Science

Antibiotics are frequently used to treat or prevent bacterial infections in humans, animals, and crops. Later, the drugs end up in the environment, particularly the water supply, through wastewater, excrement, or groundwater. Because testing for antibiotics in drinking water (even bottled water) is rare, people consume them unknowingly (1). Extensive human exposure to low-dose antibiotics can lead to decreased response to antibiotics when they are needed (2), and antimicrobial resistance is growing (3). Therefore, governments worldwide should work to identify, prevent, and remediate antibiotic contamination of water sources (4).

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The Science family mourns longtime copyeditor Jeffrey Cook, who died unexpectedly last month. Jeff joined AAAS in 1994. He was a true perfectionist and cared deeply about language, editing, and scientific communication. Thousands of Science papers published over the past three decades are clearer and more accurate because of Jeff’s meticulous dedication to his craft. He deftly transitioned from the hardcopy era to the world of online publication. Beyond being a mainstay of the Editorial team, Jeff was an accomplished musician and multi-instrumentalist. When Science launched its weekly podcast in 2007, Jeff composed the theme music, which still welcomes listeners to this day. Jeff was kind, talented, and thorough. He will be missed.

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A structure reveals insights into how a human bitter taste receptor recognizes a ligand and transduces the signal.

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Scientists call for forecasting teams to join forces, improve estimates of “tipping points”

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The use of leaded ammunition has caused collapses of raptor populations worldwide due to secondary lead poisoning (1–3). In Europe, lead kills millions of wild birds each year, and the losses in biodiversity, environmental health, and socio-economic activities are estimated to be more than 1 billion EUR (4). There is no tolerable lead intake for humans (5). In June, Denmark took an important step to address the harm caused by lead: The country will ban the use of all kinds of leaded ammunition for hunting as of April 2024 (6).

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When Vanderbilt University physician and neuroscientist Matthew Schrag first grew suspicious of work underlying a major theory of Alzheimer’s disease (see main story, p. 358), he was following a different trail. In August 2021, he provided analysis for a petition to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), requesting that it pause two phase 3 clinical trials of Cassava Sciences’s Alzheimer’s drug Simufilam. The petition claimed some science behind the drug might be fraudulent, and the more than 1800 planned trial participants might see no benefits.

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In the short history of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 was the year of the new variants. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta each had a couple of months in the Sun. But this was the year of Omicron, which swept the globe late in 2021 and has continued to dominate, with subvariants—given more prosaic names such as BA.1, BA.2, and BA.2.12.1—appearing in rapid succession. Two closely related subvariants named BA.4 and BA.5 are now driving infections around the world, but new candidates, including one named BA.2.75, are knocking on the door. Omicron’s lasting dominance has evolutionary biologists wondering what comes next. Some think it’s a sign that SARS-CoV-2’s initial frenzy of evolution is over and it, like other coronaviruses that have been with humanity much longer, is settling into a pattern of gradual evolution. “I think a good guess is that either BA.2 or BA.5 will spawn additional descendants with more mutations and that one or more of those subvariants will spread and will be the next thing,” says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. But others believe a new variant different enough from Omicron and all other variants to deserve the next Greek letter designation, Pi, may already be developing, perhaps in a chronically infected patient. And even if Omicron is not replaced, its dominance is no cause for complacency, says Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for COVID-19 at the World Health Organization. “It’s bad enough as it is,” she says. “If we

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Violence can seem to be everywhere in the United States, and political violence is in the spotlight, with the 6 January 2021 insurrection as exhibit A. Now, a large study confirms one in five Americans believes violence motivated by political reasons is—at least sometimes—justified. Nearly half expect a civil war, and many say they would trade democracy for a strong leader, a preprint posted today on medRxiv found . “This is not a study that’s meant to shock,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was not involved in the research. “But it should be shocking.” Firearm deaths in the United States grew by nearly 43% between 2010 and 2020, and gun sales surged during the coronavirus pandemic. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and longtime gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, wondered what those trends portend for civil unrest. “Sometimes being an ER [emergency room] doc is like being the bowman on the Titanic going, ‘Look at that iceberg!’” he says. He and his colleagues surveyed more than 8600 adults in English and Spanish about their views on democracy in the United States, racial attitudes in U.S. society, and their own attitudes toward political violence. The respondents were part of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel —an online research panel that has been used widely, including by Wintemute for research on violence and firearm ownership . The team then applied statistical methods to extrapolate the survey results to the entire

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More than a decade ago, a 110-million-year-old dinosaur fossil was taken from its resting place in the Araripe Basin in Brazil under murky circumstances. Eventually, it landed in the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe (SMNK) in Germany—without legitimate export permits or clear documentation of its acquisition. Now, the specimen will go back to Brazil, German authorities announced today. “We have a clear stance. … If there are objects in the collections of our museums that were acquired under legally or ethically unacceptable conditions, we will return them,” Theresia Bauer, who leads the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts for the German state of Baden-Württemberg, said in a statement to Science . Her ministry manages SMNK. The decision “is admirable,” says Felipe Pinheiro, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Pampa, São Gabriel, who with others had pushed for the return of the fossil on social media . “As a Brazilian researcher, [I] am immensely happy that [the specimen] is going home.” The ministry’s decision is an “emblematic” victory against colonialism in science, says Aline Ghilardi, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. “We have taken another step towards a real 21st century science … which is getting rid—even if slowly—of colonialist ties and biases,” she adds. The official announcement closes a contentious chapter in the fossil’s history. In 2020, researchers at SMNK published a paper (with no Brazilian authors) in Cretaceous Research describing the dinosaur as a new species they named Ubirajara jubatus .

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Australian scientists are hopeful that a dire new assessment of the country’s environment released today will prompt the recently elected government to act. The State of the Environment report, done every 5 years by an independent expert panel, describes declining biodiversity, increasing heat waves and bushfires, growing impacts on human health and, above all, the existential threat of climate change. None of that is surprising, says Terry Hughes, a coral reef ecologist at James Cook University, Townsville. “The report makes clear climate change is the No. 1 cause of the decline of ecological systems,” Hughes says. “The question is: What is this new government going to do about it?” Hughes notes that the Labor Party won this spring’s election campaigning on a pledge to cut carbon emissions by 43% by 2030, a dramatic increase over the previous target of 26% to 28%. But he thinks Australia should be even more ambitious “given the vulnerability of the country’s ecosystems as highlighted by this report.” The report was actually submitted in December 2021 to the Liberal-National Coalition, which came to power in 2013. But it was withheld in what critics said was a cynical attempt by the government to hide bad news and extend its reign. Even so, on 21 May voters resoundingly backed the Labor Party, with significant support for the Australian Greens and independents, who all favored action on climate change. “Repeated polling puts the environment at or near the top of issues the public cares about,” says La

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Last month, Dmitry Kolker, 54, director of the Laboratory of Quantum Optics at Novosibirsk State University, was dealing with late-stage pancreatic cancer. But on 30 Junе, agents with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) removed him from a cancer clinic, flew him to Moscow, and detained him on charges of treason. By 2 July, he was dead. His family learned of his fate via a curt telegram. Kolker’s colleagues at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) expressed outrage. A group of RAS members signed an open letter protesting FSB’s handling of the case and called for “those guilty of our colleague’s death to be held accountable.” Kolker’s family told local media he was accused of leaking state secrets to China. But the RAS group posted a photo of an expert report from an RAS institute concluding that optics lectures Kolker gave in China in 2018 included no classified information. The case is far from unusual. Three days before Kolker’s arrest, FSB arrested another researcher in Siberia, Anatoly Maslov, 75, an aerodynamicist at the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, who now faces up to 20 years in prison on treason charges. A 2020 investigation from independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta found that more than 30 scientists had been accused of treason since 2000. Like Maslov, many worked on hypersonics, a research area at the center of a new arms race . Scientists are “prime targets” for FSB because they have access to sensitive information and often travel to conferences

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Kathryn Clancy got her first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021 and 10 days later found herself sitting uncomfortably in a work Zoom meeting during one of the heaviest periods she’d experienced. “I had what’s often called menstrual flooding,” says Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Clancy wouldn’t have thought to connect the experience to the Moderna dose she’d received were it not for her graduate student, Katharine Lee, now at Tulane University, who shared a similar tale. “I had the worst cramps of my life” after COVID-19 vaccination, Lee says. Intrigued, Clancy—who didn’t experience similarly intense symptoms after her second dose—shared her story on Twitter . Hundreds responded with parallel stories, leading her to suspect a potential link to vaccination. Those suspicions have grown with the completion of a more formal survey in which Clancy, Lee, and colleagues gathered thousands of stories of breakthrough bleeding and bleeding more heavily after a COVID-19 vaccine from people around the world. Between April and October 2021, the survey welcomed anyone 18 and older who gets or used to get a period. Because of that, Clancy cautions, the percentage affected is likely not representative of the general population—and indeed, a whopping 42% of about 16,000 people in the survey who had a regular menstrual cycle said they bled more heavily than usual after vaccination, a number far higher than others have reported. Still, the researchers captured a broad swath of people and their stories, including populations

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