With a final rip, an iceberg roughly the size of Delaware has broken off Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf. Anticipated for weeks, the fracture is one of the largest calving events ever recorded.

On July 12, satellite images confirmed a nearly 5,800-square-kilometer, 1-trillion-metric-ton chunk of ice, equivalent to 12 percent of Larsen C’s total area, split from the ice shelf. “[We] have been surprised how long it took for the rift to break through the final few kilometers of ice,” Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in Wales, said in a blogpost for Project MIDAS, which has been tracking the effects of a warming climate on the ice shelf. Now the focus will shift to the stability of the remaining ice shelf and the fate of the giant iceberg.
Scientists had been monitoring Larsen C since 2014, when they noticed that a crack in the ice shelf had grown roughly 20 kilometers in less than nine months (SN: 7/25/15, p. 8). After a relative lull in 2015, the crack grew another 40 kilometers in 2016 and then 10 more in the first half of January 2017, bringing its total length to 175 kilometers. At that point, its tip was 20 kilometers from the Weddell Sea.
The crack grew another 17 kilometers between May 25 and May 31 — at times traveling parallel to the edge and ultimately putting it within 13 kilometers of the ice front. Then, in late June, the outer part of the ice shelf picked up speed, putting new pressure on the crack and the entire shelf. “It won’t be long now,” Project Midas tweeted June 30. Added Luckman, also in a tweet: “The remaining ice is strained near to breaking point.”

Yet the vigil lasted nearly two more weeks. By July 6, the crack had come within 5 kilometers of the edge of the ice. Then, sometime between July 10 and July 12, it finally reached the water, allowing the huge hunk of ice to splinter off into the sea.
The ice loss dramatically alters the landscape of Larsen C, Luckman notes. “Maps will need to be redrawn.” And that could be the least of the trouble ahead, says Adam Booth, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England also with Project MIDAS. “The calving event is significant because it is likely a precursor to something much bigger, potentially the collapse of the whole Larsen C ice shelf,” Booth says. The same thing happened to the neighboring Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, after it calved a Rhode Island-sized iceberg (SN: 3/30/02, p. 197).

“Glaciologists are keen to see how Larsen C will react,” says Luckman.

A complete collapse of Larsen C could have implications for sea level rise. Antarctica’s ice shelves act as buttresses, helping to slow the flow of the continent’s ice into the ocean. Since these shelves float on the water, calving icebergs don’t directly raise sea level. But calving or the collapse of an ice shelf allows glaciers and ice streams further inland to flow into the ocean, which can contribute to sea level rise.

Calving of icebergs is common, and over several decades, the shelves usually recover to their original size. But in the last two decades, ice shelves have instead continued to lose ice until collapsing, probably as a result of rising temperatures due to climate change, researchers suspect. In 2014, researchers concluded the collapse of Larsen B was the result of warming (SN: 10/18/14, p. 9).

Some computer simulations suggest Larsen C could suffer the same fate, possibly within a few years to decades, Luckman says. Still, the calving event that feeds a potential collapse may be hard to pin on climate change. “Not all ice-related stories have a clear global warming origin,” Luckman notes. Larsen C’s calving, he says, “may simply be a natural event that would have happened regardless of human activity.”
Not everyone is convinced that Larsen C will fall apart completely. Researchers from Europe predict major changes to the shelf would happen only if it loses 55 percent of its ice. At that point, a significant amount of ice could ooze from glaciers into the ocean. Still, understanding what allowed the recent rift to grow and calve will “give us insight regarding other fractures or rifts on the shelf,” says geoscientist Dan McGrath of Colorado State University in Fort Collins. While McGrath says a collapse is “very unlikely,” he adds that “these other dormant rifts are in locations where if they reinitiated, the subsequent calving event would be worrisome for the shelf’s stability.”

Discrepancies in the predictions of Larsen C’s fate raise an important point, says Richard Alley, a geologist at Penn State. Researchers don’t understand ice shelf calving and collapsing enough predict how any one individual ice shelf will behave after a break.

“The Larsen C ice shelf is, of course, just one small part of Antarctica,” Booth says. “What is worrying is that we’re seeing trends in several ice shelves that tend towards decreasing stability. Should they continue along these trends, we could be seeing the start of increased mass loss from the Antarctic continent.”

A genetic-engineering tool designed to spread through a population like wildfire — eradicating disease and even whole invasive species — might be more easily thwarted than thought.

Resistance to the tools, called CRISPR gene drives, arose at high rates in experiments with Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies, researchers at Cornell University report July 20 in PLOS Genetics. Rates of resistance varied among strains of fruit flies collected around the world, from a low of about 4 percent in embryos from an Ithaca, N.Y., strain to a high of about 56 percent in Tasmanian fruit fly embryos.
“At these rates, the constructs would not start spreading in the population,” says coauthor Philipp Messer, a population geneticist. “It might require quite a bit more work to get a gene drive that works at all.”

Gene drives are basically genetic copy-and-paste machines. These self-perpetuating machines are inherited by more than 50 percent of offspring of an individual carrying a gene drive. Working perfectly, they could transmit to 100 percent of offspring.

In its simplest form, a CRISPR gene drive consists of a piece of DNA that encodes both an enzyme called Cas9, which acts as molecular scissors, and a guide RNA that tells the Cas9 enzyme where to cut. That cutting may disrupt important genes. Researchers are experimenting with this as a way to sterilize malaria-carrying mosquitoes (SN Online: 12/7/15).

Some gene drives also carry a genetic payload. For instance, another approach to fighting malaria is to develop drives that carry genes to “vaccinate” mosquitoes against the disease (SN: 12/26/15, p. 6). Other drives might carry genes that make fluorescent proteins to indicate the gene drive’s presence; Messer and colleagues used such markers to follow two gene drives in fruit flies bred in the lab.
When an organism carrying the tool mates with one that doesn’t, gene drives go to work. Inside the fertilized egg, guide RNAs shepherd Cas9 produced by the engineered mate to a spot where it cuts the other mate’s chromosome.

If everything works correctly, cells repair that break by copying the gene drive onto the cut chromosome. But the slice can also be fixed by gluing the cut ends back together. That regluing sometimes leads to mistakes that destroy Cas9’s cutting site, creating a chromosome that is resistant to the gene drive’s insertion.

In the fruit fly experiments, some mistakes created resistance during or before fertilization. Others took place in early embryos because cells produced Cas9 for too long, allowing the enzyme to chop chromosomes again and again, Messer and colleagues discovered. That was especially a problem when females produced Cas9, they found.

Some uses of gene drives, such as those that would sterilize or kill mosquitoes, can’t tolerate any amount of resistance no matter when it arises, Messer says. Because those types of gene drives damage the organism’s fertility or viability, mosquitoes carrying resistance would have an advantage and quickly outcompete insects vulnerable to the drives.

In a separate study posted June 14 at BioRxiv.org, Messer and colleagues tested several approaches to overcoming gene drive resistance. They found that using multiple guide RNAs and turning on Cas9 only in males could reduce resistance rates.

“This is a very important and elegant set of experiments,” says MIT evolutionary engineer Kevin Esvelt.

But the conclusions aren’t news to most gene drive researchers.

“We’re aware of all these problems, and the essence of how to deal with them hasn’t been changed by these studies,” says geneticist Ethan Bier of the University of California, San Diego. Bier and lab colleague Valentino Gantz created the first gene drive in fruit flies in 2015, and have worked with other researchers to develop gene drives that would prevent mosquitoes from carrying malaria (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16).

Messer’s group is, however, the first to experimentally confirm predictions about resistance and how to avoid it, Esvelt says. “They show what’s been apparent to some people in the field for a very long time.”

Some people might think that high rates of resistance mean that gene drives are safe to release because they won’t spread easily in the wild. But that notion is misguided, says Bier. Even if a gene drive is able to affect only a small percentage of a local pest population, it could still spread around the world, Esvelt adds. “It could still screw us all over in the current form.”

Researchers should continue to conduct gene drive experiments under tight containment, he and Bier caution.

For a glue that holds up inside the body, turn to the humble slug, Arion subfuscus. A new super-sticky material mimics slug slime’s ability to stick on slick wet surfaces and could lead to more effective medical adhesives.

The material has two parts: a sticky layer that attaches to a surface, and a shock-absorbing layer that reduces strain. That makes the adhesive less likely to snap off.

Researchers tested the material as a surgical adhesive in a number of different scenarios: It stuck to pig skin and liver. It latched on to a beating pig’s heart, even when the surface was coated in blood. It sealed up a heart defect, preventing liquid from leaking even when the organ was inflated and deflated tens of thousands of times. And it was less toxic in the body than a commonly used commercialized tissue adhesive, researchers report July 28 in Science.

The researchers hope the material could someday be used in surgical procedures in place of invasive sutures and staples.

For the first time in the United States, researchers have used gene editing to repair a mutation in human embryos.

Molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 corrected a gene defect that can lead to heart failure. The gene editor fixed the mutation in about 72 percent of tested embryos, researchers report August 2 in Nature. That repair rate is much higher than expected. Work with skin cells reprogrammed to mimic embryos had suggested the mutation would be repaired in fewer than 30 percent of cells.
In addition, the researchers discovered a technical advance that may limit the production of patchwork embryos that aren’t fully edited. That’s important if CRISPR/Cas9 will ever be used to prevent genetic diseases, says study coauthor Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive and developmental biologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. If even one cell in an early embryo is unedited, “that’s going to screw up the whole process,” says Mitalipov. He worked with colleagues in Oregon, California, Korea and China to develop the embryo-editing methods.

Researchers in other countries have edited human embryos to learn more about early human development or to answer other basic research questions (SN: 4/15/17, p. 16). But Mitalipov and colleagues explicitly conducted the experiments to improve the safety and efficiency of gene editing for eventual clinical trials, which would involve implanting edited embryos into women’s uteruses to establish pregnancy.
In the United States, such clinical trials are effectively banned by a rule that prevents the Food and Drug Administration from reviewing applications for any procedure that would introduce heritable changes in human embryos. Such tinkering with embryo DNA, called germline editing, is controversial because of fears that the technology will be used to create so-called designer babies.

“This paper is not announcing the dawn of the designer baby era,” says R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison. The researchers have not attempted to add any new genes or change traits, only to correct a disease-causing version of a gene.

In the study, sperm from a man who carries a mutation in the MYBPC3 gene was injected into eggs from women with healthy copies of that gene. Carrying just one mutant copy of the gene causes an inherited heart problem called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (SN: 9/17/16, p. 8). That condition, which strikes about one in every 500 people worldwide, can cause sudden heart failure. Mutations in the MYBPC3 gene are responsible for about 40 percent of cases. Doctors can treat symptoms of the condition, but there is no cure.

Along with the man’s sperm, researchers injected into the egg the DNA-cutting enzyme Cas9 and a piece of RNA to direct the enzyme to snip the mutant copy of the gene. Another piece of DNA was also injected into the egg. That hunk of DNA was supposed to be a template that the fertilized egg could use to repair the breach made by Cas9. Instead, embryos used the mother’s healthy copy of the gene to repair the cut.

Embryos’ self-healing DNA came as a surprise, because gene editing in other types of cells usually requires an external template, Mitalipov says. The discovery could mean that it will be difficult for researchers to fix mutations in embryos if neither parent has a healthy copy of the gene. But the finding could be good news for those concerned about designer babies, because embryos may reject attempts to add new traits.

Timing the addition of CRISPR/Cas9 is important, the researchers also discovered. In their first experiments, the team added the gene editor a day after fertilizing the eggs. Of 54 injected embryos, 13 were patchwork, or mosaic, embryos with some repaired and some unrepaired cells. Such mosaic embryos probably arise when the fertilized egg copies its DNA before researchers add Cas9, Mitalipov says.

Injecting Cas9 along with the sperm — before an egg had a chance to replicate its DNA — produced only one patchwork embryo. That embryo had repaired the mutation in all its cells, but some cells used the mother’s DNA for repair while others used the template supplied by the researchers.

None of the tested embryos showed any signs that Cas9 was cutting where it shouldn’t be. “Off-target” cutting has been a safety concern with the gene editor because of the possibility of creating new DNA errors.

The study makes progress toward using gene editing to prevent genetic diseases, but there’s still has a long way to go before clinical testing can begin, says Janet Rossant, a developmental biologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto. “We need to be sure this can be done reproducibly and effectively.”

Speed has its limits — on the open road and the Serengeti. Midsize animals tend to be the speedsters, even though, in theory, the biggest animals should be the fastest. A new analysis that relates speed and body size in 474 species shows that the pattern holds for animals whether they run, fly or swim (see graphs below) and suggests how size becomes a liability.

This relationship between speed and size has long stumped scientists. Big animals have longer legs or flippers to get from point A to point B. And bigger bodies have higher metabolic rates and more fast-twitch muscle cells, needed to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy and rapidly accelerate. So, why aren’t wildebeests faster than cheetahs?
The make-or-break factor is the time it takes an animal to accelerate to its top theoretical speed, an upper limit based on mass and metabolic rate, researchers report July 17 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Fast-twitch muscle cells provide the power for acceleration but tire quickly. When an animal gets too big, it takes too long to accelerate, and these cells use up their energy before hitting top speeds. More modestly built critters need less time to accelerate to those speeds.

The researchers gathered speed and size data from past lab and field studies. The animals (some shown as icons in the slideshow below) ranged in mass from 30-microgram Spanish mites to a blue whale weighing 108 metric tons.

Maybe it’s more than reptile fashion. The high percentage of citified sea snakes wearing black might be a sign that pollution is an evolutionary force.

Off the coasts of Australia and New Caledonia, some turtle-headed sea snakes (Emydocephalus annulatus) sport pale bands on their dark skins. Others go all black. In 15 places surveyed, the all-black form was more likely to predominate in waters near cities, military sites or industrial zones than along reefs near less built-up coastlines, says evolutionary ecologist Rick Shine of the University of Sydney.
That trend plus some analysis of trace elements in snakes’ skin suggests that the abundant dark forms could turn out to be an example of industrial melanism, Shine and his colleagues propose August 10 in Current Biology.

The most famous example of this evolutionary phenomenon comes from a dark form of peppered moth that overtook pale populations in 19th century England (SN: 6/25/16, p. 6). Dark wings created better camouflage from hungry birds in the grimy industrializing landscape.
Shine doesn’t think the sea snakes are going for camouflage, though. Instead, the snakes could be more like the dark-feathered pigeons of Paris. The melanin that gives that city’s feral birds their urban chic also does a great job of binding traces of toxic metals such as zinc, explains evolutionary ecologist Marion Chatelain of the University of Warsaw. When birds molt, getting rid of darker feathers lets them unload more of the unhealthful urban pollutants, she and colleagues have reported.
This could explain why marine biologist and study coauthor Claire Goiran has so many dark turtle-headed sea snakes in a lagoon not far from her campus, the University of New Caledonia in Nouméa. Earlier studies had found only downsides to dark coloration: Seaweed spores preferentially settle on dark snakes and sprout fuzz that can cut swimming speed by 20 percent and cause a snake to shed its skin more often than normal.
To test a scenario of industrial melanism, or darkening due to pollution, the researchers collected data on skin colors for a total of about 1,450 snakes, both live and museum specimens, from 15 sites in New Caledonia and Australia. Higher percentages of all-dark snakes wriggled around the nine polluted sites surveyed. At one, a remote Australian reef that the military had long used as a bombing range, all 13 specimens were dark.

To test shed skins for trace metals, Goiran and Shine enlisted Paco Bustamante of the University of La Rochelle in France, who studies trace metal contamination in marine life.

Researchers managed to collect sloughed skins from 17 turtle-headed snakes, which inconveniently shed their skin underwater. To compare light and dark patches, the scientists turned to two local species of sea kraits, which have banded skin and visit land to shed it.
Overall, skins held concentrations of trace elements higher than those that can cause health problems in birds and mammals, the researchers report. In the krait skins, dark zones had slightly more of some contaminants, such as zinc and arsenic, than the pale bluish-white bands did.

The idea that polluted water favors melanized sea snakes “is a reasonable hypothesis based on what we know,” Chatelain says. Definitive tests will require more data and different approaches. Genetic testing, for example, would clarify whether dark populations arose instead from small groups of pioneers that happened to have a lot of black snakes.

That testing could be a long way off. Sea snakes are evolutionary cousins of cobras and mambas, and some of the species swimming around Australia and New Caledonia are “bowel-looseningly large,” Shine says. At least the little turtle-headed ones, which eat eggs of small reef fishes, have venom glands that have atrophied and “probably couldn’t fit a human finger in their mouths.” But until someone figures out how to keep them alive in captivity for more than a few days, Shine isn’t expecting definitive genetics.

China’s first emperor broke the mold when he had himself buried with a terra-cotta army. Now insight into the careful crafting of those soldiers is coming from the clays used to build them. Custom clay pastes were mixed at a clay-making center and then distributed to specialized workshops that cranked out thousands of the life-size figures, new research suggests.

Roughly 700,000 craftsmen and laborers built Emperor Qin Shihuang’s palatial mausoleum in east-central China between 247 B.C. and 210 B.C. A portion of those workers gathered clay from nearby deposits and prepared it in at least three forms, researchers propose in the August Antiquity. On-site or nearby workshops used different signature clay recipes for terra-cotta warriors, parts of mostly bronze waterfowl figures and paving bricks for pits in which the soldiers originally stood.
Around 7,000 ceramic foot soldiers, generals and horses — equipped with a variety of bronze weapons — make up the army, which was accidentally discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well. The emperor would have regarded the ceramic statues as a magic army that would protect him as he ruled in the afterlife, many researchers suspect.

Building and assembling the multitude was an enormous task. Workers poured clay mixtures into casts of torsos, limbs and other body parts, and then assembled the bodies, taking care to create different facial features for each soldier. Finished statues, now mostly gray, were covered in colored lacquers and likely fired in kilns. Most figures were placed inside one giant pit. Earthen walls formed 11 parallel corridors where statues stood in battle-ready rows.

Still, no workshops or debris firmly linked to the statue-making process have been found. As a result, the number, size, location and organization of workshops involved in producing the emperor’s ceramic troops remain uncertain.

Archaeologist Patrick Quinn of University College London and three Chinese colleagues studied the composition of clay samples from the site. The pieces were taken from 12 terra-cotta warriors, two acrobat statues found in a second pit, five clay bricks from the floor of the largest pit, clay fragments from inside three bronze waterfowl statues found in a third pit and part of an earthen wall in the acrobat pit.

Microscopic analysis of the samples revealed that the clay came from deposits near the tomb’s location, the scientists say. But the recipes for different parts varied. Paving bricks contained only a mixture of dark and light clays, while the clay used for warriors and acrobats had sand worked in. Sand and plant fragments were folded into a clay mixture that formed the core of the bronze waterfowl.
Sand may have made the clay more malleable for shaping into ornate figures and increased statues’ durability, the researchers speculate. Plant pieces may have helped reduce the weight of birds’ clay cores. A clay-processing site at or just outside the emperor’s mausoleum must have doled out the appropriate clay pastes to an array of workshops where potters made statues, bricks or other objects, the scientists propose.

What’s more, many statue and waterfowl samples show signs of having been slowly heated in kilns at maximum temperatures of no more than 750˚ Celsius. That’s lower by 150˚ C or more than some previous estimates, the investigators say. Fires set in an attack on the tomb after the emperor’s death may have refired some of the clay, accounting for the temperature discrepancy, the researchers say.

“I’m not at all surprised by the new findings,” says East Asian art historian Robin D.S. Yates of McGill University in Montreal. Legal and administrative documents previously found at two other Qin Empire sites describe workshops that specialized in various types of craft production, Yates says.

In some cases, artisans’ stamps and inscriptions on terra-cotta warriors match those on excavated roof tiles from Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. The markings suggest that some workshops made several types of ceramic objects, says East Asian art historian Lothar Ledderose of Heidelberg University in Germany. Inscriptions on statues also indicate that artisans working at off-site factories during the Qin Empire collaborated with potters at local workshops to produce the terra-cotta army, Ledderose says.

Early in Inferior, science writer Angela Saini recalls a man cornering her after a signing for her book Geek Nation, on science in India. “Where are all the women scientists?” he asked, then answered his own question. “Women just aren’t as good at science as men are. They’ve been shown to be less intelligent.”

Saini fought back with a few statistics on girls’ math abilities, but soon decided that nothing she could say would convince him. It’s a situation that may feel familiar to many women. “What I wish I had was a set of scientific arguments in my armory,” she writes.
So she decided to learn the truth about what science really does tell us about differences between the sexes. “For everyone who has faced the same situation,” she writes, “the same desperate attempt to not lose control but have at hand some real facts and a history to explain them, here they are.”

In Inferior, Saini marshals plenty of facts and statistics contradicting sexist notions about women’s bodies and minds. She cites study after study showing little or no difference in male and female capabilities.

But it’s the book’s historical perspective that makes it most compelling. Only by understanding the cultural context of the men whose studies and ideas first pointed to gender imbalances can we see how deeply biases run, Saini argues.

Charles Darwin’s influential ideas reflected his times, for instance. In The Descent of Man, he wrote that “man has ultimately become superior to woman” via evolution. To a woman active in her local women’s movement, Darwin wrote, “there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance … in [women] becoming the intellectual equals of man.”

If that idea sounds absurd now, don’t fool yourself into thinking it has vanished. Saini’s book is full of examples right up to today of scientists who have started from this and other flawed premises, which have led to generations of flawed studies and results that reinforce stereotypes. But the tide has been turning, as more women have entered science and more scientists of both sexes seek to remove bias from their work.
Saini does an excellent job of dissecting research on evolution, neuroscience and even the long-standing notion that women’s sexual behavior is driven by their interest in stable, monogamous relationships. By the end, it’s clear that science doesn’t divide men and women; we’ve done that to ourselves. And as scientists become more rigorous, we get closer to seeing ourselves as we really are.

A tiny, shimmying cantilever wiggles a bit more than expected in a new experiment. The excess jiggling of the miniature, diving board–like structure might hint at why the strange rules of quantum mechanics don’t apply in the familiar, “classical” world. But that potential hint is still a long shot: Other sources of vibration are yet to be fully ruled out, so more experiments are needed.

Quantum particles can occupy more than one place at the same time, a condition known as a superposition (SN: 11/20/10, p. 15). Only once a particle’s position is measured does its location become definite. In quantum terminology, the particle’s wave function, which characterizes the spreading of the particle, collapses to a single location (SN Online: 5/26/14).
In contrast, larger objects are always found in one place. “We never see a table or chair in a quantum superposition,” says theoretical physicist Angelo Bassi of the University of Trieste in Italy, a coauthor of the study, to appear in Physical Review Letters. But standard quantum mechanics doesn’t fully explain why large objects don’t exist in superpositions, or how and why wave functions collapse.

Extensions to standard quantum theory can alleviate these conundrums by assuming that wave functions collapse spontaneously, at random intervals. For larger objects, that collapse happens more quickly, meaning that on human scales objects don’t show up in two places at once.

Now, scientists have tested one such theory by looking for one of its predictions: a minuscule jitter, or “noise,” imparted by the random nature of wave function collapse. The scientists looked for this jitter in a miniature cantilever, half a millimeter long. After cooling the cantilever and isolating it to reduce external sources of vibration, the researchers found that an unexplained trembling still remained.

In 2007, physicist Stephen Adler of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., predicted that the level of jitter from wave function collapse would be large enough to spot in experiments like this one. The new measurement is consistent with Adler’s prediction. “That’s the interesting fact, that the noise matches these predictions,” says study coauthor Andrea Vinante, formerly of the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies in Trento, Italy. But, he says, he wouldn’t bet on the source being wave function collapse. “It is much more likely that it’s some not very well understood effect in the experiment.” In future experiments, the scientists plan to change the design of the cantilever to attempt to isolate the vibration’s source.

The result follows similar tests performed with the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, which was built as a test-bed for gravitational wave detection techniques. Two different studies found no excess jiggling of free-falling weights within the spacecraft. But the new cantilever experiment tests for wave function collapse occurring at different rate and length scales than those previous studies.
Theories that include spontaneous wave function collapse are not yet accepted by most physicists. But interest in them has recently become more widespread, says physicist David Vitali of the University of Camerino in Italy, “sparked by the fact that technological advances now make fundamental tests of quantum mechanics much easier to conceive.” Focusing on a simple system like the cantilever is the right approach, says Vitali, who was not involved with the research. Still, “a lot of things can go wrong or can be not fully controlled.”

To conclude that wave function collapse is the cause of the excess vibrations, every other possible source will have to be ruled out. So, Adler says, “it’s going to take a lot of confirmation to check that this is a real effect.”

Air pollution is a drag for renewable energy. Dust and other sky-darkening air pollutants slash solar energy production by 17 to 25 percent across parts of India, China and the Arabian Peninsula, a new study estimates. The haze can block sunlight from reaching solar panels. And if the particles land on a panel’s flat surface, they cut down on the area exposed to the sun. Dust can come from natural sources, but the other pollutants have human-made origins, including cars, factories and coal-fired power plants.

Scientists collected and analyzed dust and pollution particles from solar panels in India, then extrapolated to quantify the impact on solar energy output in all three locations. China, which generates more solar energy than any other country, is losing up to 11 gigawatts of power capacity due to air pollution, the researchers report in the Aug. 8 Environmental Science & Technology Letters. That’s a loss of about $10 billion per year in U.S. energy costs, says study coauthor Mike Bergin of Duke University. Regular cleaning of solar panels can help. Cleaning the air, however, is harder.