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The first time Jessica Cantlon met Kumang at the Seneca Park Zoo, the matriarch orangutan regurgitated her previous meal right into Cantlon’s face. “I was retching,” Cantlon recalls. “It was so gross.” But Cantlon was there to kick off a series of behavioral experiments, and her students, who would be working with Kumang regularly, were watching. “Does anyone have any towels?” she remembers asking, knowing she had to keep her cool.

Cantlon’s deliberate nature and whatever-it-takes attitude have served her well. As a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York, she investigates numerical thinking with some of the most unpredictable and often difficult study subjects: nonhuman primates, including orangutans, baboons and rhesus macaques, and — most remarkably — children as young as age 3. Both groups participate in cognitive tests that require them, for example, to track relative quantities as researchers sequentially add items to cups and to distinguish between quantities of assorted dots on touch screens. The kids also go into the functional MRI scanner where, in a feat impressive to parents everywhere, they lie completely still for 20 to 30 minutes so Cantlon and colleagues can get pictures of their brains.
“She takes steps carefully, and she thinks very hard about where she is going,” says Daniel Ansari, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, who is familiar with Cantlon’s work. “She goes for the big questions and big methodological challenges.”

The central question in Cantlon’s research is: How do humans understand numbers and where does that understanding come from? Sub-questions include: What are the most primitive mathematical concepts? What concepts do humans and other primates share? Are these shared concepts the foundation for fancier forms of mathematical reasoning? In addressing these questions, Cantlon draws on a wide range of methods. “Very few people can combine work on cognitive skills — studies from the point of view of behavior — with imaging work in very young children, and very few people do that same combination in nonhuman primates,” says Elissa Newport, who chaired the brain and cognitive sciences department at Rochester for more than a decade and now leads the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University.

As a graduate student, Cantlon determined that neuroimaging studies would add an independent source of data to the cognitive questions under exploration in Elizabeth Brannon’s lab at Duke University. So she identified collaborators and taught herself functional MRI. “By the time she graduated, she had something like four dissertations’ worth of work,” says Brannon, now of the University of Pennsylvania.

In the years since, Cantlon has identified a type of “protocounting” in baboons; they can keep tabs on approximate quantities of peanuts as researchers increase those quantities (SN Online: 5/17/15). In her most attention-grabbing work, Cantlon studied activity in the brains of children while they watched Sesame Street clips that dealt with number concepts — an unexpected success that proved everyday, relatively unaltered stimuli can yield meaningful data. An ongoing study in Cantlon’s lab seeks to find out how monkeys, U.S. kids and adults, and the Tsimané people of Bolivia, who have little formal education, distinguish between quantities. Do they determine the number of dots presented on the computer screen or do they rely on a proxy such as the total area covered by the dots?
The work explores how the brain understands everyday concepts, but it could also inform strategies in math education. “If we understand the fundamental nature of the human brain and mind, that might give us a better insight into how to communicate number concepts to kids,” Cantlon says.

Growing up outside of Chicago, Cantlon enjoyed digging deep into a topic and becoming an expert. She and a friend turned themselves into ice skating superfans one summer, reading up on the Olympic skaters and checking videos out of the local library. In another project, Cantlon decided to learn everything possible about the price of gold. When she moved to a school where she could no longer take Latin, she taught and tested herself. Despite the fact that neither of her parents went to college, no one ever questioned that Cantlon would go. She studied anthropology as an undergraduate at Indiana University in Bloomington. “I was interested in the question of where we come from,” Cantlon says. “I was interested in studying people.”
During college, she went on an archaeological dig in Belize and studied lemurs in Madagascar. For a year after graduation, she observed mountain gorillas in Rwanda, detailing their behavior every 10 minutes. “What they were thinking was something that was constantly on my mind,” she says. “‘How are we similar? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’” Though she might have succeeded in any number of careers, she wanted exploration to be a big part of her life: “I don’t think doing a less exotic type of work would have been as satisfying.”

Today, Cantlon, who at age 40 recently earned tenure, doesn’t spend much time in the field. And even in the lab, she leaves much of the data collection to her graduate students and research assistants. “At this point, we are a well-oiled system,” she says, referring to the brain scan studies on kids.
To make the kids comfortable, Cantlon’s team does trial runs in a mock scanner, describing it as a spaceship and providing “walkie-talkies” for any necessary communication. To keep them interested, the researchers treat it as a team activity and offer a ton of positive reinforcement, with prizes including Lego sets and a volcano-making kit. The kids receive pictures of their brains, which typically interest the parents most. The older of Cantlon’s two daughters, a 5-year-old extrovert named Cloe, has participated in behavioral tests and will no doubt be excited for her first brain scan.

The Sesame Street study was in part inspired by a paper by Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton University who imaged the brains of volunteers while they watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. To better understand brain development, Cantlon wanted to see how brain activity compared in kids and adults exposed to math in a natural way. Of particular interest was a region called the intraparietal sulcus, or IPS, thought to play a role in symbolic number processing. The results, reported in PLOS Biology in 2013, showed that kids with IPS activity more closely resembling adults’ activity performed better on mathematical aptitude tests.

“It was the clearest, cleanest — did not have to come out this way — result,” Cantlon says.

Cantlon is notable for her diverse set of tools, says Steve Piantadosi, a computational neuroscientist and colleague at Rochester. “But she has something which is even more powerful than that. If you have different hypotheses and you want to come up with the perfect experiment that distinguishes them, that is something she is very good at thinking about. She is a great combination of critical and creative.”

To add another methodological approach, Cantlon next plans to collaborate with Piantadosi to develop computational models that explain the operations the brain performs as it counts or compares quantities. She would also like to add data analyses from wild primates into the mix. When researchers talk about the evolution of a primitive number sense, they often speak about foraging activity — identifying areas of the forest with more food, for example. But Cantlon wonders whether social interactions also require some basic understanding of quantities.

As for a recent question from a colleague about what risky project she’ll pursue now that she has tenure, Cantlon says nothing in particular comes to mind: “I feel like we’ve been doing the crazy things all along.”

ORLANDO, Fla. — New evidence from separate labs supports the controversial idea that an overlooked and unexpected Culex mosquito might spread Zika virus.

The southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus, is common in the Americas. Constância Ayres, working with Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Recife, previously surprised Zika researchers with the disturbing proposal that this mosquito might be a stealth spreader of Zika. But two U.S. research groups tested the basic idea and couldn’t get the virus to infect the species.
Now, preliminary results from Ayres’ and two other research groups are renewing the discussion. The data, shared September 26 at the International Congress of Entomology, suggest that Zika can build up in the house mosquito’s salivary glands — a key step in being able to transmit disease. Basic insect physiology is only part of the puzzle, though. Even if the mosquitoes prove competent at passing along Zika, there remain questions of whether their tastes, behavior and ecology will lead them to actually do so.

In the current outbreak, the World Health Organization has focused on mosquitoes in a different genus, Aedes, particularly Ae. aegypti, as the main disease vector. But Ayres had announced months ago the discovery of the virus in Brazil’s free-flying house mosquitoes (SN Online: 7/28/16).

At the congress, Ayres’ foundation colleague Duschinka Guedes reported that captive mosquitoes fed Zika-tainted blood had virus growing in their own guts and salivary glands within days. The virus doesn’t spread every time a mosquito slurping contaminated blood gets virus smeared on its mouthparts, though. To move from the mosquito to what it bites, viruses have to infect the insect midgut, then travel to the salivary glands and build up enough of a population for an infective dose drooling into the next victim. When Guedes offered the infected mosquitoes a special card to bite, they left telltale virus in the salivary traces, a sign of what they could do when biting — and infecting — a real animal.

Researchers from China and Canada who were not originally on the symposium program also stepped up to share their results, some of which are unpublished. Some tasks are still in early stages, but both labs showed Zika virus building up in some kind of Culex mosquitoes.

At the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Tong-Yan Zhao found the virus peaking in the house mosquitoes eight days after their first contaminated drink. As a test of the infectious powers of the mosquitoes, researchers let the Zika-carrying insects bite baby lab mice. Later, the virus showed up in the brains of eight out of nine lab mice. The results were reported September 7 in Emerging Microbes & Infections.
From Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, Fiona Hunter has found signs that 11 out of 50 wild-caught Culex pipiens pipiens mosquitoes picked up the virus somewhere on their bodies. So far, she has completely analyzed one mosquito and reports that the virus was indeed in its saliva.

These positive results contradict Culex tests at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Those tests, with U.S. mosquitoes, found no evidence that C. quinquefasciatus can pick up and pass along a Zika infection, says study coauthor Scott Weaver. Stephen Higgs of Kansas State University in Manhattan and his colleagues got similar results. “We’re pretty good at infecting mosquitoes,” Higgs says, so he muses over whether certain virus strains won’t infect mosquitoes from particular places.

The main risk from Culex at the moment is distraction, warned Roger Nasci of North Shore Mosquito Abatement District in Northfield, Ill. After the talks, he rose from the audience to say that Ae. aegypti is a known enemy and limited resources should not be diverted from fighting it.

George Peck, who runs mosquito control for Clackamas County in Oregon, isn’t convinced that the high virus concentrations dosing the test mosquitoes are realistic. Yet he’s watching the issue because like much of northern North America, Clackamas doesn’t have the Ae. aegypti vector to worry about. But it does have plenty of Culex mosquitoes.

Using nasal cartilage cells to repair joints is nothing to sniff at.

It has worked in goats. Now, in the first human trial, researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have grown cells called chondrocytes, taken from the noses of 10 patients with damaged knee joints, into cartilage grafts. These repair patches were then surgically implanted into the patients’ knee joints.

Two years after surgery, nine patients have seen improvements in knee function, quality of life and pain. (One patient dropped out of the trial because of additional athletic injuries.) MRI scans showed that the grafts looked like normal hyaline cartilage, the hard-to-replicate material that coats the tips of bones, the team reports in the Oct. 22 Lancet. Tests in more people are needed to determine whether the technique is ready for prime time.

Mothers who don’t eat enough during pregnancy could give birth to babies with long-lasting heart problems. The results from a new study in primates add to accumulating evidence that a mother’s nutrition has more bearing on her child’s health than previously thought.

“We pass more biological milestones during development than we will ever pass again in our entire lives,” says Peter Nathanielsz, coauthor of the study published November 6 in the Journal of Physiology. And during those critical nine months, calorie intake at the extremes — too many or too few — appears to have a lifelong influence on newborn weight, future metabolism and chronic health problems (SN: 1/23/16, p. 22).
One landmark epidemiological investigation found that people born in the Dutch Hunger Winter during World War II suffered from an elevated risk of heart disease and other health concerns, with some risks even affecting two generations. But studies of human populations are complicated. It’s hard to account for the role of stress, behavior or environmental exposures. So Nathanielsz, of the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and colleagues from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio studied baboons, close genetic relatives to humans.

Sixteen pregnant baboons were fed their normal amount of chow, while 16 others received 30 percent less during pregnancy, a reduction researchers characterize as “moderate.” All other living conditions were the same. The researchers then compared offspring of the well-fed mothers with the offspring of undernourished mothers.

Infants of the underfed mothers were born small but nonetheless caught up in body weight to the offspring of the well-fed mothers by young adulthood. However, those whose mothers were underfed had more fibrous, abnormally shaped heart muscle, the researchers report. A normal heart is roughly an upside-down pyramid, but underfed offspring had more rounded and less muscular hearts. Evidence showed that these less-muscled hearts were not as efficient at pumping blood, with an average output about 20 percent lower.

Offspring undernourished in the womb also had hearts that appeared to age faster. By age five, the human equivalent of almost 25, many of their heart functions more closely resembled those of hearts of primates about three times as old.

Such experiments can show cause and effect — something that human studies can’t do, says Susan Ozanne, a developmental endocrinologist at the University of Cambridge. As a result, they provide strong evidence about the effects of maternal nutrition. “What this shows us is that certainly maternal diet has an effect on a child’s cardiac health long-term,” she says. Studies in rodents have produced similar findings, but “when you validate those in multiple species, it shows you you’re looking at a fundamentally conserved mechanism.”
The next step, she says, is to learn whether diet and exercise after birth can make up for poor nutrition during development. Doctors also don’t know whether there is a window of time during childhood for intervention, or a longer period to counteract any effects, she says.

Much attention on maternal nutrition has focused on the obesity epidemic, Nathanielsz says, but undernutrition remains a public health challenge throughout the world, even in developed countries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that approximately 13 percent of American households in 2015 reported food insecurity, or uncertainty about having enough money for food. “The number of people with food insecurity is very high,” Nathanielsz says. “It would be sad if we discounted this problem.”

In a rare bright spot for global environmental news, atmospheric scientists reported in 2016 that the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica is beginning to heal. Their data nail the case that the Montreal Protocol, the international treaty drawn up in 1987 to limit the use of ozone-destroying chemicals, is working.

The Antarctic ozone hole forms every Southern Hemisphere spring, when chemical reactions involving chlorine and bromine break apart the oxygen atoms that make up ozone molecules. Less protective ozone means that more ultraviolet radiation reaches Earth, where it can damage DNA and lead to higher rates of skin cancer, among other threats.
The Montreal Protocol cut back drastically on the manufacture of ozone-destroying compounds such as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which had been used in air conditioners, refrigerators and other products. It went into force in 1989 and phased out CFCs by 2010.

Earlier studies had hinted that the ozone hole was on the mend. The new work, reported in Science in June, is the most definitive yet (SN: 7/23/16, p. 6). A team led by Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at MIT, looked not only at the month of October, when Antarctic ozone loss typically peaks, but also at September, when the hole is growing. The healing trend was most obvious in September. Satellite measurements showed that from 2000 to 2015, the average extent of the September ozone hole shrank by about 4.5 million square kilometers, to approximately 18 million square kilometers. Soundings taken by weather balloons over Antarctica confirmed the findings.
CFC concentrations peaked above Antarctica in the late 1990s and early 2000s and have been dropping ever since, says Birgit Hassler, an atmospheric chemist at Bodeker Scientific in Alexandra, New Zealand. Each passing year allows scientists to gather more convincing data. The new study, Hassler says, “makes the whole development of the Antarctic ozone hole healing very transparent and understandable.”
It is a fitting capstone to Solomon’s career. In the 1980s she led a team that proposed that chlorine compounds were to blame for Antarctic ozone loss. She then traveled to the frozen continent to conduct pioneering experiments that measured the accumulating chemicals there. “It’s very humbling now to be 30 years later and be able to say we have a clear fingerprint that the ozone hole is starting to get better,” she says.

Solomon says that public engagement was key to solving the ozone problem, with people coming together to identify an issue that threatened society and develop new technologies to fix it. In that respect, the most successful environmental treaty in history holds lessons for dealing with a much bigger threat, she says — climate change.

To fix the ozone layer, industry stopped using CFCs and similar compounds and replaced them with hydrofluorocarbons. Those chemicals, however, turned out to be powerful greenhouse gases that accelerated global warming. In October, the nations that ratified the Montreal Protocol agreed to expand it to cover hydrofluorocarbons as well (SN: 11/26/16, p. 13).

Some ants are so good at navigating they can do it backward.

Researchers think that foraging ants memorize scenes in front of them to find their way back to the nest. But that strategy only works when facing forward. Still, some species have been observed trekking in reverse to drag dinner home.

To find out how the ants manage this feat, Antoine Wystrach of the University of Edinburgh and colleagues captured foraging desert ants (Cataglyphis velox) near a nest outside Seville, Spain. In a series of tests, the researchers gave the ants cookie crumbles and then released the ants at a fork in the route back to their nest.

Regardless of which direction they took, ants walking backward with cookie bits in tow maintained a straight path. The researchers suspect the ants relied on some sort of sunlight cues. Ants also appeared to peek behind themselves to check and adjust course. After making adjustments, ants maintained their new direction no matter their body orientation. Desert ants combine their celestial compass and long-term visual memories of the route to find their way home, the team concludes online January 19 in Current Biology.

Blobs of gas near the Milky Way’s center may be just the right mass to harbor young stars and possibly planets, too. Any such budding stellar systems would face an uphill battle, developing only about two light-years from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole with its intense gravity and ultraviolet radiation. But it’s not impossible for the small stars to survive in the hostile place, a new study suggests.

“Nature is very clever. It finds ways to work in extreme environments,” says Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Four blobs of gas near the galactic center have the right amount of mass to be planetary systems with small, young stars, Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues report online January 20 at arXiv.org. The paper is also slated for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“It is fairly likely that planets and low-mass stars do form near the galactic center. But we do not know it for sure at the moment,” says Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University. Loeb, who was not involved in the study, says the new evidence is “tentative at best.”

Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues used ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, in Chile to study emissions from five of the 44 blobs of gas that the team discovered in 2014 (SN Online: 3/24/15). Four of the clouds had between 0.03 and 0.05 as much mass as the sun, the team calculated. That’s right in line with what’s needed to generate low-mass stars — ones about the size of the sun or a little bigger — and the planets that orbit them, Yusef-Zadeh says. He points out that the team has not detected these stars or planets, just that conditions are ripe for them to exist.

Loeb notes that the team had to infer the clouds’ entire masses from the ALMA measurements, which may reveal only a surface look at the blobs. The clouds may actually be denser; as a result, they would form more massive stars, challenging the team’s claim that low-mass stars are forming.

Yusef-Zadeh and colleagues are planning additional studies with ALMA and are also working on research that suggests that black holes may, in fact, help star formation. “It’s paradoxical,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “Black holes eat everything that comes too close to them. They tear everything apart. But they may actually make the formation of stars more efficient.”

The breath of oxygen that enabled the emergence of complex life kicked off around 100 million years earlier than previously thought, new dating suggests.

Previous studies pegged the first appearance of relatively abundant oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, known as the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE, at a little over 2.3 billion years ago. New dating of ancient volcanic outpourings, however, suggests that oxygen levels began a wobbly upsurge between 2.460 billion and 2.426 billion years ago, researchers report the week of February 6 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That time difference is a big deal, says study coauthor and sedimentary geologist Andrey Bekker of the University of California, Riverside. The new date shakes up scientists’ understanding of the environmental conditions that led to the GOE, which prompted the evolution of oxygen-dependent life-forms called eukaryotes. Voluminous volcanic eruptions at the time poured fresh rock over a supercontinent near the equator, and the planet dipped into a frigid period known as a Snowball Earth.

A similar series of geologic events around 700 million years ago coincided with a second rise of oxygen, to near-modern levels, and some eukaryotes evolving into the first animals. Both oxygen upswings pushed life toward complexity and the ultimate emergence of humans, Bekker says. “For the first time, we see parallels between these two time intervals,” he says.
Oxygen-producing microbes probably first appeared more than 3 billion years ago (SN Online: 9/8/15). But oxygen remained scant until the GOE when, for unknown reasons, atmospheric concentrations of the gas rose from near zero to around 0.1 percent of modern levels.

Dating the GOE’s start has been tricky, though, because few rocks from back then remain. Geologist Ashley Gumsley of Lund University in Sweden, Bekker and colleagues studied ancient volcanic rocks from South Africa that neighbor a layer of minerals that could have formed only in the presence of oxygen. Using an old technique, geologists had previously determined those volcanic rocks to be from around 2.222 billion years ago, well after the GOE’s start.

Applying modern techniques that measure the gradual decay of radioactive uranium in the rocks, the researchers revised the volcanism’s timing to about 2.426 billion years ago. That new date — plus a separate volcanic eruption previously dated to around 2.460 billion years ago that clearly happened before the oxygen rise — helps constrain the potential GOE start date.

The GOE isn’t the only global event to have its timeline tweaked. The oldest known evidence of global glaciation, called a Snowball Earth, lies underneath and alongside the South African rocks. The new eruption dating pushes that Snowball Earth event earlier as well — to around the same time as the start of the GOE.

The oxygen rise and the temperature drop may have been related, the researchers propose.

The new data and existing chemical evidence suggest that oxygen levels during the GOE wavered between pitiful and plentiful several times, rather than steadily rising (SN: 2/18/17, p. 16). (Oxygen concentrations stabilized around 2.250 billion years ago and remained largely unchanged until levels rose again more than a billion years later.) These oscillations coincided with Snowball Earths and volcanic eruptions, Gumsley says.

Climate, oxygen and volcanism were intertwined during the GOE, the researchers propose. Volcanic eruptions covered the supercontinent with fresh rock. That rock formed near the equator where heavy precipitation weathered the rock, drawing carbon dioxide from the air and washing nutrients into the ocean. Those nutrients nourished photosynthetic microbes, which produced an abundance of oxygen. Oxygen built up in the atmosphere and reacted with methane, reducing levels of that greenhouse gas (SN: 10/29/16, p. 17).

With less CO2 and methane warming the climate, Earth froze and oxygen-producing biological activity decreased. The ongoing volcanism spewed replacement CO2 into the atmosphere over time and eventually reheated the planet.

“This is further evidence that oxygen’s history has really been a roller coaster ride rather than a unidirectional rise,” says Yale University geochemist Noah Planavsky. While he’s uncertain about the role rock weathering played in controlling ancient oxygen levels, Planavsky believes the new age will allow scientists to delve into the question of why the GOE began when it did. “Without dates,” he says, it’s impossible “to have any real grounding to tackle these problems.”

People who undergo gastric bypass surgery are more likely to experience a remission of their diabetes than patients who receive a gastric sleeve or intensive management of diet and exercise, according to a new study. Bypass surgery had already shown better results for diabetes than other weight-loss methods in the short term, but the new research followed patients for five years.

“We knew that surgery had a powerful effect on diabetes,” says Philip Schauer of the Bariatric & Metabolic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. “What this study says is that the effect of surgery is durable.” The results were published online February 15 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study followed 134 people with type 2 diabetes for five years in a head-to-head comparison of weight-loss methods. At the end of that time, two of 38 patients who only followed intensive diet and exercise plans were no longer in need of insulin to manage blood sugar levels. For comparison, 11 of 47 patients who had a gastric sleeve, which reduces the size of the stomach, and 14 of 49 who underwent gastric bypass, a procedure that both makes the stomach smaller and shortens digestion time, did not need the insulin anymore. In general, patients who had been diabetic for fewer than eight years were more likely to be cured, Schauer says.

Even those surgical patients who still needed to take insulin had greater weight loss and lower median glucose levels than others in the study. This study was also one of the few to show that bariatric surgery could help those with only mild obesity, defined as a body mass index between 27 and 34. How bariatric surgery might improve diabetes is still unknown, but scientists have pointed to effects on the body’s metabolism (SN: 8/24/13, p. 14) and gut microbes (SN: 9/5/15, p. 16).
The same research team had published similar results at one and three years after surgery, but few studies looked further, says Kristoffel Dumon, a bariatric surgeon with the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. “The criticism of bariatric research has been that there are no good long-term results. With weight-loss surgery, you often see rapid initial results, but you want to see that to a five-year time point.”
Dumon also notes that the patients who received only intensive medical therapy did not report an improvement in their quality of life, and their emotional well-being worsened. People in the surgical group reported improvements in quality of life, but not in emotional well-being, a finding that Schauer says has more to do with stress management and other characteristics that wouldn’t necessarily be affected by surgery.

Schauer hopes to have even longer-term data in the future. His team will combine their results with those from similar research at three other U.S. sites with the goal of following patients for up to 10 years.

Eijiro Miyako gets emotional about the decline of honeybees.

“We need pollination,” he says. “If that system is collapsed, it’s terrible.”

Insects, especially bees, help pollinate both food crops and wild plants. But pollinators are declining worldwide due to habitat loss, disease and exposure to pesticides, among other factors (SN: 1/23/16, p. 16).

Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, became passionate about the loss of pollinators after watching a TV documentary. He remembers thinking: “I need to create something to solve this problem.”
His answer was in an 8-year-old jar in his lab.

In 2007, he had tried to make a gel that conducts electricity, but it was “a complete failure,” he says. So he poured the liquid into a jar, put it in a drawer and forgot about it. Cleaning out his lab in 2015, he accidentally dropped and broke the jar.
Surprisingly, the gel was still sticky and picked up dust from the floor. Miyako realized that the gel’s ability to capture the tiny particles was similar to how honeybee body hairs trap pollen. His thoughts jumped to artificial pollination.

First, he investigated whether non-pollinating insects could help do the job. He dabbed his gel onto ants and set them loose in a box of tulips. The ants were coated with pollen after three days.

Still, Miyako worried that predators would snack on his insect pollinators. To give them camouflage, he mixed four light-reactive compounds into the gel. He tested the new concoction on flies, placing a droplet on their backs and setting the insects in front of blue paper. Under ultraviolet light, the gel changed from clear to blue, mimicking the color of the backdrop.

Though this chemical invisibility cloak might protect the insects, Miyako wanted a pollinator that could be controlled and wouldn’t wander off at the first scent of a picnic.

He bought 10 kiwi-sized drones and taught himself to fly them, breaking all but one in the process. Miyako covered the bottom of the surviving drone with short horsehair, using electricity to make the hair stand up. Adding his gel made the horsehair work like bee fuzz.
In tests so far, the drone has successfully pollinated Japanese lilies more than a third of the time, brushing up against one flower to collect pollen, then flying into another to knock the grains off, his team reports in the Feb. 9 Chem.
Glad he saved that failed gel, Miyako thinks it is possible to automate a fleet of 100 drones, using GPS and artificial intelligence, to pollinate alongside bees and other insects. “It’s not science fiction,” he says.