The “ghosts of the Plains” are fast becoming shadowy denizens of downtown. Stan Gehrt has been tracking Chicago’s urban coyote population for a decade and is now getting answers to some of their great mysteries, thanks to GPS collars, wearable night-vision cameras and stable-isotope analysis of coyote whiskers. Coyotes thrive in the city, where food is abundant and where the automobile, which they study closely and deftly avoid, is their only threat. Downtown Chicago is providing a laboratory for study of the largest predator to successfully exploit and colonize the urban core, yielding valuable insight to guide urban wildlife management.

For supplemental information about this New Horizons in Science briefing, see the CASW website

If you haven't kept a close eye on the fast-moving field of solid-state materials, you might not realize that novel carbon-based electronic materials such as nanotubes and graphene are already yesterday’s news. While some groups look for ways to overcome the limitations of these fascinating materials, Josh Goldberger’s lab is moving down the periodic table to create exotic single-atom-thick materials from germanium (“germanane”) and tin (“stannanane”) and build extraordinarily tiny transistors from them. They hope that these materials will conduct electric current without any dissipation while being stable and switchable, enabling the next-generation electronics needed for faster, energy-stingy computing.

For supplemental information about this New Horizons in Science briefing, see the CASW website

What role does environment play in human history? We know about earthquakes, floods and similar catastrophes, but the influences of global climate on human civilization are harder to tease from the evidence. In 2013, Lonnie Thompson and Ellen Mosley-Thompson announced an analysis of two tropical ice cores drilled from Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap. This record, which they called a “Rosetta Stone” of climate history, was so detailed that they could discern annual variations in temperature, precipitation and atmospheric chemistry over the past 14 centuries. They are now examining the interplay among doughts, El Niño oscillations and human history associated with the unusual events recorded at Quelccaya and a glacier atop the Himalayas. These cores contain evidence of “Black Swan” events corresponding to devastating population disruptions that may have been climate-related. Understanding the characteristics and causes of such events is critical for design adaptive measures in a world with unprecedented population and anthropogenic influences on climate.

For supplemental information about this New Horizons in Science briefing, see the CASW website

A decade ago, few doctors suspected that most head and neck cancers were caused by a virus—human papillomavirus or HPV, the same agent implicated in most cervical cancer. Maura Gillison, the young oncologist who brought the connection to light, has spent her career chasing one of the fastest-changing cancers on the planet. Through a combination of epidemiology and molecular sleuthing, she showed that the head and neck cancer oncologists were treating in 2000 was not the cancer they were treating 16 years earlier. The incidence of one kind of cancer, associated with tobacco use, had dropped by half, while HPV-positive cancers had more than doubled. Men now bear a heavier burden of HPV illness than do women, and that burden is growing. To devise better treatment and public health campaigns, Gillison is now studying the links between behavior and the genomics of these cancers and looking at the unusual ways the virus interacts with the host cell genome.

For supplemental information about this New Horizons in Science briefing, see the CASW website