SCIENCE science.orgPHOTO: FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
resolution by combining data from widely
space radio dishes—from France to Hawaii
and Greenland to Antarctica—into a virtual
Earth-size dish. The 15-meter dish in Africa
will help the project pursue its goal of
capturing a movie of black hole activity.
Namibian astronomers will gain oppor-
tunities to join the black hole project and
carry out their own observations.Geneticists curb use of ‘race’
GENETICS | Human geneticists have
mostly abandoned the word “race”—which
refers to socially determined categories
rather than biological groups—to describe
populations in their papers, a study of
a leading genetics journal has found.
Examining 11,635 papers published from
1949 to 2018 by The American Journal of
Human Genetics, researchers found that
the use of “race” decreased from 22% of
papers in the first decade to 5% in the
last. During the same period, the journal’s
authors increasingly employed terms—
“ethnicity,” “ancestry,” and location-based
names such as “African,” “Asian,” and“European”—perceived as more useful for
describing human biological variation. Such
changes may reflect a growing consensus
among the journal’s authors that “race” is
“a social category with biological conse-
quences,” the team writes this week in the
journal. Acknowledging that earlier geneti-
cists helped shape the racial categories still
used today, the American Society of Human
Genetics, which publishes the journal, this
week announced a project to explore past
injustices perpetrated through genetics.Einstein’s goofs fetch $15 million
HISTORY OF SCIENCE | One person’s
trash is another’s treasure. In 1914, Albert
Einstein apparently meant to discard a
sheaf of not-quite-right calculations he
used to test his then-incomplete theory
of gravity, the general theory of relativity.
Last week, the documents sold for $15 mil-
lion, Christie’s auction house announced.
They include 26 pages in Einstein’s hand,
25 in that of Michele Besso—a Swiss-
Italian engineer whom Einstein called
“the best sounding board in Europe”—andFloodwater filled St. Mark’s
Square in Venice, Italy,
in November 2019 after the
highest tide in 50 years.F
lood barriers in Venice, Italy, may cause important salt marshes
in its lagoon to drown by starving them of sediment they need
to keep up with sea level rise, a study has found. To combat
a growing incidence of major flooding, Venice spent billions of
euros to build three barriers that can temporarily close the
lagoon off from the Mediterranean Sea. But the barriers also block
stormwater that moves sediment to the marshes, and after theybegan operating in October 2020, the rate of sedimentation of the
marshes fell by 25%, Davide Tognin, a Ph.D. student at the University
of Padua, and colleagues write in this week in Nature Geoscience.
That’s worrisome because the marshes provide habitats for wildlife,
store carbon, and help clean nutrient pollution from the water.
Adjusting when the barriers are deployed could allow more storm-
carried sediment to reach the marshes, the authors say.CLIMATE CHANGEBarriers starve Venice’s wetlands of sediments that sustain them
three written by both. In those pages, the
two struggle to explain why the axis of
Mercury’s elliptical orbit shifts forward
on each circuit like the hand of a clock. In
1915, Einstein succeeded in using general
relativity to explain how the Sun’s grav-
ity is responsible for the peculiarities of
Mercury’s orbit.Warming trims Chile hydropower
CLIMATE CHANGE | A decline in water flow
expected from Andes snowmelt, caused by
warming global temperatures, has made
a hydroelectric plant planned in Chile
financially unsustainable, a U.S. utility told
a bankruptcy court last month. The AES
Corporation, sponsor of the Alto Maipo
project, had based its viability on a 59-year
record of water flow levels, Bloomberg
Quint reported. But diminished flow in
2021 would have yielded only about
half the electricity generation expected.
On 17 November, AES asked the court for
permission to restructure the project’s
finances so it can be completed and begin
operations in 2022 using the lower flow.3 DECEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6572 1177