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WASHINGTON — There’s a long-standing joke that NASA is always 20 years from putting astronauts on Mars. Mission details shared at a recent summit shows that the space agency is right on schedule. A to-do list from 2015 looks remarkably similar to one compiled in 1990. One difference: NASA is now building a rocket and test-driving technologies needed to get a crew to Mars. But the specifics for the longest road trip in history — and what astronauts will do once they arrive — remain an open question.

“Are we going to just send them there to explore and do things that we could do robotically though slower, or can we raise the bar?” asked planetary scientist Jim Bell during the Humans to Mars summit. “We need to make sure that what these folks are being asked to do is worthy of the risk to their lives,” said Bell, of Arizona State University in Tempe.
The three-day symposium, which ended May 19, was organized by Explore Mars Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to putting astronauts on Mars by the 2030s.

While the summit didn’t break new scientific ground, it did bring together planetary scientists , space enthusiasts and representatives from both NASA and the aerospace industry to talk about the challenges facing a crewed mission to Mars and rough ideas for how to get there.

Part of the appeal in sending humans is the pace of discovery. Drilling just one hole with the Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Gale Crater on Mars since August 2012 (SN: 5/2/2015, p. 24), currently takes about a week. “It’s a laborious, frustrating, wonderful — frustrating — multiday process,” said Bell.

Humans also can react to novel situations, make quick decisions and see things in a way robotic eyes cannot. “A robot explorer is nowhere near as good as what a human geologist can do,” says Ramses Ramirez, a planetary scientist at Cornell University. “There’s just a lot more freedom.”

Researchers saw the human advantage firsthand in 1997 when they sent a rover called Nomad on a 45-day trek across the Atacama Desert in Chile. Nomad was controlled by operators in the United States to simulate operating a robot on another planet. Humans at the rover site provided a reality check on the data Nomad sent back. “There was a qualitative difference,” says Edwin Kite, a planetary scientist at the University of Chicago. And it wasn’t just that the geologists could do things faster. “The robots were driving past evidence of life that humans were finding very obvious.”
To get astronauts ready to explore Mars, the Apollo program is a good template, said Jim Head, a geologist at Brown University who helped train the Apollo astronauts. “Our strategy was called t-cubed: train them, trust them and turn them loose.” While each of the moon expeditions had a plan, the astronauts were trusted to use their judgment. Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott, for example, came across a chunk of deep lunar crust that researchers hoped to find although it wasn’t at a planned stop. “He spotted it three meters away,” said Head. “He saw it shining and recognized it immediately. That’s exploration.”

Despite a lack of clear goals for a jaunt to Mars, NASA is forging ahead. The Orion crew capsule has already been to space once; a 2014 launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket sent an uncrewed Orion 5,800 kilometers into space before it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean (SN Online: 12/5/2014). And construction of the Space Launch System, a rocket intended to hurl humans at the moon and Mars, is under way. The first test flight, scheduled for October 2018, will send Orion on a multiday uncrewed trip around the moon. NASA hopes to put astronauts onboard for a lunar orbit in 2021.

Meanwhile, the crew aboard the International Space Station is testing technologies that will keep humans healthy and happy during an interplanetary cruise. Astronaut Scott Kelly recently completed a nearly yearlong visit to the station intended to reveal the effects of long-duration space travel on the human body (SN Online: 2/29/2016). And on April 10, a prototype inflatable habitat — the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module — arrived at the station and was attached to a docking port six days later. The station crew will inflate the module for the first time on May 26. No one will live in it, but over the next two years, astronauts will collect data on how well the habitat handles radiation, temperature extremes and run-ins with space debris.
Beyond that, the plans get fuzzy. The general idea is to construct an outpost in orbit around the moon as a testing and staging ground starting in the late 2020s. The first crew to Mars might land on the planet — or might not. One idea is to set up camp in Mars orbit; from there, astronauts could operate robots on the surface without long communication delays. Another idea has humans touching down on one of Mars’ two moons, Phobos or Deimos. When crews do land on the Martian surface, NASA envisions establishing a base from which astronauts could plan expeditions.

With so few details, it’s difficult for the space agency to identify specific technologies to invest in. “There have been lots of studies — we get a lot of grief that it’s nothing but studies,” said Bret Drake, an engineer at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif. “But out of the studies, there are a lot of common things that come to the top no matter what path you take.”

Any mission to Mars has to support astronauts for roughly 500 to 1,000 days. The mission has to deal with round-trip communication delays of up to 42 minutes. It will need the ability to land roughly 40-ton payloads on the surface of Mars (current robotic missions drop about a ton). Living off the land is also key, making use of local water and minerals. And astronauts need the ability to not just survive, but drive around and explore. “We want to land in a safe place, which is going to be geologically boring, but we want to go to exciting locations,” said Drake.

The technical and logistical challenges might be the easiest part. “We do know enough to pull this off,” Ramirez says. “The biggest problem is political will.” Congress has yet to sign off on funding this adventure (nor has NASA presented a budget — expected to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars), and future administrations could decide to kill it.

Multiple summit speakers stressed the importance of using technology that is proven or under development — no exotic engines or rotating artificial gravity habitats for now. And a series of small missions —baby steps to the moon and an asteroid before committing to Mars — could show progress that might help keep momentum (and public interest) alive.

“We thought going to the moon was impossible, but we got there,” says Ramirez. “If we dedicate ourselves as a nation to do something crazy, we’ll do it. I have no doubt.”

Peppered moths and copycat butterflies owe their wing color-changing abilities to a single gene, two independent studies suggest.

A genetic tweak in a portion of the cortex gene that doesn’t make protein painted the speckled gray wings of peppered moths black, researchers report online June 1 in Nature. Genetic variants in DNA interspersed with and surrounding the cortex gene also help some tasty species of Heliconius butterflies mimic unpalatable species and avoid getting eaten by predators, a second team of scientists reports, also June 1 in Nature.
In the often-told evolutionary tale, the color shift in moths began as factories in Britain started to darken the skies with coal smoke during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. Victorian naturalists took note as a newly discovered, all-black carbonaria form of peppered moths (Biston betularia) blended into soot-covered backgrounds; the light-colored typica moths, which lacked the mutation, were easily picked off by birds. By 1970, nearly 99 percent of peppered moths were black in some localities. As air pollution decreased in the late 20th century, black moths became more visible to birds. As a result, carbonaria moths are now rare.

“This begins to unravel exactly what the original mutation was that produced the black … moths that were favored by natural selection” during much of the last century, says evolutionary biologist Paul Brakefield of the University of Cambridge in England. “It adds a new and exciting element to the story.”

Wing pattern changes in butterflies and peppered moths are textbook examples of natural selection, but the molecular details behind the adaptation have eluded scientists for decades. In 2011, researchers tracked the traits to a region of a chromosome all the species have in common (SN: 5/7/11, p. 11; SN: 9/24/11, p. 16). Which of the many genes in that region might be responsible remained a mystery.
In peppered moths, the region of interest stretches over about 400,000 DNA bases and contains 13 genes and two microRNAs. “There aren’t really any genes that scream out to you, ‘I’m involved in wing patterning,’” says evolutionary geneticist Ilik Saccheri at the University of Liverpool in England.
Saccheri and colleagues compared that region in one black moth and three typical moths. The researchers found 87 places where the black moth differed from the light-colored moths. Most of the differences were changes in single DNA bases — the information-carrying chemicals in DNA. Such genetic variants are known as SNPs for single nucleotide polymorphisms. One difference was the insertion of a 21,925-base-long stretch of DNA into the region. This big chunk of DNA contained multiple copies of a transposable element, or jumping gene. Transposable elements are viruslike pieces of DNA that copy and insert themselves into a host’s DNA.

By examining the DNA of hundreds more typica moths and ruling out mutations one by one, the team ended up with one candidate: the large transposable element that had landed in the cortex gene. But the jumping gene didn’t land in the DNA that encodes the protein. Instead it landed in an intron — a stretch of DNA that gets chopped out after the gene is copied into RNA and before a protein is made.

The jumping gene first landed in the cortex intron in about 1819, the researchers calculated from historical measurements of how common the trait was throughout history. That timing gave the mutation about 20 to 30 moth generations to spread through the population before people first reported sightings of the black moths in 1848. Saccheri and colleagues found the transposable element in 105 of 110 wild-caught carbonaria moths and none of the 283 typica moths tested. The remaining five moths are black because of another, unknown, genetic variation.

Similarly, Nicola Nadeau, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sheffield in England, and colleagues combed through more than 1 million DNA bases in each of five species of Heliconius butterflies. The researchers were looking for genetic variants associated with the presence or absence of yellow bands on the wings.

Nadeau’s team found 108 SNPs in all H. erato favorinus butterflies that have a yellow band on their hind wings. Most of those SNPs were in introns of the cortex gene or outside of the gene. Butterflies that lack the yellow band don’t have those SNPs.

Other DNA changes were found to draw yellow bars on the wings of different species of Heliconius butterflies, suggesting that evolution acted multiple times on the cortex gene with similar results.

The finding that the same gene influences wing patterns in butterflies and moths supports an idea that some genes are hot spots of natural selection, says Robert Reed, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University.

None of the genetic differences in the butterflies or peppered moths change the cortex gene itself. That leaves open the possibility that the transposable element and SNPs aren’t doing anything to cortex, but may be regulating a different gene. But the evidence that cortex really is the gene upon which natural selection has acted is strong, says Reed. “I’d be surprised if they were wrong.”

Still, it’s not obvious how cortex changes wing patterns, says Saccheri. “We’re both equally puzzled about how it is doing what it appears to be doing.” The teams have evidence that cortex helps determine when certain wing scales grow. In butterflies and moths, the timing of wing scale development affects the color of the wings, says Reed. “You see colors popping up almost like a paint-by-numbers.”

Yellow, white and red scales develop first. Black scales come later. Cortex is known to be involved in cell growth. So varying levels of the protein may speed up development of wing scales, causing them to become colored, or slow their growth, allowing them to turn black, the researchers speculate.

Mars’ misshapen moons, Phobos and Deimos, might be all that’s left of a larger family that arose in the wake of a giant impact with the Red Planet billions of years ago, researchers report online July 4 in Nature Geoscience.

The origin of the two moons has never been clear; they could be captured asteroids or homegrown satellites. But their orbits are hard to explain if they were snagged during a flyby, and previous calculations have had trouble reproducing locally sourced satellites. The new study finds that a ring of rocks blown off of the planet by a collision with an asteroid could have been a breeding ground for a set of larger satellites relatively close to the planet. Those moons, long since reclaimed by Mars, could have herded remaining debris in the sparsely populated outer part of the ring to form Phobos and Deimos.
Pascal Rosenblatt, a planetary scientist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, and colleagues ran computer simulations to show how the helper moons formed, did their duty and then fell to Mars, leaving behind a pair of moons similar to Phobos and Deimos.

The rain of moons is not over. While Deimos is in a stable orbit, Phobos is developing stress fractures as it slowly inches toward the Red Planet (SN: 12/12/15, p. 11).

Turtle shells didn’t get their start as natural armor, it seems. The reptiles’ ancestors might have evolved partial shells to help them burrow instead, new research suggests. Only later did the hard body covering become useful for protection.

The findings might also help explain how turtles’ ancestors survived a mass extinction 250 million years ago that wiped out most plants and animals on earth, scientists report online July 14 in Current Biology.

Most shelled animals, like armadillos, get their shells by adding bony scales all over their bodies. Turtles, though, form shells by gradually broadening their ribs until the bones fuse together. Fossils from ancient reptiles with partial shells made from thickened ribs suggest that turtles’ ancestors began to suit up in the same way.
It’s an unusual mechanism, says Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who led the study. Thicker ribs don’t offer much in the way of protection until they’re fully fused, as they are in modern turtles. And the modification makes critical functions like moving and breathing much harder — a steep price for an animal to pay. So Lyson suspected there was some advantage other than protection to the partial shells.

He and his colleagues examined fossils from prototurtles, focusing on an ancient South African reptile called Eunotosaurus africanus.

Eunotosaurus shared many characteristics with animals that dig and burrow, the researchers found. The reptile had huge claws and large triceps in addition to thickened ribs.
“We could tell that this animal was very powerful,” says Lyson.
Broad ribs “provide a really, really strong and stable base from which to operate this powerful digging mechanism,” he adds. Like a backhoe, Eunotosaurus could brace itself to burrow into the dirt.

Thanks to a lucky recent find of a fossil preserving the bones around the eyes, the team was even able to tell that the prototurtles’ eyes were well adapted to low light. That’s another characteristic of animals that spend time underground.

Swimming and digging use similar motions, Lyson says, so you would expect to find similar skeletal adaptations in water-dwelling animals. But large claws good for moving dirt suggest a life on land.

Fossils from other prototurtle species also have wider ribs and big claws. So the researchers think these traits may have been important for early turtle evolution in general, not just for Eunotosaurus.

Not everyone is entirely convinced. “It’s a very plausible idea, although many other animals burrow but don’t have these specializations,” says Hans Sues, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Sues says that it will be important to find and study other turtle ancestors well-adapted to digging to bolster the explanation.

Lyson thinks the prototurtles’ burrowing tendencies might have helped them survive the end-Permian mass extinction around 250 million years ago (SN: 9/19/15, p. 10).

“Lots of animals at this time period burrowed underground to avoid the very, very arid environment that was present in South Africa,” Lyson says. “The burrow provides more climate control.”

A puzzling mismatch is plaguing two methods for measuring how fast the universe is expanding. When the discrepancy arose a few years ago, scientists suspected it would fade away, a symptom of measurement errors. But the latest, more precise measurements of the expansion rate — a number known as the Hubble constant — have only deepened the mystery.

“There’s nothing obvious in the measurements or analyses that have been done that can easily explain this away, which is why I think we are paying attention,” says theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University.
If the mismatch persists, it could reveal the existence of stealthy new subatomic particles or illuminate details of the mysterious dark energy that pushes the universe to expand faster and faster.

Measurements based on observations of supernovas, massive stellar explosions, indicate that distantly separated galaxies are spreading apart at 73 kilometers per second for each megaparsec (about 3.3 million light-years) of distance between them. Scientists used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make their estimate, presented in a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal and available online at arXiv.org. The analysis pegs the Hubble constant to within experimental errors of just 2.4 percent — more precise than previous estimates using the supernova method.

But another set of measurements, made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, puts the figure about 9 percent lower than the supernova measurements, at 67 km/s per megaparsec with an experimental error of less than 1 percent. That puts the two measurements in conflict. Planck’s result, reported in a paper published online May 10 at arXiv.org, is based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, ancient light that originated just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

And now, another team has weighed in with a measurement of the Hubble constant. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey also reported that the universe is expanding at 67 km/s per mega-parsec, with an error of 1.5 percent, in a paper posted online at arXiv.org on July 11. This puts BOSS in conflict with the supernova measurements as well. To make the measurement, BOSS scientists studied patterns in the clustering of 1.2 million galaxies. That clustering is the result of pressure waves in the early universe; analyzing the spacing of those imprints on the sky provides a measure of the universe’s expansion.

Although the conflict isn’t new (SN: 4/5/14, p. 18), the evidence that something is amiss has strengthened as scientists continue to refine their measurements.
The latest results are now precise enough that the discrepancy is unlikely to be a fluke. “It’s gone from looking like maybe just bad luck, to — no, this can’t be bad luck,” says the leader of the supernova measurement team, Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins. But the cause is still unknown, Riess says. “It’s kind of a mystery at this point.”
Since its birth from a cosmic speck in the Big Bang, the universe has been continually expanding. And that expansion is now accelerating, as galaxy clusters zip away from one another at an ever-increasing rate. The discovery of this acceleration in the 1990s led scientists to conclude that dark energy pervades the universe, pushing it to expand faster and faster.

As the universe expands, supernovas’ light is stretched, shifting its frequency. For objects of known distance, that frequency shift can be used to infer the Hubble constant. But measuring distances in the universe is complicated, requiring the construction of a “distance ladder,” which combines several methods that build on one another.

To create their distance ladder, Riess and colleagues combined geometrical distance measurements with “standard candles” — objects of known brightness. Since a candle that’s farther away is dimmer, if you know its absolute brightness, you can calculate its distance. For standard candles, the team used Cepheid variable stars, which pulsate at a rate that is correlated with their brightness, and type 1a supernovas, whose brightness properties are well-understood.

Scientists on the Planck team, on the other hand, analyzed the cosmic microwave background, using variations in its temperature and polarization to calculate how fast the universe was expanding shortly after the Big Bang. The scientists used that information to predict its current rate of expansion.

As for what might be causing the persistent discrepancy between the two methods, there are no easy answers, Kamionkowski says. “In terms of exotic physics explanations, we’ve been scratching our heads.”

A new type of particle could explain the mismatch. One possibility is an undiscovered variety of neutrino, which would affect the expansion rate in the early universe, says theoretical astrophysicist David Spergel of Princeton University. “But it’s hard to fit that to the other data we have.” Instead, Spergel favors another explanation: some currently unknown feature of dark energy. “We know so little about dark energy, that would be my guess on where the solution most likely is,” he says.

If dark energy is changing with time, pushing the universe to expand faster than predicted, that could explain the discrepancy. “We could be on our way to discovering something nontrivial about the dark energy — that it is an evolving energy field as opposed to just constant,” says cosmologist Kevork Abazajian of the University of California, Irvine.

A more likely explanation, some experts say, is that a subtle aspect of one of the measurements is not fully understood. “At this point, I wouldn’t say that you would point at either one and say that there are really obvious things wrong,” says astronomer Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago. But, she says, if the Cepheid calibration doesn’t work as well as expected, that could slightly shift the measurement of the Hubble constant.

“In order to ascertain if there’s a problem, you need to do a completely independent test,” says Freedman. Her team is working on a measurement of the Hubble constant without Cepheids, instead using two other types of stars: RR Lyrae variable stars and red giant branch stars.

Another possibility, says Spergel, is that “there’s something missing in the Planck results.” Planck scientists measure the size of temperature fluctuations between points on the sky. Points separated by larger distances on the sky give a value of the Hubble constant in better agreement with the supernova results. And measurements from a previous cosmic microwave background experiment, WMAP, are also closer to the supernova measurements.

But, says George Efstathiou, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge and a Planck collaboration member, “I would say that the Planck results are rock solid.” If simple explanations in both analyses are excluded, astronomers may be forced to conclude that something important is missing in scientists’ understanding of the universe.

Compared with past disagreements over values of the Hubble constant, the new discrepancy is relatively minor. “Historically, people argued vehemently about whether the Hubble constant was 50 or 100, with the two camps not conceding an inch,” says theoretical physicist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The current difference between the two measurements is “tiny by the standards of the old days.”

Cosmological measurements have only recently become precise enough for a few-percent discrepancy to be an issue. “That it’s so difficult to explain is actually an indication of how far we’ve come in cosmology,” Kamionkowski says. “Twenty-five years ago you would wave your hands and make something up.”

Cancer goes way, way back. A deadly form of this disease and a noncancerous but still serious tumor afflicted members of the human evolutionary family nearly 2 million years ago, two new investigations of fossils suggest.

If those conclusions hold up, cancers are not just products of modern societies, as some researchers have proposed. “Our studies show that cancers and tumors occurred in our ancient relatives millions of years before modern industrial societies existed,” says medical anthropologist Edward Odes of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, a coauthor of both new studies. Today, however, pesticides, longer life spans and other features of the industrialized world may increase rates of cancers and tumors.
A 1.6-million- to 1.8-million-year-old hominid, either from the Homo genus or a dead-end line called Paranthropus, suffered from a potentially fatal bone cancer, Odes and colleagues say in one of two papers published in the July/August South African Journal of Science. Advanced X-ray techniques enabled identification of a fast-growing bone cancer on a hominid toe fossil previously unearthed at South Africa’s Swartkrans Cave site, the researchers report. This malignant cancer consisted of a mass of bone growth on both the toe’s surface and inside the bone.

Until now, the oldest proposed cancer in hominids consisted of an unusual growth on an African Homo erectus jaw fragment dating to roughly 1.5 million years ago. Critics, though, regard that growth as the result of a fractured jaw, not cancer.

A second new study, led by biological anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, now at the University of Central Lancashire in England, identifies the oldest known benign tumor in a hominid in a bone from an
Australopithecus sediba child. This tumor penetrated deep into a spinal bone, close to an opening for the spinal cord. Nearly 2-million-year-old partial skeletons of the child and an adult of the same species were found in an underground cave at South Africa’s Malapa site ( SN: 8/10/13, p. 26 ).
Although not life-threatening, this tumor would have interfered with walking, running and climbing, the researchers say. People today, especially children, rarely develop such tumors in spinal bones.

“This is the first evidence of such a disease in a young individual in the fossil record,” Randolph-Quinney says.

X-ray technology allowed scientists to create and analyze 3-D copies of the inside and outside of the toe and spine fossils.

But studies of fossil bones alone, even with sophisticated imaging technology, provide “a very small window” for detecting cancers and tumors, cautions paleoanthropologist Janet Monge of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Microscopic analysis of soft-tissue cells, which are typically absent on fossils, confirms cancer diagnoses in people today, she says.

Without additional evidence of bone changes in and around the proposed cancer and tumor, Monge won’t draw any conclusions about what caused those growths.

Monge led a team that found a tumor on a 120,000- to 130,000-year-old Neandertal rib bone from Eastern Europe. Whether the tumor was cancerous or caused serious health problems can’t be determined, the scientists concluded in 2013 in PLOS ONE.

For the first time, scientists can see where molecular tags known as epigenetic marks are altered in the brain.

These chemical tags — which flag DNA or its protein associates, known as histones — don’t change the genes but can change gene activity. Abnormal epigenetic marks have been associated with brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, depression and addiction.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston devised a tracer molecule that latches on to a protein that removes one type of epigenetic mark known as histone acetylation.

The scientists then used PET scans to detect where a radioactive version of the tracer appeared in the brains of eight healthy young adult men and women, the researchers report in the Aug. 10 Science Translational Medicine. Further studies could show that the marks change as people grow older or develop a disease. The team studied only healthy young volunteers so can’t yet say whether epigenetic marking changes with age or disease.

For some people, fentanyl can be a life-saver, easing profound pain. But outside of a doctor’s office, the powerful opioid drug is also a covert killer.

In the last several years, clandestine drugmakers have begun experimenting with this ingredient, baking it into drugs sold on the streets, most notably heroin. Fentanyl and closely related compounds have “literally invaded the entire heroin supply,” says medical toxicologist Lewis Nelson of New York University Langone Medical Center.

Fentanyl is showing up in other drugs, too. In San Francisco’s Bay Area in March, high doses of fentanyl were laced into counterfeit versions of the pain pill Norco. In January, fentanyl was found in illegal pills sold as oxycodone in New Jersey. And in late 2015, fentanyl turned up in fake Xanax pills in California.
This ubiquitous recipe-tinkering makes it impossible for users to know whether they’re about to take drugs mixed with fentanyl. And that uncertainty has proved deadly. Fentanyl-related deaths are rising sharply in multiple areas. National numbers are hard to come by, but in many regions around the United States, fentanyl-related fatalities have soared in recent years.

Maryland is one of the hardest-hit states. From 2007 to 2012, the number of fentanyl-related deaths hovered around 30 per year. By 2015, that number had grown to 340. A similar rise is obvious in Connecticut, where in 2012, there were 14 fentanyl-related deaths. In 2015, that number was 188.
In Massachusetts, two-thirds of people who died from opioid overdoses in the first half of 2016 showed signs of fentanyl. This wave of fentanyl-related overdoses is “horrendous,” says Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco. What’s worse, he says, “I think it’s here to stay.”
Fentanyl is not a new drug. Available in the 1960s, it is still used in hospitals as an anesthetic and is available by prescription to fight powerful pain. What’s new, Ciccarone says, is that clandestine drug manufacturers have discovered that the euphoria-producing opioid can be made cheaply and easily — no poppy fields necessary.

Fentanyl is about 30 to 40 times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times more powerful than morphine, which means that a given effect on the body can be achieved with a much smaller amount of fentanyl. Inadvertently taking a bit of fentanyl can cause big trouble. “It’s a dosing problem,” Nelson says. “Because the drug is so potent, little changes in measurements can have very big implications for toxicity. That’s really the problem.”

That problem is made worse by the variability of illegal drugs — users often don’t know what they’re buying. Illegal labs aren’t pumping out products with carefully calibrated doses or uniform chemical makeup. The drugs change from day to day, making it nearly impossible for a user to know what he or she is about to take, Ciccarone says.

He has seen this struggle up close. Drug users have told him that the products they buy are unpredictable. Another thing people are telling him: “That they and their friends and compatriots are dropping like flies.” Tellingly, some of the most experienced drug users have recently begun doing “tester shots,” small doses to get a sense of the type and dose of drug they’re about to use, Ciccarone says.

Users are right to be wary. Typically, opioids can kill by gradually depressing a person’s ability to breathe. Illicit fentanyl, a recent study suggests, can kill within minutes by paralyzing muscles. Doctors have known that when injected quickly, fentanyl can paralyze chest wall muscles, prevent breathing and kill a person rapidly. That effect, called “wooden chest,” might help explain the rise in fentanyl-related deaths, scientists report in the June Clinical Toxicology.

A quick injection of fentanyl “literally freezes the muscles and you can’t move the chest,” says toxicologist Henry Spiller of the Central Ohio Poison Center in Columbus. That’s why doctors who dispense fentanyl in the hospital intentionally proceed very slowly and keep the opioid-counteracting drug naloxone (Narcan) on hand. “If you give it too fast, we know this occurs,” Spiller says. But it wasn’t known whether this same phenomenon might help explain the death rate of people using the drug illegally.

Spiller and colleagues tested post-mortem concentrations of fentanyl and its breakdown product norfentanyl in 48 fentanyl-related deaths. The body usually begins breaking down fentanyl into norfentanyl within two minutes, an earlier study found. Yet in 20 of the cases, the researchers found no signs of norfentanyl, indicating death came almost immediately after first receiving fentanyl.

Naloxone can counteract the effects of opioids if someone nearby can administer the antidote. But for people whose chests quickly freeze from fentanyl, resuscitation becomes more unlikely. Fentanyl “is just a bad drug,” Spiller says.
Fentanyl’s danger is magnified for people not accustomed to taking opioids, such as those addicted to cocaine, a situation illustrated by a recent tragedy in New Haven, Conn.

New Haven authorities noticed a string of suspicious overdoses in late June, leaving three people dead. Drug users thought they were buying cocaine, but the drugs contained fentanyl, says analytical toxicologist Kara Lynch of the University of California, San Francisco. As one of the handful of labs capable of testing blood and urine for fentanyl, hers was called on to identify the culprit. Her lab spotted fentanyl in Norco tablets back in March.

Lynch’s group uses high-resolution mass spectrometry to detect many drugs’ chemical signatures. But this method reveals only the drugs scientists suspect. “We can look for what we know to look for,” she says. And success depends on getting the samples in the first place.

The logistical hurdles of figuring out exactly what a person took, and how much, and when, are large. Ciccarone contrasts the situation with cases of food poisoning. When people start getting sick, public health officials can figure out what lettuce people ate and test it for pathogens. The same kind of tracking system doesn’t exist for drugs. His efforts to develop a system for testing illegal drugs in Baltimore broke down in part because no one had time to do the work. “The coroner is so busy right now with dead bodies,” he says. “They don’t have the time to test the ‘lettuce.’ ”

In the quest to curb fentanyl-related deaths, scientists and public health officials are searching for new strategies. Spiller advocates a more targeted public health message to users, one that emphasizes that fentanyl is simply a deadly drug, not just a more potent high. Ciccarone says that facilities where drug users can take illegal drugs under the care of medical personnel might reduce the number of fatalities.

For now, the scope of the problem continues to grow, Nelson says. The situation is made worse by the ingenuity of illicit drugmakers, who readily experiment with new compounds. Fentanyl itself can be tweaked to create at least 16 related forms, one of which, acetyl fentanyl, has been linked to overdose deaths. New drugs and new tweaks to old drugs rapidly evolve (SN: 5/16/15, p. 22), Nelson says, creating a game of whack-a-mole in which designer drugs confound public health officials and law enforcement.

“There is no single easy solution to this problem,” he says.

Ice volcanoes, patches of water ice and a slew of hydrated minerals paint a picture of dwarf planet Ceres as a geologically active world — one where water has played a starring role. That’s the theme of six papers in the Sept. 2 Science that describe data collected by the Dawn spacecraft.

A 4-kilometer-high mountain dubbed Ahuna Mons, with its bowl-shaped summit and ridged flanks, has the appearance of a cryovolcano — one that erupts water instead of magma. The relatively young Oxo crater also appears to be home to splotches of frozen water. Given that ice should last only tens to hundreds of years on Ceres’ surface, the patches must be recent additions, possibly exposed by a landslide or impact with a meteorite. The surface is also slathered with a class of minerals known as phyllosilicates — silicon-bearing substances that form in the presence of water — which further support the idea that water has been present throughout Ceres’ history.

Ceres is the largest body between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn has been orbiting Ceres since March 6, 2015 (SN: 4/4/15, p. 9), studying its geology and composition to better understand the formation of rocky worlds.

Better bone scanning of fossils offers a glimpse of preteen life some 360 million years ago.

Improved radiation scanning techniques reveal accumulating growth zones in chunks of four fossil upper forelimb bones from salamander-shaped beasts called Acanthostega, scientists report online September 7 in Nature. Vertebrate bones typically show annual growth zones diminishing in size around the time of sexual maturity. But there’s no sign of that slowdown in these four individuals from East Greenland’s mass burial of Acanthostega, says study coauthor Sophie Sanchez of Uppsala University in Sweden. They were still juveniles.
The bones came from tropical Greenland of the Devonian Period. Aquatic vertebrates were developing four limbs, which would serve tetrapods well when vertebrates eventually conquered land. This mass die-off doomed at least 20 individuals, presumably when a dry spell after a flood trapped them all in a big, vanishing puddle.
This find makes the strongest case yet for identifying genuine youngsters among ancient tetrapods, Sanchez says. She suspects other individuals trapped could have been juveniles too.

Not many other species were found in the mass burial. So young tetrapods may have stuck together much as today’s young fish school, Sanchez speculates. The limb shape clearly indicates that the youngsters took a long time to start adding hard bone to the initial soft cartilage, she says. So these early tetrapods were at least 6-year-olds and probably 10 years old or more.
For identifying stages of life, the improved technique “allows greater resolution and rigor, so in that regard it is a plus,” says Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago, who studies a fossil fish with some tetrapod-like features called Tiktaalik. There are Tiktaalik preteens, too, he notes.

What interests Nadia Fröbisch of Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin is that some of Acanthostega individuals were different sizes but had reached the same stage of bone development. She muses that they might even have been developing along different trajectories of growth, a flexibility that would be useful in a changeable environment.