Health & Science

Plastic trash transforms the Pacific

The amount of plastic garbage in the North Pacific Ocean has risen a hundredfold since the 1970s, and the floating debris is now so abundant that marine life is adapting to its presence. Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography sampled an expanse of the sea between Hawaii and California, where currents tend to deposit flotsam from around the Pacific basin, and found a garbage patch, or gyre, the size of Texas, with the plastic mostly broken down into confetti-size chunks. Discarded Styrofoam, plastic bags, and other buoyant refuse has added “hundreds of millions of hard surfaces to the Pacific Ocean,” study author Miriam Goldstein tells BBCNews.com, providing far more places for one marine insect, the water strider, to lay its eggs. The flourishing water striders are consuming more plankton and fish eggs than ever, Goldstein says, and the insects’ new abundance may also be creating a boom in the predators that dine on them, such as crabs. Meanwhile, marine creatures are swallowing some 12,000 to 24,000 tons of the plastic per year: Nearly one in 10 fish caught in the North Pacific has plastic in its stomach. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer says the only way to stop the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” from growing is to switch to biodegradable plastic. “We can’t clean it up,” he says. “It’s just too big.”

The cost of sleeping in

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Sleeping late on the weekends can make you fat. A new study shows that by staying out and waking up later on weekends than they do on workdays, two out of three people effectively commute between two time zones every week. The weekly discrepancy, which researchers call “social jet lag,” disrupts people’s natural biorhythms and increases their risk of obesity and other health problems. German researchers surveyed sleep data from 65,000 people and found that their odds of being overweight increased 33 percent for every hour of difference between their weekday and weekend sleep schedules. Ignoring our normal circadian rhythms forces us “to eat at times when the body doesn’t want to eat or isn’t prepared for digesting food properly,” study author Till Roenneberg tells Health.com. Previous research has also shown that living out of sync with your body clock makes you more likely to smoke and drink, and to suffer from diseases like diabetes and cancer.

Secrets of a baby planet

Vesta, the second-largest object in our solar system’s asteroid belt, is no mere asteroid. New data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has revealed that the 330-mile-diameter orb has the characteristics of a planet—including roundness, a layered composition, and an iron core. Researchers have long considered the asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter to be potential pieces of a planet that failed to form the way others in our solar system did, around 4 billion years ago. Jupiter’s strong gravity stirred up nearby dust and rocks, causing fragments to smash into one another instead of gradually coalescing into a single body. Small and battered as it is, Vesta “is special” because it started down the pathway to planethood, and provides evidence of “events at the very beginning of the solar system,” NASA geophysicist Carol Raymond tells Space.com. Among the startling features of its varied surface are two giant, overlapping craters caused by collisions with smaller asteroids 1 billion and 2 billion years ago. Similar impacts probably destroyed other protoplanets, Raymond says, making Vesta “the only intact member of a family of similar bodies that have since perished.”

Mammals in peril

Mammals are particularly vulnerable to climate change, and many species may perish as warming temperatures change their environments over the next century. A new study of nearly 500 Western Hemisphere species found that 90 percent of them will lose habitat as global temperatures rise over the next century, and 10 percent will become extinct. “Our figures are a fairly conservative—even optimistic—view of what could happen,” University of Washington ecologist Joshua Lawler tells ScienceDaily.com. Previous studies have suggested that climate change could actually expand the range of many species, without considering how those animals would travel to their new homes. But when Lawler and his colleagues calculated the size, speed, diet, and breeding habits of mammals, they discovered that many wouldn’t be able to relocate fast enough to beat the heat. They found that monkeys in the Amazon and other small species would be hardest hit. Larger, speedier mammals like elk and coyotes would fare better, but even they would face daunting obstacles like highways and farms. “Unfortunately, there is not a lot of good news in analyses of climate impacts,” says University of California, Berkeley, ecologist David Ackerly. “Rapid change will be disruptive.”