Citizen scientists observe rapid phenomena: controlling rat populations; removing nanoplastics from water

Hello! Here are some of the most interesting science stories of the week to read while you curl up on the couch with your cup of General Foods International French Vanilla coffee.

Early object

As part of the citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, volunteers search for patterns in the vast ocean of data accumulated over the 14 years of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission. They mark moving objects in the data files, and when many volunteers report the same object, astronomers investigate the discovery.

Regardless, this collective of volunteers recently reported a faint red star streaking through the Milky Way at about 1.3 million miles per hour, or 600 kilometers per second, representing the discovery of the first low-mass, hypervelocity star and the closest hypervelocity object to the Sun.

This raises an obvious question: Why is this object so fast? The researchers hypothesize that the object, called CWISE J124909+362116.0, may have been a subdwarf in a binary white dwarf system that was propelled into its current trajectory when the white dwarf exploded as a supernova. There is also a more interesting theory involving a pair of tightly coupled black holes that propelled J1249+36 out of a globular cluster.

Moving at 0.1% the speed of light, J1249+36 is moving fast enough that it will likely eventually escape the Milky Way.

Pests lavish

New York is famous for its bright lights, precise dance moves, and chewy pizza crust. Where else in the world can you eat falafel on the street while an accordion player dressed as Boba Fett serenades passing junk bond dealers? Hey, I walk here! New York is also famous for its rats, a distinction it has definitely earned and wears like a badge of depressed resignation rather than honor.

For decades, the city has controlled the rat population with poison baits, which has had a major impact on other urban wildlife, including poor owl Flaco, an escapee from the Central Park Zoo who thrilled New Yorkers for months before crashing to his death into a building. A subsequent autopsy revealed high levels of rat poison in his system. City Hall announced this year that the city would conduct a trial of a contraceptive bait program to assess its effectiveness compared to poisoning campaigns.

The researchers, however, believe that birth control programs are not necessarily an effective way to control rat populations. They cite several reasons, including the likelihood that many rats will not eat the bait and will give birth to pups that also avoid it. However, they suggest that using contraceptive baits could contribute to a variety of approaches to controlling the problem.

Water is plastic

Since season 3 of Game of Thrones, a school of Jon Snow Funko Pops the size of Rhode Island has been migrating with the tides around the Sargasso Sea. Look, I made this up, but there’s a true story about 30,000 rubber ducks that started washing up on the coast of Alaska in 1992. And the ocean is literally saturated with plastic waste and nanoplastics, as are freshwater bodies, ecosystems, and organisms, including humans.

If nanoplastics seem like a new and growing problem on top of many others, including climate change, you’re not wrong: Consider that large-scale production of plastic only began in 1950, and half of all plastic ever produced has been produced since 2000. Nanoplastic contamination is truly a new and strange problem, and as it becomes a threat to human health, researchers are looking for ways to remove nanoplastics from water.

Scientists at the University of Missouri recently reported a method using a small amount of a water-repellent solvent that removes 98 percent of nanoplastics from large amounts of water. The solvent, made from natural products, is introduced to the surface of the water, floating like oil. When the water is mixed, the solvent separates and rises to the surface, carrying the nanoplastics with it in its molecular structure.

In the lab, the scientists removed the plastic from the water surface using a pipette, but in future experiments they plan to scale up the process to remove nanoplastics from large bodies of water.

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