Hantavirus cruise ship, PCOS name change, a fish that hides in another animal’s ‘butthole’

Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, dear listeners. For Scientific American‘s Science quickly, My name is Rachel Feltman. You are listening to our weekly summary of scientific news.

First, let’s check the hantavirus situation. Tanya Lewis, SciAmThe Bureau’s Senior Editor for Health and Medicine is here with an update.

Feltman: Tanya, thank you so much for coming to chat with us.

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Tanya Lewis: Yeah, thank you very much for having me.

Feltman: So how have things changed regarding hantavirus since we last spoke?

Louis: More and more people have been confirmed or suspected of carrying the virus. We are now at 11 suspected cases and three deaths, including two confirmed cases, I believe.

Although there are more cases, the virus hasn’t spread, you know, wildly, and these are all cases that involved passengers on the ship itself, so we haven’t seen any secondary cases yet. So that’s a little reassuring. But we still don’t completely understand all the ways it is transmitted.

This virus could still be transmitted by air. We’re not talking about, you know, a COVID-like virus that’s very, very transmissible, but the Andean hantavirus variant has been known in the past to spread between people in close contact, but also in situations like a party, where there were, you know, people just talking to each other in an enclosed space.

But the general public probably won’t face this phenomenon anytime soon, hopefully. This is more concerning for people who had contact with people who were on board this ship.

Feltman: And speaking of this type of contact tracing, what do we know about what different government entities are doing to make sure that everyone who has had potential contact is aware, and what type of advice are these people receiving?

Louis: So here in the United States, I believe there are 15 or 16 people in quarantine at a facility in Nebraska. It is in fact the only establishment of its type in the country. It’s a special setup because the rooms are sort of equipped with HEPA filters and they’re what’s called negative air pressure rooms. This way, if there is a leak of any kind, it will enter the room rather than out.

And this is just a precaution, because if any of these passengers show symptoms, then they could be quickly confined and transferred to the biocontainment unit, which is more like a hospital.

And then most of the countries that have welcomed passengers from this cruise ship take it very seriously.

Feltman: So what will the next few weeks look like?

Louis: So I think we’re probably going to continue to monitor these passengers. We could still see more positive cases because hantavirus has a very long incubation period. I think it can be up to 42 days. It’s too early to say we’ve seen the last case, but I think it’s at least encouraging to see limited spread.

Feltman: Thank you, Tanya! Listeners, be sure to check ScientificAmerican.com for more recent news.

Our next article features a health issue that many of you are probably familiar with, but it has a fancy new name. The artist formerly known as polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS for short, will now be called polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMS.

This change follows a policy document published last Tuesday in the Lancet in which a global scientific consortium dismantled the inaccuracy of the historically used term. The new name is based on thousands of patient surveys and input from 56 medical societies and patients.

In fact, PCOS has always been a misnomer for the condition, which the World Health Organization estimates affects up to 13 percent of women worldwide. The “cysts” referred to in the original name are actually follicles that would normally mature and release eggs, but remain in arrested development. They are completely different from the types of ovarian cysts which can cause pain or even rupture, and sometimes require surgery.

But beyond this semantic confusion of cysts is the fact that many people who have been diagnosed with PCOS in the past due to their androgen hormone levels and irregular periods, which are also hallmarks of the disease, don’t even have the follicular “cysts” in question.

This likely contributes to underdiagnosis. The WHO estimates that up to 70 percent of women with the condition do not know they have it. And it’s a potential problem even if you don’t experience serious symptoms of PCOS itself, because PCOS, or now PMS, is associated with a higher risk of several other conditions, such as hypertension, gestational diabetes, and endometrial cancer. In fact, research increasingly suggests that this condition doesn’t just affect the ovaries; it is also about the metabolic system.

This brings us to another reason why this name change is so important. Studies have shown that male relatives of women diagnosed with PCOS/PMS are at increased risk of some of the same metabolic and hormonal issues. While the name change doesn’t explicitly help men, it’s a step toward recognizing that this condition often affects more than just reproductive health and could also affect people without ovaries.

Last week’s paper publication is just the first step in the consortium’s eight-step plan to cement the transition from PCOS to PMS. The change could officially enter the International Classification of Diseases when it is next updated in 2028.

Now let’s check with SciAmAndrea Gawrylewski, newsletter editor. She’s here to tell us about a surprising real-world application of subatomic particle detection.

Andrea Gawrylewski: Thank you, Rachel.

Interesting fact: subatomic particles are currently passing through us. And one variety is called muons.

When supernovas explode, they shoot cosmic rays into the universe. Eventually, these cosmic rays collide with Earth’s atmosphere and produce muons. Muons rain down constantly, traveling at almost the speed of light, and can penetrate up to 1.5 kilometers into the Earth’s surface.

A group of geophysicists working with other experts at Canada’s National Particle Physics Laboratory have designed a device capable of measuring muons outside the laboratory. You may be wondering: why would it be useful to detect muons outside of a laboratory? Well, scientists have been using muon detectors for decades to image the interiors of the Great Pyramids of Giza, volcanoes, and some tunnels. But these devices were huge, like the size of a room. So some of these Canadian scientists have developed a much smaller device that can be placed in nature to detect muons.

A big application will be in the mining sector. Minerals like copper, gold, silver, and palladium are absolutely essential to the development of technologies like cell phones, data centers, medical devices, and satellites. But the need for these minerals far exceeds availability, which is why the mining industry is looking for ways to improve how it finds ore and how it can extract it.

This is where a muon detector would come in handy. Each muon carries information about its direction of travel and the density of the material it passed through. So placing detectors underground and measuring arriving muons can create a high-resolution, cone-shaped three-dimensional map of the surrounding rock.

This could help mining companies create models of existing mining sites to ensure all resources have been extracted. Visualizations like this could also help them avoid underground air pockets, which can cause cave collapses and dangerous backups.

Overall, it’s a pretty nifty use of subatomic particle measurement.

If you’d like to hear more fascinating stories like these, sign up for my free daily newsletter, Today in Science, at SciAm.com/#newsletter.

Back to you, Rachel.

Feltman: Thank you, Andrea! Listeners, don’t forget to check out Today in Science if you want all the best of Scientific American straight to your inbox. You can find subscription information in our show notes.

Alright, you know I can’t resist ending with a fun animal story. And this one arrives at down very unusual animal behavior.

A study published last Monday in the journal Ecology and evolution describes a fascinating example of animal symbiosis. Scientists have noticed unusual phenomena cheeky behavior of remoras. These are fish that tend to scavenge on sharks and other animals, as well as boats and sometimes even human divers. But I guess we should be grateful that we don’t have the same kind of relationship we do with manta rays, because according to this study, remoras sometimes engage in a practice that researchers have dubbed “cloacal diving.”

Now, if you’re not familiar with the cloaca, in many animals it is a sort of multipurpose chute for entry and exit below the girdle, from mating to excretion to egg laying or childbirth. Apparently, when some remoras interact with manta rays, instead of just clinging to the ray’s skin, the remoras burrow into the larger animal’s cloaca. Now, for fish, it can provide a comfortable place to hide from predators, allow them to hitch a ride without feeling the drag of the water, and give them their first glimpse of a manta ray’s bodily waste for dinner, which they like. According to the study, manta rays are less enthusiastic about this practice.

That’s all for this week’s roundup of scientific news. We’ll be back Wednesday with an in-depth look at NASA’s ambitious plans for a nuclear reactor on the Moon.

Science quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck check in on our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more recent and in-depth scientific news.

For Scientific American, This is Rachel Feltman. Have a good week!