Children of Nso farmers in Cameroon know how to master the marshmallow test, which has tempted away the self-control of Western kids for decades.

In a direct comparison on this delayed gratification task, Cameroonian youngsters leave middle-class German children in the dust when challenged to resist a reachable treat while waiting for another goodie, a new study finds.

Of 76 Nso 4-year-olds, 53, or nearly 70 percent, waited 10 minutes for a second treat — a small local pastry called a puff-puff — without eating the puff-puff placed on a table in front of them, say psychologist Bettina Lamm of Osnabrück University in Germany and colleagues.
Only 35 of 125 German 4-year-olds, or 28 percent, successfully waited for their choice of a second lollipop or chocolate bar.

The study, which is the first to administer the marshmallow test to non-Western kids, shows that cultural styles of child raising can dramatically shift how self-control develops, Lamm’s team contends online June 6 in Child Development.

“The disparity between German and Nso cultures on the marshmallow test is huge,” says psychologist Ozlem Ayduk of the University of California, Berkeley. She concurs that parenting practices among Nso farmers may at least partly boost children’s ability to delay gratification.

Marshmallow tests conducted over the past 50 years have found that, as in the new study, a minority of children in Western countries manage to wait for a second treat without munching the first one (SN: 11/15/14, p. 28). And kids best able to wait out the test display academic and social advantages decades later (SN: 10/8/11, p. 12).

A Western cultural emphasis on raising children to be independent and to express what they want and how they feel presents challenges to self-control, Lamm says. Delaying a reward, as in the marshmallow test, stirs a frustrating feeling of powerlessness, her team proposes.
The kids in the new study were part of a long-term study of cultural differences in memory and learning. Age-appropriate assessments occurred three times during the kids’ first year of life and at ages 3 and 4. Only 4-year-olds took the marshmallow test. Among 63 of the German youngsters videotaped in play sessions with their mothers at age 9 months, those whose mothers were most lenient in letting them determine what to do displayed the least patience on the marshmallow test at age 4, the researchers say.

Researchers have long argued that “authoritative parenting,” marked by giving children freedom within specific limits, fosters self-control needed for academic and social success (SN: 8/19/89, p. 117). German kids who waited for a second treat had mothers who dealt with them authoritatively as 9-month-olds, Lamm says.

Nso mothers typically had an authoritative parenting style, keeping their kids close and training them to keep emotions in check and respect their elders, especially those high in a community’s pecking order. For 57 Nso kids recorded in play with their mothers at age 9 months, mothers consistently took the lead in organizing play activities.

Nso children’s self-control grew out of their mothers’ authoritarian, controlling parenting style, Lamm suspects.

Children also displayed cultural differences in how they tried to resist temptation during the marshmallow test. German kids tried to distract themselves while waiting for a second treat by moving about, turning around, singing, talking and even leaving the room. Nso youngsters waiting for a second treat exhibited little emotion and remained largely still. Eight of them fell asleep in their chairs.

Some previously tested Western children have rested their heads on the table and taken naps as a tactic to ignore available treats. But Nso kids appeared to zonk out spontaneously, slumping over in their chairs, Lamm says.

As a result of authoritarian parenting practices, Nso kids either squelch negative emotions or experience negative emotions in a different, more controllable way than Western peers do, she proposes.

Ayduk notes that it’s not clear whether Nso youngsters truly had greater self-control or if, true to farming community standards, they simply obeyed adults who asked them to wait for a second puff-puff, Ayduk adds.

While Nso values and parenting techniques generally characterize small-scale farming populations, especially in Africa, hunter-gatherers are another story, says anthropologist Barry Hewlett of Washington State University in Vancouver. Traditional hunter-gatherer groups value individual freedom and consider everyone to be relatively equal, regardless of age. Parents usually don’t tell their kids what to do, and children show little deference to parents and elders.

No hunter-gatherer kids have taken the marshmallow test. Hewlett expects most would scarf an available treat right away.

Get a grip. A new robotic gripping tool based on gecko feet can grab hold of floating objects in microgravity. The grippers could one day help robots move dangerous space junk to safer orbits or climb around the outside of space stations.

Most strategies for sticking don’t work in space. Chemical adhesives can’t withstand the wide range of temperatures, and suction doesn’t work in a vacuum.

Adhesives inspired by gecko feet — which use van der Waals forces to cling without feeling sticky (SN Online: 11/18/14) — could fit the bill, says Mark Cutkosky of Stanford University, whose team has been designing such stickers for more than a decade. Now his team has built robotic gripper “hands” that can grapple objects many times their size without pushing them away, the researchers report June 28 in Science Robotics.
The team first tested the grippers in the Robo-Dome, a giant air hockey table at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where two 370-kilogram robots gently pushed each other around using a small square of gecko gripper.

Then last summer, Aaron Parness and Christine Fuller, of the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Hao Jiang of Stanford took the full gripper hand, which includes several patches of gripping material in a specific arrangement, on a microgravity flight in NASA’s Weightless Wonder aircraft. The team used the hand to grab and release a cube, cylinder and beach ball, which represented satellites, spent rockets or fuel tanks, and pressure vessels.

Gripper hands could be used to repair or move dead satellites, or help miniature satellites called CubeSats stick to larger spacecraft like barnacles, Parness says.

A record-breaking quantum satellite has again blown away the competition, achieving two new milestones in long-distance quantum communications through space.

In June, Chinese researchers demonstrated that the satellite Micius could send entangled quantum particles to far-flung locations on Earth, their properties remaining intertwined despite being separated by more than 1,200 kilometers (SN Online: 6/15/17). Now researchers have used the satellite to teleport particles’ properties and transmit quantum encryption keys. The result, reported in two papers published online July 3 and July 4 at arXiv.org, marks the first time the two techniques have been demonstrated in space.
In quantum teleportation, the properties of one particle are transferred to another. The scientists first sent particles of light, or photons, from the ground to the satellite — a distance of up to 1,400 kilometers. When the researchers made particular measurements of other photons on the ground, the spacefaring particles took on the properties of the landlubbers, thanks to quantum entanglement between the earthbound and satellite-based particles. Although it’s a far cry from the Star Trek variety of teleportation, the process is an important ingredient of quantum communication.

Quantum key distribution is a method of creating a secret string of random numbers that can be used to encrypt communications. The researchers beamed photons from the satellite to Earth over distances of up to 1,200 kilometers, using the photons’ polarization, the orientation of their electromagnetic waves, to transmit a string of random numbers with utmost security.

Quantum communication via satellite can reach greater distances than land-based transmission, because in space, particles don’t get absorbed by the atmosphere. The new results pave the way for a global quantum internet that would provide for ultrasecure communications and allow quantum computers to work together.

A common blood sugar medication or an extra dose of a thyroid hormone can reverse signs of cognitive damage in rats exposed in utero to alcohol. Both affect an enzyme that controls memory-related genes in the hippocampus, researchers report July 18 in Molecular Psychiatry.

That insight might someday help scientists find an effective human treatment for fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, which can cause lifelong problems with concentration, learning and memory. “At this moment, there’s really no pharmaceutical therapy,” says R. Thomas Zoeller, a neurobiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Fetal alcohol syndrome disorders may affect up to 5 percent of U.S. kids, according to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists don’t know exactly why alcohol has such a strong effect on developing brains. But the lower thyroid hormone levels commonly induced by alcohol exposure might be one explanation, suggests study coauthor Eva Redei, a psychiatrist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

“The mother has to supply the thyroid hormones for brain development,” says Redei. So, pregnant women who drink might not be providing their fetuses with enough hormones for normal brain development. That could disrupt the developing hippocampus, a brain region involved in learning and memory.

To counter alcohol’s effects, Redei and her colleagues gave doses of thyroxine, a thyroid hormone, to newborn rats that had been exposed to alcohol before birth. (That timing coincides developmentally with the third trimester of pregnancy in humans.) The amount of alcohol fed to the rat moms corresponded roughly to a woman drinking a glass or two of wine a day.

The treatment helped, the team found. Healthy rats will freeze in place when they’re put in a room where they’ve previously experienced a mild electrical shock. Adult rats exposed to alcohol during development freeze for a shorter period of time, suggesting that they might not learn the association between the shock and the room as effectively. Thyroxine treatment after birth made rats freeze about 30 percent longer than rats that didn’t get the treatment — almost on par with rats born to nondrinking moms.

Surprisingly, treatment with a blood sugar drug called metformin also had a similar effect. While seemingly unrelated, the two treatments work in similar ways, Redei says. Alcohol makes the hippocampus produce less of an enzyme called Dnmt1. That enzyme regulates the way key learning and memory-related genes turn on and off during development. Disruptions in that process can harm hippocampus function. “Both treatments normalize those enzyme levels,” Redei says.
Whether this treatment will work in people is far from a guarantee: Many promising treatments shown in rats don’t pan out in humans. Plus, fetal alcohol syndrome includes a complex suite of physical, cognitive and behavioral symptoms, which probably aren’t all controlled by thyroid hormone levels.

“Kids with fetal alcohol effects don’t look like kids with congenital hypothyroidism,” a condition resulting in low thyroid hormone levels, says Zoeller. Alcohol exposure during development affects other systems, too, like the immune system.

Still, Redei eventually hopes to test thyroxine and metformin in pregnant drinkers during their third trimester to see if the drugs might improve their kids’ outcomes. (Both are generally recognized as safe for pregnant women at standard doses.)

If treatment works, it might be particularly helpful for women who drank heavily in their first trimester before realizing they were pregnant, says Joanne Rovet, who studies fetal alcohol syndrome at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Hominid hubbub
In “Hominid roots may go back to Europe” (SN: 6/24/17, p. 9), Bruce Bower reported that the teeth of Graecopithecus, a chimp-sized primate that lived in southeastern Europe 7 million years ago, suggest it was a member of the human evolutionary family.

“Is it appropriate to use the terms ‘hominid’ and ‘ape’ as if the two are mutually exclusive categories?” asked online reader Tim Cliffe. “The distinction being made is between our clade in particular and all other apes. It seems to me that ‘hominids’ should be described as a subset of apes, not a separate category,” he wrote.
“Yes, hominids are apes,” Bower says. “The terminology gets pretty thick in evolutionary studies, so researchers (and journalists) use some shortcuts.”

Fossils of many ancient apes dating to between 25 million and 5 million years ago have been found, but the interest in this case is in a key transition to a particular kind of ape that walked upright and displayed various skeletal traits similar to traits unique to the human evolutionary family. “That’s why one source in the story, Bernard Wood, wonders whether Graecopithecus was an apelike hominid or a hominid-like ape,” Bower says. “But it’s important to remember that hominids diverged from other, ancestral apes. So did chimps.”

Science News defines “hominid” as a member of the human evolutionary family.

Laser, camera, action
The world’s fastest video camera films 5 trillion frames every second, Ashley Yeager reported in “A different kind of camera captures speedy actions” (SN: 6/24/17, p. 5). The camera works by flashing a laser at a subject and using a computer program to combine the still images into a video. Researchers tested the device by filming particles of light as the particles traveled a short distance.

Online reader JHoughton1 wondered if the researchers really filmed a light particle in their tests. “I thought light ‘sometimes behaves like a wave, sometimes like a particle,’ but that there isn’t really any particle that’s a particle in the usual sense. Is this really a picture of a ‘particle’ of light? A photon-as-ball-of-stuff?”

The camera captured the forward progression of a laser pulse, which is an ensemble of photons, Yeager says.

Photons themselves aren’t “balls of stuff” on quantum scales, says physics writer Emily Conover. All particles, including photons, are spread out in space, propagating like waves. “Only when scientists measure or observe a photon or any other particle do they find it in one place, like the ball of stuff that people typically imagine. I think in that sense, photons are about as tangible as any other quantum particle,” Conover says.

Bringing down the mucus house
Little-known sea animals called giant larvaceans can catch a lot of carbon in disposable mucus casings called “houses,” Susan Milius reported in “ ‘Mucus houses’ catch sea carbon fast” (SN: 6/10/17, p. 13).

Online reader Robert Stenton wondered what happens to mucus houses as they fall to the bottom of the ocean.

What happens to discarded houses isn’t yet clear, Milius says, though researchers have proposed that the houses might carry substantial portions of carbon to life on the sea bottom. And if bits of a house fall fast enough to reach great depths, the carbon could get trapped in water masses that move around the planet for centuries before surfacing. Bits drifting down slowly may be intercepted by microbes and other debris feeders and would not end up sequestered.

Correction
In “Human noises invade wilderness” (SN: 6/10/17, p. 14), Science News incorrectly reported that official wilderness areas in the United States do not allow livestock grazing. Grazing is permitted in protected wilderness areas at preprotection levels under the Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the National Preservation System.

When I was pregnant, I spent a lot of time searching for good information about how to keep both my baby and myself healthy after birth. Googling “placenta” and “eat,” I got a list of stories that reached nearly opposite conclusions about the practice.

Some say eating the organ will replenish mom’s nutrients, increase breast milk production and even stave off postpartum depression. Others point out that there are no studies that report these benefits, and placenta eating comes with risks. Scientists and doctors still have a lot of unanswered questions about the safety of the practice.

Here’s one story new mothers considering eating their placenta might want to pay extra attention to: Oregon doctors suspect that contaminated placenta pills may have caused a dangerous infection in a newborn.

Just after birth, this newborn had trouble breathing. Tests revealed a blood infection with Group B Streptococcus, or GBS. These bacteria are found in about a quarter of healthy women’s nether regions and can pose a danger to newborns. The baby probably picked up a GBS infection while passing through the birth canal.

After a round of ampicillin, the baby went home healthy. But five days later, the baby was in trouble again. Doctors at a second hospital found more GBS in the blood. After another round of antibiotics, two types this time, the baby was again sent home.

Doctors at the second hospital learned that three days after the baby had been born, the mother had begun eating six placenta capsules daily. She had hired a company to clean, slice and dehydrate her placenta before grinding it up and putting it into pills. Lab tests found the exact same strain of GBS that had infected the baby in the placenta pills. Genevieve Buser and colleagues published the case details June 30 in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Buser, a pediatric infectious disease physician at Providence Health System in Portland, Ore., says the situation represents the first time researchers have turned up harmful bacteria in encapsulated placenta. “But then, I don’t think that anyone has looked.”
The mother’s breast milk tested negative for GBS. GBS can live in both men and women, mainly in the digestive tract, anus, vagina and, occasionally, skin. The placenta pills could have been dosing the mother regularly with the bacteria, boosting bacterial loads on her skin and in her digestive tract. Through touching, those bacteria could have been transferred to the baby.

The fact that the same strain of bacteria was found in the pills and in the baby’s blood led the researchers to suspect that the pills — and the mother — were a likely source of the infection. Still, Buser cautions that the bacteria transfer from pills to mom to baby “can’t be proven in one case study.”

Other sources of infection exist: The mother could have been colonized in a different way, the bacteria could have come from another person, and the placenta pills could have been contaminated after they were made. “This case report raises more questions than it answers,” Buser says. “But that is good and what science and medicine are all about.”

The baby probably picked up the first GBS infection during birth. With all the excitement of a new baby, it’s easy to forget that the placenta also passed through the same birth canal, picking up the same bacteria that live there. And anyway, placentas aren’t sterile. They’re actually home to swarms of various microbes.

Bottom line, Buser says: “This is a human tissue that is not sterilized.” She points out that dehydrating meat, including placenta, isn’t enough to kill bacteria that can make people sick, including forms of E. coli and Salmonella. A snack texturally similar to placenta, dried deer jerky, sickened people in Oregon in 1995 with E. coli O157. In later lab tests, 10 hours of drying failed to kill that bacteria.

Placenta pills (and other placenta recipes) aren’t regulated, which means there’s no way to tell if the product is safe. Nor is there a foolproof way to spot potentially harmful infections in mothers. In this case, the mother tested negative for GBS at 37 weeks of her pregnancy. That was either a bad test or she acquired the infection after it. There were no signs that she — and ultimately, her placenta — was colonized by bacteria that may have been harmful to her baby.

In their report, Buser and her colleagues don’t mince words: “The placenta encapsulation process does not per se eradicate infectious pathogens; thus, placenta capsule ingestion should be avoided.” If a mother still wants to eat her placenta, she ought to tell her care providers, Buser says. That way, they’ll be aware of the possible risks.

Our view of the earliest flowers just bloomed. A new reconstruction, the most detailed to date, suggests the flowers were bisexual, with more than five female reproductive organs, or carpels, and more than 10 male reproductive organs, or stamen. Petallike structures, grouped in sets of three, surrounded the sex organs, researchers report August 1 in Nature Communications.

Flowering plants comprise roughly 90 percent of plants on Earth. Researchers think they evolved from a common ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago. But it has been hard to reconstruct the structure of such ancient blooms because so few fossils have been found.

In the new study, Hervé Sauquet of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and colleagues combined models of flower evolution with a database of features for 792 species of flowering plants, and data from the fossil record. The new picture of ancient flowers suggests some blossoms lost their bisexuality with time. Also, modern blooms lost some of their whorls, the concentric layers of different flower parts. In some flowers, whorls dropped from at least four to two in petals and the leaflike structures at the base of a bloom, and from four to one in stamen, the team concludes. The finding suggests that natural selection pushed the plants to a less complex floral plan over time.

Sometimes body armor just isn’t enough. A car-sized dinosaur covered in bony plates may have sported camo, too, researchers report online August 3 in Current Biology. That could mean the Cretaceous-period herbivore was a target for predators that relied on sight more than smell to find prey.

The dinosaur, dubbed Borealopelta markmitchelli, has already made headlines for being one of the best preserved armored dinosaurs ever unearthed. It was entombed on its back some 110 million years ago under layers of fine marine sediments that buried the animal very quickly — ideal preservation conditions, says study coauthor Caleb Brown, a paleontologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Canada. The fossil, found in Alberta in 2011, captured not only large amounts of skin and soft tissue but also the animal’s three-dimensional shape.
“Most of the other armored dinosaurs are described based on the skeleton. In this case, we can’t see the skeleton because all the skin is still there,” Brown says.

That skin contains clues to the dinosaur’s appearance, including its coloration. “We’re just beginning to realize how important color is, and we’re beginning to have the methods to detect color” in fossils, says Martin Sander, a paleontologist at Bonn University in Germany who wasn’t part of the study.

But despite ample tissue, the researchers didn’t find any melanosomes, cellular structures that often preserve evidence of pigment in fossilized remains. Instead, Brown and colleagues turned to less direct evidence: molecules that appear when pigments break down. The researchers found about a dozen types of those molecules, including substantial amounts of benzothiazole, a by-product of the reddish pigment pheomelanin. That might mean the dinosaur was reddish-brown.
The distribution of pigment by-products also gives clues about the dinosaur’s appearance. B. markmitchelli had a thin film of pigment-hinting organic molecules on its back, but that layer disappeared on the belly. That pattern is reminiscent of countershading, when an animal is darker on its back than its underside, Brown says. Countershading is a simple form of camouflage that helps animals blend in with the ground when seen from above or with the sky when seen from below.
This is not the first time countershading has been proposed for a dinosaur (SN: 11/26/16, p 24). But finding the camouflage on such a large herbivore is somewhat surprising, Brown says. Modern plant eaters that don similar camouflage tend to be smaller and at greater risk of becoming someone’s dinner. B. markmitchelli’s skin patterning suggests that at least some top Cretaceous predators might have relied more on eyesight than today’s top carnivores, which often favor smell when hunting, Brown says.

Some experts, however, want stronger evidence for the coloration claims. Molecules like benzothiazole can come from melanin, but they can also come from a number of other sources, such as oils, says Johan Lindgren, a paleontologist at Lund University in Sweden. “What this paper nicely highlights is how little we actually know about the preservation of soft tissues in animal remains. There’s definitely something there — the question is, what are those [molecules], and where do they come from?”

Sander does buy the evidence for the reddish tint, but it might not be the full story, he says. The dino could have displayed other colors that didn’t linger in the fossil record. But the countershading findings “point out the importance of vision” for dinosaurs, he says. Sharp-eyed predators might have made camouflage a perk for herbivores — even ones built like tanks.

A 13-million-year-old infant’s skull, discovered in Africa in 2014, comes from a new species of ape that may not be far removed from the common ancestor of living apes and humans.

The tiny find, about the size of a lemon, is one of the most complete skulls known of any extinct ape that inhabited Africa, Asia or Europe between 25 million and 5 million years ago, researchers report in the Aug. 10 Nature. The fossil provides the most detailed look to date at a member of a line of African primates that are now candidates for central players in the evolution of present-day apes and humans.
Most fossils from more than 40 known extinct ape species amount to no more than jaw fragments or a few isolated teeth. A local fossil hunter spotted the nearly complete skull in rock layers located near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Members of a team led by paleoanthropologist Isaiah Nengo estimated the fossil’s age by assessing radioactive forms of the element argon in surrounding rock, which decay at a known rate.

Comparisons with other African ape fossils indicate that the infant’s skull belongs to a new species that the researchers named Nyanzapithecus alesi. Other species in this genus, previously known mainly from jaws and teeth, date to as early as around 25 million years ago.

“This skull comes from an ancient group of apes that existed in Africa for over 10 million years and was close to the evolutionary origin of living apes and humans,” says Nengo, of Stony Brook University in New York and De Anza College in Cupertino, Calif.

He and colleagues looked inside the skull using a powerful type of 3-D X-ray imaging. This technique revealed microscopic enamel layers that had formed daily from birth in developing adult teeth that had yet to erupt. A count of those layers indicates that the ape was 16 months old when it died.

Based on a presumably rapid growth rate, the scientists calculated that the ancient ape would have weighed about 11.3 kilograms as an adult. Its adult brain volume would have been almost three times larger than that of known African monkeys from the same time, the researchers estimate.
N. alesi’s tiny mouth and nose, along with several other facial characteristics, make it look much like small-bodied apes called gibbons. Faces resembling gibbons evolved independently in several extinct monkeys, apes and their relatives, the researchers say. The same probably held for N. alesi, making it an unlikely direct ancestor of living gibbons, they conclude.
No lower-body bones turned up with the new find. Even so, it’s possible to tell that N. alesi did not behave as present-day gibbons do. In gibbons, a part of the inner ear called the semicircular canals, which coordinates balance, is large relative to body size. That allows the apes to swing acrobatically from one tree branch to another. N. alesi’s small semicircular canals indicate that it moved cautiously in trees, Nengo says.

Several of the infant skull’s features, including those downsized semicircular canals, connect it to a poorly understood, 7-million- to 8-million-year-old ape called Oreopithecus. Fossils of that primate, discovered in Italy, suggest it walked upright with a slow, shuffling gait. If an evolutionary relationship existed with the older N. alesi, the first members of the Oreopithecus genus probably originated in Africa, Nengo proposes.

Without any lower-body bones for N. alesi, it’s too early to rule out the possibility that Nyanzapithecus gave rise to modern gibbons and perhaps Oreopithecus as well, says paleontologist David Alba of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology Miquel Crusafont in Barcelona. Gibbon ancestors are thought to have diverged from precursors of living great apes and humans between 20 million and 15 million years ago, Alba says.

Despite the age and unprecedented completeness of the new ape skull, no reported tooth or skull features clearly place N. alesi close to the origins of living apes and humans, says paleoanthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto.

Further studies of casts of the inner braincase, which show impressions from surface features of the brain, may help clarify N. alesi’s position in ape evolution, Nengo says. Insights are also expected from back, forearm and finger fossils of two or three ancient apes, possibly also from N. alesi, found near the skull site in 2015. Those specimens also date to around 13 million years ago.

On the morning of August 21, a pair of jets will take off from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to chase the shadow of the moon. They will climb to 15 kilometers in the stratosphere and fly in the path of the total solar eclipse over Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee at 750 kilometers per hour.

But some of the instruments the jets carry won’t be looking at the sun, or even at Earth. They’ll be focused on a different celestial body: Mercury. In the handful of minutes that the planes zip along in darkness, the instruments could collect enough data to answer this Mercury mystery: What is the innermost planet’s surface made of?
Because it’s so close to the sun, Mercury is tough to study from Earth. It’s difficult to observe close up, too. Extreme heat and radiation threaten to fry any spacecraft that gets too close. And the sun’s brightness can swamp a hardy spacecraft’s efforts to send signals back to Earth.

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015 and revealed a battered, scarred landscape made of different material than the rest of the terrestrial planets (SN: 11/19/11, p. 17).
But Messenger only scratched the surface, so to speak. It analyzed the planet’s composition with an instrument called a reflectance spectrometer, which collects light and then splits that light into its component wavelengths to figure out which elements the light was reflected from.
Messenger took measurements of reflected light from Mercury’s surface at wavelengths shorter than 1 micrometer, which revealed, among other things, that Mercury contains a surprising amount of sulfur and potassium (SN: 7/16/11, p. 12). Those wavelengths come only from the top few micrometers of Mercury. What lies below is still unknown.

To dig a few centimeters deeper into Mercury’s surface, solar physicist Amir Caspi and planetary scientist Constantine Tsang of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and colleagues will use an infrared camera, specially built by Alabama-based Southern Research, that detects wavelengths between 3 and 5 micrometers.

Copies of the instrument will fly on the two NASA WB-57 research jets, whose altitude and speed will give the observers two advantages: less atmospheric interference and more time in the path of the eclipse. Chasing the moon’s shadow will let the planes stay in totality — the region where the sun’s bright disk is completely blocked by the moon — for a combined 400 seconds (6.67 minutes). That’s nearly three times longer than they would get by staying in one spot.
Mercury’s dayside surface is 425° Celsius, and it actually emits light at 4.1 micrometers — right in the middle of the range of Caspi’s instrument. As any given spot on Mercury rotates away from the sun, its temperature drops as low as ‒179° C. Measuring how quickly the planet loses heat can help researchers figure out what the subsurface material is made of and how densely it’s packed. Looser sand will give up its heat more readily, while more close-packed rock will hold heat in longer.

“This is something that has never been done before,” Caspi says. “We’re going to try to make the first thermal image heat map of the surface of Mercury.”

Unfortunately for Caspi, only two people can fly on the jet: The pilot and someone to run the instrument. Caspi will remain on the ground in Houston, out of the path of totality. “So I will get to watch the eclipse on TV,” Caspi says.