
the V. mandarinia has become an
increasing threat to honeybee
hives in the United States. The
hornets in the study released this
month are a “sister species” to the
ones found in Washington, re-
searchers wrote.
“Everything about these two
species is the same. The size is the
same; the way they hunt is the
same,” Mattila said. “If anything,
Vespa soror actually has bigger
colonies.”
For more than seven years,
Mattila and her colleagues have
studied interactions between gi-
ant hornets and honeybees in
Vietnam, according to a news
release. Having recorded about
30,000 signals made by coloniesof bees, they believe that a bee-
hive is in constant communica-
tion — a “bustling signalling
space” — even when the bees are
relaxed, the study says.
But during stressful events,
those signals increase dramati-
cally. When the V. soror hornet
was threatening to wipe out a
hive, the bees’ signals increased
sevenfold, the study found. They
may come in the form of hisses,
quick bursts of vibration or the
loud, high-pitched whine that
had not been previously studied.
The researchers recorded the
bees’ reactions to five hornet at-
tacks, including ones by the V.
soror and a slightly smaller hor-
net called the V. velutina. They
placed microphones inside the
hives and video recorded the
hives’ exteriors to capture de-
fense activities.
While Mattila and her team
knew the honeybees had been
using the distress signal, they
couldn’t figure out how the bees
behaved while making the sound.
After all, individual actions are
difficult to spot during a giant
hornet’s attack on a honeybee
hive — a chaotic “melee” in which
honeybees frantically run around
and hornets swoop in and out of
the hive, Mattila explained.
But late one night in March,
while watching one of the videos,
Mattila was able to isolate the
sound and movement of a single
bee making the noise. The bee
raised its abdomen while rapidly
buzzing its wings and exposing its
Nasonov gland, which releases a
pheromone used to guide bees
back to a hive.
It was a breakthrough.
“So then I started watching a
whole bunch of other videos, and
I could pick them out immedi-
ately, because they really do have
a characteristic posture,” Mattila
said.
The study says there are more
questions to answer, such as
whether the alarm piping is used
to call for a specific defense such
as balling or fecal spotting. Fur-
thermore, additional research
needs to be done on how the
signals are sent and received, the
study says.
Nevertheless, the “research
shows how amazingly complex
signals produced by Asian hive
bees can be,” Gard Otis, one of
Mattila’s colleagues and a profes-
sor emeritus in the School of
Environmental Sciences at Cana-
da’s University of Guelph, said in
a news release.
“We feel like we have only
grazed the surface of understand-
ing their communication,” he
added. “There’s a lot more to be
learned.”
[email protected]KARLA SALP/WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A researcher holds a dead Asian giant hornet in Blaine, Wash., in 2019.To bees, the franticvibrating is likely a“rallying call forcollective defence”against the hornets, thestudy says.Muscles weak
as noodles...
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