Vent pecking

• "We couldn't be prouder to welcome Dr. Robert Ballard as a 2024 Horatio Alger Member," said Terrence J. Giroux, executive director, Horatio Alger Association.
• "It is our utmost honor to present the Horatio Alger Award to these 11 outstanding leaders who have exemplified perseverance, passion and a deep appreciation for higher education," said James F. Dicke II, chairman, Horatio Alger Association and 2015 Horatio Alger Award recipient.
• Dr. Ballard and the Member Class of 2024 will be formally inducted into the Association on April 4-6, 2024, during the Association's annual Horatio Alger Award Induction Ceremonies in Washington, D.C.
• For more information about Horatio Alger Association and its Member Class of 2024, please visit www.horatioalger.org and follow the organization on Facebook , X , LinkedIn and Instagram .

• Scientists believe undiscovered chemical compounds could help remove greenhouse gases, or trigger a medical breakthrough much like penicillin did.
• We needed nuclear fusion (firing atoms at each other at the speed of light) to make the last handful of elements.
• But to understand the full scale of the chemical universe, you need to understand chemical compounds too.
• So, how many chemical compounds can we make with the 118 different sorts of element Lego blocks we currently know?

Big numbers

• There are lots of these: N2 (nitrogen) and O2 (oxygen) together make up 99% of our air.
• It would probably take a chemist about a year to make one compound and there are 6,903 two-atom compounds in theory.
• So that’s a village of chemists working a year just to make every possible two-atom compound.
• And to make all these chemical compounds, we’d also need to recycle all the materials in the universe several times over.

Surely not all those compounds are possible?

• It’s true there are rules – but they are kind of bendy, which creates more possibilities for chemical compounds.
• Even the solitary “noble gases” (including neon, argon and xenon and helium), which tend to not bind with anything, sometimes form compounds.
• So, if you include extreme environments in your calculations, the number of possible compounds increases.

How scientists search for new compounds

• Often the answer is to search for compounds that are related to ones that are already known.
• The X-ray technique that Crowfoot Hodgkin invented on her way to identifying penicillin’s structure is still used worldwide to study compounds.
• And the same MRI technique that hospitals use to diagnose disease can also be used on chemical compounds to work out their structure.
• For many useful compounds, like penicillin, it’s easier and cheaper to “grow” and extract them from moulds, plants or insects.
• Thus the scientists searching for new chemistry still often look for inspiration in the tiniest corners of the world around us.

• In April of this year, Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged into the light after a 500-day stay in a cave.
• Her descent underground is probably the longest undertaken by a long stretch.

The tick of life’s clocks

• Quite simply, because biological rhythms are at the heart of life, regulating it all the way from the molecular level up to that of the entire body.
• These include not only our sleep/wake cycles, but also body temperature, hormones, metabolism and the cardiovascular system, to name but a few.
• It may be associated with an increased risk of cancers in workers, prompting the WHO to label it as a probable carcinogen.

Genes: the great clockmakers

• A biological clock is a mechanism internal to organisms that, in the absence of an environmental signal, operates at its own frequency.
• The regular alternation of day and night has, for example, favoured the evolution of the circadian clock (circa, meaning “approximately”, and diem, “day”).
• The circadian clock mechanism was first discovered in the fruit fly, also known as Drosophila, in the 1970s.

An internal clock synchronised by the environment

• This is the deviation of an individual’s internal rhythm from the time of the time zone they are in.
• Environmental signals in general, and light in particular, help to re-synchronise the individual: light perceived at the end of the night moves the clock forward, while light perceived at the beginning of the night delays it.
• In humans, light is not perceived directly by the molecular clock, but is captured in the retina and then transmitted via the retino-hypothalamic pathway to a central clock, where it modulates the synthesis of clock proteins.

Other times, other clocks

• This seasonality is generally dictated by several factors, including by what is known as a circannual clock in the case of many species.
• The clock mechanisms in marine species are also unknown, partly because of the oceans’ complex temporal structure.
• For example, many corals synchronise their reproduction, laying eggs once a year over a very short period of time.
• Our work underlines that the temporal coordination in physiology is likely critical, even in the most extreme life environments such as the deep ocean.

• It’s a magical place, especially if you’re an octopus.
• We now know why these amazing creatures gather at this and other underwater warm springs.
• In a new study involving scientists from several fields, we explain why octopuses migrate to the Octopus Garden.

Life in the Octopus Garden

• The Octopus Garden, at the base of Davidson Seamount about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of Monterey, California, is the largest of a handful of octopus nurseries recently discovered in the Eastern Pacific.
• Using Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s deep-sea robots and sensors, we studied and mapped the Octopus Garden during several visits over three years to examine the links between thermal springs and breeding success for pearl octopuses.
• A time-lapse camera that kept watch over a group of nesting mothers for six months opened a window into the dynamic life in the Octopus Garden.
• We saw that nothing went to waste at the Octopus Garden.

Warmer water speeds up embryo development

• The longer the incubation period, the greater the risk that an embryo might not survive to hatch.
• Such an extended brooding period would be the longest known for any animal, exposing an embryo to exceptional risks.
• Instead, temperature and oxygen sensors we were able to slip inside octopus nests documented a much warmer microenvironment around the eggs.
• On average, the temperature inside octopus nests was about 41 F (5.1 C), considerably warmer than the surrounding waters.
• We predicted that octopus embryos would develop faster in this warmer water.

Nurseries highlight risks to seafloor habitat

• Here, water percolating beneath the seafloor picks up heat from Earth’s mantle before it’s channeled out from volcanic rock outcrops like Davidson Seamount.
• These systems have become an emerging focus in seafloor geology, though only a few have been discovered so far.
• The recent discoveries of octopus nurseries off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, also near hydrothermal springs, suggests these areas may be more common than previously thought.