Health & Science

A world with more hellish wildfires

The monster forest fires rampaging across the Western states may soon be the norm, thanks to climate change. New research indicates that as rainfall diminishes and vegetation dries out on a warmer planet, the West is “headed into a more fire-prone future,” wildfire specialist Max Moritz tells the Los Angeles Times. After studying satellite imaging of fires and data from 16 climate models, Moritz and other researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that rising temperatures are likely to change fire patterns not just in the western U.S., but across 80 percent of the planet by the end of the century. Polar and temperate regions—including tundras, hardwood forests, and grasslands—will become drier and more vulnerable to fire, while some desert regions could experience extra rainfall, promoting bigger plants that will give flames more fuel. These abrupt changes in fire patterns will affect people who live in or near the drier regions, and “add stress to native plants and animals that are already struggling to adapt to habitat loss,” Moritz says. “In the long run, we found what [we] most fear: increasing fire activity across large areas of the planet.”

A plus for old dads

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The older men are when they have children, the more likely those children are to inherit a genetic boost that will help them live a long life. A new study shows that as men age, their sperm develop longer telomeres—the genetic material at the tips of chromosomes that helps protect against cell damage. Those longer telomeres, which are linked to slower cell aging and a decreased risk of diseases like cancer, are passed directly on to a man’s children, and continue to show up even in his grandchildren. “This happens across at least two generations,” Northwestern University anthropologist Dan Eisenberg tells Time.com. The telomeres in sperm develop in the opposite way to telomeres in the rest of the body, which shorten with age and can be stunted by environmental stress, such as exposure to violence during childhood. But while older fathers do offer a longevity advantage, previous research has shown they’re also more likely to father children with a genetic predisposition to autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder.

Black holes that wander

Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have revealed what appears to be a supermassive black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,’’ Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light sources from distant galaxy CID-42 racing away from one another at a speed of 3 million miles an hour. They also detected high-energy X-rays—believed to be signs of a black hole devouring gas—emitting from one of the light sources, but not from the other. The best explanation for the phenomenon, Civano says, is that two galaxies, each with a central black hole, slammed together. The crash likely produced gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space, of the sort Albert Einstein predicted would occur when incredibly heavy objects collided. The waves would have caused the new, supermassive black hole to recoil violently enough to tear it away from its host galaxy altogether. If this analysis is correct, there may be many supermassive black holes roaming through deep space, invisible to us because there’s nothing for them to consume.

Can plants talk?

Unsettling news for vegetarians: Plants may communicate with one another by making sounds at frequencies that humans can’t hear. British and Australian researchers have discovered that the roots of corn saplings emit a constant clicking sound. When a similar sound was played in a lab, they found that corn roots grew toward the noise, much the way plants are known to grow toward light. Sweet fennel may telegraph its presence to other plants too. The plant is known to release chemicals that slow the growth of other nearby plants. When researchers put fennel in a plastic box that blocked those chemicals, they found that nearby chile pepper plants grew even faster than they would outside the presence of fennel. The researchers theorize that the chile plants “knew’’ fennel was nearby because of sound signals not blocked by the box, and grew more quickly to protect themselves in anticipation of the usual chemical attack from the fennel. Study author Monica Gagliano tells the Daily Mail (U.K.) that while her research doesn’t prove that plants are conscious, it “opens up a new debate on the perception and action of people toward plants.” Plants, she says, are not insensate objects, and should be treated as “living beings in their own right.”