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- For Some Americans, Geography is a Curse
- The Amazon’s New Normal
- A Hummingbird Flies Into a Garden…
- Crowdsourced Search for ET Finds Nothing — Yet
- First Step, Earth’s Magnetotail. Next Step, Mars.
1. For Some Americans, Geography is a Curse
Even as the homicide rate drops to historic levels in the United States, established patterns remain: Most crimes are intraracial, with males more likely to be both victim and perpetrator. Now, new research from Berkeley reveals another risk factor: your geographical roots.
By analyzing millions of death certificates, which began including cause of death and places of birth and death in 1933, Berkeley political scientist Gabriel Lenz and former graduate student Anna Mikkelborg, M.A. ’20, Ph.D. ’24, found that the highest homicide rates for white Americans in the 1930s occurred in Appalachia, the Deep South, and the old Western frontier—a reality that seemed to follow white residents from states like Kentucky, Louisiana, and Nevada, no matter where they moved.
This elevated risk held for white migrants across generations, from 1959 to 2017, extending even to married women, the elderly, and migrants with higher income.
Why? Surveying nearly 7,500 participants, Lenz found that both residents and migrants from historically violent states reported distrusting law enforcement, viewing the world as particularly dangerous, and relying on themselves and family in violent situations. In other words, they likely internalized the stand-your-ground ethos and “culture of honor” that once predominated in the Wild West.
Acknowledging the racial limitations of the study, the researchers wrote, “We focus on White internal US migrants because they are the only group with sufficient variation in historical homicide rates across states.”
Still, Lenz says, their findings help explain the rates of homicide victimization faced by other groups today.
2. The Amazon’s New Normal
A new climate is emerging in the Amazon—one so hot that it hasn’t been seen on Earth for 10 to 40 million years. A recent Berkeley-led study calls this new biome the hypertropics.
Unsurprisingly, climate change is to blame for the shift. If we cannot reduce carbon emissions, the study predicts, hypertropical conditions could occur as much as 150 days a year by 2100, even during the typical wet season. The new climate wouldn’t be limited to the Amazon, but would likely appear across Southeast Asia and in western Africa as well.
Already, Berkeley scientists are observing hypertropical conditions—and their effects—during extreme drought periods in the Amazon. Analyzing more than 30 years of data from a study site north of Manaus, Brazil, the researchers found a 55 percent increase in tree die-offs the year after such droughts. With lower soil moisture during the drier weather, trees can experience carbon starvation and develop deadly air bubbles in their sap. The highest mortality rates were among faster-growing trees with lower wood density, promising a shift in tree species as the region heats up.
“It’s up to us to what extent we’re actually going to create this hypertropical climate,” study leader Jeff Chambers, a Berkeley professor of geography, told Berkeley News. “If we’re just going to emit greenhouse gases as much as we want, without any control, then we’re going to create this hypertropical climate sooner.”
3. A Hummingbird Flies Into a Garden…
Berkeley biology Professor Robert Dudley has long thought that alcohol consumption is not limited to Homo sapiens. Over the years, his team has discovered evidence of the behavior in the natural world, from finding ethyl glucuronide, a metabolic byproduct of alcohol, in the urine of chimpanzees and the feathers of birds, to demonstrating that Anna’s hummingbirds will still readily sip from slightly boozy sugar water.
For their newest study, instead of catching chimps peeing in the wilds of Uganda, they went to the UC Botanical Garden to collect flower nectar. Of the 29 species of plants they tested, they found detectable levels of alcohol in 26, lending further credence to the idea that ethanol is an inevitable part of some birds’ diets.
“The laboratory experiment was showing that yes, they will drink ethanol in their nectar, though they have some aversion to it if it gets too high,” postdoctoral fellow Ammon Corl said. “The feathers are saying that, yes, they will metabolize it. And then this study is saying that ethanol is actually pretty widespread in the nectar they consume.”
Using estimated caloric intake, the researchers were also able to compare the daily alcohol consumption of several creatures, including two types of hummingbirds; three species of sunbirds found in Africa; the European honeybee; the pen-tailed tree shrew; chimpanzees; and, last but not least, your average American who imbibes one drink per day. Their finding: The honeybee consumes the least alcohol in its daily diet, and the tree shrew the most, with the equivalent of roughly nine drinks a night. Ptilocercus lowii sure can throw back those palm flowers.
4. Crowdsourced Search for ET Finds Nothing — Yet
The biggest alien hunt in history came up empty, but ET may still be hiding in the data.
SETI@home enlisted a million volunteers and generated 12 billion signal detections over 21 years. No extraterrestrials turned up, but the crowdsourced project reshaped how we listen to the stars.
From 1999 to 2020, Berkeley’s SETI@home let anyone with a home computer join the search for alien intelligence, processing radio data from Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory with spare computing power. Within a year of launch, more than a million volunteers in over 100 countries had signed up—20 times more than the founders had hoped for.
The 12 billion signal detections were eventually narrowed to 100 possible hits that are now being examined by China’s FAST telescope, the world’s largest by collecting area. No confirmed alien signal has emerged so far.
Scientists still struggle to parse genuine signals from terrestrial interference, and can’t always tell what they’re discarding. Cofounder Eric Korpela, Ph.D. ’97, says, “Are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches.”
The hunt isn’t necessarily over as the dataset could be reanalyzed. Korpela, now the only paid staff member of SETI@home, told Berkeley News, “There’s still the potential that ET is in that data and we missed it just by a hair.”
5. First Step, Earth’s Magnetotail. Next Step, Mars.
After a decade in the making, ESCAPADE, NASA’s first dual-satellite mission to another planet, and the first planetary mission led by UC Berkeley, successfully made it into space last year. ESCAPADE is short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, but the twin spacecraft also go by their nicknames, Blue and Gold, a nod to the deep Berkeley roots of a project operated by the Space Sciences Laboratory.
Blue and Gold’s objective: to make it to Mars, where they will map the Red Planet’s magnetic field and atmosphere in unprecedented detail. But first, SSL sent the pair on a test run closer to home.
For ten days in March, the two probes took a spin through Earth’s magnetotail, the part of the planet’s magnetic field that stretches more than a million miles away, buffeted by the sun’s powerful solar wind. Aside from assessing the operation of the instruments, the excursion also offered an opportunity for SSL scientists to “hopefully make some discoveries,” as principal investigator Rob Lillis, M.A. ’03, Ph.D. ’06, said, perhaps even shedding more light on the phenomenon of the auroras.
It was dress rehearsal for what’s to come. Later this year, ESCAPADE will use Earth’s gravity to slingshot toward its final destination, Mars, during the two planets’ biannual alignment. The data Blue and Gold send back may someday help human explorers follow in their wake.
