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June 30, 2025—How bird flu became a human pandemic threat. Plus, forecasting when hurricanes will intensify is about to get tougher, and the oldest rocks on Earth are confirmed.
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Infrared satellite imagery of Hurricane Otis (October, 2023) compared to microwave imagery. In the latter (blue background), the center of the storm is more visible and indicates the hurricane was strengthening. NASA/NOAA | | This week, we're doing a deep-dive on bird flu. Today is part one of a three-part series. | | Pamela McKenzie inspects a sample on the beach in southern New Jersey. She is collecting bird poop to test for avian influenza. Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American | | | Where Bird Flu Comes From | The Delaware Bay, which straddles Delaware and New Jersey, is a popular flyway for many bird species migrating between their wintering sites and breeding grounds. For decades scientists have tracked along the flyways of the east coast, collecting bird droppings and testing them for avian viruses, in particular influenza viruses. Every year in mid-May Pamela McKenzie, a researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, walks the various beaches of Delaware Bay. By the second day of this year's collection her team had already found samples that came back positive for different bird flu viruses (though not the deadly strain surging through poultry farms at the moment). St. Jude's research center holds a library of more than 20,000 viruses, including isolates of various iterations, or subtypes, of avian influenza collected from Delaware Bay and other locations around the world.Why this matters: Wild birds, particularly aquatic birds, are hosts, or reservoirs, of different influenza viruses that can jump into domesticated birds and other animals—mammals, and sometimes humans. Since 2022 a deadly new strain of H5N1 has infected more than 170 million domestic poultry, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lineages of H5N1 have been detected in domestic poultry in various countries in Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa and Europe. In the U.S. the virus has raised egg prices, led to the culling of millions of chickens, and infected upwards of 1,000 herds of dairy cattle since March 2024. Every spillover from wild birds into another species—especially mammals—increases the risk of the virus acquiring the mutations necessary to infect humans more efficiently and potentially spread from person to person.
| | Lisa Kercher, the director of laboratory operations for the Webby Lab group at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, works in her converted camper on avian fecal samples. Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American | | What the experts say: "We'll never catch up with Mother Nature," Kercher told health editor Lauren Young. "We're never gonna catch up with the virus and how it mutates. But if we can get closer and approach it more, you can then look for mutations, much quicker things that make the virus resistant to antivirals or things that make it more mammalian adaptable. You would wanna know that sooner rather than later." Click here to listen to a podcast about McKenzie and Kercher's work. | | What do you want to know about bird flu? Send us your questions and we'll publish the answers to some in a future issue of Today in Science. | | | | |
- Climate activists portray our current climate crisis as a rapid careening toward a cliff after which it's game over, writes James K. Boyce, professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But this kind of thinking is nonsense: "Climate change does not end with a grand finale. Instead, it unleashes a cascade of mounting damages that will escalate exponentially over time," he says. "Even as climate change impacts ever more people ever more dramatically, it is never too late to act. On the contrary, the case for action grows ever stronger." | 3 min read
| | - Eight numbers emerge in sequence according to a certain system. One number is unknown. Can you figure out what it should be? Click here for the solution.
| | Our health editor Lauren Young traveled to the New Jersey coast near Cape May to tag along with scientists on their 40th year of gathering bird droppings there to detect avian flu. "It was so windy!" Lauren told me. "Bird poop kept flying off the sample collection swabs, but scientist Pam McKenzie took it like a champ." Who said science was a glamorous job? Tomorrow in part two of our three-part deep dive on bird flu, we'll be examining how the disease jumped from poultry to dairy farms. | | Welcome to another week of discovery! Email me anytime with thoughts, feedback or ideas: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow!
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor With contributions by Andrea Tamayo | | | | |
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