NEW ORLEANS — Ever since Ötzi’s mummified body was found in the Italian Alps in 1991, researchers have been trying to pin down how the 5,300-year-old Tyrolean Iceman died. It now looks like this Copper Age hunter-gatherer simply froze to death, perhaps after suffering minor blood loss from an arrow wound to his left shoulder, anthropologist Frank Rühli of the University of Zurich reported April 20 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

“Freezing to death is quite likely the main cause of death in this classic cold case,” Rühli said. Ötzi succumbed to exposure within anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, he estimated.

New analyses of the Iceman’s body, based on X-rays and CT scans, argue against the idea that Ötzi died from a stone arrowhead shot into his shoulder (SN: 9/6/14, p. 6). Surprisingly shallow penetration of that weapon into Ötzi’s shoulder ruptured a blood vessel but caused no major tissue damage, Rühli said. Internal bleeding totaled only about 100 milliliters, or a half cup, he and his colleagues concluded. That’s enough of a poke to cause plenty of discomfort but not death, Rühli said.

Several depressions and fractures on the Iceman’s skull also couldn’t have proven fatal, he added. Some researchers regard those injuries as signs that Ötzi was clubbed to death. Rühli’s team found that those skull injuries are more consistent with the ancient man having accidentally fallen and hit his head while walking over rough ground. The Iceman was found with fur headgear that probably helped to protect his noggin when he took a headlong tumble, Rühli suggested.

The enzyme that turns on the light for a glow-in-the-dark mushroom seems “promiscuous.” But in a good way.

Researchers have worked out new details of how two Neonothopanus fungi shine softly green at night. The team had earlier figured out that the basic starting material for bioluminescence in these fungi is a compound called hispidin, found in some other fungi as well as plants such as horsetails. Those plants don’t spontaneously give off light, but in the two Neonothopanus mushroom species, an enzyme rejiggers a form of hispidin into a compound that glows.

The enzyme that turns a fungus into a natural night-light isn’t that fussy as enzymes go, says Cassius V. Stevani of the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He and colleagues can tweak the compound that the enzyme normally reacts with and still get a glow, the researchers report April 26 in Science Advances.

This easygoing chemistry has allowed the team to develop blue to orange glows instead of just the natural yellowish-green. These bonus colors might mark the beginnings of a new labeling tool for molecular biologists, the researchers say.

The Bro Code apparently does not exist among wild cuttlefish. The first field video of male European cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) getting physical over a female shows that they are not above stealing another guy’s girl.

Cuttlefish, cephalopods known for their ability to alter their skin color, have complex and competitive courtship rituals. While scientists have extensively studied common European cuttlefish fights over mates, observing such altercations has proven elusive outside of the lab.
In 2011, biologists Justine Allen of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and Derya Akkaynak of the University of Haifa in Israel lucked out. They were in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey following a female cuttlefish with an underwater camera to study camouflage, when a male cuttlefish approached the female, and the pair mated. Soon after, another male appeared on the scene and edged in on the female. A battle of ink and arms ensued. “I just remember there being a lot of ink everywhere — so much ink,” Allen recalls.
It took the original male three tries to reclaim his mate, the team writes in the July issue of The American Naturalist. Each attempt escalated in intensity. That’s consistent with a game theory model where opponents assess peers’ abilities as well as their own, the scientists suggest.
The footage confirms that males in the wild use an arsenal of aggressive behaviors to oust romantic rivals — tactics like darkening the skin around their eyes and face, displaying a zebra pattern on their body, spraying ink while jetting through the water, biting and wrestling. Lab bouts pale in comparison to the viciousness of this encounter.

Determining whether any of this is typical for fights between males of this species requires more data and more cuttlefish.

Pancreatic cancer is hard to detect early, when the disease is most amenable to treatment. But a new study describes a blood test that may aid the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and someday make earlier screening feasible, the authors say.

The test detects a combination of five tumor proteins that appear to be a reliable signature of the disease, the researchers report in the May 24 Science Translational Medicine. In patients undergoing pancreatic or abdominal surgery, the test was 84 percent accurate at picking out those who had pancreatic cancer.
“What’s exciting about the study is that it further favors the belief that one biomarker by itself may not be able to successfully identify a disease,” says Raghu Kalluri, a cancer biologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who was not involved in the study. By putting the five protein biomarkers together, he says, “the power of the analysis might be more beneficial in differentiating healthy individuals and ones with pancreatic cancer.”

The National Cancer Institute estimates that in 2017 there will be more than 53,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer in the United States and just over 43,000 deaths from the cancer. Individuals with the most common form of pancreatic cancer, called pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, have a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent. The cancer is usually caught late because the symptoms, including weight loss and abdominal pain, often don’t arise until the cancer has spread. And current imaging technology can’t detect the cancer at the start, says study coauthor Cesar Castro, a translational oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“The unmet need here is finding some other form of detection before a cancer grows large enough for the CT scan to detect it,” Castro says.

In their hunt for better detection methods, the researchers turned to tumor-derived extracellular vesicles, small sacs shed by tumor cells that circulate in the bloodstream. The sacs “are almost like mini-mes” of the parent tumor, Castro says, because they contain proteins and genetic material that often match the tumor.

The researchers selected five promising protein biomarkers from tumor-derived extracellular vesicles. Using a gold-coated silicon chip covered with antibodies and sporting nanopores, the team tested how well the biomarkers signaled the presence of pancreatic cancer in plasma samples from patients. When light shining through the pores encountered the extracellular vesicles, bound to the chip because of the interaction between the protein biomarkers and the antibodies, the light’s wavelength changed — signaling the presence of a tumor.
In plasma samples taken from 43 patients before scheduled surgery for a medical issue in the pancreas or abdomen, the panel of five biomarkers distinguished pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma from pancreatitis — an inflammation of the pancreas — and from benign cysts as well as from control patients’ samples. A pathology report after the surgeries confirmed the results.

Using their sensing device, the researchers report that the combined five biomarkers correctly identified whether a patient had pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma or not in 84 percent of cases. The highest accuracy for any one of these biomarkers used by itself was just 70 percent.

The next step is to test patients at high risk for pancreatic cancer, and eventually those who are healthy, to see if these biomarkers are effective at early screening. “What we need to do now is pivot towards precancerous lesions,” Castro says. “Can they pick up any precancerous changes?”

“I’m excited about anything that can happen for these patients who are in desperate need for biomarkers and treatment,” Kalluri says. But he cautions that studies reporting the effectiveness of biomarkers as cancer screening tools often use different technologies for their assessments, making it hard for academic laboratories to reproduce the results. “There’s a tremendous lack of organized effort in the biomarker field,” he says, and if there is no way to come to a consensus on which biomarkers are most promising, “it’s very difficult for a patient to realize any benefit.”

Some of the earliest settlers of the Americas curtailed their coastal migration to hunker down in what’s now northwestern Peru, new finds suggest. Although researchers have often assumed that shoreline colonizers of the New World kept heading south from Alaska in search of marine foods, staying put in some spots made sense: Hunter-gatherers needed only simple tools to exploit rich coastal and inland food sources for thousands of years.

Excavations at two seaside sites in Peru find that people intermittently camped there from about 15,000 to 8,000 years ago, say anthropologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and his colleagues. Ancient people along Peru’s Pacific coast didn’t leave behind fishhooks, harpoons, nets or boats that could have been used to capture fish, sharks and sea lions, the scientists report May 24 in Science Advances. Yet remains of those sea creatures turned up at coastal campsites now buried beneath a human-made, earthen mound called Huaca Prieta and an adjacent mound called Paredones. Fish and other marine animals probably washed up on beaches or were trapped in lagoons that formed near the shore, Dillehay’s group proposes. Hungry humans needed only nets or clubs to subdue these prey.
Other marine foods found at the ancient Peruvian campsites included snails, crabs, clams, sea gulls and pelicans. Fragments of material woven out of rush plants, the earliest dating to between 10,600 and 11,159 years ago, may have come from fish traps or baskets, the researchers say.
Radiocarbon dating of burned wood, animal bones and plant seeds provided age estimates for a series of buried campsites at Huaca Prieta and Paredones.

Present-day hunters on Peru’s coast eat fish and small sharks that get trapped on the beach or in shallow shoreline lagoons. Hunters also build blinds where they wait to net and club birds, a tactic probably also used by ancient Americans, the investigators suspect.

Deer bones indicate that ancient Huaca Prieta and Paredones visitors hunted on land as well. And remains of avocado, beans and possibly cultivated squash and chili peppers at the ancient campsites — foods known to have been gathered or grown at inland locations — suggest that people transported these foods to the coast, possibly via trading.
Evidence that early New World settlers trekked back and forth from coastal to interior parts of Peru coincides with similar human movements in southern Chile more than 14,000 years ago (SN Online: 5/8/08). A team led by Dillehay uncovered seaweed fragments in hearths and structures at Monte Verde II, located 30 kilometers from Chile’s coast. Edible rushes, reeds and stones from the coast also turned up at Monte Verde II.

“Just as there was some contact with the sea at Monte Verde II, there was some contact with the interior at Huaca Prieta,” Dillehay says.

Simple stone tools, sharpened on one side, dominate implements excavated at the Peruvian sites and at Monte Verde II. Basic tools suitable for all sorts of cutting and scraping tasks fit a lifestyle in which people sought food across varied landscapes, the researchers contend.
Similar conditions may have characterized some North American coastlines by around 15,000 years ago, Dillehay says. “The problem is that these areas are now underwater” due to a global sea level rise between 20,000 and 6,000 years ago (SN: 8/13/11, p. 22).

Accumulating evidence supports the idea that early Americans favored the coast over an inland lifestyle, says archaeologist Daniel Sandweiss of the University of Maine in Orono. An ice-free corridor into North America’s interior may not have formed before 12,600 years ago (SN Online: 8/10/16), after people had reached Peru and Chile.

The pace at which people moved south from Huaca Prieta is unknown, Sandweiss says. Monte Verde II dates to roughly 500 years after the first coastal campsites in Peru, raising the possibility that Huaca Prieta folk founded the Chilean site, he suggests.

Dillehay doubts it. Modern hunter-gatherer groups vary greatly in size but usually don’t exceed several hundred members, making it unlikely that ancient Huaca Prieta and Paredones people were numerous enough to encounter food shortages, he says. Even if food ran out, hunter-gatherers only had to move a few kilometers north or south to find abundant grub. “We really don’t know where these people were coming and going,” Dillehay cautions.

Those who struggle to fit a vacation wardrobe into a carry-on might learn from ladybugs. The flying beetles neatly fold up their wings when they land, stashing the delicate appendages underneath their protective red and black forewings.

To learn how one species of ladybug (Coccinella septempunctata) achieves such efficient packing, scientists needed to see under the bug’s spotted exterior. So a team from Japan replaced part of a ladybug’s forewing with a transparent bit of resin, to get a first-of-its-kind glimpse of the folding.
Slow-motion video of the altered ladybug showed that the insect makes a complex, origami-like series of folds to stash its wings, the scientists report in the May 30 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. CT scans helped explain how the wings can be both strong enough to hold the insects aloft and easily foldable into a tiny package. The shape of the wing veins allows them to flex like a metal tape measure, making the wings stiff but bendable. Lessons learned from the wings could be applied to new technologies, including foldable aircraft wings or solar panels that unfurl from a spacecraft.

Climate change may make the rich richer and the poor poorer in the United States.

Counties in the South face a higher risk of economic downturn due to climate change than their northern counterparts, a new computer simulation predicts. Because southern counties generally host poorer populations, the new findings, reported in the June 30 Science, suggest that climate change will worsen existing wealth disparities.

“It’s the most detailed and comprehensive study of the effects of climate change in the United States,” says Don Fullerton, an economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the work. “Nobody has ever even considered the effects of climate change on inequality.”
Researchers created a computer program called SEAGLAS that combined several climate simulations to forecast U.S. climate until 2100, assuming greenhouse gas emissions keep ramping up. Then, using data from previous studies on how temperature and rainfall affect several economic factors — including crop yields, crime rates and energy expenditures — SEAGLAS predicted how the economy of each of the 3,143 counties in the United States would fare.

By the end of the century, some counties may see their gross domestic product decline by more than 20 percent, while others may actually experience more than a 10 percent increase in GDP. This could make for the biggest transfer of wealth in U.S. history, says study coauthor Solomon Hsiang, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

In general, SEAGLAS predicts that counties in the lower Midwest, the South and the Southwest — already home to some of the country’s poorest communities — will bear the brunt of climate-caused economic damages, while counties in New England, the Great Lakes region and the Pacific Northwest will suffer less or see gains. For many of the examined economic factors, such as the number of deaths per year, “getting a little bit hotter is much worse if you’re already very hot,” explains Hsiang. “Most of the south is the hottest part of the country, so those are the regions where costs tend to be really high.”
The economic gaps may get stretched even wider than SEAGLAS predicts, Fullerton says, because the simulation doesn’t account for wealth disparities within counties. For example, wealthier people in poor counties may have access to air conditioning while their less fortunate neighbors do not. So blisteringly hot weather is most likely to harm the poorest of the poor.

Not all researchers, however, think the future is as bleak as SEAGLAS suggests. The simulation doesn’t fully account for adaptation to climate change, says Delavane Diaz, an energy and environmental policy analyst at the Electric Power Research Institute in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit research organization. For example, people in coastal regions could mitigate the cost of sea level rise by flood-proofing structures or moving inland, she says.

And the economic factors examined in this study don’t account for some societal benefits that may arise from climate change, says Derek Lemoine, an economist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. For instance, although crime rates rise when it’s warmer because more people tend to be out and about, people being active outside could have a positive impact on health.

But SEAGLAS is designed to incorporate different societal variables as new data become available. “I really like the system,” Lemoine says. “It’s a super ambitious work and the kind of thing that needs to be done.”

Mums are now a flower of a different color. Japanese researchers have added a hint of clear sky to the humble plant’s palette, genetically engineering the first-ever “true blue” chrysanthemum.

“Obtaining blue-colored flowers is the Holy Grail for plant breeders,” says Mark Bridgen, a plant breeder at Cornell University. The results are “very exciting.”

Compounds called delphinidin-based anthocyanin pigments are responsible for the natural blues in such flowers as pansies and larkspur. Mums lack those compounds. Instead, the flowers come in a variety of other colors, evoking fiery sunsets, new-fallen snow and all things chartreuse.
In previous attempts to engineer a blue hue in chrysanthemums — and roses and carnations — researchers inserted the gene for a key enzyme that controls production of these compounds, causing them to accumulate. But the resulting blooms skewed more violet-purple than blue.
True blue pigment remained elusive, scientists thought, because its origin was complex; multiple genes have been shown to be involved in its generation. But Naonobu Noda, of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues were surprised to find that inserting only two borrowed genes into chrysanthemums created blue flowers. One gene, from Canterbury bells, got the enzyme process started; the other, from butterfly peas, further tweaked the pigment molecules.

Together, the gene double-team transformed 19 of 32 mums, or 59 percent, of the Taihei variety from having pink or magenta blooms into blue beauties. Additional analyses revealed that the blue color arose because of molecular interactions between the tweaked pigment and certain colorless compounds naturally found in many plants, including chrysanthemums. The two-part method could possibly be used in the production of other blue flowers, the researchers report July 26 in Science Advances.

Nearly 5 percent of U.S. adults misused prescription opioids in 2015, a new study shows.

Based on the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an in-person survey of more than 50,000 people, researchers estimate that 91.8 million, or 37.8 percent, of adults used prescription opioids in 2015. Some 11.5 million people misused the painkillers, and 1.9 million people reported opioid dependence or abuse, Beth Han of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Rockville, Md., and colleagues report online August 1 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Relieving pain was the most commonly cited reason for people’s most recent episode of misuse — for 66 percent of those reporting misuse, such as using without a prescription, and nearly 49 percent of those with opioid dependence or abuse. (Respondents could report more than one reason for their last misuse.) These results underscore the need for improved pain management, the authors say.

With just weeks to go before the Great American Eclipse, scientists are finalizing years of planning to study the solar phenomenon. But it’s not too late to get involved.

“This is the first eclipse crossing over a major landmass in the era when lots of people have digital devices,” says astronomer Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. The 120-kilometer-wide path of totality, where observers will see the moon completely cover the sun, will streak through 12 states from coast-to-coast on August 21, and the entire country will see at least a partial eclipse. So if you’re interested in collecting data on this rare celestial spectacle, there’s an app for that. Several, in fact.

Observe eclipse weather
The GLOBE Program’s Observer app lets people to catalog changes in their local atmosphere that are affected by the amount of sunlight hitting Earth. Users can take pictures or enter descriptions of cloud cover, record temperatures and write in such observations as wind speed or air pressure if they have the equipment to make them.

“The eclipse allows us to see what happens when there’s a relatively abrupt drop in sunlight,” says Kristen Weaver of the GLOBE Observer program at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Even people who aren’t in the path of totality can contribute valuable data, Weaver says.

Students from kindergarten through high school will use the data in research projects through the GLOBE education program. And if enough people send in data, NASA researchers creating models of Earth’s energy budget — the balance between the energy our planet receives from the sun and sends back out into space — could also analyze the observations.
Folks willing to take their eyes off the skies for a moment can record what plants and animals are doing around eclipse time using the California Academy of Sciences’ iNaturalist app.

Past eclipse-watchers have told tales of animals exhibiting nighttime behavior — such as birds falling silent or squirrels retreating to their dens — when the moon blocks the sun. The iNaturalist app could allow the first extensive examination of this phenomenon, says the Academy’s Elise Ricard.

People can use the app to note the behavior of whatever animals are around, be they pets, livestock, wildlife or even zoo animals. Some flowers also close up at night, Ricard notes, so plant observations are also encouraged.

The data could help scientists understand the extent of eclipse necessary to elicit certain responses. For instance, someone in an area where the moon covers 85 percent of the sun might notice odd animal behavior that isn’t seen by anyone in areas with only 70 percent coverage of the sun.

Record the sounds of an eclipse
The sounds of nature can also change dramatically during an eclipse. Ricard remembers birds falling silent in the nearby jungle during an Australian eclipse. And Henry Winter, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., recalls a friend’s story of crickets starting to chirp during an eclipse.

To capture these shifting sounds, Winter launched the Eclipse Soundscapes project, which will collect recordings during the solar eclipse to provide an audio experience for the visually impaired.

Soundscapes’ reps will record at 12 national parks, and anyone with the app can add their own sound bites to the database. The app will also include a specially designed narration of what’s happening in the sky for visually impaired eclipse-goers.

Solar snapshots for science
For anyone in the path of totality, there’s also the chance to participate in the Eclipse MegaMovie project, the first crowdsourced image archive of a total solar eclipse.

Viewed from any single place on the ground in the path of totality, the moon completely covers the sun for only about 2½ minutes. But by gathering images from over 1,000 trained volunteers and from members of the public snapping pics with smartphones across the country, the MegaMovie project will capture the full 90-minute duration of the solar eclipse as it crosses the continental United States.

The project will give astronomers an unprecedented view of the outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere — which aren’t blocked by the moon — during the entire eclipse.

Like the data collected by all these apps, the Eclipse MegaMovie images will be publicly available online, where they can be accessed by amateur astronomers, too. “They might notice some interesting phenomenon before professional astronomers get around to looking at the data,” Filippenko says.

It’s certainly an exciting time to be a citizen scientist. But if you do decide to participate in data collection, don’t forget to take time to put down your phone and enjoy the majesty of the eclipse.