Kids of the Covid generation: The road ahead
By Amber Dance What will become of children growing up during the pandemic? There’s reason for concern, but the research on resilience is reassuring. A developmental psychologist explains what adults can do to protect youngsters from long-term harm. Read more.
Could the immune system be key to Alzheimer’s disease?
By Esther Landhuis Increasing evidence suggests that chronic inflammation takes a toll on the brain over the course of a lifetime. Read more.
Will small businesses recover from Covid?
By Eryn Brown They play an outsize role in the economy, and in strengthening communities. Their prospects for surviving the pandemic may seem dim, but there are some encouraging signs, experts say — and emerging winners and losers. Read more.
How enlisting dentists can speed up Covid-19 vaccinations
By Mary E. Northridge OPINION: Dental care providers have the skills, the facilities and the trust of patients who might otherwise miss out. Read more.
From the archives
Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, whose Nobel-winning research explained the hole in the ozone layer, died January 28 at the age of 87. He is also heralded as helping to popularize the term “Anthropocene” and for developing the concept of “nuclear winter,” Harrison Smith writes in an obituary in the Washington Post. Explore Crutzen’s research via his papers: “Human Impacts on Atmospheric Chemistry” and “The Role of NO and NO2 in the Chemistry of the Troposphere and Stratosphere,” in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
Expert take
Dueling disasters
When Michael Gollner moved West with his family early last year, he got more than he bargained for. Within a month-and-a-half of setting up his “new” fire research lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the pandemic brought everything to a halt. Then, a couple of months after regaining some access to his new digs, the state’s worst wildfire season on record hit — bringing work to a standstill again.
“There were a few days when the sun never rose, the smoke was that thick,” Gollner says. “We were shut down for weeks on end because of the smoke and the power outages. But that’s what I study — so, go figure.”
When Knowable spoke with Gollner in 2019, he was igniting fire tornadoes in his lab at the University of Maryland. He creates these flaming twisters to understand how flames spread in extreme wildfires. These days, the combination of a pandemic and a treacherous fire season has Gollner thinking about how communities prepare for the unthinkable: commingling calamities. In a pandemic, for example, emergency evacuation shelters may not be open. And the health risk to firefighters — who don’t wear masks when battling blazes — is even higher than usual.
“I don’t think wildfires and a pandemic were really looked at as a compounding disaster in the past,” he says. “But it has clearly become one.”
Despite all this, Gollner’s work has inched forward. He’s been experimenting with wildfire smoldering, which can continue long after the fire has gone out. And he’s kept an eye on flame experiments conducted (remotely) aboard the supply spacecraft for the International Space Station as part of a NASA study on fire safety in space. And he’s still lighting fire whirls, looking at ways to use controlled cyclone conflagrations to quickly and cleanly burn off oil spills far from shore.
“We’re using the scary fire whirls that you see in wildfires but controlling them safely,” he says — with the aim of harnessing them to do good.
What we're reading
Tracking the virus
Logistics, logistics, logistics The rollout of America's Covid-19 vaccines is likely one of the most challenging public health problems the country has ever faced. The Biden administration is working with manufacturers and distributors to order and coordinate shipments to various states, but the bigger challenge is what follows, Cat Ferguson and Karen Hao write for MIT Technology Review. Figuring out the vaccine’s final van ride has largely been left up to the states, creating a mishmash of different rollout plans. (If you live in rural Alaska, the vaccine’s final leg may be via boat or sled, Nathaniel Herz reports at Alaska Public Media.)
Many states are struggling with this logistical stress test, but some have found ways to simplify the complexities, Griff Witte explains in the Washington Post. In South Dakota, for example, a small cadre of people are in charge of planning and have the leeway to adapt on the fly, patching up holes in coverage as they appear. But concerns abound. For one, as states rush to get people vaccinated, low-income, Black and indigenous communities are being left behind, Sidney Fussel writes in WIRED. Data suggest that rollouts — which, among other factors, may favor those with internet access and the time available to spend hours standing in line — are disproportionately favoring the wealthy and the white.
Distract yourself with science
Knit-picking Yarn by itself isn’t terribly stretchy, but interlock strands and the resulting fabric can stretch to more than twice its length. That’s the marvel of knitting, and physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto aims to unravel its mathematical rules. Drawing from principles of knot theory, she laid out an algorithmic lingo for how knitted stitches join together to create textiles. This knotty vocabulary could help create bespoke materials tailored to specific applications, writes Lakshmi Chandrasekaran at Science News, from wearable electronics to scaffolding for growing cells.
Orca oscillations There have long been two varieties of killer whales in the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea: residents, which mostly eat salmon, and transients, which mostly eat marine mammals. In the Atlantic, Katharine Gammon details how plummeting salmon stocks — combined with an uptick in animals like sea lions — have shifted the region’s orca dynamics and raised concerns that the beloved resident whales and their unique culture may disappear.
Art & science
CREDIT: KUTSCHERA L. & LICHTENEGGER E. (1992): ROOT ATLAS OF CENTRAL EUROPEAN GRASSLAND PLANTS. BD. 2/1: PTERIOPHYTA AND DICOTYLEDONEAE. PART 1, MORPHOLOGY, ANATOMY, ECOLOGY, DISTRIBUTION, SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMY. GUSTAV FISCHER, STUTTGART, JENA, NEW YORK, 851 S.
Go underground We don’t think much about the parts of a plant we don’t see — yet roots are every bit as varied as leaves, branches and blooms, and can hugely dwarf the real estate visible above ground. Shown top left is the root system of mountain alyssum (Alyssum montanum), a plant in the mustard family (same as cabbage, brussels sprouts and their friends). At right is the totally different-looking system of Anthyllis vulneraria, the common kidney vetch or woundwort, a medicinal plant in the pea family. But why stop there? Head to Wageningen University & Research for more than 1,000 drawings of root systems, from the mind-bogglingly broad extensions of Saxifraga moschata (mossy saxifrage) to the deep, branching network of Biscutella laevigata, the buckler mustard.
Each drawing is a faithful depiction of the roots of an excavated plant — the fruit of 40 years of work by Austrian botanist Lore Kutschera (1917–2008), founder of the International Society of Root Research, and her colleagues. And the roots of such efforts run deeper: American botanist and prairie ecologist John E. Weaver (1884–1966) paved the way. See, for example, gorgeous images in his The Ecological Relations of Roots (1919) and Root Development of Vegetable Crops (1927). Next time you roughly dig up a plant and watch it shrivel and die in its new location (and some of us at Knowable have done just this), these images may hint at why that happened.
