Knvul Sheikh

His wife, Beatrice Bardin, confirmed the death without specifying a cause.

An endocrinologist, Bardin was passionate about finding ways for women to take control of their own health. While working for the nonprofit research organization Population Council — as director of its Center for Biomedical Research and chairman of its International Committee for Contraception Research — he oversaw clinical trials in the mid-1990s that led to the approval of mifepristone, or RU-486, a synthetic steroid used as part of the so-called “abortion pill” to terminate a pregnancy.

When Bardin joined the Population Council in the late 1970s, the birth control pill had been around for nearly two decades, but it provided only short-term contraception; women had to remember to take it regularly. And long-acting contraceptives, like intrauterine devices, or IUDs, which were developed in the early 1900s, were difficult to insert and remove and could have severe side effects. Many women who used them experienced cramps, infections and heavy bleeding.

One IUD, the Dalkon Shield, was linked in the 1970s to incidences of pelvic inflammatory disease and even death, casting a shadow over the entire market.

Bardin resolved to invest in new “bench to bedside” research — where the results of laboratory work are used directly on patients — to develop better contraceptive drugs and delivery systems.

“As much as he respected basic research, Dr. Bardin really wanted to see products that would change people’s lives come to fruition,” said James Sailer, the current executive director of the Center for Biomedical Research, in New York City.

Bardin was part of a research team led by Sheldon J. Segal that developed Norplant, a tiny device in which six silicon rods the size of matchsticks, surgically implanted under the skin of the upper arm, release small amounts of the female hormone progestin every day. The hormone prevented pregnancy by thickening cervical mucus, making it impenetrable by sperm, and stopping the regular release of eggs for up to five years. It was one of the first significant advances in long-acting contraceptives since the Dalkon Shield disaster.

Introduced in 1991, Norplant was hailed as a welcome alternative to birth control pills.

“Once it was put in, women didn’t need to remember to take medication every day,” Elizabeth Watkins, who studies the history of contraceptives at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a phone interview. “You could set it and forget it.”

But Norplant, too, turned out to have unwanted side effects. Some women complained of unpredictable bleeding, Watkins said; others experienced weight gain and hair loss. Many doctors and Planned Parenthood clinics declined to stock the device because of its cost ($365 per kit, plus about $500 more for the insertion — totaling, in today’s money, about $1,250). Moreover, they said, they could treat more women with birth control pills, which presented fewer side effects.

From 1991 to 1994, legislators in many states proposed ways to incentivize the use of Norplant among welfare recipients, or even force them to use it, hoping that if women on welfare had fewer children, government costs would be reduced. None of these proposals became law, but the increasing controversy surrounding Norplant led its manufacturer, Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories (now Wyeth Pharmaceuticals) to take it off the market in 2002. It was never reintroduced.

Seeking a successor to Norplant, Bardin and his team developed an implanted delivery system manufactured by Schering Oy under the name Jadelle. Jadelle uses just two silicon rods, in contrast to Norplant’s six, to release a form of progestin. The federal Food and Drug Administration approved the device, initially as a means to prevent pregnancies for three years, a period that was later increased to five years, but in the wake of the Norplant controversy the manufacturer decided to market it only outside the United States.

A few years later another contraceptive device that Bardin and others developed at the Population Council was approved by the FDA and introduced by Berlex Laboratories (now Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals) as Mirena, an IUD that emits a progestin for five years.

He also oversaw the development of Nestorone, a novel progestin that is released for up to a year through an easy-to-use vaginal ring, also developed by the researchers, that women could insert and remove themselves. The device was approved by the FDA under the brand name Annovera in 2018.

Bardin’s research for the Population Council also helped scientists understand how mifepristone, or RU-486, works to abort a pregnancy. A synthetic steroid, RU-486 blocks the action of progesterone and prompts the uterus to shed its lining. It becomes what is known as the “abortion pill” when used in combination with misoprostol, which causes contractions. The FDA approved RU-486 in 2000.

Bardin paved the way for successful research into male contraceptives as well.

“There has been a lot of skepticism around whether men would ever use a contraceptive, but Dr. Bardin saw it as an obvious unmet need,” said Sailer, of the Center for Biomedical Research.

Developing male contraception has proved to be a challenge simply because men typically produce millions of sperm every day. But scientists at the Population Council built on Bardin’s research, combining Nestorone with the male hormone testosterone to develop a gel that suppresses sperm production while maintaining sexual drive. It is now being tested in human clinical trials.

Clyde Wayne Bardin was born on Sept. 18, 1934, in McCamey, Texas, to James Bardin and Nora Irene (Barnett) Bardin. In Houston, he graduated from Rice University with a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1957 and from what is now the Baylor College of Medicine in 1962.

After completing his medical internship and residency training at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, Bardin joined the endocrinology research program at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1970, he was recruited to become chief of the Division of Endocrinology at Penn State University at Hershey. He joined the Population Council in 1978.

Bardin was at different times president of the Endocrine Society and president of the American Society of Andrology and received numerous awards. In his last decade he continued to work as a consultant for the Population Council and other organizations.

Bardin’s first marriage, to Bonnie Lambdin, ended in divorce in 1978. His second wife, Dr. Dorothy Terrace Krieger, died in 1985. In 1987 he married Beatrice Clement, who survives him, along with two daughters from his first marriage, Charlotte Merritt and Stephanie Torre; three stepchildren, Bryce MacDonald, Cybille MacDonald and Alexis Bormann; and six grandchildren.

Bardin and his wife enjoyed inviting colleagues and young researchers to dinner at their New York apartment, where conversation, stretching from medicine to culture to politics, could last for hours.

“Sitting next to him was the best seat in the house,” Stephanie Torre said of Bardin. “My dad was a tremendous conversationalist. He would focus all his attention on you and listen to you and show that he really cared about what you were talking about.”

This article originally appeared in

Dr. Wayne Bardin, 85, Innovative Researcher on Birth Control, Dies

Dr. C. Wayne Bardin, a groundbreaking researcher in reproductive physiology, who was instrumental in the development of long-acting contraceptive methods — like Norplant, Jadelle and Mirena — used by millions of women around the world, died on Oct. 10 at his home in New York. He was 85.

His death was confirmed by his son, Simon, who said an autopsy report was inconclusive about the cause. At his Joachim death, Messing was the director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Messing, whose family and friends referred to him simply as Jo (pronounced yoh), became known in the scientific community for developing what is known as shotgun sequencing of DNA.

That method involves breaking up long strands of DNA into hundreds of small fragments to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks of the molecule. These building blocks — known as DNA “bases” and represented by the letters A, C, G and T — tell scientists about the genetic information stored in each fragment.

Because shotgun sequencing bypasses several steps used in older methods of sequencing, like the one Frederick Sanger introduced in 1977 for mapping DNA one base at a time, Messing’s technique was able to decode genetic information much faster than before. It also enabled researchers to start tackling larger and more complex genomes.

Messing spearheaded several big sequencing initiatives, projects that contributed to the understanding of the genetics of corn, rice, sorghum and other crops. His findings helped scientists engineer varieties of corn with higher levels of amino acids lysine and methionine, essential building blocks of proteins that people can get only from their diet. Other studies led to the development of crops that were more pest-resistant or were resilient in droughtlike conditions.

However, Messing did not patent his work.

“Jo’s approach to the development of his DNA sequencing tools was to spread them freely and widely,” said Robert Goodman, executive dean of agriculture and natural resources at Rutgers. “He was an incredibly generous man.”

Joachim Wilhelm Messing was born Sept. 10, 1946, in Duisburg, Germany, to Heinrich and Martha (Pfeifer) Messing. His father was a mason and had expected Jo to take over the family business when he grew up. His mother was more supportive of his decision to pursue science.

He decided to study pharmacy as an undergraduate at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf because the curriculum, to his great satisfaction, covered a broad range of subjects — particularly how plants produce chemicals used in treating disease. He paid for his education by working by day as an apprentice at a Duisburg pharmacy and by night helping out at the opera company across the street, a job that allowed him to indulge his interest in the arts.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1968, he went on to get a master’s in pharmacy from the Free University of Berlin in 1971. But, always interested in biochemistry, he pursued a doctorate in that field at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There he turned his attention to studying DNA on the advice of Nobel laureate Feodor Lynen, who had been recognized for his research on cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.

Scientists had long known that DNA replication was the process by which cells pass on the instructions needed for carrying out all the functions of a living organism. The process requires an enzyme called DNA polymerase, as well as some sort of primer that provides the starting point for replication. While still a graduate student, Messing demonstrated that this primer is a piece of RNA that is complementary to the DNA that needs to be replicated.

In 1974, he attended a conference at which Sanger presented early work on mapping the sequence of the DNA strand in a virus. (Sanger had won one Nobel Prize and would go on to earn a second.) Messing thought the process could be accelerated by cloning DNA and sequencing different chunks of it in parallel. He spent the next few years, including his research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, developing a suitable method for cloning genetic information.

When he moved to the United States in 1978, Messing continued to work on his method for improving DNA sequencing. His first major success with shotgun sequencing came in 1981. Together with a team of biologists from the University of California, Davis, he was able to sequence the genome of the cauliflower mosaic virus.

Once he had the tools to unlock complex genetic information, Messing moved on to studying food crops. “He was drawn to the utility of improving food crops,” Goodman said, “rather than playing around with model plants.”

Other scientists used the shotgun sequencing technique in the Human Genome Project to identify approximately 20,000 genes in humans. Automation and further iterations of shotgun sequencing also allowed researchers to develop drugs targeting faulty proteins encoded by certain genes and even helped them profile the genetic makeup of various tumors.

Messing was recruited to the Waksman Institute at Rutgers as research director in 1985. He was promoted to director shortly afterward.

In addition to his son, Messing is survived by his wife, Rita (Stremmer) Messing; a sister, Angelika; and three grandchildren.

Among his professional honors, Messing was inducted into the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (Germany’s national academy of sciences) in 2007 and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States in 2015. He was also awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture, given by the Wolf Foundation in Israel, in 2013.

Besides continuing to lead an active research lab until his death, Messing remained devoted to opera. He and his wife held season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera in New York for several years. Occasionally, Simon Messing said, his father would let him go, too.

Joachim Messing, 73, Who Charted the DNA of Viruses and Plants, Dies

Joachim Messing, a pioneer of DNA sequencing whose techniques enabled scientists to study the building blocks of viruses, improve the yield of crop plants and understand the development of cancer in humans, died Sept. 13 at his home in Somerset, New Jersey. He was 73.

It’s a myth that black widow female spiders always kill and consume their mates. But courtship remains perilous for males, cannibalism or no. The terrain, navigated in the dark, is challenging. The female’s web releases come-hither pheromones, but only about 12% of prospective males manage to reach it. And once there, they can expect to face male rivals competing to pass their genes on to the next generation.

Usually, this results in wild displays of machismo. The males slash the female’s webs to make them less enticing to others. They deposit “mating plugs” in the female’s body to block rival sperm.

Why not simply avoid the competition and seek out females’ webs empty of other males? But male black widows actually seem to thrive on the competition, according to a study published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Researchers found that male black widows find potential mates faster by following the silk trails left behind by other males.

“Males have to race to find females,” said Catherine Scott, an arachnologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada and the study’s lead author. “It makes sense for them to try to use all the tricks they can to find females as soon as possible, even if there are other males that have already found her.”

If a male arrives an hour or two late at a female’s web, he still has a chance to interrupt the courting rituals of other males and could still be the first to mate with the female, Scott said.

Males typically make their way to a rendezvous by following female pheromones back to their source. But those signals must be at just the right distance and uninterrupted by shifting winds and other factors.

Scott and her colleagues were curious to know which tools males would employ when their access to female pheromones was limited. The researchers started by marking several males with different paint colors and releasing them at different distances from a large female’s web.

Most males reached the web within a couple hours. Indeed, those who started from farther away arrived at the female’s web just as fast as their rivals: They simply followed the silk threads released by the males ahead of them.

“The silk threads act like a highway connecting the tops of plants,” Scott said. “So following this path is more efficient than trying to make their own way, climbing over obstacles and making sure they are still going in the right direction just based on pheromones carried by the wind.”

To confirm the results, Scott and her colleagues repeated the race in the lab, where the conditions of the males’ journey to the web could be more tightly controlled. The males were given two options in a maze: Follow the silk threads of a rival black widow male, or avoid the rival’s trail and instead rely on direct personal signals from a female, which were blown in his direction with a fan.

Ninety-five percent of male black widows chose to follow the paths made by their rivals, even when the pheromones were readily detectable. And the males seemed to know when the trails were left by other black widows rather than by males of other species.

“The chemicals on male black widow’s silk threads are species-specific,” Scott said.

One question that remains: Can males determine how long ago a rival produced the silk trail? It may be that a rival’s trail provides temporal as well as geographical information, signaling to followers whether they will be too late to get to a female or whether speeding up can still get them to the business of breeding.

“It’s possible that the silk trail is more useful than we thought,” Scott said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/science/black-widow-spider-males.html" id="19e22dda-9ebf-3836-ad01-290b08c5df82">The New York Times</a>.

How Does a Male Black Widow Find a Mate? Follow the Other Guys

(Trilobites)

Late blight is a common disease of plants such as tomatoes and potatoes, capable of wiping out entire crops on commercial-scale fields. Caused by a fungus-like pathogen, it first appears as black or brown lesions on leaves, stems, fruit or tubers. If conditions are favorable, it can quickly spread to other plants through wet soil and as wind-scattered spores.

In the mid-19th century, late blight famously caused the Irish potato famine. Today it still causes more than $6.7 billion in annual losses worldwide. Small farms and organic growers are often the hardest hit, because they have fewer resources to identify and treat the disease.

But farmers may have a new weapon to add to the arsenal. The technology, designed by researchers at North Carolina State University, relies on the science of subtle plant odors, and it can recognize sick plants early by employing a simple test strip that plugs into a reader on a smartphone.

Plants emit signaling chemicals from their leaves, not unlike the pheromones released by humans. “If a plant is diseased, the type and concentration of these volatile organic compounds changes,” said Qingshan Wei, a biomolecular engineer at the university. By sampling a plant’s emission profile, a farmer can assess whether a sample of their crop is infected, Wei said.

If the farmer suspects a late blight infection is underway, she can remove a leaf from a living plant and place it in a small, covered glass jar. After the leaf’s volatile compounds have accumulated for 15 minutes or so, the cap is removed and the air is pumped from the jar into a reader device attached to the back of a smartphone.

Inside the smartphone reader is a strip of paper specially treated with organic dyes and nanoparticle sensors developed by the researchers. Upon interacting with the plant’s volatile compounds, the strip changes color to indicate the presence or absence of the pathogen. It’s like a home-pregnancy kit for tomatoes, or a strep test for tubers.

In proof-of-concept testing, Wei and his team found that the technology could accurately detect changes in 10 different plant odor molecules just two days after plants were inoculated with the pathogen that causes late blight, even before the effects were visible to the eye. The team’s results were published Monday in the journal Nature Plants.

The test can also distinguish between late blight infections and other tomato diseases that appear similar, such as Septoria leaf spot and a fungus that causes “early blight.”

Currently, farmers must send leaf samples to specialized labs if they can’t identify the onset of disease by eye. This costs more and delays identification of the disease, increasing the odds that the pathogen will spread.

“Our technology uses tools that farmers already have in their pockets — their smartphones,” Wei said.

Wei estimated that the team’s prototype reader cost about $60 to make in the lab. The researchers used a 3D printer to create a reader cartridge that fits on the back of a smartphone and allows plant odors to interact with test strips in a leak-free space. The test strips had to be designed with sensors and dyes that would remain stable for a long time and cost just a few cents per strip, Wei said.

Other research groups have developed portable lab-on-a-chip devices that can do similar pathogen tests. But few are as simple or as cost-effective as the new smartphone-based technology, Wei said. His team plans to conduct more field tests before seeking out manufacturing partners.

They hope to customize the technology for other crop pathogens, which continue to emerge as climate change and global trade increase the stress on agricultural systems. “This is an important step in improving global food security,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/science/tomato-potato-agriculture-blight.html" id="10d079e4-2684-3715-a224-701618553a46">The New York Times</a>.

A New Way to Fight Crop Diseases, With a Smartphone

On Sálvora Island, off the coast of Spain, thousands of yellow-legged gulls dot the grassy cliffs from April to late July. It is a riot of white wings and plaintive calls. Occasionally, the chorus changes as the seabirds engage in courtship and chick-feeding. And when the adults notice a predator, such as a dusky-coated mink, the chorus shifts again, to a characteristic alarm call — ha-ha-ha.

These acoustic cues reach not just young and adult gulls but unhatched embryos, too. In 2018, researchers found that when gull eggs hatch, the ones that were exposed to alarm calls were able to crouch and hide from predators a couple of seconds faster than others.

A few other bird species, including quails, fairywrens and zebra finches, are known to relay similar cues about the environment to their unhatched young, to prepare hatchlings to fend for themselves.

But embryos aren’t receiving wisdom only from their parents. A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology &amp; Evolution, suggests that they’re also receiving cues from nearby unhatched siblings.

“Paying attention to cues from the outside is important for survival,” said Jose C. Noguera, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Vigo in Spain, who led the study. Embryos that do so develop traits that provide an advantage in avoiding predators, identifying other species of birds or building their own nests in warmer temperatures later in life, he said.

To study how yellow-legged gull embryos learned social cues, Noguera and his colleague, Alberto Velando, camped out on tiny Sálvora during the birds’ egg-laying season.

Typically, the mother gulls lay an egg a day until they have a clutch of three. The researchers waited and collected a total of 90 gull eggs over a period of three days. The eggs were transferred to incubators at a field station nearby, and kept in groups equal in size to wild clutches.

Each day, the researchers removed two eggs out from each clutch and exposed them to audio recordings of adult gull alarm calls. Eggs from a control group were handled similarly, except they were not exposed to any sounds. Thus manipulated, the eggs were returned to their clutches.

The researchers had created two groups of gull embryos. One in which two siblings had been “informed” of possible predators, with a third “naïve” egg, just as if three had been laid a day or two apart in the wild. In the other group, all three gull siblings were naïve.

All three embryos from the test group soon exhibited the same adaptations. The two “informed” embryos made fewer peeping noises while in the egg. But so did the third embryo, even though it hadn’t been exposed directly to the gull calls.

And once the chicks hatched, all three showed stunted growth, higher levels of stress hormones and faster reflexes than the control group, responding to alarms by crouching and hiding more quickly.

“That’s completely unexpected,” said Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who was not involved in the study. “It’s one thing if everybody is on the same page — they hear the same thing and respond the same. But this study suggests that birds that are a day or two advanced can communicate their wisdom to their siblings.”

Vibrations from the two “informed” eggs had transmitted information about gull alarm calls to the third egg. In the wild, the small informational advantage could mean the difference between being eaten or not.

“It’s a rough world out there,” McGowan said. “Most young birds do not survive to grow up to be adults, and most adult birds do not produce new offspring that survive predation. Natural selection is a monstrous numbers game.” If you can gain a leg up by eavesdropping on your siblings, why not do so?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/birds-embryos-communication.html" id="216a0a28-ede2-34db-abef-87ceb7eb92e9">The New York Times</a>.

Even Unhatched, Birds Exchange Survival Skills

But it’s no nature documentary. Real lions don’t rule over other creatures. And they certainly don’t try to return home once they’ve left the lion pride. Disney took a lot of creative license when it comes to lion behavior and family dynamics, zoologists and lion researchers say.

If the movie were true to big-cat life, the rivalry between Simba’s father, Mufasa, and his uncle, Scar, would not have existed, and the lion cub would not have been forced to flee so young.

In fact, Mufasa would not have ruled the pride at all.

“It’s always a matriarch who actually leads a lion pride,” said Craig Saffoe, the curator of great cats at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington. Simba’s mother, Sarabi, would have been the more likely leader of the group. And the movie would have been more accurate if it were called “The Lion Queen.”

Although male lions appear much bigger and more aggressive, females are more dominant, Saffoe said. They do the important decision-making. They are in charge of the majority of hunting and cub-raising. They also have to protect their territory against other intruding females and decide when to let in new males.

In a typical African pride, there are three to six adult females. Most daughters are recruited to stay with their mother’s pride until they die, so there are often several generations of related females, making the lion society quite matriarchal.

Two or three adult males also live with the females. They are usually brothers or pride mates who have formed a coalition to help protect the females. But they spend only a few years with the pride — long enough to produce more offspring — before they go out and seek a new one.

So if Disney had followed typical big cat behavior, Scar and Mufasa would have happily existed together in their pride. “It would have been highly unlikely for them to show aggression toward each other,” Saffoe said. “It’s possible that Mufasa would have been the more dominant one in the coalition, but one of the females would have been dominant over both of them.”

One aspect of lion family life that Disney did get right, however, is the affection Mufasa shows to his son.

When adult males return from patrolling the pride territory, they seem to enjoy getting to know their cubs, with lots of licking, head rubbing and purring involved. “It is ridiculously cute,” Saffoe said.

In a pride, each lioness has two to four cubs, all of whom bask in their father’s attention. Sometimes lionesses may give birth to a single cub, which would create a relationship like Simba and Mufasa’s.

But even when there are more cubs around, adult males treat all the little ones equally tenderly. That’s because when female lions ovulate, they shed a lot of eggs that may be fertilized by the same male or by different males. “Fathers can’t tell which cubs are theirs, so they just decide ‘I’ll be nice to all of them’ as a handy rule of thumb,” said Craig Packer, the director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

For male cubs, paternal affection lasts until they are about 2 years old. Then males start undergoing puberty, and the surge of testosterone starts threatening the adults.

If Disney’s Mufasa had lived until Simba was 2, he would have run his own son out of the pride. Then Simba would have roamed the savanna for a year or two until he joined a new pride around the age of 5.

In the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or Kaza, a giant network of parks across five African countries, researchers rarely see male lions return to their maternal pride once they leave. So no matter why Simba left, or regardless of whether the conspiracy theorists who say that Simba and Nala are related are right, it is unlikely that he would have ended up back in the pride with his childhood love interest.

“Male dispersal is an evolutionary mechanism to ensure that genetic diversity remains among lions,” said Dr. Kim Young-Overton, Kaza director for Panthera, a global wildcat conservation organization.

In the wild, males may easily wander up to 100 miles from their maternal pride to find a new home. If food and water are scarce, they may search even farther, Young-Overton said.

Lion habitats, though, are becoming fragmented. The species is now limited to just 8% of its historical range, which once included almost the entire African continent. Where lions once lived, humans are developing land for agriculture and mining. And, in some areas, livestock has begun to replace lions’ natural prey, which has led to human-lion conflict; lions have been killed in retaliation for eating valuable cattle. Poaching and trophy hunting have also depleted the population.

There are now fewer than 20,000 lions in Africa, and they are listed as vulnerable to extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which determines the conservation status of species. Lions are already extinct, or possibly extinct, in 29 African countries.

“Lions have declined by roughly 50% since the previous movie,” which was released in 1994, said Paul Funston, who is the senior director of Panthera’s lion program.

Funston and other researchers are hoping that the new “The Lion King” movie will help reignite human interest in and compassion for lions, despite its slightly off-kilter depiction of lion society.

“Disney really captures how beautiful lions are,” Young-Overton said. “It looks like you are right there on the African plain watching them move. And the more that people understand lions and their habitats, the more I hope we will be willing to protect them.”

Disney has also pledged to help more directly: It donated more than $1.5 million to Panthera and other organizations working on lion conservation. The company also started a “Protect the Pride” campaign and is inviting fans to help double its donation by buying special-edition products.

The goal is to support lion populations across Africa, as well as the animals who live alongside them. After all, that is Mufasa’s message to Simba in “Circle of Life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/movies/lion-king-nature.html" id="26be7179-bbc0-3169-a34a-71757512dbde">The New York Times</a>.

It’s got everyone’s favorite farting warthog, graceful giraffes, lumbering elephants and a whole cast of realistic-looking animal characters. Watching Simba and his pals try to regain their rightful place in the kingdom may have you thinking that Disney’s “The Lion King” is a pretty accurate depiction of what happens in the African savanna.

How 'The Lion King' Gets Real-Life Lion Family Dynamics Wrong

Lodestone, a naturally-occurring iron oxide, was the first persistently magnetic material known to humans. The Han Chinese used it for divining boards 2,200 years ago; ancient Greeks puzzled over why iron was attracted to it; and, Arab merchants placed it in bowls of water to watch the magnet point the way to Mecca. In modern times, scientists have used magnets to read and record data on hard drives and form detailed images of bones, cells and even atoms.

Throughout this history, one thing has remained constant: Our magnets have been made from solid materials. But what if scientists could make magnetic devices out of liquids?

In a study published Thursday in Science, researchers managed to do exactly that.

“We’ve made a new material that has all the characteristics of an ordinary magnet, but we can change its shape, and conform it to different applications because it is a liquid,” said Thomas Russell, a polymer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the study’s lead author. “It’s very unique.”

Using a special 3D printer, Russell and his colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory injected iron oxide nanoparticles into millimeter-scale droplets of toluene, a colorless liquid that does not dissolve in water. The team also added a soap-like material to the droplets, and then suspended them in water.

The soap-like material caused the iron oxide nanoparticles to crowd together on the surface of the droplets and form a semisolid shell. “The particles get stuck in place, like a traffic jam at 5 o’clock,” Russell said.

Next, the scientists placed the droplets on a stirring plate with a spinning bar magnet, and observed something extraordinary: The solid magnet caused the positive and negative poles of the liquid magnets to follow the external magnetic field, making the droplets dance on the plate. When the solid magnet was removed, the droplets remained magnetized.

“We almost couldn’t believe it,” Russell said.

In the 1960s, scientists at NASA discovered that some liquids could become magnetized in the presence of a strong magnetic field. But these liquids, known as ferrofluids, always lost their magnetism as soon as the stronger, external magnetic field was removed.

In contrast, the droplets created by Russell and his team become magnetic and stay that way, thanks to the nanoparticle shell that forms within the soapy emulsion.

As a result, the droplets can be made to change shape with just a small application of force, as if a traffic cop came upon that rush-hour traffic jam and started moving things along, Russell said.

The motion of liquid droplets can also be guided with external magnets. Thus employed, liquid magnets could be useful for delivering drugs to specific locations in a person’s body, and for creating “soft” robots that can move, change shape or grab things.

“We hope these findings will enable people to step back and think of new applications for liquid magnets,” Russell said. “Because until now, people in material sciences haven’t thought this was possible at all.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/liquid-magnet.html" id="0180ad54-1858-3a1f-a35a-fb0abefe1c9d">The New York Times</a>.

This New Liquid is Magnetic, and Mesmerizing

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Knvul Sheikh

Articles written by the author

Dr. Wayne Bardin, 85, Innovative Researcher on Birth Control, Dies

Joachim Messing, 73, Who Charted the DNA of Viruses and Plants, Dies

How Does a Male Black Widow Find a Mate? Follow the Other Guys

A New Way to Fight Crop Diseases, With a Smartphone

Even Unhatched, Birds Exchange Survival Skills

How 'The Lion King' Gets Real-Life Lion Family Dynamics Wrong

How 'The Lion King' Gets Real-Life Lion Family Dynamics Wrong

This New Liquid is Magnetic, and Mesmerizing