Particle views
Scientists are monitoring the actions of subatomic particles referred to as muons to disclose the inside worlds of pyramids, volcanoes and extra, Emily Conover reported in “Muons open doors” (SN: 4/23/22, p. 22).
Reader and longtime subscriber John Ewald praised Conover’s “enjoyable and detailed” reporting. “She alerted us to concepts and investigations that are honestly new to me,” Ewald wrote. “She carried us through those things with a pace that let me emerge [at the end] to say, ‘No particle like it.’ ”
Ewald additionally appreciated that the difficulty’s editor’s notice gave an inside look into how the thought for Conover’s function bloomed (SN: 4/23/22, p. 2). Editor in chief Nancy Shute wrote that physicists generally contemplate muons a nuisance as a result of they get in the way in which of many experiments. But Conover observed an thrilling development: scientists reimagining the pesky particles as helpful instruments for discovery. Shute “added information, so I learned from her writing too,” Ewald wrote.
A dynamic mind
A research linked COVID-19 with decreased grey matter in components of the mind related to the sense of scent, nevertheless it’s nonetheless unclear if the modifications are dangerous or everlasting, Laura Sanders reported in “COVID-19 can change a person’s brain” (SN: 4/23/22, p. 8).
News protection of the research, with headlines about mind injury and shrinkage, involved many within the public, Sanders reported. But the mind usually transforms all through life — together with throughout adolescence and being pregnant — and people modifications should not essentially a trigger for alarm. Some readers have been relieved to be taught that the mind is just not so static. “The fact that the brain is constantly changing shape due to various stimuli makes me feel less worried about COVID changes,” Facebook consumer Bel Vedere wrote. “It would certainly be interesting to see the long-term follow-up to these studies.”
The story additionally eased the thoughts of reader Lynne Mullins. After seeing some alarming protection of the research’s outcomes, “it is reassuring that answers won’t be available for a while,” Mullins wrote.
Online nook
As a part of Science News’ centennial celebration, we created a quiz to check our readers’ data of 100 years of science tales. The quiz, posted on our web site in late April, requested individuals to guess when within the final century 15 headlines have been revealed.
An article featured within the quiz, “The Earth is a soup-kettle,” was revealed in (spoiler alert!) 1932 and reported on geologist Arthur Holmes’ concept for the way continents may float atop “boiling” rock (SN: 9/10/32, p. 162). At the time, the speculation of plate tectonics didn’t but exist. Reader Martin Kappeyne requested why the piece didn’t reference meteorologist Alfred Wegener’s continental drift idea, which dates again to 1912.
That story, written by Frank Thone, “focused primarily on the question of Earth losing heat — and not the idea of continental drift,” says particular initiatives editor Elizabeth Quill.
But Thone did slip in a point out of the speculation: “Thus are mountain folds thrown up on the edge of continents, Prof. Holmes thinks; for he is one of those geologists who believe in the theory of shifting and migrating continents, most notably advocated by the great German scientist, von Wegener.”
Quill doesn’t declare to know what was occurring in Thone’s thoughts, “and his coverage choices probably had a lot to do with what was occupying the attention of scientists in his circle at that snapshot in time,” she says. “But the lack of emphasis on continental drift might have something to do with how contentious the idea was.” In a glance again on the emergence of plate tectonics as a unifying idea, Carolyn Gramling reported that debates between “mobilists” who supported continental drift and “fixists” who opposed it have been raging within the Twenties. In the following a long time, many geologists turned their consideration to different issues till curiosity within the concept rekindled within the Nineteen Fifties, when new knowledge surfaced from the underside of the oceans (SN: 1/16/21, p. 16).
Online readers scored a mean of seven.8 out of 15 on the headline quiz. Think you’ll get extra? Take the quiz your self.