Glowing evolved 540 million years ago
An ancient group of glowing corals pushes back the origin of bioluminescence in animals to more than half a billion years ago.
“We had no idea it was going to be this old,” says evolutionary marine biologist and study co-author Danielle DeLeo.
Tiny crustaceans that lived around 270 million years ago were previously thought to be the earliest glowing animals.
Genetic analysis and computer modelling revealed that octocorals probably evolved the ability to make light much earlier, around the time when the first animals developed eyes.
Bumblebees survive a week underwater
The queens of some species of bumblebee can survive after being underwater for one week, which could help them withstand floods when they hibernate underground.
An experimental accident revealed the possibility, and tests on 126 common eastern bumblebee (Bombus impatiens) queens confirmed that most can survive immersion for up to 7 days.
The findings hint that other bee species could also have built-in flood resilience. “This seems to be one small aspect of climate change that we need not worry about,” says bee researcher Dave Goulson.
WHO redefines airborne transmission
The World Health Organization (WHO) has changed how it classifies airborne pathogens.
It has removed the distinction between transmission by smaller virus-containing ‘aerosol’ particles and spread through larger ‘droplets’.
The division, which some researchers argue was unscientific, justified WHO’s March 2020 assertion that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, was not airborne.
Under the new definition, SARS-CoV-2 would be recognized as spreading ‘through the air’ — although some scientists feel this term is less clear than ‘airborne’. “I'm not saying everybody is happy, and not everybody agrees on every word in the document, but at least people have agreed this is a baseline terminology,” says WHO chief scientist Jeremy Farrar.
Climate ruling ‘makes judicial history’
In early April, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of a group of more than 2,500 Swiss female activists aged 64 or over who argued that Switzerland was doing too little to protect them as a group particularly vulnerable to health effects stemming from climate change.
“This marks the first time that an international human-rights court has linked protection of human rights with duties to mitigate global warming, clarifying once and for all that climate law and policy do not operate in a human-rights vacuum,” says legal scholar Charlotte Blattner, who advised the court. “The ruling is bound to alter the course of climate protection around the world.”
What toilet water reveals about our health
During the pandemic, sewage provided a critical source of data for monitoring the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
In Hong Kong, routine wastewater tests traced the virus to a single apartment block where no COVID had been reported — ultimately uncovering nine active cases.
Now “every day, we come up with new things that we can interrogate wastewater for”, says public-health researcher Ted Smith — including signs of drug misuse, antimicrobial resistance and exposure to air pollution.
Wastewater research coordinator Bernd Manfred Gawlik calls wastewater the “dirty blood of the city”, and compares sewage sampling to blood testing.
“We are now only starting to understand” how to diagnose this “blood” at the collective level, he says.
For these, and other wildlife, nature, and environmental news items, go to www.nature.com/nature/articles
