Life of the party
Margaret S. Collins, the first Black female entomologist in the United States to earn a Ph.D., overcame racism and sexism to become a field biologist and termite expert, life sciences writer Susan Milius reported in “Termite Pioneer.”
“I had the honor of knowing [Margaret S. Collins] in the early 1990s, when I was hired by the USDA at the National Museum of Natural History,” wrote research entomologist Dr. M. Alma Solis. “I have many stories of her as a scientist at the museum, but one of the stories I have never heard anyone relate is her ability to capture the attention and imagination of scientists at parties. If there was a group of people around someone, you knew it was Margaret reading palms! She was very good at reading people and very funny.”
Diving deeper
A marine cyanobacterium dubbed “Chonkus” stores plenty of carbon and sinks rapidly in liquid. Those traits hold promise for sequestering carbon in the ocean to help fight climate change, earth and climate writer Carolyn Gramling reported in “A mutant cyanobacterium has an appetite for carbon.”
Reader Deborah Strod asked how long it would take for the carbon sequestered by this bacterium to make its way back into the atmosphere.
The timescale of carbon cycling in the ocean can vary depending on many factors, including the depth of the water. Generally, “if you sink organic carbon deep enough, it is expected to remain separated from the atmosphere for thousands of years,” says microbiologist Max Schubert, formerly of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. “It remains an open scientific question how much biomass sinks this deep” from the ocean surface, he says.
Scientists are attempting to measure this through models of ocean iron fertilization, the practice of fertilizing the ocean surface to increase the growth of phytoplankton. These organisms capture carbon throughout their lives and ultimately sink down to the seafloor when they die.
Though ocean iron fertilization could help remove atmospheric carbon, it poses some risks. The process can rob valuable nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from the environment, potentially disrupting certain ocean ecosystems. “We were excited to see that [Chonkus] accumulated a large amount of carbon-rich polymers,” Shubert says, which may allow it to sink carbon “while robbing fewer other nutrients along the way.”
On the redesign
Science News’ January 2025 issue unveiled a new look, with more pages and visual elements, a science-themed puzzle, and our usual comprehensive and in-depth science coverage.
Some readers shared their first impressions.
“I love it,” wrote Mark Waltz. “I’ve been subscribing for most of my adult life, and it’s great to see your efforts to deliver scientific news in what I am sure continues to be a challenging news ecosystem.”
Joel Sanet wrote: “I’ve been a fan of word and math puzzles most of my life … I urge you to continue publishing them.” Acrostics, a type of word puzzle that reveals a coded message, “would give even more opportunities to incorporate science into the clues and could result in a quote from a famous scientist or in a science tidbit,” Sanet added.