This blob of glowing gas and stars (shown in a false color image) is from roughly 13 billion years ago, a time shortly after the universe formed. In the bar shown for scale, 10 kly stands for 10,000 light-years.

Using a telescope atop a Hawaiian mountain, astronomers recently caught sight of an enormous, newfound glowing object in deep, deep space. If you were an astronomer, what would you call such a thing?

How about a “blob”?

Technically, the object is called a Lyman-alpha blob, and scientists aren’t exactly sure what it is. But they have a guess. Astronomer Masami Ouchi, of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Calif led the team that identified the blob. He and his colleagues think it may be a distant galaxy — a collection of stars, gas and dust — caught in the act of a feeding frenzy.

Astronomers have different theories to explain how blobs like Ouchi’s came into being. Some suggest that Lyman-alpha blobs are smaller galaxies merging together into one larger galaxy. Other theories suggest cold gas streaming into the galaxy is essentially “feeding” it. Still other astronomers suspect that the glowing blob is a cloud of gas heated by a nearby supermassive black hole.

The galaxy is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second, so one light-year is the equivalent of about 5.9 trillion miles. The giant blob is very, very far away, about 76.1 billion trillion miles away, in case you’re counting. In fact, it’s so far away that it’s the fourth most distant object ever observed.

When we see light from a distant object in the sky — say, a star — we’re not seeing the object as it is. We’re seeing the object as it was when it emitted the light we’re seeing now. For example, light takes about eight minutes to travel from the sun to Earth, so when you see the sun, you actually see it as it was eight minutes ago. 

In other words, to look into space is to look back in time. Because the newly discovered blob is 12.9 billion light-years away, it is at least 12.9 billion years old. The universe itself is believed to be about 13 or 14 billion years old, so this blob came into being not long after.

The blob is about 55,000 light-years across, or about half the diameter of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. To observe the blob, Ouchi and his team used a special telescope that is able to see infrared light coming from space. Infrared light is made of waves with wavelengths that we cannot see with the naked eye. We can feel these waves, though: “Far” infrared radiation feels like heat.

According to Ouchi’s infrared measurements, the number of stars in the blob is equivalent to 40 billion suns. And that number is likely to keep growing since the scientists think the blob is a young galaxy in a growth spurt.

Going Deeper:

Iron in water seeping from an underground ecosystem takes on a rusty color as it is exposed to air. Surprisingly hearty life forms use iron and sulfates, instead of oxygen, to live in their long-isolated, dark and salty home.

Ever heard of Blood Falls? It’s freezing cold, far away and hard to reach — probably not where you’re headed on your family vacation this summer.

Blood Falls is at the tip of a giant glacier in Antarctica. As its name suggests, the icy face of Blood Falls is red — but not from blood. Instead the water gets its hue because it’s rich in iron. When the water trickles out from its underground beginnings, the iron is exposed to oxygen in the air and quickly forms the red rust.

It may not be a tourist hot spot, but Blood Falls is very interesting to scientists who study living creatures. A geomicrobiologist — someone who studies how tiny organisms affect or use minerals — recently studied the rusty water and came up with some surprising results.

The water that feeds Blood Falls probably comes from a salty underground lake. It’s home to microbes that surprisingly don’t need oxygen to survive. Microbes are tiny organisms, usually invisible to the naked eye. The microbes found in Blood Falls are similar to other microbes that live in the ocean.

“This briny pond is a unique sort of time capsule,” says Jill Mikucki, the Dartmouth University geomicrobiologist who led the study of the water seeping from Blood Falls. “I don’t know of any other environment quite like this on earth.”

When she and her team studied the water, they found no oxygen but lots of dissolved iron. They suspect that the underwater reservoir formed when a giant glacier, now 1,300 feet thick, moved over the salty lake at least 1.5 million years ago. This trapped the water and everything in it in an oxygen-free, or anoxic, environment.

Unlike human beings and most other forms of life, the microbes from Blood Falls don’t need oxygen to live. Instead, they are able to exist using the iron and sulfates, chemical salts also found in the water. The microbes transfer particles called electrons from the sulfates to the iron.

The microbes at Blood Falls show that life can exist in even the harshest environments. In addition to giving us more information about our own planet, the study of these “extremophiles” may be useful in other scientific areas — like the search for life on other planets! If scientists find organisms on Earth that live on sulfur and iron, instead of oxygen, researchers might gain a better idea of where to look for life elsewhere in the universe.

Power words: (Yahoo! Kids Dictionary and WordNet)

microbe: A tiny life form; a microorganism, especially a bacterium that causes disease.

iron: A silvery-white, magnetic, metallic element occurring abundantly in combined forms. Used in a wide range of important structural materials.

sulfate: A chemical compound made from sulfur.

anoxic: A severe lack of oxygen

Going Deeper:

After they’re diagnosed and for the rest of their lives, type 1 diabetics need to regularly test their blood sugar levels with a pinching tool that draws a little blood. They also have to give themselves shots of insulin several times a day to contro

When she was 9 years old, Ann Albright went to the doctor with odd flulike symptoms. She was exhausted. She had to go to the bathroom frequently in the middle of the night. She was always thirsty. Even her vision was blurry.

After a few tests, the doctor pulled Albright’s mother aside.

“I still remember it very vividly,” says Ann Albright, now more than 40 years later. “My mom left the room with the doctor and came back in with tears running down her cheeks.”

The verdict: diabetes, a disease that affects the way people process food.

At the time, the 1960s, the diagnosis meant that young Ann would never have the carefree childhood her mother wanted for her. For the rest of her life, she would have to give herself shots several times a day. She would need to be very careful about what she ate. And she might not realize all of her dreams in life.

“In the era I was diagnosed, most people were told they’d have a shorter life span,” Albright says. “As a little girl with diabetes moving into adulthood, I wondered would I be able to have kids? Would I be able to have a life?”

Science has come a long way since then, says Albright, partly as a result of her own efforts: She’s now a doctor and diabetes researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Since her diagnosis, researchers have developed better technologies, more effective medicines and a sharper understanding of how diabetes works.

Despite the advances, though, scientists still can’t answer a lot of basic questions about what causes diabetes. There still is no cure. And living with the disease remains difficult.

“Everything changes” after a diabetes diagnosis, says Ali Reed, a pediatric endocrine fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. “Life becomes more complicated.”

What’s more, diabetes is on the rise — in both adults and kids. One version of the disease, called type 2 diabetes, is increasing at an especially alarming rate.

Scientists have linked type 2 diabetes with obesity. So now, more than ever, doctors are urging young people to start developing healthy habits as early as possible.

Breakdown

Diabetes refers to a group of diseases, but there are two main kinds: type 1 and type 2. In both types, the trouble begins with the body’s ability to deal with sugar.

Sugar is the body’s main fuel source. When you eat, your digestive system breaks down your food into basic parts, including proteins, fats and a simple sugar called glucose. Glucose gets absorbed through the intestines. From there, it enters the bloodstream. Circulating blood delivers glucose to all the cells, which convert it into energy.

At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. In people with diabetes, however, sugar can’t get from the bloodstream into the cells. A hormone, or messenger molecule, called insulin is normally responsible for that transfer. But in diabetics, insulin doesn’t do its job.

As a result, sugar builds up in the bloodstream. When levels of sugar in the blood stay high, the condition is called chronic. And for reasons scientists don’t yet understand, chronically high blood sugar can lead to blindness, kidney damage, limb amputations, heart attacks and more.

“It’s not a death sentence, but it’s a very serious disease,” Albright says.

Two types

Exactly how diabetes affects a patient’s life depends in part on which type of diabetes a person has. There are important differences between the two main types.

Type 1 diabetes is the kind Albright has. In this version of the disease, the body stops producing insulin. Symptoms usually begin in kids or teenagers.

After they’re diagnosed and for the rest of their lives, type 1 diabetics need to regularly test their blood sugar levels with a pinching tool that draws a little blood. They also have to give themselves shots of insulin several times a day to control blood sugar levels. So far, scientists don’t know how to prevent type 1 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetics make insulin, but their bodies don’t use the hormone properly. Type 2 diabetes is far more common than type 1, and most people who have type 2 are adults. These days, though, more and more kids are coming to their doctors with symptoms of type 2 diabetes.

Doctors already know that adults who develop type 2 diabetes tend to be overweight or obese. And as kids have become increasingly overweight, the disease has started appearing at younger and younger ages.

Shorrocks/iStockphoto

As recently as a decade ago, type 2 diabetes was called “adult-onset” because kids just didn’t get it.

“When this disease we used to only see in adults started happening in adolescents, it was just shocking to people,” Albright says. “Pediatricians just didn’t know what to do.”

Healthy living

Doctors already knew that adults who develop type 2 diabetes tend to be overweight or obese. (Scientists can’t yet explain why.) And as kids have become increasingly overweight, the disease has started appearing at younger and younger ages.

In the United States, two out of three adults are now overweight, according to the CDC. Nineteen percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight, compared with 7 percent just 20 years ago. Over the same period, the proportion of overweight teens rose from 5 percent to 17 percent.

(You can find out whether you are overweight by plugging numbers into a calculator at an online site. Also, see the sidebar “Understanding Body Mass Index” at the bottom of this article.)

Like their type 1 peers, type 2 diabetics have to monitor blood sugar levels. But they often rely on drugs instead of insulin shots. Frequently, they can get the disease under control by simply exercising more and eating reasonable portions of healthy foods.

“We now know that we can prevent or postpone type 2 diabetes by having [adults] at very high risk lose 5 to 7 percent of their body weight,” Albright says.

Scientists don’t yet know whether the same is true for overweight kids. The trend is so new that CDC researchers are still working to gather basic information about how the disease works in young people.

But it can’t hurt to play soccer instead of video games, and to choose fruits and vegetables over junk food.

“There’s no harm in having healthier lifestyle habits,” Albright says. “Get to know what’s going into your body. Make it fun.”

Seeking answers

Weighing more than you should doesn’t mean you’re doomed to develop diabetes. The disease is far more complex than that. And while research has come a long way, plenty of questions remain.

Doctors don’t know, for example, why certain ethnic groups have particularly high rates of diabetes, including American Indians, Hispanics and African Americans. Nor can doctors say for sure why the chances of getting diabetes go up if your parents or siblings have it.

Both relationships suggest that genes play a role in setting people up for diabetes. But something in the environment has to push those genes into action, and scientists aren’t sure what those triggers are. It’s also not clear which genes are involved.

“People spend their whole careers trying to understand this stuff,” Albright says.

If you learn you have diabetes, don’t despair. There’s plenty you can do to live a long and healthy life. Also, know you’re not alone.

Reed encourages all newly diagnosed kids to go to one of the nation’s many diabetes camps. It can be hugely reassuring, she says, to be surrounded by other kids who feel like you do.

“It’s really amazing,” Reed says. “It’s a very supportive and tolerating environment for kids who are often the only ones at their school with diabetes. At diabetes camp, everyone is going through it together.”

Going Deeper:

Brown fat (black) shows up in a PET-CT scan of a man after exposure to cold (right) but is not as apparent in a scan at room temperature (left).

The human body hides more than one
kind of fat. White fat cells, which we usually think of when we think of fat,
store energy. But brown fat is different: It’s a type of fat that burns energy
and gives off heat.

When you were born, you had a pad
of brown fat on your back, and it helped you control your body temperature.
Mice also have brown fat on their backs. Until now, scientists suspected human
adults don’t have brown fat — or if they do, the brown fat is not important.

Three recent studies show that
human adults do have brown fat, and it may be important for controlling body
weight. And unlike babies, adults store brown fat in the neck, abdomen, above
the collarbone and along the spine.

In the first study, researcher Ronald Kahn of the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School
in Boston looked at the medical records of nearly 2,000 people who had received a PET-CT scan. To get a PET, or
positron emission tomography, scan, a person is injected with a chemical that
emits particles called positrons. Inside the person’s body, these positrons
create radiation called gamma rays, which pass through the body and are
detected by special machines outside the body. This type of scan provides a three-dimensional
picture of what’s going on inside the body. PET scans are often used to
diagnose cancer. A CT scan uses
X-rays to see inside a body.

Kahn and his team found brown fat
in the scans of 3.1 percent of the men studied and 7.5 percent of the women.
People younger than 50 and lean people were more likely to have brown fat.

“It is now without dispute that
brown fat is present in adult humans,” Kahn says.

When the researchers checked the
scans against the weather records, they found that brown fat was more likely to
show up when the temperature outside was cold. This comparison suggests brown
fat burns more energy in colder temperatures.

The connection between brown fat
and temperature was explored in the second study. Dutch researchers took scans
of lean and overweight men at two temperatures, 72 degrees Fahrenheit (room
temperature) and 61 degrees Fahrenheit. At the higher temperature, brown fat
barely appeared on the scans. But when the temperature dropped, brown fat
appeared on the scans of the leaner men. The more overweight the man, the less
brown fat appeared. The third study, conducted by Swedish scientists, also
found evidence of brown fat in adults.

These studies suggest that brown
fat may burn more energy in people who are lean. The connection between brown
fat and being overweight is less clear. Scientists wonder: Does having less
brown fat cause a person to become overweight, or does being overweight reduce
the amount of brown fat in a person? 

In other words, overweight people
may be overweight partially because they don’t have enough brown fat to help burn
energy. On the other hand, their excessive amount of white fat may keep the
brown fat from burning energy.

Power words: (from Britannica.com and the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary)

PET scan: Positron emission tomography, an imaging
technique used in medical diagnosis and biomedical
research. It has proved particularly useful for studying brain and heart
functions, as well as diagnosing cancer.

CT scan: Imaging method that uses a low-dose beam
of X-rays that crosses the body at many different angles.

Brown fat: A dark-colored tissue in many mammals that generates
heat to regulate body temperature, especially in hibernating animals.

Going Deeper:

A creature much like a modern hermit crab likely made these tracks 500 million years ago.

Many modern animals, like crabs, live in shells and carry their homes around with them. Picture one of these animals in your mind, and you may have some idea of what the first land-dwelling animals looked like. After studying strange marks that accompany some sets of ancient fossil footprints, scientists recently suggested that the oldest creatures to crawl out of the ocean probably wore shells.

Scientists have long known that life on Earth began in the sea. The first vertebrates — animals with backbones — came crawling out of the water between 385 million and 376 million years ago. But those animals weren’t the first creatures to come ashore, says paleontologist James W. Hagadorn of Amherst College in Massachussetts.

Hagadorn and Yale University paleontologist Adolf Seilacher say that a different group of animals, called arthropods, probably beat the first land vertebrates by more than 100 million years. Arthropods are animals that lack a backbone and have a hard exoskeleton. Examples include modern-day scorpions and insects. These ancient arthropods may have dragged themselves out of the ocean 500 million years ago.

These ancient arthropods had the right kind of bodies to survive out of the water, says Hagadorn. Their hard exoskeletons would have kept them from drying out too quickly. And though these creatures breathed through gills, which require water, a shell would have trapped humid air. This handy gear would allow the animals to keep their gills moist.

The paleontologists found evidence for the shells by studying fossilized, or preserved, tracks discovered in central Wisconsin. The tracks were left by the ancient arthropods as they walked around on soft ground. Over time, this soft ground hardened, and the tracks remained as etchings in stone.

When the scientists looked at the fossilized tracks, they found something strange. Some of the tracks included an extra mark alongside the footprints. Whenever the tracks turned, to the right or to the left, the extra mark swung out a little wider, always to the left. The scientists realized this mark could not have been made by a tail, because a tail would swing out wider on both sides. If the animal turned left, a tail
would have swung right; if the animal turned right, a tail would have swung left.

Because the mark swung out on one side only, the scientists believe it was made by a shell that dragged on the ground. Furthermore, they suspect the shell was coiled, probably in a right-hand spiral.

“This is an exciting find,” says Sally E. Walker, a paleobiologist at the University of Georgia in Athens. Now, she says, scientists can approach these ancient arthropods from a different direction. They can study ancient shells to look for scratch marks on the outside that might have been made as the shells were dragged through the sand. Or, she says, researchers can look for scratch marks on the inside — which may suggest that another animal took over a shell, after the original animal that lived there died.

Power words: (from the Yahoo! Online Kids dictionary)

Paleontology: The study of the forms of life existing in prehistoric or geologic times, as represented by the fossils of plants, animals and other organisms.

Fossil: A remnant or trace of an organism of a past geologic age, such as a skeleton or leaf imprint, embedded and preserved in Earth’s crust.

Arthropod: Any of numerous invertebrate animals of the phylum
Arthropoda, including the insects, crustaceans, arachnids and myriapods, that are characterized by an exoskeleton made of a hard material called chitin and a segmented body to which jointed appendages are attached in pairs.

Gills: The respiratory organ of most aquatic animals that breathe water to obtain oxygen.

Going Deeper:

This 25-year-old AT-1 male (foreground) isn’t as physically developed as he should be, says marine biologist Craig Matkin. Behind junior: mom.

In 1989, an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez struck an underwater reef in Prince William Sound, a large body of water in southern Alaska. The ship dumped about 11 million gallons of crude oil into the freezing water, creating the largest spill in U.S. history — and a disaster for animals that lived in or near the water.

Now, 20 years later, the area still has not fully recovered. At the time of the spill, two groups of orcas, or killer whales, were swimming in the area. One of these groups of whales appears to be headed for extinction, and the other is recovering more slowly than scientists had predicted.

The first group, called AT-1, wasn’t large to begin with: When the spill happened, the group had 22 whales. Nine of these whales died during the spill, and since then, no baby whales have been born in the group. The older males — who can live to be 60 — have been dying off. Now, only seven whales remain.

These orcas may look like and live in the same areas as other killer whales, but orcas in the AT-1 group are genetically different and communicate with a different set of sounds. They are transient orcas, which have larger home ranges than the other kind of killer whales, called resident orcas. Transient orcas eat mammals, such as harbor seals, sea lions, porpoises and other whales; resident orcas eat fish. These two types of killer whales don’t breed with each other.

Lingering effects from the oil spill are not the only threats to orcas. The whales are swimming in polluted waters, and scientists have found these pollutants in the whales’ blubber (or fat). These toxic substances may keep the whales from reproducing successfully. The pollution probably originated in plumes of air that wafted across the Pacific from China and Southeast Asia, says Craig Matkin, a marine mammal biologist who studies the whales.

“I don’t want to make it sound like the oil spill is solely responsible for [this group of whales’] decline,” Matkin says. “It just exacerbated an already bad situation.”

This male from the AT-1 population of transient orcas exhibits a curiously stunted, or small, dorsal fin.

Matkin/NGOS

The other group of endangered whales eats fish and squid. These are resident killer whales, and their group is called AB. After the spill, 13 whales in this group died. Scientists predicted the population would recover — that is, return to its original size — within 12 years. But they were wrong. The whales that died were mostly females and juveniles. Now, 20 years later, scientists think the AB group of whales will not recover for another 10 years.

The oil spill also broke up the family structure of the whales. Groups of orcas live in matriarchal communities, where a female acts as the head of the family. The matriarch of the AB group apparently died in the oil spill, and afterward many whales left to join a different group.

When the AB group does eventually recover, it won’t be the same. And the AT-1 group may become extinct. Other scientists are finding that certain other major species affected by the oil-spill — like otters, clams, herring and certain birds — have also failed to fully recover. And in many cases, they’re surprised about why, 20 years after the spill, so many effects of the Exxon Valdez disaster still persist.

Power words: (from the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary)

Orca: A black and white predatory whale (Orcinus orca) that feeds on large fish, squid and sometimes dolphins and seals. Also called killer whales.

Extinct: No longer existing or living.

Reef: A strip or ridge of rocks, sand or coral that rises to or near the surface of a body of water.

Genetics: The branch of biology that deals with heredity, or the passing of biological traits from parents to their offspring through genes.

Mammal: Any of various warm-blooded vertebrate animals of the class Mammalia, including humans. Mammals are characterized by a covering of hair on the skin and, in females, milk-producing mammary glands for nourishing the young.

Going Deeper:

A meteorite from an asteroid tracked by scientists lies in the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan. The deep black color tells researchers that the rock is rich in carbon.

On October 7, 2008, an asteroid the size of a car blazed through the atmosphere and crashed into the Nubian Desert in the African nation of Sudan. Eyewitnesses who were looking up at the sky at the time reported seeing a fireball over the desert when the asteroid, named 2008 TC3, exploded into pieces.

Some people weren’t surprised by all the fireworks though. For the first time in history, scientists were able to watch the asteroid as it flew through space, then entered Earth’s atmosphere and crashed into the desert. 2008 TC3 is the first asteroid to be observed both in space and on Earth. Before this asteroid’s arrival, scientists have had to rely on data from one place or the other.

Asteroids the size of 2008 TC3 are not uncommon, and fragments from one usually strike Earth every year. Because they are so small, Earth-bound asteroids usually remain unseen until they enter our atmosphere. Larger asteroids are easier to see, but are more rare.

“It’s like when bugs splatter on the windshield. You don’t see the bug until it’s too late,” says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., who has studied the asteroid’s collision. “You’d see a baseball coming towards the windshield much sooner.”

In the case of 2008 TC3, the astronomers who first observed it got lucky. They didn’t know they were going to see it. “It just so happened that the asteroid was coming from the direction that the telescope was pointed in,” says astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. The astronomers first saw the asteroid on October 6, through a telescope on a mountain near Tucson, Ariz.

As they watched 2008 TC3 move across the sky, the scientists studied its mineral composition by observing how the asteroid reflected sunlight. They also used tracking equipment to correctly predict when the asteroid would impact Earth. Shortly after the collision, Jenniskens and a team of astronomers and students from Sudan headed out into the desert to look for meteorites, pieces of the asteroid that survived the fiery trip through the atmosphere and landed on Earth. The team brought back about 47 meteorites from 2008 TC3.

Once they were able to study the fragments in the laboratory, the scientists quickly realized that the 2008 TC3 meteorites were unlike anything they had seen or studied before. More research on the pieces gave the scientists new information about the characteristics of different kinds of meteorites.

In addition to helping scientists understand more about asteroids, 2008 TC3 may prove to be helpful to humankind in the future. If a larger and more dangerous asteroid ever comes crashing toward Earth, scientists might see it coming.

Power words: (Adapted from the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary)

Meteorite: A stony or metallic mass of matter that has fallen to Earth’s surface from outer space.

Asteroid: Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun.

Telescope: Any of various devices used to detect and observe distant objects.

Atmosphere: The gaseous mass surrounding a celestial body and retained by the celestial body’s gravitational field.

Going Deeper:

Lowell Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts on May 30, 1868, and May 30, 2005.

It’s not just Daylight Savings Time that came early this year. All around the world, spring seems to be coming sooner than it used to. It hasn’t moved up on the calendar — but many cycles in nature are telling us that spring just can’t wait to be sprung.

Dandelions push through the soil and bloom weeks earlier than they did decades ago. Robins who migrated for the winter are shortening their stays down south. In some places, butterflies usually not seen until July have been flitting about since January. That’s great, right? After all, nearly everyone looks forward to spring’s arrival after a long, cold winter.

Not so fast, say many scientists. A growing body of evidence suggests these shifts in timing are coming about because of climate change. And these changes might spell trouble for the countless species of plants and animals that depend on one another.

Timing is everything

“The timing of life cycles in nature really matters a lot,” says Abe Miller-Rushing, a scientist at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Crested Butte, Colo. Miller-Rushing is one of a growing number of scientists investigating how climate change affects the timing of events in nature.

“Many organisms time their life cycles with the seasons,” he says. “Relationships between species could be disrupted as a result of changes in timing.”

Climate change, however, is a long-term phenomenon. To confidently say that climate change affects natural cycles, such as the date when maple trees first unfurl their leaves, scientists need to document what day the event occurs over many years. Then, they need to compare those dates with climate factors such as average temperature or rainfall over long periods of time — ideally decades. Finally, they need to figure out if changes in the timing of natural events are connected to changes in climate patterns.

“One of the big limitations to understanding how climate change affects plants and animals is you need data from a long time, and there just isn’t a lot of that out there,” Miller-Rushing says.So scientists need to be creative in their hunt for data.

Turning to history

Miller-Rushing turned to a long-dead figure in American history and literature for help. Henry David Thoreau, a writer and naturalist who lived in suburban Boston during the mid-1800s, kept detailed diaries of the natural cycles in his surroundings. In these diaries, he recorded the flowering times of hundreds of plants in eastern Massachusetts.

Kids in Arizona inspect plants for hints of early flowering.

D. Amber

To compare Thoreau’s observations with today’s cycles, Miller-Rushing and his colleague at Boston University tracked the first flowering date for 43 of those species during the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.

They found that plants like violets and buttercups are blooming on average seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s time. And some species, such as wild blueberries, bloom three weeks earlier than they did 150 years ago.

Seven days might not seem like that much time. But many plants rely on insects to move their pollen from one flower to another — a crucial step in plant reproduction. And some plants only produce flowers for about a week, says Richard Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University.

“If flowering shifts a week or two earlier and the insects that pollinate it are not coming out, it’s possible that the species won’t be pollinated, and it won’t set fruit,” Primack says.

That’s significant for two reasons. First, when a plant “sets fruit,” it makes the seeds that will become the next generation of plants. If a plant doesn’t set fruit, it doesn’t reproduce.

Second, many birds rely on fruit as a food source — especially in the fall when they are building up their energy stores to migrate south for the winter. If plants aren’t pollinated in the spring, this food resource won’t exist in the fall.

But scientists are still learning how climate change may affect communities of plants and animals. “Right now, we only know the relationships are changing,” Primack says. “Now we’re actively researching the effect these changing relationships will have on species.”

It’s not only wildlife that’s feeling the effects of these shifting cycles, says Christine Rogers. She is a biologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies how pollen, fungal spores and bacteria in the air affect people. She says kids with allergies might be sniffling and sneezing earlier than ever before.

“We know that the spring seasons are coming earlier, and that means the pollen people are allergic to is coming out earlier,” she says. “The timing of the allergy season is shifting to an earlier time period.

Citizen scientists

Understanding how nature responds to climate change will require monitoring key life cycle events — flowering, the appearance of leaves, the first frog calls of the spring — all around the world. But ecologists can’t be everywhere so they’re turning to non-scientists, sometimes called citizen scientists, for help.

A group of scientists and educators launched an organization last year called the National Phenology Network. “Phenology” is what scientists call the study of the timing of events in nature.

One of the group’s first efforts relies on scientists and non-scientists alike to collect data about plant flowering and leafing every year. The program, called Project BudBurst, collects life cycle data on a variety of common plants from across the United States. People participating in the project — which is open to everyone — record their observations on the Project BudBurst website.

“People don’t have to be plant experts — they just have to look around and see what’s in their neighborhood,” says Jennifer Schwartz, an education consultant with the project. “As we collect this data, we’ll be able to make projections about how plants and communities of plants and animals will respond as the climate changes.”

That data will help scientists predict not only how natural communities may change but also how these changes will affect people, says Jake Weltzin. He’s the executive director of the National Phenology Network.

Weltzin says scientists monitoring lilac flowering in the western United States reported that in years when lilacs bloomed early — before May 20th — wildfires later in the summer and fall tended to be larger and more severe. Lilac blooming, then, could serve as an alarm bell, he says.

“If we had a network of people collecting this information, scientists could use that information to come up with a nationwide tool for predicting fires in the west,” Weltzin says.

Down the road, he says the National Phenology Network plans to coordinate with other monitoring programs, such as the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Great Backyard Bird Count, the University of Kansas’ Monarch Watch or the National Wildlife Federation’s FrogWatch USA. Closer coordination will help scientists recognize new patterns, such as whether a change in the timing of flowering affects insect population levels.

Improved monitoring is an important step toward predicting how natural communities will respond to climate change, Miller-Rushing says.

“The best way for us to increase our knowledge of how plants and animals are responding to climate change is to increase the amount of data we have,” he says. “That’s why we need citizen scientists to get as much information from as many places on as many species over as long a time period as we can.”

Word Find: Springing Forward

A star begins its life in a dense molecular cloud called a nebula. Shown here is the Horsehead Nebula.

As long as people have been living on Earth, we’ve been looking up at bright stars in the night sky, trying to understand the universe and our place in it. Astronomers have long known that not all stars are alike. Some are almost as old as the universe itself, others are just now being born. They come in different colors: blue, white, yellow and red. Some shine brightly in the sky, and others are visible only with special telescopes. Some stars race through space in pairs or groups; others move alone. Some, like our own 4.8-billion year-old sun, are surrounded by planets.

One of the most important ways that scientists group stars is by size. In the early 20th century, just before World War I, astronomers began to put stars into two main size groups: dwarfs and giants.

“Once they discovered that there was a class of stars really big, called giants, they carved the universe up into dwarfs and giants,” says Jim Holberg, a scientist who studies dwarf stars at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “The giants are enormous stars, and dwarfs are stars like the sun.”

Despite their name, most dwarf stars are not unusually small. Or unusual at all: Most stars, in fact, are dwarfs of one kind or another. But within the large category of dwarf stars are other groups of stars. Keeping track of the different kinds of dwarfs can be difficult, but that’s all in a day’s work for astronomers.

A brown dwarf mystery: planets, stars or neither?

The tiny dot on the right side of this picture is the first verified image of a brown dwarf. This image was taken in 1995 by a camera onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The brown dwarf shown here is orbiting a much larger, brighter star called Gliese 229

S. Durrance and D. Golimowski (JHU), NASA

Some objects are so strange that even astronomers aren’t sure what to call them. One of these kinds of objects behaves like a star, but it’s not very hot — and it’s too small. Plus, through a telescope, it resembles a planet — but it’s too big to be called one. What would you call it? A star-net? A planet-ar?

An American astronomer named Shiv Kumar first predicted these strange objects might exist in 1963, and he called them black dwarfs. That name didn’t stick, and ten years later another astronomer suggested the name brown dwarfs. That name stuck.

But there was another problem: Even though astronomers like Kumar could use information to imagine how brown dwarfs should behave, no one had ever seen one. It wasn’t until 1995 — just 14 years ago — that astronomers first saw one of these brown dwarfs. Since that first discovery, astronomers have found hundreds more brown dwarfs.

Thanks to more scientists looking for these stars, and better telescopes to see them with, astronomers now know more about brown dwarfs. As it turns out, they aren’t even brown. They are almost totally dark in the sky, producing no visible light. Instead, they emit infrared light, which is so faint it can only be detected by sophisticated telescopes.

Also, brown dwarfs aren’t even stars. Some astronomers even call brown dwarfs “failed stars.”

When you see a star in the sky, it looks like a calm, twinkling light. Your eyes deceive you, however. A star is anything but calm: What you are really looking at it is a giant, fiery ball of burning gas. For most stars, that gas is hydrogen, the lightest element in the universe. Hydrogen is the fuel for stars, just as gasoline is the fuel for most modern cars.

Stars are powered by a process called fusion, where hydrogen atoms join together to form helium — and give off a lot of energy. Like stars, brown dwarfs have a lot of hydrogen. But unlike other stars, brown dwarfs don’t have enough mass to start the fusion process. So instead of burning bright and hot their whole lives, brown dwarfs smolder slowly and don’t technically qualify as stars.

This illustration of a brown dwarf studied by Phan Bao Ngoc and other scientists shows jets of gas shooting out. These jets tell astronomers that the brown dwarf formed more like a star than a planet.

David A. Aguilar (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

In December 2008, astronomer Phan Bao Ngoc, who studies brown dwarfs at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, and a team of scientists solved one mystery about brown dwarfs. They showed that brown dwarfs shoot out a stream of gas into space — like stars. Thus, the strange objects seem to form more like stars than like planets. But, Ngoc cautions, that doesn’t make them stars. “It is still too early to say this settles all debate. We need to observe more young brown dwarfs,” he says. “This opens a new window and provides an important clue for the brown dwarf formation theory.”

Red dwarf stars: the most popular stars you’ll never see

In April 2007, astronomers introduced a planet circling a red dwarf called Gliese 581 c, illustrated here. The planet is only a little larger than Earth, and though it probably could not sustain life, the discovery gives hope to scientists who are looking

ESO

Objects in space that have just a little more mass than brown dwarfs are called red dwarf stars. Red dwarfs may not be much larger than brown dwarfs, but that small increase in size makes a big difference. Red dwarf stars are massive enough to support hydrogen fusion, like the sun. And they’re also technically stars.

But unlike the sun, red dwarfs don’t shine in the sky. “They’re less massive, and they don’t produce as much energy,” says Holberg. “They don’t have a strong energy source, so they’re burning at a low rate.” Most of the energy red dwarfs produce is invisible to the naked eye but visible to high-powered telescopes.

Despite the difficulty in finding these stars, astronomers believe that most of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs. The sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf more than 20 trillion miles away. Most of our nearest star neighbors are red dwarfs.

Astronomers who are looking for life on distant planets are particularly interested in red dwarfs. Some of the planets that have been found outside our solar system are in orbit around red dwarfs. If the planets are enough like Earth, then they may support life. In April 2007, a planet in orbit around a red dwarf was discovered to be only slightly bigger than Earth, but astronomers later determined that life could probably not exist there.

White dwarf stars: the end of the line

The white dwarf in this picture is not the giant star in the center — it’s the tiny dot in the lower left-hand corner. Called Sirius B, it is the closest white dwarf to Earth. The star in the center is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky

NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI) and M. Barstow (University of Leicester)

After a long life of burning hydrogen, a star eventually runs out of fuel. At this point, the star grows and grows and grows into something called a red giant. These giant stars can be hundreds of times as large as the sun, and when theyburn up, all that’s left is the hot core of the star. This hot core is yet another kind of dwarf star.

“The star shrinks to something the size of the planet Earth,” says Holberg. There is no more fuel to burn, but the star is so hot that it blazes as it cools down. Over billions of years, he says, the heat leaks out. “Because the star is so small, it’s like pushing all the water at a dam through a small hole.”

Holberg says that nearly all the stars in our galaxy — about 97 percent — are destined to become white dwarfs. Even among dwarfs, white dwarfs go against expectations. Oddly, the smallest white dwarfs actually have the most mass, and the largest white dwarfs have the least. So the more mass, the smaller the dwarf. For comparison, imagine that you had a magic balloon that deflatedas you blew into it. When a white dwarf cools down, it becomes a black dwarf, a dense, cold object in the sky that astronomers have never seen.

Mukremin Kilic, who started studying astronomy after watching a solar eclipse, says that white dwarfs can help scientists determine the age of one part of the galaxy. But there’s an even more exciting reason to study these stars, says Kilic, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. He is most interested in studying the planets that orbit white dwarfs because, he says, these planets might help scientists figure out how Earth will end.

At the end of its life, the sun will become a white dwarf. But before this happens, the sun will expand, like a balloon of fire, into its red giant phase. “The sun will become a giant one day and swallow planets,” he says. “What’s going to survive?”

As a giant, the sun will absorb and disintegrate the closest planet, Mercury. Then, as the sun gets bigger, it will absorb our nearest neighbor, the planet Venus. Bye-bye, Venus. But astronomers aren’t sure what happens then — will the sun finally destroy Earth before becoming a small white dwarf?

Don’t worry, says Holberg, we’ve got plenty of time to figure that out: “The sun won’t go through this phase for another 5 billion years or so.”

Word Find: Popular Dwarfs (Stars)

A recent study suggests that some children may be able to beat back their allergic reactions to peanuts by gradually introducing trace amounts of the nut into their diets.

Peanut allergies are among the most common and most dangerous food allergies. A tiny exposure to peanuts can mean big trouble for a person with a peanut allergy, with symptoms ranging from sneezing or coughing to the constriction, or narrowing, of airways. Some people die from the exposure.

But a tiny exposure may help scientists find a cure. A recent study suggests that some children may be able to beat back their allergic reactions to peanuts by gradually introducing trace amounts of the nut into their diets. It’s too early to say for certain, so if you have a peanut allergy, do not try this at home. But the first results look promising.

Two teams of scientists have been experimenting on a group of 29 children, with an average age five years old, who are allergic to peanuts. At the beginning of the study, each kid received less than 1/1,000th of a peanut per day. (Imagine splitting a peanut into 1,000 parts!) Over the course of the study, the children gradually increased the amount of peanuts in their diets. At home, their parents sprinkled peanut powder on their food, and in the laboratory, the children drank solutions with peanuts dissolved inside.

Nine of the children have been receiving the treatment for two years. Five of those nine now appear to be free of their peanut allergies, says Wesley Burks, a pediatric allergist and immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. These five kids can eat peanuts with no problem. “They are putting peanuts in their diet,” Burks says.

Of those nine, the other four have not benefited as much from the therapy. Burks and his team will release data from the other 20 children in the study later this year.

The two teams of scientists are now doing a follow-up study on two groups of children with the allergy. Children in one group will receive the gradual peanut therapy, and the others will not. Burks and the other researchers hope this study will help them learn if the therapy truly works or not.

The study raises many questions, both from parents of children with the allergies and from other doctors. Scott Sicherer, an allergist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, asks, “Have we really cured the allergy, or are [the patients] just desensitized while they are getting the treatment?”

Scientists don’t understand why some people get peanut allergies and others don’t, but they’re scrambling to find a way to help people with the allergy. Because of the severity of a peanut allergy, scientists want to know as soon as possible. “This is very encouraging, but it’s not something you try at home,” says Sicherer.

Power words: (from the Yahoo! Kids Dictionary, which is also the The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

allergy: an abnormally high sensitivity to certain substances, such as pollens, foods or microorganisms. Common signs of allergy may include sneezing, itching and skin rashes.

allergist: a doctor specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of allergies

desensitize: to decrease the sensitivity or reaction to something

immunologist: a doctor specializing in the immune system, your body’s defense against illness

legume: a plant in the pea family, or a fruit or a seed from that plant. Legumes include peas, beans, peanuts and seeds.

Going Deeper: