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Human fossil footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Image Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

Human tracks may be earliest evidence of people in North America

<p>In southern New Mexico lies the Tularosa Basin, an oblong bowl that’s home to a natural sandbox: White Sands National Park.</p><p>In 2005, David Bustos came to White Sands to work as a National Park Service biologist. The following year, he took notice of odd animal footprints that would appear only when the ground was wet. (The first of these footprints was reported in the 1930s.) The markings, which would disappear as the earth dried up, became known as ghost tracks.</p><p>Then in 2009, Bustos came across tracks he thought belonged to ancient humans walking alongside mammoths. But few scientists agreed, he says, rebutting with “No, no, those are the prints of camels that were slipping in the mud,” referring to now-extinct North American camels. And the tracks would disappear with changes in the weather. Heavy rainfall drowned them; periods of drought dried them up. It would take more than a decade—and cooperative weather—for scientists to agree that the tracks belonged to humans. </p><p>Then, says U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Research Geologist Kathleen Springer, “What everyone was asking is, ‘How old are these things, really?’”</p>
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<p>In September 2021, Bustos, Springer, and a group of other researchers published their findings in the journal Science: The team identified 61 human tracks within multiple levels of earth belowground, and between layers of these tracks were seeds from an ancient aquatic plant. Analyses of these seeds—and the footprints they were embedded within—are now challenging scientists’ understanding of when and how people arrived in the Americas.</p><p>Archaeologist Joe Watkins, who was not involved in the study, believes the findings have potentially massive implications. “I think, outside the next big migration of going to the Moon or Mars, the migration to the Americas was the last great migration humanity had,” he says. Upending the timeline of this journey could have implications for both science and Native American cultures, Watkins, who is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, believes.</p><h3>Visiting the tracks</h3><p>At first light on a cold January morning in 2020, Bustos set out with Springer and her USGS colleague Jeff Pigati on all-terrain vehicles to visit White Sands’ ancient tracks. The team wore parkas to keep warm amid a prevailing wind. Springer recalls the hour-and-a-half journey through the dunes being like a “Disney ride.” It was the “funnest thing in the world,” she says. “Just being out there is surreal.”</p><p>Eventually, after passing through a large swath of national park that borders the site of the first atomic bomb test, Springer, Pigati, and Bustos fell upon thousands of tracks. They belonged to packs of dire wolves, giant sloths, 13-foot-tall mammoths, and other animals. And, Springer says, “there’s a person track right smack dab in the middle of them.”</p>
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<img alt="White Sands National Park dunes" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/White_Sands_Dunes.width-990_kjxnoic.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Gypsum sand dunes at White Sands National Park, New Mexico. Image Credit: NOVA/GBH</p>
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<p>“When Dave showed us these things and we had our eyes trained on them, we were almost afraid to step down,” Pigati says. “It looks like a painting in some places.”</p><p>Bustos recalls the conditions that day being perfect for identifying tracks. The trio saw human footprints going underneath the sediment in places, illustrating that there was more than a surface layer of them. “We were seeing seed layers popping out all over the place,” Bustos says. To determine how old the footprints were, Springer and Pigati’s team would collect these ancient seeds from different layers of footprints. The overwhelming evidence of ancient plant life excited Bustos.</p><p>About 36,000 to 19,000 years ago, lakes filled the Tularosa Basin. The largest of these was Lake Otero, which fluctuated in size and activity based on rainfall. Plants like spiral ditchgrass (<i>Ruppia cirrhosa</i>), whose seeds are now embedded in layers of earth, grew along Otero’s edges. About 23,000 years ago, the southwestern U.S. became drier and the lake shrank. This exposed a large area of land that was once underwater, whose clays and silts became overtopped by gypsum sand and silt. People began walking around these surfaces, which “were kind of squishy in some areas,” Springer explains. And the people weren’t alone: The impressions from mammoths, ground sloths, and camels, sit alongside—and sometimes right on top of—human prints. </p><p>“This can only happen if they are in the area at the same time,” Pigati said in an email. “Exactly how they may have interacted in the vicinity of our [research site] is unknown, but there is definitive evidence that humans were harassing or stalking a giant ground sloth on the west side of the basin.”</p><p>In many other cases, interactions between humans and animals seem peaceful. “What’s interesting to me,” Bustos says, “is it’s not just a mammoth and a hunter. It’s families. You see a baby mammoth turning around and spinning. We have the juvenile and adult megafauna prints with the babies and adult [humans].”</p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sloth_Footprint.width-990_j4t67Wp.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>A footprint from a Harlan's ground sloth at White Sands National Park. Image Credit: Courtesy of the National Parks Service</p>
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<p>Having about 10 hours of daylight, the team got to work “trenching” the human footprints, Springer says. With ground-penetrating radar, they were able to determine that footprints were present within layers of sediment. They then dug a trench to view the layers in cross-section. If Springer and Pigati’s cross-section was a sandwich, the footprints would be the filling and the dateable material around the footprints would be the bread. </p><p>Dating tracks only at the surface would yield inaccurate results, Pigati explains. “You can look in every direction and there are trackways everywhere in every horizon,” he says. But if you calculate the age of these footprints on the surface layer of earth only, you’ll just find that they’re younger than the ground they’re upon, he says. By looking at layers of sediment below the surface, the team set out to document how many layers contained footprints and find datable material above and below each layer. Each of these layers would contain footprints from a unique time period, the team posited. “The footprints are imprinted at the top of a given layer of sediment—they don’t really pass through the layers,” Pigati wrote in an email.</p><p>As the sun rose higher in the sky, the white sand reflected a near-blinding light, and the day quickly grew warm. The researchers shedded their parkas and worked in t-shirts until the January sun fizzled and it was time to ride back through the dunes, chunks of sediment layers in hand.</p><p>The team later extracted 40 to 60 ditchgrass seeds from every level of footprints in every sample. In a USGS lab in Golden, Colorado, they cleaned each set of seeds with a chemical treatment and began combusting them.  </p><p>The combustion process, automated by a machine in the lab, didn’t obliterate the seeds but turned them into a gas. From this gas, a machine turned the once-seeds back into solids: graphite pellets about the size of a pencil tip. This technology of making “graphite targets” dates back to the 80s, Pigati says. “Every lab does it the same way in the world.”</p><p>The team then took these pellets, tapped them down into cartridges, and sent them off to a lab to measure the amount of a radioactive isotope of carbon, called carbon-14, they contained. Then they waited for results.</p><h3>What the tracks mean</h3><p>Months later, they came. The seeds revealed that the footprints they were embedded within are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old—thousands of years older than what scientists generally consider to be the earliest evidence of people in the Americas.</p><p>“For forever, people thought Clovis were the first people to cross over [the Bering Strait] about 13,000 years ago,” Pigati says, referring to the commonly-held view among archaeologists. As the story goes, ice sheets in what is now Canada blocked passage between what is now Alaska and the rest of the Americas. Once these ice sheets began retreating, people came south through an ice-free corridor, Pigati explains. His team’s findings now challenge this belief. Carbon dating of the seeds within the White Sands footprints suggest that people were in the Americas while ice sheets still covered much of northern North America. “A lot earlier” than previously thought, Pigati says. </p><p>“When we got the final dates back, it was very…” Springer pauses over Zoom, choosing her words carefully. “The arrows were going to start flying. We knew we needed an [evidence-supported] explanation why these findings were really robust.”</p>
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<p>Archaeologist Joe Watkins says that if the dating of the seeds, and therefore footprints, is correct, “it puts us at 20% older than the dates we have from the rest of America.” Therefore, ages of other important archaeological sites like Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, where scientists have found 16,000-year-old evidence of human life, may need to be reconsidered. (In 2014, Nikhil Swaminathan <a href="https://www.archaeology.org/issues/145-1409/features/2369-peopling-the-americas-meadowcroft-rockshelter">wrote for Archaeology Magazine</a> that Meadowcroft Rockshelter is “the longest-occupied site in the Americas.”)</p><p>Watkins first heard about the White Sands tracks years ago while working in Washington D.C. as the chief of the Tribal Relations and American Cultures Program of the National Park Service. But he didn’t see them until after he’d retired, visiting White Sands during a NOVA shoot for the film “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/ice-age-footprints/">Ice Age Footprints</a>.” Seeing human footprints intermingling with those of ground sloths was overwhelming and “tremendously exhilarating,” he says.</p>
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<img alt="Archaeologist Joe Watkins holds a clovis point" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Joe_Watkins.width-990_4i0j7w4.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Watkins pictured with a replica Clovis point. His interest in archaeology was piqued at 10 years old when he found an archaic point on his family’s Oklahoma homestead. Watkins, who’s now 71, showed the point to his grandmother. The artifact didn’t come from modern Choctaw, but was much older, she explained in her native language. From that moment, Watkins became “more interested in looking into the unwritten past,” and, with his grandmother’s support, began pursuing a career in archaeology, a field he recognizes isn’t always “in advantage to the Native American community,” he says. Image Credit: NOVA/GBH</p>
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<p>But Watkins cautions that, with no other aspects of culture present but footprints, scientists like him can only speculate how ancient humans were using the land. “Were they just walking? Were they hunting? Did they have a camp nearby?” he asks. Archaeology may not hold all the answers to these questions: “I do think it’s important for American Indians to be involved so they can offer their insights so we can better understand who these people were,” Watkins says, reflecting on his own Choctaw roots.</p><p>As Native American identity is tied to the land, Watkins believes, “the Native peoples will say we’ve always been here,” he says. “I usually say [the first Americans] weren’t Native Americans. They weren’t Siberians. They were whatever they called themselves.” Combining this philosophy with science is a way to integrate belief systems, he says.</p>
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<p>The White Sands findings, Watkins says, “forced us to reconsider the most cherished ideas of the people of North America.”</p>
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<p>Watkins recites his people’s story about two stiff-legged bears that meet in a black-loam prairie and have a battle. Only one survives; it becomes the last of its species. “Some Choctaw interpret ‘stiff-legged bear’ as being a mammoth,” Watkins says. If humans did once walk alongside mammoths in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin 20,000 years ago, he adds, there’s a chance these people gave birth “to any number of tribal people across the U.S.” </p><h3>Racing against time</h3><p>Bustos, Springer, Pigati, and fellow researchers visited the ghost tracks again in January and April 2022. They extended their trench, identifying more footprints from potentially before and after the original set they excavated. To bolster their findings, Bustos explains, the team won’t rely solely on dating seeds. They’ll date pollen, too. “This work is not done,” Pigati says. “We have a window from 21,000 to 23,000 [years]. We don’t know if people were here before then.” </p><p>But the clock is ticking. Erosion in White Sands is exposing and destroying the tracks, Springer says. Though the Tularosa Basin has been eroding for nearly 12,000 years, climate change is likely exacerbating erosion today, she explains. “The layers, they’re finite,” Bustos adds. “We’re losing thousands of tracks to erosion. It’s a race to document them before they’re gone.”</p><p>Already, some tracks reveal clues about ancient daily life in the Tularosa Basin.</p><p>“There’s something about the children,” Bustos says. “You see these toddlers running and jumping, and the story really comes alive.” Watkins agrees. “When we look at the tracks of children playing in perhaps puddled water surrounded by ground sloths,” he says, “it takes us back to childhood memories of children playing in puddles all around the world.”</p>
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<p data-block-key="arqov">Footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park challenge scientists’ timeline of when humans first came to North America.</p>

A close-up of Ingenuity taken on April 5 by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU.

What to expect during NASA’s first-ever Mars helicopter flight

<p>NASA has delayed the first flight of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter, announcing that it expects to set a new date next week.</p><p>The helicopter, which arrived on the red planet tucked inside <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-landing-success/">the Perseverance rover</a> in February, was initially set to fly on Sunday, securing its position as the first rotorcraft to lift off on another world. Late on Friday night, however, a high-speed test of Ingenuity’s rotors <a href="https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/status/291/mars-helicopter-flight-delayed-to-no-earlier-than-april-14/">ended early</a>: As the helicopter’s command sequence tried to transition the flight computer from “preflight” to “flight” mode, engineers were alerted to a potential problem. The team has decided to update Ingenuity’s flight control software before attempting a maiden flight.</p><p>During this first flight, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter will lift off, hover 10 feet above the Martian surface, take pictures, and touch back down—all in a period of about 40 seconds. Meanwhile, some 200 feet away, the Perseverance rover will snap pictures and videos of its companion’s brief voyage.</p>
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<p>This first flight will be a modest beginning of a much more ambitious task: In the next 30 days, the Ingenuity team at NASA’s <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/">Jet Propulsion Laboratory</a> will attempt a total of five flights, each longer and more technical than the last.</p><p>“Each world only gets one first flight,” Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung said during a press conference on Friday. It’s a “historic moment that has analogues in 1903,” NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen added, referring to the year the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/unlikely-inventors/">Wright brothers</a> became the first in the world to fly a motor-operated airplane—after two failed liftoffs.</p><p>“History tells us that Orville and Wilbur took this setback like true engineers,” confirming that their fundamental understanding of flight was correct and going back and making subtle changes, Aung said during Friday’s press conference. Aung believes she and her team have become similarly well-versed in the unique challenges of flying a hovercraft on another planet and are aware that despite years of preparation, something could go wrong when it’s time for the first attempt. “I want to be conservative,” Aung said on Friday, adding the Ingenuity team had yet to celebrate the Mars helicopter’s achievements.</p><p>Perhaps the greatest challenge the team will face is the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/mars-facts-red-planet/">Martian atmosphere</a>. Made up of mostly carbon dioxide, Mars’ atmosphere is a mere 1% as thick as our own planet’s, which is primarily nitrogen. Its thinness makes it the equivalent of flying at three times the height of Mount Everest, Ingenuity chamber test engineer Amelia Quon said on Friday.</p><p>Rotorcrafts, including helicopters, fly by generating lift. As their blades spin, they push the air and this lifts the craft up, Aung explains. In a thin atmosphere, she says, there are fewer molecules to push, “so you need to spin much faster to get lift,” she says. While the blades of most Earthly helicopters operate at around 450 to 500 revolutions per minute, Ingenuity’s will move at 2,400 rpm.</p><p>Ingenuity’s rotors “are not something off the shelf; they’re really fine-tuned to maximize lift in a really thin atmosphere,” Aung said. Weighing in at about 35 grams, the rotors have a foam core for lightweightedness and are covered in carbon fiber, laid out in a grid, for optimal stiffness and strength.</p><p>Like its blades, the body of the Mars helicopter is also lightweight, at less than four pounds. “We couldn’t make this happen” with technology that existed 10 or 15 years ago, Aung said.</p><p>Mars’ strong winds also pose a challenge. If gusts become too strong before Ingenuity is scheduled to fly, there’s no way of automatically postponing or canceling the flight through Perseverance, Ingenuity Operations Lead Tim Canham explained during Friday’s press conference. This is because the Perseverance rover’s weather-determining system has no connection to Ingenuity. And Ingenuity has no way to right itself; if it fails to land right-side-up during any of its flights, its mission on Mars would end.</p>
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<p>But there’s good news: Martian weather is easy to predict. “Weather on Mars tends to stay the same over a period of sols,” Canham explains. (At 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds, a Martian sol is slightly longer than a day on Earth.) The Ingenuity team initially chose 12:30 p.m. Martian time Sunday, the equivalent of 11:00 p.m. EDT, for a potential first liftoff because the team calculated that’s when Ingenuity would have the most charged battery and Mars would have the calmest skies.</p><p>The team started testing in 2014 whether Ingenuity could successfully fly on another planet. We “made Mars on Earth,” Quon said, referring to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 25-foot space simulator thermal vacuum chamber, which Voyager 1 and 2 were tested in before making their way into space and out of our solar system.</p><p>First, the team used a flight model to illustrate that lift is possible—picture a couple of hops and a crash landing—in a Martian-like environment. Then, in 2018, the team had the model spin up three feet in the air and turn. In 2019, NASA scientists took data from previous tests and applied them to testing the actual Ingenuity Mars helicopter.</p><p>If all goes well, during its first sol after taking to the sky, Ingenuity will transmit its black-and-white photos and flight summary data to Perseverance, which will transmit the data to scientists on Earth. In the following days, scientists expect to receive color imagery and more complex data from the flight.</p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Perseverance_Selfie.width-990_aHdZNGv.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter, seen here about 13 feet (3.9 meters) from the rover in this image taken April 6, 2021, the 46th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS</p>
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<p>Canham is also eager to hear the sound of Ingenuity’s liftoff: Perseverance is equipped with a microphone specifically designed to survive on Mars—and capture the <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perseverance-mars-rover-records-sound-of-rock-zapping-laser1/">snaps, crackles and pops of its sizzling stones</a>. It’s possible for the microphone to capture Ingenuity’s liftoff, but given its somewhat significant distance (more than 200 feet) from the helicopter, there are no guarantees. It’s “very touch and go on whether we’ll get anything,” Canham said on Friday. “But who knows.”</p><p>What’s more certain is that Perseverance will capture its own photos of Ingenuity’s first flight.</p><p>Before, during, and after Ingenuity’s 40-second airtime, Perseverance will snap six to seven photos a second using its onboard <a href="https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/mastcam-z/">Mastcam-Z cameras</a>, one with zoomed-in perspective and the other a zoomed-out perspective. (You can view images as they come in on <a href="http://go.nasa.gov/perseverance-raw-images">NASA’s website here</a>.)</p><p>The Ingenuity team expects its second flight to happen four days after its initial flight. And if that one goes well—the goal being to have the helicopter fly up to 15 feet—the team will move to an every-three-day flight cadence.</p><p>“We want to have fun” with the fourth and fifth flights, Aung said, suggesting that the team may venture at least 150 feet out and back from the helicopter’s takeoff site, possibly into never-before-seen territory. “This is all about the future. This is all about being a pathfinder,” she said, explaining that Ingenuity can inform how future space helicopters, which will be bigger and heavier, should function.</p><p>Like NASA’s <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars-pathfinder">first Mars rover</a>—the modest 23-pound microwave-sized Sojourner, which touched down on the red planet in 1997—Ingenuity is a “tech demonstration,” explained Zurbuchen, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science. Similar to Sojourner’s brief mission on Mars, Zurbuchen believes, decades from now, we’ll look back on Ingenuity’s month of flight with awe and fondness.</p><p>“Ingenuity’s month will be an aggressive demonstration of what it can possibly do,” he said. And, teammate Elsa Jensen added, “Big Sister”—Perseverance—“will be watching.”</p>
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<p>Want to fly a rotorcraft on another planet? Here’s what it takes.</p>

Ingenuity’s first black-and-white picture from the air. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Victory! Ingenuity conducts its first powered flight on Mars

<p>When a diminutive 4-pound helicopter lifted off over a red landscape on Monday morning, it became the first craft to achieve controlled, powered flight on a planet beyond Earth.</p><p>At approximately 6:15 a.m. EDT on Monday, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter team—along with eager viewers from across the globe—watched live as data from the red planet arrived to Mission Control via a <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/services/networks/deep_space_network/about/">Deep Space Network antenna</a>. The data signified that Ingenuity’s flight, which occurred approximately four hours earlier, had been a success.</p><p>“Sometimes we have to do something just to show that we can do it,” NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen said during <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1KolyCqICI">NASA’s livestream</a> of the event. “When the Wright brothers flew for the first time, they flew an experimental aircraft. And in the same way, the Mars helicopter is designed to show that we can fly a powered helicopter flight in the Martian atmosphere.”</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/nasa-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-first-flight/">Getting Ingenuity to fly</a>, Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung added, “was the unwavering dream of our team since day one.”</p><p>On Monday, downlink lead Michael Starch, clad in an orange Ingenuity team polo, studied his computer screen in the helicopter control room. “This is downlink. Early indications,” he said, looking up from the monitor. “Data products look nominal.”</p><p>Sitting close by was Aung, who visibly grinned under her mask.</p><p>“This is downlink,” Starch repeated. “We’ve pulled in data products from Mars 2020.” He pauses for 39 seconds. The room was silent. “This is downlink,” he said again. “Confirming we received Mars 2020 telemetry. Confirming we received Mars 2020 event. Confirming we received helicopter data products.” Starch nodded his head up and down.</p><p>Silence once again fell over the control room. Aung twiddled her fingers. Some teammates nodded. Others glanced at their laptops and then back at their anxiously-awaiting colleagues.</p><p>“This is downlink,” Starch said. “Confirming we have helicopter data products, helicopter telemetry, helicopter event… battery data has been received.”</p>
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<img alt="NASA JPL's Ingenuity Mars helicopter team" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/25819_4-PIA24585-web.width-990_lltuX2v.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Members of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter team, including MiMi Aung (front), in NASA JPL’s Space Flight Operations Facility prepare to receive the data downlink showing whether the helicopter completed its first flight on April 19, 2021. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech</p>
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<p>Starch handed it off to Flight Control, which gave its announcement: “Ingenuity is reporting having performed spin-up, takeoff, climb, hover, descent, landing, touchdown and spin-down.”</p><p>Aung gave two thumbs up and then waved her fists. The control room erupted with clapping, originating from both mask-wearing team members in person and those watching over Zoom.</p><p>“Altimeter data confirmed,” Flight Control said. Cheers exploded from the control room. The altimeter plot of the flight, mechanical engineer Taryn Bailey explained during NASA’s livestream, indicates a peak. It starts off with a flat line, showing that Ingenuity is grounded, has a steep incline, indicating that the helicopter has spun up and risen, a dwell, showing that Ingenuity is hovering, and then another steep decline to the ground representing Ingenuity’s touchdown.</p><p>“Confirmed that Ingenuity has performed its first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet,” Flight Control said.</p>
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<p>As the cheers and fist pumps continued, the team received its first picture from the mission: a black and white photo that Ingenuity snapped while hovering over the Martian surface, its shadow—four rotors, four legs, and a tissue box-like body—cast beneath it.</p><p>Getting Ingenuity to fly on Mars was no easy feat. This first flight, initially scheduled for Sunday, Apr. 11, was delayed after team engineers identified a potential problem. (The team decided to update Ingenuity’s flight control software before attempting a maiden flight.) And years of preparation back on Earth was necessary.</p><p>Starting in 2014, before testing Ingenuity, the team used helicopter models to simulate flight on Mars. These models were the precursors to Ingenuity and “went through extensive environmental and aerodynamic testing,” Bailey said.</p><p>To properly test these models and then Ingenuity beginning in 2019, “We had to simulate a Mars-like atmosphere,” which is 1% the density of Earth’s, Bailey explained. The team did this by using NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s 25-foot space simulator thermal vacuum chamber, which allowed the team to control temperature and pressure to simulate Mars’ atmospheric density. The team also used a gravity off-load system to compensate for the difference in gravity between Earth and Mars, Bailey said.</p><p>After these tests “We said, ‘The next time we fly it’ll be on Mars,’” Aung said during a press conference on Apr. 9.</p>
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<img alt="The Ingenuity Mars helicopter, photographed by Perseverance" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/25816_PIA24550-1200.width-990_N22JFql.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>The first flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was captured in this image from Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on April 19, 2021. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech</p>
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<p>At four pounds, Ingenuity was built to be both light and fast, bolstering its ability to soar in Mars’ incredibly thin atmosphere. Despite its small size, the helicopter’s wingspan is 4 feet tip-to-tip: “super large for something that’s essentially carrying [a vehicle] the size of a tissue box,” Bailey said.</p><p>Each of its four blades is made of a lightweight but strong composite material and weighs less than 2 ounces—the equivalent of four empty soda cans. To generate lift in an incredibly-thin atmosphere with few molecules to push around, Ingenuity’s blades move at an average speed of 2,500 rotations per minute. (Helicopters used on Earth typically operate at 450 to 500 rpm.)</p><p>While Ingenuity’s first flight was modest—a 10-foot hover above the red planet’s surface and a touchdown—its upcoming four flights will increase in technical difficulty. The team hopes to eventually explore parts of Mars’ terrain that it can’t navigate with terrestrial rovers like <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-landing-success/">Perseverance</a>. “The rover has to navigate around a lot of obstacles on the ground that the helicopter can fly around,” Bailey said.</p><p>“We’ve sent five rovers to Mars and now we have an aerial dimension, which...elevates the next stage of space exploration,” she added. Ingenuity and its eventual successors may also allow for more collaboration and eventually open the doorway for human exploration of other worlds, Bailey said.</p><p>Though the Ingenuity team already received still images of the helicopter’s maiden flight from both Ingenuity and Perseverance, it expects to get video footage and more high-resolution images in the next couple of days. You can view these on <a href="https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/">NASA’s website here</a>.</p>
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<p>The 4-pound helicopter just became the first craft to achieve controlled, powered flight on a planet beyond Earth.</p>

A Navajo family practices social distancing and mask-wearing during the coronavirus pandemic. Image Credit: Getty Images

American Indians have the highest Covid vaccination rate in the US

<p>Before getting vaccinated against COVID-19 was an option, Francys Crevier was afraid to leave her Maryland home.</p><p>She ordered all of her groceries and limited her time outside, knowing that each venture would put both herself and her immunocompromised mother, with whom Crevier shares her home, at risk. Knowing she could provide for Mom was “a blessing, for sure,” Crevier says. After all, American Indians and Alaska Natives were <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html">hospitalized and died</a> from COVID-19 at a higher rate than any other racial group in America throughout the pandemic, says Crevier, who’s Algonquin.</p><p>“As a Native woman, I didn’t know if I was going to make it through this,” she says.</p>
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<p>Indeed, the U.S. Indigenous population had <a href="https://www.ihs.gov/sites/newsroom/themes/responsive2017/display_objects/documents/2020_Letters/Enclosure_DTLL_DUIOLL_11182020.pdf">more than 3.5 times the infection rate</a>, more than four times the hospitalization rate, and a higher mortality rate than white Americans, reports the <a href="https://www.ihs.gov/aboutihs/">Indian Health Service</a> (IHS), a federal health program for American Indians and Alaska Natives. Official data reveal that <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/us/navajo-nation-infection-rate-trnd/index.html">the Navajo Nation</a>, the largest tribe in the U.S., has been one of the hardest-hit populations, reporting one of the country’s highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rates in May 2020, the <a href="https://navajotimes.com/reznews/a-broken-system-why-number-of-native-american-alaska-native-pandemic-deaths-may-never-be-known/">Navajo Times reports</a>.</p><p>Being so disproportionately affected led to a sense of urgency toward vaccination among American Indians and Alaska Natives, says Crevier, who is the chief executive officer of the <a href="https://www.ncuih.org/index">National Council of Urban Indian Health</a>, a partner of IHS. And many IHS affiliates stepped up, showing early success with vaccination education and campaigns specifically for Indigenous communities, some of whom would otherwise have trouble accessing coronavirus vaccines.</p><p>In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Twitter that its <a href="https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/index.html#vaccination-demographics-trends">COVID-19 data tracker</a> now displays U.S. vaccination progress by race and ethnicity. The tracker, “Percent of People Receiving COVID-19 Vaccine by Race/Ethnicity and Date Reported to CDC, United States,” showed that as of July 6, American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest vaccination rate in the country, with 45.5% having received at least one dose and 39.1% fully vaccinated. They’re followed by Asians (36.6%, 35%), whites (33.7%, 32.2%), Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders (35.9% 31.3%), Hispanic/Latinos (31.8%, 28.3%), and Black people (25.8%, 23.2%). As of late May, American Indian and Alaska Native vaccination rates were higher than white vaccination rates in 28 states, including New Mexico, Arizona, and Alaska, where many Indigenous people receive care from tribal health centers and the IHS, Connecticut News Project’s <a href="https://ctmirror.org/2021/05/22/stark-racial-disparities-persist-in-vaccinations-state-level-cdc-data-shows/">CT Mirror reports</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><p>Francys Crevier, the chief executive officer of the National Council of Urban Indian Health. Image courtesy of Matthew P. D’Agostino, University of Maryland, Baltimore</p>
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<p>For many, it’s a reason to celebrate. Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma member Walter Murillo, the chief executive officer of Phoenix-based <a href="https://www.nativehealthphoenix.org/">Native Health Central</a>, says he felt “almost daily” the loss of family members, community members, and extended community members. “Every day, having lived through that trauma, when there’s a way for safety, that’s the way to go,” he says of vaccination, wiping his eyes over Zoom.</p><h3>Success and challenges of Indigenous vaccine rollout</h3><p>In November 2020, the federal government offered tribes and urban Indigenous communities two potential options: Receive vaccines through the state or separately through the IHS. Many chose the latter, as receiving vaccination via the state, Crevier and Murillo explain, would have required Indigenous communities to fully adopt the CDC’s vaccination rollout phases. These phases, though recommended to tribes, Crevier says, didn’t completely align with Native American viewpoints, which often emphasize putting culture and language—and their keepers —first. (Some Native speakers are younger than 65 years old and therefore weren’t included in the earliest U.S. vaccination phases, for example.)</p><p>In some tribes, fully complying to the CDC’s recommended phases would have entailed adopting slower vaccine rollouts than tribes actually undertook. “People knew they didn’t have to be hemmed in by those phases,” says Kerry Hawk Lessard, the executive director of Baltimore and Boston-based Urban Indian Health program <a href="https://nativeamericanlifelines.org/">Native American LifeLines</a>. “You can’t blame them. That’s their right as a tribal citizen.”</p><p>The Mashpee Wampanoag of Massachusetts, Lessard says, opted to make vaccines available for tribal citizens and anyone who shares a household or works for a Native organization. <a href="https://www.kosu.org/health/2021-03-11/tribes-in-oklahoma-begin-opening-vaccine-eligibility-to-non-natives">In Oklahoma</a>, once tribal members were vaccinated, surplus supplies of vaccines went to teachers and other non-tribal citizens serving tribal communities, often before these people were eligible per state guidelines, she says. “Some of my family members live on the <a href="https://www.mtpr.org/post/tribes-report-highest-vaccination-rates-montana">Fort Peck Reservation</a>” in Montana, where “a huge amount of people are vaccinated” compared to people in the rest of the state, explains Lessard, who is Shawnee. “We’re fortunate in the Phoenix area,” Murillo adds, referring to having ample IHS resources and support, which greatly helped make vaccines accessible to Indigenous people living in the Southwest.</p><p>And in Washington, <a href="https://nativeproject.org/">the Native Project</a>, a primary health care facility that services the greater Spokane community, decided to get its vaccine allocation through the state. “The state was very cooperative,” Crevier says. After a quick rollout, excess doses went to the NAACP and the Asian American community. “It was really kind of beautiful,” she says. “We are one big country, right? It’s nice that this community prioritized not just our [Native] community but other historically marginalized ones.”</p><p></p>
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<p>The “language you hear throughout Indian country is ‘be a good relative.' Do this for the grandmas, do this for the ceremony, do this for the language, because our people are precious...We already lost a lot. We can’t afford to lose more.”</p>
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<p>In states like South Carolina and Tennessee, however, vaccination rates have been far lower for American Indians and Alaska Natives than for white Americans, CT Mirror reports.</p><p>After all, more than 70% of Indigenous people live off of reservations, many in urban communities that lack full IHS services: dental care, primary medical care, mental health care, and other facilities under one roof, free of charge for the Native American community. While IHS facilities in the American West commonly include full outpatient care, the entirety of the East Coast lacks such IHS services due to limited funding. (Though the IHS is promised an annual $48 billion by the federal government, it received <a href="https://www.ihs.gov/sites/budgetformulation/themes/responsive2017/display_objects/documents/FY_2021_Final_CJ-IHS.pdf">$6.4 billion</a> for the 2021 fiscal year.) A lack of urban services affected many vaccination campaigns, Crevier says, though Murillo points out that it ethically shouldn’t have: “Managing an outbreak of a communicable disease on a reservation is important. Why would it be less important for Indians living in the city?” he asks.</p>
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<figcaption><p>A woman receives a coronavirus vaccine through Native Health Phoenix's program. Image courtesy of Susan Levy, Native Health</p>
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<p>Lessard is very familiar with the challenge of offering vaccines to Indigenous people living in urban areas who are far from home reservations and full outpatient care. The Boston and Baltimore Indigenous communities her organization serves had “a lot of fear”: “We have a pretty good size of Navajo Nation citizens here. Seeing what’s happening at home is devastating” and plays into wanting to get vaccinated quickly, she says. Furthermore, Lessard and her team knew that many people in their community grappled with the decision to travel to their home reservation, where they could be vaccinated immediately but potentially put family members and tribal elders at risk of infection. “If they were at home, they wouldn’t necessarily have to wait for the U.S. phases,” Lessard says. This “amped up the pressure on us to make sure the vaccine was available in their area.”</p><p>Native American LifeLines faced a lack of healthcare providers and no comprehensive healthcare services through the IHS on the Eastern seaboard, meaning there was no way for it to receive, store, and administer vaccines. The temperature requirements and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccines-clinical-trials/">shorter lifespan of Pfizer</a>, a vaccine now used exclusively at some of Native American LifeLines’ vaccination sites, added to the challenge, Lessard says. Her organization ultimately had to get its vaccine allotment through the state, potentially slowing rollout to Boston and Baltimore’s Native American communities.</p><p>Faced with urgency and enthusiasm from the people her organization serves, “We realized early on we had to make a change,” Lessard says.</p>
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<p>“Managing an outbreak of a communicable disease on a reservation is important. Why would it be less important for Indians living in the city?”</p>
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<p>In January, Native American LifeLines began seeking out partnerships “to try to fill in the gaps,” deciding that identifying institutional partnerships would be best. Ultimately, it partnered with Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the University of Maryland Baltimore to establish IHS vaccine clinics, and as part of Governor Larry Hogan's Vaccine Equity Task Force in Maryland, with the National Guard to reach remote state-recognized tribes.</p><p>The UMD Baltimore clinic, which carries only Pfizer, has seen a spike in appointments since youths became eligible to receive that vaccine, Lessard says. Now, she says, it’s just a matter of addressing situational gaps. For example, Native American LifeLines’ clinic with the Maryland National Guard uses only Moderna, so Lessard and her team are keeping an eye on the eligibility of younger people. And they’re deciding whether to set up other tribal health clinics to serve the growing list of eligible people.</p><p>In Phoenix, Murillo and his team at Native Health Central, which recently administered more than 500 shots across two school districts, hope to soon incorporate <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/05/19/998420256/pfizer-vaccine-can-stay-longer-at-warmer-temperatures-before-being-discarded#:~:text=Ethics-,Pfizer%20Vaccine%20Can%20Now%20Be%20Stored%20At%20Warmer%20Temperatures%20Much,for%20up%20to%205%20days.">modified vaccine storing</a> standards into their rollout plans.</p>
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<h3>“We can’t afford to lose more”</h3><p>The successes of Native American LifeLines, Native Health Central, and other organizations’ vaccine campaigns, and the CDC’s vaccination rate data, counter longstanding assumptions about vaccine hesitancy in Indigenous communities—assumptions that were already disproven in January by the results of a survey conducted in urban Indigenous communities, Lessard and Crevier say.</p><p>The survey, issued by the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI), involved nearly 1,500 American Indians and Alaska Natives representing 318 tribes across 46 states. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they’d be willing to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Many cited having a “strong sense of responsibility to protect the Native community and cultural ways,” as their primary motivation to get vaccinated, <a href="https://www.uihi.org/projects/strengthening-vaccine-efforts-in-indian-country/">the UIHI reports</a> on its website.</p><p>The “language you hear throughout Indian country is ‘be a good relative,’” Lessard says. “Do this for the grandmas, do this for the ceremony, do this for the language, because our people are precious....We already lost a lot. We can’t afford to lose more.”</p><p>As a Native American, “You have obligations to your community and your family,” adds Crevier, who on April 16 received her first dose of Pfizer through Native American LifeLines’ Baltimore program.</p><p>Still, Crevier says, the CDC’s vaccination data likely has some gaps due to poor data collection practices.</p><p>Many Indigenous people, particularly those living outside of reservations, may be listed by the CDC as “other” rather than American Indian/Alaska Native, Lessard explains. All Indigenous health data, she says, reports up from healthcare providers, and then sometimes to the Indian Health Service, before getting to the CDC. And not all healthcare providers collect data thoroughly with regard to race and ethnicity. Some of the forms that Lessard has personally filled out have included Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and other, but not Alaska Native or American Indian. “It’s kind of a junk in, junk out system,” she says. Crevier adds, “I always fill out American Indian/Alaska Native at the doctor’s office, but sometimes I get the form back and it says white.”</p><p>And Crevier points out more white people have been vaccinated against COVID-19 than white people who got sick from the virus. “They were the first race to have that. That kind of shows the priority,” she says. She’d love to see more efforts during the current pandemic and in the future to prioritize “people who have never been at the front of the lines: Black, brown, Indians, and Alaska Natives who have had the worst outcomes.”</p><p>A global pandemic wasn’t something that the National Council of Urban Indian Health or other Indigenous organizations could have possibly planned for, says Crevier, who personally grappled with the decision of where to go to get vaccinated before deciding to stay in the D.C. area “and fight for vaccine availability for my community.” But the pandemic reinforced a principle close to Crevier’s heart: While caring for patients and making treatments and vaccines available, historic barriers and trauma must be taken into account. “How do we do that moving forward?” she asks. “True, true investment guarantees we won’t be as vulnerable as we have been.”</p>
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<p>According to CDC data, Indigenous people are getting vaccinated quicker than any other group. Here are the successes—and challenges—of getting vaccines to urban Native American communities.</p>

The winning image of the Nikon Small World 2021 Photo Competition shows a southern live oak leaf’s trichomes, stomata, and vessels. Image Credit: Jason Kirk, Baylor College of Medicine

Nikon Small World 2021 Photo Competition winners announced

<p>The winners of the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, which aims to showcase “the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope,” were announced today.</p><p>This is the 47th year of the<a href="https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/"> photo competition</a>, which is open to anyone with an interest in microscopy—the use of microscopes to view samples and objects—and photography. This year the contest received almost 1,900 entries from 88 countries. A panel of five judges* evaluated the entries for originality, informational content, technical proficiency, and visual impact, Nikon reported. The results of the sister video competition, Small World In Motion, were <a href="https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2021-small-world-in-motion-competition">announced last month</a>.</p><p>Here are this year’s top 10 images:</p><h3>1. Live oak leaf</h3><p></p>
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<p>A southern live oak leaf’s trichomes, stomata, and vessels photographed by Jason Kirk, a professional imager and core director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Optical Imaging &amp; Vital Microscopy Core. Kirk used a custom-made microscope system to take around 200 individual images of the leaf, which he stacked together to create this image, Nikon reports.</p><p>Trichomes, stomata, and vessels are all “essential to plant life,” Nikon writes. Trichomes, fine outgrowths that protect a plant from extreme weather and insects, are featured in white. “In purple, Jason highlights the stomata, small pores that regulate the flow of gases in a plant. Colored in cyan are the vessels that transport water throughout the leaf,” Nikon said in a statement.</p><h3>2. Networking neurons in microfluidic device</h3>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Neurons.width-990_VAWUxfn.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Esmeralda Paric and Holly Stefen, Dementia Research Centre, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia</p>
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<p>This image is of a microfluidic device, which contains 300,000 networking neurons divided into two isolated populations (left and right) bridged by axons (center). The isolated populations were each treated with a unique virus, Nikon reports. The image was taken at 40X magnification by Esmeralda Paric and Holly Stefen of Macquarie University’s Dementia Research Centre in New South Wales, Australia, using fluorescence imaging, which uses high-intensity illumination to excite fluorescent molecules in a sample. “When a molecule absorbs photons, electrons are excited to a higher energy level,” Nikon writes. “As electrons ‘relax’ back to the ground-state, vibrational energy is lost and, as a result, the emission spectrum is shifted to longer wavelengths.”</p><h3>3. Rear leg, claw and respiratory trachea of a louse</h3>
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<img alt="Rear leg, claw and respiratory trachea of a louse" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Louse.width-990_kQOhyrW.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Frank Reiser, Nassau Community College, New York</p>
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<p>A rear leg, claw, and respiratory trachea of a louse, a wingless parasitic insect, at 5X magnification taken by Frank Reiser, a biologist at Nassau Community College in New York. Reiser used darkfield micrography, which “creates contrast in transparent unstained specimens” and “depends on controlling specimen illumination so that central light which normally passes through and around the specimen is blocked,” Nikon writes, and image stacking to produce this image.</p><h3>4. Embryonic rat neuron</h3>
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<img alt="Rat Neuron" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/rat_neuron.width-990_T3E6kXs.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Paula Diaz, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile</p>
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<p>A sensory neuron from an embryonic rat taken by Paula Diaz, a physiologist at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. Diaz took the image at 10X magnification and used fluorescence imaging to produce it.</p><h3>5. Housefly proboscis</h3>
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<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Oliver Dum, Medienbunker Produktion, Bendof, Rheinland Pfalz, Germany</p>
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<p>A proboscis of a housefly (<i>Musca domestica</i>) taken by Oliver Dum of Medienbunker Produktion in Bendof, Rheinland Pfalz, Germany. Dum took the image at 40X magnification and assembled it using image stacking.</p><h3>6. Mouse brain vasculature</h3>
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<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Dr. Andrea Tedeschi, Wexner Medical Center, Ohio State University</p>
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<p>3D vasculature of an adult mouse brain taken by Dr. Andrea Tedeschi of Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. Tedeschi took the image at 10X magnification and used confocal imaging, which involves scanning a specimen to create extremely thin (down to 250 nanometer thickness) computer-generated optical sections using visible light, to create it.</p><p></p>
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<h3>7. Tick head</h3>
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<img alt="Tick head" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/QLdeeqvF.width-990_0PkO1lL.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Drs. Tong Zhang and Paul Stoodley, Ohio State University’s Campus Microscopy &amp; Imaging Facility</p>
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<p>Head of a tick taken by Drs. Tong Zhang and Paul Stoodley of Ohio State University’s Campus Microscopy &amp; Imaging Facility in Columbus, Ohio. Zhang and Stoodley took the image at 10X magnification and used confocal imaging to produce it.</p><h3>8. Mouse intestine</h3>
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<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Dr. Amy Engevik, Medical University of South Carolina</p>
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<p>Cross section of a mouse intestine taken at 10X magnification using fluorescence imaging by Dr. Amy Engevik of the Medical University of South Carolina’s Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology in Charleston, South Carolina.</p><h3>9. Water flea</h3>
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<img alt="Water flea" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/1NPu7Bej.width-990_pPt1F1N.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Jan van IJken, Jan van IJek Photography &amp; Film, Amsterdam, the Netherlands</p>
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<p>A water flea (<i>Daphnia</i>) carrying embryos and ciliated vase-shaped protozoans called peritrichs taken at 10X magnification using image stacking and darkfield microscopy by Jan van IJken of Jan van IJek Photography &amp; Film in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.</p><h3>10. Butterfly wing</h3>
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<img alt="Butterfly wing" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Butterfly.width-990_pXxQlxR.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Image Credit: Sebastien Malo, Saint Lys, Haute-Garonne, France</p>
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<p>Vein and scales on a <i>Morpho didius</i> butterfly wing taken at 20X magnification using image stacking and reflected light photography by Sebastien Malo of Saint Lys, Haute-Garonne, France.</p><p></p><p><i>*NOVA Science Editor Robin Kazmier</i><a href="https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/meet-the-judges/2021-judging-panel"><i> was a judge</i></a><i> in this year’s competition.</i></p>
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<p data-block-key="zf7y1">From neurons to tick heads to louse claws, here are the top 10 images from the competition.</p>

Chadwick Boseman speaks at the 2017 San Diego Comic Con International for "Black Panther." Boseman died of colon cancer on August 28, 2020 at age 43. Image credit: Gage Skidmore

Chadwick Boseman and the rise of colon cancer in young adults

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<p>On Friday, August 28, actor Chadwick Boseman died at age 43 of colon cancer.</p><p>Perhaps best known for his role as King T’Challa in “Black Panther,” the actor starred in numerous other Avengers movies, “21 Bridges,” “Da 5 Bloods,” and a not-yet-released adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” This “superstar run” of back-to-back productions “seems all the more miraculous in light of the knowledge that Boseman pulled it off while quietly undergoing many surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy,” David Sims<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/chadwick-boseman/615868/?utm_source=feed"> writes for The Atlantic</a>.</p><p>The cancer that killed Boseman is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States after lung cancer. And although the majority of colon cancer cases are found in older adults, rates are rising among young people.</p><p>In July 2019, University of Texas at Austin researchers reported that “the proportion of newly diagnosed colorectal patients under age 50 <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cncr.32347">rose from 10 percent in 2004 to 12.2 percent in 2015</a>. Younger patients were also likely to have advanced cases more often than older patients,” Knvul Sheikh <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/health/colon-cancer-young.html">writes for the New York Times</a>. (Colorectal cancer includes illness in which tumors are present in the rectum or the colon.) According to the <a href="https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/colorectal-cancer-rates-rise-in-younger-adults.html">American Cancer Society</a>, about 18,000 people under 50 will be diagnosed with colon cancer in 2020.</p><p>Data from Canadian national cancer registries illustrate a similar trend in colorectal cancer rates in younger adults. Colorectal cancer rates increased by 3.47% among Canadian men under age 50 between 2006 and 2015, and by 4.4% among Canadian women under age 50 from 2010 to 2015.</p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sessile_Serrated_Polyps.width-990_gKqMmGj.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>Micrograph of a colorectal sessile serrated lesion, which is most commonly seen in the cecum and ascending colon, and has the potential to lead to colorectal cancer. Image credit: Nephron, Wikimedia Commons</p>
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<p>While older patients undergo regular screenings like colonoscopies, which help flag the disease in its early stages so that doctors can remove polyps before cancer develops (colorectal cancer rates have been declining among people over 65, likely because of more regular screenings), neither younger adults nor their healthcare providers are actively on the hunt for colon cancer, Kat Eschner<a href="https://www.popsci.com/story/health/colon-cancer-young-people/"> reports for Popular Science</a>. Therefore, younger patients are often diagnosed at the later stages of the disease and are more likely to die from their illness, whether or not their cancer is more aggressive than an older patient’s.</p><p>Experts aren’t yet sure why colon cancer rates are increasing among younger Americans and Canadians, but lifestyle changes may be a contributor. “Obesity and sedentary lifestyles, for example, are linked to colorectal cancer, as are poor diets low in fiber,” Sheikh writes. But experts are not entirely convinced these are the only factors at work. Trends in obesity among people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds don’t always correspond to an increase in colorectal cancer, Rebecca Siegel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society Patients, told Sheikh.</p><p>Patients with <a href="https://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(11)00170-3/fulltext?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2F">chronic inflammation</a> or <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5392343/">Type 2 diabetes</a> have also been found to be at increased risk for colon cancer. According to the National Institutes of Health, because of genetic traits, insulin resistance, and the prevalence of obesity—explained at least in part by<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/racism-stress-covid-allostatic-load/"> systematic racism and allostatic load</a>—African Americans have a<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1743410/"> high risk for type 2 diabetes</a>.</p>
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<p>As a Black man, Boseman belonged to the demographic of people who have the highest rates of colorectal cancer. In another major healthcare inequity, African Americans, particularly men, are more likely to be diagnosed at a younger age relative to other diagnoses, Eschner writes for Popular Science. And Black Americans are less likely to be screened early and are more likely to die of the disease, research <a href="https://www.asge.org/docs/default-source/education/practice_guidelines/piis0016510717318059.pdf?sfvrsn=0">shows</a>.</p><p>At the Center for Young Onset Colorectal Cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, which was opened in 2018 to treat younger patients and study the reasons for their diagnoses, Co-Director Dr. Robin B. Mendelsohn and her colleagues “are exploring whether diet, medications like antibiotics, and the microbiome — which have all changed significantly for generations born in the 1960s and later — might be contributing to the cancer in younger people,” Pam Belluck<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/colon-cancer-chadwick-boseman.html"> writes for the New York Times</a>.</p><p>As experts attempt to elucidate why colon cancer rates are increasing among young people, physicians should monitor their younger patients for symptoms that might suggest colorectal cancer, Nilofer Azad, a professor of gastrointestinal oncology at Johns Hopkins University, tells Popular Science. In this population, Eschner writes, symptoms like bloody stool, unexpected weight loss, and prolonged cramping can be overlooked or misdiagnosed as conditions like hemorrhoids.</p><p>Moving forward, better understanding and detection of colon cancer are crucial. But Boseman’s story and his legacy—an incredible collection of films created in a mere 7 years—also illustrate something else: a continued need to address systemic inequities in health care and beyond.</p>
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<p>Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Boseman’s case illustrates the importance of more screening—and addressing systemic inequities in health care.</p>

An illustration of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft stowing its sample of rocks, dirt, and other debris collected from asteroid Bennu on Oct. 20, 2020. The spacecraft will use its Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm to place the TAGSAM collector head into the Sample Return Capsule (SRC). Image Credit: NASA/University of Arizona, Tucson

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will stow asteroid Bennu sample early

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<p>Today, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx team is readying to perform an early stow of a sample from asteroid Bennu, a process originally scheduled for November 2.</p><p>"The abundance of material we collected from Bennu made it possible to expedite our decision to stow,” OSIRIS-REx mission lead and University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta said in a NASA press release on Monday. “The team is now working around the clock to accelerate the stowage timeline, so that we can protect as much of this material as possible for return to Earth."</p><p>On Tuesday, Oct. 20, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft extended its 11-foot arm and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/osiris-rex-bennu-asteroid-touchdown/">touched Bennu,</a> an asteroid about the size of the Empire State Building. From it, OSIRIS-REx autonomously collected a sample of rocks, dust, and debris.</p><p>Though collection didn’t require human oversight and input, <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-osiris-rex-spacecraft-goes-for-early-stow-of-asteroid-sample">stowing the sample</a> is done in stages and will require aid from the team back on Earth. Scientists will send commands to the spacecraft to begin the process, and with each step of stowing, OSIRIS-REx will send the team data and images, waiting for a command to proceed.</p><p>Why stow early?</p><p>“We spent years preparing for this, analyzing every scenario,” Coralie Adams, the OSIRIS-REx TAG navigation manager, told NOVA about the sampling mission.</p><p>But last week’s scenario may be surprising even to the <a href="https://www.asteroidmission.org/">OSIRIS-REx</a> team: The spacecraft may have collected <i>too much</i> of asteroid Bennu, causing the spacecraft’s collection container to jam. On Thursday, OSIRIS-REx scientists received images that showed some of the sample had leaked into outer space from the collection head, which wasn’t able to fully close.</p><p>“A substantial amount of sample is seen floating away,” Lauretta said on Friday.</p><p>The OSIRIS-REx team aimed to collect at least 60 grams (2.1 ounces) of rock, dirt, and dust from Bennu, an asteroid about 200 million miles away from Earth. Despite the distance, Bennu is considered a near-Earth object (NEO) with a 1 in 2,700 chance of striking our planet in the late 2100s. (Andrea Riley, <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart">NASA’s DART mission</a> program executive, says “there’s no concern to be worried” given that chance.) Through collecting the sample and analyzing it back on Earth, scientists hope to better understand the threat other NEOs may pose—and whether asteroids can reveal the history of planetary formation in our solar system.</p>
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/TAGSAM.width-990_JhrSgZh.jpg"/>
<figcaption><p>This image, taken on Oct. 22, 2020 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx SamCam camera, shows that the spacecraft’s sampler head is full of rocks and dust collected from the surface of the asteroid Bennu—and that some of these particles are slowly escaping into outer space. Image Credit: NASA</p>
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<p>Collecting a big sample from Bennu was key, Hal Levinson of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a NASA press conference on Monday, Oct. 19. “When I got into this a long time ago, we used to think the planets formed where we see them. What really happened is like someone picked up the solar system and shook it real hard. To really put the story together requires having a big sample” from Bennu and eventually other asteroids in our solar system, he explains.</p><p>To collect a sample from Bennu, a team at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colo., spent years developing OSIRIS-REx’s arm and its asteroid sampling method, collectively known as the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (<a href="https://www.asteroidmission.org/?attachment_id=1699#main">TAGSAM</a>). Rather than having the entire spacecraft touch down on Bennu, whose radius is a mere 861 feet, the team employed TAGSAM to reach out, touch, and ultimately collect material from the asteroid’s Nightingale Crater.</p><p>“The last 10 minutes, as the spacecraft was descending towards the surface of Bennu, was unreal,” Lauretta said. “It was this slow-motion thrill ride,” Beau Bierhaus, an OSIRIS-REx TAGSAM scientist added.</p>
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<p>At TAGSAM’s end is a foot-wide collection head like an “air filter,” Lauretta explains. This blew high-pressure nitrogen gas as it settled down on Bennu on Tuesday, disturbing the collection site and sucking up as much rock, dirt, and dust as it possibly could in just 6 seconds on the surface.</p><p>The cameras reveal that OSIRIS-REx is carrying up to 2 kilograms (2.2 pounds) of sample, which is at its upper limit. “About 400 grams seems visible from the cameras. The collection lid has failed to close properly and remains wedged open by pieces that are up to three centimeters in size, creating a centimeter-wide gap for material to escape,” Neel V. Patel writes for<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/23/1011192/osiris-rex-nasa-space-asteroid-sample-bennu/"> MIT Technology Review.</a> “It seems when OSIRIS-REx touched down on Bennu’s surface, the collection head went 24 to 48 centimeters deep, which would explain how it recovered so much material.”</p><p>Most of the escaped material—as much as 10 grams, Lauretta believes—got out because of movements of OSIRIS-REx’s arm on Thursday. Fortunately, the arm is now in a locked position, which should eliminate additional losses. Given the size of the sample, even with some of it having drifted into space, the team will not pursue a second sampling attempt. Nor will it proceed with its <a href="https://www.asteroidmission.org/?mission_update=may-14-2018">Sample Mass Measurement activity</a>, in which the spacecraft was going to pirouette in a number of spin maneuvers, allowing scientists to estimate the mass of the sample. Realizing that such movement could result in more sample loss, the team decided to cancel the procedure.</p><p>OSIRIS-REx has been orbiting Bennu since December 2018. In March, the spacecraft will leave and make its way back to Earth. More than two years later, as it passes over the Utah desert, OSIRIS-REx will drop off a small capsule containing its bounty of rocks and dirt, which will parachute to a landing—and a team of eager scientists—on Sept. 24, 2023.</p><p></p>
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<p>OSIRIS-REx scooped up so much rock, dust, and debris from Bennu that its sampling container became jammed, causing asteroid bits to leak into outer space. Now, the mission team is reassessing its sample stowing plans.</p>

Sukee Bennett

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